Phaedrus

''Bezumna požuda, koja je savladala misao i njenu težnju za onim što je pravo i
pohitala za uživanjem naslade što je daje lepota, pa je opet od njoj srodnih požuda
dovedena telesnoj lepoti, te je tako na svom pobedničkom hodu ojačala do najživljeg
razvitka snage, dobila je ime po toj istoj snazi i nazvana je ljubavlju.''


Mnogo lepo Platon piše o lepoti i zanesenosti, o duši i istini, o ljubavi... Ali, njegova predstava je toliko idealistička da sam u jednom trenutku stekao utisak da će se tekst ispred mene rasparnuti u hiljadu komadića, kao kad bi neko maljem udario o ogledalo. A, možda je to i zbog toga što sam knjigu čitao u pdf-u.

Great to read in companion with the Symposium. Socrates at his absolute best here. For and against speeches on whether it’s better to befriend as a lover or no. His ultimate aim is to point Phaedrus to the task of philosophy which is superior and indeed a prerequisite to good speech making and rhetoric. Really enjoyed this one.

Es ist ein Dialog zwischen Platon der Älteren und Phaidros der Jüngeren. Sie reden über die Liebe. Die Kunst der Rede, das Wissen und es nicht zu Kennen... Ein sehr tief philosophische Bedeutung/Interpretation. Lässt sich aber dennoch leicht zu lesen. Nur das sich beiden in vielem Wissen und in dem Buch nicht zu erklären bekommt.

Συγκλονιστικό!
Δε θα αναφερθώ παρα μόνο επιγραμματικά στο φιλοσοφικό μέρος του διαλόγου.
Σε αυτόν ο Πλάτωνας μας δίνει αρκετά στοιχεία της θεωρίας των Ιδεών, για την θεώρηση του της ψυχής και για την γνώση. Παράλληλα καταφέρεται εναντίον των σοφιστών και της ρητορικής. Στο τελευταίο μέρος μιλά για την ανωτερότητα του προφορικού έναντι του γραπτού λόγου.
Κυρίως θα αναφερθώ στο λογοτεχνικό μέρος του διαλόγου.
Ποιός Κούντερα και Φρομ, Ρίτσος και Καβάφης; Ο Πλάτωνας μας προσφέρει την ωραιότερη εικόνα για τον έρωτα και όλα αυτά 2500 χρόνια πριν.. Όλος ο διάλογος μιλά για τον έρωτα αλλά η παλινωδία του Σωκράτη είναι από τα ωραιότερα και ποιητικότερα κείμενα που έχω διαβάσει! Και είμαι σίγουρος ότι το έριξε το γκομενάκι..!

Το κείμενο δεν είναι εύκολο ακόμη και από την άριστη μετάφραση του Θεοδωρακόπουλου. Τα σχόλια επίσης στις 200 πρώτες σελίδες είναι πολύ επεξηγηματικά για όποιον δεν είναι γνωστής της Πλατωνικής φιλοσοφίας.


Καλή ανάγνωση σε όλους!

ik moet een situationship beginnen

9/24: One-sentence summary: in light of the fact that all beauty is inescapably moral, education is about the wooing of the desires toward the transcendent. Still my favorite dialogue.

10/23: Notwithstanding the claims of the Republic, this may be the greatest of the dialogues. The very roots of Classical Education are found in this work, whose three seemingly astonishingly disparate discussions are bound together in the most evocative of ways: by the question of how and in what ways the souls of men are moved. What other work can lay claim to being analyzed equally by literary critics, psychologists, pedagogues, communication theorists, and theologians? I recommend that newcomers spend more time on the second half. It's easy to be both fascinated and disturbed by the first half, and though it contains important concepts and is especially significant as the most obvious precedent for Augustine, it's just not as important to understand as the discussions of argumentative and mythical discourse. A close reading of this dialogue will reveal a web of language, imagination, and thematic interests with as much density as any play by the tragedians or Shakespeare. You can read it each time with a different framework in mind (literary theory, eros, rhetoric, cultural criticism, aesthetics, ethics, etc.) and get something totally fresh out of it accordingly. Stunningly brilliant and easily one of the headiest and most influential great texts of the Western world.

I read PHAEDRUS for a specific purpose.

Since the mid-20th century, there has been an ongoing effort to re-interpret Plato. Those pursuing this effort, not surprisingly, see it as the pursuit of a deeper truth. I assume that they are sincere in this belief.

Critics of the reinterpretation see many reasons to be skeptical. One reason is that the reinterpretation would make Plato relevant to our world today in a way that under the formerly prevailing interpretation was not the case. Another reason for skepticism is that the reinterpretation would immunize Plato from the charge that he favors authoritarian over more liberal governments. Skeptics suspect that the reinterpretation is driven, at least in part, by a 20th century agenda to defend western-style liberalism by portraying Plato as a fan of early governments that featured some characteristics of modern liberalism.

The reinterpretation of Plato relies heavily on something called ‘esoteric writing’. For those not familiar with the term, esoteric writing refers to writing that disguises the author’s true intention in such a way as to make it indiscernible to those who might persecute the author while, at the same time, communicating that intention to other readers who can be trusted to understand the intention and benefit from it. The best book about esoteric writing that I have read is Arthur Melzer’s PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE LINES. Melzer convincingly demonstrates that esoteric writing was common among philosophical writers until the 19th century.

In my own GR review of Plato’s THE REPUBLIC, I gave credence to one of the arguments that is important to the reinterpretation of Plato. Namely, the new argument that Plato did not intend for Socrates to be understood as anti-democratic by philosophically minded readers. Thus, when Plato has Socrates advocate censorship, the suppression of poetry, the removal of children from their families to be educated in state-run institutions of propaganda, etc., Plato intended for his readers to recoil at these extremist ideas. Our recoil is the message that Plato intended or so the reinterpretation wants to argue.

I gave this argument credence because it describes my own experience in reading The Republic. I did not like what Socrates had to say. That caused me to look more deeply to see if there was a subtle hidden esoteric message that I might detect and thereby understand the text more accurately.

A GR friend took me to task for this in the comments to my review. He rightly points out to me that there are many reasons to take Plato at his word and it makes sense that Plato’s philosopher king would run things as Socrates describes in the city in speech. One important reason why this is true, my GR friend argues, is that Plato believes that the organization of the city in speech should resemble the organization of a well-ordered soul, a subject also discussed in PHAEDRUS. Like THE REPUBLIC, PHAEDRUS is one of Plato’s middle dialogues. My friend argues that PHAEDRUS is solid evidence that the parts of The REPUBLIC that I do not like represent what Plato truly thought – and what most western philosophers have always understood him to have thought.

So that’s why I read PHAEDRUS. I wanted to see if it tends to confirm the old view of Plato. The short answer is that it does tend to confirm the old view. But it’s really a strange dialogue. Allow me to explain.

Phaedrus and Socrates are friends. Phaedrus has a copy of a speech written by a third friend, who enjoys a reputation as a good speaker. Socrates professes to be interested in speeches. He and Phaedrus leave the city for the countryside to find a place for Phaedrus to read the speech to Socrates. (Most of this can be argued to be very uncharacteristic of Socrates. He did not like to leave the city. And he did not like speeches, according to the explanatory essay included in this edition.)

Whatever. They find a suitable place. Phaedrus reads the speech. It is about eros, which in this context refers to the love shared by a youth and a mature man. The speech recommends that given a choice, the youth would be wise to choose someone who is a friend first rather than a love struck, impassioned lover.

Socrates does not like the speech. So he gives his own speech. Oddly, in my view, he makes the same argument as the speech written by the missing friend. That is, Socrates argues that the youth should choose someone who is a friend, not an impassioned lover. Though he argues for the same conclusion as the absent friend, he does so much more thoughtfully and persuasively than does the speech of the friend.

Then, after some discussion of rhetoric generally, Socrates gives a third speech. This one is much longer than the others. In this third speech, Socrates argues that the youth should choose the man who loves the youth with passion and not the lover who will be a friend. This is so, argues Socrates, because this kind of erotic love allows the youth to experience genuine beauty – beauty as it is understood in Plato’s theory of the forms. Such beauty allows the youth to experience the extraordinary, indeed, something divine.

It seemed to me that the dialogue is only a bit more than half completed when this third speech is concluded. The rest of the dialogue is devoted to more discussion of rhetoric, including written advocacy versus oral advocacy and so on. Socrates argues that to be persuasive the speaker/writer must know the truth about his subject. One who does not know the truth about his subject will not be persuasive, even if he knows what his audience wants to hear about the subject. This line of argument suggests that the philosopher has an advantage over the sophist when it comes to speeches.

Thus, it is not crystal clear what this dialogue is about. The candidates are numerous: speeches, erotic love, the forms, the benefits and drawbacks of oral versus written advocacy, philosophy, philosophy vs rhetoric or the well-ordered human soul.

Wait. What? Why are Socrates and Phaedrus discussing the human soul?

Good question. It did not seem a necessary topic to me, given the rest of the dialogue. But it is in PHAEDRUS that Plato first introduces his famous metaphor of the chariot: a driver and two horses, one bad and the other good. A human soul is like such a chariot. The driver must control the horses, especially the badly behaving horse. In the well-ordered soul, the driver is firmly in control of both horses and manages them in such a way as to keep them working together as a team toward a goal.

In THE REPUBLIC, this metaphor makes another appearance. There, Plato tells us that the city in speech should resemble a well-ordered soul. That is, the driver (philosopher king) should control the populace and steer it toward the goal that the philosopher king dictates to the citizens of the polis. That is how to best govern a city.

And there it is. PHAEDRUS confirms this vision. It is an authoritarian notion. The philosopher king knows best (and may not be questioned) and he manages the public toward his vision of what is best. This is the old understanding of where Plato’s head was at when he was writing his middle dialogues. The reimagining of Plato is less plausible to me after rereading PHAEDRUS than it was before.

The sad thing is that the old view of Plato makes Plato less relevant and less interesting today than the new view of Plato would make him. So be it. Let’s agree to reject the implausible in the name of sanity even if it means that Plato has less to say about our current liberalism vs anti-liberalism struggle in the West.

Phaedrus is a beautiful dialogue of Plato. I confess, I listened to the whole thing while laying down mulch for hours with my earbuds. Librivox.org, man. Plato first sets the stage by narrating a scene of playful leisure to set the stage for layered, increasingly deeper contemplation. The dialogue offers valuable, time-tested insight and guidance in the life of the mind and itself embodies the insight.

Perhaps we get the word philosophy from this dialogue. At least in it Socrates defines the types of persons who devote themselves to wisdom as "lovers of wisdom." He says they are not themselves wise, as wisdom, he caveats, is an attribute of God alone, but they love wisdom.

There is much that is memorable, much that is strikingly relevant. Socrates recounts as an Egyptian tale of ancient wisdom how a bird invented writing and blithely assumed it would assist people's memories. His mythical interlocutor shrewdly responded by saying that often inventors are not the best judges of the effects of their inventions and that writing would in actuality have a deleterious effect on our memory because people would begin to rely on it rather than their memories. He was right. This strikes me as undyingly current, strikingly relevant today. As we continue to experience huge technological innovations such as the Internet, we ought not to be too sanguine and self-blinding in our enthusiasms and enjoyments. After the industrial revolution, etc., etc. we need to learn to dignify our discriminatory powers more so that every reserve about uses of technology is not treated as fanatical, obtuse, weird, a too cumbersome to think about issue.

Plato also has brilliant, memorable sections where he likens human beings to two horses drawing a chariot, one strong and toward the upright and good, the other drawing down to the lower and more base. One section I remember vividly describes with this analogy a youth's sexual desire and the competing directions of the horses. Socialization of the sexual impulse.

There is also a significance to the whole tone set at the beginning, as I alluded to earlier. It is out of a self permission and a permission among friends for leisure that this contemplative height arises. It is easier with friends. Certain capacities in the mind have to be valued enough by a society and the avant garde of the mind in that society for this to be accomplished. A too pressing 'practicality' does not give due honor to philosophy and doctrine and it ironically becomes the most impractical of all viewed from a distance, a distance it does not allow itself.