so sick of zoom calls, just want to walk barefoot in a stream with my homie and talk about love as extreme sexual tension crackles between us i don't want click and collect i want my bros to read speeches to me please i jsut want to walk in a stream please i don't want a smartphone i

ظالمين أفلاطون يا جماعة

Ono bezbojno i bezoblično biće, koje stvarno postoji, može da ugleda samo kormilar duše, a to je um.

Fedar ili o ljepoti je svojevrstan nastavak Gozbe. Ovdje Platon malo diskutabilnije i podrobnije sagledava ljubav. Unosi određene prepreke prisutne kod ljubavnika. Naime, kod Platona ljubavnik nastoji da ima nadmoćnost nad ljubljenikom. Da bi to postigao on najviše želi da mu je ljubljenik lišen najdraže imovine. Pa s toga i da se ljubljenik liši najmilijih, oca, majke i srodnih mu prijatelja. Jer ako ljubljenik ima ovu imovinu, to za ljubavnika predstavlja saobraćajnu smetnju da dopre do njega to jest da ga ima samo za sebe. Ljubavnik nastoji da se što duže sladi požudom, i da on ljubljeniku predstavlja sve, da mu je on ta najdraža imovina. Platon se ovdje dotiče duše i objašnjava njenu pojavu. Kako je duša nerođena i besmrtna te nema početak i kraj, tako ona prebiva u vasioni i teži da se učauri u svemu onome što nema dušu, za neko čvrsto tijelo. I taj spoj tijela i duše mi zovemo živo biće. Sporedno se zove smrtno, a besmrtno se naziva jer time zamišljamo boga, kao besmrtno biće, čije je tijelo i duša zajedno sraslo, za vječna vremena. Sve to zajedno čini ljepotu.

Plato kind of insufferable and pretentious white man coded…also lowkey trifling of him to have Socrates basically dog on Phaedrus’s sugar daddy (Lysias) the whole time

I got tired of Lysias/Phaedrus’s know it all attitude about love and eros real quick and found Socrates arguments here fairly weak. If you are interested in ancient Greek attitudes on friendship, lovership and everything in between, then this is your jam, otherwise this is a long Plato read than can be skipped with little loss imo.

Central to the Phaedrus are three speeches on the topic of erotic love (eros) in the context of the erastes-eromenos relationship: the first purportedly by the rhetorician Lysias, delivered here from memory by Phaedrus, and the other two conjured extemporaneously by Socrates. Accordingly, the dialogue is concerned with both the craft of rhetoric and the value of eros, with Lysias’s speech denigrating the latter on account of its irrationality and destructive potential, and Socrates coming to its defense by portraying it as a divine madness, superior to human rationality, which can awaken within the soul of lover and beloved alike a recollection of transcendental truth and beauty, elevating them to philosophic heights unattainable by mere reason. The insistence of Socrates that rhetoric, to be anything more than an “experiential knack” or a conjuring trick, must serve the cause of philosophy, and that the simplest path to moving the souls of an audience with an effective speech is to try to tell the truth, echo the sentiments expressed in the Gorgias.

Phaedrus begins the dialogue by reciting a speech of Lysias, in which the latter argues that a young eromenos should gratify a non-lover rather than a lover on the grounds that a lover is motivated by fickle and irrational passion rather than by reason, and is thus liable to exhibit erratic and controlling behavior that harms both parties and makes a public spectacle of them. Socrates, initially taking issue only with the speech’s lack of rhetorical virtuosity, expands upon the main thrust of Lysias’s arguments with a speech of his own, identifying eros as a vice analogous to gluttony in the sense that both involve the loss of self-control and the captivity of reason to desire: in the case of gluttony, the desire for food, and in that of eros, the desire to take pleasure in beauty. A non-lover is preferable to a lover, says Socrates, because his rationality and self-control will ensure that his actions are motivated by what is best for the moral and intellectual development of the eromenos rather than a selfish desire for pleasure.

It is just as Socrates is finishing this second, supplementary oration that the most memorable portion of the dialogue begins. Suddenly seized by divine inspiration, and regretful of his participation in the denigration of Eros—who is, after all, a god—Socrates launches into a third speech in praise of love. Eros may be irrational, he concedes, but not every form of irrationality is inferior to reason. The Pythia sets aside her own reason when she transmits the oracles of Apollo, but her “madness” proves truer than the wisdom of men. Likewise, a poet who attempts to compose in a purely “logical” manner will never reach the heights of those lifted out of their senses by the muses. Eros is a “divine madness” of this fashion; and to elaborate on this point, Socrates presents his celebrated allegory of the soul as a charioteer.

The soul, he says, is like a winged chariot pulled by two horses. One horse is spiritual in nature, desirous of goodness and truth, amenable to reason, conducive to self-mastery, and obedient to verbal commands without the need of rein or whip. The second is corporeal, violent, passionate, and sensuous, requiring forceful restraint. The spiritual horse would carry us upward, toward the transcendent, following the path of the gods, while the corporeal horse would drag us down from the heavens into the mud of mortal embodiment. The gods ascend in their own chariots to their divine banquet in the realm of “pure being” above heaven itself: first comes Zeus, the king of the gods, followed by eleven “squadrons” of lesser gods; and trailing these lesser gods in turn is a procession of immortal souls. While for the gods this ascent is an easy one, since both of their horses are good and obedient, our own souls have to struggle with the wild horse. Some souls manage to soar above the rim of heaven, enjoying a sustained vision of the ideal unity of all things; others get only a few brief glimpses of pure being, popping their heads intermittently above the clouds; others still swerve about in lower climes, crashing into one another before plummeting to earth. Whatever heights they have reached, souls are inevitably dragged down when the driver loses control of the unruly horse, and this results in mortal life. Every human being embodies a soul that had at least some glimpse of the realm of pure being: this explains our ability to see the ideal unity behind the multiplicity of particular objects. But whatever type of person one becomes is dependent upon how clear and sustained a vision one had of the highest heaven. The highest-reaching souls become philosophers (naturally), followed in descending order by law-abiding kings and commanders, politicians and businessmen, athletes, priests, poets, artisans and farmers, sophists and demagogues, and last—and least—by tyrants. Most souls are embodied once every thousand years for ten cycles, with intermittent periods of reward and punishment; and it is only after ten thousand years that a soul can return to the height from which it fell. Philosophers are an exception: any soul who lives a philosophical life three times in succession will regain its wings and take flight again.

Because the wings of the soul are nourished by the contemplation of ideal being, our hope for redemption depends upon our ability to recall, within mortal life, our soul’s primordial vision of the transcendent. And this recollection is the “madness” of the lover: what the lover sees in the ephemeral beauty of the beloved reminds him of the true beauty from which he has fallen. While a lesser soul is moved only to sate worldly appetites, paying no mind to its true origin and destiny, the soul of the lover, reminded of its heavenly home, longs to take to the air once again. “His wings begin to grow and he wants to take to the air on his new plumage, but he cannot; like a bird he looks upwards, and because he ignores what is down here, he is accused of behaving like a madman.” Far from being subrational, as Lysias suggests, the lover sees what is real, which makes him appear mad to those who do not. Eros is only a supposed liability in earthly life because it presents us with a ladder that would take us out of earthly life altogether, all the way up to the highest heaven.

The erastes then tries to cultivate within the eromenos the qualities of whichever god he followed in the pre-mortal procession, awakening within the latter a reciprocal love that, when channeled towards philosophy, allows both souls to “gain their wings together” in due time.

The dialogue again shifts to the topic of rhetoric, and focuses on the question of whether writing or speech is better for the one who receives it. Socrates, arguing that a living teacher will always be superior to the written word, closes out the Phaedrus by roasting every Goodreads user:

“'Because [students of writing] will be widely read, though without any contact with a teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant. And this spurious appearance of intelligence will make them difficult company.’”

Curious about what the great Socrates may have said about Love? Guess what! This is the dialogues for you! Also he covers what he terms the sciences (unfortunately his idea of science is mostly that of Rhetoric) and some other taunting between Socrates and Phaedrus. Always fun to read Plato I must say.

Plato at his most playful. First Socrates presents one argument about romantic love (in a nutshell--that it's dangerous and not to be messed with), then professes to have changed his mind and presents an extreme counter to his own argument, (that love is a reminder of our true spiritual form and should be sought above all else). He finally reveals that he's just been messing with Phaedrus in order to show him how unwieldy and unreliable the art of rhetoric can be.

[Abridged in The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume A]

I've also read this a few years ago in full, here we skip the long set-up and love discussions and focus just on Socrates's thoughts on rhetoric and writing. He seems to be against writing because it allows you to know without remembering. Writing is silent and doesn't answer questions or defend itself - easily misused.

"The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge—discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it happy as any human being can be."


>first speech of socrates
We are all ruled, he says, by two principles: one is our inborn desire for pleasure, and the other is our acquired judgment that pursues what is best (237d). Following your judgment is "being in your right mind", while following desire towards pleasure without reason is "outrage"

>Second speech
-madness given as a gift of the gods provides us with some of the best things we have.
-A soul is like the "natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer".
-What is outside of heaven, says Socrates, is quite difficult to describe, lacking color, shape, or solidity, as it is the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence.
-One comes to manifest this sort of love after seeing beauty here on earth and being reminded of true beauty as it was seen beyond heaven
-A lover's friendship is divine, Socrates concludes, while that of a non-lover offers only cheap, human dividends, and tosses the soul about on earth for 9,000 years.

> Discussion of rhetoric and writing
-persuasion being the purpose of speechmaking and oration. Socrates first objects that an orator who does not know bad from good will, in Phaedrus's words, harvest "a crop of really poor quality"
-one must make systematic divisions between two different kinds of things: one sort, like "iron" and "silver", suggests the same to all listeners; the other sort, such as "good" or "justice", lead people in different directions.
-He goes on to compare one with only knowledge of these tools to a doctor who knows how to raise and lower a body's temperature but does not know when it is good or bad to do so,
-Socrates tells a brief legend, critically commenting on the gift of writing from the Egyptian god Theuth to King Thamus, who was to disperse Theuth's gifts to the people of Egypt. After Theuth remarks on his discovery of writing as a remedy for the memory, Thamus responds that its true effects are likely to be the opposite; it is a remedy for reminding, not remembering, he says, with the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with.
-No written instructions for an art can yield results clear or certain. Writings are silent; they cannot speak, answer questions, or come to their own defense.

وقتی چشمانش به چشمان معشوق می‌افتد٫ لرزش بدنش به گرمایی سوزاننده تبدیل می‌شود. بخشی از روح که محل رشد بال‌هاست اما در طول زندگی زمینی خشک و چروکیده شده٫ شروع به ذوب شدن می‌کند و دوباره بال‌های کوچکی از آن جوانه می‌زند:
«همانند کودکی که دندان‌هایش تازه جوانه زده و لثه‌هایش می‌خارد و درد می‌گیرد، وقتی بال‌ها جوانه می‌زنند روح متورم می‌شود، درد می‌گیرد و می‌سوزد.»

Read for class. Second work by Plato I've read this year. I don't know if Socrates was really the way Plato characterizes him, but if he was, it's no wonder they wanted to poison him lol.

Ugh, these philosophers think they're so cool. It's HIGHLY annoying.

I’m making my way though Plato’s collected dialogues – and there are quite a few of them. All the same, I’m surprised by how many I’ve read before. I’m going to add some comments about the individual ones as I go through them and maybe something overall on them as a collection once I’ve finished.

It would be easy to say this dialogue is about love, except that the Phaedrus isn’t actually about love alone, but also about the power of rhetoric and why we need to be aware of that power. One of the things I’ve particularly noticed in this read through of the dialogues is how attracted Socrates is to pretty young men. In one of the dialogues he even mentions how tongue-tied he starts off being while talking to a particularly beautiful young man. And sometimes it is fairly obvious that he is showing off in front of them. This presents something of a counter-theme to the stated aim of many of these dialogues, that beauty is more than just skin deep and that sexual attraction alone isn’t to be trusted.

I guess in some ways what is being discussed in relation to love is a bit like choosing someone to be your mentor, even if at least part of that relationship is also going to be sexual. The dialogue starts with Phaedrus going to tell Socrates of something he had read on the nature of love written by Lysias. Now, Socrates stops him, because he can see the speech is basically sticking out of his pocket and so he tells him to read it to him. This is interesting given what is said later about the power of memory and the negative aspects of written texts.

Lysias’ speech says that you should enter into a relationship with someone who doesn’t love you, since love comes with lots of problems – not least of which being jealousy – and so you might be better off with someone who just wants to have sex with you as they are likely to have your best interests at heart and will not try to necessarily keep you from mixing with other people. A disinterested lover is therefore likely to be a better mentor, whereas a passionate lover might ultimately do you harm.

Socrates listens to this and then says that he was so swept along by how involved Phaedrus was in his reading of the speech that it was all a bit contagious. Which is interesting for the second theme of this dialogue – on rhetoric – since it is that kind of contagion that ultimately Socrates is going to want to overcome. But he then says he could do a better speech on the same theme, but before starting he covers his head, I think basically out of shame and embarrassment since he is going to be swept along by the muses in what he is saying. In a sense this sort of thing sounds like it is Socrates being ironic and even a little sarcastic – and I’m sure it is that too – but I also started to wonder if this wasn’t a bit like watching science fiction films while knowing a little of physics. You know, like in Star Wars where people zap off at light speed across the universe, but everyone is still in the same time relative to each other. If you worry about the physics of the film, you’ll ruin your enjoyment of the film – but if you don’t worry about it, then you have to sort of pretend to remain dumber than you necessarily are. The solution being to worry about the physics after you’ve enjoyed the film, perhaps... Although, as someone who hasn’t seen a Star Wars film since the second one (which was probably numbered episode 7 or something stupid like that), the other option is, of course, to not bother watching them at all. Which I guess is ultimately Socrates’ point and one I've basically followed by default.

In Socrates’ first speech he is also arguing that you are better off with a non-lover – since being in love is a kind of madness and since a lover wants their own pleasure from the object of their love, that is unlikely to involve them worrying too much about what is bests for the young man. In fact, it is likely to have pretty bad consequences for the young man, since the lover will be moulding them into something that will best suit their own passions. A non-lover, on the other hand, is more likely to be a guide in the young man’s life and so ought to be chosen for those reasons.

Except, love is basically a god and so Socrates, in making this speech against love, has just blasphemed – the little ghost guy that tells him when he made some sort of blunder tells him this before he can leave, and so he now has to make another speech to make amends. And so, this time his focus is on the benefits of love. In this Socrates talks of how the particular beauty of the young man acts as a kind of stepping stone towards grasping the truth of the form of the beautiful – and this is realised in the movement from the particular (the beauty of the boy) to the universal (beauty per se) - or from the concrete realisation of beauty in the young boy, to the abstract (and therefore more true) nature of beauty as a form. To achieve ‘true’ love, the lover and the boy need to be swept along by desire so as to be nearly overcome by it, but to ultimately not give into that desire – that is, I guess, they show that their desire for knowledge and truth about beauty is stronger than the baser emotions involved in consuming and consummating their physical desire.

So, to recap a little – Phaedrus reads a speech by Lysias to Socrates, Socrates first tries to improve this speech, by improving upon its rhetorical form, but then has to give another version of the speech to not just fix up its form, but also the problems with its content. We then come to a discussion on the nature of rhetoric itself – or rather, of writing. Socrates sees writing as a problem, and it is important in that context to remember that he, a bit like Jesus, never wrote anything, but spent his life in discussions with people. All the same, as I said at the start, it is interesting that he demanded a reading of the first speech, rather than a recollection of it.

Socrates believed discussion was far superior to writing since if you don’t understand something said by someone you are talking to, you can ask them a question – and asking questions is certainly Socrates’ thing. But with a book it has the problem of only being able to tell you the same thing over and over again. And as I said before, we can too easily get swept along by the beauty of a speech, and miss the fact that perhaps nothing worthwhile is being said.

I noticed this particularly this week, after the Labor Party here in Australia lost the election – an election it had been decided by everyone for years it would be impossible for the ALP to lose. Anyway, one of their ex-politicians put a video online of him very passionately saying things needed to change. He didn’t say which things needed to change, how they needed to change, how those changes might make it more likely for the ALP to win the next election – none of that – just that things needed to change. He did, however, say this with remarkable force and conviction, so much so that I'm quite sure he was terribly, terribly sincere, and his little video has received 16,500 views. It is just that, despite the depth of his sincerity, I'm not sure I could tell you what he is being sincere about.

Of course, the problem with writing isn’t just that you can’t ask the written text questions – well, you can, it’s just you can’t expect answers. Rather, the real problem with written texts for Socrates is the impact they have on memory. Writing is often considered to be an ‘aid’ to memory – but for Socrates, it is likely to be the exact opposite. Whereas before writing you had to remember by-heart things you wanted to ‘take with you’, with writing you can always refer back to the text. The problem is, that having something ‘in your heart’ isn’t quite the same as having something that you can ‘look up’.

For a long time I tried to learn poetry by heart, and for pretty much the same reason Socrates is saying here. I highly recommend it, by the way – you can play with poems you know by heart in ways it is harder to play with them if you have to track them down and read over again. And that does make a difference. You understand poems more once you have committed them to memory – Part of me thinks that should sound obvious, but another part of me suspects many people might not really believe it.

This is one of the classic dialogues – perhaps one of the top ten – a couple of things I’ve read about it talk about how it is one of Plato’s homosexual dialogues – which is, of course, a bit stupid – given that homosexuality as we think of it now wasn’t really what the Ancient Greeks understood by the idea of love (or even sex) between a man and a ‘boy’. We find it impossible to understand the past other than through the lens of our present prejudices. As such, this book is a good curative for that.