This dialogue begins with a discourse on love, with Phaedrus recounting a speech by Lysias about love’s defects, then Socrates responding with a speech of his own. The dialogue then moves to a discussion on the merits and truths of oratory and writing, in general, before concluding. As Phaedrus recounts, “Lysias argues that it is better to give your favors to someone who does not love you than to someone who does.” Socrates’ speech meanders before getting to the theme of love. First he suggests, “each of us is ruled by two principles which we follow wherever they lead: one is our inborn desire for pleasures, the other is our acquired judgement that pursues what is best…. Now when judgement is in control and leads us by reasoning toward what is best, that sort of self-control is called ‘being in your right mind’; but when desire takes command in us and drags us without reasoning toward pleasure, then its command is known as ‘outrageousness’.” Socrates then goes on to define love, specifically, “the unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty, its force reinforced by its kindred desires for beauty in human bodies—this desire, all-conquering in its forceful drive, takes its name from the words for force (rhome) and is called eros.” Socrates goes on to describe the blinding nature of being in love, “it [the soul] forgets mother and brothers and friends entirely and doesn’t care at all if it loses its wealth through neglect. And as for proper and decorous behavior, in which it used to take pride, the soul despises the whole business. Why, it is even willing to sleep like a slave, anywhere, as near to the object of its longing as it is allowed to get! That is because in addition to its reverence for one who has such beauty, the soul has discovered that the boy is the only doctor for all that terrible pain. This is the experience we humans call love.” However, Socrates points out that madness is sometimes beneficial to the soul, but only when provided by the gods. “In fact the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god…. If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.” It is left as questionable if madness is too high a price for the soul to pay, whether in poetry or in love.
Phaedrus and Socrates shift gears towards the end of their dialogue and begin to discuss the merits of rhetoric. Socrates responds that rhetoric is useless and empty without a firm basis in philosophy. “The reason they [orators] cannot define rhetoric is that they are ignorant of dialectic. It is their ignorance that makes them think they have discovered what rhetoric is when they have mastered only what it is necessary to learn as preliminaries…. We need to determine the nature of something—of the body in medicine, of the soul in rhetoric. Otherwise, all we’ll have will be an empirical and artless practice.” Socrates goes on to emphasize that true knowledge cannot be written down in permanence. First, Socrates channels the spirit of Ammon-Ra speaking to Thoth, the inventor and god of writing, “You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention [of writing] will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” Then Socrates, in his own voice, goes on to state that written philosophy cannot truly teach those who are still ignorant. “Those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant…. Otherwise, how could they possibly think that words written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?” Plato, through Socrates, seems to be warning us to take his own dialogues with a grain of salt. Are his own writings, as well, only valuable to those with a previous understanding of their obscure truths? Socrates does seem to caution about the spreading of philosophy to the uninitiated, only through the written word. “When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not.” Socrates ends this dialogue by recapping the basic foundations one needs to first master, before being able to speak wisely. “First, you must know the truth concerning everything you are speaking or writing about; you must learn how to define each thing in itself; and, having defined it, you must know how to divide it into kinds until you reach something indivisible. Second, you must understand the nature of the soul, along the same lines; you must determine which kind of speech is appropriate to each kind of soul, prepare and arrange your speech accordingly, and offer a complex and elaborate speech to a complex soul and a simple speech to a simple one. Then, and only then, will you be able to use speech artfully, to the extent that its nature allows it to be used that way, either in order to teach or in order to persuade.”
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