Beyond the City I

The following are notes on John Sallis’ interpretation of the Phaedrus in Being and Logos. My friend and I discussed this section of Sallis' interpretation in May 2009.



Sallis’ methodological approach to the Platonic dialogues, which he outlines in the introduction to Being and Logos, bears some comment before proceeding to his interpretation of the Phaedrus. According to Sallis, when reading a Platonic dialogue one must pay attention simultaneously to three dimensions:

• Logos (speeches, what is said) – e.g., in the Phaedrus, certain assertions about the nature of love or of the soul

• Ergon (action, what happens) – e.g., in the Phaedrus, Socrates is lured outside the city by a speech; he and Phaedrus then discuss under a plane tree

• Mythos (mythic images, the sway of the divine) – e.g., in the Phaedrus, the myths of Boreas, the charioteer, the cicadas, Theuth

We will note, at this point, that in terms of the mythos of the dialogue, Sallis points out at the very beginning of his reading that the god that has the principal role is Zeus, as opposed to the Apology where Apollo had the principal role:

[A]nd in this speech [on perfected speech], which takes the form of dialogue with Phaedrus, he insists that the toil required for such perfection is one ‘which a wise man ought not to undergo for the sake of speaking [legein] and acting [prattein] before men, but that he may be able to speak and to do everything, so far as possible, in a manner pleasing to the gods’ (273e - 274a). But in the Phaedrus the god who has the principal role is no longer Apollo, who gives Socrates to the city but rather Zeus, who leads whoever can follow up to that height most distant from the cities of men (104).

Inasmuch as he tries to concern himself with various dimensions within the Platonic text, Sallis seems to combine the approaches of Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss, or at least find a via media between their extremes.

Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato concentrate on ontological questions; in doing so, he focuses solely on logos, as the house of Being. He pays no attention to the drama of the dialogue. For Heidegger's key interpretations of Plato, see: Nietzsche, Volume 1, which examines the relation of art and truth in the Republic and in the Phaedrus; "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" in Pathmarks, which exposes the underlying centrality of aletheia within the allegory of the cave in the Republic; The Essence of Truth, which is an extended reading of the Thaetetus; and Plato's Sophist, which consists of lecture notes from a course given on the dialogue of the same name.

Strauss demonstrates the opposite extreme. His interpretations of Plato concentrate on ontic or political questions; in doing so, he focuses largely on the ergon – dramatic action is often used to trump what is actually said. For Strauss's key interpretations of Plato, see: The City and Man, which includes an extended interpretation of the Republic; The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws; Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, which contains essays on Plato's Apology of Socrates, Crito and Euthydemus; and Plato's Symposium.


Sallis' interpretation of the Phaedrus is divided into three sections, which accord with natural divisions within the dialogue itself:

1. The Setting (227a - 230e)
2. The Three Speeches (230e - 257b)
3. The Perfection of Speech (257b - 279c)

Section I: The Setting 227a – 230e)
Sallis points out that the description of the setting at the beginning of the dialogue is crucial to the actual matter to be discussed in the dialogue proper – they mirror one another. We will learn later that the significance of the setting is that it is mythically charged, and in this way informs the discussion of eros, the soul and logos to follow.

The opening question of the dialogue is: “My friend Phaedrus, where are you going and where do you come from?” (227a-b).

Who is Phaedrus? We must ask ourselves to begin with. From other dialogues, we know that he associates with physicians and sophists (Symposium, Protagoras); we know that he is interested in investigations of nature, as well as the mythical things. His name means “radiant” or “shining”.

Phaedrus is addressed as “friend” (phile), which is the vocative of philos = love/friendship. If the dialogue as a whole deals with eros, what is the relationship between eros and philia?

In Laws VIII.837a, philia that becomes intense (sphodros) is called eros. (See also "Plato on Friendship and Eros" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

This raises certain questions about the proper nature of love practiced by the philosopher -- i.e., is the philosopher a lover of wisdom in an intense way, as per the divine madness of Socrates' second speech, in which case the philosopher's disposition is best described as an eros? Or, is the philosopher, as per his name, a friend (phile) of wisdom who exercises moderation in his pursuit of wisdom. (On this question, see Stanley Rosen’s essay on “Socrates as Concealed Lover” in The Quarrel of Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (91-101), which posits the following thesis: "regardless of the difference between Plato and Socrates, there can be no doubt, when all the evidence is considered carefully, that the philosophical nature must combine the natures of the lover and the nonlover" (91). Another way of phrasing this might be, following Pascal, that the philosopher must combine the esprit de finesse and the esprit geometrique (see Oeuvres completes (Paris: Pleiades, 2000), 2.743.

The initial question has a number of senses:

• There is the literal sense: Where is Phaedrus coming from and where is he going?
• There is a sense in which Phaedrus is man in general: where are men formed (i.e., in the city, by speeches)? This raises the additional question of whether or not men can go outside the city truly, or do they always carry those speeches with them (as does Phaedrus). We should note, in this context, that Socrates is one who goes beyond the city in a certain way: by being within the city in a certain way.
• There is a sense in which Phaedrus stands for human destiny: that is, the first question concerns the ultimate fate (moira) of the human soul.

Phaedrus replies to the initial question by saying that he has come from listening to a speech of Lysias. The Republic begins with a reference to Socrates' going down to the Piraeus. The Phaedrus begins with a reference to Lysias (son of Cephalus, who lived in the Piraeus) going up from the Piraeus to the Olympieum (the temple of Zeus). The abode of Zeus, freed of its link to the city, will be spoken of in the myth of the soul.

Lysias' speech defends the position of the non-lover; it is an attempt to persuade potential love-objects of the wisdom of granting favours to a non-lover, who is moderate, rather than to a lover, who is mad with his erotic passion. Socrates' immediate response to Phaedrus' presentation of the topic to be discussed is to highlight that Lysias' speech is on the side of the many, as opposed to the few who may actually be in love. He also points out that it's point of departure is that love is about serving one's self interests.

Socrates says he wants to hear the speech, despite already maligning its thesis. Phaedrus pretends not to remember it. Socrates then sees through this Phaedran pretense. He is sure that Phaedrus has memorized it and that he was going to the countryside to rehearse it. Socrates then spots the actual written speech hidden under Phaedrus' cloak. The following points should be noted in relation to this episode:

• Phaedrus enacts what the first two speeches will then describe; that is, he is concealing the fact that he is a lover, in this case, of speeches.
• Socrates sees through the pretense. Socrates knows Phaedrus and it is through knowing Phaedrus that he knows himself. This is an example of Socrates' knowledge consisting of knowing souls and the moving force of those souls -- "I know my Phaedrus as well as I know my own name" (228). As Sallis points out, "the reference is to the connection between the erotic engagement with another and knowledge of oneself, a connection that will finally be thematized when at the end of his second speech Socrates says that one 'sees himself in his lover as in a mirror' (255d)" (112-13).
  
• Socrates knows Phaedrus in the broader sense highlighted by the first question of the dialogue: that is, Socrates knows the nature (the where from) of the soul and the future destiny (the whither) of the soul.
• The movement of the soul, we shall see, is eros. The proof of the eternity of the soul is centred on its movement -- i.e., it is self-moved, as opposed to those that have their source of movement in another (compare Aristotle, Physics B1; see also, Heidegger's reading of this key Aristotelian text: "On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle's Physics B, 1" in Pathmarks). So, knowing the soul and its movements entails knowing eros.

Phaedrus says that the speech is appropriate for Socrates, because it deals with love -- somehow Socrates is accutely concerned with love, which is to say that Socrates is not aloof from erotic concerns; he does, however, set out to transform our understanding of what is erotic in the highest sense:

• Socrates says he can spot a lover and a beloved (Lysis 204b-c)
• Socrates understands nothing, but erotic matters (ta erotika) (Symposium 177d-e; 198d)
• Events in the Symposium show how he makes young men love him -- he poses as the beloved (Symposium 222b)
• Compare: Symposium 213c-d, 214c-d, 216d; Charmides 154b, 155d; Lovers 133a
• Nietzsche saw this aspect of Socrates' character clearly: see his discussion of Socrates' agonistic dialectical wrestling and his discussion of Plato's philosophy as an "erotic contest", with beautiful youths spurring the contest (Twilight of the Idols, "Problem of Socrates" 8; "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man" 23; cf. my essay, "Nietzsche's Early Political Thinking: 'Homer on Competition'").

The following problem also arises as a result of these considerations: Socrates is famous for professing that he knows that he knows nothing; however, he also says that he know eros and, in deed, knows the soul. How can we reconcile these two claims? One approach has been to take Socrates' profession of ignorance as ironic, as an attempt to speak humbly to the many who fear his strange and clever speeches. This is an easy way out of the contradiction; however, it does not seem to mesh well with Socrates' own practice of continual questioning; that is, Socrates' way of life is not that of one who seems to know things and arts as such; rather, his way of life is interrogative. He lives his life in a questioning mode. We can take both his profession of ignorance and his profession to know eros seriously if we consider the following:

• Eros is a fundamental lack, an awareness of not being whole; thus, to know ta erotika is to know that one does not possess being as a whole.
• The soul is a sited disclosure of Being, within certain limits. Knowing oneself, knowing the soul is about knowing the limits of this partial disclosure -- for instance, one's mortality, the conventions that filter nature imposed by one's community. Not knowing these limits is to not know oneself.
• One comes to know oneself through erotic engagement with another (see above). But what is the type of erotic engagement that is crucial for Socrates?
  

What Socrates loves is logoi: His love of speeches is what lures him beyond the city. We have here an enactment of what is discussed in the myth of the cave. In the erotic engagement by means of logoi, Socrates undertakes his quest of knowing himself and his limits by means of the arguments and partial disclosures offered by other beautiful souls.

Socrates is a lover of logoi, but he is also a lover of Phaedrus. How do these two facts fit together? If we recall that "Phaedrus" means radiant or shining forth, we can surmise that in some ways Phaedrus is meant to represent the shining forth of Being in the Beautiful. As we shall see in the second half of the Phaedrus, beautiful logoi (perfected speech) are the most conspicuous way in which Being shines forth as the beautiful.

The next salient aspect of the setting is the river by which the two stop to discuss love. Sallis makes much of this and the connection to the "good crossing of the river" one needs to make in the myth of Er at the end of the Republic (621c).

Phaedrus asks whether this is the spot where Boreas is said to have carried off Oreithyia. Socrates says that the spot is actually further down. This raises the following question: How is Socrates acquainted with the countryside and its locales when it has been asserted that he almost never leaves the city?:

PHAEDRUS: What a very strange person you are, Socrates. So far from being like a native, you resemble, in your won phrase, a visitor being show the sights by a guide. This comes of your never going abroud beyond the frontiers of Attica or even, as far as I can see, outside the actual walls of the city.
SOCRATES: Forgive me, my dear friend. I am, you see, a lover of learning [philomathes]. Now the people in the city have something to teach me, but the fields and trees won't teach me anything (230c-d; cf. Crito 52b)

Socrates does not know the countryside, but he does know how the countryside is given human meaning by the members of the city in their accounts and stories. Socrates seems to know things as they relate to myth.

Phaedrus asks if Socrates believes this myth. Socrates replies that ther are many wise men (sophoi) who do not believe in the myth. They contrive (sophizomenos) explanations -- for e.g., that the wind pushed her off the rocks as she played with Pharmaceia, and that now as a result we say that she was carried off by Boreas (229c-d).

• Sophizomai = 1) to devise, as in an explanation; 2) to deceive, play subtle tricks

In some ways, the rationalist explanation of myth deceives or conceals certain aspects of the phenomena in question. In this case the contrived account conceals the role love may have had in the fate of Oreithyia -- i.e., the love of a god for her and the resulting ascent to the company of the gods. The contrivers do not see love and the divine ascent it offers; they only see the descent into the rocks and to one's death.

Socrates says he avoids this type of rational explanation of phenomena. He says the wise would then be called upon to provide explanations of centaurs, chimaera, gorgons etc. Socrates sticks with trying to know himself -- and to know oneself, as we have said, requires the esprit de finesse as well as the esprit geometrique. Socrates wants to know if he is "a more complicated and puffed-up sort of animal than Typho or whether [he is] a gentler and simpler creature, endowed by heaven with a nature altogether less typhonic" (230d). He wants to know himself in relation to the limits set out in myth. The mythic creature he sets out as one pole of his possibilities is one who battled against Zeus' rule of the cosmos; he is a monster with a hundred hands who came to connote vanity or arrogance. This monster with a hundred hands does not conform to the proper organic unity of left- and right-hands or sides that marks the perfected speech. Having a complicated, Typhonic nature would mean that man is not a beautiful, organic whole and that he is not knowable as a whole

Finally, after commenting on the fact that he rarely leaves the city because the trees cannot teach him (quoted above), Socrates states that Phaedrus has found a "charm" (pharmakon; literally "drug") for getting him out. The charm in question is a speech (logos). His attachment to logoi is stronger than his attachment to the city -- in the first place, because he is only interested in the city inasmuch as its logoi can teach him about himself. The speech in question is referred to as a drug (pharmakon). As Derrida has shown, the ambiguity of this term permeates the dialogue -- that is, the written speech is referred to as a drug, which can be a remedy or a poison. As a provisional response to this Derridean aporia, we can say that speeches will be poisonous for man as man inasmuch as they conceal the view of Being; whereas speeches will be remedies for man inasmuch as they open man to the view of Being.

Plato’s Phaedrus II

The following is based on a discussion with a friend on the Phaedrus that took place in April 2009 …


The first part of Plato’s Phaedrus takes up a series of three speeches on the nature of love. The second part consists of speeches on the nature of speech. We would do well when looking at the dialogue as a whole to ask ourselves in what way these two halves belong together – in what ways are love and speech bound together as one and as a whole, akin to the primordial humans in Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium.

Part I) Speeches on Love:
The speeches on love in the first part of the Phaedrus disclose the possibilities of Eros.

a) Lysias’ speech asserts that love is a type of madness; it is apparently spoken by a non-lover. This non-lover, however, in some way wishes to conquer the beloved or love-object – that is, the non-lover is in some senses, as Socrates will point out, a disguised lover who uses his disguise as a way of winning sexual favour from a beloved.

b) Socrates’ first speech follows that of Lysias in asserting that love is a type of madness and in arguing that the sobriety of the non-lover is preferable. Socrates enacts the part of the concealed lover in wearing a veil over his head while giving the speech.

• Socrates’ next speech will indeed praise love as a type of divine madness; however, we must not simply forego what has been dealt with here – that is, all of the speeches disclose certain possibilities of love and of madness as they arise in human experience as a whole.
  

• We should also keep this in mind in relation to the nature of philosophy as the highest form of love – does philosophy need to combine the divine madness of Socrates’ second speech with the sobriety and detachment of the first two speeches? Is philosophy a combination of the poet’s attachment to the human soul and the mathematician’s detached analysis of the cosmos as a whole? A good discussion of this can be found in Stanley Rosen’s essay on “Socrates as Concealed Lover” in The Quarrel of Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (91-101).

The speech is better constructed than that of Lysias – as opposed to his professed inability to do so (see the Apology, 17a-b), Socrates is able to construct well organized speeches, with an appropriate organic unity and with an appropriate attention to the needs of the audience. Socrates is ready to leave and cross the river; however, he is prevented from doing so by his daimon because he has committed a sin against love.

c) Socrates’ second speech is offered as an atonement for his sin; it is pro-love as the highest form of divine madness. In order to express this thought, Socrates introduces the myth of the charioteer. The myth is an image of the soul and of its movements. Somehow Eros is that which moves the soul in its journey of ascent to the Divine Banquet as well as its descent into embodiment.

In the ascent to the Banquet, beings are disclosed as they are and as a whole, that is, in their Being (eidos) – their outward shining forth. Given the discussion of the truth of things disclosed in the Divine Banquet as opposed to things as disclosed in embodiment, the following spectrum seems to hold:

• Being = being as it is, in its enduring presence, as a whole
  

• Becoming = being as it is and as it is not, as temporal (absent and present), as a part (partial disclosure)

In the myth, beauty is that shining forth that reminds one of the truth of beings, incites the soul to recover the movement of ascent.

Part II) Speeches on Speech:
Let us remind ourselves of the following fundamental questions raised by the dialogue as a whole:

• What ties eros and logos?

• How are they both related to the soul?

• What is the role of beauty in relation to these terms?

Let us offer the following preliminary answer:

• Eros = the movement of the soul, as the attachment to bodies and the partial disclosure of beings they involve or as the craving for the apprehension of Being as such and as a whole

• Soul = the site of disclosure of beings in their Being; here we should think of the soul in terms of Dasein as articulated by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time: beings arise is a site (Da-) of disclosure; they arise in a world of relations, in a communal context (being-with-others); and they arise within a site which is fundamentally structured by discourse (Logos)

• Beauty = the shining forth of Being, showing of beings as such and as a whole in their radiance (see, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, 162-99)

• Logos = structure of the disclosure of beings – perfected speech is “beautiful speech” and is constructed as an organic whole; non-perfected speech, on the other hand, contains repetitions of the “already said” and parts that are seemingly interchangeable. It is for this reason that the perfected speech is described as being like a body with its proper, that is to say "beautiful" arrangement of parts into an organic whole

Let us try to flesh out these enigmatic, and proximate, definitions by returning to the text of Plato. We can gain a great deal of insight to the central relation that exists between two of the terms (Soul and Logos) by turning to Socrates’ account of his own philosophic development in the Phaedo – one presented in a more private setting, on his deathbed and among his closest friends, than his more famous accounting for his way of life in the Apology. In the latter dialogue, Socrates asserts that he takes no interest in the study of nature, or of the “things below the earth and in the sky” (19b-c). This assertion is contrasted by his private account of his inquiries, where Socrates intimates that earlier in his career he had undertaken inquiries into nature. These inquiries, he claims, led to a confrontation with the absurdity of its chaos. Even basic distinctions that he had taken for granted, such as that between a tall man and a short man, could be called into question and reversed if nature in its becoming is examined closely (Phaedo 96e – 97b). This examination of the things of nature in their pure becoming leads to a sort of blindness, Socrates claims, as when one tries to “watch and study an eclipse of the sun” (99d). This is the chaos of becoming that Nietzsche describes, where every “moment devours the preceding one, every birth is the death of countless beings, procreating, living and murdering are all one” (“The Greek State”, Paragraph 6). Nietzsche observes that, over two millennia of inquiry into nature has yielded no fundamental insights into the meaning of its becoming. This holds true today despite the advancements in theoretical physics achieved after Nietzsche’s death. According to Richard Feynman, for instance, quantum mechanics “describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is – absurd” (The Character of Physical Law, 129).

Rather than resign himself, however, to accepting nature as absurd, as the modern physicist would have us do, Socrates found a way out of the this confusion by means of the thought of Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras brought philosophic inquiry from the Ionian colonies to Athens. According to Anaxagoras, all material elements of the cosmos have existed for all time – although in a chaotic mixture. It is pure Mind (Nous) that composed definite arrangements of like particles with like, such that things could have a definite shape and could be given a name (see Metaphysics 984b 15-18). Plutarch’s description of Anaxagoras emphasizes this as a turn in the history of philosophical inquiry: “he was the first to dethrone Chance and Necessity and set up pure Intelligence in their place as the principle of law and order which informs the universe, and which distinguishes from an otherwise chaotic mass those substances which possess elements in common” (“Life of Pericles” Chapter 4).

Upon first hearing Anaxagoras’ cosmological theories, Socrates was very pleased: “Somehow it seemed right that mind should be the cause of everything, and I reflected that if this is so, mind in producing order sets everything in order and arranges each individual thing in the way that is best for it” (97c). At first blush, Anaxagoras’ theories seemed to lead the way from the chaos of physical causes to a knowledge of the “final causes” of things. So, Socrates “lost no time in procuring the books, and began to read them as quickly as [he] possibly could, so that [he] might know as soon as possible about the best and the less good” (98b). To his surprise, however, Anaxagoras “made no use of mind and assigned to it no causality for the order of the world, but adduced causes like air and aether and water and many other absurdities” (98b-c). For this reason, Socrates took it upon himself to undertake a second voyage (deuteros ploūs) in search of causes (99c). Socrates’ second voyage constituted a turning from the study of things themselves in their becoming to a study of speeches (logoi). Socrates would use speeches as a way of “trying to discover the truth about things” (99d-e) – as a way of disclosing the beings in their outward presencing (eidos) – and the “truth about things” was now to be understood in the light of what is Good as such.

Let us turn to an example of the type of blindness one can be led in to by turning to beings as beings – as opposed to beings as they arise in the disclosive site of Being. When turning to the “cat” as a being that can arise in its “catness”, we can turn to the genetic scientist who will turn to cats as a natural phenomenon, not as they are disclosed in a set of human relations, that is to say, not as they arise for us. He will, perhaps, define particular specimens of cats as residing within a genetic continuum, a blend of N+1 genetic strains. Perhaps, to put it simply, the specimen is part “cat” (in the average sense of the word) and several parts “something else”. In this way, the phenomenon of the cat withdraws to some extent. The “catness” of the particular cat we encounter is occulted.

Socrates’ answer to this dilemma was to turn to the cat as it is disclosed within logoi: the opinions and accounts of cat upon which we ordinarily depend. So we pose the question, “what is a cat”?, and see what the average, everyday response might be: furry, four-legged pet … animal with great dexterity … what have you. Each of these accounts has limitations that open them up to questioning and dialogue – this questioning and dialogue surrounding the average, everyday opinions held by most of us for the most part is enacted in its most essential form in the dialogues of Plato. In embracing this questioning we thereby open the phenomenon to their possibilities for Being (cf. H-G Gadamer, Truth and Method, 356-63).


























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