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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