Phaedrus

Last lecture: Alcibiades’ speech• Dionysian figure• Visiting Agathon; awards Agathon the ‘winner’

(places ribbons and flowers on his head)• Assigns himself role of symposiarch• Sees Socrates and is overcome with jealousy• Places flowers and ribbons on Socrates’ head

(Socrates draws him away from other kinds of beauty)

• Gives a speech in praise of Socrates (as lover), but also criticises Socrates (as beloved)

Last lecture: Role of Socrates• Rejects conventional lover-beloved relation

(pursuit of wisdom should involve two active participants; erōmenos is passive).

• Silenus figure: appears like a lover, but an object of beauty within

• Not identified with an erastes or daimon (unusual appearance in this dialogue)

• Not identified with an erōmenos (doesn’t give sexual favours in response to Alcibiades’ advances)

Setting the scene

• Dialogue takes place in the countryside• Socrates describes himself as a “lover of

speeches” (236e); he’s “sick with passion for hearing people speak” (228b).

• Both Plato’s dialogues about erotic love include long speeches (perhaps to reveal to us the state of the lover?)

• What are Phaedrus’ true intentions in pretending not to know the speech?

Socrates: “Phaedrus – if I don’t know Phaedrus, I’ve forgotten even who I am” (228a).

Socrates: “Forgive me, my good man. You see, I’m a lover of learning, and country places and trees won’t teach me anything, which the people of the city will” (230d).

Lysias: “How it is with me, you know, and how I think it is to our advantage that these things should happen, you have heard me say; and I claim that I should not fail to achieve the things I ask for because I happen not to be in love with you” (230e-231a).

Lysias’ speech

• The lover will regret the sex with the boy (regrets acting out of compulsion when his reason returns).

• The lover regrets time spent pursuing the boy and time spent with the boy.

• Lovers give the greatest affection on the object of their love, but that only lasts until they love you and then it’s given to someone else.

• It’s hard to comprehend the irrational things we do when we’re in love.

• There are more people to choose from who are suitable for you (but not in love with you) than those who are in love with you.

Lysias’ speech

• A lover will boast about having secured his beloved rather than thinking what’s in the best interests of the beloved. The beloved is far more likely to be mocked.

• Lovers become jealous.• Because lovers are, in the first place, physically

attracted to a boy’s body, they won’t remain friends afterwards.

• A lover’s judgement is suspect and they don’t praise what’s best.

Summary of Lysias’ speech

• The lover, who’s motivated by erotic passion, has a really bad effect on the beloved’ life (both in body and in mind).

• The non-lover is superior, because rational (no risk of a breakdown of identity).

• Note: similarities between Pausanias’ (Symposium) and Phaedrus’ speech: if education is that good, why include the sexual aspect at all?

Socrates: Superhumanly, in fact, my friend; enough to make me beside myself. And it was because of you, Phaedrus, that I felt as I did, as I looked at you, because you seemed to me to be positively beaming with delight at the speech as you read it; for I followed your lead, thinking that you are more of an expert about such things than me, and I joined in the ecstasy with your inspired self.

Phaedrus: Just stop. Do you mean to joke about it like this?

Phaedrus: “Don’t do that, Socrates. Tell me really – in the name of Zeus, the god of friendship – do you think any other Greek who gave his own speech on the same subject would have weightier and more numerous things to say” (234e).

Socrates: “My breast is full, if I may say so, my fine fellow, and I see that I would have other things to say beyond what Lysias says, and no worse either. I am well aware that I have thought up none of them from within my resources, because I am conscious of my own ignorance; the only alternative, then, I think, is that I have been filled up through my ears, like a vessel, from someone else’s streams” (235c-d).

Phaedrus: “watch out, and don’t deliberately make me give you a ‘Socrates, if I don’t know Socrates, I’ve even forgotten who I am,’ or a ‘he was desperate to speak, but put on a pose.’ Just make up your mind that we won’t leave this spot until you say what you were claiming you had ‘in your breast’. We’re alone in a deserted place, and I’m stronger and younger than you…” (236c-d).

Socrates covers his head

Socrates: “I shall speak with my head covered, so that I can rush through my speech as quickly as I can and not lose my way through shame, from looking at you” (237a).

Socrates: “Well then, that love is some sort of desire is clear to everyone; and again we know that men desire the beautiful even if they are not in love” (237d).

Socrates: “Well then, my dear Phaedrus, do you think, as I do myself, that something more than human has happened to me?...the spot seems really to be a divine one…” (238c-d).

Socrates: “Necessarily, then, he will be jealous, and by keeping him from many other forms of association, of a beneficial kind, which would most make a man of him, he will be a cause of great harm to him; and he will be the cause of the greatest harm by keeping him from that association from which he would become wisest. This is what that divine thing, philosophy, is, from which the lover must necessarily keep his beloved far away, out of a dread of being despised; and he must contrive in everything else that the boy should be in complete ignorance and looking for everything to his lover, which is the condition in which he will offer most pleasure to the other but most harm to himself” (239b).

Socrates’ first speech

• Claims to give a more rational speech (that a non-lover would give).

• Socrates’ argument: such a speech could only be driven by erotic desire.

• I.e. it’s the speech a lover would give to a beloved to make it easier for him to become a beloved.

• Socrates gives the speech with his head covered (this isn’t representative of his opinion).

• Attempt to speak as a non-lover is the attempt to rationalise erotic desire

Socrates: “Phaedrus – if I don’t know Phaedrus, I’ve forgotten even who I am. But I do, and I haven’t” (228a).

Socrates: “the madness of the man who, on seeing beauty here on earth, and being reminded of true beauty, becomes winged and, fluttering with eagerness to fly upwards like a bird, and taking no heed of the things below, causes him to be regarded as mad” (249d).

Socrates: “Once he has admitted him, and accepted his conversation and his company, the good-will that he experiences at close quarters from the one in love astounds the beloved, as he clearly sees that not even all his other friends and his relations together have anything to offer by way of friendship in comparison with the friend who is divinely possessed” (255b).

Socrates: “then it is that the springs of that stream which Zeus when in love with Ganymede named ‘desire’ flow in abundance upon the lover, some sinking within him and some flowing off outside him as he brims over; and as a breath of wind or some echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns to the source from which it issued, so the stream of beauty passes back into its possessor through his eyes, which is its natural route to the soul; arriving there and setting him all aflutter, it waters the passages of the feathers and causes the wings to grow, and fills the soul of the loved one in his turn with love” (255c).

Socrates: “so he is in love, but as to what he is in love with, he is at a loss; and he neither knows what has happened to him nor can he even begin to express what it is, but – like a man who has caught eye-disease from someone – he can give no account of it and is unaware that he is seeing himself in the one who loves as in a mirror” (255d).

Socrates: “These are the blessings, my boy, so great as to be counted divine, that will come to you from the friendship of a lover, in the way I have described; whereas the acquaintance of the one not in love, which is diluted with a merely mortal good sense, dispensing miserly benefits of a mortal kind, engenders in the soul that is the object of its attachment a meanness that, though praised by the many as a virtue, will cause it to wallow mindlessly around the earth and under the earth for nine thousand years” (256e-257a).

Socrates’ second speech

• Image of the soul (psyche): charioteer, a black horse and a white horse.

• There is something divine about falling in love with a beloved;• The experience is a recollection in which we glimpse the divine.• The beloved is the means by which the lover remembers or

recovers what is lost.• We constantly forget; the act of falling in love is an instance of

remembering (falling in love = remembering)• There is something divine about all virtues, but only beauty

inspires us to a kind of devotion• The love of the lover flows into the beloved.• Is love fantastic or narcissistic?