Classics and the Western Canon discussion
Plato, Symposium & Phaedrus
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Phaedrus: the Second Speech of Socrates
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The argument on madness being a good thing in certain cases seems to be a standard argument. Apollodorus is referred to as a maniac and seems proud of it in the beginning of Symposium.FRIEND: You’ll never change, Apollodorus! Always nagging, even at yourself! I do believe you think everybody—yourself first of all—is totally worthless, except, of course, Socrates. I don’t know exactly how you came to be called “the maniac,” but you certainly talk like one, always furious with everyone, including yourself—but not with Socrates! APOLLODORUS: Of course, my dear friend, it’s perfectly obvious why I [e] have these views about us all: it’s simply because I’m a maniac, and I’m raving!
Symposium 173d-e
Damned odd place for a wing to sprout if you ask me. I have trouble taking some of this seriously. The soul as charioteer makes sense, but the "wing" doesn't sprout in the presence of the True and the Good, it sprouts in the presence of an opportunity for sex. Perhaps there are two messages here: the desire for the T&G (different as it is) is somehow like sexual desire, and even Socrates needs to bow to the god Eros.
Roger wrote: "Damned odd place for a wing to sprout if you ask me. . .Perhaps there are two messages here. . ."I agree, the alt-mythology stuff makes a nice metaphor here and there, but it is pretty far out. Maybe that is why they call the opening in the pants a fly?
I understood the two messages to mean firstly, that a man whose soul has glimpsed the eternal Forms on its cyclical journey is aroused by the boy's beauty as a reflection of the perfect Forms while secondly, a man with a soul who has not achieved a view of the Forms will respond more crudely, focusing solely on the physical aspect of the boy's beauty.
Also odd here is that unlike Symposium, there is no mention as yet of procreation. We get a little creation from muse inspired madness, but no procreation.
David wrote: "The argument on madness being a good thing in certain cases seems to be a standard argument. Apollodorus is referred to as a maniac and seems proud of it in the beginning of Symposium.FRIEND: You’l..."I didn't remember "the maniac" so I had to look it up: the term is "to malakos," which is an adjectival noun based on the word malakos, which means soft, tender, feeble, etc. Waterfield translates it as "the softy." The gist of the comment is that Apollodorus is hard on everyone, except Socrates, whom he is *mad* about, so why is he called "the softy"? So the translation is not literally accurate, but I think the sense is still there. Is that Jowett?
Thomas wrote: "So the translation is not literally accurate, but I think the sense is still there. Is that Jowett?"My translation of both Symposium and Phaedrus are by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff from: Plato: Complete Works . Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Do you agree with Socrates' etymology in Phaedrus?
They thought it was wonderful when it came as a gift of the god, and that’s why they gave its name to prophecy; but nowadays people don’t know the fine points, so they stick in a ‘t’ and call it ‘mantic.’ Similarly, the clear-headed study of the future, which uses birds and other signs, was originally called oionoïstic, since it uses reasoning to bring intelligence (nous) and learning (historia) into human thought; but now modern speakers call it oiōnistic, putting on airs with their long ‘ō’. [d] To the extent, then, that prophecy, mantic, is more perfect and more admirable than sign-based prediction, oiōnistic, in both name and achievement, madness (mania) from a god is finer than self-control of human origin, according to the testimony of the ancient language givers.
How does Socrates' description of the soul here in Phaedrus compare to his description of the tripartite soul in Republic?In Republic, Socrates describes a tripartite soul composed of a rational part, a spirited part, and the appetite part. The rational part is responsible for reason and wisdom, the spirited part for emotions like courage and honor, and the appetite part for desires such as hunger, thirst, and sexual desire.
1. He seems to be leaving out the spirited part in Phaedrus.
2. I am not sure, but it seems like Socrates is promoting the appetite part over the reason part in Phaedrus, which is the opposite of his recommendations in Republic
I find it interesting that when Phaedrus asked Socrates whether he thought the legend of Boreas carrying Orithuia away was true, Socrates responded, Actually, it would not be out of place for me to reject it, as our intellectuals do. I could then tell a clever story. . .such explanations are amusing enough, but they are a job for a man I cannot envy at all. He’d have to be far too ingenious and work too hard—mainly because after that he will have to go on and give a rational account of the form of the Hippocentaurs, and then of the Chimera; [e] and a whole flood of Gorgons and Pegasuses and other monsters, in large numbers and absurd forms, will overwhelm him. Anyone who does not believe in them, who wants to explain them away and make them plausible by means of some sort of rough ingenuity, will need a great deal of time. But I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I [230] am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that. This is why I do not concern myself with them.And yet he gives us another clever, unprovable, and somewhat repackaged Myth of Er, story (see Republic X:614b-618b) about the soul and its cyclical travels that take upwards of 3,000 years. Did Plato/Socrates actually believe these convoluted stories, or were they understood only as philosophical allegory?
David wrote: "Do you agree with Socrates' etymology in Phaedrus?They thought it was wonderful when it came as a gift of the god, and that’s why they gave its name to prophecy; but nowadays people don’t know the fine points, so they stick in a ‘t’ and call it ‘mantic.’"
The etymology is nonsense, and the one that follows about the "oionistic" art is even worse, so we have to look for why Socrates wants to link those concepts. (Or less generously, we can question Phaedrus' intelligence and ask why Socrates is employing this unconvincing form of argument.)
It seems Socrates shifts all the blame (and none of the credit) given to lovers due to the irrational passion (bad madness) of love in the first speeches, to the nobility of the lover's character in light of receiving the gift of love? Minus all the creative alternative mythology behind it, it sounds more reasonable to assign accountability to a person instead of on love itself.On the other hand, we have more one-sided arguments that are the reverse of the previous one-sided arguments, they are all pro-lover and anti-non-lover.
their lives are bright and happy as they travel together, and thanks to their love [e] they will grow wings together when the time comes. “These are the rewards you will have from a lover’s friendship, my boy, and they are as great as divine gifts should be. A non-lover’s companionship, on the other hand, is diluted by human self-control; all it pays are cheap, human dividends, and though the slavish attitude it engenders in a friend’s soul is widely praised as virtue, it tosses the soul around for [257] nine thousand years on the earth and leads it, mindless, beneath it.
David wrote: "How does Socrates' description of the soul here in Phaedrus compare to his description of the tripartite soul in Republic?In Republic, Socrates describes a tripartite soul composed of a rational ..."
Great question. I think the image of the soul is tailored for a specific purpose in each case; in the Republic it is to see if it would be possible to build a just city on the model of a just soul. To do this he has to describe the parts of the soul in a way that corresponds to the parts of a city. It's a little more difficult to see what his purpose is in Phaedrus, but I think it's to show how eros can be a reflection of, and maybe even a product of the Good. I don't think he is describing the way he thinks the soul is actually composed or ordered -- he says only a god can tell what the soul actually is -- but he is telling us something about what the soul is like. He tailors his account of what the soul is "like" to suit his purpose, which in this case is to defend the honor of Eros.
David wrote: "It seems Socrates shifts all the blame (and none of the credit) given to lovers due to the irrational passion (bad madness) of love in the first speeches, to the nobility of the lover's character in light of receiving the gift of love? Minus all the creative alternative mythology behind it, it sounds more reasonable to assign accountability to a person instead of on love itself.That would be reasonable for modern people of science, who are not so different from the "intellectuals" who try to find a material explanation for the myth of Boreas and Orithuia. Socrates' response to this is that there is no end in the chain of material events; one material thing causes another ad infinitum, no fundamental principle is ever definitively final, and nothing can ever be known in its fullness. When Socrates claims not to know anything, it is often in this way -- here he says that if he can't know himself [in a fundamental and definitively final way,] "it seems laughable to think about other things." In other places Socrates calls the material the "World of Becoming", as opposed to the World of Being. The world of becoming is in constant change; the World of Being is where the Forms reside in all their eternal static perfection.
The trouble is that it isn't easy to speak about the world of Being, the realm of pure forms or ideas. In most of the dialogues Socrates chases after an idea in an attempt to pin it down and define it -- justice, knowledge, friendship -- and always fails. Ultimately he resorts to myth, by which he tries to express something true, if unprovable, about the ineffable form he is chasing after. But there is no end to myth-making either.
Thomas wrote: "He tailors his account of what the soul is "like" to suit his purpose."I suppose the same could be said of the definitions of love that Socrates has given us both Symposium and Phaedrus.
The definition of love Socrates provides in Phaedrus is an all good gift of the gods which is the result of exposure to earthly physical beauty causing a recollection of of the Forms the soul has glimpsed manifesting itself as a beneficial madness inspiring virtue and goodness between a lover and his beloved (males) in a range of relationship types between platonic and romantic, and in some, more or less than others, based on their levels of virtue or justice, and exposure to the Forms. There is no mention of Diotima, relationships with women, or striving for immortality.
In contrast The definition of love Socrates provides in Symposium is that love is the desire for the perpetual possession of the good, or more specifically, the desire for something like immortality through the creation of a legacy, i.e., children, great works, etc. The ultimate goal of love is to attain the highest form of beauty and goodness, which is the Form of Beauty itself. Through this process, one can become wise and ultimately achieve immortality.
I suspect that the definitions we get in Phaedrus are at the service of rhetoric. We get at least one definition in Socrates' first speech at 237-238. We know this definition -- love is passion without reason -- is faulty, but at least it's an attempt to say what love is. Socrates' second speech seems to avoid the attempt altogether. Instead of dialectic, which is what I would expect from Socrates, he tells a myth, and a myth within a myth, in an attempt to describe metaphorically how love affects men. It is still a passion, but one that is open to reason. Love of beauty and wisdom can be a passion, but a reasonable one. The curious thing is that the love of wisdom (philosophy) is still a divinely inspired madness. The moderation of the philosopher is qualitatively different from the moderation of the non-lover ("mortal moderation") because divinely inspired moderation is passionate, while moderation based on reason alone (the moderation of the non-lover) is not.
We appear to get a, "No-True-Scotsman Fallacy", from Socrates' in his second speech in the form of No-True-Lover. If love does not turn out to be beneficial to both parties then the lovers are not truly inspired by their memories of the realm of Forms or otherwise corrupted and are doing it wrong.Socrates claims that all love is good and we are given a very large explanation of why, but it only "sounds" true at the cost of all the contrary information available from all of the bad outcomes, many of which were mentioned in previous arguments. It appears to be a highly complex rhetoric disguising yet another one-sided argument the opposite of the first two.
Socrates' redefines love as, "all good", to be true by definition, and therefore tells us more about Socrates' use of the word love, rather than a more complete view. It is Plato, not Socrates that gives us that more complete review of love as a sum total of all of the arguments presented, some being more persuasive than others. I suppose putting the most comprehensive argument last is another trick of rhetoric to make it more believable?
Was this second speech of Socrates meant to be the true, or was it just meant as another and more highly refined example of rhetoric?
David wrote: "Was this second speech of Socrates meant to be the true, or was it just meant as another and more highly refined example of rhetoric?"Both, I think. For Plato goodness is synonymous with being, or perhaps goodness is the source of being; in any case, the closer to goodness something is, the closer it is to being that thing in itself, and therefore the more true it is. In this dialogue there is some discussion of that at 247. But to explain this in technical ontological terms is difficult and boring -- and this is more or less the way most ontology is presented, in bad style. (See Aristotle's Metaphysics, Heidegger's Being and Time, Kant, Sartre, etc.) All classics and of great value, but incredibly obscure. Plato is able to present his difficult and somewhat mystical theory of Being in a way that is literarily captivating, in a way that "shines," and he does this with his deft use of rhetoric. Maybe there is a correlation between the beauty of rhetoric and the beauty of the beloved? Both are meant as vehicles to something closer to the Good itself?
Just finished this section after falling asleep twice between chariots, wings, grasshoppers, and whatnots. I thought Socrates was condemned for corrupting the minds of the youth, not for boring them to death
The conversation has taken a ninety-degree turn, from love to rhetoric. Is Plato hinting that the previous speeches entreating the handsome young boy to prefer the lover/non-lover were exercises in rhetoric?
Emil wrote: "Just finished this section after falling asleep twice between chariots, wings, grasshoppers, and whatnots. I thought Socrates was condemned for corrupting the minds of the youth, not for boring the..."Alcibiades says something similar in Symposium:
The first time a person lets himself listen to one of Socrates' arguments, it sounds really ridiculous. Trivial-sounding words and phrases form his outer covering, the brutal Satyr's skin. He talks of pack-asses, metal workers, tanners, shoemakers; he seems to go on and on about the same arguments to make the same points...
It is interesting to consider what a man like Alcibiades found attractive about Socrates because what he saw at first glance was not attractive to him at all.
Roger wrote: "The conversation has taken a ninety-degree turn, from love to rhetoric. Is Plato hinting that the previous speeches entreating the handsome young boy to prefer the lover/non-lover were exercises in..."Yes, and I think he says as much at 262d.
"By some chance, as it seems, both the speeches were models of sorts, revealing how someone who knows the truth could play around with words and lead his audience on."
Thomas wrote: "Alcibiades says something similar in Symposium:The first time a person lets himself listen to one of Socrates' arguments, it sounds really ridiculous...."
It's funny how Socrates' speeches have the same effect on the audience after almost 2500 years. Now I am reading the third section and everything makes sense again ...
I feel like an idiot because I can never know if Socrates is serious or sarcastic. I also call a fool any person who claims to know it for sure.
Socrates realizes that the preceding speeches, both his and Lysias', were "simple-minded, even slightly irreverent." Eros is a god, after all, and those speeches disparaged him. Consequently, Socrates wishes to be cleansed of the sin of his speech. Stesichorus once sinned in a similar way and was blinded for it; by composing a palinode that corrected his error, his sight was restored. Socrates will now do the same thing. (Socrates says the previous speech was by Phaedrus, by which I think he means that it was inspired by Phaedrus; this one is inspired by the cleansing rite of Stesichorus.)
The primary fault of the previous speeches was the principle that love is a form of madness, and therefore a bad thing. Socrates does not deny love its mad quality, but says that not all madness is bad. On the contrary, the greatest things come from divine madness. Socrates outlines some other types of madness to demonstrate how madness is not always such a bad thing. Maybe the madness of eros is of that type too; perhaps the gods "grant such madness for our greatest good fortune."
Socrates says it is necessary to first understand the nature of the soul in its "human and divine forms" and launches into a demonstration of the immortality of the soul. Why must the soul be immortal for his account of eros?
After the soul's immortality, Socrates discusses the form of the soul -- he can't say what this is, but he can say what is like, which introduces the image of the soul as a charioteer driving two horses, one obedient and the other unruly. Additionally, the perfect soul is winged. He describes the heavenly world of pure Being that the gods inhabit, and that mortal souls have some knowledge of. But at some point mortal souls become weighed down; the charioteer is unable to control the disobedient part of the soul (the unruly horse) and the soul winds up falling to earth, the world of Becoming.
This appears to happen on a cyclical basis reminiscent of reincarnation. Each time the soul returns to earth, the memory of the heavenly world of the Forms (pure Being) fades a little more, and the incarnation is of a less noble type. The most noble incarnation, the one with the clearest recollection, is that of the philosopher; the least is the tyrant. In each case the soul is able to revisit the world of the Forms via memory. Love seems to be a kind of inspiration or reminder of the Forms -- Socrates doesn't allude to Diotima here, but I think her "ladder" applies here. Beautiful things and people lead to a re-growth of the wings that have been lost. (A rather erotic description of wings springing forth accompanies this thought.)
How does beauty, including physical beauty, operate to lead a soul to divine madness? (In Socrates' case, the divine madness of philosophy.)
Socrates makes a distinction between the "true" moderation of the soul that has been seized by a god (enthused) and "mortal moderation." What is the difference? Has Socrates made his case for the divine madness inspired by love?