Like every great artist he gives unity of form to the different and apparently distracting topics which he brings together. Socrates, half in jest and to satisfy his own wild humour, takes the disguise of Lysias, but he is also in profound earnest and in a deeper vein of irony than usual. While the sun is hot in the sky above us, let us ask that question: since by rational conversation man lives, and not by the indulgence of bodily pleasures. Let us take a survey of the professions to which he refers and try them by his standard. For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more! He recalls the story of Alcestis, who was willing to die for her husband Admetus. But the corrupted nature, blindly excited by this vision of beauty, rushes on to enjoy, and would fain wallow like a brute beast in sensual pleasures. While acknowledging that such interpretations are very nice, would he not have remarked that they are found in all sacred literatures? He may have had no other account to give of the differences of human characters to which he afterwards refers. So we may fill up the sketch of Socrates, lest, as Phaedrus says, the argument should be too abstract and barren of illustrations. (Compare Symp., Apol., Euthyphro.). Add to this that the picture of Socrates, though in some lesser particulars,e.g. The husbandman will not seriously incline to sow his seed in such a hot-bed or garden of Adonis; he will rather sow in the natural soil of the human soul which has depth of earth; and he will anticipate the inner growth of the mind, by writing only, if at all, as a remedy against old age. On a certain day Zeus the lord of heaven goes forth in a winged chariot; and an array of gods and demi-gods and of human souls in their train, follows him. And therefore there is nothing with which they can reproach Lysias in being a writer; but there may be disgrace in being a bad one. 
The poet might describe in eloquent words the nature of such a union; how after many struggles the true love was found: how the two passed their lives together in the service of God and man; how their characters were reflected upon one another, and seemed to grow more like year by year; how they read in one anothers eyes the thoughts, wishes, actions of the other; how they saw each other in God; how in a figure they grew wings like doves, and were ready to fly away together and be at rest. And lastly, he might tell how, after a time at no long intervals, first one and then the other fell asleep, and appeared to the unwise to die, but were reunited in another state of being, in which they saw justice and holiness and truth, not according to the imperfect copies of them which are found in this world, but justice absolute in existence absolute, and so of the rest. And are not they held to be the wisest physicians who have the greatest distrust of their art? For the two cannot be fairly compared in the manner which Plato suggests. There seems to be a notion that the work of a great artist like Plato cannot fail in unity, and that the unity of a dialogue requires a single subject. As Love is the oldest, Phaedrus suggests, he confers the greatest benefits. And perhaps we may arrive at some conclusion such as the followingthat the dialogue is not strictly confined to a single subject, but passes from one to another with the natural freedom of conversation. The soul which three times in succession has chosen the life of a philosopher or of a lover who is not without philosophy receives her wings at the close of the third millennium; the remainder have to complete a cycle of ten thousand years before their wings are restored to them. Kuriyama, Taro. Here is the end; the other or non-lover part of the speech had better be understood, for if in the censure of the lover Socrates has broken out in verse, what will he not do in his praise of the non-lover? The followers of Ares are fierce and violent; those of Zeus seek out some philosophical and imperial nature; the attendants of Here find a royal love; and in like manner the followers of every god seek a love who is like their god; and to him they communicate the nature which they have received from their god.
It has no power of adaptation, but uses the same words for all. While many men preferred women, both as sexual partners and as wives, male-male relationships were idealized for a number of reasons. Thus the comparison of Platos other writings, as well as the reason of the thing, lead us to the conclusion that we must not expect to find one idea pervading a whole work, but one, two, or more, as the invention of the writer may suggest, or his fancy wander. Socrates starts over with a second speech. And to all composers in the world, poets, orators, legislators, we hereby announce that if their compositions are based upon these principles, then they are not only poets, orators, legislators, but philosophers. He also argues for the indispensability of the soul to the practice of rhetoric; no one who has merely mastered rhetorical skills can claim to be an expert in the art of rhetoric unless he knows how to apply rhetorical remedies to specific souls in specific contexts. According to Hesiod, a great poet from around the time of Homer, Chaos was the first thing in existence, followed by Earth and Love. When they have attained to this exalted state, let them marry (something too may be conceded to the animal nature of man): or live together in holy and innocent friendship. So, partly in jest but also with a certain degree of seriousness, we may appropriate to ourselves the words of Plato. In the second speech Socrates is exhibited as beating the rhetoricians at their own weapons; he an unpractised man and they masters of the art. True to his character, he must, however, profess that the speech which he makes is not his own, for he knows nothing of himself. The soul of a man may descend into a beast, and return again into the form of man. In this instance the comparative favour shown to Isocrates may possibly be accounted for by the circumstance of his belonging to the aristocratical, as Lysias to the democratical party. And these two, though opposed, are not absolutely separated the one from the other. The chief criteria for determining the date of the Dialogue are (1) the ages of Lysias and Isocrates; (2) the character of the work.
We cannot separate the transitory from the permanent; nor can we translate the language of irony into that of plain reflection and common sense. But the conception of unity really applies in very different degrees and ways to different kinds of art; to a statue, for example, far more than to any kind of literary composition, and to some species of literature far more than to others. When we are once able to imagine the intense power which abstract ideas exercised over the mind of Plato, we see that there was no more difficulty to him in realizing the eternal existence of them and of the human minds which were associated with them, in the past and future than in the present. Lastly, in the coming ages we shall carry with us the recollection of the past, in which are necessarily contained many seeds of revival and renaissance in the future. He is much more serious in distinguishing men from animals by their recognition of the universal which they have known in a former state, and in denying that this gift of reason can ever be obliterated or lost. Can we wonder that few of them come sweetly from nature, while ten thousand reviewers (mala murioi) are engaged in dissecting them? The spirit of rhetoric was soon to overspread all Hellas; and Plato with prophetic insight may have seen, from afar, the great literary waste or dead level, or interminable marsh, in which Greek literature was soon to disappear. That philosophy should be represented as the inspiration of love is a conception that has already become familiar to us in the Symposium, and is the expression partly of Platos enthusiasm for the idea, and is also an indication of the real power exercised by the passion of friendship over the mind of the Greek. He counters Phaedrus's point by suggesting that Lysias was more interested in style than content. What would Socrates think of our newspapers, of our theology? It is antipathetic to him not only as a philosopher, but also as a great writer. There is no reason to suppose that, in the century before the taking of Constantinople, much more was in existence than the scholars of the Renaissance carried away with them to Italy. The whole myth, like the other myths of Plato, describes in a figure things which are beyond the range of human faculties, or inaccessible to the knowledge of the age. At the same time he appears to intimate here, as in the Ion, Apology, Meno, and elsewhere, that there is a faculty in man, whether to be termed in modern language genius, or inspiration, or imagination, or idealism, or communion with God, which cannot be reduced to rule and measure.
It was lost in doubt and ignorance. The perfection of oratory is like the perfection of anything else; natural power must be aided by art. Typically, a male-male relationship would exist between an older man (called the "lover") and a younger man (called the "loved one" or "boyfriend"). It is too often forgotten that the whole of the second discourse of Socrates is only an allegory, or figure of speech. What would he have said of the discovery of Christian doctrines in these old Greek legends? And yet they are praised by the authors of romances, who reject the warnings of their friends or parents, rather than those who listen to them in such matters. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. How does Plato, using integrative thinking, ultimately find a way to connect erotic love, beauty and the absolute into a unified whole? Then follows the famous myth, which is a sort of parable, and like other parables ought not to receive too minute an interpretation. Rhetoric is assailed on various grounds: first, as desiring to persuade, without a knowledge of the truth; and secondly, as ignoring the distinction between certain and probable matter. Phaedrus literature essays are academic essays for citation. There is also great hope to be derived, not merely from the extension of education over a wider area, but from the continuance of it during many generations. Why did words lose their power of expression? But there is another kingdom of love, a kingdom not of this world, divine, eternal. To the uninitiated, as he would himself have acknowledged, they will appear to be the dreams of a poet who is disguised as a philosopher. Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan! or, whether the select wise are not the many after all? Educated parents will have children fit to receive education; and these again will grow up under circumstances far more favourable to the growth of intelligence than any which have hitherto existed in our own or in former ages. He fastens or weaves together the frame of his discourse loosely and imperfectly, and which is the warp and which is the woof cannot always be determined. The use of such a parody, though very imperfect, is to transfer his thoughts to our sphere of religion and feeling, to bring him nearer to us and us to him. The soul that can control such yearning will be granted the philosopher's boon--an early return to heaven after three thousand years instead of ten thousand years. Besides, he will remark that there is a much greater choice of friends than of wivesyou may have more of them and they will be far more improving to your mind. The love of mankind may be the source of a greater development of literature than nationality has ever been.
And in Plato, more than in any other Greek writer, the local and transitory is inextricably blended with what is spiritual and eternal. Nor can we dwell much on the circumstance, that at the completion of ten thousand years all are to return to the place from whence they came; because he represents their return as dependent on their own good conduct in the successive stages of existence. Is he serious, again, in regarding love as a madness? And therefore he would have bid Farewell to them; the study of them would take up too much of his time; and he has not as yet learned the true nature of religion. The sophistical interest of Phaedrus, the little touch about the two versions of the story, the ironical manner in which these explanations are set asidethe common opinion about them is enough for methe allusion to the serpent Typho may be noted in passing; also the general agreement between the tone of this speech and the remark of Socrates which follows afterwards, I am a diviner, but a poor one.. First of all, love is represented here, as in the Symposium, as one of the great powers of nature, which takes many forms and two principal ones, having a predominant influence over the lives of men. The least things were preferred by him to the greatest. This higher rhetoric is based upon dialectic, and dialectic is a sort of inspiration akin to love (compare Symp. (Symp.) So far is the world from becoming exhausted, so groundless is the fear that literature will ever die out. Something too of the recollections of childhood might float about them still; they might regain that old simplicity which had been theirs in other days at their first entrance on life. (Else, perhaps, it might be further argued that, judging from their extant remains, insipid rhetoric is far more characteristic of Isocrates than of Lysias.) But this true love of the mind cannot exist between two souls, until they are purified from the grossness of earthly passion: they must pass through a time of trial and conflict first; in the language of religion they must be converted or born again. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. And so the example becomes also the deeper theme of discourse. Since Socrates expresses a keen interest in hearing Lysias's speech, Phaedrus manages to lure him out to the countryside. There is a twofold difficulty in apprehending this aspect of the Platonic writings. There are glorious and blessed sights in the interior of heaven, and he who will may freely behold them. This is the philosophical theme or proem of the whole. Then the stiffened wing begins to relax and grow again; desire which has been imprisoned pours over the soul of the lover; the germ of the wing unfolds, and stings, and pangs of birth, like the cutting of teeth, are everywhere felt. Apollo told Admetus that he was to die unless he could find someone to die in his place. It is not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a bastard, and when an attack is made upon this bastard neither parent nor anyone else is there to defend it. The conclusion of the whole matter is just this,that until a man knows the truth, and the manner of adapting the truth to the natures of other men, he cannot be a good orator; also, that the living is better than the written word, and that the principles of justice and truth when delivered by word of mouth are the legitimate offspring of a mans own bosom, and their lawful descendants take up their abode in others. Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Similarly in the Phaedrus, Socrates shows eros to be a divine madness that a philosophers soul must be able to control. ; or the great name which belongs to God alone; or the saying of wiser men than ourselves that a man of sense should try to please not his fellow-servants, but his good and noble masters, like St. Paul again; or the description of the heavenly originals. Socrates then proposes that they shall use the two speeches as illustrations of the art of rhetoric; first distinguishing between the debatable and undisputed class of subjects. In defense of this idea, Socrates gives an elaborate explanation of the nature of the soul. Or is this merely assigned to them by way of parallelism with men? Secondly, there seems to be indicated a natural yearning of the human mind that the great ideas of justice, temperance, wisdom, should be expressed in some form of visible beauty, like the absolute purity and goodness which Christian art has sought to realize in the person of the Madonna. Then again his ways are not ways of pleasantness; he is mighty disagreeable; crabbed age and youth cannot live together. At every hour of the night and day he is intruding upon him; there is the same old withered face and the remainder to matchand he is always repeating, in season or out of season, the praises or dispraises of his beloved, which are bad enough when he is sober, and published all over the world when he is drunk. It is doubtful whether any Greek author was justly appreciated in antiquity except by his own contemporaries; and this neglect of the great authors of the past led to the disappearance of the larger part of them, while the Greek fathers were mostly preserved.
That the first speech was really written by Lysias is improbable. When planted in a congenial soil the little seed becomes a tree, and the birds of the air build their nests in the branches. There is an echo of this in the prayer at the end of the Dialogue, Give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the inward and outward man be at one. We may further compare the words of St. Paul, Written not on tables of stone, but on fleshly tables of the heart; and again, Ye are my epistles known and read of all men. There may be a use in writing as a preservative against the forgetfulness of old age, but to live is higher far, to be ourselves the book, or the epistle, the truth embodied in a person, the Word made flesh. It has never had any stimulus to grow, or any field in which to blossom and produce fruit. And still, like a bird eager to quit its cage, she flutters and looks upwards, and is therefore deemed mad. In order to understand that love is a divine and beneficial madness, Socrates likens the soul to a chariot with two horses and a charioteer. Engaged in such conversation, they arrive at the plane-tree; when they have found a convenient resting-place, Phaedrus pulls out the speech and reads:. In this, as in his other discussions about love, what Plato says of the loves of men must be transferred to the loves of women before we can attach any serious meaning to his words. This art of dialectic can can only be acquired by philosophizing systematically about the nature of life and of the soul. For instead of internalizing and understanding things, students would rely on writing to remind themselves of various matters. There, lying down amidst pleasant sounds and scents, they will read the speech of Lysias. It had spread words like plaster over the whole field of knowledge. Moreover, when two Dialogues are so closely connected as the Phaedrus and Symposium, there is great improbability in supposing that one of them was written at least twenty years after the other. But did I call this love? We must not attribute a meaning to every fanciful detail. But Socrates does not share Phaedrus's admiration. Why did history degenerate into fable? Prodicus showed his good sense when he said that there was a better thing than either to be short or long, which was to be of convenient length. The last topic of discussion between Socrates and Lysias addresses the technology of writing. He defines love as a form of madness that occurs when desire overpowers ones better judgment. Wed love to have you back! The moral or spiritual element in man is represented by the immortal steed which, like thumos in the Republic, always sides with the reason. The first of the two great rhetoricians is described as in the zenith of his fame; the second is still young and full of promise. The country is a novelty to Socrates, who never goes out of the town; and hence he is full of admiration for the beauties of nature, which he seems to be drinking in for the first time.
First, we do not immediately realize that under the marble exterior of Greek literature was concealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion. From this tale, of which young Athens will probably make fun, may be gathered the lesson that writing is inferior to speech. The Republic is divided between the search after justice and the construction of the ideal state; the Parmenides between the criticism of the Platonic ideas and of the Eleatic one or being; the Gorgias between the art of speaking and the nature of the good; the Sophist between the detection of the Sophist and the correlation of ideas. But all men cannot receive this saying: in the lower life of ambition they may be taken off their guard and stoop to folly unawares, and then, although they do not attain to the highest bliss, yet if they have once conquered they may be happy enough. He interprets past ages by his own. The language of the Meno and the Phaedo as well as of the Phaedrus seems to show that at one time of his life Plato was quite serious in maintaining a former state of existence. Love eventually spends itself and fizzles out, leaving both men in a worse condition than they were before. Thus, Phaedrus concludes, Love is the most ancient and most honored of gods, and most capable of ensuring courage and happiness, in this life and the next. The non-lover, on the other hand, will offer the boy a stable and educational friendship.
For speech and writing have really different functions; the one is more transitory, more diffuse, more elastic and capable of adaptation to moods and times; the other is more permanent, more concentrated, and is uttered not to this or that person or audience, but to all the world.
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. Numerous fictions of this sort occur in the Dialogues, and the gravity of Plato has sometimes imposed upon his commentators. No young man could derive greater benefit than from a good lover, and no lover could derive greater benefit than from a young loved one. As in the opening of the Dialogue he ridicules the interpreters of mythology; as in the Protagoras he mocks at the Sophists; as in the Euthydemus he makes fun of the word-splitting Eristics; as in the Cratylus he ridicules the fancies of Etymologers; as in the Meno and Gorgias and some other dialogues he makes reflections and casts sly imputation upon the higher classes at Athens; so in the Phaedrus, chiefly in the latter part, he aims his shafts at the rhetoricians. But dialectic is not rhetoric; nothing on that subject is to be found in the endless treatises of rhetoric, however prolific in hard names. Now that every nation holds communication with every other, we may truly say in a fuller sense than formerly that the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. They will not be cribbed, cabined, and confined within a province or an island. Like the Scriptures, Plato admits of endless applications, if we allow for the difference of times and manners; and we lose the better half of him when we regard his Dialogues merely as literary compositions. Her form may be described in a figure as a composite nature made up of a charioteer and a pair of winged steeds. The subjects of the Phaedrus (exclusive of the short introductory passage about mythology which is suggested by the local tradition) are first the false or conventional art of rhetoric; secondly, love or the inspiration of beauty and knowledge, which is described as madness; thirdly, dialectic or the art of composition and division; fourthly, the true rhetoric, which is based upon dialectic, and is neither the art of persuasion nor knowledge of the truth alone, but the art of persuasion founded on knowledge of truth and knowledge of character; fifthly, the superiority of the spoken over the written word. (including. In the attempt to regain this saving knowledge of the ideas, the sense was found to be as great an enemy as the desires; and hence two things which to us seem quite distinct are inextricably blended in the representation of Plato. Marriage was often a social necessity in order to ensure reproduction, while male-male love was considered purer because it was less practical. Socrates first speech provides a counterpart to Lysiass argument. But the art is not that which is taught in the schools of rhetoric; it is nearer akin to philosophy. Father and mother, and goods and laws and proprieties are nothing to him; his beloved is his physician, who can alone cure his pain. Get instant access to all the benefits of SparkNotes PLUS! And when new books ceased to be written, why did hosts of grammarians and interpreters flock in, who never attain to any sound notion either of grammar or interpretation? My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class..
The difficulty was not how they could exist, but how they could fail to exist. Continue to start your free trial. Cancel within the first 7 days and you won't be charged. Like the poem of Solon, or the story of Thamus and Theuth, or the funeral oration of Aspasia (if genuine), or the pretence of Socrates in the Cratylus that his knowledge of philology is derived from Euthyphro, the invention is really due to the imagination of Plato, and may be compared to the parodies of the Sophists in the Protagoras.
And their happiness would depend upon their preserving in them this principlenot losing the ideals of justice and holiness and truth, but renewing them at the fountain of light. But there was no such definition in the speech of Lysias; nor is there any order or connection in his words any more than in a nursery rhyme. and are they both equally self-moving and constructed on the same threefold principle? The singular remark that the beloved is more affected than the lover at the final consummation of their love, seems likewise to hint at a psychological truth. Rhetoric, in fact, directs the soul. Who would imagine that Lysias, who is here assailed by Socrates, is the son of his old friend Cephalus? Nor is there any need to call up revolting associations, which as a matter of good taste should be banished, and which were far enough away from the mind of Plato. Was he equally serious in the rest? It did not propose to itself to go forward and scale the heights of knowledge, but to go backwards and seek at the beginning what can only be found towards the end. But we maintain that probability is engendered by likeness of the truth which can only be attained by the knowledge of it, and that the aim of the good man should not be to please or persuade his fellow-servants, but to please his good masters who are the gods. When Phaedrus sees that Socrates isnt impressed with Lysiass speech, he prevails upon his friend to deliver his own speech in response. Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial. Do we see as clearly as Hippocrates that the nature of the body can only be understood as a whole? Rather it is the love of the world. Once more, in speaking of beauty is he really thinking of some external form such as might have been expressed in the works of Phidias or Praxiteles; and not rather of an imaginary beauty, of a sort which extinguishes rather than stimulates vulgar love,a heavenly beauty like that which flashed from time to time before the eyes of Dante or Bunyan? Why did poetry droop and languish? The continuous thread which appears and reappears throughout is rhetoric; this is the ground into which the rest of the Dialogue is worked, in parts embroidered with fine words which are not in Socrates manner, as he says, in order to please Phaedrus. The speech of Lysias which has thrown Phaedrus into an ecstacy is adduced as an example of the false rhetoric; the first speech of Socrates, though an improvement, partakes of the same character; his second speech, which is full of that higher element said to have been learned of Anaxagoras by Pericles, and which in the midst of poetry does not forget order, is an illustration of the higher or true rhetoric.