PHAEDRUS- 227-241D

This dialogue begins with Socrates chasing down Phaedrus. We must imagine Socrates catching
a glimpse of Phaedrus in the distance and quickening his pace, perhaps even breaking into a
run in order to catch up with him. Socrates, then, has an interest in Phaedrus, a fact that will be
repeatedly emphasized throughout the first part of the dialogue: Phaedrus, you’ll recall, is a
beautiful young man, a romantic, a lover of beautiful words, who suggested the occasion of
Symposium; Socrates, an older man, is attracted to Phaedrus. In the pederastic conventions of
Athenian society, Socrates would be the lover; Phaedrus, the beloved. That said, we already
know from our reading of Symposium that Plato, when he invokes pederasty, does so ironically,
often critically: he does not take the conventional at face-value.

In this dialogue the theme will once again be eros, the sort of desire that drives lovers to make
fools of themselves and potentially wreck their lives. But don’t expect the views expressed in
Symposium, even the views specifically expressed by Socrates, to be repeated in this text. You’ll
recall that the Symposium concludes with the wild speech of Alcibiades. This speech, breaking in
almost violently directly after Socrates’ account of Diotima’s teachings, offers at every point a
contrast—an attack—on what we heard from Socrates immediately before. Nussbaum,
reflecting on this conclusion, writes:
“Plato offers us a stark choice: on the one hand, the life of Alcibiades, the person
‘possessed’ by the ‘madness’ of personal love; on the other, a life in which the
intellectual soul ascends to true insight and stable contemplation by denying the ‘mad’
influence of personal passion. Alcibiades’ madness is, allegedly, incompatible with
rational order and stability; its vision a barrier to correct vision. The life of the
philosopher achieves order, stability, and insight at the price of denying the sight of the
body and the value of individual love” (Nussbaum 201).

Socrates / Diotima defends eros by submitting it to a difficult education: we misunderstand

what we want; we get stuck on a merely personal love, a limited individual love, wrongly
believing beauty to be specific to this or that man or woman, rather than seeing Beauty itself in
its abstracted purity. The ascent Diotima guides us toward is a remedy to a sickness, a cure for a
madness— a madness we see embodied in the life and character of Alcibiades. So, if one was
inclined to be ungenerous toward Diotima’s vision, we might say that Diotima saves eros by
destroying it. Socrates’ praise of the god of love is then, an ambiguous praise. In the Phaedrus,
however,
“philosophy itself is said to be a form of madness or mania, of possessed, not purely
intellectual activity, in which intellect is guided to insight by personal love itself and by
a
complex passion-engendered ferment of the entire personality. Certain sorts of madness
are not only not incompatible with insight and stability, they are actually necessary for
the highest sort of insight and the best kind of stability (Nussbaum, ibid).
Nussbaum prepares us, then, for a very different kind of exploration of eros and its “madness”.
This will not be a purifying vision where eros is made safe to us; we will not be made immune
to tragedy and grief. If eros is a good, then the madness it engenders must be (a kind of ) good,
too. Be prepared: Phaedrus is a weirder and potentially more difficulty dialogue. We’ll only read
the first half, in which eros is the explicit theme. The second half turns suddenly and rather
unexpectedly to the question about the value of writing and whether we can trust written
“speeches” at all.

[1]

The dialogue begins outside of Athens. As we’ve seen, Socrates catches sight of Phaedrus and
quickly peppers him with questions about where he’s been and where he’s going. Turns out
Phaedrus has been in the city at the home of a particularly wealthy and respected man,
Cephalus, listening to his son, Lysias, perform a speech about love. Lyisias, it turns out, has
special but not entirely unsurprising reasons for offering this particular speech to the young and
attractive Phaedrus: he’s trying to seduce him. The back-and-forth that follows between
Phaedrus and Socrates is highly flirtatious. Both Socrates and Phaedrus seem to be enjoying
playing with the inuendo—the not-so-subtle suggestion—that Phaedrus has something Socrates
wants (the speech / Phaedrus) and that Phaedrus, as a good beloved is supposed to behave, is
playing at mock-humility and reticence, (i.e., he’s playing coy and a bit hard-to-get). Socrates
confesses that Phaedrus could drag him all over town so long has he held out a promise for a
beautiful speech.

Now, it turns out that Lysias’ praise of love isn’t very conventional. Lysias’ speech, we find out,
is an attempt to convince a young beautiful man—someone not unlike Phaedrus, for example,
to give his sexual favours to a non-lover. This may be confusing, since you might well wonder
why a non-lover would want to have sex with the beloved. The distinction Lysias has in mind is
what we tend to mean when we say that someone is not in-love with you but still would like to
maintain a sexual relationship. The ideal Lysias holds up is a sexual relationship without
emotional investment on either side. No strings attached.

Socrates is struck by the audacity of what Lysias is claiming. He pretends to be impressed:

“What a wonderful man! I wish that he would write that you should give your favors to
a poor man rather than to a rich man, to an older rather than a younger one—that is, to
someone like me and most other people: then his speeches would be really
sophisticated, and the’d contribute to the public good besides!” (227e).
Some more flirtatious banter follows. Phaedrus is being a tease about this speech that he’s
supposedly memorized: he has a copy hiding up his sleeve. Socrates calls him out for this—
Phaedrus probably wasn’t hiding it very well on purpose—and they set off into the woods in
the direction of a stream. The mood changes: this is the only time in all of Plato’s works that
Socrates leaves the city of Athens. In fact, he was known to never have voluntarily travelled
anywhere. He tells Phaedrus later why:
“Forgive me, my friend. I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to
teach me—only the people of the city can do that” (230d-e).
They search for a place to lie down. The sound of the cicadas is overwhelming. (And, as anyone
who has been to Greece will know, the cicadas create an overwhelming sound, like electricity,
that fills the air). In Greek myth, they are associated with prophetic utterances and inspiration
generally. Socrates is beside himself. These are strange feelings for Socrates. As we’ll see, this
natural context is important for the theme of what follows: Socrates will eventually refute the
speech Lysias has told Phaedrus and instead offer a praise of a particular form of madness
given by eros.The sudden surge of feelings inspired by the natural setting and the cicadas
prefigure this.

[2]

Lysias’ speech is not eloquent. It reads almost like a business report, proceeding from one point
to the next without any rhetorical flourish or display of passion. He is explaining ponderously
to the young man with whom he wishes to have sex that he ought to agree to have sexual
relations with him precisely because he, the older man, is not in love with him. Lysias lays out
all the harm that will befall the young man if he submits to the advances of someone actually in
love with him. The lover, says Lysias, is more or less out of his mind; he’s mad in love. He’s thus
temporarily crazy. So, “when desire dies down”, the lover will leave his beloved out in the cold.
When he falls in love with someone new, he’ll forget all about you and all the promises he
made. The non-lover, by contrast,
“can’t complain about love’s making him neglect his own business; he can’t keep a tab
on the troubles he’s been through, or blame you for the quarrels he’s had with relatives.
Take away all those headaches and there’s nothing left for him to do but put his heart
into whatever he thinks will give you pleasure” (231).

Lysias moves from “another point” to “another point”. It’s easier to find someone who just
wants to have sex than it is to find someone who will love you. Why deny yourself more choice?
(says Lysias). Non-lovers will make better friends in the end because they remain self-
possessed, their head set straight, their eyes clear. The lover, by contrast, will be consumed with
jealously, will be easy to anger; they will lie about you in their praise of you; will not dump you
when your looks fade, but will remain friends with you.

At this point, finishing with his performance of the speech, Phaedrus asks Socrates—we can
almost hear his enthusiasm—“Don’t you think it’s simply superb?” (234c-d). Socrates responds
with what I take to be ironically:
“It’s a miracle, my friend; I’m in ecstasy. And it’s all your doing, Phaedrus: I was looking
at you while you were reading and it seemed to me the speech had made you radiant
with delight; and since I believe you understanding these matters better than I do, I
followed your lead, and following you I shared your Bacchic frenzy” (234d)
It’s odd. Phaedrus’ performance of Lysias’ very unpassionate speech has the effect of inspiring
Phaedrus—Socrates notices Phaedrus’ “radiance”—and, seeing this, Socrates himself feels
drawn into a a kind of frenzy, the “madness” associated with the God of wine, Bacchus, also
known as Dionysus. But Phaedrus quickly sees that Socrates is just putting on an act; he tells
Socrates to “quite joking.” Fair enough. But what is Socrates’ joking about? His irony is aimed at
the fact that Lysias’ advice to his beloved is the opposite of eros; Lysias’ advice is that the young
man or woman ought not to pay attention to love, since love will cause more harm than good.
Unlike the speeches in Symposium, Lysias’ speech is a praise of Love’s opposite.

Socrates qualifies his praise of the speech. What he says about the speech reminds me of what
he said after Agathon’s speech. Socrates tells Phaedrus that he paid attention “only to the
speech’s style”—that is, how he expressed himself. In this, Socrates notes, Lysias seemed to
repeat himself often, saying the same thing “two or three times […] as if he just wasn’t very
interested [in the subject]” (235b). Phaedrus is dumbfounded that Socrates could find a fault
with anything Lysias said; so Socrates offers to out-do Lysias and offer a speech of his own, one
even better than Lysias’, but also in praise of the non-lover over the lover. Socrates is clear that
he’s been inspired, that the speech he’ll give is one composed of the thoughts of others, and not
his own. He pretends that he cannot stop himself from speaking, but in doing so also preapres
us for what will later happen: Socrates will refute / take back what he is now about to say.

Socrates puts a bag of some kind over his head while he speaks. This is a weird thing to do, but
the gesture is another indication that Socrates’ is ashamed of what he’s about to say. He takes up
Lysias’ points and clarifies the distinction between lover and non-lover and why one ought to
prefer the non-lover to the lover in every case:
“Do you think that anyone could argue that one should favor the non-lover rather than
the lover without praising the former for keeping his wits about him or condemning the
latter for losing his?” (236).
The lover, then, is less sane and should be avoided for this reason. A close reading of Socrates’
speech will observe four central claims against the eros of the lover:
1. The appetites, including the sexual appetite, are blind animal forces reaching out for
each particular object—e.g., food, drink, sex—without either incorporating or being
responsive to judgement about the good.
2. The non-intellectual elements, when in control, tend naturally to excess. (Any state
ruled by such an element deserves the name hubris / outrageousness).
3. The non-intellectual elements can never, even in a well-trained person, perform an
intellectual function, guiding a person towards insight and understanding of the good.
They are ‘mindless’, invariably sources of danger and distortion.
4. Reason / the intellect. is a leading element required for the apprehension of truth and
for right choice. It works better the freer it is from the influence of the other, emotional
and appetitive elements. In other words, intellectual clarity and purity is a fundamental
prerequisite of genuine insight.

All this, taken together, asserts a deep, irreconcilable division between heart / body and mind.
The lover, for Diotima, is in control of him or herself; she does not run around wild like
Alcibiades, nor is he driven by an irrational desire for union as in Aristophanes. In his speech,
Socrates seems once again to be in sympathy to Diotima’s teaching: the lover, driven crazy /
mad by his love, seeks only to possess his beloved. His desire demands that he control all aspects
of his beloved’s life: that he remain poor, friendless, without family, weak. And the poor
beloved will be forced endure the embraces of an ugly, raving, old man. And then, as in Lysias’
speech, the boy is tossed aside as soon as a new passion for a new beloved flares in the lover.
“Do wolves love lambs? That’s how lovers befriend a boy!” (241d).

None of this seems very good. We’ll see next class how Socrates’ turn on all this, suddenly
overcome with a sense of shame at having spoken ill and dishonoured the god of love, Eros. I
want to conclude with a question about why Phaedrus, a young attractive and ambitious man,
would be tempted by Lysias’ view. Lysias, after all, is offering fairly practical advice to
Phaedrus about how to live well and be successful in the world. And his advice comes down to
this: don’t get messed up by the passions; don’t get distracted by love. Nussbaum, as always,
seems to provide illuminating context. I’ll quote her at length here, and leave things at that:

“We must imagine a small city [Athens], in which the most able adult citizens all devote their
careers to the city’s political and cultural life. These leading citizens all know one another and
must continue to see and work together throughout their adult lives. We now imagine a gifted
and ambitious young man beginning his career in this milieu […] He is attractive as well as
talented. He is sexually inclined towards men of the older generation, and they are, almost all of
them, inclined to men of his generation. On the verge of an exciting career, surrounded by
attractive possibilities, he must now decide what sorts of personal relationships he wants to
cultivate. And he must consider the implications of his choice for his future in the city.

I think it will help us have a sense of the force of Lysias’ advice if we imagine the analogous
choices faced by young women entering male-dominated profession in which she knows she’ll
be spending the rest of her life. For in our culture it is clearly (in terms of numbers) such a
woman who is most likely to be in Phaedrus’ sexual position, more or less surrounded by
potential ‘suitors’ who are more powerful and more established than she is. She a woman
would want to live a full personal life; but she would be seriously concerned, at the same time,
to protect her clarity and autonomy, her chance to work on reasonable and non-threatening
terms with the people with whom she works. Now imagine that that profession is the whole
city: everyone she know is, of necessity, a colleague. There are no other choices. If we imagine
what a concerned feminist would say to such a young woman (or what she would say to
herself) we will be on the way to understanding what is serious about Lysias” (Nussbaum 207-
208).

As for Lysias in this context,

“He is urbane, critical, charming. He prefers a city house to country walks. He sees life very
clearly. He dislikes grandiose speeches. Suspicious of powerful emotion, in himself and others,
he is sane, kind, and decent. He offers Phaedrus a well controlled sensual friendship. If
Phaedrus rationally chooses to become involved with him, neither of them will ever see the
world differently because of it. Neither of them will ‘become someone else’ […] The affair will
be pleasant, full of mutual good will and benefit. Most importantly, it will enable both of them
to preserve autonomy and honesty […] With a man like this, Phaedrus can trust that no deep
changes or upsets will occur. He will be able to see him for the rest of his life in the market or at
meetings, without shame, jealousy, or anger. He will never feel like running away” (Nussbaum
208-209).

I trust we can recognize this vision of autonomous self-possession, not threatened by eros, as an
ideal within our own highly professionalized, highly fearful culture

Workbook 2.1

1. What are some of the main reasons Socrates and Lysias praise the non-lover over the lover?
2. Do you agree with Nussbaum’s characterization of the attraction that Lysias’ speech might
hold for Phaedrus? Can you expand or deepen her comparison of what Lysias’ praise of
non-love with contemporary concerns about sex and sexuality?