Phaedrus

“I am, you see, a lover of learning. Now the people in the city have something to teach me, but the fields and trees won’t teach me anything. All the same you have found a way to charm me into making an expedition. Men lead hungry animals by waving a branch or some vegetable before their noses, and it looks as if you will lead me all over Attica […] in the same way by waving the leaves of a speech in front of me.”

This is Socrates’s explanation as to why he agrees to go on a walk with Phaedrus outside the city walls. He contends that there is more to learn from conversation with other people than there is from the observation of nature; if they were not to have the discussion that follows, a walk in the country would be of little use to him. This stands in contrast with Socrates’s professed reverence for the spirits of the natural world that he expressed at several points in the dialogue. This may lead us to conclude that while he respects the forces of the natural world, he does not desire to spend more time in nature than he has to.

“‘How can it be sensible in a matter of such importance to trust oneself to a man suffering from a disorder of a kind that no experienced person would even attempt to cure? Lovers themselves admit that they are mad, not sane, and that they know that they are not in their right mind but cannot help themselves.’”

This is one of the major points in the speech of Lysias, which Phaedrus reads aloud to Socrates. Since everyone agrees that love is a kind of madness, and that it alters the lover’s perceptions, Lysias asks how anyone can voluntarily submit themselves to such a person as a lover. Socrates will later counter this point by delving deeper into the differing degrees of “madness.”

“‘Those not in love, who were friends before they formed a liaison, are in no danger of finding their friendship diminished as a result of the satisfaction they have enjoyed; on the contrary, the recollection of it will be a pledge of further satisfaction to come.’”

Lysias’s speech goes on to say that love puts friendships at risk. Two partners who are friends can enjoy their relationship, both emotionally and physically, only if the complications of “love” do not affect them. Each partner regarding the other rationally, with their judgment unclouded by the madness of love, strengthens their relationship.

“‘One of love’s feats is this: it makes lovers, when they are out of luck, treat as grievances things which cause no pain to ordinary men. […] Those who are in love are far more to be pitied than admired by the objects of their passion. But if you yield to my suit you will find that I, being my own master and not under the dominion of love, shall in all our dealings have an eye more to future advantage than to present pleasure.’”

Lysias’s speech also goes on to say that since a lover is preoccupied with his own self-interest, a man who is not in love will have not only his own but his partner’s interest at heart in their relationship. The partner of a man not in love will not have to worry whether his partner will put him second, and treating the situation rationally will yield benefits for both parties.

“‘The truth may be that it is not the most insistent that you should favor, but those best able to make a return; not lovers merely, but those who show themselves worthy of what they ask.’”

Lysias’s speech concludes by arguing for a rational approach in finding a partner. Those who are most desperately in love, and most insistent that a partner accept them, will likely make the worst lovers.

“In every discussion […] there is one and only one way of beginning if one is to come to a sound conclusion; that is to know what it is that one is discussing; otherwise one is bound entirely to miss the mark. Now most people are unaware that they are ignorant of the essential nature of their subject, whatever it may be […] they fall into self-contradictions and misunderstandings. Do not let us make the mistake for which we find fault with others.”

Socrates’s first speech, an attempted revision of Lysias’s, begins in this way. He criticizes Lysias for not being specific enough with his terms and definitions, and proposes to improve his argument by being clear about the meaning of “love.” This statement, however, has a much broader application than the particular speech it is found in, as it is Socrates’s main principle when making any argument. One must begin from the very beginning, by defining terms and rethinking assumptions, if a discussion is to gain any insight into its subject.

“We must realize that in each one of us there are two ruling and impelling principles whose guidance we follow, a desire for pleasure, which is innate, and an acquired conviction which causes us to aim at excellence. These two principles are sometimes in agreement within us and sometimes at variance.”

In his first speech, Socrates proposes this distinction between the two controlling impulses in human nature. The “desire for pleasure” is the urge for instant gratification, physical or otherwise, while the other impulse must be learned through the study of philosophy. “Excellence,” in this context, means correct, ethical and moral behavior. This two-part scheme of the human mind foreshadows Socrates’s great allegory of the two horses of the soul, which he will use in his second speech.

“As far as [one’s] mind is concerned, he cannot have a less desirable protector or companion than a man who is in love with him.”

This is Socrates’s conclusion to his first speech, which is a revision of Lysias’s original argument. Since a lover is primarily interested in his own gratification, he will naturally not look out for the interests of his partner. By this reasoning, if one wants the best for himself, he will not place himself in the hands of one who is “in love with him.

“Just as I was about to cross the stream, Phaedrus, I received the supernatural sign which sometimes comes to me—every time it happens it restrains me from doing what I am about to do—and I seemed suddenly to hear a voice declaring that I had committed a sin and must not go away till I had expiated it.”

As he is about to leave, Socrates suddenly feels that he has sinned against the god of Love by taking up Lysias’s argument against lovers. There is some debate as to what this “supernatural sign” means. It may simply be Socrates’s way of describing his own conscience. In other dialogues of Plato, this “supernatural sign” only tells Socrates when an action is wrong; it never prompts him to perform an action. This sense convinces him to return to the conversation and give his speech in praise of love as a form of divine madness.

“If Love is a god, or at any rate a being with something divine about him, as he certainly is, he cannot be evil, but both our recent speeches represented him as being so. In that way both sinned against Love.”

After receiving the “supernatural sign,” Socrates reconsiders the speech he has just given against Love and lovers. He feels compelled to give another contrasting speech so that the god of Love will not be angered. Whether this fear comes from genuine awe of the gods or is rather an excuse to give a counterargument is unclear. In any case, his speeches in praise of love are much more poetic and extravagant than the one that preceded it. Socrates will attribute this to divine inspiration.

“If it were true without qualification that madness is an evil, that would be all very well, but in fact madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings […] Madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.”

Socrates begins his speech in praise of love by arguing that though love is a form of madness, madness is not necessarily bad or harmful. On the contrary, it is the means by which human senses can be possessed by the gods and elevated to their level. He compares “madness” to the inspiration of poets and prophets. If love falls into this category as well, it can be an inspiring and positive force in one’s life, rather than a delusion.

“Intrinsically there is nothing in it [madness] to frighten us, and we must not allow ourselves to be alarmed and upset by those who say that the friendship of a man in his sober senses is preferable to that of one whose mind is disturbed.”

Socrates continues his speech in praise of love by breaking down Lysias’s use of the word “madness.” Lysias’s argument makes itself vulnerable to criticism, he says, because he does not define “madness.” Once Socrates has described the three types of inspiration commonly known as madness, he can find nothing inherently negative about it. The key is, however, that Socrates is having this argument on his own terms. His own definition of madness may be just as arbitrary as Lysias’s own, were he to have given one.

“All soul is immortal; for what is always in motion is immortal. But that which owes its motion to something else, even though it is itself the cause of motion in another thing, may cease to be in motion and therefore cease to live. Only what moves itself never ceases to be in motion […] it is the source and prime origin of movement in all other things that move.”

Socrates digresses into an explanation of the nature of the soul. If love is madness, which affects the soul of the lover, the qualities of the soul must be examined if we are to make a judgment on whether such an effect is harmful or not. This is the introduction to his proof of the immortality of the soul. This passage can be translated several different ways (either using “all soul” or “every soul”); using “all soul” helps reinforce Socrates’s idea that all human souls are made out of a similar “substance”and therefore have similar properties.

“All body which has its source of motion outside itself is soulless; but a body which moves itself from within is endowed with soul, since self-motif is of the very nature of soul. If then it is established that what moves itself is identical with soul, it inevitably follows that soul is uncreated and immortal.”

Continuing with his anatomy of the soul, Socrates settles on a working definition of a human being: a physical body powered by an immortal soul. This definition is crucial to his later description of how souls, living above the physical world on the plane of true reality, fall to the earth and take up residence within human bodies. Furthermore, separating the soul into spiritual and physical parts mirrors his allegory of the two horses: one half of the human/soul combination is concerned with the earthly and the physical, while the other is interested in higher truths.

“First of all we must make it plain that the ruling power in us men drives a pair of horses, and next that one of these horses is fine and good and of noble stock, and the other the opposite in every way. So in our case the task of the charioteer is necessarily a difficult and unpleasant business.”

This is the opening of the most famous portion of the dialogue: Socrates’s allegory of the soul as a charioteer with two horses. The difficulty of steering the horses, he goes on to say, is that the “good” horse is meek and yields to the commands of the driver, while the “bad” horse is disobedient. Thus, even with the best intentions, the impulsive, physical portion of the soul will often exert the most power over the body.

“The region of which I speak is the abode of the reality with which true knowledge is concerned, a reality without color or shape, intangible but utterly real, apprehensible only by intellect which is the pilot of the soul.”

This is Socrates’s description of the plane above the physical world, which only pure souls and the Olympian gods have access to. This is where true knowledge can be learned (by the soul). Once the soul has fallen to earth and taken a human body, the memories of this prior state will reoccur in“flashbacks.” This is one of Socrates’s explanations of madness as divine inspiration; in this conception, outbursts of “madness” are in fact revelations of the highest form of truth.

“This then is the fourth type of madness, which befalls when a man, reminded by the sight of beauty on earth of the true beauty, grows his wings and endeavors to fly upward, but in vain, exposing himself to the reproach of insanity […] and the conclusion to which our whole discourse points is that […] this is the best of all forms of divine possession, both for the subject himself and for his associate, and it is when he is touched with this madness that the man whose love is aroused by beauty in others is called a lover.”

With this explanation, Socrates finally returns to the theme of love as madness and applies it to his outline of the higher world of the soul. Physical love is explained as a reminder of the ideal beauty that the soul witnessed on its previous higher plane. Whether or not one accepts this definition of love from Socrates, it is undoubtedly more fully defined than Lysias’s definition of love, which doesn’t concern itself with the question of why men fall in love in the first place. Socrates’s explanation, in contrast to the first two speeches in Phaedrus, makes love out to be anything but arbitrary and irrational.

“The horse that is harnessed on the senior side is upright and clean-limbed; he holds his neck high and has a somewhat hooked nose; his color is white, with black eyes; his first for honor is tempered by restraint and modesty; he is a friend to genuine renown and needs no whip, but is driven simply by the word of command. The other horse is crooked, lumbering, ill-made; stiff-necked, short-throated, snub-nosed; his coat is black and his eyes a bloodshot grey; wantonness and boastfulness are his companions, and he is hairy-eared and deaf, hardly controllable even with whip and goad.”

This is Socrates’s elaborate description of the two horses that lead the chariot of the soul. It stands out from the rest of the dialogue for its poetic language and colorful adjectives. The individual features of the horses may have their own allegorical meanings, but even without deeper significances of that sort, the description is remarkable for its intensity and liveliness.

“Such, my son, are the divine blessings which will accrue to you from the friendship of a lover. But intimacy with one who is not in love, mingled as it is with worldly calculation and dispensing worldly advantages with a grudging hand, will breed in you [those] ignoble qualities which the multitude extols as virtues, and condemn you to wander for nine thousand years around and beneath the earth devoid of wisdom.”

This is Socrates’s conclusion to his long speech in praise of love. Once again, he is speaking in the voice of an admirer of a young man. Returning to his main theme of persuading the young man to accept the advances of one who loves him (probably, though not necessarily, the speaker), he raises the stakes by incorporating the prospect of punishment that will accrue to the young man’s soul if he does not learn of truth and beauty through the experience of love. The “wandering for nine thousand years” refers to the toil experienced by the soul when it is cut off from things like love, which feed it and cause its wings to regrow. 

“When a speaker who does not know the difference between good and evil tries to convince a people as ignorant as himself […] by representing evil as in fact good, and so by a careful study of popular notions succeeds in persuading them to do evil instead of good, what kind of harvest do you think his rhetoric will reap from the seed he has sown?”

This passage comes at the beginning of Socrates’s inquiry into what makes a good speech. This is the first step in his argument that, in order to make an effective speech, a speaker must have thorough knowledge of both the topic he will be addressing and the audience to whom he will be speaking. If he is simply ignorant (as in the quoted passage), no good can come of his speech, since he cannot know what he intends. Even if he is trying to deceive his audience, he cannot do so effectively without a complete understanding of the matter.

“Any speech ought to have its own organic shape, like a living being; it must not be without either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to fit one another and the work as a whole.”

This is one of Socrates’s criticisms of Lysias’s speech. He determines that what Lysias puts last should have been first, and that the rest of the speech’s sections are gathered in no particular order. To be sure, Lysias’s style is not the same as Socrates’s methodical process, which starts from the very foundations of the issue and works its way up. Lysias’s speech is different because he has different goals; Socrates, on the other hand, seeks to deal with his subject in full, making no assumptions and assuming no definitions. This metaphor of the speech’s body meshes well with Socrates’s comparison of the good orator to a skilled doctor.

“If we are to form a clear notion of the nature of anything at all, we must first determine whether the subject on which we wish to acquire scientific knowledge ourselves and the ability to impart that knowledge to others is simple or complex. […] Any other procedure would be like the groping of a blind man.”

Here, Socrates discusses how to put into practice his rhetorical technique of “division and collection.” If the subject of one’s speech consists of many subtopics, or if it depends largely on some other factor, the speaker must address this before proceeding to make any judgments about the subject itself. The speaker’s job—as Socrates himself has demonstrated throughout the dialogue—is to disentangle the separate issues at hand and methodically lead the audience towards clarity.

“The fact is, Phaedrus, that writing involves a similar disadvantage to painting. The productions of painting look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence. The same holds true of written words; you might suppose that they understand what they are saying, but if you ask them what they mean by anything they simply return the same answer over and over again.”

This is one of Socrates’s final arguments against the written word, and clearly shows his preference for dialogue and inquiry over reading and writing. A written text cannot be questioned the way a human speaker can; the reader cannot ask for clarification or explanation. Not only is this a limitation for the reader, it is also a limitation for the writer, who misses the chance, by discussion and dialogue, to refine his ideas according to his readers’ responses, and make them even more persuasive.