Harrison Greene

Tuesday, February 12, 2002

Professor Shaw-Hardy

Classics 114

It is well known that Plato, a devoted student of Socrates, chronicled many of Socrates’ speeches and conversations. Every so often one can find instances where Socrates and other players in these conversations seem to contradict themselves, or at least muddle their arguments. One such occurrence of this is in Plato’s Symposium and Plato’s Phaedrus. Both texts speak of love in its physical sense, both texts describe love and its effects, and both discuss how it is best realized, yet they do this in very different fashions, and for different reasons.

Plato’s Phaedrus is a conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus. In this conversation the young Phaedrus is overjoyed to tell Socrates of the speech that he had just heard Lysias, "The best writer living" (Plato Phaedrus 22), tell. In this speech Lysias uses his rhetorical skills to argue that physical love without emotional attachment is preferable to physical love with emotional attachment, "That is the clever thing about it; he makes out that an admirer who is not in love is to be preferred to one who is" (Plato Phaedrus 22). Socrates listens to this speech, as relayed by Phaedrus and quickly becomes aware that this speech was a ploy by Lysias to get Phaedrus into bed with him. Socrates then fashions a speech, on the spot, that argues the same points that Lysias did. Socrates’ speech is going well but is interrupted by "divine sign." Socrates then has to fashion a new speech that renounces the blasphemous nature of the first. Socrates’ second speech contains the famous image of love as a charioteer with two horses. He also addresses the nature of the soul and the effects that love has on it (which will be discussed later). The end result is Socrates’ new working definition of rhetoric, "Knowledge of the eternal realities, the Forms and soul" (Plato Phaedrus 79).

Phaedrus, in Phaedrus, is an attractive young man who has caught the attention of Socrates and many others. One of his admirers is the famed speechwriter Lysias. Phaedrus is taken in by the thought of making love (the physical act of sex) with someone who does not pursue you (as Lysias said). He sees this as preferable because, "Lovers repent the kindnesses they have shown when their passion abates, but to men not in love there never comes a time for such regret…Those who are not in love, on the other hand, cannot use as a pretext for coolness the excuse that love has made them neglect their own interests, or put into the reckoning the hardships they have endured, or hold the loved one responsible…and since they are relieved from all these disadvantages nothing remains for them but to do cheerfully whatever they think will give their partners pleasure" (Plato Phaedrus 27). The young impressionable Phaedrus is quickly taken in by this method of thought. He continues to read Lysias’ speech boastfully: "But those not in love, who were friends before the 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" (Plato Phaedrus 29).

However, in the Symposium Phaedrus says that young man can derive the most benefits from being in love with an elder, and vice versa: "I can see nothing better for a young boy, as soon as he is old enough, than finding a good lover, nor for a lover than finding a boyfriend. Love, more than anything (more than family, or position, or wealth), implants in men the thing which must be their guide if they are to have a good life" (Plato Symposium 189c). This is in stark contrast to the Phaedrus of the Phaedrus. However, the differences between Phaedrus’ speeches are not nearly as shocking as those of Socrates.

The differences between Socrates’ speeches are astounding. After his first shameful speech Socrates of the Phaedrus says that love is a god, or something divine: "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" (Plato Phaedrus 44). Later, in his second speech Socrates goes so far as to say that love is in fact a sort of "divine madness" bestowed upon humans by the Gods. This divine madness clearly comes from god and is the result of divine dispensation. Divine madness in all of its forms it better than one’s regular thought patterns or so Socrates says: "So, according to the evidence provide by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense, in proportion as the name of the mantic art and the act it signifies are more perfect and held in higher esteem than the name and act of augury; madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human" (Plato Phaedrus 47). Socrates goes through great pains to illustrate exactly how it is that love is a great benefit from the Gods: "It is for us to prove the opposite, and to show that this type of madness is the greatest benefit that heaven can confer on us" (Plato Phaedrus 48).He then attempts to tackle the idea that love is the greatest form of divine dispensation, "And the conclusion to which our whole discourse points is that in itself and in its origin 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 mane whose love is aroused by beauty in others is called a lover" (Plato Phaedrus 56). He goes so far as to explain what happens to men whom are given this divine gift:

This explanation of Eros is again in direct contrast to what Socrates says in the Symposium.

In the Symposium Socrates asserts (through the mouth of the mythic figure Diotima) that Eros is not good and furthermore he is not even a God. Socrates begins his speech by questioning one of his acquaintances, Agathon. He asserts that Eros is in fact ugly, Agathon agrees. He asks Agathon: "Would you agree that what is good is also beautiful?"(Plato Symposium 201c) To which Agathon responds in the affirmative. Then Socrates infers, "So if Eros Lacks beauty, and if what is good is beautiful, then Eros would lack what is good also" (Plato Symposium 201c). Already Socrates is saying that Eros is not the greatest of the gods, and that intrinsically his gift cannot be the greatest gift to man. Later on he goes on to say that Eros is not in fact a God (through Diotima but he agrees with her): "The gods are all happy and beautiful, aren’t they? You wouldn’t go so far as to claim that any of the gods is not happy and beautiful?" This question opens up the can of worms when Socrates answers negatively. "And you agree that ‘happy’ means ‘possessing what is good and beautiful…’But you have already admitted that Eros lacks what is good and beautiful and that he desires them because he lacks them…How can he be a god then, if he is without beauty and goodness…You see, even you don’t regard Eros as a god" (Plato Symposium 201c). Which Socrates admits!

This leaves the reader to wonder which is the true Phaedrus, the Phaedrus of rationalized promiscuity, or the Phaedrus of love as a god who deserves our praise. This also leaves us to wonder which of the Socrates’ presented is accurate, the Socrates of humility and respect for the power of Eros, or the Socrates who does not even recognize Eros as a God. To answer these questions one need look no further than context to figure out that neither is the true Socrates nor the true Phaedrus. In Phaedrus, Phaedrus is enamored with two men and is trying to decide between the two. His initial infatuation with Lysias gives way to his admiring Socrates. Lysias’ speech is riddled with thinly veiled advances: "Moreover, you have a better chance of improving yourself by yielding to me than by yielding to a lover" (Plato Phaedrus 29). Phaedrus seems to pick up on these advances and is intrigued by the speech, he then decides to read it all over and tell Socrates all about it. Socrates in Phaedrus is trying to get Phaedrus to sleep with him, so he says that there is, "No love greater than the love between two freeborn men" (Plato Phaedrus 45). He continually compliments Phaedrus and flirts with him, and Phaedrus flirts back, "Clearly you won’t let me go till I have given you some sort of satisfaction," to which Socrates replies, "You need be in no doubt about that" (Plato Phaedrus 23). Then in Symposium Phaedrus seems to have done nothing more than grow up, in fact Phaedrus argues a bit of Socrates’ speech from Phaedrus, he says: " That’s because the lover is a more divine creature than the younger man, since he is divinely inspired" (Plato Symposium 180b). Socrates however seems to be intent on disproving all of the speeches that preceded his. He was so intent that he would use a fictitious character to make points that he himself was clearly afraid to make. In Plato’s Apology Socrates was convicted of saying just such heretic things, and he was sentenced to death. Thus, clearly he would not state the idea of Gods not being Gods, but use Diotima instead. In the end, the question as to whom is the real whom, neither.

Phaedrus and Symposium are two conversations with the same idea, but different contexts and thus different ideals. The differences in the manner in which they reference love is nothing short of appalling. It would seem as though Eros was a God who (and whose gifts) came under much criticism, so much so that Socrates and Phaedrus needed to define Eros, both the verb and the God. Then the same discussion takes place in Symposium but with quite a different outcome. Men are Men; they change, as do their ideas. In this case the change in ideas came from context; different goals were trying to be achieved. This does not mean that either text is more or less valid or has more or less value than the other. For in both Eros is still given his due.