Phaedrus

Upon being asked whether he believes a myth to be true, Socrates responds:

“Though I readily acknowledge that these rationalizations are very nice, still, the person whose task it is to invent them is not to be envied; a great deal of labor and ingenuity will be required of him, and when he has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate the hippo-centaurs and chimeras, and then a flood of Pegasuses inundates him, and countless other inconceivable and portentous creatures. A person who is skeptical about these things, and tries to reduce them one after another to the rules of probability, using this heavy-handed sort of knowingness, will need an enormous amount of time. Now, I myself have no leisure for such inquiries.

Shall I tell you why? I am still unable to fulfill the command of the Delphian inscription and “Know myself.” To be curious about what is not my concern, while I am still ignorant of my own self, would be ridiculous. And so I say good-bye to all this; the received opinion is good enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: Am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, naturally a part of some divine, and not monstrous, dispensation?”

—

“I must ask your forgiveness, my good friend. I am a lover of knowledge, and the countryside and the trees decline to teach me anything, whereas the people in the city do.“

• Though he does praise the countryside spot under the tree that he and Phaedrus stop at.
• The trees have much to teach us.

—

“Now to him who har diseased mind, anything is agrecable that is not opposed to him; but that which is equal or superior is hateful and therefore the lover will not brook any superiority or equality on the part of his beloved; he is always working to reduce him to inferiority.”

—

“Let us next see how the man whose law of life is pleasure, and not good, will condition and train the body of the youth over whom he has gained ascendancy. He will be observed to choose a beloved who is delicate rather than sturdy and strong, one brought up in half-light and not outside in the sun, a stranger to manly exercises and the sweat of toil, accustomed to only a soft and luxurious and unmanly diet, instead of the hues of health, made up in the colors of paint and ornament, and the rest following in accordance with these such a life as anyone can imagine and which I need not detail at length. But I may sum up all that I have to say in a word, and pass on. Such a physique in war, or in any of the great crises of life, will be the anxiety of his friends and also of his lover, and a great source of encouragement for his enemies.”

—

“…hence a lover is of necessity displeased at his possession of them and rejoices at their loss; and he would like him to be wifeless, childless, homeless, as well; and the longer the better, for what he desires is to prolong his selfish fruition for as long as possible.”

• This law of pleasure manifests at the collective scale too. Perverse industry and government encourage this inferiority and depravity in their consumers and subjects

—

“Consider this, fair youth, and know that in the friendship of the lover there is no real kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you: as wolves love lambs, so lovers love their loves.”

—

“But whoever has no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul approaches the gates of poetry and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art—he, I say, is not admitted, and the poetry of the sane man is utterly eclipsed by that of the inspired madman.”

—

“All soul is immortal. For that which is always in motion is immortal. But that which moves another and is moved by another, in having cessation of motion, has cessation of life. Only the Self-Moving, since it cannot forsake its own nature, never ceases to move, and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all else that moves.”

“For if Beginning came out of and thus after something, then it would not exist from the beginning? But since it is unbegotten, it must also be indestructible. For surely if Beginning were destroyed, then it could neither come into being itself from any source, nor serve as the beginning of other things, if it is true that all things must come into being from a beginning. Thus it is proved that the Self-Moving is the beginning of motion; and this can be neither destroyed nor begotten, or else all of the universe and all of creation would collapse and stand still, and never again be able to be put into motion. And since the Self-Moving has been proved to be immortal, a person will not blush to affirm that this, self-motion, is the very essence and meaning of the soul. For every body that is moved from outside is soulless, but that which is self-moved from within is soul-full or animate. But if this is true, that the soul is identical with the self-moving, it must necessarily follow that the soul is unbegotten and immortal.”

“Now, it must be attempted to explain how a living creature is said to be both mortal and immortal. Soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven assuming different forms on different occasions-when perfect and fully winged, she soars upward, and brings order to the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight, at last settles on the solid ground, and there, finding a home, she acquires an earthly body, which appears to move itself but is really moved by her power; and this compounding of soul and body is called a living creature and is given the name “mor-tal.””

“But of the place that is above the heavens, no earthly poet ever has or ever will compose a song that does it justice. It is as I will describe; for I must venture to speak the truth, especially since truth is my theme. There occupies this place the true essence of Being: without color or shape, and intangible, visible only to reason, the helmsman of the soul, it is the object of the class of knowledge that is true.“

“The rest of the souls are also yearning for the upper world, and they all follow, but not being strong enough, they are carried around below the surface, treading on one another and colliding, each trying to get ahead of the other; and there is confusion and competition and extreme sweat; and during this time many of them are lamed or have their wings broken as a result of the incompetent driving of the charioteers; and all of them, after suffering much toil, depart without having attained to the mysteries of true being, and, departed, they feed upon mere appearance.”

• Anagogic, vedantic

“For a man must understand something spoken at the level of generality, proceeding from the many particulars of sense, and ren-c dered by reasoning into a coherent unity. This process is the recollection of those things that our soul once saw while following god— when, ignoring the things that we now say possess being, she raised her head up toward the true being. And therefore, the mind of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things by virtue of being close to which a god is divine.“

• Anamnesis

“But when she [the soul] is unable to follow, and fails to behold the truth, and through some mishap is weighed down by a double load of forgetfulness and vice, and her wings fall from her and she drops to the earth…”

“For sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses, though wisdom is not seen by it—for wisdom would cause furious passions of love if, coming into view, she offered any such clear image of herself; and so would the rest that are lovable. But as it is, beauty alone has this prerogative, so that it is most visible and that which most e excites love.”

“Ridiculous—yes; but isn’t even a ridiculous friend better than a formidable enemy?”

“…my two speeches assumed that madness is a single class of phenomena innate in us; the first speech proceeded to divide the parts of the left side of the class and did not stop dividing until it found in them an evil or left-handed love, which it justly reviled; whereas the other speech led us to the madness that lay on the right side, and found another love, also having the same name, but divine, which the speaker held up before us and applauded and affirmed to be the cause of the greatest benefits.”

• Left and right hemisphere.

“The character of thetoric is like that of medicine. Why, because in both it is necessary to define a nature-in medicine, the nature of the body, and in rhetoric, the nature of the soul; you must do so, that is, if you intend to proceed, not empirically, by trial and error, but scientifically, in the one case to impart health and strength by giving medicine and food, in the other to implant the conviction or virtue which you desire, by the right application of words and training.”

• You must therefore know the nature of the soul, as a physician should know the nature of the body, before persuading someone towards truth.

“for in fact this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, because they will not use their memories; trusting to writing, their memories will be stimulated from the outside, by external written charac-ters, and they will not remember by themselves, within themselves. And so what you have discovered is not a prescription for memory, but for being reminded. As for wisdom, it is the reputation, not the reality, that you have to offer to those who learn from you; they will have heard many things and yet received no teaching; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having acquired not wisdom, but the show of wisdom.”

“SOCRATES: Isn’t there another kind of word far better than this, one having far greater power—a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?

PHAEDRUS: Who do you mean, and what is his origin?

SOCRATES: I mean the word of knowledge that is inscribed in the soul of the learner, which can defend it-self, and knows with whom to speak and with whom to be silent.

PHAEDRUS: You mean the word of the man who knows, a word that is living and has a soul, and of which the written word might properly be called no more than an image?”

• Christ-like. Also reminiscent of Paul’s commentaries on the written vs. living law

“…in the garden of letters he will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write them down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other man who is treading the same path.

He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others have recourse to other amusements, refreshing themselves with drinking parties and the like, this will be the pastime in which his days are spent.“

• Plato with the pat on the back. But acknowledging that writing should be subsidiary to the living word.