Phaedrus

This dialogue is one of Plato’s most stylistic dialogues, and is a great place to start when you’re new to Philosophy, as love is a very universal topic, while explanations of the limitations of rhetoric are brought in surprisingly smoothly to make a very interesting dialogue.

Phaedrus is a man in his twenties who walks with Socrates along a river to ask him what love is, as he has recently received a love letter of sorts from another man in his twenties, Lysias, who states that love is corruption, while sex is mutually beneficial. Phaedrus is very flattered by the offer but it leaves him confused, so he talks to Socrates about it.

The dialogue is made up of discussing three different speeches on love, the first one by Lysias and the next two by Socrates, while Socrates also spends some time discussing the limitations of speeches and rhetoric in general.

The First Speech:

This first speech is a flowery attempt to get in Phaedrus’ pants by Lysias, and is the ancient equivalent of a goth boy seducing a naive girl by talking about the majesty of the abyss. Lysias is being intentionally edgy by repeating the same flawed logic that love is a disruptive force in people’s life. He argues that because being in love causes you to change your life entirely around your love, at the expense of ambition and so forth, it is a corruptive influence and should be avoided at all costs. He contrasts this to the mutually beneficial but clean exchange of emotionless sexual encounters as a way of telling this young man that he wants an easy hook up.

Socrates however doesn’t likes this take on love however, and also discredits the speech

“I didn’t think even Lysias himself thought the speech adequate; and in fact he seemed to me, Phaedrus, unless you say otherwise, to have said the same things two or three times over, as if he wasn’t altogether well off when it came to saying so many things about the same subject, or else perhaps because he didn’t care at all about this sort of thing; indeed he seemed to me to be behaving with a youthful swagger, showing off his ability to say the same things now in this way and now in that”

He doesn’t go too deep into why this speech is so wrong because he doesn’t need to. Especially in our modern day, love has a deeper spiritual role in society, while sex is seen as more of a madness, while this guy is saying the exact opposite. His two speeches also are in stark contrast to Lysias’ musings, so he doesn’t have to worry.

The Second Speech

Socrates starts the speech by saying that it is better that he first defines love, something missing from the first speech. He starts by saying that loving someone is to desire them, therefore it is similar to other desires such as the desire of wealth or desire of food, which in excess are called greed and gluttony. He deduces that love makes you act amorally through explaining a series of complicated emotional situations, so he comes to the conclusion that love is the word for an excess of passion and desire for a person, and is an unhealthy thing like greed and gluttony.

He then goes on to offer a very similar speech to what was offered previously, which is very ironic seeing as he so flatly called it flawed. After relaxing back down, and talking about leaving the shaded tree they’ve settled down at, Socrates realises he’s made a crucial mistake in his reasoning. What mistake he made is unclear, but it’s very likely that second speech was just framing Lysias’ speech better so he could better speak against it and prove that speeches aren’t truthful tools of persuasion.

The Third Speech

I think writing has this strange feature, which makes it truly like painting. The offspring of painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask them something, they preserve a quite solemn silence. Similarly with written words: you might think that they spoke as if they had some thought in their heads, but if you ever ask them about any of the things they say out of a desire to learn, they point to just one thing, the same each time.

This is the quote that Socrates uses to justify the wrong direction his speech took, which seems less like a genuine mistake than him trying to prove two things wrong at once.

Here he goes back into another speech with a renewed vigour to trim the fat out, to tell the truth and avoid similes and other flowery nonsense.

He starts in the very same way, describing love as this madness, but this time he doesn’t liken it to some sin like gluttony, he likens it to divine intervention. Prophets are thought to be mad, but their visions are sent from the gods. Similarly when a group is ignorant of a greater truth, and someone who knows it tries to tell them about it, they’ll call the person mad. Socrates wants to portray madness not as an inherently bad thing, but just as a disruption of the status quo that the more prudish amongst us attach negativity to.

Love is a beautiful thing that pushes people to come together and grow in a mutual, dependent way that leaves them symbiotic but with their individuality intact.

The analogy Socrates uses is especially potent here:

the madness of a man who, on seeing beauty her on earth, and being reminded of true beauty, becomes winged and, fluttering with eagerness to fly upwards like a bird, and taking no heed of the things below, causes him to be regarded as mad; the outcome is that this in fact reveals itself as the best of all kinds of divine possession and from the best sources for the man who is subject to it and shares in it, and that is when he partakes in this madness that the man who loves the beautiful is called a lover.

He describes how in the face of a truly sublime loving experience, the tendency of people to focus purely on that love is the closest humans can get to divinity, to that perfect idea of love, and that you can call yourself a lover if you rearrange your life around that madness.

He finishes his speeches by discussing how the only speeches that should be allowed are those that contain the truth, and to do that they need to have elements of the negative and affirmative in them to create a synthesis of truth.

This is why he gave the seemingly pointless second speech, he told the negatives first, to make the whole

When a person who evaluates their life by the value of their assets, or their power, or some other vain measure, they see sublime, humbling events like the life of a true lover, or the life of another lived intentionally poor, as madness, as no one in their right mind would intentionally reduce their worth and still be happy. Yet those who live for their greatest values instead of worth are the ones soaring above, taking no heed of the ones regarding them as mad below .

If you want to understand the points covered at the depth that Plato intended, feel free to read through the dialogue here.