Notes on Plato’s Phaedrus (1/2): The Argument for Love

PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Phaedrus.

SCENE: Under a plane-tree, by the banks of the Ilissus.

SOCRATES: Phaedrus, my friend! Where have you been? And where are you going?

PHAEDRUS: I was with Lysias, the son of Cephalus, Socrates, and I am going for a walk outside the city walls because I was with him for a long time, sitting there the whole morning.  You see, I’m keeing in mind the advice of our mutual friend Acumenus, who says it’s more refreshing to walk along country roads than city streets.

SOCRATES: He is quite right, too, my friend.  So Lysias, I take it, is in the city?

PHAEDRUS: Yes,  at the house of Epicrates, which used to belong to Morychus, near the temple of the Olympian Zeus.

SOCRATES:  What were you doing there? O, I know: Lysias must have been entertaining you with a feast of eloquence.

PHAEDRUS: You’ll hear about it, if you are free to come along and listen.

SOCRATES: What? Don’t you think I would consider it ‘more important than the most pressing engagement,’ as Pindar says, to hear how you and Lysias spent your time?

Phaedrus tells Socrates of a fine speech delivered by Lysias on the topic of love.  The argument in short is that although it is usual to fall in love and seek a partner who loves you, in fact it is better to seek out companionship without love.

Socrates says he would like to hear the speech, and Phaedrus says that of course he cannot remember it verbatim. It transpires though that Phaedrus has a written copy of the speech. They find a quiet spot to sit by a river outside Athens, and Socrates – who famously could not read or write – listens to Lysias’ speech.

  1. The  feelings of someone in love will change over time, ‘desire dies down’, and the person will wish they had not done favours for the one they loved.  Not so with someone not in love.
  2. A lover counts costs and benefits from a relationship, but someone not in love will not keep account of the trouble they’ve been to.
  3. Lovers admit they are sick, when they recover they renounce their love.
  4. Selecting a lover only from those who love you means choosing from a small pool.  The group of people not in love with you is much larger, and so ‘you’ll have a much better hope of finding someone who deserves your friendship’.
  5. Lovers are indiscreet and may shout their feelings to the world (not good if ‘you’re afraid of conventional standards and the stigma that will come to you if people find out about this’).  Someone who does not love you will not be excited.
  6. It is easier to make a relationship without love last a long time, because the lover is ‘easily annoyed’ and always looking for a problem or flaw with the relationship: ‘he watches like a hawk everyone who may have any othe radvantage over him’. Someone not in love is not jealous, and this leads to better friendship.
  7. Lovers who are attracted to one another physically do not know whether they will be attracted when this desire is satisfied.
  8. A non-lover will make a friend a better person through honesty.  But a lover will offer praise, not useful advice  ‘partly because desire has impaired his judgement’.
  9. (Style:  Lysias lists the first seven points of the argument in a bare bones style.  At the eighth point, though, the speech is addressed directly to a singular ‘you’.  It becomes clear that this is a speech of seduction: designed to be employed to get someone to go to bed with the speaker despite the fact the speaker is making it plain he is not in love with the intended partner.  It does the job of being a rational argument as well, but it certainly has a humorous aspect.)  Lysias goes on: ‘if you accept my offer’ then he will plan rationally for the benefits to flow from the relationship. He will not become angrily easily, like a lover,  He will forgive easily, on the other had.
  10. In conclusion, Lysias returns to rational argument, and states that the person attention and affection should be given to is the person who most deserves it and can return it ‘not those in the direst need – ‘not to those who merely desire the thing, but to those who really deserve it.’   So it is not ideal to have a relationship wih someone just because they want to have a relationship with you.

At the conclusion of the reading of the speech Socrates says it made him happy because he could see Phaedrus happy.  But he is critical of Lysias’ speech and immediately says he can give a better one.

Before Socrates even begins his speech he prepares the ground.  He is self-deprecating (But, my dear Phaedrus, I’ll be ridiculous  – a mere dilettante, improvising on the same topics as a seasoned professional!’) He also makes it clear that he concedes certain arguments made by Lysias, and does not want to argue against them (for example the argument that the non-lover is rational, while the lover may lose his wits).  He suggests that he should cover his head while giving the speech so as to avoid becoming embarrassed.

Socrates always claimed to know nothing.  In this instance he alludes to this lack of knowledge, on specific topics or in general.  In this case, though, how can he construct a speech?  He claims that Muses, the spirits of poets, will overcome him, that he will be a channel to communicate their message.

After summoning these spirits he begins his speech in the form of a story:

‘There was once a boy, a youth rather, and he was very beautiful, and had very many lovers. One of them … tried to persuade him that he ought to give his favours to a man who did not love him rather than to one who did.  And this is what he said:

Assuming the voice of the older persuader, Socrates says it is first important to examine the concepts essential to an argument. That participants in the argument should ‘agree on defining what love is and what effects it has’. The first point of order is to distinguish desire grounded in love from desire that is not (desire based on ‘pleasure’ is distinct from desire based on ‘what is best’. Love, or ‘eros’ is a variety of the former.)

Only after considering these questions of definition does Socrates move on to mounting a series of arguments similar to those of Lysias in content.  Socrates, though, displays a virtuosity – an expertise – that Lysias does not. His argument makes Lysias’ look like a series of rational points explained without Art or Persuasion.

..You should know that the friendship of a lover arises without any good will at all.  No, like food, its purpose is to sate hunger. ‘Do wolves love lambs?’ That’s how lovers befriend a boy.

Socrates’ language is emotive, it changes in style (although this is difficult to see in English) from lyric (poetry of love and nature) to epic (poetry of heroes, gods, and myth). It uses analogy and metaphor.  It is grounded in philosophy: ideas about the nature of the human soul.

But when he is finished Socrates appears to doubt his own argument.  One reason he gives is fear of divine retribution: Love, he says, is one of the Gods, the son of Aphrodite..  Given that he himself knows nothing, and is nothing but a mouthpiece for forces and spirits in the world, he can hardly go against Love. (‘..I thought I heard a voice coming from this very spot, forbidding me to leave until I made atonement for some offense against the gods.’)

And so Socrates instead puts the opposing argument: that it is better to love the object of desire than not to be in love:

There’s no truth to that story – that when a lover is available you should give your favours to a man who doesn’t love you instead, because he is in control of himself while the lover has lost his head.  That would have been fine to say if madness were bad, pure and simple; but in fact the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god.

Socrates points out that several kinds of madness are respected: the madness of the Delphic Oracle, the madness of musicians who write inspired music and poetry (‘madness that is possession by the Muses, which takes a tender virgin soul and awakens it to a Bacchic frenzy of songs and poetry’, the madness of those who predict the future.

Socrates grounds his argument about divine madness of love in philosophy: he says that in order to present his argument he must explain ‘about the nature of the soul, divine or human’. This is an excerpt:

On the Immortality of the Soul

Socrates:  Every soul is immortal.  That is because whatever is always in motion is immortal, while what moves, and is moved by something else stops living when it stops moving.  So it is only what moves itself that never desists from motion, since it does not leave off being itself.  In fact, this self-mover is also the source and spring of motion in everything else that moves, and a source has no beginning.  That is because anything that has a beginning comes from some source, but there is no source for this, since a source that got its start from something else would no longer be the source.  And since it cannot have a beginning, then necessarily it cannot be destroyed.  That is because if a source were destroyed it could never get started again from anything else and nothing else could get started from it – that is, if everything gets started from a source.  This then is why a self-mover is a source of motion.  And that is incapable of being destroyed or starting up: otherwise all heaven and everything that has been started up would collapse, come to a stop, and never have cause to start moving again.  But since we have found that a self-mover is immortal, we should have no qualms about declaring that this is the very essence and principle of a soul, for every bodily object that is moved from outside has no soul, while a body whose motion comes from within, from itself, does have a soul, that being the nature of a soul; and if this is so – that whatever moves itself is essentially a soul – then it follows necessarily that soul should have neither  birth nor death.

All soul looks after all that lacks a soul, and patrols all of heaven, taking different shapes at different times. So long as its wings are in perfect condition it flies high, and the entire universe is its dominion; but a soul that sheds its wings wanders until it lights on something solid, where it settles and takes on an earthly body, which then, owing to the power of this soul, seems to move itself.  The whole combination of soul and body is called a living thing, or animal, and has the designation ‘mortal’ as well.

Socrates is here speaking figuratively of wings and souls aflight, and rhetorically he is doing much more as well.  He is defining terms.  This brief passage gives a definition of ‘soul’ and ‘body’ and ‘mortal’, binding together meanings and terms that can then be used in an unequivocal sense.

Socrates goes on to explain that there are two forces that drive the soul: one upwards, one downwards.  The first is always striving to lift the soul to the highest level of existence where ‘truth stands’, bec ause ‘this pasture has the grass that is the right food for the best part of the soul, and it is the nature of the wings that lift up the soul to be nourished by it.’  The second, in contrast, is a force that drives the soul downward to the Earth.

All embodied beings – human and animal – are fallen souls, our wings broken.  But within us the two forces are still in conflict.  Something in the soul wants to regrow its wings and depart the material world. On Earth the divine is experienced (as a kind of madness) in a number of ways.  The first is philosophy: ‘only a philosopher’s mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as cloase as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.’

Another kind of divine madness can be produced by the experience of beauty, one of the high truths or ideal forms:

The fourth kind of madness – that which someone shows when he sees the beauty we have down here and is reminded of true beauty; then he takes wing and flutters in his eagerness to rise up, but is unable to do so; and he gazes aloft, like a bird, paying no attention to what is down below – and that is what brings on him the charge that he has gone mad.

In any case, says Socrates, where we have an experience of beauty, it is as if the soul remembers something it knew before its wings were broken, before it fell to Earth, taking up a mortal body.

…In case there is doubt about the different aspirations of the soul, even after Socrates’ explanation, it can be seen that by now he has demonstrated through his speeches the high and low to which we might aspire. It is also clear that we aspire to either high or low in constructing argument as well as setting on partners.  The first speech given by Socrates and Lysias is designed as an appeal to the lowest things in humanity, the second, delivered by Socrates in refutation of the other argument does philosophy and appeals to everything high and noble about the human mind.

By way of explanation, consider again the original speech that Phaedrus has written down, and the first speech made by Socrates. The proposition being supported is that people should find partners they do not love.  Parts of both speeches are written as though directly addressing a possible object of amorous intention, so that the argument becomes a personal one. In effect the speaker is addressing a potential partner, attempting to show them that they would make a good match because the speaker does not love the other.  Socrates makes a show of stating that he is addressing an imaginary beautiful young boy.  But at the same time he indicates Phaedrus possesses youth and beauty, and so is perhaps flirting also.

The argument that is being constructed here is no more or less than the ideal, rational, logical pick up line.  It’s an argument that anyone with enough skill should be able to use to persuade attractive people they are not in love with to sleep with them anyway.

Perhaps unsurprising that Lysias is so proud of his argument for persuading potential lovers. Unsurprising that Phaedrus has learned the argument well, and carries the written form of it with him.  It is a pragmatic argument – it confers advantage on the speaker. This is its main function: the other is as a pretty and well-made bit of rhetoric.

Socrates shows he can play this game with skill, and then aims higher in refuting this argument. The philosophical talk of the last part of the speech – the argument FOR love – represents the higher path.  Philosophy itself is the higher path because it reveals the world to us even as we engage in dialogue. When argument engages with philosophy it becomes something more than persuasion.  The argument is no longer pragmatic, it is about truth.  Lysias chooses to make the argument for desire without love because it is convenient to do so.  Socrates, once he thinks things through, has no choice.  Having discovered that his position is for love, he is bound to argue the truth.

This distinction represents two different kinds of argument.  One is aimed purely at persuasion, at winning, at convincing people the speaker is right.  The other is partly about the art of persuasive speaking.  But it is also about philosophical or scientific exploration.  Through argument we increase understanding of the world. According to Rhetoric any argument can be made with equal success – the skill of the person making the argument is the only factor in which argument is more persuasive.But an argument grounded in philosophy is an argument grounded in truth – an attempt to find truth.  Once Socrates has developed his argument about love, there is no alternative – he is unable to argue the opposite case.

Socrates goes on to recommend that Lysias abandon his type of argument – his sophistry, his rhetoric – for argument grounded in philosophy instead.

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