Episode 142: Plato’s “Phaedrus” on Love and Speechmaking

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 142 might either be what is love? Or what is rhetoric? Or possibly something else. The source of this confusion is our reading today, Plato's dialogue, the Phaedrus, probably composed around 370 BC. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots more information at Partially Examined Life. This is Mark Linsenmayer, energized by, but not overwhelmed by love. Madison, Wisconsin.

0:37 Wes: This is Wes Alwan sowing the garden of this podcast, purely for amusement in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:43 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, taming my horses in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:47 Adam: And this is Adam Rose joining in for the first time from Chicago, Illinois.

0:50 Dylan: Welcome, Adam.

0:51 Wes: Welcome.

0:52 Adam: Thank you.

0:53 Mark: So Adam is here because we are doing kind of a partnership with his company, the Great Discourses, to provide some additional offerings through Not School, one of which will be a course related to this dialogue, right?

1:06 Adam: Yes, we're going to be doing a course starting in July on Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, actually in conjunction with Plato's Dialogue, Phaedrus.

1:15 Mark: So that is very, very soon, starting after when this is posted. So hopefully people have heard about this on the blog. But you can sign up, right? Until the first day, right?

1:24 Adam: Yes, you can sign up even on the first day or even after the first class is over, if you want.

1:28 Mark: So these are seminars. They're short term.

1:30 Adam: Basically what we're doing is using online web conferencing technology to reduce the barriers to access so people can participate in live interactive discussions about classic texts with professional educators and other intellectually curious adults around the world. And so it's a chance to master some challenging classics, have some great discussions, and actually meet some great people that you probably turn into some good friends.

1:54 Mark: All right, so the plug is over, but now the normal sort of show the audience who our guest is. So you've been teaching for many, many years. Was your background in rhetoric rather than philosophy or literature? Where are you coming from for this?

2:05 Adam: Well, kind of ironically, like the Phaedrus, I've got two halves to myself. In my first life as an undergraduate, I was a software engineer, and I actually worked in the computer field for about a dozen years before I had an early midlife crisis and decided to go back to graduate school and start pursuing the humanities and the social sciences. And so I did graduate work in the humanities and also in the social sciences. And it's through that that I became a Teacher in a great Books program at the University of Chicago, where I've been teaching for over 20 years.

2:36 Mark: And you had mentioned kind of wanting to get at the Platonic dialogues from a literary dimension that that's been the focus of your studies for them before, Is that right?

2:45 Adam: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we do when, you know, my understanding of working with classic texts is to try to take each text on its own terms. And when we look at Plato, for example, they kind of seem self evidently to look like plays. I mean, they look a lot like scripts for plays. And so if we follow where that leads, it can lead into the kinds of analysis that we would actually do with plays. It doesn't mean ignoring what many people would call the philosophical content, but it means also looking at dramatic elements of the stories as well.

3:13 Wes: Yeah. And there's actually a lot in this particular reading which speaks to that idea, if you're going to say something about the written word. And there's talk at the end of the Phaedrus about being playful or whether or not to take what's been written seriously. So it's a good dialogue for having that discussion.

3:28 Adam: Yeah. And I think above and beyond even just the pure playfulness is the question of whether or not the dialogues in general or this one in particular should be treated as pieces of rhetoric and that that should not be held against it, that the text is actually trying to do something to the readers, which is what rhetoric is intended to do, in addition to possibly describing something about the nature of the cosmos or the nature of the soul or love or so on.

3:55 Mark: So am I right in thinking that Dylan and Wes, you both did this at St. John's this was my first time reading this, so I might be the only newbie.

4:02 Dylan: This is the only book at St. John's in the seminar that's read twice. It's read. It's the very last dialogue of your freshman year, and it's read at the very last seminar of your senior year.

4:14 Adam: It's like that old TV show, Kung Fu. You know, when you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to go.

4:22 Mark: Wes, what was your background with this?

4:24 Wes: Well, I did theoretically go to St. John's and read this twice, but it might as well have been for the first time. It's been long enough.

4:33 Adam: Yeah.

4:34 Mark: Folks that have listened to our older episodes, we already did one on the symposium, which is also about love. We did one of the Gorgias, which is also about rhetoric. And we do get some not Exactly. Rehashing, but some development. It's unclear with all these. Which was written first, which was written second. Doesn't really matter. They're not identical. When I was first going through this, I was feeling like, ugh, rehash, rehash. I already know about this. I know basically what his take on love is going to be. I know basically what his takes on rhetoric is going to be. That the rhetors. Is it rhetors or rhetoricians?

5:09 Dylan: I like rhetoricians or rhetorician?

5:12 Adam: Rhetorician.

5:14 Mark: I like that better because rhetorician sounds like you study rhetoric. I don't know.

5:17 Wes: It sounds like you've rhetorically inserted an extra syllable into the.

5:22 Mark: The rhetoricians, he's going to think are frauds in some way. The sophists, people that argue in courts and they don't care about what the truth is. So to do it right, you would have to add some philosophical element to it. And love. We saw in the symposium several different characters putting forward ideas about love. And for him, well, the Platonic love, that. That phrase that everybody knows, it's not going to be based on desire. It's not going to be based. It's going to be noble somehow. It's going to have to do with seeing truth, with seeing the forms.

5:52 Dylan: Well, wait, it's completely based on desire. I can't let that go by.

5:56 Mark: All right, well, it's not going to

5:57 Dylan: be completely based on desire. And so it's not gonna be based

6:01 Mark: in animal and sexual. That's what Platonic love is.

6:03 Dylan: Well, he uses sexual imagery the whole time, but also the.

6:07 Wes: We get at this towards the end, but it's. There is a sexual version, which he doesn't think is all that bad. Right. At the very end, when you give in to your lover, potentially there's just making out, or potentially there's also sex, but either way, you're elevated. If you have the right kind of temperament and your beloved has the right kind of temperament, the best kind of

6:25 Mark: love is gonna have no sex, is that the two of you can resist that urge and just be energized by that.

6:32 Wes: Though he says you will give in to some extent. We'll get to that in the text. But all right. There's no version of it where you do not give in to some sensual aspect.

6:39 Mark: And then the other, the third theme, which is the thing that I had heard about this, I thought this was going to be about language. And it turns out, yes, okay, there's this. What is rhetoric? But there's nothing about, like, what makes a word Referred to this as opposed to that. It's not that kind of discussion of language, but there is some discussion at the end which I think is what Derrida rifts off of. We'll. We'll eventually have a Derrida episode, I think, focusing on this. We had a guest that wanted to do that about whether what's better, spoken language or written language. And you could tell that Socrates, given that Socrates didn't write anything down, probably thinks his spoken language is better. So we can say a little about why that would be. And if that casts a pall on the entire project that we. Reading the classics.

7:20 Wes: There's really three main questions at work in this dialogue, right? One is whether or not love is good or bad for the beloved if they give in to the lover's advances. The other is whether rhetoric is a good or a bad thing. And then the other is whether written speeches are better than real speaking between people.

7:37 Adam: On the one hand, and I think you can say Phaedrus is to some degree kind of a mash up between the Symposium and the Gorgias. Plato has talked about a number of these ideas and other dialogues. But I think rather than approaching this dialogue and the idea, okay, I've seen this movie already, like, why am I here? Why am I reading this? Perhaps it's more helpful to think about Plato as kind of working with a common vocabulary of ideas that he mixes and matches and deploys in different ways in a variety of dialogues. So that things that he's treated in the Gorgias, for example, which is like public rhetoric speaking before large crowds.

Well, sure, in the Phaedrus we're dealing with rhetoric. But one of the unique features here, I think, is that we're dealing with private rhetoric, rhetoric between one person and another, in fact, between a lover and a beloved. So, yes, it's on the one hand, Plato's treated this before, but now we're actually in a new place with it.

8:33 Wes: And also there's, you know, the other part of this is all the connections between rhetoric and love, between those two ideas, which for the most part, he doesn't make explicitly, but there are lots of playful, unexplicit, and, like, conceptual connections that you're supposed to, as a reader, work out for yourself.

8:50 Dylan: And it also means right there implicitly from the beginning, in the idea of a lover trying to convince a beloved.

8:57 Wes: Right, right.

8:58 Adam: Yeah.

8:59 Wes: Persuasion.

9:00 Dylan: Persuasion. Right from the beginning. And whether you should give in to that persuasion and what that means and what kind of persuasion is the right kind of persuasion.

9:08 Adam: Right. So when you look at this dialogue in terms of language, it's not talking about linguistics in that sense, but more along the lines of the use and abuse of words or the use and abuse of speech.

9:20 Mark: Now, structurally, Adam, what you're saying is a mashup of the Symposium and the Gorgias. The first half is like the Symposium and the second half is like the Gorgias in that the first half is about love. And in the Symposium you got all these different speakers, five or six different

9:34 Adam: speakers, one of whom is Phaedrus.

9:36 Dylan: Yes, it's introduced by Phaedrus here.

9:39 Mark: There's only two people in the dialogue, but Phaedrus brings along a speech of Lysias, who's a famous orator of the time. And some of his speeches are apparently actually preserved. So we can go read some yourself. And Phaedrus reads this verbatim. And according to something I read, it's supposed to be Plato is giving kind of a satire of the type of speech that this person actually gave. So that's one of the voices. And then Phaedrus thinks that, oh wow, this, this is a really great speech that I just heard here, I'm going to read it to you. Socrates is not sure that's that good.

He thinks maybe he could do better. He actually gives an improved version, presenting the same position. So it's sort of an elaboration. You can see these Lysias speech and Socrates first speech as a unity. But Socrates is showing this is not just different views about love, this is really demonstrations, this first half of different kinds of rhetoric, different approaches to rhetoric. And so Socrates is trying to give a more systematic version, a better version of the same argument that was in Lysias speech. That's the first two things. Those are both against love, saying it's actually better to be a non lover than a lover.

But Socrates, after he's given that speech, says, oh, I'm actually. That's not really what I believe. Let me repent. We've been slandering Eros, who is a God after all, by talking about love this way. Let me recant, let me give another speech which is in praise of love. And he gives it in a mythic form. So he tells this whole long story. And this is, you know, that starts with the whole, here's what the soul is, here's why it's immortal, here's kind of a picture of how the afterlife and reincarnation works and all this eventually with an image about a charioteer and all this gets to giving a picture of what love is and how this works with the human soul, how it's a matter of a certain balance of the faculties, which has some interesting connections with what he had to say in the symposium.

But it's not the same.

11:29 Wes: The idea is he can use all that to support the idea that. That the beloved is actually improved by the lover rather than harmed. You're using all that to try and get at the effect of the lover on the beloved and to reverse that initial thesis that was Lysias thesis that the beloved is harmed.

11:46 Dylan: Do we want to just work through it or. Mark, were you summarizing because you wanted to skip ahead to something?

11:52 Mark: I don't want to skip ahead. I was just trying to give, you know, I think this is. It's hard to give a high level overview of this dialogue. And so I was just trying to say here's what the structure is. We got three species at the beginning. That's the first half. The second half is more of your typical dialogue where they talk about rhetoric and end with the thing on writing

12:07 Adam: there, end of summary, restating what you said in the terms of the dialogue. The first half of the dialogue consists of three specimen instances of rhetoric. So contrary to most Platonic dialogues, there's not dialectic, they're not having a discussion. So you've got three specimen pieces of rhetoric in part one that then serve as examples to be analyzed dialectically in the second part of the dialogue. So it's like if I'm trying to explain something to you, but we don't have any examples, it's very hard to do. So this dialogue very conveniently provides us with the examples at the beginning and then allows those to serve for the analysis that begins in the second part, which then leads from the analysis of those particular speeches to rhetoric in general. That doesn't have anything to do with those particular speeches.

12:56 Mark: Yeah, I think a lot more time is spent on rhetoric in general. You know, there's some slamming of Lysias. You would characterize the entire dialogue as being just a debunking of a popular orator. And this whole mode of composing speeches as being really unprincipled and disorganized. And even though Plato's against rhetoric, he could still write a better rhetoric textbook than these guys did. Because once the Lysias is dispensed with, I think maybe implicitly there's. Well, talking about it like I did as a myth, that could work. But there's not even explicit reference that I recall to like his own third speech, which is by far the longest one of the three to say, see how I did it there? See how that was better than Lysias. Like it's. No, it moves just onto what are the rhetoricians say about.

13:43 Wes: The implication is that his speech is in touch with the truth. Right. That's going to be the distinguishing characteristic between rhetoric and the.

13:49 Dylan: Yes.

13:50 Wes: Pejorative sense and rhetoric. If there is a non pejorative sense of rhetoric. Right. You know, it involves not just persuasive techniques, but also the use of those persuasive techniques to communicate the truth.

14:02 Dylan: And it's also in being persuasive, it's persuasive for the good of the one being persuaded.

14:07 Adam: Well. And it's persuasive in pursuit of showing people the truth. And I think that's where you know, this idea, I think popularly, that Plato is against rhetoric, and you certainly see that in a number of the dialogues. But I take, you know, my understanding of this particular dialogue is that it's not anti rhetoric. Actually, this whole dialogue in some way is geared towards showing the possibility and perhaps even necessity of a genuinely what you might call science or art of rhetoric, which perhaps Plato thinks is not being practiced by anybody prior to his time. But I think the dialogue suggests or even states that such an art of rhetoric is possible and perhaps even necessary

14:46 Wes: and involves the use of mythology.

14:48 Dylan: Yep.

14:48 Adam: It seems to involve at least two things. That the person who's going to make these set speeches, whether orally or in writing, has to, on the one hand, know the truth about what he or she is speaking about. But second of all, you have to know the truth about the human soul and the types of human souls so that you can address your particular speech appropriately to the particular soul you happen to be talking to at the moment.

15:10 Wes: Right?

15:11 Mark: Yes. And from there the criticism of writing follows very directly. Writing is not addressed to anybody in particular. Anybody can read it. And so it's not going to have that directedness that good rhetoric would have. If the people you're talking to have questions, the document is not going to answer their question. Whereas in an oral form you can do that, you can fill in the gaps.

15:30 Wes: You can't tailor a piece of writing towards your audience which really comes down to a particular person. Every person is different.

15:36 Dylan: Exactly.

15:37 Wes: And it may not even be the case that they should even hear a communication. Right. So not everyone has the type of soul where you should talk to them about certain things. What I was mentioning with the mythology is that early on there's this seemingly a throwaway point. So 229d we get this talk of people who sort of want to deflate mythology. They want to explain it away. So, for instance, if I disbelieved, as the wise men do, I should not be extraordinary, then I might give a rational explanation that a blast of Boreas, the north wind, pushed her off the neighboring rocks as she was playing with Pharmacia, and she is referring back to Oreithyia, and that when she had died in this manner, she had said to have been carried off by Boreas.

But I, Phaedrus, think such explanations are very pretty in general, but are the inventions of a very clever and laborious and not altogether enviable man, for no other reason than because after this he must explain the forms of the centaurs, and so on and so forth. So he has, you know, you could spend your life trying to explain away mythology and miss the point that those myths aren't meant to be literally true. They're meant to communicate something. And so you don't actually interpret myths by giving them some literal naturalistic reading, but you actually have to engage in the art of interpretation.

And I think he calls back to this. This little passage is sort of indirectly called back to numerous times in the dialogue. And I bring it up just because we were thinking of Socrates last speech as a example of rhetoric and how highly mythologized it is. And so this is one of the, I think, strands here, is the importance of the use of something like mythology rhetorically.

17:13 Dylan: That's a really good section, Wes. And I just wanted to point just a few lines later, right at 2:30, after he says that he doesn't have the time to do this sort of infinite inquiry. I myself have certainly no time for the business. And I'll tell you why, my friend, I can't as yet know myself as the inscription at Delphi enjoins. And so long as that ignorance remains, it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. Consequently, I don't bother about such things, but accept the current beliefs about them and direct my inquiries, as I have just said rather to myself, to discover whether I really am a more complex creature and more puffed up with pride than Typhon, or a simpler, gentler being whom Heaven has blessed with a quiet un typhonic nature.

17:59 Wes: Let me give you my translation of that, because it's such a great part of that passage. So he investigates not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster, more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature.

18:15 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

18:16 Adam: And I think one of the great things about this dialogue, and when we get into Socrates second speech, is that actually knowing who you are actually in some ways requires knowing the cosmos as a whole and your place in it.

18:29 Dylan: Yeah. You know, you're reminded of his scientific inquiry and the fundamental importance of mathematics and geometry for Plato as part of that.

18:38 Wes: But you get here also, you're showing the path towards a certain type of interpretive strategy. I don't ask whether there is such a thing as Typhon. Right. I'm not interested in the literal truth of Typhon. I'm interested in comparing myself to Typhon and the implications of that. I'm interested in the interpretive possibilities I can use Typhon for.

18:58 Dylan: That's interesting because if you have read the dialogues and we'll see this again, he is constantly referring to the gods and talking about being godlike or not godlike, but taking for granted some kind of fairly typical understanding of what the gods are. And like you just said, Wes, aligning his own soul against that, or people's souls, human souls against that, and not worrying, you know, well, if Olympus exists, where could it possibly exist? And how can Zeus hold on to those lightning bolts when they destroy everything around it? I mean, there's none of that kind of discussion going on. That's not the inquiry at hand.

19:40 Wes: Right. At the very end of it, he'll associate that kind of literalness with the act of writing, that kind of lack of playfulness over seriousness with what goes on when something actually commits something to paper. It lacks the possibilities of metamorphosis, let's say, the spoken word between two people.

19:59 Dylan: That insistence on that playfulness and almost a kind of mysticism about it is utterly serious.

20:05 Adam: Right? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the paradoxes that I've repeatedly come across in reading Plato, reading about Socrates is that I think the normal way of thinking about Socrates is that he's the paragon philosopher, he's Mr. Rationality Incarnate. And yet I think we see time and time again that Socrates thinks that reasoning is actually plan B, that plan A is actually having direct access to the gods or being a God. But for those who don't have that, the best we can do is reasoning. And there really isn't any plan C.

20:36 Mark: And it's not communing with nature for sure. Also, just in the section 230D right after this, he's talking about entering A nice outdoor location for this by that rock that they're talking about. Did the myth happen here? Did the north wind take this woman? And so right after that, Phaedrus is saying how little Socrates gets out of the city. And he says, forgive me, best of men, for I'm a lover of learning. Now then the country places and the trees are not willing to teach me anything, but the human beings in town are. So just to contrast with Thoreau or something.

21:04 Dylan: Yeah. This is the only dialogue that's not in the city, actually.

21:07 Adam: Right. And I think. But here's a nice way in which, you know, if you interpret this dramatically, it seems that one of the parallels that's being set up at the beginning is that Phaedrus has a chance, an opportunity of either taking a walk in the city among the colonnades or walking out in the country. And it seems to me that this is Plato's way of kind of, again, introducing the concept of doing something that's more ordered versus something that's a little bit more wild and unpredictable, and that. That walking in the city is more comparable to producing these kind of set speeches, whereas walking in the country is kind of like doing dialectic. You just never know where it's going to go.

21:44 Wes: The way the dialogue begins, Phaedrus says something to the effect that. So Socrates meets him coming from Lysias and then taking a walk after he's

21:53 Adam: been with Lysias and on the recommendation of Acumenus, who's a physician.

21:57 Wes: Right.

21:58 Adam: Who's in charge of bodily health.

22:00 Wes: Right. And he says basically that the country roads are less fatiguing than the city streets and that the city streets were where Lysias was, and that's why he's now walking the country. Meet Socrates in that particular place. And then of course, you know, Socrates later on says, yeah, there's more to learn in the city, but there's a significance here to being in the country.

22:16 Adam: Well, and that's why I say, if you're doing this dramatically, if we're not doing this like, as a biography of Socrates, that Plato, if you think of him as a playwright, if this analysis is useful or correct, that Plato is putting Socrates in the country here because it represents better Socrates preferred style of speaking, which is dialectic, which is improv. It's like word jazz, as opposed to walking in the city, which is pre programmed in a kind of way, like a set speech of rhetoric is.

22:44 Wes: Yeah, I'm just wondering if that's the case because it seems like the, you know, What Socrates later says seems to imply, you know, this idea that he can learn more from people in the city. That's where dialectic occurs. That's where you find people to have those exchanges. And with nature, you're all alone.

22:59 Adam: But the city, country contrast may be usefully symbolic of one of the issues at the heart of this particular dialogue.

23:06 Wes: Right. I'm wondering if what it's symbolic though of is the actual reading that occurs under the tree, right? And in fact, Phaedrus doesn't initially say, oh, I have a look at, here's the written speech, let's read it. They go through this thing where Phaedrus acts like he heard Lysias speak, but he doesn't remember anything. He try and give Socrates the gist, and then Socrates notices that he has

23:27 Adam: that the whole written thing something under

23:28 Wes: his cloak, and then they go to that particular tree to read it. So ultimately, I might agree with you in this, but my first impression was that what the country represents here is the written word and the unfatiguing approach, right? As opposed to the fatiguing dialectic of city streets. But I can be persuaded in the opposite.

23:47 Adam: Once you get a sense of what's at stake between dialectic and rhetoric, even at its best for Socrates, then you can have a sense of what could usefully be symbolic of it, which is kind of what we were just talking about with the Boreas incident. One other somewhat background issue worth having in mind here, which comes up in a number of the other dialogues, perhaps most famously in the beginning of the Apology, is the issue between speech that is convincing versus speech that is true. And the opening of the apology goes on about this for a couple paragraphs, that the prosecution of Socrates has been very convincing.

In fact, Socrates himself is almost carried away by it. But Socrates says not a word that they spoke was true. And Socrates himself is only going to speak the truth without regard to whether it's quote unquote convincing or not. And I think there's a deep philosophical issue and problem for Plato and Socrates here, which is it's kind of astounding when you actually think about it, which is how could the truth not be convincing to people? I mean, if you actually articulate the truth, how could somebody hear the truth and not find it convincing?

And that's certainly the case in Socrates trial, apparently. Or on the other hand, when we look at democracy, if you look at what goes on in a law court or an assembly or in Greek theater where they voted for prizes, everything depended on a vote. And the way you win a vote, whether it's with a jury or an assembly or judges at a theater, you win by being convincing. And this is what sets up this whole problem about how speech can be used, I think. And it's the issue that Socrates in this dialogue is trying to resolve with its idea that how do we have speech that can both be true and also convincing to the masses?

25:29 Mark: To the masses? Or does he really care about the masses? I thought one of the points of why written language is bad is because it is for the masses. Whereas a speech you can pick and choose.

25:39 Adam: Yeah, that's for written speeches. But there's also the question of oral set speeches, which are not written, but are nonetheless rhetoric. And Socrates, two speeches in the first half are examples of oral set speeches, whereas Lysias is obviously an example of a written speech. They're similar, but they're not the same. And I think this issue of what the multitude, you know, we can get there later, but in the second half, Socrates, they go on for quite a bit about that. The multitude is persuaded by what they find probable, regardless of what's actual. The multitude is moved by what's probable.

26:11 Wes: Yeah. Under someone else's theory. Yeah.

26:14 Dylan: I thought the argument was that that was what rhetoricians used as their technique, that they argued based upon the probable.

26:21 Wes: In fact, one rhetorician in particular, whose name I forget, had that theory.

26:25 Dylan: There's Theodorus and Thrasymachus, all of them.

26:28 Adam: Yeah, right.

26:28 Dylan: Yeah. But I don't know if it went so far as to say that that's what actually persuades. I mean, the analysis of how you get persuaded, it was an analysis of the technique that the rhetoricians use. Now, maybe those go hand in hand.

26:44 Wes: Right. And ultimately the technique makes no sense because in order to figure out what's probable or what people think is probable, you have to know the truth, or something like that.

26:54 Dylan: A lot of the problem is very similar to the idea that if you know what the good is, then why wouldn't you do it? And so it could either be a question of you actually don't know what the good is, and so it's a question of education, or you do know what the good is, but you're incontinent with respect to it, and you haven't molded your soul properly so that you can act in that way.

27:17 Adam: Well, if it's not, and you tell me if it's jumping the gun, but I could bring us to a place in the second part of the text that's kind of on this Point. Or obviously we can go back to the first part if you prefer.

27:28 Dylan: I would like us just to walk through. I mean, I feel like everything we've said would be said by just walking through the whole thing.

27:36 Adam: Then. Lead on, Socrates. Well, Lysias, is that a scroll you got in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

27:48 Wes: If I were glad to see you, wouldn't be good for you.

27:54 Mark: So the thesis is pretty simple, which is love is irrational. That if you are in love, if you've fallen in love, then it's kind of a sickness and you do things that later you regret. So that it's like you're only doing this for me because you love me. Whereas if we were just friends, you would do things for me voluntarily or because I'm a decent person and that's what friends do for each other. But if you're in love with me, then you're going to do all this stuff just because you want to get in my pants or whatever, because you're doting upon me. And that's going to fade. It's based on desire that's going to fade and you're going to regret that. It's just you're not really being you when you're in love. So wouldn't you rather have somebody who's really being themselves and being reasonable?

28:37 Wes: Yeah. Really. Though this is looked at from the standpoint of the beloved, Right? It's the beloved's calculation.

28:42 Mark: Yep.

28:43 Wes: It's a matter of what's good or bad for the beloved. And so the question is whether or not a non lover, whether the beloved should give their favors to the non lover or to the lover. So I just wanted to say, what do we mean by the giving of favors? I mean, on one level it seems obviously giving into sexual advances, but maybe there's more to it to that.

29:00 Adam: It's focusing on the person who's being importuned. It's focusing on the person who's the recipient of these acts of speaking and to figure out how to respond to these acts of speaking appropriately. Very good.

29:12 Dylan: The one who's being persuaded.

29:14 Wes: So in the more general rhetorical sense, it's about whether or not you accept someone's argument. But in the particular case of love, it's about. I suppose it could be, you know, it's about whether or not you accept their love or, you know, again, it's just this question of the giving of favors and what that means.

29:30 Dylan: But as Mark was getting to, the argument of the speech is that it's better to accept the advances of someone who doesn't love you because the lover is mad and won't actually care for you because they'll be doing whatever they can do. In a funny way, it's an argument that the lover is merely being persuasive without being true.

29:53 Adam: Bingo. And I think all of this depends upon trying to get the beloved, the addressee of these speeches about maximizing your own self interest. What course of action should I follow here that will actually benefit me and not harm me?

30:09 Dylan: Yeah. So Phaedrus finds the speech awesome, right?

30:15 Adam: Yes. And they describe Lysias as the ablest writer of the time. So I mean, in a certain way. If you take down Lysias in this dialogue, Plato is taking down the best writer of his era.

30:28 Dylan: And Socrates himself admits that it was amazingly fine and he was thrilled by it.

30:32 Wes: The way the argument goes, basically is that the lover is damaging to the beloved because they're jealous, they're smothering, they're controlling. They interfere with your friendships. If you need something from them once their passions go away, they won't give it to you. They flatter you in a way that's bad for your character. So I didn't know that we touched on that. So I just wanted to get that in there.

30:53 Mark: I think that's more of that stuff seems to be in Socrates.

30:57 Wes: No, it's all elaboration. This is based on my summary of this particular speech.

31:02 Mark: Let's just read a quote from here because we're talking about speaking style. We have to give some of the supposed speaking style attributed to Lysias here. I'm just picking sort of randomly a point we haven't Talked talked about yet. 233A. In addition, many of the lovers desire the body before they come to know the character and gain experience of the other personal traits. So that it's unclear to them whether they will still wish to be friends then when they have ceased from desire. But as for the non lovers who were friends with each other even before they did these things, it is not likely that these things through which they received benefit should diminish friendship with them.

But these things are left behind as reminders of those that are going to be. It is to be expected that you would become better by being persuaded by me rather than by a lover. For those people praise the sayings and doings even contrary to what's best in some cases fearing lest they be hated in other cases because their own knowledge is worse on account of desire. That's probably good enough. It's not exactly stirring. It's just kind of listing some reasons. Now, Socrates is pretty harsh on it. He says that really the sentences could have been given in any order, that it's highly redundant, that it's totally disorganized.

And worse off, that he doesn't start off the dialogue by saying what love is. They read the intro to it several times, which the intro is just setting up the situation which the speech is being given. The speaker saying, you know about my affairs and you have heard what these things having come to be, I believe to be advantageous for us. And I deem it to be fitting to be spared the misfortune of not getting what I asked for in this account, that I do not happen to be in love with you. So that's about the least romantic proposal that you could possibly get, right?

It's the most stilted. It's the most. It's saying you should sleep with me even though I'm telling you right now that I'm not in love with you. In fact, it's better that I'm not in love with you that you sleep with me. So Socrates says, look, he's starting right there. The way he elaborates that would you rather be loved by the lover or the non lover? Well, what is love? What does that actually mean? And just kind of characterizing it as he goes in the reasons that he gives. As Wes was saying that the lover is going to try to be possessive, the lover is going to be jealous.

Well, that's what love is. Love is being jealous and possessive.

33:06 Wes: Yeah, the definition he ultimately ends up giving for this. And by the way, this is just kind of. Mark, you've already revealed it. But the speech is much more structured. Right. Than Lysias's speech, even though it's saying exactly the same thing. So that's a kind of a lesson in rhetoric right there. But he starts off with that definition, or he builds towards it. And the definition we get is that this is around. Sorry, it's 447 in the Loeb, which is around 238C or something. Yeah.

33:31 Mark: So this is right at the beginning of Socrates's speech.

33:34 Wes: You're overcome with desire of a particular sort. So there are different kinds of desire, like for food, for instance. And you're a glutton if you kind of give into the excess of that. Well, love is being overcome by a particular sort of desire that's directed at beauty, especially quote unquote personal beauty, which I take to be the beauty of a human being.

33:54 Mark: And what do you guys think of that as definition of love.

33:57 Dylan: Love is being drawn towards beauty, or

34:00 Mark: even his eventual definition that he actually likes this one is not one that he's ultimately going to go with. Still has to do with beauty. It has to do with fixation on beauty. I mean, what do you think of that? Just as does love necessarily have to do with beauty?

34:12 Adam: Well, Socrates in his long second speech talks about that of all the forms that are out there, like truth, justice and so on, it's beauty or goodness. It turns out that beauty is the one that's most palpable in the world that we live in, which is why it has a special place for us, that beauty and truth or goodness are all equally important concepts. But you can't sensorily experience truth or goodness the way you can sensorially experience beauty. And that's why it moves us more, it moves our bodies more, because it's of the same realm.

34:47 Wes: And there's a reason why apps like Tinder involve just pictures and then a few words. Beauty is important to love. I mean, whether, you know, I think intuitively we understand that, whether it's physical beauty or what we might think of as beauty of the soul. I think at least intuitively on a first glance, let's say love at first sight. It's important.

35:06 Mark: I think it is, said someone here, that it's a matter of finding something beautiful. So it's not even a matter necessarily that the person is objectively beautiful. So therefore someone who's not objectively beautiful will never have loved, will never be loved. Like that's not the way it works.

35:23 Dylan: No.

35:23 Wes: The way he puts it, though, sounds almost like beauty is an objective thing. So, you know, again, at this 4:38 C, I say that the desire which overcomes the rational opinion that strives towards the right and which is led away towards the enjoyment of beauty, and again, is strongly forced by the desires that are kindred to itself toward personal beauty, when it gains the victory, takes its name from that very force and is called love. And so, by the way, it's worth mentioning that he sets up this desire. He sets it up in opposition to what he variously calls acquired opinion.

So cultural norms or rational opinion that strives toward the right, the things that we learned are good as opposed to simply following desire. So it sounds there like beauty is this objective thing and it's being blown away by it or having your desire overcome by it. That's the key point here. Not that it's just to each their own that, you know, we might find anything Beautiful.

36:18 Adam: That we like. No, I think because the analogy is to, like, truth or goodness, which I think for Plato and Socrates are also objective and not subjective.

36:27 Dylan: Yeah. And what do we make of this being the recapitulation of Lysias speech, but better. Right. This is the first speech and it's intended to be, in some sense, Lysias speech.

36:40 Adam: Right.

36:40 Mark: Lysias speech revised. Socrates wears a veil while he's giving it because he can't stand.

36:46 Dylan: Yeah. He's ashamed to be doing it. We're sort of talking about it, like right now we're making links about how he's talking about love and stuff like that, which it may be that there's certain things that are in common all the way through both speeches and through to the end, but it is intended to be a argument for the same sort of thing that Lysias argument was. Right.

37:10 Wes: Yeah. So, I mean, the one thing we get here is because we get a definition of love, we get a kind of causal theory, so there's a mechanism at work that we can apply in arguing for what the effects of the lover will be on the beloved. And then there's that structure. Right. So we start out with the definition. Then he's going to go on and say, look, here's how it affects. Here's how the lover affects the virtue and the intellect of the beloved. It's not good. Here's how it affects masculinity. It's not good. They look for someone who's effeminate, the lover looks for someone who's effeminate or transforms them into that.

And then here's the lover wants you not to have any possessions, basically for various reasons, and they're generally unpleasant and they won't repay your favors when their love fades. So again, making many of the same points. And that's why Mark thought when I summarized Lysias's speech, that it was Socrates speech, because it is so similar in those points, but it's got a causal theory of. Of why love does that. And it's got the structure, as far as I can see.

38:13 Mark: And Socrates explicitly brings up Ike Turner. So there you go.

38:19 Dylan: And at the end, love is the punchline, or the punchline, so to speak. Sorry, the final that love is bad and you shouldn't prefer the lover because it will cause you not to behave properly.

38:34 Wes: Right.

38:35 Adam: You mean the end of Socrates first speech?

38:37 Dylan: End of Socrates first speech.

38:38 Adam: The one that's supposed to be like Lysias 2.41d. He says at the conclusion, let that then my boy, be Your lesson? Be sure that the attentions of a lover carry no goodwill. They are no more than the glutting of his appetite for. And then he quotes his proverb as wolf to lamb, so lover to his

38:58 Wes: lad, I don't want to eat you up.

39:00 Adam: Well, and I think, you know, both with Lysias and Socrates first speech is that the argument essentially is that the interests of the lover and the beloved are mutually exclusive, and that that's a problem for the beloved.

39:13 Wes: Right.

39:13 Mark: So as a point of rhetoric, just to go back to the definition there, I think that while Socrates acknowledges that definitions of this kind of thing are going to be controversial, I got to think that giving the definition at the beginning, it's supposed to be stating a premise, a premise that will be agreeable to everyone. And ultimately, even he, in the later speech that he gives, that has diametrically opposed conclusions to this, is still going to agree that what love is, is being overwhelmed by desire in some way for the beautiful.

39:46 Wes: Not just any kind of desire.

39:47 Mark: Yes, exactly. For the beautiful. And the question is, is that bad? And then this whole speech, yes, of course it's bad. So his second speech is going to say, well, being overwhelmed, being driven mad, there are actually some good kinds of madness. And it has to then give this whole big, long cosmological picture, examples of other kinds of madness, and this cosmological picture, and then ultimately this allegorical picture of how this madness enables harmony of the soul in a way that didn't come out in the Republic. Say we got the rational part of the soul, you've got the spirited part of the soul, you've got the irrational part of the soul.

It sounded like in the Republic, the rational part should just rule end of story. And in this one, well, no, being overwhelmed, having love, having something that kind of gives a little freedom to the desire part, gives a role for it, sublimates it in some way, is going to end up being good. But again, for the rhetorical point, the point about the style of the speech, I think that the definition there at the beginning is supposed to be just. Oh, everybody agrees with this, right?

40:48 Adam: Well, I think. No, Socrates makes the point at 265d that the definition just given of love may be right or wrong. So he's not even necessarily affirming it. In fact, he's never really affirming the truthiness of most of what he said, but he says, at all events, it was that which enabled our discourse to achieve lucidity and consistency. So he's had this little passage talking about there's two kinds of words out there. There's some words like silver and iron, where everybody automatically agrees what they mean, but there's other words where the meanings seem to fluctuate or there's no consensus.

Even a single person doesn't necessarily agree with himself time after time about what truth or goodness or something like that is. And so he says, especially those words that fluctuate need to be defined at the beginning of your discourse or even of a dialectic, because otherwise you'll get to the end and you'll realize you and the person you're speaking to were thinking of different things and you've just wasted all your time. So you've got to nail down those fluctuating words at the beginning.

41:49 Mark: What do you think of that? Because as a point of philosophy, like, I think a lot of times people even have commented on this podcast, well, you didn't just define your terms at the beginning. And I would usually use Socrates as the example, why you don't do that? Because the terms themselves are exactly what is at issue. And if you're asking about transhumanism or mind or artificial intelligence or something like that, the whole point of the discussion is to work toward, in some one of the points of discussion, what that might be. And a lot of times you just, okay, well, this is something, you know, that.

So we got this specifically about God, arguments for the existence of God. Well, don't you have to, at the beginning of that podcast, define what God is, and then you can decide whether what arguments there are for its existence or whether these work? But no, it seems much better that since God is a pervasive notion in the culture, that we just kind of go on that shared vague understanding. And if we spend too much time trying to sharpen that, then we never get to anything else.

42:52 Wes: Right. Meno's problem. But I mean, a definition can just be establishing what that vague understanding is before we proceed so that we know what we're assuming.

43:00 Adam: Well, and I think this also comes down to what's the object of the exercise in reading a book like this? Because, I mean, on one level, this book is about whatever it's about, and whatever it's about may or may not be applicable to other kinds of problems. But I take it that, you know, Socrates, Again, at like 266B and following, you know, he's talking about that one of the things that's come out of these specimens that he's given is these complementary procedures of definition and division, and that the process of bringing many into one with definition, or taking one and cutting it up at its joints, so to speak, so that you can figure out the types of things that these complementary procedures are at the heart of dialectic, which I take it for Socrates is the most fabulous thing in the whole universe in this dialogue.

And actually, if you look at Socrates two speeches, my own opinion actually is that they're not separate speeches, they're actually two halves of a common speech, and that the first speech does the definition of love, which serves for both halves of the speech. And the two parts of the speech are the division. Speech number one deals with the lover who's smitten by human madness, and speech number two deals with the lover who's smitten by divine madness. What Socrates says at 266A. So that essentially, and I know, you know, we're living so long ago, but I mean, it's like Plato and Socrates have just discovered the tree, that you can draw a tree on the blackboard and you have a common term at the top and you can put two subterm like, how cool is that?

I can go down the left side, I can go down the right side. And the problem with Socrates first speech is not that it's false, it's not false, it's actually true. The problem is it's incomplete. That's why it's kind of an oratorical trick. It leaves you thinking that something is the case because it has not finished the argument by going down the right side of the tree of divine madness.

44:54 Wes: Right.

44:55 Mark: But you could still ask, when you're done, is the kind of possessive character that is described in the first Lysias type speech that Socrates gives, is that really love? And I would think that reading the rest of the dialogue, you would say, well, no, that's not really love. If you really love someone, you don't put them in a box, you don't belittle them, you don't try to possess them. Real love is, you know, this elevating thing that Socrates then goes on to

45:22 Adam: talk about and if they don't come back. But I think this is now another instance of this notion of division. Just like there's two kinds of madness, human madness and divine madness. I take it that in the dialogue there's really two kinds of love and they're both real. It just turns out that the human kind of love or the bodily kind of love is pernicious for the beloved, but that the divinely inspired love or the soulful kind of love is beneficial for the beloved. And Therefore, knowing the difference between the two makes all the difference.

45:56 Dylan: You're a divine lover, Mark.

45:58 Mark: I'm just having trouble with this as a. He's the guy that came up with the dialectic. So I can't really argue that this is not historically what he did in other dialogues. And maybe I should look at the other dialogues more closely for the example of that. But it seems like if he's in some of the other dialogues, he doesn't just say, what is justice here I'm going to tell you what justice is in the first page and then for the rest of it, we're going to kind of explore that.

46:22 Dylan: Well, no, the Republic starts just like that. He asks what justice is and he starts with Cephalus, definition of justice.

46:31 Wes: Right.

46:31 Mark: He tests out different ones and he rejects them. But what he's doing here, what he's saying you should do, is just give one. And that's what, according to Adam's analysis, that's what holds for the rest of the thing. You don't revise it.

46:43 Wes: There is a sort of argument, right, to this definition of love. Right. It builds up. He says, everyone desires a beautiful, so that's not a basis for distinguishing the lover from the non lover. And so then he has to get at that basis. So it's not just desire, for the beautiful is what love is. Then he gets at this division between the acquisitions of culture and acquired opinion and then the innate desires and pleasures. So, you know, ID and SuperEgo, let's say, and the conflict between those two, and the ways in which desire can overcome acquired opinion and lead us to do things which other people or even ourselves might disapprove of. And then that's what love becomes. I just wanted to point that out because it's not like we just simply stipulate the definition of love. We start with these other considerations and then build to it.

47:30 Adam: But I think there's also another point based on what Mark is saying, and it kind of goes to my issue about whether we treat these dialogues as philosophical dramas, because once you put it into the realm of drama, and that these are works of Plato rather than necessarily historical accounts about Socrates in the first instance, there's no reason to assume that Plato as author is doing the same thing in each of the dialogues, any more than saying that Shakespeare is doing the same thing in each of his plays, that each one could have its own purpose, and therefore what the character Socrates does or doesn't do in any given dialogue may be connected to what that particular dialogue is about.

But I'd also go one step further that a lot of the dialogues where Socrates is focused on defining things like, you know, meno, you know, what is virtue and all the rest of that stuff. I mean, it shows the importance that that's actually what happens in Meno all the time, that Meno can't be bothered to wait for the definition of virtue. He wants to go on to find out how it's acquired. And Socrates says, I understand your interest. You know, it's important to figure out how virtue is acquired. But unfortunately we can't actually do that until we first figure out what it is.

And if we don't figure out what it is in our lifetime or the next hundred years, that's too bad on us. We can't do the next step.

48:45 Dylan: Yeah, if we want to tackle the, you know, the dialectic in the sense of watching him go through the breaking apart and pulling together. I mean, he talks about that here after the speeches on love. But we would want to go through like the Sophist or something like that, where he just wanders down that tree that Adam was talking about and goes down one side, then goes back up and goes down the other side, and then talks about the activity of going up and down the tree.

49:13 Mark: So before we wrap up the first half here, let's just talk about the transition between his two speeches where the daemon comes back that he's talked about in several of his dialogues.

49:25 Wes: Well, first let me. So he ends it and Phaedra says, well, it sounds like you were still in the middle of that. That's not the end. What about the non lover? Because he only really talks about the lover. And then Socrates says, that'll work me up into too much of a passion to talk about that, so don't compel me, don't put some further compulsion on me. He says in my translation. And basically Phaedrus begs, calls him a superhuman with regard to giving speeches. And that's when you get to the daimon part.

49:52 Mark: Well, yeah, and since you're bringing that up, I mean, he had said before he started his first speech that pretty much stop me if I go into poetry. And he does go into poetry with his last line of the speech.

50:04 Adam: Yeah. And he says that he's about to break out into epic verse, that it's getting so long.

50:09 Dylan: Yeah. In fact, there's an interlude in between the definition of love. And then he goes on to the rest of the first speech where he asks Phaedrus how he's doing and that he's Divinely inspired. And Socrates says that he's speaking dithyrambically. And so that makes it even more sensible that Socrates tries to beg off again after he's done with that first speech, saying that I'm on the verge of madness as it is, and I

50:40 Mark: will be manifestly possessed by the nymphs if I keep going, if I talk anymore here. So what does this mean in terms of. Part of his dismissal of rhetoric is connected with his dismissal of poetry. We saw in the Republic that poetry is generally corrupting. It's a mere imitation, it's not the truth. And he puts poets kind of low on his list of, you know, who's the most virtuous. But can we draw any other conclusions from the particular use here? And I don't want to become a poet. I better stop now. Or is this just goofing around? Tell us something significant given that this whole thing is about rhetoric.

51:15 Wes: Yeah, I mean, the sense in which each of these speeches is. He's joking. That they're manifestations of this divine madness, which is a form of love.

51:23 Dylan: And your question, I think, is just complicated. I mean, as Adam was talking from the beginning, that. And Wes brought this up as well, that on the one hand, you have this indictment of rhetoric and you have this indictment of poetry, both as we remember from the Republic, but also even here, the way in which he's accusing himself of speaking poetically. Yet Socrates regularly refers to myths here and in other speeches, he also speaks very persuasively and speaks about how to speak persuasively. So there's this kind of tension with, on the one hand, dismissing poetry and dismissing rhetoric, but on the other hand, pointing towards the right kind of divine madness and the right kind of persuasive of speech.

52:07 Wes: Right.

52:07 Dylan: And so it's not as simple as saying that those things are wrong. In fact, in some ways both of them are incredibly important. Speaking persuasively and also being divinely inspired, but doing so in the right way is what makes the whole difference.

52:24 Wes: Yeah, the right kind of rhetoric is connected to love, as in the divine madness sort of love. And the written word is essentially the non lover. The whole lover versus non lover thing is also just a metaphor for the difference between the right kind of rhetoric and the wrong kind of rhetoric. The written word. Yes, the written word is the non lover.

52:46 Adam: If I could just say a couple things to that point before we move on. So one, I think in this dialogue in particular, the fact that Socrates is breaking out into poetry is itself a Sign that Socrates has been divinely possessed. It's not even clear that Socrates is actually the author of the speeches that he's delivering. In fact, when they're talking dialectically, later on, Socrates has to ask Phaedrus, did I define love at the beginning of my first speech? I don't remember. And so if we take that at face value, I mean, one of the things about Plato's Socrates is that he's continually presented as on a mission from God to Athens, and that this is yet another instance that Socrates is genuinely in connection with the divine.

And the second thing is in terms of this thing about you talking about the Republic and trashing poetry or trashing rhetoric and the other things, I want to just make two points about this. One is if you take this dramatic approach to Plato's dialogues, then the first thing that comes out of that is that Plato spent his whole life being a poet, that he wrote poetry. So we have to really take that into account. And second of all, I really take it that in the Republic and in the Gorgias and even here, the argument ultimately is not against rhetoric per se or poetry per se.

It's against bad rhetoric and bad poetry. And that if I can use that image from the Republic about the philosopher king that, you know, not until philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers are we going to have justice in our city. The argument is essentially the same for rhetoric and for poetry. Not until poets become philosophers or philosophers become poets, or similarly, not until rhetoricians become philosophers or philosophers become rhetoricians. But I take it that Plato in his own life and the Phaedrus as a dialogue are both affirming the possibility, albeit it's very difficult, but the possibility, indeed the necessity of having philosopher rhetoricians and having philosopher poets.

And I take it that actually Plato spent his whole life being a philosopher poet, right?

54:53 Wes: And pretty clearly the early stuff is ironic, you know, where he's saying, I don't want to get too worked up and become too poetic. I mean, pretty clearly he's endorsing divine madness when it comes to rhetoric and persuasion and love and all that, all of that stuff.

55:09 Mark: So you might say his critique is kind of like, we recently had an Adorno episode, that poetry, and, you know, this would extend to other art forms, representational art forms, is propagandistic. And the question is just, well, what is trying to be conveyed? And if the propaganda, if the message, if the way that it is attempting to mold the listener is driven by truth and the vision of good that Plato has in mind, Then that's exactly what you should be using rhetoric for. That is what a rhetorician philosopher is. Is somebody that is doing that manipulation of the subject. But is it really manipulation because you're imparting them with truth? No, you're improving them, you're not manipulating them. That sounds bad. But if you're ignorantly spouting things or self consciously lying, either one of those things, those would obviously be abuses of

55:59 Wes: the art form, right? If you know the truth and you're trying to lead people in that direction, you can use the art of persuasion. That seems to be the suggestion in this dialogue. Those techniques are legitimate as long as they are used with knowledge and with the goal of imparting, bringing people to knowledge.

56:15 Dylan: You wouldn't have to just be lying though, right? You could be trying to persuade them of something that just wasn't for their own good. You wouldn't have to lie to them to do that, but you could be trying to persuade something that was bad for them. Now, that might fall in the category of not being, being against the truth or something like that.

56:34 Wes: But even in the case of persuading someone of the truth, you can appeal to their emotions. You can use all sorts of rhetorical tricks which have nothing to do with the truth of what you're saying, in order to attract them to something that happens to be true. So that's the kind of.

56:47 Adam: Well, and we're given an example of that in this dialogue, because Socrates says that the combined speech that he gave was designed specifically to be suitable for Phaedrus soul. So this is not even a universal statement of cosmic reality or love or anything. It's the particularly tailored statement that will work for this particular addressee.

57:10 Mark: So we are up to 242B. I was about to quote, as I was going to cross the river, good man, the demonic thing and the sign that customarily arises for me, arose and on each occasion holds me back from what I'm going to do. And I seemed at that very moment to hear a certain voice which is not allowing me to go away before I have made expiation on the grounds that I have committed some fault toward the divine. So this is him pulling his daemon, his demon, which he brings up very often. One of the secondary sources I was, I was listening to said something like the most specific and descriptive he's ever been about is daemon. But I don't see that here. I don't know. He's just saying it to voice.

57:48 Dylan: I think we should sell Socrates demon plush toys

57:55 Mark: that's what I want. I want him. If he's going to say that, he has to define demon is right at the beginning, Right?

58:01 Wes: Define it so that we can draw it and then make a toy out of it. And there the merchandising empire begins.

58:09 Adam: I think it's just an eight ball that just keeps coming up with. No.

58:16 Wes: What was that character in He Man? Didn't he man have his own daemon? Daemon or something?

58:21 Mark: I think you're right. I was thinking that there's his Dark Materials, I believe is the name of the kids series the Golden Compass where everybody has a demon on their shoulder that is part of their soul that is big.

58:34 Wes: Well, it's not always on their shoulder. It's an animal of some kind.

58:37 Mark: Or yes, it might be too big for that. So we got that little cameo from the demon and that's just the transition that he. Hey, Eros is a God. We've been saying these bad things about love, but we have to. Now I feel the need to get poetic here and to give a hymn of praise.

58:55 Wes: Well, also, it's an act of atonement. He needs to atone for the sin of speaking against love, the divinity. And so now, yeah, this speech of praise is the thing that's going to get him off the hook. It's going to redeem him.

59:07 Adam: And Socrates initially says that this is going to be a renunciation, just like they've taken Lysias down a few pegs. He really kind of bitch slaps Homer for not being able to figure out why Homer lost his eyes. But at least Stesichorus had the good sense. He was a kind of like Stesichorus was a bit of a philosopher poet. He could figure out why he had lost his sight. And Socrates is going to top them all by actually doing his palinode before he gets punished. He's going to do it prophylactically.

59:37 Mark: So, writers, if you go blind, it's because of what you wrote.

59:42 Wes: There you go.

59:42 Dylan: It's not for any other reason at all.

59:44 Mark: Or all the masturbation, you have to spell it out, Is that what you're saying?

59:50 Adam: I'm not going to touch that with a plane tree.

59:54 Mark: All right, so who wants to sum up this lengthy, lengthy speech we've gotten in the last episode? Wes gave us the answer, the kind of upshot of it, but we didn't get a lot of the progression here,

1:00:05 Dylan: the divine madness and all that stuff.

1:00:07 Wes: He began the transition into this, as he says. Well, we really didn't examine the case of when the Lover is of a different sort of nature, a nobler and gentler nature. It's the kind of language he uses. And so the structure of the speech is that he begins by talking about. Because we sort of established that in the previous speeches, it was the insanity of the lover which was a problem, and the non lover should be favored for reasons of sanity. So he's going to start out by talking about the blessings of madness, which are threefold. One of them has to do with prophecy.

The other has to do with a sort of ritual distraction from our present ills. When you're cursed, you sort of engage in purifications and sacred rites, whether or not they're effective. And they take you away from those ills in some sense. And then the third is artistic inspiration. And then the next part of the argument has to prove that madness is something that will, that is given by the gods for a greatest happiness. And to do that, he starts out by proving that the soul is immortal, which is a long and interesting argument that I spent way too much time on.

I have the feeling we're not going to get into that very much. And then giving a theory of the soul in which it's this sort of composite of. Basically, it sort of combines this idea of a tripartite structure of the soul with his theory of recollection, where it's a way of giving a theory of madness as involving recollections of beautiful things that we've seen in souls before they inhabited our bodies, let's say, when we were gods. Yeah, we'll get into that.

1:01:46 Mark: When we tried to follow the gods, something like that.

1:01:50 Wes: That gives him a basis for saying, giving a new theory of what the lover does to his object, which is essentially, it's going to be that he improves the beloved.

1:01:58 Adam: You know, if you look at Socrates second speech, I mean, it is really long. And especially since we're talking earlier about the different kinds of uses of language or uses of speech. For me, I think it's important to see that the first part of Socrates second speech is essentially a philosophical treatise. I mean, it's the kind of thing that you could read from Aristotle or somebody else who's just, you know, kind of working through an argument. And then at some point it switches into this kind of mythical thing about the chariot with the two horses and the charioteer and all that kind of stuff.

And I think this is important. Even though Socrates never calls it out explicitly, it's important later because it turns out that even implicitly, within the Phaedrus, even a Philosophical treatise is a kind of rhetoric and therefore going to be ultimately not as good as pure dialectic. But the other part is, I think it's worth seeing that despite all of this high blown stuff about divine madness, what madness actually means in this case is really kind of mundane. At 2:49d, Socrates says, standing aside from the busy doings of mankind and drawing nigh to the divine, he is rebuked by the multitude as being out of his wits, for they know not that he is possessed by a deity.

And then at e Socrates says as soon as he beholds the beauty of this world, he is reminded of true beauty. His wings begin to grow. Then is he fain to lift his wings and fly upward, yet he has not the power. But inasmuch as he gazes upward like a bird and cares nothing for the world beneath, men charge it upon him that he is demented. And I take it from this, that part of what this so called divine madness is about is that to the rest of the world it looks mad that a philosopher or somebody who's in touch with this truth doesn't really give a crap about what's going on down here.

Because all of his attention is to the reality beyond the heavens. And that's what makes it mad. Not that he's actually literally doing anything crazy, it's just that he's focusing on a different realm of existence and everybody else just can't understand it.

1:04:09 Mark: I just want to finish the 249E that Adam was reading because it actually connects it back to love. We've been saying all this stuff about the theory of forms and the soul being immortal, but like, what does that have to do with love? This is being in a manic condition, being demented, as your translation said. This therefore proves to be of all inspirations the best and of the best ancestry, or caused by the best. Something like that, both for him who has it and for him who communicates a share of it. And that he who participates in this madness as one who loves the beautiful ones is called lover.

So there you go. That's what being a lover really is. It's not having a desire for you sexually that overwhelms me, it's being possessed by divine madness. We haven't even brought in why this is aimed at you in particular, but Wes gave us the answer, which is spelled out in here. I'm trying to see how many more pages it is before we get to it. It's at least a few more, at least a little bit, that it's the Beauty in you that participates in the form of the beautiful. So really that's the thing that I see in you, that is why I love you, is because I am loving the divine through you.

Which is exactly the same answer that's in the symposium.

1:05:24 Wes: But one other thing about just the madness part of it. Remember the definition of love we got in Socrates first speech was it's when desire for beauty overcomes our reasonable side as it's culturally defined cultural norms. And here it's this loving the beautiful to the point of madness, where we sort of get spelled out what this defiance of those cultural norms are. So as was mentioned, ignoring what the masses think and the fact that they laugh at you because you're stepping in potholes, because you're thinking about things rather than being practical, those sorts of things.

1:05:58 Adam: Well, I think the thing about the beauty which we were touching on a little bit earlier, is that physical beauty in the world that we live in turns out to be a kind of wormhole. That when the philosopher experiences physical beauty in the world, what he's reminded of and what he's moved by is that he's transported from thinking about the physical beauty that's actually in front of him to the actual form of the beauty that exists beyond the heavens. That's why beauty is so powerful, is that it transports us to this other realm. And then of course, you start paying attention to that other realm and not to this realm.

And that's what everybody else thinks is crazy. And if I can be vulgar for a minute, and I listen to some of your podcasts and I heard some vulgarity, so I thought it was okay. But in some ways the bumper sticker here is that the beloved is supposed to be a wormhole and not a cornhole.

1:06:52 Wes: Yeah, that's very well put. Which is not to say, and I think you're making this point, but just to make it more explicit, looking at beautiful bodies, that can be one of the inspirations, that can be one of the wormholes. This isn't simply saying, oh, I'm only attuned to the beauty of a person's soul as opposed to their body. You can be attuned to the. The beauty of people's bodies and still have that remind you of the. I'm going to use the word abstract, I'm not sure that's right. But the abstract beauty that you have encountered in the other world, even if

1:07:20 Adam: you listen to the kind of language that we normally use and just take the language seriously instead of metaphorically, that beauty of that kind can actually transport you.

1:07:31 Wes: Right.

1:07:32 Adam: If you think about that, literally it can transport you from this realm to the other realm. I mean, there's a famous picture which we actually use on our website. It's called the Flammarion engraving. And maybe you've seen it, where it's a kind of country vista with the sun and the stars and there's a guy poking his head out of the cosmos, kind of looking at the machinery behind the stars. And I think this is the kind of sense that Plato and Socrates have that there are certain things kind of take us beyond the heavens to the realm of. Of true being, that we don't come into contact very often while our souls are embodied in this realm.

1:08:10 Wes: Right. Again, that can include these very. The transporting things are not necessarily in and of themselves spiritual. They can be very sensual.

1:08:20 Adam: Yeah. I mean, I think this is, you know, we're kind of back to like the. The cave in the Republic or something, that the beauty of the beloved is a shadow of true beauty. But it's by experiencing the shadow of beauty in the beloved that one can be either reminded or start seeking the absolute beauty outside the cave, as it were. Yeah.

1:08:41 Dylan: And the same thing is in the ladder of love in the Symposium. You know, it starts with the love of beautiful bodies.

1:08:46 Wes: Right. And I think you move on to beautiful souls, but they are just steps in the ladder and they're in the Phaedrus. They're different mechanisms of being transported. Let's say.

1:08:58 Dylan: I want to take seriously, while Socrates or Plato is not giving us the image of the highest form of love, is being given beauty a hand job or something like that. Right.

1:09:12 Adam: It's. You're never going to outdo the cornhole.

1:09:17 Dylan: Yeah, no, I'm not going to do.

1:09:18 Wes: Nice try.

1:09:19 Dylan: I was going for it, but so. But there is a commonality. I don't think it's a coincidence that he. It's not merely steps along the way. There's something fundamentally the same on the. I guess it would be the kind of madness it is that he's talking about that where you are, as Adam said, transported. But there's something about it that is. You're being pulled along. That's what would become common in them, that when you are pulled by something beautiful, it is something that is acting upon you as much as you are towards it. And that is one of the things that's happening even at these highest levels is that you are being spoken to by the divine.

1:10:05 Wes: Yeah.

1:10:06 Mark: We should get at what the other world. What the divine. What the Elements of the myth are here. And it starts at 2:46 a toward the end. I want to hear what somebody else's translation says, because mine starts with. It is like some naturally conjoined power of a winged team and a charioteer, which seems very awkward. So somebody have something nicer for that.

1:10:28 Dylan: On 246A, my Hackforth. Let it be likened to the union of powers and a team of winged steeds and their winged charioteer.

1:10:39 Mark: Oh, that is worse. That is so much worse. The powers and their winged steeds. Adam, what does yours say? Wes?

1:10:48 Wes: We will liken the soul to the composite nature of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. So it's not so bad, I guess.

1:10:55 Mark: They're all terrible. Adam, what you're saying.

1:10:58 Adam: No, I got the same as Dylan's, although I got a couple other. But wait, what's so terrible about it?

1:11:03 Mark: I think it's just a hard to translate Greek phrase.

1:11:05 Dylan: The problem is, Mark is. The Greek is winged horses. Right. The Greek is to poloi, ptero te. Right. Teros for wings, like pterodactyl. And poloi is just horses. So it's winged horses. That's literally what it says.

1:11:24 Mark: Actually, my objection was to the previous phrase, which is the how are they related to each other? Which mine said the naturally conjoined power of a winged team and a charioteer. And then there's a footnote that says naturally conjoined is more literally grown together.

1:11:39 Wes: The word is sumfuto.

1:11:41 Mark: Anyway, so it's probably just one of those things that sounds fine in Greek,

1:11:44 Wes: the word for nature and grow or the. You know, that footnote is a little too clever. It is naturally conjoined because nature and growth are conceptually so intertwined.

1:11:53 Adam: I think the point here is that it's a tripartite soul, and therefore that these three things, they don't have independent existence absent their participation within that tripartite soul. So if you're thinking, you know, conjoined twins or that all the pieces here are. On the one hand, they're separate, but they're ultimately part of a single thing.

1:12:13 Dylan: Yeah. So if you imagined a hydrogen atom in which, if you took the electron out or the proton out and the neutron out, you would no longer have anything.

1:12:23 Wes: Right.

1:12:23 Dylan: They didn't have any existence apart from themselves.

1:12:26 Wes: What if one of your horses breaks free?

1:12:30 Dylan: Sorry, you got to tame your wild

1:12:31 Wes: horses, because that's my problem.

1:12:33 Mark: It pulls you along with it.

1:12:35 Wes: It does. And it's such a comical. The whole account is just Amazing. Of the bad horse in his vision.

1:12:43 Dylan: Right. None of them is ever apart. There's always three of them. But one may have more strength than the other. Your bad horse might overwhelm and not be able to be tamed by the charioteer. And it's interesting because you would think that the charioteer would be simply something like yourself and you're controlling your good horse and your bad horse, but that's not exactly it. It's that all three of them form a soul all together, and the charioteer is part of it, but the white horse and the dark horse are also part of your soul. It's not as if the charioteer is your soul controlling your physical passions versus your intellectual passions. And those are separate things. Those are all one thing. Right.

1:13:27 Adam: Well, that's why I don't understand why this seems like such a problem. I mean, if you look at Freud's soul, it's a tripartite soul with the id, ego and superego. And I think it's fundamentally. I mean, the component parts are not one to one, but the notion that each one of them.

1:13:42 Wes: If you're referring to me, I wasn't saying it's a problem by saying it's comical. The story gets comical when we have the bad horse pulling them towards the lover and then the charioteer pulls up and it's pulled up onto its haunches and just all of that stuff. Which is great. Yeah.

1:13:55 Adam: And I think, you know, if you. If you do it by comparison with Freud's, for example, I mean, it's not exactly the same tripartite soul, but it's almost like you have like a good ID and a bad ID here, but then you have some kind of. Exactly. Superego.

1:14:09 Wes: Well, for Freud, it's all ID deep down. So ego and superego are just articulations

1:14:13 Mark: of id, not Plato's view.

1:14:16 Wes: No, but I'm just this whole ego, superego, idiot comparison. I think it works.

1:14:22 Adam: But in any case, you've got these two. Just think about the picture of it, that you've got these two motive forces pulling you in somewhat different directions, and there's some other part of you that's trying to negotiate or command or control those two separate impulses. And there's a good way to do this, a successful way to do this, and there's failed ways to do this.

1:14:43 Dylan: And what you just said is the part that I found most interesting. And Wes said he spent too much time on it, which was the whole reason why our souls are immortal. Is this motive force.

1:14:55 Adam: You're self moving, self moving character of our souls. Yes. I mean that goes to the very nature of the fact that what we think of as ourselves today, it's an ensouled body, but you can tell that when the soul leaves the body, you're just left with a corpse. And so that clearly wasn't you. And that thing that came into the body and then left the body is existing forever. And that's why I think, you know, in this dialogue and in the other Platonic dialogues for Socrates, it's really important to understand the place that life on earth fits within some kind of larger cosmic soul economy, as it were. Because if you don't understand the place that life on earth fits within that, you won't know how to live properly during your time here.

1:15:40 Wes: Are we going to go over the argument for the immortality of the soul?

1:15:43 Mark: I don't think we should. I think what we've just said is probably sufficient that it's the self moving thing and a self moving thing could have no beginning. That's really what it comes down to, a self moving thing. By definition, if something else moved it, that would be the start.

1:15:58 Wes: The soul is a self moving thing, which means it has to be a sort of principle of movement for the universe, a beginning of movement for the universe, which means it can't be destroyed or created. And that's where you get the immortality from. I'm not going to go over all the details, but it's an intricate and really fascinating argument actually.

1:16:18 Mark: And he says right there that that part is a proof. But then immediately after that he moves to the Chariot, right, Which is a metaphor, which is an image, you know,

1:16:28 Wes: and as Adam pointed out, it's just like, it's such a different tone. That's why I sort of got waylaid in the proof of the soul. It's more, it's like, oh, here's an interesting. It's as if Aristotle or Kant is writing now.

1:16:38 Adam: It's a philosopher's honey pot. You got stuck in the trap because it turns out that it's just another piece of rhetoric.

1:16:44 Wes: Exactly. Well, it's not just rhetoric.

1:16:47 Adam: Well, yes, right, but it's a specimen of rhetoric.

1:16:49 Wes: Yes, but it's not just rhetoric.

1:16:50 Mark: This is what I want to know.

1:16:51 Wes: If it's not just rhetoric, it would be that sort of rhetoric.

1:16:53 Adam: Touche, touche.

1:16:54 Mark: Do we want to think that Plato actually believes or is saying that Socrates actually believed in reincarnation? Say like this is part of. If you're saying the soul is immortal, but yet obviously the Body's not immortal. Then what is the soul doing the rest of the time? Either it's sitting up in Platonic heaven, comes down once and then goes back to Platonic heaven. That's kind of what I assumed that his view was. But in this dialogue, only as part of this picture of the chariot that is whizzing around the heavens and occasionally will be dragged down to Earth and then you'll have an earthly life, but then it'll get back up there and maybe it'll follow the gods and see the forms, see the wonderful realm of the forms, and then maybe it'll go back down again and it does this rotation thousands of times.

And the going back down to Earth, you know, so gives a very. Samsara. Gives a Vedic take on reincarnation. You know, if you've lived the life of a philosopher, then you might ascend. You'll get out of the cycle more quickly. It sounds right out of Buddhism here.

1:17:49 Adam: Not might, will.

1:17:50 Mark: Well, yeah, in only, what, 5,000 rotations. Whereas will take. Or only 50,000. The others would take many thousand, 10,000.

1:17:59 Dylan: He's very specific, Mark. But, Mark, I think the question of which of these things did Socrates or Plato actually believe and did they actually believe these myths misses the point of them being myths. I don't think the status of whether they were true exactly or not is the point of them. Just like at the beginning of this dialogue, going down too deep and asking, well, where did the griffin and where did the chimera come from? And then where did their ancestors come from? That will take you on forever and you'll never get an answer. So you have to hold the myths on their own terms.

1:18:34 Mark: I guess the question is just where does myth start and stop here? That we had the argument for the immortality of the soul. Clearly not myth. Then this thing about the chariot going round and round, well, it's a myth, but it's clearly just a metaphor. Like, he really does have a tripartite picture of the soul. And this is one way of putting it. And so saying that's a myth, don't ask whether it's true or not, is kind of. You don't say that about a metaphor.

1:18:57 Wes: Yeah, it's a mythological way of explaining rationalism. Right. This idea that to be in touch with the truth of things, we have to have been set up beforehand a priori with these, what he's calling recollections, but with the cognitive apparatus that puts us in touch with the truth. You can think of it as a myth of us having seen beauty in this divine realm, or you can think of a. As the sense in which we are. That it's in our nature to respond to the beautiful in this way. In other words, that when we respond to the beauty of a particular thing or person, whether it's physical or psychological or whatever, it means more than that particular engagement. It means more than that particular response. It is also a response to beauty in general. That's the important point here.

1:19:44 Adam: I want to push back a little bit here because I think that on the one hand, this very dialogue, the Phaedrus, tells us that scientific rhetoric or rhetoric done properly, one of its features is that it presents a likeness of the truth. It doesn't present the truth itself, but it presents a likeness to the truth. And, you know, this is not the only place where Socrates talks about this soul economy. And there's a little bit in the Phaedo, for example. And, you know, Socrates, I think at the end of the day is quite clear that he says, I don't know the truth of this.

I mean, only God knows, and I don't know. But I have to believe based on all of this reading, that Plato, and therefore Plato, Socrates, take the essential element of this as true, which is that the conduct of our life in this world is going to have consequences beyond this world. And that that's why in Plato's dialogues, philosophy is not a system of thought, it's a way of life. And that's why it's important for people to be recruited. Or if you want to think about it in religious terms, in this dialogue itself, Phaedrus is converted, I think, into the philosophical life.

And essentially, again, if I continue with the religious language, it literally is the salvation of his soul because he'll be able to conduct his life in this realm properly, which will first of all prevent him from coming back as an ox or a dog or something in a future life.

1:21:08 Wes: His own argument is that to create likenesses to the truth, we have to know the truth in some sense. That's the argument at the end of the dialogue. And, you know, when we say likeness to truth, I mean, I think we agree there. It's just this is a metaphor. And the problem with metaphors is that it's not quite clear how far you can extend the metaphor, what exactly the truth it's trying to convey. So, for instance, you might think of this idea that, you know, your actions in this life have consequences beyond. And sort of the reincarnation aspect of this, you might take that as the import of the myth or it's not as relevant.

1:21:40 Dylan: When I was listening to you, Adam, I thought that you could easily just say that how we act and what we do affects our souls.

1:21:49 Wes: Right? Exactly.

1:21:51 Dylan: And whether or not that affects our immortal souls and our life in the hereafter, that's another piece of it. And that's certainly part of the myth, and maybe that's part of the rhetoric as well. Maybe it's part of its persuasiveness. But at the very least, I can see through this one and through the criticism of bad poetry and bad rhetoric that all of it comes down to those kinds of things are bad for your soul. They're bad for the most important part of what you are. Now, it's not clear to me how it cashes out on whether or not the soul is, quote, unquote, actually immortal or not.

It seems to me that at the very least you have in the myths that it's perfectly right to consider them as immortal and treat them that way. You know, I don't know if there's even a funny kind of Pascal's Wager going on in the persuasiveness of it, but the fact that those things affect your soul and that therefore, because they do, they matter, and that it matters that they are done rightly, that seems to be the core of it.

1:22:53 Wes: I mean, the immortality of the soul is important to the argument just because it's important to the concept of recollection. That's its function. It's a mythological explanation of how we might have these sorts of recollections, so that when we have a particular encounter with beauty in this world, it means something transcendent. It means something more than simply this particular encounter with beauty, with beauty in this world. And if you want to interpret that literally in terms of the heavens and afterlife and things like that, I think that's one way to go. But it can also mean something much less religious, much less elaborate. It can really just point to the same sorts of considerations that other rationalist philosophers historically pointed to.

1:23:31 Adam: Right? But I think that now it gets back to, you know, what the purpose of the exercise that we're engaged in is. If the goal is to understand this particular text or one of the other Platonic dialogues, then it may be that what's meant in this text is different than what's meant in some other rationalist philosophy. Because I take it that in the Phaedrus and in the other Platonic dialogues, one of the key issues is what's the dog and what's the Tail for the multitude, for the masses. Where we live today is the dog, and maybe there's some hereafter, and if there is, it's the tail, and it doesn't really matter. But for Socrates and for Plato, where we live today is the tail, and that the dog is someplace else. And it's the philosopher who knows that and spends his time attending to the dog and not the tail. And that's why the people down here think he's crazy.

1:24:19 Mark: So this is the ambiguity involved with the, you know, philosophy is preparation for death. Is it a Christian interpretation, literally preparation for the afterlife, or is it on an existentialist interpretation?

1:24:30 Wes: Exactly, preparation for death.

1:24:33 Mark: Living authentically is being unto death. And so let's not decide the matter here. I can very much see that Nietzsche, being a classical scholar and very steeped in Plato, like the fact that he wrote his eternal recurrence myth the way that he did. It's exactly the same take on myth that at least one could reasonably derive from this. So it's kind of even the wrong question maybe to ask, did Nietzsche literally believe that that. Is that a metaphysical princ principle of his or not? I think he was purposely vague about it in a way that it's not merely using it as a myth, because then the answer would definitely be no. Of course, Nietzsche didn't actually believe that. It's just a point to illustrate that you should live authentically.

1:25:12 Wes: Well, there's three levels, because there's a metaphysical principle, and then there's the myth taken literally as true, and then there's the illustration of some sort of moral directive. So Nietzsche could have thought that eternal recurrence was a metaphysical principle without believing it was literally true.

1:25:28 Mark: That's a little too subtle for me. Is there a corresponding point in Plato?

1:25:32 Wes: Well, you can believe that recollection is a metaphysical principle without believing that it's literally true.

1:25:37 Mark: There you go.

1:25:38 Wes: Kant is describing a form of recollection, the sense in which cognitive capacities, a priori, inject all this stuff into our experience of the world. The recollection gets at the a priori element of things. That's a metaphysical principle, although Kant would call it a critical principle. But if you describe it as recollection, I don't think it's to be taken literally. Anyway, I think, yeah, we got the ambiguity here and dealing with mythology.

1:26:03 Adam: But before we pass on from the speech, just want to point out that I think that all of the same issues apply to the philosophical treatise component, which is that the argument here is that the philosophical Treatise is Also a piece of rhetoric, and therefore also at best, a likeness to the truth and not the truth itself. That the philosophical treatise and the myth are two different ways of doing the same thing. And one may be more or less successful. But we shouldn't mistake the treatise part for truth in this particular dialogue.

1:26:33 Wes: I think that's a really good point. And it gets at the sense in which language never fully escapes metaphor. This is why there's such a big problem with when to say literally and when not to say it. And there are actually border cases where it's unclear because language is so inherently and heavily metaphorical. So even if I'm writing like Aristotle, there are metaphorical elements to that. They're just not as obvious. So if I enhance that, if I put the metaphor on steroids and make it obvious. Yeah, I think arguably you've done a service to the reader in that sense. They can't fall into the confusion that there's nothing non literal in the text they're engaged with.

1:27:10 Mark: So are there any other elements? I don't want us to dwell on too much about what the Chariot is doing as it goes around following the gods? I guess the one literal point about this that I wanted to get, that was kind of raised earlier, was what explains who we find beautiful. And it's not subjective. It's not just anybody every.

1:27:30 Adam: It's whatever you just whatever you think.

1:27:31 Mark: Still, different people have different types. And he gives one possible explanation here in the myth, which is that who is your chariot following around the heavens? Are you following around Zeus? Are you following around Ares? Are you following around Hera? And each of these will kind of give you different character type at least that you are ultimately attracted to, and that once you locate the beloved and love them in that way. I love you for your wisdom because I was a follower of Zeus before I was born.

1:27:58 Wes: Since we've already mentioned Freud, when I was reading that, I wrote down in my notes, transference. So this is sort of like the Platonic version of transference, which, for Freud is this idea that all your love relations, all your love objects, who you find to be a love object depends upon something that happened in the past. Recollection is once again the paradigm. Transference is just a different way of saying that. So in the case of Freud, it could be your parents, for instance. You know, who you find attractive could be modeled in some sense on one parent or the other or other people in your lives. Here it's on the gods that becomes really important as this section goes on.

1:28:32 Mark: Well, I guess so the way that it becomes important, if we're ultimately getting at why does love benefit the beloved? It's because if you transfer the qualities of Apollo, say, onto your beloved, then what you're really doing is you end up encouraging the beloved to be more like Apollo, to have those particular virtues, to be virtuous. I mean, they're all gods, they're all virtuous.

1:28:58 Wes: Yeah, the dynamic is really interesting here because at first it's because they are like there's some seed of them. You know, there's something rudimentary that is like Apollo, that's why you love them. But then you want to make them even more like Apollo. So you do that work and that's how you improve them.

1:29:13 Adam: 253C. This is in the case of Hera, but at the end of that sentence it says his every act is aimed at bringing the beloved to be every whit like unto himself and unto the God of their worship. So what you've got here essentially is kind of a master apprentice relationship, and that the lover as the master and the beloved as an apprentice, that the good that the master does the apprentice is helping the apprentice become a master, and both of them become more like the God of which they're a type or associated with. And this is the contrast to Lysias speech and Socrates first speech is that.

Now, what's being purportedly demonstrated here is that the interests of the lover and the beloved are not antagonistic, they're not mutually exclusive, that they actually have conjoined interests. And that's what makes the union beneficial to both of them, but in particular makes it beneficial to the beloved.

1:30:05 Mark: So what if you want to make your beloved more like Hades because Hades is one of them?

1:30:09 Wes: Well, there is talk of Ares. Right. So let me just read this because it sounded like murder suicide. So, yeah, so that's 252C. So he who's a follower of Zeus when seized by love, can bear a heavier burden of the winged God. But those who are servants of Ares and followed in this train when they have been seized by love and think that they have been been wronged in any way by the beloved, become murderous and are ready to sacrifice themselves and the beloved. So that's an unsavory model.

1:30:39 Mark: So some gods are better than others to follow, it sounds like.

1:30:41 Adam: Well, yeah, it's clear that Zeus is the highest of the gods. I mean, this is at 252e. But the followers of Zeus seek a beloved. Who is Zeus like in soul? Wherefore they look for one who is by nature disposed to the love of wisdom and the leading of men. And I take it that's the highest that there is.

1:31:00 Mark: And then where was the part, Wes, that you were trying to quote before, of when he brings the imagery of the horses back? Pretty much. I want to get at why does love constitute a harmonious relation between these three parts?

1:31:11 Wes: I think it's like 253E that that starts.

1:31:15 Mark: So then, when the charioteer, seeing the beloved's eye, or literally the erotic eye, heating his whole soul through with the sensation, begins to be filled with the goads of tickling and yearning, that one of the horses who is obedient to the charioteer, then, as always forcibly constrained by a sense of shame, holds himself back from rushing upon the beloved. The other one no longer turns in heed either to the charioteer's goads or whip, but leaps and is carried along by force and presenting all possible troubles to its yoke. Mate and charioteer compels them to go toward the boyfriend and to make mention of the delight of sexual gratification. What do your translations say for the. Make mention of the delights of sexual gratifications.

1:31:57 Dylan: Delights of love's commerce.

1:31:59 Mark: There you go. I know the Jowett did not actually have the word sexual in it.

1:32:03 Wes: Propose the joys of love.

1:32:06 Mark: These two in the beginning, strive against it with irritation on the grounds that they are being compelled to terrible and unlawful things. But at last, when there is no end to the evil, they are led to go on giving way and agreeing to do what is bidden. And they come before him and see the boyfriend's face flashing like lightning. And as the charioteer sees, his memory is carried toward the nature of beauty and sees it once more together with moderation, standing on a chaste pedestal. And upon seeing he is afraid and feeling awe, recoils on his back, and at the same time is compelled to pull the reins back so vehemently that both horses sit down on their haunches, the one willingly, though not striving against it, the wanton one very unwillingly, as the two withdraw farther off, the one soaks the whole soul with sweat from shame and amazement, the other ceasing from the pain that it had from the bit and fall, barely catching its breath, reviles them in anger, badmouthing the charioteer and its yoke, made in many ways on the grounds that through cowardice and unmanliness they quit the rank in agreement.

1:32:59 Wes: Yeah, I love that.

1:33:01 Mark: And in compelling them against their wish to go forward Again it barely yields to their begging to put it off until later. And when the agreed upon time comes, of which the two pretend to be unmindful by reminding, constraining, naying, pulling, it compels them again to approach the boyfriend for the purpose of the same speeches. And when they are nearby, it stoops down, stretches out its tail and champs at the bit, and so pulls with shamelessness. The charioteer, however, suffering the same experience, still more recoiling as if from the starting gate, drawing the bit still more with force back out of the wanton horse's teeth, bloodies the evil speaking tongue and jaws, and causing its upper legs and haunches to rest upon the earth, gives them over to pains.

And when by suffering the same thing, many times the knavish one ceases from wantonness, having been humbled at last, it follows the charioteer's forethought, and whenever it sees the beautiful one, it is utterly destroyed by fear. So that at last happens that the lover's soul follows the boyfriend, feeling a sense of shame and dread.

1:33:56 Wes: Yeah. So what I think is important here is we have a force of attraction, but we need a force of repulsion, essentially. And that force will be reverence. And the reason why that's important is because you need more than the lover simply consuming the beloved for its gratification in the way the first speech is described. So that's what introducing this otherworldly reverence does. It balances out the desire side of things. Because if it is all just lust or something like that, then the lover certainly is not good for the beloved. They simply want to consume them. But you get away from mere consumption with the reverence part, pull it, then that eventually brings that bad horse to heel.

1:34:36 Adam: That was a very nice demonstration of philosophical drama, because the tone of voice in which you read that whole thing really put a very particular spin on the passage. And I think if you read the same passage with a different tone of voice, it would lead you to something else. And I think Plato and Socrates are being serious about this, whether you or I want to follow them down there. But that there's something about this, and that this final paragraph at254e is about the lover ultimately being able to discipline his soul. And now we're back to what's the purpose of life on earth and what's the purpose of. Of love? That apparently these are opportunities for us to cultivate better souls than we started with. And it's not so much that the reverence or the awe is a repulsive force.

1:35:22 Wes: I don't think it is a repulsive force in the sense that he pulls back. The charity heir pulls back.

1:35:27 Adam: Yes, but that's the soul itself attempting to discipline itself.

1:35:31 Wes: Right, that's the repulsive force. If he weren't disciplining himself, he would simply move towards the love object.

1:35:37 Adam: Yeah, but it's not like the love object itself has a repulsive force outward, right?

1:35:41 Wes: No, I wasn't trying to say that it was repelling.

1:35:44 Adam: Right, you're right, but so the point here, I think, is that love provides the opportunity for souls to become better souls. And both the lover's soul becomes better because he's forced to tame himself and the beloved soul becomes better because he's apprenticed to a master. I think the dramatic element of this is at the very end of the dialogue at 279B when they're just about to quit and go away, Phaedrus says, now let us be going. It has become less oppressively hot. This whole thing's been happening during the midday. And I take it that Socrates is smitten with Phaedrus in this way, but is able to discipline his own soul in a way until the heat passes, as it were, and then they can go.

1:36:32 Wes: We haven't really said how the beloved can be improved from this. This whole idea of discipline and lover. We get that sense of improvement, but there's a lot more detail on how it is that this whole scenario can

1:36:42 Mark: improve the beloved before we get away from this image. I mean, both of you were saying what the benefit of having the repulsive force or having the superego or whatever is. But the wrinkle here is that if you didn't have the desire in the first place, if you didn't have the bad horse, you would never initiate the love relation in the first place. There has to be sort of a pre disciplined ID or whatever that is out of control to get things started. Otherwise shame would just make it so that we wouldn't have this opportunity to better our souls.

So that is ultimately the wrinkle in the balance between the tripartite soul. It's not just that the rational part of the soul, which I guess is the charioteer and the spirited part of the soul, the honorable warrior part of the soul, which is the good horse. It's not just that reason needs to be in charge and use the spirited part of the soul to control desire. The third part of the soul, if we were saying this maps exactly onto the way he did in the Republic, which is not entirely Clear to me. But in any case, it's not just that the bad horse is desire that must be controlled.

It's that there is a function for desire, a positive function, which we didn't see in the Republic as clearly anyway.

1:37:51 Wes: We need to have both the moving toward and the moving away. It's all moving away. There's no relationship. But if it's all moving toward, you destroy the object. So we need an in between here. We need to transfer an actual relationship with another person, which is what this push and pull allows.

1:38:07 Adam: Or that in a certain sense, life in this world, or the love object as we're calling it, it makes life here kind of like a soul gymnasium where we have to go and work out in order to improve our soul fitness. And that will actually allow our soul to come to a better end after it leaves this realm. This idea of there being a gymnasium for the soul and that you can have a flabby soul or a six pack soul. And it's a metaphor, but it's a likeness to truth. And that philosophy is what helps us get our soul in the peak of fitness for our own well being.

1:38:43 Wes: We got how it can be improving for the lover, but how it's improving for the beloved is. Different story, actually.

1:38:50 Adam: Yes.

1:38:50 Mark: Well, I think we've gotten it out. At least what I had said before is that we're trying to make the beloved into more of the image of the God that we first saw in them. So we're trying to improve them. Was there more to the story than that?

1:39:04 Wes: It's along the same lines. But the next step in this account, he revisits that. So eventually the lover is admitted to the society of the beloved.

1:39:13 Adam: Right.

1:39:13 Wes: The beloved gives in and lets them hang out. And there's an intimacy there that kind of makes familial and friendly relations pale in comparison. And then there's this close proximity. And then he uses this metaphor of the sort of fountain of desire overflowing from the lover onto the beloved. Another metaphor here is that the stream of beauty, sort of the beauty that's emanating from the beloved, bounces back onto the beautiful one. It's like they're seeing themselves in a mirror. And so their feathers sort of get stirred as well. So they get filled with love. So in other words, the loving of the beloved creates love in them. And they get the same benefits from being filled with that yearning. That's part of the story. It goes on from there.

1:39:57 Dylan: Being properly loved turns a beloved into a lover.

1:40:00 Mark: Was it part of the mirror Thing is that people can't see their own beauty. It's when somebody else sees the beauty in you, and then you see yourself through their eyes, then you see that you're beautiful.

1:40:11 Dylan: Well, no.

1:40:11 Wes: And you're not. I don't think you're thinking you're beautiful. You're thinking the other person is beautiful, even though the other person is sort of reflecting you.

1:40:18 Mark: I don't know. This is just something I got from one of the iTunes lectures that I watched about this that was raising a sort of Hegelian point, making a big deal out of this mirror aspect.

1:40:27 Dylan: I thought it was a pretty Bruno Mars point.

1:40:29 Wes: This is what Freud would call a narcissistic transference. So the love of the other is also the love of the self. But I think what the beloved is now feeling love is now a lover towards the lover. I mean, I think that's an important aspect of this.

1:40:41 Adam: With the same need to discipline himself.

1:40:43 Wes: Right.

1:40:44 Mark: That same iTunes lecture that I was watching, it actually brought in this. Yes, that does sound narcissistic. And the transference part. So it's like the lover becomes a fantasist. I don't actually love you. I love the God I see in you. The God I am projecting upon you and trying to make you into. I don't love you the way you are. I'm just trying to change you. There's something empty about that. And then likewise, if you go with that interpretation, that what the beloved is getting out of it is this narcissistic sense of their own beauty, that that's part of it, that I am lovable. I am. Then isn't there something kind of messed up about.

1:41:20 Wes: See, I disagree with that interpretation, at least as the primary interpretation the Levitt is getting out of it is they become a lover as well, not just of themselves, but the other person.

1:41:28 Adam: Well, and at 256B, or just above the B, this is where I think it becomes somewhat symmetrical in my translation. It says, and so if the victory be won by the higher elements of mind, guiding them, both of them, into the ordered rule of the philosophical life, their days on earth will be blessed with happiness and concord. For the power of evil in the soul has been subjected and the power of goodness liberated. They have won self mastery and inward peace. And when life is over with burden shed and wings recovered, they stand victorious in the first of the three rounds in that truly Olympic struggle. Nor can any nobler prize be secured, whether by the wisdom that is of man or by the madness that is of God.

1:42:20 Mark: So that's the part that I was saying that ultimately no sex.

1:42:23 Wes: Let me read to you just from above that at 2:56 a.

1:42:27 Mark: That's the best kind.

1:42:28 Dylan: Yes, yes.

1:42:29 Wes: So now they lie together. The unruly horse of the lover has something to say to the charioteer and demands a little enjoyment in return for his many troubles. And the unruly horse of the beloved says nothing but teeming with passion and confused emotions, he embraces and kisses his lover, caressing him as his best friend. So there's some physical intimacy here, even though it's friendly. And when they lie together, he would not refuse his lover any favor if he asked it. But the other horse and charioteer oppose all this with modesty and reason. And I didn't see this opposition as overcoming like it sounds to me like the beloved actually gives in to some extent to the advances, despite the sort of charioteer and the other horse saying, we shouldn't be doing this, but okay,

1:43:14 Dylan: but apropos of the beloved becoming a lover. And I think you would end up having the lover becoming a beloved as this goes along. There's a kind of symbiotic symmetry in there, right?

1:43:29 Adam: Yeah, I think so. And that they fly up together to a higher existence.

1:43:33 Mark: So that's going to happen whether or not they successfully resist the sexual urge and enter into a well arranged life and philosophy. That's going to be the best possible way. But love is beneficial even if you don't achieve that awesome platonic love, even if you give in and there's sex involved, as long as the sex is not the driving force behind the relationship and the only thing good about it.

1:43:58 Dylan: Yeah, I guess there's just so much patently erotic and sexually charged language. I just don't see how it's exclusive of it being erotic life properly understood.

1:44:10 Wes: Yeah. In other words, it sounds like there actually can be something platonic to a love relationship. Even if there actually is also sexual intimacy, one doesn't preclude the other. It can be challenging, I think, to maintain the platonic part.

1:44:24 Dylan: It wouldn't be with Alcibiades. Right.

1:44:28 Mark: All right. Well, we read the quotes, we can see how one could have either interpretation and how Christians could run with this and say, oh yes, that's exactly right. No sex for Jesus, no sex for the saints, because that's the best way. You can still be virtuous and give in. Most of us, that's what'll happen. But here's the ideal.

1:44:46 Dylan: I guess this is the part that I'm reacting against. Maybe there's this whole history of non erotic erotic devotion. But it's just when I read Platonic dialogues, it's just so clear that there's just a straight line from our erotic passions to philosophy properly understood in Plato. It's just a straight line.

1:45:08 Adam: Yes, Hallelujah, yes. But I think it's back to the thing about the shadows and the cave and this is the whole thing about the Symposium that the visible is where we start and it's where most people end. But for the philosopher, the visible is where we start and it's where we get an inkling of something more than the visible. And then once we get that inkling of something more than the visible, we turn to that thing. And don't be so preoccupied with the visible. You know, the visible is the on ramp to reality.

1:45:37 Wes: And by contrast. So if you look at 256e, he describes what you get from the non lover. So these blessings so great and so divine, the friendship of the lover will confer upon you. So he starts talking about the friendship of the lover. That's the Platonic part alongside with the erotic part. Or actually that's not a good way of putting it. You know, the friend plus lover aspect of things which we've been describing. So the friendship of the lover will confer upon you, dear boy, but the affection of the non lover, which is alloyed with mortal prudence and follows mortal and parsimonious rules of conduct, will beget in the beloved soul the narrowness which the common folk praise as virtue.

It will cause the soul to be a wonder upon the earth for 9,000 years and a fool below the earth at last. So this common idea of virtue as simply not giving in to desire, repressing at all costs, that's not what's going on here. That's why I like the, this idea of the both the push and the pull being necessary. It's not simply this exclusion of lust or physical desire. That's. I don't think that's what's going on here.

1:46:42 Mark: Well, it wouldn't be repressing, it would be sublimating, right?

1:46:44 Dylan: Sure.

1:46:45 Mark: If you say that platonic love ultimately doesn't have sex in it and that's the best kind. It's not because there's no erotic attraction. No, definitely there's erotic attraction and that is energizing. But as the guy in Dr. Strangelove says, I don't want to drain my vital essence on the.

1:47:03 Wes: But the reason why I read that passage is just because the non lover thing is what I think people typically think of as platonic love, right? That's the image they have and that's the thing he's rejecting.

1:47:13 Mark: Although the funny thing, and I don't know that this is made clear, but one of the lectures that I was reading when this whole thing at the beginning with Lysias talking about the lover and the non lover, again, that sounds like the one who wants to have sex with you and the one who doesn't. That's not what it means. It's the one who actually loves you and wants to have sex with you because of that, and the one who doesn't love you but still wants to have sex with you as a friend. So that's what's being compared here. Whose favors are you going to accept? In other words, who are you going to have hook up with somebody who actually is crazy about you or somebody that's just friends with benefits?

1:47:44 Wes: I wish you'd clarified that. When I said let's define what favors mean at the very beginning, I thought, I thought that was.

1:47:52 Mark: Well, I think this is a pretty good place to get close to wrapping up. I think, you know, there's a lot more of the dialogue left about rhetoric, but we've been pretty good about touching on the points relevant to rhetoric as we've been going through the speeches about love. But I'm sure some of you have particular notes, things standing out, underlined that you want to spell them out. So here's your opportunity.

1:48:14 Dylan: We got through the second speech and there's the whole third of the dialogue left that we could easily spend a whole bunch more time on.

1:48:22 Mark: I just didn't find that part that interesting. I mean, we've got. Do these rhetoricians treat rhetoric as a science or not? If they don't have a definition of rhetoric, if they don't have a definition of the soul, if they don't have an understanding of the soul and they're not using a knowledge of truth to drive the rhetoric, then it's not an art at all. It's just a bunch of correlations they've come with, oh, if I put forth a swooning metaphor here, then people will swoon at that. You know, they have a lot of sort of empirical rules, but it doesn't amount to being an artist. And this is what we just already discussed in the Gorgias episode ad nauseum. What is in here over and above what was in the Gorgias?

1:48:59 Dylan: But what if no one's listened to the Gorgias?

1:49:02 Mark: Then they can go listen to that, right? After this one, the one last point, which we already said at the beginning about writing versus speech, I think, well,

1:49:10 Wes: there's so much good stuff in this writing versus speech section.

1:49:14 Mark: In just summarizing it. I already gave it. You're saying there's so much stuff in that. It seems like it's a very short.

1:49:20 Wes: I don't think it'll take much time. But we do just want to touch on this whole art of writing thing, since it's part of what the Phaedrus is famous for.

1:49:27 Adam: Sure. Personally, I think the second part is where most of the meat of the dialogue is at the top level. And I think this goes into why the two halves of the dialogue exist together. It's not a random choice. The part about love is about the human soul and about. We've just talked about this, disciplining your soul and getting into the philosophical life. And this account of scientific rhetoric is a kind of. I mean, literally soul therapy, psychotherapy. It's really how you can bring people into the philosophical life. I think the episode with Phaedrus himself is an instantiation of that. That Phaedrus in this dialogue is brought to the philosophical life through the employment of scientific rhetoric. And therefore the second half is, well, okay, what is scientific rhetoric and how is it done and what are its limitations? And so on.

1:50:17 Mark: Very good. Sum up. Any particular points, Dylan or Wes or Adam that you feel like we need to.

1:50:23 Wes: Just to say what I think about the writing section. I mean. So he starts off with a myth about how sort of the invention of writing was supposed to improve memory. And in fact, it turns out to be the opposite. It leads to forgetfulness because it discourages people from actually using their own memories. When you can actually write down. Yeah, exactly.

1:50:41 Adam: You can't do arithmetic anymore.

1:50:43 Wes: Google. So this is one God talking to another. You have invented an elixir, not of memory, but of reminding. And you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and seem to know many things. So it's one thing to write for someone who already knows something and can be reminded of it. But writing per se isn't a way to actually impart knowledge. It can remind those who know, but it can't give knowledge to people that can only come through engaged discourse, where words can actually be questioned and where the word has a sort of living presence. So here's another quote. 276d.

1:51:22 Adam: He will sow his seed in literary gardens.

1:51:25 Wes: Yeah, go ahead and read what you think is the Good part of it.

1:51:27 Adam: I could just preface this by saying that I think at the highest level here, one of the things that's being done is that there's kind of a speck of the ways in which speech can be used scientifically. And if we had a whiteboard, I'd kind of put it up on the board. But on the one hand, there's what you could call oral dialectic. Now, dialectic only comes in oral form, but let's just do it for clarity and that this is true living speech, and it's the give and take between two souls in pursuit of the truth. It turns out that there's also something that you could call oral rhetoric, properly understood.

That's what Socrates did in his couple of speeches in the first part, that these are kind of set speeches, so they're not dialectic, but on the other hand, they're not written down, so it's oral rhetoric. And then on the other hand, you have written rhetoric like what Lysias had done or other people have done, which Socrates calls dead speech. So you have a kind of a continuum here between oral dialectic, on the one hand, which is living speech, and written rhetoric, which is dead speech. And then it's kind of like oral rhetoric, which is in between the two.

It's not quite fully alive, it's not quite fully dead, but at least it could provide kind of like a gateway to oral dialectic. And so when you look at the passage that Wes was talking about at 2:76d, talking about somebody who's writing, or actually we start just a little bit above that, Socrates says at the end of C, it won't be with serious intent that he writes them in water or that black fluid we call ink, using his pen to sew words that can't either speak in their own defense or present the truth adequately. Phaedrus says it certainly isn't likely.

Socrates says, no, it is not. He will sow his seed in literary gardens, I take it, and write when he does write, by way of a pastime, collecting a store of refreshment both for his own memory against the day when age, oblivious, comes, and for all such as tread in his footsteps. And he will take pleasure in watching the tender plants grow up. And when other men resort to other pastimes, regaling themselves with drinking parties and such like, he will doubtless prefer to indulge in the recreation I refer to, Phaedrus says, and what an excellent one it is, Socrates.

How far superior to the other sort is the recreation that A man finds in words when he discourses about justice and other topics you speak of. And Socrates says, yes, indeed, dear Phaedrus. But far more excellent, I think, is the serious treatment of them which employs the art of dialectics. The dialectician selects a soul of the right type, and in it he plants and sows his words founded on knowledge, words which can defend both themselves and him who planted them. Words which, instead of remaining barren, contain a seed whence new words grow up in new characters, whereby the seed is vouchsafed immortality and its possessor the fullest measure of blessedness that man can attain unto.

And I take it that these last two paragraphs of Socrates are part of the punchline. That writing, even serious philosophical style writing, is ultimately philosophical masturbation. That it can only be done for the pleasure of the person who's doing it, and it has no effect otherwise. But that dialectic is true philosophical intercourse. And it's philosophical intercourse in which the lover begets upon the beloved by impregnating the beloved with the seed of knowledge. And that seed of knowledge takes root in the beloved. And then the beloved is impregnated, is pregnant, and becomes knowledgeable or wise.

And that is the greatest boon that a lover can impart on a beloved. Now, you can see the whole sexual metaphor here. I mean, I think it's really casting. Begetting knowledge, the lover begetting knowledge through philosophical intercourse with the beloved.

1:55:41 Wes: It's my favorite type of intercourse.

1:55:43 Adam: According to this dialogue, it's the only one worth having.

1:55:46 Wes: Sometimes it's the only kind you get.

1:55:52 Adam: You think you could set up like a Tinder service or something for philosophical intercourse?

1:55:57 Wes: I try to weave philosophical intercourse into my actual erotic philosophical.

1:56:03 Mark: How's that working out for you? People will listen to a lot of shit come out of your mouth when the ire is hot, but when the desire dies down, then they're like, ah, I don't want to talk about this with you anymore. Can we respond in defense of writing briefly? I think he's pointing out an important pedagogical issue. You can't just learn from writing. But keeping that in mind, I think that philosophers are correctly responding to this when instead of, say, like the guy who wrote Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I only need to write one book.

Oh, no. I'll write a second book, you know, 15 years later, and then I'm done. I don't need to explain myself any further. Fuck you. Just figure it out. That is the wrong way. Whereas your typical professional philosopher, who Rewrites the same goddamn thing in slightly different ways 50 times and accepts, explores different avenues and is kind of responding to everybody else in the field. That actually overcomes to some extent the problem with dead speech, because you get a lot of dead speech and it adds up to a live.

1:57:12 Wes: So at St. John's of course, we value this idea of. Instead of lectures, which often are just much like reading from.

1:57:19 Adam: They're set speeches, something that's already written.

1:57:21 Wes: But yeah, set speeches. But you know that we actually have these conversations and that. That you are active when you read something. You're not just a passive recipient of the words. You are active with regard to them. And you can take that with you outside of the classroom, outside of actual discussions. So you can. The number of times I've simply read a passage, a difficult philosophical passage, and then walked around and really thought about it and done something new with it, developed my own thoughts according to it, tried to rethink it, as in go through the process of thinking that might have led to the particular thing that was written.

Or as I do with these podcasts, I write summaries of everything I read. It illustrates to me how little I actually understand of what I've read. You can have the illusion that you've actually. Oh, yeah, I get it. I understand it. If you just read it. Well, try summarizing it, try rewriting it in your own words, and you'll have a whole different perspective on it. So there are ways to be engaged with the text that are active, that don't involve conversation. That's the one thing I would say.

1:58:24 Mark: And that don't involve a superior imparting wisdom to you in a dialectical way, like this particular model of the older, wiser lover influencing the beloved. That is far from the only way to effectively.

1:58:40 Wes: And you can criticize dialectic as involving a certain amount of passivity on the recipient. I mean, I think Phaedrus is a little more active than other interlocutors in Platonic dialogues, but for the most part, he's passive to the point where when I was doing my summary, now I don't pause to talk about what Phaedrus said. Everything is in the voice of Socrates and might as well be.

1:59:00 Dylan: Yeah, that is one thing that seems to be common in the dialogues is the characters who seem to be most favored also seem to be very passive. And the ones who are not particularly favored seem to be the ones that are the most active. I'm thinking of, like Thrasymachus in the first book of The Republic. He's clearly not favored, unlike Glaucon and Adeimantus, but he's the one who actually presents arguments, engaging with Socrates, whereas Glaucon and Adeimantus, you know, they ask one or two questions. Is it really the case that the just man who no one recognizes as being, just really leads a better life?

How is that possible? But those are like sort of transitory questions that allow for Socrates to continue on with what he's doing, as opposed to what someone like Thrasymachus is doing, which is actually engaging him and arguing with him. And I think you see a similar thing with Phaedrus here. Phaedrus is a vehicle for us to hear what Socrates is saying.

2:00:04 Wes: Yeah. And it's never been clear to me that what goes on in these dialogues is actually dialectic.

2:00:10 Dylan: The closest one would be something like Meno, the conversation with the slave boy in Meno.

2:00:15 Wes: Yeah. But I'm not even sure that Plato is actually trying to show us dialectic with the dialogues, with their form.

2:00:22 Dylan: Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting question. It seems on the surface of it that one of the reasons he would pick doing dialogues, rather than simply writing speeches or something like a treatise, would be to come up with some way to embody the dialectic or at least the conversational aspect of a Socratic encounter. And that it seems like at least that that's the obvious reason he would do it, and it has to be at least that. Right.

2:00:51 Wes: What I'm suggesting. Yeah. Is that he may well be doing that, but that it's not the quality of the back and forth between the dramatis personnel that actually conveys the dialectic. I think there may be something else.

2:01:05 Adam: Well, I mean, if you're saying that in the dialogue itself that, you know, Socrates kind of talks the dialectic talk, but is not depicted as really walking the dialectic walk. Fully. That may be the case, but I think if you take this passage seriously, at least that, you know, as you were saying earlier, that it's affirming the necessity of agency on the part of a learner, on the part of a beloved. So this whole idea, whether you do Socratic method, like at St. John's or. Or some other place, but this idea that even if it's not depicted in its full glory in the dialogue, and this is what's wrong with set speeches, whether they're oral or ultimately written, is that the beloved has to start grinding his mental hips too.

I mean, if he doesn't start getting into the action, that knowledge is not actually going to grow within the beloved. And I think, you know, the last thing that, you know, maybe this is an interesting place to kind of wrap up or something, but that this indictment of writing by a guy who's a writer, of course, then raises this whole paradox of what did Plato think he's up to? And, you know, there's a school of thought out there taking this in conjunction with Plato's seventh letter, that Plato seriously never meant to convey any positive doctrine of any kind.

And that in Plato's understanding, these writings could serve functions, maybe not just literary pastimes. Right. But that they were not intended ever as statements of truth about anything.

2:02:26 Wes: I agree, and I think the Phaedrus illustrates that very well. So I don't think the dialogues are meant to illustrate agency on the part of interlocutors or learners. They just don't. So I think what the interlocutors add, what I think they do illustrate, is certain kinds of approaches to reasoning things through. But you could easily write a dialogue with a much more advanced interlocutor where it would. It would be a real match, it would be a real debate. And of course, Plato understood that he could have written something like that and he didn't. So he's trying to do something else.

2:03:00 Mark: He's trying to just inspire us to remember before we were born, when we had a lot of dialectic conversations, that this at least reminds you.

2:03:09 Adam: There is also the school of thought that whether or not these dialogues are intended as kind of infomercials for Plato's academy, that actually all these dialogues were more or less meant for novices or for people who weren't doing it. You want to do more of this, register now at the academy and we're going to do this live and in person and get rid of this bookshit.

2:03:28 Dylan: So the scrolls are 400 BC's version of YouTube?

2:03:32 Adam: Yeah, that's one way that people look at these. I'm not here to affirm or contradict that, but that is one theory of what's going on here, that the dialogues, maybe not all of them, but in general are kind of invitations to philosophy in various ways.

2:03:47 Mark: Well, clearly the upshot of all this talk about the dialectic and how spoken is better than written, it was all just reached its culmination in Hegel's logic and the encyclopedia Logic and laying out once and for all in a long text. Exactly.

2:04:05 Dylan: I thought you were going to say that this conversational back and forth dialectic has reached its culmination in Pel.

2:04:13 Adam: I thought they were going to say that reached its orgasm.

2:04:19 Mark: We've had people write to us that say every time that they hear the closing music, they have an orgasm. Several people have written in saying that.

2:04:26 Adam: Well, that's what we call, you know, the aha moments.

2:04:32 Wes: Eureka.

2:04:34 Mark: All right, thank you so much, Adam, for joining us.

2:04:37 Wes: Thanks, Adam. It was a pleasure.

2:04:38 Adam: Thank you.

2:04:38 Dylan: Thanks, Adam.

2:04:39 Mark: Folks should remember to. So you're teaching one of the courses?

2:04:42 Adam: Yeah, I'll be teaching a course on Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, which has the main character named Phaedrus. And also we'll be reading and talking about the Phaedrus by Plato as preparation for reading the novel. And also teaching a few other classes over the summer. We've got a class by a colleague, principles of Roman stoicism. Got one on the Canterbury tales, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. So you can check us out@greatdiscourses.com and see what we've got. Coming up.

2:05:10 Mark: I think there's a whole course on whether it's pronounced phaedrus or Phaedrus or phaedrus or phaedrus. Is that what you just.

2:05:17 Adam: It depends what language you're in.

2:05:21 Mark: All right, folks, should go join the conversation. Don't be so damn passive. Go to partiallyexaminelife.com and join us in a not school group. Or just respond to the blog post about this episode. We've got the Facebook group. If you're. If you're hooked up that way, We've got Twitter. You can follow us that way. We've got so many ways of connecting with us. Please donate money help this continue to happen. Thanks so much to everybody. Good night.

2:05:45 Wes: Good night. Good night.

2:05:46 Adam: Good night, everybody.

2:06:05 Mark: In summertime it's all alright? The smell of grass and barbecue? It's like a sweet perfume? You're out and running in the park? Feeling sun upon your skin? The flowers are in bloom? If I make it through the tomb, this is what I'm gonna do?

2:06:28 Adam: What I'm gonna do?

2:06:30 Mark: Wander out into the trees with a

2:06:32 Wes: bottle of fine wine.

2:06:42 Mark: And everyone. It's summertime you're not behind? You're right there where you're supposed to be? Beneath your favorite tree? Pretty as the sun goes down? You're smiling you're just hanging around in pleasant company? You can be the opener style of pleasure?

2:07:35 Adam: Not just there,

2:07:38 Mark: everything's okay? Praying for somebody to make me feel like I'm okay? No, it seems so far away? Let.

2:08:26 Adam: Me sa. Ris.