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Socrates hangs out in the country flirting with his buddy Phaedrus. And what is this "Platonic" love you've all heard about? Well, you use the enticement of desire not to rush toward fulfillment, but to get all excited about talking philosophy.
Phaedrus starts off reading a speech by renowned orator Lysias (actually Plato's invention parodying the style of this real guy) about love: Love is a form of madness, where people do things they then regret after love fades. Therefore, it's better to hang out with someone who does NOT love you, i.e., some friend who's concerned with your interests instead of fulfilling his addled desires.
Socrates critiques both this position and the speech itself. We get to learn about what makes for a good persuasive speech (one point: don't put the sentences in random order!) and see both how Socrates would make the same point Lysias does but better, and then what Socrates's true view and preferred presentation is: This takes the form of a long myth that involves a chariot, and the structure of the soul, and how beauty causes us to remember a heavenly world. And after all this, we get to hear more about rhetoric and how back-and-forth, in-person philosophical exchange is way better than reading books.
Mark, Wes, and Dylan are joined by Great Discourses founder Adam Rose, who provides us with a lot of nice literary context.
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Related Episodes: Folks may want to listen to our past Plato episodes on The Symposium (on love), Gorgias (on rhetoric), and The Republic (on what's wrong with poetry and the structure of the soul).
End song: "Summertime" by New People, from Might Get It Right (2013).
Plato picture by Solomon Grundy.
Interesting episode raising the following observations:
1) Plato was much more comfortable with integrating the rational (logos) and the nonrational (“muthos”), than I thought.
Plato’s Myths (from SEP):
For the ancient Greeks, myth was not a false belief which we believe today, but “muthos” was a true story that unveils the true origin of the world and human beings. In opposition to the memorable being transmitted orally through poetry in ancient Greece, in the seventh century BC, two opponents to poetry developed: history (shaped notably by Thucydides) and philosophy shaped by the naturalistic tradition of the sixth and fifth centuries. Plato thus broke from these naturalistic traditions by using both traditional myths and myths he invented himself, attempting to overcome the “muthos”/logos dichotomy.
2) These themes of objective truth (divine madness and eternal forms) versus subjective truth (human madness and lover obsession) came to the fore with Kierkegaard who existentially raised subjective truth as no less valid than the rational truth espoused by Hegel’s dialectics of thesis, antithesis, new synthesis, and replaced it with his own dialectic of aesthetic, ethical, and synthesis with the religious (when he became a Christian existentialist). These dialectics were much different than Plato’s dialectics which were more about dialogue.
3) Mental insemination is a little over the top, but I do agree that true interpersonal dialogue, even if it is philosophical, is a much higher form of human interaction than written attempts at dialogue or especially a prepared written monologue. That being said, each has its place. In Derridian fashion, any privileged term is subject to deconstruction by its opposite.
4) Plato was the poet-philosopher, just like Nietzsche. It’s not poetry that’s bad, but bad poetry that’s bad.
5) Chariots of Fire: nice parallel with Freudian tripartite psyche.