Phaedrus
men in general recall only with difficulty the things of another world,
but the mind of the philosopher has a better remembrance of them. For
when he beholds the visible beauty of earth his enraptured soul passes
in thought to those glorious sights of justice and wisdom and temperance
and truth which she once gazed upon in heaven. Then she celebrated holy
mysteries and beheld blessed apparitions shining in pure light, herself
pure, and not as yet entombed in the body. And still, like a bird eager
to quit its cage, she flutters and looks upwards, and is therefore
deemed mad. Such a recollection of past days she receives through sight,
the keenest of our senses, because beauty, alone of the ideas, has any
representation on earth: wisdom is invisible to mortal eyes. But the
corrupted nature, blindly excited by this vision of beauty, rushes on
to enjoy, and would fain wallow like a brute beast in sensual pleasures.
Whereas the true mystic, who has seen the many sights of bliss, when he
beholds a god-like form or face is amazed with delight, and if he were
not afraid of being thought mad he would fall down and worship. Then
the stiffened wing begins to relax and grow again; desire which has
been imprisoned pours over the soul of the lover; the germ of the wing
unfolds, and stings, and pangs of birth, like the cutting of teeth, are
everywhere felt. (Compare Symp.) Father and mother, and goods and laws
and proprieties are nothing to him; his beloved is his physician, who
can alone cure his pain. An apocryphal sacred writer says that the power
which thus works in him is by mortals called love, but the immortals
call him dove, or the winged one, in order to represent the force of
his wings--such at any rate is his nature. Now the characters of lovers
depend upon the god whom they followed in the other world; and they
choose their loves in this world accordingly. The followers of Ares
are fierce and violent; those of Zeus seek out some philosophical and
imperial nature; the attendants of Here find a royal love; and in like
manner the followers of every god seek a love who is like their god; and
to him they communicate the nature which they have received from their
god. The manner in which they take their love is as follows:--
I told you about the charioteer and his two steeds, the one a noble
animal who is guided by word and admonition only, the other an
ill-looking villain who will hardly yield to blow or spur. Together all
three, who are a figure of the soul, approach the vision of love. And
now a fierce conflict begins. The ill-conditioned steed rushes on to
enjoy, but the charioteer, who beholds the beloved with awe, falls back
in adoration, and forces both the steeds on their haunches; again the
evil steed rushes forwards and pulls shamelessly. The conflict grows
more and more severe; and at last the charioteer, throwing himself
backwards, forces the bit out of the clenched teeth of the brute, and
pulling harder than ever at the reins, covers his tongue and jaws with
blood, and forces him to rest his legs and haunches with pain upon the
ground. When this has happened several times, the villain is tamed and
humbled, and from that time forward the soul of the lover follows the
beloved in modesty and holy fear. And now their bliss is consummated;
the same image of love dwells in the breast of either, and if they have
self-control, they pass their lives in the greatest happiness which is
attainable by man--they continue masters of themselves, and conquer in
one of the three heavenly victories. But if they choose the lower
life of ambition they may still have a happy destiny, though inferior,
because they have not the approval of the whole soul. At last they leave
the body and proceed on their pilgrim's progress, and those who have
once begun can never go back. When the time comes they receive their
wings and fly away, and the lovers have the same wings.
Socrates concludes:--
These are the blessings of love, and thus have I made my recantation in
finer language than before: I did so in order to please Phaedrus. If I
said what was wrong at first, please to attribute my error to Lysias,
who ought to study philosophy instead of rhetoric, and then he will not
mislead his disciple Phaedrus.
Phaedrus is afraid that he will lose conceit of Lysias, and that Lysias
will be out of conceit with himself, and leave off making speeches,
for the politicians have been deriding him. Socrates is of opinion that
there is small danger of this; the politicians are themselves the
great rhetoricians of the age, who desire to attain immortality by the
authorship of laws. And therefore there is nothing with which they can
reproach Lysias in being a writer; but there may be disgrace in being a
bad one.
And what is good or bad writing or speaking? While the sun is hot in the
sky above us, let us ask that question: since by rational conversation
man lives, and not by the indulgence of bodily pleasures. And the
grasshoppers who are chirruping around may carry our words to the
Muses, who are their patronesses; for the grasshoppers were human beings
themselves in a world before the Muses, and when the Muses came they
died of hunger for the love of song. And they carry to them in heaven
the report of those who honour them on earth.
The first rule of good speaking is to know and speak the truth; as a
Spartan proverb says, 'true art is truth'; whereas rhetoric is an art of
enchantment, which makes things appear good and evil, like and unlike,
as the speaker pleases. Its use is not confined, as people commonly
suppose, to arguments in the law courts and speeches in the assembly;
it is rather a part of the art of disputation, under which are included
both the rules of Gorgias and the eristic of Zeno. But it is not wholly
devoid of truth. Superior knowledge enables us to deceive another by the
help of resemblances, and to escape from such a deception when employed
against ourselves. We see therefore that even in rhetoric an element of
truth is required. For if we do not know the truth, we can neither make
the gradual departures from truth by which men are most easily deceived,
nor guard ourselves against deception.
Socrates then proposes that they shall use the two speeches as
illustrations of the art of rhetoric; first distinguishing between the
debatable and undisputed class of subjects. In the debatable class there
ought to be a definition of all disputed matters. But there was no such
definition in the speech of Lysias; nor is there any order or connection
in his words any more than in a nursery rhyme. With this he compares the
regular divisions of the other speech, which was his own (and yet not
his own, for the local deities must have inspired him). Although only a
playful composition, it will be found to embody two principles: first,
that of synthesis or the comprehension of parts in a whole; secondly,
analysis, or the resolution of the whole into parts. These are the
processes of division and generalization which are so dear to the
dialectician, that king of men. They are effected by dialectic, and
not by rhetoric, of which the remains are but scanty after order and
arrangement have been subtracted. There is nothing left but a heap
of 'ologies' and other technical terms invented by Polus, Theodorus,
Evenus, Tisias, Gorgias, and others, who have rules for everything, and
who teach how to be short or long at pleasure. Prodicus showed his good
sense when he said that there was a better thing than either to be short
or long, which was to be of convenient length.
Still, notwithstanding the absurdities of Polus and others, rhetoric has
great power in public assemblies. This power, however, is not given by
any technical rules, but is the gift of genius. The real art is always
being confused by rhetoricians with the preliminaries of the art. The
perfection of oratory is like the perfection of anything else; natural
power must be aided by art. But the art is not that which is taught in
the schools of rhetoric; it is nearer akin to philosophy. Pericles, for
instance, who was the most accomplished of all speakers, derived his
eloquence not from rhetoric but from the philosophy of nature which
he learnt of Anaxagoras. True rhetoric is like medicine, and the
rhetorician has to consider the natures of men's souls as the physician
considers the natures of their bodies. Such and such persons are to be
affected in this way, such and such others in that; and he must know the
times and the seasons for saying this or that. This is not an easy task,
and this, if there be such an art, is the art of rhetoric.
I know that there are some professors of the art who maintain
probability to be stronger than truth. But we maintain that probability
is engendered by likeness of the truth which can only be attained by
the knowledge of it, and that the aim of the good man should not be to
please or persuade his fellow-servants, but to please his good masters
who are the gods. Rhetoric has a fair beginning in this.
Enough of the art of speaking; let us now proceed to consider the true
use of writing. There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of
writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he
would only spoil men's memories and take away their understandings. From
this tale, of which young Athens will probably make fun, may be gathered
the lesson that writing is inferior to speech. For it is like a picture,
which can give no answer to a question, and has only a deceitful
likeness of a living creature. It has no power of adaptation, but uses
the same words for all. It is not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a
bastard, and when an attack is made upon this bastard neither parent
nor anyone else is there to defend it. The husbandman will not seriously
incline to sow his seed in such a hot-bed or garden of Adonis; he will
rather sow in the natural soil of the human soul which has depth of
earth; and he will anticipate the inner growth of the mind, by writing
only, if at all, as a remedy against old age. The natural process will
be far nobler, and will bring forth fruit in the minds of others as well
as in his own.
The conclusion of the whole matter is just this,--that until a man knows
the truth, and the manner of adapting the truth to the natures of other
men, he cannot be a good orator; also, that the living is better than
the written word, and that the principles of justice and truth when
delivered by word of mouth are the legitimate offspring of a man's own
bosom, and their lawful descendants take up their abode in others.
Such an orator as he is who is possessed of them, you and I would fain
become. And to all composers in the world, poets, orators, legislators,
we hereby announce that if their compositions are based upon these
principles, then they are not only poets, orators, legislators, but
philosophers. All others are mere flatterers and putters together of
words. This is the message which Phaedrus undertakes to carry to Lysias
from the local deities, and Socrates himself will carry a similar
message to his favourite Isocrates, whose future distinction as a great
rhetorician he prophesies. The heat of the day has passed, and after
offering up a prayer to Pan and the nymphs, Socrates and Phaedrus
depart.
There are two principal controversies which have been raised about the
Phaedrus; the first relates to the subject, the second to the date of
the Dialogue.
There seems to be a notion that the work of a great artist like Plato
cannot fail in unity, and that the unity of a dialogue requires a single
subject. But the conception of unity really applies in very different
degrees and ways to different kinds of art; to a statue, for example,
far more than to any kind of literary composition, and to some species