Copyright © 1996 R.J. Kilcullen
Note: The Readings book does not include extracts from this dialogue. You will need your own copy (Penguin Classics), or a library copy.
Quotations below are from the translation by R. Hackforth in Plato, Collected Dialogues (ed. Hamilton and Cairns).
This dialogue is about rhetoric (cf. Gorgias). It is one of Plato's best dialogues from a literary viewpoint. Others worth reading as both as philosophy and as literature are Symposium, Protagoras and Phaedo.
See introduction in Hamilton and Cairns, p. 475; also J.S. Mill's introduction in his Collected Works, vol. 11, p. 62. According to both, Phaedrus is about all sorts of things ('This is one of the most miscellaneous of all the longer dialogues of Plato', according to Mill), and if about anything more than anything else, it is about love. It seems to me to be mainly about rhetoric, with love as the topic for model speeches. Viewed as a discussion of rhetoric it is not miscellaneous, but reasonably well unified. However (as is often the case in Plato's writings), what is there for the sake of something else is also there for its own sake: it is also a discussion of love.
Read 227a - 230e.
Introduction. Lysias was a Greek speech writer some of whose speeches are still extant, regarded as classics of Greek literature. The speech that follows is an attempt to prove a very unpromising proposition (that a young man should gratify the sexual desire ('what I ask', 230e) of someone who does not pretend to love, but relies on his own merit): 'that's the clever part of it' - a speech writer who can prove this can prove anything. It is a specimen produced for advertising purposes, not for real-life use.
Read speech by Lysias, 230e - 234c.
Note the 'maxims', generalisations the listener is expected to accept readily, on which the argument is based. E.g. 'Lovers, when their craving is at an end, repent of such benefits as they have conferred...' (231a).
Note the connections: 'And...', 'And observe this...', 'Again...'. They indicate no logical or other precise relationship.
Note that public opinion does not approve the gratifying of lovers (231e etc).
Read 234d - 237a.
Read 237a - 241e.
Note the 'topic' presupposed, that the lover is mad (236b). Where is it used as a premiss? Note the careful organisation of argument, and the words which indicate the organisation (237bc, 238de, 239c, 239e, etc).
Note the anti-climactic ending: rhetors tried for a strong ending.
Read 242a -243e.
'Palin' means 'back', 'backward'. Socrates' two speeches might be called an 'antilogy' ('anti' means 'in opposition to'). Notice that Lysias will also be ready to compose a speech on the other side (243e).
Read 244a - 257b.
Madness is not always an evil, just as death is not always an evil. The Socratic thesis that 'virtue is knowledge' means that virtue is the ability to recognise (at the moment of decision) what is really good, and what is really evil. The etymologies are a joke (244c). What follows 246b is not meant literally, but is meant to suggest things Plato does mean seriously but does not want to explain in detail or prove (cf. myth). (For an example of proof see 245c-e.)
Bear in mind the doctrine of metempsychosis - that the soul has a series of incarnations and other lives - and the doctrine of recollection or anamnesis - that learning is remembering something 'seen' not through the senses but directly by reason in an existence before birth. Seeing (literally with the eyes) something beautiful is the beginning of remembering the super-sensible world.
Note the references to plurality and unity in connection with understanding and language (249bc).
Love without sex is better, Socrates says, but love with sex is also a good thing (256).
This is all there is about love. The rest of the dialogue is about speech writing ' how to do it well, what art it comes under, whether there is an art of speech writing independent of other knowledge, how rhetoric is related to philosophy ('dialectic'), what value writing has.
Read 257c - 259e.
258a suggests that legislation is a kind of speech writing. In the Laws Plato suggests that legislation should have a preamble setting out the reasons behind it, to make it persuasive and not just coercive; see Laws, 720a-e.
Read 259e - 260e.
The true and the 'likely'. Note the more moderate position, that the speaker should know his subject, but the art of speaking is independent of such knowledge (260d). Socrates will argue that knowledge of the subject matter is essential to speaking well.
Read 261a - 262c.
Note the attempt to take rhetoric 'as a whole' (261a): to recognise the similarity of certain other activities not normally called rhetoric.
Read 262c - 264b.
Read 264b-e.
One of Plato's themes is 'the one in the many'. We should try to see how the many parts fit into the one whole, how things not usually recognised as parts belonging to some whole really are such, to make sure that the parts of something (here a speech) fit properly together to make a whole. Medieval writers talked about 'unity of order' (in contrast with simple unity, like a point without parts): where there are many things which are unified by being ordered (patterned, related), especially by being directed to the one purpose.
Read 264e - 266b.
'Collection' leads the mind to the one, 'division' to the many. 'Dialectic' is a whole including both these as parts.
Read 266c - 269c.
The speaker needs to know when to use what on whom, in view of his purpose in speaking.
Read 269c - 272b.
A true art of rhetoric would be based on a psychology.
Read 272b - 274b.
A return to the contrast between truth and likelihood (cf. 260a). Note that although knowledge is necessary for one who wishes to deceive (262b), it should not be used for that purpose (273e - 274a). When Socrates made the speech he did not believe in he covered his head for shame (243b).
Read 274b - 278e.
Conversation is better than writing, but writing is better than some other passtimes (276d). Why is conversation better? Read Letter VII, p. 1588, 341b - 345a. 278d: a philosopher (literally, lover of wisdom) who also writes should be called a philosopher rather than a writer.
Read the rest
Am I right about the unity of the dialogue (as being about rhetoric, the speeches on love being illustration, though not merely that)? (Grasping the unity of a literary work is like 'collection'.)
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