Who Is Phaedrus?

Keys to Plato's Dyad Masterpiece

Bradley

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621899112
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Who Is Phaedrus? This book delivers answers.Many have said Phaedrus is the most intriguing of Plato's works. Phaedrus is certainly one of the most difficult to follow and fathom. In part this is because the title figure, Phaedrus himself, has remained a mystery.Who Is Phaedrus? takes us on a tour of this intricate dialogue: a work of philosophy and history, and a work of art. In Who Is Phaedrus? we see how and why Phaedrus became involved in the most sensational scandals, both religious and political, in ancient Athens; and yet we see Phaedrus come across as a person remarkably contemporary, someone who could walk through a time seam and be wholly understandable as a soul in the twenty-first century.Perplexed as well as perplexing, Phaedrus, in the final analysis, needs Socrates' timeless philosophy as a salve and therapy, and we follow along as Socrates delivers.

1

Situating Phaedrus

α) Chronology

Debates about the chronological place of Phaedrus in Plato’s body of work will likely never cease. There appears to be no way to make a definitive statement on the issue, even after Kahn’s outstanding study, “On Platonic Chronology.”1 So, if I refer to Phaedrus as a middle dialogue, as distinct from an early or late, I do not aim to belabor the temporal reference.

Summarily, I agree with Charles Griswold: when a dialogue was written is less important than how a dialogue is read: “Our interpretation of a dialogue in its literary and philosophical integrity will include taking into account historical allusions or events made from within its fictional frame; but the chronology of Plato’s composition of the dialogue does not seem in and of itself to shed light on the drama, or the argument, or any such allusions or events.”2 In the case of Phaedrus, Phaedrus’s relationship with Athens and Socrates is more important, and more compelling, than the place of Phaedrus, the dialogue, in the Platonic corpus.

In brief, Louis Dyer argued long ago, and to my general satisfaction at least, that Phaedrus seems characteristic of a so-called middle run of dialogues that includes Cratylus, the Symposium, Phaedo, the Republic, Theaetetus, and Parmenides.3 That assessment, based in part on a study of style and motif, seems mostly reasonable and has been seconded by many commentators since, even if not defending Dyer in particular. But as no final statement on Platonic chronology seems necessary, or even possible, we might wish to refer, rather, to dialogue types: a “Definitions” Plato, to situate the shorter, simpler dialogues such as Lysis; a “Forms” Plato, to explain the longer, complex dialogues in which Socrates seems so fictive, such as the Symposium; and a “Kinds” Plato to explain the long dialogues in which Socrates is not as prominent, such as Sophist. C. J. Rowe recommends other terms for such categorization: “‘early’ roughly equals ‘Socratic,’ ‘middle’ is ‘constructive’ or ‘optimistic,’ while ‘late’ is ‘critical’ or ‘pessimistic.’”4

These brief comments on Platonic chronology would serve this much: to re-assess what Dyer and others mean by the claim that the “Middle Period” Socrates is a merely dramatic figure, or an entirely dramatic character.

Here I disagree in part with Dyer’s claim that in Phaedrus (and other middle dialogues) we see a “Platonizing Socrates,” a nearly wholly dramatic character. That claim seems to rest on the assumption that there is simply no way a street Socrates, as it were, could speak so well, so quickly, and so profoundly as the Phaedrus Socrates or the Republic Socrates, etc.

Apparently to Dyer and others, there is more of a blood-and-guts Socrates in the shorter, apparently early dialogues such as Lysis, while the extraordinarily subtle conversations in Phaedrus or Cratylus, etc., are so complex they are implausible as historical reports. True enough. No one thinks every word of Phaedrus, or any Platonic dialogue, is offered as precision journalism.

Yet, we should realize, although some would not like to admit as much, that the Plato of whatever period or category, “definitions Plato,” “Essences Plato,” or “Kinds Plato,” was writing what we now call creative non-fiction, albeit arguably the most creative creative non-fiction ever composed. The significant persons in Plato’s dialogues are real, but Plato never made any pretense to quotidian commentary. Plato manipulates scenes to present the essences of situations in which the historical persons were involved, and oftentimes the essence of the topic that concerns them. So, Socrates, especially, is always going to come across as fictive; in some works more fictive than in others.

So, there is little reason that Jan Zwicky, for example, should have to belabor the claim, though it is well made, that Socrates was long dead when Phaedrus was composed.5 What matters most about Zwicky’s claim that Phaedrus was surely composed after Socrates’s death is not timing but motif. Phaedrus may stand alongside the Apology as a longer version of the latter in that sense. Similarly, there is little reason Spiro Panagiotou should have to belabor the claim, though it is well made, that Lysias was already dead at the supposed time of the events of Phaedrus.6

Yet, we might ask: if Plato wrote creative non-fiction, are Plato’s dialogues then “true?” Here we should adopt, I argue, the position of Socrates himself when Phaedrus asks Socrates what Socrates thinks about the myth of Boreas associated with the place in which they are talking. Socrates says he deems the myth “true,” given the ineluctable import of the message behind it.

A final note, then, on chronology: I would second Dyer’s assessment, and that of others, that Phaedrus may be called a middle period piece given that so many elements of Phaedrus closely relate to the Republic, the textual anchor of the middle period. Yet, I am hardly alone when I call attention to intersections between Phaedrus and the Republic. Natorp, for example, regards the Republic a repository of themes of many middle dialogues, especially the Symposium, Phaedo, and Phaedrus.7 Natorp stresses the commonality of the function of dialectic in these dialogues (more implied than express in the Symposium). Natorp even concludes that there is an emphasis on collection over division in these late-middle dialogues, even though the usually thorough Natorp makes no compelling defense of that very particular claim.

Natorp appears to make that claim based on the impressions left by Phaedrus, and the PL in particular, in which there is no obvious tie, downward, as it were, to the mundane order from the Essence revolution revealed in the chariot-train myth in the PL.8 Otherwise, relative to Natorp’s claim, I see no extraordinary emphasis on collection over division in the middle period. Yet, my linking of Phaedrus with the Republic certainly does center on the issue of dialectic.9

Other connections between Phaedrus and the Republic have been persuasively posed. For example, G. J. De Vries finds a rather pointed identity of the meaning of ἁπλόος, or “simple,” as a sign of genuine character in both Phaedrus and the Republic.10

The most crucial moment in which Socrates emphasizes the idea that Phaedrus is to become ἁπλόος, or “simple,” is actually expressed with the adverbial ἁπλως, “simply” or “single-mindedly,” as Phaedrus is...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Situating Phaedrus
• Chapter 2: The Line on Dialectic, Part 1
• Chapter 3: The Line on Dialectic, Part 2
• Chapter 4: Phaedrus’s Ultimate Whence
• Chapter 5: Phaedrus’s Middle Whence
• Chapter 6: Phaedrus’s Immediate Whence
• Chapter 7: Plato’s Rehabilitation of Zeus
• Chapter 8: Triads and Dyads of Speeches
• Chapter 9: Images of the Image of the Soul
• Chapter 10: Phaedrus
• Chapter 11: Confounding Rhetoric
• Chapter 12: Phaedrus’s Whither
• Chapter 13: Two Final Triads
• Bibliography