Philosophy & Rhetoric

"So, my shall suffer what it deserves."

—Phaedrus 242a¹

It is tempting, after one has reflected closely on the words and deeds of the Phaedrus, to read the dialogue as if Socrates had the whole conversation worked out from the first words. The art of Plato is such that the intricate cohesion of word and action reveals itself through many layers. Plato writes; and as a writer he has the time and the means (written letters) to compose. But what is Socrates doing? He does not have the leisure to compose "over a long period of time" (228a). He is responding to particular individuals, in particular circumstances, in the moment. He is thinking on his feet. One might claim that this is actually the first deficiency of the dialogues, that they are artificial and unrealistic in this way. If the written text reveals itself as finely crafted in the subtlety of its inner connections, how seriously can we take the apparent spontaneity of the spoken discourse? My suggestion would be that we take this not as a fault of the dialogues, but rather as the first instance of Plato's irony. This may be Plato's supreme irony—the evocation of truth through artificiality.

But that is already going too fast. I want to begin by looking at the words and deeds of Socrates and Phaedrus, without considering yet what Plato might be doing as the author of the dialogue. My first interpretive principle will be to take the drama at face value, as naturalistic, temporal, and even commonplace—two friends go for a walk in the countryside to listen to speeches.

Immediately, however, the commonness is disrupted. The city, the commonwealth, is left behind. This is certainly uncommon for Socrates, who never leaves the city walls.² Furthermore, the language of the text indicates a thematization of , out-of-placeness, strangeness. Rather than being accused of already violating my one hermeneutical principle, it should be noted that this indication of strangeness comes through the words [End Page 264] and deeds of the characters, not through a retrospective recovery of the dialogue as a whole. From the beginning the reader encounters a tension between the commonplace and the unusual.³

Nevertheless, the impetus to move outside of the city is commonplace enough. Phaedrus has a speech that Socrates wants to hear. Before Socrates is told what this speech is about, he indicates that nothing would please him more than "hearing how you [Phaedrus] and Lysias passed the time" (227b). After Phaedrus, in his excitement, gives away the topic of the speech—"an attempted seduction of a handsome boy—but not by a lover!" (227c)—Socrates seems even more eager to hear the speech. Does Socrates already see what is to come? Is he merely excited to hear a speech, or is he excited about challenging the beautiful Phaedrus' excitement about a speech that defends an unworthy principle—"that one should gratify the one who does not love rather than the one who does" (227c)?

After leaving the city and finding a comfortable place for their speech, for , Phaedrus reads his copy of Lysias' speech for Socrates. The gist of Lysias' speech, as Phaedrus has already announced, is that a young lover should associate himself with, and gratify, a non-lover rather than one who is in love. One central theme of the speech, which will be important for thinking about irony, is that of self-mastery. The recurring motif in Lysias' speech is that the lover is not in control of himself, while the non-lover is. Therefore (the non-lover argues) associating with a lover is unpredictable, and will most likely result in harm to the beloved. The non-lover claims that his self-control will prevent and preclude unforeseen harm. This slippage, from self-mastery to mastery of the situation, is decisive. We would be wrong to interpret Socrates' two speeches as wholesale rejections of everything in Lysias' speech. Socrates cannot reject self-control outright. His consistent concern with rules out simply espousing lack of control. Yet the measuredness of Socratic practice does not entail the...