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Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII

Plato

c. 370 BCE · Ancient · Philosophy · Ancient Greek

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Posthumous or imagined likeness of Plato. Source · CC BY 2.5

Summary

This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day. Phaedrus has just heard a speech by the orator Lysias arguing that a boy should grant favours to a non-lover rather than a lover, since the lover is mad and the non-lover sane. He reads it aloud. Socrates criticizes its style and, covering his head in shame, delivers a rival speech on the same theme, defining love as a desire that overpowers reason. Then his divine sign stops him from leaving: he has blasphemed against Eros, a god. In a great palinode, or recantation, he argues that madness is not simply an evil, for some madness is a gift of the gods. He distinguishes four kinds: prophetic madness from Apollo, the ritual madness of purification and initiation associated with Dionysus, poetic madness from the Muses, and the madness of love, the best of all. To explain love he describes the soul as immortal and self-moving and likens it to a charioteer driving a pair of winged horses, one noble and obedient, one unruly and lustful. Souls once followed the gods to a place beyond the heavens and glimpsed the true forms; fallen into bodies, they forget, but the sight of earthly beauty awakens memory, makes the wings start to grow, and produces the fever, pain and joy of love. The disciplined lovers who turn their passion toward philosophy regain their wings. The second half turns to rhetoric. Socrates argues that good speaking requires knowledge of truth, a method of collection and division, and a knowledge of souls, as medicine requires knowledge of bodies; he cites Hippocrates on understanding the nature of the whole. He ends with the Egyptian myth of Theuth, the inventor of writing, whom King Thamus rebukes because writing will produce forgetfulness and the appearance of wisdom, not wisdom itself. Socrates closes with a prayer to Pan. The Seventh Letter, addressed to the friends of Dion of Syracuse after Dion's assassination, is an apologia for Plato's involvement in Sicilian politics. It recounts his disillusionment with Athenian politics after Socrates' death, his visits to Dionysius I and II, his hope of making the younger Dionysius a philosopher-ruler, and its failure. It contains a philosophical digression arguing that the highest truths cannot be put into writing but arise in the soul after long companionship. The shorter Eighth Letter advises Dion's party to seek reconciliation and a constitutional settlement under laws rather than tyranny.

Plot or Argument

Setting and Lysias' speech (Phaedrus 227a–234c)
Socrates and Phaedrus walk outside the city to the Ilissus; Phaedrus reads Lysias' speech in favour of the non-lover.
Socrates' first speech (237a–241d)
With his head covered, Socrates defines love as irrational desire and argues the lover harms the beloved.
The palinode: divine madness and the soul (243e–257b)
Socrates recants: madness from the gods is a blessing. He proves the soul immortal, describes the charioteer and two horses, the vision of the forms, and the growth of the soul's wings in love.
Rhetoric and dialectic (257b–274b)
Good speaking requires truth, definition, collection and division, and knowledge of the kinds of soul, as medicine requires knowledge of the body.
The critique of writing and the prayer to Pan (274b–279c)
The myth of Theuth and Thamus: writing breeds forgetfulness and false wisdom. Socrates ends with a prayer for inner beauty.
Seventh Letter
Plato's account of his political education, his Sicilian ventures with Dion and Dionysius II, and the 'philosophical digression' on why the highest knowledge cannot be written.
Eighth Letter
Advice to Dion's associates after his death, urging moderation, reconciliation and rule under law.

Characters

Socrates, principal speaker
Athenian philosopher who, uncharacteristically outside the city, delivers two speeches on love and a critique of rhetoric and writing.
Phaedrus, interlocutor
Young enthusiast for rhetoric who admires Lysias.
Lysias, absent orator
Famous speechwriter whose speech on the non-lover prompts the discussion.
Dion, subject of the Letters
Syracusan statesman, Plato's friend and pupil, who overthrew Dionysius II and was assassinated in 354 BCE.
Dionysius II, tyrant of Syracuse
Young ruler whom Plato tried and failed to educate in philosophy.

Lessons

Not all madness is illness
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- Which of the four kinds of divine madness have modern equivalents?
- How does Socrates' recantation complicate his first speech's view of love as sickness?
- Where is the line between inspiration and disorder?
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Context

The Phaedrus is usually placed in Plato's middle period, after the Republic and Symposium, and engages the Athenian culture of rhetoric, the sophists, and the practice of pederastic courtship. The Letters belong to the 350s BCE and concern the turbulent politics of Syracuse, the most powerful Greek city in the west.

Composition

The Phaedrus' date is uncertain, though c. 370 BCE is a common estimate. Of the thirteen letters transmitted under Plato's name, most are considered spurious; the Seventh has the strongest claim to authenticity and is widely, though not universally, accepted as Plato's or as the work of a close associate. The Eighth is more doubtful.

Reception

The palinode's imagery of the winged soul and divine madness shaped Neoplatonism, Renaissance theories of poetic furor (Marsilio Ficino wrote a commentary on the Phaedrus), and Romantic ideas of inspiration. The critique of writing became central to twentieth-century philosophy through Jacques Derrida's essay 'Plato's Pharmacy'.

Love Desire Madness / Mind Language / Storytelling Art / Creation Power / Politics Education Virtue Ethics

Comparisons

the-last-days-of-socrates
The Phaedo's argument for the soul's immortality and the Apology's portrait of Socrates' divine sign complement the Phaedrus' psychology of the soul.
the-bhagavad-gita
The Katha Upanishad's chariot image, echoed in the Gita's psychology of controlled senses, parallels Plato's charioteer; both tie self-mastery to spiritual liberation.
meditations
Marcus Aurelius inherits the Platonic and Stoic ideal of reason governing the passions, but writes privately for himself, the kind of reminder writing Plato's Socrates permits.
the-arthashastra
The Seventh Letter's failed attempt to educate a tyrant contrasts with Kautilya's pragmatic manual for kings.
on-friendship
Montaigne's essay engages the Greek ideal of love between men that the Phaedrus explores, while distinguishing friendship from erotic passion.

Quotes

“this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories”

"this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories" — Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 275a, trans. Benjamin Jowett (1892).

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“Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one”

"Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one" — Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 279b–c, trans. Benjamin Jowett (1892).

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For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

The setting at the opening of the Phaedrus: Socrates, who almost never leaves Athens, walking barefoot along the Ilissus to sit under a plane tree by a stream. Notice how often the place itself, with its cicadas, nymphs and Pan, is mentioned again.
Socrates covering his head for his first speech and then being stopped by his divine sign from crossing the river. The dialogue turns on his decision that he has sinned against Eros and must recant.
The charioteer and the two winged horses in the palinode (246a–254e). Follow carefully what each horse does when the charioteer first sees the beloved, and how the dark horse is finally mastered.
The turn at 257b from love to rhetoric. Ask why a dialogue about love becomes a dialogue about speaking and writing, and what the two halves share.
The myth of Theuth and Thamus near the end (274c–275b), and the Seventh Letter's claim that the highest truths cannot be written down. Notice that both arguments come to us in writing.

Key terms and names

Palinode: A poem or speech of recantation. Socrates' second speech on love (243e–257b) is his palinode, unsaying his first speech after his divine sign warns him he has offended the god Eros.
Divine madness (mania): The four kinds of god-sent madness Socrates praises at 244a–245c: prophecy from Apollo, ritual purification, poetry from the Muses, and love, the highest of the four.
Charioteer and two horses: Socrates' image of the soul as a charioteer driving a noble white horse and an unruly dark one. Reason must master the team so the soul can rise toward the vision of true being.
The place beyond the heavens: The region, described in the palinode, where souls following the gods glimpsed justice, temperance and knowledge as they truly are. Earthly beauty awakens the memory of that vision.
Collection and division: The method of dialectic Socrates describes in the second half: gathering scattered things under one idea, then dividing that idea at its natural joints, as a good carver divides a body.
Theuth and Thamus: The Egyptian god who invents writing and the king who judges it. Thamus warns that writing will produce forgetfulness and the appearance of wisdom rather than wisdom itself.
Daimonion: Socrates' divine sign, an inner voice that only ever holds him back. In the Phaedrus it stops him from leaving after his first speech.
Dion and Dionysius II: Plato's friend and pupil Dion, and the young tyrant of Syracuse whom Plato tried and failed to educate in philosophy. Their story is the subject of the Seventh and Eighth Letters.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension What does Lysias' speech argue about lover and non-lover, and why does Socrates decide his own first speech on the same theme was an offense against Eros?
Comprehension Describe the charioteer and the two horses. What happens to the soul's wings, and what makes them begin to grow again?
Comprehension According to the Seventh Letter, why did Plato go to Syracuse, and why did his effort with Dionysius II fail?
Interpretation Socrates says some madness is a gift of the gods and better than human sanity. How does he distinguish divine madness from mere disorder, and why is love the best kind?
Interpretation Socrates compares the true orator to a physician who must know the nature of the body. Why must a good speaker know the kinds of soul, and how does this change what rhetoric is for?
Interpretation Thamus warns that writing will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls. Is Plato contradicting himself by putting this warning into a written dialogue, or does the form of the dialogue answer the objection?
Interpretation Socrates' closing prayer asks that the outward and inward man be at one. How does that prayer gather up the dialogue's concerns about love, speech and writing?
Big Question Plato hoped to make a ruler into a philosopher and failed. Can wisdom be taught to someone who holds power, or must a person first want to be changed before teaching can reach him?

Faith Connections

Romans 7:15-25 (Scripture)
Paul describes doing what he hates and not doing what he wants, a war between two laws in his members. Plato's charioteer struggling with the dark horse is a pagan picture of the same inner division, though Paul looks for deliverance through Christ rather than through the soul's own discipline.
2 Corinthians 3:2-3 (Scripture)
Paul calls the Corinthians a letter written not with ink but with the Spirit on tablets of human hearts. Socrates likewise prizes the living word written in the soul of the learner over words written on papyrus, a striking agreement about where true teaching is inscribed.
Augustine, Confessions VIII (Church Fathers)
In Book VIII Augustine finds two wills within himself, one new and one old, fighting so that he cannot do what he wishes. He had read Platonist books on his way to faith, and his account of the divided will reads as a Christian sequel to the charioteer whose team pulls in two directions.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Lysias argued that a beloved should prefer the sane non-lover to the mad lover. But not all madness is evil; some is sent by the gods, and love is the best of these. The soul is immortal and once beheld true beauty; love for an earthly beloved revives that memory and, when governed by reason and turned toward philosophy, restores the soul's wings. Therefore the lover's madness, rightly ordered, is a greater good than the non-lover's calculating sanity, and speech worthy of the name must likewise be grounded in knowledge of truth and of souls, not in mere cleverness or written display.

Rhetorical device: palinode (recantation). At 243a–b Socrates recalls that the poet Stesichorus was blinded for slandering Helen and regained his sight by recanting, and he then delivers his own palinode on love. By unsaying his first speech instead of simply moving on, Socrates turns the structure of the dialogue itself into an argument that the first view of love was false.

Debate: Resolved: Thamus was right that writing weakens wisdom more than it preserves it.

Memory Work

Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one
Phaedrus 279b–c, trans. Benjamin Jowett (1892). Socrates' prayer to Pan at 279b–c is a short, beautiful petition for harmony between inner and outer life that rewards lifelong recitation.

this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories
Phaedrus 275a, trans. Benjamin Jowett (1892). Thamus' warning at 275a states in one line a question every generation faces about its tools of memory.

Writing Prompts

Essay: The Phaedrus seems to fall into two halves, one on love and one on rhetoric and writing. Using the palinode's account of the soul, Socrates' comparison of rhetoric to medicine, and the myth of Theuth and Thamus, argue what single question unites the dialogue.

Comparison with The Last Days of Socrates: Both the Phaedrus and the Phaedo argue that the soul is immortal and longs for a reality beyond the body, but one does so beside a river on a summer afternoon and the other in a prison on the day of Socrates' death. Compare how each dialogue argues for the soul's immortality and what each says the philosopher should love, and argue how the setting shapes the argument.

Medical Lens

The Phaedrus is a foundational text for the history of ideas about madness. Socrates' typology of divine mania (prophetic, ritual-cathartic, poetic, erotic) separates valued altered states from disease, a distinction later medical writers and Renaissance theorists of melancholy and genius returned to. Love is described in quasi-clinical terms: fever, sleeplessness, restlessness, the pains and itching of the soul's wings regrowing. The dialogue also draws an explicit analogy between rhetoric and medicine, citing Hippocrates on the need to understand the nature of the whole, and mocking a would-be doctor who knows how to make patients vomit or purge but not when or to whom. The writing myth uses the word pharmakon (remedy or poison), the basis of Derrida's famous reading. In the Seventh Letter, Plato compares the political adviser to a physician who must first persuade a patient living an unhealthy life to change his regimen. These are ancient frameworks, not anticipations of modern psychiatry, and should be presented as such.

Madness Psychosis Altered States Ancient Medicine Philosophy AS Therapy Mind Body Obsession Monomania Dementia Memory Pharmacology Poisons Sexuality Medicalized Psychology Unconscious Quackery Charlatans Physicians Doctors

Phaedrus 244a–245c
The four kinds of divine madness, contrasted with madness arising from human disease.
Madness Psychosis Altered States
Phaedrus 246a–254e
The charioteer and two horses as a model of the soul's internal conflict.
Mind Body Psychology Unconscious
Phaedrus 251a–252b
The lover's symptoms: shuddering, sweating, fever, sleeplessness and obsessive longing as the wings regrow.
Obsession Monomania Sexuality Medicalized
Phaedrus 268a–c
Socrates imagines a man claiming to be a physician because he knows how to induce vomiting and purging, without knowing when or for whom.
Ancient Medicine Quackery Charlatans
Phaedrus 270c–d
Appeal to Hippocrates: understanding the body, like the soul, requires understanding the nature of the whole.
Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors
Phaedrus 274c–275b
The myth of Theuth: writing as a pharmakon for memory that weakens memory.
Dementia Memory Pharmacology Poisons
Seventh Letter, c. 330c–331a
The counsellor compared to a physician advising a patient whose way of life must change before treatment can help.
Physicians Doctors Philosophy AS Therapy

Creative Prompts

Essay
Compare Thamus' warning about writing with contemporary concerns about smartphones and memory. Is the analogy fair?
Dialogue
Write a new Socratic dialogue on a riverbank in which Phaedrus brings a modern self-help book instead of Lysias' speech.
Classroom
Draw the charioteer and horses and label what each represents; compare with one modern model of the mind.