Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII

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.

Top Lessons

• Not all madness is illness

  Socrates distinguishes injurious derangement from divinely inspired states in prophecy, ritual, poetry and love. The dialogue invites reflection on how cultures decide which altered states are pathological and which are valued.

• The divided soul

  The charioteer image presents the self as a team that must be steered, with reason guiding spirited and appetitive forces. It is one of the earliest and most influential models of inner conflict.

• Technologies change memory

  Thamus warns that writing will weaken memory and give the appearance of wisdom. The argument still frames debates about every new information technology.

• Philosophy meets power

  The Seventh Letter records the failure of an attempt to make a ruler a philosopher. It shows the gap between ideal political theory and the realities of court, ambition and violence.

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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.

• Phaedrus 244a–245c

  The four kinds of divine madness, contrasted with madness arising from human disease.

• Phaedrus 246a–254e

  The charioteer and two horses as a model of the soul's internal conflict.

• Phaedrus 251a–252b

  The lover's symptoms: shuddering, sweating, fever, sleeplessness and obsessive longing as the wings regrow.

• 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.

• Phaedrus 270c–d

  Appeal to Hippocrates: understanding the body, like the soul, requires understanding the nature of the whole.

• Phaedrus 274c–275b

  The myth of Theuth: writing as a pharmakon for memory that weakens memory.

• Seventh Letter, c. 330c–331a

  The counsellor compared to a physician advising a patient whose way of life must change before treatment can help.