Symposium and Phaedrus

And we do sometimes need a pre-evangelism that sort of prepares the ground And one of the things I talk about in my Plato book is what is the difference between Socrates and Plato? People have different theories, but my belief is what Socrates did is he came along and cleaned the ground.

He, reading the early Socratic dialogues, which I think are very much Socrates as opposed to later ones, which are very much Plato, like the Republic and the Phaedo and the Phaedrus and the Timaeus and all that.

The early ones, They always start with, what is your definition of courage or the colors, the beauty, the fine, or your definition of friendship? And then Socrates spends the whole dialogue destroying and showing that that's a false, usually it's a false definition because it's not universal enough.

It just tells me this, but it doesn't tell me this.

But one of the things I noticed about the Aphoretic texts is they're way easier to teach.

So I've read most of the Aphoretic texts, and somebody will teach us Phaedrus, they might teach you Parmenides, and they'll teach you Timaeus, which is just considered like middle or transitional middle text even today.

Late Plato is not read by non-specialists that much.

And I wanted to ask you as to why.

I don't know if there's at least, I mean, there might be some place where it's described, but I don't know it off the top of my head.

I mean, you know, Socrates in the beginning of the Phaedrus kind of who poos a little bit on being outside.

He basically says, I'm a city boy.

I learn from other people.

Thanks to writing, we can eavesdrop on and learn from this dialogue amongst the dead.

Phaedrus, by Plato, portrays a discussion between Socrates and the younger aristocrat Phaedrus.

In the final part of the dialogue, Socrates turns to an analysis of the pursuit of truth, arguing forcefully that this pursuit should be undertaken with others in person, discussing ideas in a dialectical exchange.

This means to seek truth or to reason through exploring contrasting ideas.

Socrates criticizes the written word for dulling our memories and damaging our potential for deep understanding, with its passive one-way interaction that displaces the active exchange of dialogue.

Socrates convinces Phaedrus that their esteemed contemporary Lysias, a famous speechwriter, authors shallow and poorly constructed arguments that are weakened because they've been assembled and expressed through the one-way practice of writing.

Now, this is a very anecdotal argument that he's making, but Phaedrus is convinced.

As part of his defense of in-person dialogue, Socrates also complains about men who decide to nap in the afternoon instead of coming outside to be under the trees to engage in dialectics.

You can go all the way back to Plato.

And in the Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of Thoth, the god of technology, and the king of Egypt.

And so Thoth, the god of technology, says to the king of Egypt, we're going to give you all these gifts and it's going to be great and you're going to have, you know, irrigation and better agriculture and architecture and we're going to give you the gift of writing.

And the king of Egypt says basically, paraphrasing here, I don't have it memorized, but, well, okay, thank you, we'll take it, and it will be helpful in that we can record things, but it will be a double edge in that it will cause men to stop relying on their memory and only on the written word.

Appetite.

And the famous image in the Phaedrus of a charioteer trying to control two horses that pull in different directions.

One horse is noble and listens.

One is unruly and wants what it wants.

I teach a course on rhetoric.

So I do Gorgias and Phaedrus.

And I teach a course on how Socrates became Socrates on Fido and Symposium.

And then I teach a short platonic courses, short platonic works course where we read one single short work every class.

apparently most philosophic of the books.

So, what is Socrates' intention in going through, especially, I mean, what is Socrates' intention in the work as a whole, but what is Socrates' intention in books five through seven, and then what role does Polimarchus have on this work that he wouldn't have otherwise? So, let me rephrase this a little bit.

What is Socrates trying to do with Glaucon and or Adiamantis, Glaucon or both of them, and then what is Socrates trying to do with Polemarchus, and is that the same thing? What I have in mind is, in the Phaedrus, Polemarchus is said to become a philosopher.

And so, something must happen in this work, I think, where Socrates somehow hooks Polemarchus with regards to philosophy, Or that doesn't seem to be what he's trying to do with Glaucon and Addie and Mantis.

From his brother Lysias we learn that he fell a victim to the Thirty Tyrants, but no allusion is made here to his fate, nor to the circumstance that Cephalus and his family were of Syracusian origin, and had migrated from Thurii to Athens.

The Chalcedonian giant, Thrasymachus, of whom we had already heard in the Phaedrus, is the personification of the Sophists, according to Plato's conception of them, in some of their worst characteristics.

He is vain and blustering, refusing to discourse unless he is paid, fond of making an oration, and hoping thereby to escape the inevitable Socrates, but a mere child in argument, and unable to foresee that the next move, to use a Platonic expression, will shut him up.

He has reached the stage of framing general notions, and in this respect is in advance of Cephalus and Polymarchus, but he is incapable of defending them in a discussion, and vainly tries to cover his confusion with banter and insolence.

Wow.

So that's exactly like Plato's description of, in Phaedrus, of the male and female joined in one being and then separated.

That's biblical.

oh my gosh so really adam and eve were created at the same time but then why does god say he drew eve out of his side that's separating them wow all right so really that makes them more equal from the very beginning