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Phaedrus
Phaedrus
Plato’s dialogue on rhetoric, love, and the soul, set on the banks of the Ilissos outside the walls of Athens — the only Platonic dialogue staged outside the city, in a place “deeply moved by many visitors” (Nussbaum 1986). Socrates is drawn outside his usual haunts by the beautiful young Phaedrus, who has just heard a speech of Lysias arguing that one should grant favors to a non-lover rather than a lover. Socrates is provoked first to a parodic improvement of Lysias’s speech, then — corrected by his daimonion — to a great recantation: the second speech, the palinode, that contains Plato’s teaching on divine-madness and the soul’s wings.
The dialogue is widely agreed to be later than both plato-republic and plato-symposium (Nussbaum 1986, p. 470, citing Hackforth and the stylometric tradition). The chronology matters: the Phaedrus recants the Republic’s asceticism. Where the Republic had banished lamentation as the province of “not very good women,” the Phaedrus names four kinds of madness given by divine gift and rehabilitates the erotic mania that the Republic had ruled out. The soul, winged in its pre-incarnate state, beholds the Forms in the supercelestial place; in the descent it sheds its plumage; the sight of earthly beauty awakens anamnesis and the wings begin to grow back, in a process Plato describes with the imagery of fever, suffering, and erotic torment. The chariot allegory — soul as charioteer commanding a noble and a base horse — encodes the tripartite-soul in its most enduring mythological form. Eros itself is named as a daimon, an intermediary being whose nature Hillman traces as “his own psychic space, his own world between” — the metaxy (Hillman 1972).
The dialogue closes with a critique of writing itself, staged in the myth of Theuth and Thamus: the written word cannot answer questions, cannot adjust to the soul of the hearer, is always saying the same thing. The living logos in the soul of the philosopher is what writing can only point toward. The Phaedrus is foundational for every later figure in the depth tradition who insists that the symbol cannot be reduced to the proposition: carl-jung on the symbolic life, james-hillman on image as primary, henry-corbin on the mundus imaginalis.