Plato's Phaedrus

Blog #1: So I spent some time wondering why, with a mixture of pieces on technical writing, user experience, and visual arguments, we would read Plato's Phaedrus. Perhaps it serves as an example of Kinneavey's Modes of Discourse, which also discusses the history of discourse in Greece/Rome. Yet Kinneavey also mentions that the discourse of persuasion and poetry were dropped from the list writers kept on the forms of discourse (description, classification, evaluation, and narration). I'm going to have to go back and re-read it again, because later it stated that Alexander Bain's group included argumentation, narration, description and exposition, and that argumentation could be either persuasive or scientific. Any ideas folks? Is persuasive part of the Modes of Discourse or not? And if it is, where is it included (description, classification, evaluation or narration)?

On to Phaedrus...
I suppose that in order to understand the homosexual overtones of the work, it is important to understand that the term homosexuality is a post-Freudian concept, and it implies that one's sexual preference defines one's character as well. But in Greece, most men were married to women, but often had their closest emotional bond with other men. Typically, a male-male relationship would exist between an older man and a younger man between the ages of puberty and growing a beard. It is no secret that the activities men most admired - warfare, athletics, philosophy, etc... - were in the realm of men, and the virtue and glory could be shared amongst them in a way that no male-female relationship could.

Why bring it up? Well, the Symposium is full of sexual turbulence and at one point, Alcibiades tells Socrates that only Socrates is good enough to be his lover, and if he gratifies Socrates, then Socrates should help mold Alcibiades into a better person. Socrates wisely states that cheap thrills are no match for deep wisdom. Alcibiades persists, attempting to arouse Socrates under the sheet (literally one sheet), but finds that Socrates has self-control, which he realizes is a virtue (and later, he will see that Socrates can drink extensively and still not be tipsy, and can put up with food shortages better than others - but we, the reader, are never sure if this is accurate or just Plato idolizing his former teacher).

What, you ask, does the Phaedrus have to do with the Symposium? Well, the Phaedrus is closely connected with the Symposium, and may be regarded either as introducing or following it. Together these two Dialogues contain Plato's philosophy on the nature of love. Here love and philosophy become one, with the spiritual and emotional part elevated into the ideal, (and in the Phaedrus shows mankind seeking to recover from a former state of existence). Here the dialogue is a freely flowing conversation between love and rhetoric, the relation of art, love and philosophy - and how they interact with the soul. It is weighty stuff.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates converts the physical offer of love from Phaedrus (if you can consider it an offer - he threatens rape and Socrates flirts in turn) into a higher love (hate to use the word - Platonic). Socrates listens to a summary of the speech given earlier by Lysias, but finds fault with its repetitive nature and lack of proper structure. He attempts his own speech, using the same topic, but here Socrates makes a subtle turn : the speaker is secretly in love with the boy he is speaking to but pretends not to love him to gain his attention. Then he realizes that the speech shows love as less than divine, and recants it, giving a longer second speech where love is madness, but madness is beneficial in four forms (I'll abstain from discussing them here).

The question seems to be if a speaker can be content with what seems to be true, and they come to the conclusion that knowledge is necessary, since the soul can be lead by words. After a discussion of knowledge & art, the subject returns to the value of speaking and writing. Socrates believes that writing is an illegitimate brother of speaking. We return to Phaedrus appearing with the written text of Lysias' speech, which he can not defend. So the rhetorician distrusts his art, and the admirer of oral dialectic feels he must publish the dialogues to defend the oral lessons of his teacher.