Plato's Phaedrus: summary and how to read it

The Phaedrus, by Plato, is the dialogue in which Socrates leaves Athens, speaks against love with his head covered, and then, with his head uncovered, makes the retraction that is the heart of the book. The first half deals with love and beauty, and the second with speech: what makes a discourse lead someone to the truth, and why Plato, in the end, distrusts writing itself. They seem like two books sewn together, and this summary follows the order of the text to show that they are not. It ends with a practical piece of advice on how to read it.

Outside the walls

The scene already begins strangely. Socrates, who hardly ever left Athens, crosses the city walls with a young man named Phaedrus. The two are barefoot, walk with their feet in the stream, the Ilissus, and sit in the shade of a large tree. Socrates himself finds the situation funny: he says the fields and trees do not want to teach him anything, and that the ones who teach are the men of the city (Phaedrus 230d).

Phaedrus carries in his hand a text that delighted him. It is a speech written by Lysias, one of the most famous orators of Athens, and its thesis is provocative: it would be better to yield to someone who does not love us than to someone who does. The lover is jealous, unstable, loses his head. The other is practical, reliable, steady.

It is a very well-written text. And that is exactly where the problem lies that runs through the whole book.

The covered head and the sign that stops

Phaedrus asks Socrates to make a better speech on the same thesis, and Socrates agrees, but he does something curious: he covers his head with his cloak before beginning. He says it is so he can finish quickly and not feel ashamed to look at his friend (237a). And he gives a brilliant speech against love.

When he gets up to leave, something holds him back. It is Socrates' inner sign, the daimonion, which never tells him to do anything and only stops him, and which already has its own article. It appears when Socrates is about to cross the stream (242b). Socrates understands the message: he spoke badly of Eros, and Eros is a god. So he takes the cloak off his head and makes a retraction, the palinode, which he announces with his head bare (243b).

Keep this gesture in mind. The first speech was made with the face hidden, and the true one with the face showing. One speaks to win, the other speaks because it is true.

The madness that comes from the gods

The retraction begins by turning upside down what Lysias had said. His argument was simple: the lover is mad, and so it is better to avoid him. Socrates answers that this would only hold if all madness were an evil. He says the greatest goods come to us through madness, when it is given as a divine gift (244a).

There is, then, a madness that does not drag a man down but lifts him up. There is the prophet's, who speaks what he did not know. There is the madness of the rites that purify. There is the poet's, possessed by the Muses: without it, says Socrates, whoever has only technique makes a poetry that is worth nothing (245a). And there is the highest of all, the lover's.

Notice that Lysias's thesis seemed sensible, the way a calculation is sensible. It protects you from suffering. But it also protects you from rising.

Wings, beauty and the ache that is memory

To explain why love is this madness, Socrates tells the most famous myth of the book: the soul is like a winged chariot, with a charioteer and two horses, one that obeys and one that pulls downward (246a). Our channel has already told this myth in the class "Por que ler Platão?" ("Why Read Plato?"), and what matters here is what comes after.

Before they were born, souls followed the gods across the sky and contemplated the Forms. Then they fell, lost their wings, and forgot. This is recollection, an idea that has its own article in Recollection in Plato: to know is to recognize. And Socrates says something that changes our relation to beauty. Of the things the soul saw up there, justice, temperance and wisdom leave almost no visible trace down here. Beauty leaves one. Only it was granted the privilege of being the most visible and the most lovable (250d).

That is why, when someone sees a truly beautiful face, something physical happens. Socrates describes a shiver, heat, fever. He says the soul is remembering, that the feathers of the wings, which had been dry, begin to sprout again, and that this hurts and delights at once, like teeth coming in (251).

The class reads this passage this way: the nameless tightening you may have felt before a face, a piece of music or a beautiful landscape, as if you were in a place you had never been, is memory. And true love, in this reading, is not the wish to possess that face. It is the wish to return to where it points. That is why the true lover does not drag the beloved down: the two rise together. This passage has its own article, What Plato said about beauty.

Symposium or Phaedrus

Anyone who comes to the Phaedrus after the Symposium recognizes the subject. The Symposium shows, through the voice of Diotima, that love is desire for what is lacking, and that this lack can be a ladder, which begins with love for one face and climbs to Beauty itself, the one that does not grow old and does not end. The summary is in Plato's Symposium: summary and how to read it.

The Phaedrus speaks of the same love, but by another road. Instead of the ladder, wings. Instead of lack, memory: the beauty that makes the soul remember, and love as the madness that sets it on its way. And behind both books stands the same question, which the class puts this way: what moves a soul upward? It is not a choice between one and the other. In the Nous study program, the Phaedrus comes right after the Symposium, and whoever has already climbed the ladder recognizes the question when it returns in another form.

The turn: the book seems to change subject

And then the book seems to change subject. Socrates and Phaedrus begin to discuss what it is to speak well, what makes a speech good, what rhetoric is. Many have found the Phaedrus badly stitched together. It is not, and the key is in a sentence of Socrates: rhetoric is an art of leading souls by means of words (261a).

Leading souls is exactly what beauty did in the first half. Love leads through beauty, speech leads through words, and both can lead toward the truth or toward deception. The rhetoric Socrates criticizes is that of the handbooks of his day, and he sums it up in one line: "These people have found that the probable should be more respected than the true" (Phaedrus 267a). Probable, here, means what seems true to the crowd. It is the word that does not need to know what is just, only what convinces. You know it: it is the one that wins you over in thirty seconds and is gone the next day. Lysias's speech, well written, was exactly that: beauty of form serving a thesis that does not hold up.

And what would the word that truly leads be? Socrates requires three things, in the order of the text. First, that the speaker know the truth about what he speaks of. Then, that he know the soul of the listener, because there are souls of many kinds (271c). And finally, that he adapt the speech to those souls, not to manipulate them, but to lead them to the truth. The method for getting there he calls dialectic, a double movement: gathering what is scattered under a single idea, and then dividing it into its parts, as the good carver cuts the meat along the joints and does not break the bones in the middle (265e). It is not a rule of oratory. It is an ethics of the word: speaking well begins by respecting the form that things have. This half of the book is the subject of Plato's rhetoric: leading souls or only convincing?.

The myth of Theuth and Thamus

Near the end comes the myth that opens the class. The Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of numbers, geometry and letters, presents his arts to King Thamus and says that writing will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory. The king replies that the inventor is not the best judge of his own invention, and that writing will do the opposite: whoever trusts letters will stop exercising memory and will remember from outside, through signs that belong to others, and not from within. "So you have not invented an aid to memory, but only to reminding" (Phaedrus 275a).

Memory is what lives in you. Reminding is the note that tells you from outside. Shortly after, Socrates compares writing to a painting: painted figures look alive, but if you ask them something, they stay gravely silent. Here appears the paradox of the start, of a book written to say that books do not teach. It dissolves when we remember that Plato wrote dialogues, conversations that oblige the reader to take part, to disagree, to answer. His book does not want to be a store of knowledge. It wants to be the start of a conversation. The myth has its own article, The Myth of Theuth: why Plato distrusted writing, and the question of someone who reads a lot and keeps little is in I forget everything I read: what Plato says about it.

Four centuries later: Plato and Paul

The class ends by bringing Plato close to a man who wrote many letters. About four centuries later, Paul writes to the Christians of Corinth and says they are his letter, written on their hearts. It is the Platonic idea of writing on the soul of the one who learns, carried to a place Plato could not reach. The bridge between the two is in You are our letter: Plato, Paul and writing on the soul.

How to read the Phaedrus

The Phaedrus has a difficulty of its own: it seems like two books sewn together, one about love and another about the art of speaking and writing, and many readers drop it at the turn between them. When you get there and feel the subject has changed, hold on to a single question: what leads a soul? With it, the two halves become one.

Do not skip the first speeches, even if they seem like a detour. They are the example of what the book will criticize later. Read the middle part, Socrates' retraction, slowly: it is the heart of the book. And go to the last page, the one almost everyone skips. Before returning to the city, Socrates and Phaedrus offer a prayer to Pan, the god of that place (279b-c), and ask to be beautiful inside, and for what they show outwardly to match what they hold within. It is only a few lines, and they sum up the whole book.

About the edition: the references in parentheses in this article, such as 244a or 275a, are Stephanus numbers, which usually appear in the margins of editions and locate the passage in any translation you have at hand. There are Brazilian editions from several publishing houses, among them those of Companhia das Letras, Editora 34 and UFPA. Choosing among the editions is a matter of price, notes and what you are looking for, and it is worth comparing the same passage in two of them before buying.

To keep

The Phaedrus begins with a beautiful and false speech and ends with a prayer to be beautiful within. In the middle, two forces lift a soul upward, beauty and speech, and both can be counterfeited: beauty as appearance, speech as something that only convinces. And it is a book that, being a book, warns that a book is not enough. The knowledge that counts, for Plato, is what is written inside you, in conversation with the one who teaches you.

Here is the question with which the class ends: of everything we know, how much is already in our heart, and how much is still only in books? In the Nous study program, the next class is the Timaeus, in which Plato asks why there is a world, and not chaos: Plato's Timaeus: summary and how to read it.

Continue: What Plato said about beauty: the shiver is memory · Plato's rhetoric: leading souls or only convincing? · The Myth of Theuth: why Plato distrusted writing · Who was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Source class: Fedro, de Platão