Phaedrus: Beginning scene

* The next few blogs on the Phaedrus are a school assignment, but are written so that anyone hopefully can enjoy them.*

A few days ago I was meeting a few new people in a way that felt more like an interview than a dialogue. At one point, one of my companions asked, “Are you an outdoorsy person?” I replied, “Not as much, but I don’t mind hiking places now and again.” To which my companion acknowledged, “I greatly enjoy being outside. I would much rather look at what God created and learn from that than what man has made.” As someone who loves looking at beautiful churches and statues and other man-made articles, this comment took me by surprise. I was tempted to be defensive, since I felt she was saying it was better to study God through the natural world than through the beauty of man-made things, and because I did not do the former, I was being subtly criticized.

But when I read the beginning dialogue between Phaedrus and Socrates, I was struck by the same thing. There has been debate over what the Phaedrus is really about, but one of the candidates is the topic of the speeches themselves: love. The descriptions of the setting that begin this dialogue seem to reflect that: love for nature. Which seems strange that it occurs in a platonic dialogue… I mean, isn’t Plato supposed to hate the material world? Yet Socrates remarks about the beauty of the world in which he is. It is notable that he has not often traveled outside the city, if ever. I think for Plato, that means that Socrates is a lover of beauty– and although he recognizes it in the landscape of the country, there is a place in which even more true beauty resides: other people.

The friendship he has for Phaedrus is already evident, and it is no accident that the speech they are to read together is on love. This presentation of their relationship is a foreshadowing of the dialogue that is about to take place: Socrates is going to discuss love as a physical, erotic thing, and then will find that his “divine sign” is telling him he has blasphemed true love. True love is not the “happily ever after” man and woman presentation that Disney has portrayed. Instead, it is a type of homosexual love in that two males are like minded enough (i.e., rational) to be friends.

There are many platonic themes in the Phaedrus, and the next blog post will deal with the speeches themselves.