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a post about the phaedrus

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Greg Gauthier 2022-04-24 16:22:27 +01:00
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content/post/brief-thoughts-on-the-Phaedrus.md
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Why does Socrates spend so much effort defining and describing the soul in so much detail in the Phaedrus? He tells us outright, in the dialogue. It is because no man can gain true knowledge from a speech, if the orator does not himself know how his speech is going to guide the soul to its first memory of the unified reality of beauty, found in the divine realm. Dialectic is the way to wisdom, and dialectic can only be achieved through speech. So, a speech needs to be crafted and delivered in such a way that it both provokes and then satisfies the desire to know beauty (or truth, or goodness).
But Plato takes this a step further. He says writing is a copy of speech. This is in keeping with his theory of Forms. A painting of a chair is, to Plato, a copy or shadow of the chair itself, and so less perfect than the chair. The chair itself is yet another copy. This time, of the ideal Form of Chair, and so, less perfect than the Form. The Form is the divine pattern of the idea. So, the form is the most perfect of the series. The soul is the repository of all of these divine patterns. But the descent from the divine realm causes amnesia. Knowledge is, therefore, the recovery of these hidden memories. The better the recollection, the more divine the life.
But Plato takes this a step further. He says writing is a copy of a speech. Not the speech itself. This is in keeping with his theory of Forms. A painting of a chair is, to Plato, a copy or shadow of the chair itself, and so less perfect than the chair. The chair itself is yet another copy. This time, of the ideal Form of Chair, and so, less perfect than the Form. The Form is the divine pattern of the idea. So, the form is the most perfect of the series. The soul is the repository of all of these divine patterns. But the descent from the divine realm causes amnesia. Knowledge is, therefore, the recovery of these hidden memories. The better the recollection, the more divine the life.
It is likewise the case with writing. Letters are a thin shadow of the dialectic. As such, they cannot lead us to the soul's memory of truth. They can only lead us to a kind of nostalgia about that memory. In the same way, a painting of a chair cannot give us the chair, but only a nostalgia about the chair we once had. This is why Socrates refused to write anything down. He did not want to be the purveyor of pleasant sentiments about truth, but to be a 'midwife' of the truth itself, born to each soul he encountered in dialectic. The point of the pursuit of wisdom is the fullest possible recollection of truth, goodness, and beauty, in themselves. Anything that deceives us into thinking we have achieve the ultimate ends of our true desire is not something to be prized, but rather to be shunned and avoided. Plato lays it all out in an allegory about the Egyptian god Theuth: