Introduction

It is often maintained that Aristotle's practice in such explanatory treatises as the Parts of Animals does not correspond to the theory of science presented in the Posterior Analytics. Two major respects in which this is so, it is held, are (i) the absence in PA of the explicit syllogisms in which, according to APo., the explanations are to be cast, and (ii) the absence in PA of the axiomatic structure of explanation APo. calls for.

Writing of the second point in his little book on Aristotle (1982), Jonathan Barnes explains that

Barnes' formulation makes it clear that he takes the requirement that proper science have an axiomatic structure to mean that it is to be presented in a certain way – with its first principles presented first, and labeled as such, and its deductions following sequentially, ‘in the geometrical manner’. Similarly, the requirement of the full theory of APo. that the deductions be syllogistic in form, Barnes and others take to be a requirement that they be presented in explicit syllogisms. The absence of explicit syllogisms and of an explicit axiomatic structure is the basis of the twofold discrepancy between the APo. theory and the PA practice.

1. In my book, Aristotle's Classification of Animals I tried to show that there is no room at all for any animal taxonomy in the Aristotelian biological project. The various orderings of animals which we find in Aristotle are always relative to the point of view and the immediate objective of the inquiry at hand. Thus Aristotle can at one time order animals according to the growing complexity of their reproductive organs, at another according to the form and disposition of their nutritive organs. Certainly it seems obvious to us that such studies presuppose a distribution of animals into stable and recognized families. That is not how it is for Aristotle, and I tried to present the status, in the biological works, of his various classifications, relative to his different inquiries, none of which is able to claim priority over the others; these are purely empirical procedures, meant to facilitate the work of the biologist, but they remain outside properly epistemic research. I claim that the retrospective projection of the theoretical presuppositions of ‘classical’ natural history onto Aristotelian biology has prevented the best interpreters, and a fortiori the lesser, from grasping the exact functioning of these concepts in that biology. That is true of the notions of genos and eidos and of the relationships which, so to say, follow these two concepts, in particular the relation of analogy.

Two questions

Socrates' conversation with Phaedrus is rich in references to its own setting. As the dialogue opens Phaedrus is about to take the air outside the city walls when he happens upon Socrates, who readily agrees to accompany him in return for an account of his morning's entertainment by the orator Lysias. Their conversation in these opening pages is peripatetic, and much of it is directly concerned with the landscape in which they walk and talk. Where they should sit for Phaedrus to deliver Lysias' speech; what landmarks they pass on the way; and (when they get there) whose shrine they have stumbled upon – such are the questions that exercise them as they stage-manage the speechmaking of the dialogue's first part. Their theatre even has a resident chorus: the ‘chorus (khorōi) of cicadas’ (230c3) whose summery treble Socrates takes note of on arrival. The cicadas' song will be heard to greatest effect later in the dialogue, at the outset of the critique of rhetoric that makes up its second part. Before launching fully into their discussion of rhetoric, Socrates and Phaedrus will break off to consider their physical environment once again, when Socrates – arresting the action, as it were, to let the chorus have its moment – warns Phaedrus against the potentially mesmerising effect of the droning cicadas overhead and tells him a parable in which they are the main characters (see 258e6–259d8).

A change of course

In the pattern of my exegesis so far I have been guided by Plato's sense of drama. He begins both acts of the Phaedrus by fixing the reader's attention on the scenic background, and I have begun my interpretation with an analysis of this topographic ploy. But the time is ripe for emancipation from Plato's script.

I have shown, in a preliminary way, how important to the overall concerns of the dialogue is the effect of sudden downshift from the high rhetorical gear of the speeches on love to the comparatively sedate account of the rhetorical art they exemplify. However, an exegesis of this effect is not obliged to duplicate its jolt on the reader (for all that it cannot wholly escape the expository problems which, I have argued, that jolt brings alive: this we have just seen, in the final section of the previous chapter). Indeed, the order of understanding will be better served if at this point I reverse Plato's order of exposition, and tackle the account of rhetoric in the second part of the dialogue before the love-poetry of the first; for, to anticipate, a grasp of Plato's criticisms of the rhetorical art practised and taught in his society turns out to be an essential step towards our appreciating the following three crucial points about the actual samples of rhetorical art which precede those criticisms. The first concerns the very content of the speeches on love: it will turn out that the character and the message of the fictional speakers of each of those speeches are partly determined by the contrast between the rhetorical and the philosophic approach to the art of speaking.

This is a book about Plato's Phaedrus, nothing more; but that is quite a lot. I shall dispense with a long preamble as to its contents. Rather, my way of orienting readers to Plato's concerns in this dialogue, and to my own in writing about it, will be to take them (in my opening chapter) for an extended tour of the dialogue's scenic beauties. Like all readers of this work, we shall learn something about love, and something about rhetoric, and will consider how the two are connected. In addition, I shall have much to say about Plato's use of myth, his writing of philosophic dialogues, and his mode of psychology – topics which the dialogue strikingly exemplifies.

However, I shall not – or not often – be concerned in this book to map the position of the Phaedrus against the landmarks provided by other dialogues, nor to consider its place in Plato's philosophic development. I am out to achieve something different: to live for a while within the environment of a single dialogue; and not just to survey its acres and mend its stiles, but to sit on the grass and breathe its special atmosphere. By this means I hope to gain a better understanding of the man's philosophy – a better feel for it – at least in so far as it shows through this dialogue; and so to bring back a souvenir for others that they may think worth keeping. But readers must judge this for themselves.

Socrates' preamble

The first thing I wish to note about Socrates' mythic hymn is that it does not begin mythically. Rather, Socrates opens with a catalogue of the benefits historically attributed to madness, in order to controvert a premiss on which the nonlover's argument crucially depends: that madness is simply bad (244a5–8). Socrates, by contrast, has now seen that in certain circumstances madness can achieve beneficial results that would be beyond the reach of sobriety. In particular, he will contend that a philosophic life can best bloom when rooted in what he calls the ‘divine’ madness of love, as opposed to a merely ‘mortal’ self-control (256e3–5). It is to support this contention that he will call upon the resources of myth; but first he enumerates three established examples, in domains other than the erotic, of what he means: the prophetic madness of the Delphic Pythia and the priestesses at Dodona, among others, by whose inspired counsel all Hellas has often regulated its decisions for the better (a madness to be contrasted with the sober interpretation of bird-flight and other signs taken as portents of the future) (244a8–d5); the ‘telestic’ madness of those officiants who, we are told, ritually purified great families in the past of their ancestral crimes and ‘diseases’: what we might call ‘faith-healing’ (244d5–245a1); and the poetic madness of those who are seized by the Muses and truly inspired to glorify the deeds of past heroes – as contrasted with the uninspired hack who thinks technique alone will make a poet of him (245a1–8).

Back to the orators

In the preceding chapter, I began considering Lysias' speech as a sample of rhetoric but ended by looking on Socrates' speeches as a swatch of philosophic rather than rhetorical method, and setting it against the whole cloth of the dialogue rather than of its critique of rhetoric alone. In this I followed in Socrates' footsteps. But this course strikes Phaedrus as beginning to drift. He agrees that Socrates has given a fair account of dialectical method; but is unsure of what has happened to the account of rhetorical method which they originally set out to provide (266c7–9). He is right, in a sense, to bring Socrates up short in this way; for Socrates has apparently digressed from examining the love-speeches purely for their rhetorical qualities in order to dwell on a dialectical technique that his own speeches exemplified, and even that only ‘by chance’ (265c9).

But what Phaedrus misses is, as it were, the drift of Socrates' drifting; for Socrates has been illustrating the fact that whereas the rhetorician has two voices – that of teacher, and that of practitioner – the philosopher has only one. In other words: despite the stylistic disparity of his poetic speeches on love and their subsequent appearance as examples in his sober account of dialectical method, Socrates speaks on both occasions with a view to assessing what is important for the proper conduct of the philosophic life.

The place of beauty

Socrates' declared purpose in telling his eschatological myth, as we have just seen, is to make a place for the passion of love – hence for the contingency of physical beauty – in the philosophic life. But it is important to see that he does not, as it were, clear a space for it on a neglected shelf in philosophy's larder; rather, he portrays the life of philosophic lovers as the fullest realisation – or at the very least as one of the fullest realisations – of the philosophic life in general. Thus we recall that he described the highest of the nine ranks of life as that of ‘a seeker after wisdom or beauty, a follower of the Muses and a lover’ (248d3–4) – a life he subsequently glosses as that of ‘one who has practised philosophy without guile, or combined his love for a boy with the practice of philosophy’ (249a1–2). And at the close of the speech he asserts that his exemplary pair of philosophic lovers have gained a good ‘than which neither human moderation nor divine madness can furnish a greater for mankind’ (256b5–6). In chapter four I indicated that in his palinode, by contrast with the speeches of the non-lovers, Socrates achieves an integrated account of the conflicting impulses in the soul, learning from and harmonising all its voices. That psychic harmony should be the philosophic ideal comes as no surprise to any reader of the Republic; yet all the same, the integration is here achieved within the limits of a purely erotic context.

Theme or epilogue?

In this final chapter I return to the vantage-point of the first and assess the dialogue as a whole, knitting together its various concerns and indicating where and why the seams are meant to show. In my opening chapter I approached this task by considering Socrates' and Phaedrus' attention to their physical environment, which inaugurates both halves of the work, and by this means I oriented the reader towards what was to follow. In this chapter I will look back on the ground traversed through the filter of the critique of writing which is the final topic of their conversation. Apart from its connection with the dialogue as a whole, Socrates' devaluation of the written word in relation to the spoken in the closing pages of the dialogue has special relevance for the entire Platonic corpus, because he finds fault with all forms of written discourse, the philosophic included; therefore, apparently, with Plato's dialogues also (see 276bl–277a5). And this passage of the Phaedrus (together with a stretch of the less securely Platonic Seventh Letter, 341b3–345a1) is the major source for Plato's view on the matter.

We recall that Socrates announced his critique of rhetoric as an investigation into the conditions not only of good speaking but also of good writing (259e1–2). His general recommendations for rhetorical reform would apply to both; but with the main argument of his critique complete he broaches the special characteristics of writing as an additional matter (at 274b6). What Socrates says about writing is less clearly an indictment than a warning of potential danger; he stamps its packing-case not ‘radioactive’ but ‘volatile’ – to be handled with care.

From rhetoric to erotics

In my account of Socrates' critique of rhetoric, I have been at pains to show that the limitations of his arguments are as thematically important to the concerns of the dialogue as what can positively be claimed for them. We have seen – most especially in chapter two – that although Plato can argue the orators into formally adopting dialectical method in order to attain the grasp of truth required for their art, he cannot by discursive argument alone compel their commitment to that structure of goals, and that choice of life, which gives dialectical method its meaning for him. At some point, they must find it in themselves to either follow or reject the example that he sets. Not, however, that Plato is powerless to influence this impulse of attraction or disgust in those whom he would bend towards the philosophic life; rather, he must call upon resources other than those of formal argument, and paint a picture of the alternative choices of life from the full palette of colours at his imaginative disposal.

Now, I would be working against everything I have argued so far if, in turning from the critique of rhetoric to the speeches on love, I were to make it seem that I am about to forsake the black-and-white of philosophy for the technicolor of poetry.