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PHAEDRUS

                                             January     2003
                                             April   05, 2007
On Plato's "Phaedrus"

Socrates asserts
that what you're         And why do
drawn to in your         standards
lover's beauty,          of beauty      We blind men must
is an echo of the        differ and     be feeling up
divine,                  change?        different organs
                                        of our elephant gods.
  The dialog veers off
  into criticism of
  rhetoric, whose rules
  of form (obsession with
  beauty?)  are deemed
  useless without a core
  of truth.

     So the poetic flair displayed
     by the rhetorician produces a     Socrates makes a speech that
     beauty which is *not* an echo     they agree is beautifully done
     of the divine?                    (inspired), but which he later
                                       claims is full of shit.
     Or are we supposed to take
     this as a delusion?  It is
     not *really* beauty, we
     just think we like it.         No beauty
                                    without truth.
        In which case the
        enthusiasm shown by
        the character Phaedrus
        for the speech by
        Lysias must be                 Are there any other
        discounted as some             sorts of false love?
        sort of false love.
                                       Could it be that a
                                       lover's madness is
                                       sometimes less than
                                       divine?


If there's anything to
take away from Plato,
maybe it's a warning        And maybe that's what Pirsig was
against repeating the       doing, come to think of it.
same old mistakes.
                               He was making the case for
   Absolute standards          the excellence of excellence,
   of beauty?                  the beauty of rhetoric.

   The mind-body                   No truth without beauty.
   dichotomy?

       Beware.
                                            Why did Pirsig
                                            choose "Phaedrus"
                                            as a handle?

                                            Plato's Phaedrus
                                            rapidly dissolves
                                            into an obsequious
                                            yes-man.

                                            Perhaps it's Phaedrus's
                                            fondness for the idea
                                            of a cold, practical lust.

                                               Phaedrus is he who
                                               feigns dispassion but
                                               acts on desire.

                                               PHAEDRUS_OF_EMERSON



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