PhaedrusPlato

The Phaedrus begins as a dialogue about love and ends as one about rhetoric, binding the two through the image of the soul's ascent. Socrates and Phaedrus walk outside the walls of Athens, and beside the Ilissus river Socrates delivers two speeches on eros, the second of which contains some of Plato's most extraordinary writing.

The soul, Socrates says, is like a charioteer driving two winged horses, one noble and one base. Before incarnation, souls traveled in the train of the gods and glimpsed the Forms; incarnation is a falling, and eros is the shock of recollection that beauty provokes. When the lover sees a beautiful face, the soul's wings begin to grow back. Love is not madness in the pejorative sense but a divine madness, the best kind of possession, the one that lifts the soul toward what it once knew.

The dialogue's second half turns to rhetoric. Bad rhetoric, of the kind taught by the sophists, flatters and manipulates. Good rhetoric requires knowledge of the truth, understanding of the soul it addresses, and the ability to divide and collect kinds through dialectic. Writing itself comes under suspicion: Socrates tells the myth of Theuth to argue that written words are dead, incapable of answering questions or choosing their audience. Only living speech, planted in a soul that can defend and develop it, deserves the name of philosophy.