| This dissertation argues that Plato's Phaedrus shows that the way things are "shown forth" or manifested has ethical and psychological consequences that necessitate finding a way of using speech that is capable of breaking through common opinion and opening a view to reality. For Plato, this problem originated in the practice of rhetoric. In the character of Phaedrus, rhetoric has eroded his belief in any substance behind the words, and consequently his trust in what cannot be immediately discerned by the senses: ancient myths, gods, the piety and even laws of Athens, and perhaps the soul. His friend Lysias' written speech on "non-love" illustrates how rhetoric may use the confusion and contradictory opinions of its audience to persuade it of what is false. Socrates ironically improves Lysias' speech to show that its attack on erōs entails a dichotomy between erōs and opinion, which subordinates logos, the rhetorician, and reality, to common opinion and desires. But the self-contradiction of "non-love" shows that erōs also underlies opinion, which implies the presence of a higher erōs that seeks to reconcile speech with reality for the sake of action. Socrates' second speech shows that erōs can lead speech to reality because erōs is the fundamental experience of the soul's longing for what is whole and unchanging. This longing is only truly satisfied by using speech as reasoning (logismos) to intellect what really is, which transcends what is manifested to our senses and merely gratifies us. Therefore the highest form of erōs is the life of philosophy, which searches behind such beautiful manifestations. So long as rhetoric cannot find the real causes of the soul's gratification, and how to manifest them in speech, it will never light upon the complete persuasiveness befitting an art, and if rhetoric refuses this task altogether, speech becomes a superficial instrument for disorderly passion. Yet the feasibility of such an art is called into question by Socrates' searching erōs, which, for its own part, cannot supersede the popular efficacy of contemporary rhetoric. Plato's own rhetoric combines philosophical dialogue and superficial gratification in writing in order to address the whole range of erōs, and to inculcate in his readers an ethos of active intellection of what lies behind logos, which is the only way for the nature of things to truly show forth. |
