Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus begin with a scene of seduction. They introduce, upon the arrival of Socrates, subjects of the seduced and the seducer. If these two dialogues contain in them philosophical truths to be revealed, they reveal themselves by and through the force of seduction, made manifest by the expressions of subjects who are themselves drawn, compelled, and moved by that which seduces. This may seem odd to say of Plato’s philosophical texts, since the power of seduction is more closely associated with the sophistry of rhetoric. Yet truths never reveal themselves easily or innocently. Their veils, lofty and diaphanous, conceal as much as they attract, beckoning to be drawn away. What is concealed is made silent and absent, and the object of seduction lies in the uncovering and in the coming-to-be. This is the motif of seduction as the making-present that I would like to explore in Plato, the bringing-into-being of truth as ἀλήθεια [aletheia], what Heidegger and Derrida would later describe as unconcealment (Anwesen) or presence as presencing (enprésenting). At stake for us here, then, is a certain temporality of becoming-present, of making-actual, which is given form by a force of seduction.
Gorgias and Phaedrus begin precisely by staging an absence for the occasion of a making-present, a presentation of truth, ἀλήθεια: Gorgias, the rhetorician exemplar, in the one, a written script of Lysias’ speech in the other. Both are scarcely present, only intimated by the announcement of their being absent from the immediate scene. Absent persons and hidden objects, whose being outside the order of the audible and the visible becomes the cause of speech, dialogue, and the Platonic text. At the very opening of these texts, then, lurks a certain injunction, a pretext that urges one toward the scene, being moved by a volition, which seems to exceed one’s self, as if it were not one’s own, to speak and be made present. An accounting, then. This Platonic presentation of truth (ἀλήθεια), of beginning by staging an absence that is enjoined to come in to presence: the name of its force of coming-to-be we are calling seduction (in the original sense from the Latin seducere “to direct” but also “to lead away,” “to lure off the straight path”). Seduction, then, conjures and calls forth an Other to whom it owes its being. This debt is expressed in the name of a species of love, whose gerundive sign, philein, and exquisite substantive, philosophia, inspire rhetorical speeches, compel dialectical dialogues, and bring together protagonists and their readers into philosophy, into that space of decision, disclosure, and openings. It is a precarious, promiscuous space—this seductive space of philosophy—which confounds the boundaries between sobriety and madness, reason and unreason, volition and violation.
We spectators are seduced by these beginnings in Plato, these interludes of seduction, which spur the unfolding of discourse of the philosophical kind. It is as if one already finds oneself caught the moment the dialogues begin. Prior to articulation, again, is absence, for the Gorgias and Phaedrus begin with an arrival, of an ambulatory subject becoming-present, and the questioning and accounting of the one in attendance: “Where have you been?” “Where did you come from?” The interpellative force behind these questions goes beyond the space of the dialogue, summoning us as readers as much as Socrates and Phaedrus. Plato beckons and leads, so to stage the scene of seduction, which becomes the condition for the discursive conversation, the Platonic texts at hand. The form of the questions assumes a claim to a presence, a kind of ruse for bringing into being, into performance, seductive subjects situated to circumscribe the threat of their own subversion. Do we not hear also a hint of impatience, for the coming-to-be of what is not yet? The sense of seduction I am trying to capture here is one in which an appeal is made to an Other by means of self-fashioning and the subtle and delicate shifts between presence and absence, truth and untruth, the real and the illusory. (“Where have you been?” “Where did you come from?”). If the space of seduction is also a precarious one, it is so because the boundaries between these domains of reason and reality seem to fall back into one another, into a promiscuous mix, in which the seducer and the seduced seek to define and claim for their own. λόγος [logos], the supposed ideal of reason, which is embodied in the dialogues as Socrates, the paradigm philosopher, is not prior to or excepted from this scene: λόγος/Socrates must engage in the seductive, for its/his being is threatened by that which seduces, and therefore haunted by its/his own desire to seduce. If the essence of man lies in his faculty of discourse—his capacity for producing λόγος—man as animale rationale or ζῶον λόγον ἔχον is not only that being who has the capacity of speech but also the capacity to lead, to persuade, to seduce.
Through a reading of Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, I shall attempt to elaborate on how the philosophical encounter is profoundly a seductive one, and to expound upon the nature and condition of such a seduction. As these dialogues begin with gestures toward the seductive, so they bring together and draw in the conflict between Philosophy and Rhetoric, a conflict demonstrated to be dramatized under the auspices of seduction, and pulled into the centripetal force-field of the seductive. Gorgias and Phaedrus stand out in the Platonic corpus in their lengthy arguments about the differences between philosophy and rhetoric. In these dialogues, a concatenation of theses and contradictions, we have Socrates’ sustained refutation of rhetoric, condemning rhetors for their use of deceit and manipulation, and their appropriation of reason as seduction. In a word, rhetoric is not proper to philosophy precisely because of its impropriety as sophistic seduction.
In Socrates’ indictment, what accumulates, what incurs, is the opprobrium of rhetoric’s perversion. We are told that rhetoric, unlike philosophy, finds its truths not in essences but in simulacra, in “mere” appearances, and rhetoric’s perversion lies in manipulating the appearances of things so only to make its propositions seductive, or merely appear to be true. Socrates, then, in terms of Plato’s parable of the cave, would repudiate rhetoric for indulging in those flickering shadows, for confounding the sensory and the ideational, and, in the confusion of the two, for exploiting the shadow’s seductive dance. Socrates’ repudiation of rhetoric, we note, doubles as a certification of philosophy. For underlying this double gesture is the limning of the relationship between the two as a rival antagonism, and the divorce of the one from the other, philosophy from rhetoric. These gestures seek to keep philosophy inside of truth and rhetoric outside, so to maintain an order, a system, a programme, in the very suspension and negation of the desire we are naming as seduction. To echo Derrida in his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus,
It is thus necessary to put the outside back in its place. To keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture of ‘logic’ itself, of good ‘sense’ insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that which is, being what it is, the outside is outside and the inside inside. (Derrida, Disseminations, 128).
It would seem then that for Plato, seduction — its surplus, its dissemblance, its temptation — has no place in philosophy.
Yet what emerges from a reading of seduction in Gorgias and Phaedrus is a constant threat of a dis-rupture, an interruption in the philosopher’s effort to expel rhetoric from the provenance of reason that he has claimed for himself, of keeping “the outside out.” Philosophy, to be sure, anticipates this interruption, and in its anticipation, sets in motion a series of arguments about priorities, standards, methods, and ideals. In the story it tells of itself, a projection of an ideal image of philosophy already inscribes itself in the Platonic text. And it is in this inscription of the ideal which becomes the very citability of its own seductive power. What is thus attempted here in my reading of Gorgias and Phaedrus is a distillation of the deep anxieties and obsessions about the pursuit of truth, and the ways in which this dysphoria, this unease, becomes mediated by acts of seduction. I suggest that by reading the encounters between philosophy and rhetoric, the philosopher and the rhetorician, and Socrates and his many interlocutors as many scenes of seduction, they—these seductive encounters—offer the occasion of working through questions of conversion, power, and desire. I would therefore like to ask, How does dialectics—Socrates’ method of questioning, indeed, for him the very art and form of the philosophical conversation (dialexis)—become presented as the exemplary modus operandi of arriving at truth, if not virtue and the good life? To what extent does philosophy carry out its own means of seduction? How does it present itself as a subject and object of seduction? If this is so, how? And why seduction? My reading of Gorgias and Phaedrus is informed by this theme of philosophy’s seduction, so to put into question the subordination of rhetoric to the supremacy of philosophy in the very terms by which it has been denigrated, and to consider the ethical schema implied in Socrates’ model of philosophical discourse and his method of dialectics. In so far as encounters always seem to involve some element of seduction, how should one proceed? How does one, at the moment one encounters the other, account for and be accountable to it, to the one being addressed, to the one who bears witness to and assures the presence of what one speaks?
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But let us first begin outside, outside of Plato, outside of Gorgias and Phaedrus and into Gorgias’ “Encomium to Helen,” so to venture precisely toward that which is kept “outside out.” In this encomium the constellation of seduction, desire, and abduction finds its articulation, in the very address to an other, to an absent other, in the making present a subject in the epideictic form of praise. Who has abducted the other and by means of what seduction? This other is Helen herself, the subject of Gorgias’ encomium, whose beauty and virtue, we are told, are beyond comparison, and therefore always seductive. As “many were the erotic passions she aroused in many men, and her one body brought many bodies full of great ambition for great deeds,” so her name, and its seductive allure in myth and corporal desire, would be the signal inspiration of the Gorgiatic text (§4). Helen’s ignominy and Gorgias’ praise become the pretext for the demonstration and proof of the power of speech: “With my speech I have removed this woman’s ill repute” (§21). His proof exhausts and runs through four possible causes for her departure to Troy and shows in each case—the fate of the gods, compulsion, love, and logos or speech—how Helen is not culpable. By demonstrating the mastery and abduction of Helen by logos, Gorgias exculpates Helen, brings her out of her exiled state of blame, and this exculpation is carried out in the performance of that very power of logos in his speech.
If speech (λόγος) persuaded and deluded her mind, even against this it is not hard to defend her or free her from blame as follows: speech is a powerful master and achieves the most divine feats with the smallest and least evident body. It can stop fear, relieve pain, create joy, and increase pity. (§8)
Gorgias exonerates Helen by depicting her mind and body as being seduced by the “powerful master” of λόγος. If Gorgias imagines λόγος as having a capacity to engender material, physiological effects, almost a kind of psychic rape, then the persuasion of Helen suggests a presence of a force of λόγος that is at once sexual and violent in its arousal and exploitation of desire.
For Gorgias, the relationship between persuasion and compulsion is not only analogous but identical: to persuade is to coerce the mind of the other into agreement; and to be persuaded is to feel compelled to obey in this conformity. By denying the difference between persuasion and compulsion (§12), Gorgias suggests that the Parmenedian division between a truth that needs to be conveyed by means of persuasive force and a truth that is self-evident is untenable; both require some means of persuasion, of seducing the other toward the true. Where Plato assigns the vocation of persuasion and what he sees as its opprobrium of deception exclusively to rhetoric, Gorgias demonstrates how the persuasive and the compulsive, the rational and the emotional, are inextricably mixed with each other, and this is how λόγος still remains, in the first and last instance, a mode of compulsion. Gorgias argument about λόγος and rhetoric, force and persuasion, is precisely the occasion for Plato’s indictment of rhetoric in the Gorgias for whom persuasion’s reception begets the deception of the soul. Yet as Derrida points out, “[i]f a speech could be purely present, unveiled, naked, offered up in person in its truth, without the detours of a signifier foreign to it, if at the limit an undeferred logos were possible, it would not seduce anyone” (Derrida, 71, my emphasis). It would no longer be speech as such. It is in this sense that Gorgias’ consideration of λόγος as a potential cause for Helen’s abduction suggests a presence of seduction, of a general condition of the seductive in the encounter with and address to an other at the moment of speech. Once more, Gorgias draws our attention to the capacity of λόγος to lie and to seduce, of persuasion going inside the soul through the seduction of its speech. The lesson of Gorgias is that there is no λόγος that can be posited outside of itself, no exception or outside of truth that is a priori to the articulation of its proposition. To put it more simply, the seductive situation belongs to both the philosopher and the rhetor.
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So there is a seductive intention that animates, sets in motion, the movement of Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus. In Gorgias, the scene of seduction is announced by the arrival of the philosopher Socrates, and the eventual coming of the sophistic rhetor, Gorgias.
Callicles: Your arrival, Socrates, is the kind they recommend for a war or a battle.
Socrates: Do you imply that, in the proverbial phrase, we are late for a feast?
Callicles: You are indeed, and a very fine feast too. Gorgias has just finished displaying all manner of lovely things to us.
Socrates: It is Chaerephon who is to blame for this, Callicles; he made us linger in the market-place. (447a)
It is strikingly a belated arrival, Socrates’, which has kept those waiting in anticipation. The coming of an event—the eventual realization of an expectation, of “what is coming”—is what defines the temporality of seduction, for what is seduction if not the negation of the abrupt, the prolongation of a promise to come? Seduction is precisely this fascination with postponement. Socrates is late, and he blames Chaerephon for his tardiness, “he made us linger.” A prolongation, then, but of what and why? The explanation is absent.
Also in these first few lines of Gorgias, we have a determination of different styles and settings: a festive occasion on the one, a war-like, combative, bellicostic comportment on the other. The topology has the effect of assigning affective states to the personalities of the duel we bear witness to. For the first words of this Platonic dialogue on rhetoric are πολέμον καἰ μάχής— “war and battle” —and this dramatization casts the rivalry ever more strikingly, with the rhetor as reveler, the philosopher as rebel. Plato’s design works to lead our reaction to the battle between rhetoric and philosophy, with the former demoted to the decadence of idleness and play, and the latter ascended to the level of work and seriousness. And the revelers can only seduce the rebel by offering their master, Gorgias, and the promise, too, of his eventual arrival.
Socrates: Splendid, Callicles, but would he [Gorgias] be willing to enter into conversation with us? I want to ask him what the power of his art consists in and what it is that he professes and teaches. The demonstration can wait for some other, as you say. (447c)
Philosophical conversation first, before rhetorical demonstration. This is Socrates’ temporal inversion, his usurpation of the time of seduction. It is at this point, when Socrates re-frames the discussion from rhetorical display to philosophical discovery, that the Platonic dialogue stages our reading of the “war and battle” of philosophy against rhetoric. The stress is placed on proving the power of the art of oratory, of rhetoric; and Socrates declares dialectic as the arbitrator, the exclusive agent by which arguments offered as proofs for that power are measured. The arbitration set by Socrates accords the method of dialectic an almost consecrated status, able to adjudicate the value of truth behind each proposition. While dialectic in the form of question and answer would seem immediately interpersonal, Socrates conceives his method as ultimately moving beyond the subjective. It is in this sense that the dialectical method becomes consistent with and complementary to the Platonic notion of truth as the radical exterior to human perception and experience. As Socrates admits, his motive is “not in the least personal; it is simply to help the discussion to progress towards its end in a logical sequence and to prevent us from getting into the habit of anticipating one another’s statements because we have a vague suspicion what they are likely to be, instead of allowing you to develop your arguments in your own way from the agreed premises” (454c). Socrates offers his style as the standard model, from which issue a series of prescriptions and priorities on how one should go about the dialectical conversation, a movement of logic from one proven premise to the next, in order to arrive at what Socrates takes as the philosophical discovery of truth.
What I am suggesting here is that dialectic’s accession to the realm of logic implies not only the confirmation of rhetoric’s shortfall that Socrates seeks to prove as its inadequacy to the careful and rigorously sequential development of reason. It also reveals the very disavowal of the means by which Socrates is able to usurp, in his own terms, the status of scientificity for his method of philosophy, dialectic as the science of knowledge. This amounts to a profound impasse in Plato, a position of intellectual analysis he constructs for Socrates that is necessarily contradictory: for while the method of dialectic, as a form of self-examination and one-one-one conversation, is in practice discursive, the conditions under which knowledge is possible are defined as being outside of discourse, located instead in the transcendental realm of the Platonic Idea. We are thus left to conclude that if dialectic needs no proof of its scientificity, of its ultimate self-adequation, it is because Plato’s dialectic acquires for itself the foundational, originary premise of legitimation that it claims exclusively for itself. This justifies Socrates’ claim to Callicles in Gorgias that “I am quite sure that if you agree with me about anything of which I am convinced in my heart, we shall have there the actual truth” (487a). The usurpation of dialectic can be possible only if the conditions of episteme are posited as pre-discursive, as being outside of its own procedures, whereby the contents and formal rules of Socrates’ philosophical method are related to their identity with the essences founded upon the Platonic Idea of the good. As Gadamer notes,
The original motive of the Platonic Idea is the question of the good, which asks, simply what an entity has to be…This determination of the concept of the good is a universal ontological one. With it, everything that is determines itself, uniformly, in terms of what it has to be [...] The true being of everything that exists is the being of the Idea. (Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, 7-9)
The appeal to a universal validity is what makes for the seduction of truth in Socrates’ philosophy. It is what constitutes the ideology of seduction in the philosophical encounter. If philosophy seduces, it does so in its claims of exclusive access to and possession of truth. Philosophy’s seduction draws in that which is different, and in luring, submits that which opposes or resists into judgment, with the consequence of domesticating differences into sameness. We will see this more clearly in Phaedrus, in which the differences between philosophy and rhetoric, personified by the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus, are engaged in a seductive game of tug-and-war toward the conversion of one to the other. The rational process by which philosophy is able to establish the sovereignty of truth involves the reconciliation of difference into a determinable concept adequate to the structure of intelligibility of philosophy. It is this promise of identity which becomes the means of philosophy’s seduction. The metaphysical tradition of Plato entraps difference within a system of representation that is guided by rational reason, which gives difference its denigrated status as error, or what Deleuze describes as the appearance of difference “as accursed…[an] error, sin, or the figure of evil for which there must be expiation” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 29).
By defining the terms of truth under the principle of identity, Plato’s Socrates betrays a kind of bad faith, suggesting that it is in his own method that is the valid way of arriving at truth, expressed in forms like “If you are the same sort of person as myself, I will willingly go on questioning you; otherwise I will stop” (458a) or “Let us go on with the conversation, only if you are of the same mind” (458b). The purported promise of engaging with Socrates in dialectic—namely, the transformation from an initial condition of perplexity and ignorance toward some condition of enlightenment—leads often to the conformity of one to the terms of intelligibility that Socrates himself has defined. For Socrates, the terms of conformity are presupposed and absolute, and the price of non-conformity risks shame, a sign of a sullied state of mind which is culpable. We have Callicles’ frustrated expression of the absolutism of Socrates’ dialectical method that Callicles observes when Socrates traps Polus in self-contradiction: “as a result of an admission, he [Polus] has been entangled by you in his turn and put to silence, because he was ashamed to say what he thought” (482e).
The seduction of difference into the principle of identity underlies the systematic subordination of rhetoric to philosophy. Socrates condemns rhetoric as a mere knack, an artless counterfeit passing as an art with τέχνη [techne]. Within the contests of the arts, Socrates appraises whether or not rhetoric possesses the requirements of τέχνη for it to be qualified as a genuine branch of philosophy.
Socrates: We will discuss in a moment, if it turns out to be relevant, whether this does in fact put the orator on equal terms with the others or not; but first of all let us consider how he stands with regard to right or wrong, honour and dishonour, good and bad … Or is he quite ignorant of the actual nature of good and bad or honour and dishonour or right and wrong, but nevertheless possesses a power of persuasion which enables him, in spite of his ignorance, to appear to the ignorant wiser than those who know? Or must he have knowledge and understanding? (459d)
Socrates’ dialectical procedure suggests a series of conditions for what constitutes τέχνη. Not only self-reflexivity about its nature, but also a knowledge of what is good and bad; not only a distinct set of practices that would differentiate it from other arts, but that this distinction must reconstitute itself as a determinate concept, a reflection of its essence. In his exchange with Gorgias, Socrates gets him to agree that rhetoric conveys beliefs without knowledge, while at the same time allowing him to concede later on that those who practice rhetoric need some basis of knowledge in order for its persuasion to work. Socrates completes his refutation of rhetoric by exploiting the contradiction about knowledge that Gorgias commits, to which Socrates concludes that rhetoric is not an art with τέχνη, for it neither possesses nor conveys knowledge about a subject matter relevant to what is good.
Out of this emerges the image of philosophy as the standard of good life, a moral life that, unlike rhetoric, is guided a notion of what is true and virtuous. What makes rhetoric fallible, and this is the point against which philosophy defines itself, is rhetoric’s questionable relation to truth and justice, which stems from the rhetorician’s inability to perceive the differences between subjective conviction and objective truth, of confusing conventional beliefs for genuine knowledge. As Socrates argues, “The orator need have no knowledge of the truth about things; it is enough for him to have discovered a knack of convincing the ignorant that he knows more than the expert” (459c). In this “war and battle” of philosophy and rhetoric, the very absence of Gorgias upon Socrates’ arrival prefigures not only the game of seduction that ensues under the aegis of Socratic dialectic, but anticipates the conquest of rhetoric, the conversion of its difference as the anti-thesis to philosophy’s identity.
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If the kind of seduction in Gorgias is martial in tone, the seduction in Phaedrus is of a different register . Let us recall how it begins:
Socrates: Phaedrus, my friend! Where have you been? And where are you going?
In the apostrophe to Phaedrus, Socrates addresses him as a friend, counts him as one of his familiar, beloved companions. After the exclamation, follows the interrogative, echoing those we heard in the opening lines of the Gorgias, albeit different in tone and intent. “Where have you been? And where are you going?” Let us now articulate what is implied, barely intimated, in Socrates’ questioning. The first question, in the present perfect tense, functions as an inquiry into the effects of a past state of condition as it concerns the present; it acknowledges the as-yet known, while revealing at the same time a presence of a subtle expectation—“Where have you been?” (“Why are you not here?“). The second question, “And where are you going?”, invites an opening: it gestures toward another futurity, as it confers a moment of decision to the one being addressed, “Where are you going? (Will you go here or there?)” Phaedrus responds,
Phaedrus: I was with Lysias, the son of Cephalus, Socrates, and I am going for a walk outside the city walls because I was with him for a long time, sitting there the whole morning. You see, I’m keeping in mind the advice of our mutual friend Acumenus, who says it’s more refreshing to walk along country roads than city streets. (227a-b)
Phaedrus has been with Lysias, the father of rhetoric, and has taken part in Lysias’ oratorical performance, the memory of which lingers into the present. This lingering is the source of Socrates’ impatience and unease. Here, in the beginning, the time is not made to belong to philosophy but to rhetoric. Socrates’ question, “Where have you been? (Why are you not here?)” thus marks, one can say, Phaedrus’ infidelity to the time of philosophy, insinuating his adulterous tryst to the space of rhetoric. The seeds of seduction can be sensed in the desire of Socrates for a dis-rupture, a transition, of wanting to reclaim the time, the present time, in the name of philosophy: to recapture Phaedrus from Lysias orbit of influence. The first line—“Where have you been? And where are you going?”—seduces in its gesture to the possibility of a rupture, of interruptions of the temporal and spatial. A promise of a new time, a new pathway, once again, to lure us to the seductive encounter between the lover and the beloved, between philosophy and rhetoric, between Socrates and Phaedrus. Because he considers Phaedrus as one of his friends, as the one he would like to call and claim as one of his own, Socrates marks time, the present time, indeed the very opening of the text, for philosophy, for the sake of Phaedrus, for whom the unprofitable use of past time now demands the occasion for renewal, for transformation and conversion. The presence of seduction here involves a desire compelled by proprietary right, of a claim to ownership, for Socrates, perhaps in spite of himself, indeed feels very proprietary and protective about his beloved.
Phaedrus thinks he has spent enough of his time in the city with Lysias, and decides now to venture with Socrates beyond the outskirts of the polis, outside the Athenian city-walls and into the rural countryside. Before their departure, Socrates presses Phaedrus to recount his time with Lysias, to recite to him the speech that he witnessed, in effect, to confess and give an account of what Socrates considers as the illicit affair with rhetoric that transpired inside the walls of the city. Phaedrus, however, dissembles and pretends neither to have the ability to recall from memory nor to have procured from Lysias a written script which he can use as an aid. But Socrates suspects—and he seems to be one step ahead of the game of Phaedrus’ mendacious seduction. Socrates becomes aware of the fact that his beloved is playing coy and lying about not possessing Lysias’ speech in writing. What is withdrawn from the visible, what is kept hidden from him, is what pushes Socrates along, what moves him forward, what compels him to speak. It is jealousy bordering on obsession.
Socrates: First show me what you are holding in your left hand under your cloak, my friend. I strongly suspect you have the speech itself. And if I’m right, you can be sure that, though I love you dearly, I’ll never as long as Lysias himself is present, allow you to practice your own speechmaking on me. Come on, then, show me. (228e)
Phaedrus promises to speak more about Lysias only if Socrates will accompany him to the countryside. Once disclosed, the Lysian speech will become the pretext for this dialogue on love and speeches , and Socrates, if he wants to become privy to the secrets of rhetoric, finds no choice but to follow Phaedrus, to participate in his seduction.
What strikes us about the staging of the dialogue is the heightened sense of a seductive mood, of the quasi-salacious nature of the homoeroticized encounter between the elder philosopher and his beloved youth. In this setting, Socrates’ behavior is indeed strange, his bearing out-of-bounds with the typical Socrates we find in the Gorgias and Plato’s other dialogues. Socrates’ strange, queer behavior is inspired by the setting itself, induced by the change of environment that Phaedrus has seduced him to.
Socrates: I am devoted to learning: landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only people in the city can do that. But you, I think, have found a potion to charm me into leaving. (230e)
It is a magical, exquisite place, filled with the “sweet song of the cicadas’ chorus” (230c), and resplendent with the sensuousness and vigor of the rural wilderness. Shortly after entering the countryside, Socrates becomes possessed by the local nymphs and spirits, and experiences a kind of frenzied poetic fit. Far away from the mundaneness of the polis and free from the moorings of civic political life, Socrates is no longer in his usual dialectical mood. We are far away from the kind of question-and-answer dialogue that Socrates and his interlocutors were engaging in the Gorgias. We are faced instead with a Socrates who revels in lyrics and dithryrambs, and even delivers two rhetorically extravagant speeches himself—“an unusual flow of words,” as Phaedrus says (237c). Socrates’ retreat to the countryside presents a radical transformation of the Athenian figure notorious for his disparaging views of poetry and rhetoric, and his teachings on the abstention from intemperate bodily pleasures.
How does one account for this transformation? Why this new representation of Socrates in the Phaedrus, which is antithetical to the one that Plato has carefully crafted elsewhere? Before finishing his speech about the virtue of the non-lover, Socrates abruptly stops, in medias res, and eventually snaps out of his hypnotic delirium.
Socrates: Didn’t you notice, my friend, that even though I am criticizing the lover, I have passed beyond lyric into epic poetry? What do you suppose will happen to me if I begin to praise his opposite? Don’t you realize that the Nymphs to whom you so cleverly exposed me will take complete possession of me? So I say instead, in a word, that every shortcoming for which we blamed the lover has its contrary advantage, and the non-lover possesses it. Why make a long speech of it? That’s enough about them both. This way my story will meet the end it deserves, and I will cross the river and leave before you make me doing something even worse. (241e)
Socrates realizes that something overcame him, a force has induced him into a trance-like madness, threatening his integrity and losing hold on truth. When Phaedrus urges him to continue his speech, Socrates protests and says that if he continues, the nymphs will take complete possession of him. To continue in this ecstatic madness is to remain passive in his abduction from the realm of reason. Seduction, again. To “seduce” also means “to lead astray” (seducere), “to lure off the straight path,” “to lead off the right track”—as when the elder philosopher says to his beloved, “I followed your lead, and following you I shared your Bacchic frenzy” (234d). Socrates begins to take note of the seductive spirit and intent. Regaining his sense of self, Socrates reconstitutes himself, and begins to take stock of what has just happened. He quickly recants the arguments he had made in his earlier speech about the non-lover being the more sensible partner than the lover. He rectifies because he wants to set himself right, to carve out another path to show as the right way for Phaedrus. It is a different path which he will demonstrate to Phaedrus to be more virtuous than the one just taken. —This is where Socrates has been, and this, now, is where he is going.
Socrates’ transformation thus appears as a double seduction. Just as Phaedrus attempted to seduce him with the mesmerizing power of rhetoric, so Socrates fashions and re-fashions himself in order to offer another way of life, a more desirable and virtuous alternative to the one Phaedrus had led them to. The portrait of an ecstatic, impassioned Socrates becomes a counterpoint to the one he will now begin to portray: a projection of an ideal self, his other self, the self of reason. Socrates’ transformation figures as a prelude, as a model, a Bild, to the specific kind of transformation he wants to see in Phaedrus, so to lead him, to move him—seduce him—to the life of philosophy. It is suggested that Socrates was himself enamored by Phaedrus, captivated not only by his physical beauty and innocence, but also by his wide-eyed curiosity. Phaedrus is impressionable, and the thought that Lysias’ teachings on the art of rhetoric might have beguiled him prompted Socrates to seduce Phaedrus out of Lysias’ rhetorical charm. This dialogue in a way can be read as a contest of love, a competition for the best man, and the tactical gambit for Socrates is the display and performance of rhetorical prowess itself. The rustic episode works then as a foil, as a scene of seduction, to the way of life that Socrates promotes, a way of life guided by truth and reason, not by passion and the irrational. This scene of seduction therefore emplots the desire that sets in motion the spirit of the dialogue: it is a desire of transformation, of conversion, of the recruitment from rhetoric to philosophy of the one whose name this Platonic text signifies.
The majority of the second half of Phaedrus concerns itself to rhetoric, in the manifestation of its power in speech and in writing, and Socrates delivers a series of criticisms for the emulous Phaedrus to absorb and to take as an admonition. What troubles Socrates most is the idea, passed on to Phaedrus from the teachings of rhetoricians, that one does not need an eye for truth to be an effective subject of discourse, that one does not need the responsibility of what is true in carrying out one’s affairs.
Phaedrus: What I have actually heard about this, Socrates, my friend, is that it is not necessary for the intending orator to learn what is really just, but only what will seem just to the crowd who will act as judges. Nor again what is really good or noble, but on what will seem so. For that is what persuasion proceeds from, not truth. (260a)
To disabuse Phaedrus from this misconception, Socrates begins his litany of what is required of rhetoric to justify itself as an art, a practice with τέχνη and sound convictions. Toward his theory of rhetoric, Socrates relates the method of medicine to the method of rhetoric, so to determine the nature of rhetoric’s purpose. The analogy works to identify what justifies the existence of each practice—the restoration of the body in medicine, and the cultivation of the soul in rhetoric. Socrates thus expands the scope of the art of rhetoric to incorporate matters of the soul, elevating its purpose from the mere persuasive intent to the promotion of the good soul. Socrates lists a series of prescriptions for the proper art of rhetoric: it must determine the many kinds of souls there are and the appropriate ways of directing and acting upon each of type; in classifying the types of souls and the types of rhetorical discourse appropriate to them, it must also determine the truths regarding truth and justice.
Socrates: No one will ever possess the art of speaking, to the extent that any human being can, unless he acquires the ability to enumerate the sorts of characters to be found in any audience, to divide everything according to its kinds, and to grasp each single thing firmly by means of one form. And no one can acquire these abilities without great effort—a laborious effort a sensible man will make not in order to speak and act among human beings, but so as to be able to speak and act in a way that pleases the gods as much as possible. (273e).
For Socrates, the art of rhetoric must therefore determine with rigorous exactness the nature of the things it speaks of, and divide and classify their differences as essences into the order of forms. The injunction to determine true essences, divide differences, and classify into an order resembles nothing less than the method of dialectic. In Socrates’ attempt to seduce Phaedrus from rhetoric to philosophy, Socrates offers a model of rhetoric which assumes the form of the philosophical enterprise. The “true” method of rhetoric that Socrates offers becomes almost indistinguishable to the procedures of the dialectic. In this scene of seduction, the differentia specifica of rhetoric becomes reduced to the identity of philosophy.
* * *
Why seduction? Always seduction? We have dwelt upon beginnings, the inaugural moment of the one who speaks, in the dwelling of the opening of narrative. And in our dwelling, we have experienced firsthand the seduction behind the hospitality of the philosophical encounter. We have seen how both dialogues begin in the mode seduction, how the moment of speech, prior to the articulation of truth, prior to the philosophical event, bears in it an address to an other, a seductive address for the other to speak back, to be made present in the very accounting of one’s presence. Seduction names both the event of arrival and the eventual coming of the one expected or the one desired. It anticipates as much as it enjoins the other into conversation. If there is coercion, it is in the obligation to speak, to account for one’s presence, to put an end to absence. If there is a violation, a violence, it is in the call to lose oneself completely in seduction—blindly, as when Socrates covers his head in front of Phaedrus, so to keep himself in the dark, so to disembody his words from himself: this is the Platonic caricature of the rhetorical conceit. Yet in these beginnings, in these scenes of seduction, we take note of a profound intimacy. To say that the philosophical encounter seduces, that it needs to seduce, means that the distance between philosophy and rhetoric is not far. To speak of seduction is to inhabit that uneasy space between philosophy and rhetoric. It is to acknowledge an antinomy, while at the same time coming to comprehend that the space of difference between the one and the other, between philosophy and rhetoric, is not closed, but indeed close—in the most intimate sense.
(An essay submitted for a graduate seminar on Classical Rhetoric led by Prof. Daniel Boyarin, U.C. Berkeley Fall 2008.)
– P.N.
Image: Pinaree Sanpitak, The Mirror, 2009. Courtesy of Tyler Rollins Fine Art (NY)
Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Cooper, John M., Hutchinson, D.S., eds. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Disseminations. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus. Binghamton, NY: Yale University Press, 1991.
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