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    The Language of Love: An Interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus
    The Language of Love: An Interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus
    The Language of Love: An Interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus
    Ebook381 pages6 hours

    The Language of Love: An Interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus

    By Stanley Rosen and Martin Black

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    Stanley Rosen completed The Language of Love in the early 1970s, but the manuscript was put aside and only rediscovered in 2013, the year before his death. The Language of Love is an interpretation of the Phaedrus that was meant to follow and complete Rosen’s Symposium commentary. Only two articles have been previously published. Rosen’s frequent references to the central passages and second half of the Phaedrus were more important in pointing up the importance of his absent full interpretation of the dialogue.
         Here Rosen’s argue for the possibility of philosophy or the retrieval of human self-knowledge on the basis of a renewed argument for the partial intelligibility of ordinary experience or, in other words, for the Platonic Ideas. His book on the Symposium was an important contribution to the subsequent sea change in Plato scholarship that returned attention to the dialogue form and to the poetic side of philosophy even in its quarrel with philosophy. That change allowed us search for understanding in the light of the whole, a whole which is otherwise, as Rosen has shown elsewhere, fragmented by the scientism of analytical philosophy or the historicism of “Continental” philosophy.
         The Language of Love represents a missing key to Stanley Rosen’s work and, much more significantly, to the rediscovery of philosophy in our time. The title of the book is not merely a play on words. It points to the incommensurability between the constructed or historical nature of language or culture and the pre-discursive apprehension of things that is necessary if speech is to make sense and be understood, as opposed to being mere nonsense.
         Among many valuable insights along the way, Rosen unites the dialogue in two parts, treating both eros and rhetoric, showing the linkage between eros and writing, as between myth and analysis. He connects the comic attempt to subject eros to diaeresis in the Phaedrus with the attempt to understand non-being as an eidos in the Sophist. In both cases, the inadequacy of a technical understanding of philosophy returns us to the pre-technical world of ordinary experience.
         Rosen’s interpretation is an expression of the Socratic claim that we can’t speak beautifully without knowing the truth and that whatever truth we speak or write is a reflection of the silent invisibility of beauty as the unity of form. However, “Like every good teacher, it does not simply state that link for us to memorize. Instead, we must recollect it.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSt. Augustines Press
    Release dateOct 29, 2021
    ISBN9781587314599
    The Language of Love: An Interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus

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      Book preview

      The Language of Love - Stanley Rosen

      CHAPTER ONE:

      The Non-Lover

      I.

      The first task which confronts the student of the Phaedrus is to account for its relation to the Symposium. Although the famous banquet of Agathon is never explicitly mentioned in the Phaedrus, its ghost is perpetually present, like a half-formed memory that haunts the reader’s imagination. This relation between the two dialogues is reflected in the fact that recollection is not discussed at all in the Symposium, whereas it constitutes an essential if obliquely developed theme in the Phaedrus. It would be no exaggeration to say that one purpose of the Phaedrus is to stimulate us into a recollection of the Symposium which is at the same time a transformation or Aufhebung of the earlier treatment of Eros. The ascent of the erotic psyche, so briefly described by Diotima, becomes now the central theme of a long and beautiful Socratic myth. The key to the difference between these two accounts is the elevation of Eros from the status of daimon to that of god. The ascent as it is alluded to by Diotima must be accomplished by the mortal psyche as a resident of the incarnate or terrestrial dimension of genesis, driven by an ambiguous force which is continuously ceasing to be what it is, and coming to be what it is not. The teaching of the Symposium is a discontinuous account of a discontinuous world, which must be literally re-collected from the higher, more comprehensive viewpoint of the Phaedrus.¹ Diotima provides us with the promise or prophecy of a subsequent unification of human existence which is not fulfilled in the Symposium. As I shall argue, it cannot be fulfilled because there is no divine madness in the Symposium, but only a human madness, which consequently depreciates the quality of human sobriety.

      The importance of the doctrine of recollection in the Phaedrus, as well as the oblique manner in which it is presented there, is already evident in the title of the dialogue. The name and opening scene of the Phaedrus constitute jointly an invitation to return to the beginning of the Symposium. Phaedrus, we remember, is the father of the logos; the dialectical ascent in the Symposium begins dramatically from the fact that he is the beloved of the physician Eryximachus. Eryximachus, himself a moderate drinker, turns the banquet from drinking to a praise of Eros, in response to Phaedrus’ complaint that the god has been neglected by poets and encomiasts. Despite the atmosphere of celebration, excitement, and hybristic self-exaltation, the Symposium begins in a sober mixture of medicine and utilitarianism. This note of sobriety is never absent from the banquet, even during the presence of the drunken Alcibiades, who reveals to us the sober interior of Socrates’ erotic hubris. In fact, one may say that the human sobriety of the Symposium, with the single exception of Socrates, turns all too easily into human madness. The continuous self-transformations of the non-Socratic discourses mirror the nature of Eros itself as described by Diotima. As for Socrates, his nocturnal behavior toward the young Alcibiades would seem to suggest something more than sobriety, or something less than divine madness. As is evident in his exchanges with Diotima, the young Socrates must have been defective in Eros, and apparently this condition continued to mark his relations with beautiful young men. Or perhaps the peculiar Eros of Socrates cannot be made intelligible, does not present itself as itself, under the conditions of the Symposium. However this may be, the sobriety of Socrates would seem to be the erotic peak or fulfillment of the manifestly base sobriety of

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