I always like to be surrounded by books and magazines. However, I’m the kind of person who, instead of finishing them, just drools over the fact that there is so much to read and learn from it and therefore whenever I get bored, I switch to another one, slowing down the process of complete any of them. But, my love for them never fades.

Why am I writing this? This is to declare that finally, I have read the whole book that I chose more than 2 months ago: Phaedrus.

Why Phaedrus?

I originally selected this from the Book Fair, which is held every year at Pragati Maidan, Delhi. I’ve heard a lot about Plato. So, I decided to meet him from my first-hand experience. I read the back cover and the topic of conversation was love, or should I be more specific, homoerotic love.

In modern times, when LGBTQ remains a secret affair for fear of facing hate, discrimination, oppression, and objection even in a progressive state, I was drawn to the fact that there was a time when philosophers had not only talked about it but had a discussion about whether ‘love’ is good or bad. It piqued my interest.

The book invited me to a rhetorical time, and I was inside; know their opinion, thought and traditions about much of what has always been a taboo.

Reading Phaedrus – A Review

Phaedrus is the book’s eponymous speaker. Writing about it is as difficult as reading his speeches. He is confusing and liberating at the same time. Although the opening pages explain what’s inside, the real imagination begins to unfold only after immersing yourself in their actual conversation.

On his way for a walk outside the city walls, Phaedrus met Socrates and enticed him to join his company on the pretense of Socrates’ love of speech about speech. He told her that he had just come from listening to Lysias’ discourse on the subject of love, where he argues that a child should offer his favors and services to a non-lover rather than a lover. He then sincerely asks to know his opinion.

Socrates, being Socrates, drew a sketch of the person Phaedrus is and his affection for him. As the process of legitimacy occurs between them, it entails the characteristic behavior of both personalities, giving an impression of how well they know each other. After stripping off his behavior, Phaedrus revealed the speech in his possession and decided to read it under a tree by the Ilissus River.

Speech I: The first speech was from Lysia, where she commented on the madness that love brings with it and forces a man to lose his sanity in the process. A loved one overlooks the lover’s irrational behavior and the damage he can inflict on his life if he does it (which he does). However, when he is done, he comes to his senses and realizes the loss he has caused himself and then blames and curses him over and over again. Also, people are likely to find out about him and soon become the talk of the town, whereas this is not the case when they are not lovers. To avoid chaos and clamor, it is in the beloved’s self-interest to favor the non-lover over the lover.

Interlude: Phaedrus was amazed by Lysias’s speech and believed that he could not improve as the speech is well composed and he had no room to add more. He relied on the wisdom of Socrates, who saw directly the loose formation and gaps, declaring the incompetence of Lysias to add novelty to his speech and give the same meaning with a different flavor. Phaedrus challenged Socrates to compile a better speech, which he sheepishly refused. Seeing his reticent behavior, Phaedrus threatens him, first with force and then with his oath never to participate in a future speech.

Discourse II: Socrates made a revealing revelation that the non-lover is, in fact, the lover of the boy in disguise who did not want to bear the consequences of love and is therefore trying to convince the boy of what he is like. to his benefit please a non-lover than a lover. Thus, killing two birds with one stone. As he went on, he presented a rhetorically correct form of speech, in the process renewing every structure of Lysias’s speech and what he meant by it.

Interlude: Shortly after explaining the non-lover’s point of view, Socrates ends the speech abruptly. He then goes on to tell Phaedrus how he made a mistake in handing it over and desecrated it against the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite. She got carried away without thinking it through, and if it wasn’t for him, she never would have made such a horrible speech. Socrates wanted to leave the place, but he did not because he felt the responsibility to purify the two previous speeches and this time only the truth was told.

Speech III: The speech begins in favor of ‘madness’, severely criticized in the first two speeches as a side effect of love; that ‘Some of our greatest blessings come from madness’ and if it were pure evil then this would not be the case.

He sets out four kinds of madness that led people to convey divine truth or inspire one to music and poetry or purify them from evils and evils. The fourth type of madness is love.

The focus shifted from eros as the central theme in the previous two discourses to myth in the last, where he discussed the Nature of the soul, both human and divine and how the soul gains and loses its wings with reference to the Greek God and Goddesses and mythical creatures.

my analysis

Understanding Phaedrus is a mind-boggling exercise. It seemed simple at first, as their conversation builds and we get to know how well they are aware of each other’s ability and how good they are at reading minds, especially Socrates. It also portrays an image of how close they are, a glimpse of which we find in the way in which Socrates distinguishes a character from Phaedrus and, in return, encourages him to strike up a conversation, respect his declamation and, moreover, did not hesitate to threaten. him to open up on the subject. There is a sense of mutual respect and admiration for each other.

In the first speech, I was able to relate to the reasons Lysia had given against falling in love: irrational nature, blind love, overprotective behavior, losing her sanity, and then smearing the other when they parted ways. Also, the attention that love brings with it in the eyes of society, the moral code and the stigma attached to it. And when in the next, Socrates made an extension of his speech, he began to make more sense. Until this point, everything was clear in my head after going through it many times, when out of nowhere he realized that it was crazy. What madness? There must be a reason, and he had one.

As he moved on to read his redemption speech, he refused to make sense of it. Mainly for two reasons:

1. Now that the shift has passed from eros to mythos, great precision was required to understand the whole business of spirituality from ‘the movement of a soul’ to ‘divine being’ to ‘reincarnation’. Even if you read it again, the basic awareness of the subject it speaks demands to be known beforehand.

2. The talk about love, wisdom, madness, the soul, the declamation: it’s much more philosophical than I expected. Maybe another time!

This book has given me some serious ‘food for thought’ and a message: “Don’t judge a book by its thickness.”