Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored: Reading Plato’s Phaedrus and Writing the Soul 9780823257461

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Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored

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Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored R e a ding Pl ato’s Ph a edrus a nd W r iting the Soul

J e n n i f e r R . R a pp

F or dh a m U n i v e r s i t y Pr e s s New York 2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14

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First edition

grass of forgetting picked for a rice soup the end of the year —Basho, The Complete Haiku (translated by Jane Reichhold)

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Contents

Preface

1. 2. 3.

ix

Introduction. Replete and Porous: Reading the Phaedrus and Writing the Soul The Teeming Body: Making Images of the Soul through Words The Fluid Body: Madness and Displaced Discourse The Torn Body: Forgotten Logos and Unmoored Ideals Conclusion. Ghost Ribs of Discourse beyond the Phaedrus: Radical and Domesticated Forgetting in Euripides, Zhuangzi, and Aristotle Epilogue: Poetics as First Philosophy

127 159

Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index

165 191 199 201

1 25 61 96

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Preface

We are porous creatures. Our lives are saturated with repletion and incompleteness. Brimming and leakage abound. There is a surfeit of the self, even as much of what flows into a life slips to the margins or becomes obscured from view, often lost without a trace. Sometimes the fugitive surfeit of the self drifts back into our lives, as a rekindled intimacy with who we have been and who we are. Sometimes it remains fugitive, a ghostly vestige imparting knowledge at a distance. My primary interest has been how this lost surfeit of the self creates fissures in self-knowledge that are not empty or vacant, though they are spaces where something has gone missing. What would it mean to build an understanding of the human person from such spaces? Do these spaces suggest a way of understanding the sacred? What is their ethical significance? This book focuses on the first of these questions. Subsequent writing will engage the remaining two queries, informed by the endeavor presented here. The whole of this book is evoked by the title. Reflecting on it, prior to reading the remainder of the text, would engender a more dialogical encounter with what I propose. A few remarks to bear in mind, if you embark on this suggested interruptive reflection: “Ordinary oblivion” is how I have named the spaces in a person described above, those fissures best characterized neither wholly in terms of presence nor wholly in terms of absence. Literally and figuratively,

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remembrance and forgetting have allowed me to think through the character and meaning of these spaces in a life. Between simply being able to remember something and simply having forgotten something is a whole range of possibility. This is the range in which what is most crucial to selfknowledge transpires. It is the abode we come from, even as it is placeless. “Oblivion” indicates how the replete, brimming-over content of a life can become extinguished from the surface even as it may live on, in us, in other ways. “Ordinary” describes the mundane ubiquity of this process and my focus on nontraumatic modes of forgetfulness. “The Self Unmoored” bears two directions of reference. First, in the experiential sense, it gestures toward the often unsettling effects of ordinary oblivions—namely, that they can unmoor the self one takes oneself to be. Second, in the direction of theory, the phrase refers to my claim that our understanding of an individual life would be better were it to relinquish the apparatus of selfhood that has dominated contemporary discourse. Prevalent approaches to selfhood often presume or facilitate the notion that human beings can be regarded in terms of an abiding essence, entity, or structuring capacity. Once discovered and understood, this abiding form could then provide a secure source of identity. I depart from this conception of security and the variations of selfhood with which it can be associated. These variations include (but are not limited to) conceiving selfhood in terms of rational choice and agency, the cultivation of excellence within a model of progress, the maximization of pleasure and the achievement of gratification, and the creation of authentic, indelible expression. “Reading Plato’s Phaedrus and Writing the Soul” refers, most immediately, to my concentration on that text as the source through which I make an anthropology in terms of the soul. My reading of the Phaedrus as a source text recasts our view of Plato by attending to the overlooked complexity of the relationship between remembering and forgetting in the dialogue as well as its somatically rendered expressions of the soul. Plato has often been read as depending on a metaphysical basis for truth, with the soul being a corollary, divinely oriented concept and reality. He has also been characterized as a dualist, with the soul and body regarded as a conjunction of the (unfortunately necessary) material order and the (divinely aspiring) ideal dimensions of the person. I take these characterizations to be wrong. Plato’s understanding of the soul is best construed not in metaphysical or dualist terms, but rather through his entanglement of the soul

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with written form. As such, the subtitle of this volume points beyond my particular, theoretical interests to the larger stakes of his dialogic texts: Soul is written—that is, it is made—through the processes of engagement spurred by particular written forms. With these preliminary remarks in mind, reflect on the title in your own terms. Then, read on, to encounter mine.

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Introduction Replete and Porous Reading the Phaedrus and Writing the Soul Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul? —Theodore Roethke, On Poetry and Craft

Theodore Roethke’s query and the affirmative response it invites create this book’s terrain.1 The heart of this inquiry is a consideration of what it means to perceive the self and whether, following Roethke, through such perception the self becomes something different, a difference to be understood religiously. The idea arising from the whole of this book is that “soul” remains a meaningful word and idea for human life, not in a material or metaphysical sense, but to express those features of human being that emerge in the attempt to perceive the self. Specifically, in trying to perceive the self, there is much that cannot be seen that yet constitutes the particular character of a life. We outstrip our own habits of perception, and this incongruity leads to many forms of experience, knowledge, and emotion, the awareness of which is distinctive to human living. I take “soul” to name—indeed, to be—that dimension of human experience opened up by the juxtaposition between the perceiving self and the limitations of direct perception. To acknowledge this juxtaposition, to encounter its implications, and to pursue the alternate modes of seeing it requires make the self into something different, something for which the language of soul is compelling. This is not just a renaming of the self. It is a claim that the soul is real. Although Roethke evokes the terrain that this book examines, Plato is the figure through whom I build my account. Plato understood the

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Introduction

limitations of direct perception of the self, the necessity for alternate modes of viewing the self, and the transformative effects of those viewing processes. He is, in effect, one of the richest sources to engage Roethke’s query and to answer it affirmatively. He shows how to perceive the self and suggests how—through such perception—the self becomes understood, religiously, to be a soul. Given the connection I am suggesting between Plato, a philosopher, and Roethke, a poet, it is most significant that Plato’s examination of the processes of self-perception and the soul’s burgeoning hinges on the character of written discourse. For Plato, discourse can either obscure self-perception or engender the alternate modes of viewing through which the self becomes seen more rightly. Soul is the self rightly understood. My focus is on the written forms of discourse through which, for Plato, such understanding becomes possible. Plato engaged the kind of possibility Roethke’s words express and did so primarily through a philosophic consideration of the powers and risks of written discourse, powers and risks he enacted within his own chosen forms. The specific form to be examined here is one suggested by Socrates as a mode of argument in the Republic and realized by Plato to greatest effect in the Phaedrus: “Forming an image of the soul through words.”2 This book examines the various ways in which Plato “forms images of the soul through words” in order to effect—not merely represent—the shift from the self to the soul. Before turning to Plato, a brief consideration of another author who formed images of the soul through words in especially potent ways will help illustrate the core conceptual elements of my examination of the Phaedrus. Three poems by Emily Dickinson point to three ideas around which the rest of the book is built: the ordinary oblivion of the self, the disruption and unmooring of the self, and the need for slant modes of viewing the self. Dickinson expresses radically what I take to be present in Plato in a germinal, originary manner. The compressed and stark character of Dickinson’s poems highlights the ideas at issue and serves to focus our interpretive eye on the openings within the Phaedrus to be elaborated in the remaining chapters.

The Ordinary Oblivion of the Self One need not be a Chamber - to be Haunted One need not be a House -

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The Brain has Corridors - surpassing Material Place Far safer, of a midnight meeting External Ghost Than it’s interior confronting That cooler Host Far safer, through an Abbey gallop, The Stones a’chase Than unarmed, one’s a’self encounter In lonesome Place Ourself behind ourself, concealed Should startle most Assassin hid in our Apartment Be Horror’s least The Body - borrows a Revolver He bolts the Door O’erlooking a superior spectre Or More —Emily Dickinson (407/J670)3

Dickinson expresses dramatically and figuratively a very ordinary feature of human living: Much of who we are remains hidden from view, and these obscured aspects of the self can unsettle and disrupt the apparent surface of who we take ourselves to be. “The Brain has Corridors surpassing / Material Place”: The mind has spaces removed from direct view that cannot be simply mapped without remainder in the way one might map a material structure. “Ourself behind ourself, concealed / Should startle most”: The aspects of the self removed from direct view should surprise us, even more than unanticipated incursions from without, given the inner locale of such surprise. The self behind the self is a source for haunting, risk, and danger, where more is at stake than “a midnight meeting / [of] External Ghost.” Unarmed, solitary encounters with the self are the least safe place. And it is a place where “The Brain” and “The Body” must reckon with each other in order to navigate, control, and contain the haunted space of the self. Dickinson uses dramatic and stark forms of poetic expression, not to suggest the extraordinary or unusual nature of the psychological feature at issue, but rather to evoke the pressing significance of an ordinary, common

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Introduction

feature of the human person. Though doing so in her distinctive, innovative forms of expression, Dickinson is giving voice to a long-standing impasse in Western European philosophical and literary traditions regarding how to comprehend the replete and porous nature of the self. Augustine’s formulation of this impasse within his brilliant examination of memory characterizes the philosophical backdrop to Dickinson’s poem. Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of my soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? How can it not contain itself? [How can there be any of itself that is not in itself?]4

Not only does Augustine characterize the philosophical history of the issues present within Dickinson’s poem, he also describes features of the mind that are the locus of investigation within contemporary neuroscience. Indeed, Augustine’s characterization has been pointed to as an apt description of the conundrums faced in trying to understand the character and processes of the brain and how these bear upon the mind-body complex of human beings.5 The neuroscientist David Eagleman turns over Augustine’s query in his own words: “There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.”6 Whether expressed as the “looming chasm” within the human person, as our inability to “grasp all that we are,” or as “ourself behind ourself, concealed,” these authors point to the general idea from which this book sets forth: The human person is characterized by repleteness and porosity. The replete, overabundant character of the human being is implicated and enmeshed with its forms of insufficiency, lacunae, and failure. We are more than we can see or encompass, and yet the plenitude that has become absent from view, that has slipped away, still constitutes who we are. Our porosity consists not only in this slipping away but also in the unexpected returns that also characterize a life, when what has been concealed in corridors arrives to haunt the sense of person to which one has become accustomed. To draw on Dickinson’s imagery, the points of contact and passage between the seen and unseen realms may be likened to doors and corridors, but they are swinging doors on hinges and corridors with permeable walls. “Ourself behind ourself” suggests, through its very linguistic structure, a fluid linkage of terms in which the direction of relationship

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and boundary are nondeterminate. Indeed, Dickinson suggests that confrontation and containment of the specters of the self require force and violence (“Revolver” and “bolts the Door”) given their ghostlike nature. If we consider her work as a whole, we see her awareness of the illusion of such attempts at containment. For Dickinson, poetic force could enact encounters in the corridors of the self only if the reader also braved the radically unhinged doors such viewing requires. In this, she echoes a Platonic orientation to the self. Of course, not all that has slipped from view returns, and in this way too we can take Augustine’s observation that he cannot grasp all that he is. Who we are often lies beyond points of contact, no matter one’s efforts. It is a form of loss or absence, born of the intangible, that yet creates a felt sense of who one is. A primary interest of this book is to suggest an account of the human person that can do justice both to the recovered or returned repleteness of the self and to its irrecoverable, specter-like aspects. I take Plato’s Phaedrus to offer such a possibility and to offer a true picture of who we are. This truth rests in an apprehension of what I call the “ordinary oblivion” of the self. As the previous illustrations have indicated, much of who we are is, ineluctably, forgotten by us or has escaped our notice. The Greek language and roots of forgetting are especially telling in this regard: λήθη (lēthē) means “a forgetting, forgetfulness” or “a place of oblivion” and in the Greek language is related to the verbal form λανθάνω (lanthanō), “to escape notice, to be unknown, unseen, unnoticed.” Th roughout the Phaedrus, Plato plays with—and builds on—the associative connections between forgetting and escaping notice.7 As the word “oblivion” connotes, and as Dickinson’s poem enacts, there is a dramatic dimension of this feature of the human person, insofar as its effects on a life are often not trivial. Yet I add the descriptor “ordinary” to indicate my emphasis throughout on the mundane everydayness of the ways this oblivion works within a life. The effects of oblivion may be extraordinary, but its presence and processes are primarily ordinary, saturating a life in an intimate manner such that change occurs incrementally and deciduously. My emphasis on ordinary—rather than extraordinary—forms of oblivion, as well as the way in which I have chosen to examine this feature of personhood, is significant and needs to be addressed, however briefly. There are several extant interpretive trajectories dealing with forgetting and oblivion from which I am shifting away. In the study of religion, lēthē in

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Introduction

ancient Greek myth, oblivio within the context of mysticism, and the altered states of shamanic and other ritual practices have been deep sources for theoretical and interpretive exploration.8 Forgetting or obscured memory have, of course, been key issues in the psychoanalytic tradition(s) and trauma studies.9 These approaches to forgetting have tended to consider oblivion in its more dramatic forms, whether within the heightened ecstatic or traumatic experience of an individual or within large-scale historical and communal phenomena. Other approaches have focused on forgetting in the constitution of the self, yet with an eye to how this affects the individual person’s relationship to a broad conception of history.10 These approaches draw together the phenomenological aspects of oblivion and extraordinary, large-scale contexts or implications. The classic instance of this approach is found in Nietzsche, whose idea of self-forgetting hinges on the relationship (and its rupture) between immediate, subjective experience and history.11 As described in one of his more dramatic formulations, this rupture becomes possible when the “chasm of oblivion separates quotidian reality from the Dionysiac.”12 I am interested not in oblivion that separates quotidian reality from some other Dionysiac reality, but rather in how oblivion within quotidian reality itself creates distance from, and within, the self.13 I thus use “ordinary oblivion” as a term of art to name my present focus on the surfeit of experience that becomes lost from view in the self, a loss that does not result in vacuous emptiness, but rather creates a transformative locale of knowledge and perspective.14 Close textual attention to the Phaedrus, as framed by the poetic evocations of Dickinson, is the method of viewing I take to be most appropriate to this focus.15

Unmooring the Self Me from Myself - to banish Had I Art Invincible My Fortress Unto All Heart But since Myself - assault Me How have I peace Except by subjugating Consciousness? And since We’re Mutual Monarch How this be

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Except by Abdication Me - of Me -? —Emily Dickinson (709/J642)

If spaces of ordinary oblivion form much of oneself, we become mistakenly fixated in self-understandings when the surface content of the self is taken to be the whole and the occluded aspects of the self remain unencountered. My second conceptual interest in Plato is thus his orientation toward the disruption and unmooring of such falsely fixated selfunderstandings.16 Or, rendered in Dickinson’s language, the self must abdicate its habituated forms of sovereignty over itself when such forms of rule prove to be incongruous with the “mutual monarchy” we are. The disruption and unmooring of stagnant self-understanding requires acknowledging and accessing the ordinary oblivion of the self, even as it also means—the crux, perhaps, of this entire book—neither wholly eradicating such oblivion nor living within the mistaken aspiration of being able to expunge it from a life. This dynamic, tenuous poise between encountering the ordinary oblivion of the self and relinquishing the fantasy that it can be fully mastered, assuaged, or recovered is central to my interpretation of Plato and the account offered in this book generally. Dickinson’s poem emphasizes a torn or conflicted self, in which different dimensions of consciousness are engaged in a kind of power struggle (see, e.g., the language of “assault” and “subjugating”). Indeed, this picture of conflict or struggle is one often attributed to Plato’s conception of the soul, in which the soul’s various aspects are related in terms of compulsion and force. That is, within the starker picture of Dickinson and parts of Plato, the ordinary oblivions of the self can call into question— or outright “assault”—the sovereign surface of the self. As with Dickinson’s poem, one can’t deny that Plato’s depictions of the soul and composure of the philosophic self often suggest a kind of mastery over unruly elements, that harmony or peace arises from suppression.17 Alongside this aspect of the poem, and of Plato’s texts, I want to place and highlight other dimensions of his understanding of the soul.18 Within Dickinson’s poem, in the last stanza’s language of abdication, one of these alternate dimensions is gestured toward. It is the idea that the abdication or relinquishment of mistaken conceptions of self-mastery and sovereignty are formative, crucially so, to the soul. This is not to say that Plato, or Dickinson, is suggesting the replacement of our “mutual

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monarchy” with chaos or anarchic dissolution of the self. Rather, it is to suggest that an unmooring of the hold we take the surface self to have on all aspects of our being is needed for the soul to become fully manifest. The equally important, corollary element of this orientation in Plato’s texts is also alluded to by Dickinson, in her first stanza: “Art” will be necessary for this disruption and unmooring of the self. “Heart” and, in Plato, the dynamics of eros are not sufficient unto themselves. The art of writing— specifically, for Plato, through the entanglement of logos and mythos—is how the relinquishment and remaking of false forms of sovereignty will be effected. This returns us to the “images of the soul made through words” at the core of this book.

Viewing the Soul and Telling Its Truth Slant Tell all the Truth but tell it slant Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —Emily Dickinson (1263/J1129)

Examining how Plato tells slant the story of the soul in a way that “dazzle[s] gradually” is the connecting, structural thread of this book.19 Why must the truth be told “slant”? And why does success in such telling lie “in Circuit”? Why must “Truth . . . dazzle gradually”? Building on the previous two poems and the ideas in Plato that I take them to illustrate, I believe that the truth must be told slant and in circuit owing to the character of the self and the art of writing appropriate for engendering its movement into being a soul. The replete and porous character of the self and the need to unmoor false conceptions of sovereignty in the self mean that direct, literal, and static modes of viewing will not be sufficient. Specifically, the ordinary oblivions of the self, which arise from its replete and porous nature, entail that angled vantage points and dynamic modes of viewing will be needed to see the obscured, fertile lacunae of the self. Similarly, slant and circuitous modes of viewing will be needed to unsettle and unmoor falsely fixated understandings

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of the self’s sovereignty or univocal mastery over itself. Dickinson’s poem weaves together the capacities of seeing (“Too bright,” “dazzle,” “blind”) and telling (“Tell,” “explanation”). For Plato, these capacities and tropes were also interwoven. The ways in which the truth could be seen and could be told were of a piece. One did not take precedence over the other, but rather both were enmeshed processes of philosophic practice.20 This enmeshment is seen most dramatically and emblematically in the Phaedrus within Socrates’ main speech and his mythic narrative of the soul’s journeying in heaven before becoming embodied in an earthly bodily form. In his myth (a Platonic invention) the souls of both gods and mortals traverse a circuit around heaven, drawn forward and upward by the desire to behold the eternal truths abiding just beyond heaven’s edge. The souls of gods are able to sustain such beholding without travail, nourishing themselves and returning back down into heaven without incident. The souls of mortals have a difficult, troubled journey and are only able, at best, to glimpse the heavenly sights before falling toward earth owing to the paucity of nourishment for the wings of their souls. This is the dialogue’s most striking expression of the idea that direct apprehension—a rapt gaze of beholding—was available to, and sufficient for, the gods, but for the souls of mortals it is neither fully available nor sufficient. Indeed, this explicit depiction is bolstered by the very words with which Socrates introduces his mythic tale of the heavenly journeying of souls: Describing the soul’s character directly would be a godlike endeavor; saying what the soul can be likened to is the human task of expression that remains.21 Socrates’ characterization of his mythic, figurative approach to the soul, combined with the actual content of his mythic tale, suggests that indirect modes of apprehending truth and slant forms of truth telling will constitute human philosophic practice. This specific textual moment in the Phaedrus is a compressed statement of Plato’s philosophical approach to the relation between written discourse and the truths of human life. Word-images and other related forms of figurative discourse are the indirect, nongodlike modes of viewing through which the self becomes perceived and through such perceiving, becomes a soul. Plato transposes the extant cultic practice of gazing on sacred sights to the arena of the philosophic apprehension of truth. This transposition cannot be understood apart from the fact that Plato also depicts—and engenders— the theoretic gaze of philosophy through texts saturated with multiply angled modes of viewing.22 My suggestion is that Plato not only recasts

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the ideal of godlikeness in terms of philosophic practice but also that the texts in which he accomplishes this transposition begin, in effect, to unmoor and unmake this very ideal. Plato bolsters the slant viewing methods and modes of expression in the dialogue by also showing that “Success in Circuit lies” when describing the soul and seeking to shape its character. The need for a circuitous account of the soul is owing, in part, to the inseparability of the soul’s character from eros, ostensibly the primary topic of the dialogue. Eros is, fundamentally, a movement. The dynamism of Plato’s discursive strategies and the emblematic circuitous itinerancy of Socrates (the exemplary figure of his texts) parallel this movement, instantiating an analogous effect of movement or force on the reader. As with desire, in which absence spurs generative movement, the dialogue’s forms of withholding, its replete silences and fissures, create dynamic effects. Th is incompletion of desire and, by extension, of the dialogue form, is intertwined in the Phaedrus specifically with the processes of selfknowledge, thereby deepening and further texturing the idea that “Success in Circuit lies.” To illustrate this, consider a pair of moments early in the text. In the opening scene of the dialogue Socrates says to his interlocutor, Phaedrus: “Oh Phaedrus, if I don’t know Phaedrus then I have forgotten myself too. But neither of these is the case” (228a). Socrates’ claim that he has not forgotten himself, that he, in effect, knows himself, is followed soon thereafter with his acknowledgment that he has not yet completed the Delphic task: “I am not yet able—in the way according to the Delphic words—to know myself” (229e). The dialogue traverses the dynamic tension between Socrates’ dual claims: He both has not forgotten himself and does not yet fully know himself. He inhabits a position sustained between forgetfulness and recollection in which neither phenomenon is taken for granted. This equipoise is not a static, domesticated equilibrium but rather a pulsating, dynamic navigation. Socrates exemplifies the processes of self-perception and soul-burgeoning. And these processes are bound up in the character and value of erotic love. The ambivalence toward the written word that is expressed explicitly in the dialogue’s concluding scene is another element that informs the need for telling the truth “in Circuit.” Plato has set the attempt to “tell all the truth” about eros and the soul within a text that concludes with a consideration of whether and how the written word aids or stymies such truth seeking. The dialogue’s concluding note of ambivalence about the

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character and effects of written form cause one to reencounter the text with an eye toward Plato’s own incorporation of this critical view within his chosen discursive forms. The circuitous features of these discursive forms can be regarded as his attempt to avoid the potentially deadening and atrophying effects of writing, as these are expressed in the concluding myth of the Phaedrus. Specifically, near the close of the dialogue, again through a mythic tale of Plato’s invention, Socrates relays an account of the invention of writing. In the mythic account one person regards the invention of writing positively, as a good for human life that will enhance intelligence and human memory. Another regards it as something that will have the opposite effect, leading to the atrophy of human intelligence and memory: “For this [the invention of writing] will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practicing their memory, for those who trust in writing are reminded from outside by foreign marks, not from within, by themselves” (275a). In a famous characterization, in this mythic account, writing is called a pharmakon, a multivalent word that can be rendered as “charm,” “drug,” or “potion.”23 Indeed, this identification of writing as a pharmakon, late in the dialogue, echoes early moments in the text. At the outset of their encounter, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he (Phaedrus) has found a way “to charm” him outside, beyond the walls of the polis (230d). And whereas writing is associated with forgetting or the atrophy of memory in Socrates’ later mythic account, he states early in the dialogue, as has been noted already, that he has not lapsed into forgetfuless about himself or others. These multiple pairings in the dialogue—between the critique of writing and the fact of the written text itself, and between the acknowledged risks of writing and Socrates’ play with such risks— express a selfawareness about the text in its forms of truth telling. In the Phaedrus the reflective and discursive processes of philosophy are thus especially interrelated.24 How one comes to perceive the truth (of eros, of self) and how truth is best told are entwined philosophic endeavors. Within the world of the Phaedrus, Roethke’s query about perceiving the self and his hope for becoming a soul are inseparable from the issue of written form. “Slant” and “in Circuit” written forms are how success in this perception and this becoming are made possible. The written form or discursive approach that this book focuses on initially is made up of the “images of the soul made of words” appearing in Socrates’ main speech of the Phaedrus. They provide the most striking

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Introduction

examples of how Plato attempts to express the replete and porous nature of the soul through both surface content and discursive strategy.25 Specifically, the images in the speech express the soul’s replete and porous character through the depiction and associations of bodily processes. The soul, in effect, becomes somatic in these images. This somatic rendering of the soul parallels Plato’s attempt to approximate “ensouled discourse,” a term coined later in the dialogue to identify the ideal case of logos, of which writing is an image or phantom.26 Socrates’ speech and its wordimages can be regarded as the bodily form of discourse through which Plato communicates ensouled logos. This entanglement between soul and body at the level of the surface content of the images and between ensouled logos and written text at the theoretical level overarching the whole dialogue highlights the simultaneously descriptive and performative dimensions of the text. The replete and porous soul is expressed through a replete and porous act of writing. In both cases, irruptive forces from without the soul (and the reader) and eruptive effects from within the soul (and the reader) become intermingled to the point of blurring any conventional categorization of externality and internality. Through an examination of Plato’s representations of porosity and surfeit in the soul and his instantiation of these in the dialogue form we can regard the soul not as something to be viewed or discovered, but as something that emerges amid the processes of perception when the self begins to see rightly. Plato does not just depict something called “the soul” that then becomes identified within the self, but rather he attempts to engage the reader in transformative practices of viewing. In this respect, it is more accurate to say that the reader becomes the soul she is seeking to see, rather than to say she views a soul she already has.

Dazzling Gr adually and Ensouled Discourse What then of the remainder of Dickinson’s poem and the idea that the truth must dazzle gradually? After the opening two lines of the poem, the next four lines can be read as suggesting that the truth must be told slant and in circuit because of deficiencies or a lack of maturation on the part of the audience: “Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise / As Lightning to the Children eased / With explanation kind.” Indeed, in the case of Plato’s writing, the literary and figurative elements of his works have been explained by some as his attempt to craft

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a form of presentation that could be apprehended by a novice audience. On this line of interpretation the “slant” aspects of his dialogues are regarded more as functional adornments than as central components of his philosophy. To the extent that this line of interpretation is supported by the Dickinson poem, so too with Plato: Given his explicit interest in education and pedagogy, it would be foolish to wholly discount the rationale that his forms of presentation were crafted with an eye to the philosophically novice audience who might be encountering the texts. My account both departs from this interpretive approach and takes its premise even further. On the one hand, regarding the figurative aspects of Plato’s written forms as adornment or literary flourish embossed onto the “real” philosophic argument is insufficient to account for how the texts work. Yet, on the other hand, the crux of my interpretive account of the Phaedrus is that Plato has crafted the text precisely in order to engage the kind of audience that might encounter it. It is just that rather than cast this audience in terms of the philosophically naïve in need of figurative representations, the text is directed toward an audience whose souls, on Plato’s view, have not yet become fully manifest. The “slant” aspects of the text are part of the core philosophic argument, incorporated not to cater to the lesser minds of the novice reader or interlocutor, but to speak to any human with aspirations toward self-perception and other-regard. It is for this reason I emphasize the final two lines of Dickinson’s poem: “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind - .” Circuiting the truth and telling it slant are not evasions of its brilliance—the truth must still somehow “dazzle.” The final two lines of Dickinson’s poem are equivocal, admitting an ambiguity that speaks to Plato’s texts especially well. We can read them as: If the truth doesn’t dazzle gradually, but instead shines on us straightway, we will be blind. But, they can also be read another way: The truth must dazzle gradually, because that is how it dazzles. Th is latter possibility is the sense in which I examine Plato’s texts. How does the Phaedrus “dazzle gradually” in its forms of truth telling? Cues from the text suggest how we might understand Plato’s attempt to mold written form as part of philosophic practice. As previously mentioned, in Plato’s invented mythic tale of the origins of writing, Socrates makes a distinction between living, ensouled discourse and the written word that is its image or phantom. To understand how the Phaedrus “dazzles gradually” we need to consider how ensouled discourse could be

14

Introduction

incorporated into the written word that is its image and how the written word could engender ensouled discourse in the person who is its reader. An opening onto this issue is presented in a pair of images introduced by Socrates in the course of his discussion with Phaedrus about what constitutes good discourse, in particular, good speechmaking. This pair of images arises late in the dialogue, just before Socrates’ tale of the origins of writing and the doubts it introduces about writing’s value. The images are not explicitly connected within his discussion. I take Plato to have set them in such close proximity purposely, in order to let their resonances and tensions implicitly inform the discussion at hand. The resonances and tensions associated with the images provide the structure for this book. The first image arises as Phaedrus and Socrates attempt to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the speeches offered earlier in the dialogue. Socrates offers this imagistic, somatic analogy: “Every speech should be put together like a living animal, with a body of its own, being neither headless nor footless, and having a middle and limbs, composed in a way fitting to each other and to the whole” (264c). The second image appears soon thereafter, where Socrates describes discursive skill as “being able to cut things up by class, along their natural joints, rather than trying to break them in pieces in the manner of an incompetent butcher” (265e). The latter image of the carving butcher is a well-known feature of the dialogue and has become the emblematic illustration of the methods of “division” and “collection” characterizing dialectic.27 My interest is in the tensions between the two somatic analogies—between the integrated, blooded creature and the dissected, dead animal body—and how, when considered against the methods and structure of the rest of the dialogue, these tensions call into question the perceived merits of the dialectical, carving model of discourse. Rather than regard the butcher analogy as exemplary or the two analogies as expressive of a needed complementarity between two discursive approaches, I read the entire dialogue as Plato’s unsettling of the model of discourse suggested by the carving imagery. Teetering dynamism—not domesticated balance—characterizes the text as a whole. Through his unsettling of the carved-animal model and his exploration of the living-creature analogy of logos, Plato shows how ensouled discourse and the written word need not be at odds with each other but can be mutually constitutive. To present this reading of the Phaedrus, each chapter discusses a particular way of regarding the meaning and cogency of Socrates’ “living-animal” analogy of discourse, in contrast with the “carved-body” analogy. For Plato,

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truth-telling discourse is not the analytic parsing of cleanly sliced parts but the pliant molding and differentiation befitting a blooded animal in which “collection” connotes the pulsing ligaments and tissues connecting a body and “division” connotes the organic decay or torn destruction of this flesh. The living-animal analogy presents a compressed image that suggests not so much a basic view of unity but a range of ways to regard coherence. How does the image’s depiction of an integrated, breathing, multilimbed body suggest a way of reading the elements of the dialogue itself? Should the head within the image be granted a special status, indicating perhaps the integrative capacities of reason? Or does the dialogue instantiate the somatic analogy with different emphases, suggesting that each bodily member is equally integral and fluidly interrelated with the others? In chapter 1 I consider the somatic analogy in terms of discourse as a teeming body. Focusing on the porous, eruptive features of the wordimages of the soul within Socrates’ major speech, I examine these slant forms of truth telling as illustrative of the pulsating, potentially disruptive aspects of the “living-animal” model of discourse. I suggest that one implication of the dialogue’s pulsating, disruptive potential is an unraveling of the ideal of godlikeness, an unmaking directly related to how Plato makes images of the soul through words. In chapter 2 I consider the somatic analogy in terms of discourse as a displaced, unfixed, and dissolving body. Examining how the course of the speeches proceeds “in Circuit,” I consider the text’s movements as illustrative of the organic fluidity, decay, and dissolution associated with the somatic analogy. This chapter is the heart of my engagement with the thesis that for Plato the movements of logos and of the soul must be especially grown together while always avoiding fixated binding. Chapter 3 is both an extension and a departure from the previous chapters. It is the primary consideration of the risks and possibilities of ordinary oblivion vis-à-vis the dialogue, a consideration that the preceding chapters lead to and open. In this chapter I extend the somatic analogy to suggest a reading of the dialogue focused on the lacunae and fissures saturating the text that effect a tenuously dynamic engagement with the reader and convey a philosophic point about the soul’s character. This rendering of the somatic analogy considers the bodily image not as a clean carving or technical articulation but as fracture and torn fragmentation. The ambivalent, indeterminate character of forgetting in the dialogue and its special relation to the soul and to writing is key within

16

Introduction

this rendering. Even as Socrates’ mythic tale about writing cautions that it can bring forgetfulness into the soul, Plato incorporates oblivion into the text as motif, concept, and structural feature.28 Discourse as a living animal includes joints, openings, and spaces that risk the animal being torn asunder. So too in a life— openings and spaces of oblivion permeate the self, affecting how the self can be seen and distinguishing the kind of wholeness the soul can, and can’t, have. By incorporating lacunae or moments of oblivion within the text, Plato presses the living-animal model of discourse and its inclusion of the fragilities characterizing flesh-bound, breathing creatures. He incorporates such fragilities figuratively in order to speak to and engage a human soul. Such incorporation entails that his written forms are not without the possibility of failure. In this third, most speculative, chapter I suggest that the very ways in which the dialogue “dazzles gradually” most brilliantly are, at the same time, the ways in which it risks blindness most poetically. The three ways of reading Socrates’ living-animal analogy of discourse trace and elucidate a Platonic understanding of the query posed by Roethke. They show the Phaedrus to be an affirmative response. The chapters’ three elaborations of the living-animal analogy also indicate the kind of study I am offering, as well as the kind of study this is not intended to be. My examination of the Phaedrus is not a technical study of the intellectual, cultural, material, or literary history informing the text’s rich character, though, where pertinent, I do indicate when we need to bear in mind such considerations. Rather, as a work of constructive religious thought and interpretation, I build my reading from the terms and cues of the text itself, in concert with poetic, theoretical suggestions I take to open the text’s meaning, with the aim of offering an account of central facets of human personhood. Thus, two main dimensions of this book intersect in mutually constitutive ways: The rereading of Plato’s Phaedrus could not happen apart from the rereading of ordinary oblivion, and the attempt to look at the lost surfeit of the self could not happen without the close textual attention given to the dialogue.

Opacity, Fr agility, and the Turn from Virtue To take Roethke’s query seriously—and to return to rereading Plato in order to do so—may strike many as anachronistic. Indeed, a reversal of Roethke’s formulation may seem to be more in keeping with modern

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conceptualizations of the human subject: As the concept of soul has become perceived as inadequate or incongruous within modern contexts, the language of selfhood has taken its place.29 My reconsideration of the meaning and cogency of the concept of the soul grows out of an engagement with the impasses reached in contemporary discussions of selfhood. One impasse concerns how to reconcile the ineluctable failures and fragilities of selfperception with conceptions of agency and responsibility that presume the possibility of correct self-knowledge. How can we do justice to the character of selfhood and emend our notions of accountability accordingly? This issue within contemporary ethics and moral philosophy has been highlighted in the work of two seemingly disparate theorists, Bernard Williams and Judith Butler.30 Both use the language of opacity to characterize the impasse of selfhood I have in mind. In the postscript of Williams’s classic study, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, he calls for a departure from the conceptions of the human subject or agent that inform the major alternatives in modern ethical thought and moral philosophy currently available. I hope I have made it clear that the ideal of transparency and the desire that our ethical practice should be able to stand up to reflection do not demand total explicitness, or a reflection that aims to lay everything bare at once. Those demands are based on a misunderstanding of rationality, both personal and political. We must reject any model of personal practical thought according to which all my projects, purposes, and needs should be made, discursively and at once, considerations for me. I must deliberate from what I am. Truthfulness requires trust in that as well, and not the obsessional and doomed drive to eliminate it.31

The shift in emphasis toward deliberating “ from what I am” will require, Williams suggests, a “more substantial individualism.” This fuller conception of individualism is one in which the nontransparent dimensions of persons can be acknowledged and encompassed: “My third optimistic belief is in the continuing possibility of a meaningful individual life, one that does not reject society, and indeed shares its perceptions with other people to a considerable depth, but is enough unlike others, in its opacities and disorder as well as in its reasoned intentions, to make it somebody’s.”32 The ordinary oblivions characterizing a life are one way to understand the opacities that Williams identifies as part of what makes a life somebody’s rather than anyone’s. This recasting of personal practical thought and the identification of opacity in the idea of a meaningful individual life are also seen in the

18

Introduction

work of Judith Butler.33 Though working within very different niches of philosophical thought, Williams and Butler share an interest in acknowledging neglected forms of self-knowledge—in particular, those arising from the gaps and opacities of self-perception—that constitute the individual life and inform the character of communal moral concerns. Butler’s focus is on whether and how the failures of the narrative accountability of the self indicate not a breakdown of ethical life but rather suggest a source for relocating the locus of ethical life. In ways not wholly dissimilar from Williams’s, she is interested in what possibilities emerge when illusory ideals of transparency and seamless self-accountability are relinquished as defining models of moral philosophy. The failures in the account one can give of oneself become for Butler a locale through which to orient ethics. To acknowledge one’s own opacity or that of another does not transform opacity into transparency. To know the limits of acknowledgment is to know even this fact in a limited way; as a result, it is to experience the very limits of knowing. This can, by the way, constitute a disposition of humility and generosity alike: I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others, who are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves.34

Because we are “constituted in partial opacity” to ourselves, self-perception is not a matter of perfectibility, but rather of a commitment to imperfect processes that bear no final resolution. As Butler rightly notes, acknowledgment of this imperfection “does not transform opacity into transparency.” The opacity must be allowed, in some way, to remain, because it is part of the truth of who we are. In this respect, I share with Butler and Williams an interest in the ethical significance and implications that stem from this abiding opacity of the self. I differ in the direction I take from this shared interest. Specifically, I consider whether, from this point, a religious understanding of the self becomes opened and, perhaps, needed. Though this consideration of a religious conception of the self is inseparable from ethics, I have decided it needs to come first, prior to any elaboration of an ethics of opacity. With Butler and Williams, I agree that acknowledgment does not change opacity into transparency, but it can involve a change in how opacity becomes regarded. In a way that departs from Butler and Williams, I suggest that acknowledgment of opacity also changes the person regarding it. Roethke’s sense of the soul is one way to

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characterize this change. Plato offers a fuller way to conceive this characterization. My claim that we are constituted—not merely effaced or diminished— by the ordinary oblivions of our lives is to posit a form of fragility or precariousness as central to distinctively human life. In particular, the ineluctable tenuousness of memory entails a vulnerability in human persons that is not one of simple negation or dissolution but one that bears its own content-rich sense, meaning, and knowledge. How does my attention to this kind of fragility relate to the general interest in contemporary moral philosophy in fragility, vulnerability, and precariousness?35 With particular regard to the work of Martha Nussbaum, whose influential study of fragility and ancient Greek thought, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, was pivotal in opening this trajectory within contemporary moral philosophy, how can my reading of Plato be understood within this broader discussion? These questions become especially relevant when considering the special status Nussbaum accords the Phaedrus within Plato’s corpus, a position that bears on her interpretation of his thought more generally in comparison with that of Aristotle. Although, on the whole, Nussbaum argues that Aristotle is better poised to speak cogently and productively about human fragility than Plato, she identifies the Phaedrus as unique within Plato’s corpus because of its attunement to human particularity and the modes of exposure implicated in such nonrepeatable sources of value. Nussbaum regards the Phaedrus as a recantation, on the part of Plato, of other statements of his views in early and middle period dialogues, with particular respect to his estimation of the role and value of affective human capacities in the apprehension of goodness and truth. For Nussbaum, the distinctiveness and strength of the Phaedrus rests in its comprehension of the irreplaceable goods attending distinctly human— and therefore risky— capacities, rather than suggesting that such humanity should be abstracted from and discarded, in order to fully realize one’s highest state (as she interprets Plato to do in other texts, most notably, in the Republic). Indeed, Nussbaum suggests that the Phaedrus offers a kind of shared ground between Plato and Aristotle, insofar as it evinces a view of the valuably pliant human soul that may be considered as opening a trajectory that Aristotle then developed more fully. Especially germane to the focus of my study is that her interpretive model of recantation in the Phaedrus

20

Introduction

posits a reimagining on Plato’s part of the character and place of poeticized discourse within philosophy, a potentiality Nussbaum documents in Fragility and instantiates in her writing elsewhere.36 Although I agree that the character of the Phaedrus is distinctive, I depart from Nussbaum’s more generally critical assessment of Plato and suggest that he is able to speak about (and to) aspects of human fragility richly and finely across his corpus, in some respects with more potency than Aristotle does, by virtue of the craft particular to his texts. This departure from Nussbaum’s estimation of Plato is informed by the fact that my emphasis in this book is on the transformative potential of Plato’s written forms. Whereas, given the aims of her study in Fragility, Nussbaum differently emphasizes the adjudication of philosophical positions across various Platonic works. A long-standing query in Platonic scholarship has regarded the unity of his thought across the range and texture of his texts. In effect, Nussbaum’s reading of Plato in Fragility offers a sophisticated response to this query because she at once shifts the query’s presumptions—that is, that his thought should be unified— and builds an interpretation indicative of this loss of simple unification, in which integrity of a different sort remains across the texts. My angle of response to the query about Plato’s unity is different. In part this is because my engagement with the Phaedrus is set within a more specific aim to open up an understanding of a particular feature of human life, rather than present an overarching account of Plato’s philosophy. More substantively, this is because I am wary of unifying or integrating Plato’s corpus—in keeping with his own highly disruptive somatic images, I advocate a quite undomesticated understanding of a “corpus” of his writing. There is no simple debate to be won or lost here. In the conclusion I examine the Aristotelian alternative to forgetting in more depth and offer a fuller elaboration of my understanding of the Plato-Aristotle comparison with respect to this form of fragility. In my consideration of this comparison, I indicate the real attractions the Aristotelian alternative offers and suggest that the Aristotelian and Platonic views simply, if not in simple ways, offer different vantage points onto the incursive and irruptive effects of forgetting in a life. On balance, I suggest that Aristotle’s view is one of adaptive responsiveness in which forgetting as an ordinary form of fragility or failure becomes incorporated, and perhaps overwhelmed, on the way to manifesting virtue. By contrast, the Platonic view is one of response amid acknowledgment in which forgetting is not fully incorpo-

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rated or overcome within the manifestation of virtue, but rather allowed to stand as a place from which the soul is drawn back by the presence of something beyond itself. This is not to suggest that virtue has no place whatsoever in the Platonic picture. Of more importance, however, is that the movement of the soul is kindled through other distinctive sources—in particular, written forms. Virtue may follow from such movement, but virtue does not take precedence over it. The Platonic view rightly highlights something important about whether and how we return to reengagement within (and from) the ordinary fragilities and failures of the self. Iris Murdoch’s expression of this reengagement indicates the sense in which my understanding of ordinary oblivion is Platonic in its character and aspirations. It is a task to come to see the world as it is. . . . We act rightly “when the time comes” not out of strength of will but out of the quality of our usual attachments and with the kind of energy and discernment which we have available. And to this the whole activity of our consciousness is relevant.37

Ordinary oblivion is part of “the whole activity of our consciousness” that bears on the quality of our attachments, our powers of discernment, and our capacity for fulfilling the task of seeing the world as it is. The encapsulation of the conclusion’s longer discussion is the following claim: A virtue-oriented conception of the human person cannot encompass the features of ordinary oblivion that I am most keen to attend to. Specifically, the Aristotelian conception of virtue can’t fully appreciate the particular nature of the lacunae in a life—which must remain rather than be transcended— and thus it can’t encompass the ways in which such lacunae contribute to our forms of vision and our fulfillment, pace Murdoch, of the task of seeing. At end, it does not suffice to say that either Plato or Aristotle wholly usurps or undermines the view of the other. It may be possible (and it is, in fact, likely) that both perspectives are needed in a full life, where both imaginative capaciousness and integrative functioning are present. It may be the case that holding both perspectives within a single life in a sustained way is not possible. These are broader questions and stakes I leave open, while recognizing that their respective approaches to ordinary oblivion would be incompatible in at least specific cases in a life. It would behoove us to leave, to some extent, the differences between their vantage points unresolved. In letting them stand alongside each other, with

22

Introduction

generative tensions arising between them, we gain a fuller view of who we are and how to reckon with this view. That is, in illuminating where and how Aristotelian and Platonic orientations to forgetting depart from each other, we may also see where and how tensions and conflicts can arise in one’s own attempts to reckon with the place of oblivion in a life. Navigating the interpretive friction between Plato and Aristotle may indicate how to navigate our own interpretive friction with forgetting. My primary estimation is that Plato and Aristotle were able to see differently because their forms of looking through the written word differed. In this regard, this book shows Plato to be as relevant a source on fragility in the ancient world as any other figure. In particular, as will be explained throughout, his written forms depend on a reader who makes herself vulnerable and subject to risk. Reading his texts, especially the Phaedrus, requires a reader to be unsafe.

The Slippage of the Self and the Religious Turn Many will question the basis and need for a shift from selfhood to the soul, following Roethke and Plato. Why construe this shift religiously? Why not remain with the language of the self, simply deepening or expanding its meaning and possibilities? There are no definitive proofs or logical arguments to be offered as response to these questions. Either my fuller elaboration throughout the book of the ideas presented in this introductory essay will be compelling or it will not. This approach is not merely authorial evasion of difficult questions but has to do with the kind of argument or account that can be given for the issues at hand. An emblematic feature of the Phaedrus may help explain what I mean. Throughout Plato’s writing there is a slippage of terms. Plato shifts between “soul” (ἡ ψυχή) and “man” (ὁ ἄνθρωπος) in ways that suggest they are interchangeable within his development of philosophy.38 “Soul” comes to stand in some way for person. Additionally, in the Phaedrus in particular, there is slippage between Plato’s use of third person masculine singular forms and “soul,” a feminine noun accompanied by the appropriate feminine third person singular forms. Plato’s slippage between more generic denotations of person and the specific language of soul is seen also in the case of differentiating the soul and the embodied soul. At times they appear distinct, at other times their entanglement makes their differentiation moot, such that strictly dualistic renderings of Plato’s view of the world do not best encompass what the texts show he was able to

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imagine. The most pronounced, vibrant examples of this blurring and slippage— between person and soul, and between soul and embodied soul—occur in Socrates’ main speech of the Phaedrus and the word-images of the soul developed therein, a textual feature to be discussed more fully in chapter 1. This slippage in Plato’s writing presents a compressed philosophical point about the status and character of distinctions among kinds, categories, and states, especially with regard to the human person. Plato presents a philosophical picture in which a difference among terms and concepts is posited, even as the delineation of such differences or distinctions is unsettled. A compelling, perplexing feature of the Phaedrus is Plato’s expression of two ideas that can be held together, but not without tension: the ultimately limited, fantastical character of certain distinctions, and the need to portray difference for the sake of understanding.39 The slippage in his use of terminology for person and soul is a specific illustration of this broader philosophical point. His use of nonanalytic discursive forms— such as word-images of the soul—further instantiates this idea. This is not to suggest that Plato’s method is one of sloppy philosophy, a method that can then simply take refuge in claims of its appropriateness to the character of the soul. The philosophy in the Phaedrus is, however, brilliantly untamed, two descriptors that the detailed analysis of the wordimages of the soul will support. It is a philosophy in which the shift from the self to the soul is a meaningful difference, even as there is no final resolution or technical articulation of them as discrete phenomena. To say that such difference is still meaningful is to say that despite the compromised status of analytic distinction within the Phaedrus the text presents a resoundingly affirmative response to the question Roethke poses. The religious turn that Roethke’s query suggests is one that I take the Phaedrus to present in its philosophy and engender in its reader. This turn may be best understood in terms of William James, whose pragmatism is not necessarily incongruous with Platonic elements in his thought.40 Consider James’s explanation of the difference “the religious” makes in his conclusion to The Varieties of Religious Experience. What is this but to say that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light. . . . But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new facts as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have, over and above the altered expressions, a natural constitution different at some point from

24

Introduction that which a materialistic world would have. It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required.41

To suggest that Plato presents a religious turn of the self is to suggest this in a Jamesian sense: The self interpreted religiously is not merely a matter of altered expression, but it involves an elemental remaking in which its constitution has become different. Different events can be expected in it; different conduct must be required. If Socrates is an exemplar, it is surely in this respect. Though James conceived of the religiously changed “natural constitution” in supramaterial terms, we need not go so far or in that direction. On my reading of the Phaedrus, the religiously changed constitution of the self is conceived by Plato in the terms of this-worldly discourse, not otherworldly realities or intervention. Written form can remake the self, and in such remaking, the self becomes a soul. Different events become expected; different conduct becomes required. Plato offers a gesture toward this different conduct and the shift that written form makes possible in an emblematic, compressed moment in the dialogue. It arises in the interlude between Socrates’ rendition of Lysias’s speech and his palinode to eros. Socrates credits his familiar divine sign for stopping him from leaving because he must first purify himself of a mistake he has committed against the gods. But, Socrates then shifts the source of this understanding from the influence of his divine sign to himself: “I am a seer, and, though not a very good one, am like those who are poor at reading and writing—I am good enough only for my own purposes.” This shift to a first-person attribution is then directly followed by a further shift: “Truly, my friend, the soul is seer-like” (Phaedrus 242c). Plato’s writing may be good enough only for his own purposes, but we will come to see that his purposes are quite grand. Not only is he showing how Socrates can shift from his seer-like self to a seer-like soul; he is also asking that the same movement be made by the reader.

Chapter One The Teeming Body Making Images of the Soul through Words Socrates: I think someone said at some point that injustice profits the completely unjust person who is believed to be just. Isn’t that so? Glaucon: It certainly is. Socrates: Now, let’s discuss this with him, since we’ve agreed on the respective powers that injustice and justice have. Glaucon: How? Socrates: By forming an image of the soul through words, so that the person who says this sort of thing will know what he is saying. —Plato, Republic 588c

Socrates: Every speech should be put together like a living animal, with a body of its own, being neither headless nor footless, and having a middle and limbs, composed in a way fitting to each other and to the whole. —Plato, Phaedrus 264c

Socrates’ somatic, living-animal analogy of discourse can be read in terms of its depiction of a living creature with all the associations befitting a blooded, fluidly integrated, fleshy body.1 A dynamic, teeming body is suggested by the animal analogy, and it is in this sense that the structured exuberance of the Phaedrus can be considered. It is a teeming text. Its teeming quality is one way that Plato counterpoises the text with the difficulties of self-perception and the static forms of engagement that writing can condone. The replete character of the text is thus both a way to “tell slant” the truth of the self and to do so “in Circuit.” Socrates’ word-images of the soul within his major speech in the dialogue offer the most potent

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The Teeming Body

examples for elaborating these aspects of the living-animal analogy of discourse.2 In part this is because these word-images also draw on animal features and motifs in order to render the soul figuratively. Their brimming depictions of the teeming nature of animals and organic processes show vibrantly and concretely what the text does more broadly and implicitly throughout. The word-images open to view with distinctive vitality the interrelationships between the character of self-knowledge, the potentialities of discourse, and the burgeoning of the soul. One approach to interpretive commentaries on Plato’s texts is to move through a dialogue sequentially, building an account of its meaning and argument in a linear manner that progresses along with the order of the text.3 Given the distinctive character of the form and content of the Phaedrus, a different angle of approach is needed. As discussed in the introduction, the mythic account of the origins of writing offered by Socrates at the end of the dialogue hedges any straight appraisal of Plato’s own writing. In effect, through Socrates’ closing mythic tale Plato incorporates a clue about how to regard the text itself. The tale is a vantage point both for looking back into the text and for looking forward to the processes of rereading. It is only with the whole in view that any one particular feature can be appreciated, its multidimensional significance fully engaged. From this vantage point I identify the word-images of the soul in Socrates’ main speech as the textual crux of the entire dialogue. They instantiate concretely what is alluded to more abstractly at other points of the dialogue in terms of the potential of written speech to incorporate ensouled logos. The images draw together varied forms of embodiment both explicitly, by depicting different bodily forms as “grown together” (to use Plato’s own words), as well as associatively, by expressing a range of ways in which soul, body, and discourse can grow together—to more generative and less generative effects. The dialogue’s concluding discussion of writing posits the analogy in which discourse is likened to a living animal whose parts should join together organically; the word-images of the soul in Socrates’ major speech offer a potent, microcosmic view of such growth. The images shine forth, throwing into relief the rest of the text. This shining forth of the images parallels their depiction of emergent, eruptive aspects of the soul. Their presence in Socrates’ major speech is a point of discursive rupture with effects that ripple throughout the text as a whole. (That this speech occurs roughly in the middle of the dialogue further enhances this point.) These ripple effects are one way to construe the untamed coherence of the dialogue.

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If the word-images in Socrates’ major speech are the textual crux of the dialogue, then one image in particular is the fulcrum: It is to this point that the whole discourse about the fourth kind of madness has brought us, the one, when, seeing something of beauty here, remembering true beauty, his wings begin to grow, and, with his feathers ruffled in anticipation he desires to fly but cannot; like a bird he looks upward, and taking no care of things below, he is accused of being mad. (Phaedrus 249d)

The image appears at the apex of Socrates’ main speech as an emblem of his praiseful reimagining of the madness of eros, set in contrast to prior points of the dialogue in which madness and erotic involvement in the world have been devalued and misunderstood. Building a reading of this fulcrum image will afford an initial view onto the textual bases for my broader claims about the relations between soul, body, and written form in the dialogue. This pivotal image also affords a view onto the unresolved relation between recollection and forgetting in the Phaedrus, with special regard to the mixed dynamics of these forces in the soul and the role that written form plays in navigating their movements. The image of the madly inspired lover, whose soul is burgeoning anticipatorily, with feather-ruffled wings, has often been characterized as an endorsement of  the philosophic soul’s obliviousness to the things of the world as it rapturously remembers divinely true beauty.4 I suggest, instead, a focus on the hovering, tenuous equipoise of the avian soul that the passage can also evoke. The avian soul is poised between the movement of departure and the movement of nonperfectible aspiration, a poise that can be teetering or gracefully buoyant, but, regardless, it is marked by a dislocating dynamism. Thus, I have in mind not a comportment of placid ease and composure, as the word “poise” may connote for some. When I use the term, I use it with the intended emphasis on the connotations of hovering, dynamic suspension, and a birdlike, anticipatory stance from which responsiveness takes flight. This line of evocation from the image is expressive of the poise most appropriate for engaging ensouled discourse and the written, animal-like logos that is its manifestation. Socrates figures this position; a reader is being (re)formed to inhabit it on her own terms. The academic interpreter is not wholly freed from these concerns. Though reflecting ensouled discourse may not be the domain or task of the modern interpreter, she must still reckon with how best to do justice to the character of Plato’s text. A difficulty in framing Socrates’ mythic narrative interpretively is that its teeming qualities can vex the analytically poised

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exegete. This effect is due not solely to the limitations or failures of the interpreter, but is because Plato has crafted the text in ways to deliberately unsettle a too-sure-footed reader. My presentational strategy is thus to highlight particular textual elements while standing back and looking onto the forest as whole, so to speak, to offer points of consideration from which a reader can then read the text actively rather than passively, striking her own manner of avian poise. Because the text is meant to throw the reader off-balance, interpretive frames for Plato’s word-images need to reflect— or, at least, not unduly constrain— how they can’t be fully pinned down. With this in mind, let’s visit Plato’s menagerie of wordimages in order to understand Socrates’ avian poise.

The Platonic Menagerie To know how to look onto the image of the hovering, avian soul that I have identified as a fulcrum of the text, we need first to consider how Plato creates a way of being able to see it through the combined effects of other moments in the text. I suggest this is best done by moving through a progressively more focused series of lines of sight upon the text. First, we recall the most relevant conceptual gems that arise in the dialogue’s concluding discussion of writing and that must inform any view of earlier sections of the text, some of which have already been introduced. Second, we bear in mind the immediate context of Socrates’ main speech in the dialogue, vis-à-vis the speeches that precede his mythic rendering of the soul’s journeys in heaven, to earth, and in love. Third, we consider two key images that fall outside the main speech but that act as specters over the entire dialogue, especially for the course of Socrates’ main speech. We then can draw our gaze into the word-images of the soul within Socrates’ primary speech, tracking the vibrantly hybrid details of the core members of Plato’s menagerie. Finally, we return to the avian image of the soul introduced above as the pivotal moment of the dialogue, able to see it anew. This proposed route of viewing will appear to work in directions opposite to those suggested by my claim that the pivotal image of the avian soul is a kind of condensed, eruptive center of the work, with effects that ripple out and saturate the text. I am saying, in effect, that in order to appreciate this interpretation of the avian image of the soul we need to work backward toward it. In the manner of an off-kilter set of progres-

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sively (and permeably) layered Russian dolls, where one moves from largest layer to smallest kernel, so too must we pan out to regard the widest conceptual arcs across the text and then work our way into the rich compression of its details that inform the structure of the whole. It is thus crucial to note that this progression of viewing is made with presentational purposes in mind for readers both less and more familiar with the Phaedrus. My initial point about the compressed potency of the avian image of the soul—that is, that it is a pivotal moment ruffling the text in multiple directions—means that no one order of reading the text is sufficient unto itself. The dialogue is intended to forge a limber reader, for whom unidirectional and one-dimensional orientations to the text are no longer compelling. The direction taken here is, necessarily, neither exhaustive nor definitive, yet I do take it to gesture to something actual, true, and important about the text, in a manner befitting the dialogue’s self-consciousness about the potentially deadening effects of writing. To begin, let’s recall the philosophic cues that are dropped into the text near its conclusion, with the effect of making the ending the real beginning of the dialogue. As already noted, the grown-together aspect of the living-animal analogy of discourse parallels the grown-together features to be seen in the word-images of the soul. As discussed in the introduction, the ambiguous status of writing, with regard to its capacity to enliven the mind or bring forgetfulness into the soul, cues us to look for how Plato plays with the risks and potentialities of this ambiguity. For the specific aims of this chapter, the issue to be especially highlighted from the dialogue’s late discussion of discourse is that of “ensouled logos” and the question of how it comes to be manifest through the written word that is its “image” or “phantom.”5 What is the relationship between ensouled logos and written form, and how does it correspond with the relationship between the soul and bodily form? The entanglement of soul and bodily forms in Plato’s word-images—rather than a clean division between the two—parallels the complex enmeshment of ensouled logos and written form aimed for in Plato’s texts. With these conceptual stakes constituting the backdrop (and foreground) of the text more generally, let’s briefly contextualize the placement of Socrates’ main speech, in which the most luxurious word-images appear, with respect to the prior speeches offered in the encounter between Phaedrus and Socrates. What I have been identifying as Socrates’ “main” or “major” speech is the palinode to Eros he offers beginning at

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244a. A palinode is a genre of speech in which a retraction or recantation of a former position is offered publicly. Quite literally, it means “once again song,” and Socrates recounts its origins in the story of Stesichorus, the lyric poet who was blinded for libeling Helen and regained his sight only after he composed a lyric in which he recanted his views. What does Socrates need to recant? For those unfamiliar with the dialogue, the encounter between Phaedrus and Socrates has developed through a series of speeches, in which Phaedrus has offered his rendition of a speech he heard delivered by Lysias (a professional speech writer), and Socrates, in turn, has delivered his version of the Lysian position. In both renditions of the Lysian view, the central claim is that it is better to take a lover who is not in love with you, rather than a lover who is, owing to the lack of sanity characterizing love and the bad consequences of such a lack. Socrates must set aright the two entwined mistakes: the mistaken position that a nonimpassioned lover is better to be in a relationship with and its corollary presumption that erotic love entails a loss of reasoned control that is detrimental to all involved. Both in their apparent content and the context of their delivery, these earlier speeches raise the issue of the stakes involved in receiving knowledge from sources outside one’s own powers. They bear noting because the ambivalent estimation of writing expressed in the dialogue’s closing discussion rests in a related concern: Written form can engender a position of passive receptivity in which one becomes forgetful of— oblivious to—the soul’s participatory role in having genuine knowledge. In the words of Socrates’ mythic account of writing’s genesis: “Through reliance on writing they [the souls who have learned to write] are reminded from outside by alien marks, not from within, themselves by themselves.” 6 This concern presented late in the dialogue is echoed by the content of the first speeches and the sources to which they are attributed. The first speeches address the lover-beloved relationship with specific attention paid to what is being bestowed in such relationships (by the lover) and what is able to be received (by the beloved). And these first speeches are voiced in a way that highlights the dialogue’s (underlying and overarching) concern about source and reception. Phaedrus is presenting his version of a speech he claims to have heard delivered initially by Lysias, whereas Socrates then delivers his own rendition of Lysias’s viewpoint, based on Phaedrus’s retelling. This setup creates the effect of displacing and rendering ambiguous the question of the actual source of the speeches.

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Who, at end, is the speech giver, and who is its receiver? The reader is put on alert to not rest easy in her own reception of the dialogue. Added to all of this texturing is the dynamic between Phaedrus and Socrates—Plato surely intends for the lover-beloved dynamic depicted in the first speeches to be playing off of the dynamic between Socrates and Phaedrus (and vice versa). With Socrates as the elder figure (the lover position) and Phaedrus as the younger man (the beloved position) both the playful repartee and the starker dynamics of the power differential between them become especially relevant.7 The heart of this differential concerns what it means to give oneself over to a discourse not wholly of one’s own making and the risks involved in such an engagement, especially when others occupy positions from which such an engagement can be manipulated to both educative and destructive ends. Phaedrus is clearly shown to be someone who has too quickly and mindlessly given himself over to Lysias. Whether he will do the same with Socrates— and whether Socrates will navigate the situation differently than Lysias did— remains an open question as their interaction develops. By placing the reader in a position to track this development and its stakes vis-à-vis the Phaedrus-Socrates pairing, Plato is poising her to track her own position vis-à-vis the text and his authorial role in its making. Plato’s sobering depiction of the potential dark side of this navigation (253d–256), to be discussed here and in later chapters, renders his view of discourse and its stakes an honest, de-romanticized one. As Socrates transitions from his rendition of the Lysian position against love to his palinode in praise of love, two well-known moments arise that further elaborate and fortify the concern with source and reception in the dialogue. The first moment I noted at the close of my introduction, wherein Socrates acknowledges the appearance of his divine sign (daimonion) as having brought him up short with regard to the speech against love he has offered. The interruptive effect of the visitation of his divine sign is immediately transposed to the seer-like capacities of his own soul as a disruptive source for the apprehension of true knowledge in the wake of mistaken ideas. That is, through this transposition Plato disabuses us of any literal, or strictly metaphysical, renderings of Socrates’ divine sign as a wholly externalized origin of knowing. In so doing, he also unsettles any neat division between “interior” and “exterior” sources of understanding, a blurring that is also emblematic of the relationship between ensouled logos and written word and indicative of

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the distinctive challenges and risks of human engagements with communicated knowledge. The daimonion episode is, in effect, an interjected lesson in interpretation with regard to the “human” and “divine” comparative details of the dialogue that become more pronounced as Socrates delivers his palinode. The second, related moment to note is when, as he is about to deliver his palinode to love, Socrates uncovers his cloak-covered head, to bare himself and his speech without shame. Socrates is thus exposed, poised to voice his new ode to love from the soul as the source of this retelling. In this moment, Plato has personified a state in which exposed receptivity and activated or accessed interior sources have become drawn together, at the same time, within the single figure of Socrates. It is an exemplary state. It does not merely preface the delivery of the palinode; it makes the delivery of the kind of speech constituting the palinode possible. And it raises the immediate question: Through what melding of exposed receptivity and attunement to interior resources are we to receive and regard the speech Socrates gives voice to, as well as the various word-images of the soul arising within it? Two images that appear outside the palinode suggest how to begin reckoning with this question. These first images can also serve as an introduction to Plato’s menagerie. Beasts and Insects As I was saying just now, I contemplate not these things [the literal truth or reality of common myths], but myself, whether I am a beast [θηρίον] more tangled and raging than Typhon, or a tamer and simpler creature [ζῷον] partaking in a divine and non-typhonic nature. (Plato, Phaedrus 230a) It seems to me that the cicadas are looking down upon our heads as they sing and talk with one another in the heat. (Plato, Phaedrus 258e–259a)

The Typhon and the cicadas are haunting emblems in the dialogue of how excessiveness and porous hybridity with particular regard to communicative forms can take monstrous or alien forms. In each case, bodily form and linguistic form grow together or are especially enmeshed. The Typhon evokes an embodied form in which a surfeit and hybridity of voices are particularly characterized by a kind of unboundedness, or a flagrant violation of boundaries. The cicadas evoke an embodied form in which surfeit and hybridity are particularly characterized by a transmutation or deformation from one kind of being into another. Both high-

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light the dialogue’s recurring concern with receptivity and inwardly attuned control in the midst of contesting modes of expression and transformative discursive forms. Let’s begin with the cicadas, as they hover literally over the scene of Socrates’ and Phaedrus’s encounter as well as figuratively over the dialogue as a whole. Socrates comments on their presence at the opening of his encounter with Phaedrus before they begin giving speeches, and then he returns to notice their presence right after having delivered his palinode to Eros and before they embark on the subject of what constitutes good speech making and writing.8 The cicadas can be considered specters of the dialogue, insofar as they represent beings who went awry with forms of discourse and, on account of this, were then moved into a nonhuman form of embodiment with a very constrained, one-dimensional mode of language. They offer the most potent figuration in the dialogue of the connections between bodily form and expressive, linguistic form. In Plato’s invented myth about the cicadas’ origins, Socrates describes the cicadas as having once been men who became so entranced with the song of the Muses that they forgot to eat and drink and eventually “died without realizing it” [or until “it escaped their notice that they died”].9 These men were then moved into the bodily form of the cicada so that they could continue to live oblivious to food and drink, and are left with the task of spying on passersby and reporting back to the Muses, informing them about which people honor each Muse. They are reduced to being voyeurs that can merely look onto the world and report back what they see. They are, in effect, removed from full modes of vision and have been reduced to inhabiting one genre. The cicadas stand over and haunt a dialogue that can be regarded as Plato’s attempt to incorporate, and respond to, the critique of written form that it explicitly includes. In a compressed way the cicadas evoke the dialogue’s later concern with whether forms of discourse, writing in par ticu lar, engender forgetfulness—rather than memory—in the soul. More specifically, they express, in mythic terms, an entanglement between bodily inhabitation and the inhabitation of forms of language. They are humans who have been moved into nonhuman bodies, transformed into another kind of creature, and can communicate only through a single kind of song. The cicadas are phantom reminders of Socrates’ position in the dialogue and the reader’s relationship with the text. Socrates signals as much in his transition to the palinode when he likens his

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position to that of Stesichorus, whom he identifies as a follower of the Muses (243a). If the bodily and discursive transmutations and limitations of the cicadas are a cautionary tale, then we are left to forge a different relationship to voiced (and heard) speech. Ensouled logos, words that are its phantom image, and bodily form will need to grow together in some way, lest they become dissociated and remade in alien ways like the cicadas. As with the cicadas, the Typhon arises very early in the dialogue and serves as another evocation of the risks and realities posed by the soul’s ineluctable relationships with language and bodily form. Socrates mentions the Typhon in his opening exchange with Phaedrus, after Phaedrus has asked him whether or not he believes in the myth of Boreas, a myth associated with the pastoral, streamside locale of their meeting. In his response, Socrates says that so long as he is still unable to fulfill the Delphic inscription (to “know thyself”) he cannot take time to investigate such myths. Instead, he must continue examining himself, to see “whether I am a beast (θηρίον) more tangled and raging than Typhon, or, a tamer and simpler creature (ζῷον) partaking in a divine and non-typhonic nature” (230a). Of particular significance are the entanglements between language and bodily form characterizing the Typhon.10 As described in Hesiod’s Theogony, the partially human form of the Typhon is grafted with a hundred snake heads stemming from his shoulders, from which “voices were heard, weird voices of all kinds.” These voices are both those of the gods and of various kinds of animals.11 We also note in Socrates’ description the distinction he makes between “beast” (θηρίον) and “creature” or “animal” (ζῷον). As has been previously highlighted, the language of “living creature” or “animal” is used in Socrates’ analogy of model discourse, in which the parts of the animal body are fitted together appropriately, in relationship to the whole organism. Socrates does not answer directly his own implicit query (here or elsewhere in the dialogue) as to whether he is more tangled than the beastly Typhon or more like a tame and simple creature, with a divine, nonTyphonic nature. Given how the dialogue unfolds, we can see that the simple distinction he offers between the options is too simple and clean. Just as the daimonion episode unsettles any notion of neat and clear divisions, so too with the Typhon episode. The rest of the dialogue suggests that this early “either/or” formulation doesn’t encompass the complexities of discourse and self-knowledge. Socrates juxtaposes the two alternatives, not because either is sufficient to characterize his nature, but because the tensions between the two alternatives—and that they cannot be cleanly

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held apart—speak to the nature of the human soul. It is, so to speak, a false alternative that points to real issues in how to understand the human being’s relationship with language. As the later sections of the dialogue make clear, living creatures or animals are not as simple, tame, divine, and non-Typhonic as this early distinction would suggest. And, conversely, creatures with entangled forms of language and embodiment need not necessarily be as beastly and savage as the Typhon. Because he is not a god (or a cicada) and must inhabit analogical, multitextured, plurivocal forms of discourse, Socrates knows—even as he poses his query and the distinction it suggests—that his nature lies somewhere betwixt the beastly Typhon and the non-Typhonic animal. As with the cicadas, the Typhon is incorporated into the dialogue by Plato as a phantom reminder over the text, to call us to attend to our embodied relationships with language, without expectation of an easy way out of the risks they present or a neatly defined category into which we can be cast and made safe. The beginning of the dialogue thus introduces two otherly bodied kinds of beings in a highly concrete (if figurative and associative) way, in which embodied form and speech are especially intertwined. The close of the dialogue introduces a set of philosophic, if compressed and imagistic, points in which such intertwining reappears. In the living-animal analogy of discourse, effectively structured logos is figured in terms of an organically connected body. A more pointed, philosophically pressing intertwining arises from Socrates’ identification of written speech as an “image” or “phantom” through which “ensouled logos” becomes manifest. Between these evocative bookends of the dialogue is Socrates’ own introduction of his shift into the palinode to eros, wherein his bodily poise and his inner, divinatory aspects combine to set the stage for his major speech. These contextualizing details intersect to create the lines of sight onto the palinode in which the core word-images of the soul arise. These lines of sight are ones in which embodied form, human soul, written discourse, and the entangled relations among them, must be attended to. Let’s now turn to them. Avian Horses or Equine Birds Let’s liken [the soul] to the grown-together power of a team of winged horses and their charioteer. (Plato, Phaedrus 246a)

The avian horse-charioteer image of the soul is one of the most well known in the whole of Plato’s writing. In fact, it is so well known that it

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can be easy to gloss over its richness, unwittingly construing its meaning in domesticated terms that belie its figurative power. Socrates introduces the image in the course of his palinode to Eros. Chapter 2 examines the contours of the palinode more fully, focusing on how it is constructed in terms of related phenomena characterized by surfeit—for example, eros, madness, and beauty. Here I focus on the abundance characterizing the word-images of the soul offered by Socrates and their role in his ode to erotic love. The winged horse-charioteer image is where this angle onto the palinode must begin. In recanting and recasting the negative estimation of madness with which erotic love had been associated in the dialogue’s previous speeches, Socrates states that we must first understand the truth of the nature of the soul, both human and divine (245c). He first sets forth an account of  the soul’s immortality, presenting this within the expected style of abstract philosophic prose of the fifth century.12 He then changes course, shifting his style of presentation to address the form or character of the soul: “About the form of the soul we must say the following: that what it is—this would involve a wholly godlike narrative, but that to which it can be likened—this would involve a lesser, human one. So let us speak that way.” His proposed comparison then follows: “Let’s liken it [the soul] to the grown-together power of a winged team of horses and their charioteer.” The explicit language of “grown together” (ξυμφύτω) appears here and is why I have adopted this phrase to characterize Plato’s images more generally in other parts of the text. The descriptor is significant because it suggests an organic form of entwinement rather than a mechanistic amalgamation of parts, the latter being closer to widespread models of Plato’s conception of the soul. This detail of the image merits emphasis because it allows us to see how commonly held readings of Plato obscure from view the potential capaciousness and subtleties of his understanding of the soul and its embodiment. One long-standing interpretive orientation to this image is to regard it as emblematic of a tripartite conception of the soul, in which the charioteer represents the intellective faculties of the soul and the two horses represent the dimensions of the soul associated with appetite and thumos. This reading connects the image to Plato’s discussion of the soul in the Republic and tries to map the image in the more abstractly descriptive terms of this other text.13 Rather than construe the Phaedrus image in the less fluid, mechanistic model of the “parts of the soul,” I advocate a more

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pliant model of “porous hybridity” to characterize not only Plato’s images but also the soul and soul-body complex to which they gesture. “Porosity” characterizes and draws attention to a recurring feature throughout the dialogue and within Socrates’ palinode in particular: the blurring or permeability of boundaries or categories such that clean delineation or demarcation becomes obsolete. By “hybridity” I do not mean a mechanized joining of necessarily incongruous elements, but rather, as befits the pastoral landscape of the Phaedrus and its vegetative motifs throughout, I have in mind a messily organic entanglement of different elements.14 The avian horse-charioteer image is a striking case in point, as Socrates’ indeterminate description allows for the image to be read variously.15 On one reading, the whole “grown-together” combination of charioteer and horses is winged, such that the human, equine, and avian figurative elements can’t be cleanly delineated or dissected. Winged throughout, the soul is thus figured in terms in which the guiding charioteer must learn to integrate his movements with the equine element (and vice versa), and the wings become a kind of organic, integrative structure for the whole. On another reading of the line, the wings grow from the horses, which in turn are guided by a charioteer who must learn to meld his movements with the equine element. The equine element becomes, in effect, the organic bridge between the human and avian elements of the soul. The hybridity of this image— considered alongside the imagery of the Typhon and Socrates’ query about himself vis-à-vis that creature’s plurivocality and mixed nature—will raise questions about whether such combinations of elements as illustrations of the soul can be anything other than pejorative. The same question can be raised about the connections drawn between human elements and animal or nonhuman creatures. Aren’t such forms of mixture or conjunction at odds with notions of purity and the “unmixed” nature of the best states of the soul within an ancient Greek context? Indeed, as I’ll discuss in a moment, within the palinode itself, the gods are characterized in terms of the “unmixed” nature of their souls’ “horses,” and their divine minds are nourished by intellect and knowledge “unmixed” (ἀκηράτῳ). One approach to this issue has been to evaluate Plato’s use of animal and other nonhuman imagery in terms of his critical view of the nonintellective aspects of the human being.16 On this view, nonhuman representations express a normative stance toward the human: Those aspects of the human being that operate further from reason are less essential to

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what distinguishes us from other creatures, and these aspects should be accorded less value and regarded negatively. They can be rendered as vegetative or animal-like, as not quite part of our humanity, or, at least, the part of our humanity to be most valued and developed. Regarding the images in the Phaedrus in this way draws on other repre sentations of the soul in other Platonic texts, most centrally the Phaedo and the Republic, as well as extant cultural conceptions about human-animal comparisons in ancient Greece.17 In this approach, with respect to the image at hand, the charioteer’s domination of the team of horses would signal proper relations within the soul. It would be foolish to suggest either that Plato’s imagery is wholly freed from the associative context of his cultural milieu or that there is no bearing for reading the Phaedrus in relationship to other discussions of the soul within Plato’s texts. Further, with respect to the charioteer image, we will see that when it returns later in the palinode, the violent version it takes can provide a textual basis for hierarchical renderings of the image, in which the charioteer is to be master of unruly, animal-like aspects of the person. I am not suggesting that the text is wholly without critical elements about the foibles and fragilities of human persons. But, these critical elements are more complex than straightforward condemnation. The interpretive line that Plato uses nonhuman, animal imagery to express only critically the lesser human powers to be mastered is insufficient to account for the ways the images work in the text. To open up and trace alternate interpretive possibilities from the text—that yet are still supported textually—we need also to bear in mind several factors. First, these mixed images arise in a speech that is explicitly aiming to recast commonly held notions about madness and nonintellective capacities of the soul involved in erotic love. One-dimensional, literal understandings of such capacities have been the problem that Socrates is seeking to correct. It thus doesn’t make sense—within the order and aims of the palinode itself—to remain confined within one-dimensional, literal readings. Second, the conception and status of animals or other nonhuman creatures and beings is itself not simple or one-dimensional in the milieu out of which Plato is writing.18 For example, again within the palinode, the avian-horse image of the soul applies to the souls of both humans and gods— straightway it thus becomes untenable to regard the image within any kind of strict interpretive correspondence to actual categories. Additionally, as he develops his mythic tale of the soul, Socrates makes it clear

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that souls can be reborn in the bodies of animals as well as of humans, and this possibility is not considered a disaster or defamation of the soul. This is not to say that no difference whatsoever obtains between these kinds, it is simply to note that they are brought into proximity with each other in ways that unsettle any simple, categorical delineation. Last, as with all aspects of the text, we have to bear in mind the interpretive principle that just because Socrates says it is so doesn’t make it so. The how of what he says must be attended to as well. The face value of Socrates’ words must be constantly second-guessed and examined in relation to other aspects of the text, given the recognized methods of figuration, irony, and deft speech employed by Socrates throughout the dialogues. The need for this hermeneutic practice is further bolstered by the fact that the Phaedrus explicitly engages both the underdetermined, ambiguous character of written form and ambivalent attitudes about the value of writing. By emphasizing the teeming, grown-together aspects of the wordimages, set in relationship with the dialogue’s attention to written form, I focus on the interpretive significance of the images’ disruptive features and effects. They are meant to throw a reader off-balance, to unsettle nonslant, one-dimensional modes of viewing the character of texts and the human person. The word-images evoke comparison as a form of figurative reflection to unsettle the self and foster nonstatic self-knowledge. In incorporating nonhuman imagery and associative content, Plato’s point is not to compare us with animals, but to show us to ourselves. How does he do this? And what does he show? Plato develops the figurative, somatically rendered aspects of the word-images of the soul in tandem with Socrates’ telling of a mythic tale that ostensibly explains the human soul’s earthly embodiment and contrasts the value of erotic madness with the dialogue’s earlier speeches. The ostensible aim and surface content of Socrates’ palinode give rise to what I take to be Plato’s more significant philosophic point, one that he “shows” more than he precisely “tells”: A direct mode of gazing befits the souls of gods, but humans require slant, nonstatic, multidimensional modes of viewing in order to see the truth. The section of the palinode in which the avian-horse-charioteer image appears is where the text both denotes and connotes, or figures and performs, this overriding idea. This “shown” rather than “told” dimension of the palinode is signaled, as has already been noted, in Socrates’ introduction of the avian-horsecharioteer image, wherein he prefaces the image with the laden comment

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that he can’t say directly what the soul is—which would be a godlike task—but he can take the humanly appropriate descriptive angle of saying what it is like. With this analogical shift announced, he uses the firstperson plural form to begin (“Let us speak this way, then”), an inclusion not merely of Phaedrus within the dialogue but also of us as the readers of (and with) the dialogue. We, in company with Socrates, are to use the voice of analogy or likeness. And we are entered into this figurative speech space with many cautionary examples or tales in the air: the Typhon’s mixed and contesting voices, the cicadas’ lost voices and Muse-appropriate songs, the phantom-like communication from Socrates’ daimonion, and the exchanged chain of speech from Lysias to Phaedrus to Socrates to reader. Just as we are entered into this figurative way of speaking, Socrates continues with the analogical image, straightway developing it in terms that indicate another way human experience differs from that of the gods. Whereas the baseline version of the winged horse and charioteer image applies to the souls of gods and nongods alike, the character of experience in these cases differs. The horses and charioteers of the gods are altogether good themselves and from good sources, while those of others are mixed. First, our commander drives a pair of horses; then, one of the horses is good and noble and from such sources while the other is the opposite and from opposite kinds of sources, such that in our case the driving is difficult and troublesome. (246b)

With this difference suggested, Socrates says it remains to distinguish between “living creatures” (ζῷον, again) that are mortal and those that are immortal. Since this passage follows one in which Socrates has accounted for the immortality of soul, presumably all soul, in the terms of abstract philosophical prose, it is somewhat unclear as to why he can now posit a difference between souls that are mortal and immortal. This potential discrepancy is usually explained by the observation that he is simply alluding to gods and nongods through the language of immortality and mortality. Yes, though it remains relevant to note that he is speaking in mythic, figurative speech—not analytic precision— and so the absence of precise consistency indicates what Plato takes to be possible in this kind of discourse with these kinds of topics. The difference between immortal and mortal souls is described in terms of the character of their experience with their wings. First, their

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commonality: “All soul is charged with the care of all that is without soul, and traverses around heaven, becoming one form and then another.” Souls that are “perfectly winged” travel above the earth and govern the entire cosmos, while souls that lose their wings are moved along until they settle into an earthly body. Soul and body “fixed together” (παγεν) compose a whole that is called a living creature (ζῷον) and acquires the name “mortal.” Why do wings fall from the soul, setting in motion the processes of earthly embodiment? Socrates’ address of this issue allows him to elaborate on the preliminary, condensed version of the avian-horsecharioteer imaged soul. It is in this further elaboration that things get quite interesting, with respect to how Socrates’ figurative telling is the basis of Plato’s philosophical showing. Socrates begins this elaboration by turning his attention to the soul’s wings: “The natural power of the wing is to soar upwards, carrying that which is heavy to the place where the race of gods lives” (246d6). The wing is the connector between the soul and the divine: “Of all the things having to do with the body, it [the wing], in a way, most partakes of the divine” (246d6). In this detail, we see further that analytic precision is not the spirit in which Socrates is developing the image of the soul: The analogical image is initially introduced as being of the soul, presumably an unembodied soul or not yet embodied soul, yet this characteristic is blurred here, with the wing described as being “of the body.” This blending of categories is doubled within the detail since the wing is both “of the body” and is that which also “most partakes of the divine.” The wing thus figures a porous hybridity of the soul among its aspects and potentialities, rather than a rigidly separable combination of parts. The divine (τὸ δὲ θεῖον) in which the wing partakes is “beauty, wisdom, goodness, and all such qualities; it is by these things that the wings of the soul are most nourished and grown, while through shameful and bad and the opposite sorts of things they waste away and are destroyed.” With this key description in place, Socrates sets into the myth proper;19 he unfolds a detailed mythic narrative of the souls’ journeys in heaven (god and nongod) prior to the earthly embodiment of nongod, or mortal, souls. The details of this section of the myth proper are so replete that I do not aim for an exhaustive examination but rather attend to those features most germane to the ideas I seek to develop vis-à-vis Socrates’ word-images of the soul. We can begin with the motions of the souls of gods and other divinities (θεῶν τε καὶ διαμόνων) through which Socrates

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sets up a comparison with (our) nongod souls and through which, in turn, Plato shows us to ourselves. The souls of gods travel a repeating circuit around heaven, with their chariots easily reaching the upper region of heaven because of the consistently good, balanced nature of their horses and horse-charioteer team. (Socrates refers to the traditional twelve-member pantheon, though, in a playful nod to her connections with domesticity, notes that Hestia remains at home.) When the immortal souls of gods reach the upper region of heaven, they become borne along by its revolving motion, standing on its edge, looking out at the things beyond heaven. From this vantage point, they are able to gaze on a region that, Socrates says, the words of earthly poets are unable to capture adequately. But, he forges ahead with his mythic narrative, stating that “one must be bold enough to say the truth, especially when one is speaking about the truth of the nature of things” (247c5). The region that the gods behold is “without color or shape, is intangible,” and is “being which really is” (οὐσια ὄντως οὖσα). It is observable only by the “steersman of the soul, the mind,” and it is that about which “the class of true knowledge” is concerned. Because a divine intelligence is nourished by mind and knowledge unmixed (ἀκηράτῳ) with other things, it eventually is able “to see justice itself, see self-control, see knowledge.” The knowledge it gazes on is not subject to alteration or becoming, but is knowledge in the most abiding, eternal, nonchanging sense.20 After “feasting its gaze”21 on the truths of the region outside heaven, the soul of the god (or godlike soul) returns to the region within heaven. Lest we begin taking Socrates’ mythic tale too seriously, he deftly includes at this point— after the abstract, yet highly imagistic rendering of the region beyond heaven and its contents—the following detail: “When it arrives there [back at its home in heaven], the charioteer places his horses at their manger, feeds them ambrosia, and gives them nectar to wash it down” (247e). Souls other than those of the gods have a different experience of the heavenly journeying. The one able to follow god (now singular) and resemble him most raises the head of its charioteer into this area outside heaven, carried along by the circuitous motion, yet is barely able to see anything owing to the distractions caused by its horses. Another soul rises and sinks, the steadiness of its ability to gaze disrupted by the unruly force of its horses. Still other souls follow, straining to reach the upper region of heaven and see beyond its edge, but unable to do so, re-

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main circling down below in a mix of trampling and jostling among other souls as they strive to rise higher. Amid the contestation, wings become broken. Why such yearning to get beyond heaven’s edge? And why endure such turmoil in the attempt? Because the “meadow” in the “plain of truth” offers the proper feeding place for the best aspect of the soul; by this pasturage “the nature of the wing, which lifts up the soul, is nourished” (248c). A soul that can follow god and glimpse something of the sights of truth is kept within this circuiting pattern of heaven. But, whenever a soul is unable to follow and thus fails to see such sights, “through some mischance [it] becomes weighed down by being filled with forgetfulness and deficiency, and, being weighed down, loses its wings and falls to earth” (248c7). This forgetfulness moves the soul into an earthly form of embodiment. Significantly, it is not that the earthly form of embodiment causes a forgetting, or an unseeing.22 Rather, Socrates’ myth posits a kind of originative forgetting as precipitating the soul’s transformation into an earthly bodily form. From this originative moment, Socrates’ myth then proceeds to detail the parameters governing the type of earthly body a soul comes to embody. Th is section of the myth in which a kind of working theory of metempsychosis is presented draws heavily on conceptions of reincarnation affi liated with previous figures or religious groups.23 For present purposes, the more intricate details of the account can be left aside (e.g., how many years are in each reincarnation cycle), and we can focus on a few key elements of the explanation. The bodily forms and kinds of life a soul comes to inhabit are differentiated with respect to the amount of truth that was beheld during the circuiting in heaven. From the outset, a soul can’t come to inhabit the body of a wild creature or beast (θήρειον) in its first birth, given that it had to have had at least a minimal glimpse of truth outside heaven’s edge. Yet after many series of births, deaths, and rebirths, it is possible for a soul to be embodied as a wild creature, if it has ceased over time to glimpse truth at all. As Socrates describes: “For the soul which has never seen truth cannot take our shape” (249b6). Of the souls that can take our human shape, which souls have most seen truth and can reinvigorate the growth of their previously broken and lost wings? Those souls that saw the most in heaven become implanted in the seed of men who develop into lovers of wisdom or beauty, or who become followers of the Muses and Eros. Unsurprisingly, it is the souls of philosophers that most enjoy the regrowth of their wings. This

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regrowth is stimulated by recollecting “those things which our soul once beheld when it traveled with god, and, looking down upon the things we now say are, raised itself up into what really is” (249c3). Through this recollection and wing regrowth, the philosopher is brought near to divinity: “So far as he can, [the philosopher] is, through memory, always close to those things that, being near to, makes a god divine.”24 The philosopher’s reengagement with truth via memory brings us to the brink of the avianimaged soul with which I opened this chapter. If a man uses such reminders correctly, being continually initiated into perfect mystery rites, he alone becomes truly perfect/initiated; standing aside from human pursuits, and turning toward the divine, he is admonished by the many for being disturbed, for it escapes the notice of the many that he is in fact divinely possessed. (249c6)25

Directly after this characterization of the divine enthusiasm that renders the philosophic soul unrecognizable to most people, Socrates introduces the image that encapsulates his recantation of the common, mistaken conception of madness and refigures it anew. Through the image he posits a specific kind of madness that is divinely bestowed and makes possible the full burgeoning of the soul, It is to this point that the whole discourse about the fourth kind of madness has brought us, the one, when, seeing something of beauty here, remembering true beauty, his wings begin to grow, and, with his feathers ruffled in anticipation he desires to fly but cannot; like a bird he looks upward, and taking no care of things below, he is accused of being mad. (249d)

The hovering, birdlike soul that can’t be rightly appreciated or seen from within commonly held conceptions (and negative estimations) of madness is, by Socrates’ mythic account, instead experiencing a high state of human being: “This [avian state of the soul] is the best of all the kinds of divine possessions and is from the best, for the man who has it or shares in it, and that the man who, loving the beautiful, partakes in this madness, is called a lover.” The image of the birdlike soul gestures toward an exemplary, ideal state of the human soul, but the question remains, “How are we to read it?” Hermeneutic Interlude

To suggest how the avian soul image can be read, let’s first consider the following Robert Creeley poem:26

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Echo Entire memory hangs tree in mind to see a bird be— but now puts stutter to work, shutters the windows, shudders, sits and mutters— because can’t go back, still can’t get out. Still can’t.

The poem unsettles the aspirations we may have regarding memory’s ability to render knowledge fully present and wholly formed in the mind. The first stanza expresses this aspirational feature of memory (or of our use of remembrance); the second stanza is a performative expression of the unraveling of this aspiration; and the third stanza shifts to a constative mode of expression, identifying the impasses encountered. Whether these impasses (“can’t / go back,” “still / can’t get / out”) refer to the mind or to the bird it wants to “see . . . be” is, I think, unclear and left open in order to gesture toward the interrelated limitations of memory and present knowing. I have chosen this poem for many reasons, but three reasons are particularly linked to specific issues arising in this book. First, Creeley suggests how the order or sense we take memory to provide can, instead, precipitate an unraveling of sense and an experience of the limitations or distortions of the mind. The word choice in the second stanza incorporates consonance, assonance, and onomatopoeia to create what I have characterized as the “performative” quality of this stanza of unraveling. Creeley’s poem expresses a reversal or devolution of expectations surrounding order or sense and disorder or irrationality that are also at play in Plato’s refiguring of madness in the Phaedrus. My examination of this is the focus of chapter 2. The Creeley poem is an initial opening onto these issues. Second, the disruption, frustration, or unmaking of “entire memory” in the poem is emblematic of the mixed dynamic between remembering and forgetting that I posit as central to Plato’s estimation of memory’s powers. (This is in contrast to readings of Plato’s “theory of recollection” in which

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the full return of memory is, in effect, an endorsement of how “entire memory” can hang “tree / in mind to see / a bird be—”). Chapter 3 takes up this discussion in full. Creeley’s poem anticipates the central questions and ideas of that discussion. Third, most germane to the present purposes within this chapter: What the poem says about “entire memory” can also be regarded as a cautionary, provocative, and guiding word about interpretation, especially in the case of Plato’s texts. That is, the disruption, frustration, and unraveling of the aspirations we may have for “entire memory” to let us hang a structure in the mind on which knowledge can land holds as well for similar aspirations we may have with interpretive theories. Envisioning them as “entire,” we often take them to provide stabilizing “trees” in the mind on which we can “see a [text] be—.” Rather than letting the text “be,” using interpretive frames in this manner can strain against the character of that which they seek to understand, leading not to ordered sense but the interruption and unraveling of attempts to speak about the text. Blockage and dead ends—not the simple poise of a perched bird— are the result. Creeley’s poem expresses a disruptive critique of an orientation to memory that also holds for an orientation to interpretation in which an entire idea is taken to be sufficient for encompassing the text and letting it alight in the mind. I take the interpretation of Plato’s richly unresolvable texts to be a prime candidate for the reception of Creeley’s words. Interpretation “entire” won’t give us sight of the whole text. Instead, such interpretation “puts stutter / to work,” and “shutters / the windows” causing us to see constricted and blocked pathways of insight, not open fields of vision. Much interpretation of Plato has strangulated the spirit and actual craft of his texts. Following Creeley, I aim to offer here not interpretation “entire” but shards of generative elucidation. Specifically, with respect to the word-images of the soul, the interpretive shard offered is that the condensed, avian soul image can be considered an emblem of Plato’s unmaking and remaking of the ideal of becoming godlike. To understand this nonentire interpretation we need to begin with a reading of the dialogue with which it can be productively counterpoised. One interpretive approach to Socrates’ avian image and his mythic account in the palinode is to regard them as directly presenting an ideal for the soul in which its approximation to divinity, along with its related distancing from humanity, becomes the aim of philosophic aspiration. This interpretive approach is, of course, not strictly literal. There is no

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claim that the ideal is one in which human souls aspire to circle around heaven, mapping their experience neatly onto all the details of Socrates’ mythic tale. Rather, the approach recognizes the mythic and figurative features of Socrates’ account while regarding the tale as a direct expression of Plato’s conception of the ideal state of the human soul. This interpretive orientation examines and accounts for the figurative features of Socrates’ speech primarily within their religious, cultural, and literary contexts. That is, Plato draws on extant religious, cultural, and literary sources and genres in imaginative ways in order to craft Socrates’ speech as an evocation of a new ideal state of the soul within a distinctive articulation of philosophic practice.27 Through this recasting of extant sources Plato builds a new form of philosophic aspiration in which the depicted experience of the gods’ heavenly journeys becomes the (figuratively rendered) standard-bearer for the fullest manifestation of the human soul. Of Plato’s various cultural incorporations and reimaginings, perhaps the most significant concerns the imaged practice of gazing on truth in philosophic contemplation.28 In the Phaedrus, the depicted capacity of the souls of gods to engage such gazing without distraction, perturbation, or faltering has been regarded as the ideal toward which Plato intended the human soul to strive. We know that in his cultural milieu, Plato’s philosophy would have been readily identified with the ideal of becoming godlike.29 Further, we know that Plato’s construction (or reconstruction) of an ideal of divine aspiration involved transposing the traditional cultic practice of gazing on religious idols to the realm of philosophic practice, in which gazing on truth with the intellective faculty of the soul became the paradigmatic activity.30 The textual moments from the palinode included above illustrate Plato’s transposition of the tropes and practices of gazing (as well as initiation) from extant religious convention into religious philosophy.31 In these illustrations from the Phaedrus, the pure instantiation of the ideal is displayed by the gods, who unproblematically traverse the outer circuits of the heavens and glimpse the abiding realities beyond heaven’s edge. The human soul’s participation in the ideal begins when (as depicted in the avian image) the soul beholds earthly beauty and becomes reminded of the abiding reality of beauty previously gazed on from the outer reaches of heaven. That is, distinctive to the Phaedrus’s representation of this imagistically rendered ideal, the body of the beautiful beloved is likened to an agalma, or “sacred image,” of eternally abiding beauty. Encountering earthly beauty and contemplating divinely abiding

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truths become of a piece, potentially, in the version of the ideal depicted in the Phaedrus.32 Inseparably entwined as well are the erotically invigorated soul and the philosophically kindled intellect. All of this is the case. Yet this interpretive orientation cannot sufficiently encompass or trace out some significant implications of the text’s character. When priority of emphasis is given to the text as a text there are points of friction between these contextualized features of Plato’s development of philosophy and other aspects of his writing that the interpretive approach outlined above can’t attend to fully, even though it gains many other valuable vantage points onto his thought. How are these established features of Plato’s innovative development of philosophy related to other features of his writing that appear to be in friction with these very innovations? The primary point of friction involves the relation of the model of directly beholding truth with the fact that Plato often does anything but this, given the character of his written forms. If gazing directly on the sites of truth—with a kind of rapt, undisturbed, one-directional gaze—is the model practice or experience for becoming godlike, what are we to make of Plato’s written forms that suggest a much different mode of vision, one that is multidimensional in nature and distinctly productive of nonrapt, disrupted forms of viewing? Of course, we don’t want to make the mistake of confusing the imagery and trope of “beholding” or “gazing” as necessarily indicative of a kind of static, robotic, or entranced mode of apprehension. Indeed, the erotically charged aspect of beholding beauty affirms and enhances Plato’s conception of philosophic contemplation as a highly activated state of the soul, one of dynamically invigorated apprehension. Yet even bearing in mind a nonclichéd or more robust and nuanced conception of beholding, the connotations of direct, sustained, nondeflected contact are difficult to avoid. I thus identify a central point of friction in the text between Plato’s innovative transposition of extant religious praxis into a philosophic ideal of becoming godlike— and the character of the text through which he presents this recast ideal. As my introductory essay about slant truth telling indicated, this source of friction is the orienting interpretive concern of this entire book. Here I would take this interpretive concern a step further, emboldened by the word-images of the palinode and the aims of Socrates’ speech: If the palinode is the speech in which Socrates offers a recantation of his previously delivered position against love and its attendant mania, then it is also the speech in which Plato offers a recantation of a human-divine

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comparison in which the imagined life of the gods is that which human souls should aspire to. A straight reading of an otherwise highly nonliteral, mythic rendering of the human-divine relationship doesn’t square with the whole of the text, in particular, with those conceptual features and imagistic details discussed in the opening section of this chapter. In the mythic palinode we are told something by Socrates that we are not meant to take at face value but rather are to regard in terms of discerning what Plato is showing us—through the how of this telling. In short, Plato doesn’t want us to become like gods. He wants us to look at the character of Socrates’ slant, figurative telling of the gods’ souls in order to manifest our own souls and our own relations with written form. This alternate interpretive approach does not aim to negate the contextually informed approach to the text described above so much as present a reading that should be counterposed with it. Such negation is not possible, given the bases on which that interpretive orientation is soundly built. Further, such negation is not even sought after, given that the Phaedrus is the sacred text that it is precisely because it can be opened by a multitude of vantage points toward different truth-telling ends and does not admit of neat or definitive resolutions. To read Socrates’ palinode as Plato’s recantation of divine aspiration is to speculate about what is gained when we take the text as far as its embedded cues allow us to go. So far in this chapter I have presented and examined a set of cues that I claim allow us to go quite far in this interpretive, speculative mode. In the remainder of the chapter let’s consider other cues arising from the word-images in the palinode that support this interpretive direction. The overarching interpretive thread—again, one that doesn’t purport to be “entire” but knows it is always already frayed by Plato’s text—is that the written word is a kind of agalma, a sacred, phantom image of ensouled discourse. If there is any kind of ideal to be striven for, it will have to be located in de-centering, circuitous processes of textual engagement, not the circular, repeating patterns of heavenly soaring. To get to these further interpretive reaches we must first return to the word-images of the soul, to examine the points of friction they throw into the dialogue that frustrate any attempts to identify the text within singular interpretive frames.33 Avian-Vegetal-Mammalian Souls But, for a new initiate, one who beheld many of those things [the sights of heaven], when he sees a godlike visage or bodily form which reflects beauty well,

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The Teeming Body first he shudders with goose bumps and is overcome by something of the awe he felt before. Then, staring, he reveres him [the beautiful young man] as a god; indeed, if he did not fear being regarded as utterly mad he would offer sacrifice to his beloved as if he were an idol or a god. Looking at him [the beautiful beloved], a change comes over him [the newly initiated lover] from his shuddering, with sweat and unexpected heat. For, receiving the stream of beauty through his eyes he is warmed, the stream being that which waters the birth of his wings; as he heats up, the parts from which the wings grow melts, the parts which had been too hard and closed up and hindered the budding of the wings; as the nourishment flows in, the stalks of the feathers swell and begin to grow from the roots beneath the entire form of the soul— before, long ago, the entire soul was winged. In this process the soul seethes and bubbles, and, just as for those who are teething there is affliction around the teeth when they begin to grow, with itching and irritation about the gums, so the soul feels as the growth of the feathers begins; with the wings growing it seethes, feels irritated, tickles. When gazing upon the beauty of the young man, receiving the particulates approaching and flowing (from him)—which is why it is called “desire”—it [the soul] is moistened and warmed, its pain abates, and it rejoices. But when it is alone and dries up, the mouths of the passages where the feathers bud dry and close up, shutting in the wings’ sprouts; the sprouts are shut in along with desire; throbbing like pulsing veins, each sprout pricks the passage in which it is enclosed, such that the whole soul is stung all over and suffers in pain, until, remembering the beautiful boy again, it rejoices. The mingling of these two sensations greatly troubles the soul, and, at a loss to understand this out-of-place pathos, it is bewildered and maddened. . . . When it has seen him and watered itself with desire, the passages of growth are loosed; having respite from its stings and a reprieve from its birthing pain, the soul enjoys this, again, and, for the time being, as the sweetest plea sure. (Plato, Phaedrus 251a– 252a)

This is the densest, most vibrantly elaborated version of the word-image of the soul in the palinode. When one delves into its details— especially within the Greek language—it becomes impossible not to wonder at, and question, any attempts we make to articulate what Plato understood about the soul. If one were to walk away from this book with nothing other than curiosity about the following entreaty, it would be enough: Whenever one has become too tempted to stand in a position claiming what Plato thought, time spent with one of his more figurative passages, shorn from interpretive expectations or presumptions, is a necessary and disruptive antidote, for scholar and nonscholar alike.

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Before we consider the passage’s details and significance, a few preliminary comments can place it with respect to previously discussed sections of the palinode. This elaborated word-image of the soul follows the apex of the speech, wherein Socrates has identified eros as the fourth, and best, form of divinely bestowed madness, figuring it as the hovering, birdlike soul. In that condensed, simpler version of the image (seen above) we get the first indication that the sighting of beauty on earth reminds the soul of the eternal beauty glimpsed beyond heaven’s edge, a remembrance through which the soul’s wings become reinvigorated. Socrates goes on to explain that of the realities beheld beyond heaven’s edge beauty especially sparkled, and “since coming here, we have found, through the clearest of our senses, that it glistens with the most clarity” (250d). Of the modes of perception of the body, then, sight is, for us, the keenest. Significantly, however, it cannot see wisdom or the other heavenly realities because clear images of these would cause terrible love. Beauty alone has the fate of being seen clearly, and so is the most manifest and desired. Gazing on earthly beauty can be a source of connectivity to the most real, abiding beauty sighted in heaven. Or this gazing can go awry, and the replete character of earthly beauty can prompt behavioral excess on the part of the viewer: Behaving like a four-footed beast, the beholder of beauty gives himself over to the wanton excesses of sexual reproduction and pleasures (250e4).34 For those who have been recently initiated into the sights of heavenly truths, the beholding of earthly beauty invigorates the responsive processes depicted in the description above, which humans have named Eros. Socrates’ more general comments about beauty carry forward the features of porous hybridity discussed earlier, in the sense that beauty’s entrance through beholding eyes indicates a receptive porosity on the part of the soul as well as a kind of hybridity because the soul is not nourished from within itself alone but is constituted in concert with other sources. This play between receptivity and invigoration or activation is depicted doubly—first, in the figurative terms of physicalization and, second, in the analogical terms of the alternating dynamic between oblivion and remembrance. These initial indications of the soul’s porous hybridity in the first avian image become expressed to greatest effect in the ensuing, elaborated word-image of the soul. How are we to read its fantastic details, especially within my interpretive approach that considers the speech as a whole to act as a recantation of the ideal of godlikeness? To answer this we need first to pause on the details of the image itself, letting their

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radically undomesticated character expand in the mind before turning to other interpretive considerations. The section of the text presenting the elaboration of the word-image of the soul is the core description of the porous hybridity I have identified with the dialogue as a whole. The image’s most obvious, immediate depiction of the porosity of the soul is the lover’s reception, through his eyes, of the stream of beauty radiating from the beautiful beloved.35 The warming and watering effect of the entering stream of beauty kindles the growth of the wings, melting and softening the places from which such growth germinates throughout the entire soul.36 The wetness, warmth, and swelling conjure an organic, plantlike growth that is also clearly an allusion to sexual arousal, attraction, and response. Avian, plant, and mammalian features become melded and entangled, running riot through expectations or presumptions of species or category distinctions. The shuddering, rising heat, and aroused perspiration of the lover (all details connoting readily recognized erotic responses) then become shifted into descriptions drawn from the physical processes of infancy, further enhancing the passage’s saturation with birthing references and associations.37 The incipient growth of the wings is likened to the mingling sensations of itching, agitation, and tickling of the teething of babies.38 This detail especially drops a reader into the entwined sensations of pain, frustration, and emergent pleasure characterizing nascent erotic desire. Plato’s enmeshment of avian, plant, and mammalian organic processes allows him to render vividly the blurred distinction between pleasure and pain when erotic growth transpires. The unmoored, untamed, and entangled processes depicted in the description are augmented by a further form of porosity at work in the passage: a shift in the referent to which the description applies from “person” to “soul.” In the beginning of the description Socrates is describing the new initiate, but as the description continues, he shifts—linguistically and grammatically—to the soul.39 This syntactical point reinforces the elision between soul and soma depicted at the descriptive level of the elaboration of the image. At this point in his speech, where the embodied mortal soul is his focus rather than the precarnate souls of the heavens, Socrates is ostensibly describing the human soul’s—not body’s— experience. Soul is the referent (grammatically speaking), but entangled somatic processes become the subject (descriptively speaking). Indeed, the somatic rendering of the soul’s responses can strike a reader as blurring categories only if one

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approaches the imagery with the presumption that soul is strictly separate from soma. Instead, the description suggests that when expressing the responses of the soul in the encounter with beauty, this expression must make the soul’s responses somatic in order to tell their truth. The images depict the responses and processes of a grown-together soul-body in which enmeshment rather than delineation of these dimensions characterizes human experience. This enmeshed complexion of somatic and nonsomatic responsiveness creates a multisensory, multidimensional mode of vision, one that surpasses ordinary sight. Seeing or gazing directly through the eyes alone is but a beginning point in the perceptual processes of the human soul. More significant is the ensuing combination of embodied responses through which vision is opened to the soul and the knowledge available through the madness of eros. The ensouled body or somatic soul is the human mode for viewing and telling the truth slant. The heart of my reading of the elaborated version of the word-image of the soul is thus the claim that the description is not only one in which somatic processes are used figuratively to express the soul but also that the soul becomes made somatic through this word-image. What do I mean? The near end of this interpretive claim is relatively simple: When one digs down into the details of the word-images in Socrates’ palinode, it becomes evident that Plato bore a much more nuanced, pliant understanding of the relationship between material and immaterial dimensions of the human person than is allowed by prevalent characterizations of his thought as evincing a strict dualism. The images offered of the soul both before it has taken a body of the earth and particularly after it has become earthily embodied are rendered in thoroughly somatic ways. A somatically rendered soul does not, of course, mean Plato regarded the soul as undifferentiated from, or interchangeable with, the body. Indeed, to read the images as such would be to fall into a literal or straight reading of his highly figurative language, an interpretive error from which I have instead advocated a shift away. Yet it doesn’t suffice to regard the somatic rendering as mere figuration, without more penetrating philosophical purpose. First, this is because the image quoted above enmeshes the processes of soul and body to such an extent and in such a way that any delineation between their boundaries becomes effaced. The described processes create this effect, which is further enhanced by the fact the referents within the description shift and elide throughout. Second, at the farther end of my interpretive claim about the images, the somatically

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intense renderings of the soul can’t be regarded apart from the dialogue’s concluding discussion in which ensouled logos is identified as the vitalizing source of the written word, its image. Taken together, the two moments of the dialogue present a twinned set of ideas: A presumably wholly immaterial feature of the human person— the soul— becomes entangled with bodily features and processes, and a presumably wholly material feature of human life—written form—becomes entangled with the soul. In the somatically charged elaboration of the word-image of the soul, Plato depicts at the level of surface content what he is doing in the act of the writing itself. Th is makes the passage performative such that the somatic rendering of the soul is best regarded not only as a strategy of figurative or “slant” truth telling used to characterize the human person but also as a philosophical enactment of the conditions of possibility of the text itself.40 Bodily form and written form are interrelated modes or locales of embodiment through which soul becomes present in the world. They are or need to become, in the language of the Phaedrus, grown together and, in the spirit of the Phaedrus, porously hybrid. That is the ideal toward which the soul ought to aspire, not the bodiless, atextual existence of raptly beholding gods who parade around heaven. This interpretive orientation to (and from) the elaborated word-image of the soul is strengthened by considering a last example from the Platonic menagerie: the mollusk. Mollusks [We were] watching in pure light, being pure and not entombed in this thing, which now we name a body, carrying it around, imprisoned like an oyster. (Plato, Phaedrus 250c)

The image arises at the apex of Socrates’ palinode to eros, shortly after the first avian image of the soul that I have identified as the fulcrum of the dialogue and prior to the elaborated version of the avian image just discussed. The mollusk imagery is introduced in the course of Socrates’ rhapsodic description of the erotic encounter with earthly beauty through which the soul is recalled to its original beholding of true beauty and the realities of heaven. The description is replete with the language and associations of the mystery religions, Orphism in particular.41 Indeed the likening of the body to a tomb, illustrated by Socrates through the oyster reference, is a classic Orphic formulation. The image is also one that is

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often pointed to as indicative of a thoroughly pejorative, antihumanistic attitude on the part of Plato toward the human bodily state. On this reading, becoming godlike entails removing oneself from the concerns and realities of the body as much as possible to, in effect, become fully winged rather than shelled in by the soul’s embodied state. My interpretive interest is not in totally reversing this estimation of Plato’s antipathy toward the human body, nor is it in suggesting that he incorporated Orphic elements solely satirically, ironically, or for functional purposes in catering to an audience. I think, on the whole, Plato had a complicated and conflicted regard for, and understanding of, the human bodily state. My interpretive interest is rather in how Plato’s incorporation of the Orphic imagery is not one of simple or straight endorsement or imitation—in which the Orphic conception becomes merely mapped onto the practice of philosophy without remainder—but is a more complex, unsettling borrowing. Plato’s integration of the mollusk imagery can’t be understood apart from regarding it in tandem with other features of the text, in order to appreciate how his innovation with extant cultural forms is one that continuously strains against its own philosophic play to create effects surpassing (and often frustrating) analytic parsing of the text’s imaginative incorporations. For example, the mollusk imagery stands alongside the Typhon and the cicada imagery to create an intersecting web of associations through which human bodily and linguistic states can be better viewed and reflected upon. In the case of the mollusk image, Plato has taken this approach in a different direction, to highlight a different set of concerns. Whereas the Typhon and cicada imagery illustrates a kind of unbound or transfigured excess, the mollusk imagery emphasizes boundedness and fixity within a bodily form. The language of Socrates’ description is not insignificant: “[We were] watching in pure light, being pure and not entombed in this thing, which now we name a body, carrying it around, imprisoned like an oyster” (250c5). The description emphasizes that the body has become like an object that is carried around and in need of a name. The relationship suggested is not one of grown-together integration, but rather of parts fused together, in which one is held captive within the bounds of the other. This bound fixity of the soul within a shell-like soma images not an ineluctably doomed relationship between two dimensions of the human person. It images instead how this relationship can go awry, how it can become—as in the case of the cicadas— deformed.

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More important, with regard to the interpretive picture I have suggested in which bodily and written form are especially connected by Plato, the oyster is an emblem of the dangers of bound fixity not only in the soul-body relationship but also within the soul-logos relationship. We regard written form as a safe, shell-like haven for the soul at our peril. The dialogue is not a fixed abode of knowledge in which we can be securely encased. Written form—as with the body—becomes a tomb when it is approached as such. Which brings us back to the initial image of the avian soul, the fulcrum of Plato’s menagerie. Birds It is to this point that the whole discourse of the fourth kind of madness has brought us, the one, when, seeing something of beauty here, remembering true beauty, his wings begin to grow, and, with his feathers ruffled in anticipation he desires to fly but cannot; like a bird he looks upward, and taking no care of things below, he is accused of being mad. (Plato, Phaedrus 249d)

If the Typhon, cicada, and mollusk images act as specters in the dialogue, drawing the reader to critically reflect on the connections between bodily and linguistic forms, then the avian soul is an emblem of an ideal form of engagement with both modes of embodiment. Unlike the mollusk and its evocation of a bound fixity with respect to bodily form that has no voice, or unlike the Typhon and its evocation of a wholly unbound excess with respect to bodily and linguistic hybridity, the birdlike soul evokes a dynamic equipoise in which neither static, one-dimensional fi xity nor unbridled, plurivocal chaos characterizes the relations between soul, soma, and logos. The avian image suggests a hovering position in which the soul is invigorated by its aspiration toward truth and the need to depart from normal modes of seeing in order to pursue this vision. But these movements are buoyed by the absence of perfectible aspiration and the presence of a remaining connectivity to earth that arises from the failure and fragility of its attempts to soar skyward. The image need not necessarily be read as indicative of a flighty soul that has eschewed the world. Rather, it evokes a state of being in which neither a rapt gaze on heavenly truths nor a line of sight bound to the world suffices. A hovering, multi-angled, and circuitous mode of looking is instead suggested. The bird depicts figuratively the kind of embodiment within logos and soma through which such a mode of vision becomes possible.

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If the avian image of the soul is an evocation of this ideal, then Socrates is its closest exemplar within the text. To consider the avian image and Socrates in this way, let’s recall the interpretive terrain that has been built so far. Following Socrates’ analogy that good logos should be like a living animal, we began with the consideration that the dialogue itself is a teeming text in the manner of a blooded, pulsating creature. The wordimages of the soul developed within Socrates’ palinode to eros are most illustrative of this aspect of the text. The images are teeming, or brimming with potency, because of the multiple aspects of meaning they bear. This chapter has focused on two of these aspects: first, at the level of the images’ content, in both literal and figurative terms, and, second, at the associative or connotative level, when the images are examined with respect to their relationship to other specific features of the text. These two dimensions combine to create a third, which concerns the images’ structural effects in the dialogue more broadly, a dimension to be introduced here and considered more fully, from different vantage points, in the remaining chapters. In what I am calling the “structural” sense, the dialogue is like a teeming, living animal because these multiple aspects of meaning are grown together in a manner befitting a sinewy, flesh-and-bone, breathing body. This teeming quality of the text is one of the ways in which it tells slant the story of the soul and does so within a circuitous, nonstatic discursive mode. In particular, the images—both in terms of their content and in terms of the analogical discursive strategy they embody— open to view features of the self that are difficult both to see and to live with well. Specifically, they offer a reflective form of engagement with how the experience of repletion and porosity distinguishes the human being. How does logos that is “grown together” in the manner of a living animal speak about the human experience of surfeit and porosity? We considered the surface content of the images, in which the grown-together dimensions of the soul are, explicitly, the subject of analogical representation. Then, pressing on the figurative dimensions of the images, we considered how their details suggest that soul and soma are entangled in ways that belie any neat or clean dualism within the dialogue. Moving toward the connotations arising from the images’ relationships to other specific textual moments, we considered the grown-together relationships between bodily and written form and how these bear on the burgeoning of the

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soul, the unmaking of conventional renderings of godlikeness, and the remaking of an ideal for human aspiration. All these particular textual considerations open to view the interpretive possibilities of the text at a structural level. Specifically, to examine the broader structural makeup of the text we must study the position that Socrates holds in relation to the images and the teeming text. How is Socrates’ position grown together with the text, and, most significant, how does this position instigate in the reader a dialogical, multi-angled form of engagement with the text? If Socrates illustrates the hovering equipoise of the avian soul in terms of his relationship to the speeches, what does this imply about a reader’s orientation toward the text? The avian poise of Socrates suggests how the teeming, living-animal quality of the text might best be encountered. As with the avian soul, Socrates is buoyantly, dynamically positioned between movements of departure or aspiration and movements of connectivity or attention to the discursive situation at hand. His nonfixated pliancy is birdlike, and in this respect he exemplifies the avian ideal. Socrates does not establish his position in the discussion with Phaedrus by way of mastering the teeming nature of the discourse but rather by allowing its potentially unruly aspects to well up and be connected in the manner of a breathing, not wholly domesticated animal. Th rough the position he has crafted for Socrates in the discussion, Plato is suggesting how the replete, animallike character of the text should not be tamed and domesticated but allowed to breathe on its own terms, creating disruptive and unanticipated effects for the reader. Socrates indicates how to move within and amid the overabundance and porous hybridity of Plato’s text. A preliminary illustration from the palinode is Socrates’ handling of the word-image of the soul itself. He introduces the initial version of the image, of the winged horses and charioteer, right after having signaled his need to shift course with his discursive approach to understanding the character of the soul. This initial image is then moved through multiple variations in the course of the palinode, until he returns to an extended version of the original image at the conclusion of his speech. As he turns over the image by way of these multiple elaborations, he also incorporates multiple forms of discourse, weaving together invented mythic narrative, abstract philosophic prose, and transpositions of cultural tropes and references. It is as though Socrates himself can barely contain and control the brimming features of the word-images and this slant discur-

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sive approach to the soul. Yet in the end the speech is drawn together by Socrates, not because he tames the animal-like logos but because the multitextured, associative aspects of the images are grown together in ways the reader must trace for herself, setting them in relationship to the dialogue as a whole. This effect is enhanced within the palinode through Socrates’ constant shifting of his proximity to the speech and the scene. At times his locutions position him at a remove from the speech, as a third-person raconteur. At other times he becomes enmeshed within the speech, speaking with first-person locutions or attributing the mythic narrative itself to his memory.42 Socrates’ character as a guide is one of pliant dynamism in which he fluctuates between a position of objective distance and a position of personalized attention. This hovering poise allows for the formative effects of the dialogue on the reader to become opened, even as it risks that the reader may not forge her own way successfully. Socrates’ avian poise and the tenuous, taxing position this creates for— and demands from—the reader become especially heightened if one considers the closing of the palinode, in which the last elaboration of the horse-charioteer image describes a violent taming of the unruly horse in the equine team.43 Here the avian elements of the word-image of the soul have become nearly absent and the brute aspects of the horsecharioteer relationship come to overwhelm the image. In effect, it depicts a violently domesticating response to a soul that has taken too much of a Typhonic turn in its encounter with beauty. As with the mollusk image of the soul-soma relationship that falls right at the apex of the avian depiction of the soul, here too it will seem to many that Plato drops us off a cliff from the heights of his menagerie to the basest, least imaginative form of comparison. One may read this closing part of the palinode as indicative of exactly the kind of domestication that I have suggested Socrates does not succumb to. It is undeniable that the closing elaboration of the palinode is stark and sobering. But it suggests not that violent domestication is the best we can do or the safest option left, given the nature of our embodied souls. It is, rather, a haunting evocation of the stakes should one pursue the difficult, uncertain processes of slant modes of viewing and truth telling for which Socrates is an exemplar. We are left to the crude processes and responses of taming logos when we have failed to live rightly with its wild, creaturely nature. Like the specter of the mollusk, cast in the shadows of the bird or living animal, we

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become entombed in this thing, which now we name writing or speech, carrying it around, imprisoned. It may be tamed, but it has become but a shell, a false haven of security. The avian ideal and the teeming body of the text thus need also to be considered in the light of the erroneous relationships to logos that Plato opens to view. Let’s turn then to fixity and the fluid body.

Chapter Two The Fluid Body Madness and Displaced Discourse When analogies are present en masse, each vying to be the most apt or alluring, the insights keep shifting and according themselves to different vehicles. In this way, each analogy gives way to the next and none lingers, the writing flows and does not dwell on a single notion, and the thought penetrates to all aspects of the subject and does not guard a single corner. —Qian Zhongshu, Limited Views

Socrates: Let’s take up this point right now—how the speech was able to change from censure to praise. Phaedrus: What do you mean? Socrates: Well, it seems to me that everything else [in the speech] was really playful playing. —Plato, Phaedrus 265c5

The living-animal analogy of discourse can also be imagined in terms of the fluid integration of limbs and bodily systems within breathing creatures, such that no single element becomes a fixed center of its vitality and this vitality is instead dispersed throughout its features in dynamic patterns of change and motion. The Phaedrus is a fluid text in the way that a living animal is a fluid body. This fluidity, or more specifically, this fluid integration, is how Plato tells the truth not only slant, but also “in Circuit.” This “in Circuit” approach to truth telling is needed because of the proclivities toward fixity and stasis that characterize human relationships with the replete character of the world and the misapprehended powers of the written word. Whereas chapter 1 focused on the potentialities

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and avian ideal of the entangled relations of soul, soma, and logos, this chapter considers the problematic orientations toward discourse that are highlighted in the dialogue and made the focus for change. To recall the mollusk imagery: Just as the body can become a named object, which we then carry around in a tomblike manner, so too with the written word. It can become a dead shell, which we name in various ways and carry around, imprisoned by the false idea that it preserves knowledge and authorizes an abiding, unchanging self. Fixated stasis, not circuiting dynamism, becomes misperceived as the right relation with logos. A misconstrued relationship between the self and logos, in particular, between self-knowledge and the written word, takes several forms in the Phaedrus. The most immediate examples are the depictions of how people mistakenly value the written word, believing it to establish knowledge in abiding ways simply by virtue of its physical form. A paradigmatic instance of this occurs at the outset of the dialogue with Phaedrus’s apparent hoarding of a copy of the speech he has recently heard Lysias deliver, in which Lysias advanced the view that it is more favorable to be involved with a man who does not love you than with one who does (Phaedrus 228d6). Phaedrus’s mention of the speech occasions, in effect, the rest of his encounter with Socrates, who is eager to hear Phaedrus relay the contents of Lysias’s purported wisdom about love. As Socrates urges Phaedrus to recount Lysias’s speech and Phaedrus demurs, expressing doubts about his ability to do justice to Lysias’s oration, Socrates calls him out for such hesitation, given that he appears to be carrying an actual copy of the speech beneath his cloak. Phaedrus carries the speech as a token or talisman of knowledge that can stand in for his own perceived insufficiencies, an act of substitution and self-evasion which the dialogue’s later critique of writing has precisely in mind when it considers the potentially atrophying effects of the written word. This initial episode of repartee between Phaedrus and Socrates with regard to the heard and written forms of Lysias’s speech brings into the dialogue the issues of reception, source, and the transmission of truth discussed in the preceding chapter. Socrates’ cajoling of Phaedrus to deliver the Lysian speech is also laden with allusions to sexual force, a significant undercurrent in their otherwise philosophically flirty (or flirtatiously philosophical) exchange.1 The issue of who controls whom in the dialogical encounter is concretized in Phaedrus’s possession of a written record of Lysias’s speech, with his concealment of this record an attempt, in

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part, to protect any leverage he might have over Socrates in their discursive engagement. Is Phaedrus in possession of Lysias’s speech, or is the speech in possession of him, and how does Socrates insert himself into this dynamic? This question arises early and colors Phaedrus’s entire encounter with Socrates and our encounter with their encounter. That the speeches reckon with the character of erotic and divine possession only enhances this early effect of Phaedrus’s possession of the concealed text. The shift from being a passively receptive self to a vitally responsive soul requires a kind of openness and malleability in the presence of sources of attraction and aspiration, an orientation that necessarily risks entrancement with spurious and manipulative forms of guidance. Although Phaedrus’s behavior with the hidden speech suggests a mistaken appraisal, and naïve understanding, of its power and value, it is also an honest expression of the ways in which we can try to cover the vulnerability required for philosophic engagement of the soul, using the words of others to pass safely through to the other side of such engagement. Socrates’ calling attention to Phaedrus’s cloaked Lysian speech is a disruption of this attempt to pass. The dialogue shows us that there is no other side, no point beyond the engagement at which we can rest secure. Another emblematic instance of a misguided or misplaced estimation of the written word arises in the transition to the discussion of good speech writing that directly follows Socrates’ palinode to eros and his tale of the cicadas’ origins. Phaedrus suggests that politicians are wary to leave their positions recorded in writing, for fear of how they will be regarded by posterity. Socrates corrects Phaedrus, pointing out that, in fact, the opposite situation is the case—not only do the politicians who think most highly of themselves love speech writing and leaving a record of them behind, they also inscribe them with the names of those who have admired the speeches. In effect, they make the written speech a kind of closed circuit, a document advancing a position that is framed by endorsements that a reader would encounter prior to the content of the speech itself. He is satirizing a writing practice that mistakenly values the written word because it is treated as a means for preserving one’s reputation in perpetuity. Physical inscription is mistaken for a stability of the self.2 Analogizing the politician to the poet, Socrates characterizes this misappraisal of the relationship between abiding writing and endurance of the self: “Then if it [the speech] abides, the poet leaves the theater delighted; but if it is erased and he loses the chance of being a speech writer,

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of being considered sufficient as a writer, he and his friends mourn” (258b2–5). The erasure of written speech and the oblivion of the self are coterminous. Although the threat of oblivion is real, the politicians’ estimation that the written word can provide a safeguard against it is an erroneous hope. As with Phaedrus’s behavior of hoarding written speech, the politicians mistake written form as a protection against exposure of the self and its limits.3 A more oblique way through which Plato comments on misperceptions of the powers of discourse and the written word involves the relationship between pre sentational form and content. In the dialogue there often seems to be a mismatch between the topic under discussion and the schema through which it is being described. It is a strategy that counters the one seen in the case of the word-images of the soul. In that case, Socrates flags the need to shift to a different discursive mode, one more congruous with the subject being addressed. But at other points in the dialogue he seems to take an opposite tack. Rather than shift to a discursive mode more suited to the topic at hand, he presents the subject within a form that appears decidedly incongruous with it. One example appears early within the palinode, when he describes the forms of divinely bestowed madness that people regard as valuable, rather than as something to be avoided or spurned. The categorization of madness he suggests is decidedly incongruous with the nature of the very thing he is trying to characterize. Madness involves, by defi nition, the blurring and dismantling of conventionally accepted categories and boundaries. Another example in this vein, one to which we will return in more detail, is the definition of eros presented within Socrates’ version of Lysias’s speech. It is a telling example of Plato’s play with the fit between topic and presentational form, one that is all the more significant because the topic is eros and because Socrates has chosen how to express a position other than his own, one with which he disagrees, as expressed in the palinode. As chapter 1 illustrated, the heart of the dialogue is the human experience of repleteness and porosity, for which erotic love is an especially apt topical, conceptual, and phenomenological backdrop. The attempt to present a definition of eros— eros, which, by its very nature, cannot be pinned down and controlled with precision—is emblematic of a misperception, or mistaken appraisal, of what written form can do with this repleteness and porosity.

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Plato thus expresses how the relationship to the written word can go awry through both explicit and implicit means. His critique of erroneous orientations to the written word is often laid bare through explicit commentary or discussion within the Phaedrus-Socrates encounter. It is also created more implicitly, by virtue of how features of the dialogue are related in ways that cause strain, generating potential incongruities between form and content indicative of a philosophic point. This chapter examines both kinds of examples, the explicit and the implicit, to better understand the problematic relationships to written form that impede rather than engender the soul’s burgeoning. To understand how the relationship with the written word can go awry and how it can be reformed, we can begin with Socrates’ query to Phaedrus later in the dialogue about how the earlier speeches changed from a negative appraisal of erotic love to a positive account of eros as the best form of madness (265c5). Tracing this change across the speeches offers a view of the movement from the self to the soul by way of a refigured relationship to the written word. The intertwined philosophical position and discursive strategy across Socrates’ speeches suggest how the shift of the self into the soul becomes possible. The movements of the discourse and the soul are mutually constitutive. If we begin to understand how Socrates’ speech moved from censure to praise, we begin to understand something about how the soul emerges. Socrates’ response to Phaedrus suggests two seemingly different explanations with regard to the query about how the speeches changed from criticism of erotic love to its praise. He suggests first that his speech was the result of playfulness and then that it was the product of articulating and collating the important elements of his topic. Th is is the point at which he introduces the well-known butcher analogy of discourse, in which the carving method of the butcher represents the techniques of the dialectician. (To recall from the introduction: the butcher analogy comes shortly after the living-animal analogy in the dialogue’s later discussion of good speech writing, though without comment or explicit comparison on the part of Socrates.) Socrates attempts to trace the change in his speeches from criticism to praise in terms of the carvedanimal analogy of discourse and the techniques of articulation identified with the dialectician—not via the living-animal analogy of discourse, as I have chosen to do throughout this book. His attempt has many points of failure and omission, a feature of the dialogue that has

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been much commented on by others.4 The apparent mismatch, or at least imperfect fit, between Socrates’ butcher analogy and the shape of his earlier speeches has been a long-standing, lively point of interpretive speculation as readers reckon with its possible meaning within the dialogue as a whole. Some suggest a view of complementariness, in which the less analytic features of the palinode and the more analytic contours of dialectic method point to two equally important modes of philosophic inquiry. On this reading, the living-animal and carved-animal analogies of discourse can be held together, perhaps in a relationship of productive tension, in a unified, coherent way.5 Pressing on the discordancy between the two analogies of discourse— rather than resolving the friction between them—affords a distinctive perspective on the movements and methods of Socrates’ speeches. Exploring the living-animal analogy as far as one can within the structure of the text makes it possible to see the stakes of the dialogue. In this interpretive spirit, I pursue Socrates’ suggestion that the speeches moved by virtue of a kind of playfulness, a playfulness evoked by the image of discourse as a living animal more so than the image of the carved, dead animal body. To trace Socrates’ discursive play in the light of the dynamism and vitality of the fluidly integrated, breathing animal body, two concepts help illumine the contours and character of his speeches: fixation and displacement. These concepts will serve to connect the discussion and begin to explain how and why the dialogue tells the truth not only slant but also “in Circuit.” They are drawn from the psychoanalytic tradition(s) but in a roughhewn manner can be used to name and understand the dynamics with which Plato is concerned. I use the term “fixation” to characterize an orientation toward interpretation or understanding in which reflection or questioning has become suspended, neglected, or wholly abandoned under the mistaken belief that an end point of truth, resolution, or fact has been reached. In the face of the replete character of the world, we often respond with positions of fixation, both in our relationships to desire and to the written word. Plato aims to disrupt such fixation and move the reader to an alternative relationship with eros and logos. One way of construing this alternate relationship is through the concept of displacement. Consider a general description of displacement: “The fact that an idea’s emphasis, interest or intensity is liable to be detached from it and to pass on to other ideas, which were originally of little intensity but which are related to the first idea by a chain of associations.” 6 The

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movement of the dialogue form, and of the Phaedrus in particular, can be regarded in terms of displacement insofar as the text’s development transpires through a shifting sequence of associative, cumulative ideas more than through a progressive, logical accretion of steps. A pattern of displacement rather than fixity characterizes the text and signals the kind of relationship with logos that can counter erroneous orientations to discourse and desire, as these are depicted in the text. The concepts of fixation and displacement help open to view the tensions not only between the two analogies of discourse but also within the living-animal analogy itself. Specifically, what place does the head have within the living-animal analogy? Should it have pride of place over the other bodily components, or is it an equal part among many others? To understand the place of the head within the analogy, one must consider the place of reason within the broader context of the dialogue. And the place of reason is not a simple one. The affective, Dionysiac, irrational tropes and topics saturating the dialogue unsettle any picture in which the head of the living animal can be taken to represent the crowning powers of reason, under which all other capacities should be simply and perpetually subsumed. Through the analogy Plato signals the value and necessity of the integrative capacities of reason while hedging any neat and clear dominance of the intellective aspects of the soul over others or at the expense of others. Charles Long’s articulation of the relation between reason and other modes of thought is especially apt on this point: “Knowing how to learn, and learning how to know, imply that there are modes of thought that are not limited to the exercise of reason; and it is these modes that place reason within the structures of life itself.”7 Plato’s livinganimal analogy can be regarded as an imagistic rendering of Long’s formulation. Our task is to discern what modes of thought place reason within the structures of life itself and which discursive forms facilitate, rather than stymie, this placing. It would, of course, go too far to deny the value and status of reason within the Platonic view or to suggest that Plato wholly equalizes its place among other human capacities. If there is a model of displacement in the text, it is not one in which all is equalized or, as Socrates’ critical description of Lysias’s speech suggests, one in which one can dip one’s hand in at any point and arrive at something that is just as good as any other place.8 It is a displacement in which different emphases are required at different times, resulting not in an equilibrium of moderation or harmony of

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complementary modes, but rather a pulsating fluidity where the discursive pulse is shifted and transposed throughout the text, not within a closed, steady economy but within a dynamically brimming organism. As with Plato’s transposition, celebration, and yet ultimate disruption of the model of the theoretic gaze on truth and the statue-like beloved, so too with the living-animal analogy: The text resists any one, definitive reading of the image that would put interpretive speculation fully to rest. Reckoning with the living-animal analogy to appreciate the fluid construction of the text thus requires reckoning with the picture of reason offered in the dialogue. And this reckoning requires understanding what is at stake with the discussion of madness and the spurning and celebration of its various forms. To track these intersecting relationships in the text and to account for the movement of the dialogue in the terms of fluid displacement, let’s recall briefly the positions from which Socrates’ recasting of madness departs and then consider two outside hermeneutic sources.

The Disruption of Divinest Sense and Starkest Madness The philosophical significance of Socrates’ methods of movement from the censure of love to its praise in his palinode depends on the character and content of the dialogue’s first two speeches, Phaedrus’s and then Socrates’ renditions of the Lysian speech against love.9 In Phaedrus’s recounting of the Lysian view of erotic love, the “in love” lover is cast negatively, as a person to be avoided because of his compromised self-control, susceptibility to poor judgment, and his association with various kinds of blameworthy behavior. To be involved with a lover is to become embroiled in a relationship of troublesome exchange in which the needs and best interests of the beloved are not met or are met only erratically. By contrast, becoming involved with a nonloving lover—that is, a man who can fulfill his end of the relationship without erotic distraction and debilitation—is lauded as the preferable situation for a beloved seeking certain benefits to his own development. Socrates’ subsequent retelling and elaboration of the Lysian view adds the wrinkle that the critical depiction of the “in love” lover is being voiced by a “not in love” lover who is, in fact, only pretending to be such.

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Once upon a time, then, there was a boy, or rather a young man, and very beautiful he was; and he had a very large number of lovers. One of them was cunning, because although he was as much in love as any of them, he had convinced the boy that he was not in love with him. And once in pressing his claims he tried to convince him of just this, that one ought to grant favors to one not in love rather than to the one in love; and he spoke like this. (237b2)10

Socrates’ adaptation and delivery of the Lysian view then unfolds within this ruse of narrative “passing” such that the ensuing negative characterization of the in-love lover can’t be considered apart from this rhetorical premise. The depiction of the lover that is offered elaborates on Phaedrus’s speech in its emphasis on the harm done to the beloved due to the lover’s inability to consistently act in his beloved’s best interests, given that love enslaves the lover’s judgment, wreaks havoc with his motivations, and renders him an unstable partner. If the beloved cares about the state of his soul, he would do well to avoid a lover who loves him, claims the pretending nonlover.11 Within both renditions of the Lysian view, the problematic nature of the lover is, on balance, located in the response to desire he experiences, expresses, and represents. He is regarded as succumbing to a form of repletion at the cost of reasoned judgment and control. If Plato simply endorsed a picture in which the dominance of reason— or the head in the living-animal analogy—was the ideal, no matter the means or cost, then the Lysian view of love and madness might suffice. For obvious reasons, we know the Lysian view can’t be taken solely at face value: Socrates’ rejection of it in the palinode precludes this, as does his posed elaboration of Lysias’s position. If Plato has Socrates express the position of someone he then goes on to refute, we need to attend to how that position has been presented and what Plato is saying by way of this presentation. By including the Lysian position against love, Plato is not merely showing us an alternate, conventional view of love and madness in order to set up Socrates’ refutation. He shows how a Lysian orientation to the topic (at least as this is imagined and elaborated by Socrates) is expressive of a more significant kind of error than the one Lysias himself identifies within love. Socrates’ portrayal of the Lysian conception of the nonlover’s position evinces a madness that is more troubling—if more ordinary and common—than the destabilization of the lover Lysias has urged Phaedrus to avoid. The Lysian madness is less about succumbing to the surfeit of desire (as he would have it) than it is about denying

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the brimming, porous character of the world and deforming the self and manipulating discourse in order to sustain this denial. Understanding the ordinary madness of Lysias in this way allows us to then trace the shift to daemonic madness within the palinode. It is a shift characterized by a movement from fixation to displacement, both in terms of an orientation to the replete character of desire and in terms of an orientation to discourse befitting this repleteness. The following poem by Emily Dickinson is expressive of the reversal of or disruption in the estimation of madness that Plato effects in the shift from the Lysian view of eros to Socrates’ mythic account in the palinode. This reversal or disruption does not happen merely at the surface of the stated content of the speeches, in which case there would be no need to offer any further commentary, as merely reading the speeches would suffice. Although the refiguring of madness by Socrates does happen at the level of the surface content of the speeches, the nested layers and implications of Plato’s recasting of madness can be appreciated only when the stated content is examined in concert with a consideration of how this content is expressed. Dickinson can get us started on this examination. Much Madness is divinest Sense To a discerning Eye Much Sense - the starkest Madness ’Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail Assent - and you are sane Demur - you’re straightway dangerous And handled with a Chain —Emily Dickinson (620/J435)12

How does one come to have the “discerning Eye” through which can be seen erroneous characterizations of what is “Madness” and what is “Sense”? Or turned over in the imagery of beholding sights of truth, what modes of seeing can glimpse faulty identifications of madness and sense? This crux of who “sees rightly” is illustrated in the dialogue via the condensed image of the burgeoning avian soul, who escapes the notice of the majority of people because of their inability to discern his divinely inspired state. Uncomprehending of the avian soul’s divine madness, their stark sense handles it with censure and condemnation. At one level, Socrates’ transition from his version of the Lysian position against love to his own palinode in which he celebrates erotic mad-

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ness effects the reversal of estimation addressed in Dickinson’s poem. The “Sense” of the Lysian nonloving lover becomes recast as “the starkest Madness,” and the “Madness” of the loving, erotically invigorated erastēs becomes refigured as “divinest Sense.” I do not mean, of course, that the reversal is a kind of precise or literal one-to-one switch, in which what was “mad” is now “sense” and vice versa. Simply that what had been denigrated as dehumanizing madness becomes refigured as a mode of thought or being that, pace Long, places reason within the (erotic) structures of life itself. And what had been lauded as a humanizing sanity in the Lysian position becomes recast as a mode of thought that misplaces reason outside of the erotic structures of life. Or said in the terms of Creeley’s poem from the preceding chapter, the Lysian attempt “entire” to see another “be” leads not to controllable apprehension but rather unravels into incomprehension and imprisoning constriction. One becomes enchained by sense, not made safe by it. At another level, this reversal and disruption of “Madness” and “Sense” is effected not only through the stated content of Socrates’ speeches but through how Plato embeds this content in particular discursive strategies. In this regard, we can consider Dickinson’s poem as not just about discerning the madness or sense of people, but we can also regard it as an address of what we take to be “Madness” and “Sense” in discourse, specifically with respect to written logos. What are “Majority” forms of discourse that “prevail,” compliance with which renders one “sane” and departure from which renders one “dangerous” and subject to being “handled with a Chain”? What forms of discourse cultivate a “discerning eye,” and how do they involve their own kind of formative powers and techniques that work on and “handle” a reader? In these respects, Dickinson names the dynamics at work and at stake throughout the dialogue: How does Phaedrus’s assent and demurring vis-à-vis Lysias’s and Socrates’ speeches place him in positions of both being handled by discourse and handling it? Both conceptually and in terms of what counts as ordered and disordered speech, how does Socrates’ dissent from conventions of madness and sanity render him a risky guide? How does Lysias show us a wrinkle on Dickinson’s formulation? That is, his oratory dissent is quite different from that of Socrates, as is the danger he represents. His position is a dissent from expectations that a lover should be loving. Lysias’s use of sophistic discourse to present this dissent makes him dangerous as a teacher and thus subject to Plato’s philosophically critical handling. And, last, how is a reader being asked to navigate the mixed dynamics of assent and

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demurring in her relationship to the text, in order to have her “discerning Eye” cultivated and her soul erotically, philosophically kindled? From Dickinson’s poetic evocation of the disruption of madness that I take to be effected through the dialogue— both conceptually and discursively— let’s consider a further interpretive source elaborating this opening. It will allow us to appreciate what Plato is doing in the text beyond its stated content about madness, with regard to the discursive strategies expressing this content, creating the movement of the text, and stimulating the reader to unmoor her chained relations with logos.

Ordinary Madness and Fix ation: The De- Integr ated Self and the Amputated Limbs of Discourse Richard Wollheim’s account of madness can help us see what is at stake in the early speeches of the dialogue, within the space between Lysias’s conception of love’s irrationality and the madness evinced by his own alignment with the nonlover.13 Wollheim’s account of madness offers a compelling portrait of how fi xations of desire, self-knowledge, and discourse are related. From him, we can then consider displacement as a model for disrupting such fi xations, as illustrated by the discursive strategies used by Plato in the palinode to eros and throughout the dialogue. Wollheim discusses the kind of madness that results from rejecting features of the world through two interrelated processes: “derealization” and “depersonalization.”14 In “derealization” a feature of the world is denied. In denying this feature of the world, the person regards and fantasizes it as dependent on her thoughts and feelings. Derealization creates a “depleted or erroneous” picture of the world because “the denial, the lived denial, of some part of the world, in effect denies it a life of its own.”15 The second process, “depersonalization,” Wollheim considers the more devastating of the two in terms of its makeup and consequences. In depersonalization a feature of the self is denied. In denying this feature of the self, the person comes to regard it as independent of her thoughts and feelings. Depersonalization creates a “confused or incoherent” picture of the world because “the denial, the lived denial, of some part of ourselves, in effect denies us a life altogether our own.”16 These processes can frame the responses to repletion or surfeit that Plato

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is challenging and trying to transform. Both processes result in the creation and manipulation of fixations of desire that are riddled with misperception and error. The nonlover imagined in Phaedrus’s version of the Lysian view exhibits the process of derealization. In this speech the nonlover in effect denies desire as a feature of the world. In so doing, he creates the fantasy that desire is dependent on his thoughts and feelings. The nonlover’s pragmatic calculations and negotiations of desire, as these are highlighted and praised within Phaedrus’s speech, can be seen as versions of this fantasy. The error of fixation here involves an illusion of control. The nonlover believes he can fixate desire in his own terms of rational calculation. In Socrates’ rendition of the Lysian argument against erotic love, the position of the nonlover becomes more complicated because, as previously discussed, it is a pose adopted by the imagined narrator through which Socrates frames the speech. This narrative ruse makes the speech illustrative of the more devastating process of depersonalization. That is, the staging of the speech’s voice is a rhetorical strategy on Socrates’ part, but it also contains a loaded point about the nonlover’s orientation to desire. The vantage point of the speech is someone who is, in effect, denying part of himself. In so doing, he regards desire as independent of his thoughts and feelings. The pretending nonlover’s attempts to control desire are characterized by a particular form of rejecting surfeit in the world and porosity in the self. As we will see, desire becomes fixated in external figures (human and textual) over which the pretending nonlover must seek to exert control. There are multiple forms of fixation and control involving external figures in Socrates’ first speech, the speech in which he presents a version of the Lysian view. Three aspects are significant. First, a lover—as described by the pretending nonlover who voices the speech—is engaged in a cycle of control that appears to manifest the kind of processes Wollheim describes. In this case, the beloved becomes an external figure identified with the psychical features that the lover seeks to manipulate to his own determined ends and advantages, an orientation that acts as a kind of rejection of their (and his) nature, given desire’s incongruity with notions of control and attempts at self-contained aspiration. The lover’s preoccupations with control and dominance render him a poor lover, since his energies are taken up with navigating the lover-beloved situation to his own self-preserving ends, often to the detriment of the beloved’s well-being.

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Second, and more crucially, the pretending nonlover’s depiction of the lover is itself a kind of external figure. The processes of psychic rejection become bound up with rhetorical and discursive forms. Whereas the lover may exhibit the processes of depersonalization, the more significant dimension is that the pretending nonlover offers the characterization. Through this characterization the pretending nonlover disavows aspects of his psyche by infusing them into the externalized caricature. He creates the external figure to incarnate the aspects of self he seeks to avoid or escape. The pretending nonlover is thus doubly lost— as a lover he can describe the forms of fixity in which he is trapped, and by posing as a nonlover, he is literally trying to pass off this knowledge of himself. That all this transpires via particular rhetorical moves within a hypothetically written speech is the truly incisive aspect of Plato’s presentation. Psychic and discursive fixation, rejection, and manipulation are of a piece. This becomes highlighted in a specific feature of Socrates’ elaboration of the Lysian view, representing a third example of the fixity and control involved in depersonalization. The definition of eros presented by the pretending nonlover is a third kind of external figure by which the surfeit of the self is rejected. In order to draw out these interpretive points and their consequences, let’s consider the process of depersonalization in some detail. Wollheim’s discussion of depersonalization draws on Melanie Klein’s concept of projective identification.17 The theory of projective identification is quite technical, but understanding its basic features in a general way is sufficient to frame the multiple orientations toward the beloved depicted in Socrates’ first speech. This frame illustrates how these orientations create a very particularly daunting and distorting self-understanding. First, in projective identification the person wishing to rid himself of an intolerable feature of his psychology will associate this feature with an inner figure. The intolerable feature can be a thought or emotion or some sequence of these. The inner figure may be a whole object or part-object that is then fantasized as expelled into the outer world. Second, this expelled figure is fantasized as continuing to exist in the outer world. And, crucially, though it now exists independently of the person, the figure is fantasized as still bearing the marks of internality. That is, this external figure is fantasized as retaining special immediate access to the mental life of the person who has created it. This is why such figures become regarded as looming, ominous presences in the life of the person from which they have been expelled. Third, the expelled figures are not just

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fantasized as existing outside the person, they take up very particular places within the external world. Usually they are identified with someone else whom the person loves or hates. Wollheim notes that at a minimal level this denial and expulsion of intolerable feelings brings relief of some kind. But given the manner in which this denial occurs, a secondary effect arises from the process. Projecting these unwanted psychical phenomena into lovers and enemies “can be experienced as a way of attacking, or humiliating, above all of controlling, this person.” The relief provided by this control is short-lived because “the delusions of power that projective identification fosters are likely to arouse massive fears of retaliation from these lurking figures.”18 This secondary effect creates the graver repercussions of projective identification, tying it specifically to the question of self-knowledge. These repercussions concern how the world comes to present itself to the person. First, the person becomes cut off from himself. In the attempt to rid himself of a significant psychic feature by projecting it into others, the person is deprived of an awareness of this feature. It may be possible, perhaps even likely, that he will still manifest the psychic feature. But the crucial detail is that he will do so without the benefit of being able to represent this psychic feature internally to himself. The upshot is a kind of self-alienation in which the very feature that is most distressing and significant for the person can now be known only inferentially. There is a corollary dimension of the self-alienation stemming from projective identification. Not only has the person cut himself off from himself in a significant way, he has created others who have special knowledge about him. He cannot know himself, and he has created others who can know him only too well: “The person finds himself surrounded by others— that is, those into whom he has projected his unwanted dispositions— of whom the phantasies that he entertains force him to believe that they have some very special knowledge of him.”19 These external figures are perceived as having come by this knowledge not just by inference or witnessing, but by immediate access. The world created by depersonalization thus “contain(s) others who know, or appear to know, the person in the same way as, and better than, he knows himself.”20 The further dilemma of this twofold alienation is that the person has made this world himself, and yet it is a world he can’t make sense of. His world is incoherent because inner features of the psyche have come to inhabit the outer world and in the process both have become inaccessible to him.

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The madness of depersonalization arises from the way in which its features combine to devastating effect. That others know him better than he knows himself is bad: that others know him in the same way as he knows himself is bad. But combine the two thoughts, and it emerges that the person in trying to rid himself of intolerable thoughts and feelings has laid himself totally at the mercy of an alien, hostile world. Instead of losing parts of his psychology, he has only lost awareness of them: and this awareness he has lost to others, who now possess it, and who thereby gain unlimited power over him. He is Caliban to their Prospero. But in trying to explain how this came about, he has to fall back on thoughts which he owes to phantasy and which cannot be intelligibly stated.21

Wollheim’s discussion of the combined elements and effects of depersonalization resonate with Socrates’ first speech in several ways. In one sense, the processes and effects of depersonalization can frame the lover’s controlling and manipulative behavior of the beloved, as these are depicted by the pretending nonlover within Socrates’ “Lysian” speech. The struggle here is not really between the lover and beloved but between the lover and himself. The lover has responded to the replete character of the self, as manifested in desire, by identifying it with— or more properly in or as— another person. In rejecting this aspect of the self, he then becomes consumed with controlling it in this other person. What is at stake in ordinary madness then is a particular form of self-alienation or self-destruction, or, perhaps more accurately, a form of self-knowledge in which the psychic feature to be encountered has been simultaneously found and lost. Ordinary madness is not so much possession by some outside force, nor is it simply allowing one aspect of self to override all others—it is a denial of self in which the power of that psychic dimension is given to others. And yet that aspect of self is not really relinquished or escaped because one must then maneuver in order to keep it at bay. The reversal of the lover’s manipulative strategies highlights this well. Recognizing that he has created a situation from which he must now try to extricate himself, he leaves the beloved high and dry. Then, at the point when he should be paying back what he owes, he substitutes a different ruler and champion in himself, sense and sanity in place of love and madness, and has become a different person without his beloved’s realizing it. And the beloved asks for something in return for what happened before, giving reminders of what was done and said then, thinking that he is talking to the same man. (241a2, Rowe translation)

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Following Wollheim’s analysis, the lover has not so much regained his sanity as he has gained a clear view of the world he has created and in which he is caught. He has created a beloved with whom he can’t interact because the beloved inhabits his rejection of self. And yet he is bound to the beloved for fear that this rejected self can be used against him. In effect he is ducking out of a deformed encounter with self. The speech’s caricature of the situation may correctly depict it as pathetic or ridiculous, but this is not because it is without power. The situation is pathetic because its power is generated by, and ultimately held against, the very person seeking to defend himself from his own psyche. Of course, this is not the story given within the speech. But the situation is presented from the vantage point of someone posing as a nonlover, so we should not take his explanation at face value. This brings us to the other levels at which the idea of depersonalization resonates with Socrates’ first speech. This resonance is at the broader level of the character of discourse. The fit will thus be more speculative but more significant for the purposes of the Phaedrus. In offering a depiction of the lover and his problematic relationship with the beloved, the pretending nonlover is in fact offering a potential portrait of himself and the potentialities of desire from which he seeks to be dissociated. The nested narrative of the speech—that is, Socrates presents a speech that is voiced by the fake nonlover, who depicts what he thinks love leads to— creates a kind of deflected self-knowledge in that the nonlover’s disparaging account of love could, he well knows, apply to himself. Given this deflection through speech, my particular interest is in how the pretending nonlover denies the surfeit of his soul and attempts to make discourse its external locale. In so doing, he is concerned with the control and manipulation of discourse, since it is the locus of his fi xation of desire. His disavowal and subsequent attempts at control are manifest in particular discursive features. Most notable is the definition of eros from which he builds his pejorative account of the lover. There is first the textual detail that he characterizes eros as a “limb” of multilimbed excess.22 Though this detail connects to Socrates’ somatic analogies of discourse, which will be discussed later, I am not suggesting we take this textual point literally. Rather, my general observation has to do with how the definition itself is a kind of object or part-object. The pretending nonlover, in trying to rid himself of part of his psychology, has associated this psychic feature with a rhetorical object and expelled it into the outer world of discourse. Or in simpler terms, he has transformed

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a psychic struggle into a discursive one. And he must maneuver through rhetorical power plays in order to sustain his fractured self. The denial and deformation of the brimming, porous soul becomes bound up with forms of discourse. The fixation of desire and the techne of rhetoric are of a piece. Plato’s response to Lysias will thus have to address and transform both.

Daemonic Madness and Displacement: From Disjointed Limbs to Fluid Integr ation The concepts of derealization and depersonalization are ways of framing the dialogue’s preliminary speeches. These concepts help illuminate what is at issue with nondivine madness. It is not sufficient to regard this madness as owing to the self ’s being overridden by some kind of external power. Nor is it sufficient to regard this madness as a simple, onedimensional form of self-alienation in which part of the psyche turns against another part. There is a fracturing or dispersion of the self at work in nondivine madness, but, significantly, it embroils others in its wake and is not contained within some bounded self. Notions of “internal to self ” and “external to self ” are in fact unsettled and transformed. Further, the self-alienation at work is not a simple one of a divided psyche, as though a stranger is acting against someone’s better interests or intentions. Wollheim stresses that a kind of internality, or stamp of subjectivity, marks the process of rejection and dispersion of self into other figures. This is the only way to explain the hold these external figures have on the mad. As is clear in the initial speeches, the lover may be engaged in rituals of control and manipulation, but it is actually he who is in the grip of the beloved. The power of this grip lies in how the lover’s own subjectivity permeates, creates the beloved. It is not that a stranger lives within and against the self; it is rather that the self inhabits a stranger whom he can never come to know. The processes of derealization and depersonalization create and depend on fixations of desire. At best they engender static understandings of self; at worst they render self-knowledge impossible because of their foundation in the denial and rejection of the most salient features of the psyche. Further, this denial and deformation of the replete character of the self extends into a world that must be remade or manipulated in various ways. For Plato, this is the world not just of other people and objects

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but also of discourse. The entanglement of fixations of desire, self, and discourse is the locus of nondivine, mortal madness. In Socrates’ palinode Plato unsettles this entanglement and presents an alternative orientation to desire and discursive form. The relationship with desire moves from one of fixation to one of displacement. The forms of discourse used to present this reorientation reflect this unsettling of desire. In the palinode to eros Plato thus combines departures from conventions of rhetoric and philosophical discourse with reimagined uses of these conventions. Two textual moments can be considered as points of departure for the shift in discursive strategy marking the palinode, a shift that makes possible the movement from censure to praise across Socrates’ speeches. Both moments are potent, compressed sources of disruption with effects that saturate the remainder of the text. The first has already been mentioned: the definition of eros presented by Socrates within his rendition of the Lysian view against love. Put simply, erotic love cannot be wholly and simply contained within human conventions of control, a fact that becomes mirrored by, and enacted within, the discursive limits of the definitional form. Just as eros permeates, unsettles, and unravels human attempts to fixate it in a life, so too with its definition. Eros will bleed beyond the boundaries of the definition, unsettling its contours, disrupting the misplaced belief in the possibility and power of discursive precision and control. In the palinode, Plato thus does not present eros anew simply by redefining it. He refigures eros through a mode of discursive displacement, by shifting through and among various phenomena of repleteness, surfeit, and unboundedness. In effect, the definition of eros acts as a moment of disruption from which alternate discursive strategies then arise. The repercussions of this textual moment of disruption are thrown into relief by a second potent moment, one mentioned at the end of my introduction. If the definition creates the occasion for the change in discursive approach in the palinode, the second moment creates the terrain in which this change unfolds. In the interlude between Socrates’ first speech and his palinode to eros he credits his familiar divine sign for stopping him from leaving because he must first purify himself of a mistake he has committed against the gods (242c). But crucially, unlike the pretending nonlover who rejects and projects aspects of his psyche out into the world, into external human and rhetorical figures he can then

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manipulate and control, Socrates incorporates himself into the moment and dilemma at hand. As though the figure of the divine sign is too removed from himself to account for his actions and character, Socrates shifts the attribution of the source of his understanding to within his own being: “I am a seer, and, though not a very good one, am like those who are poor at reading and writing— I am good enough only for my own purposes. I now clearly understand my offense” (242c4). Th is embedded position within the discourse is repeated in the same passage: “Something troubled me as I was delivering the speech.” Socrates’ incorporation of himself within the situation— a stance that distinctly counters the pretending nonlover’s evasions—is followed by a further move, one highlighting how he exemplifies a kind of porosity. After identifying himself as a seer, rendered by Plato in first-person grammatical forms, Socrates then shifts this attribution to a more general source: “Truly, my friend, the soul is seer-like” (242c5). In this passage there is then a threefold movement: from identifying the knowledge at hand with an external source to locating this source within a first-person identification to a more general, abstract attribution of this source to the soul. The passage suggests an ideal of porosity and fluid integration from which the figures in the earlier speeches had become wholly estranged. This emergence of the seer-like self, of the soul, which the fi xations of mortal madness deny, is what allows for the movements of daemonic madness and discourse to become unloosed. Let’s consider the definition of eros in some detail in order to gain perspective on both the distinctive contours of the palinode as well as Socrates’ later difficulties and errors in attempting to parse its contents. The definition arises in the first section of Socrates’ elaboration of the Lysian view. Well then, that love is some sort of desire is clear to everyone; and again we know that men desire the beautiful even if they are not in love. By what then shall we distinguish the man in love and the man who is not? Our next step is to observe that in each of us there are two kinds of thing which rule and lead us, which we follow wherever they may lead, the one an inborn desire for pleasures, the other an acquired judgement that aims at the best. These two things in us are sometimes in accord, but there are times when they are at variance; and sometimes the one, at other times the second, has control. Now when judgement leads us by reason towards the best and is in control, its control over us has the name of restraint; when desire drags us irrationally towards pleasures and

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has established rule within us, its rule is called by the name of excess. Excess is something which has many names, for it has many limbs and many forms; and whichever of these forms happens to stand out in any case, it gives its possessor its own name, which is neither an admirable one nor one worth acquisition. When it is in connection with food that a desire has achieved control over both reasoning for the best and the other desires, it is called gluttony, and will give its possessor this same name; again, when it has become a tyrant in connection with drinking, leading the man who has acquired it in this direction, it is plain what appellation he will receive; and as for the other related names of related desires, we can see already that a person will be called by the appropriate one, that of whichever desire happens at any time to be in power. As for the desire for the sake of which all the foregoing has been said, it is already pretty evident what one should say; but everything is in a way clearer when said than when unsaid: the irrational desire that has gained control over any judgement urging a man towards what is correct, and that is carried towards plea sure in beauty—in turn being forcefully reinforced by the desires related to it in its pursuit of the beauty of bodies— and that wins victory by its drive, taking its name from its very force: this is called love. (237d4–238c4, Rowe translation)23

The definition is a piece of rhetoric that simultaneously spotlights the dialogue’s analogies of model discourse in terms of the multilimbed, living animal body and the multilimbed, carved animal corpse. Indeed, Socrates returns to this moment in the speech in his later analysis, a point we will return to shortly. First, by considering the tensions within the definition, I want to suggest how it bears the seeds of the strategies of displacement that characterize the palinode and the refigurement of eros. On my reading, the definition does not provide a rhetorical occasion for viewing the needed complementariness of discourse that reflects both a multilimb, living animal and a cleanly carved animal body. On this view of discursive complementariness, one might view the parts of the definition from both vantage points— as an integrated body of limbs, presided over by a rational head, and as an articulated body in which the limbs can be cleanly carved away. The discursive contours and methods of the palinode that follow on the speech in which the definition arises suggest, in my view, an alternate interpretive emphasis. The definition of eros may hold together, in a tensive and dynamic manner, both the discursive tendencies associated with a living animal body and those associated with the carved animal body. But ultimately, the features of the palinode suggest that the living-animal model is the one that breaks forth and best

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characterizes ensouled discourse. Again, the dynamism of the dialogue is not so much a vibrant harmony of complementary modes as it is a pulsating fluidity in which the discursive pulse shifts and is transposed throughout the text in differing, nonresolvable forms. To trace this interpretive emphasis, a key moment in the definition is the use of limb imagery and language to characterize the differently manifest forms of excess: “Excess is something which has many names, for it has many limbs and many forms.” The translation of hubris (ὕβρις) is difficult. For my explanatory purposes, I am following translations that render hubris as “excess” (in translations by Rowe and by Waterfield). Other translations use “wantonness” (Hackforth) or “outrageousness” (Nehamas and Woodruff ). All these options suggest important valences of the Greek term. If we consider the formal definition of hubris (ὕβρις), we see the multiple, layered senses of the term within the ancient Greek context.24 Three suggestions are given for the word’s primary meaning: (a) “wanton violence, arising from the pride of strength or from passion, insolence”;25 (b) “lust, lewdness, opp. sophrosune (σωφροσύνη)”;26 (c) “of animals, violence.” The secondary meaning suggested is the more concrete “an outrage on a person,” in particular “violation” and “rape.” The third suggestion is that the term can be used of “a loss by sea.” The entry for the related verb form (ὑβρίζω) suggests a similar layering of senses. The primary entry has four parts: (a) “wax wanton, run riot, in the use of superior strength or power, or in sensual indulgence”; (b) “of over-fed asses, neigh or bray and prance about”; (c) “of plants, run riot, grow rank and luxuriant”; (d) “metaph., of a river that swept away and drowned a horse.” The verbal form also denotes the committing of physical outrages on others or to mistreat and insult others. As with the noun form, sexual violation is an attendant meaning. These explicit and associative meanings of hubris are significant because they both echo and point toward the literary details involving unruly plant growth, animal violence and wildness, and unbound water seen throughout the dialogue. The definitional details of the language of excess are especially important because they draw attention to the potentially darker aspects of the dialogue’s thematic and structural engagement with experiential and textual forms of repleteness or profusion. The violation or porosity of boundaries throughout the surface content and inner structure of the dialogue can’t be regarded naively, within a romanticized appraisal that fails to take note of the grim potentialities within

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such violation. In particular, the allusions to sexual violation in the language of excess— compounded throughout the dialogue by literary references and the Phaedrus-Socrates interplay—mean that the reader’s attraction to the text, as well as her receptivity to its power, are not riskfree philosophical positions.27 The appearance of hubris in the definition presented within Socrates’ speech thus metonymically expresses the sustained and variously represented concern with the domestication of desire (and the absence of such domestication) in the text. The definition is, in effect, a rhetorical microcosm of the human attempt to encounter and encompass the profuse character of the world and the porosity of the self. My suggestion is that Plato is trying to show how a definitional approach to this encounter and encompassment is insufficient and incongruous with the phenomena at hand. Just as the attempt to locate aspects of the psyche in external, controllable figures or objects is bound to fail (as Wollheim’s account of madness suggested), so too the attempt to locate and control an understanding of the excessiveness of the human person within the parts of rhetoric. Eros breaks through the bounds of fixation; by analogy, eros breaks through its definition within Socrates’ first speech with effects that escape into the palinode. Although some have regarded the definition as an improvement on Phaedrus’s elaboration of the Lysian view, from which the palinode can then eventually follow more naturally and cogently, I suggest that Socrates is in fact upping the ante for the shift in discursive strategies distinguishing the palinode.28 He says that “everything is in a way clearer when said than when unsaid” right before completing the definition of eros. Later in the dialogue the wise man is characterized as one who knows “when to speak and when to remain silent” (276a). Socrates has chosen to speak in this first speech, although he has covered his head. Everything is made clearer in his first speech, in which he elaborates on the Lysian approach to love, not just because it is said, but because of how it is said. Th is clarity comes not from the surface content of the definition of eros itself but from the way Socrates sets up this definitional approach in contrast with the approach he uses in the palinode. From the comparison of the discursive methods in each speech clarity can emerge. More specifically, in the attempt to characterize the nature of eros, the definition isolates erotic love’s place within the human psyche. It is one form of excess among multiple limbs of excess from which the person is

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constituted. At times these limbs of excess are in accord with reasoned judgment; at times these limbs have gained control over such judgment; and sometimes these limbs are held under control by the restraint of reason. In terms of the multilimbed, living-animal analogy of discourse, the definition depicts eros as one limb of that body, distinguished by its combination of the irrational desire for plea sure in beauty with the force of desire for beauty in bodies. In the terms of the multilimbed, carvedanimal analogy of discourse, the definition cleaves away limbs from the body of the psyche until it arrives at the limb that is eros. Each rendering bears potential problems for understanding both the nature of eros and the forms of expression through which it can be best characterized. In the first case, eros is distinguished primarily in an object-oriented way; it is one form of excess, and this overarching excess is demarcated according to various objects of attunement. (The definition includes the examples of food, alcohol, and bodies.) In the definition, the integration of the living-animal body has become rendered as a collection of various object-fixations. This is a reductionistic rendering of the analogy, one that squanders the organic, capacious potential of the living-animal analogy. In the second case, eros is also cast in terms of the object (beautiful bodies) by which it is distinguished from other forms of excess. Th is object orientation to the excess of the human being makes the carvedanimal analogy a natural fit: Once the human person is divided into limbs of excess, each part demarcated according to a specific object, the lines along which to cleave the psychic body become tidy. On each rendering, the rhetorical form of the definition reflects and enacts a particular way of apprehending the character of desire and its place within the human person. It is a reflection and enactment marked by delusion and fantasy. To recall Wollheim’s account of madness, the definition, in effect, renders eros in terms of objects of fi xation, an approach that accords with the processes of derealization and depersonalization because it identifies the psychic feature with a location outside the self. This orientation to desire is not just referred to in the definition but is instantiated in the rhetorical form itself: Through the definition, eros becomes identified with a rhetorical object that can now be expelled into the world, held at bay from the self. Although the reductionist version of the integrated, living-animal analogy may be countered and rehabilitated, the carved-animal model is more conducive to erroneous apprehensions of desire. It bears a stronger

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tendency to trap an erroneous understanding of eros because of the closeness of fit between rhetorical method and conceptual content. Through the shift in Socrates’ discursive strategies after his first speech, Plato unmoors the reductionist version of the integrated, living-animal analogy manifest in the definition of eros and departs from the carved-animal model throughout the palinode. If eros doesn’t fit within the rhetorical form in which the pretending nonlover tries to capture and control it, what does it mean to suggest that the palinode can be regarded as the irruption of eros from the definition into the discourse? The palinode can be regarded as Plato’s philosophic play with the literal meaning of hubris (excess) within the definition, a literality about the surfeit of the self that the palinode then explores figuratively by shifting through associated phenomena characterized by repleteness or excess. Eros becomes unmoored from its fixation within the definition and displaced throughout the palinode. Less speculatively, I mean that a model of discursive displacement rather than discursive fixity characterizes the presentation of eros within Socrates’ palinode. More speculatively, one can also consider the felt sense of the unbound, rhetorical vibrancy of the palinode as a result of the release of eros from the confines of the earlier speeches.

Eros Unbound and the Shifting Terms of Excess Let’s consider the less speculative interpretive trajectory. If we regard the dialogue form as Plato’s attempt to fi nd a written form appropriate to the replete and porous character of the human person, then the palinode represents an especially potent and emblematic manifestation of this attempt. As perhaps the best evocation of the replete and porous nature of the human person, eros becomes freed from the definitional approach and expressed by way of other phenomena that overwhelm boundaries and break in on lives in analogous ways. The primary forms of repleteness or surfeit that the speech connects are madness, divinity, memory, and beauty. As nonfixated eros moves from its bounds within Socrates’ first speech, these related forms of excess wax wanton, run riot, and permeate boundaries within the palinode. The transposition of eros into shifting terms of excess gathers together the palinode in a method of fluid integration. That is how the speech moves from the censure of love to its praise, it is how Plato refigures eros, and it is how the capacious potential of the

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living-animal model of discourse is shown. The truth becomes told both slant and in circuit; eros becomes redeemed. The alteration in approach and the disruptive effects of the definition of eros are signaled by Socrates at the beginning of the palinode: “It must be said that the story is not true, the one that says if a lover is available you should instead gratify someone who doesn’t love you, since the one will be mad while the other will be moderate” (244). Straightway, with these opening lines, the previous speech has been spun a particular way. Socrates’ previous speech does identify the lover’s behavior with having an unsound mind at two points (238e, 241a– c). And the lover’s abandonment of the beloved is attributed to his regaining reason and practical wisdom in place of love and madness (241a). The thrust of the speech, however, is the manipulative behavior that characterizes the lover’s orientation to the beloved. Within the pretending nonlover’s speech, madness has not been an examined topic so much as it has been used as a rhetorical flourish to debase the lover. The speech skirts the question of what madness really is. As suggested earlier, this is because a pretending nonlover is hardly in a position to tell us about madness. Rather, it is through his example that Plato presents a picture of mortal madness. I have suggested Wollheim’s approach to madness as one way of elaborating this presentation. The beginning direction of the palinode acknowledges the inadequacy of the pretending nonlover’s characterization of madness. With the start of the palinode madness has been placed front and center as the topic of discussion. This shift to madness—when it is eros that Socrates is trying to redeem—is key to answering Socrates’ later query about how the speech moves from blame to praise. Given the course of Socrates’ first speech, there are other options open for redeeming love. He could question the defi nition offered in his fi rst speech, claiming that it can’t but set up the kind of debased depiction of the lover offered in the remainder of the speech. Or he might contend that the depiction of the lover following from the definition need not be the only outcome possible. Plato departs from the form of the definition because it is incongruous with the character of desire. Instead he refigures eros by viewing it slant and in circuit through associated forms of surfeit. The shifts between phenomena of repleteness extend or carry forward the speech’s attempt to express the previous phenomenon. This layering, deferral, and displacement from one phenomenon of surfeit to another creates the narrative movement of the palinode.

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The attribution with which Socrates begins the palinode is a compressed clue about how the speech combines phenomena characterized by replete presence with phenomena characterized by unbound, abyssal absence. Thus, although the speech can be regarded as a fluid linking of forms of repleteness, such linking bears a concomitant shadow of potential oblivion. At the outset of the palinode he identifies the speech he is about to deliver as belonging to Stesichorus, son of Euphemus, of Himera. Stesichorus, the historical figure, was the poet blinded by the gods for his besmirching of Helen, who then recanted by offering a palinode on her behalf. “Euphemus” means “to use words of good omen,” or “to avoid all unlucky words” and by implication “to keep a religious silence.”29 “Himera” calls forth himeros (ἵμερος), a form of desire or longing. So, straightway, with his attribution of the upcoming speech, Socrates joins together connotations of replete presence and limitless absence: Stesichorus represents the Muse-inspired excesses of poetry and is from a town of desire; yet he has also been blinded and is from a father named for a void in expression. Let’s focus on the phenomena of repleteness that become unfolded throughout the speech, for now simply marking the examples of unbound absence with which they are twinned. In chapter 3 I consider the moments and potential of abyssal and common oblivion in more depth. Having stated his loaded attribution of the speech’s origins, Socrates begins his recasting of the meaning and value of eros by shifting sideways, so to speak, to a focused look at madness. Its character as a paradigmatic phenomenon of surfeit and porosity is detailed by way of the examples Socrates offers. The prophetess at Delphi, priestesses at Dodona, and the Sibyl lead off his illustrations of the greatest goods that come to humans through divinely bestowed mania. Each of these examples— given the ecstatically oracular forms of expression for which they were esteemed—flies in the face of the definitional approach to eros, its presumptions of rhetorical control, and its parsing of divine eros.30 Other examples continue this pattern of emphasizing surfeit and porosity as divinely bestowed goods that we mischaracterize and devalue at our own peril: Madness can arise in the body as a purifying salve for those who need to assuage a family’s inheritance of misfortune owing to some prior offense of the gods. And madness and possession from the Muses can invigorate a soul, elevating it into the Bacchic enthusiasm from which poetry becomes possible.

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Socrates’ detailing of the divine forms of madness stops short of identifying eros as another of these cases. Instead Socrates shifts from the discussion of madness to the soul, in particular, to its immortality, which can be regarded as the first linkage to another phenomenon of repleteness or surfeit (245c). In this case, to suggest that we can regard the immortality of the soul as a linked form of repleteness is to highlight the unceasing, overabundance of time and movement noted in Socrates’ philosophical description. In this sense, we see here how the associations of repleteness are accompanied by counterpoised connotations: We can also regard immortality as the unbound, abyssal absence of the cessation of time or movement. At 246a Socrates shifts from a technical exposition of immortality, to a mythical, figurative exposition of the soul’s character, the rhetorical mode of unbound fullness examined in chapter 1. In this section, the significant linkage to the next phenomenon of repleteness or surfeit is to the divine, introduced at 246d5–e5 and then described more fully at 247c5–248a. Socrates’ first description of the divine is indeed a nod to how we might regard his own speech: “The natural property of a wing is to carry what is heavy upwards, lifting it aloft to the region where the race of the gods resides, and in a way, of all the things belonging to the sphere of the body, it has the greatest share in the divine, the divine being beautiful, wise, good, and everything which is of that kind” (246d6, Rowe translation). The speech is, in a way, Socrates’ attempt to make a winged form of discourse that lifts the soul toward truth, beauty, wisdom, goodness, and “everything which is of that kind.” The manner in which it lifts the soul, however, is not one of simple, linear ascent, but continually decentering circuiting characterized by a displacement, deflection, and dynamism of dialogical and textual motion or vitality. When Socrates continues his description of the region of the divine beyond heaven, we are given a better sense of what characterizes “everything which is of that kind.” Again, the terms of repleteness or overabundance seem apt as Socrates emphasizes the region as one of abiding being from which justice, self-control, and knowledge shine forth as continually replenishing sources of nourishment for the soul. As with madness and immortality, these idealized forms of replete presence also bear features of absence since they are “without color or shape” and without the potentiality for change. The next major linkage to a form of repleteness prior to Socrates’ explicit restatement of the character of Eros is his shift to, and inclusion of, memory as a mode of passage for the soul.

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A human being must comprehend what is said universally, arising from many sensations and being collected together into one through reasoning; and this is a recollection of those things which our soul once saw when it traveled in company with god and treated with contempt the things we now say are, and when it poked its head up into what really is. Hence it is with justice that only the thought of the phi losopher becomes winged; for so far as it can it is close, through memory, to those things his closeness to which gives a god his divinity. (249b9, Rowe translation)

Memory here is a phenomenon of repleteness and porosity insofar as it erupts from within the self, saturating it with a presence of knowledge that overwhelms other sources of perspective. The incorporation of memory also presents a potent, oblique angle onto the carved-animal analogy of a body of discourse seen later in the dialogue: If multilimbed experience is “collected together into one through reasoning” by virtue of the emergence of memory, this hardly presents a picture of the analogy in which reason can be understood in simple or one-dimensional ways, represented by the dominating head of the animal as the crown jewel of the creature. Memory may be a mode of thought, but to recall Charles Long’s articulation, “There are modes of thought that are not limited to the exercise of reason; and it is these modes that place reason within the structures of life itself.”31 Plato’s acknowledgment of this kind of expansive conception of reason and its related modes of thought is seen in two emblematic ways in this passage in which memory makes its entrance. First, his borrowing and transposition of the terms and imagery of the ekstasis of cultic religion is especially pronounced within the passage.32 Second, the incorporation of memory is accompanied by the incorporation of forgetfulness, carrying forward the pattern in the palinode of entangling phenomena of replete presence with phenomena of limitless absence. While memory may be the passage through which the soul becomes proximate with the divine, forgetfulness is the passage through which the soul becomes proximate with the human, as depicted in Socrates’ explanation of the soul’s embodiment immediately prior to his shift to memory (248c5–d1). The complex, ambivalent relationship between forgetting and remembrance will be the focus of chapter 3. Presently, let’s focus on the refigurement of eros that follows on the resurgence of memory. Socrates began the speech with various examples of madness, suspending his overview of divinely given mania prior to explicitly including eros among his examples. From this suspension he then moved through

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various topical emphases, linked by what I have suggested they bear in common: characteristics of replete presence and porosity, often concomitantly entangled with characteristics of limitless absence or lack. As such, they are appropriate discursive locales or mediums of displacement for expressing the character of erotic desire. Socrates’ fluid topical shifts accumulate throughout the palinode, pressing the speech onward toward its explicit rerendering of eros at 249d4, the point at which he picks up again the dangling thread of his earlier illustrations of the forms of good, divine madness. It is to this point that the whole discourse about the fourth kind of madness has brought us; the one, when, seeing something of beauty here, remembering true beauty, his wings begin to grow, and, with his feathers ruffled in anticipation he desires to fly but cannot; like a bird he looks upward, and taking no care of things below, he is accused of being mad.

This textual moment is emblematic of a discursive feature seen across Plato’s work, if most strikingly and famously within the Phaedrus and the Republic. Through Socrates’ itinerant, nonfi xated modes of attention the discourse moves through multiple angles onto the topic or question at hand, eventually alighting on compressed moments of evocation that express an idea without binding it. I have focused on tracing the discursive displacement and fluid integration of the palinode not only to open to view the contours of the palinode but also to highlight this especially condensed example within Plato’s writing as illustrative of his broad strategies with regard to the relation between philosophical method and presentational form. The metaphoric moment of the avian soul encapsulates many hallmark features of these strategies: There is a kind of tongue-in-cheek philosophic play with denoting eros as a fourth kind of madness. As a phenomenon that, by definition, involves eliding and eluding bounded categories, Socrates’ classificatory schematic of madness is not to be taken literally. In the avian image we see the linkage or entanglement of analogously related concepts and experiential phenomena—here, specifically, madness, beauty, and desire. Further, core conceptual elements of Plato’s philosophy (e.g., beauty, erotic aspiration) are rendered imagistically, in a way that comes closer to metaphor than analogy. That is, the analogical mode may be more common in his texts, but as we see in the case of the palinode, an accumulation of analogically related terms gives rise to a

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more metaphoric illustration. Put in the earlier language of this chapter, the displacement of discursive energy across topics gives way to moments of condensation, in which the full force and import of the discourse becomes expressed in a single moment, a moment still marked by interpretive dynamism rather than interpretive fixity. Socrates may alight on the metaphoric moment of the avian soul, but he does not rest for long. Whereas the definition of eros is a compressed disruptive moment in the speeches, the depiction of the avian soul is a compressed moment with expansive and recurrent effects in the dialogue. It is a fulcrum from which the dialogue unfolds and toward which one can return to interrogate and gauge one’s place within philosophic practice. That the palinode proceeds by way of distinctive discursive patterns with philosophical significance is thrown into relief not only in juxtaposition to Socrates’ first speech but also in his later attempt to recapitulate its contents and contours when discussing the speeches with Phaedrus. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Socrates’ attempt to characterize his speeches retrospectively, with his eye on the carved-animal analogy of discourse, is marked by misremembering and omission. He glosses the speeches in a way that overlooks or belies many of the palinode’s most salient features. One of the most immediately striking features of his later, retrospective view of the speeches is that he now speaks at a vantage point of distance from the speeches, rather than from the embedded position within the speech that he comes to inhabit within the palinode. For example, in his later analysis he doesn’t differentiate between the pose he adopts within his first speech (as a pretending nonlover) and the shift to the seer-like soul that grounds and anticipates his second speech. From his distanced vantage point later in the dialogue, from which he aims to analyze the technical features of the speeches, he is unable to see much of what the speeches do and thus offers only a limited explanation of how they differ from each other. This limitation helps explain why, in effect, he never really answers his implied query about how the speeches moved from censure to praise (at 265c– d). The extent to which Socrates’ later schematic approach to his speeches makes mistakes or oversimplifies the actual contents of the speeches is a commonly acknowledged interpretive impasse in reading the Phaedrus. Some have focused on the details of these mistakes and oversimplifications, setting them within an overarching approach in which the methods of the palinode and the methods of dialectical examination are each

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regarded as necessary, imperfect, and therefore complementary dimensions of philosophic practice. G. R. F. Ferrari offers a capacious version of the complementary view: He regards the mythic tale in the palinode as the philosophic practice of examining the grounds of the possibility for philosophy itself, whereas the later more analytic and dialectical approach represents the necessary corollary methods that then constitute the philosophy made possible by those grounds.33 I take the slant, in-circuit examination of the grounds of the possibility for philosophy in the palinode to bear a more constitutive relationship with the philosophy arising from this possibility. On this reading, the methodological emphases of Socrates’ retrospective view of the speeches are not merely incongruous with the methods of the palinode, but they also potentially undermine the work that the palinode has done to unmoor the predilections and habits of the reader. At the very least, by including the discrepancies between the earlier speeches and Socrates’ later analysis, Plato is requiring that a reader work out for himself or herself a response to this disjunction across sections of the text. He therefore incorporates a form of risk within the dialogue, for he may control how to include disruptive and unresolved features within the text, but he can’t ultimately control whether and how a reader sees and pursues such impasses. And this is the enduring sign by which one can glean Plato’s distinctly unfixated position as an author visà-vis the text. Two areas of Socrates’ later analysis suggest a way into the reading I favor— one emphasizing disruptive incongruity and the impossibility of resolution as more abiding features of Plato’s philosophy than the view of complementariness allows. The first concerns Socrates’ later characterization of the definition within his earlier speech. He claims that his earlier speech gained clarity and consistency because it included the prefatory definition of eros. But, as already noted, he offers this characterization without noting its context within his speech’s posed voice as a pretending nonlover, a pose that means we can’t just take its contents at face value. Even his own comments about the definition undercut his identification of it with the speech’s merits: In the same line in which he attributes the clarity and consistency of his speech to the definition, he also suggests this effect arose regardless of whether he spoke well or badly in offering the definition (265d). Further, right before making this claim, he tells Phaedrus he can’t remember whether or not he defined love at the beginning of his speech. How are we to read Socrates’ later misremembered or

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inconsistent appraisals of the earlier speech’s definition of eros? Does he offer them knowingly, with an eye to what their inconsistencies might prompt in the thought of Phaedrus? Does he offer them genuinely, from his nonpalinode, nonenthused position, where perhaps he now must concern himself with educating Phaedrus on the proper methods of dialectical apprehension within philosophic practice (as some versions of the view of the complementariness of the dialogue would suggest)? In short, what to make of his selective vision? By considering sections of the dialogue in relation to each other, one can speculate about whether Plato crafted the figure of Socrates to be an interlocutor who was totally in the know about what he was doing or whether Plato crafted Socrates as an interlocutor who was at some remove from himself, the author, in order to create a space for interpretive friction and engagement by the reader. (Or, as is most likely, Plato did some of each. My sense of his genius is that he ultimately emphasized the latter, creating the space with such dexterity that— despite its necessity for the potency of the reading experience— one can never fully pin it down.) There is a way in which Socrates is thus always left radically underdetermined by Plato. With respect to the present example, Socrates’ later gloss on his earlier definition of eros can be seen simply as a knowingly conveyed misappraisal, the inconsistencies or mistakes of which he doesn’t explicitly name but lets stand implicitly, for his interlocutor to note and grapple with. In this sense, he is showing how the vantage point of more analytic appraisal or parsing can’t adequately see the import and effect of the definition as a purposive point of disruption, one that unleashes his alternate discursive movements in the palinode. The wrinkle that complicates this reading is the apparent (nonironic) seriousness with which he advances the carved-animal analogy of model discourse. If he presents this analogy genuinely, without divergent intent, then his estimations of the definition could fit within this vantage point onto model discourse. His identification of a definition as a method by which discourse can have its direction delineated in a clear way would be in keeping with the carved-animal approach to rightly crafted logos (and it also affirms the “limbed” approach taken in the definition of eros itself). On this reading, in his later discussion of the speeches, and, of the definition in particular, Socrates has reentered the position of one who approaches discourse in terms of rhetorical objects, much as the pretending nonlover does. It is no surprise, then, that he favors the carved-animal analogy of

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model discourse when discussing the speeches and leaves the potential of the living-animal analogy mostly untapped. Is this yet another pose that he adopts? Or is this where the divergence between Plato and Socrates emerges? A second feature of Socrates’ analysis suggests a way into this question, if not a definitive way out of, or beyond, it. In his analysis of the earlier speeches, Socrates introduces the livinganimal analogy of discourse to critically evaluate Phaedrus’s rendition of Lysias’s speech and consider whether his own speeches improved on it. Socrates presents the analogy, pointing out that Phaedrus’s Lysian speech does not reflect it, but instead proceeds in a random, disorganized way. As Socrates says to Phaedrus: “Doesn’t it seem as though the things of the speech were thrown together at random?” (264b2). The adverb used here, “random” (χύδην), has aquatic connotations—“in floods or heaps; without order, at random, promiscuously”—given its derivation from the root (χέω) “to pour out.” These aquatic references extend his previous point that in his speech Lysias in effect swims backward through it, progressing from an end point to a beginning. From Socrates’ analytic viewpoint, the problem with the Lysian speech is that you can get into it at any point without altering the interpretive consequences. In contrast to Lysias’s lack of sufficient structure, Socrates regards his own speeches as presenting an alternative, illustrated by the second, carved-animal analogy of discourse. Whereas Lysias’s speech did not appear to have a skeleton, Socrates regards his speeches as having limbs that can be articulated. And in this move he seems to have gone too far, at least insofar as the carved-animal analogy moves him into a vantage point from which he can’t see the contours and angles of the palinode. More fitting is a characterization that arises between his criticism of the amorphous structure of Lysias’s speech and his contrasting example of the carved-animal contours of his own speech. Socrates returns to aquatic associations, and though these were used pejoratively to characterize Lysias’s speech, he now draws on them to suggest how the mythic tale in the palinode allowed him to “mix together [κεράσαντες] a not wholly unconvincing speech” (265c1). With this choice of κεράσαντες the water connotations in the palinode resurface, because the participle derives from keranumi / κεράννυμι, a verb meaning to mix or mingle, especially in the case of liquids.34 On my reading of the palinode—in which the movements of discursive displacement supplant the methods of rhetorical fixity—this characterization more aptly fits his speech than does his subsequent attempt to parse it by way of the carved-

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animal model of dialectic, an approach that is like trying to implant a dissected skeleton into a fleshy, blooded body. Th is rub between the “mingling-waters” characterization of the palinode and the “carvedanimal” characterization suggest to me a place where Plato begins to show his hand, where something Socrates mentions in passing is actually an embedded cue that calls us to consider how much to trust his version of events and imagine what Plato is drawing us to see instead. On this reading, through Socrates’ comments about mixing together a speech liquidly, in combination with the living-animal analogy of discourse he has mentioned and left behind, Plato gestures to the limits of this method of fluid mingling: A discourse cannot be a wholly amorphous jumble of limbs, from which no body becomes formed. This is why I have characterized the displacement at work not as one in which the various parts are equalized, interchangeable, synonymous components, all composing an organic economy in which equilibrium hums along by way of its complementary functions. Rather, I have suggested it is a displacement in which different emphases are required, creating a pulsating fluidity in which the discursive pulse is shifted and transposed throughout the text in the manner of a fluidly integrated, headed, and blooded animal body. The dialogue operates somewhere between random, aquatic, shapeless promiscuity and articulable, fluidless, rigid structure. Circulating blood—not rigor mortis— characterizes how it tells its truth.

Chapter Three The Torn Body Forgotten Logos and Unmoored Ideals love is more thicker than forget more thinner than recall. —e. e. cummings, 50 Poems

It is precisely because I forget that I read. —Roland Barthes, S/Z

My final reading of the living-animal analogy is in terms of the decay, dissolution, and destruction to which a blooded, breathing creature is subject. The teeming, fluidly integrated animal body can also be rent asunder, whether through deliberate force, the gradual dissipations of neglect, or simply the ineluctable effects of living through time and necessity. The fragility of the living animal— and of discourse that is modeled in its image—is expressed most emblematically in the Phaedrus through forms of oblivion. In the dialogue oblivion and recollection are not simple obverses of each other; recollection does not return fully triumphant, overwhelming oblivion without remainder. The living-animal analogy admits of potential fragility by virtue of the fissures and sinewy spaces between the limbs of the body. So too with the soul and the forms of discourse most appropriate to its character: Discourse engendering the burgeoning of the soul will also admit of potential fragility by virtue of the fissures and spaces between the elements of its written body. In order for the processes of philosophic practice to engage a human soul— and vice versa—these sources of fragility, to some extent, must remain. Eros is not simply a divinely given madness in which the rekin-

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dled memory of past truths wipes out the prior spaces of oblivion in the self. For that too would be a kind of oblivion, what poet C. K. Williams has described as “a remembering that is forgetting.”1 Eros is the rekindling of the soul, but a rekindling in which the embers of forgetfulness are not wholly expunged and instead abide in an uneasy relationship with memory, a relationship that becomes a distinct source of knowledge and occasion for the soul’s emergence. Plato is not simply a champion of recollection, presenting a one-sided picture of memory as the source for the apprehension truth.2 He had a more complex view of the relationship between remembrance and oblivion, which the dialogue form reflects generally and the Phaedrus illustrates most potently. The dialogue is like a living animal because the occasions for, and remnants of, oblivion are allowed to remain as potential sources of discursive fragility, which is constitutive of its being a live, not dead, text. These occasions and remnants of oblivion in written form suggest the ways in which the plenitude of the world and the replete character of the self cannot be wholly attended to; they constitute a life falling outside our normal modes of vision. Replete presence and limitless absence, or plentiful remembrance and unbounded forgetfulness, characterize the embodied soul, ensouled discourse, and the written word best reflective of both. Memory may be the phenomenon of repleteness in the dialogue that is most resonantly linked to eros, given its capacity to connote a dynamic in which presence and return are not without attendant forms of loss and partial completion. This book began with three poems by Emily Dickinson in order to frame the character of Plato’s writing. A characterization of Dickinson’s writing points to the aspect of memory that I have in mind: “The power of her words lies as least partly in their (and her) ability to give more than a reader can entirely understand but not enough to satisfy the desire to know.”3 Memory—like eros— can give more than a person can entirely understand and not enough to satisfy the desire to know. Plato’s texts, the Phaedrus in particular, are crafted to similar effect. They give more than a reader can entirely understand and not enough to satisfy the desire to know. The combination is not a failure of the form, but a purposive feature enabling it to tell the truth in a manner congruous with the nature of human reality. The text thus confers content while withholding completion of that content, a withholding that draws the reader into the text in a spirit of constitutive collaboration rather than one-directional, authorial transmission.

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Fissures and gaps in the expression of content become textual elements akin to oblivion insofar as something that appears, literally speaking, to involve absence or omission in fact denotes a present source of knowledge. Plato’s incorporation of oblivion into the dialogue is multiply textured. It appears in the text as a form of philosophic play, as a conceptual and philosophic resource, and as a structural feature. Reading the text with an eye to these features opens to view the complex relationship between remembrance and forgetting held within the text. This complexity further elucidates why the replete character of reality and the porous nature of the self require slant, circuiting modes of truth telling. In the case of the Phaedrus, oblivion is not how the soul becomes lost, but rather how it emerges.

Forgetting as (Serious) Philosophic Play The Phaedrus can be read richly simply by tracing the direct and allusive inclusions of oblivion throughout the surface content of the text. Such details at the level of apparent, literary content texture and enhance the conceptual elements of forgetting within the dialogue. Not mere literary adornment, the explicit and associative details of oblivion make up a form of serious philosophic play integrated with the conceptual and structural dimensions of the text.4 Most dramatically, oblivion is present in the dialogue by means of the references to mythical figures such as Dionysus, the prophetess at Delphi, the priestesses at Dodona, and the Sibyl. Dionysus evokes the general associations of oblivion through alcohol and ecstatic religious exuberance and suggests the illustrative case of Agave who, along with other manic Bacchants, tears apart the body of her son while possessed by the god in Euripides’ Bacchae. The oracular powers of the figures at Delphi and Dodona, as well as the Sibyl’s, suggest an even more resonant associative fit with the dialogue, given its concerns with the relations of logos, truth telling, and the soul: Prophecies are the example, par excellence, of nonfi xated discourse insofar as they eschew written form altogether and wholly upend the issue of singular, human authorship. This associative aspect is best emphasized by the historically later elaboration of the story of the Sibyl in which her prophecies are recorded, at the mouth of her cave, on leaves, which are then blown away by the wind. The examples of Delphi, Dodona, and the Sibyl are juxtaposed with the myth of Theuth

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and Thamous late in the dialogue, which expresses the concern that people will mistake the written form of discourse as a guarantor of abiding knowledge. Although Theuth mistakenly appraises writing as an elixir that can preserve memory and wisdom, their prophecies connote instead a tenuous, impermanent form of language that humans purport to control and harness at their peril. Less dramatic inclusions of oblivion through direct or associative reference highlight other issues. Throughout the dialogue seemingly innocuous comments appear to the effect that Phaedrus or Socrates can’t recall an earlier speech, or one of them doubts his memory.5 In particular, Socrates feigns forgetfulness throughout the dialogue, both with respect to references he invokes and with respect to the content of his own earlier speeches.6 All these instances depend on a play among meanings in the Greek language. Specifically, lēthe (λήθη), translated as “a forgetting, forgetfulness,” or from the Homeric context as “place of oblivion,” is related to the verbal form lanthanō (λανθάνω), “to escape notice, to be unknown, unseen.”7 Given these grammatical connections, Plato intertwines throughout the text these related meanings of remembering and forgetting, taking notice and escaping notice, or seeing and remaining unseen. Also at play throughout the dialogue are both the imagistic depiction and the abstract conceptualization of truth (ἀληθής) as an uncovering or unconcealment.8 This deeper philosophic connection is manifest in such surface detailing as when Socrates covers his head before delivering his first speech because he knows it to be a false account of love. Or in his palinode’s mythic tale of the soul’s heavenly journey, the wingedcharioteer soul is variously described as being submerged below the surface of heaven, and thus distanced from the eternal realities, or as emerging through this surface, to become proximate to this outer reality.9 This blurring and play between the dynamics of oblivion and the dynamics of renewed attention, or between the waters of lēthe and the emergence from such waters, are seen most vividly in the palinode’s images of the soul and its commingling of the aquatic and the mnemonic. Liquidity of various forms (water, sweat, tears, even fluid particulates of desire) flooding the soul becomes also its passage to a reinvigorated remembrance of truth. The waters in the word-images of the soul seem to combine the effects of both the mythic river Lethe and the pool of Mnemosyne—the dissolving of one form of life becomes mixed with the pooling waters of another.10

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All these surface details suggest a picture in which oblivion is not wholly condemned or eschewed and recollection is not simply valorized or triumphant solely on its own terms. The oracular, prophetic, and Bacchic associations of oblivion suggest a dramatic alternative to orientations toward discourse in the dialogue characterized by fixation and authorial hubris. Socrates’ seemingly innocuous, recurrent comments about forgetting and needing reminding suggest, playfully, that their relationship is never resolved simply and finally. Even the most imagistic, strongest expressions of the soul’s reencounter with truth are saturated with liquid elements in which the bathing of the soul is as much one of forgetting as it is of remembrance. The text suggests a permeable—not dualistically demarcated—relationship between forms of oblivion and recollection, one in which forgetting is not fully vanquished and remains with its own distinctive value, if also its own distinctive risks.

Forgetting as Philosophic Source Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation. (J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians)

The textured philosophic play with the literal and associative connections between forgetting and remembering, and escaping notice and taking notice becomes deepened by the ways in which oblivion is also a philosophic source in the dialogue. Of special significance is the entanglement of the dynamics of recuperation and annihilation within oblivion. Three originary moments in the text frame this dimension of forgetting. Taken together, these three moments suggest that oblivion is not only a feature of philosophic play or literary texture in the text but is also a deep conceptual source giving rise to the primary concerns and dynamics of the dialogue. Two arise in actual stories of origin appearing within the dialogue. The first is seen in Socrates’ mythic account of the soul and how it comes to be embodied within an earthly creature. When, unable to follow [the heavenly circuit with views of truth], and, no longer seeing, through some mischance it [the soul] becomes filled with forgetfulness and badness and grows heavy; growing heavy, it loses its wings and falls toward earth.11

An originary experience of forgetting moves the soul into a body of the earth. To be of this world is to have forgotten. “Filled with forgetfulness” seems at first a paradoxical formulation, but in fact it characterizes pre-

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cisely the porous melding of plenitude and incompletion within a human life, a melding made especially manifest in forgetting. The description of filling reflects a commonplace feature of forgetting—it involves not simply the erasure of content but also content that has shifted to the margins of the self, giving shape and perspective to a life even though it remains obscured from view. The second originary moment appears in the mythic story offered by Socrates about the discovery of letters by the god Theuth, who reports his finding with exuberant anticipation to Thamous, the king of Egypt, who takes a quite different view of the discovery. “But this study, King Thamus, will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory; what I have discovered is an elixir of memory and wisdom.” Thamus replied, “Most scientific Theuth, one man has the ability to beget the elements of a science, but it belongs to a different person to be able to judge what mea sure of harm and help it contains for those who are going to make use of it; so now you, as the father of letters, have been led by your affection for them to describe them as having the opposite of their real effect. For your invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory, as through reliance on writing they are reminded from outside by alien marks, not from within, themselves by themselves. So you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding.”12

The previous examples have already illustrated the ways in which oblivion is characterized by ambiguity, insofar as it involves the blurring of forms of heightened vision with forms of disattention or the loss of other lines of sight. Recuperative and annihilative effects commingle in forms of oblivion. This ambiguity, or mixed character, of oblivion is highlighted in the originary story of letters by the identification of writing as an “elixir” (pharmakon / φάρμακον), a word which can mean, simultaneously, “a drug, medicine,” or “an enchanted potion . . . a charm, spell,” or “a drug, poison,” or “a remedy, cure.”13 This moment in the Phaedrus has been heavily traversed and is one of the more famous aspects of the text.14 Given my specific interpretive interests let’s focus on the pairing created between these two originary moments in the dialogue. Put simply, in the first, oblivion brings the soul into a body of the earth, while, in the second, writing bears the potential of bringing oblivion into the soul. In each case, the soul’s relation with oblivion involves its inhabitation within material form, be it a creaturely body of the earth or a lettered body of

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discourse. Bodies of the earth and written forms of discourse will be where the ambiguous potentials and risks of oblivion become worked out by the human soul. In keeping with the indeterminate character of oblivion—its brush with both recuperative and annihilative effects— these processes are without end points or resolution. The third moment is less literal, insofar as it does not arise within one of the explicit stories of origin in the dialogue. Though it is, literally speaking, the first occasion in the dialogue where the language of forgetting appears, its significance as a kind of origin for the dynamics of the dialogue as a whole is best regarded in figurative terms. Th is first appearance of forgetting arises when Socrates calls out Phaedrus for claiming to be unable to recall the speech he has heard Lysias deliver. Socrates: Oh, Phaedrus, if I don’t know Phaedrus, then I have forgotten myself too. But neither of these is the case. (228a5)

With Socrates’ claim, the issues of self-knowledge and other-attunement become interrelated as well as cast within the language of forgetting and, by extension, remembrance. Knowing the self and knowing others are somehow mutually implicative, constitutive processes. Ignorance of the self and ignorance of others are related forms of forgetting, are ways in which something vital has “escaped one’s notice.” This is, however, only part of the story, for soon thereafter Socrates follows these lines with a second moment of self-revelation: Socrates: I am still unable, in the words of the Delphic inscription, to know myself. It seems to me ridiculous to investigate other things without knowing that. (229e5)

The proximity of this self-revelatory moment to the previous instance creates a pairing that can be regarded as an originary moment of the dialogue in the sense that the dynamics arising between the two statements animate the entire philosophic endeavor. Socrates has neither forgotten himself nor has he forgotten Phaedrus, and yet he is also unable to fully know—that is, remember—himself and others. He has emerged from the originary forgetting characterizing the earthly embodied soul, and yet this emergence is partially complete: He cannot fully escape or overcome his origins but must reckon with them, to live through and perhaps beyond them, but never wholly apart from them. He is, in effect, poised between his two statements, a position that suggests that the philosophic life being depicted by Plato is one in which the processes of attunement

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to self and others are ongoing sources of knowledge, contestation, and change rather than sources of satiety, resolution, and security. Turned over in the language of the daimonic, as seen in the characterization of Eros in the Symposium, the position is one of being “in between” (metaxu): Knowledge or remembrance of the self is always buoyed by ignorance and forgetting of the self.15 Seeing the self and elements of fissure, failure, and fragility in this seeing are entangled in ways that render perfectibility and completion impossible. It is a kind of equipoise that offers not a harmonious, placid equilibrium so much as it demands a sustained, tenuously balanced navigation of different currents, with different emphases, at different times. The vitality and potency—if not the literal details—of the Dionysiac backdrop to the Phaedrus are telling here. The figure of Socrates is not one of utter abandon, but neither is it one of domestication—he, like the dialogue, is a living, breathing animal evincing wild, playful vitality, not tamed, static composure. It is no accident that the dialogue form is where Plato depicts these processes unfolding; it is how he attempts to engender these irresolvable processes of the soul. As with Socrates’ dual identification of both not having forgotten himself and not yet knowing himself, the dialogue form is poised between the expression of knowledge and the incompletion of this effort. Rather than sleep, the dialogue form is the space in which one can brush with vital forces to recuperative effect, but to do so one must risk a brush with its annihilative effects. To compare writing to a pharmakon is not to dismiss entirely the powers and potential of lettered discourse (as Thamous does). It is to recognize the deep congruity and resonance between the character of the self and the medium through which it becomes a soul. In both cases, recollection and oblivion are drawn together in indeterminate, ineluctably intertwined ways, for which there can be no guarantee about the end toward which they will be navigated. Before considering in more detail this rendering of the dialogue form and its special relationship with oblivion and the soul, we can gain perspective on the character of Socrates’ equipoise by recalling two other examples of poise in the text, previously discussed in chapter 1. The first is that of the hovering avian soul, poised between its draw toward the sky and its inability to fully fly. Seeing something of beauty here, remembering true beauty, his wings begin to grow, and, with his feathers ruffled in anticipation he desires to fly but cannot; like a bird he looks upward, and taking no care of things below, he is accused of being mad. (249d5)

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A corollary, immediately prior, textual accompaniment to this description is important, given its use of the language of “escaping notice.” The person that has become enthused by way of memory, manifesting an avian-like soul, is also described by Plato with the borrowed terms of the mystery religions. A man who rightly makes use of such memories [of divine things, or the things that make god divine] always becomes fully initiated in the most complete way possible, himself alone becoming wholly initiated. Standing apart from human endeavors, becoming close to divinity, he is admonished by others as having lost his mind; possessed by god he escapes their notice. (249c5)

The hovering, anticipatory poise of the avian soul evokes the character of the equipoise I have identified with Socrates’ position vis-à-vis the processes of self-knowledge, other-regard, and the text itself. Some interpretations emphasize the tragic potential of the image, suggesting that the avian soul depicts a human person motivated by aspirations but without the ability to make good on such aspirations. Other interpretations emphasize the avian soul as a picture in which a flight from the world and a disregard for humanity are necessary relinquishments of the philosophic life.16 Yet alternative interpretive emphases become possible when the image is set within the broader dynamics between oblivion and recollection in the dialogue, as I have traced. Within this broader context, the image suggests the hovering oscillation between directions of attention constituting the philosophic life. The rapt gaze may be sufficient for the gods, but the humanly philosophic soul will need to see through multiply angled, nonfi xated directions of attunement. And this textured mode of vision will not be without enmeshed forms of gain and loss. The avian soul will be drawn upward, like a bird, away from concerns of the earth, in forgetfulness. But within Plato’s description, the view is compromised in both directions. The avian soul has broken its line of sight toward the earth, but so too with those on the ground: The divinely inspired soul escapes their notice; it is, in effect, forgotten by them as well. And though drawn toward the sky by virtue of the movements of recollection, the avian soul cannot fully enact its desire to fly. As Socrates is unable to complete the Delphic task, so too with the avian soul. Recollection and knowing do not wholly assuage an originary unknowing and oblivion. They are inextricably related such that the soul must navigate different directions of attunement, a navigation in which taking notice of

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some things comes with a loss of noticing others. This expresses a reality of human life, not a dismissive stance toward humanity. Socrates’ own oscillating position vis-à-vis the text—from a more distanced stance to an embedded one, shifting between these throughout the encounter— illustrates this navigation on the part of the equipoised avian soul. He may look away, but he always looks back again, even though it may not be when one expects him to do so or within any kind of final return. As he says to Phaedrus in the final lines of the text: “Let’s go.” The second, comparative example of poise in the dialogue is that of the cicadas. To recall from chapter 1, the position of the cicadas is significant in two respects: Plato has placed them as hovering, sonically palpable voyeurs over the encounter between Socrates and Phaedrus; in doing so, he has placed them as specters watching over the reader’s encounter with the text. They suggest how the possibility of equipoise evoked by the avian image of the soul and exemplified by Socrates can go awry. As in the description of the birdlike soul, the description of the cicadas incorporates explicitly and associatively the intertwined elements of attunement, escaping notice, and compromised vision. More pointedly than the image of the avian soul, the account of the cicadas wraps these related elements within the issues of language, discourse, and bodily form. In Plato’s invented myth of the cicadas’ origins the experience of forms of language, bodilyness, and oblivion are especially connected. The cicadas were once men who became drawn to a new form of language, succumbed therein to an oblivious state, from which they were moved into an alien bodily form, at which point a one-dimensional voyeurism came to characterize their lives. As spies for the Muses, they gaze on a world with which they can no longer interact and are confined to one form of nonhuman speech. The specific language of forgetfulness is seen again in the mythic account offered by Socrates: While still men, they took such pleasure in the Muses’ singing that they had no care for food or drink, to the point that “it escaped their notice that they died,” or “so they died without even realizing it” (καὶ ἔλαθον τελευτήσαντες αὑτούς).17 Their attraction to the language of the Muses so compromises their view of themselves that a kind of death occurs, transpiring in terms of both bodily and linguistic form. They become, in effect, dead to their own humanity and instead are tasked to watch and report on the humanness of others from within an insect body and by means of one dialect. It is a fantastic account by

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virtue of which Plato draws our attention to the parallels between the cicadas’ position and the poise of Socrates. The cicadas highlight the stakes and the risks of a philosophic practice for which the engagement with discourse is constitutive. Admittedly, they became smitten with the poetic language of the Muses, not the language(s) of philosophic discourse. But the extremity of their case throws into relief the attractions and potential oblivions that all enticing language involves, an issue that for Plato was as present for philosophy as it was for poetry, given his mixed use of genres and the highly literary ethos of the Phaedrus in particular.18 The cicadas illustrate in a brilliant, not wholly resolvable, way that linguistic and bodily forms are underdetermined spaces, each of which can become a space of expansion and capacious regard, but each of which can also become a realm of entrapment, stunted capacity, and limited views. By drawing together the figurative possibilities of attunement and forgetfulness—within forms of writing that reflect and incorporate their mixed dynamics—Plato saw that to dispel our cicada-like tendencies with written form and the voyeur’s gaze he had to risk their very possibility. Socrates figures someone who has been able to navigate these risks. He stands as a figure on the other side of the disruptive and oblivious effects of forms of discourse and desire, though also as one who knows he is not wholly beyond their potential incursions and irruptions into a life. His play with needing to be reminded and of having (and not having) forgotten is not the pretentious posturing of one who takes himself to be above the fray of fragility. It is the comic response that becomes possible once one has reckoned with the place of oblivion—be it bodily or discursive—in a life.

Forgetting as a Structur al Feature Perhaps . . . we have to look away before we can begin again. (C. K. Williams, Poetry and Consciousness)

The third kind of forgetting to consider is at the structural level of the dialogue itself, wherein forms of looking away in order to begin again constitute the contours and movements of the dialogue. Crafted in the shadow of the living-animal analogy of discourse, the text admits of fissures between its parts, lacunae that can be, paradoxically, locales of connection, integration, and knowledge. These lacunae or points of withholding are not simply empty spaces of negation within the discur-

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sive body. They are subtle, ordinary forms of textual oblivion with nonnegating, actual effects that require alternate conceptions of discursive (and philosophical) coherence. Through textual forms of looking away, Plato incorporates openings into the text that make possible—indeed, necessitate—a reader’s dynamic engagement with it, even as these openings risk the reader getting lost amid the processes of reading, unable to return and begin again. Identifying a form of oblivion with the structural aspects of the dialogue is not to suggest, more directly or literally, that the effect of its discursive strategies is to draw the reader into a state of oblivion or ecstatic abandon. My point here is not that. It is, rather, to focus on those textual features that are analogous to oblivion insofar as they unmoor the habits, expectations, and fi xed positions of a reader. Experientially, forms of oblivion suggest states in which a compromised or vacated line of sight in one direction makes possible other, refigured directions of attunement. They are states in which presence amid loss and vacuity amid immediacy are especially enmeshed, unsettling cut-and-dried conceptions of agency as well as the methods of evaluation brought to bear on human action. Textually, oblivion-like features suggest something similar: A compromised or vacated line of sight in one direction makes possible other, refigured lines of attunement. Gain and loss, risk and relinquishment, filled absence and vacuous presence are especially interrelated in the text, unsettling clear-cut conceptions of reading, both in terms of the processes and the effects or outcomes of reading. Examining the incorporation of oblivion-like elements into the text is one way to gain perspective on the ambiguous, underdetermined character of the dialogue form. It illustrates how Plato fulfi lls the challenge expressed at the end of the Symposium, namely, that authors should be able to write both tragedy and comedy, a challenge that some have interpreted as the claim that a skilled author should be able to compose a single work that affords, equally and simultaneously, both tragic and comedic renderings.19 The Phaedrus can be read as Plato’s response to the end of the Symposium and to the figure of Alcibiades as emblematic of the stakes of its closing remarks on tragedy and comedy. The Phaedrus embodies the ambiguities of forgetting and remembering to present written forms that play with— and risk— annihilative and recuperative effects simultaneously. More concretely, several examples of methods in the text illustrate this general interpretive approach to structural oblivion as a source of

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integration and coherence across a dialogue that depends on the reader’s unmooring and reengagement. These examples can be pointed to, but ultimately to fully appreciate and evaluate the contours and cogency of the interpretive approach that I have suggested, the individual reader must examine his or her own experience with the dialogue in these terms. The most iconic example of a method in which what is withheld or unsaid is more expressive than what is stated is that of Socratic irony and satire. In the cases of irony and satire the reader has to look away from the literal surface of what’s being said and look toward a more complex meaning. We can consider the example previously discussed involving Socrates’ claims to have forgotten something. Such moments are set within other depictions of him as a figure who doesn’t forget, whose memory correctly informs his speeches. How are these juxtaposed characterizations to be held together? At which point is he bluffing, when he purports to have forgotten something or when he claims to be speaking from memory? If we consider this juxtaposition with the dialogue more generally, Plato wants the reader to pause and interrogate both sets of claims by Socrates. In each case we should not take Socrates’ selfidentifications at face value. If we look away from the surface content of Socrates’ competing depictions of himself to consider what they might indicate implicitly about the character of forgetting and recollection given other dimensions of the text, we can begin anew with these moments, offering a more appropriately complex reading. Socrates’ play with forgetting is not about not remembering a particular bit of information, as the literal content of his statements suggests. Similarly, his claims to memory are not about retrieving and transmitting archived bits of information from his mind to Phaedrus (and the reader). Socrates’ itinerancy between these seemingly incongruous self-representations expresses a different, more far-reaching point about the virtue of not becoming fixated on the power of particular memories at the expense of a fluid capacity for attention. The reader has to look away from any one thing that Socrates says, taken literally, in order to set it in relation to other textual moments and features. This destabilizes interpretive presumptions and facileness, causing the reader to begin anew with a more fluidly integrative perspective on the text as a whole. In the case of irony, content that is literally absent is in fact intended as the most present meaning, and content that is literally present is a deft sleight of discourse intended to call forth this obscured content. As with the relationship between recollection and forgetting, the

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relationship between the present and absent content is not simply or straightforwardly correlated, in which one is cleanly the obverse of the other without remainder. They are counterposed to each other, but in a multiply textured—not merely one-to-one—relationship. The second example has been discussed in chapter 2 with regard to Socrates’ shifts between forms of approach to a specific topic, as well as his shifts and digressions among topics. Movements of displacement rather than methods of presentational fixity were highlighted as central to the dynamics of the text and the reading practices Plato seeks both to upend and engender. Socrates’ shifts away from a topic or discursive approach toward other thematic emphases and presentational strategies are seen throughout the text, though they are especially pointed within his two speeches. At first glance, what may seem to be discontinuous jumps or sideways steps on the part of Socrates can be regarded as Plato’s strategy of looking away to begin again. In this way, the dialogue is full of fissures and crack lines, so to speak, which bear ambiguous possibilities for the reader as well as a philosophical point about the forms of integration and coherency appropriate to the subject. The dialogue may hold together as a teeming, blooded animal, fluidly integrated with flesh joining across its lacunae, but it might also be torn asunder or decay with rot if the reader doesn’t cultivate the capacity for pliant attention it attempts to kindle and on which its vibrancy depends. Socratic looking away to begin again is often considered within the technical terms of the elenctic method and its characteristic presence throughout the Socratic dialogues. The shifting and redirection orchestrated by Socrates throughout his speeches in the Phaedrus offer examples that can be related to the elenctic technique, even if they depart from purer instantiations of this method of argument and critical interrogation. Across Socrates’ two speeches, the most evident way he looks away to begin again is by virtue of his movement between topics, transitions that are not always self-evident or explained. Often, if they are explained, the reason given does not convey the full story, methodologically or philosophically. The most striking example of this is his shift in his second speech, the palinode, to the topic of madness, a redirection that allows him to begin anew with the evaluation of erotic love. These topical shifts continue throughout the palinode, not along the delineated lines of an unfolding argument, but rather through swerves and minor readjustments that cumulatively press toward the reframing of eros.

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The other central way by which Socrates looks away to begin again has been threaded throughout this book as a whole, namely, his shifts to and among alternate discursive approaches in order to rekindle the momentum and adjust the direction of the examination. As seen most richly in his two main speeches, his shifts in topic are often accompanied by a shift in discursive approach, or his attempt to sustain a topic and consider it from other vantage points is enacted by way of multiple presentational forms. Chapter 1 focused on the most explicitly signaled example of this pattern in the text: Socrates’ announced shift within the palinode to discuss what the soul can be likened to, rather than giving a direct account of its character, a shift in approach that transpires by way of his mythic tale of the soul and his elaboration of its character through word-images. Yet we have also seen how this explicitly signaled shift is more often accompanied by others that Socrates makes without comment. His speeches press forward through a variety of movements, announced and otherwise: He moves from methods of articulation (e.g., the definition of eros, the categories of types of madness), through the inclusion or transposition of established expressive modes (e.g., the philosophically abstract account of the soul’s immortality, his borrowing of the language of the mystery religions), among his own discursive innovations via analogy and mythic rendering (e.g., the word-image of the soul and its various emendations, the tale of the soul’s journey from heaven to earth), toward his eventual expression of a refigured eros within a singular, compressed, imagistic evocation (e.g., the avian soul depiction). A kind of ellipsis characterizes many of Socrates’ discursive shifts throughout his speeches, an ellipsis that characterizes his encounter with Phaedrus more generally throughout the dialogue. This element of ellipsis also characterizes Plato’s encounter with the reader. He offers a text that is replete yet also one that withholds a fully transparent view. The text not only incorporates this mixed dynamic but also must be formative of a reader who becomes able to read and navigate its entanglement of paucity and excess. The simplest version of this point stems from the placement of the critical discussion of writing within the latter part of the dialogue. On completing a first reading of the text, a reader is simultaneously spun back to its beginning and pressed forward into the processes of rereading with an eye more attuned to how the text has been made to withstand its own expression of writing’s potential dangers. Part of this involves developing the capacity to attend to Socrates’ mixed strat-

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egies throughout the dialogue, particularly to his movements that are not self-identified or otherwise flagged for attention. The more far-reaching, speculative version of this point is that the text transposes the heavenly circuit befitting the gods to a discursive itinerancy befitting the human soul. For the gods, the direct gaze, or a “looking at,” will suffice. For us, “looking away” through alternate, varied discursive approaches is how we begin again within the Delphic task to “look toward” a fuller expression of the soul. This multiperspectival form of seeing is engendered in the Phaedrus by how it withholds things from the reader’s notice while calling the reader to recognize what has escaped her notice. The text draws together—without ever resolving entirely—the possibilities exemplified in Socrates’ twinned claim that he has not forgotten himself and that is he not yet able to fulfill the Delphic inscription. So too for the reader. She may develop her capacity for attention, her ability to take notice of things beyond the self. But this will arise, in part, from the presence of opacity and obscured lines of sight, a presence that may be responded to differently yet which can never be vanquished fully, given how its mixed annihilative and recuperative effects kindle the soul’s growth.

Oblivion ’s Effects The fissures and spaces within the living animal body afford locales for both connectivity and tearing, associations I have emphasized to illustrate analogous sources of discursive fragility within the Phaedrus that are constitutive of its simultaneously annihilative and regenerative potential. This emphasis opens to view aspects of the dialogue— and, by extension, of Plato’s writing more generally—that have become overly domesticated within attempts to characterize his philosophic vision in determinate ways that are ultimately incongruous with the craft of the texts themselves. I have focused on the generatively tenuous, unresolved relationship between oblivion and recollection as an instance of a broader pattern where Plato’s text suggests a complexity that cannot be encompassed within interpretive resolutions that have come to be commonly held. In the specific case here, I have tried to unsettle the form of interpretive resolution wherein recollection’s triumph and the vanquishing of forgetting are taken to best represent Plato’s philosophic ideal. As with many forms of dualism commonly ascribed to Plato, positing one between remembering and forgetting is insufficient to account for the texture and

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points of irresolution surrounding them within the text. As discussed in chapter 1, the untidy richness of the word-images of the soul suggests a porous—rather than clearly delineated—boundary between the soul and the earthly body it joins. Similarly with the relationship between recollection and oblivion and any conception we might have of them as separate, bounded entities: A porosity or permeability of their borders more aptly characterizes their depiction and incorporation within the text. I have emphasized these interpretive openings within the Phaedrus in order to suggest what possibilities arise from the text, not in order to lay claim to an interpretive theory that could encompass the whole of the dialogue, much less the rest of Plato’s work. Indeed, the aspects of the dialogue that I have drawn attention to call into question the amenability of the dialogue to holistic accounts, given the ways in which a kind of interpretive inexhaustibility is built into the text. The aspects of the dialogue to which I have drawn attention call into question how the text coheres as a single discursive body. It remains a further question as to how this text coheres with the body of Plato’s writing. At the very least, the Phaedrus shows how attempts to characterize Plato’s thought have often missed more than they have seen, in large part owing to their methods of looking. The Phaedrus shows, trenchantly, that the notion of “Plato’s thought” is doubly misguided—the phrase denotes both a presumption about a unified entity to be apprehended as well as the singular mode (“thought”) through which it can be identified. Both are oversimplifications or generalizations that do not bring clarity and instead set us awry, leading us to look at him in many of the same misguided ways that we see in Socrates’ young interlocutor, Phaedrus. These general implications can be thrown into relief by considering three specific issues affected by the interpretive emphases that I have set forth: the possibility of tragedy, the relinquishment of the teleological view, and the unmaking of the ideal of becoming divine.

Poised between Tr agedy and Comedy I have suggested that the Phaedrus holds together annihilative and recuperative possibilities simultaneously, a holding together that can be likened to their ambiguous, tenuous relations within forms of oblivion. This idea can be turned over another way, in the language of comedy and tragedy, as I have suggested is signaled at the end of the Symposium in the claim that a

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skilled author should be able to write a single work from which both tragic and comedic renderings become possible. To explain this transposition of the dynamics of the Phaedrus within the terms of tragedy and comedy, we can consider J.-P. Vernant’s characterization of tragedy. The tragic consciousness of responsibility appears when the human and divine levels are sufficiently distinct for them to be opposed while still appearing to be inseparable. The tragic sense of responsibility emerges when human action becomes the object of reflection and debate while still not being regarded as sufficiently autonomous to be fully self-sufficient. The particular domain of tragedy lies in this border zone where human actions hinge on divine powers and where their true meaning, unsuspected by even those who initiated them and take responsibility for them, is only revealed when it becomes a part of an order that is beyond man and escapes him.20

Plato is surely not wholly within the realm (and genre) of tragedy, but neither is he wholly removed from it. The content of the Phaedrus allows one to consider Vernant’s description in a literal sense, evaluating whether and how the divine-human relationship within the dialogue both approximates and departs from his account. Indeed, the dialogue is well known within Plato’s larger body of writing as the place where the humandivine intersection is vibrantly depicted in ways such that the distinction between the two realms is maintained even as it is blurred. I want to consider instead Vernant’s description figuratively and speculatively with respect to the Phaedrus. His second statement is key: “The tragic sense of responsibility emerges when human action becomes the object of reflection and debate while still not being regarded as sufficiently autonomous to be fully self-sufficient.” One way to consider his statement is that it is reflective of the ways in which the dialogue shows how “human action becomes the object of reflection” while it is “not being regarded as sufficiently autonomous to be fully self-sufficient.” The dialogue expresses this through the interwoven, divinely bestowed incursions of madness, beauty, and erotic love as requisite to the soul’s burgeoning. If we step back and look onto the dialogue as a whole, we can regard Vernant’s point more broadly and speculatively within the terms of discourse and writing. On this reading, human action is regarded as not being sufficiently autonomous to be fully self-sufficient, not because of its need for divinely bestowed forms of mania, but because of its need for bestowed texts marked by both surfeit and incompletion. We

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are not fully self-sufficient because we depend on written forms that draw forth the soul. Vernant’s third formulation then becomes crucial: “The particular domain of tragedy lies in this border zone where human actions hinge on divine powers and where their true meaning, unsuspected by even those who initiated them and take responsibility for them, is only revealed when it becomes a part of an order that is beyond man and escapes him.” In a rough-hewn way, we can recast Vernant’s description in textual rather than divine terms. Human actions hinge on texts where the true meaning of those actions, unsuspected by even those who initiated them and take responsibility for them, is revealed only when it becomes a part of a (textual) order that is beyond the human and escapes him or her. “Action” here can be thought of as the combined processes of reading the text and reading the self. The mutually constitutive relationship between the reader and a text such as the Phaedrus implicates the possibility that the meaning of the reader’s actions is revealed only as part of an interpretive order that is beyond her, an order that can escape her. But a text such as the Phaedrus also bears a comedic consciousness, in which the meaning of the reader’s actions is revealed as part of an interpretive order that is beyond her, but that need not escape her entirely. Socrates is an exemplar because he is able to recognize and draw together both forms of (textual/ interpretive) consciousness. He embodies the comedic consciousness, yet because he is still able to acknowledge the present possibility of the tragic consciousness, he is not marked by hubris, or pride. His discursive actions can become part of an order that is beyond him yet does not escape him, but he is wise because he knows his actions cannot produce final, fi xable maps of that order. He is an exemplar because he knows his actions can also become part of an order that is beyond him and does escape him. The difference between Plato as author and Socrates as textual figure is how Plato has crafted the dialogues so that this twinned possibility becomes incorporated within a single text. The difference is the gap, so to speak, that means that the discourse always outstrips Socrates’ powers, even if he is the most able guide within the text. This feature of the craft of the dialogue runs parallel to Socrates’ dual claim that he has not forgotten himself and also does not yet fully know himself. The processes of self-knowledge will always outrun his efforts. So too with the discourse. On occasion, his efforts are coterminous with the order of the discourse

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in which he is participating, giving rise to a comic moment. But these will be intermixed with moments of failure and fragility as well, in which Socrates and the text can’t be neatly mapped onto each other. The equipoise, avian ideal is one in which a fluttering anticipation for the comedic possibility must coexist with a fluid attention to the earthly realities of the potential for tragedy. Socrates models vis-à-vis the discourse what the reader is being drawn to participate in vis-à-vis the text: a navigation of tragic and comedic possibilities in which reading actions can be selfdirected and reflected on, even as they are dependent on the unwilled effects and incursions of the discourse. The text stands outside the self, even as it is intimately relatable to the self, an intimacy the self depends on in order to become a soul.

The Relinquishment of Teleology The incorporation of oblivion into the Phaedrus and the possibility for tragedy this brings into the text unsettle teleological characterizations of the philosophical view(s) arising from the dialogue. If the possibility of forgetting is not wholly assuaged within the Phaedrus—that is, if recollection is not fully triumphant, and it does not expunge oblivion and its effects without remainder—this disrupts many teleological conceptions of the soul’s emergence and growth. The presence of forgetting in a life and in the dialogue creates impasses for natural growth and cultivation models of the soul and its engagement with the divine. The lacunae in the Phaedrus, both literally and figuratively, cannot be subsumed and enfolded within a broader account of the text and the soul by virtue of the transformative effects of memory and recollection. These transformative effects cannot fully encompass and transfigure the experience of oblivion, its character, and its effects. Acknowledging the distinct, formative character of oblivion and how it is not merely the obverse of recollection means that it withstands, to some extent and in some way, the movements of recollection. It abides in a way that can’t be incorporated within a teleological view of the human person because, by virtue of its nature, it brings modes of interruption, fissuring, and opacity into that view, unsettling the cogency and coherence of a teleological model of human growth. Many elements of the Phaedrus call to mind precisely the features and connotations of a teleological model that are at issue. For the sake of

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illustration and explanation, by “teleological model” I have in mind a view of the development of the human person in which an elemental essence at the core of the person becomes more fully cultivated and manifest through a progressive sequence of growth. The elemental essence at the core of the person is a harbinger of the end or ideal form toward which growth tends.21 In the context of Plato, this model might be described in terms of a divine spark or seed that distinguishes the soul, the kindling and cultivation of which characterizes the effects of beholding beauty and the practice of philosophy.22 Much of this kind of account melds well with the Phaedrus. Most basically, the human soul’s glimpse of the divine in its heavenly journeys becomes a kind of stored seed within memory, that, once uncovered and appropriately nourished, expands in the soul to reestablish the humandivine connection. More specifically, as seen in the examination in chapter 1 of the word-images of the soul, details of biological, plantlike growth permeate Plato’s depiction of the soul’s encounter with beauty. This kind of imagery becomes especially pronounced again in the closing section of the dialogue and its discussion of ensouled discourse. In this discussion, the person who rightly knows how to use dialogue is compared to a farmer who skillfully sows his seeds (276b– e). Down to details such as the idea of a “garden of letters” this section of the text appears to epitomize the natural growth model. Further, these specific instances are set within a dialogue that takes place in a decidedly pastoral setting, away from the polis, with Dionysic references and associations abounding throughout.23 Given these features, it would be interpretively foolish to suggest that the teleological model does not have any roots within the text. My point here is not to suggest that the dialogue entirely dismisses the teleological view but rather to suggest how other features of the dialogue strain against it. Recalling the plantlike aspects of the word-images presents an illustration of this strain: Although Plato incorporates details of biological models of growth (mammalian, avian, and floral) in his imagistic elaboration of the soul’s expansion, he does so to such fantastic effect that he presses on the limits of those models even as he draws on them. The teeming, porous hybridity of the images suggests that he is not adopting the natural growth model simply straightforwardly but is unsettling expectations we might have of such growth. Similarly, the idea of the “garden of letters” cannot be read in a picturesque way, given both the stakes that have been laid in the dialogue about the potential dangers of written discourse and

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the character of the text itself. The Phaedrus is hardly the picture of a refined, formally manicured garden. If it is a garden of letters, it is an unruly one in which the efforts of domestication never fully tame the dynamics of the wild. Beyond the points of strain within the plant-oriented details in the text, the teleological model meets a deeper point of impasse when the irresolution between recollection and oblivion is considered. If, as I have traced throughout this chapter, the picture arising from the Phaedrus is not one in which recollection eventually emerges, overwhelming oblivion without remainder, but rather suggests a more tenuous, hovering relationship between their dynamics, this strains against certain aspects of a teleological view. On some understandings of this view, the growth or unfolding of the soul through stages of fulfillment would depend on the lacunae of forgetting becoming filled or overcome, as the soul is drawn toward higher, more complete forms of manifestation. If Plato is suggesting that oblivion cannot so readily be subsumed or overwhelmed—given the inexhaustible nature of the processes of self-knowledge and the ways in which forgetting is also recuperative for the soul—then a model of growth will need to allow the spaces of oblivion in a life, to some extent and in some way, to remain. The stakes of this issue come into focus if we consider the connections between the teleological approach to the soul and the potential orientations toward memory and discourse implied by it. To make these connections, let’s consider two ideas from the literary theorist Stephen Owen’s comparative account of the literary fragment within Western European and classical Chinese philosophic and literary traditions.24 The first is Owen’s characterization of the conception of the fragment in Romanticism as involving a “false fragment.” The Romantic theory of the fragment does not involve a “true” fragment but rather “a new metamorphosis of older theories of unity and completion.”25 Given the Platonic remnants informing the Romantic view, it is no surprise that Owen’s characterization of the pseudofragment could be directed straight at elements of the Phaedrus: “What we see here is not a genuine fragment but a seed, containing the whole as future possibility. It is the divine Logos in embryo, looking to some future fulfillment when sown in the reader’s mind.”26 I have suggested some ways in which the teleological model, which can be called a “false fragment,” strains against dimensions of the Phaedrus, even if it also enjoys points of resonance with the text. To borrow Owen’s terms, I suggest that significant discursive features

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and effects of the Phaedrus express a shift away from a “false fragment” understanding of the soul toward a “true fragment” understanding of the soul. For Owen, a true fragment is an “asymmetrical shard” that survives the dissolution of some whole such that “it draws our attention to empty spaces around a jagged periphery.”27 Plato does not write by means of fragments, nor am I suggesting that we regard him as emblematic of Owen’s description. Indeed, other ancient writers would be more illustrative of a strong version of Owen’s account.28 But Owen’s comparison between the false and true fragment throws into relief tensions within the Phaedrus with respect to how to understand the incomplete characters of memory, discourse, and the soul. The partially complete characters of memory, the written text, and the knowledge-seeking soul can be productively viewed in Owen’s terms, namely, that they draw “our attention to empty spaces around a jagged periphery.” In the case of Plato, the periphery may not be as jagged as Owen imagines within his own literary contexts, and, as we have seen, the empty spaces of oblivion are in fact full. But the general picture Owen describes is apt for reckoning with the ways in which the Phaedrus’s edges are not cleanly cut. A second idea drawn from Owen further elaborates the significance of misunderstandings of the fragment and the broader teleological models of which they are a part. Here the relationships to memory and discourse become especially focused in ways that resonate with concerns in the Phaedrus. Owen identifies how one “goes astray” with the fragment when the value expressed by it becomes misidentified as the fragment itself. Th is shift or error makes the fragment into a token, a souvenir, a commodity: “The value of the whole is concentrated in the fragment: it is replete. But as with other repositories of value, the value may gradually come to seem a property of the token itself. And we in turn acquire value by possessing the token.”29 Owen has in mind the mistaken appraisal of the fragment that transpires in the material world of objects, an error that carries particularly germane valences if we bear in mind the cases of written speech and recalled memory within the Phaedrus. There is a clear danger here, a snare: the ability to appreciate and understand the fragment may become nothing more than a touchstone of sensibility, an oblique exercise in self-praise. One may cease to care about the lost whole . . . and instead prefer the fragment in its own right, as it reflects back on the understanding self.30

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By going astray with the fragment in this manner one passes over “into a true decadence, in which everything turns back upon itself, and sensibility is a decoration of the self rather than a means to know.”31 This sense of the decadence created by the misappraisal of the fragment captures well the core of Plato’s concerns with the written word. The idea of turning a fragment into a token that becomes “a decoration of the self rather than a means to know” expresses well Plato’s concerns with rhetoric and writing. One can read Socrates’ behavior throughout the dialogue as the attempt to call out the various ways in which Lysias, Phaedrus, and others go astray with discourse. Indeed Socrates’ concern with Phaedrus is that he has become enraptured with the approach to discourse displayed by Lysias, a figure who has clearly gone astray in Owen’s terms. Phaedrus’s very handling of the material copy of Lysias’s speech—hoarding it as a concealed token of value— exemplifies Owen’s point. Phaedrus’s preoccupation with dissecting the parts of rhetoric, as well as Socrates’ repeated play in bungling his efforts, furthers the comparison. Many other details enhance the comparison between Owen’s idea of “going astray” and Plato’s critique of writing. See, for example, Socrates’ discussion directly following the palinode (257d–258). He describes how politicians are more concerned with the names of admirers that can be inscribed on their speeches than they are with the actual content of the speeches. He depicts those people—politicians and sophists—for whom discourse has become nothing more than a touchstone of sensibility, an oblique exercise in self-praise. They regard the speech as a way to make themselves immortal. Discourse and self are made into exchangeable tokens, and truth is rendered moot. Socrates tries to lay this bare for Phaedrus, since it is clear Phaedrus has become a pawn in Lysias’s speech trade or oratory exchange. In turn, the larger stakes expressed are the character of the relationship between Phaedrus and Socrates and between Plato and his readers. These examples of going astray with discourse bleed into similar dangers in the case of recollection and the misappraisals of memory throughout the dialogue. Consider Socrates’ description of those for whom discourse has become merely an arena for self-indulgent grandstanding: “If [the speech] abides, the writer leaves the theater delighted; but if it is erased and he loses the chance of being a speech writer, of being considered sufficient as a writer, he and his friends mourn” (258b).32 They mourn because they have made memory, like discourse, into tokens through

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which they believe they can be immortally transmitted. They have falsely fixed their hopes on the power of discourse and memory to remove loss, even death, from their world. Writing and memory are pharmakons not because they are cure-all elixirs for loss, but because they bear the risks of enveloping us in the most potent forms of self-delusion. Even with the much celebrated, paradigmatic encounter with beauty depicted in the Phaedrus, Plato eventually turns against its suggestions of memory’s ability to deliver us from loss. From the imagistic heights of Plato’s representation of the encounter with the beautiful boy, the palinode to Eros descends into a realm of violent solipsism and manipulation. Inebriated with the notion that loss in a life can be controlled and overcome, the lovers are left to haggle over the coins of desire. We can read this downturn as pointing to the risks of overestimating the redemptive power of memory and of erroneously equating recollection with the erasure of forgetting and loss. The Phaedrus suggests—both through its expressed content and by virtue of how this content is crafted—that forgetting as a fertile fragility and generative form of looking away cannot be simply erased. It unsettles the interpretive hold of teleological approaches to the text and suggests the need to relinquish forms of encompassment and narrative coherence associated with teleological models of the soul.

Unmooring the Ideal of Becoming Divine For us, well-being has reference to something other than ourselves, while, for the god, he is himself his own well-being. (Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 1245b18–19) Through trust in writing they are reminded from outside by foreign marks, not from within, by themselves. (Plato, Phaedrus 275a2)

Pressing on the complex place of oblivion within the Phaedrus opens to view the tragicomic dimensions of the text and the insufficiency of teleological models to express the mixed character and ambivalent place of forgetting within the soul and the philosophic life. It also, by extension, requires a reconsideration of the ideal commonly identified with Plato, the ideal of becoming godlike. This reconsideration requires reckoning with whether and how human well-being needs “reference to something other than ourselves” or if it requires eschewing external “foreign marks” in favor of drawing on our own interior sources, ourselves by ourselves. In the case of the Phaedrus, both become constitutive of the religiophilosophic picture and praxis arising from the dialogue.

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The ideal of “becoming godlike” was a signature feature of the Platonic view within the ancient world, as introduced previously in chapter 1.33 Traditionally this ideal was, and has been, identified specifically with contemplation, as the activity par excellence of the philosopher. To recall from previous chapters, in his construction of philosophy as a specific way of life, Plato transposed the cultic practice of beholding religious rites and statues to the realm of philosophy and the beholding of beauty and truth.34 In this transposed meaning, the soul approximates divinity through the beholding and apprehension of truth, a beholding enmeshed with the attracting and vitalizing movements of eros. Aspiration involves focused, deliberate attunement and seeing. Aspiration also involves relinquishment, whereby the soul is drawn toward an object of sight. Indeed, within the Phaedrus, the ideal is illustrated quite vibrantly and explicitly within the palinode, as the winged, divinely enthused soul becomes more proximate to the divine and heavenly truths.35 Though the ideal is illustrated in the apex of the palinode, we have also seen already how this illustration suggests a complex rendering of the ideal, insofar as the avian soul occupies a position of suspension, drawn upward through the movements of aspiration and yet buoyed by the stabilizing effects of the realities of its mortal imperfectibility. To trace this complex rendering of the ideal of becoming divine, throughout my interpretive readings of the dialogue I have focused on how “telling the truth slant” and “in circuit” better characterizes the human mode of participation in the ideal. Aspiration, for the human soul, cannot involve only a direct, engrossed gaze on objects of beauty and truth, but also involves multiple angles of viewing, deflection, and reattunement. To recall the point from which we began: Socrates claims that stating directly what the character of the soul is would be an endeavor appropriate to the gods. He is left, instead, to tell us what the soul may be likened to. The direct gaze may befit the gods, but for humans, seeing is best accomplished through a composite mode of viewing in which looking away and beginning again are intertwined. I take this to represent neither a derivative form of vision nor one that an elite few can eschew in favor of the divine gaze. Because the dialogue form is emblematic of this composite mode of seeing— a mode of seeing that Socrates’ own methods of looking idealize—I take it to be closer to Plato’s conception of the ideal philosophic life. Engaging in this complex form of seeing, by virtue of particular forms of writing, is an alternate construal of the ideal of becoming divine, which

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has been cast previously in terms of a single, one-dimensional gaze for which a single, one-dimensional genre would suffice for the soul. (Recall the cicadas as illustrative of the consequences of such one-dimensional gazing when it goes awry: They are left as mere voyeurs of the world and are reduced, in effect, to one genre.) Plato offered multigenre texts because humans are not singular genre souls. His texts suggest he is less interested in the soul’s approximating divinity through a winnowing focus of vision on a select set of truths than he is in engendering in the soul a pliant, anticipatory capacity for seeing in which movement—not rapt beholding—is of most value. In this regard, Socrates exemplifies what the texts themselves incorporate figuratively and structurally. On this rendering, Platonic transcendence transpires through the texts and may involve experiences or states beyond them, but it is, significantly, not apart from them. The ideal of becoming divine and the transcendent elements identified with Plato’s texts have presented points of impasse for modern and contemporary evaluations of the continuing relevancy of his ideas. His picture of transcendence has been characterized as one in which aspiration involves transcending one’s humanity to the point of relinquishing or scorning the very dimensions of ourselves that make us humans, not gods.36 On this reading of Plato, Aristotle has often been regarded as presenting a more viable and cogent conception of transcendence, one in which transcendence by means of virtue becomes the focus, keeping its model of aspiration squarely within the human realm.37 Other theorists have responded to the points of impasse surrounding the perceived transcendent dimensions of Plato’s texts by redirecting interpretive emphases on the texts, refiguring what the transcendent elements in the texts may actually be about, and recasting the meaning and significance of the divine ideal. One approach has been to defend a realist view of transcendence in terms of the Good, in which an attendant metaphysical grounding is not needed and the resultant model of aspiration is for distinctively human forms of excellence and well-being.38 Another form of response has focused on beauty and the ways in which it offers a form of transcendence within the world that may draw on elements of Plato’s ideas without depending on otherworldly features of his texts.39 To these responses I suggest another, one that I take to open from Plato’s texts more generally and from the Phaedrus in par ticu lar. It is a picture of transcendence not by way of virtue or by way of a realist con-

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ception of the Good or primarily by way of beauty, though it does bear an aesthetic dimension. It is transcendence by way of genre and the engagement with written form. As such, to call it an ideal of transcendence quickly becomes a misnomer. I think Plato didn’t just recast the ideal of godlikeness, I think he began to unmake it. Becoming a soul—not, becoming godlike—is the alternate ideal that emerges from such unmaking. This becoming transpires amid the ordinary oblivions and mundane new beginnings of philosophic reading rather than through the ecstatic heights of dramatically returned recollection or the engrossed gaze of contemplation. Many will yet ask: What does it mean to say that a burgeoning soul arises in, or from, this becoming? It means that, much as Plato reimagines Eros as a lover rather than as a static being in the Symposium, so too with the soul—it is an incarnated movement in the world, not a stable vantage point that, to recall Creeley’s bird, can simply “be” in the hung tree of the mind. On this reading of the soul, we “look away” and “begin again,” able to unmoor and forge ourselves anew while remaining committed to earthly forms of life by way of our engagement with particular forms of discourse. That is what the Phaedrus shows us through much of its apparent content; it is what the text performs for (and with) us in its very makeup. Aristotle may have accorded literary texts less qualified respect than Plato in terms of his address of the classical genres, but it is Plato’s writing—not Aristotle’s— that gives us examples of how nonanalytic, nonabstract written forms and philosophic practice are of a piece. Estimations that an ideal of transcendence beyond the human is a central, abiding element of Plato’s philosophy thus need not lead us to set him aside as irrelevant for, or incongruous with, the modern world. In Plato, transcendence has become not just recast, but cast off. This unmooring of transcendence I still take to be religious in character, because it depends on the recognition of sacred sources within the ordinary. I characterize the possibility stemming from the Phaedrus as religious because the dialogue acknowledges and expresses that in the spaces of unmooring we are often drawn back, not solely through the efforts of the will, but because of the presence of a reality outside of the soul. The potential religious significance of the Platonic picture lies not in its inclusion of god(s) per se, but rather in its evocation of how we are formed by external sources in ways that make visible the porousness of our selves, the tenuousness of our agency, and the otherness of our characters

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in relation to another reality. Written form is the “external source” or the “something other than ourselves” on which I have focused. Because Plato did not condone a dependence on “foreign marks” outside the person through which our own interior resources become atrophied, this characterization of written form needs further clarification. That is, not just any written form will do, but to borrow Plato’s terms, these written forms must bear a special relationship with ensouled logos. The three readings of the Phaedrus offered in this book have attempted to illustrate how his text is crafted to embody this relationship, to create a distinct liaison between human soul and written text. In this regard, it is worth noting a relevant point from the writing of Iris Murdoch, the twentieth-century Platonist with which my approach here may have the most in common and from which I am offering my own elaboration and emendation of a focus on the entanglement of the literary and the philosophic within Plato’s texts. In her discussion of techne within Plato, Murdoch suggests that technical disciplines and forms of study “might be thought of as introductory images of the spiritual life” but that they are not to be mistaken for “the spiritual life itself.”40 I am suggesting that written form be considered in this way and Plato regarded as one who attempted to make such introductory images. The texts as introductory images should not be taken for the spiritual life itself, nor did Plato seem to be overly concerned with articulating what such a life would look like precisely.41 Of Plato’s introductory images—that is, the written texts left to us— much can be explored and said. Of the spiritual life itself that may arise from them one can only speculate. I suggest that Plato opens the following terrain within religious thought. It is in the ordinary oblivions of a life that sacred sources can become encountered, a statement that can be best explained by way of an analogy: As there are unstated sources of meaning that emerge in the spaces surrounding the stated content of text, so do sacred sources make themselves present in the recesses of ordinary existence. In the latter case as in the former, such emergence can be disruptive, annihilative, and recuperative. It can draw one back, expansively, to begin again with renewed and remade understanding and attention. The dialogue form, with its dynamism by way of shifts, lacunae, withholdings, and new beginnings, is the introductory image of this further elaboration. The word-image that best evokes this unmooring of the ideal of becoming divine is the one with which we began, identified as the fulcrum

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of the Phaedrus: the hovering avian soul, fluttering upward with winged anticipation while remaining encumbered by the realities of its nature— a dynamic equipoise without resolved equilibrium. The image can be turned over in the more general terms of atopia (ἀτοπία) and aporia (ἀπορία). Aporos, in its most basic sense, means to be without a passageway. The root poros (πόρος) gives this an aquatic reference point, relevant given oblivion’s place in the dialogue: to be without a means of passing a river or the sea. Poros can also mean “means of providing” or “resource,” such that impeded passage and insufficiency of resources are both denoted by aporos.42 Atopos, in its most basic rendering, means to be without place, to be out of the way. Socrates’ atopic nature is a familiar feature of Plato’s dialogues, highlighted in the Phaedrus by its pastoral setting outside the walls of the polis. In the Phaedrus, Plato is addressing how we become aporos within ourselves through the very things we take to offer us a stable locale, way, or source of knowing: the body, memory, and written discourse. The unsettling and disruptive character of the dialogue attempts to dislodge these fixed locales of the body, remembrance, and written form. In the spirit of Socrates, we are being prompted and moved toward an atopic orientation with respect to these forms of embodied life. Given the undomesticated spirit of Socrates, this prompting and atopic orientation shouldn’t be glossed simply in picturesque terms of insouciant itinerancy. A brief mention of a moment in the Symposium reminds us why. This move seems especially fitting given that my examination of the Phaedrus has been posed from the outset from a moment in another Platonic text, the Republic. The textual moment from the Symposium is Diotima’s tale of the origin of Eros.43 In the tale, the conception and birth of Eros is the result of his mother, Penia (πενία, Poverty/Lack), contriving to become impregnated by Poros (πόρος, Resource/Plenty). Penia experiences Poros sexually while he is dozing off in a drunken sleep in Zeus’s garden, having partied too hard in celebration of Aphrodite’s birthday. Diotima’s mythic tale is offered as a figurative expression of Eros’s daimonic character, of his perpetually “in between” poise—between mortals and immortals, destitution and wealth, and ignorance and knowledge—or, said in the terms of this book, between incompleteness and repletion. The poise is not unlike that depicted in the avian image of the soul in the Phaedrus. These general resonances stand out across the texts, but I want to focus on the particular details of the garden as the site of Penia’s and Poros’s coupling and the nature of this commingling. The tale says she

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contrives to become impregnated by him, but what actually transpires when they lay together in the garden is left indeterminate. Does her contrivance lead to her sexual usurpation of a sleeping Poros? Is her guileful entry into the garden met by an awakening, willing Poros? Or does the withheld specificity within the tale gesture toward the inadequacy of the conceptions of agency implied in such questions? The encounter between Penia and Poros in the garden echoes the encounter between Phaedrus and Socrates in a pastoral locale outside the polis walls, which, in turn, echoes the encounter between the reader and Plato in the undomesticated garden of letters that is the Phaedrus. In each of these relationships, if variously manifested, the “grown together” potentials and risks attending erotic relinquishment and maneuvering are inescapable. Indeed, they are vital to the potency of the engagements and yet admit of no clearly discernible account of who is safe and who is not. The garden in which erotic, philosophic coupling transpires is not a haven of protection but a necessary space of exposure and vulnerability. Ultimately, Plato does not deliver us from an atopic position in the sense of giving us a picture in which a secure abode is found. He presents, instead, an extraordinary human ideal in which textual place has become ensouled passage.

Conclusion Ghost Ribs of Discourse beyond the Phaedrus Radical and Domesticated Forgetting in Euripides, Zhuangzi, and Aristotle Post-Construction Who knows better than the builder not to trust a structure, where it’s off kilter, how too few raf ters bear too much roof? And still it may stand, proof against craft, strong as though ghost ribs had been added after one left. —Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

Plato was a builder of texts who knew better “not to trust” their structure and “how too few / rafters bear / too much roof,” given their aspirations toward apprehending and expressing truth. Indeed, he characterizes the written word as an “image” or “phantom” of ensouled discourse.1 And yet as the preceding chapters have illustrated, he wrote, despite his suspicions of the power of written form. His integration of forgetting within the

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dialogue form, whether explicit conceptual content or implicit structural feature (both examined in chapter 3), can be regarded as the “ghost ribs” he has left behind, which paradoxically constitute the off-kilter strength of his texts. In effect, Kay Ryan’s poem expresses a structure of the self that I have formulated instead in the terms of ordinary oblivion: There is a structure and strength to the self, but it is one in which “too few / rafters bear / too much roof,” where left-behind ghost ribs become the source of standing. Said another way, in my chosen terms of oblivion: The rafters of memory are too few to bear the roof, so to speak, of the self; the forms of oblivion in the self are the specter-like fi laments left behind memory’s wake that build our off-kilter structure. I call such off-kilter structure “soul” and suggest that the written forms able to see and engage this structure must be built analogously. I have identified Plato as a central source for this philosophic insight. But he is not the only source. To gain a broader view of a context in which to place my reading of Plato consider how other religiophilosophic options can be compared with Plato in relation to Ryan’s poem. Two figures in particular—Euripides and Zhuangzi—imagine oblivion and integrate discursive “ghost ribs” in their texts in a radical way. A third figure, Aristotle, can be juxtaposed with these two, given his domestication of forgetting in his account of virtue. The stakes of this comparison, in particular with respect to where I position Plato in relationship to these figures, can be highlighted in terms suggested by Bernard Williams. Claiming that we have become misguidedly oriented to contrasts such as “the religious and the secular” and “the prerational and the rational,” Williams argues for a different query. These contrasts of course dig a ditch that leaves Sophocles and Thucydides on opposite sides. If we reject the progressivist picture, however, we shall be more open to the thought that the important question . . . is whether or not a given writer or philosophy believes that, beyond some things that human beings themselves shaped, there is anything at all that is intrinsically shaped to human interests, in particular to human beings’ ethical interests. In the light of that question and the distinctions it invites, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel are all on the same side, all believing in one way or another that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations. Sophocles and Thucydides, by contrast, are alike in leaving us with no such sense.2

In my view, Euripides and Zhuangzi would be keeping good company with Sophocles and Thucydides, whereas, contra Williams, I suggest that

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Plato falls between the two sides, poised between their more radical visions and that of Aristotle. Euripides and Zhuangzi did not believe “in one way or another that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations.” Euripides’ plays depict the violation and dissolution of such pattern making. Zhuangzi’s writings unsettle and upend the very presumptions involved in seeking sense through human patterns. Aristotle did believe that human reason could yield patterns that made sense of human life. Even if his texts are characterized (and valued) by many for his inclusion of aporetic moments, on balance what shines forth from his writings is a sustained, unflagging attempt to reason a sense of human life and its place in a larger order. As I have shown throughout the preceding chapters, Plato’s esteem of reason’s powers was counterpoised with his acknowledgment of its fragilities and lacunae, an acknowledgment borne out in the dialogic forms of writing he made as a basis for philosophic practice. Offering a sufficiently judicious, thorough account of this broader comparison would require its own book-length examination. Here I offer only a gesture toward the beginnings of such a comparison, in order to locate my reading of Plato within a wider context and suggest its potential implications for how we might, pace Williams, reconceive the elemental choices made when aligning oneself with one religiophilosophic view rather than another.3

Euripides and Zhuangzi: Torn and Carved Bodies amid the Ghost Ribs of Language When the Phaedrus is considered alongside Euripides’ Bacchae and the writings of Zhuangzi,4 several obvious potential points of comparison leap from the surface of these texts. Through both explicit commentary and implicit illustration via examples, forms of oblivion saturate the texts of Euripides and Zhuangzi even more strongly than the Phaedrus. The shared associations and thematic elements of oblivion across the Phaedrus and The Bacchae are, of course, not random connections given Plato’s purposive inclusion of Bacchic cultic references throughout the dialogue. A central thematic and structural element of The Bacchae is the play of tension between phenomena of rapt engagement and forms of blindness or looking away. The women of Thebes have become Bacchants through the manipulations of Dionysus; they have fixated their attentions on the god at Mount Cithaeron and forgotten their duties and

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commitments within the city. This dynamic between rapt attention and forgetfulness culminates in the play’s closing scene, in a kind of warped apotheosis, when Agave tears apart the body of her son in the midst of the Bacchic celebration. Agave, having killed her son within an oblivious, bacchant fervor, can’t hear her father speaking to her, saying she has “forgotten” the words he has spoken to her (line 1272). Additionally, and more subtly, throughout the play Pentheus is a figure consumed within the tensions of seeking to see the world as it is and his (seemingly willed) obliviousness to the presence of Dionysus before him. Caught between the yearning to see and the evasion of the very sights such seeing would involve, Pentheus eventually becomes destroyed by the entailment of these two dynamics. By the time he is ready to see the Bacchant rites, it is too late. Peering onto the Bacchants from his perch in a tree, on the sidelines, is not sufficient: “And the Maenads saw him. . . . He didn’t see them though.”5 The two forms of oblivion conspire toward his destruction. The newly converted Theban Maenads do not recognize Pentheus within their Bacchic oblivion and take him to be an animal. Pentheus has postponed actually looking at the reality of the god for so long that he has become unable to recognize what he is witnessing below him. This undoing of the capacity to see is precisely the risk that Plato draws on in his incorporation of Bacchic elements throughout the Phaedrus. The unmooring of stunted vision cannot transpire without risking oblivion’s more calamitous effects. Plato thought the dialogue form offered a way into—yet also back from—these risks. Euripides thought otherwise: to go in, really in, was to lose one’s way. This impasse between different modes of vision—and the forms of destruction or dissolution resulting therein—is seen within the Zhuangzi, also expressed in terms of forgetting or oblivion.6 The dilemmas expressed in the figure of Pentheus find their analog in the following episode from the Zhuangzi. Gongsun Long said of Prince Mou of Wei, “When I was young, I studied the Course7 of the former kings; when grown, I came to understand the practice of Humanity and Responsibility. I could combine the same and the different, separate ‘hard’ and ‘white,’ make the not-so appear so and the unacceptable appear acceptable. I had confounded the wisdom of all the philosophers and stopped the mouths of all the debaters. I thought I already understood everything. But now that I have heard Zhuangzi’s words, I am bewildered and lost in their strangeness. Does his rhetorical skill surpass mine? Is my knowledge unequal to his? At this point, I barely know now to open my beak! Please explain this to me!”

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Prince Mou leaned against his low table, breathing deeply, then looked up at the skies and laughed. “Have you never heard the story about the frog in the sunken well? He said to the tortoise of the Eastern Ocean, ‘How happy I am! I jump about on the railings and beams of the well and rest on the ledges left by missing tiles along its walls. When I splash into the water, it supports my armpits and holds up my chin, and when I tread in the mud, it submerges my feet up to the ankles. The surrounding crabs and tadpoles are certainly no match for me! For to have such mastery over one whole puddle of water like this, possessing all the joy of this sunken well—that is perfection! Why don’t you come in and have a look sometime?’ But before the tortoise could even get his left foot in, his right knee was stuck in the opening. So he pulled himself back out and told the frog about the ocean: “ ‘Its vastness exceeds a distance of a thousand miles; its depth is beyond the mea sure of a thousand fathoms. In Yu’s time the lands were flooded for nine years, but its waters did not rise. In Tang’s day there were seven droughts in eight years, but its shores did not recede. Unpushed and unpulled by either a moment or an aeon, unreceded and unadvanced by either little or much—that is the great joy of the Eastern Ocean!’ “When the well-frog heard this, he was cast into uncontainable astonishment, shrinking into utter discouragement. Now, for the intellect, which doesn’t know how to handle even the ultimate reaches of affirmations and negations, to contemplate the words of Zhuangzi—that is like a mosquito trying to carry a mountain on its back, or an inchworm trying to scurry across the Yellow River. It cannot be done. Your intellect, not knowing how to make sense of these most wondrous words of his, instead taking delight in its own momentary gains—is it not a frog trapped in the sunken well of right and wrong? . . . For you to rigidly seek him out with your acute discernment, searching for him with disputations, why, that’s just like trying to survey heaven through a tube, or to mea sure the depth of the earth with an awl. Isn’t it just too small? You’d best simply forget about it and go your way. Haven’t you heard about how Yuzi of Shouling tried to learn the walking style of Handan? Before he was able to master this local skill, he had forgotten his original gait and had to return home on his hands and knees. If you don’t get out of here, you might lose your original skills and be left without a career!” Gongsun Long, unable to close his mouth or retract his tongue, broke into a run and bolted away.8

This episode’s mention of the “Handan walk” highlights the feature shared by Plato, Euripides, and Zhuangzi that I take to be most important: Each author writes of the necessary risks involved in transforming one’s capacity to see. Each offers examples or illustrations of what it looks like when the consequences of these risks materialize. Most significantly,

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each author offers textual features and specific structural, discursive strategies through which the shaping of a reader is intended such that these risks may be experienced as transformative and generative rather than calamitous. Before considering these structural, discursive features in Euripides and Zhuangzi in more detail, some additional comments on the place of forgetting in the Zhuangzi are needed. In The Bacchae, Euripides renders the darkly idealized state of Dionysiac, ecstatic oblivion in wholly bodily terms, with respect to the kinds of physical changes that overcome the Theban women. This bodily change extends to the realm of language, in two senses: The Theban women are converted to new forms of communicating with the god and with each other as Bacchants (e.g., the musical and nonhuman vocalizations of revelry at Mount Cithaeron). At the level of the play itself and how it works vis-à-vis the audience, the Maenad chorus embodies through language the altered state of seeing afforded by their worship of Dionysus, an issue to be returned to momentarily. In the Phaedrus, Plato depicts a kind of originary forgetfulness as the cause of the soul’s inhabitation of an earthly bodily form. Here too, the bodily change is not merely one of physical form, but extends to the realm of language, insofar as the forms of expression able to speak about (and to) this kind of embodied being are also affected. In both Euripides and Plato, physical, bodily forms and discursive, language forms are deeply implicated with each other as modes of embodied experience. And for each figure, oblivion is a kind of mediating, threshold state—radically idealized within Euripides, and in Plato, more ambivalently acknowledged as a source of needed unmooring for the soul. In the Zhuangzi, the connections between forgetting, bodily form, and modes of communication are formalized in the concept of zuowang, “sitting in forgetfulness.”9 The ideal is rendered most emblematically in this episode at the end of chapter 6. Yan Hui said, “I am making progress.” Confucius said, “What do you mean?” Yan Hui said, “I have forgotten Humanity and Responsibility.” Confucius said, “That’s good, but you’re still not there.” Another day he came again and said, “I am making progress.” “What do you mean?” Yan Hui said, “I just sit and forget.”

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Confucius, jolted as if kicked, said, “What do you mean, you sit and forget?” Yan Hui said, “It’s a dropping away of my limbs and torso, a chasing off of my sensory acuity, which disperses my physical form and ousts my understanding until I am the same as the Transforming Openness. This is what I call just sitting and forgetting.”10

This passage spiritually idealizes, or renders within a radical religious state, the play between the relinquishment of bodily forms of perception and the opening into new modes of attunement with the world. Forgetfulness is used to name the mediating or threshold space between conventional existence and a spiritually exemplary state. This religious play between the relinquishment of old ways of seeing or being and new modes of attunement is seen also in Zhuangzi’s more this-worldly ideal of “effortless action” or “effortless responsiveness” (wuwei).11 The well-known story of Cook Ding from chapter 3 in the Zhuangzi best illustrates the ideal of wuwei. Its imagistic connections with the Phaedrus make it an especially important comparative source. The cook was carving up an ox for King Hui of Liang. Wherever his hand smacked it, wherever his shoulder leaned into it, wherever his foot braced it, wherever his knee pressed it, the thwacking tones of flesh falling from bone would echo, the knife would whiz through with its resonant thwing, each stroke ringing out the perfect note, attuned to the “Dance of the Mulberry Grove” or the “Jingshou Chorus” of the ancient sage-kings. The king said, “Ah! It is wonderful that skill can reach such heights!” The cook put down his knife and said, “What I love is the Course, something that advances beyond mere skill. When I first started cutting up oxen, all I looked at for three years was oxen, and yet still I was unable to see all there was to see in an ox. But now I encounter it with the spirit rather than scrutinizing it with the eyes. My understanding consciousness, beholden to its specific purposes, comes to a halt, and thus the promptings of the spirit begin to flow. I depend on Heaven’s unwrought perforations and strike the larger gaps, following along with the broader hollows. I go by how they already are, playing them as they lay. So my knife has never had to cut through the knotted nodes where the warp hits the weave, much less the gnarled joints of bone. A good cook changes his blade once a year: he slices. An ordinary cook changes his blade once a month: he hacks. I have been using this same blade for nineteen years, cutting up thousands of oxen, and yet it is still sharp as the day it came off the whetstone. For the joints have spaces within them, and the very edge of the blade has no thickness at all. When what has no thickness enters into an empty space, it is vast and open, with more

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than enough room for the play of the blade. That is why my knife is still as sharp as if it had just come off the whetstone, even after nineteen years. “Nonetheless, whenever I come to a clustered tangle, realizing that it is difficult to do anything about it, I instead restrain myself as if terrified, until my seeing comes to a complete halt. My activity slows, and the blade moves ever so slightly. Then all at once, I find the ox already dismembered at my feet like clumps of soil scattered on the ground. I retract the blade and stand there gazing at my work arrayed all around me, dawdling over it with satisfaction. Then I wipe off the blade and put it away.” The king said, “Wonderful! From hearing the cook’s words I have learned how to nourish life!”12

Though the language or conceptual terminology of forgetting does not arise in the Cook Ding story, we still see here, figuratively, a play between modes of vision and being that become left behind, creating an opening onto an exemplary, perfected manifestation of embodied skill. The story is, in effect, the counterpart to the “Handan walk” episode in which relinquishing one way of being leaves the person adrift, crawling home on his hands and knees. In the butcher story, forgetting one mode of seeing makes possible the cook’s attunement to the ox: “But now I encounter it with the spirit rather than scrutinizing it with the eyes.” And this new form of attunement is rendered in the Zhuangzi in the terms of the sounds accompanying the cook’s exceptional skill: “Wherever his knee pressed it, the thwacking tones of flesh falling from bone would echo, the knife would whiz through with its resonant thwing, each stroke ringing out the perfect note, attuned to the ‘Dance of the Mulberry Grove’ or the ‘Jingshou Chorus’ of the ancient sage-kings.” As in The Bacchae, the characters within the text embodying an exemplary state enjoy an altered relationship with bodily created sound or forms of communication (e.g., music). Further, this depiction of the relationship between a spiritually idealized state and forms of language is set within a text that strives to enact an analogous relationship between itself and its reader or audience. That is, for Zhuangzi, as for Euripides and Plato, the text does not merely depict a view of language and written form; it also performs in its very makeup the orientation to discursive form that its surface content expresses. Kay Ryan’s idea of the “ghost ribs” of built structures offers a way into this shared feature across these disparate texts. Let’s consider Ryan’s poem alongside the Zhuangzi story of the cook carving the oxen. In Ryan’s poem, the conventional, visible rafters of the

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built structure are complemented and fortified by some other structural source, “as though / ghost ribs / had been added.” In the episode in the Zhuangzi, the cook attributes the infrequency of his need to sharpen his knife to being able to see the structure of the ox before him in a new way, one in which his gaze is not fixated on the expected, visible forms of animal physiology. When I first started cutting up oxen, all I looked at for three years was oxen, and yet still I was unable to see all there was to see in an ox. But now I encounter it with the spirit rather than scrutinizing it with the eyes. My understanding consciousness, beholden to its specific purposes, comes to a halt, and thus the promptings of the spirit begin to flow. I depend on Heaven’s unwrought perforations and strike the larger gaps, following along with the broader hollows. I go by how they already are, playing them as they lay. So my knife has never had to cut through the knotted nodes where the warp hits the weave, much less the gnarled joints of bone.

In this story, “Heaven’s unwrought perforations” are akin to Ryan’s ghost ribs. As the translator Ziporyn clarifies: “Heaven’s unwrought perforations” are tianli . . . which also could be translated as “Natural Perforations,” or “Spontaneous Perforations,” or “Skylike Perforations.” This is the only occurrence of the character li [“coherence, pattern”] . . . in the Inner Chapters, and the first time in Chinese literary history that the binome tianli is used. This term would later come to stand for the crucial category in Neo-Confucian metaphysics, in which context it is sometimes translated as the “Principle of Heaven” or “Heavenly Pattern.” The meaning here is much more literal. The term li can refer to the optimal way of dividing up and organizing a raw material to suit human purposes or to the nodes in the material along which such division can most easily be done. In this context, it remains closely connected to a still more literal meaning, the pattern of lines on skin.13

In order to best see the structure of the ox, the cook has had to look beyond the obvious points of juncture within the animal’s body and discern its more subtle, ephemeral nodes of coherence. Once seen, it is as though the animal simply falls apart before his eyes, without effort. In the Phaedrus, the analogy of the carved-animal body as a model for wellexecuted discourse is presented in a much simpler way, though my previous chapters have shown how the text as a whole belies the one-dimensionality of the passage in which the famous analogy arises. In the case of the carved-animal passage in the Phaedrus, carving the animal along its

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visible, structural joints is identified as the norm for rightly operating reason. As chapters 1 through 3 have illustrated, the dialogue’s methods and structure suggest alternate readings of the articulated animal body. In effect, I have shown how there are gaps or “perforations” in the dialogic form and strategies of the text such that its coherence (and its potential dissolution) are best understood in terms of the teeming musculature of a living animal body, rather than the delineated lines of a carved animal corpse. A built structure depending on “ghost ribs” and not simply conventional, visible forms of support characterizes Plato’s written forms. Zhuangzi expresses more succinctly what Plato gestures toward across the whole of the Phaedrus with respect to the relinquishment of normalized lines of sight, the opening onto new modes of viewing, and the patterns of discourse able to encompass and activate each. Of course, in the case of The Bacchae, the imagery of carving or elegant butchery used by Plato and Zhuangzi becomes overwhelmed by the imagery of raw butchery and dismemberment with abandon. In Euripides, normalized lines of sight are not so much relinquished as they are torn apart, either nullifying the ability to see or creating bereft modes of viewing. To pursue these ideas in more detail, let’s return to the entirety of Ryan’s line: “And still it / may stand, proof / against craft, / strong as though / ghost ribs / had been added / after one left.” In the cases of Euripides, Plato, and Zhuangzi, the necessity of “ghost ribs” in their texts is bound up with the character of the spiritual exemplars or guides within these texts. That is, we can imagine Ryan’s phrase “after one left” both in terms of an author who leaves the scene of the built text, upon its completion, and in the case of these particular authors, in terms of the central spiritual figures depicted within the texts. Socrates, Dionysus, and the character Zhuangzi are each distinguished by their itinerant, constantly shifting positions vis-à-vis their interlocutors. They, in effect, always leave their interlocutors hanging, moving through, in, and around scenes of encounter without providing stable ground or being themselves locatable within any fixed position.14 Their ambiguous, fleeting—though yet still resounding— presence in the texts contributes to the off-kilter character of these texts, given the impossibility of determining without remainder where they are coming from and where they are going. The authors behind these figures thus leave ghost ribs in their texts, in order to create a written structure that is congruous with the nature of these spiritual guides and exemplars. Didacticism is not the method of these guides; neither are the texts’ strat-

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egies vis-à-vis their audiences. Phantom forms of support abide in these texts, continuing to prod and shape a reader left in the wake of an encounter with their visible rafters and central, though vacating, guides. Chapters 1 through 3 have examined and illustrated the various ways in which Plato’s discursive methods constitute the structure of the dialogue such that it is more “off-kilter” than first readings may discern. The written word may be deemed a mere phantom of ensouled discourse in the Phaedrus, but Plato creates ghostlike structural effects in the dialogue with such brilliance and multidimensionality that one has a hard time not imagining the sheer delight he took in making such phantoms. Specifically, there are visible “raf ters” in the dialogue form, readily apparent on a first viewing. These might include the characters, the presence of myth, the contours and content of argument, and the rich use of literary association. Plato’s word-images might also be regarded as rafters of the text. Then there are those structural features that are less apparent on a first viewing. Chapter 2’s discussion of discursive displacement and chapter 3’s discussion of structural forms of ordinary oblivion in the dialogue might also be “ghost ribs” in the text. Most strongly, and perhaps most speculatively, the “ghost ribs” of greatest significance that I have in mind are the nonvisible effects on the reader that textual elements have, effects that come to constitute the off-kilter, dynamic, “living-animal” structure of the built text. The ghostlike textual features in concert with the forms of engagement they kindle in the reader become, ultimately, the source of the text’s enduring strength.

Ghost Ribs and Phantom Effects in the Zhuangzi In the Zhuangzi, explicitly identified and cannily incorporated discursive strategies can be considered as rafters of the text that give way to the ghostlike ribs of its structure. Here the phantom sources of off-kilter coherence in the text involve the dynamic interplay between textual features and reader engagement. Since the sage Zhuangzi paradigmatically leaves the scene throughout the text, the confrontation he poses is, in many respects, carried out by the text’s ghost ribs and their phantom effects. This dimension of the Zhuangzi is best understood in terms of the text’s threefold strategy with language, identified in the twenty-seventh chapter and manifest throughout.15 The first of these is “lodging-place language” (yuyan) in which the speaker inhabits the position or “words”

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of the intended audience, in order to begin from a shared context for the purposes of potential persuasion. In this basic form, “lodging-place language” resembles the more conventional rendering of the chorus in Greek tragedy, wherein the chorus reflects the linguistic and normative context with which the audience would identify, thus gaining entrance into the world of the play. Yet in a manner akin to how Euripides stretches the conventional rendering of the chorus, a point to be returned to momentarily, so too does the Zhuangzi stretch the range of lodging-place language. Rather than merely function as a beginning point of identification, lodging-place language in its more imaginative varieties moves the reader from his or her habituated position into new linguistic and conceptual territory. One variety of Zhuangzi’s imaginative play with language that “discuss[es] a topic by borrowing an outside viewpoint” would be his presentation of imaginary conversations between figures that the reader must inhabit in order to participate with the text.16 Exchanges between Confucius and a follower may be the most readily identifiable examples of this strategy.17 They provide the reader familiar or conventional opinions as entry points to the exchange, but then, in the course of the exchange, such views are pressed upon and unsettled in ways that implicate the reader, not just the interlocutor of Confucius. As Lee H. Yearley notes in his analysis of this type of language, its more imaginative, extended varieties exhibit two features that place it beyond simpler forms of ad hominem argument: “One feature is the nurture of sympathetic identification. The other is the nurture of our ability to move among positions that differ from those that normally attract and hold us.”18 On this extended version of lodging-place language— one that closely resembles Euripides’ expansive use of the chorus—the form of the language reflects and requires qualities associated with a spiritual ideal seen in the text more broadly and concentrated in its central exemplar. Yearley’s analysis helps frame the relationship between language strategy and the spiritual ideal that Zhuangzi creates: “This kind of lodging place language involves wandering among positions in which you might lodge. It exhibits, that is, the spiritual perfection of the wanderer, the person who may temporarily light in one or another place, but whose lodging is always temporary and contingent.”19 As we will see, this is similar to Euripides’ chorus, in that language does not serve merely to echo and affirm conventional wisdom, but rather introduces the reader to shifting abodes and the movements of relinquishment and refigured attention they require.

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The second kind of language identified in the Zhuangzi is “repeated words” (chongyan) or “weighted words” (zhongyan). These are words whose potential for persuasion rests in the authority of the speaker’s experience, a strategy most readily identified in the aphorism. Perhaps most significant to the present discussion is the capacity of this type of language to “dislodge” the reader from habituated positions. Examples of this strategy would include pointed questions directed at interlocutors from figures bearing the authority of knowledge: “How do I know that to take pleasure in life is not a delusion?” The pointed question is then repeated within variations on the same theme: “How do I know that we who hate death are not exiles since childhood who have forgotten the way home? . . . How do I know that the dead do not regret that ever they had an urge to life?”20 As Yearley describes, “weighted words” often have a poetic character insofar as this type of language “often brings us up short; our ordinary intellectual inertia is overcome by something both perplexing and enticing.”21 A longer discussion would be required, but on this point we begin to see how the strategies of language in Zhuangzi involve a dimension of dissolution and destruction, a feature that can be compared with similar features in Euripides’ plays. The violent dimensions of The Bacchae are of course famous and may prompt one to pause at the robustness of the resonance I identify between Euripides and Zhuangzi. But beyond the literal surface violence of the play is another, structural form that has counterpoints with the Zhuangzi’s types of language and the demands they place on an engaged reader. As Yearley suggests, “The transformation of ordinary forms through controlled violence underlies Zhuangzi’s understanding of spiritual advancement and the language that informs it.”22 The third type of language identified in the Zhuangzi, “goblet” or “spillover” words (zhiyan), is less a discrete strategy than it is a general orientation to language that permeates the text.23 The name of this type of language refers to a drinking vessel that can spill its overflowing contents and therein regain equilibrium. This fluid exchange of surfeit, released excess, and regained equipoise transpires through a range of linguistic strategies: “Goblet language is that kind of fluid language in which equilibrium is kept despite (or perhaps because of) the presence of changing genres, rhetorical forms, points of view, and figurative expressions.”24 Goblet language extends or elaborates radically the functions of the first two kinds of language: It begins from the reader’s position only to move her into new, transformed linguistic, mental and spiritual abodes, and it requires processes of disorientation to effect this movement. This

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language manifests “a skill that both moves from and transforms” the rules and forms of ordinary patterns of rhetoric and argument.25 And its disorienting power arises, in particular, from its highly paratactic character. Swift, recurrent changes in genre, rhetorical form, and subject matter render the text, on first reading, apparently unconnected or disjointed. The hallmark of the paratactic character of the Zhuangzi is its inclusion of the devastating non sequitur. The paratactic shifts emblematic of “goblet” or “spillover” words are a prime example of Ryan’s “ghost ribs.” Much more could be said about this third type of language in the Zhuangzi. For the purpose of suggesting a comparison of goblet language with the chorus of The Bacchae, I want to focus on three of its aspects. First, goblet or spillover language has the effect of deflecting attention from the exemplary figure (e.g., the sage Zhuangzi) while dissolving any static notion of authorial position or authority. Youru Wang characterizes this aspect of goblet words as the “structural disappearance of the author in the shift and multiplying of meanings and viewpoints.”26 Yearley characterizes this effect similarly: “We are rarely sure who is speaking and therefore we know neither from what perspective statements come nor with what authority they are delivered. We face, that is, the perplexing situation of having been alerted to the significance of authorial perspective and authority, and then left with words that seem to come from a void.”27 So too, I suggest, with the chorus of The Bacchae: The chorus is certainly in the shadow of the authority of the exemplar Dionysus, but it is a voice that creates a third space vis-à-vis the audience, allowing the audience entry to the world of the play. Second, closely bound up with the first aspect, is that goblet language necessitates particular modes of engagement on the part of the reader. Goblet words, in particular because of their paratactic character, rupture any one-to-one model of the relationship obtaining between authorial voice and reader. As Wang notes, goblet words “suspend or interrupt any possible reception of a linear or teleological relation between the author and the reader.”28 This disruption entails that a kind of “active participation” on the part of the reader becomes required.29 Goblet language effects a displacement of the reader while eliciting a response to it and engendering an engagement with its processes. Yearley examines the participation engendered and required by goblet language in the terms of Zhuangzi’s approach to thought and action and the ideal of adaptive responsiveness. As with the ideal of adaptive responsiveness in the realm of

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action, the ability to “use or grasp spillover language” requires a particular motivational structure and disposition: “The abilities required, that is, touch the deepest features of a person’s character; they are neither a simple linguistic talent nor a narrow trait.”30 Goblet words do not merely depict exemplary states from which the reader learns mimetically. Rather, goblet words call for a kind of engagement on the part of reader that is transformative of that reader. They create, and thus offer, a space of tenuousness that the reader can learn to inhabit. A third, perhaps most significant, aspect to note is the kind of equilibrium that goblet or spillover words suggest and instantiate. The image of this kind of goblet—that is, one that risks excess because it can tip, overflow, and right itself again— suggests that a kind of exuberant equipoise marks any equilibrium arising from the text, calling to mind the avian equipoise examined previously in the Phaedrus. Two connotations of the image are especially relevant, and Yearley’s analysis captures them best. First, regarding the risk with surfeit: “The goblet can never be so full it simply tips over because it will always right itself— and a continuing motif in Zhuangzi is how a perfected person or language, no matter how plentiful, always regains balance.” Second, regarding the exuberant aspect of this regained balance: “The vessel will never be empty in the sense that absence defines it— and a continuing motif in Zhuangzi is how a perfected person’s emptiness and language always displays fullness not vacuity, stillness not a lack of vitality.”31 This characterization of the equilibrium of goblet words suggests how we might regard the chorus of the The Bacchae. Unlike the excesses of its exemplary figure, Dionysus, the chorus incorporates surfeit into the text while allowing for spillover effects that set the play right again. Plato’s discursive strategies, as these are delivered through the enigmatic figure of Socrates, perform similarly. As with the Zhuangzi, in each case, the ideal suggested is not one of placid equipoise, but of vital equilibrium. They recall Ryan’s vibrantly off-kilter structure with gaps, not in the sense of defining absences, but as spaces into which other forms of support become rendered, displaying “fullness not vacuity,” vital order not static structure. Beyond the specific language strategies of the Zhuangzi, the text expresses a more general orientation to language that evokes Ryan’s sense of the “ghost ribs” of structure. It also expresses a resonance with the enmeshed relationship between forgetting and discourse in Plato and Euripides.

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A fish trap is there for the fish. When you have got hold of the fish, you forget the trap. A snare is there for the rabbits. When you have got hold of the rabbit, you forget the snare. Words are there for the intent. When you have got hold of the intent, you forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words, so I can have a few words with him?32

Plato and Euripides do not, of course, precisely echo the sentiment or idea evoked by this passage from the Zhuangzi. The cogency of the comparative moment arising from the passage rests, rather, in the occasion it offers for imagining how these figures might relate to it, in tension as well as congruity. Specifically, the passage highlights the transformative aim of language in the Zhuangzi, the relinquishment of its hold on the person once its transformative effects have worked, and the ineluctable return to language upon such relinquishment. Throughout chapters 1 through 3 I have traced an analogous relationship to discourse in the Phaedrus: Plato incorporates textual strategies to unmoor a reader from her presumed modes of thought, depending on and risking moments of relinquishment in order to effect a reimagined return to, and relationship with, forms of discourse. In the case of The Bacchae, one can imagine Dionysus saying a slightly different version of the passage’s last line to Pentheus: “Where can I find a man who has (not) forgotten words, so I can have a few words with him?” And, indeed, within a disguise, he does just that in the course of the play. Or amid the starkness of the play’s ending, Dionysus finds the woman who had forgotten words joining other bacchants outside the polis to celebrate in the nondiscursive communication of the god. He comes to have the last word with her and her father, in the wake of Pentheus’s dismembered corpse, but Agave’s return to language has become confined to the words of lamentation and grieving. To better appreciate the distinctiveness of the relations Euripides posits among unmooring, relinquishment, and language, let’s consider briefly the ghost ribs of discourse in The Bacchae.

The Specter of the Chorus in The Bacchae In suggesting that the chorus of The Bacchae is a kind of ghost rib within the play, I have two ideas in mind. First, given the enigmatic, itinerant character of Dionysus, the chorus is a kind of ghost rib that “had been added / after one left.” Dionysus moves in and out of the scene (if always remaining a looming presence in the play) while the chorus stays behind,

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offering the audience (and the reader) passage into the play. Second, and more significant, the kinds of discourse and language used by the chorus bear implications for the audience’s relationship to discourse and language. These implications, in effect, also constitute structural ghost ribs of the play. Pentheus’s orientation to discursive questioning (and the modes and presumptions about knowledge contained therein) leaves him unseeing and doomed. Through the chorus, the audience is given a glimpse into an alternate orientation to language and sight, through which they might avoid Pentheus’s blindness and fate. By implicating the audience’s modes of viewing with those of the chorus, Euripides prompts the building of structural ties that in concert with the play’s more visible elements create a standing, if off-kilter, text. Specifically, in The Bacchae Euripides is doing something with the snares of language and bodily form that is not dissimilar to the passages noted above in the Zhuangzi. Fixation within either form of embodiment (linguistic or physical) is what Dionysus seeks to upend. The Maenad chorus offers a way out, so to speak, of such a fi xation. In this regard, the chorus can be considered a kind of “lodging-place” discursive form, in the manner of the Zhuangzi, insofar as it opens to the audience the possibility for moving among various perspectives, outside their accepted views.33 The chorus is the transient abode left behind in the disruptive wake of Dionysus: The audience (or reader) cannot take up permanent residence within it but can use it as a temporary shelter through which to encounter the challenges posed by the god. The story of the chorus in The Bacchae is a complicated one, insofar as the convention of the chorus in tragedy is often to voice civic or social responses and norms relevant to the unfolding action. In The Bacchae, the position of the chorus, depicted as Maenads from Asia, necessarily unsettles this formal convention, as well as the civic and ethical reminders that might be expected from it. Instead, the chorus is a semblance of the exuberant equipoise— discursively and somatically—more excessively manifest in Dionysus.34 Consider an excerpt from the choral lyric that highlights the shifts in bodily and communicative forms emblematic of the Dionysiac ideal.35 Pentheus: I’ll go in, then either I’ll come out in arms or go with you, and follow your advice. Exit Pentheus into the palace. Dionysus: He’s in the net now, women. He’ll get to see his Bacchae. . . . 36 ............................................................

144 Chorus: Oh, will I, sometime, in the allnight dances, dance again, barefoot, rapt, again, in Bacchus, all in Bacchus, again? Will I throw my bared throat back, to the cool night back, the way, oh, in the green joys of the meadow, the way a fawn frisks, leaps, throws itself as it finds itself safely past the frightening hunters, past the nets, the houndsmen urging on their straining hounds, free now, leaping, tasting free wind now, being wind now as it leaps the plain, the stream and river, out at last, out from the human, free, back,

Conclusion

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into the green, rich, dappleshadowed tresses of the forest.37

In this section of the play Pentheus has been netted by Dionysus’s persuasive words and guise. Euripides juxtaposes this with the Maenad chorus, who, like the frisking, leaping fawn, fi nd themselves past the nets of hunters and houndsmen, becoming wind that leaps the plain. Th is evaporation, relinquishment, or release of both somatic and communicative forms recalls the “dropping away” of limbs and language in the Zhuangzi’s ideal of “sitting in forgetfulness.” Slipping from the snares of language, the choral lyric form itself “becomes wind” that leaps across the play. That is, the play between alterations in bodily and communicative forms is not just depicted in the drama but evident and incorporated in the makeup of the text itself. Shifts, alterations, and formal features of Euripides’ lyric, particular to this play, mark or accompany the drama’s representations of bodily and communicative transformation. In particular, the choral lyric quoted above is a famous one within Greek tragedy, in part, because the lightness and fluid rapidity of the lyric echo the very scene depicted. Further, ambiguous sections of the lyric that bear multiple meanings reflect the chorus’s shifting roles and perspective throughout the course of the play.38 In these respects, the chorus illustrates and constitutes the ghostlike structure of The Bacchae. More akin to the fawn that becomes wind than an abiding wooden rafter of support, the chorus is a permeable rib of the play through which the reader can exit the house of the polis and experience the Dionysiac abode. The figure of Agave is haunting because she reminds us of what such transport might cost.39

Poised between Euripides, Zhuangzi, and Aristotle At the outset of the conclusion I suggested that Plato might be situated between the radical pictures offered by Zhuangzi and Euripides and the domesticated view arising from Aristotle, with respect to how they might each relate to Bernard Williams’s characterization: Do they believe in

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one way or another that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations? When considering the place of oblivion and “ghost ribs” within their texts, both in terms of depicted content and structural effects, I suggest that Zhuangzi and Euripides explore more radically and disruptively the possibilities of written form engaged by Plato in the Phaedrus. And on the other side, I suggest that Aristotle domesticates the place of oblivion within the philosophic life, such that he inhabits a terrain ultimately set apart from Plato, in terms of the modes of thought— and discursive forms— acknowledged and incorporated as essential to giving expression to human life and human aspirations. To begin the comparison of how the views of Plato and Aristotle are different from Williams’s characterization, with respect to the place of forgetting in the apprehension of the patterns of human life, consider the following line from Plato’s Republic: Let us never, then, admit a forgetful soul into the ranks of those that are philosophers in an adequate way. (486d)

My basic suggestion is that Aristotle, in his account of virtue, stays closer to upholding this ideal than did his former teacher, who, in writings such as the Phaedrus, allowed aspects of his development of philosophy to remain tensively counterpoised with each other. Indeed, in the Phaedrus, it is through forgetting that the soul enters humanity and the possibility for embodied, philosophic living. And as I have illustrated throughout, figurative forms of unmooring and oblivion on the part of the reader are essential aspects to the transformative processes of philosophic engagement. Aristotle’s account of virtue suggests a different response to forgetfulness and its place in the philosophic life, one that sustains the ideal upheld in the line from the Republic.40 To pursue this comparison between Plato and Aristotle, and to consider where each might fall in relationship to Zhuangzi and Euripides Martha Nussbaum’s introductory comments to The Bacchae provide an apt starting point.41 Specifically, her sense of the resonance and dissonance between Euripides and Aristotle opens to view the comparison I am suggesting between these figures and Plato. Further, her characterizations of Euripides and Aristotle allow me to highlight the ways in which I take Plato to speak cogently to (and about) forms of fertile fragility. Given the influence of her work on contemporary discussions of fragility and her emphasis on Aristotle as the ancient

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figure best poised to speak to fragility within contemporary contexts, I aim to suggest that Plato may encompass human vulnerability within his texts more than has been recognized.42 In her introduction to The Bacchae, Nussbaum suggests that the play expresses a view of “the human middle,” which is much in keeping, on her view, with the Aristotelian position. On this view, “Virtue securely holds the human middle ground, and holds the human being in that middle ground, preventing egress either up or down.” 43 In par ticu lar, she reads the play’s closing scene as expressive of a view of the distinctly human responses made possible within conceptions of virtue based on, and valuing, the affective recognition “that we are needy and not self-sufficient, not fully in control of the most valuable things.” Cadmus’s and Agave’s piecing together of Pentheus’s dismembered body “in grief and pity suggests that it is the capacity for these emotions that is the source of integration and community in human life, the way we piece ourselves together. Indeed, it suggests as well that human beings, and no one else, are the source of whatever integration and community human life possesses.” 44 Nussbaum regards the scene as expressive of a resonance between Euripides and Aristotle but also as an occasion for marking the point of departure between these figures. All this is Aristotelian. And true, as far as it goes. But I have said that Aristotle could not approve of, could not accept, this play. For the human community depicted here is not just subject to sudden losses and underserved reversals, the subject matter of pity and grief. It is subject to stranger changes as well: to sudden ferocity, to blinding insight and searing rage. Virtue’s walls are not, as in most of Aristotle’s ethical thought, firm against such incursions. All walls are to some extent porous, all identities to some extent fluid. Good character does not, as in Aristotle, stand reliably between the good person and the possibility of horrible acts. The walls of character, the ways in which human beings define themselves as orderly and civilized and good, can themselves shift or give way. And this fluidity is not simply weakness; it is, somehow, necessary for a good and fully human life. Or, to put it differently, the risk we run in trying to live humanly is not simply a risk of loss; it is a risk of evil.45

I suggest that we consider forgetting as one of “the stranger changes” to which we are subject, as a phenomenon of porosity through which we see that “all identities [are] to some extent fluid.” And this source of porosity is something in tension with “the walls of character” and the stable contours of virtue.

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In the case of Euripides, we see forgetting in its more dramatic forms—in his case it does not suffice to consider only ordinary oblivion, but one must encounter the extraordinary forms that oblivion takes and the demands this places on the audience. Even if one tries to avoid caricatures of the Dionysiac dimensions of his plays, one cannot get around the ways in which ordinary oblivions become something else within his imagined world. It is in this sense, in part, that I have suggested that forgetting becomes religiously radicalized by Euripides. And by contrast, as framed by Nussbaum’s comparison (and to be elaborated further by my own reading), forgetting becomes religiously domesticated within the Aristotelian view. (Or, on Nussbaum’s stronger reading, the religious dimension can become eschewed from an Aristotelian account of human transcendence.) Plato’s orientation to oblivion arises somewhere between these possibilities, insofar as Plato acknowledges in the Phaedrus how, to echo Nussbaum’s description, “the ways in which human beings define themselves as orderly and civilized and good, can themselves shift or give way.” The fluidity that oblivion brings into a life “is not simply weakness” but “is, somehow, necessary for a good and fully human life.” And oblivion presents a “risk of loss” that also can be perhaps “a risk of evil.” 46 The Phaedrus marks a religious and ethical terrain poised between the extraordinary oblivions of Euripides’ world and the domestication of oblivion within Aristotle’s. I have already offered a preliminary glimpse into the Euripidean orientation to oblivion in The Bacchae and its resonance with the Zhuangzi. Let’s turn then to consider the Aristotelian alternative and to explain my characterization of its domestication of oblivion.

Forgetting and the Stable R af ters of Pr actical Wisdom In the move to Aristotle, some issues of interpretive and methodological fit should be addressed. One issue is whether and how my interpretive and conceptual terms can be located within Aristotle’s texts in judicious and fruitful ways, in order to develop a comparison between my Platonic picture and a potential Aristotelian alternative. Specifically, the multivalent ways in which I have been using “oblivion” or “forgetting” as a term of art—from the more literal to the more figurative— creates an interpretive situation in which I cannot simply map Aristotle’s texts in philological terms, tracking all of the instances in which “forgetting” appears. In

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part, this is because I am not pursuing here an endeavor of intellectual history of the concept of forgetting, in which case I would have to deal with the epistemological accounts of Plato and Aristotle, focusing on a different set of texts. This is also because in the case of the Phaedrus we have an ideal case. In short, it is my central ancient interpretive source precisely because it uses the language of forgetting in multivalent ways that extend beyond strictly epistemological concerns. So, in the turn to Aristotle, though we can consider where he does address forgetting, we will need also to consider other textual features. On my view, one of the most apt places to look is the Aristotelian picture of phronēsis (practical wisdom), given that this is how Aristotle addresses issues of attention and attunement in ways that relate to my figurative renderings of forgetting in Plato. I aim then for an emblematic account of the Aristotelian alternative, if not an exhaustive one.47 Let us begin with occasions in the Nicomachean Ethics where forgetting is explicitly addressed, as this will bring to light key aspects of a potential Aristotelian alternative and suggest how we will need to look to other aspects of his ethic to imagine this alternative. In a straightforward sense, it may seem that forgetting is simply out of place in a virtueoriented ethic, insofar as virtue depends on habituated memory (or the memory of habituation) in order to manifest appropriate action over time.48 Although this may be germane in the case of dramatic forgetting or trauma, I think in the case of ordinary oblivion the story becomes more complicated: On the one hand, the case of ordinary oblivion may evince the texture and range of the Aristotelian model. On the other hand, perhaps even in doing so, it will suggest how such fissures become eclipsed in the broader conception of virtue. The most direct and significant way in which forgetting is addressed in the Nicomachean Ethics concerns Aristotle’s estimation of the stability and steadfastness of virtue (or “excellence,” as an alternate translation of aretē / αρετή). The first instance of this arises, significantly, in his discussion of whether the happiness (eudaimonia) of a person can be assessed during his lifetime, given the potentiality that changes in fortune can befall someone, and thereby cause one to revisit the assessment of happiness (NE 1.10).49 In responding to Solon’s position that the assessment of happiness can be rendered only at the end of a life, Aristotle wants both to acknowledge the reality of changing fortune in a life while maintaining that assessments of happiness can persist through and in spite of such

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changes.50 A key feature of Aristotle’s response is the claim that activities of excellence (or “endeavors of virtue”) are the most steady of human works and seem to be more stable than even the things of systematic knowledge (1100b13–15).51 Of the activities in conformity with virtue, the most esteemed are the most lasting, for they most fully and continuously constitute the lives of those who are most blessed and flourishing (1100b15–18). This stability becomes expressed by Aristotle specifically in the language of forgetting: Forgetfulness does not happen in the case of the activities in accordance with virtue because of the pride of place they hold in the fully eudaimonistic life (1100b17–18).52 The steadfastness of virtue and the stability of the eudaimonistic life are thus mutually implicated: “The happy man will be so throughout his life, for always, he— of all people most of all—will do and contemplate the things having to do with excellence” (1100b18–20). The inclusion of forgetting as a comparative term to distinguish the flourishing life of excellence from the endeavors of systematic knowledge or rational, technical expertise reappears in book 6 in Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom (phronēsis) (NE 6.5). As Aristotle distinguishes practical wisdom from other operations and capacities of the intellect, he suggests that it is not sufficient to think of practical wisdom only as a habit in accordance with reason because this kind of habituation could be forgotten (for example, a technical expertise), whereas practical wisdom cannot fail in this way (1140b28).53 Here too, as with the passage in book 1, something about the virtues— and practical wisdom in particular— makes them resilient to forgetfulness in a way that is different from the potential effects of forgetfulness on other reasoning faculties of the soul. If we consider these passages together, a few ideas emerge. Most clearly or straightforwardly, we see Aristotle making a claim about the endurance of virtue and the quality of a life oriented to it. Yes, cases such as Priam’s will arise and unsettle this possibility, but in the case of more ordinary misfortunes and change, the virtuous life abides. And this abiding quality is owing to the mutually reinforcing or constitutive relationship between virtue and happiness. The activities of excellence are manifest in the excellent person’s life in a way that constitutes and sustains the very attribution of excellence and happiness. In the second case in book 6, which deals specifically with practical wisdom, Aristotle makes a similar point, though one that seems more tightly connected to the logical or definitional implications of identifying something as a virtue. Virtues

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must be made manifest in practice in order to be the virtues that they are, whereas one could temporarily forget, or lose sight of, an acquisition of the intellect without the capacities or processes of the intellect necessarily being impugned. In these passages, Aristotle suggests that virtues are not— and by definition cannot be—forgotten in the way that other aspects of the reasoning soul can be forgotten. This supports his conceptions of practical wisdom and virtue as good bases for a stable life characterized by eudaimonia. So when we look to Aristotle’s direct mentions of forgetting, we see that the contextualizing concern is the steadfastness of the endeavors of virtue, in contrast from the lesser stability of systematic know-how (epistēmē) or faculties of reason unconnected with practice. A hallmark of virtue, then, is that it is not readily forgotten. But what of the place of forgetting within the processes of virtuous activity (rather than in terms of virtue itself)? This query comes closer to the emphases in my approach to ordinary oblivion. Specifically, in the cases of Plato, Euripides, and Zhuangzi, I have suggested that shifts and lapses in attention can make possible an unmooring of thought that bears transformative effects. How might these kinds of processes be considered within an Aristotelian conception of the deliberative processes of practical wisdom? Aristotle does not specifically mention or address how forgetfulness might bear on the deliberative process of phronēsis. But if one considers the account of practical wisdom offered in book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics, we can speculate as to how the ideas and emphases about forgetting that I have suggested might be engaged within his framework. I think a capacious reading of Aristotle’s conception of practical wisdom offers a plausible alternative for how one might account for the ways in which we “look away” in the course of deliberation. Yet it differs from the Platonic approach in ways that I think ultimately matter. Before identifying these ultimate differences, let’s consider briefly the potential of Aristotle’s conception of practical reason to speak to the aspects of forgetting that I have highlighted throughout. I think the best way to consider this potential is by way of the pliancy characterizing practical wisdom, a general characteristic that is made manifest through particular features and that has been especially emphasized in Nussbaum’s advancement of an Aristotelian trajectory in contemporary moral philosophy. My basic interpretive suggestion is that the shifting and unmooring movements of forgetting emphasized in my

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Platonic approach might be rendered in the Aristotelian view as pliant modes of attention constituting the deliberative processes of phronēsis. On this reading, the disruption and movement of attunement associated figuratively with forgetting might be transposed within Aristotle’s depiction of the pliant movement of practical wisdom. The central, overarching feature of his account, through which this kind of transposition might be imagined, is the emphasis placed on the particulars of a situation as constituting the locus of concern for practical wisdom. That is, the distinguishing feature of practical wisdom—in comparison to theoretical reason and scientific knowledge—is its attunement to the particularities making up the specific situation with which it is engaged. Practical wisdom is concerned with the contingent particularities of human experience rather than the universal and unchanging necessities of experience that are the domain of scientific knowledge and theoretical reason. In this respect, the account of practical wisdom in book 6 is one that emphasizes adaptive responsiveness. Phronēsis involves a fluid tacking back and forth between accepted starting points of consideration (the universals) and empirically derived discernment of the situation at hand (the particularities). In a literal sense, a moment of forgetting or distraction that arises in the course of deliberation could be regarded as just one of those particularities with which practical wisdom contends. More fruitfully and less literally, I think the picture of flexible vision and attention arising from Aristotle’s emphasis on the relationship between phronēsis and particularity suggests that nonfixated lines of sight onto the world are accorded special value. Looking away and beginning again within the processes of deliberation may be built in to his conception of practical wisdom—that is, they might be a way to characterize the flexibility of attunement constituting and distinguishing phronēsis. This overarching, central thread of pliant attunement is further supported by Aristotle’s consideration of the range of ways of “looking” that accompany and complement phronēsis. For example, his discussion of comprehension (synesis / σύνεσις [1142b35]) and cleverness (deinoteta / δεινότητα [1144a24]) suggest capacities of reason that are not identical with phronēsis but accompany and enhance its enactment. One can read book 6 as Aristotle’s attempt to describe and delineate the various textures of attunement that characterize the excellent apprehension of human circumstances needed for responses in praxis. Phronēsis on Aristotle’s view is adaptively responsive in ways that could

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potentially accommodate the kinds of qualities and dynamics I have associated with forgetting. This estimation of the Aristotelian model’s potential to encompass forgetting cogently is enhanced by its fluidity in one particularly significant way. This has to do with the ambiguities of agency and accountability surrounding forgetting. Specifically, is forgetting a chance occurrence (suntuxia) or happening in the soul, as suggested in the Phaedrus? Is it an instance of culpable failure? Is it an unavoidable fragility of the self for which we cannot reasonably be held accountable? In one respect, forgetting simply cannot be parsed neatly and definitively along these lines of questioning. Because we live within a contemporary scientific context of brain neuroscience, this much seems obvious. But despite their lack of a modern scientific context, the ancients also knew such discrete parsing was not possible or appropriate. Plato’s analogical discursive approaches in the Phaedrus represent one form of response to this impasse. Aristotle’s tack toward such complexity in the soul is different. One way of reading Aristotle, with Nussbaum representing the strongest elaboration of this interpretive trajectory, is that his account of practical reason is sufficiently capacious and nuanced to incorporate these queries and their enmeshed areas of examination. That is, forgetting construed under various guises—as a “happening” in the soul, as a moment of ethical weakness, as an illustration of internal contingency— can be accommodated and considered within the Aristotelian view, given its integrated approach to the rational and irrational dimensions of the soul and its consideration of misfortune within the virtuous life. The Aristotelian alternative is thus a cogent one in many regards and on balance may offer the more tenable, sustainable, and stabilizing way of navigating oblivion within a life. Yet it de-emphasizes aspects of the Platonic approach to forgetting in ways that crucially matter. Two aspects of forgetting in particular suggest differences between the Aristotelian and Platonic frameworks. First, though the Aristotelian approach may accommodate a textured and nuanced understanding of agency and the soul, ultimately its emphasis favors the mindful and the deliberative over the inchoate processes of unmooring in oblivion. In this sense, it is less able to speak to (and about) the cognitive and affective modes of the soul that oblivion involves, insofar as the account of practical wisdom suggests a sustained state of conscious awareness, with intentional attunement better

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characterizing its deliberative and decision-making processes. Even though a generous or judicious reading of Aristotle’s account allows for a potentially sophisticated rendering of practical wisdom’s contours and movements, it cannot sufficiently encompass the ways in which forgetting is a distinctly nondeliberative state. Part of how forgetting unsettles and unmoors one’s thoughts is that it involves a relinquishment of attention and an absenting of one’s own position in ways that strike me as difficult to trace within the deliberative model, even if one does not woodenly characterize the latter as made up of tangible, transparent stages of thought culminating in action. Forgetting involves a disruption and distancing from the self that is in tension with Aristotle’s picture of practical wisdom, even, in some senses, counterposed to it. More dramatic readings of madness and oblivion in Plato would create a starker contrast with Aristotle in this regard. But I think such dramatic readings do both figures a disser vice and make their writings less open to us as interpretive sources in a contemporary context. Even on my more “ordinary” interpretation of Plato, there is a marked difference in emphasis between the figures with regard to the place and function of alternate cognitive states of the embodied soul. Plato emphasizes the disruption of adapted states to unmoor the soul’s responses, whereas Aristotle emphasizes adaptive responsiveness to stabilize the soul’s responses and mitigate disruption. Aporetic moments may arise in the case of each figure’s texts—and within the life of the soul as they each conceive it—but how these arise and the ends toward which such aporetic moments are engaged are imagined differently. This general difference leads to a second one: Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom, given the ideal of adaptive responsiveness that it suggests, can encompass forgetting in a way such that forgetting becomes contextualized or woven into the broader deliberative process vis-à-vis the specific situation at issue. Again, even though I am less interested in dramatic cases of forgetting, I am still interested in preserving the sense that ordinary oblivion involves lacunae and lapses in a life that cannot be readily woven into its broader narrative contours. The gaps need to be allowed to stand, not just because this is part of their quality, but because distinctive forms of knowledge and perspective can be gained from such gaps. To close, bridge, or patch such gaps is to lose such sources of perspective, and this is what the model of deliberative practical wisdom entails. A third difference of emphasis merits considering: This difference involves Plato’s and Aristotle’s respective conceptions of the relationships

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through which the soul experiences and navigates oblivion or forms of disattention. There are two ways that we might consider and appreciate a comparison of how each figure construes the movement of reengagement after the disruptive effects of forgetting. Even if, at it seems, there are differences in their conceptions of what looking away involves and how far afield it takes the soul, a consideration of how the soul begins again in each remains illustrative. Indeed, how they each construe the processes of reengagement may indicate differences in the forms of looking away they allow for and condone. In the case of Aristotle, the first, perhaps most directly related, vantage point of consideration would be the concept of decision (prohairesis) within his account of virtue.54 That is, reengagement in his account can be understood in terms of the decision for a particular action that emerges from the deliberative processes of practical wisdom or as the manifest expression of the dispositions. Beginning again, after lapses of attention, is the seamless outflow of committed action characterizing excellence. A second, more oblique, vantage point for considering renewed and reformed engagement in Aristotle’s framework is his conception of friendship. In the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle suggests: “For us, wellbeing has reference to something other than ourselves, while, for the god, he is himself his own well-being” (1245b18–19). Friendship is a central way, for Aristotle, by which we have reference “to something other than ourselves” and on which our well-being depends. The context of the line from the Eudemian Ethics is indeed that of discussing friendship, and the idea is perhaps more famously captured in Aristotle’s inclusion in the Nicomachean Ethics of the characterization that “the friend is another self ” (1166a31). What Aristotle means by this is not precisely clear, and the text offers multiple ways in which the idea can be understood. One way it can be construed is that the virtuous friend can help one engender and sustain one’s own virtue throughout life, in the midst of the difficulties and distractions befalling the endeavor of excellence. The friend is one through whom you come to see how to begin again, and she helps stabilize and reinforce one’s efforts in such new beginnings. It may be vis-à-vis the friend of virtue that one comes to better understand what a correct decision consists in. The friend of virtue may support one’s ability to sustain the manifestation of correct decisions over the course of a life. Alongside this view of Aristotle, I want to suggest that in the Phaedrus we get a different set of vantage points, which speak to important differences between these figures. Specifically, in Plato’s picture reengagement

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after the unmooring of the self is imagined as transpiring vis-à-vis particular kinds of discursive encounters in which erotic love, rather than friendship, is the central relationship. We see this, more literally, in the depiction of the Phaedrus-Socrates encounter and in their speeches’ depiction of the lover-beloved relationship. But, more speculatively, I have suggested that the dialogue speaks to reimagined engagements on the part of the reader with the text. It evokes an orientation to beginning again in which particular written forms and erotically conceived figures are what draw the soul back after it has looked away. Forms of writing are the “something other than ourselves” to which our well-being must make reference. It is not simply cliché to note that Plato and not Aristotle is the literary artist with regard to the character of their written texts. Written form is imparted the task of seeing in Plato in a way that is just different from the case of Aristotle. Aristotle’s conceptions of practical wisdom and friendship come closer to the visible, abiding rafters of structure in Ryan’s poem, and his texts reflect this emphasis in their makeup and tenor. Plato’s conceptions of modes of thought “that may be more or less than reason” (to borrow Charles Long’s locution) and erotic love come closer to the tenuous ghost ribs of structure in Ryan’s poem, and his texts reflect this emphasis in their makeup and tenor.55 When regarded from these various vantage points, we see that Aristotle and Plato may each be able to attend to a common human phenomenon, but they do so with very different emphases, offering very different insights and expressing different necessary truths about human fragility. There are certainly points of opacity within each alternative. My aim has been to suggest that where Aristotle is less poised to see and let stand the ordinary oblivions of a life as a source of perspective, Plato offers a compelling alternative. Plato’s may be the more tenuous picture, full of risks that compromise its practical immediacy, but this tenuousness is, in an elemental way, in keeping with the chance absences characteristic of ordinary oblivion. Plato leaves undomesticated a dimension of human personhood that Aristotle sought to tame within the virtuous life. The unruly features of the Phaedrus documented in chapters 1 through 3 are emblematic of this lack of domestication. Plato may not encompass phenomena of oblivion with the abandon and starkness seen in the case of Euripides in The Bacchae or with the potent incisiveness and radical upending seen in the Zhuangzi. But, contra Williams, he did glimpse and give expression to the possibility that human reason might not, when prop-

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erly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations. In the wake of the disruption and dissolution of these patterns he made instead off-kilter texts. He knew not to trust their structure, knew where too few rafters bear too much roof, and knew where to add ghost ribs in anticipation of his leaving.

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Epilogue Poetics as First Philosophy And the helpless philosophers say still helpful things. Plato, the reddened flower, the erotic bird. —Wallace Stevens, “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas,” The Collected Poems

Kay Ryan’s poem “Post Construction” is surely an oblique meditation on Emily Dickinson’s rendering of the house built by poetry, a rendering that partially expresses the point of written form I have identified with Plato. The Props assist the House Until the House is built And then the Props withdraw And adequate, erect, The House support itself And cease to recollect The Augur and the Carpenter Just such a retrospect Hath the perfected Life A Past of Plank and Nail And slowness - then the scaffolds drop Affirming it a Soul —Emily Dickinson (729/J1142)1

Dickinson’s poem evokes the relationship I have identified in Plato between written form and the manifestation of the soul. It is through “A Past of Plank and Nail / And slowness”—in which such construction

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involves “props” and “scaffolds” of written form—that a soul is affirmed or, recalling Theodore Roethke’s locution, that a self becomes a soul. Dickinson’s poem also helps us see the ways in which the house that Plato built differs from the one depicted by Dickinson. By considering this difference, we can see how Plato’s innovations with written form are not as radical as either those seen in Kay Ryan’s homage to Dickinson or within Zhuangzi’s approach to language and the ghost ribs of discourse. Some trajectories elaborated from the Platonic corpus would regard the Dickinson poem as enjoying a closer fit with Plato than I do in terms of the conception of the soul it offers. Specifically, “the perfected Life” in which “retrospect” is one of “ceas[ing] to recollect / The Augur and the Carpenter” is a characterization of the soul that some would take as congruous with the Platonic ideal of becoming godlike. The perfected soul from which all scaffolding has dropped, which is able to forget the work and tools responsible for its making and which can “support itself” may accord with many interpretive approaches to Plato that have emphasized a perceived otherworldly, rarefied conception of the soul’s highest state. Neoplatonic and Christian interpretive elaborations of Plato’s texts would especially see resonance between Dickinson’s language of perfection and Plato’s ideal of godlikeness. (Obviously, Dickinson is writing the poem informed by her own interpretation— and disruptions of—the Christian context in which she found herself.)2 As the preceding chapters have indicated, I do not regard the language of “perfection” to accord with the view of the soul expressed by Plato. There is no final, completed stage of building the soul through the engagement with the props of written form, from which such external scaffolding can be wholly dropped and the work of “The Augur and the Carpenter” forgotten. Indeed, such forgetting of the place and significance of written form in a life seems to be what Plato is most concerned to frustrate. Although, like Dickinson’s, his view is one in which “A Past of Plank and Nail / And slowness,” in particular forms and methods of writing, are how the soul is made manifest and affirmed, he does not share the picture of potential perfectibility expressed by Dickinson. Rather, as the preceding chapters have suggested and illustrated, the constitutive relationship between the soul and particular written forms is ongoing, admitting of and requiring variegated methods of engagement. Particular props and scaffolds may build the soul to a certain point, but they are never fully relinquished or unnecessary. If they drop away, such withdrawal is temporary and never permanent. It is in

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this regard that we can view the itinerant character of Socrates: He knows that he has not forgotten himself and that he yet doesn’t fully know himself. If he enjoys moments in which he is “adequate, erect,” supporting himself, these are always accompanied by his reengagement with discourse and interlocutors. He, in effect, always remembers and returns to “The Augur and the Carpenter” and the “Plank and Nail / And slowness” of deliberative, discursive engagement with others. And yet the concluding dash of Dickinson’s poem (“Affirming it a Soul - ) may be meant to convey something similar, that the soul affirmed by past poetic engagement is always already on its way to interruption, disruption, and a next relationship with the props and scaffolds of poetic form. If Plato (and, on one reading of the poem’s final line, Dickinson) resists and unsettles a conception of the soul’s perfectibility as (possibly) expressed in the poem, this is not to say that he goes as far as either Zhuangzi or Kay Ryan with respect to the relationship between language and knowledge imagined in these more radical figures. In the case of Ryan’s homage to Dickinson, as seen in the conclusion, the structure referred to in her poem “still . . . may stand, proof / against craft” not because it is “adequate, erect” and able to “support itself ” but because it is “strong as though / ghost ribs / had been added / after one left.” Ryan has, quite literally, taken apart Dickinson’s imagined construction of “The House” and rebuilt it within a more—to use her own term—“off kilter” orientation to language, meaning, and notions of completion.3 Ryan suggests a poetics in which the props of poetic form are not so much external scaffolds that eventually drop away from a stand-alone soul as they are internal, ghostlike ribs of support constituting the poem (and, perhaps, the person) with off-kilter strength. In his method and play with the dialogue form, as illustrated in the preceding chapters, I take Plato to fall between Dickinson and Ryan. He shares Dickinson’s strong view of the relationship between building through written linguistic structures and the manifestation of the soul, without sharing her gesture toward the soul’s perfection (though, to repeat, the poem’s final dash may be read as undoing this gesture toward perfection in the poem). He shares Ryan’s sense of the play and meaning and purpose in mistrusting the structures of language and improvising with those structures in ways that speak to what we are actually like as human beings. Yet he does not go as far as Ryan, not simply in terms of style and genre, but in the ideas expressed through their respective forms of writing about the nature of language.

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The fish trap story about “forgotten words” from the Zhuangzi discussed previously can bring these points into special focus.4 This passage from the Zhuangzi conveys both Ryan’s sense that the structures of language can never be wholly left behind (at least in poetry) and Dickinson’s suggestion of the place from which one may “cease to recollect / The Augur and the Carpenter” of discursive form. It may not be too much to suggest that Zhuangzi’s story of the fish trap is one way to gloss Dickinson’s poem, with regard to her poem’s inclusion of the forgetting of language made possible by an ideal state of apprehension and its closing dash that suggests that the dropping away of the scaffolds of words is always only temporary. I suggest that Zhuangzi presents a “radical” view of the relationship between language and self precisely because—within a single, compressed writing, as exemplified here by the fish trap story—he both depicts an ideal state in which words can be forgotten and performs how such forgetting must always include a return to, a remembrance of, the world of words. Although Dickinson’s poem may include both gestures tenuously (if one accepts a strong reading of the poem’s concluding dash), Zhuangzi more fully inhabits and relishes the dynamic created across these counterpoised gestures of “forgetting words” and reengaging words amid this cessation of recollection. I am suggesting, in effect, that Plato keeps company with these figures, though without including a view of perfection as robustly as Dickinson’s poem may allow, and without developing and sustaining an off-kilter view of written form as radically or imaginatively as Ryan and Zhuangzi present. I include Dickinson, Ryan, and Zhuangzi as illustrations because the emphases struck in their respective works highlight the features of Plato I have been most interested to attend to, drawing them to a reinvigorated interpretive view. The relationship Plato creates between the props and scaffolds of written form and the manifestation of the soul falls somewhere between (or among) these other figures. It is a relationship that is forged most vibrantly in the Phaedrus but also seen in other Platonic texts. My aim has been simply to elaborate this thread within Plato, to create and hold an interpretive space for this dimension of his philosophy. We see a germinal possibility that remains unresolved and left underdetermined in his writings. I characterize the relationship made between writing and the soul in the Phaedrus as an anticipatory philosophical position, one we are left to elaborate on within the context of Plato’s corpus and our own contemporary questions. Plato is the rich

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source that he is because he leaves the reader poised within his anticipatory position regarding the possibilities for written philosophy. This anticipatory aspect of Plato’s ideas and texts constitutes the very strength and continued vitality of his body of work, even as it is perhaps the very thing that interpretive responses to him have most occluded from view. I want to call this anticipatory position “poetics as first philosophy.” I am, of course, playing on Aristotle’s identification of metaphysics as first philosophy and Emmanuel Levinas’s later prioritization of ethics as first philosophy.5 Plato, unlike his student (Aristotle) and later elaborator (Levinas), suggests instead that poetics is first philosophy. I do not mean that Plato posited a technical, encompassing theory of poetic structure that informed or grounded the metaphysical, conceptual, and ethical elements of his thought. Ultimately, Plato did not construct and communicate his conception of philosophy through poetry. Indeed, on Diogenes’ account, he relinquished his forays into poetry, burning his own poems after encountering Socrates and deciding to become one of his students. And, of course, I am taking liberties with the term “poetics,” given the constellation of issues and meanings that surround it in Plato’s historical context, which diverge in some ways from ours.6 I use the phrase simply as a suggestive term of art, to identify what I take to be the elemental, founding feature of Plato’s forging of philosophy: The recognition that engaging the figurative possibilities of written form is the basis for—the creating condition of—knowledge of the self and the world of others of which it is a part. Without “A Past of Plank and Nail” and “The Augur and the Carpenter” of built written form there is no disclosure of the self, no “Affirming it a Soul.” In this sense, poetics and philosophy are enmeshed for Plato. Reckoning with the character and place of written form in the discernment of truth is an originary, not secondary, philosophic practice. It is only from this reckoning that metaphysics (figuratively construed) and ethics (actually lived) become possible. Or, more specifically, metaphysics and ethics become possible to explore in ways appropriate to the kind of beings that we are, shorn of the delusions, errors, and fantasies of completion or certainty often accompanying them. Plato saw that given the nature of human beings— a nature I have characterized in terms of the ordinary oblivions that constitute us—philosophy would require forms of looking congruous with that nature, thereby differentiating human philosophic practice from the gazing of the gods. His texts stand as a first attempt at building these forms

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of philosophic looking through written form. It is only once (and as) these forms of looking are made that questions about the nature of the world and how we should regard others can be rightly seen. For such apprehension, informed now by a Platonic orientation to the methods of looking, we are now poised.

Notes

Introduction. Replete and Porous: Reading the Phaedrus and Writing the Soul 1. In the phrase used as the epigraph, “Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?” (Theodore Roethke, On Poetry and Craft [Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2001], 3), Roethke may well be drawing on Keats’s idea of soul making, wherein an intelligence becomes a soul through the processes of suffering. Roethke both builds on this poetic history and departs from it: Exuberant engagement with the material world— not primarily suffering—is the locale of soul-making for Roethke. 2. Plato, Republic 588b (εἰκονα πλάσαντες τῆς ψυχῆς λόγῳ). Unless otherwise indicated, translations from Plato’s texts are my own. In the case of the Phaedrus—the predominant text of this book—my translations are based on Burnet’s Oxford text, Platonis Opera: Volume II, ed. John Burnet. Oxford University Press, 1901. I have also consulted Harvey Yunis’s 2011 edition of the dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For those people new to the dialogue who need to read it in translation, I recommend working across at least two versions, in particular, setting the translation by Christopher Rowe (New York: Penguin Books, 2005) or Stephen Scully (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Philosophical Library, 2003) next to that by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), using the indispensable notes from the Yunis edition throughout. 3. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 188. Throughout I identify

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Dickinson’s poems first by the number in the Franklin edition of her collected poetry, followed by the number within the Johnson edition (indicated with a “J”). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Back Bay Books, 1951). 4. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. F. J. Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward, 1944), book X, viii, 174. Italics added; however, the brackets are as in the source. 5. See, e.g., David Eagleman’s incorporation of Augustine’s words “I cannot grasp all that I am” in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 55. 6. Ibid. 7. I examine this textual feature of the Phaedrus more fully in chapter 3. 8. For a general overview of the philosophic history of forgetting, see Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, trans. Steven Rendall (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). For a classic treatment in religious studies see Mircea Eliade, “Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting,” History of Religions 2, no. 2 (1963): 329–44. 9. Freud’s examination of forgetting in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life signals, in one sense, the “ordinary” direction of oblivion I am taking, though it signals in another sense the “pathologic” direction that I am departing from. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. Alan Tyson and ed. James Strachey (1901; New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 9–61. 10. For recent work in this vein see the phenomenological approach taken by Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For studies that deal more specifically with Nietzsche’s influence on ideas of memory and forgetting see David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), and Petar Ramadavonic, Forgetting Futures: On Meaning, Trauma, and Identity (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001). 11. See in particular Nietzsche’s examination of self-forgetting and history in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59–123. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 51. 13. Though my understanding of memory differs from hers, Lynda Sexson’s Ordinarily Sacred (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) is another example of the attempt to locate the religious within unexceptionable features of ordinary life. For a remarkable account of how traumatic oblivion manifests in ordinary, unsuspecting ways that unsettle many

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common conceptions of the experience and stakes of remembrance and forgetting see Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave (New York: Knopf, 2013). 14. Although this volume has a very specific focus on the implications of ordinary oblivion for an understanding of human personhood, subsequent writing of mine will consider the extraordinary and larger-scale implications of oblivion. In that case, I return to consider in more depth how a figure like Nietzsche does (and does not) inform my sense of the intersections between individual and communal oblivion. 15. That is, I purposively shift away from some of the scholarly apparatus that has been built around the other interpretive trajectories of forgetting just mentioned because I take them to be insufficient for encompassing the features of the self I am most keen to understand. In this regard, my approach— interpretively and presentationally—is deeply informed by the Phaedrus and Plato’s interweaving of philosophic point and presentational strategy, a feature of his thought that the entirety of this book will examine and illustrate. 16. The phrase “false fi xity” can be seen in the work of Lee H. Yearley. Yearley uses the term to refer to the fallacy of mistakenly seeing contingent features of the self as part of the nature of things, drawing on its psychoanalytic connections with fi xation. See, in particular, “Selves, Virtues, Odd Genres, and Alien Guides: An Approach to Religious Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 25, no. 3 (1998): 127–55. 17. Within the Phaedrus, see, e.g., 256a– e and in the Republic 443–45. 18. As discussed later in this introduction, incongruities among depictions of the soul across (and within) Plato’s texts have been one reason questions about the unity of his thought have persisted. The Phaedrus has often been accorded a distinctive place within Plato’s writing for, among other reasons, its humanely capacious renderings of the impassioned soul. See, in particular, Martha Nussbaum’s reading of the dialogue in comparison to the rest of Plato’s corpus (chapter 7 in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986]), a reading I return to discuss later in this introduction. 19. For a lucid study of how this poem can be considered to frame Dickinson’s poetics, see Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). 20. In focusing on the relationship between Plato’s written forms or discursive strategies and the shaping of the soul, my study joins a growing interest in recent Platonic scholarship to the philosophic significance of the structural and presentational dimensions of Plato’s texts that fall outside of technical argument and prose. For studies of Plato’s written form that focus on his use of, and innovations with, genres in the ancient Greek context see, e.g., Andrea Nightingale,

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Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construction of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Kathryn Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). For analysis of the Phaedrus in particular, with respect to its incorporation of, and innovation with, extant genres and rhetorical devices see Harvey Yunis’s Introduction to his edition of the Greek-language Phaedrus, 18–22. For examinations of how the Socratic dialogue can be understood in its historical, cultural context as a form of literarily crafted philosophy see Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Diskin Clay, Platonic Questions: Dialogues with the Silent Philosopher (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). For a study of the development of written texts in the ancient Greek context see Harvey Yunis, ed., Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), in particular chapter 9 by Yunis, “Writing for Reading: Thucydides, Plato, and the Emergence of the Critical Reader.” For a more general study of the orality-literary shift, with reference to the ancient Greek context, see Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 21. Plato, Phaedrus 246a. 22. For a masterly, vibrant study of Plato’s transposition and reimagining of the tropes and practices of cultic worship to express philosophic gazing/ theorizing see Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 23. The classic treatment of this multivalent term is Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); see especially pages 95–117. The scholarly discussion that has arisen around Derrida’s essay is one from which I am shifting away, at least in terms of presentational and illustrative choices made throughout the present book. I take Plato’s texts to offer sufficient grounding within their own terms for many of the elaborations that Derrida unfolds through his own theoretical trajectory and language. With him, as with Heidegger’s reading of the Republic (see, e.g., “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill and trans. Thomas Sheehan [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]) the lacunae or philosophical blind spots they identify in Plato and then seek to excavate or remedy I think can be addressed (if not resolved) from the Platonic sources themselves, without recourse to the additional theoretical frameworks they build

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around him. If I have made recourse to sources outside of Plato, I have chosen to do so primarily via poetics, as I take this approach to be most congruous with the ideas advanced in his writing, both through their content and their form. For a related shift away from the interpretive apparatus stemming from Derrida see Harry Berger, “Phaedrus and the Politics of Inscription,” in Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 415–54. 24. Note 20 addresses studies of the interrelation between discursive form and philosophic argument in Plato more generally. For examinations of the Phaedrus in particular on this issue, see Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue, chap. 4, and Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, chap. 7. Especially relevant are two examples of writing that engage the Phaedrus, and, in order to do so, attempt to evince the dialogue’s enmeshment of form and content through their own choices about presentational form to express this engagement: Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Martha Nussbaum, “Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 314–34. For another engagement with the Phaedrus that evinces my orientation to the relationship between expressing Plato’s ideas and choice of presentational form see Norman O. Brown, “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,” in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 1–7. 25. I am thus not pursuing here a technical study of the image within Plato’s epistemology, at least as that kind of focus has most often been construed within Platonic scholarship. The status of images within Plato’s philosophy is complex, given that their disparagement is accompanied, often simultaneously, by his innovative use of them to express philosophic content. In the case of the phrase from the Republic from which I poise my interpretation of the Phaedrus, “image” translates εἰκών. In the case of the Phaedrus, it translates εἴδωλον, as will be discussed momentarily. For a more technical discussion of how Plato’s epistemological position on images begins to shift in Phaedrus and Timaeus see Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth, 162–80. 26. Plato, Phaedrus 276a. The Greek ἔμψυχον (empsūchon) shows literally and visibly the innovation Plato is seeking to effect in the relationship between idealized logos, the written word, and the self. “Image” or “phantom” translates εἴδωλον. 27. In the Greek the language is that of “dividing/separating” (διαιρέσεων) and “bringing together” (συναγωγῶν); Plato identifies those skilled in these processes as “dialecticians” (διαλεκτικούς). For an overview of this passage

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in the Phaedrus and a discussion of how it has been overinterpreted as a link between Plato and a technical understanding of dialectic see Charles Griswold, “Reflections on ‘Dialectic’ in Plato and Hegel,” International Philosophical Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1982): 115–30. 28. That is, I am proposing an alternate reading of the relationship between forgetting and remembering than is cast within what is often called Plato’s “theory of recollection” in which the presence of knowledge in the philosophic soul comes by way of the return of memory, via a recollection of things previously apprehended by the intellective capacities of the soul. I take the relationship, as evidenced in the Phaedrus, to be more indeterminate than theories in this vein have allowed, and I read the recurring trope of recollection within Plato primarily in analogical, figurative terms rather than strictly epistemological ones. For a helpful overview of recollection in Plato—if with a much different emphasis than my examination—see Dominic Scott, “Platonic Recollection,” in Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93–124. 29. For the definitive examination of this modern development see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). For an examination of the concept of “self” more specific to the ancient Greek context see Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 30. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), and Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 31. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 200. 32. Ibid., 202. 33. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. 34. Ibid., 42. 35. For examples of texts engaging the current interest in vulnerability see Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Press, 2004); and Jonathan Schofer, Confronting Vulnerability: The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). The pivotal contemporary text on fragility has been Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness. 36. Again, in Love’s Knowledge, “Love and the Individual” (321) is an example of Nussbaum’s attempt to inhabit, exhibit, and create “a non-controlling art of writing” in a manner true to the Phaedrus. 37. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 375.

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38. For a general discussion of this textual feature in Plato see T. M. Robinson, Plato’s Psychology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 3–20. 39. For a cogent, imaginative reexamination of the conception of truth within Plato that characterizes his perspective in the terms of pluralism and for which the varied discursive aspects of his texts are essential, see Jeremy Barris, The Crane’s Walk: Plato, Pluralism, and the Inconstancy of Truth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 40. For a discussion of Platonic elements in the religious thought of James and others see William Clebsch, American Religious Thought: A History (1973; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 41. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 518.

1. The Teeming Body: Making Images of the Soul through Words 1. To recall, the line in the Phaedrus presenting this analogy (264c) uses the term ζῷον which can be translated as “living being,” “living creature,” or “living animal.” All translations of the Greek text are my own unless otherwise indicated, drawing upon the Burnet edition of the Phaedrus. 2. By “major speech” I refer to Phaedrus 244a–257, also conventionally referred to as “the palinode,” the reasons for which I discuss. 3. In addition to this general feature of commentaries on Platonic texts, those on the Phaedrus in particular are often structured around the issue of how to connect what have been perceived as two “halves” of the dialogue: a first half that includes the speeches about eros and a second half that includes the discussion of speech writing and written form. I have set aside the “two halves” interpretive framing of the dialogue for the most part, regarding it as incongruous with the organically structured, yet still unruly, whole of the text. Examples of recent commentaries that explain the coherence of the text in terms of a nonsimple, if unifying, complementarity between its major parts include Charles Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), and G. R. F. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 4. Some have criticized the Platonic view associated with this image of flight, owing to a perceived idealization of escaping from the human world and finding refuge in a realm beyond it. See, e.g., Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), chap. 3. Martha Nussbaum offers a more complex reading of the text than Annas does, but ultimately she also regards Plato as incongruous with—and

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insufficient for— a contemporary ethical context, given the flight from humanity she takes to be condoned, on balance, by Plato. See The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chap. 15. 5. For my initial discussion of ensouled logos and writing as its image or phantom see the introduction. 6. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). Explanatory material in brackets has been added. 7. See Andrea Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 154. Nightingale discusses this issue in terms of “alien” and “authentic” discourse and Plato’s pointed complication of expected “active” and “passive” roles in erotic relations and philosophic, discursive exchange. On the issue of receptivity in homoerotic relations in the ancient Greek context see David Halperin, “Plato and Erotic Reciprocity,” Classical Antiquity 5 (1986): 60–80. Thank you to Louis Ruprecht for drawing my attention to the potentially starker dimensions of the play and power at work in the Phaedrus-Socrates, beloved-lover dynamic, which I address at greater length in chapter 2. See Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Symposia: Plato, the Erotic, and Moral Value (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), for a fine, textured consideration of the complexities involved in evaluating the figure of Socrates and his various stances vis-à-vis erotic love (and erotically philosophical partners). His whole study is keenly relevant, though see 89–93 on this issue in particular. 8. See Plato, Phaedrus 230c and 259a. I have not spent much time here with the landscape and scenery of the encounter between Phaedrus and Socrates, about which much could be said, especially with respect to the organic and vegetative dimensions of the word-images of the soul. For discussion of this feature of the text, and, in par ticu lar the contrast emphasized between the city and the “non-polis” setting of the dialogue see Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, 2–25. 9. Plato, Phaedrus 259b. Again, the Greek locution is tied to the language of forgetting and escaping notice: καὶ ἔλαθον τελευτήσαντες. 10. For a discussion of the Typhon and how its voices “conspire” in ways illustrative of the soul’s plurivocality see Nightingale, Genres, 172–73. 11. Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Apostolos Athanassakis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), lines 823–35. 12. For historically situated analyses of the generic conventions adopted (and elaborated on) by Socrates in the palinode see Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18–25, and Nightingale, Genres, 138– 62.

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13. Plato, Republic 435c. 14. The language of organic hybridity reflects the actual content and figurative dimensions of the imagery more accurately than the long-established convention of speaking in terms of the “parts of the soul.” The actual language of “parts” appears rarely in the Platonic corpus, and the Phaedrus suggests a quite different, less mechanistic conceptualization of the soul’s multidimensionality. For example, in Rowe’s translation of the Phaedrus he notes at one point in the palinode that, for the purposes of translation, he has had to import the word “part” to complete the phrase “best part of the soul” because, in the Greek, there is no such specification. See Phaedrus, trans. Rowe, 80n106. For a discussion of the complexities (and misguided attempts) in determining any kind of precise picture of the soul in Plato see T. M. Robinson, Plato’s Psychology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 39, 119–31. 15. Some translations (e.g., those by Hackforth and Yunis) emphasize that both the pair of horses and the charioteer are winged, given Socrates’ explicit statement at 251b7 that the entire soul is winged. Other translations (e.g., those by Rowe and Nehamas and Woodruff ) translate the descriptor as applying to the pair of horses in particular. Given the indeterminate character of the text, both are interpretive possibilities. 16. See, e.g., Julia Annas, “Humans and Beasts: Moral Theory and Moral Psychology,” in Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 117–36. 17. On the issue of human-animal comparison in the ancient Greek world see Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). Sorabji notes Plato’s changing conception, across his texts, of the extent to which animals participated in reason or the mental processes involved in belief (see pages 10–11 in particular). 18. Again, for discussion of the complexity of the human-animal comparison in Plato’s cultural and philosophical context see Sorabji, Animal Minds. There were identified resonances across human-animal species in the ancient Greek context, rather than simple, outright differentiations in which everything animal was wholly “bad” or “other” vis-à-vis the human. 19. By myth “proper” I refer to the shift at this point in his speech into a more explicit narrative of god and non-god souls journeying in heaven, a shift marked by an intensification of style in Plato’s writing. On this stylistic shift see Yunis, Phaedrus, 140. 20. The translation of the description of this kind of knowledge strains all possibilities, and so I have settled on a paraphrase of what I take the phrase to point to. More literal translations include, e.g., Rowe: “that which is in what

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really is and which is really knowledge” (28), and Yunis, “the knowledge that is real in the circumstance of what is truly Being” (142). 21. This phrase is taken from Rowe’s translation as I think it best captures Socrates’ description— and Plato’s choice of language. 22. The myth’s inclusion of the language and conceptual trope of forgetting draws on connections in the ancient Greek context between forgetting as “concealment” (λήθη) and truth as “unconcealment” (ἀ-λήθεια). For discussion of this point in the text see Yunis, Phaedrus. 144. Momentarily I return to discuss the relationships posited figuratively in the myth between “sighting” “sites” of truth and forgetfulness in the soul. 23. On Socrates’ picture of metempsychosis and its connections to Empedocles, the Orphics, and the Pythagoreans see Yunis, Phaedrus,143, and Michael Morgan, Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth Century Athens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 171–87. 24. The idea and Greek phrasing here strain in the translation; in this case I am borrowing closely from Yunis’s rendition of the line: “For to the extent that he can, [the philosopher] is through memory always in close proximity to those things whose close proximity to a god makes him a god” (147). In Rowe: “For so far as it can, it is close, through memory, to those things his closeness to which gives a god his divinity” (30). The difference in pronoun choice is because in the Greek it is specifically “the intelligence/ mind of the philosopher” (ἡ τοῦ φιλοσόφου διάνοια), which some interpret to stand for “soul” (e.g., Yunis) and some prefer to keep distinct from soul in the translation (e.g., Rowe). 25. I borrow Yunis’s suggested translation of “perfect/initiated” in order to make clear the context of the language being used here but also to indicate that the point is not so much that the soul becomes perfect per se; rather it is that it is initiated into the highest rites of knowledge. On Plato’s incorporation of Eleusinian cultic imagery, language, and initiatory conceptualization see Yunis, Phaedrus, 150 and Morgan, Platonic Piety, 171–72. 26. Robert Creeley, Echoes (New York: New Directions, 1989), 15. 27. On Plato’s appropriation and reinvention of religiocultural praxis in his development of philosophy see Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Nightingale gives par ticu lar attention to Plato’s transposition of the cultic rites of beholding sacred statues or images (agalmata) to the apprehension of sites of truth in philosophic practice. For a more general overview of Plato’s incorporation of religiocultural themes, references, and terminology see Morgan, Platonic Piety. Yunis’s commentary on the text is also especially helpful in parsing the references to mystery religions used and recast here in the realm of philosophic attainment.

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28. See Nightingale, Spectacles, chap. 1 for a discussion of theoria as a cultural practice prior to Plato, and chaps. 2–4 for Plato’s reimagining of extant praxis within the aims specific to his construction of a distinctive form of philosophy. See in particular pages 107–13 for Nightingale’s discussion of the scholarly debate around the “seeing/sight” metaphor in Plato in terms of whether it is mere literary adornment or bears deeper philosophic significance. 29. On the Platonic ideal of becoming like god see David Sedley, “The Ideal of Godlikeness,” in Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 309–28. 30. Again, see Nightingale, Spectacles, chap. 2, for an introductory overview of the general issue within Plato’s texts; for discussion specific to the Phaedrus, see 157– 68. 31. For other textual bases of the ideal of “becoming like god” (homoiōsis theiōi) see also Theaetetus 176b, discussed and emphasized by Sedley, “Ideal of Godlikeness, 311–15. Sedley and Nightingale both examine Timaeus 90a– d; for extensive discussion of the ideal in the Republic see Nightingale, Spectacles, chap. 3. 32. For a discussion of the distinctiveness of the Phaedrus in this regard, in comparison to the Republic, see Nightingale, Spectacles, 157– 68. (Although the Symposium opens up this possibility of the regarding the beautiful beloved as like an agalma in his evocation of more abiding beauty, the elaboration in the Phaedrus is distinctively more robust.) 33. Chapter 2 examines stylistic and structural features of the development across Socrates’ speeches in order to further elaborate this reading. Chapter 3 deals specifically with the relationship between forgetting and recollection, given the centrality of this relationship to conceptions of the ideal of godlikeness (wherein a triumph of memory is imagined) and thus to my claim that the ideal may, in fact, be understood quite differently. On the reading of the text that I am setting forth, just as we are not meant to become gods, wherein our humanity would become expunged without remainder, so too with memory. We are not to strive for its perfection, for a state in which the fragility of forgetting has been expunged from a life. We are, rather, to reckon with the ways in which the mixed dynamics of recollection and oblivion in a life are irresolvable and inexhaustible. Chapter 3 also revisits the ideal of godlikeness and considers whether and how any kind of transcendence is entailed within the Phaedrus. 34. The line refers to the most physical dimensions of the contestation between receptivity and activation given its connotations of anal intercourse the issue of who is receiving whom in the act. See Yunis, Phaedrus, 151. This continues and strengthens the subtext throughout with regard to

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the Phaedrus-Socrates relationship and the sexualized power dynamics therein. 35. For a discussion of Plato’s borrowing of this epistemological notion from Empedocles see Yunis, Phaedrus, 153. 36. See also Anne Carson’s essay “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 137–48. Carson examines gendered aspects of wetness and other such physical details, to be borne in mind with their appearance this passage. 37. For an excellent detailing of the potential Sapphic source of the physicalized erotic response see Yunis, Phaedrus, 152. Yunis suggests that the shift to infantile imagery may heighten, through juxtaposition, the prior description that readers at the time would have readily identified with Sappho. 38. On the gendered aspects of wetness, ripeness, and wantonness in the ancient Greek context see Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place.” 39. That is, in the technical, grammatical sense the syntax comes to refer to, and agree with, the feminine, singular soul rather than the singular masculine subject. See, for example, the use of πᾶσα at 251b6 (πᾶσα γὰρ ἦν τὸ πάλαι πτερωτή). 40. In this regard, my reading can be related to how some have interpreted the figure of the χώρα (chora) in the Timaeus. See, e.g., John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Sallis’s work is, in part, a response to Derrida’s essay “Khora,” available in the collection On the Name, trans. David Wood, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 41. See Morgan, Platonic Piety, 172. 42. Chapter 3 will discuss his claims to “have forgotten” his place amid the argument, a kind of distancing effect within the dialogue. Such moments are counterposed with others, in which he explicitly places himself within the content that he is describing. The best example of this textual feature can be seen at 250c– d, where he appears to credit personal memory and prior experience as the source of his mythic account of love. 43. Plato, Phaedrus 253d–257.

2. The Fluid Body: Madness and Displaced Discourse 1. For discussion of these associations in the language of the text see Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 90. Yunis also provides a helpful overview of the scholarly debate surround-

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ing the question of whether and how Phaedrus and Socrates are meant to model the beloved-lover roles (erōmenos / erastēs) of the time period, with Phaedrus enacting the part of the potential beloved and Socrates as the potential lover (7–10). Yunis’s treatment of this issue is compelling; he suggests that it is more sound (textually, historically, and philosophically) to regard Phaedrus as a potential lover—that is, it is not so much that he is being courted (or manipulated) by Socrates as a potential beloved but rather that he is being trained by Socrates in the art of love for truth, that is, to become a good lover of wisdom. The indeterminacy of Phaedrus’s position with respect to the beloved/lover model is important because it keeps a reader on her toes in terms of assessing the dynamic between Phaedrus and Socrates, a dynamic reflecting her own position vis-à-vis the text as a receptive partner to its strategies or as an active participant in its processes. Both positions are required. 2. For discussion of the “intensifying ridicule” in this section of the text see Yunis, Phaedrus, 171–73. 3. By way of contrast, Socrates inscribes his palinode to (and with) memory when he attributes the genesis of his speech to memory (250c6). This figurative inscription acknowledges the impermanence of self-knowledge, given that memory is neither perfectible nor wholly abiding, as discussed in chapter 3. 4. See, e.g., G. R. F. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 59– 67. 5. Charles Griswold’s study Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), tends toward this approach in discerning unity across the dialogue. 6. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 121. 7. Charles Long, “The University, the Liberal Arts, and the Teaching and Study of Religion,” in Beyond the Classics? ed. Sheryl Burkhalter and Frank Reynolds (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 34. 8. See Phaedrus 264b– e for a discussion of the seemingly random order of Lysias’s speech. 9. For purposes of clarity, I consider Socrates to have made two speeches, first, his version of the Lysian position, and, second, his response to Lysias in the palinode. Some commentators refer to Socrates’ whole oration as one speech. Here, in my analysis, I refer to Socrates’ “first” and “second” speeches. (Keep in mind that there are, in fact, three speeches in this early section of the dialogue: Phaedrus’s retelling of Lysias’s speech, plus Socrates’ two speeches.) 10. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), with the minor substitution of “young man” for “lad.”

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11. Hereafter I use the term “nonlover” (following common practice in scholarship on Plato) to identify the man who takes the position of the lover in the lover-beloved (erastēs-erōmenos) model of homoerotic relationships in Plato’s context, but does so without being in love with the beloved. I add the descriptor “pretending” when needed to differentiate between Phaedrus’s portrayal of the nonlover and Socrates’ version, in which the nonlover position is actually a pose. 12. Because Dickinson’s poems are untitled, I include poem number references for both the Franklin edition of Dickinson’s poem and the Johnson edition. 13. Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 14. Ibid., 269–75. Wollheim is elaborating on Freud’s introduction of these terms in the essay “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” For present purposes it will be sufficient to consider Wollheim’s elaboration apart from the history of these terms within Freud’s work. 15. Wollheim, Thread of Life, 270. 16. Ibid. 17. Melanie Klein coins the term and concept in 1946 in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 27 (1946): 99–110; republished in Developments in Psycho-Analysis, ed. Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, and Joan Riviere; and The Writings of Melanie Klein, III: 1946–1963 (London: Hogarth, 1975), 1–24 . 18. Wollheim, Thread of Life, 272. 19. Ibid., 274. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 275. 22. Plato, Phaedrus 238: ὕβρις δὲ δὴ . . . πολυμελὲς. 23. The definition passage is especially cumbersome to translate, and for the purposes of exposition Rowe offers, on my view, the clearest rendition. Comparisons with other major translations (Scully, Waterfield, Hackforth, and Nehamas and Woodruff ) help illustrate the difficulties of translating this passage. 24. All definitions from A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., with revised supplement, compiled George Liddell and Robert Scott (Oxford University Press, 1996). 25. Phaedrus 238a is listed as an example in the entry in Greek-English Lexicon. 26. Socrates’ definition uses this opposition with practical wisdom. 27. For discussion of the eroticized power dynamics between Phaedrus and Socrates see chapter 1. For an example of mythic reference with these

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dimensions see the inclusion of the story of Boreas and Oreithuia at 229b5— a story of physical seizure and sexual possession that, according to the myth, took place at the locale of Phaedrus’s and Socrates’ encounter. 28. Waterfield notes improvements made in the definition from Lysias’s view of love. See Phaedrus, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xix. 29. Greek-English Lexicon. For a discussion of likely Platonic invention in the breakdown of Stesichorus’s family name and origin, see Yunis, Phaedrus, 131. 30. As Yunis helpfully characterizes in his commentary on the text: “Institutionally ensconced prophets, such as the Pythia at Apollo’s oracle in Delphi and the priestesses at Zeus’s oracle in Dodona, as well as individual diviners used ritual preparation and autosuggestion to attain a physically altered, ecstatic state in which they channeled the divine and thus performed their prophetic ser vice. It is this ‘inspired prophecy’ . . . distinguished below from rationalistic divination (244c5– d2) that Plato views as a form of divine madness” (131). 31. Long, “University, the Liberal Arts,” 34. 32. For technical analysis of the cultural background of these details in the text see Yunis, Phaedrus, 146–50. 33. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas. 34. Greek-English Lexicon.

3. The Torn Body: Forgotten Logos and Unmoored Ideals 1. C. K. Williams, Poetry and Consciousness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 92. 2. To recall from the introduction, I am not pursuing a technical, epistemologically focused analysis of recollection as Plato’s explanatory model for the apprehension of knowledge, often called his “theory of recollection,” in which recollection is entirely positively cast and forgetting is its (negatively regarded) negation. As this chapter illustrates, the relationship between the two—when their analogical, figurative, and textual dimensions are sufficiently considered—is more indeterminate than interpretive approaches dominated by recollection allow. To understand the scholarly emphases from which I depart and the Platonic texts at issue, see the general overview offered by Dominic Scott, “Platonic Recollection, in Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93–124. For other relevant Platonic texts see Meno 80d and Phaedo 72e.

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Within epistemologically oriented interpretive models focusing on recollection, I should make it clear that, though singular in emphasis, they yet give careful attention to the varieties of remembering at stake in Plato, given their technical attempt to parse his conception of knowledge acquisition. So, for example, internal recollection of a prior apprehension of truth (usually couched in terms of “the Forms”) is distinguished from being reminded by external sources, both of which would be differentiated from something like rote memory. The terms pertaining to internal recollection include ἡ μνήμη (“a remembrance, memory”) and ἡ ἀνάμνησις (“a calling to mind, recollection”). When external sources prompting remembrance are at issue, relevant terms are, for example, ἡ ὑπόμνησις (“a reminding”) and ἀναμιμνήσκω (“to remind one of a thing” or in another construction “to remember”). For technical discussion with respect to specific examples in the Phaedrus see Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 228. Although I acknowledge the merits of epistemologically oriented interpretive approaches, given the emphases specific to this book, I do not pursue a technical exegesis of memory and recollection in epistemological terms. This is primarily because I view the reader-text interrelationship to be the central source of burgeoning knowledge in the Platonic view, not recollection of what has come to be called “the Forms.” 3. Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 19. 4. Scholarship since the 1990s has attended to the enmeshed relationship between literary and philosophic features in Plato’s texts, shifting away from previous interpretive models in which literary aspects of the texts were regarded as adornments to the actual philosophy. The literary and the philosophical are now commonly regarded as of a piece, to the point that even the notion that Plato was resolutely “antipoetry” is deemed too narrow a characterization of his orientation to the literary arts. For examples see Andrea Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Kathryn Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 5. For example, Socrates says at 234e–235a that the content of Lysias’s speech “escaped his notice” (ἔλαθεν). 6. With regard to his forgetfulness about references, see 235c where Socrates says he can’t remember whether Sappho or Anacreon is the source of his ideas. With regard to Socrates’ recurring feint about forgetting what he has done or what he is doing discursively, see, e.g., 263d: “Tell me whether I defined eros— I can’t remember because I was inspired.” Or at 266d Socrates thanks Phaedrus for “reminding” him that they have not yet dis-

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cussed the remaining parts of rhetoric. As discussed in chapter 2, Socrates’ summation and analysis of his earlier speeches includes slips and omissions of memory. 7. Definitions taken from A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., with revised supplement, compiled by Henry Liddell and Robert Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 8. Perhaps the most well known elaboration of this connection can be found in Heidegger’s reading of Plato. See, in particular, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, ed. William McNeill, in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 155–82. Though a brilliant essay, in my view Heidegger elaborates possibilities that can be drawn from Plato on his own terms without recourse to a Heideggerian framework. 9. See Plato, Phaedrus 248b and 249c for examples of these respective points. 10. For the aquatic associations of Mnemosyne I draw on the Lake of Memory referred to in the gold tablets buried with the dead by practitioners of Dionysiac religious ritual in ancient Greece. See Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets (London: Routledge, 2007). 11. Plato, Phaedrus 248c, my translation with bracketed information added for clarity, though Rowe’s is also good here; he uses “incompetence” for “badness” (kakia / κακια). 12. Plato, Phaedrus 274e5, Rowe translation. 13. Greek-English Lexicon. 14. See the introduction and note 23 in par ticu lar for discussion of Derrida’s influential essay on the pharmakon. 15. On Eros as a daimon, rather than a god, see lines 203–4 in the Symposium. 16. See, e.g., Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). 17. Plato, Phaedrus 259c. The locution in the story (ἔλαθον) is, again, grammatically related to the language of forgetfulness (λήθη). 18. For Socrates’ explicit reference to the Muses as he invokes his version of the Lysian speech see 237a7. Philosophic and poetic aspirations and attractions are not cleanly delineated for Plato, in terms of how they both risk forms of entrancement and misdirection that cut across human attempts to definitively categorize language and genres. 19. See, e.g., Jonathan Lear, Open-Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 7. 20. J.-P. Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 27.

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21. By “elemental essence” I don’t mean a material essence. The phrase can be variously understood within different versions of a teleological anthropology; I simply mean to gesture toward the idea that something elemental about the human being (conceptually, psychologically, or spiritually speaking) informs our growth or expansion throughout life, always already throwing out before us an end in which aspiration and manifestation are rightly, naturally, or divinely constituted. 22. For the classic study of this version of the teleological model of the soul and its influence on the Romantics see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). 23. That is, Dionysus is a kind of emblem of agricultural and organic abundance. 24. Stephen Owen, Remembrances: Th e Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). 25. Ibid., 68. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 66. 28. See, e.g., Heraclitus in this regard. 29. Owen, Remembrances, 77. 30. Ibid., 78. 31. Ibid., 79. 32. See chapter 2 for the initial discussion of this example. 33. See chapter 1. 34. Again, for a thorough examination of this adaptation from the cultic context to the realm of philosophy see Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 35. See Plato, Phaedrus 249d1 for the specific language of coming close to divinity. 36. Martha Nussbaum’s elaboration of this critique is probably the most well known; see The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chap. 15. Although Nussbaum acknowledges that the Platonic view calls us to “take note of the positive draw of transcendence itself ” as “a powerful part of human ethical experience,” she ultimately regards Plato’s picture of transcendence as incongruous with a full acknowledgment and engagement with the nature of our humanity. See Love’s Knowledge, 368.

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37. Again, Nussbaum’s account has been perhaps the strongest within contemporary moral philosophy; she characterizes the Aristotelian alternative as “the internal transcendence of virtue” (Love’s Knowledge, 381–82). 38. The most robust work in this regard is that of Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). He also includes a response to Nussbaum’s critique of Platonic transcendence at pages 53–56. 39. Of course, this general approach is seen throughout the Platonic threads of the Western European Romantic tradition beginning in the late eighteenth century. Here I have in mind accounts within Western European scholarship in which a kind of rehabilitation or revisitation of the cogency of beauty as a basis of ethics has emerged. See, e.g., Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), and her discussion of the superfluous character of the metaphysical dimensions of ancient conceptions of beauty (33). 40. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 374. 41. Even when we consider a text such as the Republic or the Timaeus, in which one might expect to see Plato more squarely address this issue, we are confronted with the recognition of just how far we are from his world and of how we can work with his texts only via imaginative, contested interpretation (something that may also have been true in his time). 42. Greek-English Lexicon. 43. Thank you to Louis Ruprecht for calling my attention to the links between this Symposium moment and my reading of the Phaedrus. The relevant passage of the Symposium is 203b–204b.

Conclusion. Ghost Ribs of Discourse beyond the Phaedrus : R adical and Domesticated Forgetting in Euripides, Zhuangzi, and Aristotle 1. To recall from earlier chapters, the language in the text is that of εἴδωλον, which can be translated “image” or “phantom.” 2. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 163. 3. For a more extensive elaboration of the preliminary comparison offered here see Jennifer R. Rapp, “A Poetics of Comparison: Euripides, Zhuangzi, and the Human Poise of Imaginative Construction,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 1 (2010): 163–201. 4. Throughout this chapter I refer to C. K. Williams’s translation of the The Bacchae of Euripides: A New Version (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

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1990), and Brook Ziporyn’s translation of Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009). Translations from Euripides’ Greek that are my own will be noted. 5. Williams, Bacchae, 69. 6. For readers unfamiliar with this Daoist text from the fourth century b.c.e. “the Zhuangzi” refers to the text attributed to the author, Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi is also the name of the primary sage-like figure or guide in the text. The singular authorship of the Zhuangzi is a contested and complex issue. Scholarly convention is that a first series of sections, called “the inner chapters,” were authored by a single historical figure, Zhuangzi. Sections of the text beyond the inner chapters are considered to fall within a range of authorial possibility, from “likely authored by Zhuangzi” to “most certainly compiled by a later student or follower of Zhuangzi.” 7. “Course” is Ziporyn’s translation for “Dao.” He explains his choice in his glossary: “Often translated as ‘Way,’ the term originally designated a program of emulation and study by means of which a particular set of skills could be cultivated . . . or a process by which a particular type of valued result was produced. More concretely, it denotes a ‘road’ or ‘path’ and also means ‘to speak.’ In pre-Daoist thought it has a highly normative and ethical flavor: deliberate activity directed toward a goal that is seen and known in advance. Putting these implications together, it can be translated as “Guiding Discourse.” Daoist use of the term, beginning with the Daodejing, ironically plays on this original meaning, reversing it to signify the nondeliberate and indiscernible process that is claimed to be the real source of value and being, on the model of the unhewn raw material from which a particular culturally valued object is carved” (214). 8. Ziporyn, Zhuangzi, 74–75. As will become clearer in the discussion of Zhuangzi’s methods of language and narrative, it was necessary to include the whole of this episode from the text in order to relay the layered discursive strategies emblematic of the Zhuangzi. 9. Also translated as “sitting forgetting.” Related terms include “forgetting self” (wangji) and “losing self” (sangwo). For a discussion of “sitting forgetting” in the context of Daoist practice and religiosity see Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), all relevant, but see especially pages 110, 133, 157. 10. Ziporyn, Zhuangzi, 49. 11. For a discussion of the concept of “effortless action” within the Zhuangzi see Edward Slingerland, “Effortless Action: The Chinese Spiritual Ideal of Wu-wei,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 2 (2000): 293–327.

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12. Ziporyn, Zhuangzi, 22. 13. Ibid., 22. I have added the content in brackets, drawing from the glossary that Ziporyn cites within the passage. 14. This characteristic is seen more strongly or jarringly in the cases of Dionysus and the character Zhuangzi than in the example of Socrates. Indeed, the Phaedrus closes with his inclusive summons, “Let’s go.” Yet, on balance, across the dialogues, Socrates is identifiable in terms of his itinerant position vis-à-vis his interlocutors, whether his roving movement is within the discussion itself (and not literally physical) or is illustrated by his actual physical straying from the scene at hand (see, e.g., his separation from others in the Symposium). 15. I can offer here only a brief sketch of these strategies; for more extensive analysis see Angus Graham, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001); Youru Wang, Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003); Kuang-Ming Wu, On Chinese Body Thinking (Leiden: Brill, 1997), and Lee H. Yearley, “Daoist Presentation and Persuasion: Wandering among Zhuangzi’s Kinds of Language,” Journal of Religious Ethics 33, no. 3 (2005): 503–35. 16. Ziporyn translation; quotation is from the opening section of chapter 27, “Words Lodged Elsewhere,” in which a variety of Zhuangzi’s strategies with words is explicitly addressed. 17. See, for example, the exchanges in chapter 4 of the Zhuangzi. 18. Yearley, “Daoist Presentation,” 510. 19. Ibid., 511. 20. The exchange is between Ju Quezi (Ch’ü-ch’üeh-tzu) and Chang Wuzi (Ch’ang-wu-tzu) with the latter directing the questioning (Ziporyn, Zhuangzi, 18–19). 21. Yearley, “Daoist Presentation,” 512. 22. Ibid., 525. 23. For a discussion on the blurring among the three types of language and the difficulties in neatly categorizing them, see Wang, Linguistic Strategies, 140. 24. Yearley, “Daoist Presentation,” 518. 25. Ibid. 26. Wang, Linguistic Strategies, 147. 27. Yearley, “Daoist Presentation,” 523; italics added. 28. Wang, Linguistic Strategies, 146. 29. Ibid., 149. 30. Yearley, “Daoist Presentation,” 519, 521. 31. Ibid., 525. 32. Ziporyn, Zhuangzi, chap. 26, p. 114.

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Notes to pages 143–46

33. For a classic discussion of the chorus with respect to this issue, see J. P. Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1996). 34. For a full-length study on the play and the distinctiveness of the chorus within it see Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). 35. This excerpt taken from the chorus arises several lines after (a disguised) Dionysus has attempted to persuade Pentheus to go spy on the Maenads, dressed as a woman. The translation is by Williams, Bacchae, 52–53. 36. Euripides, Bacchae, lines 845–48. 37. Ibid., lines 862– 76; For Williams’s explanation of emphases in his approach to translating The Bacchae see his prefatory remarks, xlv–xlvii. For his more extensive explanation of translation see C. K. Williams, Sophocles’ Women of Trachis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Williams does not account for metrical conventions, and, the descending form of presentation is his attempt to suggest how, if performed, members of the chorus might trade off singing, fluidly, in the absence of music. As he explains: “So the effect would be that of the actual speeches of the choruses being composed in their passage from one voice to another. There would then be, one would hope, a kind of musicalization of space, and of the language of the odes as they move through that space” (Bacchae, xlvii). 38. For a discussion of these aspects of the chorus see Martha Nussbaum, Introduction to Bacchae of Euripides, trans. C. K. Williams, xiii, xv, and xii; Segal, Dionysiac Poetics, 242–47; and Vernant, Myth and Tragedy, 29–48. 39. For a consideration of what it would mean to place the image of Agave holding her torn son at the center of Western European philosophy (rather than, e.g., Mary and Jesus), see David Tracy, “Tragedy as Cultural Unconscious of Western Religion and Philosophy,” keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, November 21, 2005. 40. The relationship between this line from the Republic (at 486d) and the rest of the text would require, of course, a longer interpretive story, with respect to whether and how Plato upholds its literal meaning throughout the text or unsettles its conveyed message. For example, the Myth of Er presented in book 10 of the Republic— given its inclusion of oblivion at several key points in the myth—precludes any simple reading of the sentiment expressed at Republic 486d. Dealing with this interpretive issue adequately would require its own study. 41. Nussbaum, Introduction to Bacchae, vii–xliv.

Notes to pages 147–55

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42. Nussbaum’s central work in this regard is The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 43. Nussbaum, Introduction to Bacchae, xl. 44. Ibid., xli. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. For example, an exhaustive comparison with emphasis on their respective places in the development of epistemological conceptions of memory and forgetting would need to consider a different range of texts, e.g., Aristotle’s On Memory and Plato’s Theaetetus. 48. For this direction of consideration see Richard Miller, “The Moral and Political Burdens of Memory,” Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no. 3 (2009): 533. 49. In general, I cite only book and section information for the Nicomachean Ethics as needed. In the case of direct quotation or inclusion of the Greek text I also add the Bekker line information. The Loeb Classical Library edition of the Greek text does not include Bekker line information; please consult the Perseus Digital Library searchable edition of the NE as needed: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus %3atext%3a1999.01.0053. 50. He does make an exception for extraordinary forms of misfortune, illustrated by him through the case of Priam (NE I.9). Given that my emphasis is on ordinary, rather than extraordinary, oblivion, Aristotle’s focus on ordinary misfortune seems especially germane. 51. “Activities of excellence” or “endeavors” of virtue translates τὰς ἐνεργείας τὰς κατ′ ἀρετήν. “Most steady” translates βεβαιότης. “More stable” translates μονιμώτεραι. 52. Reading τοῦτο γὰρ ἔιοκεν αἰτίῳ τοῦ μὴ γίγνεσθαι περὶ αὐτὰ λήθην at 1100b17–18. 53. Reading ἀλλὰ μὴν οὐδ′ ἕξις μετὰ λόγου μόνον· σημεῖον δ′ ὅτι λήθη τῆ μὲν τοιαύτης ἕξεώς ἐστι, φρονήσεως δ′ ουκ ἔστιν at 1140b28. 54. I translate prohairesis (προαίρεσις) “decision,” but this should not obscure its fuller meaning of “an act of deliberate choice,” that is, a decision or choice that follows deliberation, the mutually constitutive nature of the relationship between “decision” and “deliberate choice” being central to Aristotle’s thought. That is, not “choice” in the modern notion of that term. My translation of the term follows that of Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe; see Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, translated and with a historical introduction by Christopher Rowe and philosophical introduction and commentary by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). An

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Notes to pages 155–63

alternate option taken in Joe Sachs’s translation is “choice” (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Publishing, 2002). 55. Lest this approach to distinguishing Plato and Aristotle in eros-philia terms become too comfortable, we must also note that at the close of the Phaedrus, the penultimate line of the dialogue is the well-known proverb, “Friends have all things in common” (or “Friends share all things”). The proverb also appears in Aristotle’s Politics, book 2, chap. 5. I consider Charles Long’s characterization of reason in chapter 2. Charles Long, “The University, the Liberal Arts, and the Teaching and Study of Religion,” in Beyond the Classics? ed. Sheryl Burkhalter and Frank Reynolds (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 34.

Epilogue: Poetics as First Philosophy 1. The numbers in parentheses refer to the numbered identification of the poem in, respectively, the Franklin and Johnson editions of Dickinson’s collected poems. 2. For a discussion of the relationship between Dickinson’s poetry and the religious sources informing it, see Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), chap. 4. 3. I am not so concerned with whether or how to characterize the approach to language, structure, and poetics imaged and imagined in her poem as “modern” or “postmodern,” and, therein, as simply representing a next/subsequent historical stage in American poetics, following after Dickinson. Indeed, the brilliance and smart fun of Ryan’s poem lies in how it obliquely both draws on and is informed by the locutions and ideas of “construction” saturating postmodern theory, and does it better. (Of course, the poem’s title is a signal of Ryan’s tongue-in-cheek poise, a poise that yet expresses something quite penetrating and substantive.) 4. To recall: “A fish trap is there for the fish. When you have got hold of the fish, you forget the trap. A snare is there for the rabbits. When you have got hold of the rabbit, you forget the snare. Words are there for the intent. When you have got hold of the intent, you forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words, so I can have a few words with him?” (Ziporyn, Zhuangzi, 114). 5. The “first” here is not meant in a temporal sense, but rather in terms of primacy, as in “most elemental.” 6. Such divergences are why, even given the critique of poetry in the Republic, most contemporary interpreters do not hold the long-standing interpretive presumption that Plato was simply, categorically “antipoetry.” That

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is, his critique of poetry in the Republic does not necessarily mean a dismissal of all poetic forms tout court. And, this is not simply because in that text he allows certain poetic forms within the model of education presented for the ideal polis. Rather, beyond the literal, surface content of the discussion of poetry in that text—when considered in the context of how Plato writes the Republic—it is clear that he not only harbored an openness to figurative forms of language but that he took them to be necessary for the philosophic expression of truth (this latter point having been the crux of this entire book, as should now be apparent). On this issue see Julius A. Elias, Plato’s Defence of Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), but also the work of Andrea Nightingale and Kathryn Morgan.

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Bibliography

Unless otherwise indicated, translations of Plato throughout are my own, from Burnet’s Oxford text and Harvey Yunis’s 2011 edition of the Phaedrus. The translations of the few quotations from the Republic and the Symposium, are from the Loeb Classical Library editions of those dialogues. For readers new to the Phaedrus I recommend choosing a couple of translations, reading them alongside each other in conjunction with Yunis’s extensive textual notes. Choosing one from Rowe/Scully (both closer to the Greek text) and one from Waterfield/Nehamas and Woodruff (both freer with the Greek text) would offer a glimpse at the range of translation choices made.

Phaedrus Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995. ———. Phaedrus. Translated by Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. ———. Phaedrus. Translated by Stephen Scully. Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Philosophical Library, 2003. ———. Phaedrus. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. Phaedrus. Edited by Harvey Yunis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———. Platonis Opera: Volume II. Edited by John Burnet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1901.

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Symposium Plato. Symposium. Translated by Avi Sharon. Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Philosophical Library, 1998. ———. Symposium. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. 1994.

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Acknowledgments

This book is not “for” anyone, which those who know me well will understand. It came out of and beyond myself, from places both not of my own choosing and of my own making that I am now quite ready to leave behind. This book is dedicated to my teacher, L.H.Y. It is offered with enduring gratitude to my parents, who have been steadfast supporters of my work and have never withheld their help or their compassion. For his commitment to me, even when I have faltered, I express deep thankfulness to my brother, witness to this book’s multiple origins. My great thanks are given to my mentor, Andrea, for her careful reading of my prose, the generosity of her attention, and her exuberance as a scholar. To Michael, I extend my appreciation for your impassioned, comradely support of my work. To Dave, for helping me learn those most important things that books— even great ones— can’t bring into a life, I say thank you. To the high desert of the Eastern Sierra—which didn’t give me my voice and has often been close to overwhelming it—I offer my forgetfulness of the tears you require and my remembrance of the clarity you bestow.

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Index

Agave, 130 aporia, 125 Aristotle: conception of transcendence, 122–23; on forgetting and human fragility, 19–22, 146–47, 149–55; on friendship, 155; interpretive considerations, 148–49; orientation to reason and pattern making, 128–29; on practical wisdom, 151–53; on virtue, 20–21, 149–51 atopia, 125 Augustine, 4 avian-horse-charioteer image, 35–44, 59–60 avian soul image: directions of attunement and equipoise of, 103–5; as emblem of ideal relations between soul, body, and logos, 56–60; as fulcrum, 27, 91; interpretative approaches to, 28–29, 44–49; madness and, 44, 90; as unmooring ideal of becoming divine, 124–25

carved-animal analogy: defined, 14–15; reduction and fi xation of eros by, 84–85; related to Zhuangzi’s butcher story, 135–36; in Socrates’ retrospective view of speeches, 93–95; tensions with living-animal analogy, 65–68. See also living-animal analogy cicada emblem, 32–34, 105–6 comedy, 114–15 Creeley, Robert, 44–46

The Bacchae (Euripides): “ghost ribs” in, 136–37, 142–45; oblivion/forgetting and modes of seeing in, 129–30, 132, 136, 142, 147–48; role of Greek chorus in, 138, 140, 141, 142–45. See also Euripides

daimonion episode, 31–32 depersonalization, 72, 73–79 derealization, 72, 73, 78–79 desire, 73, 78–85 dialogue form, 103

beauty: soul-body relationship and, 51–53; word-image of soul’s encounter with, 49–54 “becoming divine” ideal, 120–26, 160–61 bodily form: avian soul ideal and, 56–60; relationship with soul (see soul-body relationship); relationship with written form and oblivion, 32–35, 54, 105–6, 132–37 butcher story in Zhuangzi, 133–35 Butler, Judith, 18

202 Dickinson, Emily: characterization of writing of, 97; characterizations of madness and sense, 70–72; expression of self ’s ordinary oblivion, 2–5; expression of self-unmooring, 6–8; expression of truth’s “slant” apprehension, 8–9, 12–13; writing as a process of soul, 159–61 discourse: complex relationship to memory, 118–20; displacement’s unsettling of, 78–85; ellipsis and discursive shifts, 110–11; fi xation and depersonalization of, 77–78; incongruous modes of, 64–65; relationship to soul (see soul-logos relationship); somatic analogies of, 14–15 (see also carved-animal analogy; living-animal analogy). See also writing and written form displacement: as Plato’s mode of resisting fi xation, 66–68; unsettling of desire and discourse, 78–85 Eagleman, David, 4 “Echo” (Creeley), 45–46 elenctic method, 109 ellipsis, 110 ensouled logos: relationship to written form, 13–15, 137; significance to word-images to, 26–27, 54 eros: as central relationship in Phaedrus, 156; Lysian speech against (see Lysian speech against eros); madness and, 68–72, 86–87; refiguration through displacement, 79–85; Socrates’ palinode to (see palinode to eros); Symposium’s tale of origin of, 125–26; transposed into shifting terms of excess, 85–95 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Williams), 17 Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle), 155 Euripides: forgetting and human fragility in, 146–48; “ghost ribs” in, 136–37, 142–45; oblivion and modes of seeing in, 129–30, 132, 136; orientation to reason and pattern making, 128–29; role of Greek chorus in, 138, 140, 141, 142–45. See also The Bacchae excess: eros figured as, 82–85; shifting terms of in palinode, 85–95

Index false fragments, 117–19 Ferrari, G. R. F., 92 fish trap story in Zhuangzi, 142, 162 fi xation: danger of in relationships between soul, body, and logos, 54–56; eros and, 84–85; resistance through displacement, 66–68; role in derealization and depersonalization, 72–79 fluidity, 61–62, 94–95 forgetting and forgetfulness: Aristotle on human fragility and, 19–22, 146–47, 149–55; earthly embodiment of the soul and, 43, 100–101; Euripides on human fragility and, 146–48; “ghost ribs” as discursive forms of (see “ghost ribs”); modes of seeing and in Zhuangzi, 130–37; ordinary oblivion of the self and, 5–6; Plato on human fragility and, 19–22, 97; soul’s relation to oblivion and, 43, 100–106, 124–26. See also memory and recollection; ordinary oblivion fragility: Aristotle’s view of, 19–22, 146–48; Euripides’ view of, 146–48; inherent in living-animal analogy, 96–97; Plato’s view of forgetting and, 19–22, 97 The Fragility of Goodness (Nussbaum), 19–20 fragments, 117–19 friendship, 155 “garden of letters,” 116–17 gazing on truth, 9–10, 47–49 “ghost ribs”: chorus in Bacchae as form of, 142–45; in Euripides and Plato, 136–37; in Zhuangzi, 134–35, 136–42 “goblet words,” 139–41 heavenly journeying myth, 9, 41–43, 100–101 hubris, 82–83. See also excess hybridity. See porous hybridity immortal souls, 9, 40–43 interpretative approaches: to avian soul image, 28–29, 44–49; implied by living-animal analogy of discourse, 25–28; implied by permeable relations between memory and oblivion, 111–12 irony and satire, 108–9

203

Index James, William, 23–24 Klein, Melanie, 74 lanthanō, 5, 99 lēthē, 5–6, 99 linguistic form. See writing and written form living-animal analogy: described, 14–15; eros unmoored from fi xation through, 84–85; fluidity of, 61–62, 94–95; fragility inherent to, 96–97; interpretive approaches to Phaedrus implied by, 25–28; place of the head and reason in, 67–68; tensions with carved-animal analogy, 65–68. See also carved-animal analogy “lodging-place words,” 137–38, 143 logos. See soul-logos relationship; writing and written form Long, Charles, 67 “looking away” strategies, 109–11 love. See eros Lysian speech against eros: contextualization and set-up for palinode, 30–32; derealization and depersonalization in Lysian view, 72–78; displacement’s unsettling of Lysian view, 79–85; erroneous orientations to written form, 62–66; Socrates’ adaptation and delivery of, 68–72; Socrates’ retrospective view of counterposed speeches, 91–95. See also palinode to eros madness: avian soul image and, 44, 90; derealization and depersonalization as features of, 72–78; Dickinson on sense and, 70–72; eros and, 68–72, 86–87 “Me from Myself - to banish” (Dickinson), 6–8 memory and recollection: complex relationship between discourse/writing and, 118–20; limitations and distortions of, 45–46; ordinary oblivion of the self and, 4–6; permeable relation to oblivion, 96–98, 99–100, 111–12; refiguring eros by shift to, 88–89; relationship to oblivion unsettling Phaedrus’s teleological model, 115–20. See also forgetting and forgetfulness; ordinary oblivion

mollusk imagery, 54–56 mortal souls, 9, 40–43 “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (Dickinson), 70–72 Murdoch, Iris, 21, 124 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle): forgetting explicitly addressed in, 149–51; orientation to forgetting different from Plato’s, 153–55; pliancy of practical wisdom in, 151–53; view of friendship, 155 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6 Nussbaum, Martha, 19–20, 146–48 oblivion. See ordinary oblivion “One need not be a Chamber” (Dickinson), 2–5 opacity, 17–18 ordinary oblivion: defined, ix–x; as defining feature of the self, 2–6; modes of seeing and forms of in Bacchae and Zhuangzi, 129–37; opacity, fragility, and forgetting as features of, 16–22; permeable relation to memory, 96–98, 99–100, 111–12; as philosophic play, 98–100; as prompting reconsideration of ideal of becoming divine, 120–26; relationship with bodily and written forms, 32–35, 54, 105–6, 132–37; soul’s relation to forgetting and, 43, 100–106, 124–26; as a source of perspective, 156–57; structural forms of in Phaedrus, 106–11; as unsettling teleological model of self becoming soul, 115–20. See also forgetting and forgetfulness; memory and recollection Orphic imagery, 54–55 Owen, Stephen, 117–19 palinode, 30 palinode to eros: contextualization of, 29–32; displacement’s unsettling of desire and discourse in, 78–85; elenctic method in, 109; eros transposed into shifting terms of excess, 85–95; as Plato’s recantation of divine aspiration, 48–49; Socrates’ retrospective view of speeches, 91–95; teeming nature of imagery, 57–59; word-images of the

204 palinode to eros (cont.) soul in (see word-images of the soul). See also Lysian speech against eros Penia, 125–26 Pentheus, 130 Phaedrus (Plato): discursive “ghost ribs” in, 136–37; eros as central relationship in, 156; forms of structural oblivion in, 106–11; interpretive approaches to (see interpretative approaches); Nussbaum’s reading of in terms of human fragility, 19–20; oblivion as philosophic play in, 98–100; oblivion unsettling of teleological model in, 115–20; as poised between tragedy and comedy, 112–15; reconsideration of Platonic ideal of becoming divine, 120–26; relationship between reader and text, 110–11, 114–15; word-images of the soul as discursive approach of, 2, 11–12, 25–28 philosophic soul, 43–44 philosophy and poetics, 163–64 phronēsis. See practical wisdom Plato: as author and crafting of Socrates as interlocutor, 92–95, 114–15; conception of the soul, x–xi; conception of transcendence, 122–23; critique of writing, 2, 10–11, 119; discursive “ghost ribs” in, 136–37; dualism as misguided orientation to, 111–12; as guide to self becoming soul, 1–2; ordinary oblivion as a source of perspective in, 156–57; “poetics as first philosophy” applied to, 163–64; as poised between Euripides, Zhuangzi, and Aristotle, 127–29, 145–48; reconsideration of Platonic ideal of becoming divine, 120–26; shift from self to soul in writings of, 22–24; unsettled teleological model in, 115–20; view of forgetting and human fragility, 19–22, 97; view of reason, 67–68, 89, 128–29; view of virtue, 20–21; writing as a process of soul in, 159–64 “poetics as first philosophy,” 163–64 Poros, 125–26 porous hybridity: of images and nature of the soul, 37–39; monstrous forms of, 32–35; in soul’s encounter with beauty, 51–53

Index “Post-Construction” (Ryan), 127–28, 134–35, 136–37, 161 practical wisdom, 150–53, 154 projective identification, 74–76 reason, 67–68, 89, 128–29 reception and source, 30–32 recollection. See memory and recollection “repeated words,” 139 Republic (Plato), 2, 146 Roethke, Theodore, 1–2 Ryan, Kay, 127–28, 134–35, 136–37, 161 satire and irony, 108–9 self-alienation, 75–76 self and selfhood: effect of derealization and depersonalization on, 72–78; erroneous orientations to written form, 62–66; necessity of unmooring, 6–8; need for “slant” modes of apprehending truth of, 8–12; opacity, fragility, and forgetting of, 16–22; ordinary oblivion as defining feature of, 2–6, 128; perception of giving rise to soul, 1–2; Phaedrus’s unsettling of teleological model of, 115–20; Plato’s shift to soul from, 22–24; prevalent approaches to, x; reliance upon written form to become a soul, 113–15 (see also soul-logos relationship); Zhuangzi’s radical view of language and, 162 self-knowledge: depersonalization and, 76–78; erroneous orientation to written form and, 62–66; otherattunement and, 102–3 sense and madness, 70–72 “sitting in forgetfulness,” 132 Socrates: as character/interlocutor and exemplar, 10, 57–59, 91–95, 114–15, 161; equipoise of, 102–5, 106; forms of structural oblivion in dialogue of, 108–11; palinode to eros by (see palinode to eros) somatic analogies, 14–15. See also carved-animal analogy; living-animal analogy soul: avian-horse-charioteer image of, 35–44, 59–60; avian image of (see avian soul image); burgeoning of philosophic soul, 43–44; as emerging from

205

Index self-perception, 1–2; encounter with beauty, 49–54; heavenly journeying myth, 9, 41–43, 100–101; Phaedrus’s unsettling of teleological model of, 115–20; Plato’s conception of, x–xi; Plato’s shift from self to, 22–24; porous hybridity of, 37–39; reconsideration of Plato’s ideal of becoming divine, 120–26; relationship with bodily form (see soul-body relationship); relationship with discourse and written form (see soul-logos relationship); in relation to forgetting and oblivion, 43, 100–106, 124–26; tripartite conception of, 36; word-images of (see word-images of the soul) soul-body relationship: avian soul ideal and, 56–60; beauty and, 51–53; danger of fi xity in, 54–56; entangled nature of, 12, 34–35, 49–54 soul-logos relationship: avian soul ideal and, 56–60; dangers of and erroneous orientations to, 30–32, 62–66; dialogue form and becoming soul, 103; ensouled logos (see ensouled logos); entangled nature of, 12, 32–35, 54; self becoming soul through, 113–15, 121–26; writing as a process of soul, 159–64 source and reception, 30–32 speech writing discussion, 63–64, 119–20 “spillover words,” 139–41 Symposium (Plato), 107, 125–26 techne, 124 teleological model, 115–16 “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (Dickinson), 8–9, 12–13 “The Props assist the House” (Dickinson), 159–61 Theuth, 101 tragedy, 112–15 transcendence, 122–23 tripartite conception of the soul, 36

truth: gazing on, 9–10, 47–49; need for “slant” modes of apprehending, 8–12 Typhon emblem, 32, 34–35 The Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 23–24 Vernant, J.-P., 113 virtue, 20–21, 149–51 Wang, Youru, 140 weighted words, 139 Williams, Bernard, 17, 128–29 Williams, C. K., 97 Wollheim, Richard, 72, 75–76 word-images of the soul: avian-horsecharioteer image, 35–44, 59–60; avian soul image (see avian soul image); as discursive approach of Phaedrus, 2, 11–12, 25–28; significance to ensouled logos, 26–27, 54; soul’s encounter with beauty, 49–54; teeming nature of, 25–26, 57–59 writing and written form: complex relationship to memory, 118–20; dangers of and erroneous orientations to, 30–32, 62–66; discursive shifts in discussion of, 110–11; mythic account of origins of, 11, 30, 101; Plato’s critique of, 2, 10–11, 119; relationship to ensouled logos, 13–15, 137; relationship with bodily form and oblivion, 32–35, 54, 105–6, 132–37; relationship with soul (see soul-logos relationship). See also discourse Yearly, Lee H., 138, 139, 140–41 Zhuangzi: “ghost ribs,” phantom effects, and language use in, 134–35, 136–42; oblivion/forgetting and modes of seeing in, 130–37; orientation to reason and pattern making, 128–29; radical view of language and self, 162 zuowang, 131