Phaedrus 246a-256d; Symposium 201c-212a (Sample reflection paper)

“Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure.” (57) Socrates begins this section of the palinode (his retraction of his earlier speech denigrating eros) with a not-so-subtle hint concerning one of the main points of his speech: images, and particularly beautiful images, have a unique power to make comprehensible ideas that would otherwise remain unavailable to us. Whatever else it might be, the image is also a medium or a vehicle that transports the viewer beyond what is immediately given in experience, and Socrates seems to place this function of the image ahead of its power to serve as a copy or representation of some independent reality. “a pair of winged horses and a charioteer” (57) The image that Socrates uses to describe the soul is, as he explains, a “composite,” which is meant to account for the fact that governing one’s own soul is no simple or easy matter. Because one horse is of noble breeding, and the other ignoble, the soul is always (potentially) in conflict with itself; it is drawn in different directions, driven by incompatible motives. The task of bringing order to the soul, then, will entail not only finding a common purpose to unite its various parts, but also choosing the goal that is most appropriate as the end of its movement. Several questions present themselves simultaneously with the introduction of this image of the soul: What is meant by the ascent of the soul, and why are the true objects of knowledge only to be found in “the heaven which is above the heavens”? What makes one horse bad and the other good? What decides which of these will win out, and gain control of the soul’s movement? Given that the very same divine beings toward which the perfect soul aspires are also what “nourishes” the soul’s wings and makes this ascent possible, how does the soul which dwells beneath the heavens ever begin to make this ascent? It is especially with respect to this last question that we begin to see how Socrates’s image of the soul connects back to the question about beauty, and the erotic desire that it inspires. Though the embodied soul does not, by virtue of the distractions of the sensible world, have immediate access to the region above the heavens, where the “colorless, formless, intangible essence[s]” reside, these latter do penetrate into the realm of the sensible. The chief advantage of beauty is that it, among all of the divine beings, shows through in the sensible world most perfectly, or with the least loss of its perfection: “This is the privilege of beauty, that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight.” (61) At this point in Socrates’s speech, we might reasonably wonder why beauty is not simply an unqualified good. Through it, the divine reaches into the mortal world, and serves as a reminder of the true nature of our soul, by making us feel the lack in ourselves so long as we do not have contact with the intangible essences that lie behind appearances. What complicates matters is the fact that there are two widely disparate responses to the appearance of beauty, which correspond to the two winged horses that the composite soul comprises. “Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer.” (64) What makes this response to beauty ignoble and shameful, is that it mistakes the true object of the desire that it feels. What we love when we love beauty is not the beautiful thing, but the beauty that appears in and through it; it is the idea of beauty, and its intimate connection to the good, that the soul truly desires: “Then love…may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good.” (Symposium, 72) The question of the connection between the beautiful and the good is one of the most important elements of Plato’s account of the effect of beauty on the soul, and without this connection Plato seems to have little ground for explaining why we desire to possess what we find beautiful. True, beauty is indeed one of the intangible “forms” or “ideas” of which Socrates speaks, and this could account for its powerful influence on the soul. And yet, when we interrogate the notion of an intangible idea of beauty, and ask what is left of our notion of beauty when its sensible element is stripped away, we are left with something like a notion of form, order, or perfection that closely resembles the Platonic conception of the good. See the top section of p. 71 (204e) for Diotima’s argument connecting beauty and the good. As crucial as this link between the beautiful and the good is for Plato, however, it also becomes the source of a great difficulty surrounding the status of the artist. Though we may see the need to trace a link between what is beautiful and the good, we can easily recognize that these two ideas cannot be conflated, and that any attempt to do so is an invitation to serious moral confusion. It is precisely with this concern in mind that Socrates begins his interrogation of the poets—makers of beautiful images—in the discussion of the ideal city in the Republic. It is important to keep this background established by the Phaedrus and the Symposium in mind as we consider Socrates’s arguments for the censorship of poetry (and the other arts).