Admiration's Double Labor: Phaedrus in the Mirror

"Where is that boy I was talking to?," asks Socrates at the beginning of the most roundabout reversal of the Phaedrus, the narrative climax at which his defense of love begins. ¹ "He must listen to me once more, and not rush off to yield to his nonlover before he hears what I have to say" (243e). Socrates' leading question operates, first of all, as the apostrophic reinvocation of debate, for his previous mock-argument against love addressed a hypothetical beautiful boy. Socrates again summons this ideal presence, a spectator whose absence suggests that he stands in for the future reader of Plato's dialogue. More slyly, though, the question refers to Socrates' interlocutor, the boy Phaedrus, and their provocative ongoing encounter in the woods outside of Athens. In the (at least) double scene of discourse the Phaedrus stages, philosophical demonstration receives its dramatic enactment in dialogic form. ² Phaedrus and Socrates embody the subjects of argument, the beautiful boy and his lover. In a dialogue bustling with sexual double-entendres, Plato uses multiple means to claim the superlative value of love. If this superbly handled situation demonstrates literary mastery, however, it also displays the insistent textual repetition that haunts Plato's philosophy of ideal forms. In the Phaedrus, Socrates serves both to define and to exemplify the quality of the singular ideal, love; yet he constantly resorts to love's false simulacra in order to sustain his argument. Thus, the mimetic operation Plato elsewhere condemns inhabits his dialogue's rhetorical strategies. Within this structured universe of ideal forms, good copies, and simulacra, it would appear that, in every instance, the philosopher must have recourse to the discredited simulacra in order to define the ideal.

The definition of love in the Phaedrus depends upon the doubling play of the mirror for its very constitution. Apparently, no human contact with the divine ideal is conceivable without the mirror of mimesis, a mirror that inevitably distorts. Describing for Phaedrus the ideal interaction of true lovers, Socrates says that, when the boy

comes close to his lover in the gymnasium and elsewhere, that flowing stream which Zeus, as the lover of Ganymede, called the 'flood of passion,' pours in upon the lover. And part of it is absorbed within him, but when he can contain no more the rest flows away outside him, and as the breath of wind or an echo, rebounding from a smooth hard surface, goes back to its place of origin, ever so the stream of beauty turns back and reenters the eyes of the fair beloved. (255c-d)

Reflection takes on both fluidity and sound as it begins its circular course. Love involves "a flood of particles" (251c). Material metaphors enable Socrates to figure passion as unboundable excess, as a 'something-more' that overwhelms its container. The scene of passion is rewritten as the passive influx of inspiration. Socrates continues,

And so by the natural channel it reaches his soul and gives it fresh vigor . . . whereby the the soul of the beloved, in its turn, is filled with love. So he loves, yet knows not what he loves; he does not understand, he cannot tell what has come upon him; like one who has caught a disease of the eye from another, he cannot account for it, not realizing that his lover is as it were the mirror in which he beholds himself. (255c-d, my emphasis)

It is curious that love's imitative operation is sustained only in the boy's ignorance; Socrates reiterates his statement for emphasis. ³ And reiteration serves precisely as the mirror movement by which the beloved is "captured" (253c).

This passage suggests that, were the boy to see the illusion as illusion, were he to discover the mirror, its efficacy would vanish. The transference cannot be dissolved. Love, then, would be none other than a nurturing false image or beneficent disease, ⁴ a simulacrum working only when its double status goes...