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TWO PHAEDRUS: PHAEDRUS’ BEST CITY IN SPEECH In accordance with Eyximachus’ suggestion and Socrates’ command (177d–e), Phaedrus offers the first eulogy of Eros. One of the puzzles of Phaedrus’ speech is the essential ambiguity of his account of the divinity of Eros. At the opening of his speech, he appeals to Hesiod and Parmenides in order to establish the antiquity of the god and in doing so comes very close to arguing that Eros is simply a natural principle. It is, at any rate, the first of the gods “devised” by becoming (178b). Throughout the rest of his speech, however, Eros is treated as the passion in the soul of the lover that is the indirect cause of moral virtue. Eros appears first as something like a cosmological or natural principle and then as a psychological principle of conventional conduct. Why either should be identified with a god, let alone the same god, is difficult to see. We have only the authority of Hesiod and Parmenides (178b), in the one case, and the rhetoric of Phaedrus, in the other—he speaks of the lover as having “the god within him”(180b)—as a ground for our belief in the divinity of Eros. Not surprisingly, it will prove to be the case that Phaedrus understands the ground for his teaching regarding the divinity of Eros to be neither a cosmology nor a psychology, but a novel art of speaking that combines poetry and political rhetoric in equal measure. Having asserted the antiquity of the god eros, Phaedrus argues, on the basis of the conventional identification of the old with the good,1 that Eros is the cause of the greatest goods and that its causal power is displayed in the relationship between lover and beloved: each is a great good for the other, he initially appears to claim (178c). It soon becomes evident, however, that, given the fact that only the lover is animated by Eros, Eros must act as a cause of the good in entirely different ways for lover and beloved. In fact, Phaedrus argues that the presence of love in the lover acts as a cause 15 16 EROS AND THE INTOXICATIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT of the good exclusively for the beloved (179a–b). The lover becomes useful for the beloved precisely insofar as he pursues not the good, but the beautiful (178d). The lover’s primary object of pursuit, however, is not the beauty of the beloved, but the politically beautiful or the noble. The lover desires to embody in his own person the beautiful or noble life. The desire for the beautiful so understood is then the offspring of a recoil before the ugly or the shameful (178c–d). Lover and beloved are distinguishable as much by the presence and absence of shame as that of love. Since the lover then is the “real man” (aner) who would choose death before dishonor as long as he is under the watchful eyes of his beloved, a city composed of an army of lovers would, by Phaedrus’ account, prove invincible (178e–179a)—she would vanquish all and rule over all and her greatness would be that of universal empire. Eros as instilling the desire for the politically beautiful is the cause of the political good. It is the most useful of political passions. Phaedrus’ beloved then appears to be the city of Athens surrounded by her citizen-lovers who “use their bodies as if they were alien to them and their minds as most their own in order to accomplish anything on her behalf.”2 Though Phaedrus begins this portion of his speech by seeming to identify the old with the ancestral and thereby to associate Eros’ antiquity with the venerability of traditional morality (178b), he has, in fact, subordinated the ancestral to an entirely novel understanding according to which the old means not the ways of one’s fathers, but the ways that transcend any particular city and its traditional order: the ways that all cities have always practiced in deed, whatever they have claimed to practice in speech. As Thucydides’ Athenians assert on the island of Melos, each city has everywhere and always sought to rule over all others.3 In offering his account of Eros, Phaedrus is simultaneously articulating an account of the essential nature of political life: Phaedrus’ erotics is subordinated to a “Machiavellian” political science. It seems to be the case that, according to this science, the distinction between traditional moral virtue and...

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