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CHAPTER EIGHT Truth Phaedrus 247c-250c We have explored something of the destiny that awaits the human soul. Yet the Phaedrus differs from the Phaedo in that its focus is less on the ultimate fate of the soul and more on the life of the soul in advance of incarnation. Socrates maintains in the Meno and Phaedo that we had an acquaintance with ideas in an earlier existence. But there Plato had not ventured to put into words a description of the primordial, prenatal encounter that the soul had with the ideas. This encounter is detailed for us in the central pages of the Phaedrus. Plato's metaphysical texts are often read -as early exercises in physical science, charting the structure of the heavens and the earth. We must grant that although Plato's own final picture of the universe becomes codified in authoritative form in the Timaeus, there surely is a world picture contained in the Meno and the Gorgias, the Phaedo and the Republic, and the Phaedrus. Their mythical passages sketch the Earth, with its rocks and seas, grottos and caves, and Tartarus, the underworld ; then, above the Earth, the winds and clouds of the sublunary region; again above that the bright upper air and aither, where the heavenly bodies circulate; and, special to the Phaedrus, the outer rim of heaven and even the "place beyond the heavens." Parts of this "meteorology " certainly replicate the Orphic cosmologies. And yet, whether we are reading the old Orphic texts or the text of Plato, treating the arduous journey of the soul to the places of its purification, its return to Earth, or its ultimate release, we cannot suppose them to be manuals for a space flight. As I noted in the previous chapter, when we read, "the souls that are called immortal mount up to the summit of the heavens I 174 175 I Truth and see the things that are outside," this is an imagined soul flying through an imagined heaven and an imagined space and time. We have to dematerialize the account and grasp its cosmology in relation to the main theme of the myth: the origin and fate of the soul itself. At 249b-c, and restated at 24ge4, Plato establishes a general condition for becoming human: the soul must have seen truth, aletheia, because a human soul must be able to grasp things according to the idea. Recollection makes that possible, as we shall be seeing in detail. Thus the mythically stated journey of the soul in and beyond the cosmos, in the company of the god and a select group of companions, proves to be the condition for the possibility of characteristically human awareness. Stated mythically, it is a prenatal vision, a story of how being and truth are infused into our souls, a prenatal encounter of the soul with being, truth, justice, and the like. And the topic actually has to be treated to some extent mythically, for it is an effort to express in words the ground of the possibility of dialectical reason, an account that cannot be conducted only in dialectical terminology. Its value is not diminished by its mythical form of statement. We are making not a cosmological reading, then, but a reading focused on the grounds for having a self and knowing oneself. In fact, the whole dialogue has already been convincingly expounded as an exercise in self-knowledge by Griswold.1 Griswold is able to treat all three rhetorical exercises as being animated by the question of self-knowledge .2 It is in the teaching of the supernal life of the soul that Socrates achieves the self-knowledge he has been seeking. Even the account of the heavens and what lies beyond the heavens continues the same course of inquiry into the self or soul, for what this speech opens up is the eternal homeland of the soul. Self-scrutiny and self-knowledge have not been left behind at the point at which the Phaedrus becomes most metaphysical, because that metaphysics contains the truth about the soul? It was possible for ancient readers of the Phaedrus to take the Great Speech of Socrates, and parallel texts from other dialogues, as essays in cosmology. But we cannot do so. We must interpret them as the elaboration of self-knowledge. 1. Charles Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus. 2. Ibid., pp. 45-51, 57-59, 74-137. 3. Griswold makes this point well in ibid., pp. 3-4, 92-99...

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