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.If, as the passage is too often read, this is taken to bean account of all erotic experience, then it would mean that Plato is havingSocrates here issue a general condemnation of sexual consummation in lovea"airs, which would be strange indeed.But the passage is much more limitedthan that limited, again, to a description of the e"orts of a Zeus lover to resistthe temptations of sexual desire in favor of philosophic friendship.One couldhardly imagine, for example, that a follower in the train of Aphrodite would orcould resist such temptations.Rather, the teaching here is the more limited onethat, first, even Zeus lovers have their black horse of desire and will be sorelytempted by sexual desire; but also that, if one wants to have a philosophicfriendship, it is probably best to resist this temptation.As the poignant descrip-tion of a pair of Zeus lovers who do not quite succeed in resisting this temptationshows (256c d), if one does enter into a philosophic relationship a Zeus-love and that relationship becomes sexual as well, its purely philosophic char-acter is likely to be compromised.And is this not true?Second, it is noteworthy that even in the midst of the description of a no lesspassionate a"air (254b c), we are reminded that the sight of the beautifulbeloved serves to remind the lover of his   prior  experience of beauty itself whenit stood with sophrosyne on a sacred pedestal.This is in a way a striking claim.Even in the very midst of the intensity of erotic passion, Socrates seems to besaying, there is some intellectual apprehension in play.Deeply immersed in ourpassion, we nevertheless see something and what we see, what we recognize, isthat the beauty of the beloved is a reminder of true beauty.Indeed, it is this veryrecognition that so inspires us.But this co-presence of sexual desire and intellec-tual insight reminds us of the double role or double challenge of the charioteer,our reason: on the one hand to control the black horse of sexual desire, and onthe other hand to adequately see what is really at stake.Only if, once   reminded of the true beauty it has seen, the charioteer succeeds in controlling the desires ofthe black horse, will the experience be transformed from the potentially vulgarone that every erotic experience risks to the virtuous living promised by Diotimaand limned here in the tale of the successful charioteer.Does this amount to the claim that, for Plato, the lover really just uses thebeloved for his own intellectual ends? That for Plato love is in the end selfish andindeed exploitative of the beloved a charge often enough leveled against him?Such a reading is, I think, unnecessary and even bizarre.In this entire passagethe question of beauty in the phaedrus 87there is not the slightest suggestion that, since the beauty of the beloved remindsthe lover of beauty itself, this somehow diminishes or makes less genuine thelover s love of the beloved.Quite the contrary: it leads the lover to treat thebeloved as well as possible, indeed, to do everything possible to lead the belovedinto philosophy.Moreover against yet another charge often leveled at Platothe poignant description of the experience of the beloved as he too falls in love,testifies that this love is reciprocal.The two benefit each other.Finally, toward the conclusion of the palinode, describing what will happenif the Zeus follower and the beloved are successful in resisting sexual temptationand achieving a philosophic friendship, Socrates says:If now the better elements of the mind (dianoia) prevail, which lead to a well-ordered life and to philosophy,20 they live a life of blessedness and harmony here,self-controlled and orderly, holding in subjection that which causes evil in the soul,and freeing that which causes virtue.When they have accomplished this they arelight and winged, for they have won one of the three truly Olympian contests.Neither human sophrosyne nor divine madness can confer upon a human being agreater good than this.(256b)We now see that what has been developed in the palinode is an elaborationof the claim made but not defended by Diotima in the Symposium, that theexperience of beauty itself could lead not merely to   knowledge of what beautyis  but to   true virtue.  It can be accomplished, to be sure, but only with astruggle, the struggle to control the very human desires of the black horse, andthe   true virtue  to which it will then lead is that of philosophic living.And thisphilosophic living, the story tells us, is inseparable from one might even sayimpossible without philosophic friendship.Moreover, and this is in a way themost stunning claim of the palinode, this philosophic living and this philo-sophic friendship are generated by, and so impossible without, the erotic experi-ence of beauty.The experience of beauty then, at least for certain types of humanbeings, generates philosophy.What, then, can be said about the treatment of beauty in this palinode? I amstruck most of all by the decisive role of the non-discursive elements in theexperience of beauty.It is almost as if the speech is a certain kind of loose proto-phenomenological account, the point of which is to bring us to   see,  that is, tohave the appropriate intuitional experience of beauty and its significance.We arethus as far as possible from the apparently naïve optimism of the Hippias Major(and for that matter the other   definitional  dialogues) that to understandsomething like beauty is a matter of discourse alone, that if only we can get anadequate definition of beauty we will have what we want, we will   know  beautyitself.Both the Symposium and the Phaedrus suggest, almost, that a categorymistake is being made here.Beauty (as perhaps, or in all probability, the other  beings  as well) is simply not the sort of thing that is susceptible of completediscursive articulation.To know the   beings  is something very di"erent from88 plato and the question of beautybeing able to say definitively what they are.Moreover, as we suggested earlier,this non-discursive moment bounds any discourse, any logos, on both sides.Our experience of beauty, first, is originally non-discursive: we see somethingbeautiful, and if these two dialogues are right, this first beautiful object is usuallyor rather necessarily a beautiful person.This non-discursive experience, as bothdialogues suggest, leads us to generate   beautiful logoi    that is, it leads us tospeak in the light of our non-discursive experience.And this discourse may leadus toward a certain culminating experience which is also non-discursive: theinsight, as the Symposium has it, into   Beauty itself,  or as the Phaedrus putsit, the recollection of our   earlier  non-discursive experience of beauty itself.But this in turn suggests, or reminds us, that Plato is not turning the experienceof beauty into some sort of mystical experience, unless you think that everytime you experience beauty you have a mystical experience [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]