Plato's Phaedrus: To Love Well
In what follows, I will show that
the Phaedrus teaches us a profound lesson about what being a good lover
requires. Specifically, the Phaedrus shows us that being a good lover requires
love to be absorbed into our motivational set in a way that is tightly squired
by knowledge of our own psychology and knowledge of how rhetoric works to
influence that psychology. I will argue for the importance of this lesson and
its constituent ideas by showing the truth in them and ultimately drawing on
their ability to explain the attractiveness of genuine, authentic charm.
After
emerging from the Symposium with a clear and broadly interpreted picture of
love as giving birth in beauty, the Phaedrus introduces an important
distinction: a distinction between good and bad loving. The former is an
enriching and healthy relation, the latter a toxic and unhealthy relation
between a lover and her beloved. Though both kinds of love are a form of
madness, the nature of this madness could not be more different; bad loving is
a destructive kind of madness and good loving is a divinely inspired madness.
More
specifically, the distinction between good and bad loving can be traced back to
the different distribution of power between the three parts of the human soul
in the good and the bad lover, respectively. Here, Plato gives us the same picture of
the human soul as in the Republic. However, instead of simply calling the three
parts rational, spirited, and appetitive, Plato gives us a lively analogy. He
allegorizes the human soul and its three constituents as a charioteer with two
winged horses; one black and one white. The charioteer represents the rational
part of the soul, the black horse the appetitive part, and the white horse the
spirited part. He uses this analogy to give us a first, very colorful, picture of
his distinction between good and bad loving. In the bad lover, and thus in the
destructive kind of madness that can be love, this harnessed team is in constant
conflict with one another. This ultimately leads the bad lover to sink into a
state of utter unhappiness and destruction—a state below that of the average
human state. In the good lover, on the other hand, the harnessed team is in
perfect harmony, each part doing what it is properly suited to do and not
interfering with the other parts. This in effect lifts the good lover up
towards a fulfilling, happy, and divinely inspired life—one that is above the
average human state. Though this is a very figurative and colorful picture, the
thought seems quite convincing. The way in which we talk about love strikes
some of the same cords. Things like “you fell in love with the wrong person”,
“they have a very toxic relationship”, and even “his love for her drove him
insane, but not in a good way” sound very familiar, after all. It is even quite
reasonable to assume that a fair amount of crimes can be attributed to love—the
bad kind of love of course. After all, a strong hate towards another often only
arises after one has fallen in deep, but destructive and thus bad, love with
that person. At the same time, we often find ourselves in awe at the way in
which the good kind of loving, the kind of loving we, although we might not
quite understand what it entails, want for ourselves, has the potential to
transform our lives into something far more fulfilling, purposeful, and
meaningful than we ever thought possible—something many seem to deem worthy of
being called divine. When we’re in love, it seems that the whole world suddenly
becomes brighter, starts to glow, and is filled with a sizzling aliveness. In
this way, there is a very stark difference between good and bad loving.
Having
laid down the basic distinction between good and bad loving, I would now like
to turn to the way in which the Phaedrus is structured. Here, I think we get a
more elaborate account of what good loving requires. Towards the beginning,
Socrates hints at how important it is for the lover to understand the workings
of human psychology, including that of herself. Then, after we get the speeches
about love, we get a rather elaborate examination of rhetoric. Though at first
this discussion of rhetoric strikes many as unexpected, I think it has
something important to say about good loving. Moreover, the structure of the
Phaedrus seems to contain a clear point in itself: for loving to be the good
kind of loving, it needs to be absorbed into our psychology in a way that is
tightly squired by understanding of the workings of human psychology and how
good rhetoric needs to be tailored to the structure of our psychology to be
effective. I will now clarify how exactly these ideas fit together to give us
an important lesson about love.
The
brief survey of self-awareness towards the beginning of the Phaedrus seems to
lead us down the following train of thought. Given Plato’s picture of the human
soul, or rather psychology, as having at least three constituents, there seem
to be at least three different fundamental orderings of people’s motivational
sets. One is primarily appetitive, another primarily spirited, and a third
primarily rational. By motivational set, I mean the complete set of conative
and cognitive states which constitute an individual’s motivations. To clarify,
conative states are roughly desire-like states and thus world-directing states,
while cognitive states are roughly belief-like states and thus world-directed
states. Here, world-directing means they are aimed at changing something about the state of the world while world-directed
means they are concerned with representing how the world is. It is important to note that cognitive states at least to some
degree influence our conative states—the kind of person I believe to be good,
worthy of being, and want to be will largely influence the kind of conative
states I will endorse in my motivational set. In this way, the conative and
cognitive part are in some important sense intertwined—we cannot make a clear
split down the middle, as there are conative aspects to cognitive states and
vice versa. It should, however, have become quite clear why understanding how
our own motivational set is ordered and the distinction between the conative
and cognitive part is necessary to love well. This is because we must
understand the nature and working of the psychology we want love to be absorbed
into before we can figure out the right way to integrate love.
The
second idea is placed at the opposite end of the Phaedrus and is closely
connected to the first. Here, we get an examination of rhetoric. This is the
second part to the lesson about the way in which loving needs to be absorbed
into our psychology to be the good kind. The basic function of rhetoric is to influence
our motivational set. To do this, information needs to be encoded into a
rhetoric shell which will allow this information, which otherwise would likely get
caught in the filter of our cognitive part of the motivational set, to bypass
this filter and thus influence the motivational set in the way the rhetorician desires.
To do this, however, the rhetoric shell must be of the right kind—where right
is a function of the kind of ordering the person’s motivational set and her
kind of soul. But why is all this rhetoric-talk important to loving well or
badly? The answer is to be found in the importance of the function of rhetoric
in loving. Specifically, influencing the people we love to love us back is
important—provided we do so in a way that is ethically acceptable. But to do
this well and effectively, we need to understand two things. For one, we need
to understand what kind of soul they have, and then, secondly, be able to
tailor our rhetoric to influence them in the way that caters to this soul and
psychology. In this way, both
understanding human psychology and understanding rhetoric are an integral part
of good loving.
At
this point the basic point of the Phaedrus should have become clear. Good
loving requires us to understand the relevant human psychology and the way in
which our rhetoric needs to be tailored to this psychology in order to
influence it. With this in mind, I would now like to offer an idea about the
explanatory potential this account of good loving has in explaining the attractiveness
of genuine, authentic charm. It seems
that charm is one of the most sought-after qualities in a partner—hardly anyone
would deny how attractive it is for someone to be very charming, provided her
charm is of genuine and authentic nature. But isn’t charming, then, exactly
what Plato suggests on our interpretation of how properly tailored rhetoric is
an integral part of good loving? I think it might be. After all, charm does
seem to be aimed at bypassing the filter in the cognitive part of the
motivational set in an effort to influence the potential partner—perhaps most
importantly to love us back. For this reason, I think my interpretation of
Plato gives us a reasonable explanation of how it is that charm is so effective
in influencing others, namely because it is a kind of rhetoric that is specifically
designed to bypass the filter in the cognitive part of our motivational set and
influence. As my interpretation of the Phaedrus would suggest, doing this requires
understanding of human psychology and the way in which rhetoric may influence
this psychology.
In
this way, understanding that good loving requires love to be absorbed into our
psychology in a way that is tightly squired by understanding of our psychology
and of how rhetoric can influence this psychology strikes me as an important
insight. As I have shown above, this insight seems to offer a
plausible explanation of our attraction to genuine and authentic
charm—something I have suggested to be a kind of rhetoric specifically designed
to get others to love us.
This understanding often seems to be subconscious.
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