#Phaedrus

[spinnychaircirclecasting]

is that lysias's latest great speech in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? ;P

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Quicumque amisit dignitatem pristinam, ignavis etiam iocus est in casu gravi.

- Phaedrus

Whoever has lost his ancient dignity Is a joke to baser men in the midst of grave mistake.

[renaultphile]

Ghosts of ghosts of ghosts…..and we haven’t even started yet

On this re-read I wanted to think more about the role that Plato's Phaedrus plays in The Charioteer.  The description at the end of chapter 3 makes it feel almost like a character in its own right: 

What I have always found so interesting about the gift of the book is how contradictory it is.  It is meant to be an antidote to Jeepers, but the ideas in it ‘don’t exist in real life’.  The comfort in it for Ralph seems to lie in the idea that he can be held to the same standards as everyone else, offering some kind of redemption. But the message of shame is still there, just as it is in Christian doctrine, and even as he hands the book over he seems already to have admitted defeat.  It feels more like a curse than a gift.

But what an extraordinary passage preceding it!  You can link to it here courtesy of this post by @alovelywaytospendanevening. It is a beautiful, idyllic description.  Everything about his encounter with Andrew seems to follow naturally.  Andrew helps him up but makes it feel like a game, they navigate a difficult subject together (war, not the other one), Andrew utters the immortal words ‘I won’t hurt him.’  Andrew takes his shirt off, and Laurie puts down the tract he was pretending to read.  Symbolically, he seems to stop looking for guidance and enjoy the moment.  They are unfazed by being thrown out of Eden, even elated.  I am struggling to think of another passage in the book where Laurie is so filled with joy.  The experience is rooted in the senses, he is living in his body, not his head.  He is living in the moment. 

But it doesn’t last long.  Within two paragraphs, the very real and beautiful horses have reminded him of Plato's Phaedrus, and he immediately thinks of the analogy of Charioteer.

It’s hard not to think of Ralph if we already know the book.  But the book doesn’t represent him anymore.  It has taken on a life of its own.

I’m waiting to see what happens when he gets the book out again and how it affects his relationship with Andrew……I would love your thoughts.....

[grape-v1nes]

Wolfstar (specifically remus) is so Plato’s-philosophy-on-beauty-and-love coded

(remus genuinely feels like sirius’ beauty physically heals his soul and brings him closer to god)

[marydarkblacknoir]

Love is a serious mental disease.

Plato, Phaedrus

[merc-chan]

I have a doubt. So, I was rereading The Charioteer, and in this reread I'm focusing only on the parts with Ralph on it. After Ralph tells Laurie about how he's going to be moved to the other hospital and Laurie tells Ralph about Andrew, there's a moment in which they both lie on the rug in front of the fire while Ralph tells him some story about his time on the sea, and then comes this paragraph:

"The strange feeling of fulfilment touched Laurie again; suddenly he remembered and understood. In the weeks of that summer holiday seven years before, after he had read the Phaedrus by the stream in the wood, he had gone for long walks alone, and, returning, sat in the evening by a September fire, so silent and enclosed that more than once his mother had asked if he was well. It was of this that he had been dreaming."

I remember that afterwards, when Ralph's helping Laurie pack up his room after his mother's wedding, Laurie tells him to sit in a chair, and tells him that it's the chair he always sat on. Is he refering to that dream? Was 'Ralph' always sitting on that chair while Laurie fantasized about him after reading the Phaedrus by the stream in the wood? Because I never really understood the chair thing before. But within this context... I think it kind of make sense?

I would love to read your opinions in the matter, please!

[the-framed-maelstrom]

Just as the wolf loves the lamb, so the lover adores his beloved.

Plato, Phaedrus

[blackponderer]

"Phaedrus" by Plato

[thatscarletflycatcher]

"...On the one hand, man is of such nature that he possesses himself in freedom and self determination; he can and must examine critically all that he encounters; he can and must give shape to his own life on the basis of his insights. On the other hand this same autonomous man is nonetheless so much involved in the Whole of reality that things can happen to him and he can be dislodged from his autonomy. This need not take only the form of forcible restriction. Provided that the man does not close himself off obdurately, it may take such a form that in the very loss of his self-possesion another fulfillment is granted to him, one attainable in no other way."

Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine Madness: On the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus

[philosophybitmaps]

[linusjf]

Phaedrus: Gentleness

“Gentleness is the antidote for cruelty. ” —Phaedrus.

[renaultphile]

"What is it about?" Phaedrus re-enters the narrative (TC re-read week 5)

At the beginning of this year's re-read, I thought it might be interesting to follow the Phaedrus as if it were a character in the book. Part one is here.

When Laurie finally gets out the Phaedrus again, he is alone, and he has sought out another location to read it, one from 'two operations back' before he knew Andrew. Their last encounter has been fraught to say the least (as we were discussing!)

While he is reading, Andrew creeps up on him and surprises him. The book serves as a test of Laurie's sincerity - Andrew couldn't believe he was really absorbed in the book and thought he was deliberately ignoring him. Laurie passes the test in part - he was genuinely absorbed, but he spends the rest of their conversation wishing Andrew would go away or fall asleep. He has been reading a passage all about mirrors, masks, and imitation, and the effects of being in love:

"He is in love, therefore, but with whom he cannot say; he does not know what has become of him, he cannot tell."

Andrew says by way of apology for being irritable,

"I don't know what's come over me, to make me behave like this."

No wonder Laurie is desperate not to reveal what he has been reading!

At this point I remember one of the key messages of the book and its biggest ironies - Socrates (as written by Plato) says that one shouldn't trust the written word, because one cannot interrogate it.

Andrew is not going to be given the opportunity to interrogate anything because Laurie initially hides the book altogether, then reveals only the most elusive hints at its content. Andrew, however, is a natural at Socratic questioning. He asks what the book is about, and Laurie, groping for something 'safe' to say, opts for rhetoric. Andrew merely remarks that Laurie doesn't seem like the kind of person who would be interested in that subject. Meanwhile, Laurie is trying desperately to be truthful and sincere with Andrew, and failing very badly.

Andrew really won't let up. He asks more about the book, and is not satisfied with Laurie's summary of it. When they move on to the analogy of the Charioteer, Laurie seems to read the book as poetry rather than philosophy. He seems to have fallen in love with the book as a fixed entity, for what it represents. Andrew on the other hand has already had to do some hard thinking and examine his moral choices.

Still none the wiser about the content and Laurie's thoughts on it, Andrew begins to interrogate the book itself and its provenance. He asks Laurie if he will lend it to him, Laurie forestalls him again with a false excuse about the state of it, and Andrew insists that does not matter. For a second time, Laurie ignores the message of the book he is reading. When Andrew says 'you needn't for me,' he is trying to connect on a deeper level, where appearances don't matter, and Laurie is resisting.

Finally, we hear those fateful words out of Andrew's mouth: 'Ralph Ross Lanyon', and another attempt to find out what the book means to him. Laurie over-does his denial of Ralph and Andrew responds by saying 'A lot of people would have just told me to mind my own business.'

In the end, Andrew says he will sleep for a bit and then tells him,

"Just forget about me. You looked so peaceful before I came disturbing you. Now you can get on with your book as if I weren't there."

Finally, Laurie can enjoy his book in peace, undisturbed by the real Andrew.

On one of their regular talks in the kitchen, Laurie attempts a bit of sophistry himself:

A cockroach scuttled into a crack behind the draining-board; he watched Andrew reach for a tin of Keatings and sprinkle the crack with it. "Does life stop being sacred," he asked, "when it gets down to cockroaches?" "Well, the Jains don't think so," said Andrew seriously. "But I never know how they meet the fact that our own bodies destroy millions of micro-organisms every day, without giving us any alternative to it except suicide. One has to draw the line where one sees it oneself." "Is that what you call the inner light?" "If you like, yes."

Andrew argues for individualism, not to impose his views on others, but for the right to make his own moral choices as he sees them. We don't find out if they ever discuss Plato again, but Laurie begins to carry the book around with him in his trouser pocket as he had done previously. We're not done with Plato yet…….not by a long chalk.

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

A sick man takes pleasure in anything that does not resist him, but sees anyone who is equal or superior to him as an enemy.

Plato

[pandaemoniumpancakes]

The rich will make temples for Śiva. What shall I, a poor man do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold. Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay.

Basavanna, ‘820.‘ in Speaking of Śiva, trans. A. K. Ramanujan. 

   omnia quae videntur perire mutari (Seneca, from Epistulae 36:11.)

                        ❧

   “Every soul is immortal. That is because whatever is always in motion is immortal, while what moves, and is moved by, something else stops living when it stops moving. So it is only what moves itself that never desists from motion, since it does not leave off being itself. In fact, this self-mover is also the source and spring of motion in everything else that moves; and a source has no beginning. That is because anything that has a beginning comes from some source, but there is no source for this, since a source that got its start from something else would no longer be the source. And since it cannot have a beginning, then necessarily it cannot be destroyed. That is because if a source were destroyed it could never get started again from anything else and nothing else could get started from it—that is, if everything gets started from a source. This then is why a self-mover is a source of motion. And that is incapable of being destroyed or starting up; otherwise all heaven and everything that has been started up would collapse, come to a stop, and never have cause to start moving again. But since we have found that a self-mover is immortal, we should have no qualms about declaring that this is the very essence and principle of a soul, for every bodily object that is moved from outside has no soul, while a body whose motion comes from within, from itself, does have a soul, that being the nature of a soul; and if this is so—that whatever moves itself is essentially a soul—then it follows necessarily that soul should have neither birth nor death.” (Plato, from Phaedrus, 245c-245e, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff)

                        ❧

   “6.23 The Master said, “The wise take joy in rivers, while the Good take joy in mountains. The wise are active, while the Good are still. The wise are joyful, while the Good are long-lived.”

   commentary: This is a famously cryptic passage. A somewhat neo-Daoist-flavored interpretation of the first two lines is provided by Bao Xian: “The wise take joy in actively exercising their talent and wisdom in governing the world, just as water flows on and on and knows no cease. The Good take joy in the sort of peace and stability displayed by mountains, which are naturally nonactive and yet give birth to all of the myriad things.” The precise meaning of the last line is particularly problematic. It is unclear why only the wise (and not the Good) should be joyful, for instance. As for “the Good are long-lived” statement, some commentators attempt to reconcile it with the premature death of Yan Hui by understanding it metaphorically: it is the reputation or beneficial influence of the Good person is long-lived. Others reject this strategy, arguing that—the isolated counter-example of Yan Hui aside—the Good are long-lived because they are calm and free of desire for external things. All of these interpretations are quite speculative.” (Confucius, from Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Edward Slingerland)

                        ❧

   “The world is but a perennial see-saw. Everything in it—the land, the mountains of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt—all waver with a common motion and their own. Constancy itself is nothing but a more languid rocking to and fro. I am unable to stabilize my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness. I grasp it as it is now, at this moment when I am lingering over it. I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage from one age to another (or, as the folk put it, from one seven-year period to the next) but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must adapt this account of myself to the passing hour. I shall perhaps change soon, not accidentally but intentionally. This is a register of varied and changing occurrences, of ideas which are unresolved and, when needs be, contradictory, either because I myself have become different or because I grasp hold of different attributes or aspects of my subjects. So I may happen to contradict myself but, as Demades said, I never contradict truth. If my soul could only find a footing I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself. But my soul is ever in its apprenticeship and being tested. (Michel de Montaigne, from ‘III.2. Of repenting’ in The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech)

[obrother1976]

he's so real

[the-framed-maelstrom]

…but the soul that hath seen the most of Being shall enter into the human babe that shall grow into a seeker after wisdom or beauty, a follower of Muses and a lover.

Plato, Phaedrus