#Phaedrus

[blvvdk3ep]

I think we should replace all essays with yaoi of our favorite philosophers and playwrights arguing #embracetradition

[the-framed-maelstrom]

When the essence of the soul ascends to the outermost boundary of Being, it encounters the realm of pure presence—the clearing where true Being reveals itself. This realm lies beyond the confines of sensory perception and earthly representation. It is the region where Being itself unfolds in its primordial truth, free from color, shape, or tangibility, accessible only to the intellect. As the soul partakes in this revealing, it aligns with the unconcealing (aletheia), gazing upon the essence of justice, self-control, and knowledge—not as transient or mutable phenomena, but as entities revealed in their eternal, unchanging truth. In this moment of alignment, the soul is carried through the cycle of Being, returning to its origin within the cosmic order. The soul’s charioteer, embodying the role of Dasein as the guide of Being, reins in the drives and distractions (the horses) to dwell in this state of attunement with the primordial essence of Being. This is the act of care (Sorge) as the grounding structure of existence—an effort to sustain the harmony of its essence within the greater unfolding of truth. Ambrosia and nectar symbolize the sustenance derived from this ontological attunement, the nourishment of Being that reaffirms its place in the cosmic order.

Plato: Phaedrus (Heidegger Narration)

[loneberry]

This itching in the wings, in the absence of the beloved, is a violent pain: The channels through which the wings push up are dried up and closed and hinder the growth of the wing. What is inside them, full of desire but closed in, beats like a pulse in an inflamed sore; it pierces these channels like a needle. Thus the whole soul everywhere is stung (κεντουμένη) as if bitten by a gadfly and tortured. At the same time, having the memory of beauty, it is full of joy. [When it sees the beautiful, the part where the wings are pushing is soothed], it has a respite from the prickings and the tortures, and tastes for a time the sweetest of delights.  —Plato's Phaedrus, quoted in "God in Plato," Simone Weil's fragmentary notes on Plato. Weil: “The soul recovers a memory of the god that it followed above and whose image it sees in the beloved. ... The lover tries to make the beloved as much like this god whose memory he has found again as possible, and when the beloved responds to this love, there is established between the two of them a friendship founded on a common participation in divine things.”

[kebriones]

(had to split bc they're on different pages)

Alcibiades: You won't refuse to drink from my hand.

Phaedrus: who can refuse oblivion and beauty given by your hands?

🫣🥴🥴🥴okayy

[canon-in-too-deep]

Typesetuary Day 27

Typesetuary is almost over! We're in the final five, woooooooooo!

Today, we have another classic work: Phaedrus by Plato, sized for half letter (letter folio).

You can find it for FREE in my library! (Personal use only!)

[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]

John Addington Symonds on Plato

A Problem in Greek Ethics, John Addington Symonds, privately published in 1908.

This passage reminds me of the way Mary Renault uses Plato in The Charioteer. Laurie does seem to read the Phaedrus as poetry, and Ralph seems to believe in the divine gift of love, a gift which seems to torture him while offering salvation. it reminded me particularly of his response to finding out that Laurie was not dead after all:

"There must be some reason why things happen. Something in us must touch them off. Like a magnetic mine."

[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)

[fredbensonenthusiast]

So, here are my thoughts on the excerpt from The Life of Alcibiades. I found it very interesting, because it kind of says more about the time it was written than about the customs of Ancient Greece. I apologize for the length of this!

"No girl at Athens had any education at all, and could not possibly be a companion to a man except for one purpose."

"The absence of the culture and of the mental and moral development of women"

Here, dear old Fred is displaying a logic typical of an Englishman of his period: formal education and culture are intrinsically linked; therefore, since Athenian women had no access to formal education, they had no culture at all!

“With such a guardian, then, we must make allowance for a lad whom Athens was doing her very best to spoil and corrupt. She was crazy about him: whatever he did, as the preservation of these innumerable adventures of his youth shows, was the subject of laughter and gossip. As a boy and a young man he provoked all the social interest which is now shown in the doings of some high-bred, daring, witty and wonderfully beautiful girl; if Athens had had daily papers they would have been full of paragraphs about Alcibiades. Every madcap insolence was forgiven him by the adoring city for his amazing charm and his beauty at an age when, in modern life, he would still have been in the fifth form of a public school and liable to be set down to write five hundred lines of Homer or to be birched. But we find him in his school-class asking his master for a Homer, and, because he had not got one, smacking his face. He was forgiven; nothing happened.”

I don’t know if Benson was the first person to come up with this concept, but this is truly a fantastic description: Alcibiades as a media phenomenon! Everybody talks about him, everybody knows what he’s done, every boy wants to be as cool as him. He seemed unstoppable, until suddenly he wasn’t. He’s debauched, reckless and self-destructive, yet his imperfections are actually a large part of his appeal, a way for people to form a parasocial relationship with him and somehow understand his deeply flawed but shining humanity. The Marilyn Monroe of Ancient Greece!

If Benson were a very bold author, he could’ve written a decadent novel around this. He knew how to write social comedy, so this would’ve been an obvious progression. But as we know, his self-preservation instincts always got the better of him.

“The flesh, so ran his most Christian gospel, warred against the spirit; the two were like a pair of ill-mated horses harnessed to a chariot which was driven by the lover of beauty, and the wicked black horse of the flesh had to be tamed, and its wanton desires beaten out of it, till at length it learned its lesson, and no longer lusted after the fair form, but with awe and holy reverence discerned through it the eternal beauty of God. [...] It is in this spirit that, at the end of his dialogue with the young Phædrus under the plane trees of the Ilyssus, he offered the prayer which, but for the paganism of its invocation, might have been that of some enlightened Christian mystic after the realization of Him who is altogether lovely.”

Another typical fallacy: he was “righteous” and enlightened, which means he was a proto-Christian! This one has been around since the Middle Ages, as a way to justify the moral validity of Ancient Greek philosophers.

“It is also important, in rendering his environment, to try to dissipate the erroneous view of Athenian love which is current.”

“But the Athenian lover, as defined by Plato, was no carnalist, but one who filled the mind of his beloved with all manliness and noble aspirations. He was not, as Socrates the arch-lover of youth is never tired of insisting, the lover of the beauty of his body, but of the beauty of his soul, which he discerned and adored through the fair veil of the flesh. The whole instinct, largely the result of the social non-existence of women at Athens, was not considered shameful or secret it was in no sense a hidden moral cancer, nor could it possibly have been, since, as far as we can judge, there was as much cancer as healthy tissue, and many, probably the majority, of the most high-minded of intellectual Athenians, Socrates and Plato, Themistocles and Sophocles, accepted and shared it as a normal instinct, and saw in it an elevating influence.”

"There was an ideal affection behind it; it did not result in the promiscuous and abnormal immorality with which it usually credited."

There’s a lot of bad faith arguing here, and this rationalization continues to be repeated throughout the text. Benson took Plato’s idealization of Socrates at face value and extended it to the whole Athenian society, while conveniently ignoring all the evidence within Plato’s own texts that indicates most Athenian men didn’t follow this anti-carnalist philosophy to the letter (or at all). There’s even an adult male/male couple in the Symposium!

I also noticed he raised the matter of gender segregation in Classical Athens, but excused himself from making any potentially worthy comparison between it and his own deeply homosocial society, where boys used to grow up mostly around only boys. And considering his comments in Mother, we know he was aware of this reality.

I don’t take Benson as stupid, nor do I think he was a gullible and/or pious man. I believe he knew a lot of his arguments didn’t hold water. He was doing his usual preaching-to-the-choir number, which allowed him to write about the things he was interested in without making too much of a fuss. He probably thought it was the only option available at the time (which is understandable, of course).

---

I remember you also mentioned a possible correlation between Benson's and Ralph's arguments. I think they're different in nature. Benson was basically arguing that homosexuality in Classical Athens was a rather incidental thing, since the average male/male relationship there was free of “any promiscuous and abnormal immorality.” Ralph, on the other hand, seems to acknowledge the prominence of homosexuality in this historical context; what he was actually trying to say is that men like Bunny and Sandy would be ridiculed and disrespected even in Ancient Greece, because they are effeminate and enjoy (or are perceived to enjoy) bottoming, while Laurie would be respected because he maintains a traditionally masculine appearance (and is a top?) — a sound point, mind you.

Oh, this is such a treat @alovelywaytospendanevening 😊 I have been pondering on this all day, no apologies needed for the length of it! I am so glad I asked you for your thoughts on the way Fred tries to 'explain' or perhaps 'explain away' Athenian 'love'. I feel like both Fred and Ralph are using a kind of 'straw man' argument, as in 'people talk a lot of rubbish', conveniently leaving it to the reader to infer what that might be and both avoiding the need to commit themselves to an actual view - both distance themselves from it in different ways......fascinating. Anyway, thank you! I so enjoyed this 🧐

[weatheredfailnot]

A’loq’s adoptive parents <33

[raysanthology]

feeling meh so I'll post on my Dragon Age account tomorrow but here's some Phaedrus and Abdiel! I decided to change his hair hehe. Also I wish I got more pics of Phaedrus but I suck at trying to take them sometimes haha but he's so HANSUM

[the-framed-maelstrom]

As the wolf, in the spectral glow of the moon, watches the lamb with eyes ablaze—hunger and worship entwined—so does the lover, trembling before the altar of his beloved, adore with a passion that devours even as it kneels.

Plato, Phaedrus (Victor Hugo Narration)

[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!

[quotationadmiration]

Everyone is bound to bear patiently the results of his own example.

Phaedrus

[mercuriicultores]

Plato – Phaedrus, 279c

Ὦ φίλε Πάν τε καὶ ἄλλοι ὅσοι τῇδε θεοί, δοίητέ μοι καλῷ γενέσθαι τἄνδοθεν· ἔξωθεν δὲ ὅσα ἔχω, τοῖς ἐντὸς εἶναί μοι φίλια. Πλούσιον δὲ νομίζοιμι τὸν σοφόν· τὸ δὲ χρυσοῦ πλῆθος εἴη μοι ὅσον μήτε φέρειν μήτε ἄγειν δύναιτο ἄλλος ἢ ὁ σώφρων. Ἔτ᾽ ἄλλου του δεόμεθα, ὦ Φαῖδρε; Ἐμοὶ μὲν γὰρ μετρίως ηὖκται.

[LAT] O amice Pan aliique omnes dii, qui locum hunc colitis, date mihi ut pulcher intus efficiar: et quaecumque extrinsecus habeo, illis quae intrinsecus sunt, sint amica. Divitem autem sapientem existimem. Tantum vero mihi sit auri, quantum nec ferre nec ducere quaet alius nisi vir temperans.

[HIS] Oh querido Pan, y demás dioses que aquí habitéis, concededme que llegue a ser bello por dentro, y todo lo que tengo por fuera se enlace en amistad con lo de dentro; que considere rico al sabio; que todo el dinero que tenga sólo sea el que pueda llevar y transportar consigo un hombre sensato, y no otro.