Chariot allegory
Plato paints the picture of a charioteer driving a chariot pulled by two winged horses:
"First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome."[4]
The charioteer represents intellect, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth; one horse represents rational or moral impulse or the positive part of passionate nature (e.g., righteous indignation); while the other represents the soul's irrational passions, appetites, or concupiscent nature. The charioteer directs the entire chariot/soul, trying to stop the horses from going different ways, and to proceed towards enlightenment.
Plato describes a "great circuit" which souls make as they follow the gods in the path of enlightenment. Those few souls which are fully enlightened are able to see the world of the forms in all its glory. Some souls have difficulty controlling the black horse, even with the help of the white horse. They may bob up into the world of the forms, but at other times enlightenment is hidden from them. If overcome by the black horse or forgetfulness, the soul loses its wings and is pulled down to earth.
Should that happen, the soul is incarnated into one of nine kinds of person, according to how much truth it beheld. In order of decreasing levels of truth seen, the categories are: (1) philosophers, lovers of beauty, or someone musical and erotic; (2) law-abiding kings or civic leaders; (3) politicians, estate-managers or businessmen; (4) ones who specialize in bodily health; (5) prophets or mystery cult participants; (6) poets or imitative artists; (7) craftsmen or farmers; (8) sophists or demagogues; and (9) tyrants.[5]
One need not suppose that Plato intended this as a literal discussion of metempsychosis or reincarnation: perhaps he meant it figuratively.[6]
Plato does not see the human soul as a sort of patchwork of emotions and concepts; this differs from the views of many philosophers of his time. Instead he views the soul as a sort of composite, in which many different elements blend together and affect each other. He uses the allegory of the charioteer to explain that love is a reflection of love of the forms, and is thus a "divine madness," a theia mania.
Madness and divine inspiration
In the Phaedrus, Socrates makes the rather bold claim that some of life's greatest blessings flow from madness; and he clarifies this later by noting that he is referring specifically to madness inspired by the gods. Phaedrus is Plato's only dialogue that shows Socrates outside the city of Athens, out in the country. It was believed that spirits and nymphs inhabited the country, and Socrates specifically points this out after the long palinode with his comment about listening to the cicadas. After originally remarking that "landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me, only people do",[Note 54] Socrates goes on to make constant remarks concerning the presence and action of the gods in general, nature gods such as Pan and the nymphs, and the Muses, in addition to the unusually explicit characterization of his own daemon. The importance of divine inspiration is demonstrated in its connection with the importance of religion, poetry and art, and above all else, love. Eros, much like in the Symposium, is contrasted from mere desire of the pleasurable and given a higher, heavenly function. Unlike in the Ion, a dialogue dealing with madness and divine inspiration in poetry and literary criticism, madness here must go firmly hand in hand with reason, learning, and self-control in both love and art. This rather bold claim has puzzled readers and scholars of Plato's work for centuries because it clearly shows that Socrates saw genuine value in the irrational elements of human life, despite many other dialogues that show him arguing that one should pursue beauty and that wisdom is the most beautiful thing of all.
Pederasty
The pederastic relationships common to ancient Greek life are also at the fore of this dialogue. In addition to theme of love discussed in the speeches, seeming double entendres and sexual innuendo are abundant; we see the flirtation between Phaedrus and Socrates. As Phaedrus encourages Socrates to make his first speech, Phaedrus makes a remark at noon-time that Socrates should not leave as the heat has not passed and it is "straight-up, as they say," Socrates wishes to know what Phaedrus is holding under his cloak, and so on. The relationships discussed in the speeches are explicitly pederastic. And yet, this is tempered in various ways; role reversals between lover and beloved are constant, as they are in the Symposium. Socrates, ostensibly the lover, exhorts Phaedrus to lead the way at various times, and the dialogue ends with Socrates and Phaedrus leaving as "friends": equals, rather than partaking in the lover/beloved relationship inherent in Greek pederasty. In the beginning, they sit themselves under a chaste tree, which is precisely what its name suggests—often known as "monk's pepper", it was used by monks to decrease sexual urges and is believed to be an antaphrodisiac. Notably, Socrates sees the pederastic relationship as ideally devoid of sexual consummation; rather than being used for sexual pleasure, the relationship is a form of divine madness, helping both lover and beloved to grow and reach the divine.
Rhetoric, philosophy, and art
The Phaedrus also gives us much in the way of explaining how art should be practiced. The discussion of rhetoric, the proper practice of which is found to actually be philosophy, has many similarities with Socrates's role as a "midwife of the soul" in the Theaetetus; the dialectician, as described, is particularly resonant. To practice the art, one must have a grasp of the truth and a detailed understanding of the soul in order to properly persuade. Moreover, one must have an idea of what is good or bad for the soul and, as a result, know what the soul should be persuaded towards. To have mastered the tools of an art is not to have mastered the art itself, but only its preliminaries. This is much like the person who claims to have mastered harmony after learning the highest and lowest notes of the lyre. To practice an art, one must know what that art is for and what it can help one achieve.
The role of divine inspiration in philosophy must also be considered; the philosopher is struck with the fourth kind of madness, that of love, and it is this divine inspiration that leads him and his beloved towards the good—but only when tempered with self-control.
Writing, examined separately but ultimately equated with philosophy and rhetoric, is somewhat deprecated; it is stated that writing can do little but remind those who already know. Unlike dialectic and rhetoric, writing cannot be tailored to specific situations or students; the writer does not have the luxury of examining his reader's soul in order to determine the proper way to persuade. When attacked it cannot defend itself, and is unable to answer questions or refute criticism. As such, the philosopher uses writing "for the sake of amusing himself" and other similar things rather than for teaching others. A writer, then, is only a philosopher when he can himself argue that his writing is of little worth, among other requirements.
This final critique of writing with which the dialogue concludes seems to be one of the more interesting facets of the conversation for those who seek to interpret Plato in general; Plato, of course, comes down to us through his numerous written works, and philosophy today is concerned almost purely with the reading and writing of written texts. It seems proper to recall that Plato's ever-present protagonist and ideal man, Socrates, fits Plato's description of the dialectician perfectly, and never wrote a thing.
There is an echo of this point of view in the Seventh Letter, wherein Plato (or the pseudo-Platonic author) says not to write down things of importance. [Note 55]
Soul: soul-leading; life as self-motion; self-motion and intelligence
Jessica Moss has argued that the entire unity of the Phaedrus is assured by the motif of soul-leading.[7] The discussion of rhetoric, for instance, features the orator leading the soul to some decision or course of action. Socrates' great myth illustrates this motif most clearly when the soul is depicted as a charioteer and its horses, being led around a heavenly circuit. This is the occasion for the first appearance in Plato's dialogues of the prominent Platonic doctrine that life is motion: the soul, being the principle (or source) of life, is that which moves itself, as opposed to inanimate objects that require an external source of motion to move them.[8] The view that life is self-motion and that the soul is a self-mover is used by Plato to guarantee the immortality of the soul, making this a novel argument for the soul's immortality not found in the Phaedo.[9] Plato relies, further, on the view that the soul is a mind in order to explain how its motions are possible: Plato combines the view that the soul is a self-mover with the view that the soul is a mind in order to explain how the soul can move things in the first place (e.g., how it can move the body to which it is attached in life).[10] Souls move things by means of their thoughts.[11]
