Admiration's Double Labor: Phaedrus in the Mirror

“Where is that boy I was talking to?,” asks Socrates at the beginning of the most roundabout reversal of the Phaedrus, the narrative climax at which his defense of love begins.1 “He must listen to me once more, and not rush off to yield to his nonlover before he hears what I have to say” (243e). Socrates' leading question operates, first of all, as the apostrophic reinvocation of debate, for his previous mock-argument against love addressed a hypothetical beautiful boy. Socrates again summons this ideal presence, a spectator whose absence suggests that he stands in for the future reader of Plato's dialogue. More slyly, though, the question refers to Socrates' interlocutor, the boy Phaedrus, and their provocative ongoing encounter in the woods outside of Athens. In the (at least) double scene of discourse the Phaedrus stages, philosophical demonstration receives its dramatic enactment in dialogic form.2 Phaedrus and Socrates embody the subjects of argument, the beautiful boy and his lover. In a dialogue bustling with sexual double-entendres, Plato uses multiple means to claim the superlative value of love. If this superbly handled situation demonstrates literary mastery, however, it also displays the insistent textual repetition that haunts Plato's philosophy of ideal forms. In the Phaedrus, Socrates serves both to define and to exemplify the quality of the singular ideal, love; yet he constantly resorts to love's false simulacra in order to sustain his argument. Thus, the mimetic operation Plato elsewhere condemns inhabits his dialogue's rhetorical strategies. Within this structured universe of ideal forms, good copies, and simulacra, it would appear that, in every instance, the philosopher must have recourse to the discredited simulacra in order to define the ideal.

The definition of love in the Phaedrus depends upon the doubling play of the mirror for its very constitution. Apparently