Love In Plato's Phaedrus

In the beginning of “Phaedrus,” Socrates is convinced, by Phaedrus, to visit the country for a discussion. Socrates is immediately uncomfortable and out of place once he steps outside the city walls. Socrates is a man of the polis, or in other words “the city”. He is not a man who typically ventures beyond the city gates, but would rather stay inside to enjoy “stimulating” conversation. He did not seem to appreciate the beauty and meaning that can be found in nature. However, somewhere along the way Socrates seems to change his mind, and this is where it all begins.
Socrates tells Phaedrus in the passage above that “the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees, or the country.” You can almost hear the disgust in his voice …show more content…
Socrates has two main speeches in “Phaedrus” the first regarding love and its negative effects as a means of refuting Lysias’s claims about love. Socrates discusses love as a form of madness and how it forces people to lose morality and control. He seems to be drawing on his own opinions that he has formed from the polis. He is convinced that love is a terrible thing and that it causes more harm than good. However, in his second speech, known as “The Great Speech”, he discusses love as eros and that there are four types of divine madness. The four types are each connected to different gods Apollo, Diyonsous, the Muses, and Aphrodite. The fourth type is eros and he relates it to the soul by saying the soul is like a chariot with two horses and a driver. He says the greatest good would be to fly with the gods and if the soul is strong it will catch the ideas of beauty and self-knowledge. His descriptions of the heavens and the gods are clearly influenced by nature and this is where his contradicting statements come full …show more content…
He incorporated nature into his second speech to help prove his point. He also mentions the gods which are very influenced by nature in their qualities. He even says “…happy as in a mystery; shining in pure light, pure ourselves and yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, as in an oyster shell…” (Phaedrus 113). He is specifically making a comparison to nature, even though he supposedly thinks it is not inspiring. Socrates is influenced by nature regardless of how out of place he feels in the country. This idea of the city and the country appears in the beginning and is carried throughout the dialogue. The two men’s opinions are greatly influenced by their surroundings and help them to be better philosophers. They tie love and madness together with nature and natural human