The Role Of Madness In Phaedrus By Plato

The current American lifestyle is arguably centered around what ancient Greek philosophers called the desires of the heart: ambition, power, and money, and the desires of the liver: sex, food, and alcohol. Plato, like most Ancient Greek philosophers, however, looked down upon giving into such desires because he believed doing so allowed irrationality to lead one’s life. Instead, Plato extoled a life led by reason, stemming from the brain. Plato exhibits his view through the voice of Socrates in Phaedrus by showing how love madness, usually thought to be a lack of reason led by the sexual desires of the liver, is a means of living a desirable life of philosophy, led by the reason-based desires of the brain. In telling the story of Democritus, Ancient Pseudo-Hippocrates, like Plato, displays his uncommon perception of madness and its relation to the practice of philosophy. Modern-day researchers, Paul Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, who view madness not in terms of philosophy, but still in relation to the brain and thinking, also perceive madness differently than their society. By defining madness in ways unique from the commonly held beliefs of their times and societies, Plato, …show more content…
If “desire takes command . . . and drags [a man] . . . without reason toward pleasure” (17) in regards to pursuing a boy, then reason does not guide the man, which means he cannot practice philosophy. A life without philosophy, in the eyes of Plato, would be inherently bad or at the very least, bad in the sense that it would be impossible to regain one’s wings and return to heaven; love, by Socrates’s new definition, cannot be related to such a bad, unphilosophical life because it is connected only to the good on earth. A man led predominantly by sexual desire, then, cannot truly be in love. Therefore, Socrates now requires true love---true love madness, that is---to be