Ph?drus, which meant nothing to our Ph?drus since he didn’t call himself by that name. The Greek Ph?drus is not a Sophist but a young orator who is a foil for Socrates in this dialogue, which is about the nature of love and the possibility of philosophic rhetoric. Ph?drus doesn’t appear to be very bright, and has an awful sense of rhetorical quality, since he quotes from memory a really bad speech by the orator Lysias. But one soon learns that this bad speech is simply a setup, an easy act for Socrates to follow with a much better speech of his own, and following that with a still better speech, one of the finest in all the Dialogues of Plato.
Beyond that, the only remarkable thing about Ph?drus is his personality. Plato often names Socrates’ foils for characteristics of their personality. A young, overtalkative, innocent and good-natured foil in the Gorgias is named Polus, which is Greek for “colt.” Ph?drus’ personality is different from this. He is unallied to any particular group. He prefers the solitude of the country to the city. He is aggressive to the point of being dangerous. At one point he threatens Socrates with violence. Ph?drus, in Greek, means “wolf.” In this dialogue he is carried away by Socrates’ discourse on love and is tamed.
Our Ph?drus reads the dialogue and is tremendously impressed by the magnificent poetic imagery. But he’s not tamed by it because he also smells in it a faint odor of hypocrisy. The speech is not an end in itself, but is being used to condemn that same affective domain of understanding it makes its rhetorical appeal to. The passions are characterized as the destroyer of understanding, and Ph?drus wonders if this is where the condemnation of the passions so deeply buried in Western thought got its start. Probably not. The tension between ancient Greek thought and emotion is described elsewhere as basic to Greek makeup and culture. Interesting though.
The next week the Professor of Philosophy again does not appear, and Ph?drus uses the time to catch up on his work at the University of Illinois.
The next week, in the University of Chicago bookstore across the street from where he is about to attend class, Ph?drus sees two dark eyes that stare at him steadily through a shelf of books. When the face appears he recognizes it as the face of the innocent student who had been verbally beaten up earlier in the quarter and had disappeared. The face looks as though the student knows something Ph?drus doesn’t know. Ph?drus walks over to talk, but the face retreats and goes out the door, leaving Ph?drus puzzled. And on edge. Perhaps he’s just fatigued and jumpy. The exhaustion of teaching at Navy Pier on top of the effort to outflank the whole body of Western academic thought at the University of Chicago is forcing him to work and study twenty hours a day with inadequate attention to food or exercise. It could be just fatigue that makes him think something is odd about that face.
But when he walks across the street to the class, the face follows about twenty paces behind. Something is up.
Ph?drus enters the classroom and waits. Soon, there comes the student again, back into the room after all these weeks. He can’t expect to get credit now. The student looks at Ph?drus with a half-smile. He’s smiling at something, all right.
At the doorway there are some footsteps, and then Ph?drus suddenly knows… and his legs turn rubbery and his hands start to shake. Smiling benignly in the doorway, stands none other than the Chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods at the University of Chicago. He is taking over the class.
This is it. This is where they throw Ph?drus out the front door.
Courtly, grand, with imperial magnanimity the Chairman stands in the doorway for a moment, then talks to a student who seems to know him. He smiles, while looking away from the student, around the classroom, as if to find another face that is familiar to him, nods and then chuckles a little, waiting for the bell to ring.
That’s why that kid is here. They’ve explained to him why they accidentally beat him up, and just to show what good guys they are they’re going to let him have a ringside seat while they beat up Ph?drus.
How are they going to do it? Ph?drus already knows. First they are going to destroy his status dialectically in front of the class by showing how little he knows about Plato and Aristotle. That won’t be any trouble. Obviously they know a hundred times more about Plato and Aristotle than he ever will. They’ve been at it all their lives.
Then, when they have thoroughly cut him up dialectically, they will suggest that he either shape up or get out. Then they are going to ask some more questions, and he won’t know the answers to those either. Then they are going to suggest that his performance is so abominable that he not bother to attend, but leave the class right now. There are variations possible but this is the basic format. It’s so easy.
Well, he has learned a lot, which is what he has come for. He can do his thesis in some other way. With that thought the rubbery feeling leaves him and he calms down.
Ph?drus has grown a beard since the Chairman last saw him, and so is still unidentified. No long advantage. The Chairman will locate him soon enough.
The Chairman lays his coat down carefully, takes a chair on the opposite side of the large round table, sits, and then brings out an old pipe and stuffs it for what must be nearly a half a minute. One can see he has done this many times before.
In a moment of attention to the class he studies faces with a smiling hypnotic gaze, sensing the mood, but feeling it is not just right. He stuffs the pipe some more, but without hurry.
Soon the moment arrives, he lights the pipe, and before long there is in the classroom an odor of smoke.
At last he speaks:
“It is my understanding”, he says, “that today we are to begin discussion of the immortal Ph?drus.” He looks at each student separately. “Is that correct?”
Members of the class assure him timidly that it is. His persona is overwhelming.
The Chairman then apologizes for the absence of the previous Professor, and describes the format of what will follow. Since he already knows the dialogue himself he will elicit from the class answers that will show how well they have studied it.
That’s the best way to do it, Ph?drus thinks. That way one can learn to know the individual students. Fortunately Ph?drus has studied the dialogue so carefully it is almost memorized.
The Chairman is right. It is an immortal dialogue, strange and puzzling at first, but then hitting you harder and harder, like truth itself. What Ph?drus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things. There is no contradiction. There never really can be between the core terms of monistic philosophies. The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it’s not, you’ve got two. The only disagreements among the monists concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself. The One can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech. Socrates chooses a heaven-and-earth analogy, showing how individuals are drawn toward the One by a chariot drawn by two horses. —
But the Chairman now directs a question to the student next to Ph?drus. He is baiting him a little, provoking him to attack.
The student, whose identity is mistaken, doesn’t attack, and the Chairman with great disgust and frustration finally dismisses him with a rebuke that he should have read the material better.
Ph?drus’ turn. He has calmed down tremendously. He must now explain the dialogue.
“If I may be permitted to begin again in my own way”, he says, partly to conceal the fact that he didn’t hear what the previous student said.
The Chairman, seeing this as a further rebuke to the student next to him, smiles and says contemptuously it is certainly a good idea.
Ph?drus proceeds. “I believe that in this dialogue the person of Ph?drus is characterized as a wolf.”
He has delivered this quite loudly, with a flash of anger, and the Chairman almost jumps. Score!
“Yes”, the Chairman says, and a gleam in his eye shows he now recognizes who his bearded assailant is. “Ph?drus in Greek does mean ‘wolf.’ That’s a very acute observation.” He begins to recover his composure. “Proceed.”
“Ph?drus meets Socrates, who knows only the ways of the city, and leads him into the country, whereupon he begins to recite a speech of the orator, Lysias, whom he admires. Socrates asks him to read it and Ph?drus does.”
“Stop!” says the Chairman, who has now completely recovered his composure. “You are giving us the plot, not the dialogue.” He calls on the next student.
None of the students seems to know to the Chairman’s satisfaction what the dialogue is about. And so with
