Comic Psychagogia in Plato's Phaedrus

Steve Heiny (Earlham College)

Griswold begins and ends his study of Plato's Phaedrus marveling at the comedy of Plato's pairing Socrates with Phaedrus (Self-Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus 1, 228).  Phaedrus, a "laughable imitation of the Zeus-like" (130), seems comically out of place in a dialogue with Socrates. But it is his pairing with the reader of the Phaedrus that (in addition to explaining his pairing with Socrates) gives Phaedrus his place in the text. Ultimately, I propose, Plato makes Phaedrus the target of the reader's laughter in order to cultivate in the reader an active critic of words, including the very words of the Phaedrus itself, to address any passivity the written word induces in the reader. 

At one point Socrates proposes a definition of rhetoric, that it is the art that leads souls, psychagogia, not only in the law courts and public assemblies, but in private meetings (§n fid€oiw) as well (261a10 [Robin]).  Phaedrus says he's never heard of such a thing—this in spite of the fact that he himself had earlier rehearsed Lysias' attempt to persuade in a private meeting (Burger, Plato's Phaedrus 75; Asmis, "Psychagogia in Plato's Phaedrus," ICS 11 [1986] 155) and in spite of the fact that he himself had earlier willingly played the boy who was the target of the rhetoric of the palinode (243e7-8).  But this blindness to what is happening to him is Phaedrus. If, as Bergson argues, "a comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself" (Laughter 71), his lack of self-knowledge makes Phaedrus comic (Griswold 18-25).  But our laughter has a function that critics have not seen.

It is also a rhetorical strategy, a corrective (Bergson 117, 148, 185, 187), by means of which Plato cultivates in the reader the very awareness lacking in Phaedrus.  He invites his reader to correct Phaedrus'  blindness by recognizing that there truly is a psychagogia—whose merit must be assessed for the sake of one's soul—in private meetings, including the private meeting between text and reader. 

We see this critic in the palinode: he "correctly uses such things" (i.e. imperfect things, De Vries, A Commentary on the Phaedrus of Plato 147) as reminders (ÍpomnÆmasin 249c7) of something better.  Socrates so uses Lysias' speech, unlike Phaedrus who embraces it uncritically.  When Socrates insists that writing can serve as a reminder (Ípomn∞sai 275d1, ÍpomnÆmata 276d3, ÍpÒmnhsin 278a1), but Phaedrus laughably uses the same word to confess that he can't remember their argument (ÍpÒmnhsÒn 277b4), we see Plato telling us how to use his own writing (Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas 207-8 and 278 n. 7; Griswold 210).

It is not the case, then, that the only defense Plato offers of his writing is an acknowledgment that it can bring on such passivity (Burger, "Socratic Irony and the Platonic art of Writing: The Self-Condemnation of the Written Word in Plato's Phaedrus," Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 9 [1978] 114).  The critic his comedy creates is the goal of Plato's psychagogia everywhere, a psychagogia that invites an active scrutiny of its own words (Sinaiko, Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in Plato 12-16; Frede, "Plato's Arguments and the Dialogue Form," in Klagge and Smith, eds., Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues 217-219).  Plato's comedy is serious psychagogia.  Its aim is nothing less than to win the reader to philosophy.