Phaedrus

The main theme of the first half of Phaedrus is the difference between these two kinds of love, and the desirability of each. Lysias’s opening speech, as read by Phaedrus, makes no mention of what Socrates will come to call “ideal love.” For Lysias, all love is physical and erotic; it warps the senses of the lover to the point of madness. As Socrates later points out, Lysias’s argument suffers from his tendency not to define the terms he uses. In this case, Lysias makes no effort to distinguish between different varieties of love. When Socrates finally begins to rebut Lysias’s premise (after first giving a revised version of his speech on the same topic), he declares that “love” does not refer to a single concept, and that true love, or “ideal love,” is divinely inspired.

This contrast between the multiple senses of “love,”and the ambiguity one encounters when using the term, reinforces Socrates’s insistence that the terms of an argument must always be clearly defined. However, the picture that Socrates ultimately paints is slightly more complex. Both forms of love, physical and ideal, are not polar opposites. He makes this clear in his allegory of the soul, through the image of a charioteer driving two horses. The physical, erotic side of love has its place, especially since it spurs on the lover to seek higher forms of love and higher revelations of truth and beauty. Socrates does not doubt that physical attraction is usually the first “symptom” of love, but physical beauty, he argues, is a gateway to the appreciation of “ideal” beauty. The relationship between these two forms of love is redefined over the first three speeches in the dialogue: it changes from opposition to tension and finally into a kind of synergy.