Sylvain Delcomminette - The Reception of Plato’s ›Phaedrus‹ from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Beitrge zur Altertumskunde

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Platos Phaedrus is an extremely rich dialogue. It covers themes as diverse as the value of myth and allegory, religion and theology, love and beauty, the essence and condition of the soul, teaching and learning, metaphysics and epistemology, rhetoric and dialectic, as well as the role and the limits of writing. It is also a literary masterpiece, and although up to now commentators still debate about the unifying theme of the dialogue, it is hardly doubted that it at least aims to live up to the famous canon it itself introduces for any valuable discourse, namely to display organic unity (Phaedrus 264bc).

It thus comes as no surprise that this dialogue has had a tremendous influence on Western culture since Antiquity. Especially its famous myth of the charioteer and its account of love have had an extraordinary afterlife in the West; yet the dialogues views on the nature of the soul, on beauty, on rhetoric and on writing have also provoked numerous reactions and reflections. The commentary on the Phaedrus attributed to the fifth-century Platonist Hermias of Alexandria, the only extant commentary from Antiquity, The Phaedrus influence, however, was hardly limited to those whom we would now call Platonists. The dialogues ambition to lay the foundations for a philosophical rhetoric was further developed by Aristotle and later picked up by a number of Latin authors. Literary writers alluded to the Phaedrus dramatic setting and treated it as a model for the locus amoenus. The psychological ideas of the dialogue were known and discussed not only among Platonists, but also by the Church Fathers and by physicians like Galen, who even drew inspiration from Socrates teachings on the arts in general, and on medicine in particular. Its views on beauty were elaborated by Plotinus and had a profound impact on Renaissance artists and art theorists. Its religious content was reanimated and adapted in the Renaissance, a time when the criticism of writing developed in the dialogue also met with renewed interest thanks to the emergence of mechanical printing.

The influence of the Phaedrus from Antiquity to the Renaissance thus offers an excellent perspective from which one can assess the diverse and profound influence of Plato on the history of ideas. Until now, however, no attempt has We do not claim that it exhausts the history of the reception this major text, but we do hope that it will place it in a broader perspective than is usually done.

Our volume opens with the Phaedrus first known reader and critic, Aristotle. It is mainly in the field of rhetoric that the Phaedrus left its mark on Aristotles work. Nicolas Zaks shows that, contrary to a widely held view, Aristotles reception of the dialogue is far from being merely critical, as is apparent in all three books of the Rhetoric. In Rhetoric III, Aristotle not only explicitly refers to the Phaedrus, but also draws on key points of Platos dialogue, such as the comparison between a speech and a living being and the criticism of divisions of speech made in the rhetorical tradition. As a matter of fact, the very existence of Rhetoric III seems to be justified in terms of Socrates distinction between invention and arrangement at Phaedrus 235e236a. As for Book II, Nicolas Zaks argues, controversially, that the study of passions and characters in chapters 2 to 17 accomplishes Socrates program for a scientific rhetoric exposed at Phaedrus 271ab. Finally, Book I notably studies the relationships between dialectic and rhetoric in a way that might be less critical than is usually thought, since, in the end, Aristotle endorses rather than criticises Platos view according to which being a competent dialectician entails being a competent rhetorician.

There are clues that the Phaedrus was read by the Hellenistic philosophers, but they are scarce and rather marginal. Matters change from the 2nd century ACE onwards, when the Phaedrus became a widely cited work even outside institutionalized Platonism, as Teun Tieleman shows with Galen of Pergamum. Galens project consisted in the foundation of a medical philosophy and his admiration for Plato is well-known. Against this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that the Phaedrus, in which Plato lays an explicit claim on Hippocrates (270cd), became a central text for Galens self-understanding as both a physician and a philosopher. This is illustrated by Teun Tieleman with reference to passages in various Galenic treatises. In the ninth book of his On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Galen draws extensively on Phaedrus 261a274b, which he takes to be dealing not only with rhetoric but with the correct method of any art. In addition, Galen considers this section particularly relevant from an epistemological point of view, because of the attention Plato pays here to such key-concepts as truth and verisimilitude, unclarity and disagreement. The moral and religious dimension of the art of medicine emerges from a passage in Book III of Galens Exhortation to Medicine, which, as Teun Tieleman argues, alludes to the Phaedrus myth, i.e. the procession of the gods and human souls (247d248a). It thus seems that Galens self-understanding as a philosophically educated medical scientist and practitioner was in many ways informed by his engagement with the Phaedrus.

Turning to the tradition of Platonism in a more narrow sense, Alexandra Michalewski analyses some key aspects in the debates between Platonists and Aristotelians of the imperial era. The focus of her paper, in which Atticus and Plotinus are the main protagonists, concerns the reception of the definition of the self-moving soul, presented at the beginning of the palinode of the Phaedrus (243e257b). In the long fragment 7 (des Places) preserved by Eusebius, Atticus systematically uses the Phaedrus definition of the self-moving soul in a polemical way to highlight the consequences of the Peripatetic doctrine of the soul. Plotinus, who is equally critical for the conception of the soul as an entelechy, does not limit himself to a simple opposition of Plato to Aristotle: he also shows how the soul, being an impassible substance, is at the same time a self-moving principle, a source of the bodily motions.

Suzanne Stern-Gillet tackles Plotinus reception of the Phaedrus from an entirely different angle. She argues that, contrary to a widespread claim in the scholarly literature, Plotinus does not depart from Plato in (mostly) dispensing with the concept of (recollection). After a brief outline of the role that recollection plays in the Phaedrus, a dialogue to which Plotinus returns time and again, she offers a critical reading of the most salient passages in the Enneads where Plotinus makes use of the notion. She then shows that the function of , in Plotinus understanding of the term, enables the embodied human soul to become aware of the presence in itself of riches she had previously been unaware of possessing, namely