Be Late

A blog by Paul Nadal

https://belate.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/plato-philosophy-rhetoric-seduction/

Image: Pinaree Sanpitak, The Mirror, 2009. Courtesy of Tyler Rollins Fine Art (NY)

Platos Seduction
Platos Gorgias and Phaedrus begin with a scene of seduction. They introduce upon
the arrival of Socrates subjects of the seduced and the seducer. If these two
dialogues contain in them philosophical truths to be revealed, they reveal
themselves by and through the force of seduction, made manifest by the
expressions of subjects who are themselves drawn, compelled, and moved by that
which seduces. This may seem odd to say of Platos philosophical texts, since
the opprobrium of seduction is conventionally attributed to sophistic rhetoric. Yet
truths never reveal themselves easily or innocently. Their veils, lofty and
diaphanous, conceal as much as they attract, beckoning to be drawn away. What is
concealed is made absent, and the object of seduction lies in the uncovering and in
this coming-to-be. This is the motif of seduction as the making-present that I
would like to explore in Plato, the bringing-into-being of truth as
[aletheia], what Heidegger and Derrida would later describe as
unconcealment (Anwesen) or presence as presencing (enprsenting). What will be
at stake for us is a certain temporality of becoming-present, of making-actual,
which, I suggest, is given form by the force of seduction.

Gorgias and Phaedrus begin precisely by staging an absence for the occasion of a
making-present, a presentation of truth, : Gorgias, the rhetorician
exemplar, in the one, a written script of Lysias speech in the other. Both are
scarcely present, only intimated by the announcement of their being absent from
the immediate scene. Both texts, then, open with absent persons and hidden
objects, in which their being outside the order of the visible and audible becomes
precisely the cause of speech and dialogue, or more forcefully the Platonic texts at
hand. For at the very opening there lurks a certain injunction, a pretext that urges
one toward the scene, being moved by a volition, which seems to exceed ones self,
as if it were not ones own, to speak and be made present. An accounting, then, if
you will. This Platonic presentation of truth (), of beginning by staging an
absence that is enjoined to come into presence, we can describe as seduction: a
force of coming-to-be in line with the original sense from the Latin seducere to
direct but also to lead away, to lure off the straight path.
We spectators are seduced by these beginnings in Plato, these interludes of
seduction, which spur the unfolding of discourse of the philosophical kind. It is as
if one already finds oneself caught the moment the dialogues begin. For prior to
articulation is absence: Gorgias and Phaedrus begin with an arrival, of an
ambulatory subject becoming-present, and the questioning and accounting of the
one in attendance: Where have you been? Where did you come from? The
interpellative force behind these questions goes beyond the space of the dialogue,
summoning us as readers as much as Socrates and Phaedrus. In this way, Plato
beckons and leads, so to stage the scene of seduction, which becomes the condition
for the discursive conversation, of the Platonic texts at hand. When we look at the
very form of the questions, we see that they assume a claim to a presence, a kind of
ruse for bringing into being, into performance, seductive subjects situated to
circumscribe the threat of their own subversion. Do we not hear also a hint of
impatience, for the coming-to-be of what is not yet? The sense of seduction I am
trying to capture here is one in which an appeal is made to an Other by means of
self-fashioning and the subtle and delicate shifts between presence and absence,
truth and untruth, the real and the illusory. (Where have you been? Where did
you come from?). If the space of seduction is also a precarious one, it is so because
the boundaries between these domains of reason and reality seem to fall back into
one another, into a promiscuous mix, in which the seducer and the seduced seek to
define and claim for their own. [logos], the supposed ideal of reason, which
is embodied in the dialogues as Socrates, the paradigm philosopher, is not prior to
or excepted from this scene: /Socrates must engage in the seductive, for
its/his being is threatened by that which seduces, and therefore haunted by its/his
own desire to seduce. If the essence of man lies in his faculty of discoursehis
capacity for producing man as animale rationale or is not
only that being who has the capacity of speech but also the capacity to lead, to
persuade, to seduce.
Through a reading of Platos Gorgias and Phaedrus, I shall attempt to elaborate on
how the philosophical encounter is profoundly a seductive one, and to expound
upon the nature and condition of such a seduction. As these dialogues begin with
gestures toward the seductive, so they bring together and draw in the conflict
between Philosophy and Rhetoric, a conflict demonstrated to be dramatized under
2

the auspices of seduction, and pulled into the centripetal force-field of the
seductive. Gorgias and Phaedrus stand out in the Platonic corpus in their lengthy
arguments about the differences between philosophy and rhetoric. In these
dialogues, a concatenation of theses and contradictions, we have Socrates
sustained refutation of rhetoric, condemning rhetors for their use of deceit and
manipulation, and their appropriation of reason as seduction. In a word, rhetoric
is not proper to philosophy precisely because of its impropriety as sophistic
seduction.
In Socrates indictment, what accumulates, what incurs, is the opprobrium of
rhetorics perversion. We are told that rhetoric, unlike philosophy, finds its truths
not in essences but in simulacra, in mere appearances, and rhetorics perversion
lies in manipulating the appearances of things so only to make its propositions
seductive, or merely appear to be true. Socrates, then, in terms of Platos parable
of the cave, would repudiate rhetoric for indulging in those flickering shadows, for
confounding the sensory and the ideational, and, in the confusion of the two, for
exploiting the shadows seductive dance. Socrates repudiation of rhetoric, we note,
doubles as a certification of philosophy. For underlying this double gesture is the
limning of the relationship between the two as a rival antagonism, and the divorce
of the one from the other, philosophy from rhetoric. These gestures seek to keep
philosophy inside of truth and rhetoric outside, so to maintain an order, a system, a
programme, in the very suspension and negation of the desire we are naming as
seduction. To echo Derrida in his reading of Platos Phaedrus,
It is thus necessary to put the outside back in its place. To keep the outside
out. This is the inaugural gesture of logic itself, of good sense insofar as it
accords with the self-identity of that which is, being what it is, the outside is
outside and the inside inside. (Derrida, Disseminations, 128).
It would seem then that for Plato, seduction its surplus, its dissemblance, its
temptation has no place in philosophy.
Yet what emerges from a reading of seduction in Gorgias and Phaedrus is a
constant threat of a dis-rupture, an interruption in the philosophers effort to expel
rhetoric from the provenance of reason that he has claimed for himself, of keeping
the outside out. Philosophy, to be sure, anticipates this interruption, and in its
anticipation, sets in motion a series of arguments about priorities, standards,
methods, and ideals. In the story it tells of itself, a projection of an ideal image of
philosophy already inscribes itself in the Platonic text. And it is in this inscription
of the ideal which becomes the very citability of its own seductive power. What is
thus attempted here in my reading of Gorgias and Phaedrus is a distillation of the
deep anxieties and obsessions about the pursuit of truth, and the ways in which
this dysphoria, this unease, becomes mediated by acts of seduction. I suggest that
by reading the encounters between philosophy and rhetoric, the philosopher and
the rhetorician, and Socrates and his many interlocutors as many scenes of
seduction, theythese seductive encountersoffer the occasion of working
through questions of conversion, power, and desire. I would therefore like to ask,
How does dialecticsSocrates method of questioning, indeed, for him the very art
and form of the philosophical conversation (dialexis)become presented as the
3

exemplary modus operandi of arriving at truth, if not virtue and the good life? To
what extent does philosophy carry out its own means of seduction? How does it
present itself as a subject and object of seduction? If this is so, how? And why
seduction? My reading of Gorgias and Phaedrus is informed by this theme of
philosophys seduction, so to put into question the subordination of rhetoric to the
supremacy of philosophy in the very terms by which it has been denigrated, and to
consider the ethical schema implied in Socrates model of philosophical discourse
and his method of dialectics. In so far as encounters always seem to involve some
element of seduction, how should one proceed? How does one, at the moment one
encounters the other, account for and be accountable to it, to the one being
addressed, to the one who bears witness to and assures the presence of what one
speaks and the one who speaks?
*

But let us first begin outside, outside of Plato, outside of Gorgias and Phaedrus and
into Gorgias Encomium to Helen, so to venture precisely toward that which is
kept outside out. In this encomium the constellation of seduction, desire, and
abduction finds its articulation, in the very address to an other, to an absent other,
in the making present a subject in the epideictic form of praise. Who has abducted
the other and by means of what seduction? This other is Helen herself, the subject
of Gorgias encomium, whose beauty and virtue, we are told, are beyond
comparison, and therefore always seductive. As many were the erotic passions
she aroused in many men, and her one body brought many bodies full of great
ambition for great deeds, so her name, and its seductive allure in myth and
corporal desire, would be the signal inspiration of the Gorgiatic text (4). Helens
ignominy and Gorgias praise become the pretext for the demonstration and proof
of the power of speech: With my speech I have removed this womans ill repute
(21). His proof exhausts and runs through four possible causes for her departure
to Troy and shows in each casethe fate of the gods, compulsion, love, and logos
or speechhow Helen is not culpable. By demonstrating the mastery and
abduction of Helen by logos, Gorgias exculpates Helen, brings her out of her exiled
state of blame, and this exculpation is carried out in the performance of that very
power of logos in his speech.
If speech () persuaded and deluded her mind, even against this it is not hard
to defend her or free her from blame as follows: speech is a powerful master and
achieves the most divine feats with the smallest and least evident body. It can stop
fear, relieve pain, create joy, and increase pity. (8)
Gorgias exonerates Helen by depicting her mind and body as being seduced by the
powerful master of . If Gorgias imagines as having a capacity to
engender material, physiological effects, almost a kind of psychic rape, then the
persuasion of Helen suggests a presence of a force of that is at once sexual
and violent in its arousal and exploitation of desire.
For Gorgias, the relationship between persuasion and compulsion is not only
analogous but identical: to persuade is to coerce the mind of the other into
agreement; and to be persuaded is to feel compelled to obey in this conformity. By
4

denying the difference between persuasion and compulsion (12), Gorgias

suggests that the Parmenedian division between a truth that needs to be conveyed
by means of persuasive force and a truth that is self-evident is untenable; both
require some means of persuasion, of seducing the other toward the true. Where
Plato assigns the vocation of persuasion and what he sees as its opprobrium of
deception exclusively to rhetoric, Gorgias demonstrates how the persuasive and
the compulsive, the rational and the emotional, are inextricably mixed with each
other, and this is how still remains, in the first and last instance, a mode of
compulsion. Gorgias argument about and rhetoric, force and persuasion, is
precisely the occasion for Platos indictment of rhetoric in the Gorgias for whom
persuasions reception begets the deception of the soul. Yet as Derrida points out,
[i]f a speech could be purely present, unveiled, naked, offered up in person in its
truth, without the detours of a signifier foreign to it, if at the limit an undeferred
logos were possible, it would not seduce anyone (Derrida, 71, my emphasis). It
would no longer be speech as such. It is in this sense that Gorgias consideration of
as a potential cause for Helens abduction suggests a presence of seduction,
of a general condition of the seductive in the encounter with and address to an
other at the moment of speech. Once more, Gorgias draws our attention to the
capacity of to lie and to seduce, of persuasion going inside the soul through
the seduction of its speech. The lesson of Gorgias is that there is no that can
be posited outside of itself, no exception or outside of truth that is a priori to the
articulation of its proposition. To put it more simply, the seductive situation
belongs to both the philosopher and the rhetor.
*

So there is a seductive intention that animates, sets in motion, the movement of

Platos Gorgias and Phaedrus. In Gorgias, the scene of seduction is announced by
the arrival of the philosopher Socrates, and the eventual coming of the sophistic
rhetor, Gorgias.
Callicles: Your arrival, Socrates, is the kind they recommend for a war or a battle.
Socrates: Do you imply that, in the proverbial phrase, we are late for a feast?
Callicles: You are indeed, and a very fine feast too. Gorgias has just finished
displaying all manner of lovely things to us.
Socrates: It is Chaerephon who is to blame for this, Callicles; he made us linger in
the market-place. (447a)
It is strikingly a belated arrival, Socrates, which has kept those waiting in
anticipation. The coming of an eventthe eventual realization of an expectation,
of what is comingis what defines the temporality of seduction, for what is
seduction if not the negation of the abrupt, the prolongation of a promise to
come? Seduction is precisely this fascination with postponement. Socrates is late,
and he blames Chaerephon for his tardiness, he made us linger. A prolongation,
then, but of what and why? The explanation is absent.

Also in these first few lines of Gorgias, we have a determination of different styles
and settings: a festive occasion on the one, a war-like, combative, bellicostic
comportment on the other. The topology has the effect of assigning affective states
to the personalities of the duel we bear witness to. For the first words of this
Platonic dialogue on rhetoric are war and battle and this
dramatization casts the rivalry ever more strikingly, with the rhetor as reveler, the
philosopher as rebel. Platos design works to lead our reaction to the battle
between rhetoric and philosophy, with the former demoted to the decadence of
idleness and play, and the latter ascended to the level of work and
seriousness. And the revelers can only seduce the rebel by offering their master,
Gorgias, and the promise, too, of his eventual arrival.
Socrates: Splendid, Callicles, but would he [Gorgias] be willing to enter into
conversation with us? I want to ask him what the power of his art consists in and
what it is that he professes and teaches. The demonstration can wait for some
other, as you say. (447c)
Philosophical conversation first, before rhetorical demonstration. This is Socrates
temporal inversion, his usurpation of the time of seduction. It is at this point, when
Socrates re-frames the discussion from rhetorical display to philosophical
discovery, that the Platonic dialogue stages our reading of the war and battle of
philosophy against rhetoric. The stress is placed on proving the power of the art of
oratory, of rhetoric; and Socrates declares dialectic as the arbitrator, the exclusive
agent by which arguments offered as proofs for that power are measured. The
arbitration set by Socrates accords the method of dialectic an almost consecrated
status, able to adjudicate the value of truth behind each proposition. While
dialectic in the form of question and answer would seem immediately
interpersonal, Socrates conceives his method as ultimately moving beyond the
subjective. It is in this sense that the dialectical method becomes consistent with
and complementary to the Platonic notion of truth as the radical exterior to human
perception and experience. As Socrates admits, his motive is not in the least
personal; it is simply to help the discussion to progress towards its end in a logical
sequence and to prevent us from getting into the habit of anticipating one
anothers statements because we have a vague suspicion what they are likely to be,
instead of allowing you to develop your arguments in your own way from the
agreed premises (454c). Socrates offers his style as the standard model, from
which issue a series of prescriptions and priorities on how one should go about the
dialectical conversation, a movement of logic from one proven premise to the next,
in order to arrive at what Socrates takes as the philosophical discovery of truth.
What I am suggesting here is that dialectics accession to the realm of logic implies
not only the confirmation of rhetorics shortfall that Socrates seeks to prove as its
inadequacy to the careful and rigorously sequential development of reason. It also
reveals the very disavowal of the means by which Socrates is able to usurp, in his
own terms, the status of scientificity for his method of philosophy, dialectic as the
science of knowledge. This amounts to a profound impasse in Plato, a position of
intellectual analysis he constructs for Socrates that is necessarily
contradictory: for while the method of dialectic, as a form of self-examination and
one-one-one conversation, is in practice discursive, the conditions under which
6

knowledge is possible are defined as being outside of discourse, located instead in

the transcendental realm of the Platonic Idea. We are thus left to conclude that if
dialectic needs no proof of its scientificity, of its ultimate self-adequation, it is
because Platos dialectic acquires for itself the foundational, originary premise of
legitimation that it claims exclusively for itself. This justifies Socrates claim to
Callicles in Gorgias that I am quite sure that if you agree with me about anything
of which I am convinced in my heart, we shall have there the actual truth
(487a). The usurpation of dialectic can be possible only if the conditions of
episteme are posited as pre-discursive, as being outside of its own procedures,
whereby the contents and formal rules of Socrates philosophical method are
related to their identity with the essences founded upon the Platonic Idea of the
good. As Gadamer notes,
The original motive of the Platonic Idea is the question of the good, which asks,
simply what an entity has to beThis determination of the concept of the good is a
universal ontological one. With it, everything that is determines itself, uniformly,
in terms of what it has to be [] The true being of everything that exists is the
being of the Idea. (Gadamer, Platos Dialectical Ethics, 7-9)
The appeal to a universal validity is what makes for the seduction of truth in
Socrates philosophy. It is what constitutes the ideology of seduction in the
philosophical encounter. If philosophy seduces, it does so in its claims of exclusive
access to and possession of truth. Philosophys seduction draws in that which is
different, and in luring, submits that which opposes or resists into judgment, with
the consequence of domesticating differences into sameness. We will see this
more clearly in Phaedrus, in which the differences between philosophy and
rhetoric, personified by the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus, are
engaged in a seductive game of tug-and-war toward the conversion of one to the
other. The rational process by which philosophy is able to establish the
sovereignty of truth involves the reconciliation of difference into a determinable
concept adequate to the structure of intelligibility of philosophy. It is this promise
of identity which becomes the means of philosophys seduction. The metaphysical
tradition of Plato entraps difference within a system of representation that is
guided by rational reason, which gives difference its denigrated status as error, or
what Deleuze describes as the appearance of difference as accursed[an] error,
sin, or the figure of evil for which there must be expiation (Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition, 29).
By defining the terms of truth under the principle of identity, Platos Socrates
betrays a kind of bad faith, suggesting that it is in his own method that is the valid
way of arriving at truth, expressed in forms like If you are the same sort of person
as myself, I will willingly go on questioning you; otherwise I will stop (458a) or
Let us go on with the conversation, only if you are of the same mind (458b). The
purported promise of engaging with Socrates in dialecticnamely, the
transformation from an initial condition of perplexity and ignorance toward some
condition of enlightenmentleads often to the conformity of one to the terms of
intelligibility that Socrates himself has defined. For Socrates, the terms of
conformity are presupposed and absolute, and the price of non-conformity risks
shame, a sign of a sullied state of mind which is culpable. We have Callicles
7

frustrated expression of the absolutism of Socrates dialectical method that

Callicles observes when Socrates traps Polus in self-contradiction: as a result of an
admission, he [Polus] has been entangled by you in his turn and put to silence,
because he was ashamed to say what he thought (482e).
The seduction of difference into the principle of identity underlies the systematic
subordination of rhetoric to philosophy. Socrates condemns rhetoric as a mere
knack, an artless counterfeit passing as an art with [techne]. Within the
contests of the arts, Socrates appraises whether or not rhetoric possesses the
requirements of for it to be qualified as a genuine branch of philosophy.
Socrates: We will discuss in a moment, if it turns out to be relevant, whether this
does in fact put the orator on equal terms with the others or not; but first of all let
us consider how he stands with regard to right or wrong, honour and dishonour,
good and bad Or is he quite ignorant of the actual nature of good and bad or
honour and dishonour or right and wrong, but nevertheless possesses a power of
persuasion which enables him, in spite of his ignorance, to appear to the ignorant
wiser than those who know? Or must he have knowledge and understanding?
(459d)
Socrates dialectical procedure suggests a series of conditions for what constitutes
. Not only self-reflexivity about its nature, but also a knowledge of what is
good and bad; not only a distinct set of practices that would differentiate it from
other arts, but that this distinction must reconstitute itself as a determinate
concept, a reflection of its essence. In his exchange with Gorgias, Socrates gets him
to agree that rhetoric conveys beliefs without knowledge, while at the same time
allowing him to concede later on that those who practice rhetoric need some basis
of knowledge in order for its persuasion to work. Socrates completes his
refutation of rhetoric by exploiting the contradiction about knowledge that Gorgias
commits, to which Socrates concludes that rhetoric is not an art with , for it
neither possesses nor conveys knowledge about a subject matter relevant to what
is good.
Out of this emerges the image of philosophy as the standard of good life, a moral
life that, unlike rhetoric, is guided a notion of what is true and virtuous. What
makes rhetoric fallible, and this is the point against which philosophy defines itself,
is rhetorics questionable relation to truth and justice, which stems from the
rhetoricians inability to perceive the differences between subjective conviction
and objective truth, of confusing conventional beliefs for genuine knowledge. As
Socrates argues, The orator need have no knowledge of the truth about things; it
is enough for him to have discovered a knack of convincing the ignorant that he
knows more than the expert (459c). In this war and battle of philosophy and
rhetoric, the very absence of Gorgias upon Socrates arrival prefigures not only the
game of seduction that ensues under the aegis of Socratic dialectic, but anticipates
the conquest of rhetoric, the conversion of its difference as the anti-thesis to
philosophys identity.

If the kind of seduction in Gorgias is martial in tone, the seduction in Phaedrus is of

a different register. Let us recall how it begins:
Socrates: Phaedrus, my friend! Where have you been? And where are you going?
In the apostrophe to Phaedrus, Socrates addresses him as a friend, counts him as
one of his familiar, beloved companions. After the exclamation, follows the
interrogative, echoing those we heard in the opening lines of the Gorgias, albeit
different in tone and intent. Where have you been? And where are you
going? Let us now articulate what is implied, barely intimated, in Socrates
questioning. The first question, in the present perfect tense, functions as an
inquiry into the effects of a past state of condition as it concerns the present; it
acknowledges the as-yet known, while revealing at the same time a presence of a
subtle expectationWhere have you been? (Why are you not here?). The
second question, And where are you going?, invites an opening: it gestures
toward another futurity, as it confers a moment of decision to the one being
addressed, Where are you going? (Will you go here or there?) Phaedrus
responds,
Phaedrus: I was with Lysias, the son of Cephalus, Socrates, and I am going for a
walk outside the city walls because I was with him for a long time, sitting there the
whole morning. You see, Im keeping in mind the advice of our mutual friend
Acumenus, who says its more refreshing to walk along country roads than city
streets. (227a-b)
Phaedrus has been with Lysias, the father of rhetoric, and has taken part in Lysias
oratorical performance, the memory of which lingers into the present. This
lingering is the source of Socrates impatience and unease. Here, in the beginning,
the time is not made to belong to philosophy but to rhetoric. Socrates question,
Where have you been? (Why are you not here?) thus marks, one can say,
Phaedrus infidelity to the time of philosophy, insinuating his adulterous tryst to
the space of rhetoric. The seeds of seduction can be sensed in the desire of
Socrates for a dis-rupture, a transition, of wanting to reclaim the time, the present
time, in the name of philosophy: to recapture Phaedrus from Lysias orbit of
influence. The first lineWhere have you been? And where are you going?
seduces in its gesture to the possibility of a rupture, of interruptions of the
temporal and spatial. A promise of a new time, a new pathway, once again, to lure
us to the seductive encounter between the lover and the beloved, between
philosophy and rhetoric, between Socrates and Phaedrus. Because he considers
Phaedrus as one of his friends, as the one he would like to call and claim as one of
his own, Socrates marks time, the present time, indeed the very opening of the text,
for philosophy, for the sake of Phaedrus, for whom the unprofitable use of past
time now demands the occasion for renewal, for transformation and
conversion. The presence of seduction here involves a desire compelled by
proprietary right, of a claim to ownership, for Socrates, perhaps in spite of himself,
indeed feels very proprietary and protective about his beloved.

Phaedrus thinks he has spent enough of his time in the city with Lysias, and
decides now to venture with Socrates beyond the outskirts of the polis, outside the
Athenian city-walls and into the rural countryside. Before their departure,
Socrates presses Phaedrus to recount his time with Lysias, to recite to him the
speech that he witnessed, in effect, to confess and give an account of what Socrates
considers as the illicit affair with rhetoric that transpired inside the walls of the
city. Phaedrus, however, dissembles and pretends neither to have the ability to
recall from memory nor to have procured from Lysias a written script which he
can use as an aid. But Socrates suspectsand he seems to be one step ahead of the
game of Phaedrus mendacious seduction. Socrates becomes aware of the fact that
his beloved is playing coy and lying about not possessing Lysias speech in
writing. What is withdrawn from the visible, what is kept hidden from him, is what
pushes Socrates along, what moves him forward, what compels him to speak. It
is jealousy bordering on obsession.
Socrates: First show me what you are holding in your left hand under your cloak,
my friend. I strongly suspect you have the speech itself. And if Im right, you can
be sure that, though I love you dearly, Ill never as long as Lysias himself is present,
allow you to practice your own speechmaking on me. Come on, then, show me.
(228e)
Phaedrus promises to speak more about Lysias only if Socrates will accompany
him to the countryside. Once disclosed, the Lysian speech will become the pretext
for this dialogue on love and speeches , and Socrates, if he wants to become privy
to the secrets of rhetoric, finds no choice but to follow Phaedrus, to participate in
his seduction.
What strikes us about the staging of the dialogue is the heightened sense of a
seductive mood, of the quasi-salacious nature of the homoeroticized encounter
between the elder philosopher and his beloved youth. In this setting, Socrates
behavior is indeed strange, his bearing out-of-bounds with the typical Socrates we
find in the Gorgias and Platos other dialogues. Socrates strange, queer behavior is
inspired by the setting itself, induced by the change of environment that Phaedrus
has seduced him to.
Socrates: I am devoted to learning: landscapes and trees have nothing to teach
meonly people in the city can do that. But you, I think, have found a potion to
charm me into leaving. (230e)
It is a magical, exquisite place, filled with the sweet song of the cicadas chorus
(230c), and resplendent with the sensuousness and vigor of the rural
wilderness. Shortly after entering the countryside, Socrates becomes possessed by
the local nymphs and spirits, and experiences a kind of frenzied poetic fit. Far
away from the mundaneness of the polis and free from the moorings of civic
political life, Socrates is no longer in his usual dialectical mood. We are far away
from the kind of question-and-answer dialogue that Socrates and his interlocutors
were engaging in the Gorgias. We are faced instead with a Socrates who revels in
lyrics and dithryrambs, and even delivers two rhetorically extravagant speeches
himselfan unusual flow of words, as Phaedrus says (237c). Socrates retreat to
10

the countryside presents a radical transformation of the Athenian figure notorious

for his disparaging views of poetry and rhetoric, and his teachings on the
abstention from intemperate bodily pleasures.
How does one account for this transformation? Why this new representation of
Socrates in the Phaedrus, which is antithetical to the one that Plato has carefully
crafted elsewhere? Before finishing his speech about the virtue of the non-lover,
Socrates abruptly stops, in medias res, and eventually snaps out of his hypnotic
delirium.
Socrates: Didnt you notice, my friend, that even though I am criticizing the lover, I
have passed beyond lyric into epic poetry? What do you suppose will happen to
me if I begin to praise his opposite? Dont you realize that the Nymphs to whom
you so cleverly exposed me will take complete possession of me? So I say instead,
in a word, that every shortcoming for which we blamed the lover has its contrary
advantage, and the non-lover possesses it. Why make a long speech of it? Thats
enough about them both. This way my story will meet the end it deserves, and I
will cross the river and leave before you make me doing something even worse.
(241e)
Socrates realizes that something overcame him, a force has induced him into a
trance-like madness, threatening his integrity and losing hold on truth. When
Phaedrus urges him to continue his speech, Socrates protests and says that if he
continues, the nymphs will take complete possession of him. To continue in this
ecstatic madness is to remain passive in his abduction from the realm of
reason. Seduction, again. To seduce also means to lead astray (seducere), to
lure off the straight path, to lead off the right trackas when the elder
philosopher says to his beloved, I followed your lead, and following you I shared
your Bacchic frenzy (234d). Socrates begins to take note of the seductive spirit
and intent. Regaining his sense of self, Socrates reconstitutes himself, and begins
to take stock of what has just happened. He quickly recants the arguments he had
made in his earlier speech about the non-lover being the more sensible partner
than the lover. He rectifies because he wants to set himself right, to carve out
another path to show as the right way for Phaedrus. It is a different path which he
will demonstrate to Phaedrus to be more virtuous than the one just taken. This
is where Socrates has been, and this, now, is where he is going.
Socrates transformation thus appears as a double seduction. Just as Phaedrus
attempted to seduce him with the mesmerizing power of rhetoric, so Socrates
fashions and re-fashions himself in order to offer another way of life, a more
desirable and virtuous alternative to the one Phaedrus had led them to. The
portrait of an ecstatic, impassioned Socrates becomes a counterpoint to the one he
will now begin to portray: a projection of an ideal self, his other self, the self of
reason. Socrates transformation figures as a prelude, as a model, a Bild, to the
specific kind of transformation he wants to see in Phaedrus, so to lead him, to
move himseduce himto the life of philosophy. It is suggested that Socrates
was himself enamored by Phaedrus, captivated not only by his physical beauty and
innocence, but also by his wide-eyed curiosity. Phaedrus is impressionable, and
the thought that Lysias teachings on the art of rhetoric might have beguiled him
11

prompted Socrates to seduce Phaedrus out of Lysias rhetorical charm. This

dialogue in a way can be read as a contest of love, a competition for the best man,
and the tactical gambit for Socrates is the display and performance of rhetorical
prowess itself. The rustic episode works then as a foil, as a scene of seduction, to
the way of life that Socrates promotes, a way of life guided by truth and reason, not
by passion and the irrational. This scene of seduction therefore emplots the desire
that sets in motion the spirit of the dialogue: it is a desire of transformation, of
conversion, of the recruitment from rhetoric to philosophy of the one whose name
this Platonic text signifies.
The majority of the second half of Phaedrus concerns itself to rhetoric, in the
manifestation of its power in speech and in writing, and Socrates delivers a series
of criticisms for the emulous Phaedrus to absorb and to take as an
admonition. What troubles Socrates most is the idea, passed on to Phaedrus from
the teachings of rhetoricians, that one does not need an eye for truth to be an
effective subject of discourse, that one does not need the responsibility of what is
true in carrying out ones affairs.
Phaedrus: What I have actually heard about this, Socrates, my friend, is that it is
not necessary for the intending orator to learn what is really just, but only what
will seem just to the crowd who will act as judges. Nor again what is really good or
noble, but on what will seem so. For that is what persuasion proceeds from, not
truth. (260a)
To disabuse Phaedrus from this misconception, Socrates begins his litany of what
is required of rhetoric to justify itself as an art, a practice with and sound
convictions. Toward his theory of rhetoric, Socrates relates the method of
medicine to the method of rhetoric, so to determine the nature of rhetorics
purpose. The analogy works to identify what justifies the existence of each
practicethe restoration of the body in medicine, and the cultivation of the soul in
rhetoric. Socrates thus expands the scope of the art of rhetoric to incorporate
matters of the soul, elevating its purpose from the mere persuasive intent to the
promotion of the good soul. Socrates lists a series of prescriptions for the proper
art of rhetoric: it must determine the many kinds of souls there are and the
appropriate ways of directing and acting upon each of type; in classifying the types
of souls and the types of rhetorical discourse appropriate to them, it must also
determine the truths regarding truth and justice.
Socrates: No one will ever possess the art of speaking, to the extent that any
human being can, unless he acquires the ability to enumerate the sorts of
characters to be found in any audience, to divide everything according to its kinds,
and to grasp each single thing firmly by means of one form. And no one can
acquire these abilities without great efforta laborious effort a sensible man will
make not in order to speak and act among human beings, but so as to be able to
speak and act in a way that pleases the gods as much as possible. (273e).
For Socrates, the art of rhetoric must therefore determine with rigorous exactness
the nature of the things it speaks of, and divide and classify their differences as
essences into the order of forms. The injunction to determine true essences, divide
12

differences, and classify into an order resembles nothing less than the method of
dialectic. In Socrates attempt to seduce Phaedrus from rhetoric to philosophy,
Socrates offers a model of rhetoric which assumes the form of the philosophical
enterprise. The true method of rhetoric that Socrates offers becomes almost
indistinguishable to the procedures of the dialectic. In this scene of seduction, the
differentia specifica of rhetoric becomes reduced to the identity of philosophy.
*

Why seduction? Always seduction? We have dwelt upon beginnings, the inaugural
moment of the one who speaks, in the dwelling of the opening of narrative. And in
our dwelling, we have experienced firsthand the seduction behind the hospitality
of the philosophical encounter. We have seen how both dialogues begin in the
mode seduction, how the moment of speech, prior to the articulation of truth, prior
to the philosophical event, bears in it an address to an other, a seductive address
for the other to speak back, to be made present in the very accounting of ones
presence. Seduction names both the event of arrival and the eventual coming of
the one expected or the one desired. It anticipates as much as it enjoins the other
into conversation. If there is coercion, it is in the obligation to speak, to account for
ones presence, to put an end to absence. If there is a violation, a violence, it is in
the call to lose oneself completely in seductionblindly, as when Socrates covers
his head in front of Phaedrus, so to keep himself in the dark, so to disembody his
words from himself: this is the Platonic caricature of the rhetorical conceit. Yet in
these beginnings, in these scenes of seduction, we take note of a profound
intimacy. To say that the philosophical encounter seduces, that it needs to seduce,
means that the distance between philosophy and rhetoric is not far. To speak of
seduction is to inhabit that uneasy space between philosophy and rhetoric. It is to
acknowledge an antinomy, while at the same time coming to comprehend that the
space of difference between the one and the other, between philosophy and
rhetoric, is not closed, but indeed closein the most intimate sense.
(An essay submitted for a graduate seminar on Classical Rhetoric led by Prof. Daniel
Boyarin, U.C. Berkeley Fall 2008.)
P.N.

13

NOTES

Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press, 1993.
Cooper, John M., Hutchinson, D.S., eds. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Disseminations. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press,
1981.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Platos Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations
Relating to the Philebus. Binghamton, NY: Yale University Press, 1991.

14