God and Nature in Plato’s Phaedrus

What form of god, or nature, is figured in Plato’s Phaedrus? In this paper, I explore this question with reference to three moments in the dialog: Socrates’ displacement from the city; the lyrical description of the dialog’s setting along the grassy banks of the Ilissos; and the myth of the cicadas. In this exposition, I will borrow from selected interlocutors in the commentary tradition, namely Hermias, who wrote the only surviving complete Neoplatonic commentary on the Phaedrus, and two contemporary Anglophone scholars, Alexander Nehamas and James I. Porter. In discussing the question of nature and divinity, we will also touch on other themes of Plato’s dialogue: rationalism or philosophy vs irrationalism or madness; the relationship of nature with beauty; and the place of Plato and of philosophy in the Greek polis and beyond.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates leaves home for a while, the only time in all the dialogs where the philosopher steps outside the city walls of Athens. In the Crito, we learned that Socrates could well be said to “have stayed at home more than all the rest of the Athenians,” never leaving even for a festival in the countryside (“except once to the Isthmus”) and never traveling except when obliged to for military service (Crito 52b). Thus, Phaedrus is quite right in calling Socrates “out of place,” ατοπώτατος, when he ventures outside the city in the Phaedrus:

Σὺ δέ γε, ὦ θαυμάσιε, ἀτοπώτατός τις φαίνῃ. ἀτεχνῶς γάρ, ὃ λέγεις, ξεναγουμένῳ τινὶ καὶ οὐκ ἐπιχωρίῳ ἔοικας· οὕτως ἐκ τοῦ ἄστεος οὔτ’ εἰς τὴν ὑπερορίαν ἀποδημεῖς, οὔτ’ ἔξω τείχους ἔμοιγε δοκεῖς τὸ παράπαν ἐξιέναι.

And you, my remarkable friend, appear to be totally out of place. Really, just as you say, you seem to need a guide, not to be one of the locals. Not only do you never travel abroad — as far as I can tell, you never set foot beyond the city walls.

(Phaedrus 230c–d; trans. Nehamas and Woodruff)

Can philosophy be done outside of the city, among fields and trees (“τα χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα”)? Is being atopotatos an obstacle to or condition of philosophy?

On Socrates’ word, the city is the necessary condition for philosophy. In response to Phaedrus, Socrates says:

Συγγίγνωσκέ μοι, ὦ ἄριστε. φιλομαθὴς γάρ εἰμι· τὰ μὲν οὖν χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα οὐδέν μ’ ἐθέλει διδάσκειν, | οἱ δ’ ἐν τῷ ἄστει ἄνθρωποι.

Forgive me, my friend. I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me — only the people in the city can do that.

(230d–e)

All meaningful learning happens in the polis. Arendt wrote that laws, like walls, are not just features of the city but constitutive of it; building walls and making laws are the indispensable activities of city life, i.e. the political. All meaningful action happens within the realm thus delimited: “before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place … the laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action but products of making” (The Human Condition, 194).

Socrates might seem to be similarly firm about the necessity of a city for leading a meaningful life, in his case a life of learning. Yet what Socrates needs most is not quite the city — it is the right teachers. Those who teach him most are “the people in the city” (οἱ δ’ ἐν τῷ ἄστει ἄνθρωποι). What exactly is the connection between the city and the people, though? Does it just so happen that people are good teachers within the walls of the city, as when Arendt says that meaningful action can only happen in the polis — rendering learning impossible outside city walls? This interpretation seems to be contradicted by the very dialog we are in. Surely there is learning happening in the Phaedrus, outside the walls of the city!

A different interpretation would be that we need people of the city in order to learn. Then, still, Socrates would be saying that he can only learn from people of the city, but perhaps these people can venture out and take learning with them. Along these lines, Hermias comments on this passage saying:

Τὸ δὲ ἄστυ καὶ τὸ μηδέποτε ἐξιέναι τοῦ ἄστεος τὸν Σωκράτη δηλοῖ τὸ ἀεὶ τῶν οἰκείων ἀρχῶν καὶ αἰτιῶν καὶ τῶν νοητῶν καὶ οἰκείων ἑαυτοῦ θεῶν ἔχεσθαι αὐτόν· ἡ γὰρ ἀληθὴς πατρὶς τῶν ψυχῶν ὁ νοητός ἐστι κόσμος· οὐκ ἐκ τῶν οὖν ἐνύλων καὶ ἀντιτύπων ἡ μάθησις (ὃ δηλοῖ τὰ χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα), ἀλλ᾿ ἐκ τῶν λογικῶν καὶ νοερῶν ψυχῶν καὶ ἐξ αὐτοῦ τοῦ νοῦ.

The city and the fact that Socrates never leaves the city show that he is always attached to his own origins [οἰκείων ἀρχῶν] and causes and to his intelligible and particular [οἰκείων ἑαυτοῦ] gods, for the true fatherland [πατρὶς] of souls is the intelligible world [κόσμος]; therefore learning is not from the enmattered and tangible (as is shown by the fields and the trees) but from rational and intellective souls and intellect itself.

(32; trans. Baltzly & Share, modified)

What really matters is that the people of the city (οἱ δ’ ἐν τῷ ἄστει ἄνθρωποι) have logos; this, they can take with them, even into the fields and trees that are otherwise made of matter (ἐνύλων, literally “made of wood” or “forested” but since Aristotle used in this technical philosophical sense as opposed to the intellect, νοῦς) and therefore lifeless and incapable of thought. This would account for Socrates’ explanation of why he has ventured out of the city, although he knows there is no learning to be found in the trees and fields themselves. It is Lysias’ speech that he wants to hear, from Phaedrus’ mouth, and he would travel to the ends of the earth to do so: even if Phaedrus were to walk “all the way to Megara, … to touch the wall and come back again,” Socrates would not leave his side (227d). Where there is learning to be found, speeches he wants to hear, Socrates will go.

In this case, being atopotatos, out of place, is an accidental condition of the “real” philosophy that one finds in speeches in dialog. But I think this interpretation too quickly dismisses the setting of the dialog as just accidental to the essence of the speeches. Perhaps there is something to the place in which Socrates and Phaedrus find themselves that is actually necessary for the philosophy that happens there. At the very least, this spot on the banks of the stream, under the shade of a plane tree, with grass and cicadas, inspires an uncharacteristic lyricism in Socrates. In a remarkable passage, immediately preceding the exchange with Phaedrus quoted above, Socrates paints us a picture that resonates with anyone who has found themselves walking along a cool river in a hot Mediterranean summer today, 2500 years later:

Νὴ τὴν Ἥραν, καλή γε ἡ καταγωγή. ἥ τε γὰρ πλάτανος αὕτη μάλ’ ἀμφιλαφής τε καὶ ὑψηλή, τοῦ τε ἄγνου τὸ ὕψος καὶ τὸ σύσκιον πάγκαλον, καὶ ὡς ἀκμὴν ἔχει τῆς | ἄνθης, ὡς ἂν εὐωδέστατον παρέχοι τὸν τόπον· ἥ τε αὖ πηγὴ χαριεστάτη ὑπὸ τῆς πλατάνου ῥεῖ μάλα ψυχροῦ ὕδατος, ὥστε γε τῷ ποδὶ τεκμήρασθαι. Νυμφῶν τέ τινων καὶ Ἀχελῴου ἱερὸν ἀπὸ τῶν κορῶν τε καὶ ἀγαλμάτων ἔοικεν εἶναι. εἰ δ’ αὖ βούλει, τὸ εὔπνουν τοῦ τόπου ὡς ἀγαπητὸν καὶ σφόδρα ἡδύ· θερινόν τε καὶ λιγυρὸν ὑπηχεῖ τῷ τῶν τεττίγων χορῷ. πάντων δὲ κομψότατον τὸ τῆς πόας, ὅτι ἐν ἠρέμα προσάντει ἱκανὴ πέφυκε κατακλινέντι τὴν κεφαλὴν παγκάλως ἔχειν. | ὥστε ἄριστά σοι ἐξενάγηται, ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε.

By Hera, it really is a beautiful resting place. The plane tree is tall and very broad; the chaste-tree, high as it is, is wonderfully shady, and since it is in full bloom, the whole place is filled with its fragrance. From under the plane tree the loveliest spring runs with very cool water — our feet can testify to that. The place appears to be dedicated to Achelous and some of the Nymphs, if we can judge from the statues and votive offerings. Feel the freshness of the air; how pretty and pleasant it is; how it echoes with the summery, sweet song of the cicadas’ chorus! The most exquisite thing of all, of course, is the grassy slope: it rises so gently that you can rest your head perfectly when you lie down on it. You’ve really been the most marvelous guide, my dear Phaedrus.

(230b–c)

Much could be made of this passage. Hermias, for instance, interprets everything symbolically: the “full bloom” (ἀκμὴν τῆς ἄνθης) indicates Phaedrus’ readiness for Socrates’ guidance (anagoge, the opposite of “resting-place,” katagoge); Socrates inclining with his head higher than his feet shows how he descends from the intellectual to the material in order to dispense with this guidance; and even the oath “by Hera” is because she is the goddess “who generates and orders the beauty of the creation” (In Phdr. 31–2). This sort of interpretation may not convince everyone; as Baltzly & Share, the translators of Hermias, write: “Examples could be multiplied, but this would only multiply the incredulity of many readers.” To me, Socrates’ lyrical description is more simply redolent of an ordinary afternoon in the summer, one conducive to long chats with friends and mildly hallucinatory philosophizing. The question is the relationship between this ordinary experience and the very extraordinary things said and evoked, that is the relationship between the human and the divine. What is it that inspires the lyricism of Socrates? What kind of inspiration is this — perhaps description, ekphrasis, or some kind of transcendence, ekstasis? Brought about by a visit from the Muses, or a mild case of heatstroke, or just the incessant drone of the cicadas? To answer these questions brings us straight to the heart of the matter: Plato’s figuration of god or nature, deus sive natura.

What inspires not just the lyrical description quoted above but also the very speeches about love and the soul that follow might best be described as a sort of enchantment. As Alexander Nehamas puts it:

What has happened to change Socrates so radically? His own explanation is that he has come to be possessed by the gods and spirits that inhabit the enchanted place where he and Phaedrus have found themselves: the speeches he makes, he insists again and again, are not his own creations but theirs.

(Nehamas, xi)

In the woods (ἐνύλων), strange things happen. Think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where we once again leave the rational, rule-bound order of love in the city of Athens to find mayhem and, maybe, inspiration, in the woods inhabited by Puck and the other fairies. Yet let us not lose sight of the fact that both Shakespeare’s play and Plato’s dialog are staged, produced by authors with audiences in mind.

Thinking for a moment of the Phaedrus as more like an Elizabethan drama than a systematic philosophical treatise, we might realize that the bewitching effects of the “fields and trees” extend not just to the characters but beyond to us readers and viewers, too. Thus, Nehamas notes:

Of course Socrates in the Phaedrus and these other works is Plato’s own creation. And the question we need to ask is not primarily why Socrates is behaving so strangely in this case, but rather why Plato has taken his very urban and rational Socrates and made him willing to leave Athens, vulnerable to possession by the nymphs (numpholeptos, 238d) and by the gods (enthousiazon, 241e) and capable of composing such magnificent orations. For, in the process, Plato has himself produced one of the strangest dialogues he ever wrote. The whole of the Phaedrus, no less than Socrates or the magical place where its action takes place, is an unending source of enchantment, of unexpected situations, of puzzlement and speculation.

(Nehamas, xi–xii)

One source of puzzlement: Who is the enchanted, and who the enchanter? Who is mad here, and who divine?

To address these questions thoroughly requires a deeper engagement with other parts of the Phaedrus, especially the description of the soul as a winged chariot. If one were to follow this path, one could read the whole dialog for an “unwritten doctrine,” a sort of Platonic theology, alongside the Timaeus and the Republic, an investigation that would also require consideration of Plato’s views on love, writing and rhetoric, and the nature of the soul.[2] Of course, such readings were undertaken not only by Neoplatonic commentators like Hermias, Porphyry, Proclus, and Plotinus, but also by their contemporaries and followers in Islam and Christianity. In other words, systematized responses to the question I have been asking — what form of god or nature is figured in the Phaedrus — are just what would resound for centuries to come in philosophers from Ibn Arabi through Maimonides to Spinoza and beyond.

Such a reading, in other words, would focus on the theory of Forms and of the soul in the speeches. Nehamas argues, in my opinion persuasively, that though significant, the theories elaborated from the great speeches of the Phaedrus are ultimately means to an end. After presenting several arguments for why we might not be willing to accept that Plato believes literally in the views of the Great Speech, Nehamas asks:

What if we were to think that the truth Plato accepts does not consist of the philosophical theories the speech contains? What if Plato simply wants to communicate instead the idea that philosophy is the most important part of life? In that case, the theories of the speech, which Socrates presents so colorfully, will turn out to be the means by which he tries to move Phaedrus to realize that philosophy is superior to a life that finds its greatest pleasures in rhetoric. … The countryside, for which Socrates has left Athens, has turned him, surprisingly, into an accomplished rhetorician. Much more surprisingly, however, it has provided him with an opportunity to cast doubt on views that, within the fiction of Plato’s dialogues, he had developed within the city walls. This Odysseus returns home from abroad a different man indeed.

(Nehamas, xliv)

If Odysseus is the man who has come to know many cities and the minds of many people (πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω) after passing through the citadel of Troy (ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν), then Socrates is the man who has come to know many theories after passing through the fields and trees (τα χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα) beyond the city walls. Through this knowledge of others he has gained, which is really just knowledge of what the others do not know, Socrates has come to know himself, or at least, unable to know himself, to wonder whether he is “a beast more complicated and savage than Typho” or “a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature” (230a) — a question that is immediately followed by the lyrical description of the dialog’s setting quoted above.

To accept Nehamas’ view, even provisionally, diverts us from the path of systematically reading Plato for a doctrine on god or nature in the way I gestured to above. But that is not to say that there is nothing substantial to be said here. To deem the Phaedrus to be just another game (as Nehamas suggests on p. xlvi) is not to say it is meaningless. In fact (Wittgenstein would say) to recognize that the speeches of the Phaedrus make up a language-game would be just to realize that our search for meaning shouldn’t try to look “under the hood” of the speeches for some deeper structure — after all, “the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work” (Philosophical Investigations, §132). We might take our cue from Wittgenstein to return to that most ordinary and idle of phenomena, the cicadas buzzing in the background throughout the speeches being recited by Phaedrus and Socrates under the plane tree on the banks of the Ilissos.

The myth of the cicadas comes after Socrates’ great palinode, as a sort of interlude between that and the analysis of rhetoric and writing. The buzz of cicadas is both always present and a gentle background for so much of the summer in the Mediterranean. We can imagine Phaedrus and Socrates caught up in their dialog until a lull in the conversation, or a particularly loud cicada, brings their attention back to them. Socrates mentions them first:

καὶ ἅμα μοι δοκοῦσιν ὡς ἐν τῷ πνίγει ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς ἡμῶν οἱ τέττιγες ᾄδοντες καὶ ἀλλήλοις διαλεγόμενοι καθορᾶν καὶ ἡμᾶς. εἰ οὖν ἴδοιεν καὶ νὼ καθάπερ τοὺς πολλοὺς ἐν μεσημβρίᾳ μὴ διαλεγομένους ἀλλὰ νυστάζοντας καὶ κηλουμένους ὑφ’ αὑτῶν δι’ ἀργίαν τῆς διανοίας, δικαίως ἂν καταγελῷεν, ἡγούμενοι ἀνδράποδ’ | ἄττα σφίσιν ἐλθόντα εἰς τὸ καταγώγιον ὥσπερ προβάτια μεσημβριάζοντα περὶ τὴν κρήνην εὕδειν· ἐὰν δὲ ὁρῶσι διαλεγομένους καὶ παραπλέοντάς σφας ὥσπερ Σειρῆνας ἀκηλήτους, ὃ γέρας παρὰ θεῶν ἔχουσιν ἀνθρώποις διδόναι, τάχ’ ἂν δοῖεν ἀγασθέντες.

I think that the cicadas, who are singing and carrying on conversations with one another in the heat of the day above our heads, are also watching us. And if they saw the two of us avoiding conversation at midday like most people, diverted by their song and, sluggish of mind [νυστάζοντας], nodding off, they would have every right to laugh at us, convinced that a pair of slaves had come to their resting place to sleep like sheep gathering around the spring in the afternoon. But if they see us in conversation, steadfastly navigating around them as if they were the Sirens, they will be very pleased and immediately give us the gift from the gods they are able to give to mortals.

(259a–b)

The mention of the Sirens is telling. It suggests that Socrates is aware of the dangers of enchantment; and further, that Plato is aware of the echo in his text of an earlier tale of enchantment by the quasi-divine.

In the Odyssey, like the Phaedrus, a cunning man is drawn out of his comfort zone into a journey of confrontation with strange creatures and stranger ideas. Perhaps more importantly, both Odysseus and Socrates are caught between madness and reason (again, like the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The Latin writer Hyginus recounts a story of the mad lengths to which Odysseus went to avoid leaving his beloved Ithaca (Fabulae §95). As Nehamas narrates it:

Odysseus had never wanted to take part in the Greek expedition against Troy that is the subject of Homer’s Iliad: strange and dangerous things often happen away from home. He pretended to be mad, but the great trickster was himself tricked by Palamedes. … To prove that he was mad, Odysseus took to plowing a rocky piece of land where nothing could grow. Palamedes, however, placed Odysseus’ infant son, Telemachus, on the plow’s path. Odysseus then swerved in order not to kill the child, and his madness was shown to have been a ruse.

(Nehamas, ix)

The fields are the place for madness, and yet also where madness finds its limit. Odysseus is again tempted by madness when he comes to the Sirens. Socrates, similarly, says that he and Phaedrus are carefully sailing around the Sirens as they are having their dialog (διαλεγομένους καὶ παραπλέοντάς), hoping like Odysseus to gain the gift of wisdom. Yet, like Odysseus’ journey, a dialog outside the city walls carries both rewards and peril.

What is this gift of the cicadas that might be worth putting one’s sanity and thus one’s self at risk? Socrates tells Phaedrus:

λέγεται δ’ ὥς ποτ’ ἦσαν οὗτοι ἄνθρωποι τῶν πρὶν Μούσας γεγονέναι, γενομένων δὲ Μουσῶν καὶ φανείσης ᾠδῆς οὕτως ἄρα τινὲς τῶν τότε ἐξεπλάγησαν ὑφ’ ἡδονῆς, ὥστε ᾄδοντες ἠμέλησαν σίτων τε καὶ ποτῶν, καὶ ἔλαθον τελευτήσαντες αὑτούς· ἐξ ὧν τὸ τεττίγων γένος μετ’ ἐκεῖνο φύεται, γέρας τοῦτο παρὰ Μουσῶν λαβόν, μηδὲν τροφῆς δεῖσθαι γενόμενον, ἀλλ’ ἄσιτόν τε καὶ ἄποτον εὐθὺς ᾄδειν, | ἕως ἂν τελευτήσῃ, καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα ἐλθὸν παρὰ Μούσας ἀπαγγέλλειν τίς τίνα αὐτῶν τιμᾷ τῶν ἐνθάδε. Τερψιχόρᾳ μὲν οὖν τοὺς ἐν τοῖς χοροῖς τετιμηκότας αὐτὴν ἀπαγγέλλοντες ποιοῦσι προσφιλεστέρους,d τῇ δὲ Ἐρατοῖ τοὺς ἐν τοῖς ἐρωτικοῖς, καὶ ταῖς ἄλλαις οὕτως, κατὰ τὸ εἶδος ἑκάστης τιμῆς· τῇ δὲ πρεσβυτάτῃ Καλλιόπῃ καὶ τῇ μετ’ αὐτὴν Οὐρανίᾳ τοὺς ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ διάγοντάς τε καὶ τιμῶντας τὴν | ἐκείνων μουσικὴν ἀγγέλλουσιν, αἳ δὴ μάλιστα τῶν Μουσῶν περί τε οὐρανὸν καὶ λόγους οὖσαι θείους τε καὶ ἀνθρωπίνους ἱᾶσιν καλλίστην φωνήν.

The story goes that the cicadas used to be human beings who lived before the birth of the Muses. When the Muses were born and song [ωδή] was created for the first time, some of the people of that time were so overwhelmed with the pleasure of singing that they forgot to eat or drink; so they died without even realizing it. It is from them that the race of cicadas came into being; and, as a gift from the Muses, they have no need of nourishment once they are born. Instead, they immediately burst into song, without food or drink, until it is time for them to die. After they die, they go to the Muses and tell each one of them which mortals have honored her. To Terpsichore they report those who have honored her by their devotion to the dance and thus make them dearer to her. To Erato, they report those who honored her by dedicating themselves to the affairs of love, and so too with the other Muses, according to the activity that honors each. And to Calliope, the oldest among them, and Urania, the next after her, who preside over the heavens and all discourse, human and divine, and sing with the sweetest voice, they report those who honor their special kind of music by leading a philosophical life.

(259c–e)

Hermias comments that a life thus led is not philosophical but philomusical (φιλόμουσον δὲ ἀντὶ τοῦ φιλόσοφον, 215). The cicadas represent, according to him, “the philosopher who wants to ascend towards the gods [ἀναχθῆναι πρὸς τοὺς θεούς], and does not require cultivation [ἐπιμέλεια] of the body or bodily existence, and cares nothing for this, but wishes to depart from it; for he practices death [μελετᾷ γὰρ θάνατον], which is a departure from this life” (216). James I. Porter comments that “Hermias exalts the cicadas to a quasi-divine status by blurring the line between music or art (mousikē) and philosophy, and rendering the cicadas into the very picture of ‘men who despise sensory objects and, amazed by divine harmony [ἐκπληττόμενοι τὴν θείαν ἁρμονίαν], ascend [ἀνήχθησαν] to another plane of reality’” (590).

We might remember that Socrates earlier called himself, like the cicada, an “animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature” (ζῷον, θείας τινὸς καὶ ἀτύφου μοίρας φύσει μετέχον, 230a). The myth of the cicadas is thus precisely the question of how Plato figures god and nature — complementary but coexisting? interchangeable, as implied by the famous Spinozist motto deus sive natura?

Porter has an interpretation that attempts to answer this question. He writes that the cicadas

are every bit as equivocal as the souls of the palinode, who flutter uncertainly between matter and its transcendence. For the same reason they represent less a beautiful sort of music than a sublime music.

They are sublime for the same reasons that souls, gods, and even Forms beheld by us are sublime for Plato and the Platonic tradition, which is to say, just because they are so equivocal a kind of creature, poised uncertainly between matter and its negation. The cicadas represent a voice at its purest emission, at the point of its greatest disembodiment.

(590–591)

The cicadas, like Socrates, are ultimately like the soul, seeking a glimpse of that place beyond description and understanding, a beauty beyond beauty, making love or art or dialog or philosophy as a kind of asymptotic approach to the sublime, what Porter calls “a reality that lies beyond the realm of language, thought, and the imagination” (577). This desire to “eff the ineffable,” as Richard Rorty more humorously put it, resembles what I understand Wittgenstein’s project to be: to refuse the possibility of finding an ultimate ground of meaning, yet to do philosophy of some sort nonetheless, to make some sort of meaningless meaning from a groundless ground. Or, put differently, it is a question of how our mortality at once draws us towards and ever prevents us from reaching the divine — or, to put it in Kantian terms, how the conditions of possibility that structure our ability to make sense of the world both constrain and constitute the ideas we form of it.

The question is whether describing these conditions of possibility, or the “grammar” in Wittgenstein’s terms, gets us anywhere metaphysical, or is really an exercise in skepticism, ultimately an act of unwriting more than writing. As Porter puts it:

To pass beyond the heavens is to subtract away from all that has passed before one’s eyes and the imagination. Such an ascent may be an exercise in recollection (of some prior known reality). But it is at the very same time and with equal force an exercise in radical forgetting and erasure. The Platonic myth unwrites itself as it progresses, with each new line, until there is nothing left to see or say.

(587)

Wittgenstein wrote poignantly of this dilemma in his Lecture on Ethics (a transitional text between the Tractatus and the Investigations):

My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk ethics or religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless. — Ethics, so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

(51)

Thinking with Wittgenstein for a moment, we might on the one hand have to utterly disavow approaches like Hermias’. After all, Wittgenstein wants us to refuse ostension wholesale as a ground for meaning. If ordinary signification is out the window, then rich symbolic hermeneutics like the Neoplatonists’ are out too! But such a project of disenchantment does not in any way allow us to get around e.g. the cicadas. For what Wittgenstein wants is not to redirect symbolic explanation to a more “scientific,” disenchanted plane at all; his is rather a desire to refuse, or rather to short-circuit, explanation tout court. Yet in so doing, there is a place for religion, for ethics, for philosophical speculation, or if not a ground for them, at least a feeling — or what Stanley Cavell, reading Wittgenstein, calls “the specific plight of mind and circumstance within which a human being gives voice to his condition” (Must We Mean What We Say? 240).

So then, what of the cicadas? What do they represent, what meaning can we make of them? I began this paper with the question of what form god or nature takes in the Phaedrus. I indicated one direction such an inquiry could take, a path that is more doctrinal, systematic, and gave some reasons not to follow that path. Nehamas and Porter, like other contemporary interpreters of the Phaedrus, largely follow this line of thinking which, by taking seriously Plato’s comments on writing, his playfulness, and his literary style, refuses to take seriously the theories elaborated in the speeches. I am not sure I have departed much from this line of thinking, except to register my skepticism that in these refusals we might nonetheless conscript the dialog into a larger project, whether of an art of living or of the sublime. Which, in the end, is not to have gone far from Plato (or Hermias, or Nehamas, or Porter) at all. As Porter puts it, it is precisely “our inability to pin Plato down … [that] makes his dialogues so philosophically rich and elusive” (592).

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Bibliography

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———. On Plato’s Phaedrus 227A–245E. Translated by Dirk Baltzly and Michael Share. Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

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