Phaedrus 229e · 229e

Socrates completes his refusal to play the myth-debunker's game, and the refusal turns on a single loaded word: <em>scholḗ</em>, 'leisure.' To explain away every monster — to reduce Boreas to a gust of wind, then the Centaurs, then the Gorgons, one by one 'through a rustic cleverness' (<em>ágroikos sophía</em>, the boorish smartness he named a moment earlier) — would consume 'a great deal of leisure,' and Socrates has 'no leisure at all' (<em>oudamôs scholḗ</em>) for it. The word <em>scholḗ</em> is worth pausing on, because it is the ancestor of 'school': for the Greeks, leisure was not idleness but the free time that makes the highest activities — philosophy, learning, the examined life — possible. Socrates is not too busy for demythologizing; he is saying that such cleverness is a <em>waste</em> of the very leisure that should go to something incomparably more urgent.<br><br>And that something is the command carved over the temple at Delphi: <em>gnôthi seauton</em>, 'know thyself.' Socrates cannot yet obey it — 'I am not yet able… to know myself' — and until he can, he has no attention to spare for whether a myth is literally true. This is one of the great redirections in Western thought. The pre-Socratic philosophers had trained their <em>sophía</em> outward, on nature, the heavens, the origins of things; the rationalizing mythographers turned the same cleverness on the old stories. Socrates turns it around, inward. The proper object of inquiry is not the wind that might have blown Oreithyia off a rock, but the strange, unmapped creature asking the question — himself. He goes on (a breath later, at 229e–230a) to wonder, self-mockingly, whether he is 'some monster more complicated and swollen with passion than Typhon, or a gentler and simpler creature with a share of something divine' — turning the very catalogue of mythical monsters he refused to explain into a set of possibilities for his own nature. The whole dialogue that follows — the anatomy of the soul, its two horses, its wings, its loves — is Socrates finally getting the <em>scholḗ</em> to attempt the Delphic task. He debunks no myths; he builds the truest one, and it is a map of the self.

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