The Trees Teach Me Nothing
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Socrates — φιλομαθὴς γάρ εἰμι· τὰ μὲν οὖν χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα οὐδέν ἐθέλει διδάσκειν, οἱ ἐν τῷ ἄστει ἄνθρωποι
Here is Socrates' famous confession, and the joke of the setting. The most celebrated conversation about the soul's flight into the open heavens takes place with a man who insists he learns <em>nothing</em> from the open country — only from people, in the city he has just been lured out of. He personifies the landscape charmingly: the trees are not <em>willing</em> to teach him.
Phaedrus teases that Socrates never leaves the city — and here he is, coaxed into the countryside. Socrates explains why he is such a stranger to it: he learns only from people, not from places.
The line is both true and slyly self-undermining. Socrates really is a creature of dialogue — his whole method needs a living interlocutor to question and be questioned; a tree cannot answer back, which is exactly the charge he will bring against the written word at the dialogue's end. And yet Plato has set this confession beneath a plane tree, by a stream, among cicadas, in a scene so beautiful it became the model for every literary landscape after. The word to hold is <em>philomathḗs</em>, 'lover of learning' — the same <em>philo-</em> as philosophy: Socrates claims not wisdom but the love of it, and admits, even here, that he is a beginner who must be taught.
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