They Admit They Are Sick
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Phaedrus — καὶ γὰρ αὐτοὶ ὁμολογοῦσι νοσεῖν μᾶλλον ἢ σωφρονεῖν, καὶ εἰδέναι ὅτι κακῶς φρονοῦσιν, ἀλλʼ οὐ δύνασθαι αὑτῶν κρατεῖν· ὥστε πῶς ἂν εὖ φρονήσαντες ταῦτα καλῶς ἔχειν ἡγήσαιντο, περὶ ὧν οὕτω διακείμενοι βουλεύονται;
For they themselves admit they are sick rather than sane, and that they know they are thinking badly but cannot control themselves. So how, once they have come to their senses again, could they think it good — what they resolved upon while in such a condition?
Lysias plays what he thinks is his trump card — and, without knowing it, hands the whole dialogue its central question. The lovers themselves confess that love is a sickness they cannot govern.
This is the sharpest and most fateful sentence in Lysias's whole speech, because it is <em>true</em> as a description and hands Plato the exact question the entire dialogue exists to answer. The lovers, Lysias says, confess it themselves: they are <em>sick</em> (<em>noseîn</em>), not <em>sane</em> (<em>sōphroneîn</em>); they know their judgment is bad and yet 'cannot control themselves' (<em>hautôn krateîn</em> — the failure of self-mastery, the deposed charioteer of 232a and the whole <em>Republic</em>). Therefore, the argument runs, nothing decided in that state can be trusted, and no sane person would ratify, once cooled, the promises made in the fever. It is unanswerable on its own terms. Love <em>is</em> a kind of madness; the lover <em>does</em> lose command of himself; his judgment while love-sick <em>is</em> unreliable. Lysias thinks he has closed the case.<br><br>And this is precisely the door Socrates's daimonion will refuse to let him walk out of. The entire palinode is generated by the single word Lysias treats as a self-evident insult: <em>madness</em>. Lysias assumes, as the whole world assumes, that <em>maínesthai</em> (to be mad) is simply the failure of <em>sōphroneîn</em> (to be sane) — a disease, a deficiency, a loss. Socrates will grant every empirical fact — yes, the lover is beside himself; yes, he cannot govern his desire; yes, sober prudence would never choose this — and then detonate the assumption underneath: there are <em>two kinds</em> of madness. One is the disease Lysias means, appetite overthrowing reason from below (the <em>hýbris</em> of 238a). The other is a seizure from <em>above</em>, a god-sent madness that the sane will never know, and which is 'the greatest of goods' (244a). The love-sick man who 'cannot control himself' is not necessarily a patient to be pitied; he may be an initiate being carried where mere <em>sōphrosýnē</em> could never take him. Lysias's argument is not refuted — it is <em>transcended</em>: he correctly diagnosed the symptom and catastrophically misjudged the condition. He saw a fever and prescribed avoiding all warmth, never guessing that this particular fever is how the soul remembers it once had wings. Everything from 244a onward is the answer to the confident question Lysias asks here — and the answer is that the sane man's careful deliberation, prized so highly in this sentence, is exactly the small safe thing the divine madness leaves behind.
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