Body Before Character
Read the full text in our reader
Phaedrus — τῶν μὲν ἐρώντων πολλοὶ πρότερον τοῦ σώματος ἐπεθύμησαν ἢ τὸν τρόπον ἔγνωσαν καὶ τῶν ἄλλων οἰκείων ἔμπειροι ἐγένοντο, ὥστε ἄδηλον αὐτοῖς εἰ ἔτι τότε βουλήσονται φίλοι εἶναι, ἐπειδὰν τῆς ἐπιθυμίας παύσωνται;
Here Lysias lands his heaviest blow. The lover, he observes, wants the body before he has any idea who the beloved is — the craving arrives first, and only afterward, if ever, comes acquaintance with the person's character and the intimate texture of a life. Which means the whole thing rests on a countdown: no one can say whether the lover will still care to be a friend once the desire has spent itself. An attachment built on appetite has an expiry date built into it.
Lysias presses his strongest point. The lover, he says, is caught by the body before he ever knows the person — desire comes first, character later, if at all. So there is no telling whether, once the craving burns out, he will want to stay a friend at all.
This is the argument's real engine, and it is not stupid — Plato would not have built the dialogue around answering it if it were. Lysias sees that desire can outrun knowledge, that a love fixed on the body may burn out and leave nothing, and he names the risk precisely: an attachment that is 'unclear,' adēlon, the moment the appetite fades. His word for the lover's eventual acquaintance with the person is empeiros, 'experienced,' from peira, trial — the root of 'empirical'; love here is a slow accumulation of data about someone, gathered too late. Socrates's answer, when it comes, will not deny that bodily desire is where love begins. It will insist that erōs, rightly followed, is exactly what carries the soul from the beautiful body up to the beauty the body only reflects — that the appetite Lysias wants to wait out is the first stir of the ascent, not merely a hazard to be managed.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 232e in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 232e — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/232e/