He Becomes Another Man
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Socrates — μεταβαλὼν ἄλλον ἄρχοντα ἐν αὑτῷ καὶ προστάτην, νοῦν καὶ σωφροσύνην ἀντʼ ἔρωτος καὶ μανίας, ἄλλος γεγονὼς λέληθεν τὰ παιδικά.
Having changed to a different ruler and master within himself — reason and temperance in place of love and madness — he has become another man, without the beloved's realizing it.
Socrates's first speech reaches its cruelest point: the lover's promises are worthless not because he is a liar, but because when desire burns out, a different self takes the throne of his soul — and that self owes the beloved nothing.
This is the sharpest and most philosophically interesting stroke of Socrates's first speech, and it is why the anti-love case cannot simply be dismissed as cynicism. The lover's promises are worthless, Socrates argues, but not because he is a scoundrel — because he is <em>no longer the same person</em>. While desire ruled him, one governor sat on the soul's throne: <em>érōs</em> and <em>manía</em>, love and madness. When the fever breaks, a different ruler takes over — <em>noûs</em> and <em>sōphrosýnē</em>, reason and temperance — and the man who made the vows is, in the most literal sense the soul's psychology allows, gone. 'He has become another' (<em>állos gegonṓs</em>), and the beloved, still addressing the promises to him, is talking to someone who was never there. The betrayal is metaphysical, not moral.<br><br>The argument rests entirely on the picture of the soul Socrates sketched at 237d — the two rulers, appetite and judgment, contending for the throne — and it uses the exact vocabulary of governance: a new <em>árchōn</em> (ruler) and <em>prostátēs</em> (master, the one who 'stands before') installed within (<em>en hautôi</em>). The self is a little kingdom, and which self you are depends on who is reigning. Here is the deep irony that makes the whole dialogue turn: <em>everything in this analysis is something Plato believes</em>. The tripartite soul, the war of reason against appetite, the ideal of reason ruling — these are the doctrine of the <em>Republic</em>, and the palinode itself will crown the charioteer (reason) over the horses. So why must Socrates recant? Because the first speech draws the <em>wrong conclusion</em> from the right psychology. It sees only that love is a usurper to be deposed by reason, and so counsels avoiding love altogether. What it cannot yet see — what the daimonion stops him to supply — is that there is a madness reason should <em>not</em> depose, a seizure from above (not below) that is the soul's true health, and that the man 'changed' back to cold temperance has not been cured but <em>diminished</em>: he has become the small, safe, <em>aneleútheros</em> soul of 256e, the crowd's counterfeit virtue. The first speech is not false psychology; it is true psychology missing its highest term. The lover who 'becomes another man' when love dies has not grown up — he has lost his wings.
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