Don't Fear — Choose the Stirred, Not the Sane
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Socrates — ὥστε τοῦτό γε αὐτὸ μὴ φοβώμεθα, μηδέ τις ἡμᾶς λόγος θορυβείτω δεδιττόμενος ὡς πρὸ τοῦ κεκινημένου τὸν σώφρονα δεῖ προαιρεῖσθαι φίλον·
Three divine madnesses down, Socrates turns to the one that matters. He steels himself and us against the first speeches' verdict. Let us not fear it, he says, and let no argument throw us into a panic and scare us into accepting its rule — that a boy should choose the sōphrōn, the sound-minded, self-possessed friend, over the one who has been 'moved,' set in motion, stirred out of his calm by love. That was the whole recommendation of both earlier speeches, and Socrates now plants his flag against it. His task, he announces, is to prove the exact opposite: that this madness is sent by the gods for the greatest good fortune. The prudent, unmoved friend is about to be dethroned in favor of the one love has shaken awake.
Having shown three kinds of god-sent madness to be blessings, Socrates squares up to the real fight. Let us not be scared off, he says, nor let any clever argument bully us into the first speeches' rule — that one should prefer the sane, self-possessed friend to the one 'stirred' by love. He is about to prove the reverse: that love, the fourth madness, is the greatest gift the gods send.
The sentence turns on a single opposition — ho sōphrōn against ho kekinēmenos, the 'sound-minded' man against the 'moved' one — and both words are about to detonate. The sōphrōn, the self-possessed, unruffled soul, was the hero of the first two speeches and, on any ordinary Greek reckoning, simply the good person: master of himself, unshaken by passion. The kekinēmenos is his opposite, the one love has 'set in motion,' knocked off his stillness. The first speech said: prefer the still one. Socrates says: don't let that scare you. And then he does something breathtaking with the very word for 'moved.' In the lines that immediately follow — the famous proof of the soul's immortality — kinēsis, motion, becomes the definition of soul itself: the soul is the aeikinēton, the ever-moving, the one thing that moves itself and is therefore the ungenerated source of all motion in the universe. So the man dismissed here as merely 'stirred' is, it turns out, doing the very thing that makes a soul a soul — moving, self-moving, toward what it loves. The first speech wanted a soul at rest. Plato is about to prove that a soul at rest is a contradiction, and that to be moved by love is to be most fully alive. Sōphrosynē keeps the mind safe; only motion carries it anywhere worth going.
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