Wings for the Philosophical Lover
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — πλὴν ἡ τοῦ φιλοσοφήσαντος ἀδόλως ἢ παιδεραστήσαντος μετὰ φιλοσοφίας… οὕτω πτερωθεῖσαι τρισχιλιοστῷ ἔτει ἀπέρχονται.
Most souls need ten thousand years to grow their wings back. Socrates now names the two exceptions, who are re-fledged in three thousand: the soul that has 'philosophized without guile,' and the soul that has 'loved a youth with philosophy.' If such a soul chooses the philosophical life three times running, it is winged and flies home far ahead of the rest. The whole point of the palinode is folded into that pairing. The philosopher and the philosophical lover are set side by side not as two good options but as one and the same person — because loving beauty rightly and pursuing wisdom are, for Plato, a single motion of the soul. The lover who follows his desire all the way up, and the philosopher who loves the truth, are re-growing the same wings by the same means.
Socrates names the exception to the ten-thousand-year cycle. Only two souls grow wings faster — in three thousand years, on the third millennial circuit: the one who has done philosophy without guile, and the one who has loved a youth with philosophy. In the palinode's logic these two are really one: the philosopher and the true lover.
This is the sentence the entire palinode was written to reach. Every earlier move — the four madnesses, the self-moving soul, the chariot, the fall, the vision of the Forms, the diet of the wings — has been clearing the ground for one identification: the philosophos and the paiderastēs 'with philosophy' are the same soul, and it is the highest. The qualifiers do the whole ethical work. Philosophy must be adolōs, 'without guile' — the love of truth with no ulterior motive; and love of a youth must be meta philosophias, 'with philosophy' — desire for a beautiful person taken up as the first step of the ascent, not as a thing to consume. So qualified, the two lives are one, and they grow the soul its wings fastest, because both are just the soul feeding its plumage on the beautiful and the true, which is what wings eat. Set this against where the dialogue began. Lysias, and Socrates in his veiled speech, told a boy to give himself to the non-lover, on the ground that love is a diminishing appetite. The palinode answers by making the philosophical lover the one soul that flies home ahead of all others — and by making the beloved not a harvest but a fellow-traveler, since to love a youth 'with philosophy' is to want, above everything, that he grow his own wings too. The word to watch is pterōtheisai, 'winged': it is the exact undoing of pterorrhuein, the molting that was the fall. The myth that began with a soul losing its feathers and dropping to earth ends with the philosophical lover getting them back and departing — and the lesson, brought all the way down from heaven, is that this re-fledging is what love, rightly lived, is for.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 249a 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 249a — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/249a/