Phaedrus 256a · 256a

This is the pivot on which the whole ethics of the palinode turns. The two lovers, souls in an uproar — the dark horse lunging toward the body, the charioteer and white horse hauling back in reverence — reach a crisis, and Socrates poses it as a contest with two possible winners. <em>If</em> 'the better parts of the mind win out' (<em>nikḗsēi tà beltíō tês dianoías</em> — <em>nikáō</em>, the victory-verb of Nike), they are led into two things named together: 'an ordered way of life' (<em>tetagménēn díaitan</em>) and 'philosophy.' The pairing is the point. Self-discipline and the love of wisdom are not two prizes but one — an <em>ordered</em> life (<em>díaita</em>, the root of 'diet,' the whole regimen of one's days) is what philosophy looks like from outside, and philosophy is what an ordered soul does from within. The victory is not repression; a few lines on, Socrates makes clear these lovers do not kill their desire but govern it, winning back their wings together at death. Erotic madness has not been extinguished — it has been <em>steered</em>, and steered toward the Forms.<br><br>What makes the passage quietly radical is that the prize is available to <em>lovers</em>, not to those who avoided love. This is the total reversal of Lysias's opening. Lysias urged the boy toward the calculating non-lover precisely to escape the storm of eros; Socrates says the storm is the raw material of the highest life, if the charioteer can hold the reins. The 'blessed' (<em>makários</em> — the word for the happiness of the gods and the blessed dead) life is won <em>through</em> the madness, by mastering it, not by refusing it. The disciplined lovers get everything the non-lover was promised — order, friendship, a good life — plus the wings the non-lover will never grow, because he never let himself be seized by beauty at all. The whole dialogue's wager is here: better to be driven mad by the divine and learn to ride it than to stay sanely on the ground.

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