Which Kind Is Love?
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Socrates — ὀξέως αἰσθάνεσθαι… γένους… τὸν ἔρωτα τῶν ἀμφισβητησίμων…
Phaedrus — βλάβη τῷ ἐρωμένῳ καὶ ἐρῶντι… μέγιστον τῶν ἀγαθῶν.
Socrates turns the general rule onto the specific word, and the move is quietly brilliant. First the rule restated: the skilled speaker, approaching any subject, must 'perceive sharply,' oxeōs aisthanesthai, which of the two kinds — which genos — it belongs to, the agreed or the disputed. Then the test case: is love, ho erōs, one of 'the disputable things,' tōn amphisbētēsimōn, or not? Phaedrus does not hesitate: disputed, obviously. And his proof is delicious, because it is drawn from the very speeches they have spent the day making. Could you possibly have said, he asks Socrates, what you just said about love — that it is a blabē, a harm, to both the beloved and the lover — and then turned around and said it is 'the greatest of goods'? The two speeches contradict each other flatly about what love is. That self-contradiction is the demonstration: a word one can honestly call both a curse and the greatest blessing is, by definition, a wandering word, one of the contested kind.
The rule is set: know which class each of your words belongs to. Socrates says the artful speaker, coming to each thing, must perceive sharply which of the two kinds it falls under. Then he applies it to the word at the heart of the whole day's speeches. Is love a disputed word or an agreed one? Phaedrus answers instantly — disputed, of course — and gives the proof from the speeches themselves: they called love a harm to both lover and beloved, and then the greatest of goods.
There is a lovely reflexivity in this passage, the dialogue turning to examine its own body. All day Socrates and Phaedrus have been making speeches about love — Lysias's cool dismissal, Socrates's first speech condemning love as a harmful madness, and then the great palinode crowning it as the soul's highest gift and a divine blessing. Now Socrates uses that very swing, from 'harm' to 'greatest of goods,' as clinching evidence that love is a disputed word, one of the terms about which minds wander and cannot settle. The point is not that one of the speeches was simply wrong. It is that love is the kind of thing about which such opposite speeches can both be made persuasively — and that this is exactly the diagnostic mark of a contested concept. You could not do this with 'iron.' No one can give a plausible speech proving iron is a curse and another proving it the greatest of goods, because iron is anchored to a perceptible object that steadies the word. Love has no such anchor; it points to something the senses cannot fix, and so it floats, available to be praised or damned with equal eloquence. And this is precisely why, Socrates is implying, the whole day's rhetoric about love was built on sand until someone did the prior work of definition. It also quietly vindicates the structure of his own palinode. Recall how that speech began: not by plunging into praise, as Lysias plunged into his pitch, but by first dividing madness into its kinds — the prophetic, the ritual, the poetic, and the erotic — and locating love precisely among them as a specific, god-sent form of divine madness. That opening act of division was Socrates doing the very thing he now prescribes: taking a wandering word and giving it a fixed place in a map of kinds, so that everything said afterward had a defined subject to be true or false about. Lysias never did this, which is why his speech could be shuffled into any order; Socrates did it, which is why his had a living shape. The analysis of the speeches, in other words, confirms the method: the difference between artful and artless speaking about love comes down to whether the speaker first grasped which kind of word 'love' is, and then steadied it by division and definition before daring to move a single soul about it.
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