Two Kinds of Madness
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — μανίαν τὸν ἔρωτα… μανίας εἴδη δύο τὴν ὑπὸ νοσημάτων ἀνθρωπίνων τὴν ὑπὸ θείας ἐξαλλαγῆς… νομίμων.
Socrates begins to show Phaedrus the machinery hidden inside his own palinode, and it starts with a single distinction. Both of the day's speeches on love, he reminds him, agreed that erōs is a mania, a madness — that was the shared premise. The disagreement lay in what to make of that. And the palinode's decisive move, Socrates now points out, was to divide the one word 'madness' into two eidē, two kinds: the madness that comes 'from human diseases,' nosēmatōn anthrōpinōn — the pathological sort, a sickness in the soul — and the madness that comes 'from a divine release,' theia exallagē, a god-sent 'altering' or lifting-out 'of the customary conventions,' the accustomed nomima by which people ordinarily live. That cut is everything. His first speech, like Lysias's, had lumped all love-madness together as the diseased kind and condemned it; the palinode saw that madness has two natures, only superficially alike, and that love belongs to the second — not a disorder to be cured but a divine release to be revered.
Turning to his own speeches, Socrates begins to lay bare the method behind them. Both speeches, he recalls, agreed on one thing: that love is a kind of madness. But where his first speech treated that madness as a disorder to flee, the palinode drew a distinction the first speech missed. Madness, Socrates now says, comes in two kinds: one arising from human diseases, and one arising from a divine release from the ordinary rules of life.
This unassuming recollection is Socrates beginning to name the method that will occupy the rest of the dialogue, and it is worth watching him do it in slow motion, because the method is the practical payoff of everything the second half has argued. He has established that good speaking requires knowing your subject, and that knowing a disputed word like 'love' means fixing it by definition. Now he shows how the palinode actually did that fixing: by division. It took the wide, contested notion of madness and cut it into its real kinds — first into two, the human-diseased and the divine, and then (as the next lines will recall) the divine into four: the prophetic, the ritual, the poetic, and the erotic. Locate love precisely within that structure — as the fourth species of the divine genus of madness — and you have defined it, given the wandering word a fixed place in a map of kinds, so that everything said about it afterward has a determinate subject to be true of. This procedure, cutting a single form into its natural species, is diairesis, 'division,' and Socrates is about to name it explicitly and pair it with its partner, 'collection.' What makes this passage the quiet turning-point is that it reveals the difference between the day's good speech and its bad ones to have been, all along, a difference of method and not of eloquence. Lysias and Socrates's own first speech were not simply less beautiful than the palinode; they had failed to divide. They took 'love' or 'madness' as an undifferentiated lump and either praised or condemned the whole of it, and so were bound to say something false, because 'madness' names two utterly different things that happen to share a surface. The palinode's superiority was that it cut at the joint — separated the disease from the divine gift — and thereby could praise the right thing while condemning the wrong. And notice how this vindicates the palinode's whole daring reversal. To defend the madness of love looked, in the first speech's terms, like defending a disease; it became not just defensible but true the moment Socrates saw that love's madness is exallagē, divine release, and not nosēma, sickness. The revaluation of love that crowned the first half of the dialogue turns out to rest on a single correct act of division in the second half's sense — which is Plato's way of showing that his soaring myth and his dry method are the same insight seen from two sides. The philosopher who can divide rightly is the one who can love rightly, because both are a matter of telling the divine kind of madness from the diseased.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 265a 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 265a — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/265a/