From Blame to Praise
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Socrates — μυθικόν ὕμνον προσεπαίσαμεν τὸν δεσπότην ἔρωτα… ἀπὸ ψέγειν πρὸς ἐπαινεῖν… ὁ λόγος μεταβῆναι.
Socrates looks back on his great speech with affectionate lightness. It was, he says, a mythikos hymnos — a 'mythic hymn,' praise cast as a story — sung 'measuredly and reverently' to Erōs, whom he calls 'the master,' despotēn, 'of you and me both,' and 'overseer of beautiful boys.' The playfulness is deliberate: he treats the soaring palinode, with its winged souls and chariots, as a piece of sacred play, a hymn offered to a god. Then he isolates the feature he wants to study. The remarkable thing about the day's speeches, he says, is that they contrived 'to pass' — metabēnai — 'from blaming to praising,' apo tou psegein pros to epainein. Love was first censured as a harmful madness and then hymned as the soul's highest blessing. That swing between the two poles of evaluative speech, blame and praise, psogos and epainos, is exactly what he now wants to anatomize — because the swing was not arbitrary. It was made possible by a definite intellectual procedure, and that procedure is what he is about to name.
Looking back on the palinode, Socrates describes it fondly as a kind of mythic hymn — measured and reverent — sung to Love, the master of them both and overseer of beautiful boys. Phaedrus agrees it was no unpleasant thing to hear. Then Socrates points to the feature he wants to examine: how the day's speaking managed to swing all the way from blaming love to praising it. That swing, and the play behind it, will let him extract the method that made the good speech good.
Two small things in this passage repay attention, and both point forward to the naming of the method. The first is the word hymnos, hymn. By calling the palinode a hymn to Love, Socrates keeps alive the frame that has governed the whole speech from the start: it was a recantation, a religious act, praise offered to a god he had offended, and he treats it still as worship even as he prepares to dissect its logical bones. This is characteristic of Plato's refusal to let 'myth' and 'method' fall apart. The palinode was a mythikos hymnos, a mythic hymn, all image and inspiration and reverence — and Socrates is about to show that this same soaring thing was, structurally, a rigorous exercise in definition by division. The hymn and the logic are the same object seen in two lights, and Plato wants us to hold both at once: the philosopher sings and analyzes in one breath. The second thing is the pair blame and praise, psogos and epainos. These were the two poles of what the Greeks called epideictic or display rhetoric — the rhetoric of ceremonial evaluation, of funeral orations and encomia and invectives, the art of making something look admirable or contemptible. Socrates points out that the day's speeches ran the full span from one pole to the other about the very same thing, love. And this is the crux he is building toward: the fact that a single subject could be both plausibly blamed and plausibly praised is not a scandal but a clue. It shows, as the earlier argument established, that love is a disputed word — and it shows that the swing from blame to praise was accomplished by first cutting the ambiguous thing into its kinds, so that the diseased madness could be blamed and the divine madness praised, each truly. The move from psogos to epainos was licensed by a division. So when Socrates says he wants to 'grasp' how the speech managed that passage, he is really asking Phaedrus to notice the hidden method, and the next lines will finally lift it into full view: the two procedures of collection and division, by which the mind gathers a scattered manifold into one form and then cuts that form at its natural joints. The mythic hymn was, all along, a demonstration of dialectic. Socrates is about to make the demonstration conscious.
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