A Lover of Divisions
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Socrates — τούτων δὴ ἔγωγε αὐτός τε ἐραστής, ὦ Φαῖδρε, τῶν διαιρέσεων καὶ συναγωγῶν, ἵνα οἷός τε ὦ λέγειν τε καὶ φρονεῖν· ἐάν τέ τινʼ ἄλλον ἡγήσωμαι δυνατὸν εἰς ἓν καὶ ἐπὶ πολλὰ πεφυκόθʼ ὁρᾶν, τοῦτον διώκω κατόπισθε μετʼ ἴχνιον ὥστε θεοῖο.
Of these — the divisions and the collections — I myself am a lover, Phaedrus, so that I may be able to speak and to think. And whenever I judge another man able by nature to see toward the one and toward the many, I pursue him from behind, in his footsteps, as though they were a god's.
Naming the method behind everything he has done — gathering the many into one and cutting the one into its kinds — Socrates confesses his devotion to it in the language of love and the hunt.
Socrates names his method, and the naming secretly stitches the whole dialogue together. The method is dialectic: <em>synagōgḗ</em> — collection, gathering scattered particulars up into the single Form that unites them — and <em>diaíresis</em> — division, cutting that Form into its true kinds, at the natural joints and not, as he said at 265e, like a clumsy butcher hacking through the bone. This double motion, seeing 'toward one and toward many,' is for Plato the very shape of thought; his late dialogues will turn it into a formal technique. But watch the word he chooses for his relation to it: <em>erastḗs</em> — 'lover,' the same word for the lover of a beautiful boy that has run through the entire first half of the dialogue. Socrates is a <em>lover</em> of divisions. The love-speeches and the rhetoric were never two subjects: dialectic is eros redirected onto the structure of the real, the soul's winged desire aimed at the Forms instead of a face.<br><br>And the hunt-imagery seals it. He does not merely admire the man who can see one-and-many; he <em>pursues</em> him — <em>diṓkō</em>, the verb of the chase and of the lover's pursuit — tracking his footprints (<em>íchnion</em>) 'as if a god's,' in a line that slips into Homeric diction (the epic genitive <em>theoîo</em>) and mock-reverent tone. Desire, the hunt, and reverence for the divine: the emotional vocabulary of the palinode, transposed intact onto the practice of philosophy. The dialogue has been arguing, through two apparently mismatched halves, that to think well and to love well are the same discipline — and here, quietly, in a confession of method, it says so outright.
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