The Seed That Never Dies
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Socrates — … βοηθεῖν ἱκανοὶ καὶ οὐχὶ ἄκαρποι ἀλλὰ ἔχοντες σπέρμα, ὅθεν ἄλλοι ἐν ἄλλοις ἤθεσι φυόμενοι τοῦτʼ ἀεὶ ἀθάνατον παρέχειν ἱκανοί, καὶ τὸν ἔχοντα εὐδαιμονεῖν ποιοῦντες εἰς ὅσον ἀνθρώπῳ δυνατὸν μάλιστα.
The sentence begun at 276e reaches its climax. The words the dialectician sows in a fitting soul are 'able to defend themselves' (boēthein hikanoi) — the one power the orphaned text lacked — and, more than that, they are 'not barren but bearing seed' (ouchi akarpoi alla echontes sperma). From that seed, others spring up 'in other characters' (en allois ēthesi), soul after soul, so that the words 'are able to render this immortal forever' (aei athanaton parechein) and to 'make the one who holds it as happy as is possible for a human being.' The living word does what the written word only mimics: it propagates, it survives its author, it defends itself, and it confers on its possessor the highest human good — eudaimonia, flourishing 'as far as is possible for a human.'
Socrates completes the description of the words dialectic plants in a fitting soul. Unlike the orphaned text, they can defend themselves — and they are not barren: they carry seed, which springs up in other souls and other souls again, keeping the truth alive forever and making the one who holds it as blessed as a human being can be.
The imagery here is not a stray flourish; it is the <em>Phaedrus</em> reaching for the same vision as the <em>Symposium</em>, in almost the same words. In Diotima's teaching, some are 'pregnant in soul' rather than body, and give birth, in contact with a beautiful soul, to <em>logoi</em> and understanding and virtue — and it is through this begetting in the beautiful that a mortal partakes of immortality, leaving behind not children of the flesh but offspring of the mind that keep the parent's name and thought alive. That is exactly the seed here: words planted in a fitting soul that put out seed of their own in other souls, an unbroken succession that makes the truth <em>athanaton</em>, deathless, and makes the one who carries it <em>eudaimōn</em>, blessed. It is worth noticing that dialectic — living philosophical conversation — is being credited with the very thing eros was credited with in the earlier dialogue: a mortal reaching toward the immortal through generation in another. The philosopher does not achieve deathlessness by carving words in stone, which only rot in the reader's memory; he achieves it by planting understanding in living minds that will plant it again. And the closing qualification is pure Plato: happiness 'as far as is possible for a human,' <em>eis hoson anthrōpōi dynaton malista</em> — the same guarded phrase he uses in the <em>Theaetetus</em> for becoming like god 'so far as one can.' The human end is real and reachable, but it is a likeness of the divine, not an equality with it. Dialectic offers the most a person can have: not the gods' immortality, but the nearest a mortal comes to it — a truth handed on, soul to soul, that does not die when the body does.
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