The Man You and I Would Pray to Become
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Socrates — … οὗτος δὲ ὁ τοιοῦτος ἀνὴρ κινδυνεύει, ὦ Φαῖδρε, εἶναι οἷον ἐγώ τε καὶ σὺ εὐξαίμεθʼ ἂν σέ τε καὶ ἐμὲ γενέσθαι.
Phaedrus — παντάπασι μὲν οὖν ἔγωγε βούλομαί τε καὶ εὔχομαι ἃ λέγεις.
Having described the philosopher — the man who knows the truth, plants living words in fitting souls, and lets his 'legitimate sons' grow up in soul after soul — Socrates does not leave him an abstraction. 'This sort of man, Phaedrus, is likely to be the one that you and I would pray both you and me to become,' houtos … kindyneuei … einai hoion egō te kai sy euxaimeth' an … genesthai. Phaedrus answers with his whole self: 'By all means; I too wish and pray for what you say.' The exchange is small and quiet, but it does two things at once. It gathers the entire argument about speech and writing back into a question of who to be rather than what to know; and it introduces, in the word euchomai, 'I pray,' the note on which the whole dialogue is about to end.
The living words, Socrates has said, sprout as 'legitimate sons' in soul after soul, each according to its worth — and let the rest go their way. Then he names, quietly, what all this has been describing: not a doctrine but a person, the one he and Phaedrus should most wish to be. Phaedrus assents with his whole heart, and the register turns, for the first time, to prayer.
It is characteristic of Plato that the summit of an argument is not a proposition but a person one might become, and characteristic of Socrates that he reaches for it with a hedge — <em>kindyneuei</em>, 'is likely,' the tentative verb of one who ventures rather than asserts even his highest ideal. The man just described has no name yet (that comes two lines later, when Socrates refuses 'wise,' <em>sophos</em>, as fitting a god alone, and offers 'lover of wisdom,' <em>philosophos</em>, instead). Here he is defined purely by desire: he is the one 'you and I would pray to become.' The doubling in the Greek — 'you and I … both you and me' — is not padding; it makes the aspiration mutual and reciprocal, an ideal shared between two friends rather than a standard one holds over the other, and it quietly recovers the erotic frame of the whole dialogue. In the palinode, love was the wing by which the soul climbs toward the truth it once saw; now, at the end, that same upward longing reappears stripped of its mythic machinery, as two people simply wishing, together, to become the kind of soul in which true words can live. And the verb that carries it, <em>euchomai</em>, is the language of prayer. Its appearance here is the hinge: the conversation that began by dissecting a clever speech about desire ends by turning toward the gods, and within a page Socrates will be praying to Pan for inward beauty. The argument has done its work; what remains is not another thesis but an orientation of the whole person — wish, prayer, and the readiness to be changed.
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