There’s a part in Euthyphro where Socrates starts talking the difference between carrying and being carried, leading and being led, seeing and being seen and asks Euthyphro if he knew where the difference lies and Euthyphro says “I think I understand”. I certainly didn’t have a clue what the fuck Socrates was on about so I wrote it out and I got this; one is to do, the other is being done to. “And is not that which is beloved distinct from that which loves?” asks Socrates. “Certainly” Euthyphro says. Socrates goes on “Well; and now tell me, is that which is carried in this state of carrying because it is carried, or for some other reason?” What Socrates is saying here is that there is a difference between a thing being, and the state in which it is being. What’s more, that “a thing is not seen because it is visible, but visible because it is seen” as in the being comes first than the state it’s in. “Nor is a thing led because it is in a state of being led” the point being, the state follows the act. There is a primacy in being, that being causes form. The state something is in is a result and not the cause i.e. the form it’s in is a result of its being and not the reverse. “The state of being loved follows the act of being loved, and not the act the state.” The state follows the act. Now if your familiar with the dialogue you know it’s Socrates drawing out the contradiction of Euthyphros definition of piety, what is dear and loved by the Gods.
At this point of the dialogue (10a-c) Socrates shows that what is dear and what is loved are not identical to the Gods. The way he goes about proving it I find much more faciniating, his method of thinking is much more than blind probing questioning, but he seems to me to be thinking of circles within circles. So far we see that being takes precedence over the state of being. This matters because it constructs Socrates rebuttal “whether the pious or holy is beloved by the Gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the Gods” – “The one is of a kind to be loved because it is loved, and the other is loved because is of a kind to be loved.” Notice this beautiful idea Plato wants us to analyze, the loving something for what it is vs loving something because it is a kind to be loved. A similar illustration is made in the dialogue Parmenides. Do you love someone for who they are or what they are? Are you in love with the form of this person, or for the person? Parmenides shows how the form doesn’t exist, it is literally nothing (hypothesis 1) but also, that the person cannot not exist (hypothesis 3) but exists very definitely in many ways with many others, but above all else, does exist (hypothesis 2). So if you love someone for who they are, and not just their form, you love them surely in their many forms, but it’s never the forms or a single form, but you love them for who they are and most importantly that they are. This latter part, that they are, is love itself coming to recognize itself: I love this person, this person is the very love I feel, this love is as I am delivered to what is with love that is. How this is worded within the argument found in Euthyphro is as follows: is piety loved for what it is, or is piety loved because it is a kind to be loved. Rhetoric stresses the importance of saying the right thing at the right time to the right person in the right way, so there is a definite context that necessitates the dialectic to spring to action, so it makes sense why Plato must teach in dialogue form, but what he’s teaching cannot be said outright because you remove how it comes to work in general. So I’m trying to figure out this method of thinking that Plato seems keen to write about, I don’t believe for a second he’s writing to propose a set of doctrines through Socrates but rather how a certain dialectic reveals the truth as itself, that thinking brings us to the world as it is, instead of a state that it’s in. I know the eleatics were very secretive so I think there is a deliberate subtlety to Plato’s dialogues. The very essence of Plato seems to me to be untapped, except for Epicurus, Hegel, and Derrida.
“Orithyia was playing with Pharmacia…”
Honestly, after reading Plato’s Pharmacy over and over again, I am beginning to really believe that we are just beginning to understand Plato, Phaedrus being the key. It’s absolutely crazy, weird, and spooky that what Derrida writes about in Of Grammatology he finds in Plato’s Phaedrus. I can’t imagine how spooked he was when it all started to unravel. 
“A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception. And hence, perpetually and essentially, they run the risk of being definitively lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances? The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the “object,” without risking—which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught—the addition of some new thread. Adding, here, is nothing other than giving to read.”
I cannot stress how absolutely groundbreaking this essay is, especially in regards to Plato. There is a system at work that seems absolutely uninvestigated for the past twenty five centuries, really requiring someone like Derrida to disassemble it to find what had so far been left unfound. It’s impossible to paraphrase. The word Pharmakon is used in multiple different ways in the Phaedrus, from describing the Lysias stream they sit beside, to describing the text hidden in Phaedrus’ robe, to the very way the latter part is treated just as an appendage, a supplement, a pharmakon to the dialogue, when the whole thing is woven from front to end like some beast brought to life by a demigod. And what’s more, something I have been thinking about since I read it, I can’t get over, is how writing itself is described by Socrates as a a kind of living being, and this he echoes in the Sophist and elsewhere. Hegel begins the Phenomenology of Spirit with a reference to Anatomy
“ -the knowledge of the parts of the body regarded as lifeless – we are quite sure we do not possess the objective concrete fact, the actual content of the science, but must, over and above, be concerned with particulars. Further, in the case of such a collection of items of knowledge, which has no real right to the name of science, any talk about purpose and suchlike generalities is not commonly very different from the descriptive and superficial way in which the contents of the science these nerves and muscles, etc. – are themselves spoken of. In philosophy, on the other hand, it would at once be felt incongruous were such a method made use of and yet shown by philosophy itself to be incapable of grasping the truth.”
Something is going on and it’s not at all what anyone has been able to give birth to. I want to continue this push. The king tells Thoth that he likes his other gifts, but that writing specifically he doesn’t like. And his reasoning is, not the it causes bad memory part, but that it’s not an art. I had to really think about this- writing doesn’t really accomplish anything in the way that say arithmetic or astronomy or letters do- i.e. there’s no magic. There’s just a false memory, according to the King. But Plato does do something with writing. This is what I mean by Plato being unmasked for the first time by Derrida, and also really explaining what Plato is doing, what he did, in the history of thought, as the father of philosophy, as the person to differentiate mythos for logos. And what is logos, if it’s not just writing, like a story? What does Plato make writing do, exactly? As in, what does philosophy in regards to Plato, do as an art? This is unthought so far for those unfamiliar, which includes almost everyone.
“Now when he had made many into his lovers and had benefited large numbers of them, he dreamed as he was on the point of death that, having turned into a swan, he was moving from tree to tree, and in this way was causing extreme toil for the hunters. Simmias the Socratic interpreted this dream as follows: that Plato would be difficult to grasp for those succeeding him who wished to explain him: for the commentators who attempt to pursue the concepts of the ancients are like bird- catchers, and Plato is difficult to grasp since it is possible to interpret his words on the level of natural philosophy, ethics, or theology – in short, in many different senses – as is also the case with the [words] of Homer. For these two souls are said to have embraced every mode, which is why it is possible to take the words of both of them in all manner of ways. When he died, the Athenians buried him lavishly, and inscribed upon his tomb: Two did Apollo bring forth, Asclepius and Plato, The one to keep our soul healthy, the other our body.”
As if words are shadows, orphans due to a patricide of their own making, yet made possible by an absent father, a filial inscription, a reflection of a father who is not there to recognize the offspring that bears his appearance, that stands for his absence.
“by the name which was given by them to the rational investigation of futurity, whether made by the help of birds or of other signs–“
Is this just dialectics used for no end?
SOCRATES: By making the point that it is through discourse that the same thing flits around, becoming one and many in all sorts of ways, in whatever it may be that is said at any time, both long ago and now. And this will never come to an end, nor has it just begun, but it seems to me that this is an “immortal and ageless” condition that comes to us with discourse. Whoever among the young first gets a taste of it is as pleased as if he had found a treasure of wisdom. He is quite beside himself with pleasure and revels in moving every statement, now turning it to one side and rolling it all up into one, then again unrolling it and dividing it up. He thereby involves first and foremost himself in confusion, but then also whatever others happen to be nearby, be they younger or older or of the same age, sparing neither his father nor his mother nor anyone else who might listen to him. He would almost try it on other creatures, not only on human beings, since he would certainly not spare any foreigner if only he could find an interpreter somewhere.
Critics abound like bastards, or more like those diabolical Egyptian surgeons, performing surgery’s on living bodies, as if they were already dead. But criticism of this sort is exactly what philosophy is not, beside it being nowhere near the level of scholarship any of those named properly reside in. It’s fascinating to see these displays of censorship to new interpretations though, because the false memory, once it has been accepted, becomes sacrosanct. Ironically it was Nietzsche who tells the story of memory and pride fighting. “Memory said it was that way, and pride said it couldn’t have been, and memory gave in.”
“Here, structure, the framework of construction, morphological correlation, becomes in fact and despite his theoretical intention, the critic’s sole preoccupation. His sole or almost sole preoccupation.”
There’s a book called Plato the myth maker that lays out a really solid argument that what we know as “myth” didn’t become “myth” as we know it today until Plato had established “the logos” or philosophy in general. And when you step back from all our conditioned notions of philosophy, Plato’s dialogues are very very strange pieces of work, almost absurdist to a certain extent. The Phaedrus has been described up until Derrida as one of Plato’s weaker works, due to him becoming senile, hence why he criticizes language. You can tell this interpretation is clearly reading the surface. What Derrida does NO ONE has done for any of Plato’s works, ever. The book is an incredible example of 1st rate scholarship on Derrida’s part, and not only that. There’s a book about Derrida, specifically that essay, and it goes into how Derrida actually does in the essay what Plato does in the dialogue, almost like teaching through doing. Most readers find Derrida obscure in the same way that they dissect Plato with these cookie cutter readings that sustain their own reading while preventing that very structure from revealing how poorly built its foundations are and, as can be seen, always have been.
Up until that time (1969) the accepted interpretation on the Phaedrus was that Plato wrote it when he was getting old and that explains why he bashes writing at the end. Like Plato became bitter at his legacy and wrote the Phaedrus as a kind of critique of his whole enterprise. Derrida is the one to blow this out the water and shows how the dialogue, from begining to end, deals with the same theme in multiple ways. And Derrida doesn’t deconstruct the whole thing. I can imagine the implications of the king and Thoth relationship bear to not only Socrates and Phaedrus but also the lover/non lover and the beloved. It just feels like you could keep going over and over it and see the intense tapestry work in this beast. And to think how many other dialogues have yet to be revealed in this way. It made me think of the Parmenides, how it begins with finding the person who remembers the story of Socrates meeting Parmenides, and how the boy was taking a horse, and I wonder now how that must play into the greater part of the dialogue knowing what we know about the Phaedrus.
What follows is a contribution made by an anonymous friend who I think is on the right path;
Phaedrus can be seen as the treatment of the rhetoric of Eros. Boy pussy isn’t the point; replace it with whatever conscious being could be considered a beloved and that does the trick.
The 1st half is 3 speeches to the beloved from the perspective of the lover, 2nd half is a discussion of rhetoric and speeches and writing. The 2nd half is key to the first (and key to most Platonic dialogues). A critique of writing is contained in a written text from the mouth of a character with a reputation for irony; whether this is Plato being himself ironical or disagreeing implicitly with Socrates is an important issue. The really important passage is about logographic necessity, which suggests how to read the whole dialogue (as passages that have a causal necessity to each other instead of bits that can be abstracted from the whole; i.e., seeing how the first speech necessarily leads to the second and so on with the third).
A simple relationship between the two halves is the necessity of the lover portraying themselves a certain way to the beloved, in both having its source in the feeling that the lover lacks something without the beloved, but also vice versa so that the beloved sees any value in the lover. This also works for the relationship between student and teacher–
or a Priest and King, or the written word and the truth that it is attempting to represent.
There’s a sphere past all “justified true belief” that people don’t even consider because the belief of its possibility, it’s height, could only be seen if you were already high enough to see past the mountains that tower you, at that peak in the distance. Such a view, not of the east or west or north or south, but of a panorama of the whole scene- that is what Hegel did. Sure, Goethe did the same, but not in artistically direct precise systematics as Hegel. All things would lead back to Plato if it wasn’t for this fucking German Lord.
What is the relation between Plato and Derrida then? That’s a really really really high mountain. And the question is too simple to set off on such a big task. If you read Derrida, he always starts where he needs, he doesn’t give a fuck if you don’t know who Bataille is or if you haven’t read all his minor works or if you’ve never thought about how the Accursed Share bears reference to the system of the dialectic. He just sets off from where he must begin. Plato is the same way. Think about how abruptly the Philebus begins. Or even the means of irony and sarcasm, he doesn’t care whether you don’t understand, he only cares about understanding, pure and thorough understanding. Because at that height disagreement doesn’t exist, and genius works out it’s own perfection much like a master artist. There is only admiration for the sophistication and bravery and fearlessness.
“How we read Plato will be connected to how we size up Plato’s reasons for writing dialogues, and those reasons will ultimately connect with a conception of what it means to do “philosophy,” a conception in turn tied to notions of eros and rhetoric–these are all threads of a single tapestry. “
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