WHAT THE CICADAS SANG

know; this, indeed, is what the writers of rhetorical manuals (criticised in the second part of the dialogue) capitalise upon.30 All the more important, then, that the reader should not neglect the role of the background in these skills also, and should acknowledge what they share with the less remarkable capacities that engage attention in the dialogue's preliminary episode. Of course, this is to review that episode with the hindsight available only to the close reader of the entire dialogue. On a first reading we are likely to be as intrigued by Plato's extraordinary play with the topography in general as Phaedrus is in particular by Socrates' extraordinary pastoral gushing. Our speculations will be guided by the hypothesis that, because this is literature and not life, Plato's unusually hot attention to the scenery is dictated not by fancy but by heavy purpose; with the result that Plato will have obliged us by literary artifice to take off our sandals and paddle to train on life's simpler moments something like the philosophic eye for paradigms that an always unshod Socrates needs no such inducement to exert.
What the cicadas sang

In the opening section of this chapter I posed two questions: why does Plato build into the conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus so elaborate a consideration of its setting? And why, once he has sat his characters down in their pastoral theatre, does he again, and markedly, direct their interest towards the environment allowing the cicadas' orchestral accompaniment its solo passage at the crucial point where rhetoric ousts love from the spotlight of discussion? Up to this point I have explicated and defended my answer to the first question only. Now that I have adverted to the philosophical importance of the concept of 'background', I can turn to the second of my two questions. My anticipatory answer to this question was: Plato marks the transitional point between the two parts of the dialogue with renewed attention to its scene in order to orient our reading of its curious structure the 25

ORIENTATION

brusque shift, that is, from celebration of love to cerebration over rhetoric. I have already shown how the characters' dealings with their dramatic ambience are paradigmatic of a larger pattern in the exercise of human skills and arts, and how Socrates' reactions in particular emblematise the distinctive quality of his philosophic art: that particular art which investigates (among other things) the conditions of art in general, including its own. But the Phaedrus is itself a product of this self-conscious philosophic art. Small wonder, then, that, as I will now argue, Plato steps up the emblematic charge of the dramatic action so that it empowers an interpretation of how the dialogue itself is to be read. The chorus of cicadas takes centre-stage not immediately after Socrates has given the peroration of his great speech on love and the discussion veers, but when Socrates has reached agreement with Phaedrus (after a brief transitional passage, 257b7-258e5) that they need to investigate the criteria of good speaking and writing. Here he breaks off and alerts Phaedrus to the sound of the cicadas in the branches overhead. The cicadas are watching us, he insists. We should take care not to doze off in the noonday heat, but to keep our discussion alive; and if we put on a good show, they will grant us the reward that is theirs to give. Phaedrus has never heard of this prerogative of theirs, and asks Socrates to explain. Socrates replies with a short myth. The cicadas were men once, back in the time before the Muses were born; but the Muses came and brought song into the world and you would not believe the pleasure of it. Some people forgot their food and drink and sang themselves to death. The Muses turned them into the first cicadas so that they could sing all day without food or drink and at the end of their days appear before them with an account of who honoured which of them among men on earth. So if we want a good report to reach Calliope and Urania, the philosophic Muses, we had better not flag in the heat but push on with ourfinetalk (this in summary of 258e6-259d8). Clearly, Socrates' pause to temper his and Phaedrus' resolve marks a new beginning. Moreover, the old beginning 26

WHAT THE CICADAS SANG

resonates with Socrates' remark here that they have at any rate the 'leisure' {skhole, 258e6) to continue talking. Recall the prominent contrast in the dialogue's opening pages between the leisure of the professional and a layman's leisure. There Phaedrus asked Socrates if he had the time to come and hear Lysias' speech, and Socrates, the man 'sick for words' (228b6), assented with characteristic enthusiasm; but now that Socrates has captured the conversational initiative with the rhetorical tour de force of his speeches on love, it is he who asks Phaedrus whether they need to examine the criteria of good speaking and writing, and Phaedrus who eagerly concurs: 'You're asking if we need to do this? But why else would anyone bother even to live, you might say, if not for this sort of pleasure? Certainly not for that other sort, at any rate, where there must be a foregoing pain if there's to be any pleasure at all; something almost all bodily pleasures have. That is why they're rightly called "slavish" (andrapododeisY (25 8 e 1-5). The unabashed delight in intellectual talk to which Phaedrus here gives vent is a philosophic trait; Socrates himself freely confesses and exhibits it. Yet it is at most a necessary, not a sufficient qualification for the life of philosophy. Indeed, as Socrates' admission that he is 'sick for words' suggests, such enthusiasm is double-edged; and Phaedrus is showing its dangerous side. We have seen how, as cultural 'impresario', he has a tendency to promote clever talk for its own sake, indiscriminately. I propose that through the myth of the cicadas Plato takes his stand against this tendency in such a way as to admonish readers that they too, at this delicate point in the action, must beware of careless discrimination among the breeds of intellectual discourse. (As Socrates warns, introducing the myth, 'no one who loves the Muses should be ignorant of such things', 259b5~6.)31 Just about all bodily pleasures are 'slavish', Phaedrus sweepingly declares; or rather, reports the declaration as an established philosophic dogma, to which he enthusiastically subscribes.32 In response, Socrates indicates that even the pleasures of the mind promote their variety of slavishness; and furthermore, that this slavishness is of just the sort that
27

ORIENTATION

Phaedrus has displayed by citing authority in support of his personal predilections. If they allow themselves to be bewitched by the cicadas' drone, says Socrates, and doze off like sheep at siesta around the spring, the cicadas will rightly mock them as 'slavish types' (andrapod' atta, 259a4-5). Slavish with a bodily slavishness, we might think. Yet consider more closely the pleasures that the cicadas purvey. According to Socrates' figurative description, theirs is just that verbal virtuosity, in all its facets, which Phaedrus ranks most highly: they both 'sing and converse' (aidontes kai allelois dialegomenoi, 258e7-259al) in the foliage overhead; they are Sirens (259e7), whose seduction is in their voice; and it is the 'lazily relaxed mind' rather than body of the hearer (di* argian tes dianoias, 259a3-4) that is sensible to the seductive pleasure of language stripped down to a mantra's hum. Moreover, none show better than the cicadas themselves the dangers of this pleasure. In Socrates' story they indulge indiscriminately in the gifts of the Muses, overwhelmed by the pleasure of song (see 259b8), and receive their just deserts: they become messengers, mere vehicles for conveying to all the Muses how others, but certainly not the cicadas themselves, discriminate between them in their devotion. The cicadas 'sing' and 'converse' at the same time (why make distinctions when glossolalia bites?), but Socrates has just switched, and abruptly so, from the 'singing' register of his poetic declamations on love33 to the dialectical conversation with Phaedrus that makes up the second part of the dialogue. And whereas the cicadas run their errand for the entire band of Muses without distinction, Socrates does not hesitate to attribute to Calliope and Urania, Muses of philosophy, the 'fairest voice' (259d7) among them all. Not for him the cicadas' fate. Phaedrus, on the other hand, is susceptible to their disease. Not only has he been temporarily overwhelmed by the beauty of Socrates' magnificent encomium of love (so that Socrates has had to correct his pendulum swing of sudden contempt for Lysias, 257b7-d7), but he is now all set to view the continuation of their subtle talk exclusively (and with an equally sudden shift of immediate perspective) as a prospect of fur28

WHAT THE CICADAS SANG

ther pleasure - albeit pleasure of the noblest rank. That is why the myth of the cicadas crops up not in the immediate aftershock of the poetic speechmaking but only when the decision has been taken to analyse rhetorical effectiveness in general; because it warns Phaedrus (and, indirectly, the reader) how not to take the transition between the overtly poetic and rhetorical speeches and the sober analysis of the art they exemplify. For Phaedrus, analysis is desirable because it is more of the same, more highbrow talk; uppermost in his mind is not the truth it might reach but the pleasure it will bring just in getting itself said (typically, the snippet of philosophy he cites in encouragement at 258e3-4 - the dogma that his mind has retained - concerns not truth but pleasure). In this he ignores the implications of the very point they have just decided: that writing is not shameful as such (nor is Lysias the speechwriter to be condemned simply because he writes), but both writing and speaking are good and bad only in so far as what is said and written is properly or improperly said and written (258dl7). The principle behind this claim would be that accidents of format are not a sound basis for judgments of value. Phaedrus agrees submissively enough (258d6), but in his subsequent outburst makes it clear that he considers all intellectual talk good for no more intrinsic reason than that it stimulates mental rather than visceral pleasure (a point not substantially affected by the fact that he recognises, as we saw, that the pleasure must be felt for the appropriate reasons; for he does not ask himself why those reasons are appropriate). For Socrates, by contrast, intellectual talk is pleasant because it is good - if it is good. He discriminates between good and bad within each mode of intellectual talk, and between better and worse modes overall. However, here we encounter a deep irony that makes of this scene not the somewhat smug put-down of Phaedrus' dilettantism that it might otherwise seem, but a revelation of Socratic modesty in Plato's teaching and a vademecum for the dialogue as a whole. After all, on what is Socrates' discrimination to be 29

ORIENTATION

grounded? In giving philosophy the palm he mentions other Muses and their special provinces: Terpsichore and choral odes, Erato and love lyric (259c6d3). Here, then, would be a ready basis for discrimination 'according to the form of honour paid each Muse' (259d23); for the choral dithyramb fits neither love lyric ... nor, one supposes, philosophy? But this will not do. To declare Calliope's voice the noblest for formal reasons whether the form considered appropriate for philosophy be dialectical prose or the verse of an Empedocles would be to fall back into Phaedrus' error of judging the good by externals. But might there not, after all, be some single most appropriate format for philosophy, just as in Plato's culture only metrical language can be properly called poetry? There might; but Plato's presentation of this scene indicates not only that philosophy is not to be accorded the highest place among the arts (if it deserves that place) on the strength of its format, but also that the aims of philosophy are ill-suited to the restrictions of a single format in any case, and can be most strikingly captured by the peculiar multiplicity of formats exhibited in the dialogue as a whole. For look again at the particular cast of Muses mentioned by Socrates: choral Terpsichore, Erato the erotic, the philosophic Calliope and Urania. Earlier, Socrates compared his first speech in emulation of Lysias to a choral dithyramb (228d2-3); and both of his speeches were erotic in theme. Is this a way for Plato to declare them unphilosophical, then? Yet of the supposedly philosophic Muses Urania's name recalls nothing so clearly as the metaphysical 'heaven' [ouranos) that enthralls us in the poetic myth of Socrates' second speech (see esp. 246e4; also 247b 1 and 247c3), and Calliope, as de Vries points out (apud 259d67), 'is the Muse of poetry par excellence'. Where, then, is the 'philosophy' in this dialogue? I am saying that it lies in both halves of the dialogue and, just as crucially, in the articulation between them.34 We have seen that through his characters' interest in the scenic background Plato offers an example and emblem of interaction between 'foreground' and 'background' of competence: between that aspect which is or can be made explicit,
30

WHAT THE CICADAS SANG

and that which is either contextually or, it may be, essentially tacit - which is shown rather than told. We can now see that the entire dialogue is jointed with such a dovetail of background and foreground. In its second part Socrates and Phaedrus attempt to describe and analyse the rhetorical competence that has been (only) displayed in the first. This much is made quite explicit; but the fact that the second part of the dialogue is heralded by the droning of the cicadas - for all the fleeting quality of this episode ('a relaxing intermezzo', says de Vries apud 258e6-7) - stands as a marker of what is less explicit but equally crucial for an understanding of the dialogue's structure. And here the casual manner in which the cicadas impinge upon the conversation is actually the clue to their importance. The place for a drone, after all, is in the background. Socrates and Phaedrus can remain alert to the cicadas only briefly. Once the real talk begins the sound recedes below the threshold of their (and our) attention, as it must; for background noise is not there to be talked about, it is there to be talked against or over.35 Yet just this momentary passage into and out of earshot alerts the reader - at least, if the reader is the kind who worries at intermezzi - to the background, the constant pedal-note of the dialogue's second part: to what the dialectic in that second part is showing rather than to what it is saying. Its propositional content is an analysis of the rhetorical skills displayed in the earlier part of the dialogue; but what it in turn displays is, of course, that prime philosophic activity, the analysis of conditions of possibility (in this case of the rhetorical art). Rhetoric is first displayed then investigated; the investigation displays philosophic technique - this sequence should prompt in us the following question: what would it be for philosophy to turn from analysing the conditions of possibility of other arts to analysing its own conditions as an art? And we have only to look to the first part of the dialogue for one answer.36 In the second part, rhetoric is examined and philosophy exhibited; in the first, conversely, rhetoric parades for the purpose of examining philosophy. For in Socrates' culminating speech Plato probes the conditions of possibility for the pursuit of 31

ORIENTATION

philosophic love - the highest expression of philosophic art. The join between background and foreground in the two parts of this dialogue is thus truly a dovetail. One part thrusts out its arms where the other has drawn back; one is background to the other's foreground, foreground to the other's background.37 I am saying, then, that Plato chose to probe the conditions of philosophic art and the philosophic life in the first part of this dialogue in what is a confessedly poetic fashion. But why, we might ask, would he not rather turn his gaze on philosophy in the dialectical manner of the analysis of rhetoric? I have two replies to this question. First, to insist that only a dialectically styled account of philosophy can be properly philosophical would be to commit Phaedrus' and the cicadas' error of identifying a discipline with, and valuing it for, its (typical) bag of formal tricks. This would be an especially wry mistake in so far as the dialogue reveals in its investigation of verbal arts the inadequacy of all and any verbal means whether mythical or dialectical - to capture what it is that the competent practitioner of those (and other) arts knows. Second, and more importantly, not only is myth a peculiarly appropriate recourse when philosophy probes itself, but also, and even though formal myth is not the only possible recourse for saying what needs to be said, these things cannot be any more clearly or explicitly said, I think, in a prose free from mythical and poetic marks. To explain this second reply. A philosophic analysis of philosophy as an art is inevitably coloured by the special circumstance that philosophy is that art which examines all arts, all forms of knowledge, in order to discover what knowledge is, and what it is to be an art. Any such analysis must always to some extent show what it is trying to tell: not, however, as one might write rhetorically about rhetoric or couch a metrical primer in verse (for in these cases we have the option of composing in an unrhetorical style or in prose); rather, if philosophy is the art which analyses the general conditions of the diverse arts and forms of knowledge, and we wish to analyse the conditions of that art, we must ultimately attempt to
32

WHAT THE CICADAS SANG

analyse what makes possible such analysis of conditions of possibility (because just that will be what makes philosophy possible). But a successful attempt must therefore exhibit in the course of analysis the skill that it describes (there are no options in this case). In this sense, you already understand what you are discursively investigating - which is a common enough situation for the manual craftsman attempting to convey his competence in words. But for a philosopher the predicament is more exquisite. All competence, philosophy reveals, has a tacit as well as an explicit component; but only philosophy attempts to capture this phenomenon in explicit propositions. By its own conclusions, then, philosophic competence displays a tacit background even as it presses on with its propositional chase. But no sooner is this phenomenon described than it too becomes a proper object of explicit philosophic investigation. The philosopher longs for what his own verbal enquiries tell him is unattainable through verbal means, and cannot rest content with pat summaries of his longing of the type exemplified by the first limb of this sentence. To do so would be to settle after all for the Phaedran life of mere words. There is no such settlement for the Socrates we find in this dialogue: the man 'out of place', who cannot leave the background where it belongs; the man who listens to the cicadas. (And we are beginning to see, I trust, that we shall hardly understand what Plato has to say about the philosophic life in this dialogue unless we get to know Phaedrus and Socrates: recognise who they are, what they are. To this end I have been peering at them in the mirror of their environment; for, after all, scenery is not important in itself, but only for the human reactions it bestirs. Or, to use Socrates' words at 230d4-5: 'landscapes and trees, you see, have nothing to teach me; only people in the city'.) In the discussion of philosophic love in Socrates' great speech Plato expresses by means of a myth this sense in which the philosopher walks into a background that is always one step ahead: a myth which 'explains' the philosopher's prior understanding of what he investigates as a recollection of the
33

ORIENTATION

Forms (and which I will analyse - together with the need for those scare quotes - in chapters five and six). Platonic myth, being a verbal genre that confesses outright its inadequacy to convey truth (see 246a3-6), is a medium especially suited to this message. Nonetheless, it is not the only possible medium; I have here, after all, been trying to say the same thing in unmythical prose. Yet I have been compelled to take my distance from any pat formulation of the philosopher's predicament. That we have the ability to produce such formulations is in fact part of the predicament. Saying this in unmythical prose is not saying it better; only differently. And just this, I believe, is Plato's point in 'doing philosophy' in this dialogue through the two distinct and strikingly juxtaposed verbal paths of myth and dialectic. He allows neither path to reach a satisfactory goal; rather, one leads only to the other. If we want Plato's view on the philosophy displayed but not analysed in the dialogue's second part we must turn to the first; but there his view is presented only mythically; but if we turn back to the second part's philosophic account of the first in the hope of something more explicit, we find an analysis of its rhetorical style only, not of its substance ... And so, beginning from a due appreciation of the difference between the fervour of the speeches and the sobriety of the subsequent conversation (not allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed, as Phaedrus is), we are led to see that this contour of difference does not straightforwardly divide the poetry of the dialogue from its philosophy; all the more so because the conversation does indeed seem philosophic and the speeches poetic.38 It is just the kinship in limitation of these otherwise very different paths of discourse, myth and argument - at least when the philosopher confronts his own art - that is of such philosophic interest. Apologia pro capitulo suo In this chapter, then, I have argued that Plato's extraordinary attention to topography in the Phaedrus is his means of orienting readers towards the dialogue's central philosophic
34