Phaedrus

Plato. Plato: Complete Works. Hackett Publishing, 1997. Phaedrus.

On my first day of seventh grade (freshman year of junior high school), I had a very childish argument with a kid wearing glasses about a stupid question. The main form of this argument was as follows: You’re stupid. Bounce back! Bounce is not valid! The rebound is valid, period! My IQ is twice yours, comma! My IQ is your absolute value! Of course, we could go on and on with this rhetorical question. However, when I first heard the concept of “absolute value,” I realized I couldn’t continue the argument. The reason was that I didn’t know what “absolute value” was, i.e., I had no signified in my head, and my whole language system went down for a few seconds. Perhaps in retrospect, we could have stacked that argument with concepts like “squaring,” but that would have implied some kind of rhetorical rift.

This essay is about the dialog between Socrates and Phaedrus, but for ease of communication, I will refer to Socrates’ view as Plato’s view. Plato believes that discussing the concept of love should ensure that both participants in the discussion have an equal understanding of it. But this is obviously not possible, as no two people have the exact same experience. The love Plato discusses in the dialogues takes three different forms: love motivated by profit, love driven by sexual desire, and pure and divine love. But none of them expresses the concept of “love” in its entirety. If I were to argue with my seventh-grade eyeglasses about the others, the essence would be the same as the forms described by Plato in his essay. We could open an argument about the largest number, as Sanskrit Buddhists have done for the last thousand years. Gangā-Nadī-Vālukā = 10^52 Asaṃkhyeya = 10^140 Nayutaḥ = 10^37 Nirabhilapya nirabhilapya Parivarta = 10^(7×2^122 ) It doesn’t really matter how big these numbers are, but rather the fact that they were all created to expound on the length of time that the Buddha experienced. And the authors always felt that the existing number designations were not big enough, so they had to invent a bigger number. And it is not enough just to use these numbers, it is even more important to emphasize them repeatedly. In a sentence, large numerical designations are always placed on top of each other for multiplication. “A nirabhilapya parivarta times a nirabhilapya parivarta is an ineffably ineffable [nirabhilapya nirabhilapya]. A nirabhilapya nirabhilapya times a nirabhilapya nirabhilapya is a nirabhilapya nirabhilapya parivarta” (Mahāvaipulya Sūtra of Buddha Adornment, Fascicle 45, Chpt. 30). Not to mention that the entirety of that article is non-stop creating large numbers by squaring stacks.

I’m certainly intrigued that Plato wants to discuss rhetoric here and that he mentions the limits of rhetoric: apparently reading through a dictionary doesn’t mean that one has learned everything. Memorizing an entire medical work does not mean one can practice medicine. “It is their ignorance that makes them think they have discovered what rhetoric is when they have mastered only what it is necessary to learn as preliminaries” (546). In addition to this, Plato also explains the relationship between writing and memory through the story of an Egyptian god on page 551. Plato argues that what is written down in books is not the wisdom of the human brain. I would be willing to provide another ridiculous punchline for your pleasure for a while:

“The bigger the fish, the more spines it has; the more spines it has, the less flesh it has; the less flesh it has, the smaller it is. So the bigger the fish, the smaller the fish.” “The greater the rate of surplus value, the greater the surplus value. The more surplus value, the less necessary labor. The less necessary labor, the less variable capital. The less variable capital, the higher the organic composition of capital. The higher the organic composition of capital, the smaller the rate of profit. So the greater the rate of surplus value, the smaller the rate of profit.”

This is of course a logical fallacy, but it doesn’t matter. After all, all logic depends on the metaphysical structure of language. For example, we can see if we can write it this way:

“The more knowledge you have, the more literate you are. The more literate you are, the more you read. The more you read, the more you take notes. The more notes you take, the less you memorize. The less you memorize, the less you know. So the more knowledge you have, the less knowledge you have.”

Naturally, then, the act of studying “what is the definition of this word” obviously does not make a student a philosopher. I’m happy to doubt that. Is it really so? There are times when I do feel that perhaps a dictionary explaining all philosophical terms is necessary, and there are times when I feel that a dictionary should never be allowed. I am not conclusive.