플라톤 - 파에드로스 [Plato - Phaedrus]

<Phaedrus>

이 대화편은 소크라테스와 파에드러(로)스가 나무 그늘 아래서 이런 저런 이야기를 나누는데, 그 중심 내용은 ‘사랑’과 ‘수사’에 관한 것이다.

(텍스트에 대한 이해가 제대로 뒷받침 되지 않아서 정확히 말하기는 어렵지만) 플라톤은 육체적 쾌락으로서의 사랑보다는, 미와 선의 충동으로서, 또 진리를 향해 나아가는 방편으로서, 사랑을 이야기하고 있다. 변전하는 현실계보다는 보다 확고한 이데아의 세계를 지향하는 플라톤의 태도는 이 대화편에서도 그대로 지속되고 있다. 수사학에 대한 논의에서도 진리를 지향하는 플라톤의 태도는 견지된다.

 

**To him <Socrates> it is an impulse full of beauty and goodness, a kind of divine madness which lifts the soul up and can enable it to enter the path which leads to the truth. The first movement to philosophy, the impulse to seek what is higher--in Plato's phrase, "the beyond"--comes from falling in love with visible, physical beauty. (475)

**To fall truly in love starts a man on the path upward to where love is satisfied in the perfect beauty of the truth. (475)

 

*I'm a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything whereas men in the town do. (479) (S)

*And now we must essay to tell how it is that living beings are called mortal and immortal. All soul has the care of all that is inanimate, and traverses the whole universe, though in ever-changing forms. Thus when it is perfect and winged it journeys on high and controls the whole world, but one that has shed its wings sinks down until it can fasten on something solid, and settling there it takes to itself an earthy body which seems by reason of the soul's power to move itself. This composite structure of soul and body is called a living being, and is further termed 'mortal'; 'immortal' is a term applied on no basis of reasoned argument at all, but our fancy pictures the god whom we have never seen, nor fully conceived, as an immortal living being, possessed of a soul and a body united for all time. (493) (S)

*Beauty it was ours to see in all its brightness in those days when, amidst that happy company, we beheld with our eyes that blessed vision, ourselves in the train of Zeus, others following some other god; then were we all initiated into that mystery which is rightly accounted blessed beyond all others; whole and unblemished were we that did celebrated it, untouched by the evils that awaited us in days to come; whole and unblemished likewise, free from all alloy, steadfast and blissful were the spectacles on which we gazed in the moment of final revelation; pure was the light that shone around us, and pure were we, without taint of that prison house which now we are encompassed withal, and call a body, fast bound therein as an oyster in its shell. (496-7)

*All the rules of conduct, all the graces of life, of which aforetime she was proud, she now disdains, welcoming a slave's estate and any couch where she may be suffered to lie down close beside her darling, for besides her reverence for the possessor of beauty she has found in him the only physician for her grievous suffering. (498)

*All the great arts need supplementing by a study of nature; your artist must cultivate garrulity and high-flown speculation; from that source alone can come the mental elevation and thoroughly finished execution of which you are thinking, and that is what Pericles acquired to supplement his inborn capacity. (515)

*If men learn this <writing>, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. (520)