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The Examined Life Examined
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13232 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1987 |
4,642 Words |
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Timothy Fuller
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SELF-KNOWLEDGE IN PLATO'S PHAEDRUS
Charles L. Griswold, Jr.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986
315 pp., $29.50
Charles Griswold, associate professor of philosophy at Howard University, has provided us with a remarkable, challenging commentary on Plato's dialogue Phaedrus. Professional students of Plato's philosophy will examine its arguments carefully, laying the original text alongside it. Even though well-written and clear, it is a complex book for a nonprofessional, merely interested, reader of Plato. Why should such a person want to read such a book?
The answer to that question depends on how the nonprofessional reader receives the proposition that the unexamined life - life without pursuit of self-understanding - is not worth living. Socrates' famous admonition in Plato's Apology looks behind Professor Griswold's analysis of the quest for self-knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus. For according to Griswold's reading, Phaedrus is an extended, profound investigation into the predicaments of trying to lead an examined life, as well as a central dialogue for understanding Plato's philosophy as a whole.
For Griswold, the effort to lead the examined life begins with the puzzle of figuring out exactly what we mean by "examined." We encounter this puzzle in terms of the split between methods of examination; the dominating urge to acquire technical competence through highly professionalized, often arcane, modern scholarship - the scientific approach - and commonsense views of the human condition expressed in the formation of practical moral and political opinions. Griswold intends to redress an imbalance in current thought against the value of common sense and everyday experience for assessing ourselves adequately, without denying that technical competence produces insights.
Everyday attitudes and scientific attitudes are locked in perpetual dialectical tension. Griswold argues that by trying to choose one while excluding the other in an attempt to avoid the tension that comes with confronting the need to have and to handle both, we arbitrarily arrest the search for self-understanding.
The analysis of the Phaedrus is designed to show that Plato already experienced the split between relying either on the detachment of science or on religion, tradition, custom, received habits, and practices. In the Phaedrus, Plato sought to respond directly to this "methodological" split over the question of the best path to defining the meaning, purpose, and direction of human existence.
Phaedrus is a conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus outside the walls of Athens about the nature of love and about rhetoric. It is not hard to see how these are related; there is no pursuit more likely to excite us to rhetorical flourishes than the passionate pursuit by the lover of his beloved. On the other hand, it is also obvious that persuasive speech can be used not only for the satisfaction of genuine love, but also for the indifferent or cynical satisfaction of one's self-centered desire for bodily pleasure.
Thus to discuss rhetoric and love together is to discuss the high and the low, or the
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