Rhetoric and Consciousness in Plato’s Phaedrus
Plato was a mystic. The moniker itself reveals little; however, this mystic’s words, when deciphered through the appropriate mystical semiotics, reveal far more than a quaint conversation about rhetoric and philosophy. It is from this starting point, and this point alone, that one must approach Phaedrus, lest one stumble into the pitfalls of superficial criticism and be accosted with the notion that Plato was attacking the art of rhetoric. In fact, few claims could be further from the truth. Rhetoric was an integral part of Plato’s path to knowledge, and it was necessary as a means of evoking knowledge in others. Rhetoric is the sibling of philosophy — they work together, ideally in harmony. When they are not in harmony, when the rhetorician has supplanted morals with ambition and truth with flattery, then the latent evil of rhetoric may rear its ugly head. Some amount of disharmony occurs in nearly every human brain. With enough diligence and introspection, this can be rectified and harmony can be achieved. For the rhetorician who has lost his way and has eschewed philosophy, there is no solution other than to return to the source of all knowledge, the divine. Herein lies Plato’s true criticism of the Sophists. Nonetheless, criticism is not his motivation for composing these dialogues. Plato’s Phaedrus is actually a complex allegory designed to bring the reader’s conscious mind, represented by Phaedrus, into harmony with his unconscious, represented by Plato, and in this allegory, rhetoric plays as important a role as philosophy. But Plato’s Phaedrus is neither a guide for rhetoric nor philosophy; it is a guide to mystical transcendence.
A little background information is required to put the clues in the right place and decipher the puzzle of Phaedrus. Plato lived during an era of great cognitive change. Consciousness was evolving, as it surely is today, but not as rapidly as in the second millennium BCE. It is clear from the works of Homer and Sappho that the notion of individuality was emerging as the fundamental aspect of humanity. But this was not always the case. The impetus for the change is controversial, though one of the most compelling explanations is the theory of the bicameral mind. Preconscious man, having developed the capacity for language but not the full symbolic mode of perception we call consciousness, did not sense a unity of mind as does the modern man. Preconscious man functioned almost as though the two halves of his brain were independent. In the early stages of his developing consciousness, one side of the brain, the decision making side, appeared as a vision or a voice to literally tell the agent part of the brain what to do. To wit, “at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man” (Jaynes 84). The evidence for this phenomenon is ubiquitous in the ancient texts, especially in the epic narratives. Heroes like Odysseus did not make their decisions. In the Iliad, when Odysseus faces a dilemma, he calls upon the gods to tell him what to do, and the gods appear to him as distinct voices, often accompanied by visions.
Remnants of bicamerality exist to this day. In Plato’s era, those remnants were far more salient. Perhaps some of the most compelling are the oracles, most famously those of Delphi alluded to by Socrates, but there were many more. Heraclitus described “raving Sybyl, [who] through the god, utters somber, unembellished, unperfumed sayings, reaching over a thousand years with her voice” (Geldard 24). When induced into a trance and questioned in the ritualistic fashion, oracles produced immediate, convincing, sometimes lengthy answers to abstruse problems, yet they were never more than bucolic and illiterate young girls. The oracle at Delphi lasted for almost a thousand years after the breakdown of the bicameral mind. This particular manifestation of bicamerality required what Jaynes called “the collective cognitive imperative, or belief system, a culturally agreed-on expectancy of prescription which defines the particular form of a phenomenon and the roles to be acted out with that form” (Jaynes 324). Once this belief system began to wear down, so too its cognitive effects on the oracles. But Plato was still bound by the mythology of the Greeks, which explains his use of Greek mythology to lay down his theory of language and consciousness. He did not believe literally in a god or gods as the more ancient Greeks did, nor as most modern people. Plato believed in the ineffability of the so-called divine, but was bound like the rest of mortal man to describe it in the lower planes of language.
Plato seemed to possess a knowledge of the mind far beyond the intelligence of his era. Modern science has discovered much about the nature of consciousness that corroborates his ancient suppositions. Consciousness is an illusion based on thought and words, which are arguably inseparable. Consciousness is not an entity, but a function, “the function of knowing. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known” (McDermott 170). Consciousness is the process by which stimuli are selected and reduced and then repackaged as a type of narrative that occurs entirely in our mind-space, but projected outside of it. We never see reality, rather we see mere shadows on a cave wall. The images themselves, the Ideal Forms, are outside the cave of consciousness, beyond the limits of our ken. Historical studies align the origins of consciousness with Jaynes’s theory: “the phenomenon of consciousness as we know it is probably no more than three thousand years old. The concept of a central ‘experiencer’ and decisionmaker, a conscious I, has prevailed for only a hundred generations” (Nørretranders ix). The concept of the individual and his conscious reality is in fact an illusion, for we “experience not the raw sensory data but a simulation of them” (289). Everything the average human being perceives as his “reality” has actually been analyzed and heavily processed by the unconscious. Furthermore, our minds beguile us into believing that we are in control, that they are separate from us, and that I actually exist. None of this is even remotely accurate.
The historical evidence reveals much about its evolution, but little about the origin of consciousness. Jaynes argued that “consciousness is [an] invention of an analog world on the basis of language, paralleling the behavioral world even as the world of mathematics parallels the world of quantities of things” (Jaynes 66). The expansion of civilization necessitated a vaster vocabulary with a symbolic nature, for no longer could man gesture and grunt within the context of his tribe — he had to represent the unseen and the unknown. The logical result would be a sort of metaphoric collapse in which the sheer weight of symbolism sparked a significant cognitive change in the way man understood his world. His language must now fit the paradigm of existence — pattern. Mathematics is a type of language in this sense, for it describes nothing in reality. It merely attempts to represent some aspect of reality. Because of the influence of his symbolic language, “man’s uncorrected sense impressions give him a picture of the universe that is simple, sensible, and satisfying, but very wide of the truth” (Whorf 250). One can never really speak the truth of anything. One can only attempt to represent the truth. The difficulty lies on overcoming the notion that what we see is reality, rather than our privy shadow version of it, for we have been taught this bosh from birth.
Language is largely to blame for our delusion of reality. Children learn that they have hands and feet and arms and legs and, even more egregiously, a mind and a body. How utterly ridiculous! I have spent the past 25 years of my life training to overcome the physical disunity that resulted from my linguistic indoctrination. Not just the individual, but the entire universe has been shown to have a unity, a pattern, a singularity of nature. In fact, “the cosmic picture has a serial or hierarchical character” (Whorf 248). Mankind, through science and observation, and “lacking recognition of such serial order . . . chop[s] segments, as it were, out of the world” (248). This is done largely through our symbolic systems of language and mathematics, among others. One does not see the universe in all its glory. One sees the twinkling stars, or perhaps the waxing moon, or maybe the setting sun, its rays spreading across the firmament, casting a purple glow over the distant horizon. But the truth is there are no rays and no colors and no sun — we have merely labeled the different aspects of a singular phenomenon. Language creates this illusion, and rhetoricians must be careful to seek the world of truth, the unconscious world, rather than attempt with their fancy words and phrases to dominate the shadow world of consciousness.
When mystics use language to talk about consciousness — true mystics who have had actual mystical experiences — they fail from the outset. As we have seen, language is the foundation for consciousness, and consciousness is a process, not a thing; therefore, consciousness is the means through which language facilitates thought and perception. Consciousness and language are as inseparable as the verb and its object. We do not describe actions independently of their agents or recipients. We do, however, separate them in fallacious thought experiments called grammar, but they are nonetheless just like what we call the sun and its rays — arbitrary linguistic divisions of perceived stimuli. We could just as easily create a word for the rays of sunset different from the rays of sunrise, or perhaps a word for different color variations of the sun itself. There is no end to the infinite divisions man can create of his environments. We have devised tools that exceed our human visual capabilities in an attempt to name everything under that sun, even those infinitesimal quarks and leptons. Every aspect of language subverts the singularity of universal phenomena. The mystic seeks to transcend the divisions of language to gain a mystical awareness, a “non-cognitive intuition of undifferentiated being” (Katz 144). When a mystic experiences this awareness, it is most often temporary, and he must return again to the lower planes of reason and individuality. He has had a glimpse of the upper planes of cognition, and he is driven to share his experience. The mystic cannot describe his journey in words. He can only create metaphors and allegories to spark some revelation in others. Mystical semiotics may seem designed to describe the mystical experience, but in fact these alternate modes of understanding function to “release the individual from attachment to the assumption that words have a one-to-one correlation with separate entities in either ideal or physical experience” (150). Plato must employ language and rhetoric most skillfully if he wishes to spark the kind of cognitive change required to see through their illusions.
The mystic, who knows that truth lies beyond the word’s ability to describe, disdains the rhetorician who attempts to define it. But the mystic does not disdain rhetoric itself. It is his most powerful tool in dismantling the reality dissembled by language, and it is his only means of communicating the symbolic truth to his fellow man, trapped in the prison cell of consciousness, unaware of the vast universe that surrounds him just beyond the mouth of the cave. One of the ways in which Plato demonstrates the mutability of language is by presenting two sides to the very same argument, the latter supposedly superior, even divine, compared with the former. But this is not a contradiction by any means. It is rather a demonstration. In the former speech, Plato’s philosophical voice, Socrates, argues from the point of reason. In the greater allegory, Socrates actually represents intuition, while Phaedrus represents reason. But Socrates makes a remarkable admission before he begins his first speech: “I believe that I know Phaedrus about as well as I know myself” (Williams 193). Socrates then describes with seemingly great accuracy the thoughts and experiences of the young Phaedrus. He has assumed the perspective of Phaedrus, the rational, conscious being. But they have left the city for this discussion and passed through the liminal space between city and country, man and beast, mind and soul, as Socrates prepares to enter an entirely different mindset.
Socrates then crosses the threshold, but not before the admission that he is a “monster more complicated and swollen than Typho” (Williams 194). Typho is a “creature with a hundred heads, possibly all speaking contrary dialects” (Brook 263), representing the many manifestations of unconscious emotions that to bicameral man were voiced in auditory hallucinations. Unless Plato was relying wholly on the rhetorical structure of more ancient literature and thought, which seems highly improbable, he (or his mentor Socrates), like bicameral man, heard voices from his unconscious mind that informed and guided him. Yet somehow he (or Socrates) was able to remain conscious of the lower planes of perception, unifying reason and intuition. Bicameral man did not share this type of autonomy — the voice thus spoke, and he then did. A remarkable thing happens to Socrates soon after — he actually lapses into a sort of trance, like the oracles at Delphi. He even invokes his muse, Zeus, the “fire in the mind, pure consciousness” (Geldard). Socrates has been “filled through the ears, like a pitcher, from the waters of another” (Williams 196). From this point on, he divulges the truth, the divine argument of the lovers, the “recantation of Stesichorus the son of Godly Man,” not the former argument, which was “the word of Phaedrus, the son of Vain Man” (201). Socrates has crossed over to a higher state of consciousness. But that is not all. He is hearing the voice of his bicameral brain.
The threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness is noted in several ways. The fact that the conversation takes place outside the city walls is the first clue. They have left the confines of civilization, a product of the rational mind, and entered into communion with nature, which resembles more the intuitive mind. It is a pastoral scene, reminiscent of Wordsworth and countless mystical poets who sought enlightenment through the wordless demesnes of flora and fauna. They seek a particular tree, and they find it. It is at this point that Socrates begins to cross the threshold. The tree is an ancient symbol representing “the undestroyed simplicity and directness of the natural production of a form” (Campbell 170). The tree itself is the Ideal Form; the word tree and the concept tree are the illusions. When Socrates grasps the Ideal Form through the metaphor of the tree, he is able to temporarily transcend the lower level of consciousness. Crossing the threshold allows him to hear the voice of his unconscious, and like the oracles, he repeats what he hears to Phaedrus. When he is on the verge of crossing the “stream,” or the threshold, he claims, “I heard a voice saying in my ear that I had been guilty of impiety, and that I must not go away until I had made an atonement. Now I am a diviner” (Williams 200). Of course, the uninitiated reader might assume this is the inner “voice” that we all have, not a literal voice, merely a thought or a conscience. But that’s just it — our thoughts literally are voices. We have simply convinced ourselves that they are not.
The voice Socrates hears is not unlike the voices of oracles and schizophrenics alike. Jaynes cites schizophrenia as strong evidence of his theory of bicamerality. Schizophrenics hear voices, and more frighteningly, the voices often originate from objects and places outside their own heads. Perhaps you might think the voice you hear during a conversation comes from your partner’s mouth, but it does no such thing. Every sound you hear occurs right inside your ear, a vibration upon an organic drum, processed and projected outward by the conscious mind. We are all schizophrenic in a way. The voices that control our decision making are subtle, quiet, often unheard. And though we think we make decisions consciously, it is that voice that is actually guiding us. Socrates has made the mistake (or demonstration) of arguing with conscious rationality, ignorant to a world beyond consciousness. Once he crosses the threshold, his unconscious voice, his “prophetic soul,” emerges to correct his fallacy.
The prophetic soul of Socrates betrays his forehead to reveal his “third eye,” the ancient symbol for wisdom beyond conscious knowledge. Before describing the myth of the charioteer, Socrates speaks at length about madness and its different incarnations. It is evident from this text that bicamerality was remote enough that its remnants were beginning to be judged as mental disorders, as we judge them today. But Socrates attempts to disabuse Phaedrus of such a notion, claiming that the ancients “would never have connected prophecy, which foretells the future and is the noblest of arts, with madness, or called them both by the same name, if they had deemed madness to be a disgrace or dishonor” (Williams 201). The “inspired madness” which he speaks of originates from the unconscious mind. Socrates uses typical mystical figures in describing this type of madness as superior to the sane mind, “for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin” (201). It has become clear that descriptions of the gods or anything divine literally refer to that which exists outside conscious perception. No words are adequate to describe such a reality. Man can only invent ridiculous figures and tropes in hopes, not of conveying some accurate sense of the universe, but of challenging the nature of reality through skilled application of rhetoric.
The myth of the charioteer is cryptic, but not indecipherable. A charioteer controls two horses, one base and the other divine. The base horse is unmanageable, and unless the two horses and the charioteer can work in harmony, they will fall from the upper region of perception, the realm of the “gods,” into the conscious realm where words have meaning and what we perceive with our eyes and ears is reality. The chariots of the gods presumably follow only one horse, for Socrates finds it necessary to state that “the human charioteer drives his in a pair” (Williams 202). It is not a myth of gods, but of the mind itself. The charioteer is logos: word and thought drawn through time and space by two parts of the same mind. The base horse then is akin to the rational mind, the ego-conscious individual, while the divine horse is the intuitive mind, the unconscious. The entire apparatus through its movement in space-time is consciousness. The figure describes the difficulty of finding harmony within a mind divided, but also provides an object of desire within the structural framework of Greek culture: to wit, knowledge of the divine sort will bring one closer to the gods, closer to immortality.
To become closer to the gods is a common metaphor for enlightenment. Bicameral man literally thought that he walked and talked with the gods, and so as bicamerality faded away and the gods receded “into special people called prophets or oracles” (Jaynes 232), man and his emerging consciousness questioned the disappearance of the divine and sought to replace his ancestor’s guide, his authority, his will. This longing led to countless acts of sacrifice and oblation, and occasionally, in times of great stress, the gods would return to bestow their wisdom. This divine madness was not necessarily accidental, for we can see Socrates follow the phases outlined by Jaynes to evoke the divine voice. There already existed in Greece the collective cognitive experience in the belief system of mythology. Socrates induces the alternate state of consciousness by calling his muse, Zeus, the symbol of absolute consciousness. He describes a trance, a state of frenzy, which he enters into as the words pour from him, and he uses the Greek gods, especially Zeus, as archaic authorization (Jaynes 324). Socrates is the oracle, and his speech on love and rhetoric is his “prophecy.”
The figure of the charioteer is followed by the myth of Theuth, in which Socrates attempts to explain the origin of consciousness and its foundation in language. Theuth brought writing to the Egyptians, asserting that it would make them wiser and “give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit” (Williams 217). The god Thamus demurs, asserting that the discovery of writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves” (217). Thamus distinguishes between memory and reminiscence, which appears not as the truth, “but only the semblance of truth” (217). Thamus has accurately described the relationship between memory and consciousness. Bicameral men had not developed the narrative mind-space that allows one to reminisce about the past. These are truly not memories, but in fact recreations. Imagine yourself as a child — you inevitably see from the outside rather than through the eyes of your younger self. It is because consciousness has taught us to recreate the world in this very way during all of our waking hours. But memory costs: “entropy builds up as the memory gradually fills with molecules that went by ages ago. The bother of keeping track of this huge memory exceeds the gain of having it” (Nørretranders 29). What Thamus is saying is that language will create such a type of mind-space as this, that man will be forced to “forget” his natural instincts because he will be convinced that the reality created by words and thoughts and consciousness is the true reality, and therefore will see all of his past and all of his future as the same dramatic reenactment of not reality, but imagination.
Socrates has laid at the feet of Phaedrus the keys to enlightenment, and yet at the end of the dialogue Phaedrus still seems clueless as to how to unlock the door. It’s clear in this interpretation that Plato means for us to know that “only when both philosophy and rhetoric are in synchronization and in harmony can one be said to be on the just path” (Ramsey 259). He has explained the nature of consciousness, even hinted at its origins. He has demonstrated the induction and communion with his unconscious mind, wherein his Muse emerged and bestowed His divine knowledge upon them. But there is still something lacking in our understanding of the importance of rhetoric. It would seem that even in this thorough analysis, rhetoric does not stand equal to philosophy. It is even here that Plato astounds, for he is truly the consummate genius that Samuel Coleridge described. Plato was aware of the myriad of unconscious processes that occur before a word is ever spoken. Plato somehow knew of the natural patterns that produce the syntax and grammars of our languages. Plato understood that in order to write, to speak, to persuade, one had to have a connection to his unconscious mind, for it is there that all speech and all acts originate.
This analysis is nearly complete, though questions remain. How does Plato justify the use of the written word when in his own deductions it is clearly inferior to the spoken? Of course he likely understood through reason or intuition that far more human communication is verbal than nonverbal — from body language to pheromones to intuition, which is likely influenced by such things as pheromones and body language — and these communicative methods do not translate in any way. But remember, the allegory of the mystic does not attempt to describe the mystical experience, for that would be utterly futile. Instead it challenges the reader’s notions of reality and thought. And perhaps Plato has succeeded, for there have been generations of mystics and enlightened beings, like Coleridge, who credit Plato with their enlightenment. There is yet another possibility — that Plato was an utter failure, a mere parrot, mimicking the words of his truly enlightened teacher Socrates, the scholar-warrior known for his almost superhuman physical and mental stamina. Socrates was the link between bicameral man and modern consciousness, and somehow he acquired the ability to harmonize his mind and transcend both of these cognitive structures. His student, Plato, was unable to transmit this divine knowledge to his own students. Aristotle saw no magic in Plato’s mysticism, and so there the path diverged from the divine to the mundane. Based on personal experience, I cannot accept this final option, for in studying his ancient and cryptic words, I literally had a brief vision of unity, the first in a quarter of a century of studying mysticism, meditation, and martial arts. Rhetoric, if composed from the heart, not the mind, is truly divine. Plato was the consummate genius — of rhetoric, philosophy, and mysticism.
Works Cited
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