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“The Phaedrus”

A victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure.

Commentary on “The Phaedrus”

The Phaedrus plops the reader into a dialog between and Phaedrus on the outskirts of Athens. We are thrust into a dialog unaware of the greater context.

At stake is love and rhetoric. How does one express depth of passion, the telling of the idea, the crafting of the concept?

Memory is the key to the craft of rhetoric. Imprecise memory cannot do justice to a complex work. Is memory exercised at the expense of others? Can souls recall the holy things they saw, or have the lost the memory of the holy things. Memory lingers on scenes that have passed away. Can a memory be memory carried to true the true beauty?

Is rhetoric an invocative exercise in finding the sacred truth? Is rhetoric memory? Do we craft form within ourselves a vision of reality, perfect or flawed, and then commit this to words?

The dialog is a commitment to finding truth. Words are expressions of deeper truths. When words touch us, we form deeper bonds to them. Our memory becomes and incorporation of the rhetoric.

We consume words and make the part of or minds. Words are like food, the most truthful elements like proteins, bind to us and fill us with energy. Yet truthfulness is a perception and a flawed one at that.

Love and passion for words and dialog, the sophist pleasure to which they are enslaved. The words that find meaning give a deep and lasting pleasure to being.

Such is the tradition.

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