Content area
Full Text
RHOADES, James M. Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. xiv + 573 pp. Cloth, $49.95-This book, the first of a projected three-volume work on Plato, contains three related inquiries dealing with hermeneutics, an interpretation of the Seventh Letter, and an analysis of Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus. A second volume on the Republic and a third on the Laws are also planned.
Dr. Rhoades explains in his opening chapter that "Plato's constant dramatic refrain is that the healing of a tyrannical eros is necessary to political wisdom. This implies that the study of eros is the study of politics and vice versa. Thus, the Platonic dialogues that we perceive as erotic are also political, and the dialogues that we classify as political are also erotic" (p. 21). The working out of this thesis in his analysis of the Symposium and the Phaedrus constitute the bulk of this work. But because Rhoades holds that Plato presents Socrates as having knowledge of eros, which is one of the greatest things, and maintains in the Seventh Letter that serious matters are in no way a spoken thing nor should they be written about, it becomes necessary to articulate where Plato and his Socrates stand on what Rhoades calls "their policy of refraining from writing or speaking about serious things" (p. 26) to which he gives the name "Silence." The investigation of this issue requires a chapter on nineteenth- and...