What I learned reading “Phaedrus.”

“Phaedrus” was written by Plato. Below I tell what I learned from reading his book.

1. Knowing oneself should be the beginning of knowledge.
2. You should never accept conditional love or sex (that is, love or sex in exchange of a favor or belonging).
3. Advantages and favors should be granted to those who deserve them.
4. Those who love without being carried away by blind emotion do so responsibly.
5. Those who love irrationally say things that they later regret .
6. Lovers sometimes recognize that they are irresponsible, but at the same time, they are not able to correct themselves.
7. Irrational love fosters envy and jealousy, drives away friends and eventually ruins the relationship.
8. The beloved person needs to have friends as well.
9. If you really love someone, you will forgive their small faults.
10. Passion and friendship are two manifestations of love.
11. Who should we make friends with?
12. When reason dominates harmful desires, that person has the virtue of temperance.
13. Intemperance has different names depending on the desire that submits the person.
14. The irrational lover wants a weak person to love: if the beloved is superior or equal, the irrational lover will be frustrated, because he wants pleasure at that moment, which could only be obtained if the partner was inferior to him.
15. The irrational lover works for the degeneration of the beloved’s physical ability and wisdom, to keep him under control.
16. The irrational lover wants the beloved also to be poor, to keep him dependent.
17. An irrational lover wants the beloved to remain miserable, so he can be treated like a belonging.
18. Irrational lovers are prone to cheating.
19. Don’t trust a lover’s promises, as he might be making promises on emotion.
20. Irrational love is an appetite and, as such, vanishes when satisfied.
21. Religion seems to come from divine inspiration.
22. Madness also produces music and poetry.
23. A chain of causes can not regress infinitely.
24. Myth of the car guided by two winged horses: reason wants to bring us to certainties and truth, but emotions draw us to earthly problems that hinder the search for eternal things.
25. The philosopher, when he contemplates the truth, is regarded as mad by others, but is only misunderstood.
26. The contemplation of the beautiful is part of the process of elevating the soul.
27. The true lover does not want the impoverishment of the beloved, but his improvement.
28. Reason and emotion are necessary to love.
29. Speech that is not praised is also not transcribed.
30.   Rhetoricians do not speak of what is good, beautiful, fair, or useful, but of what appears to be one or more of these things.
31. The rhetorician, knowing the opinions but not the truth, plays with opinions so that the listener is led to think as he wishes.
32. The technical arts deal with real things, but the rhetoric that is not committed to the truth is not technical art, because it deals with fictions.
33. But rhetoric, if it’s commited with truth, could make a person accept something real more easily.
34. Rhetoric can disfigure the object of it’s speech.
35. It deals with contradictions.
36. Rhetoric has more power when it comes to uncertain and dubious matters, by taking advantage of the listener’s ignorance and the abundance of opinion in a given subject.
37. A rhetorical trick: do not explain the meaning of the terms used in the speech.
38. The rhetorician has no power over those who understand the subject they are dealing with.
39. To be a perfect speaker, the individual needs to have a natural inclination, to study and to practice the oratory.
40. The perfect oratory has constructive potential over the listener.
41. Anyone who talks about something is supposed to be able to describe the nature of said thing.
42. We need to define the object we are talking about.
43. Good rhetoric should be able not only to say what rhetoric is, but also what soul is, because rhetoric acts upon the soul of the listener.
44. Because there are different kinds of idiot people, we need different types of speech.
45. There’s a different kind of argument for each person.
46. Rhetoric deals with the verisimilitude, not necessarily with the truth.
47. If the rhetorician wants to convince, he turns to the convincing argument, not necessarily to the true (though the truth may be accessory).
48. This is especially evident when accuser and accused strive to hide the truth about the case.
49. Knowing the truth allows you to use more convincing probabilities.
50. The book is limited by the reader’s understanding.
51. Dialectically written discourses have an extended limit.
52. Complex souls require complex writing.
53. It is necessary to know what is being discussed.
54. The best written discourse is one written for the use of the writer himself, as a means of later consultation, with its effectiveness being reduced if the reader is not the writer himself and diminishing the more distant the reader is of the writer.
55. If you are sure that you have the truth and are able to defend it, you are already a philosopher.
56. Friends should have everything in common.