Madness
I have found myself bombarded with the theme of extremities in the books that I have been exploring in the last week. Do you ever notice how in life we sometimes fail to find the middle ground that our sanity depends upon? It's either all or nothing, black or white, good or bad, high or low. I really believe that life can be harder for passionate people because they experience emotions and pursue goals with marked intensity, and thus are prone to these extremities. I have been fascinated reading about characters in mythology suffering from this passion, which is a blessing and a curse.
The Phaedrus is a book that's been sitting on my shelf for months, but I'd forgotten about until we got into the Symposium in class. The two works are spoken of as companion dialouges. But rather than an open discussion amoung friends at a party, Phaedrus takes place between two characters only: Phaedrus and Socrates. And while it also centers around the topic of love, Phaedrus explores a wide range of other high passions including madness, divinity, art and beauty (which is why I enjoyed it even more than the Symposium, and would highly reccomend it as a compliment to that discussion). And the best part of Phaedrus, I thought, was it's discussion of the nature of the soul and the extremeties that rule us: our lust for pleasure, and our conscience or judgement that aims at what is right. In other words, excess and restraint. Socrates uses the perfect metaphor of the soul in 3 parts: A charioteer driving two horses. On the right is a white horse: he is good, noble, and obedient. On the left is a black horse: he is evil, disobedient, and drives the charioteer towards excessive and lustful delights. And Socrates says that for true love to flourish, the dark horse must be tamed and the good one freed. As we learned in the Symposium, love is highly reliant on balance; for true love to flourish, the dark horse must be tamed, and the good horse freed.
Classical Literature is littered with examples of the extremities. Even the genres of comedy and tragedy represent opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Comic characters are worse; the heroes in tragedy are better. I am really enjoying the exploration of madness and sanity in the material we're reading. In the beginning of Phaedrus, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he is "sick with passion for hearing people speak". He goes on to a deeper discussion of madness, defending it in a way, because great things come from madness, and this is true. When we become possessed by passion, that is when action is taken. Aristotle said in his Poetics that action is active: when we percieve something that we want, something beautiful, we move ourselves towards it. Madness, and passion, is a driving force. It is productive. Love is madness: it takes us to the extremes. Which leads me to Ovid...
The Phaedrus is a book that's been sitting on my shelf for months, but I'd forgotten about until we got into the Symposium in class. The two works are spoken of as companion dialouges. But rather than an open discussion amoung friends at a party, Phaedrus takes place between two characters only: Phaedrus and Socrates. And while it also centers around the topic of love, Phaedrus explores a wide range of other high passions including madness, divinity, art and beauty (which is why I enjoyed it even more than the Symposium, and would highly reccomend it as a compliment to that discussion). And the best part of Phaedrus, I thought, was it's discussion of the nature of the soul and the extremeties that rule us: our lust for pleasure, and our conscience or judgement that aims at what is right. In other words, excess and restraint. Socrates uses the perfect metaphor of the soul in 3 parts: A charioteer driving two horses. On the right is a white horse: he is good, noble, and obedient. On the left is a black horse: he is evil, disobedient, and drives the charioteer towards excessive and lustful delights. And Socrates says that for true love to flourish, the dark horse must be tamed and the good one freed. As we learned in the Symposium, love is highly reliant on balance; for true love to flourish, the dark horse must be tamed, and the good horse freed.
Classical Literature is littered with examples of the extremities. Even the genres of comedy and tragedy represent opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Comic characters are worse; the heroes in tragedy are better. I am really enjoying the exploration of madness and sanity in the material we're reading. In the beginning of Phaedrus, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he is "sick with passion for hearing people speak". He goes on to a deeper discussion of madness, defending it in a way, because great things come from madness, and this is true. When we become possessed by passion, that is when action is taken. Aristotle said in his Poetics that action is active: when we percieve something that we want, something beautiful, we move ourselves towards it. Madness, and passion, is a driving force. It is productive. Love is madness: it takes us to the extremes. Which leads me to Ovid...
posted by Carly Parelius at 7:08 PM
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