>>17863018 (OP) Plato tailored each dialogue to show different modes of approaching Truth. He’s not writing doctrine, he’s staging soul-movements.
Symposium (The Dialectical Ascent)
Purpose: To show how eros can lead from desire to wisdom, step by step.
Method: Dialectic. Logic, analysis, subtle progression.
Why no anamnesis? Because Plato here is crafting a philosopher's map of love. It’s not about memory; it’s about method: how you go from one form of beauty to the next, until you reach the eternal.
Result: Love becomes a structured pathway to the Form of Beauty; clear, teachable, cumulative.
>this is Plato writing for a reader who is willing to climb, not one who is already overwhelmed by divine memory. Recollection would muddy the clean dialectical model.Phaedrus (The Mythic, Mystical Approach)
Purpose: To explore love as a spiritual force that shatters rationality and awakens memory.
Method: Myth, poetry, imagery, divine madness.
Why include anamnesis and reincarnation? Because Plato here is focused on the soul's origin, its trauma of embodiment, and its erotic shock when beauty reminds it of the eternal.
Result: Love is portrayed as divine madness, a sacred wound, that triggers remembrance of the divine realm.
>Plato uses myth here to crack open the non-rational, ecstatic dimension of love; the parts that dialectic can’t reach.
It reminds me of Parmenides' poem.
http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenidesunicode.htm
