Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

interlocutor in the work, writing, "Understanding the Phaedrus
as a unified system of discourse principles, or as a lesson
about love or wisdom or beauty, we mimic the limitations of
Phaedrus himself, the boy who would rather acquire and memorize
facts and concepts than ask questions” (13). Because of that
failure to control the Phaedrus as “unified system of discourse
principles,” Covino reads Plato’s work, the tortuous discourse
between Plato’s Socrates and Phaedrus, as a first-hand
representation of the philosopher’s suspicion of the rhetor
whose “writing […] provokes (or means to provoke) certainty and
clarity” (18) and faith in “the man who acknowledges the
dangerous 'playfulness' of writing, playfulness which invites
rather than silences the questioning of the philosopher” (18).
Because of this, Covino declares:
Given the condemnation of clarity and certainty in
writing, both in the words of Socrates and in the
variegated form of the dialogue, we should be less
disposed to regard the Phaedrus as a tissue of
information than as a collection of prompts to
further discourse, as the interplay of ambiguities,
the stuff of philosophy. (18-9)
Covino concludes his rereading of Plato’s Phaedrus with his
interpretation of its essential “meaning”:
The “right” use of writing, as a reminder “of what we
know already” means enlarging the field of inquiry,
which is what this passage and the entire dialogue
are “about.” Faced with placing the Phaedrus in
intellectual history, and moved by its statements on
rhetoric and writing to form particular conclusions
on those issues, we find ourselves wondering what the
dialogue is about, only to realize, once we abandon
the extraction of lessons and principles, that
“about” may be reconsidered [...] as a verb, as a
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