Pastoral Places and the City: Environmental Rhetoric in Plato’s <i>Phaedrus</i>
Historically, the notion of nature or the place outside the city in <i>Phaedrus</i> has been read as a proto-pastoral dialogue. If we accept this reading of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus hierarchizes the landscape where the city is perceived as superior to the noncity. However, I argue that...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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MDPI AG
2025-01-01
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| Series: | Humanities |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/14/1/7 |
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| Summary: | Historically, the notion of nature or the place outside the city in <i>Phaedrus</i> has been read as a proto-pastoral dialogue. If we accept this reading of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus hierarchizes the landscape where the city is perceived as superior to the noncity. However, I argue that Plato offers an alternative in Phaedrus that opposes the country–city hierarchized binary. Rather than seeing the natural world as a starting place for intellectual knowledge, Plato refuses the pastoral impulse that projects a construction of nature in Phaedrus. Instead, he values the noncity as any other place where individuals can come together in a dialectical fashion to ascertain truth. Indeed, Socrates’ orientation toward the setting in Phaedrus suggests that he is practicing a rhetoric of immersion in the ambient nonhuman place around him before attempting to project meaning onto it. |
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| ISSN: | 2076-0787 |