Abstract

When the Phaedrus produces an account of eros that goes beyond earlier oversimplifying terms, it rests its analysis on a distinction between human and divine. The dialogue’s attempts to articulate this distinction repeatedly fail. In part they rest on the difference between right and left, but in ways that problematize that difference as well. In the end this difficulty in definition casts a shadow over the prospect of the effective reciprocation of love, because the loved one will not be able to tell the difference between a lover in pursuit crazed by divine eros and the lover who is crazed in the ordinary and destructive fashion.