Steve Watson

On the Platonic Frenzies

Plato is not now generally thought of as being overly sympathetic to the mystical path to knowledge – the later position of the Academy notwithstanding – yet in the Phaedrus 244^a-245^c, 265^b and Symposium 210^e-211^b, Plato makes claims that seem to amount to an acknowledgement that there are paths to truths that are independent of the use of logos/reason (whether working on sensation or not,) and that some truths may be inaccessible to it. Certain truths, he seems to say, are accessed through varieties of mania[1], which are a kind of frenzied ecstasy that takes a person inspired (or enthused) by the relevant gods.

At Phaedrus 265^b Plato says of mania that:

… in the divine kind we distinguished four types ascribing them to four gods: the inspiration of the prophet [Prophetic] to Apollo, that of the mystic [Telestic] to Dionysus, that of the poet [Poetic] to the Muses, and a fourth type which we declared to be the highest, the madness of the lover [Erotic,] to Aphrodite and Eros

1. The prophetic eumania is at first blush the easiest to understand. It simply refers to knowledge of future events that the relevant God (not necessarily Apollo, incidentally) makes known to us through an inspired oracle. Those of Delphi and Dodona, for example, were well known and respected through the Greek world. On the other hand, to know about the future in Plato’s epistemology, means to know something about the changing world and that is not something that Plato elsewhere readily admits. The world is rather the realm of belief or opinion, but if the God tells you that a thing will happen and it is therefore a necessary and unchanging fact that that will happen, then that hardly seems to be a matter of mere opinion. Nor, however, can it be a matter of unchanging universals and general truths such as are imagined in the realm of the Forms and which are the objects of actual knowledge, so the nature of this ‘knowledge’ of the future turns out to be a bit mysterious.

2. Even more uncertain is the nature of the telestic Plato’s accompanying statements to his introduction to this form of inspiration have long puzzled readers. It seems to say that help for the suffering is granted through the institution of rites and prayers and purifications on the advice obtained through manic communications. The Dionysiacal connection indicates, as does later interpretation, that the rites and rituals here are the Eleusinian mysteries (and note that the Phaedrus is set near the site of those rituals,) the Corybantic rites, and the Bacchic and Sabaziac initiations. This might suggest to us that the ‘frenzy’ is that of the ritual itself and this has indeed been the usual interpretation since those rituals were certainly said to involve possession by deities,[2] but that doesn’t seem to be what Plato says:[3] the manic revelations seem rather to be prior to the ritual frenzy. In either case the knowledge involved is actually less problematic than for the prophetic eumania: it is either practical advice on treatment – a knowledge of what to do in order to achieve a good outcome – or it is knowledge by acquaintance of the god.

3. With poetic eumania, we are to understand only that the poet comes to have ‘knowledge how’ to get his message across.

… [I]f any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness.

But ‘knowledge how,’ is not a category of knowledge that appears in Greek philosophy, and it does not constitute a challenge to the standard forms of Platonic epistemology.

4. Plato finally declares that the highest form of eumania is the erotic, in which the lover loses his reason in contemplating the beauty of the beloved. But when we look more closely at the consequences of this mania as it is presented by Diotima in the Symposium we see that it does not present any truths about Beauty or anything else, but only inspires an ascent up a ladder of more perfect instantiations or participations in the Form of Beauty, resulting at last, for those whose intellect and virtue are capable of it in acquaintance with the Form of the One itself.

It looks, therefore, as if, except in the historically special case of prophetic eumania[4], these frenzies are not in fact supposed to constitute paths to ultimate truth inaccessible to the normal ways of coming to know about things, they are rather ways that the Gods can give us a nudge in the right direction towards various kinds of ‘knowledge,’ or they are pointers towards a path towards knowledge (of one form or another.) As such, they do not pose a threat to the Platonic epistemology or give support to mystical claims. This is actually consistent with Plato’s cautious declaration in introducing them that

The greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, indeed of madness that is heaven-sent.

[1] The term mania itself is as ambiguous or equivocal in Plato’s usage as it is in our own. He clearly intends that the person affected by such a mania should be considered to be operating outside the usual constraints of reason and in that sense to be like those whose manic condition is caused by some kind of illness, but in the case he is considering this is the result of a God’s possession of a mortal to a very particular purpose. (Note that mental illness in the ancient world was generally thought to be a possession of some kind anyway[1] – so simply distinguishing it as ‘a possession’ would be inadequate.) In future, if the need arises, we can distinguish the two intentions as eumania and dysmania.

[2] Yulia Ustinova (2018) Divine Mania: Alteration of Consciousness in Ancient Greece. London; New York: Routledge

[3] The Greek here is apparently quite unclear.

[4] In the special case of prophetic eumania, there are a number of ways that Plato could make them less offensive. He could declare that they are merely statements by the gods through their oracles and no more inherently ‘knowledge’ than any other statements, though they are contingently more reliable because of the closer acquaintance of the Gods with reality. Moreover, much of what they predict is in their power to make come to pass, so these are statements of intent rather than revelations of already exiting facts about the future.