One of the things I found interesting in this essay was the idea of defining people by their souls and what their unique passion may or may not be. He starts in the world of the divine, stating that people are different based on how noble their souls are and whether or not they can love truly. This is broken down into a person's personality and how they love, whether basely through lust, or through the truer expression of compassion and empathy.
Using the example of gods, we follow the idea that we most connect with, for example people that worship Zeus will fall in love with someone that is lordly and philosophical, someone that worships Ares will look for someone that is full of passion and possibly evil. He makes a definite connection between the gods and divinity, saying if one pursues this divinity with fervor and passion they are considered mad, when in fact they are just outside the bounds of reason, not confined by mortal rules and codes of conduct. However, this seemed to be in discord. If a person worships Zeus and falls in love with a person that is filled of wisdom and philosophy are they not still bound by reason and wisdom? Also, is someone that worships Ares and the base forms of pleasure also not connected with truth in a sense, the truth being the divine?
It seems to me that Plato seperates the divinity of gods into levels, saying that Zeus is better than Ares, when in fact they seem to me to all be divine. They are the spectrum of emotion and to denote beauty as being less than wisdom seems misplaced. He does say that there are joys which are more obvious than others, for example beauty being more obvious through our sense of sight (most dominant) than wisdom which is gathered through our sense of (?). However, if the divine is the goal of humanity, then it seems wrong to forsake certain parts of divinity for another.
For example with his analogy of the two horses and the horeseman he shows how the passionate horse, the one that does not follow the rules of modesty and discretion, incensed by selfishness, leads to the other two finding love, bringing that person close when the others would have stayed back and admired. Later, the other two check the passionate horse and all is well and balanced, but it is important to realize that this horse was the catalyst that started the motion. If this is so, and if he believes that motion is godliness, then what is the truest sense of godliness-passion or reason?
What this means for rhetoric is that the notion that we can define souls as something unique in itself and in a sense permanent, is misplaced. He states that to define an audience we must know the depth of what a soul means and what the person's soul or character might be. I would argue that their is no such thing as an absolute soul, one defined by one god or another. Instead, we have pieces of these gods or characteristics in us and are held sway by each at different times, or by several at the same time. To connect with someone rhetorically would then mean that we have to try to touch as many frames of mind as possible (limited by a vague definition we concur of our audience) to present an effective argument and frame the discussion in the light that we are hoping to choose. Passion is the catalyst that begins an argument and it is the logic that sums it up and brings it back down to earth.
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