The book Soul and Beauty in the Phaedrus Dialogue is part of a larger project on the relationship between soul and speech in Plato's philosophy. The first volume of this project, Soul and Evil in the Phaedo Dialogue, focuses on the threat to our lives of the blindness to which the human soul is seduced by its partial nature and its connection to the individual body. This blindness, according to the Phaedo dialogue, can be overcome by "escaping to speech" as a transparent image of what is, and by nurturing the mutuality of souls that underlies this escape. The book Soul and Beauty in the Phaedrus dialogue, on the other hand, focuses on the parallel between speech and the body, showing not only the chances but also the risks of human reciprocity. Both a beautiful body and beautiful speech are capable of triggering a movement of love in the human soul, which Plato conceives as a recollection of true beauty. The body and speech can thus become a medium for remembering what is, and thus an opportunity to overcome our blindness, but they can also be mistaken for what the soul desires and remembers through them. It is in this ambivalence that speech and the body constitute the space in which human life, conceived as the multifaceted movement of embodied souls contributing to the formation of the cosmos as a whole, is realized.
Czech edition