Cicadas

Cicadas also spend their lives starving to death in pursuit of their desire. These insects enter the dialogue somewhat tangentially, as Sokrates is passing from one topic of conversation to another and notices them singing in the branches above. He points them out to Phaedrus:

… καὶ ἅμα μοι δοκοῦσιν ὡς ἐν τῷ πνίγει ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς ἡμῶν οἱ τέττιγες ᾄδοντες καὶ ἀλλήλοις διαλεγόμενοι καθορᾶν καὶ ἡμᾶς.

… and the cicadas appear to be staring down at us, singing away in the heat over our heads and chatting with one another.… (258e)

Phaedrus is curious about cicadas so Sokrates goes on to supply some traditional lore:

λέγεται δ᾽ ὥς ποτ᾽ ἦσαν οὗτοι ἄνθρωποι τῶν πρὶν Μούσας γεγονέναι, γενομένων δὲ Μουσῶν καὶ φανείσης ᾠδῆς οὕτως ἄρα τινὲς τῶν τότε ἐξεπλάγησαν ὑφ᾽ ἡδονῆς, ὥστε ᾄδοντες ἠμέλησαν σίτων τε καὶ ποτῶν, καὶ ἔλαθον τελευτήσαντες αὑτούς· ἐξ ὧν τὸ τεττίγων γένος μετ᾽ ἐκεῖνο φύεται, γέρας τοῦτο παρὰ Μουσῶν λαβόν, μηδέν τροφῆς δεῖσθαι γενόμενον, ἀλλ᾽ ἄσιτόν τε καὶ ἄποτον εὐθὺς ᾄδειν, ἕως ἂν τελευτήσῃ.…

Once upon a time, the story goes, cicadas were human beings, before the birth of the Muses. When the Muses were born and song came into being, some of these creatures were so struck by the pleasure of it that they sang and sang, forgot to eat and drink, and died before they knew it. From them the race of cicadas arose, and they have this special privilege from the Muses: from the time they are born they need no nourishment, they just sing continually without eating or drinking until they die.… (259b-c)

Like Midas, the cicadas can be read as an image of the fundamental erotic dilemma. They are creatures pulled into confrontation with time by their own desire. They enact a nobler version of this dilemma than Midas did, for their passion is musical, and they offer a new solution to the lover’s paradox of ‘now’ and ‘then.’ The cicadas simply enter the ‘now’ of their desire and stay there. Abstracted from the processes of life, oblivious to time, they sustain the present indicative of pleasure from the instant they are born until, as Sokrates says, “they escape their own notice, having died” (elathon teleutēsantes hautous, 259c). Cicadas have no life apart from their desire and when it ends, so do they.

Here is an alternative to the tactics of Lysias’ nonlover. The nonlover sidesteps painful transitions between ‘now’ and ‘then’ by stationing himself permanently at the end of desire. He sacrifices the intense and transient pleasure of the lover’s ‘now’ in return for an extended ‘then’ of consistent emotion and predictable behavior. Cicadas choose the opposite sacrifice, investing their whole lives in the momentous delight of ‘now.’ Passing time and its transitions do not affect them. They are stranded in a living death of pleasure.

Unlike Midas, the cicadas are happy in their choice of life-as-death. Yet, they are cicadas. That is, they are creatures who were once men but who preferred to decline from human status because they found man’s condition incompatible with their desire for pleasure. They are creatures whose sole activity in the course of a lifetime is the prosecution of that desire. It is not a choice open to human beings, nor to any organism that is committed to living in time. Organisms struck by desire, however, tend to misprize this commitment, as we have seen. Plato gives us one further image of what happens when they do so.