Plato's rhetoric: leading souls or only convincing?

You know the word that convinces in thirty seconds and vanishes from your head the next day: the well-built speech, the sentence that closes the discussion, the argument that seemed great and of which you cannot repeat a thing. Plato knew it too, and he devoted a good part of the second half of the Phaedrus to the difference between it and the word that takes someone somewhere. His question is more demanding than "how to speak well": it is what the word is for.

A very well-written text

The problem shows up in the first scene of the book. Phaedrus carries a speech by Lysias, one of the most famous orators of Athens, and its thesis is provocative: it would be better to give yourself to someone who does not love you than to someone who does, because the lover is jealous and loses his head, and the other is calm, practical and reliable. It is a very well written text. And it is right there, says the source class of this article, that the problem which will run through the whole book begins: the form is impeccable and the thesis does not hold.

Keep this in mind, because the rest of the discussion is about how to recognize a speech like this.

The book that seems to change subject

Halfway through the dialogue, the subject seems to shift. Socrates and Phaedrus leave love and begin to discuss what it is to speak well, what makes a speech good, and what rhetoric is. Many readers thought, for that reason, that the Phaedrus was badly stitched together. It is not, and Socrates gives the key in one sentence: rhetoric, he says, is an art of leading souls through words (Phaedrus, 261a).

Leading souls is exactly what beauty did in the first half. Love leads through beauty, speech leads through words, and both may lead to truth or to deception. If you want to see the first half along this path, it is in What Plato said about beauty: the shiver is memory.

Psychagogy: the word that leads

The Greek name for this is psychagōgía, from psykhḗ, soul, and agōgḗ, leading. It is a technical and unusual word, but the idea is simple: to speak is to move someone, and whoever speaks chooses where. This changes what it means to speak well. A speech is not good for being elegant, nor for winning. It is good according to the place it leads to.

Notice the symmetry. A speech can lead someone upward, toward what is true, or lead them where only the speaker benefits. The same art serves one destination or the other, and that is why the question that gives this article its title is Plato's, and not a provocation of ours.

The rhetoric of the handbooks, and the probable

The rhetoric Socrates criticizes is that of the handbooks of his time, and he sums up what those masters of rhetoric taught: "These men discovered that the probable must be respected more than the true" (Phaedrus, 267a). The text names Tisias and Gorgias as the masters he has in mind.

Probable, here, means what seems true to the crowd. Socrates himself defines it so, asking whether what Tisias considers likely is not "what seems so to the multitude" (Phaedrus, 273b). It is the word that does not need to know what is just. It needs only to know what convinces. Lysias, with his well-written speech, was exactly this: beauty of form in the service of a thesis that does not hold.

This is the point where Plato meets, from opposite sides, two other articles of ours. In Mark Antony's speech: rhetoric against logic, the Roman crowd changes sides in a few minutes, led by someone who stirs the emotions of the listeners, and Shakespeare shows how much that yields. In The Art of Being Right, by Schopenhauer: summary and analysis, the tricks are catalogued, thirty-eight of them, so that the reader may recognize them. What Plato adds to these two scenes is a question they leave aside: winning is one thing, leading somewhere is another.

What the word that leads demands

Socrates does not stop at criticism. He says what a word that truly leads requires of the one who speaks, and the list comes in order.

First, knowing the truth about what one speaks of. Second, knowing the soul of the listener, because there are souls of many kinds (Phaedrus, 271c-272b). Third, adjusting the speech to that soul, and here comes the qualification that separates Plato from the manipulator: not to manipulate it, but to take it to the truth.

You can read these demands from our side. When someone speaks to you, the list becomes a question: does this person know what they are talking about? Are they speaking to me, or to a generic crowd? Does the adjustment they make lead me somewhere, or only to agree? It is our reading, not Plato's, but it comes straight out of his three demands.

Gathering and dividing: the good carver

To reach the truth, Socrates describes the method he calls dialectic. It is a double movement. First, gathering what is scattered under a single idea, so as to know what one is talking about. Then, dividing that idea into its parts, following its natural joints (Phaedrus, 265d-266b).

He gives a kitchen image. Divide the way the good carver does, who cuts the meat along the joints, and not the way the bad one does, who breaks the bones in the middle (Phaedrus, 265e). The first movement keeps you from speaking of a thing without knowing what it is. The second keeps you from cutting by force, the way someone who breaks a bone in the middle does.

Notice that this is not a rule of oratory. It is an ethics of the word. Speaking well begins by respecting the form things have, and this holds before any question about how to sound convincing. A speech like Lysias's can be very well written without respecting any of this.

The difference that remains

Rhetoric, for Plato, is then neither an evil nor a neutral technique that serves any end. It is a responsibility. The word that only convinces is the one that dispenses with the true. The word that leads requires it, and it also requires that whoever speaks look at the one who listens.

One last point, which closes the circle with the opening of the book: Socrates gave his first speech with his face covered. The true one is given with the face uncovered. One speaks to win; the other speaks because it is true.

A note on the passages: the references in parentheses are the Stephanus numbering, which locates each passage of the Phaedrus in any edition you have at hand, and the wording varies from one translation to another. To see the whole work, start with Plato's Phaedrus: summary and how to read it. For what Plato thought of writing, the other theme of the second half, see The myth of Theuth: why Plato distrusted writing.

Continue: Plato's Phaedrus: summary and how to read it · What Plato said about beauty: the shiver is memory · The Myth of Theuth: why Plato distrusted writing · Vatican and Caravaggio Museums
Source class: Fedro, de Platão