Phaedrus

Phaedrus and Socrates discuss whether a speaker must be knowledgeable about his subject to be persuasive. Phaedrus has heard that a speaker simply needs to express his ideas with conviction to be persuasive, but Socrates disagrees. Phaedrus agrees to debate Socrates’s arguments to the contrary one at a time.

Socrates gets Phaedrus to agree that rhetoric is the art of winning a “verbal contest,” whether such a contest takes place in a courtroom, in a political speech, or in private conversation. In all cases, an effective speaker will be able to convince his audience to do what he wants, regardless of whether such an action is actually right or wrong, or whether his case is truly just or unjust. If a speaker wants to deceive his audience, Socrates asserts, he must know the truth about the matter, in order to make his argument seem reasonable and to avoid being detected by his audience. Thus, he concludes, one who does not know the facts about his subjects will fail as an orator.

Socrates suggests that they use Lysias’s speech, which Phaedrus read at the beginning of the dialogue, as a test case for these ideas about rhetoric. Somewhat immodestly, he also proposes to use his own earlier speech as an example of the art of rhetoric. Socrates immediately criticizes Lysias’s speech for not beginning with a definition of his terms: he jumps straight into using terms such as “love” without any thought as to their actual definitions. To be truly persuasive, Socrates argues, a speaker has to define his terms, so they are no longer ambiguous, and cannot be twisted to mean something the speaker does not intend.

Socrates reminds Phaedrus that in his own speeches, he began by carefully defining the terms he would use, including “love” and “madness.” Socrates declares that there are two main methods of reasoning that can be demonstrated by his speech: one can group several things into a single category, defining that category, or one can describe the several parts that make up a single category. Socrates points out that he used these two methods in his two speeches: in the first, he described several concepts that, together, we take to mean “madness”; in the second speech, he broke down the category of “Love” into two separate parts:idealistic love (the good horse) and lustful, physical love (the bad horse). Socrates calls these two rhetorical methods “division” and “collection.”

Ultimately, Socrates and Phaedrus conclude that to follow the rules of a well-made speech, as set forth by the ancient writers and authorities they cite, is not enough to be persuasive. They acknowledge that knowing these rules is essential to the composition of an effective speech, but that they are only a starting point. Speculating on the missing ingredient, Phaedrus asks Socrates to further explain the “genuine art of the convincing speaker.”