Isn't It Extraordinary?
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Phaedrus — ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν ἱκανά μοι νομίζω τὰ εἰρημένα· εἰ δʼ ἔτι τι σὺ ποθεῖς, ἡγούμενος παραλελεῖφθαι, ἐρώτα.
Phaedrus — τί σοι φαίνεται, ὦ Σώκρατες, ὁ λόγος; οὐχ ὑπερφυῶς τά τε ἄλλα καὶ τοῖς ὀνόμασιν εἰρῆσθαι;
'For my part, I think what's been said is enough; but if you still want more, thinking something has been left out, ask.' — So the speech ends. What do you think of it, Socrates? Isn't it extraordinarily well done, both in general and, above all, in its choice of words?
Lysias's speech ends, and Phaedrus can barely contain himself. His question to Socrates reveals exactly what he admires — and, in one telling word, exactly what he has missed.
Phaedrus's breathless question is a small masterpiece of characterization, and it turns on his last word: <em>onómasin</em>, 'in its diction' — the speech is wonderful, he says, 'especially in its <em>words</em>.' He praises the surface: the phrasing, the polish, the verbal finish. What he does not mention — what has not occurred to him — is whether the speech is <em>true</em>, or well-reasoned, or good for the soul it means to seduce. His enthusiasm is <em>hyperphyôs</em>, 'extraordinarily' — literally 'beyond nature,' the adverb of a fan whose judgment has left the ground. Plato lets the young man convict himself: he is exactly the reader Lysias writes for, dazzled by manner, blind to matter.<br><br>This is the seed of the entire second half of the dialogue. The critique of rhetoric to come is not that eloquence is worthless but that eloquence divorced from truth and from knowledge of the soul is a cosmetic — 'not an art but a knack,' as the <em>Gorgias</em> puts it, like pastry-cooking dressed up as medicine. Phaedrus loving the <em>words</em> is the disease the dialogue diagnoses; teaching him to ask instead whether a speech is built like a living body (264c), whether its maker knows the truth and knows his listener (277b), is the cure. The whole turn from love to rhetoric is really one subject: how words work on a soul, and whether the one who wields them cares what happens to it.
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