Must the Speaker Know the Truth?
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Socrates — τὸν λόγον καλῶς ἔχει λέγειν καὶ γράφειν… σκεπτέον… δεῖ τὴν τοῦ λέγοντος διάνοιαν εἰδυῖαν τὸ ἀληθὲς;
Socrates comes back to the business at hand and states the thesis the rest of the dialogue will defend. The question, he reminds Phaedrus, is 'in what way it is good to speak and write a speech, and in what way not' — and that, he says, is what 'must be examined,' skepteon, the verb of philosophical inquiry from which we get 'skeptic.' Then the thesis itself, framed as a question no one could refuse: must it not be the case that, for anything to be 'well and finely' spoken, the dianoia — the mind, the discursive understanding — of the speaker first 'knows the truth,' to alēthes, of the things he means to talk about? The claim is deceptively simple and quietly revolutionary. Good speaking, Socrates proposes, is not a matter of technique or charm at all. It begins in knowledge — the speaker's mind must be in possession of the truth about his subject before a single fine word is worth anything.
Refreshed by the cicada myth, Socrates returns to the question they set out to examine: in what way it is good, or not good, to speak and write a speech. And he opens with the thesis that will govern the whole rest of the dialogue — his challenge to the teachers of rhetoric. Is it not necessary, if something is to be spoken well and finely, that the speaker's mind first know the truth about the subject?
This one question is the axis on which the whole second half of the Phaedrus turns, and to feel its force you have to know what Socrates is arguing against. The teachers of rhetoric in his day — Gorgias above all, and the tradition that followed him — made a bold and liberating claim about their art: that persuasion is a skill independent of knowledge. The orator, on this view, does not need to know medicine to be more convincing than a doctor before an ignorant crowd, nor to know justice to win a case; he needs only to master the techniques of persuasion, and he can then speak plausibly about anything at all. Rhetoric, so understood, is a pure technology of winning, detachable from truth. Socrates's question here is the flat denial of that whole picture. He insists that speaking well is not a free-floating skill but is rooted in knowledge: the speaker's mind must know the truth of his subject, or his fine words are worthless — worse than worthless, since they will persuade people of things the speaker himself does not understand. Notice the word he chooses for the speaker's inner state: dianoia, the discursive, reasoning mind, the faculty that works through argument toward understanding. Good rhetoric, he is saying, is an outgrowth of a mind that has done the philosophical work of coming to know, not a cosmetic applied to ignorance. This is why the dialogue's two halves belong together. The first half showed love going right only when it reaches through beauty toward the truth of the Forms; the second half will show speech going right only when it reaches through persuasion toward the truth of its subject. In both, the same principle governs: the beautiful surface — the beloved's face, the fine phrase — is legitimate only when it is a road to the real, and corrupt when it becomes a substitute for it. The sophist's rhetoric and the vain lover's seduction are the same error, the love of appearance cut loose from truth. And Socrates's answer to both is the same: examine, skeptomai — do the hard work of knowing — before you presume to speak, or to love.
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