Persuasion, Not Truth
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Phaedrus — τῷ μέλλοντι ῥήτορι… δίκαια μανθάνειν ἀλλὰ τὰ δόξαντʼ ἂν πλήθει… ἐκ τὸ πείθειν ἀλλʼ οὐκ ἐκ τῆς ἀληθείας.
Phaedrus lays out the rhetoricians' creed with admirable clarity, and it is a genuinely formidable position. The man who is going to be an orator, they hold, has no need to learn 'the things that are really just,' ta tō onti dikaia, but only 'the things that would seem just to the multitude,' the plēthos, the mass of ordinary people who will sit in judgment. Nor need he trouble himself with what is really good or beautiful, only with what will pass for it. And the reason is blunt and practical: 'persuasion comes from these' — from appearances, from what the crowd already believes — 'not from the truth,' ouk ek tēs alētheias. The whole opposition of the dialogue's second half is now on the table in two words: peithein, persuasion, set against alētheia, truth. The rhetorician bets everything on the first and declares the second irrelevant to his craft.
Socrates has claimed that good speaking must begin from knowing the truth. Phaedrus answers with the rhetoricians' famous rebuttal — the very case the teachers of persuasion make for themselves. The would-be orator, they say, need not learn what is really just or good, but only what will seem so to the crowd who will judge. For persuasion is built out of appearances, not out of the truth.
It would be a mistake to hear this as a straw man, and Socrates, tellingly, does not treat it as one. His immediate reply is that 'the word wise men speak is not to be cast aside' — we must examine whether there is something in it — and there is. The rhetoricians' claim is not stupid; it is, on its own terms, largely true. Juries and assemblies are in fact swayed by what seems plausible to them, not by what is the case; an orator who insisted on the unvarnished truth against the crowd's settled opinions would often lose, and the smooth manipulator would often win. Persuasion really does operate in the medium of doxa — opinion, appearance, seeming — and this is precisely why Plato takes rhetoric so seriously as a danger. The opposition between doxa and alētheia, seeming and being, is the deepest fault line in all of Plato's thought: it is the line between the shadows on the wall of the Cave and the realities outside, between the many beautiful things and Beauty itself, between belief that can be shaken and knowledge that cannot. The sophists have planted their whole art on the near side of that line, in the realm of appearance, and made a virtue of never crossing it. What makes their position dangerous rather than merely cynical is that it works. A technique for producing conviction without regard to truth is a real power, and in a democracy where everything is decided by persuading crowds, it is an enormous one. Socrates cannot answer it by pretending it doesn't work. His response, developed through the rest of the dialogue, is subtler and more devastating: he will argue that you cannot even reliably produce the appearance of truth unless you know the truth itself — that the master of seeming must, paradoxically, be a master of being, because to lead people gradually from what they falsely believe toward what you want them to believe, you have to know the real degrees of likeness and difference between things, which is to say you have to know how things really are. The rhetorician who scorns truth, Socrates will show, cannot even be good at deception. But that argument lies ahead. Here, at the threshold, Plato does something important: he states the enemy's case at full strength, in Phaedrus's own admiring voice, so that the victory to come will be a real one and not a rigged game.
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