Calling a Donkey a Horse
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Socrates — εἴ σε πείθοιμι… κτησάμενον ἵππον ἄμφω δὲ ἵππον ἀγνοοῖμεν… συντιθεὶς λόγον ἔπαινον… τοῦ ὄνου ἵππον ἐπονομάζων.
Socrates answers the rhetoricians' creed not with a counter-argument but with a joke that turns into a trap. Imagine, he says, that I set out to persuade you to acquire a horse to fight off your enemies — but neither of us actually knows what a horse is, and I have found out one thing about you: that Phaedrus thinks a horse is 'the tame animal with the biggest ears.' So I go to work. I 'compose a speech,' syntitheis logon, an epainon, a praise-speech, in honor of the donkey — calling it a horse, hippon eponomazōn, and extolling this splendid creature as worth everything to own, at home and on campaign, a fine mount to fight from and strong enough to carry the baggage. The persuasion is flawless; it fits your beliefs perfectly. And it will send you to war on a donkey. The rhetoricians said persuasion works on appearance, not truth. Socrates has just granted the point and shown where it leads.
To test the claim that persuasion needs no knowledge, Socrates invents a comic example. Suppose I talked you into buying a horse to fight off your enemies — but neither of us actually knew what a horse was, and I happened to know that you, Phaedrus, believe a horse is 'the tame animal with the biggest ears.' Then I compose a speech praising the donkey, calling it a horse, and urging you to take this fine mount to war.
This little comedy is Socrates's first move against the doctrine that persuasion has nothing to do with knowledge, and it works by taking that doctrine perfectly seriously and following it to its end. Everything the rhetoricians said is honored here: the orator does not know the truth (neither man knows what a horse is), he studies only the audience's existing beliefs (Phaedrus's odd conviction about ears), and he tailors his speech to what will seem convincing rather than to what is real. By the sophists' own standards the speech is a triumph — it persuades. And it is a catastrophe, because the persuaded man now rides a donkey against armed enemies. The joke lands a serious blow. If rhetoric is defined purely as the power to produce belief, with no anchor in truth, then its successes and its disasters are indistinguishable — the very same skill that wins the argument loses the war. Persuasion cut loose from knowledge is not a neutral tool that can be used for good or ill; it is a blind force that, precisely when it 'works,' can lead straight to ruin, because it has no way of telling a horse from a donkey. But Socrates is setting up something more pointed than 'ignorance is dangerous.' Look closely at how the trick works: to pass the donkey off as a horse, the speaker has to exploit the fact that donkeys and horses are similar — both four-footed mounts, close enough that the swap is plausible. You could not persuade Phaedrus that a fish was a horse. And that observation is the seed of Socrates's whole positive theory, which is coming: the art of leading people from one belief to another, step by plausible step, depends entirely on knowing the real gradations of likeness and difference among things. The skilled deceiver, no less than the honest teacher, must know how things actually are, or his deceptions will not even be convincing. So the donkey joke does double work. It shows that truth-blind rhetoric is practically ruinous, and it plants the paradox Socrates will spring later — that even to mislead well, you must first know the truth.
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