Not an Art but a Knack
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Socrates — οὐκ ἔστι τέχνη ἀλλʼ ἄτεχνος τριβή… λέγειν φησὶν ὁ Λάκων ἔτυμος τέχνη ἄνευ ἀληθείας ἧφθαι.
Socrates concedes that Rhetoric's self-defense is just — but only conditionally. She earns her acquittal, he says, only if the arguments now marching up against her fail to convict her of being no real art at all. And he can already hear those arguments coming, 'protesting that she lies': that rhetoric as it is actually practiced 'is not an art but an artless routine,' ouk esti technē all' atechnos tribē. The distinction is loaded. A technē, for Plato, is a genuine art that knows the causes of what it does; a tribē is a mere knack, a skill worn smooth by repetition — the word comes from tribō, 'to rub' — that gets results by habit without understanding why. Then the clincher, put in the mouth of a laconic Spartan: 'of speaking there is no genuine art' — etymos technē, a true art — 'without laying hold of the truth,' and there never will be. Knowledge is figured as a grip, a hand closing on the real; a rhetoric that has not gripped the truth is not an art but a habit dressed up as one.
Phaedrus asks whether Rhetoric speaks justly in her own defense. Socrates answers: yes — but only if the arguments now advancing against her fail to prove she is no true art at all. And he seems to hear those arguments coming, protesting that rhetoric lies: it is not an art but an artless routine. Of real speaking, they say — quoting a Spartan — there is no genuine art without laying hold of the truth, and there never will be.
The charge Socrates puts in the mouth of the advancing arguments is one Plato had leveled at rhetoric before, most memorably in the Gorgias, and it is worth understanding precisely because it sounds harsher than it is. There, Socrates classes rhetoric with cookery and cosmetics as a mere 'knack,' empeiria kai tribē — an ability, got by practice, to produce a pleasing effect in people without any understanding of what is genuinely good for them. A doctor knows why a treatment heals and can give an account of it; a pastry chef merely knows, from long habit, what will taste good, even if it ruins the body. The difference is not skill — the pastry chef may be very skilled — but knowledge of causes and of the real good. By this standard, the rhetorician who studies only what will persuade a crowd, without knowing whether what he persuades them of is true or good, is a pastry chef of the soul: expert at producing conviction, ignorant of whether the conviction is nourishing or poisonous. That is what it means to call rhetoric an atechnos tribē, an artless knack. But notice that the charge, stated this way, contains its own remedy, and that is where the Phaedrus goes beyond the Gorgias. The problem is not that rhetoric involves persuasion; it is that it has been cut off from knowledge. Supply the missing ingredient — 'laying hold of the truth' — and the knack could become a real art. The Spartan's saying is exactly balanced: there is no genuine art of speaking without a grasp of truth. It does not say persuasion is worthless; it says persuasion without truth is not yet an art, and could still become one. And the verb for that grasp, haptomai, 'to lay hold of,' is quietly perfect. Truth here is not something you merely glance at or believe; it is something you take hold of, grip like a solid object, make your own. The whole rest of the dialogue is Plato's attempt to describe how a speaker might do exactly that — how the tribē might at last grow into a technē — by grounding the art of persuasion in real knowledge of two things: the truth of the subjects one speaks about, and the nature of the souls one speaks to.
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