Rhetoric Is Leading of Souls
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Socrates — ἆρʼ οὖν οὐ τὸ μὲν ὅλον ἡ ῥητορικὴ ἂν εἴη τέχνη ψυχαγωγία τις διὰ λόγων, οὐ μόνον ἐν δικαστηρίοις καὶ ὅσοι ἄλλοι δημόσιοι σύλλογοι, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν ἰδίοις…
So then — is not rhetoric, taken as a whole, an art of leading the soul through words: not only in law-courts and every other kind of public assembly, but in private conversations as well?
Having agreed that a speech must be a living whole, Socrates turns to the deep question: what is the art of rhetoric, really? His answer redefines the whole discipline in three words.
Here is the sentence that saves rhetoric from the contempt Plato had poured on it in the <em>Gorgias</em>, where it was dismissed as no art at all but a mere 'knack' for flattery, cookery masquerading as medicine. The rescue is a single coined phrase: rhetoric is <em>psychagōgía dià lógōn</em>, 'a leading of souls through words.' Everything hangs on that noun. <em>Psychagōgía</em> was not a neutral term — before Plato it named the work of the necromancer, the <em>psychagōgós</em> who led the souls of the dead up from the underworld. Plato keeps the dark power deliberately: words really do move souls, the way spells were believed to move ghosts. What he adds is accountability. If speech is soul-leading, the speaker is responsible for where he leads — and cannot lead well without knowing two things he could ignore as a mere flatterer: the truth of his subject, and the <em>nature of the soul</em> he is working on.<br><br>Notice the last expansion — 'not only in law-courts… but in private conversations too.' Rhetoric is usually imagined as the loud public art of the assembly and the court. Socrates quietly universalizes it: any time words move a soul, in a courtroom or a whispered exchange under a plane tree, this art is at work. Which means the <em>Phaedrus</em> itself — two men talking privately about love and speeches — is a specimen of <em>psychagōgía</em>, and Socrates has been practicing on Phaedrus all afternoon. The dialogue names its own method. And the demand this definition generates — that the true rhetorician map the kinds of souls and fit the kinds of speech to them (271d) — is why the reformed art turns out to require the psychology of the palinode. The two halves of the dialogue were one inquiry all along: how <em>lógos</em> leads a <em>psychē</em>.
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