Arguing Both Sides of the Just
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Socrates — ἐν δικαστηρίοις οἱ ἀντίδικοι… ἀντιλέγουσιν… περὶ τοῦ δικαίου τε καὶ ἀδίκου.
Socrates brushes the celebrity rhetoricians aside — 'let those men be' — and asks a deliberately simple question that will do a great deal of work. In the law courts, what do the antidikoi, the opposing parties in a case, actually do? They antilegousin: they 'speak against' one another, contradict each other. And the subject of their contradiction, Socrates gets Phaedrus to agree, is 'the just and the unjust,' to dikaion te kai to adikon — one side arguing that an act was just, the other that the very same act was unjust. It looks like an innocent description of ordinary courtroom procedure. But Socrates has quietly isolated the essential feature of rhetoric he is going to press: it is the power to make the same thing appear now in one light, now in its opposite. The prosecutor and defender are not talking about different deeds; they are making the identical deed look just or unjust at will. That capacity — to argue either side of anything — is what the next lines will turn into a trap for the whole sophistic view of the art.
Phaedrus plays along with the joke, naming the real rhetoric-teachers behind the Homeric masks — Gorgias as 'Nestor,' Thrasymachus and Theodorus as 'Odysseus.' Socrates waves the famous names aside and puts a plain question instead. In the law courts, what do the opposing parties actually do? Don't they contradict one another? And about what — is it not about the just and the unjust? The answer will spring a trap.
What Socrates has put his finger on here is the technique the sophists were proudest of and that Plato found most revealing: antilogia, the art of 'speaking against,' of constructing a persuasive argument for either side of any question. Protagoras, the greatest of the sophists, was famous for the claim that there are two opposed arguments (dissoi logoi) about everything, and for teaching pupils to argue both — to 'make the weaker argument the stronger.' In the law courts this is simply the daily reality: every case has a prosecutor and a defendant, each making the same event look guilty or innocent, just or unjust. The rhetoricians took this as proof of their central doctrine — that persuasion floats free of truth, since the skilled speaker can make anything appear anything. If the same act can be shown to be just and shown to be unjust, then (they concluded) what the speaker knows about real justice is beside the point; all that matters is the technique of making things seem. But Socrates is setting a trap, and it is worth seeing its shape in advance, because it is one of the most elegant arguments in the dialogue. He is about to ask: how does the skilled speaker manage to make the same thing appear just to one audience and unjust to another? Not by magic — by moving people in small, plausible steps from what they already grant toward the opposite conclusion, exploiting the fact that just and unjust acts often resemble each other closely. But to lead people across those resemblances without their noticing, the speaker must himself know exactly how the two things are alike and how they truly differ — which is to say, he must know what justice really is. The very power to deceive about justice, Socrates will argue, presupposes knowledge of justice. Antilogia does not free rhetoric from truth; it secretly depends on it. And so the sophists' proudest proof that their art needs no knowledge is about to be turned inside out into a demonstration that it needs knowledge more than any other art. The innocent question about what litigants do is the first move of that reversal.
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