Where Deception Happens
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Socrates — περὶ πάντα τὰ λεγόμενα μία τέχνη… πᾶν παντὶ ὁμοιοῦν… ἀπάτη πολὺ διαφέρουσι γίγνεται μᾶλλον ἢ ὀλίγον;
Socrates completes the generalization and then makes his move. The art of contradiction, he concludes, is not confined to law courts and assemblies but ranges 'over everything spoken' — it is 'one single art,' mia tis technē, whose whole power is 'to make everything like everything,' pan panti homoioun. That phrase is the essence of rhetoric as Socrates now understands it: the capacity to assimilate any thing to any other, to slide one description into its neighbor until the mind has traveled anywhere the speaker wishes. Phaedrus asks what he means, and instead of explaining, Socrates poses a question that looks almost trivial and turns out to be the hinge of the entire argument: 'Does deception' — apatē — 'happen more between things that differ much, or things that differ little?' He is about to answer his own question, and the answer will overturn everything the sophists believed about the relation between persuasion and truth.
Socrates draws the conclusion and then turns the corner into his real argument. The art of contradiction, he says, is not about courts or assemblies in particular but about everything spoken — a single art, if it exists, by which one could make anything resemble anything. When Phaedrus asks what he means, Socrates begins to investigate, with a deceptively simple question: does deception happen more readily between things that differ greatly, or between things that differ only a little?
The question Socrates asks here is one of those innocent-looking moves that, in Plato, quietly decide everything, so it is worth seeing exactly where it is going before the next passages spring it. The word at its center, apatē, 'deception,' carries a dark weight in Greek — Hesiod made it a goddess, one of the sinister children of Night — and it names precisely the charge against rhetoric: that it is the art of leading minds into falsehood. The sophists embraced this. Deception, they thought, proved that persuasion is independent of truth, since the skilled speaker can make anything seem anything. Socrates accepts the whole dark power of apatē and then does something disarming: he treats it not as a magic but as a mechanism, and asks where, structurally, it operates. And the answer, which Phaedrus will be led to give in a moment, is the reverse of what the sophists assumed. Deception happens not between things that differ greatly but between things that differ only a little. No one is fooled by being told that a horse is a mountain; the gap is too obvious. You are fooled by being led, one small step at a time, from a thing to something almost identical to it, and from that to something almost identical to that, until you have arrived, without noticing any jump, at the opposite of where you started — the donkey passed off, degree by degree, as a horse. Deception is a walk across close resemblances. And here is the reversal that undoes the sophists: to walk someone across those resemblances without their noticing, the deceiver must himself see every one of the tiny steps clearly — must know exactly how each thing resembles and differs from its neighbor. He must possess the very map of reality that his victim lacks. The man who does not know the truth cannot even deceive reliably, because he will not know which likenesses are real and which will suddenly break down and expose him. So the art of 'making everything like everything' is not liberated from knowledge; it is more dependent on knowledge than any honest art, because it must navigate the finest gradations of likeness in the dark. Rhetoric's proudest power — deception itself — turns out to require the philosopher's knowledge of what things truly are. That is the trap Socrates has just baited, and the whole of his positive account of a true rhetoric is about to climb out of it.
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