The Deceiver Must Know the Truth
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Socrates — κατὰ σμικρὸν μεταβαίνων λήσεις ἐπὶ τὸ ἐναντίον… δεῖ τὸν μέλλοντα ἀπατήσειν… τὴν ὁμοιότητα τῶν ὄντων καὶ ἀνομοιότητα ἀκριβῶς διειδέναι.
Here the trap closes. Deception, Phaedrus has conceded, lives among small differences; and Socrates now shows why. It is precisely 'by moving in small steps,' kata smikron metabainōn, that you 'escape notice' — lēseis — while arriving at the opposite of where you began. A single big leap would be seen and refused; a chain of tiny, plausible shifts is invisible. But — and this is the whole point — to lay down that chain, to move a mind imperceptibly across near-identical stepping-stones from a truth to its opposite, the deceiver must himself see every stone with perfect clarity. He 'must know accurately,' akribōs, 'the likeness and unlikeness of the things that are,' tēn homoiotēta tōn ontōn kai anomoiotēta. Only someone who knows exactly how things resemble and differ can navigate the narrow path of resemblance without stumbling into a gap that gives him away. The would-be deceiver, in short, must be a better knower of reality than the person he means to fool.
Phaedrus has agreed that deception happens between things that differ only a little. Socrates draws it tight: precisely by moving in small steps, he says, you more easily slip unnoticed to the opposite than by big leaps. Therefore the one who means to deceive another, without being deceived himself, must know accurately the likeness and unlikeness of the things that are. The conclusion is inescapable — and it is the reverse of what the sophists believed.
This is one of the most quietly devastating arguments Plato ever made, and its target is the entire self-understanding of the sophistic art. The sophists took the possibility of deception as proof that rhetoric floats free of truth: since a clever speaker can make anything seem anything, they reasoned, knowledge of how things really are is beside the point — all that matters is mastery of appearances. Socrates has now turned that reasoning completely inside out. Yes, he grants, the speaker can make anything seem anything; but examine how he does it, and you find that the trick runs entirely on knowledge. Deception is not a leap but a walk, and the walk goes across resemblances — from a thing to its near-twin, and from that to its near-twin, until the mind has traveled to the contrary of its starting point without ever seeing a jump. And a walk like that can only be led by someone who has mapped the whole terrain of likeness and unlikeness in advance, who knows to the finest degree how each thing resembles and differs from its neighbors. That map is precisely knowledge of the truth of things. So the person best equipped to deceive is not the one indifferent to reality but the one who knows it most exactly — and, by the same token, the only person safe from being deceived is the one who knows the truth, because he alone can feel when a chain of plausible steps has quietly crossed a real boundary. The consequences ramify in two directions, and Plato means both. The dark one: the truly dangerous deceiver is not the ignorant charlatan but the knower who turns his knowledge to fraud — which is exactly why philosophy, the discipline of knowing reality, is morally serious and not merely clever. The bright one: this same power of leading a mind step by step across resemblances is the method of teaching and of dialectic itself. To lead someone from a false belief toward a true one, Socrates too must move in small steps across likenesses — the difference is only the direction of travel and whether it is done in the light. The art of deception and the art of instruction are the same art, pointed opposite ways, and both require the philosopher's knowledge of what is truly like what. This is why the dialogue can end by redeeming rhetoric rather than banishing it: the very analysis that convicts truth-blind persuasion of being dangerous also reveals that persuasion grounded in knowledge is possible, and is nothing other than the philosopher's own art of leading souls toward the real.
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