He Has Hunted Opinions
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Socrates — λόγων τέχνην ὁ τὴν ἀλήθειαν μὴ εἰδώς δόξας τεθηρευκώς γελοίαν καὶ ἄτεχνον παρέξεται.
Socrates delivers the conclusion as a compact, contemptuous portrait. The person who has 'not known the truth,' tēn alētheian mē eidōs, but has instead 'hunted opinions,' doxas tetherukōs, will produce an art of speeches that is 'ridiculous,' geloian, and 'artless,' atechnon — no genuine technē at all. The choice of verb is the sting. Thēreuō means to hunt, to chase wild game, and Socrates uses it to picture the false rhetorician as a huntsman not of realities but of popular beliefs — stalking and bagging the opinions of the crowd the way a hunter bags animals, and mistaking his catch for knowledge. His speeches may dazzle, but because they are woven from opinions he has run down rather than truths he has understood, the 'art' behind them is a sham, and — Socrates adds the word that must have stung a lover of speeches most — laughable. Then he turns practical: enough abstractions; let us look at real examples, Lysias's speech and our own, and see there what artless and artful actually look like on the page.
Socrates states the verdict the whole argument has earned. A person who does not know the truth, but has instead gone chasing after popular opinions, will turn out an 'art' of speeches that is ridiculous and no real art at all. Then he proposes to stop dealing in abstractions: let them look at the actual speeches already before them — Lysias's, and their own — for concrete examples of what makes rhetoric artless or artful.
The image of hunting opinions rewards a moment's attention, because it captures precisely what Plato thinks is wrong with rhetoric as it was taught and practiced. A hunter goes where the game is; he studies the habits of his quarry, its trails and waterholes, and lies in wait. The sophistical rhetorician does exactly this with human beliefs: he studies what people already think, what they fear and desire and find plausible, and he lies in wait for those opinions, catching and deploying them. It is genuine skill of a kind — real hunters are skilled — but it is skill aimed entirely at what seems, never at what is. And that is why Socrates can call it, in the same breath, both artless and ridiculous. Artless, atechnon, because a true technē for Plato is grounded in knowledge of causes and realities, and this one is grounded only in a shrewd familiarity with appearances; it is a knack, as the earlier passage said, not an art. Ridiculous, geloian, because there is something absurd in the spectacle of a man who has mastered every trail of popular opinion while remaining ignorant of the truth those opinions are opinions about — a huntsman proud of his trophies who has never seen the living animal, only its tracks. But notice that Socrates does not stop at the put-down. He immediately proposes to make the criticism concrete: 'let us look at the speeches we have,' Lysias's and our own, and find in them actual examples, paradeigmata, of the artless and the artful. This is a characteristic and important move. Having argued in the abstract that real rhetoric requires knowledge, Plato now brings the discussion back down to the three speeches that opened the dialogue — Lysias's on the non-lover, and Socrates's two on love — and turns them into a workshop. The rest of the dialogue will dissect them: Why was Lysias's speech a shapeless heap while Socrates's had a living structure? What is it that a speech, to be an artful whole rather than a hunter's bag of persuasive scraps, actually needs? The answer, when it comes, will be the method of collection and division — the disciplined knowledge of what things are and how they divide — which is nothing other than dialectic, philosophy itself. The hunter of opinions is about to be shown what the knower of realities can do with a speech instead.
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