First, Divide by Method
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Socrates — τὸν μέλλοντα τέχνην ῥητορικὴν… δεῖ ὁδῷ διῃρῆσθαι καὶ εἰληφέναι χαρακτῆρα τοῦ εἴδους… τὸ πλῆθος πλανᾶσθαι.
Now the criticism becomes a positive prescription, and with it the dialogue's constructive method finally steps into the light. Since rhetoric has its greatest power exactly where the crowd 'wanders,' planatai — in the disputed words like 'just,' 'good,' and 'love' — the first duty of anyone who would truly master 'the rhetorical art,' technē rhētorikē, is spelled out in a cluster of loaded terms. He must proceed hodōi, 'by a way,' methodically (the word hodos, 'road,' is the root of 'method'); he must 'divide,' diairein, the words into their kinds; and he must 'grasp a mark,' charaktēra — a distinguishing stamp, like the die's impress on a coin — 'of each kind,' hekaterou tou eidous. Two of these words carry the whole weight of Plato's mature philosophy. Diairesis, 'division,' is the technical name for the method Socrates is about to unfold; and eidos, 'form' or 'kind,' is the very word Plato uses for the Forms. Before a single persuasive sentence is composed, the true rhetorician must first be a divider of kinds — a taxonomist of reality — able to sort every word he uses into the stable class or the wandering one.
Socrates draws the practical lesson from the two classes of words. We agree about some, disagree about others; and it is precisely in the disputed ones — where the crowd 'wanders' — that we are most easily deceived and that rhetoric has its greatest power. Therefore, he concludes, anyone who means to master the art of rhetoric must first divide words methodically into the two kinds, and grasp a distinguishing mark of each: where minds must go astray, and where they cannot.
This is the moment the second half of the Phaedrus stops criticizing and starts building, and what it builds is the method that dominates Plato's late thought: diairesis, division. The idea is that to know what something truly is, you locate it within a structured map of kinds — you take a wide class and cut it, again and again, at its natural joints, following the real divisions among things until you have isolated the precise form you are after. Socrates will demonstrate it beautifully in a moment, showing that his own speeches on love worked by first gathering the scattered instances into a single kind — 'madness' — and then dividing madness into its sorts until they reached the specific divine madness that is love. Division is the disciplined inverse of the deceiver's art: where the deceiver slides across resemblances to blur one kind into another, the philosopher cuts along the true seams to hold each kind distinct. And notice that Socrates makes this taxonomic skill the foundation of rhetoric, not an alternative to it. The would-be orator's very first act, before he learns a single trick of persuasion, must be to divide his words into the two classes and grasp the charaktēr, the identifying mark, of each — to know which of his terms are anchored, iron-and-silver words that steady themselves, and which are floating, just-and-good words where minds wander and where, therefore, both the danger and the power of speech are concentrated. The word charaktēr is quietly perfect here. It is the stamp on a coin, the mark that certifies what a thing is and guarantees it against counterfeit; to have the charaktēr of a kind is to be able to tell the genuine article from the fake — which is exactly the competence the earlier argument proved a truth-blind speaker lacks. So the prescription answers the whole preceding critique. The demagogue is powerful in the domain of wandering words precisely because he has never mapped them; the philosophical rhetorician earns a legitimate power in that same domain by doing the hard prior work of division, learning the true marks and joints of things, so that when he leads a soul through resemblances he leads it toward the real and cannot himself be counterfeited. Rhetoric, Plato is saying, becomes an art at the exact moment it is grounded in dialectic — in the knowledge of kinds and forms. Everything from here to the end of the dialogue elaborates this single claim.
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