A Speech Is a Living Creature
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Socrates — ἀλλὰ τόδε γε οἶμαί σε φάναι ἄν, δεῖν πάντα λόγον ὥσπερ ζῷον συνεστάναι σῶμά τι ἔχοντα αὐτὸν αὑτοῦ, ὥστε μήτε ἀκέφαλον εἶναι μήτε ἄπουν, ἀλλὰ μέσα τε ἔχειν καὶ ἄκρα, πρέποντα ἀλλήλοις καὶ τῷ ὅλῳ γεγραμμένα
But this much, I think, you would say: that every speech must be put together like a living creature, with a body of its own, so that it is neither headless nor footless, but has a middle and extremities, all written to fit one another and the whole.
Turning from love to the craft of speaking, Socrates lays down the first principle of good composition — the one his own dialogue quietly dares us to apply to it.
This single sentence is the fountainhead of the Western idea of <em>organic form</em>. A speech, Socrates says, must be a <em>zôion</em> — a living creature — with its own body: not headless (<em>aképhalon</em>), not footless (<em>ápoun</em>), but possessed of a middle and its extremities, every part 'fitting' (<em>prépon</em>) the others and the whole (<em>hólon</em>). The claim is that a good discourse has the internal necessity of an organism: you cannot move a limb or lop an end without maiming it. Aristotle takes exactly this over into the <em>Poetics</em> — a plot must be a whole with beginning, middle, and end, of a size the eye can hold — and it runs from there through Horace's decorum to Coleridge's 'organic unity' and all of Romantic aesthetics. The vocabulary is doing the work: <em>prépon</em>, 'the fitting,' becomes Latin <em>decorum</em>; <em>hólon</em>, 'the whole,' gives us 'holism.'<br><br>And Plato knows he is handing us a knife pointed at his own book. The <em>Phaedrus</em> has been accused since antiquity of being two mismatched creatures stitched together — a rhapsody on love, then a dry treatise on rhetoric — and here, at the seam, it announces the very standard by which such a failure would be judged. The move is deliberate. Having demanded that a speech be one living body, Socrates spends the rest of the dialogue showing that the love-speeches and the rhetoric are one argument: both are about how words move the soul, whether spoken by a lover or a craftsman of persuasion. The dialogue passes its own test only if you read it whole — which is precisely the discipline it is teaching. It practices its doctrine by making you supply the unity, the way recollection makes you supply the Forms.
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