The Web Hangs Apart
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — ὑπʼ αὐγὰς… τὴν τέχνης δύναμιν… διεστηκὸς τὸ ἤτριον.
Socrates proposes a test: hold the handbook art up hyp' augas, 'to the light,' the way one inspects a piece of cloth for flaws, and see what power it actually has. Phaedrus concedes it has real power 'in gatherings of a crowd' — and that is true; the tricks work on audiences. But when Socrates holds it to the light he sees something the crowd cannot: the art's very ētrion, its 'warp,' the woven threads that should give it structure, stands diestēkos — 'pulled apart,' gaping, full of holes. The weaving metaphor is exact and quietly devastating. A real art is a fabric, its parts crossing and binding one another into a single cloth; the handbook art, examined thread by thread, turns out to be no fabric at all but a heap of separate strands laid side by side, with nothing woven through them to make them hold. It has parts but no connective tissue — which is precisely why, powerful as it looks in performance, it falls apart under inspection.
Leaving the small stuff aside, Socrates proposes to hold the handbook art up 'to the light' and see what power it really has. Phaedrus says it has plenty — before a crowd. Socrates grants that, but points to what he sees when he looks closely: the fabric of these techniques, its very warp and weft, hangs apart in gaps rather than holding together as a woven whole. He asks Phaedrus whether he sees the same disjointedness.
This little image of the gaping web is the pivot between the destructive and constructive halves of the whole discussion of rhetoric, and it works by naming, in a homely metaphor, exactly what the handbooks lack. The word ētrion means the warp of a loom, and to see a fabric's warp 'standing apart' is to see that it was never truly woven — that what looks like cloth is only threads lying together, ready to fall into separate pieces at a touch. Everything the survey has exposed is gathered into that picture. The manuals catalogue the parts of a speech — proem, narration, proof, recapitulation — as a weaver might lay out separate threads, but they never supply the crosswise binding that would make those parts into a single living structure. And Plato has, characteristically, chosen a metaphor that answers an earlier one. He told us, at the climax of the critique of Lysias, that a speech must be like a living animal, a body whose members belong to one another and to the whole. The gaping web is the anti-image of that living body: not an organism but a loose warp, parts without the unity that makes them parts of something. What supplies the missing binding? Only knowledge — of the truth of the subject, which gives the speech its real subject-matter and order, and of the soul being addressed, which tells the speaker which thread belongs where. The handbook writer has neither, and so can only lay strands side by side and hope the crowd, dazzled, will not look too closely at the seams. Socrates's invitation to 'hold it to the light' is thus an invitation to do the one thing the handbook art cannot survive: careful, undazzled inspection. And the passage sets up the two great examples that immediately follow — medicine and tragedy — each of which will make the same point in a different register: that knowing the elements is not knowing the art, because the art lives in the weaving, the composition, the standing-together of parts into a whole. The handbook rhetorician is a man with a pile of threads calling himself a weaver.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 268a in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 268a — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/268a/