They Could Not Define It
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Socrates — οὐ συγγιγνώσκειν… διαλέγεσθαι ἀδύνατοι ὁρίσασθαι ῥητορική… τὰ πρὸ τέχνης ἀναγκαῖα μαθήματα.
Here Socrates diagnoses the whole disease, and the diagnosis is exact. The great figures, he imagines, would say: don't be harsh, but forgive — syngignōskein — the handbook-writers, because their failure has a single, understandable root. They did not know how 'to converse dialectically,' dialegesthai, and so 'were unable to define,' adynatoi horisasthai, 'what rhetoric is,' ti pot' estin rhētorikē. That inability is the source of everything. Because they could not define their subject, they could not tell the art from its preliminaries; possessing 'the necessary studies prior to the art,' ta pro tēs technēs anankaia mathēmata, they naturally took those preliminaries to be the art and taught them as rhetoric. Two words carry the whole diagnosis. Dialegesthai is dialectic, the method of collection and division that Socrates has been describing — the power to gather and divide until you can say what a thing is. Horisasthai is 'to define,' to draw the boundary that fixes a thing's nature. The handbook-makers failed at the second because they lacked the first: with no capacity for dialectic, they could never define rhetoric, and so were doomed to mistake its threshold for its interior.
Softening his tone, Socrates imagines how the great figures would react — not with the boorish contempt he and Phaedrus have been showing, but wisely. They would urge forgiveness, not harshness, toward the handbook-writers. For those men's real failing was simply this: not knowing how to converse dialectically, they were unable to define what rhetoric actually is — and so, possessing the necessary preliminaries to the art, they mistook the preliminaries for rhetoric itself.
This passage is the still center of the whole second half of the dialogue, because it reduces every fault of the rhetorical tradition to a single missing capacity: the inability to define, which is the inability to do dialectic. Trace the chain backward. The handbook-writers taught preliminaries as if they were the art; they did this because they could not tell the preliminaries from the art; they could not tell them apart because they had never defined rhetoric — never fixed what it essentially is; and they could not define it because they did not know how to dialegesthai, to reason a concept through by collection and division until its nature stands clear. Everything hangs from that final link. Definition, for Plato, is not a verbal formula one looks up; it is the achievement of dialectic, the end-product of gathering a thing's scattered instances into one form and cutting that form at its joints until you can say precisely what it is and is not. The handbook-makers, lacking this method, were like men trying to describe a country they could only see in fragments, never from the map. And notice how this ties the two halves of the dialogue's second part into one. The first movement named the method — collection and division, dialectic, the art of the true philosopher. The second movement, this survey of the handbooks, has been showing what happens to an art practiced without that method: it fragments into a heap of named devices, a gaping web, a pile of preliminaries mistaken for mastery. The disease and the cure are the same thing seen from opposite sides. Dialectic is the power to define; without it, no real art of anything is possible, because you cannot compose toward an end you cannot specify. And there is a fine moral note in the imagined generosity. The great figures do not despise the handbook-writers; they forgive them, because the error was honest — an intellectual limitation, not a vice. This is the educated response the earlier musician modeled: to understand the error from inside is to be gentle with it. Socrates is teaching Phaedrus, and us, that the right relation even to those who get it wrong is not contempt but the patient work of showing them what they missed. And what they missed, in the end, is nameable in a single word: they could not define, because they could not think dialectically. Supply that one thing, and the whole heap of preliminaries could at last be organized, from above, into a genuine art.
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