Phaedrus 270c · 270c

This exchange grounds the entire reformed art of rhetoric in a principle that reaches far beyond speaking: <em>you cannot know a part without knowing the whole it belongs to</em>. The true rhetorician must know the soul (271d) — but Socrates now raises the stakes, asking whether the soul's nature can be grasped 'without the nature of the whole' (<em>tês tou hólou phýseōs</em>), the whole of things, nature entire. And Phaedrus answers not with philosophy but with <em>medicine</em>: Hippocrates, the great physician, held that you cannot understand even the <em>body</em> except by this same method — by situating it within the nature of the whole, understanding the part through its place in the larger system. The move is characteristic and profound: the art of tending souls (rhetoric, philosophy) is put on the same footing as the art of tending bodies (medicine), and both are made to depend on a science of nature as such.<br><br>Scholars have argued for centuries about exactly which 'whole' is meant — the whole cosmos, or the whole of the particular thing you're studying (the whole body, to understand an organ) — and Plato may intend the ambiguity, because the method is the same at every scale. To know a liver, know the body; to know the body, know its nature and environment; to know the soul, know the whole to which souls belong. It is the death of the specialist who knows his narrow trick and nothing else — the very charge against the rhetoricians, who have techniques but no knowledge of the soul they work on, and no place for that soul in any larger truth. What Plato is describing, and what he takes medicine to have already achieved in its domain, is the ideal of <em>systematic</em> knowledge: nothing understood in isolation, every part referred to its whole and ultimately to the Forms. The <em>Phaedrus</em> thus quietly annexes rhetoric to natural science and both to metaphysics — and does it by borrowing the authority of a working doctor, so that the loftiest claim in the dialogue arrives sounding like practical common sense. To speak well about anything, in the end, you must understand everything, or at least know how the thing before you hangs in the whole of what is.

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