Simple or Multiform?
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Socrates — περὶ φύσεως… ἁπλοῦν ἢ πολυειδές… δύναμιν δρᾶν ἢ παθεῖν.
Socrates lays out the general method — the one a true art must apply to whatever it works on. Faced with 'any nature whatever,' the first question is: is it 'simple,' haploun, or 'multiform,' polyeides — a single kind of thing, or a thing with many kinds inside it? Then comes the analysis of its 'power,' dynamis, and Socrates defines power exactly by its two directions: what the thing 'naturally does,' pephyken eis to dran, to what, and what it naturally 'undergoes,' eis to pathein, from what. A nature is known by what it can do and what can be done to it — its active and passive capacities. If the thing turns out to be multiform, the same procedure is simply repeated for each of its kinds: count the kinds, then for each one determine what it does and undergoes. This is the abstract skeleton of the method that, applied to the soul, will become the science of rhetoric — and applied to the body, is already the science of medicine.
Socrates spells out the method for studying any nature at all — the procedure a true art must follow. First: determine whether the thing is simple or multiform. Then, if it is simple, examine its single power — what it naturally does to other things, and what it can have done to it by them. If it has many kinds, count them, and do for each kind what you did for the simple case: find what each naturally does, and undergoes.
What Socrates is describing here is nothing less than the general form of scientific analysis, and it is worth recognizing how modern it sounds. To understand any nature, he says, you must first determine its structure — is it one kind of thing or several? — and then determine its causal powers, defined as its capacities to affect and be affected. That is very close to how we still think a science works: classify the kinds, then map the causal dispositions of each kind, what it does and what happens to it under what conditions. Plato has abstracted, from the examples of medicine and the promised science of rhetoric, the bare procedure common to every real art of dealing with a nature. And two features of it carry the weight of the whole dialogue. The first is the priority of the question 'simple or multiform.' Before you can study a thing's powers, you must know whether you are dealing with one nature or many, because if it is multiform and you treat it as simple, you will attribute to the whole what belongs only to a part, and go wrong at every step — exactly the error the handbook rhetoricians made with 'the soul,' treating it as a single target when it is in fact many kinds requiring many treatments. This is why the method begins with counting the kinds: it is collection and division, the dialectic named earlier, now stated as the first move of any science. The second feature is the definition of a nature by what it 'does and undergoes,' dran kai pathein — its active and passive powers. This is Plato's operational answer to the question 'what is a thing's nature?' You know a nature not by staring at it but by mapping its dispositions: what it can do to other things and what they can do to it. For the soul, this means: what does each kind of soul do — how does it act, what does it pursue — and what is each kind susceptible to, what kind of speech can move it, calm it, rouse it? A rhetoric that knew this would be a genuine science of the soul's powers, able to bring the right speech to bear on the right soul the way a doctor brings the right drug to the right body. The passage is dry, almost algebraic, and deliberately so: Socrates is giving the formula. The next lines will begin to fill it in for the specific nature the orator works on — the psychē, the soul — and the austere skeleton laid down here will take on flesh as the program for a true art of rhetoric.
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