Otherwise, a Blind Man's Walk
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — μέθοδος τυφλοῦ… τὴν οὐσίαν ἀκριβῶς τῆς φύσεως… ψυχὴ.
Socrates presses the point with a memorable image: a 'method,' methodos, that proceeds without this analysis of natures would be like 'a blind man's walk,' typhlou poreia — groping forward with no vision of where it is going or what it is dealing with. And no one who pursues anything by genuine art, he insists, should resemble the blind or the deaf. The conclusion is therefore plain: anyone who 'gives speeches by art' will first 'show precisely,' deixei akribōs, 'the essence,' ousia, 'of the nature' to which he is going to apply his speeches. The word ousia — 'being,' 'essence,' 'what a thing really is' — is one of the heaviest in Plato's vocabulary, and its appearance here is deliberate: the true orator must grasp not the surface but the very being of his object. And that object, Socrates now names outright, is the psychē, the soul. The doctor's object is the body's nature; the orator's object is the soul's. To speak by art is to work on souls from a precise knowledge of what the soul essentially is.
Socrates draws the moral. A method that skips this analysis of natures would be like a blind man's walk — groping, directionless. But no one pursuing anything by real art should be likened to the blind or the deaf. So it is clear: whoever gives speeches by art will first display, with precision, the essence of the nature to which he means to apply his speeches. And that nature, Socrates points out, is the soul.
The image of the blind man's walk crystallizes everything the dialogue has said against rhetoric-without-knowledge, and it does so by making the point about vision. The handbook rhetorician, for all his devices, is blind — he moves through his art groping, because he has never seen the nature of the thing he works on. He knows tricks the way a blind man might know the feel of the furniture in a familiar room, by rote and touch, but he cannot see the room, and so cannot find his way in an unfamiliar one. The artist, by contrast, has sight: he grasps the ousia, the essence, of his material, and so can move through his work with vision, knowing where he is and where he is going. And Plato's choice of the word ousia raises the stakes above mere competence. Ousia is being itself, what a thing truly is — the term that points, in Plato, toward the Forms, the real natures behind appearances. To say the orator must grasp the ousia of the soul is to say that true rhetoric rests on a metaphysics of the soul, a knowledge of what soul really is, not just a familiarity with how audiences tend to behave. This is the exact difference between the empirical knack the Gorgias despised and the genuine science the Phaedrus demands. The knack observes regularities on the surface; the science grasps the being beneath, and from that being derives, with precision, akribōs, how the thing will act and be acted on. And with the naming of the soul as the orator's object, the whole analogy with medicine snaps fully into place and the program of the rest of the dialogue is set. As medicine grasps the ousia of the body and treats it with drugs and diet, rhetoric must grasp the ousia of the soul and treat it with speeches. But there is a difficulty lurking here that Plato is quietly aware of, and it shadows the confident program: the ousia of the soul is far harder to grasp than the nature of the body. Socrates himself says elsewhere, in this very dialogue, that to say what the soul is would require a god and a long discourse, though what it is like can be told in a shorter, human way. The true rhetoric, then, is set an almost impossibly high bar — it must know the being of the soul — and this is part of Plato's point. Real rhetoric is hard, as hard as philosophy, because it is philosophy applied to persuasion; and the reason the handbooks are full of easy tricks is precisely that the real thing is so demanding that almost no one attempts it. The blind man's walk is easy; seeing is the labor of a lifetime.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 270e 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 270e — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/270e/