Fitting Each Speech to Each Soul
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Socrates — τὰ λόγων ψυχῆς γένη παθήματα… προσαρμόττων ἕκαστον… αἰτίαν πείθεται.
The program reaches its culmination in a single, dense sentence. The complete orator, having first shown the nature of the soul and then analyzed its kinds and powers, now performs the crowning correlation: he 'classifies the kinds of speeches and of souls,' ta logōn te kai psychēs genē, together with 'their affections,' pathēmata — the states each kind can be put into — and then 'goes through all the causes,' dieisi pasas aitias, 'fitting each to each,' prosarmottōn hekaston hekastōi. That is, he pairs each type of speech with the type of soul it moves, and explains why: 'teaching what sort of soul, under what sorts of speeches, for what cause, is necessarily persuaded, and what sort is not.' The word 'necessarily,' ex anankēs, is the mark of a real science: the orator does not merely observe that a certain speech tends to work on a certain audience; he knows the cause, the aitia, that makes it work of necessity, as a doctor knows why a drug of necessity heals this condition. Rhetoric, fully developed, is the systematic knowledge of the causal correlations between kinds of speech and kinds of soul.
Socrates gives the third and culminating step of the true art. Having classified the kinds of speeches and the kinds of souls, and the affections each is prone to, the orator goes through all the causes — fitting each kind of speech to each kind of soul, and teaching precisely which sort of soul, under which sorts of speeches, and for what reason, is necessarily persuaded, and which is left unmoved.
This is the complete blueprint of Plato's true rhetoric, and it is worth seeing how thoroughly it mirrors the structure of any mature science. There are three moves. First, establish that the soul is multiform and identify its kinds — the taxonomy of souls. Second, identify the kinds of speeches and the affections, pathēmata, that souls undergo — the taxonomy of speeches and effects. Third, and this is the heart, discover the causal laws that connect them: which speech necessarily moves which soul, and why. That third step is what turns two catalogues into a science. A mere collector might list the kinds of soul and the kinds of speech and stop; the scientist discovers the lawful correlations between them, the ex anankēs, the 'of necessity,' that lets him predict and produce effects. This is exactly what the doctor has for bodies — a knowledge of which treatment necessarily produces which change in which kind of body — and what Plato is demanding rhetoric acquire for souls. And the vision is genuinely the ancestor of a scientific psychology of persuasion; one can hear in it the distant program of everything from Aristotle's Rhetoric, with its systematic analysis of the emotions and how they are aroused, down to modern social psychology's study of attitude change. Plato is imagining a rigorous science of how words move minds. But two things keep this from being merely a technology of manipulation, and they are essential to Plato's meaning. First, recall the goal set earlier: the true orator produces not just persuasion but virtue, aretē — he is a physician of souls, and his correlations of speech to soul are meant to heal, to lead souls toward truth and goodness, not merely to push them wherever he likes. The science of persuasion is placed in the service of the soul's health. Second, this whole knowledge presupposes the earlier foundation — knowledge of the truth of the matters spoken about, won by dialectic — so that the orator leads souls toward what is real, not toward plausible falsehoods. The correlation of speeches and souls is the delivery system; truth and virtue are the cargo. Strip away those, and you would have exactly the sophist's dream, a pure technology of persuasion — which is why Socrates keeps insisting that this science of the soul must sit atop the knowledge of truth. The complete art is the union of the two: know the truth (dialectic), know the soul (this psychological science), and then fit the true word to the particular soul that can receive it. Only then, Plato will say in the next breath, is the art 'finely and perfectly accomplished.'
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