Speech Is Soul-Leading
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Socrates — πανοῦργοί ἀποκρύπτονται ψυχῆς… λόγου δύναμις τυγχάνει ψυχαγωγία οὖσα.
Here, at the pivot of the whole account, Socrates gives rhetoric its definition — and it is one of the most resonant phrases in the dialogue. 'Since the power of speech,' logou dynamis, 'happens to be psychagōgia,' soul-leading. That word, psychagōgia — psychē, 'soul,' plus agōgē, 'a leading' — names what speech essentially is and does: it leads souls. This is why everything in the true art comes back to the soul: if speech is by nature a leading of souls, then to master speech one must know souls, their kinds and their susceptibilities, exactly as Socrates has been insisting. The definition also carries a barbed observation about the handbook-writers. They are, he says, panourgoi — 'crafty,' ready for any trick — and they 'conceal,' apokryptontai, that they actually do understand the soul 'perfectly well.' The charge is subtle: it is not that they know nothing of souls, but that they have some real practical sense of them which they hide behind their catalogue of devices, refusing to bring it into the open as the science it would have to become. Until they write in the way Socrates has described — beginning from the frank analysis of the soul — we should not credit them with a genuine art.
Socrates now states the definition that his whole account of rhetoric rests on, and turns it into a test. The current writers of speech-manuals, he says, are crafty men who secretly understand the soul perfectly well but conceal it, dressing that knowledge as tricks. Until they write in the way just described, we should not believe they write by real art. And the reason the soul is everything here is given in a single luminous clause: because the power of speech is, in its very nature, soul-leading.
The word psychagōgia is the key that unlocks Plato's whole positive theory, and its resonances run deep. Literally 'soul-leading,' it was an ordinary Greek word with a striking range of uses. It could mean the leading-up of souls from the underworld — a psychagōgos was one who could summon or conduct the spirits of the dead, a kind of necromancer. It could mean the 'winning' or captivating of an audience, the enchantment a poet or speaker works. Plato gathers all of this into a definition: the power of speech is the power to lead souls, to move them from where they are to where the speaker would take them. And this definition does something decisive to the whole preceding argument. It settles, once and for all, why rhetoric must be founded on knowledge of the soul: if the very function of speech is to lead souls, then a rhetorician ignorant of souls is like a guide ignorant of the terrain — a leader who does not know where he is leading or by what paths. The metaphor of leading also quietly imports a moral dimension. To lead is to take someone somewhere, and the whole question then becomes: where? The demagogue leads souls astray, toward falsehood and their own harm; the philosophical orator leads them upward, toward truth and virtue — which is exactly the psychagōgia the palinode described in mythic form, where love and beautiful speech lead the soul up toward the vision of the Forms. So the dry definition here and the soaring myth of the first half turn out to name the same thing: speech, rightly used, is the leading of souls toward the real. Rhetoric and the erotic ascent are two faces of psychagōgia. And notice the psychological acuity of the charge against the handbook-writers. Plato does not simply say they are ignorant; he says they are crafty men who half-know the soul and conceal it. This is more damning and more true to life. The successful sophist does have a real, intuitive feel for how audiences work — you cannot manipulate people effectively without some grasp of them. What he lacks, and what makes his craft a knack rather than an art, is the willingness or ability to raise that intuition into explicit, systematic, teachable knowledge — a science of the soul held in the open and answerable to the truth. He keeps his soul-knowledge tacit and mercenary, a trade secret rather than a science. Socrates's demand is that this concealed, practical soul-sense be brought into the light and made a real knowledge — which is to say, that rhetoric become philosophy. Define speech as soul-leading, and you have committed rhetoric, whether it likes it or not, to becoming a science of the soul; and a science of the soul, pursued honestly, is nothing other than a branch of philosophy.
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