Know How Many Souls There Are
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Socrates — τὸν μέλλοντα ῥητορικὸν ἔσεσθαι ἀνάγκη εἰδέναι ψυχὴ ὅσα εἴδη ἔχει.
The one who intends to become a rhetorician is bound, of necessity, to know how many kinds the soul has.
If rhetoric is the leading of souls, then the would-be master faces a hard prerequisite. Socrates states it as an absolute necessity — and in doing so binds the whole art of persuasion to the theory of Forms.
This short sentence is the payoff of the definition at 261a, and it quietly detonates the ordinary idea of rhetoric. If persuasion is <em>psychagōgía</em>, the leading of souls, then no one can practice it as an art without a science of the thing being led — and Socrates states the requirement in the strongest word Greek possesses: <em>anánkē</em>, necessity, the must-be that even the gods do not fight. The rhetorician is not advised but <em>compelled</em> to know the soul. A knack for pleasing crowds is not enough; you must know what a soul <em>is</em>, and how many types there are, because (as the lines just after this spell out) each kind of soul is moved by a different kind of speech, the way each disease answers to a different drug. Rhetoric, done truly, becomes a branch of psychology — which is why the dialogue needed the palinode's map of the soul before it could rebuild the art of speaking.<br><br>And notice the two words at the sentence's heart, because Greek is making an argument English cannot hear. The soul's kinds are its <em>eídē</em> — the very word (with <em>idéa</em>) that Plato uses for the eternal Forms; to speak well, you must know the soul's <em>eídē</em> as the philosopher knows the Forms. And the verb for that knowing is <em>eidénai</em>, from <em>oîda</em> — which is the perfect tense of 'to see' (same <em>weid-</em> root as <em>eîdos</em> itself, and as English 'vision' and 'wise'). To 'know' the soul's 'kinds' is, in the grammar, to have <em>seen</em> its <em>looks</em>. So the demand made on the rhetorician turns out to be the demand made on the lover in the palinode: both must have beheld the true Forms and remember them. The craft of persuasion and the ascent of the soul collapse into a single requirement — real knowledge, which is recollected sight. This is how the two halves of the <em>Phaedrus</em> were always one book.
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