The Dialectician Plants in a Fitting Soul
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Socrates — … πολὺ δʼ οἶμαι καλλίων σπουδὴ περὶ αὐτὰ γίγνεται, ὅταν τις τῇ διαλεκτικῇ τέχνῃ χρώμενος, λαβὼν ψυχὴν προσήκουσαν, φυτεύῃ τε καὶ σπείρῃ μετʼ ἐπιστήμης λόγους…
Phaedrus has just called the writer's occupation a 'far finer play' (pankalēn paidian) than the trivial kind — the pastime of one who can sport in words, mythologizing about justice and the rest. Socrates accepts the word 'finer' and then trumps it: far finer than any such play is the spoudē, the 'earnestness,' that arises 'when someone, using the dialectical art (tē dialektikē technē), takes a fitting soul (psychēn prosēkousan) and plants and sows in it, with knowledge (met' epistēmēs), words' — living words, which the next line will describe as able to defend themselves and their planter. The garden imagery, dismissive a moment ago, is now redeemed and made the very figure of teaching: the philosopher is a farmer of souls, and the true 'writing' is done not with reed and ink but with dialectic, in the living soil of another mind.
Phaedrus has praised the 'far finer play' of one who can sport in words, telling tales about justice. Socrates agrees — and then raises the stakes: far finer still is the earnestness that arises when a person uses the art of dialectic, finds a soul fit to receive it, and plants living words there with real knowledge. This is the positive counterpart to the dead letter.
Here the dialogue names its hero: <em>hē dialektikē technē</em>, the art of dialectic. Everything the second half of the <em>Phaedrus</em> has been circling — the demand that the speaker know the truth, know the kinds of soul, proceed by collection and division — is gathered into this one art, and set as the living original of which writing is only the shadow-image. Dialectic is Plato's name for philosophy as an activity: the disciplined give-and-take of question and answer that, in the <em>Republic</em>, stands as the coping-stone of all the sciences, the only path that removes its assumptions and travels up to the first principle itself. Its instrument is not the page but the <em>psychē prosēkousa</em>, the 'fitting soul' — teaching that finds the mind ready to receive it, exactly the discrimination the orphaned text could never make, since writing 'does not know to whom it should speak and to whom not.' And notice the governing pair the passage turns on: <em>paidia</em> and <em>spoudē</em>, play and earnest. Plato returns to it often — in the <em>Laws</em> he calls human beings the playthings of god and makes that our highest dignity, and here the same tension is at work: writing is play, dialectic is earnest, and yet the earnest thing is described in the play's own vocabulary, planting and sowing and tending. The deepest teaching is not the grim opposite of play but its perfected form — <em>serious</em> cultivation, done with knowledge, in a soil that can bear fruit. The metaphor that was used to belittle the book (the fruitless garden of Adonis) is now used to exalt dialectic (the true planting), and the difference between them is the whole difference between a mind that already holds the truth and a mark on a page that only points at it.
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