What the True Speaker Must Know
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Socrates — πρὶν ἄν τις τό τε ἀληθὲς ἑκάστων εἰδῇ πέρι ὧν λέγει ἢ γράφει, ὁρίζεσθαι δυνατὸς γένηται, ὁρισάμενός τε πάλιν κατʼ εἴδη μέχρι τοῦ ἀτμήτου τέμνειν ἐπιστηθῇ, περί τε ψυχῆς φύσεως διιδὼν…
Until a man knows the truth of each thing he speaks or writes about, and becomes able to define each in itself; and, having defined it, knows how to divide it by kinds down to the indivisible; and has discerned the nature of the soul in the same way … [he will never handle speech with art].
Near the end, Socrates gathers the whole inquiry into rhetoric into a single condition — the prerequisites no one who would speak or write with real art can skip.
This long conditional is the whole positive doctrine of the dialogue's second half, gathered into one breath — the list of everything the true speaker must have before he may claim an art (<em>téchnē</em>) rather than a knack. It has four demands, and they recapitulate the entire <em>Phaedrus</em>. First: know <em>the truth</em> of your subject — the demand Lysias failed, arguing from the merely <em>likely</em> (233a) without knowing what love is. Second: <em>define</em> it — <em>horízesthai</em>, from <em>hóros</em>, a boundary-stone; to define is to fence a thing's essence, to know exactly where it begins and ends, which is why the good speeches in the dialogue open by defining love and the bad one does not. Third: <em>divide</em> it by kinds 'down to the indivisible' — the <em>diaíresis</em> Socrates called himself a lover of (266b), cutting a Form into its true species at the natural joints (265e), <em>témnein</em> (the verb behind 'anatomy') as far as <em>tò átmēton</em>, the uncuttable (the same word, with ἀ- + cut, that gives 'atom'). Fourth, and the one that makes rhetoric a branch of psychology: <em>know the nature of the soul</em> — because persuasion is soul-leading (261a), and you cannot lead what you have not mapped (271d).<br><br>The four conditions are really one: <em>knowledge</em>, in place of the plausible shadow the sophists sold. Truth, definition, division, and the soul — these are the four labors that turn a clever talker into a philosopher-rhetorician, and it is no accident that the same four are the tools of philosophy itself. This is the sentence in which the two halves of the dialogue finally, explicitly fuse: the art of speaking well <em>is</em> dialectic (definition and division) applied to souls (whose nature the palinode revealed). There is no true rhetoric that is not philosophy, because to move a soul rightly you must know both the truth you are speaking and the soul you are speaking to — and knowing those two things, by defining and dividing, simply <em>is</em> what a philosopher does. Everything the dialogue has ranged over — love, madness, the Forms, the soul, writing — converges on this quiet, demanding list. It is Plato's specification for an honest use of words.
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