Phaedrus 279a · 279a

Near the very end, Socrates makes a prediction about a real young man — Isocrates, who in Plato's day would become the most famous rhetorician and teacher in Greece, a lifelong rival of Plato's own school. Socrates says his natural gifts outstrip Lysias's, that his character is nobler, and — the line quoted here — that 'there is by nature a certain <em>philosophía</em> in the man's <em>diánoia</em>.' It is a generous, and famously double-edged, compliment. Read straight, it is praise: Isocrates has something Lysias lacks, a native reach toward wisdom that might, if he follows it, carry him past mere speechmaking into philosophy. Read with the hindsight Plato's audience had, it is gently ironic: Isocrates did <em>not</em> become a philosopher in Plato's sense; he built a rival vision of education based on rhetoric and civic prudence. Socrates blesses the road not taken.<br><br>But the phrase matters beyond the personal jab, because it states the dialogue's final hope in three words: <em>philosophía</em> can be <em>innate</em> (<em>éphyto</em>, 'present by nature') in a <em>diánoia</em>, a reasoning mind. This is the whole argument of the <em>Phaedrus</em> landing softly. The palinode said every soul once saw the Forms and can recollect them; the critique of rhetoric said the true speaker must love wisdom and know the soul; and here, at the close, Socrates finds the seed of exactly that in a living Athenian — a mind in which philosophy is already latent, waiting, like the wing that only needs beauty to make it grow. <em>Diánoia</em> is precisely the discursive, reasoning mind (as against <em>noûs</em>, direct intuition) — the ordinary thinking of a clever young orator — and the claim is that even there, in the working mind of a rhetorician, philosophy can be native. The dialogue that began by diagnosing what love and speech do to the soul ends by pointing at a real soul and saying: there, look, it could still turn upward.

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