Plato wrote one other dialogue, the Phaedrus, which treats rhetoric extensively. The Phaedrus is generally thought by scholars to be considerably later than the Gorgias, in consideration of both stylistic features and content. Certainly its mood is very different - calmer, detached from political struggles, playful rather than bitter in its irony, almost serene, as befits its idyllic setting by a shady stream. The attitude to rhetoric too is much less dismissive. Whereas in the Gorgias there was at most a hint of a possible worthwhile kind of rhetoric, in the Phaedrus rhetoric is explicitly divided into good and bad and the differences are explored.
The dialogue has two parts, which as G. A. Kennedy notes correspond to the two methods of instruction current at the time in Greece.13 The first half contains three ‘display’ speeches such as sophists or Isocrates would use as models, while the second half, starting at 257b, contains a theoretical discussion of such issues as a rhetorical handbook might cover: the definition and different forms of rhetoric, and especially the question of what makes a speech good or bad.
The speeches in the first half are entertainingly introduced. Socrates’ young friend Phaedrus has just been listening to a display speech by Lysias, and persuades Socrates to join his walk and hear what he remembers of it, but Socrates sees the actual text hidden beneath Phaedrus’ cloak and demands to hear the speech verbatim (228d-e). This first speech thus purports to be by the well-known orator Lysias, but there is no reason to suppose it is other than a clever construction by Plato, analogous to the speeches in the Symposium. This speech too is ‘in a sort of way about love’ (227c4-5), but the thesis it presents is that a boy will do better to prefer the suit of an older man who does not actually love him than of one who does. Bearing in mind that homosexual relationships between older men and boys were taken for granted in Plato’s Athens, even so this thesis would have been as unacceptable in Plato’s Athens as today, and the whole idea was to ‘show off’ by defending the indefensible (as we have seen with the Helen of Gorgias or other works of the same genre, or the Unjust Argument caricatured in Clouds, etc., discussed earlier in this chapter).
The second speech is by Socrates, and defends the same position as that of Lysias, merely improving style and structure. Plato is showing he can out-Herod Herod. But then, half-way through, Socrates suffers a revulsion from what he is doing - as being both absurd and verging on blasphemous, in denying the goodness of love (242d). And this leads into his ‘recantation’, a long, rich and eloquent panegyric, in the form of a myth, of love and its inspirational and purifying power on the souls of lovers. This is the emotional high point of the dialogue, Plato at his most poetic and most moving.
This speech and the other two stand in the background of the rest of the dialogue. The style after this changes abruptly as the conversation turns from examples to analysis. Socrates recognises that speaking - or equally writing, its alternative vehicle of expression - can be done well or badly, and raises the question of what makes a speech good (257c-258e, 259e). They agree that one necessary condition is that the speaker or writer should himself know the truth of what the speech is about (259e); indeed, this is desirable even if his aim is to mislead his audience successfully (262a-c)! But Socrates does not suggest that this knowledge adds up to mastery of an art of persuasion. Is there such an art, or is rhetoric just an artless knack (260e; cf. Pl. Gorgias 462c)? In discussing this, Socrates very interestingly starts from a definition of rhetoric which extends it far beyond the public domain assumed in general in Greek usage, including Plato’s in the Gorgias and elsewhere, and also including later Aristotle’s, to include any linguistic communication whatever (216a):
An art of winning over souls by means of words, not only in lawcourts and other public
Meetings, but also in private ones, applying equally to small or great matters, and in
Which no less merit attaches to correctness in minor matters than in major ones.
Good powers of analysis are an essential prerequisite, especially where controversial topics such as ‘justice’, ‘virtue’ or indeed ‘love’ are concerned. Also structure is crucial, and is beautifully described (264c):
Every speech should cohere, like a living creature, lacking neither head nor foot, but having both middle and beginning and end so written as to fit one another and the whole.
It soon emerges that this structure coincides with the method of collection and division, called ‘dialectic’ at 266a-d and identified with philosophical activity here and in Sophist, Statesman and other late dialogues. But despite some sarcastic comments on current textbooks of rhetoric, it becomes clear that Plato grants there is more to rhetoric than sound philosophy alone, though sound philosophy is essential. The crucial extra factor is psychological insight into the human souls to be won over (271), and the Phaedrusposition is summed up at 277b-c: a good speaker must know the truth of his subject, must be able to analyse it logically, and must have an equally good understanding of psychology and ability to tailor his words to his hearer or hearers. All this, says Socrates, is essential to any ‘art’ of speaking, whether to teach or persuade.
Is the Phaedrus" view of rhetoric essentially different from that of the Gorgias? It has been claimed (notably by W. K.C. Guthrie)14 that there is no real difference but of tone. But this does not seem entirely right. The Gorgias offers only two models of persuasion, on the one hand chicanery and pandering, and on the other pure logical argument, of which one is ethically unacceptable and the other, as the Gorgias is designed to illustrate, ineffectual in circumstances of real conflict. The Phaedrus offers a way in between by recognising that awareness of your hearer’s character does not automatically imply surrender to his values, but is the way to open his mind (and heart) to yours.15 But the demands set upon rhetoric in the Phaedrus are still impracticably high: if it is to qualify as an art it must rest on knowledge of everything relevant (reasonable belief will apparently not do), and this knowledge involves full dialectical analysis. Can it really be the case that persuasion based on less than this is disreputable? But if the limits are set at less than full knowledge, how do we justify this?
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