Plato’s Socrates goes through a review of a string of handbooks of oratory written by sophists and rhetoricians of his time, textbooks which offer advice on how to craft and deliver a rousing speech.[16] In the end, he delivers his scathing judgment on the whole genre:
Is it possible for an expert who doesn’t know what each entity is to lead an audience step by stepfrom one position to the opposite one through similarities, or to escape being led by another in the same way? (Not at all.) Then the person who doesn’t know the true art of speaking but merely pursues opinions, it turns out, practices only an absurd non-art.[17]
The point Plato is making here is not new. He had said virtually the same thing in his Gorgias (ch. 11.3*), written years earlier.[18] Plato is unwilling to call a technique of persuasion, as long as it is based on emotional appeals and deceptive inferences, an art or craft (technē). For him, a craft is an applied science in which true principles are applied to derive productive results. In that sense, Plato’s art of public speaking will be closely allied with his doctrine of truth, language, and reality. You must know how things really are in the world, tell it like it really is, and only then, do your best to persuade others about how to act in the world.
Plato does offer one remarkable suggestion for the composition of speeches—one that is valuable for literature as well. After criticizing Lysias’ speech, which Socrates seems to be composed of random arguments with no natural sequence or logic to connect them, he states:
Every speech should be composed like a living creature [hōsper zōion],having its own body, lacking neither head nor feet, but endowed with a middle and extremities, with every part portrayed in a way appropriate to every other and to the whole.[19]
This is the doctrine of organic unity. It is an ideal to strive for in compositions, whether rhetorical or literary: every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph should function as an organic part of the whole, such that to delete it would damage the unity of the composition, as would adding any extraneous features.
As it stands, Lysias’ speech could be reordered by interchanging the component arguments, without any loss in the structure or the effect, just like a four-line poem Socrates quotes in which any line can be moved without loss of meaning.[20] A good speech, like a good story, should move inexorably from the introduction to the conclusion, perhaps include suspense, build to a climax and then a resolution. Socrates’ second speech contains such elements, and Plato’s best dialogues, like the Phaedo, embody the principle of organic unity.
In the Phaedo, as we have seen (ch. 16*), on the day of his execution, Socrates is presented with an argument against the immortality of soul; he refutes it; another is offered and refuted, then another; then two even more challenging arguments are offered; Socrates makes methodological remarks; he then refutes the third argument; he then discusses philosophical method, refutes the final argument, develops a cosmology and an eschatology describing the afterlife; he drinks the hemlock and dies bravely. A story of Socrates’ life and death is interwoven with a philosophical discussion of, well, life and death, a tragedy is turned into a comedy with a joyful ending, an optimistic philosophy is defended, and its champion is vindicated. Q.E.D.
[16] Plato Phaedrus 261b-d; later 266d-267d.
[17] Plato Phaedrus 262b-c.
[18] Plato alludes to the dialogue at Phaedrus 260e.
[19] Plato Phaedrus 264c.
[20] Plato Phaedrus 264d.