Socrates and Phaedrus address two topics: love and rhetoric. Let’s focus on the latter. We saw in the Gorgias how rhetoric is often used to mislead. In Socrates’ time, there were people called rhetoricians, masters of persuasion. They could convince anyone of anything, and they didn’t care whether what they were saying was true. One day they could make something seem good, and the next, make that same thing seem evil. These people, often holding high political positions thanks to their persuasive skills, were respected members of society.
Socrates, being someone who cares about the truth, couldn’t see himself aligning with the rhetoricians. But he also wanted to persuade others. He rightly believed that his teachings would be useless if his audience couldn’t be convinced. So, he tells them that his rhetoric is rooted in truth. Socrates introduces the idea of the "Philosophical Rhetorician", someone who has seen the truth and can then use rhetorical techniques to persuade. In fact, the Philosophical Rhetorician must know the truth to be effective at rhetoric, because the more someone understands the truth about their subject and about human beings, the better they are at deviating from it, if their goal is to convince others of something false. The responsibility, then, also falls on the audience: they must know the truth to protect themselves from being misled.
In our time, where knowledge is highly specialized, only a handful of people understand any given subject. It’s easy for experts to mislead, and it’s unreasonable to expect non-experts to guard against deception because they would need years of training in each of the subjects to be capable of discerning the truth. For example, an expert might claim that their science will bring enormous returns, wealth, power, for those who fund it, and the audience would be completely incapable of performing due diligence. Phaedrus doesn’t address this problem. For now, it seems like we first need to understand how people navigated persuasion before truth became the central concern so that we may learn from them.
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