Addressing Souls: Persuasion as a Psychological Praxis

Abstract In Phaedrus, Socrates lays out the requirements to be met by a rhetoric that would be a genuine art. An artistic rhetor would need to have not only knowledge of the subject matter of a particular discourse but also knowledge of the audience's soul. Socrates makes this argument through an analogy of rhetoric to medicine. But there is an incoherence in this position. Socrates' initial discussion of his own lack of self-knowledge suggests that souls cannot be known in the ways that bodies can. Because we cannot know with certainty who we are or who an Other is, persuasion becomes a philosophical problem. By working through the need for knowledge of the soul and the impossibility of such knowledge, Phaedrus argues for the necessity and complexity of persuasion as a resource for dealing with a world in which misunderstanding is a structural feature.