Passage from Phaedo on Argumentation

I have downloaded this passage from Phaedo because I want to come back to it later and mull over it. It strikes me that this passage does a better job of explaining the difference between dialectic and rhetoric as understood by Socrates than does the hatchet job in Gorgias and Phaedrus.

Socrates: When a simple man who has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great disputers,as you know, come to think, at last that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and

instability of all arguments, or, indeed, of all things, which, like

the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing

ebb and flow.

That is quite true, I said. 

Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and very melancholy too, if there be such

a thing as truth or certainty or power of knowing at all, that a man

should have lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed

true and then turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself

and his own want of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be

too glad to transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general;

and forever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose the truth

and knowledge of existence.

Yes, indeed, I said; that is very melancholy. 

Let us, then, in the first place, he said, be careful of admitting

into our souls the notion that there is no truth or health or soundness

in any arguments at all; but let us rather say that there is as yet

no health in us, and that we must quit ourselves like men and do our

best to gain health-you and all other men with a view to the whole

of your future life, and I myself with a view to death. For at this

moment I am sensible that I have not the temper of a philosopher;

like the vulgar, I am only a partisan. For the partisan, when he is

engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question,

but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.

And the difference between him and me at the present moment is only

this-that whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he says

is true, I am rather seeking to convince myself; to convince my hearers

is a secondary matter with me.