This thesis claims that a philosophical understanding, in Plato, may only happen correctly whenever it comes through a vital experience. It intends to highlight the personal and deep aspects of philosophical experience. The thesis supports that, in Plato, philosophy is a kind of experience that, although being strictly rational, the whole soul engages in it. It has four chapters. The first and second present the psykhagogikos aspect of philosophy, analyzing Plato`s relation with Greek poetry (chap. 1) and rhetoric (chap. 2). In the first chapter, we claim that, despite all Plato`s criticism against poetry, he still retain an essential aspect of it - psykhagogia - as a necessary part of philosophy. The second chapter supports that there is an aspect of rhetoric - also psykhagogia - that must be present in philosophy so that knowledge might be inscribed in the soul of the student. The third chapter analyses Plato`s criticism against the written word, present in The Seventh Letter and the Phaedrus. We claim that philosophy depends on a personal process that is not assured by being described through words: it is necessary, first, to be felt by a vital experience, so that it may become alive in one who knows. At last, the forth chapter presents the notion of dialectic in the Republic as a conversion. The notion of conversion confirms this thesis because it claims that the rational philosophical process intends a personal and deep transformation in the student of philosophy.