Today’s Plan:
- Check the Shared Reading Space (25 minutes)
- A Quick Introduction to Something Like Poststructuralism (40 minutes)
- Reading Plato’s Gorgias (20 minutes)
- Homework
A Quick Introduction to Something Like Poststructuralism
I want to open by highlighting a few sentences from Ong:
For the real word “nevertheless,” the sounded word, cannot ever be present all at once, as written words deceptively seem to be […] A word is an event, a happening, not a thing, as letters make it appear to be. […] The oral world as such distresses literates because sound is evanescent. Typically, literates want words and thoughts pinned own–though it is impossible to “pin down” an event. (p. 20)
Later in the essay, Ong note how writing “separates interpretation from data,” how writing distances the speaker and the hearer, and how writing “enforces a verbal precision.” I’d like to open our course exploring these ideas, illustrating both how writing helped to develop increase precision and a desire for certainty.
First, let’s try a quick exercise to flush out one of Ong’s ideas–that writing helps develop precision. In rhetorical terms, writing expands logos. When we read Aristotle, we will learn that logos essentially translates to something like “idea, reason, evidence” and comes in two forms–hard evidence (stats, facts) and invented arguments (reasons). This can be a tricky distinction that breaks down rather quickly–but that is an activity for another day. Today, we are working on precision. Exercise #1: Words and words. Follow up: tree falls in a wood and no one is there to hear it? No one is there to see it? What *is* our *fundamental* sense?
Okay, on to the trickster stuff. Let me begin by paraphrasing the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose names is fairly synonymous with “deconstruction.” For Derrida, deconstruction isn’t a “methodology” but rather a way of being, a way of life, a way of inhabiting and traversing the world. It is, then, a “philosophy” in its most ancient sense. I’ll say more about this later. I want to open with a cursory overview of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Derrida argues that philosophy preferences speaking and has a distaste for writing because it believes the former has an immediacy, a kind of truthfulness, that the latter does not (recall Ong’s reading of Plato’s critique of writing). Derrida deconstructs this premise, building off the work of Saussure, to show how both speech and writing share a system of signification that isn’t immediate or assured, but rather plagued by what he terms “differance.” He uses the “a” to mark this otherwise “silent” difference (in French difference and differance would be pronounced the exact same way). Exercise #2: A Cat Came Through My Window. Implications of differance, of language’s reliance on interpretation.
There’s one other major component of Derridean deconstruction. I don’t want to say too much. Let’s do another Exercise.
A final note on deconstruction: origins, foundations, essences, first principles. See stock lecture on “administration.”
Introduction to Plato
Below is an introduction to Plato that I wrote for students before reading his “Apology.” I believe it will be useful here, too.
Introduction to Plato
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that all Western intellectual history is merely a footnote to Plato, an ancient Greek thinker believed to have lived from 428-347 BC is often credited with the “birth of philosophy.” Plato was one of the first philosophers to practice writing (and he was quite prolific), and scholars such as Walter Ong have traced how Plato’s concepts of Ideal forms was influenced by the technics of print writing (the real world is to the word/signifier as the Ideal Form is to its meaning/signified). But to understand the impact and importance of Plato’s thought, it is a bit necessary to understand the intellectual context in which he was thinking and writing.
Ancient Athens was an interesting political experiment: it was one of the first democracies (although we should use that word cautiously, since only rich male land owners were allowed to speak and vote), in which political and legal decisions were made via oral deliberations in an open (again, sort of) agora. Due to this political and legal structure, teachers taught forms of speech craft and delivery, these teachers were called sophists.
Plato was skeptical of the sophists, since they claimed to teach people righteousness but instead only taught them manipulation. In his famous Gorgias dialogue, Plato’s Socrates likened sophists to pastry bakers, while true philosophers, he believed, were doctors. The one gave you merely what you want (to eat / to hear), the other what you needed to be healthy (and it might not taste good!). We can recognize at least one truth to Whitehead’s quip: to this day we tend to refer to the sophists and their art by the name that Plato gave it: rhetoric. Mere, empty rhetoric (which is always in opposition to truth). And we retain a sharp division between truth and persuasion.
We can get a better sense of what is going on here by examining the complex history of the Greek term logos. The term originally meant “word” or “speech.” Overtime it came to mean something closer to “idea” or “opinion.” But for Plato, and the philosophers who followed him, the term came to meant “reason” or “truth.” More than that, it served as a name for the system of argument, called dialectic (in which two interlocutors debate back and forth, eliminating probability to arrive at a higher level of certainty). Plato thought that all politics should be based on this version of logos, and that anything–either appeals to character or appeals to emotions–simply got in the way of finding the truth. For Plato, truth was something that existed beyond the borders of our physical world, something which, with training and dedication (learning to see past the limitations of this world) the philosopher could access. Your reading tonight, Book VII of Plato’s Republic, narrativizes this conception of logos.
Rhetoricians differ from Plato in two key ways. First, they believe persuasion is essential to maintaining and healthy democracy, and that persuasion requires more than logos alone. While they recognize the importance of argument and evidence (logos) in rhetoric, they also argued that truth alone is not always sufficient to move human beings into action. Rather, humans have to trust the person speaking to them, acknowledge that they belong to the same community as themselves. They need to have a sense of “us.” We call this–sharing a cultural identity and ideology–ethos. And often humans fail to act on things that they know to be true. Often to move them to action requires creating an emotional response. Also, people are not machines, they are not objective. They approach problems from a particular emotional register, with preconceptions and expectations. We call the use of emotional appeal pathos. Rhetoricians believe you can train yourself to identify these preconceptions and work to subtly shape them (since, if you confront someone directly, they might get defensive, resistant, or aggressive). Second, at a more philosophically rigorous level, rhetoricians believe that truth is kairotic, that is, the production of a group of people at a particular place and time. It is neither absolute or eternal, but temporary and contingent. It is not something we access or discover in a world beyond this one. Rather, every truth is man made, and must be revisited and renewed. We renew our social truths through sharing speech and language.
Not surprisingly, Plato found these ideas not only wrong, but dangerous. Truth for Plato wasn’t easy to discover, it required natural ability, training, and dedication. Hence, incompetent and lazy people invented reasons why Truth was “impossible.” And while Plato was very suspicious of written language (even though he was a voracious writer), he believed any miscommunication was a mistake that could be cleaned up through better words. Much of 20th century philosophy is a battle over this very point–whether words have clear and exact meaning and miscommunication means an error on the speaker/writer or the listener/reader, or whether words work *because* listeners are always in a process of (re)inventing the speaker’s meaning, and miscommunication is a necessary possibility if we are to have communication at all (note: the second position won). Contrary to Plato, we now accept that our access to language is mediated through language and the personal, cultural, social, political, economic, etc. experiences that shape our understanding and inhabiting of language. Or, at the rhetorican Kenneth Burke put it in the 1960’s:
Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.Today I attempted to stage an experiment to demonstrate how playful language can be: “why are you here?”
But Plato would dismiss Burke’s insistence and my little joke as meaningless, mere parlor tricks. In your reading tonight, he will open with an allegory that illustrates the dangers of sophistry, rhetoric, etc. Most people, he argues, are trapped in a kind of cave. What is it that keeps them trapped? Well, it might be their own lack of intellectual ability and laziness (Plato was an elitist and thought democracy was a very bad idea–the selection you are reading for homework is from his long work The Republic, in which he argues for reforming government around an intellectual oligarchy). So, what keeps them trapped? Rhetoric, and the power-hungry sophists who use it.
I recognize that this will be a challenging reading. I imagine few of you have experience reading ancient Greek dialogues, and the terminology, syntax, and style will be challenging. But I want you to work through it. Should you pursue a career in Technical Writing, you will be charged with learning to reading and summarize difficult text that speaks a specialized language. Working with the source texts during this first unit will give you an opportunity to practice that skill. Remember, too, that our goal here is to gain an understanding of how classical perspectives on education still do or do not inform our contemporary schools (both high schools and colleges). To what extent can you see Platonic influence on your own secondary or higher education?
Homework
Read Kennedy’s entry on Plato–this should give you some helpful contextual information and an overview of the dialogue. Then read the following sections of Plato’s Gorgias:
- Socrates’ “debate” with Gorgias (pages 791-809)
- Socrates’ feud with Callicles (pages 826 -869)
This will be one of the longer, more sloggy, reading assignments this semester. Put aside about two hours to get through them. Focus your energy on some of the longer passages.
