Today’s Plan:
- Isocrates
- Let’s Try Something
- Bill Readings
- For Next Class
Isocrates
One thing that I’ve realized teaching these texts this semester: Isocrates provides the clearest example of the strong defense that we can find in the ancient world. Here is an amended thread from my last round of feedback. Consider this my best attempt at writing my rough draft.
I see what you are doing here. But I’m not sure I agree with the idea that Isocrates represents the weak defense here, nor that Haskins is accusing him of doing so. Haskins is arguing for the practical nature of Isocrates’ approach–that we become good people by trying to do good things in public. What happens when we argue about things in public?
I’m thinking of a particular passage from Isocrates here, one in which he directly confronts Plato’s accusation that sophist rhetoricians claim they can ensure the moral righteousness of their students:
I consider that kind of art which can implant honesty and justice in depraved natures has never existed and does not know exist, and that people who profess that power will grow weary and cease from their vain pretensions before such an education is ever found. But I do hold that people can become better and worthier if they conceive an ambition to speak well, if they become possessed of the desire to be able to persuade their hearers, and, finally, if they set their hearts on seizing their advantage. (Antidosis, 337)
Okay, first, those opening sentences sound to me like he isn’t skirting the Q Question, rather, he’s admitting straight out that no course of study can ensure moral righteousness. This is a direct response how Plato’s Socrates attacks Gorgias: that the latter, because he does not study moral knowledge, cannot possibly ensure that he teaches a “dangerous” art like rhetoric to good people. In the dialogue, Gorgias argues that he can ensure the moral righteousness of his students; McComiskey persuasively argues that the historical Gorgias would never make this argument. I would argue that the historical Gorgias likely would have made the argument made here by his pupil.
Second, notice how his rebuttal, “But I do hold…” places emphasis on learning to work with people (persuading). To answer my question above: when we aim to persuade people, we have to work with them. We have to respect them and their authority. When we think of truth/knowledge in line with McComiskey’s Gorgias and relativistic epistemology, Jarratt’s conception of nomos, Isocrates’ notion of the polis, and/or Lanham’s strong defense which sees truth as the result of social dramas, then we recognize that the fate of our proposed truth is in the hands of the other(s). We cannot control what will be(come) of our worlds/whirls of language (to paraphrase Vitanza).
So, again, why does Isocrates think this makes us a good person? Because when we seek cooperation we approach people in a more open (Corder might call it) spirit. There are seeds of this in Aristotle’s idea that the ethos of the speaker is inherent in their speech. Do they seem fair minded–which I interpret as “did they spend enough time and sincere effort learning their opponent’s position, or do they turn their opponent into a strawman and/or boogeyman?” But beyond what emerges in the speech, there is the more tricky question of whether they approach discussion and debate with the kind of productive hesitancy that Jim Corder describes. Insert long explication of Corder here, on the necessity of learning how to be more open.
But also something else beyond this ethical transformation, this implicit framing of how people dedicated to civic cooperation comport themselves. I said last class, responding to someone else’s paper, that there’s a difference when we think of individual vs. social knowledge (episteme vs nomos/doxa). Isocrates isn’t interested in what I know or what you know but rather what we collectively know. And we can measure what we collectively know by paying attention to what we do. Knowledge that doesn’t lead to action is just intellectual masturbation. He would have us consummate. (Sorry, sorry).
I think this becomes clearest in Isocrates’ explication of the term “advantage.” What does he mean by advantage. He specifically does not mean what Plato (via Callicles) would suggest it means: ambition, greed, or self-aggrandizement. Isocrates is not Gordon Gecko, arguing that greed is good. Rather, it means:
men who take advantage of the good and not the evil things in life… who pursue and practice those studies which will enable us to govern wisely both our households and the commonwealth. (Antidosis, 343)
I think you can see how that second passage resonates with the Haskins quote. And, altogether, how Isocrates and Lanham might have quite a bit in common.
Let’s Try Something
I’ve said a few times that rhetoric is about embracing complexity. Let’s see how that goes. We have until about 10:20 to work on this.
So last week a thing happened.
Then, a thing happened in response to the thing.
I want to conduct a rhetorical analysis of a response to the response to the thing.
I’ve listened to the response once. Today, in live time, I/we are going to try and track the complexity here. That complexity lies in the density of enthymemes tied to different identifications. Let’s see if this will work.
For Next Class
Read Readings, University in Ruins, chapter 2. Find and print a copy of your major’s mission statement.
FINAL PAPERS are due Saturday at midnight. Get them done.
