Today’s Plan:
- Some preliminary reactions to the first round of papers
- Secondary Source presentations
- Discussion of Isocrates: major concepts, grid issues, etc
- Break
- Papillion, Welch, Haskins, Vitanza
Paper Day Reactions
Here’s some jumbled cut and paste from my feedback.
The Art of Knowing (Diverse) Souls
Ok, this one I addressed a bit in class. I have a serious ethical problem with the Phaedrus. Kennedy’s problem is more pragmatic–simply that Plato’s method of analyzing the soul of your audience breaks down once we have more than one type of soul. Like I said, my problem is ethical, which, here, I will loosely define as the “method(s) by which we conduct ourselves with others in the world.” I work from a body of theorists, including the phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, poststructuralist Jacques Derrida, and feminists such as Julia Kristeva and Adriana Cavarero, that challenge the idea that we can ever know another person. In fact, they argue that the very idea that we could know another is responsible for much of the violence in the world. Their articulation of ethics is rooted in the idea that we cannot ever know an/other. And I think rhetoric, with its ability to pay attention to audience’s and the problematics of communication, can play a role in understanding why and how we cannot know an/other.
But that gets ahead a little bit. For now I would reaffirm my opposition to the claim that we can know someone’s soul. Also, pragmatically speaking, I would suggest entering into a rhetorical situation with the mindset that 1) you know what the other person should think and 2) you know them better than they know themselves is probably counterproductive!
Is this fair to Plato? Could we offer a more charitable reading? When he writes of knowing souls, could he be arguingI, from a practical perspective, a philosopher must learn how to interact with the social/political “structures” (here I am folding together a chain of significations: ethos, ideology, habitus, habitat, nomos, place, gathering place of socially constructed identity) of his (sic) day. So, ideally speaking (har, har), we wouldn’t need to learn rhetoric. But because we live in a democracy, and because we have courts, it is important for a philosopher to know how to address different kinds of souls.
And, if we read the term souls outside of our modern connotations, but read it with Isocrates in mind, then perhaps Plato is saying that we need to know how to address different groups of people (understood broadly, what sells in Athens won’t sell in Sparta, what sells in Boston probably won’t work in Dallas).
Unrealistic, or Should I Say Idealist, Representation of the Wrangle of the Barnyard, the Whirl of Language
I’m smirking a bit when thinking of this Idealized scene of Idealized dialectic put next to Burke’s depiction of the human barnyard and our contemporary political practice. Jim Corder, a Burke disciple, responds to Carl Rogers’ theory of argument this way:
Such insights added to those of Carl Rogers, I’ll say again, have been highly valuable. They lead to patterns of argument that may even work, part of the time, in some settings. But they won’t do. They do not, I believe, face the flushed, feverish, quaky, shaky, angry, scared, hurt, shocked, disappointed, alarmed, outraged, even terrified condition that a person comes to when his or her narrative is opposed by a genuinely contending narrative.Then it is one life or another, perhaps this life or none. (“Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love” 21).
This passage pretty much explains my own reaction to Platonic rhetoric, and even much of Aristotle’s logocentric approach (and here I would complicate my own characterization of Aristotle by pointing out the more Heideggerian treatment of pathos we discussed in class). And I think it sets up Vitanza’s reaction to Isocrates that we will discuss.
Rhetoric and Poetics
I’m not familiar with Gagarin, but this claim intrigues me a bit. I’m curious what constitutes persuasion here. Also, if I am following: is Gagarin claiming that the sophists were more like performers than politicians? So that sophistic style might compare to say, a hip hop artist? Again, if I am following, that is an intriguing idea (though here I would echo McComiskey’s caution against using the term Sophist as a collective).
This makes me think of Jeffrey Walker’s work on the connections between rhetoric and poetics. In essence, Walker argues that while we often try to dissociate the two, or treat rhetoric as a public, practical transformation of the prior poetic tradition, we can’t easily do those things. Rather, if anything, poetry was an intense specialization of a more common and dominant epideictic tradition (in the style of Gorgias).
The Essential Sophists
I’m thinking here of Derrida, and his idea that any Idea must necessarily contain its opposite, that it cannot exist without it. But the question I have is “what is a sophist?” What is it about the sophist that is essential. Here I am also reminded of McComiskey’s caution against homogenizing the sophists as Sophist.
Your idea that sophistry is connected to the social (and, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suppose that Protagoras is the sophist behind your Sophist).
But I am also thinking this essential sophistry another way–in terms of methodology. To what extent is a dialectical analysis a transformation of the chief sophistic maneuver: making the weaker argument the stronger? Which i would argue is already a mischaracterization, since the sophistic movement might better be articulated as the ability to occupy (as in place, as in ethos) two different sides of an argument. To stand in two different shoes. Ethics. The ability to think in pieces (dialectic, Aristotelian ontology/taxomony).
Can Virtue Be Taught?
Yeah, one question driving Greek debate over rhetoric and pedagogy is whether virtue can be taught. Boy, they spill a lot of ink on this. Isocrates, in particular, seems vexed by this one. Socrates gets to essentially skip this one, since he repeatedly claims that he doesn’t teach anyone anything. To which, I would want to respond, “bullshit.”
Secondary Source Presentations
Presto! These will happen now.
Discussion of Isocrates
Key topics:
- Definition of philosophy
- Definition of sophistry
- Papillion’s interpretation of techne
- Papillion on epideictic (157-159); read with Halloran on ethos
- Purpose of rhetoric
- Characterization of dialectical training, swipes at Socrates
- Concept of paideia; how we can redefine logos
- Concept of advantage, implications for rhetoric
Here’s my 2011 reading notes on:
And here’s my reading of the Papillion article:
Papillion extracts from Isocrates an interpretation of techne that resists the more literate (Ong), logocentric, or ontological sense supplied by Plato and Aristotle. Rather than providing fixed rules, Isocrates attempted to develop more of a kairotic, situational awareness through a mix of practice, performance, and analysis (151, 156). This pedagogical difference is rooted in a theoretical one, for Papillion suggests that “Isocrates’ refusal to use the term rhêtorikê shows his desire to avoid the abstraction that Plato sought” (151). Similarly: “Plato and Aristotle fought to separate rhetoric and philosophy; Isocrates sought to keep the interest in communication, in logos, together. […] Isocrates saw himself in a synthetic role, not an analytic one: rhetoric and philosophy were not separable in his view” (153). Papillion’s distinction between synthesis and analysis predicts Latour’s distinction between construction and critique; Isocrates occuplies a pragmatic middle ground between a chaotic refusal of systemization (which Papillion connects to Derrida and poststructuralism) and insistence upon fixed systems (which he associates with Plato and Aristotle).
Papillion concludes re-appraising epideictic from an Isocratic perspective. Part of Aristotle’s ontological project involved breaking rhetoric into species, and Papillion suggests that he created the species of epideictic as praise and blame. But Isocrates would have rejected such a distinction, arguing that praise and blame were a part of any rhetorical situation. Papillion:
I would propose here that what Isocrates did, what Isocrates taught, was not epideictic rhetoric, not judicial rhetoric, not even deliberative rhetoric; Isocrates practiced what I shall call hypodeictic rhetoric. This is rhetoric that uses praise and blame– mostly praise– and a strong sense of comparison to set out situations as examples for those around to learn and from which those around could create policy for the future. […] I offer “hypodeictic” here as a new term to show the importance for the community of such discourse. (158 emphasis original)
I believe this sense of hypodeictic can be read across Isocrates’ concept of paideia, and in line with the sense of ethos developed by Halloran, the sense of nomos developed by Jarratt, and the more robust articulation of epideictic offered by Sullivan. For Isocrates, our sense of community is what drives any persuasive situation; like Burke’s concept of identification, Isocrates’ notion of paideia insists that we must first occupy a position as a we before any logical (or even emotional) appeal will have affect.
Before we move forward, I would stress that I think Isocrates provides us with a much more comprehensive sense of ethos than we get from Plato or Aristotle. Plato and Aristotle are chiefly interested in logos. Aristotle’s (Heideggerian) treatment of pathos, for instance, can be understood as minimizing the extent to which emotional predisposition interferes with rational argumentation. In her paper, Amy pointed out that Aristotle’s Rhetoric seek to transform an audience (think Ong: one large homogenous group) into listeners (think Ong: readers, complete with the modern notion of critical distance).
Isocrates isn’t interested in that project. He’s thinking of discourse in terms of what it can do, and how it can best be leveraged to affect change. In particular, he is thinking of discourse as what unites us together. Anticipating Althusser and Zizek by a few millennia, Isocrates is essentially suggesting that “all discourse is ideology ethos/epideictic.” Or, for those more familiar with Burke (“Terministic Screens”) and Corder (“Argument as Emergence”), that it is impossible to experience the world outside of our strategic vocabularies (Burke) or our narratives (Corder). Papillion concludes “arguing for a more profound sense of epideictic,” and I think we can turn to 20th century theory, which, of course, is a strong rejection of the logocentrism that extends from Ancient Athens to Modern Europe, particularly England and Germany. This connection, from Athens to Germany, is what haunts Vitanza.
Understanding How We Understand Isocrates
First a quick overview of Welch.
Second, some Haskins.
Third, let’s go back to Papillion.
How are we to interpret Vitanza’s skepticism? Tonight I want to tease out an answer through a chain of passages from Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric:
- 140, Panhellenism
- 132, Logos and Panhellenism
- 4, Burke. 5, Deleuze
- 142, Unity
- 147, Hegemon and Paideia
- 149, at home
- 157, what home?
- 164, back to Burke and Germany
- 125, Negative Essentializing
- 12, ” We would kNOw.”
- 49, 258 Ontological / dialectical thinking versus…
- 236,…any attempt to count to infinity
It should go without saying by now that Vitanza names this attempt to count to infinity, an attempt to be/come in the image of the Talmudic tradition, “sophistry.”
A final thought. Problems. Thinkers. Ideas.
