In today’s class we will focus our attention on Plato’s castigation of rhetoric. You have read the Gorgias dialogue and the Apology. I want to supplement these readings and open our discussion by introducing Plato’s (in)famous “Allegory of the Cave,” from the seventh book of his Republic. Then we will discuss the Apology and the Gorgias. This discussion will follow the reading grid we have set up. I want to pay particular attention to 1) the metaphors for/surrounding rhetoric Plato introduces and 2) the tension between Plato’s Socrates and Plato’s Callicles.
Finally, I will end class by pointing to Plato’s more charitable consideration of rhetoric in the Phaedrus dialogue.
At some point I want to differentiate Truth and falsity from truth and lie, episteme from alethia, truth in literacy from truth in orality.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, The Final Judgement
In his longest work, The Republic, Plato compares the journey and development of the philosopher to a prisoner escaping a cave. (http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html)
Already we can see a disdain for mere appearances, and a desire to move beyond normative culture to the Truth. This parable continues to fuel many critical philosophies, which frame themselves in terms of the Matrix‐as a move beyond base ideology and into the realm of Truth.
Plato’s Gorgias
Here’s the passages from the reading that I want to discuss today
- Apology
- Socrates’ wisdom: 21b / 23b / *33b*
- Socrates’ methods: 23d / 30b / *38a*
- Socrates’ aversion to politics: 31e
- Socrates and the birth of critical philosophy: 39c
- Gorgias
- Favorite line by Gorgias 449c
- Where Gorgias gets in trouble / what does oratory make? 450b-c
- Plato’s Gorgias offers a Platonic understanding of rhetoric 452e
- Gorgias: rhetoric is a weapon *456d
- Socrates and Gorgias: the doctor or Dr. Oz? 452 / 456b-d
- Callicles’ “unthinkable” thesis: 483d-e
- Callicles: philosophy as a child’s game 484c-e
- Socrates’ method- straight out of Ong–advanced terminology
- Who is the elitist? (Answer: they both are) see 491b
- Socrates’ and individualism/libertarianism 491d / 504e
- Paging Nietzsche 491b
- Socrates’ distrust of politics 521e / the cerpuscular tale
As a response to Plocrates’s argument that rhetoric is a weapon that promotes injustice (480c), I offer the Quintilian:
There follows the question as to whether rhetoric is useful. Some are in the habit of denouncing it most violently and of shamelessly employing the powers of oratory to accuse oratory itself. 2 “It is eloquence” they say “that snatches criminals from the penalties of the law, eloquence that from time to time secures the condemnation of the innocent and leads deliberation astray, eloquence that stirs up not merely sedition and popular tumult, but wars beyond all expiation, and that is most effective when it makes falsehood prevail over the truth.” 3 The comic poets even accuse Socrates of teaching how to make the worse cause seem the better, while Plato says that Gorgias and Tisias made similar professions. 4 And to these they add further examples drawn from the history of Rome and Greece, enumerating all those who used their pernicious eloquence not merely against individuals but against whole states and threw an ordered commonwealth into a state of turmoil or even brought it to utter ruin; and they point out that for this very reason rhetoric was banished from Sparta, while its powers were cut down at Athens itself by the fact that an orator was forbidden to stir the passions of his audience.
[…]
Doctors have been caught using poisons, and those who falsely assume the name of philosopher have occasionally been detected in the gravest crimes. 6 Let us give up eating, it often makes us ill; let us never go inside houses, for sometimes they collapse on their occupants; let never a sword be forged for a soldier, since it might be used by a robber. And who does not realise that fire and water, both necessities of life, and, to leave merely earthly things, even the sun and moon, the greatest of the heavenly bodies, are occasionally capable of doing harm.
Here is a link to my intro lecture on Plato for Historical Rhetorics.
In Socrates’ exchange with Gorgias, he makes the following comparisons:
cosmetics : gymnastics :: sophsitry : legislation
pastry baking : medicine :: oratory : justice
Because rhetoric satisfies itself with “mere opinion” instead of absolute Truth, Plato views it as a set of tricks (or knack) rather than an art, what the Greeks would call techne.
Ong gives us a rationale for such suspicion‐although he might not have consciously recognized it, Plato was enchanted by the power of the literate sign. Let’s take a minute to conceptualize, roughly, how language works.
Language operates via signification‐the exchange of signs. The sign breaks down into two parts‐the signifier (the symbolic/material component, such as “dog”) and the signified (the meaning). As Ong’s essay stresses, writing externalizes and visualizes this process.
Of course, there is an amount of slippage between signifiers and signifieds. One of the first things you realize when you start to consider language is how we do not have direct access to signifieds‐we live, and are reliant, on signifiers. Furthermore, Plato’s ambitious philosophical goals include transcending (moving beyond) the material register (the signifier, the world) to contemplate (or see) the Ideal forms of things (pure signifieds). Ironically, we can refer to this transcendental realm of pure Ideas as the “Real” for Plato, since he believed this world was just a transitory illusion. The Real world, the world that matters is the world of Ideas/Ideals that exist beyond this material register.
His central method for this movement toward Ideal Forms is dialectic‐a back and forth questioning in which one moves beyond what is probable to arrive at what is essential. Hence, Platonism is often referred to as essentialism.
Let us think of a dog again. When we look at a dog, we can begin to identify a number of characteristics. But which of those characteristics belong solely to a dog? Which of those characteristics are essential to being a dog? What is the essence of a dog? This kind of dialectical investigation into something’s essence is further developed by Aristotle and often referred to by the term “ontology.” Plato believed ontology could reveal how everything in the world had a proper place‐the goal of philosophy becomes identifying the proper essence of everything, understanding to what category of Being it belonged, and making sure that the world was ordered in the proper hierarchy. The proper task of the philosopher, then, involves a kind of critical engagement that distinguishes the eternal, the essential, the universal, the objective from the transient, the accidental, the specific, the subjective.
There is another consequence to this thinking. At the conclusion of the Gorgias dialogue, Plato debates with Callicles regarding the value of thought. Callicles, foreshadowing Socrates’s death, reminds the gadfly that his intelligence is useless if he cannot convince his peers of its utility and veracity, to which Socrates responds that he cares not as to whether a single other person accepts his thinking, for we waits for a higher, divine judgment after death. While this notion of judgment after death might seem commonplace for us now, it was quite revolutionary to Greek culture. In fact, it is upon this notion of final judgment that Nietzsche will later castigate Socrates and Plato for shackling the “true” Greek spirit under the Jewish resentment (a line that Hitler will find quite useful when used out of context decades after Nietzsche’s death).
More on point for the present moment: the debate between Socrates and Callicles is a debate about what tasks a theorists should commit herself to. This debate rages on throughout the next millennia–it is a debate we still engage today. Think of a high school curriculum: what do we teach? What courses? What skills? How might a high school curriculum differ if it was generated by Callicles and not by the Platonic tradition (in actuality, most high school curriculum can be traced back to the Romans, who inherit the various Greek traditions; they designate the 7 liberal arts: Rhetoric, Logic, Grammar, Arithmetic, Music, and Astronomy).
The Phaedrus
In his later dialogue, The Phaedrus, Plato recognizes the necessity of rhetoric‐but only if rhetoric comes after philosophic, dialectical procedures. In other words, rhetoric is what we use to communicate a message after we have determined the truth. And what marks the center of the now acceptable rhetorical art? Plato:
Since the nature of speech is in fact to direct the soul, whoever intends to be a rhetorician must know how may kinds of soul there are. Their number is so-and-so many; each is such-and-such a sort; hence some people have such-and-such a character and others have such-and-such. Those distinctions established, there are, in turn, so-and-so many kinds of speech, each of such-and-such a sort. People of such-and-such a character are easy to persuade by speeches of such-and-such a sort in connection with such-and-such an issue for this particular reason, while people of such-and-such another sort are difficult to persuade for those particular reasons.
The orator must learn all this well, then put his theory into practice and develop the ability to discern each kind clearly as it occurs in the actions of real life. Otherwise, he won’t be any better off than he was when he was still listening to those discussions in school. He will now not only be able to say what kind of person is convinced by what kind of speech; on meeting someone he will be able to discern what he is like and make clear to himself that the person actually standing in front of him is of just this particular sort of character he had learned about in school‐to that he must now apply speeches of such-and-such a kind in this particular way in order to secure conviction about such-and-such an issue. When he has learned all this‐when, in addition, he has grasped the right occasions for speaking and for holding back; and when he has also understood when the time is right for speaking concisely or appealing to pity or exaggeration or for any other of the kinds of speech he has learned and when it is not‐then, and only then, will he have finally mastered the art well and completely. (271d-272b)
What kind of (ethical) problems might this insistence create?
