We have too much to do today!
- Question: Should school teach morality?
- Use Twitter in class w/ the tag #enc3371
- Flash read together: Plato’s Phaedrus
- A Somewhat Spontaneous Defense of Plato
- Intro to Aristotle
- Homework
A Question
At the beginning of class please take 5 minutes to consider the following question: should schools teach morality (right from wrong)? Or is morality the responsibility of other social/civil institutions (family, church, television)?
You can write this response wherever you please.
A Twitter Request
I want to try something new today; I want to create a backchannel. Since this is mostly a lecture / discussion class, I want to get more voices involved. So, during class, tweet stuff out: either questions, quotes, or responses. Just make sure to use the hashtag #enc3371.
Plato’s Phaedrus
Last class we focused our attention on Plato’s Apology and Gorgias dialogues, and looked briefly at his Allegory of the Cave from book VII of the Republic. Collectively, they paint a pretty negative picture of rhetoric and politics. Before we move on from Plato, I want to spend a bit of time with his Phaedrus dialogue, in which he articulates a potential value to rhetoric if, and only if, the rhetorician is trained properly in dialectical philosophy (that is, her methodology begins with a systematic, syllogisitic, investigation into the Truth of a matter). Plato’s Socrates explains:
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)
Kennedy notes, in his introduction to Aristotle, that such a rhetoric is best suited for one-on-one encounters and ill-suited to the kind of democratic, one-to-many engagements constituting Greek politics (see p. 15). I want to problematize this differently by highlighting how such a characterization/methodology for rhetorical engagement raises issues of power and authority that undercut cooperation and compromise.
A Somewhat Spontaneous Defense of Plato
I was thinking after last class that I have done too much to frame Plato in the role of a villain. He is, after all, generally considered the hero of philosophy departments (and those working in philosophy generally work with a different “Plocrates” than the one who appears in the dialogues concerning rhetoric–rhetoric brings out the worst in Plato).
Reason #1 I would defend Plato: People. Are. Fucking. Stupid.
Reason #2 I would defend Plato: His idealistic dedication to truth and logic form the basis of Western progress. He is the godfather of the Question. His relentless pursuit of Truth informs every progressive movement: Marxism, Socialism, Feminism, the Enlightenment, etc. In short, he insists that things do not have to remain the way they are. Things can change.
Despite these reasons (and there are others), I have issues.
Intro to Aristotle
Let’s talk.
Homework
We are already slipping behind a bit, but I don’t want to crush you this weekend. Let’s finish Book I of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (47-110) and Chapters 1-11 of Book 2 (11-147). I know, it is a lot (but much of it can be skimmed).
