So I have asked each of you to work from a single sentence. Now it is my turn to do the same. My sentence comes from the introductory moments of the Gorgias dialogue, when Socrates is laying down the rules. Gorgias agrees to these rules (much to McComiskey’s disbelief, as we will see in a few weeks), but notes:
There are some answers, Socrates, that must be given by way of long speeches. (449b)
I want to explicate what I feel is the significance of this line and, along the way, defend my argument that the Gorgias dialogue is the most rhetorical–even procedural–of any of Plato’s texts. I’m afraid that to do so will require a long speech. Or, at least, several shorter parts of other speeches spliced together to make (w)hole the logocentric, transcendental Idealism Plato opposes to cupcakes.
I begin pointing to Derrida and his reading of the Phaedrus in Dissemination. Derrida highlights how Plato’s King Thamus chides Theuth’s gift to humanity: writing. Rather than extending their memory, the king warns that
… it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so. (275a-b)
Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the passage focuses on dismantling the binary between speech and writing that underwrites (har) Thamus’ critique. Both speech and writing, Derrida suggests, are equally reliant upon the “external,” every signifier–whether spoken or written–reaches up toward a signified, the precise meaning of which expands beyond our grasp. Derrida’s reading hinges upon the dual meaning of the term pharmakon, which means both “cure” and “disease.” You cannot have meaning without the possibility of having other-than-meaning, for the very play (in terms of exchange, gift) that makes the former possible relies on the possibility of the latter play (in terms of mis(s)/take). Derrida drives home this point via the idea of speech, writing, meaning, and memory:
Memory therefore always already needs signs in order to recall the nonpresent, with which it is necessarily in relation. The movement of dialectics bears witness to this. Memory is thus contaminated by its first substitute: hypomnesis. But what Plato dreams of is a memory with no sign. That is, with no supplement. A mnene with no hypomnesis, no pharmakon. (133-134).
Before moving on from Derrida and his critique, I want to highlight an earlier passage from “Plato’s Pharmacy,” one in which Derrida addresses the threat writing poses to logos, dialectic, and the patriarchal Certainty is represents. He spends quite a bit of words playing with the idea of writing as an orphan, without father. What is the nature of this father, divinity, transcendental Truth (speaker)? Derrida speculates:
Now, about this father, this capital, this good, this origin of value and of appearing beings, it is not possible to speak simply or directly. First of all because it is no more possible to look them in the face than to stare at the sun. On the subject of this bedazzlement before the face of the sun, a rereading of the famous passage of the Republic VII is strongly recommended here.
I don’t have space for such a re-reading. Let me suggest that the transcendental nature of the Truth Plato describes here is troubled at the idea of a language we cannot control. This idea–of language as beyond our control, as Truth beyond our reach–is a central tenet of a kind of rhetoric that *I* (and not them) want to loosely and sloppily and supplementally label “sophist.”
So, to Kenneth Burke. To understand Socrates’ need for a long speech in response to Callicles’ resistance we must next turn to Kenneth Burke. Especially if we want to understand in what way the Gorgias is both rhetorical/procedural. First, let me conjure up Burke’s paradox of substance. Burke’s target isn’t Socrates, or Thamus, but rather Jon Locke. But while the target might be different, the charge is generally the same. Burke notes that etymologically “sub/stance” confers not what something is, but rather the context, what is external, that makes something possible (and Latour lovers can probably see how this puts us on a path to the “thing” and his networked ontology–but I get ahead of myself). However, in the philosophic tradition substance means something else–it speaks to the essence of a thing, to what is transcendentally intrinsic to it. He concludes:
Here obviously is a strategic moment, an alchemic moment, wherein momentous miracles of transformation can take place. For here the intrinsic and the extrinsic can change places. To tell what a thing is, you place it in terms of something else. This idea of locating, or placing, is implicit in our very word for definition itself: to define, or determine a thing, is to mark is boundaries, hence to use terms that posses, implicitly at least, contextual reference. We here take the pun seriously because we believe it to reveal an inevitable paradox of definition, an antimony that must endow the concept of substance with unresolvable ambiguity, and that will be discovered lurking beneath any vocabulary designed to treat of motivation by the deliberate outlawing of the wordsubtsance. (Grammar of Motives, 23-24)
Derrida insists that the play of the signifier is essential to life. To life! From a Derridean perspective a differant sense echoes in determine: terminate. To terminate the play of the signifier in an effort to contain or certify meaning is to terminate life. But we aren’t talking Derrida here, we are talking Burke–and Burke isn’t reading sub/stance critically here but rather constructively. Play becomes a resource for destabilizing terms in order to see otherwise (and here I would love to turn to his essay Terministic Screens both for its recognition of trained incapacity, or why our language/ways of seeing prevent us from seeing otherwise, and for the connection between how one approaches meaning and how one approaches humans, but unfortunately this speech is growing long enough without such a detour).
A second Burke passage. This one more straight-forward. The parlor metaphor.
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
This is here because Latour is going to use the word interminable.
Before we leave Burke, we can get closer to Vitanza and the threat of Callicles and Theuth’s gift by turning to the conclusion to Burke’s Permanence and Change. Here Burke is thinking about language and play. He is thinking about staring at the sun, at the transcendental divide between human and God, which if we listen read Derrida we hear see sub.stantively as the divide between signifier and signified, word and thought. Burke:
In these troubling antics [what, for concision, I might identify as substantively negotiating with others via “education, propaganda, or suasion”], we may even find it wise on occasion to adopt incongruous perspectives for the dwarfing of our impatience. We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made institutions–but beyond these tiny concentration points or rhetoric and traffic, there lies the eternally unsolvable Enigma [THIS], the preposterous fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. Our speculations may run the whole qualitative gamut, from play, trough reverence, even to an occasional shiver of cold metaphysical dread–for always the Eternal Enigma is there, right on the edges of our metropolitan bickerings, stretching outward to the interstellar infinity and inward to the depths of the mind. And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man, there is no place for purley human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of the abyss.
But what on Earth does any of this have to do with Callicles and long speeches. Let’s ask Latour.
No wait, let’s ask Nietzsche first.
Oh if there were more time! If this were truly interminable! But it isn’t. And so we can’t look at too much from Twilight of the Idols. But I cannot resist one passage from “What I Owe the Ancients”:
Please do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete skeptic about Plato, and I have never been able to join in the customary scholarly admiration for Plato the artist. The subtlest judges of taste among the ancients themselves are here on my side. Plato, it seems to me, throws all stylistic forms together and is thus a first-rate decadent in style: his responsibility is thus comparable to that of the Cynics, who invented the satura Menippea. To be attracted to the Platonic dialogue, this horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must never have read good French writers — Fontenelle, for example. Plato is boring. In the end, my mistrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic Greek instincts, is so moralistic, so pseudo-Christian (he already takes the concept of “the good” as the highest concept) that I would prefer the harsh phrase “higher swindle” or, if it sounds better, “idealism” for the whole phenomenon of Plato. We have paid dearly for the fact that this Athenian got his schooling from the Egyptians (or from the Jews in Egypt?). In that great calamity called Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an “ideal,” which made it possible for the nobler spirits of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to set foot on the bridge leading to the Cross. And how much Plato there still is in the concept “church,” in the construction, system, and practice of the church!
But what misunderstanding? Latour will tell us. Latour will tell us of Socrates and Callicles what Nietzsche already told us of the difference between the historical/philosophical laborer and the true philosopher (see Beyond Good and Evil, section 211), namely that there is no will to truth beyond the will to power.
But first, one more preliminary nod to Victor Vitanza, who reading Derrida, Burke, and Nietzsche identifies in Isocrates (perhaps unfairly, perhaps–we will see in week six) King Thamus’ fear, the desire for Certainty, the violence of determination via identification: or, in other words, how far people are willing to go in order to construct an ethos that protects a [very specific articulation of] logos. For Vitanza, the way we approach the question of historiography–whether to uncover and reveal a lost past or to invent a future-perfect is already caught up in question(s) of speech and writing, essence and context, truth and power, short answers and long speeches.
My position is, especially in the next chapter, that we are not at home in our world/whirl of language. Any and every attempt to assume that we are has or will have created for human beings dangerous situations. (Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric 157).
Latour’s reading of the Gorgias dialogue begins by dismantling the difference between Socrates and Callicles and focuses on what they have in common: a disdain for the public, the people, democracy. Via Nietzsche we can see how both are fundamentally interested in power, even if they draw that power from a different “anchor.”
There is, to be sure, a big difference between the two anchors, but this should count in favor of the real anthropological Callicles [who will end up looking a lot like McComiskey’s take on Gorgias or Jarratt’s idea of a sophist], not Socrates. the good guy’s anchor is fastened in the ethereal afterworld of shadows and phantoms, whereas Callicles’ anchor is at least gripping the slid and resisting matter of the Body Politic. Which one of the two anchors is better secured? Incredible as it seems, Plato manages to make us believe that it is Socrates! (Pandora’s Hope 226).
Latour laments the shadow puppet version of Callicles Plato invents and imagines how else an actual sophist might have responded to Plato. That response is going to sound a bit like Burke, but–at the same time–a bit unlike Burke. Latour imagines how Callicles might respond to Socrates’ long speech at the end of the dialogue:
[…] because politics is not about the naked dead living in a world of phantoms and judged by half-existing sons of Zeus, but about clothed and living bodies assembled in the agora with their status and their friends, in the bright sun of Attica, and trying to decide, on the spot, in real time, what to do next.” But the straw Callicles, by now, through a happy coincidence, has been shut down by Plato. So much for the dialectical method and the appeal to “the community of free speech.” When the time of retribution has come, Socrates speaks alone in the much despised epideictic way. (Pandora’s Hope 227)
Latour continues on to suggest that what Socrates, and by extension all academics, needs to face is the demand to make a decision on the spot, in the wild, swimming in sub.stance and play and danger and facing the bright Sun of the unknown future that haunts the present and all the decisions we make. Kairos is Latour’s answer, both in Pandora’s Hope (see 242) and throughout the entirety of Politics of Nature. So, unlike Burke, the conversation *shouldn’t* be interminable.
But, to return to my opening, we ask why at the end of the dialogue, in the battle against Callicles/Nietzsche/democracy/power/uncertainty/etc does Socrates speak in that despised epideictic way? By now I hope this question rings rhetorical, or procedural. Can’t you, by now, answer it for yourself? Reading the Gorgias dialogue, Plato’s Socrates isn’t *proving* in the dialectical way, the superiority of dialectic. Because he can’t. Because he asks us to look at the Sun. What happens when we look at that Sun? Latour would suggest we all go blind–that any attention to the transcendental pulls us away from the problems and politics of this material world (and, hey look, I wrote a thing about this!). But I would argue that Latour asks the impossible when he asks human beings to simply ignore the question of the transcendental, of the beyond, of from where we come and go. And I think Plato’s on my side. And so, the Gorgias dialogue gives us two senses of what it means to stare at the Sun (not the son, but the Father says Derrida). Do we see the Light that leads us to higher truth, to the Good? Or do we see the abyss, turtles all the way down? The structure of the Gorgias dialogue is procedural because its lack of a dialectic conclusion, its devolving into a long speech, forces the audience to pick a side. To follow Socrates and his disinterested pursuit of timeless truths and happiness in the form of aestheticism? Or Callicles and his “hedonistic” enjoyment of a civic life spent wrestling the beast?
Whatever your choice, just be sure to render it in the form of a short answer.
