June 7th Notes

Plato. Gorgias. In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.87-138.

Plato. Phaedrus. In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 138-168.

In Plato’s Gorgias, he recreates a discussion (sometimes turned into an argument!) between Socrates and three men identified as Sophists or belonging to the sophist tradition: Gorgias, his student Polus, and Callicles. The discussion begins when Socrates urges his student, Chaerephon, to ask Gorgias to define who he is. This turns into a debate and an investigation of the true nature of rhetoric and the duty or purpose of the rhetorician. Socrates is particularly interested in what reponsibility a teacher and accomplished practicioner of rhetoric has for persuading his students and his audience to pursue noble, just aims. When the three Sophists fail to dispel Socrates’ contention that rhetoric is not noble but instead mere flattery – dishonest and potentiall harmful, like using cookery instead of medicine – it seems as if Plato is dismissing rhetoric, for rhetoric is not good in itself. Effective rhetoric depends on the rhetor understanding and pleasing the audience, and if the rhetor’s success is dependent then on his audience’s preconceived whims and wishes and beliefs, what place is there for a rhetor who speaks unpopular yet noble and good Truth? A slave to convention, then, is the rhetorician, and therefore the rhetorician does not, as the philosopher does, move people towards justice and good.

Plato’s hardline stance against rhetoric is revised in the Phaedrus. First, through the retelling of a speech by the orator Lysias and then through an extended speech by Socrates, it is shown that rhetoric, as was proven in Gorgias, is too easily tied up with ignoble human ambition and desire to be a pure end to good. These two speeches compare rhetoric to an evil lover, who desires to control his beloved and therefore is prone to pettiness and madness which can lead to harm, for both the lover and the beloved. However, Plato doesn’t stop here – he recognizes that not all madness is evil, and therefore all love is not manipulating, selfish flattery. Madness is an attribute of the gods and the muses, and therefore, the madness which is love can also have a transcendent, beautiful side, one that is worthy of the divine. Rhetoric of this kind – the rhetoric of the noble lover – pushes the audience (the beloved) to strive for the good and the noble. Speech is powerful; this Plato cannot deny, and the noble rhetorician uses his power of speech and the power inherent in language for good, not for flattery or to uplift unseemly arguments. Rhetoric, then, has an important place in society, for philosophy is a solitary pursuit – in order for large groups of people to graspe the truths reached through individual study and contemplation, there needs to be a rhetorician who understands the fine divisions and classifications of both small and great things to express these truths to an audience. Rhetoric is social, and noble rhetoric can uplift a society, but to become this sort of rhetorician requires careful study and a deep understanding of the world.

I found some of the rhetorical structures of both dialogues interesting juxtaposed next to what seemed to be Plato’s argument (what Socrates was saying.) First of all, in Gorgias, it was known that the Sophists were excellent speakers, but they all seemed stunted in this dialogue: Socrates spoke the most and, although he chastised them numerous times for not making their answers concise enough, his lines were longer and more detailed and contrived than the Sophists. I don’t think Plato gave a fair representaiton of the Sophists, for he allows Socrates to reign in the argument – the Sophists answer his questions instead of questioning Socrates. But perhaps this is because the Sophists boasted that they could speak on any subject, and when they spoke, they gave answers instead of more questions, which is a hallmark of Socrates. Does that mean it is more effective to pose questions than to give answers? That to control the discussion and the conversation, you need to be the questioner instead of the one being questioned? And did the Sophists, the supreme rhetoricians that they were, not realize the effectiveness of the “defensive” position of questioning than the “offensive” one of giving answers?

But can you be a noble rhetorician if all you do is be defensive?

June 4 Response

June 4

 

In both the “Encomium of Helen,” believed to be written by Gorgias, and Dissoi Logoi, composed by an unknown Sophist, the author approaches his argument from the unexpected outside perspective. Gorgias reverses the common notion that Helen is an evil seductress by pointing out her helplessness in the hands of divine Fate, passion, and language – who could resist these forces that are powerful beyond her own human (even if she is only half-human and half-god) desires and wishes? The author of Dissoi Logoi, like Gorgias, also approaches his discussion of good/evil, just/unjust, etc. by looking at the situation anew, without the taint of the commonly held standard. For, as this author points out, the black-and-white distinction that we like to place on the terms “good” and “evil” or “seemly” and “unseemly” is not actually there – for death is bad, but good for the gravediggers; for boys to learn warfare instead of philosophy is seemly in Sparta, but not in the other Greek city-states, etc. Everything, these authors point out, is relative, and that refusal to take a hard-line stance on issues seems to be the hallmark of the Sophists.

It’s interesting to me that these “premodern” philosophers (that is, those who came before Plato and Aristotle) are so postmodern according to our 21^st century academic distinctions. The insistence at looking at a situation removed from its immediate context so that you might understand all sides of it is what I consider to be one of the tenants of postmodernism – that there is no one Truth, only small truths that are true from a particular viewpoint. So, I don’t think Gorgias was trying to convince everyone that Helen was an innocent victim; why would a Sophist want to establish an alternative Truth that just replaces the old Truth with itself? Instead, I think Gorgias just wants his audience to realize that the stories we tell are not necessarily rooted in positivist, solid soil – they are ever-shifting and can be told in various ways.

I believe that this relativism and consequently this emphasis on individual human experience is what 20^th and 21^st century rhetoricians are appealing to when they argue that rhetoric should try to revive sophistry as the “antidote,” as Vitanza suggests, to the Aristotelian line of rhetoric that has been preserved and therefore preferred as the canon today. In John Poulakos’ essay, “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” he enters the debate of whether or not rhetoric is a theory-based discipline or an art by showing that the Sophists, with their emphasis on the moment and preference to give speeches off the cuff, so that they might better react to their audiences, side with the art (techne) camp. I imagine it would be difficult to pass a major in rhetoric past the Arts and Sciences faculty if you constructed the major around a Sophistic perspective! According to Poulakos, since Sophistic rhetoric emphasized “rhetoric as art, style as personal expression, kairos (the opportune moment), to prepon (the apprioppriate) and to dynaton (the possible),” there could be no hard and fast rules that were easily transferable from teacher to student (56). Since there is no one vision of the possible, and because every moment is a unique one, everything depends on the individual speaker. Rhetoric is art.

Susan Jarratt continues Poulakos’ argument that the Sophists thought of rhetoric as an art in her article “The First Sophists and the Uses of History” by emphasizing the performative nature of sophist rhetoric. She points out that many of the new popular composition classroom techniques, such as sentence-combining, could be directly linked to the Sophists, but since there has been little historical work done on the Sophists (as of 1987), that connection has not been clearly made yet. She also argues that it is difficult to do work on the Sophists and explain their rhetoric because when we do, we still explain it in the context of an Aristotelian tradition and canon. We need to, as the unknown author of Dissoi Logoi would have argued, taken ourselves outside our comfortable mindset and see rhetoric anew, with a different perspective. Victor Vitanza actively tries to push his reader out of their comfortable mindset in the style of his writing, as shown in his article, “Critical Sub/Versions of the History of Philosophical Rhetoric.” His playful nature with nature, creating new meanings in words by inserting slashes or deliberately spelling them different, shows his audience that language is a flexible reality, just like the world. Vitanza is arguing for the arrival of the “Third Sophist” to change the nature of rhetoric today. That Third Sophist would transform rhetoric into the new metadiscipline that is the foundation of all other disciplines, transplanting positivist philosophy, which holds that position in today’s academy (41). In his mind, historiography attempts to display those unexpected perspectives that the Sophists made visible to their audience; this new history is “pluralistic, anarchistic, intertextual” – unlike anything we are used to in our particular academic mindset (53). However, in order to have this work, the academy must be willing to accept it, not only in rogue scholars like Vitanza, but others also, who come from the same Sophist ideology but, since everything is individual, relative, and performative in sophism, look nothing like Vitanza. Can the academy grow to understand and make room for nontransferable, unique knowledge like this? Can the spirit of Sophistry replace the institution created through traditional, canonoized philosophical rhetoric?