Alrighty, this week we finished up Plato's Phaedrus, discussed Isocrates' Against the Sophists, and started reading Aristotle's The "Art" of Rhetoric. I'll be honest and say that these definitely hurt my brain a bit, not necessarily because they're difficult (although they are), but because there is a lot that I find interesting about platonism, I like entertaining the ideas of transcendent truth or that more exists in the world than we are capable of perceiving, but the landfills of narcissism inherent to platonism, and its assumption that subjective and socially constructed truth are unimportant, make my interest difficult to justify. Plato also seems to be incredibly hierarchically-minded, which lends itself to elitism, xenophobia, and misogyny, and I think that the way in which he constructs those hierarchies, and value in general, is inherently flawed because of the value system he has placed on truth. Relativism, in its purest sense, is problematic also, because its hard to argue against the existence of objective truth. I like to think the two, "T" and "t" truth, are capable of existing simultaneously and transcend hierarchy, as I think most of us inherently do. Our minds construct and reconstruct worlds through the subjective experience of an objectively existing (materialistically speaking) empirical reality, and to ignore the discourse between the two, or to claim that one is essentially superior than the other, seems like a failure to realize how complex and essential the interplay between mind and world is. For this reason, I struggle a bit with both the sophists and Plato. Also, Plato's impulse to judge everything in terms of value seems inherently problematic (or capitalist) in nature, so I struggle with that in particular. Nevertheless, lets move on.
In due time, from under the tutelage of Plato, like Eve from Adam's rib, comes the more sensible Aristotle ready to pluck the forbidden fruit: rhetoric (I apologize for that). I have yet to get very far into Aristotle's The "Art" of Rhetoric, but, and I think it is probably because these works weren't intended for publication, Aristotle feels far more accessible and less esoteric. He writes in a manner that more straightforward, and less allegorical in nature, than Plato; he seems less concerned about starting with the answer or following the trajectory of a dialectic. That said, Aristotle is mighty long winded, dry, and doesn't seemed worried about going into loosely related tangents for multiple pages. My only previous experience with Aristotle is in ethics courses, which means I am somewhat aware of the way in which his sense of virtue, the self-sufficient end's superiority over a means, and the golden mean/middle way relate to his sense of morality, but I have yet to make sense of their connection to rhetoric. Putting aside the fact that Aristotle attempts to justify slavery or call women the lesser sex on every third page or so, I find his ideas regarding ethics interesting, so I'm interested to see whether they relate to rhetoric, or if he is just working his way through an unrelated tangent. However, Aristotle does achieve quite a bit right from the get-go: defining rhetoric, explaining the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme (somebody needs to create a really nerdy meme using that word), explaining logos, ethos, and pathos, and defining the three types of rhetorical situations: deliberative, forensic, and epideictic. After that, Aristotle goes into a discussion of the good, happiness, and virtue, which I think is prefacing how he will eventually define the good rhetorician/sophist (I hope), but I have yet to get there.
Now, Isocrates. I enjoy the fact that he, more than any figure we have read so far, disrupts the binary I created in the title of this posting. Neither a Platonist nor Plato's vision of a sophist, Isocrates is similarly striving for truth, but is capable of considering the way much of it is subjective and/or socially constructed. I think the fundamental, albeit ironic, argument that Isocrates levies against his fellow sophists is this...
Which is easy to say when money's not a problem. Nevertheless, I think there is some merit to his worry about whether or not his colleagues are both teaching for the right reasons, and capable of keeping the promises they make to their students. Also, whether you simply teaching your students a skill, which is inherently neither ethically good nor bad until used, or you are teaching students to use a skill for the good changes what constitutes a good teacher and a bad teacher. I think Isocrates is advocating for the latter, and I think his sense of good vs. bad, in this case, relates primarily to the question of whether or not you are teaching your students to side with the truth, whatever that may be, or to intentionally persuade people of false claims for some kind of gain. By truth, I think Isocrates is looking more for honesty than accuracy. Students should be able to persuade, and understand how they are persuaded, but do so honestly, and with an intent to understand truth from both their own and others perspectives. If I am correct in this assessment, then I admire Isocrates' claims, despite the fact that they might be failing to recognize that less economically successful sophists need to eat also, and can't necessarily.
Works Cited
Aristotle. The "Art" of Rhetoric. Translated by John Henry. Freese, Harvard University Press.
Isocrates. “Against the Sophists.” Perseus Digital Library, data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0010.tlg008.perseus-eng1:13.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Digireads.com Publishing, 2019.
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