Thursday, September 20, 2007
Plato's Rhetorical Choices
I know it's late (40 min till class!), but I want to start a thread devoted to analyzing Plato from a rhetorical standpoint, as Poster recommends: "reading Plato rhetorically." I think this is a wide open area in which all our topics can fit, but with their focus on the ways in which Plato, or Socrates, sets up, defines and defends his arguments.
7 comments:
I’m looking at his second speech, which he begins by conceding an advantage of madness: “ in fact the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift from god.” I thought, until re-reading this, Socrates was against madness, explaining how a love relationship based on sophism and pedagogy from elder to younger was the more noble form of love, because it remains unaffected by passion.
This beginning of his second speech still sounds like his recantation. Acknowledging madness as a gift from god seems to refute much of what he argued for in the first speech. I think I can connect his concession or his reason to offer a concession to my freshman comp class (as a student when I was 18; I’ve never taught comp). I remember being taught to acknowledge at least one point I was arguing against, maybe to consider it in a positive light only long enough before maintaining my argument against it. I’d cite an example, but it’s late, so maybe I’ll have one for class.
Maybe it’s to the speaker’s advantage to bolster a counterpoint for the sake of making one’s own argument stronger. I mean if Socrates can acknowledge madness as a divine gift, and then he soundly criticizes madness, then hasn’t he outdone the gods? If he can prove some of the best things come from divine madness, then prove better things can come from non-divine, grounded logic, isn’t he setting himself up to appear divine?
The madness that Plato refers to was a bit confusing but after reading Gerard's post especially when he says, "Socrates was against madness, explaining how a love relationship based on sophism and pedagogy from elder to younger was the more noble form of love, because it remains unaffected by passion." Thanks for that great summary!
I thought after the speeches and the talk of 'what is rhetoric' again Plato starts to define the cannons of rhetoric. He attacks Lysias's speech because of lack of arrangement, audience analysis and matching arguments, and the fact he did not define his terms. I thought he used more concrete examples to show what he meant- a huge improvement over the general 'over the head speak' found in Gorgias. After covering some of the 'style' elements in Dr. Shea's Classical Tropes class, I also see him criticizing the style and starting to deliniate his own style. The audience analysis is also a crucial point here. Phaedrus and Socrates start to decide where Rhetoric is used and though they mention in law making and court cases, they start to differentiate arrangement, audiences, and such that are necessary in addressing these topics versus the epidiectic (or ceremonial). So after listening to all this, maybe Plato needed to free write to get to the crux of Rhetoric. Kinda like we discussed in class last night!
I was going to put this comment on Danielle’s post, but as it sort of relates to Poster’s suggestion of reading Plato in different ways, I decided it would fit here too. Last night in class, I started thinking about Danielle's comment about feeling like her anxiety was a feminine characteristic, and it reminded me of a study I read about communication. The study said that women tend to relate to each other in conversation by showing how similar they are or how similar their experiences are to each other, whereas men tend to relate by competition, one-upmanship. I realize that's a gross generalization, but it was interesting that both Dan and Gerard mentioned feeling like there is some competitiveness in the posts, whereas several of the ladies in class worried about whether or not they could demonstrate the same abilities as others in their posts. So speaking rhetorically about Plato, I wonder if he felt some of the same anxiety we feel. Did he criticize the sophists and their study of rhetoric because he felt that same “masculine” need to compete with them? Or is that tendency an American phenomenon? Or a modern phenomenon? If Plato did feel that tendency to be competitive with other men, what does that say about his attitudes toward Socrates or Phaedrus or anyone else as characters in his dialogues? If, as a surface reading of the text suggests, Plato idolized Socrates, maybe he was jealous of his attentions to Phaedrus. Or maybe if some of it was meant to be ironic, he was poking fun at Socrates’ attention to Phaedrus. Alas, as Vitanza says, we’ll never know...
Socrates, acting as dialectician, begins his first speech by defining love. But it is a flawed definition, and therefore a flawed speech/argument. The lover, he says, is all emotion and no rationality, so the non-lover is to be chosen over the lover as a superior companion. His second speech is also largely devoted to definition, but he reaches so far back, and speaks so figuratively, that he can hardly be refuted. But the most important thing he does, I think, is to excuse his earlier speech as the result of madness, and then in his second speech to define that madness as a dialectician and use it, even defend it. But what is the rhetorical purpose of the first speech? They already have an “inferior” speech to which to compare a better one: Lysias’ speech. So why give another bad one? I think it’s for two principal reasons. First, to bring in the topic of madness, which Socrates does by claiming that he’s been overtaken by the muses, and which he develops into a central part of his argument in the second speech. Second, to bring in the gods. His first speech, he contends, is so insulting to lovers that he must’ve offended Eros, so he must now give a second speech to atone for the first, and he must make it worthy of being heard by the gods, and, maybe because of this, he brings them in as part of his definition of the
soul.
A rhetorical method of Socrates (arguably of Plato) is to use the definition period of his argument as an opportunity to “discourse” on the largest possible topics—love, the soul, (im)mortality—so that by the time he comes back to earth, his argument/definition is so high-flown and otherworldly that it becomes unimpeachable. Indeed, making his arguments irrefutable seems to be Socrates’ method. This is generally the purpose of his many questions: to trap his interlocutor in a defined web that appears to be that person’s own creation, but is actually Socrates’ creation. So by the time Socrates has made his point, he has already talked the other person into agreeing with him. In fact, he has involved the other person so thoroughly in the argument that it appears that they have created the argument or definition together. Thus we have dialectic and not mere rhetoric, or so it appears.
It's interesting that, prior to his formal arguments denigrating rhetoric in the Phaedrus, Plato attempts to demonstrate himself as a superior rhetorician to Lysias and as a master of dissoi logoi through the two speeches delivered by Socrates. Obviously rhetoric had some value for Plato or he wouldn't have engaged with it to that degree of intimacy.
I don't think Socrates was opposed to madness that was of the four kinds that are defined as divinely inspired in Phaedrus (mantic, poetic, philosophic, erotic). In the Republic at the end of Book II he denies that anything negative can have a divine origin, so presumably other types of madness have a mysterious diabolic origin.
To bounce from "rstone" (Sorry, I can't connect names to ID's, it's a character flaw) on pg 7 of 38 as I have it printed out, Socrates states "He [Lysias] is a master in his art and I am an untaught man." This goes against what we've seen prior, as Rhetoric not being a teachable art in Plato's arguments. This statement by Socrates seems to prove that Plato believed it was a teachable art. He is not asking if Lysias is a master, but stating it. Regardless of the later disection at the hand of Socrates, this statement is an inch given that before, was not there. Is this a small sign of what was happening in Athens at the time, and the increasing popularity of rhetoric as a subject?
Post a Comment