Mutual agreement, subliminal persuasion, and the possibility of pluralism

ABSTRACT

This article concludes the correspondence between Michael Warren Tumolo and myself about the roles of philosophy and rhetoric in each other’s business. It builds upon his original article “A Sublimed Experience of the Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic,” my response to this, and then his response “On Critical Faith and Metacritical Agnosticism: Nietzsche, Socrates, and the Searches for Knowledge.” Tumolo begins with a discussion of Plato’s method in his Republic and his use of deceitful rhetoric in the Metals Myth at the same time as he is devaluing rhetoricians for being deceitful. My response concerns his selective and literal versus my holistic and contextual readings of Plato and the complexities of reading a dramatic dialogue. His response illuminated the orientation for his method in the antiepistemologist stance he shares with several colleagues and the metacritical or pluralist stance he claims to share with Nietzsche. My conclusion examines the difficulties of maintaining a pluralist position when certain of one’s argument. Tumolo’s antiepistemological and pro-rhetoric polemic belies his advocacy of pluralism. I find Nietzsche to be compatible with a dramatic and dialogical Plato and suggest that Tumolo’s method would be stronger if inspired by this Plato rather than fighting against him.