Introduction: The ancient and current quarrels between philosophy and rhetoric

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Notes

George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 7.

Rhetoric 1356a, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Phaedrus 273c7–9: “Phew! Tisias—or whoever else it was and whatever name he pleases to use for himself*—seems to have discovered an art

which he has disguised very well!” [*The translators note: “Socrates may be referring to Corax, whose name is also the Greek word for ‘crow.' ”] Trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, in John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, eds, Plato. Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997).

Translation of Gorgias by Donald J. Zeyl, in Cooper and Hutchinson, Plato. Complete Works. On rhetorical persuasion, see also W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 179: “Rhetoric teaches from the first that what matters is not what is the case, but what appears, what men can be persuaded of.” [Guthrie here cites Phaedrus 267a. The Sophists first appeared as Part I, Vol. 3, of A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).]

Thus does C. M. Bowra refer to them in Ancient Greek Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1967 [first published 1913]), 66.

We should note, in passing, that this was not their previous conclusion, according to which some sorts of imitative poetry were to be allowed. Translations of passages from Republic are by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, in Cooper and Hutchinson, Plato. Complete Works.

• But of course, Plato's dialogues themselves exhibit an unparalleled mastery of rhetoric. As Ileana F. Szymanski observes in her review in the present collection of Randall Baldwin Clark's The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Argument and Magical Rhetoric in Plato's Laws:

  • In the Laws, Plato seeks to establish the conditions for the founding of a city, the deployment of its government, and the goals for its people; all of these themes resound of philosophy, reason, and logic. The treatment of these subjects is offered in constant apposition to those of medicine, rhetoric, and magic. This is pursued on at least three levels: I. Just as we follow the ultra-rationalistic path of the main interlocutors (the Athenian Stranger and his two Dorian companions, viz., Kleinias and Megillus) when forging laws without any pragmatic application, we also follow their discussions on the many different superstitions and habits of peoples that govern their feelings and their minds. II. The ideal statesman is many times compared to the ideal physician. III. Many arguments in the dialogue—be they about the rational law or about the irrationality of feelings or magic—depart from the traditional argumentative style, and end up straying away from actual demonstration and wandering into the path of charm and rhetorical persuasion.

• See, for example, “The Problem of Socrates,” 5 [Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968), 31]:

  • With Socrates Greek taste undergoes a change in favour of dialectics: what is really happening when that happens? It is above all the defeat of a nobler taste; with dialectics the rabble gets on top. Before Socrates, the dialectical manner was repudiated in good society: it was regarded as a form of bad manners, one was compromised by it. Young people were warned against it. And all such presentation of one's reasons was regarded with mistrust. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion. It is indecent to display all one's goods. What has first to have itself proved is of little value. Wherever authority is still part of accepted usage and one does not “give reasons” but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously.—Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what was really happening when that happened?

An excellent account of this portion of the history of rhetoric remains Richard McKeon's “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” in Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952). See also McKeon's “Rhetoric and Poetic in the Philosophy of Aristotle,” in Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, Volume 1: Philosophy, Science, and Culture, eds. Zahava K. McKeon and William G. Swenson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 137–64 (and see 35–6 for an illuminating discussion of the controversy provoked by Crane's Critics and Criticism).