Sublimation therapy: Helping reason get back to a solid footing

ABSTRACT

This article responds to Professor Tumolo’s “A Sublimed Experience of the Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic.” He selects passages from Plato’s Republic in order to illustrate Plato’s explicit use of rhetoric as a subliminal tool for political control. He finds the Myth of Metals establishes through “public memory” a caste system ensuring that only the golden people, the philosophers, will be considered able rulers. They are the only ones able to see the Truth outside the Cave. Philosophy publically opposes rhetoric because it privately manipulates it for its own power. I respond that Tumolo’s conclusions are too broad for the limited passages that he considers, too literal when considering a dramatic and dialogic text like the Republic, and too committed to a preconceived mind-set that Plato (and philosophy) is opposed to rhetoric and wishes to avoid it. Philosophy and rhetoric do basically differ that one needs to reveal itself for examination and the other to conceal for most effective persuasion, but they also need each other. Tumolo finds rhetoric in the Republic; if he can free himself of advisors like Popper, he may also see the philosophical role of rhetoric to find the best opinions for guiding our lives. Amid the free speech in a democracy, philosophy can best flourish.