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The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and Their Successors

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The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and Their Successors THE BIRTH OF RHETORIC ISSUES IN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY General editor: Malcolm Schofield GOD IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY Studies in the early history of natural theology L.P.Gerson ANCIENT CONCEPTS OF PHILOSOPHY William Jordan LANGUAGE, THOUGHT AND FALSEHOOD IN ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY Nicholas Denyer MENTAL CONFLICT Anthony Price THE BIRTH OF RHETORIC Gorgias, Plato and their successors Robert Wardy London and New York First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 First published in paperback 1998 © 1996 Robert Wardy All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Wardy, Robert. The birth of rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato, and their successors/ Robert Wardy. p. cm.—(Issues in ancient philsophy) Includes bibliographical rerferences (p. ) and index. 1. Plato. Gorgias. 2. Rhetoric, Ancient. 3. Gorgias, of Leontini. I. Title. II. Series. PA4279.G7W37 1996 170–dc20 95–48938 ISBN 0-203-98196-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-14643-7 (pbk) Uxori carissimae eloquentissimaeque maritus loquax uxoriusque CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: GORGIAS’ ON 6 WHAT IS NOT Who was Gorgias? 6 The challenge of Parmenides 9 The impossibility of communication 14 Could this be philosophy? 21 2 IN PRAISE OF FALLEN WOMEN: GORGIAS’ 25 ENCOMIUM OF HELEN Who was Helen? 25 Cosmetic truth 29 In praise of Helen 31 Pleasure 32 Causes and excuses 33 In praise of logos 35 Poetical effects 39 Magic 40 Slippery opinions 41 Force and persuasion 42 Logos is logos is logos… 44 Psychotropic drugs 45 Erotic visions 46 vii 3 IN DEFENCE OF REASON: PLATO’S GORGIAS 51 Rhetorical feasting, philosophical plain fare? 51 Power revisited 57 For the sake of the logos 62 Crowds 63 In defence of rhetoric 65 Philosophical competition 68 Ignorance 69 Moral education? 70 Force and persuasion revisited 73 Magic revisited 76 Parmenides revisited 78 A philosopher in politics 82 4 AFTERLIVES 84 ‘The Gorgias/Gorgias problematic’ 84 Protagoras and Isocrates: the genius of evasion 85 Cicero: the ideal orator 94 Aristides: the speech for the defence 101 5 ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC: MIGHTY IS THE TRUTH 105 AND IT SHALL PREVAIL? Epistemological optimism 105 Invalid persuasion 109 Legitimate feelings 111 Speaking on both sides 113 Sneaky questions 115 Philosophical aggression 116 Rules of the dialectical game 118 For appearances’ sake 121 viii Rules of the rhetorical game 124 Trading on ambiguities 126 Truth and triviality 129 Raising passions 131 EPILOGUE: DOES PHILOSOPHY HAVE A GENDER? 135 Gorgias, Socrates and Helen once more 135 Begging the question 138 Other people 141 Aggression purified? 144 Notes 146 Bibliography 197 Index 201 INTRODUCTION What is rhetoric? There are too many answers, too much at variance with each other. Rhetoric, let us say, is the capacity to persuade others; or a practical realisation of this ability; or, at least, an attempt at persuasion, successful or not. Furthermore, this capacity might, to one degree or another, be either natural or acquired. Again, rhetorical exercises might or might not be confined to language: if visual or architectural ‘rhetoric’ is a metaphorical extension of ‘rhetoric’, what does this metaphor preserve, and what does it discard, of the core meaning, rhetorical language? Again, rhetoric is ‘mere’ rhetoric: it is the capacity to get others to do what its possessor wants, regardless of what they want, except to the extent that their desires limit what rhetoric might achieve: this, of course, is the rhetoric of ideological manipulation and political seduction. And finally, rhetoric is for some a distinctive mode of communication, whether admirable or deplorable; for others, as soon as one person addresses another, rhetoric is present. This book is devoted to helping the reader understand what rhetoric is. It does not pretend that only one conception of rhetoric is possible, let alone desirable; nor is the account it develops either complete or conclusive. That is as it should be: any study of rhetoric with pretensions to completeness or conclusiveness inevitably betrays a dogmatism which fails to do justice to the suggestiveness—at once bewildering and exciting—largely responsible for rhetoric’s perennial attractions. This book will try to help readers indirectly, by showing them how it might come about that there are so many answers to the fundamental question with which we began. Any such approach must be rooted in Classical antiquity. Only Westerners ignorant of their own past traditions, and so, necessarily, ignorant of rival foreign institutions, would imagine that rhetoric is some sort of cultural universal. Granted, it is a trivial enough truth that human societies are not to be found in which people do not engage in what we would call the activity of persuasion; 2 INTRODUCTION indeed, one might reasonably contend that engagement in persuasive negotiation, very broadly conceived, is precisely what makes a collection of individuals into a community. But such an undeniable truth does not entail that multiple, profound differences do not exist between what we mean by ‘persuasion’, and whatever term we suppose approximates to it in the language of another society. So in some drastically etiolated sense, persuasion might well be a human universal; but what we in this culture mean by ‘persuasion’ cannot possibly be, because our concept is the product of a complicated historical process starting with the ancient Greek idea of rhetoric. In the West, self-conscious reflection on the theory and practice of persuasion is a Greek achievement, initiated in the fifth century BCE and culminating in the fourth. But—and this is why Greek rhetoric continues to speak to us in a voice we cannot afford to ignore—such reflection was anything but a calm collective meditation issuing in a ruling consensus. Greek rhetoric was born in bitter controversy; and its most important legacy to us is a highly ramified debate, not a body of doctrine. This book will not, however, aim for anything like a comprehensive study of Greek rhetoric: it contains no study of the orators, for example, and no analysis of the elaborate technical handbook tradition, fascinating as these both are in their own right. That would be to attempt at once too much and too little: too much, obviously, because the field is so vast; not quite so obviously, too little, because wide-ranging surveys of rhetoric tend to represent it as a history from which the essential debate has been disastrously leached. So this book is about Gorgias. The first answer to our question, that rhetoric is a persuasive ability, although a commonplace, derives from Plato’s dialogue, the Gorgias, which also has something to say about the source of this capacity. The message of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen invokes the persuasive power of vision as well as of language. More than any other text, the Encomium invites us to confront the terrifying, exhilarating possibility that persuasion is just power, and that no human contact is innocent of its manipulative presence. Thus focusing sharply on Gorgias will eventually enable us to understand why our question calls forth a plurality of conflicting responses: the Greek debate over the nature and value of rhetoric, from which all the answers ultimately come, centres on his figure. This is a genetic thesis, but the justification for concentrating on Gorgias is not restricted to historical considerations; my hope is that this book will convince the reader that Gorgias not only inaugurated the great rhetoric debate, he also gave unequalled expression to some of its most vital components. INTRODUCTION 3 To learn about Gorgias is to learn about what continues to matter in rhetoric. There are additional limitations. Gorgias is significant for other reasons too, ones irrelevant to our concerns. This book does not delve into aspects of Gorgianic studies unconnected with Gorgias the rhetor or with the formative reactions to him. Even within these terms, there is no pretence that my coverage of the voluminous scholarship is anything like complete. My intention is that, since I am writing for readers keenly interested in the cardinal question of rhetoric, and such readers come from widely different backgrounds, they should not be put off by the rebarbativeness of a learned apparatus concealing the chief lines of the argument. Scholarly citations are accordingly of work the reader may find helpful in following those lines (whether the works referred to are insightful or misleading) and are in the form of end- rather than footnotes, to signal that involvement in the secondary literature is optional. For similar reasons the main text does not assume any knowledge of Greek or Latin; a few notes will be of interest only to the philologically inclined specialist. Nevertheless, because the composition of the texts considered is often careful and subtle in the extreme, I do not avoid the occasional transliteration, rather than translation, of certain key terms. Of course the point is to alert the reader without Greek or Latin to potentially misleading connotations, and so such transliteration will always be accompanied by an explanation of the distinctive semantics of the original term.
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