The selections from Plato for this week struck me as being a more natural form of dialogue. The reason is that _Gorgias_ is set up much like a play without stage directions. One person speaks and then the other. _Protagoras_ and _Symposium_ both have a more narrative structure--albeit a narrative that is driven still by dialogue. Rather than just what was said, we get a limited narrative of how people responded. We see the audience cheering. We see Socrates seemingly momentarily stumped. The characters start to take on some dimension, and we gain a bit more insight--especially when it's Socrates who is narrating the tale of what happened with Protagoras.
I find it interesting that in _Symposium_ we meet up with a second female, sophistic teacher for Socrates in the form of Diotima. He seems to have respect for her and doesn't dispute with her as he disputes with others. When he was quoting Aspasia, his interlocutor seemed doubtful of the origin of the speech...Perhaps he thought Socrates was making it up and simply attributing it to her. It does seems suspect when he seems so accepting of something. And with Diotima, he doesn't seems to be challenging her ideas, simply accepting them.
Early in the selection, Diotima points out one of Socrates' flaws--he tends to limit options. In class last week, someone noted that Socrates was committing the either/or fallacy. He seems to see things in terms of one option or the other and overlook the possibility for gradients. Diotima asks him, "Or havent' you found out yet that there's something in between wisdom and ignorance?" She hits the mark. In much of his arguments that we've seen thus far, he seems to be confining his opponents to speaking in terms of extremes--or he only allows for one word to cover a whole multitude of concepts that may be related but are not quite synonomous.
My thoughts about Socrates calling rhetoric a tribe were the same as yours, Laurie, until I started perusing the internet for our vocabulary word definitions. I found that ‘knack’ is a rather bad translation of tribe. Originally, tribe meant “a rubbing,” and its roots can be traced to the name of a tribe [trahyb], the tribudes, whose women were purportedly homosexuals. The ‘rubbing’ in the etymology refers to their sexual practices that did not produce children. When Socrates calls rhetoric a tribe, he is at once putting a heterosexual lens on his metaphor and making a snide jab at the Sophists. He considers their work inferior because it doesn’t produce any offspring, whereas philosophy makes babies.
The etymology of tribe illuminates a few of Plato’s moves in this week’s readings. At the beginning of the Protagoras, Socrates and Hippocrates are initially turned away from Callias’ door by a eunuch. Eunuch comes from the Greek words ‘eune’ (bed) and ‘ekhein’ (to keep), and if you crunch the two together, you get a description of the eunuch’s occupation: they guarded a ruler’s harem from other suitors. (Of course, a eunuch doesn’t have genitals, so he’s no threat at all.) In Protagoras, the eunuch is protecting the emasculated Sophists who, like the tribudes, spend their days rubbing for gratification and not procreation. When the philosopher enters, dialectic ensues, which Plato considers productive. Socrates, the manly man, proceeds to ‘impregnate’ the Sophists with ‘real ideas.’
Plato puts a penthouse (oh, I couldn't resist) on this hierarchy in the Symposium. Diotima clearly considers physical procreation a lower thing than intellectual procreation. Her speech, recounted through Socrates (and Plato), proposes a program of education where youth are shown the beauty of a body, many bodies, the form of beauty, and finally the Good. Those who have a pregnant soul are rendered productive when beauty is introduced to them via a philosophic teacher. They produce 'children' of virtue and excellence. According to Plato, “Everyone would rather have such children than human ones.”
For those in Dr. Bay’s Gender Rhetoric class, there’s a good essay by Michelle Ballif in the Fall 2004 issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly about gender rhetoric and Plato, from which I stole most of the ideas in this post: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4142/is_200410/ai_n9464001/pg_10