In the pieces we have read up to this point in the semester, there seems to an ongoing discussion about creating distinctions between sophistic argumentation and platonic dialectic and conflicting attitudes toward pure rhetorical mastery. On the one hand you have the sophists, who claim to be masters at arguing any point of a given situation or topic with the desire to persuade an audience into accepting what they have presented as the most appealing argument through situational ethics. On the other hand you have Plato’s dialectic, which claims there is always a singular truth to every issue or topic of debate and it is the philosopher’s main objective to reach that truth through a series of divisions, definitions, and distinctions. The sophists seem to deal in ornamentation and appearance, while dialectic seems to rely on logic.
Pitted against each other, both sophism and dialectic seem to have their advantages and disadvantages. Sophism gives you the skill to persuade a large audience where individualism cannot possibly be pinpointed because the group is too large. Dialectic gives you the tools required to persuade or convince a small number of people or an individual where differences of opinion can be reduced to truths or the truth as you see it. How then are we supposed to imagine rhetoric to this point and how are we supposed to create divisions, which seem to be Platonic constructions, between the two opposing view points I mentioned earlier? We know, based on the readings we have done so far, that rhetoric is a practiced form of persuasion requiring a topic to be discussed and an audience to be persuaded. How we reach that goal, however, seems to have many different modes of communication. Even in the Gorgias, Plato makes Socrates break form and enter into a sophistry in order to reach the conclusion his argument needs.
In the Phaedrus, the first three speeches could in fact be read as rhetorical arguments that do carry with them some sophistic traits. One could even view Socrates’ two speeches as sophisism, because he clearly displays the ornate ability to argue a single point from both sides of the issue -even if it is erotic pleasure that is crafting his words or the gods speaking through him. So are we to assume that sophistic rhetoric is bad or are we to assume that sophistic rhetoric is indeed an art which can be studied and utilized if the situation dictates (keep in mind Socrates’ comment about Isocrates)? It seems the later point is what Plato is truly getting at in the Phaedrus. It appears that Plato prefers the dialectic, because the philosopher is supposed to be the lover of wisdom, but the philosopher must also be able to give the simple soul a simple argument. So if the interlocutor is craving a sophistic argument it is the philosopher’s duty to produce a sophistic argument in order to appease the interlocutor’s soul. So maybe, the true philosopher is the rhetorician who has a command of situational ethics, or the idea of Karios as presented in Mark Pepper’s post, and uses it with Platonic virtue as a means to discover or persuade truth.
Based on my previous claim, I think we can view the two speeches of Socrates in the Phaedrus as an attempt to create a specific speech that is properly construction for a specific soul. In this case, Socrates has created a wonderful speech for Phaedrus, who is a lover of speeches, with the purpose of persuading Phaedurs to become a lover of wisdom rather than a lover of speeches. As Socrates points out near the end of the Phaedrus:
[I]t is much nobler to be serious about these matters, and use the art of dialectic. The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge - discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it as happy as any human being can be (553).
In a sense then, the Phaedrus is constructed as an illustration of how someone can achieve the type of teaching and style of rhetoric Plato is advocating. In so doing, both Socrates and Phaedrus’ flying chariot team have the ability to grow very long wings and make it to heave, because only philosophers can do that according to Plato.
Ps: This is also somewhat of a preview for Aristotle.
In Phaedrus, I think we start to get a much clearer sense of Plato’s Socrates’ view of rhetoric. In the first two speeches—Lysias’ speech read by Phaedrus, and Socrates’ initial response—we are given examples of what Socrates sees as the misuse of oratory. Socrates then gives a very different speech on love, one that proposes an alternate view and is suffused with Platonic philosophical notions about ideals/forms. (I’m really interested, by the way, in the relationship between madness and self-control that he presents here, as it relates both to love and rhetorical/literary invention.) Plato’s Socrates then deftly switches to dialectic as instructs Phaedrus that rhetoric in itself is not bad, but it must always be subordinated to philosophy and dialectic, which seek the Good and True:
“It is not speaking or writing well that’s shameful; what’s really shameful is to engage in either of them shamefully or badly” (258, d).
“Won’t someone who is to speak well and nobly have to have in mind the truth about the subject he is going to discuss?” (259, e).
“As the Spartan said, there is no genuine art of speaking without a grasp of truth, and there never will be” (261, a).
“The reason they cannot define rhetoric is that they are ignorant of dialectic. It is their ignorance that makes them think they have discovered what rhetoric is when they have mastered only what it is necessary to learn as preliminaries” (269, c).
So, there is such a thing as a valid art of rhetoric: that which is grounded in the dialectic, a philosophical rhetoric. This is the true rhetoric, for Plato’s Socrates.
On another point, Socrates’ specific statements about writing are really fascinating (especially when we consider that Plato was such a prolific writer, and that Socrates himself is to some extent a literary character). Given Socrates’ charge that writing is inferior because it doesn’t partake of the dialectic, that words are inert and do not have the interactive quality of discussion, I wonder what Plato’s Socrates would think of writing in the digital age, which, as numerous scholars have pointed out, has revived certain aspects of oral culture, including interactivity.