Chapter 4: Philosophical Rhetoric

• Intro
  • rhetoric is closely connected to democracy and new ideas, so the conversative power does not like it
  • Socrates: rejects nomos, or convention
    • anti-democracy
    • little has been done by Athenian democracy and justice by lawcourt rhetoric
    • philosophical rhetoric: anti-democratic in origin (or against a version of democracy in Athens)
    • Plato’s works about rhetoric:
      • Republic, Symposium, Menexenus, Apology, Gorgias, Phaedrus.
• Plato’s Apology of Socrates
  • Apology is the earliest work of Plato, so it might be closet to the actual Socrates
    • the trial of Socrates
    • Socrates claims that he speaks the whole truth.
    • In Socrates’s speech, btw proemium and epilogue, there are 3 main parts:
      • a statement of the case (Socrates’s defense)
      • an explanation (with a narration)
      • a refutation (mainly dialectical, thoughts on death)
        • In 3rd part, Socrates blames orators, not jurors
    • excursus: digression, parekbasis, a digression that supports a deeper understanding of the ethical situation
      • ethical digression: a feature in classical rhetoric
• Plato’s Gorgias
  • Socrates vs Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles
  • (1) Socrates vs Gorgias: definition of rhetoric
  • (2) Socrates vs Polus (Gorgias’s follower): whether it is better to do or to suffer wrong; how rhetoric should be used
  • (3) Socrates vs Callicles: how one should live
  • one after another, each removed from sympathy to Socrates
  • Socrates uses dialectic
    • In Meno: false knowledge must be destroyed
    • dialectic is the only acceptable form of philosophical reasoning
    • In theory, the participants do not have certainty
      • But Socrates always has a predilection and his hypothesis has to be correct
      • Plato’s explanation: truth is not discovered, but recollected (from Phaedrus)
      • My notes: Dialectic involves testing hypothesis, so it should be against certainty, but Socrates seems to maintain certainty at the beginning. But does dialectic always lead to the truth?
    • In some situations, Plato seems to recognize that dialectic won’t work, and the only alternative is rhetoric.
  • Socrates vs Gorgias
    • General definition of rhetoric: rhetoric is an art of faculty to present subject matter persuasively.
      • sphere: lawcourts, council, assembly, public meetings
      • subjects: deals with justice
      • a persuasion that produces belief, not knowledge
      • Gorgias is portrayed as someone with lower level of knowledge
      • However, Kennedy points out
        • rhetoric can deal with other subjects
        • rhetoric can deal with both knowledge and belief
    • knowledge: grounded in nature, not in convention
    • knack: not knowledge, but flattery, a tool (makes the unknowing seem to know more than the knowing)
    • Real Gorgias: in his On the Nonexistent or On Nature, shows he does not have a higher level of knowledge, but he is willing to teach and learn
      • Gorgias is in the state of learning and subject to changes.
    • Socrates, in contrast, has a overestimated high expectation to expertise
      • he believes the general public cannot make good public policies.
      • he mechanically distinguishes the expert from the orator: no spirit of inter-disciplines
        • e.g. the builder is a master and the rhetor is a flatter
        • Socrates fails to see the co-existence of rhetoric and the knowledge of a builder.
    • Gorgias distinguishes btw rhetoric (amoral) and orator (morality)
      • the orator has moral responsibilities
  • Socrates vs Polus
    • rhetoric
      • is not techne, not based on knowledge and rule
      • is empeiria, a matter of experience,
      • is a tribe a knack (an empirical cleverness)
      • other 3 empeiriai
        • sophistic argument (verbal tricks)
        • cosmetics or ornamentation
        • cookery
      • empeiriai are forms of flattery, and reflections of true arts
    • True arts: 2 groups (or provinces): based on true knowledge, aim at the good
      • soul (or politics)
        • (1) legislation: normative, future
        • (2) jurisdiction (the art of administering justice): corrective, past
      • body
        • (1) gymnastics (or training): normative, future
        • (2) medicine (curing bodily illness): corrective, past
    • Flattery: 2 groups: based on experience, aim at pleasures
      • soul
        • (1) sophistic: in a sham form, inducing fake principles
          • normative, future (compared with legislation. it is more about educating people with false knowledge)
        • (2) rhetoric: in a sham form, persuading audience by flattery that something is just
          • corrective, past (compared with jurisdiction, in lawcourt)
      • body
        • (1) cosmetics or ornamentation: counterpart to gymnastics
        • (2) cookery: counterpart to medicine
        • Even though, Kennedy mentions cosmetics and cookery as the counterparts for gymnastics and medicine, but he does not state clearly whether these two body knacks have the normative and corrective features.
    • conclusion: better to suffer injustice than to do injustice; a person who is not punished for crimes is worse.
  • Socrates vs Callicles
    • a failed pedagogy from Socrates:
      • the emotion and the good willing to learn from Callicles is consumed.
      • (1) fatigued Gorgias, (2) incompetent Polus, (3) emotionally repulsive Callicles (4) Socrates’s insistence to certainty
    • Callicles: justice is convention, not nature
    • Socrates: poetry as a form of rhetorical public address
      • the current rhetoric is shameless
      • there should be another rhetoric: to cultivate the soul, and the orator is morally good
  • Conclusion:
    • one must study to be good
    • bad must be punished
    • flattery should be avoided
    • rhetoric should be only used for justice
  • Socrates’s flaw:
    • does not separate politics from rhetoric
    • However, I think Socrates separates them, one as the true knowledge of the soul, the other as the flattery to the soul.
  • Isocrates:
    • orator needs to be morally good
    • relative to situation
    • standards can be more flexible.
  • Gorgias is the first example to identify rhetoric with flattery and deceit
  • Interpretation of Gorgias: attack rhetoric as that practiced in the time of radical democracy in 5th century BC
    • Quintilian: Plato was against those who use speech for evil purposes
  • In 2nd century AD, sophist Aelius Aristides had 3 works to respond to Platonic Socrates’s indictment of rhetoric
• Plato’s Phaedrus
  • subjects: love, spoken and written words
  • the foundation for Aristotle’s Rhetoric
  • organization: introduction + 3 speeches
    • (0) Introduction
      • Lysia: a young man should love the one who does love him, but physically attracted to him.
      • to be what a deceitful rhetoric is
      • corrupt the soul
    • (1) Socrates’s first speech
      • criticizes Lysia’s speech’s structure
      • improves the organization:
        • a definition of love, a logical division of the subject, arguments are similar to Lysia
      • after the speech, Socrates turns to Phaedrus saying that he does not agree with what is said in the speech
      • Both the introduction and the first speech talk about “attention” or winning the attention of the lover.
    • (2) Socrates’s second speech
      • love is a form of mania (madness)
      • madness is not evil, and beneficent madness in 4 forms
        • inspiration of prophet
        • rites of purification
        • poetic inspiration
        • madness of love
      • To understand love, we have to understand the “soul”
        • soul as a charioteer and two winged horses
          • horse 1: spiritual and noble
          • horse 2: physical and evil
        • soul was in the heaven to see Beauty and Truth
        • But when a soul is born, it forgets, but it is still drawn to beauty
        • the greatest human life: to live a philosophical and orderly life
      • the 2nd speech is not a public speech, but it addresses the soul, it has the ethical implications.
    • Analysis of the first half of Phaedrus
      • the first half: good vs evil
      • Lysias: evil
      • Socrates’s 1st speech: a bigger victory of evil,
        • more sophistic clever, using dialectic for evil purposes
      • Socrates’s 2nd speech: a victory of philosophical rhetoric
    • (3) Socrates’s third speech
      • conceptualize rhetorical composition and considers the content of rhetorical handbooks
      • Subject 1: writing speech
        • Socrates’s preliminary definition of rhetoric:
          • “a kind of leading the soul by means of words, not only in lawcourts and public assemblies but in individual encounters”
          • so one-to-one occasion (private rhetoric) can be rhetorical
            • different from classical rhetoric: space limited to public speaking
            • However, Aristotle does not take the suggestion
        • speakers should be able to divide the subject into logical categories
          • Lysia’s speech fails in doing so
        • the sense of unity (most influential principle of literary criticism in Plato)
          • reflected in Aristotle’s notion of tragedy
            • beginning, middle, and end
          • scattered materials into a single idea
          • divide materials into species
          • For Socrates, who can do these (categories and unity) are “dialecticians”
          • Kennedy notes: the true rhetoricians can do the same
      • Subject 2: knowledge
        • rhetorical ability: combination of nature, knowledge, and practice
        • Aristotle: emotion is important
          • the audience has the equality with the speaker in the speech
        • Socrates: souls as types not as individuals
        • Orators need to know more knowledge
          • because small differences can only be detected by a person with full knowledge
          • “the probable is a semblance of the true, and can only be known by knowing truth” (73, or Phaedrus 273d-e)
          • To know the difference, or to detect knowledge from flattery, one needs to know more knowledge. And knowledge is there as to be remembered, so it is static. One can only know more or less.
      • the value of speaking and writing
        • negative view on writing
          • writing encourages forgetfulness
          • forgetfulness separates us from Good and Beauty
        • the superiority of dialectic
          • in its question-and-answer process of exploring an hypothesis
        • rhetoric: it is like writing, without an opportunity for questioning
      • paradoxes in Platonic Socrates, he is
        • a rhetorician who distrust rhetoric
        • a poet who abolishes traditional poetry
        • an admirer of oral dialectic but published dialogues (in writing)
• Aristotle
  • Peripatetic school: walking around with covered walkways
    • Theophrastus succeeded Aristotle’s school
  • Aristotle’s contributions:
    • (1) map of learning: each discipline with a name
    • (2) a detailed description of logic
      • as a tool discipline (organa)
      • with no specific subject matter
      • with methods for many subjects
      • In Aristotle’s work Organon, he includes tools as
        • formal logic, scientific demonstration (apodeixis), and dialectic (in the Topics)
  • Division of intellectual activities in 3 categories (in Aristotle’s Metaphysics)
    • theoretical: e.g. math, aim to know
    • practical: e.g. ethics and politics, aim to do
    • productive: e.g. creating a poem or a work of art, aim to make
    • Science vs Art
      • Science: cannot be other than they are; so science is true, not what is probable.
      • Art: in the realm of probable, to realize a potential
        • it concerns with “the coming into being of something which is capable of being or not being”
        • The probable, or “coming into being” is resulted from the operation of 4 causes (in Aristotle’s Physics)
          • (1) material cause
          • (2) formal cause, e.g. pattern, to create a form
          • (3) efficient cause, e.g. the maker
          • (4) the final cause, more like the aim or goal
        • In rhetoric, the 4 causes
          • (1) material cause: words, arguments, topics
          • (2) formal cause: 3 species of rhetoric
            • judicial, deliberative, and epideictic
          • (3) efficient cause: speaker with morality
          • (4) final cause: persuasion to right judgment, action or belief
            • But different species of rhetoric has their own final causes
            • judicial: justice
            • deliberative: advantageous
            • epideictic: honorable
  • Aristotle’s general concept of rhetoric
    • the counterpart of dialectic
    • a tool discipline
      • has theoretical, practical, and productive levels of activity
    • But Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is not stable; rhetoric as
      • persuasion
      • a branch of dialectic
      • ethical part in politics
      • practical art in politics
      • productive art
  • Rhetoric
    • Book 1: outline of Aristotle’s philosophical rhetoric + rhetorical invention
    • Book 2: rhetorical invention
    • Book 3: delivery, style, and arrangement
    • Book 1
      • rhetoric and dialectic
        • rhetoric as the counterpart of dialectic
        • neither falls within any distinct discipline
        • Aristotle’s dialectic is different from Plato/Socrates
          • Reasoning levels:
            • the best: apodeixis or demonstration
              • reasoning from scientifically true premises
            • dialectic:
              • reasoning from premises that are generally accepted
        • dialectic is useful in 3 ways:
          • (1) intellectual training
          • (2) determining the truth
          • (3) connection with various intellectual disciplines
        • Aristotle fails to note how rhetoric is different from dialectic
        • But there are some differences
          • Form:
            • rhetoric in continuous discourse
            • dialectic in the form of question-and-answer debate
          • Audience:
            • rhetoric has large audience
            • dialectic in one-on-one
          • Subject
            • rhetoric: deals with concrete or practical questions
            • dialectic: deals with philosophical and general questions
          • Emotion
            • rhetoric: arouse emotion
            • dialectic: not arouse emotion
          • Focus
            • rhetoric: a good character of the speaker
            • dialectic: only the argument matters
      • Another definition of rhetoric (81)
        • “Rhetoric … is useful, for the audience cannot be expected to come to the right conclusion if the truth is not presented so people can understand it.”
          • Rhetoric is used to clarify the truth for people who don’t see it yet.
    • Chapter 2 in Book 1
      • definition of rhetoric: “a dynamis, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion.”
        • dynamis: potentiality, power, ability, faulty
        • in each case: rhetoric deals with particulars
          • different from dialectic: deals with the general or universals
      • 2 means or modes of persuasion
        • atechnoi:
          • atechnic, non-artistic, external modes
          • not invented by the orator
          • are used
          • e.g. witnesses, written contracts, direct evidence
        • entechnoi
          • entehnic, artistic, internal modes (3 sorts)
            • ethos (speaker)
              • personal character of the speaker
              • different from nowadays, Aristotle’s ethos should be established by what is said and should not be a matter of authority or the previous reputation of the speaker
                • reason: ethos should be created, not as an atechnoi, to be used; the authority of the speaker is in the external of the speech occasion.
            • pathos (audience)
              • emotion
            • logos (speech)
              • a matter of enthymemes
      • More information about logos, enthymemes, and dialectic
        • Argument can be
          • inductive:
            • from examples to generalization
            • etymology: (in) lead to, advance to the grace of god (general)
          • deductive
            • from generalization to specific conclusion
            • enthymeme: similar to syllogism
              • syllogism has 3 premises
                • (1) major premise: All humans are mortal.
                • (2) minor premise: Socrates is a human.
                • (3) conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
              • enthymeme: one premise is omitted
                • Socrates is mortal because he is human.
                • (omitting the major premise, all humans are mortal)
                • relying on audience to infer the missing premise.
                  • Notes: so in the white paper protest case, one of the premises is missing (signs for demands), but audience in the context knows what happened. It is a case of using enthymeme. And enthymeme is in the state of incompleteness, a state of want.
            • etymology: de (down) lead to, to demonstrate
        • about examples (as witness)
          • historical examples
          • invented examples
            • the parable: comparison
            • the fable
          • proof from example can take syllogistic form
        • enthymeme (83)
          • Isocrates: a thought or idea uttered by an orator
          • Aristotle: in Prior Analytics, enthymeme is as syllogism based on probabilities or signs
            • so it is expected that enthymeme is used in dialectic, to deal with probabilities
          • But in the Topics, Aristotle
            • dialectical argument is called syllogism
            • rhetorical argument is called enthymeme
              • different names: less rigorous logical context in speech
              • enthymeme connected to syllogism, but less formal
              • orators suppresses one of the premises
            • for Aristotle, any syllogistic argument in a rhetorical context is an enthymeme (enthymeme is syllogism in rhetoric)
              • whether the premises are certain or only probable
              • whether there are two or only one premises
          • 2 ways to categorize enthymeme
            • (1) Source of premises
              • probabilities
              • signs
            • (2) subject/topics discussed (idia)
              • koinoi topoi: common topics, without no specific subjects
              • 4 koina (commonalities)
                • the possible and the impossible
                • past fact,
                • future fact
                • magnitude
              • dialectic topics
          • 3 kinds of audience to 3 species of rhetoric
            • judges of past action: juridical (chapters 4-8)
            • judges of future action: deliberative (chapters 10-15)
            • spectators: present time, judge of the effectiveness of a speech
            • epidictic and deliberative overlap, different in styles
              • Usually, what is epideictic is deliberative, written in epideictic styles.
            • Notes: In the White Paper protest, different audience read the situation in different genres. The public reads it as deliberative rhetoric, since it calls for an action. The authority reads it as epideictic, since it blames government’s policies.
            • for Perelman and Olbrechet-Tyteca
              • epideictic is noncontroversial
              • aim at adhering to an accepted value
    • Book 3: Style and Arrangement
      • delivery and voice
      • difference between language of poetry and language of prose
        • In Poetics, Aristotle prefers a simple and clear style of composition
      • the concept of mean: related to 中庸
      • Theophrastus: On Style: a standard list of 4 virtues
        • correctness, clarity, ornamentation, and propriety
      • Aristotle always discussed styles in book 3, can be used as a reference for the development of early forms of composition
      • Arrangement (taxis)
        • 2 necessary parts: proposition and proof
        • at most: proemium, statement, proof, epilogue, and sometimes narration.
        • 4 amphisbeteseis “points open to dispute” (it is about morality)
          • whether something is actually done
          • whether it causes harm
          • whether it is important
          • whether it is just
        • stasis (question at issue)
• The Philosophical Tradition after Aristotle
  • the Stoics: distinction between tropes and figures of speech
  • Neo-platonic philosophers: study of rhetoric to train mind
  • Cicero: On Invention on the relation between philosophy and rhetoric
    • again morality
    • wisdom + eloquence
  • Quintilian: influenced Saint Augustine’s On Christian Learning
• Dialectic and Rhetoric in Antiquity
  • Aristotle’s Topic
    • topos: place
      • a topic is to find a place for an argument
    • Book 1:
      • distinguishes scientific demonstration from dialectic (probable reasoning)
      • 3 kinds of propositions:
        • ethical,
        • physical,
        • logical
          • 4 predicables: definition, property, genus, and accident (Book 2 is on this)
      • propositions are basis for deductive and inductive reasoning
        • deductive: in the form of syllogism
      • syllogism can be applied in 4 ways
        • the provision of propositions
        • an ability to distinguish different meanings of words
        • the discovery of differences
        • investigation of similarities