Plato's writing is rhetorical. His rhetorical purpose is...to....discredit rhetoric? How the hell is that working. He clearly does not like or approve of rhetoricians and their art, and uses what they preach in order to tell us that.
My question then is whether this is on purpose or not. Is Plato ignorant that he is utilizing exactly what he claims to be simultaneously defeating? Or is he demonstrating rhetorical weaknesses? Or is Plato a crazy dude who actually secretly has a thing for rhetoric and does it all the time? I just don't get how this can all work.
Also, it took me an absurdly long time to figure out what cookery is.
Carson, the whole thing does seem a little Hypocritical to me as well. the thing is, I think that Plato wanted to breach the subject of morality and Rhetoric in order to inform the ignorant of the dangers of rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteI would have to agree with Tim. While Socrates does discredit the use of rhetoric, the whole section on virtue is written using rhetoric. Is it possible that Socrates used rhetoric to reason with himself to come to philosophical conclusions or truths?
ReplyDeleteSocrates uses rhetoric implicitly, while others claim (and do) use it explicitly. I guess that is one difference which I noticed. Further, maybe the distinction is argument as rhetoric vs. colorful and extensive language as rhetoric?
ReplyDeletePlato offers an audience a diverse look into rhetoric as a whole. To discredit rhetoric, one must have the means of persuasion to inform the audience in a way that allows them to formulate their own opinions. Who knows what Plato was thinking thousands of years ago, but I believe his writing was meant to stem the flow of conversation and to inform an audience of all matters rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sam, but Plato wrote down things as HE remembered it, not necessarily what happened live. Could Plato be putting his own spin into this transcription just to build up the story? Most likely not, but we will never know.
ReplyDeleteCarson, Aristotle makes a distinction between what Socrates is doing - dialectic - and what he calls rhetoric. Dialectic is an intimate affair that occurs between two usually highly educated people - or a small group - who can begin with particular ideas that everyone will take to be true (but that are not mathematical facts) - and then the argument proceeds from there. Rhetoric (in Aristotle's framework) is about appealing to large audiences who are less likely to have the breadth of education that participants in dialectic would have. So Aristotle too is making a distinction between these two moments. The sorts of arguments that work in dialectic, then, tend to be more discipline specific, and start from some kind of educated consensus that rhetoric (in the division) doesn't have as a starting place. There's a distinction between individual and mass effect as well.
ReplyDeleteBut you're rightly, I think, questioning that distinction, which becomes even more problematic when you think of the dialogues of Plato as designed for a broader audience. In any case, this is another of the definition constraints that we'll disregard this semester, finally. Plato is rhetoric too, and it's masterful rhetoric, rhetoric about why it's better than rhetoric.