(excerpts)
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What do philosophers have to say about rhetoric? Generally speaking, very little qua philosophers. Like all reflective people, philosophers dislike rhetoric as it is commonly practiced, bemoan the decline of public speech into mere persuasion and demagoguery, and generally think of themselves as avoiding rhetoric in favor of careful analysis and argument. “Rhetoric” tends to have a very negative connotation, and for the most part means “mere rhetoric.” As an object of academic study, the subject of rhetoric seems best left to English professors who specialize in the long history of manuals on techniques of persuasion and such. Consequently, philosophers, especially in modernity, have had little to say about rhetoric. By contrast, Aristotle devoted a book to the topic. And Plato struggles with rhetoric — or sophistry as it is sometimes also called, although the two are not identical — repeatedly. We recall that Socrates was put to death in part because he was suspected of being a sophist, a clever rhetorician who twists words and makes the weaker argument into the stronger, and for a fee will teach others the relevant techniques.[4] Plato's polemic against the sophists was so persuasive that, in conjunction with a well established and ongoing popular hostility towards sophistry (a hostility of which Socrates was, ironically, also the object), we have come to use “sophist” as a term of opprobrium meaning something like “mere rhetorician.” In Plato's dialogues there is unquestionably an ongoing quarrel between philosophy on the one hand and rhetoric and sophistry on the other, and it too is justly famed and pondered. What is it about?
Once again, the question is surprisingly difficult. It is not easy to understand why the topic is so important to Plato, what the essential issues in the quarrel are, and whether rhetoric is always a bad thing. We do recognize commendable examples of rhetoric — say, Pericles' Funeral Oration, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, or Churchill's rousing speeches during World War II. These were rhetorical, but were they merely rhetorical, let alone sophistical? Still further, Plato's Socrates is not above speaking to his interlocutors rhetorically at times, even sophistically (some of his arguments against Thrasymachus in book I of the Rep. have been suspected of falling into the latter category, and Socrates' interlocutors are occasionally reported as feeling that he has played some kind of verbal trick on them). And are not Plato's dialogues themselves rhetorical in significant senses of the term?
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The quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy, thus understood, ultimately addresses a range of fundamental issues. “Rhetoric” is taken here to constitute an entire world view. Its quarrel with philosophy is comprehensive, and bears on the nature of nature; the existence of objective moral norms; the connection (if any) between happiness and virtue; the nature and limits of reason; the value of reason (understood as the rational pursuit of objective purpose) in a human life; the nature of the soul or self; and the question as to whether there is a difference between true and false pleasure, i.e., whether pleasure is the good. It is striking that while Socrates wants to contrast “rhetorical” speech-making with his own approach of philosophical dialogue, in practice the differences blur. Socrates too starts to speak at length, sounds rhetorical at times, and ends the discussion with a myth. Callicles advances a substantive position (grounded in a version of the distinction between nature and convention) and defends it. These transgressions of rhetorical genres to one side, from Socrates' standpoint the ultimate philosophical question at stake concerns how one should live one's life (500c). Is the life of “politics,” understood as the pursuit of power and glory, superior to the life of philosophy?
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Is all of rhetoric bad? Are we to avoid — indeed, can we avoid — rhetoric altogether? Even in Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias, as we have seen, there is a distinction between rhetoric that instills belief, and rhetoric that instills knowledge, and later in the dialogue a form of noble rhetoric is mentioned, though no examples of its practitioners can be found (503a-b)
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Many rhetoricians have artfully and effectively misled their audiences, and Socrates argues — somewhat implausibly perhaps — that in order to mislead one cannot oneself be misled. [Sitaram can easily imagine that certain demagogues, seen by history as supremely evil, were actually misled themselves by their own rhetoric]
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Rhetoric is the art of “leading the soul by means of speech” (261a8). Popular rhetoric is not an art, but a knack for persuasion. Artful rhetoric requires philosophy; but does philosophy require rhetoric? Why must philosophical discourse — say, as exemplified in “Socratic dialogue” — have anything to do with rhetoric? Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus points to the interesting thought that all discourse is rhetorical, even when the speaker is simply trying to communicate the truth — indeed, true rhetoric is the art of communicating the truth (notice the broad sweep of the discussion of discourse at 277e5-278b4). Rhetoric is present wherever and whenever people speak (261d10-e4 and context). Even when one is not sure what the truth is, and even when one is thinking through something by oneself — carrying on an inner dialogue, as it were — discourse and persuasion are present.[29] Of course, a philosopher will question assertions that he or she ought to persuaded of X; but that questioning too, the Phaedrus suggests, is part of a process aimed at warranted persuasion, and inevitably involves a mix of the “persuadability” of the philosopher on the one hand, and the truth (or falsity) of the claims on the other. The bottom line is that there is no escaping from persuasion, and so none from rhetoric — including of course from the very problem of distinguishing between warranted and unwarranted persuasion. Self-deception is an ever-present possibility (as Socrates implies here, and notes at Cratylus 428d). That is a problem about which the philosopher above all worries about. It is always a question of “leading the soul by means of speech,” even where it's a matter of the soul leading itself (or to use a phrase from earlier in the dialogue, moving itself (245e)
