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Week #4, Continued: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, February 9th.
Previous Notes for 1st two weeks begin here | Previous Notes for 3rd week
 The Works (to be studied and discussed: |
 1. Plato, Sophist (Trans. Cornford)
2. Gorgias (Trans. Hembold)
3. Phaedrus (Trans. Hembold and Rabinowitz)
And
4. Gorgias, "On Non-Being" or "On the Nonexistent or On Nature" (paraphrased by Sextus, Trans. Geo. Kennedy)
5. "Encomium of Helen" (Trans. Geo. Kennedy)
Supplemental Readings (in following sequence):
1. J. Poulakos, "Rhetoric, the Sophists, and the Possible";
2. Schiappa, "Neo-Sophistic Rhetorical Criticism or the Historical Reconstruction of
Sophistic Doctrines?";
3. J. Poulakos, "Interpreting Sophistical Rhetoric: A Response to
Schiappa";
4. Schiappa, "History and
Neo-Sophistic Criticism: A Reply to Poulakos";
5. Schiappa, "Sophistic Rhetoric: Oasis or Mirage?";
6. Vitanza, "The Sophists?"
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Plato: The Sophist-Rhetoric Dialogues: |
1. Sophist (Trans. Cornford)
The issue here, among other issues, is immediately NAMES. (Proper! Names, such as Sophist, statesman philosopher, etc. [217a].) The hunt for Names is usually done by way of Diaeresis or Division of Names (see Kerferd 74). The Question in dis/respect to Names will be, What is a Sophist? (Later, in the Gorgias, the question will be, What is Rhetoric?) The form of the dialectical (ontological) questioning will be that of definition (the establishment of limits for Names):
species (to be) genus and differentiae.
| Hamilton and Cairns, the editors of Plato: The Collected Dialogues, write: "The argument [in the dialogue] is hung on the figure of the Sophist apparently quite arbitrarily. No real picture is given of the men who were the professional instructors of Greece for many years. All Plato does is to ascribe to them every notion he disapproves. He detested the whole band of Sophists. To him they were shallow-minded, pretentious, superficial, mercenary--they were really doing what Socrates was charged with, corrupting the minds of the young" (958).
Cf. Stanley Rosen, Plato's Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image. Also, very important for general introduction to the Sophists are W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists and G.B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement. |
In the opening lines, the introduction of issues and of "characters," there is the all-so-humorous introduction of the Stranger, who is asked by Socrates,
Which do you commonly prefer--to discourse at length by yourself on any matter you wish to make clear, or to use the method of asking questions, as Parmenides himself did on one occasion in developing some magnificent arguments in my presence, when I was young and he quite an elderly man? (217c).
The Stranger responds:
When the other party to the conversation is tractable and gives no trouble, to address him is the easier course; otherwise, to speak by oneself.
There's much here to comment on: We have, in one sense, the introduction of the difference between the rhetor-sophist (who supposedly engages in a monologue) and the philosopher (who engages with the other in a dialogue, dialectic). The Stranger would favor the former if the partner should prove to be intractable! but will go with the latter. Essentially, what the partner is to do is say, as a puppet or stooge would, Yea or Nay, when appropriate (when proper). The questioning, therefore, is really a monologue led by the teacher or, as some would have it, the inquirer after truth. It should be said here, however, that from a traditional philosophical point of view, a person as a partner who cannot follow the discussion in a logical manner, or who does not know the language (cf. Plato's Meno on remembrance of truth) can be of little help and only a problem. So much for teaching!, which is what the dialogues, in a great sense, were for: teaching people how to engage in the new thinking of the philosophical critique of Names. And of course, the dialogues were for the greater glory of Plato's way....
The setting of limits today in postphilosophical thinking is set aside, or overpowered, by a transgression of limits. (See Foucault Language, Counter-Memory, Practice.) The setting of limits can and does create the conditions of excluding much that can and will only manifest itself as a return of the repressed, or as Foucault suggests, the counter-memory!
The method (or mode of production) of the Angler:
The dialogue opens with the extended metaphor of the Angler who catches what there is to catch with his nets (or terministic screen). The Angler uses the approch of the Tree, the offshoots, the binaries. The Stranger--don't you un/just love the name of The Stranger, especially in the facelessness of the Proper Name and then in the facelessness of the Freudian Stranger [the Uncanny]--... The Stranger describes and applies the Angler's method and hopes to catch the Sophist (What is ...?) in the Net(work) of Parmenidean-Socratic-Platonic thinking, though The Stranger will have to kill off Father Parmenides (see 237a, 241d, 242c, 258c-d) in catching What this Thing Called Sophist IS!
The Stranger weaves (exemplifies) the Net that he would eventually catch "Sophist" in by illustrating the method of division and subdivision in the following manner. Here, however, he is concerned with the idea of Acquisition (Conquest and Exchange) vs. Production, "in which class [genus] shall we place the art of the angler [species]"?
First, Art of Acquisition (Conquest, exemplifying debates for profit):
Second, Acquisition (Exchange, exemplifying huckster of the ideas of others):
Then, Art of Production (exemplifying insincere manufacture of false images):
(These three tree representations, though modified, are from Andrea Nye  .)
In summary and in the extended metaphor of the angler-net, The Strang(l)er says:
Then now you and I have come to an understanding not only about the name of the angler's art, but about the difinition of the thing itself. One half of all art was acquisitive--half of the acquisitive art was conquest or taking by force, half of this was hunting, and half of hunting was hunting animals; half of this was hunting water animals; of this again, the under half was fishing; half of fishing was striking; a part of striking was fishing with a barb, and one half of this again, being the kind which strikes with a hook and draws the fish from below upward, is the art which we have been seeking, and which from the nature of the operaiton is denoted angling or drawing up [catching, the Big Catch through poria, which, however, can become The Big Catch that GotAway, through aporia!]. (218d-221d; bold emphasis mine)
Enough of this!
And so, The St. Ranger says: "...let us endeavor to find out what a Sophist is" (221c).
The outcome--I am not going to reHearse the whole catch and killing--IS caught appearing in the following "guises":
"hired hunter of rich young men"
"merchant of learning as nourishment of the soul"
"retail dealer in the same wares"
a seller of "products of his own manufacture"
"an athlete in debate, apprpriating that subdivision of contention which consists in the art of eristic"
"a purifier of the soul from conceits that block the way to understanding" (231d-e)
Then The StrAng(l)er concludes:
"Now does it strike you that when one who is known by the name of a single art appears to be master of many, there is something wrong with this appearance? If one has that impression of any art, plainly it is because one cannot see clearly that feature of it in which all these forms of skill converge, and so one calls their possessor by many names instead of one." (232a; bold emphasis mine)
And Da Stranger also asks-concludes:
But about the Sophist, tell me, is it now clear that he is a sort of wizard, an imitator of real things--or are we still uncertain whether he may not possess genuine knowledge of all the things he seems capable of disputing about?
Theaetetus: He cannot, sir. It is clear enough from what has been said that he is one of those whose province is play.
Stranger: Then we may class [genus-cide] him as a wizard and an imitator of some sort.
Thea-tetanus: Certainly. (234e-235a; misspellings mine!!! hahahahahaha)
And then, most worriedly, the Regnarts concludes:
The truth is, my friend, that we are faced with an extremely difficult question. This 'appearing' or 'seeming' without really 'being,' and the saying of something which yet is not true--all these expressions have always been and still are deeply involved in perplexity. It is extremely hard, Theaetetus, to find correct terms in which one may say or think that falsehoods [Nothing, the nonexistent] have a real existence [cf. Gorgias's "nothing exists"; Schiappa's the sophists, oasis or mirage?], without being caught in a contradiction by the mere utterance of such words....
The audacity of the statement lies in its implication that 'what is not' has being...." (236e-237a)
Thereafter, the dialogue gets into the One and the Many issue. Any One Thing that is a plural--that is, Many Things--is only in a statelessness of appearance. But, as The Stranger points to the scandal of scandals, we should, given Father Parmenides's warning, "hold back [our] thought from this way" (237a). The scandal of scandals is that apparently we cannot not speak of this mirage of what is not!, as he has just proven. Yes, he has fallen into a contradiction, has violated the 2nd law of logic. Therefore, The Stranger must eventually deal with this problem and therefore the issue is no longer the Sophist but the reestablishment of the method in terms of forms (248a). In passing, the "Sophist" (that which does not exist, for the thingless is in the realm of the Many) becomes the very epitome of the problem of contra-diction and hence is depicted as "our Hydra-headed Sophist" (240c).
The issue, moreover, becomes just One thing, not many things.
| Andrea Nye, in Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic, has an invaluable discussion of Parmenides and of Plato and the Sophist. |
Let's complicate as The Stranger does: There is not One, Two, Many in relation to the real or truth. There can be definitely no Third (many) thing. There can be no "third thing" (250b; cf. Vitanza, "The Sophists?" and elsewhere). If we accept this third thing, we will be forced to go against the third law of logic, the excluded middle--while all along we will have been incipiently going against the first law of logic, identity. If we transgress the third law, the excluded middle, we get but muddle, The Stranger (the masked man?) says. VVell then, the MUDDLE!
The Stranger continues with these distinctions:
The difference between the philosopher (good) and the sophist (bad)
The kinds of forms that will allow for a look at the truth:
The Stranger returns and finally concludes:
The art of contradiciton making, descended from an insincere kind of conceited mimicry, of the semblance-making breed, derived from image making, distinguished as a portion, not divine but human, of production, that presents a shadow play of words--such are the blood and lineage which can, with perfect truth, be assigned to the authentic Sophist.
Theaetetus: I entirely agree [yeasuh! Mastah!]
"the authentic Sophist"!!! Oh, the ironies ring endlessly......
2. Gorgias (Trans. Hembold)
This dialogue is the most harsh and satirically biting against sophists (i.e., anyone who is not a follower of Plato) and rhetoric (i.e., any signifying practice that is not formed by philosophical dialectic). It is in three part, growing in wild intensity as we move to the third (!): Gorgias himself allegedly, Polus (Young Colt), and Callicles (near fascist as presented).
What we will do in class is take a look at the opening satirical (if so) treatment of Gorgias in the Q&A. He is, of course, made to look like a fool when Plato writes "him." For a give and take (dialectic) exchange, obviously "Socrates" has all of the words. But what is important about the discussion, the discovery that the species "Rhetoric" is looking at the many and not the one is very, very important here. The questions of the dialectic assume, as they must, that in our words today "Rhetoric" is a discipline, or a specific science, and not a "universal" one, as it is for Aristotle in his Rhetoric, which we will get to next week. And because of this assumption, there is nothing but speaking at cross purposes. Every question is a double articulation, meaning one thing by "Socrates" and meaning yet another by "Gorgias."
In the second part of the dialogue--that with Polus (the young student)--"Socrates" says that rhetoric is the counterpart of "cookery" (465).
In the second part of the dialogue--that with Callicles--all things rhetoric are seen as extremely un/questionable (since irrational), if not downright bad and evil.
There is obviously more to say--and we will in seminar and during the semester say more--but now I must go on to the next dialogue.
3. Phaedrus (Trans. Hembold & Rabinowitz)
This dialogue, like the Gorgias, is composed of three sections, or this time speeches: One is prepared by Lysias (231-234), another is Socrates's first speech (237-241), and the final one is Socrates's second speech (244-257).
Topics/Notes concerning the...
The Discussion Prior to the First Speech:
The first big issue, for us, the the distinction Mythos vs. Logos. The tale (mythos) of Boreas ahving carried off Oreithyia! Phaedrus asks Socrates: "do you really believe in the truth of this tale?" (229). His reponse is that he has time, no "leisure," only for "conduct[ing] my researches not into them [the characters in the tale], butinto myself" (229-230). But of course he has time for the mythos of his second speech! Socrates adds: "My appetite is for learning. Trees and countryside have no desire to teach me anything; it's only the men in the city that do. You, however, seem to have found the remedy [spell, charm] to draw me out" (230).
First Speech: Lysias's speech. The speech of the 'non-lover'.
The lover who is sick with love is irrational; the lover who is a non-lover rational, stable. Blah, Blah, Blah! The speech is filled with commonplaces!
The dialogue between Phaedrus and Socrates becomes one of seduction, with us caught in the tension of wondering who is seducing whom here. (Phaedrus suggests to Socrates that he is younger and stronger than Socrates and that he could force him to speak.)
Second Speech: Socrates's first speech. The speech of the 'evil-lover'.
Socrates continues in the vein of the Professor of Desire, examining desire (appetite), as Aristotle will do at great length (and R. Barthes as well). Along with desire, he discusses the master/servant relationship (cf. Hegel in the Phenomenology and Kojeve in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel) in a relationship founded on desire (so-called love). After the speech, he examines various kinds of 'madness'.
Socrates speaks to the issue of "the lover and the non-lover" in relation "to a lad who consorts with them. Now the one is mastered by desire and a slave to pleasure.... [T]he lover will not willingly endure to have his beloved stronger or an equal but will continually strive to make him weaker or inferior" (238-239). This is the problem of the Social! The Master/Slave relationship! And it is important to see how it is being worked out here and especially in the third speech by Plato-"Socrates".
The issue of Madnesses inevitably must be dealt with in relation to both desire/s (passion, emotion, and finally the obsessions of some lovers) and inner voices. The latter is important, for Socrates stops midway through this second (his first) speech: "when I was about to cross the river, there came to me the divine familiar sign which always holds me back from something I'm about to do. I thought I heard a voice which forbade me to go away until I had made atonement for an impiety to heaven" (242).
Socrates hears voices! What kind of voices? The exclamation and question are taken up in the ...
Third Speech: Socrates's second speech.
Socrates opens:
It is not ture, that tale which declares that if taking a lover is in view, one shuld rather yield to a non-lover on the ground that a lover is out of his senses, while a non-lover is perfectly sane. If it were true that madness is invariably an evil, then the statement would be correct; but, in fact, the greatest benefits come to us through madness when it is bestowed on us as a figt of the gods" (244).
Madnesses, the un/kinds:
Socrates's ancestors spoke of Mania, "madness under devine guidance"
Socrates's contemporaries changed Mania to Mantic, which is practiced by "the uninspired and sane who inquire into the future by observing bird-flights and other such indications: on the ground that this skill, proceeding from purely human reasoning, produced merely understanding and information, they called it oionoistic,... The first proceeds from a god, the other from mere man" (244).
Socrates's third form of madness is that which "comes from the Muses" (245).
It is the first kind of madness--Mania, madness divinely inspired and that guides [hegemon, on which our 'hegemony' is built]--that now, so to speak, kicks in and becomes the subject matter of Socrates's second speech. And then we get the allegory of the charoteer who has to deal with two horses, "one of them is noble and handsome and of good breeding, while theother is the very opposite, so that our charioteer necessarily has a difficult and troublesome task" (246). I am not going to paraphrase or quote the long passage on its way to the Divine Banquet. But of special importance is the beginning of Plato's discussion of what is eventually called the Great Chain of Being (see A. O. Lovejoy, The History of an Idea: The Great Chain of Being). Plato uses this hierarchical set to explain just where souls fall that are not perfect enough to enter the heaven (of forms [and get some of the chow of the Divine Banquet!]) he describes. The level at which they fall in the Social hierarchy is determined by the most "Reality" they have seen (248), that is, how much they agree or disagree with what goes for "Reality" as predetermined by Plato and Co. (I keep wondering if there is a sign up near the DB that says to all, "No sprouting Wings, No Entry." Or We reserve the right to refuse service to people without their wings! [Yeah, it's congregation by way of segregation!])
The Hierarchy:
The Philosopher (!)
The Good Monarch
The Statesman, man of business or merchant
"hard-working athlete or physician"
"prophet's life or a priest of the mysteries"
"poet's life or some other devoted to imitation will be proper"
"the craftsman or a farmer"
"a sophist or a demagogue" (!)
"a tyrant"
Let's interrupt and say that at this point in the speech, "Socrates" mentions a fourth Madness: "when a man sees beauty in this world and has a rembembrance of true beauty, he begins to grow wings. While they are sprouting, he is eager to fly, but he cannot.... [T]he man who partakes of this madness and loves beauty is called a lover" (249). He is a noble lover! A Philosopher, that is, a Lover of Wisdom!
A Question: Is the Philosopher--as he is given to thinking and acting out his brand of wisdom, Namely, the Truth--not the Evil Lover?! Un/Just a thought!
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Gorgias: The Nature of Being, if there is a Being: |
I really have no more notes to add on these two works (plays) than are already available as "III: Still 'some more' Helens" in Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (252-269).
But ... a Few Comments, nonetheless:
Questions concerning the Gorgian Trilemma: Is on non-being a parody (as some say) of Parmenides's poem? Or is it a pastiche (as I say) of the poem? What would be the difference (in terms of ontology and epistemology) between the two questions?
Having stated the above difference, I still believe that the reason that non-being is a pastiche is because there really is, in one sense, no difference between what Parmendies (Plato, The Stranger) is saying and what Gorgias is saying:
Basically, there is no difference between Being and Non-Being, Something and NOthing. There is no difference because both are predicated on, determined in the symbolic system by, the Negative.
The Stranger seems well aware of this problem in his justification of patricide (or the justification of the purification rite [cf. Adorno's Negative Dialectic], and yet the killing of father Parmenides is for Naught. Why? Father and Stranger say but the same thing even after the Stranger thinks he has remedied (pharmakon[ed]!) the contradiction of speaking of NOthing. Things are similar only by NOt being like other things; Things are different only by NOt being like other things. What's the DifferAnce? (Again, a lengthy page-turner on this issue is to be found in my Negation....)
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The Supplementary Readings of the Schiappa-Poulakos Exchange, and My Response to Schiappa's "Sophists, Oasis or Mirage?": |
Yes, again, I have nothing more to add to what I've said in my summaries of Schiappa-Poulakos in "Some Rudiments of Histories of Rhetorics and Rhetorics of Histories," Rethinking the History of Rhetoric pp. 216-218; and of course in what I say about Schiappa in "The Sophists?"
I said nothing in our discussions of the Phaedrus about Plato's-"Socrates's" closing commentary on What a good Rhetoric--that is, a philosophical rhetoric--should look like, for I will pick up next week's discussion with this list of necessities prior to our talking about Aristotle's Rhetoric. NOtes5 >>>>
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