"Honey, I Blew Up the Rhetorical Tradition!"
Comments on The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece

James Arnt Aune
@ Texas A & M University


This book is an outstanding achievement.

There is no other book by a Speech Communication scholar to rival it in its scholarship, clarity, and, for that matter, chutzpah. From his 1990 American Journal of Philology article, "Did Plato coin 'rhetorike'? onward, Edward Schiappa has sparked controversy by challenging orthodoxies in at least two fields, has carefully responded to his critics, and has earned himself a secure place at the table of the interdisciplinary Humanities.

A subtitle of Schiappa's book might be: "Honey, I blew up the rhetorical tradition!" My review focuses first on the consequences of Schiappa's "creative destruction" of traditional scholarship and then proposes an alternative formulation of the conflict between Plato and the Sophists, arguing that Schiappa has failed to examine the "standard" account of Plato as rigorously as he has the standard account of the history of rhetoric.

Now What?

The first part of the book develops further Schiappa's argument in Protagoras and Logos (1991) that Plato coined the term "rhetoric," and that this coinage matters: "prior to the coining of rhetorike, the verbal arts were understood as less differentiated and more holistic in scope than they were in the fourth century; the teaching and training associated with logos do not draw a sharp line between the goals of seeking success and seeking truth as is the case once Rhetoric and Philosophy were defined as distinct disciplines" (23). The preponderance of the evidence seems to be on Schiappa's side; his careful response to his critics is a model of scholarly controversy at its best.

The consequence of Schiappa's thesis is both the "standard" account of the origins of rhetoric and the "neosophistic" account are wrong. There is no such thing as "rhetoric" that was born with the democratization of Syracuse, was developed by the Sophists in a somewhat shallow way, was criticized by Plato in a somewhat "impractical" way, and rescued by Aristotle, whose Rhetoric found "the mean" between Sophistic relativism and Platonic idealism. But neither were the Sophists a unified movement of teachers of rhetoric and democracy, who were French feminists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists avant-la-lettre. It is anachronistic both to praise and to condemn fifth-century sophistic rhetoric.

The rest of the book is somewhat more technical; the most interesting parts are Chapter VIII, where Schiappa develops a formalization of Gorgia's "On Not-Being," making at least a provisional case for its philosophical significance, and Chapter XI (co-authored with David Timmerman), where he analyzes the de-emphasis on epideictic in Aristotle's Rhetoric.

There is no concluding chapter; after finishing the book, I found myself thinking, "Wait! Isn't something missing?" Why isn't there a chapter where the author sums up his argument and discusses its implications? Every year I teach a survey course in the history of rhetorical theory to Texas A & M undergraduates, and I teach a similar course to graduate students. I have assigned and discussed Schiappa's work for several years, but this recent book compels me to rewrite my syllabus. But how? The earlier myth of origins worked, and my students always seem to find it very interesting, especially the Corax and Tisias story. I found myself uttering the words "undifferentiated art of the logos" in class the other day, and the students seemed confused. I hope Schiappa follows up the current work with some essays or a textbook describing the pedagogical implications of his arguments.

One potential way of extending Schiappa's work is to consider the process of symbolic influence at any given point in time as consisting of three interrelated points of a triangle:

It is now possible to teach the history of rhetorical theory as punctuated by the invention of writing, printing, broadcasting, and, now, hypertext. A problem, however, with standard histories and anthologies (I am thinking especially of Bizzell and Herzberg here) is that they tend to leave out exemplary rhetorical practice. They include De oratore but not Cicero's orations, De doctrina christiana but not Augustine's preaching. Schiappa's work includes all three points of the triangle. He also points in the direction of enriching the study of rhetorical theory by including cultural elements that affect how symbolic influence is talked about at any given point in time.

The Road Not Taken

Schiappa has made his case by providing careful definitions and assembling linguistic evidence. In short, he uses the methods of traditional humanities scholarship supplemented by the more speculative theories of Eric Havelock. It seems strange, then, that Schiappa appears to endorse the neo-sophistic rejection of the difference between rhetoric and philosophy. Even given his etymological argument, the distinction between rhetorical success and the truth is a distinction that meshes with our deepest moral intuitions. Not only that, but Schiappa's account of Plato assumes that Plato is attempting to beat up the Sophists and enshrine Socrates in their place, largely in the name of the totalitarian vision expressed in the Republic. But this will not do at all. He devotes far less space to the analysis of Plato's writings than to Gorgias, Protagoras, and Aristotle. The unexamined assumption common both to the standard account of rhetoric's origins and to the neosophistic account is that Plato was hostile to rhetoric. As Schiappa writes on p. 28, "Plato may have helped to empower a discipline that his philosophical outlook found repugnant." But this assertion is plausible only if we read the Gorgias literally, and if we discount the Phaedrus.

There are too many anachronisms, puns, and puzzles in the texts of Plato for us to identify easily his positive teaching. In the Gorgias specifically, the reader is struck by the following problems: 1) Socrates bullies Gorgias in the first part of the dialogue with transparently unfair questions; 2) Socrates comes late to Callicles' house to avoid hearing Gorgias give a long speech, but the dialogue itself ends with Socrates giving a long speech in front of an audience; 3) In that final speech Socrates provides a completely different account of rhetoric from the one he gave to Polus in part two of the dialogue; 4) If Plato finds the Sophists so "repugnant," why does he make Socrates so anxious to persuade them?

Since ironies, contradictions, and wordplays are such a constant part of Plato's craft, it seems plausible that he is inviting the discerning reader to look beneath the surface of the text. We know that the dialogues were written as exoteric works, and that there were secret doctrines taught in the Academy. I would argue, following Leo Strauss (1964) and Allan Bloom (1968), that a tripartite scheme of reason, thymos (spiritedness), and appetite as the parts of the soul is the organizing principle for Plato's major dialogues, corresponding to the philosophers, warriors, and masses in the Republic. We also have the evidence of Cicero's interpretation of the Republic as addressed to spirited young men, designed to get them to moderate their political ambition. Bloom used Cicero's insight to interpret the Republic not as a design for utopia but as a lesson about the fallibility of human political designs. We can in turn read the Gorgias as a political tragedy in which the conditions for the ideal city are in place: we have the rhetorician, who can appeal to appetite; we have Callicles, the spirited young man who must be tamed; we have the philosopher, who must come back into the daylight to persuade the rhetorician and spirited one to unite for the good of the polis. But Socrates fails; he speaks longer and longer as the dialogue progresses, and yet he persuades no one. James H. Nichols, Jr.'s recent (1998) translation and commentary on the Gorgias provides further evidence that Plato's attitude toward rhetoric was by no means as hostile as traditional and neosophistic writers have argued. Plato's primary difficulty with the Sophists was their contention that rhetoric is all-powerful. Real politics requires force as well as persuasion. Democracy is not an unqualified good; it must be checked by the rule of law to prevent the abuse of minorities.

An overemphasis on the reality-creating character of discourse and a naive defense of majoritarian, participatory democracy are the two great unexamined assumptions of the neosophistic and critical-cultural turn in the humanities. A close reading of Plato remains an important check on the ethical and epistemological relativism epidemic in the contemporary university. Schiappa's careful scholarship indicates that he has aligned himself with Plato and the forces of reason, even if he cannot quite bring himself to admit it.

References

Bloom, Allan. 1968. "The Republic" of Plato. N.Y.: Basic Books.

Nichols, Jr., James H. 1998 Plato: Gorgias. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Schiappa, Edward. 1990. Did Plato Coin Rhetorike? American Journal of Philology 111: 457-70.

Schiappa, Edward. 1991. Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press.

Strauss, Leo. 1964. The City and Man. Chicago: Rand McNally.