The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic by James L. Kastely;

Author:James L. Kastely; [Kastely, James L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226278766
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-07-16T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Rhetorical Account of Philosophy

As Socrates’s struggles to get a nonphilosophical audience to not dismiss philosophy out of hand as a useless or pernicious activity has revealed, philosophy’s abiding rhetorical challenge is to persuade a nonphilosophical audience of the value of a practice in which they are incapable of participating. To provide his audience with some appreciation of this practice, he now turns to an account of dialectic. To practice philosophy is to engage ultimately in dialectic, and, according to Socrates, one pursues dialectic only after a rigorous course of study has prepared a mature person to undertake this difficult form of inquiry (536d–537d). Given this understanding of dialectic, Socrates cannot provide access to philosophy by engaging the nonphilosophic audience in dialectic. Not only would that be a futile exercise; but more importantly, it could be politically corrosive. Near the end of Book 7, Socrates is explicit about the genuinely injurious consequences of exposing a person who has not been adequately disciplined in philosophy. Such exposure leads to an ethical nihilism (537e–539c). So Socrates cannot and should not communicate what philosophy is to a nonphilosophic audience by pursuing dialectic. He must find another way to effect persuasion.

If a nonphilosophic audience cannot possess philosophy’s understanding of itself, that does not mean that it would not be responsive to images of philosophy that allowed the audience to understand philosophy’s worth. These images could create an authority for philosophy and make philosophy as available as it needs to be for a nonphilosophical audience to become open to further argument about the need for and rightness of philosophical rule. Accordingly, what the Republic offers is not the actual practice of dialectic but an image of that practice. Plato’s most famous discussion of philosophy—his image of the cave—needs to be understood not as an instance of philosophic practice but as an effort at persuasion aimed at a nonphilosophic audience. In its presentation and defense of philosophy, the dialogue is not dialectical but rhetorical.

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