Long Ago, in a Land Far, Far Away. . .
Men and women noticed that life was brutal, short and difficult. They grouped together in small family groups and roamed around trying to kill their dinner. Even though they were in a group that afforded them some protection, there were still alot of animals in the wild that saw them as food and would often prey on them and eat them, their children and elders for dinner. There was also the problem of other families (tribes) It seems to be a universal cultural trait; whether called chiefs, princes, kings, emperors, gods or goddesses, groups coalesce around indivdual families. These families of royals would produce a single leader to rule the rest in the settlement. For a long period, consensus seemed to be the rule:”kingdoms” were ruled by one but the “norm” and “policies” of these rudimentary governments seemed to have been developed through agreement between all in the settlement, exactly how is a mystery. It was only a matter of time however before these “royal families” began to war among themselves for ultimate power. Some would rise and subdue, others would fall; and so it was throughout the world.
Or so states Protagoras, a Fifth Century BCE teacher of rhetoric in one of these now not so small settlements in an area known as the Peloponese. Although Protagoras was not a native of Athens (named for the Greek goddess Athena the goddess of wisdom), he was drawn to the city precisely becase he was a rhetor and a teacher and Athens, long tired of internal warfare like many of the other Greek city-states (Sparta and Thessalonika to name only two), had come to an uneasy balance of power. Powerful families would vie in public institutions like Courts, Councils and often in the city streets to gain an edge in the verbal battle for the hearts and minds of those who participated in the formation of the ruling consensus. In the Athens of the 5th and 6th century BCE, if one wanted power and wealth one had to know how to argue and persuade others to engage in the production of the rules and attitudes that ruled the polis (city). Thus the art and techniques (ars, tekne) of rhetoric in the popular imagination of the times, became inextricably intertwined with the act of engaging in politcal activity. And so it remains to this day.
Within this intellectually oriented, ostensibly democratic city-state of Athens, there existed a rather public argument about the nature of ruling the polis, of what the rules were that governed the process of engaging in politics. Two schools of thought rose up to do battle. One orientation based itself in the practicalities of everyday language in those very institutions that governed: the courts and councils of government. The Sophists (Wise Ones) originally were simply teachers of the rules of winning court cases, but as time passed they developed verbals tactics and strategies of speech, invention and performance that they claimed would ensure those desperate to participate in politics a way to engage and win arguments of whatever kind, in public. Two prominent members of this school of thought were Protagoras and Gorgias. In the vanguard of this movement, Protagoras stated that “Man is the measure of all things.” that individuals’ beliefs construct reality, that their beliefs govern their actions and it is both rational and just to allow a certain malleability to truth based on cultural specificity; Gorgias was known for his ability to extemporaneously expound on any subject drawing from a huge compendium of verbal ploys and arhuments and an equally large lexicon, he won the Olympics’ speech category several times during his lifetime, it was said that his speeches often threw crowds into paroxysms of emotion, often bringing entire crowds to tears. While it is difficult to lump all Sophists into one group or attribute any single all-encompassing theory to all in that class, a common theme among them was the claim that all points of view in a discussion are viable, and due to the malleability of truth; one can and ought to be able to successfully argue any viewpoint, thus “winning” is reduced to the skill of the orator, or writer, and truth is a trivial point of contention virtually ignored.
Possibly rising out of religious attempts to explain the world about them, separate from the religiously based epic poetry of the Theogony, the Odyssey and te Iliad; a cadre of teachers gained fame for their systems of integrating explanations of how the world operated into techniques for engaging in the act of living a righteous, ethical or effective life. These “philosophoi” or lovers of wisdom laid claim to Truth. You may recognise some of their names: Pythagoras, Diogenes, Socrates, Plato and finally Aristotle. All of these men claimed to have invented a True framework through which one might parse reality and live an effective life. Philosophy in Attican Greece was not words on paper or memorized speech, but a rational, explicable method of living that did not necessarily rely on religious beliefs or faith. But by the sixth century most if not all, philosophies predicated themselves on Absolute Truth. The point of contention among them was not whether Truth existed but what that Truth was.
These two schools of thought: Sophistry and Philosophy, literally battled in the street of Pericles’ Athens. There is even a brilliant play by Aristophanes called the “The Clouds” that hilariously spoofs the claims of the Sophists utilizing Socrates as a central character, not as Plato portrays him in “Phaedrus” as an opponent and detractor of the tekne of Rhetorika, but as a a leading proponent of the art of persuasion. A farmer, shut out of governmental machinations because he’s a bit of a rube,decides that someone from the family needs to learn the art of rhetoric so they might drfrnd the family’s fortunes in council and court. He sends his son, a wastrel who generally lays about and gambles his father’s wealrh away on horse races, to Socrats’ rhetoric school. The son learns the teke of argument so well that he successfully deflects all his father’s remonstrations about his gambling and carousing and eventually persuades the old man that the oldster deserves to be beaten simply for even bringing up the subject. In desperation the old man invests the remainder of his wealth in rhetoric lessons with Socrates so that he can defeat his son’s arguments, but all he hears is an argument by a rather desultory Socrates that the gods don’t live on Olympus but that they are embodied in the clouds.
Sophistry became the technique of anyone who wanted to rise in power in Athens. It threatened the philosophical foundations of the right of the wealthy and powerful to rely upon absolute truth to justify their right to rule over the less fortunate. The schools of the Sophists offered oratorical education to anyone who could afford their fees and thus tacitly became a threat to the ruling elite. The Conservative families exercised their power in Socrates’ lifetime by outlawing the practice of Sophistry. Ironically the elite used the very tools of oratorical persuasion the Sophists touted against them and through a series of trials convicted them of treason and “perversion of youth’. Thus Socrates, swept up in the hysteria was sentenced to exile from Athens or death. He chose death. Even though the Sophists were ostensibly banished, the Athenians, no matter how hard they tried, could not disassemble the ars rhetorika by forcing it into exile or by “outlawing it’s practice or teaching” confine it yet again in the Pandora’s Box of authoritarian control.
Socrates, as evidenced by the writings of Plato, his chosen heir, was a philosopher not a sophist. The dialogues of Plato utilize Socrates as a mouthpiece to engage in an ongoing attack on the art of rhetoric as a contender for the minds of the intellectual and political elite. Plato ruthlessly and relentlessly attacks any whisper of the sophistic arts in nearly every text he produced. His response to the idea that the world was a malleable place was a disciplined description of a universe connected to and governed by absolute Truth, a world of misapprehensions and false representations of a perfect ideal that only the highly rational, disciplined and intelligent individuals could perceive and who by their very natures were destined to become rulers. His treatise The Republic details the specifics of the perfect, benevolent, oligarchical society: with absolute caste positions based on inclination for everyone, according to Plato, some individuals were by nature, meant to be slaves. There was no place for persuasion and rhetoric in such a universe of obvious utility based on absolute Truth.
Given his philosophy, Plato prospered in the elitist atmosphere of Post-Socratic Athens. He was invited to spread his philosophy of absolute ideals underpinning reality throughout the Greek Empire. He was even invited to help form a government in a new colony based on his ideas in The Republic. It seems to have been an abject failure. He successfully formed his own school in Athens and taught there until a ripe old age, attracting students from all over the Mediterranean. One of these students was a young Macedonian named Aristotle.
Aristotle entered Plato’s Academy at a young age, did well and received the exoteric passing on of knowledge from the Teacher to the Student that every acolyte in every culture desires when they enter a discipline. The inclusion of every aspect of one’s teaching in text was actually pioneered by Aristotle. As the teacher of Alexander the Great Aristotle acquiesced to the tradition of veerbal transmission of his innermost, secret teachings, so Alexander left Aristotle’s tutilage believing yhat he and only he had his entire teachings. Upon the publication and circulation of his teacher’s works however, Plutarch notes a rather petulant letter from the World Conqueror to his former master complaining that now: “. . .anyone who can read. . .” could gain insight and even a full understanding into Aristotle’s teachings. As Plato’s star pupil, Aristotle had every expectation that he would carry on in his master’s footstep’s in Athens. But since he was not an Athenian, that was not to be the case. He returned to Macedonia, married an Athenian woman and returning a year later, vopened his own school. After Athens fell to the Macedonian King Phillip, enslaved he was taken to Phillip’s capital to be the royal tutor to Alexander. He accompanied Alexander on a portion of his exploits but returned to Greece as Alexander’s travels and battles took him farther afield. It was upon his return that He wrote his treaties on subjects ranging from biology to rhetoric. We will concern ourselves in this course to his ideas about the art of rhetoric and its place in the order of things. Unlike Plato didn’t have open animus toward rhetoric, but simply saw it as a lower order tekne or technique for accomplishing the work of civil politics. Being the Great Taxonomer, he applied his usual method of the categorization of broad subjects into smaller and smaller units to organizing extant rules for public speaking and the art of persuasion in general.
It is generally dangerous to try to reduce anything to generalizations or simple explanations, but for the purposes of this course in composition, I would like you to concentrate on the following ideas lifted nearly whole-cloth from Ars Rhetorica:
What separates Aristotle’s good rhetor from a Gorgian sophist is the ‘good rhetor’ ‘s dedication to identifiable, knowable, absolute Truth. The good rhetor abides by the following rules:
a) They identify and understand the nature and proclivities of their listeners and adjust their informaton, delivery and performance to those natures and proclivities.
b) The good rhetor identifies and tailors their piece to a specific purpose: praising, convincing, arguing, evaluating or proposing a solution to a dilemma.
c) They use one of three types of appeals to their audience:
i) An appeal to logic and rationality through syllogism. (Logos)
ii) An appeal to the audience’s emotion through iconic, normative metynomy. (Pathos)
And
iii) An appeal to authority: claiming justification through law, or religious or moral grounds. (Ethos)
We get the words logic and logical from logos, pathetic from pathos and Ethics and ethical from ethos. Would you rather be described as logical, pathetic, or ethical? Aristotle graded the appeals as follows:
An argument devoid of emotion that stands on logic alone should have been best he theorized, unfortunately, he concedes that doesn’t seem to be the case. So he then states that the good rhetor should be of such great and grand personal character that their mere presence lends credibility to anything they say. And he grants the least efficacy to pathetic appeals.
So according to Aristotle the rhetor should be of good character, tell the truth and be rational. What do you think? Given the past few centuries of history, what kind of appeals seem to be the most effective?
The last idea we will take from Aristotle for application in our writing this semester is the idea of invention. From BYU”s Rhetoric website, as good a source as any:
Aristotle, in fact, defines rhetoric primarily as invention, “discovering the best available means of persuasion.” An important procedure that formed part of this finding process was stasis.
Stasis names a procedure within rhetorical invention by which one would ask certain questions in order to arrive at the point at issue in the debate, the “stasis.” Four such basic kinds of conflict were categorized by the Greeks and Romans: conjectural, definitional, qualitative, and translative.Question to find Stasis: Did he do it?? Question of Fact; Conjectural Stasis
Question to find Stasis:What did he do? Question of Definition; Definitional Stasis
Question to find Stasis:Was it just/expedient? Question of Quality;Qualitative Stasis
Question to find Stasis:Is this the right venue for this issue? Question of Jurisdiction;Translative Stasis
Further argumentative strategies in the invention process would depend on which of these was determined upon, as would the number and arrangement of the parts of an oration to be followed.
( Invention: http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Canons/Invention.htm; Stasis: http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Canons/Invention/Stasis.htm)
But invention and stasis go beyond these definitions to hve a successful argumentative strategy the argument you use must be both relevant address all the components of the counterargument created by its statement. Simply posed: the argument: “The sky is blue because of the air’s chemical components.” creates a counterargument of: “The sky is not blue because of the air’s chemical components.” In orer to be in stasis and to wage a successful defense of your topic you must anticipate and counter the oppositions’ most obvious arguments.
Why did Aristotle write his treatise on rhetoric? Why go to all that trouble? Because the sophists and their schools were still around, still spreading the gospel of winning over truth, of memorized technique over cultivation of good character, and reason. Aristotle sought to silence them once and for all. Did he succeed?
