Argument Against Rhetoricians

In one sense the second part of Plato’s Phaedrus is an exegesis on the first: a discussion about argument following the argument for and against love given by Socrates.  In another sense, the second part makes the first a demonstration of the different qualities that rhetoricians, speechmakers, might possess. These qualities are properly the subject of the second half of the Phaedrus.

In this part of the dialogue Socrates is no longer arguing about love, but instead for a certain kind of argument: the higher, philosophical kind that he used to defend love and passion as a striving of the soul for pure beauty.

In making an argument against ‘low’ argument designed only for persuasion, Socrates is making a refrain upon arguments put in several other dialogues by Plato.  In A Sophistical Refutation and in The Republic Plato rails against writers, sophists,

Here the subject, specifically, is the construction of speeches, and so Socrates considers how different speakers might put together an oration.  The two speakers are antithetical – the first is the professional Rhetorician, someone who believes any argument can be made to appear to be the truth, if sufficiently persuasive.  The second speaker is the philosopher,  someone who seeks the truth, rather than merely trying to persuade people of it.  The synthesis of this part of Socrates’ argument has already been put in the first part of the dialogue:  the conclusion is that the philosopher is to be valued far more highly than the rhetorician.  The philosopher, asserts Socrates, has wisdom, while the rhetorician has wit and the semblance of  true argument.

Having established by example that the philosophical argument is higher, more substantial, more divine, more ideal, than the merely rhetorical argument, Socrates approaches the argument from a different vantage in the second part.  This time he compares spoken discourse or argument with written argument of the sort that Lysias has prepared, and of which Phaedrus has a copy.  Written argument is painted as insubstantial, an image of knowledge, rather than the thing itself. This is contrast with the true discourse that comes directly from a human soul as spoken word.

Socrates famously could not read or write.  Two-and-a-half thousand years later this seems odd for one of the most historically significant philosophers for Western and other civilisations.  We know of Socrates from those who wrote about him.  The most significant of these was his pupil, Plato. 

Plato wrote most – not all – of his philosophy in dialogue (or script) form.  This is unusual (not unheard of) today, but was common in the past.  Dialogue seems a more natural form  than prose for cultures in which writing is relatively new. 

Plato usually populated his dialogues with real people – famous people: rhetoricians, philosophers, teachers – some living and some who had died.  Socrates was Plato’s teacher, and is also his ‘main character.’  Over a long career and many works of philosophy, Plato wrote Socrates into his philosophy.  We can only speculate as to what extent this Socrates is Socrates, and to what extent an instrument for Plato to make his own arguments (there’s enough material and food for thought to speculate a lot).  Scholars suggest Plato’s early works may have faithfully rendered Socrates philosophy, but that his later works may more closely reflect his own ideas, placing these into the mouth of his established lead. 

Socrates’ argument against writing

Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred.  The name of that divinity was Theuth, and it was he who first discovered numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and above all else, writing.

Now the king of all Egypt at that time was Thamus, who lived in the great city in the upper region that the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes; Thamus they called Ammon.  Theuth came to exhibit his arts to him and urged him to disseminate them to all the Egyptians. 

[..and when they came to discuss the art of writing..]

Theuth said ‘O King, here is something that once learned will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom. Thamus, however, replied “O, most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are.  In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it; they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from inside, completely on their own.   You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.  Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being  properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing.  And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

…

SOCRATES: You know Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The figures in painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemly silent.  The same is true of written words.  You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.  When it has once been written down, everey discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not.  And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself, nor come to its own support.

PHAEDRUS: You are absolutely right about that, too.

SOCRATES: Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse, a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how it is by nature better and more capable?

PHAEDRUS: Which one is that? How do you think it comes about?

SOCRATES: It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.

PHAEDRUS: You mean the living, breathing discourse of the person who knows, of which the written one can be fairly called an image.

In conclusion Socrates makes high demands on the person he considers worthy as a speaker (and a philosopher).  In efforts to write and deliver extraordinary speeches his criteria serve as a good set of aspirations:

‘First you must know the truth concerning everything you are speaking or writing about; you must learn how to define each thing in itself; and, having defined it, you must know how to divide it into kinds until you reach something indivisible.  Second, you must understand the nature of the soul, along the same lines; you must determine which kind of speech is appropriate to each kind of soul, prepare and arrange your speech accordingly, and offer a complex and elaborate speech to a complex soul and a simple speech to a simple one.  Then, and only then, will you be able to use speech artfully, to the extent that its nature allows it to be used that way, either in order to teach or in order to persuade.  This is the whole point of the argument we have been making.

Socrates’ argument against rhetoric and rhetoricians has two vehicles in the Phaedrus.  The first vehicle is demonstration in the form of arguments for and against love in relationships.  Here Socrates shows how a rhetorical argument is defeated by a philosophical one. 

The second vehicle for Socrates’ proposition that philosophical discourse is higher and more powerful than rhetorical or persuasive speechmaking is the argument against writing.  The proposition is argued in the second part of the dialogue that writing is a secondary form of communication, speech the primary and superior mode.  This conclusion, though, becomes a premise in the larger argument for philosophy over rhetoric – for speech-making grounded in the search for truth, rather than in creating the perception of it. Because writing, as Socrates has it,  can only ever rise to the level of the rhetorical speech.  True wisdom cannot be recorded on the page.

Romantic irony

It only remains to discuss the romantic irony inherent in the Phaedrus that provides a diversion from the main argument in the text, or a duplicitous complication of it, depending on how it is interpreted.

The Phaedrus is a written text.  Plato, unlike Socrates, could and did read and write.  We know much more about Socrates and other ancient Greek figures because Plato did write, and because many of his texts have survived.

Depending on how this fact is approached, there may be substantial consequences for the argument against writing overall.  If these are accepted, the convolution flows on to broader argument against sophistry that the Phaedrus is designed to contain.

The simplest way to approach the fact that the Phaedrus is effectively a written argument against the written word is to say that Plato was forced to write his argument down in order to communicate it to us, thousands of years afterwards.   All of the greatly more powerful arguments made via the medium of speech in Ancient Greece, and not written down, have disappeared. The written word has one great advantage over the spoken word, then (except on Twitter): longevity.  Of Socrates, we know only what others’ wrote. 

This is a powerful argument for the merits of writing things down. And Plato may have employed this method for its merits, and despite its short-comings.  Aware that the written argument is a semblance of the spoken, Plato nonetheless considered it better than nothing.  To the extent that Plato was providing a record of actual spoken arguments, this can be seen as an especially faithful exercise.  Writing may be the poorer format for argument.  But given the ephemeral nature of speech, the true expression of the soul, writing is the only way to carry words and ideas into distant futures.   

Plato may be forgiven, then, for creating the conundrum of a written argument espousing the relative virtues of speaking them. He has at least adopted the forms of written speech, and does so frequently – in this way (as dialogue in On Sophistical Refutations shows) – he considers that he avoiding the worst, lowest, and least truthful genres of literature.  In this way Plato’s intention can be seen as benign, and his argument as consistent.

The alternate interpretation is that Plato has deliberately contradicted the argument put by Socrates. And he has done so, again through demonstration, via the very medium in which Socrates’ argument is contained.  At every turn, as Socrates presents his case for the virtues of wisdom and truth directly from the soul, he struggles against the cruel romantic irony that the audience is comprised of readers, not listeners. This inexorable contradiction sits at the shoulder of the reader.  The argument put by Socrates is brilliant.  But should the reader attribute this to Socrates’ brilliance, and assume that what we have is a shadow, an echo, of the genius of the man?  That Plato has done his best in a poor medium ill-equipped for the task?

What mitigates against this interpretation is that the Phaedrus appears to be a written work of genius. In content it exhorts the virtues of spoken language.  In form it exemplifies the virtues of language written down: expert use of various styles of language as needed, crafting of narrative devices, analogies, points of reason that constitute individual, subsidiary arguments; the masterful way the disparate arguments on very different themes are interlocked, supporting one another while raising more difficult questions on the nature of love, language, truth and the human soul.  If written argument is impoverished, it does not appear so in consideration of The Phaedrus.  If Plato had wanted the reader to ignore the counter-argument represented  by the fact that the Phaedrus is a written argument, he might have thought to write tne dialogue less well.

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I’ve written down this bit of discourse so that you can look at and be reminded of it later. I should add also that the treatment presented here is really a remembered bit of discourse from preparation from tutorials for a unit I taught at uni years ago.  The lecturer who convened the unit and introduced me to the Phaedrus was Adam Dickerson: he mentioned most of the salient points raised here.

An Epilogue (inappropriately) to these notes is forthcoming on the question as to how Plato would revise his argument in the context of modern text and speech-based technology.