The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic

Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion

James L. Kastely

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226278766
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Plato isn't exactly thought of as a champion of democracy, and perhaps even less as an important rhetorical theorist. In this book, James L. Kastely recasts Plato in just these lights, offering a vivid new reading of one of Plato's most important works: the Republic. At heart, Kastely demonstrates, the Republic is a democratic epic poem and pioneering work in rhetorical theory. Examining issues of justice, communication, persuasion, and audience, he uncovers a seedbed of theoretical ideas that resonate all the way up to our contemporary democratic practices. As Kastely shows, the Republic begins with two interrelated crises: one rhetorical, one philosophical. In the first, democracy is defended by a discourse of justice, but no one can take this discourse seriously because no one can see—in a world where the powerful dominate the weak—how justice is a value in itself. That value must be found philosophically, but philosophy, as Plato and Socrates understand it, can reach only the very few. In order to reach its larger political audience, it must become rhetoric; it must become a persuasive part of the larger culture—which, at that time, meant epic poetry. Tracing how Plato and Socrates formulate this transformation in the Republic, Kastely isolates a crucial theory of persuasion that is central to how we talk together about justice and organize ourselves according to democratic principles.

CHAPTER ONE

The Republic:

Plato’s Democratic Epic

In recent years, a strong case has been made that Plato has much to contribute to rhetorical theory and cannot be read, as he has been by some in the past, as an unyielding and unsympathetic opponent of rhetoric.1 Along with this revision of Plato’s relationship to rhetoric, there has been a serious reconsideration of his relationship to democracy, and he is no longer seen as necessarily an implacable foe.2 I am making a stronger claim. I argue that the Republic, when read as a work of rhetorical theory, contributes positively to our ability to think about problems fundamental for a democracy.3 At the center of my argument is the challenge Glaucon and Adeimantus issue Socrates to provide not only a seeming defense of justice but one that is genuinely persuasive (357b). They seek a rhetoric adequate to the ethical and political complexity encountered in the everyday world. Their request for a genuinely persuasive defense of justice does not serve merely as a pretext that allows Plato to explore a myriad of issues; it is what makes the dialogue a unified and coherent work of philosophy. At issue is not primarily the question of what justice is or might be (although the dialogue is clearly concerned with this question), but the prior question of whether it is even possible for people to engage in a meaningful discourse about justice. However much justice is a philosophical problem, it is equally or more so a rhetorical problem, and indeed, it is the rhetorical crisis that makes justice a problem for philosophy. At stake is philosophy’s viability as a practical discourse. As Danielle Allen has argued, Plato believed that philosophy has an obligation to be practical: “A guiding principle of both Platonic and Socratic philosophy . . . is that leaving people with false ethical concepts, when one has the power to correct them, is to harm them” (28). That Plato set this rhetorical crisis in a democratic Athens suggests that he believed this crisis raises questions specifically about democracy’s ability to deliberate about and justify one of its foundational values. Josiah Ober makes the important point that democratic discourse was shaped by the ordinary citizens of Athens: “‘The many’ gained control of the public language employed in political deliberations, and so the primary context for felicitous speech performance in Athens was defined by popular, not elite, ideology” (Political Dissent, 40). He specifically cites “justice” as one of these key terms in the democratic political vocabulary (Political Dissent, 40). And, as Arlene Saxonhouse notes, “democracy is based on the claim to rule as a principle of justice” (106). If the citizens of a democracy are cynical about the value of justice, then democracy is imperiled at its core.

There is a particular urgency to the question of whether philosophy can speak meaningfully to a democratic population. At issue is the vexed problem of philosophy’s capacity to impact an audience that is, for the most part, composed of nonphilosophers. Marina McCoy has observed that, for Plato, “it is the philosopher’s very desire for truth that requires him to keep revisiting foundational questions in light of new experiences, in particular in the face of challenges to it from non-philosophers” (19).4 The binary of philosopher and nonphilosopher is central for Plato, and he uses it strategically to define philosophy. This binary “enables Plato to erect a new hierarchical system which places all people in one of two categories: that of the philosopher and that of the non-philosopher” (Nightingale, 55). On the one hand, the limitations of the nonphilosopher are essential for understanding what is distinctive about philosophy; on the other hand, the nonphilosopher poses a fundamental challenge to philosophy—namely, how does a philosopher explain the significance of philosophy to those who cannot participate in dialectic. If Plato sought to address problems that were real for an audience of nonspecialists and that arose as part of everyday life, then it is reasonable to assume that he was alert to the need to create a rhetoric that could reach this audience. Stanley Rosen offers a concise characterization of the need for such a rhetoric: “When we converse, especially, on a topic that arouses as much excitement as does politics, and that requires modes of persuasion other than purely logical, we do not simply exchange arguments crafted for validity, as though we were doing exercises in a logic textbook” (2). If it is to succeed, a discourse about justice derived from the practice of philosophy must be capable of offering a nonphilosophic audience a persuasive argument, and that is possible only if the argument responds seriously to the world in which the audience lives. If this audience is to free itself from an intellectual and political inheritance rooted in and continually reinforced by its everyday experience of the world, Plato needs to persuade nonphilosophers that such an argument is necessary.5 Danielle Allen emphasizes the importance that Plato attaches to philosophy having consequences in the real world: “As Plato presents the discipline of ‘pharmacology,’ it entails above all understanding how abstract concepts and their rhetorical conveyance, whether in images or stories or poems or even dialectical argument, shift the horizons of understanding and expectation and the normative commitments both of the individual and of the social group with consequences for lived experience” (22). If philosophy is to help the citizens free themselves from their imprisonment in the cave, then it has to be rhetorically effective. If it fails as rhetoric, then philosophy is proven to be irrelevant.

At stake in the rhetorical crisis in the Republic is the possibility of a political discourse derived from a philosophical inquiry. The goal of this discourse would be to allow the citizens of democracy to understand themselves and their form of government as grounded in values that are inherently political. As Paul W. Ludwig wonderfully puts it, “He [Socrates] perfects politics, not because a perfect politics is necessarily good, but because a perfect politics is perfectly revelatory of what politics is” (217). As a work of rhetorical theory, the Republic is asking the fundamental question of whether it is possible to have a political discourse that is not simply a displaced pursuit of private interest. If the value of justice is defended in terms of private advantage, the political as an independent concept and value loses meaning and becomes merely a rhetorical cover for the exercise of private advantage. In terms of the dialogue, that would mean that the interlocutor Thrasymachus was right all along.

But when philosophy takes seriously its obligation to seek a persuasive discourse, it encounters a paradox. If, on the one hand, philosophic discourse can only address those who already practice it, then it is redundant and unnecessary; if, on the other hand, philosophic discourse cannot be understood or appreciated by those who are not philosophers, then it is fated to be incomprehensible to the majority of people. In either case, it appears to be pointless. This looming irrelevance argues that persuasion is a structural issue for philosophy—one that cannot be approached as a matter of strategy, for it goes to the very heart of philosophy as a meaningful human practice that can contribute to the larger human good.6 Nowhere is the importance of this potential contribution more in question than in the defense of justice. As the Republic makes clear in the first two books, the citizens of a democracy have good reasons to believe that injustice is preferable to justice. Glaucon makes this point explicitly: “I shall claim that all those who practice it do so as something unavoidable, against their will, and not because they regard it as a good. Thirdly, I shall say that this is a rational way for them to behave, since the unjust man, in their view, has a much better life than the just man” (358c).7 Justice needs the assistance of philosophy to come up with a defense sufficiently powerful to counter a self-evident truth that threatens to erode a principle that is foundational for a democracy.

Plato believes that the common but mistaken belief in the desirability of injustice cannot be dismissed simply as an error in calculation or a misunderstanding of true, if unrecognized, motives. The standard defenses concede that what people truly desire is injustice and accept the claim that if people could operate with impunity, they would choose to be unjust. Another interlocutor, Adeimantus, asserts: “If we can have injustice coupled with counterfeit respectability, then we shall be following our own inclinations in our dealings with gods and men alike, both in our lifetime and after our death. That is the opinion of most people and of the experts. In light of these arguments, Socrates, what could induce anyone with force of personality, any financial resources, any physical strength or family connections, to be prepared to respect justice, rather than laugh when he hears it recommended?” (366b–c). There seems to be a general agreement that the desire to be unjust, as it is manifested in everyday life, simply registers a brute fact. That this desire is often suppressed or held in check does not negate its continuing presence or, more importantly, the continuing appeal of injustice.8

For Plato, however, both desire and belief are shaped, at least in part, by rhetoric and hence have the possibility of being transformed by a discourse that can speak to foundational values. This understanding is central to Socrates’s criticism of traditional poetry. He acknowledges that his own love of poetry is, in part, a product of the way in which his culture has shaped him: “It’s the same with us. The love of imitative poetry has grown in us as a result of our being brought up in these wonderful regimes of ours, and this will predispose us to believe that she is as good and as true as possible” (607e–608a). Through mimesis, a culture transmits and inculcates its values and shapes the ethical and political character of its citizens. Consequently, mimesis is a major rhetorical resource with which to constitute individuals and cities by cultivating certain beliefs and desires that become part of the individual’s personality and the city’s ideology. Mimesis is, of course, a vexed activity for Plato, and I will discuss it at length in chapter 10. But at this point in the argument all that I want to note is that if we are to understand why mimesis is important for Plato, then we need to appreciate that he sees it as operating rhetorically. G. R. F. Ferrari provides a helpful clarification: “‘Imitation,’ indeed, is too pale a word in English for what Socrates evidently speaks of here: ‘identification’ or ‘emulation’ would be closer to the mark” (“Plato and Poetry,” 116). If mimesis is a form of identification or emulation, then it is an affective activity that has an important role to play in the constitution or reconstitution of souls. Understanding mimesis will be essential to understanding how it might be possible for a philosopher to genuinely persuade a nonphilosophic audience without making them into philosophers. A philosophic rhetoric would be a discursive practice that seeks to shape or reshape the soul as an affective and endoxic entity. For Plato, the human soul is, in part, a rhetorical artifact.9 Any defense of justice that fails rhetorically to transform its audience’s beliefs and desires necessarily fails as a genuinely persuasive defense.10

Persuasion is at the heart of the Republic. And although politeia has been traditionally translated as “republic,” an alternative and more helpful translation is “constitution.” The act of constitution—as the act through which a soul or a city is made into a functional unity by the harmonious arrangement of belief, desire, and reason—depends upon the artful use of language to enable an audience to transform itself. Persuasion is distinguished from an activity such as manipulation in that the aim of manipulation is to assist change in the audience by imposing an outside order on the audience, while persuasion’s purpose is to allow the audience to understand and embrace the order that is proposed to it. The order is internalized and becomes the audience’s own. The dialogue as an effort at constitution provides a mimetic representation of the act of philosophic persuasion. In arguing that Plato should be considered as a philosophical poet, Jill Gordon provides the following definition of a Socratic dialogue: “A Socratic dialogue is an imitation of philosophical activity which by means of language represents dialogue that aims at turning one toward the philosophical life” (77). She goes on to say that the “object of mimesis is philosophical conversation” (78). Gordon argues that where Aristotle gives the place of preference to action, the Socratic dialogue gives it to thought (78–79). But this is a misleading distinction. The thought—the philosophic content—especially in the Republic, cannot be separated, even analytically, from the action. The inquiry into justice is enacted as a conversation, and philosophical conversation is represented as certain kind of discursive activity. In the Republic this represented philosophical conversation is identified explicitly in Book 2 as an act of genuine persuasion (357b).

Socrates and his interlocutors engage in the activity of constitution as they craft an ideal state, and, for Plato, philosophical persuasion’s guiding purpose and way of proceeding are both embodied in the act of constitution. Philosophical persuasion seeks to reconstitute its audience to reflect in new ways about the values that ground their lives. Its purpose is to support a practice in which a community and the individuals within that community move from an unreflective possession of a political constitution (one embodied both in a set of laws and practices and equally in an individual and communal identity) to a reflective possession of that constitution. To effect this individual and political reconstitution, Plato crafted the Republic as a mimetic representation of a genuine act of persuasion. As a work of mimesis, the dialogue is an extended rhetorical effort by a philosopher to persuade nonphilosophers so that they come to realize the value of justice and truly desire to be just.

Currently, when the citizens are forced to explain to themselves and others why one should value justice, they give lip service to a political value in which they do not believe. If they said what they honestly believed, then they would have to confess that they do not desire to be just. If they reluctantly concede the need for justice, this is only an admission on their part of their own inadequacy to pursue their true desires. Glaucon makes this point succinctly: “They [the general population of the city] say that this is the origin and essential nature of justice, that it is a compromise between the best case, which is doing wrong and getting away with it, and the worst case, which is being wronged and being unable to retaliate” (359a–b). Contradiction and hypocrisy may be too strong a description of this situation, but the reluctant defense of justice at least indicates a deep dissatisfaction with the political life most people feel that they are compelled to lead, and it argues for an inherent instability within democracy. Tyranny, in the form of the dream or fantasy or nightmare of absolute power and freedom, must be an always-present threat. A democratic community that does not value justice as an end in itself is vulnerable to the continual appeal of tyranny, for it is the fantasized life of the tyrant that the citizens truly desire. If Glaucon and Adeimantus are right that traditional discourse has proven incapable of providing a convincing defense of justice, and, in fact, has supplied unintentional support for the inherent attractiveness of tyranny, then for democracy to be viable a new rhetoric must be undertaken, one that through the activity of persuasion allows an audience (both the interlocutors within the dialogue and the readers of the dialogue) to reconstitute themselves as citizens moved by a sense of justice.

I

The Republic engages a problem that is beyond most rhetorical theory, which seeks primarily to theorize and offer advice on how to be effective within normal discursive practice.11 Thrasymachus, as the professional rhetor in the dialogue, takes great pride in having formulated such a discourse that is intended to be effective in the world as it is. He offers himself as a practitioner of an enlightened and sophisticated rhetorical practice, one that bases it authority on an understanding of the force of the current cultural commonplaces and the timidity of the average citizen. He boasts that rhetoric’s authority is grounded in its willingness to look unblinkingly at reality, to regard things the way they really are, and to move beyond the confused self-deception that compromises the majority’s understanding of reality and its discussion of justice (343b–d).12 As a rhetorical practitioner and theorist, he sees himself as a bold intellectual, unintimidated by conventional understanding, with the courage to speak the truth about the inherent appeal of tyranny (344a).

According to Thrasymachus, all people desire power, so what distinguishes some people is their courage, ability, and willingness to act on this basic desire. Rhetoric is an instrument that serves the interest of this natural meritocracy. It enables large-souled individuals, those who understand and act on this innate desire for power, to acquire agency (338d–339a). For Thrasymachus, the practice of rhetoric can thus be divided into two discourses: the discourse of the average citizen, which is a naive, ineffective, and compromised rehearsal of ethical bromides that produce a surface allegiance to justice but are without genuine persuasive force; and the enlightened and hardheaded discourse of professional rhetors that, through its contemptuous disregard for the polite surface discourse of democracy and a cynical exploitation of this s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Republic: Plato’s Democratic Epic
• 2. The Elenchic Victory and the Failure of Persuasion
• 3. Glaucon’s Request for a Persuasive Argument
• 4. Confronting Obstacles to Persuasion
• 5. The Limits of Persuasion: The Residual Force of Culture and the Unruliness of Desire
• 6. The Argument for Philosophy
• 7. A Rhetorical Account of Philosophy
• 8. Compelling a Philosopher
• 9. A Genuinely Persuasive Defense of Justice?
• 10. The Rhetorical Office of Poetry
• 11. Philosophical Rhetoric
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index