RHETORICAL MASQUERADE
A theory of the Sophistic foundation of Rhetoric
Frank Caron
20135651
Professor Nadine Gingrich
ENGL 309A
For the men of Ancient Greece, and the generations that followed, a weapon was a trusted tool; a tool that could bring a man to power, or take his power from him. Wars were won and lost at the tip of a spear, the blade of a sword. But weapons of steel and solder were not the most powerful of weapons that the Greeks and their descendants would wield: that honour was reserved for rhetoric. The potent power of being able to bring together the opposing views of men and uniting them in a common pursuit, the power of rhetoric, is unarguable. Bringing those who hated, feared or stood against battle straight to the front lines, turning governments with a passing sentence, pacifying attackers with a magnificent lyric – so was the uncanny and fearful power of the orator; the master of rhetoric. And, unlike a physical weapon, the blade of rhetoric could be forever concealed. Indeed, this powerful weapon was something to be feared, for it could lay dormant in the body of any man: even the most unexpected. However, it did still require training; years of practice and teaching would facilitate the rise of most orators. This brought upon the Greeks the need for teachers; for men of rhetorical prowess to stand up and offer their skills to those who would go on to lead their lands – and this is a service the Sophists provided. The forever-accursed, forever-disdained Sophists.
The writings of Bruce McComiskey in his text Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric present an interesting image of the Sophists. Unlike the vast majority of those in the study of rhetoric, McComiskey decides to look at the Sophists in a lighter way: deconstructing many of the prejudices against them, and even disconnecting the word “sophist” from the group that it typically defines. According to his definition, the sophists were the early teachers of rhetoric as an attained skill. Perhaps they were not the first to exist, but surely they were the first to capitalize on the sale of this learned skill in any significant way. It would seem that their intent to sell this sacred skill is perhaps the most likely reason for why many later rhetoricians attempted to distance themselves from the image of a sophistic salesman; a distancing that attempted to set apart the rhetorician in question, and sell his different and better teaching to the mass public. A hypocritical act indeed. However hypocritical, though, one fact was and is still startlingly evident: rhetoric was not a philosophy or a higher act of man. No, rhetoric was and has always been a skill as the Sophists defined it. Surely, rhetoric can be used as a vessel for deep and meaningful philosophical thought or debate, but the primary use for rhetoric has been, and always will be, for connecting to an audience and bringing them a supposition with an underlying agenda that they will understand and act upon. The goal of rhetoric has been to persuade; to shine light on that which was dark in order to recruit the aid of those in the audience, and even beyond.
Thus, hypocrisy becomes quite evident within the world of Classical Rhetoric. Men who strove to differentiate themselves from the vagabonds of rhetoric-sale that came before them were simply applying the same old practices in a seemingly new way to attract business. If being a sophist means being one who sells wisdom, as the term is based on, then the entire student body of rhetoric is a league of Sophists. No matter how far from the original goal they strayed, they still maintained the tiniest bread-crumb trail back to the truth: they were selling a teaching service for public consumption. Philosophical or scientific influences, selected and screened students, political and social agendas: all were simply masks put on to hide the fact that rhetoric was a profitable product.
Through the course of the periods of classical rhetoric that is outlined in the textbook Readings from Classical Rhetoric, this becomes evident in the very rhyme and reason of many of the rhetoricians. These great rhetoricians who claimed to be something else were simply sophist incognito, masquerading the sale of their service as something better than it actually was. Most notable of these many great men are the three sets of rhetoricians who clearly attempted three defining methods of escaping their sophistic heritage: Plato, who attempts to mask his rhetoric in the art of philosophy, and with concern for the morality and nobility of rhetoric; Aristotle, who sought to define rhetoric with a set list of skills and claim it a teachable science; and Longinus, who claims in one breath that evoking emotion from an audience with aesthetic and ornament is a practical skill, and yet in another breath says that the “magic” of rhetoric is a myth. These men all went to extreme measures to hide the fact that they were selling the same rhetoric that we know today, denying the sophistic foundation of rhetoric. It is the intent of this paper to demonstrate how they did so, and how the differences that they claimed were merely plays on the original properties of sophistic rhetoric.
As time passed, and the Sophists receded into history, many scholars stepped
forth and attempted to define themselves in contrast to the Sophists; the old
sellers of wisdom. One of these scholars, a man who could be viewed as the one
who “wrote the book on rhetoric” quite literally, went to great lengths to show
the science and strict rules behind the skill of rhetoric. That man was
Aristotle.
The most prolific of Aristotle’s many corollaries revolved around his stringent conformation to scientific way. While some viewed rhetoric as an art, to Aristotle it was quite clearly a science; a science formed on structured rules and regulations. One of his weapons of choice in his pursuit of rhetoric was the syllogism, which he related directly to the scientific proof of the same name. Thus, rhetoric in his eyes was simply the use of “probabilities and accepted truths.” His rhetoric was formed explicitly on set skills and set methods; on the usage of tools and the knowledge of context. Indeed, his rhetoric was one that could be written down and handed out in a manner no different than that of a modern day textbook. And it was.
Aristotle is hailed for his contributions to rhetoric. His multi-part text, entitled Rhetoric, defined and simplified in great detail the many different tools and tropes available to an orator. His texts even go so far as to provide explicit examples of a situation which “the orator” may find himself in. Upon reading these texts, it becomes obvious that the writing is less for discussion, and more for application: a textbook by definition. And, understandably, his text surely formed the basis for his educational curriculum. Thus, should not Aristotle be called a sophist? Is he not selling bottled wisdom that boils down to a few simple rules and tools? Exactly what separates him from them? Are his scientific pursuits truly enough of a differentiation to render his sale of rhetoric as something wholly unrelated to the selling of wisdom?
But alas, Aristotle was not one who proclaimed his disdain for the Sophists from the hilltops. Unlike Plato, Aristotle was not preoccupied with the Sophists; his underlying pursuit for money was not built on a foundation of overt hatred for their ways, though he still sought to capitalize on his “new” method of rhetoric. And indeed, the culprits of Classical Rhetoric that have been outlined so far are just that: culprits. They took what the Sophists built, modified it or masqueraded it every-so-slightly, and then sold it as their own. And this proliferation of the underlying sophistic rhetoric continued for years and years by many of the most revered rhetoricians, even up to the days of Longinus.
Longinus’ work took a decidedly different tone than that of Aristotle’s, while maintaining the notion that rhetoric was a teachable avenue. In his text On the Sublime, he illustrated that rhetoric is not a force to be used for persuasion, but rather should be used to help transport an audience out of their bodies and into a setting through which they are most readily able to accept a new proposition or idea from the orator; it was the plight of creating and present that which was not but could be. He argued that the ornament and aesthetic of language were tools that should be used not for persuasion, but for crafting this possible future for the audience to see, and through the use of this difference, his illustrated the faults of Gorgias and the other sophistic methods.
But how different was Longinus’ method from that of the Sophists? Using ornament and aesthetic of language for “crafting this possible future” seems like nothing more than a carefully planned euphemism. At the core of his discourse lie the same familiar tools that the Sophists had employed with great criticism hundreds of years before his time.
Of course, the most glaring and strong attacks against the Sophists and their rhetoric was from none other than the writings of the man who has formed a large portion of the history of that time for the contemporary student: Plato. Plato’s disdain for the Sophists is inarguable, and it shines through in every one of his writings: from his political works like The Republic that seek to use rhetoric as a political tool rather than a simple, sellable skill, to his works on the Sophists themselves, like Gorgias. Of all the points that Plato brings against his adversaries, the most repeated theme is that of virtue. Plato, through Socrates, proclaims loudly the importance and necessity of virtuosity in oration. His constant echoing that only a noble man can speak the truth acts as his fundamental claim for the superiority of Socrates’ negative dialectic; a conversational and philosophical discourses which apparently did not seek to win an argument, but rather arrive at a truth. But what constitutes this truth? How is this truth defined? And what really is negative dialectic? Is it not simply a conversation held within a rhetoric construct that acts to suppose and then reinforce definitions in the hopes of reaching one final agreement that is just as easily swayed as the standard audience of a sophistic orator, as evident in the entire body of the Gorgias? Plato, through Socrates in the text, certainly seemed to think it was something entirely different and far more important, despite how similar it truly was. And indeed, it was by this very principle that he differentiated his school over the rest.
But despite what Plato believed, sophistic rhetoric takes into account these very concerns. Sophistic rhetoric, as defined within the works of Kerford in “The Sophistic Movement”, addressed the very issues that Plato focuses on. An entire chapter, entitled “Can virtue be taught?” deals with this very concern. The Sophists considered the morality behind rhetoric, and also believed that it had the power of good as well as evil. A man with bad intentions could easily use rhetoric to his advantage as a weapon of ill-will. A tyrant could use rhetoric to march his soldier’s to their deaths. Or, as Gorgias argued, a man could easily convince a woman to belie her virtues at the spell of his word. Thus, the need for describing this consequence was a necessity in the teaching and proliferation of rhetoric. Indeed, the Sophists shared many of the beliefs that Plato criticized them for being devoid of. Thus, at its true core, Plato’s rhetoric – and the skills that he taught at his school – was truly of no great difference to the methods of the Sophists; only now, his teachings were shrouded behind words like “philosophy” and “dialectic”. Thus, it seems that Plato very well should be defined as a sophist, as he was by definition a seller of wisdom, simply under the guise of the aforementioned synonyms.
These many similarities to the work of the Sophists are not isolated to these three rhetoricians; these are similarities present in all writing that followed their unfortunate past. Thanks to the fact that not many original sophistic works remain, Plato’s history of the time serves as the main foundation for what is known about the Sophists. Whether they truly were as despised as Plato has led historians to believe is a question that will most likely never be answered properly. However, by isolating definitions and examples of what does remain from the Sophists, and understanding the sociopolitical implications that would result from distancing oneself from them, it is easy to see why many rhetoricians attempted to distance themselves from these rhetorical lepers. After all, if a man can sell a product founded on predetermined principles and yet claim it as something new and improved, would he not be able to attract the attention and coin of all who passed by?
Many of the techniques and theories created by the different rhetoricians over the period of Classical Rhetoric were simply modifications or extensions of already existing sophistic foundations. The concern for morality and nobility in writing, the scientific and regimented rules that oration follows, and the need for ornament and art in order to captivate an audience: all of these qualities stem from the works of the Sophists in some capacity or another and thus sophistic rhetoric is the very foundation of rhetoric as it has survived today. The works of the men that followed – the works of Aristotle, of Plato and of many other rhetoricians – is thus derived from this foundation, and yet these are the very men who sought to belittle the Sophists for their own gain. Though they themselves contributed to rhetoric as we know it today, it is incredibly important to realize that the true underlying structure and form of rhetoric comes from none other than those who sought to sell wisdom. And what could be more evident than this: a proof of the sophistic foundation of rhetoric by the words of a student of rhetoric some two thousand years later.
Bibliography
Kerford,
G B. The Sophistic Movement.
Matsen, Patricia P., Philip Rollinson, and Marion Sousa, eds.
Rhetoric.
McComiskey, Bruce. Gorgias and
the New Sophistic Rhetoric.
"Aristotle's Rhetoric." Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2002.