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Lecture notes

English 471

2/18/02

Overview:

In the classical era, Rhetoric was a major cultural force—tied to governmental practice and the rise of textual literacy.

Historical, Political, and Social Contexts for Classical Rhetoric:

• Nomadic tribal groups evolve into city states.  Systems of governance develop.

• Advent of alphabetic literacy.

• 478 BCE: Greek City states come together as the Delian League.

• 449 BCE: Pericles makes peace with Persia & a cultural flowering ensues:  Socrates, Sophocles, Hippocrates, etc.

• In-fighting within the Delian League leads to the Peloponessian War during the 4th century BCE, but Plato and Aristotle do significant work despite the turmoil.

• Peloponessian War weakens the city states, and eventually the Macedonians, under Alexander the Great, conquer the city-states, setting off events which lead, eventually, to the Roman Empire.

The Sophists (or Pre-Socratics): The First Rhetoricians

• The Sophists: a diverse group of early philosophers who traveled among the city-states teaching young people (mostly wealthy young men) the art of public speaking.

• The Sophistic philosophy (see Protagoras and Gorgias in handout): absolute truth is unavailable to humans.

• Dialectic: pitting opposing sides of an issue against each other for the purpose of arriving at probable truth.

• Controversy: those in power believed that chaos would result from radical questioning of belief systems (see Antigone).

• The empowerment of the Sophistic philosophy.

• Also, Rhetoric threatened the tradition of nobility, since reason could dispute against tradition. 

• Empedocles: widely acknowledged as the first Rhetorician (circa 450 BCE). 

• Protagoras (circa 400 BCE; see reading packet): studied the precise meanings of words in an attempt to create standardized vocabulary for public discourse.  Claimed “man is the measure of all things.”

• Gorgias (circa 400 BCE; see reading packet): studies and exhibits the power of language to induce belief.  He’s poetic.  He speaks beautifully.  Later thinkers (chiefly Plato/Socrates) will consider him deceptive. 

• For ages—even today—the word “Sophist” has negative connotations.  “Sophistry” is akin to linguistic trickery.  In the 20th Century, though, rhetoricians see the relationship between the Sophist movement and post-modern science, and the Sophist legacy gains value.

• There are some opportunities for women in this period: the poet Sappho writes at this time.  And Aspasia, a mistress of the Athenian ruler, Pericles, seems to have been a sought-after teacher.  Scholars have suggested that the Sophistic movement led to a feminist movement of the time.  However, that movement was largely repressed (as was the Sophistic movement) and so there are few remaining texts.

Introduction to the Big Three: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (see reading packet):

• Plato writes the Socratic dialogues, which are largely arguments between Socrates and one or more of the Sophists (although, in the dialogue in the reading packet, Socrates is not pitted against a Sophist).

• Socrates (469-399 BCE) is against the Sophists because he believes that the only worthy goal of Rhetoric is to pursue absolute truth (allegory of the cave, realm of the forms).  True Rhetoric, then, is “the method of a philosopher and a pupil who free themselves from conventional beliefs and all worldly encumberances in the pursuit of transcendent, absolute truth” (Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition).

• Plato (428-347 BCE) is a student of Socrates.  Some of his most important contributions to Philosophy are the Socratic dialogues he composes.  He also wrote The Republic, a utopian treatise on the nature of the ideal society.

• Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a student of Plato’s, who went on to found his own school (one of his pupils was the ruler Alexander the Great) and to become one of the widest ranging and most important writers in the Western tradition.  His Rhetoric is still essential reading for anyone pursuing advanced studies in philosophy, law, or English.

• More detailed consideration of these thinkers will follow.

• Though we are not studying them here, later Rhetoricians of the classical period, such as Cicero and Quintilian, further perfected the art of speaking well and considered questions of Rhetoric’s relationship to truth.