framing theaetetus plato and rhetorical (mis)representation - c. poster

Rhetoric Society of America

Framing Theaetetus: Plato and Rhetorical (Mis)RepresentationAuthor(s): Carol PosterSource: Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Summer, 2005), pp. 31-73Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40232472 .Accessed: 25/03/2014 17:07

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CAROL POSTER

Framing Theaetetus: Plato and Rhetorical (Mis)representation1

ABSTRACT: This essay is divided into two parts, the first part showing how certain disciplinary and historiographical habits and ideologies have formed obstacles to rhetorical reading of Plato by many scholars in rhetoric. The second part reads rhetorically a dramatically related group of four Platonic dialogues, Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Sophist, and Statesman, arguing that Plato's commitment to Heraclitean ontology determines certain rhetorical, temporal, and argumentative patterns of these works.

I. Prolegomena: Plato and Rhetorical Scholarship rhetoricians should interpret Plato is probably an unanswerable ques-

tion. Innumerable commentators, including ancient and modern rhetoricians, have been writing about Plato for over two millennia, and no firm consensus has been achieved about either methods or results of Platonic exegesis. This should not, however, lead to the conclusion that since we cannot provide uncontested accounts of Plato, the only alternative is radical subjectivism. In- stead, the differing approaches to Plato lead not so much to a fixed set of conclusions, but to an ever-expanding corpus of questions and topoi of Platonic interpretation, which can contribute three things to rhetorical scholarship:

1. A set of questions which serve as entry points into the Platonic corpus, useful not only for scholarship but for pedagogy (as students simply assigned Platonic dialogues, without any suggestions for how to read them or what issues to follow, often get lost in the bewildering profusion of arguments and counterarguments). 2. An understanding of which issues are contested and cannot be assumed as fixed starting points for interpretation of Plato. Al- though there are no necessarily "right" or "wrong" interpretations, there are ones that have consistently led to dead ends and others which have consistently been productive. Interpretations of Plato that depend on factual or logical errors, of course, can be omitted from consideration as anything other than historical curiosities. 3. A collection of extremely sophisticated interpretive tools which can be applied to other equally complex texts, and which, because of the dramatic nature of the Platonic dialogues, are particularly

Rhetoric Society Quarterly 3 1 Summer 2005 | Volume 35 | Number 3


sensitive to arguments from ethos, a sensitivity which should be carried over into understanding even the narrative personas of apparently monological treatises - the dry Oxonian humor and robust "common sense" of mid-twentieth century ordinary language philosophers or the systematic thoroughness and obsessive documentation of nineteenth-century German philologists being just as much authorial personas as the varied characters through which Plato speaks.

Plato is an especially fruitful figure for application of rhetorical approaches to historiography and interpretation. Five of the areas in which rhetorical methods are particularly productive in Platonic scholarship are:

1. Reception: especially analysis of how and why people have argued certain ways about Plato. 2. Rhetorical criticism of Platonic scholarship: i.e. analysis of what needs to be proven about Plato and what can be presumed, what type of evidence we have for given claims about Plato, and what types of analysis are most productive given the types of evidence we have about Plato. 3. Rhetorical criticism of Plato: examination of the intentions of the Platonic dialogues, their persuasive effects on both their original and subsequent audiences, and how they were intended to support or refute various ancient theories and practices. 4. Rhetorical form: demonstration of how the form of the Platonic dialogues itself acted as a vehicle of persuasion (especially persuasion through ethos). 5. Platonic rhetorical paradigms: investigation of the ways in which the available ancient forms of literary or persuasive language affected the contours and possibilities of Platonic thought.

This essay is divided into two parts, the first being a summary of what I consider to be some of the more important issues which need to be addressed by rhetoricians interpreting Plato and the second putting those theories into practice in an analysis of how Plato, in a group of dramatically linked dialogues, addresses the relationships among knowledge, ontology, and rhetorical form.

Platonic Studies There are several major contemporary schools of Platonic interpretation

among classicists and philosophers, as well as, naturally, many individuals who do not fit in any particular school. A rather oversimplified outline, however, will be useful context for understanding rhetorical approaches to Plato2:

1. Traditionalists: generally read Plato dogmatically, seeing his work as containing fixed and explicit dogmas, usually found in the statements of Socrates. Alfred Edward Taylor (1926), Paul Shorey (1904, 1933), and I. M. Grombie (1962) were typical of

32 Rhetoric Society Quarterly


this approach in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. More recently, "analytic philosophers" combine a traditionalist method with interest in tracing formal arguments in the dialogues, especially in Socratic speeches (e.g. Fine, ed. 1999 and Vlastos ed. 1971). Gregory Vlastos (1981) and his followers within the analytic school also investigate the relationship of the historic Socrates of the "early dialogues" to the Platonic Socrates of later dialogues. 2. Dramatic Interpreters: emphasize the importance of the literary form of the dialogues and the interplay of ideas with dialogue form (e.g. Arieti 1991 and Press 1993, 1997, and 2000). These scholars, who in the 1990s were somewhat of a radical fringe, but since have (inevitably) become more established as they have gained seniority, tend to be more open to interdisciplinarity than the traditionalists. Philosophers sympathetic to this position oc- casionally publish on Plato in Philosophy and Rhetoric.3 3. Esotericists: argue, on the basis of ancient commentators, that Plato had doctrines that cannot be found explicitly in the dialogues (discussed in Poster 1993). This group includes several who are sympathetic to neoplatonic readings of Plato, e.g. John Niemeyer Findlay (1974), the German Tubingen school (e.g. Kurt Gaiser 1980; Hans Joachim Kramer 1990; and Thomas A. Szlezak 1999), their Italian followers (e.g. Giovanni Reale, 1997), and Straussians who believe that Plato only revealed his true esoteric doctrines to a small philosophical elite and that Platonic exoteric moral principles and political theories serve primarily to form a society which allows that elite to prosper. Straussians cluster in Chicago, and tend to be interested primarily in politics, in contrast to the metaphysical focus of the Continental scholars (Leo Strauss 1975, 1978, 1983, 2000; and, to a degree, his students, Seth Ber- nadete 1984, 1989. 1991, 1993, 2000; and Stanley Rosen 1983, 1987, 1995). Neoplatonic scholars (e.g. John Dillon 1977, 1-10 and Philip Merlan 1960) also tend to interpret Plato neoplatonically. 4. Oralists (e.g. Eric Havelock 1963, 1982, 1983; Walter Ong 1982; Kevin Robb 1993, 1994) are often hostile to Plato, seeing him as part of a global shift they believe had occurred between "oral" and "literate" modes of thought in classical Greece. Have- lock especially, although assigning it a different cause, imputes to Plato much the same totalitarianism as did Karl Popper (1945). 6. Postmodernists: As Catherine Zuckert points out in her cogent Postmodern Platos (1996), many of the postmodernist interpreters of Plato are primarily interested not in reconstructing Plato

Poster I Framing Theaetetus 33


in ancient context but in using Plato as stimulus for their own philosophical projects. While this approach may be useful for contemporary philosophic and rhetorical study, its contribution to the understanding of ancient texts per se is, at best, indirect and therefore, I shall not discuss their work here.

Despite the disciplinary emphasis by classicists on projecting a rhetorical ethos of impersonal objectivity (discussed in Hallett and Nortwick 1997), even fairly narrowly philological problems are often matters of intradisciplinary polemic within Classics and grounded in personal stances and party affiliations. While this should lead rhetoricians to cite classical scholars with care and with attention to the context of their arguments within the disciplinary conversations of classics, this should not lead to the polemical excesses of Martin Bernal's Black Athena4 nor the abandonment of historical scholarship per se by those contemporary theorists like Victor Vitanza (1994) who conclude that since we cannot gain perfect and uncontested knowledge or interpretation of ancient philosophy and rhetoric, and that since classicists who claim objectivity can be shown to be motivated by factors not exclusively objective, there is no point trying to attain the best knowledge we can by careful analysis of ancient texts and contexts. This is not the case. First, proving extrinsic motivation does not always disprove conclusions - even though, e.g., it is possible to show that many advocates of the heliocentric account of the solar system were engaged in religious (often, but not exclusively, Protestant) polemic, that does not suf- fice to disprove the heliocentric account; one may well believe the right thing for the wrong reason. Moreover, there are things about classical texts that are knowable with some degree of certainty, and ways of judging what might be more or less plausible accounts of those things that are not knowable with any degree of certainty. As Malcolm Heath (2002) has pointed out, disagreements can be viewed as producing, rather than precluding, knowledge.

Even on basic philological matters such as the dates and the authenticity of certain Platonic dialogues (Hippias Major, Epistle VII, e.g.), there is no general consensus among classical scholars, much less on broader issues of hermeneutic method5. There are no clear methods of adjudicating among competing systems of Platonic interpretation other than by reference to the original texts and contexts (for specific claims) and to one's purpose as an interpreter (for method), although systems should be abandoned if they have internal incon- sistencies, lack explanatory power, or produce conclusions which conflict with empirical evidence (identities of characters, dates of specific historical events, common uses of Greek terms in the period, etc.). Where empirical evidence is ambiguous or lacking, it is easy for theoretical or ideological presuppositions to fill the void. Rhetorical awareness of underlying polemical impulses, however, should lead, not to dismissing all scholarship as biased, but rather lead to citing works from several disciplines more judiciously while avoiding the tunnel-vi- sion resulting from allegiance to individual disciplinary ideologies.



Below I will enumerate what seem to me areas where 1) in many cases, rhetorical scholarship could benefit by emulating the technical meticulousness advocated in classics and 2) where classics (a discipline that is not without its own tendencies towards insularity) could benefit by certain areas of methodological sophistication which rhetorical scholars bring to interdisciplinary Platonic conversations.

1. As discussed in John Kirby's "A Classicist's Approach to Rhetoric in Plato" (1997) and Thomas Conley's "The Greekless Reader and Aristotle's Rhetoric" (1979), rhetorical scholars often try to bypass philological issues (e.g. textual variants, the precise meanings of Greek words, historical contexts) in order to move directly to rhetorical analysis.6 But to interpret an author one must establish what that author actually wrote, whether in the local sense of individual words or passages within texts or the authenticity of entire texts, and those textual decisions are often matters which are not settled as facts but consequences of interpretive theories.7 Translations are, as it were, two removes from the author's original text, as they are the result of a translator's interpretation in a target language of an editor's reconstruction of a text in a source language. Benjamin Jowett's translations, e.g., although pedagogically useful because they are widely available online and in very inex- pensive editions, were described, with almost as much precision as malice, by A. E. Housman as "The best translation of a Greek philosopher which has ever been executed by a person who understood neither philosophy nor Greek." No word in one language has exactly the nuances of a word or phrase in another, as Frances Gornford pointed out in a frequently cited passage:

Many key-words, such as 'music', 'gymnastic', Virtue', 'philosophy', have shifted their meaning or acquired false associations for Eng- lish ears. One who opened Jowett's version at random and lighted on the statement (at 549B) that the best guardian for a man's Virtue' is 'philosophy tempered with music', might run away with the idea that, in order to avoid irregular relations with women, he had better play the violin in the intervals of studying metaphysics. There might be some truth in this; but only after reading widely in other parts of the book would he discover that it was not quite what Plato meant by describing logos, combined with mousike, as the only safeguard of arete. (Gornford "Preface", v-vi)8

This does not, however, mean that one should leave "keywords" untranslated, as is sometimes recommended, for this simply dodges the problem of figuring out how to best understand the Greek terms and is of little practical help to the Greekless reader.9 Rather than unreflectively appropriating Frances Gorn- ford and W. K. G. Guthrie (who quotes Gornford in The Greek Philosophers) as "authorities" to support a "keyword method" of studying ancient Greek texts (which is not precisely what they were recommending), it is important



to understand their work in rhetorical context. Cornford was translating Plato when a standard of ancient Greek at least equivalent to a third year course in a contemporary North American university was required for entrance into Cambridge; his translation was intended primarily for those who either lacked university education or had forgotten their Greek but wanted to return to Plato in their later years. Guthrie's Greek Philosophers was a survey intended as background reading for undergraduates who were not necessarily studying classics. Neither book was written for fellow scholars nor were the approaches Cornford and Guthrie felt helpful in lower division undergraduate pedagogy intended as methods of scholarly investigation or guidelines for how to write for the expert audience of scholarly journals, as can be seen if one compares their elementary pedagogical works with their more specialized scholarly ones.

Like her "keyword method", Kathleen Welch's (1990) suggestion of com- paring translations with each other without consulting the original (or the actual purpose of the translator) is not even useful for historiography - James Mill's analysis, e.g., of where Thomas Taylor translated from Ficino's Latin rather than Plato's Greek (1809) would not have been possible without close attention to Greek, Latin, and English versions. Welch's own comparison (1990, 20) of versions of Aristotle by Lane Cooper, John Henry Freese, and Rhys Roberts, intended to compensate for the possible biases of individual translators by selecting among various English versions as convenient, actually compounds the problem, for one can only understand (and possibly remedy) the aims and biases of translators by examining each translation carefully against not only the original text but the other writings by that particular translator. If one examines rhetorically the three versions Welch cites, in terms of subject matter (the original Greek text), authorial intention, and audience one finds that Cooper was expanding and paraphrasing for "students of composition and public speaking" rather than translating literally (a practice not unjustifiable given the difficulty and terseness of an Aristotelian original which had not been polished for public circulation), that Freese (following the mandate of the Loeb Classical Library) was trying to follow the Greek as closely as possible for the benefit of those with some, but not fluent, Greek (to the detriment of readability of the English text), and that Roberts was trying to remain relatively faithful to the Greek but at the same time to balance that aim with a desire to produce (moderately) readable English. Close attention to issues of "keywords," translation, and the rhetoric of philology, does not lead to a way around the difficult tasks of philology, but suggests that rigorous philological analysis should be combined with equally meticulous understanding of the contexts and rhetoric of classical scholarship.

2. One minority position in classical studies, popularized by many outside the field during the 1980s and early 1990s, posited a "great divide" between oral and literate "mentalities" in antiquity, with some (most notably Eric



Havelock) seeing the "sophists" as examples of "orality" and Plato and Aristo- tle as examples of "literate" mentalities. This position was appropriated, with an exaggerated sense of the significance of "orality," by many rhetorical scholars, and though generally abandoned in more recent scholarship still retains a surprising degree of influence. While a quite narrow account of oral-formulaic composition is useful in accounting for certain features of Homeric epic, the evidence for distinct oral and literate mentalities is slight and archeological discoveries have tended to move sub-Mycenaean syllabic literacy and archaic alphabetic literacy closer together (see, e.g., Woodard 1997). Recent classical scholarship has moved beyond simplistic acceptance or rejection of oral theory and the extremes of the "great divide" theories, to investigation of actual uses of and attitudes towards oral and literate communications and their interactions with each other. Rhetoricians could offer a unique perspective on some of these debates by analyzing the argumentative assumptions and strategies underlying the contemporary scholarship in this field, rather than simply taking sides with congenial authorities.10

3. The circumstances of composition and modes of circulation of the Pla- tonic dialogues are not documented in any useful detail in ancient sources - Cherniss' The Riddle of the Early Academy still remains the most plausible, if not provable, contemporary account of their pedagogical use in the Academy. Whether the dates of composition of Platonic dialogues can be determined, and if so, whether they have any particular interpretive significance, is still highly contested in Platonic scholarship, as I have discussed elsewhere (Poster 1998) and yet often rhetorical scholars take terms like "early" and "middle" dialogues as known facts rather than hypotheses, relying on the (possibly unprovable) assumption that Phaedrus was written after Gorgias to support the claim that a Platonic critique of rhetoric was followed by a reconstruction of an "ideal" rhetoric.11 This Platonic developmentalism, which was assumed by many traditionalists, has been questioned in more recent scholarship (e.g. James Arieti 1991, Jacob Howland 1991, and Debra Nails 1993). It is important to be aware of the rhetorical component of dating Platonic dialogues, namely that "developmentalism" is usually brought forth to support specific interpretations of the dialogues (as discussed in Poster, "Ideas of Order" and

Tigerstedt, Interpreting Plato). 4. Even more worrisome is a tendency that some rhetoricians share with

traditionalist and analytic interpreters to assume that any statement made

by the Socratic character in a dialogue can be excerpted from its context and

prefaced by the phrases "Plato says" or "Plato believes." But the words uttered

by the Socratic character in a dialogue can no more be assumed to be the "beliefs" of Plato than those uttered by a character in Shakespeare's plays can be assumed to represent Shakespeare's own beliefs, an issue addressed with some cogency by the contributors to Who Speaks for Plato? (Press, 2000).



While it is true that Plato admired and associated with Socrates, it is equally true that Plato was also influenced by many others including Pythagoras, Cra- tylus, Parmenides, and Heraclitus and was a highly original thinker. Instead, the utterances of Platonic characters should be interpreted, particularly by rhetoricians, as parts of a literary construct that as a whole is intended to have certain effects on its immediate audience. In particular, it is worth examining the relationship between Platonic uses of dramatic characterization and the theories and practice of impersonation and argument from ethos in Greek rhetorical theory and oratory.

5. The Platonic canon in rhetorical scholarship is often limited to a very small group of dialogues, which do not adequately reflect the range of positions articulated by Platonic characters. Protagoras is often read without the Theaetetus (which presents Socrates correcting his own earlier misrepresen- tations of Protagoras), Gorgias and Meno without Parmenides and Sophist (which further analyze "sophist" and provide a reductio ad absurdum of the "theory of forms"), Republic without Laws, and Phaedrus and Symposium without Philebus (which gives a more complex analysis of love and plea- sure)12. The sheer number of cross-references and shared characters among the dialogues suggests that the Platonic corpus needs to be studied as a whole, and that dialogues read in isolation are liable to egregious misinterpretation. Furthermore, it is necessary to read each dialogue as a dramatic whole, rather than interpreting in isolation those sections of a dialogue that contain the word "rhetoric," a fault exacerbated by the frequent use of anthologies rather than complete texts in graduate courses on the history of rhetoric.

Plato's Gorgias, for example, opens with a preliminary discussion of rhetoric occupying some twenty-six Stephanus pages (447-472), which introduces a substantially longer (fifty-five Stephanus pages) discussion of justice (473-527). Even among ancient commentators, there was substantial debate over the actual subject or aim of the dialogue. The author of the Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy (ed. Westerink) considered Gorgias concerned with the social problem of justice (XX.26). Olympiodorus, in his Commentary on Plato's Gorgias summarized the ancient debates about the aim or topic of the dialogue (0.4). Aristides' "To Plato in Defense of Oratory" probably responds to Pergamene philosophers who invoked Plato's Gorgias in their own attacks on rhetoric. Generally, reception has followed the interests of the receiver, as it were, with rhetoricians, ancient and modern, emphasizing the rhetorical section of the dialogue. Contemporary scholars, however, like the neoplatonic commentators, should take into account the "skopos" or end of the dialogues. There is nothing in either the dialogues or ancient testimonia to suggest that rhetoric was a central aim or interest for Plato. Language is important for Plato - it is a constant area of investigation in numerous dialogues - but it is discussed instrumentally, as a tool (albeit a deeply



flawed one) which is necessary for the task of philosophizing, but as a means rather than an end of philosophy (as I discuss in the second part of this study). Rhetoric per se appears consistently as a misuse of language - as Brad McAdon ("Plato's Denunciation of Rhetoric in the Phaedrus") points out.

Even given the difficulties of dialogue form, it is possible to determine what subjects are of greatest concern to Plato and which thinkers he considers most important by examining the degree to which Plato engaged their ideas, either by including them as characters in his dialogues or by having the participants in the dialogues discuss their words and ideas. Among the thinkers who most interest contemporary rhetoricians, Gorgias, Protagoras, and, to a lesser degree, Prodicus are of obvious interest to Plato. Thrasymachus and Critias were important figures in the development of rhetoric who were considered quite important by Plato and rarely discussed by contemporary rhetoricians. Isocrates, who is mentioned in only one passage in the dialogues, is an insig- nificant figure for Plato, and efforts in rhetorical scholarship to read a significant degree of interest in Isocrates into the Platonic dialogues (e.g. Goggin and Long 1993) are based on the false assumption, that because modern rhetorical scholars are interested in both Plato and Isocrates, Plato must have been interested in Isocrates. But rather than expend considerable ingenuity on an effort to inflate a single passage into an elaborate Platonic response to Isocrates, it seems more productive to work from the assumption that the figures of greatest interest to Plato were those to whom he devoted the most words and focus scholarship on other more significant relationships among ancient thinkers. While it might be true that the historical figures in the Platonic dialogues could stand in for positions held by Plato's contemporaries, there is no reason to sup- pose that Plato would have refrained from more overt attacks had he desired to make them. As is made apparent in, e.g., the rivalry between Demosthenes and Aeschines, or almost any play by Aristophanes selected at random, Athe- nians were not noticeably restrained in attacks on their political, literary, or

ideological rivals, nor would Plato, who was self-supporting and without local

political ambitions, have needed to be circumspect. Thus it is more likely that the Platonic preference for historical, fictive, and anonymous participants was based on ontic status rather than discretion.

6. Rhetorical historiography (perhaps as yet another unfortunate side effect of a manner of thinking based on "keywords") has tended to fetishize the term "rhetoric," treating the word "rhetoric" as if it represented some transcendent reality rather than simply being a convenient label existing within a system of differences,13 and thus ignoring works dealing with issues of persuasion, language, oratory, writing, writing pedagogy, etc. in which the word "rhetoric" does not occur.14 Yet if we are to make claims for the general utility of a "medium-sized" (if not necessarily "big") rhetoric that makes useful contributions to multiple disciplines, we need to incorporate into our research



studies of the entire range of verbal and persuasive practices, not just those which use the term "rhetoric" or one of its cognates. Trying to pin down what is or is not "rhetoric" to valorize or marginalize certain areas of inquiry, is, on the whole, unproductive. As Edward Schiappa points out, "scholarship ad- vances not through metadisciplinary wrangling . . . but through the production of exemplary work." ("Critiques of Big Rhetoric" 271)

One example of fetishizing the term "rhetoric" that has produced a truism of rhetorical Platonic scholarship unsupported by the specific details of the Greek text is the claim that Socrates in the Phaedrus (261 sq.) attempts to reconstruct a "true rhetoric" (e.g. Black 1958, Gurran 1986, Golden 1984, and Murray 1988) as opposed to the "false rhetoric" of the sophists condemned in Gorgias (a point solidly refuted by Brad McAdon 2004). In Plato's Greek, the good arts being praised by Socrates, with the assent of Phaedrus, are called those of "dialectic" and "speech," not "rhetoric," as I have pointed out elsewhere (Poster 1993 and 1997).

7. Accompanying the fetishization of the term "rhetoric" is a problem which Richard Whately called "party-feeling" (The Use and Abuse of Party- Feeling in Matters of Religion15), the tendency for group partisanship to move from a preference for a certain ideas held by a certain party to unquestioning acceptance of a complete and ready-made ideological program associated with that party. In rhetoric, this appears as a form of disciplinary team spirit, mani- fested, e.g., in Vickers (A Defense of Rhetoric) and more recently, the discussions of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies found in Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34:3 (2004), which, although perhaps a deplorable necessity in the scramble for departmental funding and rank in the academic prestige economy, can be inappropriately transferred to historical inquiry, especially when "rhetoric" (or "sophistic") is treated as the "our team" or "the good team" and "philosophy" as the opposing "other team" or "bad team" in what becomes nearly a college football rivalry account of ancient thought, one that obscures the ancient lines of demarcation and polemic, which follow quite different patterns.16 Although it is important to trace how ancient rivalries functioned, and also to be aware of how modern academic politics may affect historiography, modern and ancient quarrels should not be mapped onto each other, as they are prod- ucts of quite different cultural contexts.

This team spirit approach has led to certain modern "parties" constructing narratives in which Plato is described as having "marginalized" the sophists, with Plato cast as part of a "bad" team of oppressive authority and the sophists as oppressed underdogs who are accordingly sentimental favorites. In reality, the sophists were the "TV dons" of antiquity, commanding huge audiences and salaries, and the philosophers a marginal group of eccentric intellectuals. Moreover, although certain neosophists (e.g. Jarratt 1991, Vitanza 1994, et sim.) claim that Plato marginalized sophists, in fact, contemporary neosophists



seem to write only about the figures Plato popularized (or made central). Such figures as Antiphon and Anaximenes and the post-classical Greek sophists and rhetoricians have been, to a large extent, ignored in rhetorical historiography, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Robert Gaines 1982, 1985, 1991, 2003; Robert Reid 1996; and Jeffery Walker 2000). Also, even more significantly, the Older Sophists, like Socrates, the Eleatics, and the Heracliteans, form a group of recurring characters in the Platonic dialogues, whose ideas are investigated in some depth, in contrast to characters like Ion or Euthyphro whose ideas are dismissed in single rather short dialogues.

Perhaps the most important issue is not just whether team spirit has led to inaccurate history in specific cases (which it unfortunately has) but whether rhetorical scholarship benefits by a partisan attitude that results in cheering for favorite ancient thinkers and booing opposing ones in the manner of overly excitable football fans rather than an approach based on a more neutral curi- osity about ancient questions. Not only do such polemics distort accounts of antiquity, but also limit interdisciplinarity, for if one is mainly concerned with praising the friends and castigating the enemies of "rhetoric," one is far less likely actually to investigate the issues of other disciplines and engage produc- tively in interdisciplinary dialogue.

New Paradigms for Rhetorical Platonic Scholarship Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and Richard Rorty

(Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) have described the process of discovery in both scientific and humanistic disciplines not as a gradual evolution, but as a series of paradigm shifts, of abandoning certain conceptual structures and vocabularies which have ceased to be useful, in favor of new concepts and vocabularies. These shifts are not a matter of producing new answers to old questions, but of asking new questions. Many of the questions that dominated rhetorical scholarship about Plato in the 1980s and 1990s grew out of very specific institutional circumstances. Rhetoricians in both Communication and English have found themselves considered or treated as involved primarily in service functions (first year writing and public speaking courses) for their institutions, contributing mainly to lower division studies preliminary to the central intellectual aims of the broader academic culture. Graduate programs in rhetoric have often been treated (by those outside the field) as places that aimed merely to replicate a new generation of teachers and administrators to fulfill similar service functions. Rhetoricians, therefore, have been quite concerned with demonstrating the scholarly legitimacy of the discipline in face of institutional marginalization. Much of the rhetorical scholarship concerning the history of rhetoric, as it were, has reflected a concern for self-legitimation of rhetoric as an academic discipline (discussed in Poster 1998). This led to two major impulses in rhetorical scholarship, one that focused on the pedagogical

Poster I Framing Theaetetus 4 1


functions of the discipline and argued for the centrality of pedagogy and one that strove for prestige by affiliation with humanistic traditions of historical scholarship17 or social sciences. The first of these impulses has led, in the history of rhetoric, to numerous works which either studied the history of writing pedagogy in its own historical context or attempted to recuperate ancient authors for the modern classroom,18 a type of work that has had a salutary effect on speech and writing pedagogy and has led to an important new way of viewing ancient teachers of rhetoric, by understanding their systems as not just abstract theories but as shaped by pedagogical practices. If this approach has not always been grounded in meticulous scholarship, it has made a substantial contribution to interdisciplinary classical scholarship, and has contributed to several other disciplines, especially classical and medieval studies and the history of education. The second of these impulses, the quest for transferred prestige, by using the cachet of antiquity to secure prestige for the marginalized contemporary discipline of rhetoric, has had somewhat less positive effects, for it has led, in many cases, to seeing ancient thinkers primarily in terms of polemical utility, with those ancient thinkers who were "for" rhetoric (or certain models thereof) being applauded and those who "against" rhetoric being calumniated. Of course, not all historians of rhetoric fall into these categories - in fact, much of the outstanding work in the field, and especially that done in the past decade, avoids anachronism and party-spirit in favor of historical reconstruction - but the pedagogical and transferred prestige impetuses have often defined the contours of rhetorical study of Plato as reflected in rhetoric journals and graduate pedagogy in English and Communications.

The second part of this essay does not respond directly to either of these two approaches that rhetoricians have commonly applied to Plato, and neither agrees nor disagrees with them, but seeks instead a "third way" of rhetorical Platonic scholarship, in light of Richard Rorty's methodological suggestions:

To say that there is no such thing as intrinsic nature is not to say that the intrinsic nature of reality has turned out, surprisingly, to be extrinsic. It is to say the term "intrinsic nature" is one which it would pay us not to use, an expression which has caused more trouble than it has been worth. . . . On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against . . . the idea of "the intrinsic idea of reality." The trouble with arguments against the use of familiar and time-hon- ored vocabulary is that they are expected to be phrased in that very vocabulary. . . . This sort of philosophy . . . [suggests ignoring] the apparently futile traditional questions by substituting new and possibly interesting questions. It does not pretend to have a better candidate for doing the same old things which we did when we



spoke in the old way. Rather, it suggests that we might want to stop doing those things and do something else. (Rorty, "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" 9)

Rather than insisting on the vocabulary of "rhetoric" and asking whether Plato was "for" or "against" it, Part II of this study begins by asking what questions and terms relating to language and persuasion appear in a group of dramatically related Platonic dialogues and seeks to understand how Plato argued about those questions, and rather than reading Plato in terms of "rhetoric" as a fetishized keyword, reads Plato's dialogues rhetorically.

II: A Rhetorical Reading of Plato's Late Maiuetic Dialogues This section examines Plato's investigations of persuasive language as

they are embodied and articulated rhetorically in a group of four dramatically related dialogues, Theaetetus, Statesman, Sophist, and Euthyphro, particularly emphasizing Theaetetus and Sophist. These dialogues are important correctives to the ones more commonly studied by rhetoricians, both because of the problems they discuss (the relationship of being to language and knowledge) and the manner of discussion (cooperative rather than agonistic, as discussed in Blondell 2002, 256 sq.). In Theaetetus, Plato explicitly revisits an earlier treatment of Protagoras, substituting for the entertaining, albeit gentle, satire of the Protagoras a sustained engagement with Protagorean rhetorical epistemology. In Sophist, similarly, as well as pursuing the often quoted and dismissive definition of the "sophist," the characters discuss how the problem of non-being makes sophistic language necessary and unavoidable in all conversation, and how despite its unavoidable limitations, sophistic language is, in fact, something even philosophers cannot avoid, as is demonstrated by the form of the Platonic dialogues themselves. These points are not set forth as Platonic "dogmas," but rather dramatically enacted, with each claim embodied in the ethos of the character articulating it, the very dialogue form showing that Plato understands the relationship between knowledge and language (for living human beings) not as a universalizable and disembodiable abstraction, but something which varies depending on the individual knowing, speaking, and hearing. Because of this, especially as rhetoricians, we should read the Platonic dialogues not as non-rhetorical apodictic proofs but as rhetorical ar-

guments from ethos about thought and language.

Hermeneutic Methods For rhetorical understanding of the Platonic dialogues, the virtues of

dramatic reading seem self-evident: Plato wrote dialogues, not treatises19; he never spoke in propria persona (except, perhaps, in Epistle VII, if it is authentic)20; he only lectured once (the infamous lecture "On the Good").21 There is a difference, though, between reading Platonic dialogues with



sensitivity to the nuances of dramatic form and reading the dialogues as drama. The biographical tradition suggests that Plato abandoned tragic poetry for philosophy, not that he merely offered up a new type of tragedy in prose. Plato himself shows no evidence of admiring tragedy as a vehicle for philosophical discourse; ancient commentators, in fact, were to reject the possibility of tetralogic arrangement being based on imitation of tragic performance for precisely that reason.22 Rather than trying to understand the form of Platonic discourse in terms of genres he disliked, instead, it seems more reasonable to examine the rhetorical strategies of Platonic writing as grounded in the areas of thought in which he appeared to be most interested, ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, and theology. (Ethics, although a major interest of Plato's seems to have a less direct relationship with literary form of the dialogues.) This study argues that the form of the Platonic dialogues can be accounted for primarily as an attempt to create a way of writing which would adequately enact Platonic conceptions of being and knowledge as grounded in rhetorical ethos.

The dialogues I shall use to discuss how Platonic theories of being affect human knowledge and the implications of this for writing are a dramatically related group, which directly engages these problems, namely Theaetetus- Euthyphro-Sophist'Statesman.23 Theaetetus and Sophist are particularly important for rhetoricians because of the light they shed on the paradox of Platonic writing, as they both insist on the inadequacy of the very language they use. Euthyphro and Statesman add to the dramatic group two distinct types of relationship between character of interlocutor and success of elenchus. The hermeneutic problem of the explicit distrust of language in the dialogues is complicated by the subjects of discussion - knowledge, being, and language - which are portrayed as quite as problematic as the linguistic means by which they must be discussed. For Plato, these issues are inextrica- bly interdependent: we cannot give an adequate account of knowledge unless our language has the capacity to do so. As the Eleatic Stranger points out at Sophist 260a5-9, "if we were deprived of this [logos], we should be deprived of philosophy" - but language itself, though essential to philosophy, cannot be its singular starting point for we cannot know how to go about saying anything unless we have prior knowledge of that about which we are trying to speak.24 The problems of knowledge and language are even further complicated by the nature of what can be known or articulated, namely either the changing phenomena, which fixed words can only approximate, or transcendent unchanging ideas, which can only be reflected faintly and distortedly in the dark glass of phenomenal words. On the one hand, language fails at least partially in so far as its fixed and abstract nature is removed from the individuated flux of the phenomenal world, a failure at the center of the Heraclitean critique of language which Plato inherited.25 On the other hand, the very phenomenal



and inconstant (as a word not only can have multiple simultaneous meanings but also, as shown by the etymologies of Cratylus, can vary in meaning over time) nature of words makes language inadequate with respect to the unchanging objects of true knowledge (the forms, the definite, or the One). While the dialogic form of Plato's work makes it difficult to reconstruct a platonic theory of language per se, it is possible to adumbrate the problems which concerned him from the dialogues and use Epistle VII as evidence of the areas in which Plato or one of his immediate followers thought solutions to or clarifications of such problems might be found. Of particular interest are the four stages of apprehension - name, definition, image, and knowledge - from which follow a fifth category, the thing itself (Epistle VII 342a-344e). Plato explicitly rejects both language (Epistle VII 342c, 343a, 344c) and discursive reason alone as able to comprehend the fifth. He suggests (Epistle VII 342d) that of the four inferior categories, knowledge, the subject of the Theaetetus, comes closest to the fifth, and insists, repeatedly on the fallibility of language.26

Plato's "late maieutic" dialogues, Theaetetus and Sophist, which are particularly important for rhetoricians due to their engagement with sophists and language, require, perhaps, even greater methodological self-awareness with respect to interpretive assumptions than the rest of the Platonic corpus.27 These dialogues share in common with the rest of the Platonic oeuvre the general problems of Platonic interpretation such as Platonic silence, dramatic form, the Socratic question, and chronology, but add to these the complication that the dialogues themselves directly address questions of knowledge, method, and understanding, so that as one interprets these dialogues one must take into account what the dialogues themselves say about interpretation. Thus not only should attention be paid to Epistle VII and testimonia as points outside the dialogues which can mitigate the necessary circularity of interpretation of the dialogues, but also, when examining any given dialogue of this group, one ought to look at other dialogues which stand in some explicit relationship of dramatic sequence to the given dialogue under consideration, for dramatically related dialogues often show the progress or outcome of the maieutic process described in the given dialogue. In the case of a framed dialogue such as The- aetetus, the exterior frame also can serve both as a guide to interpretation of the inner dialogue and as a way of situating the dialogue as a whole with respect to dramatically related dialogues.28

What are interpretive problem for readers of the Platonic dialogues are rhetorical problems for Plato himself. Plato somehow needed to construct a literary form that could work around the constraints of necessarily limited knowledge and unsatisfactory language. As I shall argue below, I think he man- aged this by using dialogue to recapitulate simultaneously multiple elements of his ontology. The dialogue form (re)presents the dualism of the indefinite dyad which is the Platonic principle of becoming,29 and thus the substrate of



the phenomenal world; reading a given dialogue sequentially, as theories are set forth, examined and discarded, is to experience the flux of the physical world as embodied in a language that constantly changes speakers, stances, tone, and style (see Fish 1980). A dialogue as a whole, as one associates30 with it in memory after multiple rereadings is a unity, like the One beyond being, which when perceived outside the temporal flux of the dialogue as it is read sequentially, can kindle the flame of knowledge described in Epistle VII (34 Id and 344b8-10). These two ontological substrates are particularly prominent in the "late maieutic" dialogues, and self-reflexively foregrounded in the discussion of the relationships among becoming, flux, knowledge, and language in Theaetetus and Sophist.

Ontological Principles Although venturing to attribute any doctrine whatsoever to Plato is to

tread amidst the quicksands of interpretative theory, understandings of Pla- tonic dialogue still must be grounded in some assumptions about Platonic ontology. Any discussion, reading, interpretation, or learning depends on some basic agreement on what sort of entities exist. For example, the Eleatic Stranger's use of the example of Theaetetus flying (Sophist 263a) depends on the general ontological presumption that our world does not contain human beings capable of flight unaided by mechanical contrivances. The case of the flying mathematician, as it were, does not offer problems of dramatic contesta- tion with respect to the specific claim concerning flight - neither the subject of the sentence nor the Eleatic Stranger nor any of the listeners claim at any point that Theaetetus has flown, is flying, or will fly. This agreement indicates to a reader a set of shared ontological assumptions in which to ground readings of the dialogues; whatever the more arcane details of Platonic metaphysics, quotidian natural laws still apply within it. Universals, on the other hand, such as justice or beauty, or human types such as the philosopher, sophist or statesman, however, do not engender any such general agreement.

Making claims about elements of Plato's ontology other than individuals is very much complicated by the non-dogmatic or dramatic nature of the Platonic dialogues. No statement by one of the characters in the dialogues concerning the existence or non-existence of any particular class of entities can be assumed to represent a genuine Platonic position. Unless one assumes with Kramer (1990), which I do not, that the agrapha dogmata, the unwritten doctrines attributed to Plato by later commentators, contain specific writable doctrines not expressed in the dialogues, but nonetheless recoverable, one cannot resort to locating a systematic Platonic ontology in the agrapha. Despite this apparent impasse, however, there are still several possible ways of coming to use Platonic ontology hermeneutically by locating the shared assumptions which make the discussions among the characters in the dialogues possible (like the non-existence of mathematicians capable of flight unaided



by mechanical contrivances), namely the ontological substrates of Plato's rhetorical strategies, Epistle VII, and the reports of Plato's students.31

On the most general level, it can be claimed that there are two classes of objects in the Platonic ontology, things visible to the eye and things percep- tible to the mind (noeta).32 Both the objects of perception and the objects of knowledge are discussed in the majority of the Platonic dialogues and are often presented in terms of a radical bifurcation between the two. While Plato may consider the objects of perception in some way inferior to the noeta, unlike the Eleatics, he does not dispute their existence. Although the non-phenomenal elements of the Platonic ontology are not writable (discussed in Poster 1993) and the phenomena are not knowable (for they are only becoming rather than being), the Platonic dialogues do presume that it is possible, at least on the level of opinion, to discuss phenomena and come to some agreements about them - whatever the metaphysical status of Theaetetus might be, he does not fly - and also that the phenomena are not the only class of entities about which the intellect reasons; Platonic use of language is grounded in these presump- tions.

Support for a Platonic assumption of general division between changing objects of sense perception and unchanging objects of knowledge, the former tending to be dyadic in some manner and the latter unitary, can be found outside the dialogues as well, both in Epistle VII and in the reports of Plato's students and later commentators. Aristotle's reports of Plato's philosophy, especially as glossed by Simplicius, also emphasize a dualistic ontology. In Metaphysics 987b20, Aristotle claims that for Plato the Great and Small is the first material principle and the One is the principle of being.33 Simplicius (On Aristotle's Physics 187al2) mentions that Aristotle in his books "On the Good" reports that Plato considered the principles of all things, even the forms themselves, to be the One and Indefinite Dyad (he aoristos duas) which he terms the Great and Small (to mega kai mikron).

Although there has been considerable scholarly debate as to whether the One and the Indefinite Dyad are explicitly discussed in Plato's dialogues or not, the question of which dialogues explicitly address the ontological questions to which the One and the Indefinite Dyad discussed by later commentators are relevant is somewhat less debatable. The dialogues Theaetetus, Sophist, Parmenides, and Philebus all raise questions about the nature of being and becoming and the One and the many in terms of ontology and its epistemological consequences.34 The synthesis of methodological self- consciousness with ontological content in these dialogues links the ontological questions of what things are and what is the manner of their being with the rhetorical question of how they can be said (pos legetai)35 Whether these dialogues are distinguished by conventional chronologies of composition or

by their esoteric nature and/or audience, as a group they are closely related in



subject matter, level of abstraction, and, to some degree, style (as discussed in Sayre 1992). While much of the contemporary debate concerning Platonic ontology has centered on Parmenides and Philebus, the discussion of the Protagorean/Heraclitean theory of flux in the Theaetetus not only illuminates many of the ontological components Aristotle and others attribute to the agrapha, but also makes apparent the ontological exigencies which underlie the rhetorical substrate to the literary form of the Platonic dialogue. Because of this, and because they explicitly engage Protagorean/Heraclitean rhetorical ontology and the relationship of sophistic to knowledge, analysis of these dialogues can provide a valuable to corrective to a portrait of Plato in rhetorical scholarship based primarily on the less epistemologically and ontologically sophisticated arguments oiPhaedrus, Gorgias, and Protagoras.

Ontology and Dramatic Form

Narratively, Theaetetus is one of the more complexly framed Platonic dialogues.36 The dialogue opens with a conversation between Eucleides and Terpsion concerning the middle-aged Theaetetus who is being brought home injured from the Athenian camp at Corinth. This conversation reminds Eu- cleides of Socrates' (correct) prophecy that Theaetetus would become an admirable man. Socrates, a little before his own death, had conversed with the young Theaetetus, and recounted the conversation to Eucleides, who wrote Socrates' account in a book, and then corrected his book in further conversations with Socrates. The inner dialogue is cast as a transcription of a slave's reading aloud of Eucleides' book.

The speakers of the inner dialogue are not, therefore, men of the present, existing in the world of becoming as apprehended through aisthesis, but men of the past. Past actions and characters are determinate because of their very pastness. Actions of the past no longer participate in becoming; one properly can refer to them only as having been. Instead, the past exists in the realms of kleos and logos, only changing in so far as words themselves are perceived through the senses. Past deeds, however, rather than the present words which represent them, are no longer phenomenal and thus belong to the realm of nous as objects of possible knowledge rather than opinion.

The inner dialogue Socrates, like the Socrates of the Euthyphro, is portrayed in the process of philosophizing while on his way to answer the accusations of Meletus, although the Socrates of Theaetetus differs dramatically from the one of Euthyphro, for the Socrates of the unframed dialogue Euthyphro is situated in a changing dialogic world of becoming, philosophizing in the present tense, and not ending his conversation with fixed conclusions but merely being left at an aporia, which will only be resolved by his impending death. His death, as well as being, according to the famous discussion in Phaedo (another framed dialogue), something towards



which all philosophers aim, has specifically narrative significance not only for the reasons explicitly discussed by Socrates and his interlocutors in Phaedo, but also because the dead are no longer becoming but being, in the realm of unchanging or only gradually changing remembered fame (kleos) as held (like the dialogues after they have been read) in memory and sustained by repeating aloud or rereading of logoi.37

The fixed image of the framed Socrates of Theaetetus does not exist in the semantic present (see below for discussion of syntactic present), participat- ing in the changing world of becoming, but rather in the past, as remembered (thus as having kleos) and then transmuted into the absolutely static medium of writing, dead words on the page.38 This static conversation of the past is completed, but as the frame shows, this completion has the sense of the Greek perfect tense, an action completed in the past with an effect in the present. The present tense of the actual verbs in the dialogue, like the mimetic form of direct rather than reported speech is a dramatic illusion. The conversation of the past interior dialogue created the noble Theaetetus of the more recent frame, as well as inspiring Eucleides' continuing interest in philosophy, and is being projected into the future as it might awaken the desire for philosophy in Terpsion, who himself, through the slave's reading and thus his hearing of Eucleides' book (which is what all future readers are engaging), is handing down the philosophical spark to the posterity in which we ourselves now read the dialogues.

In terms of dramatic chronology of the interior dialogue, the unframed Euthyphro intervenes between the framed Theaetetus and explicitly unframed (though implicitly embedded in the Theaetetus frame) Sophist, for Theaetetus ends with Socrates walking to the Stoa of the King Archon where he would en- counter Euthyphro, and Sophist begins on the subsequent morning, followed by Statesman the next day. The four dialogues work as a dramatic group.39 While the interior Theaetetus ends with the conclusion that all the philosophical offspring which have been examined are false (210b), the frame provides, as it were, a happy ending, for it shows the narrative or human offspring of the Socratic conversation, the adult Theaetetus, to be an admirable and admired man.40 From a theoretical or logical point of view, however, the discussion of flux and opposites in Theaetetus produce not a genuine philosophical offspring, concerned with being and the One, which are the proper task of the philosopher, but rather a necessarily preliminary investigation of flux and the many, a task proper to the sophist such as Protagoras.41 At Sophist 259d5-7, the Eleatic Stranger in fact, characterizes antilogic or argument from opposites that was characteristic of sophistic practice as "no true elenchus, but ... plainly the newborn offspring of some brain that has just begun to lay hold upon the problem of being." In terms of narrative, however, the discussion of flux is situated as the beginning of Theaetetus' specifically philosophical education, but



not as a purely elementary exercise, for it is building upon his already impres- sive mathematical knowledge. In terms of ontology, however, the Protagorean dyadic flux is an object of inquiry preliminary both to the Heraclitean ontology which admits both dyadic flux and monadic logos (as discussed in Poster 1996), and to the study of being itself.

The unframed Euthyphro, however, eschews such direct ontological ab- stractions, and instead shows Socrates leading Euthyphro from certain knowledge to an aporetic conclusion with respect to piety. Unlike the willing and brilliant young Theaetetus, Euthyphro shows no signs of philosophical genius, and despite a fairly good-natured willingness to play along with Socrates, a certain intellectual inflexibility. Euthyphro is often considered a dolt and straw man, an unequal contestant in a battle of wits and unworthy of Socrates' refu- tative efforts, but if we consider him from the point of ethos, he is possessed of certain virtues. Euthyphro is a genuinely pious man, willing to be subject to ridicule and enmity in order to behave in accordance with his religious beliefs. Like Socrates or Antigone, he believes that he has immediate personal knowledge of the gods' wills, and is acting in accordance with what the gods tell him. Unfortunately, he is wrong. As West (1993, 156) has pointed out, his prophecies concerning the successful outcomes of his trial and that of Socrates turn out false. Euthyphro's case is unlikely to prevail and Socrates is condemned to die. The falsity of Euthyphro's prophecies, like the brilliant career of Theaete- tus, is known to readers of the dialogue, which was written after the death of Socrates. The story of Euthyphro unfolds more tragically than comically. As in tragedy (which deals with known stories rather than the fictive/new/unknown ones of comedy), the reader knows the ending of the story and Euthyphro's failure like that of many tragic heroes (Oedipus, Greon, etc.) is prideful un- willingness to be turned from a path which the audience knows will lead to destruction. While Alcibiades, or many of Plato's clever sophists or sophisti- cally trained young men, are examples of cleverness without virtue, or the intellectual capacity for, and perhaps exposure to, philosophy without the will to pursue it, Euthyphro is an example of will to virtue and piety without the knowledge or ability to change. The sequence Theaetetus-Euthyphro-Sophist dramatically embodies an ontological perspective on education.

Theaetetus, which discusses change, shows a capable and willing student, who through a discussion of the nature of knowledge and change, himself becomes changed to one who is prepared to approach philosophy. Euthyphro, which discusses piety, the object of which is the unchanging world of the divine, shows an inflexible but virtuous man who through his inability to change is unable to reach any true knowledge of virtue or piety, and thus, despite his best efforts, acts in a manner effectively impious and without virtue. Next, the Sophist (268c-d) provides a happy ending, as it were, reinforcing the message of the frame of Theaetetus, that a gifted and willing pupil can successfully



progress towards philosophy, by himself changing and being changed through understanding change or becoming, and from there moving towards, if never actually reaching, an understanding of fixed being.42 The Eleatic Stranger (Sophist 268c-d), with the help of his able and cooperative interlocutor, The- aetetus, discovering the real sophist and pinpointing him in a fixed location from where he cannot slip away, speaks an exact truth (talethestata). The subsequent dialogue, the Statesman, shows that the happy (in both the nontech- nical sense and in Austin's sense) ending of the Sophist was not accidental, nor dependent on the specific person of Theaetetus, but rather repeatable and generalizable - at least to other talented and cooperative interlocutors. The Eleatic Stranger, with the help of the Younger Socrates, successfully locates the statesman (311b-c), just as he has previously found the sophist in his discussion with Theaetetus.

In these four dialogues, the degree to which the participants succeed in defining or locating the object of their inquiries depends on the nature of the object under discussion as well as the interlocutors. The statesman and the sophist are successfully defined; piety and knowledge fail to be defined; and definition of the philosopher is not attempted. Both the statesman and the sophist belong exclusively to the phenomenal world of flux, and thus can be located by a dialectic method grounded in Protagorean/Heraclitean antilogy, which instantiates the dynamic equilibrium of simultaneously present opposites. Piety and knowledge, whose objects are a divine unchanging world, cannot be found or defined accurately by phenomenal language as it occurs within time, one word following the other in an ever-changing sequence. True knowledge (episteme) is not to be found in perception but in soul directly engaged in realities (ta onta) (Theaetetus 187a).

The philosopher himself is not discussed,43 because in so far as one par- ticipates in philosophy, one partakes of things beyond language, like the One of Parmenides whom Socrates claims to reverence more than any other man (Theaetetus 183e). Socrates thus refuses to discuss being flippantly (Theaete- tus 183e), perhaps because of the inadequacy of language with respect to the Parmenidean (and Platonic) One. If it is impossible to discuss the One, however, and philosophy depends on our ability to have discussions (see Sophist 260a5-9, cited above), then in order to philosophize, we must go beyond Par- menides, as the Eleatic Stranger claims to be doing at Sophist 258c8-d9, where he points out that in his discussion with Theaetetus he has proceeded "further in his investigation" than Parmenides because they have been talking about non-being. Language depends on a mixture of being with non-being, a mixing characteristic of the dyadic phenomenal world of which sophists discourse. Unlike the simple One, or the many simple forms, words are multiplicities and mixtures. Words themselves, on the most literal level, are combinations

Poster I Framing Theaetetus 5 1


of letters (Sophist 252el sq.) and our power of discourse is derived from the interweaving together of the forms44 as the Eleatic Stranger mentions at Soph- ist 259e8-9, as part of his inquiry (Sophist 260b8-10) into the question of whether non-being (to me on) mingles with opinion and speech (doxe to kai logo mignutai).

Mingling and Logoi The problem of mingling provides an ontological counterweight to the

dramatic optimism concerning true opinion implied by the endings of Sophist and Statesman. The very linguistic nature of the dialogues limits the range of topics that they can happily address. The corporeal world, like the world of discourse, is a mixture. Thus speech can imitate phenomena more adequately than it can imitate noeta, because it is the corporeal or phenomenal embodi- ment of thought, as the Eleatic Stranger says: "Well, then, thought and speech are the same; only the former, which is a silent inner dialogue of the soul with itself has been given the special name of thought" (Sophist 263e3-6). But speech, being corporeal, imitates only "the appearances of things but not the reality and the truth" (Republic 596e4-5), and the very Platonic dialogues we read are not the real conversations of the participants but only the things which resemble them (Republic 597a3-5)45. Plato, like the painter imitating the cabinet maker, presents to us images that he himself situates at three removes from reality.

All linguistic imitation is thus inherently imperfect. Eucleides emphasizes the distance between his book and the actual conversation when he describes how he handles oratio obliqua:

Now this is the way I wrote the conversation: I did not represent Socrates relating it to me, as he did, but conversing with those with whom he told me he conversed. And he told me that they were the geometrician Theodorus and Theaetetus. Now in order that the explanatory words between the speeches might not be annoying in the written account, such as "and I said" or "and I remarked," whenever Socrates spoke, or "he agreed" or "he did not agree," in the case of the interlocutor, I omitted all that sort of thing and represent Socrates himself as talking with them. (The- aetetus 143b4-c6)

Eucleides' explanation of his rhetorical reasons for omission of such words as "I said" or indications of oratio obliqua may be trustworthy with respect to the apparent motivations of his dramatic character, but are considerably less innocent when read in a larger Platonic context. Plato himself does not universally avoid such constructions,46 and in the Statesman has the Eleatic Stranger expound the necessity for tedium in pursuit of philosophy; he argues that the appropriateness of the form of a philosophical discourse should be



judged only by whether it "makes the hearer better able to discover the truth" (Statesman 286e and sq.). Even more significant, however, is that the type of diction Eucleides decides to use for convenience is precisely the one condemned by the Socrates of Plato's Republic. While there is no extrinsic reason to assume doctrinal compatibility between Republic and the Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman triad, the ontological discussions in these three dialogues do help to resolve an apparent paradox concerning mimesis in the Republic. Moreover, the notion of mimesis in the Republic clearly parallels the literary application of the theory of imitation in the Sophist.

In Republic, Book III, Socrates describes everything said by fabulists or poets as narration (diegesis), and portrays them as proceeding either by pure narration or by a narrative that is effected by imitation, or by both (Republic 392d5-7).47 He defines pure diegesis as narration in which "the poet himself is the speaker and does not even attempt to suggest to us that anyone else is speaking" (Republic 393a7-8), i.e. indirect speech, and mimesis as the type of narration where the poet speaks in the voices of his dramatis personae, as in tragedy or comedy. Socrates emphasizes that the poet can, by using diegetic method, "conceal himself nowhere" and accomplish "his entire poeticizing and narration without imitation" (Republic 393c8-dl). Of the two methods, Socrates claims diegesis to be clearly superior and argues that the guardians should, in general, eschew mimesis (Republic 396e-397b).

If the mingling of mimesis with diegesis is rejected for the guardians on moral grounds, there also are epistemological reasons for rejection of mimesis in discourse that aims at understanding true being. Simple diegesis (haple diegesis, Republic 394b 1) without any mixture of mimesis is possible. For discussion of true being, which is also unmixed, pure diegesis would be far more appropriate than the mimetic form Eucleides chooses in the Theaetetus frame. In Republic Book X (especially 598d-602c) Socrates unequivocally condemns imitation, and points out that those who had true knowledge would not devote themselves to the fashioning of images but instead would devote themselves to realities (599a5-b5), and the Eleatic Stranger contrasts imitations with truth in a similar manner in his division at Sophist 235e ff. How does the explicit framing of Theaetetus as mimetic affect the way in which the dialogue is understood? Are we to assume that this inquiry into the nature of knowledge, like all other imitations, is itself at a third remove from the truth (Republic 602cl- 3) and read this Platonic dialogue like we might Homeric epic or Attic tragedy? Or does the caveat of the frame rescue the interior dialogue from its mimetic nature by calling attention to its own necessarily misleading nature?

As the Eleatic Stranger discusses in the Sophist, meaning is generated by interweaving; names on their own mean nothing (244c-d and 259e-260a) and even names themselves are blendings of letters. In order to philosophize at all, letters must mingle to form names, words must combine in sentences,



sentences combine to make speeches, speeches by multiple characters blend to form philosophical dialogues, and those eager for philosophy must in turn mingle or associate with (in the sense of sunousia, discussed above) philosophical discourse. Not only do single names mean nothing, but even single sentences, such as the "puzzling little phrases" of the obscure Heracliteans (Theaetetus 179e-180d), fail to bring forth philosophical offspring. As Plato's strictures on imitation imply, the mimetic mingling of the Theaetetus will not lead to knowledge of being, but only to a "newborn offspring" (Sophist 259d5- 7, discussed above), preliminary even to the attempts at separation we find in the method of division practiced in Sophist and Statesman.

Preliminaries, however, are necessary. The pursuit of knowledge must start somewhere, and just as human babies, when newborn or young, must first master elementary matters, such as linguistic competence (in the non- technical sense of distinguishing "dogs" from "cats"), so philosophical learning also proceeds by stages, and this notion of progressive stages of learning is what informs Plato's apparently inconsistent theory of mimesis, and justifies his writing of mimetic dialogues. As Alexander Nehamas points out (1982, 53), "[t] hough children can learn from imitation, the adult inhabitants of the city are not to be exposed to it." This is the crucial difference in dramatic situa- tion between Books III and X of the Republic; the earlier book discusses the education of children, the later one adult society.48 The question of mimesis and the role of poetry in learning are solidly grounded in ontological consider- ations. The paideutic issue of learning to act well as a child by apprehending exempla of good things but as an adult by approaching the Good itself through dialectic, is analogous to the epistemological issue of first needing to learn the particulars to trigger in some way knowledge of the forms, but then, as Bostock says (1988, 19) "once that has happened our experience of this world has no further role to play [in acquiring true knowledge]." The youthful Theaetetus is not yet prepared to inquire directly about the objects of true knowledge, even were such unmediated inquiry possible. Instead, Socrates' conversation with him centers on how we know the particulars, an intermediate stage between the very preliminary discussions of particulars themselves, without self- conscious methodological awareness, and actual philosophy. The self-aware methodological focus on knowledge in Theaetetus followed by the more rigorous dialectic of the Sophist give Theaetetus the tools he will need to become philosophical; since the middle-aged Theaetetus of the frame is described as kalos te kai agathos (Theaetetus 142b7) and is known to the readers as a brilliant mathematician and generally admirable character, it seems that readers are invited to interpret the process as having succeeded.

The interior dialogue of the Theaetetus, then, does not stand in direct, but only in paideutic, relation to the unmingled truth or being of the One. As the Eleatic Stranger claims, if not-being does not mingle with being all things



are true (Sophist 260b9-cl). Since discourse is the product of such mingling, however, no discourse, including that of Plato or his characters can be entirely true. From the mingling of non-being "false opinion and false discourse come into being; for to think or say what is not - that is where falsehood arises in mind or words" (Sophist 260b9-c4). From falsehood grows deceit, and conse- quently discourse (including Plato's) is filled with images and likenesses and fancies (Sophist 260c6-9). The dialogue, thus, in investigating the relationship between knowledge and aisthesis, uses the necessarily misleading medium of language to discuss the equally misleading phenomenal world of becoming.

The narrative structure of the Theaetetus, then, rather than violating Plato's ontological strictures against mimesis, enacts the very ontological claims the dialogue addresses. Imitative form, for Plato, was not only not a fallacy, but inherent in the nature of the cosmos, as well as in language. The frame appropriately begins an investigation of being and becoming with a self- referential mention of indirect speech that makes the audience aware of the problematic nature of the mimetic form of the inner dialogue. Surrounding both outer dialogue and frame are the other dialogues of the dramatic sequence, as well as the cross-references which extend throughout the platonic corpus. The audience of Plato's written dialogues is not left with a specific set of logical solutions, but rather narrative closures, in which the lives and reputations of the now dead interlocutors show how philosophical ideas and conversations shaped the ethical choices of individuals and communities. Plato's frame, which introduces the Theaetetus, is thus itself finally framed by another unwritten and unwritable frame, that of the reader's participation in the dialogue as it extends forward into history and is experienced within the temporal flux of the phenomenal world, which is where both Plato's dialogue and this essay leave us.

Conclusion This analysis of selected Platonic dialogues should suggest that it is indeed

possible for rhetoricians to "drag Plato back to the orators like a runaway slave" (Aristides, "Defense of Oratory" 463) but in order to do this well we must radically reappraise the common understandings of Plato in contemporary rhetorical scholarship. As a starting point, it will be necessary to avoid transferring the habit, necessary for academic politics, of acting as advocates of rhetoric, to historical studies of rhetoric and other verbal practices. Rather than trying to fit Plato into contemporary paradigms by searching for isolated passages of dogma within the statements of a Socratic character and then either approving or disapproving such reconstructed dogmatic content, rhetoricians should examine Plato's actual rhetorical and pedagogical practices in historical context. Such an examination, paradoxically, yields a Plato closer to and more useful for contemporary rhetorical studies than the anachronistic one based on contemporary disciplinary frameworks.



One of the most distinctive characteristics of the Platonic dialogues is that they are self-consciously pedagogical and rhetorical in a manner almost unique among major western philosophers. Rather than laying out some philosophical system in a monological treatise, the dialogues examine ontology, epistemology, and ethics by showing the processes by which people learn and teach them and the practices that inculcate habits of teaching, learning, and intellectual investigation. Since language, for Plato, is the tool by which ideas are learned, taught, and understood, as the dialogues grapple with notions of being and knowledge they explicitly address the issue of how language affects the ways in which phenomena are apprehended. The practice of philosophy, as it appears in the dialogues and was taught in the Academy, is a constant striving towards an unreachable goal, demanding a life-long commitment to learning and inquiry. Thus all learning itself is rhetorical, in that (1) it can only be done by means of language; (2) it requires self-conscious reflection about the linguistic tools it employs; (3) it is dialogical; (4) it is audience-centered (different types of interlocutor require different methods); (5) it is overtly and self-reflexively pedagogical.

For Plato, because of the interdependence between language and epistemology, precision of utterance and argument are crucial skills for the aspiring philosopher. Thus generalized (liberal) rhetorical studies (as opposed to the vocational approaches of many professional sophists) were a standard practice at Plato's Academy, a tradition continued through late antiquity under such Platonists as Porphyry, Proclus, Syrianus, and Iamblichus (Poster 1998). One might even say that in Aristotle the Platonic Academy had the first and most influential of all graduate instructors in first year writing.

While Plato was, as far as we can tell (Poster 1997), in one sense implacably opposed to the common uses of rhetoric in the courtroom and assembly, in another sense, due to his insistence upon language as a necessary tool for thought, he was also a strong advocate of a "big rhetoric" and a seminal figure for the institutional development of epistemic and liberal writing instruction. As rhetoric re-examines its institutional roles and disciplinary nature, it may well benefit from revisiting Plato not as a source of dogmas, but as a thinker who examines how language functions in the processes of thinking and learning.

English Department York University

Notes 1. I wrote a preliminary version of the second part of this essay as a Visiting Fellow at University of Iowa Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry in 1998-99 and



presented drafts at the 1998 meeting of Classical Association of the Midwest and South and the University of Iowa Classics Department Colloquium Series (23 March 1999). York University research funding and the excellent library system of University of Toronto have enabled me to compose the first part and expand and revise the second extensively. I owe thanks for extremely useful discussions and suggestions to Brad McAdon, Susan Miller, Thomas Miller, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly editor, Gregory Clark. My greatest thanks are owed to Jeffrey Walker for a detailed and cogent reading of the manuscript and John Finamore for numerous useful suggestions, Platonic, neoplatonic, and gastro- nomic. I should apologize in advance for the inordinate number of self-references, but given that the length of this article already exceeds the patience of most readers, rather than summarize positions I have argued elsewhere, I substitute references for the sake of brevity. 2. A complete bibliographic survey of this conflict would fill a substantial monograph. Several scholars, however, have discussed the history of Platonic interpretations in depth. In particular, Poster (1998), Thesleff (1982), and Tigerstedt (1974, 1977) discuss the history of Platonic interpretation and its relationship to notions of authenticity and chronology of the dialogues. Sev- eral recent edited collections discuss issues of dramatic interpretation of the dialogues and provide extensive summaries and bibliographies of the conflicts between advocates of dramatic reading and those with whom they disagree; especially valuable are Gonzalez (1995), Griswold (1988), Hart and Tejera (1997), and Press (1993). 3. The special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric on Plato (1993) edited by Ken- neth Dorter provides examples of what is often termed "the new Plato." 4. Bernals (1987) simply replaces meticulous, if not undisputed, scholarship with uncritical reading and radical ideology; see Mary Lefkowitz 1996 for refu- tation. Susan Jarratt (1991) and Jasper Neel (1988) both use Plato and the sophists in what are essentially polemical works concerning contemporary English departments; their work is often tendentious and invokes Plato mainly instrumentally as an enemy of rhetoric. 5. Tigerstedt (1977) discusses how questions of authenticity are as much the results of as the grounds for interpretation. I have discussed the relationship between interpretation and dating of Platonic dialogues in Poster (1998). 6. Despite such welcome exceptions as, e.g., Thomas Conley, Janet Davis, Robert Gaines, Larry Green, Katya Haskins, Brad McAdon, Edward Schiappa, Robert Sullivan, and Jeffrey Walker, many rhetoricians who claim to be doing radical revision of ancient thought still rely on the translations and editions of the classicists they claim to be challenging. 7. One's beliefs concerning authenticity of Epistle VII have significant consequence for how one interprets Plato (as I have discussed in "Plato's Unwritten Doctrines"). Many of the odder interpretations of the Aristotelian



enthymeme have been based on an intrusive gloss in early printed editions of the Prior Analytics and determinations of authenticity of rhetorical texts and their interpretation have been intimately connected for several centuries (as I have discussed in "Theology, Ganonicity, and Abbreviated Enthymemes"). For discussions of how the history of the Aristotelian corpus and its concomitant textual problems affect interpretations see Felix Grayeff s interesting, if not entirely reliable, Aristotle And His School and Brad McAdon's "Reconsidering the Intention or Purpose of Aristotle's Rhetoric. "

8. One particularly complicated rhetorical issue which remains in translation from Greek is the tradition of Greek first being translated into Latin and then from Latin to English in many European educational contexts - even when I was a graduate student, some of the more traditional Hellenists would have students who were having difficulty with Greek texts translate the Greek into Latin first before attempting to determine the English sense of the text. There conventional translations of Greek terms which have come into English via Latin cognates (e.g. "arete" into "virtus" into "virtue"; "techne" into "ars" into "art") result in terms which would not have been chosen had the translation been directly from Greek into English, e. g. "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" proof make far more sense in English than the conventional "artistic" and "inartistic" (which are p

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