What is Rhetoric?

Our FYC program writes and publishes their own textbook every year. This year, they asked me to write a short introduction addressing what rhetoric is and why one might study it. Here's my answer (probably rife with errors, it could use some quality revising).

Why Study Rhetoric?

I have been tasked with the question “why study rhetoric?” Crafting a response to this question is in fact tricky, because “rhetoric” has referred to different things in different eras. In today’s popular parlance, the term is often analogous with “bullshit,” to grab the title of Harry G. Frankfurt’s recent sequel to his earlier book, On Truth. “That’s just empty rhetoric” the pundits say in response to the politician’s apology. But this perks me to ask: “is there full rhetoric?”

In what follows I will answer this question by briefly sketching the art of rhetoric’s complex history. My history is in no way comprehensive—I hope to give a long view of a very complicated, and conflicted, intellectual conversation about the purpose of education, people, and language.

Few people are aware that, until only about 200 years ago, rhetorical training comprised the first three years of higher education (and practically all of elementary and secondary education). But , even though it was the focus of education, “rhetoric” hasn’t been one stable thing for the last 2,500 years. In fact, what I hope to tease out in this brief historical overview is how rhetoric’s uses change in connection to an era’s dominant information-communication technologies.

What is Rhetoric?

I’ll claim that there are three different historic uses of rhetoric—each corresponding to a different era and communicative media (progressively: orality, literacy, and post-literacy or electracy). In the era of orality, before written language, rhetoric operated primarily in terms of persuasion. The job of the rhetorician involved captivating and purposing human attention, either to remember history, celebrate achievements, encourage change, or consider legal matters. In the era of literacy, rhetoric formally concerned itself with interpretation (what is called hermeneutics). The job of the rhetorician involved carefully reading texts and engagingly sharing the products of that reading. Religion, history, and law where no longer contained is stories and speeches—now they found their homes in letters and books. The rhetorician was tasked with writing, reading, and interpreting these new technologies. In the contemporary electrate era, rhetoric emphasizes the importance of ethics, focusing on responsibility and relations. Under this developing rhetoric, the task of the rhetorician is to analyze social systems and maximize opportunities for engagement, sharing, and diversity. These aims, I would argue, are affordances made possible by digital connectivity (through radios, telephones, televisions, computers, mobile phones and whatever comes next).

How Far We Going Back? Way Back…

Rhetoric’s first major appearance in the West was in ancient Greece. Ironically, our knowledge of this time period comes almost exclusively from books, since the Athens of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Gorgias represents the moment when orality and literacy operated side by side. Most famous of the Greek thinkers on rhetoric was Aristotle. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, had famously castigated rhetoric as manipulation and trickery, arguing that if philosophy is medicine for the mind, then rhetoric is merely baked goods—quite tasty, but ultimately unhealthy. Rhetoric, Plato asserted, kept people trapped in a cave, in which they could not differentiate between good and evil, truth and falsity.

Aristotle’s response to his teacher was a bit pragmatic: sure, in a perfect world, we could do without rhetoric. But in a real world, one composed of human necessities and desires, permeated with joys and fears, rhetoric is a necessary evil. Aristotle argues that philosophy focuses on discerning matters of absolute truth and falsity, while rhetoric explores “greyer” issues of probability and possibility. Contrary to Plato’s ideal, matters of politics are almost always “grey” matters; therefore, we need rhetoric to help navigate the inevitable ambiguities of complex, social problems. Furthermore rhetoric, for Aristotle, is inoculation against maliciousness and trickery. It forefronts the obligation of all citizens to protect themselves against corruption in order to maintain a healthy civic body.

Aristotle’s rhetoric attuned students to two major elements of public persuasion: the appeals and the topoi. Aristotle identified three primary appeals and attached each to a particular performance. Logos, an emphasis on logical argument, pertained mostly to deliberative, or what we might call political, matters. Ethos, the study of communal values and individual character, was the principal material for juridical rhetoric. Finally, pathos, the fostering of human emotion, most concerned epideictic, or ceremonial rhetoric. Topoi, which literally translates as “places,” refers to Aristotle’s system for finding common argumentative positions and propositions, and learning how to situate a set of circumstances within these inventive parameters. Aristotle’s topics might seem elementary today (generate a definition, make a comparison, highlight a contradiction, etc), but these elements were first explored in writing in Ancient Greece and revolutionized public discourse.

While, historically, Aristotle and Plato loom as the largest figures in classical rhetoric and philosophy, it is important to highlight that they were not the dominant intellectual figures in their own era. Sophistry, recent scholarship has shown, represented a far more robust intellectual movement than Plato’s representation. It is unknown how much of Aristotle’s rhetoric was in fact plagiarized from the (illiterate?) sophists who preceded him (unlike Plato and Aristotle, the sophists didn’t seem to believe in writing things down; it might be that, as dedicated oralists, they distrusted writing as cold and distant from human memory). For the sophists, rhetoric didn’t simply describe a real world existing independent of language; rather, rhetoric—by focusing human attention and energy—produced the world. Independent of language and human energy, the world does not exist. Humans, through their interactions with each other, with objects and technologies, with animals and plants and sunshine and coal and words and images and jellyfish, call worth the world in which they dwell. As such—contra Plato—there is no philosophical “Truth” to be found outside of the realm of human judgment and language, no Ideal realm opposed to this one, no outside to our “cave.”

Plato, Aristotle, and the sophists greatly influence the practice of rhetoric in the Roman Republic. In Cicero’s Rome, one might argue, rhetoric reached its high point, since the entire education system was designed around rhetorical training and performance, preparing students for the rigors of participating in the Roman Senate. Consider Quintilian’s response to Plato’s castigation of rhetoric:

Under such a mode of reasoning, neither will generals, nor magistrates, nor medicine, nor even wisdom itself, be of any utility; […] in the hands of physicians poisons have been found; and among those who abuse the name of philosophy have been occasionally detected of the most horrible crimes. We must reject food, for it has often given rise to ill health; we must never go under roofs, for they sometimes fall upon those who dwell beneath them; a sword must not be forged for a soldier, for a rubber may use the same weapon. Who does not know that fire and water, without which life cannot exist, and (that I may not confine myself to things of earth,) that the sun and moon, the chief of the celestial luminaries, sometimes produce hurtful effects? […] And so, although the weapons of eloquence are powerful for good or ill, it is unfair to count as evil something which it is possible to use for good” Institutes of Oratory II.xvi.9- 10).

Rather than thinking of rhetoric as even a necessary evil, Quintilian’s analogies suggest that it is a vital, necessary good (and, like many things that are good for us, it becomes poisonous if misused).

A more contemporary development for persuasive rhetorical theory is Kenneth Burke’s notion of identification. Nutshell: any act of persuasion requires a rhetor to create an identity that can be shared between speaker and audience. Very often, “I can’t agree with that idea” is a function of a deeper, subconscious “I can’t be that person.” Thus, 20th century rhetoric has dedicated significant attention to how rhetorical performances create habitable identities. Much of contemporary advertising, politics, art, and culture hinges upon crafting, connecting, challenging, and collecting our different identities.

From the Ear to the Eye

The second movement in rhetoric might be as old as the first—although I would want to properly mark its inauguration in the work of St. Augustine of Hippo. Unlike Aristotle’s Greece or Quintilian’s Rome, Augustine’s Holy Roman Empire was a feudal monarchy rather than a democracy or republic. There was little reason for the populace to learn rhetorical persuasion, since the day’s political and social organization offered few opportunities for deliberative engagement. But the rapid increase in literacy—particularly the increasing centrality of the Bible in legal, political, and social life—called for robust training in textual interpretation. It is quite difficult for anyone living in the 21st century to imagine a time when reading was considered a technology, but it was an unwieldy complex technology for the majority of people in the middle ages.

Augustine tackled these problems by formalizing methods for textual analysis. He took the tools for audience analysis developed by oral-persuasive rhetoric and applied them to reading texts. His focus was on resolving ambiguities and conflicting passages. This version of rhetoric would be called “hermeneutic” and is particularly invested in the development of literacy. The printed word calls for close interpretation in a way that orality does not (Ong)—allowing for critical reflection, abstraction, and intense precision. Augustine’s rhetorical system was not only designed to help priests deal with conflicts in biblical meaning but also drew on persuasive rhetoric to help priests engagingly deliver their interpretations to their parishioners. The Humanities reading strategies are all descendents of St. Augustine of Hippo’s early treatises on signs, language, and human feeling.

The emphasis on interpretation and reading developed by Augustine is amplified in the Enlightenment. While the development of the study of vernacular literatures (such as English, Italian, and French) call for robust interpretive tools, the scientific foundations of the Enlightenment call for a form of rigid argumentative reading and writing (to facilitate the sharing of new knowledge across universities, countries, and continents). Enlightenment rhetoric develops an emphasis on clarity of expression and structural procedures (such as the thesis) that remain fundamental expectations for scholarly writing to this day.

The emphasis of hermeneutic rhetorics transform significantly in the 20th century. Rather than searching for the one, ultimately True reading of a text, scholars began investing attention into multiple readings of a text, noting that all reading involves a degree of writing by the reader. Theorist Roland Barthes refers to this as wreading a text. This pluralist shift in interpretation is generally referred to as a facet of postmodernism, which can be hastily described as an increased distrust of objectivity, an interest in diversity, and an aversion to essentialist, binary systems of classification (i.e., right vs. wrong, man vs. woman, white vs. black). Ironically, rhetoric finds itself back in an Aristotelian/sophistic world of grey ambiguities.

From the I to the Alliance (and, hey, there is an I in alliance)

The third and final rhetorical movement I want to cover develops out of this subjective wreaderly approach to hermeneutics. It attempts to move beyond “human centric” activity—one that begins to pay attention to how ecologies produce humans as much as humans produce environments. In a sense, this introduction is a function of this third movement, since one of my presuppositions concerns the relation between the media we use and the ideas we explore (such that using writing generated an entirely new set of intellectual concerns, using computers and the Internet will generate new questions). It is factually accurate to say that, once upon a time, humans created television. From this third perspective, however, I would argue that it is equally accurate, today, to say that televisions create humans.

This third movement, still in its infancy, strictly concerns itself with neither persuasion or hermeneutics. Rather, it concerns maintaining ethics, in the sense that it seeks to ensure that humans learn to attune themselves to all the voices, objects, and forces that permeate decisions. Given the increase in complexity of political, economic, social, and educational institutional systems, we require new ways, and attitudes, of ensuring all voices receive representation. This third rhetoric, that which I am naming ethical rhetoric, a rhetoric of alterity, ensures that all entities are accounted, represented, and—most importantly (and what distinguishes this somewhat from hermeneutic activity) are offered the opportunity to respond. Others have called this rhetoric dispensation learning how to listen. In my remaining space below, I would like to focus on one theorist of this new rhetorical movement.

Sociologist Bruno Latour’s 21st century work addresses the growing disconnect between academic research and political problems. Latour sees this disconnect as a rhetorical problem attributable to the rise of the 19th century research University (itself created in the image of Plato’s metaphor of the Cave). The research University positioned itself outside of the realm of politics, as an institution seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake. This protected the research university and its faculty from religious or political persecution. However, it also distanced the university from political activity, since to be an academic meant to be something of a hermit, holed up in a library or laboratory and far from public forums.

Latour’s work advocates a resurgence in Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric to combat this disconnect. His emphasis is on the importance of fostering alliances between ideas, people, and things (since, for Latour, something is real only to the extent that other entities recognize its reality). Latour insists that Plato was wrong—there is no outside to the Cave, there is no such things as an abstract, Ideal truth beyond the realm of human decision making. For Latour, rhetorical training isn’t simply a matter of dragging the unenlightened to the Truth. Rather, it is a matter of collecting participants in one place to work out what will be accepted as true. The differences might sound subtle, but they have incredible impacts on how we view the relations between higher education, rhetorical training, and political activism.

Rhetorical scholarship in this third movement retains persuasion (how to foster partnerships) and hermeneutics (how to read social systems) and adds to it an emphasis on inclusion, participation, and responsiveness. It focuses less on the products of an individual I, and more on the possibilities contained within any collection of we’s. If orality focused on persuasion, and if literacy focused on interpretation, then it is the radio, television, and especially the Internet that has peaked rhetoricians interest in ethics, alliances, networks, and relations.

So, Why Study Rhetoric?

I’m still not sure there’s any single answer to this question. In closing, I would suggest that you might be interested in studying rhetoric if you want to influence social decision-making, improve your ability to read, analyze, and respond to arguments, and/or combat tyranny and social oppression. And that, I believe, is no meager “bullshit.”

Plato's Laches

In an effort to put more up on this blog, I'm going to start publishing my reading notes from Evernote. Today, I came across a reference to the Laches dialogue in Brad McAdon's 2004 article "Plato's Denunciation of Rhetoric in the Phaedrus." I was interested in this dialogue precisely because its central concern is courage--a quality I think central to Plato's distrust of sophistry, Latour's socialization of science, and Levinas's intersubjective ethics. In brief: Plato misunderstands sophistic notions of courage as either 1) denigration of the masses or 2) propensity toward power. Latour and Levinas (and recent depictions of the historic Gorgias by people such as Bruce McComiskey and Scott Consigny) offer us a third option: courage as the willingness to approach the many from a position of weakness rather than [epistemological, rational, etc.] strength.

What appear below is my initial reactions/notes to the dialogue. Many are grammatical fragments. Please proceed with tolerance.

The dialogue opens with Lysimachus querying two Athenian generals, Nicias and Laches, as to whether his sons should learn to fight in armor. Nicias says "yes" (for the sophistic reasons). Laches says no (can't fake it to real soldiers, looks foolish). Lysimachus calls for a vote, who should teach his sons courage, he asks Socrates to join the discussion.

Nicias--all men should learn to fight in armor (182e). Long passage suggests learning to fight in the terms that the sophists argue for learning to speak--preparation for combat, self-defense against the accusations, err, attacks of the one and the many. Nicias identifies combat among the

...forms of exercise especially suited to a free citizen. For in the contest in which we are the contestants and in the matters on which our struggle depends, only those are practiced who know how to use the instruments of war. And again, there is a certain advantage in this form of instruction even in an actual battle, whenever one has to fight in line with a number of others. But the greatest advantage of it comes when the ranks are broken and it then becomes necessary for a man to fight in single combat, either in pursuit when he has to attack a man who is defending himself, or in flight, when he has to defend himself against another person who is attacking him. A man who has this skill would suffer no harm at the hands of a single opponent, nor even perhaps at the hands of a larger number, but he would have the advantage in every way. [...] And we shall add to this an advantage which is not at all negligible, that this knowledge will make every man much bolder and braver in war than he was before. And let us not omit to mention, even if to some it might seem a point not worth making, that this art will give a man a finer-looking appearance at the very moment when he needs to have it, and when he will appear more frightening to the enemy because of the way he looks. (182-a-d).

How closely does this echo the defense of sophistry found in the Gorgias? Couldn't 'this skill' be logon techne? As the dialogue progresses, it becomes clear that Nicias is meant to stand for sophistry (particularly his association to Damon and Prodicus).

Socrates's response to Lysimachus's call for a vote: "So I think it is by knowledge that one ought to make decisions, if one is to make them well, and not by majority rule" (184e). As in the Gorgias (specifically Polus), a rejection of majority. And, of course, a rejection of the sophistic aspiration that the "better" course consists of the one that can be more persuasively presented to the masses. Better is trans(cendentally) human here.

Interesting note by Socrates' own education: "...concerning myself, that I have had no teacher in this subject. And yet I have longed after it from my youth up. But I did not have any money to give the sophists, who were the only ones who professed to be able to make a cultivated man of me, and I myself, on the other hand, am unable to discover the art even now" (186c).

Translator Rosamond Kent Sprague notes the overlaps between Socrates's rejection of learning in Laches and in the Gorgias (in both instances, a reference to pottery--learn how to craft small items before moving on to the larger one's. In this case, explore how to teach minor things before teaching the student?). More evidence for my interpretation that this dialogue, ostensibly on military training, is more about education and sophistry.

Nicias--who represents the sophist position, on dealing with Socrates: will question and question on something that seems quite removed from the original subject. To engage Socrates is to

...keep on being led about by the man's arguments until he [Socrates's interlocutor] submits to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. And when he does submit to this questioning, you don't realize that Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail. I personally am accustomed to the man and know that one has to put up with this kind of treatment from him, and further, I know perfectly well that I myself will have to submit to it. I take pleasure in the man's company, Lysimachus, and don't regard it as at all a bad thing to have ti brought to our attention that we have done or are doing wrong. Rather I think that a man who does not run away from such treatment but is willing, according to the saying of Solon, to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life." (188a-b).

What I notice here is that the Sophist (like Gorgias in Plato's dialogue), submits to Socrates. Honors his response. Invites the alterity that Socrates brings. And does so without running away, with courage, faces.

To note, Laches is interested in speeches that sound harmonious. He will not do well, I fear.

Socrates--let's investigate an element of virtue, particularly "ought we to take the one to which the technique of fighting in armor appears to lead? I suppose everyone would think it leads to courage, wouldn't they?" O.k., so Nicias has already warned us how the show works. This will lead to anything but courage. (190d)

Laches: courage is a willingness to "remain at his post and to defend himself against the enemy without running away" (190e).

Socrates: looking for a more abstract definition for courage, one that could count the man in the assembly as well as the solider at his post. (191d).

Laches's response (take 2): "an endurance of the soul" (192c).

Socrates rebuts: "it would be wise endurance which would be courage" (192d). Here I am already thinking that wide endurance is something, from a sophistic perspective, that amounts to obstinance. Think: Apology.

Socrates's aim is to show, almost ironically to my reading, that holding out in the face of defeat (that which Lache's originally identified as courage) is not wise but foolish. (193b).

Laches, unused to dialectic deliberation (oh, the drug of the soul): "But an absolute desire for victory has seized me with respect to our conversation, and I am really getting annoyed at being unable to express what I think in this fashion. (194b).

Nicias: courage is wisdom (but not in particularly musical arts--flute playing or lyre playing, Platonic-Socratic metaphors for Gorgias's style). As with Gorgias in the Gorgias, sophistry is reduced to a kind of mystical performance that, stripped down to notation, carries no force.

Laches expresses confusion/outrage at Nicias's assertion that wisdom and courage are the same thing.

Nicias's "wisdom" is equated to something mystical--to the "magical" gift of the seer. Think: idiotic things Plato's Gorgias says vs. the things that Gorgias's actual texts indicate he would probably say.

Laches responds that Nicias is simply twisting words to avoid defeat. Such a demented practice is only suitable for a court of law.

Nicias: "My view is that very few have a share of courage and foresight, but that a great many, men and women and children and wild animals, partake in boldness and audacity and rashness and lack of foresight." (197b) [Like Callicles, sophistry as a denigration of the common in favor of the superior, a typical Platonic representation of sophistry].

Socrates positions Nicias within a tradition of sophists (Damon, Prodicus). Laches: "well, Socrates, it is certainly more fitting for a sophist to make such clever distinctions than for a man the city thinks worthy to be its leader" (197d).

It is unlikely that a sophist would agree to Socrates's distinction that fear is only a product of future evils, not present ones. (198b). Fear is also a product of the present, part of the mood of the scene, the kairotic moment. Fear is not simply a state of mind, but a mode of being.

Also, Socrates tricks Nicias. The logical conclusion would be that fear and hopelessness also have a past and a present, and that wisdom of courage is an understanding of what made us fearful, why we are fearful, and what we might come to fear. Instead, Socrates limits fear and hope to the future, searching for completely different qualities (dimensions) of courage in the present and past. (See 199d-e)

The funniest part of the dialogue might be that Socrates wins the argument (and the endorsement as the teacher of Lysimachius's sons without himself offering even a definition of courage!). But, of course, he has offered a demonstration of armored combat, adorned by the sparse speculations of dialectic rather than the lavish shine of sophistry.

There is also, at the conclusion of the dialogue, what I think can be read as a clear swipe at Isocrates's complaints of Socrates as an old-school boy: "What I don't advise is that we remain as we are. And if anyone laughs at us because we think it worthwhile to spend our time in school at our age, then I think we should confront him with the saying of Homer, "Modesty is not a good mate for a needy man. And, not paying any attention to what anyone may say, let us join together in looking after both our own interests and those of the boys." (210b)

I appreciate Socrates's sentiment--particularly that first line: "what I don't advise is that we remain as we are," Anyone in rhetoric, I assume, forefronts the propensity toward change. As the sophist-monster often points out--the difficult part of social discourse isn't the argumentation, but the inclination. How do you get someone to care? And, once they care, how do you get them to listen? And, once they listen, how do you get them to contemplate (rather than antagonize?). We cannot be so silly as to take the disposition toward change for granted, as something that merely precedes the real work of rhetorical theory.

At the same time, however, is Socrates really an emblem for change? When in the course of a single Socratic dialogue did Socrates ever change his thinking on anything? Socrates is a master antagonist, but he targets the other and insulates the self. That line should really read: "what I don't advise is that you remain different from my transcendental ideal."

Reading Cicero Otherwise

So I am more and more coming to the realization that I will likely have to learn at least Latin, if not Greek, in the coming years. My Latin is tolerable enough to work through small passages, but I admit to being reliant on translations. Reading Cicero in preparation for my graduate seminar this week, I was struck by what I believe to be a telling anachronism in a passage from J. S. Watson's 1970 translation:

For the proper concern of an orator, as I have already said, is language of power and elegance accommodated to the feelings and understandings of mankind. (20)

It was that last word that really struck me--mankind, since, to my knowledge, the Greeks did not have such a conception (this, I realize is a difficult statement--certainly, Plato and Isocrates, via Idealism and Hellenism, approach the concept, but I don't want to engage that fight here). Now I realize that Cicero is a Roman--but the opening section of his De Oratore is a pragmatic response to Plato's treatment of rhetoric. Essentially, Cicero argues that Plato, sitting in his corner (an allusion to Aristophanes' The Clouds), discusses important matters in dead, lifeless, bloodness, dry, academic language. The power of the orator comes in injecting life into this language--imbuing it with an animating passion.

It was this celebration of language that got my spider sense tingling--because, beyond the direct Enlightenment language of "mankind," I also hear an 18th century preference for understanding over passion. Readers of Addison and Samuel Johnson will be familiar with such an echo. To confirm my suspicion, I checked a few other [free, electronic] translations of the passage. First, from the 1904 E. N. P. Moor translation:

For the special province of the orator is, as I have said already more than once, to express himself in a style at once impressive and artistic and comfortable with the thoughts and feelings of human nature.

I hear in this one a remnant of Ramus--a reduction of oratory from style (I can't get into it here--but Cicero is suspicious of the term rhetoric, linking it to books, and prefers the term oratory, stressing the performative elements. Style has a default logography to it. Hmm.

From the 1822 Guthrie translation:

For, as I have often said, the province of an orator is to talk in a language that is proper, graceful, and suited to the affections and understandings of mankind.

"Proper" and "graceful" here are powerful Enlightenment concepts--connected to the Order of the Beautiful. A bit of interpretive induction suggests that the orators' power isn't suitable to the occassion, but rather to the Truth of Mankind. Again, I am reading beyond the lines, but I believe such a reading is productive.

Now, like I said, my Latin is rusty and was never close to fluent. But here's the original Latin:

hoc enim est proprium oratoris, quod saepe iam dixi, oratio gravis et ornata et hominum sensibus ac mentibus accommodata.

Rather than transform "hominum sensibus" as some form of "understanding of mankind"--which seems to [theoretically] universalist and [philologically] sloppy--I chose to go with a more literal representation of the words: one that captures sensibus as feeling/perception in connection with the senses. Additionally, let accommodata ring with its sense of "suitability" or "propriety." So, my amateur interpretation would look something like this:

For the particular being of oratory is, as said, weighty/pregnant speech furnished by a perceiving mind and adaptable disposition/soul.

While the use of soul might seem odd here, remember that this is Cicero's most direct response to Platonic censure. It is quite likely that he might want to tease out soul here--a way of exorcising Platonic spirits and celebrating rhetorical souls. Pregnant is a possible meaning for gravis--and I personally like it here, since it reminds us that the purpose of speech isn't transference, but growth. The notion of a[hu]mankind is proper to a transcendental, idealist, dualism which Cicero here, and in other places, resists. For Cicero, the orator is responsible, first and foremost, to the people surrounding her.

In historical rhetorical studies, theorists such as Poulakos and Vitanza often get accused of reading ancient texts with a postmodern bias (which they, and I, do). I wonder, however, if closer study of all translations wouldn't reveal the extent to which the texts we teach in graduate classes aren't, in ways that often escapes our attention, written from an extreme default modernity. There's a Levinasian slant to my reading--one drenched in a postmodern feminine [pregnant] ethic of responsibility, accountability, singularity, and transience. I think we can see in Cicero a celebration of the saying's power, a dedication to enacting change in the polis, and a skepticism of knowledge for knowledge's sake.

NOTE: I am working from a coffee shop today. I have found 4 other translations available at the USF library, so I will check those tomorrow.

Plato Said, I Say

Plato, Book VI, Republic:

Let's agree that philosophic natures always love the sort of learning that makes clear to them some feature of the being that always is and does not wander around between coming to be and decaying. (485a-b)

Me: No.