Plato Rhetoric Quotes

We're all—especially those of us who are educated and have read a lot and have watched TV critically—in a very self-conscious and sort of worldly and sophisticated time, but also a time when we seem terribly afraid of other people's reactions to us and very desperate to control how people interpret us. Everyone is extremely conscious of manipulating how they come off in the media; they want to structure what they say so that the reader or audience will interpret it in the way that is most favorable to them. What's interesting to me is that this isn't all that new. This was the project of the Sophists in Athens, and this is what Socrates and Plato thought was so completely evil. The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not—what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, "Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want.

the matter is as it is in all other cases: if it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice ...

... there is no necessity for the man who means to be an orator to understand what is really just but only what would appear so to the majority of those who will give judgment; and not what is really good or beautiful but whatever will appear so; because persuasion comes from that and not from the truth.

Arguments, like men, are often pretenders.

When [a man] thinks that he is reasoning he is really disputing, just because he cannot define and divide, and so know that of which he is speaking; and he will pursue a merely verbal opposition in the spirit of contention and not of fair discussion.

to suffer is better than to do evil;' and the art of rhetoric is described as only useful for the purpose of self-accusation.

A rhetorician is capable of speaking effectively against all comers, whatever the issue, and can consequently be more persuasive in front of crowds about… anything he likes.

Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.

what young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin—that is grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); and,

Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which may he a fortress to me all my days? For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are unmistakable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men. –Plato

One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case.

With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts and assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not be punished.

SOCRATES: Will you understand my answer? Rhetoric, according to my view, is the ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics. POLUS: And noble or ignoble? SOCRATES: Ignoble, I should say, if I am compelled to answer, for I call what is bad ignoble: though I doubt whether you understand what I was saying before. GORGIAS: Indeed, Socrates, I cannot say that I understand myself.

SOCRATES: In my opinion then, Gorgias, the whole of which rhetoric is a part is not an art at all, but the habit of a bold and ready wit, which knows how to manage mankind: this habit I sum up under the word ‘flattery’; and it appears to me to have many other parts, one of which is cookery, which may seem to be an art, but, as I maintain, is only an experience or routine and not an art:—another part is rhetoric, and the art of attiring and sophistry are two others: thus there are four branches, and four different things answering to them.

How to define a name, may not only be an inquiry of considerable difficulty and intricacy, but may involve considerations going deep into the nature of the things which are denoted by the name. Such, for instance, are the inquiries which form the subjects of the most important of Plato's Dialogues; as, “What is rhetoric?” the topic of the Gorgias, or, “What is justice?” that of the Republic. Such, also, is the question scornfully asked by Pilate, “What is truth?” and the fundamental question with speculative moralists in all ages, “What is virtue?

[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.) What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine." A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?

War and battle' are the opening words of the Gorgias, and the declaration of war against the corrupt society is its content. Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric, is in Athens as the guest of Callicles, an enlightened politician. It is a day of audience. Gorgias receives visitors and is ready to answer all questions addressed to him. Socrates, with his pupil Chaerephon, calls at Callicles’ house in order to see the great man. The ultimate motif of the battle is not statedexplicitly but indicated, as so frequently with Plato, through the form of the dialogue. Gorgias is somewhat exhausted by the stream of visitors and the hours of conversation, and he lets his follower Polus open the discussion; Socrates leaves the opening game to Chaerephon. The battle is engaged in as a struggle for the soul of the younger generation. Who will form the future leaders of the polity: the rhetor who teaches the tricks of political success, or the philosopher who creates the substance in soul and society? The substance of man is at stake, not a philosophical problem in the modern sense. Socrates suggests to Chaerephon the first question: Ask him “Who he is” (447d).

POLUS: And if able to gratify others, must not rhetoric be a fine thing? SOCRATES: What are you saying, Polus? Why do you ask me whether rhetoric is a fine thing or not, when I have not as yet told you what rhetoric is? POLUS: Did I not hear you say that rhetoric was a sort of experience? SOCRATES: Will you, who are so desirous to gratify others, afford a slight gratification to me? POLUS: I will. SOCRATES: Will you ask me, what sort of an art is cookery? POLUS: What sort of an art is cookery? SOCRATES: Not an art at all, Polus. POLUS: What then? SOCRATES: I should say an experience.

SOCRATES: Whether the rhetorician is or not inferior on this account is a question which we will hereafter examine if the enquiry is likely to be of any service to us; but I would rather begin by asking, whether he is or is not as ignorant of the just and unjust, base and honourable, good and evil, as he is of medicine and the other arts; I mean to say, does he really know anything of what is good and evil, base or honourable, just or unjust in them; or has he only a way with the ignorant of persuading them that he not knowing is to be esteemed to know more about these things than some one else who knows? Or must the pupil know these things and come to you knowing them before he can acquire the art of rhetoric?

And soon after I procured Xenophons memorable things of Socrates, wherein there are many examples of the same method [socratic method]. I was charged with it, adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquire. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury in Collins, made a doubter, as I already was in many points of our religious doctrines, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore, I took a delight in it, practiced it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved.

Society is a conspiracy to keep itself from the truth. We pass our lives submerged in propaganda: advertising messages; political rhetoric; the journalistic affirmation of the status quo; the platitudes of popular culture; the axioms of party, sect, and class; the bromides we exchange every day on Facebook; the comforting lies our parents tell us and the sociable ones our friends do; the steady stream of falsehoods that we each tell ourselves all the time, to stave off the threat of self-knowledge. Plato called this doxa, opinion, and it is as powerful a force among progressives as among conservatives, in Massachusetts as in Mississippi, for atheists as for fundamentalists. The first purpose of a real education (a "liberal arts" education) is to liberate us from doxa by teaching us to recognize it, to question it, and to think our way around it.

The issue regarding the soul's relation to the state is posed with great force by Plato but also by More, not only in his fictional Utopia but also in later life when the issue would arise in a dramatically personal way because he found that neither laws nor rhetorical speech could save him from execution for a silence that he insisted was required by his soul.6

Gerbert’s first loves were the subjects of the trivium, especially rhetoric and logic. His insistence that students learn the rules of logic before embarking on anything else made Aristotle the founder of the medieval university curriculum.18

But Aristotle held a deeper interest for Boethius. With the knowledge of Greek steadily disappearing from western Europe, the need for a Latin version of Aristotle seemed more urgent. In fact, Boethius made it his life’s work. “I wish to translate the whole work of Aristotle,” Boethius wrote when he turned thirty. “Everything Aristotle wrote on the difficult art of logic, on the important realm of moral experience, and on the exact comprehension of natural objects, I shall translate in the correct order.”9 Boethius never finished the mammoth project he had set for himself (prison and death also interrupted his plans to translate Plato’s dialogues). Aristotle’s writings on politics, ethics, and rhetoric, along with his central work, the Metaphysics, had to wait another six centuries before they saw the light of day in the West.

imagine instead that you’re a fifth-century AD student of philosophy. You have come to the great center of learning that is the city of Alexandria in Egypt. (Don’t forget to visit the lighthouse, I hear it’s wonderful.) You already have a good education under your belt—you are literate, and have studied some rhetoric—and now you are going to try to master philosophy. What’s the first thing you will study? Of course it will be Aristotle. In late antiquity even Platonists introduced their students to philosophy through Aristotle, saving Plato’s texts for more advanced research.

Rome’s fall, some began to say, was the awful price of embracing Christianity. Augustine decided he had to meet the rumors head-on. When he entered his basilica, he addressed his congregation with all the skill and eloquence he could muster from his years as a teacher of rhetoric. “Do not lose heart, brethren,” he told them, “there will be an end of every earthly kingdom.” He told his astonished listeners that the fall of Rome was not actually bad news, but good news. It was merely another step in God’s construction of His new Jerusalem.

Those who listened to the teachings of Socrates became the best philosophers. But those who studied under Plato, relied more on the rhetorical path and therefore, the greatest opportunists.