Nalin Ranasinghe: Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009.

If a political man might identify the love of fame as the ruling passion of the noblest minds, what is the ruling passion of the best minds? It is `philo-sophia,’ the love of wisdom, Socrates maintained. But unless defined carefully, neither the love of fame nor the love of wisdom encompasses goodness in the moral sense of the word, virtue or strength of soul. (And even virtue might be redefined immorally, as Machiavelli does with his virtù).

Nalin Ranasinghe argues for an understanding of Socrates as a man whose love of wisdom reinforced virtue. Contemplating the cosmos, its nature, need not result in amoral estheticism or scientism, let alone immorality. The philosopher who considers the nature of human beings and the human place in nature as a whole will find that the wisdom he loves strengthens his courage, moderation, and justice. The Gorgias, Plato’s account of Socrates’ dialogues with the most eminent Sophist of his day, the Sophist’s disciple, and an impassioned, highly intelligent immoralist, highlights the virtue of Socratic philosophy by plunging Socrates into an underworld of political intrigue and educational corruption.

Ranasinghe begins by remarking that “many close readings of the Gorgias suggest that Plato uses his text’s many moral impasses to indicate the impotence and inadequacy of Socratic ethics” (1). The “backdrop” of the dialogue—”the long and brutal Peloponnesian War”—itself lends itself to nihilism, even as the First World War and the Holocaust would do, centuries later. But on the contrary: “I will contend that the true focus of the Gorgias is the instrumental perversion of speech introduced by its namesake. Although the trajectory of the dialogue moves away from the sophist himself, Socrates’ extended debate with Callicles employs indirect communication and reductio ad absurdum argumentation to show the itinerant Gorgias the long-germ result of his manipulative technique and moral irresponsibility—effects extending into our own times” (4). Good as his word, Ranasinghe illustrates many points in the dialogue with parallels between Gorgian sophistry and what has come to be called ‘postmodernism,” with its claim that human beings either manipulate or are manipulated by the verbal tropes they invent.
Against this, “more than any other [Platonic] dialogue, the Gorgias vividly depicts the great value that Socrates and Plato attached to the soul’s freedom and integrity” (4). And even this isn’t strong enough; Ranasinghe’s interpretation finds Socrates and Plato discovering that freedom and attachment, not merely `attaching value’ to it. “The passionately written Gorgias militates against the separation of moral from intellectual virtue and requires that its readers souls be integrated and fully engaged by the labyrinthine work before it” (5). By this act of intellectually erotic integration, our souls re-enact and recover “the Socratic vision of a morally governed cosmos that eventually provided both the language and concepts by which the sublime message of Christianity spread throughout the Hellenized world and gave birth to Western Civilization” (6).

Socratic philosophy counteracts the nihilism that finds its most courageous expression in Nietzsche, its most democratized expression in the writings of our contemporary disciples of Derrida. But unlike Leo Strauss, who also praised Socrates as the philosopher who stands at the core of the West, Ranasinghe points to the Gorgias, not the Republic, as the Socratic-Platonic dialogue we most need now. In Strauss’s lifetime, the crisis of the West consisted first and foremost of the attack on human nature seen in modern tyranny, usually called (but not by Strauss) ‘totalitarianism.’ As Strauss understood it, the Republic gives its careful reader a devastatingly ironic account of the evil and folly of a political regime that attempts to order human lives as if they were ideas. Today, however, “nihilism replaces totalitarianism as the main challenge facing humans” (7). Ideas in the Platonic sense are not abused; they are dismissed, rejected as nonsense, as `mere rhetoric.’ With its unmasking of the blandishments of sophistic rhetoric, the Gorgias becomes the Platonic dialogue to study now. Strauss was right to recover Platonic political philosophy, but as the political circumstances under which we live differ from those Strauss faced, our ‘point of entry’ into that philosophy should change.

The dialogue is anything but a history, an account of a series of events that really happened. Even Socrates’ most vehement interlocutor, Callicles, may well be an invention of Plato. But the diplomatic mission of Gorgias to Athens, his successful persuasion of the Athenians to make war on Syracuse on the side of his own embattled city, Leontini, did indeed occur, and the Gorgias “has to do with Socrates’ efforts to heal the effects visited by the plague of rhetoric on the city. In other words, while the Republic warns us against tyrants trying to supplant politics, the Gorgias depicts the contrary danger of a demagogic political regime that would transcend gods and nature and eventually leave everyone alienated from reality” (8). Wars don’t make nihilism; nihilists and their sophistries do. “Gorgias, [who] valued victory over truth, answers over questions, and satisfaction over learning,” who taught men “to use language in an opportunistic or instrumental way,” thereby “corrupted Greek culture and denied humanity the interrelated experiences of participation in the logos and the cosmos,” a severance that “slowly poisons the soul itself” wherever it becomes the regnant “attitude toward life” (8).

Although not a history, the dialogue has its own order or “interior proportions” (9). These are geometrically exact: four sections of equal length: Socrates’ interrogation of Gorgias; Socrates’ victory over Polus; Socrates “spirited discussion” with Callicles; Socrates’ speech about the underworld. The number 4 parallels the four principles that order the cosmos: earth, air, fire, water. Socrates’ art imitates nature. The imitation of nature by the philosophic artist contrasts sharply with an interpretation of the Platonic dialogues Strauss himself unearthed, namely, the claim by medieval Islamic theologians that “all philosophers are atheists and that ethics merely serves as an exoteric pretext for helping friends and harming enemies” (11). In this, the theologians opposed religious bellecism to philosophic eroticism. But this charge should have been directed at the sophists, not the philosophers; in Plato’s Philebus “Protarchus claims to have heard Gorgias insist that persuasion is superior to all the other arts because it enslaves all of them by their own consent” (12)—just the sort of thing an enterprising immoralist would want to do. Gorgias also anticipates postmodernism by claiming “that in the absence, inaccessibility, or inexpressibility of Truth our reality is held together by a worldwide web of persuasive words” (13). Far from strengthening democracy, sophistry ancient, modern, and postmodern warps the soul into a being incapable of self-knowledge, forgetting its natural place in the cosmos and viewing itself instead “as the measure of reality” (14). Severing the souls of citizens from reality causes democracies to choose their wars foolishly and fight them blindly, sending ignorant armies to clash by night.

As previous commentators have observed, the word polemou—”war” or “battle”—begins the dialogue. Ranasinghe provides the account of the Leontine embassy to Athens written by Diodorus Siculus, who says that the Athenians were susceptible to Gorgias’ eloquence for two reasons: they “are by nature clever and fond of dialectic,” and so Gorgias’ speech filled them with “wonder”; they had long “been covetous of Sicily because of the fertility of its land” (16). This puts an important limit on Ranasinghe’s gloss—”the gods deluded the Athenians into exchanging much gold (and priceless blood) for a few brazen words of flattery” (17)—because it indicates what really happened: Gorgias was telling them what they wanted to hear, giving them an excuse for their land hunger, rather in the manner that some American orators told their fellow citizens that a continental empire was their “Manifest Destiny.” While the corruptive power of sophistic rhetoric must not be underestimated, it works best with those already somewhat corrupt, given to wishful thinking and even fantasy because their desires are so strong.

Ranasinghe is especially alert to Platonic play with Greek legends. “Gorgias” sounds a bit like “Gorgon,” and sure enough, Socrates parodies Odysseus’s “deadly fear of the Gorgon’s deadly beauty” (held to turn men into stone) by arriving late to Gorgias’ display-speech. Indeed, Callicles, the host, effectively calls Socrates a coward for arriving late to the battle, a jab he will come to regret having made. Far from cowardly, Socrates will soon put Gorgias himself on display, and not in the most flattering light. But Gorgias begins the battle with supreme confidence, rather as the Athenians will invade Sicily. Socrates’ friend, Chaerephon, had once asked the Delphic Oracle whether there existed any man wiser than Socrates; here “it is Gorgias himself who plays the role of the eminent Oracle,” who promises to answer any question put to him (19). Gorgias supplants a god. “With his feigned omniscience, Gorgias—an intellectual molehill—has made the oracles, and indeed the gods, redundant” (19). Socrates “is not responsible for bringing this strange new god or post-theological phenomenon into the Agora,” but he will meet the invader in battle.

But Gorgias first sends out an expeditionary force, his student Polus, to test the mettle of the challenger. “It seems that Gorgias is not merely omniscient, [but] also capable of transferring his wisdom to anyone” (20); “it is striking that Socrates was never known to have claimed Chaerephon was his student” (24). This can only occur because to Gorgias and his students ‘omniscience’ derives from their nihilism, their very belief that there is nothing that can be known. If so, omniscience consists in the ability to say anything others can be brought to believe, and no real “religious and moral bonds” to restrain them (20). “For Gorgias the questioning process ends not with truth, or zetetic insight, but in the termination of the wonder that gave rise to the question and its replacement by the satisfaction or pleasure of the questioner. To this way of thinking democratic citizens were but a herd of auditory animals ruled by desire, ignorance, and passion.” (20) By contrast, “Socrates will oppose this bid to draw nihilistic conclusions from what must be seen as conditions for the possibility of human freedom and excellence” (21). Gorgias “bases his claims to omniscience on his power to reduce human diversity to a generic uniformity of need and desire through flattery and obfuscation” (23); he “creat[es] democratic truth, by saying whatever he believes his audience needs and wishes to hear” (25). To Gorgias’ self-deluding delusiveness, Socrates will oppose self-knowledge, the foundation of self-government. To democracy’s tendency toward political arithmetic—counting heads without regard to what is in them, identifying the good with majority opinion, and in our day taking polls the way an invalide imaginaire takes his own temperature—Socrates will oppose geometry, “the art dealing with ratios between naturally unequal entities” (21). He will oppose human freedom to the sophistic/democratic inclination to treat human beings as “free to be bought, sold, and counted like money” (21). In this sense he anticipates philosophically what Abraham Lincoln expressed politically in his debate with Stephen Douglas: natural right against undiluted popular sovereignty.

For his part, Gorgias enters the fray with such supreme confidence that he agrees to answer Socrates’ questions briefly, not with the long, winding speeches for which he is famous. After all, His Omniscience surely masters discourses long and short. More, he “is so much in love with his cleverness that he displays the naked truth of his art—in the hope of gaining greater acclaim” (26). ‘I am so good at what I do, I can tell you what I am doing to you and still do it.’ And why not, if one conceives of learning not as the noetic perception of reality, of nature, of being, but as an experience of word alone? “The rhetorician only learns from experience to speak eloquently on these very subjects through the experience of speaking frequently on them” (28). “For Gorgias the art of rhetoric is not embodied in or related to nature but rather represents the power of the eloquent will to create a realm of meaning that is independent of elusive or hostile nature” (28-29). Although a Leontine on a mission for his home city, as a sophist Gorgias is a traveling man. Here today and gone tomorrow, scouring the cities of Greece for new audiences and especially clients, he “will inevitably experience and portray reality as thoroughly fickle and changeable” (29). If modern science aims at conquering nature, in manipulating it for human advantage, at least it assumes that nature is really ‘there’ and knowable, even if scientists need to ‘torture’ nature with their ‘experiments’ so as to force her to reveal her secrets. But sophistic rhetoric, ancient and post-modern, operates through language alone, exercising “a pseudo-scientific power that seems to order or conquer nature” with words alone (29), a power to rule in one’s own city or in any city one passes through. “However, as Socrates soon points out, Gorgias and his students do not see that rule of the temperate man over himself, as opposed to the power to rule over others—even if this is limited to the populace of one’s own city—is the greatest human action” (29). Without that, the rhetorician catches himself in the self-contradiction seen in Gorgias’ own way of life: this cosmopolitan undertakes a mission in the service of his own city because even a cosmopolitan needs some physical and political platform upon which to speak. To put it in current-day terms, as I sit peacefully typing these letters onto a computer screen, I may imagine myself as free of nearly all constraints, physical and political. Am I not now entirely a ‘citizen of the world,’ preparing my thoughts for presentation to any reader who happens by, whether next door or in Myanmar? The answer is ‘no.’ I am in fact sitting in a chair, safely at home in a building that does not collapse, protected by police and fire departments, in a country that defends my right to freedom of speech and the press. I am firmly located in nature and in political life, whether I think about it or not. But if I don’t think about those realities, they may well change, and not to my advantage. The apolitical politics of sophist rhetoricians will otherwise deceive me, and them. Or, as Ranasinghe puts it (more forcefully), “a freedom that is created by speech alone tends to threaten to supplement and annihilate the ethos that gives it meaning” (31). The God of the Bible can create something out of nothing by the power of His Word, but I cannot, and even Gorgias cannot. There is “a subtle difference between rule over oneself and self-persuasion”; to ignore it is to engage in “the very delusory act of persuading [one]self that he is engaged in self-creation”  (32). The attempt at self-creation ends in self-destruction. Even God does not create Himself.

Sophists can manipulate a political community, but they cannot establish one. Ranasinghe asks “how sophists can genuinely interact with each other” (32). As he has learned from Augustine, even robber gangs need to maintain honor amongst themselves. But like the three Gorgons, the three sophists in the Gorgias do not “persuade or converse with one another”; “genuine interaction between avowed relativists and flatterers is impossible” (32-33). They may form alliances, but the friendships upon which social and political life depends cannot exist among them. Socratic philosophy, which openly admits that it know that it doesn’t know, “does not necessarily hurl us to the depths of non-being” or nihilism, the night in which all cows are black and no friends can be found; “prudentially mediated human truth is available in the metaxy or in-between realm, where we ‘participate’ in reality without having creative mastery over it” (33-34). To say that reality or nature is not fully transparent, that full ‘Enlightenment’ is impossible, is not to say that we do not glimpse nature and come to some understanding of it, even if that understanding is limited. Self-knowledge and knowledge of other persons is also limited, but sufficient for strengthening the virtue of souls and friendships among those souls. Sophistic rhetoric blocks these things from happening because it prevents self-correction and shields us from correction by our friends. Socrates can feel gratitude to the one who refutes his argument, but a sophist can feel only resentment, “growing in thumos rather than eros” (37).

Gorgias does exhibit a sort of prudence; he wants to bail out of his sinking rhetorical ship. Having been forced to choose “between being exposed as a knave or as a fool”—an untrustworthy nihilist who doesn’t believe in the justice to which he must appeal or an incompetent speaker who pretends to supreme technical mastery of speech— he decides that when the going gets tough, the tough get going—right out of town. Or at least out of the conversation. He is rescued from continued embarrassment by his disciple, Polus, who intervenes by attempting to shame Socrates into a like silence. But Socrates proves difficult to shame, inasmuch as he has nothing to be ashamed of.

Polus attempts a more open defense of rhetoric. Eschewing the appearance of justice, he thinks that “the inherent weakness of human nature makes it possible and necessary that rhetorical power should rule openly over man, nature, and the arts” (45). Socrates slows him down by asking what he thinks rhetoric is. Socrates challenges him to defend himself from the charge that rhetoricians qua rhetoricians do not understand politics at all; they have mastered only “a semblance of a branch of the art of politics” (46). The distinction between what is real and what only seems to be real begins to put rhetoric in its place. Socrates then gets Polus to admit two particular instances of that distinction: the real and only ‘seeming’ health of the soul and the real and only ‘seeming’ health of the body. But if so, Polus owes his interlocutors, and indeed himself, an account of why “the power and glory” that rhetoric brings to the rhetorician is good for anyone, first of all himself. Socrates then names four “false” arts—cookery, cosmetics, sophistry, and rhetoric—false because “they guess at the pleasant without concern or regard for what is best” (48). Cooking with lard results in a tasty cake, but the cook evidently doesn’t care much about my cholesterol count. Similarly, sophistry and rhetoric produce “phantasms” which “supplant natural phenomena and blind us to reality” (48).

Ranasinghe observes that although victory-loving Polus takes all of this sourly, his mentor Gorgias gets interested in Socrates’ argument, to the extent of breaking his self-imposed silence and asking a question or two. He is at least open to learning. This raises a very good question: “The absence of clear and definite knowledge, especially with regard to nature and the gods, is partly responsible for the prevalence and proliferation of flattery, but this being the case, how can we account for one man becoming a Socrates”—who never flatters without irony—”and another a Gorgias”—who flatters with an eye to power and profit? (49). This directs us to considering “the soul and the foundational moral experiences constituting it” (49). What is good for the soul, that thing sophists, rhetoricians, and philosophers alike must attend to?

What Ranasinghe considers the second quarter of the Gorgias “begins with Polus indignantly asking Socrates whether he thinks that rhetoric is but flattery” (50). Socrates deflects what he rightly considers a ‘rhetorical question,’ then denies Polus’ assertion that rhetoricians enjoy great power in the city. In so doing, he does points the young man to a more careful understanding of what power is; “the word translated power, dunamis, means ‘potential’ and is not considered something desirable in itself… Raw potential needs to be realized and actualized as energeia; otherwise happiness (eudaimonia) will not result” (51). Rhetoricians may or may not succeed in manipulating public opinion, but they lack real power because they depend upon their audience. And even when they succeed, they fail, because “tyrannical acts of this kind defeat the purposes inherent in human action itself to desire and do what is best” (52). Power exists for a purpose; it is not an end in itself. To treat power as if it were a purpose “only destroys the deliberative capacity essential to making something turn out for the best” (53). “Power should not be purchased at the cost of self-knowledge” (54), as the Delphic oracle might say.

Socrates goes on to make his celebrated, radical argument that suffering evil is better than doing evil. “To Polus’s way of thinking, the interior (the intellect) is a calculating infrastructure that exists purely for the greater glories of one’s image and passions” (58). The tyrant Archelaus is his hero—Archelaus, who not only sustained his tyranny but burnished his reputation by patronizing Euripides, thus doing “all he could to ensure that his legacy was spun to the best extent possible” (58). But Socrates is the last person to allow himself to be swayed by image-makers and the favorable public opinion they inspire. “This Archimedean Point of personal integrity”—this refusal to ‘go along to get along,’ much less to warp one’s perceptions in order to bring oneself into accord with what ‘everybody else says’—”represents an understated reference to what is surely terra incognita to Polus: the human soul” (59). Socrates found in himself the strength of soul to resist public opinion up to and including its verdict of death upon Socrates. “While Polus regards the soul egotistically as a power capable of triumphing in the shadow games played out on the wall of the cave, Socrates’ soul exists in another dimension of reality—one where moral principles are not created by necessity but rather guide the actions of free men” (59). “Socrates does not claim that unjust or excessive punishment is good; it would not be good for a minor offender to be delivered into the hands of sadistic and vicious judges. We may well contrast the strikingly different manner in which Jesus and Socrates were executed. It is also significant that Socrates viewed the relatively mild manner of his death as a sign of great divine favor” (61). It is also significant that Socrates never implied that he was God; he was charged with the impiety of denying the existence of the gods, not of claiming to be God.

Socrates undermines Polus’ self-assurance by inducing him to admit that although “it is worse to suffer injustice than to inflict it,” it is also “more shameful or ugly (aiskion) to do injustice than to suffer it” (63). But if so, then there must be some way to define the noble and the shameful, to distinguish them, and thus to account for our feelings of shame at doing injustice. Committing a shameful act is not physically painful, as suffering injustice often is, but then our discomfort must stem from some sense that injustice is bad for us. The soul has something in it that feels bad when it does bad things. “Doing injustice is worse than suffering it” (64) because doing injustice troubles the soul, whereas suffering injustice pains the body.

Although Polus concedes the truth of this, Ranasinghe remarks that a man “ruled by shame” might still commit injustice if he knew his crimes would go undetected. If Polus could make himself invisible, would he still avoid wrongdoing? To truly come around to Socrates’ view, Polus would need to see “why what is shameful and bad, is bad for him” (64), whether or not others knew his crimes. This is the weakness of the rhetorician’s soul, dependent upon public opinion, partly resentful of its sway and attempting to manipulate it, but finally bowing to it. This is why Socrates next suggests that of the three kinds of baseness—poverty, disease, and “defects of the soul”—the latter is worst because it alone brings “moral repugnance” in its train (66). This “psychic account of evil,” this understanding of evil as damaging to the soul of the evildoer, stands as “one of the deepest insights provided by the Gorgias” (66). If the remedy for poverty is money-making and remedy for disease is medicine, the remedy for defects of soul is “the art of justice” (67). The demi-art of rhetoric won’t cure a defective soul. “The true arts… connect the self to reality, rather than knack-like methods for excessive material accumulation or thumotic display without any moderating form or limiting principle” (68). The tyrant Archelaus terrorizes and image-builds adroitly, but why should one envy him his soul? “Human flourishing or happiness occurs in a setting requiring the individual soul to interact with others in the world through speeches and deeds…. [T]his is precisely what an unjust life cannot allow since it seeks to make itself the center or omphalos of being. Accordingly it sets out to warp everything, including the perception of other humans, around its singular and diseased perspective on reality” (70). Nor should we admire the democrat. “The chronic democratic temptation to pursue ‘freedom for oneself and hegemony over others’ ignores the crucial Archimedean point of self-rule” (70).

Socrates seldom speaks in public. He practices his dialectic on individuals in private. This comports with his insistence on the importance of the souls of his interlocutors. He does not seek to shame them in public, although he may cause them to blush in shame in front of a small circle of friends and relatives. Public shaming does not reach into the individual soul. Shaming by public rhetoric will not cure the soul so shamed. Shaming by private dialectic leads the individual soul to convict itself, and thus to desire to cure itself. “Our ignorance about what is positively just is unavoidable as long as the state, rather than the soul is viewed as the origin of virtue”; “a true regime of virtue can only be founded in the soul; it can never be imposed on [or, in any thoroughgoing way, by?—WM] any larger unit” (75). “Socrates teaches Polus, a professional rhetorician, to see the limitations of this outlook by helping him to understand that speech and truth, rather than being derivative from manipulated appearances, were founded on the moral quality of the soul and the reality of the world. In other words, Polus is shown the intentional structure immanent in speech itself; he also sees how this order reflected the self-evident teleology of the human desire for what was truly noble and good” (76). “Rhetoric works through breaking down the unity of the human soul into a great many unruly and needy desires”; this is to say that rhetoric ‘democratizes’ the soul, persuades it to imitate the desirous clamor of assembly and marketplace (76). “Conversely, Socrates’ art sets out to restoratively recollect the integrity of the individual and the genuine plurality of the citizenry,” while also “restor[ing] the self-knowledge of the soul and the self-evidence of the kalon [the noble]”—a restoration indispensable to both man and citizen.

Seeing that Polus began to lose the argument when he admitted to the experience of shame, Callicles jumps into the dialogue with an assertion of his own proud shamelessness. “Far more of a hedonist and nihilist” than Gorgias or Polus, Callicles proves “far harder to educate than either of the other two men” (77). He speaks “for the blinded and speechless desires” (78). Socrates accordingly replies by describing the two loves in the souls of the two men: Socrates loves Philosophy and Alcibiades, Callicles the Athenian people and Demos, son of Cleinias. But this means that Socrates loves the intelligent, Callicles the unintelligent. And Callicles confuses himself by claiming that his twin loves are really expressions of his own version of natural aristocracy, namely, the strength of his soul needed to pursue one’s desires without moderation. “Unlike Polus, who prefers to be one of the manipulators of shadows in the cave, Callicles desires to be powerful and shameless enough to charge into the cave like a rampaging lion and terrorize its hapless denizens” (84). To him “philosophy is the earliest and lowest stage on the intellectual ladder that culminates in tyranny” (85); he advises the aged Socrates to quit acting like a child. Anticipating the advice of the ‘postmoderns,’ Callicles would make philosophy into “a language game that future leaders must learn to play so that they may lie fluently to the masses when it’s time to go down to the cave and preside over the shadows” (87). “According to Callicles’ upside-down realism, men can only grow up when they become just as unjust, irrational, and power-driven as reality itself” (88).

How can Socrates reply to such a man? In the dialogue’s third part, “the obstacles Socrates faces in his agon with Callicles are quite unlike those he encountered with Gorgias and Polus? (94). Recalling the tripartite division of the soul outlined in the Republic, Ranasinghe finds the dialogue with Gorgias to have been “abstract and cerebral”—a battle fought by reasoning “on the chessboard of ideas” (94). The dialogue with Polus centered on thumos or spiritedness, with Socrates showing him that the very nature of logos or speech, the rhetoricians’ stock in trade, did not lend itself to the satisfaction of the “personal pursuit of political power and glory” (94). But Callicles valorizes the third ‘part’ of the soul, the desires; his “cultivated shallowness ensures that his pursuit of hedonism cannot be interrupted either by pure intellectual speculation or by practical reflections within himself concerning the compatibility between his methods and his long-term goals” (94). “Libido ergo sum is his intemperate motto,” as he “aspires to be the strongest beast amid chaos” (94-95). More, “Callicles’ shameless words, once acted on, will help to create the chaos in which he expects to thrive” (95). Callicles combines the teachings of Callicles with the lawless and tyrannical ethos of wartime Athens, the Athens of the Thirty Tyrants.

But this combination cannot sustain itself, any more than the Athenian empire could. If Callicles would dominate chaos, he himself must remain resolute, not chaotic. But if the chaotic ‘many’ who rule in democracy are the stronger, and they legislate for equality, then must they not be the truly natural men, not Callicles? Socrates thus shames the shameless Callicles, “making [him] feel an interior dimension that he most manifestly cannot control through violent power, a cave whence he cannot storm out like an unchained young lion” (98). “Callicles’ chaotic reality is much like ours; peopled by ungrateful freedmen, it is like Plato’s Cave without anyone in charge of the shadows” (101). Once again, in a way Socrates himself does not win the argument; logos does. Socrates “starts to triumph over Callicles the moment he forces his adversary to describe his infinite desire in words” (105).  Callicles tries to escape into silence, but it is too late. Returning the favor that Callicles had done him when he had tried gracefully to bow out of his own dialogue with Socrates, Gorgias intervenes to urge Callicles on—for his, Gorgias’, sake and for the sake of the argument. Gorgias understands that in refuting the arguments and assertions of his students, Socrates embarrasses the master rhetorician himself, the man whose career depends upon never being ‘shown up.’

Radical hedonism requires its devotee to refuse “solidarity with the rest of reality” but instead to use it as if the cosmos were a peach to be sucked dry by the hedonist (112). Ranasinghe criticizes Devin Stauffer for regarding Callicles’ hedonism as inconsistent because he praises prudence and courage, arguing that for Callicles these virtues are merely instrumental to his pursuit of pleasures. Similarly, he criticizes Stauffer for claiming that Callicles’ professed admiration for certain prominent Athenian statesmen bespeaks a “commitment to something beyond glory and hedonism” (114 n. 25). Callicles is more likely to (mis)understand such statesmen in the manner characteristic of Callicles’ assumptions: as instances of Athenian glory and dominance. “Conversely, a Socratic would attach great value to the Athenian discovery of the connection between logos and the cosmos” (114 n. 25). It might have been better to have written “discover great value in” rather than “attach great value to.” However that may be, “Callicles’ problems stem from knowing too much about his desires and too little about his soul” (115); “one who lives by desire cannot see his soul as anything but a nexus for the continued enjoyment of pleasure” (116). Gorgias, who is not nearly so far gone in mindlessness, watches and listens, and maybe learns. But Ranasinghe does not contend, as Stauffer does, that Gorgias will ever truly befriend Socrates because “there is a fundamental difference between rhetoric and philosophy”: “Dialectical speech is ruled by its ends and cannot proceed by the sophistical devices of exploiting ignorance and creating false certainty. While Gorgias pushes ignorance, Socrates’ eloquence comes from his being pulled towards a cosmic order that he will soon describe” (118 no. 29).

In politics, Callicleanism plays out as a quest for Athenian glory by means of the cultivation of the strong amidst the chaos of the weak. The shameless, hedonic master spirits will thrive in the democratic chaos of Athens, rule the stupid and spineless many, and thereby turn Athens among the cities into the kind of ravening lions they are, among the Athenians. Like themselves, Athens will prove voracious, rapacious, and dominant. Socrates opposes his ‘theory of the ideas’ to this because the ideas or forms are “not simply creatively imposed from above” but “discovered” as the self-definitions of nature. Reasoned speech, guided by the principle of non-contradiction, describes the nature of which it is a part; to be governed by reason is the soul’s true nature. Just as “physicians generally allow healthy people to satisfy their desires, but do not extend such freedoms to the sick—presumably because their desires are in disarray,” so the soul, when “filled with vices… must not be permitted to indulge its desires and perform actions other than those which will improve it” (119). This is “why just punishment—even including death—may be preferred to living on with a diseased and untreated soul” (119). Socratic ‘idealism’ is “more realistic” than Calliclean ‘realism’ (122).

The final part of the Gorgias consists of Socrates’ own speech, his own rhetorical performance, as he tells a myth that illustrates what he has argued dialectically in the first three parts. Ranasinghe observes that Socrates, having defeated each of his three would-be conquerors, has left himself to deliver a “sort of internal dialogue” (123) in fact, he does not call this a myth at all, but a logos, clearly implying that he regards his speech as an extension of his reasoned argument. Unlike the sophistical rhetoricians, “the philosopher will emphasizes causes and ends rather than effects and means; he also privileges the recovery o erotic being over the sophistical aim of creative dominion over godforsaken becoming” (124).

Socrates has argued that the good is superior to pleasure, that the good means the presence of virtue in the soul, and that virtue means right order. Right order in the soul is by nature, but this natural order can be improved or deranged. Philosophy improves it, sophistry deranges it. “The very nature of the incomplete but erotic human soul seems to necessitate that it choose and actualize its own virtue from within itself, albeit in circumstances that inspire it toward transcendence with a vision of the nobility and beauty of the cosmos” (124). Happiness “is an internal state of flourish that is not dependent on external events” (125); eudaimonia “literally means having a happy guiding spirit” (125). Old, henpecked, poor, ugly Socrates is a happy man because he loves wisdom, opens his soul to the order of the cosmos and orders his soul so as better to understand the cosmic order. His reason rules him, and so his soul does not oscillate between prickly, honor loving thumos and self-contradictory physical desires. By contrast, the tyrant’s deranged, badly ordered, soul cannot trust others because it cannot trust itself; it cannot trust itself because it whipsaws from one tormenting desire or fear to another (128).

This rightly-ordered soul comports with the well-ordered cosmos. In perceiving, partially understanding, and teaching others about the cosmos the man of this always limited, but always growing wisdom serves as a kind of daimon or messenger from the cosmic order to his fellow-men; the order of his soul, conveyed by his speaking and reasoning, his logos, improves the orderliness of their souls. In so doing, he adds a bit to the good order of the cosmos of which all human beings form a part. “This cosmic flourishing is neither a divinely granted revelatory dispensation… nor is it a wholly human creation” (130). It is an act of “non-coercive erotic authority” (131). “God is neither dead to the world nor a double-predestining, doom-dealing puppeteer”; to believe so is to reject the metaxy, that in-between position “where participation [in the cosmic order] occurs,” which “cannot be over-determined” (131). “What Socrates has described is a partnership between the human and the divine that allows god to be god and man to be man” (131). There cannot be “perfect knowledge of all that ever will be,” nor can there be “perfect technical knowledge over human souls” (133). And this is good news for human beings and for the cosmos itself. The modern-philosophic promises to achieve such mastery over nature “through the existence of technical power” (133) are both impossible and bad. “Socrates’ point is that instead of being based on selfish calculations regarding probable events in the future quite beyond man’s (or god’s) control, human beings should instead be ruled by the ideas of justice and temperance,” a condition of the soul that puts it “into harmony with the cosmic order” (134). The philosopher is the daimon who brings this message (or, to use another Socratic metaphor, the midwife who delivers), this modestly improved orderliness to human souls by bringing them to imitate the cosmos instead of trying vainly (in both senses of the word) to master it. Friendship can then replace manipulative rhetoric and tyranny. In his final comment to Socrates, Callicles indicates that he “now knows what Socrates was talking about, even though his body is un-persuaded by this non-rhetorical reasoning” (141). He will never philosophize, but he can be brought to think, a little. This is one modest achievement of Socrates’ “true political art” (142), and the limitations of the achievement underline Socrates’ ready insistence that human speech can only go so far in its effects. When a radio quiz show host asked witty Dorothy Parker to use the word ‘horticulture’ in a sentence, she famously replied, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.” Socrates would say you might be able to, but just barely. Both the ugly old man and the beautiful young men and women will discover that limits to their erotic attractiveness. If Socrates goes before a jury in Athens, he already knows what the likely verdict will be.

Socrates final logos describes the cosmic order in terms of the god Kronos and his sons Zeus (a god of the sky, the air), Poseidon (a god of the earth and the sea), and Pluto or Hades (a god of the underworld). The “underworld” of Ranasinghe’s title refers to Hades, and the actual underworld Socrates is “in” is the city, the Cave of the Republic and specifically the city of Athens; in each of these three underworlds, the “denizens have ‘no-idea’ (a-eidos) of who they are, but see and know themselves only as shadows,” manipulated by “orators, poets, and politicians” (149). Although Zeus is the god of the sky, he is not the sky itself. “The mysterious distinction between the sky and the gods is better understood when we take the sky to represent a realm of eternal unchanging ideas to which even the gods are subject; this issue was notably examined in the Euthyphro—where the virtues are recognized by the gods and cannot be whatever the arbitrary deities happen to fancy. The further implication of this is that the gods themselves are but time-bound representatives of the Platonic forms or ideas” (150).

Similarly, human beings come from the earth, but are not the earth. They are down-to-earth political animals, but also capable of navigating by the stars in the sky. Socrates, the messenger who mediates between sky and earth, gods and men, is guiltless of the charge the Athenians bring against him, the charge of impiety. He did not introduce “strange deities” to replace the gods of Homer; “rather, he is upholding the higher timeless principles that the sky represents in his model of the four-fold [cosmos]” (151). In the Gorgias he “provides a logos of psychic interiority to support its after-worldly mythos (152). In so doing, he would replace the warrior-gods of Homer (who have misled Athenians into believing they can fight the Peloponnesian War as if they were Achilles and Odysseus at Troy) while resisting the blandishments of Dionysus, “the demi-god of drunken democracy” (158), at whose shrine ambitious young Athenians like Callicles are inclined to burn the candles of their souls. “Socrates overthrows the blood-stained Olympian tyrant and replaces him with a regime of virtue” (156), a regime strong enough to resist the insurgent Dionysians, as well.

The Socratic regime or “way of life” rests on five tenets: “fear doing injustice more than suffering it”; “value being good in private and public over seeming good”; “see that goodness comes first with just punishment next”; “flee all flattery”; “take care that rhetoric should be used only to serve justice” (160). The “true political art” or statecraft founds this new regime of the soul’s self-knowledge, against the bad regime of a soul corrupted by those who “pander pleasure and pain” (161). In the larger realm of city politics, Athens must “disgorge her vast imperial acquisitions,” the winnings “of the grandiose imperialism of Cimon and Pericles” (161). “The future of the School of Hellas must be found in thought rather than deed,” as “the torch of Prometheus is passed from Pericles to Plato,” from whom it will eventually “blaze open a path that will carry the imperishable logos from Jerusalem, through the Hellenized World, all the way to Rome” (161). Ranasinghe thus modestly points the reader toward his own Catholicism, often held to combine Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation.

In his epilogue, Ranasinghe recalls Gorgias’ “triple denial of Truth’s existence, its know-ability, and its speak-ability” (162). Socrates rejects both Gorgias’ claims about nature and (consequently) his “way out of the abyss by persuasive manipulation of democratic opinion” (162). “Like the Gorgon’s head, seductive sophistry has the power to kill souls by placing them in a this-worldly Hades” (162). Socratic dialectic liberates souls from this cave or underworld. “Since Christianity has altered Socrates’ model by externalizing good and evil and placing the complementary concepts of an omnipotent merciful God and original sin, like a good and bad angel, on either side of us, the resultant synthesis is unequal to the task of confronting the problem of evil unless the soul’s power to choose between good and evil is taken very seriously” (163). One does so by seeing the parallel between the natural order of the soul and the order of nature itself, the homology of man and cosmos which the daimon/philosopher can show us by his dialectical arguments. “Socrates suggests that it is within the power of the human soul to deliberate well and prudently when confronted with the many dyadic categories (freedom and necessity, good and evil, nobility and vice) that operate on it” (164). Socrates proved this to be possible by living the philosophic way of life, embodying the self-knowing, soul-ordering regime of philosophy.  Contra Machiavelli, who teaches that men must learn not to be good in order to survive in a dangerous world, Socrates shows that “good humans do their polity a priceless service by constantly proving that virtue is immune to the false necessity of vice” (167). Such humans can be true friends, and true friendships strengthen the political community. “Socrates’ inspiring example suggests that true happiness is gained neither through ‘spinning’ vain fabrications in the void nor by being envied in the cave-like abyss of non-being”; eudaimonia can only be earned by using the `enduring power’ of the human soul to participate in the beauty of the cosmos” (168).

In considering the interpretations of Devon Stauffer and Nalin Ranasinghe, one sees that both scholars recover the Socratic understanding of the philosopher as a man of both intellectual and moral virtue. Stauffer emphasizes Socrates’ efforts at reforming rhetoric, at teaching Gorgias how his art might be put to better use if it observed the virtues of justice and moderation. Ranasinghe pays more attention to Socrates’ use and understanding of Greek myths as a way of showing the connection between the distinctive feature of human nature, logos, and the larger nature or cosmos which our logos perceives and attempts to describe. In rightly delineating the limits nature sets on human beings, the philosopher’s way of life finds its home in the cosmos. But this ‘cosmopolitanism’ respects the political order that human speech and reason also generate, by arts that can do a better job of aligning that order with nature than sophists and rhetoricians have been inclined to do, then and now. Both of these studies prove to be good companions in the sociable, political philosophy Socrates inaugurated.

Aristotle: Rhetoric. Joe Sachs translation. Newburyport: Focus Philosophical Library, 2008.

Larry Arnhart: Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the “Rhetoric.” DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1981.

Note: This is the first of two essays on the Rhetoric and Arnhart’s commentaries, bringing out somewhat different aspects of both. The second review will be found under the title “Aristotle on Rhetoric.”

Aristotle’s treatise on rhetoric imitates rhetoric as he understands it. Repeatedly, he identifies a feature of rhetoric and then illustrates it by the kind of argument he makes. And he does make arguments. Although today we pair the word “rhetoric” with such adjectives as “mere” and “empty,” Aristotle regards rhetoric as possessing rational content.

“Rhetoric is the counterpart”—the antistrophe—”of dialectic.” Both come within the knowable experience of “all men” and neither belongs to a “definite science” (1354a). As human beings simply, all of us discuss statements and test them; we all defend ourselves and accuse others. Rhetoric is an art, “the means of persuasion” (1354a). As Arnhart puts it, art involves knowledge, as does science, but unlike science it aims at a practical end; one might add that science understood as `technology,’ which is very scientific, is nothing other than science made artful, as the etymology of the word itself suggests.

Arnhart spells out the problem Aristotle addresses: “The rationality of rhetoric becomes especially dubious if scientific demonstration is taken to be the sole model of valid reasoning.” More, to demand scientific precision of all reasoning gives political speech a task it cannot bear. By that criterion, “the political itself becomes irrational” (4)—a realm of prejudice and passion, nothing more. Can politics be redeemed from this suspicion? Aristotle sets out to do so, in a series of arguments that parallel the Socratic-Platonic defense of the rational content of myths.

Aristotle criticizes previous writers on rhetoric for having missed rhetoric’s rational character by failing to discuss enthymemes—premises that are not self-evident truths but probabilities, or else “signs” of other things. By a “sign” Aristotle means roughly what we mean by evidence; if a woman has milk it is a sign that she has given birth (1357b). Enthymemes give rhetoric its rational content. In the spirit of the contrarian, he goes so far as to call a speaker’s appeals to emotions inessential to the rhetorical argument itself—”merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case” (1354). It is “sound law and custom” to forbid such appeals in law courts; “you might as well warp a carpenter’s rule before using it” (1354a). Nonetheless, Aristotle will in fact go on to discuss the emotions themselves in the center of the treatise, perhaps knowing that a speaker needs to understand the persons to whom he addresses his arguments, however well-grounded they may be.

The mention of a law forbidding personal appeals enables Aristotle to comment on the character of law itself, which provides the frame for political speaking, whether in an assembly or a court. Lawmakers attempt to “leave as little as possible up to those doing the judging” for the very good reason that the lawmakers themselves are likely to `study up’ on the subject-matter of the particular law they are making; left to themselves, the many citizens to whom the law applies are unlikely to know as much as those who make the laws know. Also, the lawmakers “have considered things for a long time, while judgments of cases are made on the spur of the moment. Finally and most important, the lawmakers exercise their practical judgment with regard to “future and universal matters,” not merely a single case that comes before them. This longer range and more general view makes them less inclined than judges—especially judges acting in assemblies, the kind that convicted Socrates, the man of reason—to judge in accordance with “love and hate and private advantage” (1354b), as judges and juries may do. Law inclines toward reason.

But the very generality of law—the way in which it is rational, which often imitates the way in which science is rational—makes it a less than infallible guide to particular circumstances. To be authoritative, law must (as we now say) be applied to the specific case. What has happened here? What is possible or impossible to have happened? Here we need judges, like it or not.

Here is where enthymemes come in, being arguments with some rational content that are applicable to particular cases. Aristotle then introduces a nuance: a law against appealing to emotions makes sense in law courts more than it does in assemblies because in law courts the judges judge the interests of others, whereas in the assembly “the judge is making a judgment about his own interests” (1354b). “Human beings are adequately directed toward what is true by nature, and for the most part hit upon the truth” (1355a); if they did not, they wouldn’t survive for long. Indeed, “things that are true and things that are just are by nature stronger over their opposites,” so if the true and just things do not prevail it is the speakers’ fault, not the audience (1355a). Political speakers need not attempt to instruct their audience, inasmuch as “there are people whom one cannot instruct” and human beings in courts or in assemblies are adequately grounded in more or less sound opinions, anyway. So, as Arnhart remarks, Aristotle distinguishes rhetoric from pedagogy on the one hand and from sophistry on the other. A speaker must know how to argue both sides of a question not in order to mislead—”we ought not be persuasive about corrupt things” (1355a)—but in order to see facts clearly and to be ready to refute an unjust argument (Arnhart, 4-5). Rhetoric is easily confused with sophistry because both use many of the same techniques of persuasion, but they differ in “intention” (1355).  The existence of sophistry makes knowledge of the rhetorical art all the more needed. In cases not of persuasion regarding judgment of policies but of persons, one needs rhetoric to defend oneself. “It would be absurd if being incapable of defending oneself with the body were a shameful thing, but it was not shameful to be incapable of doing so with speech, which is more distinctive of a human being than the use of the body” (1355b). And, as Arnhart puts it, “One possesses rhetoric as an art only when one knows the reasons for the success of some techniques of persuasion and the failure of others” (15). Rhetoric thus entails reason both in its substance, insofar as it deploys enthymemes, and in its techniques.

“Rhetoric may be defined as a power of seeing in any given case the means of being persuasive” (1355b). Persuasion has three dimensions: exhibition of the personal character of the speaker, establishing his credibility; putting the audience into the right disposition by appealing to the appropriate emotions; and proof “or apparent proof” of the substance of what the speaker says (1356a). Enthymemes enter in with the third dimension. Aristotle recalls that rational or logical argument can be inductive, proceeding from particulars to a general conclusion or syllogistic, deducing particular conclusions, including recommended actions, from first principles. In the art of rhetoric, examples are the staple of inductive argument, enthymemes that of syllogism. The speaker must know not only these kinds of argumentation but also choose them according to the audience; he must know his audience, even as a doctor must know his patient. He must especially know the opinions of his audience, as they will determine the range of claims likely to be judged plausible by that audience.

In addition to knowing his audience, the speaker must also know the three kinds of rhetoric: “advisory” or “deliberative,” appropriate for assemblies deliberating on policy; forensic, appropriate when addressing judges; and “display,” appropriate for such as weddings, funerals, and civic ceremonies and commemorations. Each of these kinds of rhetoric aims at a particular kind of action: to choose or refuse an action in the case of political speech; to attack or defend someone in the law court; and to praise or censure someone or something, at a civic ceremony. In terms of time, political rhetoric aims at the future, forensic rhetoric aims at the past, and display rhetoric aims at the present. Finally, each form of rhetoric aims at a purpose: political rhetoric seeks to persuade the audience that a certain action will bring advantage or harm; forensic rhetoric seeks to show that a given judgment of a past action is just or unjust; and display rhetoric seeks at persuading listeners of the beauty or shamefulness of the persons or events the occasion is intended to bring to mind. One notices that justice is central to forensic rhetoric but subsidiary to considerations of advantage and disadvantage in political speech. As Arnhart remarks, “the enthymeme combines reasons and passion”–logos, ethos or character, and pathos or emotion; this suggests that pathos or emotion can be made amenable to reason (10). Further, “For Aristotle, good style is not merely ornamentation, since the goodness of the style is determined by how well it satisfies the natural desire of listeners of learning through reasoning” (12). While rhetoric isn’t directly instructive, it can educate indirectly with prudent appeals to the better angels (or, as the Greeks would say, demons) of our nature.

Aristotle now turns to the first of the three kinds of rhetoric. Regarding advisory or political rhetoric, he distinguishes it from knowledge about politics or political science, which he treats in the Politics. Rhetoric is an art or a sort of power or capability, not a form of knowledge. Political deliberation consists of several topics: finances or what we now call political economy, war and peace, military defense, imports and exports, and legislation. Although Aristotle doesn’t deploy the term `geopolitics,’ he knows what it is, and commends its study; similarly, respecting legislation, he commends the study of `comparative politics’ to learn “what forms of government [are] in use among other peoples, and what sorts fit what sorts of people” {1360a). In addressing all of these topics, the speaker should aim at the “target” all human beings desire, namely, “happiness and its parts”—the latter consisting of bodily goods such as health, beauty, and strength, along with such external goods as children, friends, riches (1360b). Citizens desire these goods for themselves and also for the political community generally. “The political or deliberative orator’s aim is the advantageous; deliberation seeks to determine not ends but the means to the end” (1362a). Aristotle takes a decidedly `tough’ view of what human beings actually regard as good, observing that we incline to choose our own good above those of others, given the fact that when we act when no one is looking we choose the good for ourselves, but “it is not thought that one would choose to do good [to others] unnoticed” (1365b). “Everyone is persuaded by what is advantageous,” less so by what is just (1365b). In political terms, the advantageous is what preserves the existing regime. The ruling principle of democracy is freedom, of oligarchy riches, of aristocracy education and custom, of tyranny self-preservation.

Averting his readers’ eyes from such considerations, Aristotle considers the topics of display speeches. These center on the beautiful—understood in the moral sense, the beautiful or well-ordered soul–and the virtues needed to achieve it—the ones described at length in the Nicomachean Ethics. In contrast to the advantageous, “the greatest virtues would necessarily be those that are most useful to others” (1366b). The virtues do not anticipate those of Christianity in every particular. For example, “taking vengeance on one’s enemies rather than reconciling with them, because repayment in kind is just and what is just is beautiful, and it befits a courageous person not to be bested,” numbers among the virtues (1367a). Exaggeration “comes in reasonably in speeches of praise, since it has to do with preeminence, and preeminence is among the beautiful things” (1368a). The art of rhetoric in display speeches consists largely in such exaggeration, whereas political speeches depend mostly on examples, “since we judge what is going to happen by making surmises based on what has happened before” (1368a).

Not so in forensic rhetoric. Here is where enthymemes come to the fore. To establish the probabilities upon which enthymemes rest in legal cases, one needs to know the nature and number of incentives for wrong-doing, the state of mind of wrong-doers, and the kinds of persons who are wronged, along with their condition. Aristotle defines injustice as “doing harm willingly contrary to law,” which for the purposes of arguing in court consists of “particular law”—”the written law by which people are governed”—and “common law”—”those unwritten laws that seem to be agreed to by everyone” (1368b), law which “comes from nature” (1373b). Culpable acts of harm-doing entail choice, knowingly doing wrong without being forced. The several reasons for making harmful choices stem from character defects (examples include “a person with a soft character… taking easy options” and “an ambitious person [being] unjust for the sake of honor”), but these are choices nonetheless. The same goes for the “conditions” of the wrong-doer. For example, riches and poverty do not cause crime; badly-governed desires cause crime. All uncoerced actions, good or bad, arise from thinking something good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant.

“Desire is an appetite for what is pleasant,” and pleasure consists of “a certain kind of motion of the soul, a sudden and perceptible resettling into its proper natural condition” (1370a). Habit being a sort of second nature, acts too are pleasant, including the habitual and initially painful exertions of athletics. Desires may be irrational (as we now say `instinctual’) or they may be “combined with reason” (1370a). Aristotle disagrees with John the Apostle, who judges the heart to be desperately wicked. The desires and their associated pleasures can range from bodily necessities to “learning and being in a state of wonder” (1371a). “Everything that is like and akin to oneself is pleasant,” and “everyone is necessarily a lover of self to a greater or lesser extent”; human beings love and take pleasure in the things that are “their own”—flatterers, friends, children (1371b). There is no crime in that.

The criminal states of mind occur when our self-esteem partners with feelings of impunity. A position of power, the belief that the act will go undetected, the belief that there will be no penalty or a light one all contribute to crime. If you are poor and ugly, Aristotle observes with a touch of unkind humor, you might commit adultery on the belief that you will never be detected, or indeed suspected. On a more grandiose scale, the tyrant may calculate that “there is no punishment equal to the benefit” (1372a). “But those who most of all believe it to be in their power to commit injustice without penalty are people who have ability at speaking, have practical skill, have experience in various conflicts, if they also have a lot of friends and are rich” (1372a). As for the criminals’ victims, they are often over-trusting and easygoing souls, people who let their guard down. Also, the friendless and the tongue-tied have a target on their backs. And “there are also injustices that shame prevents the victims speaking about, such as violations of the women in their households” (1373a). To establish as facts these states of mind and these conditions in a forensic speech goes a long way to building the probabilistic groundwork for an enthymeme.

As for just and unjust actions, they violate either the particular, written law of a community or the unwritten, common law of nature (“for there is something that all men have a notion of as naturally just and unjust, even if there is no unanimity or agreement among them” regarding its exact content) (1373b). Unjust actions violate one or both of these kinds of law, and do injustice “either to one definite person”—adultery, assault—”or to the community”—refusing to serve in the army (1373b). Reasoning comes into the arguments here, too, because proof of adultery or assault (for example) may not lead to a just conviction or at least not to a severe penalty if there are extenuating circumstances (not knowing the sexual partner was married, understandably fearing that the person you assaulted was a threat to your own safety). Equity “makes up for the defects of a community’s written code of law,” laying hold of “the sort of justice that goes beyond the written law” (1374a). Misfortunes and mistakes do not amount to criminal offenses, and it is the business of the forensic orator who speaks in behalf of the defendant to establish such circumstances in the minds of the judges, “so that the decent thing may prevail” (1374b). The reverse of extenuating circumstances are exacerbating ones: an act so deeply unjust that no established punishment adequately fits the crime. In such cases the forensic orator must ask the judges to lay it on.

In arguing a court case, the orator needs to understand not only how to use enthymemes but also how to use the “non-technical” means of persuasion: laws, witnesses, contracts, tortures, and oaths (1375a). By `using’ laws as a means of persuading judges, Aristotle means appealing to the letter of the law when it supports your case and appealing to the unwritten “common law” when it doesn’t. Indeed, “it is the mark of a better man to use and stand by the unwritten laws rather than the written ones” (1375b), inasmuch as the unwritten laws hew more closely to justice and equity. As for cases in which torture has been used as a means of persuasion, Aristotle remarks that “no truth can be placed in evidence under torture” (1377a).

In Book II Aristotle turns to considerations of character or ethos. “Since rhetoric is for the sake of a judgment… it is necessary not only to look to the argument, so that it will be demonstrative and persuasive, but also to present oneself as a certain sort of person and prepare for a certain sort of judge; for it makes a big difference as far as persuasion is concerned, in deliberations especially and secondly in trials, what sort of person the speaker appears to be and how his hearers assume he is disposed toward them, and moreover, whether they themselves might happen to be disposed in some particular way” (1377b). The speaker must make an impression on his hearers as a person of good sense, good moral character, and good will. Only these thing will win their trust. This consideration requires the speaker to understand not logic but the emotions, indeed the passions. Aristotle proceeds to enumerate and describe these, as they relate to persuasion.

Anger comes first because so much of oratory consists in arousing moral indignation in an audience, whether in the assembly or the courtroom. Anger is the passion most closely associated with justice; it is “a desire, accompanied by pain, for revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one friends” (1378a). Along with this pain comes a pleasure, namely, “the expectation of revenge” (1378b). We feel this passion especially when we are belittled, and even more when belittled by those they respect or want to be respected by. Aristotle shrewdly notices that forgetting a person’s name will incur such anger. “The orator will have to speak so as to bring his hearers into a frame of mind that will dispose them to anger and to present his adversaries as guilty of such charges and possessed of such qualities as do make people angry” (1380a). A speaker must also know how to calm an angry audience, precisely by avoiding any statement that appears to belittle (in modern misusage, `condescend to’) them. “Even dogs make it clear that anger stops toward those who show humility by not biting people who squat down” (1380a). For their part, human beings “are lenient with those who are never insolent, mocking, or belittling toward anyone, or not toward honest people, or not toward people of their own sort (1380a).

This leads Aristotle to discuss feelings of friendship and enmity. “Liking” someone means “wanting someone to have the things one believes are good, for that person’s sake and not one’s own” (1381a). Causes for liking someone include being the friend of a friend, being a hater of those you hat, being one who supports himself and not a parasite, being temperate and “not unjust,” being one who “stay[s] out of other people’s business,” easygoing, “adroit at teasing and being teased,” and being one who praises you for your “good attributes, especially those [you] fear [you] do not possess” (1381a-b). People “like those who hold them in serious regard in any way” and also those “who desire the same things” (1381b). Those with the opposite characteristics arouse enmity.

Fear is “a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future, especially the imminent future (“we all know we shall die, but give it no thought because death is not close at hand” (1382a). Aristotle again displays his tough-minded aspect, observing that “since most people are worse rather than better, unable to resist a chance to gain, and cowardly amid dangers, it is for the most part a frightening thing to have oneself at the mercy of anyone else” (1382b). Fear consists of our reaction to the opposite of the pleasure associated with anticipated revenge, as “all frightening things are more frightening when there is no chance for those who have transgressed to set things right” (1382b). An orator may invoke fear or counteract it by inspiring confidence—this by minimizing his hearers’ vulnerabilities or by whipping up their anger. In this way, anger and fear have a subtle relationship, the one counteracting the other; if one often uses anger to counteract fear, anger may become a habitual follow-up passion to fear.

It is noteworthy that all of the emotions Aristotle discusses in this section of the Rhetoric involve thumos, the `spirited’ aspect of the soul. Shame and shamelessness involve the spirited passion of self-regard. Like belittling, we feel it most sharply “in relation to those whom people have regard for” (1384a). Self-regard also enters in when we receive kindness, which we most appreciate from “those who stand by us in poverty or in exile” (1385a). We pity the most those like ourselves, and feel indignation at the “undeserved prosperity” of those unlike ourselves, such as “the newly rich” (1386b). Envy we reserve for the good fortune of equals. So too with emulation, the distinction being that when we envy we want to pull the other guy down, and when we emulate we want to pull ourselves up to his level. Friendship can survive emulation, but not envy.

Aristotle’s down-to-earth description of the emotions in the context of his treatise on rhetoric likely occasioned Thomas Hobbes’s esteem for the Rhetoric—the only Aristotelian book on ethics and politics Hobbes praised. In discussing character, Aristotle similarly eschews the careful theorizing seen in the Nicomachean Ethics for a descriptive account relevant to his topic. Character consists of the emotions and the soul’s moral qualities, its virtues and vices, which incline it to “will and do” the actions seen as `characteristic’ of the person (1388b). An orator especially needs to understand character as it relates to the various conditions of his audiences—his listeners’ time of life and also their fortune (social status, wealth, power).

“The characters of young people are dominated by desires,” about which “they are changeable and fussy” (1389a). The young are also “spirited and quickly provoked,” loving honor much and victory more. They love money much less. They are over-critical and over-trusting, in both cases because they have little experience with evil. Generally, “the young are as overheated by nature as others are by drinking wine” (1389a). Appeals to hope galvanize them because “for the young there is a lot of future and a short time gone by” (1389a). They “prefer to perform beautiful deeds rather than advantageous ones, because they live by character more than by reasoning” (1389a). “They believe they know everything and are completely sure about it all,” thus inclining more to insolence than to malice (1389b). The elderly are just the opposite—unsure of themselves, “assum[ing] the worst about everything,” distrustful “because of their experience” (1389b). “They love like people who are going to hate and hate like people who are going to love” (1389b). Small-souled, desiring nothing great, stingy because they know how easy property is to lose, they are “cowardly and afraid of everything before it happens” (1389b). They seek advantage, not beauty, “for the advantageous is good for oneself while the beautiful is good simply” (1340a). They “live in memory rather than in hope” (1340). They appear to be temperate, but only because their desires have faded; they complain a lot. Men in their prime hit the Aristotelian mean between these extremes, “judg[ing] people by the truth of the situation,” guided by both the beautiful and the advantageous, in balance, both brave and temperate (1389b). They are the best audience a speaker can have.

As to external good, the good of fortune, those of “good birth” are ambitious and take pride in their ancestors, although a speaker should not assume that a new generation equals its distinguished forebears: “in the generations of men, just as in what is brought forth by the earth, there is a certain harvest, and sometimes, when the stock is good, extraordinary men are produced for some time, and then things go back the other way” (1490b)—I give you the Churchill family, among others. As for wealth, “rich people also believe they deserve to rule, since they believe they have the things that make someone deserve to rule” (1391a). In this as in much else, “the character of a rich person is that of a fortunate fool” (1391a). Men of political power, on the other hand, “are more ambitious and more manly in their characters than rich people,” and also “more energetic on account of being in a position of responsibility, forced to look out for what affects their power” (1391a). With some humor, Aristotle notes that while good fortune generally makes us “more arrogant and more inconsiderate,” it also inclines us to piety and “respect for divine power, in which they believe because of events which are really he result of fortune” (1391a-b).

Having concluded his assessment of character and fortune, Aristotle veers somewhat abruptly back to the art of rhetoric, and therefore back to reasoning. One uses persuasive speech to “lead to decisions” (1391b), whether speaking to an individual or a group. In doing so, the speaker invokes what Aristotle calls “topics”: whether a thing is possible or impossible, and how big or small the good thing he praises or the bad thing he condemns or warns against seems. The speaker deploys two kinds of rhetorical forms: enthymeme and example. While the “topics” involve inflating or deflating hopes and fears, the forms lead the audience to intellectual discipline, to the coherent limits of action. On this and similar points in Aristotle’s presentation, Arnhart offers an excellent general observation: Emotion or pathos “is essential for rhetorical proof so long as it enters as zn integral part of enthymemematic reasoning” (23).

Example “has the nature of induction, which is the foundation of reasoning” (1393b). Proceeding from the particulars to the general, examples consist either of actual past facts or inventions; the latter consist of analogies or fables. Concurring with Plato’s Socrates, Aristotle regards fables as “well suited to public speaking” because invention is easier than finding facts. “One ought to make [fables] up in the same way as analogies, if one is able to see the point of similarity, and philosophic pursuits make it easier to do this very thing” (1394a) because philosophic reasoning sees the general in the particulars; it classifies, seeks the nature of things. When a speaker “has no enthymemes,” examples must suffice as his reasons for action. But “when one does have enthymemes” he should use examples as “a follow-up to them,” a sort of illustrative testimony to their validity (1394a). Aristotle considers maxims a form of example, amounting to a premise or a conclusion of enthymeme but with the connective logical tissue removed. Maxims “make speeches reflect character” because “the person stating the maxim reveals the universal basis of his choices, so if the maxims are sound, they make the speaker appear as someone with a sound character” (1395b).

Enthymemes themselves rest on four things: likelihoods, examples, criteria, and signs. Both likelihoods and examples in operate on the principle of resemblance: Your listeners know or firmly believe one thing to be so, and you show them that what you maintain resembles those known things. By “criteria” Aristotle means things necessarily and always so—unlike likelihoods—and by “signs” things “universally or in particular” so—again, a more convincing basis for an argument than a likelihood or an example, but less convincing than a “criterion” (1402a). Enthymemes make sense in forensic speech because they are addressed to judges, that is, to persons in authority expected to exercise judgment in practical matters rather than to philosophers who require rigorous proofs in support of theories.

In Book III Aristotle addresses the more strictly technical or artful dimensions of rhetoric, the “wording and arrangement” of speeches (1403a). While “the just thing would be to aim at nothing more in a speech than that it not cause pain, but not cause pleasure either, since it is just to argue one’s side by means of the facts themselves,” the “corrupt condition of the citizens” requires speakers to concern themselves not only with the style of their speeches but their own style of speaking (1404a). Aristotle steadfastly recommends moderation here, too: speak in a “natural,” not a “contrived” manner; use metaphors sparingly; “keep a careful eye out for the mean” when deploying epithets (1405b). He catches Gorgias saying to a swallow, “when it let its excrement go falling down on him, in the best tragic tone: `Shame on you, Philomena'” (1406b). Better to avoid such risible pretentiousness and confine one’s speech to what is “easy to read and easy to say” (1407b). “Wording will have appropriateness if it conveys feeling and character and is proportioned to its subject matter” (1408a). Simplicity and elegance will carry the day, but verbosity will leave your listeners behind, and leave them glad to be there. Arnhart remarks, “For Aristotle, good style is not merely ornamentation, since the goodness of style is determined by how well it satisfies the natural desire of listeners for learning through reasoning” (12).

Witnesses to Henry Clay’s speeches in the United States Senate found the spoken versions more impressive than the printed ones. Clay, they said, wooed his audience like a lover, and few lovers’ speeches seem persuasive when reduced to cold print. Aristotle knows that, too. Wording suitable for writing ought to exhibit precision; words suitable for debate should “convey character and feeling” (1413b). This is most true in speeches for assemblies, less true in speeches for law courts. “Wording suited to public assemblies is in every way like scene-painting, since the bigger the crowd is, the farther off is the view, and hence in both cases precise detail are a waste of effort and make things appear worse” (1414a).

Aristotle’s recommended structure for a speech supports reasonable argument: first state your case, then prove it. In political speeches, that means stating what we now call the `position’ to be defended or attack; in courtroom speeches, stating what the story you will tell is about—as a poet would do at the beginning of a play or an epic; and in display speeches, stating whether you come to praise Caesar or to bury him. Narratives in speeches “should be designed to reveal a state of character” by saying “what sort of choice this is, what sort of character is present and what sort of choice it is in turn by what sort of end it aimed at” (1417a). Mathematical treatises do not consist of states of character because they demonstrate necessity, not choice; “there is no that-for-the-sake-of-which in them” (1417a). Socrates, who brought philosophy down from the heavens of pure theory, engaged in exactly such telos-oriented speech. Aristotelian moderation appears again in his advice not to over-use reason itself, not to overload a speech with enthymemes but to “mix in other things” (1418a), including jokes but especially irony, which “is a more suitable style for civilized people than clowning” (1419b).

Aristotle concludes the Rhetoric with a discussion of the way to conclude a speech. The four elements of a successful conclusion are, first, “setting up the listener to be favorable toward oneself and unfavorable toward one’s opponent”; exaggerating and understating; “getting the listener to certain state of feeling”; and reminding the listener of the main points of one’s argument (1419b-1420a). Aristotle has deployed each of these elements not so much in his conclusion but throughout the book. For example, he began by exaggerating the rational content of rhetoric before correcting his own exaggeration in the central sections. And he has returned to the main points of his argument repeatedly, giving the impressions of an argument, and a writer, balancing several elements of a complex subject in a way that does justice to all, and to the whole. “To be successful in rhetoric,” Arnhart remarks, “good men must see to it that they are not naïve” (26). Unlike sophists, who attempt to make the weaker argument seem stronger, “Aristotle sharpens the ability of the rhetorician to discern the superiority of the stronger over the weaker argument” (69).

Arnhart emphasizes the rational content of political rhetoric. In this he may engage in a bit of what Aristotle considers salutary exaggeration. Aristotle himself associates the most rational form of rhetoric with forensic speech, not political or “advisory” speech, which focuses on character. In this Arnhart shows himself to be a genuine American, a citizen of the country his founding rhetorical act, the Declaration of Independence, consists of an enthymematic syllogism, and leaves proofs based on character to the test of God.