The Challenges of Contemporary Rhetoric Echoed in Understanding Plato

Reading Booth’s “How Many ‘Rhetorics’?”, I could not help but recall an earlier discussion of Rhetoric that I had in a course on Plato. While the discussion was only short, the topics stuck in my head. The Euthydemus is a dialogue concerning the dangers of rhetoric and the power of what Booth would call rhetrickery, it centers on two men who claim to have come to some deeper truth of the world and are offering their teaching for payment. These sophists–viz. paid teachers, philosophers, and rhetoricians–make a claim that they teach “Virtue…better than anyone else and more quickly” (Euthydemus 273d). As with many Platonic dialogues, the material is not, in fact, historic, but it seeks to make a point. So, Plato’s usual protagonist Socrates seeks to understand the pair.

Many of their arguments are centered on problems in the philosophy of the Greek language, and as such do not translate well into English, but I will do my best to outline some of their arguments so that you may see the forms of Rhetoric they use.

The Paradox of Learning:

The paradox of learning asks if on learning something, we know it or do not know it. If we answer the former, then we cannot learn it, as learning is acquiring knowledge that we did not already have. However, if we then answer the latter, that we acquire knowledge of that which we do not know, then how would we recognize the knowledge? Euthydemus frames this as concerning language, and how when a teacher lectures, they lecture in words and “letters” that we already know, and so they teach us what we already know (275d-277d).

While perhaps to us, this seems quite the simple dilemma to resolve, that we are being taught something more than merely the words coming from a professors mouth, or the letters of a book that we are reading, to the people of the time, this problem was a very real and very complicated matter. But, it still seems on reading that even given the problem presented, Euthydemus and his partner Dionysodorus are using a form of rhetrickery, twisting their words and the way in which we use some words in many different ways depending on the situation. By doing this, they are able to effectively mislead their opponents in argument and refute any point true or false.

The Problem with Properties:

The pair also present a problem with the way in which we present properties and identities. They ask if your father is a father, which seems like a harmless enough question, and the answer is obviously yes. However, they prepare yet another example of shifting definitions and ask whether, for example, my father is also a father, to which the answer remains yes. But, we may then ask if my father is other than a father, as it seems that he is not your father. And so it becomes clear that my father is a father, and is not a father. Which is clearly a contradiction. So either none of us has a father, or we all have the same father. (298a-c)

Again, there is a challenge in translation, but it is clear to see that without a language with the idea of relations, then this is a problem. If we do not see fatherhood as a relation between two people and merely as a property as they did at the time of Plato’s writing, then this would present a serious problem.

Rhetorical Domains:

Relating these arguments, which are but two of the many in the Euthydemus, to Booth, we can see a few important factors for communication. For one thing, it seems necessary to avoid rhetrickery that we solidly define terms crucial to our discourse, and further crucial that we stick to these definitions. If we allow multiple different definitions of knowing, no matter how similar they may be, we can run into the paradox of learning, and if we allow other such confusions into our discourse, we encounter other serious problems. Compare this to the “fake news” and confusion surrounding terms such as racism in the United States, and we see that this problem of definition is still alive and well.

Similarly, we can see another challenge when communicating. To someone reading the Euthydemus from a contemporary view, these problems seem absurd and ridiculous. Particularly given the translation to English. However, we need to recognize that these problems operate in a different Rhetorical Domain than the ones which we may use today. In this sense, the very real and concerning language problems to the peers of Plato will easily be ignored or misunderstood by a contemporary reader. We can see this in current events as well, how easy it can be to talk past one another and how one issue may seem so clear to one while another has great difficulty grasping it. Discussions across Rhetorical Domains only work when not only Listening Rhetoric is used, but also that Listening Rhetoric takes into account that we may be presenting completely different issues using the same language.