Jacob Craig Dr.

Yancey Rhetorical Theory + Practice 1/21/2013 SRR Phaedrus Summarize || Socrates spots Phaedrus walking around outside of Athens. Socrates stops Phaedrus. After Socrates establishes himself as a keen observer of man, Phaedrus in particular and the natural world, they read one of Lysiass speeches. Lysias makes the case that it is better to give approval to a non-lover as opposed to a lover. Lysias makes his argument by claiming that love breeds madness (fear and poor judgment) in the lover. Socrates praises the arrangement of Lysiass text, because Lysiass invention, his subject, leads to an inevitable argument. Phaedrus urges Socrates to compose his own speech. Socrates makes the case that people are driven by an innate desire for pleasures and an acquired opinion which strives for the best. The relationship between these drives causes the person to act with reason (self-restraint) or excess. Dissatisfied with this argument, Socrates crafts another one. Instead of making the case that love is bad as it is in Lysiass speech and Socratess first speech, Socrates begins with the premise that love is divine, so it cannot be bad. The madness that ensues when someone is in love is divine too. What follows are section about the soul (immortal b/c it self-motivates and is not created; comprised of three parts; circulates in the heavens where it lives among forms like beauty and justice; has memory of forms; gets excited when it sees instances of the forms on earth). Using this understanding of the soul, Socrates can make some premises and get to a conclusion that accounts for goodness in loves madness: these blessings, so great and so divine, the friendship of a lover will confer upon you At the conclusion of Socrates second speech, the conversation turns to rhetoric. They cover topics like instruction in rhetoric; arrangement; probability and Truth in speech and speech making; the relationship between writing, the dialectic, and knowledge making; and analysis and synthesis as prerequisite activities in the speechmakers development as a speechmaker. Respond || I want to say two things about Phaedrus. I want to address the relationship between metaphysics and Truth, and Socratess available metaphors. The aspect of Phaedrus that most surprised me is how rhetoric and truth are so closely associated with metaphysics. Socratess beliefs out-and-out drive his second speech. Without his understanding of the soul and beauty as things, he cannot account for the means by which truth can exist or for the way that people act and react when in love. I am not sure what to do with this relationship. I did not expect it. I wonder if there is a relationship between the study of rhetoric in secularized contexts and constructed truth(s). Thats one of those roads that I am not willing to go down. Truth(s) seems to be a more useful and inclusive concept. The second thing I want to say touches on his metaphysics but more squarely deals with Truth. For Socrates, someone who teaches or deals with rhetoric inevitably deals with souls. What we might call an understanding of audience, Socrates refers to as an understanding of the souls nature, its action, and draw relationships between kinds of speeches and kinds of souls. This is important for Socrates, because rhetoric leads the soul. Rhetoric that indulges in probabilities rather than Truth conceals the soul. So rhetoric that indulges in Truth (dialectic) de-clutters the soul, allowing it to soar with the forms in the heavens. This strikes me, because it is beautiful. Yes, it presupposes that there is objectivity. But the reverence and respect for the power of language in these pages is incredible. Third, I want to point to the metaphors Socrates has available to him to describe his concepts. I am interested in the idea of availability. When Socrates is describing seeing beauty in his second speech, he talks about the flowing of beauty through the eyes, fountains, etc. Socrates borrows imagery from the natural world and examples from his religious belief. I was interested in this, because although we have supplanted natural metaphors with materials, networks, and machines, there is still an interest bodies.

Reflect || On the first day of class, someone brought up the idea that rhetoric could be used to predict behaviors. I dont think that is true. But rhetorics attention to psychology is really very interesting. The general introduction to the book mentions Aristotles interest in psychology, but I think that it is present in Phaedrus, too. Phaedrus begins on a note that goes something like: Phaedrus, knowing you, I know that you have the book on you, and you are trying to trick me into letting you practice on me. Socrates reinforces the idea of classifying people (souls) later in the work. And it seems like that classification should be in part based on his reason/desire chariot metaphor. A person who is ruled by desire is swayed by this kind of speech (pathos) whereas the restrained and reasonable person is swayed by another kind of speech (logos). Understanding the configuration of reason and desire in a person is to understand their psychology (it would seem). And more than that, Socrates speeches discuss human behavior at length. A lover does X. Non-lovers do Y because of A,B, and C. Or in his second speech, these things occur which stir these emotions and actions. Platos unfavorable treatment of rhetoric that deals probabilities and favorable treatment of the dialectic as it deals with truth did not surprise me. But what really interested me was that in after reading Platos denouncement of rhetoric, Aristotle seems to be fine with probabilities. Aristotle doesnt deal in truth, because he is interested in times where truth is not available. Aristotle deals in the materials that might be used to construct artistic proofs arguments. Aristotle deals in topics. This difference was so surprising, because the introductions stress the lineage of teacher-student in the classical era, so I inferred that there would be a little more inheritance of ideas. And there was some agreement pertaining to audience and the presence of relationship between rhetoric and the dialectic. But Aristotle doesnt seem to be very interested in the point that Socrates via Plato drives home objectivity and the dialectic method as the method finding that objectivity. Aristotle embraces conventions as some of the materials of argument rather than disregarding them. And Aristotle treats truth where it exists as not necessarily final or inevitable. A speaker who has the truth on his side can still be defeated, and more interestingly, truth can be guessed without methodical discourse. And truth can be approximate rather than either true or not true.