Turning McComiskey's argument against him

In "Disassembling Plato's Critique of Rhetoric in the Gorgias," McComiskey argues that, given his relativistic epistemology, there's no way Gorgias would have agreed to premises offered by Socrates that assume rationality, absolute truth, and a foundational epistemology. What McComiskey must argue, then, is that Plato knowingly altered the actual argument between Socrates and Gorgias for political reasons, and he offers a hypothesis about why Plato would have done this. But couldn't one take the same formal argument that McComiskey uses (namely, that given figure x's views, y, there would be no way that figure x would have uttered any speech that entails not y) and use it to refute McComiskey's entire thesis. In other words, isn't it just as plausible to argue that, given Plato's foundational epistemology, which entails an insistence on one, correct version of the truth, there's no way he could have altered what he knew to be a true account of the dialogue to produce a misleading account? The problem with McComiskey's argument is that if one finds it logical, one also has to accept the above refutation of it, which is equally as logical.

Dworkin reads Plato

Just thought this was fascinating and kind of humorous: a feminist reading of Plato, not in the sense of an interpretation of Plato, but in the sense of the actual activity of reading Plato. This is from Andrea Dworkin's autobiography Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant. She interlaces her first time wearing lipstick, her fear of a shiny nose, and her late-night readings of Plato under the covers when her parents were asleep:

“I’d wear Tangerine, along with a favorite dress that let me see my own breasts, a deep V-neck, a cut I still like, and I’d be making my way through Plato’s Symposium. It had been communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of women that a female’s nose must never shine….I would pretend to go to sleep; I’d wait for them to go to sleep; I’d turn on my reading light, read, and simultaneously listen for any movement at their end of the house, at which point I’d get rid of any light in my room, hide the book, and wait until I heard my mother or father return to their bed.

I was taunted by this problem: how could someone write something like the Symposium and make sure that her nose did not shine at the same time? It didn’t matter to me that I was reading a translation. I’d read Plato’s brilliant, dense prose and not be able to tear myself a way. Even as a reader my nose shined. …Plato was my idea of a paperback writer: the Beatles were not yet on the horizon, and anyway I’m sure that John would have agreed with me. There was nothing I wanted so much in life as to write the way Plato wrote: words inside ideas inside words, the calzone approach attenuated with Bach.”

From Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant by Andrea Dworkin. New York: Basic Books, 2002. pp. 28-29

Zen master Socrates

Socrates' main beef with the Sophists is that rhetoric is merely a form of flattery, that it strives to give the appearance of plausibility rather than proceeding on the basis of an investigation into what is actually the case; thus it is not a true art. And yet, Socrates only offers a positive account of what is actually the case (for example, what is rhetoric) when pressed by others to do so. The rest of the time, as we have mentioned often in class, most of what he says is riddled with vagueness, verbal trickery, and even downright contradictions. How could the Sophists have been any worse--in the sense of presenting only what is plausible rather than what is true--than Socrates; indeed, from what we have read so far, Socrates isn't really even very good at presenting what is plausible! Here's a possible explanation: Socrates didn't believe that attaining the truth--the ideal realm of goodness, beauty, and truth--was possible through language or indeed at any time that we are embodied souls with a limited perspective, not even for philosophers. So, maybe what's going in with Socrates' simultaneous bad reasoning combined with his denigration of the Sophists is similar to what is going on with the Zen master who presents his students with verbal paradoxes: the point is not only to humble the arrogant student who believed any kind of absolute knowledge was possible, but even more to parody the entire attempt to attain truth by such a limited method as linguistic investigation. Thus, Socrates is not so bad with argumentation that no one pays him any attention. He is just good enough to get people to listen and just bad enough to (intentionally) steer the whole project towards shipwreck every time. The dialectic as parody. Socrates as Eastern guru. "The way that can be spoken of is not the true way." (Lao Tzu)

Do words really ever have an effect?

Adams reads the conversion of the lover's soul in Phaedrus as an allegory for rhetoric. He is wrong. In the Phaedrus, Socrates presents the charioteer and his two horses as a metaphor for the human soul. The soul, when it falls in love, first succumbs to a kind of manic love and then, through the shock of perceiving the ideal form of beauty, is converted to true love. Adams reads this entire process as an allegory for the two-way effect of rhetoric: the beauty in the boy's face corresponds to the unadorned truth in the rhetor's topoi (i.e. not just any topoi, but ones that are based on truth); the audience, like the charioteer and his horses perceiving the beauty, are blown away by the sheer power of this unadorned rhetoric and are further given a cue on how to employ this same method back to their audience (in this case, the beautiful boy). But why does Adams claim that Plato intended this to be read and why does he claim that it is best read as an "allegory." It makes more sense, in terms of Plato as well as in terms of rhetoric, to understand--not the horses and charioteer; this is clearly a metaphor for the soul--but the process itself as a literal description of how an audience is won over. That is, being won over by the beautiful face of the speaker is not a metaphor for the effect this speaker's words have: this is in fact how the speaker wins us over. That is not to say that every speaker that we are won over by has a beautiful face, but it is to say that we have already identified with the speaker's image to some extent before we are won over. Once we have identified with the image that someone projects, they are going to be effective and if they aren't effective then it's because we have--usually this is an unconscious process--rejected the image they project. Now, the Internet corrects for this to some extent, but even a purely discursive exchange between two people who never see each other's image will at some point reach the stage at which an identification is made and this identification, visual in essence, is much more powerful than any opinion one has formed on the basis purely of another person's words. For example, one of the people in the chat room will say to the other, hey, we've known each other for a long time, why don't you send me a picture. Let's say the other person refuses and makes up an excuse. Now, even without ever having seen that person who refuses to give them a picture, the first person will form an image based on the fact that the other person is a person who doesn't want to send out a picture. OK, sorry, this is going on too long. The point is that Adams is exactly right in his interpretation of how rhetoric works but is exactly wrong in demoting Plato's description of this process to the level of allegory, an extraneous step that it seems is an attempt by Adams to save rhetoric from the obvious truth that Socrates (and this is consistent with the Socrates who in other places tries to get people to see that words don't really ever have a positive effect in attaining the good, true, and beautiful; they can only make us see what we don't know) is promoting: it's not words that have an effect, it is only beauty. Adams, despite his best effort and because the recourse to allegory is clearly superfluous, demonstrates only that, as in his case, the study of the effect words have is all just a cover-up, a way to console ourselves by persisting in the illusion that words have any persuasive force, an illusion of mastery in the face of helplessness.