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)