BMCR 2008.12.36, Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers

Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists.
Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007.  Pp. viii, 212.  ISBN
978-0-521-87863-0.  $80.00.

Reviewed by Evan G. Rodriguez and Ravi Sharma, California State
University, Long Beach ([email protected]; [email protected])
Word count:  1788 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0806/2007007242-t.html)

The "philosophers and sophists" of this book's title are not the
historical figures whose work forms the intellectual background to
Plato's. They are instead the characters of the dialogues themselves:
the book is a study of Plato's attempt to differentiate his Socrates,
the philosopher par excellence, from the various "sophists" who
populate the dialogues. While there is no shortage of works concerning
Plato's engagement with the sophistic movement, the current resurgence
of interest in Plato as a literary author invites a fresh examination
of the interplay between drama and philosophy in Socrates' many
encounters with sophistry. The topic of the book is thus a timely one.

As McCoy points out, a comprehensive survey of that topic would engage
most of the Platonic corpus. Her own account is necessarily more
limited. There are six selective treatments, focusing on aspects of the
Apology, Protagoras, Gorgias, Republic, Sophist, and Phaedrus. In an
introductory chapter, McCoy develops her main theme, which is that
there is no methodological distinction between philosophy and
sophistry. Although dialogues like the Gorgias might be read as
suggesting that the philosopher has a distinctive method, such
suggestions are consistently undermined by dramatic features of the
encounters between Socrates and his interlocutors. For, "philosophy, as
Plato understands it, includes important rhetorical dimensions" (3).
Here and elsewhere, McCoy uses the term 'rhetoric' to designate any
persuasive verbal technique ("the means used to persuade through words"
(3)). She is especially concerned with those techniques that appeal
primarily to the emotions, and her thesis that philosophy includes
rhetorical dimensions is thus a contention that Socrates freely avails
himself of such techniques in examining his interlocutors. (See for
instance pp. 3-4, 42.) As McCoy would have it, the ultimate difference
between Socrates and the sophist is to be found "in character and moral
intention" (1). That is to say, Socrates speaks as he does with an eye
to some overarching goal of character formation, while the sophist does
not. (What precisely the sophist's goals may be is not so clear. McCoy
tells us at one point: "nor are the sophists consistently presented as
disinterested in knowledge or morally corrupt" (3).)

In her chapter on the Apology, McCoy discusses the ways in which Plato
appropriates characteristic themes and devices of the oratorical
tradition in order to pursue his own moral purposes. She continues that
discussion in her chapters on the Protagoras and Gorgias, where she
contends that Socrates has no fixed conversational method and instead
adapts his approach to the moral condition of his interlocutor. In
subsequently analyzing the Republic, she argues that the dialogue
offers a gradual disambiguation of the roles of philosopher and
sophist. The former, it turns out, is a lover of the Forms who displays
virtues both moral and intellectual. McCoy underscores the idea of the
philosopher's virtue in her chapter on the Sophist, which contrasts the
Eleatic Stranger, who identifies philosophy with the method of division
and collection, with the true philosopher, who is centrally concerned
with "self-knowledge and knowledge of the human soul and its moral
good" (139). Her final chapter on the Phaedrus gathers together all of
these themes. Here, the philosopher emerges as someone who uses
rhetoric to lead the soul toward love of the Forms. It is this love
that is crucial for self-knowledge and moral improvement.

II

The idea that Socrates avails himself of the same techniques as the
sophist raises some familiar questions about Socratic sincerity. Is it
acceptable for Socrates--who is of sound character and moral intent--to
argue in a knowingly fallacious manner? Can one make someone else a
good person (whatever precisely that might mean) without supplying
models of honesty, clarity in argument, and so forth? Are these utterly
non-moral values? At points, McCoy thinks not. For her, good character
is inextricably linked to certain conversational virtues, namely good
will and frankness. (Those virtues are a central theme of her chapter
on the Gorgias; see pp. 86-7, 97, 103-6.) Yet this raises hard
questions about her general idea that the philosopher can at times
eschew "intellectual" appeals and appeal instead to "emotion."

Take her chapter on the Apology as an illustration. Denying that the
work preserves a historical record of Socrates' trial, McCoy argues
instead that it offers a "rhetorical defense of Socrates" (20). The
defense is also "philosophical" in the sense that it shows Socrates to
be centrally concerned with the moral improvement of his audience:
apparently overcoming the reservations he expresses in the Gorgias
about the efficacy of speaking before large audiences, Socrates seizes
the occasion of his trial to work at improving the entire group of
jurors, and perhaps the surrounding audience besides. Yet, Socrates
realizes that "excellence cannot be taught" (24); and so he aims not so
much to inculcate virtue as to provoke a kind of "intellectual and
emotional disequilibrium" (24). His hope is that the disequilibrium
will foster a commitment to moral truth.

This is precisely the sort of interpretation regarding which one needs
a fuller elaboration. Why precisely should Socrates think that
"disequilibrium" fosters any commitment to truth? And what techniques
for producing disequilibrium are appropriate, given the larger goal?
Instead of answering those questions directly, McCoy concentrates on
defending the idea that the Apology is written in full consciousness of
the oratorical tradition--a thesis that most scholars these days will
hardly doubt.[[1]] What the reader really needs, but doesn't so clearly
get, is a more painstaking analysis of Socratic practice. There is
little by way of precise discussion here or elsewhere as to what forms
of moral and intellectual "seriousness" are relevant to Socrates'
larger purpose. In general, the chapters of the book are much longer on
paraphrase than on integration of the various themes the author sounds.

III

To our minds, the book's strengths and weaknesses are most clearly on
display in the chapter on the Protagoras. That chapter is a reworked
version of an earlier article focusing on the dialogue's final section,
the one devoted to hedonism. McCoy's main argument here is that
Socrates' questioning of Protagoras is not meant as an exposition of
the explicit views of either thinker. It is instead meant to bring out
the implications of what Protagoras says earlier, in his "Great
Speech," where he characterizes human behavior as essentially
self-interested and directed towards "survival, pleasure, and other
physical goods" (62). When Socrates forces Protagoras to embrace a
hedonistic position, he effectively shows that Protagoras' truncated
conception of the human good fits poorly with the sophist's
inclinations to celebrate the nobility of courage and to proclaim his
own wisdom as a teacher.

In working out this reading, McCoy is at her best as an interpreter.
Her account of the "Great Speech" brings together a number of otherwise
puzzling features of Protagoras' narrative and creates an engagingly
nuanced portrait of Protagoras as a thinker. Her approach to the
discussion of hedonism also holds a good deal of promise. At 351b6 and
e2, Socrates introduces the whole discussion in a way that would
suggest he expects a positive answer regarding the truth of hedonism.
McCoy's interpretation neatly explains such remarks: Socrates invites
Protagoras to embrace hedonism precisely because he believes it to be
the upshot of what Protagoras has already said. Regrettably, however,
McCoy does not develop that interpretation in detail. Rather than
discuss the workings of the hedonism argument, she largely confines
herself to general comments on the passage's significance.

The last section of McCoy's chapter shows how some of the novelties of
her approach can be stretched too far. There, she argues that Socrates'
labor in the dialogue is not entirely negative and critical. Instead,
Socrates is engaged in a "process of discovery," one that is
essentially dialogical in the sense that it cannot be the work of an
"autonomous rational agent" (71). In elaborating this idea, McCoy
relies almost entirely on a few lines in which Socrates offers a
quotation from Homer to support the idea of a joint undertaking
(348c-d). As she reads those lines, the passage "testifies" to
Socrates' "skepticism about the individual human being's ability to
reason adequately on his own" (73). It also supports the idea that one
could never be sure one has made an intellectual discovery without the
presence of another person to confirm it. For, "Socrates does not hold
there is some independent, universal epistemic standard by which a
person could judge whether his beliefs are adequate or inadequate"
(73).  These are large claims indeed--much too large for the slight
support of the passage on which McCoy relies. And unfortunately, we
find out little about how precisely McCoy would develop them. She tells
us that philosophy "has performative elements" in the sense that the
meanings of the key terms under discussion are "created" in the process
of conversation. However, she also insists that Socrates is trying to
get at something he deems objectively real, existing beyond any social
construction. It is of course a significant question how these two
ideas can be held together.

McCoy would like to resist any suggestion that the process of discovery
can be reduced to a single method of inquiry: "[Socrates'] approach to
questioning varies depending upon the person with whom he is in
dialogue" (61). Accordingly, she rejects Vlastos' famous account of the
elenchus as too reductive an explanation of Socrates' conversational
practice. Yet it remains unclear how precisely Socrates might think he
can get at "the real" through the process of question and answer. Most
of McCoy's positive descriptions of Socratic practice would seem to
apply equally well to features of Vlastos' view or to the many
modifications of it that have since been proposed. In the end, she
offers a host of interesting suggestions about how to approach the
Protagoras and other dialogues; but her treatments are far too short on
connections between the larger themes she sounds. To that extent, her
conception of Socrates as a thinker of many methods seems ultimately to
get in the way of a more fully integrated account of his philosophical
concerns.

The book is handsomely produced, as is typical for Cambridge University
Press. There are, however, a number of distracting errors. Most
puzzlingly, the name 'Palamedes' is given the non-standard spelling
'Palamades' throughout the book (even in bibliographical references in
which the standard spelling is used). And there is occasionally an
unfortunate casualness about matters of fact. On p. 25, for instance,
McCoy cites with cautious approval Ledger's late date of 386 BCE for
the composition of the Apology. Then on p. 28, she tells us that by the
time that Plato wrote the latter work, a certain rhetorical device had
become quite familiar. Among the figures cited in support is
Demosthenes, who of course was not born until 384.[[2]]

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Notes:


1.   Over the course of the chapter, we get precious little by way of
reference to the numerous scholarly discussions of the composition and
structure of the Apology. There is no mention, for instance, of S. R.
Slings and E. De Strycker, Plato's Apology of Socrates: A Literary and
Philosophical Study With a Running Commentary (E.J. Brill, 1994).

2.   This stretch of the book also contains a number of misspellings of
ancient proper names: 'Demonsthenes' for 'Demosthenes' (p. 28),
'Manthitheus' for 'Mantitheus' (p. 28), and 'Denarchus' for 'Dinarchus'
(p. 30).