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Language as Teleological, Not Instrumental PLATO puts into Protagoras’ mouth a myth about the origins of the arts and virtues. This myth, along with the logos or account that follows it, serves as a common framework for understanding very different conceptions of the nature of rhetoric and several of the issues about politics and language that anyone interested in civic education has to confront. Prometheus stole from Hephaestus and Athena “wisdom (sophia) in the practical arts together with fire. . . . The wisdom they acquired was for staying alive; wisdom for living together in society, political wisdom, they did not acquire, because that was in the keeping of Zeus” (Protagoras 321d). At that first technological stage, humans developed “speech and words” (322b), but not the art of politics, which includes the art of war. Taking pity on people who possessed technology but no justice, Zeus sent Hermes with justice and a sense of shame (322c). Language developed in the context of the arts, I suppose especially for transmitting the arts and exchanging their products. There are all sorts of arts, and each of them has a way of talking associated with it. Language precedes the gift of justice and piety, and is itself quite a minor actor in Protagoras’ story. Protagoras’ myth and argument are designed to advertise the goods he wants to sell. As he continues, he will have to tie linguistic facility and political excellence together, but it is important that they have distinct origins. Human beings receive the productive arts from Prometheus, and language is a by-product of the arts. People are innocent recipients of stolen divine property. Justice and shame are, unlike the arts, gifts of Zeus. Everyone must share in these gifts so that everyone can live together. While the arts are necessary for living, justice and shame are necessary for living together . Still, justice and shame have no special relation to discourse. As Isoc186 8 eugene garver Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Civic Education in Aristotle and Isocrates rates says (Nicocles 5–9), “There is no institution devised by man which the power of speech has not helped us to establish.” If language is as omnipresent as that, there is no special connection between it and justice. Protagoras uses the myth to show that everyone in a polis must have justice and shame. He then has to explain why, if everyone has justice and shame, and passes them on to the children, there is a place in the polis for professional teachers of these things. The more justice and shame are universal endowments, the less room there is for experts. Protagoras argues himself out of this bind by comparing himself to a teacher of Greek. Everyone speaks Greek; everyone teaches Greek by speaking it; yet there are professional teachers as well (328a). The equality of Hermes’ distribution of justice can coexist with Promethean inequality of technē. There is no special association of justice with discourse in the myth, but there is instead a special analogy between teaching justice and teaching language. Greeks who called non-Greek speakers “barbarians” would appreciate this connection between justice and the possibility of living together with facility in the language of nature and truth. Language is useful, and has its origin in the domain of the crafts, not of political wisdom, and so it is conceived instrumentally by the Sophists. Yet when Protagoras abandons myth for logos he alludes to the civilizing powers of the Greek language. The relation of these two sides of language, explicit and implicit in Protagoras’ discourse, is as unstable as the relation between the two sides of rhetoric, as neutral power, and rhetoric as civilizing force, one that, Protagoras says, was surreptitiously practiced by Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, and others (316d). There is no special association of justice with discourse. But there is a special analogy between teaching justice and teaching language. The Sophists trade on these two sides of rhetoric, the instrumental and the civilizing. Their art would not be worth buying unless speakers could use it to advance whatever purposes they have. An art which only permitted speakers to tell the truth would have much less exchange value. And yet such an art would be admired and praised, while the art of advancing any cause has a much more doubtful moral status. Thus Hippocrates at the beginning of the Protagoras wants to learn from the Sophists, but he is horri- fied at the idea that he might become one, or be mistaken for one. Such a...

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