Kinos: The Fourth Proof

MICHAEL DIXON Kinos: The Fourth Proof I EXORDIUM: IN OLD VIENNA The exordium, according to no less an authority on rhetoric than Cicero, aims to seduce; it should render the orator's audience good-willed, advertent, and open to suggestion (benivolem, attentum, docilum). Shall we then dance? Leonard Bernstein once characterized the ·waltz as 'intellectual' because its tempo is grounded in the number three and so represents a theoretical construct superimposed on the binary tempi evolved by natural mimesis from felt rhythms of the heart; as a dance, notes Marshall McLuhan, the waltz was considered salacious when introduced into Viennese circles.' Is this conjunction of triadic theory and moral dubiousness merely gratuitous? Another induced serendipity from postmodernism? Or had Vienna, on the brink of Darwin and the very front portal of Freud, experienced symbolically in the waltz a historically prophetic moment, recognizing 'unconsciously' as it were, Faustian riot festering beneath the stately gavotte of Enlightenment intellectualism? II NARRATIO: SOCRATIC TRILEMMA History is habitually a maintenance allowance extracted from the past to support present myths, and among the recent addenda to the Platonic footnotes Whitehead identifies as The History of Western Thought appears more than one castigating the footnoted text himself for giving totalitarianism a good name; also New Criticism and, more forgivably perhaps, Modernism, whose felix culpa seeds our nourishing diet of Modernism's Post-serials. Insufficiently noted and barely tapped as a font of indignation and profitable critique, however, is Plato's status as a poorly documented footnote to Pythagoras, who, on dividing a vibrating string equally in three rather than two intervals and hearing the harmonies of a perfect fifth rather than a boring octave, drew the notobvious conclusion that cosmic essence is number. Obvious or not, it struck a resounding chord with Socrates' apologist, and suddenly radical triadicals resona ted everywhere out of dialectieals. The ideal soul was a harmonic triad; so was the state. Rationality itself was schematically UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1992 KINOS: THE FOURTH PRCXJF 501 triangular, the inductive obverse of triadic reality dilating to the broad base of all phenomena from a single Idea at the apex. Analogies bred anatomies; Plato bred Aristotle, ladders cross-bred Great Chains, and through Aristotle's Platonic footnotes Pythagoras did his number on us. 'Answer me ten questions [the triadic number, note you, reputedly sacred to Pythagoras] about anything,' said Aristotle, 'and I'll slot it.' Uniquely defined, eternally retrievable, Nature devacuumed, everything was in its place: numb(erred); in-errant. Number is identity; Three is God. Small wonder Vienna trembled on the brink to waltz time: it sensed, diachronically (without sensating, of course - mere dancerly speculate in neurotic alienation from expressure due to dysfunctionally normative signifiers) the great unresolved theoretic Platonic triadic problematic. III PROPOSITIO: ARISTOTELIAN PARSIMONY The scope of this paper, and professional courtesy, both preclude my deconstructing this appalling problematic all at once; full apocalypse must wait on extended theoretical controversia in cutting-edge journals, some, no doubt, yet unhoned. Here I can isolate only one small, but I think not unsynecdochal, knot in the amtriguous tangle represented by those particular Platonic footnotes composing Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric. Specifically, I should like to take issue with his limiting the methods of rhetorical proof, predictably, inevitably to three: ethos, pathos, and logos. There exists, I believe, a fourth proof, rendered largely invisible by triadic myopia until Darwin needed it. To situate Darwin's rhetorical dilemma I must digress. IV DIGRESSIO: RHETORIC AND SCIENTIFIC PARADIGMS Plato had denigrated rhetoric as counterfeit philosophy, and Aristotle is hardly less flattering, striking in his delivery the posture of magisterial fastidiousness that Zeus might assume while acknowledging a distasteful but undeniable love-child by Apollo out of Fraud. He recognizes in the bastard an inherent rigour and orderly method, and despite the fraudulent proclivities on its mother's side, contradicts Plato (setting a £ootnotable trend) by conceding to rhetoric status as 'ANTlSTROPHOS' to dialectic , its necessary partner in the dance of reason. Rhetoric is yin to logic's yang. The particular complementary distinction between rhetoric and logic focusing the issues in this paper is simple but decisive. Rhetoric is the alternative to logic necessitated...