Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Literary Humanism

8. Style and Virtue

151 The ancient struggle between Plato and the sophists, the rhetoric teachers of his day, was the opening exchange in the centuries-long debate over the symmetry question in language. Plato considered the sophists dangerous for a variety of reasons, but at the philosophical heart of it was the belief, promoted by some sophists, that there existed parallels and affinities between patterns of language, patterns of thought, and patterns of human society. Plato believed seriously in a competing theory: the good society was supposed to mirror the pattern of the perfect soul, and language had very little to do with it. If the sophists were right, Plato realized, then the form of education they were promoting—rhetoric—might be considered just as important as philosophy and science. The perfection of human society, as Plato’s rival Isocrates had openly claimed, would lie within the cultivation of language as much as with reason. That would be a disaster. In Plato’s view it already was a disaster. For Plato, the most astonishing and outrageous advertisement of the sophists was the claim that their teaching would make young men virtuous . In the dialogue Protagoras, Socrates visits the sophist of that name in the company of a young man who wants to sign up for instruction. 8 Style and Virtue 152 Style and Virtue When Socrates asks Protagoras what a person can hope to take away from the course, the itinerant wise man answers with swaggering confidence: “Young man, if you come to me your gain will be this. The very day you join me, you will go home a better man, and the same the next day. Each day you will make progress toward a better state.” When Socrates inquires in just what way the young man is to become “better,” Protagoras does not flinch, answering: “The proper care of his personal affairs, so that he may best manage his own household, and also of the state’s affairs, so as to become a real power in the city, both as a speaker and man of action.” Socrates, clearly surprised, inquires: “Do I follow you? . . . I take you to be describing the art of politics, and promising to make men good citizens.” Protagoras claims that is exactly what he professes to do. At such an answer Socrates is completely astonished and driven to irony: “Then it is a truly splendid accomplishment that you have mastered . . . if indeed you have mastered it” (Protagoras 318a–19a). For Plato, the sophistic claim about virtue was outrageous. The public discourse practiced by sophists and their students was widely considered a deceptive and disreputable activity, not a virtuous one; furthermore, the claim was philosophically shallow—the sophists hardly knew what they were talking about when they spoke about virtue. Finally, the sophist’s stock in trade was manifestly a verbal discipline, not a philosophical one. In Plato’s view, it was dialectic, not the study of words, that might give to individuals the power of better understanding the world, and hence of conducting better lives. But sophistic teaching was based on the cultivation of language and little else. Plato’s student Aristotle may be seen as taking the side of Plato, though only up to a point. His Rhetoric, which begins with the famous statement, “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic,” presents itself openly as an attempt to yank rhetoric away from an overemphasis on verbal artistry and give it back to reason (1354A). But even with the adjustment toward dialectic , the practical-minded Aristotle is wary of the virtue agenda promoted by the sophists; and he makes no claim in this direction. Actually, it is Plato himself, in his soaring and captivating dialogue Phaedrus, who envisions a kind of elevated and noble discourse based upon the cultivation of the soul’s innate gravitation toward truth, beauty, and goodness. The virtue agenda does not go away with the shift from language to pure reason. The argument, for Plato, is ultimately about who should be in charge of promoting virtue: the philosopher or the teacher of rhetoric. Plato devotes the remainder of Protagoras to demonstrating that the re- Style and Virtue 153 nowned sophist has no good idea of what “virtue” is; therefore, he cannot possibly be a fit teacher of it. With devastating powers of cross-examination , Socrates demonstrates that Protagoras cannot even defend the proposition that virtue can be taught, much less the proposition...