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DOI: 10.7330/9780874219364.c003 3 O n to l o g i ca l Rh e to r i c Pl ato The dominant rhetorical tradition of ancient Greece and Rome, from Plato (429–347 BCE) to Quintilian, is characterized by a view of discourse that is arguably the antithesis of magical rhetoric, proposing, in essence, that language is all humble rather than all powerful. The reason for its humble status, even in disciplines (like logic and rhetoric) at the heart of liberal-arts learning, is the belief that the reality named by language is intrinsically coherent independent of verbal mediation. Plato’s theory of discourse, for example, is consistent with his view of other human mediations of the world-in-itself: why settle for a knock-off when you can have the real thing? And so Plato is a good place to begin an introduction to the perspective that I call “ontological” rhetoric. The Republic repeatedly distinguishes between Being (the Ideal) and Becoming (the Actual), two distinct orders of reality, hierarchically arranged, the first generating the second and providing its variety, coherence, and purposefulness . The world of Being is a metaphysical plane (“above nature”), variously called the plane of the Good (Plato 1960, 507b), of the Beautiful (507b), of ideal pattern (472c), or, famously, of Ideas or Forms, after the Greek eidos. Becoming is a physical plane, the familiar world of the senses, characterized by appearance rather than reality, change rather than permanence, decay rather than eternal perfection, shadows rather than things in themselves, and opinion or illusion rather than knowledge . Socrates underscores the difference between the eye’s power to perceive the “daylight” of knowledge and the sun’s power to create that daylight (508d), not wholly to disparage human mediations of Being but to insist on the priority of the metaphysical over the physical and to avoid the error of supposing that a knowledge of manifestations of the Good is equivalent to the Good itself (509a). The Republic’s well-known cave metaphor (514 f.) makes the distinction clearly by characterizing the human condition as degrees of imprisonment in a world of semidarkness dominated by the appearances of things, shadows thrown on a 50   C. H. Knoblauch wall by flickering firelight. Most human beings inhabit the cave either as prisoners chained to illusion or as prisoners tyrannized by a dependence on belief rather than knowledge. A few courageous souls are able, by the use of reason, to escape these conditions and clamber out of the cave, representing the upward progress of the mind through education, but their eyes are unaccustomed to light and they mistake their perceptions of objects made visible by the sun as the ideal forms of true knowledge. Only a very small, elite group of human beings perseveres to achieve the capacity for pure intellection, which for Plato is akin to mystical understanding , no longer dependent on mediations but instead intuitive and ineffable. This group is comprised of “philosophers,” who discipline themselves in the fierce daylight outside the cave until they are able to apprehend the sun directly, representing the contemplative experience of the plane of true Being. Since most human beings are unable to achieve Socrates’s ultimate PhD, the capacity for direct, unmediated apprehension of the world of Forms, he directs his educational attention primarily to the befuddled undergraduates still clambering out of the cave and to the mediations of reality they persistently mistake for true knowledge. One such mediation is art, which Socrates discusses late in the Republic (Plato 1960, 595 f.) by appeal to an argument he gradually extends to all human depictions of the world. Socrates offers a representational or “mimetic” theory of art (after mimesis, the Greek word for “imitation”), suggesting that the painting of an object, let’s say a table, constitutes an imitation at two removes from the plane of ideal forms. Since the gods first conceived the idea of Table, it follows that the carpenter who makes an actual table resembling the governing form is imitating the gods. When an artist then depicts the physical table on a canvas, the depiction is an imitation of an imitation, no better than a mirror image (596d) of the material object and, as such, only a distant likeness of the original idea. Socrates extends the example of the table painting to literature as well in the Republic, observing that the tragic poet works similarly at two removes, the action of the play imitating action in the human...

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