[Note: the following essay was presented some years ago for a graduate course in classical rhetoric. Overcome this evening by an acute sense of nostalgia for the relatively carefree pre-dissertation days of graduate work, I've decided to post the essay on this blog. I don't have the time or energy to revise it, so it should be kept in mind that the essay was written specifically for the purpose of a class presentation, and it thus retains certain rhetorical strategies perhaps more appropriate to oral delivery than to a written essay.]
Tonight I am going to introduce to our discussion of Isocrates and of the rhetorical tradition in general some words about a chapter from Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle by Ekaterina Haskins. Now, being myself an avowed Gorgianic believer in the sensual power of language, I must admit that, for me, this author’s name – Ekaterina Haskins – irresistibly conjures visions of a glamorous tennis star or perhaps even a Nabokovian nymphet. Despite this, though, Ekaterina Haskins is in fact a professor at Boston College and is one of a group of scholars whose work has facilitated what has been called a “social turn” in rhetorical studies. So, I think it is important at the outset to characterize, however broadly and imperfectly, some of the basic assumptions, the first principles, of scholars who, starting in the ‘70s and up to the present day, embrace a rhetoric of social constructionism both in their methodology and in the content of their work – the content being the view that they offer of some of the ancient rhetoricians. I turn to another scholar, Bruce McComiskey, who sums up the basic assumptions of what he calls the “new sophistic rhetoric”: “first, knowledge can only be understood within the defining context of particular cultures; second, rhetorical methods rely, at least in part, on probability, affect, and kairos; and third, this relativistic rhetoric of the right moment supports democratic power formations that depend on the invention of ethical arguments.” [notice, by the way, that last part, which is important: invention of ethical arguments, not the discovery of so-called moral truths]. For scholars accepting such basic assumptions, writing about figures from the ancient world is an activity in which the line between historical interpretation and historical appropriation not only is blurred but is in fact theoretically untenable. So, I place Haskins in this post-modern tradition in that she very self-consciously is attempting in her book to rehabilitate Isocrates and debilitate Aristotle and Plato, because she believes that re-visioning the rhetorical tradition in such a way benefits our contemporary cultural and pedagogical discourse. Like many of these scholars, she wants to have her cake (or her fruit, to be consistent with Isocrates’s metaphor for his own discourse) and eat it too in that she argues that Isocrates himself would agree that the art of rhetoric is a self-conscious process of appropriation and reinterpretation of prior discourses carried out in an effort to affect public, political discourse (Haskins will argue that what I’ve just called a process of appropriation and reinterpretation of prior discourse is, for Isocrates, an activity that is simultaneously taught and carried out by means of mimetic imitation, but I’m getting ahead of myself). I should allow Haskins to speak in her own words as to her overall purpose in the book. On page 3 of her introduction she writes:
My purpose… is not simply to reevaluate Isocrates’ contribution to the history of rhetoric. I provide a reading that compares and contrasts the texts of Isocrates and Aristotle in order to describe a more performatively grounded notion of human agency and a more socially productive approach to rhetoric than can be supported by Aristotle’s writings alone. My argument, then, promotes a historically grounded yet noncanonical conception of human agency and rhetorical performance more associated with Isocrates than Aristotle.
Now, hopefully to help us grasp what on earth this actually means – “a more performatively grounded notion of human agency and a more socially productive approach to rhetoric” – I am going to talk about the book’s second chapter, entitled “Between Poetics and Rhetoric.” I selected this chapter because, for one thing, it offers a detailed account of Antidosis, and also it deals with Plato quite extensively, and not just Aristotle (since we haven’t yet started with Aristotle, I thought that was important); also, of course, I am interested in thinking about poetics and the nature of mimesis.
As a whole, chapter 2 can be said to compare and contrast Plato/Aristotle and Isocrates in terms of their respective attitudes toward mimesis, or, to put it another way, their respective attitudes toward the Greek poetic tradition and its role in philosophical education. By making this comparison vis-à-vis mimesis, Haskins is ultimately comparing the differing views that these thinkers hold about philosophy and rhetoric. Isocrates, Haskins points out, pointedly avoids the term rhetoric, and for him philosophia seems to be synonymous with rhetoric understood in the postmodern sense as the creation of discourse. Regardless, Haskins begins with Plato, and outlines various descriptions of mimesis that Plato offers in the Republic. First off, she claims, Plato refers to mimesis as a kind of dramatic impersonation: Plato mentions the way that a rhapsode, rather than simply narrating the words of a character within a poetic fiction, speaks the words as if he were the character; Plato also suggests that anyone, not just a rhapsode, who speaks in the voice of another person imitates that person and takes on his or her character in the act of imitation. Later, in his discussion of the proper education for the guardians of the city, Plato describes mimesis as a kind of learning by imitation of behavior (so, imitation of behavior not just speech). Lastly, in Book 10, Plato appears to conceive of mimesis as two distinct phenomena: on the one hand, he refers to mimesis as the act of poetic representation in general, so, mimesis in a broad sense as the fundamental representational activity of poetry; and on the other hand, he refers to mimesis as the audience’s emotional identification with the performance. Haskins points out that this latter sense of mimesis – mimesis as the audience’s emotional identification with the performance – incorporates the earlier descriptions of mimesis as a kind of fundamental identification with the speech and behavior of another person. Further, Haskins claims that by splitting mimesis into two different entities – poetic representation, on the one hand, and audience identification, on the other – Plato splits apart poetic content and poetic style. The content, Plato implies, is presented through the poetic representation, which in theory can be apprehended purely intellectually; and the style – the use of meter and metaphor and music and dance – is solely responsible for the emotive power of poetry, poetry’s ability to put an audience in a spell so as to identify emotionally with characters. Haskins will later argue that it is Aristotle who brings this Platonic splitting apart of mimesis to its quite literally logical conclusion. Haskin claims that Aristotle, following Plato in rigidly separating poetry’s representational content from its emotive power, will both elevate the status of poetry – specifically tragedy – by making its content susceptible to purely rational apprehension, and lower the status of rhetoric by associating it with all the stylistic manipulation of human emotion formerly associated with poetry.
All this may sound terribly complicated, but fundamentally what is at issue is the way that mimesis, the way that poetry, actually works – and related to this the way that education actually works. Think of the difference between the predominantly logical apprehension and then logical re-articulation of the action imitated by a poetic work (in other words, a course taught by Dr. ------), and the act of emotionally entering into a poetic work and intellectually reflecting upon one’s own emotional involvement (a course taught by Dr. Cowan), and then, finally, consider the mimetic educational act in which I am now engaged (pretending, for not too much longer, I hope, to be a professor): in this course, we are learning what Haskins would describe as a basic Isocratean principle, the principle that teaching and learning take place not through studying some unchanging, pre-established “content” but through continual, rather unpredictable acts of imitation. Haskins argues that Platonic and, later, Aristotelian philosophy strategically privilege the first, Dr. ------ sense of mimesis so as to make mimesis purely a contemplative act removed from practical ethical deliberation within a political community – the kind of deliberation that is irretrievably an emotional, give-and-take, performative process. Haskins will argue that Isocrates does not split apart mimesis in this manner because he takes for granted the “mutually enriching relationship between nonrational identification and self-conscious reflection.” For Isocrates, according to Haskins, the representation and imitative properties of mimesis are not separable but mutually dependent and even ultimately indistinguishable. (I love Dr. ------ courses, by the way, but I think it’s undeniable that in his courses emotive response, even if it is of a fist-pounding variety, only occurs in the service of defending highly rational interpretations).
Turning finally, and before I get myself into severe trouble, to Haskins’ reading of Isocrates’s Antidosis: Haskins claims that Antidosis is a manifesto proclaiming Isocrates’s educational philosophy, an educational philosophy that views mimesis as the means and end of education, and therefore as constitutive of political identity. As Haskins writes, “Antidosis is mimetic in itself: Isocrates sets up the account of his career and his pedagogical views as a speech of self-defense in the Athenian court. Although the title and the procedure of this fictional ‘trial’ give an impression that litigation is over a property exchange, Isocrates deliberately resorts to the language of another well-publicized self-defense – Socratic Apology.” According to Haskins, Isocrates intentionally invites comparisons with Plato because one of the central purposes of Antidosis is to espouse an alternative view of philosophia quite distinct from the philosophy taught at Plato’s Academy. Isocrates not only turns the hierarchy of knowledge espoused by Plato and Aristotle on its head – for Isocrates, geometry and astrology do not constitute philosophical study but are a preparation for it – but also proposes a definition of philosophia that in effect makes it inseparable from rhetoric. Haskins quotes this passage in detail:
[T]hose whose concern is philosophy pass on to their pupils all the structures which speech (logos) employs. When they have given them experience and detailed knowledge of these, they again exercise the students and make them accustomed to hard work, and then force them to synthesize everything they have learned in order that they may have a more secure understanding and their views (doxai) may be better adapted to the right moments (kairoi). It is not possible to learn this through study, since in all activities, these opportune moments elude exact knowledge (episteme), but in general those who are particularly attentive and can understand the consequences most often apprehend them.
Philosophia for Isocrates does not involve learning timeless truths but rather learning the various structures that speech employs so that these structures can be applied to the always contingent moments that define political discourse. Put another way: for Isocrates (as Haskins sees him) so-called timeless truths are created, not discovered, by the forms of logos. Haskins argues that for Isocrates the various structures of logos are best learned through the kind of mimetic imitation that characterized traditional Greek poetic education: “A student coming to Isocrates for instruction should expect not only to memorize poetry and prose for the sake of gaining facility in speech but also to gradually become a public person whose actions are worthy of being praised in similar discourses.” For Haskins, Isocrates accepts the basic assumption of traditional poetic education (mousike) that speaking well and acting well are inseparable – by the way, assumptions also shared by the Homeric characters within traditional Greek poetry. In addition, Isocrates embraces the multiplicitous aspect of poetry, its ability to expose students to a variety of viewpoints, character types, and problematic human situations. Haskins goes on to point out that Isocrates, unlike Plato and Aristotle, does not believe that self-control and justice can be taught to someone not already possessing such qualities. However, the Isocratean mimetic practice of philosophia can foster the attempt to seek praise and honor (advantage, as Isocrates puts it) in the context of political discourse, logos politicos. By speaking/acting in an honorable manner, students of Isocrates can promote pan-Hellenic unity, and, more specifically, ensure that Athens plays a leading role in the cultivation of such Greek unity. For Isocrates, honorable or gentlemanly discourse is inherently more poetic than the kind of forensic oratory present in the courts and the assembly – thus, as Haskins puts it, Isocrates aestheticizes public address by drawing on older Greek cultural discourses (poetry and drama), and in doing so he promotes a version of philosophia in which education and civic life are inseparable. In Antidosis, Isocrates offers samples of his own discourses, which he describes as fruits, simultaneously to fashion his own identity as a writer of political discourse and to reveal what promoting pan-hellenic unity through discourse actually looks like. In sum, then, Haskins argues that unlike Plato and Aristotle, who split apart the representational and imitative aspects of mimesis so as to propagate a form of philosophical contemplation removed from the contingencies of public, political life, Isocrates reveals that the imitative aspect of mimesis is in effect the very content that is represented by mimesis in the first place: mimetic poetry involves the imitation of imitation, as it were, and thus the fostering of a knowledge of the inevitable “acting” (in both senses) involved in human life.
As someone who believes that poetry teaches us about human nature, in all its complexity, and that this knowledge is crucial for political life; and further, as someone who believes that the power of logos is not a neutral tool for cultural discourse but rather creates cultural discourse, I find Haskins’s portrayal of Isocrates compelling. Nevertheless, and as paradoxical as it may seem, I find her reading of Plato and Aristotle, a reading that negatively establishes the positive identity of Haskins’s Isocrates, to be undeniably partial. Plato’s supposed views about mimesis are entirely abstracted from the Republic. What would happen if Haskins took into account the Phaedrus, for example, where it is after all a glorious act of mythic, poetic mimesis that allows Plato to define a philosophical rhetoric? Regardless, it does seem that the view Haskins offers of Plato and Aristotle is at the very least accurate vis-à-vis the way that Plato and Aristotle are frequently interpreted. As such, her rehabilitation of the so-called Isocratean philosophia over the so-called Platonic/Aristotelian approach perhaps also pushes readers to discover the inherent Isocrateanism in Plato and Aristotle themselves.
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