Abstract

I am grateful to Arthur Walzer and Heather Hayes for arranging the opportunity for three scholars to respond to my book, and to Arabella Lyon, Bruce Krajewski, and Michael Svoboda for their responses.Because he so thoroughly disagrees with my argument, Professor Krajewski offers me a helpful place to begin to clarify that argument. He argues that, whatever the intent of my argument, my reading of the Republic relies on the presumption that rhetoric is subservient to philosophy. My concern, however, is not with some hierarchical arrangement but with addressing questions essential for the theoretical grounding of rhetoric. Because these questions do not admit of empirical or fixed answers, they are the kinds of questions that the rhetorical theorist Michel Meyer characterizes as philosophic (74).Professor Krajewski is troubled by Plato’s unfair characterization of the sophists. No one can argue that Plato’s representation of the sophists is friendly, but I would argue that it is more nuanced than a simple dismissal of them as corrupt. More to the point, corruption is really not the complaint that Socrates brings against the sophists in the Republic. Indeed, he explicitly defends them against the charge of corruption and criticizes them, instead, for confirming rather than challenging the city’s views on justice.For Professor Krajewski, Socrates’s various depictions of the audience show contempt for interlocutors and readers, characterizing them as children, sheep, and worse. But Plato’s critique of the public is grounded on the assumption that we do not know who we are. This lack of self-knowledge is not one that divides elites and masses but is a condition of the entire human race. For Plato, the philosophical issue that necessitates his dialogue arises because the citizens of Athens are justified in what they believe, responsible in the way that they hold those beliefs, and, despite that, they are in deep self-contradiction. Glaucon argues that Socrates is simply the latest in a long line of apologists for justice who perpetuate a public discourse in which no one believes. This discourse has led unintentionally to a corrosive situation in which no one believes that he or she really desires to be just. Glaucon’s request, in which he is joined by his brother Adeimantus, is for a new form of discourse that has the potential to be genuinely persuasive—they seek from philosophy a rhetoric that can honor and address the concerns of the average citizen.Professor Krajewski raises the important issue of the relationship between ruler and ruled. To understand this relationship, it is important to realize that for Socrates this is an issue of persuasion and not of legislation. The rule that occupies Socrates is effected through public discourse; hence the request for a discourse that can genuinely speak to what the public believes. Glaucon does not seek advice on how to govern the citizens but on how to speak to them. The goal is not compulsion but persuasion.In pointing to the methodological role of doubleness in the Republic, Professor Lyon zeroes in on an important aspect of the dialogue, and she makes me wish that I had given more explicit attention to it. Although she admires my approach to the Republic, neither I nor Plato has convinced her fully that the goal of reconstituting a democratic citizenry can be accomplished through an act of persuasion. At issue is the way in which the audience participates in this reconstitution. Professor Lyon advocates for a process of deliberation, for such a process would invite active rather than passive spectators. She is uneasy with what seems to be a passive role for the spectator or reader of the Republic. I think that her insight into the doubleness of the dialogue provides a way of addressing her concerns.If part of the rhetorical effort of the dialogue is not simply to provide an intellectual defense of justice but to alter the way that its readers desire, so that they genuinely desire to be just, how can a text achieve that end? Professor Lyon argues that Plato attempts to achieve that end “through erasing alternative desires.” I don’t see any effort to erase desire. What I see is a text that is attempting, as a text, to transform desire, and I see it doing this through recourse to a doubleness that produces a dissonance, which, in turn, opens up justice as an object of desire. To suggest how this happens, I turn to Anne Carson’s account of the tension at the heart of the erotic experience. Although she does not use the term doubleness to characterize erotic engagement, that is what her account suggests. For her the moment of desire is when the actual and the ideal are brought into a proximity that both offers the hope of a new identity at the same time that it reminds one, painfully, that that identity is, in fact, not the case (17, 36, 69). The dissonance between the ideal and the actual fosters desire. Such a dissonance is at the heart of the Republic, as the Kallipolis as an impossible ideal is brought into continual contact with a reality to which Socrates and his interlocutors seek to be adequate. Out of that tension a desire for justice is born.Professor Svoboda and I agree that there are strong reasons to read Plato’s Republic, not as an anti-democratic text, but as a more complex response to a set of historical events that both created a series of crises for Athens and that led to the establishment of its democratic constitution. He rightly notes that Plato’s text makes deliberate allusions to those events, and that its opening book, in particular, engages those events and would be so viewed by fourth-century Athenian readers. I agree fully. Further, I agree with his argument that Plato’s philosophy is best understood as a “situated practice responding to particular problems.” Such a perspective supports a reading of philosophy as a particular kind of effort to engage responsibly the events that provoke critical reflection. It recovers a purposiveness for philosophy and makes clear that philosophy is inextricably joined with rhetoric.The point whose force I felt the most was Professor Svoboda’s reminder that the peace achieved in Athens after the Peloponnesian wars was attained only by an agreement of both sides “to forget injustices that had been done to them during the civil conflict.” This is a sound historical point and, as Professor Svoboda notes, this agreement turns the “Republic’s common sense understanding of justice on its head.” He goes on to make an important point: that it precisely the dissonance between Plato’s account of justice and Athens’ important pragmatic response to those serious injustices that marked civil strife at the end of the fifth century BCE that helps us understand the possible philosophical motivation behind the Republic. In offering an account of justice and making clear that such an account requires an extended philosophical justification, Plato is challenging his readers and confronting the costs hidden in the agreement that had succeeded in establishing peace. The question becomes: how to develop a complex understanding of the problem of justice sufficient to the world as it is and that provides a genuine reason to be just? It is this type of question that is at the heart of a philosophical rhetoric as a discourse essential to the psychological health of individuals and the overall health of the commonwealth.It is my hope that we have begun a discussion that relocates what I take to be an old, tired opposition and recasts it as a theoretically more compelling inquiry into the importance of rhetoric for values that are foundational to our culture and that shape us as creatures of language who participate in those cultures.