Argument in Composition. John Ramage
is generally credited with developing a form of “antilogic” that renders dialogue open-ended, allowing the beliefs (doxa) of each speaker to play a role in the resolution of an issue.
The Protagorean view . . . appears to be bilateral, in that the two sides of a question must be brought to bear on each other to effect some resolution of the issue at hand. Since neither side is privileged a priori over the other, and both are founded on the hearer’s doxa, we may characterize the relationship between speaker and audience as “symmetric.” (Conley 6-7)
Plato’s manipulation of this form of dialogue makes clear how difficult it is to reconcile an absolutist faith in one’s beliefs and genuine dialogue. If one privileges some beliefs a priori over other beliefs before a dialogue begins, one cannot hold out the possibility that those transcendent beliefs might be changed in the course of that dialogue. The only way that a dialogue might cause other beliefs to displace the a priori privileged beliefs is through some sort of chicanery. All of which takes us back to the Fish vs Leo debate in the previous chapter. Only “relativists” and those with dangerously “multiculturalist” leanings might hold out the possibility that genuine dialogue with one’s enemies could be a good thing or that one’s own views might actually be changed by such an exchange. The fact that the “absolutist” in the modern day version of the Sophist v Platonist debate fails to lay claim to any specific universal absolutes is symptomatic of the differences between the ancients’ world and our own. Today’s absolutisms, as M. H. Abrams once wryly noted, are sorely lacking in absolutes. Like Leo, most latter-day Platonists tend to rely on jeremiad as their primary vehicle of persuasion. By focusing their attack—and their audience’s attention—on all the things that have gone wrong since approximately 1968 when the relativists took over the asylum, Leo and his ilk can avoid reference to any absolutes other than those that have sadly lapsed. The treatment of these universal values is in turn more of an exercise in nostalgia than in analysis.
Implicit in the opposition between ancient philosophers and rhetoricians, and their more recent incarnations, are different assumptions about the ends of reasoning. The ancient philosophers’ rejection of effect as an aspect of truth is part of a larger difference between the two approaches. The end of reasoning for philosophy is some sort of discovery—of truth, of reality, or of the good—which will then be known and shareable. For rhetoric on the other hand, the end of reasoning is a choice; to be sure the choice may bring us closer to truth, reality or the good (and if any of the three are privileged by rhetoric it would be the latter, as we have indicated), but it is the act itself, performed in a particular time and place to bring about a particular outcome, not knowledge for its own sake, that motivates the process. Indeed, according to Blumenberg, the rhetorical situation is such that one “[lacks] definitive evidence and [is] compelled to act” (441), versus Plato who, according to Blumenberg, “institutionalized” the notion “that virtue is knowledge,” thereby making “what is evident . . . the norm of behavior” (431). By Plato’s lights once one possesses right knowledge one is compelled to act in virtuous ways, while rhetoricians hold that virtue must be compelled anew in each new situation, using incomplete information and means specific to that situation.
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