the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish “principles” and study “methods” and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries… the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason.
The sessions on Aristotle were round an enormous wooden round table in a dreary room across the street from a hospital, where the late-afternoon sun from over the hospital roof hardly penetrated the window dirt and polluted city air beyond. Wan and pale and depressing. During the middle of the hour he noticed that this enormous table had a huge crack that ran right across it near the middle. It looked as though it had been there for years, but that no one had thought to repair it. Too busy, no doubt, with more important things. At the end of the hour he finally asked, “May questions about Aristotle’s rhetoric be asked?”
“If you have read the material”, he was told. He noticed in the eye of the Professor of Philosophy the same set he had seen the first day of registration. He took warning from it that he had better read the material very thoroughly, and did so.
The rain comes down more heavily now and we stop to snap on the face mask to the helmet. Then we go again at moderate speed. I watch for chuckholes, sand and grease slicks.
The next week Ph?drus had read the material and was prepared to take apart the statement that rhetoric is an art because it can be reduced to a rational system of order. By this criterion General Motors produced pure art, whereas Picasso did not. If there were deeper meanings to Aristotle than met the eye this would be as good a place as any to make them visible.
But the question never got raised. Ph?drus put up his hand to do so, caught a microsecond flash of malice from the teacher’s eye, but then another student said, almost as an interruption, “I think there are some very dubious statements here.”
That was all he got out.
“Sir, we are not here to learn what you think!” hissed the Professor of Philosophy. Like acid. “We are here to learn what Aristotle thinks!” Straight in the face. “When we wish to learn what you think we will assign a course in the subject!”
Silence. The student is stunned. So is everyone else.
But the Professor of Philosophy is not done. He points his finger at the student and demands, “According to Aristotle: What are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?”
More silence. The student doesn’t know. “Then you haven’t read it, have you?”
And now, with a gleam that indicates he has intended this all along, the Professor of Philosophy swings his finger around and points it at Ph?drus.
“You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?”
But Ph?drus is prepared. “Forensic, deliberative and epideictic”, he answers calmly.
“What are the epideictic techniques?”
“The technique of identifying likenesses, the technique of praise, that of encomium and that of amplification.”
“Yaaas — ” says the Professor of Philosophy slowly. Then all is silent.
The other students looked shocked. They wonder what has happened. Only Ph?drus knows, and perhaps the Professor of Philosophy. An innocent student has caught blows intended for him.
Now everyone’s face becomes carefully composed in defense against more of this sort of questioning. The Professor of Philosophy has made a mistake. He’s wasted his disciplinary authority on an innocent student while Ph?drus, the guilty one, the hostile one, is still at large. And getting larger and larger. Since he has asked no questions there is now no way to cut him down. And now that he sees how the questions will be answered he’s certainly not about to ask them.
The innocent student stares down at the table, face red, hands shrouding his eyes. His shame becomes Ph?drus’ anger. In all his classes he never once talked to a student like that. So that’s how they teach classics at the University of Chicago. Ph?drus knows the Professor of Philosophy now. But the Professor of Philosophy doesn’t know Ph?drus.
The grey rainy skies and sign-strewn road descend to Crescent City, California, grey and cold and wet, and Chris and I look and see the water, the ocean, in the distance beyond piers and grey buildings. I remember this was our great goal all these days. We enter a restaurant with a fancy red carpet and fancy menus with extremely high prices. We are the only people here. We eat silently, pay and are on the road again, south now, cold and misty.
In the next sessions the shamed student is no longer present. No surprise. The class is completely frozen, as is inevitable when an incident like that has taken place. Each session, just one person does all the talking, the Professor of Philosophy, and he talks and talks and talks to faces that have turned into masks of neutrality.
The Professor of Philosophy seems quite aware of what has happened. His previous little eye-flick of malice toward Ph?drus has turned to a little eye-flick of fear. He seems to understand that within the present classroom situation, when the time comes, he can get exactly the same treatment he gave, and there will be no sympathy from any of the faces before him. He’s thrown away his right to courtesy. There’s no way to prevent retaliation now except to keep covered.
But to keep covered he must work hard, and say things exactly right. Ph?drus understands this too. By remaining silent he can now learn under what are very advantageous circumstances.
Ph?drus studied hard during this period, and learned extremely fast, and kept his mouth shut, but it would be wrong to give the least impression that he was any sort of good student. A good student seeks knowledge fairly and impartially. Ph?drus did not. He had an axe to grind and all he sought were those things that helped him grind it, and the means of knocking down anything which prevented him from grinding it. He had no time for or interest in other people’s Great Books. He was there solely to write a Great Book of his own. His attitude toward Aristotle was grossly unfair for the same reason Aristotle was unfair to his predecessors. They fouled up what he wanted to say.
Aristotle fouled up what Ph?drus wanted to say by placing rhetoric in an outrageously minor category in his hierarchic order of things. It was a branch of Practical Science, a kind of shirttail relation to the other category, Theoretical Science, which Aristotle was mainly involved in. As a branch of Practical Science it was isolated from any concern with Truth or Good or Beauty, except as devices to throw into an argument. Thus Quality, in Aristotle’s system, is totally divorced from rhetoric. This contempt for rhetoric, combined with Aristotle’s own atrocious quality of rhetoric, so completely alienated Ph?drus he couldn’t read anything Aristotle said without seeking ways to despise it and attack it.
This was no problem. Aristotle has always been eminently attackable and eminently attacked throughout history, and shooting down Aristotle’s patent absurdities, like shooting fish in a barrel, didn’t afford much satisfaction. If he hadn’t been so partial Ph?drus might have learned some valuable Aristotelian techniques of bootstrapping oneself into new areas of knowledge, which was what the committee was really set up for. But if he hadn’t been so partial in his search for a place to launch his work on Quality, he wouldn’t have been there in the first place, so it really didn’t have any chance to work out at all.
The Professor of Philosophy lectured, and Ph?drus listened to both the classic form and romantic surface of what was said. The Professor of Philosophy seemed most ill at ease on the subject of “dialectic.” Although Ph?drus couldn’t figure out why in terms of classic form, his growing romantic sensitivity told him he was on the scent of something… a quarry.
Dialectic, eh?
Aristotle’s book had begun with it, in a most mystifying way. Rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic, it had said, as if this were of the greatest importance, yet why this was so important was never explained. It was followed with a number of other disjointed statements, which gave the impression that a great deal had been left out, or the material had been assembled wrongly, or the printer had left something out, because no matter how many times he read it nothing jelled. The only thing that was clear was that Aristotle was very much concerned about the relation of rhetoric to dialectic. To Ph?drus’ ear, the same ill ease he had observed in the Professor of Philosophy appeared here.
