The Professor of Philosophy had defined dialectic, and Ph?drus had listened carefully, but it was in one ear and out the other, a characteristic that philosophic statements often have when something is left out. In a later class another student who seemed to be having the same trouble asked the Professor of Philosophy to redefine dialectic and this time the Professor had glanced at Ph?drus with another quick flicker of fear and become very edgy. Ph?drus began to wonder if “dialectic” had some special meaning that made it a fulcrum word… one that can shift the balance of an argument, depending on how it’s placed. It was.
Dialectic generally means “of the nature of the dialogue”, which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at. It’s the mode of discourse of Socrates in the Dialogues of Plato. Plato believed the dialectic was the sole method by which the truth was arrived at. The only one.
That’s why it’s a fulcrum word. Aristotle attacked this belief, saying that the dialectic was only suitable for some purposes… to enquire into men’s beliefs, to arrive at truths about eternal forms of things, known as Ideas, which were fixed and unchanging and constituted reality for Plato. Aristotle said there is also the method of science, or “physical” method, which observes physical facts and arrives at truths about substances, which undergo change. This duality of form and substance and the scientific method of arriving at facts about substances were central to Aristotle’s philosophy. Thus the dethronement of dialectic from what Socrates and Plato held it to be was absolutely essential for Aristotle, and “dialectic” was and still is a fulcrum word.
Ph?drus guessed that Aristotle’s diminution of dialectic, from Plato’s sole method of arriving at truth to a “counterpart of rhetoric”, might be as infuriating to modern Platonists as it would have been to Plato. Since the Professor of Philosophy didn’t know what Ph?drus’ “position” was, this was what was making him edgy. He might be afraid that Ph?drus the Platonist was going to jump him. If so, he certainly had nothing to worry about. Ph?drus wasn’t insulted that dialectic had been brought down to the level of rhetoric. He was outraged that rhetoric had been brought down to the level of dialectic. Such was the confusion at the time.
The person to clear all this up, of course, was Plato, and fortunately he was the next to appear at the round table with the crack running across the middle in the dim dreary room across from the hospital building in South Chicago.
We follow the coast now, cold, wet and depressed. The rain has let up, temporarily, but the sky shows no hope. At one point I see a beach and some people walking on it in the wet sand. I’m tired and so I stop.
As he gets off, Chris says, “What are we stopping for?”
“I’m tired”, I say. The wind blows cold off the ocean and where it has formed dunes, now wet and dark from the rain that must just have ended here, I find a place to lie down, and this makes me a little warmer.
I don’t sleep though. A little girl appears over the top of the dune looking as though she wants me to come and play. After a while she goes away.
In time Chris comes back and wants to go. He says he has found some funny plants out on the rocks that have feelers which pull in when you touch them. I go with him and see between rises of waves on the rocks that they are sea anemones, which are not plants but animals. I tell him the tentacles can paralyze small fish. The tide must be all the way out or we wouldn’t see these, I say. From the corner of my eye I see the little girl on the other side of the rocks has picked up a starfish. Her parents are carrying some starfish too.
We get on the motorcycle and move south. Sometimes the rain gets heavy and I snap on the bubble so it doesn’t sting my face, but I don’t like this and take it off when the rain dies away. We should reach Arcata before dark but I don’t want to go too fast on this wet road.
I think it was Coleridge who said everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. People who can’t stand Aristotle’s endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato’s soaring generalities. People who can’t stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle. Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the “one.” Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the “many.” I myself am pretty much Aristotelian in this sense, preferring to find the Buddha in the quality of the facts around me, but Ph?drus was clearly a Platonist by temperament and when the classes shifted to Plato he was greatly relieved. His Quality and Plato’s Good were so similar that if it hadn’t been for some notes Ph?drus left I might have thought they were identical. But he denied it, and in time I came to see how important this denial was.
The course in the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was not concerned with Plato’s notion of the Good, however; it was concerned with Plato’s notion of rhetoric. Rhetoric, Plato spells out very clearly, is in no way connected with the Good; rhetoric is “the Bad.” The people Plato hates most, next to tyrants, are rhetoricians.
The first of the Platonic Dialogues assigned is the Gorgias, and Ph?drus has a sense of having arrived. This at last is where he wants to be.
All along he has had a feeling of being swept forward by forces he doesn’t understand… Messianic forces. October has come and gone. Days have become phantasmal and incoherent, except in terms of Quality. Nothing matters except that he has a new and shattering and world-shaking truth about to be born, and like it or not, the world is morally obligated to accept it.
In the dialogue, Gorgias is the name of a Sophist whom Socrates cross-examines. Socrates knows very well what Gorgias does for a living and how he does it, but he starts his Twenty Questions dialectic by asking Gorgias with what rhetoric is concerned. Gorgias answers that it is concerned with discourse. In answer to another question he says that its end is to persuade. In answer to another question he says its place is in the law courts and other assemblies. And in answer to still another question he says its subject is the just and the unjust. All this, which is simply Gorgias’ description of what people called Sophists have tended to do, now becomes subtly rendered by Socrates’ dialectic into something else. Rhetoric has become an object, and as an object has parts. And the parts have relationships to one another and these relations are immutable. One sees quite clearly in this dialogue how the analytic knife of Socrates hacks Gorgias’ art into pieces. What is even more important, one sees that the pieces are the basis of Aristotle’s art of rhetoric.
Socrates had been one of Ph?drus’ childhood heroes and it shocked and angered him to see this dialogue taking place. He filled the margins of the text with answers of his own. These must have frustrated him greatly, because there was no way of knowing how the dialogue would have gone if these answers had been made. At one place Socrates asks to what class of things do the words which Rhetoric uses relate. Gorgias answers, “The Greatest and the Best.” Ph?drus, no doubt recognizing Quality in this answer, has written “True!” in the margin. But Socrates responds that this answer is ambiguous. He is still in the dark. “Liar!” writes Ph?drus in the margin, and he cross-references a page in another dialogue where Socrates makes it clear he could not have been “in the dark.”
Socrates is not using dialectic to understand rhetoric, he is using it to destroy it, or at least to bring it into disrepute, and so his questions are not real questions at all… they are just word-traps which Gorgias and his fellow rhetoricians fall into. Ph?drus is quite incensed by all this and wishes he were there.
In class, the Professor of Philosophy, noting Ph?drus’ apparent good behavior and diligence, has decided he may not be such a bad student after all. This is a second mistake. He has decided to play a little game with Ph?drus by asking him what he thinks of cookery. Socrates has demonstrated to Gorgias that both rhetoric and cooking are branches of pandering… pimping… because they appeal to the emotions rather than true knowledge.
In response to the Professor’s question, Ph?drus gives Socrates’ answer that cookery is a branch of pandering.
There’s a titter from one of the women in the class which displeases Ph?drus because he knows the Professor is trying for a dialectical hold on him similar to the kind Socrates gets on his opponents, and his answer is not intended to be funny but simply to throw off the dialectical hold the Professor is trying to get. Ph?drus is quite ready to recite in detail the exact arguments Socrates uses to establish this view.
But that isn’t what the Professor wants. He wants to have a dialectical discussion in class in which he, Ph?drus, is the rhetorician and is thrown by the force of dialectic. The Professor frowns and tries again. “No. I mean, do you really think that a well-cooked meal served in the best of restaurants is really something that we should turn down?”
Ph?drus asks, “You mean my personal opinion?” For months now, since the innocent student disappeared, there have been no personal opinions ventured in this class.
