Philosophy & Rhetoric

The call for papers for this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric¹ acknowledged the continuous centrality of human agency across the history of Western thought on rhetoric. At its ancient Greek origins, the Sophists and philosophers were at swords points over the question of what constituted responsible speech and who had responsibility for the consequences of moving the demos to public actions that bore on the city-state and the lives of its citizens. On the one hand, sophistic understood the human world as indeterminate, progressing or regressing through appeals that would establish social and political reality for the community through the power of language and argument to move the minds and hearts of citizens. Protagoras expressed this vision with his aphorism, "Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not." Central to their understanding of the human world was a recognition and exploration of language's psychogogic powers. For the philosophers, on the other hand, sophistic's position represented a problematic abandonment of the quest for Eternal Truth.

The tension between the quest for contingent truth and Eternal Truth is illustrated by Xenophon's rendition of the aftermath of the Athenian naval victory at Arginoussai, in 406 BCE. In his Hellenika,² he recounts how some of the victorious fleet's sailors became separated from it during the confusion of battle and were left behind. Although the commanders sent a group to rescue them, violent seas thwarted their efforts and the men drowned. Upon returning to Athens as victors, the commanders were arrested and charged with cowardice. The Ecclesia met to decide whether to bind them over for trial. The commanders seemed to have persuaded most of their innocence, but time ran out for that day's proceedings before a vote on whether to bind them over for a trial could be taken. That evening, at a festival in the city, opponents of the commanders attended dressed in [End Page 181] black mourning clothes and pretended to be grieving relatives of the lost sailors. Their displays of sorrow over the sailors' deaths were so convincing that they swung the emotions of many in the opposite direction.

The next day, opponents of the commanders played upon the events of the night before and the citizens, remembering the displays of grief they had witnessed, were persuaded to try the commanders themselves, rather than deciding whether to bind them over to the courts for trial. Arguments went back and forth on how to interpret the tragic event—were the commanders brave but foiled by nature, or was their conduct spineless? Did they deserve a laurel wreath for their victory in battle, or to be executed for cowardice in allowing the stranded sailors to drown? Finally a vote was taken and, reversing their sentiment from the day before, the citizens voted to condemn the commanders. The military leaders were taken away to be executed. Soon thereafter, Xenophon tells us, the citizens had a change of heart and wished to reverse their verdict. However, since it was too late—the generals having already been put to death!—they lodged a complaint against those who had persuaded them to convict for "deceiving the People."

The story may be read as a representative anecdote of rhetoric's fatal flaw or of rhetoric's constitutive powers of agency. On one reading, Athenian Ecclesiasts, convulsed with emotion, were stripped of their agency by arguments seeking the probable through sensory engagement structured by phantasia and mimesis³ while lacking a foundation in the Eternally True. However, it also may be read as disclosing the absence of Eternal Truth on which to ground a human world, and the agential power of language—of rhetoric—to constitute understanding and action.⁴ On one side, agency resided in the self-aware person who made responsible arguments with reference to pure reason and ideal justice. On the other, agency resided in the powers of language to engage thoughts and emotions, of discourse to circulate, and of representative thinking⁵ for discovering human reality. These latter were products of human...