Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 11:33:35 +0200
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: The misunderstanding statement 2


Cologne 25-Jun-2001

Henk van Tuijl schrieb Sun, 24 Jun 2001 23:28:23 +0200:

> Poetry is ecstatical, following Plato's "Phaedrus" (245a; translation
> Perseus):
>
> "And a third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses. This takes
> hold upon a gentle and pure soul, arouses it and inspires it to songs and
> other poetry, and thus by adorning countless deeds of the ancients educates
> later generations. But he who without the divine madness comes to the doors
> of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no
> success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before
> that of the inspired madmen."
>
> You ask if there is a relation between poetry and the rhetorical. In his
> "Protagoras" Plato names the rhetoric of the sophists, the poetry of Homer
> and the rites of sects in one breath (316d; translation Perseus):
>
> "Now I tell you that sophistry is an ancient art, and those men of ancient
> times who practised it, fearing the odium it involved, disguised it in a
> decent dress, sometimes of poetry, as in the case of Homer, Hesiod, and
> Simonides sometimes of mystic rites and soothsayings, as did Orpheus,
> Musaeus and their sects [...]."

Henk,
So sophistry assumes the guise of something it is not. Inter alia it assumes the
guise of poetry.

> > So, for Socrates, rhetoric is

> > not a vehicle for philosophical ecstasy.
>
> We have seen that there is a relation between poetry and ecstasy - and that
> there is a relation between poetry and the rhetorical. Poetry is
> educational, following Plato. So is the rhetorical in the "Gorgias" (527b;
> translation Perseus):

Various interrelations between poetry, ecstasy, rhetoric.

> "[Among] the many statements we have made, while all the rest are refuted
> this one alone is unshaken that doing wrong is to be more carefully shunned
> than suffering it; that above all things a man should study not to seem but
> to be good both in private and in public; that if one becomes bad in any
> respect one must be corrected; that this is good in the second place, next
> to being just, to become so and to be corrected by paying the penalty; and
> that every kind of flattery, with regard either to oneself or to others, to
> few or to many, must be avoided; and that rhetoric is to be used for this
> one purpose always, of pointing to what is just, and so in every other
> activity."

That would be a reformed rhetoric that has finally (at the end of the dialogue)
mended its flattering ways.

> > philosophy has already transcended,
> > apparently without going anywhere.
>
> This is certainly not true for Plato (cf. his "Phaedo" 114b-c; translation
> Perseus):
>
> "But those who are found to have excelled in holy living are freed from
> these regions within the earth and are released as from prisons; they mount
> upward into their pure abode and dwell upon the earth. And of these, all who
> have duly purified themselves by philosophy live henceforth altogether
> without bodies, and pass to still more beautiful abodes which it is not easy
> to describe, nor have we now time enough."

Yes, Plato tends to get carried away with his transcendence.

> Following Plato's "Phaedo" philosophy is making music (60e; translation
> Perseus):
>
> "And I formerly thought it was urging and encouraging me to do what I was
> doing already and that just as people encourage runners by cheering, so the
> dream was encouraging me to do what I was doing, that is, to make music,
> because philosophy was the greatest kind of music and I was working at
> that."
>
> The things themselves seem to be anything but things.

'Things' has a very broad semantic spectrum. Socrates was attuned in his own way
to the issue of being.

Bye for now,
Michael
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