The next time the class in Ideas and Methods 251, Rhetoric, met at the large round table in South Chicago, a department secretary announced that the Professor of Philosophy was ill. The following week he was still ill. The somewhat bewildered remnants of the class, which had dwindled to a third of its size, went on their own across the street for coffee.
At the coffee table a student whom Phædrus had marked as bright but intellectually snobbish said, “I consider this one of the most unpleasant classes I have ever been in.” He seemed to look down on Phædrus with womanish peevishness as a spoiler of what should have been a nice experience.
“I thoroughly agree”, Phædrus said. He waited for some sort of attack, but it didn’t come.
The other students seemed to sense that Phædrus was the cause of all this but they had nothing to go on. Then an older woman at the other end of the coffee table asked why he was attending the class.
“I’m in the process of trying to discover that”, Phædrus said.
“Do you attend full-time?” she asked.
“No, I teach full-time at Navy Pier.”
“What do you teach?”
“Rhetoric.”
She stopped talking and everyone at the table looked at him and became silent.
November wore on. The leaves, which had turned a beautiful sunlit orange in October, fell from the trees, leaving barren branches to meet the cold winds from the north. A first snow fell, then melted, and a drab city waited for winter to come.
In the Professor of Philosophy’s absence, another Platonic dialogue had been assigned. Its title was Phædrus, which meant nothing to our Phædrus since he didn’t call himself by that name. The Greek Phædrus is not a Sophist but a young orator who is a foil for Socrates in this dialogue, which is about the nature of love and the possibility of philosophic rhetoric. Phædrus doesn’t appear to be very bright, and has an awful sense of rhetorical quality, since he quotes from memory a really bad speech by the orator Lysias. But one soon learns that this bad speech is simply a setup, an easy act for Socrates to follow with a much better speech of his own, and following that with a still better speech, one of the finest in all the Dialogues of Plato.
Beyond that, the only remarkable thing about Phædrus is his personality. Plato often names Socrates’ foils for characteristics of their personality. A young, overtalkative, innocent and good-natured foil in the Gorgias is named Polus, which is Greek for “colt.” Phædrus’ personality is different from this. He is unallied to any particular group. He prefers the solitude of the country to the city. He is aggressive to the point of being dangerous. At one point he threatens Socrates with violence. Phædrus, in Greek, means “wolf.” In this dialogue he is carried away by Socrates’ discourse on love and is tamed.
Our Phædrus reads the dialogue and is tremendously impressed by the magnificent poetic imagery. But he’s not tamed by it because he also smells in it a faint odor of hypocrisy. The speech is not an end in itself, but is being used to condemn that same affective domain of understanding it makes its rhetorical appeal to. The passions are characterized as the destroyer of understanding, and Phædrus wonders if this is where the condemnation of the passions so deeply buried in Western thought got its start. Probably not. The tension between ancient Greek thought and emotion is described elsewhere as basic to Greek makeup and culture. Interesting though.
The next week the Professor of Philosophy again does not appear, and Phædrus uses the time to catch up on his work at the University of Illinois.
The next week, in the University of Chicago bookstore across the street from where he is about to attend class, Phædrus sees two dark eyes that stare at him steadily through a shelf of books. When the face appears he recognizes it as the face of the innocent student who had been verbally beaten up earlier in the quarter and had disappeared. The face looks as though the student knows something Phædrus doesn’t know. Phædrus walks over to talk, but the face retreats and goes out the door, leaving Phædrus puzzled. And on edge. Perhaps he’s just fatigued and jumpy. The exhaustion of teaching at Navy Pier on top of the effort to outflank the whole body of Western academic thought at the University of Chicago is forcing him to work and study twenty hours a day with inadequate attention to food or exercise. It could be just fatigue that makes him think something is odd about that face.
But when he walks across the street to the class, the face follows about twenty paces behind. Something is up.
Phædrus enters the classroom and waits. Soon, there comes the student again, back into the room after all these weeks. He can’t expect to get credit now. The student looks at Phædrus with a half-smile. He’s smiling at something, all right.
At the doorway there are some footsteps, and then Phædrus suddenly knows… and his legs turn rubbery and his hands start to shake. Smiling benignly in the doorway, stands none other than the Chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods at the University of Chicago. He is taking over the class.
This is it. This is where they throw Phædrus out the front door.
Courtly, grand, with imperial magnanimity the Chairman stands in the doorway for a moment, then talks to a student who seems to know him. He smiles, while looking away from the student, around the classroom, as if to find another face that is familiar to him, nods and then chuckles a little, waiting for the bell to ring.
That’s why that kid is here. They’ve explained to him why they accidentally beat him up, and just to show what good guys they are they’re going to let him have a ringside seat while they beat up Phædrus.
How are they going to do it? Phædrus already knows. First they are going to destroy his status dialectically in front of the class by showing how little he knows about Plato and Aristotle. That won’t be any trouble. Obviously they know a hundred times more about Plato and Aristotle than he ever will. They’ve been at it all their lives.
Then, when they have thoroughly cut him up dialectically, they will suggest that he either shape up or get out. Then they are going to ask some more questions, and he won’t know the answers to those either. Then they are going to suggest that his performance is so abominable that he not bother to attend, but leave the class right now. There are variations possible but this is the basic format. It’s so easy.
Well, he has learned a lot, which is what he has come for. He can do his thesis in some other way. With that thought the rubbery feeling leaves him and he calms down.
Phædrus has grown a beard since the Chairman last saw him, and so is still unidentified. No long advantage. The Chairman will locate him soon enough.
The Chairman lays his coat down carefully, takes a chair on the opposite side of the large round table, sits, and then brings out an old pipe and stuffs it for what must be nearly a half a minute. One can see he has done this many times before.
In a moment of attention to the class he studies faces with a smiling hypnotic gaze, sensing the mood, but feeling it is not just right. He stuffs the pipe some more, but without hurry.
Soon the moment arrives, he lights the pipe, and before long there is in the classroom an odor of smoke.
At last he speaks:
“It is my understanding”, he says, “that today we are to begin discussion of the immortal Phædrus.” He looks at each student separately. “Is that correct?”
Members of the class assure him timidly that it is. His persona is overwhelming.
The Chairman then apologizes for the absence of the previous Professor, and describes the format of what will follow. Since he already knows the dialogue himself he will elicit from the class answers that will show how well they have studied it.
That’s the best way to do it, Phædrus thinks. That way one can learn to know the individual students. Fortunately Phædrus has studied the dialogue so carefully it is almost memorized.
The Chairman is right. It is an immortal dialogue, strange and puzzling at first, but then hitting you harder and harder, like truth itself. What Phædrus has been talking
about as Quality, Socrates appears to have described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things. There is no contradiction. There never really can be between the core terms of monistic philosophies. The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it’s not, you’ve got two. The only disagreements among the monists concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself. The One can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech. Socrates chooses a heaven-and-earth analogy, showing how individuals are drawn toward the One by a chariot drawn by two horses. —
But the Chairman now directs a question to the student next to Phædrus. He is baiting him a little, provoking him to attack.
The student, whose identity is mistaken, doesn’t attack, and the Chairman with great disgust and frustration finally dismisses him with a rebuke that he should have read the material better.
Phædrus’ turn. He has calmed down tremendously. He must now explain the dialogue.
“If I may be permitted to begin again in my own way”, he says, partly to conceal the fact that he didn’t hear what the previous student said.
The Chairman, seeing this as a further rebuke to the student next to him, smiles and says contemptuously it is certainly a good idea.
Phædrus proceeds. “I believe that in this dialogue the person of Phædrus is characterized as a wolf.”
He has delivered this quite loudly, with a flash of anger, and the Chairman almost jumps. Score!
“Yes”, the Chairman says, and a gleam in his eye shows he now recognizes who his bearded assailant is. “Phædrus in Greek does mean ‘wolf.’ That’s a very acute observation.” He begins to recover his composure. “Proceed.”
“Phædrus meets Socrates, who knows only the ways of the city, and leads him into the country, whereupon he begins to recite a speech of the orator, Lysias, whom he admires. Socrates asks him to read it and Phædrus does.”
“Stop!” says the Chairman, who has now completely recovered his composure. “You are giving us the plot, not the dialogue.” He calls on the next student.
None of the students seems to know to the Chairman’s satisfaction what the dialogue is about. And so with mock sadness he says they must all read more thoroughly but this time he will help them by taking on the burden of explaining the dialogue himself. This provides an overwhelming relief to the tension he has so carefully built up and the entire class is in the palm of his hand.
The Chairman proceeds to reveal the meaning of the dialogue with complete attention. Phædrus listens with deep engagement.
After a time something begins to disengage him a little. A false note of some kind has crept in. At first he doesn’t see what it is, but then he becomes aware that the Chairman has completely bypassed Socrates’ description of the One and has jumped ahead to the allegory of the chariot and the horses.
In this allegory the seeker, trying to reach the One, is drawn by two horses, one white and noble and temperate, and the other surly, stubborn, passionate and black. The one is forever aiding him in his upward journey to the portals of heaven, the other is forever confounding him. The Chairman has not stated it yet, but he is at the point at which he must now announce that the white horse is temperate reason, the black horse is dark passion, emotion. He is at the point at which these must be described, but the false note suddenly becomes a chorus.
He backs up and restates that “Now Socrates has sworn to the Gods that he is telling the Truth. He has taken an oath to speak the Truth, and if what follows is not the Truth he has forfeited his own soul.”
TRAP! He’s using the dialogue to prove the holiness of reason! Once that’s established he can move down into enquiries of what reason is, and then, lo and behold, there we are in Aristotle’s domain again!
Phædrus raises his hand, palm flat out, elbow on the table. Where before this hand was shaking, it is now deadly calm. Phædrus senses that he now is formally signing his own death warrant here, but knows he will sign another kind of death warrant if he takes his hand down.
The Chairman sees the hand, is surprised and disturbed by it, but acknowledges it. Then the message is delivered.
Phædrus says, “All this is just an analogy.”
Silence. And then confusion appears on the Chairman’s face. “What?” he says. The spell of his performance is broken.
“This entire description of the chariot and horses is just an analogy.”
“What?” he says again, then loudly, “It is the truth! Socrates has sworn to the Gods that it is the truth!”
Phædrus replies, “Socrates himself says it is an analogy.”
“If you will read the dialogue you will find that Socrates specifically states it is the Truth!”
“Yes, but prior to that — in, I believe, two paragraphs — he has stated that it is an analogy.”
The text is on the table to consult but the Chairman has enough sense not to consult it. If he does and Phædrus is right, his classroom face is completely demolished. He has told the class no one has read the book thoroughly.
Rhetoric, 1; Dialectic, 0.
Fantastic, Phædrus thinks, that he should have remembered that. It just demolishes the whole dialectical position. That may just be the whole show right there. Of course it’s an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don’t know that. That’s why the Chairman missed that statement of Socrates. Phædrus has caught it and remembered it, because if Socrates hadn’t stated it he wouldn’t have been telling the “Truth.”
No one sees it yet, but they will soon enough. The Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods has just been shot down in his own classroom.
Now he is speechless. He can’t think of a word to say. The silence which so built his image at the beginning of the class is now destroying it. He doesn’t understand from where the shot has come. He has never confronted a living Sophist. Only dead ones.
Now he tries to grasp onto something, but there is nothing to grasp onto. His own momentum carries him forward into the abyss, and when he finally finds words they are the words of another kind of person; a schoolboy who has forgotten his lesson, has gotten it wrong, but would like our indulgence anyway.
He tries to bluff the class with the statement he made before that no one has studied very well, but the student to Phædrus’ right shakes his head at him. Obviously someone has.
The Chairman falters and hesitates, acts afraid of his class and does not really engage them. Phædrus wonders what the consequences of this will be.
Then he sees a bad thing happen. The beat-up innocent student who has watched him earlier now is no longer so innocent. He is sneering at the Chairman and asking him sarcastic and insinuating questions. The Chairman, already crippled, is now being killed — but then Phædrus realizes this was what was intended for himself.
He can’t feel sorry, just disgusted. When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
A girl rescues the Chairman by asking easy questions. He receives the questions with gratitude, answers each at great length and slowly recovers himself.
Then the question is asked him, “What is dialectic?”
He thinks about it, and then, by God, turns to Phædrus and asks if he would care to answer.
“You mean my personal opinion?” Phædrus asks.
“No — let us say, Aristotle’s opinion.”
No subtleties now. He is just going to get Phædrus on his own territory and let him have it.
“As best I know — ” Phædrus says, and pauses.
“Yes?” The Chairman is all smiles. Everything is all set.
“As best I know, Arist
otle’s opinion is that dialectic comes before everything else.”
The Chairman’s expression goes from unction to shock to rage in one-half second flat. It does! his face shouts, but he never says it. The trapper trapped again. He can’t kill Phædrus on a statement taken from his own article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Rhetoric, 2; Dialectic, 0.
“And from the dialectic come the forms”, Phædrus continues, “and from. — ” But the Chairman cuts it off. He sees it cannot go his way and dismisses it.
He shouldn’t have cut it off, Phædrus thinks to himself. Were he a real Truth-seeker and not a propagandist for a particular point of view he would not. He might learn something. Once it’s stated that “the dialectic comes before anything else”, this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.
Phædrus would have asked, What evidence do we have that the dialectical question-and-answer method of arriving at truth comes before anything else? We have none whatsoever. And when the statement is isolated and itself subject to scrutiny it becomes patently ridiculous. Here is this dialectic, like Newton’s law of gravity, just sitting by itself in the middle of nowhere, giving birth to the universe, hey? It’s asinine.
Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.
The class ends, the Chairman stands by the door answering questions, and Phædrus almost goes up to say something but does not. A lifetime of blows tends to make a person unenthusiastic about any unnecessary interchange that might lead to more. Nothing friendly has been said or even hinted at and much hostility has been shown.