Manly Thor's Day Special

The manly art of rhetoric
The Art of Manliness site is planning a series on rhetoric. I love rhetoric and look forward to it. So far they only have the introduction up.

When I was a university debater, we used to do exhibition debates for high schools. I remember one English teacher was thrilled with me after one such debate. He loved my style of argument and he wanted his students to see this so he made a bunch of admiring remarks disguised as questions afterward.

I disappointed him. He praised my logic and I said that it wasn't about logic. Logic kills debate. I'm not saying that illogic wins or should win but that logic is just the frame you hang an argument on. What really matters is persuasion.

No where is this more clear than in love. Sexual love. That is where rhetoric matters most and huge part of being a man is knowing how to talk someone into love.

I was thinking about this the other day because my niece came to town. She is a staggeringly beautiful young woman and very smart to boot. Every time I see here we talk about writing. She loves Frost at Midnight, Emma and Plato.

This last time we talked about Plato. While eating Indian food with a group of people we know and love, which I think is an ideal setting to discuss Plato. She mentioned The Symposium, The Republic and The Phaedo. I, rather unfairly, asked her questions about the arguments and plots of the dialogues thereby putting her on the spot in front of others. She came through with flying colours as I hoped but was not absolutely certain she would do.

She'd never read The Phaedrus though. I gave her my copy as a going away present.

For my money, this is the greatest Platonic dialogue of them all. It's about erotic love and the central issue is whether it's better to have sex with someone you are in love with or whether it's better to have a casual arrangement with someone you are attracted to but not infatuated with. Three quarters of the book are the greatest defense of erotic infatuation ever written.

Of course, being Plato, it's about man-boy love, Plato was the original NAMBLA man (I love putting things like that in posts as Google bait to see who they draw in).

It has another weird twist though. as I said, three quarters of the book is a defense of erotic love. The last quarter is suddenly about rhetoric. This really puts some readers off. "Where the heck did that come from?" It's not completely crazy, Socrates and Phaedrus (the only two characters in the story, "Phaedrus" is pronounced fee-druss BTW) have been discussing not so much love as speeches about love such that, logically, the transition makes perfect sense.

What is hard to understand is the rhetorical transition. It just seems natural to go from an analysis of a bunch of speeches about love to a discussion of love in general. To go from a these speecehs to a discussion of speeches in general seems weird.

The answer to the puzzle is that Plato thought that love speech was the ultimate form of speech. All of the speeches in The Phaedrus as well as those in The Symposium can be read not just as speeches about love but also as attempts to seduce particular people. I suspect that, for Plato, seduction was the highest form of communication. A political speech or a legal argument was a poor cousin by comparison.

I think he was right. Nothing tells you that a man is not really a man more decisively than his not being able to talk comfortably and persuasively to women.


PS: Percy Bysshe Shelley did a translation of The Symposium and, even better, it is available in a  good, cheap edition today*. He did not do The Phaedrus, and that is tragic, but his one Plato translation is one of those books you have to read; ideally, you should read it when you are nineteen.

*This site is not monetized. I get not a single cent from the links I put up.