Isocrates' decision to label his rhetorical education as education in philosophy presents us with an interesting case to explore classical rhetoric in his day (on Isocrates, see further, T. L. Papillon, Chapter 6). It is interesting because the label philosophia defies our disciplinary assumptions. Indeed, from a disciplinary viewpoint, his choice of the term philosophia can only be understood either as a misnomer or, as several scholars have already pointed out, a public relations ploy on his part, a way for him to distance his rhetorical education from the disreputable sophists and to associate himself with the more respected intellectual activity of philosophy. Yet, if we suspend our disciplinary understanding of rhetoric and philosophy, it may be possible to provide some other explanation that will in turn also shed light back on alternative ways of understanding rhetoric’s relation to the Greek culture.
To begin with, let us keep in mind that the kind of question Isocrates addresses is not rhetorical but pedagogical and, from all indications, a question that many intellectuals in his day were also raising with an utmost sense of urgency: can education in any way help bring the city out of its near-crisis situation? Isocrates’ general claim, that he can teach people how to discover the right course of action for the city in any given situation, shows that the pedagogy he was practicing had been designed to provide a response to the intellectual concerns of his day. His specific claim, that he can help students improve their judgments and, as he puts it, enable an orator ‘by his powers of conjecture (doxa) arrive generally at the best course of action’ (15.271) or reach ‘a judgment (doxa) which is accurate in meeting occasions as they arise and rarely misses the expedient course of action’ (12.30), shows that he framed the question in political and philosophical terms. For doxa (opinion, belief, judgment, conjecture) invited both sets of problems. Politically, doxa determines the fate of the community, and human lives often hang on a single opinion that dominates deliberation in the Assembly and binds Athenians to a particular course of action. Isocrates’ contemporaries knew too well that the rise and fall of the Athenian empire had been a story of good and poor judgments made by orators/politicians.
Philosophically, doxa posed the vexing problem of standards. On what basis could one doxa be said to be better than another? What certainty could we have that even the best judgment reached was anything more than a lucky guess? Plato had already addressed in the Meno the problem of arriving at the correct solution for the city as a problem of doxa. Even though the good statesman in the Meno wants to make the right decision for his people every time, he is inevitably caught up in a situation where, with mere opinion as his guide, he sometimes hits and sometimes misses the mark. Plato’s proposed solution, that one must reach a level of knowledge (epistlml) that would provide a standard for judging false and correct opinions alike, was expressed as follows: ‘He who has knowledge will always hit on the right way, whereas he who has right opinion will sometimes do so, but sometimes not’ (97c). It was a solution Isocrates could easily dismiss by redirecting the issue back to the political realm: unless someone has the ability to predict the future, he reasoned, there can be no certainty about the outcome of political decisions. This reasoning gave Isocrates the authority to expose Plato’s philosophy as being out of touch with Athenian politics - ‘no system of knowledge can possibly cover these occasions, since in all cases they elude our science’ (15.184) - and plenty of opportunities to remind his audience that, in the political realm, doxa is all there is: ‘In dealing with matters about which they take counsel, [people] ought not to think that they have exact knowledge of what the result will be, but to be minded towards these contingencies as men who indeed exercise their best judgment (doxa) but are not sure what the future may hold in store’ (8.8).
The question Isocrates raised about doxa, then, led to a philosophical problem that philosophy, as practiced at the time, was not equipped to resolve. The importance of the question he raised, self-evident to his contemporaries, provided him with an angle from which to critique the existing practices of philosophy: ‘I hold that what some people call philosophy is not entitled to that name’ (15.270). But ifIsocrates criticized the discipline of philosophy for not being able to resolve the problem of doxa in the context of political deliberation, he also criticized the discipline of rhetoric for not even addressing doxa as a problem. For the field of rhetoric had thus far placed all its energy on eloquence and persuasion, eu legein. The plethora of sophistic teachings on rhetoric made it fairly easy for someone to learn how to defend his doxa or undermine his opponent’s doxa eloquently and persuasively. However much improved in the areas of pleasing discourses and techniques with persuasion, the discipline of rhetoric had thus far nothing to say about the process of formulating sound judgments.
Isocrates addressed the lacuna he had identified in the disciplines of philosophy and rhetoric, as they were practiced at the time, by resorting to history. Athenian history, with its plentiful examples of sound decision making and good judgments in political deliberation, offered countless opportunities to witness doxa in its best possible renderings. Isocrates points to Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles as men in the distant past who had repeatedly reached sound decisions, had spoken eloquently and persuasively, and had advocated courses of action that conferred the greatest benefits on their fellow Athenians. These men, he remarks, were ‘the best statesmen ever to have come before the rostrum’, ‘the most reputable orators among the ancients’, and ‘the cause of most blessings for the city’ (15.231).
Isocrates’ move to history enabled him to offer a pragmatic solution to the problem of doxa. If we have no criteria for distinguishing one doxa from another, we can at least look to the past and identify examples of wise people having made sound decisions. Furthermore, we can study these examples at present. Under his guidance, he remarks, a student will select from the past ‘those examples which are the most illustrious and the most edifying; and, habituating himself to contemplate and appraise such examples, he will feel their influence not only in the preparation of a given discourse but in all the actions of his life’ (15.277). By invoking the great statesmen of the past, Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles, who were still celebrated in his day for their practical wisdom in strengthening the city as well as for their persuasive eloquence, Isocrates succeeded in creating a space where rhetoric and philosophy could first be reconfigured and then be blended together into an indissolubly single practice. It is the space of sophia, an old cultural activity, still being understood by his contemporaries as practical wisdom in action.
Isocrates ends his inquiry into doxa by bringing philosophy to the service of sophia, contemplation to action. The distinction between the two, as the following passage demonstrates, is the difference between wise decisions made in the past and the preparation necessary to develop the ability to make sound decisions in the present (15.270-271):
I hold those men to be wise (sophous) who are able by the power of conjecture to arrive
Generally at the best course, and philosophers those occupying themselves with the
Studies from which they gain most quickly that kind of insight (phronrsis).
Wise people are men of action, blessed with practical wisdom and the power to make correct conjectures or, translated more literally, to arrive at successful opinions, as much as that is humanly possible. Philosophers are those who study the decisions of wise men, who turn wise decisions of the past into an object of study, and who contemplate manifestations of wisdom in order to cultivate their own ability with making sound judgments.
By tapping into a traditional understanding of sophia, Isocrates could make the case to his contemporaries that oratory could still be practiced under him as it once had been by men of practical wisdom, provided that orators-to-be would study the decision-making practices of these men. He could also make the case that, by taking for its subject matter the ways wise people had acted in deliberative situations, philosophy could help demystify practical wisdom and make sound doxai subject to training and education rather than to innate talent.
Isocrates’ treatment of rhetoric is instructive if only because it exemplifies how an intellectual inquiry can oftentimes lead to paths beyond the pressures of ideological commitments and disciplinary formations at present. True, Isocrates was concerned with the identity of rhetoric and its distinction from philosophy, sophistic, or eristic. But for him, shaping this identity was not an end in itself. The disciplinary refiguration of rhetoric he arrived at - a strengthening of political deliberation by means of deliberative discourses from the history of the community as well as by means of the reflective rigor that philosophy could bring to the study of these discourses - was the result of his commitment to the question he raised, not to the field he served. Equally true, Isocrates worked from within the ideological framework of his day and looked to fashion an educational program fit for leaders and suited for members of the upper class. But rather than privilege this framework and the moral egocentricity that goes with it, he infused his rhetorical education with the city’s pressing political needs at the time. As a result, the identity he created for the orator who would serve the city best - one who would worry less about making his proposals for action eloquent and persuasive and more about scrutinizing his proposals from the perspective of the community’s history and would reflect on the potential benefits and consequences of his proposals as much as wise people are expected to - ended up being more a potential space, open to any member of the polis committed to the life of politics, and less a fixed identity to be taken up exclusively by an aristocrat. Isocrates’ example illustrates that the possibility to learn unique aspects of classical rhetoric depends entirely on the open-ended nature of the questions we raise about it.
World History
