4 - The voice of reason?

Summary

From rhetoric to erotics

In my account of Socrates' critique of rhetoric, I have been at pains to show that the limitations of his arguments are as thematically important to the concerns of the dialogue as what can positively be claimed for them. We have seen – most especially in chapter two – that although Plato can argue the orators into formally adopting dialectical method in order to attain the grasp of truth required for their art, he cannot by discursive argument alone compel their commitment to that structure of goals, and that choice of life, which gives dialectical method its meaning for him. At some point, they must find it in themselves to either follow or reject the example that he sets. Not, however, that Plato is powerless to influence this impulse of attraction or disgust in those whom he would bend towards the philosophic life; rather, he must call upon resources other than those of formal argument, and paint a picture of the alternative choices of life from the full palette of colours at his imaginative disposal.

Now, I would be working against everything I have argued so far if, in turning from the critique of rhetoric to the speeches on love, I were to make it seem that I am about to forsake the black-and-white of philosophy for the technicolor of poetry.