"Gorgias" and "Phaedrus"

Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Politics

Plato, James H. Nichols

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801471483
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

With a masterful sense of the place of rhetoric in both thought and practice and an ear attuned to the clarity, natural simplicity, and charm of Plato's Greek prose, James H. Nichols Jr., offers precise yet unusually readable translations of two great Platonic dialogues on rhetoric.

The Gorgias presents an intransigent argument that justice is superior to injustice: To the extent that suffering an injustice is preferable to committing an unjust act. The dialogue contains some of Plato's most significant and famous discussions of major political themes, and focuses dramatically and with unrivaled intensity on Socrates as a political thinker and actor. Featuring some of Plato's most soaringly lyrical passages, the Phaedrus investigates the soul's erotic longing and its relationship to the whole cosmos, as well as inquiring into the nature of rhetoric and the problem of writing.

Nichols's attention to dramatic detail brings the dialogues to life. Plato's striking variety in conversational address (names and various terms of relative warmth and coolness) is carefully reproduced, as is alteration in tone and implication even in the short responses. The translations render references to the gods accurately and non-monotheistically for the first time, and include a fascinating variety of oaths and invocations. A general introduction on rhetoric from the Greeks to the present shows the problematic relation of rhetoric to philosophy and politics, states the themes that unite the two dialogues, and outlines interpretive suggestions that are then developed more fully for each dialogue.

The twin dialogues reveal both the private and the political rhetoric emphatic in Plato's philosophy, yet often ignored in commentaries on it. Nichols believes that Plato's thought on rhetoric has been largely misunderstood, and he uses his translations as an opportunity to reconstruct the classical position on right relations between thought and public activity.

PLATO
Gorgias

TRANSLATED WITH
INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND AN
INTERPRETATIVE ESSAY BY

JAMES H. NICHOLS JR.

Cornell University Press

ITHACA AND LONDON

Preface

The design and execution of this volume rest on three premises. First, that the questions regarding the nature of rhetoric and its proper relation to philosophy, politics, and education are of perennial concern and importance. Second, that Plato’s investigation of these questions is profound and valuable for our own thinking. And third, that a careful translation by the same person of both Gorgias and Phaedrus, with notes and interpretative suggestions, could be very helpful for those wishing to come to grips with Plato’s understanding of rhetoric.

Of course, I hold these premises to be true and to provide sufficient justification for the present volume. In fact, these premises seem to me sufficiently modest that I imagine most people might well agree with them. I further believe that substantially stronger assertions along each of these lines are defensible, though of necessity more controversial, and that these assertions make a far more compelling case for the value of this volume.

My full argument for these stronger assertions is to be found in the entirety of the volume that follows, including introduction, translations, notes, and suggestions for interpretation. Let me sketch them here briefly as follows.

First, rhetoric is the crucial link between philosophy and politics and must take an important place in education if political life and intellectual activity are to be in the best shape possible. While it is easy to denigrate the art of persuasion, most obviously by contrasting its possible deceptiveness with the truth of genuine knowledge, science, or philosophy, one should never forget the fundamental political fact that human beings must coordinate their activities with other human beings in order to live well, and that the two most basic modes of such coordination are through persuasion and by force. Everyone knows the disadvantages of excessive reliance by a political community on force or violence. If the highest intellectual activities—science, philosophy—are to have much efficacy in practical political life, rhetoric must be the key intermediary.

Second, Plato presented the first full investigation of the most important and fundamental questions about rhetoric, and its relation to philosophy on the one hand and politics on the other. His investigation is classic, in the sense that one can argue with plausibility that no later investigation has surpassed its clarity and force on the basic questions. His understanding of these questions and his philosophic suggestions about rhetoric decisively affected the way these matters were viewed and dealt with for many centuries and remain indispensable today.

Third, Plato’s teaching on rhetoric is an aspect of his thought that is very often misunderstood. Several features of the intellectual life of the last century or two make it difficult for many scholars to take the issue of rhetoric as seriously as Plato himself did. Hence, for example, they are often misled to think that, although the Gorgias does of course discuss rhetoric, it is more deeply concerned with justice or philosophy. And similarly regarding the Phaedrus, many are reluctant to see rhetoric as its central theme. New translations of both great Platonic dialogues on rhetoric, done by one translator animated by the concern to recover a fuller and more adequate understanding of Plato’s teaching on rhetoric, may be just what the philosophical doctor ordered for those who sense the need to take a fresh and sustained look at the problem of rhetoric.

So much for the overall design of this volume. Now a few words on particular aspects, starting with the translations. In his preface to The Dialogues of Plato (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), R. E. Allen makes an elegant statement of a translator’s need to make “the tactful adjustment of competing demands which cannot each be fully satisfied” (xi–xii). He discusses these demands under the names fidelity, neutrality, and literalness. My own adjustment puts considerable weight on literalness, with a view to trying to provide the reader with as direct an access to Plato as possible and with as little dependency as possible on the translator’s interpretative understanding. In the preface to “The Republic” of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968), Allan Bloom’s statement of the case against the search for contemporaneous equivalents and in favor of a literalist tilting of the balance is compelling—all the stronger, I find, because he criticizes the leading nonliteral translations not by digging up some passages to blame (which one can do to any translation) but by examining sample passages that the translators themselves singled out as exemplary of the excellence of their approach.

On the basis of my own experience, I would supplement Bloom’s statement on behalf of literal translation in the following way. One could pursue the goal of being literal to whatever degree one might choose. But because words in two languages rarely correspond well in a one-to-one mapping, the more literal one wishes to be, the more notes one must add, either to explain one’s word-for-word translation more fully, when necessary, so as not to mislead the reader; or where one cannot translate word for word, to point out that a particular Greek word is the same one that one has translated differently elsewhere. Too many such notes, however, would make the translation unbearable. One must therefore choose to which Greek words one will devote this close treatment and to which ones not. In the choice of where to be fully literal and to add notes, one cannot help subjecting the reader to dependence on one’s interpretation.

That statement of the problem does not vitiate the goal of choosing to be literal rather than not, up to a point. It simply clarifies just why the goal of literalness can be attained only within some limits, and it suggests that the translator might well try to indicate what the principles of choice in that domain have been. The reader may of course gain fuller information on that point by looking at the actual notes to the translation itself.

Here I wish to indicate three principles by which my own choice of when to strive for literalness has been guided. First, as my opening remarks on rhetoric suggest, I pay especially close literal attention to words related to rhetoric, persuasion, speech, and the like. Second—a principle that, regrettably, I find myself able to state only vaguely—I strive for especial literalness with those words that most people concerned with philosophy, morality, and politics consider of obviously central importance (the good, the beautiful, the just,...