Ambiguity
Ambiguity seemed like a hot-button topic during last Monday's class. The ambiguity of teaching seems to come from an individual's ability to perceive concepts differently depending on who their teacher is and what is being taught. Plato's character, Socrates, seems to avoid the ambiguity of difficult concepts such as justice and virtue by attempting to speak the language of the discourse community that surrounds him. Plato provides Socrates with literary tools that allow his audience to use personal experiences as a basis for the concepts they are attempting to define. I made the analogy for teaching virtue (or concepts such as love, friendship, etc.) as teaching a language in Monday's class because although one can be taught how to spell a word, I believe that only through practice and experience can one learn how to apply it.
Throughout the dialogues Socrates often uses the word "persuasion;" especially in the Crito, he says he must either persuade the Athenian state as to its wrongdoing or he must suffer that wrongdoing. By persuasion, he certainly doesn't mean rhetorical sophistry--but neither, I think, does he mean that we should approach arguments as something it is possible to win, like a battle. Persuading somebody to believe something, especially something like the nature of the good or just, means demonstrating to them that it is both desirable and practical, and neither insulting nor condescending to them at the same time. I think it is for this reason that we see Socrates so often walking a tightrope between logic and rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteNicely put. But if demonstration in the mathematical sens is impossible (as is almost certainly the case for justice), might persuasion have to take the form of convincing someone, in a friendly spirit, without adequate data or definitive arguments? And mightn't that convincing sometimes be hard to distinguish from self-interested sophistic manipulation? Hard, but not impossible (the difference being the friendly spirit -- sunousia/philia -- at the heart of the process)?
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