초록

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Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

Sophists considered rhetoric, the maker of persuasion (peithous demiourgos), an effective tool for manipulating the mass opinion. They exercised rhetoric to seize the power of handling the mass opinion in courts, agora, and theaters. This essay first reconstructed ethical problems of rhetoric in the...

Sophists considered rhetoric, the maker of persuasion (peithous demiourgos), an effective tool for manipulating the mass opinion. They exercised rhetoric to seize the power of handling the mass opinion in courts, agora, and theaters. This essay first reconstructed ethical problems of rhetoric in the Gorgias, the Phaedrus, and Gorgias" corpus. Three principal characteristics of sophistic rhetoric were identified: (1) the capacity to provide two-sided arguments on every topic (dissoi logoi); (2) its amoral hedonism regarding the purpose of persuasion; (3) the knowledge of the appropriate time (kairos) and content (to prepon) for maximum effectiveness of persuasion. These characteristics are partly dependent upon the sophist"s claim that rhetoric can teach civic virtues even without true knowledge of it. In an attempt to contextualize the role of rhetoric within the conflicts between the sophists and the Socratic tradition, I first reviewed the ethical problems of the principles of rhetoric from both the perspectives. This study continued to examine the moral integrity of the sophist"s arguments regarding the ethical indifference with the true knowledge in persuasion. In particular, the nature of the dialectic exchanges between the rhetors and Socrates illustrated in the Gorgias were compared with the one in the rhetorical texts by Gorgias. Based on the examination of the sophistic and the Socratic interpretations of the nature of rhetoric, I argued that (1) it is not possible for the sophists to defend themselves in any coherent way against the Socratic attacks on the ethical indifference with the true knowledge in persuasion; (2) it does not follow however that the rhetor has to accept the Socratic dialectics (including the Socratic elenchos) as the only possible means to communicate with others in a sincere way; and (3) the modern persuasion expert should actively seek an ethical foundation to defend one"s way of communication against the Socratic and other lines of critiques of rhetoric. The questions thus remain to be answered: (I) Does rhetoric matter only to the means of communication without concerning to the purpose? (2) Does rhetoric have to do with the true knowledge of the subject matter? (3) Does rhetoric contribute to teaching political virtues in a democratic society? Depending on the answer to these questions, modern persuasion experts will have different ethical positions by which one can judge the ethical integrity of persuasive communication.