Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aristotle's Rhetoric against Rhetoric:Unitarian Reading and Esoteric HermeneuticsCarol PosterIn Platonic scholarship, it recently has become a commonplace to foreground problems of interpretation.1 Most Anglo-American discussions of Aristotelian rhetoric, however, while often involving disagreements about specific readings of individual passages in the Aristotelian corpus, frequently presume the adequacy of a relatively unproblematic hermeneutic with respect to overall, as opposed to local, interpretive strategies.2 Readings of Aristotle's Rhetoric such as those in collections edited by Erickson 1974, Furley and Nehemas 1994, and Rorty 1996 mainly address specific technical issues while eschewing discussion of more general hermeneutic problems. Even those scholars who have attempted to situate the Rhetoric with respect to broader problems in Aristotelian philosophy usually have restricted the scope of their inquiries to such specific issues as the relationship of rhetoric to Aristotelian psychology, ethics, or politics rather than considering the methodological implications of the esoteric nature of the Aristotelian [End Page 219] corpus.3 Specific interpretation of the Rhetoric, however, presumes a general hermeneutic for reading the Aristotelian corpus.One of the most dramatic shifts in the past few decades of scholarship concerning ancient philosophy has been the rehabilitation of late antiquity in general and neoplatonism in particular.4 Among continental scholars especially, this has resulted in a concomitant interest in neoplatonic esoteric readings of Plato.5 The recent essays on and translations of the generally neoplatonic Greek Commentaries on Aristotle and the work of Gadamer 1986 and Reale 1990 mark the beginning of a similar movement towards neoplatonic esoteric interpretation in Aristotelian studies.6 Unfortunately, this shift in philosophical historiography has had little effect upon rhetorical scholarship.7There are four specific areas in which the neoplatonic turn in ancient philosophical historiography can contribute to a general hermeneutic for understanding Aristotle's Rhetoric: (1) the unity of Plato and Aristotle, (2) esotericism, (3) the textual status of the Aristotelian corpus, and (4) the role of endoxai.Plato and Aristotle: The Unitarian ApproachColeridge once stated:Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure that no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian.(Coleridge 1888, 118) [End Page 220]His dictum has become a truism of modern philosophical historiography. These two giants of ancient philosophy have been seen as two polar opposites rather like north and south poles of a magnetized bar around which lesser philosophers have gathered like iron filings. Such was not the case in late antiquity. In the 15,000 extant pages of the Greek Commentaries on Aristotle, the fundamental unity of Plato and Aristotle is almost universally acknowledged,8 especially in works subsequent to Porphyry's seminal, but no longer extant, "On the School of Plato and Aristotle Being One" (Sorabji 1990, 2). In the neoplatonic schools, Aristotle's works, and, in fact, the discipline of rhetoric itself, were often taught as "lesser mysteries" propaideutic to the "greater mysteries" of Plato (Marinus 1814, 13 and Saffrey 1990, 178).Although the neoplatonic assumption of unity between Plato and Aristotle and the voluminous corpus of neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle might appear useful only in the study of, for example, medieval philosophers who routinely viewed Aristotle through the lens of neoplatonism, such is not the case. Considering the possibility of a greater unity between Plato and Aristotle than is usually assumed has significant consequences for interpretation of Aristotle himself.9While arguments concerning the possibility of constructing a unitarian model of Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy in general tend to hinge on the question of the separation of the forms in Plato and their existence as formal causes or enhulē eidē in Aristotle, most comparisons of Platonic and Aristotelian rhetoric eschew broader theoretical concerns, instead contrasting Aristotle's Rhetoric with a limited group of Platonic dialogues, namely Gorgias, Protagoras, and Phaedrus.10 Scholarly opinions can be broadly divided into two camps, one asserting that [End Page 221] Plato disapproved of rhetoric while Aristotle approved of it, and the other claiming that Aristotle's Rhetoric carries out a program for the "ideal rhetoric" outlined in Plato's Phaedrus. In this article I shall...