The Conflict between Philosophy, Rhetoric and Theology

Abstract

The struggle between philosophy and rhetoric has a long past. It is rooted in the earliest Greek writings. For the Grees, rhetoric and philosophy cannot be separated from cultural and political reality. Indeed this conflict provides the arena for the definition of Greek life. In the Homeric Age, emphasis was on physical competition. But the eristics of the Sophists in the fifth century B.C. brought a new kind of competition or agon — a rhetorical contest. According to Diogenes Laertias, Protagoras was the first to introduce “contests in arguments” (logon agonas).³⁶ The Sophists did not educate the masses, instead they provided the training for an elite core who wanted to rule or for those who in turn wanted to teach oratory.³⁷ The need for oratory and its value in a participatory democracy is self-evident. If you are able to sway the opinions of others, you have power. Indeed the success of the sophistically trained politician inevitably engendered hostility and praise, depending upon whose cause was favored. Those opposed to the extended power exercised by the people criticized the materialistic motives of Sophists. This power struggle is at the heart of the debate between philosophers and rhetoricians. Both groups asked fundamental questions such as: What is the nature of truth? What is the nature of knowledge? Can knowledge be transmitted? What are the ethical dimensions of any question? Philosophers, Sophists, rhetoricians — whatever they may have called themselves and each other — all claimed to address such questions and at the same time staked their claim by denying other groups the same rights. Both Sophists and philosophers pose important questions, which will be the focus of my examination of a number of important debates in the struggle between philosophy and rhetoric. I do not intend to present a full account of the history of philosophy and rhetoric. Instead, I will concentrate on the following works which serve as focal points for these questions: 1) Plato’s Gorgias and Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen 2) St Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana 3) Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi 4) Lorenzo Valla’s De voluptate and 5) the correspondence between Pico della Mirandola and Ermolao Barbara and Melanchthon’s Reply to Pico. All of these controversies shift the emphasis between rhetoric, philosophy and theology and thus provide important points of orientation for our understanding of Lessing’s polemics.

God made the world and turned it over to man for disputation—Medieval Adage