Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece PDF
Preview Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece
STUDIES IN RHETORIC/COMMUNICATION Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor LISTENING to the LOGOS Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece CHRISTOPHER LYLE JOHNSTONE THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS Man is conscious ofa universal sou/within or behind his individual life, wherein as in a firmament, the nature ofJ ustice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its property. . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" Contents SERIES EDITOR'S PREFACE ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi Prologue 1 ONE The Greek Stones Speak: Toward an Archaeology of Consciousness 4 TWO Singing the Muses' Song: Myth, Wisdom, and Speech 13 rHREE Physis, Kosmos, Logos: Presocratic Thought and the Emergence ofNature-Consciousness 36 FOUR Sophistical Wisdom, Socratic Wisdom, and the Political Life 86 FIVE Civic Wisdom, Divine Wisdom: !socrates, Plato, and Two Visions for the Athenian Citizen 146 SIX Speculative Wisdom, Practical Wisdom: Aristotle and the Culmination of Hellenic Thought 188 Epilogue 215 NOTES 225 BIBLIOGRAPHY 269 INDEX 295 Series Editor's Preface In Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece, Christopher Lyle Johnstone explores how the ancient Greeks thought about the connections between wisdom and speech. He finds not a unified idea of how these connections can or should develop but a consistent inquiry into the issues of speech, language, dialogue, and argument on the one hand and the pursuit of wisdom on the other. Are these separate, perhaps even competing or incompatible, disciplines and practices, or interacting principles, or resources for one another? Johnstone focuses on the Greek world in the period 620-322 s.c.E., when, according to his account, understandings of the world that had been grounded largely in myth were joined rapidly by new rational, naturalistic, and philo sophical modes. The three centuries studied in this work saw the interacting development of what came to be called philosophy and rhetoric. Johnstone's book is not so much a history of early Greek philosophy or early Greek rhet oric as a synthetic account of the emerging and enduring sense of the connec tions between speech and wisdom from early Greek thought to the flowering of systematic rhetorical and philosophical thought. Johnstone traces the complex relations among language and thought as variously understood in Homer, Hesiod, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedo cles, Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, !socrates, and Aristotle. At the same time, Johnstone draws widely on generations of scholarship that inform our understandings of these issues and thinkers. Johnstone provides an appreciation of the achievements of fourth-century B.c.E. Greek rhetorical and philosophical thought without, however, losing his simultaneous appreciation of the earlier modes of thought and expression from which they emerged. Listening to the Logos is the fruit of one scholar teacher's lifetime of study and reflection and a book to which scholars and stu dents of rhetoric may tum for instruction and refreshment. w. THOMAS BENSON Acknowledgments The author is grateful for permission to use previously published material from the following sources: "Sophistical Wisdom: Po/itike Arete and 'Logoso phia,"' Phi/nsophy and Rhetoric 39, no. 4 (2006): 265-89, © 2006 by the Penn sylvania State University, by permission of the Penn State University Press, University Park; "'Speech Is a Powerful Lord': Speech, Sound, and Enchant ment in Greek Oratorical Performance," Advances in the History of Rhetoric 8 (2005): 1-20, © 2005 by the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, by permission of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric; "Eros, Logos, and Sophia in Plato: Philosophical Conversation, Spiritual Lovemaking, and Dialogic Ethics," in Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provin dality, edited by Kathleen Glenister Roberts and Ronald C. Arnett (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 155-86, © 2008 by Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., used by permission of Peter Lang Publishing. Research for this book commenced during a 1986-87 sabbatical leave sup ported by the Pennsylvania State University and by Dennis Gouran, then head of the Department of Speech Communication. I am also grateful to the Clas sics Faculty Library at Cambridge University for granting me visiting-scholar status during the summer of 1986 and to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, for my appointment as senior associate member in 1987 and again in 1991, 1997, 2002, and 2007. I am especially appreciative to Richard Leo Enos, Edward Schiappa, and Janet Atwill, all of whom read early versions of several chapters and provided encouraging and helpful feedback. Stephen Browne, Thomas Benson, and Michael Hogan provided useful guid ance in the later stages of the project. Bill Rawlins read and provided very helpful comments about my discussion of Plato and engaged me in "loving conversation" about key ideas in it. I also want to acknowledge Michael Hyde, who once asked me, "Why study the Greeks?" In a way, this book is my answer to his question. Over the years when I was studying the materials on which I draw here, I taught both graduate and undergraduate courses that focused on one or another set of these texts. Discussions and debates with the students in those xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS courses were important sources of insight into the ideas I write about in this book. I cannot name them all here, but among those who deserve my acknowl edgment and gratitude are George Elder, Pat Gehrke, Gina Ercolini, David Tell, and David Dzikowski. Thank you for taking these texts, questions, and ideas seriously. I am also indebted to two reviewers for the University of South Carolina Press, whose comments, suggestions, and encouraging responses to the manuscripts were instructive and affinning. The second reader in particu lar and james Denton, acquisitions editor at the press, provided valuable guid ance and exhibited great patience. Finally, I owe more than words can ever express to my soul mate and life partner, Patty, for never losing faith in me and this project.
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