Listening to the Logos

Christopher Lyle Johnstone

Description

An exploration of the role of language arts in forming and expressing wisdom from Homer to Aristotle

In Listening to the Logos, Christopher Lyle Johnstone provides an unprecedented comprehensive account of the relationship between speech and wisdom across almost four centuries of evolving ancient Greek thought and teachings—from the mythopoetic tradition of Homer and Hesiod to Aristotle's treatises.

Johnstone grounds his study in the cultural, conceptual, and linguistic milieu of archaic and classical Greece, which nurtured new ways of thinking about and investigating the world. He focuses on accounts of logos and wisdom in the surviving writings and teachings of Homer and Hesiod, the Presocratics, the Sophists and Socrates, Isocrates and Plato, and Aristotle. Specifically Johnstone highlights the importance of language arts in both speculative inquiry and practical judgment, a nexus that presages connections between philosophy and rhetoric that persist still. His study investigates concepts and concerns key to the speaker's art from the outset: wisdom, truth, knowledge, belief, prudence, justice, and reason. From these investigations certain points of coherence emerge about the nature of wisdom—that wisdom includes knowledge of eternal principles, both divine and natural; that it embraces practical, moral knowledge; that it centers on apprehending and applying a cosmic principle of proportion and balance; that it allows its possessor to forecast the future; and that the oral use of language figures centrally in obtaining and practicing it.

Johnstone's interdisciplinary account ably demonstrates that in the ancient world it was both the content and form of speech that most directly inspired, awakened, and deepened the insights comprehended under the notion of wisdom.

Sujets

• Communication Studies
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• PHILOSOPHY
• Protágoras
• Theory of Forms
• Euthydemus (dialogue)
• Humanism
• Human nature
• Divine law
• Endoxa
• Philosophical language
• Magna Moralia
• Critias (dialogue)
• Subjectivism
• Charmides (dialogue)
• General officer
• Semantics
• Spirituality
• Rhetoric
• Ontology
• General
• Discipline
• Reason
• Logos
• Protagoras

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 23 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781611171754
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Listening to the Logos
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
2009 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2009 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Johnstone, Christopher Lyle, 1947-
Listening to the logos : speech and the coming of wisdom in ancient
Greece / Christopher Lyle Johnstone.
p. cm. - (Studies in rhetoric/communication)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-854-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Logos (Philosophy) 2. Philosophy, Ancient. 3. Rhetoric, Ancient. I. Title.
B187.L6J635 2009
180-dc22
2009021900
ISBN 978-1-61117-175-4 (ebook)
To my maternal grandfather, Robert I. Plomert, who encouraged me to ask questions. He was the wisest person I ever knew in real life .
Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein as in a firmament, the nature of Justice, 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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prologue
ONE
The Greek Stones Speak: Toward an Archaeology of Consciousness
TWO
Singing the Muses Song: Myth, Wisdom, and Speech
THREE
Physis, Kosmos, Logos: Presocratic Thought and the Emergence of Nature-Consciousness
FOUR
Sophistical Wisdom, Socratic Wisdom, and the Political Life
FIVE
Civic Wisdom, Divine Wisdom: Isocrates, Plato, and Two Visions for the Athenian Citizen
SIX
Speculative Wisdom, Practical Wisdom: Aristotle and the Culmination of Hellenic Thought

Epilogue

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX
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 B.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 philosophical 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 rhetoric as a synthetic account of the emerging and enduring sense of the connections 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, Empedocles, Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, Isocrates, 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 students of rhetoric may turn for instruction and refreshment.
T HOMAS W. B ENSON
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful for permission to use previously published material from the following sources: Sophistical Wisdom: Politik Aret and Logosophia, Philosophy and Rhetoric 39, no. 4 (2006): 265-89, 2006 by the Pennsylvania State University, by permission of the Penn State University Press, University Park; Speech Is a Powerful Lord : Speech, Sound, and Enchantment 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 Provinciality , 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 supported by the Pennsylvania State University and by Dennis Gouran, then head of the Department of Speech Communication. I am also grateful to the Classics 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 guidance 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 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 acknowledgment 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 affirming. The second reader in particular and James Denton, acquisitions editor at the press, provided valuable guidance 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.
Prologue
Early in my career I published three essays (1980, 1981, 1983) that, in examining how ethical standards for communication might be devised, focus on connections between speech and wisdom-between oral expression, sophia , and phron sis . In the first of these essays I conclude from a synthetic reading of the Nicomachean Ethics , the Rhetoric , and the Politics that Aristotle conceived rhetoric as an exercise of phron sis or practical wisdom and of the latter as fundamentally rhetorical. Following a trajectory set by Aristotle s notion ( Nic. Eth . 1.7) that the (morally) good or happy life for a human being lies in the fulfillment of his/her proper function or work ( ergon ), the second essay sets out explicitly to situate guidelines for ethical speech in a commitment to the realization of our fundamental nature as human beings. The third essay examines the implications for a rhetorical ethics of John Dewey s moral theory and his conception of communication, and it points toward a contemporary conception of practical wisdom.
A point of departure for the present work comes from a passage in the second essay, where I consider the ethical implications of our species designation, Homo sapiens, understood as the wise human (as distinct from the upright-walking human, Homo erectus , and the adaptable human, Homo habilis ): A humanistic ethic that embraces [this conception] of human nature will commit its adherents to the pursuit of wisdom, for in this pursuit lies the fulfillment of human being (Johnstone 1981, 180). In the remainder of the paragraph I sketch a conception of wisdom that informed my thinking at that time. Human wisdom, I write, involves a kind of knowing, as is indicated by the significance of sapience . Wisdom is both a grasping of the way things are -of the patterns and regularities in human experience and of how these fit into the kosmos -and an appreciation of the truths thus grasped. . . . It is generated by apprehensions of the truths of human nature, by one s realization or understanding of how humanness fits into the nature of things.
I am particularly interested in the relationship between wisdom and speech-between what Aristotle termed the most finished form of knowledge and the instrumentalities of language. What is wisdom, and how is it acquired? Can it be communicated or taught to others? What is the role of speech, language, dialogue, argument-that is, of logos -in its attainment? If the pursuit of wisdom is taken as the highest moral end of human conduct, what are the implications for how language ought to be used in t