Epilogue The Past and Future of Plato’s Rhetorical Theory

This chapter reflects on the larger significance of the book’s arguments. Plato’s theory of language-as-statement and the split of seeming from being, which culminates in the Sophist, would come to dominate all theories of language and metaphysics in the West from the late classical to the contemporary era. But Plato’s innovation does not ensure that logos is in fact representational or signifying. By that same token, it also does not ensure that logos was ever detached from its archaic, natural powers in the first place. Rather, language-as-signification creates the mistaken impression that we can disarm lies and falseness by looking to the referent, to what the language represents in the world, and in so doing distinguish seeming from being. It is this mistaken notion that is signification’s greatest danger. Far from disarming the dangerous power of the sophists’ logos, Plato “weaponized” it by convincing us that it is “mere language,” imitative and removed from the world. The apparatus of rhetorical theories designed by Plato as prophylactic against the dangerous force of the sophists’ language, when mistaken for language as such, in its most basic and essential function, leaves the hearer unarmed against the overwhelming, archaic power of speech.

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