Leonine Chameleons: Relativism and Fascism

"You have probably lost track of the number of articles about people who have jettisoned family members over contradictory and reprehensible political views. How do we get to the point that educated people, some skilled in philosophical argumentation, fail to make communicative progress with others? As the U.S. sinks further into fascism, why haven't philosophers' arguments against fascism caused fascists to do a regretful volte-face? Are non-fascist philosophers ill-equipped to deal with fascism? I ask those questions mindful of Stanley Cavell's statement that "Nothing a philosopher says can insure that you will not act immorally.""

"My proposition is that some philosophers, long smitten with the false notion that philosophers are not sophists or rhetoricians, believe that professional philosophers are superior creatures who, unlike sophists, don't do things for money, and have no truck with relativism. Centuries ago, philosophers felt a need to run from relativism like plantation owners who'd rather have you think of their property as a wedding venue rather than an old slavery site. Thus, philosophers wrote their own flattering backstory."

"According to Jacqueline de Romilly, "What Plato calls 'rhetoric' was but a low and second-rate offspring of philosophy." As Håkan Tell and Christopher Moore tell the history, Plato has the tale exactly backwards. The rhetoricians and sophists were not inferiors who came after the origin of philosophy, rather philosophers envied the sophists. As Christopher Moore puts it, "The name philosophos seems to have begun as 'sage-wannabe,' a bemused label for a person's repetitive and presumed excessive efforts to join the category of sophoi." Kojin Karatani ( "Socrates is better understood as a Sophist from Athenian soil") and Barbara Cassin (the Sophists are philosophy's "bad" repressed "other") corroborate this perspective."

Philosophers' rejection of sophistry and rhetoric fosters a self-conception that undervalues persuasion and practical rhetoric. That self-image produces communicative failures among educated interlocutors and contributes to moral impotence in the face of harmful political movements. Historical evidence indicates that sophists and rhetoricians influenced early philosophy and were not simply inferior successors; philosophers retroactively denigrated sophistry to craft a superior lineage. This fabricated split diminishes attention to rhetorical skill, impairs civic persuasion, and helps explain why philosophical argumentation alone often fails to change entrenched or authoritarian beliefs.

Read at Apaonline