PSYCHAGOGIA: A STUDY IN THE PLATONIC TRADITION OF RHETORIC FROM ANTIQUITY THROUGH THE MIDDLE AGES

[摘要] This dissertation is a history of an idea that has endured in rhetorical theory from Plato to Weaver – the idea that rhetoric can lead souls to their own betterment; that is, guide them in an ascent along a metaphysical hierarchy through beauty, goodness, and truth to a fuller participation in being.This is a study of what Plato calls psychagogia.Comprising replicating hierarchies, the Platonic tradition saw intricate connections between cosmology, theology, psychology, and language.At the height of this tradition, St. Bonaventure notes that rational philosophy is consummated in rhetoric, indicating that such an inquiry transcends the disciplinary sub-field of 'the history of rhetoric” and engages much larger issues concerning the nature of language, language’s relationship with human rationality, and its analogy with the divine.Thus, this study maps the structural framework of the Platonic intellectual tradition from antiquity to the Middle Ages in order to identify the conditions necessary for rhetorical activity under a tripartite metaphysics.By comparing the parallel structures inherent in reality, language, and the mind, I contend that rhetoric plays a definitive role for the Platonist in the process of spiritual formation.Indeed, in some cases it represents the only machinery that humanity has to achieve intellectual, spiritual, and societal amelioration.But reality, knowledge, and language for the Platonist were all living things.So while I do not deny Plato’s rationalism, idealism, or realism in this study, I seek to investigate their interaction with his own skepticism, aestheticism, and above all, mysticism.The same is true for Augustine, Bonaventure, and the Platonic tradition as a whole.Such models as the Platonists provide can illustrate how philosophical tensions now thought to be in diametrical opposition can be brought into dialectical synthesis.The result is a truly organic intellectual framework that informs a rhetorical theory of equal vitality – a tripartite rhetoric, at once rational, spiritual, and emotive, culminating in the soul in a rhetoric of ascent.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh