Abstract

In this dissertation I will argue that an original art logon techne---an art of "philosophical" and "political" speech---was at home in what I call a culture of display, and that it was a crisis in this culture of display that brought about the fragmentation logon techne into rhetoric and philosophy. By "culture of display" I mean a culture in which people identify primarily with the image of themselves perceived by others. In other words, cultures of display value the essentially visible and public aspects of human existence more than the essentially private and hidden side of life. ;Part One of my dissertation, "The Archaic Culture of Display," explores the way in which socio-political and cultural structures were maintained in the archaic Greek culture of display. I argue that speech functioned politically as a display signifying the sociopolitical standing of the speaker and also by justifying action as honorable or condemning it as dishonorable by comparing it to past actions preserved in the oral tradition. True speech makes manifest what is hidden in the past, and persuasion occurs when the speaker can turn the attention of the listeners to the hidden or forgotten. ;Part Two of my dissertation, "The Crisis in the Culture of Display and the Emergence of Rhetoric," shows how pressures within the archaic culture of display forced a series of sociopolitical crises out of which was born the art of rhetoric. I explore the pressures that led to the crisis in the culture and politics of display, the various responses to the crisis, and the new set of relations between self, polis, and universe the responses engendered. I then show how the sophistic concepts of logos and eikos arose in the context of the new relations between self, polis, and universe created by the crisis in the culture of display. Plato's philosophy is viewed as a response to the Athenian culture of display. In my view rhetoric comes to be defined in contradistinction to, rather than as the complement of, logos, due to these changes