II. Dialectic and Rhetoric: The Ancient Distinction
The distinction between dialectic and rhetoric is as old as philosophy itself. Plato, in his dialogues, repeatedly warned of the danger posed by rhetoric unmoored from truth. The Sophists of fifth-century Athens claimed to teach virtue but in fact taught persuasion, the art of making the weaker argument appear the stronger, of winning debates regardless of where truth lay. Socrates opposed them, not because persuasion is inherently wrong but because persuasion divorced from truth is manipulation, and manipulation degrades both the manipulator and the manipulated.
Aristotle, more systematic than his teacher, distinguished the two arts precisely. Dialectic is the method of reasoned inquiry, proceeding through premises to conclusions, testing propositions against logic and evidence, aiming at truth. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, analyzing audiences and occasions, selecting appeals that will move hearers, aiming at assent through emotional manipulation. Aristotle did not condemn rhetoric, indeed, he literally defined and categorized it, but he understood that rhetoric without dialectical grounding becomes sophistry that is effective, morally empty, and ultimately destructive.
It is worth noting that the Enlightenment did not arise in opposition to Plato and his warnings about rhetoric. It arose, in a very real sense, from Plato’s philosophy. The theory of Forms, with its insistence that ultimate reality is abstract and immaterial, that the visible world is mere shadow, planted a seed that bore strange fruit once Christian Aristotelianism lost its grip on Western intellectual life. The Enlightenment philosophers, from Descartes onward, retained Plato’s conviction that pure reason operating on abstract principles could arrive at truth independent of experience and tradition. They simply replaced his Forms with their own abstractions: natural rights, the social contract, the general will, the invisible hand. These concepts functioned exactly as Platonic Forms had functioned, as idealized entities that were held to be more real than the messy particulars of actual human life, and against which existing institutions could be measured and found wanting.
The Aristotelian tradition, grounded in observation, experience, and the careful accumulation of particular knowledge, should have been the natural bulwark against this rationalist overreach. That it failed to serve as one is the great intellectual catastrophe of the modern era. The Scholastic method was intensely dialectical: proposing questions, marshaling objections, articulating responses, proceeding through careful distinctions toward conclusions that could withstand scrutiny. The great Summae were not works of persuasion but of demonstration. They assumed an audience committed to truth, willing to follow the arguments wherever they led, and prepared to abandon positions that could not survive logical examination.
This assumption was the tradition’s great strength and its fatal weakness. It was a strength because it produced genuine philosophical progress through the refinement of ideas, the resolution of difficulties, and the accumulation of insight across centuries. It was a weakness because it left those responsible for passing on the tradition entirely unprepared for opponents who were not committed to truth, who understood that most men are moved by passion instead of reason, and who were willing to ruthlessly exploit that understanding for the benefit of their false philosophy.