Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

It was this “technical rhetoric” that branched off from
classical rhetoric, it would seem, that earned Knoblauch and
Brannon’s criticisms. However, it is Covino’s intention with
his book to unveil that “philosophical rhetoric” that has become
forgotten or ignored over time. To that end, he offers
reinterpretations of the defining works of those rhetoricians
who represent the “classical” tradition, with the hopes that
such a rereading will remove them from that limited and limiting
definition of “technical rhetoric.”
Covino begins with Plato and it is that discussion that I
would focus upon here. For Covino, all of the disparate
readings that have been offered of Plato’s Phaedrus are a
testimonial to that Greek philosopher’s willful attempts to
confuse his work’s readers by filling it with inexplicable
ambiguities. He explains:
Commentary on the Phaedrus writes a history of
confusion. Since Antiquity, those engaged and
seduced by the dialogue ask the urgent question,
“What is it about?'” […] The critical urgency to
locate a unifying subject or purpose in the Phaedrus
sets aside the irresolute complexity that informs
philosophical rhetoric and writing for Plato.
Reducing the conceptual and personal drama of this
dialogue to academic summary follows the tendency to
read philosophical rhetoric as a digest of
information, as a taxonomy of instructions, and thus
effectively discounts the striking ambiguity of form
and meaning that makes philosophy (and rhetoric)
possible and necessary. (10, emphasis mine)
Covino compares those attempts to “locate a unifying subject or
purpose in the Phaedrus” and thus capture its meaning with
certainty to the misunderstandings of Phaedrus, Socrates’
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