Peitho, the Greek goddess of persuasion, is linked with the goddesses of marriage not for her domestic skill but because of her seductive powers and trickery, depicts Jarrett. Although persuasion is given to a Greek god as a divine trait, this persuasive power and trickery is often viewed more commonly as a sophistic trait. Plato depicts Gorgias as able to hypnotize and deceive audiences by his enchanting oral style. Protagorous is often seen as using the same skill. Seduction is also a common theme In Homer’s Iliad.
The Oxford dictionary definition of seduction is, “to attract someone to a belief or into an inadvisable course of action.” When translated to Greek by Persesus, a wide range of definitions appear. One of the words has a familiar definition, as to bring over or convince. Surprisingly there are two words, πειράζω and πειράω, used in different tenses but share the same meaning, “to make proof, trail of, and attempt to do.” (Persesus) These two words are used more frequently than any of the other words for seduction and appear a combined 4,770 times in Greek literature. (Perseus) This definition for seduction is very interesting, as it does not carry the same negativity as the oxford definition of alluring or attracting into an inadvisable action. Nor is this definition seen as mere trickery.
In rhetorical scholarship, women do not garner the same respect and visibility of their male counterparts. According to Jarrett, platonic ideas commonly place sophistic rhetoric and women together. Plato was opposed to the sophist’s ideas, and therefore placed them in the polar opposite of his philosophy as “the other”, thus viewing negatively. According to Jarrett, the “other” is often labeled feminine, and garners the same negative views. Perhaps if more rhetorical scholarship was done on this persuasive power, it might reveal more instances were people were being put to the test by this form of persuasion. Furthermore this view could warrant a more liberal definition of seduction, shining a more positive light on the Sophists and persuasive skills they were practicing, thus dispelling some of the negative feminine connotations of seduction as trickery.
Oxford Dictionary
Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998. 65-66.
4 comments:
Megan Harlow
Seduction's libratory potential lies in viewing it as "a third term-beyond the active/passive binary" as Michelle Balliff argues in Seduction Sophistry and The Woman with the Rhetorical Figure. Western dualism’s have created the active/passive binary in which seduction is seen as imposing one’s will on another as the dictionary definition Josh uses states. Baliff argues that seduction confuses the boundaries of master/slave or the rhetor or agent who willfully imposes their will onto another through seduction in which the master violently imposes through seduction his will creating a slave. This Western view of seduction creates a victimization ideology that is upheld through describing rhetoric as aimed from a speaker who wills his end to an audience, seducing them to believe him through seduction.
Rather seduction should be thought of “in the Baudrillardian sense: it is a forgetting of the forgotteness of truth’s illusions, truth’s metaphors. It is a “liquidation of the metaphor”, letting flow what has been represented and thus repressed” (Jarrett 87). The speaker does not seduce because he is speaking from a place of authority as the master, but rather is already implicated in a system of discourse which designates the speaker as such. Seeing that we are all implicated the seduced and the seducer in a system of discourse moves us into a shadowy area that dissolves static notions of identity and grammar. The I voice that speaks is already a part of a system that defines it as I but it is never in complete control or separate from that system. This brings up questions of agency, Balliff says that this subjectivity can be seen in the third space outside master/slave through the loss of the ego---through forgetting oneself as subject within a discursive economy that puts one into binaries there becomes open a space for affirmation of act not tied to self as Nietzsche writes in Will to Power, “Becoming an invention, willing, self-denial, overcoming of oneself: no subject but an action, a positing, creative, no ‘causes and effects’(Nietzsche 331).
Have you explored this topic before this excavation? Thoughtful post.
I think this is an interesting and very good post, I think its also relavent to notice that it is very likely that more than just women were written out of the history and as being such there is many alternative histories that have not been considered.
There have been a handful of experiments that put "non-logical" rhetorical devices to the test, especially in fields such as psychology.
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