Rhetoric occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, entering the library primarily through two distinct channels: the Platonic dialogues, where it is subjected to sustained philosophical critique, and the post-Jungian archetypal tradition, where it is rehabilitated as a mode of soul-speech. In Plato’s Gorgias, rhetoric is definitively demoted from art to mere ‘experience,’ classified alongside cookery as a flattery that mimics genuine techne while serving only gratification rather than truth. The Phaedrus complicates this verdict by entertaining the possibility of a philosophically reformed rhetoric grounded in psychological knowledge of souls. Among the Stoics, as Long and Sedley document, rhetoric is distinguished from dialectic as the art of continuous versus compressed discourse, integrated within a broader logical curriculum yet ultimately subordinated to wisdom. The most consequential revaluation occurs in James Hillman, who argues that rhetoric — with its hyperbole, indirection, personification, and pathologized figures of speech — is precisely the language through which anima speaks: it shapes the imagination rather than forming definitions, and its pleading mode mirrors the speech of symptoms and dreams. López-Pedraza further develops an ‘archetypal rhetoric,’ proposing that different styles of rhetorical address correspond to different archetypal constellations and could transform psychotherapeutic technique. The humanist recovery of Ciceronian eloquence, traced by Sharpe and Ure, adds a further dimension: the philosopher-rhetorician as civic ideal. The central tension throughout is whether rhetoric serves soul or seduces it.
Rhetoric’s pleading, complaining, and reiterating speaks the way our symptoms speak, the way our dreams speak. It is an argument of mood; or rather, the imagination does not argue, it imagines.
Hillman argues that rhetoric is not a deficient mode of rational discourse but the authentic language of anima — the speech register of symptom, dream, and imaginative life — precisely because it moves by mood and image rather than by logical proof.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
rhetoric is of two sorts; one, which is mere flattery and disgraceful declamation; the other, which is noble and aims at the training and improvement of the souls of the citizens
Socrates distinguishes a degenerate rhetoric of flattery from a possible noble rhetoric oriented toward the moral improvement of souls, while conceding that no actual practitioner of the latter can be named.
, Gorgias, -380thesis
To say the truth, Polus, it is not an art at all, in my opinion… I should say a sort of experience… An experience in producing a sort of delight and gratification.
Socrates delivers the Gorgias’s central verdict: rhetoric lacks the systematic knowledge that constitutes a genuine art and is reducible to a knack for producing pleasure in its audience.
, Gorgias, -380thesis
The work of modern scholars on rhetoric, the different styles of rhetoric as a way to connect to the different archetypes, could be of great help in this direction. We need to know more about archetypal rhetoric.
López-Pedraza proposes that different rhetorical styles correspond to different archetypal constellations and that developing an ‘archetypal rhetoric’ should be a central project for Jungian psychotherapy.
, Hermes and His Children, 1977thesis
as cookery: medicine:: rhetoric: justice. And this, I say, is the natural difference between the rhetorician and the sophist
Socrates maps rhetoric as the simulacrum of justice in the same structural position that cookery occupies relative to medicine — a flattery that mimics genuine care of the soul without possessing its knowledge.
, Gorgias, -380thesis
rhetoric should be used like any other competitive art, not against everybody,—the rhetorician ought not to abuse his strength any more than a pugilist or pancratiast or other master of fence
Gorgias defends rhetoric by analogy with physical combat arts: the misuse of rhetorical power by pupils does not indict the art itself, which was taught for legitimate purposes.
, Gorgias, -380supporting
Then rhetoric is not the only artificer of persuasion?… Seeing, then, that not only rhetoric works by persuasion, but that other arts do the same… Of what persuasion is rhetoric the artificer, and about what?
Socrates establishes that persuasion is not the exclusive property of rhetoric but is shared by arithmetic and other arts, pressing toward the question of what specifically distinguishes rhetorical persuasion.
, Gorgias, -380supporting
the actual facts, if they are improbable, ought to be withheld, and only the probabilities should be told either in accusation or defence… the orator should keep probability in view, and say good-bye to the truth.
The Phaedrus documents the sophistic rhetorical doctrine that probability, not truth, governs forensic speech — the position that Socrates will go on to refute by arguing for a rhetoric grounded in genuine knowledge of souls.
, Phaedrus, -370supporting
it would be Cicero’s double-identity as both philosopher and rhetorician that would underlie his abiding influence… the complete philosopher will be a master rhetorician
Sharpe and Ure identify Cicero’s fusion of philosophical and rhetorical authority as the model that shaped Renaissance humanism’s rehabilitation of rhetoric as a philosophical discipline.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
it would be Cicero’s double-identity as both philosopher and rhetorician that would underlie his abiding influence… the complete philosopher will be a master rhetorician
The Renaissance rehabilitation of Cicero positioned the complete philosopher as necessarily a master of rhetoric, reversing Plato’s sharp separation of the two vocations.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
even those humanistic texts with a direct concern with moral philosophy have an unmistakably rhetorical, exhortatory dimension
Kristeller’s observation, relayed by Sharpe and Ure, that Renaissance humanist moral philosophy is constitutively rhetorical in character marks the integration of persuasion into the philosophical project itself.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
even those humanistic texts with a direct concern with moral philosophy have an unmistakably rhetorical, exhortatory dimension
The humanist disciplines — grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy — are shown to dissolve the boundary between philosophical argument and persuasive exhortation.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
characterizing compactness and brevity as the hallmark of dialectic by the clenching, and hinting at the breadth of rhetorical ability through the outspread and extension of his fingers
The Stoic distinction between dialectic as compressed reasoning and rhetoric as expansive continuous discourse is dramatized by Zeno’s famous gesture, establishing their structural opposition within the logical curriculum.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
When I say these things to some people, they think I am disparaging the study of rhetoric or theorems. It is not this that I disparage, but the ceaseless concern with those things and resting one’s hopes on them.
Epictetus clarifies the Stoic position that rhetorical study is not condemned in itself but becomes vicious when mistaken for the proper locus of philosophical hope and self-transformation.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
Tisias and Gorgias, who are not ignorant that probability is superior to truth, and who by force of argument make the little appear great and the great little
Socrates catalogues the techniques of the sophistic rhetoricians — amplification, diminution, probabilistic argument — as examples of rhetoric deployed without philosophical grounding in truth.
, Phaedrus, -370supporting
the express testimony of Aristotle, who quotes, in the Rhetoric, the well-known words, ‘It is easy to praise the Athenians among the Athenians,’ from the Funeral Oration
A bibliographic citation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is used to authenticate the Platonic authorship of the Menexenus, incidentally marking rhetoric as an authoritative textual source in ancient philosophical scholarship.
, Menexenus, -386aside
The language in which he couches his jeux d’esprit owes its light touch to its rhetorical background. It is the birthright of Greek rhetoric
Snell identifies Callimachus’s poetic lightness as a legacy of Greek rhetorical training, treating rhetoric as the stylistic substrate underlying Hellenistic literary refinement.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside
The words which rhetoric uses relate to the best and greatest of human things.
Gorgias’s initial self-definition of rhetoric as concerning ‘the best and greatest of human things’ sets up the Socratic interrogation by claiming for it an ungrounded supremacy over all other arts.
, Gorgias, -380aside