of Socrates and Theaetetus, the famous digression at 176a–c that one ought to become like God as much as possible (ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν) perhaps ought to be interpreted to say that philosophical conversation prepares one to converse soul to soul, and internally soul to divine.
It is therefore with Plato that the singularity of prosopon (face)-prosopon (mask) begins to separate. The prosopon is no longer a simple presentation of the true individual, since the principle of unification that makes one a singular individual is interiorized. Plato thus refuses to identify the self with the external face in the Alcibiades: “When Socrates converses with Alcibiades through words, he isn’t addressing your face (πρόσωπον), it seems, but Alcibiades, that is your soul (ψυχή).”23 With Plato the interiority of the prosopon is distinguished from its outer nature. The outer prosopon (face) begins to conceal, as masks do for many moderns, an inner self or an interior (soul). Hence the context is now clear for the well-known image from the Phaedo. The mormolukeion becomes the image of the soul’s inversion. It can be turned over to reveal its reverse side empty of spirit and soul. Thus if Socrates tells Alcibiades that he does not want to converse merely with his face but with his soul, Alcibiades, for his part, famously describes Socrates as Silenus, a follower of Dionysus whose ugly exterior covered interior divine treasures. In other words, Socrates’ face is a type of mormolukeion covering an inner divinity.
Therefore, although Plato interiorizes the person he also reasons that self-knowledge is reached through discursive processes, first, in conversation with another and, second, in an inner conversation with the self. It is important to know that these two conversations are not incommensurable. In the Sophist (263e–264b) Plato writes that they are part of a common family or kind (τούτων τῷ λόγῳ συγγενῶν ὄντων). What comes to light or appears both in face-to-face conversation with another and in the interior conversation of thinking and self-examination are part of the same discursive phenomenology of self-knowledge.24 Plato, therefore, begins to delineate the field of truth by claiming that contradictions that emerge in conversation with another also hold when thinking with oneself. This search for internal contradictions frames a central question in Platonic self-knowledge: whether the self-examination of one’s interior discursive person (what one thinks one is) leads to a prior prediscursive person (what one actually is). For later followers of Plato, like Plotinus, the soul is the phenomenon of discursivity itself: the first principle of motion that originates the temporal processes and movements of reasoning.25 Plato’s argument that thought takes the form of discursive internal conversation raises the question whether self-knowledge consists simply of a series of successive internal self-presentations (which would be equivalent to donning various internal masks corresponding to each successive state of self-consciousness) or whether self-knowledge leads to something prior to the successive states of soul, which would be the prediscursive core of one’s identity.
Platonic Colors: Ancient and Renaissance Rhetoric
If the force of Platonism turns us toward an inner persona, after Plato it is left to the rhetorical traditions of subsequent times to confront the discursive persona of external public speech. Even in rhetorical theory—equally among the ancients as in the Renaissance—one feels Plato’s attempt to distinguish discursive and prediscursive identities.
In the Gorgias Socrates resists classifying rhetoric as a techne, preferring instead to call it a knack (ἐμπειρία). He thereby establishes the analogy that rhetoric impersonates (ὑπόκειται) philosophy, just as cooking impersonates medicine.26 Aristotle must have learned much from Plato about this matter, for he addresses the same question in his Rhetoric and gives a different answer while nonetheless following a logic similar to his teacher’s. His work begins: “Rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic; for both have to do with matters that are in a manner common (ἃ κοινά) for the cognizance of all men and not confined to any special science.”27 He continues by stating that since rhetoric, like dialectic, does not deal with a particular class of subjects but argues about what is common, it must be able to persuade opposites.28 Like dialectic, one should add, rhetoric is also discursive. Already one notices that rhetoric for Aristotle is concerned with the instrumentalization of techniques for persuading others; in Plato’s terms, it deals with seeming. Likewise, it is with Aristotle’s analysis of character (ἦθος) that one notices how much he, like Plato, understands rhetoric as the construction of a discursive persona put on display in the public sphere: “The orator persuades by moral character (ἤθους) when his speech is delivered in such a manner as to render him worthy of confidence; for we feel confidence in a greater degree and more readily in persons of worth in regard to everything in general, but where there is no certainty and there is room for doubt, our confidence is absolute. But this confidence must be due to the speech itself, not to any preconceived idea of the speaker’s character.”29 Isocrates had postulated that in order for a speech to persuade there ought to be a correspondence between the orator’s speech (λόγος) and character (ἦθος). But for Aristotle, it is not the character of the prediscursive person that moves the members of his audience to emotion (πάθος) and persuades (πείθω; πιθανός) them to act. What matters for achieving these ends is the speech (λόγος), its style (λέξις), and the delivery or interpretation of the oratorical performance (ὑπόκρισς). Rhetoric is therefore the way in which one can discover these techniques of persuasion in order to perform them on the public stage. The sum total of these parts, when spoken and acted (including oratorical gestures, expressions, timing, and so on) assembles the orator’s traits and words into a discursive character.
Whereas in Athens speech was not so much a right as an obligation (and in Socrates’ case a mortal necessity), in Rome speech was reserved for privileged individuals who were legitimized for and recognized by public discourse, for example forensic oratory for legal advocates and deliberative oratory for patricians. Such a social and political order meant that charismatic authority first established the mechanisms for legitimacy in speech in the early republic. Beginning with the early Latin manuals, followed by the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Cicero’s early De inventione, the place of personae in rhetoric was primarily set by its supposed correspondence with the prediscursive moral character, first of the client and then of the orator speaking on his behalf. In speech, the rhetorical persona was therefore less a question of style (elocutio) and delivery (pronuntiatio, actio) than of establishing the trustworthiness of the persona for the audience in the exordium, establishing the attention (attentus), the goodwill (benivolus, benivolentia), and the receptivity (docilis) in the relationship between speaker and audience. The good orator assembles his attributes as a premise in an argument, or as a fixed object in the narration of the speech. In his mature rhetorical writings, however (especially the De oratore, the Brutus, and the Orator), Cicero fully realized the importance of Greek rhetorical theory about character and theorized that an orator can craft his individual identity through a rhetorical persona. In these later works, Cicero does not conceive of the rhetorical persona in terms of correspondence to an orator or client’s supposed prediscursive identity but, what is most important, contends that the oratorical persona is fabricated from all parts of the discourse, including inventio, elocutio, and actio or pronuntiatio. It is in discourse itself that the Roman orator fashions a self-image that he projects in public. This is especially felt in the Orator where Cicero seems, on the one hand, to replace a single persona with the technical skill to utilize various stylistic personae and, on the other, to argue that one’s persona is strictly dependent on decorum (used like the Greek prepon); that is, one’s style and delivery must suit the situation.30
Cicero thus bolstered Latin rhetoric with the discursive persona of Greek rhetorical theory, and while he claims in his letter to Lentulus that he wrote the De oratore in the manner of Aristotle (Aristotelius mos), some have argued that Cicero is, broadly speaking, following an Isocratean tradition insofar as, unlike Aristotle and others, he never truly divorces the speaker’s persona in discourse from the
