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us,” stubbornly persists. Nevertheless, we remain conflicted over how to
meet these obligations. How then to address the proverbial “problem of
strangers” in an open but self-protective society? How to accommodate
the values and beliefs of those who seem to oppose us, those beyond
our borders with different political and religious ideologies? These are
questions that I believe the rhetoric practiced by the ancient sophists and
their postmodern descendants can help us try to answer.
Sophistry and ‘rooted uprootedness’
I would like to ground my discussion first by referencing the relatively
recuperation of the ancient Greek sophists and their contributions to
modern rhetorical scholarship by researchers Susan K. Jarratt and Steven
Mailloux. From here, my paper will move chronologically and tropically,
examining what I deem the sophists’ “rooted uprootedness” as key to
their anti-foundationalism, their skepticism toward all absolute truthclaims.
Against Plato and Aristotle’s charge that the sophists promoted
a form of “bad rhetoric” that pandered to the prejudices and ignorance
of its audience, I intend to make the opposite case: their rejection of
moral certainties for moral contingencies provides methodological basis
for discussing what is “good” and “true” that can extend the conversation
and agreements beyond the polis to the cosmos, to forge what philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah calls, in a similar effort, a global “ethic of
strangers.” Moreover, when Socrates attempts to discredit Gorgias by
inquiring, “Who are you?” in the self-same dialogue, I believe Gorgias’
non-response rhetorically infuses the dialogue with an element of
existential open-endedness denoting not only the alterity of the sophists
as wandering “strangers” in the ancient Greek polis, but the shifting
ontological ground of their discursive methodology.
It is my view that the concrete and abstract “nomadism” of the
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sophists, both literally and figuratively, is an example of what Appiah
has deemed a “rooted cosmopolitanism”—a global worldview between
nationally-situated citizens throughout the world who share, or potentially
share, basic values of human liberty and dignity (Nussbaum 276). The
baseline for attaining this cosmopolitan ideal that Appiah argues for is
most effectively achieved, as I see it, rhetorically, in particular, through
the rhetoric advanced by the ancient sophists as emended by such modern
philosophers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Kenneth Burke, Richard Rorty, and
Stanley Fish. More specifically, a rooted cosmopolitan thus views the
world as a continually expanding “imaginative discourse community”
between strangers who freely partake in “free and open encounters”
achieved through non-essentialist forms of discourse (Rorty 68). As a
form of argumentation and persuasion that constantly interrogates
entrenched values and beliefs, sophistic rhetoric is thus inherently political,
facilitating agreements between opposing parties, if only contingently,
insofar as the various contexts in which these agreements were made
remain stable and unchanging (Mailloux 16). Viewing sophistic rhetoric
as a deliberative political process in this fashion disallows personal beliefs
and popular opinion to settle into dogma or harden into ideology. By this
rubric, sophistic rhetoric is a means for uprooting politically motivated
definitions of the “other,” providing a framework for beginning a global
conversation over facts and their meaning, values and their importance,
in which a cosmopolitan ideal, ethical agreements between strangers, can
be obtained.
Nomadic Rhetoric
Reacting strongly against E.D. Hirsch’s call for a “cultural literacy”
in the U.S., a shared cultural discourse over canonical knowledge and its
importance to a “literate democracy,” educator Chris Anson famously
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