A Test on Rhetorics

Jane

汉英

Socrates treats rhetoric by arguing, against the pretensions of orators in the Phaedrus, that the good rhetorician must also be a dialectician and, against the sophists in the Gorgias, that rhetoric is a sham art, or rather no art, but experience and use which are substituted for justice. He frequently employs the example of artists and artisans in the arguments Plato records, usually running through a series of analogies such as would connect the poet in turn and in varying respects with the physician, the carpenter, the cobbler, and the shepherd, contrasting art with the irrational, the incalculable, the habitual, and the empirical, but requiring no fixed differences among the arts, nor even between the arts and the sciences. The judgment of poetry attributed to Socrates in the Republic, like the later Platonic judgment expressed in the laws (if indeed such differentiation between the two positions is necessary), is based on consideration of educational, practical, and rhetorical effects, and it leads to moral disapproval and political censorship. Like the orator, the poet finds himself in competition with the dialectician and the legislator, and no method or accomplishment is disclosed in Plato's analyses of rhetoric or poetry that would seem to Aristotle to involve problems beyond those of dialectic and morals or to require new acknowledgments of Plato's originality or additional criticisms of his errors. Among the independent sciences instituted by Aristotle's philosophic method, on the other hand, rhetorical arguments could be considered as devices of persuasion apart from consideration of truth or falsity of conclusion, accurate or candid presentation of the character and predilections of the speaker, or preferable ends or desires of the auditor, and poetry could be considered in terms of the structure of the poem apart from its tendency to stimulate moral or immoral conduct or to produce pleasure or other passions. Such separate consideration of things or disciplines depends on a philosophic scheme in which related questions can be treated according to their proper principles in their appropriate sciences. As applied to the arts, the accomplishment of Aristotle's philosophic method was the separation of problems involved in the mode of existence of an object produced or of a productive power (which might properly be treated in physics and metaphysics) as well as problems involved in the effects of artificial objects or artistic efforts (as treated in psychology, morals, and politics) or in doctrinal cogency and emotional persuasivensss (as treated in logic and rhetoric) from problems which bear on the traits of an artistic construction consequent simply on its being a work of art. As applied to rhetorical persuasion, the same method permits the recognition that rhetoric is a counterpart, or offshoot, or subdivision of dialectic; that it borrows from sophistic; that it is derivative from ethics; and that it is a sham substitute for politics when it is not made a proper part of politics; and at the sme time it permits the examination of the peculiar devices of persuasion apart from consideration of those relations and analogies.
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Of course I don't expect anyone to translate the whole paragraph. I just want to present it as a translation challenge. How do you translate this kind of writing. Please discuss any related issues as you like.

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