The greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free

Funny how age and experience change your understanding of things, sometimes reversing them, sometimes adding shades to what seemed brightly delineated, sometimes adding depth not seen before.

I first read Plato's The Republic in its entirety in college with all the callowness and arrogance that comes from youth and inexperience. I knew that I was reading something important but couldn't quite work up any enthusiasm for it. I now see that much depended on the translation and much depended on how it was presented.

Book III opens with what I, at the time, found a problematic text. I fastened on to 1) the freedom of speech aspect of what was being discussed, and more broadly the statism that was being argued, and 2) that this was an example of the Socratic method where a line of questioning starts in one direction but ends up leading you in another. It is almost as if my impressionable and somewhat empty cognitive ability was straining at the limits just to handle the surface of the text.

BOOK III
Such then, I said, are our principles of theology–some tales are to be told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one another.

Yes; and I think that our principles are right, he said.

But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these,and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death? Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?

Certainly not, he said.

And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and terrible?

Impossible.

Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.

That will be our duty, he said.

Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning with the verses,

’I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to nought.’

We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared,

’Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should be seen both of mortals and immortals.’

[snip, multiple of Homeric passages to be extirpated]

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

It is that last passage which caught my eye recently. I have been working on the difference between rhetorical and logical/empirical arguments in the context of decision-making. In companies, in teams, and in the public discourse, we often lump all arguments together without distinguishing the two forms and their purposes.

A logical/empirical argument, ideally, is simply seeking to answer the question, "What is true?" A simple question but hard to answer as it involves establishing definitions, surfacing assumptions, seeking out biases, looking for counterfactuals, assessing the quality of the empirical evidence in terms of volume, duration, robustness, replication, randomness, double-blindness, etc. It requires first the validation that the phenomenon exists as an empirical reality and then scrubbing on the hypothesized cause of that reality. It is interesting, fun, hard work, and sometimes useful.

A rhetorical argument does not answer "What is true?" The truth is assumed as a predicate. The rhetorical argument seeks at the least to persuade others of that assumed truth. Occasionally, it also seeks to inspire, through the stirring of the emotions, for others to act on the belief in that assumed truth.

With a logical/empirical argument, you are essentially evaluating its efficiency. Does it address and explain the totality of the evidence with the least amount of effort?

With a rhetorical argument you are instead evaluating its effectiveness. It doesn't matter if the argument is true. It matters whether people believe it to be true.

Much strife and heartburn arises from mistaking the two forms of argument or mixing them together. More importantly, much time is wasted and too often false or destructive actions taken because of a failure to distinguish the two and relying on persuasion (rhetoric) rather than explanation (logic/empirical).

Working through those issues, I now look at that last passage somewhat differently than I did all those decades ago.

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

Isn't that, perhaps, another way of saying that we need to be careful about the persuasiveness of rhetoric over the freedom that comes from logic/empiricism. Perhaps thats a stretch but it seems not too great a stretch.