Abstract

The ancients praise rhetoric, and moderns condemn it. This change in attitude toward rhetoric follows from a change in the prevailing account of autonomy. For Descartes, Locke and Kant, the autonomous capacity to direct one's own actions implies the illegitimacy of influence. Plato and Aristotle, however, consider autonomy compatible with persuasion, influence that changes another's desire. I explore the relation between autonomy and persuasion through three questions: How is it possible to change another's desires? How can such guidance be considered good, given human autonomy? Why does rhetoric offer the best mode for such guidance? My aim is not to show that all rhetoric is good, nor that all forms of rule are legitimate, but to rethink the principles by which we judge the legitimacy of influence. ;Ancients and moderns agree that autonomy is inseparable from the capacity for reason, but they disagree over the nature of the freedom reason provides. For moderns, autonomy is the pure spontaneity of the will. Such autonomy leaves the rest of nature, including human desire, wholly determinate. Even if changing determinate desire is possible, such influence is illegitimate. Autonomy is itself the human good, and guidance, as distinct from influence to protect society, threatens this necessarily individual good. The only legitimate influence over the private pursuit of one's own good is rational argument to which one can rationally consent. ;For the ancients, reason is embodied, and autonomy is the desiring reason and reasoning desire of resolve. Desire is responsive to reason, and we can choose what we will desire as we choose what we will do. Autonomy is the potential for flourishing, rather than good in itself, and learning to exercise this capacity well requires guidance. Friendship, characterized by wishing a friend's good for his or her own sake, means one person can offer another guidance in attaining a truly common good. Given the role of desire in choice, the guidance offered by wise friends must speak to desire as well as to reason. The ancient account of human nature thus shows rhetoric to be not only legitimate but integral to the human good