possible. The philosopher must be, or must become, an orator.
Similarly, in the Statesman Plato notes that rhetoric cannot
instruct and teach by means of reason and dialectic (what Cicero
calls sermo); rather, it is the technique by which the many
(plethou) or the mob (ochlou) is persuaded by means of myths and
stories (ouchlou dia mythologiai).
The masses are brought to
philosophic truth and to moral virtue by means of deceptions and
fictions. Cicero makes a similar point. He notes that philosophy
and rational discourse are helpless without rhetoric: “it does
not seem possible that a wisdom either silent or lacking speech
[inops dicendi] could have converted men suddenly from their
[primitive and savage] habits and introduced them to different
ways of life....unless men had been able by eloquence to
persuade their fellows of the truth of what they had discovered
arrived at by philosophy and by knowledge, and thereby embed
them within a concrete culture, it is necessary to translate
them into a language the people can understand.
In this sense, the connection between hegemony and rhetoric
is crucial to understanding Gramsci’s project: to transform a
subordinate group into a hegemonic subject capable of ruling, to
transform the subaltern into the hegemonic, which is to form a
“personality” that is reflexive, conscious and self-disciplined.
Convention