Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth

The Form and the Way

Haixia Lan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315400402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

The current study argues that different cultures can coexist better today if we focus not only on what separates them but also on what connects them. To do so, the author discusses how both Aristotle and Confucius see rhetoric as a mode of thinking that is indispensable to the human understanding of the truths of things or dao -the-way, or, how both see the human understanding of the truths of things or dao -the-way as necessarily communal, open-ended, and discursive. Based on this similarity, the author aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of differences to help foster better cross-cultural communication. In making the argument, she critically examines two stereotyped views: that Aristotle's concept of essence or truth is too static to be relevant to the rhetorical focus on the realm of human affairs and that Confucius' concept of dao -the-way is too decentered to be compatible with the inferential/discursive thinking. In addition, the author relies primarily on the interpretations of the Analects by two 20th-century Chinese Confucians to supplement the overreliance on renderings of the Analects in recent comparative rhetorical scholarship. The study shows that we need an in-depth understanding of both the other and the self to comprehend the relation between the two.

1 Aristotle and rhetorical invention

A legacy of interdisciplinary inquiry

Aristotle offers one of the most systematic studies of rhetorical invention, but his view emerged—and studies of his views have continued to develop—out of dynamic interactions with other perspectives on it. This chapter provides a brief historical and interdisciplinary review of rhetorical invention, focusing on the dynamic relation between discoursing and thinking, in different periods of the Western world up to the present. This effort to survey the history of rhetorical invention in relation to Aristotle’s teaching is important to the current comparative study because it helps to show that the West in general and Aristotle in particular have wrestled with issues of language-use in relation to thinking, as have the East and Confucius, despite the fact that rhetoric is analyzed as a discipline of study by Aristotle but is integrated into studies in general by Confucius. Some issues introduced here will be discussed further in other chapters, especially Chapter Three, but the purpose of this historical survey and of the studies of the Analects in the next chapter is to prepare for a discussion that is less on whether but more on how the two teachings on rhetorical invention are both similar and different.

Rhetorical invention in the West, as well as in Aristotle’s consideration, has an ambiguous dimension. It is ambiguous because it seems to deal with two disciplines of study, disciplines that are deemed as separate endeavors in the West in general: inventing effective ways of expression or inventing probable ways of thinking. This tendency to separate thinking and expression is rooted in a view of reality that dichotomizes form and matter, the truth of the matter and the matter itself. Investigating this ambiguous nature of rhetorical invention, Aristotle shows that he values probable thinking that is between the truth of the matter and the matter itself, and he sees rhetorical invention as activities that genuinely and truly invent both probable truths and expressions for conveying them. To Aristotle, in other words, rhetoric operates in the space between the permanent and the random and, subsequently, rhetorical knowledge is neither identical with nor separable from either. To discuss this Aristotelian view, I will start by examining some issues in the study of Aristotle’s treatment of invention.

Aristotle is generally considered one of the first Greek thinkers to theorize invention as one of the five canons of the rhetorical art, the other four being arrangement, style, delivery, and memory. According to Aristotle, rhetorical invention is accomplished artfully or artificially and discursively through the credibility proof, emotional proof, and rational proof. Even though classifications like canons and proofs are predicated on the understanding that each in the system plays its different role, taxonomies by definition are also indicative of an ecosystem of coexistence. Therefore, Aristotle discusses the scope and function of rhetorical invention in a way that is as dynamic as it is systematic and, in doing so, he both continues and contributes towards the effort to understand the nature of rhetorical invention. More specifically, what and how do rhetoricians invent? This question leads to the enduring issue in studies of language-use: what is the relation between thought and expression, content and style, episteme and techne—knowledge of certainty and of probability? Could there be deep relations between sophia and techne—philosophical wisdom and productive knowledge—or between nous and techne—intuitive grasping of first principles and discursive reasoning or understanding?

Addressing these questions entails explorations beyond as well as into Aristotle’s Rhetoric, despite the fact that some scholars do not agree. Quoting from Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Nicomachean Ethics, as well as his Rhetoric, Barbara Warnick argues that Aristotle clearly divides the five faculties into distinct modes of thought and therefore “rhetoric has its starting point in general opinions, its fruition in right action” (306). Warnick is right about Aristotle’s delineation of modes; however, the characterization of inflexible and impermeable borderlines is too definite for Aristotle. For example, Aristotle discusses logos in relation to nous (Posterior Analytics 100a2), showing the complexity of the boundaries he draws. I will explore further the complexity of these views in later chapters where the specifics between Aristotle’s and Confucius’ rhetorical thinking will be compared and contrasted, but it is important to emphasize that the issue here is not whether these modes of thinking are identical but how they relate. Therefore, I will examine the tension among different dimensions in Aristotle’s thinking in general and his Rhetoric in particular, exploring the relations between episteme and techne. This chapter will conclude with a survey of the investigation into this inclusive Aristotelian view of invention in contemporary Western communication and composition studies. Overall, I argue that rhetorical invention in the Aristotelian vein stands for a way of thinking that is by nature relational and supports a kind of inquiry that is interdisciplinary. Aristotle sees language-use as inseparable from thinking that is philosophical, spiritual, cultural, and historical, and Aristotelian rhetoricians and writers engage the mutually constituting relations between what they think and what is thought by others, especially by their audience and their readers, in the ongoing search for expediency, justice, and honor.

Episteme and techne

Aristotle’s view of distinction and relation is complex, often simultaneously differentiating and synthesizing. An example of this view can be seen in the Nicomachean Ethics VI, where Aristotle discusses the scientific and calculative parts of the soul as distinct but also related, as shown below:

And let it be assumed that there are two parts [of the soul] which possess reason—one by which we contemplate the kind of things whose principles cannot be otherwise, and one by which we contemplate variable things; … Let one of these parts be called the scientific and the other the calculative; for to deliberate and to calculate are the same thing, but no one deliberates about what cannot be otherwise. Therefore, the calculative is one part of the faculty which possesses reason.

(Nicomachean Ethics 1139a6–15)

The calculative and scientific parts of the soul are differentiated clearly by the changing and unchanging objects they contemplate. On the one hand, scientific knowledge, which is episteme, is about objects invariable, “of necessity … eternal, … ungenerated and imperishable” (Nicomachean Ethics 1139b23–24). On the other hand, calculative knowledge, which is “the same” as techne, deliberates matters of contingency in the changing world. Aristotle reiterates this same point in the Rhetoric as follows:

The subjects of our deliberation are such as seem to present us with alternative possibilities: about things that could not have been, and cannot now or in the future be, other than they are, nobody who takes them to be of this nature wastes his time in deliberation.

(Rhetoric 1357a4–7)

Dealing with the contingent or the invariable, techne and episteme, according to Aristotle, represent knowledge of probability and of certainty; they differ clearly and in fact contrast sharply. However, the two are also connected by reasoning and the soul, and the difference is therefore not one of mutual exclusion. The techne of rhetoric, according to Aristotle, deals with the probable, the multitude of variables that connect to the invariable. For example, Aristotle describes “art, scientific knowledge, practical wisdom, philosophical wisdom, intuitive reason” all as “states by virtue of which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation or denial” (Nicomachean Ethics 1139b15–17). Art helps to affirm and deny what is true and what is not; it does not merely convey what is affirmed and denied by other faculties. Assisting in this process of affirmation and denial, techne is itself a kind of thinking that is inherently connected to truth. Furthermore, Aristotle describes rhetoric as “partly like dialectic” (Rhetoric 1359b10) and as not about “anything whatever” (Rhetoric 1357a36¹). Giving the art of rhetoric a stable dimension in these descriptions, Aristotle reveals that the rhetorical art is both dynamic and connected with knowledge of certainty. This twofold characteristic of techne suggests a partial overlap between episteme and techne. Far from identifying the two, therefore, Aristotle nevertheless points to the need to inquire into how both certainty and uncertainty inform the art of rhetoric.

This complex relation between episteme and techne in Aristotle’s thinking has been noted and examined by many others. Tracing “a general mixing of episteme and techne” or Aristotle’s seeming indifference in “using episteme and techne” (Parry 3.10) in Physics, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, Richard Parry points out a primary and then a more lenient “secondary sense of episteme” that “is important to understanding the relation between techne and episteme” (3.4). Parry alludes to the following example. Having established that episteme is not knowledge of contingency, “Aristotle still describes medicine—which does deal with contingency—as an episteme” (3.10). Parry’s observation is supported by Aristotle’s description of science in the Metaphysics, “all science is either of that which is always or of that which is for the most part” (1027a20–21). And “for the most part,” or what science is about, actually characterizes probability, which is said repeatedly to be what rhetoric is about in the Rhetoric: “probability is a thing that usually happens²” (1357a35), “is that which happens usually but not always³” (1402b22), and is “only usually true⁴” (1357a33). Therefore, the strict sense of episteme, as explained by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, seems to be limited to rather specialized fields like formal mathematical studies; even natural sciences deal with both certainty and probability and, in that sense, are about both episteme and techne. What Parry describes as Aristotle’s indifferent mixing of episteme and techne is what I view as a fundamentally relational element in Aristotle’s thinking, the thinking that prompts him to examine the value and the workings of rhetoric as an art or techne. As expressed in the Introduction, this is hylomorphism that I will discuss in Chapter Three, but it is also the main reason that I see Aristotle’s more lenient use of the word episteme not as misapplications of episteme to ideas that are probable but instead as indicative of his relational treatment of different fields of study. I see this use as indicative of Aristotle’s insight that, as important as specialized pursuits of both episteme and techne are, inquiries into how episteme and techne relate and interact are also essential. In other words, many fields of study are concerned with, to various extents, the search for an element of truth, certainty, or episteme. While some fields focus on episteme per se, others focus on techne in relation to episteme. To Aristotle, rhetoric is among the latter.

To study techne or knowledge of probability in relation to episteme or knowledge of certainty is to deliberate and calculate primarily the contingent matters and connect them to the “knowledge … of universals” (Metaphysics 981a16), as described below:

From many notions gained by experience one universal judgment about similar objects is produced. For to have a judgment that when Callias was ill of this disease this did him good, and similarly in the case of Socrates and in many individual cases, is a matter of experience; but to judge that it has done good to all persons of a certain constitution, marked off in one class, when they were ill of this disease, e.g., to phlegmatic or bilious people when burning with fever—this is a matter of art.

(Metaphysics 981a6–12)

Aristotle adds in the Rhetoric:

In the same way the theory of rhetoric is concerned not with what seems probable to a given individual like Socrates or Hippias, but with what seems probable⁵ to men of a given type. (1356b33–35)

Aristotle explains further, technites can generalize because they “know the ‘why’ and the cause”; that is, they “know in a truer sense” (Metaphysics 981a31). Similarly, the function of rhetoric is “to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously” (Rhetoric 1354a10). For example, similar to the techne of medicine that guides the physician with the knowledge of what could help all individuals with an affliction like lethargy or nausea, the techne of rhetoric guides the rhetorician with the knowledge of how to invent probable knowledge in rhetorical situations of certain types like deliberation and disputation. As a result, just as “we think art more truly knowledge than experience is, for an artist can teach and men of mere experience cannot” (Metaphysics 981b7–9), the art of rhetoric teaches how to invent the particular judgment, “that which happens usually but not always,” based on general principles. In these discussions, Aristotle connects techne to, or even gives it a characteristic of, episteme and shows that a techne like rhetoric connects the world of generality and certainty, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the world of particularity and contingency. By the same token, then, technites like rhetoricians are valuable precisely because they are good at operating in the realm between the purely scientific certainty and the purely random unpredictability, between the world of necessary truth and the world of senseless arbitrariness. This in-between realm is the world of the human and the domain of the rhetorical.

These words by Aristotle are crucial to understanding his view of rhetorical invention, which is about experiences of truths and truths of experiences, not merely truths or merely experiences. Such a dynamic conception of rhetorical invention does not make it perfect; however, it does make it valid as well as viable. It depicts an aspect of the human condition as at once powerful and vulnerable. At times, rhetoricians seem to be and may very well be “of two minds, [leaving] many particulars of the theory unexplained” (Graff 125) for the time being. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, for example, the element of certainty enables orators to sound convinced that “things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites⁶” (1355a21–22); that “things that are true and things that are better are, by their nature, practically always easier to prove and easier to believe in” (1355a35–39); and that “the arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts” (1354a16–17). Yet, contingencies compel orators to appreciate the shaping impact that strategies have on probable knowledge, strategies, such as the following: “things look better⁷ merely by being divided into their parts since they then seem to surpass a greater number of the things than before” (Rhetoric 1365a10–11). In the ensuing chapters, I will discuss strategies like this and the element of truth in them in more detail, but even though these strategies can make us question Aristotle’s faith in truth and his ethical compass, they do not have to. The absolute value, truth, or episteme of a whole may be constant, and studies of it in fields like theoretical mathematics are crucial to everyday lives. But absolute values are only one dimension of the dynamic human world where contingenc...