Deep Rhetoric

Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom

James Crosswhite

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226016481, 9780226016344
• eBook ISBN: 9780226016511
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Rhetoric

"Rhetoric is the counterpart of logic," claimed Aristotle. "Rhetoric is the first part of logic rightly understood," Martin Heidegger concurred. "Rhetoric is the universal form of human communication," opined Hans-Georg Gadamer. But in Deep Rhetoric, James Crosswhite offers a groundbreaking new conception of rhetoric, one that builds a definitive case for an understanding of the discipline as a philosophical enterprise beyond basic argumentation and is fully conversant with the advances of the New Rhetoric of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca.

Chapter by chapter, Deep Rhetoric develops an understanding of rhetoric not only in its philosophical dimension but also as a means of guiding and conducting conflicts, achieving justice, and understanding the human condition. Along the way, Crosswhite restores the traditional dignity and importance of the discipline and illuminates the twentieth-century resurgence of rhetoric among philosophers, as well as the role that rhetoric can play in future discussions of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. At a time when the fields of philosophy and rhetoric have diverged, Crosswhite returns them to their common moorings and shows us an invigorating new way forward.

ONE

What Is Deep Rhetoric?

One way of approaching the question of deep rhetoric is to begin by explaining what ordinary rhetoric is and then to describe the difference between deep rhetoric and ordinary rhetoric. However, there is nothing easy or clear about that approach. The word “rhetoric” has over the last few centuries been reduced to little more than a derogatory term. Rhetoric is, in the popular understanding, a manipulative and dishonest use of language, a use of language that tries to trick or coerce people into believing something that they would not believe on the basis of the evidence alone. Or rhetoric is language that is used to lead people into doing something that, if they knew the truth, they would not do. Or rhetoric is a way of using language to manipulate emotions, to stir up anger or prejudice or fear, and so to lead people to make judgments that they would not make if they were calm and reasonable. In the popular, modern understanding, the goal is to “get beyond all the rhetoric,” or to “get behind it,” or to “set it aside,” in order to be reasonable, in order to have a chance at finding out what is true or which course of action is best.

Because this view of rhetoric is drastically out of line with much of the history of what has been written about rhetoric, drastically out of line with a long tradition of liberal education in which rhetoric has had a central place, and drastically out of line with the idea of rhetoric that will be developed in this book, I will start with a simple statement about rhetoric that contrasts drastically with the popular conception, let it stand, and then start again.

Rhetoric is a form of human transcendence, a way we open ourselves to the influence of what is beyond ourselves and become receptive, a way we participate in a larger world and become open to the lives of others, a way we learn and change. Rhetoric is also a way the world and others become open to us, open to our giving and our participation; it is a way we teach, a way we change our common conditions, a way we form relationships and bear the lives and experiences of other people. Rhetoric is a shape taken by Hebraic wisdom, who cries out in the streets, who was present at the creation of the world.¹ Rhetoric is a shape taken by John’s logos, the logos that was from the beginning and through whom all things come into being.² Rhetoric is also a form of the logos about which Plato pondered, saying memorably, through the agreement between Socrates and Phaedrus, that there was a special power specific to it, the power of psychagōgia, or leading the soul. Rhetoric, as the possibility of there being any leading or being led at all, is necessary for any finding of direction, any purpose. Yet rhetoric is also always something historically and materially specific, a specific shape taken by wisdom and word, a shape that has a special kairotic belonging to some times, some situations, some places.

We are rhetorical beings, and through rhetoric we give ways of being to each other and receive them from each other. Rhetoric is not a debased kind of communication; it is the reality of all communication, and it leads us into experiencing the world in some particular ways and not in all ways. Rhetoric is the inescapable event in all communication—the form and the direction of the influence we exert on each other. We exert such influence in every encounter because we never experience each other outside of a communicative event. Communication and the rhetoric that gives it form and direction grant us our being with each other and our being with ourselves. Ordinary rhetoric is connected with the way this influence and direction can be studied and taught, learned and used, criticized and improved. Deep rhetoric is connected with the dimensions of rhetoric that allow individuals, societies, human activities, and the world itself to take place—and so it brings the very possibility of philosophy and the sciences into its realm.

What Is Rhetoric?

Now, let us start again, differently. What is rhetoric? To begin, consider two apparently incompatible characterizations of rhetoric, both from philosophers. The first is from Paul Ricoeur (1989). He offered it in a lecture titled “Rhetoric—Poetics—Hermeneutics” that he gave in 1970 in Brussels at the Institute for Higher Studies, whose president was Chaim Perelman, one of the authors of The New Rhetoric. Perelman was also in the audience. Perelman’s rhetorical theory develops a concept of rhetoric whose scope reaches to all nonformal communication, including inward deliberation. Ricoeur believes that this concept is too broad, that distinctions must be made among rhetoric, poetics, and hermeneutics. He argues that each has a different generative seat, a different origin, and he concludes that this limits rhetoric’s scope in a specific way. Ricoeur says that rhetoric was born with the legal reforms that took place in sixth-century BCE Sicily, and he believes that rhetoric is forever conditioned, shaped, and limited by the typical discursive situations in which it arose. In this context, he mentions Aristotle’s famous three: the deliberative, judicial, and epidictic contexts and genres of rhetoric. Deliberative rhetoric would be found mainly in legislative assemblies or similar contexts, forensic in the institutional settings for trials, and epidictic rhetoric would have its proper place on ceremonial occasions. Ricoeur acknowledges that there is an internal tendency of rhetoric to move beyond these contexts—specifically, he believes that rhetoric’s focus on argumentation as a kind of reasoning that takes place in conditions of uncertainty, in the vast domain between arbitrary deciding and certain proof, moves rhetoric’s scope outward without limit toward all discourse, even to that point of completion at which it incorporates philosophy. However, he also believes that the generative seats of rhetoric provide an unconquerable constraint on rhetoric’s ambitions. Rhetoric will always have a historical and situational and quasi-institutional character.

I have two reservations about Ricoeur’s account of rhetoric. First, it neglects the fact that the concept of rhetoric has a significant educational and formative dimension. The origin of rhetoric lies not simply in the new kind of speech made possible and necessary by early democratic reforms in Sicily, but also in the coincident recognition that this new artful communication could be learned and taught. This recognition spurred the development of teachers who became experts in the ways of the courts and assemblies and who offered to train young men in the arts of speech and persuasive reasoning—for a fee. But this educational dimension of rhetoric quickly grew beyond the needs of a specialized class. These arts came to be relevant to all spheres of life, from the household to the assembly. So powerful was the emergent idea of rhetoric that it spawned another transformation. The concept of an individual, free, fully developed citizen began to change to include a new kind of communicative competence, a competence that was very quickly conceptualized by rhetorical theorists as an essential competence for human beings, one without which they would be unable to develop their most human abilities. The early history of rhetoric, the history of its origin, was connected not only with specific changes in political institutions and social practices but also with new conceptions of education and of the specific nature of human beings. From the beginning, rhetoric had exceeded its institutional origins, exceeded Ricoeur’s constraints.

Let me broach my second, related, reservation by moving on to some words of Hans-Georg Gadamer, originally published in 1977, words which characterize rhetoric very differently: “Rhetoric is the universal form of human communication, which even today determines our social life in an incomparably more profound fashion than does science” (1986, 17). Here is a very different definition of rhetoric, sweeping but subtle, like so much in Gadamer, apparently simple and almost hiding its central key paradox.³ I want to develop my second reservation about Ricoeur’s account of rhetoric by exploring the paradox in Gadamer’s casual-looking definition of rhetoric. The paradox is this. On the one hand, “Rhetoric is the universal form of communication.” What could be simpler? When and where human beings communicate, for whatever purpose, rhetoric reigns as the form of that communication. There is no qualification about its scope’s being limited by its “generative seats” or by specific occasions or situations. Rhetoric is simply the universal form of human communication. Well, not simply. For Gadamer adds that “even today” rhetoric determines our social life more profoundly than science does. This suggests of course that rhetoric’s power to determine social life is a historical power that can wax and wane, and it makes clear that Gadamer’s claim is that even though this power can wax and wane in its historical unfolding, it has not yet waned significantly, at least not in comparison with the power of science to determine social life. But if rhetoric is the universal form of human communication, how could it increase and decrease in its power to shape social life? How could it be in a kind of competition with science to shape social life? If it is the universal form of communication, and science is not, how could rhetoric ever not shape social life more profoundly than science? In general, if it is the universal form of human communication, it cannot at the same time permit of being “more or less” the universal form of human communication. It is either universal or it isn’t. This is the paradox.

Gadamer starts to clarify the paradox while still in the course of articulating it, and then we can carry out the task out from there. Rhetoric is not really even commensurate with science in this matter of shaping social life, for rhetoric conditions social life “in an incomparably more profound fashion than does science.” Rhetoric may have a history of some kind, and its shaping of social life may be altered in some way by science and its history, but rhetoric’s power as the universal form of human communication is somehow “incomparably” more profound. We can imagine human beings before modern science, and so we can perhaps imagine ourselves without it. However, there is something that Gadamer here calls “rhetoric” that we cannot imagine ourselves without unless we imagine ourselves as profoundly different from what we now are.

Origins of Rhetoric

To get a better idea of why Gadamer says this—even though, we must assume, he knows the stories of rhetoric’s origin as well as Ricoeur does—it might help to look at some of the early testimony about the nature of rhetoric. For the very nature of rhetoric was an issue right from the start.

To take this step embroils us in a little bit of relevant controversy, though, for Edward Schiappa has set forth a strongly historicist and quite thought-provoking argument about rhetoric’s beginnings that would make this step look like question-begging. Schiappa warns us not to look to pre-Aristotelian philosophy to understand rhetoric, because the concept of rhetoric was not really developed until after Plato coined the term and Aristotle refined the concept. In The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (1999), Schiappa urges us to give up our anachronistic accounts of rhetoric’s pre-Platonic history. Plato coined the word “rhetoric,” he says, and conceptualized it in a specific relationship to philosophy, dialectics, eristics, and other specialized Platonic descriptors of what was more generally referred to in terms of logos. Not until “rhetoric” becomes part of a discourse that organizes it as a term in relation to other terms do we begin to understand the history of rhetoric. Only when rhetoric is differentiated from some general art of logos, a differentiation that begins in Plato and is almost complete in Aristotle, do we really have “rhetoric.” So, if, in order to show that Gadamer’s philosophical approach to rhetoric has merits that go beyond Ricoeur’s more historicist approach, we appeal to what certain ancients said about the art of logos in general, are we not demonstrating that we have simply neglected the historicist challenge?

Well, no. And for two reasons. First, the historicist method employed here tends to be question-begging. Schiappa imagines three stages in the early development of what we now call rhetorical theory. A first stage, a fifth-century stage, represented by the older sophists, was primarily concerned with logos.⁴ A second stage, represented by Plato, developed a new focus on an art of logos or speech, sometimes called by Plato “rhetoric.” By the end of the fourth century, with Aristotle, a third stage had been reached, in which the split between philosophy and rhetoric was complete. Schiappa urges us not to think of the early stages in this process as essentially concerned with rhetoric. As he says, “The meanings associated with logos and legein are such that one cannot argue they mean the same thing as was later conveyed by ‘rhetoric’” (1999, 34).

However, that is just the issue. If the older sophists spoke of logos in a general way, and Plato began to speak of logos and rhetoric and philosophy in such a way that there were both differences as well as identity, and then Aristotle systematized the differences so that there was not as much left to say about a general art of logos—well, what is the best or most helpful or truest or most desirable way to speak and write and think about these things? Schiappa seems to take the strong historicist view that we must understand the origin of rhetoric the way the people near its origin understood it, and especially the way Aristotle understood it. As he says at one point, the idea of “rhetoric derived from fifth century Greece is improbable. . . . Ahistorical definitions are misleading, unhelpful, or superfluous” (64). However, if we want to know whether a historicist or a philosophical approach to the question “What is Rhetoric?” is more helpful, we can’t simply decide the issue by historicist fiat the way Schiappa does here. So, the first reason not to go Schiappa’s way is that it begs the question. Our question is not simply a historical one. Our question is: What is rhetoric? And more specifically: Is rhetoric the universal form of communication or is it a particular kind of communication limited to particular times and places?

A second reason why we are not simply neglecting the historicist challenge is that there was a controversy at the origin of rhetoric about just what rhetoric is. Schiappa’s neat three-part progression that resolves itself in the “completion” of the conceptualizing of rhetoric in Aristotle is a tidy way to resolve this controversy, but it is hardly a satisfying resolution for those who believe that there is something philosophical in the conflict between philosophy and rhetoric. Plato was not merely at a halfway point between the older sophists and Aristotle in some three-part problem-solving process. In the Phaedrus (261a-b, Fowler trans.), Socrates poses this question to his young interlocutor:

“Is not rhetoric in its entire nature an art which leads the soul by means of words (dia logōn), not only in law courts and the various other public assemblages, but in private companies as well? And is it not the same when concerned with small things as well as with great, and, properly speaking no more to be esteemed in important than in trifling matters? Is this what you have heard?”

That is, Socrates is asking: Isn’t rhetoric an art of logos in general, an art whereby we have an influence on each other’s souls, an art of teaching and leading one another, an art whose scope ranges from the largest public political matters to the smallest private affairs? In other words: Isn’t rhetoric best understood in light of logos in general? Isn’t rhetoric the universal form of human communication?

Phaedrus answers as a good student should, along the well-informed and knowledgeable paths that Ricoeur and Schiappa follow: “No, by Zeus, not that exactly; but the art of speaking and writing is exercised chiefly in lawsuits, and that of speaking in public assemblies; and I never heard of any further uses” (261b, Fowler trans.). Here Phaedrus gives the properly Aristotelian answer, jumping to Schiappa’s stage three right in the middle of one of Plato’s dialogues. He says: No, Socrates, rhetoric is not the universal form of human communication. One has judicial rhetoric, and then one has deliberative rhetoric, and so rhetoric has its institutional generative seats which limit it and so prevent it from rightly being characterized as the universal form of human communication. Rhetoric is a distinct art or discipline and not a kind of philosophy or general art of logos.

Socrates then carries the dialogue forward, examining the kind of speech that occurs in courts and assemblies, arguing that “the art of contention in speech [antilogikē] is not confined to courts and political gatherings, but apparently, if it is an art at all, it would be one and the same in all kinds of speaking” (261d-e). This is his beginning of a long argument for a conception of rhetoric as equivalent to an art of logos, a conception of rhetoric as something like the universal form of human communication. The long discussion eventuates in two very important claims in the Phaedrus. First, the attempt to conceptualize rhetoric as something that can be understood and learned independently of some more general art of logos is a mistaken effort, one that confuses the preliminaries or elements of an art with the art itself. Without understanding the purpose of an art of logos, a mastery of the techniques of logos is meaningless. Second, since it is the special power of logos to lead the soul, the art of logos, rhetoric itself, is the art of leading souls, and so, Socrates says, the art of rhetoric is a lot like the art of healing, and not much different from a philosophical dialectic. These are arguments for the claims that (1) rhetoric cannot be detached from deep rhetoric without losing its purpose, which organizes it as an art, and (2) rhetoric cannot be detached from deep rhetoric without obscuring the fact that rhetoric is not just an external and optional activity but is also a matter of who and what we are intrinsically.⁵

The point of all this is that Plato has an explicit argument against conceptualizing rhetoric the way Schiappa and Ricoeur and Aristotle want to. There is an advantage in valorizing the Aristotelian approach. It yields a discipline of rhetoric that is fairly well-defined and mercifully distinct from philosophy and its eternal failure to define itself. The Aristotelian approach can give an answer to the question of what rhetoric is that for most people will not cause serious problems.⁶ On the contrary, for most rhetoricians, it will remove difficulties, and allow them to proceed with work in their discipline in a productive way. However, the approach does not offer a serious philosophical response to Plato, and it does not help with the project of trying to understand what a deep rhetoric would be. So it is at least an open question whether we should look at historical sources that seem to have a general, logos-oriented conception of rhetoric for help in answering our contemporary question: what is rhetoric?

When Aristotle subordinated and disciplined and so legitimated rhetoric, he at the same time disciplined philosophy—made it less than the whole. Plato knew that both rhetoric and philosophy were striving with a general conception of logos toward something like a genuine art or practice of logos, although the idea of an art or practice in this context is highly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. What Is Deep Rhetoric?
• 2. What Is Deep Rhetoric? II
• 3. The Deep Rhetoric of Plato’s Gorgias
• 4. Rhetoric and Violence
• 5. Through Heidegger: Transcendence and Logos
• 6. Beyond Heidegger: False Trails and Re-readings
• 7. Reason and Justice: The Deep Rhetorical Dimensions of the New Rhetoric Project
• 8. Rhetoric and Wisdom
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index