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The History of Chinese Rhetoric
Weixiao Wei
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The History of Chinese Rhetoric
Weixiao Wei
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About This Book
This book challenges the existing misconception that there was no rhetoric in ancient China. Instead, this book provides ample evidence from public speeches in the Xia dynasty and oracle bone inscriptions in the Shang dynasty to public debates about government policies in the Han dynasty to show that persuasive discourse and rudimentary rhetorical techniques already existed in ancient China.
Using literary analysis and discourse analysis methods, this book explains how the Mandate of Heaven was inscribed at the core of Chinese rhetoric and has guided Chinese thoughts and expressions for centuries. This book also demonstrates Chinese rhetorical wisdom by extracting many concepts and terms related to language expression, persuasive speech, morality and virtue, life and philosophy, and so on from great Chinese literary works. Well-known names, such as Confucius, Laozi, Sima Qian, Liu Xie, Mozi, Hanfeizi, Guibuzi and so on, are all touched upon with their famous theory and sayings related to and explicated from the rhetorical perspective. Many surprising facts are found by the author and revealed in the book. For example, a thousand years ago, the Chinese author Liu Xie already found that all words have preferred lexical neighbors and structural environment. This is later on 'discovered' by corpus linguistics and illustrated, for example, by the concepts of collocation and pattern grammar.
This book targets postgraduate students, teachers, researchers and scholars interested in advanced Chinese language and Chinese literature, history, and culture.
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1Rhetoric in the West Versus Xiuci in Chinese History
DOI: 10.4324/9781003206279-2
As is commonly known, China has a recorded history of at least 3,000 years, from the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 bce) to the present. Traces of Chinese writings that began to reveal some kind of rhetorical evidence can be identified from the remnants of ancient China beginning with Xia and Shang dynasties. The research scope of this book spans from Xia circa 2070 bce to the outbreak of the Opium War in 1840, investigating the manifestation and theorization of rhetoric in the literary works of the ancient and imperial periods in Chinese history.
As the title suggests, the investigation of this book starts with the rhetoric of ancient China. As such, the first questions coming to mind are about fundamental issues: ‘What is the definition of rhetoric?’, ‘What is the Chinese equivalent for rhetoric as conceptualized in the West?’, ‘What new light can Chinese rhetoric bring to rhetorical studies in the West?’ And so on. As early as in 1993, Lu and Frank pointed out that ‘Western rhetorical scholars will miss the depths and nuances embedded within ancient Chinese texts if they use ‘rhetoric’ as the English equivalent for Chinese senses of bian [debate]’ (1993, p. 451). Lu (1998) further argues that the Chinese term bian (辩 argumentation/disputation) could be used to describe Chinese ancient rhetoric. He also proposed a new term ming bian (名辨 to name and to differentiate) as the close appropriation to English rhetoric, which, according to Lu, would allow an exploration and restoration of ancient Chinese rhetoric in the Chinese cultural contexts. Swearingen and Mao (2009) consider that the Chinese term most commonly used to translate ‘English rhetoric’ is xiuci (修辞). Standing on the shoulders of Chinese scholars who have vigorously investigated Chinese rhetoric and with a concentration on Chinese rhetoric before modern times, this book adopts the term xiuci as the fundamental term and concept to provide interim answers to the questions just posed. In Chinese, xiuci (修辞 ornate diction), and the study of rhetoric, or xiucixue (修辞学), are two separate entities. The former refers to rhetorical activities, while the latter relates to theories and ideas about xiuci. This journey of searching for corresponding answers to questions and debates raised in Western rhetorical studies opens a window to comparing and contrasting ancient Chinese xiuci/study of xiuci with the Western rhetoric.
Origins and the Early Days
The Greek word rhētorikē consists of two morphemes, rhe (speech) and ikē (art). The popular origin of rhetoric in Greek culture has been academically recognized as a cornerstone of Western rhetoric. Several scholars believed that the Homeric poems are the earliest rhetorical history of ancient Greece from the 11th to the 9th centuries bce (Keuls, 1978; Karp, 1994; Kennedy, 1998; Huang, 2002). Homer’s epic was finally fixed in writing when Pisistratus (c. 605–527 bce) ruled in Athens. It is also widely believed that rhetoric originated from Syracuse, Sicily, in the 5th century bce. Although rhetoric was to become a prominent concept in many aspects of Western culture and civilization, its beginning was allegedly no earlier than the 11th century before Christ.
By contrast, the root of Chinese xiuci can be traced to the Xia dynasty, which lasted from about 2070 bce to 1600 bce and left us a great number of ritual vessels made of bronze and jade. Originating in the Xia dynasty, the earliest public speech that showed some signs of rhetoric in Chinese history is ganshi (甘誓),1 recorded in Book of Documents (尚书) and Records of the Grand Historian (史记), serving as a brief military mobilization order given by Xia Qi (夏启), who had just ascended to the throne. Notwithstanding, as Enos (1993) maintains, ‘Rhetoric did not originate at a single movement in history. Rather, it was an evolving, developing consciousness about the relationship between thought and expression’ (xvii). Suffice it to say that the Chinese rhetorical tradition does not pale in comparison with that of the West and that there is plentiful neglected evidence of public speeches involving the use of rhetoric, such as yizheng (胤征 Yi goes on a battle) in the Xia dynasty, tangshi (汤誓 speech made by Tang, the first king of the Shang dynasty) in 1600 bce, taishi (太誓 speech made by King Wu) in 1084 bce, mushi (牧誓 the speech at Mu) in January 20, 1046 bce, and qinshi (秦誓 speech made by Qin Mugong)2 in 627 bce, etc. Under this circumstance, the widely accepted conclusion (e.g. Graham, 2004) that ancient xiuci in China aimed mainly to persuade the emperor/king or lord in contrast to the mass audience-jury in the court system of Greece was probably a lopsided view.
Western rhetoric has undergone more than 2,000 years of changes from classical rhetoric, medieval rhetoric, Renaissance rhetoric, 18th- to 19th-century rhetoric, and new rhetoric to the 21st century. During this lengthy period, different interpretations of ‘rhetoric’ appeared in different stages. Oliver (1971) narrates that Western rhetoric traditionally denotes the civic art of speaking in law courts and other formal and political occasions, especially in the democracies of Syracuse and Athens. Early rhetoric in the West was the art of speech as the core rhetorical skills taught by the sophists of ancient Greece. Corax, along with Tisias, was widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of ancient Greek rhetoric. His judicial speech included seven basic elements: introduction (proemium), narrative (diegesis), major arguments, subordinate arguments and subsidiary remarks, and summary. His reverse-probability argument, labeled as a ‘logical paradox’ and also a quasi-logical argumentation method, prevailed as well. According to Huang (2002), the handbooks of Corax and Tisias are thought to be the earliest studies of Greek rhetoric.
Gorgias (c. 485–380 bce), the founding father of sophistry, conceptualized rhetoric as a tool of persuading with which one could persuade an audience toward any course of action. According to him, ‘Speech is a powerful master and achieves the most divine feats with the smallest and least evident body. It can stop fear, relieve pain, create joy, and increase pity’ (Gigon, 1936. p. 213). Gorgias believed rhetoric was the king of all sciences. He elaborated on the structure and ornamentation of speech from a rhetorical point of view and introduced paradoxical thought and expression. His surviving work, The Encomium of Helen, is a good example of epideictic oratory.
Socrates (469–399 bce) greatly influenced the discourse and thoughts of the Classical Period in Western history. Most of what we know about him, however, comes from the posthumous writings of his student Plato. These accounts were written as dialogues, in the style of questions and answers, similar to the genre in The Analects of Confucius. In Gorgias (a book written in 385 bce by Plato), Socrates narrates that ‘rhetoric is also personal adornment and sophistry’. Socrates’s brief definition of rhetoric emphasizes the spiritual aspect, which is consistent with Gorgia and Guiguzi (see Chapter 3). In other words, they all agree that the function of speech is to affect the soul.
An important school for rhetoric was one founded by Isocrates (436–338 bce) to teach young men with goodness and to develop their court debate skills. Isocrates wrote in Antidosis (translated by George Norlin) that the power to speak well and think right will reward the person who approaches the art of discourse with love of wisdom and love of honor. From then on, the study of rhetoric gradually became a regular part of the formal education of young men (as females’ rights to education were still largely ignored in those eras), and the theory and practice of rhetoric pervaded not only court debates, where it originated, but also other activities such as the literary production of poetry and prose (van Els and Sabattini, 2012). The Sophists taught students how to manipulate language, including vocabulary and structure, patterns of emphasis, metaphors, and so on, as rhetorical devices in speech. These skills, generally falling within the domain of speech style, could help to make a favorable impression on audiences and became very important in ancient Greece with the introduction of democracy, which required citizens to speak for themselves.
The word ‘rhetoric’ in English first appeared in Plato’s Gorgias. In this book, Plato (427–347 bce) considered the art of an orator on a par with that of a pastry cook and concluded that rhetoric was flattery. According to Plato:
[Rhetoric] seems to me then … to be a pursuit that is not a matter of art, but showing a shrewd, gallant spirit which has a natural bent for clever dealing with mankind, and I sum up its substance in the name flattery… . Well now, you have heard what I state rhetoric to be – the counterpart of cookery in the soul, acting here as that does on the body.(Translated by W.R.M. Lamb)
In Phaedrus, Plato developed a philosophical rhetoric pursuing truth through the souls of human beings.
By the time the relatively well established rhetorical convention was passed on to Aristotle (384–322 bce), a complete theory of rhetoric was ready to be developed. As a great theoretician of rhetoric, Aristotle famously identifies three kinds of persuasive speech: political, legal, and ceremonial. He depicts the nature of rhetoric in his treatise On Rhetoric in this manner: ‘Let rhetoric [be defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion. This is the function of no other art; for each of the others is instructive and persuasive about its own subject’ (p. 37). His rhetoric theory is conducted hierarchically, including inartistic proofs (physical evidence the audience has access to) and artistic proofs (logical arguments created by the speaker). The latter includes the three well-known rhetorical techniques of ethos, pathos, and logos. This classification servers as the masterstroke in this book, which dictates that rhetoric itself is an art of doing and embodies a power in certain ways of speaking. The idea also echoes Isocrates’s thinking. In addition, Aristotle gave due consideration to three elements in speechmaking: speaker, subject, and hearer. The last factor, the hearer, determines the speech’s goal and the concluding remark.
In ancient Rome, Cicero’s (106–43 bce) definition for rhetoric is that it is a great art containing invention, arrangement, elocution, memorization, and delivery, which were collectively called the Five Canons for developing a persuasive speech that is still used to teach public speaking today. Cicero’s influential works, such as De Inventione (On Invention) and the Ad Herennium (For Herennius), served as the fundamental books of rhetorical theory throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, along with De Oratore (On the Orator) on rhetorical principles and topics.
We can say with some certainty that Western classical rhetoric has exhibited the characteristic of systematization and has created some kind of theoretical framework at the outset with the aforementioned landmark works. From that time onward, there has been a constant flow of far-reaching thoughts and treatises on rhetoric.
Unfortunately, Chinese literati did not know about Western rhetoric until probably as late as the end of 19th century, when China’s first systematic grammar book, Ma Shi Wen Tong (马氏文通), spoke about the grammar and rhetoric of Western languages. Kennedy made the same observation when he said, ‘There was no influence of Western ideas of rhetoric on ancient China’ (1...