Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw

Animals, Language, Sensation

Debra Hawhee

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226398204
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

We tend to think of rhetoric as a solely human art. After all, only humans can use language artfully to make a point, the very definition of rhetoric.Yet when you look at ancient and early modern treatises on rhetoric, what you find is surprising: they're crawling with animals. With Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Debra Hawhee explores this unexpected aspect of early thinking about rhetoric, going on from there to examine the enduring presence of nonhuman animals in rhetorical theory and education. In doing so, she not only offers a counter-history of rhetoric but also brings rhetorical studies into dialogue with animal studies, one of the most vibrant areas of interest in humanities today. By removing humanity and human reason from the center of our study of argument, Hawhee frees up space to study and emphasize other crucial components of communication, like energy, bodies, and sensation.Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to Erasmus, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw tells a new story of the discipline's history and development, one animated by the energy, force, liveliness, and diversity of our relationships with our "partners in feeling, " other animals.

CHAPTER 1

Aristotle and Zōa Aisthētika

The first characteristic of an animal is sensation; for even those which do not move or change their place, but have sensation, we call living creatures.

ARISTOTLE, De anima1

The judgment is in perception.

ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics2

Since Aristotle. If animal studies has an opening gambit, this phrase may be it.3 It was Aristotle, after all, who established the logos/alogos—the with- or without-logos (speech or reason)—distinction that so decisively cleaved humans from other animals. Even those who know that the logos/alogos distinction predates Aristotle acknowledge that he did something more emphatic: “With Aristotle,” as classicist John Heath puts it, “the link between logos and humans, and the rejection of logos from the non-human, becomes explicit.”4 Usually the “since Aristotle” gambit is accompanied by a gesture to the famous passage in the first book of the Politics where Aristotle declares humans to be the animals that have logos (zōon logon echon).5

That passage may be worth another look, though, especially in conjunction with Aristotle’s writings on other animals, on the soul, and on rhetoric, the artful use of language. Such a survey, as this chapter will show with more detail, helps to draw out a perceptive core of existence shared by all animals. This perceptive core is too often skipped over by scholars of Aristotle’s rhetoric and politics, trained as they are to follow the path of logos.6

But leaving behind the alogos—the without-logos—as a category, or even presuming that Aristotle did so, comes at a cost. That cost is a more comprehensive, fully fleshed-out theory of rhetoric. The trick is to approach alogos as something other than an absence of logos, to identify in positive terms what takes the place of logos. In other words, the privative work of the alpha (α, a) in alogos needn’t make it a deficiency or, as Jacques Derrida formulates it, a withholding.7 Alogos, after all, names a part of the soul for Aristotle, a part that operates without reference to rationality; it is nonrational (as opposed to irrational).8 Alogos may therefore usefully be approached as a capacity or set of capacities. Resources for approaching the term as a capacity or set of capacities rather than a deficiency may be found in texts composed by Aristotle himself and in the capacities exhibited by the nonhuman animals that appear there.

Richard Sorabji, a philosopher long preoccupied with Aristotle’s writings on nonhuman animals, models such an approach when he offers this observation: “If animals are to be denied reason (logos), and with it belief (doxa), then their perceptual content must be compensatingly expanded, to enable them to find their way around in the world.”9 This perceptual expansion occurs on more than the content level where Sorabji leaves it. In the context of rhetorical theory, nonhuman animals expand into the role of proxy feelers and are often carriers of sensation. In such a view, the implications of which I develop in this chapter, an insistence on nonhuman animals’ being aloga is as much an attribution as it is a denial or rejection, and this attribution of expansive, and oftentimes intense feeling to nonhuman animals helps account for their constitutive role in the teaching and shaping of rhetorical theory, as chapter 3 on fables will help show. Such constitutive force is not, or not always, as one might surmise, a simple constitutive outside—that which helps identify logos-having by precisely and only not having logos. Instead, this constitutive role works through instruction, illustration, and a persistent presumption of cross-species likeness.

Nonhuman animals therefore do the work of sensation, folding back on the logos they have been denied, lending it energetic life through sounds, shapes, textures, and movements. This does not mean they are only or even mere rhetorical objects or figures, but instead means that they infiltrate rhetorical lifeworlds through encounters imaginative and real. In short, in premodern rhetorical theory, and especially in Aristotle’s key and formative texts, nonhuman animals exert a pull. And that pull is toward feeling.

As I will show, nonhuman animals frequently show up in passages where sensation and feeling matter most; Aristotle thereby exploits their ambiguous relation to categories of judgment and thought, but he consistently uses nonhuman animals to display feelings. Sensing, breathing, moving animals can at times embody pure spirit (thumos). They show feelings ranging from pleasure and pain to anger and friendliness. They can be especially confounding for critics when they show up in discussions of cultural economies of honor and shame so crucial for judgment, but less confounding if approached through the category of aisthēsis, the ancient term for sense perception. For Aristotle, nonhuman animals also act as sensible objects in that they are observable, but they are also simultaneously sensing—on this Aristotle is completely unambiguous. This means that along with sensation, which is decidedly alogos, nonhuman animals often bring life, energy (energeia), to logoi, to speeches, to writings, or to words themselves. Such is the role they play in treatments of rhetorical style. Sensing, feeling animals help to fill out the parts of rhetoric that are alogos, but this does not mean that nonhuman animals remain far removed from the domain of logos. As this chapter’s last section and the next chapter will show, nonhuman animals as lively, energetic, sensible beings inhabit discussions of rhetorical style, filling logos with life.

Nonhuman animals have capacities to be uniquely instructive for political life and for rhetorical theory. Aristotle does not underestimate those capacities, nor should we. To show how this constitutive force plays out, I will begin by reexamining the passage in the Politics that inspires all those “since Aristotles,” putting it next to passages that draw out a more dynamic and lively version of alogos. I will then follow aloga zōa into the Rhetoric, showing how a zoocentric approach to rhetoric and to rhetorical theory stresses with specificity the components of rhetoric that are themselves alogos, outside the bounds of both verbal language and rationality, but nevertheless crucial for a comprehensive account of the art.

Aristotle’s Politics of Aisthēsis

Here, then, is the passage where Aristotle famously denies logos to all animals except human ones:

That man is much more a political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal is clear. For, as we assert, nature does nothing in vain; and man alone of the animals has speech. The voice indeed indicates the painful or pleasant, and hence is present in other animals as well; for their nature has come this far, that they have a perception [aisthēsin] of the painful and pleasant and signal these things to each other. But speech [ho de logos] serves to make visible [dēloun] the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared with the other animals that he alone has a perception [aisthēsin] of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this sort; and community [koinōnia] in these things is what makes a household and a city.10

In placing logos at the polis’s center, Aristotle twice asserts a distinction between human and nonhuman animals. The first and more famous of these two assertions has to do with exclusivity: logos is that which man alone of the animals possesses.11 This assertion is too often where scholars stop. But the rest of the passage, the part that contains the second assertion, deserves attention as well. In elaborating the zōon logon echon doctrine, the passage moves from logos to sense perception (aisthēsis) and—curiously—not back again. In remaining with aisthēsis, the passage introduces the capacity that binds together all animals (human and nonhuman) in Aristotle’s writings on the soul, on zoology, on ethics, and even—as I will show—on rhetoric.

In the Politics, the zōon logon echon distinction supports Aristotle’s assertion that it is clear (dēlon) why “man is a much more political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal.”12 The comparative word rendered as “much more” is mallon, and the implication is that other animals are also political, just not as intensely so as anthrōpos.13 Supporting this reading is Aristotle’s characterization of politika in History of Animals as “those which have some one common activity,” a characterization he supports with a list of examples: “humans, bees, wasps, ants, cranes.”14 Without the connection to the History of Animals it might be easy to overlook the centrality of aisthēsis in the Politics passage. Indeed, even those scholars who insist on the connection between the two treatises stress the indicative work of logos over the perceptive work of aisthēsis.15

But the link across the two treatises—and the nonhuman animals prompting the link—ought to alert readers to the cross-species comparison happening here as much as to the differentiation.16 When the Politics passage unravels the claim about logos to a core of perception, that unraveling is enabled and shared by the nonhuman animals considered alogos in this scheme. Reading this passage as a gloss on the phōnē/logos (sound/speech) distinction rather than the logos/alogos distinction returns more forcefully to a base of aisthēsis or sensation. Phōnē, in this passage, names the way animals signal “a perception of the painful and pleasant,” while logos “serves to make visible (dēloun) the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust.”17 That difference repeats in the second distinction, where Aristotle ascribes to anthrōpos alone “a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this sort.” Read in this way, the Politics passage places logos at a perceptual remove from the polis, for logos “serves to make visible” (epi tō dēloun) a perception of a just world, to, in a way, hand it over to or share it with other perceiving humans, thereby creating (or in some cases maintaining) an associative bond. That handing over of a perception, at least in this passage, constitutes a polis. This emphasis on sharing perceptions matters because it places all animals on the same plane in the way they participate in their world. On such a reading, the differences between sound and words seem smaller inasmuch as both are deemed the means by which animals exchange perceptions. But what humans are deemed to perceive and to make visible to others bears more of the cross-species difference than logos itself.

A similar emphasis on sharing perceptions or aisthēsis constitutes friendship for Aristotle, and the relevant passage in the Nicomachean Ethics also distinguishes such perception sharing from the associative activity of nonhuman animals:

Existing is, as we saw, a choiceworthy thing because of a person’s perception [aisthanesthai] that he is good, and this sort of perception [aisthēsis] is pleasant on its own account. Accord...