The Philosophy of Rhetoric V7

I.A. Richards, John Constable

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781136351440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is Volume seven in a collection of ten of the Selected Works of I.A. Richards. Perhaps since his death the most widely known of all Richards' books, certainly the most read, The Philosophy of Rhetoric 1936 is a simplified treatment of the major theoretical concerns of Interpretation in Teaching.

LECTURE ONE

INTRODUCTORY

Yet beware of being too material, when there is any impediment or obstruction in men’s wills; for preoccupation of mind ever requireth preface of speech; like a fomentation to make the enter.

Francis Bacon, ‘Of Dispatch’

These lectures are an attempt to revive an old subject. I need to spend no time, I think, in describing the present state of Rhetoric. Today it is the dreariest and least profitable part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English! So low has Rhetoric sunk that we would do better just to dismiss it to Limbo than to trouble ourselves with it – unless we can find reason for believing that it can become a study that will minister successfully to important needs.

As to the needs, there is little room for doubt about them. Rhetoric, I shall urge, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies. We struggle all our days with misunderstandings, and no apology is required for any study which can prevent or remove them. Of course, inevitably at present, we have no measure with which to calculate the extent and degree of our hourly losses in communication. One of the aims of these lectures will be to speculate about some of the measures we should require in attempting such estimates. ‘How much and in how many ways may good communication differ from bad?’ That is too big and too complex a question to be answered as it stands, but we can at least try to work towards answering some parts of it; and these explanations would be the revived subject of Rhetoric.

Though we cannot measure our losses in communication we can guess at them. We even have professional guessers: teachers and examiners, whose business is to guess at and diagnose the mistakes other people have made in understanding what they have heard and read and to avoid illustrating these mistakes, if they can, themselves. Another man who is in a good position from which to estimate the current losses in communication is an author looking through a batch of reviews, especially an author who has been writing about some such subject as economics, social or political theory, or criticism. It is not very often that such an author must honestly admit that his reviewers – even when they profess to agree with him – have seen his point. That holds, you may say, only of bad writers who have written clumsily or obscurely. But bad writers are commoner than good and play a larger part in bandying notions about in the world.

The moral from this comes home rather heavily on a lecturer addressing an audience on such a tangled subject as Rhetoric. It is little use appealing to the hearer as Berkeley did:

I do… once for all desire whoever shall think it worth his while to understand… that he would not stick in this or that phrase, or manner of expression, but candidly collect my meaning from the whole sum and tenor of my discourse, and laying aside the words as much as possible, consider the bare notions themselves…

The trouble is that we can only ‘collect the whole sum and tenor of the discourse’ from the words, we cannot ‘lay aside the words’; and as to considering ‘the bare notions themselves,’ well, I shall be considering in a later lecture various notions of a notion and comparing their merits for a study of communication. Berkeley was fond of talking about these ‘bare notions’, these ‘naked undisguised ideas’, and about ‘separating from them all that dress and encumbrance of words’. But an idea or a notion, when unencumbered and undisguised, is no easier to get hold of than one of those oiled and naked thieves who infest the railway carriages of India. Indeed an idea, or a notion, like the physicist’s ultimate particles and rays, is only known by what it does. Apart from its dress or other signs it is not identifiable. Berkeley himself, of course, has his doubts: ‘laying aside the words as much as possible, consider…’. That ‘as much as possible’ is not very much; and is not nearly enough for the purposes for which Berkeley hoped to trust it.

We have instead to consider much more closely how words work in discourse. But before plunging into some of the less whelming divisions of this world-swallowing enquiry, let me glance back for a few minutes at the traditional treatment of the subject; much might be learnt from it that would help us. It begins, of course, with Aristotle, and may perhaps be said to end with Archbishop Whately, who wrote a treatise on Rhetoric for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana that Coleridge planned. I may remark, in passing, that Coleridge’s own Essay on Method, the preface to that Encyclopaedia, has itself more bearing on a possible future for Rhetoric than anything I know of in the official literature.

Whately was a prolific writer, but he is most often remembered now perhaps for an epigram. ‘Woman’, he said, ‘is an irrational animal which pokes the fire from the top’. I am not quoting this, here at Bryn Mawr, to prejudice you against the Archbishop: any man, when provoked, might venture such an unwarrantable and imperceptive generalization. But I do hope to prejudice you further against his modes of treating a subject in which he is, according to no less an authority than Jebb, the best modern writer. Whately has another epigram which touches the very heart of our problem, and may be found either comforting or full of wicked possibilities as you please: here it is. ‘Preachers nobly aim at nothing at all and hit it!’ We may well wonder just what the Archbishop meant by that.

What we have to surmise is how Whately, following and summing up the whole history of the subject, can proceed as he did! I He says quite truly that ‘Rhetoric is not one of those branches of study in which we can trace with interest a progressive improvement from age to age’; he goes on to discuss ‘whether Rhetoric be worth any diligent cultivation’ and to decide, rather half-heartedly, that it is – provided it be taken not as an Art of discourse but as the Art – that is to say, as a philosophic discipline aiming at a mastery of the fundamental laws of the use of language, not just a set of dodges that will be found to work sometimes. That claim – that Rhetoric must go deep, must take a broad philosophical view of the principles of the Art – is the climax of his Introduction; and yet in the treatise that follows nothing of the sort is attempted, nor is it in any other treatise that I know of. What we are given by Whately instead is a very ably arranged and discussed collection of prudential Rules about the best sorts of things to say in various argumentative situations, the order in which to bring out your propositions and proofs and examples, at what point it will be most effective to disparage your opponent, how to recommend oneself to the audience, and like matters. As to all of which, it is fair to remark, no one ever learned about them from a treatise who did not know about them already; at the best, the treatise may be an occasion for realizing that there is skill to be developed in discourse, but it does not and cannot teach the skill. We can turn on the whole endeavour the words in which the Archbishop derides his arch-enemy Jeremy Bentham_ ‘the proposed plan for the ready exposure of each argument resembles that by which children are deluded, of catching a bird by laying salt on its tail; the existing doubts and difficulties of debate being no greater than, on the proposed system, would be found in determining what Arguments were or were not to be classified’ in which places in the system.

Why has this happened? It has happened all through the history of the subject, and I choose Whately because he represents an inherent tendency in its study. When he proceeds from these large-scale questions of the Ordonnance of arguments to the minute particulars of discourse – under the rubric of Style – the same thing happens. Instead of a philosophic enquiry into how words work in discourse, we get the usual postcard’s-worth of crude common sense: be clear, yet don’t be dry; be vivacious, use metaphors when they will be understood not otherwise; respect usage; don’t be long-winded, on the other hand don’t be gaspy; avoid ambiguity; prefer the energetic to the elegant; preserve unity and coherence… I need not go over to the other side of the postcard. We all know well enough the maxims that can be extracted by patient readers out of these agglomerations and how helpful we have all found them!

What is wrong with these too familiar attempts to discuss the working of words? How words work is a matter about which every user of language is, of necessity, avidly curious until these trivialities choke the flow of interest. Remembering Whately’s recommendation of metaphor, I can put the mistake best perhaps by saying that all they do is to poke the fire from the top. Instead of tackling, in earnest, the problem of how language works at all, they assume that nothing relevant is to be learnt about it; and that the problem is merely one of disposing the given and unquestioned powers of words to the best advantage. Instead of ventilating by enquiry the sources of the whole action of words, they merely play with generalizations about their effects, generalizations that are uninstructive and unimproving unless we go, more deeply and by another route into these grounds. Their conception of the study of language, in brief, is frustratingly distant or macroscopic and yields no return in understanding – either practical or theoretical – unless it is supplemented by an intimate or microscopic enquiry which endeavours to look into the structure of the meanings with which discourse is composed, not merely into the effects ofvarious large-scale disposals of these meanings. In this Rhetoricians may remind us of the Alchemists’ efforts to transmute common substances into precious metals, vain efforts because they were not able to take account of the internal structures of the so-called elements.

The comparison that I am using here is one which a modern writer on language can hardly avoid. To account for understanding and misunderstanding, to study the efficiency of language and its conditions, we have to renounce, for a while, the view that words just have their meanings and that what a discourse does is to be explained as a composition of these meanings – as a wall can be represented as a composition of its bricks. We have to shift the focus of our analysis and attempt a deeper and more minute grasp and try to take account of the structures of the smallest discussable units of meaning and the ways in which these vary as they are put with other units. Bricks, for all practical purposes, hardly mind what other things they are put with. Meanings mind intensely – more indeed than any other sorts of things. It is the peculiarity of meanings that they do so mind their company; that is in part what we mean by calling them meanings! In themselves they are nothing – figments, abstractions, unreal things that we invent, if you like – but we invent them for a purpose. They help us to avoid taking account of the peculiar way in which any part of a discourse, in the last resort, does what it does only because the other parts of the surrounding, uttered or unuttered, discourse and its conditions are what they are. ‘In the last resort’ – the last resort here is mercifully a long way off and very deep down. Short of it we are aware of certain stabilities which hide from us this universal relativity or, better, interdependence of meanings. Some words and sentences still more, do seem to mean what they mean absolutely and unconditionally. This is because the conditions governing their meanings are so constant that we can disregard them. So the weight of a cubic centimeter of water seems a fixed and absolute thing because of the constancy of its governing conditions. In weighing out a pound of tea we can forget about the mass of the earth. And with words which have constant conditions the common-sense view that they have fixed proper meanings, which should be learned and observed is justified. But these words are fewer than we suppose. Most words, as they pass from context to context, change their meanings; and in many different ways. It is their duty and their service to us to do so. Ordinary discourse would suffer ankylosis if they did not, and so far we have no ground for complaint. We are extraordinarily skilful in some fields with these shifts of sense – especially when they are of the kind we recognize officially as metaphor. But our skill fails; it is patchy and fluctuant; and, when it fails, misunderstanding of others and of ourselves comes in.

A chief cause of misunderstanding, I shall argue later, is the Proper Meaning Superstition. That is, the common belief – encouraged officially by what lingers on in the school manuals as Rhetoric – that a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling its use and the purpose for which it should be uttered. This superstition is a recognition of a certain kind of stability in the meanings of certain words. It is only a superstition when it forgets (as it commonly does) that the stability of the meaning of a word comes from the constancy of the contexts that give it its meaning. Stability in a word’s meaning is not something to be assumed, but always something to be explained. And as we try out explanations, we discover, of course, that – as there are many sorts of constant contexts – there are many sorts of stabilities. The stability of the meaning of a word like knife, say, is different from the stability of a word like mass in its technical use, and then again both differ from the stabilities of such words, say, as event, ingression, endurance, recurrence, or object, in the paragraphs of a very distinguished predecessor in this Lectureship. It will have been noticed perhaps that the way I propose to treat meanings has its analogues with Mr Whitehead’s treatment of things. But indeed no one to whom Berkeley has mattered will be very confident as to which is which.

I have been suggesting – with my talk of macroscopic and microscopic enquiries – that the theory of language may have something to learn, not much but a little, from the ways in which the physicist envisages stabilities. But much closer analogies are possible with some of the patterns of Biology. The theory of interpretation is obviously a branch of biology – a branch that has not grown very far or very healthily yet. To remember this may help us to avoid some traditional mistakes – among them the use of bad analogies which tie us up if we take them too seriously. Some of these are notorious; for example, the opposition between form and content, and the almost equivalent opposition between matter and form. These are wretchedly inconvenient metaphors. So is that other which makes language a dress which thought puts on. We shall do better to think of a meaning as though it were a plant that has grown – not a can that has been filled or a lump of clay that has been moulded. These are obvious inadequacies; but, as the history of criticism shows, they have not been avoided, and the perennial efforts of the reflective to amend or surpass them – Croce is the extreme modern example – hardly help.

More insidious and more devastating are the over-simple mechanical analogies which have been brought in under the heading of Associationism in the hope of explaining how language works. And thought as well. The two problems are close together and similar and neither can be discussed profitably apart from the other. But, unless we drastically remake their definitions, and thereby dodge the main problems, Language and Thought are not – need I say? – one and the same. I suppose I must, since the Behaviourists have so loudly averred that Thought is sub-vocal talking. That however is a doctrine I prefer, in these lectures, to attack by implication. ‘To discuss it explicitly would take time that can, I think, be spent more fruitfully. I will only say that I hold that any doctrine identifying Thought with muscular movement is a self-refutation of the obscrvationalism that prompts it – heroic and fatal. And that an identification of Thought with an activity of the nervous system is to me an acceptable hypothesis, but too large to have interesting applications. It may be left until more is known about both; when possibly it may be developed to a point at which it might become useful. At present it is still Thought which is most accessible to study and accessible largely through Language. We can all detect a difference in our own minds between thinking of a dog and thinking of a cat. But no neurologist can. Even when no cats or dogs are about and we are doing nothing about them except thinking of them, the difference is plainly perceptible. We can also say ‘dog’ and think ‘cat’.

I must, though, discuss the doctrine of associations briefly, because when we ask ourselves about how words mean, some theory about trains of associated ideas or accompanying images is certain to occur to us as an answer. And until we see how little distance these theories take us they are frustrating. We all know the outline of these theories: we learn what the word ‘cat’ means by seeing a cat; at the same time that we hear the word ‘cat’ and thus a link is formed between the sight and the sound. Next time we hear the word ‘cat’ an image of a cat (a visual image, let us say) arises in the mind, and that is how the word ‘cat’ means a cat. The obvious objections that come from the differences between cats; from the fact that images of a grey persian asleep and of a tabby stalking are very different, and from some people saying they never have any imagery, must then be taken account of, and the theory grows very complex. Usually, images get relegated to a background and become mere supports to something hard to be precise about – an idea of a cat – which is supposed then to be associated with the word ‘cat’ much as the image originally was supposed to be associated with it.

This classical theory of meaning has been under heavy fire from many sides for more than a century – from positions as different as those of Coleridge, of Bradley, of Pavlov and of the gestalt psychologists. In response it has elaborated itself, calling in the aid of the conditioned-reflex and submitting to the influence of Freud. I do not say that it is incapable, when amended, of supplying us with a workable theory of meaning – in fact, in the next lecture I shall sketch an outline theory of how words mean which has associationism among its obvious ancestors. And here, in saying that simple associationism does not go far enough and is an impediment unless we see this, I am merely reminding you that a clustering of associated images and ideas about a word in the mind does not answer our question: ‘How does a word mean?’ It only hands it on to them, and the question becomes: ‘How does an idea (or an image) mean what it does?’ To answer that we have to go outside the mind and enquire into its connections with what are not mental occurrences. Or (if you prefer, instead, to extend the sense of the word ‘mind’) we have to enquire into connections between events which were left out by the traditional associationism. And in leaving them out they left out the problem.

For our purposes here the important points are two. First, that ordinary, current, undeveloped associationism is ruined by the crude inapposite physical metaphor of impressions stamped on the mind (the image of the cat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Editorial Introduction
• The Philosophy of Rhetoric
• Lecture 1. Introductory
• Lecture 2. The Aims of Discourse and Types of Context
• Lecture 3. The Interinanimation of Words
• Lecture 4. Some Criteria of Words
• Lecture 5. Metaphor
• Lecture 6. The Command of Metaphor
• Index of Names