Rhetoric

Jennifer Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134380275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Rhetoric has shaped our understanding of the nature of language and the purpose of literature for over two millennia. It is of crucial importance in understanding the development of literary history as well as elements of philosophy, politics and culture. The nature and practise of rhetoric was central to Classical, Renaissance and Enlightenment cultures and its relevance continues in our own postmodern world to inspire further debate.Examining both the practice and theory of this controversial concept, Jennifer Richards explores:

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• historical and contemporary definitions of the term 'rhetoric'
• uses of rhetoric in literature, by authors such as William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce
• classical traditions of rhetoric, as seen in the work of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero
• the rebirth of rhetoric in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment
• the current status and future of rhetoric in literary and critical theory as envisaged by critics such as Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida.

This insightful volume offers an accessible account of this contentious yet unavoidable term, making this book invaluable reading for students of literature, philosophy and cultural studies.

1
THE CLASSICAL ART

BEGINNINGS

Rhetoric is not only concerned with debate, but has always seemed to provoke it. In this chapter, I want to consider how the key terms of the disputes originated principally because the disagreements elicited by this way of thinking about language have repercussions that continue into the present. We can summarize this debate quite simply at the outset as a question: is rhetoric a means to knowledge or simply an aptitude or a skill that helps us to persuade, regardless of the truth of the matter? As we shall see the responses this produces have some profound consequences.

In the West, the rhetorical tradition is believed to have originated as a self-conscious practice in Sicily in the fifth century BC. No texts survive from this period, but a story or myth does: after the overthrow of the tyrant Thrasybulus, the citizens initiated lawsuits to reclaim confiscated land and they began to systematize the use of persuasive speech to help them to win their cases. The earliest surviving handbook, though, is Athenian rather than Sicilian and it dates from the fourth century BC. This is Aristotle’s Rhetoric (c. 332 BC), a text which has shaped all subsequent understanding of the subject. This work is regarded as seminal because it establishes that rhetoric is an art. As George Kennedy argues, it ‘organizes its subject into essential parts, provides insight into the bases of speech acts, creates categories and terminology for discussing discourse, and illustrates and applies its teaching so that they can be used in society’ (Aristotle 1991: ix).

This is an important contribution to the defence and definition of an ‘art’ that had already provoked doubts over its entitlement to be regarded as one. Aristotle’s antagonist is his predecessor Plato (428–347 BC), especially in two of his most important dialogues: Gorgias and Phaedrus. In these dialogues Plato presents the philosopher Socrates’ excoriation of rhetoric as a mere knack and a branch of flattery that is concerned with suasion rather than the truth. Rhetoric aims to please and gratify its makers as well as influence its recipients, but the satisfactions it offers are closer to those provided by a good meal rather than philosophical enquiry (Plato 1964a: 462c–d).

Socrates’ attack has had a significant legacy and even theorists of rhetoric can be seen to demonstrate his point. Some five hundred years later Quintilian (c. 35 BC–AD 95), Professor of Latin Rhetoric under the emperor Vespasian and author of this art’s most comprehensive handbook, On the training of the orator (Institutio oratoria), defines oratory as ‘the science of speaking well’ (Quintilian 2001:8.Pr.6). Socrates might well have agreed with this and, equally, with Quintilian’s insistence that the ‘art’ of the orator ‘comprises various means of creating belief’ (5.8.1). This depends on a range of learned techniques, many of which aim to arouse an audience’s emotions. An orator, he tells us, should seek to ‘entice’ an audience ‘with delights, drag them along by the strength of [his] pleading, and sometimes disturb them with emotional appeals’ (5.14.29).

What is so different about Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and the reason why it is central to defences of rhetoric, is its argument that this art does indeed lead to knowledge, albeit of a practical kind: the kind that helps us to resolve disputes, to reach agreements and to ascertain what is probably true. In relation to this last point Aristotle is commended for providing this art with a logical basis; he explores the method of reasoning specific to its practitioners. Aristotle proposes that we consider rhetoric as an art that has a philosophical as well as a pragmatic purpose and defines it as ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’ (Aristotle 1984:1355b, 26–27). This means that it helps us to make decisions when the matters under consideration are uncertain. Rhetoric is integral, in Aristotle’s view, to both the discovery and presentation of knowledge, and this brings it closer to philosophical endeavour.

This chapter takes account of the technical defence and elaboration of rhetoric. My aim is to provide an introduction to the classical system, some of its key terms and its so-called standard history. I begin by exploring Plato’s formative attacks on this ‘art’ in Gorgias and Phaedrus because these works provide a crucial context for understanding Aristotle’s defining contribution as well as the scope and limitations of the later Roman technical tradition; we need to understand a little about both of these dialogues in order to grasp the significance of this key moment of origin in the rhetorical tradition as it has come to shape the defensive stance of its standard history. However, a perhaps unexpected reason for attending to these is that it will enable us also to understand how for one Roman theorist, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Plato rather represented a positive beginning: his attack on rhetoric can also be seen as a rhetorical gesture which brings to light the shared method of the orator and the sceptical philosopher, argument on different sides. This is the beginning of a different defence of rhetoric, not as a useful skill, but as a ‘critical’ method, as a way of thinking.

PLATO’S ATTACK

Plato was a follower of Socrates, who was executed by the civic authorities in Athens in 399 BC for impiety. Socrates appears as the leading disputant in almost all of Plato’s dialogues, which explore a wide range of subjects, including the proper education of male citizens in the ideal republic and the right and wrong kinds of homoerotic love. However, rhetoric is a recurring preoccupation, and it is against this ‘knack’ that Socrates’ own philosophical style of enquiry is contrasted by Plato in his dialogue Gorgias. Socrates is critical of the method of the sophists, their tendency to argue different sides of an issue. We can see this method in one of the few surviving speeches of the sophist Gorgias (483–376 BC), the figure who comes under scrutiny in Plato’s dialogue of that name. Gorgias came from the city of Leontini in Sicily and settled in Athens in 427 BC where he taught rhetoric to young men with the means to pay for this education. He did not write rhetorical handbooks, nor was he a teacher of rhetoric per se. Rather, he taught the practical skills of civic participation; his teaching of rhetoric as an aspect of this is best described as ‘unsystematic’. His idea of rhetoric is really embodied in his practice, in performed speeches such as the Encomium of Helen (Kennedy 1994:19). This sets out to exonerate the legendary Helen of Troy from the dishonour of abandoning her husband and country, and it does so by offering a range of different possibilities to explain her behaviour, while refusing to affirm any one of them.

For either it was	by the will of Fate
and	the wishes of the Gods
and	the votes of Necessity
that she did what she did,
or	by force reduced
or	by words seduced
< or	by love possessed. >

(Dillon and Gergel 2003:78)

The sophists have had something of a ‘renaissance’ in the last two decades, especially among teachers of Rhetoric and Composition, who discover in their pedagogic and philosophical practice a potential model for their own teaching of rhetoric. Thus, Jasper Neel provocatively describes his own work as ‘sophistry’, and Stephen Mailloux advises that ‘we are presently within a third sophistic’ (Mailloux 1995:1–2). For sophists like Gorgias, rhetoric is not a means to communicate persuasively ‘truths’ discovered through philosophical enquiry. Rather, it is a means to knowledge and understanding in the absence of a priori truth. The sophists are known as ‘philosophical relativists’; that is, they are recognized as being ‘skeptical about the possibility of knowledge of universal truth’ (Kennedy 1994:7). Protagoras had famously written a treatise which began by endorsing a subjective relativism: ‘Man is the measure of all things’. In contrast, Gorgias’ surviving speech On Nature evinces a radical scepticism: nothing exists, or if it exists it cannot be known, or if it can be known then it cannot be communicated.

It is this relativism, this openness to different possibilities, that has proven attractive to contemporary teachers of Rhetoric and Composition because it offers a new direction for both the writing of the history of rhetoric and the pedagogy of rhetoric teaching itself. Thus, Susan Jarratt reclaims specific stylistic devices and argumentative strategies for contemporary historians of rhetoric: antithesis, the pairing of opposite words; parataxis, the loose and non-hierarchical association of clauses; antilogy, the opposing of one argument with another or discovering contradictions in an argument; and, finally, anagogy, the exploration of different positions, demonstrated in the quotation from the Encomium to Helen above. These techniques, she argues, encourage openness to ‘a multiplicity of possible causal relations’, and they challenge the idea of a continuous, progressive history that dominates standard accounts of rhetoric; they allow for coterminous histories (Jarratt 1991:10–12, 21, 103).

Nonetheless, despite such interest, the sophists remain the negative starting point of standard histories of rhetoric. The value of the position taken by Gorgias, George Kennedy argues, is that it ‘opens up a place for rhetoric in debate and a need to argue both sides of an issue as persuasively as possible’. However, ‘it also opens up a place for skill in “making the weaker the stronger cause”’ (Kennedy 1994:8). It is this problem that Socrates is highlighting in Gorgias. For Socrates, the sophists are concerned with suasion rather than the truth. They argue any side of the question so long as it pleases and gratifies the audience (Plato 1964a: 462c–d).

Let us take a closer look at this dialogue. Gorgias, probably written around 387 BC on Plato’s return from a trip to Sicily, is deemed the foundational example of anti-rhetorical thinking. It is also the first text in which the Greek term denoting public speaking, rh

torik

, appears (Kennedy 1994:3). This dialogue is organized in three parts: Socrates converses with the sophist Gorgias and then, when this breaks down, his followers Polus and Callicles step in. Gorgias understands that the province of rhetoric is ‘persuasion’, and he sets out to defend its utility in moral terms. For example, a rhetorician might persuade a patient to take essential medicine when the real expert, the physician, has failed to convince him (Plato 1964a: 456b). This does not make rhetoric ‘moral’ exactly, but it does mean that it is useful: it can help to make people ‘better’. This defence of rhetoric, however, is undermined by Socrates. The problem with Gorgias’ defence is that he has already commended the power of the orator elsewhere. For example, when he suggested that someone who possesses rhetorical expertise will be able to persuade the real experts to serve his interests: ‘you will make the doctor … your slave,’ he argued, ‘and your businessman will prove to be making money, not for himself, but for another, for you’ (452e). Gorgias’ moral defence of rhetoric will be dropped later in the dialogue: Polus argues that rhetoric is ‘good’ because it empowers those who wield it, while Callicles advises that it helps us to avoid suffering at the hands of others. This last claim is undoubtedly a pointed allusion to the judicial condemnation of the real Socrates in 399 BC. Both speakers, however, succeed only in condemning themselves from their own mouths.

Socrates famously argues in Gorgias that rhetoric is a ‘knack’ because it produces pleasure, not knowledge. It serves only to gratify the whims of the people rather than leading them to a deeper understanding of what constitutes good citizenship (462a). The problem, according to Socrates, is that the rhetorician lacks rational understanding of the moral issues he defends or contests. For example, though Polus may be ‘well trained in rhetoric’ he does not know what counts as Good (471d). He thinks that having power is a good thing because it makes one happy, even if this ultimately involves harming others; on his view it is better to do wrong than to suffer.

Socrates takes the moral high ground, insisting that a person is ‘better’ if he acts justly, ‘worse’ if he acts unjustly (470c), and he undermines Polus’ position by attacking his process of argument. From the very beginning of the dialogue Polus is characterized as a speechifier, as someone who is more interested in making longwinded orations than in conducting a conversation (448d). When countering Socrates, for instance, Polus engages in ‘rhetorical refutation’; this is the practice, deployed so successfully in the law courts, of calling upon witnesses to support a position. One such ‘witness’ cited by Polus to disprove Socrates’ argument is Archelaus, the slave whose willingness to murder secured him the throne of Persia (470d–471d). Is he not a happy man, Polus asks? Socrates rejects this method of refutation and its conclusion because it is easy for a witness to provide false testimony. False witnesses include, for Socrates, all those members of an audience who think that Polus’ conventional view makes sense. Just because Polus is giving voice to popular opinion does not make him right.

To counter this Socrates employs a different style of refutation, setting out to reveal that everyone agrees with him. By prompting his antagonist to answer directly and concisely the questions he poses, Socrates forces Polus to retrace his steps. In so doing, he also practically demonstrates the difference between the rhetorical style of the sophists and the conversational method of the philosopher. So, for example, thanks to Socrates’ questioning, Polus is invited to distinguish between what is admirable and contemptible, the very categories he mistakenly collapsed in his longwinded speech. This will lead him to acknowledge what he initially failed to see: first that doing wrong is more contemptible than suffering wrong, and then, that because it exceeds suffering wrong in harmfulness it is also ‘worse’ (475c–d). Once this point is conceded Socrates can then challenge Polus’ citation of Archelaus as a...

Table of contents

• THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE CLASSICAL ART
• 2 RHETORIC RENEWED
• 3 FROM RHETORIC TO RHETORICALITY
• CONCLUSION
• Glossary of rhetorical terms
• Bibliography
• Index