Rhetoric and Philosophy

Richard A. Cherwitz, Henry W. Johnstone Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136696152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

This important volume explores alternative ways in which those involved in the field of speech communication have attempted to find a philosophical grounding for rhetoric. Recognizing that rhetoric can be supported in a wide variety of ways, this text examines eight different philosophies of rhetoric: realism, relativism, rationalism, idealism, materialism, existentialism, deconstructionism, and pragmatism. The value of this book lies in its pluralistic and comparative approach to rhetorical theory. Although rhetoric may be the more difficult road to philosophy, the fact that it is being traversed by a group of authors largely from speech communication demonstrates important growth in this field. Ultimately, there is recognition that if different thinkers can have solid reasons to adhere to disparate philosophies, serious communication problems can be eliminated. Rhetoric and Philosophy will assist scholars in choosing from among the many philosphical starting places for rhetoric.

__________________________________ Chapter 1

The Philosophical Foundations of Rhetoric

Richard A. Cherwitz

Since the 5th century B.C. there has been a fascination with “rhetoric,” a concept encompassing the manner in which humans symbolically influence one another. Throughout the ensuing centuries, thinkers have attempted to refine understanding of the nature, scope, and function of the rhetorical art. To be sure, definitions of rhetoric, although varied, have focused attention on an important aspect of human thought and behavior, namely, the way the content and form of language affects individual experience and social order.

Beginning with one of the earliest, systematic, and extended treatments of the subject and continuing through the 20th century, let us consider some representative definitions of rhetoric: rhetoric is the art of “enchanting the soul with words” (Plato, Phaedrus, p. 261a); rhetoric is an art whose function is to discover “in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion” (Cooper, The Rhetoric of Aristotle, p. 1355b); rhetoric involves the “application of reason to imagination for the better moving of the will” (Dick, 1955, p. 309); rhetoric is “the rationale of informative and suasory in discourse” (Bryant, 1973, p. 14); and rhetoric may be described broadly as the study of “all of the ways in which men may influence each other’s thinking and behavior through the strategic use of symbols” (Ehninger, 1972, p. 3). Although these and other definitions are suggestive of the varied purposes, functions, processes, ends, and effects of communication, they all underscore the centrality of “persuasion” to rhetoric.

Regardless of one’s definition or theoretical orientation, it would be hard to deny the pervasiveness of persuasion in society. After all, what human enterprise does not involve symbolic influence? All human activity, unintentionally or by design, contains a rhetorical component. Whether our interest is in making ethical judgments, articulating the preferability of a particular philosophical, scientific, or historical theory vis-à-vis another, or in gaining followers for a political, social, or religious cause, rhetoric abounds. Although the motive for engaging in these or other activities may not always explicitly be to persuade, this fact cannot obfuscate the existence and importance of symbolic influence; in each of the aforementioned cases we can discover the presence of a rhetor (speaker or writer) utilizing a wide array of symbolic tools (verbal and nonverbal) to communicate a message to an audience. The fact that the intent of rhetors in each of these instances is not identical is unimportant. It might be, for example, that some of these rhetors desire conversion or change in audience attitudes, beliefs, and values, whereas some seek modifications in human behavior, and still others wish only to obtain the understanding of those with whom they communicate. Yet in every case the dynamic relationships among rhetor, message, and auditor indicate the potential for, if not the fact of, symbolic influence. In short, our ability or inability to discern the intent or outcomes of messages is not germane to detection of the rhetorical.

It is not surprising, therefore, that throughout history scholars interested in comprehending human symbolic influence have written treatises explicating the role of rhetoric in and the relationship of rhetoric to such activities as politics, philosophy, science, religion, and literature. However, it is only of late that we have begun to recognize how essential rhetoric is to the functioning of these other enterprises. In the last 10 years alone countless numbers of books and essays have emerged from a variety of academic disciplines – all arguing for the significance of rhetoric in human affairs. Explication of rhetoric in the late 20th century is an interdisciplinary quest. For example, at major centers of learning throughout the United States today, scholars from various parts of campus routinely convene to explore what has been termed “the rhetoric of inquiry” – the common denominator and essential core undergirding all human efforts to know (Lyne, 1985; McCloskey, 1985; Nelson & Megill, 1986; Simons, 1985, 1989). Economists, philosophers, historians, political scientists, accountants, mathematicians, and others are beginning to notice that it is the discipline and subject matter of rhetoric that contains many of the principles and concepts endemic to and accounting for all academic inquiries. Rather than remaining preoccupied with the methodological and ideological differences traditionally separating disciplines and resulting in battles over academic turf, increasingly principles and methods uniting all domains of knowledge acquisition are sought. And within rhetoric we may have discovered the glue binding together the many seemingly disparate, academic ventures; for regardless of content and methodology, we now realize that knowledge is discovered by or created through the machinery of human symbol use (Brummett, 1976; Cherwitz, 1977; Cherwitz & Hikins, 1986; Scott, 1967, 1976). Sharp distinctions between content and form, and invention and disposition no longer can be maintained (Johnstone, 1969). To speculate about human symbol use, therefore, is to make comment not only about how we communicate, but about how we inquire and come to know.

Admittedly, recognition of the ubiquitous and interdisciplinary properties of rhetoric is enlightening. Cognizant of the rhetorical fact that communicators of our day (whether they be politicians, theologians, scientists, or philosophers) inherently reside within the tenuous and often unstable world of ideas, surely we must be humbled. Discerning the rhetorical forces at work in all varieties of conduct and inquiry underscores the habitual problem of locating certainties as a basis for action, and reminds us of the virtue of tolerance. But if symbolic influence is indeed “a” or even “the” basis for all human thought and action, then the use or conscious choice of a rhetorical theory will have consequences and implications for one’s understanding and evaluation of the world. To say that rhetoric is a fundamental part of all activity, from trivial to serious, does not mean, for example, that we will arrive at and share the same understandings and evaluations. How the art of rhetoric is conceived, what theoretical assumptions are made about its operation and scope, and what is posited as rhetoric’s relationships to the other essential dimensions and components of human activity will affect our understandings and evaluations. Thus, at a time when the vocabulary for analyzing the many different activities of life is so fulsomely rhetorical, it is necessary to make clear not only the different possible conceptions of rhetoric, but the rationales for choosing among them.

Rhetoric and Philosophy represents an attempt to do just that. This collection of essays begins with a two-part question:

1. If common sense and experience suggest that symbolic influence is both pervasive and important to understanding the world in which we live, then what are some of the possible conceptions and theories of rhetoric we might choose from to explain the art’s pervasiveness and potential impact?

2. If there are many potential conceptions of the nature, scope, and function of rhetoric, then what is to account for differences among them, and what method can be used for choosing or preferring one conception over another?

To answer these questions requires philosophical analysis. Thus, Rhetoric and Philosophy is not a case study of actual specimens of rhetorical discourse; its objective is not criticism. Nor is this book an investigation of chronological developments in rhetorical theory or an interpretive account of the views espoused by rhetorical theorists of the past and present; history is not a goal. Our concerns are conceptual and theoretical; for one cannot accomplish the tasks of rhetorical criticism and history, or perhaps such projects will be of diminished worth, without first canvassing the landscape of available theories of rhetoric and articulating the philosophical assumptions attendant to choosing among them.

Put simply, one of the central claims of this book is that rhetoricians are, or at least on occasion must be, philosophers. The reader should note that the term “philosopher” is used here to underscore (as the degree title Ph.D. – Doctorate of Philosophy — designates) how all serious inquiries are at root philosophical. The term is not intended to suggest that rhetoricians are professional philosophers. The fundamental questions raised by rhetoricians have been and will always be about the world of prudential conduct. From its inception rhetoric has been a discipline devoted to a study of praxis. But, as the essays in this volume attest, any academic consideration of rhetorical praxis must commence with and end in theory; scholars in rhetoric, like scholars in any area of study, seek to account for and make sense out of the world – in this case, the rhetorical world. And it is this habit of accounting and making sense that is the cornerstone of theory. Yet the demands for generalization incumbent upon theory cannot be met exclusively through an analysis of actual events, rhetorical or otherwise. After all, how those events are viewed, that is, what methodologies are employed and how those methodologies are used to examine and analyze the data of the rhetorical world is as much the product of antecedent theories as it is the result of methodological rigor and painstaking efforts to be obedient to the details of the world scrutinized.

If at least a part of our theory is antecedent to rhetorical analysis, and if that theory can affect the outcome of analysis, then we must ask: What is the source of such theory and how can one be made conscious of and choose among competing theories? The answer, of course, is that in order to compare and choose one must ask philosophical questions, think philosophically, and employ philosophical methods of analysis. To do this will in turn require us to make our assumptions explicit, examine the consequences entailed by those assumptions and, in the spirit of dialectic, interact argumentatively with others. To say that a rhetorician must be a philosopher, then, is to suggest what should be obvious: a complete and thorough understanding of the practice of human symbolic influence involves the critical inspection of and inquiry into the theoretical presuppositions of rhetoric.

Yet there may be a more fundamental sense in which rhetoric is and must be philosophical. Rhetoricians, like all scholars, must introduce a technical vocabulary as part of their theorizing. Whenever such terminology is offered, the first question asked will always be Socratic: What is it? History reminds us that, whether the focus of analysis is ordinary language or the more erudite and specialized jargon comprising academic explanation, humans inherently must grapple with the philosophical issues of definition and interpretation. To raise and answer the question of “what is it” is to engage in philosophical analysis. Avoiding or circumventing this question prevents or restricts the kind of clarity and knowledge necessary for informed scholarly inquiry.

Nowhere is the importance of philosophical activity more apparent than in academic studies of rhetoric. Regardless of what rhetorical phenomena are investigated or the rhetorical methods utilized, conclusions will always be about human agents, symbol systems, audiences, and the place of each in the world. It seems inconceivable that generalizations could be made about any of these constructs or the interrelationships among them without presuming or advancing philosophical claims. To make comment on the properties of the symbol system comprising a communicator’s message, for instance, is to raise serious philosophical questions about meaning and interpretation. Similarly, to delineate the effects of rhetorical discourse (and in so doing ascertain the relationships among rhetor, message, and auditor) is to broach the traditional philosophical question of what is reality. Moreover, to determine how speakers and writers build arguments for consideration of their audiences is to wrestle with the philosophical problem of certainty and the related question of whether and how we can know.

It is important to note that such issues, whether presumed as a basis for conducting rhetorical analysis (antecedent theory) or taken as a part of the theoretical conclusions derived from rhetorical study, are quintessentially philosophical. And because they are philosophical, they cannot be discussed rigorously and comprehensively in the absence of philosophical analysis. An analogy will serve to illustrate. Just as science cannot and does not retreat to methodological arguments as the basis for establishing certitude, so too rhetoric cannot hide within the logic of its analytic systems as the basis for advancing larger knowledge claims; for the methodologies and logic of rhetoric, like those of science or any discipline, are themselves predicated upon philosophical assumptions. One cannot use the rules of a particular methodology as a way of validating the methodology itself. In arguing for the viability of knowledge about rhetoric, therefore, one must raise and endeavor to answer philosophical questions. When that is done, researchers necessarily will stand back from their data and methods, articulating the assumptions made and the arguments underpinning them; and to accomplish this feat will require investigators to think and speak philosophically.

At this point the reader may feel uncomfortable with an insistence that rhetoricians frequently must operate in the realm of the philosophical. This claim, some might retort, is at best arguable. Yet to attempt refutation, as have many rhetoricians (including several contributors to this volume), is itself a philosophical act. After all, even many familiar pronouncements – for example, that rhetoric must be “resituated at the end of philosophy” (Schrag, 1985, pp. 164–174), or that traditional philosophy is of little value to understanding the practical world of the rhetorical (this seems to be the upshot of Fisher, 1987), or that philosophy is not foundational and should be de-centered (Derrida, 1981; Heidegger, 1973), or that traditional philosophical questions are problematic, unanswerable, or misleading (Rorty, 1979) – are themselves philosophical contentions. Conclusions of this sort cannot be articulated, defended, or evaluated in the absence of philosophical argument and a philosophical context. Like all other propositions of a larger order, these claims must be argued and secured explicitly. Hence, whatever our view of rhetoric and its relationship to other human activities, there will come a time when we must don our philosophical hat and critically inspect rhetoric’s theoretical tenets and the presuppositions anchoring them.

Rhetoric and Philosophy is premised on the claim that all theories of rhetoric are ultimately shaped by a particular philosophical worldview; one cannot understand differences and similarities among theories of rhetoric without first discerning their philosophical moorings. Each of the contributors to this book illustrates how one’s choice of a philosophical system – a set of first principles – constrains and occasions the development of rhetorical theory. Our thesis is that all theories of rhetoric are an outgrowth of a particular intellectual climate; that is, one’s theory of human symbolic influence is predicated upon a specific understanding of philosophical problems. Hence, differences among rhetorical theories may be explained by the differing views held about the world and how humans apprehend that world. The argument within each chapter proceeds inductively, showing how particular beliefs about, for example, ontology (the study of what is), epistemology (the study of how we come to know what is), and the issue of whether those questions (ontology and epistemology) should be raised or can be answered, lead to unique theories of the nature, scope, and function of rhetoric.

Although previous work in rhetoric focuses on the historical development of thought and deals predominantly with key thinkers in rhetorical theory (Ehninger, 1972; Foss, Foss, & Trapp, 1985; Golden, Berquist, & Coleman, 1989; Johannesen, 1971), few efforts have been made to understand the concept comparatively and at an ideational level. The purpose of this book is to take some of the major philosophical starting places (regardless of wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 The Philosophical Foundations of Rhetoric
• Chapter 2 Realism and Its Implications for Rhetorical Theory
• Chapter 3 Relativism and Rhetoric
• Chapter 4 Critical Rationalism: Rhetoric and the Voice of Reason
• Chapter 5 Idealism as a Rhetorical Stance
• Chapter 6 Materialism: Reductionist Dogma or Critical Rhetoric?
• Chapter 7 Existentialism as a Basis for the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric
• Chapter 8 Rhetoric After Deconstruction
• Chapter 9 Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and Practical Wisdom
• Author Index
• Subject Index