After Plato

Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing

John Duffy, Lois Agnew, John Duffy, Lois Agnew

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781607329978
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

After Plato redefines the relationships of rhetoric for scholars, teachers, and students of rhetoric and writing in the twenty-first century. Featuring essays by some of the most accomplished scholars in the field, the book explores the diversity of ethical perspectives animating contemporary writing studies—including feminist, postmodern, transnational, non-Western, and virtue ethics—and examines the place of ethics in writing classrooms, writing centers, writing across the curriculum programs, prison education classes, and other settings.

When truth is subverted, reason is mocked, racism is promoted, and nationalism takes center stage, teachers and scholars of writing are challenged to articulate the place of rhetorical ethics in the writing classroom and throughout the field more broadly. After Plato demonstrates the integral place of ethics in writing studies and provides a roadmap for future conversations about ethical rhetoric that will play an essential role in the vitality of the field.
 

Contributors: Fred Antczak, Patrick W. Berry, Vicki Tolar Burton, Rasha Diab, William Duffy, Norbert Elliot, Gesa E. Kirsch, Don J. Kraemer, Paula Mathieu, Robert J. Mislevy, Michael A. Pemberton, James E. Porter, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Xiaoye You, Bo Wang

Section One

Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

1

Recovering a Good Rhetoric

Rhetoric as Techne and Praxis

James E. Porter

DOI: 10.7330/9781607329978.c001

Does it bother you as much as it bothers me that the US news media and public still define rhetoric as lying, manipulation, and deception, as the opposite of truth, honesty, facts, and wise judgment—in others words, as innately unethical versus ethical?

It has been over fifty years since publication of the English translation of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric (1969)—a bold, innovative effort to recover a broader, more positive view of rhetoric and its civic role. Since that time the field of rhetoric has worked hard to reestablish itself as a worthy, distinctive, and valid area of study with significance for public discourse—as it once was. We have made some progress at the university, but in the public realm, not so much. We are still stuck with the negative view: rhetoric is lying, the opposite of ethics. Something has gang aft agley.

In this chapter I conduct a historical frame analysis that attempts through historical inquiry and critique to understand how our current situation came to be: How did rhetoric come to be viewed as lying, deceit, manipulation? How did ethics become so disconnected from rhetoric? In a short chapter it is not possible to answer these questions completely or satisfactorily. What I will do, rather, is consider a few key historical moments that speak to the question:

1. 1. The Greek and Roman classical conception of rhetoric as both techne and praxis, involving rhetoric and ethics as complementary, integrated arts serving the public good,
2. 2. The influence of Ramism, in the sixteenth century, and its disastrous effects on the meaning and placement of the study of rhetoric in the Western higher education curriculum,
3. 3. The formation of the modern US research university, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which established the current disciplines and departments for higher education (rhetoric, of course, not among them).

I’m aware of the danger of cherry picking historical moments: you run the risk of oversimplifying a complicated story, making a smooth, clean narrative where one is not to be found. I hope to make my narrative clear without doing injustice to the richness, complexity, and nuance of the issue. What I hope to show is some key moments that contribute to rhetoric being viewed as unethical—with the aim, of course, of suggesting how we might change the view. The way down is also the way up.

My argument overall is this: rhetoric is a techne, but it is also a praxis. That is to say, rhetoric should aim at practical, transformative connection with the world. The purpose of rhetoric is not just to make a symbolic artifact: a speech or a piece of writing, a Web page or a weaving. That constructed symbolic entity is expected to do something. Its purpose is to do good work in the world, to provide value or benefit for somebody, to change the world from its current state to some better state. To inform us. To make us warm. To stop an injustice. To praise the worthy. To keep the peace. And because rhetoric aims ultimately at some improvement, some change in the state of things, it invariably involves a judgment about what that good should be, and that decision requires ethical reasoning. The good state is the telos of rhetoric, its final cause.

Several Greek and Roman classical rhetoricians said this quite clearly and emphatically in a number of places—most notably Isocrates, Cicero, and particularly Quintilian, who defined rhetoric as “the art of speaking well” (2006, 2.13.38) or “a good man speaking well” (2006, 12.1.1). That definition insists that the rhetor must first be a virtuous person—vir bonus—or else he will not have the credibility (ethos) to compel an audience. But “speaking well” has a second important meaning, considered by Quintilian in Institutio (2006, 11.1.8–10) and by Cicero as well in De Oratore (1948). The good speaker must be guided by her public position and by her duties and obligation to the polis. The rhetor should be a leader speaking for the good of the polis (Walzer 2003, 2006).

Over a long period of time, the ideas that rhetoric involved ethics, that rhetoric was concerned with the public good, that there was an ethic inside rhetoric were lost. (Well, not so much lost as intellectually sabotaged.) Rhetoric as techne (art) became confused with tribe (mechanical process) and lost its connection with praxis. Rhetoric became associated exclusively with text-as-expression rather than text-as-action. We have to fix that. But it won’t be easy because, as I will discuss, the Western intellectual tradition has treated rhetoric badly and because rhetoric remains housed in an institutional structure (i.e., the modern university system) that is fundamentally hostile to it.

Methodology: Historical Frame Analysis

To examine this question, I use a critical approach that exposes and then questions the foundational category systems we have inherited—the frames or terministic screens that have established themselves over time as the way things are, as unexamined reality. These frames are built into our everyday uses of language and are perhaps even, as George Lakoff (2008) argues, hardwired into our brains. It is just such a frame that over-determines our understanding about rhetoric and its relationship with ethics and that puts those terms into a particular configured relationship, one that has proven very difficult to change:

ethics : rhetoric :: truth : lying

Ethics is to rhetoric as truth is to lying. There are, of course, many variants of this analogy frame that help support the classification system:

philosophy : dialectic :: rhetoric : persuasion

philosophy : interlocutor (engaged co-equal participant) :: rhetoric : audience (passive, subordinate)

language : thought :: packaging : content

Frame analysis has been explicitly articulated as a methodology by Erving Goffman (1974) and by George Lakoff (2008). But the version I am using is a looser kind of frame analysis that is probably closest to Michel Foucault’s archaeological analysis (1972), particularly because it examines the classification systems in which key terms (like rhetoric and ethics) appear, how and why those systems are modified (in particular what power dynamics are in play at the moment of modification), and finally, how the system becomes reified into institutional structures (like the university).

The purpose of the methodology is to expose the often hidden (forgotten, suppressed, or denigrated) “other” that the dominant classification system obscures. It aims to expose and challenge the moments when the essentialized categories (such as those related to race, gender, and sexuality or to disciplinary formations) and classification system emerged and became established politically and institutionally. I will use this method first to examine the historical configuration of rhetoric and ethics within the Western rhetorical tradition and second to propose an alternate view of that configuration—a historical counter-story.

The alternate view actually lies within the Western intellectual tradition and even within the work of some of the key figures of that tradition, particularly Isocrates and Quintilian. To put it another way, there is already an alternate view of the relationship between rhetoric and ethics in the Western rhetorical tradition that needs to be recovered—what we might call a good rhetoric, a view that sees rhetoric and ethics as necessarily intersecting and overlapping arts. Over time many historians and scholars of rhetoric, several of whom I cite here, have made this point. Mostly, I am echoing arguments that have already been made in the field.

Rhetoric as Techne and Praxis

Here is the key frame shift: rhetoric is not only a techne, it is a praxis.

In classical Greek thought, techne refers to the skill or craft of making something, including making a speech. But be wary of simple definitions of complex concepts: the simplicity can hide histories, complexities, power moves, cultural nuances, and the tensions and ideological battles involved. You have to understand the battles—and also the conceptual system, the ideological grid, what Foucault call the discursive formation in which the term sits. Techne as opposed to what? In relation to what? Within what system of knowledge or human activity? In what system is techne configured?

The earliest uses of the term techne connect it with Greek gods and goddesses who have the gift of art and technology (Atwill 1998): for instance, Prometheus’s knowledge of fire, which he shared with humans—and then was punished for it. The person with techne knows how to do something technically and materially, and that art has a value and the person shares it. The shared thing is useful and beautiful, and it intervenes in human affairs in a way that changes the world. Socrates explicitly identifies as technai such activities as playing the harp, generalship, piloting a ship, cooking, medicine, managing an estate, smithing, and carpentry. Poetry is a techne, medicine is a techne, carpentry is a techne, professional writing is a techne. Notice that this art is not just for art-ists (in our sense of the word); it refers to artisans, skilled craftspeople.

Because techne makes things that work in the world, it must address both materiality and the possibility of changing conditions. The carpenter who makes a rudder must think about the conditions of the sea, the size of the ship, the depth of the port. He needs to make a rudder that can perform its function, deal with change, and be sustainable, last. That is the art/techne of rudder making (Plato n.d., 390d; Wild 1941). Because techne deals with fluctuating conditions, like the sea, it is not perfectly predictable or certain; it does not generate a guaranteed outcome. You can build the best rudder in the world, but if it hits a rock your ship will go belly-up anyway. C’est la mer. Techne deals with fluid and fluctuating and unexpected circumstances, matters on the ground, educated guesswork—and with probability, not with idealized, static, or abstract certainty (Atwill 1998).

Techne includes the technical/material facet as well as a critical/intellectual facet: it includes theoria (broad philosophical knowledge), but it also involves knowledge of material and tools, as well as principles of construction and design. For rudder making, that means knowledge about the properties of wood, knowledge about carving tools, knowledge about design and shaping—as well as knowledge about the physics of the rudder. It means knowing how to position the hand holding the knife to leverage just the right amount of scraping and shaping of the wood. There is a physical embodied craft involved.

What is techne not? Techne should not be confused with tribe, which is the mechanical/algorithmic repetition of a task (Wild 1941), or with kakotechne, or false art, chicanery, eristic, manipulation, deception, lying (Quintilian 2006, 2.15).

And, of course, rhetoric is frequently equated with both of these things. Quintilian addresses this point quite clearly in Institutio (2006, 2.15), when he notes that we do not define the field of medicine based on the malpractice of quacks, and we do not define poetry based on the drivel of bad poets, so why do we use the term rhetoric to mean bad rhetoric? Yes, of course there are instances of bad rhetoric all over the place (sad). But that is not what rhetoric is.

Nor is techne merely a “knack,” a practical technique that one simply copies from one situation to another. Here is the vital distinction between a technician and a craftsperson or artisan. A technician copies, follows rules and rote procedures, but does not know why or when to use them or, most important, how to adapt them for different situations and uses. Techne requires a deep understanding of audience and context of use; it requires an integrated, transdisciplinary view of the arts: rhetoric intersects integrally with politics, ethics, philosophy, design. These arts are not isolated, they are not disciplines; they are arts, and as such they are interrelated.

If you read Aristotle’s Rhetoric (2006) by itself, rhetoric seems like its own distinct sphere with an emphasis on the productive side of speech making. But if you read it alongside Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, all sorts of interconnections emerge: the three texts are really one big text (Johnstone 1980; Porter 1998). The common aim that ties them all together, the causa ultima, was the good of the polis.

What is the ultimate purpose of rhetoric—or its telos? For a discussion of telos in the classical realm, we need to look at some of Aristotle’s other works: Physics, Metaphysics, Posterior Analytics. (Some of Aristotle’s most interesting and important statements about rhetoric are not in Rhetoric.) What Aristotle (2006, 194b33) calls the final cause is “the end (telos), that for which a thing is done.” Health is the final cause of walking: a person walks in order to be healthy. Walking is the means; health is the telos.

So what is the telos of rhetoric? For classical rhetoricians it often meant the good of the polis, the civic good. In Panathenaicus (n.d., 12), Isocrates says that the purpose of rhetoric is “the good of the state” and “the needs of the commonwealth.” Cicero’s and Isocrates’s critique of philosophers is that while they may have advanced thinking skills (theoria), they are “not able to contribute to the common good” because they make philosophizing the ends rather than the means. Doctors must have episteme—scientific knowledge of the body and of medical research—but they should never forget that the ultimate object and aim of their art is healthy bodies. Their art requires epistemic knowledge, but their telos is very much situational, located in the healthy body of the patient and the overall public health of the polis. The purpose of the good oratory, according to Cicero in De Oratore (1948, Book I, 34), is to “lead people out of their brutish existence in the wilderness up to a condition of civilization as citizens . . . to give shape to laws, tribunals, and civic rights . . . to uphold the safety of countless individuals and of the entire State.”

The classical rhetoricians—particularly Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian but also, in a way, Aristotle—emphasized this view. And philosophers of praxis have emphasized this approach as well, including Hannah Arendt, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section One: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
• Section Two: Disciplinary and Pedagogical Perspectives
• About the Authors
• Index