Rhetoric in European Culture and Beyond

Jirí Kraus

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9788024630427
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Rhetoric in European and World Culture traces the position of rhetoric in cultural and educational systems from ancient times to the present. Here, Jirí Kraus examines rhetoric's decline in importance in a period of rationalism and enlightenment, presents the causes of negative connotations of rhetoric, and explains why rhetoric in the twentieth century regained its prestige.Kraus demonstrates that the reputation of rhetoric falls when it is reduced to a refined method for deceiving the public and increases when it is seen as a scientific discipline that is used throughout all of the fields of the humanities. In this sense, the author argues, rhetoric strives for universal recognition and the cultivation of rhetorical expression, spoken and written, including not only its production but also reception and interpretation.

1. THE ORIGIN OF RHETORIC IN ANCIENT GREECE

THE SEARCH FOR TECHNÉ

The capacity to use the power of words to tell a story and to persuade others was highly respected throughout antiquity, the foundation of European education. Although the spread of the word and concept of rhētorikē, rhetoric, was associated with Plato’s dialogues, rhetorical skills were esteemed as early as the Homeric period of Greek history. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the rhētēr, rhetor, also sometimes called the rhétér mythōn, the narrator of ancient stories, was a highly regarded authority, who could, like the sage Nestor, speak in public, give advice, captivate, win general consent and admiration. This is also related to the words rhēsis, rhētra, speaking, narration, utterance, speech discourse, and rhētos which refers to what has been said, uttered, or named. Rhetoric was the art of mastering the word, logos, as well as a discipline which rationally reflected on the different uses of the logos, captured its laws and attempted to codify them through an arranged set of rules.

Documents regarding life in ancient Greece and the earliest references to political and judicial speeches make manifest that the rise of rhetoric as a discipline focusing on technē, persuasive speech making, is many decades older. It is particularly Thucydides’s History of The Peloponnesian War which demonstrates that ancient politicians and military leaders made speeches. This is undoubtedly true of Pericles’s speech over the fallen (epitafios logos) during the war’s first year. The authenticity of the preserved extract is, however, questionable and it was likely the subject matter of later stylization. Speeches by politicians and leaders, which very likely lacked written preparation, were thus preserved only in paraphrase. In Phaedrus, Plato uses the character of Phaedrus to claim that: “. . . the greatest and most influential statesmen are ashamed of writing speeches and leaving them in a written form, lest they should be called Sophists by posterity” (Plat. Phaedrus 235). On the other hand, speeches delivered in court were preserved in many collections and their authorship ascribed to famous logographers. These speeches, often recognized as practical models for further speech making, were preserved in libraries and even traded. Oldest among the canon of ancient orators was Antiphon of Ramnos (ca. 480–411 BCE), a supporter of the oligarchic Four Hundred government, which was later overthrown. His works were compiled by Caecilius of Calacte at the beginning of the modern era. Three of his court speeches concerning murders, along with 15 speeches written for other occasions, have been preserved in full and another 60 are known of either from fragments or by name. Antiphon was also possibly the first orator who preserved his court speeches in writing and sold them for money, as was ironically noted in Aristophanes’s comedy The Wasps (422 BCE).

From the outset, however, rhetoric did not include all speech functions, and instead primarily focused on those aiming to influence the audience at a particular moment and through particular circumstances surrounding the speech. It was the orator’s task to take advantage of anything that could help persuade the audience in the given situation. The earliest teachers of rhetoric did not merely formulate the principles of an effective speech, but also persuaded the audience that these principles could be learnt at school. The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka characterized the dissemination of ancient rhetoric in the following manner: “Educating people to enable them to engage in political life, to provide them with an instrument for success in this life primarily meant teaching them rhetorical skills, teaching them the power of speech.”⁶

Since its outset, rhetoric has been based on two fundamental prerequisites: freedom of speech, parrēsia, and freedom to act, which allowed the audience to lean towards the most persuasive of the possible behavioural variants, towards the best of presented arguments, without being forced to take a particular stance. Rhetoric thus does not concern the domain of irrefutable knowledge, apodeixis, or threats and verbal violence, instead it focuses on the area of opinion, doxa. Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium illustrated the difference between dialectic, whose realm consists of irrefutable propositions, and rhetoric, which seeks what appears probable (eikos), by comparing the symbol of a firmly closed fist (a succession of logical proofs) with the symbol of an open hand (the strategic arrangement of rhetorical arguments). The etymology of the Greek words peithein, to persuade, and pistis, persuasion, are close in meaning to the Latin word fides, faith, clearly expressing the extent of freedom and personal involvement which distinguishes the subject matter of rhetoric from what a man perceives as necessary and thus immutable. The etymology of the Latin verb persuadere, to persuade, provides yet another perspective on the essence of rhetoric: the assumed Indo-European basis svadūs, sweet, pleasing (corresponding to the Slavic root sladk-, English sweet or German süss), evokes an activity related to delight and intoxicating illusion, something rhetoric has been reproached for since Plato’s time.

The prestige of an appropriately delivered speech and, to the same degree, an awareness of the effects of words, cultivated by reciting rhapsodies and ancient drama, these are the foundations from which rhetoric sprouted in the 5^th century. Impulses for its formation arose from two significant political transformations within Greek society: from Ephialtes’s justice reform and Cleisthenes’s democratic constitution, which enacted a new system of city administration. Both changes caused an unprecedented surge in civic activities fundamentally connected with increased demands for political and judicial oratory.

These demands became manifest most notably in judicial practice. In 462 BCE, Ephialtes, the leader of the democratic party in Athens, introduced the institution of jury and appellate courts, hēliaia, which replaced the judicial power of the traditional aristocratic council, areopagus. After the establishment of hēliaia, the traditional aristocratic council which was made up of life-members, archons, it was assigned the duty of making decisions concerning capital crimes. The hēliaia had 6,000 drawn jurors (hēliastai) who made decisions in councils (discateria), with the number of jurors for individual hearings ranging from 201 to 1501. They did not have any specialized judicial education and could only be informed about the case from the speeches delivered by the prosecution and defence. The jurors had to swear that they would be impartial (homoios) and that they would not allow personal relationships or animosities to affect their judgement. The prosecutor and defendant were not only to provide a convincing description of the case, but also to apply and interpret any pertinent laws. In each lawsuit, views and opinions were to be presented by the individual and nobody was allowed representation. The only help to be used was that of a paid expert, logographer, who wrote the speech and rehearsed its delivery with the client.

This was the origin of the oldest types of court speeches (dikanikon genos): accusation (katēgoria) and defence (apologia). As Aristotle states (Rhet. 1359b), they concern actions that have or have not occurred in the past and it is the role of the hēliastic court to judge these actions from a legal perspective as just (dikaion) or unjust (adikon). This genre may be exemplified in the literary form represented in both Apologies of Socrates (Sōkratous apologia) by Plato and Xenophon, and the Sophist Polycrates’s Prosecution of Socrates (Sōkratous katēgoria).

The most typical expression of Athenian democracy was advisory political oratory (to symbuleutikon genos). In his stylistics textbook, Dionysius of Halicarnassus defines rhetoric as dynamis technikē pithanou logou en pragmati politiko telos echousa to eu legein (an artistic faculty of persuasive discourse in political matters, having the goal of speaking well). Political rhetoric in Athens was used at assemblies (ekklēsia), in which all citizens of good character participated at least forty times a year. The themes of such political speeches concerned the future, and it was the assembled citizens’ task to judge their content with respect to what appeared beneficial (ōfelimon) or harmful (anofelēs) to the community. Demosthenes’ Speech Against Philip the Macedon is a clear representation of the harsh polemic genre of political speeches.

The above-mentioned genres, which R. Volkmann, the author of a synthetic history of ancient rhetoric (1895), calls pragmatikon, are contrasted with the epideictic oratory (to epideiktikon genos), that is, celebratory and defamatory speeches. They are characterized by their level of literacy, a focus on the aesthetic value of the speech and occasionally even a certain playfulness and jocularity related to the topic, often strikingly trivial or employing unusual linguistic or stylistic means as an intentionally stylized counterpoint to the seriousness of the speech. There are two types of epideictic speeches: praise (epainos) and denigration (psogos). They focus on what the orator considers beautiful (kalon) or ugly and ripe for condemnation (aischron). The epideictic genre included panegyrik, the praise of public figures, institutions and community virtues, enkomion, those more intimate praises usually delivered during feasts, epithalamion, speeches given at weddings, genethliakon, a speech delivered to mark a birthday, and epitafios logos, a funeral oration. Many of these were designed primarily to win favour, to promote (protreptikon logos, from the Greek work protrepō, to urge, win someone for something) and it was their task to entice a liking for various people, sciences, arts, philosophical views and other matters.

It was this epideictic genre that gave rise to the association, which has been raised and condemned so frequently over the course of history, of rhetoric with verbal magic, the irrationality of affecting through speech and creating illusions. In The Republic, Plato claims that the desire to create apatē, an illusion, among the audience, is what rhetoric and magic have in common. Rhetoric as a rationally developed skill, technē, is contrasted with the commonly used and misused view of speech which acts like a powerful ruler (dynastēs megas) capable of manipulating people, akin to deceit inspired by unearthly beings (entheos epoidos), magical power (dynamis) and sorcery (goēteia). Both principles, the factual and magical, are ever-present in the semantic field of rhetoric and the contradiction between them inspires numerous reflections on the role of the word in human community.

The modern view of rhetoric’s history is marked by significant changes in the perception of the role of celebratory speeches in ancient society. They were originally perceived as unimportant as they did not urge the audience to make weighty decisions or engage in activities, as was the case with judicial and political speeches, but merely to think about methods used in depicting the topic and the aesthetic values of the linguistic means employed. This effectively made the orators’ role closer to that of playwrights or actors. Epideictic speeches also generally lacked the controversial character of opposing views, and the listener was not enthralled by the duel of ideas, agōn, but rather by the speaker’s stylistic virtuosity, sometimes lapsing into mannerism. A speech delivered on a festive occasion became a social ritual. In ritual, what is said is necessarily subservient both to the moment and time in which it is said and the methods the speaker uses to convey this. Speech in itself becomes an important social act, and it is through this act that the audience realizes the cohesion of its shared values, which combine to delineate the community’s fate and future. The epideictic genre gave birth to Greek patriotism and awakened the awareness of allegiance to their ancestors’ ideas while simultaneously pinning their hopes in the generations to come. The epideictic genre may be illustrated by Thucydides’s impressive rendition of Pericles’s funeral oration over the fallen in the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 2.36).

Due to the emergent social reality, free Greek citizens had no choice but to face the pressing need to learn the art of oration, to master the most important tool for political success – logos, the art to prove, the power of speech. This task was assumed by travelling teachers of rhetoric, Sophists (sofistai, promoters of the principles of practical wisdom), who innovated teaching, being the first to charge fees. In Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates claims he “knew of a single man, Protagoras, who made more out of his craft than the illustrious Pheidias, who created such noble works, or any ten other statuaries” (91d). What and how Sophists taught we only know from their opponents, as it was they who, in their works, preserved statements of the earliest Sophist exponents, albeit in escalated or ironical form. Harsh condemnations of Sophists and their concept of rhetoric is an omnipresent theme throughout Plato’s dialogues, who thus stands at the outset of long-term conflict between rhetoric and philosophy. In reality, however, the contradiction between the Sophists’ epistemological relativism and the constant realm of Plato’s ideas attest to the fact that this concerns a conflict within philosophy itself which has continued to the present day.

Only recently have researchers such as Hans Blumenberg⁷ credited the Sophist merit with turning the attention of Greek philosophy from cosmogonic and metaphysical questions to everyday problems and free discussions on civic matters. Blumenberg realized that as long as man strove to grasp the world in its totality through philosophy and as long as he needed to reassure himself of the existence of the unchangeable metaphysical truth, sophistry must have represented a deterrent careless error in the matters of spiritual life and morals.

PROTAGORAS’S AGONISTIC RHETORIC

Considering that rhetoric coalesced as a discipline relatively late, the teaching of Protagoras of Abdera, representative of the first generation of Sophists (some believe he lived between 485–415 BCE, others between 500–430 BCE), are not associated with rhetoric as technē, but rather with the fact that this philosopher, for the first time in history, examined language, logos, as an independent subject of research. Language loses its seemingly unproblematic nature and becomes an important tool of framing strategic behaviour. Protagoras does not consider meaning to be the reflection of an unchanging concept of a thing, rather that it takes on its own life and changes in the process of communication and interpretation. In his teaching, Protagoras thus anticipated the thesis that the use of language is not a neutral and transparent reflection of inherent semantics, but is instead intentional or unintentional influencing, which is part of the battle (agōn) between the two participants in a controversy. This leads to an interest in cultivating dialectic skills in a discourse which manipulates words and potentially even transform their meanings to their very opposite. This manipulation is applied in monologues as well as in solving a problem through dialogue, asking short, and often artful and leading questions, which later came to be known as the Sokratikos logos.

Protagoras believed that rhetorical and political skills (aretē) could be acquired through systematic teaching and practice. This idea could be fully developed only after rhetoric had elaborated its own system based on the arrangement of speech, the semiotic relation between the form and meaning of words, as well as the laws of dialectics. Protagoras favoured analogy as a method of argumentation.

Protagoras made a special contribution to Sophistic rhetoric with his three claims. The first is the homo mensura maxim, the second is the notion of duo logoi and, finally, the claim that an orator must be able to “make the weaker argument appear the stronger.”

Czech philosopher Jan Patočka sees the importance of Protagoras’s claim that “man is the measure of all things (pantōn tōn chrēmatōn anthrōpos metron estin); of things that are not, that they are not; of things that are that they are” in that “no matter what one chooses from reality, no matter whether he means it in this or the opposite manner, every opinion will always be legitimate in it.”⁸ This potential for conflict is developed by another of Protagoras’s claims: every argument can be met with a counterargument (dissoi logoi). However, this does not mean that both arguments are of equal value. An orator has to ensure that the argument he supports does not ultimately end in a disadvantage, even though it may be or seem to be weaker. This is the origin of Protagoras’s frequently criticized requirement ton hettō logon kreitō poein, to make a weaker argument stronger. The attribute “weaker” does not necessarily mean, as Protagoras in particular and Sophists in general were reproached, that it is a false argument or an argument that is morally unjustifiable. On the other hand, logos may become weaker due to various external and unfavourable circumstances. “And this is where the importance of rhetoric, the art of orator’s logos, lies: making the issue at stake valid under any circumstances,”⁹ says Patočka highlighting Protagoras’s “lawyer’s mentality” and “lawyer’s philos...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Origin of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece
• 2. Hellenistic and Roman Rhetoric
• 3. Rhetoric and Medieval Christian Culture
• 4. From Humanism to the Enlightenment
• 5. Baroque Rhetoric in Service of the Church
• 6. Scholarly Community Replaced by the Republic of Letters. Philosophy versus Rhetoric at the Threshhold of a New Era
• 7. Taste Norms and Criteria in 18th-Century Rhetoric
• 8. Rhetoric in the 19th Century
• 9. RHETORIC IN THE 20TH CENTURY
• 10. Other Rhetorical Theories and Other Cultures
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Name Index