Political Theory between Philosophy and Rhetoric

Politics as Transcendence and Contingency

Giuseppe Ballacci

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781349952939
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the significance of rhetoric from the perspective of its complex relationship with philosophy. It demonstrates how this relationship gives expression to a basic tension at the core of politics: that between the contingency of its happening and the transcendence toward which it strives.

The first part of the study proposes a reassessment of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric, as it was discussed by Plato, Aristotle, and above all Cicero and Quintilian, who ambitiously attempted to bring them together creating an ideal that is at the roots of the humanist tradition. It then moves to twentieth-century political theory and shows how the questions that emerge from that quarrel still strongly resonate in the works of key thinkers such as H. Arendt, L. Strauss, and R. Rorty.

The volume thus offers an original contribution that locates itself at the intersection of politics, rhetoric, and philosophy.

© The Author(s) 2018

Giuseppe BallacciPolitical Theory between Philosophy and RhetoricRhetoric, Politics and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95293-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Giuseppe Ballacci¹

(1)

University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

End Abstract

According to the ancient tradition of rhetoric, one of the most important moments in the composition of a discourse is that of inventio: the discovery of the argumentative premises from which to start developing the discourse. The search for these premises was considered to be a creative and ingenious process of looking over usual arguments, or common places (also known in rhetoric as “topics of invention”, from the Greek topoi, which means places), in order to locate the resources to construct one’s own discourse. Ingenuity and creativity were considered necessary skills in this process, because only through them can we find unexpected and unusual connections between apparently distant questions and develop new arguments. In ancient rhetoric this process was systematized into a method known as ars topica. Rhetoricians believed that this art has to be accompanied by another—ars critica—which submits to critical analysis the arguments found in order to check their logical consistency. Giambattista Vico, one of last exponents of the long tradition of rhetoric, explained that these two arts should go together, because without one the other would have been crippled. Ars topica, as he said, “finds and amasses” while ars critica “divides and removes.”¹ Nevertheless for him the former had a certain priority, since as he wrote in the Scienza Nuova it is:

an art of regulating well the primary operation of our mind by noting the commonplaces that must all be run over in order to know all there is in a thing that one desires to know well, that is, completely.²

Vico stressed in particular the creative aspect of ars topica. For him this art has the great merit of making minds inventive and providing discourse the breadth and fecundity typical of a cultivated intellect. A discourse developed through ars topica, Vico said, is one that gives the impression of not having left anything relevant out of it.³

Looking at the debate in contemporary democratic deliberation and legitimacy, it seems that some of those involved have made a good use of ars topica, recovering central insights of that tradition of which this art is a part: rhetoric. Indeed, in the last two decades, an increasing number of theorists have turned to the ancient tradition of rhetoric to find arguments to overcome the hyper-rationalist paradigms of public deliberation. They have recovered ancient rhetoric (mainly Aristotle’s version of rhetoric), in order to find support for developing a better account of democratic deliberation: less biased in evaluating the role of extra-rational mechanisms of communication and judgment, and more attentive to the different forms they take according to their aims and contexts. It is a new and growing trend that has been labelled by one of its exponents, Bryan Garsten, a “rhetoric revival in political theory.”⁴ In effect, as Garsten himself recognizes, the rhetoric revival in political theory is much broader than that observed in the debate on deliberative democracy. It is a trend that has to be located in a much more general cultural and philosophical context, going back to the first part of the twentieth century, which saw the primacy of the category of truth questioned and, simultaneously, the linguistic character of reality vindicated. This new context has clearly been vital to the development of a renewed sensibility for the rhetorical aspects of society and culture and thus permits rhetoric, with its exceedingly long tradition, (re)emerge from the depths of discredit to which it descended with the consolidation of the rationalist and positivist principles of modernity.⁵

Today there is a vast panoply of ways that rhetorical categories and concepts are employed and studied in different areas of the social sciences and humanities. And a great variety of references to rhetoric is also visible in the domain of political science or, more specifically, of political theory, which is the domain in which this book is located. For instance, scholars such as Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli, in their attempt to revive the republican tradition, have also recovered rhetoric as the central component of that tradition.⁶ Skinner, furthermore, has combined Austin and Wittgenstein’s views on language as a kind of action with the insights of ancient rhetoric to elaborate a new methodology for the history of ideas. Here ideas are seen not only as abstract descriptions or appraisals of some state of affairs, but also as instruments and tools to be employed strategically in an ideological and political debate.⁷ A poststructuralist thinker such as Ernesto Laclau has come to explain the ontological structure of society in terms of a rhetorical, or more specifically tropological, process of transposing meanings.⁸ Rhetoric has also been proposed by other theorists as the basis to a new conceptual framework for the study of politics, which gives prominence to its ideological, linguistic, and strategic dimensions.⁹ Or there have been theorists who have employed insights from ancient rhetoric to inquiry into the nature of judgment and practical reason in politics¹⁰; or to assess populism by drawing parallelisms between it and ancient demagoguery.¹¹ Finally, this new rhetorical sensibility has inspired a number of works on rhetoric and the history of political thought.¹²

This cursory overview demonstrates that today rhetoric is amply used and recognized in the domain of political science and political theory. Nevertheless, I think that a creative exercise of ars topica in relation to the arguments and insights provided by the tradition of ancient rhetoric is certainly still possible. In this book I propose an exercise of that kind by exploring the significance for political theory of rhetoric from the perspective of its debate with philosophy. My aim is to bring to the fore how that debate gave expression to a tension which lies at the very core of politics: that between the contingency in which politics occurs and the transcendence toward which it strives. The relation between these two dimensions of politics is tense but necessary, and in it rhetoric can play the crucial role of a mediating force. The quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric is a central episode not only in the history of the two disciplines, but more in general for the development of western culture. Stanley Fish, for instance, has written that “the history of Western thought could be written as the history of this quarrel.” For him we can see there a sort of original confrontation between two opposite ways of thinking: a “foundational thought” and a “rhetorical one.” This confrontation engendered a series of dichotomies—“inner/outer, deep/surface, essential/peripheral, reason/passion, things/words, realities/illusions, fact/opinion, neutral/partisan”—that according to him have marked the development of our culture ever since.¹³ Fish is referring here to two opposing positions that can be identified respectively with Plato and the sophists. It is one of the aims of this book, however, to show that the relation between philosophy and rhetoric can be, if never completely unproblematic, less binary and more collaborative. In order to do this, I will leave aside the position of the sophists and concentrate on three other great interpreters of the rhetorical tradition: Aristotle, and above all Cicero and Quintilian. Each of them can be said to take a middle ground between Plato and the sophists, to the extent that each defended rhetoric but at the same time didn’t repudiate the ‘pole’ of philosophy. Beyond them, however, I will need to engage with Plato’s attack on rhetoric. It is that attack, in effect, that came to constitute the framework in which the relation between philosophy and rhetoric was generally assessed after him.

My analysis of Plato and Aristotle’s conceptions of rhetoric will be presented in Chap. 2, while that of Cicero and Quintilian will be found in Chap. 3. Chapter 2 starts with a brief historical reconstruction of the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece. After that I take in consideration, first, Plato’s famous critique of rhetoric and, then, move on to Aristotle to discuss his theory of rhetoric as the first systematization of the art of speaking. Plato’s critique of rhetoric testifies to the relevance of the pole of transcendence in politics. It is an attack made in the name of an ethical and political necessity to transcend conventions by pursuing absolute knowledge. Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric, on the other hand, offers the first systematic defence of the art by way of a revaluation of contingency as the specific realm of human affairs. In his view rhetoric represents one of the most important forms of the kind of reason proper to this realm: practical reason. Chapter 2 might be considered an introductory chapter. Its main function in the general argument of the book is to demonstrate how the dimensions of transcendence and contingency correspond to philosophy and rhetoric. In Chap. 3 I move to Cicero’s ideal of the perfect orator and the ‘formative’ process, as it is described in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. The figure of the perfect orator is for Cicero the incarnation of his ideal combination of philosophy and rhetoric or, to use his words, of wisdom and eloquence. This chapter is the most important to the argument of the book, since it is dedicated to one of the most compelling attempts to combine, through rhetoric, the transcendent and contingent dimensions of politics. In Cicero’s view rhetoric assumes a central role because it is considered the skill to make theoretical knowledge bear on practice and practical experience bear on theory, thereby creating an adequate communicative interaction between the two realms. The ideal associated with the figure of the perfect orator is one of the founding elements of humanism and in it rhetoric came to assume arguably the highest status it has ever attained. As a formative model, its aim is the creation of a broad, enlarged individual, in which the two poles in the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric—reason and emotions, theory and practice, impartiality and partisanship, etc.—are made to coexist. It is an idea that shows at the same time that the question of rhetoric goes far beyond the theme of public deliberation, bringing to the fore an existential dimension: the question of the best form of life. For Cicero the best form of life is the combination of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, which can be reached only through, and in, perfect eloquence. The process to acquiring this ability is for him one of both self-cultivation, achieved through the pursuit of an encyclopedic wisdom, and civic education. As I will argue, in this way the figure of the perfect orator helps us re-think the relation between the ‘existential’ and the ‘political’ by conceiving the human good in terms of ‘communicative’ virtues.

The first two chapters constitute the first part of the book. In the second part I will move to modern political theory. Here the question discussed in the first part will be deepened by engaging with three influential twentieth-century theorists: Leo Strauss, Richard Rorty, and Hannah Arendt. This operation may seem questionable at first sight. First of all, because of the temporal gap that exists between these thinkers and ancient rhetoric. Second, because neither Strauss, nor Rorty, nor Arendt has ever really discussed at length rhetoric as a tradition of political thinking. Nevertheless what I hope to demonstrate is that a dialectical relationship between the transcendent and contingent sides of politics, with rhetoric operating as a mediating force, can be found playing a central role in their political theories. Strauss, Rorty, and Arendt in effect provide quite different understandings of the ideas of transcendence, contingency, and of their relationship, and hence also of rhetoric as a mediating force. But, in a sense, they all testify to the relevance of that tension within politics between the contingency in which it occurs and the impulse to transcend what is given (what is given could be false opinions, as in Strauss, or one’s own self-image, as in Rorty, or the mute mechanical repetitions of nature, as in Arendt). Furthermore all of them believe that rhetoric—here broadly understood as the capacity to master communication—is essential to mediate that tension. In this sense recovering the ancient quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric can be considered an exerci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 1. Part I
• 2. Part II
• Backmatter