Persuasion, Reflection, Judgment

Ancillae Vitae

Rodolphe Gasché

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253025852
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Gasché expounds on Aristotle, Heidegger, and Arendt in "a major interpretative achievement that underscores what is at stake in political thought" ( Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews ). As one of the most respected voices of Continental philosophy today, Rodolphe Gasché pulls together Aristotle's conception of rhetoric, Martin Heidegger's debate with theory, and Hannah Arendt's conception of judgment in a single work on the centrality of these themes as fundamental to human flourishing in public and political life. Gasché's readings address the distinctively human space of the public square and the actions that occur there, and his valorization of persuasion, reflection, and judgment reveals new insight into how the philosophical tradition distinguishes thinking from other faculties of the human mind. "Here Rodolphe Gasche is at his best: rigorous, scholarly, creative, forceful, laser focused on the issues at stake, learned, thoughtful, and original. He demands much of his readers, but reading his work is rewarding in ways that can be profoundly affecting." —Dennis J. Schmidt, author of Between Word and Image "Rodolphe Gasche has long been one of the most meticulous readers of texts on the philosophical scene and here he once again offers a master class in how to do philosophy through interpretation." —Robert Bernasconi, author of How to Read Sartre

PART I

PERSUASION (ARISTOTLE)

IN ARISTOTLE SCHOLARSHIP, the Stagirite’s treatise on rhetoric has undergone a peculiar treatment. Not only is it one of the philosopher’s most neglected works, but this neglect has also taken peculiar forms. When it is taken seriously at all, the Rhetoric is considered only after all the other works of the philosopher have been dealt with. Commentators’ uneasiness with the work has been so great that the place usually reserved for it is, once respect has been paid to all of Aristotle’s great works, at the end of their commentaries, in the shape of an acknowledgment, an endnote, as it were, that he deigned also to write this piece. Whereas Aristotle’s other writings are heralded as having (together with those of Plato) incontestably laid the foundations of Western philosophical thought—in particular, through his invention of formal logic, celebrated as a creation of genius—the Rhetoric has been judged to be nothing more than a collection of handbook techniques for orators. According to one recent commentator’s assessment of its treatment, “it has been described as a mishmash of half-baked logic, psychology, and ethics.”¹ Compared to the philosopher’s indispensable theoretical, or scientific works, the scope of this book, because it is about practical matters, is often seen as very limited. As regards the subjects addressed in the treatise, for example, the emotions, their treatment is usually held to lack all scientificity and to be nothing but a rehearsal of popular opinions about them. Aristotle’s “psychology” in the Rhetoric is not even held to be quasi-scientific. Rather, it is said to lack all scientificity whatsoever. This has led Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, for one, to remark that because of such limited psychology, “instead of resembling a quasi scientific treatise on breeding the best, most fertile chickens, the Rhetoric is like a treatise telling farmers how to get ordinary chickens to lay good eggs.”² Indeed, the book’s concern with practical matters has been a serious obstacle to its being taken seriously, even more so since its object is rhetoric, a practical art which, since it became a school discipline in the times of Hellenism and the Middle Ages, has received the thorough contempt of the philosophical establishment. Furthermore, the work has been found to be badly constructed, muddled, obscure, and even inconsistent; its introductory chapter found to contradict all further developments, to have been carelessly assembled; Book III found to have been artificially added to it. Questions about the latter’s authenticity have even been voiced. It has been argued as well that the Rhetoric, as it has been handed down to us, is an unsuccessful conflation of earlier and later views by Aristotle on the art in question. Another cited problem with the treatise is that it leaves the relation of the Rhetoric to all of Aristotle’s other writings unresolved. And last, but not least, many commentators have expressed moral outrage at what they construe as Aristotle’s condescending views regarding common man, who is the target of the art of persuasion, and at the philosopher’s not having shied away from advocating unsavory means to achieve this goal. It is in this spirit that Sir David Ross, after having reviewed all of the philosopher’s works, starting with the Logic and ending with the shortest account of the Rhetoric and Poetics, writes in his Aristotle: “The Rhetoric may seem at first sight to be a curious jumble of literary criticism with second-rate logic, ethics, politics, and jurisprudence, mixed by the cunning of one who knows well how the weaknesses of the human heart are to be played upon. In understanding the book it is essential to bear in mind its purely practical purpose. It is not a theoretical work on any of these subjects; it is a manual for the speaker […] For these reasons we have dealt very briefly with this book.”³ Not only did Ross postpone any discussion of the work until the end of his book on Aristotle, but, what is more, the editors of the 1831 Berlin Academy edition of Aristotle had already put it at the end of their edition. As Heidegger muses: “They did not know what to do with it, so they put it at the end.”⁴ Heidegger thus explains that the philosophical tradition has long lost any understanding of the original sense of rhetoric. Holding Aristotle in such high esteem, the editors, clearly embarrassed by the fact that the great philosopher had assented to write a piece that “is the end,” had thus no choice but to put his “impossible” work on rhetoric, in an edition moreover that sought to achieve completeness, at the very end of the edition. But has the very place where the Rhetoric thus ended up sealed its fate?

In Being and Time, Heidegger remarks, in passing, as it were, that “contrary to the traditional orientation, according to which rhetoric is conceived as the kind of thing we ‘learn in school,’” in short as a kind of “discipline,” Aristotle’s Rhetoric “must be taken as the first systematic hermeneutics of the everydayness of Being with one another,” which is also part of “publicness, as the kind of Being which belongs to the ‘they.’”⁵ This reference to Aristotle’s treatise as the “first systematic hermeneutics of the everydayness of Being with one another” signals a different approach, an assessment of the work in question different than the one that had until then prevailed in Aristotle scholarship. But until the recent publication of Heidegger’s lectures from 1924, Fundamental Concepts of Aristotelean Philosophy, devoted in large part to a commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to gauge the sense of Heidegger’s aside in Being and Time, and in particular the kind of new interpretation of the Rhetoric that it presupposes. From these lectures of 1924 it is clear that a novel interpretation of what it means for the human being to be a being endowed with speech guides Heidegger’s interest in Aristotle’s treatise. According to Heidegger, in the fourth century the “Greeks lived in discourse” and “were completely situated under dominion of language” to such a degree that “being-there was so burdened with babble” that it required Plato’s and Aristotle’s “total efforts […] to be serious about the possibility of science.”⁶ The reappraisal of the Rhetoric that the incidental remark from 1928 suggests presupposes, according to the 1924 lectures, a different conception of speaking than the one familiar to us moderns. Defining the human being as a being capable of speech presupposes a Greek’s understanding of logos, or speaking, Heidegger contends, which is primarily a speaking-with-one-another, “a reckoning-speaking about that which is conducive” to human beings in their world.⁷ Furthermore, the specifically Greek understanding of logos as, first of all, a speaking with one another as Heidegger highlights in his commentary on the Rhetoric in the lectures in question, implies an acknowledgment of a certain originariness of publicity (Öffentlichkeit). Indeed, given Heidegger’s usually derogatory remarks on this topic, one may also find to one’s surprise a much more favorable treatment of publicity and publicness in these lectures.

Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Aristotelean Philosophy sought to wrench a new understanding of the Rhetoric from the then dominant Aristotle scholarship. His reinterpretation of the work in question owes, in my view, a great deal to Nietzsche’s early lectures on the Greek art of oratory. However, Heidegger seems to have been unaware of Cope’s 1867 An Introduction to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, whose commentary defines the goal of rhetoric in a manner that supports Heidegger’s assessment in sometimes surprising ways. Let me also point out that during the last fifty years a variety of studies have appeared in which philosophers have begun to reclaim Aristotle’s Rhetoric for philosophy. Although unaware of Heidegger’s early lectures on the subject, many of the findings in question broadly confirm Heidegger’s analyses. The object of this part of the book is not to explore Heidegger’s novel interpretation of the treatise. If, however, I mention Heidegger here, it is to indicate that it is his remark in Being and Time on the connection of the hermeneutics of Dasein to Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric that motivated me to take on Aristotle’s treatise to begin with; it is also to acknowledge that some of the emphases I put on certain issues in my interpretation are certainly owed to my reading of Heidegger’s 1924 lectures.

In the first three chapters of this book I seek to bring to light the theoretical cornerstones of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. I do not claim that Aristotle’s work is entirely without difficulties. But I hope that once the theoretical framework of the treatise is established, it will become clear that no fundamental problems haunt this work to the point of putting its unity into question. The difficulties that one may encounter in reading the Rhetoric are not intractable, especially if one pays careful attention to the organization of the work. Above all, however, I hope that by elaborating in a close reading of the first three chapters of Book I on the theoretical building blocks of the treatise, I have further contributed to relocating the Rhetoric from a place at the end—a place that is a dead end to be sure—to a place that is, philosophically speaking, much more central, one, indeed, that directly concerns us today in that it is about being together with one another. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is the art—a very fragile art, as we will see—of how to address our most vital concerns in the most lively form of being with one another in the practice of speaking with one another.

1

A TRUTH RESEMBLING TRUTH

WHEREAS IN THE TOPICS, which is closely associated with the Rhetoric, Aristotle clearly names his addressee, namely, students of philosophy, he does not specify for whom the Rhetoric is intended.¹ This alone is reason enough not to call this work a technical handbook for rhetoricians, as it has been, and still is by most of the commentators. I do not deny that the Rhetoric also contains advice for students about public speaking; it certainly does so. But right from the beginning, Aristotle takes issue with previous compilers of “arts” of rhetoric who have, as he argues, “provided us with only a small portion of this art” in that they have elaborated only on what is accessory to an art of rhetoric. In this way, he is also putting in question the conception of rhetoric as an art that is based on what is extraneous to rhetoric. One must distinguish, then, between the handbooks for rhetoric written by the technographers, “which chiefly devote their attention to matters outside the subject,” and what Aristotle will propose in terms of an art of rhetoric (5).² Even if we agree that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is addressed to would-be rhetoricians, and hence is a technical handbook of sorts, this technical consideration only occupies one part of the text. Still, the distinction made between what is outside the subject of rhetoric and what is essential to it, requires Aristotle’s Rhetoric to be twofold. He writes “that Rhetoric is composed of analytical science and of that branch of political science which is concerned with Ethics” (41); it must be composed of a part that deals with the human being’s ability of logical (syllogistic) reasoning, and another part, on character, virtue, and the emotions (17–18). It is this analytical dimension of the work concerned with reasoning and rhetoric’s argumentative dimension that I will seek to engage above all. If Aristotle’s Rhetoric is an art, it is not only an art entirely different from that of his predecessors who have exclusively focused on the pathe “for the arousing of prejudice, compassion, anger, and similar emotions” (5) with the primary intent of influencing the jurors, but also, because it is based above all on the human’s capability for logical reasoning, it is, for the first time, an art of logos, an art of speaking.

As also becomes clear right from the beginning of the treatise, the art of rhetoric that Aristotle will propose is not only an art distinct from all the previous so-called arts of rhetoric in that it is based on rhetorical argument, it is also the only art of the human faculty of speaking with one another that is suitable to a well-policed state. In a city, such as Athens, that is well administered, where well-enacted laws define as much as possible, and leave as little as possible to the discretion of the judges, there is nothing left for a rhetorician whose only object is to influence the jurors. Such laws require that during trials the litigant only address the subject matter and “prove that the fact in question is or is not so, that it has happened or not”; they are forbidden to speak “outside the subject,” as, for instance, when seeking to arouse “prejudice, compassion, anger, and similar emotions [that have] no connexion with the matter in hand, but [are] directed only to the dicast” (5), the dicast being a citizen eligible to sit as a judge—that is, the juror. In a well-administered state, rhetoric will have to be an art in Aristotle’s sense, in that, in such a state, its function is limited to providing proof of whether the subject deliberated in a court happened or did not happen, is going to happen or not, or is or is not true, leaving it to the juror to decide whether this is so or not. In a well-governed state where the legislators have defined all issues as precisely as possible, such a decision by the judge as to whether a thing has happened or not, is going to happen or not, is or is not so, is the only thing left to the judge’s discretion, and rhetoric consists precisely in nothing more and nothing less than providing the judge with proof, or reasons, that speak for or against what is under consideration. To accomplish this the rhetorician needs to be “a master of rhetorical argument,” that is, to excel in the art of speaking as an art of argumentation (7).

Plato, in Gorgias, famously compared rhetoric to cookery: “Sophistic is to legislation what beautification is to gymnastics, and rhetoric to justice what cookery is to medicine.”³ Consequently, when Aristotle opens his treatise with the claim that “Rhetoric is a counterpart of Dialectic,” Dialectic being a discipline that subjects opinions on general issues to a rational examination, rhetoric is raised to a status not only well beyond cookery, but also beyond the accusation, in other Platonic dialogues, of being no art at all, or at best one for deceiving an audience (3). Let me recall here that the Greek term antistrophos, rendered in English as “counterpart,” is a term that designates a relation of analogy.⁴ To understand in a more precise manner what the analogy between dialectic and rhetoric implies, I continue to quote from the beginning of the treatise. To his initial remark that rhetoric and dialectic are counterparts, Aristotle adds: “for both have to do with matters that are in a manner within the cognizance of all men and not confined to any special science. Hence all men in a manner have a share of both; for all, up to a certain point, endeavor to criticize or uphold an argument, to defend themselves or to accuse” (3). Aristotle stresses here only what both rhetoric and dialectic have in common, what distinguishes them from the sciences, which have their own domain, and of which only the scientists are knowledgeable, but he offers very little about their difference from one another. Both dialectic and rhetoric have this in common: they deal with matters of which all men are cognizant and thus also address a knowledge and a capability that is shared by all men. In distinction from the sciences (and philosophy) they are clearly practices of everyday life. Now, these things of which all men are cognizant, are, as we will see, everything they can have an opinion about. The way all men are cognizant of these matters is hinted at when Aristotle remarks that all men “up to a certain point, endeavor to criticize or uphold an argument, [and] to defend themselves or to accuse” (3). To speak of rhetoric as being analogous to the dialogical examination of arguments, whether in front of students or in a dispute that I have with myself about an argument, asking myself questions to which I must stand answers, is to uphold, against Plato’s indictment of it as being no better than cookery, rhetoric’s rational and argumentative nature. It is also to suggest from the start that rhetoric is about truth, a truth that, in distinction from the special subject domains of the sciences, pertains to those things of which all men are cognizant. Finally, although Aristotle does not explicitly address the differences between rhetoric and dialectic, the truth in question, as will become clear hereafter, is one that is a function of public deliberation.

If, apart from having the before mentioned points in common, dialectic and rhetoric are also different, it is because of a difference that concerns the way in which they dispute about issues, the nature of argumentation proper to each. The arguments that are the object of dialogical dispute are mainly arguments about general issues upheld by an opponent. Furthermore, whereas dialectic regards any issue as only probable and thus open to discussion as a sort of intellectual contest with an adversary with the goal of defeating the opponent, rhetoric deals with opinions about things that are of vital concern to the citizens in the polis and are thus discussed in public speech. Whereas dialectic argumentation could even take place, as Cope puts it, “in a man’s own brain and in his own study,” hence in a private way of using language, rhetoric discusses opinions on vital issues to the community and is from the start a form of public speech.⁵ It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Persuasion (Aristotle)
• Part II. Reflection (Heidegger)
• Part III. Judgment (Arendt)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index