Week 1-3. The Enlightenment

The enlightenment paradigm is one of the primary foundationalist paradigms in Western thought, one that continues to shape our thought about language, rhetoric, inquiry, knowledge, value and the arts. The enlightenment paradigm holds that empirical observation and rational analysis provide a secure ground or "foundation" for knowledge of the world; that science offers the most reliable means of apprehending that world; that human reason is a reliable instrument for assessing the truth of nature; that certainty may be found in the laws of mathematics and logic. In this model, the art of rhetoric tends to be looked upon as a means of embellishing literal discourse and often distorting the facts for one's personal advantage.

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Among the nineteenth century figures who challenged the Enlightenment paradigm, Nietzsche is perhaps the most significant, both for the depth and breadth of his critique, and for the influence he has had on subsequent thinkers. Repudiating the positivism of the Enlightenment, and insisting that "facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations," Nietzsche articulates a neosophistic conception of rhetoric, claiming that "Every advance in epistemology and moral thought has reinstated the Sophists." Nietzsche argues that language is inherently rhetorical, consisting of maneuvers or "tropes" made in verbal contests or games; that ostensibly independent "facts" are constructed by partisan rhetors; and that "truths" consist of a mobile army of metaphors and other tropes that audiences are persuaded by.

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Like Nietzsche, Burke maintains that our language is a form of action, anchored not in an objective world but in a rhetorical situation, and that our orientation in such situations may be articulated through the metaphor of drama. All discourse is rhetorical for Burke, and words are "weapons" in our arsenal of symbolic actions. One of Burke's principle instruments for analysis of human discourse is a topos or commonplace he derives from drama, one comprised of the "scene, agent, agency, act and purpose" of any speech act. Using this topos, he examines all forms of human discourse, including works of science and poetry as well as such conventional "rhetorical" texts as legal briefs and political speeches.

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One of the most influential contemporary rhetorical theorists, Derrida advances what he calls "deconstruction," an art of reading and writing that bears a striking resemblance to the art that Plato calls "antilogic." For like antilogic, deconstruction is a means of exposing the assumptions and biases of one's rival, and of articulating one's own views in a way that conceals one's own assumptions. For Derrida, as for Nietzsche and Burke, language does not consist of labels for representing the world, but rather consists of powerful topoi and tropes; and ostensible truths about the world are rhetorically constructed in verbal games.

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Foucault argues that rationality is a cultural construct; that various notions such as madness and sexuality may be best understood by examining the various "discourses" in which they are articulated, rather than by assuming that they are objective "facts" to be examined; and that a "genealogical" method affords a useful way of understanding human experience. "Discourse," for Foucault embodies various ways in which people constitute knowledge, along with other social practices. Discourses are not only modes of thinking and generating meaning; they constitute the very nature of the human body, the mind, and the emotional life of the people who use them.

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Kuhn is important in contemporary rhetorical theory because he treats science as a form of rhetoric, rather than a privileged means of approaching objective truth. Repudiating the Enlightenment paradigm, Kuhn argues that scientists are members of a community, and that their ideas and methods are shaped by a dominant "paradigm" or model of the world. While one paradigm reigns, scientists engage in "normal" science, working out its details and addressing anomalies that it generates. If the anomalies resist such explanation, a scientist may propose a rival paradigm, what Protagoras calls a "weaker logos," to account for them. In such a revolutionary period, scientists defend rival accounts, and the one that is most persuasive to the community of scientists triumphs.

Reading:

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty examines the Enlightenment paradigm in detail, and urges us to abandon it. Opposing the foundationalism of the Enlightenment, he advances an antifoundationalist model of inquiry, truth and value. A postmodern pragmatist, he argues that we construct our world and ourselves in rhetorical "conversations."

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A literary critic and legal scholar, Fish advances an antifoundationalist conception of language, the world and the self.

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Lanham argues that the new electronic media, and especially the computer (and the Web), create a world in which the "rhetorical world view" becomes indescribable. The world of "hypertext" alters traditional notions of textuality; and new notions of the "self" and the "world" become remarkably similar to notions articulated by the Greek Sophists. Landow, similarly, sees electronic communication, and especially hypertext, as embodying and validating many postmodern theories of communication.

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Early in the Spring of 1996, the journal Social Text published an essay suggesting a link in quantum mechanics and postmodernism by Professor Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University. On the day of publication Sokal announced in Lingua Franca that the article had in fact been a hoax. In "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, we find one of the first direct attacks in a major journal against the institution of cultural studies.

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