1. The Current Disparagement of Rhetoric

I propose that rhetoric be seen as an heuristic art, an art of inquiry that enables us to articulate problems and potential solutions in practical way.

To make such a claim for rhetoric today is to invite either ridicule or distrust, for in the popular and philosophic mind rhetoric is construed as either a vacuous mode of stylistic ornamentation or an invidious art of deception. In the popular mind, rhetoric is not seen as an essential component of inquiry, but rather a kind of parasitic pursuit that distorts or undermines meaningful inquiry and communication.

Rather than seeking for the truth, the rhetorician is seen as engaging in deception, concealing or disguising the truth for his own personal advantage. A rhetorical question, for example, is not a real question posed in the conduct of inquiry, but simply a device used for its effect on an audience. Thus W. B. Yeats claims that the sentimentalist deceives himself, the rhetorician deceives others. Rather than attempting to create beauty, the rhetorical writer is seen as writing solely for effect; for jerking tears from a sentimental audience through a love story, or conversely making style an end in itself, forsaking the clean, well-lighted prose of a Hemingway for the figurative proliferation of the pompous orator. And rather than aiming at the good, the rhetor is taken to be concerned only with his own profits the highly sophisticated pusher of tobacco doesn’t care about the health of his audience, but only for his own personal gain.

The philosophical attack on rhetoric parallels and reinforces this popular mistrust. The rhetor is not in search of truth, because he sees all truth as perspectival, subjective and relative. Man is the measure of all things, and what is true is the opinion we are persuaded to believe. Nor is the rhetor concerned with beauty, given that beauty is no more than personal preference or taste, resting solely in the eye of the beholder. And rather than aiming at the good or the socially just, the rhetor attempts only to satisfy his own egoistic will-to-power.

These popular and philosophical conceptions of rhetoric are deeply entrenched in our society, most notably perhaps in the curricula of our educational system. For although we teach both grammar and logic, we have few courses in rhetoric as an art of inquiry. When we do study rhetoric, it is to show us how to avoid it as we avoid other diseases. "Propaganda analysis" is meant to prepare students for the invidious onslaughts the media will marshal against their innocent minds. For why should rhetoric as an art of heuristic communication be taught when in most of our experiences we find with Samuel Butler that the rhetoricians’ many rules only serve to name his tools?

Hence our scorn and distrust of rhetoric seem natural and reasonable. But, if we examine the history of western education and culture, from classical Greece to the present, we find that our view is not at all normal. Rather, our disparagement of rhetoric appears as a radical aberration in history. For from Gorgias and Protagoras to Sidney and Vico, from the time when the Athenian sophists established liberal education through the renaissance, rhetoric functioned as the queen of the arts, that nearly universal art which served as the capping stone of every student’s education.

But what was this great art that endured for over twenty centuries? And what did it allow men to do?

2. The traditional rhetorical synthesis

Rhetoric emerged, according to Cicero, when men became w willing to forsake violence and engage discursively in an inquiry into their common problems. It developed into an art of inquiry carried out through communication and can be seen as an art of disclosure and choice, as an art of situational revelation employed to reach a free decision. The factors involved in the rhetorical enterprise were the speaker, the audience, the situation in which they were engaged, and the linguistic devices the rhetor had at his command for the conduct of the rhetorical inquiry.

The factors in the rhetorical project were interrelated and reciprocal; they functioned as an organic unit, with each factor sustaining and being sustained by the others. The speaker derived his identity and integrity not apart from the rhetorical context but through it; he was always a situational man, a man-in-a-situation. Similarly, the rhetor was understood by the image he projected to his audience he was characterized by the look given him by the other and was essentially a social being. Third, the rhetor was able to function in the rhetorical situation before an audience because of his use of language; it was in discourse that be emerged as an individual and through which he communicated to others: he was essentially a linguistic being: through language he could dwell in the world.

The rhetor always realized his own finitude and perspectival limitations; hence he welcomed an opponent or adversary to present alternative perspectives in a given situation, believing that an audience could best reach a decision if it were presented with coherent alternatives. The rhetor did not enter into a rhetorical situation with preconceived ideas which he wanted his audience to adopt; rather he attempted to make sense of new and inchoate situation with a variety of strategies. Thus the rhetor attempted to be persuasive only in so far as he attempted to render one interpretation of a given context coherent and cogent. And it is an error to see the primary function of rhetoric as simple persuasion. The main task was to disclose the structure of a situation by revealing its issues or problems in a persuasive way.

Just as the rhetor found his integrity and identity through an engagement with an audience and situation so the audience came into existence only in the presence of a speaker. The audience was called upon to maintain impartiality as it listened to alternative speakers, and to judge between them on the grounds of coherence and practicality. The audience was not a passive element in the rhetorical enterprise, but rather a dynamic organic part in the conduct of inquiry. The decision reached by an audience was the final determiner of the rhetorical inquiry. No one could say that a man was innocent or guilty, for example, apart from the rhetorical enterprise of a jury trial.

Both speaker and audience functioned in a rhetorical situation, The situation was not definable apart from the rhetor’s characterization of it, and hence was reciprocally dependent on and disclosed only through the adequacy of his formulations. Whereas the rhetor did not create the situation, he did reveal and interpret it, and different hermeneutics could represent a situation in radically different ways.

The rhetorical situation was always practical and immediate; it demanded that the rhetor render it comprehensible and that the audience reach a decision; for if a decision was not reached, this failure would itself count as a decision. The situation would itself change, and rhetor and audience would be faced with a new rhetorical situation, again demanding disclosure and decision. If one did not respond to the energy shortage, for example, one would soon be faced with an energy absence. Thus the rhetor was condemned to meaningful disclosure and the audience was condemned to free choice. Those engaged in the rhetorical project could not choose not to decide.

The rhetorical situation, characterized by an audience, a specific time and place, and changing events, was always in flux; it was always a novel situation. Hence the rhetor could not simply apply a predetermined method or rules in his attempt to understand it. The situation was often radically indeterminate, in that the problems were not formulated prior to the rhetor’s engagement in the situation. The rhetor did not encounter well-formulated problems; he was thrown-into a novel and indeterminate situation and called upon to disclose and articulate what the issues were. A rhetor looking at the situation in Latin America today, for example, would have to decide if the problem was, say, the "communist insurgence" or rather, the abject poverty of the masses. Certainly the formulation of the problem would be crucial in determining the various choices available for action.

The rhetor, thus thrown into a novel and indeterminate situation, required a means with which he could disclose issues and formulate options for action. These means were his repertoire of rhetorical devices, an elaborate armory of instruments which allowed him to perform a multiplicity of cognitive operations in different kinds of situations. With the devices the rhetor could be sensitive to nuances of context without predetermining his final formulation, but he could also gain mastery of the situation and not be reduced to am ad hoe or accidental responses.

These devices included the common and special places or topics and the rhetorical figures of language and thought. The places were not a rigid body of arguments but rather a repertoire of flexible alternative ways one could formulate an issue given the particularities of audience and situation. The commonplaces, such as the "possible and the impossible," "cause and effect," "past-present and future," and others, were general conceptual means of making sense of a variety of kinds of situation; the special places allowed the rhetor to respond more specifically to particular issues. For instance, a rhetor addressing a 17th century gathering of Massachusetts Puritans may employ the topic of "witches, demons and gods" to make sense of certain psychic phenomena; a rhetor addressing a gathering of 20th century Viennese psychoanalysts may use the topics of "ids, egos and superegos" to render coherent the very same phenomena.

Besides the places, the rhetor had a large repertoire of figures he could employ, various operations of language and thought which afforded different kinds of disclosure. Because language itself for the rhetor consisted of various kinds of operations, the mastery of language was needed for an effective heuristic rhetoric. Language was not used for ornamentation but for inquiry. One such figures was the metaphor, a means of exploration akin to the scientific models the relatively known concept or entity was used as a model or perspectival lens for understanding the less known. To say "time is a beggar" is to reveal something about time by using what we already know about beggars. To say that "Light is the shadow of God" is to disclose something about divine brightness through our mundane notions of light and shadow.

A second rhetorical figure of disclosure was irony, used by Socrates to probe into the statements of his interlocutors, and used by an author of a text to lead his readers away from an ironic and deceptive surface passage to an unstated, more coherent context from which to interpret the text. Through the use of irony in a text, a reader could be led to discover a new way of seeing the whole work, and of sharing a special vantage point with the author.

Metaphor and irony were by no means the only disclosure devices available to the rhetor. On the contrary, rhetors could employ hundreds of such figures, §ach with its own particular use and nuance, each appropriate for a different kind of disclosure. It was in this store of devices that the core of rhetoric as an art resided, for with these instruments the rhetor could disclose issues without predetermining his characterization of the rhetorical situation, and articulate it eloquently to his audience. The devices affecting disclosure and rendering options for choice allowed the rhetorical enterprise to function organically, with each element reciprocally supporting and being supported by the other.

3. The Degenerations of Rhetoric

Though a powerful art, this organic rhetorical interplay was fragile, and could easily degenerate in various ways. If any one element became fixed or frozen, the inquiry would come to a halt, as would a human body if its heart and lungs were removed. So rhetorical inquiry always depended upon the trust and good faith of each participant, a willingness to risk one’s own position should an alternative be more persuasive. If the speaker became fixed in his views, he would attempt not to discover the best way to understand and act in a situation, but would attempt to persuade an audience of his preconceived ideas, thus sabotaging rhetorical inquiry.

If the audience became fixed, it would not listen to an alternative position, and hence would foreclose further inquiry. If the situation was seen as fixed or beyond one’s control, the rhetorical project itself became impotent. When the participants had no control over the situation, speech degenerated into "idle chatter," with important events being understood A controlled by higher forces.

But though subject to perennial degeneration, the organic rhetorical enterprise remained a viable and architectonic art for over twenty centuries, as the capping stone to education, allowing them to function in a wide variety of disciplines and situations. Students mastered grammar to speak correctly, logic or dialectic think coherently, and finally rhetoric in order to become engaged in the world, be those worlds legal, scientific or literary. The result was a potential community of scholars or renaissance men in which the scientist, critic, artist and statesman could communicate and explore issues together.

The poet or artist functioned as rhetor, entering the turbulent world of his thoughts and passions with his lively and sullen art, in an attempt to render his world coherent. The literary critic functioned as a rhetor, entering the relatively indeterminate world of the literary text, which exhibited several similarities to an context,, and employing his repertoire of critical places and figures in an attempt to make sense of novel texts. And the scientist functioned as rhetor in employing scientific places in an& attempt to render coherent the "book of nature."

It was not until after the renaissance, in the vast restructuring of the social and intellectual world that the organic rhetorical synthesis was severely shaken. The changes in this newly capitalized, technologized world were complex, but it is possible to isolate the newly mathematized sciences and attendant scientific philosophies as presenting perhaps the most direct and predominant challenge to the art of rhetoric. For the new sciences, with their highly specialized languages and limited audiences, radically restricted the scope of what was to count as falling within the range of the rhetorical situation. With the situation thus knowable through science outside rhetoric, the role of rhetoric as a coherent methodology was severely undermined.

Descartes disdained the rhetorical eloquence of nonscientific writers, attacking the "feints and disguises" of rhetoric. And John Locke argued that if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that the art of rhetoric, namely the "artificial and figurative application of words Eloquence has invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment." The new philosophies of science were to argue, eventually, that all knowledge had to be scientifically verifiable and hence synthetic; or else logically tautological and analytic. The rhetorical devices were strongly attacked as no longer heuristic but merely as ornamental. Bacon attacked the places as sterile pigeonholes of past information rather than as devices to explore the unknown, Language was seen as either scientific and literal, a veritable mirror of nature; or, conversely, merely rhetorical and deceptive. Rhetorical figures were no longer seen as a complex verbal repertoire that enabled people to think in new ways, but were scorned as deceptive ornaments or alterations, parasitic upon literal discourse.

With the scientific attack, the art of rhetoric began to degenerate from within. The traditional union of invention and expression, once inseparably linked so that disclosure was seen as a task achieved through communication and discourse, now was ruptured. The renaissance logician Peter Ramus assigned invention to Logic, and logic became the method of science. Rhetoric was thus left with Expression bereft of invention and proof; by the 20th century it had become no more than a vacuous art of figures without content, of places without substance.

The queen of the arts had thus degenerated because the situation had been "fixed" and the devices rendered impotent. A corresponding fixation and isolation of speakers and hearers followed rapidly. The poet, once the rhetor par excellence, no longer could communicate with an audience using rhetorical figures. He became the isolated genius, alone in a world of his imagination, concerned not with the real world but with the figures of his fancy. Alienated from his bourgeois audience, the poet was left only to cheer his own solitude. And his audience was no longer privileged to hear him, it could only overhear. Poetry no longer attempted to speak coherently to intelligent men about their situation in the world, but moved inexorably toward the verbal silence of music.

The Need for Regeneration

But in the 20th century we have learned that the decay of rhetoric as a coherent art of discursive inquiry has been disastrous for the human condition. Having placed our faith in the two disparate cultures fashioned by pure science or poetic genius, we have been painfully disabused of our illusions. Theoretical science has shown us only that its ideal of purely objective knowledge is an illusion; our Frankenstein technologies have escaped our control and direction. Our task is to discover means of bringing science within the manageable scope of the human rhetorical lifeworld.

Nor has the isolation and worship of poetic genius led to human salvation. Not only were artists isolated, but everyman became a stranger, waiting out subjective endgames, having forgotten how to speak. And while highly sophisticated esthetes practiced new modes of subjective artistic experimentation, entire populations of European citizens were systematically exterminated to the lofty strains of Die Meistersinger. The true artist would again see his role not as private but as human:. The poet is not the man who speaks a private language, but the man who can explore the frustrations, anxieties and joys of all men to forge the uncreated conscience of his race. Poetry must again strive to become a new rhetoric, an organic art of discovering oneself in the presence of others.

The new rhetoric, now underway, will draw on both the existential and linguistic developments in recent philosophy. Rhetoric will be existential in that the rhetor finds himself thrown into new situations, before the Other, condemned to choosing between options. His art may draw upon the traditional rhetorical repertoire, allowing him to respond anew to novel situations, allowing him to develop projects on the stages of life’s way. The man who achieves coherence in his life will have more than knowledge; he will approach sophia, or wisdom.

But for the rhetor to be wise, he must be able to articulate his wisdom in a social context. Engaged in speech acts in a rhetorical context, he must establish his personal authenticity by effecting true communal cooperation. He will thus combine wisdom with eloquence in a renewed attempt to make sense of human forms of life in a world that would otherwise remain simply absurd.