What is Rhetoric?

A Caryatid (link).

Weaver, Richard M.
Rhetoric moves the soul with a movement which cannot finally be justified logically (23).. . . Rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain extending up towards the ideal, which only the intellectual can apprehend and only the soul have affection for. . . .Rhetoric appears, finally, as a means by which the impulse of the soul to be ever moving is redeemed.

The Ethics of Rhetoric. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953. 25.

1. any systematic effort to make people percieve some thing or some one or some action one way instead of another (the rhetoric of ... )
2. any of the handbooks or "rules" that explain how to alter perception and therefore judgment.

More specifically:

If there is a commonality among all rhetorics it is effacement, the desire to keep one's rhetoric hidden, invisible. "Intrigues fail by being found out." "The Difficulties of Persuasion," Han Fei Tzu. "The best trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist," to quote something more contemporary. Charles Baudelaire said this but Christopher McQuarrie brought it to wider attention with "The Usual Suspects," You accuse others of using rhetoric. You, of course, speak the truth.

"Rhetoric," you see, stands in for all nefarious forms of verbal artifice (Gk. techne). For some people, all artifice is nefarious because it seeks to add to or subtract from the given, the natural, the authentic, the real. From the perspective of sophisticated skepticism, those are just words too. We get this pejorative understanding of rhetoric from the Greek philosopher Plato, at least in so far as The Gorgias is concerned. We get a more instrumentalist view of rhetoric from Plato's The Phaedrus. We get a descriptive or scientific view of rhetoric from the Greek philosopher Aristotle. From the Greek logographer A speech writer. Since representation in the law courts was forbidden, each person (man) had to speak for himself and since that capacity is rare, litigants often paid someone to tell them what to say. The craft of logography was looked down on by those who didn't need it or need to do it for a living. and teacher Isocrates we get a view of rhetoric which is politically focused, speech in the service of the city and the people. And pretty much everyone who wrote about rhetoric since has landed somewhere on the instrumental / philosophical / political spectrum.

The Greek adjective "rhetor" originally described a public speaker and as such it didn't mean much because any male citizen with an income sufficient to permit him the liberty of attending to civic matters -- being a juror paid a small stipend, not enough to feed and shelter a family -- could address the political assembly (ekklesia) and bring cases to court, but during the fifth century BCE the word "rhetores" came to mean "those who speak in public," a nascent class of professional politicians and lawyers, people who could profit from their facility with words. When we look at dialectic we will learn to reflexively ask, what's the opposite term. What's the opposite of rhetor? Well, idiot, as it turns out. Seriously. Anyone who didn't participate in political debate, who held themselves apart from the group was an idiotes, a private citizen, what the British used to call, with imperial condescension, the man in the street. (link)

Until the fifth century BCE these roles were purely amateur. The idea of making money from them was repellant to many people (corruption is inevitable if there is money in politics) and thus the idea of making money by teaching others how to exploit the people (polis) was repugnant, especially for people who felt power (authority) should be inherited. The word "rhetoric," did not exist, apparently, "Did Plato Coin Rhetorike?" Edward Schiappa. until Plato made it up in his dialog The Gorgias. He created the term rhetoric to promote philosophy by contrast. "Philosophy," (gk. philos, love, sophia, wisdom) lover of wisdom, was how he characterized the goal of the intellectual technique which he taught. He called that technique "dialectic" and we'll be looking at it in detail soon. "Rhetoric," as the art of teaching people how to sway public opinion in the speaker's direction, is a straw dog, a fake alternative, a piece of salesmanship, leger-de-man, created to be destroyed in order to promote philosophy and to denigrate political instruction, literary instruction, and word-craft generally. A "rhetorician," also a made up word, was one who taught others how to make public speeches. Prior to Plato, no one used the words "rhetoric" and "rhetorician," as far as we can tell, although there were certainly people teaching others various word-crafts. Those people were referred to as sophists and prior to Plato the word sophist just meant a skilled or learned person, although the skillful and learned have always been suspect for some. Plato exploited that tendency. It's note-worthy that Plato's student Aristotle picks up the word "rhetoric" and legitimates it, providing what he considered a sound, dialectical, foundation for rhetorical practices. Plato himself modified the stance he took on rhetoric in The Gorgias in a later dialog called The Phaedrus, which we will also read. The view he takes there is instrumentalist, rhetoric is a shortcut to wisdom necessitated by audiences who are too simple-minded or too emotional to follow a dialectical argument.

In 20th and 21st, we (people who teach composition in English departments) have come to use the term "rhetoric" to refer to a form of education that has public service through effective writing and speaking as its goal. This definition allows us to draw a straight line from Isocrates (a contemporary of Plato who did not use the word "rhetoric" but who taught what we might call current affairs), through Cicero, the great Roman republican, through the medieval trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) also sometimes referred to as the three fundamental liberal In the context, the word liberal means appropriate for those who aren't in service, who are free. arts, up into the Enlightenment, and this line of historical descent offers a way to legitimate composition studies. That is, rhetoric gave people who would teach undergraduates how to write a subject matter to investigate, an academic enterprise that the literary historians and critics who "owned" English would accept as legitimate scholarship, and without whose acceptance we didn't have a safe home. Not everyone who teaches composition takes the rhetorical route. Some study self-expression. Some study "professional" writing in the sense of technical and business prose composition, writing in the work-place. And many study the way literary works are a function of social conditions or an engine for social change.

Not everyone who takes the rhetorical route, however, is focused on teaching high school or college composition. Some are more interested in rhetoric as an explanation of how language-based thinking works in the context of social interaction. For these people, a rhetoric is a set of unnoticed beliefs and related linguistic habits out of which one builds an interpretation of the world (Weltanschauung) and one's place in it. From this perspective, you inhabit The Greek word habitus, from which we get habit and inhabit, as well as habitat is instructive here. As Wikipedia explains, "In sociology, Habitus (/ˈhæbɪtəs/) comprises socially ingrained habits, skills and dispositions. It is the way that individuals perceive the social world around them and react to it. These dispositions are usually shared by people with similar backgrounds (such as social class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, education and profession). The habitus is acquired through imitation (mimesis) and is the reality in which individuals are socialized, which includes their individual experience and opportunities. Thus, the habitus represents the way group culture and personal history shape the body and the mind; as a result, it shapes present social actions of an individual." If you are a PhD student, or some other kind of masochist, look up French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930 - 2002). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste is a great book and more accessible than Outline of a Theory of Practice, though it too rewards the effort. a rhetoric. You have so engrained a set of beliefs and linguistic habits that you are no longer aware of them as such and each one filters and informs how you understand and interact with the world. Change your rhetoric, change your mind, change your world. If you want to begin tracing your own rhetoric, look for the metaphors you use so habitually that you don't even see them as metaphors (did you notice the word "see" as a metaphor just now? Just to get a sense of how engrained vision is in your world view, try to write about anything using no visual imagery. You can't use the word "image" while you're at it, btw.) The imagery you habitually use is only one layer of your rhetoric, however, merely a trace of the larger practice. You also need to track down the unnoticed premises (the assumptions) upon which you build your reasons and from which you draw your conclusions. Are you instinctively patriotic, rebellious, religious, iconoclastic? When you see the police, do you feel safe or threatened? And so on. If the answers to those kinds of questions don't come readily, then look to the kinds of movies or books that "speak to you," those that for some reason you want to experience repeatedly. What are they saying that you want to say or at least that you want to hear? What's a movie or book you can't stand, and what does that tell you about the rhetoric you inhabit? And what's one you don't get at all, and what does that tell you about how you interpret the world?

Does Rhetoric have historical foundations? And if so are they really Greek?

If rhetoric is a phenomenon of communication, then however it works it would work independently of any study of it, and any study of it that relied on historical accounts would be rhetorical itself, that is it would be influencing our understanding in the process of explaining. Sociologists and Psychologists who study persuasion and other effects of language take this view for the most part. But English, because it is a textual enterprise, has looked to the remnants of previous understandings in order to understand rhetoric. Communication has done so as well, though to the extent it has been interested in scientific methods it has sometimes played down history. So Rhetoric as a field of study within English studies has since 1874 when Harvard adopted a mandatory first year writing course for all First Year Students who hadn't learned Greek or Latin and who couldn't write a grammatically correct essay about Shakespeare's Tempest or Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (for as long as "English" has been a discipline charged with, and funded by, teaching college students how to write) has read and discussed what others have said about how to make speeches and how to write arguments.

Because the Greeks themselves like to talk as though they created culture (a barbarian is anyone who doesn't speak Greek), and because Greek Philosophy dominated education in the Mediterranean and was spread far and wide (from Northern Greece to what is now Pakistan and Egypt) by Greeks in the wake of Alexander the Great, thus making the Greek language and rhetoric synonymous with learning for many hundreds of years, many people read the Greek texts somewhat innocently, accepting as simply true things that were more complicated than they were made out to seem. Simplification, btw, is the essence of rhetorical power. The more complicated something is, the harder it is to believe and understand, and therefore the harder it is to "sell." The more complicated it is, the more likely it is to be a fair representation of the actual or the real, which is why it is easy to drive a wedge between rhetoric and reality, apart from the sibilance and the iambic structure which make that phrase so catchy.

So traditionally we have begun the study of rhetoric by looking to classical (5th and 4th century BCE) Greek culture as being the "origin" of Rhetoric. From JF Dobson, The Greek Orators

Corax, Tisias
Cicero has preserved, from Aristotle, a statement that forensic rhetoric came to its birth at Syracuse, when, after the expulsion of the tyrants in 465 B.C., many families, whose property had been confiscated by them, tried to re-establish their claims (Cicero, Brutus, § 46.). Certainly Corax, the founder of rhetoric, was teaching about the year 466 B.C., and composed a τέχνη, or handbook of rhetorical principles (Arist., Rhet., ii. 24. 11.). He was followed by his pupil Tisias, who also wrote a treatise which Aristotle pronounced to be better than his master's, and was in turn soon superseded by a better one (Soph. Elench., 183 p. 28 sqq.). Both Corax and Tisias attached great importance to εἰκός (probability) as a means of convincing a jury. A sample of the use of this argument from the work of Corax is the case of the man charged with assault, who denies the charge and says, ‘It is obvious to you that I am weak in body, while he is strong; it is therefore inherently improbable that I should have dared to attack him.’ The argument can of course be turned the other way by the prosecutor—‘the defendant is weak in body, and thought that on that account no one would suspect him of violence.’ We shall find that this argument from εἰκότα is very characteristic of the orator Antiphon; it occurs in his court speeches as well as in his tetralogies, which are model exercises. It seems, indeed, that he almost preferred this kind of argument to actual proof, even when evidence was available (See below, p. 36). Tisias improved on the theme of Corax; supposing that a feeble but brave man has attacked a strong one who is a coward, he suggests that both should tell lies in court. The coward will not like to admit his cowardice, and will say that he was attacked by more than one man. The culprit will prove this to be a lie, and will then fall back on the argument of Corax, ‘I am weak and he is strong; I could not have assaulted or robbed him,’—and so on. (source) Since the 1980s, however, the idea that "The Greeks" invented the art of public speaking or persuasive discourse has been dismissed and we have begun looking to earlier cultures for rhetorical understandings. But because one has to start somewhere, and much work has been done to render the Greek understanding of Rhetoric accessible to new students, this class focuses on the Greeks and their immediate descendants, the Romans. I'm guilty of taking an easy out here. In the last twenty years a great deal of work has been done in comparative rhetorics -- looking beyond the Greeks, the Romans, and their descendants -- and while I have kept up, somewhat, with that work, I haven't yet fully incorporated it into this class. That will take time. See the "Comparative rhetorics" section for this in detail. To answer the questions that head this section, while "rhetoric" has its origin in Plato, the complex phenomena that we have come to call "rhetoric" has no foundation, except perhaps in language itself, and it certainly does not belong to the Greeks or any other culture exclusively.

Even though we are looking to ancient Greek culture as a platform for our understanding of Rhetoric as it pertains to contemporary English composition studies, we are not idealizing or romanticizing that culture. The ancient Greeks were an androcentric and imperialistic slave-holding people. While the origin stories of rhetoric make much of the role democratic institutions play in the development of rhetoric as a subject (see George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric [PA3038 .K46 1994], Amazon ]), and Athens was a radically democratic place at some times, only citizens could participate directly and only men whose parents were both born in Athens could be citizens. In other words, the majority of people were actually excluded from directly participating in the democratic institutions. And while the Athenians in particular were proud of their institutions, and tended to talk as though anyone with the right training could become an important member of the democracy, many of these people were selling rhetorical training and using the lure of success on ambitious students. Study with me and you will get rich is an obvious ploy, one we still use today. It is important to keep in mind that even if rhetorical techniques do work, material and social factors contribute to beliefs. Politics and money have always and will always be a part of rhetoric.

A Brief Digression on Rhetoric through the Ages

In the wake of Alexander the Great's conquests, the Greeks exported their ideas about education (paieda) across the Mediterranean. This cultural phenomenon is called Hellenization (today we might think of it as colonization). When the Romans, who had a penchant for absorbing and repurposing the ideas of those they had conquered, took over the "known" world, they accepted, for the most part, Greek education as a part of civic life. Even as the Roman Empire gave way to the Papacy, rhetoric remained the center of education, now focused on the interpretation of divine texts and the control of the devout people rather than on argumentation among "equals" and speeches designed to rouse a crowd or generate admiration (and obedience) for an Emperor. When the "Western" world descended into the chaos of the "dark" and middle ages, learning, and rhetoric continued in the "East," where Muslim scholars preserved the work of Aristotle and made it once again available in the West during their expansions West. The Renaissance of 1300 - 1600 Europe revived and reinvigorated rhetoric. It remained the center of advanced education until the Enlightenment, with it's focus on empirical knowledge, relegated rhetorical ways of knowing to the past. A touchstone for this moment in Rhetorical history is the publication of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620)

Subsequently, of course, the need for sharing sound scientific understandings with non-scientists made the study of rhetoric once again respectable, at least in so far as rhetorical knowledge can simplify complexity. Much of what you might learn about displaying data for lay people is grounded in understanding the importance of audiences, in rhetoric in other words. For all of this in far greater detail and much better accuracy, read Brian Vickers' In Defense of Rhetoric

Starting in the late '80s of the previous century, scholars of rhetoric made concerted and sustained efforts to identify non-western rhetorical practices and to recognize women as rhetorical beings, something that the history of rhetoric to that date hadn't openly acknowledged. These rhetorical interests continue. The most recent (2020) example has a couple of articles written by graduates of our PhD program.

Since 1995, there has been a marked turn toward digital rhetoric, toward trying to imagine what ubiquitous computing, algorithmic decision making, and even machine-generated writing might mean for rhetoric and composition as a sub discipline of English and for communication practices more generally. My own course of study follows this trajectory. NOTE: I last rewrote this section in 2020. Since then AI text generators have become a huge thing. Rhetoric will never be the same. I don't currently have time to update this section, so here is a link to my current thinking about AI and composition.

Even if we can't agree on a definition of "rhetoric," to the point where several scholars of rhetoric and composition (see Art Walzer for example) have argued that we should stop trying to define rhetoric, it is safe to say that rhetoric is interested in several phenomena of human communication which can be set out as questions.

• What does language do?
• How are language and reality related?
• How are language and knowledge (epistemology) related?
• How are language and culture related?
• How are language and gender related?
• How are language and ethnicity related?
• How does language relate to thought?
• How does langauge relate to wealth and power?
• Is rhetorical facility necessarily a consequence of cultural capital?
  If yes, will it go away now that AI is here?
• Is non-verbal thinking different from verbal?
• Are there truths independent of language?
• Do ideas, true or false, exist independently of language?
• Do ideas originate in a person's head or are they put there? And if put there, then by whom or how?
• Is rhetorical capacity innate the way speech is said to be?
• What does it mean to be rhetorically astute?
• What does it mean to be rhetorically obtuse?
• What is rhetorical naivete?
• Can one learn to be more rhetorically effective?
  And if so, how?
• Do rhetorical acts exist outside public, civic institutions?
• Can one use rhetoric on one's self?
• Is "the self" a form of rhetoric?
• Is there an authentic self independent of rhetoric?
• Is being blunt, the same as being arhetorical?
• Are there any non-rhetorical forms of discourse?
  What is the scope of rhetorical study, rhetorical practice?
• Are socially binding decisions truly made by means of speeches or are speeches just a manifestation (and or cover) for material circumstances?
  This approach is sometimes called the hermeneutics of suspicion. Marx, Freud, and lately Q are examples
• Can a speech or a text change your mind?
• Did I place these questions in this order for some specific reason?

These are all rhetorical questions in the sense that they are questions relevant to the study of rhetoric, but some rhetorical in the sense that they are statements disguised as questions. Can you tell which ones are and which ones aren't? And what does that tell you about the assumptions you are making about me?

Why study "Classical" Rhetoric? An Object Lesson in (Sophistic) Rhetorical Invention

Because this class is required of MA and PhD candidates in Rhetoric and Composition, and therefore most of you are not here entirely of your own choice, you might be wondering why a person like yourself needs to study ancient rhetorics. Fair enough. Consider the following points. I've presented them as blocks of text with few if any transitions so that were you inclined, you could easily cut an paste them into an argument of your own devising, and then sand the edges (provide transitions) to create an apparently seamless surface.

I'm using this prefabricated parts technique of writing instruction as an allusion to what Plato complains about in Phaedrus, which we will soon read, namely that some of the people who taught others to speak publicly did so by giving them readymade things to say, templates, modules, chunks of prefabricated discourse that they could memorize and re-use in more or less subtle ways depending on their skill. Plato felt public speakers should be more "organic" and more analytical, less pre-fab. In fact many of the complaints aimed at rhetoric over the years have to do with its contentment with traditional expressions and its acceptance of topics and stock characters, commonplace language, as a legitimate way to speak and write. Aristotle complained that people who teach by handing out readymade pieces of discourse are like those who would teach a person how to make shoes by giving them examples to copy rather than principles of design (I doubt Aristotle made a lot of shoes, btw, although there was a sophist named Hippias who made all of his own clothes, apparently). At any rate, treat what follows as potential material for your own writing (<rhetoric>because there might be an exam question in here somewhere.</rhetoric>)

---

Classical Greek rhetoric refers to the writings on communication theory and practice developed by Plato and Aristotle, arguably the origin of Western philosophy in particular and education in general. So that's one reason. Communications at that time, 4th c BCE, took place at a moment when oral culture was being replaced by literate culture. Prior to this time, all important decisions were made publicly through oral discourse. Decrees were literally written in stone but the process that determined what should be written in stone was oral. During the fourth century people began circulating written discourses as a way of creating fame for themselves and for influencing public policy. This new form of civic engagement had a profound effect on education and politics and society in general and not surprisingly these changes were not welcomed by all. Those who benefited from the previous culture in particular were suspicious of the new. We live at an analogous moment.

We are moving into a post-literate world. The internet has replaced the library and video and audio are replacing text. The ultimate consequences of these changes are yet to be determined (that they are actually happening might be disputed too), but, people don't need the same skill set today that they needed 25 years ago. Oddly enough, what they need is much more like what was needed 2500 years ago. The ability to think quickly, make rapid decisions, keep track of simultaneously presented arguments, build a network, make oneself heard in a crowded space, deliver on camera facial expressions that help an audience understand and feel what is being said, all of these skills were a part of the oral culture classical rhetoric was born into. So that's another reason.

Classical rhetoric was a struggle to incorporate the traditional oral practices into a literate format, retaining as much of the face to face culture as might be preserved in a distributed culture. At the same time, however, it ushered in significant changes in communication practice.

Contemporary rhetoric is similarly facing forward and backward simultaneously (the repetition of "sim" "sime" sounds is a Georgianic figure -- more later). We're trying to hold on and let go. So we might learn something from watching others who did this before we did.

If that doesn't work, try this: History repeats itself in interesting ways. The word that Aristotle used to describe rhetoric was techne. The word is often translated as "art". As in the art of public speaking. But it is also the root of technology. A significant part of the art of rhetoric (invention) was to assemble a stock of things to say on different occasions, so that one would never be at a loss for words or unsure how to respond. One could simply run through the catalogue of topics in one's head, locate the relevant ones, and present them as needed. In many ways this stock of things to say was a bit like a database, pieces of information associated with key words or images. So, it's a bit of a stretch, I know, but Aristotle's rhetoric can be seen as the first information technology.

And then again, a remarkable amount of modern composition advice is directly connected to the classical lore that you will learn in this class. Have a look at the book on internet style called Hottext, it's straight out of the tradition. Not really updated at all. As more and more of us need to learn how to look and sound good on the screen, and sound good via podcast, traditional delivery advice is relevant again, though sadly there isn't as much of that left as we would like. It was likened to acting and seen as unworthy of theoretical treatment. We do have Thomas Sheridan's On Elocution. A much more recent book, and a fascinating one, is Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, Adam Kendon.

Here's another reason for studying ancient rhetoric: Aristotle pretty much got it right and humanity hasn't sufficiently changed over the years to warrant further (scientific) investigation into rhetoric. In other words, what worked then works now because people are people regardless of heritage, education, and place in life. This is a bit hard for most people to accept today. The idea of a universal human nature is unfashionable.

We abhor universal truths. We want to insist that context is so influential that most generalizations are bogus. Still, if you want to teach people how to write or speak, you're left in a bit of quandary here. If everything is contextual, then discourses have to be born in the moment of utterance (Kairos, gk. timing, often personified as the figure on the right, with the back of his head bald from people trying to catch hold of him as he perpetually flees.) and can't live on in anything but some suspended or altered state. There isn't much to teach if every rhetorical situation is always different. No rules or even guidelines really. On the other hand, perhaps there are some principles that are just general enough to have wide application but specific enough to be meaningful. This, I will assert, is what the classical tradition is full of. Useful principles, and, though it may be the result of hindsight bias, I really can't think of much that was added after Aristotle. A few exercises (The progymnismata), the idea of stasis theory (nascent in Plato but fully developed by Hermagoras 1st c BCE), and some elaboration on memory (ad herrenium, 1st c bce), well, and perhaps a bit on delivery in the form of gesture (elocutionary movement 18th c), but other than that, well, there's product placement and indirect marketing like contests and give-aways and sponsorships. But really, that's about it. What you will learn in this class pretty much covers the subject.

And there's prestige. You will learn some Greek words and using them will make you sound very learned.

And there's always quotations from and allusions to classical texts that will make you sound learned, though today you will need to provide only the faintest outlines, so that only other learneds get the joke and no one will think you pretentious or "elite."

And you will learn tried and true, best practices is the modern phrase, methods of writing and speaking instruction. Also, classical rhetoric presents thinking, writing, and speaking, as a continuous practice, not cut up and distributed among different disciplines, so you can claim to have expertise in philosophy, speech, and composition.

Anything that can be said about historical knowledge in general can be said of historical knowledge of rhetoric in particular. Thus anyone who doesn't know history is doomed to repeat it, anyone who doesn't know the history of rhetoric will make false discoveries about how to teach writing and thinking--re-inventing the wheel, etc., etc.,

---

Anyway, you get the idea and the ideas.

Next » « Previous