What is rhetoric?

31 January 2013

James H. Nichols Jr.’s (JHN) Brief History on “What is Rhetoric?”

JHN’s introduction to Plato’s Gorgias contains a nice, brief history of the contested term that spans 2 millenia. The following is but some rough notes on his overview.

Rhetoric is often conflated, or, perhaps, oversimplified to its accused sophisitc means of persuasion–the bells and whistles, or ornamentation, or other means of speaking with some surface-level craft with subversive intent. For these reasons, rhetoric is often associated with politics and politicians, who emplow but “‘mere rhetoric’” (p. 2) as JHN writes about even today. Due to this conception of rhetoric, it is often thrown into opposition to reality, blocking us from what we can know and understand about something, someone, etc. Yet, much like Socrates and his dispute with sophists, he sought to maintain a broad definitinon of rhetoric that incorporates “the teaching of genuine knowledge” (p. 3), because how can we know but through language and our articulation of it, argued Socrates.

Quick notes

“Rhetoric clearly has to do with speaking well” (p. 4), but shouldn’t be limited to but a skill or science of doing this well.
- Such intentional rumination and reflection on this skill stems from the Greek Sophists, Gorgias and Protagoras.
JHN claims that postmodernists “praise sophistic rhetoric” in direct conflict with Plato.
Plato’s fusion of philosophy and rhetoric informed much of Western thought and tradition to follow.

Two definitions of rhetoric, spanning two millenia

Aristotle: “the power [or a capacity or ability] in each [case whatsoever] of discerning the available means of persuasion” (p. 4)
- Rhetoric is a “counterpart of dialectic,” according to JHN, which makes the “scope of rhetoric very broad” that yet concerned itself mainly with “the sciences of politics and ethics”
Francis Bacon: “a science excellent, and excellency well laboured. For although in true value it is inferior to wisdom, as it is said by God to Moses, … it is eloquence that prevaileth in an active life. … The duty and office of rhetoric is to apply reason to imagintion for the better moving of the will” (qtd. from Advancement of Learning).

JHN compares these two definitions, highlighting how they “[b]oth distinguich between the substance of what one wishes to persuade (or the direction in which one wishes to move the will) and the verbal means of effecting that persuasion (or of actually moving the will)” (p. 4). ALl of this matter is entangled with politics, and the means by which to articulate and stir action or inaction is to construct knowledge in a way toward some desired end.

Such a rhetoric was regarded highly in higher ed; JHN states from the time of Aristote, around 1800
the Romans extended the Greek tradition, and it is worth noting that rhetoric is Athenocentric, since we only have artifacts from Athens to derive our theories and praxis.
Cicero and Quintiliian (Romans) secured rhetoric’s place in the medieval trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
From there, rhetoric expanded into other discourses, such as preaching sermons, or the Renaissance’s humanist tradition that revived its civic function of which Cicero’s works were highly influential.
The Renaissance gave rise to the belles lettres, as well as lectures on “moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and political economy” (p. 5).