Rhetoric offers a way of constructing and understanding the world through communication (though not always through language). It can be persuasive but attends to more than persuasion. Rhetoric creates communal truth, mediates relationships, opens possibilities, sustains civic discourse, facilitates political action. In short, rhetoric does; rhetoric creates. But rhetoric also is: it’s essential. It’s social. It’s relational. It’s kairotic.
In his article “The ‘Q’ Question,” Richard Lanham provides an interesting way of examining definitions of rhetoric like the one above: the weak defense vs. the strong defense. The weak defense portrays rhetoric as mere style; rhetoric acts as a tool (a set of hermeneutics for some, a set of rhetorical appeals for other) that reveals truth and/or persuades hearers of the Truth. The strong defense, on the other hand, offers an essential, social, relational view of rhetorical practice: “The Strong Defense argues that, since truth comes to humankind in so many diverse and disagreeing forms, we cannot base a polity upon it. We must, instead, devise some system by which we can agree on a series of contingent operating premises” (Lanham 189). At the center of Lanham’s discussion of the Q question (Does rhetoric involve speaking well or a good man speaking well?) lives the connection between rhetoric and composition, rhetoric and ethics, rhetoric and truths: "At the heart of the 'Q' Question stands the need to demonstrate a connection between specific reading and writing practices and the moral life" (Lanham 173).
It might be useful, then, to divide our readings along the line that Lanham draws: Who populates the world of the weak defense? For whom is rhetoric no more than a tool? Who, as I would hope to, populates the world of the strong defense? Who offers a rhetorical practice that privileges creativity, creation, and action?
The Weak Defense: A Retrospective
The weak defense begins, of course, with Plato’s distrust of rhetoric and Aristotle’s codification of rhetorical techniques and strategies, but Augustine and Ramus, a few centuries later, take up the task of applying this distrust and codification to literate cultures.
Augustine: For Augustine, rhetoric is style in oratory and a set of hermeneutic practices through which it is possible to discover the truth of a text. His attention to the weak defense, however, is best seen in his discussion of appropriate ecclesiastic styles: “Now in the subdued style, [the preacher] persuades his hearers that what he says is true; in the majestic style, he persuades them to do what they are aware they ought to do, but do not; in the temperate style, he persuades them that his speech is elegant and ornate.” (4.25.55). The proper use of a particular style should result in a particular response from the audience. Ultimately, Augustine’s appeal, especially in Book 4, is that Christians not reject rhetoric because of its secular tradition. To prevent this reaction, as Green notes in his introduction, Augustine suggests that rhetoric is a “neutral ground, which Christians must occupy” (xvii). The emphasis on style and the attention to rhetoric as a tool rather than a set of productive practices or creative processes places Augustine firmly on the side of the weak defense.
Ramus: Like Augustine, Ramus defends rhetoric as utilitarian. In fact, Ramus is the poster boy for the weak defense: Not only does he not ascribe creativity or creation to rhetoric, he delegates even intention and disposition to philosophy. For Ramus the only purview of rhetoric is “style…and oral delivery” (Ong 276). In fact, Ong argues, for the literate culture in which Ramus wrote, in which orality was distrusted as perversion of “pure...noiseless concepts or ‘ideas’ in a silent field of mental space,” the best rhetoric was “no rhetoric at all” (291).
The Strong Defense: A Potentiality
Cicero: Without a doubt, however, Cicero belongs to the strong defense. His definition of rhetoric rejects oratory as style without understanding: “But if you allow nothing to belong to the orator but to speak aptly, ornately, and copiously, how can he even attain these qualities without that knowledge which you do not allow him? For there can be no true merit in speaking, unless what is said is thoroughly understood by him who says it” (I.xi). Put more simply: “language can have no place if you take away the matter, nor the matter receive any illustration if you take away the language” (III.v). He also rejects the idea that oratory is possible outside its public practice. In his discussion of civil law, for example, Crassus submits that “the end proposed in civil law,” which is determined through oratorical interventions (I.xxxvi), “be the preservation of legitimate and practical equity in the affairs and causes of the citizens” (I.cxlii). Here, as elsewhere in De Oratore, Cicero creates an enduring link between rhetoric and civil practice.
Quintilian: Quintilian agrees with Cicero that rhetoric is, at least in part, the performance of civil polity and asserts that the best definition of oratory “is the science of speaking well…for it embraces all the virtues of oratory at once and includes also the character of the true orator, as he cannot speak well unless he be a good man” (2.15.33-34). Anticipating the objections of those from the weak defense camp, Quintilian notes that “the most common definition [of rhetoric]…is that oratory is the power of persuading,” but he suggests that this definition is misleading. Why? Because such a definition separates style from substance, oratory from philosophy, which has, Quinitilian argues, proved problematic. As Quintilian points out, “Cicero remarks that the power of eloquence is to be derived from the deepest sources of wisdom, and that accordingly the same persons,” that is, the philosophers, “were for a considerable time the teachers at once of eloquence and of morality” (Quintilian 12.2.6). However, Quintilian says, he is not arguing that orators should be philosophers, not only because such teachers of philosophy dramatically undervalued oratory but also because “no other mode of life has withdrawn itself further from the duties of civil society and all that concerns the orator” (Quintilian 12.2.6). According to Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, oratory takes place before the public in service of the public good, and because philosophy is not concerned with this contextual public good, it is not as useful as rhetoric. Quintilian, then, also offers the strong defense: his definition pays little attention to style; rather he discusses both the character of the orator and the civic value of rhetorical practice.
Grassi: Ernesto Grassi’s attention to reuniting philosophy and rhetoric, especially through metaphor and semantic language, also places him among those who argue a strong defense of rhetoric. His project, which is in part to discover if theoretical/philosophical thought is rhetorical (hint: yes), aims at blurring the distinction between rhetoric and philosophy instituted first by Plato and reinforced by Ramus. He argues, in part, that philosophy is only explicable through “semantic language, which is immediate, not deductive or demonstrative, illuminating, purely indicative, and which has a preeminence opposite the rational language” (21). The pathetic as well as immediate character of philosophical discourse suggests that rhetoric and philosophy, according to Grassi, have always been concomitant, and hence, rhetoric is crucial to philosophy and vice versa.
Isocrates: Isocrates definition of rhetoric also reflects the strong defense. Allow me to quote him at some length: “With this faculty [skill in discourse] we both contend against others on matters which are open to dispute and seek light for ourselves on things which are unknown; for the same arguments which we use in persuading others when we speak in public, we employ also when we deliberate in our own thoughts.” Isocrates offers a definition of rhetoric that offers balance between civic persuasion and private seeking. He also wants to make it clear that, in his definition, rhetoric, though it could be used for bad ends, “tends toward virtue” (66) and that the best arguments can only be made in favor of things which are “great and honorable, devoted to the welfare of man and our common good” (276).
The Sophists (old and new): I haven’t the space I need here to trace all the ways the various ancient (Gorgias and Protagoras) and modern (Vitanza, Jarrat, McComiskey and others) sophists assert a strong defense for rhetoric. I would argue that sophistic rhetoric answers the vacuum left by Plato on the subject of style by emphasizing style without neglecting substance: “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.” Truth (capital T) doesn’t really exist but persuasive arguments do exist. Men are persuaded, and so it is not the substance, which can never really be proven, by rather the style and the agreement of the audience that make an argument successful. We see a similar commitment to agreement and creation in the modern sophistic tradition. According to Jarratt, for example, sophistic discourses seek to create space for alternative voices in the same way that nomos, which she also attributes to the sophists, opens space for a social construction of ethical truth (60). The attention to construction, measurement, and agreement in these definitions suggests a commitment to the strong defense.
Conclusion
Let me end, though, not be coming back to my definition of rhetoric (I consider myself to be firmly in the strong defense camp: rhetoric does things.) but by answering questions I’ve been asked for the last 3 years but to which I have been unable to formulate a coherent answer: what should the university do? What should rhetoric and composition do? What should FYC do? Here’s my answer: it’s possible to be both pragmatic (teach students strategies for writing and rhetorical techniques that will help them in other classes, on the job, and as civic participants) and theoretical (ask them to read challenging texts and discuss challenging issues, challenge them to grapple with ontological questions, and make room for them think and talk about things they won’t be asked to think and talk about anywhere else).
To this end, Thomas Rickert theorizes “a postpedagogy that recognizes the inventive possibilities already inherent in post-Oedipal subjectivities in order to promote writing Acts that shift control of the dominant loci of contention from the teacher to the student” (163). This new approach to teaching recognizes that “each student’s life is its own telos” (165). Each student has her own responsibilities, with all the multiple meanings that the word indicates, and the student’s needs and desires become the central force that drives what happens in the classroom. This view of pedagogy requires a great deal of risk in terms of teacher authority; it requires teachers to risk missing an opportunity for critique and organized deep thinking in favor of making space for what students value and leaving themselves open to surprises and challenges.
My answers to these questions mirror my definition of rhetoric, I think: we should strive for balance, in the classroom and the university, between preparation for college, work, and life and the hard work of coming to terms with giving meaning to those activities. This is the kind of balance that I see in the best ancient definitions of rhetoric (Quintilian and Cicero both discuss civic and epistemological uses for rhetoric). Rhetoric creates both knowledge/truth and practical laws. I’m not sure these things are so far apart, actually. And don’t believe that pragmatism and theory are so far apart either.
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