There is nothing inherently evil about Apple’s imaginative use of stock characters from the American imagination to sell their product. Like all mythic simplification, it undoubtedly overstates the differences between the two products, not to mention the differences between two very large American corporations, but all advertising is understood to be delivered with a wink, and overstatement is hardly a sin. The mischief lies in the elevation of a questionable premise to an unquestioned assumption, and of a role that all of us are occasionally asked to play to an essentialist ideal that all should aspire to be. The mischief also lies in the constant reinforcement of individualist over communitarian values. If the values represented by “MAC” seem innocuous in the context of the ad, they may seem less so when extended to the realm of civic virtues. Rugged individuals, after all, do not play well with others. Their questioning of authority seldom appears to extend to questioning the authority of their own core values. However much good they may do heeding the words of the bumper sticker, “Question Authority,” they are ill-prepared by their credo for actually assuming authority themselves, for questioning the ends to which authority is best put, and for promoting collective action that secures a common good. Yet the ability or inability of politicians to sell themselves plausibly as rugged individualists has been an important predictor of political success in this country throughout much of the last three decades.
In the above analysis of the ad, we ourselves are making an assumption about identity that not everyone, certainly not all our students, may find agreeable. We assume that identity is what Burke calls “parliamentary” and variable as opposed to being unitary, essential, and fixed. In this view of identity, we play many roles and authenticity is not so much a matter of remaining true to a central self as it is a matter of consciously selecting the roles we play and being fully engaged in those roles. Rhetoricians’ assumptions about human identity are as basic to the way they practice their art as the neo-classical economists’ assumptions about identity—personified in neo-classical economists’ default model of identity, homo economicus—are basic to their own practice. The literal truth of either discipline’s assumption is always open to conjecture, though contemporary rhetoric’s assumptions about identity appear to square better with those currently dominant in the fields of psychology, philosophy and psychology. The economists’ assumption that human agents make decisions solely on the basis of rational self-interest, comports well with nineteenth century utilitarian assumptions about human nature, but appears often to be at odds with actual human behavior. Still, for all its admitted flaws, the model continues to work well enough to serve as a starting point for micro-economic analysis and continues to be used even by skeptics, albeit with increasing amendment and modification. While we are prepared to defend the validity of rhetoric’s regnant model of human identity, we should not feel that we have to prove it beyond a doubt to our students or to colleagues in other disciplines. Like the economists’ far more simplified model, it serves to explain a number of behaviors observed in rhetorical analysis and to provide a clear framework for rhetorical theory.
So just what are some of the implications of the “parliamentary,” non-essentialist model of identity? First and foremost, the model implies a strong sense of agency on the part of every rhetorical actor. The model assumes that people have the freedom to make choices, not just choices of behavior, but of identity, and that rhetoric is a primary means by which those choices can be systematically examined, made, and defended. The freedom assumed by rhetoric, can be seen from an essentialist standpoint as a curse, insofar as one is never quite “finished” and safe; like Sartre’s existential hero, homo rhetoricus is “condemned to freedom.” Hans Blumenberg contrasts human agents to other animals in this regard, noting that unlike other members of the animal kingdom, we are bereft of instincts that allow us to know or be anything im-mediately. Even self-knowledge or “self understanding has the structure of ‘self-externality.’” A “detour” is required to acquire this knowledge, an act of mediation through the other—the phoros of an analogy, the vehicle of a metaphor, the second term of a ratio, the relationships we maintain with other human beings. In some cases we initiate this process of identity construction; in other cases we find ourselves selecting or resisting choices offered to or foisted off on us. In the latter case, rhetoric plays a particularly crucial role insofar as it “is not only the technique of producing . . . an effect, it is always also a means of keeping the effect transparent” (Blumenberg 435-36). This second capacity, the ability to interpret effects on ourselves as well as to produce effects on others, that makes mastery of rhetoric particularly crucial for our students at this moment in history when so many forces are at work conjuring up dysfunctional identities for them and marginalizing perfectly functional ones in the process.
Ethics and Argument
The model of identity that prevails in rhetoric, insofar as it stresses human agency and choice, ensures the centrality of ethics to our enterprise as well. As philosopher Charles Taylor has noted “selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably interwined themes” (3). We have failed to take proper account of this connection, he goes on to argue, mostly because of moral philosophy’s fascination with “defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life” (3). The good life, as that concept is understood by Taylor, is fundamentally social insofar as the self is fundamentally a social construct. I am who I am by virtue of my relationships with other humans and happiness cannot be understood apart from those relationships. It is a vision that flies in the face of those visions equating happiness with pleasure or maximization of utility, or, in the case of the rugged individualist, with complete self sufficiency. Unlike the neo-classical economists’ model of the good life, a model that dominates the American popular imagination, social benefit is not an accidental byproduct of individual greed. For a social benefit to have ethical or rhetorical significance, it must be a product of intention. The good life is, in Kenneth Burke’s homely phrase, “a project for ‘getting along with people’” (Attitudes 256). Getting along with each other entails the collective identification of those “particular lived values that unite us and inform the institutions we cherish and wish to defend” cited by Stanley Fish. There is no universal standard that will dictate those values and institutions—or, more precisely, none of the various standards claimed by their adherents to be universal are universally subscribed to—hence the need to articulate them and work out the differences among them through the only means short of force we have to achieve this end—argument, or as some philosophers prefer, “conversation.”
So long as one sees ethics not just in terms of individuals making the right choices, but also in terms of a society determining what options individuals have to choose among, and institutionalizing those choices through collective action, the study of rhetoric is tantamount to the study of ethics. That said, anyone who has taught argument will recognize the fundamental linkage between the two pursuits. Ethical questions arise out of all sorts of arguments, even some that seem at first glance far removed from sphere of ethical thought. The question is not whether we should attend to the ethical dimension of argument, the question is how best to go about teaching ethics in an argument class. Later on we will talk about ethical arguments per se when we discuss a theory of argument types known as stasis theory. We will talk about ethical arguments, that is those whose major claim constitutes an ethical judgment, as a special sort of evaluation argument and utilize some of the language traditionally used by philosophers when determining the “content of obligation” in a given circumstance and laying out systematic means for reaching ethical decisions. But at this point, we are talking much more broadly about the relationship between ethics and rhetoric. In what follows we will be concerned about the common features of ethical and rhetorical reasoning and about the ethics of arguing.
One way of underscoring just how much rhetoric and ethics have in common is to consider the question of where ethics might best be taught in a curriculum. The process of making a case for teaching ethics in a writing course focused on argument, makes eminently clear just how closely related the two pursuits are. Traditionally of course, ethics has been taught at the college level