Philosophy vs Rhetoric
In one sense, everything discussed in this chapter can be understood through the lens of philosophy vs rhetoric. It’s the ur struggle from whence so many of our skirmishes, then and now, have arisen. If early on most philosophers defined themselves through their differences with rhetoric, a number of more recent philosophers and critics, including Hans Blumenberg, Hayden White, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton, and others, have returned the favor and distinguished themselves from their peers by in some cases embracing rhetoric explicitly and in others by embracing ideas consonant with contemporary rhetoric. In the second part of this chapter where we highlight the contributions of contemporary rhetoricians, we will see that a number of them have their roots in philosophy. We will take up these more recent attempts to redefine philosophy through rhetoric later in the chapter. In the present discussion of the philosophy/rhetoric divide, however, we limit ourselves to those major themes that emerge from the ancient rupture of the two disciplines.
The ancient struggle between philosophy and rhetoric embodies many tensions, but our focus for this section will be on the central tension between and philosophers’ bold claims to offer irrefutable demonstration of truths for ideal audiences, versus rhetoricians’ more modest claims to persuade given audiences that a particular conclusion warrants their assent. The fact that even today, twenty-five hundred years after the debate began, prestige lies with those who claim to demonstrate truth to experts, versus those who claim to persuade general audiences underscores the uphill battle rhetoric faces in its struggle with philosophy to carve out a legitimate niche among the human sciences. Part of the problem lies in the fact that philosophy was long ago declared the winner in the struggle and subsequently the history of the debate was written from their point of view. As rhetorical theorist Susan Jarratt has suggested of the earliest rhetoricians, the Sophists, we have difficulty understanding them save through the lens of the ancient philosophers, in particular Plato and Aristotle, with whom history has sided for over two millennia. More recent history has been kinder to rhetoric, in no small part thanks to scholars like Jarratt, and consequently it has become possible to understand it on grounds other than those imposed by philosophy. Which is not to say that the above tensions have disappeared; they have simply been reconfigured as largely internal tensions within the field of rhetoric. One particular manifestation of the struggle, for example, may be glimpsed in attempts to “professionalize” the discipline of rhetoric, to transform it into a social science capable of delivering, if not irrefutable demonstrations, reliably data-based conclusions about the world, and to become more “autonomous” or less parasitic on other disciplines. Resistance to these attempts involves the aforementioned turn toward contemporary philosophers—who mostly reject philosophic traditions that demonize rhetoric—who espouse pragmatic and constructivist views and accept rhetoric as a trans-disciplinary activity without apology.
The tension between philosophy and rhetoric or demonstration and persuasion is sometimes also characterized as the tension between truth and effect. In simplest terms, this conflict is between those who view truth as independent of people’s perception of it, and those who see audience-assent as a necessary condition of deeming something truthful. In our earlier discussion of Fish and Leo, whose meta-argument is in effect a contemporary revival of the ancient one we are now considering, we termed the former view “absolutist” in that it was non-contingent and non-relational. Philosopher Hans Blumenberg rejects such a view on the following grounds:
In the dealings of Greeks with Greeks, Isocrates says, the appropriate means is persuasion, whereas in dealings with barbarians it is the use of force. This difference is understood as one of language and education because persuasion presupposes one shares a horizon, allusions to prototypical material, and the orientation provided by metaphors and similes. The antithesis of truth and effect is superficial, because the rhetorical effect is not an alternative that one can choose instead of an insight that one could also have, but an alternative to definitive evidence that one cannot have, or cannot have yet, or at any rate cannot have here and now. (435-6)
What philosophers suggested for centuries was possible is precisely what Blumenberg is here saying is not possible—definitive evidence for the truthfulness of their assertions in the here and now. Blumenberg’s refusal to separate truth from effect points toward an acceptance of the fact that, as Burke puts it, we live in “Babel after the Fall” where the only alternative to force is to establish identification between speakers, a state that must be earned through considerable exertion and guile thanks to all those barriers of language, gender, class, and so forth that always already exist.
For Blumenberg as for Burke, only when speakers share a horizon does conversation, let alone persuasion and identification become possible. In a post-lapsarian world, truth is social. One is certainly free to assert that “definitive evidence” for one’s point of view exists outside the awareness or understanding of those fallen souls with whom one converses, but that assertion itself carries no force absent others’ willingness to grant it. A truth which has no effect, which gets nothing done in the world, is not much of a truth. A number of contemporary debates confirm the futility of appealing to sources of authority not granted by the targets of one’s argument. The debate between creationists (or proponents of “intelligent design”) and evolutionists, for example, is a clash of incommensurable languages and incongruent horizons. Not only is resolution of the question impossible to imagine, a meaningful conversation among the adversaries is difficult to envision. Whether my truth lies in a coherent theory buttressed by a century of empirical data or in the poetry of ancient holy text, it will not be received as truth unless our audience shares the horizon within which it resides. Even geometric proofs cannot be “demonstrated” unless the axioms on which they rest are granted. The incommensurable nature of various truths and vocabularies has of late given rise not only to rancorous and futile public debates, but bloody and violent clashes between incommensurable belief systems
The first great champion of the view opposed to the one attributed here to Blumenberg and Burke was Plato. The target of his scorn was of course the earliest school of rhetoricians, the Sophists. Ironically, Plato’s stance toward the Sophists is articulated in a series of oratorical set pieces in which he deploys a range of rhetorical practices that bear an uncanny resemblance to the ones he charges against his adversaries. To make matters worse, Plato’s practices are even less savory than those promoted by some of his targets. In particular, Plato’s is a markedly “asymmetrical” rhetoric, to borrow a term from Thomas Conley (6-7). It is asymmetrical insofar as the speaker, Socrates in the case of Plato, is active, knowledgeable and has an agenda while his interlocutors, especially if they happen to be poets or Sophists, are typically passive, gullible and full of false knowledge. Ostensibly of course, Plato’s Socrates has the best interests of his interlocutors at heart and the express goal of his interrogations is to educate them, to save them from the error of their ways by serving as a midwife who plucks truth from their unsuspecting consciousness. In theory, Plato has no designs on his audience and is the purest of persuaders. But even he cannot persuade his audience to acknowledge truths that lie beyond their horizons. Conversation cannot transport his audience to the unassailable truths he wishes to share. He must