The politics of persuasion cannot respond to this problem of situated critique. It cannot respond because judgment appealing to existing opinions alone does not account for the emergence of new ways of understanding existing social and political practices or ways of envisioning how they might be otherwise. That is not to say, however, that there are no other resources in the rhetorical tradition or early modern political thought for considering this important problem of situated political critique in a new way.
Beyond Persuasion
Looking to the rhetorical tradition, we find a more capacious understanding of rhetoric that goes beyond the dignity of persuasion. Such conceptions of rhetoric, as we will see, offer rich resources that sustain political critique. Where conceiving of rhetoric as “mere” persuasion has long been a hallmark of philosophy’s valorization of reason alone, Ernesto Grassi’s account of the rhetorical tradition redirects our attention to a much more productive and theoretically significant role, also originating with Cicero. Conceived of as an imaginative language, rhetoric in Grassi’s understanding reaches far beyond its instrumental uses to encompass the creation of new meaning.8 Such new meaning is not created in a vacuum but, rather, works creatively from within particular social and linguistic practices. In this way, rhetoric uniquely offers the capacity to develop new ways of thinking in response to contingent and novel circumstances and the changing needs of human life. Rhetoric provides indispensable resources for critique situated on the finite terrain of politics.
Insofar as we conceive of philosophy as proceeding by the force of logic to the exclusion or subordination of rhetoric and its play of imagination on the passions, our thought remains tethered to the first principles from which deduction follows. From where do we get the original insight into such first principles and what is the source for new models of thought? How, in other words, could we proceed beyond mere repetition with deduction alone? The discovery of the conditions of rational thought, Grassi argues, lies not in logic but in the imaginative power of figural language to generate new ways of ordering and presenting images on which speech that is both reasonable and effective depends. Metaphor and analogy are essential for generating new images and frameworks out of familiar terms. Such figural language entails a borrowing, or transfer, of familiar words into unfamiliar relation. to produce new meanings. It is, in other words, to discover or invent a new relation, not derived from fact or through logic, but by virtue of the ingenious activity of the speaker. This capacity of ingenium, a distinctive human ability for making meaning, works by joining the diverse and disparate. It “reveals something ‘new’ . . . something ‘unexpected’ and ‘astonishing’ by uncovering the ‘similar in the unsimilar, i.e. what cannot be deduced rationally.’”9 Understood this way, rhetoric does not simply adorn or destabilize philosophy’s reasoned arguments; rather, it makes possible the production of new spaces for arguments and shared meaning.10 As Grassi writes, “Insofar as metaphor has its root in the analogy between different things and makes this analogy immediately spring into ‘sight,’ it makes a fundamental contribution to the structure of our world.”11 To critically orient ourselves to the situated world of politics, rather than idealizing detachment, requires the creative power of rhetoric, unleashed through metaphor. Rhetoric as imaginative language is indispensable for envisioning our social and political arrangements in new and different ways.
To consider rhetoric as an indispensable capacity for critique then requires a shift in perspective from philosophical tradition. Always situated and dialogic, rhetoric presumes a particular audience, a relation between speaker and audience(s), located in a specific time and place.12 The appeal to audience (or readers) may be explicit in the text or it may come by implication through the repetition of a familiar image or idiom. In both cases, the text marks its position within relations between speaker and audience. This situation invites us to read in new ways, even philosophical texts, attentive to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls heteroglossia.13 To tend to this plurality of modes of speech within a text is to be aware that words and phrases, idioms and images, are not always deployed to produce and reproduce meaning in the same ways. Instead, we must tend to the moments when meanings are pluralized and decentered, following the play of style and argument and attuned to the possibility of language being deployed in new ways or even turned against itself, as in parody or satire. The presence of multiple and varied modes and forms of address does not necessarily mean that rhetoric has overtaken philosophy, undermining rational thought.14 On the contrary, stylistic and figural invention, framed by the text’s appeals to readers, can be recognized as contributing essentially to philosophical and political arguments themselves. Dialogic and heteroglossic dimensions of the text may challenge norms of philosophy’s monologic forms of address. They can also, however, reveal the essential and transformative role of imaginative and inventive language in launching new modes of judgment and critique that lie at the heart of the philosophical enterprise.
Reconceiving Early Modern Rhetoric and Philosophy
Those who recount the seventeenth century as the end of the rhetorical tradition and the twin rise of the modern state and science are not without reason. Nowhere does the break seem clearer than in the philosophical and scientific innovations of the Royal Society, as recorded in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society. The Royal Society counted among its members Locke, Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Dryden, Isaac Newton, and others who, in Sprat’s words, “have indeavor’d to separate the knowledge of Nature, from the colours of Rhetoric, the devices of Fancy, or the delightful deceit of Fables.”15 They professed “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.”16 Contrasted with the “Artifice, Humors, and Passions of Sects,” Sprat presents the emerging natural philosophy, with its plain style, as conducive to political stability and religious moderation.17 We need think only of Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which a new science of politics draws upon mathematical reasoning and institutes sovereign control over linguistic creativity and interpretation, to see how closely interwoven with politics these developments in science, philosophy, and language were.
Locke enjoys a central role in these momentous changes and it takes no stretch of imagination to associate him with the “rhetoric against rhetoric.” He is aligned with the Royal Society, in tension with older traditions of Aristotelianism and humanism, on the one hand, and new, nonconformist religious sects, on the other. In contrast to Hobbes, however, Locke’s New Science is that the early English empirical scientists. Locke does not write extensively on rhetoric per se, but when he does, there is little doubt that he too harbors suspicions of the capacity of language to create confusion in the human understanding and conflict in social and political life. In his best-known passage on rhetoric, Locke speaks with great consternation of the relationship of rhetoric to passions, and to judgment, while advocating for order and clarity in speech. If we are to “speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetoric, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat: And therefore, however laudable or allowable Oratory may render them in Harangues and popular Addresses, they are certainly, in all Discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided” (3.10.34).18 Rhetoric matters for Locke here, insofar as it raises the power of the passions to overwhelm judgment. It raises, in other words, a fundamental concern for his philosophy.
Not surprisingly, then, figural language comes under his critical gaze in several