The Dialectic of Aristotle’s Rhetoric

Abstract

Aristotle writes the Art of Rhetoric rhetorically. His actions sometimes speak louder than his words. At first, he presents rhetoric as concerned with a species of logos, but gradually makes clear that all logos is somehow rhetorical. To understand human beings, the animals with logos, one must first understand logos, thinking through its dyadic structure as at once communication and articulation—a structure that guarantees its failure fully to articulate and fully to communicate. Now, persuasion proceeds “by speaking either examples or enthymemes, and besides these nothing.” To understand the enthymeme proves to require an understanding of topos—topic. But topos becomes clear only by way of a long series of examples. Finally, then, it is owing to the example, its strange mixture of the universal and particular, that we understand what Aristotle is doing. The example, itself exemplary of the power logos is the key to understanding human nature.