The Value of the Classics in Rhetoric

Abstract

While classical rhetoric expands its influence in departments of English, in some Speech departments classical rhetoric is being eliminated. If the study of rhetoric is stimulating, presumably it would not be endangered in those departments that had known it best since the 1920s, but in those very Speech departments, rhetoric is sometimes called a dead hand. Yet those of us who have studied classical rhetoric carefully insist on its value, although we may not agree on the source of its value. After teaching classical rhetoric for thirty years, I am convinced that one source of its value is neglected; the value of studying rhetoric may lie not entirely in the knowledge, wisdom, or, more accurately, in the answers it provides, but even more in the questions rhetoricians have answered. If we can change our emphasis from one that searches only for answers to one that is keenly aware also of the questions rhetoricians have answered, we may make the study of rhetoric more stimulating in the following ways. 1. We can detect the varieties of rhetorics. Classical rhetoric is not the energizing force it might have been because we tend to teach all rhetorics as if they were answers to only one kind of question: What are the means of persuasion? or, much like it: How may we communicate more effectively? That this kind of question is the great question of rhetoric is merely the conventional wisdom of twentieth-century commentators on rhetoric. Many rhetorics are more concerned with other questions. Protagoras, for example, seems to have answered, in addition to questions such as those he asked about causation and other matters, the question How may speaking push understanding as far as understanding can go?' He believed that when understanding had gone to its limits, it would discover dissoi logoi, or ideas in opposition, each of which contradicted the others, yet each of which was true. Although he probably meant nothing quite so simple, we can see that a kind of dissoi logoi exist: we find night and day, both of which are opposites, yet each of which is true in the sense that each exists, neither of which can