What Is Rhetoric ?

Abstract

At one of its biannual conferences, the Rhetoric Society of America offered a souvenir t-shirt that had printed on the back the question “What Is Rhetoric?” Surrounding the provocative question were definitions of rhetoric from throughout the ages, accompanied by the authors and works who provided those definitions (“‘The faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.’ Aristotle, Rhetoric”; “‘The duty and office of rhetoric is to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will.’ Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning”; “‘The use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.’ Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives”). These definitions set up the shirt’s punchline, which appeared at the bottom: “‘Rhetoric? Isn’t that just bullshit?’ Dad, on hearing I changed my major to Rhetoric.’” It’s a good joke, one that brings home the twin facts that rhetoric is an ancient study of one of the most fundamental aspects of being human and that at any moment it is likely to be dismissed as bullshit. The proliferation of great thinkers on the back of the shirt rather exacerbates this ambivalence. On the one hand, they are proof that the greatest minds in history have taken up the question of what rhetoric is, each in their particular moment across time and place; on the other hand, these greatest minds have continually failed to come up with a definitive answer.It is in the spirit of this latter possibility that Michel Meyer engages the question What Is Rhetoric? Meyer’s aim is nothing less than to “unify” rhetoric which he sees as heretofore divided into invention and arrangement (which he calls “argument”) and style (which he calls “rhetoric stricto sensu”). Meyer’s innovation is a “question-view” of rhetoric: the search for answers has for too long been considered the dominant concept of rhetoric; rhetoric instead ought to be understood through the question itself. The book is grounded in the concept of the “problematic” (which is central to Meyer’s previous work, such as Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science, and Language), a mode of discourse and thought in which problems can be conditionally resolved, and which stands in opposition to the apodictic, wherein answers are definitive. Apodictic reasoning seeks to eliminate the question by presenting it as already solved, by presenting its answer as a proposition; problematic reasoning seeks out the question itself and offers multiple alternative answers, which themselves raise or respond to additional questions. The role of rhetoric is to allow interlocutors to settle on an answer or answers that will allow decisions to be made and relationships to continue even if answers reached are only tentative or only convenient. Rhetoric achieves this because it is, in Meyer’s definition, “the negotiation of the distance between individuals, ethos and pathos, on a question (logos) which is more or less divisive, or more or less reductive of the distance between them” (225). Distance and problematicity are related—the more problematic (for instance, the more contentious) a question, the more distance is required between speaker and audience in order to minimize hostility or aggression. To strike this balance of distance and problematic, speaker and hearer can either investigate the question and its nature or the relationship between the individuals involved in the question and their attitudes toward that question. Thus, Meyer’s rhetoric can approach a question through logos or through the relationship of pathos and ethos. Interlocutors can also address the question directly through argument (the canons of invention and arrangement, one subset of rhetoric more broadly) or indirectly through rhetoric stricto sensu (figuration, the other subset). The approach through argument (logos), however, depends on the relationship of speaker and audience (ethos and pathos), and argumentative strategies are therefore inextricable from figurative ones.As the book progresses, Meyer builds his argument logically: rhetoric’s indirect approach to questions is represented formally as “a1 → q1 * q2,” which is meant to indicate that in rhetoric a given answer necessitates two additional questions, which in turn imply a further answer. Similarly, Meyer identifies four “operators” symbolized as “=,” “±,” “+,” and “–,” which correspond both to the four master tropes of metaphor (=), metonymy (±), synecdoche (+), and irony (–), as well as to four argumentative operations of agreeing with a judgment (=), modifying it (±), adding a further judgment (+), or contradicting the judgment (–). That the tropes and the argumentative positions can be schematized in this manner indicates, for Meyer, that argument and rhetoric stricto sensu are fundamentally unified. Chapters on literary and artistic rhetoric allow Meyer to discuss poetics and the role of context and figuration in determining the relationships of ethos and pathos, while chapters on pathos and ethos allow Meyer to establish formulae tracing out the way passions and values create and negotiate distance.The foundation of Meyer’s argument is laid in the first (and at sixty-six pages by far the longest) chapter, “The Basic Features of the History of Rhetoric.” In some ways a very conventional history, the chapter’s first half treats Plato, Aristotle, and then Roman rhetoric, by which is meant primarily Cicero and Quintilian. Meyer argues that each of these is defined by one of the argumentative appeals, Plato by pathos, Aristotle by logos, and the Romans by ethos. Passing over the middle ages and much of the Renaissance, Meyer then takes up his history with Descartes, whose method is central to the apodictic mode. Meyer demonstrates convincingly that Descartes’s 1637 Discourse on Method is in fact an adaptation of the rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, style, and memory. After Descartes, Meyer focuses on the twentieth century, where he groups major figures as treating ethos (especially Kenneth Burke), logos (Group Mu, Stephen Toulmin, and Chaïm Perelman), and pathos (I. A. Richards). This analysis provides the theoretical tools through which Meyer examines the roles of invention and arrangement, style, ethos, logos, and pathos in his definition of rhetoric. The historian of rhetoric will find his organization new and compelling, and his argument that Descartes is fundamentally rhetorical is powerful given a long-dominant narrative that sees his method as the death of rhetoric.However, the history is offered first and foremost as a means to an argumentative end, and so historians of rhetoric will not find the kind of detail that marks out the work of other more historically oriented authors who tackle similarly large questions, such as George Kennedy, Thomas Conley, Nancy Struever, or Jennifer Richards. Meyer’s approach is philosophical: ultimately, “rhetoric is a branch of philosophy,” though one that “can be studied independently, as it was by Aristotle and Perelman” (226). This means that the thinkers he examines have been engaged in the theorizing of what rhetoric is, rather than, as a cataloger of tropes might view it, in studying how rhetoric might be used or taught in practice. Meyer thus approaches the question “What is rhetoric?” as one to be answered definitively, rather than contingently, and past answers that may have been responses to particular circumstances and conditions of their historical moment are less credited with making a contribution to that moment than tasked for not adequately addressing the fundamental question. One may dislike a rhetoric that focuses exclusively on style, but as scholars of eighteenth-century rhetoric like Lois Agnew and Mark Longaker have shown, the thinkers who resorted to such means did so out of a genuine belief that doing so would be an effective way of addressing contemporary problems of shaping virtues and other social structures. Meyer’s approach also means that his study is focused on a narrow rhetorical tradition—primarily men, primarily European or American.None of this is a failing on the part of the book, which is intended as a work of philosophy, not of history. As such, Meyer’s book is a tour de force: it offers a number of brilliant innovations and insights into rhetorical theory, it explicitly sets out to offer a unified view of rhetoric, and it succeeds. Historians of rhetoric will find much that is compelling, challenging, and useful not only in Meyer’s larger argument but in many of the points he makes along the way. But to commit fully to the argument does mean the reader will have to accept the unspoken premise that the question “What is rhetoric?” can, and should, be definitively answered.