Apologia Accepted

After all of our reading, what remains, finally, of rhetoric? Has the hyper-rational, agonistic, elitist, arguably manipulative rhetoric of Aristotle been entirely replaced by a thousand other rhetorics of technology, place, culture, gender, race, creed, sexuality, or ability?

Not so fast, Lunsford and Ede caution. Much of our discomfort with classical rhetoric seems to have stemmed from certain reductive readings of Aristotle and others, with the result that we tend to read the aforementioned qualities into the rhetoric, whether they are there or not. This makes it easier to claim that the classical categories are no longer sufficient to describe rhetoric in a modern context.

For instance, an insistence that classical rhetoric is hyper-rational, a relic of a worldview based on Platonic ideals, misses much of the nuance of Aristotle. In reality, he saw logos (rational appeals in the form of enthymemes) functioning alongside pathos (emotional appeals in the form of enargeia and honorific/pejorative language). Humans are not merely rational, but both rational and emotional.

And I thought this was a good response to a pretty bad argument. It’s hard to claim that Aristotle’s rhetoric is hyper-rational, disconnected is it is from dialectic; enthymemes are, by their nature, probabilities, not verities. Classical rhetoric was never meant to replace scientific demonstration, though I think Aristotle might be persuaded to agree with Kuhn that scientific demonstration contains rhetoric.

Similarly, Lunsford and Ede point out that accusations of rhetorical manipulation fail to take into account the juxtaposition, in Nicomachean Ethics, of morality and emotion (41). Again, the defense seems stronger than the claim it tries to refute; on what basis does postmodern rhetoric, which, most have settled, is “cognate with language” (see Weaver and Richards), and therefore, as such, is part of a system of control (see Foucault) see classical rhetoric as manipulative?

Finally, Lunsford and Ede argue that, in the enthymeme, the rhetor and the audience co-construct proofs, which is a strong, dialogical way of arriving at meaning—far from one-sided, far from centering only on persuasion. This, too, makes sense—although there are other ways to make meaning dialogically, and there are certainly others, like Bahktin, who stress this dialogue more, one would be hard-pressed to call this one-sided.  

I think that I would contend that the centuries-long conversation about rhetorical theory would be largely incoherent without the terminology of classical rhetoric—audience, rhetor, ethos, pathos, logos, topoi, kairos, etc—and that suggests that conceptually, there is still some coherence to the classical system. It is a remarkably robust set of concepts.  Even Kenneth Burke, who posits a rhetoric of identification rather than persuasion, is quoted by Lunsford and Ede as admitting, “there is no chance of keeping apart the meanings of persuasion, identification (‘consubstantiality’) and communication” (44).

This, for me, is true of the theorists we’ve read this semester (including Zappen): they expand on classical rhetoric, modernize it, clarify it, or challenge it on certain points—and these are helpful, necessary additions and corrections—but the classical system does not go away. In fact, I’m not sure what would be left without it. Maybe someone else could answer: if we did away with Aristotle, where would the new rhetoric begin?