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Classical And Modern Rhetoric An interpretive option for historicist's of classical rhetoric and composition lies waiting: Platonic rhetoric. Two primary issues need to be re conceptualized and integrated into contemporary rhetoric and composition studies in order for this option to work: (1) what Plato says about rhetoric and writing in dialogues such as Phaedrus, Gorgias, and Protagoras and in Letter VII and (2) as significantly, the nature of Plato's writing as writing. Classical rhetoric, from Core to the Sophists, to Plato and Aristotle, and on into the Romans, is consistently regarded as a faculty, an ability, as much as it is conceived of as a subject for study. Classical rhetoric, in Plato's sense of "a universal art... having to do with all matters, great as well as small, good and bad alike" (Phaedrus, p. 503) and in Aristotle's sense of "discovering in the particular case, what are the available means of persuasion, " (Rhetoric, Cooper translation, p. 7) covers as its domain all the language use that we employ in our everyday activities, from writing an inventory to reading a poem.
The apparently utilitarian (or what some people regard as harmless) language uses that enable and constitute everyday activity comprise one region of rhetoric. The structures - psychological, philosophical, and linguistic - that underlie these everyday uses also constitute a region of classical rhetoric. Dialectical critics of classical rhetoric tend to address the psychological, philosophical, and linguistic issues that partly constitute classical rhetoric. These considerations distinguish Dialectical School interpretations from Heritage School interpretations, even as other characteristics obscure their differences. The Heritage School of classical rhetoric is positivistic in its assumptions and imitative of the natural and social sciences in its rhetorical stance.
It assumes a definite, knowable reality "out there, " it ignores the flux and counter flux of language that enables it to exist in the first place, and it presents methods of presenting the "truth" of that knowable reality. The stability is treated as unchangeable and unchanging. Positivism works well in the conventional hard sciences and social sciences. It works well for what Aristotle called definite knowledge. Positivism works far less well for what he called contingent reality, or the world of probability. Rhetoric exists within and in turn helps to create the realm of probability.
The apparent (or posited) definiteness of a scientific theory cannot work for a rhetorical theory. Probability resists the definite: one can predict discourse situations, but one cannot be certain about them in advance of their happening. This issue is why rhetorical training rests on being able to meet a language issue that arises in a given context. With no preparation, a rhetorically trained person-of the kind evoked by Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, to name five classical writers-can meet the requirements of a given communication situation. In other words, probability has been accounted for. It can be predicted (the future evaluated) but it can be definite only in hindsight (the past evaluated).
The temporal distinction of definite discourse situations that are more definite because they have already happened and discourse situations that might happen provides a primary difference between the production (the encoding, or the writing or speaking) of a text and the reception (the decoding, or the reading of or listening to) a text. Four primary language issues stand out as characteristics of Heritage School positivism in the contemporary reception of classical rhetoric: (1) the use of formulas in lists, rules, and dicta (or prescriptions); (2) the severing of thought and discourse, thereby making each process appear to be discrete; (3) de contextualizing concepts by using formalist literary techniques of isolation when they are inappropriate for the material, the writer, the reader, or the context; and (4) relying on Saussure's identification of translation-as-substitution, a move that results in what Cornford, Guthrie, and others have called mistranslations. These four characteristics of positivism contributed to the complex conversion of Aristotle's theories of logic (that is, the systematic use of reasoning and argument) into "automaton" logic. The historicizing of logic, obviously an important aspect of the history of what is usually called western thought, intertwines with the historicizing of rhetoric. Rather, a version of thought frequently called "logic, " but in fact not connected to traditional logic, provides the focus of concern here. The problem with this kind of positivistic thinking is that it works well for the present scientific moment with electrons, but it does not help us understand the nature of written or spoken discourse.
In other words, positivistic thinking, in the guise of either traditional or familiar logic that does not help to understand the manipulation that inheres in all language use (spoken, written, and electronic). Both kinds of logic leave too much unsaid, too much presumed. These ways of thinking tend to discount language manipulation as impressionistic, personal, harmless, and irrelevant. The Heritage School of classical rhetoric occupies the secure territory of positivism, asserting a reality that is never questioned. The problem with this rhetorical stance is that language use is not definite.
In the contemporary reception of classical rhetoric, the Dialectical School has in its many and various manifestations reevaluated the familiar Heritage School cordoning off of logic as a rational, positivistic language issue. Rather than privileging traditional logic or the more common familiar logic, many writers in the Dialectical School have repositioned traditional logic as one aspect of language use. C. Jan Swearingen, for example, writes in "The Rhetor as Eiron: Plato's Defense of Dialogue": "Plato's critique of sophistic rhetoric remains a viable critique of rhetoric and... was in no way superceded by Aristotle's carefully elaborate partitioning of rhetoric, poetics, logic, and ethics" (p. 290). Issues such as language manipulation, culture and context, and the demands of a particular language moment characterize the contemporary reception of classical rhetoric according to the widely varying rhetorical stances of the Dialectical School.
The definiteness of positivism does not take interpretation very far into these issues. In general, classical rhetoric tended to define a mechanistic, skill-based model of composition, using preconceptions about the shapes of completed texts as the basis for describing writers' activities. For instance, texts are supposed to have introduction s and conclusions; therefore, introducing and concluding were regarded as skills to be learned separately and then combined to produce acceptable writing. Modern rhetoric, by contrast, tries to define the process of composing, not the shapes of texts, assuming that the process is organic, not a series of discrete parts. Although stated in widely varying terms, the distinctions persistently drawn between classical and modern or "new" rhetoric fall under four related heads. Images of man and of society provide one area frequently cited as distinguishing the two rhetorical periods.
According to many definers of new rhetoric, the classical tradition, and especially Aristotle, defined man as a "rational animal" who dealt with problems of the world primarily through logic or reason and who lived during a time characterized by stable values, social cohesion, and a unified cultural ideal. In contrast, modern rhetoric defines man as essentially a "rhetorical" or "symbol-using" or "communal" animal who constitutes the world through shared and private symbols. And this modern man is said to live not in a simple, cohesive society but in a complex universe in which generally agreed upon values and unifying norms are scarce or nonexistent. In such a universe, it is argued, the bases of classical rhetoric are simply inadequate. The second distinction often drawn between classical and contemporary rhetoric - that classical rhetoric emphasizes logical proofs while modern rhetoric stresses emotional (or psychological) proofs - is closely related to the first. Aristotle's image of man as a rational animal had a direct influence on his rhetoric.
This preference for logical proof is also evident in classical invention, which focuses on the analysis of subject matter at the expense of a concern for the basic laws of human understanding. Therefore, a successful classical orator has to be an expert logician, while the modern speaker or writer needs, in contrast, to be a great student of practical psychology. A third distinction between the two periods concerns the rhetor-audience relationship, a relationship said to be characterized in the classical period by manipulative, antagonistic, one-way or unidirectional communication. The new rhetoric is conversely said to posit not an antagonistic but a cooperative relationship between rhetor and audience, one based upon empathy, understanding, mutual trust, and two-way or "dialogic" communication.
The final distinction often drawn between the two periods is inextricably related to the rhetor-audience relationship just described. This distinction results from identifying the goal of classical rhetoric as persuasion, while the goal of the new rhetoric is identified as communication. One similarity between classical and modern rhetoric is their shared concept of man as a language-using animal who unites reason and emotion in discourse with another. Central to this concept is the role of language in the creation of knowledge or belief and its relationship to the knowing mind. Aristotle's Rhetoric unites reason and emotion, for example. In addition, Aristotle's works on logic, ethics, and epistemology as well as the Rhetoric demonstrate that Aristotle recognized the powerful dynamism of the creating human mind.
These works further indicate that Aristotle was aware of man's ability to use symbols and that he viewed language as the medium through which judgments about the world are communicated. Modern theories, of course, also posit language as the ground of rhetoric. Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. As expected in rhetoric's removed by twenty-three hundred years, however, Aristotle's system of language use differs from ours. The resultant distinction between the two periods is potentially profound: Aristotle addressed himself primarily to oral discourse; modern rhetoric's have addressed themselves primarily to written discourse. Our understanding of the historical and methodological ramifications of the speaking/ writing distinction has been hampered by the twentieth-century split among speech, linguistics, philosophy, and English departments.
Despite the work of scholars such as Walter Ong, Kenneth Burke, and Jacques Derrida, many questions about the relationship of speech and writing remain unanswered and, in some cases, unexplored. The second major similarity between Aristotelian and modern rhetoric is the view of rhetoric as a tech or dynamic methodology through which rhetor and audience, a self and an other, may jointly have access to knowledge. We have already examined Aristotle's concept of the enthymeme and the ways in which it united speaker and audience, logos, ethos, and pathos, in the pursuit of knowledge leading to action. In modern theory, particularly the work of Kenneth Burke, rhetoric provides the means through which we may both achieve identification with an other and understand that identification through the attribution of motives. Such a view of rhetoric as creative or epistemic must characterize any viable, dynamic rhetoric and, indeed, any other view reduces the role of rhetoric to a "naming of parts" or to stylistic embellishment, reductions characteristic of many rhetorical theories. But this basic similarity should not mask an equally important distinction between classical and modern rhetoric.
As we have seen, this distinction concerns not the notion of man, the nature of proof, the speaker-audience relationship, nor the goal of rhetoric. Instead, this distinction concerns the nature and status of knowledge. In Aristotle's system, knowledge may be either of the necessary or the contingent. Knowledge of the necessary or universal, epitome, operates in the realm of the theoretical or scientific. Breaking with Plato, Aristotle admits of another kind of knowledge, that of the contingent. Such knowledge, do, is the way of knowing contingent reality (that is, the world around us that is both characterized and limited by change).
Rhetoric's realm is limited to the contingent, and the connections among language, thought, and that reality are grounded in an epistemology which posits reality independent of the knower. In short, rhetoric uses thought and language to lead to judgment (kiss) as the basis of action in matters of this world. And for Aristotle, that world of contingent reality, though itself in a state of flux, could be understood by systematic application of the intellect because that reality was itself thought to be informed by stable first principles. Modern rhetorical theory rests on no such fully confident epistemology, nor does knowledge enjoy such a clearly defined status. In fact, we are in radical disagreement over what "knowledge" may be, though we generally agree on man's ability to communicate that disagreement. So, for the modern period, connections among thought, language, and reality are thought to be grounded not in an independent, charitable reality but in the nature of the knower instead, and reality is not so much discovered or discoverable as it is constituted by the interplay of thought and language.
Rhetoric's grounding in language and its potential ability to join rhetor and audience in the discovery of shared (communicable) knowledge suggests a third compelling similarity between classical and modern rhetoric: in both periods rhetoric has the potential to clarify and inform activities in numerous related fields. By establishing rhetoric as the antistrophes or corollary of dialectic, Aristotle immediately places rhetoric in relation to other fields of knowledge, and these relationships are painstakingly worked out in the Organon. Rhetoric, poetics, and ethics all involve do, knowledge of contingent, shifting reality. Hence, rhetoric is necessarily useful in addressing complex human problems in any field where certainty is unachievable. In addition, Aristotle Rhetoric provided a theory that was intimately related to practice. For the Greeks, and indeed for the Romans who followed them, rhetoric was a practical art of discourse which played a central role in education and in the daily affairs of citizens.
Aristotle's work established a theoretical relationship among belief, language, and action; Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian all adapted and acted out that theory, Quintilian using it as a basis for a rhetoric which would serve as a way of knowing and a guide to action throughout a person's life. Despite the efforts of modern rhetoricians, we lack any such systematic theory to inform current practice. In fact, there has been a division between rhetorical theory and practice and an extreme fragmentation of the discipline. Aristotle's theory is revolutionary in that it establishes rhetoric as an art and relates it clearly to all fields of knowledge.
Bibliography: Aristotle, The Rhetoric of Aristotle. Trans. Lane Cooper. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1932.
Herrick, James A. : The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction, Allyn & Bacon; 2 edition (July 11, 2000) Plato, Phaedrus. Trans. W. C. Helm bold and W. G.
Rabinowitz. Indianapolis, IN: Books-Merrill, 1956 Swearingen, C. Jan, "The Rhetor as Eiron: Plato's Defense of Dialogue." Pre/Text. Vol. 3 (1982), pp. 289 - 336
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Research essay sample on Classical And Modern Rhetoric
