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Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy
The Living Art of Michael C. Leff
By Antonio de Velasco, John Angus Campbell, David Henry Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2016 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-273-5
CHAPTER 1
Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric
From Philosophy and Rhetoric 36 (2003): 135–47.
I intend to approach the issue of tradition indirectly by first considering some problems connected with rhetorical agency. This strategy might seem awkward, if not actually dangerous, since it entangles two equally complex and disputed concepts. Nevertheless, I hope to show that, within the humanistic strand of rhetoric, these concepts are linked in a way that is not now recognized but has an important bearing on our understanding of both. Specifically, I argue that the humanistic approach entails a productively ambiguous notion of agency that positions the orator both as an individual who leads an audience and as a member of a community who is shaped and constrained by the demands of the audience. This tension, I maintain, becomes intelligible when we understand how tradition can function as a mediating force between individual and collective identities, and once viewed from this angle, tradition emerges as the primary resource for rhetorical invention.
Before proceeding to this argument, I need to explain the sense in which I am using the term "humanistic," since humanism, like tradition and agency, is also a concept that carries with it a variety of different and largely unrelated meanings. Consequently, I want to be clear that I am not referring to a kind of secular religion, as in a "religion of humanity," or to the version of pragmatic philosophy developed by William James and F. S. C. Schiller, or to the ideological formation often called "liberal humanism." Instead, I have in mind a rather specific development in the history of rhetoric that begins in classical Greece with Protagoras and Isocrates, appears in Rome under the sponsorship of Cicero and Quintilian, rises to prominence again in the Renaissance "humanists," and still commands attention and respect from some contemporary rhetoricians. Throughout most of the history of this development, Cicero has been the dominating presence, and so it is often characterized as "Ciceronian rhetoric," and while this history is complex and includes much local variation, at least some features of the approach are consistent. These include a suspicious attitude toward abstract theory not only in respect to rhetoric but also to ethics and politics, a conviction that discourse, especially discourse that allows for argument on both sides of an issue, has a constitutive role to play in civic life, a valorization and idealization of eloquence that entails a strong connection between eloquence and virtue, and a conception of virtue that is decisively linked to political activity. In what follows, I hope to demonstrate that certain views about agency and tradition also fall within this cluster of common attitudes.
Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric
Among contemporary rhetorical scholars, one of the most widely accepted judgments about traditional humanistic rhetoric is that it contains a strong, almost totalizing, emphasis on the agency of the rhetor. Robert Scott sums up this position in a sentence: "To take the speaker as active and the audience as passive is quite traditional," and Wayne Brockriede elaborates on the point when he asserts that the perspective placing "the speaker at the center of the transaction" is "a pervasive one historically. From the practice of the sophists and the writings of Isocrates and Cicero to the thrust of many twentieth-century textbooks in public speaking, the rhetorical transaction has been seen as one in which a speaker seeks to have his way with an audience — both to achieve an immediate end and to achieve power or glory as a respected member of society."
Brockriede's remarks have a political and ethical subtext that Lois McNamara Byham makes explicit: "Old rhetoric was unidirectional thereby vesting those with authority the power to impart information to inferiors," and its goal, she adds, was to manipulate and exploit. More recently, Dilip Gaonkar translates these observations into postmodern argot when he identifies classical rhetoric with "an ideology of human agency," which, among other things, regards the speaker as a "seat of origin rather than a point of articulation."
The classical treatises on rhetoric contain much that supports the claims I have just reviewed. The technical apparatus always is informed and organized from the speaker's perspective, and the humanistic rhetoricians construct the orator as a cultural hero and celebrate the magnitude and apparent autonomy of oratorical power. One of the earliest and most noteworthy examples of this homage to the rhetor appears in Plato's Gorgias. In that dialogue, Gorgias immodestly claims that rhetoricians hold absolute sway in public debate. They can speak more persuasively than the expert on any given topic and overwhelm "all opposition of any kind," since the force of their art is so great and splendid that no one can address "a crowd, on any subject in the world, more persuasively than the rhetorician."
Plato, of course, is no friend of rhetoric, and he presents this view only to refute it. But the testimony of the rhetoricians themselves proves that Plato was not constructing a straw man. Isocrates, in his Antidosis, offers an elegant hymn to the power of speech that associates rhetorical eloquence with sound thought and concludes by asserting that the power of discourse is so important "that nothing done prudently occurs without speech, that speech is the leader of all thoughts and actions, and the most intelligent people use it most often" (257). This power is the possession of the speaker, and elsewhere, Isocrates explains that mastery of eloquence requires much study and is "the work of a brave and imaginative soul" (Against the Sophists, 17). Cicero addresses the same themes. In his De inventione, the orator emerges as the heroic agent who, by combining wisdom and eloquence, persuaded humanity to abandon its naturally savage condition and adopt a civilized and just way of life. In the De oratore, he refashions this topos so as to embody the eloquence that is being praised: "There is ... no more excellent thing than the power, by means of oratory, to get a hold on assemblies of men, win their good will, direct their inclinations wherever the speaker wishes. ... For what is so marvelous as that, out of the innumerable company of mankind, a single being should arise ... who can make effective a faculty bestowed by nature on every man? ... Or what achievement is so mighty and glorious as that the impulses of the crowd, the consciences of the judges, the austerity of the Senate, should suffer transformation through the eloquence of one man? What function again is so kingly, so worthy of the free, so generous as to bring help to the suppliant, to raise up those that are cast down, to bestow security, to set free from peril, to maintain men in their civil rights?" (1.30–32).
These Ciceronian sentiments reverberate through the history of humanism. During the twelfth-century revival of classical learning, for example, John of Salisbury defines the eloquent speaker as the one "who fittingly and efficaciously expresses himself as he intends," and John find himself at a loss "to see how anything could be more generally useful; more helpful in acquiring wealth, more reliable for winning favor, more suited for gaining fame, than is eloquence." Two centuries later, the Florentine humanist Coluccio Saltutati offers another variation on this theme when he asserts that nothing is "more important than to control the motions of the mind, to turn your hearer where you will and to lead him back again to the place from which you moved him, pleasantly and with love. These, unless I am mistaken, are the powers of eloquence; this is its work. All the force and power of rhetoricians strains to attain it. To be sure, it is a great thing to adorn writing with words and maxims, but the greatest — however embellished and dignified by the language — is to move the minds of the listeners. Only eloquence achieves these things."
This list of witnesses could be extended at some length, but even the short version justifies the conclusion that humanistic rhetoric valorizes and centers itself on the individual agent. Nevertheless, there is another side to this story, a complication embedded within this apparently simple conception of agency. John Witherspoon hints at this underside of rhetorical agency when he observes that the highest achievement in the art of speaking must coincide with "the greatest reserve and self-denial in the use of it, otherwise it will defeat its own purpose." That is, the power of the orator ironically implies humility before the audience, because the power to move and persuade an audience requires accommodation and adaptation to its sentiments. The audience necessarily constrains the orator's intellectual horizons, modes of expression, and even representation of self, and so, if orators are to exert influence, they must yield to the people they seek to influence.
Isocrates and Cicero mark and emphasize this dependency on audience and social context. Hence, while Isocrates sometimes underscores the bold imagination needed for success in political discourse, he also warns his reader not to expect novelty, since his is a type of discourse that allows "no room for paradox, or for what is incredible or unconventional. Instead we should consider most accomplished the man who is able to draw together the most ideas held by others and articulate them most elegantly" (To Nicocles, 44). Likewise Cicero explains that "the whole art of oratory lies open to the view, and is concerned in some measure with the common practice, custom, and speech of mankind, so that, whereas in all other arts that is most excellent which is farthest removed from the understanding and mental capacity of the untrained, in oratory the very cardinal sin is to depart from the language of everyday life, and the usage approved by the sense of the community" (De oratore 1.12). Orators must adapt their thinking to "the understanding of the crowd" (1.108) and regulate their eloquence to conform with "the good sense of the audience, since all who desire to win approval have regard to the goodwill of their auditors, and shape and adapt themselves completely according to this and their opinion and approval" (Orator 24).
In the first book of De oratore, Cicero offers a dramatic representation of this point. When Crassus, one of the two main interlocutors in the dialogue, considers the special burdens placed upon the orator, he stresses the anxiety caused by the demands of the audience. Based on his own experience, he has learned that the best orators are most "frightened by the difficulty of speaking," the doubtful outcome of the effort, and the "the anticipations of the audience." He confesses that he "turns pale" and "quakes in every limb and in all my soul" when he begins to speak, and he recalls one incident where he was so overcome by fear that the presiding magistrate had to adjourn the court. Crassus, we should remember, is portrayed as an imposing figure. The other characters in the dialogue display attitudes toward him that range from deep respect to reverence, and he is a distinguished political leader and a preeminent orator, whose special talent is the arousing of emotion. Paradoxically, then, this man who strikes awe into the heart of his listeners is himself awed by his audience (De oratore 1.123–24).
As Jerrold Seigel has demonstrated, the Renaissance humanists, owing largely to their commitment to Christian notions of virtue, were forced to acknowledge the discrepancy implicit in this dual perspective on the orator and made elaborate efforts to resolve it. Among the classical writers, however, no such tension surfaced, and the two perspectives coexisted within a symmetrically balanced pattern: The orator led the people, bent their will, and won applause but was also lead by the people, bent by their will, and dependent on their applause. The orator was simultaneously active and passive.
The critics of ars oratoria (and the humanism associated with it) do not recognize this complexity and regard the conception of agency as all one thing or the other. As Gaonkar's comments indicate, the postmodern inclination is to associate humanistic rhetoric with a view of the orator as an autonomous agent. On the other hand, Enlightenment thinkers condemned ars oratoria for precisely the opposite reason: Since it demanded accommodation to concrete circumstances, motives, and audience interests, it rendered the orator heteronomous and therefore incapable of exercising either imaginative freedom or clear, unfettered reason. Thus, Locke, in a now much quoted passage, maintained that the devices of rhetoric worked to no other purpose than "to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat." Kant regarded the rhetorical art of persuasion suspect because it deceived through a beautiful show and catered to human weakness so as to promote "one's own designs." It did not matter, in Kant's view, whether such designs were "well meant or even actually true," since an art based upon this compunction to accommodate was, in principle, "worthy of no respect."
The Enlightenment antipathy toward humanistic rhetoric arises from many causes, but one of the most basic — and one that has a special bearing on the question of agency — is the systematic discrediting of tradition. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, tradition collapses under the weight of Enlightenment rationality because it never begins with "unassailable self-evident truths" and because it can never aim toward achievement of a final and universal rationality. Traditions are always embedded in the contingencies of history, are always subject to internal alteration, and are "always and ineradicably local." As applied to agency, this means that whoever thinks or acts in terms of tradition cannot pass the test for autonomous judgment required by Enlightenment epistemology.
Tradition entails a different conception of agency and self. In place of the isolated self of modernity (or the alienated self of some versions of postmodernity), tradition constitutes the self through social interaction and as part of an ongoing historical development. Both the individual agent and the tradition achieve and change identity through a reciprocal circulation of influence. Inclusion within a tradition shapes the individual self, but also, and as a direct result of submitting to the mores and practices of the community, the individual gains the power to shape tradition. Moreover, the agents who succeed in effecting change in tradition also change their self-conception since individual and affiliative identities never lose connection with one another. Ralph Ellison explains how this process works in the performative tradition of jazz: "Each true jazz moment springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity, and as link in the chain of traditions." This fluid relationship between individual and community also seems to describe the conception of agency implicit within humanistic rhetoric. Like the jazz artist, the orator leads the community by merging with it, and identifies the self not as a still, isolated essence but as something realized in and through public performance. The individual and the collective, as Greg Clark has said, "interact in relationships of collaboration."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy by Antonio de Velasco, John Angus Campbell, David Henry. Copyright © 2016 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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