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Week #6: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, February 23rd.
Previous Notes for 1st two weeks | 3rd week | 4th week | 5th week
 The Works (to be studied and discussed): |
 1. S. Ijsseling, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict;
2. R. Lanham, "The Rhetorical Ideal of Life" in Motives of Eloquence.
Supplemental Readings:
3. V. Florescu, "Rhetoric and Its Rehabilitation in Contemporary Philosophy."
4. R. Lanham, "The 'Q' Question."
5. B. Vickers, "Territorial Disputes: Philosophy versus Rhetoric."
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Samuel Ijsseling, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (1976): |
In his opening chapter, Ijsseling tells his audience about "the rehabilitation of rhetoric." It is a rehabilitation (or decriminalization), as the reader proceeds through the book, that is included not by rereadings or rediscveries of Aristotle (Chaim Perelman), but by rereadings of such nineteenth-century thinkers as
Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx (the three hermeneuts of suspicion [see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy and Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx"]),
and by
Heidegger.
(It might be thought from a traditional point of view that such a rewriting/revision of The History of Rhetoric is not a decriminalization but a recriminalization of The History. And a recriminalization of The Histories of Rhetoric, language, the polis, and education.)
| The commentary here on Ijsseling's history is from my discussion in Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric. Specifically, from Ch. 4, titled "Isocrates, the Logos, and Heidegger," beginning on p. 169- . I have omitted and revised sections and added new passages. After all is said and undone, Beings/s' Withdrawal--the fiction thereof, the friction thereof, or the f(r)iction thereof--invites, evokes, provokes reVisions.
It is crucial here, when reading, to see the parallel between the histories of Being/s and being/s that I believe Ijsseling has set in e/motion in his writing and that I've tried, I believe, to unset in com/motions in "our" wry(e)ting the hysteries of rherotics. (The only way, which is all ways, to establish the conditions for com/motions is through the wry(e)ting of radical singularities. Can such an un/thought be/come understoodless?) |
The influences are hermeneutical, and begin with Heraclitus, then, Nietzsche and Heidegger's reading of Heraclitus and their subsequent critique of metaphysics. Inevitably, this influence leads to considerations of the uncanny. (Hence, my quip about recriminalization.)
What we have in Ijsseling's history is a subtle rereading/revision of The History of Rhetoric semiotically across The History of Being. Such a "heideggerian" rereading of The History raises the ancillary question of What is human being's place in history (What is being given/revealed to human being? and What is expected from this being and How expected?). In Heideggerian terms, once that we discover that human beings are "thrown" into time/historicity, in to our homelessness, the question becomes What is it to be at home? This question, rewritten for more specific purposes, becomes What is it to be at home in rhetoric? (Some variatons of the question: Are we a function of rhetoric, or Is rhetoric a function of us? Is rhetoric a function of logos, or Is logos a function of rhetoric?) The three hermeneuts of suspicion all argued and demonstrated that we are, more so, a function of rhetoric, and that rhetoric is a function of logos. Hence, in part, their suspicion. (But I am getting ahead of Ijsseling and of myself here.)
After a discussion of the so-called rehabilitation of rhetoric, Ijsseling goes on to emphasize what I will call the Isocrates-Heidegger connection (which Ijsseling discusses in chapter three), and goes on much later to emphasize what, in passing, I will call the Nietzsche-Freud-Marx connection (which he discusses in chapters thirteen and fourteen). Hence, Ijsseling retells the story achronologically, metaleptically (by way of reversal on its way to displacement); for Ijsseling again wishes to retell the story according to the question raised by Heidegger, which is a question that Nietzsche himself initially had raised but did not pursue--namely, the Question of Being, which is also, as I referred to it earlier, the ancillary question that entitles Ijsseling's last chapter, "Who is Actually Speaking Whenever Something is Said?" Again, Is the speaker a function of logos, or logos a function of the speaker?
General Summary: Ijsseing's history of rhetoric--which is ostensibly a history of the rehabilitaiton of rhetoric as told via the narrative of the conflict between philosophy and rhetoric--is quite atypical. The chapters do not, in any traditional sense, logically follow. What a reader might expect--as is very typically expressed in chapter two, "Plato and the Sophists"--is a continuation of what has come to be known as "The History of Rhetoric," as in the grand narrative of The Enlightenment History of Rhetoric. The logic of the narrative is less that of traditional, chronological history and more than of a (Kafkan) novel. It is in chapter three, "Isocrates and the Power of the logos," that the story veers from what we expect of traditional narrative. Into intensities, series, flows.
In the second chapter, Ijsseling is as about lackluster as any writer using a current-traditional perspective can get; but then in chapter three, instead of sticking to the traditional party line on Isocrates--via Jaeger and Marrou--Ijsseling abruptly gives the reader a set of intensities (not intentions) from which to think about The History of Rhetoric. This different slant is brought about by Ijsseling's abrupt, strange yoking of Isocrates with Heidegger. Ijsseling's inclusion of Heidegger is rather daring, eccentric and a "threat" to the stabiity of integrity (coherence) of The History; and secondly, Ijsseling's inclusion of Heidegger turns traditional historiography on its head, allowing most radically Ijsseling to "read" history achronologically--that is, metaleptically--with Heidegger influencing a reading of Isocrates.
Therefore, with Ijsseling's hermeneutical principle in mind--which is a (Nietzschean)-Heideggerian "linguistic/rhetorical turn"--let us take a look at what he has to say about Isocrates's view of logos and Heidegger's view of logos, doxa, and physis. These words and concepts are inextricably connected with the problem of The History of Being. And as I have said, How these words/concepts are defined determines our view of not only history, rhetoric, language, but also of the polis and education and philology, and finally of each human being's place in dis/respect to these Western institutions. (Be they ever so homely or unhomely.) After all, if it is the logos that defines us as human beings (as Zoion Logon echon) and as political animals (as zoon politikon) and, therefore, as distinct and separate from beasts and barbarians, as Isocrates insists in his hymn to the logos, then much, rather obviously, is at stake in this word logos--one of the most difficult, if not most mysterious, of unearthly words.
What Heidegger attempts to account for is what logos meant for the pre-Socratics and Plato and others. It is the Platonic view of logos that, according to Heidegger, inaugurates "The History of Being." (Which is really a series of histories of Being; for each new age redefines logos for its own ends and thereby reconstructs Being.) My point is that when we study The History of Rhetoric, we simultaneously are studying The History of Being. What we have, however, in this joint study is the postmodern conditions of the possibilities for rhetorics unconstrained by Platonic or Aristotelian Being(s). After all, there are others' Beings, of which we have no histories/hysteries. To historicize is to place these Others/Beings under negation. Is to make them absent but ever present.
But, for a Heidegger, matters are more difficult; for let us not forget, Heidegger's Being(s) is (are) withdrawing. From us. If Being(s) is (are) withdrawing into exile, human being begins to see, will have begun to see, the uncanniness. While Being withdraws, Nihilism sets in. Being sees its uncanniness. Indeed, The History of metaphysics sets in; for this History is The History of Being's withdrawal, its uncanniness. If in a manner of speaking, Being's (Beings's) withdrawal causes The History of Metaphysics, or Philosophy, or Nihilism, What effect, then, might The History's (metaphysical and physical time's) or Nihilism's effect have on The History of Rhetoric? Heidegger's problem--the question of the withdrawal of Being--would become my paraquestion, un/namely, that of the question of the return of what has been repressed, suppressed, politically oppressed.
To round out the discussion: Ijsseling's histories have led me to see the problem of The History of Rhetoric, specifically in Heideggerian terms, and yet also in Nietzschean, Freudian, and Marxist terms. While Ijsseling presents the conflict between rhetoric and philosophy in incipient terms of the will to power (kairos, or many competing forces at play) and the will to truth (death, Nihilism), I would still represent the conflict in yet more radical terms. It is not a Platonic or Aristotelian kairos, nor a Heideggerian kairos that I would reach for, but a Nietzschean kairos, that is, a reaching for the unmeasured. Is this dangerous? Yes. Is this dangerous? No, when I consider the alternatives of The History, whose so-called authors "would rather will nothingness than not will" (Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo 163; Nietzsche's emphasis).
"would rather will nothingness
than not will"
The Hymn to Logos, as Hegemon (Dynamis?): Ijsseling begins his discussion with a close look at what has come to be know as Isocrates's "hymn, or eulogy, to logos" (Nicoles 5-10; Antidosis 253-57). For Ijsseling, the hymn is concerned with Who is actually speaking whenever something is said?, and, therefore, is concerned with the question What is Being? Isocrates's answer to this one-and-the-same question is
Logos,
but let us see how he arrives at this answer and what it means for him and us. Isocrates says:
Because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts; and, generally speaking, there is no institution devised by man which the power of speech [logos] has not helped us to establish. (Nicoles 6-7)
Logos (the power to speak, to persuade and be persuaded) is creator of all culture (paideia): It directs our public and private affairs and gives us our concept of justice and self-control. It divides us from the beasts and the barbarians. Because of logos (the sun), we have a home.
Isocrates continues: "... the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul. With the faculty we both contend against others on matters which are open to dispute and seek light for ourselves on things which are unknown." And then he writes: "Speech is our guide" (7-9). Here, we have Isocrates's answers to Who is speaking? and What is Being? The word "guide" in Greek, Ijsseling points out, is hegemon, which means not only "guide," but also "prince" or "leader." (It obviously also gives us our word "hegemony.")
Logos/Doxa: Let us return to Ijsseling's (and Heidegger's) questioning of the history of the words/concepts logos and doxa, and examine them, first, very generally and, then, more specifically. Ijsseling tells us that logos, during the 6th and 5th centuries B. C. undergoes a shift in meaning: Initially, it was logos as speech/writing (the orator's monologue or poet's myth); then later, it is logos as reason (dialogue, dialectic). It is the "philosopher"/sophist Isocrates, who maintains the view of logos as speech/writing. Other philosophers--beginning with Parmenides-Plato and moving through Locke, Kant, and Hegel--begin to think of the logos as the guide of (pure) reason (ratio, Vernunft) (See Heidegger Introduction to Metaphysics 188). Plato characterizes a distinction between, on the one hand, ordinary logos (monological speech) as doxa and, on the other, logos (dialogical speech) as episteme. He favors the latter view of logos. Unlike Isocrates's hymn to logos, Plato's, like Parmenides's before him, is a Hymn to Pure Logos/Reason. (Plato, after all, wanted/wants to answer the question of Being definitively! He desires to master our desire.)
Ijsseling tells us, howerver, that in Greek culture, in particular in sophistic culture, the word logos had many other meanings such as number, account, connection, arrangement; and that the word doxa meant not mere opinion, as it is revised by Plato and is most often translated still today to mean, but also meant "brilliant, esteem, glory, fame, honor"--all of which were transitory. Which finally might mean, according to Ijsseling and Heidegger, that prior to Plato's revision, "the essence of being [in logos] lay partly in appearing" (doxa) (Ijsseling 24; Heidegger Introduction to Metaphysics, 102-03). This apsect of the word--appearing, appearance--will play an important part in Heidegger's view of logos as unconcealing/concealing. In addition to this interpretation of logos, there is yet a different one expressed in the Greek ideio logon didonai which means "to give an account of" (Ijsseling 20). The telling of a story is the giving of an account, which the Sophists both embraced and enacted.
Up to this point I have let Ijsseling speak for the connection between Isocrates and Heidegger. Let us now have Heidegger tell The Story (or stories); for, indeed, it is Heidegger who partially tells Ijsseling's history-cum-histories; I say "partially" because as I read Ijsseling's histories, the primary story teller is Nietzsche and, then, Heidegger, with Freud and Marx thrown in as additional interlocutors. Hence, heteroglossia. Specifically then, let us take a closer look...[I am ""withdrawing"" here at p. 177; for the rest of stories, go yee to NSHR.].
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Richard Lanham, "The Rhetorical Ideal of Life": (1976): |
Serious Premises: The chapter--the beginning chapter of the book--begins by focusing on Style. Good Style vs. Bad Style. Style has much to do with how one represents oneself to others. Yes, it is intimately linked with Ethos. There is a crossing, a semiotic crossing, between the canon (offices) and the three major proofs. (If you would wish to look at the issue the way a formalist might!)
Let's look, however, at this style-thing more closely, as Lanham opens the issue for us. I am going to quote or paraphrase the long passage in which Lanham give us some idea of what it was like (and is still like!) to be educated in the "rhetorical paideia" (2-3). But I will also make a list here of what follows that passage. Remember that when reading the list that it does not at all correspond to the homo seriosus dicta (of the paideia), but is the becoming of the homo rhetoricus. Instead, there is a moving away from all intentions of seriousness to playfulness, from fixity at base to flux at baseless. The passage on the paideia:
Start your student young. Teach him a minute concentration on the word, how to write it, speak it, remember it. Stress memory in a massive, almost brutalizing way, develop it far in advance of conceptual understanding. Let words come first as objects and sounds long before they can, for a child, take on full meaning. They are looked at before they can be looked through. From the beginning, stress behavior as performance, reading aloud, speaking with gesture, a full range of histrionic adornment. Require no original thought. Demand instead an agile marshaling of the proverbial wisdom on any issue. Categorize this wisdom into predigested units, commonplaces, topoi. Dwell on their decorous fit into situation. Develop elaborate memory schemes to keep them readily at hand. Teach, as theory of personality, a corresponding set of accepted personality types, a taxonomy of impersonation. Drill the student incessantly on correspondences between verbal style and personality type, life style. Nourish an acute sense of social situation. Let him, to weariness, translate, not only from one language to another, but from one style to another. [...]
Make this intense training in the word, in dramatic incarnation, the aristocratic paideia, the only path to wealth and honor, union-card to public life. Downgrade training in a subject, shoe making, business, generalship, medicine.... Training in the word thus becomes a badge, as well as a diversion, of the leisure class. As such, attach to it a whole range of snob values, of invidious comparisons, with which it has no natural affinity.
What kind of world would such a training create? What kind of man would homo rhetoricus be? [become?!] What would 'the rhetorical ideal of life' be like? Our composite picture suggests, as a first reflection, that rhetorical man must have felt an overpowering self-consciousness about language. So far have we moved in the opposite direction [however] that the point bears emphasis. For rhetorical man, what we think of as a natural verbal spontaneity was never allowed to develop. Langauge, spoken or written, was naturally premediatated.... (underlined emphasis mine)
Lanham's dramatic opening of denouncement but reannouncement (which will become even more dramatic and sharp as we continue here) becomes more and more the list of characteristics. Yet this list is mixed, whether or not Lanham would fix it; for many items in it, though t/rue(ful), become, in time, even more radical. E.g., the notion of reality as "public, dramatic" becomes, more so, characterized as a reality as private in public, dramatic situations! As we will see (theoeyeze) soon, and as Lanham makes so in my underlined quoted passage above, what was to be in terms of the "rhetorical paideia" was not, for it became--becomes--something else. If something other than "they" ("aristotelians") intended, then, whose in charge? As Ijsseling asks: "Who is Actually Speaking Whenever Something is Said?" Or we could reask: "Who is Actually Teaching Whenever Something is Taught? (Cf. KBurke's "pure persuasion"!) Seriosus becomes inevitably Rhetoricus. And as we will see, as Lanham sees, vice versa! And yet, then what?
The List: Rhetorical man
is an actor; his reality public, dramatic [cf. RRorty, public&private, wk. three];
his sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily historionic reenactment. He is ... centered in time and concrete local event;
his motivations must be characteristically ludic, agonistic;
is committed to no single construction of the world; much rather, to prevailing in the game at hand;
accepts the present paradigm and explores its resources;
trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it;
can play freely with language;
will always be an unregenerate punster. (selected from p. 4)
Emphasizing his point, Lanham once again writes:
The premises used in discussing style, I hope it is now apparent, have not been those actually operating when style was taught. Indeed, the two sets of premises, serious and rhetorical as I shall call them, stand diametrically opposed. The opposition, it seems to me, goes far to explain the two persistently puzzling facts about the history of rhetoric: why it has been so deplored and why it has so endured. It has been deplored because it has been discussed in serious terms, in terms, that is, not germane to its essence. If we consider rhetoric within serious premises, it will truly be the 'grotesque bogey' which a distinguished historian of medieval Latinity, E. R. Curtious, thought it. It will be indeed the bogey that Plato conjured up under the banner of 'sophist' and that has been plaguing us ever since. The only thing to be done with it will be to do away with it. So George Kennedy prefaces his definitive history of Greek rhetoric with an epigraph from the great Platonist Paul Shorey: "We are freed from rhetoric only by study of its history." But this long tradition of criticism, so apposite within its own serious terms, within rhetorical premises seems besides the point. Such criticism points to differences so fundamental they indicate a wholly different way of looking at the world. (5; underlined emphasis mine)
The List (continues but with eplayboration): Rhetorical man:
The Western self has from the beginning been composed of a shifting and perpetually uneasy combination of homo rhetoricus and homo seriousus, of a social self and a central self. It is their business to contend for supremacy;
To settle the struggle would be to end the Greek experiment in a complex self. Those who seek for sensible compromise, like Aristotle, though they contibute more to a living balance, throw less light on the theoretical antithesis than those, like Plato, who wish the Western self to become entiely serious;
From the Sophists onward, it addressed itself to speaking and acting in the city's business;
It provided a training in the mechanisms of identity, offered a selection of roles the adolescent could try out.
It offered a training in tolerance, if by that we mean getting inside another's skull and looking out.
It offered the friendliest of advices on how to tap into any and all sources of pleasure.
It habituated its students to a world of contingent purpose, of perpetual cognitive dissonance, plural orchestration.
It specialized less in knowledge than in the way knowledge is held, which is how Whitehead defines wisdom.
Perhaps the serious premises have thrived because they flatter us.
The rhetorical view does not. The rhetorical view of life is satirical, radically reductive of human motive and human striving. Rhetoric's real crime, one is often led to suspect, is its candid acknowledgment of the hretorical aspects of 'serious' life.
The concept of a central self, true or not, flatters man immensely. It gives him an identity outside time and change that he sees nowhere else in the sublunary universe. So, too, the theory of knowledge upon which seriousness rests. Here there is little to choose between a positivist reality and a Platonic, between realism and idealism. As Eric Havelock points out, 'For Plato, reality is rational, scientific and logical, or it is nothing.' How reassuring to arrive at essence, Eleatic Being.... How humiliating to be all this time only looking in a mirror.
At the heart of rhetorical reality lies pleasure;
Perhaps we can see now why the Western paideia has always been a mixed one.
The Sophists cannot have founded it alone, nor the philosophers.
The best education has always put the two views of life into profound and fruitful collision. Divorce and domination persent equal dangers.
The West has confused itself unnecessarily. It seduction has until modern times been in the hands of rhetoricians, but the historians of education have been philosphers. So too in literary history. The poets have been rhetoricians, the critics serious philosophers.
Best is collision.
Shorey's dictum, then, taken as a description of the whole truth, may seriously mislead. The study of rhetoric does not free us from rhetoric. It teaches, rather, that we cannot be freed from it, that it represents half of man. If truly free of rhetoric, we would be pure essence. We would retain no social dimension.... To liberate man from his rhetorical dimension is to freeze him in the nightmarish prison of unchanging essence Plato so prayerfully invoked in the Republic. The Republic succeeds in abolishing politics, abolishing dramatic reality. What remains, though, is not essential reality but ontological vacuum, not freedom but political tyranny. For the central self depends on the social self. (7-8)
The notes for this evening continue at NOtes6b >>>>
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