Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse along with grammar and logic/dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform, persuade, and motivate their audiences. Rhetoric also provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations.
Aristotle defined rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion", and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, he called it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Aristotle also identified three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric, or phases of developing a persuasive speech, were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in Western education and Islamic education in training orators, lawyers, counsellors, historians, statesmen, and poets.
Uses
Scope
Scholars have debated the scope of rhetoric since ancient times. Although some have limited rhetoric to the specific realm of political discourse, to many modern scholars it encompasses every aspect of culture. Contemporary studies of rhetoric address a much more diverse range of domains than was the case in ancient times. While classical rhetoric trained speakers to be effective persuaders in public forums and in institutions such as courtrooms and assemblies, contemporary rhetoric investigates human discourse writ large. Rhetoricians have studied the discourses of a wide variety of domains, including the natural and social sciences, fine art, religion, journalism, digital media, fiction, history, cartography, and architecture, along with the more traditional domains of politics and the law.Because the ancient Greeks valued public political participation, rhetoric emerged as an important curriculum for those desiring to influence politics. Rhetoric is still associated with its political origins. However, even the original instructors of Western speech—the Sophists—disputed this limited view of rhetoric. According to Sophists like Gorgias, a successful rhetorician could speak convincingly on a topic in any field, regardless of their experience in that field. This suggested rhetoric could be a means of communicating any expertise, not just politics. In his Encomium to Helen, Gorgias even applied rhetoric to fiction by seeking, for his amusement, to prove the blamelessness of the mythical Helen of Troy in starting the Trojan War.
Plato defined the scope of rhetoric by discarding any connotation of religious ritual or magical incantation, simply taking the term in its literal sense, which means "leading the soul" through words. He criticized the Sophists for using rhetoric to deceive rather than to discover truth. In Gorgias, one of his Socratic Dialogues, Plato defines rhetoric as the persuasion of ignorant masses within the courts and assemblies. Rhetoric, in Plato's opinion, is merely a form of flattery and functions similarly to culinary arts, which mask the undesirability of unhealthy food by making it taste good. Plato considered any speech of lengthy prose aimed at flattery as within the scope of rhetoric. Some scholars, however, contest the idea that Plato despised rhetoric and instead view his dialogues as a dramatization of complex rhetorical principles. Socrates explained the relationship between rhetoric in flattery when he maintained that a rhetorician who teaches anyone how to persuade people in an assembly to do what they want, without knowledge of what is just or unjust, engages in a kind of flattery that constitutes an image of a part of the art of politics.
Aristotle both redeemed rhetoric from Plato and narrowed its focus by defining three genres of rhetoric—deliberative, forensic or judicial, and epideictic. Yet, even as he provided order to existing rhetorical theories, Aristotle generalized the definition of rhetoric to be the ability to identify the appropriate means of persuasion in a given situation based upon the art of rhetoric. This made rhetoric applicable to all fields, not just politics. Aristotle viewed the enthymeme based upon logic as the basis of rhetoric.
Aristotle also outlined generic constraints that focused the rhetorical art squarely within the domain of public political practice. He restricted rhetoric to the domain of the contingent or probable: those matters that admit multiple legitimate opinions or arguments.
Since the time of Aristotle, logic has changed. For example, modal logic has undergone a major development that also modifies rhetoric.
The contemporary neo-Aristotelian and neo-Sophistic positions on rhetoric mirror the division between the Sophists and Aristotle. Neo-Aristotelians generally study rhetoric as political discourse, while the neo-Sophistic view contends that rhetoric cannot be so limited. Rhetorical scholar Michael Leff characterizes the conflict between these positions as viewing rhetoric as a "thing contained" versus a "container". The neo-Aristotelian view threatens the study of rhetoric by restraining it to such a limited field, ignoring many critical applications of rhetorical theory, criticism, and practice. Simultaneously, the neo-Sophists threaten to expand rhetoric beyond a point of coherent theoretical value.
In more recent years, people studying rhetoric have tended to enlarge its object domain beyond speech. Kenneth Burke asserted humans use rhetoric to resolve conflicts by identifying shared characteristics and interests in symbols. People engage in identification, either to assign themselves or another to a group. This definition of rhetoric as identification broadens the scope from strategic and overt political persuasion to the more implicit tactics of identification found in an immense range of sources. Burke focused on the interplay of identification and division, maintaining that identification compensates for an original division by preventing a strict separation between objects, people, and spaces. This is achieved by assigning to them common properties through linguistic symbols.
Among the many scholars who have since pursued Burke's line of thought, James Boyd White sees rhetoric as a broader domain of social experience in his notion of constitutive rhetoric. Influenced by theories of social construction, White argues that culture is "reconstituted" through language. Just as language influences people, people influence language. Language is socially constructed, and depends on the meanings people attach to it. Because language is not rigid and changes depending on the situation, the very usage of language is rhetorical. An author, White would say, is always trying to construct a new world and persuading his or her readers to share that world within the text.
People engage in rhetoric any time they speak or produce meaning. Even in the field of science, via practices which were once viewed as being merely the objective testing and reporting of knowledge, scientists persuade their audience to accept their findings by sufficiently demonstrating that their study or experiment was conducted reliably and resulted in sufficient evidence to support their conclusions.
The vast scope of rhetoric is difficult to define. Political discourse remains the paradigmatic example for studying and theorizing specific techniques and conceptions of persuasion or rhetoric.
As a civic art
Throughout European History, rhetoric meant persuasion in public and political settings such as assemblies and courts. Because of its associations with democratic institutions, rhetoric is commonly said to flourish in open and democratic societies with rights of free speech, free assembly, and political enfranchisement for some portion of the population. Those who classify rhetoric as a civic art believe that rhetoric has the power to shape communities, form the character of citizens, and greatly affect civic life.Rhetoric was viewed as a civic art by several of the ancient philosophers. Aristotle and Isocrates were two of the first to see rhetoric in this light. In Antidosis, Isocrates states, "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 has not helped us to establish." With this statement he argues that rhetoric is a fundamental part of civic life in every society and that it has been necessary in the foundation of all aspects of society. He further argues in Against the Sophists that rhetoric, although it cannot be taught to just anyone, is capable of shaping the character of man. He writes, "I do think that the study of political discourse can help more than any other thing to stimulate and form such qualities of character." Aristotle, writing several years after Isocrates, supported many of his arguments and argued for rhetoric as a civic art.
In the words of Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, rhetoric is "...the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion". According to Aristotle, this art of persuasion could be used in public settings in three different ways: "A member of the assembly decides about future events, a juryman about past events: while those who merely decide on the orator's skill are observers. From this it follows that there are three divisions of oratory— political, forensic, and the ceremonial oratory of display". Eugene Garver, in his critique of Aristotle's Rhetoric, confirms that Aristotle viewed rhetoric as a civic art. Garver writes, "Rhetoric articulates a civic art of rhetoric, combining the almost incompatible properties of and appropriateness to citizens." Each of Aristotle's divisions plays a role in civic life and can be used in a different way to affect the.
Because rhetoric is a public art capable of shaping opinion, some of the ancients, including Plato found fault in it. They claimed that while it could be used to improve civic life, it could be used just as easily to deceive or manipulate. The masses were incapable of analyzing or deciding anything on their own and would therefore be swayed by the most persuasive speeches. Thus, civic life could be controlled by whoever could deliver the best speech. Plato explores the problematic moral status of rhetoric twice: in Gorgias and in The Phaedrus, a dialogue best-known for its commentary on love.
More trusting in the power of rhetoric to support a republic, the Roman orator Cicero argued that art required something more than eloquence. A good orator needed also to be a good person, enlightened on a variety of civic topics. In De Oratore, modeled on Plato's dialogues, Cicero emphasized that effective rhetoric comes from a combination of wisdom and eloquence . According to Cicero, the ideal orator must demonstrate not only stylistic skill but also moral integrity and broad learning, thus uniting theory and practice for the betterment of the state. Influenced by Aristotelian ideas, Cicero advanced the tradition by systematizing the five canons of rhetoric—inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio —which he saw as key to crafting persuasive discourse. In this view, a well-trained orator, who draws from philosophy, law, and other disciplines, is best able to address civic and ethical challenges, thus underscoring Cicero's vision of rhetoric as both an intellectual and ethical pursuit.
Modern works continue to support the claims of the ancients that rhetoric is an art capable of influencing civic life. In Political Style, Robert Hariman claims that "questions of freedom, equality, and justice often are raised and addressed through performances ranging from debates to demonstrations without loss of moral content". James Boyd White argues that rhetoric is capable not only of addressing issues of political interest but that it can influence culture as a whole. In his book, When Words Lose Their Meaning, he argues that words of persuasion and identification define community and civic life. He states that words produce "the methods by which culture is maintained, criticized, and transformed".
Rhetoric remains relevant as a civic art. In speeches, as well as in non-verbal forms, rhetoric continues to be used as a tool to influence communities from local to national levels.