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August 5, 2009
We have inherited two extreme points of view from modern (positivist) philosophy. Knowledge originates either in scientific, objective observation of the "real" world, or in emotional, highly personal apprehension of values expressed as I like or approve of this. This leaves us in the position that objective observations don't need to be argued for (they are facts) whilst emotionally apprehended values cannot be (they are personal expressions). Consequently, passionate commitment--that can be found in political life---has lost its connection with the provision of good reasons.
Rhetoric is not possible within this duality. We, can however, question this duality and this involves some border crossing from the territory modern philosophy into the old world of rhetoric that turns to study the particular sites where writing takes place to explore how writing and persuasion works. From this perspective the structure of a scientific report is not just a matter of superficial style, but rather a complex stock of argumentative moves or commonplaces that serve to reinforce and reproduce a view of the world that characterizes the discipline of science. In short, the *common* topics have become, in their way, as specialized as the *special* topics (or specialized knowledge that characterizes a particular discipline).
Knowledge is also discovered through dialectic. Knowledge is not created through the isolated self interacting with the physical world, nor even by groups of selves attempting to achieve Platonic certainty through the discursive testing of logical propositions or mathematical axioms. Rather, knowledge is developed communally through the process of making an intelligible world with my fellow human being. Hence we have the idea of an ongoing conversation with persuasion a necessary means of keeping the conversation (as a form of social interaction) going.
But how do we influence each other through language? In Why Does Rhetoric Need a Theory of Reading? Doug Brent says:
Traditional rhetoric simply had to have faith that an audience could interpret accurately. Rhetoric is traditionally defined as the art of using language to influence others' behaviour and belief. This implies that discourse is a reasonably reliable means by which one person can affect another. The rhetor must know that what he puts into his discourse will be roughly reflected in what the audience takes out. Otherwise persuasion is meaningless, for the rhetor has no predictable influence on his audience. To do his job, the rhetor must believe human beings act not at random, but rather for reasons that he can predict and use. This assumption, however, has been treated simply as an assumption, an article of faith.
An audience doesn't interpret accurately, since people reinterpret what they hear or read from their past experiences and different perspectives, as in the differences of interpretation that even the simplest work of literature generate. Readers construct meaning through interpretation. This leads to the ideas of Fish, Derrida, and de Man, about unstable interpretation and their arguments that denying that (literary) texts have any stable meaning.
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The problem here is that even for those that deny rhetoric exists, it's still all-encompassing; in fact, one of the most enlightening experiences in this regard is to go through Schopenhauer's "the art of being right", nominally an attack upon the Kantian, pure-reason approach, and notice just how many of the rhetorical devices he lists are used constantly by philosophers, especially at conferences. Rhetoric is inescapable, and denying that it exists simply makes one more amenable to it. Certainly, Socrates' criticism - that rhetoric is a political tool, and not inherently a philosophical one - still stands, but doesn't mean it's irrelevant, merely that it's insufficient.
I find myself that I lean towards an idealised aesthetic, where the language one uses to convey an idea and the idea itself are inextricably linked; projects that engage one alone, such as the main analytic and continental traditions, both remove philosophy from the world, and occur only to it's detriment.