The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

But the second question is our principal interest: how was the orator able to use them with full public consent when he cannot do so today?

I am going to suggest that the orator then enjoyed a privilege which can be compared to the lawyer’s “right of assumption.” This is the right to assume that precedents are valid, that forms will persist, and that in general one may build today on what was created yesterday. What mankind has sanctified with usage has a presumption in its favor. Such presumption, it was felt, instead of being an obstacle to progress, furnishes the ground for progress. More simply, yesterday’s achievements are also contributions to progress. It is he who insists upon beginning every day de novo who denies the reality of progress. Accordingly, consider the American orator in the intellectual climate of this time. He was comfortably circumstanced with reference to things he could “know” and presume everyone else to know in the same way. Freedom and morality were constants; the Constitution was the codification of all that was politically feasible; Christianity of all that was morally authorized. Rome stood as an exemplum of what may happen to nations; the American and French Revolutions had taught rulers their necessary limitations. Civilization has thought over its thousands of years of history and has made some generalizations which are the premises of other arguments but which are not issues themselves. When one asserts that the Romans had a “high standard of moral virtue which made them the easy masters of their race,” one is affirming a doctrine of causality in a sweeping way. If one had to stop and “prove” that moral virtue makes one master, one obviously would have to start farther down the ladder of assumption. But these things were not in the area of argument because progress was positive and that meant that some things have to be assimilated as truths. Men were not condemned to repeat history, because they remembered its lessons. To the extent that the mind had made its summations, it was free to go forward, and forward meant in the direction of more inclusive conceptions. The orator who pauses along the way to argue a point which no one challenges only demeans the occasion. Therefore the orator of the period we have defined did not feel that he had to argue the significance of everything to which he attached significance. Some things were fixed by universal enlightened consensus; and they could be used as steps for getting at matters which were less settled and hence were proper subjects for deliberation. Deliberation is good only because it decreases the number of things it is necessary to deliberate about.

Consequently when we wonder how he could use such expressions without trace of compunction, we forget that the expressions did not need apology. The speaker of the present who used like terms would, on the contrary, meet a contest at every step of the way. His audience would not swallow such clusters of related meanings. But at that time a number of unities, including the unity of past and present, the unity of moral sets and of causal sets, furnished the ground for discourse in “uncontested terms.” Only such substratum of agreement makes possible the panoramic treatment.

We can infer important conclusions about a civilization when we know that its debates and controversies occur at outpost positions rather than within the citadel itself. If these occur at a very elementary level, we suspect that the culture has not defined itself, or that it is decayed and threatened with dissolution. Where the chief subject of debate is the relative validity of Homoiousianism and Homoousianism, or the conventions of courtly love, we feel confident that a great deal has been cached away in the form of settled conclusions, and that such shaking as proceeds from controversies of this kind, although they may agitate the superstructure, will hardly be felt as far down as the foundations. I would say the same is suggested by the great American debate over whether the Constitution was a “constitution” or a “compact,” despite its unfortunate sequel.

At this stage of cultural development the commonplaces of opinion and conduct form a sort of textus receptus, and the emendations are confined to minor matters. Conversely, when the disagreement is over extremely elementary matters, survival itself may be at stake. It seems to me that modern debates over the validity of the law of contradiction may be a disagreement of this kind. The soundness of a culture may well be measured by this ability to recognize what is extraneous. One knows what to do with the extraneous, even if one decides upon a policy of temporary accommodation. It is when the line dividing us from the extraneous begins to fade that we are assailed with destructive doubts. Disagreements over the most fundamental subjects leave us puzzled as to “where we are” if not as to “what we are.” The speaker whom we have been characterizing felt sure of the demarcation. That gave him his freedom, and was the source of his simplicity.

When we reflect further that the old oratory had a certain judicial flavor about it, we are prompted to ask whether thinking as then conceived did not have a different status from today’s thinking. One is led to make this query by the suggestion that when the most fundamental propositions of a culture are under attack, then it becomes a duty to “think for one’s self.” Not that it is a bad thing to think; yet when the whole emphasis is upon “thinking for one’s self,” it is hard to avoid a feeling that certain postulates have broken down, and the most courage we can muster is to ask people, not to “think in a certain direction,” but to “think for themselves.” Where the primary directive of thinking is known, the object of thinking will not be mere cerebral motion (as some exponents of the policy of thinking for one’s self leave us to infer), but rather the object of such thinking, or knowledge. This is a very rudimentary proposition, but it deserves attention because the modern tendency has reversed a previous order. From the position that only propositions are interesting because they alone make judgments, we are passing to a position in which only evidence is interesting because it alone is uncontaminated by propositions. In brief, interest has shifted from inference to reportage, and this has had a demonstrable effect upon the tone of oratory. The large resonant phrase is itself a kind of condensed proposition; as propositions begin to sink with the general sagging of the substructure, the phrases must do the same. Obviously we are pointing here to a profound cultural change, and the same shifts can be seen in literature; the poet or novelist may feel that the content of his consciousness is more valid (and this will be true even of those who have not formulated the belief) than the formal arrangement which would be produced by selection, abstraction, and arrangement. Or viewed in another respect, experiential order has taken precedence over logical order.

The object of an oration made on the conditions obtained a hundred years ago was not so much to “make people think” as to remind them of what they already thought (and again we are speaking comparatively). The oratorical rostrum, like the church, was less of a place for fresh instruction than for steady inculcation. And the orator, like the minister, was one who spoke from an eminent degree of conviction. Paradoxically, the speaker of this vanished period had more freedom to maneuver than has his emancipated successor. Man is free in proportion as his surroundings have a determinate nature, and he can plan his course with perfect reliance upon that determinateness. It is an admitted axiom that we have rules in one place so that we can have liberty in another; we put certain things in charge of habit so as to be free in areas where we prize freedom. Manifestly one is not “free” when one has to battle for one’s position at every moment of time. This interrelationship of freedom and organization is one of the permanent conditions of existence, so that it has been said even that perfect freedom is perfect compliance (“one commands nature by obeying her”).

In the province we are considering, man is free to the extent that he knows that nature is, what God expects, what he himself is capable of. Freedom moves on a set of presuppositions just as a machine moves on a set of ball bearings which themselves preserve definite locus. It is when these presuppositions are tampered with that men begin to grow concerned about their freedom. One can well imagine that the tremendous self-consciousness about freedom today, which we note in almost every utterance of public men, is evidence that this crucial general belief is threatened. It is no mere paradox to say that when they cry liberty, they mean belief—the belief that sets one free from prior concerns. A corroborating evidence is that fact that nearly all large pleas for liberty heard today conclude with more or less direct appeals for unity.

We may now return to our more direct concern with rhetoric. Since according to this demonstration oratory speaks from an eminence and has a freedom of purview, its syllogism is the “rhetorical syllogism” mentioned by Demetrius—the enthymeme.[149] It may not hurt to state that this is the syllogism with one of the three propositions missing. Such a syllogism can be used only when the audience is willing to supply the missing proposition. The missing proposition will be “in their hearts,” as it were; it will be their agreement upon some fundamental aspect of the issue being discussed. If it is there, the orator does not have to supply it; if it is not there, he may not be able to get it in any way—at least not as orator. Therefore the use of the rhetorical syllogism is good concrete evidence that the old orator relied upon the existence of uncontested terms or fixations of belief in the minds of his hearers. The orator was logical, but he could dispense with being a pure logician because that third proposition had been established for him.

These two related considerations, the accepted term and the conception of oratory as a body of judicious conclusions upon common evidence, go far toward explaining the quality of spaciousness. Indeed, to say that oratory has “spaciousness” is to risk redundancy once the nature of oratory is understood. Oratory is “spacious” in the same way that liberal education is liberal; and a correlation can be shown between the decline of liberal education (the education of a freeman) and the decline of oratory. It was one of Cicero’s observations that the orator performs at “the focal point at which all human activity is ultimately reviewed”; and Cicero is, for connected reasons, a chief source of our theory of liberal education.[150]