The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.[20] The realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuousity into life, produced by a consciousness that “nothing is lost.” Yet this is preferable to that desolation which proceeds from an infinite dispersion or feeling of unaccountability. Even so, the choice between them is hardly ours to make; we did not create the order of things, but being accountable for our impulses, we wish these to be just.

Thus when we finally divest rhetoric of all the notions of artifice which have grown up around it, we are left with something very much like Spinoza’s “intellectual love of God.” This is its essence and the fons et origo of its power. It is “intellectual” because, as we have previously seen, there is no honest rhetoric without a preceding dialectic. The kind of rhetoric which is justly condemned is utterance in support of a position before that position has been adjudicated with reference to the whole universe of discourse[21]—and of such the world always produces more than enough. It is “love” because it is something in addition to bare theoretical truth. That element in addition is a desire to bring truth into a kind of existence, or to give it an actuality to which theory is indifferent. Now what is to be said about our last expression, “of God”? Echoes of theological warfare will cause many to desire a substitute for this, and we should not object. As long as we have in ultimate place the highest good man can intuit, the relationship is made perfect. We shall be content with “intellectual love of the Good.” It is still the intellectual love of good which causes the noble lover to desire not to devour his beloved but to shape him according to the gods as far as mortal power allows. So rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain extending up toward the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and only the soul have affection for. This is the justified affection of which no one can be ashamed, and he who feels no influence of it is truly outside the communion of minds. Rhetoric appears, finally, as a means by which the impulse of the soul to be ever moving is redeemed.

It may be granted that in this essay we have gone some distance from the banks of the Ilissus. What began as a simple account of passion becomes by transcendence an allegory of all speech. No one would think of suggesting that Plato had in mind every application which has here been made, but that need not arise as an issue. The structure of the dialogue, the way in which the judgments about speech concentre, and especially the close association of the true, the beautiful, and the good, constitute a unity of implication. The central idea is that all speech, which is the means the gods have given man to express his soul, is a form of eros, in the proper interpretation of the word. With that truth the rhetorician will always be brought face to face as soon as he ventures beyond the consideration of mere artifice and device.

Chapter II
DIALECTIC AND RHETORIC AT DAYTON, TENNESSEE

We have maintained that dialectic and rhetoric are distinguishable stages of argumentation, although often they are not distinguished by the professional mind, to say nothing of the popular mind. Dialectic is that stage which defines the subject satisfactorily with regard to the logos, or the set of propositions making up some coherent universe of discourse; and we can therefore say that a dialectical position is established when its relation to an opposite has been made clear and it is thus rationally rather than empirically sustained. Despite the inconclusiveness of Plato on this subject, we shall say that facts are never dialectically determined—although they may be elaborated in a dialectical system—and that the urgency of facts is never a dialectical concern. For similar reasons Professor Adler, in his searching study of dialectic, maintains the position that “Facts, that is non-discursive elements, are never determinative of dialectic in a logical or intellectual sense....”[22]

What a successful dialectic secures for any position therefore, as we noted in the opening chapter, is not actuality but possibility; and what rhetoric thereafter accomplishes is to take any dialectically secured position (since positive positions, like the “position” that water freezes at 32°F., are not matters for rhetorical appeal) and show its relationship to the world of prudential conduct. This is tantamount to saying that what the specifically rhetorical plea asks of us is belief, which is a preliminary to action.

It may be helpful to state this relationship through an example less complex than that of the Platonic dialogue. The speaker who in a dialectical contest has taken the position that “magnanimity is a virtue” has by his process of opposition and exclusion won our intellectual assent, inasmuch as we see the abstract possibility of this position in the world of discourse. He has not, however, produced in us a resolve to practice magnanimity. To accomplish this he must pass from the realm of possibility to that of actuality; it is not the logical invincibility of “magnanimity” enclosed in the class “virtue” which wins our assent; rather it is the contemplation of magnanimity sub specie actuality. Accordingly when we say that rhetoric instills belief and action, we are saying that it intersects possibility with the plane of actuality and hence of the imperative.[23]

A failure to appreciate this distinction is responsible for many lame performances in our public controversies. The effects are, in outline, that the dialectician cannot understand why his demonstration does not win converts; and the rhetorician cannot understand why his appeal is rejected as specious. The answer, as we have begun to indicate, is that the dialectic has not made reference to reality, which men confronted with problems of conduct require; and the rhetorician has not searched the grounds of the position on which he has perhaps spent much eloquence. True, the dialectician and the rhetorician are often one man, and the two processes may not lie apart in his work; but no student of the art of argumentation can doubt that some extraordinary confusions would be prevented by a knowledge of the theory of this distinction. Beyond this, representative government would receive a tonic effect from any improvement of the ability of an electorate to distinguish logical positions from the detail of rhetorical amplification. The British, through their custom of putting questions to public speakers and to officers of government in Parliament, probably come nearest to getting some dialectical clarification from their public figures. In the United States, where there is no such custom, it is up to each disputant to force the other to reveal his grounds; and this, in the ardor of shoring up his own position rhetorically, he often fails to do with any thoroughness. It should therefore be profitable to try the kind of analysis we have explained upon some celebrated public controversy, with the object of showing how such grasp of rhetorical theory could have made the issues clearer.

For this purpose, it would be hard to think of a better example than the Scopes “evolution” trial of a generation ago. There is no denying that this trial had many aspects of the farcical, and it might seem at first glance not serious enough to warrant this type of examination. Yet at the time it was considered serious enough to draw the most celebrated trial lawyers of the country, as well as some of the most eminent scientists; moreover, after one has cut through the sensationalism with which journalism and a few of the principals clothed the encounter, one finds a unique alignment of dialectical and rhetorical positions.