Rhetoric as the Philosopher’s Toolkit

Rhetoric is a great many things to a great many people. For some it is primarily forensic, centered on argumentation, rationality, and deliberation. It is a mode of discovery, harking back to Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric being about “the discovery of the available means of persuasion.” For others, it is prosaic and technical. It is less about content and much more of presentation. For most, this might be a familiar form bringing us back to composition classes in high school, where grammar and spelling are rigorously fine-tuned until an essay speaks with the tonality of an Emmerson, a Proust, or a Shakespeare. For me, rhetoric most certainly is these things. However, to limit its scope so risks minimizing its place in the great philosophical pantheon. Indeed, even today one would be hard pressed to find rhetoric among the pillars of philosophy.

Largely, this has to do with rhetoric’s place as a functional tool for philosophical evaluation. Going back to Plato’s early criticism, rhetoric is not an art, but a techne, or skill. Plato’s familiar example from the dialogue Gorgias contrasts philosophy and rhetoric by analogizing them to medicine and cooking. One is substantive, the other merely mimics substance. This twenty-five hundred year old critique has largely endured, being marginalized and expanded and marginalized again throughout the Western tradition. A cliché among textbooks on rhetoric is to reference its mischaracterization as “empty talk”. However, it is exactly this utility that distinguishes it from fields such as epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics (which are all certainly rhetorical) is the versatility of the discipline.

This could just be a cognitive bias on my part. I am, after all, a rhetorician and less knowledgeable in formal philosophy. Yet, I feel confident saying what makes rhetoric so significant and crucial is that without it there could be no epistemology, aesthetics, or ethics. This is because rhetoric is first and foremost about discourse and inquiry. It is the mechanism by which philosophy, by which all conscious action, occurs. Rhetoric is not simply writing beautiful prose, it’s the “discovery” of prose that persuades. While all philosophy liberates the individual who discovers it, in order to discover philosophy, one must first learn how to perform it.

My contribution to this blog will be mostly centered on rhetorical pedagogy. My mission is to provide our audience with the tools to access these “available means of persuasion” which will allow for the kind of intellectual probing that philosophers get up to. As such, I will be providing some “teaching essays” in the coming weeks to layout a framework of useful models, theories, and concepts within the rhetorical tradition that will allow you to better process and digest the larger, more field specific articles in epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, aesthetics, and ethics. In addition, I’ll be using these same models, theories, and concepts to dissect our commonly held beliefs and values, interrogating (to paraphrase Raymond Carver) what we talk about when we talk about ideas.

I also want to move the focus away (as best I can) from the Western tradition. I will likely be one of the biggest advocates for de-emphasizing canonical rhetorics and “re-Orienting” (a cumbersome term I will come back to later) toward critical scholarships. This does come with a caveat, however, that my initial essays will focus on seven white, male scholars within the literature: Plato, Stephen Toulmin, Chaim Perelman, Kenneth Burke, Joseph Campbell, and Walter Fisher, and Marshal McLuhan. These authors serve as key figures in the introduction to rhetoric as argumentative storytelling, which I advocate is emblematic of the “available means of persuasion. More so, I contend that these authors lay a suitable foundation before getting into the more technically rigorous essays I will be producing.

Before I conclude, I would like to leave our readers with a clear working concept of what I mean when I discuss rhetoric. First, rhetoric is epistemic. It is concerned with the discovery of knowledge. However, this does not make it a neutral tool. The Platonic criticism of rhetoric still continues to influence because rhetoric is, second, concerned with creating meaning. This will bring us, then to a distinction in how these particular theorists will be approached. Plato, Toulmin, and Perelman are much more concerned with the deliberative and investigatory aspects of the rhetorical toolkit. Burke, Campbell, Fisher, and McLuhan cover the interpretative side of the coin, emphasizing influence and persuasion and how it is achieved. This give and take (between masking and unmasking rhetorics) is complex and requires a great deal of nuance to elaborate, but emphasizes the malleability found throughout philosophical inquiry. In order to work with that malleability, the philosopher will first need a toolkit. Rhetoric is that toolkit.