Why study rhetoric?

(This post is indebted to Professor Curry Kennedy, of Texas A&M University. His Substack is Wisdom Speaking. Professor Kennedy has given a series of lectures on rhetoric for the Versed community. )

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion.

So opens Wikipedia’s article on the topic. If you want to be able to persuade people (and who doesn’t?), you need to study rhetoric.

That definition seems to hark back to one of the most famous definitions, given by Aristotle in his Rhetoric.

Let rhetoric be defined as the ability, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion.

This is rhetoric viewed through the clear, cool eyes of a research scientist. Aristotle sees it as what the Greeks called a techne: both a practical skill and the systematic body of knowledge that underpins it. But he seems also to recognize in rhetoric a power that’s uniquely mysterious:

This is the function of no other art; for each of the others is instructive and persuasive about its own subject: for example, medicine about health and disease and geometry about the properties of magnitudes and arithmetic about numbers and similarly in the case of the other arts and sciences. But rhetoric seems to be able to observe the persuasive about “the given,” so to speak. That, too, is why we say it does not include technical knowledge of any particular, defined subject.

[Rhetoric, 2.1.§1355b]

This is rhetoric in the abstract: a set of techniques (that word derives directly from the Greek techne) that can be observed to operate consistently – almost ruthlessly – in any given situation.  

It’s a vision that’s both alluring and alarming. Rhetoric seems to promise knowledge that can be used to persuade any audience of any point of view. And this, broadly, is the modern view of rhetoric: a dark, dangerous art that can be turned to any purpose, good or evil. When we study it, we do so, usually, with that assumption in mind.

But rhetoric is a techne. We don’t just study it. We do it.

The word  ‘rhetoric’ actually means the art of producing a rhetor. And ‘rhetor’ simply means ‘speaker’. Rhetoric, it seems, is not so much the art of persuasion as the art of creating a certain kind of human being.

A story of rhetoric’s origins

The ancient teachers of rhetoric began by telling their students a story. One of the most famous versions was recorded by a young Roman called Marcus Tullius Cicero, in his book, De Inventione – ‘On Invention’ – which is almost certainly a version of his lecture notes, edited when he was an older man.

This is how the story begins.

There was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild food. They did nothing by the guidance of reason, but relied chiefly on physical strength. There was as yet no ordered system of religious worship nor of social duties. No one had seen legitimate marriage, nor had anyone looked upon children whom he knew to be his own. Nor had they learned the advantages of an equitable code of law. And so, through their ignorance and error, blind and unreasoning passion satisfied itself by the misuse of bodily strength, which is a very dangerous servant.

Don’t think of this as a historical account. Think of it as a parable. Use it, as young Cicero was invited to use it, to think about your own situation.

Isolation and disintegration

The people in this story face two major problems. One problem is external; the other, internal.

The external problem is isolation. People in this story wander about in the fields, in a kind of fevered loneliness, separated and hidden from each other. They interact from time to time – they even produce children – but they never really connect. And they have no idea whether any of the children are their own. Nothing ties these people to the past or prepares them for the future: there’s no religious practice, marriage, citizenship, or law. This is a world without collaboration, cooperation or community. And conflicts are settled by force.

The internal problem is disintegration. (Professor Kennedy borrows this term from Dan Siegel’s book, The Developing Mind.) For the people in this story, reason and emotion have become disconnected. Reason strays into ignorance and error; emotion – bereft of reason – drives people to satisfy their appetites at random. They live in a wild scrambling storm of anxiety and appetite, of fear and anger.

These two problems – isolation and disintegration – aggravate each other. External isolation breeds anxiety and fear; internal, unregulated appetite and anger will tend to intensify isolation and alienation. Without a sense of community, we become more and more disintegrated psychologically; people suffering from psychological disintegration will never achieve a sense of community.

This spiral of disintegration and isolation can result in only one, terrible thing: violence. (‘A very dangerous servant’.)

Here’s how the story continues.

At this moment a man – great and wise, I’m sure – became aware of the power latent in man and the wide field offered by his mind for great achievements if one could develop this power and improve it by instruction. Men were scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats when he assembled and gathered them in accordance with a plan.

He introduced them to every useful and honourable occupation, though they cried out against it at first because of its novelty, and then, when through reason and eloquence they had listened with greater attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk.

How could it have been brought to pass that men should learn to keep faith and observe justice and become accustomed to obey others voluntarily and believe not only that they must work for the common good but even sacrifice life itself, unless men had been able by eloquence to persuade their fellows of the truth of what they had discovered by reason? Certainly only a speech at the same time powerful and entrancing could have induced one who had great physical strength to submit to justice without violence.

Wisdom and eloquence

In the story, rhetoric proposes two remedies for the twin problems of inner disintegration and external isolation: wisdom and eloquence.

Wisdom addresses the problem of psychological disintegration. It combines reason and emotion, thinking and feeling. It steers the passions, rather than suppressing or ignoring them. Wisdom applies the lessons of experience to understand the problems of the present. And it faces the uncertainly of the future with discernment and courage.

Eloquence addresses the problem of isolation. By speaking well, the wise man in the story gathers people into communities of mutual benefit and gives them the tools they need to create an enduring culture. Eloquence binds parents and carers to children; it transforms neighbours into neighbourhoods; it makes private people into citizens.

(Notice, incidentally, that the wise man’s speech is described as ‘entrancing’. Eloquence has an element of magic and enchantment.)

Just as isolation and disintegration aggravate each other, wisdom and eloquence reinforce each other. The Greek rhetorician Isocrates, writing five hundred years before Cicero, put it like this.

…The power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul.

Notice that Isocrates doesn’t say that eloquence objectively makes you wise; he says that we perceive eloquence as a sign of wisdom. Wisdom is recognized socially.

Isocrates then discusses the power of rhetoric in our own thinking.

With this faculty we both contend against others on matters which are open to dispute and seek light for ourselves on things which are unknown; for the same arguments which we use in persuading others when we speak in public, we employ also when we deliberate in our own thoughts; and, while we call eloquent those who are able to speak before a crowd, we regard as sage those who most skilfully debate their problems in their own minds.

Rhetoric combines wisdom and eloquence. It helps us think well. And thinking well helps us speak well.

When rhetoric goes bad

Cicero’s story has a third part. His teacher, it seems, was well aware of the dangers if wisdom becomes separated from eloquence.

But when a certain agreeableness of manner – a depraved imitation of virtue – acquired the power of eloquence unaccompanied by any consideration of moral duty, then low cunning supported by talent grew accustomed to corrupt cities and undermine the lives of men…

Therefore it was not undeserved, I am sure, that whenever rash and audacious men had taken the help of the ship of state, great and disastrous wrecks occurred. These events brought eloquence into such odium and unpopularity that men of the greatest talent left a life of strife and tumult for some quiet pursuit, as sailors seek refuge in port from a raging storm.

‘A good man speaking well’

Almost 200 years after Cicero heard this parable in his rhetoric class, another Roman, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus – known to us as Quintilian – produced a twelve-volume textbook called Institutio Oratoria – generally known in English as the Institutes of Oratory.  He sees the Institutes, not – as we tend to do – as a rhetorical textbook, but as a work about education. His task is to educate an ideal orator: a man who can be an effective politician. And he defines this orator with a phrase that’s found a permanent place in the rhetorical tradition: one that, in stark contrast to Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric, places the speaker at its core.

Let the orator whom I propose to form, then, be such a one as is characterized by the definition of Marcus Cato, a good man skilled in speaking.

[Book 12, Ch.1]

A few lines later, he reinforces this definition.

My judgement carries me still further, for I not only say that he who would answer my idea of an orator must be a good man, but that no man, unless he be good, can ever be an orator.

Quintilian – as is his habit – expands and expounds on this theme at great length.

Goodness, in his view, is granted to men by Nature – Nature, by definition, being itself good – but to reach its full potential, it must be educated (by Quintilian himself, naturally). Similarly, the ability to speak well depends on two natural faculties – speech, and reason – that distinguish men from animals (and, when it comes to reason, also from barbarians, slaves and women).

These two halves of the ideal orator go together. The skill in speaking well is inherently tied to being a good person. The techniques of persuasion cannot be divorced from the broader techniques of speaking well; and, more crucially, they can’t be divorced from the values of the speaker themselves.

For Quintilian, eloquence and wisdom are inseparable.

We might update his definition. We should do so for obvious reasons; but also, because in the modern world we use language in so many different ways. Here’s my suggestion.

Rhetoric is the art of using language wisely.

If you pursue rhetoric at all, you’ll find yourself living a tension between these two definitions. We live in language, and the swirling currents of argument and counter-argument will never be still. To live rhetorically is to live in the vortex between these two definitions. Do you see it, with Aristotle, as a purely instrumental techne, divorced from any moral or political values? Or do you feel, as you seek to speak or write more eloquently, an echo of Quintilian’s urging, to use language, not merely beautifully, but well?

It’s said that archaeologists once found an inscription on a wall from ancient Greece, which said:

Whoever does not study rhetoric will become a victim of it.