Selected Definitions of Rhetoric
Plato: Socrates asks,
Must not the art of rhetoric, taken as a whole, be a
kind of influencing of the mind by means of words, not
only in courts of law and other public gatherings, but
in private places also? And must it not be the same art
that is concerned with great issues and small, its right
employment commanding no more respect when dealing with
important matters than with unimportant? Phaedrus,
261a-261b.
Isocrates (353 BCE):
But since we have the ability to persuade one another
and to make dear to ourselves what we want, not only do
we avoid living like animals, but we have come together,
built cities, made laws, and invented arts. Speech is
responsible for nearly all our inventions. It legislated
in matters of justice and injustice and beauty and
baseness, and without these laws, we could not live with
one another. By it we refute the bad and praise the
good; through it, we educate the ignorant and recognize
the intelligent. We regard speaking well to be the
clearest sign of a good mind, which it requires, and
truthful, lawful, and just speech we consider the image
of a good and faithful soul. With speech we fight over
contentious matters, and we investigate the unknown. We
use the same arguments by which we persuade others in
our own deliberations; we call those able to speak in a
crowd "rhetorical"; we regard as sound advisers those
who debate with themselves most skillfully about public
affairs. If one must summarize the power of discourse,
we will discover that nothing done prudently occurs
without speech, that speech is the leader of all
thoughts and actions, and that the most intelligent
people use it most of all.
Aristotle (ca. 350 BCE):
Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each
[particular] case, to see the available means of
persuasion. This is the function of no other art; for
each of the others is instructive and persuasive about
its own subject [are they?]: 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 genus [of subjects].
Rhetorica ad Herennium (ca. 80 BCE):
The task of the public speaker is to discuss capably
those matters which law and custom have fixed for the
uses of citizenship, and to secure as far as possible
the agreement of his hearers. [How? NB:
Manipulative vs. non-manipulative social relations]
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue:
[For earlier moral philosophers], the difference
between a human relationship uninformed by morality and
one so informed is precisely the difference between one
in which each person treats the other primarily as a
means to his or her ends and one in which each treats
the other as an end. To treat someone else as an
end is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for
acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it
to them to evaluate those reasons. It is to be
unwilling to influence another except by reasons which
that other he or she judges to be good. It is to
appeal to impersonal criteria of the validity of which
each rational agent must be his or her own judge.
By contrast, to treat someone else as a means is to seek
to make him or her an instrument of my purposes by
adducing whatever influences or considerations will in
fact be effective on this or that occasion. The
generalizations of the sociology and psychology of
persuasion are what I shall need to guide me, not the
standards of normative rationality.
If emotivism is true, this
distinction is illusory. For evaluative utterance
can in the end have no point or use by the expression of
my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of
the feelings and attitudes of others.
[On this view], the sole reality of
distinctively moral discourse is the attempt of one will
to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences and
choices of another with its own. Others are always
means, never ends.
Cicero (ca. 90 BCE):
There is a scientific system of politics which includes
many important departments. One of these departments—a
large and important one—is eloquence based on the rules
of art, which they call rhetoric. For I do not agree
with those who think that political science has no need
for eloquence, and I violently disagree with those who
think that it is wholly comprehended in the power and
skill of the rhetorician. Therefore we will classify
oratorical ability as a part of political science. The
function of eloquence seems to be to speak in a manner
suited to persuade an audience, the end is to persuade
by speech.
Steven Mailloux (1989):
[Rhetoric is] the political effectivity of trope and
argument in culture. Such a working definition includes
the two traditional meanings of rhetoric—figurative
language and persuasive action—and permits me to
emphasize either or both senses, differently in
different discourse at different historical moments, in
order to specify more exactly how texts affect their
audiences in terms of particular power relations. Rhetorical
Power.
Charles Bazerman (1988):
The study of how people use language and other symbols
to realize human goals and carry out human activities [.
. .] ultimately a practical study offering people great
control over their symbolic activity. Shaping
Written Knowledge, p. 6.
Krista Ratcliffe:
But as Kenneth Burke has taught us, rhetoric may be
defined very broadly (e.g., I tell the students in my
undergraduate rhetorical theory class that the study of
rhetoric is the study of how we use language and how
language uses us).
Christine Farris:
What rhetoric has always addressed: not the mastery and
regulation of language so much as the ways in which
language shapes, reflects, and changes practices among
members of particular communities.
Michael Holzman:
In antiquity rhetoric was education, the leading out of
the child from the private world of the family (and the
family's responsibility for suitable training) to the
social and political worlds. Learning to write well,
which meant, on the one hand, a complicated technique,
and, on the other hand, a discrete (primarily literary)
body of knowledge, was the necessary preparation for
what was seen as the only truly human existence: that of
a participant in the social life of the community and
the political life of the state.
Knoblauch:
[Rhetoric] deals with "questions surrounding any study
of language: the relation between language and the
world, the relation between discourse and knowledge, the
heuristic and communicative functions of verbal
expression, the roles of situation and audience in
shaping utterance, the social and ethical aspects of
discourse. . . .
Cherwitz and Hikins:
Rhetoric is the art of describing reality through
language. Under this definition, the study of rhetoric
becomes an effort to understand how humans, in various
capacities and in a variety of situations, describe
reality through language. To act rhetorically is to use
language in asserting or seeming to assert claims about
reality. At the heart of this definition is the
assumption that what renders discourse potentially
persuasive is that a rhetor (e.g. a speaker or writer)
implicitly or explicitly sets forth claims that either
differ from or cohere with views of reality held by
audiences (e.g. a specific scholarly community, a reader
of fiction, or an assembly of persons attending a
political rally). Communication and Knowledge: An
Investigation in Rhetorical Epistemology. 62.
James Boyd White:
Law is most usefully seen not, as it usually seen by
academics and philosophers, as a system of rules, but as
a branch of rhetoric, and . . . the kind of rhetoric of
which law is a species is most usefully seen not, as
rhetoric usually is either as failed science or as the
ignoble art of persuasion, but as the central art by
which community and culture are established, maintained,
and transformed. So regarded, rhetoric is continuous
with law, and like it, has justice as its ultimate aim.
Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of
Cultural and Communal Life, 52.
Terry Eagleton (1983):
Rhetoric, which was the received form of critical
analysis all the way from ancient society to the 18th
century, examined the way discourse are constructed in
order to achieve certain effects. It was not worried
about whether its objects of inquiry were speaking or
writing, poetry or philosophy, fiction or
historiography: its horizon was nothing less than the
field of discursive practices in society as a whole, and
its particular interest lay in grasping such practices
as forms of power and performance. This is not to say
that it ignored the truth-value of the discourse in
question, since this could often be crucially relevant
to the kinds of effect they produced in their readers
and listeners. Rhetoric in its major phase was neither a
language, nor a "formalism," preoccupied simply with
analyzing linguistic devices. It looked at such devices
in terms of concrete performance-they were means of
pleading, persuading, inciting and so on-and at people’s
responses to discourse in terms of linguistic structures
and the material situations in which they functioned. It
saw speaking and writing not merely as textual objects,
to be aesthetically contemplated or endlessly
deconstructed, but as forms of activity inseparable from
the wider social relations between writers and readers,
orators and audiences, and as largely unintelligible
outside the social purposes and conditions in which they
were embedded.
Roland Barthes (1964-1965):
The rhetoric under discussion here is that metalanguage
(whose language-object was "discourse") prevalent in the
West from the fifth century BC to the nineteenth century
AD. We shall not deal with more remote efforts (India,
Islam), and with regard to the West itself, we shall
limit ourselves to Athens, Rome, and France. This
metalanguage (discourse on discourse) has involved
several practices, simultaneously or successively
present, according to periods, within "Rhetoric ":
- A technique, i.e., an "art," in the classical sense
of the word; the art of persuasion, a body of rules
and recipes whose implementation makes it possible to
convince the hearer of the discourse (and later the
reader of the work), even if what he is to be
convinced of is " false."
- A teaching: the art of rhetoric, initially
transmitted by personal means (a rhetor and his
disciples, his clients), was soon introduced into
institutions of learning; in schools, it formed the
essential matter of what would today be called higher
education; it was transformed into material for
examination (exercises, lessons, tests).
- A science, or in any case a proto-science, i.e. a. a
field of autonomous observation delimiting certain
homogeneous phenomena, to wit the "effects" of
language; b. a classification of these phenomena
(whose best-known trace is the list of rhetorical
"figures"; c. an "operation" in Hjelmslevian sense,
i.e. a meta-language, a body of rhetorical treatises
whose substance—or signified—is a language-object
(argumentative language and "figured" language).
- An ethic: as a system of "rules," rhetoric is imbued
with the ambiguity of that word: it is at once a
manual of recipes, inspired by a practical goal, and a
Code, a body of ethical prescriptions whose role is to
supervise (i.e. to permit and to limit) the
"deviations" of emotive language.
- A social practice: Rhetoric is that privileged
technique (since one must pay in order to acquire it)
which permits the ruling classes gain ownership of
speech. Language being a power, selective rules of
access to this power have been decreed, constituting
it as a pseudo-science, closed to "those who do not
know how to speak" and requiring an expensive
initiation: born 2500 years ago in legal cases
concerning property, rhetoric was exhausted and died
in the "rhetoric " class, the initiatory ratification
of bourgeois culture.
- A ludic practice: since all these practices
constituted a formidable ("repressive," we now say)
institutional system, it was only natural that a
mockery of rhetoric should develop, a "black" rhetoric
(suspicions, contempt, ironies): games, parodies,
erotic or obscene allusions, classroom jokes, a whole
schoolboy practice (which still remains to be
explored, moreover, and to be constituted as a
cultural code)."The Old Rhetoric: An aide-mémoire." The
Semiotic Challenge, 12-14.
Wayne Booth (1974):
What happens, then, if we choose to begin with our
knowledge that we are essentially creatures made in
symbolic exchange, created in the process of sharing
intentions, values, meanings, in fact more like each
other than different, more valuable in our commonality
than in our idiosyncrasies: not, in fact, anything at
all when considered separately from our relations? What
happens if we think of ourselves as essentially
participants in a field or process or mode of being
persons together? If man is essentially a rhetorical
animal, in the sense that his nature is discovered and
lived only in symbolic process, then the whole world
shifts: even the usage of words like I, my, mine, self,
must be reconsidered, because the borderlines between
the self and the other have either disappeared or
shifted sharply . . . All we need do is honour what we
know about who we are and how we come to be, in
language. Once we give up the limiting notions of
language and knowledge willed to us by scientism, we can
no longer consider adequate any notion of "language as a
means of communication" . . . It is, in recent models,
the medium in which selves grow, the social invention
through which we make each other and the structures that
are our world, the shared product of our efforts to cope
with experience.
Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (2001):
Rhetoric has a number of overlapping meanings: the
practice of oratory; the study of the strategies of
effective oratory; the use of language, written or
spoken, to inform or persuade; the study of the
persuasive effects of language; the study of the
relation between language and knowledge; the
classification and use of tropes and figures; and, of
course, the use of empty promises and half-truths as a
form of propaganda. Nor does this list exhaust the
definitions that might be given.
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