a reading of holy writ other than the one offered by whatever authority happens to control the pulpit. It’s the failure to imagine a ground of identification between oneself and whatever embodiment otherness has taken on. The failure of absolutism also involves a simple failure to notice things: The failure to notice that the answers derived from holy writ over the centuries change from time to time and from place to place, and the failure to notice that there is no court of appeal with binding authority to adjudicate differences among competing absolutes or to overturn the appeals of relativists. The major problem arising from the failure of ethical absolutisms is that they ultimately come full circle and return us to the place from whence ethics and rhetoric alike arise, the place where might makes right. Above all else, ethics and rhetoric share in their rejection of force as a means of resolving difference.
Rhetoric begins, as Burke argues, in acts of courtship, in the creation of a sense of identification between entities belonging to different classes—gender, socio-economic, political, etc. The obligations of ethics arise from the recognition of the self in others, the “thou-ness” of strangers toward whom one must act as one would wish to be acted upon. Absolutism creates a world of binaries—Us/Them, Good/Evil, Right Reading/Wrong Reading—and then offers no civilized means of overcoming those binaries. In fact absolutism counsels against parleying with, let alone identifying with, the Other. To maintain one’s faith in an absolutist view of the world, one must remain always within the borders governed by those absolutes. To leave the kingdom of one’s absolutes is to be challenged at every turn by strange ideas and customs and to have few resources for negotiating those differences. But we learned long ago from our Sophist forebears how to traverse multiple kingdoms and in the process multiple realities while hanging on to our sanity and our safety. If that most benign forebear of the absolutists, Plato, vanquished the Sophists in his dialogues, they in fact survived to argue another day and teach us how to do likewise. In a world beset by too much certainty about too many irreconcilable notions and too little willingness to set force aside and try courtship our students would be well served by ethical instruction infused by the spirit of the Sophists.
Notes
1. In using Perry’s framework for this discussion of student development, we do not mean to imply an uncritical acceptance of his theory. A number of trenchant critiques of Perry’s schema were mounted in the seventies and eighties, particularly by feminist scholars (e.g., Gilligan, Belenky, et al.) who noted the strong male bias of Perry’s research and its failure to account for gender differences. Women’s ways of knowing, we would acknowledge, are indeed different from men’s ways, particularly when it comes to ethical matters. That said, the reactions of college students, particularly entry-level students, male and female alike, to the challenges posed by classes focused on argument, appear to track those anticipated by Perry’s schema sufficiently well to use as a loose framework for the present discussion.
2. In the case of Fish v. Leo, we appear to be contradicting ourselves by declaring our preference for Fish’s argument. But keep in mind, the nature of their disagreement is more in the nature of a “meta-argument” than a regular argument, and as such the reason for our preference goes back to the fact that Leo offers no reason to “listen” to opposing arguments, while Fish specifically calls for a dialectic approach to disagreement like the one we are supporting here.
3. Absolutism as we use the term here is a mindset rather than an ideology or belief system. Within any religion, thus, there are absolutists who pretty much act as advertised. There are also imaginative folk who manage to reconcile their religious beliefs with a concern for the well being of even those who fail to share their beliefs.
The number of casualties of the 9/11 attacks had not yet been fixed, at slightly fewer than 3,000, at the time of Leo’s writing.
2 The History of Argument
Our goal in this chapter is not to present an exhaustive history of argument. Our goal is to construct a chapter about the history of argument that is optimally usable for contemporary teachers of argument. Certainly we have drawn from a number of many fine histories of rhetoric and of the teaching of writing, and our readers may consult our citations if they wish to explore those histories in greater depth. But in the brief space we have available for this discussion, we have aimed at economy over thoroughness, at usefulness over novelty. In order to make the following material as usable as possible, we have constructed a two-part chapter. In the first part we present a “slice” or core sample of pre-modern rhetoric in the form of two recurrent themes—or more precisely, recurrent tensions—that mark the evolution of argument theory. These tensions in fact survive into the present age and continue to animate current day controversies. The first tension centers on the ancient enmity between philosophy and rhetoric while the second focuses on rhetoric’s not always successful resistance to ossification. After reviewing these tensions, stressing their applicability to current choices teachers of argument still face, we will proceed in the second part of the chapter, to offer a more in-depth discussion of several modern theories of argument which have either altered—or have the potential to alter—the way in which argument is taught. Because there has been a sharp break over the past fifty years in our understanding of argument, and over the past twenty-five years in our approaches to teaching argument, we spend more time on argument’s recent history than on its storied past. In so doing we don’t mean to scant the accomplishments of the Sophists, Aristotle, Cicero, Erasmus, Augustine, Campbell, et al. Indeed, as a number of contemporary theorists we cite have themselves acknowledged, the wisdom of our forbears shines through most strongly in the best work done in recent days. Insofar our goal in this chapter is to create a usable past by indicating the sources of our approach to argument, what follows comprises the heart of the book.
Philosophy vs Rhetoric
In one sense, everything discussed in this chapter can be understood through the lens of philosophy vs rhetoric. It’s the ur struggle from whence so many of our skirmishes, then and now, have arisen. If early on most philosophers defined themselves through their differences with rhetoric, a number of more recent philosophers and critics, including Hans Blumenberg, Hayden White, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton, and others, have returned the favor and distinguished themselves from their peers by in some cases embracing rhetoric explicitly and in others by embracing ideas consonant with contemporary rhetoric. In the second part of this chapter where we highlight the contributions of contemporary rhetoricians, we will see that a number of them have their roots in philosophy. We will take up these more recent attempts to redefine philosophy through rhetoric later in the chapter. In the present discussion of the philosophy/rhetoric divide, however, we limit ourselves to those major themes that emerge from the ancient rupture of the two disciplines.
The ancient struggle between philosophy and rhetoric embodies many tensions, but our focus for this section will be on the central tension between and philosophers’ bold claims to offer irrefutable demonstration of truths for ideal audiences, versus rhetoricians’ more modest claims to persuade given audiences that a particular conclusion warrants their assent. The fact that even today, twenty-five hundred years after the debate began, prestige lies with those who claim to demonstrate truth to experts, versus those who claim to persuade general audiences underscores the uphill battle rhetoric faces in its struggle with philosophy to carve out a legitimate niche among the human sciences. Part of the problem lies in the fact that philosophy was long ago declared the winner in the struggle and subsequently the history of the debate was written from their point of view. As rhetorical theorist Susan Jarratt has suggested of the earliest rhetoricians, the Sophists, we have difficulty understanding them save through the lens of the ancient philosophers, in particular Plato and Aristotle, with whom history has sided for over two millennia. More recent history has been kinder to rhetoric, in no small part thanks to scholars like Jarratt, and consequently it has become possible to understand it on grounds other than those imposed by philosophy. Which is not to say that the above tensions have disappeared; they have simply been reconfigured as largely internal tensions within the field of
