discipline of rhetoric, to transform it into a social science capable of delivering, if not irrefutable demonstrations, reliably data-based conclusions about the world, and to become more “autonomous” or less parasitic on other disciplines. Resistance to these attempts involves the aforementioned turn toward contemporary philosophers—who mostly reject philosophic traditions that demonize rhetoric—who espouse pragmatic and constructivist views and accept rhetoric as a trans-disciplinary activity without apology.
The tension between philosophy and rhetoric or demonstration and persuasion is sometimes also characterized as the tension between truth and effect. In simplest terms, this conflict is between those who view truth as independent of people’s perception of it, and those who see audience-assent as a necessary condition of deeming something truthful. In our earlier discussion of Fish and Leo, whose meta-argument is in effect a contemporary revival of the ancient one we are now considering, we termed the former view “absolutist” in that it was non-contingent and non-relational. Philosopher Hans Blumenberg rejects such a view on the following grounds:
In the dealings of Greeks with Greeks, Isocrates says, the appropriate means is persuasion, whereas in dealings with barbarians it is the use of force. This difference is understood as one of language and education because persuasion presupposes one shares a horizon, allusions to prototypical material, and the orientation provided by metaphors and similes. The antithesis of truth and effect is superficial, because the rhetorical effect is not an alternative that one can choose instead of an insight that one could also have, but an alternative to definitive evidence that one cannot have, or cannot have yet, or at any rate cannot have here and now. (435-6)
What philosophers suggested for centuries was possible is precisely what Blumenberg is here saying is not possible—definitive evidence for the truthfulness of their assertions in the here and now. Blumenberg’s refusal to separate truth from effect points toward an acceptance of the fact that, as Burke puts it, we live in “Babel after the Fall” where the only alternative to force is to establish identification between speakers, a state that must be earned through considerable exertion and guile thanks to all those barriers of language, gender, class, and so forth that always already exist.
For Blumenberg as for Burke, only when speakers share a horizon does conversation, let alone persuasion and identification become possible. In a post-lapsarian world, truth is social. One is certainly free to assert that “definitive evidence” for one’s point of view exists outside the awareness or understanding of those fallen souls with whom one converses, but that assertion itself carries no force absent others’ willingness to grant it. A truth which has no effect, which gets nothing done in the world, is not much of a truth. A number of contemporary debates confirm the futility of appealing to sources of authority not granted by the targets of one’s argument. The debate between creationists (or proponents of “intelligent design”) and evolutionists, for example, is a clash of incommensurable languages and incongruent horizons. Not only is resolution of the question impossible to imagine, a meaningful conversation among the adversaries is difficult to envision. Whether my truth lies in a coherent theory buttressed by a century of empirical data or in the poetry of ancient holy text, it will not be received as truth unless our audience shares the horizon within which it resides. Even geometric proofs cannot be “demonstrated” unless the axioms on which they rest are granted. The incommensurable nature of various truths and vocabularies has of late given rise not only to rancorous and futile public debates, but bloody and violent clashes between incommensurable belief systems
The first great champion of the view opposed to the one attributed here to Blumenberg and Burke was Plato. The target of his scorn was of course the earliest school of rhetoricians, the Sophists. Ironically, Plato’s stance toward the Sophists is articulated in a series of oratorical set pieces in which he deploys a range of rhetorical practices that bear an uncanny resemblance to the ones he charges against his adversaries. To make matters worse, Plato’s practices are even less savory than those promoted by some of his targets. In particular, Plato’s is a markedly “asymmetrical” rhetoric, to borrow a term from Thomas Conley (6-7). It is asymmetrical insofar as the speaker, Socrates in the case of Plato, is active, knowledgeable and has an agenda while his interlocutors, especially if they happen to be poets or Sophists, are typically passive, gullible and full of false knowledge. Ostensibly of course, Plato’s Socrates has the best interests of his interlocutors at heart and the express goal of his interrogations is to educate them, to save them from the error of their ways by serving as a midwife who plucks truth from their unsuspecting consciousness. In theory, Plato has no designs on his audience and is the purest of persuaders. But even he cannot persuade his audience to acknowledge truths that lie beyond their horizons. Conversation cannot transport his audience to the unassailable truths he wishes to share. He must resort to the same sort of manipulative practices his foes are famous for using. Plato’s genius lies not in his ability to craft logically airtight arguments but rather in his unmatched ability to disguise his asymmetrical rhetoric as dialogue.
In contrast to Plato’s reliance on asymmetrical rhetoric, Protagoras is generally credited with developing a form of “antilogic” that renders dialogue open-ended, allowing the beliefs (doxa) of each speaker to play a role in the resolution of an issue.
The Protagorean view . . . appears to be bilateral, in that the two sides of a question must be brought to bear on each other to effect some resolution of the issue at hand. Since neither side is privileged a priori over the other, and both are founded on the hearer’s doxa, we may characterize the relationship between speaker and audience as “symmetric.” (Conley 6-7)
Plato’s manipulation of this form of dialogue makes clear how difficult it is to reconcile an absolutist faith in one’s beliefs and genuine dialogue. If one privileges some beliefs a priori over other beliefs before a dialogue begins, one cannot hold out the possibility that those transcendent beliefs might be changed in the course of that dialogue. The only way that a dialogue might cause other beliefs to displace the a priori privileged beliefs is through some sort of chicanery. All of which takes us back to the Fish vs Leo debate in the previous chapter. Only “relativists” and those with dangerously “multiculturalist” leanings might hold out the possibility that genuine dialogue with one’s enemies could be a good thing or that one’s own views might actually be changed by such an exchange. The fact that the “absolutist” in the modern day version of the Sophist v Platonist debate fails to lay claim to any specific universal absolutes is symptomatic of the differences between the ancients’ world and our own. Today’s absolutisms, as M. H. Abrams once wryly noted, are sorely lacking in absolutes. Like Leo, most latter-day Platonists tend to rely on jeremiad as their primary vehicle of persuasion. By focusing their attack—and their audience’s attention—on all the things that have gone wrong since approximately 1968 when the relativists took over the asylum, Leo and his ilk can avoid reference to any absolutes other than those that have sadly lapsed. The treatment of these universal values is in turn more of an exercise in nostalgia than in analysis.
Implicit in the opposition between ancient philosophers and rhetoricians, and their more recent incarnations, are different assumptions about the ends of reasoning. The ancient philosophers’ rejection of effect as an aspect of truth is part of a larger difference between the two approaches. The end of reasoning for philosophy is some sort of discovery—of truth, of reality, or of the good—which will then be known and shareable. For rhetoric on the other hand, the end of reasoning is a choice; to be sure the choice may bring us closer to truth, reality or the good (and if any of the three are privileged by rhetoric it would be the latter, as we have indicated), but it is the act itself, performed in a particular time and place to bring about a particular outcome, not knowledge for its own sake, that motivates the process. Indeed, according to Blumenberg, the rhetorical situation is such that one “[lacks] definitive evidence and [is] compelled to act” (441), versus Plato who, according to Blumenberg, “institutionalized” the notion “that virtue is knowledge,” thereby making “what is evident . . . the norm of behavior” (431). By Plato’s lights once one possesses right knowledge one is compelled to act in virtuous ways, while rhetoricians hold that virtue must be compelled anew in each
