Rhetoric and the Loss of the Whole Man

A brief account of why rhetoric fell from grace, plus a sampling of Richard Weaver's work

Recently, a plumber came to my house to fix a rather significant issue with the water service line. Somehow, we got onto the subject of my occupation. I told him I taught communication.

“Like what we’re doin’ right now?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Well, that’s simple. Just don’t lie,” he said.

Right, indeed. It is best not to lie. He wasn’t very impressed by what I proposed to teach. I didn’t feel like there was much of an opening to argue the merits of studying communication with him.

I didn’t mention how the theory and practice of communication, especially the art of rhetoric, could help him improve the logo on his truck, negotiate better prices or regular contracts with local companies, hire employees, develop a comprehensive marketing and public relations strategy, and so on. Who in their right mind would be interested in all that?

Having taught rhetoric, I tacitly knew that praising rhetoric was not likely to be helpful in that moment. It wasn’t the time then. But perhaps it is the time now.

Mr. Plumber, if you’re reading this, this article’s for you.

I want to try something new by offering you two articles on the same subject: rhetoric. This first article will briefly expand upon the fall of rhetoric. Next week, I’ll explain the scope of rhetoric a bit more and try to articulate why it matters.

Rhetoric and the Whole Man

The art of rhetoric has a complicated history. In the ancient and medieval worlds, rhetoric was a mainstay of the educational curriculum. Contrary to the what many believe, Plato held a balanced view of rhetoric and was himself a consummate rhetor. Aristotle, of course, wrote his famous treatise on Rhetoric. The Roman orator and statesman Cicero wrote about the art and practiced it himself.

You could trace its contemporary decline to the 16th century thinker Peter Ramus and his advocacy for new modes of thinking and educating. You could also trace the fall of rhetoric (and dialectic, an argumentative art of verbal discourse) to the printing press, which helped usher in a preference for the written word over the spoken. For the sake of this post, however, I’ll simply focus on more modern developments that have impaired the study of rhetoric and damaged its image. These contemporary attacks on rhetoric have come from scientism, an ideology that, among other things, despises probable truths.

In his remarkable essay “Language is Sermonic,” Richard Weaver traces the modern decline in rhetoric’s esteem back to the 19th century, when something had “come over the minds of men.” What changed? The powerful credentials of the natural sciences lent credence to the idea that man was at his best a logic machine, a purely rational being devoid of emotion, a creature who could stand outside and above history, one who could transcend a situation so as to understand it from the outside looking in. This transcendent posture, which assumes that man can know his fellow men without bias or preference, we call today “objectivity.” As the Jesuit Fr. Walter Ong explains in The Presence of the Word, in ages past, nobody would’ve been teaching students to attain the ideal of “objectivity.” Ong writes,

“Sweeping as it may sound, and even brash, to say so, the fact is that from antiquity until well through the eighteenth century the formal educational system that trained the Western mind at no point undertook to train a student to be ‘objective.’”

“Heresy!” you cry out. “Without objectivity, we are nothing!” Allow me to explain.

With a change in the image of man, and with the rise in the application of the sciences directly to the study of man himself, rhetoric fell from grace. Scientism and noble rhetoric, as it turns out, are absolutely and unequivocally incompatible. Rhetoric does not hesitate to draw on the particular, the concrete, the practical, the contingent, the historical, the emotional, the situatedness of man. It addresses, in the words of Weaver, “the whole man.” If you lose your image of “the whole man” with his head as well as his heart, rhetoric must go, too.

Physis and Nomos

As everyone knows today, rhetoric is not “substance.” It is not that distilled, pure information the Expert Gods pour into your head like honeyed nectar while you sit back passively and allow it to go to work. Rhetoric is manipulation! It is coercion. It is “fluff” as opposed to “stuff” (per Richard Lanham). It is not “content.” It is “demagoguery” and “propaganda.”  

A less extreme perspective may position rhetoric as mere ornamentation or style. Rhetoric, in this view at least, is either the opposite of the truth or somehow lesser than “facts,” “objectivity,” and “logic.” We use rhetoric to make the truth more palatable, a perspective that Richard Thames would call the Mary Poppins view of rhetoric: It is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.

In his 1995 article “How Harvard Destroyed Rhetoric,” Jay Heinrichs explains how the Boylston chair of rhetoric at Harvard gradually underwent a transformation, eventuating in the disappearance of rhetoric from Harvard’s curriculum. John Quincy Adams held the Boylston chair first. Adams began his post in 1806, and he taught the art of rhetoric as oral persuasion, this despite the fact that Harvard was founded by Puritan Ramists who had considerably narrowed the scope of rhetoric to mere elocution and pronunciation. Over time, the Boylston chair was converted first into a chair of English and literature and then into one of poetry. As rhetoric fell from grace at Harvard, it fell from grace elsewhere, too.

Heinrichs further describes what helped shake the foundations of rhetoric as a respectable art. He suggests that Enlightenment thinkers rejected the distinction between nature and second nature. He writes:

“Political and natural scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rejected the Sophists’ distinction between natural and human science. René Descartes thought it perfectly likely that human behavior would someday become utterly predictable. They declared contingent truths to be anathema. Said Descartes, flatly: ‘We reject all such merely probable knowledge and make it a rule to trust only what is completely known and incapable of being doubted.’”

And yet, so much of life consists of the ambiguous, the uncertain, and the probable. Contingency defines our collective lives. Will interest rates rise? Will this or that person accept an invitation to join this or that company? Will my kid turn out OK? Human beings, whatever they are, are not predictable.

As per Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, anytime you seriously deliberate between multiple courses of action, you can’t even predict your own behavior if you’re deciding between alternative possibilities. Omniscience precludes decision-making. If you already know what you’re going to decide, you’re not actually deliberating. Rhetoric is at home in the process of deliberation. Insofar as the social sciences aspire towards omniscience and certain truth in the human realm, they simultaneously conspire against rhetoric.

The Sophists’ distinction between natural and human science is indicated by the Greek terms physis and nomos. The realm of physis is the realm of nature (note here the etymological connection between physics, physical, and physis). Physis dictates that gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared. You can’t argue with the law of gravity. You could try, but I don’t recommend it.

Nomos, on the other hand, essentially means “second nature,” which is the human realm of dispute, of law, of convention that could always be otherwise. The word “economics” comes from “oikos” (house) and “nomos” (law). Economics is the “law of the house.” And rhetoric involves the maintenance of this law, written or unwritten, or its change. Whether you like it or not, our political and economic system could always be otherwise. Though human nature is a constant, our laws could always be different.

Much of the aforementioned relies upon lectures delivered by Richard Thames on the subject of rhetoric. Thames, who currently teaches at Duquesne, would say that our theories about nature must change in accordance with the recalcitrance (or stubbornness) of nature. But with second nature, the realm of the nomos, we can make human beings comply with our theories. I don’t want to get too far afield, but this idea of compliance-gaining by virtue of the aura of the social sciences could be expanded upon to highlight how some appeal to “science” to manipulate and coerce individuals into the “correct” way of acting. Instead of “correct,” we call it “normal.”

In this article, I wanted to make clear that scientism and its view of human nature destroys the possibility (and desirability) of rhetoric. If there’s no distinction between nature and second nature, between human beings and other animals, then we can essentially use the same means of controlling our peers as we do chimpanzees (e.g., through Pavlovian conditioning, by giving people “treats” as if they were dogs, etc.). Carrots and sticks happen to be the two primary ways of compliance-gaining in a world devoid of rhetoric.

In next week’s article, I’ll expand more on precisely what rhetoric is. As a preview, it’s more than just the art of persuasion (although, it is that, too). In the meantime, keep your head on a swivel for those who would undermine rhetoric in the name of Science, Expertise, and Statistics. They’re just being rhetorical. And although you know there’s nothing wrong with being rhetorical, there is something profoundly unjust in using it for yourself but denying its use to others.

Thank you for reading and for your attention. As Simone Weil put it, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” If you’ve appreciated this post, please like and subscribe. Also, please consider leaving a comment, question, or reaction below. For more on the history of rhetoric, check out Marshall McLuhan’s book on the trivium. You can learn more about the physis/nomos distinction in W. K. C. Guthrie’s The Sophists.