Understanding Rhetoric

A brief account of what the art concerns and why it matters

Now, what is rhetoric? In last week’s post, I briefly summarized its modern decline. But what is it? As many might suggest, rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Indeed, it is that. But it is also much more.

Weaver calls rhetoric “an art of emphasis embodying an order of desire.” Whenever people dispute, whenever there’s conflict, whenever there are alternative possibilities for action, therein you’ll find rhetoric. Indeed, rhetoric emphasizes this instead of that. Whenever a news channel shows you this event or that person, the very choice that they make is itself rhetorical. Why are you covering this potato sack race? Why do you keep talking about this politician? By showing you one thing, they’re simultaneously not showing you another. The rhetorician Kenneth Burke would refer to this phenomenon of concealing one thing while simultaneously revealing another as a “terministic screen.”

Rhetoric teaches you how to allocate your audience’s attention. For this reason, Richard Lanham calls rhetoric the “economics of attention.” Why? Because economics studies the allocation of scarce resources. And what could be scarcer in our information-saturated age than attention?

How do you both obtain and then keep your audience’s attention? You use metaphor, story, compelling evidence in the correct order, etc. Above all, you understand your audience and take its needs seriously. You understand that attention is finite, and you need to work to keep it.

What else is rhetoric? Kenneth Burke would say that rhetoric is the “identification” and “consubstantiality” between individuals that establishes unity, concord, and harmony. If I’m a politician campaigning in the Midwest, I can look to my audience and say, “I was a farm boy myself.” I identify with my audience. I make myself “consubstantial” with them (literally, “of the same substance”).

We do this sort of identification all the time, whether we’re conscious of it or not. Burke writes,

“All told, persuasion ranges from the bluntest quest of advantage, as in sales promotion or propaganda, through courtship, social etiquette, education, and the sermon, to a ‘pure’ form that delights in the process of appeal for itself alone, without ulterior purpose. And identification ranges from the politician who, addressing an audience of farmers, says, ‘I was a farm boy myself,’ through the mysteries of social status, to the mystic’s devout identification with the source of all being.”

When I say, “You and I are not so different, you know,” I identify with you. “We are the same,” I say, even if I don’t use these exact words.

Rhetoric is a way of perceiving the world and the possibilities of speech within it. Per Aristotle, rhetoric is the “faculty” of observing the available means of persuasion in any given situation. By implication, rhetoric is a mode of perception; it changes how you perceive and think about yourself, the community you belong to, and the world you live in. 

More than simply an extrinsic skill that we pick up every now and then, rhetoric is a habit of being. A rhetor is something that you become, something that education in the liberal arts transforms you into. All education at its core must have transformation as its end, lest education degenerate into mere credentialing. Rhetoric studies and aims at transformation par excellence. But transformation of what? The audience, of course. And you.

A Cosmic Scope

Despite the merits of Heinrichs’ article “How Harvard Destroyed Rhetoric” (mentioned in last week’s post), he goes too far in his opinion of Socrates as an enemy of rhetoric as well as Christianity as anti-rhetorical. Heinrichs writes, “The Christian rhetorician did not persuade; he proclaimed.” Augustine, of course, was a Christian rhetor. Augustine appropriated the rhetorical tradition and used it for Christian ends. But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t trying to persuade people.

Many misquote Augustine when they attribute the following to him:

“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”

So far as I can tell, Augustine never said this. And it makes sense that he would never say it. Why? The man spent a considerable amount of time not only studying rhetoric but also defending the Catholic faith with extraordinary rhetorical flourish. It’s also ironic that he would use a rhetorical figure (in this case the simile “like a lion”) to define the truth.

You can find the presence of rhetoric in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a staple text in the Christian Middle Ages. Alcuin of York scattered the seeds of the trivium (rhetoric, grammar, and logic) in Europe by command of Charles the Great. Alcuin essentially laid the groundwork for the medieval educational system that Aquinas and the other great scholastics inherited. I could mention other Christians through whom the rhetorical tradition travels (e.g., Erasmus, St. Thomas More, Giambattista Vico), but the point is that it has a long and venerable history both before and after Christ appeared on the scene.

And that raises an interesting question: Did God use rhetoric? 

As per St. Irenaeus, God used persuasion instead of violently forcing us to believe in Him:

“He [God] did not use violence, as the apostasy had done at the beginning when it usurped dominion over us, greedily snatching what was not its own. No, He used persuasion. It was fitting for God to use persuasion, not violence, to obtain what He wanted, so that justice should not be infringed and God’s ancient handiwork not be utterly destroyed.”

God invites; He does not compel. Placed in a cosmic perspective, God is the consummate Rhetor. He speaks His Word from the beginning. It is a Word perfectly adapted to His audience: Fallen Man. God’s Word creates and regenerates; His Word revivifies and resurrects; the Word does not return to the Father empty handed. Undoubtedly, God’s Word transforms those who have ears to hear.

Thus, from the most mundane exchanges about what to eat for dinner to the Incarnation itself, rhetoric has a place. Or had a place until the wheels came off the bus in modernity, and people gave up on rhetoric.

Without our capacity for speech, we’re nothing but brute animals. On this point, I will leave you with the following from Isocrates’ Hymn to the Logos:

“For in the other powers which we possess we are in no respect superior to other living creatures; nay, we are inferior to many in swiftness and in strength and in other resources; but, because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts; and, generally speaking, there is no institution devised by man which the power of speech has not helped us to establish.”

Rhetoric is everywhere; we use it to constitute and maintain communities; it actualizes our potential to be fully human; it provides a prophylactic defense against its sinister employment, and so on.

We’re not simply robots, or “men without chests,” as C. S. Lewis put it. Rhetoric matters because it presupposes our audience can make choices. Its assumptions about human nature are fundamentally correct. In this regard, rhetoric allows us to think outside the dominant materialist paradigm that reduces minds to brains, translating everything metaphysical into the strictly quantifiable, observable, and verifiable.

I hope you’ve found this article instructive, entertaining, and moving. After all, the three duties of the orator are to teach, to delight, and to move. Hey, isn’t that the title of this Substack?

I’ve said practically nothing about how to practice rhetoric, which is an art, after all. But as Nietzsche suggested, if you don’t have a why, you’ll never really care about the how.

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 what rhetoric is and why it matters, check out Richard Weaver’s Language is Sermonic or his Ethics of Rhetoric. If you’re up for a challenge, check out Kenneth Burke’s “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle.” Finally, if I’m not mistaken, the late Eric McLuhan talks about God as a Rhetor as well as the relationship between rhetoric and transformation. You might find more on these subjects in Theories of Communication or Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul.