The evolution of rhetoric and rhetorical theory

History Of Rhetoric

Rhetoric and rhetorical theory has been evolving and changing since Aristotle first wrote On Rhetoric, and this process continues to this day. Changes in rhetorical theory have largely coincided with developments in other areas of philosophy and critical thought, but one cannot consider the evolution of rhetorical theory to be a straightforward process, because contemporary theorists are still grapple with many of the same questions and issues first proposed by Aristotle, because each new contribution to the field forces a reevaluation of everything that came before.

Utilizing an eclectic approach to the history of rhetoric with an explicit goal of avoiding the biases inherent in the majority of rhetorical texts prior to the last thirty years, this essay considers the evolution of rhetorical theory from Aristotle until the present day without pretending that this evolution proceeded in a strictly linear fashion, with one text naturally giving rise to the next. Instead, it recognizes that certain elements of all texts remain in conversation with each other, so while this history proceeds in a linear fashion, the meaning created by these texts and the status and function of rhetorical theory is considered to be far more amorphous and changing.

Examining rhetorical theory in this way allows one to see how an abandonment of the moralizing goal of rhetoric first proposed by Aristotle has allowed rhetorical theory to expand the scope of its criticisms so that it has become an important critical framework for understanding the function of power and ideology as it relates to language.

Rhetoric and rhetorical theory has been evolving and changing since Aristotle first wrote On Rhetoric, and this process continues to this day. Changes in rhetorical theory have largely coincided with developments in other areas of philosophy and critical thought, with some of the most major developments occurring over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, one cannot consider the evolution of rhetorical theory to be a straightforward process, because contemporary theorists are still grapple with many of the same questions and issues first proposed by Aristotle, because each new contribution to the field forces a reevaluation of everything that came before. Thus, rhetorical theory is still very much concerned with investigating the meaning of rhetoric, what sets rhetoric apart from other forms of speech, how rhetoric is deployed in the public sphere, and the parameters of a possible universal theory of rhetoric. This essay does not pretend to be able to answer those questions, but rather serves to demonstrate how the answers to those questions have changed over time due to historical context of contemporary philosophical and critical thought, deeper understanding of human nature and ways of meaning, and the particular deployment of rhetoric in any given period.

Before discussing the evolution of rhetoric and rhetorical theory throughout human history, it will be useful to briefly consider rhetoric as such, in order to provide the reader with a clue as to some of the key issues and themes running throughout the history of rhetorical theory. Because the deployment of rhetoric can be so varied, from attempts to "improve student retention" at universities to debates over the role of religion in science to the shifting discourse surrounding gays in America, one must attempt to consider rhetoric in general in order to understand the fundamental characteristics linking all of these deployments of language (Waggoner 86, Lessl 379, Darsey 43, Montanye 325).

At its core, the study of rhetoric is devoted to a recognition that "words often do more than merely inspire;" they motivate others to action such that language becomes as powerful as physical force (Archer iii). However, a precise definition of rhetoric is hard to come by, because different theorists have posited different constituent aspects of rhetoric, such that certain instances of speech might be considered rhetoric or not depending on the theoretical paradigm used (Kennedy 2). In a broad sense, one may consider rhetorical theory to be "a science of human social discourse," but this only helps in narrowing its object of study somewhat by noting that rhetoric must in some way be public or social (Klinkenberg 145). Nonetheless, this broad consideration of rhetoric highlights the relationship between society and language, a relationship that will become especially central to rhetorical theory in the mid to late twentieth century.

Recognizing that rhetoric is a necessarily public deployment of discourse leads to the crucial distinction between rhetoric and all other forms of language, which is the fact that rhetoric is deployed specifically to motivate action on the part of an audience (even if that action is only mental). Of course, nearly all public discourse can motivate some kind of response, but to be considered rhetoric the particular instance of discourse must have motivation to action as its primary effect. Certain theorists attempt to include the intention of the speaker in this definition by suggesting that rhetoric must have motivation to action as its primary intention, but because determining the intention of another consciousness is so problematic, considering the effect of the speech is a somewhat more fail-safe approach. This distinction leads to the central problem in attempting to discuss the evolution of rhetoric, because the disagreements on seemingly fundamental aspects of the object under discussion lead one to wonder if there is even a single history of rhetoric.

This is not to say that the task undertaken in this essay is a priori doomed, but rather to acknowledge that one must attempt "the pluralizing of the history of rhetoric" if one wants to provide a robust account of the various approaches offered on the subject, because the history of rhetoric for much of the twentieth century revolved around an unnecessarily reductive idea of "the rhetorical tradition" (Bizzell & Jarrat 20, Miller 6). This notion of a single, unified history of linear rhetorical evolution has led to "problematic constructions that reflect unexamined biases about rhetoric and history, biases unwittingly inscribed by historians into their histories" (Miller 6). This is not to suggest that previous considerations of rhetorical theory have been unhelpful or otherwise useless, but rather to acknowledge the tendency of all human production to re-inscribe the biases of the dominant culture.

Thus, in order to avoid these previous mistakes, this essay will discuss the evolution of rhetoric without making claims towards the continuity of this evolution. In other words, although this history will proceed linearly, discussing the developments in rhetorical theory as they occurred throughout history, it will nonetheless avoid considering these developments as linearly building upon each other, but rather acknowledge that all of these texts remain in dialogue with each other, such that insights in one may inform a reading of another, regardless of their position in a time-line of rhetorical theory. In this way, this essay hopes to implicitly argue for the necessity of "a newly 'eclectic' history of rhetoric," while charting the "historical changes in the status of rhetoric from a science/art of correct, effective, & persuasive speaking to a tool in the stylistic analysis of discourse & language" (Gross 89, Domanska-Gruszka 43). While these changes do not represent a fundamental change in rhetoric itself, they do mark the evolution of rhetorical theory, which has gradually emerged from the cultural and academic ghetto in which it resided for many centuries.

The first major contribution to rhetorical theory recorded in human history is Aristotle's text On Rhetoric. In it, he attempts to define rhetoric and explicate its particular uses. One of the first key insights offered by Aristotle is his claim that "rhetoric […] does not belong to a single defined genus of subject [and] its function is not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case" (Aristotle 35). This would seem to contradict the earlier statement which claimed that the effect of rhetoric is to motivate others to action, but only if one does not investigate Aristotle's statement further.

After defining rhetoric as "an ability, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion," he notes that "this is the function of no other art, for each of the others is instructive and persuasive about its own subject […] but rhetoric seems to be able to observe the persuasive about 'the given' so to speak" (Aristotle 36-37). Aristotle's point in claiming that rhetoric serves not to persuade but rather to see the available means of persuasion is a way of noting that rhetoric does not limit itself to the expression of true statements or an appeal to people's reason through unassailable logic, but rather may be deployed to argue any point, and to do so using any of the possible means of persuasion. Thus, the function of a particular deployment of rhetoric is to persuade an audience, but only after the entirety of the possible means of persuasion have been regarded by rhetoric as such, in the same way a particular argument is different from argumentation in general.

From here, Aristotle outlines his somewhat famous distinctions regarding the different means by which people are persuaded: the character of the speaker (ethos), an appeal to the emotions of the audience (pathos), and an appeal to logic (logos) (Aristotle 37-38). While these are some of the more famous elements of rhetorical theory, they do not require extensive discussion here for two reasons. Firstly, they are fairly well-known. Secondly, and more importantly, they actually do not provide much insight into the uses of rhetoric, because Aristotle implicitly inserts an ethics into his discussion of rhetoric that precludes it from having as robust an application to the real world as would be desired, due to the fact that rhetoric does not equally "target the emotional and rational attitudes and convictions" of the audience (Martina 567). In particular, Aristotle's theory suffers from assumptions regarding human beings receptivity to logic and a belief that rhetoric is ultimately "a means of attaining truth and knowledge" (Hugenberg 1). In fact, rhetoric is more often than not deployed as a means of avoiding or otherwise obscuring the truth, and but Aristotle's moralizing attitude precludes him from effectively addressing this fact.

Following Aristotle, the next major development in rhetorical theory came around the first century BC with the writing of Rhetorica ad Herennium, which was previously attributed to Cicero but is now considered to be the work of an unknown author. In it, the unknown author discusses the deployment of rhetoric in a structured way, arguing for a series of six steps which should be included in any successful argument. In English, these six steps are listed as "the Introduction, Statement of Facts, Division, Proof, Refutation, and Conclusion" (Unknown 9). These steps should sound familiar to most Western students, because they are largely analogous to the format of the standardized five-paragraph essay, which has led "many students [to] obtain the imprecise idea that writing is merely a skill, [as] they do not fully comprehend the theoretical issues that form the basis" of this kind of academic writing (Reznizki iv). Thus, the standardization of the five-paragraph essay format may be seen as an example of the assumptions and biases often included in the study of rhetoric, because these standards of argumentation are taken as a given without any mention of Rhetorica ad Herenium.

The rest of Rhetorica ad Herenium consists of explicating these six steps in detail by discussing the variety of styles which may be deployed. This history need not discuss the entirety of these stylistic choices, but it will be worthwhile to consider each of the six steps in a little more detail. The introduction is precisely what it sounds like, and is the point at which the speaker (or writer) first engages with the audience and "by it the hearer's mind is prepared for attention" (Unknown 9). Following this, "the Narration or Statement of Facts sets forth the events that have occurred or might have occurred," and the Division is the portion in which "we make clear what matters are agreed upon and what are contested" and state definitively what position the speaker is taking (9). The Proof and Refutation stages are the central argumentative portions, as the speaker or writer proposes the evidence in support of his or her argument and refutes any possible counterarguments that might arise. Finally, the conclusion "is the end of the discourse, formed in accordance with the principles of the art" (9).

In some ways the Rhetorica ad Herenium is even more important to the study of rhetoric than Aristotle's text, because while Aristotle nonetheless remains the preeminent figure in nearly all philosophy, the rhetorical process described in Rhetorica ad Herenium has been so deeply engrained into Western educational culture that it is now often taken as a given. Thus, while students of philosophy are often required to learn the different tactics of persuasion outlined by Aristotle, students of nearly any subject are required to learn the rhetorical structure outlined in Rhetorica ad Herenium, even if no mention is ever made of the text itself. That this text is so deeply engrained in Western educational standards demonstrates both its specific utility and the ease with which human culture assimilates concepts and subsequently disguises their origins, such that in many cases ideology becomes nearly invisible.

Rhetorica ad Herenium was the preeminent rhetorical text for much of recorded human history, and fundamental challenges and additions to the theory outlined there did not appear until centuries later, when the intellectual explosion of the Enlightenment and the years that followed led to a dramatic increase in the number of people considering the theoretical and critical assumptions which had previously been taken for granted. This marked the beginning of a process of questioning and reevaluation that continues to this day, and a look at one of the most important critical texts to arise out of the Enlightenment will allow one to appreciate the overwhelming power wielded by the assumption that rhetoric serves to convey truth, and assumption instigated by Aristotle but not challenged for centuries of human history.

One of the most important of these new philosophers to emerge from the Enlightenment was Frederick Nietzsche, and his text On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense finally managed to accurately describe the reality of human interaction that Aristotle was unable to as a result of his moralizing paradigm. In particular, Nietzsche notes that:

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible that how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. (Nietzsche 889)

Nietzsche discussion of deception is a crucial contribution to the study of rhetoric because it frees the theorist from Aristotle's assumption that "true and better [arguments] are by nature always more productive of syllogism and, in a word, more persuasive" (Aristotle 35). The assumption that true arguments are always more persuasive has been the root cause of innumerable atrocities and political problems, because this assumption leads people to believe that if something is persuasive, it must be true, when in fact most persuasive things rely on exploiting human beings' common logical failures.

For instance, humans are particularly bad at imagining long-term risk and particularly adept at making assumptions regarding people of other ethnicities or races, which has led to any number of short-sighted, bigoted decisions being widely supported precisely because they were so persuasive, and thus assumed to be true. Thus, rhetoric is not necessarily "the basis from which knowledge is created, reproduced and transmitted," but rather the result of a complex interaction between reality and its manipulation through speech (Carbajal 32). Recognizing that deception is a fundamental part of the normal functioning of human society allows one to consider rhetoric objectively, without relying on moralizing assumptions that ultimately serve to cloud the issue.

In 1888, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels' Manifesto of the Communist Party contributed to rhetorical theory by popularizing the format of the manifesto. The manifesto represented a condensation of Marx's larger work Das Kapital, and although both represent an enormous contribution to critical and political theory as a whole, the manifesto's contribution to rhetorical theory in particular largely has to do with the format of the text itself, rather than the critical theory expressed in its content. In particular, the Manifesto of the Communist Party represented one of the first instances of what might be called a performative rhetoric, in which the act of dialogue itself achieved the action intended in the deployment of that rhetoric. Appreciating this development helps one to predict the even more fundamental change that rhetorical theory would undergo in the twentieth century.

The manifesto begins by noting that "a specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of Communism" (Marx & Engels 87). The purpose of the manifest, then, is to transform this specter into reality, and "to this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages" (Marx & Engels 87). The manifesto format represents a kind of meta-rhetoric, because while it argues in order to motivate action on the part of others, it simultaneously achieves some of that action in the act of arguing itself. Thus, when the Communist Manifesto ends with its dramatic call for "WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" It does so with the implicit acknowledgment that this unity has already been partially achieved in the writing of the manifesto (Marx & Engels 125). The manifesto offers an inkling of the critical force which rhetorical theory will gain over the course of the twentieth century, because it represents one of the earlier instances in which criticism does not merely serve to describe reality, but actively campaigns to change it. (Of course, all criticism implicitly serves to change and influence reality and the social world, but by making this activity clear, the Communist Manifesto serves to celebrate what was previously something of an open secret, predicated on the assumption that academic work is somehow separate from the ugly, brutal process of political and social meaning-making).

In many ways the publication of the Communist Manifesto heralded a new age of rhetorical theory and investigation, and the twentieth century saw an explosion of interest in the means by which language is deployed, and in particular "its power to create realities and social relationships" (Borchers 305). One of the earliest instances of this interest came in 1945, with the publication of Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives, which, when combined with Language as Symbolic Action, represents a theory of rhetoric which focuses on rhetoric as the interaction between "basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives," such that one may consider one of the goals of rhetorical theory to be the investigation of how these particular symbols and forms of thought are manipulated in order to control and structure motive and action (Burke 992).

However, like many theories of human behavior formulated at a time of relative ignorance regarding the reality of the natural world, Burke's theory suffers from an assumption based on human discontinuity from animals even as he attempts to claim otherwise. In his discussion of the "logological screens" which serve to proscribe the horizons of individual rhetoric and thought, Burke notes that there is often "a distinction between terministic screens positing differences of degree and those based on differences in kind" (Burke 1038). Burke claims that while "Darwin sees only a difference of degree between man and other animals [….] theologians sees a difference in kind," because "where Darwin views man as continuous with other animals, the theologian would stress the principal of discontinuity in this regard" (Burke 1038. Burke counters, however, with the claim that "Darwin overstated his case," because he "says astonishingly little about man's [perceived] special aptitudes as a symbol user" (Burke 1038).

While Burke's theory of logology is generally sound, he misapplies it in this case by asking "what other animals have yellow journalism, corrupt politics, pornography, stock market manipulators, plans for waging thermonuclear, chemical, and bacteriological war?" And then suggesting that because animals do not participate in these activities, "man, the typically symbol-using animal, is alas! something special" (Burke 1038). In reality, this difference in kind posited by Burke is nonexistent, because many animals, and especially apes, whales, dolphins, and elephants, have complex cultures and grammars, so that while they do not have journalism or thermonuclear weapons, animals nonetheless engage in politics and culture in precisely the same way as humans. This does not obviate Burke's contribution to the study of rhetoric, but rather further demonstrates how assumptions based on ignorance and unrecognized bias serve to preclude otherwise useful texts from achieving their full potential.

In 1962 Jurgen Habermas contributed greatly to the study of rhetoric with his investigation of the space in which all rhetoric is deployed, the public sphere, because "without a public sphere, we could not have social actors, nor society as we now know it," but previous to Habermas this phenomena had not been investigated intelligibly (Hauser 37-38). Building on the pioneering work of Marx and Engels, Habermas investigates the role of public opinion in relation to reason and rhetoric. In particular, Habermas charts the way in which the public sphere in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries "served only to integrate subjective opinions into the objectivity assumed by the spirit in the form of the state" (Habermas 120). This is a crucial observation, because it marks the beginning of a trend in rhetorical theory, in which the purpose of criticism in increasingly seen to be the uncovering of the structures of power, rather than a search for some ephemeral "truth."

In some ways one may view this as a specific application of Nietzsche's theory regarding human's propensity for illusion and deception, because Habermas is interested in the way ideology shrouds itself by seamlessly integrating the assumptions of that ideology into the everyday discourse of the public sphere. This creates the foundation for understanding a crucial reality: "human beings in collectivity behave and think differently than human beings in isolation" (McGee 2). Habermas' contribution allows one to understand how rhetoric is not merely the manipulation and expression of facts or arguments, but also the subtle reinforcement or challenging of the ideological assumptions held by the audience and upon which human society relies. Thus, any action which rhetoric seeks to motivate must be framed within the context of the ideological paradigm which ensnares everyone whether they are aware or not.

Robert Scott helps to uncover one of the underlying assumptions inherent in much rhetorical theory in his 1967 essay "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic," and his observations reveal one of the continual problems plaguing views of rhetoric that rely on some of the most moralistic interpretations of truth, because "accepting the notion that truth exists, may be known, and communicated leads logically to the position that there should be only two modes of discourse: a neutral presenting of data among equals and a persuasive leading of inferiors by the capable" (Scott 10). This formulation is of course uncomfortable for anyone believing in the moralizing nobility of rhetoric as expressed by Aristotle, and it helps to demonstrate the unhelpful nature of considering rhetoric as a means of expressing some universal truth. Instead, one must recognize that there is no universal truth attainable by human beings, because all humans are necessarily constricted by ideology in the form of language.

Thus, the study of rhetoric must be considered an implicit form of epistemology that only ever asymptotically approaches answering the question of how one knows what one knows. Recognizing this inability to attain or express actual truth through rhetorical discourse allows one to understand the role of rhetoric more accurately, because it forces one to consider the actual functioning of rhetoric rather than the perceived or idealized purpose. Understanding this serves to reveal the ideological work performed by all previous instances of rhetorical criticism while arguing in favor of an explicit recognition of ideology in all subsequent instances of rhetorical criticism.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the introduction and subsequent refutation of an important notion in the study of rhetoric, the idea of the rhetorical situation, and examining this notion helps to further demonstrate the relationship between rhetoric and ideology. First proposed by Lloyd Bitzer, the rhetorical situation is a means of describing "the contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse" (Bitzer 17). Bitzer claims that "rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation, in the same sense an answer comes into existence in response to a question, or a solution in response to a problem; [such that] discourse is rhetorical insofar as it functions (or seeks to function) as a fitting response to a situation which needs and invites it" (Bitzer 19-20). The problem with this formulation is the idea that situations may be inherently "rhetorical," meaning that there is some inherent quality of a given situation which demands a rhetorical response. In reality, there is no inherent meaning in any situation, let alone a rhetorical one.