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Crowley

For us modems, rhetoric means artificiality, insincerity, decadence. Rhetoric is now thought of as empty words, or as fancy language. Tv newspeople often say something like "there was more rhetoric from the president"

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264 views21 pages

Crowley

For us modems, rhetoric means artificiality, insincerity, decadence. Rhetoric is now thought of as empty words, or as fancy language. Tv newspeople often say something like "there was more rhetoric from the president"

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Cchr Cclsa
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a __ SECOND EDITION | ANCIENT RHETORICS FOR CONTEMPORARY | STUDENTS iii z SHARON CROWLEY The Pennsylaania State University DEBRA HAWHEE | Te Pesan tte Unies | Allyn and Bacon | Boston | Lindon | Tron | Swiney Tokyo | Singapore | Vice President: Eben W. Ludlow Series Editorial Assistant: Linda M. D'Angelo ‘Executive Marketing Manager: Lisa Kimball Production Editor: Christopher H, Rawlings ‘Text Design: Carol Somberg /Omegatype Typography, Inc, Editorial-Production Service: Omegatype Typography, Inc. Composition and Prepress Buyer: Linda Cox Manufacturing Buyer: Suzanne Lareata Cover Administrator: Jenny Hart Electronic Composition: Omegatype Typography, Inc. es Copyright © 1999 by Allyn & Bacon A Viacom Company 160 Gould Street Needham Heights, MA 02494 Internet: www.abacon.com Previous edition, copyright © 1994 by Macmillan College Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including Photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without ‘written permission from the copyright owner. Libraty of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crowley, Sharon Ancient zhetorics for contemporary students / Sharon Crowley, Debra Hawhee. — 2nd ed Pom. Includes bibliographical references and index, ISBN 0-205-26903-6 1. English language—Rhetoric. 2. Rhetoric Ancient. 1. Hawhee, Debra. IL Tile PEMOS.C725 1999 808.012 —deat 98.5535 cP Printed in the United States of America 0987654321 3 @ mn w 9 ‘Text and Cartoon Credits: Credits appear on page 396, which should be considered an extension of the copyright page. insincerity, decadence. Perks this is simply nderstend it tecome barbarians ourselves. H.LMarou ANCIENT RHETORICS: THEIR DIFFERENCES, AND THE DIFFERENCES THEY MAKE WHEN AMERICAN R the word thetoric, they tend to think of politicians’ attempts to deceive them. Rhetoric is now thought of as empty words, or as fancy Tanguage used to distort tie truth or to tell lies. Television newspeople often say something like “There was more thetoric from the White House today” and editorialists ‘write that politicians need to “stop using rhetoric and do something.” Many people blame thetoric for our appar- ent inability to communicate and to get things done, Bat that isn’t the way thetoricians defined their art in ancient Athens and Rome. In ancient times, people used thetoric to make decisions, resolve disputes, and to medi- ate public discussion of important issues. An ancient teacher of rhetoric named Aristotle defined shetoric as the power of finding the available arguments suited to = given situation. For teachers like Aristotle or practitioners like the Roman statesman Cicero, rhetoric helped people ‘to choose the best course of action when they disagreed about important political, religious, or social issues. In fact, the study of thetoric was equivalent to the study of citizenship. Under the best ancient teachers, Greek and Roman students wrote themes and speeches about moral and political questions that daily confronted their communities. CHAPTER 1 / ANCIENT RHETORICS Ancient teachers of rhetoric thought that disagreement among human be- ings was inevitable, since individuals perceive the world differently from one another. They also assumed that since people communicate their perceptions through language—which is an entirely different medium than thoughts or perceptions—there was no guarantee that any person's perceptions would be accurately conveyed to others. Even more important, the ancient teachers knew that people differ in their opinions about how the world works, so that it was often hard to tell whose opinion was the best. They invented rhetoric to that they would have means of judging whose opinion was most accurate, useful, or valuable, If people didn’t disagree, zhetoric wouldn't be necessary. But they do, and itis. A twentieth-century rhetorician named Kenneth Burke remarked that “we need never deny the presence of strife, enmity, for] faction as a characteristic motive of rhetorical expression” (1962, 20), But the fact that rhetoric originates in disagreement is ultimately a good thing, since its use allows people lo make important choices without resorting to less peaceful means of persuasion such a8 coercion or violence. People who have talked their way out of any potentially violent confrontation know how useful rhetoric can be. On a larger scale, the Usefulness of rhetoric is even more apparent. If,for some reason, the people who negotiate treaties were to stop using rhetoric to resolve their disagreements about limits on the use of nuclear weapons, there might not be a future to de- liberate about. That's why we should be glad when we read or hear that our diplomats and their diplomats are disagreeing about the allowable number of warheads per country or the number of inspections of nuclear stockpiles per year. At least they're talking to each other. As Burke observed, wars are the re. sult of an agreement to disagree. But before people of good will agree to dis- agree, they try out hundreds of ways of reaching agreement. The possibility that ‘one set of participants will resort to coercion or violence is always a threat, of course; but in the context of impending war, the threat of war can itself operate asa rhetorical strategy that keeps people of good will talking to each other, en that argument can deter violence and coercion, we are disturbed by the contemporary tendency to see disagreement as somehow impolite or even undesirable. In 1995, the Congress and President ofthe United States illustrated what can happen when these who disagree over policy refuse to argue their way through that disagreement, The federal government was briefly shut down because Congress and the President could not agree on a budget. Government workers went without pay, national parks were closed, maintenance on build~ {ngs and roads was halted—all because political leaders stopped arguing about the issues that divided them. It seems to us that Americans do not value disagreement as highly as an- cient thetoricians did. Our culture doesnot look t disagreement as away of un- covering altemative courses of action. Americans often refuse to debate each other about important matters like religion or politics, retreating into silence if someone brings either subject up in public discourse. In fact, i someone dis- agrees publicly with someone else about politics or religion, Americans some~ times take that as a breach of good manners. This is so because we tend to Fink people's opinions to their identities. Americans assume that people’s opinions CHAPTER 1 / ANCIENT RHETORIGS FOR CONTEMPORARY STUDENTS — 3 result from their personal experiences, and hence that those opinions are some- how “theirs” —that they alone “own” them. Hence, rhetors are often reluctant to engage in arguments about religion or polities or any other sensitive issue, fear- ing that listeners might take their views as personal attacks rather than as an in- vitation to discuss differences. This intellectual habit, which assumes that religious and political choices are thoroughly tied up with a person's identity, makes it seem as though people rover change their minds about things like religion and politics. But as we all know, people do change their minds about these matters; people convert from one religious faith to another, and they sometimes change their political affilia- tion from year to year, perhaps voting across party lines in one election and vot- ing a party line in the next. ‘The authors of this book are concemed that if Americans continue to ignore the reality that people quite naturally disagree with one another, or if we pre- tend to ignore it in the interests of proserving etiquette, we risk undermining the principles on which our democratic community is based, People who are afraid Of airing their differences tend to keep silent when those with wham they dis agree are speaking; people who are afraid of airing their differences tend to as- sociate only with those who agree with them. In such a balkanized public sphere, both our commonalities and our differences go unexamined. In a democracy, people must call the opinions of others into question, must bring them inio the light for examination and negotiation. In commmunities where cit- izens are not coerced, important decisions must be made by means of public dis- course. Otherwise, decisions are made for bad reasons, or for no reason at all. ‘Sometimes, of course, there are good reasons for remaining silent, Power is. distributed unequally in our culture, and power inequities may force wise peo- pple to resort to silence on some occasions. We believe that in contemporary ‘American culture men have more power than women, white people have more ‘power than people of color, and people who enjoy high socioeconomic status have more power than those who have fewer resources and less access to others in power (and yes, we are aware that there are exceptions to all ofthese gener- alizations). We do not believe, though, that these inequities are a natural o7 nec- essary state of things. We do believe that rhetoric is among the best ways available to us for rectifying power inequities among citizens. ‘The people who taught and practiced rhetoric in Athens and Rome during an- cient times would have found contemporary unwillingness to engage in public disagreement very strange indeed. Their way of using disagreement to teach so- lutions was taught to students in Western schools for over two thousand years, and is still available to us in translations of their textbooks, speeches, lecture notes, and treatises on rhetoric. Within Simits, their way of looking at disagree- ment can still be useful to us. The students who worked with ancient teachers of rhetoric were members of privileged classes for the most part, since Athens and Rome both maintained socioeconomic systems that were manifestly unjust to CHAPTER 1/ ANCIENT RHETORICS many of the people who lived and worked within them. The same charge can be leveled at our own system, of course. Today the United States is home not only {ots native peoples but to people from all over the world. Its non-native citizens arrived here under vastly different circumstances, ranging from colonization to immigration to enslavement, and their lives have been shaped by these circum- stances, as well as by their gender and class affiliation. Not all—pethapsnoteven majority —have enjoyed the equal opportunities that are promised by the Con- stitution. But unfair social and economic realities only underscore the need for principled public discussion among concerned citizens. The aim of ancient shetorics was to distribute the power that resides in lan- ‘guage among all of its students. This power is available to anyone who is will- ing to study the principles of rhetoric. People who know about rhetoric know how to persuade others to consider their point of view without resorting to co- ercion or violence. For the purposes of this book, we have assumed that people prefer to seek verbal resolution of differences rather than the use of force. Rhetoric is of no use when people determine to use coercion or violence to gain the end they seek. A knowledge of thetoric also allows people to discern when rhetors are making bad arguments or are asking them to make inappropriate choices, Since rhetoric confers the gift of greater mastery over language, itcan also teach those ‘who study it to evaluate anyone's rhetoric; thus the critical capacity conferred by thetoric can free its students from the manipulative rhetoric of others. When knowledge about rhetoric is available only to a few people, the power inherent in persuasive discourse is disproportionately shared. Unfortunately, through- out history rhetorical knowledge has usually been shared only among those who can exert economic, social, or political power as well. But ordinary citizens can learn to deploy rhetorical power, and if they have the chance and the courage to deploy itskillfully and often, it's possible that they may change other aspecis of our society as well. In this book, then, we aim to help our readers become more skilled speak- ers and writers. But we also aim to help them become better citizens. SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MODERN AND ANCIENT RHETORICS ‘The great age of ancient rhetorics dictates that there will be differences between them and modern thinking about rhetoric. One such difference is that ancient shetoricians did not value factual proof very highly, while facts and testimony are virtually the only proofs discussed in modern rhetorical theory (see the chapter on extrinsic proofs). Ancient teachers preferred to use arguments that they generated from language itself and from community beliefs. They invented and named many such arguments, among them commonplaces, examples, con- jectures, maxims, and enthymemes (see the chapters on stasis, commonplaces, and on thetorical reasoning). Another difference is that ancient rhetoricians valued opinions as a source ‘of knowledge, while in moder thought opinions are often dismissed as uni CHAPTER 1 / ANCIENT RHETORICS FOR CONTEMPORARY STUDENTS 5: portant, But ancient rhetoricians thought of opinions as something that were held not by individuals but by entire communities. This difference has to do with another assumption that they made, which was that a person's character {and hence opinions) were constructions made by the community in which she lived. And since the ancients believed that communities were the source and reason for thetori, opinions wore for them the very stuff of argument. ‘A third difference between ancient and modern rhetorics is that ancient thetoricians always situated their teaching in place and time. Their insistence that local and temporal conditions influenced the act of composition marks a fairly distinct contrast with modem rhetorie’s conventional treatment of rhetor- {cal occasions as if they were all alike. For example, modern rhetoric textbooks insist that every essay display a thesis. Ancient teachers, on the other hand, were not so sure that every discourse has a thesis to display. For example, people sometimes write or speak in order to determine what alternatives are available ina given situation. In this case they are not ready to advance a thesis, And if a thetor has a hostile audience, afterall it might be better (and sofer) not to men- tion a thesis at all, or at least to place it near the end of the discourse (see the chapter on arrangement) "Alast difference between ancient and modern thetorics has to do with an- cient teachers’ attitudes toward language. Modern rhetoricians tend to think that its role is limited to the communication of facts. Ancient rhetoricians, on the other hand, taught their students that language does many things. Marcus Tul- lius Cicero, who was an extremely skilled and influential speaker in the days of the Roman Republic, assorted that the ends of language use are to instruct, to Gelight, and to move. But the point of instructing or delighting audiences nally, to move them to accept or eject some thought or action. Just the Facts, Please From an ancient perspective, one of the most troublesome of modern assump- tions about the nature of argument goes like this: if the facts are on yout side, you can't be wrong, and you can’t be refuted. Facts are statements that some- ‘body has substantiated through experience or proved through research. Or they are events that really happened, events that somebody will attest to as factual Facts have a “you were there” quality—if the arguer doesn’t have personal knowledge of the facts, she or he is pretty sure that some expert on the subject, does know them, and that they ean be looked up in a book. Here are some ox- amples of factual statements: Water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit ‘The moon orbits the earth ‘Timothy McVeigh was convicted of blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Fed- eral Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on April 19, 1995, "These are facts because they can be verified through experience or by means of testimony. Individuals can test the accuracy of the first statement for CHAPTER 1 / ANCIENT RHETORICS ‘themselves, and all three statements can be confirmed by checking relevant and reliable sources. No doubt the importance given to facts derives from the modern faith in empirical proofs, those that are available to the senses: vision, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. During the nineteenth century, rhetoricians came to prefer empirical proofs t0 all the other kinds outlined in ancient rhetoric. After 1850, American rhetoric textbooks began to reduce the many kinds of evidence dis criminated by ancient hetoricians to just two: empirical evidence and te mony. Both of these kinds of evidence have the “you are there” quality: empirical evidence derives from someone's actual sensory contact with the rel- evant evidence; testimony involves somebody’s reporting their acquaintance with the facts of the case. During the twentieth century, thetoric textbooks en- langed testimony to include accounts by persons recognized as experts or au- thorities in specialized fields of study. The modern reverence for facts and testimonies explains why students are offen asked to write research papers in school—their teachers want to be sute they know how to assemble empirical evidence and expert testimony into a coherent piece of writing. ‘There are some problems with the modern reliance on empirical evidence. For one thing, it ignores the possibility that the evidence provided by the senses isneither reliable nor conclusive. People are selective about what they perceive, and they continually reconstruct their memories of those perceptions, as well Moreover, people don’t always agree about their sensory perceptions. An an-

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