Orthodoxy and Rhetoric in a Postmodern World: Perpetually Re-creating Foundations in the Present

Nearly a decade ago, Cambridge philosopher Don Cupitt made the provocative claim that "[o]rthodoxy, essences, and authority are dead."¹ Such an assertion has been echoed by many individuals within contemporary philosophical and theological circles. As Richard Rorty similarly observed, "About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe."²

When considered from one vantage point, Cupitt's assertion about orthodoxy, essences, and authority seems nearly incontestable in the contemporary intellectual climate. Existing as we do in a largely postmodern world, claims to universality, normativity, and consensus have, to many observers, become passé notions that hearken back to a naive and bygone modernist era. Rorty, again, notes that "[t]he suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own."³ And so to many, Cupitt's so-called radicalism and Rorty's now-famous ironism are inescapable features of a postmodern world full of contested, shifting claims about the nature of "reality" and "objectivity."

Contemporary philosophical notions about reality notwithstanding, when considered from another vantage point, Cupitt's assertion about orthodoxy, essences, and authority can also seem nearly absurd. Even a cursory glance at the current cultural landscape suggests that such notions are alive and well. Public discourse, be it academic, political, or religious, is riddled with claims about who is "orthodox" and who is not. Likewise, essentialist arguments about categories such as truth, gender, and history abound. And political and religious figures regularly base varied policy decisions or doctrinal judgments upon one form or another of a supposed transcendent authority.

At the outset of this essay I introduced Cupitt's assertion about crumbling foundations as a provocative claim. That may have been putting the matter too lightly, for the sort of debate that Cupitt's comment initiates also gestures toward many of the perennial problems in the Western philosophical tradition, and so a careful adjudication of Cupitt's claim extends far beyond the bounds of this essay. Nevertheless, his declaration provides a helpful frame for this review essay precisely because his claim simultaneously rings both true and false, especially for rhetorical critics and theorists interested in the rhetorical manifestations of orthodoxy in a postmodern world.

Although Cupitt's claim is well-taken from a philosophical and theoretical vantage point, a student of rhetoric often seeks a more nuanced analysis of appeals to orthodoxy, essence, and authority within public discourse. In spite of various philosophical critiques of cherished foundations, there exists a persistent—and, some might say, ironic—compulsion to establish the "truth" or validity of one's norms within and among discourse presented to members of increasingly diverse communities. To put the matter slightly differently, although Cupitt may be correct in suggesting that philosophical foundations are now considered passé, persuasion nevertheless continues to employ them in an attempt to convince others of the accuracy of various conceptions of reality. Even if Cupitt is correct about the philosophical "death" of such foundations, one must also recognize that their perpetual rebirth is ever and always occurring within various rhetorics that characterize shared, public life.

Each of the books considered in this essay speaks to the debate about the role of foundational knowledge and its manifestation (or not) via rhetoric. The authors of the texts examined here seek to understand how various discourses can and should function in a world increasingly suspicious of...