Response to Being Honored

The manager of this event made it clear that he expected me to have something to say this evening--something beyond the expression of a gratitude that I deeply feel. And so I have prepared to sing for my supper. Here, then, is an aria from the depths of Old Fartdom.

I return, in the twilight of my career, to the question with which I began my career. It is a question asked by every first-year graduate student: What is rhetoric? Manifestly, the circumstance in which I ask the question now is different from what it was fifty years ago. And that difference is not simply that I am half a century older; it is--more importantly--that now I have an answer. It's an answer that you've probably already thought of. Nonetheless, I will articulate it. Stating the obvious may be the foible of the young, but it is the duty of the old.

Rhetoric, pressed to its ultimate implication, is associated with the view that belief itself is the primary element in the shaping of character and of society. In that view, no influence is causally or logically anterior to belief--no influence, either economic or social, hereditary or environmental, natural or artificial: none. Between an economic condition and its influence is an attitude toward that economic condition, and the same shadow of attitude falls between social conditions and their influence or heredity and its influence or natural events and their influence, or anything else that could be adduced as affecting human consciousness.

The transactions that issue in belief are the most rudimentary forces at work in history. Those transactions constitute rhetoric.

We struggle over beliefs, within ourselves and with one another. What we do not struggle over is whether what a person believes is important to understanding that person and that person's actions. We believe in belief.

In fact, even those who would substitute for belief some alternative basis for action, who would abandon motive as an explanatory principle and put some version of causality in its place, even they--the philosophical opponents of rhetoric--find themselves having to defend their substitution through argument. They must persuade people of whatever automaticity they are proposing. They must be rhetors or they must be mute. And so they are subverted finally by the sovereignty of language; they must yield finally to the dominion of rhetorical culture.

It is this quality of omnipresence, this persistence even in the face of opposition and rejection, that brings me to say that rhetoric is inextinguishable. But when I refer to rhetoric here, I am referring to a cultural orientation and to the broad set of practices and attitudes that accompany that orientation. I am not referring to an academic discipline or to its practitioners. I am not referring to us.

Our academic discipline is certainly not imperishable. We all know that the study of rhetoric is infinitely more fragile than is rhetoric itself. The wonderful center of rhetorical studies at Cornell, where I and, later, Tom Benson studied decades ago, is gone, and not even the ghosts of Winans and Caplan and Wichelns haunt the halls of Goldwin Smith because there is no one there to remember them.

I don't want to depress you by extending the inventory of once distinguished centers of rhetorical study that have fallen into oblivion, or to discompose your postprandial torpor by reciting those departments--many of which are represented here--that are or are becoming models of excellence. These are all fugitive concerns; issues of who is up and who is down. In the long run, they are too transitory to matter. And even in the face of Tom Benson's charming exaggerations, I must inform you that I don't really matter. But rhetoric matters. It matters not only because it is pervasive and enduring. It matters also because it imparts to our common language an ineluctable moral dimension.

Rhetorical activity is predicated on volition...