Chaim Perelman

Chapter 7: Rhetoric as a Technique and a Mode of Truth

CHAPTER 7 Rhetoric as a Technique and a Mode of Truth H enry Johnstone and Chaim Perelman were friends, but their friendship did not prevent Johnstone from criticizing Perelman’s work, sometimes severely. Central to Johnstone’s concerns was an issue that has dogged rhetoric since its beginnings in ancient Greece: Is it a technique, or is it a mode of truth? In one of his many criticisms of The New Rhetoric, Johnstone complains about its chapter, “The Dissociation of Concepts ,” that “one is never sure whether [Perelman is] thinking of rhetoric primarily as a technique or primarily as a mode of truth. One wonders, too, what status [he is] claiming for the book itself” (99).1 Since the chapter in question largely concerns philosophical argument, the doubt is very much à propos. But the response to Johnstone’s implied question—a response that Johnstone does not think available—is that the correct answer legitimately varies in a systematic way. While in philosophical contexts, and, incidentally , in scientific ones, rhetoric is invariably a mode of truth, in contexts of public address it need not be. To see how this systematic variation might be the case, we will focus, as does Johnstone, on the dissociation of concepts as a test case of the robustness of a rhetoric oriented toward truth. For Perelman and his co-author, Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, all dissociations of concepts are rhetorical strategies. But they are not all equal. To explore these differences, we must first define dissociation, and then come to terms with the way in which concepts are dissociated in public address, in philosophy, and in science. In treating these examples, we intend to illustrate the wide scope of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s ideas; in doing so, however, we must be wary. While dissociations will vary systematically according to 82 chaim perelman field, they are not each instances of any general “law.” Johnstone is surely right to “doubt whether there is any general logic of dissociation; there is only the logic of each particular dissociation, generated in each case by a particular problem” (99). When we have run through our illustrations, we can return to Johnstone’s question about the status of rhetoric and of Perelman’s study of it. Dissociation vs. Breaking the Links In the midst of the Civil War, in a letter to his good friend, James C. Conkling , a letter meant to be read publicly at a meeting of Union supporters that Lincoln could not attend, the President tackles the issue of the cause for which the War is being fought: You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the [Emancipation P]roclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then, for you to declare that you will not fight to free negroes. (722–723) In this passage, Lincoln is breaking the links between the fighting of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves; he is saying, in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s terms, that he is “affirming that elements that should remain separate and independent have been improperly associated” (411). This is very different from the associated and more important concept of dissociation: Dissociation . . . assumes the original unity of elements comprised within a single conception and designated by a single notion. The dissociation of notions brings about a more or less profound change in the conceptual data that are used as the basis of argument. It is then no more a question of breaking the links that join independent elements, but of modifying the very structure of these elements. (411–412) In the following passage, Lincoln dissociates the founding and flourishing of America from the framing of the Constitution; he does so in the interest of promoting what he sees as the real principle animating our Union and our continuing prosperity, then as now—the principle of liberty to all: Rhetoric as a Technique and a Mode of Truth 83 Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result ; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something, is the principle of “Liberty to all”—the principle...