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  • The Brussels School of Rhetoric:From the New Rhetoric to Problematology
  • Michel Meyer

The Beginnings

Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca founded the Brussels school of argumentation in 1958, when they published their famous Traité de l'argumentation. Even if, in Brussels, Eugène Dupréel had already set out to rehabilitate the Sophists, the intellectual atmosphere in the French-speaking world was not very propitious for rhetoric. Most French intellectuals were plunged into ideological debates linked to the intellectual monopoly of the French communist party on societal issues. Free discussion was certainly not very topical. It was only after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, five years after Perelman's death, that rhetoric began to draw increasing attention. His ideas then gained momentum in France, as they had already done in the United States and in Italy. Rhetoric came to be seen more and more as a new matrix for the humanities, replacing linguistics, which had played a key role during the structuralist era. Society and its values became more and more problematic and debatable in the wake of 1968: family values and political values, which were previously not in question, came to be questioned. What human being is appeared itself a question, to be questioned as such in turn, and as a result, problematicity became more and more a thematic problem per se. Rhetoric proved to be the language of the problematical, and this [End Page 403] is how problematology was born. Today, argumentation is everywhere: in the media, on TV, in commercials, in politics, but also in many aspects of everyday life, as well as in the social sciences. The claims put forward by those sciences are arguments, never proofs, in contrast to the kinds of hypotheses offered by the natural sciences, which make use of mathematical demonstration. People give reasons for what they do and think. They have basic problems in mind that motivate them to act and think the way they do. Their answers, in turn, are questionable and are often questioned by the others. Nothing can remain unquestioned for long.

Perelman's work came at the beginning of that era in which questions and their theoretical expressions widely gained in the fields of the humanities and the social sciences. As far as I can remember, he had always been favorable to the important role given to questioning in the humanities. This explains why he was so supportive of my own endeavors to develop a philosophy of questioning per se, right from my PhD thesis, which had "problematology" in its subtitle. But his main concern at that time (1977) was Habermas's so-called universal ethics, based on the rules of argumentation as rules of universalization, to which he was opposed. Problematology was, for Perelman, a way of counteracting those views by giving a foundation to rhetoric that was not based on Kant's conceptions. Unfortunately, "peace and love," or consensus, rhetoric, as developed by Habermas first and pursued later by the Amsterdam school, had gained wider influence in the field of rhetoric. Too normative and angelical in its aims as in its descriptions, this form of rhetoric leaves many aspects of rhetoric to one side, such as literature. But Perelman was not interested in passions nor in literary rhetoric. For Perelman, questions mattered if they reflected opposition, alternatives—that is, conflicts—and were of real concern to him if they had to be settled in court; these cases, as far as Perelman was concerned, could only be resolved by the law and the judge, who would decide what was just or right. Most of the time, people do not resort to debate with assent in view, and these conflicts are most of the time not of the sort that seem likely to end up in court. They often debate to express what they think about some question or what they wish from their interlocutors, if not to show that they exist, when they do not want simply to increase and mark their distance from them, as with insults. And that is rhetoric too.

With time, however, problematology evolved into more than the foundation for rhetoric that Perelman saw in it. It...

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