Chaim Perelman

Preface

Preface For each of us, Perelman has been a central figure, hovering steadily over our scholarly work, our excursions into rhetorical theory and rhetorical criticism. We hope that this short book helps others also see the inspirational importance of his achievement. Still, there is no getting away from the fact that The New Rhetoric is difficult to read, a task made even more difficult for American audiences because virtually all its examples and illustrations are from a literature in a foreign language. We have addressed this latter problem by drawing our examples largely from American sources, mostly from the work of Abraham Lincoln. But stubborn expository difficulties remain. Moreover, Perelman’s later attempts to achieve clarity, in The Realm of Rhetoric, and numerous shorter articles, are equally puzzling. Consequently, some of Perelman’s best ideas are virtually buried in a very long work, and therefore largely lost even to the most careful readers. In addition , on such central issues as the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy Perelman remains maddeningly obscure. While there has been some useful exegesis in English, most of it merely perpetuates misunderstandings that stem from superficial acquaintance; the few articles that might be helpful are nestled nearly beyond recovery in dusty and largely unread periodical volumes. This expository feebleness would not matter if Perelman were not, in our opinion, one of Aristotle’s most important heirs; if he did not develop the Master’s ideas in ways that match in fruitfulness the work of Kenneth Burke, one of the most important maverick Aristotelians. We think it is not incidental to Perelman’s interest in rhetoric, moreover, that he was, like Aristotle , a philosopher deeply concerned with the idea of justice. In our view, the most significant tenet of The New Rhetoric concerns the centrality of rhetoric in a world in which human freedom is also central: “Only an existence of an argumentation that is neither compelling nor arbitrary can give meaning to human freedom” (514). While we are conscious of Perelman’s considerable merits, we are not blind, we think, to his limitations. He renovates and refurbishes each of the key Aristotelian components of rhetoric—invention, style, and arrangement . In addition, he adds insight to insight in his discussion of two of the Aristotelian proofs: ethos, from the character of the speaker, and logos, from the lines of reasoning of the speech. But he is almost entirely silent on pathos , that is, proofs that derive from the emotional state of the audience. In this, he seems a true heir of the Enlightenment, distrustful of emotional proofs as inimical to reason and rationality. In recent decades, however, in the work of such scholars as Martha Nussbaum (from classics), Antonio Damasio (from neurophysiology), and Jon Elster (from political theory), we have become aware that the emotions have a rational component: in certain situations at least, we require the emotions in order to act reasonably. This scholarship has also reminded us that Aristotle’s theory of the emotions, enunciated in the Rhetoric, is deeply cognitive, and that in the Ethics Aristotle asserts, as he should, that the emotions are central to ethics: there are some things at which we ought to be angry. Can it be rational to maintain our equanimity when what we hold dear is insulted and traduced, or when the guilty go free, and the innocent are slaughtered? There is another, graver fault that can be imputed to Perelman. If human freedom depends, as he seems to imply, on a free exchange of views in the public sphere, why does he theorize almost exclusively about the arguments that people make rather than about the process of arguing? On this topic, his work seems to have been far outdistanced by Jürgen Habermas , a scholar who has devoted his maturity to the elaboration of a theory of communicative action, and to its application to the crucial arenas of ethics and the law. An excerpt from Between Facts and Norms gives the flavor of Habermas’s work: A legal order is legitimate to the extent that it equally secures the cooriginal private and political autonomy of its citizens; at the same time, however, it owes its legitimacy to the forms of communication in which alone this autonomy can express and prove itself. In the final analysis, the legitimacy of law depends on the undistorted forms of public communication and indirectly on the communicational infrastructure of the private sphere as well. This is the key to a proceduralist understanding of...