The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity

Prologue: Rhetoric and/as Rhetorical Pedagogy

Prologue Rhetoric and/as Rhetorical Pedagogy Different people have defined the art of rhetoric differently. Let this be added to the ancient definitions: Rhetoric is a discipline of speech that exercises the rhêtôr in evenly balanced cases. Anonymous Byzantine scholar (c. tenth century), as quoted in ChristianWalz, ed., Rhetores Graeci 7.1:49 Overviews One can, of course, define rhetoric in different ways.“Rhetoric” may mean (1) persuasive discourse, as opposed to nonpersuasive, which is a standard popular conception, or practical oratory, discourse delivered in deliberative, judicial, and ceremonial forums, which is a traditional (if outmoded) scholarly conception. One can say, for example, that an issue “generated a lot of rhetoric.” Or “rhetoric” may mean (2) the persuasive practices or “devices” of persuasive discourse , as when one says,“The rhetoric of the President’s speech was effective” or talks about “the rhetoric of ” something, such as national security policy or Christian conservatism. “Rhetoric” may also mean (3) the critical analysis or description of those practices, or a theory of the general principles that underlie the practices that have been described—an account of what makes “rhetorical” discourse persuasive or unpersuasive, as Aristotle suggests (in Rhetoric 1.1.2). Or finally,“rhetoric” can be defined as (4) the teaching of persuasive discourse or the cultivation of rhetorical capacity (speaking/writing ability), the “prescriptive” counterpart to the “descriptive” activities of criticism and theory. No doubt other definitions are possible, but these, I think, are the basic modalities. All of these modes of definition are valid, insofar as they are in widespread use. However, the first two are not particularly helpful for rhetoric as an academic discipline, aside from naming the object of study in a general way. One problem is that, if “everything is rhetorical,” as is often said, definitions 1 and 2 do not define anything in particular and thus make“rhetorical studies”the study of all signification and human behavior, a task performed already by a range of 2 | The Genuine Teachers of This Art other disciplines, such as the social sciences, linguistics, cultural studies, or psychoanalysis , which never have felt the need to identify themselves as rhetoric or to pay much serious attention to rhetorical theory.1 A further problem of defining rhetoric as persuasive discourse or persuasive practices is that it can open rhetoric to the traditional charge of being something added to communication —empty talk,spin,manipulation,or equivocation,of which there cannot be a respectable study, unless the study is merely defensive (“how to see through rhetoric and get to the facts”).2 Even if that charge can be avoided, a comprehensive study of all persuasive practices across histories, cultures, classes, places, and times (and so on) would be impossible and would dissolve rhetorical studies into an incoherent miscellaneousness.(What would be the principle of selection ?) Moreover, definitions 1 and 2 make a category mistake. The term rhêtorikê, after all, names “the art of ” the rhêtôr, the “speaker,” not the speaker’s speech or its devices.(Literally it means the“speakerly art.”) Even Aristotle’s definition focuses on the capacity of the rhêtôr, his or her dunamis, for intelligent thought and speech in practical decision making. The third definition of “rhetoric,” an “art” concerned with critical analysis and theory, seems more useful as the basis for a credible academic enterprise. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any teaching of rhetorical skill divorced from the critical/theoretical enterprise that would not be vapid. But without the teaching enterprise of the fourth definition, the critical/theoretical enterprise has little point.What is the critical/theoretical study of persuasive practices for, if not the production of a rhêtôr? Without that point of application, as I have argued elsewhere,3 rhetoric ceases to be a distinct disciplinary practice and becomes simply a kind or counterpart of literary studies, a critical hermeneutic or philosophical theory of “rhetoricality,”4 detached from the training of actual speakers or writers.The student will be an appreciator, interpreter, analyst, judge, or theorist of discourse, but not an excellent producer of it. Further, even if rhetoric as criticism/theory is taken as propaideutic to rhetorical production, there is no direct link between being able to articulate the theory and being able to actually perform what the theory describes, or to perform it well.As Augustine points out, surely on the basis of his own...