Week 1 Rhetoric Write-Ups from My History of Rhetoric PhD Course

Division, It’s Not Just for Math Class Anymore: Brief Thoughts on Richard Lanham’s Divisions of Rhetoric

Richard A. Lanham’s “Divisions of Rhetoric” was an engaging read, providing what Dr. Comas termed a “(re)introduction” to the basics of rhetoric. As I read I thought, “I could use excerpts of this in my composition courses.” I found it to be a good, practical model for thinking about rhetoric in a general sense like those posters of the inside of the human body that you find in doctor’s offices. Just like those posters, Lanham’s essay is effective but limited in scope. I don’t say that disparagingly. His goal was to provide a catalogue of terms, vocabulary that would serve as a heuristic for discussing rhetoric, and he did.

It was intended to be didactic, not dialectic, unadorned rather than eloquent. Yet I did find one part that caught my attention beyond simply being informative. His description of how verbal commonplaces were less important because “we no longer trust traditional wisdom” (170) jarred me because I always teach my students that commonplaces were intellectual safe havens upon which to dock their arguments because beginning with agreement could lead to more agreement, making one’s point less dialectic and more instructional, even if the overall argument being made is dialectic in nature. I’m glad Lanham added that visual commonplaces—thanks to technology—are becoming more prevalent. If the internet is filled with muddied judicial arguments filled with fallacies, then it’s at least encouraging to know that on the other end of the rhetorical spectrum, commonplaces of some kind still have a place.

All that said, Burke’s essay seems to be a more fleshed-out version of Lanham’s text. I say that not to oversimplify but to point out that “Traditional Principles of Rhetoric” has more of a “how to” feel than “Nietzsche’s Lecture Notes.” Both Burke and Nietzsche discuss rhetoric’s historical and philosophical place, but Nietzsche’s seemed more theoretical than practical, more Einstein than Edison.

Burkian Backbone: The Underlying Principles of Rhetorical Philosophy

“A beautiful naked blonde jumps up and down” is the first sentence in chapter 10 of Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas’ Memory Book. I first came across it (the book as a whole, not necessarily that sentence) about 10 years ago, and since then, I’ve been intrigued with the memory: how it works, how to improve it, and how the ancients perceived it. When reading Burke’s “Traditional Principles of Rhetoric,” I found myself drawn most towards the section on imagery and imagination. Starting there, I see Burke’s essay as a discussion on the philosophy of rhetoric or, more accurately, an examination into rhetoric as philosophy. In fact, when I read this, I wasn’t able to make a clear distinction between the two disciplines as Burke presented them. If philosophy is a way of understanding the world, then rhetoric is the description of that understanding. But where one ends and the other begins, I couldn’t quite pinpoint.

Burke begins by presenting different definitions—first from Aristotle, then from Cicero, and finally Augustine—and then moves towards the different branches of rhetoric. I like how he discusses the two purposes of rhetoric, argument and understanding: “Bring several rhetoricians together, let their speeches contribute to the maturing of one another by the give and take of question and answer, and you have the dialectic of a Platonic dialogue. But ideally the dialogue seeks to attain a higher order of truth, as the speakers, in competing with one another, cooperate towards an end transcending their individual positions” (53).

I think of rhetoric in those two terms because it deals with how we think and how we express what we think. If expression is the ethereal made concrete, or as St. Paul said, “the Word made flesh” (I disagree with Burke’s point that we need a secular equivalent. The secular and religious borrow liberally from one another. Why should a rhetorical term be any different?), then we can’t separate the discussion of the two.

My point is that I feel Burke’s analysis focuses more on application whereas Nietzsche’s energy flows more towards the pursuit of understanding. I wonder if it’s cultural, but I found Burke’s text more engaging because I tend to lean towards the memory and style aspects of rhetoric. For instance, I could use his examples of gradatio when discussing the term in class or elsewhere, and I could also imitate those examples if I want to incorporate it into my own writing. I don’t want to fall into the trap of style making the man, but the more I teach, the more I am interested in rhetoric’s ability to gain an audience’s attention, keep it, and remain in their consciousness thereafter.

I don’t want to get too into Nietzsche’s essay just yet, but I think I would’ve enjoyed his more than Burke’s when I was an undergrad simply because my focus was on ideas and using those ideas to pursue truth. One last point on Burke: the difference between an ideal, the image produced in one’s head of that ideal, and the verbal expression of that ideal is something he spent a great deal of time on. It seems as if we academics underestimate the value of imagination in pursuing our own ideas. For instance, at my undergrad, creative writing was not a requirement for English majors. I think this is a mistake. Attempting to write a play gives one a different perspective when trying to analyze one. I know imagination has a place in rhetoric’s history and principles, but I wonder if imagination and memory should be emphasized more so in the liberal arts education. Is it enough just to study creativity? Should we also aim to be creative ourselves? I would think Burke (and Aristotle and Cicero and Nietzsche) would say yes.

Schadenfreude: It Has Nothing to Do with Nietzsche or Rhetoric, but It’s My Favorite German Word

Dr. Comas’ email asked a question about why Nietzsche taught rhetoric to his students. He’s clear in his opening paragraph that it’s “essentially [a] republican art [and] it is the highest spiritual activity of the well-educated political man” (97). As a 38 year old United States Senator, John Quincy Adams told his Harvard rhetoric students the same thing. Nietzsche’s thinking about rhetoric is that it’s to help us see the world more clearly and lead others more effectively. I read his article and thought that he concentrated more on molding the mind than sharpening the tongue.

Nietzsche seemed to be focused more on the hypothesis than the thesis of rhetoric. I wonder if this has to do, not just of being part of a different century, but also of being German. A former classmate taught English in Germany and said that if you said you would be somewhere at 7:00 and you weren’t there at 7:00, you got a call at 7:00. She may’ve exaggerated, but that always stuck with me. I wonder if there’s a precision to how the German mind sees the world that I simply lack. For instance, Nietzsche spends a great deal of time dissecting tropes, not how to use them so much but getting at what one means when using them. I’ve always felt that if I use a trope and the audience I’m speaking to has a similar cultural commonplace, the meaning would be clear.

But when he says “[i]n sum: the tropes are not just occasionally added to words but constitute their most proper nature. It makes no sense to speak of a ‘proper meaning’ which is carried over to something else only in special cases,” he wants to get at not what is said in a given moment but what that says about language (108). Essentially, I feel like I look at language in a finite sense whereas he’s examining it in the infinite. I appreciate tropes because, when used well, they can encapsulate an idea more powerfully than the most well-executed paragraph. I now see I need to perhaps look at them on a larger scale: what does my use of metaphor, for example, say about me and what I think of the subject. By their metaphors you shall know them.

Moving on, I like that Nietzsche points out that “there is neither a pure nor an impure speech in itself,” noting the fluidity of language, its ability to move “according to unconscious laws,” like water trickling unpredictably down a rocky surface (109). He provides another example of this when he discusses how missionaries in central Africa wrote down the language of “savage tribes” only to find that after a decade, the writing was outdated (122). I wonder what Nietzsche would’ve made of our quick-changing literary landscape filled with slang terms, hashtags, and social media apps that evolve (or if you prefer mutate) every six months. It’s as if our phones have sped up writing to (almost) the speed of language.