Aristotle’s Rhetoric

In Aristotle’s treatment of rhetoric, at the very beginning it is contrasted with dialectic. This is an important distinction, especially when the latter is defined as the art of persuasion in any given situation. While this distinction is made to emphasize the fact that the purpose of rhetoric is different from that of logical discussion, I think it also underlines the fact that rhetoric is essentially a monolog, where the direction of speech (or shall we say flow of information) is unidirectional: from the speaker to the audience. The speaker is actually involved in exercising a form of art, like someone who is creating a painting or a statue. As such, moral purposes are almost irreverent, or perhaps a better characterization is to say that rhetoric is a morally neutral art, it can be used for good or bad purposes, just as an artist can implement his art in service of a good or a bad cause. This is not to say Aristotle himself did not have any prescriptive opinion about rhetoric, as can be deduced from his distinction between rhetoric and poetics (the latter being too involved with emotions to allow it to serve as a basis for a social form of discourse). But it goes to emphasize that moral prescriptions are irrelevant to the essence of rhetoric itself. The moral neutrality of rhetoric and the fact that it is unidirectional also affects its epistemological status. I think we are justified to claim that rhetoric in and on itself does not embody an epistemological status, value, or goal, for it may be used (just like a tool) in a large variety of cases where no truth-related activity is implied, for instance in generating excitement and inducing action. This especially holds when rhetoric functions on the basis of appeals to ethos and pathos, but even when it involves logos it still attempts to convey a truth that has been arrived at in a different domain. On the other hand, dialog can embody an epistemological methodology. For in dialog parties attempt to enter into an exchange in which, at least in principle, they can be interested in approaching the “truth”. Thus, dialog in inherently pluralistic and not unidirectional, and each party contributes (again at least in principle) to the solution that is not known in advance. As such it can be argued that dialog is inherently less amenable to ideological discourse, (unless we expand the meaning of ideology so far that it includes all kinds of discourse). For if we take ideology to mean a set of value-driven a-priori principles that are consciously or unconsciously held and more or less algorithmically generate an answer to a wide variety of questions without the need to refer to anything outside themselves, then dialog seems to not be a suitable ground for ideology. On the other hand, rhetoric can be a suitable tool for ideological discourse, because more often than not ideologists (in the particular meaning of the word defined above) assume they have reached the truth and already have the answer, and their main interest is to merely convey it to others. Of course we can expand the meaning of ideology to include any discourse, in which case we can say that in dialog it is more likely to self-question the fundamental assumptions held by the parties involved in the dialog, whereas in rhetoric the goal of persuasion makes such foregrounding of hidden assumptions less likely and less relevant to the goal of the discourse.