Rhetoric: from Persuasion to Understanding

Moe Azadeh
Eng. 651
Prof. Steven Wexler
Rhetoric: from Persuasion to Understanding

Introduction

Traditionally, rhetoric is defined as effective use of language for the purpose of persuasion. Implicit in this Aristotelian definition is an instrumental view of language which takes it to be a tool whose “effective use” can be mastered, a tool to represent abstract concepts which themselves are beyond the realm of language and which can be used for a variety of purposes, for example, representation, communication, persuasion, etc. Also implicit in this definition is a lack of any normative or ethical qualification on the nature of the “persuasion” that takes place: as long as persuasion has happened, the act of rhetoric has been achieved and its goal has been reached.
Both these points can be challenged. The instrumental view of language is now deemed to be grossly naïve. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of modern philosophy has been an intense attention to language and its active role both in the formation of our own selves as linguistic beings and in the creation of the construct that we call “the world.” Wittgenstein summarizes this view aptly: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Outside language, there is no world. Rhetorical theories, therefore, must reflect this fundamental role of language and examine its ramifications. On the ethical dimension, there is little doubt that not all persuasions are equally “authentic.” Those who are persuaded that a spaceship is about to take them to a better place and the journey starts with a mass suicide have no doubt been convinced through the power of language, but it is hard to ignore the point that in this instance of persuasion something has gone seriously wrong.
The challenges mentioned above can be given a more serious theoretical undergirding through an area of philosophical inquiry that has come to be known as philosophical hermeneutics, especially as identified by the name of Hans George Gadamer. In the special sense of the term, hermeneutics is interested in the understanding of the meaning of texts, and its history goes back to the understating and interpretation of scripture. In its more general sense, however, what Gadamer calls philosophical hermeneutics is interested in unraveling the mechanisms through which “understanding” is made possible and takes place, be it the understanding of the meaning of a text, or the understanding of a particular event, or indeed the understanding of the world we found ourselves in. In short, philosophical hermeneutics is interested in understanding understanding.
As a side note, it is worth mentioning that the impact of modern hermeneutic thought in general, and Gadamer’s work in particular, has not remained limited to pure theoretical or philosophical investigations. To give an example of the impact of Gadamer’s work in practical matters, one can mention the publication of a study by the Catholic Church with the title: Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past. This study, which almost exclusively was based on Gadamer’s work, was the background for Pope John Paul II’s pronouncement about the past faults of the Church, including the wrongdoings of the Church towards the Jewish people (Dostal, 6). The fact that an apparently abstract philosophical theory has caused such a move in a conservative institution such as the Church says something about Gadamer’s work.
But what are the implications of hermeneutical insights for rhetoric? One expects that a philosophical enterprise which sets as its goal the study of understanding should have something to say about rhetorical aspects of language. Indeed, in a sense rhetoric is the art of effective communication in which a major part (if not the major part) should be understanding. Surprisingly however, there have been relatively few works dedicated to exploring the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric (Ryan).
In this paper I will investigate two approaches to the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric. The first approach, which I will call descriptive, deals with the ways hermeneutics can shed light on reasons behind the force of language. Here the concern is not whether this force is used in a morally or ethically (or in some other normative sense) acceptable manner, rather, the goal is simply to give a descriptive account of the persuasive power of language. However, the second approach, which I call prescriptive, tries to address rhetoric from a value-laden perspective, and thus deals with questions such as “authentic” vs. “inauthentic” rhetoric, or more generally, ways in which we can critique rhetorical acts from an ethical or moral perspective.

Hermeneutics and Rhetoric: Descriptive Approach

One cannot question the power of language, a power that exerts itself in numerous explicit and implicit ways. We all enjoy when we read a literary masterpiece; it gives us a kind of fulfillment and satisfaction that cannot be reduced to other kinds of pleasures. A good speaker or a powerful piece of writing can stimulate in us strong and sometimes fierce emotions and extract from within us sensations which even we ourselves were not aware of. Certainly this power does not originate merely from the content. This can be easily observed in the case, for instance, of a poem. Sometimes a poem can exert such a power as to completely transform someone’s life. Karen Armstrong, supposedly, found such a transforming power in T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday, so much so that it became the turning point of her life. However, a theoretical article with the exact same contents would very likely have ended up as just one more article in her stack of papers and books. But what is the source of this power? Why should words exert such command on people? A descriptive approach to rhetoric observes this extreme power and then tries to explain its origin by giving an account of it, without attempting to pass any normative judgments on the nature of such acts.
Hermeneutics’ contribution to a descriptive account of rhetoric can be attributed to the insights that it provides on the nature of language. As mentioned earlier, hermeneutics tries to give an account of human understanding and the conditions for its occurrence. Among these conditions, language occupies a particularly crucial (and mysterious) position, for indeed any act of understanding is deeply linguistic. Language is “among the most mysterious questions for human reflection” because “the very pondering or thinking about language transpires in language” (Figal). Language is so close that: “when it functions it is so little an object that it seems to conceal its own being from us.” (Figal, quote from Gadamer). Language is always already there, something through whose mediation the world is revealed to us. It is something we can never completely understand, transcend, or bring under control, as any attempt to achieve such goals can itself only be carried out within language. One of the best accounts of how deep language is rooted in our existence is from Helen Keller, who described her pre-language experience as such:
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew nothing, or that I lived, or acted, or desired. I had neither will nor intellect… my inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.[1] (Keller, 113)
It is interesting to note that Gadamer distinguishes between two alternative views of language: language as image, and language as sign. He then goes on to claim that ever since Plato Western thought has replaced the concept of image with that of a sign. Gadamer emphasizes the imaging power of language, where by imaging he intends to underline the revelatory aspect of the word (logos) (Baker), the power to “bring into open” and to dis-close, a power lacking in mere signs. Gadamer’s famous adage summarizes this view: “being that can be understood is language.” We are linguistic beings for whom “the world” manifests itself through language. We can never completely master language, or understand its workings, because our very understanding is mediated through language. We are as much in control of language as language is control of us (Figal). In fact, Gadamer points out: “it would be literally more correct to say that a language speaks us than to say that we speak a language” (ibid).
In this view, in short, language creates us as well as our world, “the conversations that we ourselves are” (Figal, quote from Gadamer). This sense of language provides a basis for the power of rhetoric, for it is not merely a tool to use language effectively, but rather a means of creation, creation of realities in which people can find new homes for their being. The life changing power of a true piece of poetry, for instance, originates from the world-changing power of language: “When one reads a poem, its words do not stand for something else; they are themselves the instantiation of a presence that every interpretation intends but for which none is a substitute” (Baker). Thus, we can say that in this sense rhetoric is the means of creating new realities, or new worlds, new worlds over and against an existing history, tradition, or linguistic background. To this end, rhetoric is effective to the extend that it succeeds in this act of creation, and if hermeneutic insights are correct, this success is determined by the ability of the rhetor to maintain a balance between two extremes: on one side one must work within the confines of the familiar world of the audience, or more precisely, within the hermeneutic circle or horizon which they occupy. If one strays too far off from this horizon, one runs the risk of simply walking out of the world of the audience and thus losing the communication. On the other side, one cannot build a new world right in the middle of the world everybody occupies, for such a familiar horizon lacks the ability to move, create, reveal, or open up new possibilities. Thus, it is the responsibility of the rhetor to locate his or her rhetoric strategically within and yet away from the mundane center of the hermeneutical world of the audience. And of course since rhetoric is an act of language, it can never be fully transcended, understood, or planned in advance. Both the rhetor and the audience are bound within the circle of language, even if one is trying to channel and use it to affect the other.

Hermeneutics and Rhetoric: Prescriptive Approach

As noted before, rhetoric is usually defined as the ability to use language effectively to persuade. The term “persuade” is critical here, for it signifies an “act” which originates from the rhetor as the subject, and is “performed” on the listener or the reader as the “object,” with the consequence that the latter is persuaded of the truth of the message that the former has originated. In stronger cases, the audience not only is persuaded regarding the intended message, but also “moved” to act upon it. Such terminology carries a strong sense of subjugation and suppression, as if rhetoric is the act of (intellectual) subjugation and conquering of the audience. But is this view of rhetoric ethically defendable? Can we prescribe a rhetorical act, no matter how apparently successful it has been in terms of persuasion, if that persuasion has resulted from such a one-directional transaction in which one side is the subject and the other side is the object? Indeed this implicit sense of power and dominance in the traditional definition of rhetoric may lead to the identification of persuasion with, for instance, “… a deliberate, patriarchal attempt on the part of a rhetor to change the listener's mind, and… therefore, a form of social and intellectual violence” (Ryan). In a prescriptive approach, one attempts to address such concerns by trying to delineate the parameters of what one may call “authentic” or “true” rhetoric. The hermeneutic answer to the question of what constitutes a true or authentic rhetoric can be summarized as follows: true rhetoric is a rhetoric in which the focus has shifted from persuasion to understanding. In the reminder of this paper, I try to discuss the meaning and ramifications of this focal shift.
The key concept in this shift is the concept of understanding. Let us then start with giving an account of the meaning of understanding from a hermeneutical perspective. Mostly under the influence of experimental sciences, standard views of understanding hold that to understand “correctly” requires a suspension of one’s presuppositions and prejudices, so that “objective” knowledge could be obtained. In other words, in order to understand (approach “Truth”) one must, as much as possible and ideally completely, set aside one’s cultural and individual backgrounds, prejudgments, and perspectives, for such factors can taint the objectivity of the process of knowledge. The problem, of course, is that such a “view from nowhere” is not available. Human understanding is deeply contingent, situated within cultural, historical, and linguistic backgrounds (Wachterhauser).
Unlike positivistic approaches which naively try to deny this contingency, hermeneutics embraces human understanding’s “situated-ness” and recognizes it not as a hindrance to, but as a condition for knowledge. Indeed Gadamer’s controversial claim is that it is due to one’s prejudices (i.e., presuppositions) that any understanding becomes possible. In order to understand, one needs to occupy a point of view, a perspective. Any understanding is situated within a tradition, a historical and linguistic background, as part of an on-going conversation. These factors are not impediments to understanding; rather, they are precisely the conditions for understanding (Gorndin). Of course, this does not mean that presuppositions are not to be questioned or critiqued. What it means is that in stead of trying to ignore or deny them, authentic understanding tries to bring its presuppositions to light and to subject them to the critique of reason. Although these presuppositions can never be fully understood and transcended, they can be questioned, examined, and to various degrees understood.
This Socratic view of knowledge can be understood better if we examine Gadamer’s understanding of understanding more carefully. Gadamer distinguishes between three meanings of understating (Gorndin). The most familiar sense of understanding is to know something, for example, to understand or to know that Paris is the capital of France. In this sense, knowledge has a conceptual nature, a “knowing what” character. This epistemological sense of knowledge is in contrast with the second kind of knowing which can be called “knowing how.” In knowing how, we know how to do something, or how to achieve a goal, for example how to ride a bicycle or how to swim, even if we are not able to provide a theoretical account of that knowledge. In this sense knowing is more a practical matter of knowing how to achieve a goal as opposed to a theoretical knowledge of some facts. But a third kind of understating (which is the primary mode of understanding Gadamer is interested in) is the sense in which two individuals come to understand each other. In fact, Gadamer gives primacy to this mode of understanding because he thinks other kinds of understanding are more or less subspecies of this more general sense, for any understanding is indeed a dialog within some tradition, and against some historic and linguistic background. The model Gadamer uses to describe this mode of understanding is that of a horizon. Understating is less an act and more an event, an event that takes place over and after the active engagement of all participants, an event that signifies a merging of horizons between a subject on one side, and a text, a tradition, or another subject on the other side. Based on this understanding of understanding, we can proceed and discuss means of critiquing rhetorical acts in a normative manner, i.e., less in terms of their effectiveness, and more in terms of what may be called “authenticity.” But how are we to distinguish between “authentic” vs. “inauthentic” rhetoric? Again, to repeat what was mentioned earlier, it is not hard to motivate such a distinction, for it is easy to show examples of “effective use of language” where the outcome has been disastrous.
My answer to this question, in short, is that authentic rhetoric is one in which both the rhetor and the audience enter in a dialog whose aim is not for one side to persuade (or be persuaded by) the other, but to prepare the conditions for the event of understanding. In other words, the goal of authentic rhetoric is to deliver, and even reveal, the “truth”: authentic rhetoric is truth oriented. Now, we can say all rhetorical acts at least implicitly include truth claims. This is the case with speech acts as much as writing, and even more so in practical matters such as teaching writing or composition. To quote Daniel Royer:
“I thoroughly agree with James Berlin who insists: To teach writing is to argue for a version of reality and the best way of knowing and communicating it-to deal ... in the metarhetorical realm of epistemology and linguistics. And all composition teachers are ineluctably operating in this realm, whether or not they consciously choose to do so” (Royer).
However, as countless examples show, more often than not, truth claims are merely claims, and do not contribute to any authentic disclosure or understanding. So the question of how to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic rhetoric still remains.
One way to proceed is to contrast authentic rhetoric with inauthentic rhetoric. Inauthentic rhetoric is an instance of monolog, in which the main concern is not reaching understanding or delivering of truth, but rather the utilization of others as means to some external goal. Even when apparently a conversation is going on, the two sides talk past each other or at each other, rather than cooperating in a constructive way towards unraveling the truth of the matter at hand. Now I am aware of the problems associated with a term like “truth”, and how careful one must be when using it. To this end, we need to start by defining “truth” and its achievement through dialog, as the occasion towards which authentic rhetoric must strive.
The debate on the meaning of truth is of course one of the most fundamental concerns of philosophy and one that goes back (at least within Western tradition) to sophists on one side and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle on the other side. This paper is obviously not the place to survey such a deep and conservational issue as the meaning of truth. However, as far as we are concerned, and in terms of philosophical hermeneutics, this debate is between those who hold that the hermeneutic circle is a vicious one, and those who believe otherwise (Wachterhauser). Gadamer belongs to the latter group, and this is the position I am trying to defend too. This view is a position which attempts to establish a position between relativism on one side (the view that all human beliefs are only justified by other beliefs, and thus the whole enterprise of human knowledge is “spinning frictionlessly in the void” (ibid.)) and naïve realism on the other, a view that holds reality is simply out there ready to be discovered.
What distinguishes the hermeneutical stance towards truth from naïve realism is that historic and linguistic preconditions of any act of understanding are not rejected, but accepted, and acknowledged as a precondition for understanding. The hermeneutical circle is a circle, but it is not viscous in the sense that it makes some contact with reality, as opposed to spinning frictionlessly in the void. In this view, truth is the consummation of the event of understanding, whereby the different parties enter an act of dialog with the intention of achieving a goal, while genuinely acknowledging their own historic and linguistic limitations. Each side is willing to listen as much as to talk, to give up as much as to defend, to make space for question as much as to provide answer. And of course the dialog happens within language, and it is acknowledged that language brings into light, reveals, as much as it covers.
Thus, a genuine act of rhetoric is one in which the speaker and the audience (or a tradition, or a text) enter into a dialog with the aim of revealing the mystery that is otherwise hidden, a truth that is not known or planned in advance, but rather is a goal towards which the process of understanding struggles. It follows that a genuine act of rhetoric (just like any genuine dialog) cannot be planned in advance, for in fact the more it is preplanned, the more artificial it sounds. Rather, it is like a game that the parties enter, and although it has rules, its outcome is not known in advance. Through the sincere cooperation of the parties, the truth is gradually (and always only partially) revealed. Indeed, we can say, an act of rhetoric is most authentic when it itself is (paradoxically) most transparent and unnoticed, letting the “the matter at hand” to be dis-closed through the cooperation of the participants. It should be noticed that in this sense, authenticity becomes also a matter of an ethical decision, a decision that is by no means easy. The speaker (or more generally the “active” side of the conversation) must be ready to listen as much as to talk. Here listening does not mean a mechanical act of letting others speak. In stead, it means a decision on the part of the speaker that he is entering a space with many players, and that his role is not to command others into subjugation, but to open up a space for them (and for himself) in which questioning, dialog, and new thoughts can flourish. Likewise, the listener (or the reader, or more generally the “passive” side of conversation) must also make a decision to the effect that he is not merely seeking assurance for things he already knows or believes, but that his responsibility is to be a genuine participant in a conversation that has been going on and will likely continue to go on, and for which there is no last word.
Authentic rhetoric can better be understood once it is contrasted with inauthentic rhetoric, a monological act in which the rhetor plans in advance to manage, handle, or move the audience in a pre-planned direction. If we want to use Kantian terminology, we can say that in inauthentic rhetoric the audience are not treated as ends in themselves, but rather as tools to some end intended by the speaker. Whether this external goal is legitimate or not is of little consequence, for even if it were legitimate, the audience has not entered the act voluntarily, as they are being manipulated towards some goal outside the working of their free will. In other words, in inauthentic rhetoric one side hands over his powers of reason, resistance, and questioning; and instead enters a transaction which is based mainly on a one-directional, unchallenged, flow of language.
Let us summarize the key points mentioned above once again. Against the background of the traditional definition of rhetoric as persuasive use of language, and informed by hermeneutical insights, we can take at least two approaches. In the first approach, we can try to go beyond the surface of rhetorical acts and try to give an account of the working of language in a deeper level. From this perspective, hermeneutics provides deeper insights about the force of language in terms of the recognition of how deeply linguistic our existence is, and to what extent it is us who are spoken by language rather than the other way around. In the second approach (which is in fact built upon the first), we can go beyond mere description of the power of language and qualify the use of language in terms of its goal. To this end, authentic use of language involves an inherently dialogical effort towards the realization of understanding. Here dialog must be taken in a general sense, and can take various forms like the dialog between two persons, between a speaker and the audience, between a writer and the readers, between a teacher and students, or between a text and its readers. Moreover, the emphasis is not on persuasion, but understanding. Thus, if language is used in a manner that lets the various sides involved in the dialog approach the truth of the matter at hand, the goal of language has been realized, even if no persuasion has taken place.

References

Baker, J. M. “Lyric as Paradigm: Hegel and the Speculative Instance of Poetry in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics.” The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Ed. Robert J. Dostal. Cambridge University Press, 2002. 143-167.

Dostal, Robert. The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Ed. Robert J. Dostal. Cambridge University Press, 2002. 102-126.

Figal, Gunter, “The Doing of the Thing Itself: Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Ontology of Language.” The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Ed. Robert J. Dostal. Cambridge University Press, 2002. 102-126.

Gorndin, Jean. “Gadamer’s Basic Understanding of Understanding.” The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Ed. Robert J. Dostal. Cambridge University Press, 2002. 36-52.

Keller, Helen. The World that I live In. New York, the Century Company, 1914

Royer, Daniel J. “New Challenges to Epistemic Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review. Vol. 9, No. 2. 1991. 282-297.

Ryan, Kathleen J. and Natalle, Elizabeth J. “Fusing Horizons: Standpoint Hermeneutics and Invitational Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2. 2001. 69-90.

Wachterhauser, Brice. “Getting it Right: Relativism, Realism, and Truth.” The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Ed. Robert J. Dostal. Cambridge University Press, 2002. 52-79.

[1] I owe this reference to Dr. Dean Pickard.