Rhetoric and the origins of the human sciences: A Foucauldian tale untold

ABSTRACT

Michel Foucault’s famous history of the human sciences focused on “the order of things” and in doing so it overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: pedagogy, politics, and psychology. If we revisit Foucault from a rhetorical perspective there are consequences: (1) at the level of architectonic, we rediscover rhetoric’s role at the inception of the human sciences, and (2) at the level of thematic, we can make better sense of rhetorical phenomena such as the sixteenth-/seventeenth-century sacred arts of listening, which feature a “public ear.” Foucault’s late interest in the pastoral picks up this rhetorical thread, although he never was able to revise the disciplinary and biopolitical history implicated therein. This article initiates just such a revision, paying particular attention to historiographic questions, and to recent discussions of biopower that wind up looking very different from this rhetorical perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Foucault
• biopower
• human sciences
• sacred rhetoric
• listening

Notes

1. Arthur E. Walzer, “Parrēsia, Foucault, and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2013): 1–21. Walzer’s article also summarizes the uptake of Foucault and rhetorical studies per se. A lively “Forum on Arthur Walzer’s ‘Parrēsia, Foucault, and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition’” appears in Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 4 (2013): 355–81. Contributors include Pat J. Gehrke, Susan C. Jarrett, Bradford Vivian, and Arthur E. Walzer.

2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970 [1966]), 310.

3. Foucault, The Order of Things, 309.

4. Foucault, The Order of Things, 318.

5. “To sum up, I think that if we look for the operation (opérateur) of transformation for the transition from natural history to biology, from the analysis of wealth to political economy, and from general grammar to historical philology, if we look for the operator that upset all these systems of knowledge, and directed knowledge to the sciences of life, of labor and production, and of language, then we should look to population.” Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, eds. Michel Senellart and Arnold J. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 78.

6. Along with the pastoral I discuss in this essay, Foucault devotes significant attention in his late lectures to psychagogy as the movement of souls. However this movement is contrasted explicitly with rhetoric insofar as Foucault treats psychagogy (psukhgōgia) as a truthful relation to being, which is to say a special kind of philosophical relation. The key passage comes at the end of the final Collège de France lectures where Foucault focuses on Plato’s Phaedrus in his effort to identify a specifically philosophical and political practice of truth. “The discourse of rhetoric, the mode of being of rhetorical discourse is such that, on the one hand, indifference to the truth means that it is possible to speak for or against, for the just as for the unjust. And, on the other hand, rhetorical discourse is marked by being concerned solely with the effect to be produced on the soul of the listener. In contrast, the mode of being of philosophical discourse is characterized by the fact that, on the one hand, knowledge of truth is not just necessary to it, it is not just its precondition, but is a constant function of it. And this constant function of the relation to the truth is in discourse, which is the dialectic, is inseparable from the immediate, direct effect which is brought about not just on the soul of the person to whom the discourse is addressed, but also of the person giving the discourse. And this is psychagogy. The tekhnē peculiar to the true discourse is characterized by knowledge of the truth and practice of the soul, the fundamental, essential, inseparable connection of dialectic and psychagogy, and it is in being both a dialectician and a psychagogue that the philosopher will really be the parrhesiast, the only parrhesiast, which the rhetorician, the man of rhetoric cannot be or function as. Rhetoric is an atekhnia (an absence of tekhnē) with regard to discourse. Philosophy is the etumos tekhnē (the genuine technique) of true discourse.” Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 335–36.

7. Paul Oskar Kristeller provides the sketch of early modernity dominant in intellectual history since at least the 1940s. His focus question: “What is the Renaissance philosophy of man?” As it turns out, Medieval and Renaissance philosophies can be distinguished according to whether their view of human nature is pessimistic or optimistic. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Dignity of Man,” in Renaissance Concepts of Man and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 5.

8. See especially Nancy Struever, “Garin, Camporeale and the Recovery of Renaissance Rhetoric,” Modern Language Notes 119, no. 1 (2004): 47–55. Struever explains how the Italian program redid the history of philosophy “not as an internalist account of philosophy as a group of disciplines—logic, metaphysics, epistemology—but as responses to a broad range of cultural events” (48). That is to say philosophy-as-rhetoric/rhetoric-as-philosophy, e.g., Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric As Philosophy; The Humanist Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980). I argue in this article that the rhetorical history of the human sciences has to first untie this rhetoric-philosophy knot which Foucault also adopts counterproductively.

9. Theologia Rhetorica lies at the heart of the Trinkaus essay entitled “Themes for a Renaissance Anthropology.” The rhetorical theology Trinkaus finds most pronounced in the writing of Lorenzo Valla produced a new understanding of human nature by combining Sophistic-Ciceronian epistemology with the religious eroticism of Augustine. No longer was man a part of a great chain of being, a graduated scale of animal, human and divine, each segment overlapping with the next; Platonic metaphysics had been definitively left behind. See Charles Trinkaus, The Scope of Renaissance Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 390; A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). However Trinkaus ultimately treats human nature as a universal concept introduced in extant literature by the Sophists, revised in Plato’s Timeus, rendered rhetorical in Cicero’s De officiis, and restored to the Platonic model in the medieval Christian tradition (running through Nemesius of Emesa’s fourth-century treatise De natura hominis to late medieval Scholasticism), before finding its modern expression in late Renaissance Humanism (343–96).

10. Thus Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: “Perhaps the simplest observation we can make is that in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2. In a way, Greenblatt radicalizes Burckhardt’s claim, arguing that the expression of human nature—its rhetoric—actually produced the Renaissance individual. In contrast to Greenblatt I focus on the disciplinary history of rhetoric.

11. The foremost challenger to rhetoric as architectonic of the human sciences is law. See Donald R. Kelley, History, Law, and the Human Sciences (London, UK: Variorum, 1984); “Altera natura: The Idea of Custom in Historical Perspective,” In New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy, eds. John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London, UK: Duckworth, 1990). Schematically the difference between the two disciplines as architectonics of the human sciences is that rhetoric appeals, whereas law punishes and protects.

12. See, however, Hans Blumenberg’s important 1970 essay where he defines modernity as the turn from metaphysics to anthropology. This claim, reminiscent of Dilthey and of Blumenberg’s own masterwork The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), is then given a new twist: as God slowly retreats from the modern world, philosophical anthropology begins to generate rhetorics of human nature in place of God. Humankind has no unmediated or purely “interior” relationship to itself; indeed no predetermined essence or nature whatsoever. Rhetoric provides compensation for this essential lack, creating the verbal institutions that give self and Other form. Hence we find the historical subject defined by way of comparison, the school subject trained in the art of verbal delay, the religious subject formed in ritual prayer—a rhetorical act that is particularly meaningful to Blumenberg because of its massive historical scope (447). Hans Blumenberg, “An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric,” in After Philosophy: End or Transformation? eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 433, 456.

13. “Biopower” appears in the first volume of the history of sexuality, La volonté de savoir (1976) which translates to “the will to knowledge” significantly since the subtitle highlights an epistemic and disciplinary analysis that originates in Foucault’s earlier work on the human sciences and their institutions. Now biopower is contrasted with the subtractive powers of a sovereign in that the power to take life with the sword becomes one element among others working to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them … ” (136). And “discipline” in the sense of bodily control as well as in the academic sense now merge in characteristic fashion. Though Foucault observes that the great technology of power only consolidates in the nineteenth century, most was in place earlier: “During the classical period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines—universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies in the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of ‘biopower’” (140). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980).

14. Discussions of Melanchthon and English arts of listening are drawn in part from two previously published essays: Daniel M. Gross, “Melanchthon’s Rhetoric and the Practical Origins of Reformation Human Science,” History of the Human Sciences 13, no. 3 (2000): 5–22; Daniel M. Gross, “Listening Culture,” in Culture & Rhetoric, eds. Ivo Strecher and Steven Tyler (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 59–73.

15. Georges Gusdorf, Introduction aux sciences humaines; essai critique sur leurs origines et leur développement (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960); Donald Kelly, “The Idea of Custom in Historical Perspective,” in New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy, eds. John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London, UK: Duckworth, 1990); Roger Smith, The Norton History of the Human Sciences (New York: Norton, 1997); Fernando Vidal, The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

16. Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philipp Melanchthon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Heinz Scheible, Melanchthon: Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 1997); Karl Hartfelder, Philipp Melanchthon als Praeceptor Germaniae (Nieuwkoop: Graaf, 1964); T. Muther, Die Wittenberger Universitäts- und Facultäts-Statuten vom Jahre 1508 (Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1867); C. Scheurl, Briefbuch, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Reformation und ihrer Zeit, F. von Soden and J.K.F. Knaake, eds. (Aalen: Zeller, 1962); Lawrence D. Green and James J. Murphy, eds., Renaissance Rhetoric Short-Title Catalogue 1460–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

17. Philipp Melanchthon, “De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis,” in Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl: Studienausgabe, ed. R. Stupperich (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1963), 34–39.

18. τέχνή έστι σύστήμα έγκαταλψεων έγγεγυμνασμένων πρός τι τέλος εύχρήςτον τών ένί τώ βίώ. “Finem seu utilitatem in omnibus artibus in primis spectandam esse probat ex ipsius artis definitione, quae et Quintiliani causa fuit, cur rhetorices finem tam magna cura libro secundo capite decimo octavo quaesiverit.” Philipp Melanchthon, “Praefatio in officia Ciceronis,” in Corpus Reformatorum Philippi Melanthonis Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, eds. C.B. Bretschneider and H.E. Bindseil (Halle: C.A. Schwetschke, 1846), Volume 11, 257 [hereafter CR].

19. Melanchthon, Elementorum rhetorices libri II. CR, vol. 13, 431–32.

20. For instance Flacius Illyricus [Matthias Flacius], Clavis Scripturae Sacrae, seu De sermone sacrarum literarum, in 2 vols. (Basel: Johannes Oporinus and Eusebius Episcopium, 1567); Salomon Glassius [Salomon Glaß], Philologiae Sacrae, qua totius Sacrosanctae, Veteris et Novi Testamenti, Scripturae tum stylus et literatura, tum sensus et genuinae interpretationis ratio expenditur; libri quinque; quorum I. II. Generalia de S. Scripturae stylo et sensu; III.IV. Grammatica Sacra; V. Rhetorica Sacra (Jena: Steinmann, 1668 [1623]).

21. Melanchthon, Liber de anima. CR, vol. 13, 171.

22. Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 120.

23. “rectius leguntur haec in futuro ‘Non dabit, ut moveatur pes tuus, neque dormitabit, qui custodit te.’ Cohaeret autem hic versus cum superioribus, quia enim instituit Propheta exhortationem in idem, hoc agit, ut his ceu promissionibus instet, urgeat et hortetur ad retinendam illam fiduciam in auxilium divinum. Est autem summe necessarium adhortari et urgere non solum alios, sed etiam nos ipsos propter illa visibilia et instantia pericula et vexationes. Quia enim ista, quae contristant, praesentia sunt, contra quae consolantur, sunt absentia, ideo opus est, dum durant praesentia, quae vexunt, ut verbo exitemur ad perseverantiam et patientiam. Est enim haec experientia coniungenda cum doctrina. Nam oculi nostri multo sunt obtusiores, quam ut possint ad invisibilia ista pertingere et finem praesentium afflictionum videre. Hinc fit, ut natura semper circumspiciat de modo, quo liberari possit, et dum eum non videt, sicut est absconditus et invisibilis, cruciatur. Opus est igitur hortationibus, ut ista (liceat enim sic loqui) naturalis brevitas seu angustia cordis nostri dilatetur, magnificetur, et prolongetur. … Rhetoricatur igitur Spiritus sanctur iam, ut exhortatio fiat illustrior.” Martin Luther, Dr. Martin Luthers Werke, kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–1987), vol. 40/3, 59–60. Note the deponent form rhetoricatur which has a passive form but an active meaning. As quoted in Klaus Dockhorn, “Luthers Glaubensbegriff und die Rhetorik,” in Linguistica Biblica 21/22 (1973): 19–39, 30.

24. Klaus Dockhorn, “Rhetorica movet: Protestantischer Humanismus und karolingische Renaissance,” in Rhetorik: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland vom 16.—20. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmut Schanze (Frankfurt/M.: Athenaion, 1974); and Dockhorn’s famous review of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, in Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 218 (1966): 169–206. For a bibliography on the topic of Luther and Rhetoric see Reinhard Breymayer, “Bibliographie zum Thema “Luther und die Rhetorik,” in Linguistica Biblica 21/22 (1973): 39–44.

25. On this topic see especially Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

26. “Alterum officium est postea inventa intelligere, agnoscere, et tanquam dictata accipere. Ab hoc officio nominatur intellectus patiens. Vidit Aristoteles in omni vita, in artibus, in consiliis publicis et privatis, in stratagematibus, in poètica, in eloquentia, alios aliis perspicaciores esse, et inventione plus valere: Alios inventa intelligere, et suis cogitationibus anteferre, ut Themistocles suadens, ut cives relicta urbe naves ingrediantur, plus valet intellectu faciente, quam alii, sed coeteri intelligunt consilium et adprobant.” Philipp Melanchthon, Liber de anima, CR Vol. 13, 148.

27. Erasmus’s translation of Galen: “Agite igitur, o pueri … ad cognoscendas artes animum appellite … scientes quaecunque artes nihil adferunt utilitatis ad vitam, has artes non esse.” Quoted in Olaf Berwald, Philipp Melanchthons Sicht der Rhetorik (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 12.

28. Nicolaus Caussinus, Eloquentiae sacrae et humaneae parellela libri XVI (Paris, Sebastian Chappelet, 1619), 1.

29. Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor literarius philosophicus, revised edition (Lubeck: Petri Bockmanni, 1714), 941.

30. For the history of this distinction see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Significance of the Humanist Tradition for the Human Sciences,” in Truth and Method, second, revised edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 3–42.

31. John Stuart Mill, System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (London, UK: John W. Parker, 1843).

32. Richard McKeon, “Aristotle’s Conception of Moral and Political Philosophy,” Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy 51, no. 3 (1941): 290. McKeon’s influential Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941) separates (1) natural sciences (2) moral and political philosophy, i.e., the practical sciences (3) rhetoric and poetic.

33. On this literature see also Ceri Sullivan, “The Art of Listening in the 17th Century,” Modern Philology 104, no. 1 (2006): 34–71; Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

34. Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s Noise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

35. Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

36. Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9.

37. Though Krista Ratcliffe’s award-winning book underscores the “stance of openness” that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture (xiii), her inattention to an alternative genealogy reproduces some familiar problems including most importantly the unnecessary decisionism built into this very definition that emphasizes agency as conscious choice (26). See Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 2005).

38. Here I have paraphrased Hugh Roberts, The day of hearing (London, UK: J. Barnes, 1600), 63.

39. Jeremiah Burroughes, Gospel-Worship, 1. Hearing the Word (London, UK: P. Cole and R.W., 1646), 167.

40. John Newman, B. Grosvenor, Thomas Bradbury, Jabez Earle, William Harris, and Thomas Reynolds, Practical Discourses Concerning Hearing the Word; Preach‘d at the Friday Evening-Lecture in Eastcheap (London, UK: Printed by J. Darby, 1713), 9.

41. Thomas Taylor, The Parable of the Sower and of the Seed (London, UK: T. Purfoot, 1634), 42.

42. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 32.

43. Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie, GA 18 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002); translated as Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

44. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 292.

45. The City of God against the Pagans XX .6 http://www.augustinus.it/latino/cdd/index2.htm

46. Giorgio Agamben’s landmark Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995]), 3.

47. See also Judith Butler on social death and a life worth living, including the interview: Fina Birulés, Interview with Judith Butler: “Gender Is Extramoral,” MR Zine, May 16, 2009, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/butler160509.html

48. Robert Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 [2004]); Ian Hacking sums up his work: “I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications.” In Hacking’s “10 ways of making people” one can easily recognize Foucault’s influence at the level of epistemology and his history of the human sciences: “1. Count! 2. Quantify! 3. Create Norms! 4. Correlate! 5. Medicalise! 6. Biologise! 7. Geneticise! 8. Normalise! 9. Bureaucratise! 10. Reclaim our identity!” London Review of Books 28, no. 16 (2006): 23–26. See also Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

49. Michael Hardt writes that Foucault needs the discovery of biopolitics to grapple fully with politics (Michael Hardt, “Militant Life,” New Left Review 64 (2010): 159. He continues, “The militancy of the ancient Cynics, however, is clearly an entirely different politics of life. Biopolitics is the realm in which we have the freedom to make another life for ourselves, and through that life transform the world. Biopolitcs is thus not only distinct from biopower but also may be the most effective weapon to combat it” (159).

50. Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions Journal 5 (Fall/Winter 2011).