![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
With the rise of poststructuralist critiques of the autonomous subject, attention has shifted from the nature of “intentional persuasion” to the constitutive nature of discourse. Although this turn has led to valuable new insights into the nature of rhetoric, it also threatens to discount one of the most vital contributions of the rhetorical tradition—the nature of rhetorical invention. This essay seeks to recover the notion of invention by drawing from John Dewey's naturalistic interpretation of experience. In Dewey's framework, “consciousness” is neither the private contents of thought nor a point of articulation for social discourse, but a practice of manipulating public meanings as a means of responding to problematic situations. I then use Dewey's notion to advance the concept of a “rhetorical consciousness,” which I define in terms of the sophistical principles of imitatio and dissoi logoi. To demonstrate the pragmatic significance of this concept, I then show, through an analysis of Charles Darwin's notebooks, how Darwin employed his own rhetorical consciousness within his struggle to invent the revolutionary arguments that led up to his publication of On the Origin of Species. My hope is that this naturalistic interpretation of rhetorical invention will contribute to the ongoing project of cultivating a more intelligent, critical, and creative citizenry through the application of classical rhetorical principles to contemporary democratic forms of education in both the arts and sciences.
Notes
1. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1958), 119.
2. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, 120.
3. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin's Notebooks: 1836–1844, ed. Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 244. Subsequent citations from this collection of Darwin's notebooks (with the exception of one entry from the Geological Notes) will be indicated by parentheses within the text that refer to the letter of the notebook, followed by Darwin's original pagination. For instance, this citation would appear at (B214) referring to page 214 of Notebook B.
4. It is important to note that Darwin went through many different so-called “theories” in his early speculations. David Kohn counts at least five of these “episodes.” David Kohn, “Theories to Work by: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection,” Studies in History of Biology 4 (1980): 68–170.
5. Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), 108.
6. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998; original work published 1859), 459.
7. Gruber, 97. See also Alan Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); David Kohn, “Darwin's Principle of Divergence as Internal Dialogue,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 245–58; Marcello Pera and William R. Shea, Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric (Canton: Science History Publications, 1991); Martin J. S. Rudwick, “Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science,” ISIS 73 (1982): 186–206.
8. John Angus Campbell, On the Way to the Origin: Darwin's Evolutionary Insight and Its Rhetorical Transformation (Evanston: School of Speech at Northwestern University, 1990), 22.
9. For anti-foundational critiques of agency, see Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986; original work published 1968); Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, and Context,” in Glyph 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 172–97; Michel Foucault, “Afterward: The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208–26; Lester Faigley, Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernism and the Subject of Composition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). For a pragmatist critique of the anti-foundationalist position, see Donald Jones, “Beyond the Postmodern Impasse of Agency: The Resounding Relevance of John Dewey's Tacit Tradition,” Journal of Advanced Composition 16 (1996): 81–102.
10. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 28–85. Gaonkar selects for particular criticism the following Campbell essays: “Darwin and The Origin of Species: The Rhetorical Ancestry of an Idea,” Speech Monographs 37 (1970): 1–14; “The Polemical Mr. Darwin,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 375–90; “Scientific Revolution and the Grammar of Culture: The Case of Darwin's Origin,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 351–76; “Charles Darwin: Rhetorician of Science,” in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, ed. Donald N. McCloskey, Alan Megill, and John S. Nelson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 69–86.
11. Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” 51.
12. Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” 51.
13. Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” 33.
14. Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” 57.
15. Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” 57.
16. Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” 59.
17. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Close Readings of the Third Kind: Reply to My Critics,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics, 344.
18. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith, “Introduction,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics, 13.
19. Michael Leff, “The Idea of Rhetoric as Interpretive Practice: A Humanist's Response to Gaonkar,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics, 92.
20. Although Leff does not use the term “transactional,” his approach echoes that taken with the field of rhetoric and composition. Inspired by John Dewey's distinction between “interaction” and “transaction” found in his essay “Conduct and Experience,” in Philosophy and Civilization (New York: Milton, Balch, and Company, 1931), 249–70, and then later in his co-authored book with Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949), the following works expand upon Dewey's distinction and apply it to how author, text, and context evolve within a transactional relationship through time: Nathan Crick, “John Dewey on Creative Expression and the Origins of ‘Mind’,” College of Composition and Communication 54 (2003): 254–75; Janet Emig, “The Tacit Tradition: The Inevitability of a Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Writing Research,” in Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Aviva Freedman and Ian Pringle (Ottawa: The Canadian Council of Teachers of English, 1980), 9–17; Stephen M. Fishman, “Teaching for Student Change: A Deweyan Alternative to Radical Pedagogy,” College of Composition and Communication 47 (1996): 342–66; Stephen M. Fishman and Lucille Parkinson McCarthy, “Is Expressivism Dead? Reconsidering Its Romantic Roots and Its Relation to Social Constructivism,” College English 54 (1992): 647–61; Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
21. Leff, 94.
22. John Dewey, “Construction and Criticism,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984; original work published 1929), 127.
23. John Dewey, “Philosophies of Freedom,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984; original work published 1927), 113.
24. Dewey, “Philosophies of Freedom,” 113.
25. Dewey's concept of the problematic situation is too nuanced to be given a full treatment here. However, this extended passage should give a sense of Dewey's naturalistic interpretation which rejects the popular notions that the character of situations is either just “in our heads” or, alternately, “in our discourse.” As he explains: “A variety of names serves to characterize indeterminate situations. They are disturbed, troubled, ambiguous, confused, full of conflicting tendencies, obscure, etc. It is the situation that has these traits. We are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful. Personal states of doubt that are not evoked by and are not relative to some existential situation are pathological. … Consequently, situations that are disturbed and troubled, confused or obscure, cannot be straightened out, cleared up and put in order, by manipulation of our personal states of mind. … The habit of disposing of the doubtful as if it belonged only to us rather than to the existential situation in which we are caught and implicated is an inheritance from subjectivistic psychology. … For Nature is an environment only as it is involved in interaction with an organism, or self, or whatever name be used.” John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), 105–6. For an extended discussion of how Dewey's notion of the problematic situation relates to rhetoric, see Chapter 5, “The Rhetorical Situation,” of my dissertation, John Dewey on the Art of Communication (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2005).
26. Barrett et al., 7.
27. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 2nd ed. (New York: Open Court, 1929) 166.
28. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 187.
29. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 190.
30. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 378.
31. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 303.
32. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1916), 295.
33. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1934), 263.
34. Dewey, Art as Experience, 263.
35. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 303.
36. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 308.
37. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 103–4.
38. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 168.
39. John Dewey, “Monastery, Bargain Counter, or Laboratory in Education?” in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 6, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985; original work published 1944), 109.
40. John Dewey, “Art in Education—and Education in Art,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984; original work published 1926), 112.
41. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1927), 208.
42. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 208.
43. Eberly picks up on Dewey's line of inquiry in The Public and Its Problems to show how the reading of literature is a public, rather than a private experience, and how literature can be used to promote the “reemergence of local and temporal publics, groups of private people connected through common concerns and conjoint action and energized by common texts.” Eberly thus shows both the “publicness” of thinking and the power of rhetorical and artistic objects to influence public action. Rosa Eberly, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 23.
44. Leff, 97.
45. Leff, 97.
46. Leff, 97.
47. The sophist Hippias gives a good example of this technique: “Some of these things may perhaps have been said by Orpheus or, in a brief and scattered fashion, by Musaeus; some may have been said by Hesiod or Homer or other poets; some by Greek or foreign prose-writers. But from among all these saying I will make a collection of the most important and closely related passages, and I will make out of them a new and multifaceted account.” Robin Waterfield, The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 210. Richard McKeon also provides an account of this creative method: “The use of the commonplaces of creativity erects and fills the commonplace as a storehouse of the familiar to provide materials for commonplaces as instruments for the perception, creation, arrangement, and establishment of the new in existence, experience, discursive exploration, and inclusive organization.” Richard McKeon, “Creativity and the Commonplace,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6, no. 4 (1973): 210.
48. G. B. Kerford, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 31.
49. Kerferd, 40.
50. See the description in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds., The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1990), 367–79.
51. Kerferd, 84.
52. John Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 58.
53. Poulakos, 58.
54. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 222.
55. Dewey describes the way the practice of dissoi logoi influences reflective thinking as follows: “Discussion is thus an apt name of this attitude of thought. It is bringing various beliefs together; shaking one against another and tearing down their rigidity. It is conversation of thoughts; it is dialogue—the mother of dialectic in more than the etymological sense. No process is more recurrent in history than the transfer of operations carried on between different persons into the arena of the individual's own consciousness. The discussion which at first took place by bringing ideas from different persons into contact, by introducing them into the forum of competition, and by subjecting them to critical comparison and selective decision, finally became a habit of the individual with himself. He became a miniature social assemblage, in which pros and cons were brought into play struggling for mastery—for final conclusion. In some such way we conceive reflection to be born.” John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic (New York: Dover, 1916), 194–5.
56. Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1996), 69.
57. Billig, 76.
58. Billig, 29.
59. Billig, 112.
60. Gerard A. Hauser and Carole Blair, “Rhetorical Antecedents to the Public,” Pre/Text 3 (1982): 153.
61. Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 69.
62. Farrell, 96.
63. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: Norton, 1991), 15.
64. Peter Brent, Charles Darwin: A Man of Enlarged Curiosity (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 26.
65. Brent, 26.
66. Brent, 26.
67. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, 28.
68. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, 28.
69. Desmond and Moore, 21.
70. Desmond and Moore, 22.
71. Desmond and Moore, 31.
72. Desmond and Moore, 31.
73. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, 56.
74. Desmond and Moore, 44.
75. Desmond and Moore, 48.
76. Darwin was always torn between identity as a revolutionary scientist and his identity as an English gentleman-scholar, and this tension literally culminated in a physical illness that he could never quite shake. This inner conflict is described in detail in James R. Moore, “Darwin of Down: The Evolutionist as Squarson-Naturalist,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 435–81.
77. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, 60.
78. Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Volume 1 of a Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 126.
79. Quoted in Browne, 128.
80. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, 59.
81. Desmond and Moore, 48–9.
82. Gillian Beer, “Darwin's Reading and the Fictions of Development,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 550.
83. For a detailed analysis of Darwin's reading habits, see Mario A. DiGregorio and N. W. Gill, Charles Darwin's Marginalia (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990).
84. DiGregorio and Gill, 521.
85. DiGregorio and Gill, 478.
86. DiGregorio and Gill, xxxvi.
87. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, 68.
88. M. J. S. Hodge, “Darwin and the Laws of the Animate Part of the Terrestrial System (1835–1837): On the Lyellian Origins of His Zoonomical Explanatory Program,” Studies in the History of Biology 7 (1982): 211.
89. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 460.
90. On the importance of Lyell to Darwin's theoretical development, see Hodge, 1–106; Martin J. S. Rudwick, “The Strategy of Lyell's Principles of Geology,” Isis 61 (1970): 5–33; Frank Sulloway, “Darwin's Conversion and Its Aftermath,” Journal of the History of Biology 15 (1982): 346–51.
91. Sandra Herbert, “Darwin the Young Geologist,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 489.
92. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology: Volume II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; original work published 1832), 124.
93. Sandra Herbert, The Logic of Darwin's Discovery (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 1968), 206.
94. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, 77.
95. Quoted in Kohn, “Theories to Work by: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection”, 70. For the rest of this essay, words included in < < > > were subsequently included by Darwin after writing the original sentences, and words included in <> were subsequently crossed out.
96. Kohn, “Theories to Work by: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection,” 72.
97. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 311.
98. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 311.
99. Rudwick, “Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science,” 189.
100. Rudwick, “Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science,” 189.
101. Rudwick, “Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science,” 189.
102. Martin J. S. Rudwick., The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 437.
103. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists, 436; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London: Sage Publications, 1979), 237–8.
104. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists, 435.
105. Rudwick, “Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science,” 189.
106. Kohn, “Theories to Work by: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection,” 73.
107. Desmond and Moore, 220.
108. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1896), 275.
109. The Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Darwinism.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/darwinism (August 13, 2004; Accessed September 14, 2005).
110. Desmond and Moore, 6–10.
111. Erasmus Darwin quoted in Barrett et al., 170.
112. Erasmus Darwin quoted in Barrett et al., 170.
113. Lyell, 30.
114. Barrett et al., 172.
115. Campbell, On the Way to the Origin: Darwin's Evolutionary Insight and Its Rhetorical Transformation, 21.
116. Kohn, “Theories to Work by: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection,” 148.
117. Dewey describes the moment of this type of revelation as a kind of “intuition” brought about after a long labor of inquiry. He writes: “‘Intuition’ is that meeting of the old and new in which the readjustment involved in every form of consciousness is effected suddenly by means of a quick and unexpected harmony which in its bright abruptness is like a flash of revelation; although in fact it is prepared for by long and slow incubation. Oftentimes the union of old and new, of foreground and background, is accomplished only by effort, prolonged perhaps to the point of pain. In any case, the background of organized meanings can alone convert the new situation from the obscure into the clear and luminous. When old and new jump together, like sparks when the poles are adjusted, there is intuition.” Dewey, Art as Experience, 266. Unfortunately, considering Darwin's life as a “tormented evolutionist,” as Desmond and Moore call it, Darwin probably ended up with an unhealthy ratio of pain to revelation. But such is the fate, more often than not, of revolutionary thinkers.
118. John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy: And Other Essays in Contemporary Thought (New York: Henry Holt, 1910), 18.
119. Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy: And Other Essays in Contemporary Thought, 9.
120. Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy: And Other Essays in Contemporary Thought, 19.
121. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1939), 102.
122. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184.
123. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183.
124. Hauser and Blair, 163.
125. For such an “unfettered” view of science, see J. E. McGuire and Barbara Tuchanska, Science Unfettered: A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorical Ontology (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).