Looking Into Aristotle's Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision

Abstract

This article culls a theory of rhetorical vision from Aristotle's Rhetoric by examining the cluster of terms that bears on his theory of visual style. Rhetorical vision stands apart from but complements visual rhetoric in that it attends to the rhetorical and linguistic conjuring of visual images—what contemporary neuroscientists call visual imagery—and can even affect direct perception. The article concludes by examining rhetorical vision in Demosthenes' Epitaphios. At stake in this investigation is the visible and visual liveliness of rhetoric and its ability to alter sense perception.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the following people for their engagements with this article: Richard Graff, Ned O'Gorman, John Marsh, and anonymous readers.

Notes

1. See also Auerbach (1968, 3) for a discussion of the visual in ancient Greek philosophy; see also Jay (1994, 24ff); John T. Kirby (1997) considers the “textualization of the visual” in the ancient world, which is nearly the obverse of what I propose to examine: the visual capacities of language.

2. This translation is my own. For translations of passages from De Anima, I have relied on Hett unless otherwise noted, and for the Rhetoric, Kennedy, with slight amendments that “detranslate” words like phantasia and energeia, and with discussions of the particular Greek words where relevant.

3. As it is well known, Aristotle's Poetics offers Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as the epitome of tragic form.

4. For others, see Fortenbaugh (2002) and Walker (2000a,b).

5. For Kennedy's discussions, see especially his headnote to chapter 11 of book III, 221–222, where he notes the “emphasis on the visual, which is characteristic of Aristotle” (2007, 222), as well as his treatment of what he calls “Aristotelian words with visual imagery” (2007, 170), and his meditation on possible connections to neurolinguistics (1996, 171–172). The two recent noteworthy examinations of Aristotle's visual concepts are by Sarah Newman (2002) and Ned O'Gorman (2005). I make more extensive use of each of these articles later.

6. Scholars who have weighed in with arguments about the unity of Aristotle's Rhetoric include Gross and Dascal (2001); McAdon (2004); Poster (1997); Ross (1995, 285); and Barnes (1995, 263–264). These last two are also cited in Gross and Dascal (2001, 275).

7. Similar theoretical work has been done with a focus on sound. See Porter (2004) and Graff (2001).

8. For some of the best work in visual rhetoric, see Finnegan's articles (2001, 2005, 2008) and her book, Picturing Poverty (2003); Robert Hariman and John Lucaites (2007), and James Kimble (2006).

9. David Blakesley and Collin Brooke, in an introduction to a special issue on visual rhetoric in Enculturation, mention phantasia briefly in their meditation on the intersections between the rhetorical and the visual, as well as Gorgias's recognition of “the power of the word to conjure images” (2001, node 2). See also Catherine L. Hobbs, who mentions phantasia in the context of visual rhetoric and ocularism, attributing its development primarily to the Epicureans (2004, 63–64). Joshua Gunn (2003) and James P. McDaniel (2000) both mention phantasia in their recuperation of psychoanalytic strands of imagination. Finnegan, Blakesley, Brooke, Hobbs, Gunn, and McDaniel aside, though, the scanty regard for Aristotle's emphasis on the language and the visual is especially curious given the affinity that visual rhetoric scholars have for terms in Aristotle's rhetorical toolbox, often adopting familiar concepts such as enthymeme, pathos, and topoi. See, for example, Valerie Smith's (2007) discussion of the uses and misuses of enthymemes in visual rhetoric scholarship. Joshua Gunn (2005) discusses iconic topoi in the context of Satanism, and Finnegan's work, especially “The Naturalistic Enthymeme” (2001) and “Recognizing Lincoln” (2005), turn on the notion of enthymeme. Hariman and Lucaites deploy enthymemes (2007, 33, 165–166) and pathos (140–141, 166, 351n11, and 258n62). I want to acknowledge here the work that has been done on written words as graphic images (e.g., Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006, and in the ancient context, Graff 2001) and to note at the outset, even though it will become clear as I define terms that this kind of direct vision, while important and fascinating, is not my main focus. Of this work, my contribution potentially intersects with Craig Stroupe's article “Visualizing English,” which crosses the “visual/verbal border” (2000, 609)—only I am crossing at a different place. The end of the article contains a brief discussion of neuroscientific findings along these lines of visual imagery.

10. A theory of rhetorical vision is not of course confined solely to the pages of the Rhetoric; its residue can be found in other texts, Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian. Since I began working on this concept, I have noticed something like rhetorical vision, for example, in the writings of Quintilian, Augustine, GiambattistaVico, Joseph Priestley, Kenneth Burke, and others. It is Aristotle, however, who first offers an array of tools and terms for considering how words enable sight, and an elucidation of rhetorical vision in Aristotle may help shed light for work on subsequent theorists whose accounts mobilize or augment a notion of rhetorical vision: Quintilian (1960), Institutio Oratoria 4.2. For Vico, see especially Luft (1997). Joseph Priestley's ([1777] 1965) commitments to Hartelian associationist psychology make for a lively and vivid account of how “things” make lively imagistic connections in the mind which yield thought. His discussion of amplification flickers on the edges of a notion of rhetorical vision (26–32; see also Hawhee and Holding 2010, 280–281). Mary Carruthers's Book of Memory (2008) describes medieval memory systems and their dependency on what I am calling rhetorical vision. See especially chapter 2, 18–15. For Kenneth Burke ([1950] 1969), see especially the Rhetoric of Motives passage excerpted by Moran (1996) and discussed later in this article.

11. Modrak (1986) writes: “Our notion [of imagination] seems to exclude the immediate awareness of objects in our environment and to include the manipulation of ideas.” Aristotle's notion of phantasia, I shall argue, includes the former and excludes the latter. Kevin White (1985) notes this same difficulty and observes, “The physiological study of the ‘imagination’ seems to have its origins in Galen's medical researches, which make use of Aristotle's remarks on to phantastikon” (484n4); in other words, there is a link, but later uses of the term imagination do not by any means correspond to phantasia: “We must bear in mind the extreme inappropriateness of these post-Aristotelian connotations of the term” (White 1985, 484).

12. Martha Nussbaum (1985) and Victor Caston (1996) would probably disagree with my wish to stress “image” here; Nussbaum argues that images have been overstressed in contemporary interpretations of phantasia, and she opts instead to emphasize its ties to the verb phainesthai, “to appear”; Caston follows a similar logic by linking Aristotle's phantasia to Plato (21n3). Most other scholars discussed in this essay, however, foreground images rather strenuously.

13. For a book-length discussion of Aristotle's theory of language and meaning-making replete with references to phantasia, see Modrak (2001).

14. Victor Caston (1996, 21n3) includes speech in a long list of activities Aristotle explains with reference to phantasia.

15. Here I am thinking of Kennedy's use of scare quotes when discussing Aristotle's metaphor and “bringing-before-the-eyes” in book III: “the hearer ‘sees’ something in a different way and takes pleasure in learning” (2007, 222).

16. González (2006), whose treatment of phantasia in book III of the Rhetoric will be considered later in this article, is an important exception here.

17. I.10; 1369b 11–15: “Through anger and desire [come] things that are vengeful. But revenge and punishment differ; for punishment is for the sake of the sufferer, revenge for the sake of the doer, that he may get a sense of fulfillment. What anger is will become clear in the discussion of emotions, and through longing is done whatever seems pleasurable.”

18. I have written previously about the antagonistic relationship between saying and seeing in the ancient world (see Hawhee 2004); here, I wish to examine how the two work in tandem.

19. Carruthers (2008) discusses Wolfson's (1935) approach to deliberative phantasia in her well-known Book of Memory.

20. My reading of huperochē as a rhetorical strategy complements O'Gorman's reading of epideictic in terms of sight and scale (2005, 30) rather than restricting it to belief and value. Considering phantasia as the link between rhetoric and belief, hyperochē as a kind of piling up of images good or bad helps to make the link between magnitude and value.

21. A 1997 article by W. V. Harris is likely the reason Kennedy amended his translation for the second edition. Harris asserts that “it is thoroughly implausible, as well as philologically indefensible, to attribute to [Aristotle] the opinion that anger is provoked only by slights that are conspicuous or notorious” (1997, 454). Even so, if “conspicuous” is read as a strong version of “apparent,” a case could still be made for this translation, and it appears as well in Roberts's translation and commentary by Cope and Sandys (Harris 1997, 452).

22. It should be noted that Gross's account is not new. David Konstan refers to the “classical view of pathe as arising primarily in and from social interactions” (2007, 39).

23. Kennedy's note (2007, 135n50) corroborates this: “This parenthesis really applies to those who cannot speak at all, infants and animals.”

24. For a discussion of opsis in Aristotle, with particular focus on the Rhetoric and the Poetics, see Stanford (1936, 109–110).

25. Sara Newman too, briefly characterizes bringing-before-the-eyes as happening immediately (2002, 13). While her useful analysis of bringing-before-the-eyes is designed to elaborate Aristotle's notion of metaphor, I wish to present the concept as working more broadly in the service of rhetorical vision.

26. While the authorship of the “Epitaphios” has been called into question because of its inaccuracies and similarities to other authors, the fact that Demosthenes (1949) delivered the funeral oration for the dead at Chaeronea is taken as a given; see “On the Crown,” 285–288. On this point, see also Loraux (2006, 36) and Derderian (2001, 163).

27. For a study of the importance of visual properties of written words, see Cohen et al. (2002). For a neuroscientific account of language, see Mildner (2008).

28. The imprint of energeia can be seen in common syntactic and semantic constructions too, as finds Dan Slobin's (2008) study of the prominent occurrence of “paths of vision” alongside paths of motion, as embedded in such expressions as “looking beyond, over, or towards.” He also observes that “linguists, starting at least with Gruber in 1967, have noted that verbs of perception appear in the same syntactic and semantic constructions as verbs of motion” (2008, 1).