Gadamer's Rhetorical Imaginary

Abstract

Hans-Georg Gadamer's idiosyncratic reading of what he calls “the distant ancient meaning of rhetoric” pulls out an unfamiliar thread in the history of the Greek logos from the weave of the ancient texts, and his separation of the sophistic challenge from rhetoric proper stems from his commitment to rhetoric. What has typically been read as rhetoric's counter-tradition, a kairotic-performative rhetoric championed by Isocrates and Cicero against Platonic essentialist philosophy, is for Gadamer the counter-tradition to Western essentialism as a whole, anchored squarely in Plato's dialogic example. In this reading, Plato becomes strange to all ersatz platonists, and the great body of the dialogues become the gravitational center of a humanist rhetoric. Gadamer's recommendation that we treat Plato's dialegesthai as the highest fruit of ancient rhetoric provides a fresh opportunity to reimagine our interdisciplinary debates.

Notes

¹Plato is always at the heart of the storm in rhetorical studies. Michael Leff asserts that the doctrine of forms in the Phaedrus “sharply distinguishes Plato from rhetorical humanists” (22). Richard Enos concludes that a rhetorical art is inconsistent with Platonism, since for Plato “There is no such thing as partial, likely or probable knowledge; there is no such thing as ‘more’ knowledge but rather only total comprehension” (Title 16). Thomas Conley asserts that “On both practical and philosophic grounds, therefore, Plato had nothing good to say about rhetoric or its practitioners” (9). For similar views, see Carol Poster, “Aristotle's Rhetoric Against Rhetoric,” and Brad McAdon, “Plato's Denunciation of Rhetoric in the Phaedrus.”

²A whole study could be devoted to tracing the theme of rhetoric through Gadamer's oeuvre, but here is a brief indication. The famous hermeneutic circle, as Gadamer points out in Truth and Method, is grounded in the ancient rhetorical principle of part and whole (291). Rhetoric is thematized in papers such as “Rhetorik, Hermeneutik, und Ideologiekritik” (original 1967); “Rhetorik und Hermeneutik” (original 1976); “Logik oder Rhetorik” (original 1976); “Die Ausdruckskraft der Sprache: Zur Funktion der Rhetorik fur die Erkenntnis” (original 1983). In the many essays Gadamer wrote on reason through the 1970 s, he contrasts scientific rationalism with rhetorical ideals such as the practical standard of plausibility, the sensus communis, judgment based on the particular case, and so on. For instance, in 1974 he wrote: “In the end, this is the birth of the concept of reason: the more what is desirable is displayed for all in a way that is convincing to all, the more those involved discover themselves in this common reality” (Reason in the Age of Science 77). Gadamer's 1992 essay “Towards a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language” makes the clarion call that “one must return to rhetoric its broad applicability,” and he develops this idea with the same range of applicability as in the Dottori dialogue (24). Gadamer's transcribed conversation in 1996 with Jean Grondin is an important text in this regard (Gadamer Lesebuch 280–295). There in a long retrospective conversation about his career and thought he turns the theme to rhetoric six times, giving it its most expansive role outside of the Dottori dialogues.

³See Klaus Dockhorn (161).

⁴Gadamer's response to Dockhorn appears in “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique” (314).

⁵A good example of this is a 1974 essay that is hardly more than a paean to Aristotelian rhetoric, that yet never mentions the word rhetoric (“What Is Practice?” 69–87).

⁶Gadamer was speaking to his long-time friend and biographer, Jean Grondin. He also cites “the relationship between practice and theory in ethics,” but this, as he will explain in A Century of Philosophy, is precisely rhetoric.

⁷The special value of this attribute of rhetoric for twentieth-century hermeneutics will be its opposition to the notion of a separable scientific proof.

⁸A hallmark of Gadamer's position is the insistence on a fundamental accord between Plato and Aristotle.

⁹Gadamer recognizes dialectic conventionally as the practice of rational thinkers who test claims methodically to avoid faulty reasoning, but he will always quickly try to supplant this meaning with something more general and humanist such as phronesis (reasonableness) or simply dialogue. See, for instance, The Idea of the Good (41–44).

¹⁰Plato's dialectic, in a rhetoric textbook, “actually becomes the method whereby the philosopher and his pupil free themselves from the conventional and all worldly encumbrances in the pursuit and eventual attainment of absolute truth” (Bizzell and Herzberg 28). Careful readers of the canonical rhetoric dialogues have noted the obvious tensions and ambiguities in Socrates's use of the term rhetoric. For instance, Anthony Petruzzi notes that “Plato is not attacking rhetoric per se” (17), and Gregory Clark (qtd in Petruzzi 20) sees Plato distinguishing “between two rhetorics of opposing purposes” (20). Although many rhetoricians, such as Robert Scott, believe that Plato “should be placed outside of the rhetorical tradition on the grounds that he was a lifelong enemy of rhetoric,” some have agreed with Gadamer in enlarging the meaning of rhetoric in Plato: “When examining Plato's commitment to the value of discourse, it is incumbent on us to appreciate the broad scope which his theory of rhetoric entails. Rhetoric, he held, embraces any form of discourse designed to win the soul.…The fact that we have not always shown an awareness of the wide range of rhetoric envisioned by Plato is due, in part, to our excessive preoccupation with the Phaedrus and Gorgias.” See Golden (18). McAdon insists that Plato denounces rhetoric completely in the Phaedrus (“Plato's Denunciation” 22).

¹¹See Gooch (32–41).

¹²Cicero (209).

¹³For reasons of space, I will focus this article on Plato, and fill out the role of Aristotle in a subsequent study.

¹⁴The phrase eis tous logous kataphûgonta [turn, flight or recourse into the logoi] occurs at Phaedo (99e). Socrates describes it as the decisive narrative moment of his life. Socrates admits that, from the experience of failure, he “had given up investigating realities [ta onta]” and embarked on “a second voyage,” a kind of demotion in which he relies on “some other medium“—he uses the metaphor of water, as though language were a kind of sea that we swim in (Phaedo 99d).

¹⁵Gadamer believed that we must now make newly alive “den alten weiten Sinn von Rhetorik” (Gadamer Lesebuch 295).

¹⁶ Gorgias (503b, 504d–e, 517a). Socrates distinguishes between sophistae and rhetorēs at 465c. As my analysis will show, Socrates can even be interpreted to associate this good oratory with his own dialegesthai.

¹⁷We thus have a correction operating from both directions: Aristotle correcting Plato's pythagorian tendencies, and Plato correcting Aristotle's monologic tendencies. In Aristotle's schematism the rational part of the soul has two faculties, one that contemplates invariable universals, and one that contemplates “those things which admit of variation” (Nichomachean Ethics VI, I, 5, H, 327).

¹⁸Mark Jordan refers to Gadamer's interpretation as “anti-textual” (582). Carol Poster called such interpretations “wishful thinking” (222). Others have rallied to Gadamer's view, and there is a growing body of scholars who take the “mixed world” approach. See for instance Randall, and Gonzalez.

¹⁹Gadamer vacillates between remonstrating that Plato does not offer a doctrine (particularly a two-worlds doctrine) and that he offers a mixed world doctrine. A contextual study of this self-contradiction would be valuable.

²⁰Gadamer, Century of Philosophy (52).

²¹Socrates as the model for the speculative-political bond is quite explicit in Gadamer's major study on Plato, The Idea of the Good (e.g., 68–75).

²²In 1907, Fred Newton Scott envisioned something very like this appropriation of Plato into rhetoric. See Mailloux (11–12).

²³“Let's open Plato's Gorgias one more time…” (Gadamer, Century of Philosophy 64). Like a good debater, Gadamer goes to the strength of his opponent's case.

²⁴Others supporting this view include Bizzell and Herzberg (56); Welch (100).

²⁵Schiappa theorizes that the term rhetorikē was Plato's neologism in the Gorgias (14–23).

²⁶I have chosen to translate dialegesthai here as dialogue rather than dialectic. Socrates's modeling of the art here emphasizes its social and discursive properties, rather than the technique of division and subsumption.

²⁷See also Gorgias (457c–458a) for a fuller development of this attribute.

²⁸Periodically Socrates regards rhetoric as a term of equivocation that comprehends various possible practices: “Yet indeed I do not know whether this is the rhetoric which Gorgias practices” (462e).

²⁹At 519d–e Socrates complains of being forced to speak at length without a conversation partner, but then immediately draws a firm distinction between sophistry and rhetoric (520b). Presumably the long speech can also be noble, if less so. The ambiguity is not resolved in the dialogue.

³⁰See for instance Berlin (11–12).

³¹In this respect he was a Hegelian, but, through Heidegger's influence, a partisan of Hegel's “bad infinite.”

³²Plato's explication of an ideal world is in Gadamer's mind a counter-factual offered to make the truth of the mixed world unavoidable.

³³Ibid., 101.

³⁴The Heracletian constituents of this theme are metaphysical unity: “The mind, to think of the accored that strains against itself, needs strength, as does the arm to string the bow or lyre” (frag. 45), disunity: “Two made one are never one. Arguing the same we disagree. Singing together we compete. We choose each other to be one, and from the one both soon diverge” (frag. 59), and the infinite task of understanding this tension: “The soul is undiscovered, though explored forever to a depth beyond report” (frag. 71) (Heraclitus 30, 38, 45).

³⁵See Plato, Theaetetus (152d), The Collected Dialogues (857).

³⁶Gadamer, The Idea of the Good (10).

³⁷Ibid., 50.

³⁸See, for instance, Philebus (16d, 61b, 22a).

³⁹The phrase “weakness of the logoi” [to ton logon asthenes] occurs in the seventh letter, 343a. The Gadamer quote is from Dialogue and Dialectic (111). For Plato's description of linguistic multiplicity, see Theaetetus (202a–c).

⁴⁰This is the reason for Gadamer's longstanding and provocative claim that Plato did not underwrite what has become known as the doctrine of ideas.

⁴¹Our own incredulity to Gadamer's Plato stems in part from the concerns that preoccupy us, and we hardly know how things might look from this alternative perspective. It should be noted that ideas about the dialogues that Gadamer was teaching forty years ago are now fashionable new trends in scholarship—what is called the “third way” in Plato interpretation, narrative and dialogic alternatives to doctrinal readings, the pro-Plato Aristotle, are claims that sounded strange and radical when he first pronounced them. The “third way” is to treat the dialogues neither exclusively as doctrine nor as poetic literature, but as “inviting us to a conversation in which we must actively participate” (Gonzalez 2). For instance, Gonzalez remarks: “To the unprejudiced reader, it is evident that there is no ‘theory of forms’ in the dialogues” (12). In 1992, Gail Fine concluded that Aristotle's interpretation of Plato is one “of pressing impressionistic language in one strightforward way, and of filling in incomplete arguments with the aid of Aristotelian assumptions” (15).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Arthos

John Arthos is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Denison University, Granville, OH 43023, USA.