Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca: Introduction

The history of Chaim Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s “new rhetoric” and its arrival on American shores tells an interesting story even when in its most condensed and basic form. The product of a philosopher who had discovered rhetoric relatively late in his career working closely with a scholar who was well-versed in literature, the new rhetoric was brought to the United States by another philosopher turned rhetoric enthusiast (Henry Johnstone). The story is well known and its main point, no matter how obvious, deserves to he stressed: rhetoric and philosophy have a history of not only repudiation but also discovery and embracing. This relationship is significant for this special issue because the essays we feature appropriately focus on some of the deepest and, often, most difficult aspects of the new rhetoric, including, particularly, the sometimes easy to miss or underestimate philosophical assumptions behind some of its main concepts (such as the arbitrary from an epistemological perspective or the universal in the context of logic). Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca pursued a theory of, specifically, argumentation, as the main title in the French original of their book signaled, but one embedded in a theory of knowledge that was quite ahead of its time in certain aspects – one might say even post-structuralist avant la lettre in its emphasis on community, truthfulness, and the individual subject.

Many scholars in our discipline have complained that the work of the two Belgians is insufficiently studied, even though their status is as high as that of thinkers who receive far more attention, such as Kenneth Burke. The reason for this relative neglect, comparatively speaking, might be in part connected to the simple fact that they were not American. We take this possibility seriously: we recognize the need for more translations from Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s rhetorical corpus that would make an expanded corpus more accessible and for more work situating their rhetoric in its historical context. Thus, this special issue consists of a translation; an essay that examines the role of translation in Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s own work, not just as transposition from one language into another but more broadly as a transfer of ideas across intellectual traditions; and two critical essays. This structure reflects, we hope, some of the general challenges scholars face when engaging with the work of the two Belgian thinkers, from the need to expand the corpus of their writings about rhetoric for English-speaking audiences, to the importance of thematizing translation as a conceptual focus that matters in their case, and finally to the continuing demand for analytic applications of their theoretical ideas.

With the first contribution to this special issue Advances in the History of Rhetoric continues a long-standing commitment to publishing translations of important works in the history of rhetoric – in this issue a translation by Michelle Bolduc and David A. Frank of Perelman’s “l’arbitraire dans laconnaissance” (hereafter, l’arbitraire), a work first published in 1933. This work serves as a philosophical proemium to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric (NR). The burden Perelman accepts in l’arbitraire is to discredit the idea – dear to logical positivists and rigorous empiricists – that there are procedures – deductive, inductive, empirical – that can, if followed, produce conclusions that are logically necessary and therefore universally valid. This same argument Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s set forth in the Introduction and Framework to the New Rhetoric some twenty-five years later. All argument ultimately rests on an element that is arbitrary,¹ Perelman argues in 1933, concluding that, in Frank and Bolduc’s translation, “tolerance between groups, all of which are established by means of value judgments”² is the only basis for all reasonable truth claims. If we substitute NR’s “noncompulsive elements”³ (NR 1) for “arbitrary,” and NR’s “community of minds”⁴ and “preliminary conditions”⁵ (NR 14) for l’arbitraire’s “tolerance between groups”, we can readily see l’arbitraire as providing the philosophical underpinnings of NR. The work will be of interest to theorists studying Perelman’s philosophical development or attempting to place the New Rhetoric in its philosophical milieu.

The second contribution to the issue is Michelle Bolduc’s “Translation and Translatio in the New Rhetoric Project’s Rediscovery of Rhetoric,” which is based on a section from her forthcoming Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric. We think the work is an important and fascinating contribution to our understanding of the origin and evolution of the “new” rhetoric. Bolduc traces how Perelman took inspiration from the Italian philosopher Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto (translated into French as Li Livres dou Tresor), an encyclopedic work that included a section on rhetoric, heavily influenced by Cicero’s De Inventione. Perelman was led to the work by Jean Paulhan, an important literary theorist whom Perelman most likely discovered through Olbrechts-Tyteca. Thus, Bolduc documents Olbrechts-Tyteca’s role in the origin of the new rhetoric, a role that has been under-appreciated. Latini’s Ciceronian and therefore philosophical (as distinguished from literary) sense of rhetoric was most compatible with Perelman’s. As Bolduc also documents, Perelman’s philosophical orientation contrasted with the more literary and linguistic interests of his contemporaries Barthes, Genette, and Ricoeur, with whom Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca shared a complicated relationship. What is most interesting about Bolduc’s history is how differently Paulhan and Perelman understood the importance of Latini’s work on rhetoric. The intellectual genealogy Bolduc reconstructs points to potentially fertile further investigations into the differences in philosophical assumptions and method of study between Perelman and some of the most prominent French language theorists of the time. These differences make it tempting to wonder if perhaps Perelman had a very different vision, not only of rhetoric, but more broadly of language and discourse than, for example, Barthes and Genette. Put bluntly: was he, similar to Ricoeur, too much of a heretic by the standards of these diehards of structuralism? By tracing the historical trajectory of Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca road to rhetoric, Bolduc helps us understand how unique, or even idiosyncratic, they most likely were in the intellectual context of the time, dominated as it was by structuralism.

Perhaps this unique, unorthodox intellectual position is partly the reason their contribution to rhetoric is in the paradoxical position of being simultaneously praised and criticized, often for the very same ideas. Praised for conceptual sophistication, but also charged with incoherence or internal contradictions, considered both very general in their applicability and accused of being too dependent on (often obscure) philosophical examples, these ideas have nonetheless exerted a deep influence on the field. Yet they continue to baffle scholars who wish to assess their analytic purchase and to apply them saliently. Two concepts are especially fraught: the universal audience and the dissociation of concepts. It is fitting, then, that our two analysis essays offer a provocative reading of the universal audience by Alan G. Gross, and, in Justin D. Hatch’s essay, an illustration of how the dissociation of concepts can function subversively, not only influencing our perception of reality but in fact transforming it. A senior scholar and a junior one show us both how relevant the New Rhetoric is for enduring rhetorical questions, and, at the same time, how difficult it can be to pin down the conceptual scope of its terms. Gross’s focus is on clarifying what Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca meant by “universal” in coining the term of art “universal audience,” and to this end he puts Perelman in dialog with himself, or rather with a (mis)-representation of himself. Parsing out carefully various readings of the concept of the universal audience, Gross builds upon his own work, done in collaboration with Ray Dearin, as well as expands it to address more recent (by his account) misunderstandings. Whereas Gross addresses fellow rhetorical critics rather reproachfully at times, Hatch finds himself in large agreement with other scholars who have engaged with the dissociation of concepts. The main task he sets for himself is to clarify the analytic significance of the term and to assert, more forcefully than previous scholars, the epistemic and political power of dissociations of concepts.

We see these four contributions as advancing the study of the New Rhetoric in significant ways, getting us ever more closely to giving its authors a fully deserved comprehensive attention.

Notes

1. “La verification en general a de l’arbitraire å sa base,” p. 24. All French quotations are from “De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance,” Archives de la Societe belge de Philosophie, vol. 3, 1933, pp. 5–44.

2. “Tolerance entre groups basés tous sur des jugements de valeur,” l’arbitraire, p. 44.

3. “Non contraignant,” Traité de l’Argumentation, p. 1. All French quotations are from Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité de l’Argumentation: La nouvelle rhetoric, 2nd ed., Editions de l’Institut de Sociologie, 1970.

4. “Une communauté des espirits,” Traité de l’Argumentation, p.18.

5. “Conditions prealables,” Traité de l’Argumentation, p.18.