Weaver, Richard. The Ethics of Rhetoric.

Rhetoric in society reflects the order or disorder of that society’s soul (speaking loosely). For example, the 17 century represented heroic mental energy (seen in Milton’s prose), the 18th century saw counterpoise and balance (seen in the magnificent Dr Johnson). The 20th and 21st centuries, given postmodern and nihilistic chaos, have almost lost the ability to communicate with grace and style.

Phaedrus and the nature of rhetoric

Plato gives us embodiments of three types of discourse: the non-lover, the evil lover, and the good lover (Weaver 6). The non lover uses a purified speech (think mathematics).

Term of policy: a term of motion. Motion is part of the soul’s essence (17). When we educate a soul we begin a process of rightly affecting its motion. “True rhetoric is concerned with the potency of things” and “potentiality is a mode of existence” (20).

Back to the problem: if truth alone is incapable of moving someone, then what else is needed? Plato reminds us that the soul is more than just cognition, but impulse (23). Proper rhetoric, then, reanimates the soul “by holding up to its sight the order of presumptive goods. This order is necessarily a hierarchy leading up to the ultimate good. All of the terms in a rhetorical vocabulary are like links in a chain stretching up to some master link which transmits its influence down through the linkages” (23).

Edmund Burke and the Argument from Circumstance

Edmund Burke rightly feared and hated the French Revolution, as all godly patriots must. His command of English prose was rivaled only by Johnson and Gibbon. Unfortunately, Gibbon hamstrung his efforts by what Weaver called “the argument from circumstance.” Men as disparate from Plato to Lincoln argued from genus, which is an argument made from the nature of the thing (56). This is why even today Lincoln’s greatest rhetorical moment was only 80 seconds long, but delivered with a rhetorical force that few can match. Burke, unfortunately, argued from “the facts surrounding the case” (57). These facts determined the strongest premise of his argument.

His defense of the English Revolution of 1688 illustrates the problem. By precedent England had a generational defense and practice of property and rights that are upheld by the monarchy. All well and good. In fact, paradoxically, England took up arms to prove they didn’t have the right to overthrow the government. Here is Burke’s problem: “What line do the precedents mark out for us? How may we know that this particular act is in conformity with the body of precedents unless we can abstract the essence of the precedent? And if one extracts the essence of the precedent, does not one have a speculative idea” (74)?

Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, had a much more powerful form of rhetoric: the argument from genus.

How to Write Well: Aspects of Grammatical Structure

This is the money of the book. Weaver demonstrates why some writers succeed where others fail.

The basic sentence: the mind is taking two or more classes and uniting them to the extent they share a formal unity (117). “The single subject-predicate frame has the broad sense of listing or itemizing” (119). Its brevity makes it a useful sentence to begin or end with.

The complex sentence: distinguishes classes according to hierarchy or cause and effect. Gibbon: “Rome fell because valor declined.” As Weaver notes, “It brings in the notion of dependence to supplement that of simple togetherness” (121).

The compound sentence: its structure conforms to a settled view of the world. It sees the world as an equilibrium of forces. This was the essence of the 18th century. We see the impulse for counterpoise. “One finds these compounds recurring: an abstract statement is balanced (in a second independent clause) by a more concrete expression of the same thing; a fact is balanced by its causal explanation” (125).

The noun: nouns connote substances (127). The noun/substance thus has a relationship in the sentence in which other words are “about” it.

The adjective: Weaver notes: “One of the common mistakes of the inexperienced writer, in prose as well as poetry, is to suppose that the adjective can set the key of discourse….nearly always the adjective has to have the way prepared for it. Otherwise, the adjective introduced before the noun collapses for want of support” (130). Of course, there are exceptions. There is nothing wrong with saying “The hot day.”

Take Henley’s poem:

Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole.

In this case the noun (night) has preceded the adjective (black). Had Henley said something like Black is the night or something like that, he would have lost his rhetorical force. “The adjective would have been presumptuous” (131).

In other words, the danger is that we are tempted to make the adjective bear more weight than the substantive.

Conjunctives: be careful here. Therefore doesn’t mean the same as thus. Therefore means “in consequence of” whereas thus means “in this manner,” and so indicates that some manner has already been described” (138).

“Also” simply denotes some mechanical sort of addition. “While” means at the same time. Whereas suggests some precise relationship.

Phrase: “the strength normally found in the preposition can be greatly diminished by connection with an abstract noun” (139).

Participial phrase: the participial phrase allows for sharp, succinct language and “the opportunities of subordination” (140). The “man who is carrying a spear” becomes “the spear-carrying man.” These auxiliary structures in the sentence allows for the central though to emerge more readily. Weaver notes that because English intonation places emphasis on the last word in the sentence, participial phrases should not be at the end of the sentence (140).

Lagniappe

The rhetorical syllogism is the enthymeme. The audience supplies the missing proposition.

I don't imagine most people would find this book exciting, but I did. My studies of English have not ended with attaining a bachelor's degree in the subject. I continue to read broadly in my field. The reason I was so excited to read this book is that this is the most enlightening book on the subject that I have ever read. His nuanced readings of various speeches and writings, as well as his broader perspectives on word use in our culture were intriguing. This is the third book that I've read by Weaver. I've read Ideas Have Consequences and his Southern Essays. Both books were very well written, and full of insight. I knew from his writings that he had a keen understanding of rhetoric, and that he might have something to teach me. He certainly did, and I will be reading more of his books.

Weaver opens his book by arguing for the structural and thematic unity of Plato’s Phaedrus, and his Platonism persists undiluted throughout the book. Weaver’s interpretation of the Phaedrus is that the lovers represented by each of the dialogue’s three opening speeches are allegories for different types of language. The “non-lover” of Lysias’ speech represents the cold logic of “neutral,” scientific language--a ideal “semantically purified speech” Weaver doesn’t think could be realized (7). Socrates’ first speech represents “evil” rhetoric--the deceitful, manipulative use of language--and his second speech represents “good” rhetoric. The latter, for Weaver as for Plato, must be predicated on rigorous dialectic. Good rhetoric is what gets “added on” to “truth” when the latter is “not sufficient to persuade men,” while dialectic is “a method of investigation whose object is the establishment of truth about doubtful propositions” (15). For Weaver, “[W]hen the disputed terms have been established, we are at the limit of dialectic,” and rhetoric can safely take over (17). In the opening chapter, then, Weaver seems to shift the classical stasis points of conjecture and definition (especially definition) to dialectic, leaving rhetoric with policy and some aspects of value.

In fact, stasis theory guides--though usually not explicitly--much of Weaver’s text. In his case study of the Scopes Monkey Trial, he is largely concerned with illustrating that the prosecution and the defense were arguing different stasis points (the former focused on an issue of lawfulness, the latter on an issue of scientific truth). Chapters on Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln focus on the stasis points from which the two men tended to argue. Lincoln, who Weaver claims argued from definition, is the better of the pair: “Lincoln came early to the conclusion that human nature is a fixed and knowable thing” (87), and “proved his greatness through his habit of transcending and defining his objects” (108). He thus “came to repudiate … those people who try by relativistic interpretations and other sophistries to evade the force of some basic principles” (106). Lincoln was a Hegelian, not a Nietzschean, and thus an exemplar of good conservatism for Weaver. That is, Lincoln was a “true” conservative with “a trust in the methods of law [as] … the embodiment of abstract justice” (113), not the sort of modern conservative who “worship[s] … Mammon” (114).

Convinced of the existence of transcendent, essential, dialectically obtainable categories, Weaver goes on to parse the rhetorical significance of various grammatical categories (complex sentences, simple sentences, nouns, adverbs, etc.). Nouns, for instance, are more real than most other sorts of words, coming to us “peculiarly fulfilled” (128). Throughout his chapter on the rhetoric of grammar, Weaver gestures with distress toward the potential tyranny of language: “[O]wing to its public acceptance, while you are doing something with it, it is doing something with you, or with your intention.” All in all, however, Weaver’s elucidation of the rhetoric of grammar seems to precede from the conviction that rigorous enough attention/intention can turn the tables on language, putting the rhetor back in charge: “language is something which is born psychological but is ever striving to become logical.... that is why one must think about the rhetorical nature even of grammatical categories” (142).

Hearkening back to his confidence in Lincoln’s and Plato’s unimpeachable natures, Weaver turns to lamenting (though without expressing much explicit support for) the loss of “spaciousness” in rhetoric. That is, he notes that “the homogeneity of belief which obtained three generations ago has largely disappeared. Such belief was … the old orator’s capital” (167). This “capital” allowed the orator to take a lot for granted, throwing around abstract dialectical terms and without carefully defining each one. The speeches of these orators “have resonances, both historical and literary, and … this resonance is what [Weaver calls] … spaciousness” (169). In contemporary debates, however, “disagreement is over extremely elementary matters, survival itself may be at stake” (171). Weaver offers “modern debates over the validity of the law of contradiction” as an example. Like Lincoln, he’s no Nietzschean. And yet Weaver also seems to regret the following development: “From the position that only propositions are interesting because they alone make judgments, we are passing to a position in which only evidence is interesting because it alone is uncontaminated by propositions. In brief, interest has shifted from inference to reportage” (172). Though not strictly Nietzschean, Weaver’s apparent nostalgia here seems connected to post-Nietzschean critiques of the truth-claims of science and calls for a return to the rhetorical methodologies of the ancient sophists. Of course, for Weaver, careful dialectical work must precede rhetoric in order to avoid dangerous sophistry. And Weaver is back in Platonic form when he claims, “The true orator has little concern with singularity … because the singular is the impertinent” (176). The second half of that claim seems a key point at which poststructuralist rhetorical theory has really diverged from Weaver.

So Weaver wraps up by critiquing the scientific pretensions of 1950s social science, claiming it’s a dialectical rather than scientific undertaking which needs to reconcile its nature as such. Social “scientists’” scientific, anti-poetic pretensions are undercut [1] by recent theories of metaphor, “now receiving serious attention [which claim] that metaphor is itself a means of discovery.... one of the most important heuristic devices” (203, with an allusion to “the meaning of meaning” hinting that Weaver has the work of I. A. Richards in mind?), and [2] by social scientists’ optimism:

In all writing which has come to be regarded as wisdom about the human being, there is an undertone of the sardonic. Man at his best is a sort of caricature of himself.... The comic animal must be there before we can grant that the representation is ‘true.’ The typical social science report, even when it discusses situations in which baseness and irrationality figure prominently, does not get in this ingredient. (200-1)

Weaver piggybacks an additional clarification of rhetoric’s definition on the chapter’s end: “a process of coordination and subordination which is very close to the essential thought process” (210).
t
Taking a page for Kenneth Burke (whom he cites directly), Weaver ends by looking at “Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric.” He argues that “progress,” and secondarily “fact,” “science,” “American,” “modern,” and “efficient” are the predominant “god terms” of his day. “History” is on the wane as a god term, while “un-American,” “prejudice,” and especially “Communist” are the reigning “devil terms.” Meanwhile, “charismatic terms” like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “the war effort” float unmoored from any clear referent so that “‘[w]ar effort’ became for a period of years the supreme term.... It was a term to end all other terms or a rhetoric to silence all other rhetoric. No one was able to make his claim heard against ‘the war effort’” (231). Meanwhile, traditional value hierarchies, like the “exterme altruism” of Christianity (226), are being upended by the violence heaped on young GIs--who turn to the vocabularies of sex, war, and shit in order to cope--and in the arenas of competitive sports. Though Weaver relies on some dubious propositions along the way (“It must be observed in passing that no people are so prejudiced in the sense of being committed to valuations as those who are engaged in castigating others for prejudice” [223-4].), he does note some noteworthy contradictions in dominant American ideologies (“the acquisitive, hard-driving local capitalist is made the chief lay official of a Christian church” [227]), as well as some persistent, if not transcendent, political concerns. Concerned the language will get the best of us in the end, Weaver ends by writing,

The machinery of propagation and inculcation is today so immense that no one avoids entirely the assimilation and use of some terms which have a downward tendency.... Perhaps the best that any of us can do is to hold a dialectic with himself to see what the wider circumferences of his terms of persuasion are. This process will not only improve the consistency of one’s thinking but it will also, if the foregoing analysis is sound, prevent his becoming a creature of evil public forces and a victim of his own thoughtless rhetoric. (232)

So dialectic is the key to ethics, but rhetoric still has some potentially noble role to play.