Rhetoric is Not Bad; It's Human

We should all work to harness the energy of rhetoric

In general parlance, the word “rhetoric” has bad connotations. It is associated with trickery, phoniness, and manipulation. Let’s look at a few recent headlines: “Trump is doubling down on rhetoric to end the Iran war”; “Tucker Carlson’s Divisive  Rhetoric  Raises Concerns About GOP’s Future”; “The Myth, Danger, and Normalization of Holocaust Rhetoric”; and “GOP: Vandalism fueled by toxic rhetoric.” None of these put rhetoric in a good light. They all suggest that rhetoric is a tool for nefarious ne’er-do-wells and no one else. The negative connotations reflected in these headlines are misleading. Rhetoric is juxtaposed to truth when, in reality, truth is in dire need of rhetoric.

Rhetoric is the skill of discerning which words and delivery will convey real knowledge as clearly as possible to real people. Rhetoric is not something used only by the cunning; it is used by anyone who wants to get their point across, and that is everyone. The need for this skill does not discriminate between good and evil. Rhetoric is as intrinsically human as eating and breathing. It is a necessary skill to be used regardless of one’s moral purity. In fact, if the morally pure can use it, they can better combat those morally impure who abuse it.

Aptitude vs Moral Purpose

Perhaps decoupling the term from ignobility and mendacity is in order. Persuasion couched in trickery, phoniness, and manipulation, i.e., the kind of rhetoric represented in the above headlines, is called by a different label among rhetoricians. That label is “Sophistry,” named after the group of teachers and philosophers who, according to the most popular accounts, taught how to sound intelligent without actually being intelligent.

Aristotle wrote, “What makes a man a ‘sophist’ [as opposed to one who uses rhetoric] is not his faculty, but his moral purpose.” Rhetoric is a skill, an aptitude, to be wielded by a variety of characters. To take liberties with a culture war refrain, “Rhetoric doesn’t trick people; people trick people.”

Rhetoric is an imperative skill in a free and liberal society. If one cannot convey the truth in a way most receptive to an audience, one will be bested by someone who can couch lies in a way most receptive to an audience. Rhetoric is not just about persuasion; it is about protection from “sophistry.” Aristotle, when talking about the necessity of rhetorical skill in public deliberation, wrote,

[I]t is absurd to hold that a man out to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being that the use of his limbs. … A man can confer the greatest of benefits by a right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly.^¹

To take even more creative license with Second Amendment clichés, “The only way to stop a bad guy with rhetoric is a good guy with rhetoric.”

But notice the human quality to rhetoric. Aristotle analogizes the use of rhetoric with the ability to defend oneself against potential physical threats. Potential mental threats are more common and abundant. Where the human body needs martial skills, the human psyche may need rhetorical skills.

Mind and Soul

Before Aristotle penned his treatise on rhetoric, his teacher, Plato, also had a revelation that graduated rhetoric from the weapon of deceivers to the medium of truthtellers. Plato’s Phaedrus is a tacit mea culpa for denigrating rhetoric about 2 decades earlier in The Gorgias, where he said that rhetoric was mere “flattery,” and “not an art but a habitude or knack” unconcerned with truth.² Plato is kinder to rhetoric in The Phaedrus and crafts a new description of it acknowledging that everyone must use it to some degree, but that, in order to use it as a supplement to the truth, one must speak to the human soul.

Yes, the soul. Plato writes that anyone who wants to perfect or teach rhetoric “will, in the first place, describe the soul very precisely, and let us see whether it is single and uniform in nature or, analogously to the body, complex. For to do that is, we maintain, to show a thing’s nature.” He continues,

And secondly, he will describe what natural capacity it has to act upon what, and through what means, or by it can be acted upon. ... Thirdly, he will classify the types of discourse and the types of soul, and the various ways in which souls are affected, explaining the reasons in each case, suggesting the type of speech appropriate to each type of soul, and showing what kind of speech can be relied on to create belief in one soul and disbelief in another, and why.³

We go deeper than mundane humanity and address the human soul. That is, to truly get another to understand the truth, one first needs to know the nature of one’s soul and shape one’s words accordingly. To know one’s audience in an effective way is to know their values, attitudes, beliefs, hopes, and ideals: the things many would say constitute the human soul.

Rhetoric is a sine qua non for the mind and the soul; it is of instrumental necessity to both. This cannot be a bad thing. If so, human nature and the congruence of mind and soul would be a bad thing. Rhetoric must consider a person as a confluence of mind and soul.

By extension, empathy, of both the affective and cognitive variety, is a necessary part of rhetoric, especially when speaking to one’s soul, as it were. Thus, in a sense rhetoric is not just an extension of human experience. It can also enhance human experience because it is partly constituted by compassion. It is a practical compassion, but compassion, nonetheless. Empathy and compassion are powerful forces—life forces—in the human experience. Effective rhetoric does not work without them.

Rhetoric is a Life Force

Yes, rhetoric is a kind of life force. One need not be especially “woo-woo” to say such a thing. Civilizations are built and maintained by verbal persuasion. Rhetoric, then, is a skill that can move people’s hearts, minds, and wills. An anonymous definition of rhetoric from the 15^th Century reads “[Rhetoric] is the science which refreshes the hungry, renders the mute articulate, makes the blind see, and teaches one to avoid every lingual ineptitude.”⁴This seems a bit dramatic, but the implication is clear: rhetoric is powerful and almost esoteric, like some kind of life force that drives persuasion, motivation, and will. The rhetorician George Kennedy spoke of rhetoric as a kind of energy.

Rhetoric in the most general sense may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication: the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expended in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message.⁵

If we see rhetoric as energy, we can infer that it can be applied in a variety of ways toward a variety of directions. It is a force available to us all, and those who hone that force into a skill are the ones that will make the biggest differences in human interactions.

Rhetoric can be used for bad, but it is an ultimate good. We should all work to harness its energy.

1. Aristotle, Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 3^rd ed, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020, 212.

2. Plato. Gorgias. In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020. 115.

3. Plato, Phaedrus. Trans. R. Hackforth. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. 271a-272a.

4. Quoted in Harry Caplan, “Classical Rhetoric and the Medieval Theory of Preaching.” Of Eloquence: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Rhetoric. Ed. Anne King and Helen North. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970. 109.

5. George A. Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 2.