Perelman, Condit, Quintilian, and the Rhetor's Well-Roundedness

Being a visual learner, creating a schema (and being exposed to others’ schemas) helped me contextualize Perelman’s ideas within a historical framework, something I found especially useful because I think it is important to understand the “cause and effect” aspect of theory development. Knowing how Aristotle influenced Perelman, and how Perelman influenced Condit, et cetera, helps me see development of rhetoric in the long run, as a time spectrum.

Jennifer writes that “Perelman was Aristotle in the spirit of Barthes… Perelman pulls focus, at least in part, away from the orator and more towards the audience.” I think this is very smart because the concept of “audience” is pivotal in terms of Perelman’s rhetorical structure, especially since he draws attention to this idea of the “presence,” which is comprised of whatever the rhetor picks out from among the audiences’ already established facts, beliefs, structures, etc. (1395) and weaves together in an attempt to foster “adherence” (1376). Perelman states that men gain adherence to varying degrees and that you’ll only know that degree if you seek it (page); in saying this, I believe he, in a way, poses rhetoric as a kind of practice as well as art, but assigns to it a gravity that hadn’t been present since before the Renaissance.

One really important thing, here, is that adherence is born out of a “meeting of the minds” scenario (need to find page). Perelman wants to focus on the fact that people create their world (culture, institutions, future) through communication (1382), and because of this, he insists that the rhetor has to “adapt” his/her argument to fit with the audiences’ already established understandings (of life, politics, culture, etc.). To appeal to them, you have to meet them beliefs-wise.

This assertion reminded me almost immediately of Quintilian, who states on (page) that, to be a good rhetor, you’ve got to do your research if you’re going to speak about a field/area/culture that’s outside your own. He and Perelman seem to share the idea that rhetoric forces you to continually seek out education from others or even self-educate.
 
And while Perelman seems to discuss just the good rhetorician, Quintilian discusses the ‘good man,’ and asserts that a good rhetorician is a good man. We can recognize that educating ourselves continually, throughout our lives, about others’ customs, beliefs, et cetera, makes us more well-rounded, (and while I’m not trying to conflate 'well-roundedness' with the idea of being a “good person,” I am saying that the act of endeavoring to understand others and 'meeting them halfway' is considered virtuous) in addition to being a more prepared rhetor (however, I would say that this idea is more foundational to Perelman’s rhetoric than it is to Quintilian’s, since Perelman emphasizes the importance of constructing a “presence” and Quintilian mentions this idea as part of a series of improvements a rhetor could undertake to become better at what he/she does). 

Condit’s argument, or her addition to Perelman's (which she says "created the possibility of crediting a more full panoply of rhetorical options anew" (109)), is an extension of this effort toward 'knowledge-of-the-other-based' well-roundedness that Perelman and Quintilian (and Aristotle, etc.) have already advocated. Perelman may be linking us to rhetoric in antiquity, but Condit is too because she’s trying to expand his argument to include the full spectrum of human habits in terms of how they address and respond to others and exigencies- that is, she recognizes that Perelman privileges reason over emotion (Condit 98) and then (appropriately) throws pathos back into the mix ("...without passion, there is no humanity" (102)), and in so doing, creates a more "full-bodied theory that could give us a sufficiently broad range of topics" (104).

Not only this, but she shares Perelman’s focus on the rhetor-audience mental connection (107). Neither is suggesting or advocating that humans become disembodied in order to practice rhetoric- although, I feel, in agreement with Sarah and Kyle, that Condit’s extension of Perelman’s argument better addresses the idea of fully-functioning, embodied humans. She is right to draw attention to the fact that we are thinking and feeling creatures, and that we make decisions and arguments using both of those faculties.