Signposts and Revival

Perhaps I am just going to have to get use to the idea that in order to “find” myself , in terms of understanding what rhetorical theorists are talking about, I need to first allow myself to feel “lost” for a while. This week’s reading from Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric was a case in point. Before I continue into a discussion of what I think Perelman is advancing in New Rhetoric, let me first raise the phenomena of what reading Perelman (or anyone) under the framework of the schemata assignment does. Having something like the schemata assignment tasked to you before you begin your reading a material places your mind in a mode of alertness and anticipation. You are looking out for key points that will aide you when it comes time to put pen to paper. I find that after I am done with a reading it is these key points that stand at the forefront of my thinking on the material, and thus, they are what most strongly inform my reasoning. When my group divided the labor for our schemata (which we undertook in the form of a concept map) it became my job to look for the links between Perelman’s theory and other rhetorical theorists. So, not surprisingly, when I turned the last page on our excerpt of The New Rhetoric and I looked at the notes I made and the connections I drew I said to myself: “my goodness this is all just about digging up Aristotle!” I have come to take Perelman’s work to be simultaneously an effort to refocus Aristotelian Rhetoric to the forefront of intellectual attention, and a “surgery”, if you will, to redress a perceived ineptitude in how Aristotle’s work on the subject has been passed down through history.


In order to “find” my way around Perelman’s Rhetoric I embedded as a signpost the idea that the origin of this entire theory lies in the personal narrative of Perelman’s search for justice. In 1945 Perelman published his paper on justice which argued from a logical empiricists stand point that “formal justice is a principle of action, according to which beings of one and the same essential category must be treated in the same way.”(1389). The dilemma came when Perelman realized that the criteria with which this rule rests- the indication of “which categories are relevant and how their members should be treated,”- was foundationally a system of value judgments (1389). Here I was lost again until I came to appreciate what it meant to come from a positivist/ logical empiricist background. In Perelma’s words, for the neopositivist “the rational is restricted to what experience and formal logic enable us to verify and demonstrate. As a result, the vast sphere of all that is concerned with action…is turned over to the irrational.”[italics added] (1404). So in 1945 Perelman came to rest an entire theory of justice on something that he realized could not positively be demonstrated and verified. “I was led inevitably to the conclusion,” he write, “that if justice consist in the systematic implementation of certain value judgments, it does not rest on any rational foundation.” (1389). This is ultimately the exigency out of which the New Rhetoric emerged from. Perelman’s answer was to create a “theory of argumentation” in order to provide a rational foundation from which to reason about value judgment and other things for which we cannot furnish demonstrable proofs (1390).

It was the appreciation of the intellectual climate surrounding the birth of New Rhetoric that made me understand why, having just read out of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, was it a big deal for someone to claim that we could arrive to acceptable standards of truth and knowledge through Rhetoric. Well, the big deal was that for several intervening centuries scholars were not doing this and claiming that which cannot be demonstrated is baseless. Instead, scholars have been reinterpreted rhetoric to be that art used to decorate language, what Perelman has defined as this modern “stylistic” interpretation (1385). So it took Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyceta to come out swinging and declare that if we continue to limit what we accept as rational knowledge to be only that which can be positively proven, we continue to scorn entire fields vital to human experience, the “moral, social, political, philosophical, or religious order [that] by their very nature elude the methods of the mathematical and natural sciences…”(1377).

To examine my growth in the traditional manner of a conclusion I would have to say that this week I came to realize that there is something at stake when we talk about what is rhetoric, and what is its function –potentially, anyway. Certainly up until this point I was conditioned to see rhetoric in light of the “stylistic” interpretation and was ignorant as to any epistemological role it could play. Tracing out Perelman’s theory in light of other rhetorical thinkers I came to have an awareness of just how many people he is fighting against, and how ardent he is in advocating a revival of Aristotle’s approach to informal reasoning. However, I use the word ‘potentially’ as a qualifier when talking about what’s at stake because I’m not sure if there really is that much on the line once we step out of the world of theoretical rhetoric. When I ask the question “how does what these persons are arguing about directly effect my life” I struggle for an answer. Perelman might say that if one sides with the philosophers who say they are no more inclined to make formal proof’s as tennis players are to make baskets, It would be siding with a school of thinking that universal deems all my and my fellow mans action as irrational; whereas, if I embrace argumentation as a means for arriving at knowledge- about myself or anything that lends itself to the art- I am embracing a new dawn for justice and good in human affairs. But really, is that what is at stake? Or am I caught in the middle of an intellectual fashion-trend dispute? At this point I am disinclined from saying yes or no to either. Instead, I’ll take Perelman’s work at face value for now and continue to kneed out what role- practical role- I could see for his work in an individual or a society’s daily affairs.