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The Ethics of Rhetoric

4.03 of 5 stars 4.03 · rating details · 33 ratings · 4 reviews

Weaver's "Ethics of Rhetoric, " originally published in 1953, has been called his most important statement on the ethical and cultural role of rhetoric. A strong advocate of cultural conservatism, Weaver (1910-1953) argued strongly for the role of liberal studies in the face of what he saw as the encroachments of modern scientific and technological forces in society. He wa...more

Paperback, 240 pages

Published November 1st 1995 by Routledge (first published January 1st 1953)

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Sep 11, 2012 Eric rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: field-exam, rhet-comp

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). Socr...more 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).

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.(less)

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Sep 21, 2011 Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: rhetoric, rhetoric-field-exam

Enjoyed reading this quite a bit. It does seem old-fashioned, though, in its neo-Platonism and its form, but, my, it seems so enjoyable and applicable. I love the connotation/denotation bit quite a lot, and naturally, I’m inclined towards the power of poetic language. It’s sad that this has fallen out of favor because things like chivalry and the power of rhetoric to improve someone’s life are things that I so desperately want to believe in.

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Jun 01, 2009 Christopher Hurtado marked it as to-read

The Ethics of Rhetoric by Richard M. Weaver (1995)

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Mar 30, 2009 Douglas Wilson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: wordsmithing

Very good.

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About Richard M. Weaver

American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as a shaper of mid- 20th century conservatism and as an authority on modern rhetoric. A solitary figure in 20th-century American academic life, briefly a socialist in his youth, a lapsed leftist intellectual conservative by the time he was in graduate school, a teacher of composition, a Platonist philosopher wh...more

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