On the End of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern Author(s): S. M. Halloran Reviewed work(s): Source: College English, Vol.

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Vol. 36, No. 6

FEBRUARY

1975

College English

S. M. HALLORAN

On the End of Rhetoric, Classicaland Modern

(Institutio Oratoria, XII, i, 1). The master of rhetoric was the man who had DEFINES classical the EDWARD P.J. CORBETT interiorized all that was best in his culture tradition of rehetoric as extending from and applied this knowledge in public the fifth century B.C. down to the close forums, influencing his fellow citizens to of the eighteenth century A.D.1 There think and act in accord with their comare in actuality many distinct theories of mon cultural heritage. He was the man rhetoric that arose during this period, but of such broad knowledge and general they are unified by a single cultural ideal. that he could apply the That ideal was stated by the Greeks in competency accumulated wisdom of the culture to the word arete, signifying the quality of the particular case in a sufficiently logical excellence in all modes of human endeafashion to move his hearers' minds (lovor, a quality valued above any specialgos), and with enough emotional force to ized talent because it was considered the their passions (pathos). The name foundation of good citizenship. In Rome, engage for the third of the traditional modes of the ideal was most succinctly stated by rhetorical appeal, ethos, indicates the Quintillian, who described the perfect importance of the orator's mastery of the orator as "a good man skilled in speaking" cultural heritage; through the cogency of his logical and emotional appeals he S. M. Halloran is Assistant Professor of Combecame a kind of living embodiment of munication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he recently completed the doctorate in that heritage, a voice of such apparent communication and rhetoric. He has published authority that the word spoken by this articles in The Centennial Review, Philosophy man was the word of communal wisdom, and Rhetoric, and other journals. 1Edward P. J. Corbett, "Survey of Rhetoric" a word to be trusted for the weight of the in Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student man who spoke it and the tradition he (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), spoke for. pp. 535-68.
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Classical rhetoric, then, rested on the assumption that wisdom is open and publicly available. In principle if not in fact, the individual was assumed to be capable of knowing everything worth knowing. The orator was a polymath rather than a specialist. This is why Aristotle sees the common lines of argument-those applicable to any sort of argument, such as the possible and the impossible-as being of more central concern to rhetoric than the special lines of argument which apply only to particular fields of argumentation. The world of classical rhetoric-its complex of images and values and the motives for action that arise from them-was a known world, a world in which common sense prevailed over specialized knowledge. The Renaissance was in an important sense the rebirth of a culture built upon this rhetorical ideal of the man who took all knowledge as his province, wore his learning with grace and dignity, and wielded his universal mastery in the forum of practical affairs.2 The Middle Ages had been anti-rhetorical in that knowledge had been arcane, pursued and preserved in the isolation of the monastery. Renaissance figures such as Petrarch, Erasmus, and Francis Bacon virtually reincarnated the classical ideal of a culture so publicly knowable that it could be embodied in a single man. These men aspired to becoming the living ethos of their age, and one might argue that they succeeded. What is important, however, is the existence of the ideal rather than the possibility of its realization. The image of the politically and socially active polymath as a cultural ideal
2The influence of the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition on Italian humanists of the fourteenthand early fifteenth-centuries is traced in Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanismz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

survived through the Enlightenment. As serious amateurs of science, writers of considerable talent, and politically engaged men, Voltaire in Europe and Benjamin Franklin in America were inheritors of the tradition of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Bacon, who in turn were descendants of Cicero. But while eighteenth century science was still in a state where the amateur could make a significant contribution, Newton was in the process of raising"it to the level of a highly specialized activity, accessible only to the man who will subordinate all other interests to it, cultivating what Whitehead has called a "celibacy of the intellect." Appropiately, Newton himself was not a polymath but a one-sided eccentric with no taste at all for the public controversies in which Quintillian's good man would exercise his skill in speaking. The tradition of classical rhetoric, then, is defined principally by the image of the Orator as a cultural idea. He appears in Greece as the man who possesses arete, in Rome as "the good man skilled in speaking," later as The Renaissance Man, and later still as the Enlightenment's "man of reason." He takes all knowledge as his province, becomes a kind of living repository of the accumulated wisdom of the culture, and puts what he knows to practical use in guiding the conduct of human affairs. The existence of such a cultural model implies certain assumptions about the world, namely that it is knowable, that values are coherent, that wisdom is public and can be fully mascered by one man, who in turn can relate the accumulated wisdom of mankind to the particular case at hand in a clear and persuasive fashion. II Today the image of the Orator as a

On the End of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern 623 cultural ideal seems thoroughly dead. Should a Demosthenes or a Cicero arise in the modern world, he might well be reduced to tormented gurgling, like the Orator who appears at the end of Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs. Where could he begin the process of inventio, of scanning the communal wisdom of our culture for arguments pertinent to the particular case at hand? From what premises would his argument proceed? What common values could he assume in his audience? The Orator is speechless because the assumptions about knowledge and the world on which his activity must be based are no longer valid. It is of interest that George Steiner, who sees the modern world as having evolved a "post-culture," finds the roots of this modern malaise in what he calls "the great ennui" that followed the disappointment of the romantic-utopian hopes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.3 He thus sees the "postculture" as having been born just this side of the point Corbett defines as the end of the period of classical rhetoric. Steiner has long been preoccupied with Nazis, particularly with their ability to appreciate great literature and art, and at the same time indulge in the barbarity of the "final solution." Steiner does not say so, but this phenomenon might well be taken as defining the death of the tradition of classical rhetoric. Quintillian's perfect orator was a "good man" largely because he was so intimately acquainted with Homer and Vergil, and this acquaintance was not merely a matter of feeling the beauty of their poetry, but of embodying the virtues they articulated. The ancients went to poetry not merely for delight, but for instruction also. What Steiner remarks in the Nazis' attitude toward art
3George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 1-26.

and literature is nothing more than their ability to see a picture or a poem as an artifact totally removed from the concerns of everyday life. In doing so, they were merely following the counsel of post-romantic aestheticism: Never attempt to make the images of great art the companions of your daily life; do not permit their mute splendor to pervade your everyday dreams. Rather, keep them apart from the dust and trivialities of daily life and linger with them only in the rare moments of elevated joy of iiving4 As a source of knowledge and value pertinent to the conduct of life, art has been declared null. Science likewise has been dominated by the ideal of disinterestedness and thus largely negated as a source of values pertinent to human affairs. This is not to deny the obvious fact that science has profound implications for the way we live, or that there are certain values implicit in the conduct of science. Certainly Jacob Bronowski makes a very persuasive case in Science and Human Values for his claim that the practice of science has reinforced certain important values, such as respect for truth and diversity of opinion. Yet even granting all Bronowski's claims, it remains true that the drive of modern science toward specialization and exactness has tended to remove the scientist from the arena of practical decisions on contingent human affairs, first because such matters are outside his specialty, and second because they are by definition inexact. At best, the scientist becomes an advisor making his "input" in turn with many other specialists to some decision-making ma4Georg Mehlis, "The Aesthetic Problem of Distance," in Susanne K. Langer (ed.) Reflections on Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 82 (Mehlis' essay first published in 1917).

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chine (human or otherwise) whose "output" no one individual scientist can be fullv identified with. Indeed, it is not quite true, as Bronowski seems to believe, that even those minimal values he is concerned with are generated by; the practice of empirical science. In his work as a scientist, a man must cultivate what Bronowski calls "the habit of truth," but once he leaves his laboratory he may and frequently does become as self-deceptive and prevaricating as anyone else. Scientific work demands that certain values be preserved within the walls of the laboratory and the pages of the journals, but it does not examine the nature of these values or otherwise pursue them per se. Nor does it demand that they apply outside the highly stylized framewvork of science itself. Faced with a question of how one ought to behave outside the laboratory, the scientist becomes like the man who assaulted Samuel Beckett and replied when asked why he had stabbed a total stranger, "Je ye sais pas."5 Modern science has made it possible to prolong and manipulate life in the most marvelous wvavs,but when asked in the particular case whether and how one ought to use these powers, the scientist can only shrug, "Je ne sais pGIs." His province is general laws, not particular cases. One could go on listing the many ways in which modern man has been denied the possibility of achieving knowledge on which he can base his life; the decline of religion would be another important theme. But our concern is simply to point out that the cultural ideal upon which the tradition of classical rhetoric rested is today moribund if not dead. There have been efforts to revive it, one
5The story is recounted in Martin Easlin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1969), p. 17.

of the most ambitious and interesting being the Great Books movement started at the University of Chicago. What this amounts to is an attempt to create more or less by fiat a comprehensive vet coherent and manageable canon of books constituting all that is most worth knowing in our culture. One reads the books and, with the Svntopicon at hand to jog the memory, one becomes a twentiethcentury Erasmus. The fact that the whole effort seems more like a wholesome amusement than a serious educational task suggests the futility of trying to resurrect the classical ideal. Nick Carraway, in Fitzgerald's The Great Gcatsby, put it well vwhen he referred to the modern dav polymath as "that most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man." The assumptions about knowledge and the world that informed classical rhetoric are no longer tenable. External reality is paradoxical; our very effort to know something of the physical environment alters that which we seek to know so that the object-as-known is not the same as the object we set out to know. Our values seem arbitrary, contradictory, and ultimately groundless. The wisdom our culture has accumulated is arcane and available only in narrow portions governed by specialists who speak mysterious and intimidating languages. What those specialists knoxv is so intricate that the ordinary citizen must simply accept their conclusions on faith. The modern world is less akin to the cozy study pictured in magazine advertisements for subscriptions to the Great Books than to the endless succession of compartments filled with undecipherable books described by Jorge Luis Borges in "The Library of Babel." Like the hero of that story, modern man searches for the "catalogue of catalogues" that will unlock the mystery

On the End of Rhetoric, Classical and Mlodern 625 of the library and make sense of the world once more. What, then, happens to the discipline of rhetoric in such a situation? There are those who would resurrect the classical tradition more or less intact. Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book is one example; Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Mlodern Student is another. Yet, sound as they are, such texts have a musty, antiquarian air about them, as if their authors had succeeded in blotting out a hundred years or so of modern history. Corbett can note President Kennedy's use
of asyndeton in the line ". . . we shall pay

pretensions and resonances which I prefer as a matter of choice to do without, or shall I say steer clear of, or if you like to reject." To inhabit a world is to possess images of how things are beyond the reach of one's immediate experience, images that have implications for how one experiences the immediate, and that generate values which make claims on the conduct of one's life. In the absence of a world given by a stable and coherent cultural tradition, man is compelled to construct his own. To open one's own world to others is to run the risk of discovering its inadequacy or falsehood, and thus to be compelled to reconstruct
it. M4any men, like Deeley, "prefer ... to

any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." But he cannot note the irony these words take on in the context of the decade that followed President Kennedy's inaugural. Indeed, one gets the impression that the authors of such books would pick out classical commonplaces and figures of speech with the same detached skill whether the text under analysis were a speech by George Wallace, Malcolm X, Winston Churchill, or Adolph Hitler. It might be argued that a technique for rhetorical analysis ought to deal with any text by xvhatever speaker or author in precisely the same manner and with precisely the same attitude of detachment. And certainly in the world of the classical rhetorician-a world shaped by the common knowledge and shared values of a relatively stable culture-this is correct. But Adolph Hitler and Malcolm X, despite their having inhabited the same planet, did not live in the same world. As Deeley in Harold Pinter's recent play Old Times says, with a self-destructive irony characteristic of modern man,
". . . the word world possesses emotional

steer clear of" this risk, reducing language to superficial banter. Some, like Beckett's assailant, are themselves unaware of the shape of their world, and so can only answer "Je ne sais pas" when asked why thev live as they do. A number of modern rhetorical theorists have clearly been responding to the cultural scene sketched above. I. A. Richards, for instance, suggested nearly forty years ago in The Philosophy of Rhetoric that rhetoric should be "a study of misunderstanding and its remedies." In other words, it is no longer valid to assume that speaker and audience live in the same world and to study the techniques by which the speaker moves his audience to act or think in a particular way. One must turn instead to the more fundamental problem of why the gap between the speaker's and audience's worlds is so broad and how one might bridge it successfully. Maurice Natanson and Henry Johnstone both place great emphasis upon the element of risk involved in genuine argumentation.6
6Xlaurice Natanson & Henry W. Johnstone, Jr. (eds.), Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Argu(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania 7ientation

political sociological and psychological

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Natanson, for instance, distinguishes betureen an argument to convince and an argument to persuade: the former is little more than an intellectual game, like a debate contest, with nothing of real importance at stake; in an argument to persuade, however, one's complete existentiality is at risk, including the immediate world of feeling and perception. If, for example, a white supremecist is persuaded that his racism is reprehensible, he must learn to perceive the black man he sees on the street in an entirely new way. Johnstone argues that it is only through the existential risk of rhetoric that one transcends the boundaries of immediate experience, and thus it is through rhetoric that the self and its world are constituted. Not to engage in rhetoric is not to be human. Kenneth Burke likewise redefines rhetoric in the context of what Steiner calls the "post-culture." While Burke draws heavily on Aristotle and in fact sees himself as a neo-Aristotelian, his insistence in A Rhetoric of Motives that the key term for a modern rhetoric is not persuasion but identification indicates a profound shift of emphasis. To persuade a man, in the Aristotelian sense, is to move him to act or think in a certain way on a certain topic, the topic and the other terms of the argument being assumed as preconditions of the persuasive effort. To achieve identification, or, as Burke also calls it, consubstantiality, is to enter into that very condition assumed as the precondition of persuasion. It is to articulate an area of shared experience, imagery, and value; it is to define my world in such a way that the other can enter into that world with me. Burke is thus in accord
State University Press, 1965); see especially "Introduction One" and "Introduction Two," by Johnstone and Natanson respectively, pp. 1-19.

with Johnstone, who defines rhetoric as "the evocation and maintenance of the consciousness required for communication."7 That consciousness consists in establishing the proper distance from the object, setting it in contrast to the welter of sensory impressions of which wve are, strictly speaking, unconscious; rhetoric thus strives toward the establishment of a certain order in the stream of consciousness, an order that constitutes the identification or consubstantiality between the speaker and audience. The conflict in terminology between Burke and Natanson points up an important problem that arises in the study of rhetoric as we are here discussing it. Natanson sees persuasion as the object of rhetoric, insisting only that this term be distinguished from conviction, which he sees as a purely intellectual state with no existential implications. Burke relegates the Aristotelian notion of persuasion to a
subsidiary position in his view of rhetoric,

emphasizing instead his own term, identification. The problem is one of existential commitment to the implications of an argument, or more simply of the seriousness with which one takes an argument. For Aristotle, the problem apparently did not arise; when both speaker and audience are assumed to inhabit the same world, it is sufficient that both attend to the argument. But when speaker and audience inhabit different worlds, it becomes possible for both to hear without listening. The speaker may hear himself in an attitude of intellectual detachment and smugness, never listening for the nuances of his words, never asking whether he is willing to live the implications of what he says. The audience likewise is detached, hearing the speaker's
7Henry WV. Johnstone, Jr., The Problem of the Self (Universitv Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State Univ-ersity Press, 1970), p. 121.

and Modern 627 On the End of Rhetoric, Classical

argument but never allowing it to touch defense of the rhetoric that seeks honestly his life, never measuring the images artic- to give effectiveness to truth. The faithulated in the speech against the contours fulness of this allegorical interpretation to of his own world. It is possible, in other Plato's intention in writing the dialogue x-ords,for both speaker and audience to is not the question of primary concern to hear the speech in the way an aesthete Weaver. What is of interest is Weaver's looks at a painting by a currently fashion- own understanding of the nature of rhetable artist. In Sartrean terms, both speaker oric. Divested of its mythological and and audience are liable to the rhetorical idealistic implications, the "divine madequivalent of bad faith. The apparent ness" Weaver sees as informing true conflict between Natanson and Burke on rhetoric, the kind defended in Socrates' the proper object of rhetoric is resolved second speech, is very like the seriousness, by this notion. Both are concerned to or existential commitment, we spoke of rule out of the province of rhetoric above as prerequisite to a rhetoric that speech heard and spoken in bad faith. aims to achieve identification. The title of the book in which WeaIdentification, as Burke means it, and as Natanson means that, are ver's essay originally appeared, The persuasion, possible only if both speaker and audience Ethics of Rhetoric, suggests at what point enter into the rhetorical transaction as a such notions as "divine madness," "seriserious existential commitment. ousness," or "existential commitment," fit Richard Weaver, in his interpretation into a theory of rhetoric that maintains of Plato's Phaedrus,8 focuses on this ele- roots in the classical tradition. Ethos, most ment of seriousness in rhetorical speech. simply defined as the persuasive appeal Weaver interprets the three speeches in growing out of the character of the the dialogue on the subject of the relative speaker, is acknowledged by Aristotle to excellence of lovers and non-lovers as be "the most potent of all the means to allegories on three modes of speech. The persuasion." For the ancients, ethos confirst speech in praise of the non-lover, sisted in the degree to which the speaker attributed to Lysias, is interpreted by embodied the virtues most revered by the Weaver as a defense of language devoid culture, the degree to which he had of rhetorical inclination, the sort of lan- apparently internalized all that was best guage Philip Wheelwright calls steno- in the tradition that defined the shared language. The first of the two speeches world of speaker and audience. Ideally, attributed to Socrates, in which he pur- the hearer would perceive in the speaker ports to handle Lysias' own theme more the living embodiment of all his own eloquently by attacking the lover, is in highest aspirations, and the speaker's Weaver's view an attack on the kind of voice would thus become the voice of the rhetoric that seeks to persuade by decep- hearer's own best self, the ideal self tion, half-truth, and trickery. The final defined by his education in the common speech, in which Socrates presents his wisdom of the culture. In our time of own view that the lover is in fact more fragmentation and isolation, ethos is genexcellent than the non-lover, becomes a erated by the seriousness and passion with which the speaker articulates his own 8Richard Weaver, "The Phaedrus and the world, the degree to which he is willing Nature of Rhetoric," in The Ethics of Rhetand able to make his world open to the oric (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, other, and thus to the possibility of 3-26. 1953), pp.

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rupture. If, as Johnstone argues, rhetoric is the means whereby the self and its world are constituted, ethos is the measure of one's willingness to risk one's self and world by a rigorous and open articulation of them in the presence of the other. III As we noted above, efforts to define the classical tradition of rhetoric in terms of the genre(s) of discourse it encompasses seem indequate. It is the position of this study that all such efforts are inadequate, yet it must be admitted that efforts persist to define rhetoric by marking out the canon of discourse that is its legitimate province. One of the more recent and interesting of these attempts is James R. McNally's proposal that rhetoric be defined as "(1) sign-behavior exhibiting a pragmatic concentration of meaning or (2) the study of such behavior."9 McNally is here invoking Charles Morris' theory of signs, within which pragmatics deals with the relationships between signs and the people who use them; the other two branches of Morris' semiotic are semantics, the study of the relationships between signs and what they signify; and syntactics, the study of the relationships among signs themselves. McNally suggests that statements of alleged fact, such as "The Yankees won three pennants in the 1950's," exhibit a semantic concentration of meaning; statements about the symbolic universes of science or literature, such as "Pi = 3.1416" or "Rhett Butler got his revenge," exhibit a syntactic concentration of meaning. Exhortations to act or think in a particular way, such as "Cubism is ugly" or "Do not lie,"
9James R. McNally, "Toward a Definition of Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric III (Spring, 1970), p. 77.

exhibit a pragmatic concentration of meaning, and thus the canon of discourse constituting the legitimate province of rhetoric would consist of such statements. As McNally himself notes, no statement is such that its meaning falls entirely within one of his three areas of semiotic. To an ardent fan, the statement that "The Yankees won three pennants in the 1950's" may be charged with value, and hence would have meaning on the pragmatic dimension. The emotive, hence evaluative and pragmatic significance of "Rhett Butler got his revenge" is even more complex, particularly if one raises questions about such matters as the literary sophistication of the one who makes or hears the statement, or the place of a notion like male chauvinism in his/her world. As Bronowski points out in "The Abacus and the Rose," whether one chooses to equate Pi with
3.1, 3.14, 3.1416, or 3.141592. . . implies

value judgments about the situation in which the equation is made.10 Hence, McNally's notion of semantic concentration; realizing that no statement can be fully identified with one of the three areas and no others, he falls back on the idea that the meaning of a given statement will fall mostly in one or another area. Rhetoric, according to McNally, is properly concerned with language whose meaning falls mostly in the area of pragmatics. Literature falls outside the province of rhetoric, since its meaning falls mostly in the area of semantics. It is important to note that McNally departs from the thinking of Morris on this point. Morris claims that poetry is "an example of discourse which is appraisive-valuative:" "its primary aim is to
10In Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values, revised edn. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 89; the measurement in question in "The Abacus and the Rose" is not Pi, but the wavelength of the sun.

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a central element of the foundation upon which tradition of classical rhetoric, as described above, was built. It was largely by knowing a canon of art and literature that the orator came to know the world he shared with his audience, and thus the values he could argue from. If the orator wanted to know what the culture's ideal of manhood was, and how he could use the definition of man as a commonplace from which to argue, he could look to Homer. Literature gave reality to the ideals upon which the stability of the culture was based. Indeed, one might see Plato's dismissal of poets from his Republic as growing out of a variation of this notion. Believing in an objectively real realm of ideas discoverable through phiin CreativeIntuition in Art and Poetry losophy, Plato feared the power of poets proceeds from the notion that art in to make alternative, and hence false ideas general and poetry in particular reveal attractive. both things and creative subjectivityA particularly striking illustration of both the world and the self. Albert the ancients' recognition of the role of Hofstadter's Truth and Art goes further, literature, especially dramatic literature, asserting that it is through language, of in defining the world is Aristophanes' which all art is an instance, that the The Frogs. Written subsequent to the world and the self are brought into being. death of Euripides, the last of the three One is reminded inevitably of Johnstone's great tragedians, during a period of politiposition that it is through the existential cal and moral choas in Athens, The Frogs risk of rhetoric that both the world and is Aristophanes' version of how the the self are constituted, and thus that one crumbling world might be put back becomes human. "All language," says together again. The god Dionysus goes to Hofstadter, "articulates human being." the underworld to find and bring back Prior to this articulation there are only the greatest of the dead tragedians, who things and brute existence. In this process it is assumed will somehow be able to of articulation, which is both a giving bring order into the chaos that seems to shape to the outer and an uttering of the be consuming Athens. Aeschylus is held inner, both the self and the world are to be the greatest of the tragedians beformed, and in that region of self/world cause he gives expression to the noblest human being is realized. ideals. Indeed, the very presence of The function of art in giving shape to Aeschylus is so effective that the charthe world has long been recognized, acter of Dionysus undergoes a striking implicitly if not explicitly, and in fact is change in the course of the play; a ridiculous and cowardly figure at the 11Quoted in Philip Wheelwright, The Burnbeginning, thus signifying the state to ing Fountain (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Uniwhich Athenian society has fallen, he 65. versity Press, 1968), p. cause the interpreter to accord to what is signified the preferential place in his behavior signified by the appraisors."1' Thus within McNally's definition of rhetoric, Morris himself would clearly make of literature an instance of rhetoric. Yet in order to draw literature into the province of rhetoric it is not necessary to accept Morris' idea of what literature is, an idea that, as Philip Wheelwright points out in The Burning Fountain, is not adequate to the sophisticated reader's experience. If, as we have suggested, rhetoric has to do with the way in which one defines one's world and self, then literature falls quite readily within the province of rhetoric. Jacques Maritain's philosophy of art as developed

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regains his dignity once he meets with the three tragedians. It is important to point out that the idea of literature as giving shape to one's self/world is quite different from notions of literature as propaganda. When Morris identifies the aim of literature as "caus[ing] the interpreter to accord to what is signified the preferential place in his behavior signified by the appraisers," he reduces literature to the level of propaganda, as Wheelwright correctly asserts. In the first place, propaganda is aimed at "causing" the desired behavior (or attitude), and thus the propagandist feels no obligation regarding the freedom of the audience. Morever, for the propagandist the desired outcome is never in question; he knows what it is he wishes his audience to do, think, or feel. For him there is no existential quest, no serious commitment to the discovery creation of his authentic self/world. The rhetorical dimension on which one distinquishes literature from propaganda is therefore ethos. It remains now for us to define just what sort of study of literature is properly rhetorical. Perhaps the one feature of discourse that has remained a constant emphasis of rhetorical theories from ancient Greece down to the present is that it is addressed. Rhetorical discourse is discourse spoken to an audience. This remains so even if one person becomes both speaker and addressee; if a single person is divided on a given issue, the symbolic means by which he seeks to resolve his inner conflict are subject to rhetorical analysis precisely because the person addresses himself, becoming his own audience. A rhetorical analysis of a work of literature would therefore focus on the work as something addressed to a readership. It is because of their concern with language as addressed to an audience that

rhetorics of the past have accorded a central place to conventions of style and argument such as commonplaces and figures of speech. Language is communicative because it is conventionalized, because it is an organized system of repeatable patterns which can be combined and permuted in ways that provide speaker and audience with presuppositions about what can be said without limiting their creative potential in determining what actually is said. Lacking conventionalized patterns, language would become wholly private or even chaotic. At its most fundamental level, the system of conventions is described by the lexicon and grammar of a given language. A rhetoric (to be distinguished from "rhetoric" in the same way that "a grammar" differs from "grammar") moves beyond this fundamental level, providing more subtly nuanced conventions in the form of commonplaces and figures. A complete rhetoric-which would be an ideal at least as difficult to realize as a complete grammar-together with the lexicon and grammar it is built upon, might be taken as constituting the world shared by the speaker and audience for whom the rhetoric functions. A measure of the complex formality of the Elizabethan world is the nearly two hundred figures of speech defined in Peacham's The Gar-

den of Eloquence(1577).
Deprived of a given world, the modern author is likewise deprived of a given rhetoric. To the extent that he must articulate his own world in such a way that his readers can enter it with him, he must likewise invent the commonplaces and figures that are the rhetorical lineaments of that world. Rhetorical analysis of such literature is the effort to discover the conventions established by a given work or group of works, and thus to trace the outlines of the world articulated

On the End of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern by it, particularly as that world is made open to the audience. IV This essay has presented a view of rhetoric, classical and modern, centering on the concepts "world" and "self." According to this view, modern rhetoric is distinguished by its emphasis on the responsibility of the speaker (or author) to articulate his own world, and thereby his own self. The seriousness with which he undertakes this task, hence the rigor and passion with which he discloses his world to the audience, is his ethos. In this view, literature is of interest to the rhetorician, since it is most importantly a medium in which a man articulates his world and self. It should finally be noted that the view

631

of rhetoric herein presented encompasses literature because it likewise encompasses all uses of language. Language is always a disclosure-more or less deliberate, prothe one who found, and honest-of speaks, of his personal view of the world. There is always a dimension of ethos in language, even when it is the evasive ethos of bureaucratic language or the dispassionate ethos of science. The improbable uses of the passive voice that mar bureaucratise, for example, are rhetorical conventions that articulate a selfthe timid self of the bureaucrat who hides his opinion behind "It is believed that
. ." The concept of ethos is crucial to

rhetoric because the object of rhetoric is man speaking. The end of rhetorical analysis is to discover a man in his words, whether that man is the Ciceronian Orator or the lonely modern anti-hero.