The Opposite of Rhetoric is Rhetoric
The reputation of “rhetoric” as a term suffers from the tendency of many to use it as a synonym for hot air, bulls**t, or empty language. It’s a usage that we who study rhetoric think of as “mere rhetoric,” as in “What I am telling you is the truth, while my opponent only offers you mere rhetoric.”
Like the word itself, this usage extends at least as far back as ancient Greece. In Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, Socrates says that “Rhetoric, according to my view, is the ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics.” He takes offense at the notion that a person practicing rhetoric might be more persuasive to a patient than that person’s doctor, for example; in this sense, rhetoric is the (potentially irresponsible) simulation of knowledge, as opposed to knowledge itself.
While I have no particular fondness for Plato, I can understand (in part) where he’s coming from on this. I imagine that the frustration that he expresses is the same that many of us feel when legislative attacks on Planned Parenthood are cloaked in the language of “women’s health,” or the language of affirmative action is deployed on behalf of so-called “intellectual diversity.” Some of what bothers Plato is that rhetoric provides no safeguards against its abuse; there’s no way to guarantee that it won’t be used against our own interests, or that our own language can’t be turned against us.
This is both the danger and the appeal of rhetoric in general. In a recent post at Text Patterns, Alan Jacobs writes
I think it’s now generally understood that the disaffected cultural left and the disaffected cultural right have become mirror images of each other: the rhetorical and political strategies employed by one side will, soon enough, be picked up by the other. At this particular moment, the right seems to be borrowing from the left — in ways that make many on the left distinctly uncomfortable.
That’s the same discomfort that Socrates expresses. He and Plato argue on behalf of an ideal Truth independent of our attempts to represent it, against which any expression might be measured. But as soon as that truth enters the world through discourse, it becomes rhetorical regardless of how fervently one may believe it. We may be more or less sensitive to the rhetoricality of language — we tend to view with more suspicion those with whom we disagree, for example — but we can’t attribute our awareness to the language itself. Rhetoric is not a matter of degrees, any more than physics is.
All of which is to say that there’s nothing “mere” about rhetoric. We might deem it credible, noncredible, or incredible, but this doesn’t make a speech or a book or a website more or less rhetorical.
[Note: Although I never have just one, my overarching writing project this summer is a book manuscript. It draws on a certain amount of rhetorical terminology (and one hopes, expertise) to think more broadly about questions of public discourse. I’m writing for a more general audience than I typically do, and a result, I’ve been thinking about how to frame it in a way that isn’t overly academic.]
