As the story goes, rhetoric died long ago. When the Enlightenment ushered in truth, science, and objectivity as ultimate ends, rhetoric was condemned for its affinity with power, its love of persuasion, its manipulative metaphorical moves. Of course, it was condemned... [more]

As the story goes, rhetoric died long ago. When the Enlightenment ushered in truth, science, and objectivity as ultimate ends, rhetoric was condemned for its affinity with power, its love of persuasion, its manipulative metaphorical moves. Of course, it was condemned even during the ancient days of its prosperity -- Plato would have evicted all the rhetors from his Republic. The rhetors, Plato claimed, were like quacks: their simulated knowledge and wisdom could only make things worse. They professed to administer curative medicine, while in fact they insinuated poison. Ancient rhetoric always found itself up against this charge: without knowing the truth, it persuaded the masses with lofty, ornamental eloquence. After all, Socrates (perhaps the quintessential rhetor, with all his ironic mastery, his humor and charm, his cunning) was iced for his powers of persuasion over the masses. It was the preference for the figural over the literal, the trope over the bare-headed truth, the example over the essence, that brought the enmity of the dialecticians down upon them. Or more serious still: it was the very insinuation of images and appearances at the very heart of Platonic forms that troubled the philosophers to no end. Was there no essence behind the surface play? Perhaps it is this rhetorical move that repeats itself today as we engage contemporary problems. For now that conceptual edges are often blurred with swarming images, now that the power of repetition rips away essential rinds, what is left but the task of creating truths out of distortions, ideas out of appearances? This has, in a sense, always been the task of the ancient rhetor. [show less]