What is rhetoric, and is it—as many claim—naught but a skill to persuade, to gain power over the minds of others to bend them to one’s own will? Rhetoric is associated, that is, with the politician, the lawyer, the television pundit and the streaming sophist. The art of rhetoric, it is claimed, consists in confusing and obscuring one’s true intents, making the untrue seem obvious and the unjust appear righteous. The accusations are not new; we find their like in, among other great works of antiquity, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. Against these, the master rhetorician replies:
Doctors have made use of poisons, and those who wrongly assume the name of philosopher, have at times been apprehended in the gravest of crimes. Let us disdain of food; for often it is the cause of destroying our health. Never should we enter under a roof; for sometimes they collapse upon the inhabitants. Never let a sword be forged for a soldier; for perhaps that iron may be used by a robber.
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, lib.2, c.16: “…in medicis venena et in his, qui philosophorum nomine male utuntur, gravissima nonnunquam flagitia deprehensa sunt. Cibos aspernemur; attulerunt saepe valetudinis causa. Nunquam tecta subeamus; super habitatnes aliquando procumbunt. Non fabricetur militi gradius; potest uti eodem ferro latro.”
The very real evils that may be committed under the guise of rhetoric, that is, no more deserve the name than dialectical sophisms constitute logic. Truly, the skills of the rhetorician may be put to malicious ends—no different than those possessed by the doctor. Should we not learn to heal, because the same knowledge may be used to kill? Should we create no instruments of defense because they can also be used for offense? Should we not strengthen our bodies because our might can also be used to oppress the weak?
The study of rhetoric, then, is a study not only of defending ourselves against false accusations, slander, calumny, and other verbal assaults upon our character, but is further a study of making known the truth, so that it may speak for itself. If logic, which cannot be justly divorced from rhetoric, consists in learning the valid structures whereby one discovers truth for himself (by understanding the nature and action of thought), then rhetoric consists in the discovery of righteous means to persuade other to grasp those same truths.
Such will be at the core of our study, which is available to all Lyceum Institute members.
Rhetoric Schedule [2024]
Art of Rhetoric I: Discovery of Arguments will meet twice per week (every session is recorded) on Mondays at 6pm ET and Thursdays at 12pm ET. Members may attend either or both sessions.
Monday (6pm ET)
Thursday (12pm ET)
Week I Week II Week III Week IV
September 09 September 16 September 23 September 30
September 12 September 19 September 26 October 03
BREAK
October 07
October 10
Week V Week VI Week VII Week VIII
October 14 October 21 October 28 November 04
October 17 October 24 October 31 November 07
Art of Rhetoric I: Discovery of Arguments
In this course, the Discovery of Arguments, we will analytically investigate the use of persuasive expression in its most fundamental structures: beginning with a consideration of ethics and the use of rhetoric; attaining a correct and thoughtful definition of rhetoric; and examining inventio—the habit of discovery—in its two interrelated aspects of appeal and the topics. This study will allow us to see how others affect (or fail to affect) persuasion in their written words. We will also draw attention during discussions to the persuasiveness of the spoken word.
In this second course, the Styles of Persuasion, we will learn how to craft arguments ourselves by studying the five constitutive elements of an oration—the exordium, narratio, confirmatio, refutation, and peroration—and undertaking a consideration of style (here classified under elocutio). We study, in all the practices and doctrines of the Trivium, as our chief object, the word as the sign of thought. The word, which is the principle of all our discursive intellectual operations, seizing meaning—“meaning” succinctly understood as the intelligibility of being which directs our specifically human way of living—and brings it forth. The word, therefore, may communicate the truth. But, by neglecting a study of the word we allow it to be used rather to the obfuscation of meaning or the creation of meanings at odds with human nature; we imperil truth and abandon meaning to the basest of impulses. Contrariwise, by continually deepening our understanding of the word, we not only defend the truth, but allow meaning to thereby flourish, and it is this flourishing as diffused through language into culture that the rhetorician seeks. In this course, we will investigate the persuasive expression of not only the word which makes known the truth, but all the other relevant structures of persuasion; and, accordingly, train ourselves in those means of persuasion which do not manipulate the mind but clear away its confusions.
…it is strange if it is a shameful thing not to be able to come to one’s own aid with one’s body but not a shameful thing to be unable to do so by means of argument, which is to a greater degree a human being’s own than is the use of the body. And if someone using such a capacity of argument should do great harm, this, at least, is common to all good things—except virtue—and especially so in the case of the most useful things, such as strength, health, wealth, [and] generalship. For someone using these things justly would perform the greatest benefits—and unjustly, the greatest harm.
That rhetoric, then, does not belong to some one, definite subject matter, but is in this respect like dialectic, and that it is useful, are manifest. Manifest, too, is the fact that its task is not to persuade but rather to see the persuasive points that are available in each case, just as in all the other arts as well. For it does not belong to medicine to produce health but rather to advance health to the extent that a given case admits of it: even in the case of those unable to attain health, it is nonetheless possible to treat them in a fine manner.
In addition to these points, it is manifest also that it belongs to the same art [i.e., rhetoric] to see both what is persuasive and what appears to be persuasive, just as in the case of dialectic, too, which sees what is a syllogism and what appears to be a syllogism. For sophistry resides not in the capacity but rather in the choice involved [in how one puts that capacity to use]—except that here, [in rhetoric], one orator will act in accord with the science, another in accord with his choice, whereas in dialectic the sophist acts in accord with his choice, [and] the dialectician acts not in accord with his choice but in accord with the capacity in question
Aristotle: The Art of Rhetoric, 1355a 38–1335b 22.
Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (translated by Robert C. Bartlett).
