Study at the Lyceum
Rhetoric
The ability to persuade is not a matter of mere manipulation, but a necessary part of one’s education in the arts of signification—an art reclaimed in our rhetoric courses.
The Art of Persuasion
Ethos of Communication
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.”
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.
Method and Approach
This course intends to develop in its participants a keen awareness of persuasive means and their employment throughout the world. This awareness unfolds over a course of 8 weeks, through lectures, readings, discussions, and practical efforts at analyzing the persuasiveness of arguments employed in a variety of texts.
Readings
There are two primary texts for this course: Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, translated by Robert C. Barlett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in the Lyceum Institute reprint (PDFs provided; print edition available) and with brief additional readings from Cicero, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and a reader of great oratory (PDFs to be provided).
Art of Rhetoric II
Styles of Persuasion
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.
Method and Approach
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. Close attention will be paid to these varied technical means.
This again unfolds through lectures, readings, discussions, and praxis exercises that challenge the student not only to analyze but also to construct persuasive arguments.
Readings
Primary readings remain drawn from Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, translated by Robert C. Barlett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in the Lyceum Institute reprint (PDFs provided; print edition available), as well as an increased incorporation of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, more supplemental texts drawn from Cicero, and a reader of great oratory (PDFs to be provided).
Excerpt from Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric
On the Necessity of Rhetoric
…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
