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Constructing Ethics through Rhetoric: Isocrates and Piety

2009; Routledge; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00335630903140622

1479-5779

Kenneth R. Chase,

Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

Abstract Critical, postmodern, and constitutive rhetorics are typically guided by an ethical stance opposing domination and marginalization. However, this stance often functions as an unreflective morality operating outside the constitutive practices of rhetoric itself. To locate an ethical stance within rhetorical practice, we can turn to Isocrates, who practiced a constitutive rhetoric that had a strong moral orientation. His dependence on piety as a receptive attitude toward persuasive discourse may provide the insight necessary to develop an ethic supporting the critical orientation of current rhetorical theory. Keywords: LogosCommunication EthicsSophistic VirtueConstitutive Rhetoric Acknowledgements Portions of this essay were presented to the Ninth National Communication Ethics Conference at Pittsburgh, PA, in July 2006, and to the National Communication Association annual convention in San Antonio, TX, in November 2006. The G.W. Aldeen Memorial Fund (Wheaton College) provided valuable support enabling the completion of this essay Notes 1. On the interdependence between the sophistic rhetorical tradition and a constructionist approach to social reality, see Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Contingency and Probability”; Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric”; and Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 151–66, 616–22. 2. On the various agendas of the sophistic turn, see Steve Whitson and John Poulakos, “Nietzsche and the Aesthetics of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 131–45; and Richard A. Cherwitz and James W. Hikins, “Climbing the Academic Ladder: A Critique of Provincialism in Contemporary Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 375–85. John Poulakos celebrates a sophistic rhetoric that opposes “those who claim to have transcended language and to be dealing in such languageless entities as concepts, ideas, and truths.” See J. Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), xiii. Raymie E. McKerrow outlines an ethical directive for a critical rhetoric in “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91–111. See also Maurice Charland, “Finding a Horizon and Telos: The Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 71–74; and McKerrow's reply, “Critical Rhetoric in a Postmodern World,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 75–78. 3. For recent essays in “critical rhetoric” in which a species of this ethical judgment shapes the project, see Charles E. Morris III, “Passing by Proxy: Collusive and Convulsive Silence in the Trial of Leopold and Loeb,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 264–90; Albert González and JoBeth González, “The Color Problem in Sillyville: Negotiating White Identity in One Popular ‘Kid-Vid,’” Communication Quarterly 50 (2002): 410–21; and John M. Sloop, “Disciplining the Transgendered: Brandon Teena, Public Representation, and Normativity,” Western Journal of Communication 64 (2000): 165–89. 4. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “Commitment to Telos—A Sustained Critical Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 59 (1992): 48–60. Ono and Sloop readily acknowledge this lack of ethical rationale: “In refusing to ground criticism on an Archimedean point, however, theoretical and critical choices may appear unjustifiable—a problem which eternally plagues criticism stemming from the Nietzschean tradition” (55). To remedy this lacuna, they recommend following Rorty's lead and constructing a “contingent utopia” that motivates the critical act toward some more desirable future. They agree with Rorty that such a construct cannot be defended using traditional and analytical modes of proof, but must be simply proffered as a critical judgment and preference. Throughout their essay, Ono and Sloop accept without question McKerrow's stated preference to critique domination. 5. I rely on Edward Schiappa in distinguishing the “historical reconstruction” of ancient rhetorical texts from their “contemporary appropriation.” See Edward Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 65–68. For a helpful reformulation of Schiappa's distinction, see Bruce McComiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 8–11. 6. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 71–76. Also see Thomas Rosteck and Michael Leff, “Piety, Propriety, and Perspective: An Interpretation and Application of Key Terms in Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 53 (1989): 327–41. Recent scholarship on Burke's “metabiology” complicates Burke's treatment of piety. See Debra Hawhee, “Burke on Drugs,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (2004): 5–28; Jordynn Jack, “‘The Piety of Degradation’: Kenneth Burke, the Bureau of Social Hygiene, and Permanence and Change,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 446–68; and Bryan Crable, “Ideology as ‘Metabiology’: Rereading Burke's Permanence and Change,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 84 (1998): 303–19. The dominant interpretation of Burke, however, remains constructionist, a position fueled by his publications after P&C. See Robert Wess, Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 55–107. 7. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 370. 8. Maurice Charland, “The Place of Impiety in Civic Argument,” The Public 8 (2001): 35–50. 9. Charland, “Place of Impiety,” 44. 10. Ross Wolin, The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 77. 11. See The Oratory of Classical Greece series translations, volumes 4 and 7, edited by Michael Gagarin; Isocrates, Isocrates I, trans. David C. Mirhady and Yun Lee Too (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); and Isocrates, Isocrates II, trans. Terry L. Papillon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). For recent and significant book-length treatments, see Yun Lee Too, The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Takis Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates’ Rhetorical Education (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); Ekaterina V. Haskins, Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004); and Yun Lee Too, A Commentary on Isocrates’ Antidosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The 1998 Obermann Humanities Symposium at the University of Iowa brought many of the leading Isocratean scholars together, and these essays have been published in Takis Poulakos and David Depew, eds., Isocrates and Civic Education (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). 12. Isocrates and Civic Education is valuable on this point, especially Michael Leff's “Isocrates, Tradition, and the Rhetorical Version of Civic Education,” 236. 13. In speaking of Isocrates’ contribution to “rhetoric,” I am taking liberty with Isocrates’ vocabulary; he preferred the term philosophia, although much of what he described falls comfortably within the historical development of the term “rhetoric.” See David M. Timmerman, “Isocrates’ Competing Conceptualization of Philosophy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 31 (1998): 145–59. Also see Schiappa's discussion of rhētorikē in Protagoras and Logos, 40–49. 14. I rely on the new translations by Mirhady and Too, and by Papillon, throughout this essay. The Mirhady and Too translation includes the Encomium of Helen, Busiris, Against the Sophists, Evagoras, Nicocles, Areopagiticus, and Antidosis. Papillon's volume includes Panegyricus, On the Peace, and Panathenaicus. These translators include Greek transliterations for many technical terms and I have retained these. All citations to Isocrates will be to the standard section numbers. 15. Isocrates, Evagoras, 76–81. See also Takis Poulakos, “Isocrates's Use of Narrative in the Evagoras: Epideictic Rhetoric and Moral Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 317. 16. Isocrates, Evagoras, 22–25. 17. Isocrates, Evagoras, 22, 45. 18. Isocrates, Evagoras, 46. For a helpful review of how the notion of virtue changed from ancient Greek thought (i.e., Homer) to the more democratic notions of the sophists and the character-based analysis of Plato, see Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 168–71. Isocrates straddled this complex cultural history, speaking of the virtues as simultaneously competitive and communal, as god-given and educable. Here, as in other matters, Isocrates’ view of virtue emerged from his persuasive performances, in which specific political questions brought forth different emphases. Regardless of these shifts, his discourses consistently evidenced a moral bearing enabling praise and critique. 19. Isocrates, Evagoras, 7. 20. Helen F. North, “Canons and Hierarchies of the Cardinal Virtues in Greek and Latin Literature,” in The Classical Tradition: Literary and Historical Studies in Honor of Harry Caplan, ed. Luitpold Wallach (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 170. 21. T. Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis, 35–41; Haskins, Logos and Power, 90–95; Ekaterina V. Haskins, “Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Cultural Memory: Rereading Plato's Menexenus and Isocrates’ Panegyricus,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 25–45. 22. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 3, The Conflict of Cultural Ideals in the Age of Plato, trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), 55–59. 23. David Konstan, “Isocrates’ ‘Republic,’” in Poulakos and Depew, Isocrates and Civic Education, 118. 24. Isocrates, Nicocles, 5–9 and Antidosis, 253–57. Jaeger notes that the hymn-like composition of Isocrates’ paean to logos is characteristic of one who describes the work of a god, Paideia, 89, n30. 25. Although Isocrates places this hymn to persuasion in the mouth of a monarch, we need not presume that his view of persuasion is necessarily connected with monarchial rule. See Too's introductory comments in her translation of Nicocles, in Isocrates I, trans. Mirhady and Too, 169–70. For an overview of Isocrates’ political views, see Konstan, “Isocrates’ ‘Republic,’” 107–24. In Areopagiticus, Isocrates specifically addresses his commitment to democracy in the face of the charge that he favors oligarchy (16–17). 26. Isocrates, Nicocles, 5–6. 27. T. Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis, 12. 28. T. Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis, 14–17. 29. Isocrates, Nicocles, 6–7. 30. Isocrates, Nicocles, 7–9. 31. For helpful comment on Isocrates’ use of hēgemonia, see J. Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric, 139. 32. Isocrates, Nicocles, 9 33. Isocrates, Antidosis, 274. 34. Haskins, Logos and Power, 56. 35. T. Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis, 104. 36. Haskins, Logos and Power, 46. 37. Robert Hariman, “Civic Education, Classical Imitation, and Democratic Polity,” in Poulakos and Depew, Isocrates and Civic Education, 217–34. 38. Leff, “Isocrates, Tradition,” in Poulakos and Depew, Isocrates and Civic Education, 238. 39. Kathryn Morgan, “The Education of Athens: Politics and Rhetoric in Isocrates and Plato,” in Poulakos and Depew, Isocrates and Civic Education, 136. 40. Leff, “Isocrates, Tradition,” in Poulakos and Depew, Isocrates and Civic Education, 239. 41. Norman Clark, “The Critical Servant: An Isocratean Contribution to Critical Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 118. 42. T. Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis, 24. 43. Haskins, Logos and Power, 46. 44. Haskins, Logos and Power, 46. 45. Haskins, Logos and Power, 134. 46. Haskins, Logos and Power, 135. 47. Vanessa B. Beasley, “The Rhetoric of Ideological Consensus in the United States: American Principles and American Pose in Presidential Inaugurals,” Communication Monographs 68 (2001): 178. 48. More precisely, we can creatively construct an ethic from within the Isocratean tradition of logos. Isocrates does not explicitly make the argument I attribute to him here. Thus, I am moving away from “historical reconstruction” to explore the heuristic potential of Isocrates’ views for a contemporary rhetorical ethic. 49. Isocrates, Antidosis, 246. 50. Isocrates, Antidosis, 247. 51. Isocrates, Antidosis, 249. 52. Isocrates, Antidosis, 241. 53. Isocrates, Isocrates, with an English Translation by George Norlin, vol. 2 (London: William Heinemann, 1929), 249 note b. 54. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff, eds. and trans., Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13. 55. R.G.A. Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study in Peitho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 37. Also see Deborah Tarn Steiner, Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 189 n17. 56. Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy, 31–48. 57. For Isocrates’ connection between eros and persuasion, see T. Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis, 55–57. 58. Isocrates, Busiris, 40, 41. Isocrates’ comments about the gods in Busiris were for the purpose of praising this ancient Egyptian king. Despite his reference to piety within Egyptian society, Isocrates wrote his encomium for Greek readers, featuring those qualities of Busiris that would enable Greeks to praise him. Thus, the piety of the Egyptians toward their gods was what Isocrates would urge on Athenians toward their own gods. Also see Terry L. Papillon, “Isocrates and the Use of Myth,” Hermathena 161 (1996): 9–21. 59. Isocrates, Busiris, 25. 60. Isocrates, Busiris, 24. 61. Isocrates listed piety among the virtues, as I noted previously (see North, “Canons and Hierarchies,” 170). Thesaurus Linguae Graecae indicates that Isocrates used some form of eusebeia (piety) seventeen times. This is more than any writer prior to the Common Era, as revealed by a usage and frequency search conducted in the classical Greek texts collected in Perseus (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/). He also used eusebeia more frequently than all but the orators Antiphon, Dinarchus, and Lycurgus, and the poet Bacchylides. Isocrates did not, however, restrict his treatment of piety to these terms, for he repeatedly associated a more general sense of godly reverence with proper citizenship. 62. Isocrates, Panathenaicus, 124. 63. Isocrates, Panathenaicus, 138. 64. Claude Calame, “The Rhetoric of Muthos and Logos: Forms of Figurative Discourse,” in From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, ed. Richard Buxton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 119–43. Although not discussing Isocrates’ use of myth, C. Bradford Welles helpfully describes Isocrates’ use of history as strategic and interpretive: “[T]he orator was selective. History was a means, not an end. Like the historian, he must interpret events, and his interpretations would not always be consistent or unobjectionable. But invent he could not without risking refutation or ridicule.” See C. Bradford Wells, “Isocrates’ View of History,” in Classical Tradition, 24. Isocrates’ frequent historical references, therefore, are defensible within the common understandings of his audience. 65. Isocrates, Panathenaicus, 124–25. 66. Isocrates, Nicocles, 29. 67. As argued in Too, The Rhetoric of Identity, and A Commentary on Isocrates’ Antidosis, 8–11. 68. Isocrates, Nicocles, 10. 69. Isocrates, Nicocles, 1–4. 70. Isocrates, Areopagiticus, 74. 71. Isocrates, Areopagiticus, 75. 72. Haskins directly addresses these charges against Isocrates, helpfully responding to Victor Vitanza's scathing indictment of Isocrates on these matters; Logos and Power, 122–25; Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (Albany: State University of New York, 1997). 73. J. Poulakos contrasts Isocrates with those orators who “are driven by two impulses—the exhibitive and the competitive.” See Sophistical Rhetoric, 126. 74. Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1985), 3–26. This contrast with Platonic rhetoric is doubly important, for it not only provides a rich context for grasping the distinctiveness of Isocratean piety, but it is a comparison Isocrates himself invites through constructing his Antidosis as a “dazzling appropriation” of Plato's Apology of Socrates. See Josiah Ober, “I, Socrates … The Performative Audacity of Isocrates’ Antidosis,” in Poulakos and Depew, Isocrates and Civic Education, 23. Also see Too, Commentary on Isocrates’ Antidosis, 24–26. 75. Weaver, Ethics of Rhetoric, 25. 76. Richard Weaver, “Language Is Sermonic,” in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001), 1355. 77. Eugene Garver, Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); also see his “Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Civic Education in Aristotle and Isocrates,” in Poulakos and Depew, Isocrates and Civic Education, 186–213; Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 78. Garver, “Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Civic Education,” 204. 79. Haskins, Logos and Power, 112. 80. Farrell develops his neo-Aristotelianism with a substantive treatment of Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics. Claiming that “the good life … is anticipated in every successful act of speech,” to use Farrell's felicitous phrasing, Habermas develops a performative ethics of discourse that aligns in some ways with my view of Isocrates. See Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture, 190. The differences, though, are significant, requiring analysis that exceeds the scope of this essay. See Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 81. John Poulakos and Steve Whitson, “Rhetoric Denuded and Redressed: Figs and Figures,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 385. 82. Hariman, “Civic Education,” 230. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKenneth R. Chase Kenneth R. Chase is Associate Professor and Chair of the Communication Department at Wheaton College, Illinois