2.3 (July 2002): 293-296
© 2002 National Communication Association

Correcting Our View of Aristotle

James A. Herrick

Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer, editors. Rereading Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. xi + 237 pages. Bibliography, index. $40.00.

This important book brings together eleven distinguished scholars from several fields to examine afresh a variety of settled interpretations regarding one of the most important texts from the history of rhetoric—Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric.  The essayists include Jeanne Fahnestock, Thomas B. Farrell, Robert N. Gaines, Eugene Garver, Lawrence D. Green, Alan G. Gross, Carolyn R. Miller, Michael Tiffany, Jeffrey Walker, Arthur E. Walzer, and Barbara Warnick. The book is filled with careful, detailed scholarship that challenges assumptions about both the content and the influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

The audience for this rather technical collection is, according to the introduction, “scholars in rhetorical studies, including most prominently scholars in speech communication and composition” (xi). The book is divided into three sections, with essays addressing each of the three books of Aristotle’s text. In general, the essays reflect excellent scholarship that contributes much to the knowledge of even those well versed in Aristotle’s classic text. There is an iconoclastic edge to several of the essays that some readers may find unsettling, but I found that the brazen revisionism of the more provocative pieces only added to the pleasure of reading this collection.

In the lead essay, Robert Gaines challenges some of the most influential of contemporary interpreters of Aristotle on perhaps the central questions of authorial intent—how to understand the enthymeme. He argues that some leading interpretations of enthymeme, “conflict with clear passages in the Rhetoric and, therefore, misappropriate Aristotle’s authority for doctrines alien to his view” (16). This is the essence of Gaines’s case, and it is convincingly argued. Gaines alleges that commentators on the Rhetoric “would appear to exploit Aristotle more for the ‘brute force’ of his disciplinary authority than for the cogency of his contributions to the disciplinary corpus” (19).

Alan Gross tackles a similarly large question in his essay, “What Aristotle Meant by Rhetoric.” Like Gaines, Gross takes on some leading interpreters of the Rhetoric in making his case. Gross focuses attention on “Aristotle’s key words,” for instance, techne, arguing in this case that “it is through the mediation of phronesis and phronesis alone, that the technai are linked to the networks of deliberation, decision and action that constitute the city-state.” Thus, the “ultimate telos” of rhetoric is “the good of the polis” (32-33). But Gross’s principal conclusion is that Aristotle is inconsistent when his discussion of rhetoric is set next to his general philosophy. “The Rhetoric underlines Aristotle’s failure to integrate rhetorical theory and practice into the broader concerns of his philosophy” (35).

Arthur Walzer, in “Aristotle on Speaking ‘Outside the Subject’: The Special Topics and Rhetorical Forums,” finds that Aristotle intended rhetoric’s method to be debate, and its goal victory. “’Opponents’ (Aristotle’s usual word, e.g. 1.1.6) seek victory as measured by the persuasion of an audience of ‘simple’ people who are nonparticipants. This is what rhetoric as an art or discipline is for Aristotle” (42). Rhetoric becomes a political art for Aristotle when it is situated in various forums, each with its own political function. “Aristotelian rhetoric understands the rhetorical forums as mediating tension between rhetoric as autonomous art and rhetoric as an instrument of politics” (43).

In my favorite essay in the collection, “The Contemporary Irrelevance of Aristotle’s Practical Reason,” Eugene Garver maintains that for Aristotle, “all practical reason is moral reason,” and thus that “the development of Aristotelian practical reason requires a development of emotions coordinate with such reason.” He adds provocatively, “it is not clear to me that Aristotle will continue to seem so attractive or so relevant once the emotional dimension is laid out more fully”(59). This is because proper emotions for Aristotle lead us to “take things personally” and to live very publicly. Thus, emotions aligned with practical reason do not leave us the option of ever retreat[ing] into a valuable private sphere” (64). Whereas “being moral is a part-time job for us,” it is not for Aristotle (67).

Jeffrey Walker argues in “Pathos and Katharsis in Aristotelian Rhetoric: Some Implications,” that for Aristotle, “all enthymemes are enthymemes of pathos” (85). Thus, Aristotle is “close to saying, with Socrates in the Phaedrus, that rhetoric is a techne psuchagogia” (85).  “Aristotle’s Enthymeme as Tacit Reference” presents Thomas Farrell’s case that “the enthymeme is partisan argument as collaborative utterance, an utterance whose well-foundedness would need to be confirmed or redeemed by the proper audience” (99). Farrell finds Lloyd Bitzer “really most helpful on this point,” which should be heartening for Bitzer as he comes in for some rather stiff criticism in a couple of these essays.

In “Two Systems of Invention: The Topics in the Rhetoric and The New Rhetoric,” Barbara Warnick provides a straightforward comparison of the topical systems of the Rhetoric with that advanced in Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric. In her highly engaging essay, “The Aristotelian Topos: Hunting for Novelty,” Carolyn Miller offers us a fascinating exploration of the spatial metaphor implicit in the notion of a topic, and takes us back to “the world of the hunter and the sailor” to locate the source of arguing from signs.

Three concluding essays in this collection address Aristotle’s discussion of style in Book Three. In “Aristotelian Lexis and Renaissance Elocutio,” Lawrence Green challenges the notion that the Rhetoric’s treatment of lexis played an important role in later, especially Renaissance, discussions of style. “Neither the Greeks in the East nor the Latins in the West thought that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, was a particularly important treatise, but for very important reasons” (150). Because Ciceronian and other treatments of style were already well established and useful, “pedagogues had little need for Aristotle when they taught practical rhetoric” (163).

Coming to Aristotle’s defense on the issue of his contribution to our understanding of rhetorical style, Jean Fahenstock finds that, though Aristotle “may have specified fewer devices, . . . he seems to have held a more complex view of the effects that these devices could achieve” (167). Thus, Book Three is not a cursory treatment of style, but Aristotle made a significant contribution to our understanding of figuration. The editors and Michael Tiffany conclude Rereading Aristotle’s Rhetoric with a lengthy and helpful guide to scholarship on Rhetoric.

Several of the essays in this collection helpfully integrate the Rhetoric with the rest of the Aristotelian corpus.  Moreover, the essays provide a much richer and more nuanced understanding of basic Aristotelian notions such as enthymeme, pathos, special topics, and style.  Several scholars completely invert previous received opinions about some of these treasured concepts, which suggests that a few of these essays will elicit controversy. At the same time, these authors are not all of one accord in their revisionism. Thus, Thomas Farrell’s entry provides us a different and, I think, irreconcilable account of enthymeme than does the immediately preceding essay by Jeffrey Walker.

I found this book to be a valuable source of interpretive insight into Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Gross and Walzer are to be commended for collecting essays exhibiting a great deal of studied insight into the Rhetoric. Moreover, it is a pleasure to read authors who take their work so seriously and who at the same time write with such a deft touch.

James A. Herrick is Professor and Chair in the Department of Communication at Hope College.