Rhetoric According to Aristotle (pt. 1)

As long as we’re here talking about rhetoric, we might as well talk about the guy who wrote the book on it

If you ever study rhetoric in school, odds are you’ll come across Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It’s a book that is often considered the first serious consideration of the topic, so it enjoys a prominent place in many introductions to rhetoric’s history.

That’s because before Aristotle, philosophers mostly complained about rhetoric—in fact, Aristotle’s teacher Plato wrote about rhetoric being a sort of cheap, fraudulent version of philosophy, an assessment that is still common today (and has even shown up in the comments section here from time to time).

So, I think that, for a lot of people, Aristotle’s Rhetoric is seen as a text that did a lot to legitimize rhetoric. Instead of just dismissing it, Aristotle took the time to understand it and discuss its usefulness and validity.

And, even though its over 2000 years old, there’s a still a lot in the Rhetoric that’s useful and valid today. So I thought we’d take the first step into talking about this ancient and interesting book, not just to see what Aristotle wrote but to see why rhetoric is still just as relevant in the 21^st century.

A Counterpart to Dialectic

In the opening sentence of the Rhetoric, Aristotle says that rhetoric is a counterpart to dialectic, which is, of course, as clear and straightforward as it gets, so it’s kind of weird that he decided to write anything else.

But it is a useful and important starting place for a couple of reasons that get much clearer when we understand what dialectic is and who Aristotle’s audience most likely was.

Aristotle is probably most famous for being a philosopher, just like his teacher Plato, and dialectic was an important method that philosophers used to try to understand what was or wasn’t true.

Of course, his audience was most likely composed of students who were much more familiar with philosophy and dialectic than they would have been with rhetoric. So Aristotle started out by comparing rhetoric to something that they would already have known a lot about.

For the rest of us, though, dialectic involves two people standing on opposing sides of a question or issue and then asking a series of questions in order to test or challenge the other side’s claims. It’s a method of scrutinizing an idea through intense, iterative questioning in order to figure out a clear, precise understanding of something.

For example, in Plato’s Gorgias dialogue, we see the philosopher Socrates asking the rhetor Gorgias about what rhetoric is using a dialectical method like this:

SOCRATES: Very good then; as you profess to be a rhetorician, and a maker of rhetoricians, let me ask you, with what is rhetoric concerned: I might ask with what is weaving concerned, and you would reply (would you not?), with the making of garments?

GORGIAS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And music is concerned with the composition of melodies?

GORGIAS: It is.

SOCRATES: By Here, Gorgias, I admire the surpassing brevity of your answers.

GORGIAS: Yes, Socrates, I do think myself good at that.

SOCRATES: I am glad to hear it; answer me in like manner about rhetoric: with what is rhetoric concerned?

GORGIAS: With discourse.

You can see that, rather than just ask Gorgias to describe rhetoric, Socrates arrives at the conclusion through a series of questions—and, in order to refine the definition of rhetoric even further, Socrates asks many, many more questions.

Eventually, Socrates gets Gorgias to assert that rhetoric concerns itself with the just and the unjust and that a rhetorician must be just. However, through that series of questioning, Socrates discovers a problem and says as much, pointing out, “I was thinking at the time, when I heard you saying so, that rhetoric, which is always discoursing about justice, could not possibly be an unjust thing. But when you added, shortly afterwards, that the rhetorician might make a bad use of rhetoric I noted with surprise the inconsistency into which you had fallen…”

And the dialogue goes on from there—but you can see the basic point of dialectic. A philosopher like Socrates asks questions about an idea, following a strict and technical logical method, looking for inconsistencies or gaps in order to find an accurate and truthful definition of the matter in question.

But, for all the advantages that dialectic has for arriving at really exact and well-tested definitions, it also has some serious limitations that make room for the validity of rhetoric

Aristotle understood that rhetoric was like dialectic in a lot of ways but that it was also built to do different things. So, rather than dismiss it as something inferior, he acknowledged its value and set about explaining what it was for and how it worked—and his Rhetoric is, in some ways, an effort to explain and justify rhetoric to an audience of philosophy students who might otherwise dismiss it themselves.

So Aristotle compares rhetoric to a method that his students would have been familiar with, explaining that rhetoric is a counterpoint to dialectic, a method for figuring things out and getting things done, but one that was better suited to certain contexts than the philosophers’ dialectic.

In particular, rhetoric differs from dialectic in three key ways that we’ll now take a look at: its audience, its methodological strictness, and its overall purpose.

Audience

As we’ve already talked about, dialectic is a tool for philosophers. You might even say it’s a highly specialized method that’s meant to be used between and among experts. But Aristotle suggests that rhetoric is meant to be used among people who aren’t experts or specialists—an audience that is especially relevant in the context of early Greek democracy.

For example, he explains that, while it could be possible to work through a dialectical process in a democratic court where the judge and jury are all fellow citizens, Aristotle says, it would “necessarily not be easy to follow because of the length” pointing out that “the judge is assumed to be a simple person” or, in other words, not an expert in dialectic.

See, for whatever strengths dialectic has for arriving at clear and precise definitions of truth, it has some limitations that don’t make it very useful in the democratic process.

For one, it’s a very long and potentially tedious method. If you’re working with someone who’s willing to sit through an endless battery of increasingly nuanced questions, fine—but, if not, you might be in trouble.

Simply put, everyday people don’t have the time, training, or investment to put up with the dialectical method.

Also, you might have a hard time finding someone who is willing to answer questions while you scrutinize their every response to find inconsistencies. There’s a reason that Socrates had a reputation for irritating people wherever he went.

When you’re working with an early form of democracy where, at least in theory, everyday people are making all the decisions, it probably isn’t a good idea to rely on a method that is tedious, that requires specialized training, and that has a high probability of irritating or offending the people you’re supposed to be working with.

In other words, dialectic is a great tool for doing philosophy, but it isn’t especially well suited for doing democracy. When it came to the democratic processes of ancient Greece, the rhetoric that was being taught by figures like Gorgias and Lysias were finding a great deal more success, much to the disappointment of the philosophers like Socrates and Plato, who often saw rhetoric as a cheap knockoff of dialectic.

Specialized methods like dialectic require everyone involved to have specialized training in order to understand and participate. With rhetoric, though, the people involved don’t need to be experts, so more people can participate.

Just imagine, for example, the different kinds of conversations you could have about physics between a group of people who all took a class in high school vs. a group of Nobel-prize-winning physicists working at a massive particle collider.

It’s not that one conversation is inherently better than another. It’s true that one may be less technical—but it will also be more accessible to more people.

As we’ll see in a second, rhetoric and dialectic do have some meaningful differences—but those difference grow out of the fact that rhetoric is suited to the context of democracy, where many different people without specialized training are coming together to solve the problems they all face.

Methodology

Dialectic involves a highly logical process, and it hangs on a logical structure known as a syllogism.

In his translation of the Rhetoric George A. Kennedy points to one of the most classic syllogisms:

“If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal”

In this—and all—syllogisms, we have two conditional statements, known as premises, and a conclusion.

When dealing with a syllogism, you have two statements that are known to be true that then allow you to draw a conclusion that is also guaranteed to be true by virtue of the truths it grows out of. If the first two statements are true, then the final statement must be 100% true too. There is no version of reality where men are mortal and where Socrates is a man and then end up with a Socrates who isn’t mortal.

It just isn’t possible, and the syllogism is a tool for arranging knowledge and testing its truthfulness. If you have a valid syllogism—or if the logical connections between all three steps are valid—then you have something that is absolutely true.

But Aristotle explains that rhetoric uses its own kind of syllogism, which he calls the enthymeme. Again, Kennedy provides a good example:

“If Socrates is wise, he is virtuous.”

You might already notice some key differences here between a dialectical syllogism and a rhetorical enthymeme—for one, it’s shorter.

And why is it shorter? Because a rhetorician trusts that the audience can understand the connection between wisdom and virtue and accept the conclusion that a wise person is virtuous.

If we were doing dialectic, we would have to go through a lengthy question-and-answer process to establish the absolute truth of the relationship between wisdom and virtue—but the rhetorician trusts the audience to validate that connection with their own experience rather than with a lengthy dialectical examination of why wise people are also virtuous people.

As Aristotle himself writes, if you wanted to say that “Dorieus has won a contest with a crown it is enough to have said that he has won the Olympic games, and there is no need to add that the Olympic games have a crown as the prize; for everybody knows that.”

And, again, if we’re thinking in the context of a democratic process, there is value in keeping things short, trusting your audience to know about how the world works, and sparing them the step-by-step tour of how you know that every statement is true. People have brains, and we can trust them to use them.

But there’s another key difference between the parts of a syllogism and the parts of an enthymeme. Each part of a syllogism must be certain, must be 100% true. But each part of an enthymeme is only probable, or likely to be true.

And you might feel like one of Aristotle’s students and wonder why on earth you would settle for something that is probably true when you could put in the work to get to something that is absolutely true.

Well, in this case, I think it’s helpful to remember that rhetoric isn’t about playing it fast and loose with the truth—instead, it’s about working through situations where 100% certainty is impossible or impractical.

Consider, for example, the relative complexity involved in confirming the truthfulness of the two statements:

Socrates is a man and Socrates is wise

Especially if we’re willing to accept man as a generic term historically used to refer to the human species, we aren’t going to have to do much investigative work to confirm that Socrates is a human person. We can know Socrates’ species with 100% certainty.

We really can’t know in any quantifiable way, though, whether Socrates is wise. What counts as wise? If Socrates ever did a foolish thing in his life or in the past three weeks, would he still be wise? And how would we ever know whether or not he did some foolish thing in secret?

We can’t say with absolute certainty whether Socrates is wise in the same way that we can say he is a human, but we can also feel very comfortable calling him wise if we’ve seen enough wisdom in his behavior and character.

When we say Socrates is wise, there could be room to debate the claim, but it isn’t really a controversial thing to say it’s probably true. It’s likely enough that we’re willing to accept that it’s true.

And, of course, that’s helpful in a democracy: if you’re trying to figure out whether to raise taxes or go to war or distribute medicine, 100% certainty about the right course of action is unrealistic.

You could, I suppose, work through a formalized process of discovering the absolute truth, but, first things first, you’d risk boring or confusing or irritating the voters and, secondly, that process would take so long that the economy could collapse or the enemy could invade or the sick could perish in the meantime.

So, yes, rhetoric doesn’t approach truth with the same methodological formality—but that’s because the real world often requires immediate action and it will rarely slow down to give us time to ponder irrefutable, cosmic truth.

Means of Persuasion

Aristotle famously explained that rhetoric gives us the ability “to see the available means of persuasion in each case” that we may encounter. And, when we’ve talked about persuasion on the show before, we’ve discussed how true persuasion aims to motivate others to take action.

So a mastery of rhetoric means an ability to know, in a given situation, what would motivate other people to take a particular action.

In contrast, dialectic and philosophy are more interested in figuring out what is true in an absolute sense.

The dialectical process can tell you that Socrates is 100% mortal, and the rhetorical process can tell you that Socrates is probably virtuous.

Rhetoric leaves some room for doubt, but there isn’t much you can do with the certainty that Socrates is mortal. If you’re confident that he’s virtuous, though, that can do a lot to influence how you interact with him.

So ancient philosophers—and their modern-day counterparts—worry about the fact that rhetoric doesn’t go out of its way to ascertain absolute truth. But in all that worrying, they overlook the fact that rhetoric isn’t really meant to figure out what is absolutely true: it’s meant to figure out what is useful and then to motivate people to get to work.

Dialectic is great for imaginary dialogues among dead philosophers or even for academics at scholarly conferences, but it’s not very good for helping everyday people deal with real-world issues in a democracy.

For that, you need rhetoric. And, in that light, rhetoric is not just a dereliction of your dialectical duty; instead, it’s a vital part of a healthy society.

So I’m excited to talk with you about more of Aristotle’s rhetorical insights, but I think I’ve gone on for long enough today. There’s a lot more good stuff to get into, so stay tuned, and I’ll see you then.