This Series Could Change Your Life (It Changed Mine) | Intro to the History of Rhetoric

For centuries, getting an education meant getting an education in rhetoric—it was the foundation of the liberal arts, one of the three core disciplines of the trivium along with grammar and logic. Rhetoric as we often think of it—and even the word itself (ῥητορικός)—comes from ancient Greece and the opportunities and necessity for public speaking that arose in early democracy. The Romans learned it, employing rhetorical skill in courts, politics, and public life. Rhetoric was at the heart of medieval education, and it was at the center of the Renaissance passion for Classical knowledge. Even as far from Athens as the 19th-century United States, students were learning rhetorical techniques for eloquence and composition. 

But then, all at once, rhetoric vanished. Or it seems like it did. What was once at the heart of learning, at least in the European tradition, became just a word you use to dismiss the hot wind of your political opponents—it’s all just rhetoric. What happened?

That’s exactly the question I asked when I was sitting in my professor’s office one day. I was partway through a class called the history of rhetoric, and I wanted to know, if it was such a big deal for so many hundreds of years, where did it go? Richard Vatz had argued that rhetoric deserved to be recognized as “the supreme discipline,” so why was I only hearing about it now as a junior in college taking his last general education course?

That’s a question I want to think about with you as we embark on this series about the history of rhetoric. I took a history of rhetoric class more or less on a whim—because it seemed like the least miserable way to fill a history credit. Little did I know that my final throwaway general education class would set me on a path that would include, of all things, a PhD in that lost art of rhetoric. 

It’s hard to explain exactly what happened when I encountered rhetoric. On the one hand, I felt like the boundaries of my intellectual world were being blown open—I was learning about thinkers and ideas that I had never known about and seeing how rhetorical thought permeated so much of the intellectual, cultural, and religious traditions that I had inherited. On the other, it felt like I was finally learning words for things that I had always suspected were true about language and people. 

Over the course of this series, we’re going to look at several ways that the understanding and practice of rhetoric have changed over the centuries. Whether we’re looking at Aristotle’s understanding of Rhetoric as a means “of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion,” Quintilian’s view of rhetoric as the product of a "...good man speaking well," or modern perspectives like Kenneth Burke’s characterization of rhetoric as “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents” or Lloyd Bitzer’s as “a mode of altering reality,” we’ll be looking at how we can study language, not just as an object of curiosity but as a medium of communication, identity, and social connection. 

Of course, this show is called Writing with Andrew, so we’ll be looking specifically at how rhetorical thought throughout history can support our growth and practice as writers, but to think of rhetoric only as an art of communication would be to limit its true scope. Yes, teachers and scholars of rhetoric have been, since the earliest days, committed to helping students become better speakers and writers, but that advice is inseparably tied up in a rhetorical worldview that affirms human freedom, values the exchange of ideas, and prioritizes collaboration across difference. The 20th-century scholar Richard Weaver called rhetoric “the most humanistic of disciplines.” It is, after all, a discipline that looks at where we are now and tries to rally us, collectively, toward a better future. 

Now, before we embark toward our rhetorical future, it’s probably worth pointing out a few things, or explaining my approach to this enormous subject. One, it’s impossible to cover everything, so I’m not going to try.

Additionally, the history of rhetoric, with its roots in ancient Greece and Rome is unavoidably a history that follows the trajectory of Europe. Throughout, we’ll do what we can to include some insights from more recent scholarship that highlight rhetorical practices from other parts of the world. Of course, too, any journey into history will involve encounters with turns of phrase that might strike our ears in odd ways: yes, Quintilian defined rhetoric as “a good man speaking well,” no, that does not mean that rhetoric as taught and practiced now is only for men. We might not speak in the same ways that historical figures did, but I’m going to leave the texts and translations as they are lest anyone think I’m putting words in Cicero’s mouth.

And, finally, you may find yourself disagreeing with certain rhetoricians or certain rhetorical ideas—I certainly do.

Kaput: And I can think of one I disagree with all the time!

Yes, I’m sure you can, bud. But the discipline is, as we’ll see, so much larger than any one thinker or even generation of thinkers. So not only is rhetoric big enough to handle disagreements, it’s a discipline designed to help us navigate such disagreements without conflict. I’ve already endured graduate school, so I’m not terribly interested in playing the “what’s wrong with this article” game—instead, my focus will be on what I think is valuable, on the ideas that I think are useful. 

As a professor once said when we were struggling through some difficult Burkean theory, “Nobody gets all of Burke in one go. Get what you can, hold onto what you think is worthwhile, and then let go of the rest. You can always get it next time.” I’d add that it’s perfectly acceptable to leave things permanently to the side—but I’m not interested in making the search for problems or inadequacies a priority over the search for useful, applicable ideas. We can focus on problems, but our rhetorical practice is incomplete if we’re not prioritizing solutions.

Kaput: For example, I’ll be here too as a solution to the inevitable boredom you’ll  experience…especially when we hit the Medieval years…

How generous. But the point is that rhetoric is expansive—after thousands of years, how could it not be? It’s so much more than an epithet that you can use to dismiss an opponent. Of course, any simple definition of rhetoric is going to be inadequate to the task of explaining all that rhetoric is and does, but one that I keep coming back to is I.A. Richard’s: “Rhetoric,” he says, “is the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.”

At its root, that’s what rhetoric is: a tool for studying what goes wrong when people disagree and outlining what can be done to repair those disagreements in productive, nonviolent ways. I’ve said it for years, and I’ll say it again: knowing what I know about rhetoric, I really do think so many of the problems we face personally, in our local communities, and globally could be resolved if everyone just knew something about rhetoric and practiced it conscientiously. Of course, getting everyone to practice it conscientiously is probably beyond my reach, but I can at least share what I know so that more people will know it too. I wouldn’t call myself a hero -

Kaput: Neither would I...

But if there’s anything that I think could save the world—or, at the very least, make it somewhat more tolerable—I think rhetoric is that thing.

So I really am excited to share this series with you. When I say that learning the history of rhetoric changed my life, I mean it: I would never have taken the path I ended up taking if not for that history of rhetoric class I took just to get out of an even worse requirement. Now, I’m not saying that you have to apply for a PhD program after watching this series, but there is some precedent for it. 

Either way, I’m sure we’re going to have a great time—maybe even a life-changingly great time—so thank you for being here, and please join me in the next video where we’ll take a look at ancient Greece and the earliest days of rhetoric as we know it.