The Politics of Rhetoric: Richard M. Weaver and the Conservative Tradition (Contributions in Philosophy)

THE POLITICS OF RHETORIC

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THE POLITICS OF RHETORIC Richard M. Weaver and the Conservative Tradition Bernard K. Duffy &

Martin Jacobi

Contributions in Philosophy, Number 51

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Duffy, Bernard K. The politics of rhetoric : Richard M. Weaver and the conservative tradition / Bernard K. Duffy and Martin Jacobi. p. cm.—(Contributions in philosophy, ISSN 0084-926X ; no. 51) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-25713-2 (alk. paper) 1. Weaver, Richard M., 1910-1963. 2. American literature— Southern States—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Politics and literature—Southern States—History—20th century. 4. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching—Southern States. 5. Conservatism—Southern States—History—20th century. 6. Southern States—Historiography. 7. Rhetoric—Philosophy. I. Jacobi, Martin James, 1949- . II. Title. III. Series. PS261.D83 1993 814'.54-^dc20 92-36514 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1993 by Bernard K. Duffy and Martin Jacobi All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-36514 ISBN: 0-313-25713-2 ISSN: 0084-926X First published in 1993 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). P In order to keep this title in print and available to the academic community, this edition was produced using digital reprint technology in a relatively short print run. This would not have been attainable using traditional methods. Although the cover has been changed from its original appearance, the text remains the same and all materials and methods used still conform to the highest book-making standards.

Copyright Acknowledgments The authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following copyrighted material: Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Times. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Richard M. Weaver, Language Is Sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric, edited by Richard L. Johannesen, Rennard Strickland, and Ralph T. Eubanks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970. Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. © 1948 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published 1948. Paperback edition 1984. From Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays by Richard M. Weaver, used by permission of the publisher: Liberty Fund, Inc., 7440 North Shadeland, Indianapolis, IN 46250. Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953. Used by permission of Hermagoras Press. Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, edited by George Core and M. E. Bradford. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington, 1968. Used by permission of Regnery Gateway, Inc. The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, edited by George M. Curtis and James J. Thompson, Jr., 1987, used by permission of the publisher: Liberty Fund, Inc., 7440 North Shadeland, Indianapolis, IN 46250. Quotations from personal letters, speeches, college termpapers, and other material included in the Richard M. Weaver Papers at the Heard Library at Vanderbilt University and the Henry Regnery Papers at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California, and quotations of unpublished material collected in a dissertation on Richard M. Weaver by Thomas Goodnight, were used by permission of Polly Weaver Beaton.

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To Elizabeth and Susan Dufiy, and Sasha, Evan, and Andrew Jacobi

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Contents

Preface List of Abbreviations xi 1. Introduction

xi xix 1

2. Cultural Theory, Part 1

19

3. Cultural Theory, Part 2

41

4. Literary Theory

67

5. Rhetorical and Composition Theory

93

6. Science, Metaphysics, and Sectional Culture

125

7. The Rhetoric of Social Science: Brute Facts and Created Realities 143 8. General Semantics and Spacious Rhetoric

159

9. Rhetorical Genres

175

10. Conclusion

197

Works Cited

205

Index

213

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Preface

Richard M. Weaver was fundamentally an essayist and the themes of his individual essays cross and recross one another, creating a web of ideas and opinions not easily disentangled. Most of his books are comprised of essays, many of which were published earlier in journals; the two that are not collections of essays, Ideas Have Consequences and Visions of Order, have something of the same character. The essay collections are loosely thematic and cross-referential, though Weaver does not often remind us that he has discussed a matter previously. As a consequence it made less sense to us to study Weaver's books individually or to express how Weaver's ideas developed over time. His essays cross several disciplines, including our own, and also politics, philosophy, and, to some extent, sociology, anthropology, and education. We do not attempt to treat Weaver's work comprehensively or pretend to speak from the perspectives of all these disciplines or from all perspectives within our own disciplines. Nor do we represent this book as Weaver's literary biography, although we recognize the influence of his life and cultural experiences upon his canon. Instead, we have focused on those concerns of Weaver's that seem representative of his thinking and most germane to our two disciplines of English and communication, and to what we teach and study—rhetorical theory, composition theory, literature, and public address. Our interest, therefore, has been primarily in Weaver's rhetorical theory, his critique of modern rhetoric, his composition pedagogy and assessment of education, his theory of the "cultural role of rhetoric," and examples of his own argumentation concerning a number of social issues that are of as much concern today as when he first discussed them in the late 1940s and early 1950s. We are particularly interested in assessing the

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degree to which Weaver's conservatism led him to enduringly useful insights into rhetoric and culture, and from this interest the book derives its title. His conservatism also led him to use his rhetorical talents to p r o m o t e cultural and political positions; that is, he offers us both a rhetorica docens, a rhetorical theory, and a rhetorica utens, a body of rhetorical discourse. By theorizing that rhetorical discourse includes moral promptings to think and act prudently, Weaver establishes a presumption that his own use of rhetoric will do just that. Specifically, he places rhetoric into the service of a transcendent, p r e s u m e d truth of a decidedly conservative cast. Part of the reason why his rhetorical theory has not received the attention it deserves concerns his readers' not clearly distinguishing b e t w e e n rhetorica docens and rhetorica utens. Looked at as rhetorica utens, some of Weaver's strategies are partial, even "sophistic." H e does argue that a neomedieval Judeo-Christian world view is the closest to the ideal w e can get on the earth, and that it is most beneficial to human action and most suited to the nature and function of rhetoric. Also, he argues for the existence of stable truth, the maintenance of cultural traditions, and the importance of ethical responsibility. It is no surprise that American conservative politicians have thought him worth reading, nor is it surprising that most modernists and postmodernists find a great deal with which to disagree. While Weaver can be charged with using rhetorical theory for the purpose of political propaganda, such a charge could b e made against any rhetorical theorist. As Weaver supports a conservative political agenda, Kenneth Burke supports a neo-Marxist one, although to be fair, Burke's political leanings must be inferred while Weaver seems rarely to miss an opportunity to show how his rhetorical theory supports his political and cultural assessments. Even looked at as rhetorica docens, Weaver's work inevitably indicates a political orientation through the description of its key elements, although from this perspective his theory does seem much more powerful and persuasive. Much of his rhetorical theory is the product of his rhetorical and cultural criticism. H e does not unfold a rhetorical theory, such as Aristotle's, that discusses rhetorical proofs, style, and organization and that elaborates the potential premises of arguments founded upon cultural assumptions. (His composition textbook represents his closest approximation to this format.) More customarily, Weaver positions himself as a philosopher of rhetoric and a rhetorical critic whose theory concerns the relationship of rhetoric to dialectic, metaphysics, and culture. His approach to the subject is much like Plato's, who criticized existing rhetorical theories and practice, suggested a b e t t e r version of the art, and placed the study of rhetoric in relation to its cognates, particularly philosophy. However, Weaver's affection for rhetoric is, ultimately, far greater than Plato's. Weaver, therefore, provides a more positive assessment of rhetoric than that which Plato allows.

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Weavers essays themselves seem often to be comprised of correlated but disparate elements and use digression to give relief from the main argument while subtly supporting it in ways that might not at first be apparent. His essays are rich in the variety of support, both illustrative and logical, and bespeak the erudition and expansiveness of the classical lecturer, essayist, and orator. Many of his essays follow the epideictic genre for they are clearly demonstrative, not only of the praiseworthy and blameworthy, but of Weaver's virtuosity as a rhetorician and of the virtues of rhetoric as a medium of expression. His essays, which frequently argue paradoxical positions, link Weaver with sophistic display speeches, such as Gorgias's Encomium of Helen. Like Paganini's violin concerti, they celebrate the virtuoso performer and reveal the possibilities of the instrument. Some of his essays dealing with paradoxical themes, however, are more than opportunities to display his skill. As Paganini has serious motives regarding his music, so Weaver's motives at times allow him to be a forensic rhetorician who appeals dimly remembered historical verdicts, arguing for the revaluation of people and ideas he identifies with conservatism. In this role, he frequently impresses us with his acute grasp of rhetorical principles and techniques, drawing us into the game but failing to win our assent for positions that are ultimately indefensible. Although we examine Weaver's own rhetorica utens, it is fundamentally to understand and criticize his arguments, rather than to characterize, except incidentally, his invention or style. It should not be left unsaid, however, that no matter what conclusions may be reached concerning the dialectical positions he argues, his vivid and engaging style is admirable. (We believe it is admirable, although we can imagine a position based on Cicero's belief that true eloquence always requires wisdom; we can also image a position maintaining that a full appreciation of Weaver's rhetorica utens would rely upon an acceptance of the philosophical underpinnings of his rhetorica docens.) One of the few hostile comments about Weaver's style, in a review written by George Geiger for the Antioch Review, is clearly prejudicial: "Mr. Weaver's pretentious style—combining the most obnoxious features of Milton Mayer and Mortimer Adler—must be held responsible" for Geiger's "violent reaction" to Ideas Have Consequences (251). Contrary to Geiger, we believe that Weaver's eloquence is itself a reason to read his works, though the disjunction between form and substance implied in this comment would doubtless concern Weaver greatly. Indeed, the reasons to read Weaver are many and, although it has been said that his primary audience was like-thinking conservatives, there is evidence that he hoped his cultural critique would produce among liberals precisely the "violent reaction" admitted by Geiger. It is not ultimately satisfying, after all, to wound one's academic enemies—or one's political enemies—unless they know it. That Weaver's books elicit such responses make him a unique figure in modern rhetorical theory, a figure similar to

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Plato, who roundly attacked the Sophists, or Protagoras, who some say was banished for refusing to recant his treatise on the nonexistence of the gods. How one interprets Weaver depends upon what one believes his major emphasis to have been—whether rhetoric, conservative philosophy, or cultural criticism, to name the three most reasonable possibilities. From one perspective, he was a conservative who used rhetorical theory as a way to study the arguments and persuasive claims for both conservatism and liberalism, with the hope of establishing grounds for conservative argumentation. To the extent that Weaver's rhetorical theory supports his conservatism, one could recall both his own argument that "language is sermonic" and his view that discourse suppressing a point of view in a falsely objective interest fails on humanistic grounds if on no other. That is, rhetorical treatises have been written with political viewpoints in mind, and, like Machiavelli's The Prince, Weaver's writing is intellectually interesting to students of rhetoric even if its inspiration is political. Further, Weaver's notion that language is sermonic provides a circular rejoinder to claims that he is not objective; in this sense, his theory is self-sealing. On the other hand, to the extent that his conservatism informs his rhetorical theory, some would argue that his rhetorical theory is impure or suspect, despite the insights it provides. We take no final stand on either position, although we try to point out not only the extent to which his theory supports his politics but also the extent to which his conservatism seems to inform, and even sometimes distort, his rhetorical theory. Looking at this issue from another perspective, one can say that theorizing about rhetoric cannot be done in a vacuum. As it is developed, a theory of rhetoric shows not just its theoretical lineaments but also the nature and method of its application. One might imagine a continuum, at one end of which is the belief that truth exists prior to rhetorical acts, and that rhetors are responsible for discerning and presenting that truth effectively, and at the other end is the belief that truth is what is created through collaborative rhetorical acts, and that rhetors are responsible for using discourse to foster these creative contexts. It is our opinion that many people, whether or not they are rhetorical theorists and whether or not they are aware of what they are doing, approach the former pole in their rhetorical acts. They approach a discussion or argument believing that they have the answers, and that their purpose in the situation is to bring their interlocutors into alignment with their own predetermined positions. In fact, perhaps most people find it difficult always to maintain an open-minded toleration of other ideas and an acceptance of the possibility that they will be altered through discourse with others—hallmarks, as Robert Scott maintains, of the rhetorical theory implicit in the continuum's latter pole. A study of Weaver's works not only illuminates his rhetorical theory, placing him at the pole in which truth precedes rhetorical presentation; it also indicates how rhetoric is used by a person who believes as Weaver does about the

Preface xv

relationship of rhetoric to truth. In brief, it shows that such a theory as Weaver develops can induce a rhetor to see ends justifying means. Like Plato, who states in The Republic that rhetoric is available for educational and political seduction when the facts of the case may not be persuasive (Book 3, 389B; Book 5, 459C), Weaver occasionally, at least, uses some suspect rhetorical strategies in an attempt to persuade his audience to a position that he apparently feels we would otherwise not accept. Weaver's theory is oftentimes interesting and sometimes profound. However, as he employs his rhetorical knowledge in the analysis and subsequent discussion of real-life events, he occasionally wavers as regards his principal points* and as he uses rhetoric to pursue his own practical and real-world issues—such as the justifiable extent of academic freedom, or the social attitudes of and toward the South, or the responsibilities of the censor to the maintenance of discourse whose end is the health of society— he sometimes gives short shrift to positions laid out in his theory. That is, in practice Weaver occasionally operates as if the "truth" he is to present is not what has been dialectically secured with his intended audience but rather something he has developed in vacuo to set them right; and he tends to see as "artful" any means that will allow him to get his audience to accept his truth. Weaver wrote at a time when the menace of international communism was perceived to be very real and very great, and when the civil rights and feminist movements had not yet made Americans as sensitive to race and gender issues as we are now. Therefore, to fault Weaver for what might now look like political paranoia or to fault him for attitudes we would now call racist and sexist might be seen as unkind or even unfair. Yet we feel that these criticisms of Weaver are fair. In his discussion of the sexism in Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Wayne Booth has an imaginary critic complain that Booth is unfair "in [his] failure to see him [Rabelais] in his own time and to recognize just how far his imagination ranged beyond that of most of his contemporaries" (Company We Keep, 408). As part of his defense against this charge, Booth states that, despite Rabelais's relative feminist tendencies when he is compared with his contemporaries, we do not read Rabelais in his time but in our own. He says: "For me, here and now, the power of any 'past' text to work on me and to reshape me, for good or ill, is thus in this one sense ahistorical. All works that I re-work speak to me, bless me or threaten me, where I am" (412). That is, the mark of great literature has always been that it speaks to all people about the human condition, no matter their particular personal, social, and cultural orientations. Such standards should also apply to the writing Weaver does. If his work is important to us not merely as a historical artifact but as a body of thought that speaks to us today, we must look at all that it is telling us; as readers of our book will see, we believe that Weaver offers us a great deal that is useful and thought-provoking, but he also offers us

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opinions that a doctor of culture in the late twentieth century would find flawed. His flaws cannot be ignored. Weaver is most interesting when he is most abstract and most concerned with rhetorical theory, and he is most prone to antagonize when he is most specific and most interested in social and political issues. His theories, then, are more likely to command the admiration of the community of academic rhetoricians than are the specific conservative positions they are used to support. Weaver's oeuvre is an interesting study of a person who does not distinguish clearly enough between theoretical constructs and the real world; as a result, his applications of his own theories, while interesting, lead him oftentimes to ideological excesses. Despite such problems, Weaver has enjoyed a great deal of prominence in the discipline of rhetorical theory—as it exists in departments of English and, even more, as it exists in departments of speech communication. His prominence reflects the valuable insights he offers into the nature and function of rhetoric as a human activity; into the relationship of rhetoric to ethics, to society, and to the cultural underpinnings of society; into the role of rhetoric in discerning "truth"; and into the responsibilities of the rhetor to his or her audience as regards the presentation of that truth. These insights ought to be understood and fully considered. Our collaboration on this book began some years ago when we were colleagues in the English department at Clemson University. During our time at that institution we discovered that we had a mutual interest in Richard Weaver; specifically, we found through numerous discussions that we agreed on our understanding and evaluation of his rhetorical theory. We talked to each other about various aspects of his theory and its implications, and we shared drafts and final versions of conference papers. While collaboration is beneficial in many ways, we came to understand, shortly after we began work on this book, that there can also be drawbacks, because one of us took a position at an institution some three thousand miles away. Nevertheless, we have managed to continue an active, critical, and productive collaboration on Weaver despite the geographical distance. While we have been able to continue our collaboration, each of us has taken primary responsibility for several chapters, with the other serving as the critical reader suggesting expansions, deletions, and other changes. Thus, Bernard Duffy is the primary author of Chapters 1, 6, 7, and 8, and Martin Jacobi the primary author of Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5. The preface, the conclusion, and Chapter 9 have been jointly written. Our book tries to consider the insights Weaver offers in a fairly systematic fashion. Chapter 1 introduces Weaver the man, the cultural critic, and the rhetorician. The final division of the chapter preliminarily considers his vision of the cultural role of rhetoric and questions one of his core concepts, the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric. Chapters 2 and 3

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analyze Weaver's general and specific cultural theory, respectively, in order to provide what Weaver would see as a necessary basis for his rhetorical theory. Chapter 2 looks at the origins and nature of culture and at the effects that the rise in the importance of science have had on Western culture; it closes with an analysis of how Weaver's ideas on truth compare with such concepts as the social construction of knowledge and rhetoric as epistemic, and with how these theories' rhetorical components compare with his rhetorical theory. Chapter 3 describes and evaluates Weaver's thoughts on the antebellum southern society as an approximation of the "ideal culture"; the chapter ends with the implications of this cultural view for feminist, economic, and military considerations. Chapter 4 looks at how Weaver's literary theory relates to his cultural theory and offers insights into his rhetorical theory. Starting with the similarities and differences between Weaver's and Plato's thoughts on literature, this chapter addresses the status of literature as cultural artifact, its creators, and its effects on audiences and on cultural development and maintenance. Chapter 5 discusses how Weaver's rhetorical theory applies to the teaching and practice of speaking and writing, with a focus on professional communication. This discussion not only shows the benefits Weaver offers to the teacher and practitioner of rhetoric but also indicates the pitfalls into which his particular theory can, or even must, lead the unwary student of his work. Chapter 6 explains Weaver's analysis of the Scopes trial. Ostensibly, Weaver's analysis is meant to illustrate the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, but his chapter also pleads the case of the prosecution and illustrates Weaver's desire to promote the metaphysical interests of the South while denouncing the presumptions of scientific and modernist culture. Chapter 7 concerns Weaver's critique of social scientific rhetoric, which hinges upon a distinction between "dialectical" and "positive" terms. Although the distinction is problematic, we find much to commend in Weaver's overall analysis of this rhetoric. The chapter elucidates the intellectual sources, substance, justification, and political basis of Weaver's critique. Chapter 8 takes up Weaver's views on language by examining his assault on General Semantics and contrasting it with his praise of spacious rhetoric. Chapter 9 explores the possibility that Weaver expresses himself in two rhetorical genres, the epideictic and the forensic. At his best he is an epideictic rhetor, engaged in a celebration of abstract values; at his worst, he is a forensic rhetor, pleading conservative causes with no more than the pretence of impartiality. Our conclusion offers a summary of Weaver's significance for the discipline of rhetorical theory. We would like to thank Marilyn Brownstein, senior humanities editor at Greenwood Press, for her help and patience. The gestation period for the book was longer than we anticipated, in part because of the geographical distance separating the authors. We are also grateful for the work of Pamela

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Chergotis, who copyedited the manuscript and Catherine Lyons, our production editor, who guided it into print. We would also like to thank California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo and Clemson University for providing sabbatical leaves to assist in the completion of this project. We gratefully acknowledge the Southern Humanities Commission for a travel grant to visit the Vanderbilt Archives. We appreciate the assistance of the archivists at Vanderbilt University Archives in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Hoover Institution Archives in Palo Alto, California. We also thank Professor Daniel Young of Vanderbilt University, and Polly Weaver Beaton, Richard Weaver's sister, for providing useful information about Weaver's life. We would like to thank Richard Johannesen for the helpful comments and encouragement he generously gave in response to conference papers and articles, as well as for his development of an excellent body of scholarly work on Weaver. Several people read portions of the manuscript and offered useful suggestions, including professors Stephen Ball, Susan Duffy, Richard Johannesen, Robert P. Newman, Edward P. Willey, Mark Winchell, and Mary DeShazer. Of course, any errors in the book are entirely our own. Finally, we would like to thank our families, Susan and Elizabeth Dufiy, and Sasha, Evan, and Andrew Jacobi.

List of

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used for in-text citations. For complete citations, see the Works Cited. Papers DDP

Donald Davidson Papers

HRP

Henry Regnery Papers

RMWP

Richard M. Weaver Papers

Weaver's Work AF DC EC

Academic Freedom: The Principle and the Problems "The Division of the Churches over Slavery (General)" [in Goodnight] "English Composition in the Classroom" [in Goodnight]

ER

The Ethics of Rhetoric

HH

"Hawthorne: What Was He?" [in Goodnight]

IHC

Ideas Have Consequences

LIS

Language Is Sermonic

LP

Life without Prejudice

PEM

"The People of the Excluded Middle" [in Goodnight]

PL

"The Place of Logic in the English Curriculum" [in Goodnight]

RC

Relativism and the Crisis of Our Times

RCWR

Rhetoric and Composition: A Course in Writing and Reading

List of Abbreviations

xx

RE

"The Role of Education in Shaping Our Society" [in Goodnight]

RL

"The Roots of the Liberal Complacency" [in Goodnight]

RR

"A Responsible Rhetoric"

SE

The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver

STB

The Southern Tradition at Bay

SW

"The Strategy of Words" [in Goodnight]

TW

"Making the Most of Two Worlds" [in Goodnight]

UTC

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" [in Goodnight]

VO

Visions of Order

Also used is the following abbreviation: WMFCT

World's Most Famous Court Trial

1

Introduction

What most distinguishes Richard Weaver as a rhetorician is his philosophical conservativism. As dramatism defines Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory, philosophical conservatism defines Richard Weaver's. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand his conservatism without acknowledging that his explanation of what it means to be a conservative is informed by his perspective on "the cultural role of rhetoric." The relationship between Weaver's conservatism and his rhetorical theory harkens back to the philosophical controversy between the ancient Sophists and their antagonist, Plato. Plato disparages rhetoric in the Gorgias as a method by which audiences are gratified so that politicians can achieve power, and he subordinates rhetoric to his idealistic philosophy in the Phaedrus. Weaver similarly criticizes rhetoric in the service of what he dislikes in modern culture, while granting it an essential role in the preservation of the traditional culture he prefers. For Weaver it is not all rhetoric that is evil, but rhetoric in the interest of liberal, socialistic, and scientistic causes, rhetoric that does not bow to a preceding dialectic or whose dialectic is marred. Yet he finds equally objectionable dialectic without rhetoric, which he sees as a false ideal promoted by interest in scientific objectivity and nurtured by General Semanticists intent upon eliminating linguistic ambiguity and rhetorical evocation. Conservative rhetoric, "right reason," attempts to achieve persuasion and cultural coherence by expressing intuitive and imaginative truths, preferably in arguments from definition, analogy, and genuine authority, rather than from false authority or from vexing arguments from circumstance, which assume that things as they are create imperatives for belief and action. Weaver's preferred rhetoric finds support in the judgments of those who possess philosophical insights, not in the calculations

2

The Politics of Rhetor

of social engineers and social scientists who profess the importance of statistical data even as they advance highly subjective programs of social change. The richness of Weaver's literary legacy subsists in the interrelationships among his conservative philosophy, his cultural criticism, and his rhetorical theory and criticism. For Weaver, modern culture is a reflection of the rhetoric that has shaped and sustains it. Therefore, to speak of rhetoric is to speak of its historical and potential influences on culture. His rhetorical theory is an accretion of his cultural criticism, which is disdainful of modern mass society with its scientistic and mediocriticizing tendencies. Weaver casts himself in the role of the cultural critic who uses his understanding of rhetoric to explain modern culture's deflection from the socially integrative force of an older rhetoric that appealed to staid values and philosophical constants. He detects in the degeneration of public discourse a renunciation of the principles that unified the more conservative polity of the past and sees in the right use of rhetoric the opportunity to restore the habits of moral thought and expression essential to a society founded upon cultural truths. WEAVER'S BACKGROUND AND CAREER

Weaver's autobiographical essay "Up from Liberalism"; the reflective opening essay of his Visions of Order, his last book; and reminiscences of him by his intellectual allies, such as Russell Kirk and Eliseo Vivas, and his publisher and friend Henry Regnery, provide a reflection of who Weaver was. Although he apparently kept up a massive correspondence, unfortunately very little of it has survived, perhaps, as Professor Daniel Young of Vanderbilt University conjectured, because Weaver, an antimaterialist, was not prone to accumulate possessions of any kind (RMWP Box 2; Young). Weaver was a child of the South at a time when the rural South appeared to be comprised of pockets of material deprivation, largely untouched by northern industrialism and the twin beacons of scientific and technological progress. During his early childhood the Scopes trial fixed an impression of southern society as backward, religiously fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, and opposed to the enlightenments of science or the material improvements of northern industrialism. Weaver was born in 1910 in Asheville, North Carolina, and spent most of his youth in the adjoining community of Weaverville. A town of 1,111 at the time of his death, it has grown together with and is now indistinguishable from Asheville itself. After his sudden death on April 3, 1963, of a heart attack at the age of 53, the University of Chicago, where Weaver taught from 1944 until his death, flew its flag at half-mast (news release, HRP Box 68). However, despite the university's homage to Weaver, he was in some sense a southern expatriate. One of the great incongruities in his life was that he chose to live in just such an urban hub of the modernist

Introduction 3

culture that he spent his academic career opposing. In a speech written for a family gathering in 1950 Weaver declared: "I have been condemned for the past six years to earn my living in that most brutal of cities, a place where all the vices of urban and industrial society break forth in a kind of evil flower." His speech expanded upon the reasons he disliked the "metropolis," including the anonymity it imposed upon its residents, its mechanistic outlook, and its dehumanization of its residents, compared with the provincialism of southern communities, which, by resisting the "urban ideal," had conserved the individuality and humanity of its people. Chicago, in all ways inimical to what Weaver held dear, was, nevertheless, the "vantage point" from which he considered the cultural decay of the northern city, while the model of the small southern community provided its "indispensable conservative counterpoise" ("Address of RMW," RMWP Box 3). Weaver's familial and cultural roots were in Weaverville, precisely the sort of rural southern community he had in mind. A half-serious saying, familiar in the South, which Weaver relates in one of his essays, is pertinent here: "In the South, it has been said, a man from another country is a stranger and one from another state is a foreigner" (SE 17). For Weaver, Weaverville, which bore his family's name, and was so small that the point of a map pin might exceed its boundaries, was a locus of culture and tradition, while the brutal northern megapolis, which treated humans as interchangeable parts, represented an altogether alien world (RMWP Box 3). Weaver, who was given to thinking in terms of dialectical opposites, could not have found two more representative poles of tradition and modernity, agrarianism and industrialism, religiosity and relativism, than Weaverville and Chicago. Kenneth Burke would say, no doubt, that these two places were the materializations of Weaver's deepest yearnings and anxieties. According to Henry Regnery, Weaver was, despite his feelings about Chicago, proud of his association with the University of Chicago, where he served as professor of English in its undergraduate college. Nevertheless, Regnery acknowledges, Weaver was not happy there, and though a committed teacher who in 1949 won a college prize for his teaching, he was isolated and excluded, where possible, by the faculty (Henry Regnery to Buckley, 4 April 1963, HRP Box 10; Regnery Memoirs 192). Wilma Ebbitt, who headed Chicago's English department, reports, however, that the faculty felt "a sense of desolation" at the prospect of Weaver's leaving to accept an appointment at Vanderbilt and comments that he was the institution's "most distinguished teacher of writing . . . in the last twenty years" (Ebbitt 415-16). An article in the University of Chicago's newspaper spoke of him as an austere man who kept to his schedule and routine, and who was dedicated to his students and his scholarship. Some people, observed the author, "were kept at a distance by his reticence, his sense of decorum, his rather formal courtesy, and by a calm stability which seemed to invite neither offers of aid nor the exchange of confidences" (5 April 1963, p. 5;

4

The Politics of Rhetoric

HRP Box 68). Eliseo Vivas, who knew Weaver for twenty years, expresses a similar response to Weaver in his introduction to Weaver's posthumous Life without Prejudice: "You sensed in him a man of great depths, of depths with which he seemed familiar, but into which you were not able to penetrate" (Vivas ix). Daniel Young of Vanderbilt's English department, where Weaver had planned to take the post of visiting professor, remembers him as a man who "spoke southern," and whose conversation was distinguished by polite answers to questions and an unfailing agreeableness (Young interview). Russell Kirk comments that the stoical Weaver lived in a single hotel room, braved the winters in Chicago wearing two overcoats at a time, and allowed as much as a year to elapse between meetings with even his best friends in Chicago (Kirk 308). Yet Willmoore Kendall, a friend who often visited him in Chicago, disputes Kirk's characterization of Weaver as a recluse, noting that he "took part in the day-to-day life of the university," respected his colleagues, ate lunch in the cafeteria where students could speak with him, but who, like other scholars, also enjoyed the sanctuary of his study (80-81, ftnt. 20). Ralph Eubanks reports that Weaver took pleasure in the company of others and in being what he called "a practicing humanist" (Eubanks 414). Weaver was perceived differently by different people, but in general seemed a private though congenial person who with great discipline had dedicated himself to the exploration and articulation of his social and philosophical convictions. He was a throwback to a more genteel era, the gentleman of broad learning who, Weaver laments, is regarded by modern society as "an impecunious eccentric, protected by a certain sentimentality, but no longer understood" (IHC 55). He had endured many hardships as a child and attended high school and college during the Great Depression. His father died when Weaver was five, and he helped his mother care for his brother and two sisters. He attended a public high school in Lexington, Kentucky, and a private school in Harrogate, Tennessee, intended for students who needed to work to support themselves through school. Kendall Beaton, the husband of Weaver's sister Polly, and the literary executor of Weaver's estate, disclosed a remarkable insight into the formation of Weaver's character in a testimonial Beaton delivered at a family reunion in 1963. When only fifteen years of age Weaver had organized a society at his boarding school and written a constitution that expressed the following purpose: "To promote the exchange of ideas, investigate theories, propagate principles, follow an argument wherever it goes, and develop ourselves." Contained in the constitution's first article is the solemn declaration: "No member shall cherish society above solitude or engage promiscuously in social activities." Foreshadowing his later accomplishments the precocious Weaver had at a tender age devoted himself to a humanistic life of scholarship, inquiry, and reflection, preferring solitude and meditation to the enticements and temporal

Introduction

5

satisfactions of social intercourse ("A Clear Voice," HRP Box 18). Polly Weaver Beaton described her brilliant brother as a "strange guy" and a "lonely fellow." He was, she recalled, the brightest of the Weaver children, so bright that he had a difficult time understanding his more conventional siblings. "We were," she said, "a nuisance to him" (Beaton interview). As often is the case with the most committed, Weaver was a convert to the conservatism that subsequently steered the course of his intellectual career. He was, to be sure, no ordinary student at the University of Kentucky, as his induction into Phi Beta Kappa attests. The few essays Weaver saved reveal a writer of prodigious ability. One of his papers considered

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and commented on the prospects of modern

liberalism. Weaver perceives that true liberalism is unaggressive and tolerant, but for this reason potentially ineffectual, whereas intolerant liberalism gives up its creed in its struggle to survive. For this reason, concludes the young Weaver, the "liberal commonwealth" must wait until man renounces aggression. Indeed, as a student Weaver wrote an article for the Intercollegian in 1929 on the subject of world peace in which he complains of the "garish and superficial things" that might keep students from considering the subject of his brief report (RMWP Box 2). Weaver's earliest writings show an intellectual maturity, vocabulary, style, and rhetorical technique that belie his youth. In 1932, the year of his graduation from the University of Kentucky, Weaver joined the American Socialist party and became secretary of its local chapter. Finding nothing congenial in the personalities of the other members of the party cell into whose company he was cast, Weaver began to doubt his commitment to what had first appeared a solution to the problems of the Great Depression. Throughout the Depression era and particularly in its first years, socialism and other alternative political ideologies attracted the interest of intellectuals like Weaver. He attributed his association with socialism to his youth and fascination with a fashionable idea, and his eventual embrace of conservativism to his contact with John Crowe Ransom and the teachings of the other Southern Agrarians, who resolutely defended the cultural traditions of the South against the encroachments of northern, scientistic culture. M. E. Bradford reports that Weaver spoke of himself in Chicago as an "agrarian in exile" ("Richard M. Weaver" 309). It was the cultural climate of Texas A&M University, where Weaver taught after taking his master's degree at Vanderbilt, that led him finally to discard his socialistic notions in preference to the conservativism he had discovered at Vanderbilt (LIS 131-34). Texas A&M, one of many southern technological institutions created to serve the practical needs of the economically backward South, promulgated a set of values Weaver found repugnant: "rampant philistinism, abbetted by technology, large-scale organization and

6

The Politics of Rhetoric

a complacent acceptance of success as the goal of life. . . . I feel," said Weaver, "that my conversion to the poetic and ethical vision of life dates from this contact with its sterile opposite" (LP 135). He emerged from this fortress of technological education dedicated to finding himself in the roots of his southern past and, like many southerners, immersed himself in the history of the Civil War. His interest was not merely a historical one. In these studies he learned the significance of defending the lost cause. Many of his essays begin with positions that have been left behind in the wake of history, such as his paradoxical approval of prejudice as culturally conserving "prejudgment," or his incisive rebuttal to the scientifically presumptuous position of the defense in the Scopes trial. In examining arguments of liberals and conservatives and in finding support for unpopular positions, Weaver explored the potential of both dialectic and rhetoric. Although many rhetoricians do not agree with Weaver's philosophical conservativism, or his argumentation on its behalf, few of his detractors would deny the eloquence of his essays. Writing at a time of a well-entrenched and accepted social liberalism, Weaver's rhetorical regrounding of conservative conclusions was iconoclastic, incisive, and trenchant in its criticisms of contemporary society. In a letter to his publisher, Henry Regnery, Weaver speaks of "New Dealism" as the enemy and the need to combat it with an alternative "set of principles" (HRP Box 68). In challenging the political status quo, Weaver's own reliance on rhetoric to find ways of justifying his views merged with his equally passionate interest in rhetorical theory. As Clarence Darrow was "the attorney for the damned," Weaver was an apologist for positions that contradicted settled presumptions of modern society; for example, that science and social science would provide the means for limitless improvements in life, or that Henry David Thoreau was a laudable model of American individualism. One of his critics, however, argues that in broad terms Weaver's Platonic idealism is not the abandoned one he claims it to be, because, despite the influences of science on society, the Western philosophical and religious tradition still dominates (Geiger 53-54). Tracing his own intellectual development, Weaver says his explorations of the Civil War led him to understand "why certain actions which in the light of retrospect appear madly irrational appeared at the time the indisputable mandate of reason" (LP 138). In his historical research Weaver came to appreciate that arguments secure their force from deeply embedded systems of belief. By itself this is a relativistic insight, but Weaver not only consistently rejects relativism, he denies that notions long ago discarded in the name of progress are perforce wrong. Chief among these old notions is the belief in the reality of ideas overturned in the Middle Ages by nominalism. To rediscover the philosophical basis of seemingly atavistic ideas, one needs, he remarks, only "to look at the 'progress' of history through the eyes of those who were left behind" (LP 138). Weaver is a

Introduction

7

critic who reconstructed abandoned conservative positions not simply to revise history, but to provide an alternative to what he perceived to be a regnant and presumptive liberalism. In his essays, such as his comparison of the political philosophies and distinctive individualism of John Randolph and Henry David Thoreau, Weaver looks for the internally consistent dialectic that supported conservative ideals while attempting to reinstate those that coincided with his intuitions. Similarly, in his analysis of the WebsterHayne debate, Weaver opposes the received opinion that Webster's "Reply to Hayne" was a rhetorical and doctrinal triumph. As Weaver sees the matter, Hayne, an advocate of states' rights, argues from historical fact and from a concept of individual liberty anathema to Webster's wrongheaded notion that the Union's power should be expanded (SE 104-33). As a historian and rhetorical critic, Weaver attempts to locate abstract, underlying principles that, when considered with only muted reference to the policies they were used to support, appear more defensible. In the abstract, states' rights is not objectionable; in situ it is, for it supported the policy of slavery in the antebellum South and, in the 1950s, the policy of segregation. Weaver seems to ask, let us look at principles and definitions, independently, suspending our judgments concerning their material consequences. How then does Weaver believe these principles are to be judged? The answer seems to be in terms of other still more abstract principles, in what Weaver refers to as "an aristocracy of notions" (ER 23). Therefore, Weaver argues that the state of Tennessee, by a right of cultural and political sovereignty, was amply justified in its passage and enforcement of a law preventing the teaching of evolution (ER 47, 50; SE 143). Weaver consistently leads one down a maze of interlocking principles that in the end turn back upon one another, although he would characterize his arguments

as leading the reader upward toward loftier principles. Many of his essays take the tack of constructing a defensible rhetorical position where none was thought to exist. "I have," says Weaver, "a strong tendency to side with the bottom dog, or to champion the potential against the actual if the former seems to have some reason behind it. . . . To this extent I am a reformer or even a subverter" (LP 140). This is an apt self-appraisal, for Weaver was only peripherally involved in partisan political causes. He was an intellectual, a critic, and a writer, not a political activist. This is not to say that his work was not influential or that his ideas were not political. Weaver's regular contributions to the conservative publications, Modern Age and National Review, evidence his interest in shaping political opinion. Fellow conservative Frank Meyer asserts that Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, a testament of his conservative beliefs, published in 1948, is the origin of the neoconservative movement (Meyer 243). Weaver was not simply a theorist; his positions have deep political implications and one must agree with Russell Kirk that his "teachings were instruments for action" (VO viii). Weaver confirms this

8

The Politics of Rhetoric

assessment when, in analyzing the practical purposes of rhetoric as compared to the intellectual purposes of dialectic, he declares: "But we are reminded that the end of living is activity and not mere cognition" (VO 64). It is for this reason that his essays and books, no matter how intellectual in outlook, invariably find their goal in the denegration of modernist assumptions and practices and in the praise of lost virtues. THE ROLE OF THE CULTURAL CRITIC

In the first chapter in Visions of Order, Weaver offers greater insight into how he understands the process of cultural criticism as he undertook it. He sees himself battling modernist cultural presumptions hardened and protected by a language that has attained social sanction. He had articulated this position most clearly in his well-known essay "Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric" in The Ethics of Rhetoric. In Visions of Order he tells us: "To describe these [modern] tendencies in the language that is used most widely is to endorse them, whereas to oppose them is to bring in words that connote half-forgotten beliefs and carry disturbing resonances" (VO 8). The "pessimists," the critics of modern culture, have the "proof," he argues, while the optimists have the rhetorical advantage. The task Weaver lays out for himself is to "bring a rhetoric along with a proof to show that the present course of our culture is not occasion for complacency but for criticism and for possible reconstruction" (VO 6). Thus Weaver establishes that the illnesses of modern culture are also necessarily rhetorical ones that can be treated with the antibodies of an opposing rhetoric advancing the truth. Weaver refers to the cultural critic as a "doctor of culture" who might restore it to health. In describing the role of the critic Weaver speaks of one who, though nominally accepting membership in the culture, "has to some degree estranged himself from [it] through study and reflection." Culture becomes objectified and critics "who have in a way mutilated themselves by withdrawal, by a special kind of mental discipline," render the culture as an object and, though part of the culture, see what those who live in and speak its language fail to see (VO 8). As a critic Weaver says he attempts to achieve a detachment from culture akin to Schopenhauer's "looking upon the world as if it were a pageant" (LP 140). Weaver, who spent much of his adult life in a city that glorified the very aspects of culture he disdained, surely describes himself when he reflects upon one who is "learned in it [culture], but not exactly of it" (VO 8). Weaver's life bears witness to this dictum. The editor of Modern Age, for which Weaver was an associate editor, spoke of Weaver shortly after his death as one who had refused to accept the conveniences of technological society. He flew in an airplane once and only of necessity; he used the train to return to Weaverville in the summers, where he plowed his field behind a horse; and he wrote with

Introduction

9

pen and paper, converting the manuscript to typescript on an antiquated portable (Davidson 227). Although he saw his beloved South as a bastion against industrialism, even of it he admitted innumerable disappointments (LP 144). Despite Weaver's asceticism, and his recognition that the critic must in some way be removed from culture, he did not believe in cultural isolation; quite the contrary. In "Humanism in an Age of Science," a speech delivered to the Newman Society, Weaver warns against detachment. "The man who is self-consciously perched above the fray comes to have a sort of disdain for those who are wrestling with the world's intractibility, and that too tends to be inhumane in the way that it divides us off. We are all here to be proved, and its seems that a man should not try to save himself by individual withdrawal" ("Humanism" 11, RMWP Box 3). In an enlarged expression of this notion, Weaver remarks in Ideas Have Consequences that "the sin of egotism always takes the form of withdrawal." It is a withdrawal from the "spiritual community," and a consciousness of "oneness." As Ralph Eubanks has observed, Weaver "was acutely aware of the danger in letting one's dialectic get separated from the real world" (Eubanks 415). INTRODUCTION TO WEAVER'S CULTURAL CRITICISM Weaver's cultural theory might well be considered romantic, if not in its spiritualism, then certainly in its portrayal of the antebellum South as representing certain admirable qualities of traditional culture, but Russell Kirk recalls that no one was less romantic in his personal life than Weaver (VO viii). As Weaver expresses disdain for a culture dominated by the brute facts of science; he posits an alternative, admittedly theological perspective, that emphasizes the tragic nature of man, the existence of evil, and the need for piety and grace. We are, he says, "inhabitants of a fruitful and well-ordered island surrounded by an ocean of ontological mystery" (LP 141). The individual's most splendid achievements, Weaver maintains, derive from "projections that include the natural environment and whatever is suggested by his spirit regarding the mystery that broods over creation" (VO 10). "The more man is impressed with the tragic nature of his lot, the more he dramatizes his relations with the world" (VO 10). Weaver speaks of his own rediscovery of the importance of piety as a kind of rebirth, a "recovery of lost power" that is "repressed by dogmatic, utilitarian, essentially contumacious doctrines of liberalism and scientism" (LP 144). He sees contemporary culture's embrace of scientific values as moving it away from a sense of purpose and value emanating from the contemplation of humanity's relationship to creation. From such contemplation comes an apprehension of the ideal, which provides order and harmony. Weaver celebrates the spiritual yearning that, through imagination, shapes a world of ideas beyond nature and empirical experience. Modernism's focus upon the empirical world impels culture centrifugally away from a unifying core

W

The Politics of Rhetoric

of ideals and toward individualism (IHC 52-53). Cultures, he maintains, are centripetally organized through the "tyrannizing image," which may take the form of anything from scripture to warfare. The tyrannizing image provides a locus of "identification and assimilation" and produces hierarchy and order (VO 12). Elsewhere Weaver talks of the importance of myth in coalescing society and of the "metaphysical dream. . . . which is the bond of spiritual community" and the basis for civilization (VO 37; IHC 18). These musings are consistent with Kenneth Burke's dramatistic view of rhetoric, for Burke similarly sees the world as consisting of both identification and division and perceives that the purpose of rhetoric is to create "consubstantiality," a unity of substance that does not exist in nature but must be brought forth in a conception of the ideal. Burke recognizes the unique potency of the "mythic image." The mythic image, such as the winged charioteer in the Phaedrus, transcends the concrete conceptual image and thus provides a new basis for motivation (Rhetoric of Motives 202). As Weaver perceives the tyrannizing image as a culturally potent "ideal of perfection and goodness," in a different vein Burke completes his definition of man with the ironic notation that he is "rotten with perfection." Terminologies, Burke explains, invite one to fulfill, to "perfect," their implications (Language 19). One notices immediately the difference in critical stance. Burke's exposition of the linguistic and symbolic causes of human motivation seems detached, but in a different way than Weaver expects cultural criticism to be detached, for Weaver's own exposition carries a strong undercurrent of reverence. It is obvious that Weaver does not intend that the critical distance required of the cultural critic will result in an exposition that betrays no inclination. In fact, Weaver piously stands in awe of the cultural consequences of the tyrannizing image. It is, one might say, a powerful potion in the bag of the doctor of culture. In response to such images, true culture, he observes, provides "form," "coherence," "style," and "discriminations," whereas a false notion of democracy attempts to destroy culture to the extent that it undermines distinctions among people and ideas (VO 14). Sounding much like Friedrich Nietzsche, who is no less polemical concerning the evils of democracy and false egalitarianism, Weaver insists that "when democracy is taken from its proper place and is allowed to fill the entire horizon, it produces an envious hatred not only of all distinction but even of all difference" (VO 15). It might be argued that democracy has itself become a tyrannizing image through what Nietzsche would regard a profound transvaluation of values from those of the "hardness" and individualism of the master to the meekness and collectivism of the slave (IHC 120). Weaver anticipates and attempts to refute this notion. He maintains that the democratic nature of religious societies is sustained in some higher interest and tends to mute, rather than to eliminate, distinctions of role among their members. According to Weaver, it is the "propaganda of egalitarianism," not social distinctions themselves, that leads to jealousy and

Introduction

11

unrest. For Weaver false egalitarianism, misapplied democracy, is but a step on the way to socialism and communism, the ultimate direction of any such perversions of nature. Writing in the early 1960s, Weaver criticizes court-ordered integration as one among several steps on the path away from the natural segregation created by the tyrannizing image that had shaped the feudal culture of the South (VO 21). Weaver's criticisms are of the world of technological and social progress, wherein change is wrought by material circumstances rather than philosophical imagination. Philosophy, Weaver says, "begins with wonder. . . . We begin our other affirmations after a categorical statement that life and the world are to be cherished" (IHC 19). Without an imaginative conception of life, "the metaphysical dream," and the "unsentimental sentiment," chaos ensues. Weaver warns of a world of competing ideas lacking all reference to metaphysical truth. What moderns call freedom, Weaver believes to be no more than license, a freedom from the constraints of authority or principle that leads to moral depravity. Real freedom rests upon an ordered existence in which consensual beliefs form a basis for the expression of individuality (ER 171). "The decline" prophesies Weaver, with evocations of Milton's "Paradise Lost," "is to confusion; we are agitated by sensation and look with wonder upon the serene somnambulistic creations of souls which had the metaphysical anchorage" (IHC 21). Weaver fears that the individual, without philosophical constructs as guides, will fail to transcend the raw data of sensory experience that provides humanity neither a direction nor a moral compass. Weaver's answer to this danger is quintessentially Platonic: "the reality which excites us is an idea, of which the indirection, the veiling, the withholding, is part" (IHC 26-27). In the descent from metaphysics to a brutal materialism and "the endless induction of empiricism," Weaver discerns the cause for the pathogenic problems of the culture. Among these problems are sensationalistic journalism, loss of respect for parents, decreased concern about children, replacement of true friendships with self-serving business associations, lack of distinction between old and young and between genders, the diminution of the hero, the enlargement of a business culture and of the relativism it engenders, and the disappearance of chivalry in modern wars waged indiscriminately upon civilians (IHC 30-33, 64). Particularly durable is Weaver's discussion of journalistic sensationalism and the pervasiveness of the media in shaping an attitude toward life oriented to the immediate present, exterior reality, and sensation rather than to memory, inward contemplation, and metaphysical conception (IHC 92-112). Although Weaver's focus is on journalism, radio, and film, the influential media of his day, his critique is also pertinent to television, which he merely mentions. He argues that the mass media fragment reality, depicting it in successive moments and creating a "decomposed eternity." Moreover, they promote values he associates with cultural disintegration, such as materialism, "happiness through comfort,"

12

The Politics of Rhetoric

and a commitment to the false "dogma of progress" (IHC 101-2, 104-5, 111; see also ER 178-79). The counterweight to the destructive tendencies in society is piety, for piety expresses one's inwardness and one's denial of the importance of the external world. This is Weaver's solution to the cultural ills he describes, and it might be conjectured that it is a solution deriving from Weaver's own spiritual and philosophic rebirth. Weaver's view of piety also informs his critical stance. He speaks of the "deadness to the world" affected by the Puritans as beneficial and liberating, as he speaks of the need for the critic to achieve distance from the world. Weaver's antihero is the pessimist with strong moral convictions rather than the modern optimist who has lost all conviction (IHC 173-74). In discussing piety, Weaver pleads the case for a proper philosophical relationship to nature, tolerance toward others, and a respect for history (IHC 171-82). His discussion of piety does not devolve into religious pronouncements, but any discussion of piety cannot entirely avoid the theological. Weaver seems to understand, however, that his influence as a social critic would be undermined by a theological treatment of issues that can also be discussed philosophically, without the baggage of sectarian religion (IHC 185). Rather, he speaks of metaphysical notions that in the last century could have been the themes of edifying and morally uplifting Chautauqua lectures. Coming closest to pure religious sentiment is Weaver's idea that personality is a gift that makes the individual conscious that he is a "vessel" carrying the "universal mind." Weaver is critical of the view that man is to be deified, a doctrine modern religious fundamentalist leaders have demagogically attributed to all humanists in every century, but which Weaver attributes to modernism in general and incidentally to "literary humanism," by which he means presumably the revival of Greek humanism espoused in the 1920s by Irving Babbit and Paul Elmer Moore (IHC 181-83; see Duffy, "Anti-Humanist"). Weaver is a humanist, but he is decidedly a Christian rather than a pagan humanist, whose views are rooted in Platonic realism turned toward the sensibilities of orthodox Christianity. (See Johannesen, "A Reconsideration.") THE CULTURAL ROLE OF RHETORIC Plato, writing at a time of rhetoric's prominence, does not explictly account for rhetoric's significance as an agency of preserving culture, while Weaver, who is acutely aware of the modern degeneration of rhetoric, forcefully expresses the importance of traditional rhetoric as a means of restoring culture to its belief in transcendent ideas. He interprets the current low status of rhetoric as a corollary to modern culture's abandonment of philosophical realism, which requires the imaginative and suasory force of rhetorical expression, in favor of logical positivism, which holds figurative and evocative rhetorical discourse to be defective communication. Ac-

Introduction

13

cording to Weaver: "The current favor which rational and soulless discourse enjoys over rhetoric is a mask for the triumph of dialectic. This triumph is directly owing to the great prestige of modern science" (VO 56). No modern cultural critic has championed the art of rhetoric as has Richard Weaver, and no adequate account of the major currents of Weaver's canon could ignore his notion of "the cultural role of rhetoric," which we take up again in succeeding chapters. Rhetoric was Weaver's profession, and his idealized vision of rhetoric became a standard against which he measured social and political discourse and thereby society itself. To his conception of rhetoric he refers most of his lines of cultural criticism. As it did for Isocrates, the contemplation of rhetorical theory produced for Weaver a theory of ethical culture. He understands rhetoric not merely as a body of techniques but as the means of preserving culture. In delineating the topoi, the places to find arguments, rhetorical theory assimilates the corporate beliefs constituting society (VO 64). Weaver, a neo-Platonist, speaks with far greater fondness and enthusiasm for rhetoric than could have been possible for Plato, who witnessed the evil results of political rhetoric in the prosecution and execution of Socrates (see Vickers 84-88). Both Plato and Weaver see immoral examples of rhetoric as manifestations of cultural degeneracy, but Weaver wishes to restore rhetoric to its former cultural prominence, while Plato emphasizes the prospects for a rhetoric suited to the philosophic enterprise and, as in the Phaedrus, to the instruction of the single interlocutor (Duffy, "Platonic Functions" 87-92). Weaver recognizes Plato's ambivalence toward rhetoric, due in part to Plato's conviction that rhetoric was the instrument of Socrates's death and, though his point of view is Platonic, he surpasses Plato in his commitment to rhetoric as a means to achieve social order and harmony (VO 59-62). While Plato is cynical of rhetoric addressed to popular audiences, Weaver holds that popular opinion ought not to be regarded as insignificant; indeed it is the stuff of humanity (VO 71). Weaver departs from the path of pure rationalism that he believes the Hellenic tradition establishes (VO 66). Dialectic, understood as the realm of "pure speculation," requires, he insists, the actualizing power of rhetoric to bring it into the world, just as Hellenic rationalism required the "music" of Christian rhetoric and poetry. Weaver unites himself with Cicero in reflecting "that the orator is a teacher and a moral teacher at that" (VO 67). Effectively, Weaver sees the declension of modern society as concomitant with the disenthronement of the orator. The world of nineteenth-century America, in which the orator served as a moral authority who eloquently rehearsed society in its most deeply felt commitments, has passed away. In the new reign of the logical positivist, the scepter of rhetoric and orb of communal belief that gave authority to the orator and rhetorician have been lost in a new emphasis on "mere dialectic" and objective discourse, what he calls "semantically purified speech" (ER 7). Weaver boldly claims that

14 The Politics of Rhetoric the "upholders of mere dialectic . . . are among the most subversive e n e mies of society and culture." In his estimate, objectivity in discourse is applauded because it comports with a scientific ideal, while rhetorical discourse is viewed as just so much propaganda (VO 70). So, the art of rhetoric as Weaver would define it is essential to culture itself. More than an art with limited practical application, rhetoric expresses the culture's metaphysical dream and integrates society by celebrating the historic beliefs of the people. Both in discussing the cultural role of rhetoric and in his exegesis of the Phaedrus in The Ethics of Rhetoric, Weaver develops the idea that dialectic explores logical possibilities while rhetoric brings dialectical propositions into existence, or "actualizes" them (ER 20-28). H e speaks of dialectic as "abstract reasoning on the basis of propositions," and as "high speculation about nature" (VO 56, ER 17). One senses immediately that the strict dichotomy of dialectic and rhetoric is false in practical terms, and Weaver admits that the actualized dialectical position inheres in its rhetorical expression without being its equivalent (VO 64). A related question, however, is the extent to which rhetoric is involved in the operation of dialectic itself and the extent to which dialectic is already related to the real world. Even in its purely speculative form, dialectic requires discourse, if only an inward discourse. To the extent that dialectic is pursued through language, it is affected by the figurations that Weaver attributes to rhetoric, for all language, as I. A. Richards has argued, is metaphoric (ER 18). It is interesting to consider in this regard G. B. Kerferd's discussion of the difference between the sophistic method of antilogic and that of Platonic dialectic. Antilogic, which Plato sees as something less than dialectic, opposes two logoi and operates at the level of verbal contradictions. According to Kerferd: "While it is possible for people without being aware of it to mistake antilogic for dialectic, . . . it lacks the essential feature of dialectic, namely the power to discuss on the basis of Division of things by Kinds, and instead it proceeds on the basis of (merely) verbal contradictions." In other words, Platonic dialectic is distinguished from antilogic by its involvement in what Plato describes in the Phaedrus as the definitional processes of division and collection, in its reference to the forms, and thereby in its transcendence of the phenomenal world (Phaedrus 263, 265-66; Kerferd 64-65). When Weaver discusses dialectic he frequently describes the features of antilogic, but generally also the distinctive Platonic process of "discriminating into categories and knowing definitions" (Kerferd 64; ER 23). Thus Weaver speaks of dialectic establishing essences by "logical exclusion and inclusion" (ER 18). Yet there are times when he speaks about dialectic more as a logical wrangle wherein a proposition is pitted against its opposite and a logical position is verbally dissected. For example, h e explicitly scrutinizes the position of the defense in the Scopes trial in the m a n n e r of the "dialecticians" (ER 49-50). At these moments he is unwit-

Introduction

15

tingly describing or illustrating antilogic rather than Platonic dialectic. Thus Weaver sometimes renders dialectic as a mode of speculation that has a greater relationship to a shifting phenomenal world than Plato would wish dialectic to have. In this relationship the distinction between rhetoric and dialectic that Weaver observes becomes muddled. In fact, Plato must accept antilogic too, since, as Kerferd argues, "antilogic is the first step on the path that leads to dialectic" (67). Thus, Weaver's dichotomy between a nonrhetorical, purely speculative realm of dialectic and an actualizing realm of rhetoric is conceptually problematic. More perplexing and startling is Weaver's explicit rejection of the Socratic assumption that popular opinion should be distrusted. Effectively, he asks that we move from the Platonic forms to "affections and opinions that are part of the settlement of any culture" (VO 70-71). In drawing this conclusion, Weaver establishes a much more important place for rhetoric than Plato was willing to give it. Weaver claims that Phaedrus effectively makes the rhetorician a dialectician (VO 62). Also, Weaver appears to contradict his own commitment to Platonic realism. The transcendent beliefs to which the speaker should appeal are, he says, the beliefs of humankind, a part of creation, rather than of some sphere of truth remote from humanity itself. In his dedication to rhetoric, Weaver must distance himself from the strict philosophical realism that Plato espoused and give greater credence to the real world. Weaver, a Platonist in some sense, is also a rhetorician and conservative who feels compelled to stipulate traditional culture as the agency for the preservation of transcendent belief. Like Plato, he trusted in recollection, not of the previous experiences of a reincarnated soul described by Socrates, but rather of the beliefs that unify culture and are carried forward in memory and called to mind by literature and rhetoric. In this formulation, the rhetor, "as the moral artist" Plato speaks of in the Gorgias, joins with the poet to remind the individual of "primordial conception" (Gorgias 504; IHC 165, 157). Weaver speaks of possessing knowledge that "comes from immediate apprehension," the possession of which makes one a "participant in the communal mind" (IHC 157). H e does not mean the mind of a generation, or of a particular society, but some d e e p e r and more mystical consciousness: "Primordial conception is somehow in u s " (IHC 157). In this statement Weaver reasserts the cardinal doctrine of his philosophic faith, namely, the notion that essential meanings, buried d e e p within the well of consciousness, reside in us all, impervious to time and place, and abstractly preserved in the artistic, the literary, and the rhetorical productions of culture. "What has h a p p e n e d , " Weaver inquires ruefully, "to the one world of meaning? It has b e e n lost for want of definers" (IHC 164). As Weaver insists throughout his writings, modern culture has substituted relativism for philosophic realism, temporality for eternity, and the empirical for the universal. In this benighted condition of culture, modern literature and

16

The Politics of Rhetoric

rhetoric are predictably not fulfilling their philosophic and cultural function to remind the people "of what they already thought" (ER 172; cf. Phaedrus 278). Those responsible for creating culture, he observes, must "furnish the molds and the frames" that keep one from "accepting raw experience" and thus "sinking in upon the moral being." The metaphysician, the mythologist, the poet, and the orator provide the images that allow one to be reunited with the forms, with essences and true knowledge (IHC 22-24). The orator joins in this philosophic enterprise when he speaks epideictically, that is, when the orator attempts to represent the essential values of the society that are rooted in history and memory. Such rhetoric brings "the past into a meditative relationship with the present" (ER 178). Culturally integrative epideictic rhetoric such as the ancient funeral oration, which spoke of the heroism of Greeks fallen in battle, is instructive to the young and stimulating to those who are already conversant in the abiding truths of the culture. Weaver even attempts to establish the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric as contributing to the cultural differences between the industrial North and the antebellum South. The antebellum South, he says, held to the importance of sentiment and to the "Ciceronian tradition of eloquent wisdom," while the North and, after the Civil War, the South as well, embraced not only science, industry, and business, but also the tendency toward New England rationalism and dialectic exhibited in the influential writings of Emerson and the Transcendentalists (IHC 55; SE 51, 136). Rhetoric as "eloquent wisdom" preserved and synthesized the sentiments of culture in the antebellum South, while dialectic in the form of New England rationalism compromised traditional beliefs by establishing them on an intellectual basis and thus making them available for logical dissection (SE 136-37). Religious beliefs accepted by southerners as "inscrutable" were in the North evaluated in the cool light of scientific developments, particularly evolutionary doctrine (SE 138). The "defeat of Ciceronian humanism" in the South ushered in a new illiberality in which the facts of science and business enterprise became more important than general propositions (IHC 55, 58-59). Such thinking is mirrored in the social order by the increased role of the specialist at the expense of the liberally educated gentleman, specifically the southern gentleman of the last century, whose knowledge of the world was shaped by sentiment and rhetoric rather than by reason and logic alone (IHC 54-59). It is no accident that when Weaver speaks of the propositional and stylistic "spaciousness of old rhetoric," he uses as examples the deliberative and epideictic oratory of southerners in the antebellum period, while he attributes to northern intellectuals the spritually deadening hand of mere logic (ER 164-85). There is, one might say, a deliberate cultivation of the southern gentleman that led him to consider the relationships among broad matters of concern rather than to focus

Introduction 17 on the narrow-gauge interests promoted by a technological culture. The southern gentleman, the humanist, and Cicero's ideal orator are distinctive in their capacity to speak more expansively on a wider range of topics than people schooled in the primary importance of information, logic, and the scientific method. Although it seems paradoxical, Weaver believes that one of the chief consequences of an older, spacious, and socially integrative rhetoric is that it fosters individual liberty. Weaver responds to an anticipated objection that the individual is now freer, perhaps in the very proportion to which he or she is unmoved by the old orator's paeans of democracy, agrarianism, and Christianity, which appealed to a more harmonious culture. He argues that, to the contrary, the modern individual is less free to make important decisions because there are too many to make. Social anomie has deprived humanity of its anchorage in communal belief and has set the individual adrift among competing currents of opinion and ideology. Jacques Ellul, whose social critique is often complementary to Weaver's, argues that competing propagandas within a democracy do not mitigate against the mentally short-circuiting consequences of propaganda. On the contrary, the citizen of a democratic society infused with propaganda is left confused, neurotic, and certainly not freer (Ellul 254-56). One of Weaver's guiding assumptions, then, is that rhetoric and other modes of suasory communication shape the individual and the culture for better or worse. If, as Weaver maintains, the day of the epideictic orator is over, perhaps it is because the core of communal belief to which the orator can appeal has diminished. The cause of the relative decline of oratory rests with the culture rather than with the orator or oratory. In a revealing hyperbole, Michael Grant, a translator of Cicero's orations, says that in ancient Rome the orator was "several thousand times" more important than he is today (Grant 15). The same judgment might also apply to the role of oratory in nineteenth-century America. The decline of the orator and of traditional rhetoric is but one manifestation, though an important one, of vast differences in culture, which Weaver interprets as a symptom of the decline of culture. One might argue that, although Weaver provides an interesting, if tendentious, description of why "spacious" rhetoric is no longer of the same cultural significance, he cannot restore it to its former importance. It is difficult not to regard Weaver as an antiquarian, an atavist, or a reactionary. But he is plainly more than a subjective historian; he pleads the case for a society held together by a shared comprehension of ideals, wherein an older rhetoric, which gave voice to enduring values, would not be embarrassing to the sensibilities of modern audiences. He believes there is a path toward this restoration. Society must return to a core of belief, but first it must acknowledge that ideals, which would form this core, have an ontological status (IHC 52-53). Concerning the prospects of this restoration, it must be said that Weaver

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The Politics of Rhetoric

is one of the pessimists with strong conviction whom he approvingly describes. He claims to have faith in the regenerative powers of culture and in the potentially salutary influence of rhetoric and the other expressive arts, although there is little in his cultural theory or criticism to give evidence that there is much hope for a reverse in the downward spiral of culture he perceives. His cultural theory, as we shall see,, is almost by definition inhospitable to the policies of social liberalism that have been pursued since his death. His literary and rhetorical theory stand up better than his cultural notions, which is to say that they are consistently useful and insightful despite their tendentiousness. In his defense it must be said that Weaver never adopts a pose of ideological neutrality, although as a critic he tacitly claims to be removed from culture. His persona, when not that of the polemicist, is that of the "philosophic doctor," the none-toogentle critic who would heal culture by reuniting it with its lost ideals and by restoring it to its philosophical bearings.

2 Cultural Theory, Part 1

INTRODUCTION Weaver believes that it is important to know the origins and strength of one's culture, since a coherent and consistent culture provides the support for a stable society, and since social stability is necessary not only for happiness but also for the ability to be ethical and productive. Stability, he holds, depends upon a consensus regarding the values and laws of the group, which is to say that a society's stability depends upon the degree to which its members accept the society's cultural basis. Our society, Weaver contends, has lost its cultural consensus and, therefore, its ability to provide us with the good life. The causes of this loss are for Weaver clear. In his view, the "defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence" (IHC 3). The medieval debate to which Weaver refers was between those supporting realism and those supporting the nominalist philosophy articulated by William of Occam. With the victory of nominalism comes a series of developments concluding with the cultural conditions Weaver terms modernism. Modernism contains nearly everything with which he disagrees, everything that contradicts his notion of the ideal culture founded on logical realism. This chapter and the next are linked through their analyses of Weaver's cultural theory. This chapter discusses first the origins and nature of culture and then the effects modernism has had on traditional Western culture. It is important to investigate Weaver's statements about reality and truth, not only because they lay out the conflict between traditional and modern cultures but also because they indicate his perception of an ideal

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The Politics of Rhetoric

culture. The next chapter describes Weaver's view that antebellum southern society approaches his conception of the ideal and concludes with a critique of his ideal culture. This critique focuses on his conception of the role hierarchy plays in culture and its effects on culturally disadvantaged people; it also considers his statements about the role of business and war in the maintenance of a culture. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF CULTURE In an expression of his breezy anthropology, Weaver says that a culture mysteriously emerges out of "climatic, geographical, ecological, racial, religious, and linguistic soils," and precedes the formation of a nation-state or the development of nationalism both in history and in importance (LP 19; see also SE 132-33). At the core of a culture, giving it its impetus and its coherence, is a center of authority. This center Weaver calls a "tyrannizing image," an ideal of excellence embodied in religious rituals, a body of literature, a code of conduct, or some other central body of belief (VO 11). This is not to say that a culture is developed out of any particular ritual or epic poem or book of religious teachings, but rather that each of these artifacts of the culture articulates and, through repeated presentation, maintains some or a good deal of the essence of the culture's guiding beliefs about its origins, its mores, and its ethical code. This body of belief generates the "metaphysical dream" of the culture (IHC 18), which unifies the cultural members by compelling belief in a certain set of values and acceptable actions.1 The belief provides a way of looking at the world; it is "man's response to the various manifestations of this world as they impinge upon his mundane life. He alters these to forms that reflect meaning; he fills interstices which appear unbearable when left void; he dresses with significance things which in their brute empirical reality are an affront to the spirit" (LP 15-16). To use Kenneth Burke's term from Permanence and Change, a culture provides an orientation by and through which we understand experience as well as generate and order our ideas. It creates a way of seeing in addition to—or, perhaps better, by means of—denying other ways of seeing; as Burke puts it, "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B" (Permanence and Change 49). Such a characteristic gives a culture its principle of exclusivity. Further, a cultural orientation does not provide absolute meanings but rather makes meanings that comport with the metaphysical dream. To quote again from Burke, "Even a set of signs indicating the likelihood of death by torture has another meaning in the orientation of a comfort-loving skeptic than it would for the ascetic whose world-view promised eternal reward for martyrdom" (Permanence and Change 35). The set of cultural beliefs is not logically grounded. Rather, cultural members hold them as "sentiments" or "prejudices," what the ancient

Cultural Theory, Part 1 21

Sophists called nomoi; they are held as true even though they cannot be proven by logical means. The sentiments or prejudices of a metaphysical dream of a culture have charisma, gained from their relation to the metaphysical dream, and they exert over the cultural group a pious adherence, an attitude of reverence or acceptance with which a mere individual is not to tamper (SE 196; see also STB 32 and LP 143). While a prejudice or sentiment may be unreasoned, it is not illogical: it does not take a merely "sentimental" stance with regard to the world; it does not contradict itself in immediate ways nor is it contradicted by other elements of the metaphysical dream. In fact, Weaver asserts, the sentiments that inform a culture's metaphysical dream of the world allow for the practice of deductive logic rather than the converse, insofar as logic rests on definitions and assumptions, which are themselves finally intuitive (IHC 19-21), and which are part of the metaphysical dream that informs the culture. Rather than denying these beliefs because they have no empirical verification, we should admit "the right of an individual or a society to hold a belief which, though unreasoned, is uncontradicted" (LP 13)—uncontradicted by reasons that themselves hold as much or more weight in the culture. 2 Weaver offers as support for this position our belief in judgments whose verification has simply been forgotten, or that have been vouched for by experts, or that have subconscious origins (LP 8). It is this last group that informs the greater part of the metaphysical dream. One of them, for Weaver, is the "categorical statement that life and the world are to be cherished" (IHC 19); any deliberation or action that a culture will logically articulate, then, must not contradict this assumption. How that assumption is to be understood is, of course, a problem with which the culture must struggle, and a problem we will address shortly. Generally speaking, a culture's orientation is continually reinforced in each person by life within the culture, from an individual's earliest interaction with other cultural members, through schooling, and through the constant and thereby self-sustaining and self-reinforcing application of the orientation to explain physical phenomena and experiences. This inculcation is necessary to maintain cultural integrity. A culture that does not develop adherence among its members and that does not exclude alien influences must wither (VO 11, 21; LP 16-17; IHC 33; RE 615). Further, not only the culture suffers, but, Weaver asserts, so do its people. A loss of cultural integrity upsets people's "psychic composure" and threatens their ability even to exist (DC 339). Consequently, it is difficult for one person to criticize his or her culture, even if that person believes that the culture has developed problems. And it is possible for a culture to go awry: Weaver does not hold with those cultural anthropologists who argue that, since each culture is based on nonlogical prejudices, each culture is acceptable on its own terms. As he argues, a culture may at some point encounter "something comparable to

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'natural law* . . . a law that derives sanction from a universal consideration of justice. . . . [N]ot all phases of a single culture have been equally happy for m a n " (VO 73-74). F u r t h e r m o r e , cultures must not b e absolutely static, although they must possess stability. A culture that attributes an immanence to its forms and institutions, that makes divine its prejudices, "begins to levy an excessive tribute upon the human beings for whom these things exist" (VO 78-79). Yet societal m e m b e r s who most enjoy its benefits will see anything that threatens them as a menace, even though the threat is a refinement and an advancement of virtuous and productive life. T h e r e fore, a balance must be struck between this conservatory nature and a willingness for "adding to the sum total of knowledge" (AF 7). And, as we have intimated, a balance must be struck between implicit cultural dictates and explicit societal laws. Sometimes the legal guidelines do not adequately reflect or support the tyrannizing image, and sometimes the elements of the tyrannizing image cannot be precisely determined. However, just as the culture takes precedence over the political unit, so the cultural laws take precedence over the laws of the state. W h e n people talk about the hierarchical relationship of the state's laws to "natural law," they mean something like this necessary precedence. Thus, for instance, S u p r e m e Court Justice Clarence Thomas was asked repeatedly during his confirmation hearings in 1991 about his beliefs regarding the right of women to have abortions, and many of the questioners referenced his earlier, written statements about natural law: Did he think there might be a law different in kind from and greater in importance than laws made by states or the federal government? In response Thomas noted that for some time slavery was legal in our country but was still profoundly wrong and immoral because it offended against natural law, and he suggested that every senator and American citizen could accept the accuracy of his observation. Although occasionally coming close to denying that slavery in the antebellum South did offend against natural law (STB 266, for one instance), Weaver nonetheless makes the same sort of distinction that Justice Thomas makes between natural law and the laws of the land. A useful distinction b e t w e e n the two can be approached through the Greeks' concept of nomos, which translates roughly as a society's custom-laws and which compares with Weaver's notion of the metaphysical dream of the culture, insofar as it provides a social construct with ethical dimensions. Similarly, as natural law transcends the laws of the land, so do nomoi transcend the explicit laws of the state. For instance, we have explicit laws against taking the life of a fellow citizen except in cases of self-defense, and our nomoi concur with and in fact underpin these laws. However, in certain instances these laws are ignored or their punishments reduced to a vanishing point. Examples include cases in which an elderly person has taken the life of a terminally ill spouse because he or she felt the spouse was suffering too much, and

Cultural Theory, Part 1 23 the courts have responded with verdicts of innocence or with sentences in keeping with far less serious crimes than murder. Of course, as our aside about Weaver's attitude toward slavery indicates, the specific form of natural law or of nomos is unknown; thus, conflicts between either and the laws of the state often prove thorny, and the problems our society has trying to resolve such confusions underline the occasional difficulty we have in deciphering the lineaments of our culture's metaphysical dream. Again, the nomination hearings for Justice Thomas provide an illustration, in the form of questions about abortion's status in his conception of natural law. It is reasonable to say that those who favor the right of women to have abortions and those who do not favor such a right both agree that the premeditated taking of another human being's life for monetary gain constitutes a particularly heinous crime of murder; probably both would also agree that paying another person to kill a human being is also heinous. The two sides differ, of course, on the definition of a human being and so on the attribution of m u r d e r to the act of abortion. Should the S u p r e m e Court overturn Roe v. Wade, it seems possible that the justices will have agreed that a legal right not to be m u r d e r e d accrues to the fetus, that birth is not a requirement for membership in the human race. Abortion in effect would constitute murder and on these grounds must be banned. F u r t h e r m o r e , since contract murders are a crime not only against the laws of the land but also against the cultural nomoi, perhaps the justices would have considered, if they overturn Roe v. Wade, what society should do about the tremendous increase in first-degree murders certain to follow in short time. While such means as living wills exist to help with our elderly couple's problem discussed above, and while a judge can learn something about a surviving spouse's knowledge of the late spouse's wishes, there seems to be no parallel mechanism in place as regards the wishes of a fetus. 3 This extended example is meant to indicate that enormous difficulties can exist in identifying nomoi and their relationship to the legal system; it also suggests that nomoi may change—slowly and slightly, perhaps, but change nonetheless. And such change is necessary, as we have already mentioned, if the culture is not to rigidify and ultimately die. Yet despite the difficulties in determining the relationship between nomoi and state law, to understand the nature of a culture we must realize the existence of these differences. This is, then, also to say that the culture must have some means of self-adjustment, that there must exist people who are able to get outside their culture's orientation, who are able to awaken from the metaphysical dream and gain the objectivity necessary to criticize it. This escape from the culture's way of seeing the world, while necessary for the culture's continued health, is difficult. Through study and reflection, one can estrange oneself to a degree to which she or he can "become sufficiently

24 The Politics of Rhetoric aware of what is outside it to see it as a system" and to determine what is worthy of adherence and what is in need of adjustment. Such a person Weaver calls a "doctor of culture." The role of a doctor of culture, a role that Weaver takes for himself, is crucial if a culture is to stay viable and virtuous (VO 7, 75). To stay viable and virtuous, a culture must have a clear and fairly stable sense of itself. Thus, a culture must be conservative, maintaining a stable appreciation of its nomoi, refining them only slowly and with clear and compelling reasons. This conservative presumption, as we will show momentarily, denies power to a notion of "progress" defined as conquest over nature, as technological development, as the evolutionary perfectibility of the species. Stability requires a structural hierarchy, since, as Weaver contends, a society must have a structure to be understood, and a structure requires some form of hierarchy (IHC 35). Weaver continues by arguing that the hierarchy for people in a society must recognize two grounds for elevation—knowledge and virtue. If people agree on the common ends of their culture—that is, agree on the outlines and goals of their culture's metaphysical dream—then they will believe in this hierarchy, find their just place in it, and work toward a common social end in harmony rather than in competition with one another (IHC 36-43). Equalitarianism would therefore make no sense because it provides no hierarchy for a unifying structure, in addition to the obvious argument that people are physically and intellectually and morally (this last as regards their practice rather than their innate attributes) unequal. In an argument that mirrors that between Socrates and Callicles in the latter half of Plato's Gorgias, Weaver says that, without a social hierarchy in which the wise and the good bear the responsibility and enjoy the prestige, the society must either be leaderless or else be led by those who gain power through brute force or through appeal to mass appetite. 4 To be viable and virtuous a culture also must have a clear sense of human nature, since we are the generators of culture and the recipients of its benefits. According to Weaver, we have four separate faculties. In each person's daily decisions and actions, as well as in the large, mysteriously produced corporate decisions made on behalf of cultural development and maintenance, all the faculties must be considered. These faculties are the cognitive, the inquiring faculty that produces knowledge; the aesthetic, the contemplative faculty that provides enjoyment of beauty; the ethical, the evaluative faculty that determines right and wrong; and the religious, the intuitive faculty that provides a glimpse of the transcendental world and of our destiny. Weaver sees a hierarchy among these faculties that helps to maintain the culture. The cognitive faculty, while extremely important in its manifestation as dialectic and logic, and in its manifestation as the abductive and inductive procedures of the scientific method, is in fact merely a tool to be directed by the other faculties. Specifically and

Cultural Theory, Part 1

25

immediately, the cognitive faculty is controlled by the ethical faculty, in ways and for reasons that Weaver elaborates in his statements on the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric. (This relationship is addressed in detail in Chapter 5.) The ethical faculty also controls the aesthetic faculty; for instance, Weaver contends that literature is not merely aesthetic but sermonic, its aesthetic power delightful in itself but also a means by which the work's "truth" is to be artfully presented. All three of these faculties—the cognitive, the aesthetic, the ethical— Weaver concludes, are controlled by the religious faculty, the faculty that allows us our ability to create and to be aware of the metaphysical dream (VO 84-86; see also LIS 204). To summarize, we might say that the religious faculty makes possible a cultural orientation—a context that allows us to think coherently, to appreciate beauty, to create value systems; as such, it transcends the other faculties. One might consider how Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, for instance, engaged the Greeks' cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical faculties as it taught, delighted, and persuaded them, respectively, or one might consider how the Bible has done much the same for Western culture over the last two millennia. Insofar as the teaching was coherent and understandable; insofar as the form and style and treatment of subject matter were aesthetically pleasing; insofar as the persuasion was effective rather than ineffective or simply ethically incoherent: so did these works present to their readers important statements about their culture. At this point in our analysis of Weaver's cultural theory, we should complete his definition of human nature, begun with his attribution of the four faculties. According to Weaver, we are a mixture of good and evil, unable to perfect ourselves in this world: neither our faculties nor our existence as physical, mortal beings in nature are such that we can arrive individually or as a species at a state of blissful contentment in perfection. We are imperfect beings, possessing a tendency to physical conflict, and our laws as well as our nomoi serve to protect ourselves from ourselves. A healthy culture must have this understanding of human nature and it must have a conservatory emphasis as regards its fundamental beliefs. Unfortunately for Western civilization, Weaver maintains, this understanding and emphasis was lost, and cultural stability was weakened.

MODERNISM AND ITS EFFECTS ON CULTURE The weakening began, as mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, with the exchange of logical realism for nominalism as the abiding philosophy of Western culture. The next section elaborates on the distinctions between these two world views as regards their visions of reality. Of importance at this stage of the discussion is to say that a nominalist philosophy, with its denial of universals, leads in Weaver's mind through a series

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of logical, devolutionary steps to the modernist world view that is the hallmark of the twentieth century. The medieval world view ordered the way its scholars, teachers, politicians, and so forth looked at the world, but after the fourteenth century an orientation based on the nominalist philosophy arose to replace it. As Weaver says: "It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. . . . The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man. . . . The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived in the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change . . . we are on the road to modern empiricism" (IHC 3). The road is described in this way. Nature is no longer perceived as possessing an "unintelligible" aspect, something partaking of the mystery of God, forever beyond human understanding and approachable only through our religious faculty. Rather, nature is a "rational mechanism" that, with study, offers up its secrets. With the intellect focused upon the sensory world rather than upon what the mind can apprehend independently, nature becomes something which, when carefully observed and analyzed, rewards the researcher with repeated successes in the accumulation of new knowledge and inventions. The refinement of the scientific method and the development of scientific disciplines produce even more successes, and the scientific perspective develops into "logical positivism." The "road," however, does not end at modern empiricism. The early successes of science were stunning not only to scientists but to the populace, and it is small wonder that more science would be done. Scientists explained much that was previously unexplained by the current orientation, and the material benefits accruing from their work were appealing. However, because of the pieties accorded to cultural orientations, the entrenched orientation was not easily replaced, and the prophets of the new orientation, such as Galileo or Copernicus or, from the realm of literature, Faust, had their difficulties. Weaver describes piety as "an attitude of reverence or acceptance toward some overruling order or some deeply founded institution which the mere individual is not to tamper with" (SE 196); it is "an attitude toward things which are immeasurably larger and greater than oneself, . . . the habit of veneration [that] supplies the whole force of social and political cohesion" (LP 143); it is "a warning voice that we must think as mortals, that it is not for us either to know all or to control all. It is a recognition of our own limitations and a cheerful acceptance of the contingency of nature, which gives us the protective virtue of humility" (STB 32). And piety also has in its favor the undeniable fact that the orientation that it supports has been able to keep its adherents alive and functioning in a hostile world (Burke, Permanence and Change 76-77). However, the power and benefits of the new science proved so compel-

Cultural Theory, Part 1 27

ling that they overcame the pieties supporting the old order; the scientistic orientation came to be accepted and even preferred. Given the glittering successes of science in its own field, society came to see even nonscientific matters from within the frame of science and to imagine that even nonscientific problems could be solved by science. Thus, useful methods or attitudes found their way into areas for which they were not designed, and the utility of science qua science was so pronounced that its method was adapted for purposes far removed from the laboratory; in the realm of human affairs, "to think validly is to think scientifically" (LIS 203), and the scientist's ways of thinking came to replace the Scholastic's in areas concerning the goal of human life, the right course of human action, and the right use of language. Some results of the scientistic orientation's gaining validity as the dominant cultural attitude are provided in the introduction to Ideas Have Consequences. One result is that rationalism becomes the predominant philosophy. Rationalism, in giving up a transcendent realm and relying on empiricism, sees nature as a self-operating mechanism and human beings as rational animals. This need to apply reason to evidence from nature assumes materialism, which holds that we are explained totally by our environment. Materialism then gives a basis for such concepts as biological necessity and psychological behaviorism, as well as for evolutionary theory. In sum, the human race becomes totally immersed in matter and so, paradoxically, unfit to deal with the problems of matter. Seeing the world as object rather than subject, as quantifiable mass rather than as qualitative particulars, reduces human beings' actions to biochemical and other determined responses; and when human actions are reduced to a deterministic level, human choice and ethical systems are rendered impossible: we are abolished as beings who are qualitatively different from the rest of the material world. Those familiar with C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man know that this paradox is at the heart of his argument against modernism as well.5 The rise of the scientistic orientation caused problems also because it weakened elements that make for social cohesion, specifically traditional beliefs and the utility of reasoned discourse about these matters. In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, Wayne Booth remarks that modernism differentiates between "scientific" and "irrational" beliefs, between those that can be proven empirically and those that cannot; the former take on a force akin to natural law, while the latter are relegated to the realm of pure motivism, where everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. As Booth describes the society built upon the "modern dogma" of the primacy of the scientific method, that which is concerned only with "mere" probability and the emotions loses favor; there is no middle ground between irrationalist opinion and determined truth. The very hallmark of the scientific method being systematic doubt, the loss of this middle ground threatens cultural assumptions, since they have no basis in empirical veri-

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The Politics of Rhetoric

fication. They can be ignored because of their lack of empirical verification, and whereas residual piety as well as common sense offer some protection, traditional values tend to be replaced with modernist ones. Cultural assumptions are further threatened by science's contribution to our definition of ourselves. The scientistic theory "denies in effect that there is a nature of man," because we are still evolving; we were one thing before, something else now, and something different to come. We cannot know either what we are intended to be or the nature of the Intender, if there be one at all. The traditional theory, on the other hand, does not depend upon science but upon "an image . . . a product of our total awareness of what man has been, is now, and—the indispensable component of the picture—what man ought to be" (LP 102-3). That is, distinct from classical and Christian "tragic" views of our mixed nature and our inevitable errors of thought and action, the modern view, informed by evolutionary theory, scientific success, and certain tenets of social science, sees us evolving toward mastery over physical nature as well as ultimately a mastery over human nature. 6 The operative concept as regards this complex of threats might be "progress." Progress, Weaver contends, is not an end but only a means to a stable, predefined end. Thus, putting forward modern achievements as evidence of good in a culture requires first that we have determined what we mean by progress and by good. Weaver asks society to consider whether the progress it touts has strengthened or weakened cultural and social stability, our mental and emotional strength, our physical health, and the health of our physical environment, as well as the health of our immortal souls. If it has rather caused harm, then it is not "progress" in any meaningful sense. As an example of this confusion, Weaver points out that in 1960 thirty-eight thousand Americans lost their lives in highway accidents and many others were injured, sometimes severely. He points out that these figures do not include deaths and injuries from other modes of mechanical transportation or the deaths and injuries caused by the automobile in other modern Western countries. Thus: "A society . . . willing to sacrifice 40,000 lives a year and take care of several hundred thousand wounded . . . certainly does not regard human life as infinitely precious. . . . It would seem . . . that comfort and convenience, to which we should add a love of mobility, have made themselves a new Moloch; and the idol demands of his worshipers not only the annual toll of life but also a restlessness and superficiality of spirit" (VO 83-84). Weaver thereby points out the lack of correlation between the amount of comfort societal members enjoy and the achievements of that society's civilization. The Golden Age of Greece, he maintains, brought into being great philosophy, great literature and art, and a model of democratic government still powerful today, yet they "sat outdoors on stone to behold their tragedies" and when "the Greek retired for the night it was not to a

Cultural Theory, Part 1 29

beauty rest mattress; he wrapped himself up in his cloak and lay down on the bench like a third-class railway passenger" (IHC 117). A worship of comfort manifests only that the worshipers desire to live entirely in the material world, not that the prosperity and subsequent comfort are to be used for ends that are valuable in a Judeo-Christian ethical system. Leaving aside that many people in our society often set aside comfort for what they perceive to be more important—for instance, their responsibilities in times of war—Weaver means to emphasize our need to consider whether a long life span, free from illness and travail, is the only or even the primary goal of life, or whether one might find it more important to live, for instance, with honor and grace than with creature comforts. Certainly, says Weaver, modernism's case is not made "until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, of an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to the happier condition" (IHC 15). That is, progress can only be good if it produces good. Outside of some vague sense of eternal physical comfort—itself an impossibility—identifying any goal of life puts us into the realm of transcendentals once again, thereby undermining the logic of the rationalist and materialist thrusts of modernism. According to Weaver, then, modernism's contention that we, our physical environment, and our society are continually progressing, continually improving, is in error. Far from maintaining stability, far from a conservatory approach, this modernist approach causes continual upheaval in the political and social realms that threaten culture because it creates continual change. Thus: By the very nature of things, freedom depends upon an establishment of law and custom. To be free a man has to know where things are to be found and in what form, for these are the very instrumentalities of his choice. An order which derives its impetus from a dynamism and which moves along on a collective urge cannot present the alternative choices which a conservative order holds out. The responses which are to be made are willed in advance, and progression keeps things in a perpetual unsettlement. This state of affairs is most inimical to freedom where the compelling force is a political one (SE 127).

The culture is also threatened in other ways. The increased emphasis on technology produces occupational specialization, which means that people have less in common with one another as regards their daily business. Having little in common includes, of course, having little shared knowledge of, belief in, and concern for the cultural traditions that bind society. Further, since people in a technological society are more mobile, due not only to improved transportation but also to transfers by their employers and their searches for better jobs, they are less likely now than in the nineteenth century to have much in common with their neighbors, because they are

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urban planners or cardiologists while their neighbors are factory workers or insurance salespersons, and because they grew up in the rural South and their neighbors in urban New England or the Pacific Northwest. As Weaver puts it, "this terrible mobility is fatal to mythical constructs. Myths have always developed among a people occupying one region for a long period of time and developing a strong provincial consciousness. . . . To take away place is to take away the locus of myth" (VO 37-38). In addition to such weakening of shared knowledge brought about by increasing specialization and mobility, modernism undermines the traditional beliefs people and their neighbors might otherwise share. In "The Spaciousness of Old Rhetoric," Weaver discusses how the "homogeneity of belief" obtained in nineteenth-century American political address has disappeared; because of the modern assumption that we do not accept what we cannot empirically verify, we have moved "from the position that only propositions are interesting because they alone make judgments . . . to a position in which only evidence is interesting because it alone is uncontaminated by propositions" (ER 172). This distinction is an important one in analyzing culture, for when a culture replaces a focus on propositions with a focus on evidence, it has lost its direction. There exists in modernism a lack of concern for the religious faculty as Weaver defines it, which means that while "evidence" can be used to teach, delight, and persuade, t h e r e is no social consensus regarding what evidence ought to b e considered and what ends for the use of that evidence ought to be thought worthwhile. "It is a dangerous thing," Weaver says, "to develop means without reference to rational ends, because if you do, the means may condition the e n d s . " H e concludes aphoristically: "A great flowering of means may even be a cover-up for a failure of purpose" (TW 514). Once a culture's spiritual resources are gone, there remains no power of self-restraint for the drive for technological progress. As the religious faculty is the guarantor for the metaphysical dream, the importance of "revealed" knowledge, of religion, of a cultural dream, is distinct from and superior to what is learned through investigation and reasoning. People cannot have a peaceful and productive life if the postulates for their daily acts are continually revised to fit the most recent advancements in scientific knowledge (SE 142). Furthermore, while examining religio-cultural beliefs may result in a valuable ethical philosophy, relying on the cognitive faculty separated from the religious cannot produce the binding power of the old creed (SE 136-37). 7 More often, discarding the old my thos in the pursuit of modernism leaves society without the coherent philosophy or ethical structure Weaver requires. To illustrate the problem that develops when the unifying cultural code is discarded, we offer an anecdote concerning modernism's effect on journalism. While driving to a professional conference a while ago, one of us was listening to the news on a commercial radio station. As with most such

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31

newscasts, the time allotted was minimal and the reporting was superficial. Listeners learned that the Pentagon was paying exorbitant prices for coffee makers to go on air force jets and had paid $229 for otherwise unremarkable rubber washers. The whole report took no more than fifteen seconds, and no explanation or evaluation was offered; it was followed by a report of a fire in a city some one thousand miles distant in which a number of people were killed, but again there was no explanation of the data, no evaluation of its importance to the lives of listeners or society, no reason at all for why it was reported other than it happened. The last item of news provided listeners with information "just in from the Nepal News Agency," a report on "marauding pachyderms" who killed a number of people and trampled two houses. The newscaster sounded bemused, and as he came to the end of the report the disc jockey broke in, laughing, and asked if the news bureau would be receiving more such stories. Apparently this information, although factual, was so foreign to their presuppositions about the world that it seemed like a slapstick sketch in a Hollywood comedy. As the news show ended, the two men were still chuckling. Such "news" items are the stuff of newscasts because each "contributes to that informing of the public which journalists] acknowledge as their duty" (ER 178). Generally, the news consists of material from all over the world, presented according to the standard journalistic convention of "objective reporting," and providing vivid illustrations and details about actual events. If a producer was asked why a particular illustration was given air time, the questioner would most likely be met with incomprehension. T. S. Eliot notes that "many people act upon the assumption that the mere accumulation of 'experiences' . . . is—like the accumulation of money—valuable in itself" (After Strange Gods 37). And, as Weaver notes, "the lavish use of detail" is seen as "a visual aid to education, and therefore an increased illustration contributes to that informing of the public which [newspeople] acknowledge as their duty." But, by and large, the "illustrations are vivid rather than meaningful or communicative" (ER 179), with their principle of selection being not education but shock value. That is, the material of journalism is oftentimes profoundly unimportant to those who hear it. After all, a resident of rural South Carolina, Manhattan, or anyplace else in the United States has little immediate and practical need to know that Nepalese villagers have been crushed by elephants. Descriptions of mayhem can be vivid, but the educative function contained in the grisly details of disconnected events from around the world is limited in the extreme. The information is further irrelevant because it includes no ethical valuations. The modernist injunction for journalistic objectivity explicitly rules out of court not only editorializing but also any legitimatizing principle for selecting which pieces of news are reported and which are not. It rules out, in fact, even the educative function itself, since an objective reporter, by definition as well as by the principles of the profession,

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can have no particular agenda by which he or she would teach. It means, then, that while there may be a good deal of vivid particulars to report, no good reason is offered to report any of them. 8 The vivid particulars consist of intrusive detail, but the details are of ideas that are never taken up and that "the average man does not care to reflect upon, especially under the conditions of newspaper reporting" (ER 178-79). To argue, as Weaver says journalists sometimes do, that sensationalist journalism presents the raw stuff of life and that journalists have the responsibility to leave nobody undeceived about the real nature of the world, simply begs the question; it is the "raw stuff of life" that is exactly what civilized people want and need to have refined (IHC 29). Since our society's philosophy is revealed by what our public discourse shows to be pertinent, modern journalism reveals that our society has adopted a philosophy of instrumentalism and materialism (ER 182). Thus, to the extent that journalism takes its purpose to be merely the objective reporting of shocking events from around the world, it exhibits the deleterious effects of our modern loss of a central core of beliefs and values; it illustrates that "sickly metaphysical dream" that has replaced traditional culture, sickly enough to enable people to expend news time on pathetic stories of people far away and to laugh at their misfortunes, and to expend this time to no educative end. In an argument supporting Weaver's position, Jacques Ellul asserts that popular media provide the basis for our communal identifications. Because of specialization and other fragmenting aspects of modernism, we need a

sense of commonality all the more, which advertisers and the mass media are happy to provide. Thus, as Weaver also states in "The Great Stereopticon," the social consequences of deindividuation are the creation of dependencies on the media for information that forms our ever-changing attitudes, and the creation of "mass man" and a society with homogeneous opinions, predilections, consumptive habits, and the like (IHC 69-100). While a thoughtful, educated person might see and try to resist attempts at homogenization, our social environment is now fundamentally different from that of the previous century: people then were not exposed to the constant intrusion of the media into those attempts at meditation and contemplation best carried out in silence. Ellul's belief, and Weaver's, is that the continual barrage of the voices and sounds of advertising and the popular media help to mold and remold our attitudes and orientations. 9 On another automobile trip, one of us heard a radio station advertise that its music would "make the work day fly by." Weaver might well wonder about the care and productivity of employees with their attention not on their work but on the "best hits of yesterday and today," and he might also wonder about the messages being absorbed by the uncritical listeners. 10 Weaver provides other illustrations besides journalism of the effects modernism has had on traditional Western culture. He discusses the changing

Cultural Theory, Part 1 3

status and role of women, changes in our educational system, and the military mind's exchange of the war of limited objectives for the concept of total war. We will turn to these topics in the next chapter. It is important first to clarify the most important difference between traditional culture and modernism, the difference that stands behind and gives impetus to these many problems Weaver sees in twentieth-century society. We speak of the conflict between realism and relativism as foundational philosophies for culture. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN REALISM AND RELATIVISM

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Weaver contends that realism is the philosophy of the traditional culture that existed through the medieval ages, whereas nominalism, in the form of relativism, is the philosophy of modernism. Realism, in Weaver's understanding, maintains the existence of a transcendental realm, which provides "a structure of reality independent of [our] own will and desires" (LP 158) and "a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man" (IHC 3). Included in this realm are universals, which exist a priori and ante res, and, further, which are stable, eternal, and independent of humankind and the physical world. As Weaver recounts the history of the West, this Platonic realm of the universal serves as the grounding for belief in a Judeo-Christian God, and the various proofs for the existence of God developed by Church fathers all depend upon this philosophical stance. The universals are perceived to be more than conventions of the mind in that they would exist even if humanity ceased to exist or never existed. As examples, right triangularity is said to have existed even before the invention of geometry, just as the mathematical formulation of the law of gravity did not create this natural phenomenon but merely explained it. Thus, universals are not created by a human thinker but rather discovered. As Weaver says, "I suspect that this is evidence supporting the doctrine of knowledge by recollection taught by Plato and the philosophers of the East" (IHC 157); the Church's thinkers would say not that we previously existed in Plato's metaphysical heaven and in that place gained our intuitive awareness of the universals but rather that the universals exist in the mind of God and are vouchsafed to us through God. This line of reasoning applies not only for the truths of the physical world but also for values and for ethics. For instance, the ideal of justice exists at a transcendental level separate from this world; worldly justice, no matter how refined and practiced, never rises to the level of ideal justice, but gains value by its similarity to ideal justice. This stability of values provides for Weaver the goal for human reflection and activity, including rhetorical activity: the pursuit of and adherence to the transcendental truth. Nominalism, on the other hand, maintains that universals have no objec-

34 The Politics of Rhetoric tive existence and validity, that they are merely intellectual and linguistic conventions; all that exists are physical objects and our recollected experiences and analyses of them. This world view shifts the focus of attention from a transcendent principle (why the world was made) to a physical one (how the world works), from philosophy and religion to science. It ignores as an illusion the transcendent realm, leaving the material realm as the sole context for human thought and action. Accordingly, nominalism is linked to "a radical empiricism in which the evidential base for all knowledge is direct experience of individual things and particular events" (Edwards, vol. 8, 307). This passage supports the contention Weaver makes that nominalism provided the impetus for Western society's development of science; as he puts it, "With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism" (IHC 3). As he continues, this turn ultimately makes relativism the only reasonable epistemological stance. According to Weaver, relativism "denies outright that there are any absolute truths, any fixed principles, or any standards beyond what one may consider his convenience. A theory is true only relative to the point of view of the individual, or to the time in which it is asserted, or to the circumstances which prevail at the moment. Truth is forever contingent and evolving, which means, of course, that you can never lay hands on it" (RC 4). Weaver's distinctions between the philosophical positions of realism and relativism are crucial for the establishment of his ideal culture. He maintains the validity of realism, but it is not just his belief in eternal, unchanging, absolute truths that make commentators so often identify Weaver as a Platonist. It is also his insistence on claiming this realm as the source of human values and the determinant of right actions. Now, few people argue that there is no objective reality, at least when talking about the physical world. Those who do so argue take a position that Daniel Royer identifies as "subjective idealism," a position that denies the objective existence of things known and reduces reality to appearance (293). Royer goes on to say that extreme theories of epistemic rhetoric and social constructionist philosophy partake of this erroneous view. Kenneth Burke offers a commonsensical objection to this view in his discussion of "recalcitrance," saying that reasonable people are not going to believe that they can safely jump out of the window on the upper floor of a tall building, unless they have something like a parachute (Permanence and Change 255-56). The laws of objective reality, in this case the law of gravity, are not relative to the leaper's point of view. The difficulties for reasonable people do not arise when considering whether the law of gravity exists, or whether a triangle will always contain three angles that total 180 degrees; they arise when they look to the realm of transcendentals for guidance in matters of value. Here the burden is on the side of the realists. Royer notes an erroneous, dogmatic position here

Cultural Theory, Part 1 35 as well, which h e calls "direct realism"; it denies the participation of h u m a n knowers in the creation of reality and reduces appearance to reality (293). The problem is to find some position between these two extreme dogmas. O n e approach is made by C. Jack Orr, who distinguishes between two social constructionist theories of reality and truth, which he calls "intersubjectivism" and "critical rationalism." The first, like Royer's subjective idealism, posits that reality and truth are superfluous for the pursuit of knowledge and in fact denies an objective reality that exists apart from the mind. It is important to say that those who deny the existence of universals are in some logical trouble, as both Orr and Weaver contend. O n e reason, and perhaps the strongest, is that if one posits that reality or truth results only from a specific way of knowing, then competing theories of either cannot be criticized—including, to mention Orr's example and a particularly problematic one for intersubjectivists, the mechanistic objectivism of logical positivism. Weaver states that an individual who need not "refer his action to the external frame of obligation" but only relies on his own beliefs and sense of rights "cannot be disciplined on the theoretical level" (IHC 70). The result in practical terms, Weaver continues, is that he must be disciplined by society but that society's power must logically be perceived not as derived from a transcendent realm but only of human origin itself— and therefore, insofar as it limits the individual, is brutal. That is, intersubjectivism does not differentiate between a belief in objective reality and a belief in objectivism; it does not distinguish between absolute truth as an ideal that we can never attain and a claim that the truth can b e known. However, intersubjectivism is not the only way to understand social constructionist philosophy. In order to believe that one cannot d e t e r m i n e with certainty reality and truth, one need not also believe that universals themselves do not exist. Critical rationalism, according to Orr, maintains the following tenets: that while objective truth cannot be consistently denied, knowledge is nonetheless uncertain; that knowledge claims d e p e n d on the framework of the claimant; that socially constructed frames of reference are rational if held self-reflectively and contingently and irrational if not; and that all constructions of reality must be subject to criticism, which is to say that criticism is a persistent aim of inquiry and not a prelude to certitude. Weaver holds a position like this; according to Walter H. Beale, he maintains "the commonsense, fallibility-based view that every coherent construction of reality must necessarily fall short of grasping the whole truth of things, is inevitably contaminated with self-projections and self-deceptions, and will inevitably throw large chunks of reality into shadows" (633). This position also allows for the concept of nomos as an analogue to natural law. Nomos requires not the prophetic voice of the priest or the hypnotizing voice of the bard, who present the truth to a mesmerized audience; rather, it requires a speaker and an audience both involved in defining knowledge and deciding upon action (Jarratt 60). These definitions and de-

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cisions are subject to the perceptions of the participants as well as to historical and geographic contexts. Susan C. Jarratt, in her discussion of nomoi, believes that one need not have a concept of absolute good in order to participate in and resolve questions of ethics. If, however, ethical decisions are determined solely by societal customs, then the ground on which one looks for change, or even holds that one's different position is itself enough reason to look for change, does not exist. Weaver, and the critical rationalist position, hold that absolutes do exist, in fact that they give a ground for questioning the customs of a society, customs that may have become ethically suspect even though not seen or accepted as such by societal members. That is, Weaver, following Plato, tries to get beyond the dogmatism of the direct realists without falling into the problems of the subjective idealists. Weaver accepts that the transcendental realm exists but, as does Plato, admits that it is beyond the ability of anyone to know that realm with certainty. Beale argues that, for Weaver, reality "is not something that exists as an independent material substance to which a properly controlled use of language has direct access. Though it may not exist independently of human consciousness, it does exist independently of human will and subjectivity, and the right use of language may provide a responsible and creditable apprehension of it" (631). Royer takes much the same tack by approving the "neorealism" of Alfred North Whitehead and Sean Sayers as the solution, both of whom posit "a reality that is not disjunct but is yet neither merely physical (phenomenal) nor merely mental (noumenal)"; they

posit the existence of an objective material world that is knowable by human consciousness (Royer 290-91). While it is not within the scope of this book to address Whitehead's "organism" or any other variant of neorealism, it is important to see that such a position supports Weaver's theoretical position even as it undermines his more overtly political attacks on the relativism he abhors in modern society. All this is to say that, despite Weaver's concern that denying realism leads to the "relativism of 'man the measure of all things' " (IHC 4), in his theoretical statements he accepts something much like Protagoras's position. The reasons for this seeming contradiction in Weaver's position are complex, bound up with his views of cultural autonomy as well as his views on ontology. To support his position on the origin and nature of cultures he must place the culture's group into something like Burke's cultural orientation and must assert that they view their world through what Burke calls a "terministic screen" (Language as Symbolic Action 44-62). That is, while asserting the existence of absolutes Weaver also says that "different persons have . . . different orientations towards values. . . . Variations

appearing in these forms do not mean simply that one man is right and

another wrong; they mean that the persons in question are responding according to their different powers to apprehend an order in reality." He

Cultural Theory, Part 1 3 goes further in this passage to say that "the reason for not only permitting but encouraging individualism is that each person is individually related toward the source of ethical impulse and should be allowed to express his special capacity for that relation" (LP 60-61). H Weaver is not shy about asserting some people's scant capacities, some people's suspect impulses, some people's flawed perspectives; however, he also admits that there is "no ready position from which one can tell the fellow members of his culture that they are guilty of perverseness" and even less status for making such a claim about people of other cultures (VO 74). It is not clear how one identifies those with large capacities, pure impulses, and accurate perspectives, nor is it clear whether one can with any assurance make these identifications, regardless of whether or not that person's cultural members will agree. To clarify: Addressing himself to the Phaedrus, Weaver reminds us that Plato saw writing as at best a mixed blessing; in the dialogue's closing discussion, Socrates is made to say that written discourse cannot contain the truth because "it has 'no reticences or proprieties toward different classes of persons' " (IHC 95). For Plato as for Weaver, while the truth leaps up "like a flame" between people engaged in oral discourse, it is "never wholly captured by men even in animated discourse and in its purest form, certainly, never brought to paper" (IHC 95-96). As Weaver says, "To know an absolute absolutely is something that is not given to men." He goes further, saying that "in this concrete world the application of an absolute principle has to be tempered by the diversity of fact and circumstance. To imagine oneself able to proceed absolutely on an absolute principle is the mark of a madman" (RC 11-12). Leaving aside Weaver's silence about the means by which an absolute principle is identified, it seems necessary to assume on the basis of this passage that the person making the application is going to be the "measure" of how and in what ways diversities of fact and circumstance will temper the application of the absolute principles. Weaver does say that one must believe in absolute principles, that relativism "is a matter of relevance to the moment and to the situation" (RC 12). We assume that he is arguing against a kind of situation ethics—or lack of ethics—that would be applied in particular instances without thought for any principle other than immediate personal advantage. There are people who operate in this way, and undoubtedly there are some who have some power in the world. But once one accepts that the application of absolutes must be adjusted for facts and situations, one has moved the issue to qualitatively different grounds, and the difficult task is the determination of what constitutes an acceptable or unacceptable adjustment—not the determination that an adjustment has been made. It seems to us that critical rationalism as Orr describes it makes sense of a good deal of Weaver's position and brings him into agreement, especially in such statements as the one quoted above from Life without Prejudice (60-61), with Chaim

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Perelman's view of the state's responsibility to respect different individuals and groups, not to suppress the liberties of individuals but only to moderate dangerous excesses ("Philosophy of Pluralism" 67). In Weaver's terms, "people of cultivation and intellectual perceptiveness are quickest to admit a law of Tightness in ways of living different from their own; they have mastered the principle that being has a right qua being" (IHC 175). With such sentiments, Weaver allows for a cultural pluralism, albeit eschewing cultural relativism. Ultimately, insofar as Weaver's position can be described as critical rationalism, with its concomitant acceptance of pluralism, it can be said that he accepts—consciously or not—the necessary corollary to this position: that particular perspectives are not objective presentations of reality, nor are they merely subjective. Thus, theoretically at least, Weaver accepts the impossibility of possessing more than a partial—that is, an incomplete as well as a prejudiced—world view; he accepts that a world view will be necessarily ideological. In fact, in his discussion of positive and dialectical terms, he says of the latter that "they take their meaning from the world of idea and action. They are words for essences and principles, and their meaning is reached not through sensory perception, but through the logical processes of definition, inclusion, exclusion, and implication. Since their meaning depends on a concatenation of ideas, what they signify cannot be divorced from the ideological position of the user as revealed by the general context of his discourse" (LIS 145). He also contends that the meaning of a word "will depend upon the time and place in which it is used and the

point of view of the user" (LIS 117). Thus, not only is reality ideological but its construction is established and maintained by means of language. (How language helps to create and maintain an ideology is discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.) Putting this discussion into the context of most importance to Weaver, we can say that the modernist may be able to tell the conservative that the latter "cannot show any acceptable source of authority for what you say is the nature and image of man" (LP 103). However, the conservative is correct to respond that the modernist provides no vision or intuition of what man is, and since no grounds exist for saying how we should behave, ethics and politics go out the window—a situation that is simply intolerable for conservative and modernist alike. Further, the conservative can point to historical evidence and to what Booth calls the "social test of truth," to what the Sophists called the nomoi, and to what Weaver sees as the cultural buttresses for harmonious social life and action, as worth something in the establishment of these matters. Weaver also responds to modernists who say about his desire for the principles and values of the traditional culture that "you can't turn back the clock"; some things do not have temporal status, Weaver responds, and so do not need to change with the passing of time. As regards the attempt to

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stay the march of material progress, modernists contend that we cannot stop the inevitable march of events, that history is self-determining. Weaver replies that we need not allow ourselves to b e "ground u n d e r by the iron march of e v e n t s " (LP 118). Of course we cannot stop time, but the point may b e taken that while it is hard to change our way of life as radically as we would n e e d to change it to get away from the problems that modernism and its technological component have caused us, such a contention does not deny that we may, with enough adherence to principle and force of will, stop the march of material progress. 1 2 The r e q u i r e m e n t of adherence to principle, however, can become a twoedged sword, forcing a person to accept defeat because h e or she is unwilling to compromise to fight what are perceived as unfair tactics. Such is the failure Weaver attributes to the southern cause in the Civil War—a noble failure, h e argues, but a failure nonetheless. F u r t h e r m o r e , we are contending that Weaver allows, theoretically, for the adjusting of principles to fit a more refined awareness of the transcendental truths; it seems, though, that he at times cannot make the adjustment, cannot adjust his applied rhetoric to his own principles. Either that, or, as we will suggest later, his truths allow the use of certain means that others would find unethical—an act that appears to others as trampling certain principles to uphold others. The third chapter explores Weaver's closer description of the principles that a society should uphold. These principles inform the metaphysical dream that Weaver says is as near the ideal as we in the United States have come: the society of the antebellum South. Weaver's explication of the South is crucial to understanding his rhetorical theory. First we describe his analysis and defense of southern society; then we critique them. T h e critique attempts to illustrate how Weaver countermands his "ultimate" principle, to cherish life and the world, in pursuing principles in the "dialectical realm." T h e results, unfortunately, are some inhumane positions and actions. NOTES

1. Similar to Carl Jung's position that poets access the collective unconscious of the race, Weaver's position is that poets access the collective metaphysical dream of their culture. We take up this point in Chapter 4. 2. In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, Wayne Booth makes quite the same request, asking that, instead of withholding agreement pending proof, we grant agreement pending disproof; he calls this strategy the "social test of truth" (101). 3. The social problems that would result with this increase in premeditated murder—by women, their doctors, and their doctors' staff—might be big enough to keep Roe v. Wade intact. Declaring abortions illegal yet meting out no appropriate punishment to the criminals might well further erode citizens' respect for the logic and practice of law. We discuss complications regarding this topic in Chapter 9.

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4. The next chapter considers the hierarchy of the antebellum American South, in which the gentleman class had prestige without necessarily exhibiting the wisdom and justice that should be its prerequisite. 5. Despite changes since Weaver's time both in scientific disciplines and in society's attitude toward them, the attitude that worried him is not dead. A review of Paul Davies's The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World, in The New York Times Book Review (February 23, 1992), quotes Davies: "The power of science to explain things is so dazzling I found it easy to believe that, given the resources, all the secrets of the universe might be revealed'' (12). Davies goes on to assert that "given the laws of physics, the universe can create itself." The reviewer also cites the ending of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which takes a similar position. 6. In the political realm Weaver sternly opposes the application of social science in programs of social engineering, a notion that gained currency in the 1930s and suggests Roosevelt's "liberal'' New Deal. 7. This point is made by T. S. Eliot in "The Humanism of Irving Babbitt" (Selected Essays) and by Carl G. Jung in "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." 8. In the first chapter of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that owners of mass media have an agenda, although one not readily apparent to the public or even to many media workers. Ben H. Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly concurs with this position. 9. Neil Postman notes that television's use of visual images heightens the media's ability to gain uncritical acceptance (Conscientious Objections 72-81). His discussion of television's effect on culture (103-15) logically extends Weaver's concerns. 10. In a complementary argument, T. S. Eliot claims in "Religion and Literature" (Selected Essays) that the uncritical assumption of modern literature serves to reform readers' orientations along lines detrimental to their existence here and hereafter. 11. Here Weaver agrees again with Plato, who says that some people better remember truth and had seen more truth before their souls inhabited their bodies. Thus, as Plato says in the Phaedrus, "The one which has seen the most Reality shall at birth enter the seeker of wisdom" (31). 12. Regarding Weaver's desire to "turn back the clock," we are reminded of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, in which the protagonist confronts a future that makes him literally want to turn back the clock. Our society's embrace of technological, social, and political "progress" has brought with it a degradation of the physical, social, and political environments that should make all reasonable people, Weaver believes, consider the value of "turning back the clock."

3 Cultural Theory, Part 2

WEAVER'S ANTEBELLUM SOUTH We have tried to show how Weaver's theoretical view of culture supports a critical rationalist position, a view that culture is a socially constructed, ideological manifestation that may have affinities with a vaguely or subconsciously intuited transcendent realm but that finally is only a representation of that realm. The antebellum South provides for Weaver a close approximation of that realm, and, despite its poor reputation and historical treatment over the last century, offers much to a society embroiled in the problems visited by modernism. It is an example of "the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world"; its promise as well as its achievement "offers a challenge . . . to save the human spirit by re-creating a nonmaterialist society. Only this can rescue us from a future of nihilism, urged on by the demoniacal force of technology and by our own moral defeatism" (STB 391). For all its flaws, and Weaver admits that they exist, the antebellum South is presented as a culture to be emulated. The southern attributes of mind, Weaver contends, include an attitude of veneration for nature as a creation of God and not as something to be conquered; a dislike of analysis, especially in the sciences and other specialized activities; and a profound conservatism, including stability of religious and political opinions, a dislike of centralized government and the fruits of industrialism (including the intellectual fruit of progressivism), and an abiding attachment to one's physical and cultural locale (see SE 220-28, 236). These attributes come out of what Weaver sees as the fourfold root of southern antebellum culture, which he takes up at length in the first chapter of The Southern Tradition at Bay.

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The first root was the establishment and maintenance of a feudal theory of society. Feudalism provided the hierarchical structure necessary for what Weaver claims was a harmonious fraternity among all m e m b e r s of the cultural group, and it also provided a strong sense of place as regards the people's physical and social environments; both helped to produce respect and loyalty among m e m b e r s rather than envy and hatred (see I H C 43 and STB 49). The feudal system also provided, continues Weaver, a stable and acceptable economic system in which everyone was given a useful skill and a place in which this skill could be practiced and appreciated. The second root of southern culture was its code of chivalry, a means by which humanity's inherently violent nature could b e kept from threatening cultural stability, a means to channel violence and, if not harmlessly dissipate it, at least keep it under control. The third cultural root of the South was the gentleman class. The gentleman was not trained in specialized skills but rather was educated in the general humanities; the focus of his education— and the closest thing to a specialization in this education—was leadership in statecraft and warfare. This class was an elite group whose cultural reason for existence was to provide the apex to the hierarchy of the feudal structure and so to provide the locus of power, privilege, and responsibility. Its importance was not in what its members could do but in who they were (STB 81)—a strong statement in support of a hereditary aristocracy as opposed to an aristocracy based on ability. The fourth root of southern culture was its religiousness. W e have already touched on the importance of religion in maintaining cultural stability; in his description of the South, Weaver clearly indicates how this traditional society, holding to philosophical realism rather than scientistic relativism, accepted that a certain portion of life must remain inscrutable, accepted that religion met this need, and accepted that it was thereby given force in the establishing and enforcing of rules, dictates of conscience, and ethical propriety. Religion was an unquestioned support of the culture (SE 135), a "great conservative agent and a bulwark of those institutions which served [the gentleman]'' (STB 104-5). That is, it functioned much as the established Roman Catholic Church traditionally has functioned in Central American countries, keeping established orders in place and providing rationales for the establishments' maintenance of power and the lower classes' submission to that power.

A CRITIQUE OF THE ROOTS OF SOUTHERN CULTURE Despite Weaver's arguments for the value of antebellum southern culture, a critique of its fourfold root exposes shortcomings of some magnitude. First, Weaver's contention that the feudal system results in societal m e m b e r s ' knowing their place—no matter what that place may be—and consenting to live and work in harmony with the other classes, is on its

Cultural Theory, Part face suspect. Ideological propaganda can persuade people to believe that their existence as serfs or slaves is in their best interest in this world as well as in some heaven to come, yet Weaver does state, in another context but applicable here, that it is moral solipsism to hold a belief in the selfjustification of any cultural expression (VO 76). Even if cultural leaders are able to convince an enthralled class that they should love their status, and even if cultural nomoi develop to accept, for instance, the establishment of slavery, a doctor of culture may still reasonably assume that slavery is wrong according to natural law and so is wrong for the culture. (As mentioned in the previous chapter, Justice Clarence Thomas, although no doctor of culture, takes this position.) Weaver himself belonged to a class that, while not in thrall, lacked in the antebellum South much opportunity for a university education. Furthermore, although society's elite might not seriously consider histories written by members of the lower classes that express social and cultural discontent, and although Weaver may not have been aware of many such histories, there are slaves' narratives that indicate a profound dissatisfaction with their lot. Frederick Douglass's Narrative certainly was ava able to Weaver; so was the 1946 dissertation by Marion W. Starling, "The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History"; and so was the autobiographical writing of Harriet Brent Jacobs (Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which provides ample reasons for a profound dissatisfaction with her lot. l As with claims of scholars attempting to expand the literary canon to include women writers of past centuries, a dearth of histories written by people who were systematically denied public voice does not mean that the canonical history accurately reflects those times. However, Weaver does come uncomfortably close to assuming just such a weak position when he offers as evidence for the worth of the feudal system Goethe's description of German life, a description that showed a hierarchical social order without dissension among its various classes. After quoting at length from Goethe's Poetry and Truth from My Life, Weaver remarks: "The classes thrived in mutual dependence, and the principle of distinction, far from being felt as invidious, was the cement that held the whole together. One senses the kind of satisfaction that was felt in seeing different kinds of people to the right and left of one and, since it is in the nature of things, above and below. Not to be overlooked is the fact that the lowest' class often finds satisfaction in knowing itself 'superior' to other classes in certain respects—in hardihood, in industry, or in religiousness'' (VO 17). Anyone evaluating these observations should remember that Goethe's attention was not on the lower classes or women but only on upper- and middle-class men—on the noblemen, secure in their exclusive and timehonored privileges, and on the burghers, who, Goethe claimed, felt it beneath their dignity to pretend to the noble's level. Nor should one fail to consider Goethe's interest in maintaining a status quo beneficial to himself.

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He need not be seen as a wicked social commentator crassly representing his culture to his own advantage; he could rather be seen merely as one comfortable in and therefore persuaded of the belief that his world view is not ideological but objectively real. Finally, one might also remember that Goethe's Germany did not remain harmonious and that the seeds of its disharmony were somehow within the very feudal system that was offered as a benefit to the society. Goethe's observations support the adage that history, including cultural history, is written by those who have won, and they support the truism that the victors who have created the cultural orientation come to believe that everyone is as pleased about the victory as are they. In articulating the argument for slavery, an important component of the social and economic system of feudalism, Weaver, referring to a comment by Albert Taylor Bledsoe, says, "The right to freedom is predicated upon the ability to use it, and since the negro was without experience in the conduct of a civilized state, the law could abridge his freedom as it does that of children and defectives'' (SE 150). That is, leaders can refuse to prepare a people for their duties as citizens and thereby retain the right to deny these people their place as free citizens in the society. What might have appeared to an antebellum southerner as conventional wisdom ought not to receive so easy a verdict from modern readers, who should detect its self-serving captiousness. It is also untenable to argue, as Weaver does, that providing for each slave a specific job on the plantation was "an important factor in his self-respect" (STB 52), or to argue that slavery benefited the slaves because it enforced "habits of discipline and industry" (STB 167). Self-respect is not developed by a system that tells individuals they are not human, and it is debatable that what is most desirable to develop in human beings is discipline rather than se/f-discipline—that is, forced accession to external control instead of thoughtful self-control. It is also debatable whether industry is developed within a person through forced labor, especially when proceeds of the labor are taken from the worker and given to a relatively idle overlord. However, Weaver attempts to support these observations by citing a number of commentators on the southern condition, including Frances Butler Leigh, who complains of primitive and indolent freed slaves who yearned for nothing more than "plenty to eat and unlimited idleness" (STB 263). Additionally, in his lecture notes on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which he used at the University of Chicago, Weaver remarks that the accounts northerners offered about the southern slave "seldom report that he was by nature very industrious or provident, that he preferred monogamy to other forms of marriage or that he had a deeper understanding of the Christian mysteries than the white people from whom he learned his religion. Nor is there any evidence in the documents I have studied that family ties were especially strong." Weaver continues by citing the

Cultural Theory, Part 2 4 emancipated slave's poor performance in education and his propensity for criminal behavior, finishing with the observation that "he has been an amiable, docile, and frequently bewildered and confused member of the higher civilization into which he was unfortunately thrust. There is pathos in that

situation, but there is no reason for inverting the real order of things, as

Mrs. Stowe did in her ideological novel" (UTC 317-18). Such a characterization of the African-American population is gross stereotyping, and a careful and thoughtful doctor of culture would consider laying at least some of the blame for any poor record that emancipated slaves may have at the feet of the system under which they were held in thrall. A feudal structure undermines self-motivation, and it undermines respect for the authority and the government that had perpetuated slavery. If African-Americans of the twentieth century are disproportionately incarcerated and score lower on the Scholastic Aptitude Test than white Americans, perhaps the reason is that the culture's ideology has not yet allowed the freed slaves an equal place in the society. Before one blames the victims of such discrimination, it seems fair to blame a society that does not provide reasonable opportunities for education or reasonable hope for meaningful and gainful employment, a society with a documented record of prejudicial legal treatment on the basis of skin color. Furthermore, a doctor of culture would consider more closely the charges leveled at the black race: They are indolent and improvident; they have high divorce rates and weak family ties; they have poor educational records and high crime rates; they are "frequently bewildered and confused members" of the civilization they inhabit. The antebellum southern society destroyed African-Americans' culture, first by taking them from their indigenous culture, then through treatment that included sexual harassment, forced breeding, and family separation; the denial of any education beyond vocational training immediately useful to their owners; and the systematic disruption, through threats, punishments, and relocations, of any attempts to develop cultural identity. Since Weaver also argues forcefully that a good deal of the modern "white" world's problems are the result of a weakened culture, it seems reasonable to compare the plight of African-Americans with the plight of modern people at large. The spoiled child syndrome of which Weaver speaks charges the dominant culture with indolence and improvidence; he claims that the dominant culture's divorce rates and family problems result from our fateful turn to modernism and, specifically, the modernist idea of equal rights for women; he rails against poor educational policies of the dominant culture and the poor educational performances of all our students. He even uses the same word—confusion (IHC 21)—to describe everyone's problems that he uses to describe the problems of the African-American, and he clearly sees the dominant culture's dominant group as increasingly bewildered and confused by and in the culture we have created. In short, the distinction between the plight of the

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emancipated slaves and the rest of society's members is primarily that the former had their culture taken from them forcefully, while the latter have no one to blame but themselves. A fair evaluation of this crucial economic linchpin of the feudal system ought to consider at least two more points. First, Weaver states: "Although some slaveholders were not gentlemen, there was moral truth in the observation that only u n d e r the rule of gentlemen was the peculiar institution tolerable" (STB 54-55). Thus, by the logic of the statement the system was intolerable, which means, to the extent that the feudal society d e p e n d e d upon the slave class, that the culture of the antebellum South was also intolerable. Second, the feudal system is built on large manorial holdings in which slaves work specialized jobs but gain no private property thereby. However, specialization, Weaver contends, both dehumanizes and criminalizes, because the workers are not likely to have a clear sense of what they are producing (IHC 64); although this concern may not apply to the artisan class of slaves, it does to those who harvest cotton. In fact, Weaver claims that a worker who is not responsible for what is produced "is made to surrender both freedom and initiative" and, since a burden of responsibility is the best means of getting anyone to think straight, ultimately to surr e n d e r "the ability to think clearly as well." When a worker "has long b e e n absolved of the duty of thinking, he may be seized with a sense of helplessness and panic when the necessity of it is thrust upon him" (IHC 66). In his epilogue to The Southern Tradition at Bay, Weaver notes that "there are numerous resemblances between the Southern Agrarian mind and the mind of modern fascism" (395), and while he does not approve of this form of government or society, the comparison may be more accurate than he wishes. Burke observes that fascism, "with its great hordes of state laborers . . . shows a marked analogy to the feudal ideal" (Attitudes toward History 21n), and the ease with which a fascist-minded government can usurp freedom is a mirror for the treatment of slaves—and probably the lower-class whites as well—by the wealthy agrarians of the antebellum South: Just as the fascist state underwrites corporations that in turn support it, so southern state government and plantations were mutually supportive and together protected "the peculiar institution." In Weaver's way of seeing things, "the moral solution" to the problems that such economic systems visit on us "is the distributive ownership of small properties. These take the form of independent farms, of local businesses, of homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property. Such ownership provides a range of volition through which one can be a complete person. . . . [Pjroperty shows itself a benevolent institution by encouraging certain virtues, notable among which is providence" (IHC 133). Clearly, as the feudal system militates against the moral solution through its establishment of large

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tracts held by individuals and worked by slaves, and through its refusal to provide to some millions of its inhabitants the chance to possess any private property whatsoever, it is small wonder that the lower class would be "improvident" and the society as a whole immoral. The second root of the antebellum southern culture, the code of chivalry, was also inherently flawed. Among the reasons offered for its existence, Weaver contends that since human beings will always engage in war we should maintain a means by which these wars can be formalized to some degree and so managed. The code of chivalry raises war from the barbarism with which it is otherwise fought—as it was fought for hundreds of years after the fall of Rome, and as it was fought by the American government in the Civil War and World War II. Weaver also contends that might makes right, that strength is given to those in the right, that losers submit to their enemies when defeated, and that victors will treat the vanquished according to humane rules of war (VO 100, 102). But do these contentions obtain in any historical or imaginable culture? As regards merely the last: medieval serfs who rebelled against their lords were not treated according to humane rules of war, nor were runaway or rebellious slaves in the American South treated humanely. While a proponent of the code of chivalry can argue that it does not apply to the nobleman's treatment of the lower classes, such an omission would reopen the door to barbarism. To hang, draw, and quarter a recalcitrant serf or to set dogs on a runaway slave is to engage in barbaric acts that are out of place in civilized society. Further, Weaver admits, whereas the code was in general upheld by southern gentlemen fighting in the Civil War, these men were guilty of occasional breaches. For a code of chivalry to work as a means of maintaining social harmony and stability, it cannot be followed only when it is convenient to do so. Such would be to live by the rule of expediency rather than by principle—the mark of a society, Weaver says elsewhere, that has replaced realism with relativism. But even if the nobility were always to act according to the rule of chivalry, Weaver's preference for it is still suspect. The statement that chivalry raises war from barbarism assumes too much. One should question if civilization can flourish when it condones warfare as a response to disagreements, insofar as warfare is itself a throwback and a concession to our barbarism. Of war, Weaver says, many southern soldiers "were forced to admit that it brought out the brutish nature of man" (STB 206), and, in what Weaver himself calls "one of the most searching observations ever made," no less chivalrous a gentleman than General Robert E. Lee remarked of war, "It is well this is terrible; otherwise we should grow fond of it" (SE 172). That southern gentlemen were fond of warfare, that they studied it and, saw it and statecraft as the only occupations worthy of gentlemen, and that they reveled in it when given the opportunity, suggests that if a culture makes a place for war and presents that place as romantic and even charismatic, then people will continue to engage in it.

48 The Politics of Rhetori It is possible—as the duels of the South indicate—that warfare so perceived would be not only condoned but encouraged and pursued. Furthermore, the logic of Weaver's defense would seem to dictate that if we make a place for war because we engage in it, we should make places for other corruptions we practice—such as murder, theft, and other transgressions against traditional cultural values. It is also reasonable to argue, despite Weaver's protestations to the contrary, that some civilians are harmed even in the limited wars that a code of chivalry would preserve. Everyone works harder and longer to maintain the war effort—even though that effort may result in their poverty or even continued slavery. Peasants and other members of the lower classes are often forced to feed troops, and the female members of these lower classes are perhaps forced to submit to the sexual demands of officers. Of the female noncombatants in such a system it can also be said that their spouses, their fathers, and their sons are killed in these wars, and that they, as well as the aged and the young, are left without the emotional and economic assistance of their men. Finally, it is useful to consider whether the horrors of a total war encourage people to advance beyond the use of warfare to resolve their disagreements. This last point seems particularly apposite in 1992, since we seem to have witnessed the decline of the Soviet Union as a threat to our social and cultural well-being (a threat Weaver saw as very real and very useful in supporting much of his political theory). We have witnessed this apparent decline without having to have helped it along with a war involving the United States and the Soviet Union as principals; in fact, according to the political heirs of Weaver's theory, this decline has occurred because the terror of total war in the nuclear age has kept the United States and the late Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from settling differences on the field of battle. Closely connected to the code of chivalry is the concept of the gentleman class. An evaluation of this third support again confronts us with problems. As Weaver reads southern history, the code of chivalry was designed not merely to control our inherent propensity for war but also to reinforce and protect the gentleman class, who, under the code's rules, could not be injured with impunity or questioned about their motives or their word (STB 61). This class was granted the sole right to engage in duels, and while a gentleman was barred thereby from challenging a member of the lower class on the field of honor, he was allowed to "chastise a low fellow with whip or cane for offering him an insult" (SE 162; see also STB 63). Without researching the matter we imagine that the "low fellow" had little recourse if he thought his caning unjustified, or if he was insulted by a gentleman. Gentlemen were simply treated differently from members of the lower classes, but this inequality, if it is to be allowed, must produce compensatory benefits for the society as a whole—and especially, it would seem, for the lower classes. We have already suggested that the compensation to the

Cultural Theory, Part 2 society's slaves was inadequate. Further, since the purpose of this preferential treatment was to provide for social stability, its weakening by gentlemen would problematize their preferential treatment and their very existence as a class. It seems that they did, indeed, cause problems for the South. Consider, for instance, their disinterest in literature, even though literature, Weaver argues, is not only a repository for the culture's metaphysical dream but also a significant means for maintaining cultural unity and coherence. Despite literary journalists' expressions of belief in the importance of literature for southern society, literary journals were unsupported by the gentleman class and so short-lived. The literary man in the South, Weaver admits, was considered by the gentleman class to be in times of peace an entertainer and in times of conflict a derisive being (STB 96); in general, the gentleman's attitude toward artists was one of tolerance rather than respect (STB 71). Weaver also notes that the southern people, including apparently the gentleman class, were less interested in literary magazines than in sensational magazines such as the Police Gazette, magazines described by a commentator of the day to be "receptacles for every species of moral filth that cannot find sewerage through other channels" (STB 165); and although this specific complaint comes after the war, the people's disinterest in great literature is said by Weaver to predate the war. The lower classes might have taken an interest in good literature had only their aristocracy led the way, but, as regards the activity of the gentleman himself, "where war and statecraft are held the chief offices of man, preoccupation with an art will be regarded as a sentimental weakness" (STB 82). The gentleman class's disinterest in literature was rivaled by its disinterest in education. "It is a maxim that in every society education will ultimately serve the needs of the dominant class," Weaver says, "and in the South this consisted of gentlemen planters, who contemplated lives of ease and independence" (STB 73). The sons of the planters looked to futures as unquestioned rulers of their plantations and did not feel the need for special training. Indeed, the significant feature of the education of the southern gentleman "was its avoidance of specialization. . . . Since specialization is illiberal in a freeman, his acquaintance with the arts and sciences must remain that of the amateur. . . . The career of a gentleman is being a gentleman" (STB 79, 81). Thus, much like the system of classical Greece, the southern economy was fueled by the specialized talents of slaves; the role of gentlemen was to appropriate their slaves' labor and manage their own holdings—although, as Weaver admits, the gentlemen usually hired others to take even this duty from them; they "exhibited an aversion to the handling of money, except perhaps at the gaming table" (STB 64). However, unlike the Greek, the southern gentleman did not consider literature worthy of serious educational effort, nor did he—again unlike the Greek— find analytical study worthwhile. In an observation that, as much as any

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other, distinguishes Weaver from the traditional southerner, he notes that "the southerner rebels against the idea of analysis because his philosophy or his intellectual tradition, however transmitted down the years, tells him that this is not the way to arrive at the kind of truth he is interested in" (SE 190). It can be said that analysis—"the process of breaking things down (which is nearly always carried on for some practical purpose)"—is necessary for synthesis, and that the South's lack of interest in the former caused its ultimate inadequacy with the latter. The South's failure, Weaver says, is "a failure to study its position until it arrived at metaphysical foundations. . . . Perhaps the sin for which the South has most fully though unknowingly atoned is its failure to encourage the mind" (STB 389). The gentleman also saw education as a privilege of class. "Education beyond the most elementary, it was believed, is adapted only to those whose minds are previously disposed to the virtuous and honorable—in other words, to an aristocracy" (STB 75). One result of the lack of education offered the lower classes is that they were poorly equipped for the rigors of life during the Civil War; Weaver cites a number of diaries whose authors argue that the better soldiers were the educated ones, those who were better able to adapt to new situations, who knew about hygienic precautions and so were not as apt to go on sick call, whose better-trained minds kept them from despair, and who, in general, were "hardier, stronger, tougher, less liable to break down than the sons of the soil" (STB 247-48). The denial of educational opportunities to the lower classes, then, seems to be at least a contributing cause of the southern defeat in the Civil War. It should be noted in this context that "every system of education is ultimately a tool of the state" (STB 97), which means that, as regards the system of education chosen to support their system of economics and government, southerners apparently chose wrong. Finally, it should be mentioned that even the education in which the upper class was interested did not do much for them. Weaver reports: "It was natural that a people whose talent lay almost wholly in the direction of statecraft should consider eminence in war and eloquence in council the marks of illustrious manhood" (STB 72). However, their eminence in war notwithstanding, the victory went to their opponents and, as regards eloquence in council, Weaver reports that many of their legislative and military sessions were rife with meaningless contention, self-pluming, and petty dignity (STB 245). Such are hardly the marks of oratorical or political eminence but are rather indications of spoiled, unrealistic people. In short, despite the educational advantages of the gentleman class, despite their freedom to develop all the skills necessary for the effective rule of a society, despite their privileged place, the South fell on hard times, as Mary Chesnut complained, because of "the gradual loss of initiative and energy on the part of the old ruling class" (STB 245). As Weaver admits at the conclusion of The Southern Tradition at Bay, after the war the South surrendered

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initiative and no longer believed in itself (389). As Weaver elsewhere says, to remain stable and healthy a society must have wise and good leaders who not only enjoy prestige but who also bear responsibility; it seems that the gentleman class was not sufficiently resilient to discharge its responsibilities in its society's darkest hours, and that inability is a telling comment on the worth of its status in the social structure. Regarding the fourth root of southern culture, religiousness, Weaver differentiates between religion's role in the North and its role in the South. He contends that New England tested belief by reason, making it conform to the fruits of empirical investigation and the laws of logic, whereas the South continued to believe that a certain portion of life should and must remain inscrutable, and that religion served to provide "for guidance in this life a body of knowledge to which the facts of natural discovery are either subordinate or irrelevant" (STB 106; see also SE 138). Given southerners' conservative position on social change, it is not surprising that they would criticize the North for making religion a handmaiden for political and social reform, a means for converting the outer society instead of the inner person (SE 141). However, it is significant that powerful and educated southern churchgoers seemed to have little respect for religion, that they regarded their faith and the labor of its ministers with apathy (SE 140). Rather, religion was perceived by the populace, and so used by the gentleman class, as an unquestioned support for culture, as "a great conservative agent and a bulwark of those institutions which served him [the gentleman]" (STB 104-5; see also SE 135). Like education, religion served the ends of the controlling class. Weaver argues that religious skepticism is the achievement of people with education and access to libraries, and that the general populace is unaffected by the skepticism if uneducated (SE 144). Since an educated class might wish to maintain control over a society that provides them with privileges of place and action, it is not overly cynical to imagine that this class might use the "revealed truths" of the people's religion (truths a skeptic might see to be foolish, unexamined myths) to maintain the status quo. The Bible was often used to defend the institution of slavery, as Weaver himself attests, by saying that "it is well recognized in the Old Testament, and it is not without endorsement in the New; indeed, a strict constructionalist interpretation almost requires its defense" (SE 150). Of course, strict constructionalism can also ban dueling, drinking alcohol, and even wearing cloth made of more than one material, although perhaps only this last stricture would have the approval of the cotton growers. The point is that the religiousness that serves as one of the roots of the southern culture may well have been cynically used by the elite to maintain a system of government and economy that had no other defensible support. It seems, then, that the culture of the antebellum South generated more problems than benefits. It was woefully deficient in developing or even

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allowing the expression of the four faculties of human nature: as we have said, its interest in the aesthetic faculty was limited as was—in light of its scant regard for analysis and education—-its interest in the cognitive faculty; and, as we have suggested, its interest in the religious faculty may have been merely a cynical cover for partisan purposes, leading thereby to perversions of an ethical faculty that should have protected citizens from the excesses of the gentleman class and the horrors of slavery. Further, its system of social order was manifestly unfair and illogical, and its need for stability was undermined by the forces designed to maintain that stability. Weaver does admit that the South erred in certain ways; he does not say that it lacked an adequate foundation, but simply that its disinterest in education and philosophy meant that it never determined the foundation that would have given it the strength to persevere in its beliefs and actions. Despite these shortcomings, it does, according to Weaver, offer modern readers the challenge to "save the human spirit by re-creating a nonmaterialist society" (STB 391). We leave unexamined the notion that a society can be nonmaterialist whose leaders were so much in love with land and other possessions; who lived with an eye toward ease, eating, and fighting; who were uninterested in such nonmaterialist pursuits as literature and the life of the mind. However, we do want to end this section by remarking on Weaver's statement that the "politicians of mid-nineteenth-century America were unknowingly entangled in the great debate of the Schoolmen, with the southern separatists playing the part of the Nominalists, and the Northern democrats and equalitarians playing the part of the Realists" (STB 197). While in this context the southerners are supposed to be seen as superior, defending the particulars of locale and association against the universals of common human experience, still it is surprising to see the southern cause linked to that philosophy, which, through its changes in Western culture, created the untenable position in which the South came to find itself. It is surprising, and it is illuminating. SOME LINEAMENTS FOR AN IMPROVED CULTURE It is important that a critical analysis of a society's weaknesses have an ideal against which it is being compared, and Weaver's vision of the South provides his grounds for identifying the bad in a society. Although his conception of a specific ideal culture is less important than his critique of the existing modernist culture, it must be said that Weaver is at his weakest when he tries to describe specifically an ideal society. It is, furthermore, also important to realize that Weaver's theory of culture can be useful even though his attempt to apply his theory practically is flawed. Perhaps his problems of application can be considered from another angle. It is the mark of a confused person to desire a hierarchical system in

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which he would like to have power and place but apparently not to recognize that he would fit into the system only at one of the lower levels. His observations about William Gilmore Simms offer an illustrative analogy. "The career of William Gilmore Simms demands special appraisal, for it is peculiarly instructive in the fascination which the Southern social order exercised upon men of strong and independent mind, even while it tormented them with frustration. . . . The tragedy of Simms' entire career was that he expected something which this [Southern] society was not prepared to give, and that in the struggle he sacrificed too much" (STB 93, 95). These comments could have been Weaver's own epitaph, had the kind of hierarchy he hoped for actually been returned to his society. Yet, while his appeal to the values of the antebellum South is fraught with difficulties, Weaver does provide indications of the principles that guide his belief in an ideal culture. In this concluding section, we look at the strengths that can be culled from Weaver's cultural theory and his vision of an ideal society. Some of the strengths already mentioned include his awareness that cultures are and must remain to a certain extent closed to alien ideas; his awareness of the difficulty in examining the worth of one culture from the perspective of another, even while accepting that some cultures and some cultural institutions are intrinsically less valuable than others; his realization of the ideological nature of any cultural position; and his awareness of the necessity of hierarchy in cultural organization. As regards this last point Burke comments that "the hierarchic principle itself is inevitable in systematic thought" (Rhetoric of Motives 141), and it seems for Weaver just as inevitable that hierarchy is necessary in social systems, even though it might need to be less rigid than the class system of medieval Europe and less rigid even than that of the southern society before the Civil War. Hierarchy, Weaver maintains, is natural, in that some people are more intelligent, more adept at organizational tasks, stronger, and what have you than other people, and these people will of necessity rise to the top of an orderly society that wishes to maintain its order and its very existence. But there is no reason to replace such a hierarchy of worth with a hierarchy of birth, as was the case in feudal societies. Indeed, Weaver argues elsewhere that society's leaders must constantly be recruited according to democratic principles, "that aristocracy cannot exist without democracy" (IHC 49). Further, "no country can be great unless it possesses sufficient social mobility to allow its citizens to find places consonant with their gifts. The unanswerable argument in favor of democratic education is that it enriches the community by discovering aptitudes" (STB 371). One of the flaws of Weaver's South was that it did not realize the truth of this idea until after the Civil War, and one of its fallacies was that these ideas were honored more in theory than in practice. Further, as regards hierarchy, there is no necessary reason for a hierarchy of worth to include privileges of excessive

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wealth or exemptions from laws that govern the rest of the society; in Plato's ideal society, those who are better equipped to rule do so, but personal gain is neither their reason for doing so nor the reason for providing them with the chance. Even these theoretical strengths, however, are not without practical limitations. Just as a hierarchy can be conditioned by a culture's ideology to diminish the place and possibilities of minority groups, so can it be conditioned to diminish the place of women. Weaver argues that modernism's alteration of our cultural values includes both the placement of women on a level equal with men, which is "more truly a degradation than an elevation," and the decay of chivalry, which require thereby that women make their own way in the world (IHC 178-79). He argues that women are not happy in the workplace because they are unfitted for it, yet admits that "they are not treated as equals" and that the men responsible for this treatment "have been the white-slavers of business who traffic in the low wages of these creatures" (IHC 179). Like Weaver's characterization of the African-American population, this argument is guilty of gross stereotyping, and our arguments concerning African-American slaves, made earlier in this chapter, apply to some extent here as well. Many women are happy and successful, and many exhibit freedom and initiative in the workplace, just as some exhibited happiness, success, and initiative in 1948, when Weaver wrote these words. Furthermore, it is reasonable, and certainly so from a feminist ideological perspective, to argue that much of the failure and unhappiness of women in the business world result less from their lack of

fitness and the "fact of stubborn nature" than from oppression and discrimination by "white slavers," the dominant group of businessmen. Further, this ideological perspective accepts not just that women have been made wage-slaves by patriarchal businessmen but that women have always been kinds of slaves in Western society, lacking the "freedom and initiative" that Weaver indicates is necessary for a happy and productive life (IHC 66). His use of Queen Elizabeth I to condemn "feminist agitators" (IHC 180) seems particularly suspect, since she was not a traditional mother or housewife but the "Virgin Queen," the powerful ruler of a powerful nation-state. Here again his theory is adequate insofar as he claims that modernism disrupts traditional values of culture and the possibility of reasonable forms of hierarchy, but his ideological biases flaw his practical application. Hierarchy is inevitable in society, but in the establishment of a hierarchy of worth Weaver provides no reason for claiming that this worth is somehow gender-specific. Of significance also is his investigation of modern education, especially of the progressive education movement, in which he illustrates again his difficulty in moving from theory to practice. Theoretically, Weaver holds that education is a tool by which the dominant ideology maintains power by controlling the populace's view of its own welfare (IHC 93; STB 73, 97).

Cultural Theory, Part 2 5 He suggests the lineaments of an educational program built on his cultural principles and identifies the problems caused to education by the dominant modernist ideology. In practice, however, Weaver denies the very cultural principles he needs for his theoretical construct. Ideally, education should develop the critical faculties of dialectic and rhetoric in order to provide a liberal and humanistic education that develops the mind and orders the passions (IHC 49). Educators must be allowed to assert their understanding of truth "regardless of the political winds of doctrine at the moment" (LP 53-54); in fact, the expanding knowledge that education provides must be allowed even if it unsettles societal conventions (AF 7). Academic freedom allows education to be free of manipulation by the ideological hierarchy (LP 56; AF 11) and of political ensnarements (IHC 136; RE 616); it thereby can help students understand their society's current ideology, evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and maintain the former while improving the latter. This liberal and liberalizing education is countered by the educational system, informed by modernism, which is in place today. Modernism has devised an educational system that maintains its materialist principles; this system's methods are to emphasize empirical observations rather than abstractions, particulars rather than universals, induction rather than deduction. That is, education changes from truths of the intellect to facts of experience (IHC 7); it encourages "modern man" to believe in the preeminence of facts and information, and to believe that "an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge" (IHC 13). It assumes that the values of our capitalist society are acceptable, and it aims to prepare students to accept and, for some at least, to succeed in their commercial lives as producers, purveyors, and purchasers of material goods. 2 To achieve this goal it must keep students from seeing or feeling the loss of the transcendental issues of contemplation, aesthetic appreciation, and ethical action. Modernism in equalitarian democracy proposes universal education; but without a sense of what should be taught, the result is an elective system that produces specialization and vocationalism, not a carefully wrought liberal education that produces broad intellectual growth. The appeal for universal literacy is not enough. The question society needs to ask as it ponders its citizens' literacy is not what people can read but what they do read, and what they learn from their reading (IHC 14). Too often people are debauched by what they read, because they lack the cultural stability that tells them how to place their reading into a context and how to determine thereby what is valuable and what is not. The cure is a carefully designed educational system that provides for the "symmetrical growth of the individual, so that he is his own sufficient guardian" against the debaucheries that modernism encourages (LP 27). In theory these ideas do not seem too controversial. In sum, Weaver contends that the path to true knowledge assumes that speculative inquiry,

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not merely the investigation of experience, is necessary for understanding (IHC 13). Weaver is right that "no education is worthy of the name which fails to make the point that the world is best understood from a certain distance or that the most elementary understanding requires a degree of abstraction. To insist on less is to merge ourselves with the exterior reality or to capitulate to the endless induction of empiricism" (IHC 27). The question, especially in light of Weaver's preference for the antebellum South, is under what auspices the distance is to be gained and the abstractions made. To illustrate his answer, Weaver identifies John Dewey and the progressive education movement as the agents of modernism against which one should fight. It is Weaver's contention that the progressive education movement teaches "a concept of society not espoused by the people" (VO 114), and that its proponents are "openly proposing a theory of man and a theory of education wildly at variance with the traditional beliefs of the American people" (AF 11). Generally, it is "not designed for man as an immortal soul, nor is it designed to help him measure up to any ideal standard. The only goal which it professes to have in view is 'adjustment to life' " (LP 48). However, adjustment is not an end in itself, since "it would be nearer the truth to say that the great creative spirits of the past have been maladjusted to life in one or more important ways." Further, insofar as human life involves no transcendent spiritual considerations, life adjustment becomes for the progressive educationalists "nothing more than the adjustment of a worm to the surface it is crawling on" (LP 49—50). Specifically, Weaver is exercised by progressive education's proposal that schools teach the "strange cant" of "education for democratic living, . . . a rhetorical way of sneaking in the totalitarian concept" by identifying a way of life with a form of government (VO 131; see also RE 617). Progressive education errs also by implying that our political nature is more important than our contemplative, aesthetic, and cultural natures, that is, than the traditional focus of liberal education, which is not "compatible with the current concept of mass democracy" (VO 132). He provides a list of this movement's major tenets (VO 115-16), which can be shortened to a lack of faith in the existence of absolute knowledge, a belief in the goal of education as "the educationally illicit one of conditioning the young for political purposes," and an identification of the teacher as a facilitator rather than an authority (VO 132). To say that progressive education teaches concepts of human nature and society not espoused by the people seems to contradict his argument that society's members have in fact come to accept just such concepts, and that this acceptance is what makes the culture sick. It seems rather that Weaver's concepts of education are the ones not espoused by the people. Regardless, on general grounds Weaver is opposed to censorship of teachers

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or ideas, holding that reform must come not from governmental dictate but "with the symmetrical development of the individual, so that he is his own sufficient guardian" (LP 27). He comes close to suggesting censorship in cases "where physical and moral survival raise problems of a more immediate kind" (LP 37). And because we are in dangerous times and need the survival of our political and social systems in order to provide academic freedom, he does allow for the restriction of those practices of academic freedoms that are part of "an offensive campaign against the traditional foundations of our country" (AF 12-15). 3 Still, Weaver does advocate free speech. He argues that our "pluralistic society by its very nature tolerates propaganda of all kinds [because] . . . most issues, including some of vital relation to our welfare, are still in the realm of deliberative forensics [and] . . . there exists among our people enough good sense, education, and reflective intelligence to insure us that in this deliberative process we will come up with the right answer" (RR 82). His theoretical position also holds that teachers need academic freedom for the unpopular ideas and knowledge they may disseminate and for protection in the ensuing disagreements. Perhaps, like last century's stands for women's suffrage and against slavery and child labor, some ideas are "right" even when not immediately accepted, and our traditions of deliberative forensics and academic freedom allow these ideas to get the hearings they need. Of course, "no education [or idea] is innocent of an attitude toward the existing world" (VO 120), which is to say that all education and ideas are politicized: they are necessarily ideological, and they either necessarily support the status quo or they try to refine or overthrow it. The question, then, must consider in what way the campaign of progressive educationalists threatens our political and moral survival. One way is to say that education for democratic living imports a totalitarian concept into education and our lives, but this charge relies on Weaver's identification of these educators as part of a Communist vanguard intent on overthrowing the American way of life. Indeed, if knowledge is absolute and discernible by an expert, then democracy seems to be a suspect form of government as well as a suspect attitude to take toward students. However, if people lack the ability to perceive absolute knowledge and so must socially construct their positions—and in the previous chapter we showed that Weaver in fact agrees with this position—then education should be concerned with helping students to understand this and to help build and maintain adequate consensual versions of reality. Students need to develop the dialectical skills required for their intellectual development and social intercourse, and a true dialectic requires the democratic treatment of interlocutors. Since reaching consensus requires that participants be political equals and adept at democratic negotiation—which is to say, skilled in expressing and judging others' responses—education, especially

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an education in rhetoric, must be in part an education for democracy. (Chapter 5 explores the implications that education for democracy has for a rhetorical education.) F u r t h e r m o r e , Weaver contends that modernism's weakening of hierarchical structures has allowed progressive education to remove teachers from their place as people of superior knowledge, relegating them to moderators in democratic forums (IHC 50; VO 129). As Gregory Clark argues, students must serve apprenticeships before they are able to engage in the cultural conversation (69), and it seems inescapable that teachers must possess, and students must understand that they possess, knowledge that the students do not yet have. Teachers know more than their students, as regards both what and how to think, and to claim otherwise would lead to the selfevident absurdity that we can "choose our teachers as the ancient Greek democracies chose their magistrates, by lot" (LIS 194-95). If facilitation skills are the only requirements teachers must possess, then advanced d e grees in chemistry or philosophy or rhetoric are irrelevant to teachers. However, there is no necessary theoretical contradiction between the sentiments Weaver expresses here—that one group of people know the truth to the extent that they can transmit it to others—and his agreement with that position in the Phaedrus that perceives truth to leap up "like a flame" b e t w e e n people engaged in dialogue. It does appear, though, that W e a v e r agrees with the Platonic sentiment only insofar as the m e m b e r s of the dialogue are peers engaging in mutual investigation; perhaps he does not see students as peers, certainly not in their knowledge of his subject matter, probably not in their adherence to the life of the mind, and perhaps not even for purposes of a classroom dialectic. As will be explained in Chapter 5, Weaver seems to hold that teachers find truth through a dialectic practiced with themselves and their peers; they present the discovered truth to their students through an epideictic rhetoric, relying on their superior knowledge (logos), their authority as teachers (ethos), and their skills of presentation (pathos), to induce their students to listen and understand. However, belief in teachers' superior knowledge does not require this practice of what Paulo Freire calls the "banking concept" of education, in which students are passive receptacles waiting to be filled with the teachers' necessarily ideological version of the truth (57-59). Rather, teachers can act as the "midwife" Socrates saw himself to be in the Theaetetus: one who guides students on a path that will allow them to learn for themselves. Socrates speaks of the midwife as intellectually barren and of the knowledge students gain as coming from within themselves, but we take these observations to b e more complicated than they at first appear. Certainly Socrates knows much, including a sense of both what the students are likely to say and w h e r e they and he are likely to end up agreeing; and the knowledge that comes from within his students might best be thought of as their realization that what rises like a flame between their teacher and them-

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selves is valuable—more valuable than what they receive only from themselves or only from the teacher. Thus, it seems perverse to interpret Dewey's declaration that it is more important to make maps than to learn them as his privileging of activity over thinking (VO 126). It is much more reasonable to say that Dewey believes students should actively pursue knowledge—that is, make it in a dialectical exchange with others—rather than simply read the ahistorical "knowledge" that others have constructed in other contexts and for other audiences and purposes, and that is therefore not necessarily applicable to them. Weaver seems willfully to misread Dewey, just as he misreads progressive educators who, he charges, ought not to be allowed to teach because, in their subservience to the Moscow party line, they do not freely present truths they have discovered but rather misrepresent what they believe for partisan ends (AF 12).4 It is more reasonable to say that the professoriate has a duty to present knowledge even if it conflicts with tradition but does not have the right to use its position—with its attendant academic freedom—to move from the exposition of discovered knowledge to a persuasive attempt to see that knowledge introduced into society; the latter role is for those who accept the risks that come with supporting such unpleasantnesses. Yet, since all language use, including its

use in education, is "sermonic . . . [and] we have no sooner uttered words

than we have given impulse to other people to look at the world, or some small part of it, in our way" (LIS 224), it is difficult to differentiate between exposition and persuasion. Also important in Weaver's cultural theory is his belief that philosophical ideas are more important than material comfort. He opposes a culture of modernism that creates an urban, corporate environment and that employs technology. He desires in its place a culture of tradition, which emphasizes philosophy and ideas. Weaver believes that the driving force behind culture ought to be a concept of the Good, or of God; what drives modern culture, he contends, is economics—Marxism in the East and capitalism in the West—and of both he has a low regard. Weaver is concerned that we not emphasize economics as a cultural criterion, except as economics follows certain principles. In this regard, his observations on the modern business practices of American society are particularly interesting. He holds, for instance, that assembly line manufacturing dehumanizes and criminalizes workers because they no longer know what they are producing and so are unable to grasp the ethical implications of their tasks (IHC 64). His example is the atomic bomb project at Oak Ridge, and many other examples exist. Would people have more severe ethical problems, this position asks, if instead of producing minute and unconnected items that look like nothing in particular they worked from start to finish on nerve-gas bombs or other horrors of mass destruction? Further, business's commitment to this manufacturing process unsettles established ways of life and action by initiating endless innovations of technological "progress" (SE 17)—

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as regards both the means of production and the new products that must constantly be offered to consumers if the corporations are to grow. The products of finance capitalism, in the forms of stocks, bonds, and securities, make the owners of corporations analogous to assembly line workers in that they too have no say in the business of the corporation. Such ownership makes the corporations in effect anonymously owned, providing another threat to our "metaphysical right" to private property. The anonymity is in Weaver's opinion also a constant invitation to increased state direction in our lives because, as he says, "it requires but a slight step to transfer them to state control . . . and, if we continue the analysis further, we should discover that business develops a bureaucracy that can be quite easily merged with that of government" (IHC 133).5 Stockholders do not have an interest in the particular activities of the corporation—in the product it creates, in its treatment of its workers and the environment, in its attitude toward the law and the duties of good citizenship; they are concerned only with two very specific items: the stock's yearly dividend and its selling price. The emphasis on business harms the culture in another way. Referring to Donald Davidson's "A Mirror for Artists," Weaver argues that industrialism "prevents the conditions out of which true art emerges. It can create wealth; it can organize and distribute; but it destroys the one thing most needful for artistic creation: the attitude of leisure" (SE 19). He approves of Davidson's statements that the leisure afforded by industrialism is pure sloth, and that art becomes thereby merely entertainment, "purchased in boredom and enjoyed in utter passivity" (SE 20). If the late twentieth century is examined for proofs of the increasing control of business, its increasing merger with government, and the decreasing importance of "high" art, Weaver's concerns seem to be borne out. Weaver's fears of business's effects on our traditional culture are couched in his belief that businessmen are a threat, and if he is right about the links between business and government, he is right to worry about the power these people have. 6 He is quite blunt, saying, for instance, that "the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist . . . [which] explains the tendency of all organic societies to exclude the trader from positions of influence and prestige" (IHC 32). Because businessmen stand not on principle but rather on expediency and immediate profit, they ought not to be in the position of public leaders. Businessmen see knowledge as in the service of consumerism and appetite, and the state, if run by such people, ceases to concern itself with the development of human potential but only with the promotion of economic activity and the desire to consume. In one of his more loosely developed attacks, Weaver claims that the British Empire illustrates these problems. Asking himself how the empire could be built without noble principles, he responds by saying that "cynicism and indifference to principle may be exactly the qualities that make

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for a successful worldly career. Modern empire rests upon commerce, and it is an indisputable truth that the factors in commercial success are shiftiness and opportunism" (PEM 389). These characteristics, he claims, the British Empire's leaders showed in abundance. "There are always those with a negative understanding of the good, that is to say, with a perception of how the good attracts the masses of people, but without any impulsion towards it. These may well be the most evil members of society[.] [W]hile applying decorum to themselves, they bring the good into disrepute, they exhaust its power for meretricious ends, and so diminish the power of the ordinary man to distinguish between good and bad. Commercial men are usually of this group" (PEM 389-90). Weaver has been called the fons et origo of modern American political conservatism, and if one looks at his attacks on liberalism in its various forms, at his attacks on progressive education, or at any number of the topics he takes up during his career, this appellation seems well deserved. However, his stated concerns about technological progress and especially his statements on business certainly ought to give pause to those political and economic leaders who, in and during the Republican administrations since 1980, have claimed status as conservatives.7 The rapid increase in corporate mergers, the increasing influence of government in business and business in government, the push for ever more technology as the means to solve problems that technology has created in the pursuit of even more money, and the decreasing interest in the arts—except as they are occasionally attacked by proponents of the conservative Right: these events indicate that the conservatism Weaver espoused as the model for American society is, if anything, less likely to be put into practice than before the "conservative" Reagan revolution. 8 In place of the material comforts promised by the economically oriented government now in place, comforts that are not always forthcoming, not always comforting, and accompanied by the baggage of the discomfort of a bewildering and fragmented culture that seems to have no sustaining reason for living, Weaver proposes the comforts of clear principles. In discussing the loss of a clear sense of the important values and issues that a society should share, he claims that we have now "mere empirical communities, which are but people living together in one place, without friendship or common understanding, and without capacity, when the test comes, to pull together for survival. On the other side," Weaver continues, "is the metaphysical community, suffused with a common feeling about the world which enables all vocations to meet without embarrassment and to enjoy the strength that comes of common tendency. Our plea then must be to have back our metaphysical dream that we may save ourselves from the sins of sentimentality and brutality" (IHC 32-33; for an eloquent statement of his concern for the loss of a clear sense of principles, see ER 21314). He follows this passage by quoting, from William Butler Yeats's "The

62 The Politics of Rhetoric Second Coming," the lines, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity," and claims they are explained by the replacement of our metaphysical community with an empirical one. Apparently, we are to understand in these lines that "the best" are unwilling or unable to develop strong convictions in such a state of flux, while those who are less thoughtful and virtuous passionately embrace one or another of the faddish issues of the day. However, in the context of Weaver's discussion, the poetic lines are used to stress the passionate embracers, the "worst" of society, and for Weaver they are the relativists, the liberals. 9 Yeats, however, does not make this distinction, saying only, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." "The worst" for Yeats are simply those who in the confused world are passionate advocates of their position. In this construction, we have to count Yeats himself among the worst, given the passion he evinces for the position he presents in this poem as well as for the other passions for which he is generally known. And, of course, insofar as Weaver is a passionate advocate of the conservative values of traditional Western culture, we must count him among the "worst" as well. In any event, while Weaver often enough decries the excesses of the liberals, Yeats's poems would encourage him to decry equally the excesses of the Right; Weaver is unwilling to accept this encouragement, and consequently he harms his ethical appeal as a person willing to play fair with all aspects of the issue. We are unwilling, though, to call Weaver one of "the worst" of modern times. We would like to claim that Yeats is employing a bit of poetic excess to make his case; for our purposes here we would consider a change of emphasis in the poem by altering the end of the line, so that instead of "the worst" it indicates something less extreme—perhaps "the more." While we do not claim to be improving on Yeats's poetic craft, we do claim that" such an alteration more closely describes the modern state than does the line as written. To clarify: William Perry in his Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme argues that human beings cognitively develop from a position Perry calls dualism—a polarized position of good versus bad, right versus wrong, and no gray areas between—to a position he calls commitment in relativism—a position in which we examine competing responses and tentatively commit to one that under the particular circumstances seems most reasonable. Perry claims that the development is both intellectual and ethical: the realization that we ought to commit only tentatively to a position allows us, in fact encourages us, to see the other positions as potentially worthy. 10 It is fair to say that whereas "conviction" is qualitatively distinguished from "passionate intensity" by Yeats and Weaver, distinctions between the two are not easy to determine. What is conviction without passion and intensity? Cannot passionate intensity exist because of one's conviction? Would Weaver say that he has con-

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viction whereas Kenneth Burke, who is as liberal as Weaver is conservative, has only passionate intensity? Instructively, Burke does take a different stand on the sentiments expressed in Yeats's lines, although to our knowledge he doesn't address the poem. He agrees with Weaver that modern culture has lost the cultural unity that it had in earlier centuries (a position he develops at length in Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History), and he offers as an explanatory analogy the conditions during the rise of Christianity in Imperial Rome. It was a time of cultural mongrelism, when many distinct cultural integers had been brought into vital contact by the political unification of Rome. . . . There were many discordancies of evaluation, many conflicting schemes of spiritual order, leading to much the kind of imperfect overlaps we find in perspectives today. There was also a highly tolerant group of thinkers who took the very confluence of rival certainties as their point of departure, and were seeking to erect a philosophy of tentativeness precisely at the moment when a new authoritarian doctrine was beginning to gain power (Permanence and Change 159-60). This philosophy of tentativeness, it should be noted, has something in common with the psychological perspective of William Perry; furthermore, as is explained in Chapter 5, it has a great deal in common with a fully rhetorical perspective, even as Weaver describes it. Eor Burke and Perry, at least, to lack uncritical conviction is good, and they would be suspicious of such a comment as this: "The prospect of living again in a world of metaphysical certitude—what relief will this not bring to those made sea-sick by the truth-denying doctrines of the relativists!" (IHC 131). Perry points out that those who are cognitively developing, when confronted with complexities for which they do not feel prepared, may "retreat" into their previous stage of development; Perry, Burke, and those who hold to a critical rationalist position all urge that we not engage in what Burke calls a "hysterical retreat into belief," lest by locking ourselves into a single position we lose the flexibility, the tentativeness, that allows us to adjust our perspectives to account for the refinements we are able to make on our view of the transcendental realm. Once again, Weaver causes himself problems when he attempts to articulate the specifics of his cultural theory; there remain two important issues not yet addressed, perhaps the two issues besides cultural theory closest to Weaver's philosophical interests and certainly the two on which he is best educated to speak. First, he contends that literature serves an important function in the generation and maintenance of a stable culture, and he urges increased attention to it. A virtuous society will give place to literature and to the creators of literature. He also contends that rhetoric is the

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noblest activity that can be practiced by human beings as they work to attend to their literary artifacts and to the health of their culture, and he urges increased attention to it as well. Perhaps of all his useful ideas, those that bear on literature and rhetoric are the most important. As with his cultural theory, we find that his theoretical pronouncements in these areas offer a great deal while some of his applications are not so salutary. The following chapters take up both the theories and his applications in detail. NOTES 1. Mary Helen Washington states that Brent's life has been documented "as not only entirely authentic but 'representative' of the experience of many slave women" (xx). Washington provides bibliographies of numerous other slave narratives. 2. As both Chaim Perelman and Jacques Ellul state, education echoes the culture. Ellul states that education is "prepropaganda" that prepares people to act upon the information selected by the state and subtly promotes the fundamental beliefs in its society. Perelman makes connections among the propagandist, the educator, and the epideictic rhetorician (The New Rhetoric 52). 3. Elsewhere (PEM 403-4) Weaver offers a rationale for limiting free speech; this argument is addressed in Chapter 9. 4. Perhaps Dewey's liberal political stance, his embrace of science, and his signing of the Humanist Manifesto prejudiced Weaver toward anything this educator said. 5. From an economic perspective, fascism is corporationism. Centrally controlled big business can as easily be controlled by the federal government as by a corporate headquarters. A typical conservative position—and one to which Weaver ascribes in theory—is that small businesses and their tendency toward individualism and personal freedom should be encouraged. 6. Strictly economic interpretations of human nature—capitalist or communist—deny metaphysical and religious interpretations. If our purpose is to accumulate capital, to consume, or to communize, we cannot live life in the pursuit of the ideal.

7. President Eisenhower dismayed the military and big business in his "Fare-

well Address" by castigating "the military industrial complex," which tended away from traditional principles of a limited federal government and, therefore, threatened freedom. The policies of Reaganomics, which ignored his concerns, are a throwback to Coolidge, whose position was that "what is good for business is good for government." 8. Postman claims that President Reagan was not a conservative but a radical, and his reasons sound quite Weaverian: "I do not say he is against preserving tradition; I say only that this is not where his interests lie. You cannot have failed to notice that he is mostly concerned to preserve a free-market economy, to encourage the development of what is new, and to keep America technologically progressive. He is what may be called a free-market extremist. All of which is to say he is devoted to capitalism. A capitalist cannot afford the pleasures of conservatism, and of necessity regards tradition as an obstacle to be overcome" (105).

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9. Weaver's reading here seems self-contradictory. Relativists, by his definition, are those who lack convictions. 10. Perry's research was done in the 1950s at Harvard, when that institution accepted only males. While the model of development presented by Mary Belenky and her co-authors of Women's Ways of Knowing differs in some respect from Perry's, it would also endorse these comments.

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4 Literary Theory

INTRODUCTION Weaver's literary theory, like his broader philosophic outlook, has similarities to Plato's. Both say that the artist is "inspired,'' by which they mean that he is acting "out of his senses"—possessed by the gods or God, or whatever, but in any event acting beyond the limits of mere rationality. And both Plato and Weaver say that art not only delights its audience but also teaches and persuades. However, literature, as well as rhetoric, occupies a much broader, more useful, and more honored place in Weaver's world view than it does in Plato's. Weaver says that literature contributes something to the life of the mind—"feeling and motion"—that dialectic does not and cannot, thus linking literature with rhetoric. The emotions employed and generated by literature are good, and these works are creative and instructive gifts to society, "certain forms of cognition and expression which have a part in holding culture together" (VO 62). In Weaver's view, art is more realistic, the artist wiser, and effects the art produces on its audience much more constructive than in Plato's view. Art is realistic in the philosophical sense: it represents what we know intuitively to be the true nature of things, and it holds as real the values and beliefs by which we can understand and live our lives. In fact, art does not distort reality but helps us to define and constitute it. The artist, like the noble rhetorician, is interested in "truth plus its artful presentation," and if the poet sometimes seems as interested in presentation as in truth, nonetheless she or he has a much more profound insight into the nature of things than Plato would grant. Noble literature, again like noble rhetoric,

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teaches people to understand their culture and themselves, and helps them develop better versions of themselves. In this chapter we will take up these three aspects of literature—its status as cultural artifact, its creators, and its effects on audiences. However, before this material is presented two clarifications are in order. First, while Weaver's emphasis is on "fine" literature per se—poetry, prose, and drama— his argument supports the inclusion of all art and, ultimately, the artistic products of noble rhetoric. * In this chapter, then, the terms artist, poet, and author, and the terms art, poetry, and literature will be used interchangeably. In order to develop his views on literature, this chapter will also introduce Weaver's perception of the similarities between literature and rhetoric, emphasizing the literary side of the similarity and leaving the rhetorical side to the next chapter. Second, while this chapter focuses on Weaver's thoughts on the nature and function of literature, his published work develops no detailed theory or criticism of literature comparable in its subtlety and complexity with, say, that offered by Kenneth Burke in works he had published during Weaver's lifetime or, for that matter, with literary and rhetorical critics more traditional than Burke. Weaver does not, for instance, concern himself with analyzing and categorizing tropes or with counting sentence and paragraph lengths, nor is he overly interested in seeking the archetypes, symbols, mythic images, or "tyrannizing images" that give works of literature so much power. This last notion, however, comes closest to Weaver's theoretical interest, because it addresses his specific concerns regarding literature: its psychological, ethical, and cultural aspects. His primary interest in literature, and this chapter's emphasis, is not with its stylistic or aesthetic effects and certainly not with these effects in individual works, but in literature's ability to teach and persuade. In order to explain Weaver's position on these issues, we begin by offering a comparison to the position taken by Plato. PLATO ON THE NATURE OF ART Plato's opinions on the nature of art are interspersed throughout his dialogues. They amount to a rejection of most art, even when it is not designed purposefully to lead audiences astray. In Book 10 of The Republic he calls art an imitation of an imitation, by which he means that art imperfectly imitates the physical world, which itself imperfectly imitates the realm of ideal forms; as such, art cannot be taken as an accurate representation. A poem written in praise of a hero's horsemanship in battle, for instance, will misrepresent at the same time that it presents both the nature of horsemanship and the strategies of warfare. Plato's complaint, of course, is not the error of a naive realist who fears that some day he may mistake a picture of a horse or, worse yet, a written description of one for a physical horse and thereby have an unsatisfactory

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ride. Like the General Semanticists of the twentieth century, Plato knows that a word is not the thing we use it to represent, although he is concerned with rectifying the word with its true meaning, its essence. What comes clear in The Republic is that he is concerned with the degree to which the artistic imitation agrees with his perception of the thing, and whether the artistic rendering will persuade members of the audience toward culturally unethical and socially unacceptable actions. As Socrates reminds Glaucon in The Republic, poets may utter blasphemy. Further, even if they accurately express the prevailing social position on an issue—no small feat in itself—that prevailing position may be wrong from a realistic point of view. That is, what the poet says is true is not always so, since what people say is true is not always so. By his explicit remarks on poetry as well as by his comments about those who read poetry dramatically, Plato shows disdain for the belief that it is a means for telling the truth. Further, by his references to the stylistic method of appeal that poetry shares with sophistic rhetoric, Plato broaches his disapproval of literature's use of these emotional appeals to induce persuasion. Plato refers to the poet as divinely inspired, so it might seem that the poet thereby should be honored and listened to, unable to fall into error. However, even while describing the poet as divinely inspired, Plato says also, in the Ion and the Phaedrus, that he is mad, out of his senses. Should a poet appear at the gates of the republic, Socrates and Glaucon agree, they would "fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being," but they would also refuse him admittance to the city (Book 3, 398A). While this refusal might seem from a modern perspective another instance of blasphemy, the Greeks perceived the gods not as creators of the cosmos but only as exalted beings living in it, subject to errors and passions themselves, and so perhaps flawed in their inspirations to mortals. For modern purposes, this distinction proves to be useful in explaining why in our day poets and other "inspired" voices seem to differ in their messages even while their representations are so powerful for their audiences. Of course another explanation, and one to which we will return, is the Platonic belief, adhered to by Weaver, that we cannot accurately present absolute truths in human language.2 One more way of coming to grips with Plato's charges against poets is to say that he condemns inspired discourse because it is not the product of Socratic dialectic. If poetry has truth value yet does not have dialectically developed support, its truth is suspect, for in Plato's cosmology the intellect is privileged and should be the guide toward truth and right action. That which does not rely on the intellect or, worse, which ignores it, is prone to error. But even if the messenger of the gods or the madman were accurate and accurately understood, and even if upon dialectical investigation poetic truths were seen to be reasonable, still the method of presentation "feeds the waters of the emotions" of the audience. Having to appeal to the passions

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in order to gain an audience's adherence is a weakness both of speaker and of audience (a point with which Aristotle, at the beginning of Book 3 of The Rhetoric, agrees); the intellect itself and the force of its logical argument should suffice. Furthermore, employing the irrational emotions to elicit acceptance weakens the mind's control over them. In terms of Plato's analogy in the Phaedrus, it strengthens the black horse at the expense of the white horse and, ultimately, of the charioteer. Unlike Aristotle's contention that art provides a cathartic for drawing off emotional weakness and unbalance, Plato contends that art increases these problems; it seduces an audience through its emotional appeal, making them feel and even act in ways they otherwise would not if they were in control of their senses, and infecting them with increasing susceptibility toward this illogical method of persuasion. This observation brings us to Plato's second serious charge against literature and connects the two, even as it provides a bridge to Weaver's counterstatement. When a poet or an audience says that something adheres to "the way men say things are," the nature of ideological orientations invites the conclusion that such is the way things ought to be. Plato knows that an effective presentation can induce people to accept the accuracy of its perspective, and that "what is" is oftentimes accepted as "what ought to be." Art has formidable propagandistic potential, and whether it is used in the societal propaganda to which education is sometimes put, or employed in the market place in the form of advertising or television programming, or bodied forth in more traditional forms of art, it can affect social and political attitudes and actions. In fact, Oscar Wilde's observation that life imitates art is quite accurate when literature is thought of as powerful rhetoric, able to persuade thoroughly. In The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne Booth argues that if literature can profit us, there is no escaping the fact that it can also harm us. Further, if artists can powerfully affect their audiences even when sometimes they do not know exactly what they are saying or why they are saying it, they will at times, even though they may not wish to do so, affect audiences in socially harmful ways. A work of literature may induce a judge to weep for a criminal or a people for a regicide. The veracity of the poetic truths cannot be demonstrated, and, contends Plato, the audiences become increasingly susceptible to both the message and the method of delivering that message. Everyone ultimately suffers, with the potential for a criminal to be freed and even for a judge to fall into similar criminal actions. For Plato, the drawbacks of free artistic speech outweigh the benefits, and while he is willing to let into his ideal republic poetry written in praise of heroes and the gods by proven patriotic citizens in the employ of the state, still he limits literature's use to the explicit goals of the state. He goes so far as to make this statement at the end of The Republic: "At all events we are well aware that poetry being such as we have described is not to be re-

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garded seriously as attaining to the truth; and he who listens to her . . . should be on his guard against her seductions" (608A). WEAVERS CONCEPTION OF LITERATURE

While Weaver has many affinities with Plato, there is a good deal that he does not accept. Weaver espouses an ethical and psychological realism for the nature of art's imitation, ethical because it is grounded in the deeply held cultural values and symbols that validate "what ought to be," and psychological because it accepts as the repository for these values and symbols the collective and individual human mind. He espouses the status of inspired truth for poetry, although the source of inspiration is not unambiguously divine, and he even places the truths of literature exclusive of and above those that dialectic can disclose. And he espouses for literature an important educative function in the culture. In his statements on the existence of cultural values and symbols in a transcendent realm, he suspects that our participation in a "communal mind" itself supports the doctrine of "knowledge by recollection taught by Plato" (IHC 157), the knowledge that there exists a God who creates all and legislates all. Of course, in a Judeo-Christian culture, Plato's doctrine of divine inspiration requires that the poet gain the rank of prophet and requires that the audience accept the revelation without question or reservation. However, Weaver does not want to sink into the quagmire of speculating about which poets are divinely inspired and which mistaken or duplicitous. Instead, he affirms only that truths partake of universal patterns within human minds and are transcendent only in this way. His distinction is the same one Burke makes between Plato and Kant when Burke says of Plato, "We need but take his universals out of heaven and situate them in the human mind (a process begun by Kant), making them not metaphysical but psychological" (Counter-Statement 48). Weaver's poets have access to these universal psychological truths, as we all do according to this view; their artistry is in the fullness with which they see and depict these truths and in their ability to prophesy persuasively about the effects of confrontations with these truths. Weaver thereby shifts the source of the poet's power from the supernatural to the natural, and his position on the origins of this power find support in psychological and scientific theories. Artistic truths, like psychobiologists' "biogrammatical triggers" and Carl Jung's archetypes of the collective unconscious, are innate and psychological. Jung says that archetypes are "universal images that have existed since the remotest times"; they are the stuff that informs myths and are "first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul" ("Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" 206-7). Of the importance of cultural myths, Weaver says that they are "the great symbolic structure which hold together the

72 The Politics of Rhetori imagination of a people and provide bases of harmonious thought and action" (VO 34). The archetypes that embody the myths reside in the depths of the collective unconscious, and poetry is able to drag from these depths, blurred and obscured though they are, glimpses of archetypes. Certain of these archetypal images of a collective unconscious are collected in the "metaphysical dream" of the culture. Tyrannizing images, analogous to archetypal images, are compelling embodiments of shared beliefs and attitudes. Like archetypes and the collective unconscious, tyrannizing images and the metaphysical dream are not dialectically secured, and while their truth can only be apprehended intuitively they are quite compelling. Unlike Jung's archetypes, however, a great deal of their force is dependent on culture; their power lasts as long as the culture does and when the culture's unity is weakened, so must be the power of that which relies on common agreement. The force of a tyrannizing image comes in part from its linkage with the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and in part from its participation in the subconscious collectivity of the cultural members in their metaphysical dream. And again analogous to archetypes, they are strongly deterministic and fundamentally nonrational. Thus, changes in political and social attitudes affect our access to a tyrannizing image. Burke mentions how an adult may chop down a tree for the utilitarian purpose of firewood, yet lurking just below conscious awareness feel a vague sense of symbolic parricide. "It is possible," he continues, "that much of the anguish affecting poets in the modern world is due to the many symbolic outrages which a purely utilitarian philosophy of action requires us to commit." He goes on to suggest that primitive cultures may have understood the offenses better and devised propitiatory rituals of expiation (Permanence and Change 71-72). Weaver's position is much the same: The "overriding mythos, . . . [the] constructive symbol which gave the artist a starting point and a resolution of his values" (LP 28-29), has been harmed enormously in the last century or two by modernism; since the communal assumptions have been weakening, it is not surprising that literature has become less persuasive and so is held in increasingly less regard by modern society. In many ways the effects on literature of the scientistic assumptions of modernism are like those on rhetoric, and the loss of literature's status as a powerful force for cultural cohesion is a loss to society. Weaver says that "man necessarily uses both the poetical and the logical resources of speech" (VO 165). Literature's weakening, like the weakening of rhetoric, has resulted from society's emphasis on the rational, empirical, logical patterns of thought to the neglect of its irrational, intuitive, and emotional feelings and motions. Like his attitude toward rhetoric, Weaver's attitude toward literature includes a positive depiction of its nonrational basis. The emotions are not bad but necessary to give direction and elan to the intellectual processes, and the means by which literature effects emotional responses are similar to the means employed by rhetoric.

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Of course, poets remain subject to the charge that they are not "inspired," that what they say is not a prophecy culled through some special ability but only exaggeration or caricature. (See ER 19-20, and LIS 21720, for discussions of this charge as it is leveled against rhetorical inspiration.) Since an awareness of archetypes is available to all people—indeed, must be available to give them their status as "collective"—poets differ from the rest of the society in that they see more deeply into the unconscious realm and respond to cues more subtly and fully than do others. This ability comes because the poet "communes with the mind of the superperson," with the communal mind, an ability that derives in part from the poet's facility with language. Weaver continues, "It is a means of access to the complex reality . . . which gives him his ability to see potencies in circumstances" (IHC 162). This process is similar to that outlined by T. S. Eliot in "The Metaphysical Poets," where he observes that the poet's mind "is constantly amalgamating disparate experience . . . always forming new wholes" from the chaotic and fragmentary experiences of life (Selected Essays 247). The poet whose amalgamations reflect deeply felt beliefs of the audience is "inspired," eloquent. It is useful here to return for a moment to the connection between madness and poetry in order to point out that madness can be construed as the process of inspiration through which poets produce their work and by which they delve into the cultural images and body forth eloquent representations. But madness can also be positioned in the audience. Burke notes in Counter-Statement that it is not the artist who dreams but rather the audience: the audience is induced to act "irrationally," to accept without dialectical support certain truths contained in a work of art, whereas the artist oversees the conditions that determine this dream (36). A similar point is made by Gorgias in his Encomium, when he tries to exonerate Helen by saying that language has the power of witchcraft, or magic, that it operates on the mind like drugs on the body to make people act against their wills. The rhetor is an enchanter of souls and so, presumably, the audience's madness is the product of enchantment (35 [10]). Even so, the notion of the audience's madness seems at least partially a misnomer. People suspect eloquence when they are moved by a work of literature. But as more people are moved—over time and over societal differences—and especially as they remain moved after critical reflection, it is easier to award the name of poet to the creator of the literary work and easier to see an audience who is moved by a work to be not mad but sensitive and acculturated. As a result of the poet's ability to induce this response, he is called by Weaver, referring to Shelley's famous dictum, the unacknowledged legislator of mankind, a strong statement of the truth value of poetic discourse and a direct contradiction of Plato's perspective (IHC 162). It is this legislative ability that Weaver has in mind when he says that "art is a form of cognition of reality; one of its functions is thus epistemic" (LP 36). It is not, or at least need not be, merely an imitation of an indi-

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vidual's perspective. However, it is not accurate to say that by "epistemic" Weaver means that art creates reality; rather, he continues, "the consensus speaks to the artist, but it does not tell him exactly what he must do. . . . It rather says, Tell the story, but tell it in a new way' " (LP 36). The epistemic nature is not an ability to create reality but an ability to create a way of understanding and seeing reality that did not previously exist; it is still a realistic universe, a reality already shared by the audience. If the literary work's assumptions are based in the collective unconscious, it can present a perspective that is persuasive as proverbial advice for one's life. The artist presents a perspectival "is" with such archetypal support that it stands for many as a cultural "ought." Thus, in a discussion of "the world of our best Southern writing," Weaver says, "It is a world of place and time, but it is also a world which includes the mystery of the timeless. It is a place in which the transcendental is apprehended in the actual, and the actual is never without some link to the transcendental" (SE 57). In Weaver's view, the artist does even more. Our interdependency not only makes communication possible but also makes cooperation critical. All members of a community are linked by common assumptions that they must understand in order to communicate well, and literature helps to maintain cooperation by clearly and forcefully presenting our common ground, our areas of interdependency. Beyond tapping the collective unconscious and presenting reality to audiences, the poet helps develop and then maintain the metaphysical dream around which a culture is organized. What is tapped from the collective unconscious, then, are those elements that exist with the culture's metaphysical dream, which means that any healthy culture will have a metaphysical dream with strong affinities to the collective unconscious of the race. Further, literature is "the form in which an intellectual culture stores the ideas from which a society derives its rhetoric of cohesion and impulsion," that is to say, the storehouse of the metaphysical dream (VO 152). In fact, the culture need not be particularly "intellectual," if one wants to consider such things as creation myths and religious rituals of primitive tribes to be elements in the cultural storehouse. Literature has a cultural mission to symbolize reality as reflected in our attitudes and as expressive of a consensus (LP 21). To find acceptance, a work of literature depends upon shared assumptions of the culture about important issues; it then builds on and maintains these agreements. The assumptions may not be apparent to the audience; as Weaver notes, the artist may be presenting an emerging consensus and so may appear to have a skewed perspective. The artist might well be ahead of his or her time in identifying the movement of the culture, and societal members need the work of art to help the nascent movement begin to coalesce. It is probably accurate to say that the artist applies the cultural values to new situations and so provides what will become the culture's accepted way of dealing with the situation. We think, for instance, of John Steinbeck's treatment of

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migrant workers in The Grapes of Wrath, of Kate Chopin's treatment of women in The Awakening, even, perhaps, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's treatm e n t of scientists in "The Birthmark" and "Rappacini's D a u g h t e r . " F u r t h e r m o r e , a work of literature can serve us in our daily lives. As Burke contends in an argument much like Weaver's, although more developed, works of art are "proverbs writ large." They strategically name a common h u m a n situation and present an attitude toward it. Artists size up the situation, naming its structure and outstanding ingredients in a way that contains an attitude toward them (Philosophy of Literary Form 1). As the situations are common to their audiences the names will be of "sociological" interest to others—entirely in addition to the aesthetic interest (Philosophy of Literary Form 296-300). Sociologists may consider the value of a work in "naming" a situation according to how it may work sociologically in real life. For example, the sociological critic might look at how Sophocles, Shakespeare, Shirley Jackson, Anthony Burgess, and Henry Thoreau develop strategies for dealing with the question of civil disobedience in Antigone, Coriolanus, "The Lottery," A Clockwork Orange, and Walden, in an attempt to figure out an appropriate strategy in a similar, real-world predicament. Thus, Weaver suggests that "there is more social psychology in Hamlet than in a dozen volumes on the theory of the subject" (ER 204). W h e t h e r we read Sinclair Lewis or Shakespeare or some other author, "it is enlightening to know that some men are like Babbitt and others like Hamlet, or that we all have our Babbitt and Hamlet phases" (ER 205). It is important h e r e to distinguish between literature in the narrow sense of propaganda and in the broader sense of guidelines for living in one's community. T. S. Eliot makes a similar point in his analysis of the different kinds of religious literature, claiming for the first two narrow moral purposes we might call propagandistic and only for the third the kind of ethical power Weaver claims (Selected Essays 344—46). As Weaver notes: "We may freely admit that it is not the prime purpose of literature and of art in general to edify; still, no art can avoid providing materials which will b e used for instruction. As a great philosopher of the aesthetic has pointed out: we cannot conceptualize unless we have data in the form of images, and it is the exercise of the aesthetic faculty which provides these images. The artist provides the basic content of our knowledge through his faithful seeing and truthful expression" (SE 72-73). W e take W e a v e r s restrictions on the aesthetic realm to b e strategic, as h e is concerned in the essay from which this quotation is drawn with a comparison b e t w e e n southern and

other literature. In Visions of Order, on the other hand, he allows that

when literature is not controlled by the ethical faculty, w h e n a culture is satisfied only with the formal excellencies of its literature, the result can b e disastrous for the culture's health (84-87). As discussed in the second chapter, the aesthetic realm, if it is to provide health and happiness, must

76 The Politics of Rhetoric be controlled by the ethical faculty that is itself ultimately controlled by the religious faculty. This is to say, in Weaver's psychology, good literature must represent the metaphysical dream of the culture; these reflections give to a people the images worth conceptualizing about. Thus, when Weaver says that works of literature such as The Canterbury Tales "were composed not to further any specific moral purpose, but to deepen our vision of what is, to help us to penetrate to the structure of reality and potentiality" (VO 90), he is arguing that literature does not serve some specific, narrow moral interest. In helping us understand societal views of reality, it does help us understand our culture's ethical strictures in their broadest articulation. It relates "the events of history to a pure or noble metaphysical dream, which [all people] have as a protecting arch over their system of values" (IHC 165). Thus, by participating in the establishment and maintenance of the metaphysical dream, literature is certainly implicated in ethical matters. In sum, Weaver, like Plato, believes that there is a body of values and beliefs that exists beyond any one individual's full perception of it, and outside of the purely intellectual realm. Also like Plato, Weaver accepts that artistic representations of these archetypes are possible, are subject to error, and may powerfully affect the conduct of our lives. So, how does the artist succeed in an accurate and powerful presentation? The answer, says Weaver, is that the artist adds what dialectic alone cannot, and without which there is no life; the artist adds feeling and motion. However, because of the effects of modernism, literature is less able to produce these additions. "True" art cannot flourish unless we believe that life presents us with momentous issues; unfortunately, the modern age has no clear "overriding mythos" to give the artist a starting point and a resolution of values. Belief is fragmented (LP 30). Not only the weakness of art but also its wholesale revolt in modern times can be explained by this loss of cultural coherence, in that the fragmentation of the culture's overriding mythos leaves artists with two choices: to symbolize traditional values in traditional forms and be quaint, or to revitalize the tradition, beginning with an audience who is aware of what has happened. 3 An artist who chooses the second option and attempts to revive the cultural mythos must address the audience through "offensive warfare against the complacent and stereotypical" (LP 31). The poet uses revolutionary means to move toward a more unified and full world view, avoiding stock devices and patterns, using rather unexpected combinations and juxtapositions as means to surprise and shock readers into realizing the reality aesthetically to be intuited beyond sentimental and vulgar encrustations of contemporary society. T. S. Eliot's oeuvre is a good example of the "offensive warfare . . . working to restore the tradition." His revolutionary techniques are not meant to present a picture of fragmentation or anarchy but rather "something like the

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consensus which underlay the mythic structure of Western culture" (LP 28-35). LITERATURE, TRAGEDY, AND MODERNISM

The consensus, as it is played out in literary works, requires the ability to write and understand tragedy. "Tragedy presents a universe still unknowable when it depicts man as incapable of learning enough in time to insure his happiness" (VO 146). Tragedy, in Weaver's definition, is about a being who potentially is, and actually should be, discerning and free, but who gets entangled in something which "conditions" him to the extent of obscuring his discernment and ending his freedom. The tragic struggle itself is between this spiritual and unconditioned man and the forces that conspire against that conditionless state. . . . The tragic flaw is always this susceptibility to losing one's freedom of choice where right action is necessary. Our response to the tragic depends upon a belief that some men become in this sense conditioned and others do not (VO 148). Instead of the culture's traditional view of human nature, that we are flawed agents who need education and restraint (SE 236), modernism provides us with a somewhat self-contradicting vision that denies our capacity to choose consciously but incorrectly. It is of no small importance to Weaver that a large contributor to this confusion is the loss of religiousness in culture, a religiousness that reinforces our flawed natures and teaches the right choices to make in life. Tragedy, for Weaver, reinforces the lessons of religion. It teaches us that we can choose, and that we do not always choose correctly: "Perhaps there is nothing in the world as truly educative as tragedy. Tragedy is a kind of ultimate. When you have known it, you've known the worst, and probably also you have had a glimpse of the mystery of things. And if this is so, we may infer that there is nothing which educates or matures a man or a people in the way that the experience of tragedy does. Its lessons, though usually indescribable, are poignant and long remembered" (SE 218). Until we admit again of our flawed nature, Weaver contends, we will be unable to appreciate and be guided by tragic works of literature. We believe, however, that it is more accurate to say that the theory of modernism makes theoretically impossible the existence of tragedy. Insofar as people give up their freedom of choice they give up the possibility of tragic action—or any purposive action at all.4 However, those who do not accept the conditions that derive from modernism (no matter whether they profess belief in its theory) will not have this limitation. We wish to explore the implications of Weaver's position on tragedy, especially his contention

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that it, and religion, are crucial to the maintenance of the kind of culture h e sees as most worth having. In Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards says: "Tragedy is only possible to a mind which is for the moment agnostic or Manichean. The least touch of any theology which has a compensating heaven to offer the tragic hero is fatal" (246). This book was published in 1925, and although Richards was both a literary and rhetorical theorist of some note during Weaver's professional career, there seems to be no consideration by Weaver of this restriction on religion's place in tragedy, but in fact, just the opposite. Yet Richards's position has merit. If a person knows that his or h e r actions are wrong and will result in eternal perdition, we would not have tragedy. Iago, after all, is not a tragic figure. And if a person has no sense that his or her actions are wrong, punishment would produce not tragedy but, as Aristotle says, outrage or pathos. Sophocles tells us, for instance, that Oedipus' horrific fate was foreordained by the gods before his birth; some would say, thereby, that he should be considered a pathetic rather than a tragic figure. F u r t h e r m o r e , we have a problem with Weaver's contention that tragedy is possible only in a society in which values and mores are agreed upon, w h e r e there is ethical and religious uniformity, rather than where there is conflict. Rather, great tragedies are written specifically at those cultural moments when people question established guidelines. 5 The pre-Socratics had thrown into question the Greek establishment just before and during the time of the great tragedians of the ancient world, and the Renaissance and the discovery of the New World had done the same just before the Elizabethan era. As Burke states: Macbeth "stands at the turning point between the feudal attitude toward ambition, as punishable pride, and the commercial attitude toward ambition, as the essence of vocation. Shake speare heralds the new, while fearing it in terms of the old" (Attitudes toward History 24). H e goes on to say that Goethe both welcomed and feared his Faust, and that both playwrights illustrate " 'tragic ambiguity,' whereby a growing trend is at once recommended and punished"; the trend is given expression, but in "forbidding connotations of criminality" (29). Nor does it seem quite accurate to say that tragedy teaches right from wrong, or that it teaches what happens when we choose the wrong thing. Consider Sophocles' Antigone. The ruler of Thebes, Creon, is confronted with a conflict; in his mind, he must either let Antigone bury her brother and thereby risk the dissolution of the shaky social stability he has so painstakingly held together, or he must punish her for transgressing his law. H e chooses to execute his duties as a ruler and so executes her; Antigone dies, as do his son and his wife, but society remains intact. H e is devastated by the death of his family but has carried out his duty as the ruler of Thebes. It is not easy to decide—indeed, Creon is not sure himself—if he has done right or wrong, and therefore it is not easy to say what lesson we are to

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learn from the drama except that, as humans, we are going to b e faced with monumental choices, the answers to which we can neither guess nor assume we will be able to answer correctly. Weaver might say that the arrogant individualism of Antigone must be punished and the social structure of Thebes maintained; then again, he might say that the society ought not to stand if the only way to do so is to renege on the duties humans owe to the gods; society is not worth preserving, may in fact b e too "progressive" to warrant preserving, if Creon goes against the express law of the gods to bury one's relatives. T. S. Eliot, to whom Weaver refers as an artist who illustrates how to recover our traditional culture and values, seems himself quite capable of tragedy—at least in his early career when h e was not expressly a religious believer. For instance, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem certainly modernist in form as well as in the issues addressed, is described by Weaver as "an extraordinary intuition of the frustration, lack of direction, and helplessness which can be felt by a modern man at the height of our materially flourishing civilization" (LP 33). That much alone makes the poem tragic, since the titular character is aware of his condition and aware that he has brought it upon himself. In the first two-thirds of this poem Prufrock is debating whether he will ask his overwhelming question, whether he will act on his desires; but after he frightens himself with a vision of the "eternal F o o t m a n , " after h e frightens himself with the possibility that his question will not b e well received, his monologue changes to the past tense. His story is the story of a being who should be discerning and free but who entangles himself in conditions that end his freedom; the great tragedy of Prufrock is that h e has not lost his discernment and is aware that his loss of options is his own doing. After Eliot's conversion, however, it is less clear that he is able to write tragedy; it seems, as Richards contends, that the existence of a transcendental afterlife denies it. A good indication of Eliot's change is Murder in the Cathedral: the saint dies, to be sure, but he has escaped the temptations visited upon him and will, we assume, be with his creator in eternity. If we feel pathos rather than tragedy over the problems of Oedipus, we feel outrage rather than tragedy over the m u r d e r of the saint. O u r concern with Weaver's views on tragedy extends to his comments about American literature. H e sees it as incapable of tragedy and contends that the loss is the result of two systematic distortions in our literature as regards our traditional view of human nature. One distortion is naturalism, which posits a universe in which the transcendent realm does not exist and in which we are merely creatures of circumstance. The other distortion is transcendentalism, which posits that we are by nature good, and which, in H e n r y James, Sr.'s opinion, does not recognize the existence of evil. In Weaver's mind, both literary schools remove responsibility for evil and so remove the possibility of tragedy, the former because we are helpless vie-

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tims unable to choose and the latter because there is no evil that could tempt us to choose it (SE 51-54). These two distortions come from two differing emphases of modernism, both of which derive from materialism and produce two radically different views of human nature. The scientific emphasis holds that, with the denial of the transcendent realm, we are merely material beings who by logical necessity must be creatures of circumstance. This emphasis allows for literary naturalism. The social emphasis derives from benefits science has brought and holds that we are as gods, able to know everything and have everything; this latter emphasis might be described as materialism run amok, in that scientific materialism provides the reason for believing we can know all and our materialist emphasis on capitalism provides the reason for believing that we can have everything. This emphasis allows for literary transcendentalism. However, it seems to us that neither transcendentalism nor naturalism in practice denies the possibility of tragedy being written or understood. As regards transcendentalism's loss of tragic possibility, Stephen E. Wicher disagrees with Weaver, at least as regards the form of transcendentalism presented by Emerson. In an article published six years before Weaver's essay just cited, Wicher argues that Emerson did exhibit a "tragic sense." He contrasts Emerson with Benjamin Franklin, whose "free and easy assurance" about life and himself is found to be lacking in the New England Transcendentalist. Wicher sees the Emersonian tragedy as a "tragedy of incapacity . . . between a vision that claims all power now, and an experience that finds none. . . . Only as we sense this tension of faith and experience in him can we catch the quality of his affirmation. He had to ascribe more reality to his brief moments of 'religious sentiment' than to the rest of life, or he could not live" (43). It is also worthwhile to note, pace Richards's observations, that Emerson had a strong strain of Manichean belief. We might also consider the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, who are often grouped with the Transcendentalists and who, with Emerson, were skeptical about traditional Christianity. As Weaver suggests in his brief notes on Hawthorne, this writer "was haunted by knowledge of a 'bosom serpent.' This serpent was egotism" (HH 719). For example, in Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand," "Rappacini's Daughter," and "The Birthmark," and in Melville's Moby Dick, characters are tragic because, in part at least, they conceive of themselves as gods. If, as Weaver contends, one emphasis of modernism would have us believe we are gods, the ground is fertile for tragedy. We cannot of course know and have everything, and to think that we can is hubris, the tragic flaw of pride. When we do not understand what we need to understand, when we do not get what we want—and sooner or later these eventualities happen to all—we thereby experience tragedy. Indeed, in "The Spoiled Child Psychology" (IHC 113-

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28), Weaver makes this very point—although for reasons we will mention shortly, he does not term modern people's experience as tragedy. Although the great Romantic writers of the transcendental movement seem perfectly capable of producing tragedy, Weaver's point is a good one if we consider the "hysterical optimism" not of the best Romantic writers but of popular romancers: If evil does not exist or is so ineffectual that protagonists easily overcome it and choose only the good, then tragedy does disappear. Popular romances, of course, while popular, are not often mistaken for real life or for the best that is thought and said. The practitioners of literary naturalism hardly suggest a world in which hysterical optimism grips modern humanity. Further, Weaver is correct to point out that the naturalists' theoretical pronouncements do deny the possibility of tragedy. Naturalism is "a heresy from the world of scientific materialism" (SE 54), a world in which, as described in the second chapter, human beings are creatures of circumstance. He cites the great American literary naturalist Theodore Dreiser's theory and claims that in the universe Dreiser describes, "neither intellect nor moral will has any efficacy" (SE 54). In such a world tragedy could not exist because free action does not exist. However, we are confronted again with a theory of the universe and human nature, and, as Weaver continues, "Dreiser the novelist and Dreiser the philosopher go marching off in opposite directions . . . [since] there cannot be a story about a man who has no moral choice; there can only be a chronicle, and between the two lies a great gulf" (SE 54-55). It is a commonplace among literary critics that the novels of the great American literary naturalists—such as Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris—are at best ambiguous about such a world and can be read more profitably, and perhaps more fairly, as something quite different, even as tragedies. If characters are unable to choose at all because they are helpless victims of circumstances they can neither understand nor control, then they cannot be tragic figures. However, George Hurstwood of Dreiser's Sister Carrie cannot be said to be without free will; rather, in terms of Weaver's description of tragedy we have cited above, Hurstwood is discerning and free but gets entangled in his desire for Carrie and a new life and so takes money from his employer's safe. The tragic struggle, in at least one reading of the novel, is between the spiritual and unconditioned Hurstwood before he meets Carrie and the forces conspiring against his conditionless state. He loses very clearly his freedom of choice when the safe door swings shut and thereby loses the chance for right action, but the loss is of his own making. Tragedy is a powerful means for recommending a cause, an action, a way of life, since it shows a person willing to die for his or her beliefs (Burke, Permanence and Change 196). It is, thereby, a useful form of literature, one that should exist in the best society, although Weaver would not want

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it available to those who wish to promote the wrong ideas. It occurs to us, therefore, that possibly Weaver's statements concerning tragedy have hierarchic intimations. That is, Aristotle and many literary theorists and critics who followed him perceive the tragic mode of literature as the most refined, as the "goddess of poetry." If Weaver believes in this positioning, he might on some conscious or subconscious level wish to claim that good cultures have the capacity to write and understand tragedies whereas flawed cultures do not, and then fit his analysis of literary works to his desire. In Attitudes toward History Burke says: "Call a man a villain, and you have the choice of either attacking or cringing. Call him mistaken, and you invite yourself to attempt setting him right. Contemporary exasperations make us prefer the tragic (sometimes melodramatic) names of Villain' and 'hero' to the comic names of 'tricked' and 'intelligent' " (4-5). Weaver was exasperated by contemporary life, and his privileging of the tragic could well be a means by which he established the dominance of his ideal over the modernism all around him—a modernism that produced not tragic figures but only spoiled children. 6 These observations suggest that, despite the theoretical pronouncements of modernism, people are nonetheless unable to maintain their "hysterical optimism" and, sooner or later, must fall. It may be harder to accept the fall, let alone learn from it, when we also have to learn the lesson that we are limited beings, but this adds to the power of tragedy rather than lessens it. There is, however, one last point to be addressed concerning Weaver's concept of tragedy. He says that for a literary work to capture and then present effectively a representative human event, the author and the audience must have shared assumptions and values that allow the audience to make sense of the work and have the subsequent emotional response. We have contended that the modern author and audience do share a great deal—including the theory of modernism and the experiential awareness of its limitations. However, there remain the elements of fragmentation caused by modernism, occupational specialization, and alienation from the immediate lives and interests of our fellows. These do cause problems. However, it does not take great effort for the fragmented audience to understand something of a literary work's perspective. Further, a literary work is able to appeal to members of its audience in ways that transcend their various specializations and other differences. Besides the events presented in the plot, art's power comes also from the formal and stylistic excellences that help to embody the images but that are enticing in themselves. The former emphasis Burke calls "emotional form" and the latter "technical form"; we respond to the latter, he says, because of our "racial appetites" that appreciate the sort of closure—an arousing and fulfilling of desire—provided by form, regardless of the content that the emotional form offers to us (CounterStatement 41-45). Weaver has not chosen to write much about the strategies of stylistic

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appeal, his lengthiest treatment being in his textbook on writing, and almost nothing explicitly addressing specifically literary rather than broadly rhetorical matters. Instead of a discussion of the strategies of presentation and appeal, he is more interested in their effects, particularly as regards what can be called the "charismatic effects" of literature.

CHARISMA AS AN ARTISTIC EFFECT

In "The Spaciousness of Old Rhetoric," Weaver emphasizes the importance of moving from individual to collective perspectives. A narrow artistic perspective on a particular image is an "impertinence" because, as a detail, a singularity, a datum of information, it asks that attention be focused on itself rather than on that idea it illustrates. Proverbially put, it sees the trees instead of the forest. Since the truths that the artist presents are not specific pieces of empirically supported information but deeply held archetypal truths, they are generic, or representative, or "idealized" images rather than particular images. What concrete data they do employ are used in the service of presenting the idealization, and the importance rests not with the image in its particularity but with what that image can connote. (A similar notion, discussed in the second chapter, concerns the appropriate uses of journalism.) Weaver's notion of "spaciousness" relates to this sense of resonance—the elements of context—which is comparable to I. A. Richards's "interinanimation" of words (Philosophy of Rhetoric 47-66). In describing his concept of spaciousness Weaver also refers to "aesthetic distance." Aesthetic distance provides a fuller perspective on the image through which "the parts fall into a meaningful pattern, the dominant effect emerges, and one sees it 'as it really is' " (ER 175). It permits one to filter the data of experience through a tightly woven net of propositions. We perceive what we intend to perceive, in accordance with our inclinations and preferences. An object that is perceived "as it really is," that has escaped the confines of the realm of the particular and physical for the realm of the idealized, has for its audience a "charismatic" power. It generates "feeling" sympathetic to it and "motion" toward it. Weaver introduces a taxonomy that includes "god terms," "devil terms," and "charismatic terms" and distinguishes between the appeal of god and devil terms, which are dialectically secured, and the appeal of charismatic terms, which are not. He notes: "We normally 'understand' a rhetorical term's appeal through its connection with something we apprehend . . . from a reading of palpable circumstances," and we give allegiance and good will to those ideas that have clearly been beneficial—physically, politically, socially—in our day-to-day lives. Charismatic terms, however, "seem to have broken loose somehow and to operate independently of referential connections," that is, are not

84 The Politics of Rhetoric clearly apprehensible from a reading of experience, and thus we can offer no logical reason for accepting them (ER 227). Weaver provides for both god terms and devil terms examples from two categories, one relating to politics and one relating to the larger community and culture that contain the political system. For god terms, American is the political term and science, progress, fact, and efficient the broader terms. His political devil terms include un-American, Communist, fascist, Tory, and—depending perhaps on one's upbringing—rebel or Yankee; his broader devil terms include prejudice and various descriptions of biological elimination and reproduction—what Weaver calls "GI rhetoric." The dialectical ground for the significance of the political terms is easy to understand. Devils are called such because their values are antithetical to those which we have been taught to value, and because they try to usurp what we perceive to be rights and privileges. Some Christians would contend, for example, that heaven is our birthright but that Satan can cheat us out of it. For another example, the period from the end of World War II through the appearance of "Ultimate Terms" in 1953 provides a bracing list of "Communist" transgressions against our way of life. The list includes the transfer of political power in Eastern Europe and China to Communist governments, the threat to Greece and Turkey repulsed only after the institution of the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, and the Berlin Crisis; the list emphasizes how real and large were the stakes for Weaver and for the West at that time. Indeed, more recently President Reagan once went so far as to refer to the Communist government in the Soviet Union as the "evil empire." The point is that society's members are asked to associate "Communist" with bad actions and intentions, just as Christians are asked to associate "devil" with bad actions and intentions. Further, for Weaver and for many Christian Americans, communism was also evil because it was anti-Christian as well as totalitarian and antidemocratic. God terms work in the same way. In the political lives of Weaver's audience in the 1950s, to be an American was an unalloyed good. The status of that term was faced with challenges in the 1960s and early 1970s, challenges that Weaver would have seen as examples of our society's increasing fragmentation. Using the American flag as a curtain, as a patch for the seat of one's blue jeans, or as fuel for a fire, he might continue, illustrates the sense of alienation from the sources of culture and society that has been produced by the country's liberalism. Yet, despite the beatings this term has taken, American is the name we call ourselves, and insofar as our society is not riddled with self-loathing and schizophrenia, it retains the power of a god term. Such a source of power can be seen as an illustration of the question-begging fallacy, or simply as acknowledgment that our first principles of action at the socioeconomic level are cultural assumptions that determine us and tyrannize over us. Charismatic terms that Weaver identifies in the broader field, such as

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freedom or democracy, like terms of the narrower political sort, rely for their effects on their connection to the shared values and symbols of the group. Given this connection, it is not difficult to see why Weaver selects democracy as an example. His political perspective would see in its use by the German Democratic People's Republic a usurpation of its charismatic power for a political system that, in Weaver's eyes, has no right to use it. The East German Communists had cynically appropriated the good will and allegiance people feel for the term. Weaver's taxonomy helps clarify the extra-logical force in words available for literary use. A slight realignment of the terms, moreover, can further clarify this functioning of artistic effect. All terrns of whatever kind gain much of their power from the cultural attitudes that lie behind them, not from the logic of scientific law, and this is more important than any distinction among them. God and devil terms give names to positive and negative poles of society's system of values, so they help to categorize eulogistic and dyslogistic images used by artists. Of course one person's god term might be another's devil term, even when they live in the same society. Thus, progress was a god term for the citizens of the United States in the early 1950s, although it is clearly not so for Weaver or for many others. The more common such differences, the more fragmented the society. In a society with a clear and strong value system, however, well-named terms have the power implied by their names, but in all societies their force comes from whatever foundation the society has, on whatever common assumptions are beyond question. Charisma is the degree of adherence a god or devil term generates, which is only partly determined by explicit ties to community values. While we can perhaps point to physical evidence that supports our feelings about American or progress or Communist or prejudice, such evidence does not account for the full force of our emotional attachment or rejection. Charisma appeals on a limbic level and on the level of the collective unconscious, and the acquired uncritical responses form a strong cultural orientation. The source of this power may be called the "biogrammar," or the collective unconscious, or the metaphysical dream, but regardless, its method of appeal is the use of charisma. A "pure" charisma would have no rationally discernible reason for acceptance. From Plato's point of view it would constitute what he means by poor imitation; after all, anything we accept as a good imitation should have some basis for belief in the intellect as well as the emotion. Dialectically secured truths, as well as empirically validated truths, have their own methods for belief, but charisma names that power of an image to evoke irrational, emotional feelings. In his use of this term Weaver does not explicitly include the charismatic power of a powerful style, a charismatic power not in the image but in the presentation of it. Implicitly, however, he does, so that charisma need not attach to a single term but can attach to a concept or an idea. Therefore, one of

66 The Politics of Rhetoric his definitions of rhetoric, "truth plus its artful presentation," can stand as his definition of art as well; truth residing in the image has a charismatic force, perhaps is even seen as truth because of its charismatic force, while the appeal of the artistic presentation has another kind of force. An art work is charismatic in its use of a powerful image, and in its powerful presentation of that image. So, to take an example from the legal world, a charismatic idea is something like the "little red wagon" that psychology consultants emphasize as an important component in lawyers' cases. If the lawyer can find just the right image, of a child with a shining red wagon who is crossing the street just as the drunk driver careens down the road, for example, the jury will remember and be affected—albeit extra-logically—by that image during its deliberations. A similar example is offered by Wayne Booth in a discussion of how the attorney for a small southern utility company beat the attorney for a large one: The attorney for the large company thought he had the law on his side, and thought he had presented his case quite well. Then the other attorney fixed in the jury's mind the image of the small company as a catfish and the big company as a fisherman about to gut the fish. As Booth recounts the story, the first lawyer accurately predicted at that moment that he had lost the case (Company We Keep 304). To clarify further our analysis of Weaver's concept of charisma in artistic effects, we offer an extended illustration. "Rugged individualism" is a concept that has played a major role in the development of the American ethos. As a charismatic idea it has gone under different names, but it includes especially the attribute of self-sufficiency, the ability and the willingness to "go it alone" in everything from procuring food and shelter to societal relations. The charismatic image of the rugged individual embodies attributes described by the idea, and when artistically rendered it can command allegiance. In our societal tradition this image conjures up pioneers, cowboys, and Indian scouts, yeoman farmers and independent businessmen. Perhaps in today's more complex society, with such forms of rugged individualism long since impossible, the examples would include the independent entrepreneur, perhaps the private detective or spy, or even the corporate raider. We know the extent to which politicians have traded on the concept of rugged individualism, as regards their backgrounds and qualifications for election and as regards their appeals to their audience's sense of the American ethos. 7 Of course, advertisers use this charismatic image, as they do any such image that they can discern as powerful. For instance, the Marlboro advertisements, using western mountains and ranges as settings, portray a single, rugged horseman herding cattle through winter storms or performing other difficult but useful activities alone; the charisma of this Marlboro Man is apparently thought by the cigarette manufacturer to be powerful enough to sell its cigarettes, even though there is no discernible logical connection between the cowboy and the product.

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Numerous canonical authors of American literature have provided general descriptions of this charismatic idea, but perhaps two have been most effective. Before the colonies achieved independence, Benjamin Franklin wrote a handbook for the practice of self-reliance in the country's economic system, his Autobiography. This text describes the free enterprise economy and offers practical approaches for success. Franklin has been called the patron saint of American business, and those who call him this believe that the lessons from this saint's life should be used by the industrious individual to get ahead in the dangerous world of business. Franklin's description of and influence on this charismatic idea is, however, only partial. It emphasizes what the rugged individual can accomplish in business and public service, but it is left to Ralph Waldo Emerson to describe this individual's nature and attributes. Nature and essays like "Self-Reliance" do for psychological individualism what Franklin did for the economic. They argue for the extent to which the idea can be taken in the psychological realm, as for example in the remarkable ending of Nature in which Emerson asserts that the individual can create one's own world, devoid of all the vermin and other pests that make the world less than ideal. Although Emerson maintains an appreciation for Plato, in the American's philosophy the dialectical questioner after knowledge is replaced with the individual who intuits, even creates, knowledge. That is, transcendentalism gives the rugged individual not only extreme economic freedom but also extreme individual freedom and opens the door to an individual relativity of values.

With Thoreau's Walden, the handbook is available for the sort of individualism whose practitioners march to the beat of a different drummer, and whose philosophy and subsequent actions so exercise Weaver. Taken together, Franklin and Emerson provide a description of the resourcefulness, industry, self-reliance, and individual system of values attributed to this charismatic idea. But Franklin and the Transcendentalists only describe the charismatic idea; as with the difference between the neutral discourse of science and business on the one hand and the powerful discourse of the rhetorician on the other, it is one thing to offer instructions on how something is done and another to show it in vivid particularity. The Autobiography and Nature inform us about a tyrannizing image, while other literary works appropriate its charismatic charge in some sort of story. Literary characters who exemplify this image include James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumpo and Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood, as well as Walt Whitman's poetic persona and most of Ernest Hemingway's characters. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman can be read as Willy Loman's tragic response to his heritage of rugged individualism, genetically his through his father, and culturally his through his acceptance of Benjamin Franklin's business ethic as it developed in modern American society. His inability to succeed in business can be read as Miller's condemnation of the economic version of rugged individualism.

88 The Politics of Rhetoric Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" offers a most instructive illustration of the power of the charismatic idea, since the poem is often read as a paean to rugged individualism. In this reading the narrator is faced with a fork in a path and decides not to follow the crowd but instead to take "the one less traveled by." Striking off for himself "has made all the difference" in his outing. Something momentous has happened, which he will be talking about ages and ages hence. This reading places the poem in a tradition with Franklin and Emerson, with Whitman and Cooper and Hemingway, and it is not surprising that Frost is seen as a quintessentially American poet. This poem is probably one of the most often anthologized and most often read American poems, and a reader equipped with even basic reading skills can get through it easily. It is also a powerful poem, because of its craftsmanship and the charismatic image so boldly sketched. The poem is stylistically charismatic, to be sure. Its aesthetic appeal, Plato might complain, in fact helps blind the audience to a curious discrepancy between the action of the narrator's woodlands walk and the recitation of it which he plans to deliver "ages and ages hence." But in this analysis we want to look not at Frost's stylistic appeals but at his use of this charismatic image. For three quarters of the poem the narrator clearly tells us that he has no way of choosing between the two paths. He might as well have flipped a coin. Whereas the rugged individual controls his circumstances and knows what he is doing when he acts, the narrator appears to be merely a creature of chance, responsible neither for the glories nor the shame at the end of the trail. Yet the narrator himself seems hardly able

to accept this interpretation; he knows he will later say that matters were different, the paths did differ, and his archetypal act has "made all the difference." He knows that later he will impose a form on that chaotic moment, the traditional form that invests his action with the accepted values of the group. Frost thereby confronts his audience with this question: Are we to understand the narrator's action through the data we are given or through the narrator's attitude? Restating the question, are we to accept the scientific or the charismatic perspective? "The Road Not Taken" does more than ask us to contemplate these questions. It provides us with good reasons to doubt the validity of the charismatic image itself, and by extension to question the validity of beliefs based not on empirical proof but otherwise. We suggest that Frost's narrator presents in his woodlands walk a metaphor for the modernist's loss of selfdetermination, and he asks that the audience accept this implication of its perspective. The disjunction between facts and attitudes is so clear, the weight of evidence so clearly on the side of the facts, and the attitude of the traveler so patently irrational, that the poet dares the audience to be swept away by the charismatic image when it appears at the end of the poem. Nonetheless, very often readers are swept away. They ignore the facts

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because they see rugged individualism as a cultural good, as well as something that can be achieved. We could say that the poem is a cynical portrayal of how emotions will overwhelm the truth, just as too much garlic in a dish overwhelms subtler spices. We could say that Frost created the poem so that each reading would be a scientific experiment conducted on the reader, to determine whether empirical data or charisma is the more persuasive. In the case of this poem, the results constitute a scientific defense of the unscientific. The poet gives us every opportunity to protect ourselves from being taken in by the poem's emotional power, and we nonetheless are taken in, unless we are careful readers. Insofar as we fall for the trap and accept that the poem is this paean to rugged individualism, which is to say, insofar as the charisma seduces us, thus far are we acting not like individualists: we are acting not as a member of the human race but rather, almost instinctually, subconsciously, as a member of the race. In any event, however one wants to argue the intentions of the narrator or the author, it is clear that charismatic effects are a powerful vehicle. CONCLUSION For Weaver, literature is a powerful vehicle for cultural order and social cohesion, but disruptions in modern society have cost it a great deal of influence and power. Nonetheless, Weaver says, it "offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind" by helping us to see that "there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time" (IHC 166). Literature reminds us that we are more than eating, defecating, and mating animals; it provides a gesture of piety toward a realm beyond the merely physical (VO 152). Like Burke, who argues for the poetic metaphor as the "ultimate metaphor for discussing the universe and man's relations to it" (Permanence and Change 263), and who encourages us to attend not just to great drama but to the dramas of everyday life, Weaver contends that if we and our culture are to be saved we must come to have "an awareness of the ethical and religious drama of every moment" (VO 152). By understanding everyday life, we realize that it mirrors a higher realm; as we see this relationship, we are able to give to our social and political lives a sense of the measure and reason necessary for virtuous living. A great deal of the power of literature overlaps the power of a noble rhetoric, and the purpose of a noble rhetoric overlaps the purpose of literature as Weaver has described it. Indeed, it is perhaps less accurate to say that the "complete man" is "the 'lover' added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician" (ER 21) and more accurate to say that, insofar as the complete person is the rhetorician (and we believe for Weaver that this is the case), this person is the poet added to the dialectician. A problem arises, however, with this description of the rhetorician. Both

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the dialectic and poetic aspects of rhetoric are involved in the canon of invention, in that both are means of discovering truths. Weaver intimates in a n u m b e r of places (ER 18-19 and VO 6 1 - 6 5 offering two good illustrations) that the truths of dialectic are prefatory to the poetic inspiration of rhetoric; they clear the ground of misunderstandings and identify the general position. However, the truths of poetry are clearly superior, not only for purposes of rhetorical persuasion but as kinds of truth. And we note that whereas dialectic is a process carried out collaboratively, designed so that everyone participates in the identification of truths, the inspired truths of poetry and noble rhetoric come from one person. In this reading, Weaver's vision of the rhetorician is indeed in line with the Romantic view of the "unacknowledged legislator," even in line with the Augustinian rhetorician who is inspired by God. The rhetorician as prophet or lawgiver opens up the ominous possibility that this person will see himself or herself as possessing truth and not in need of verifying it through communal discourse. Shifting the focus from literary theory to rhetorical theory, the next chapter takes up this potential problem, especially insofar as Weaver sees its purpose to produce a virtuous culture and virtuous citizens of society.

NOTES 1. In "Egotism in Work and Art" (IHC 70-91), Weaver discusses music and painting, as well as literature, as aspects of art. He also refers, in a footnote to "The Importance of Cultural Freedom" (LP 39), to architecture.

2. Language's inability to represent reality is discussed by Gorgias in his Encomium. His point, that to represent truth we need a different language since current language only represents probabilities (35 [11]), is made by Plato in the Phaedrus (246). 3. Weaver's options are a variation of those offered the modern artist by Burke in Permanence and Change (52-54). 4. The point is identical to that made by Burke in his distinction between action and motion. For one discussion, see The Rhetoric of Religion (39). 5. Terrance DesPres contends that the power of Antigone today comes from the instability of our modern world, which arose from the French Revolution (12). 6. The conservative hero strives to support the conservative way of life, but the tragic hero, as we have argued, is not conservative but liberal, acting contrary to established traditions. The liberal hero is thus not a lawgiver but a lawbreaker, or lawmaker. Accordingly, Antigone is a conservative hero who, like the American South in the Civil War, is willing to lose all in the defense of cultural principle, which in her case is piety to the gods. Creon is a liberal hero, risking change in tradition for what he believes to be necessary. In this reading, Creon's end is tragic, and Antigone's outrageous. 7. On the eve of his election, Herbert Hoover said, "Our national task is to meet our many problems, and in meeting them to courageously preserve our rugged individualism, together with the principles of ordered liberty and freedom, equality of opportunity with that of idealism to which our nation has been consecrated'' (New

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York Times 6 November 1928: 24). Six years later Hoover said that the term "has been used by American leaders for over a half-century in eulogy of those Godfearing men and women of honesty whose stamina and character and fearless assertion of rights led them to make their own way of life" (Safire 387).

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5 Rhetorical and Composition Theory

INTRODUCTION During his thirty-year academic life, Weaver taught primarily freshman composition at the University of Chicago. Of his coauthored essay, "Looking for an Argument," Edward P. J. Corbett has said that it provides "perhaps the first suggestion of the value of classical rhetoric for the Freshman composition course," and of his writing textbook that it "represented the first instance of the use of the topics in a freshman rhetoric since . . . the 1930's" (380). Yet despite Corbett's kind words and those of others in writing and public speaking, and despite the depth and range of Weaver's work in composition as well as in rhetorical theory, he is not often cited by rhetorical theorists, at least by those affiliated with English departments, and he is infrequently cited in the burgeoning number of articles and books devoted to composition pedagogy. It is possible that Weaver's philosophical and political conservatism has caused some of his neglect. Teachers and scholars who have embraced General Semantics (a particular bugbear of Weaver's) or who find conservative political theory uncongenial, or who find congenial such philosophically liberal theories as Robert Scott's epistemic rhetoric, or James Sledd's demands for students' rights to their own languages, or James Moffett's student-centered research and expressive writing: such teachers may shy away from Weaver. Furthermore, Weaver's statements on race and gender issues, on politics, and on education, to cite but a few examples, can cause legitimate trepidation for first-time readers who discover them in Weaver's writings, and they can give pause—or worse—to those who feel they understand something of Weaver's overall theory. Yet for teachers to neglect

94 The Politics of Rhetoric Weaver's writing on composition because of his conservatism would be unfortunate. As we argued in the second chapter, it is not only useful, but necessary, for anyone espousing the social construction of knowledge or the idea of rhetoric as epistemic to be open to different points of view; silencing or ignoring dissenting voices is a sure path to intellectual and disciplinary rigidity and torpor and, ultimately, inadequacy. A commonplace at least as old as Plato states that good rhetoricians cannot understand their own positions fully without also coming to grips with the other positions. It therefore seems reasonable that current rhetorical theorists, by the very nature of the field, should be open to examining competing perspectives for whatever they could offer. If nothing else, Weaver's distinctive counterstatement provides a richer context in which liberal theorists and teachers could consider their own perspectives, and it could even offer partial correctives or adjustments. Weaver also may have been neglected in the field of composition because he did not publish profusely, and all his publications predate the tremendous growth of this field. He was part of what Walter H. Beale calls the "First Rhetorical Awakening,'' which took place before composition became important as a disciplinary interest (626-27). 1 Yet, while the quantity of his advice is slight and his topics broad, still this advice should command attention because of its quality and foresight. Composition, he makes clear to say, is not a course in grammar or logic or some other skill in the narrow sense of "a system of forms of public speech" (ER 115) without its own content. Weaver recognizes the conventional belief that composition courses are designed to make students more articulate but notes the confusion concerning appropriate ends for their improved articulation. Teachers of communication courses are "turning loose upon the world a power. Where do we expect the wielders of that power to learn the proper use of it?" (LIS 188). He believes that a course in composition should be a course in liberal education, and the "content and method" of liberal education should "develop the mind and the character in making choices between truth and error, between right and wrong" (LP 63). As Wilma R. Ebbitt has pointed out, Weaver argues that freshman composition has content, that its content is rhetoric, and that rhetoric is not a skill but the key to a liberal education (417); one can suppose that this very notion has caused at least some of Weaver's marginalization in composition studies: his is a philosophy of rhetoric rather than an outline of rhetorical principles and as such is not easily cited, summarized, or applied to freshman composition. He also argues that a good writing course enlarges students' understanding of the humanities as well as of the principles of scientific investigation, and that it helps students in their other courses, in their professions, and in their social relations (EC 741). In the preface to his textbook he expands the importance of rhetorical studies still farther, asserting that "the continuing debate' which is democracy cannot proceed unless a significant number of

Rhetorical and Composition Theory 95 our people have an adequate grounding in logic and persuasion" (vii). Weaver's reason for granting rhetoric this importance is that rhetoric determines values and involves ethical choices, and he insists that rhetoric should be taught and used with these attributes in mind. While logic is not the focus of a course in speaking or writing, it is an important component. Since Weaver agrees with Kenneth Burke that all discourse is persuasive (LIS 224), and with Plato that sound persuasion has a basis in logic (LIS 73; PL 730), he naturally gives the study of logic an important place in his textbook. He argues for its "unassailable" place in the curriculum, saying that it is a necessary part of argumentation (PL 729). It verifies a line of reasoning, making it convincing for readers, while rhetoric induces them to accept the convincing (RCWR 134). By emphasizing formal logic, Weaver includes a method of critical analysis that was not present in many courses, and while he cannot be said to be the major impetus for the recent attention to argument in the composition class, the increase in argument-based textbooks and the appearance of numerous professional articles on the subject suggest that his emphasis is well founded. To this emphasis Weaver adds an introduction to and thorough discussion of the topics. Besides his textbook and the coauthored "Looking for an Argument," Weaver also discusses the topics in "A Responsible Rhetoric" and "Language is Sermonic." In the latter essay he ranks the topics according to their ethical worth in an argument, with definition first, then similitude, cause and effect, and circumstance. In the former essay he adds another topic, the "rhetorical-historical," which, taking notice of the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, combines definition with reference to historical circumstance. 2 Commentators on Weaver have criticized the hierarchy of topics for one reason or another. For instance, J. Michael Sproule argues that classifying arguments is more subjective than objective (29798), and that the origins of arguments are not as neatly determined as Weaver's contention that arguments from definition arise from dialectically secured positions and arguments from circumstance from expedient factual inquiries (298-303). Further, lower-ranking topoi may not indicate inherently unethical arguments but rather conscious decisions to use what is deemed to be more agreeable to particular audiences. Indeed, while Weaver says in one place that his analyses exclude "artful choices which have in view only ad hoc persuasions" (ER 55), he elsewhere says that the rhetorician should use whichever topic has "the greatest chance to impress" the audience (LIS 217), and it can be argued that an appeal to one's audience other than "in the name of their highest good" (LIS 212) uses ends to justify means. Regardless of the problems Weaver's ranking causes, his privileging of definition does find support in Kenneth Burke's contention that definitions indicate one's perspective on the world and are in fact most often the causes for disagreement. As Sproule claims, "Weaver is correct in his belief that the moral analysis of rhetoric may profitably begin with

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an inquiry into a rhetor's definitions" (304).3 Furthermore, current composition textbooks show the value of Weaver's reintroduction: almost all offer some sort of topical heuristic, and many offer variations on the classical topics. In his textbook, where most of the particular techniques of composition are discussed, Weaver offers what has become standard discussions of invention and organization, traditional advice on diction, sentence structure and paragraphing, and a handbook on grammar. In various other places he offers some good apothegms for writers. For instance, in "Milton's Heroic Prose" he remarks, "A timid correctness, like perfect lucidity, sometimes shows that more attention has been devoted to the form than to the thought, and this may give the writing a kind of hard surface which impedes sympathy between writer and reader" (ER 162). In the same chapter he notes the value of writing "built upon concepts and not conventionalized expository patterns" (144)—advice that, when one looks at the modal organization of many composition textbooks (including a section of his own), has unfortunately not been heeded. And his chapter entitled "Some Rhetorical Aspects of Grammatical Categories" (ER 115-42) provides interesting observations on sentence patterns and parts of speech that students of rhetoric may wish to consider. Whether we accept the implications for composition that Weaver draws from his cultural theory, such as his belief that every writer should strive for the protection of democratic principles, his emphasis on critical thinking and argument is salutary. In many ways Weaver was ahead of his time, which passed through a "current-traditional" product-oriented phase emphasizing modes and products, through a process phase emphasizing personal and expressive writing, to the current interest in argument and the fuller understanding of rhetoric that requires writers to take responsibility for their writing and consider the predispositions of those who read it. Whatever the reasons for the lack of attention given to Weaver, they have denied us a full accounting of his rhetorical theory and an adequate evaluation of the relationship of his rhetorical theory to the teaching of composition. He presents a perspective that demands our response; we can accept or reject or modify it, but in any event he leads us to clarify what we mean by rhetoric and how we should teach and use it. In this chapter, we want to explore his rhetorical theory and its implications. In many ways, his theory is a response to the effects of modernism, and these effects are most clearly seen in that form of rhetoric taught under the rubric of professional communication. Thus, we begin with an examination of how professional communication courses indicate these effects and follow with a discussion of how Weaver would readjust the teaching of writing toward what he sees as a "noble rhetoric" by replacing the ethical component in rhetorical study and practice removed by modernism. However, there are some ominous implications for the application of noble rhetoric in society,

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and the chapter moves next to take these up. Generally, we contend that his noble rhetoric has theoretical value but his practical use of it is flawed; he falls prey to pressures in his political conservatism and comes to teach and employ an ethically suspect rhetoric. MODERNISM'S EFFECTS ON COMPOSITION Professional communication courses, explicitly designed to prepare students for rhetorical situations they will face during their adult lives, oftentimes present two conflicting attitudes toward their product during the same course of instruction. One approach holds that professional communication should teach students about forms and formats standard in their professional worlds and about the importance of an objective discourse that transmits information. The other approach holds that these courses should teach students about appeals available to them in their professional world and their utility for manipulating audiences. While these approaches describe fairly well two kinds of rhetorics, neither considers adequately the relationships among rhetoric, truth, and ethics. They both treat rhetoric as a tool to present knowledge found by other means, rather than a part of the process for discovering knowledge. And while theoretically Weaver seems at times to place rhetoric in a more central place in this process, in the end he theoretically—and so practically—treats it as a tool, divorced from the discovery of truth and limited in its ethical significance. In "To Write the Truth" (LIS 187-200), Weaver describes the two modern variants and his corrective, calling them recte loqui, utiliter loqui, and vere loqui—correct speaking, useful speaking, and true speaking. He also provides a historical context for them. Weaver says of the conception of modernism: "There came a moment in the fourteenth century when teachers of rhetoric and philosophy hesitated between two aims: Was it their duty to teach men vere loqui or recte loqui, in the phrases then employed?" (LIS 188). Vere loqui was employed by the Scholastic fathers in debates about metaphysics, within the context of medieval philosophical and social unity and stability, and, says Weaver, employed dialectic and rhetoric in order to discover truth and present it effectively. Western culture abandoned vere loqui because it came to believe scientific assumptions about the nature and limits of truth: metaphysics, or any issue of metaphysics, becomes unscientific and so unimportant; medieval unity and stability is broken down; and the components of truth and the effective presentation of truth are artificially separated. To replace this approach, Western culture has employed recte loqui and utiliter loqui. Recte loqui is described as the concern to use conventions in the attempt to "get things right" within the context of increasing occupational specializations and social fragmentation. It arose because the belief that science could determine objective, empirical truths led to the need to present these truths clearly and accu-

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rately (see LIS 190). This belief produced the corresponding belief that some areas of experience are outside the bounds of empirical verification, and utiliter loqui arose to express personal opinions and desires in those areas. Utiliter loqui simply realized the logical implications of the "loosening [of] the ontological referents" begun by the rise of science and became concerned to use anything to "better our position in the world" in those areas not covered by empirical investigation (LIS 189). It has been employed by journalists, politicians, and the advertisers of business. Weaver sums up the taxonomy this way: "From speaking truthfully to speaking correctly to speaking usefully—is this not the rhetorician's easy descent to Avernus?" (LIS 188-89). 4 While Weaver makes a case for the historical progression, his tripartite division describes elements of language use that are not so much temporally as dialectically related. That moment in the fourteenth century is forever born anew: we are always asked to decide the degree to which we will try to distance our personality and beliefs from our discourse, the limits that we will place on our attempts to persuade others and aggrandize ourselves, and the extent to which we will say the right thing in the way w e believe it should be said, regardless of how much it might cost us personally or financially or socially. Textbooks for writing courses, and this is especially clear with professional writing textbooks, admit of this logical, rather than temporal, division, although they offer as choices only recte loqui and utiliter loqui. These nearly opposite formulations, of neutral and highly partisan discourse, coexist in the textbooks' conventional approach to professional writing, and the seeming paradox is explained by the nature of society's modernist perspective: the former is used to put forward objectively the empirically discovered truths of research, and the second is used in those areas in which scientific verification does not apply. As will be shown momentarily, Weaver would hold that the former emphasizes dialectic without rhetoric, and that the latter emphasizes rhetoric without dialectic. Significantly, the third alternative, the vere loqui that combines dialectic and rhetoric, is most often left unmentioned. This is not to say that professional writing instruction willfully misrepresents the nature of language and discourse. Rather, it may be that some teachers do not realize that something is missing, and the more thoroughly society and teacher education have been conditioned by the scientistic perspective, the better the chance of this happening. Alternatively, they may sense an absence in the theoretical conception of professional writing and so its pedagogy—may sense that there is a need for something besides pure objectivity or manipulation—but have no way of thinking or speaking about it, because a received modernist theory of language does not allow for it. In such a pedagogy, recte loqui is precise and concise, a slave to conventional English and standardized formats, and, above all, neutral or objective. Such writing was put forward as the ideal by Thomas Sprat in his The

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History of the Royal-Society of London, in which he says that writers must "return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal n u m b e r of words. They have exacted from all their m e m b e r s , a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; and native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can" (113). Such writing shows no affection for its subject, employs a "sober fidelity," and distrusts any departure from the literal and prosaic (ER 8). In professional writing it is used for instructions, process analyses, and the three to thirteen kinds of business and technical reports categorized in the textbooks. Its emphasis on convention exhibits itself in the classroom when students are asked to learn accepted forms that are said to apply to contexts in their future professions. Yet, as even a cursory review of real-world professional writing shows, there are no "forms" of any specificity that can be taught in the classroom. T h e r e are certain formats, such as the formats for professional letters or memoranda, and there are general psychological strategies that suggest outlines for "good n e w s , " "bad n e w s , " and "sales" letters. Beyond these generalities, the formulaic approach to professional writing should be met with Quintilian's observation, that "rhetoric would be a very easy and small matter, if it could b e included in one short body of rules, but rules must generally b e altered to suit the nature of each individual case, the time, and necessity itself" (II, xiii, Book 2). 5 Its emphasis on standard English and an objective style is also apparent. Besides a demand for correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling, this style employs a neutral tone and an objective point of view in an attempt to let the facts speak for themselves; it is perceived as a "window p a n e , " which the writer constructs and through which the audience is able, as Matthew Arnold says in another context, "to see the object as in itself it really is." The important function of neuter rhetoric is the clear and precise delivery of information, and students learn to keep from this window pane anything that would distort clear presentation, including authors themselves. However, the convention of the scientistic, "window p a n e " theory of communication is misguided and perhaps even dangerous (LIS 139-58; ER 2 1 - 2 2 ; 186-210). It is misguided because no one can practice a purely neutral discourse: since "reality" is not something that can be "objectively" understood, it stands to reason that it cannot be objectively rendered.6 The facts that go to make u p our versions of reality are necessarily "regarded with sympathy and . . . treated with that kind of historical understanding and appreciation which lie outside the dialectical process" (VO 56). 7 It is dangerous because it allows and perhaps even encourages ethical irresponsibility, since removing the author removes one way of addressing the ethical component. A tenet of modernism is that the scientist qua scientist is not charged with ethical responsibility. As Burke notes, a technical expert assigned the task of perfecting new and more destructive weapons is mor-

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ally required, as technical expert, only to work on the task thoroughly and effectively. "The question of what the new force might mean, as released into a social texture emotionally and intellectually unfit to control it . . . is simply 'none of his business,' as specialist, however great may be his misgivings as father of a family, or as a citizen of his nation and of the world" (Rhetoric of Motives 30). The clear, accurate transmittal of the nowdetermined truth is likewise ethically neutral. Far from being responsible for what is transmitted, the investigator—or a writer employed by the investigator—is concerned only to stay out of the way. Recte loqui, as Weaver contends, "appeals to those who expect a scientific solution to human problems" (ER 9). However, from a perspective outside the modernist assumptions, recte loqui creates "an inherently unethical behavior": it allows writers anonymity and so freedom from being responsible for what they write, by suggesting that texts replicate objective knowledge gained from scientific research (Rubens 337). It is a tool, ethically neutral in itself and in its concern for its content. Recte loqui is not seen as suitable for all professional contexts, such as those in which no "truths" can exist, nor is it seen as appropriate—or effective—for intentions other than the clear and precise transmittal of such truths. These additional contexts and intentions are also part of the professional communicator's responsibilities and included in modern professional writing textbooks. For these contexts and intentions, the suitable approach is utiliter loqui, seen as effective for sales, request, and bad news letters, for proposals, and, in fact, for all those documents whose function is not primarily informative (for example, a trip report that tries also to obtain money for future trips, or a progress report that tries to make the writer look as busy as he or she was supposed to be). Utiliter loqui is epitomized in the writing of many advertisers and political speech writers, who believe in emotionally charged language, in a highly subjective point of view, and in making the "facts" speak for the interests of the writer. Since values and policies cannot be supported with demonstrable proofs, such arguments must be seen as merely expressions of writers' "irrational" beliefs: while users of recte loqui assume that choices are already determined, users of utiliter loqui are solipsistically free to follow their own "irrational" desires. Aristotle's point—that strict scientific demonstration is applicable only in narrow areas of experience and that elsewhere less stringent but still reasonable means for agreement must be used—is lost. However, users of utiliter loqui must go beyond irrational desire and undertake thorough rhetorical analyses of contexts and audiences, the better to find out how to manipulate acceptance for their positions. Since rhetorical choices in such writing have no ethical limits (Booth, Modern Dogma 65-67), they have at their disposal any strategy that will get the job done. If the technical expert has no option but to report on new weaponry, writers whose job it is to sell this weapon to Pentagon officials or to the Amer-

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ican public have all sorts of options. They might provide facts in the most neutral style, or they may use euphemisms, emotional appeals, perhaps misrepresented statistics and even outright lies to make the sale. Additionally, writers need not even be true to their own personal beliefs. For instance, a writer of advertisements for cigarettes may emphasize the rugged individualism of an American cowboy on the Montana range, or the glamorous life of a career woman in a tasteful and expensive salon of a midtown Manhattan apartment; the writer may use these ploys because he or she believes that while the members of the audience consciously are admiring the scene, they subliminally are induced to buy the cigarette in order to "join" that scene. The writer may say that the product has "just the great taste of success you deserve," or that it "gives you 30 percent more of the flavor you want," or perhaps will go further. The writer need not think that cowboys or salons have anything to do with cigarettes, nor have any idea how success tastes and how much of it one deserves, or how one measures flavor; he or she certainly need not believe that the copy clearly and precisely presents much of anything. The goal of this writing is only "to make men more eloquent about their passions and their interests" (LIS 189). This separation of "truth" from rhetorical techniques of persuasion is possible because rhetoric is perceived as a tool. The attention-getting devices and catchy phrases and excited tones are merely tools a writer uses, and since the writing is not meant to be objective, the assumption is that it can employ any view of reality the writer pleases—so long as the readers will buy it. If recte loqui is in the service of business truth, then utiliter loqui is in the service of what Wayne Booth calls a "systematic deception," which assumes that "men are not accountable to their fellows for how they acquire and spend their private fortunes" (Modern Dogma 202n). However, making people eloquent about their passions and interests while ignoring ethical accountability produces a cacophony of selfish, competing voices that easily leads to chaos—either that or, in the attempt to avoid chaos, to the growth of a totalitarian government and its systematic, forceful suppression of the individual's passions and interests (IHC 70). Further, regardless of whether one can achieve and sustain selfish eloquence, Weaver is opposed to the assumptions and methodology of a rhetorical practice that condones self-aggrandizement through willful deception of and even harm to an audience. When he argues that the classroom should reflect values that are not a matter of controversy in society (VO 114), he certainly does not believe that our society accepts or even overtly condones deception; and when he argues that the classroom should be the place where scholars "seek out the structure of reality and to proclaim it by one means or another to the uninitiated" (AF 3), he certainly does not believe that utiliter loqui accurately represents anything like reality. Such use of discourse Plato calls sophistry. From the perspective of those who buy the cigarettes and remain far from the range or the riches of

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Manhattan, and from the perspective of those who develop emphysema and cancer, this appellation seems correct. Yet, attitudes of rhetoric as a tool cannot and need not do much with Plato's charge. Given the retreat of ethics, one cannot call utiliter loqui sophistic, nor can one call "inherently unethical" the abdication of responsibility by the writer employing recte loqui. For that matter, one cannot say that a consideration of ethics, no matter the ethical position taken, is part and parcel of the modernist way of life. It is difficult, when materialism has replaced transcendentalism, to challenge whatever uses of rhetoric seem accepted by the society. Sophistry is in the eye of the beholder, and complaints about the uses to which rhetoric is put would only identify the beholder as out of step with the current rhetorical climate. Some alternative to the pure objectivity or pure relativism available when ethics is removed is essential, Weaver contends, if we are to use rhetoric for the artful presentation of transcendent truth. 8

A NOBLE RHETORIC In considering the kind of instruction needed to develop this fuller rhetoric in the face of the dominant use of recte loqui and utiliter loqui, more must be done than simply to "rebuke the moral impotence fathered by empiricism"; Weaver goes further to assert that the role of rhetoric is to "reclaim the world of metaphysical certitude," and that education should be involved in "the difficult, and dangerous, work of teaching men to speak and write the truth" (LIS 198). A rhetoric whose aim is to reclaim this world has the "intellectual love of God" as "its essence and the fans et origo of its power" (ER 25). It is not the neutral presentation of material truths discovered by empirical investigation and limited by logical positivism, or a partial presentation of those truths to gain what is personally desired. This rhetoric is intellectual, he continues, because it employs dialectic, so that each position taken "has been adjudicated with reference to the whole universe of discourse." It is love, because it desires to give actuality to the truth discovered by dialectic and because it acts for "emotional" as well as logical reasons. And it is the love of God, which Weaver allows to be read as the "love of the Good," because it gives ultimate place to the highest good we can intuit. Thus, "rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain extending up toward the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and only the soul have affection for. . . . Rhetoric appears, finally, as a means by which the impulse of the soul to be ever moving is redeemed" (ER 25).9 The last passage prepares for two central issues of noble rhetoric: the relationship of dialectic, as agency of the intellect, to inspiration, the motive impulse for rhetoric; and the ques-

Rhetorical and Composition Theory 103 tion of how ethics and metaphysics are related to rhetoric, which is to say, the concept of redemption. In saying that the soul—the human being—moves, Weaver refers to our ability to make conscious choices. Burke makes a useful distinction, to which we have referred previously, between motion and action. People act, Burke says, and things are moved, which means that we have the capacity to choose consciously and so the capacity to know good choices from bad, right from wrong. To say then that the soul is ever moving means that, as human beings, we must act: our ethical faculty, our knowledge of good and evil formed by our religious faculty's perception of the metaphysical dream, is forever a part of any idea, decision, and action with which we are engaged. It is the function of rhetoric to guide this motive impulse, Weaver says, but the actions we depend upon rhetoric to guide cannot be justified merely by logic. One reason is that logic cannot act on its own accord. As rhetoric itself is a tool for the users of recte loqui and utiliter loqui, logic is merely a tool for thinking—a neutral method of investigating that tries to establish the truth of doubtful propositions (VO 71)—requiring some outside force to be put into action. Once engaged by the rhetorical process, it pursues its epistemological and logical role of defining and categorizing so that the subject under discussion is adequately represented with regard to logos (VO 64; ER 27). Thus, claims Weaver, "In any general characterization, rhetoric will include dialectic" (ER 15; see also VO 65). Another reason why dialectic cannot guide actions is that the intellect is limited in the degree to which it can identify right action. As Weaver states, "The duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception" (ER 24). The strength of scientific perception, and of dialectic, is its ability to provide truth and knowledge of the physical world—experiential observations of physical events and verifiable logical deductions based on these observations. These intellectual faculties are concerned with what Weaver identifies as "positive terms," things that exist simply in the physical world. "Consequently, a rhetoric of positive terms is a rhetoric of simple description, which requires only powers of accurate observation and reporting." They are not concerned with "dialectical terms, . . . terms that reflect judgments of values and always leave one committed to something (ER 187-88). And they are most certainly not concerned with "ultimate terms," terms that "impart a general ideological tendency to the entire discourse" (Beale 634) and provide that to which dialectical terms commit. 10 Dialectic alone is unable to make such judgments and, when brought to bear on them, can be subversive. 11 Pure dialectic does not consider audience emotions, so the dialectician may thereby seem remote, arrogant, or otherwise insulting. And it is "antisocial," since it works only with logical inference and not with what people believe or what has happened in the past; it is unconcerned with the organic feeling of the community that comes from its history, tradi-

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tions, and culture. Thus, pure dialectic cannot support the metaphysical dream but rather threatens to dissolve society. It questions everything, tears down but doesn't build, and ends as an "unassimilable social agnostic" (VO 58-65). For example, in his analysis of the Webster-Hayne debate, Weaver maintains that Webster's argument for the sale of public lands is a dialectic regarding power while Hayne's argument constitutes a "rhetoric of history," arguing thereby that Webster was undermining the fragile agreement that held North and South together (SE 114). Dialectic functions as an aid in our attempt to cope with the data of the world, after we have accepted the existence of inspired truths, understood that they must be considered, and established our feelings toward them (IHC 167). Dialectic is employed like logic, something to be used after one determines one's position, in order to develop a defense that can rationally validate it. This position offers an interesting alternative to the concept of "writing as a way of knowing," by which through and in the process of writing students come to know something about the world and their own attitudes that they did not know before, and, more narrowly, know what they want to say in the writing they are undertaking. Weaver's alternative is helpful not because the concept of "writing as a way of knowing" is wrongheaded but because an extreme statement of it can be. A number of researchers into the composition process (Hagge; Selzer; Broadhead and Freed) believe that real-world writers employ a much more linear process than is suggested in some process-oriented writing textbooks. They already have a clear sense of their rhetorical contexts, including their data and their

intentions, and so can move from this knowledge through an outline and often to a single-draft piece. While researchers do not discount that writing leads to further discovery, the writers being studied seem not to discover their intentions in the process of writing so much as they come to the process with intentions already in mind. 12 Writers write most often because they have something to say, and they have something to say because they believe they have a topic and an audience who wants or needs to hear their thoughts. Weaver would recoil from some process theorists' assertions that the "knowing" that writing produces is "a self-centered, inward-turning act dependent on private inarticulate meanings" (Hagge 100). Instead, he cites with approval a passage from the Phaedrus in which Plato's personified rhetoric is made to say, "I do not compel anyone to learn to speak without knowing the truth, but if my advice is of any value, he learns that first and then acquires me. So what I claim is this, that without my help the knowledge of the truth does not give the art of persuasion" (ER 15, emphasis added). However, dialectic, as it involves an active dialogue with others, remains part of the rhetorical process for much longer than Plato's quotation implies, and perhaps the issue of dialectic's role in rhetoric is only a quibble over terms. That is, besides the kind of dialectic that would verify one's

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previously attained position, there is the sense of dialectic as an abductive, investigative, Socratic process used to determine one's position, and it is this use of dialectic, perhaps more than the other, that provides protection from megalomaniacal "truths." To explain, let us say that dialectic is the name for the process of rhetorical invention by which one investigates questions at issue between oneself and one's putative audience, then moves the investigation toward and logically secures a position one thinks makes sense for the interlocutors; so far we have described the process of S«#cratic dialectic. Now let us imagine that the dialectician wishes to prepare a speech or essay in which the discovered position and its supporting argument are to be presented to people not necessarily involved in the original dialogue. In the process of drafting the essay or speech, the rhetor "revises" the position, engaging in an attenuated dialectic with interlocutors past and audiences future as well as with himself or herself. This revision occurs because new ideas come to the rhetor and because the situation changes insofar as the audience or the speaker changes, even though, as the researchers mentioned above observe, it sometimes does not change much. It is even fair to say that issues commonly considered rhetorical because they are categorized under the aspects of "editing"—choices of organization, rephrasing, and so on—can be called dialectical issues insofar as choices are made in order to help the audience more clearly understand the communicator's point. Further, as Karen Burke LeFevre argues, "rhetorical invention . . . is an act initiated by a writer and completed by readers" (35), which is to say, the dialectic process goes on in an attenuated version by the audience—while listening or reading and afterward. Indeed, this is Weaver's position on the use of the enthymeme in discourse (LIS 154-55; ER 173-74; VO 63). LeFevre's comments and Weaver's discussion of the enthymeme can be used at least as partial responses to Socrates's complaints about writing that conclude the Phaedrus; a written text cannot answer, it is true, but it can induce the audience into active contemplation and questioning of their previously held positions. We are hard pressed to categorize all aspects of creation, revision, and editing as dialectic; some choices are made less to clarify a point than to lead the audience to accept "uncritically" the communicator's position. And we are hard pressed to claim that our broad description of dialectic is Weaver's as well. He contends that in the process of creation dialectic goes only so far and must be replaced by inspiration. Similarly, in the process of communication, "the clearest demonstration in terms of logical inclusion and exclusion often fails to win assent. . . . [The communicator] passes from the logical to the analogical . . . where figuration comes into rhetoric" (ER 17-18). In the first process, that of discovering knowledge, the creator nonlogically comes to an understanding and acceptance of the truth of a situation; in the second process, that of presenting it, the audience nonlogically understands and accepts, while the creator, through artful pre-

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sentation, oversees the conditions by which this is accomplished (Burke, Counter-Statement 36). That is, the dialectical interchange that goes on to discover knowledge is supplanted by a monologic presentation of that discovery. Gregory Clark says: "What rhetoric represents, for Weaver, is an attempt by one person to define for others a truth they all will share, a claim to power that is the private purpose that propels much of what we say to others. . . . Implicitly or explicitly, writers write for the purpose of inducing others to adopt their beliefs. And because we cannot not fully believe what it is we believe, nor, when we express those beliefs, not try to persuade others to accept them, that purpose is unavoidable" (49-50). Because of dialectic's limitations, Weaver believes that we must get beyond mere intellect to "intuit" the truth. This intuition is nonlogical (not necessary illogical), "a movement which cannot finally be justified logically" (ER 23). It is therefore akin to poetic inspiration or divine madness (ER 14, 17), a kinship whose Platonic shift Weaver finds congenial. The results of this madness, while not scientifically verifiable, are not thereby the results of megalomania but rather of what cannot be proven but is nonetheless true. Inspiration is not the result of exaggeration or caricature, not the product of mere wantonness, but rather "prophecy" (ER 19-20). While perhaps we cannot know if it is exaggeration or prophecy until, like a literary classic, it has stood the test of time, we should consider that prophecy is not about an "unreal potentiality" but about an "actual possibility": it is not analogous to the impossible romances of Horatio Alger or others but to the novels of Steinbeck or Orwell, whose fictional presentations resemble what later came to pass in society. To determine whether one might believe what lacks empirical verification, Weaver provides three kinds of unverifiable truths: judgments whose verifications have dropped out of memory but that exist; judgments adopted from others, not proven by us but by them; and judgments that have a subconscious origin (LP 8). Thus, scientists believe, although they cannot prove, that any particular discovery they make in the laboratory will fit with the collected body of scientific knowledge, that somehow all the bits of scientific knowledge are connected and, significantly, that future discoveries can be predicted. 13 Their belief is, then, an inspired madness, the means by which they leap from the ground prepared by dialectic to a decision about what to believe to be true. In support of this movement, P. B. Medawar says that a scientist must read and study the basic subject matter of the field, experiment and observe carefully, and discuss the material with others in the field, in order to "put himself in the way of luck" with regard to scientific discovery and creativity. Blind luck does not play a role because significant indications would be overlooked or misinterpreted (4950). Like Medawar's scientist, the "sane" skills of dialectic put us in the way of an inspired discovery of our "truth" of the issue. Afterward, a de-

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ductive form of dialectic comes into play to verify our truth and to help develop a structure for its reception by others. This explanation of the role of dialectic leaves unexplained the process by which the leap to truth is made possible. Medawar says simply that scientists must rely on an act of creative imagination, likening it to the act of poetic creativity and discounting any possibility that such creativity can be premeditated (52). Weaver's maneuver at this crucial point is similar, and similarly vague. An honest and persistent Socratic dialectic brings one to a moment of "divine madness," of inspiration, through which truth is intuitively realized. It is not to be found only in, or even necessarily at all in, physical objects and experience; neither is it solipsistic or subject to change with changing circumstances. Rather, it exists in a realm transcending empirical observation and analysis, absolute and unchanging. Further, while it can never be clearly understood or fully articulated, it is to some degree apprehensible by all people. Yet we find it inadequate merely to say that the noble rhetorician "is aware of axiological systems which have on tic status," and "has a soul whose perceptions are consonant with a divine mind" (ER 17), and so is able to intuit the truth individually and surely. To understand the process of discovery, one should ask about the nature of that truth that lies beyond what can be discovered by logic alone. Burke offers the suggestion that we "take [Plato's] universals out of heaven and situate them in the human mind (a process begun by Kant), making them not metaphysical but psychological." Not metaphysical certitude, but certitude nonetheless, psychological universals that are transpersonal and transexperiential (Counter-Statement 48, 149-50). Jung's theory of the collective unconscious is also less quaint than the myth of recollected knowledge; it broadens the psychological base of common assumptions, arguing that we share a "potentiality handed down to us from primordial times in the specific form of mnemonic images or inherited in the anatomical structure of the brain." These shared "archetypes" give us commonality, so that "whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring" (817, 818). Not metaphysical certitude yet, but something perhaps analogous. Burke's metabiology expands upon his attempt to find common ground among all people. He holds that social members have similar orientations not only because they share the biological traits of humanity but also because they share social experiences and similar ways of thinking and talking. "We discern situational patterns," Burke contends, "by means of the particular vocabulary of the cultural group into which we are born" (Permanence and Change 14). In fact, we may give more credence to society's orientations than to our own sense of what happened because this metabiological aspect

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is so strong, as for instance, Oedipus's happiness with Jocasta dissolves when he discovers that she is not only his wife but his mother. People wish to identify with their social group and tailor their interpretations to fit communal standards. "Any explanation is an attempt at socialization" (Permanence and Change 24), and since socialization is biologically authorized, that is, "hard-wired" into our makeup, we try to explain our feelings both to ourselves and to others according to communal standards. Metabiology, or the collective unconscious, or the doctrine of knowledge by recollection, is a guarantee that discourse—literature, spacious rhetoric, or other—can speak to all people to some extent because all people share common ground. In a complex modern society, the discourse may have to be fairly "primitive," stripped of markers that for one group of people would trigger one response and for another group trigger another, but the common ground does exist.14 Weaver supports his position on divine madness by referring to Plato's myth of the soul and his doctrine of knowledge by recollection, although he admits it might be considered quaint. But he makes a maneuver similar to Burke's, supplanting the Platonic with the psychological, when he offers his conception of the "metaphysical dream." The metaphysical dream is the "collective consciousness of the group [which] creates a mode of looking at the world or arrives at some imaginative visual bearing. It 'sees' the world metaphorically according to some felt need of the group" (VO 10-11). The noble rhetorician has a mind consonant with divinity (IHC 150; ER 17) and possesses the power to see truth and present it. 15 Since truth is stable and partially perceivable, our political and social attitudes and actions should be guided by it, which means our ethical decisions should be guided by it. Weaver's critical rationalist approach to truth thus would seem to be an improvement on the rhetoric as epistemic movement. For instance, Robert Scott, whose 1967 article is sometimes seen as the beginning of this movement, requires that situational truth consider the "ethical guidelines of toleration, will, and responsibility" ("On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic" 16), and he asserts that these guidelines "have meaning only in a reality that is social" ("On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic: Ten Years Later" 266, emphasis added). As stated in the second chapter, restricting meaning only to what can be socially constructed opens up complexities difficult to reconcile. A number of rhetorical theorists also see these problems. Richard Cherwitz criticizes the complexities generated by this theory and concludes by saying "the claim that rhetoric is epistemic must be markedly attenuated" (219). Richard Fulkerson suggests that epistemic rhetoricians, in the attempt to determine the extent of adherence a truth can claim, insert between mere relativism and transcendentalism an evaluation based on the "quantity and quality of audience adherence." However, as Fulkerson continues, one would have to consider whether this evaluation itself were a good one, thereby launching a continuing regression that can only end by

Rhetorical and Composition Theory 109 re-establishing the transcendental realm (200). Edward Schiappa notes that the price we pay for adhering solely to a socially constructed view of reality is to give up history, and if all history is interpretation, he continues, "then Ronald Reagan's history of the Vietnam War is as reliable as that of Stanley Karnow, and his account of the Iran-Contra Affair is as good as that of Bill Movers." Schiappa then cites Foucault's power/knowledge dynamic and argues, "Eliminate all vestiges of the will-to-truth, and naught but the willto-power remains. If power is all that writes history, then there is no basis for reclaiming marginalized histories, no basis for critiquing establishment narratives, and no basis for curing cultural amnesia about past genocide, misogyny, and racism" (13). A system in power uses whatever is available to stay in power, and providing it with the right to determine history, as well as current affairs and our very reality, gives it enormous potential for harm. Weaver agrees with these observations. "Positivism and relativism," he contends, "may have rendered a certain service as devil's advocates if they have caused us to be more careful about our concepts and predicates, yet their position in net form is untenable. The battle against general propositions [Fulkerson's transcendental realm] was lost from the beginning" (LIS 224). Further, positivism and relativism can lead to social chaos, since the loss of a constraining transcendent system can tempt one not to adhere to Scott's sense of responsibility but rather to see what one can get away with (RC 12); it can also lead, as a corrective to chaos, to a brutal rule by force rather than the application of Scott's toleration (RC 12; IHC 70). Scott contends, on the other hand, that belief in transcendent truth "leads logically to the position that there should be only two modes of discourse: a neutral presenting of data among equals and a persuasive leading of inferiors by the capable" ("On Viewing Rhetoric" 10), with, apparently, the first used for the philosophers' speech among themselves, and the second for their speech to the hoi polloi, that is, recte loqui and utiliter loqui, respectively. However, people who believe they possess some truth, situationally or not, oftentimes will profess their beliefs in one way to their colleagues and in another way to "inferiors." They may believe that their peers can add to or correct their position and so present material in one way; for those unacquainted with the material and ill-equipped to understand it at the expert level, speakers have another goal, best served by another form of presentation. Also, and perhaps less reasonably, people tend to show more respect and deference to their peers than to those they perceive as their inferiors. It must also be said that some epistemic rhetoricians speak and write at times as if they are quite certain of their positions and quite dismissive of conflicting ones (Fulkerson 200-1). Although it is too simple to say that even relativists believe in at least the certain truth of relativism, Weaver cannot ignore the philosophical necessity for some stable ground for relativistic beliefs and the theory that supports those beliefs, for some ground beyond changing situations.16

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Furthermore, Weaver holds theoretically that the noble rhetorician does not have full access to the truths residing in the mind of God, only that those truths exist. The rhetorician is still required to abide by the ethical guidelines of toleration, will, and responsibility in the pursuit of some understanding of these truths, just as Socrates abided by these guidelines in his dialectical pursuit of truth. Thus, Socrates's remark to Phaedrus that Pericles would be gentle in correcting an erring student suggests the dialectician's belief that the true rhetorician does not block thinking and discussion but encourages it. Indeed, in his analysis of the Phaedrus, G. R. F. Ferrari maintains that the dialogue argues not for the assertion of certain truths but for their pursuit and for our necessary reliance on what is probably true. Socrates even remarks to Phaedrus that "an attempt to reach the good is probably good for one" (emphasis added). Weaver admits of the importance of tolerance regarding the opinions of others (LP 60-61; AF 3 4), and while neither Plato nor Weaver is willing to say that an individual can certainly know certain truth, both agree that certain and stable truths do exist and that some people can have more access to them than others (RC 11). Perhaps, given the impossibility of finding metaphysical certitude; or, finding it, of being able to understand it fully; or, understanding it, of being able to communicate it completely—perhaps, given all this, we may need to look elsewhere for what to believe and the extent to which we should hold it as true. The rise of nominalism, Weaver believes, has left "no escape from the relativism of'man the measure of all things/ " and it might have to be accepted that we are the measure—not Nature, not empirical science, not transcendent truth. Perhaps our duty involves, in the words of Wayne Booth, "discovering warrantable beliefs and improving those beliefs through shared discourse" (Modern Dogma xiii). But this chapter is not the place to describe what a "warranted speaking" would entail. We have described dangers in the modern use of rhetoric of which Weaver warns us, pointed out problems Weaver himself introduces in his attempt to overcome these dangers, and showed, despite these problems, how Weaver makes an important contribution to an understanding of rhetoric. He warns us away, forcefully and eloquently, from doing unthinkingly what we are told is "right" or from doing what is immediately and selfishly "useful." His conception of rhetoric as axiological, concerned to restore habits of moral thought and expression essential to a society founded upon traditional humanistic truths, is a step away from the coercion of scientistic dialectic and the blandishments of its sophistic counterpart. This much is a good deal of help. Yet despite Weaver's help in giving us a perspective on the problems of modern rhetorical use, his theory generates some problems of its own. This chapters last section investigates these problems.

Rhetorical and Composition Theory 111 SOME PROBLEMS IMPLICIT IN WEAVER'S RHETORICAL THEORY

Walter H. Beale cites with approval Richard Lanham's remark that "every serious treatment of rhetoric is at least by implication a study of human motivation," and continues to say that "thoughtful treatments and programs of rhetoric . . . are either celebrations of a particular character type and a particular ideal or—at their most engaging moments—attempts to change or rehabilitate both character and culture" (626). Weaver quite clearly celebrates one character and ideal while trying to change another, so as we examine his understanding of rhetoric we should consider also his understanding of character. Beale's observation suggests that rhetorical theorizing can indicate not just what the theorist thinks of rhetoric but much more—what the theorist thinks of a culture and of appropriate activities of the human character. To look at Weaver's rhetorical theory in this way is to follow also Burke's observations about the creative process, which applies even though Burke is speaking especially about "fine literature." Burke says that "a poet will naturally tend to write about that which most deeply engrosses him—and nothing more deeply engrosses a man than his burdens" (Philosophy of Literary Form 17). Further, the writer "dances an attitude" toward these burdens, an attitude that can be deciphered in a manner analogous to how a psychiatrist might decipher the reasons for a person's facial tics. In light of Burke's observations, our question is: What does Weaver celebrate? Certainly he celebrates the existence and practice of noble rhetoric, which, in a definition that encapsulates the problems arising from his theory, he calls "truth plus its artful presentation" (LIS 71). A noble rhetorician must know how to come upon some aspect of the truth, as well as know how to find the available means of persuading an audience to accept it. As we have indicated, this definition of rhetoric suggests that the discovery of truth is prior to rhetoric, that the identification of truth is distinct from its presentation to others. The inclusion of the modifier "artful" creates a further problem: it suggests that the presentation might be manipulative or exploitative, as well as untrue, since if rhetoric consists of truth plus something else, the "something else" must be other than truth. In effect, this definition of rhetoric separates dialectic from presentation and opens the door to abuses of and through rhetoric. The separation of dialectic from presentation also diminishes rhetoric's significance. Rhetoric is bifurcated in Weaver's definition into invention and style, and in practice, rhetoric as a disciplinary activity is limited to the latter. 17 This separation of rhetoric into dialectic and style, apparent in the use of both recte loqui and utiliter loqui, is also apparent in Weaver's own textbook. This separation could be seen as a curricular or administra-

112 The Politics of Rhetoric tive matter, with the textbook becoming a handbook for those who already have something to say and an audience to whom they wish to say it. Yet such a removal would counter Weaver's own eloquent argument for the importance of rhetoric, since the means by which students determine values and ethics, and the means by which they assist in the maintenance of the democracy, are learned elsewhere. Dialectic, having been theoretically separated, can be reintroduced into the classroom but its reintroduction confuses the course of instruction. Weaver's textbook illustrates this confusion. Despite its prefatory statement that students must first have "the topic and the end in view for the writing" (ix), it does not offer the means for finding something to say and a reason for saying it. The result relegates the teaching and study of rhetoric to a mere skills course. The skills of how (not what) to present effectively— how to categorize and organize it, how to validate it logically, how to ornament it—are quite useful in themselves, but they are abstract, neutral, removed from particular events. Thus, for instance, education in dialectic is replaced by education in formal logic, which teaches students to examine arguments already made but does not show them how to develop their own arguments; logic is something they learn in order to apply it after they have a topic, a purpose, and oftentimes, a draft of their argument. Meanwhile, distancing the skills from particular issues and purposes makes advice on using the topics to develop content and on using logic to check reasonableness less helpful than it could be. Since questions are substantively separated from content, students have less occasion to see reasons and methods for adjusting to the recalcitrance of an audience or to actual events. On what basis, a student may ask, can one know what topical material is reasonable and should be kept and used? Good communication is much more than what is indicated by the text because it involves invention in a much richer sense. Thus, Weaver's textbook is limited by its artificial separation of dialectic from rhetoric and the removal of the former from the course of study. Students must somehow, outside the assistance offered by the textbook, find contexts in which they can develop "topic and purpose," so that they can make the abstract skills understandable, practical, and useful. A more serious implication—one that goes beyond poor pedagogy to social danger—is the problem voiced implicitly by Scott and Clark. One who knows the truth and is preparing to present it to others, as distinct from one who presents a contextual, tentative position for examination by others, tends toward manipulation. This latter role is one of the roles of the rhetorician in Perelman's pluralistic state. For Perelman, the state can fulfill its role as the arbiter and guardian of order not through coercion or manipulation, but only by refusing to identify itself with any ideology. It must refrain from granting to any individual or group the exorbitant privilege of setting up a single criterion for what is valid and appropriate. It must respect different individuals and groups, regardless of their ability to

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create or understand metaphysical subtleties, and recognize that the exercise of rights and freedoms may have drawbacks and even cause trouble. "The state's function is not to suppress these liberties, but to moderate their most dangerous excesses" (Perelman, "Philosophy of Pluralism" 6 6 67, 71). At times, Weaver's theory agrees with much of this position. He says, for instance, that "it is wholly unpermissible to censor works of culture for presenting a subject as less attractive than one would like it to be" (LP 22), and while he does allow for censorship "where physical and moral survival raise problems of a more immediate kind" (LP 37), our own country's thorny censorship problems indicate the difficulty in determining threats to moral survival in a pluralistic culture. Further, his theory claims "that a free society is a pluralistic society, that a pluralistic society is one with countless propaganda from many sources, and that coping with propaganda requires a widespread critical intelligence which is largely the product of education" (RR 82)—not censorship, but education. However, this position is directly counter to the role of the rhetorician who already knows the truth and is presenting it to others. In The Republic, Plato saw the role of rhetoric to be for social control—the only means of social control besides coercion for those unable to scale the heights of philosophical disputation and look on truth that way. Some people say that Plato's vision of a political state borders on fascism because he favors the censorship of politically questionable discourse, is ill-disposed to democracy and certainly to universal education, and is uncomfortable with the teaching of rhetoric and the practice of writing. Weaver, if not as repressive as Plato, is still tradition-bound and even reactionary. Since he believes that traditional values should guide one's actions, he sympathizes little with such political and social movements as liberalism, communism, and radical egalitarianism. In the realm of language theory, therefore, he would not sympathize with such recent ideas as rhetoric as epistemic, the indeterminacy of language, and the process theory of composition that holds, in the words of Erika Lindemann, that teachers "cannot be authorities, in the usual sense, transmitting a body of knowledge to students" (259). However, such views as Weaver mentions are what Scott has in mind when he scents the "breath of the fanatic" who is only too willing to engage in the "persuasive leading of inferiors by the capable" ("On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic" 12, 10). Further, his hierarchical position on the possession of knowledge opens up the question of the ethical implications of the communicator. How, for instance, does such a view define "persuasiveness"? Does it allow rhetoric a well-intentioned manipulation of inferiors? To what extent does it allow for deceit—if only "in the best interests of" inferiors? In The Republic, for instance, Plato condones falsehood and deceit by the rulers for the good of the people (Book 5, 459D). In Laws (Book 4, 720-22; Book 10, 855), he says that rhetoric can be used to present a benevolent lie to persuade the

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populace. Is Weaver very far removed from Plato's positions? To what extent might his conception of rhetoric allow for censoring what is deemed untrue and dangerous to the polity? The answers lie to some extent in Weaver's perception of language's relationship to human nature and to knowledge. Unfortunately, Weaver is not clear about how we can know the truth. As Johannesen, Strickland, and Eubanks note: "What the ultimate Good was and how it is known through intuition, Weaver never really made clear. What comprised his ultimate Good was likewise unclear" (LIS 12). Part of the problem is that, even in Weaver's view, truth is unobtainable, something to strive for but not to attain. Perhaps poets' legislative function is unacknowledged not simply because no poet has the artistic grace to make truths appealing to all but also because their intellects and experiences limit the way in which truth is perceived. Weaver refers to the quality of "spaciousness" in rhetoric both as the "resonances" that truth has and as the "opacity" of its presentation, as including both content and style (ER 169, 175). Setting aside the issue of one's ability to present truths artistically, there remains the issue of one's ability to perceive the truth: the fact is, Weaver admits that the truth cannot be clearly, unambiguously perceived. While ideal forms exist in the transcendent realm, we limited humans can only perceive and create lesser versions here on earth. 18 For Plato and for Weaver, as well as for the Christian ethos within which Weaver places himself, there exists an eternal truth that, due to the limitations of this world, we cannot perceive clearly or fully, and may misperceive. Thus, despite a "pipeline to the gods," the intellect and set of experiences of the noble rhetorician invariably filter and, to an extent, distort the truth. Furthermore, while the audience shares with the speaker a metaphysical dream—or a collective unconscious, a recollection of the realm of ideas, or a kinship through God in heaven—societal fragmentation and the specialization of knowledge increase the possibility that they will not share the speaker's perception of truth. Despite what remains of their awareness of the culture's metaphysical dream of the culture they may see the speaker's "divinely inspired truth" as no more than personal truth, and no more valid. Many people have perceptions about truth that conflict with those of their fellows, and some people are even inspired by "intimations of divine approval" to take socially unpleasant actions. Henry David Thoreau, for one, held that he should not resign his conscience either to the government or to majority opinion when he had divine approval, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, says Weaver, also claimed authority from divine approval. Attacking these Transcendentalists, Weaver says that the former lacked the sense that individual rights are secured only within and through a social context (LP 71), and that the latter is guilty of an "arrogant egotism" that seems to say, "What I am doing is right because I am the one who is doing it" (SE 52).

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Weaver claims to ground his inspired truth in social contexts and cultural traditions, a benefit to understanding since at least we all are familiar with them and understand them. In general, people agree with the truth of the statement that "life and the world are to be cherished" (IHC 19). And people can also agree with his sentiment that we should favor the stability of tradition, meanings, and values, provided they can be altered in the face of good reasons. But, as Chapter 3 makes clear, the particulars of his vision of the transcendent realm of truth have problems, as do his means of discovering truth—his belief in divine approval, his "arrogant egotism." These problems reveal a difficulty in distinguishing between base rhetoric and noble rhetoric. Johannesen, Strickland, and Eubanks point out that "Weaver fails to explain how a critic may determine whether a given line of argument is a metaphysical choice reflecting a speaker's philosophical stance or an 'artful' choice necessitated by the practicalities of audience adaptation" (LIS 26-27). For example, he says that a base rhetorician would "dress up one alternative in all the cheap finery of immediate hopes and fears, knowing that if he can thus prevent a masculine exercise of imagination and will, he can have his way" (ER 12). This rhetorician uses "exaggeration" and "caricature" (ER 19), and "takes advantage of his hearers by playing upon their feelings and imaginations. He overs tresses the importance of his topics by puffing them up, dwelling on them in great detail, using an excess of imagery or of modifiers evoking the senses, and so on" (LIS 218). The noble rhetorician, however, uses not caricature but "prophecy" (ER 19-20), not exaggeration but emphasis or amplification (LIS 217). The use of the latter Weaver defends by saying that making an action animated and a scene vivid merely adds the emotions to the reason for the better moving of the will. Yet, caricature for one person is prophecy for another, and exaggeration for one is noble amplification for another. Weaver attempts to differentiate base from noble rhetoric and exaggeration and caricature from acceptable amplification and vividness by analyzing Daniel Webster's speech for the prosecution in the murder trial of John Francis Knapp. Webster, Weaver contends, engages in "actualizing for the jury the scene of the murder as he has constructed it from circumstantial evidence" (LIS 218). While some people, Weaver admits, feel that such dramatization too much affects the emotions to the detriment of intellectual judgment, we simply cannot avoid the participation of emotions in our deliberations and, in fact, must employ such appeals if we are to make our case. In this way Weaver endorses Webster's use of rhetoric. In theory the point makes sense and is similar to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's notion of "presence" (New Rhetoric 115-20): something present to the consciousness assumes thereby importance, and Antony's waving of Caesar's bloody tunic, or the accused traitor's showing scars he received in his nation's wars, or the young child's little red wagon illustrate the concept. In practice, though, it is sometimes

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difficult to differentiate between noble amplification and the "exaggeration," the "caricature," the "cheap finery" of the base rhetorician. The difficulty is in fact apparent in Weaver's analysis of Webster's speech. Webster reconstructs the murderer's heinous attack on his sleeping victim, claiming at the end of the passage Weaver quotes that he got away cleanly: "The secret is his own, and it is safe!" (LIS 219). Actually, John Crowenshield, the man whom the Knapp brothers hired to commit the murder, committed suicide in prison. John Francis Knapp was on trial for hiring the murderer and aiding in the commission of the crime, and his brother Joseph was to be tried as an accessory. Webster needed to demonstrate John Francis Knapp's involvement in the crime and therefore emphasized the careful planning and the window that had been deliberately opened for the murderer to enter, presumably for Crowenshield. Thus, the amplification Webster used to get the audience beyond the "cold and unmoved" state in which the facts alone might leave them was effective, but it exceeded the facts of the case to establish John Francis Knapp's complicity, since he was neither the murderer nor even in the room when the murder was committed. Knapp was hung, in part because of Webster's keen ability to visualize the murder scene for the jury and also because of Webster's immense prestige. However, Weaver does not tell us that John Francis Knapp was the author of the murder but not the murderer, thereby leaving the impression that Webster merely described Knapp's own actions with rhetorical vividness. When we also know that the case against Knapp was built upon circumstantial evidence, it is even more difficult to see Weaver's example as somehow different in kind from those he ascribes to base rhetoricians. 19 Weaver also seems guilty of a few instances of base rhetoric in his celebration of political conservatism, since the charge that the base rhetorician "seeks to keep the understanding in a passive state by never permitting an honest examination of alternatives" (ER 12) can be leveled at him. For instance, he offers the following: "We must avoid, however, the temptation of trying to teach virtue directly, a dubious proceeding at any time and one under special handicaps in our day." Following his own advice, apparently, he argues for the transcendentalist position and against the materialist by appealing to the right of private property—what he calls the last metaphysical right but what some might see as the first materialist right (IHC 13031). He also maintains that the return to principles espoused by the antebellum South would restore the "moral and aesthetic medium" of modern society. Yet he decides that those who try to bring these principles back into favor should not employ "symbols of lost causes. There cannot be a return to the Middle Ages or the Old South under slogans identified with them. The principles must be studied and used, but in such presentations that mankind will feel the march is forward" (STB 394-95). This strategy is manipulative in that it encourages adherents of Weaver's position to pre-

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sent reactionary positions in ways that makes them look progressive. In fact, the manipulation is condemned by Weaver himself in another context when, speaking of "rhetorical prevarication," he says, "The users do not fall back on the excuse that reality has changed and that verbal usage must change with it; they simply take the word out of one context and put it in another in order to advance an ideological point of view" (LIS 135). While one might say that Weaver is only urging adherents to "speak the language of the tribe," as Burke encouraged the participants of the 1935 American Writer's Congress to exchange the term proletariat for the more honorific people, one might perhaps more accurately say that he urges adherents to mislead the public, because he and they know what is good for the rest of the country. Apart from this advice, Weaver employs in his own practical rhetoric a number of examples of exaggeration and caricature. How else shall one describe his statement that liberal professors are less interested in the structure of reality than in supporting and promulgating Marxist theory (AF 8)? Certainly he must admit to exaggeration, in that this description does not include all liberal professors, and he also should confess to his caricature of liberals as ideological and conservatives as not so. He does admit, when theorizing, that "every use of speech, oral or written, exhibits an attitude"—whether the use is by a liberal or a conservative (LIS 221). Indeed, theoretically he denies the existence of objective discourse, whether practiced by pure dialecticians (VO 57), social scientists (LIS 145), public information officers (ER 22; IHC 100), or anyone else. In the pamphlet on academic freedom, he charges the professoriate with an "almost vituperative hostility" toward the McCarthy era House Committee on Un-American Activities, "despite the almost unanimous support of this committee by the membership of the House, the people's elected representatives" (AF 10). However, some congressmen were clearly not in favor of this committee, which, as Weaver certainly should have known at the time, was muzzling free speech and blackballing opposition—hardly appropriate for the ends of noble rhetoric. Finally, Weaver celebrates a view of education that places "capable" teachers and "inferior" students in a clear hierarchical relationship. As Weaver says: "By what arrogance do we set ourselves up as teachers? There are two postulates basic to our profession: the first is that one man can know more than another, and the second is that such knowledge can be imparted. Whoever cannot accept both should retire from the profession and renounce the intention of teaching anyone anything" (LIS 194). Weaver believes that teachers, and perhaps especially teachers of rhetoric, can and should teach truth. Goodnight argues that Weaver's classroom lectures and his numerous talks to the Chicago writing staff, the English department, and various professional and social groups prove that he attempts to make the classroom a place where students can develop critical thinking skills

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and try out alternative positions (655). But despite Goodnight's protestations, Weaver's theory does argue for teachers' authority in the classroom, and it seems to him that a true dialectic between teacher and student is not possible or at least not desirable. For instance, he says that teachers "know what things really are," and that despite the difficulty of getting people "to admit the possibility of objective truth," teachers still are "charged with the awful responsibility of telling a younger generation the true names of things" (LIS, 194-96). In two letters to Donald Davidson that refer to the article in which this quotation appears, he notes the "consternation among the brethren" that it caused and tells Davidson "there is no doubt in my mind about the essential Tightness of the position." This position is of a piece with his condemnation of Dewey's statement that it is more important to make maps than to read them, which Weaver says means that activity is more important than thinking (VO 126). It seems, though, that Dewey means we must act, take personal control of and responsibility for our actions, rather than be moved by the dead hand of tradition. We cannot say that Weaver was an authoritarian in his class, but we do say that a rhetoric divorced from dialectic opens the door for such authoritarianism. It removes truths constructed through a communal dialectic and replaces them with what the teacher holds to be received truth. It makes the teacher believe that she or he is the capable preacher to the inferior. And it appears to disagree with Plato's statement at the end of the Phaedrus that suggests students do not gain knowledge by passively "learning" through book or lecture but make knowledge through the thinking carried out in a dialectic among equals. 20 As we have said, Weaver holds in theory that rhetoric helps students engage in "the 'continuing debate' which is democracy" (RCWR vii), yet in practice he disallows it. He calls the "education for democracy" movement "totalitarian radicalism," claiming that its proponents have as their aim "the educationally illicit one of conditioning the young for political purposes" (VO 132; see also RE 617). Again, he suggests that only his opponents are guilty of ideological bias: Dewey is wrong to say that education is primarily political, since "an education in the student's cultural tradition is not political; in fact it is the only kind of education that does not presume political ends" (RE 616-17). If the various attacks on, for instance, the literary canon have argued for anything, they have argued that all education, even the traditional education in English departments of the "great books," is ideological. Just as we must suspect those who "ask us to place our faith in the neutrality of their discourse" (ER 22), so must we suspect those who ask us to believe in the neutrality of education. CONCLUSION Weaver offers much to the fields of rhetoric and composition. He encourages the centrality of argument, he argues for the importance of the

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topics and other tools of invention, and he provides sound advice on stylistic matters. Most importantly, he reintroduces into rhetorical study and practice an emphasis on ethics, which had been de-emphasized by the pursuit of an objective discourse unconcerned with the speaker or the audience, and by the pursuit of a manipulative rhetoric concerned only with aggrandizing the speaker at the expense of the audience. He asks us to consider the importance of an ethical approach to rhetoric, including such issues as the rhetor's responsibility to search for a truth shared with the audience, the appropriate goal of rhetorical practice, and the responsibility of the teacher of rhetoric. However, whereas his theory provides us with a great deal of value, his development is problematic, and in two ways. First, it is not necessary, as argued in the second chapter, to limit an ethical rhetoric to one that supports absolute truths; in fact, an ethical rhetoric ought to be concerned with a rhetorician's responsibility toward the audience—not only insofar as the audience should be presented with the truth as the rhetorician sees it, but also, and more importantly, insofar as the rhetorician ought to attempt to present truth that has been constructed in concert with the audience. Second, in his practical application of his theory—in his rhetorica utens as opposed to his rhetorica docens—Weaver loses sight of his lofty goals in an attempt to support his own personal or political position at the cost of some portion of his credibility. In proverbial terms, he asks us to do as he says, not as he does. In part this result comes from his decision, despite his long career in education, not to center his cultural drama on the teacher. Rather, the lawmaker, a political philosopher, takes center stage. The shift from educational emphasis to political emphasis, by putting the politician in charge, puts rhetoric in a potentially subordinate role, if its effective use is not as a goal of public action but as a tool for political action. In part the choice is determined by one's political philosophy. Weaver's conservatism is not only the dialectical opposite of liberalism but its ultimate opposite as well, a god term to liberalism's devil term. While his work is full of implicit and explicit statements about the bad state of rhetoric under liberalism, we have tried to offer a different story. We have tried to suggest that conservatism offers a greater threat to rhetoric's standing, and we believe this is so because conservatism understands the threat that a fully developed and practiced rhetoric holds for it. Our reading has been predicated in part on Weaver's conservative stance toward the relationship of rhetoric to knowledge: knowledge is not constructed through language but only discovered through it, and then only partly so. Language is primarily a tool for the transfer of knowledge—either "objectively" or "manipulatively." His vere loqui becomes a means for teaching or persuading audiences to understand or at least accept their received truth. In Weaver's words, it "seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves" (ER 25). The political liberal does not

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accept such a relationship and is more likely to hold that knowledge arises out of a rhetorical exchange between empowered members of the social group. Believing in a philosophy of progressive improvement, the liberal uses rhetoric to learn about the group's values, traditions, and laws but also to evaluate them and keep a healthy balance between the stability gained through adherence to them and the change necessary to fit them to modern situations and to fit modern situations to them. The liberal allows for and even encourages changes to improve conditions. Certainly, rhetoric can be misused in a liberal society; the excesses of recte loqui and utiliter loqui illustrate as much, and Schiappa's comments, discussed above, suggest how in a liberal atmosphere rhetoric in pursuit of knowledge can be replaced by rhetoric in pursuit of power. However, rhetoric is primarily useful in developing the critical thinking necessary for analysis and in administering the dialogue of social analysis and evaluation to create the democratically constructed frame for reality that best abides critiques and changes. Therefore, liberals study rhetoric. The conservative knows the group's values, traditions, and laws, and strongly adheres to them. Theoretically, the conservative believes that rhetoric is required because we are symbol-using animals (LIS 224); because it helps to maintain a healthy balance between status and function, traditions and their refinements (see for instance VO 22-39; AF 3-7); and because it is a traditionally important discipline. On these grounds it is worthy of study and effective use. The Greeks thought rhetoric important, and it has almost always been considered important to good thinking. Therefore, conservatives study rhetoric. Ironically, however, this sort of rhetoric sows the seeds of dissent in a conservative climate, since developing its component of dialectic allows for its use against the traditional way of seeing and doing (see STB 108). This was, of course, the problem Socrates brought to the Athenians. 21 As an alternative to this threat, the tendency is to put rhetoric into the service not of improving society but of maintaining it. Plato's Republic envisions this role for it and, as we have attempted to show in the closing section of this chapter, in such a role it is often employed by Weaver. The conflict between rhetoric as agent for empowerment and rhetoric as sustainer of the status quo comes when Weaver turns to teaching. Teachers can use rhetoric to empower students: They can help students see that their rhetorical statements are partial interpretations, inherently provisional and ideological; they can help students see that the knowledge they construct and the actions they take should be products of negotiation, socially constructed and determined through shared conversation among societal members; they can help students see that communication must therefore be democratic, with active participation of all the guarantee of democratic results; and they can help students see that such a democratic rhetoric must be at the center of a "publicly constitutive, personally liber-

Rhetorical and Composition Theory 121 ating education" (Clark 67).22 The better this kind of rhetoric is taught, the better students are equipped to take responsibility for their actions and their society's actions, and the better they are equipped to challenge and change the status quo. The conservative teacher may decide that, for the sake of the traditional culture, rhetoric must be turned from its educational goals and toward the political end of sustaining the status quo. This much Weaver does. There remains a final and formidable question: Does Weaver practice his theory? Goodnight argues that Weaver takes on various roles, of lawgiver, teacher, and hero; he also says that the hero must take a position and argue it to its ultimate end, must—as Burke would say—show that the position is worth dying for. Yet as a hero, as well as a lawmaker, Weaver's extreme attacks make Goodnight ask "whether he was in any way committed to dialectical study" (649). We think he is, when he presents himself as the teacher: he shows himself committed to dialectic as well as to rhetoric, and to showing a balanced vision of the self that includes truth as well as its artful presentation. Yet it seems to be poor teaching, in that an observant student sees that the master does not practice what he teaches; in fact, he condones the use of what he condemns in theory, and anyone who has been persuaded by his theory to see a difference between a noble and a base rhetoric now sees him using the latter. Weaver remarks that the South lost the Civil War because it was unwilling to act other than in accordance with its principles. He applauds its decision as much nobler than letting the goal of victory lead to unethical behavior. As suggested in the third chapter, his analysis of the southern cause is flawed, but this position is ethically sound: the ends should not justify the means. Yet in his own practice of rhetoric, he lets ends justify means: he lets the goals of political conservatism determine the extent to which and manner in which rhetoric will be used. Can society condone a rhetoric that is charged with the ethical responsibility to develop people's critical perception, regardless of where that perception might take them and society? Either Weaver has created a theory that he cannot put into practice, and that no one can, or he knows what is right but cannot choose it in the face of its overwhelming threat to his cause. For the sake of the possibility of an ethical society, we opt for the second choice. NOTES 1. Wayne Booth, in a conversation with one of the authors, recalls that Weaver had wanted the Chicago faculty to contribute chapters to a book on rhetoric and composition; unfortunately, Booth said, only one other professor knew enough to contribute. 2. John Bliese says this category of argument is introduced in "Two Types of American Individualism" ("Richard Weaver's Axiology" 286).

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3. Lawrence Green, working from a practical more than a philosophical position, ranks consequence ahead of definition because the former gives a clearer sense of movement to an argument, and the latter can be perceived as unduly sensationalist. The discussion of fair and unfair sensationalism is taken up later in this chapter. 4. Weaver offers elsewhere another description of descent—from philosophic doctor, to gentleman, to specialist—that to our minds corresponds (IHC 61). 5. Plato and Cicero make similar points in the Phaedrus (266-72) and the De Oratore (Book 3, xix). The problems are analogous to those Aristotle wishes to resolve by changing the teaching of rhetoric from imitation of methods and forms in particular contexts to a systematic study of the discipline (Art of Rhetoric, Book 1, i). See also LIS 208. 6. In Lila, Robert Pirsig uses anthropology to dramatize this problem. He describes Franz Boas's anthropology as based on logical positivism and Boas's adherents as existing behind an "inner wall of prejudice," holding that patterns of culture operate according to the laws of physics (51, 53). They deny the existence of values, even though values "provide the only basis for fully intelligible comprehension of culture because the actual organization of all cultures is primarily in terms of their values" (58). 7. Kenneth Burke notes that writing does not reflect reality; we necessarily select aspects of reality and strategies of presentation based on our interests and thereby deflect any representation of "objective" reality (Language as Symbolic Action 45). 8. These rhetorical strategies are analogous to perversions that Weaver sees as the result of modernism's influence on literature. Recte loqui and utiliter loqui abdicate responsibilities, as do, theoretically, literary naturalism and transcendentalism. 9. Whereas these quotations come from Weaver's exegesis of Plato's Phaedrus, we believe that they represent not just his opinion of Plato's position but his own position. 10. From the context of the human faculties, positive terms are limited to the cognitive, dialectic terms extend to the ethical, and ultimate terms include the religious faculty. 11. This subversiveness is in addition to its ability to be engaged in what Perelman calls eristic and critical dialogue—pushing of one's position despite the quality of an interlocutor's ideas, and attacking another's ideas despite one's own. Perelman terms the useful form "dialectical dialogue." (See "Dialectical Method" 164-65.) 12. For a discussion of this distinction in composition instruction generally, see Gage, "On the Relations between Invention and Pre Writing," and Gage, "Why Write?" 13. In "Systematic Wonder: The Rhetoric of Secular Religions" (690-91), Booth develops this line of argument at length. 14. The young man in Achebe's No Longer at Ease reads The Heart of the Matter much differently from his European supervisor; he says first that the book has a "happy ending" but then qualifies: "Perhaps happy ending is too strong, but there is no other way I can put it. The police officer is torn between his love of a woman and his love of God, and he commits suicide. It's much too simple. Tragedy isn't like that at all" (43). The different reading may result from cultural difference, or

Rhetorical and Composition Theory 123 modernist fragmentations, or merely differences among individuals. In any event, in his alternative reading he cites Auden, who argues that some people think that the great gesture is less tragic than an event, taking place in an untidy corner out of the way, that makes of life "a bowl of wormwood which one sips a little at a time world without end" (43-44). 15. Weaver's description is comparable to Eliot's catalyst theory, which maintains that the artist, filled with experiences and opinions, undergoes a process whereby these "data" merge into a truth greater than the parts, making possible Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of the world" (Selected Essays 7-8; see also 247). 16. Stanley Fish asserts that philosophers who simplify relativism in this way do not understand it. Relativists, or what he calls anti-foundationalists, do not say that there are no foundations, only that they are established by persuasion and are cultural and contextual, and that they must make their way against objections and counter-examples (Doing What Comes Naturally 29-30). 17. Cicero blames such bifurcation on Socrates, who caused "that divorce, as it were, of the tongue from the heart, a division certainly absurd, useless, and reprehensible, that one class of persons should teach us to think, and another to speak, rightly" (De Oratore, Book 3, vi). Also, Ramus and Talon are accused of demoting rhetoric to mere style. 18. Analogously, Jung notes the ambiguity of the archetypes and the impossibility of "any unilateral formulation" ("Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" 230). 19. Information on this trial can be found in Craig R. Smith's Defender of the Union: The Oratory of Daniel Webster (22-23). 20. We mention again Socrates' insistence in the Thaeatetus that he does not teach students; he only facilitates their making of knowledge. We also note in passing that Weaver should have seen problems with what James Berlin calls "current-traditional" rhetoric and benefits of a process-oriented approach. Perhaps he was not involved in the advent of the "process approach" because his philosophical preference for "being" over "becoming" militates against the process approach's insistence on the continual "becoming" of a student's writing, and because bifurcating dialectic and presentation encourages the single-draft approach. 21. Bruce McComiskey points out that during the tyranny of the Thirty in Athens, instruction in rhetoric was forbidden, because Critias and the other oligarchic rulers thought that rhetorical prowess would empower those people without wealth and high birth. McComiskey argues that Plato, who like Critias was Socrates' student, casts rhetoric in such a bad light because he favored a conservative oligarchy over a liberal democracy (80-81). 22. Such concepts as "education for democracy" and "liberatory education" promote rhetoric as an agent for social improvement. See Clark (61-72) and Jarratt (98-112).

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6 Science, Metaphysics, and Sectional

Culture

Science and scientism are frequent targets of Richard Weaver's social criticism. The negative impact of science and technology upon society has become a familiar theme found in the work of a broad spectrum of intellectuals and social critics, ranging from such liberals as Herbert Marcuse, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Kenneth Burke to such conservatives as James Burnham, Friedrich von Hayek, and Richard Weaver. Although many of the arguments Weaver makes are also expressed by other critics, the uniqueness of his statement rests in his perspective, which reflects both his southern identity and his intellectual conservatism. Throughout Weaver's writings one finds a critique not only of science and technology but of the pervasiveness of scientific thinking in general American culture. Weaver consistently expressed his dislike of the modernist culture that science had ushered in. It underminded the settled values of the agrarian society he saw as the mainstay of conservative America. The social commitment to science had unfolded in empiricism, pragmatism, logical positivism, materialism, and economic and social scientific interpretations of man. At the same time it leveled regional distinctions based upon cultural sentiment and custom. Weaver associated scientific society with the rise of socialism and modern liberalism, which looked toward the improvements that could be made to the material circumstances of the masses while blithely ignoring traditional spiritual concerns. To his way of thinking, modernist culture threatened the triumph of thing over idea, perception over cognition, fact over proposition, logic over sentiment, and physics over metaphysics. Weaver was more confident of the values that derived from the agrarian setting of the nineteenth century than he was of the new cultural values that science had promoted. He shared with Thomas

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Jefferson a profound faith in the individual uprightness of the farmer, yet felt none of Jefferson's enthusiasm for scientific and technological innovation. He believed the American South to be the last stronghold against modernism: While the old sources of power and self confidence were being weakened by debunking and scientific investigation, it [the South] clung to the belief that man is not saved by science alone, that myths and sentiments are part of the constitution of a nation, and that poetry ultimately decides more issues than economics. In the choice that had to be made its voice was perhaps decisive; and the choice was between a world illuminated by religious and poetical concepts made human by respect for personality, and a world of materialism and technology, of an ever greater feeding of the physical man, which is nihilism (SE 188). In "Dialectic and Rhetoric at Dayton Tennesee," Weaver evaluates the proper role of science in society and reveals his attitudes toward science as a source of social change. He argues the case of the prosecution, defending the idea that the state government has the right to make a law that prevents the dissemination of scientific knowledge about evolution in the public schools. Science, he insists, ought not to be its own master. The facts and theories of science must be controlled by the society, no less than society should determine the morality of using the instruments of modern warfare. Weaver offers the Scopes trial as a peculiarly telling example of how Platonic rhetoric, which he interprets as rhetoric informed by a preceding dialectic, is superior to its opposite, the "mere rhetoric" Plato lambasted in the Gorgias. He interprets the trial as a contest between a dialectical position and a rhetoric that perversely employed scientific factuality as if it were an ultimate argument and a substitute for moral reasoning. Weaver maintains that the spheres of science and rhetoric are separate. He objects eloquently to what he regards as a sacrilegious conception—the idea that science could be made to replace dialectic or dialectical rhetoric. The idea that the general culture's faith in and commitment to science could overturn a state's policy against the teaching of evolution is simply incompatible with Weaver's world view. In his mind, the Scopes trial exemplifies the undermining of dialectic and philosophical rhetoric in an era of mass public enthusiasm for science. Viewed from a different perspective, it is a manifestation of Weaver's deep faith in traditional southern culture, his belief in the role of philosophical speculation in establishing cultural purpose, and his commitment to dialectical rhetoric as a means of edifying the people and leading them to right action. Weaver's interpretation of the rhetoric of the Scopes trial can be read as a philosophical justification for a public policy of religious prejudice. To correct what he sees as an encroachment upon the prerogatives of a re-

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gional and religious subculture in American society, he fosters a confusion about the nature of dialectic and rhetoric. He makes it appear that he chooses to discuss the Scopes trial simply because it is a peculiarly good example for a point he wishes to make about dialectic and rhetoric. But this is undoubtedly a bit of subterfuge to enhance the credibility of his analysis. The trials significance for Weaver exceeds by far its usefulness in providing examples of dialectic and rhetoric. Weaver, it must be remembered, was an apologist for southern traditions and mores and for the ideas of the Southern Agrarians that had influenced him at Vanderbilt. For those who know Weavers devotion to his agrarian mentors, it is not difficult to see why he would take up the gauntlet laid down by the northern press in its reporting of the Scopes trial and attempt to defend the South against its Yankee detractors. In an essay on the Southern Agrarians Weaver claims that the "Scopes 'anti-evolution' trial . . . was the decisive factor in turning the Nashville group against scientific rationalism" (SE 37). In a letter to his friend, Southern Agrarian Donald Davidson, Weaver, after attempting to excuse his praise elsewhere in The Ethics of Rhetoric for the principled argumentation of Abraham Lincoln, told Davidson that his Scopes trial chapter would "show where I really stand" (DDP). Even without such documentary evidence of Weaver's motivations, the essay itself reveals that Weaver's stance against the defense's rhetoric in the Scopes trial was occasioned by sectional interests as well as philosophical and theoretical ones. Moreover, it is apparent that Weaver saw it as a means to pay homage to the Southern Agrarians. In this light it becomes clear why Weaver goes to such lengths to find the logic in the state's position. His analysis is aimed at rewriting history in the interests of a better outcome than history provided. If Weaver were a poet he might have been inspired to write an ode to the right of Tennessee to outlaw the teaching of evolution. Instead, because he is a rhetorician, he finds rhetorical and philosophical principles to defend the argumentation of the state and to denigrate the argumentation for the defense. This is not to say that Weaver is ultimately more interested in the particular instance than in the general conclusions he draws from it; on the contrary, the weight of Weaver's philosophy supports the preeminent importance of the universal. Weaver's examination of the argumentation of the Scopes trial provides confirmation for what he believes are uni-

versal principles about the role of dialectic, rhetoric, and science in society.

It is not difficult to understand why Weaver would have chosen to consider the Scopes trial, quite apart from the nature of its argumentation. Perhaps more than any other event since the Civil War, the trial shaped a national perspective on the modern South. Like the Civil War the Scopes trial defended an institution at the point of its manifest untenability. It fixed the image of the rural South as doggedly resisting the enticements of

modernism in favor of an archaic system of values. The trial was more than

simply a test case on the teaching of evolution; it was a litmus test of the

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durability and tenacity of religious tradition in the face of scientific theory where the urban, industrial, and technologically advanced North was clearly identified with Darwinism and the rural and agricultural South with religious fundamentalism. Exploited by the national press, the event riveted public attention and underscored the cultural chasm that separated North and South. The Scopes trial was a last-ditch effort to defend the old ways from the encroachment of the new. It was a dramatic confrontation between larger-than-life figures, among them William Jennings Bryan, one of the last silver-tongued orators, and Clarence Darrow, the "attorney for the damned." It was a contest between the Cod of our forefathers and the new creed of science and progress. Weaver uses his understanding of the nature and cultural roles of dialectic, science, and rhetoric to reconsider the argumentation of the Scopes trial. In "Dialectic and Rhetoric at Dayton Tennessee," he takes the position that there is not only an essential difference between the facts and theories of science and dialectical propositions, but that dialectical propositions are more significant. Science, he suggests, is not an independent institution, but is subordinate to the will of the public. Thus, a dialectical proposition might reject on moral grounds the value of a particular scientific notion, as was the case in Tennessee when the legislature determined that the theory of evolution should not be taught in the public schools. Weaver would also have us believe that the status of science in society is, and should be, purely a matter of public evaluation. Using his analysis of the Phaedrus as a point of departure, Weaver asserts his conviction that rhetoric must make the audience see how the dialectical truth relates to "the world of prudential conduct" (ER 27-28). Echoing Plato, Weaver declares that dialectic must precede rhetoric, if rhetoric is to be "honest" (ER 25). Dialectic, according to Weaver, is "an intellectual thing," in which opposites are posited, producing "dry understanding"; rhetoric, on the other hand, presents an argument for one of the contraries (ER 21). In Visions of Order, he explains that "dialectic is abstract reasoning upon the basis of propositions; rhetoric is the relation of the terms of these to the existential world in which facts are regarded with sympathy and are treated with the kind of historical understanding and appreciation which lie outside of the dialectical process" (56). Dialectic, in Weaver's view, transcends the actual world. In his analysis of the Phaedrus, Weaver identifies dialectic with pure logic, rationality, and neutrality. Dialectic supplies the "logical positions," while rhetoric attempts to actualize the possibilities that dialectic provides. He allocates to rhetoric the Platonic function of "giving wings to truth," or, as he says in Language Is Sermonic, of providing the actualization that logic by itself cannot produce (217). Weaver's understanding of the relationship of dialectic to rhetoric is problematical. First, one wonders how Weaver regards rhetorical inven-

Science, Metaphysics, and Sectional Culture 129 tion, for according to his analysis, it would seem to be simply a process of looking for arguments in the structure of the dialectic that preceded it. Without a preceding dialectic there would seem to be no basis for rhetorical invention. It is central to Weaver's conception that "there is, then, no true rhetoric without dialectic, for the dialectic provides that basis of high speculation about nature' without which rhetoric in the narrower sense has nothing to work upon." Thus, one ought not to invent arguments simply on the basis of what an audience might be willing to accept; all genuine rhetorical arguments must originate in dialectical truth (ER 17). The rest are simply sophistic in that they make no claim to presenting a resemblance of the truth but rely only on appearance. The role Weaver accords rhetoric is that of making people believe the truth and act upon it, something that dialectic alone cannot do, as Plato concludes in the Phaedrus when he has a personified rhetoric proclaim: "Without me, even the man who is thoroughly familiar with the facts will be not a bit nearer to the art of persuasion" (ER 28; Phaedrus 260d). A second problem is that Weaver attempts to find confirmation of the superiority of dialectical rhetoric over sophistic rhetoric in a historical incident remembered more for its displays of passion than its invocation of logic. His application of his position on dialectic and rhetoric to the Scopes trial is procrustean, since Platonic dialectic and the social dialectic that occurred in the Tennessee state legislature are vastly different. There are times in the essay when Weaver confuses dialectic with an agreement upon moral principles, no matter how unexamined; Plato, on the other hand, saw dialectic as a means of achieving an understanding superior to that embodied in the opinions of the market place. The Tennessee legislature did not provide for a level of debate approaching the method of logical inquiry Plato supported. It is Weaver who articulates the dialectic that he claims the prosecution is supporting. He recognizes the logic in the prosecution's position because he agrees with it. Like the prosecution, he is convinced of the importance of the public conscience and the sovereignty of the state legislature over education in the public schools. Weaver would doubtless agree with Alcuin's pronouncement that the "voice of the people is the voice of God." Throughout his essay Weaver moves facilely between two senses of dialectic—social dialectic and dialectic as a process of logical inquiry that aims at arriving at truth. To most northern observers the Tennessee antievolution act was simply an affirmation of the prejudices of the state's fundamentalists, but Weaver perceives in the act a philosophical legitimacy and accords it an approbation that is not justified by the prosecutions actual argumentation. Weaver argues for the preeminence of the social dialectic and in a second step argues that the prosecution presented its position with philosophical correctness. But it is Weaver who supplies the philosophical underpinnings of the state's position, and it often seems that

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he is creating or at least idealizing the state's rationale rather than simply interpreting it. His thesis is that the trial was paradoxical in its argumentation. According to Weaver, "The remarkable aspect of this trial was that almost from the first the defense, pleading the cause of science, was forced into the role of rhetorician; whereas the prosecution pleading the cause of the state, clung stubbornly to a dialectical position" (ER 30). Weaver sees in the forensic dispute "a unique alignment of dialectical and rhetorical positions," maintaining that the prosecution's argumentation had dialectic to commend it, while the defense's argumentation relied solely upon rhetoric. Weaver would like us to see two kinds of rhetoric, the noble and the base, the dialectical and the sophistic; that is, rhetoric armed with and in the service of social truth and rhetoric that aims merely to be ingenious and effective. In naming the defense's role that of "rhetorician," Weaver is as much as saying it was that of mere rhetorician, or base rhetorician, while the prosecution's rhetoric was sanctified by its identification with dialectic. Weaver would have us see a contest between the dialectical position he claims for the prosecution and the rhetorical one he says the defense had to use because it was unable to counter the prosecution's dialectic. There are several errors in Weaver's analysis. The first is his assumption that there is but one dialectical position that controls the issue of whether or not evolution should be taught—the position embraced by the prosecution. The second is his assumption that the dialectical position supported by the prosecution somehow bathed its rhetoric with an ethical sanction that the

argumentation of the defense could not attain. The final error is Weaver's characterization of the prosecution's rhetoric almost solely in terms of its dialectical position, rather than in terms of its emotionally charged rhetoric. Weaver's analysis misses the mark because it examines the Scopes trial largely from the point of view of the prosecution and, then, largely from its legal position. His analysis is self-sealing; it confirms his presumption that the prosecution, not the defense, spoke from a position of ethical right. Weaver fails to perceive that the defense appealed to cultural assumptions about the role of science that constituted a dialectical position beyond the one he identifies in the rhetoric of the prosecution. In sum, the prosecution did not have a corner on dialectic and the defense used rhetoric no more than did the prosecution. Weaver promotes the idea of the rhetorician as the guardian of public belief, of those emotional commitments that constitute the world view of a group or a region. Therefore, he prefers the oratory of public encomiast William Jennings Bryan, who had offered his services for the prosecution, to the pleading of Dudley Field Malone and Clarence Darrow, who spoke for the defense. Bryan had made his reputation and, later in life, his livelihood through his verbal pyrotechnics, particularly as a stumper for fundamentalist religious beliefs. The caustic H. L. Mencken, whose reports of

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the trial are vintage journalism, characterized him as "a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola Belt" (Gould 277). Bryan came from the mold of the nineteenthcentury moral leader and vox populi, whose passing from the cultural scene Weaver laments in "The Spaciousness of Old Rhetoric" (ER 164-85). Although Bryan's oratory made him the darling of the hustings and, later, the pulpit, Weaver's admiration of him seems grounded in his position rather than in his oratory. The Scopes trial, in any event, did not find Bryan at his oratorical best, although he managed to please the crowd with his oratorical flourishes and ascerbic comments against evolution and Darrow. Yet, his dismal performance on the witness stand defending a literalist interpretation of the Bible against the withering logic of Darrow's cross-examination was a defeat and a humiliation. When Weaver maintains that the prosecution took the side of dialectic, he is really saying it took the side of public wisdom, of a truth superior to any that science could produce. Weaver supports a notion of the unimpeachability of corporate belief, at least when it is aligned with his vision of the truth. He insists, as did the prosecution, that this was the only real issue in the Scopes trial. The prosecution presented the issue as a legal one: Did John Scopes teach Hunter's Civic Biology in defiance of the Tennessee law that made it illegal to teach any work denying biblical creation and supporting the abominable theory of evolution? The defense necessarily had a very different interpretation of the status of the case, for purely upon the basis of the prosecution's case Scopes was guilty. He had, quite deliberately, assigned the objectionable portion of the text and had required his students to map the lineage of the human species using Darwin's theory. With Scopes as a willing victim, the case was intended to test the constitutionality of the law, and the defense intended ultimately to plead the case before a higher court. For the purposes of the Dayton trial, the defense counsel desired little more than to establish the basis for an appeal by making the case for the scientific accuracy of evolutionary theory. The defense wished to argue that the law was unjust because an accepted theory of science should not be banned from the classroom. Although Weaver makes it appear that the prosecution alone could lay claim to dialectic, the defense simply appealed to a different dialectic from that of the prosecution—the cultural commitment to scientific knowledge and the agreement of the community of scientists regarding the truth of evolutionary theory. Scopes' attorneys had gathered a group of distinguished scientists to testify on this matter and desired to call them. The prosecution would not hear of it and waged a protracted battle to confine the issue to the narrow case it knew it could win. Bryan expressed the prosecution's objection tersely when he said: "This is not the place to try to prove that the law ought never to have been passed. The place to prove that, or teach that, was to the legislature" (WMFCT 171). Like Bryan, Weaver believes that the legislature foreclosed the dialectic and that the defense could not reopen it. What the

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nation thought of the Tennessee strictures on evolutionary doctrine was beside the point. But the defense saw that the basis for a rhetorical appeal to the nation was in the narrow-mindedness and backwardness of the law, and that the basis for an appeal to a higher court was the law's unconstitutionally. The exchanges between the prosecution and the defense were truly remarkable, for they reveal the emotional intensity with which the battle between two very different sorts of truth was fought. Although the prosecution's main strategy was, as Weaver asserts, to claim the right of the legislature to determine "dialectically" that evolution should not be taught, the prosecution's rhetorical appeals were frequently ad populum. Despite Weaver's claim that the strength of the prosecution's case lay in the principle of the state's sovereignty over public education, the extent to which Weaver has idealized the state's position becomes apparent when one examines Bryan's highly emotional rhetoric. Bryan, the old populist war horse, played to his strong suit. While attempting to hamstring the defense by limiting the kinds of evidence and argumentation it could use, the prosecution availed itself of every avenue of rhetorical appeal. Bryan's appeals extended far beyond the dialectical limits Weaver would have us believe constrained the prosecution. The prosecution wanted to exploit the dramatic possibilities of the case. Bryan intended, no less than the defense, to argue the case as if it were, to quote Darrow, "a death struggle between two civilizations" (WMFCT 74). Bryan's rhetoric amounts to a tub-thumping affirmation of religious prejudice and an arrogant and anti-intellectual rejection of scientific authority. Bryan knew full well that, compared with the issues arising from the legal principles involved, the rhetorical strength of the case lay in the fact that the teaching of evolution cut at the core of the traditions of home, family, and child rearing, if not of democracy itself. The legal issue was not essential to Bryan; it merely presented an opportunity to express what he felt was in the heart of every God-fearing Tennessean. As he said in his major court address, "We could have a thousand or a million witnesses [for evolution], but this case as to whether evolution is true or not, is not going to be tried here, within this city; if it is carried to the state's courts, it will not be tried there, and if it is taken to the great court at Washington, it will not be tried there. No, my friends, no court of the law, and no jury, great or small, is going to destroy the issue between the believer and the unbeliever" (WMFCT 181). The question raised in Dayton was, essentially, who would control the minds of the next generation—the purveyors of scientific knowledge or the families in the farming communities of the rural South. Bryan put the matter bluntly: "They [the evolutionists] demand that we allow them to teach this stuff to our children, that they may come home with their imaginary family tree and scoff at their mother's and father's Bible" (177). The fundamentalists of Dayton were poised to defend

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their way of thinking and their way of life, no matter what the status of scientific knowledge on the question of evolution, and no matter what the legal position on whether evolution could be taught. The Scopes trial came at a time when the settled values of the rural South were growing increasingly less tenable, a fact that guaranteed that the debate would be impassioned if not vitriolic (Hofstadter 126). Listen, for example, to Bryan rail against the scientists: "More than half of the scientists in this country . . . do not believe there is a God or personal immortality, and they want to teach that to these children, and take that from them, to take from them their belief in a God who stands ready to welcome his children" (WMFCT 179). Bryan accurately and ably expressed the fears and anxieties of his fundamentalist constituency. A theme that ran throughout the debate and surfaced in a number of specific issues centered on the primacy of civil authority. The defense pitted the authority of scientific experts and science itself against the authority of the citizens of Tennessee, of their legislature, and of the Bible. In the trial the question focused upon whether or not the defense could introduce scientific experts to testify to the truth of evolutionary theory and theological experts who would offer interpretations of the Bible at odds with literal creationism. Weaver accepts the prosecution's argument that such testimony should be excluded. He agrees that the point is not whether evolutionary theory or the creation story are true, but whether the people of Tennessee have the right to prohibit the teaching of evolution. Weaver's position is reminiscent of the one Plato expressed in The Republic: that the measure of what should be taught should not be its verisimilitude—its accordance with fact—but rather the effects it has upon the listener. Thus, fairy tales should be taught to children if they foster belief in the values of society, despite their being untrue in the subordinate sense of not being factual. Weaver appears to agree with Plato that the beliefs and goals of society, not some external objective standard, ought to determine what should and should not be taught. Weaver's interpretation of Plato's discussion of the myth of Boreas in the Phaedrus underscores his diminution of scientific fact (229c-230b). Weaver attaches great importance to Socrates' comment that he does not care to learn the factual explanation for how a mythical maiden had been swept off a rock. He applies to his own times Socrates' proposition that self-knowledge is more important than reducing myths to verisimilitude, fashioning from it an injunction against scientific inquiry into matters of religious faith. According to Weaver: "The scientific criticism of Greek mythology, which may be likened to the scientific criticism of the myths of the Bible in our day, produces at best 'a boorish sort of wisdom' " (ER 4). In other words, Weaver sees it as presumptuous for science to evaluate matters of faith. Weaver is also of the opinion that the place of science is not above but below that of philosophy and theology. He takes considerable exception to Dudley Malone's expla-

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nation of science as a modern institution that advanced from the metaphysical reasoning of Plato and Aristotle when Galileo began using the telescope and microscope. What rankles Weaver about this statement is the idea that the metaphysics of Aristotle and Plato were inferior to science with its instruments for making the empirical "facts" visible. Weaver, justifying Bryan's position, judges that metaphysics and its dialectical propositions are superior to modern science and its statements of empirical fact because dialectic can evaluate the social utility of scientific knowledge. He goes so far as to suggest that evaluations of science "are science too" (ER 31). In considering this pronouncement one wonders if Weaver is not misidentifying science with the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of science with the judgments about the teaching of evolution expressed by the Tennessee legislature. No one would disagree with Weaver that there is a difference between dialectical and scientific truth, but his hierarchical arrangement of these so-called levels of knowledge begs the question. Weaver objects especially to the defense's attempt to introduce evidence of the scientific factuality of evolution, since, he argues, this is not proof that evolution should be taught. In apparent affirmation of Aristotle's distinction that rhetoric deals with probability and not certainty, Weaver argues that scientific fact cannot become the subject of rhetoric. The scientific facts of evolution cannot, he maintains, make any claims about whether evolution should be in the public school curriculum. How, he asks, can scientific fact "overcome" the dialectical position of the state? The answer is that it cannot, if the state does not allow it, but one might counter with the reciprocal question: How can the state overcome the facts and theories of science? It is a crucial question that Weaver never answers. His argument assumes that since a dialectical position can evaluate a scientific one, the state is justified in making laws following from such evaluations. But he ignores that one dialectical position can also evaluate another dialectical position; thus the state's own position was evaluated by the defense and judged to be antagonistic to the cultural significance of evolution and science and anathema to the U.S. Constitution. Weaver asserts that whether or not evolution should be taught must be decided in light of the society's moral commitments. The prosecution adopted essentially the same position when it questioned the pertinence of both scientific and theological witnesses. According to Bryan: Your honor, we first pointed out that we do not need any experts in science. Here is one plain fact, and the statute defines itself, and it tells the kind of evolution it does not want taught, and the evidence says that this is the kind of evolution that was taught, and no number of scientists could come in here, my friends, and override the statute or take from the jury its right to decide this question, so that all the experts that they could bring would mean nothing. And when it comes to Bible experts, every member of the jury is as good an expert on the Bible as any man

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that they could bring, or that we could bring. The one beauty about the Word of God is, it does not take an expert to understand it (WMFCT 181). Bryan opposed what he believed to be the two-flanked attack upon fundamentalist belief: science and the higher criticism of the Bible. Both threatened the fundamentalists because they suggested that one needed to look for the truth beyond the literal Word and the simple beliefs taught at home. Science and nonliteralist biblical exegesis interposed standards of judgment that required an acquiesence to intellectual authority. They compelled the recognition of a larger, dominant culture beyond the rural South with its small towns and homogeneous values. It is easy to see how Bryan's rhetoric was well suited to his fundamentalist audience. Bryan appealed not only to the audience's paranoia, but also to their anti-intellectualism. At one point he said: "Let me read you what Darwin says, if you will pardon me. If I have to use some of these long words—I have been trying all my life to use short words, and it is kind of hard to turn scientist for a moment" (WMFCT 175-76). Ironically, Weaver concurs with Bryan's anti-intellectual rejection of science and the expert on an intellectual basis, for he saw in positivism a great threat to the humane aspects of culture. Of course, the court did not itself have the expertise to decide the question of whether or not evolution was a scientifically supportable theory, and, in a lower court, the question of evolution's factuality could not be made to decide the outcome of the trial. However, Weaver's argument transcends the juridical inadmissibility of scientific evidence in the trial. His point is much more far-reaching. For him the trial is an illustration of a prevailing tendency in society: "It is plain that those who either expected or hoped that science would win a sweeping victory in the Tennessee courtroom were the same people who believe that science can take the place of speculative wisdom" (ER 53). However, the prosecution did not have a corner on speculative wisdom in the Scopes trial, as Weaver suggests, nor is there any evidence that the defense devalued speculative wisdom or that supporters of science in general seek to substitute it for metaphysics. Weaver maintains that the defense avoided the question of whether the teaching of evolution should be decided dialectically. Rather, it presumed that because evolution is a scientific fact it should be taught, and argued its case rhetorically by showing the value of science. But, when one looks at the trial transcript one finds, for example, that Malone's arguments were neither presumptuous nor without a dialectical basis, as Weaver would have us believe. Instead, Malone, whose performance in the trial won more audience acclaim than Bryan's, according to H. L. Mencken, attempted to draw a distinction between theology and science (Gould 271-72). One purpose of this line of argument was semantic, for by Malone's perverse interpretation, the Butler antievolution act made it illegal to teach evolution

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only when an anticreation view was also taught. A second purpose was philosophical—Malone attempted to argue that since theology and science w e r e separate, a person could be both true to his or h e r beliefs and educated in the conclusions of science. The same distinction could also b e used to support the view that religious beliefs should not be taught in the public schools. After asking his audience if "I should fall down when Bryan speaks of theology?" Malone facilely applied his distinction between theology and science to the psychology of his audience: But these gentleman [the prosecution] say the Bible contains the truth—"if the world of science can produce any truth or facts not in the Bible as we understand it, then destroy science, but keep our Bible," and we say "keep your Bible/' Keep it as your consolation, keep it as your guide, but keep it where it belongs in the world of your own conscience, in the world of your individual judgment, in the world of the Protestant conscience that I heard so much about when I was a boy, keep your bible in the world of theology where it belongs and do not try to tell an intelligent world and the intelligence of this country that these books written by men who knew none of the accepted fundamental facts of science can be put into a course of science, because what are they doing here? This law says what? It says that no theory of creation can be taught in a course of science, except one which conforms with the theory of divine creation as set forth in the Bible. In other words, it says that only the Bible shall be taken as an authority on the subject of evolution in a course on biology (WMFCT 185). Is Malone not acting as a dialectician in the sense that Plato understands the t e r m ? Has he not defined the key terms in the controversy—science and theology—and based his argument upon these definitions? H e argues that theology and science occupy different places in life and that theology cannot be allowed to judge science. Certainly this is a fitting response to Weaver's claim that metaphysical truth can be the legitimate arbiter of the social acceptability of scientific truth (ER 50). There is an essential difference between religious conviction and scientific knowledge, a fact Weaver himself makes plain in his analysis, but neither the prosecution nor Weaver can make metaphysics the inevitable judge of science. They can merely argue that the state has a right to suppress scientific knowledge, although it is an argument that must overcome the cultural commitment to scientific discovery. Weaver believes that the significance of scientific facts and theories must be j u d g e d outside of science, a partial universe of discourse. H e sees science as an agency that should lay bare the facts of nature, without bringing any compulsion to teach them or to apply them to the rest of life. It galls Weaver to think that scientific fact and theory would take the place of metaphysical evaluation. Weaver argues that the facts produced by scientific investigation ought not to be given cultural value simply because they are "facts." In defending the dialectic that made the teaching of evolution

Science, Metaphysics, and Sectional Culture 137 illegal in Tennessee, Weaver fails to recognize that the cultural role of science is itself the product of a centuries-long dialectic. Weaver would return civilization to the Middle Ages when the question of whether or not scientific discoveries would be disseminated was resolved metaphysically. He would place the evolutionist in the position of Galileo, who was forced to recant his theory of a sun-centered universe in the face of theological opposition. Weaver is correct in observing that the defense assumed the "nonscientific" role of rhetorician in pleading for science, but his claim that their argumentation was therefore inappropriate makes little sense. As Weaver's objections to the cultural ascendency of science make plain, even science needs its spokespersons and defenders. The rhetoric of the defense was, in fact, part of the continuing social dialectic concerning the role of science in society. But this is not a dialectic Weaver applauds. While the prosecution argues that scientific evidence in the trial was legally "incompetent," that is, inadmissible, Weaver regards it as irrelevant to the metaphysical issue. He believes science to be outside the sphere of moral debate. "The urgency of the facts," Weaver maintains in the initial paragraph of his essay, "is not a dialectical concern" (ER 27). Yet, from the point of view of the defense, calling witnesses for the scientific validity of evolutionary fact and theory was crucial, for if evolution is a legitimate scientific finding, it should be taught. This is, of course, a very difficult position to defend in a courtroom, unless there is some prior agreement on the role of science. Without such agreement the defense needed to argue what was by the 1920s a foregone conclusion to most of the civilized world: that the dissemination of scientific fact and theory is of the utmost cultural value. Malone articulated this value with an encomium of truth, which the audience rewarded with their sustained applause: There is never a duel with the truth. The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the forces of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal and immortal and needs no human agency to support it. We are ready to tell the truth as we understand it and we do not fear all the truth that they can present as facts. We are ready. We are ready. We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with fundamental freedom in America (WMFCT 187-88). Weaver quotes a portion of this passage as evidence that Malone, who at one point equates fact and truth, does not understand the difference between dialectical truth and scientific fact. For Weaver, scientific fact has no intrinsic value; it waits for dialectic to give it meaning. The defense appealed to the cultural dialectic that had led to an acceptance of science as an agency of material truth and an instrument of social

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progress. The attorneys for the prosecution, by contrast, asserted the significance of a very different dialectic—a subcultural dialectic in which the people and the state determine what is worth teaching and what is not. To answer the question of which argument is more thoroughly grounded in dialectic, one must first ask, according to whose definition of dialectic? On the surface it seems odd that Weaver would argue that the commonweal should be followed in this case, when, given his Platonism, one would expect him to prefer the wisdom of a philosophical elite. In fact, Weaver is no democrat, as he makes plain in Visions of Order: "There can be no such thing as a "democratic" culture in the sense of one open to everybody at all times on equal terms" (12). Weaver considers cultures aristocratic in the sense that they discriminate among things of varying importance. He believes fervently in the right of a culture or a subculture to establish and preserve its own hierarchy of values. In "The Importance of Cultural Freedom," published almost ten years after his essay on the Scopes trial, he argues at length that cultures have a right to be autonomous. It is a principle that Weaver no doubt discovered in his reflections on southern history and in his own cultural experiences in the South. The fundamentalist South was a most significant instance of a culture that adopted a reactionary position against the larger culture. It pugnaciously asserted the sort of cultural uniqueness Weaver believed should be preserved and protected against the leveling influences of modern mass society. Within this light it is easier to understand why Weaver would ennoble the right of the legislature to prevent the teaching of evolution.

The defense believed that, far from representing cultural conviction supported by dialectic, the people of Tennessee had simply enacted their prejudices into law. Weaver determines that the prosecution, the state, and the people of Tennessee were right because they valued a metaphysical truth above mere scientific fact and theory. "The legislature," he says, "is the highest tribunal and no body of religious or scientific doctrine comes to it with a compulsive authority. In brief, both the Ten Commandments and the theory of evolution belonged in the class of things which it could elect to reject, depending on the systematic import of propositions underlying the philosophy of the state" (ER 45). Weaver's argument is similar to one currently used by creationists, namely, that if the state can eliminate the biblical story of creation from the school, as it had in this case through a previous act of the Tennessee legislature, it can also eliminate evolutionary doctrine. At the time Weaver wrote his essay, and looking back on the period of the Scopes trial, Weaver could say with somewhat greater assurance than today that "the legislature is the supreme arbiter of education in the state." But in 1925, as today, there was a higher authority. Beyond noting that the Butler Act opposed the commitment of the larger culture to science, the defense, although less insistently, also pointed out that the act violated the dialectical decisions embodied in the Constitution.

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Weaver and contemporary opponents of evolutionary theory ignore that the teaching of creation contravenes the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the establishment of a state religion. In fairness to Weaver, however, it should be noted that not until 1968 did the Supreme Court rule against state laws that banned the teaching of evolution. The Butler Act and others like it prevented the teaching of evolution for no other reason than that it was perceived to oppose the creation story of the Bible. Therefore, the act violated the Constitutional protection against the establishment of religion. According to John Neal, one of the defense attorneys: "In this law there is an attempt to pronounce a judgment and conclusion in the realm of science and in the realm of religion. We contend, may it please your honor, that was not the purpose for which legislatures were created; under our system they were created for very definite, limited purposes. . . . But the great domain of opinion, the great realm of religion, the framers of our constitution . . . regarded . . . so important that no power, legislative or court, would attempt to lay down and assign a rule to bind conscience and the minds of the people" (WMFCT 55). The Constitution embodied the larger social compact—one that involved a much more careful and rigorous dialectic than that which produced the Butler Act. In his interpretation of the defense strategy, Weaver focuses not so much upon what the defense counsels say, but upon the testimony of the scientific experts the defense had brought to Dayton. Although the defense called only one of the witnesses, before their testimony was excluded, their written statements were entered into the record, so that a higher court could judge its significance. Weaver quotes from the testimony of the only scientific witness, Maynard Metcalf, and from several of the written statements. He detects in them a pervasive line of argument addressing the consequence of banning evolution from the public schoolroom. Some of the arguments are much the same as those voiced by scientists today, for example, that biology, geology, and other scientific specialties cannot be taught intelligently if evolutionary doctrine is excluded. Dr. H. E. Murkette, one of the defense witnesses, stated this point concisely: "Students have a right to be taught the truth about the whole man rather than a half truth. The future of human progress demands [it]" (WMFCT 229). Although Weaver does not quote Murkette, it is obvious that this is, in fine, precisely the attitude Weaver rejects. Neither science nor progress can, in Weaver's mind, make demands; there is no scientific imperative. From Weaver's point of view, the defense had to introduce evidence of the beneficial consequences of teaching evolution, because the prosecution occupied the high ground of principle in the debate. Elsewhere, Weaver argues that argument from consequence is a form subordinate to argument from definition or principle. Obviously, Weaver regards the arguments of the defense to be philosophically inferior to those of the prosecution.

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When Weaver asserts that "the pleaders for science were forced into the non-scientific role of the rhetorician," he is clearly objecting to the idea of scientists contributing to a social dialectic. He assumes that the role of the scientist is simply to make discoveries and report them. However, the scientific community does not take a vow to abstain from participating in dialogue about the ethical consequences of its own activities. The prosecution attempted to discredit expert testimony on such questionable grounds as that experts cannot commit perjury when they are expressing their professional opinions (WMFCT 150). Weaver, using a similarly illogical argument, makes it appear that only the nonexpert can properly use rhetoric or provide moral leadership. Both Weaver's and the prosecution's analyses reflect a rigid conception of the role of the scientist in society. Weaver limits the scientist to the discourse of science and sees it as paradoxical that the scientist should turn rhetorician. In fact, it is the expert who has an advantage over the nonexpert, for while the nonexpert cannot effectively argue the conclusions of science, the expert, who is also a member of the society, can participate in a social dialectic that involves his area of expertise. It would be shortsighted, indeed, to exclude scientists from addressing matters of public policy related to science. Only if one accepts Weaver's attempt to separate the scientific expert from the dialectical decisions of the society is it paradoxical that the defense would ask scientists to express opinions in the Scopes trial regarding the consequences of teaching evolution. Malone touched upon the problem with the prosecution's outlook on expert testimony when he said: "I feel that the prosecution here is filled with a needless fear. I believe that if they withdraw their objection and hear the evidence of our experts their minds would not only be improved but their souls would be purified. . . . [A]re the teachers and scientists of this country in a combination to destroy the morals of the children to whom they have dedicated their lives? Are preachers the only ones in America who care about the youth? Is the church the only source of morality in their country?" (WMFCT 187). On one hand, Weaver argues that the defense was presumptuous in its argument that evolution should be taught because it is scientifically valid, and, on the other hand, he argues that the defense was entering into forbidden territory when it asked scientific experts to testify to the benefits of teaching evolution. He cannot have it both ways. If the defense attorneys were truly presumptuous, then they would not have bothered to argue their case in the way they did. In fact, the defense attempted to satisfy the necessity of making an argument on behalf of teaching evolution, though these arguments, at times, lacked philosophical sophistication. The defense certainly did not believe that the mere validity of evolutionary theory would cause the court to find Scopes innocent. The issue raised in the trial far exceeded the case in its significance. The real purpose of the trial, as we have said, was to dramatize a significant social conflict regarding the role

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of science and religion in the society and only incidentally to defend Scopes from the charge. Weaver is right in believing that the approbation of science in modern society often gives science and scientific experts a prestige that can be used to great rhetorical advantage. The commitment of the modern world to science has brought with it a faith in scientific rationality that makes it virtually impossible to suppress the dissemination of scientific knowledge in the interests of preserving a competing view of the world. At times, the testimony of scientists can be used with annoying presumptuousness. The defense in the Scopes trial did trade upon the respect society accords the scientist. It made use of the assumption that scientific truth should be available to all, but it also argued on behalf of that assumption. The accuracy of these observations should not, however, lead one to accept Weaver's objection to the scientist speaking on behalf of science or his insistence that community moral standards should govern which scientific conclusions are proper to teach in the public schools. Plainly, Weaver attempts to do more in his essay on the Scopes trial than comment objectively on the use of scientific values by the defense and the use of dialectic by the prosecution. His rhetorical analysis is aimed at criticizing and transvaluing the values that scientific rationality have brought to the culture. He sees in the skirmish at Dayton a challenge to traditional culture by a world view that embraces scientific knowledge without question. His analysis addresses a need he identifies in Visions of Order: "The need then is great for a revisionist view of what is known as modernism" (6). Culture, as Weaver defines it, "satisfies needs arising from man's feeling and imagination. . . . The very concept of culture runs counter to blind progressivism, by which I mean that state of mind which cannot measure anything except by number and linear extension" (VO 18). In Weaver's mind the Scopes trial was an example of how the modern commitment to scientific thinking can be inimical to culture. Weaver glorifies the religious biases expressed in the Butler Act because he believes fervently in the sanctity of cultural discrimination. According to Weaver, "The ways of a culture are rooted too deep in immemorial bias and feeling to be analyzed. If a culture appears arbitrary in the preferences it makes and the lines it draws, this is because it is a willed creation" (VO 12). The defense counsel's arguments on behalf of teaching evolution undoubtedly represented for Weaver one of the "erroneous attempts to break down the discriminations of culture," which, he says in Visions of Order, the conservative has a duty to expose (13). It is paradoxical, yet consistent with his conservatism, that Weaver fails to see that the devotion to science is cultural and no less ingrained than the biases of competing cultures. Weaver wishes to retrieve from the dustbin of history the religiously based culture that fought a symbolic battle for self-preservation in Dayton, Tennessee. He revels in supporting the lost cause, although he acknowl-

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edges its difficulty. To oppose modern tendencies, he says, "is to bring in words that connote half-forgotten beliefs and carry disturbing resonances" (VO 5). His argumentation supports a position on the teaching of evolution that most educated people would find completely untenable. Yet, he is obviously sincere in his belief that the morality of teaching evolution was an open question that the defense could not answer by proving evolution correct in light of accepted scientific fact. Weaver demands that the question was and is dialectical, and therefore one that admits of opposite views. In light of his analysis, he confidently, almost smugly, challenges his reader: "Can you any longer maintain that people of opposing views on the teaching of evolution are simply defiers of truth?" (ER 50). Weaver defends the right of individual cultures to support dialectical positions that do not conform to scientific knowledge. He seeks to restore the primacy of cultural truths he believes rise above the facts of the material world. At the same time, he wishes to restore the importance of rhetoric as a force for integrating society through the imaginative and compelling expression of its values and beliefs.

7 The Rhetoric of Social Science: Brute Facts and Created Realities

Richard Weaver's indictments of scientific culture take many forms, including a retrospective defense of the right of Tennessee to secede from the Western scientific tradition in its battle against evolution in the Scopes trial (ER 27-54). His dissection of social scientific rhetoric, on the other hand, does not suggest the procrustean cultural views or the southern partisanship of some of his other essays. It runs somewhat above the surface of the main currents of his philosophical conservatism. Although Weaver's comments on social scientific rhetoric are scattered among his works, he wrote two sustained commentaries on the subject: " 'Concealed Rhetoric' in Scientistic Sociology," first delivered as a lecture in 1958, and "The Rhetoric of Social Science," a chapter of The Ethics of Rhetoric (LIS 138). At the time they were written, few rhetoricians, and certainly few professors of speech or English, had focused upon the subject. Kenneth Burke had surveyed the contours of this fecund field of rhetorical analysis, and the conservative economist Friedrich von Hayek, who like Weaver was a professor at the University of Chicago, had written his insightful book on the cultural problem of scientism, The Counter Revolution of Science. Weaver's view on social scientific rhetoric reflects both von Hayek's and Burkes thinking. Rhetoricians who feel a kinship to Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory find it easy to appreciate Weaver's analysis of the rhetoric of social science, for it clearly hews to Burke's notions of scientism. Both Burke and Weaver debunk the pretensions of social scientific rhetoric, although Weaver's conservative political views and his disdain of relativism ordinarily place him in a radically different orbit from the relativistic and left-leaning Burke. Weaver's perspective on the rhetoric of social science is not purely Bur-

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kean, although, as Richard Johannesen has skillfully shown, he made ample use of Burke's critique and was undoubtedly influenced by Burke, whose seminar for the English faculty of the undergraduate college at the University of Chicago he attended in 1949.* Weaver wrote his first essay on social scientific rhetoric, "The Rhetoric of Social Science," as an outgrowth of the seminar. Initially published in The Journal of General Education in 1950, it was republished with minor revisions as a chapter of The Ethics of Rhetoric (Johannesen, "Uses of Kenneth Burke" 317). Weaver's 1958 essay, "The Concealed Rhetoric of Scientistic Sociology," reveals an even greater, although largely and inexplicably unacknowledged, reliance on Burke, (Johannesen, "Uses of Kenneth Burke" 322-26). In a sense, Weaver's examination of social scientific rhetoric is a bridge across which several notions important in his work were transported from Burke's rhetorical theory. One of these notions, as Johannesen observes, may have been the distinction between positive and dialectical terms, a concept that informs two other chapters in The Ethics of Rhetoric: Chapter 1, "The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric," and Chapter 2, "Rhetoric and Dialectic in Dayton Tennessee." However, as we will see later, Weaver takes this dichotomy out of its context and gives it a Platonic interpretation, thereby creating a basic problem in his analysis of social scientific rhetoric. Weaver's variations on Burke's analysis are scored to resonate his philosophical conservatism and to amplify Burke's original insights. Weaver's creativity flowed from a desire to rationalize his intuitive opposition to forces he believed undermined the philosophical and cultural beliefs identified with traditional southern culture. He is invariably a spokesperson for the conservative South, even as he speaks against something so apparently unrelated as social scientific rhetoric. His analysis of social scientific discourse is of particular import in the renewal of interest in rhetoric and the expansion of its purview. The use of rhetoric as a means of understanding social scientific discourse in terms of its intentions, sociological influences, and cultural impacts represents a decidedly modern turn in rhetorical theory. Weaver shows how the "human sciences" strain to establish themselves as sciences, not only in methodology, but through a discourse stylized to reflect the scientific status of their content. Although the title of his earlier essay, "The Rhetoric of Social Science," suggests an analysis of the rhetoric of all the social sciences, Weaver draws most of his examples from sociology. Indeed, the title of his second essay dealing with "scientistic sociology" more accurately describes the focus of both essays. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that all of the social sciences encounter the same difficulties in attempting to describe the condition of humanity in the manner that the physicist might describe the structure of the atom. Donald McCloskey's recent book, The Rhetoric of Economics, discusses the pervasiveness of rhetoric in economics, and demonstrates the utility of thinking about the "dismal science" from a rhetorical perspective.

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Like McCloskey's critical reading of economic dogma, Weaver's analysis of social scientific rhetoric does more than simply criticize the social sciences for their jargon or their defective prose; first it shows their rhetoric to be motivated by a desire to appear scientific. Only thus, Weaver maintains, will they be heard and believed by society and the governmental and academic establishment that funds their research. Their rhetoric aims at attaining a more prominent place in an academic and social hierarchy that awards power and funding to those disciplines flying the banner of science. Second, Weaver observes that, unlike their counterparts in the physical sciences, the social sciences require the public to appreciate the problems their research investigates (ER 186). In short, the social sciences need rhetoric not merely to express their findings to one another, but to persuade the public that their research is significant; through rhetoric the social scientist "passes from facts to values or statements of policy" (LIS 139). In both of his essays on social science, Weaver, following the critical method of Kenneth Burke, attempts to establish the motivations behind the social scientists' self-consciously "scientific" use of language, since, from a dramatis tic perspective, any use of rhetoric cannot be properly recognized or understood without a conception of what motivates it. In "The Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology" Weaver states plainly that in his view the decision to be scientific was a rhetorical one, in that it involved a salutary identification with science. The name "social science" by itself is rhetorically potent (LIS 143-44). In other words, Weaver's analysis serves to debunk the social sciences in a manner reminiscent of Burke. Taken as a whole, his analysis not merely makes use of Burke's insights about social scientific rhetoric but reflects Burke's dramatism, for Weaver systematically questions the form and argument of social scientific rhetoric in light of its purposes and motivations. What is unquestionably missing in Weaver's judgmental, prescriptive, and at times dour critique is Burke's essential relativism. In fact, Weaver's essays reveal a consistency with his own neo-Platonism. For example, in explaining the nature of sociology's identification with science, he maintains that identifications can be judged ethically on the basis of whether or not they accord with "reason and a defensible scheme of values" (LIS 144). Weaver's essays also reflect his antipathy to modernism, which is a central impulse in his writing. WEAVER'S PURPOSE

As Weaver inquires about the motivations of the social scientist, one should ask a corresponding question about Weaver's motivations. What in Weaver's vision of the world would lead him to embrace Burke's position that the social sciences engage in academic imposture? Weaver's dislike of the social scientists' attempt to mimic the physical sciences derives, as does his critique of the preeminent place of science in modern society, from a

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dialectic in which scientism is contrasted with what it replaces, social philosophy. As Socrates in Plato's Gorgias lambasts rhetoric as a sham art that takes the place of the true art of justice, Weaver maintains that scientistic rhetoric, purporting to have the authority of science, replaces a philosophically grounded rhetoric (Gorgias 464). In the nineteenth century, an age less committed to a scientific evaluation of problems, the social philosopher and, at a popular level, the epideictic orator played a commanding role. In " 'Concealed Rhetoric' in Scientistic Sociology" Weaver says flatly that he would prefer that social science were renamed social philosophy, a proposal that flows logically from his argument that the social sciences are misidentified (LIS 158). Weaver's prescription is Platonic in that it attempts a rectification of sociology's name with what Weaver believes its essence to be. From a Burkean perspective, however, Weaver is himself proposing a rhetorical strategy for transforming the social sciences linguistically. Following Burke's analysis of dialectic, one might say that Weaver pairs the "titular" terms social science dialectically with social philosophy (Rhetoric of Motives 184). The term social philosophy, according to Weaver, "would widen its universe of discourse, freeing it from the positivistic limitations of science and associating its followers with the love of wisdom. At the same time it would enable them to practice the art of noble rhetoric where it is called for, without unconscious deception and without a feeling that they are compromising their profession" (LIS 158). For Weaver a fundamental problem with the social sciences is that they deprive social philosophy of its influence in society. Social scientific rhetorics challenge and undermine philosophically grounded rhetorics. Unwilling to admit that they are involved in value judgments and dialectical decisions, the social sciences fail to make their decisions within a philosophical system, or with what Weaver calls "an extra-empirical reference" (LIS 157). Weaver's critique of social scientific rhetoric is a reflection of his philosophical conservatism. He sees in social science a means of avoiding proper consideration of essential philosophical questions of value. Instead values are presumed, such as, for example, the assumption that society is "democratic and dynamic," rather than "aristocratic and traditional" (LIS 155). Weaver's choice of example is, of course, revealing, for it suggests his disagreement with the implicit liberalism of sociologists and with their "meliorism," their optimistic belief in the possibilities of social betterment. More broadly, Weaver's disaffection with social science stems from his recognition of social science as a competitor to religion and philosophy. L. L. and Jessie Bernard suggest that in the nineteenth century, Comte's conception of a science of society established the foundation for the scientific revolution that is more generally credited to Darwin and Darwin popularizers like T. H. Huxley (846). A scientific view of the structure of society clearly challenges the presumption of metaphysics to answer such questions. In the broadest sense Weaver is concerned with the rhetorical sources for the

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authority of social science in modern society. His essay should not be read as simply a complaint about the surface features of social scientific discourse, but rather as a critical comment about the potency and legitimacy of social scientific rhetoric as a force in shaping society. In this light, his essay is a reflection of his fundamental dissatisfaction with the modern tendencies of society, in which the authority to interpret social life has passed inexorably and unalterably from theologians, philosophers, ethicists, and orators to a group of social scientific specialists whose factual prose pales in comparison to the unctuous eloquence of such nineteenth-century luminaries as Emerson, Thoreau, or Webster. The paradox of the social sciences is that, on one hand, they insist upon avoiding value judgments and, on the other hand, they make them implicitly but uncritically. Weaver sees social scientists using language to maintain a pose of scientific objectivity while promoting values sub rosa. His critique is necessarily two-pronged. First, he argues that the social sciences engage in a pretense of scientific detachment and a concern for the facts alone. Second, he shows how the social scientist cannot avoid the values entailed in his or her research and becomes a "tendentious dialectician" (ER 195).

DIALECTICAL AND POSITIVE TERMS Although Weaver does not cite Friedrich von Hayek until his second essay on social science, he must surely have read his book The CounterRevolution of Science before writing "The Rhetoric of Social Science," because von Hayek discusses the central paradox in Weaver's analysis (LIS 143). Von Hayek's analysis of the methodological problems is more detailed than Weaver's and pursues a different aim, but his conclusions and Weaver's are clearly related. For example, in speaking of the tendency of social scientists to look at examples of collectives like capitalism, socialism, democracy, and so on, von Hayek notes that "the scientistic approach . . . because it is afraid of starting from the subjective concepts determining individual actions, is . . . regularly led into the very mistake it attempts to avoid, namely of treating as facts those collectives which are no more than popular generalizations" (38). Von Hayek argues that examples of societies, economies, and so forth "are never given to our observation but are without exception constructions of our minds" (54). Like Weaver, von Hayek renders the problem as a misleading use of terms. "The terms for collectives which we all readily use do not designate definite things in the sense of stable collections of sense attributes which we recognize as alike after inspection." He explains that terms like "market" or "capital" have lost their reference to the physical world and refer instead to popular conceptions. Such terms as these have a variety of meanings, which, says von

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Hayek, "are classed together solely because of a recognized similarity in the structure of the relationships of men and things" (56). The theoretical linchpin of Weaver's analysis is the concept of positive and dialectical terms, which Johannesen suggests Weaver appropriated from Kenneth Burke, unless both Burke and Weaver discovered it in the Phaedrus and Euthyphro (Johannesen, "Uses of Kenneth Burke" 318, 320). The question of how Weaver arrived at this distinction is significant, both because it makes us aware of the source of Weaver's intellectual notions, and because it suggests a problem with Weaver's understanding of Plato, from whom he attempts to derive authority for his analysis. In The Ethics of Rhetoric Weaver leads us to believe that he has discovered the conceptions of positive and dialectical terms in the Phaedrus. He first introduces the dichotomy in Chapter 1, which is partially an analysis of the Phaedrus and partially an extrapolation from it. Reading the section of the Phaedrus Weaver cites in his first discussion of the dichotomy it appears that, rather than discovering the dichotomy in the Phaedrus, Weaver has interpreted the Phaedrus in light of these notions, undoubtedly first encountered in Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives or in what Burke said in the Chicago seminar. Plato speaks of two kinds of words: "those namely in the use of which the multitude are bound to fluctuate, and those in which they are not" (263b). His examples are the "just" and "good" on the one hand and "gold" and "silver" on the other (262a). But, as Weaver notes, another of Plato's examples of disputed terms is the horse, a term with a precise material referent. Weaver admits from the outset that Plato is "not perfectly clear about the distinction between positive and dialectical terms." Indeed he is not, and that is because the distinction Weaver attributes to him is not his. Plato maintains that to be persuasive the rhetorician must first undertake a dialectic, in which distinctions among things are made through the coordinate processes of "division" and "collection." He does not say that value-laden terms are the only ones requiring a preceding dialectic, or that words like good and just are dialectical. Nor does he say that words like iron and silver are positive. These elements of analysis are Weaver's impositions on what Plato has to say about disputed and undisputed terms. Plainly, terms that are disputed can be of many kinds, including those involving disputes about putative facts. Looked at in another way, it is highly unlikely that Plato would have accepted a distinction such as the one that Weaver reads into his philosophy. In the first place, Plato fails to come to grips with the distinction between fact and value, treating values as if they have an existence independent from those who possess them. Plato constructs analogies between the physical and ideational, which imply that ideas have an existence no less real than material objects. In the Gorgias he equates craftsmen, such as shipwrights, physicians, architects, and painters, who manipulate physical realities, with "the true orator" the "moral artist," who similarly fash-

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ions the soul (503-4). According to Plato the true orator's aim is "the engendering of justice in the souls of his fellow citizens and the eradication of injustice, the planting of self-control and the uprooting of uncontrol, the entrance of virtue and the exit of vice" (Gorgias 504). In this description Plato makes it appear that the rhetor can approach the soul with the same control over his material that the physician has on the body or the architect on the space he wishes to enclose. Plato's failure to acknowledge the distinction between material and ideational existence is of a piece with his philosophical realism, which proposes that ideas have an ideal existence. Where did Weaver find the distinction between positive and dialectical terms? He found it no doubt, as Johannesen has concluded, in Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives, which Weaver read in typescript when he participated in Burke's seminar at Chicago (317). Burke cites Jeremy Bentham as one source of the concept of "positive terms," although the name Burke chooses is not Bentham's "concrete entities" but rather one that is suggestive of the logical positivism he discusses (183). Similarly, it seems likely that the name "dialectical term" reflects Burke's appreciation of Hegel and Marx's notion of dialectic, as much as Plato's (Burke, Rhetoric of Motives 188). Burke takes the idea that dialectic operates by contrasting opposites and casts it in terms of his perspectivism, noting that a term like " 'capitalism' would look different if compared and contrasted with 'feudalism' than if dialectically paired with 'socialism' " (Rhetoric of Motives 184).2 Moreover, Burke discusses Mannheim's relativistic conception of dialectic, which serves to reveal the philosophical biases of Platonic dialectic (197-203). Although the "positive" and "dialectical" labels probably originated with Burke, Weaver glossed them in The Ethics of Rhetoric with a reference to the Phaedrus, thus giving the impression that this critical conceptual tool he uses in his critique of social science derives from Plato. Similarly, in Weaver's discussion of the general semantics movement, he is prone to find in Plato authority for his criticisms of distinctly modern institutions and social tendencies (e.g., ER 7-9). His interpretation of Plato in this regard is not really interpretative, but loosely associative. He subjects the rhetoric of social science to a rhetorical analysis he would like one to believe is Platonic in inspiration and authority. In fact, Weaver is speculating loosely about what Plato might have said about the confusion of so-called dialectical and positive terms in the social sciences. Weaver makes greater use of Plato's admonitions against rhetoric in the Phaedrus when he criticizes social scientific rhetoric's tendency to slip from appearance into disguise. Weaver maintains that the social scientist "crosses a divide" between positive and dialectical terms, indeed "passes with indifference from what is objectively true to what is morally or imaginatively true." He sees the social scientists engaging in acts of rhetorical slight-ofhand that they announce neither to their readers nor perhaps even to themselves (188-89). Thus Weaver criticizes the social scientists for engag-

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ing in a "primary equivocation" in which they claim to deal in facts alone while mixing in moral judgments that lack an ontological foundation. In a letter to Donald Davidson in May 1950, the month after the essay was published in the Journal of Education, Weaver expressed both his enthusiasm for the distinction between positive and dialectical terms and his concern that he had not worked it out fully. Weaver, it would appear, sensed the difficulties with the dichotomy even as he anticipated the stir he hoped to create with it. Noting that he had circulated copies of the essay to social scientists at the university, Weaver complained that he had heard little from them. "I was," he wrote, "trying to hit them where it would hurt. You may have the solution: the majority of them are so benighted that they can't even follow this exposition. I think that the point about positive and dialectical terms is the dynamite for them; it [sic] this can be established—and I know that I have not yet done enough to establish it— they are really going to have to cut out some of their presumptuousness" (DDP). HISTORICAL SOURCES OF THE PROBLEM The terminological and rhetorical problem of the social sciences Weaver discusses has its roots in the history of sociology's development as a discipline. It is important to remember that American sociology, which became a discipline in the political milieu of the late nineteenth century, identified itself with social work and progressive action to improve society. Sociology is a discipline in which the pragmatic consequences of a particular research agenda are not merely recognized by the researcher but are at times actively sought. Moreover, what social scientists choose to study is a function of their perception of what are the most pressing problems in the society. The French social psychologist, Serge Moscovici, points out that American social psychology has consistently drawn its research agenda from the problems of American society (19). He speaks of the implicit moral assumptions and maxims in such research ranging from "We like those who support us" to "Understanding the point of view of another person promotes cooperation." Moscovici's conclusion about social psychology echoes Weaver's thesis about social science generally: "Social psychology is not truly a science. We wish to give it an appearance of science by using mathematical reasoning and the refinements of experimental method; but the fact is that social psychology cannot be described as a discipline with a unitary field of interest, a systematic framework of criteria and requirements, a coherent body of knowledge or even a set of common perspectives shared by those who practice it" (32). Of course, what is today freely admitted by some practitioners of social science was far more controversial at the time Weaver was writing his first essay on social scientific rhetoric. In their history of American sociology, the Bernards speak of the twin

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ambitions of sociology as "a passion for social reform and an adoration of science" (845-46). 3 They comment, however, that the interest in science would overtake the interest in reform, and that in their day, 1943, some sociologists had repudiated reform altogether. Edward Shils also notes that sociologists have in various periods been more or less radical in their reformism and politics. Shils observes an ebb and flow in the spirit of reform running high during the Progressive Era; receding during the 1920s, when sociology became more self-conscious in its desire to be scientific; and returning during the Great Depression, when the omnipresent problems of poverty again altered the research agenda (392-410). One of the concerns eloquently addressed by sociologists, the condition of blacks in society, is particularly telling of the social consciousness of their discipline. Far from bemoaning the involvement of sociologists in the problems of their society, Shils asserts, "Sociology has been accepted as an organ of illumination of opinion, as qualified as journalism or literature to illuminate and criticize the condition of man and the state of contemporary society" (409). He acknowledges, furthermore, that sociology can "aspire to be a prelude to action," in the sense that it contributes to the resolve of those who must make political decisions (408). None of Shils' statements concerning the moral involvement of sociologists necessarily denies sociology's aspirations for scientific status. It is perfectly possible to admit the political uses of sociology without denying that its findings are objectively accurate. It can be argued, of course, that despite his abiding interest in the consequences of his findings, the professional sociologist can hold strictly to a norm of disinterestedness when collecting and analyzing data. WEAVER'S RHETORICAL AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC RHETORIC

But quite apart from any doubt concerning social scientists' ability to hold their biases in check, Weaver argues that social scientific researchers are doomed to subjectivity by the nature of their object of study and by their need to define society through abstractions. To develop theories and principles, social scientists must generalize; they must go beyond what is measureable in the particular instances. As Aristotle says: "None of the arts theorize about individual cases" (Rhetoric 1356b, 25). Weaver argues that the act of defining society leads one to generalization and abstraction of an entirely different order from generalizations in the physical sciences (ER 190-91). In this, he aligns himself closely with von Hayek, who notes that what social scientists examine are concepts created by societies themselves (von Hayek 36-38, 53-54). Furthermore, social scientists are part of the very society they wish to describe and share in the received conceptions of the society. The qualities of democracy, capitalism, or poverty are not fixed in objective reality, as are the qualities of, say, mammals or plutonium; nor

152 The Politics of Rhetoric von Hayek tells us, are they recognizable through sense perception (55). Therefore, social scientific researchers deal with concepts whose meanings are in flux. Weaver suggests that, rather than define through scientific classification notions such as "slum," social scientists name them. Slum, Weaver tells us is "contingent upon judgment (and theoretically our standard of living might move up to where Westchester, Grosse Point, and Winnetka are regarded as slums)" (ER 191). In sophistic terms, slum is part of the nomos of society, a concept relative to the individual and to the society itself. When Weaver says that the social scientist "names" slum, rather than determines its "genus," he argues, in effect, that social science is involved in nomos, the rhetorical world of created realities, not in physis, the scientific world of nature. The rhetorical positioning of the social sciences is concealed in a collection of stylistic abominations that Weaver says result from a "pedantic empiricism" (ER 191). Because social scientists fail to admit the rhetorical nature of their enterprise, they create arabesques in the attempt to appear objective. Weaver identifies a ratio between form and purpose. In a sense the form becomes its own purpose, quite separate from what the study is meant to communicate. Weaver lampoons the tentativeness of the conclusions in social scientific studies. "Everything," he says, "sounds like a prolegomenon to the real thing" (ER 192). He remarks that conclusions are qualified until the qualifications appear to be "rhetorical contortions" (193). Analysis and definitional division are conducted apparently for their own sake; the analysis does not end in any clear statement. He sees social scientific analysis as reflecting "discredit upon the very principle of division which was employed." What Weaver seems to be saying is that the dialectic of the social sciences discredits a genuine Platonic dialectic, which, rather than analyzing data, pursues definitions in the realm of ideas alone. He blames the impoverished style of social scientific rhetoric on a failure of rhetorical invention. One must have something significant to say to give life to the prose in which it is expressed. The "harsh and crabbed style" Weaver discovers in one particularly deathless example of social scientific rhetoric is of a piece with the insignificance of its content (ER 194-95). "The object of empirical analysis," Weaver says with blunt irritation, "is primarily to give the work a scientific aspect and only secondarily to prove something." And before we can think of contrary examples, he quickly adds: "In fact, this is almost the pattern of inferior social scientific literature" (ER 195). What Weaver undoubtedly notices in social scientific discourse is that it projects the researcher's persona as one detached from the object of investigation and from the personal and social consequences of the study. It is as though this rhetorical pose could, in itself, make the discourse objective. There is, furthermore, the implicit suggestion in social scientific writing that strict adherence to the method of the social sciences is more important

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than the insight of the individual researcher. Weaver conjectures that it may be for this reason, in part, that there is such an apparent paucity of conventional rhetorical invention. The social scientist, qua social scientist, is judged by his enactment of the role ascribed to him by the community of social scientists. Every article describing a research study becomes a vehicle for demonstrating the practitioner's acceptance of the strictures and sanctions of the discipline, in short, the success of his academic socialization.4 Disciplinary norms replace individual genius, method takes precedence to content, formal prescription circumscribes rhetorical invention, and a bloodless, uninspired prose results. Weaver sees the stylistic impositions placed on social scientific discourse not merely as an impediment to vigorous and purposeful expression, but as a means to conceal the need of the social sciences for a Platonic rhetoric informed by dialectic. "If," Weaver speculates, "a writer feels guilty about his dialectic excercises (his definitions), he may seek to counterweight them with long empirical inquiries" (ER 195). The notion that social scientists as a group suffer from a common guilt expurgated by "long empirical inquiries" may seem far-fetched, if thought about too literally. It is, however, consistent with Weaver's Burkean critique to account for social scientific discourse by delving into its conscious and unconscious motivations. Still on the question of motivation, but of a more ideological sort, Weaver asks if social scientific discourse does not reflect the meliorism of the social sciences. He connects the Latinate and euphemistic vocabulary of social science with the predisposition of social scientists to view society as capable of improvement. Faithful to his political biases, Weaver sees the social scientist as the handmaiden of liberalism and government bureaucracy. It is useful to remember that at the time Weaver wrote his first essay on social science, not only had social science come unto its own, but Democrats had been in office for five terms, and the New Deal had produced a new army of government bureaucrats, many of whom were charged with improving the conditions of social life. Throughout the Great Depression many sociologists dramatized an array of social problems and helped establish the agenda of social reform. Weaver himself speaks of the importance of influential social scientific studies such as Middle town, which he regards as the concrete representation of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (ER 205). Weaver's response to the Latinate vocabulary of the social sciences is at once aesthetic and philosophic, as well as ironic, if not mock serious. He argues that a Latinate vocabulary reflects a desire "to picture things a little better than they are." "Impecunious," he says, is more optimistic than "penniless" (ER 199). He claims that Anglo-Saxon diction suggests the "brute empirical fact, while its Latinate counterpart seems at once to become ideological, with perhaps a slight aura of hortation about it" (ER 199). An Anglo-Saxon diction is closer to empirical fact in the same way that, presumably, the plain or Attic style in classical oratory would be felt closer to

154 The Politics of Rhetoric the object than the florid or Asiatic. A Latinate vocabulary is foreign, artificial, less available, and lacking in realism in the sense that it does not represent the object with crisp accuracy. The hortatory quality of a Latinate vocabulary suggests that there is an ideological position behind what is said, but it is not one that has been worked out philosophically. Essentially, Weaver asks why social scientists do not use language that is consistent with their expressed aim of objectivity and faithfulness to the object of inquiry. Weaver, who is convinced that true wisdom is impossible without an acceptance of the tragic nature of human life, maintains that the Latinate vocabulary lacks the cynicism of truly sagacious writing and therefore bespeaks an unhumanistic social science. He cannot, of course, ask them to use the "semantically purified speech" he criticizes elsewhere as an accretion of scientism (ER 7-9). Instead, Weaver counsels that "the limpid prose of the Manchester Guardian" should be the ideal for social scientific reporting (ER 201). On one hand, he argues that social scientific rhetoric is a development of an academic subculture, one that violates his conservative norms for pellucid descriptive prose comprised of Anglo-Saxon derivatives. This argument is paired with his notion that the social sciences should make more use of the resources of metaphor. Weaver argues that the social sciences are misguided in their distrust of metaphor and their preference for a more denotative language. Metaphor, he notes, is not merely a vehicle to stimulate imagination but "a means of discovery," even within the sciences (ER 20304, cf. RC 256). Metaphor codifies conceptual analogies that lie at the heart of new discoveries and theories. As McCloskey has noted, in economics one must be aware of the implications of such figures as "the demand curve" or "human capital," and indeed some metaphors such as "marginal productivity" are declarations of a mathematical objectivity (78, 82). Although Weaver cites other authorities on this point, mathematician Jacob Bronowski has shown provocatively how scientific conceptions were born in comparisons such as that between the apple fallen to earth from the tree and the earth's gravitational pull on the moon (26). To the extent that social science subscribes to the notion that only a language of pure denotation will create objectivity, it misinterprets the method of the natural sciences. More importantly, it establishes an artificial limitation that blinkers and restrains invention. In Language Is Sermonic Weaver makes plain that he sees analogy as second in philosophical status to definition. Weaver's complaint that social scientists do not ground their research in dialectical definition is consistent with his perception that they are reluctant to use analogy, since, to follow Weaver's argument, analogy may help one perceive essences (LIS 213). In contrast to his philosophical analysis, Weaver finally proposes a relatively mundane reason for the character of social scientific rhetoric. It is a matter of training, clubiness, and elitism, a product of a "caste spirit" (ER

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206-7). Completing the Burkean framework of his analysis, Weaver maintains that the rhetoric of social science is motivated by hierarchy; it serves to establish social scientists as elites (ER 206). Thorstein Veblen might speak of social scientific rhetoric as a reflection of a "trained incapacity" to see beyond one's specialty. Weaver acknowledges the insulating or "protective" effect of social scientific jargon, and bemoans the consequences for the average person who is mystified by the language of scientism and bureaucracy. Significantly, Weaver sees social science as sharing with other social institutions a responsibility to educate the public (ER 210). His ideal for social scientific rhetoric is not, in this important sense, different from his ideal for all rhetoric. In his first essay on social scientific rhetoric, Weaver notes that social science is limited in the extent to which it can use the traditional resources of rhetoric. On the other hand, he is obviously concerned that an obfuscating, jargon-ridden social scientific rhetoric impedes the working of traditional democracy (ER 208-10). By identifying social scientific rhetoric with bureaucracy, Weaver implies that it is part of a technocractic trend in government that insulates government from public access to the information necessary for making public policy decisions. Although it is ultimately used in the public forum, the specialized and insular rhetoric of the social sciences attempts to deny what is essential to all rhetoric, its intimate connection with ethics. WEAVER'S SOLUTION

Weaver's restatement of his views on social scientific rhetoric in "Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology" provides a clearer picture of his vision of an acceptable social scientific rhetoric. In this later essay he maintains that social scientific rhetoric is a kind of deliberative oratory, in which the social scientist proffers advice on alternative policies (LIS 152 ff.). Social scientists do more than provide facts that are used in argumentation about public policy; they inevitably express their perspectives, often without acknowledging the difference between the two. Weaver does not wish to limit social scientists to the facts alone or to impose upon them what McCloskey has called "verbal hygiene." This would be inconsistent with Weaver's complaint that the General Semanticists attempt to sanitize language of its evocations and to create a kind of neuter speech. Rather, he desires a social scientific rhetoric that is logical and factual on one hand and propositional and ethical on the other. Moreover, he agrees with Max Weber that the social scientist must take pains to indicate what is factual and what is evaluative. The overarching problem is how social scientists can use rhetoric appropriate both to their role as "social scientists" and to their role as citizens (LIS 156). Weaver wishes to reunite philosophy and the study of society through a recognition of its rhetorical and, therefore, ethical character. When social scientific research

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is used in the formation of public policy, the researcher enters into an arena of competing rhetorics. Implicitly, Weaver suggests that the arguments of the social scientist should not take precedence to those of nonscientists who also give counsel on matters of public policy. Richard Harvey Brown is one of many recent sociologists who laments the passage of social philosophy. He notes that "classical thinkers such as Comte and Marx hoped that social theory would convert popular consciousness to new modes of historically redemptive thought. This more synoptic view—at once philosophical, historical, and sociological—characterized the makers of modern social thought. Today narrowly professional social scientists seem both incapable and uninterested in this classical pursuit. In order to reappropriate this larger, classical view we must try to restore the idea of social science as public philosophy" (7). Weaver, while similarly asking that social science should take seriously its obligation to establish a philosophical foundation for its perspectival leanings, would oppose the positivism of Comte, the materialism of Marx, and the liberalism of other classical social theorists. The idea of social meliorism itself represents, after all, a philosophical perspective regarding the improvability of society. As in much of Weaver's rhetorical criticism, his complaint that a given example of rhetoric lacks a philosophical foundation is, upon closer examination, more a complaint that the philosophical position is not Platonic, conservative, or one that accepts the premise of cultural autonomy, especially the autonomy of the American South against the industrial and technological North. There is, then, some considerable doubt that social scientists, who, as Weaver notes, tend toward liberalism and the integration of society, would ever conceive a social philosophy that Weaver would find satisfactory. Ultimately, Weaver's suggestion that social scientists should call themselves social philosophers may be no more than a vain wish that social scientists recognize the error of their ways and become social philosophers of the sort he most prefers. Weaver is willing to admit that a "pure subjective idealism" is an unaffordable luxury, and that hard data and measurement are necessary (158). But his overarching wish is to re-establish the prominence of philosophy and rhetoric in public deliberation. Weaver is less impressed with the need for objectivity in the social sciences than he is with the need for a philosophical ideal against which the social sciences can measure their findings. Weaver's romantic desire to restore philosophy to a position of preeminence separates him from Burke, whose analysis of social scientific rhetoric draws no such conclusion. Weaver is jealous of the position of the social scientist in society, and his examination of social scientific rhetoric is meant to raise questions about its legitimacy. His essays on social science express the hierarchy he thinks should exist among branches of knowledge, just as in another of his essays he attempts to establish a philosophic hierarchy of argument types (LIS 201-25). One cannot help but notice the Quixotic nature of Weaver's essays or to

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appreciate their eloquence and humanism, even if one disagrees with their metaphysics and politics. It must be held in mind that Weaver's rhetorical views are colored by his resistance to modern culture. His reaction to social science, although analytical, is first of all visceral. This point is well illustrated by his complaint that social science engages in appeals to authority through "the patter of modern shibboleths." The vocabulary of social science annoys him because it suggests "intellectual fashion" and optimistic programs for change. "Modern, rational, liberal, professional, intergovernmental, objectivity, research, disciplines, workshops" are examples of words he finds objectionable but difficult to oppose "without putting oneself in the camp of reaction and obscurantism" (LIS 151). He is a man who is never far from his own prejudices, a quality he would count as a great virtue. What has been said of Evelyn Waugh may well be said of Richard Weaver: he was out of place in his generation, disliking most of what separated it from the past. Weaver's theoretic perspective on social scientific rhetoric is derivative of von Hayek's critique of social science and Burke's rhetorical theory. Weaver has shaped these notions together with his own extrapolations and fitted them into the mosaic of his rhetorical theory. His use of the dichotomy between dialectical and positive terms is problematic because, although borrowed from Burke, it is erroneously presented as consistent with Plato's views on rhetoric. The idea that there is one universe of discourse referring to the positive world and one to the dialectical is deceptively simple and certainly not Platonic in origin. On the contrary, any term, depending upon its use, can be made dialectical. Nor is it safe to say that Plato would attribute greater realism to terms that stand for objects in the natural world than he would to abstract concepts such as justice or beauty. Perhaps most daunting is Weaver's unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of liberal social theory he finds at odds with his own Platonism. Instead, the notion that society can be improved by social scientific inquiries into social problems is circularly defined as symptomatic of social science's tendency to take ethical positions without a preceding dialectic. But clearly, Comte, the founder of social science, was a social philosopher, whether or not one accepts his philosophy. The rhetorical charm of Weaver's analysis might well keep one from questioning the premises upon which it is based. Weaver is not merely elaborating on what Kenneth Burke said, although he uses certain of his notions and is even led to write a critique that might be characterized as dramatistic. One must realize, however, that at a more essential level Weaver's conservative partisanship makes him anything but a Burkean. NOTES

1. Philip K. Tompkins notes that when Burke was asked about Weaver's Ethics of Rhetoric at an informal gathering, he maintained that it contained ideas that

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Weaver had appropriated from him after Weaver attended the seminar Burke held at the University of Chicago. According to Tompkins, Burke claimed that it was for this reason that he "lost all interest in writing his own ethic." 2. Compare Weaver's statement that the meanings of dialectical terms "change according to what they are matched with" (LIS 147). See also Johannesen, "Uses of Kenneth Burke," 325. 3. Quoted in Howard Washington Odum, American Sociology: The History of American Sociology through 1950. New York: Longman, Green, 1951, p. 69. 4. According to sociologist Andrew Weigert in "The Immoral Rhetoric of Scientistic Sociology": "The phenomenon of identity transformation in sociology is intelligible in terms of the discipline's own perspectives: the motives of a status group; class consciousness predicated on the relationship to the means of production such as research grants, computers, and free time; the objective and constraining quality of intersubjective forms; the symbolic construction of the objects of knowledge; the situational conferring and validation of identities" (112).

8 General Semantics and Spacious Rhetoric

THE OLD ORATORY AND NEUTER DISCOURSE: POLES OF WEAVER'S DIALECTIC ON LANGUAGE The cultural contest between science and rhetoric is for Weaver a very real one, observable in every corner of intellectual and social life. In Weaver's mind, modern society, shaped by a faith in the world of sensory experience, has replaced a society wherein ideas were thought more important and interesting than facts. In an earlier time oratory summarized the guiding beliefs of the culture. The modern preoccupation with fact, which Weaver describes in his essay on the Scopes trial, has insidiously undermined traditional rhetoric and oratory. Weaver maintains that a higher form of rhetoric flourished in America in the nineteenth century, an era confident in the universality of the broad beliefs expressed by the great orators of the day. He argues that the tendency of modern audiences to judge the facts for themselves, rather than to rely upon the orator to give the facts their philosophical and cultural meanings, is a consequence of society's commitment to science. In "The Spaciousness of Old Rhetoric" he blames the press of modern culture for a public attitude that makes the grandiloquence and high-minded propositions that resounded in the ceremonial oratory of the nineteenth century seem quaint and, indeed, irrelevant (ER 164). As his analysis of the argumentation of the Scopes trial reveals, Weaver believes the purpose of rhetoric is not to establish fact but to embody metaphysical propositions that guide human belief and conduct. We are, Weaver maintains, in the throes of an era in which graphic representations of the empirical world are preferred to language that captures essences and promotes transcendent beliefs. Lost is the sense of the ideal orator Cicero

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described in De Oratore—the person whose power resided in an eloquence rooted in wisdom. Lost is a rhetoric underlain by dialectic and expressive of the shared beliefs of the society, what Weaver describes as the "universal enlightened consensus" (ER 170). Weaver provides an idealized image of an old oratory, rich in human significance and in the valuations that unify a culture. Such oratory manifested the positioning of the culture in relation to the world. The nineteenth-century orator—really the southern orator, on the strength of Weaver's examples—invented his arguments from the shared and confident beliefs of the community. From Weaver's point of view, it is a mark of social degeneration that the public no longer finds this sort of rhetoric interesting. Under the domination of scientific ways of thinking, modern culture has become more concerned with what can be seen, rather than what can be thought. It has looked outward rather than inward for its truths. Platonic rhetoric, which unites dialectical truth with imagination, seems inconsistent with the empirical orientation of modern culture. By contrast, Weaver sees today a discourse that emphasizes logic and fact and engages in sensationalism, without stimulating the imagination of the audience or orienting it toward an ethical good. In his analysis of the Scopes trial he portrays science as lacking a dialectical position, arguing that because science is objective it cannot also be rhetorical. As Wayne Booth suggests, however, the work of recent philosophers of science, such as Michael Polyani and Thomas Kuhn, has helped us see the rhetorical dimension of science (Modern Dogma 108-9). Similarly, Weaver criticizes rhetoric that reveals scientistic tendencies in presenting objective information about the world without addressing the question of how such information should be evaluated. "Language is sermonic," Weaver proclaims in an essay of the same name; it is a carrier of tendency (LIS 115-38). Genuine rhetoric expresses the subjective prejudices of the speaker and provides the means to move the audience toward good or evil. Rhetoric distilled of its subjectivity and thus its ethical dimension is not rhetoric at all. Weaver blames the influence of science for the eclipse of authentic rhetoric by an antirhetoric that pursues the false goal of pure objectivity. If science has pulled rhetoric from its pedestal, profound changes in culture and in communication have prevented it from returning to its former place of prominence. Weaver leaves undiscussed a crucial reason for the difference between nineteenth-century oratory and modern political speech making—the former was written for print rather than broadcast. This simple fact, as much as anything, accounts for the existence of the "widths of sound and meaning" in nineteenth-century oratory that strike modern audiences as contrived. The oratory of modern political leaders is intended for transmission by the electronic media. From Franklin Roosevelt's presidency onward there has been a general recognition that the effectiveness of popular political oratory resides in its accessibility to the mass audience

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created by radio and television. Roosevelt's "fireside chats" represent a telling example of the new genre of oratory that values plainness over ornamentation, simplicity over complexity, and immediate comprehension over metaphysical reflection. When Weaver expresses regret over the passage of the old oratory, he is also consciously regretting the passage of an era when orators spoke to small audiences assembled in remote corners of American society and sharing a distinct cultural identity that has been eroded by the massness of modern society. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which Carl Sandberg aptly called the "great American poem," reached the larger national audience by means of newspapers and, although Lincoln read the speech to the small audience assembled for the ceremony, essentially it was literature. The spacious rhetoric of the nineteenth century was both more literary and more propositional than most contemporary public discourse. When Weaver dusts off the manuscripts of the old oratory he discovers a literary and philosphical substantiveness, which he says demands our admiration. Proximal to Weaver's conception of rhetoric based in metaphysical truth, the grandiloquent speeches of the nineteenth century represent one pole of Weaver's dialectic on language. At the other pole is what he calls "semantically purified speech," which Weaver believes threatens to become the modern ideal (ER 7). It is, says Weaver sardonically, "language under the surveillance of science" (VO 71). In interpreting Plato's Phaedrus, Weaver, as discussed earlier, compares Lysias' speech praising nonlove with its businesslike use of language, to the "neuter discourse" he says is promoted by the General Semanticists. General Semantics does not now enjoy the popularity or notoriety it did at the time Weaver wrote about it, and it may not be immediately obvious why Weaver's reaction should have been so intense. However, it is not difficult to find some validity in his claim that the General Semanticists' program strains to deprive discourse of its subjectivity. The General Semantics movement, founded by Alfred Korzybski and further popularized by such men as Stuart Chase and S.I. Hayakawa, is antirhetorical to the extent that its mission is to make discourse as faithful to its objective referents as possible. To believe Weaver, the semanticists, under the spell of the "tyrannizing image" of science, seek to perfect language to conform to its new cultural milieu. Weaver speaks derisively of the semanticists' naive desire to "plane the tropes off language" (LIS 46), though Chase, for one, denies that this is his intention (Tyranny 17). LANGUAGE, SCIENCE, AND SOCIAL BETTERMENT A discussion of the relationship between language and science should help clarify and focus the issues involved in Weaver's assault upon the General Semanticists' program. As compared with rhetoric, which attempts

162 The Politics of Rhetoric to induce belief and action, Kenneth Burke defines science a " 'semantic' or 'descriptive' terminology for charting the impersonal wishes of nature from an 'impersonal' point of view regardless of one's wishes or preferences" (Rhetoric of Motives 41). The scientific attitude, with its dedication to material truth, inclines to perfect language as an agency of objective inquiry. Language, John Locke's system of "delegated efficacies," is perceived as imperfect because of its relativism and its subjectivism. Long before Korzybski, the philosophers of the scientific revolution viewed language apprehensively as an imperfect instrument for communicating the new truths of science. The impress of scientific rationality upon culture injected a fear of the subjective aspect of language that rhetoric exploited. Philosophers realized that language, essential to scientific reasoning, expression, and documentation, if carelessly used, could be a drag upon the enterprise of science and the acquisition of knowledge. Sir Francis Bacon helped lay the groundwork for the modern interest in semantics. The rhetorician Karl Wallace notes that Bacon counseled that the careful scientific investigator should express his findings in denotative and unambiguous language (Wallace 388-89). Although Bacon acknowledged the utility of figurative language in scientific discourse, presuming that the usages faithfully depicted reality, he saw that misused language was a serious impediment to knowledge (Stephens 216). In the section of his Novum Organum that deals with the "Idols of the Market Place," Bacon, remarks Wallace, "speaks like a present day semanticist" (402). Bacon believed that words, whose meanings are determined by the agreements of the common run of humankind, are often too imprecise to deal efficiently and accurately with matters requiring careful intellectual judgments. John Locke was similarly concerned with language as a means of transferring knowledge. He devoted a large section of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the abuses of rhetoric and the prospects for a discourse that would facilitate communication. Locke's interest in language is cogently summarized by Wilbur Samuel Howell: "Thus he [Locke] indicated that, whether words are intended as argument or exposition, they are ruled by the same law—a law which would judge the effectiveness of discourse by its linguistic adequacy in transferring accurate ideas of things from one man to another without distortion, deceit, or undue difficulty" (328). Plainly, Locke's insistence that words are not the ideas they represent anticipates the basic position of the General Semanticists. Interestingly, Korzybski, the father of General Semantics, claimed that his work was independent of empiricism (Schuelke 220). But the connection that Korzybski explicitly denies exists nevertheless. For the General Semanticists and for the empiricists, meaning in language is a function of human perception (Schuelke 222). The idea that meanings are in the mind rather than in a reality of ideas

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that language represents is one that cuts at the heart of Weaver's philosophical pieties. If meaning is relative to individual perception, it is contextual and impermanent, and thus ideal knowledge is impossible. Weaver believes in the ideality of language, namely, in the notion that essences can be expressed and preserved in language (LIS 25). In contrast to the General Semanticists' relativistic outlook on language, Weaver expresses a commitment to a transcendent "one world of meaning" (LIS 50). "Words," he declares, "each containing its universal, are our reminders of knowledge" (IHC 158). He challenges both the General Semanticists' postulates and their pragmatic aims. He sees in their treatment of language a denial of the reality of ideas: They desire language to reflect not conceptions of verities but qualities of perceptions, so that man may, by the pragmatic theory of success, live more successfully. To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucinations and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world. To such people as these, Christ as preacher of the Word, is a "homosexual paranoiac." (IHC 37) One does not need to be an idealist to appreciate Weaver's mordant criticisms of General Semantics. He is not far from the truth when he suggests that semanticists attempt to deprive language of its tendency. The linguistic beau ideal of the semanticist derives from the notion that science and technology can be used to shape most anything into a more rational, and therefore superior, form. Korzybski, an engineer by training, saw himself studying language as one who studied a machine to discover how it "ought to work" (73). In the depths of the Great Depression he speculated about a Utopian society in which writers and authors would be compelled to undertake a course of semantic "training": When we become more civilized and enlightened no public speaker or writer will be allowed to operate publicly without demonstrating first that he knows the structure and semantic functioning of the linguistic capacities. . . . All history shows at present, and this evidence should not be taken lightly by scientifically enlightened society, that the majority appears "always wrong," and that all that we call "progress," "civilization," "science," has been achieved by a very small minority. . . . [Professional scientific bodies would have to set the standards and perfect the technique of the linguistic structural examinations. . . . As a result, quite probably, a great amount of useless, befogging issues, delusional writings and speeches would not be produced, with great benefit to all concerned (485-87). In the so-called Machine Age, the public looked to science and technology for social panaceas. Korzybski appealed to a naive public optimism

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about the potential of finding engineering solutions to nonmaterial problems. The rectification of the use of language with the principles of General Semantics would, he felt, end public delusion and lead to general social betterment. As this quotation illustrates, Weaver is right that General Semantics was a perverse application of scientific rationality to language. Korzybski attempted to reduce language to structure and to see meaning as simply psychological. Weaver, on the contrary, believes that linguistic meanings are transcendent. WEAVER'S IDEALISM AS THE FILTER FOR HIS RESPONSE TO GENERAL SEMANTICS

In his analysis of the Phaedrus, Weaver finds evidence that Plato agrees with the spirit of his criticisms of the semanticists. His interpretation of the Phaedrus reveals as much or more of Weaver's philosophy than Plato's (ER 3-26). In a sense, Weaver uses the Phaedrus as a philosophic Rorschach to which he relates his own perceptions of the problems of modern society dominated by science. He sees in the dialogue a confirmation of his criticisms of modern positivism. The well-known dialogue, which simultaneously concerns love and rhetoric, develops through three speeches, one in praise of the nonlove, a second in praise of physical love, and a third in praise of a virtuous love whose satisfactions are intellectual rather than corporeal. The first speech is one that the youth Phaedrus has heard the logographer Lysias deliver and that he enthusiastically recites to Socrates. Like much of the rhetorical fare of epideictic oratory presented by the Sophists, the speech supports a paradoxical theme, the praise of nonlove, as a display of the speaker's rhetorical virtuosity. Lysias argues that one should give sexual favors to the nonlover and offers in support the advantages to nonlove and the disadvantages of love. Weaver interprets Lysias' speech as implicitly arguing for a kind of neuter language, although explicitly Lysias praises the nonlover by pointing to the prudence of nonlove relationships. Consistent with his belief that the entire dialogue compares love and rhetoric, Weaver sees the nonlove relationship as analagous to one that is nonrhetorical in the sense that it excludes the affections of the rhetor and the audience. He speaks of the semanticists who seem to prefer a "neuter form of speech" or a "semantically purified speech" to one that excites emotion or involves us in ethical choices. As Weaver explains: "By 'semantically purified speech' we mean the kind of speech approaching pure notation in the respect that it communicates abstract intelligence without impulsion. It is simple instrumentality, showing no affection for the object of its symbolizing and incapable of inducing bias in the hearer. . . . Like a thrifty burgher, it has no romanticism about it; and it distrusts any departure from the literal and prosaic" (ER 8-9). Despite Weaver's opposition to the General Semantics movement, it would

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be impossible for him to oppose completely the basic idea that one should take care in the use of language. To the extent that Weaver is a Platonist, he cannot deny the philosophical importance of correct names. In the Phaedrus, Socrates revealingly declares himself to be a lover of words. The notion that language is ideal is one he inherits from Plato. Not surprisingly, Plato is ambivalent about the idea of correct names. A more direct and perhaps more reliable index to Plato's views on semantics than the Phaedrus is what he says about Prodicus, the Sophist most concerned with correct language. Unfortunately, Plato's perspective is not wholly clear; he expresses a good deal of ambivalence about Prodicus, seeing both value and limitation in Prodicus' one drachma and fifty drachma lectures on discovering correct names among what appear to be synonyms. In contrast to Weaver's polarization of semantics and rhetoric, it is interesting that Prodicus undoubtedly instructed his students in linguistic precision as part of his course in rhetoric (Guthrie 223). Guthrie speculates that Socrates, who refers to himself as a pupil of Prodicus, might have incorporated Prodicus' own method into his, since both ask that names be correctly used, though for Socrates this idea serves as a foundation for philosophy, while for Prodicus it is essential to rhetoric. In Plato's dialogues, Prodicus is indirectly criticized as one who would teach those of his students who were not pregnant with thought and who could then simply be told the facts, rather than acquiring their own wisdom through the Socratic method (Guthrie 27576). Guthrie places Prodicus into the class of orators Plato criticizes in the Phaedrus—those who "have imagined that it is rhetoric they have discovered when they attained merely the preliminaries to the art" (Phaedrus 269b-c, quoted in Guthrie 276). What they lack, as Guthrie points out, is an understanding of philosophy. Predictably, Weaver acknowledges that proper naming is essential to knowledge. Although he admits to sounding fanciful, Weaver nevertheless asserts: "A name is not just an accident; neither is it a convention which can be repealed by majority vote at the next meeting; once a thing has been given a name, it appears to have a certain autonomous right to that name, so that it could not be changed without imperiling the foundations of the world" (LIS 192-93). One cannot educate youth, Weaver maintains, without teaching them what names mean. It is a task, apparently, for one who knows their true meaning. Indeed, Weaver claims that the relativist could not teach meaning, since he "is blind to the unities and pluralities of the world" (LIS 192-93). The views of the General Semanticists are really quite far afield from Prodicus's notion of semantics, or, for that matter, from the semantic analysis undertaken by Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning. In the first place, General Semanticists are social reformers while philosophers such as Prodicus or Ogden and Richards are decidedly not. Korzybski, Chase, and Hayakawa promote a social agenda tied to the idea that society can be

166 The Politics of Rhetoric far more rational if only language were understood and used with greater care. Moreover, Korzybski denies that general semantics can be equated with traditional semantics. According to Korzybski, who undoubtedly has the Ogden and Richards book in mind, "The present day theories of meaning are extremely confused and difficult, ultimately hopeless, and probably harmful to the sanity of the human race." Korzbyski critizes such theories for a failure to account for human values, and then proceeds to reduce values to something like psychological homeostasis. In Science and Sanity he says that General Semantics must "work out a theory of evaluation which is based on the optimum electro-colloidal action and reaction of the nervous system" (xxx-xxxi). Clearly, the orientation of the General Semanticists is not that of Prodicus or the modern philosophers of meaning. Nor is it difficult to understand why Weaver would feel such strong antipathy toward the General Semantics movement. The General Semanticists are as disdainful of traditional philosophy as Weaver is of General Semantics. Consider, for example, the exception that Stuart Chase takes to philosophy: "To say that philosophers avoid facts is not true. But they are not governed by the facts; they are not humble before the facts; facts are not central in their concepts" (Tyranny 208). Weaver, as we have seen in studying his analysis of the Scopes trial, has no use for facts as arbiters of moral concerns. The question becomes: What shall be master, the facts of human existence or human sentiment, preference, and inclination? There is little reason to wonder why Weaver sees General Semantics as an expression of the antiphilosophical and antirhetorical perversions of scientistism. The General Semanticists are as unabashed in criticizing Weaver's intellectual icons as he is in criticizing theirs. The General Semanticists' pragmatism and their faith in the data of experience threaten Weaver's romantic and atavistic vision of a society ordered by philosophical ideals and by sentiment. (See Johannesen, "Conflicting.") According to Weaver, the semanticists promote the view that linguistic meaning derives from the extramental world rather than from the society or the collective consciousness. While the semanticists caution that words as generalizations might distort the meaning of the individual instance, so that the word dog might not represent the specific dog, Weaver maintains that it is in the essence of language to generalize. Like the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Weaver believes that meaning is a function of both the objects of consciousness and consciousness itself. Thus, according to Weaver "words do not have a relation to thoughts alone; they have relation to the real world through thought" (LIS 125). In this way, he navigates a course through the shoals of subjectivism on the one hand and objectivism on the other. He recognizes that if there were no relationship between the material world and language, objective knowledge would be impossible. Like Bacon, but with a different philosophical purpose, Weaver believes that the meanings of words go beyond those recognized in their everyday

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usage. He claims that there are true meanings that the common imagination is incapable of disclosing. Taking an almost mystical turn, Weaver tells us that meanings reside in imagination which "ideally . . . is commensurate with humanity itself . . . [and] capable of telling us theoretically exactly what every word must mean because it is the imagination that holds in contemplation all the various meanings that have to remain discrete and yet have somehow to function together in coherent discourse." It is, Weaver declares, "the man of greater imagination who helps to raise our imagination toward the absolute correctness of meaning" (LIS 123). Thus, Weaver considers the person of uncommon imagination, the poet, the philosopher, or the rhetorician, to be the one who brings us closest to the "true" meanings of language. This line of thought should not be unfamiliar; it is deeply embedded in Weaver's philosophy. The individual who uses language with a unique imagination can give the rest of us a glimpse of the ideal. It is the same thought that Weaver expresses in his discussion of the Phaedrus (ER 18). Needless to say, the idea suggests a sort of hierarchy of imagination in which the apprehension of true meaning and, thus, true knowledge, is the province of the superior intellect or of a "divine madness." Within this framework rhetoric becomes a way of conveying these meanings to those who would be unable to discover them on their own. Weaver's belief in superior imagination accords with his idea that one of the problems with contemporary society is that it no longer looks to authority for its meanings, values, and truths. That is but one reason why the tradition of the great ceremonial orator of the nineteenth century no longer holds sway and why today's public often distrusts arguments from authority. It would be remiss not to point out the obvious, namely, that the power to give meaning to socially significant symbols and to name them is not necessarily the province of those with superior wisdom or intellect. An historical analysis would suggest that all manner of totalitarian regimes, caste systems, and social hierarchies, no matter how questionable their legitimacy, exert influence by establishing the meanings of words. Totalitarian political propaganda characteristically takes ordinary words and redefines them to serve the interests of the state. Weaver's perspective on meaning, with its emphasis upon inspired imagination, is a far cry from the relativism he detects in the General Semanticists' position. Their position lacks the philosophical authoritarianism obvious in Weaver's, yet Korzybski's ideas for the application of General Semantics suggest a missionary zeal, if not an intellectual arrogance. Korzybski makes proper language use into something that can be learned only from his quasi-scientific notions and, as we have seen, he even speculates about a kind of licensing procedure for professional journalists and writers. Although not himself an engineer like Korzybski, Stuart Chase is also one who was imbued with the idea that engineering principles could improve society. Although he is well known as a popular economist, Stuart Chase

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was also among the circle interested in Technocracy Inc., a radical organization that throughout the 1930s promoted the idea of a government run by technical experts. What Chase would later do for the General Semantics movement with his Tyranny of Words, he did earlier for technocracy with Technocracy: An Interpretation: he served as one of the movement's unofficial publicists and interpreters (Duffy, "Technocracy" 18). General Semantics is, as Weaver recognizes, a movement grafted to an ideology of social betterment through scientific and technological progress. It attempts to apply scientific rationality to language to improve society. Weaver explicitly denies that "the vocabulary of reduced meanings will solve the problems of mankind," as he would deny categorically that science is a means to social salvation (IHC 151; ER 22). He believes it is an unpardonable sin that language, regarded in mystical terms by the Greeks and by the Christians, should be debased as a mere instrument for the transference of objective information. General Semanticists applaud language that faithfully represents the particular instance and warn against language that expresses abstractions. They are suspicious of words that frame traditional philosophical generalizations. Since Weaver promotes a philosophical rhetoric that embodies ethical ideals, it is no wonder that he should strike out against semantics. He believes modern rhetors and their audiences should be far less concerned with the particular than with the generic; less with empirical facts than with propositions that evaluate them. To Weaver's way of thinking, the General Semanticists seek to diminish the very qualities of language that make it the means of apprehending, communicating, and preserving philosophical and cultural ideals. THE STATUS OF RHETORICAL DISCOURSE AS AN INDEX TO CULTURAL WELL-BEING

Weaver believes that a culture can be judged by the way it treats discourse; the decline of traditional culture can be traced from the rise of nominalism in the Middle Ages to the final linguistic abuses of General Semantics. From Weaver's point of view the ultimate consequences of semantic tendencies are grave: "Verbal skepticism is the beginning of moral nihilism." He argues that if words have no fixed meanings the society has no means whereby it can make its institutions endure (SE 195-96). Semantics, the most recent expression of Medieval nominalism, begins with the assumption that word and thing are separate. Characteristically, Weaver refers to the traditional South for a model of a society less affected by the modernist tendency to treat language as relative. Only in a society such as this, where there is a foundation of belief in the word, can unity and order prevail. Weaver believes that semanticists engage in a vain pursuit when they attempt to orient society toward a use of language that is more faithful to its referents; the real task is to discover the true meanings of words and

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then to use them for the sake of preserving the settled beliefs of culture. He maintains that southerners are virtually made rhetoricians by living in a culture whose permanence is mirrored in a fixed vocabulary (SE 19495). He sees rhetoric as the leaven that binds society; a scientistic society, suspicious of all rhetoric, is inevitably fragmented. The persuasive appeal of the old eloquence, Weaver argues, is to the memory of values embedded in history, and a society that does not value rhetoric loses the agency of its own coherence (VO 55-56, 71-72; see Chapter 1). Every philosophy must forge its identity by establishing what it is not, as well as what it is. To this end General Semantics serves Weaver's interests well because it is a nearly perfect foil for his thinking about the rhetorical, as against the scientistic, conception of language. Indeed, Weaver admits the utility of positivism and relativism as devil's advocates (LIS 224). General Semantics is science applied to language as Weaver's theory is ethics applied to rhetoric. General Semantics posits the ideal of a neutral language, while Weaver insists that the proper role of rhetoric is to be the bearer of cultural values and truths. Weaver sees General Semantics as divesting language of its most humane functions: to embody the ideal and to move audiences toward it, to give voice to passions and sentiments, and to preserve the cultural beliefs of the past. In commenting on the rhetorical character of southern literature, Weaver speaks passionately of the need for words that express and evoke emotion: "The conviction that feelings are real and that discourse can be a devilish or divine instrument stands at the farthest remove from the mechanistic and sterile theory of notation which the modern teachers of 'communication' are trying to foist upon us" (SE 67). Weaver's ideal of rhetorical discourse is founded upon a nearly unequivocal approval of southern oratory, intimations of which he also finds in the rhetorical quality of southern literature. To substantiate his assessment of southern literature he quotes a poignant speech in Robert Penn Warren's At Heavens Gate: "The pore human man, he ain't nuthin but a handful of dust, but the light of God's face on him and he shines like a diamint, and blinds the eye of the unuprighteous congregation. Dust it lays on the floor, under the goin forth and the comin in, and ain't nuthin, and gets stirred up under the trompin, but a sunbeam come in the dark room in that light it will dance and shine for heart joy" (SE 66). Southerners, Weaver seems to say, use the language to express their very human responses to a world that produces a welter of emotions. In this and other examples of southern literature Weaver hears the "tumbling streams of image-bearing and evocative words [which] create the speaker's world of value and inclination" (SE 66). In exemplifying southern literary rhetoric with an example of vernacular eloquence Weaver demonstrates the ineluctable rhetorical power inherent in the language itself. His point is also well made by Kenneth Burke: "We cannot speak the mother tongue without employing the rhetorical devices of a Roman ora-

170 The Politics of Rhetoric tor." With particular pertinence to the topic at hand, Burke goes on to remark that Jeremy Bentham recognized that the "unconscious piety" involved in the use of language is what the "neutral vocabularies of science" seek to expunge (Permanence and Change 75). With few exceptions, when Weaver provides an example of oratorical eloquence it is that of a southerner. Among the southern speakers he praises are Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, the Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln, and Douglas MacArthur, a Virginian. "In the department of utterance," Weaver concludes, "the South has made its deepest mark" (SE 195, VO 55). The description of southern oratory that substantiates Weaver's evaluation is invariably the same. Southern orators, responding to the coherent aspects of their own cultural background, prefer argument from definition and move audiences by sentiment—a unity of emotion and settled belief—and by the legitimate authority associated with their role as expositors of society's values (ER 164-85). Weaver's discussion of his preference for the argument from definition in Language Is Sermonic as well as in two chapters in The Ethics of Rhetoric helps give dimension to his views on language and rhetoric. Admitting the theological nature of his views, Weaver expresses a philosophical predilection for arguments from definition, because in definition there is the possibility of expressing ideal meanings (LIS 212). Not only does Weaver note his own faith in a transcendent world of meaning, he assumes that those who argue from definition imply the existence of an apprehensible ideal. Although at times orators might simply attempt to articulate settled

belief, such as in ceremonial oratory, at other times their rhetorical invention carefully weighs the meaning of a priori conceptions, which then control their arguments. Lincoln, for example, concluded that slavery was wrong based upon a definition of humankind that stipulated the freedom of all people. In discussing Lincoln's tendency to argue from definition, Weaver comments on the powerful originality of his arguments, the anticipation of which apparently aroused apprehension in his judicial opponents (ER 86). It is, as we have said, in response to rhetorical exigencies that the great lights are led to discover meanings that premise arguments, but which may also become principles that transform society. If, as Weaver suggests, ideal meanings are immutable, they must also be discovered and expressed by individual speakers in human discourse within the context of historical events (LIS 206). The real world gives rise to the need for persuasion and thus to the possibility of finding essences that must then be represented rhetorically. Although a definition of humankind that establishes the principle of individual freedom may appear self-evident in the abstract, this definition must be presented in such a way as to move an audience that is situated in time and space. Lincoln, though confident in his stance that slavery violated the essence of humanity, at one point argued his case against the extension of

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slavery by asking his audiences to look at the assumptions that lay behind their own behavior. In his Peoria speech he pointed out that, although his audience would not allow its children to play with the children of slave traders, they would allow them to play with the children of slaves (ER 92). On a psychological and emotional basis Lincoln's argument provided potent proof for this audience that slavery violated the essence of humanity. In other words, Lincoln realized that his definition of humankind and his inclusion of the slave in this definition might not be persuasive to some people unless they saw how their own behavior and emotions manifested a prior acceptance of his definition. He appealed to a belief that drew its force from being already implicit in the minds of the audience and thereby led the audience to accept its consequences. Lincoln, Weaver would say, actualized the possibilities of his dialectic on human freedom in an argument that adapted to the audience's uniqueness and its place in history. He fulfilled Plato's prescription for a rhetoric that, although substantiated by truth, adapts to the varying nature of the human soul. It was not principally Lincoln's intention to assert a definition of humankind, although his eloquent arguments on behalf of human freedom are of universal value. To the contrary he articulated his definition because of the exigencies of the moment and in reference to problems with political and ethical scope. Weaver argues that the nature of language is to be found in its rhetorical uses, and in the richness and complexity of persuasive human interactions, not in some abstract notion of pure referential meaning conceived in the mind of the General Semanticist. It is the rhetorical or "sermonic" nature of language that Weaver regards as its definining characteristic. Although he admits that language varies in the degree to which it is objective, he believes nevertheless that the essential nature of language is to express the speaker's attitude, and from this follows motivation and the attempt to influence, even in the realm of science (LIS 221-22; ER 22). At this point one detects obvious convergences between Weaver's insistence that language is "the carrier of tendency" and Burke's emphasis upon the motivational aspects of discourse and his view of language as "symbolic action." Weaver's notion that "men are born into history, with an endowment of passion and a sense of the ought" approximates Burke's conception of man as the "inventor of the negative," that is, of moral impulse (LIS 221; Burke, Language 9-13). In fact, Weaver cites Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives in confirmation of his thesis of the attitudinal qualities of language (LIS 221). In The Ethics of Rhetoric he uses Burke's notion that only in a very narrow sphere can one make language be made to seem neutral (22). Although obviously influenced by Burke, Weaver departs from him in asserting that there is a superior form of rhetoric that embodies essences and presents resemblances of truth. Weaver regards rhetoric Platonically as providing the stimulus to truth, "actualizing" it, as it were, through form. It creates the linkage between

172 The Politics of Rhetoric the purely speculative positions of dialectic and their effectiveness in the real world, affording the means of moving from the possible to the actual. Weaver represents this notion in terms of a geometric relationship: "Accordingly when we say that rhetoric instills belief and action, we are saying that it intersects possibility with the plane of actuality and hence of the imperative" (ER 28). While dialectic establishes essences, rhetoric, by rendering them persuasive, gives them existence in the world. Rhetorical devices such as, for example, narrative description that appeals to the senses, allegory, metaphor, metonomy, and epithet help move audiences subjectively and, rather than requiring suppression in the interests of objectivity, should be valued for their instrumentality. Not only are the rhetorical qualities of language inescapable, they are of utmost social value when used by people of insight and authority in a good interest. Rather than denouncing the rhetorical uses of language, we should celebrate the "web of intercommunication and inter-influence" and attend to evaluating the orator's insight and ethical purpose (LIS 224). Rhetors are, it would seem, as Gorgias proposed, enchanters of souls, who make use of the magical properties of the language to stimulate belief and move audiences to action. With some modification of this metaphor, they are what Plato idealized them to be in the Phaedrus, namely, noble lovers who move souls toward the good configured in rhetorical language. Weaver was committed to the idea that scientism applied to language was destructive of culture. His interest in semantics persisted until the end of his life. Interestingly, one of two courses he asked to teach at Vanderbilt was in semantics. A faculty member in the English department commented at the time that Weaver knew little about semantics. In fact, he knew a great deal; he had, one might say, a prosecutor's fascination with what he saw as a kind of intellectual criminality. Since Weaver died before assuming his post at Vanderbilt we can only speculate about the content of the course, probably a graduate seminar. It seems likely, however, that he would have used this subject to express the cultural and philosophic significance of rhetorical discourse and its scientistic antithesis (Young). The clarity in Weaver's writings invariably results from his tendency to construct polar opposites and to understand their causes and consequences in antithetical pairs. As modernism is all that philosophical realism is not, so neuter discourse is all that rhetorical discourse is not. One can appreciate, therefore, Weaver's long-standing interest in the false ideal of language profferred by the General Semanticists. In the very sphere of Weaver's greatest knowledge he had discovered a cancer, a manifestation of the evils of modern culture in the form of an antirhetoric, devoid of rhetorical evocation, of subjectivity, of historical resonance, and of memory that could reconstitute lost ideals. The doctrine of General Semantics impiously shattered the unity of word and thing, and in turn the unity brought about by the communal belief in the significant symbols of culture. In Weaver's mind

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neuter discourse is to the current century what spacious oratory was to the last, an index to the character of the culture. It is the low water mark of modernist culture. What Weaver would think of current attitudes toward language is not difficult to predict. Although for a time there was considerable interest in General Semantics, including popular books and regular college course offerings, as a notion of social improvement through linguistic precision it has gone the way of all intellectual fads. In this light, Weaver might be taken as reactionary sounding a false alarm. However, the ideal of an objective language, particularly in the service of science and social science, has by no means lost its currency. So long as culture is under the spell of science, Weaver would argue, such tendencies are inevitable. Society has certainly not returned to an admiration of spacious rhetoric, and this would be enough to tell Weaver that culturally all is not well. Nor has rhetoric of the type Weaver admires returned to greater favor, although the academy has witnessed some resurgence in the study of rhetoric. In its popular use the term rhetoric still suggests to media commentators and political pundits an obscuring of reality rather than, as Weaver understood it, a means to cultural coherence and philosophic revelation. There are also curricular tendencies that reflect some of the semanticists' themes. Textbooks in communication encourage an interest in eliminating communication barriers and reducing ambiguity, and likewise courses in technical and business communication demonstrate how to sanitize, or objectify, practical prose. These developments would no doubt have confirmed Weaver's fears of the drift away from a rich rhetoric of evocation and toward an eviscerated "neuter discourse." Thus, despite the loss of interest in General Semantics, Weaver's analysis still has great pertinence. Like all of Weaver's rhetorical theory it is self-reflexive, because Weaver's analysis of semantics is also fundamentally a cultural critique made effective by an eloquent rhetoric that is the antithesis of neuter discourse.

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9 Rhetorical Genres

Rhetorical theorists tacitly invite their readers to consider their own rhetoric insofar as a rhetorical theory's expression either purposefully or unconsciously reflects the theory itself. Cicero's De Oratore, for example is manifestly self-reflexive, the theory calling attention to its manner of expression and, in turn, the expression providing confirmation for the theory. Michael Leff characterizes De Oratore as a work that relies upon "enactment as well as statement" (121). De Oratore is an eloquent and wise discourse on eloquence and wisdom, as Plato's Phaedrus is a work of literary imagination on this, among other, subjects. Richard Weaver's theory is also self-reflexive, although its explicit conclusions and formal implications are different from either Cicero's or Plato's. The descriptions of ethical rhetoric Weaver articulates, as well as his own rhetorical tendencies, can be better understood by viewing them in light of the Aristotelian categories of epideictic, forensic, and deliberative rhetoric. Weaver, himself, finds it telling to categorize social scientific rhetoric as deliberative, since it helps him argue that social scientists argue for liberal social change (LIS 152-58). By asking what genres of rhetoric Weaver seems to prefer, we do not intend to arrive at a final and definitive categorization of his rhetoric but rather to shed light on his method and purpose. Plainly, it is impossible to make Weaver exclusively into one kind of rhetor or another because, just as the purposes of the three genres are intertwined, so are his purposes. However, it cannot escape notice that Weaver frequently occupies himself with honor and dishonor, the goals of epideictic rhetoric, and with questions of justice and injustice, the goals of forensic rhetoric. The distance between praise and blame on the one hand and justice and injustice on the other is not great, nor for that matter is

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the distance between what is praiseworthy and the deliberative rhetor's interest in what is advisable (Rhetoric 1368a). Like his rhetorical theory, Weaver's rhetoric is multidimensional and can be viewed from several avenues of approach. What appears epideictic from one perspective may be more like forensic from another. Indeed, Weaver often wishes us to think of him as defending the indefensible, a forensic pleader in the court of history, but he also enlists stylistic resources identified with the epideictic orator. His defense frequently focuses on the praise of the philosophic virtues he says underlie the actions of those he praises and are absent in those he condemns. This focus upon values makes his essays appear epideictic. Yet, in the same essay he may deal with the facts in the partial manner of the Greek funeral orator, or when viewed differently, in the manner of a prosecuting attorney overly eager to win a case. Part of the difficulty is that, although Weaver's primary audience is conservative, a secondary audience comprised of liberals will read him quite differently. From one perspective Weaver is writing for the delight and edification of like-minded conservatives who might well regard his essays on behalf of lost causes as ingenious displays of the virtues they identify with conservativism. On the other hand, a liberal audience might recoil from Weaver's exposition of virtues they do not accept. In this case, his essays, such as his defense of John Randolph, will appear highly controversial, and arguments that would strike a conservative audience as cunningly clever will seem sophistical to audiences not prepared to accept Weaver's conclusions. He is, in our opinion, at his best when seen as an epideictic rhetor and worst when regarded as a forensic rhetor. Least of all is he a deliberative rhetor, except in that his ethical evaluations and forensic judgments imply action without stipulating what it should be. Certainly he is not a deliberative orator of the liberal type, such as the social scientists he criticizes, for he does not offer specific prescriptions for social change. THE EPIDEICTIC RHETORICIAN Weaver's rhetoric is frequently one of praise and blame, relying less upon the use of inartistic evidence than upon the devices of rhetorical amplification. Weaver frequently expresses himself in an epideictic style, and his discourse embodies the ethical purposes with which serious epideictic rhetoric is associated. He is also most approving of epideictic oratory in the form of the spacious ceremonial speeches of nineteenth-century America, although he does not mention the epideictic genre in this connection. The reasons for Weaver's predilection for the epideictic, as we shall see, are as much philosophic and cultural as they are literary and aesthetic. A discussion of his approval of epideictic oratory provides a useful way of summarizing his notions of what rhetoric should be in the ideal, and how the ideal has been abandoned. Ideally, rhetoric has a cultural role, and in this em-

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phasis as well as in the kind of role he sees for rhetoric Weaver follows Plato, though Weaver ultimately arrives at a greater appreciation for rhetoric's potential than does Plato. Weaver's interpretation of the Phaedrus, itself a work on rhetoric that enlists the epideictic genre, is foundational to his understanding of rhetoric. It provides a well of insight to which he frequently returns. Although we have discussed Weaver's interpretation of the Phaedrus before, it is important to point out that the three speeches that comprise it are each epideictic, although each manifests quite a different character. The first speech, recited by Phaedrus, is Lysias' playful and impious argument on behalf of the nonlover. The next two speeches, Socrates' own, are also epideictic; one censuring, the other praising, love. Taken together the three are model speeches intended for instruction in the use and misuse of rhetoric. They are display speeches such as those used by the Sophists as models to instruct their students, although their philosophical purpose is different. Several sorts of epideictic rhetoric were practiced in ancient Greece, ranging from amusing displays to serious recitals of Greek history in funeral orations. The sort illustrated in the third speech in the Phaedrus is well suited to the presentation of Plato's philosophic notions. It makes use of epideictic for the purpose of instructing the single interlocutor, a particularly appropriate use given the themes of love and nonlove (Duffy, "Platonic" 86). l Weaver's appreciation of the third speech in the Phaedrus as a work of literary afflatus is underlaid by his preference for rhetorical discourse that moves audiences toward a truth first discovered through dialectic (ER 17). If, as Plato maintains, knowledge is a recollection of some prior vision of the truth, then the function of rhetoric is to stimulate the imagination toward its remembrance. Platonic epideictic rhetoric purports to give shape to truth rather than being coextensive with its discovery. By nature epideictic rhetoric is noncontroversial and deals less in fact than in the means whereby facts are evaluated. This is not to say, of course, that epideictic rhetors do not make use of logical proofs, but rather that the premises of their enthymemes tend not to be in dispute. In epideictic discourse the frequent use of enthymemes, sententia, and maxims contribute to its stylistic characteristics by providing a means of amplification and rhetorical accumulation. The major premises of such enthymemes affirm deeply held and perhaps unconscious audience beliefs. By making use of these beliefs the rhetor can lead the audience to conclusions that are credible and psychologically satisfying (ER 174). An illustration will help make this point. Theodore Roosevelt's famous address "The Man with the Muckrake," which sought to restrain the muckraking journalists from their excesses, made ample use of enthymemes, many of which were variations on the same theme. The speech did not incorporate a single example of muckraking, in part because Roosevelt did not wish to name the muckrakers he specifically had in mind. Rather, it relied for its effectiveness upon conclu-

178 The Politics of Rhetoric sions deductively drawn from maxims and the store of conventional wisdom. An example of one of Roosevelt's arguments should suffice to give a flavor of the entire speech: "It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth. An epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character does no good, but very great harm. The soul of every scoundrel is gladdened whenever an honest man is assailed, or even when a scoundrel is untruthfully assailed" (Roosevelt 213). Roosevelt, in the manner of Weaver's spacious orator, conspicuously avoided the lurid sensationalism of which he accused the muckrakers, preferring to make his case with arguments that flowed from moralistic propositions. What one notices in Roosevelt's speech, therefore, is his ability to attenuate his thoughts with enthymematic proofs and to embellish them with style. The chief resource of epideictic is amplification, and its genius subsists in its formal characteristics. Epideictic relies upon the evocative power of language to stimulate the memory and imagination, and is therefore the most literary of the three Aristotelian genres of rhetoric. If truth is presumed to be prior to its expression, then epideictic rhetoric would seem to be the genre of rhetoric most appropriate to its representation. Upon concluding the third speech in the Phaedrus, Socrates says the form of the speech was occasioned by Phaedrus himself: "The poetical figures I was forced to use, for Phaedrus would have them" (Phaedrus 257a). Plato's attempt to persuade Phaedrus of love's divine nature forced him to use a sensual and beautiful discourse, although Plato would also want us to recognize that the speech, while exciting Phaedrus' passions, led him to an intellectual rather than a physical catharsis. In this way, Plato invites us to see the possibilities of rhetorical discourse most clearly visible in the epideictic genre. Weaver comments that: "It is so regularly the method of Plato to follow a subtle analysis with a striking myth that it is not unreasonable to call him the master rhetorician" (ER 19). In terms of the dramatic argument of the Phaedrus this might have been the judgment Plato wished us to reach, although more broadly he would have preferred us to think him the master dialectician. At the end of the dialogue he explictly discusses dialectic as the more serious and noble pursuit (Phaedrus 276d). Why has Weaver so forcefully commended Plato to us as a rhetorician? He is struck, no doubt, with Plato's ability to fuse dialectic analysis with a figurative use of language, which together produce persuasive discourse. Without naming it as such what Weaver admires in Plato's use of rhetoric in the third speech of the Phaedrus is its epideictic character. Indeed, Plato's prose lies closest to the epideictic genre, a fact upon which Theodore Burgess has commented: "His themes came from philosophy but his style is epideictic in the best and highest sense" (246). If the role of dialectic is to discover truth, then it falls to rhetoric to present the result of dialectic in discourse

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that, in Weaver's interpretation of the Phaedrus, is analogous to love. Like love, rhetoric finds its object in the real world where differing audiences and situations require artfully adapted modes of presentation (ER 21). In this conception of rhetoric the truth is not contested, for it has already been discovered in dialectic. Rhetoric becomes the complementary element without which, "even the man who is thoroughly familiar with the facts will be not a bit nearer to the art of persuasion" (Phaedrus 260d). The highest form of rhetoric is exemplified by Plato, "the master rhetorician," who begins with "convictions and virtues," that is, with a knowledge of what is praiseworthy and what is censurable, to use epideictic terminology (Phaedrus 270b). As Weaver interprets Plato, the art of rhetoric, therefore, concerns how dialectically secured positions can be "actualized" by their adaptation to meet differences in the audience and the situation. If Weaver perceives that rhetoric has a role in dialectic or in the discovery of truth, he does not discuss it. To the contrary, he upholds the view that dialectic and rhetoric are separable, while admitting that not everyone would agree (ER 27). Rhetoric, with the emphasis he gives it, is not heuristic; it is representational. Rhetorical invention does not dwell upon establishing the validity of the propositions to be advanced, or in exposing them to dialectical scrutiny, but in finding the means of making them persuasive in the real world. For this purpose, Weaver believes, one must look to the commonplaces, to the fund of accepted opinion that is the wellspring of the rhetorician's premises (VO 63). Chaim Perelman observes that epideictic rhetoric, unlike the other two forms of rhetoric, is uncontroversial because the values it brings to the forefront are not open to dispute (48). In this he aligns himself with Cicero, who said in De Partitione Oratoria: "Epideictic does not establish propositions which are doubtful but amplifies statements that are certain or accepted as being certain" (21, 71). A. Lehigh Deneef, speaking of epideictic poetry, agrees: "Epideictic does not prove, it demonstrates" (221). Similarly Weaver sees nineteenth-century oratory as declamatory and as rekindling settled values through a process of "steady inculcation" (ER 181, 172). There is little wonder that Weaver would acknowledge Plato as the master rhetorician. In praising Plato's rhetorical acumen Weaver is implicitly praising his own ethical notions regarding the proper use of rhetoric. In the Phaedrus* extraordinary use of epideictic discourse Weaver sees intimations of a rhetoric that illuminates ideals, leads audiences to appreciate cultural sentiments, and provides a means for social integration. Epideictic rhetoric of the ceremonial type is distinctive for its appeal to memory, so it is significant that the Phaedrus purports to deal with, among other things, the question of written discourse. While Socrates disapproves of writing, on the grounds that it destroys memory, at the end of the dialogue he speaks of written discourse as "a treasury of reminders against an old age of forgetfulness" (Phaedrus 276d). Weaver's conservatism leads him to extol

180 The Politics of Rhetoric

the importance of memory, whether couched in terms of Platonic recollection or Weaver's notions of the "universal mind" and the "universal enlightened consensus" (IHC 181, ER 170). Weaver searches the past for the enduring values that should be reconstituted in the future. He forcefully rejects the liberal notion that the future should unfold merely as a response to the material circumstances of the present (LIS 215). Plato's other sustained statement about epideictic rhetoric is the Menexenus, in which Socrates delivers a model speech, perhaps meant to rival Pericles' funeral oration. Weaver does not discuss the Menexenus, although his treatment of nineteenth-century ceremonial oratory suggests his strong approbation of civic oratory of this type. The funeral oration was an address to the polus and concerned matters of civic virtue illustrated in the history of Athens and in the commitments of the Athenians who fell in its battles. Although Plato seems approving of epideictic rhetoric he does imply that poetry is preferable for the purposes of the funeral oration. At the beginning of the dialogue Socrates comments that the poets might use his "plain prose" in "providing material also for others to build into odes and other forms of poetry in a manner worthy of the doers of these deeds" (Phaedrus 239b).2 In the Menexenus Socrates presents a speech that celebrates Greek values, instructing the young, offering consolation, and deepening the cultural and political beliefs of the older generation. In Plato's model speech and in Greek funeral oratory generally, little importance is placed upon the faithful recounting of factually accurate history. The values illustrated in heroic deeds are true beyond any sense of the objective verifiability of deeds themselves. Indeed, George Kennedy notes that in The Republic Plato accepts the utility of myths and fairy tales as a means of conveying a truth, where truth is intended to mean that which produces the right effect upon the audience (162). Although they are fabrications, Socrates still proposes that they can be judged on the basis of how truthfully and beautifully they convey the appropriate values (Phaedrus 378c-379a). Public epideictic oratory of the kind represented in the funeral oration of the Menexenus also performs a philosophically educative function, celebrating values even while failing to provide an objectively accurate account of the facts. Weaver's praise of nineteenth-century ceremonial oratory delivered on occasions such as agricultural fairs and Fourth of July celebrations accounts for many of the qualities of Greek funeral oratory, the most important form of epideictic oratory in Greek life. His essay in praise of this atavistic form of rhetoric is itself an interesting example of epideictic rhetoric. Like so many of Weaver's essays it attempts, in the tradition of a certain form of epideictic oratory, to make an argument in support of an improbable position. While the Sophists often spoke on paradoxical themes to display their virtuosity as orators and to delight their audiences, Weaver adds to this the serious purpose of revealing the values he believes lay behind the old rhetoric. In part to establish the difficulty of his rhetorical undertaking, Weaver

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begins with the statement that spacious nineteenth-century speeches create in the modern hearer a sense of discomfort. He illustrates how such speeches represented a homogeneous society, while the discomfort they bring to modern audiences is a reflection of a society that is fragmented. What makes the old oratory spacious is not simply its grandiloquence but its interest in broad statements, in universals, and in essences. Like Plato, Weaver believes in the importance of subordinating fact to the truth of general propositions. What is important is the ethical effect such oratory has on the audience. That society is no longer interested in the old orator's orotund phrases suggests its cynicism toward the sort of general propositions they expressed. Ceremonial rhetoric of the nineteenth century began at the point where dialectic left off, although in this case, dialectic might be taken to mean the informal means by which society has arrived at its fundamental precepts, rather than the painstaking process of careful logical inquiry. Spacious oratory celebrated the very beliefs that gave the culture its coherence. Such rhetoric resubstantiated the ideas that were the heritage of previous generations. Even in the face of the vicissitudes of the material world, ceremonial oratory asserted the permanence of ideas. It was a rhetoric that symbolically argued against the mutability of the world and against eulogistic notions of progress. As spacious rhetoric is, by Weavers account, a splendid example of the right use of the art, others who do not share his conservative pieties might see in it societal self-congratulation and a smugness leading to complacency. The spacious rhetoric that wins Weaver's approval nearly always celebrates conservative rather than liberal values, although neither spacious nor epideictic rhetoric is the exclusive province of conservatism. In epideictic oratory, the authority of orators results in part from their identification with the values they praise. Nineteenth-century encomiasts of religious and civic virtues were bent neither on communicating the facts nor on interpreting them in the manner of a specialist. They spoke as generalists rather than as experts, whose training might have created, as Thorstein Veblen suggested, an incapacity to see beyond their own provinces of knowledge (Burke, Permanence and Change 48-49). Weaver's exemplary orators spoke ex cathedra, with a presumptive authority. In the Scopes trial, William Jennings Bryan, the prosecution's spokesperson on religious matters, opposed the defense's attempt to introduce scientific experts on the grounds that they would be meaningless, since, concerning the Bible, there was no need for experts; every jury member could act as his own expert (WMFCT 181). In the same sense neither an acquaintance with the facts of evolution nor a formal theological training gave Bryan the authority credited to him by his Dayton audience. His was the authority of the Greek funeral orator, derived from a manifest understanding of how political questions could be resolved by referring them to ethical constants.

182 The Politics of Rhetoric Epideictic is the most literary of the rhetorical genres and traditionally the most likely to be written because its invention is circumscribed by its focus upon pre-existent ideas. Ceremonial orators, as we have said, looked to style for a means to distinguish their discourse. In the ceremonial addresses of the nineteenth century, which Weaver uses to exemplify spacious rhetoric, we hear the voice of southern eloquence. Characteristic of Weaver's affinity for spacious rhetoric is his description of passages in Faulkner's fiction, "where tumbling streams of image-bearing and evocative words create the speaker's world of value and inclination" (SE 66). It is interesting that Weaver commends stylistic vivacity even though he sternly objects to sensationalism in journalism. The difference, he would argue, is that lurid sensationalism distastefully magnifies the object at hand, while a vivid, even sensual style, when used by realist philosophers and spacious orators, stimulates the imagination toward the apprehension of an ideal or an essence. Facts alone are inadequate to this task. Thus, Socrates tells Phaedrus that neither "vision" nor "comprehension," but "imagination" reveals the gods (246d). In the Phaedrus, we are shown ideal love in terms of a brilliant allegory. In Daniel Webster's prosecution of Francis Knapp, which Weaver uses to exemplify the sermonic nature of language, Webster used a vivid and necessarily imaginative narration to reveal the full nature of the crime, with the result being Knapp's conviction, although no one actually witnessed the murder and Knapp was not the assassin but an accomplice (LIS 218-19). What links these two examples, which are from quite different spheres of discourse, is that in neither are the facts made the central concern: both exceed what can be known from the facts. The truth about love and the truth about the wickedness of the Knapp-White murder conspiracy could be said to exist in a realm above mere facts and verisimilitude. The presentation of such truths requires the rhetorician's nonliteralist approach to language. Through rhetorical appeals to the affections of the audience, both Plato and Webster ask that objective reality be subjectively transcended. Weaver's ideal rhetorician, whether as philosopher, encomiast, or jurist, subordinates the facts to the higher truths, which rhetoric can illuminate. This focus upon value and truth, rather than upon fact and verisimilitude, defines the epideictic genre. The Greek funeral orator Plato emulates in the Menexenus similarly had little regard for the unembellished narration of Greek history; his fundamental purpose was to celebrate the historic values of Greek society. Consonantly Weaver describes the role of spacious rhetoric as bringing "the past into a meditative relationship with the present" (ER 178). In preferring the qualities of rhetoric best seen in the epideictic genre, Weaver situates himself with ideas and history rather than with ambient reality, a reasonable choice given his disdain for the modern world under the spell of science and technology. Weaver prefers to contemplate the world through the lens of spacious rhetoric rather than gaze

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directly at the morally neutral facts uncovered by science. He appreciates the "aesthetic distance" the old oratory achieved, for it filtered from view all that was not pertinent to the occasion (ER 175). Epideictic is the genre of rhetoric in which form is most conspicuous, and Weaver believes it is modern culture's renunciation of form that has taken it away from ideals. "Forms and conventions," he tells us, "are the ladders of ascent." Next to poetry, epideictic discourse is the form of discourse most likely to serve as what Weaver calls a "veil" that is "half adornment, half concealment," yet through which truth can be discerned (IHC 26). Indeed, it is only through such a veil that truth is discernible. Not all epideictic discourse is of equal value, of course. Appeals to moral imagination may fall short either for want of inspiration or for want of art, although in practice the two are indivisible. Of them inspiration is the more crucial, as Socrates makes plain when he says that without inspiration the poet "will find that he is found wanting and that the verse he writes in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen." Not all discourse is the product of divine madness, which Plato says is "nobler than sanity" (244d). Some is insanity, without being divine, and some, according to

Weaver, pursues the scientistic ideal of a "language of purion" (

7). The aesthetic and philosophic value of Socrates' second speech in the

Phaedrus is its figurative expression of an ideal that could not be otherwise e described. The purpose of rhetoric, Weaver maintains, is to make the logical analogical, in the sense that figurative language can represent an ideal without fully embodying it (ER 18). Put in Platonic terms, rhetoric deals in resemblances of the truth. As a prelude to describing the immortality of the soul in terms of the allegory of the winged charioteer, Socrates maintains that only a divine discourse could reveal it completely, but that "what it resembles, however, may be expressed more briefly and in human language" (Phaedrus 246a). Contemplating this image, Wallace Stevens re marked: "A poet's words are of things that do not exist without words. Thus the image of the charioteer and the winged horses . . . was created by words of things that never existed without the words" (33). In its use of figurative language and symbolism, epideictic rhetoric is most congenial with Platonic philosophy and with Weaver's conservative notions of how truth is best represented. Epideictic rhetoric is thus a convenient bridge spanning idealistic philosophy and rhetoric. We cannot help but notice that Weaver is himself often the epideictic rhetorician whom he describes. First one must consider his themes, which, like those of the ancient Sophists' display speeches, are frequently paradoxical. Weaver relishes making a compelling argument for what on the surface appears exceedingly difficult to argue. He even at times takes pains to point out that presumption is against his argument, such as when he discusses spacious rhetoric. He delights in overturning presumption, in leading the reader down forgotten paths of conservative philosophy. That Weaver

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states explictly that this is his intention makes yet more interesting his use of the genre of rhetoric first shaped by the Sophists (LP 140). He lays out for himself the formidable tasks of showing John Randolph's individualism better than Thoreau's, and Hayne's historically based rhetoric better than Webster's "dialectic of power." He reveals Lincoln to be a conservative in his argumentation, and Edmund Burke, the great conservative, to be a liberal. He disputes a list of terms like progress that carry social sanction, and shows social scientific discourse to be rhetorical and subjective. He opposes the usurpation of the word prejudice into the lexicon of social disapprobation, arguing that before it was freighted with pejorative connotations it could mean simply "prejudgment," an act consistent with a conservative belief in the existence of universal standards of valuation and the capacity to apply such standards unerringly (LP 1). He demonstrates the preferability of spacious rhetoric to reportage and, analyzing the Scopes trial, he argues that in controversies between science and cultural truth, science must yield to metaphysics. Weavers persona is of one struggling against the new order from the disadvantaged position of the old. At times he defends a culture, particularly southern culture, and its right to autonomy; at other times he defends the past against liberal presumptions of scientific and technological progress. Still more abstractly he evaluates argument types and praises argument from definition, analogy, and genuine authority and questions argument from circumstance, which he ascribes to his liberal adversaries. In all he supports philosophical realism as against positivism and relativism. It is not enough to call Weaver a critic. More specifically, he has the Sophist's eye for the rhetorical theme that will best display the concealed vitality of atavistic positions while also demonstrating the power of traditional rhetoric and his own brilliance as a rhetorician. It is not far-fetched to think of Weaver as a Sophist with the critical difference that, unlike the Greek Sophists, he was anything but a relativist. However, from one perspective, Weaver's essays can be read as confirmations of relativism, because they often succeed in creating doubt about beliefs thought not to be in question. In praising the manifestations of the values he believes in, whether they apply to people, types of discourse and argumentation, ideas of language, philosophical constructs, or such notions as the gentleman class or chivalry, Weaver keeps to the purposes of epideictic rhetoric. His focus is upon the ethics of rhetoric, and for him epideictic is the genre by which virtue and vice are best revealed. It might be argued that, unlike the audience of Greek funeral oratory, Weaver's readers might not be celebrants of the values that underlie his discourse. However, Johannesen has concluded that his primary audience was made up of conservatives such as Weaver himself ("A Reconsideration" 4-6). Weaver indicates that he intends to show how the conservative position could best be argued, not that he plans on changing the minds of liberals (LP 139-40). If anything, he intends to ran-

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kle liberals. He is engaged, then, in a kind of rhetorical demonstration, although one in which there are often unexpected turns of argument and in which the themes themselves are difficult to anticipate. His argumentation shines most brilliantly as he attempts to illuminate universal principles. As we might expect of the epideictic speaker, his essays prove him to be a masterful prose stylist. Weaver's purpose was, broadly speaking, what he ascribes to the old orator, namely, to "place the past in a meditative relationship with the present." The conclusions he reaches frequently hinge upon the acceptance of philosophical and cultural notions identified with the past. His revisionism suggests an attitude toward history comparable to that of the Greek funeral orator or the American ceremonial orator. Weaver's rhetoric, like that which he consistently praises, provides the vehicle whereby the past is transmitted to the present. It is most appropriately Weaver's way of expressing his "poetic and ethical vision of life" (LP 135). The rich linguistic and philosophical textures of spacious rhetoric, as we point out in discussing Weaver's analysis of language, is the very opposite of the linguistic brutalism he decries. It amplifies rhetorically what sensationalism intensifies by exposure. At one level of irony, the rhetorical facility Weaver says is being lost to modernism is richly represented in the discourse of this modern rhetorician. At another level, his rhetoric, the very sort Weaver claims is unpersuasive in a culture such as ours, entreats us to be persuaded of this very truth. It is Weaver's self-confessed passion to argue for the lost cause. However, the "transvaluation of values" he attempts goes beyond traditional epideictic rhetoric. At least on the surface, essays with such intent do not attempt to move audiences in the direction implicated by their own beliefs but to dislodge them from beliefs they already hold. When for instance Weaver indicts northern liberals and defends southern conservatives, he has shifted from the purely declamatory intentions of display rhetoric to a plea for alternative historical interpretations and evaluations. Those prepared to agree with his conservatism might see such rhetoric as epideictic, since they hold people like Hayne and Randolph to be heroes; since the audience is already prepared to grant him victory, Weaver can be seen as simply posing, for rhetorical effect, as one who has chosen to argue an impossible position. But the people who make up such an audience do not accurately reflect the dominant culture as Weaver describes it. A broader audience may still see Weaver as engaging in epideictic, just as the Athenians might have understood Gorgias' Encomium of Helen. Both the Greeks and moderns could say that rhetors rely, in theory and practice, on the magic of words to help them carry their arguments. Whereas Gorgias* reliance on the "irrationality" (what Burke says is "nonrationality") of a powerful rhetoric is of a piece with his epistemology, Weaver, like Plato, stresses more the importance of dialectic, although he too makes a place for a nonrational understanding provided by and through the leap to the

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literary, mythic, and prophetic realm. Further, both Gorgias and Weaver make untenable assumptions: Gorgias' audience would not necessarily agree that Helen's being overwhelmed by the god of love should in turn overwhelm her duty to justice, as well as her duty to and love of family and country; Weaver's larger audience does not accept that education should be subordinate to the state in the way and to the extent Weaver states in Academic Freedom: The Principle and the Problems. Both Gorgias and Weaver argue paradoxical issues, both rely on nonrational leaps to truths that cannot be empirically verified, and both rely on the "magic" of rhetoric to induce or seduce others. One difference, however, between the two men is Gorgias' contention that since nothing can be "known," we are free to believe what we wish—which for Gorgias means what we find reasonable to believe. Weaver, of course, derides this position, holding instead that some things can be known and that the noble rhetor is obliged to discern them and present them to the public. This first difference brings us to a second one: we can imagine that Gorgias did not care overly much if he persuaded his audience of Helen's innocence, only that he persuaded them of his virtuosity; Weaver, though, is serious about his positions, problematic though they may be for his audience. His seriousness sets his paradoxical arguments apart from the display rhetoric prac-

ticed under the banner of epideictic and categorizes it more appropriately

as forensic. All historical writing requires, as George Kennedy points out, the talents of the rhetorician: the evaluation of evidence, the making of a case, the determination of justice (7). When Weaver looks at history, the method of the forensic orator is particularly apparent. Like every historian, Weaver does more than recount a chronology of events; he argues for an interpretation—one not occasioned by the facts alone but by the filter of Weaver's a priori conceptions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, regarding past events and figures aligned with historically controversial positions. Weaver's first rhetorical tactic is to show that we cannot trust the received opinion of history and that apparently unimpeachable and unrepealable verdicts should be reviewed in a court where Weaver's metaphysics is law. WEAVER AS FORENSIC RHETORICIAN

The confusions of intention and audience show that Weaver is neither one whose statements can always be taken at face value nor one without contradictions. To explore these confusions a bit more deeply, we want to expand our analysis of Weaver as epideictic rhetorician to consider him also as a forensic rhetorician, beginning with a summary of the characteristics of epideictic rhetoric Weaver employs. He uses shared assumptions and a vivid style to endorse or apply shared cultural values. These characteristics can be examined more specifically by considering the three appeals of pa-

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thos, logos, and ethos, which overlap just as the kinds of rhetoric overlap. Weaver develops ethos by exhibiting his knowledge of classical rhetoric and applying its lessons in his prose, his wide knowledge about Western and specifically American history, and his clearly expressed desire to understand and create what most people would see as "better versions of themselves" (ER 25). Concerning pathos as an appeal to audience affections, it goes nearly without saying that his is one of the more evocative styles exhibited by twentieth-century American rhetorical theorists, with the result that his theoretical position is more easily apprehensible since, as Aristotle notes, "we all take a natural pleasure in learning easily" (Rhetoric, Book 3, 10). Compared with Kenneth Burke, for instance, Weaver is much more easily read, because he uses a clearer, more conventional organizational structure, more carefully selected words and images, and more carefully crafted sentences. Added to this emotional appeal is his frequent use of assumptions and values to which his audience has strong emotional attachment. Further still, he sometimes uses an approach he describes as common to such master rhetoricians as John Randolph of Roanoke, who "did not pass through methodical trains of reasoning, but dived at once to his concluding propositions and tried to make it vivid with illustration. That is, he does not rely upon drawn-out logic for his persuasiveness, but rather

upon 'the world's body' made real and impressive through concrete depic-

tion" (LP 81). Our discussion has overlapped into the domain of logical appeal. Weaver contends that there can be "no true rhetoric without dialectic" (ER 17), but his preference is not the "drawn-out" and distancing syllogistic approach but the briefer and engaging enthymematic approach. Like the syllogism, the enthymeme contains an assumption, or major premise; proof, or minor premise; and an assertion, or conclusion. Unlike the syllogism, its context constrains its development in that it also includes a specific question at issue, that is, a point of disagreement that gives rise to the rhetorical context of which the enthymeme is a part. In epideictic rhetoric the disagreement is either nonexistent or based on something like a paradox, which is to say that it functions less as a question at issue than as a motive for displaying rhetorical skill. The enthymeme is further distinguished from the syllogism by two related characteristics (Bitzer 147-48). First, instead of using major premises without a concern for the audience's agreement, it requires assumptions that the audience not only accepts but can be said to "ask for"; that is, determining an adequate solution to a particular question at issue begins by finding some common ground on which to base the development of the solution (see LIS 154-55; ER 173-74; VO 63). It is this common ground that the audience asks for, or supplies, in that it needs it to understand the development of the solution, and in that it accepts the writer's solution when it can see that it has been reasonably developed out of an assumption it already holds. In this sense, the rhetorician is required

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to include the audience's participation in the framing of an argument (Lay 12). The second distinguishing characteristic of the enthymeme is that, instead of presenting empirically verified truths, it builds on shared assumptions to offer probable and generally accepted assertions (which, in the case of epideictic rhetoric, are generally accepted even without concomitant proofs. The enthymeme uses all three appeals: it employs logos in its logical structure, pathos in its appeal to and reliance on audience values, and ethos in its presentation of a rhetor who knows and works with the audience in the pursuit of shared truths. Enthymematic reasoning is even more important in forensic than in epideictic rhetoric. Since epideictic rhetoric is concerned with endorsing already accepted positions, the development of a line of reasoning is secondary to the force of the stylistic presentation, whereas forensic rhetoric, while still needing a forceful and engaging style, must be much more careful to make a logical case for its assertions. We have already discussed some complications involved in a forceful, vivid style—how, for instance, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish noble amplification from caricature and exaggeration. One way of distinguishing is to analyze logical underpinnings, specifically, an argument's ability to stay out of the excluded middle to develop true and valid enthymemes: when an argument is not supported by logic and clear definitions, what might otherwise be regarded as legiti-

mate stylistic amplification assumes the appearance of stylistic exaggeration

and caricature. 3 Of logics importance we assume no disagreement. We include definition not only because it is identified as crucially important by Weaver, but also because it is one of the statuses directly identified by Roman rhetoricians and indirectly by Aristotle as crucial for forensic rhetoric. As these means serve to determine whether a vivid style is base or noble and to evaluate the worth of forensic arguments generally, we turn now to their fuller examination. We begin with a lengthy illustration. During a 1988 presidential campaign debate, many political analysts believed that Michael Dukakis had caught George Bush in a trap by asking whether Bush was prepared to call everyone who had an abortion a criminal. While Bush admitted during the debate that he had not thought through the matter of crime and punishment as regards the abortion issue, he nevertheless claimed that people who participate in abortions are murderers since they take the lives of innocent people. This claim constituted supporting evidence for his thinking and Dukakis's question was an attempt to make him articulate the full argument. The assumption of Bush's argument, with which an American audience in a forensic situation would undoubtedly agree, is that murderers should be punished; thus, with the supporting contention that people who participate in abortions are murderers, he needed, logically, to answer Dukakis's question in the affirmative. Indeed, to recall our discussion of an

earlier chapter, Dukakis might also have observed that those who engage

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in abortions do so with premeditation and that Bush, who had previously stated belief in the death penalty, must know what punishment they should receive. The next day, Jim Baker, then serving as Bush's campaign advisor, announced that overnight the candidate had thought through the issue and now believed that doctors who perform abortions should be punished and women who have abortions should be helped, not punished. Bush's new argument now turned on the assumption that either a whole class of people who contract for murders and deliver their victims to the killer should not be punished but rather given help, or that those who contract for a murder, deliver the victim to the murderer, but do not physically commit the murder are not murderers. Either assumption is unacceptable to the same audience concerned with justice and injustice.4 The assumption that murderers need help, not punishment, is normally associated with liberals, not conservatives. In fact, Bush had derided the criminal furlough plan of his opponent's home state because it was just such a liberal idea: politicians and criminologists who want to help rather than punish criminals are, according to Bush, "soft on crime." Thus, Bush was employing what Aristotle calls sham enthymemes, enthymemes that either are built on unacceptable assumptions or produce invalid conclusions; he also falls into the excluded middle by saying that a fetus both is and is not defined as a human being, and that murder both is and is not defined as contracting for the taking of innocent human lives. These two same flaws of forensic rhetoric are visible in some of Weaver's arguments. In one argument against the injustices of the academic professoriate, he charges that academic tenure "has been converted into a kind of advanced barricade in an offensive campaign against the traditional foundations of our country" (AF 12). Weaver elsewhere castigates these same agents of political upheaval as a "cabal" that has carried out a "virtual educational coup d'etat," using schools to actualize a concept of society at odds with its traditions and beliefs (VO 114). The teacher who supports society's traditions and beliefs is not engaged in political acts at all, for Weaver says that an "education in the student's cultural tradition is not political; in fact it is the only kind of education that does not presume political ends (RE 616). Thus, he can claim of our nation's founders that they "were prepared for great political achievement by an education which was not political in the overt sense. They had been educated in the long tradition of Western culture. It is my contention that this kind of education is non-political because the tradition has presumption in its favor. It is an accomplished settlement, not perfect in any case, but again not trying to put over anything. It is those programs which are trying to put over something which have to be inspected for their political motives" (RE 618-19). Burke's response to such an argument is illuminating as well as educative as regards the academy's current concern with "political correctness" and

190 The Politics of Rhetoric "canon busting." Burke says: "So much progressive and radical criticism in recent years has been concerned with the social implications of art, that affirmations of art's autonomy can often become, by antithesis, a roundabout way of identifying oneself with the interests of political conservatism. In accordance with the rhetorical principle of identification, whenever you find a doctrine of 'nonpolitical' esthetics affirmed with fervor, look for its politics" (Rhetoric of Motives 28). Burke's comments seem particularly apposite when we find Weaver saying, in "To Write the T r u t h , " that teachers must be prepared to "lead the dangerous life," ready to "stand guard against the relativism which has played havoc with so many things" in our society, prepared to take "part in the redemption of society" (LIS 197-98). Such a stand is political to be sure, but not reflective or supportive of our society's traditions; rather, it sounds a call for teachers to subvert social traditions that have been developing since William of Occam. His logical flaw is that he defines education and educators in one way at one time and another way at another time. A more serious descent into the excluded middle, because more central to his importance as a rhetorical theorist, is the problem he has with the term dialectic. Those not expert are befuddled while the more knowledgeable see him to be confused; worse, it seems Weaver, like Lewis Carroll's H u m p t y D u m p t y , believes that a word can mean whatever he wants it to mean, no more and no less. At times he says that dialectic is "the counterpart in expression in language of the activity of science . . . because they are both rational and they are both neutral" (VO 56). The dialectician is in the position of the nonlover, the user of neuter rhetoric, who induces no bias in an audience, at least not from the use of an affecting style; the "characteristic of this language is the absence of anything like affection. . . . Instead of passion, it offers the serviceability of objectivity. . . . Like a thrifty burgher, it has no romanticism about it; and it distrusts any departure from the literal and prosaic" (ER 7-8). However, such a definition of dialectic does not comport well with the definition used when he describes H e n r y David Thoreau as dialectician, for certainly Thoreau's essays on civil disobedience and John Brown, to name only two pieces, cannot be called purposefully unaffecting, even if limited only to consideration of their style; they are rather quite obviously—and purposefully, one must say—attempting to induce bias in an audience through, among other tactics, numerous and vivid departures from the literal and prosaic. Much the same case can be made for Socrates, who, again, Weaver sees as too much the dialectician (VO 66), even though his presentation is hardly neutral and unaffecting to his audience. W e are aware that Weaver links the scientist and Thoreau on the basis that both develop a line of reasoning based on abstractions and generalities, even though the scientist would rather develop arguments inductively, from particular instances observed in nature or the laboratory. Further, his distinction b e -

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tween "dialecticians," like Thoreau and Webster, who argue from abstract principles, and "rhetoricians," like Randolph and Hayne, who argue from history, just does not hold up. Weaver has violated the law of the excluded middle: one cannot say both that dialectic is neutral discourse without the intention of biasing an audience, and that it is highly charged discourse with an explicit intention to bias an audience. Weaver also sometimes employs unacceptable assumptions and sometimes produces invalid conclusions. To begin our look at these problems, we distinguish between epideictic rhetoric's occasional use of "display pieces" and something quite different. As we have said, epideictic rhetoric recasts essential truths of a society already accepted by the audience, but sometimes the genre is exemplified quite differently, by the attempt to display intellectual cleverness and rhetorical skill through the development of paradoxical or otherwise nonstandard topics. Such attempts are similar in a way to Weaver's attempts at a "transvaluation of values" (LP 65). At such times he is engaged in the attempt to overthrow the accepted values of his society, values that have their origin as early as the fourteenth-century defeat of realism by nominalism and that he aptly describes and condemns in numerous chapters and essays. He is interested in presenting himself as a "sponsor of lost causes and impossible loyalties" rather than as the defender of our current society's way of life. Thus, while these attempts may have the superficial appearance of epideictic display pieces, they differ in intention: his is the serious attempt to argue for the justice or injustice of particular acts, ideas, or stances—which is to say, he has the intention of a forensic rhetorician. He argues that past actions considered just may not be. Two pieces that most explicitly attempt such a transvaluation of values are "Two Orators" (SE 104-33), which contrasts Daniel Webster and Robert Hayne, and "Two Types of American Individualism" (LP 65-98), which contrasts Henry David Thoreau and John Randolph of Roanoke. In the former, Weaver wishes to rescue from the injustice visited upon it Hayne's argument for states' rights, while in the latter he argues that, as regards American individualism, Thoreau has been elevated unjustly by common consensus and that Randolph much more deserves the honor. In the latter piece, Weaver maintains that Thoreau is a dialectician because, while he stands for isolationism, he takes an untenable position (LP 86) and so fails to consider the consequences of his stand (LP 66). One of the major proofs with which Weaver attempts to clinch his contention concerns the two men's position on slavery. Thoreau demands that the slaves be freed, but, says Weaver, "One looks in vain for a single syllable [in Thoreau's writing] about how or on what the freedmen were to live" (LP 94).5 Randolph, on the other hand, prepared a will in which he not only freed his slaves but also provided means for their support. Let us consider more carefully these supports to Weaver's determination of justice and injustice.

192 The Politics of Rhetoric First of all, the rhetorical situations producing these documents are distinctly different. Randolph's was a will, not made public or even executed until his death. Furthermore, although he admitted in this document to knowing that his slaves were "justly entitled" to their freedom and to "heartily regretting that I have ever been the owner of one" (LP 76), they remained enslaved until he died, some dozen years after his confession of guilt and injustice. Thoreau's writings, on the other hand, were public, intended, we suspect, to move audiences to change their stand on slavery and even to act to remove it as an institution allowed under law in the country. As such, it is reasonable to say that burdening his presentation with particulars about the means of livelihood of freed slaves would have detracted from its main purpose. We at least say that if we were enslaved, we would be more interested in gaining our freedom than in delaying it until a master who

had made provisions for us passed to a better place.

Thus, regarding which man "failed to see the consequences"—or failed to act on them—we disagree with Weaver. After all, what are the consequences of knowing that one's slaves ought to be free but keeping them enslaved for years afterward? Further, while Weaver approvingly refers to Randolph's scorn of dialecticians (LP 79-80), he should ask if Randolph is blind to the controlling assumption and subsequent line of reasoning any decent dialectician would see in the argument, an assumption and line of reasoning, by the way, that Weaver elsewhere praises: he notes Lincoln's "argument from definition," which contends that "since the Declaration of Independence had interdicted slavery for man, slavery was interdicted for the negro in principle" (ER 95). The second clause of this quotation is the conclusion that escapes Randolph, even though the unstated minor premise—that the negro is a human being—seems to have been granted with his remorse at having owned slaves and his belief in their just entitlement to freedom. Either Randolph does not agree with the assumption validated by the Declaration, which would be unfortunate for a U.S. representative, or he is guilty of invalid reasoning, which could be the result of his lack of interest in dialectic. Lincoln's argument from definition is presented by Weaver in the most positive light, with never a hint that such a dialectical drive to the abstract principle was somehow not to be countenanced. In short, Lincoln, and we must assume Thoreau as well, relied not on the "instinctive insight" and "intuition" praised in Randolph (LP 81-82), but rather on the logical process with which Weaver said Randolph had so little patience—a process that produces the following reasoning: men deserve liberty, slaves are men, therefore, slaves deserve their liberty. Once one grants the assumption that all human beings have a right to be free, then Randolph's position—far from being the preferred rhetorical position—becomes untenable. The other major argument Weaver levels against Thoreau is inconsistency. He notes that at the beginning of "Civil Disobedience" Thoreau says

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he is not a no-government man but only wants a better government, but says later in the same essay that he wants government simply to vanish. A more sympathetic reader sees the latter sentiment as amplification, a poetic "vision" like Churchill's "broad sunlit uplands," cited approvingly by Weaver (ER 20), or like one of the leaps into myth that occur so often in Plato. Thoreau states his "realistic" rhetorical position, that he is not a no-government man, and later states his mythic position, that it would be fine if we needed no government to live happily together. In any event, with Thoreau's sentiment that the federal government is altogether too intrusive, both Randolph and Weaver agree. Weaver's preference for Randolph over Thoreau, then, seems poor, based on the confused and confusing charge that Thoreau is too dialectical. He decries in Thoreau the very action that for Lincoln he says is the "price of honesty, as well as of success in the long run . . . to stay out of the excluded middle" (ER 95). Lincoln is nothing if not dialectical in Weaver's description of his arguments. Weaver's preference is also based on his own weak dialectic. He fails to make a convincing case that Randolph's "social bond individualism" is preferable to Thoreau's "anarchic individualism," or, better, he fails even to make a case that these are acceptable terms to use for the two men's thoughts on the relationship between individuals and society. Problems with definitions and enthymemes are also apparent in the attempt at a "transvaluation of values" in "Two Orators." Again in this essay, Weaver wishes to show that the rhetorician is justly seen as superior to the dialectician, and that Hayne is justly seen as superior to Webster in his method of argument, his adherence to the Constitution, and, it would seem, his innate morality. Early in this essay, Weaver notes that Hayne responds to the charge that slavery was harmful to the character by referring to slaveholders such as "Washington and other illustrious sons of Virginia" (SE 116). He asks his audience to assume that the Founding Fathers are illustrious, which at that time was most probably a valid assumption. However, his argument does not straightforwardly address the charge that slaveholding harms the character unless he is also asking that the audience see the sons of Virginia as perfect: logically speaking, since slave holding was said to be detrimental to character, not destructive of it, they may have been more illustrious had they not owned slaves.6 Yet Weaver approves of this strategy because it is an appeal to history (SE 114-15) and is more telling than the dialectician's appeal to abstractions. However, this method of argument, which "deals in the realm of the phenomenal" (LIS 215), Weaver identifies as cause and effect and of a lower order than an argument from definition, which uses "what is most permanent in existence, or what transcends the world of change and accident" (LIS 212). It is interesting to note that, in describing the superior form of argument, Weaver uses an illustration that undercuts Hayne's position: he

194 The Politics of Rhetoric says, "If a speaker should define man as a creature with an indefeasible right to freedom and should upon this base an argument that a certain man or group of men are entitled to freedom, he would be arguing from definition" (LIS 212-13). Insofar as Webster argues from definition—whether acceptable or not—and Hayne argues from consequence, Weaver finds himself in a contradiction: as rhetorical theorist he ranks the more abstract argument from definition above the more "pragmatic" argument from consequence; as practicing forensic rhetorician he prefers "a less exalted source of argument" (LIS 214). Furthermore, it is fair to say that the great experiment in democracy undertaken by our nation's founders was not supported by history but by an abstraction, and also important to note that whereas, according to Hayne, historical situations may condition the right to claim a privilege, Webster says that certain rights and obligations are above or independent of historical situations (SE 123). Using history rather than principles to support one's position means that liberals have a better argument than Weaver, since he claims that from at least the fourteenth century things have been going the liberals' way. Distinguishing the men on the basis of dialectic and rhetoric is finally disingenuous. After all, Webster does appeal to historical facts, and Hayne, whose "method was to bring forth certain broad historical truths" (SE 120), can be said thereby to argue dialectically, since broad historical truths are themselves abstractions. The argument for preferring Hayne to Webster turns rather on which man is seen as the more just. Weaver notes that Hayne "injected into the exchange one word about which the whole argument may revolve logically—the word 'liberty' " (SE 111). Yet, since Hayne supports the South's right to own slaves, we wonder whether he has any ground left on which to argue, any reason to be considered just in his defense of states' rights. An argument can be made for preferring the rights of the individual states over federal power, but when the states' representatives who prefer states' rights are found to use it for the enslavement of their people, the argument seems weak. Similarly, Weaver argues that Tennessee legislators acted justly in passing its antievolution statute, since it fell to states and localities to determine what children should be taught in the public schools. But the narrow legal issue is neither as persuasive nor as pertinent as that introduced by the defense. To censor evolutionary theory, they maintained, was to surrender to a religious position the progress made by modern science. In sum, these forensic arguments employ flawed enthymemes. One could say that his reasoning is invalid, but it seems more reasonable, for two reasons, to say that his assumptions are flawed. First, Weaver is unquestionably intelligent and well versed in logic, and while anyone might reason invalidly, it is unlikely that he did so repeatedly. Second, some of his assumptions find little agreement from modern audiences. To return for a moment to the system of classical status with slavery as the example, Weaver

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would agree with his audience as regards the status of conjecture: slavery did exist. He would also agree on the status of definition: slavery is the bondage of certain people by others. But he would disagree on the status of quality. Cicero divides this status point into nature and law and subdivides these into divine rights and human rights, within which, he says, it is possible to argue from written rules of conduct and from unwritten customs of the nation. Insofar as Weaver leans toward slavery as an acceptable institution or at least insofar as he countenances Randolph's and Hayne's acceptance of it, the justice or injustice of the case turns on this status of quality. Yet in neither essay does he develop a line of argument to support this position, even though one can assume that, without it, he will be at odds with the assumptions of almost everyone reading the pieces. In short, the transvaluation has not been effected. We close our critique of Weavers methods of argument with a final example. As mentioned in the third chapter, Weaver claims to favor free speech and oppose censorship. However, in an essay that Goodnight believes is meant to be an advisory piece for the incipient conservative political movement, Weaver seems to support censorship. He claims that the British and American governments are not concerned with the expression of alternative views that challenge their positions because "with them logical demonstration is never the decisive force" in determining a course of action (PEM 403-4). Regarding what he thinks is an appropriate attitude toward freedom of speech, he has this to say: "If you know something beyond a doubt, and if this thing you know is the surest guarantee of all you hold valuable, what can you possible [sic] gain by permitting opposition? All that opposition could do would be to afford constant annoyance, or to weaken your confidence and in this way impair your efficiency" (PEM 403). The hypothetical form into which he casts his assumption suggests the possibility that one can know "beyond a doubt"; yet, as we have argued, his theoretical position holds that we cannot, and that we ought therefore to allow, even encourage, opposing voices. It seems he overstates his case to make a partisan argument. Further, such a line of argument should chill anyone who takes it seriously, since Weaver proposes that the conservatives, should they find themselves in power, should pursue this fascistic disregard of opposition. In this example, then, as with those cited earlier, his theoretical position gives way once more to pragmatic ends. NOTES

1. The analysis of Plato's use of epideictic rhetoric summarizes and applies to Weaver's rhetorical theory the argument in Bernard K. Duffy, "The Platonic Function of Epideictic Rhetoric," 79-83. 2. Weaver goes so far as to say that poetry, rather than dialectic, "provides access to higher realms of truth" (IHC 167). He comments that "poetry offers the

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fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind" (IHC 53). In discussing the Phaedrus, he emphasizes the poetic resources available to the rhetorician, noting that it is Plato's use of figuration that makes his second speech in the Phaedrus effective rhetoric (ER 18). 3. To illustrate: just before Operation Desert Storm, President Bush called Iraq's Saddam Hussein a "Hitler." The line of reasoning for this statement assumes that people like Hitler should be removed from power and punished, and concludes that Hussein should therefore be removed from power and punished. That he was not suggests that Bush employed not amplification but exaggeration. 4. Bush's other qualification, that abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or incest, is also problematic. While still assuming that abortion is the murder of an innocent human being, he asserts that the sins of the father should be visited on the children—they should be murdered because their biological fathers were criminals. Two possibilities could stand as the missing support for this reasoning: a fetus who is the product of rape or incest is not human, or it is not innocent. In either case it may be executed. Either premise would be problematic for the forensic audience. 5. While Thoreau does not address these particulars, Weaver has little cause for complaint: we mentioned that the editors of Language Is Sermonic note Weaver's similar vagueness about an ultimate good (LIS 12). More significantly, he condemns progressive education but does not offer even a syllable about how he would prepare all citizens for their political, cultural, and vocational futures. He is concerned only with the forensic argument of establishing problems with our educational system; such an argument is a necessary step to a deliberative argument concerning what policy to institute to remove these problems, once we agree on their existence and nature. 6. If Hayne's audience knew, for instance, that Thomas Jefferson thought blacks biologically foreordained to have "a very strong and disagreeable odor" and to be unable to follow Euclid's theorems or write poetry (Robinson 42), but that he nevertheless took a black mistress (possibly without seeking her agreement) who bore children whom he did not acknowledge, they might have considered him less illustrious than did Hayne.

10 Conclusion

We have two issues to address in this closing discussion. First, we want to round out our analysis of the genres of Weavers rhetoric by commenting briefly on his stance as a deliberative rhetorician; second, we want to offer a summarizing evaluation of his significance as a rhetorical theorist. As regards the first issue: Weaver says, "So successful have the Liberals been in establishing [their] dogma through education, publishing, and politics that people today are literally unable to understand the language of the conservative point of view. They can conceive neither the meaning of its term nor the spirit of it" (RL 543). He also says, "You cannot talk with a person whose basic premises are completely incompatible with your own. The words that are exchanged are without meaning, so that in the real sense there has not been discourse" (SW 557). Two pieces in which Weaver professes to preach neither to the opposition nor to the uncommitted but only to those who agree with him are "The Strategy of Words" (564) and "Rhetorical Strategies of the Conservative Cause" (598-99), both in Goodnight. In considering these arguments, John Bliese argues for the "general merit" of conservatives' directing their appeals to those who already agree: the strategy will help the group "to build up its own enthusiasm and maintain its cohesion and commitment. It will then be ready to take the offensive if events open up opportunities for it" ("Richard M. Weaver and the Rhetoric of a Lost Cause" 324). However, it seems to us that this approach encourages conservatives—and by extension, any group using this strategy—to wait until some outside force brings it back into power. This seems defeatist, or at least isolationist, and it seems to make rhetoric and rhetorical persuasion extremely limited. Such a position might be understandable for an activist who, for example, favors a woman's right to abortion and

198 The Politics of Rhetoric feels it has become impossible to speak to a militant antiabortionist, but she or he ought to address also the uncommitted. It is particularly problematic for a person whose stock-in-trade is rhetoric to avoid the opposition. Certainly it leaves conservatives at the mercy of hoping that change will come through circumstances outside their control—not a position into which Weaver would want to place himself. We imagine, therefore, that Weaver is being extreme for effect. As regards the first quotation (RL 543), American politics attests to the fact that people have shown themselves able to understand the conservative point of view well enough to elect the conservatives' standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, twice. And while it would be true that a person could not communicate with another when the basic premises of each are completely incompatible, such is of course never the case. Two people may disagree enormously, but there is always common ground on which to build. Thus, Stanley Fish argues, we can take a person from one context of understanding to another, even if that person does not share the assumptions of the second context, by backing up "to some point at which there was a shared agreement as to what was reasonable to say so that a new and wider basis for agreement could be fashioned" (Is There a Text in this Class? 315). This is a strategy similar to Toulmin's "backing" for "warrants" ("warrant" being his term for assumption) that are not accepted or understood by the audience; it is also similar to the dialectical process of Socrates, who attempts to back up discussions until he and his interlocutor(s) can find common ground. Perhaps, Fish says, one can identify some category of the person's understanding that could serve as analogue. In time, this person will come to understand the new context, at which point she or he will be able to understand—at the same time—its assumptions and its meaning (315). At that point a collaborative discourse or overtly persuasive attempt could be undertaken. Given his awareness of Socrates' methodology and his belief in his own dialectical competence, it seems reasonable, despite his occasional comments to the contrary, that Weaver does not address his discourse only to those who already believe in the position he is espousing. But it is also fair to say that he is not overly interested, in his published pieces at least, to offer particular strategies for the future. Since he does not offer, for example, a specific alternative for the current educational system's attempt to prepare all young people for a variety of occupations, or, for another example, a strategy for dealing with the high arrest rate and low academic achievements of African-Americans, we would say that he is not a deliberative rhetor of the traditional, or of the liberal, type. He is, in practice and seemingly by nature, a naysayer and a gadfly, more comfortable pointing out the many problems we face and identifying their causes than telling us what he thinks should be done to resolve them. While it is reasonable to say that all conservatives are interested in reclaiming the virtues of the

Conclusion 199 past, a deliberative rhetorician would give specific programs to accomplish this end. Now to our second, and final, point. Considering Weaver's significance as a rhetorical theorist, we want to answer a question that may be on many readers' minds, and was certainly on ours as we progressed in our study. Given the many problems we have indicated with Weaver's rhetorical theory and practice, how is it that he has gained the prominent role he enjoys in the discipline of rhetoric? Three answers seem to present themselves for consideration. The first might be called an accident of history. The postwar United States saw a rapid and large growth in courses in written composition and in communication courses in general, in part at least because of the rapid and large increase in college students. Since Weaver was one of the few theorists after World War II to offer a sustained discussion on rhetorical theory, and one of the only writers whose theory was informed by an understanding of the classical origins of the discipline, he undoubtedly proved useful for English department literature faculty pressed into service as composition teachers. The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953), for instance, had some use as a textbook and certainly offered many faculty good theory as well as some practical pedagogical ideas: it explicitly addresses issues of grammar ("Some Historical Aspects of Grammatical Categories"); it ties composition to matters of disciplinary interest and familiarity for English professors ("Milton's Heroic Prose"); and it discusses fundamental issues of communication—such as the relation of ethics to rhetoric—clearly and understandably ('Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric"). His article on the role of the composition teacher, "To Write the Truth," appeared in College English in 1948, and his composition textbook was published in 1957; by the first half of the 1960s faculty could also refer to such thoughtful discussions of the discipline as "Language Is Sermonic" (first appearing in 1963) and "The Cultural Role of Rhetoric" (appearing in VO 1964). Further, in a number of pieces he took on General Semantics, which itself gained some prominence, at least among some teachers of composition, and attempted a "transvaluation of values," arguing for its replacement by a fully articulated and classically based theory of rhetoric. In brief, purely on disciplinary grounds Weaver found himself to be the right person at the right time, offering to a needy or interested clientele helpful ideas and advice. The second reason for Weaver's prominence, and an admittedly speculative one, is that he honors cultural verities, promises a society that has order and harmony and justice, and also, and not insignificantly, promises to his primary academic readers a privileged place in that society. Regardless of the contributions he makes to rhetorical theory and the disciplines of public speaking and composition, and despite the vagueness of his vision, there is something compelling about his alternative to people who see the world around them crumbling—who believe that higher education suffers from open admissions and subsequent underqualified or unqualified

200 The Politics of Rhetoric students, suffers from the increasing influence of "vocational" instruction both inside and outside their departments, and suffers from the beginning stages of the dismantling of the core curriculum and those incipient ideas and concerns that were to lead to postmodern literary theories and criticisms, ethnic and women's studies programs, and other questionings of the traditional canon. And, although many of the professoriate were more politically liberal than was Weaver, many might have found compelling his analysis of the decline of Western culture, with its paean to the liberal arts generally and to literature and rhetoric specifically. As American adults in the early 1950s, they also may have appreciated his comments on the threat from the Soviet bloc. Couched in less incendiary fashion in his writings on rhetorical theory than in his political tracts, Weaver's comments could have made a good deal of sense to a great number of people, people who had not yet or never would read his more overtly political and partisan pieces. All of this is to say that Weaver might have been the right person at the right time in a venue larger than communication pedagogy; and once a person and his ideas have gained prominence, something like momentum keeps them somewhat in place. This reason is really also an accident—if not of history, at least of misapplication. Weaver's worth as a rhetorical theorist should not be dependent only on the value of his political philosophy and cultural theory, whatever that may be. And our first reason likewise does not provide enough reason to place Weaver as one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American rhetorical theory. Thus, our third reason: by most accounts he does belong in the category of important rhetorical theorists, and our attempt in this book has been to evaluate his contributions to decide if his placement is justified. We have tried to argue that his political philosophy and especially his cultural theory are important contributors to his rhetorical theory, that an understanding of them is necessary to understand the complexities and the implications of his rhetorical theory, and so we have offered in this book a thorough analysis of his complete oeuvre. His most enduring insights are his rhetorical ones, even when it is plain that he makes use of rhetorical theory as a device by which, for example, to vindicate the South from the national humiliation of the Scopes trial, to indict the rhetoric of liberal-minded social scientists, or to decry the antihumanistic tendencies of the General Semanticists. His comments on the General Semantics movement in particular and on the nature and problems of neutral, objective discourse in general are incisive. Teachers in the humanities quite understandably felt some discomfort with the kind of writing and the assumptions that lay behind the choices made by communicators in the hard and social sciences, in business, and in government, and Weaver provides a means for seeing the essential Tightness of these feelings of discomfort. Also, both for people of Weavers time and for teachers and theorists today, Weaver offers another and important benefit. Perhaps the best way to indicate this benefit

Conclusion 201 is to note Johannesens and Tompkins's articles on the debt Weaver owes to Kenneth Burke: while we believe that Weaver's theory needs Burke's, we also believe that Burke's theory, and the theories of those rhetorical "relativists" categorized under such headings as social construction or antifoundationalism or rhetoric of inquiry or rhetoric as epistemic, need Weaver's. If he had not existed, they would have had to invent him. While there is a good deal of value in the position taken by those who hold that rhetoric creates truth, a counterstatement is necessary. As discussed in the second chapter, a more reasonable position assumes the existence of objective reality, and insofar as theorists deny its existence they cause themselves logical and theoretical problems. That is, in addition to what Weaver offers on his own ground, he also presents a forceful and eloquent caution to the excesses of certain schools of thought that have gained some prominence in (and because of, Weaver would add) modernist times. Given the description sketched in the previous chapter and at the beginning of this conclusion, it seems best to call Weaver a paradoxical figure. He reveals much of himself when he says, concluding on the career of Albert Taylor Bledsoe: "Where would one look to find another such sponsor of lost causes and impossible loyalties? Can anything be salvaged from the thought of a mind which ran so perfectly counter to the path of history? The easy verdict will be that Bledsoe was another gifted southerner condemned by the tumult of his age and the defeat of his people 'to keep with phantoms and unprofitable strife' " (SE 158). But we would not want to render so easy a verdict about Weaver. He was, to be sure, Quixotic, and certainly one whom many would perceive to be characteristically on the wrong side of the questions he addressed. However, there is an advantage, both psychological and tactical, to arguing the lost cause. If it is expected that one will lose, the more is the gain in the unlikely event that one should win, even if the victory is partial or pyrrhic. Weaver brandished his rhetoric against ideas that many believed could not be defeated, not least of which was the presumption that scientific discovery and material progress were suitable modern substitutes for religious faith and metaphysical reflection, or that the South was correct to value the latter, even though in doing so it exhibited an embarrassing backwardness compared to the commercially, industrially, and technologically superior North. Weaver supported the Southern Agrarians and perhaps he would like to be seen in something of the same light as he saw them. He describes them as engaged in verbal combat: "Penetrations were made and flanks were threatened; and the enemy was alerted to a degree he had not experienced in decades" (SE 8). Weavers first book, Ideas Have Consequences, created enough vituperative outpourings from his opponents to qualify as a second-wave agrarian assault on northern materialist culture (Nash 41-42). l Howard Mumford Jones, for example, in a lengthy review in the New York Times,

202 The Politics of Rhetoric proposed that, in contrast to Weaver's assessment, "one of the most depressing aspects of the tragedy of the West . . . is the irresponsibility of intellectuals who condemn without comprehension in the name of an austere intellectualism the total life of our time" (Jones 4:1). In a particularly acerbic review, George R. Geiger commented, "The reviews have by now been many, and the reviewers have been neatly divided—those who have been baptized on Chicago's Midway and the gentiles." Geiger's own verdict was that it is "essentially an evil book" (251). From the first, Weaver was a partisan and his support lay with those who occupied the same intellectual ground as he did. He gave dimension to ideas that many conservatives intuitively accepted but that were more compelling for his artful presentation of them. He was, according to Frank Meyer, an "irreplaceable . . . champion" of conservatives (243). The extent of Weaver's influence upon conservatism is difficult to gauge, and Frank Meyer's often-quoted comment that Ideas Have Consequences was modern conservatism's "fons et origo" (a term he likely appropriated from Weaver, who used it to describe rhetoric), may be an exaggeration (243; see ER 25). Weaver was, as Meyer notes, among the first to reconstruct the conservative position during the years immediately following World War II, yet, according to another conservative, Willmoore Kendall, Weaver was more eulogized than heard (79-80). Whatever may be the judgment of Weaver's influence as a neoconservative political theorist, his place as a rhetorician seems secure. Henry Regnery wrote that Weaver thought of The Ethics of Rhetoric as his best book ("Review" 438). From our perspective we are inclined to agree. Despite criticisms of his political theory, including our own misgivings, his rhetorical theory is extraordinarily valuable. Finally, it may be to rhetoric that Weaver contributed most. Conservatives have commented on Weaver's prescience in recognizing cultural problems. In the same vein, it is interesting to recall Wayne Booth's judgment that Weaver and Kenneth Burke were the two leading rhetorical theorists in the 1950s. Weaver wrote about rhetoric long before the day when English and speech professors decided that a renaissance in rhetoric was underway. It is to our profession's great benefit that Weaver fused his passion to formulate the basis of conservative ideas with his vocational interest in rhetoric. As he helped revive conservatism from the perceived stranglehold of New Deal liberalism, his celebration of conservative rhetoric helped renew interest in a discipline that had suffered from neglect in the academy and abuse in the forums of public opinion. Rhetoric, Weaver sought to tell the world, was not elementary composition technique, nor was it propaganda. While we may disagree with his conservatism and thereby question his perspective on rhetoric, it is impossible to deny that his essays and books take positions that, if unfashionable, are nevertheless provocative. Whether one sees Weaver as the devil's or the angel's advocate, he deserves a hearing, for

Conclusion 203

he speaks with unusual grace and insight about the power of the word and the importance of rhetoric. NOTE

1. For consideration of Weaver in relation to the Southern Agrarians, see Bradford.

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Postman, Neil. Conscientious Objections: Stirring up Trouble about Language, Technology, and Education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Quintilian. The Institutio Oratorio. Translated by H. E. Butler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921. Regnery, Henry. Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979. . Review of Language Is Sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric, by Richard M. Weaver. Modern Age 15 (1971): 437-38. Richards, Ivor Armstrong. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press, 1936. . Principles of Literary Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925. Robinson, William H. Critical Essays ofPhillis Wheatley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Roosevelt, Theodore. "The Man with the Muckrake." In American Public Addresses 1740-1952, edited by A. Craig Baird. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956, 211-19. Royer, Daniel J. "New Challenges to Epistemic Rhetoric." Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 282-97. Rubens, Paul. "Reinventing the Wheel?: Ethics for Technical Communicators." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 11 (1981): 329-39. Safire, William. The New Language of Politics: An Anecdotal Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans, and Political Usage. New York: Random House, 1968. Schiappa, Edward. "Sophistic Rhetoric: Oasis or Mirage?" Rhetoric Review 10 (1991): 5-18. Schuelke, L. David. "The Relationship of Seventeenth Century Empiricism to Current Theories of General Semantics." Southern Speech Journal 35 (1970): 215-24. Scott, Robert L. "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic." Central States Speech Journal 18 (1967): 9-17. . "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic: Ten Years Later." Central States Speech Journal 27 (1976): 258-66. Selzer, Jack. "The Composing Process of an Engineer." College Composition and Communication 34 (1983): 178-87. Shils, Edward. "The Contemplation of Society in America." In Paths of American Thought, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, 392-410. London: Chatto and Windus, 1963. Smith, Craig R. Defender of the Union: The Oratory of Daniel Webster. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Sprat, Thomas. History of the Royal Society of London, edited by J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones. St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1959. Sproule, J. Michael. "Using Public Rhetoric to Assess Private Philosophy: Richard M. Weaver and Beyond." Southern Speech Communication Journal 44 (1979): 289-308. Starling, Marion W. "The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History." Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1945. Stephens, James. "Rhetorical Problems in Renaissance Science." Philosophy and Rhetoric 8 (1975): 213-29. Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942.

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Tompkins, Philip K. "Kenneth Burke's 'Missing' Ethic." Paper delivered at 75th annual meeting of the Speech Communication Association, San Francisco, 18-21 November 1989. ERIC ED 315 803. Vickers, Brian. In Defense of Rhetoric. 1988. Reprint. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Vivas, Eliseo. Introduction. In Life without Prejudice and Other Essays, by Richard Weaver, vii-xvii. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965. von Hayek, Friedrich. The Counter-Revolution of Science. Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1952. Wallace, Karl. "Aspects of Modern Rhetoric in Francis Bacon." Quarterly Journal of Speech 42 (1956): 388-406. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860-1960. New York: Doubleday, 1987. Weaver, Richard M. Academic Freedom: The Principle and the Problems. Philadelphia: Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, 1963. . The Ethics of Rhetoric. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953. . "Humanism in an Age of Science." RMW Papers, Box 3, folder 1. Also published in Intercollegiate Review 7 (Fall 1970): 11-18. . Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. . Language Is Sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric, edited by Richard L. Johannesen, Rennard Strickland, and Ralph T. Eubanks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970. . Life without Prejudice and Other Essays. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965. . Relativism and the Crisis of Our Times. Philadelphia: Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, 1961. . "A Responsible Rhetoric," edited by Thomas D. Clark, and Richard L. Johannesen. Intercollegiate Review 12 (Winter 1976-77): 81-87. . Rhetoric and Composition: A Course in Reading and Writing. With Walter S. Beal. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. . The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, edited by Geore M. Curtis III and James J. Thompson, Jr. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1987. . The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, edited by George Core and M. E. Bradford. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington, 1968. . Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Times. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Weigert, Andrew. "The Immoral Rhetoric of Scientific Sociology." The American Sociologist 5 (1970): 112-19. Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. New York: Henry Holt, 1895. Wicher, Stephen E. "Emerson's Tragic Sense." In Emerson: A Collection of Critical Views, edited by Milton Konvitz and Stephen Wicher, 39-45. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962. The World's Most Famous Court Trial: State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. 1925. New York: DiCapo, 1971. Young, Daniel. Personal interview with Bernard Duffy. 15 April 1987.

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Donald Davidson Papers. The Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Vanderbilt University. Nashville, Tenn. Henry Regnery Papers. Hoover Institution. Palo Alto, Calif. Richard M. Weaver Papers. The Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Vanderbilt University Archives. Nashville, Tenn.

Index

Abortion, 22, 23, 39 n.3, 188-89, 196 n.4, 197-98 Achebe, Chinua, 122 n.14 Actualization, rhetoric as, 14, 15, 128, 171-72, 179 Advertising, 32, 70, 86, 98, 100, 101 Aesthetic, 25 Aesthetic faculty, 24-25, 52 Alger, Horatio, 105 Analogy, 154. See Argument types Anglo-Saxon diction, 153-54 Archetypes, 71-72 Argument types, 1; analogy, 154; consequence, 139; definition, 139, 170171; hierarchy among, 156, 184 Aristotle, xii, 122 n.5, 151, 175-76, 187, 188; on catharsis, 70; on tragedy, 82 Arnold, Matthew, 99 Asiatic style, 154 Attic style, 153 Auden, W. H., 123 n. 14 Babbitt, Irving, 12 Bacon, Sir Francis, 162, 166-67 Bagdikian, Ben, 40 n.8 Baker, James, 189 Beale, Walter, 94, 103, 111 Beaton, Kendall, 4

Beaton, Polly Weaver, 4 - 5 Belenky, Mary, 65 n.10 Bentham, Jeremy, 149, 170 Berlin, James, 123 n.10 Bernard, L. L., 146, 150-51 Bernard, Jessie, 146, 150-51 Bitzer, Lloyd, 187 Bledsoe, Albert Taylor, 44, 201 Bliese, John, 121 n.2, 197 Booth, Wayne, xv, 86, 121 n . l , 122 n. 13, 160, 202; literature's effects, 70; modernism's effects, 27, 100, 101; role of rhetoric, 110; social test of truth, 38, 39 n.2 Boreas, myth of, 133 Bradford, M. E., 5 British Empire, 60-61 Broadhead, Glenn, and Richard Freed, 104 Bronowski, Jacob, 154 Brown, Richard Harvey, 156 Bryan, William Jennings, 128, 130-35, 181 Bureaucracy, governmental, 153, 155 Burgess, Anthony, 75 Burke, Edmund, 184 Burke, Kenneth, xii, 1, 10, 71, 89, 95, 100, 107, 117, 121, 125, 143-45, 148-49, 155, 156, 157-58 n.l, 181,

2 / 4 index Burke, Kenneth (continued) 187, 202; on attitudinal qualities of language, 171; on definition, 95; on fascism, 46, 53; on hierarchy, 53; on literature, 68, 73, 75, 82, 90 n.3, 105-6, 111; on metabiology, 107-8; on motion and action, 90 n.4, 103; on orientation, 20, 63; on piety, 26, 72; on political conservatism, 189-90; on recalcitrance, 34; as rhetorical relativist, 201; on semantic terminology, 161-62, 169; on terministic screens, 36, 122 n.7; on tragedy, 78, 81, 82 Bush, George, 188-89, 196 n.3 Business, 11, 59-61; effect on art, 60; Benjamin Franklin on, 87; government and, 60, 64 n.5 Canterbury Tales, The, 76 Censorship, 56-57, 113 Charisma, 21, 83, 85-89; charismatic terms, 84-85 Chase, Stuart, 161, 166, 167-68 Cherwitz, Richard, 108 Chestnut, Mary, 50 Chivalry, code of, 42, 47-48 Chomsky, Noam, 40 n.8 Chopin, Kate, 75 Christ, Jesus, 163 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, xiii, 13, 122 n.5, 123 n.17, 159-60, 175, 179, 195 Ciceronian humanism, 16 Civil War, 6, 41-52, 127 Clark, Gregory, 58, 106, 112, 123 n.22 Communism, xv Composition, 93-121; related to logic, 94, 95 Comte, Auguste, 146, 156, 157 Conservatism, xii, xiv, 5, 116, 119, 120, 123 n.21, 146, 156, 157, 17981, 189, 197-98, 202 Conservative movement, 7, 202 Constitution, U.S., 134, 138-39 Coolidge, Calvin, 64 n.7 Cooper, James Fenimore, 87 Corbett, Edward P. J., 93 Crane, Stephen, 81 Culture: autonomy, 156; doctor of, 8,

18, 24, 43, 45; integrity of, 21; language and, 168-73; literature's adverse effects on, 70-71; literature's positive effects on, 71-77; origin of, 20, 141; society and, 22-23; southern, 127-28, 144; stability of, 21-24, 29-30, 55; unified by oratory, 160 Darrow, Clarence, 6, 128, 130, 131 Darwin, Charles, 135, 146 Davidson, Donald, 80, 118, 127, 150 Deliberative rhetoric, 155, 175-76, 196 n.5, 197, 198-99 Democracy, 10-11, 53, 55, 57, 112, 123 n.21, 138 Deneef, A. Lehigh, 179 DesPres, Terrance, 90 n.5 Devil terms, 83-84 Dewey, John, 56, 64 n.4, 69, 118 Dialectic, 24-25, 55, 95, 191-93; competing dialectics, 131; confusion of social and Platonic, 129; education and, 57, 58; inspiration and, 105-7; literature and, 69, 71, 76, 90; as neutral tool, 104; relation to motive impulse, 103; rhetoric and, 1, 13—16, 98, 102, 103-6, 111-12, 118, 126, 127, 128-29, 135-42, 160, 170-72, 177-79, 181, 184; science and, 134; social science and, 157; as social scientific, 152, 153; as subversive agent, 103-4; Weaver's, 161 Dialectical and positive terms, 38, 103, 122 n.10, 144, 147-49, 157 Dialectical opposites, 3, 142, 146, 158 n.2; Weaver's tendency to use, 172 Dialectician, tendentious, 147 Division and collection, 148, 152 Douglass, Frederick, 43 Dramatism, 145 Dreiser, Theodore, 81, 87 Duffy, Bernard K., 195 n.l Dukakis, Michael, 188-89 Ebbitt, Wilma, 3 Economics, rhetoric of, 144-45, 154 Education, 45, 53, 55; affected by modernism, 54-56; as agent of subver-

Index

sion, 189-90; as counter to propaganda, 113; for democratic living, 56-58, 118, 123 n.22; hierarchical relationship in, 117-18; literature and, 71; mass media and, 31; philosophic, 180; progressive education, 56-59; use of rhetoric for, 120-21; as societal propaganda, 70; southern gentleman's attitude toward, 49-50 Egalitarianism, 11. See Democracy Eisenhower, Dwight, 64 n.7 Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 31, 79; catalyst theory of poetry, 123 n. 15; poetic process, 73, 76-77; religion and literature, 40 n.10, 75 Elizabeth I, 54 Ellul, Jacques, 17, 54 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 16, 147 Empiricism, 151-53 Empiricists, British, 162 Enthymeme, 105, 177-78, 187-88; sham, 189 Epideictic rhetoric, xiii, 16-17, 58, 146, 159-61, 164, 186, 187, 188, 191; characterizing Weaver's prose, 184-86; most appropriate for presentation of truth, xiv-xv, 175-86 Equal rights, 45 Ethical faculty, 24-25, 52, 103 Ethics, 33, 36, 37, 38, 62, 155, 160, 168; ethical constants, 181; literature and, 71; rhetoric and, 113-18, 119; systems, 20, 27, 29, 30; Weaver's focus on, 179, 184 Ethos, 58, 86, 114, 187, 188 Eubanks, Ralph, 4, 9 Evolutionary theory, 127-28, 131-42, 194 Expediency, 47, 60 Fact, interest in, 159-60, 166, 177-81 Factual history, 180 Faculties of human nature, 24-25, 30, 52 Fascism, 46, 64 n.5, 113, 195 Faulkner, William, 182 Feminism, xv, 54. See Equal rights Ferrari, G.R.F., 110

215

Feudalism, 42-44, 46; fascism and, 46 Fish, Stanley, 123 n.16, 198 Forensic rhetoric, xiii, 175-76, 186, 187-95 Foucault, Michel, 109 Franklin, Benjamin, 80, 87 Freire, Paulo, 58 Frost, Robert, 88-89 Fulkerson, Richard, 108-9 Fundamentalism, religious, 128, 130, 132-36, 138 Funeral oratory, Greek, 16, 180, 181, 184 Gage, John, 122 n.12 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 125 Geiger, George, xiii, 202 General Semantics, 69, 93, 155, 15973, 199, 200 Gentleman, 4, 16-17, 42, 46, 48-50, 122 n.4, 184. See also Specialist "Gettysburg Address," 161 God terms, 83-84 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 43-44, 78 Goodnight, Gerald Thomas, 117-18, 121, 195 Gorgias, 73, 90 n.2, 172; Helen, xiii, 185-86 Great Depression, 151, 163 Green, Lawrence, 122 n.3 Guthrie, W.K.C., 165 Hagge, John, 104 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 75, 80 Hayakawa, S. I., 161, 165-66 Hayek, Friedrich von, 125, 143, 14748, 151-52, 157 Hayne, Robert, 191, 193-94 Hegel, Georg, 149 Hemingway, Ernest, 87 Herman, Edward, 40 n.8 Hierarchy, 20, 24, 42, 43, 52-54, 55 History, 127, 180, 182; Weaver's attitude toward, 185, 186 Hofstadter, Richard, 133 Hoover, Herbert, 90-91 n.7 Howell, Wilbur Samuel, 162

2/6 Index Humanism, literary, 12; social science's lack of, 154 Hussein, Saddam, 196 n.3 Husserl, Edmund, 166 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 146 Idealism. See Plato Ideology, 38, 41, 44, 45, 53, 54, 55, 117; education and, 57, 118, 120 Imagination, 167, 177 Industrialism, 2 Invention, rhetorical, 90, 96, 112, 119, 128-29, 152-54, 179 Jackson, Shirley, 75 Jacobs, Harriet Brent (Linda Brent), 43 James, Henry, Sr., 79 Jarratt, Susan, 123 n.22 Jefferson, Thomas, 125-26, 196 n.6 Johannesen, Richard, 114, 115, 144, 148, 149, 184, 201 Jones, Howard Mumford, 201-2 Journalism, 30-32, 83, 98; muckrakers, 177-78 Kant, Immanuel, 71, 107 Kendall, Willmoore, 4, 202 Kennedy, George, 180, 186 Kerferd, G. B., 14-15 Kirk, Russell, 2, 4, 7, 9 Knapp, John Francis, 115, 182 Korzybski, Alfred, 161-64, 166-67 Kuhn, Thomas, 160 Language: denotative, 154, 162; essences, 159, 163, 170-72, 181-82; figurative language, 171-72, 178, 182-83; General Semantics, 159-73; ideality of, 163, 165; meanings transcendent, 15, 163, 164-66; metaphoric, 153-54; mythic image, 10, 178, 183; of "pure notation," 183; rectification of names, 146, 165; rhetorician's nonliteralist approach to, 182; and science, 161-62; semantically purified speech, 164. See also General Semantics

Lanham, Richard, 111 Latinate vocabulary, 153 Law: natural, 22, 43; nomos and, 22 Lay, Mary, 188 Lee, Robert E., 47 LeFevre, Karen Burke, 105 Leigh, Frances Butler, 44 Lewis, C. S., 27 Lewis, Sinclair, 75, 153 Liberalism, 5-6, 9, 81, 84, 113, 119, 125, 146, 153, 156, 157, 175, 176, 180, 189, 194, 197, 202 Lincoln, Abraham, 127, 161, 170, 192, 193 Lindemann, Erika, 113 Literature: ethical function of, 75-76; gentleman's lack of interest in, 49; "Gettysburg Address" as, 161; means for cultural cooperation, 74; modernism's effect on, 72, 76; oratory as, 160-61; religious, 75; repository for metaphysical dream, 20, 49; rhetoric and, 67, ,74; southern, rhetorical character of, 169, 182; virtuous society and, 63 Locke, John, 162 Logic, 16-17, 20-21, 24, 29, 38, 51, 128, 160; composition's relation to, 94, 95, 112; epideictic and, 177; metaphysical dream as basis for, 21; motive impulse's relation to, 103; neutral tool, 103. See also Dialectic Logos, 58, 103, 187, 188 Lost cause, 7, 141-42, 176, 201 Lysias, 164 McCloskey, Donald, 144-45, 154, 155 McComiskey, Bruce, 123 n.21 Machiavelli, Nicollo, xiv Malone, Dudley Field, 130 Mannheim, Karl, 149 Marcuse, Herbert, 125 Marx, Karl, 149, 156 Mass media, 11, 30-32, 160-61 Medawar, P. B., 106-7 Meliorism, social, 146, 153, 156 Melville, Herman, 80 Memory, 15-16; epideictic rhetoric

Index and, 177-80, 182; "half-forgotten beliefs," 141; of values, 169, 172 Mencken, Henry Lewis, 130, 135 Metaphor, 154, 162 Metaphysical dream, 10, 11, 14, 85, 104, 114; effects on rhetorical theory, 97; formed by cultural beliefs, 20, 39; literature and, 72, 74, 78; means for understanding experience, 20, 108; modernism's effects on, 32, 81, 114; nomos and, 22; religious faculty and, 25, 30, 103 Metaphysical propositions, 159-61 Meyer, Frank, 7, 202 Middletown, 153 Mill, John Stuart, 5 Miller, Arthur, 87 Modern Age, 7, 8 Modernism, 19, 27-33, 54, 59, 88, 125, 127, 141, 145, 159-60, 185; effects on composition, 96-102; effects on literature and rhetoric, 72, 76; effects on tragedy, 77, 80, 82; ethical responsibility and, 99, 102 Moffett, James, 93 Moore, Paul Elmer, 12 Moscovici, Serge, 150 Mythic image, 10, 178, 183 Naturalism, literary, 79, 81 Neal, John, 13 "Neuter discourse," 161, 164, 173, 183 New Deal, 6, 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10 Nominalism, 6, 19, 25-26, 33-34, 110, 168, 191 Nomos, 21-25, 35-36, 38, 43, 152; natural law and, 22 Norris, Frank, 81 Occam, William of, 19, 190 Ogden, Charles, 165-66 Orator, 13; idealized, 148-49; Roman, importance of, 17 Oratory, 16-18; nineteenth century, 13, 17, 159-61, 167, 170-71, 176, 179-82, 185; political, 160-61; Theodore Roosevelt and, 177-78; "spa-

217

cious," 159-61, 167-73, 176, 18081. See also Rhetoric; WebsterHayne debate Order, 9-10, 13 Orientation, 20, 25, 26, 44, 70; scientism and, 27-28 Orr, C. Jack, 35-37 Orwell, George, 106 Pathos, 45, 58, 78, 79, 187, 188 Perelman, Chaim, 38, 64 n.2, 112-13, 122 n. 11, 179 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 115 Pericles' Funeral Oration, 180 Perry, William, 62-63, 65 n.10 Perspectivism, 149 Philosophy, social, 146 Physis, 152 Piety, 9, 12, 26-27 Pirsig, Robert, 122 n.6 Plato, xii, xiv, xv, 6, 13-16, 33, 54, 71, 107, 110, 128, 156, 157, 160, 171, 175, 195 n.l —on correct names, 165 —epideictic rhetoric and, 177-83 —Emerson on, 87 —on imitation, 85 —on literary theory, 67-71, 76, 88 —myth of the soul, 108 —on rhetoric, 94, 95, 113, 120, 123 n.21 —on rhetoric adapted to soul, 171, 178-79 —on sophistry, 101-2 —on truth, 36, 114 —on writing, 37, 105, 113 —Works: Euthyphro, 148; Gorgias, 1, 15, 24, 126,146, 148-49; Ion, 69; Laws, 113-14; Menexenus, 180; Phaedrus, 1, 10, 13-16, 37, 40 n . l l , 58, 69, 70, 90 n.2, 104, 105, 110, 118, 122 nn.5, 9, 128-29, 133, 14849, 161, 164-65, 167, 172, 175, 17783, 196 n.2; Republic, xv, 68, 70, 113, 129, 133; Theaetetus, 58, 123 n.20 Poetry, 179, 180, 183; Gettysburg Address as, 161; Christian, 13

218

Index

Polanyi, Michael, 160 Positivism, 135. See Scientism Postman, Neil, 40 n.9, 54 n.8 Primary equivocation, 150 Prodicus, 165, 166 Progress, 28 Progressive Era, 151 Protagoras, xiv Quintilian, 99 Rabelais, Francois, xv Race, 151 Ramus, Peter, 123 n.17 Randolph, John, 7, 176, 184, 185, 187, 191-93 Ransom, John Crowe, 5 Reagan, Ronald, 61, 64 n.8, 84, 109, 198 Realism, philosophical, 12, 15, 19, 25, 33-39, 42, 47, 148-49, 157, 191 Recte loqui, 97, 98-100, 101, 102, 103, 109, 111, 120, 122 n.8 Regnery, Henry, 2, 3, 6, 202 Relativism, 33-39, 42, 47, 162-63, 165; of Weaver's essays, 184 Religion, 34, 42; fundamentalism, 128, 130, 132-36, 138; ritual, 20; southern religiousness, 42, 51; tragedy and, 77, 78 Religious faculty, 24-25, 26, 30, 52; metaphysical dream and, 25, 30 Rhetoric: artistic production and, 68; definition of, H I ; deliberative, 155, 175-176, 196 n.5, 197, 198-99; democracy aided by, 120-21; dialectic and, 1, 13-16, 55, 98, 102, 103-6, 111-12, 118, 126, 127, 128-29, 13542, 160, 170-72, 177-79, 181, 184; duty of, 103, 119; education and, 5 7 58, 67-68, 120-21; epideictic, xiii, 16-17, 58, 146, 159-61, 164, 186, 187, 188, 191, epistemic, 34, 73-74, 94, 113; forensic, xiii, 175-176, 186, 187-95; genre characterizing Weaver's prose, 184-86; goal of, 33, 90, 102, 110; ideal meanings and, 17072; inspiration and, 105-7; literature and, 67, 68, 70, 74; love and, com-

pared, 164, 177-79; modernism's effects on, 72; most appropriate genre for presentation of truth, xiv-xv, 175-86; Platonic, 160; related to ethics, 95, 110, 113-18, 119, 155, 160, 168, 179, 181, 184; role of, 12-18, 102, 167; science and, 126, 127, 128, 145; social science, 143-58; sophistic rhetoric, 69, 101-2, 110; spacious, 159-73, 176, 180-81. See also Language; Oratory; Style Rhetorica docens, xii, 119 Rhetorica utens, xii-xiii, 119 Rhetorician, noble, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114, 115 Richards, Ivor A., 78, 79, 80, 83, 16566 Roe v. Wade, 23, 39 n.3 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 160-61 Roosevelt, Theodore, 177-78 Royer, Daniel, 34-36 Rubens, Paul, 100 "Rugged individualism," 86-89, 101 Sandberg, Carl, 161 Schiappa, Edward, 109, 120 Science, 26-28, 34, 97-98, 108, 126, 127, 128, 145, 184; effects on rhetoric and oratory, 159-61; evolutionary, 131-42 Scientism, 9, 27-28, 98, 125, 143-58; in language, 166-73, 184 Scopes, John, 131, 200 Scopes trial, 2, 7, 125-43, 160, 166, 181, 184, 200 Scott, Robert, xiv, 93, 108, 109, 112, 113 Segregation, racial, 11 Selzer, Jack, 104 Sermonic nature of language, 171 Shakespeare, William, 75, 78 Shelley, Percy, 73 Shils, Edward, 151 Simms, William Gilmore, 53 Slavery, 43, 44-47, 49, 57, 170-71, 191-92, 193-94; natural law and, 22 Sledd, James, 93 Social science, rhetoric of, 143-58, 175, 176

Index

Social scientific discourse as public philosophy, 156 Sociology: discipline of, 150; rhetoric in, 158 n.4; social reform and, 15051, 153 Socrates, 165 Sophists, 183-84 Sophocles, 75, 78 Southern Agrarians, 5, 127, 201, 203 n.l Specialist, 16, 135, 147, 181 Specialization, 29-30, 46, 49, 55, 82, 97, 122 n.4 Sprat, Thomas, 98-99 Sproule, J. Michael, 95 Starling, Marion, 43 Steinbeck, John, 74-75, 106 Stevens, Wallace, 183 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 44-45 Strickland, Rennard, 114-15 Style, 152-54, 159-61, 177-83. See also Language; Oratory Talon, Omar, 123 n.17 Technocracy, 155, 168 Texas A & M University, 5-6 Thomas, Clarence, 22, 43 Thoreau, Henry David, 6, 7, 75, 87, 114, 147, 184, 190-93, 196 n.5 Tompkins, Philip, 157-58 n.l, 201 Topics, rhetorical, 13, 93, 95, 119, 179; related to ethics, 95 Toulmin, Stephen, 198 Tragedy, 77-82; modernism's effect on, 77-82; religion's effect on, 77-78 Tragic condition, 9, 154 Transcendentalism, literary, 79-81, 114 Transvaluation of values, 10, 141, 185 Tyrannizing image, 10, 20, 68, 72, 161 Ultimate terms, 103, 122 n.10 Unconscious, collective, 72, 85 University of Chicago, 2, 3, 143, 144, 149, 157-58 n.l University of Kentucky, 5 Utiliter loqui, 97, 98, 100-102, 103, 109, 111, 120, 122 n.8

219

Vanderbilt University, 3, 127, 172 Veblen, Thorstein, 155, 181 Vere loqui, 97, 98, 119 Vickers, Brian, 13 Vivas, Eliseo, 2, 4 Wallace, Karl, 162 Warren, Robert Penn, 169 Washington, Mary Helen, 64 n.l Waugh, Evelyn, 157 Weaver, Richard: art, definition of, 86; asceticism, 8-9; compared to Sophists and epideictic orators, xiii, 18486; conservatism, xii, xiv, 5, 93, 119, 121, 146, 156, 157, 179-81, 202; conservative movement and, 7, 61; critic, role of, 8-9; death, 2; development of ethos, 187; education, nature of, 117-18; education, role of, 55, 190; education of, 4-5; persona, 18, 183-84; place of literature and rhetoric, 67; Platonism, 13, 15, 34, 145-46; prominence explained, 199201; relation of rhetoric to knowledge, 119; religious viewpoint, 9, 12; rhetoric, definition of, 86, 111; rhetorician, nature of, 89-90, 107, 108, 110; Southern partisanship, 127, 144; tragedy, nature of, 77; use of logic, 187; use of pathos, 187; use of term "dialectic," 190-91 Weber, Max, 155 Webster, Daniel, 115-16, 147, 182, 191, 193-94 Webster-Hayne debate, 7, 104, 184, 185 Weigert, Andrew, 158 n.4 Wells, H. G., 4 0 n . l 2 Whitman, Walt, 87 Wicher, Stephen, 80 Wilde, Oscar, 70 Winged charioteer, 183 Women: effect of modernism on, 54; and suffrage, 57 Writing, destruction of memory through, 179 Yeats, William Butler, 61-62 Young, Daniel, 2, 4

About the Authors BERNARD K. DUFFY is Professor of Speech Communication at California Polytechnic State University. He is coeditor, with Halford Ross Ryan, of American Orators of the Twentieth Century: Critical Studies and Sources and American Orators before 1900: Critical Studies and Sources (both Greenwood Press, 1987) and, with Ryan serves as adviser for Greenwood's Great American Orators series. His articles have appeared in various journals relating to rhetoric, philosophy, and history. MARTIN JACOBI is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. He is coeditor with Michael G. Moran, of Research in Basic Writing: A Bibliographic Sourcebook (Greenwood Press, 1990) and has published numerous articles on composition and writing as well as literary criticism.