From Metaphysics to Rhetoric.

• Author: Willard, Charles Arthur

This collection is a translation of the 1986 festschrift to Chaim Perelman, De la metaphysique a la rhetorique. Its title was originally Perelman's--intended, Michel Meyer writes in the Foreword, for the grand synthetic work Perelman never completed. Meyer kept the title because it captures "the modernity of rhetoric"--its place after ontology. Rhetoric's modernity, Meyer argues, is its return to a logos, a conception of rationality as interrogativity. In his essay, "Toward an Anthropology of Rhetoric," he adds that "rhetorical awareness derives from a need for closure in broken logos" (135): From Plato to Descartes, the search for certainty has failed; after the God is dead movement has come the death of Man as foundation; the center has not held; and a value- and ideal-free materialism has wormed its way into the center of multiple cultures.

The book jacket says that the organizing question of this volume is: "What we can say today about rhetoric?" I would put the question differently: What must we say about rhetoric to get a metaphysics without ontology? Should we search for order in the world or for order within worlds? If we choose the latter, do we thereby preclude and by implication denounce the former? Are partial rationalities "globally irrational" (129)? Does the death of Cartesian subject yield a postmodernity that is irretrievably irrational?

The words "modernity" and "postmodernity" are clearest as labels for a broad literary genre. The terms usually arise amid talk of crisis or decay and nearly always designate transition arguments. Epochs or paradigms have changed or are changing; we are thus pre- or post- this or that. Beyond their function as genre markers, the two words may mean any number of things, for there are many schools of thought that advance different pictures of modernity, its crisis, and its next stage. The essays in this volume represent one of these schools. The "crisis of Western thought" is the death of the Cartesian subject at the hands of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Reason can no longer account for itself; its foundations have crumbled. The next stage is a recovery--of Greek wisdom and something much like Renaissance humanism. The essayists here differ on whether the redemption of rhetoric and rise of a non-ontological metaphysics is modernity's next stage or a postmodern successor. But the common thread is a recovery of what Perelman calls a universalizing intention.

The first essay, by Perelman, is called "Formal Logic and Informal Logic"--the contrast in the title being between demonstration and argumentation.

In argumentation it is not a matter of showing (as it is in demonstration) that an objective quality (such as truth) moves from the premises toward the conclusion, but rather it is a matter of showing that one can convince others of the reasonable and acceptable character of a decision, based on what the audience already assumes and based on the theses to which it adheres with sufficient intensity. (11)

Thus comes the subordination of argumentation to philosophy that is familiar to Perelman's readers. After speaking of the Sophists' use of "means unworthy of the philosopher" and the Phaedrus as advancing a "rhetoric worthy of the philosopher," Perelman advances his most familiar idea--the universal audience:

The best argumentation is that which could convince the most demanding, the most critical, the best informed audience--like one made up of the gods or constituted by divine reason. It is thus that philosophical argumentation appears as an appeal to reason, which I translate into the language of argumentation, or that of the new rhetoric, as a discourse addressed to the universal audience. A rational argumentation is characterized by a universalizing intention: it aims to convince, i.e. persuade an audience which, in the mind of the philosopher, incarnates reason. (13)

This looks like a queen of the sciences argument: If the philosopher has the conceptual wherewithal and arbitrates what counts as the audience, then the field of philosophy is the universal audience. Queen of the sciences arguments are perhaps harmless rituals within fields--like pep rallies--but they pose difficulties across field lines, for any intellectual field is free--and perhaps obliged--to ask why it should pay attention to hegemonic claims from outside fields. Some writers would denounce tying the rationality of argumentation to the universalizing intention, but to my mind the deeper flaw is that...