Aritotle's 'Rhetoric': An Art of Character.
Author | Jasinski, James |
Given the discipline's persistent emphasis on Aristotle's Rhetoric, rhetoricians may quibble with Garver's claim that "Aristotle's Rhetoric remains relatively untouched" (4) as a source upon which to draw for insights into contemporary theoretical and conceptual problems. Scholars in rhetoric and argumentation have been engaging the Rhetoric for roughly seventy years. Garver's encounter with this often under appreciated yet seminal text achieves a level of depth, nuance, and sophistication very rarely seen in the discipline's commentaries and explications of the Rhetoric. His analysis situates the Rhetoric in the context of Aristotle's discussions of politics, ethics, and dialectic while also employing insights from the Rhetoric to expand upon and clarify issues and problems introduced in these related inquiries. Garver offers not only an original and provocative reading of the various components of Aristotle's practical philosophy. His book explores the very urgent problem of how practical reason might be reinvented.
The key to Garver's reading strategy, and his larger recuperative project, can be found in the subtitle. For Garver, rhetoric is an "art of character." This claim has two important implications. First, the claim implies that the essence of rhetorical art is ethics or character; Aristotle's Rhetoric, in Garver's reading, makes rhetorical art ethical. Second, the claim implies that ethics and character are inherently artful or artistic. In a lengthy discussion of the virtue of "truth-telling" (aletheia), Garver shows that it "is not a matter of transparency or accuracy of representation of thoughts in words but of appropriate self-presentation, finding the right amount to put forward about oneself in the circumstances." He concludes: "Increasingly, it looks as though truth-telling is not a virtue but a rhetorical skill" (218). Repeatedly, Garver insists that his reading does not completely collapse the distinction between art (techne) and the intellectual virtues of character. Rather, Garver's book is a sustained meditation on a series of apparent oppositions, antagonisms, or incompatibilities - between craft and character, techne and virtue, art and ethos, a power (dynamis) of proving opposites and an intellectual virtue oriented toward good ends, rules and particulars, and logos (the idea that the enthymeme is the center of rhetorical art) and ethos (the idea that ethos is the most effective mode of proof) - in the hope of disclosing possibilities for particularized (circumstance-dependent) reconciliation and integration.
Garver begins the process of interpretive negotiation...
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