the dangers of dichotomy

The Dangers of DichotomyAuthor(s): Brian VickersSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1990), pp. 148-159Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709752 .

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The Dangers of Dichotomy

Brian Vickers

My first reaction, on reading Peter Munz's review article, was one of surprise-surprise that a Platonism of such purity, unmarked by any reflection on the a priori judgments lying behind those brilliant dialogues, should still exist. Already in his second sentence we find the traditional Platonic tactics for devaluing this ars bene dicendi: ". . . rhetoric, always alleged to be the art of persuasion not by truth or reason or any other authority; but by a number of irrational, psychologically effective, devices, which an earlier, more rational age, might have dismissed as irrelevant tricks." That is a fine example of rhetorical insinuatio, properly placed in the exordium, as classical authors recommended. Yet it includes a whole sequence of begged questions and pre-formed judgments. Rhetoric has "always" been "alleged" to be a number of disreputable things. Always? By all writers on it. Obviously not! Only at some times and by some writers, those openly hostile to it. As for the word "alleged," which seems to suspend judgment about the truth of such disreputabilia, we discover, as we read on, that this is just a feint, a pretence of objectivity or distance, since the rest of the essay endorses all the slurs, indeed offers a historical explanation for them.

Another debating trick is used at the end of the sentence, the suggestion that "an earlier, more rational age might have dismissed "-but surely, if rhetoric was "always" alleged to be such a shabby art, it must have often been dismissed- rhetorical devices as "irrelevant tricks." Our own age, then, is "irrational," caught, as we shortly discover, in the grip of relativism, sadly lacking in "truth or reason or any other authority." And just as in Plato, the desire to devalue rhetoric produces a kind of overkill which results in self-contradiction. The "devices" of rhetoric are simultaneously "irrelevant tricks" and "psychologically effective." Professor Munz seems to be caught on the horns of a dilemma facing all controversialists, whether to make the enemy look dangerous or in- competent. Unable to choose, he makes rhetoric both at the same time.

This single sentence is proleptic of much of the essay's argument, resting as it does on the polemical use of dichotomies which are simply assumed, introduced as privileged categories immune from critical inspection. This is precisely the technique used by Plato in his famous, or infamous, attack on rhetoric in the Gorgias, as I showed at some length in my book.1 (It is perhaps revealing that Munz records that I devote a 64-page chapter to Plato without giving his readers

In Defence ofRhetoric (Oxford, 1988; corr. repr., 1989), page-references incorporated into the text, with the prefix IDR.

148

Copyright 1990 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.



An Exchange: The Rhetoric of Rhetoric 149

any account of its argument, whether fair and well-grounded or not.) Making full use of two outstanding editions of that dialogue by specialists in Greek philosophy,2 I showed that Plato's well-known animus towards democracy extended itself, inevitably enough, to rhetoric through a whole series of maneuvers designed to upgrade dialectic-the speech of one against one, as Socrates puts it (Gorgias, 474a)-and downgrade rhetoric, the speech of one against the mass, or mob. I have no wish to repeat the detail of my analysis but shall briefly recall the role played in Plato's strategy by these unargued, unexamined dichotomous categories. The true statesman, so his persona Socrates declares, like the true philosopher, educates the citizens, prescribes remedies that may be unpleasant but are good for them. The democratic politician, on the other hand, like the orator, merely wants to please them, proposing policies that satisfy their egos, vanity, love of glory, or whatever, policies that, like junk-food, instantly please the palate but lead in the long run to all kinds of bodily sickness. The democratic politicians, or rhetores as Plato calls them, merely flatter the people, pander to their wishes, practicing kolakeia (a peculiarly base form of flattery, ready to satisfy the customer's desires whatever the degradation involved) but at the same time feeding off the state like a parasite (IDR, 86-88, 103-9).

Running through the dialogue, that masterly literary construct in which Socrates successively demolishes three "defenders" of rhetoric-defenders who are either made to incriminate the art, alleging that its goal is to achieve power in order to satisfy personal desires, like the tyrant, or else shown as logical tyros or boobies, wholly unable to construct their case or tell a good argument from a bad one-running through his masterpiece of unscrupulous rhetoric is a series of dichotomies that privileges Plato's position and simply excludes any alternative. One group of dichotomies concerns the function of rhetoric in the state, its socio-political existence as opposed to philosophy and dialectic. This can be represented by dichotomies such as these: spurious/genuine, rhetoric/dialectic, pleasing / curing, flatterer/doctor, cookery / medicine, corruption / education, pleasure/virtue, self-indulgence/self-control, self/community, and tyranny/ Plato's state. Other arts which merely flatter the audience, Socrates alleges, giving them gratification not moral improvement, are music (flute and lyre playing), drama (both dithyrambic and tragic), and poetry (IDR, 105-7). This lumping-together of Plato's betes noires helps us to see how one-sided and unargued his categories are, for just as the tragic poets-Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides-never ceased from making the sharpest possible presentation of the destructive effects of violence, war in all forms, and patriotic vanity (including that of the Athenians), so the Greek orators did not hesitate to tell their listeners unpleasant truths, whatever the personal cost to themselves, putting their com- mitment to a coherent policy above pleasing the audience. Plato seems to think that the mere situation of addressing an audience forces a speaker to abandon his whole integrity, sell out to delectare and wholly forget docere.

The same technique used to devalue rhetoric in its social context is brought to bear on it as an intellectual discipline. There are two forms of conviction, Socrates states, one deriving from learning and systematic teaching and pro- ducing knowledge, the other deriving from persuasion alone, yielding conviction

2 E. R. Dodds (ed.), Gorgias. A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford, 1959); Terence Irwin (ed.), Gorgias, Translated with Notes (Oxford, 1979).



150 Brian Vickers

without knowledge. By applying this dichotomy Plato allows Socrates to confuse and rout Gorgias, who is made to assent to the ridiculous conclusion that the rhetorician has no knowledge of any subject and simply deceives his audience by pretending to be an expert (IDR, 92-97). As Gorgias gives up this unequal contest, Socrates hampers his next opponent with the dichotomy that rhetoric is merely an empeiria, a "knack" based on trial and error, having no logos or rational principle, hence no scientific status as a techne (IDR, 97-98). But, as Terence Irwin has objected, Plato's attempt to link the external defect of rhetoric (its desire to gratify the audience) with the internal one (it supposedly cannot offer a "rational account" of itself, or give the "cause" or "explanation" of its treatment) does not cohere. "Socrates has not shown why there cannot be an 'Art of Rhetoric' explaining why each rhetorical device is the right one to use to persuade different audiences in different conditions. He apparently thinks that the concern of rhetoric with pleasure disqualifies it from being a craft. But why is that?"3 Why indeed? Only because Plato says so: having arbitrarily denied the orator any intentions other than flattery, he can hardly now concede that he practices an intellectually coherent art. The elaborate fictional device of a dialogue which Socrates wins three nil conceals the dichotomies which are not neutral categories but unargued value judgments. In the detail of argument, as both Dodds and Irwin have shown, there are many shifty sequences, Socrates being allowed to exploit unclarity, illegitimate inference, unacknowledged as- sumptions, and structural ambiguities (IDR, 113-20). As an example of the last type of evasion, when Gorgias says that rhetoric is about logoi in the general sense of "what is spoken or thought," in reply Socrates "plays on the suggestion that logos must be rational discourse," but later, at his convenience, "rejects the claim of rhetoric to be about logoi in this sense, saying that it is 'irrational,' alogon, 465a."4

Which brings us back to Munz's second sentence, with its description of rhetoric's "irrational, psychologically effective devices." Munz has absorbed, whether consciously or not, the Platonic technique of dividing in order to destroy. His essay is built around dichotomies such as these: persuasion/truth, irration- ality/reason, and psychological effectiveness/logical argument. This pristine Platonism survives, I suspect, because few readers have been aware of the strategy behind the dichotomies, what seems an innocent and heuristically valid dualism turning out to be an arbitrary and dogmatic monism. One of the least read, or least cited sections in The New Rhetoric of Chaim Perelman and Lucy Olbrechts- Tyteca, is the discussion of what they call "les couples philosophiques," phil- osophic pairs,5 starting with appearance/reality or Term I/Term II. As they acutely point out, in such pairings "term II provides a criterion, a norm which allows us to distinguish those aspects of term I which are of value from those which are not" (NR, 416). What the dissociation does, in fact, is to "attach value to the aspects that correspond to term II and ... lower the value of the

3 Irwin, ed.cit., 135. 4 Ibid., 114. 5 Traite de l 'argumentation. La nouvelle rhetorique (Paris, 1958; 3rd edition, Brussels,

1976), para. 90-96, 556-609. Quotations are from the English translation by J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver, The New Rhetoric. A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, Ind., 1969), page-references incorporated into the text, with the prefix NR.




aspects that are in opposition to it. Term I, appearance in the strict sense of the word, is merely illusion and error ... being devalued as compared to the reality of things in themselves" (NR, 417). But as soon as we inspect the dichotomy critically we realize that it begs a number of questions. This opposition, for instance, "does not warrant assigning all the advantages to reality at the expense of appearance. For, whereas appearance is given, reality is con- structed, knowledge of it is indirect, sometimes even impossible, and rarely capable of communication in an exhaustive and unquestionable manner" (NR, 418). The deeper we pursue the notion of reality, the harder it becomes to grasp, except as part of a dichotomy which is meant to be accepted at face value. "When the criterion or standard laid down by reality is not in fact challenged ... reality doubtless gains in value in relation to appearance" (ibid.). To chal-

lenge the dichotomy is to reveal the values that it seeks to have taken for granted. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca analyze three philosophers' use of dicho-

tomies, Plato in the Phaedrus, Spinoza in his Ethics, and Lefebvre in a series of Marxist treatises (NR, 420ff.). As they point out, such pairs "are often introduced as data, not for discussion, as instruments that make it possible to structure the discourse in a manner that appears objective" (ibid., 422; my italics). They are

part of the contract between one speaker and another as to which elements of the discourse may be taken as given, and the straw personae whom Socrates routs are blissfully unaware that once they have accepted the pair, they have

bought with it a value judgment that ascribes to Term II positive attributes ("the criterion of value"), to Term I solely negative ones ("that which does not satisfy this criterion": NR, 441), implying a further distinction between

right and wrong. The introduction of a dichotomous category is a device intended to put one's interlocutor in the wrong: "For in argumentation, what one person terms appearance is generally what was reality to someone else, or was confused with reality, or else it would not be given this new status" (ibid., 424). To introduce the concept of error, for instance, is "to assert that there is a rule" (425) and that one's opponent is either ignorant of it or has broken it knowingly. The speaker or writer who uses such categories, intended to enhance one term and diminish the other, is claiming to have superior insight or to occupy a position of privilege.

Socrates' interlocutors, invented characters in a fictional dialogue, at the mercy of their creator, were not allowed to choose, or to think. Readers of Peter Munz, however, have that freedom and will exercise it. To examine his philosophical pairs is to note that rhetoric is always Term I set over against some higher value. Take these two sentences: "We believe we rely on rhetoric when there is no or little evidence for a statement and when there is no or little logical argument to support it. The heart of the matter is that when a statement can be shown to be true, no rhetoric is required to persuade people to give their assent." Let us not bother with Munz's Term I here, with its implied travesty of rhetoric, denying it any evidential or logical status, and concentrate on his

privileged Term II. In this view, something called "truth," he continues, "provided it shows itself to be true, commands assent." Tautology aside, we can only ask, when, where, and how such a phenomenon takes place. "What is



152 Brian Vickers

truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. "6 Nor does Munz,

typically taking his Term II as a given. Yet the only situation I can imagine in which truth appears univocal and universally accepted would be within a closed

community (united, for instance, against a common enemy), or a closed belief-

system-when it would not be truth at all, but dogma, and Term I would be

"heresy." Although widely-read, and familiar with many works of or about rhetoric,

Munz seems unhappy with the basic requirements of the communication situ-

ation, namely that a speaker, granting his audience the possession of free will, attempts to "apply Reason to Imagination for the better moving of the will"

(FB, III, 409). As against Bacon's definition, Munz seems to be invoking the notion of a rational science first formulated by Descartes, the refutation of which formed the starting point for The New Rhetoric. As Perelman and his collaborator

showed, the Cartesian model science elaborates "a system of necessary propositions which will impose itself on every rational being, concerning which agree- ment is inevitable" (NR, 2). With such a system "disagreement is a sign of

error," and everything which is not accepted by formal logic as self-evident can be dismissed as being subject either to "irrational elements ... such as imagination, passion, or suggestion," or to "suprarational sources of certitude such as the heart, grace," or intuition. As they vigorously object, this is "a perfectly unjustified and unwarranted limitation of the domain of action of our faculty of reasoning and proving" (NR, 3; authors' italics), involving "a differentiation between human faculties which is completely artificial and contrary to the real

processes of our thought" (ibid.). The dichotomy of Cartesian systems, reason/ unreason is an either/or and corresponds (to use the distinctions developed by Gregory Bateson and Anthony Wilden)7 to the working of a digital computer (like an adding-machine), a movement through discontinuous steps which includes the options yes/no, on/off. Rhetoric, however, resembles the analog computer (like a clock), marked by continuous functions along the scale of less/ more, and lacking the option yes/no. As the proponents of this new rhetoric

put it, "the object of the theory of argumentation is the study of the discursive

techniques allowing us to induce or increase the mind's adherence to the theses

presented for its assent. What is characteristic of the adherence of minds is its variable intensity ..." (NR, 4; authors' italics). The speaker's aim is to increase

adherence, decrease disagreement, both seen as variables in a process that always involves the reason, on both sides, but does not imagine that apodictic proofs or self-evident axioms are the sole guarantee of truth.

In any case, even if there were such a thing as a single truth, human perception and assimilation do not function with the automatic rapidity of a calculating- machine. Munz's model of mankind is curiously schematic, granting us reason but wholly ignoring the passions, or "affections" as they used to be called.

6 Bacon, Essay "Of Truth," The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857-74), VI, 377. Page-references incorporated into the text, with the prefix FB.

7 See Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London, 1973), 261-62, 342-44, and

Wilden, System and Structure, Essays in Communication and Exchange (London, 1972), 24, 155-57, 161-63.




Bacon anticipated and answered Munz's fallacious concept of man as a solely rational being, pointing out that

if the affections in themselves were pliant and obedient to reason, it were true there should be no great use of persuasions and insinuations to the will, more than of naked propositions and proofs; but in regard of the continual mutinies and seditions of the affections, Video meliora, proboque, /Deteriora sequor, reason would become captive and servile, if eloquence did not practise and win the imagination from the affections' part, and contract a confederacy between the reason and imagination against the affections. For the affections themselves carry ever an appetite to good, as reason doth.... (FB, III, 410-11)

It may be objected that Bacon's view of the passions as inherently good is optimistic, like so many pronouncements of Renaissance humanists about rhetoric; but his model of the human processes of perception and judgment is much more realistic than Munz's, and usefully ties in with the new rhetoric's emphasis on "adherence" as the fundamental goal of persuasion. Both agree, too, on the variability of the audience addressed, which means that every speech needs to be adjusted to its listeners' differing capacities and interests. For Munz, though, such variability must seem dangerous. One of the burdens of his complaint involves an attempted explanation of this "remarkable feature of the second half of our century," the revived interest in rhetoric. He attributes it to the contemporary belief (how widely shared does he imagine it to be?) that "all knowledge, even so called scientific knowledge, is relative to a paradigm or a frame-work, and that evidence which is true under one paradigm is not so under another.... The importance attached to rhetoric is functionally dependent on relativism." The recovery of rhetoric, then, is due to the rise of relativism, and the decline of belief in any absolute truth. This proposition relies on the philosophical pairs: modern relativism/absolute truth or positivism, and rhetoric/ ?philosophy-at this point Munz's Term II is unclear. Later on, though, he states that "History ... shows that the importance attached to rhetoric is in inverse proportion to the absence of science," which yields this pair: rhetoric/ rational science. The "importance of scientific rationality in making rhetoric redundant," Munz claims, is seen by the fact that no rhetoric is needed to persuade people that 2 X 3 = 6, while "rhetoric has to be reserved for attempts to persuade people that two threes make seven." Where is the rhetorician who has achieved that feat? Let him be duly celebrated!

Munz is provocative here, but at least this dichotomy is clearly identified, making rational science opposed, and superior to rhetoric. Munz states his argument in both synchronic and diachronic terms: it is in the nature of science to be like that; and this split did happen in history. Rhetoric was important in antiquity, he writes, and rhetoric can be equated with relativism. So Munz finds it "no surprise that relativisms should have been in the ascendancy in ancient times when there was no science of importance...." Other historians might have qualms over relegating Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, and a host of brilliant Greek thinkers to oblivion; but the rhetoric of Munz's dichotomy leaves him no choice, since they are all subsumed under Term II, which stands in "inverse relationship" to Term I. I shall not pursue that point, however, since Munz's application of the dichotomy to a later period is much more serious.



154 Brian Vickers

"In the seventeenth century," he writes, "the scientific revolution provided information and theories for which there was evidence," so that scientists no longer needed to have "recourse to rhetoric." Thus, "rhetoric continued to flourish in the Houses of Parliament, but not in the Royal Society," for "the demise of rhetoric which set in during the seventeenth century" was due to "scientific rationalists" finding it "useless." Galileo's science was "anti-rhetorical," involving a "definite, concrete kind of activity."

There is obviously much truth in this last assertion, since Galileo's was indeed a science of things, not words; but Munz's opposition between rhetoric and science is historically unfounded. I should like to make some distinctions and clarifications by means of a simple division of scientific activity into four stages, using Francis Bacon as a convenient test-case for the supposed hostility of the new science to rhetoric. First, then, is the collection of data, observable

phenomena in the natural world, where indeed rhetoric would be inappropriate. As Bacon wrote, in this stage we should ignore "all that concerns ornaments of speech, similitudes, treasury of eloquence.... For no man who is collecting and storing up materials for ship-building or the like, thinks of arranging them elegantly ... all his care is that they be sound and good, and that they be so arranged as to take up as little room as possible in the warehouse" (FB, IV, 254-55). But in the second and third stages, the use of experiment to generate or test scientific laws, the whole process of invention, translating models from one context to another, the ability to perceive analogies is essential. Recent studies of Bacon have validated his scientific practice from the misconceived charges of mechanical fact-collecting. Peter Urbach describes his use of analogy for heuristic purposes as "correct" and "original," while Antonio Perez-Ramos, in an outstanding study, rebukes previous scholars for overlooking the "all- important analogical component in Bacon's theory of knowledge. "8 As Bacon said himself, contrasting scholastic logic (which could manipulate pre-formed verbal counters but never move beyond the syllogism into invention and dis- covery) with his new inductive-operative logic, "whatsoever science is not con- sonant to presuppositions must pray in aid of similitudes" (FB, III, 407).

The final stage of scientific activity, the communication of results, is un- thinkable without rhetoric. The apparently simple process of writing up an experiment, even the ways in which data are presented, these are all "artificial," not "natural" processes, involving choice between various possibilities to find the most persuasive. Prior to this, the making of an audience receptive to science, freeing it from old and new discredits-tasks so memorably accomplished by Bacon's Advancement of Learning and other writings-all this involves rhetoric. Making a space for one's own discoveries can also involve discrediting rival or opposed versions. One of the finest examples of this necessity is provided by Galileo, supposedly "anti-rhetorical," who in his Dialogue of the Two World Systems made fluent use of the resources of epideictic rhetoric, praise and blame, to satirize the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian world-view and to support heliocentrism.9

8 Peter Urbach, Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Science (La Salle, Ill., 1987), 167; Antonio Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition (Oxford, 1988), 293 and passim.

9 See Brian Vickers, "Epic and Epideictic in Galileo's Dialogo," Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia delle Scienze di Firenze, 8 (1983), 69-102.




Similarly Kepler (who had been a teacher of rhetoric in his day) cast a defense of Tycho Brahe in the form of a judicial oration, making devastating use of the rhetorical figure concessio, where the orator argues from his opponent's premisses to show that "no matter how charitably" one considers his case, "it still fails. "10

As for the Royal Society's hostility to rhetoric, that is an old canard which has been refuted in detail." The young Thomas Sprat's claims that the Society had abolished "all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style" in favor of "a close, naked, natural way of speaking"12 can no longer be taken at face value. It was part of a (very successful) campaign designed to make the Royal Society the central scientific establishment and to discredit its opponents, occultists and enthusiasts, those magicians and sectarians who had "obscured" language. Far from disclaiming all interest in rhetoric, Sprat goes out of his way to praise Bacon's style, "the Wit Bold, and Familiar. The comparisons fetch'd out of the way, and yet the most easie" (HRS, 36), especially his use of analogies drawn from science, that "vast Treasure of admirable Imaginations which it afforded him, wherewith to express and adorn his thoughts" (HRS, 416). Instead of opposing rhetoric and science, Sprat assures his readers that the new "Ex- perimental Philosophy" will have no "ill effects on the usual Arts whereby we are taught the Purity and Elegance of Languages" (ibid., 324), and he promises the "Wits" and "Gentlemen of our Nation" that the New Sciences will offer, in place of the obsolete mythological sources of tropes, a whole new world of similitudes and comparisons, which will be "solid and lasting," consisting of "Images that are generally observ'd, and such visible things which are familiar to mens minds" and will thus make "the most vigorous impressions on mens Fancies" (ibid., 414-16). Science was not hostile to rhetoric, and to make an antithetical, mutually exclusive pair out of them, is factitious.

As for the decline of rhetoric in the seventeenth century, that is another fiction. Since Munz has not cited any evidence for it, there seems no need to refute him in detail. As yet no reliable printing-history exists,13 but a little acquaintance with library-catalogues will show that the classical rhetoric texts were being printed and translated, often with more elaborate commentaries, throughout the period. In every decade half-a-dozen new or reprinted English rhetoric books appeared, catering both to professional and amateur readers, while rhetoric continued to have a major part in school and university curricula.

10 Nicholas Jardine, The Birth of History and Philosophy of Science. Kepler's 'A Defence of Tycho Brahe against Ursus' with Essays on its Provenance and Significance (Cambridge, 1984), 72-79.

" See Brian Vickers, "The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment," Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles, 1985), 1-76; and Paul B. Wood, "Methodology and Apologetics: Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society," British Journal for the History of Science, 13 (1980), 1-26.

12 History of the Royal Society (1667), facsimile edition by J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones (St. Louis, Wash., 1958); page-references incorporated into the text, with the prefix HRS; here, 111-13.

13 See, however, R. C. Alston, A Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year 1800, 10 vols. (Leeds, 1965-72), VI, with Additions and Corrections (Leeds, 1973), 46-55; and H. Plett, Englische Rhetorik und Poetik 1479-1660. Eine systematische Bibliographie (Opladen, 1985).



156 Brian Vickers

The holdings of one library alone (the Clark Library of UCLA) of works on rhetoric published between 1641 and 1700 amount to over 120 titles, and more could be added. Even those supposed proponents of the plain style, the Puritans and parliamentarians, had no animus to rhetoric. Many of the educational reformers included rhetoric as a useful art in their revised curricula, and Crom- well's 1657 plan for a new foundation of the University of Dublin included a chair of rhetoric.14

Munz's opposition between "relativisms" and "authoritative belief-systems," between "rhetoric" and "science," seems clear-cut, confidently articulated. Yet the cutting edge of a dichotomy can sometimes damage its user. If "relativisms" and "science" are mutually antithetical, how comes it that our age, with its revived interest in rhetoric, is also dominated by science? Munz sees this awkward exception to his rule, and tries to block it with the "immediate answer" that relativism is in the ascendant, invoking Foucault and Kuhn. The twentieth century is an age of great "scientific progress," he writes, and the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century was premissed on the belief that "correct knowledge can be obtained by observing the world and by generalising those observations." Many readers could be forgiven for thinking that the earlier revolution inaugurated modem science, and that there is a direct continuity between the two. Munz, however, labels the earlier scientific attitude "positivism" (an unfortunately reductive and confusing label) and says that relativism is now seen as "the only alternative to an untenable positivism." (He has another candidate, "evolutionary epistemology," which I won't discuss: I just want to follow out this dichotomy.) Later on, however, he says that the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences is all about "the failure of Baconian positivism to account for the existence and successes of ... science." Silently, it seems, the wedge of another dichotomy has been driven into Munz's version of history. First we had seventeenth-century science equated with "positivism"; now, it seems, "Bacon- ian positivism" is removed from science, unable to explain it. Just as the "relativism" of the present age is silently assumed to be shared by all philosophers and all scientists, Munz takes for granted a Foucault-like discontinuity between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, as if workers in physical, biological, botanical, and other sciences now no longer believed in observation and experiment. As with Plato, dichotomies can be manipulated as hidden persuaders, shifting position from Term I to Term II as the occasion demands. The inverse coupling of "science" and "rhetoric" seems artificial, untrue.

As this "philosophical pair" collapses, the reader's misgivings at Munz's use of excluding binary oppositions will increase. A substantial part of his essay discusses metaphor, invoking the antithesis: rhetorical or metaphoric meaning/ literal meaning. Munz claims that "rhetoric without control from a non-rhetorical source, becomes free-wheeling," but it could (that is, should?) be con- trolled by reference to "literal, i.e. non-rhetorical meaning." Many readers, I imagine, will want to reject this crude dichotomy from the outset, involving as it does the chimera of value-free, non-persuasive, non-figurative communication. The habit of argument by division and exclusion leads Munz to further absolute and categorical formulations, such as these: "we call literal meanings all those

14 See Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1620- 1660 (London, 1975), passim, but especially 176, 198, 203-4, 215, 226, 549.




meanings which are consistent and compatible with each other. By contrast (note the excluding tactic) metaphorical meanings are frequently inconsistent with each other. Literal meanings are like nature herself-naturally consistent. Metaphorical meanings have a certain unnaturalness and artfulness about them.... " It is usually a sign of desperation, of firing one's last bolt, to invoke the unnatural/natural pair, "nature" being one of the most notoriously sub- jective and arbitrary concepts known to man. (Was it Nabokov who advised that the word should only ever be used inside inverted commas?) Munz is so intent on establishing his dichotomies that he sweeps over many essential distinctions. It would have needed much more argument to establish the linguistic conditions within which literal meanings could be said to be "consistent" (starting from the same suppositions? conflicting descriptions of the same situation?). Metaphoric meanings, conversely, can often be consistent, as in the extended metaphor, or in the thematic use of metaphors in great works of literature (the imagery of clothes in Macbeth, say, or sickness in Hamlet and King Lear). They are not necessarily the better for that, of course: some metaphors can be extended too far, into the banal and predictable. Consistency is a quality subordinate to other criteria.

The polemical intent behind the use of dichotomies is revealed when Munz

expatiates on what he finds to be the "unenviable dilemma" of the contributors to The Rhetoric. "If metaphors are not substitutes for literal meanings, one cannot judge a metaphor by whether it can be reduced to a true literal meaning." But who would ever dream of attempting such a thing? That would be not to

"judge" a metaphor, but destroy it. Not explaining how he would go about

establishing a "literal" meaning (nor what a "true" one would be), Munz tries to impale his opponents on the horns of their (supposed) dilemma. The "rhetorical quality" of rhetorical figures, he argues, can only be evaluated by checking "how they perform compared to literal meanings." The Rhetoric's contributors

apparently do not accept Munz's opposition between literal and metaphorical and therefore cannot even discuss rhetorical figures. According to Munz, however, "Vickers quietly and confidently assumes that metaphors are used to emphasise literal meaning and, in decorating it, assist in making it more persuasive. "

I utterly reject this dichotomy, along with the ascription of such views to me. I would never dream of discussing metaphor in such crass terms! In my book I give pride of place to Aristotle's account of metaphor in the Rhetoric and Poetics, which emphasizes the qualities of actuality, liveliness, and surprise that metaphor can give, and I endorse his famous praise of skill with this trope to be "a sign of natural genius, as to be good at metaphor is to perceive resemblances" (IDR, 320). I define metaphor, traditionally enough, as the trans- ferring of a word "from one thing to another, for illumination and for emotional

emphasis" (496); and I draw attention to the emphasis in Roman rhetoric on its power to move the feelings (320-22). The crucial points to note are that

metaphor effects a translatio between concepts not normally linked together, and that it often does so for a persuasive purpose. As Aristotle writes in the Rhetoric, "if you wish to pay a compliment, you must take your metaphor from

something better in the same line; if to disparage, from something worse. To illustrate my meaning: since opposites are in the same class, you ... [can] say



158 Brian Vickers

that a man who begs 'prays,' and a man who prays 'begs'; for praying and

begging are both varieties of asking." Similarly with two common expressions for actors, each "is a metaphor, the one intended to throw dirt at the actor, the other to dignify him."15 In other words, and despite Munz's disclaimer, it is possible to deduce an author's intention from the kinds of metaphor he or she uses, and the purpose to which they are put. Discussion of metaphor that

begins from trying to reconstruct a putative literal meaning defeats the purpose of criticism. What is important is to register the impact that metaphors have on us as readers or listeners, and to analyse the kinds of evaluation that they make-as well as responding to the unexpected imaginative connections they make.

To conclude with some words in eigener Sache. Munz says that I am "equiv- ocal" in some places, "shrinking away" from Vico and Hayden White, whose

support he expected me to have welcomed. But I made no general evaluation of either figure, citing them only in one specific and unequivocal context, as

representing the modern reduction of the tropes from thirty-odd to four, or two16 (IDR, 439-42). I also discussed a passage in Michel Tournier's recent version of Robinson Crusoe (Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique), in which this modem Robinson withdraws into a protozoic existence in a primeval slime, or a fetal posture in a cave. One striking effect of his complete isolation involves

language and rhetoric, for the hero observes himself gradually losing awareness both of "the meaning of things" and "the meaning of words which do not

represent concrete objects. I can only talk literally. Metaphor, litotes and hy- perbole," tropes that depend on selection and abstractions, demand more imaginative effort than he is capable of (IDR, 380-82). I connected this passage with Cicero's remark that if "a wise man" were guaranteed material subsistence so that he could "in perfect peace study and ponder over everything that is worth knowing, still, if the solitude were so complete that he could never see a human being, he would die." I could also have cited Aristotle's Politics, that man is "more of a political animal," than other "gregarious animals," since nature has

given man alone "the gift of speech," which allows moral discrimination.17 Denied speech, then, that gift which turns "an association of living beings" into a social organism, man might well regress to the state of animals, who can make noises but not express thoughts. Not accepting either my reading of Tournier or the relevance of Cicero, Munz invokes Thomas Mann's novel Der Erwdhlte (known in English as The Holy Sinner), whose hero also undergoes a phase of life outside society, a text which Munz uses for another sermon on the metaphorical versus the literal. (There seems to be a degree of confusion in Munz's mind as to whether the hero of Mann's novel, who spends seventeen years

15 Rhetoric, 1405a14-26; tr. W. R. Roberts. 16 Iwas ignorant at the time of writing as to the tradition behind Vico's "systema-

tization" or reduction of the tropes to four, but a colleague has kindly sent me an article which shows that the move was originated by Ramus and Talaeus, taken further by Vossius. See Andrea Battistini, "Tradizione e innovazione nella tassonomia tropologica vichiana," Bollettino del centro di studi Vichiani, 3 (1973), 67-81.

17 De offciis, I.xliii.153; tr. W. Miller (Loeb Classical Library); Aristotle, Politics, 1253a2-18; tr. B. Jowett.




chained to a rock in total solitude, is also in a "protozoic existence," and if so, whether it is real, quasi-literal, metaphoric, or any combination of these.) With the greatest respect, all I can say is that Munz has missed my point. Tournier shows his character regressing into a protozoic state (real, not metaphorical) as, under the pressure of isolation, he gives up soliloquizing with himself, only to find talking to the trees and clouds just as pointless. Defoe keeps Crusoe writing, perhaps because he fears that silence would de-humanize him (and, of course, to create a novel). Tournier characteristically pushes Defoe's thought a stage further, seeing that even writing and talking may not be enough to keep one human, if there is no one else to talk to. All communication presupposes a reader or listener at some point. Solitude destroys even the possibility of communication, and with it humanity.

Munz claims to be giving "merely an expansion of [my] own themes," but he has twisted them to his concerns. He says that I show "no regard for the dialectics of the history of ideas which makes rhetoric now important and now unimportant." In fact, quite a large portion of my book is devoted to tracing the rise and fall of rhetoric, and to propose historical reasons for its vicissitudes, whether political, social, or intellectual. Any reader will see that. But more importantly, I should like to challenge Munz's assumption that the "history of ideas" has some constant and universally accepted form. If he is hoping to bracket it with what he describes as those "authoritarian or comparatively authoritative truths like modem science" I could only say that he has misun- derstood the nature of the humanities, which deal not with absolute values and self-evident truths but with issues that are by definition contestable, subject to adherence or disagreement, more or less powerful depending on the conviction which a writer's interpretation of a literary work, philosophical issue, or historical process carries for each reader. To invoke a binary category which implies no disvaluation of either side, our activity is idiographic, not nomothetic, attending to the nature of individual art works or philosophical systems as things that are unique and different, not attempting to find scientific laws that are universally true and binding. Munz may unknowingly aspire to the latter, Cartesian state, but his own work falls in the former category, and is none the worse for that. But it would benefit from a less biassed and more open-minded judgment on rhetoric, and the role it still has to play.

Centre for Renaissance Studies, ETH Zurich.



the dangers of dichotomy

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