FROM TO SYNTHESE LIBRARY

STUDIES IN , LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PffiLOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Managing Editor:

JAAKKO ffiNTIKKA, Florida State University, Tallahassee

Editors:

DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley GABRI1~.L NUCHELMANS, University ofLeyden WESLEY C. SALMON, University ofPittsburgh

VOLUME 202 FROM METAPHYSICS TO RHETORIC

Edited by MICHEL MEYER University ofBrussels,

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publlcation Data

From ~etaphyslcs to rhetorlc / edlted by Mlchel Meyer. p. cm. -- (Synthese llbrary : 202)

1. Rhetor1c. I. Meyer. Mlchel. II. Serles: Synthese llbrary : v. 202. PN175.F76 1989 808--dc19 88-24073

ISBN-13: 978-94-010-7672-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-2593-9 DOl: 1O.l 007/978-94-009-2593-9

Translated from the French by Robert Harvey, University of California at Berkeley. * indicates author's own translation.

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Originally published in French .as: De La Metaphysique a la Rhitorique Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles, 1986.

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MICHEL MEYER' Foreword - The Modernity of Rhetoric 1 CHAIM PERELMAN, Formal Logic and Informal Logic 9 JEAN LADRIERE 'Logic and Argumentation 15 JEAN-BLAISE GRIZE, To Reason While Speaking 37 PIERRE OLERON 'Organization and Articulation of Verbal Exchanges: Question-Response Exchange in Polemical Contexts 49 JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE and OSWALD DUCROT , Argumentativity and Informativity 71 JUDITH SCHLANGER' Saying and Knowing 89 LAMBROS COULOUBARITSIS , . Rhetoric and Critique in 95 MICHEL MEYER 'Toward an Anthropology of Rhetoric 111 PAUL RICOEUR' Rhetoric-Poetics- 137 MICHEL BEAUJOUR, Rhetoric and Literature 151 OLIVIER REBOUL ,The Figure and the 169 ROMAIN LAUFER' Rhetoric and 183 MICHEL MEYER

FOREWORD - THE MODERNITY OF RHETORIC

Perelman suddenly left us on 22 January 1984, just as he was getting ready to write the great synthesis that he had been preparing for several years. He wanted to entitle it From Metaphysics to Rhetoric. I have insisted on keeping that title for this volume of essays on argumentation. I shall speak neither of the man that he was nor of the thought which is henceforth associated with his name. It is thus that the discretion of friendship joins with the work's notoriety in order to justify this silence. What should instead be dwelt upon is the significance of that passage from ontology to rhetoric which Perelman wished to make the keystone of his new work. In its genesis as well as in its ambitions, ontology opposes itself to rhetoric. That the two coexist with Aristotle is owing to his lucidity concerning the services that can render - services which , obsessed as he was by the Sophists' manipulative intellectual games, could not discern in argumentation. While it forgot rhetoric, the metaphysics which was to follow, up to and including Heidegger, was inspired by the Stagirite. For it must be recognized that Plato's critique is unavoidable. Is argumenta• tion truly anything other than a technique for making people act and think, an act of violence upon freedom and upon respect for ? Conviction is not demonstration, is not reason, opinion is not science. These are some of the oppositions whose evidence Plato consecrated. And it is difficult today, as it was in the past, to separate the Greek Sophist from the tribune which our society (which is democratic as well) engenders regularly at every crisis. Here is rhetoric reduced to propaganda and to the exaltation of the irrational. What is the use of looking for a rationality proper to argumentation if it must remain the servant of everything within us that escapes the field of reason? It will continue to be objected that the great philosophical debates are elsewhere, on the side of essential values. Because they are threatened, it is necessary to speak of these values. In sum, were rhetoric not harmful, it would at the very least be secondary. All is said: we can close our Plato in good conscience.

1 2 MICHEL MEYER

However, the implications, or rather the presupposItlOns, of such an attitude that consists in depriving rhetoric of all possibility have not yet been perceived. What model of rationality or logos does such a condemnation suppose? It is obviously a logos closed upon itself and in which discussion only exists in the form of a vehicle for pre-constituted . Thus the role of intuition and evidence. Is this really rational? Thus no question will be asked without our already having the answer (by intuition) or the means of making it spring forth from other answers (by deduction) which are already at one's disposal. Being closed, a question is then no longer but the pretext for answering out of context and independently. No real problem may any longer arise: somewhere the proposition that suppresses it exists. By the play of opposites which it activates, argumentation hides that which renders it vain and which only the ignorance of the true proposition makes possible. The knowledge of this disputed proposition is quite the contrary of argumentation. We have simply to improve our means of knowledge and we will have nothing more to debate. Does not truth speak for and of itself? Rhetoric creeps into us like a defect of the soul in order to make up for our ignorance, our natural imperfection. Thus, the propositional model of reason is that in the name of which rhetoric was rejected. How could such a model emerge? What indeed could have happened to Socratic logos - open and interrogative as it was - that it became entrenched through and through in propositional logos? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to understand what Plato reproaches . The latter, it shall be recalled, restricts himself to challenging what his interlocutors say and ends the discussion with the acceptance of the non• resolution of the question put initially. Socrates does not care about answer• ing since he knows that he knows nothing. What use is questioning if it does not lead to an answer? Moreover, can knowing be an answer? How can I find an answer to the questions that I put to myself if I do not know what I am looking for? And if I know what I should find, what need have I still to search? This reasoning may well contain a sophism, it nevertheless will have the decisive and irreversible impact of dissociating knowledge from that which pertains to problematization. And as there is no answer without a question, and as the articulation of both results only in a sophism, it will be necessary that knowledge be elucidated otherwise. For knowledge transcends individuals, contrary to questions which appertain, in each case, to what each individual may know or not know already. This is subjective, and knowledge is not. Knowledge can certainly arise because a problem is posed, as the theory of reminiscence claims. But this knowledge can in no way be justified FOREWORD 3 by the question in its being an answer, if only in a circumstantial (i.e. inessential) manner. One indeed must question oneself in order to remember, says Plato, but the dialectic, which would be scientific, must be something else even if it remains a play of question and answer. This contradiction did not escape Aristotle: he split the scientific from the dialectic and logic from argumentation whose respective theories he was led to conceive in order to clearly define their boundaries and specificities. As for Plato, he found in the famous theory of Ideas what he sought in order to justify knowledge as that which is supposed to hold its truth only from itself. What do Ideas mean within the framework of our approach? In what consists the passage from rhetoric to ontology which leads to the denaturation of argumentation? When Socrates asked, for example, "What is virtue?", he thought one could not answer such a question because the answer refers to a single proposition, a single truth, whereas the formulation of the question itself does not indicate this unicity. For any answer, another can be given and thus continuously, if necessary, until eventually one will come across an incompatibility. Now, to a question as to what X, Y, or Z is, one can answer in many ways and nothing in the question itself prohibits multiplicity. Virtue is courage, is , and so on. Just as Napoleon is the emperor of the French, is the victor of Austerlitz, is Josephine's husband, and who knows what else. Lacking an answer, we remain, in the final analysis, with the question which thus becomes an aporia. For there to be an answer, virtue (to take up the same example) must be something well defined: that which causes it to be virtue and not something else, that which defines it necessarily thus to the exclusion of anything else. Necessity, unicity, definition - all this goes back to the idea that virtue is this and not something else; it supposes that the being of virtue exists, that virtue has an essence that corresponds to it and which founds all correspondence with an individuation of this virtue. The question "What is X?" thus sustains a radical alteration: it is interpreted as assuming an essence - an Idea - that one inquires about (in order to recall it through inquiry, precisely). We have effectively moved on from "What is X?" to "What is X?". Ontology subtends interrogative activity and guarantees its meaning through an outcome. It is possible, moreover, to speak of a veritable ontological stroke of power, if not of a stroke of the magic wand. Who says that virtue essentially is? Who proves to us that it is even that (i.e. an essence) which is asked in "What is virtue?" Is it not, in the end, Socrates who is right? But in declaring the contrary, Plato begs the question: as answer, he provides something problematical, that is, that virtue has its own 4 MICHEL MEYER being. Now, the unicity of the answer (thus, simply, the answer) is precisely what Socrates puts radically into doubt until proof to the contrary. Ontology consists in affirming what should be justified. Whence my expression of "stroke of the magic wand". Ontology can thus only be circular. Furthermore, Plato draws up all questions concerning any X in such a way that it is a question not about X but about its being as the sole condition for an answer. Thus doing, he subordinates questioning to ontology and thereby generally to propositional ism. Let us take up this last point. The essence of things informs us about what they are, while excluding what they are not. This amounts to making the Idea the criterium of identification - of identity as well as the foundation of that of which one is speaking. This foundation makes specific to us why they are this and not the contrary. What courage is, for example, allows us to identify any act of courage and not to confuse it with anything else; the being, the Idea, the essence of courage is thus indeed that which justifies the truth of any utterance on the subject of courage by virtue of the fact that the essence justifies anything one might say, either directly or by deduction, about courage. The first point brought up earlier is of importance as well. With the advent of ontology, questioning and, consequently, non• propositional rhetoric (i.e. rhetoric which refuses to sub-contract) are dead. We always already know what we are looking for as soon as we are told that we can only seek the being of what we are analyzing. Intuition and deduction will ensure the coherence of this Platonic logic (which is still to a large extent ours) - a coherence which, in the final analysis, is founded merely on the ontological decree. Let it be noted, as Pierre Aubenque has, that ontology will never be but a science to be sought, a science which is impossible to find. It was necessary to wait until the present day in order to see the propositional model collapse without, for all that, being replaced. Ontology is born of the need for answers which, it must be recognized, Socrates did not satisfy. But, the primacy of being - ontology - can only evacuate the very practice of philosophizing as Socrates understood it. The being to which one would be able to relate back all interrogation (an idea that we encounter, moreover, up to and including Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics) must inevitably be covered by the answer. There is henceforth no difference between what is in question (being) and what the answer will say. Without this difference, questioning, which articulates problems and solutions, would disappear as such. Being resolves problems by suppressing them at the outset, by transforming them into the forms of the answers to be found. Consequently, we have ready-made solutions to problems not formulated to begin with. Resolution through suppression and not through FOREWORD 5 answer as such - this is really all that ontology offers us. But in dogmatically affirming what each answer must be (not as such, for questioning has not been questioned, but de/acto), metaphysics has, throughout its history, given the impression that it resolves when in fact it simply prevents questioning - whence the illusion of questioning. Listening to being is indeed one of those illusions. Just because it has been decreed that to answer is to utter the essence and not anything else, does not mean that even the plural which was decreed impossible and overcome has been suppressed in reality. From that moment on, it was inevitable that metaphysics be constantly wandering and at the prey of "conflicts of reason". This displacement, which would establish the propositionalist norm, was fatal for rhetoric. Rhetoric is not to be understood outside the interrogativity of logos. Only a question to be resolved creates debate: an opposition of propositions maintained by its pure contradictoriness is difficult to imagine without there being a subjacent problem to which, precisely, there is a choice between at least two answers that confront each other. With propositionalism, questions, far from being primary, are derived: as Aristotle says, they are but the interrogative form of assertions about truth upon which it behoves us to pronounce judgement (Topics I.iv.lOlb.33-36). A real problem cannot exist since it is but a sentence whose content, precisely, is a proposition. As for the proposition itself, it is of course an answer, but one which, referring back to no question, is not really an answer. It is quite simply the minimal support of the truth that it expresses; it is the unity of the thinkable which cannot be measured by the subjective yardstick of individual questions. If there no longer remains but the propositional, there is no longer but the axis of truth and science, at least as far as a norm. Situated on this side of the true, where truth is not yet decided or even decidable, rhetoric will inevitably be of inferior stature. The propositions discussed are at best awaiting confirmation concerning their truth. On the other hand, logic puts order into truths, which confers a superiority upon it if one refers to the values of propositionalism. Henceforth either the dialectic prepares us for science and is useful at that level (this is Aristotle's argument), or else, on the contrary, it cannot ascribe to itself such a task because it places itself outside established truth. And since it (supposedly) operates with propositions, it succeeds in getting what only has the appearance of truth accepted as truth. For this reason it is pure manipulation, the very leading astmy of the propositional order which only knows truth and its indubitable justification. For debates, there are proposi• tions, but we are not here in the realm of the true; and the propositional is indeed that which always possesses a truth-value. Consequently, the propos i- 6 MICHEL MEYER tion at hand can only have propositional appearance, the appearance of truth, the opinion hiding behind a reasoning that is only illusorily so. How would we expect that a proposition (thus, what is true) only be problematic without the essence of the proposition being, in the same stroke, betrayed? Of course, we will have recognized Plato's argument in this second path of the alterna• tive. But his critique has no other validity than that which propositionalism, with its corresponding idea of truth, enjoys. Aristotle perpetuates the model. And even if he handed down to us both a theory of argumentation and a theory of science, he did so only in order to show that the positivity of dialectic resides in the fact that it can be useful to establish a propositional order of science. Let us not forget that in his dialectic, Plato had mixed the scientific with the interrogative which are nevertheless incompatible if one confines oneself to his own conception, thus leaving only the manipulatory path to rhetoric stricto sensu. If we give up the propositional model, we eliminate at the same time the Platonic condemnation. Logos grounded in the evidence of universal assertability has today lived itself out. The crisis of reason has also become a crisis of language. We know that to argue is to discuss a question; it is from this that the contradictory alternatives that define rhetoric spring. But, in general, speaking equals answering and, by extension, the raising of ques• tions. Logos, as it is emerging in the new rationality that we must institute, is problematological and, as such, meant for argumentation. Ontology bas now proven its failure. It has closed up the logos on the problematic which, nevertheless, must be increasingly sayable because it is the very problematicity of our logos which must be faced and expressed. Dogmatic reason can only conceive of the problematic as inconceivable; and it can only say it as the unsayable. And yet, with the crisis of Western thought in• augurated in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, reason finds itself once again problematized in its very foundation, i.e. the Cartesian subject, dubbed transcendental by Kant. Unable to enunciate its new condition in order to overcome it, logos created a new absurd, a new irrational: the impossibility of calling itself Reason, whence silence - or the opposite solution, the reassur• ing cult of science with its machinery for answering. At the basis of all this is the famous concept of proposition which evacuates, a priori, any referral to the interrogativity of logos. And it is too often forgotten that Being appeared as philosophical concept in order to ensure the function of universal respon• dent for rhetorical and assertorialized questions. Heidegger's endeavor may have been the last great ontological adventure (in spite of a repeatedly FOREWORD 7 reaffirmed preoccupation with overcoming) because Being remains con• ceived as the universal meeting point of every answer with every questioning which, once again, prevents the latter from expressing itself independently. Ontology (thus, metaphysics in the sense that this concept has always been understood) was born of the closure of logos upon itself with the correlative impossibility of thinking rhetoric otherwise than by propositionalizing it, that is, otherwise than by deforming it. Metaphysics and rhetoric are opposed to one another as the negation of questioning is to thought's real, explicit taking charge of questioning. Questioning is indeed the key concept - inherited from history -, which allows us to comprehend this opposition and which, by extension, permits us to overcome it towards a new rhetoric and a metaphysics which would no longer be ontological. It is a matter of opening a path for thought which falls neither into the Socratic non-answer nor in the Platonic deformation of answerhood. It is imperative to reject the Socrates• Plato dilemma. To Socrates, an answer cannot be given to a question because the answering is multiple; to Plato, an answer must be given which neces• sarily establishes its own unicity. In order to avoid this double bind, it is at least necessary to question questioning as such, that is, to establish a problematology which neither Socrates (who questioned without being able to answer) nor Plato (who answered without questioning) could erect. What then is this modernity of rhetoric, if not the return to a logos, to a rationality become once again possible, rejuvenated by an interrogativity that founds the propositional field for what it is, i.e. as an answering? CHAl'MPERELMAN

FORMAL LOGIC AND INFORMAL LOGICt

While the concept of fonnallogic has been known since the time of Aristotle, the idea that logic and fonnallogic are synonymous by virtue of an elimina• tion of any conception of infonnal logic becomes generalized in the mid• nineteenth century under the influence of mathematician-logicians. Father Bochenski, who is one of the representatives of this tendency, expressed as much once again in a recent colloquium held in Rome in 1976 on the theme of modem logic. In a communication entitled "The General Sense and Character of Modem Logic" ,1 he identifies modem logic (ML) with fonnal logic. He characterizes ML by three methodological principles: the use of an artificial language, fonnalism, and objectivism. He also stresses the great progress that recourse to an artificial language has made possible by allowing for the elimination of misunderstandings, ambiguities, and controversies which are not easily avoidable with natural languages. Indeed, the fundamental condition for the construction of an artificial language is that each sign, as well as each well-conceived expression, have one and only one meaning. The objectivism to which he alludes presupposes that modem logic only deals with objective properties, truth, falseness, probability, necessity, etc., independent of humans' attitudes, independent of what they think or what they believe. The same would be true of the system's axioms (enumerated at the outset), as well as of the substitution and deduc• tion rules which indicate which operations are allowed (in accordance with the rules) and which enable one to tell a correct deduction from an incorrect one. Every formal system will thus be limited in its possibilities of expression and demonstration in such a manner that, given an artificial language, it does not permit everything to be said; given a set of axioms and rules of deduction, one must allow (at least if the system is coherent) the existence of irresolv• able propositions, i.e. those whose affirmation, no more than whose negation, may be resolved. By these various requirements, an artificial language and a formal system

9 10 CHArM PERELMAN are opposed to the characteristics both of a natural language and of a non• formal system like that of modem . A natural language is an instrument of communication which, in principle, is universal. It must be capable of communicating any idea whatsoever. The methodological conditions of a sensible communication take precedence over all other considerations like that of the univocity of signs used. It is thus that we presume that what we are told is not incoherent and is not without interest. When we read the famous Heraclitean fragment, "We enter and we do not enter the same river twice", our first reaction is not to think Heraclitus incoherent. We strive instead to interpret what he tells us so as to ascribe an acceptable meaning to it, for example, by pointing out the ambiguity of the expression "the same river" which alternately refers to the shores and the waters which run between them. To safeguard the notion of sensible com• munication, we renounce the hypothesis of the univocity of words employed. In the same manner, when in Cesar, Pagnol's famous play, the author has Panisse say on his death-bed, "Dying doesn't bother me, but leaving life does", we are compelled, in order to understand Panisse, to not treat "dying" and "leaving life" as synonyms even though that is what dictionaries teach us. When someone says to us "a penny is a penny" or "money is money", no one interprets these expressions as applications of the principle of identity, for except in a logic course (where it suffices that someone make the effort of expressing these ideas) these expressions must communicate something other than a tautology. I recall a real life experience. A young man's parents came to a train station to await his return after their son's long absence in a foreign country. When the son appeared at the doorway, the father could not hold back his tears of emotion. When the mother saw this, she exclaimed, "Now I see that not only mothers will be mothers, but also fathers will be fathers". If the mother needed this moving event to admit that fathers will be fathers, then this statement could not be tautological. There are other situations which compel us to interpret a text in a less than usual way. We are all familiar with Pascal's thought "When God's word, which is truth, is false literally, it is true spiritually".2 In order to safeguard the truth of the sacred text, Pascal advises us to stray from the literal meaning. Similarly in law, the letter of the law will be countered by the spirit of the law in order to provide the text with an acceptable interpretation. The possibility of lending several sometimes entirely novel meanings to a single expression, of appealing to metaphors and controversial interpretations is connected to the conditions for use of natural language. The fact that the FORMAL LOGIC AND INFORMAL LOGIC 11 latter often resorts to fuzzy notions which give way to numerous interpreta• tions, varied definitions, quite often compels us to make choices and decisions which do not necessarily coincide with them. Then, we are very often obliged to justify these choices and to provide motives for these decisions. In law, usually (contrary to what happens in a formal system), the judge is simultaneously obliged to make a decision and to justify it. The famous Article 4 of the Code Napoleon indeed proclaims that "the judge who shall refuse to give judgment under pretext of the silence, obscurity or insuf• ficiency of the law, may be prosecuted as guilty of denying justice". Even when, at first glance, the law appears to contain a loophole, an antinomy or an ambiguity, the judge must interpret the system by means of legal reason• ing techniques, in order to find a solution and justify it. In all such cases, one must appeal to informal logic which is the logic which justifies action, which allows a controversy to be settled and a reasonable decision to be made. It is thus that when it is a matter of bringing out the reasonable opinion (euAo)Qc;), Aristotle opposed analytical reasonings, such as , with dialectical reasonings, that is, those one encounters in debates and con• troversies of all sorts. While formal logic is the logic of demonstration, informal logic is that of argumentation. While demonstration is either correct or incorrect and binding in the flISt case or worthless in the second, are more or less strong, more or less pertinent, more or less convincing. 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. Persuasive discourse therefore aims at a transfer of adhesion, of a subjective quality which may vary from mind to mind. That, moreover is the reason why the error in reasoning called "begging the question" is an error in argumentation, for is supposes that a contested thesis is granted. Conversely, the principle of identity, "if P, then P", far from being an error in reasoning, is a logical law that no formal system can fail to recognize. A formal system shows us what consequences stem from axioms whether the axioms be considered to be like obvious propositions or simple hypotheses which are conventionally granted. In a formal system, axioms are 12 CHAW PERELMAN never the object of controversy; they are taken to be true, either objectively or by convention. Such is not the case in argumentation where the starting point must be granted by the audience one wants to persuade or convince by one's dis• course. The original arguments consist in commonplaces, i.e. in commonly held propositions, whether they be propositions of common sense or uncon• tested arguments in a particular discipline. Sometimes, as in the Socratic dialogues, the speaker will make certain, in expressed manner, of the adhesion of the interlocutor to the theses upon which he builds his argumenta• tion. But contrary to axioms, which do not give rise to controversy inside the system, commonplaces, about which there exists a general consensus, concern vague, scrambled, controversial notions from which one cannot draw consequences without seeking to clarify them. It is thus that everyone will agree that freedom is better than slavery and that justice and the common good must be sought; but in order to derive a particular line of conduct, one must clarify what one means by these theses which initially seemed uncon• tested. Moreover, the commonplaces which are presumed granted at the outset and that no one objects to when they are taken individually, may give rise to incompatibilities. What is to be done when the seeking of the common good hinders the realization of justice, at least at first? Some would say that the good opposed to justice is but an apparent good; others would say that the common good is opposed to an apparent justice. How do we decide what is authentic value and what is only illusory? We must give a customary notion a new meaning - one that is more adapted to the situation. But this change of meaning cannot take place without reason, for contrary to the generally granted meaning, the change in meaning must be justified. The burden of proof befalls the opponent to the customary meaning. This notion of the burden of proof, unknown in fonnal logic (as the notion of presumption is unknown there) is borrowed from law where it dispenses one of factual proof. It is thus that the presumption of innocence imposes the burden of proof upon he who would reverse it. Similarly, since the spouse of the mother is presumed to be the child's father, he does not have to produce proof of paternity. This notion of presumption, along with the corresponding notion of the burden of guilt, is of common usage in the area of nonns and values. And this explains philosophical pluralism, as P. Day showed in his communication entitled "Presumptions".3 As soon as we adhere to a principle or a value, we have not to justify what is in accordance with it, but only what violates or FORMAL LOGIC AND INFORMAL LOGIC 13 opposes it Day distinguished three attitudes which he calls conservative, liberal and socialist - each being characterized by its adhesion to other principles and other values. Thus conservative presumption favors what is, and manifests itself by the rule according to which only change - everywhere, always and in anything - requires a justification. Thus he who conforms to precedents, to custom and tradition, has not to justify himself, only all deviation from these must do so. Liberal presumption is well expressed in that sentence by John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, Chapter V): "letting people do what they will is always better, ceteris paribus, than forcing them". Freedom is self-evident, only the limitation of freedom requires a justification. Isaiah Berlin expresses socialist presumption when he writes: "Equality needs no reasons, only inequality does" (Equality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 [1955-1956] p. 305). But his argument may be generalized: he who abides by the golden rule, or by the categorical imperative, or by the principle of , has no need to justify his behavior. The existence of these varied principles (which can come into conflict with each other in concrete situations) explains the diversity of philosophies, each of which fits into a current of opinion which is generally accepted in a milieu at a given moment. By this, we see that informal logic, basing itself on facts, principles, opinions, topoi and values accepted by the audience, is necessarily situated and thus cannot claim the objectivity of formal logic. But, in this case, does the criterion to which informal logic is submitted merely consist in efficiency, in the fact of persuading the audience which it addresses? This was the serious objection that Plato had to the sophists and demagogues who utilized means unworthy of the philosopher - lies and flattery - in order to gain the adhesion of an ignorant crowd. In exchange for this objectionable procedure, presented in the Gorgias, he proposes, in the Phaedrus, another rhetoric worthy of the philosopher - one which could convince the gods themselves (273e). In other words, the efficiency of a persuasive discourse is not enough to guarantee its value. Since efficiency is a function of the 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 charac• terized by a universalizing intention: it aims to convince, i.e. persuade an audience which, in the mind of the philosopher, incarnates reason. While a 14 CHArM PERELMAN formal demonstration is valid to the extent that it conforms to purely formal criteria, one cannot really speak of the validity of a non-formal argumentation or reasoning. In fact, an argumentation is never binding and always allows an opposing argumentation. Whence the fundamental principle of legal proce• dure according to which one must always listen to the opposing party. But it is not because there exist arguments for the thesis as well as for the antithesis that these arguments have the same value. How may arguments be evaluated? Their value depends on the philosophy and methodology that are adopted. Thus utilitarianism essentially takes into account the value of consequences, Aristotelianism valorizes that which conforms to essence, neo-Platonism is based on ontological hierarchy, etc. But each of these conceptions abides by the rule of formal justice according to which essentially similar situations must be treated similarly. He who has, in one case, conceded to the value of an argumentation must, ceteris paribus, concede to the value of this same argumentation in an essentially similar case. This rule justifies conformity to precedents, not only in law, but in all matters. This rule is what allows for the elaboration of a methodology adequate to each discipline. One final question: can argumentative techniques be formalized? One can try to reduce arguments to a calculation of probability using certain prear• ranged conditions. And, in certain cases, such conditions can be agreed upon. But this always supposes an agreement on the notions to be utilized. And when disagreement plagues these, which is the case with fundamental notions of philosophy - such as reality, freedom, justice, virtue - such a reductionism appears to me to be impossible. Using the techniques of argumentation, philosophy attempts to put forth a reasonable vision of man in relation to society and the universe. This vision does not appear to me to be reducible to the most probable. This is moreover why all original philosophy is the product of freedom.

NOTES t UnpUblished text of a lecture given in Maurice Loi's seminar at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris on 23 February 1981. 1 In the volume Modern Logic edt by E. Agazzi (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980) pp. 3-14. 2 Pascal, Pensees 555 (31)(inL'Oeuvre "Pleiade") p. 1003. 3 Appeared in the Acts of the XIVth International Congress of Philosophy (Vienna: Herder, 1970), vol. V, pp. 137-143. JEAN LADRIERE

LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION

At fIrst glance, logic is paradigmatic. It provides us with the model for valid reasoning and, in its fIgures, proposes the exemplar which any procedure pretending to a rational foundation should try to approach. If it is such, it is undoubtedly because logic creates an ideal situation (ideal in the way one speaks in physics of an "ideal gas"), perhaps inspired by what effectively happens in the scientifIc pursuit, and - in a singular manner - what happens in mathematics, but free from any contingency. The notion of form expresses this well. Logic appears as soon as we discover that it is possible, in any proposition, to isolate an organizing diagram (which is available for an infinity of possible applications) and the terms organized by this diagram. The terms constituting a scientifIc language are generally divided into two classes: "purely logical" terms on the one hand, and, on the other, "descriptive" terms. This classification indeed corresponds to the presupposi• tion of logic. It then appears that certain typical relationships between propositions are, in reality, relationships between their organizing diagrams, the "descriptive" terms being neutral, in a way, in these relationships. The usual procedures of modelling reflect this propositional behavior. If we take a language L and a universe U, in which we propose to construct an interpreta• tion of language L, we will have to specify the interpretation of the individual and predicative constants of L by relating these elements of L respectively with well-defIned individuals of U and with well-defined subsets of U. An elementary proposition of L like "a is P" can thus be interpreted by means of a set proposition expressing the allegiance on the part of the individual corresponding to a to the subset corresponding to P. But if it is a matter of interpreting, for example, the conjunction, we can no longer simply establish a correspondence with an element of U or constructed upon U. We must have recourse to the metatheoretical predicate ''True in relation to an interpreta• tion". We may say, for example: "A proposition of L like A & B is true in relation to a given interpretation (for the constants of L) if and only if the propositions A and B are both true for this interpretation" (which we may express by saying that the set propositions corresponding to A and B by virtue of the interpretation are true in the universe under consideration). The

15 16 JEAN LAORIERE distinction in the treatment that a semantic interpretation must set aside for "logical terms" and for "descriptive terms" shows that "logical terms" are not directly related to elements (individuals, classes, properties, processes, or whatever) of the universe upon which the discourse turns, but rather are related to the manner in which the repercussions of the arrangement that they impose upon the descriptive terms are felt in the validity of what the proposi• tion states. This duality between constituent elements in the proposition is also, to a certain extent, the duality that exists in language between "descriptive terms" and the propositions themselves. A descriptive term and a proposition mayor may not be endowed with meaning. But in either case, it does not take place in the same way. A descriptive term endowed with meaning indicates (or names) an individual, denotes a class, connotes a property (either monadic or relational), but cannot be true or false. The proposition, on the other hand, expresses a fact and may be true or false depending on whether the fact that it expresses happens to be realized or not in the form of an effective state of things. In sum, the proposition affords the speaking subject the possibility of taking a position with respect to the behavior of the world's elements which are described by the terms which it puts into place. Now, it is precisely these elements which are dubbed "logical", which allow us to construct proposi• tions. Furthermore, these elements seem to possess the remarkable property of introducing a relationship to truth. These elements are, in fact, operators. One may, indeed, interpret them as abstract objects acting upon descriptive terms in the language in order to produce propositions. The central problem in logic is to study the relation• ships between propositions which depend solely on their form, that is, on their mode of construction. In other words, the problem consists in studying the behavior of propositional operators. Still more precisely, it consists in studying the effect upon the propositions' truth value of the transformations which can be performed upon these operators (or, what amounts to the same thing, of the relationships existing between these operators). The most obviously interesting aspect of this problem concerns the transformations which leave the truth value constant. This, however, can be considered from two different perspectives: either that which amounts to making the conse• quences of a given set of propositions known, or that which consists in going back to general propositions of which the given set could be considered an exemplification. The first view only gives results which are certain. The second view inevitably brings in the concept of probability (under the guise of the degree of confirmation, of acceptability, plausibility, etc.). And even LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION 17 though we speak of "inductive logic" in reference to it, this perspective could already be considered to pertain to the idea of argumentation and even to constitute a particularly remarkable case of argumentation (because it is analyzable by means of mathematical methods). Thus, the notion of deduc• tion appears to be the most significant, taking on the value of exemplar. Correct deduction assures us that the truth descends from premises to conclusions, and moreover, reciprocally, that falseness ascends from conclusions toward premises. But what is a correct deduction? It is a sequence of elementary transforma• tions (acting upon propositions assumed to be given or already deduced), each of which is effected according to rules, and each rule being assumed to guarantee the transfer of truth from the antecedents to the consequents. But the transformations which the rules effect pertain to the structural elements of the proposition, that is, in fact, to the logical operators. A priori, nothing guarantees that a rule in fact possesses the property that we would want to attribute to it That must be shown. Two procedures are possible. The first would consist in stating the condition to which the rule must abide (to ensure the transfer of truth) in the form of a proposition in an appropriate metalan• guage, and then in showing that this proposition can be deduced from appropriate axioms formulated in this metalanguage. In this case, obviously, one would merely be shifting the problem from one level of language to another. This problem, however, is altogether general: the rules must be justified no matter what the level of language considered. One is thus obligatorily referred to a second procedure which will consist in justifying the rules on the basis of an interpretation of the logical operators. And to interpret an operator is to specify in what circumstances it may be introduced or eliminated (in a proposition). Such an interpretation is not a deduction. It in no way has that absolute and indisputable character which we recognize in the result of the application of a rule once that rule has been accepted (to the extent, of course, that said rule responds to the condition which is always presumed in the elaboration of a system of formal rules, i.e. that each application of the rule to particular propositions must be subordinated to effective control). In short, the rule must be recognized as acceptable with respect to a given objective which is precisely the conservation of the truth. However, if the acceptability of the rules must be established even before a deductive procedure can be rendered operable, it is difficult to see how one could proceed if not by way of argumentation. Let us consider, for example, the modus ponens rule. Drawing on the methods of Gentzen, Curry furnished a justification of this rule which rests 18 JEAN LADRIERE entirely upon the intuitive notion of deduction. Suppose the proposition "If A, then B" appearing in an axiomatized (but not necessarily strictly formalized) deductive theory T. It may be interpreted as follows: if we add A as a new axiom to those of T, then the proposition at hand is true if B is a theorem of the theory thus enriched. In a formal structure, we can attempt to depict to ourselves the intuitive notion of deduction by means of the notion of the "deductive tree". We say that a proposition B is deducible, or derivable from the propositions A l , ••. , An if a set of propositions arranged in the form of a tree exists in which each proposition occupies the position of a node in the tree. The tree itself will be constructed according to certain rules in such a way that the proposition B occupies the last node in the tree and so that the nodes above be either occurrences of the propositions Al' ... , An or proposi• tions eliminated in a move from one node to another (on the path leading from the upper nodes to the lower node). The "truth" of the proposition "If A, then B" will be representable by the "derivability" of this proposition. And, depending on the interpretation proposed, we will be able to say that this proposition is derivable if there exists a deductive tree for which it is the last node, such that the part of the tree above this node constitutes a deductive tree for the proposition B, it being possible to eliminate all of the occurrences of the proposition A in this tree. (In other words, the proposition "If A, then B" can be deduced from the axioms of the theory under consideration if by means of the supposition of A, one can derive B from these axioms.) Let us now suppose that we in fact have a derivation of "If A, then B". In pursuance of the proposed interpretation, this implies that the situation just described is in place. Henceforth, we have a derivation of B at our disposal in which the proposition A intervenes by way of supposition. Let us assume that A be derivable. If we place the derivation of A above each occurrence of A in the derivation of B, we obtain a tree of derivation constituting a complete derivation of B (without supposition this time). In short, if the propositions "If A, then B" and A are both derivable, then the proposition B is also derivable. We have assumed in the preceding that the "truth" can be represented by "derivability". Only a completely relative notion has thus been understood since derivability must always be understood "in relation to certain axioms and certain rules". We will be able to state the nature of the correspondence under consideration more precisely by introducing the notion of validity; a proposition belonging to an axiomatized theory is valid if it is an axiom of that theory or if it is derivable in that theory. One could then say that the "validity" of a proposition (in an axiomatized validity) represents the LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION 19

"assumed truth" of that proposition. A transformation which preserves the validity can then be interpreted as a transformation preserving the "assumed truth". And we can say that a rule justified on the basis of the notion of derivability indeed responds to the condition which must render a rule acceptable. In the case of modus ponens, we will thus have: if the proposi• tions "If A, then B" and A are assumed true, then the proposition B must also be considered to be true. (If it is false, at least one of the premises must be considered false and the premises cannot therefore both be assumed true). As we can see, everything in this justification depends on the credit we bestow on the proposed representation (of the truth through validity) and on the reconstruction proposed for the concept of deduction. In a sense, there is an apparent circularity here. Supposed truth is represented by validity and the latter is explained on the basis of the notion of the deductive tree, but this notion itself is obviously conceived in such a way as to represent as ade• quately as possible the idea of "transfer of truth". We thus show that a given rule indeed ensures the transfer of validity, and thus represents a transfer of truth, by presupposing a notion of derivation itself founded upon the intuitive idea of a transfer of validity, and thus (via the assumed representation) of a transfer of truth. There would only be true circularity if we had proposed to deduce the idea of "transfer of truth" from the idea of derivation. In reality, we have merely clarified this idea by means of a representation which allows us to extract, so to speak, from the intuitive idea that which is truly pertinent in it. The representation in question completely brackets the role of axioms - which may be absolutely arbitrary just as the peculiar nature of the proposi• tions concerned - in order to only retain the properties of the logical operators. This representation thus allows a precise meaning to be given to what is more or less confusedly expressed by the idea of assumed truth. But the manner in which the justification of rules proceeds clearly reveals that the rules do not have an absolute character. This is particularly obvious in the case of rules concerning the role of negation. With the support of the notion of derivation, one can provide different interpretations of the notion of negation. Following the given interpretation, the rules will differ. This means that what becomes recognized as conditionally true (on the basis of assumed truths) will also be different. Now the arguments capable of compelling someone to prefer one interpretation to another have nothing deductive about them. Thus the argumentation given in favor of intuitionist negation rests upon an entire conception of mathematical thought and merely translates the requirement of constructivity stemming from that conception into the sphere of logic. If need be, the preferences could be bracketed. Then, one would 20 JEAN LADRIERE of logic. If need be, the preferences could be brl:' keted. Then, one would obtain metatheoretical propositions like "If we grant such and such an interpretation of negation, then such and such a proposition is a theorem and such and such other one is not". But, of course, these very propositions presuppose the existence of rules which function according to the general criterium of the transfer of validity. For to say "Such and such a proposition is a theorem" is to in fact say "The granted rules guarantee the derivability of this proposition on the basis of accepted axioms". Thus, even within this hypothesis of a neutralization of controversy, one is led back to the problem of the justification of rules. It becomes clear that the concept of validity is always relative to rules which are assumed to be accepted, but this relativity of the notion of validity is, in fact, already inscribed in the very notion of derivation. The philosophical implication of the variability of rules is that it shows us -- if we at least accept that the truth may be represented by validity -- that there is a certain relativity in the notion of truth itself. The effects of the decisions made concerning formal rules are felt like aftershocks, if you will, on the criteria of truth. Thus the variety of the possible interpretations of negation leads us to recognize that there are "intuitionistically true" proposi• tions and "classically true" propositions. But throughout all this, axioms have been bracketed. And, consequently, we have confined ourselves to discussing "assumed truth". If we now wish to speak simply of truth, then we must obviously take an interest in the premises of the argument, and thus in those propositions which, in the deductive representation which we conjure up of a theory, play the role of axioms. The case of mathematics is exemplary here. What is interesting is not deductions as such, but rather problems. Yes or no, can a fifth degree equaLion be solved by radicals? Yes or no, can a sphere be turned inside out in a continuous manner? Yes or no, can the structure of continuum be represented by means of the structure of the class of countable ordinals? And so on. In each case, the sole basis for departure is the nature of the objects at hand. But it is a matter of discovering methods of analysis which would allow us to penetrate quite deeply into the comprehension of the nature of these objects in order to find the answer to the problem posed. In the case, for example, of the problem of continuum, the method consisted in exploring the properties of certain classes of models of the axiomatic theory of sets. We were able to perceive that, in certain models, the continuum hypothesis is verified; in others, it is not. This allows for the reformulation of the problem with much greater precision. Finally, it is always a matter of revealing certain properties via detours which are sometimes of extraordinary complexity, along the lines LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION 21 of a procedure which is present in an almost immediate form in ancient geometric demonstrations by construction. A certain manner of decomposing or complementing a figure reveals a property which was not altogether apparent. This is the "synthetic" path which consists in proceeding backward toward a "principle" liable to clarify the situation. In this circumstance, the principle is not necessarily a general law , but rather the key to the problem: the property of the structure starting with which a solution may be es• tablished. The deduction, strictly speaking, only happens after the event. It confines itself to exhibiting, in a systematic and step-by-step manner, the fecundity of the principle and to showing how, starting with the proposed construction or with the imagined detour, one can in effect establish a solution (or show that there is none and why). This is the analytic path. It plays but a secondary role. If it is recognized as having a peculiar virtue, it is because it offers a security guarantee, in a sense, to thought: made up of elementary steps, each of which consists in the application of a rule, it is controllable from beginning to end and thus allows for the verification of the cogency of the inventive procedure characteristic of the synthetic path. When we have recourse to axiomatization, it is in order to provide as precise a characterization as possible to the category of objects under study and to facilitate the application of the analytic procedure. But a system of axioms is only interesting and acceptable to the extent that it can be con• sidered to be an adequate representation of the area under study. And this means that it must be possible to derive from it all of the propositions which are pertinent to this area, i.e. all propositions which express the answers which may be provided for the problems pertaining to this area. Of course we judge of the acceptability of a system of axioms on the basis of its deductive possibilities. But these possibilities themselves have value in relation to a capacity for representation which itself cannot be evaluated except in relation to the knowledge that one can have, moreover, of the area represented. This is readily apparent when one sees the functioning of the method thanks to which the study of the properties of an axiomatic system from the point of view of its ability to represent is possible. This method consists in studying the nature of the models acceptable by a system. An axiomatic system is relatively adequate with respect to a given theory if that theory constitutes a possible model of the system, i.e. if an interpretation of the system can be constructed in the theory in question such that every theorem of the system be true according to this interpretation (thus true within the theory). Further• more, an axiomatic system is entirely adequate with respect to a given theory if it is complete for that theory, i.e. if for any interpretation of the system 22 JEAN LADRIERE within the theory in question, a proposition which is true according to this interpretation is a theorem of the system. We know that, in general, adequa• tion in this sense is not obtained. But, however it may be as to the question of completeness, it must be emphasized that the acceptability of a theory must be measured by its representative capacity and that the latter refers back, via the notion of interpretation, to the truth value which can be granted to the propositions of a theory. Validity, in an axiomatized system, is precisely nothing more than a representation of the truth of the represented proposi• tions. And, finally, it is this truth which counts. The discovery of truth is never entirely analytic. It is true that one can purpose to legitimize an axiomatic system by means of a demonstration of non-contradiction. It is doubtful if such demonstrations can ever be carried out in an absolute sense in the case of the great mathemati• cal theories. But in the cases where a demonstration has in effect been realized, and in cases where one could be, what, exactly, is its meaning? This demonstration is relative to the deductive possibilities of the system being considered. And if it is recognized as a criterium of validity, then this would seem to indicate that through its agency, it is possible to show in a purely intrinsic manner the validity of a body of axiomatic propositions by merely making use of the relation of deducibility in the system. But what is the criterium itself worth? The worth of the proposed demonstration is merely to make the question about the validity of the system fall back upon that of the validity of the criterium. And how could such a criterium be justified, if not on the basis of certain considerations of a philosophical order concerning the nature of mathematical being? Now, from the philosophical point of view, it may be asserted that non-contradiction, i.e. logical possibility, is but a minimal condition which does not yet guarantee existence. And, what is at stake is indeed the existence of mathematical objects and their properties. In reality, as the motivations of the Hilbertian idea of the demonstration of non• contradiction clearly shows, the true goal of such a demonstration is to lead the validity of non-constructive procedures (of demonstration in mathe• matics) back to that of constructive procedures. This problem is not, in itself, one which pertains to deducibility. It is a problem which pertains to the very idea of mathematical demonstration. But a demonstration is quite another thing as a deduction. By privileging constructive procedures, Hilbert indeed seemed bent on showing that it is possible, finally, to tum any demonstration back to a synthetic moment in which it is possible to "see" how the studied object behaves. The privilege of construction is that it gives us an understand• ing of the object from the very heart of its production: the apprehension of its LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION 23 nature and properties being identified with the procedure which constructs it. By constructively demonstrating the non-contradiction of a theory which has recourse to the agency of non-constructive procedures, one only renders plausible the acceptability of non-constructive propositions on the basis of the acceptability that one supposes to be recognized of constructive proce• dures (the notion of constructivity being, of course, acceptably defined). The method used to ensure this transfer of acceptability is itself merely a plausible argument whose entire strength consists in convincing us that by accepting such a transfer, we run no risk of ending in total confusion (if the theory is contradictory, anything can be demonstrated in it). It remains to be said that this is only a guarantee that one offers oneself a posteriori and that the true indicator of research remains the discovery of interesting properties, the solution of problems remaining open, the formulation of new problems, and, if possible, the revelation of yet unknown domains. Moreover, this is why there is absolutely nothing dramatic in the difficulties encountered with regard to demonstrations of non-contradiction.

* * * We thus see that logic, considered in its most meaningful nucleus - which is the theory of deduction - refers us to argumentation. It is thus not the idea of deductive reasoning which appears exemplary, but rather that of a procedure that provides a justification. Deduction ensures the transfer of the assumed truth of certain propositions to certain others. The procedure which provides a justification must render a proposition acceptable, i.e. have its truth recognized, if possible, or, if not, have the title it may have as a candidate for truth recognized. But how is the acceptability of a proposition established? Only two methods are possible: either an intrinsic method or an extrinsic one. The intrinsic method consists in showing the acceptability of the proposition in question directly, by simple monstration. This, in short, corresponds to the traditional idea of "self-evident truths". Of course, some preparation may be necessary: an explanation of the meaning of terms, the elimination of misunderstandings which may arise from certain ambiguities in the language used or from certain inopportune comparisons, possibly the contrast with other propositions or suggestive comparisons with other propositions. In short, it is a question of revealing the proposition considered according to its peculiar meaning, by eliminating any interference, so that it may itself show its validity. The extrinsic method consists in connecting the proposition considered to already accepted propositions according to a determined link. 24 JEAN LADRIERE

This link must be of such a nature as to be recognizable as ensuring a transfer of acceptability. The clearest case of this is the deductive link. If a proposi• tion A can be deductively connected to a set of propositions P, then it can be considered to be as acceptable as the most weakly acceptable of the proposi• tions of P, but only relatively to the rules used for the deduction. The acceptability of rules (in the sense stated above) is thus the condition of transferability. But the deductive link is only a particular case. Besides, it presupposes, itself, justifications which are not of the deductive type. The example of the demonstration of non-contradiction cited above is quite illustrating. By constructively demonstrating that a given theory is not contradictory, we in fact, as we said earlier, reduce the acceptability of non• constructive propositions to that of constructive propositions. This justifica• tion is not a deduction. Here, the link is not constituted by the application of rules (assumed acceptable), but by a principle like "If a theory is non• contradictory, the procedures of demonstration, possibly non-constructive, which it implements are acceptable and henceforth, the propositions which it demonstrates are also". Let us call such a principle a "Hilbertian principle". Suppose a non-constructive theory whose non-contradiction has been demonstrated constructively. We thus have the following situation: if the procedures of constructive demonstration are acceptable, the argument according to which the theory is non-contradictory is acceptable and if the Hilbertian principle is acceptable, then the theorems of this theory are acceptable. But what allows us to say that this principle is acceptable? In the case of rules of deduction, the guiding notion is that a rule is acceptable if it ensures the transfer of the supposed truth. In the case of the Hilbertian principle, the guiding notion of a possible justification seems to be that non• contradiction is an index of truth. In the one case, there is only an indirect relation to the truth, while in the other it is direct in the sense that it is a matter of a criterium which allows for the recognition of the truth itself. This difference probably stems from the fact that in the case of rules, we are only dealing with the behavior of logical operators which are transformers, while in the case of a criterium such as the Hilbertian principle, we are dealing with the notion of mathematical truth and, through it, the idea of mathematical reality. What the principle must guarantee is that the non-constructive procedures afford us access, in spite of their non-monstrative character, to authentic aspects of mathematical reality. Nevertheless, in spite of this very significant difference, we could maintain that argumentation refers us, in the end, back to deductive logic. Except in the rare case where a proposition can manifest its own validity by itself and LOGIC AND ARGUMENT ATION 25 where there is henceforth no place for an argumentation stricto sensu (the preparation for the moment of evidence not really being an argumentation), the essential thing is still the possibility of establishing a link between the acceptability of a proposition and that of another. The argument is only valid if this link can be established by virtue of a principle which is itself accept• able. One can then say that if a proposition A could be connected to a proposition B by means of a principle P, then the acceptability of A is comparable to that of B in an amount corresponding to the degree of accep• tability of P. But what exactly does "to be connected to" mean? It seems that we can only represent this idea to ourselves precisely by taking its clearest realization as a model: that of deducibility (the role of the principle P thus held by the rules of deduction). Argumentation will henceforth appear to us to be a generalization of the deductive procedure and only explainable in an analogical mode: to maintain a proposition A by argumentative means, is to connect it to a proposition B according to a link analogous to what unites the conclusion to the premises in a deduction. It would thus indeed be deductive logic constituting the paradigm of all valid reasoning.

* * * It seems then that there must be a common root to logic (understood in the narrow sense of deductive logic) and to argumentation. And this common root must be such that it can account both for the difference between the two procedures and for what in each of them refers to the other. In both cases, it is a matter of the possibilities of discourse and, even more precisely (and although according to different modalities) of the relation between discourse and truth. The main theme which should allow us to understand both the role of logic and that of argumentation is the notion of "logos". "Logos" is a measure within things. It is also that which, within us, allows us to take note of and to measure up to that measure: the sensible word in that, according to the meaning which carries it, it attempts to fit together with the hidden word which dwells in the world and makes it a comprehensible world. There is a word which recounts, one that celebrates, one which institutes, another which interpellates, questions, entreats, one which expresses admiration and pity, love and disappointment, joy and abandonment, and there is that free word which speaks only for its own delight. But there is also the word which attempts to say what is, in truth - what must be said thus because of the nature of things. The truth, however, does not allow itself to be captured easily. In order to tame it, many tricks and long patience is needed. Since it is 26 JEAN LADRIERE a matter of coming into harmony with a hidden "logos", the art of making one's way to the encounter with truth could be called, in an altogether general way, "logic". However, this must be clarified in two directions. On the one hand, 3ince truth (in general, in any case) does not reveal itself in an ir• refragable evidence, one must almost always proceed by conjecture: the crucial problem thus becomes justification. Whence the idea of acceptability. Something is acceptable, from the point of view of the discourse which attempts to come into harmony with the truth, if its claim to truth appears sufficiently founded. And since justification can be unequally well es• tablished, there must be degrees of acceptability. In any case, justification and acceptability are correlative concepts: something is acceptable in a certain measure if it is justified in this same measure and reciprocally. Furthermore, the very idea of justification leads to an extension of "logic" (in the general sense) beyond what is marked by the notion of truth. This is because there exist, beside descriptive propositions which attempt to express how things are in the world, propositions which are normative with respect to the orientations of action, and propositions which are evaluative with respect to works and thus to the order of "technique" (in the most general sense, covering all forms of art: that of the technician, the politician or the doctor, as well as that of the artist, properly so-called). All of these propositions (in that they are not simply the expression of subjective preferences as such) utter claims to validity. These claims can only be supported with appropriate justifications. A judgment which is normative with respect to a particular situation can be justified by connecting it to more general norms. But, finally, what can justify a norm is its ability to express the requirements which are inscribed in the very structure of action. A judgment which is appreciative with respect to a particular work can be justified with respect to criteria which are contingently of very great generality. But what justifies the criteria themselves is their ability to express the constitutive rules of the "art" that they concern. There is thus an obvious analogy between the three types of propositions considered from the viewpoint of problems of justification. In each case, it is a matter of showing the acceptability of a proposition. In the case of descriptive propositions, the criterium is the adequation with what reality reveals of itself - what the notion of truth expresses. In the case of normative propositions, the criterium is the adequation with the ethical order (insofar as the inner requirements of action mean its ordering after the ethical order). And in the case of appreciative propositions, the criterium is the adequation with what could be called the "poetic order" (insofar as the rules constitutive of an "art" mean making states of things exist in conformity with LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION 27 an inspiring "idea" such as that of the city in the case of political art, or that of health in the case of medical art). Because of this analogy, the term "logic", in the general sense indicated above, can be extended to all the contexts of justification which have their counterpart in discourse. And this extension may be made explicit by saying that "logic", in the most general sense, is the art of advancing towards the encounter with the acceptable (whether the acceptable be defined with respect to the order of truth, the ethical order or the "poetic order"). However, we must account for the difference which appeared, in the effective practice of this art of justification, between logic in the narrow sense and argumentation. The difference must come from the very nature of what is under consideration. In order to explain it, we can stick to the case of descriptive propositions, since the other cases may be dealt with through analogy. A proposition is never absolutely isolated; it only takes on its full meaning and value in the context of a discourse which connects propositions to each other, thus creating, in a sense, a solidarity between them. Deduction (studied by logic in the narrow sense) is a very particular modality of sequencing which ensures, as we have seen, the transfer of assumed truth. Argumentation establishes relationships between propositions which could be characterized by the notion of "support". To attempt to justify a proposition A on the basis of a proposition B is, in effect, to reveal the truth of B as support for the truth of A. The strength of the argument results from the acceptability of the proposed support relationship. Deduction allows for the complete reduction of justification of a proposition• consequence to the justification of its premises, and, in this sense, it can be considered a privileged case of argumentation in which the degree of support is the greatest. But the precisely deductive moment does not yet bring in justification; it is only a possible instrument of it (in case it is feasible). In general, argumentation implements quite varied support processes which the theory of argumentation attempts to record and whose mechanisms it attempts to analyze. In both cases, there is a relationship to truth; on the one hand, in the form of a relationship of transfer, and, on the other, in the form of a relationship of support or foundation. A dual possibility thus seems to be inscribed in the relation which the discourse can entertain with truth. If the propositions that present themselves as true only appear so in a presumptive manner, it is because their relation to truth is always indirect. Even if we grant that self• evident propositions exist, it seems problematic to take evidence for a sort of unconditional, definitive and absolutely indubitable revelation of the truth. Evidence, after all, is but an index - although a privileged one. However, 28 JEAN LADRIERE what allows us to recognize a proposition as being at least presumptively true, is the relation that we believe to discern in it with an originary event: that of an advent of truth of which it is, as a presumptive proposition, a local and contingent trace. Agreement is founded upon this event; it is the con• sonance which appropriates the discourse to what reveals itself. There cannot be true discourse, even conjecturally, except for the fact that the world reveals itself - thus, because there is manifestation. In truth, discourse is not purely and simply secondary to manifestation. It belongs to its very structure, inasmuch as it is that moment when the meaning of what reveals itself breaks away, so to speak, from the materiality of its adherence and asserts itself for itself, in the autonomy of an ideality capable of sustaining itself by its own instituting force, which is precisely that of discourse. The originary event of the advent of the truth is that moment when the meaning of the fact or the event arises, then, from what is and from what happens, or else when the immanent "logos" of things reveals itself in its purity. But discourse can only clear its path in the medium of language and it can only express meaning by adapting itself to the contingency and the inertia of a device which, malleable as it may be, nevertheless always leaves discourse at a certain distance from the very thing that it behoves it to express. The passage into language is what could be called the inscription of meaning. According to the most generally accepted analysis, the primordial locus of this inscription is the proposition inasmuch as it possesses the minimal structure necessary for expressing the fact that things can, effectively, be understood as pertaining to such or such view of intelligibility, thus, for expressing, even at great distance, the originary event of the automonstration of meaning. However, on its own, the proposition does not exhaust this event precisely because it only has a limited reserve of descriptive terms, predi• cates, and operators at its disposal. Discourse attempts to make up for the inadequacy of the proposition by hinging one proposition to another, thus, by varying the views while at the same time showing how they fit together with each other. It is only by this course, which connects propositions to each other by various figures of concatenation, that discourse has a chance of ietting the originary event come to the surface of words and thus of constitut• ing itself as true discourse. In any case, it is this originary event which carries discourse along its trajectory and which accounts for the force of the links it establishes between propositions. In every relationship, there is some degree of constraint. What constrains is the force which comes from the manifesta• tion and which clears the path of meaning through the denseness of language. But discourse can organize itself according to two very different LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION 29 modalities. It may take advantage of the constructive resources specific to language by provisionally leaving what is concerned in the inscription of meaning in abeyance, or, it may, on the contrary, find a basis in the very vicissitudes of that inscription. The means of construction that language affords discourse are the logical operators whose nature and role were recalled earlier. Now, the working of the operators allows for transformations which could be called semantically neutral in that in their implementation, they do not directly appeal to the instituting force of discourse (which is that of the originary event). They, of course, can have an effect on the truth value and, to the same extent, have a semantic effect, but it is always a matter of an assumed truth value which is in a way only present in a purely gratuitous fashion, by way of mere eventuality. If a proposition is modified by an operator of negation, its truth value is altered. However, this happens altogether independently of how things are, in reality, with this truth value and with the manner in which one could possibly determine what it is. By relying on this remarkable property of logical operators, regulated procedures may be brought into focus which allow for the extraction from a proposition of what it contains. (The premises of a deductive argument can be considered to only form a single proposition. They must simply be linked by a conjunc• tion.) The notion of deduction expresses very precisely what this procedure of disimplication may signify. Deduction, however, implies rules. And what produces the constraint of the rule and moreover its legitimacy is indeed, in compliance with the general principle stated above, the refraction within it of the originary event's force. If this is so, it is apparently because of the thematizing possibilities of the operativity peculiar to language which are implemented in the formalization process. If some proposition or other appears with a certain claim to truth, it can only be to the extent that the originary event of the apophansis of meaning is refracted within it, however weakly. Now, this event is present within the proposition as an inscription of the requirement of its own unfolding, i.e. as a growing explicitation of what it was bent on expressing from the first moment of its formulation. And it is this requirement which is conveyed in the process of dis implication and in the concept of deduction which constitutes its theory. Now, such a process is possible because the language in which meaning attempts to inscribe itself, offers appropriate devices on its own accord. And because the language, insofar as it is, in effect, a set of devices, possesses a sort of ideal materiality (not that of expressive supports, like voice and writing, but that of structures which linguistic theory so skillfully brings to the fore), it can be objectivized, i.e. considered outside its effective usage, like a mere building material of 30 JEAN LADRIERE discourse, or like a mere locus of the inscription of meaning. The objectiviza• tion of language is ipso facto the thematicization of the operations which it contains, i.e. their representation in a separate state, on a base which is no longer driven by the will to express specific to discourse. Formalization provides us with such a representation in which operations are shown to us in the pure abstraction of their operativity, independently of the contents upon which, in the realm of discourse, they must normally act. To the extent that the constituting force of discourse has withdrawn from this representation, it can be said that all direct relations to the originary event have been suspended. But, to the extent that the representation itself reveals to us how the operatory resources of language make a conservative disimplication (of assumed truth) possible, and the extent that it brings to evidence the constrain• ing force of rule, it can be said that in the deductive process, an indirect relationship is maintained with the originary event and even that it is on account of this relationship that deduction can take place. The power of deduction thus consists in its ensuring the transition from the implicit to the explicit according to a trajectory corresponding to the progressive accomplish• ment of the apophansis of meaning. This transition is potentially fruitful, and in many cases, necessary, because the proposition is, in a way, incapable, in general, of showing, straight off, by a simple unveiling of its apparent structure, everything revealing that it already possesses, in fact, concerning the truth. The other modality of the construction of discourse is that which is involved in argumentation. Here, the course takes place in the opposite direction from what happens in the case of deduction. Instead of starting with a proposition (or a set of propositions) in order to move toward others whose validity is guaranteed by the given proposition (or the given set of proposi• tions), we start with a proposition given in a problematic form, and move toward those which might offer it as substantial a support as possible. Deduction, as the word indicates, is descendant; it departs from a seat of truth and moves toward more and more distant partial truths, in a process of crossed branching in which the final node of a deductive tree may itself be a branching point from which several new deductive lines radiate. Argumenta• tion is ascendant; it departs from a proposition the acceptability of which is weakly ensured in order to move toward propositions the acceptability of which is better and better secured. Argumentation should ideally be able to anchor this whole regressive process, finally, in propositions whose accep• tability would no longer raise the least doubt, i.e. in propositions whose truth would impose itself in absolute fashion. Even if, in fact, such an ascent LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION 31 toward absolute truths appears out of reach, nevertheless the "telos" of an unconditional truth no doubt drives the enterprise of justification. In fact, it seems that what can effectively be realized is merely the reduction of the least plausible to the most plausible by settling upon propositions which seem to enjoy maximum acceptability available in the historical context of the research area one is involved in. The enterprise is rendered both necessary and possible by the fact that there exist various degrees of acceptability. When certain propositions possess a small amount of acceptability (e.g. because they only possess the conjectural value that certain facts might suggest), it is necessary to render them more acceptable, or, in any case, to investigate whether they are liable to become more acceptable. But this is only possible if propositions, whose at least relative acceptability has already been established, are at our disposal. It must be noted that the degree of acceptability is not linked to the relatively general character of propositions. In certain cases, for example in the context of confirming theoretical hypotheses, an attempt is made to render very general propositions acceptable by relying on experimental propositions whose degree of generality is lesser, but whose acceptability is based on their proximity to an empirical practice, interpreted as a privileged locus of manifestation. But in other cases, a very general proposition, judged to be already acceptable to a sufficient degree may be relied upon in order to justify more particularized propositions. If there are thus differences between propositions from the point of view of their acceptability, this means that the relation to truth is only revealed by degrees. However, if it is true that this relation is founded on an originary event which is the very constitution of discourse in the medium of manifesta• tion, then this variability in the force of certification of the truth itself refers back to the conditions under which that event takes place, i.e. under which the advent of discourse takes place. Within every proposition appearing with even the most minimal claim to say the truth, there is a trace of this advent, like an echo of the originary. Now, the originary advent of the truth, which is constitutive of discourse, is itself made up of the articulation of three moments: there is the moment of the gift, which is the manifestation itself in its most essential; there is the moment of institution, in which emerges, from the very movement of manifestation, the medium in which the meaning of the manifest may be shown; and there is the moment of receptivity where the discourse thus constituted gathers within itself what is shown in the moment of the gift. However, the proposition, which is the elementary link [maille] of discourse, only gathers what is shown (as we have already stressed) through 32 mAN LADRIERE the filter of language. The inscription of meaning is conditioned by the limitations which the discourse's status of ideality imposes on its power of monstration. Discursively, we only apprehend the world in fragments and in perspectives, by isolating, with more or less arbitrariness, more or less extensive regions in the universal field of what reveals itself (which cor• responds to the referential function of language), and by constructing points of view which allow us to look at things in a certain generality (which corresponds to the predicative function of language). The proposition articulates the generality of a point of view to the singularity of a concrete aim. It thus refers, in accordance with its very structure, to this irreducible something, aimed at by the reference, through which the power peculiar to the moment of the gift comes to it, even if it be in a veiled form or by delegation. In an apparently clear manner, the predicate exhibits a meaning; it represents that moment when meaning broke away from the concreteness of the manifestation and thus is shown in and for itself. The apophansis of meaning appears to complete itself in the predicate. But this meaning is elusive, unsituated, gratuitous in a way; its scope remains indeterminate and thus enigmatic. The proposition attempts to restore it to its proper place, that is, to restore it in the movement of manifestation, to retrace in the opposite direction the path by which it came, from the concreteness of the primary gift to the ideality of a pure representation. But in doing so, it provides a represen• tation of that advance by which meaning emerges. It thus provides, locally and only concerning a limited aspect of things, an image of manifestation itself. Inasmuch as it belongs, as a part of discourse, to the structure of manifestation, we can thus say that it is located in this reflexive moment where that manifestation becomes effective by providing itself with an objectivized form of its own execution. In the structure of the proposition, it is obviously the articulation of the predicative function with the referential function which constitutes the decisive moment within which the problem of the relation to the truth is, so to speak, concentrated. Discourse institutes this articulation, but it can do it pertinently only to the extent that it attempts to gather together what is announced at the moment of giving. The degree of legitimacy of the articula• tion, i.e. the degree to which its relation to the truth asserts itself in the proposition, is exactly the degree to which the force of the originary moment of the giving acts within it. Now, this does not depend on the willpower of the person holding forth the discourse, but on the objective resources (in point of fact, on linguistic devices) that the latter implements. The ideal of a proposition showing, without reservation, its acceptability is that of a LOGIC AND ARGUMENT ATION 33 discursive situation in which the originary giving force of the manifestation would be directly visible in the very structure of the proposition. The problem of justification is, in short, that of approaching this ideal. And the idea of argumentation is, in short, to propagate the justification of the most favorable cases toward the less favorable ones. The crucial moment in the process is obviously the establishment of an appropriate connection between the proposition to be justified and those which served as support for the justification. This connection must be of a nature such that it can divert at least some of the originary giving force already operating in the justifying propositions toward the proposition to be justified. In order for the process may be effective, i.e. so that there really be a justification, the connection must appear to be implemented after a principle recognized as acceptable. And a principle of connection is accept• able if it shows that it effectively expresses what is asked of the nature of the connection. However, the acceptability of a principle is not exactly the same as that of a descriptive proposition. Nevertheless, the very notion of accep• tability indicates an analogy upon which one may usefully rely. What is at stake in the principle is not directly the manifestation (insofar as it shows the meaning of the portion of reality that is appearing), but the manner in which it operates, or, more precisely, the manner in which the originary giving force can be transferred from one proposition to another one, from a more receptive structure to a less receptive one. Whereas, in a descriptive proposition, the originary giving force gives to see the meaning which rises from the middle of things and which the proposition tries to express, in the principle, the originary giving force reveals in a sense itself in its mobilizing force, in its ability to bend language to fit the event of the advent of meaning. Indeed, the same force is at work in both cases; it is indeed in the very resources of the manifestation that descriptive and justificatory discourses derive that which can legitimize them. Just as a descriptive proposition would be recognized as being fully acceptable to the extent that it rendered the action of the originary giving force within it directly visible, so a justificatory principle would be recognized as being fully acceptable to the extent that it rendered directly visible, through the medium of language, the expansion of that originary force from the loci where it is the most visible toward those where it is the least visible. The two modalities of the organization of discourse are thus both con• nected to the structure of manifestation and to the originary giving which is its primary moment. But while deduction puts the force of giving provisionally in abeyance (in that it does not take into account what the 34 mAN LADRIERE propositions upon which it operates say, stricto sensu, or claim to say), argumentation consists essentially, to the contrary, in relying upon this very force with a view to expanding its field of effectiveness. Deduction proceeds by disimplication from what is contained in a set of propositions by taking advantage of their mode of construction and of the relationships which exist between them simply because of their mode of construction. Argumentation is a sort of exploration: it attempts to increase the degree to which the apophansis of meaning takes place within the given propositions, by establishing between these and other propositions relationships which are not simply of a structural order, according to principles of connection which are recognized as acceptable. It is possible to say that in both cases, use is made of relationships between propositions. However, in one case, it is by a mere bringing to light of relationships already given with the very structure of the primary propositions, while in the other, it is by the progressive constitution of a network of relationships which was not given at all in advance. On the one hand, there is merely a recording of virtualities inscribed in an already available apophantic; on the other, there is a modification in the apophantic structure, a reinforcement (at least a local one) of the degree of acceptability, and extension of the sphere of effectiveness of the originary, and, correla• tively, a transformation of the network of connections between propositions. On the one hand, the process is retrospective, and on the other, it is prospec• tive.

* * * What has been said about descriptive propositions could easily be extended to the case of normative propositions and to that of appreciative propositions. The acceptability of the former is measured by the intensity according to which the force of the originary giving is refracted within them. What is made manifest by this giving is everything that happens, with all the condi• tions which govern the production of what happens. In this sense, this could be called the "evenementiel". In an analogous manner, an originary giving refracts within normative propositions, viz. that original experience in which ethical requirements are asserted. Here, it is the ethical order which is made manifest. Similarly, in evaluative propositions, we see a refraction of that originary constitution in which the requirements characteristic of the poetic order (in the sense indicated above) are instituted. It would be well, of course, to specify the nature of the criterium of validity peculiar to each of these areas, as well as to distinguish (as in the case of descriptive propositions) the LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION 35 acceptability of the propositions considered on their own from the accep• tability of the principles by means of which one attempts to justify them. Analogy, which allows the comparison of justificatory processes in the three areas of description, normativity and appreciation, authorizes us to generalize about what we have seen concerning descriptive discourse. In any order of discourse in which a claim to acceptability is asserted, that duality between deduction and argumentation will be found. And, in each case, it will be possible to reduce this duality to two types of discursive organization: disimplication (of a given apophansis) and restructuration (of the field of the apophansis by redistribution of the degrees of apophansis upon the proposi• tions of the discourse). On the side of deduction, validity (assumed) is merely exhibited, in all its ramifications. On the side of argumentation, it is actively constituted by a practice of exploration that tries to clear paths for the extension of acceptability. This is why logic (in the strict sense) has an atemporal character, while argumentation has an essentially historical character. Deduction has value solely in virtue of the strength of rules, independently of what those who implement it, in fact, do. Argumentation has value only with respect to a given state of discursive elaboration, relatively to experience and perplexities which are always situated and which, furthermore, change with the transformation of knowledge, with variations in ethical consciousness, and with the emergence of new "poetic" figures. One can doubtless attribute the difference separating syntactic purity (considered to also include the theory of models) from pragmatics to this difference between the atemporal and the historical. Even when it speaks of contexts, syntax is decontextualized. On the contrary, pragmatics is, by definition, the restitution of language to its anchoring in acts. And it is through acts that there is history. But the difference between the atemporal and the historical is doubtless also what explains the relative poverty of pure logic, which invents nothing, as well as the irremediable contingency of argumentation which never demonstrates except conditionally and according to a certain measure of plausibility. The pursued objective is indeed to give sufficient reason, but the idea of reason is both superbly obvious and quite strangely fleeting. JEAN-BLAISE GRIZE

TO REASON WHILE SPEAKING

INTRODUCTION The development of and the daily presence of computer technology tend to lead one to believe that arguing amounts to proof and deduction. However, nothing of the sort is true and I would like to discuss argument in the altogether general sense of the shift from one judgement to another. Still, it must be noted that this shift does not necessarily require a dis• course. Neither the very young child nor the computer speak: the former because he does not yet have language at his disposal, the latter because it calculates. Nevertheless, it will be a matter here of discursive reasonings only. All of these, however, are not of the same nature and it is useful to distinguish between two types. On the one hand, those which have currency in areas where it only matters that one proceed from one truth to another - areas which thus pertain to formal logic. On the other hand, those which unfold in domains where it is a matter of establishing what is preferable, acceptable and reasonable [ ... which] are neither formally correct deductions nor inductions ranging from the particular to the general, but argwnents of all types aiming at gaining the. adherence of minds for the theses which are presented for their approval. (Perelman, p.7). These arguments are part of the field which we call natural logic, by which is understood the system of operations which allow thought to manifest itself through discourse. It is characterized by two essential features. First, it is the logic of the subject: each of the propositions has an enunciator who takes responsibility for it. Next, it is the logic of objects in that their construction is more important to him than predication. This study will be devoted to this second type of argument. I must nevertheless first make one thing clear. This text is meant to be an homage to Chaim Perelman, to his work, and to the realms of thought that he opened. If it is true that lowe him much (and probably even my taste for argumenta• tion), the same is true, directly or transitively, of my collaborators. That is

37 38 JEAN-BLAISE GRIZE why it will not be a question of my "ideas" in what will follow, but rather of some research results of our Center. Since I am the senior member (and only for this reason), I will consider myself their spokesman and thus take up the pen for those who have reflected on what "to reason while speaking" means.

1. NON-FORMAL ARGUMENTS In order to characterize this type of spoken argument, it will be most useful to begin with what remains paradigmatic about formal arguments: the syl• logism. I will stress five aspects of it which contrast with non-formal arguments:

a) the type of discourse at stake; b) the operations used; c) the statute of the premises; d) the nature of the conclusion; e) the objects that are involved.

1. And first, the discourse itself. It is generally granted, since the work of Benveniste, that the dialogue is the very condition of human language (Benveniste 1966, 60) and that, consequently, every speech-act is an exchange between an I and a YOU. Now, the discourse of formal arguments is characterized, on this point, not only by the fact that it erases the inter• locutors, but also aims to do so. Expressions like "I say that the triangle ABC is equal to the triangle A'B 'c'" are purely stylistic clauses. Indeed, one can say, expanding Perelman's terminology, that "I" is the universal speaker who adresses a universal audience. Better yet, it is reason speaking to reason. This is, moreover, what allows a computer ultimately to be entrusted with calculating arguments of this sort. Non-formal arguments. on the other hand. are expressed in discourses where receiver and sender remain present. The obligation of a dual adjustment [double reglage] falls upon the orator: on the one hand, that obligation demanded by cognitive necessities (which are only, by right, present in formal arguments), and on the other, that which requires the presence of YOU. This last remark implies that we have gone beyond the demonstrative framework and penetrated the argumentative order. More precisely, as M.-J. Borel has shown (Grize 1984, 12ff, 13Of!), the signs of these discourses refer to three levels which are linked, but function• ally distinct. TO REASON WHILE SPEAKlNG 39

a) The cognitive or notional level: what is said. b) The argumentative level which ensures the coherence of the dictum, which aims to avoid the receiver's production of counter• discourses. c) The purely rhetorical level (belonging to the speaker) which tries to aid the reception of what is presented. Thus in the following example: In sum, the discourse offormal arguments is very different from that of non-formal arguments. Indeed, the first is monological while the second is dialogical. What is in italics pertains to the cognitive level; the clause introduced by "indeed", to the argumentative level; and "in sum", to the rhetorical level.

2. Coming now to operations, it is known that formal arguments only utilize propositional operations and quantifiers. But, let us consider this brief non• formal argument which I borrow from C. Pequegnat: The distribution of water is easy, for each targa feeds a determinate field surface which would not exist without it: when water is abundant, everyone takes as much as they want. (Grize 1966, 21) We notice that the conclusion "the distribution of water is easy" results from the following series of transformations: The argument's condition: "when water is abundant". a) everyone takes as much as they want process b) as much water is taken as is wanted erasure of the agent c) water is easily distributed substitution of predicate d) the distribution of water is easy nominalization, state We see that the nature of the operations (transformations) at stake may be multifarious. These pertain to: - objects: abundant water ---+ distribution of water - predicates: to be taken ---+ to be distributed - legal content: everyone takes water ---+ water may be distributed Finally, let it be noted that this type of argument may extend to pure plays on words: And, at the source of all reproduction, communication, association, and communion, there is the gemination of two cellular beings born of a doubling (cellular auto• reproduction): thus no father; the father is the son, the son is the father while at the same time being neither son nor father, but himself and his own brother. (E. Morin, La vie de la vie, Paris, Seuil, 1980, pp. 439-40). 40 JEAN-BLAISE GRIZE

3. It is difficult to decide whether for Aristotle himself, a could have false premises. J. Lukasiewicz thinks so (Lukasiewicz 1959). But the question here is not historical. It is rather that, in his mind, the premises of a formal argument are hypothetical and that the logician's task is not to guarantee the argument's truth. In non-formal arguments, on the other hand, (arguments that a discourse puts forth at any particular moment) premises are given precisely by way of facts. And as a fact only counts if it is received as such, the necessity of arguing is found once again.

4. I now come to the nature of conclusions. It is known that, formally, the conclusion must contain nothing that was not already present in the premises. It is for this very reason that logic lays itself open to the criticism of sterility. The situation is very different in non-formal arguments where the conclu• sion only has some interest, or only escapes the reproach of tautology, to the extent that it offers up some new element. The most famous example is provided by "I think therefore I am". This example allows us to see well the essential role played by the meaning of terms which are face to face. To replace "to think" or "to be" with other predicates, or even "I" with another pronoun would destroy the argument. Thus to reason while speaking certainly ,always amounts to dealing with forms, but to the same degree as well with contents of thought. This leads us to study the objects under consideration.

5. It is known that a formal system comprises two parts. One is called pure and its role is to provide the deductive apparatus. The objects that it deals with are totally empty or banal, as F. Gonseth says (Gonseth 1937). And this follows from the fact that deduction strives to be pure form. As for the second part, called "applied", it quite obviously contains objects, but which are entirely determined from the outset by the axioms to which they are subor• dinated. These are artificial objects, created by the researcher, that is, which amount to a few properties that seemed important to him. For everyday arguments, the situation is totally different. Here, the objects exist prior to the discourse to be held forth about them. Their properties, the relationships that are maintained between them are limitless and we never grasp but a few of them. In other words, in arguments founded on language as it exists - and not as the scientist constructs it - two facts thrust themselves upon us: TO REASON WillLE SPEAKING 41

a) All objects have a meaning before we reason upon them. b) All arguments are founded upon certain aspects thought to be familiar to the interlocutor, or which he makes explicit, or which he even creates.

This is important enough for us to devote some thought to it.

2. THE OBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 1. An object of discourse is a linguistic sign which we say represents a cognitive representation in language. It comprises two main characteristics: a) It is always endowed with a meaning and this in contrast with the signs of formal systems which must be interpreted. b) This meaning is always more or less fuzzy, partially undeter• mined, and the role of discursive activity is justly to bring it progressively into definition. Thus, the object man in the following text: Racist and yet altruistic, a fanatical idealist endowed with the most highly perfected sense of organization of the living kingdom. Fundamentally aggressive and often putting this aggressiveness to the service of an offensive and militant pacifism. Authoritarian and a loner, yet irresistibly swayed by the intoxication of totalitarianism and of submission to absolute power. Such is this being that is stranger than all others: man. (Dr. Escoffier-Lambiotte: "L'homme aux trois cerveaux," Le Monde, 19-20 February 1984, p. vi).

2. Before being put to discourse, an object is already accompanied by a network of aspects, that is, a (fuzzy) totality of properties or relations with other objects and potential actions. To take an everyday example, the object key may be predicated on "being of iron" or "being light-weight", but normally not on "being gaseous" or "being even". It may be put into a relation with the object lock or with the object pocket, but not with the object cloud. We may tum a key but not determine its square root. Here a remark must be made which both compli• cates the situation and opens unlimited possibilities for argument. I have written "normally". This is indeed because languages are open to the phenomenon of metaphor with the result that the speaker may always broaden the cluster of objects that he deals with. 42 JEAN-BLAISE GRIZE

3. The preceding remains theoretical and it is necessary to have at one's disposal an operational concept in order to deal with objects of discourse. We have, for this reason, introduced the concept of object-class, a close relative of the mereological class in the sense that Lesniewski gives it (Mieville 1984). With the help of a certain number of operations which we have dealt with elsewhere (Borel-Grize-Mieville 1983), it is possible to follow the construction of objects in a given discourse. I will limit myself here to demonstrating this with one example. The city was silent. Its streets deserted, not a single house lit. The city center seemed abandoned. In succession, there are: - anchorage operation: the city; - ingredience operation: the city, its streets; - ingredience operation: the city, its streets, a single house; - specification operation: the city, its streets, a single house, the city center. What may thus be described on the technical level corresponds, on the plane of thought, to that which I will later call the expansion of an object: an expansion directly linked, in non-formal arguments, to the enrichment of conclusions.

4. The above text is only given by way of illustration and other operations are required in order to elaborate object-classes. It follows that, contrary to what happens with ordinary mathematical classes which only pertain to the relation "is an element of' (e), object-classes (loci of non-formal arguments) enjoy several distinct appurtenance relations. D. Apotheloz (Grize 1984, 197-201) discerns five types: a) Is an element of. "The rectangle is a quadrilateral". b) Is part of. "Ixelles is part o/the urban area". c) Belongs to the realm of. "The experimental method belongs to the realm of contemporary psychology". d) Belongs through restriction to. "Animal psychology belongs through restriction to psychology". e) Belongs through overdetermination to. "The advances in biology belong through overdetermination to biology". It is obvious that we are dealing with qualified relations, that the two latter ones are even of a specifically speech-related nature, and that we are in an entirely other context than that of formal logic. TO REASON WlllLE SPEAKING 43

3. THE MECHANISMS OF NON-FORMAL ARGUMENTS 1. Even if, as I have stated above, the operations of non-formal arguments are not all of a propositional nature, it nevertheless remains true that, at a primary level of analysis, such an argument appears as an ordered (and obviously fmite) series of statements. The difficulty here is that a description, narrative, or narration appear under the same aspect. I will thus posit that an argument is characterized by the presence of a specific statement: a conclusion. Let us suppose provisionally that we know how to recognize a conclusion. Under these conditions, it is legitimate to classify all other statements in a single category. I will call these premises. Thus conclusion and premise(s) are two notions that are relative to each other and nothing in an isolated statement allows us to determine anything about its statute. This is perhaps trivial, but it allows us to understand why it is necessary, in formal arguments, to come to an advance agreement concerning what is going to serve as premise and to mark it linguistically. ''If a triangle has two equal sides, then it has two equal angles". Such a conditional proposition is a sort of reserve which means that in the case that I encounter an isosceles triangle, I can affrrm that it has two equal angles. This is nothing other than a modus ponens. It is nothing else than this, but nothing less either. This in effect means that under the right circumstances, the conclusion stands out from the premises. Yet, remaining for the moment on the theoretical plane, and in a quite general fashion, this allows us to posit that a conclusion is a statement that distinguishes itself from others under the terms of a particular relationship that it maintains with them. Fortunately, it happens that discourse marks this distinction. The following is an example:

The young of man can be situated with respect to verbal activity: the word enfant ["child"] is composed of two unities, "in" and "farl", which signify "to not speak". Thus the child is perceived from the perspective of a lack or an absence. (D. Bouvet, La parole de I'enfant sourd. Paris, PUF, 1982, p. 15). The "thus" signals that what follows is the conclusion.

2. "Therefore" is also a sign of conclusion in formal arguments which, in the classical tradition, are of the form: "I say that p. As a matter of fact q. Therefore p." This is a form in which the premises precede the conclusion. It is, however, illusory to think about relying on the order of statements. 44 JEAN-BLAISE GRIZE

Nothing in day-to-day arguments dictates the premise-conclusion order. In the example of the targa, the conclusion precedes the premises. In that of the child, it follows them. In this there are certainly rhetorical processes situated beyond the formal mechanisms and whose scope remains to be studied. The problem is thus to find other means for recognizing a conclusion. There is one which is all the more important to us as it is of a perfectly discursive nature and is indebted to one of the operations which we have isolated in our natural logic. All conclusions are marked by a variation in the level of discourse, a denivellation. Let us examine things more closely and, in order to do so, start with an example which I borrow, once again, from C. Pequegnat (Grize 1984,70). Animals impose no restriction upon themselves in the satisfaction of their sexual needs. An adult male may sexually approach any female, including the female who gave birth to him (his mother), or females born of the same mother as him (his sisters). This sexual behavior without inhibition ... (E. Reed, Feminism and Anthropol• ogy, Paris, Denoi!l, 1979, p. 15.) It may be noticed that the text (discourse) brings about a whole operation upon the objects of discourse. First, there is an expansion:

animals ~ satisfaction of their sexual needs ~ an adult male ~ any female ~ the female who gave birth to him ~ females born of the same mother as him. This expansion is followed by a condensation: "This sexual behavior without inhibition" which signals a change in level. With the assistance of the operation we have called ro, the expression "this sexual behavior without inhibition" refers to the whole expansion and what will be said about it will become the conclusion.

3. If our way of understanding natural logic as pertaining as much to subjects as to objects is correct, the expansions of objects must depend upon the point of view of the speakers who argue. This phenomenon does not appear clearly in the already-constituted areas of knowledge where, precisely, the competent authorities have agreed upon a single point of view. Thus writes J. Piaget: to say that bodies attract in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance supposes [ ... ] a certain choice of defInitions of bodies. (Piaget 1967, 1166). And it is known that such a choice was not in the least bit obvious. Thus, as long as a knowledge is groping, several points of view remain in competi• tion, or in a polemical relationship in regard to each other. It follows that in TO REASON WlllLE SPEAKING 45 order to argue in favor of one of them, it is fitting to review some of the others. It is thus that many non-formal reasoned processes initiate a veritable circuit of the points of view and thereby reveal diverse facets of the objects in question. Here is a characteristic example which I have abbreviated somewhat: l. Can it not be claimed that the inventory of all observable phenomena is the ultimate goal of science? By experimenting "randomly", my experiments contribute to the building of universal knowledge. It is the ideal of the "exhaustive exploration of reality". 2. Even if my experiments have little motivation, can I not hope to detect, by this means, a significant anomaly or make a surprising observation which will allow me to reach a fruitful hypothesis? This is the idea of suggestive tlbricolage" which Claude Bernard also defended ... 3. Finally, certain authors stress the importance of the "fruitful error" ... 4. It is no doubt exact that some of the most brilliant experimental results of our century were the effect of errors or of failures ... But it would be difficult to justify sociologically the maintenance of the great experimental apparatus which characterizes our epoch by the fruitful error or by bricolage. (R. Thorn, ''La methode experimentale",Le debat, nO 34, mars 1985, pp. 15-16). Here, we are presented with four points of view. The three first ones are explicitly those from which the author wishes to distance himself (thus the use of quotation marks), whereas the fourth, presented as the only legitimate one, is that of R. Thorn.

4. I have just spoken from a point of view presented as legitimate. Now this poses a delicate problem. A non-formal argument has no necessity characteris• tic. How, therefore, can it be convincing? I would answer that it is so by giving a certain characteristic of the obvious to its conclusion, as in the famous phrase, "one can thus see that". In order to bring out the general mechanism, I will freely use as my authority M. Meyer's extraordinarily fertile concept of problematology (Meyer 1979, 1983). I stress [retiens] the following idea. Every text and, particularly, every statement has two sides: 46 JEAN-BLAISE GRIZE

a) it indicates a question toward which it points; b) it answers that question. Thus, taking up once again a text we have cited, the assertion "the young of man is located with respect to verbal activity" may answer more than one question and, in particular, this one: "In what frame of reference should the child be placed?" This stated, in order to understand the "evidence" character of conclusions, one must investigate the type of questions answered by statements having various levels. The classic way to proceed is to distinguish open questions from closed questions (what, which, how, why ... ) which present a choice between an infinite number of answers ("Did you walk, take a taxi, or did someone bring you?''). Under these conditions, it is conceivable that a non-formal argument does not proceed from one truth to another, but rather from one question to another. As any question can have more than one answer, we are theoretically in the presence of a network constituting a veritable problematic on a given theme. To argue is then to layout a path within this network by arguing in such a manner that when the last question is asked, only one answer is possible. Schematically, the process is the following: a) To begin with: a description of the matter at hand. b) Through successive variations in level: answers to open ques• tions, thus the delineation of the field of the matter at hand. c) Answers to closed questions. d) Conclusion distinguishing itself: the answer remaining. We could thus say that the process aims at building a space of fibered discourse. Let it be further noted that a process of this type is only possible by means of natural language which tends to pose the problem of its simulation by artificial intelligence. Indeed, the three levels which I have brought to light are required: expansion and variation of level take place on the cognitive plane, the indices of changes in points of view are located on the argumenta• tive plane, and the signs of detachment on the rhetorical plane.

5. Before concluding, one point remains to be examined. We cannot speak of premises and conclusions without investigating the mechanism of inference, that is, the operation of thought that allows the passage from one or several propositions to another. TO REASON WHILE SPEAKING 47

The difficulty is that this definition is much too broad. When Caesar said "Veni, vidi, vici", he might have been inferring "I conquered" from the two other propositions (modesty was apparently not his strong point), but certainly not "I saw" and "I came" even if the coming was the necessary condition for observing the situation. I would thus posit that in order for there to be an operation of inference between two propositions, there must be a specific relationship which I will call founding relation between them. In formal arguments, this relationship is unique: it is the relation of implication which is entirely determined by the truth value of the propositions. In non• formal arguments, on the other hand, the nature of the founding relation may be of many types: causal, significative, lexical, ideological, etc. This diversity moreover shows that the conclusion of such an argument cannot simply be transferred into another context. Since it is qualified, it necessarily remains more or less particular.

CONCLUSION It is obvious - and it shows - that all of this still needs to be checked and refined. Nevertheless, it seems that to argue while speaking corresponds fairly closely to what L. Apostel calls "consolidation", a procedure which he characterizes by four features (AposteI1981). 1) The whole text is at stake. This is indeed what happens with expansion-condensation couples. 2) We are dealing with a process. I have stressed the importance of transformational strength in discursive activity. 3) The consolidation activity is finalized. The entire argumentative aspect of arguments of this type depends on this. 4) Finally, this activity is guided by the very thing that it makes possible. This is what I have called the construction of a fibered space.

BmLIOGRAPHY Apostel, L. (1981): Refiexions sur la tMorie de l'action dialectique: implication et signification, Communication & Cognition. 14(4),285-342. Benveniste. E. (1966): Problemes de linguistique generale. Paris. NRF. Borel. M.-J .• Grize. I.-B .• Mieville. D. (1983): Essai de /ogique nature/Ie. Berne. Frankfurt am Main, New York, P. Lang. Gonseth. F. (1973): Qu'est-ce que la logique? Paris. Hermann. 48 JEAN-BLAISE GRIZE

Grize, I.-B. (Ed.) (1984): Semiologie du raisonnement. Berne, Frankfurt am Main, New York, P. Lang. Lukasiewicz, I. (1957): Aristotle's Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic. Oxford. Meyer, M. (1979): Dialectique, rhetorique, hermeneutique et questionnement, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 127-128, 145-177. Mieville, D. (1984): Un developpement des systemes logiques de S. LeSniewski. Berne, Frankfurt am Main, New York, P. Lang. Perelman, Ch. (1977): The Realm ofRhetoric. Paris, Vrin. PIERRE OLERON

ORGANIZATION AND ARTICULATION OF VERBAL EXCHANGES: QUESTION-RESPONSE EXCHANGES IN POLEMICAL CONTEXTS

I.INTRODUCfION In this contribution, we are concerned with verbal exchanges, that is situa• tions in which several speakers intervene and their remarks are produced alternately. A great amount of time is devoted to these exchanges in our society. From the moment that humans had a flexible and rich enough language at their disposal, they surely began to dialogue and to debate. Literary forms, like plays or written dialogues produced by certain authors or philosophers (plato being, from this point of view, the most famous) are constituted on the basis of such exchanges. But the media (which have reinforced the public character of the word by providing it with an audience which is incommensurable with that allowed by direct contact) have increased the number of situations in which politicians, writers, artists, researchers, technicians, etc. are questioned by journalists and/or the public or called upon to debate with each other. This is the case for radio and television as well as for the written press. An inventory of the time devoted in one day to this would result in a con• siderable number of hours, and, for newspapers and magazines, to a non• negligible printed surface. It rests with sociologists to describe this situation with exactness and to determine the reasons for such an expansion - or inflation. It is clear that exchanges in which numerous intervening participants debate, in which turns at speaking are relatively brief and alternating, have a pedagogical quality, where communicating knowledge is concerned, which is superior to the monological didactic paper. Debates between intervening participants who defend opposing views very closely resemble sports events of which the public is traditionally fond - especially when political stars are involved. A trustworthy study (but, for that very reason, arduous) would perhaps show that, in this case, the public tries also (which, theoretically, is the goal of these exchanges) to clarify its decision with a view to a political choice, to social or economic options, or even to options of an ethical order.

49 50 PIERRE OLERON

Our goal is to investigate the manner in which verbal exchanges are organized and articulated and to propose a few elements for response. It must be pointed out that this concerns a problem which is approached relatively little in classical studies of argumentation. As we have already noted (Oleron 1984b), those studies have mostly turned on the nature and organization of arguments developed by one orator rather than on that of arguments developed by orators in conflict. The counter-argument is not mentioned in the index of the now classic New Rhetoric by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1970) and the references to refutation are very few. Now, a current, and, as we have just said, sociologically important reality such as this cannot reasonably be omitted from studies, especially as its analysis may very well enrich and refine the knowledge collected by the analysis of more traditional forms of argumentation. We have investigated (Oleron, 1984b) the possible contributions to such a subject which might be afforded by the study of conversation and of discur• sive (or narrative) organization. Like verbal exchanges, discourse brings complex sequences of statements into play; and conversation, for its part, is made up of alternating exchanges. Furthermore, both of them are today the objects of a literature which cannot be ignored. But it seemed to us that the information collected on these subjects was not applicable literally to the exchanges which we are now considering and that, at best, the proposed frameworks would have had to be transposed and adapted. In that article, we had only considered polemical exchanges. Here, we will deal essentially with them also. Other types of exchanges exist (like those mentioned above) which are articulated around the diffusion of knowledge, and in which there is the problem of the articulation between question and answer or of the alternating interventions of various specialists in order to deal with different facets of a subject. However, we intend to take argumenta• tion as a privileged object, and it is the polemical exchanges which provide the typical illustrations. In order to try to reduce the heterogeneity of the views which intervene in debates between, let us say, persons of similar status (even if the rules of order and the intervention of a game leader contribute to reducing this heterogeneity), it seemed pertinent to restrict ourselves to situations of the question-answer type. Indeed, the statute of these exchanges implies a priori stronger constraints than the "open" situations and, consequently, the analysis of the relationships between the views should be facilitated. What is presented here is but an outline of the treatment of the subject. We have based ourselves on the elements of a corpus.! These, however, have not VERBAL EXCHANGES 51 been elaborated systematically, but rather in a manner which must be qualified as impressionistic, aiming to suggest a few directions and frameworks to clarify later in order that they be applied systematically.

ll. THE DUAL ARTICULATION OF EXCHANGE As Perelman put it very clearly, argumentation aims at obtaining an effect upon an audience. We have emphasized this point ourselves (Oleron, 1983), because it leads us to connect argumentation with techniques of influence which in turn allows for the clarification of its finalities and mechanisms. In polemical exchanges, the effect on the listener aimed at is primordial. In the first place, for each participant, it is a matter of convincing the audience of the cogency of his arguments and positions and of the weakness of those of his adversary. This conviction is the condition of various actions which make up a long list (for example, in the political sphere, in voting in one way or another, in the adhesion to a party or to a campaign committee, in participating in a demonstration, or in giving financial support). On a more speculative level, it is a matter of the appreciation or depreciation of an individual, of a group, of the confidence to grant their views, of their moral or ethical qualities, of the truth or probability of their affirmations. Finally, one should not forget the confmnation of status (authority, competence, power of conviction) of the speaker with regard to the public for which stardom is an almost obligatory intermediary for the development of beliefs and opinions. In order to clarify and abbreviate our writing, we will suggest the use of a notation proposed elsewhere (Oleron, 1984a). Suppose I to be the person who holds forth with the initial view and pI to be that view; R will be the person who responds to this view and pR his own view. The fundamental diagram which is the basis for this notation consists in considering pI as a starting point. We thus do not investigate what was apt to precede it or even to have provoked it. This diagram is determined by methodological grounds. It is indeed applicable to polemical exchanges in which an affirmation naturally begets its refutation or a counter-affirmation. It is applicable as well and in pertinent fashion to exchanges of the question-answer type. Nevertheless, like all diagrams, this one simplifies. Even when it is a matter of question-answer pairs (except for the first of these), each one is preceded by others, and for each pair, the contents of pI and pR are in• fluenced by the previous statements (and, naturally, by the events, objects or situations to which the exchanges refer). A thorough analysis should take this complexity into account. Let it be noted, however, that the notation can be 52 PIERRE OLl~RON adapted to such an analysis. A series of pairs may be designated by pI-pR, p'I-p'R, etc., and, when other participants take over, by pI-pR, pI'-pR', etc. The problem which we must examine may be presented in the following manner: the exchange starts with a pI; it goes on with a pR; we will inves• tigate the relationship linking these two views. It appears, at the outset, that this relationship is not simple. Indeed, the situation brings in two types of constraints simultaneously: 1) pR must answer the finality which has just been evoked: to be such that it is liable to exercise an influence on the audience; 2) pR must be coherent with pI, since it appears, in the exchange, as an answer to pI. If we put ourselves on the level of the skill which the polemicist is called upon to implement, it can, in a parallel manner, be analyzed in two com• ponents: 1) to be capable of producing views which answer the concern of persuading, i.e. which constitute declarations favorable to the polemicist's arguments and/or unfavorable to the opposing arguments; 2) to know how to articulate his view with respect to pI in such a way that it appears called forth or determined by it, even in a quasi-necessary manner. We must take notice of these two components or rather, in this case, the procedures which mobilize them. Finality and mechanism are closely woven together. Ideally, the play of mechanism only obeys an intrinsic determinism. Thus, in terms of a psychological and elementary mechanism, pI may be considered a stimulus and pR a reaction to this stimulus. And, in fact, pR is set off by pI; in situations considered without pI, there is no pR, and if there is pI, the absence of pR is a breaking of the rules of the game and an exclusion of R from that game (which does not eliminate the possibility of a refusal to answer, for this type of refusal is also an answer, generally motivated in various ways; cf. supra). However, pR is only partially determined by pI. For a given pI, several pR are possible and the goal pursued, the effect to be produced, and, of course, the talent of R are what led to a selection among them (yet another type of determinism). The orator has a message to communicate on the chosen themes. More precisely, he has a storehouse of messages at his disposal in which the pR which will be introduced as an answer to pI is found. This VERBAL EXCHANGES 53 situation is even in play when true association, the taking up again of a word, the evocation of a word closely connected with a word from pI set off pR. Association is exploited, not suffered; it is integrated into the procedure. The storehouse of messages can become the object of an inductive study. On the basis of a given orator's productions, a list of messages can be established and even the frequency with which each of them is produced can be determined. Of course, such a list is subject to variations according to events and various aspects of situations extrinsic and/or intrinsic to the exchange situation, as well as according to individual personalities. (This development and the role of the influencing variables may also be studied in an inductive manner.) The plurality of messages in the storehouse does not at all exclude the possibility of regularity in the production of pR (and of pI) and even of a play of quasi-automatisms. The limited character of the storehouse and its dependence with respect to identifiable variables should allow for a certain amount of precision. With certain orators, given the expression of certain pI, the probability of such or such pR should be assessable, at least ap• proximately.

m. THE GLOBAL ORGANIZATION OF EXCHANGES

1. The unity and distribution ofparts We will mention only as a reminder the fact that exchanges taken as a whole answer to a principle of unity: place, time, characters, that duration, defined by a timetable, is limited and that the whole is divided into parts (themes and sub-themes) which are dealt with successively. In this perspective, a plan can be located which is sometimes explicitly announced at the outset by the game leader. This plan corresponds, in any case, to a program defined on the basis of variables like the competence of R, his specialization, elements of current events, etc. There is nothing original in this, compared to didactic exposi• tions. Nevertheless, exchanges include an element of liveliness which motivates their choice by the organizers and the broadcasting organs and which leads to breaks with a canonic order - improvisations, returns back• ward. Without the disconnected quality of informal conversational ex• changes, they do retain certain of their characteristics. 54 PIERRE OUiRON

2. Dynamic structure Verbal exchanges, like conversations, are characterized by exchanges of roles: intervening participants taking turns at speaking, alternating in the roles of speaker and listener. A first characteristic which is quantitative and is immediately apparent to observation concerns the frequency of these alternations. When things unfold canonically, i.e. when to each pI cor• responds a pR, this frequency is reduced to the number of each of these (which are, by definition, quantitatively equal). Relating to a determinate duration, it is a matter of the density of alternations. This density may vary considerably according to situations (here, broadcasts) and, in the case of a same situation (one broadcast under the same title), according to the interven• ing participants. If we disregard speed of delivery (which is nonetheless not a negligible variable) these variations are essentially due to the duration of each intervention. A low frequency of alternation corresponds to longer turns at speaking: he who has the floor keeps it longer. The opposite is true when the frequency is high. These quantitative characteristics and variations reflect the underlying mechanisms determining the dynamics of the exchanges. It is not necessary here to recall known notions. The main point is that control of the floor is an objective. When several speakers are together, they are also in competition and conflict. The situations considered here are not of the inconsiderate type in which the winner is he who is able to speak the loudest for the longest time and without pausing, which would allow the other to step in and establish himself in tum. But this eventuality is not excluded, even if its manifestations are a bit more subtle (as the tactics of insertion into discussion and the maintaining of the floor are more subtle in informal conversational ex• changes). Relations of power between speakers are at play. Much could be said on this point. Let us note simply that the questioner is endowed with power by the fact that he is supposed to thus direct the conversation (cf. Owsley and Scotton, 1984), but let it also be noted that when he who is questioned exercises power (in the case of the politician with his authority and stature), the scales often tilt in his favor in reality. To remain with the idea of the density of exchanges, it may be remarked that we are in the presence of two types of factors:

1. Acceleration/actors in exchanges. The rules of the game include imposing a relatively rapid rhythm to exchanges. This rule is sometimes explicitly recalled by the game leader. It corresponds to the concern of garnering the VERBAL EXCHANGES 55 pleas me of a public which delights (or is thought to delight) in a rapid rhythm that increases the density of exchanges, as in boxing matches. The game leader and the I's who, theoretically are concerted with him, endeavor to abide by this rule by increasing their interventions. There is another concern in the same vein: the tactic of harassment that certain I's utilize. To intervene when R has the floor is a way of preventing him from pursuing his develop• ment and possibly, even with an occasional intervention (which is not always a question, but often an affirmation), a way of steering him toward a less favorable stance. Furthermore, (and here we return to the level of power), this type of intervention suggests a certain fragility in R who, to the extent that he reacts to the interruption and follows the interrupter on his turf, does not demonstrate the ascendancy and authority that his status implies.

A rhetorical element comes into the picture when I (or any other intervening participant hostile to R) justifies his interruption by some declaration like "Such a view is inadmissible" or "I cannot allow such an affirmation or such an accusation". It appears determined by passion, conviction, such an intense concern for the truth that it cannot allow a view contrary to it to not be immediately countered ...

2. The participants are concerned to express themselves in a sufficiently long and detailed manner. This essentially concerns, under the circumstances, R's (the pI's being, by principle or by nature, briet), since in the case of politicians, they have messages to communicate, as we have recalled; this leads them to try to occupy a sufficient enough speaking time in order that they be allowed to set forth a maximum number of messages with sufficient levels of development so as to have them apprehended and accepted by the audience. These two factors are at odds. The unfolding of exchanges is marked by this conflict which contains vicissitudes revealing the dominance or efface• ment of one or the other participant. The I's tend to start their intervention once again or to produce a new pI when a break occurs in the unfolding of pR or there occurs a point calling for or allowing the introduction of a new pI. On his side, R utilizes various classic procedures allowing him to continue the development in which he is involved. Certain procedures are mechanical, like the technique of "smothering": preventing I from completely producing his intervention by continuing to develop one's own view. Others pertain to discursive technique. Having allowed pI to finish, R claims the necessity of continuing to respond (to finish responding) to a question previously posed, 56 PIERRE OLERON thus deferring the examination of pI until a later moment in the debate. This may be accompanied by references to norms: the right to express oneself completely on the point one was asked to deal with, the condemnation of an I who interferes with the normal unfolding of the debate, preventing one from dealing with an important point, the lack of consideration for a guest or for a person who is not of the I's orientation ... This kind of behavior typifies, let us say, an extreme R, but one represented by certain very real characters and which are more or less similar to certain others. The existence of notable differences between R's must be remarked. Certain ones lend themselves more willingly to the game of interruptions and agree to react to most of the pI's. Global attitudes underlie these variations and analyzing them could dissociate the aspects concerning the personalities of the intervening participants from the aspects corresponding to the choice of a role to play, even those concerning different conceptions of what exchanges are - and perhaps, even, of what relations between individuals are... not to forget intellectual characteristics like the sharing of one's attention between one's own view and that of others, and the plasticity in the articulation of the latter. These are problems which call for specific analyses which we merely point out here.

IV. STATUTE AND MODALITIES OF pI'S The structuring of exchanges depends on the nature of the pI's which not only intervene, as we have seen, like "launchers" [diclencheursJ of pR's, but also contribute to determining their content. It is logical to investigate their nature in order to understand their influence on this structuring. The exchanges under consideration here are, theoretically and from the formal point of view, of the question-answer type. pI is thus a question - still theoretically - for observation shows, as we shall see, that this is not always the case. Not going beyond the case where pI actually has the form of a question, it would be as well to define the actual statute of the view expressed in this form. Classical studies on the social rules of conversational exchanges have familiarized us with the idea that a question may be hidden under formulations which do not directly express the point about which the speaker wishes to be informed. One must delve deeper. The relationship between question and answer here is not simple and univocal. Simplicity and univocity characterize questions whose finality is authentically informative, with answers which are situated in a closed storehouse - for example, a registry office questionnaire, a tax declaration, a curriculum vitae, a lest, or, VERBAL EXCHANGES 57 in daily life, a request for the time, directions, or the price of a good... In many other cases, the gmmmatical identity (like the interrogative form of the verb, the question mark in writing) hides a variety of aspects and functions. Analyses of them pertain to specific studies which it is out of the question to approach here. Only a few points will be recalled that help in apprehending the structure of exchanges. When exchanges involve individuals whose relationship is characterized by polarity, those exchanges are rarely neutral and purely informative. This is the case with politicians, all representatives of tendencies, doctrines, interpretations which are in conflict with others; one is for or against them or the groups or ideas or values that they defend, just as they are themselves for certain of these and against others. This polarity orients their views and determines a selection within the framework of the storehouse alluded to above, but it orients the views which are addressed to them as well. The public complexion which media rebroadcasting confers upon these exchanges only amplifies these aspects. This holds true for questions. In debates where speakers who are at polar opposites intervene, speakers who are of the same level and function (two politicians, for example), the finality of a question posed by one or the other of them is practically never informative. I does not seek to inform himself (in general, he knows the answer), nor does he seek to inform the audience. On the contrary, for this would run counter to his objective and would favor the communication of the arguments of his adversary. The question is a move made, as in tennis or chess, and the goal is to inconvenience the other, to put him in an awkward situation from which it is hoped he will not escape or will escape with difficulty and hence a point be scored against him. In the exchanges studied here, where I is a journalist and R is a politician, one expects that the questions would have an informative finality. Actually, such questions are posed, but the participating journalists are not inves• tigators whose essential aim is to enlighten the public as to facts, opinions, programs, reactions to events or declarations. More often than not, they themselves have opinions certified by their attachment to the media to which they habitually offer their contribution. Thus their questions often have the same finality as those of politicians: to inconvenience the questioned and, if possible, to make him lose a point in the exchange. This is not the general rule. Certain journalists are specialists in a technical area (the economy, for example), others are of the same orientation as the politician questioned and the finality of their questions may actually be informative or play the role of an investment.2 In any case, the spectacle 58 PIERRE OLERON component which enters into these exchanges encourages the expression of conflicts and the production of questions which appear, in addition, to be challenges apt to maintain the attention of the audience - and to maintain the statutes in a system of stardom (involving the two faced off participants). Thus, even the fonn of a question may hide polemical and aggressive intentions. In the actual unfolding of exchanges, pI's which are no longer formally questions but rather affirmations may be moreover pointed out. Certain affrrmations are not an absolute break with the production of questions. Thus, a question may be preceded by expository elements concerning the present situation, the past, R's views or procedures, someone else's views or procedures, etc. This exposition may be considered to be an accompaniment or a natural introduction to a question, a procedure facilitat• ing its presentation. Thus, there is an equivalence between: "What do you think of Mr. X's statement according to which ... ?" and "Mr. X stated that... What do you think of this statement?" It is understood that the expository part does not exclude various possible angles to the presentation of things and that it may contribute to the determination of pRo On the other hand, affrrmative pI's have a less obvious status. What happens, for example, when I takes the floor again after pR in order to declare that this is not an answer to his question? This reply (noted as p'I) is an affirmation. It is not by nature necessarily polemical. In a sequence of pl-pR whose finality is didactic, I may legitimately declare that he has not understood, that he needs more complete explanations, clarification on a detail, etc. But in our exchanges, this reply is often polemical in that a tactic used by R often consists in side-stepping at least part of the answer. It can be considered that I merely prolongs his initial intention in this case which was to refuse to accept pR because a non-answer is a way of maintaining and prolonging the initial pI. But even though this is valid on the level of form, it does not exclude the polemical intention and the implicit accusation brought against R of a lack of sincerity and of respect for the rules of the game - even if these rules are formal principles that everyone knows are largely there in order to be circumvented.

v. STATUS AND MODALlTIES OFpR'S pR is a reaction to pI. It comprises two components which were distinguished above: 1) the response itself, articulated in accordance with the content of pI; 2) the use of speech to deliver a message, the utilization of pI more or less articulated upon it and the answer to it. It is fitting to examine both of them VERBAL EXCHANGES 59 while not forgetting that the rule of coherence of an expressed view implies the existence of links between them. Beforehand, it is fitting to reserve a place for non-answers which constitute a separate category of reactions.

1.lVon-responses The rules of the game of verbal exchanges imply that R is required to react before a pI which interpellates him (which is the case for a question, but also for any affirmation which runs counter to his positions and constitutes an attack against his person or his group). Silence would be tantamount to the loss of a point to the adversary or, worse yet, the loss of "face". (Abandonment, i.e. leaving the exchange situation, physical exiting from the "stage" can be, on the other hand, a means of protest with real scope, although it must be submitted to a different evaluation, but which, in any case, comes up more often than not to react to a mode of debate conduct, to the impossibility of answering, or, in public meeting situation, to an audience's reactions and/or attitudes.) What we call "non-response" is not silence, but rather an actually produced pRo We must distinguish between two categories. The first includes explicit declarations which make known, unequivocally, that R will not answer. The second concerns pR's that R presents as answers to pI, but whose meshing with the latter is contested by I, possibly by the game leader, or, in certain cases, by the audience.

A. Refusals to answer. The refusal to answer (in order that it not be confused with the loss of a point) is normally accompanied by a justification through which R makes known the reasons for his not answering. In the framework of actual exchanges, this justification is generally brief. One could comment upon it at greater length in order to show some of the presuppositions that are not at all or not completely mentioned by R. Justifications are of several types which are not necessarily exclusive.

1. The excuse of non-competence or of non-information. R declares himself to not be competent or informed concerning the point to which the pI pertains. Such a reaction occurs especially in technical areas where R can legitimately invoke this excuse or else occurs in relation to recent or confidential events or statements of which he can, with all appearance of probability, affirm that he has no knowledge. 60 PIERRE OLERON

2. The charge of non-pertinence. In these cases, not only does or may R declare that he will not answer, but his reaction appears to be an explicit or implicit criticism of pI and of I himself. The question asked is not pertinent: this is a way of accusing I of not respecting the rules of verbal exchanges, whether it be a matter of general rules of conversation, rules specific to the situation in which exchanges take place, or more general rules of an ethical nature or of the nature of conventions which concern relations between men, their responsibilities, the obligations that these responsibilities imply, etc. We should distinguish between: a) The charge of non-authenticity. According to R, the question is not really a question. I, or even any informed person, the audience, the public in general, knows the answer. For example, R has made numerous statements on a given subject and his position is common knowledge. I's information or the information of a larger circle introduces more than a nuance to this situation. On a theoretical level, in accordance with Searle's principle of sincerity, a question is sincere when the questioner does not know the answer. But that applies to rules for exchanges which are, let us say, private: between interlocutors without witnesses. In situations where the exchanges are public, the requirement of sincerity upon I is less obvious: he may be considered the spokesperson for an uninformed public which he, in away, incarnates. Thus the charge of non-authenticity seems more valid if it aims at form: rather than to question (which implies ignorance on his part), I should request that R express himself for the public's benefit. Only if the public has every chance of being informed is the charge formulated by R truly justified. b) The charge of impropriety. The refusal to answer is justified by a variety of reasons for which it appears difficult to anticipate an exhaustive list. Here are a few examples of it:

1. In response to a question posed concerning the disposition, intentions, plans of a third party, X (a head of state, or government, a president or leader of a party, of a group, etc.), the curt reaction of R consists in saying: "Ask him yourself!" It can be assumed that the subjects in the question pertain to X's "privative domain" to which he alone has direct access. R's answer could only be hypothetical or probable. R may refuse the change in register required by a question concerning a fact with only one answer (what made up X's mind, what he thinks, what he plans, etc.) but which can legitimately only be expressed in conjectural terms. And if X is a close acquaintance of R's, the latter's refusal can be justified by ethical reasons: to answer would VERBAL EXCHANGES 61 be contrary to the discretion implied by the intimacy of a third party and the trust associated with it.

2. R may declare that to answer would run counter to norms, would be improper or ill-timed (which is a way of putting I under accusation) for example, because it would jeopardize the dignity of the person concerned in the question, the respect associated with his functions, the sincerity in his words, his loyalty of action, etc.

3. If the question concerns a decision or a choice by R which is outside of his direct control ("Would you accept to be President X's prime minister?"), then R can justify his refusal by this situation ("It is up to the President to choose his prime minister." "One is never a candidate for the position of prime minister.")

4. If the question relates to a state which is unreal or not topical ("If, in an election, you had to choose between X and Y, for whom would you vote?") R may back up his refusal by the lack of topicality or the unreality of the situation alluded to.

5. In response to a question posed concerning some aspect of the present situation, R may justify his refusal to answer by declaring that these are secondary, minor, even contemptible aspects (e.g. problems of tactics or of electoral alliances), while the importance of other problems (the state of the economy, the future of the country) should lead I to make them the object of his questions. (Which is a way of acting upon the course of the debate by trying to inflect it toward subjects which R wishes to treat.)

B. Answers/non-answers. When R refuses to answer (which we have just examined), the situation is clear, even if the justifications he offers may be contested. On the other hand, it happens that, in reaction to pI, R may hold forth at some great length and that the quality of such an answer to I is not entirely obvious. It happens also that the audience feels this, and that I, or some other intervening participant (broadcast organizers have even imagined how to interpellate the guest by means of synthetic voice) express this quite crudely, the most direct way consisting in saying "You are not answering the question!" "We are questioning you on a specific point and you are speaking of something else!" Here, we enter into situations difficult to analyze and material for controversy and debate. Thus, a less demanding, less aggressive, 62 PIERRE O~RON more accommodating I with respect to R may declare himself satisfied or let it be known, by his silence, that pR constitutes a pertinent answer. Before a challenge to his statement, R has several possible attitudes at his disposal: 1) to admit that this statement indeed does not constitute an answer, but shift the burden of responsibility onto pI - a question which cannot have an answer. This brings us back to the situation in A2 above; 2) to affirm that he has, on the contrary, answered the question - a simple affmnation or one accompanied by an argument justifying it. This situation has no originality compared to the one which, in a general manner, we will now examine, in which pR is articulated with pI in a way which we must attempt to clarify. Indeed, either R answers I by simply maintaining his view by affirming its validity, or he demonstrates, by arguments, the mode of articulation linking pIandpR.

VI. THE pI-pR ARTICULATION The themes and views relating to a "same" subject define complex concep• tual networks. So that the articulation between pI and pR may take numerous forms which, in a more or less clever and a more or less convincing manner, I and especially R exploit. The mode of articulation is situated between two extremes which constitute, in away, its upper and lower limits. The upper limit is made up of answers which are strictly fit together with questions: the case we have discussed above. The lower limit would correspond to the production of pR's which are completely foreign to the question posed. This extreme case can only be imagined based on an artificial situation mentioned elsewhere (Oleron, 1984b) in which pR's would be picked at random from a sampling representing all of the themes possible and thus having every chance of ending up with no logical relation whatsoever with pI. Certain pR's observed are situated at the upper limit. None, obviously correspond to the lower limit, but a large proportion is situated between the two. Certain ones are treated as non-answers by I, or apprehended so in a more or less confused manner by the audience (cf. supra). When this is not the case, the situation is nonetheless far from clear due to the fact that the modes of articulation between pI's and pR's do not correspond to strictly determined frameworks, and because it is consequently difficult to situate pR on the scale defined by the two limits mentioned with any precision. On the level of tactics, R's move, which gives the impression that he is answering when he is not really, is a sign of skill. It is comparable to the ducking or dodging action of a boxer or fencer. These two athletes VERBAL EXCHANGES 63 demonstrate mastery of their art by knowing how to dodge. The same is true for a speaker in a debate. But points are not scored on the basis of dodges, but on that of "touches" and punches which actually reach the opponent. Whence the importance for R to unite positive elements (positive from his point of view), i.e. elements of his own message, with criticism of his opponent in the very framework of his answer to I. The fact of comprising various degrees or various forms of freedom characterizes the relationship between pI's and pR's. This is the opposite of the relationship between answers that fit together with the question. It is a freedom which allows R not to get closed into a framework that I might like to impose upon him and to introduce elements of his own message into his answer. The manners liable to ensure this freedom are several and we will not claim to propose an inventory or a systematization of them here. We will only mention three around which it appears possible to group statements covering a great diversity of contents.

1. The change in level The change in level will be considered on three scales: abstract/concrete, emotional, axiological (reference made to values). a) Abstract/concrete. This scale allows us to illustrate the notions of level and change. It is a scale familiar to common sense and widely used, at least in the form of dichotomies. In fact, it is a scale which considers the abstract/concrete character as much as the particular/general character of things. Any statement can be placed, in at least a plausible and approximate manner (and, in case one wants a more objective assessment, by having recourse to judges), at a certain level of abstraction and generality. One can speak of a change in level if when pI is situated at level N, pR does not remain at this level, but rather evokes more abstract or more concrete representations. Let us take an example. Consider the question (PI): "Why have you recently co-signed a bill in favor ofreinstating the death penalty?" and the answer (pR): "Two murders of children have recently taken place in my district. They provoked a strong reaction in the population." pI relates to a concrete and particular event: R 's signature, on an ap- 64 PIERRE OLE-RON proximately stated date, of a bill of law. pR as well concerns concrete and particular events which are localized in time. Both question and answer can be considered to be situated at the same level. However, R develops his answer and completes it by the following p'R: "Every man who kills must expect to be killed in turn." Now, a general principle is evoked and from this point of view, p'R is situated at a higher level than pIon the scale. The question concerning a particular fact has become an occasion to present a philosophical justification of the attitude with regard to capital punishment. (A reference to this attitude not being excluded, at the implicit level, from the question.) (It would be easy to find other examples in which in response to a general question about the justification for capital punishment, answers will be given which evoke particular cases of murder or, in an inverse direction, legal errors committed against "guilty parties" given the death penalty. This is a change in level going in the opposite direction from that which was just illustrated.) b) Emotional charge. The exploitation of an emotional register is a classic characteristic of argumentation. Question-answer exchanges of the purely informative kind exclude this (let it not be forgotten that the emotion connected to an answer can be a source of information for the questioner), but it comes into the picture when the exchange aims at or implies an influence on the listener. A statement may be emotionally neutral or it may express the speaker's emotional state or aim at provoking an emotion - indignation, anger, enthusiasm - in the listener. The change in level derives from the fact that a pR whose charge of emotion can be considered stronger or weaker than that of pI corresponds to a neutral or emotionally charged pI. For example, to an apparently factual question concerning an event, an action, or a plan, R may answer in an informative manner, but may also emotionally charge his answer. Thus he might become indignant that he could be asked the question put to him or express various sentiments with regard to events, persons, declarations, etc. upon which he is questioned. In the opposite direction from a dramatized question, he might answer by "calming down" the exchange and by returning to a cool vision of the matter at hand. c) Axiological references. Argumentation usually makes use of references to VERBAL EXCHANGES 65 values and norms. This allows for either positive or negative justifications and assessments concerning persons, actions, words, etc. This situation is comparable to the one we described with the emotional charge. Moreover, values and norms include emotional components which are difficult to disregard and which often motivate the references that the authors make to them. Thus, pI may be neutral and not include any reference to values or norms. On the other hand, R may answer with a statement which does mention them or which, without explicitly mentioning them, criticizes or approves (or refutes). Criticism or approval and justification are but the application, within the domain of discourse and its objects, of norms and values which are, for the moment accepted within the circle of speakers and listeners. Values are normally bipolar (good/bad, just/unjust, freedom/oppression. equality/inequality, etc.). The change in level can take place in the shift from one orientation to another. Consider the following pI: "Doesn't your preference for election by majority hinge on the fact that you count on it to help you win the next elections?" and the answer (pR): "We defend the election by majority because it is the only democratic vote." pI includes a (non-explicit) charge which aims at devalorizing R's behavior (or that of the group he belongs to): R's positions are determined by self• interest, ambition, the conquest of power. pR on the other hand, situates his position on the side of a value which is that of : R fights for the type of vote being debated as a defender of this value.

2. Exploitation of links between concepts Any domain which can be dealt with verbally is made up of a plurality of concepts which are linked in such a way as to form networks of great complexity, as we have recalled above. It is extremely difficult to reduce this complexity to a few limited chapter headings. The philosophers who proposed lists of categories, like Aristotle and Kant, tried to provide a solution, as, in the same way, but on a more concrete and utilitarian level, researchers in automated information. In the domain we are considering here, organization has yet to be done and, again, the inductive process is required in order to determine what links are most often implemented. By way of 66 PIERRE OllRON illustration, we will mention a few. a) Partition of the domain. Whatever its dimensions, every conceptual domain is divisible into parts. This even holds for a single concept which always comprises a union of characteristics and attributes. This is all the more spectacularly (and more frequently) the case with domains in which a plurality of concepts are articulated. Thus, the economic situation of a country is subdivided into sub-domains such as the budget balance, the inflation rate, the foreign trade balance, employment, tax rates, etc. R's freedom consists in utilizing these sub-domains, i.e. moving from one to another according to the message he wants to spread, while at the same time ensuring a certain coherence between his answer and the question, to the extent that these sub-domains belong to the same domain (in the above example, to the economy). Thus an opposition politician to whom it is asked if he does not feel compelled to recognize the government's success in the area of inflation will shift his answer into the area of unemployment (which is increasing) or into that of the total foreign loans contracted (too high in his opinion). He moves from a sub-domain favorable to his adversary to an unfavorable one while remaining in the same domain (the economy). b) Assimilation and differentiation. The relationships between sub-domains are not just characterized by partition, let us say, of an additive type that we have just discussed. Relationships of resemblance and difference also come up which R can exploit. A classic example of resemblance is that of analogy. The links between situations which are declared analogous or treated as such are generally indeterminate. They afford a considerable freedom to he who invokes them by choosing them from a very open set. The analogy with a past situation is classic: the precedent always carries considerable weight as theoreticians of argumentation have noted. Let us say that a politician belonging to a small party is questioned about the weak support for his party. He evokes an analogous situation in past years for this same party - a situation which took a positive turn thanks to the popularity of a leader whose name still carries much weight. He thus means to demonstrate that a weak situation at a given moment can be modified overnight, as it happened in the past. c) Links of cause and effect. Links of causality are important in the ex• changes considered here, for the questions treated relate to action: a domain VERBAL EXCHANGES 67 where such links are often mentioned (the causes for a situation or for events; the effect of decisions or of steps taken). Furthermore, causality easily leads to the charge, the attribution of responsibility which, in the area of polemics, is often invoked. Links of causality must be considered broadly to include reasons, motives, intentions, etc. which determine action - and may also justify action or propose a condemnation of it. The link between cause and effect is generally loose in subjects where the effects are determined by a plurality of causes and the mechanism uniting cause and effect is a matter for conjecture. It is also difficult, in these cases, to predict the consequences which would result from a decision or an intervention. This is where R's freedom comes from when utilizing this type of link and all the more so because a report on the origin of the facts con• sidered is sometimes not demanded by the question itself. R uses it to more effectively have his argument accepted. The same holds true in the case of the motives which are supposed to explain the opponent's actions or deci• sions.

3. Confrontation andfacing offwith the opponent Polemical exchange is tantamount to a conflict with an opponent against whom, as we recalled, one must mark points, for example in the political arena, by bringing into question the competence, or the behavior, of party representatives or leaders - their long- or short-term objectives, their programs, their past or present achievements. R is naturally (one could say "legitimately") led to speak of his opponent when the question put to him concerns the latter. If the theme of the exchange is focussed upon the opponent, this is an occasion for R to attack him by bringing up points not directly pertaining to the question or included in it, but which, in certain cases, are almost logically connected to it. For example, if questioned on his hostility toward an individual, on his refusal to consider him to be a "valid interlocutor", R will give the reasons for his hostility, his stance; these reasons constitute a critique of the individual, of his actions, attitudes, declarations. This allows for the communication of the negative message concerning him. When R is questioned on his opponent's statements concerning him and the attacks that the latter carries out against him, this is a situation of the same type. It is an opportunity to use the defense as a counter• attack. When the question does not concern the opponent, many possibilities are left open for introducing it. Thus the angle of history, when the opponent 68 PIERRE OLl~RON

(before a change in regime or majority) occupied the same offices as R (or members of his party). Questioned on his action in a country with which aid treaties exist, R will retrace the historical background of the situation. This might reveal errors committed by the other, the fact that he was less effective in ensuring the territorial freedom and autonomy of the country in question. Similarly, when questioned on his meeting with a personage hostile to an allied country, R might recall that he had been received officially by one of his predecessors. Or, on another point, R might recall that his objectives are the same as those of his opponent (which should have the effect of defusing the critiques coming from this direction), but that he realizes them faster and/or more efficiently than him. History may be used not only in a descriptive manner, but as the basis for a causal interpretation. The responsibility for a negative aspect of the present economic situation falls upon the opponent who, because he was a leader in the past and did not pursue a policy which would have avoided this situation (this is the "heritage" theme, as it has been dubbed in recent debates). Comparison and antithesis are of what could be termed normal usage. During an exposition by R of what he wants or of what he is accomplishing, he readily introduces points on the basis of which he can show opposition to his adversary as well as his lesser quality or lesser efficiency ("We are defending public schools. X and Y want to break them down!").

It should be noted that the rubrics discussed in this section are not ex• clusive. An exchange can be dealt with within several of them. For example, the mark of an opposition to an adversary can be made by invoking a value or a norm. Historical causality is an "intellectual" connection exploited on the level of opposition of actions and successes, etc. The pluridimensionality of the "space of exchanges" constitutes an additional difficulty for analysis, but it does not furnish the material for a theoretical objection since the "space of referents", i.e. the realities to which the exchanges refer, is itself multidimen• sional. The statute of the dimensions remains to be clarified and the dimensions which can be isolated are not necessarily situated on the same level. For example, those considered in 3. have a more direct relationship than others to the finalities of the polemical exchanges and may be considered to play a mobilizing role (cf. the distinction between sub-registers of components and of actualization, Oleron, 1984b) This is a distinction which the theory of argumentation. and, in general, the whole theory of action, implies. VERBAL EXCHANGES 69

VII. CONCLUSION We will not repeat once again that the elements for analysis proposed in this contribution are an outline which calls for numerous expansions, as much from the inventory point of view as from that of systematization. But to work in the direction proposed is a manner of trying to introduce rigorous elements in an area which escapes the rigor of logical models but in which all is nevertheless not nebulous and fluid or impressionistic and subjective. This is in conformity with Perelman's efforts to characterize and illustrate the modes of rationality peculiar to argumentation. One can hardly challenge the existence of a rationality underlying verbal exchanges. Even if, particularly in polemics, these exchanges manifest the play of automatisms, cliches, repetitions, mobilization of the irrational, even bad faith, and even if their effectiveness on the level of action can be questioned (not, however, irremediably), they are acts of intelligence. Our knowledge of them should widen and, we could say, "disenclave" the classical representation of intelligence which psychologists construct and in which the incorporation to the social and to the verbal is overly neglected.

NOTES

1 We have based ourselves on samplings of radio programs, principally: Le club de la presse (Europe 1), Le Grand jury (R.T .L.) and Face au public (France Inter) in which politicians are questioned by journalists and/or debate with them. The material limits of this contribution did not permit the inclusion of the specimens recorded in order to illustrate the analyses. In the case of those we did cite as examples, we have remained faithful to their mood and general meaning. 2 When the listeners intervene, if their anonymity is preserved, the questions they ask also suggest a polarity and intentions that are not purely informative.

BIBUOGRAPHY Oleron, P. (1983): L' argumentation. ColI. Que sais-je? Paris, PUF. OlelOn, P. (1984a): Elements pour une analyse de l'argumentation poIemique. Colloque Association pour la Recherche Cognitive, Les modes de raisonnement, Orsay, 25-27 April, pp. 390-405. Oleron, P. (1984b): Sur les echanges poIemiques et Ie probleme des macrostructures du langage. Bulletin de Psychologie, 38, 1-12. Owlsey, H.H. and Scotton, C.M. (1984): The conversational expression of power by television interviewer. Journal ofSocial Psychology, 123,261-271. Perelman, Chai'm and Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1970): Traite de I' argumentation, Ed. de l'Universite de BruxelIes, Bruxelles. JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE AND OSWALD DUCROT

ARGUMENTATIVITY AND INFORMATIVITY*

Modern science is constituted by substitut• ing... an Archimedean world of geometry which has become considered as real, for the qualitative world, or (which amounts to the same thing) by substituting a universe of measurement and precision for the world of the more or less, which is that of our daily life. Indeed such a substitution excludes from the Universe anything which cannot be submitted to exact measurement ... (A. Koyre, Etudes d' histoire de la pensee scientijique).

INTRODUCTION Studies in the new rhetoric have accustomed us to minimizing the role played in argumentation by facts and deduction from facts. More precisely, C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca have pointed out the many inter• ferences that exist between this factual or objective basis (in the usual sense of the term "objective") and the intersubjective relationships that the speaker establishes with his audience. Moving further in this direction, intersubjective relationships could be claimed to be not only parallel to but the very foundation of apparently objective data. As far as we are concerned however, our research on argumen• tation, carried out from a different point of view (i.e. that of linguistics), shows a similar evolution. Investigating the argumentative role played by the linguistic rendition of facts, we no longer distinguish the facts themselves from this rendition. The aim of the present article is to describe this evolution and its theoreti• cal implications. Indeed, we think that four stages can be distinguished in our study of argumentation. The rrrst consisted in considering language and argumentation as being entirely separate, in accordance with a prominent rhetorical position.

* Translated by Jean-Claude Anscombre.

71 72 JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE AND OSWALD DUCROT

During the second stage, inspired by analytical philosophy, argumentation (while remaining outside language) appeared to rely on some basic semantic properties of utterances: mainly, the distinction between asserted and presupposed contents. In a third approach, we noticed that inside the very structure of sentences, there exist strictly argumentative operators. We were thus led to include independent argumentative values within the meaning of sentences, alongside descriptive values. Such was the idea that we wished to emphasize in 'our book Argumentation in language (1983). In the fourth approach, our aim is to defend a more radical position, derived from the systematic use of the notion of topos. The "facts" "described" by sentences no longer seem to be more than the mere crystallization of argumentative dynamics. We will now present each of these four stages in detail, and show the different descriptions they imply for similar linguistic phenomena.

1. RADICAL DESCRWfIVISM In the first stage of argumentative theory, the linguistic structure of an utterance was not related to its argumentative use. In order to represent the argumentative sequences in discourse, it must be assumed that they rely not on the utterances but rather on the facts referred to by these utterances. In a discursive sequence, an utterance U leads to a conclusion C because U points out a fact F; and because in addition certain rules shared by the speakers allow them to believe that C is the case on the basis of F. In numerous cases (analyzed in particular by the new rhetoric), it is not F which leads to C but the fact that the speaker's intention is to bring out F by uttering U. In such a configuration, what is the role of language? It is twofold. On the one hand, the capacity for U to bring out F depends at least partially on the linguistic structure of the sentence P expressed by U. Note, however, that this first contribution of linguistic structure to argumentation is not, strictly speaking, argumentative in nature. It is the mere consequence of the power of words to refer to facts. On the other hand, language has a capacity to tell when a sequence is argumentative to the extent that connectives (such as therefore. consequently,for) can be found which indicate, when occurring between two utterances, that the facts referred to by one imply the acceptance of the validity of those referred to by the other. The only valid argument against such an approach (let it be called radical descriptivism), strictly speaking, would be drawn from a sentential analysis of utterances. Such an analysis should be able to show (as we will do later), ARGUMENT ATIVITY AND INFORMA TIVITY 73 that at the abstract level of sentences, some information is given on the argumentative use of their occurrences (i.e. the utterances). But such considerations alone did not force us to tum away from radical descriptivism. The study of connectives was the clinching argument. We realized that particles like but and even, traditionally analyzed as introducing relations between facts, have an argumentative value just like the words generally described as being the very basis of reasoning. Even a conjunction as apparently objective as and shows specific argumentative constraints of use: it cannot occur, for instance (without emphasizing a feeling of strangeness) between two utterances with opposite objectives.1 For example, an utterance like: Go see that movie: it is poorly directed and very well acted. Sounds odd under normal circumstances, but but would fit perfectly. Now it happens that such connectives are very commonly used in all types of discourse. It follows that argumentation, far from being a case by case phenomenon limited to a peculiar form of intellectual activity, is a permanent feature in the use of language. This certainly does not prove that argumenta• tion is to be integrated into the description of any sentence, but calls for such a hypothesis. It would lead to a more homogeneous description of what is inside sentences and what is between them. The following two examples will show the strictly linguistic implications of the approach meant by our first stage of reflection upon argumentation. A semantic description of French should be able to account for the difference between "little" (Fr. peu) and "a little" (Fr. un peu); for example between: (1) Peter has worked little. and: (2) Peter has worked a little. This difference explains the ironic value of the sequence "Peter has worked little: thus he might pass his exam" while it remains completely natural to draw the same conclusion from (2). To account for this phenomenon, we must assume that (1) and (2) bring out different facts (if we claim that argumentation is based solely on facts). A possibility is to claim (as has been done before) that "little" and "a little" refer to different quantities ("little" would be less than "a little"). Thus at a semantic level, the linguistic contrast between these two adverbs is reduced to a purely factual one between two quantities. Since the aim of this article is to no way polemic but rather to bring out the theoretical networks underlying each of the stages involved, we 74 JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE AND OSWALD DUCROT will not enter to a discussion about such a description of "little" and "a little". We prefer to bring in another couple of examples meant to reveal another aspect of the linguistic semantics imposed by "radical descriptivism". Consider the following: (3) Peter is as tall as Mary. (4) Peter is the same height as Mary. How can it be accounted for the differences between these two utterances? For they notably diverge as regards their argumentative potentialities in discourse. For example: (5) Peter is not really tall for his age: he is as tall as Mary. seems problematic (unless "as" is read as rectifying a "more", and then is - or could be - followed by a "no more") compared to: (6) Peter is not really tall for his age: he is the same height as Mary. which carries no rectifying intention. If argumentative dynamics relies on the facts referred to by utterances, then we have no alternative but to postulate that (3) and (4) do not refer to the same facts. From this point of view, a possible solution would be to assign contrasting descriptive values to the expressions. "To be the same height as" would refer to numerical equiv• alence, and "to be as tall as" to a quantative relation similar to what is called "greater than or equal to" in mathematics. Used as an argument, (3) would then not exclude a situation in which Peter is taller than Mary: hence the impossibility of (5). Let us merely mention one theoretical consequence of this kind of hypotheses. They make it necessary to introduce something similar to the of discourse - if only to explain why, in a multitude of contexts, and from an informative viewpoint, "as ... as" means equality. It is usual for example, to conclude that Peter and Mary are approximately the same height on the basis of (3) (otherwise, why else would we speak of a comparison of equivalence?). A solution frequently used by radical descriptivism is to assume that communication and information are governed by such a law of discourse (namely our Law of Exhaustivity'l), which requires that the maximum amount of information be given regarding the topic. Uttering (3) in a situation where Peter is known to be taller than Mary (even though such a situation would not entail the falsity of (3» would be to transgress this law. The use of "as... as" therefore implies an equality of height between Peter and Mary. ARGUMENT ATIVITY AND INFORMA TIVITY 75

Let us summarize the main arguments involved in radical descriptivism: a) Argumentative sequences in discourse are based on the facts referred to by the utterances. b) The linguistic structures expressed by utterances ("sentences" in our terminology) have the description of facts as their basic semantic role. From this point of view, sentences ascribed to utterances with an obvious quantita• tive interpretation provide the prototype of semantic structure of language. c) The information provided by utterances is derived on the one hand from the semantic value of sentences (which is informative), and on the other hand through the application to that value of laws of discourse governing the transmission of information. We stress this last specification, for we now appeal to laws of discourse that are formulated in terms of argumentation rather than information (see for example our Law of Weakness3 or the Law of Exhaustivity, in their present form)).

2. PRESUPPOSmONAL DESCRIPTIVISM

We will not go into too much detail for the second stage since it is only, all things considered, a kind of extension of the first. The claim that argumenta• tive sequences are strictly of factual origin remains. But they are no longer based on all the facts referred to by utterances: they only take some of them into consideration. This selection among facts is made on the basis of the linguistic properties of sentences. Taking inspiration from the philosophy of language, we will for instance split the semantic value of utterances into an asserted value (or assertion) and a presupposed value (or presupposition). Hence, the information in the utterance can be asserted or presupposed. It will then be postulated that argumentative sequences, like all sequences, hinge only on presupposed values. If we assume that assertion and presupposi• tion correspond to two specific attitudes in the speaker as regards the information provided, the second stage then implies a connection between argumentations and illocutionary attitudes. The examples of the preceding paragraph can be dealt with in such a framework; in order to distinguish "little" from "a little", they will be described as ascribing different values of assertion and presupposition to the utterances in which they occur. Thus: (1) Peter has worked little. would have the presupposition "Peter has worked" and the assertion "The quantity of work Peter has put out is low", which is an analysis in keeping 76 JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE AND OSWALD DUCROT with the usual criteria for presupposition_ Similarly, it will be postulated for: (2) Peter has worked a little. the assertion "Peter has put out some quantity of work", and the presupposi• tion "in case some work has been put out, the quantity is low". Since argumentation relies only on the assertion, it is clear that the conclusions drawn from (1) only involve the low amount of work put out, while those drawn from (2) only bring out the existence of some work. The advantage of this solution over the one given at the first stage is that it evades the assumption of a quantitative difference between "little" and "a little", while accounting in some degree for their contrastive argumentative potentialities. The second example, "as ... as" can be dealt with in a similar manner, by ascribing to: (3) Peter is as tall as Mary. the presupposition "Peter's height ~ Mary's height", and the assertion "Peter's height = Mary's height".4 On the contrary: (4) Peter is the same height as Mary. would consist in the sole assertion "Peter's height = Mary's height". As above, such a solution accounts for argumentative data: (3) only allows us to draw conclusions from Peter's tallness (since the assertion brings out the possibility of Peter's being taller); while the equivalence asserted in (4) is compatible with any conclusion depending on what is known or believed about Mary's height. This in no way prevents (3) from involving the same indication of equivalence as (4), which is obtained by combining both the assertion and the presupposition. The cleverness - or the trick - of such a technique is fairly obvious. The argumentative effects are accounted for on the basis of the asserted indication of the possibility of Peter being taller. But to take the informative value into account, this indication is discarded by means of the presupposition. What are the differences between these two stages? At the level of discourse, we find in both cases the claim that argumentation proceeds from fact to fact and consists in particular in drawing conclusions from facts. The second stage diverges from the first in that not all the facts referred to are involved in the argument, but only some of them, namely those which are meant to be asserted within the linguistic structure of the sentence. Thus the second stage assigns a decisive role in argumentation to the linguistic ARGUMENTATIVITY ANDINFORMATIVITY 77 structure, since it tells us which facts are and which are not argumentatively relevant. That is, the choice of one linguistic expression over another (for example "little" rather than "a little") entails the simultaneous selection (based on the same facts) of one type of conclusive objective over another. If at this second stage, argumentation is bound to linguistic structures, it is so by virtue of very general properties (the assertion/presupposition distinction and its role in the sequencing of utterances), and not because of a specifically argumentative property that would be an inherent semantic feature in the sentences.

3. ARGUMENTATION AS A COMPONENT OF MEANING We will now outline the third stage, which corresponds principally to the research collected in L' argumentation dans la langue. On thinking it over, we now consider it more justified as a transition towards the fourth stage than as an improvement over the second one. Nevertheless, it allows us to evade some of the fallacies involved in the solutions considered in the preceding section. For instance, these solutions consisted in introducing, for the sake of agreement with empirical data, presuppositions which would sometimes meet no real independent justification. Of course, in the above mentioned ex• amples with "little", the presupposition postulated meets the usual criteria (the interrogative and the negative are presupposition preserving). But the problem is more complex in the case of "a little" and "as ... as" (and the same holds for other examples not examined here). We had for example ascribed to: (2) Peter has worked a little. the presupposition, due to "a little", "if some work has been put out, the quantity is low". Now this component of meaning is certainly not apparent in (2), which may be meant for an addressee unaware of Peter's work. If we take such a component of meaning for granted, we must postulate it: it is then natural to consider it as a presupposition, since it apparently comes out in the question "Has Peter worked a little?". Strictly speaking, we cannot claim that this component is found both in the statement and in the question. All that may be said is that if it is assumed to be brought in by the statement, it is also found in the interrogation, and must then be granted the status of a presupposi• tion. This ad hoc approach at least provides a rationale for looking into other solutions. 78 JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE AND OSWALD DUCROT

Let us suppose nevertheless that such a presupposition is granted. Another problem then arises related to an ambiguity in the definition of asserted and presupposed content. Under closer examination, these definitions, though looking factual, are only a way of disguising argumentative values. Let us take the example of "little" once again. To define its asserted content, we had to appeal to the notion of "low quantity" (cf. for (1) the assertion "the quantity of work put out is low"). What might "low" mean here? The only possible explanation (that is one which would not introduce the fuzziness of "low" into the theory) appears to be the following. At the level of the sentence, a low quantity is one inferior to some limit whose existence (but not whose nature) the sentence ensures. The nature of this limit is specified, at the level of the utterance, by the context: it may be an expected, hoped-for quantity, or a quantity considered as normal. By saying that "little" sets such an upper bound, we seemingly account for the fact that a conclusion based on the importance of this quantity cannot be drawn from the quantity referred to in the statement. (1) cannot lead to conclusions based on Peter's work, since (1) brings in the existence of an upper bound to that work, without mention• ing a lower bound. In fact, such an explanation is a mere illusion. First, it gives no account for: (1') Peter has worked rather little. which must meet the same argumentative constraints as (1). Of course, (1,) sets an upper bound just like (1). But to the extent that "rather little" refers to a greater quantity than that brought in by "little" in the same context, it sets a lower bound as well. In case the explanation given for "little" were correct, (1') should be argumentatively ambiguous, depending on whether the lower or the upper bound is involved. This is obviously not the case: (1') leads to the sole conclusions based on the insufficiency of Peter's work. The difficulty seems even greater. If (1) precludes a certain type of conclusions, it is not because the quantity referred to is below some limit, but because it is brought in by the utterance from the viewpoint of this limit. Be the selected item "little" or "a little", in either case owing to this selection, a viewpoint that lessens the quantity referred to is taken up. And the argumenta• tive constraints derive from the adoption of this viewpoint. This is the notion that our third stage attempted to construct. In order to give an adequate semantic description of "as ... as", we claimed that utterances like: (3) Peter is as tall as Mary. ARGUMENT ATIVITY AND INFORMA TIVITY 79 bring in, at the very level of the sentence, two semantic components: a factual one and an argumentative one. Factually, (3) brings up the equivalence of Peter and Mary's height. In this, the utterance is analogous to: (4) Peter is the same height as Mary. But in addition, (3) entails argumentative directives: the equivalence of heights calls for the same type of conclusions that would be drawn from "Peter is tall". 5 We will deal with the case of "little" and "a little" in a very similar fashion. From a factual point of view, (1) and (2) are perfectly synonymous. That is, they both refer to a quantity which, in the meaning of the sentence, is ascribed to the same parameter and thus meant to be interpreted in the same way in the utterances. In a situation where "to work little" would mean "to work for one hour", in that same situation (and factually speaking), "to work a little" would also mean "to work for one hour". The difference between the two lexical items lies only at the argumentative level. (1) must be used to draw the type of conclusion which "Peter has not worked" would lead to, while (2) would argumentatively parallel "Peter has worked". The comparison between the second and the third stages may be outlined as follows. Both stages have in common that the utterance meaning involves factual indications which are determined by a factual component of the sentence meaning. They also both support the claim that the argumentative dynamics lie, at least partially, upon this factual component inherent in sentence meaning. On the other hand, the second and third stage differ in two respects. First, strictly speaking, only the third brings argumentative values into the semantic structure. Moreover, the second only brought out that the semantic structure of the sentence entailed the impossibility of some argumentative structures. The third goes further: it states that at least some sentences (e.g. those with "little", "a little", "as ...as") not only can exclude certain argumentative structures, but must also include others. They demand that their utterances must also be used argumentatively and in a given direction.

4. RADICAL ARGUMENTATIVISM We will now outline the position that we are presently attempting to elaborate. Although it implicitly underlied certain chapters of L' argumentation dans la langue, especially the last one, this position requires that we revise some of the formulations - and assumptions - made in this 80 JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE AND OSWALD DUCROT book. To be sure, the third stage is based on theoretical positions that provide useful tools for detailed analyses.6 But they underlie an image of language which we do not consider to be linguistically adequate, even if corresponds fairly well to a common viewpoint about language. For example, the third stage preserves the idea that argumentative dis• course is based on facts which are referred to as necessarily bringing in other facts (or belief in other facts). This is because of the nature of the facts. On this view, the intellectual process governing argumentative discourse would be logical or empirical deduction. For example, that of a detective who deduces that someone used a gun because there are fingerprints on it. In our opinion, it is on the contrary a matter of the process that consists in taking aspirin for a headache. In doing so, we merely apply a rule - that aspirin cures headache - without trying to find out the exact relationship between the physiology of the headache and the chemistry of aspirin. In a more general way, we will say that the discursive sequence leading from an utterance• argument to an utterance-conclusion always involves the application of general principles which we call topoi (pace Aristotle). If we conclude utterance B from utterance A, it is not because A refers to a fact F, and B to a fact G, and that referring to F necessarily brings G in. It is because A brings in F in a way that justifies the application of a topos (or a series of topoi) leading to an utterance B which appears to be a linguistic rendition of G. For us, the meaning of a sentence is the set of topoi whose application is said to be valid when uttered. To choose to utter, in a given situation, one sentence rather than another is to choose to apply certain topoi rather than others in this situation. Here is another formulation: the semantic value of sentences consists in allowing and focussing on facts from an argumentative viewpoint. To choose to describe an object as expensive and not cheap is not to provide some information on its price, but to choose to apply topoi regarding expensiveness rather than cheapness. For example, "The less expensive it is, the better deal it is", as opposed to "The more expensive a thing is, the less a good deal it is". Through this rough formulation of two specific topoi, we bring in a general hypothesis which in our opinion, is fundamental: a topos consists of a correspondence between two non-numerical gradations, even though some interpretations consist in mapping familiar numerical scales onto these gradations. For instance, such a notion as cost is not primarily numerical, even if it is usually interpreted as an amount of money. ARGUMENT ATIVITY AND INFORMA TIVITY 81

G"2

Our present conception of argumentative discourse thus implies that there are, at the deep level of language (i.e. at sentence level) directives having to do with the topoi to be used in a given utterance. More generally, we describe the linguistic predicates (e.g. the verb to work") as bundles of topoi. To understand the word "to work" is to think it possible, in a certain field of activity, to build up a gradation Go defined through its correspondences with a series of other gradations G;, G;,,,.G~. Each of these correspondences (Go' (G;), Go' G,),,,., (Go' G~) is a topos Tl' TZ,,,.,Tn • Go being the gradation of work, G; may be for example that of success, G; that of merit, G~ that of fatigue. A first comment: each of the gradations G;, G;, ... G~ is itself in correspon• dence with a series of other gradations G"p G"z,"" G'~. A sort of topical field is then substituted for the usual lexical field. Second remark: our diagram must read with a structuralist perspective in mind: each of its summits has value only in relation to others. One does not start by setting the gradation of work", and then the correspondence with the gradations of "merit" and "fatigue". The gradation of "work" is intrinsically made up, via the topoi, of its relations with other gradations. In other words, to claim that Peter has worked more than John would be tantamount to committing oneself to the fact that Peter's work (all other things being equal) is more tiresome, successful or meritful than that of John. Third remark: the above diagram is, of course, ultra-simplified, mainly in 82 JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE AND OSWALD DUCROT that it does not show that each summit may itself be reached by a multitude of topoi. The word "work" may be understood without assuming it is the only source of success. A final remark: we in no way claim that all individuals of the same linguistic community share the same topical field, nor even that a given individual always uses the same one. We will re-examin the examples in the preceding paragraph from within this new framework. It will be remembered that in order to describe "little" and "a little" at the second stage, we had to appeal to the notion of low quantity considered as a factual data. Having noted the basically argumenta• tive nature of the concept of lowness, we had to give up this notion at the third stage. We substituted a purely factual parameter common to both "little" and "a little" for this concept, which had to support contrastive argumentative orientations. The relevance of such a parameter is what is brought into question in the fourth stage. What might the notion of low quantity mean? This is indeed a valid question: the fact that "low quantity" is a commonly used expression (whose directives for use are provided by language) does not entail any a priori status of a concept valid for a linguistic description with scientific objectives in mind. To show what kind of objective we are aiming at, we will analyze (1) and (2) as follows. (2) will be described by assigning to the expressed sentence the set of topoi involved in the predicate "to work", i.e. ''The more work there is, the more y". Thus, amongst other properties, the operator is topoi preserving when applied to a predicate. The sentence therefore stipulates that when uttering (2), a selection will have to be made between these topoi, and a conclusion like "He is tired" or "He is meritful" - or conclusions drawn from them - will have to be considered. We have frequently referred to this selection of topoi as argumentative orientation. But, besides argumentative orientation, the sentence expressed by (2) involves other directives relating to its argumentative force. That is, it locates, for example, Peter's work at the bottom of the gradation Go of work. In our structuralist perspective, such a force simply means that from ut• terances like (2), the only conclusions that can be drawn are related to an equally low position on the gradation Gi put into correspondence with Go in the selected topos. (2) could then be followed by "We must give him a little something", but not by "He deserves a big reward". Unless some extra argument is brought in, such as "The weather is unbearably hot", which would then allow for "moving upwards" in the gradation G~. The case of "little" is more complex and has to appeal to two more notions. The first - often referred to in our research - is that of polyphony.7 The ARGUMENT ATIVITY AND INFORM ATIVITY 83 second is that of converse topos which we will roughly define. Suppose a topos (+x, +y), which we call a direct topos. It cannot be brought in without at the same time assuming another topos - the converse topos (-x, -y); the converse topos "The less work there is, the less fatigue there is" is closely related to the direct topos "The more work there is, the more fatigue there is". The former also sets out correspondences between gradations involved in the direct topos. Let us now return to (1) and the description of "little". We will say that the sentence underlying (1) stipulates that is occurrences bring in two utterers. The viewpoint of VI could be roughly paraphrased by (2). He thus applies a topos like "The more work there is, the more y", thus locating Peter's work in the lower zone of the Go gradation of work. The speaker S of (I), considering the location of Peter's work in the gradation, is then led to apply an argumen• tative law (namely our Law of Weakness): the fact that S only considers arguments thought to be weak arguments in favor of a given conclusion amounts arguing strongly for the opposite conclusion. This amounts to S's bringing in and even sharing the viewpoint of an other utterer V 2 who would no longer call for a direct topos, but a converse one "The less work there is, the less y". To the extent that S shares V 2's viewpoint in this crystallized debate, (1) must lead to a conclusion called forth by the converse topos. We thus explain that (1) is argumentatively parallel with "Peter has not worked", while at the same time allowing for the validity of VI'S viewpoint, that is, some work has been done. Let us go to our second example - that of "as ... as", dealt with in the utterance: (3) Peter is as tall as Mary. On the one hand, the difficulty of this structure is due to the fact that it seems to bring out some sort of symmetry between Peter and Mary. On the other hand, it simultaneously involves a dissymmetry that shows up in discursive sequences. These sequences can only be based on Peter's height, not on Mary's. At the third stage, and in order to account for this two-fold nature, we have assigned the symmetry to the informative level (equivalence of heights), and the dissymmetry to the argumentative one. We now consider this separation as some sort of a compromise. In our present conception, its main advantage, beyond its explicative value, lies in bringing in the notion of argumentativity in a field where informativity ruled as master. In fact, we intend to go much further. What would make that the informative component of our description appears to be convincing is that in uttering (3), the 84 JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE AND OSWALD DUCROT speakers are generally thinking of a numerical comparison of heights. In fact, the apparent value of a quantitative equivalence is not related to the "as ... as" structure of (3), but to the adjective "tall", or rather to a specific use of it. Such a value seems less obvious if "tall" refers to a moral or historical value, and totally fades away if "nice", "hospitable", "clever", etc. are substituted for "tall". It so happens that pedagogical grammars usually take, as examples of comparison of equivalence,s adjectives suggesting a quantitative interpreta• tion, whereas such adjectives ("tall", "old", "heavy", "long", etc.) are in no way prototypical. The position taken in the third stage then makes it neces• sary to claim that most of the uses of comparison of equivalence depend on a numerical metaphor: we analyze niceness, cleverness, etc. as if they could be quantified. Our attitude is just the opposite. We would like to propose a non-quantita• tive general description of "as ... as" - a description whose quantitative interpretation would only be possible and not basic. For us, the sentence expressed by (3) requires that in all the topoi (Go' G~), (Go' G;), ... , (Go' G~) brought in by the predicate "tall", Peter and Mary be located at the same degree of the initial gradation Go. This description stipulates that, mutatis mutandis, uttering (3) amounts to granting that the same conclusions can be drawn from either the location of Peter or that of Mary on the gradation Go. We thus account for the symmetrical aspect of the comparative structure. In particular, this symmetry can be seen as a numerical equality by simply mapping a quantitative scale onto Go. The dissymmetrical aspect depends on another directive involved in the sentence: when uttering (3), we perform an act of argumentation that must consist in applying the (direct) topos selected to Peter and not to Mary. This is what was roughly formulated in terms of (3) having the same argumentative objectives as "Peter is tall"9. In view of these examples, the difference between the third and fourth stage may be summarized as follows. In the third stage, the function of the argumentative operators was to introduce argumentativity into the semantic structure of the sentence. This had two consequences: 1) That there can be sentences without argumentative value (those where such operators do not occur). 2) That the sentences with operators may show argumentative components (brought in by the operator) along with informative components involved in the initial sentence to which the operator was applied. In the fourth stage, on the contrary, argumentative operators do not introduce argumentativity: it is already there in the initial sentences, by means of the topoi which constitute the meaning of the predicates. The more ARGUMENTATIVTIY AND INFORMATIVITY 85 restricted role of the operators is to specify the way the topoi must apply. Should direct or converse topoi or both be selected? What argumentative force will the utterance have? etc. Within such a framework, and if we extend this argument to its logical conclusion, it should be claimed that there are no informative values at sentence level. Not only would there be no purely informative sentences, but there would not even be any informative component in the sentence meaning. This does not mean that there are no informative uses of sentences. But it does in fact mean that informative-like uses are derived from a deeper component which is purely argumentative. They result from a utilitarian use of language, a certain rationalizing ideology (Benveniste called it "logicizing") which is hidden in the utterances and which can only hide by granting to words an intrinsic power to represent things. The gradation Go which, in our opinion, is involved in any linguistic predicate, thus tends to be viewed as a measurement of reality: work, niceness, intelligence, etc., could be quantified. It will doubtless be objected that such things as numbers and measure• ments are, indeed, found in natural languages: there are nouns for numbers and units of measurement. The solution which we are presently considering is the following: numerical indications are operators, but contrary to the other operators mentioned here, they do not give argumentative results when applied. Of course, they also apply to basic sentences involving argumenta• tive values. A sentence like "Peter has worked for three hours" comes from the application of an operator to an initial sentence "Peter has worked", just like "Peter has worked a little". But the operators examined in this article differ from the numerical operators. The latter cancel the constraints involved in the initial sentence with regard to the use of topoi: whereas the former re• enforce, invert or attenuate them. In this respect, numerical operators look more objective - or less argumentative - than the other operators. They open up potentialities that argumentative operators constrain. To examplify this idea, let us compare: (7) Sue has some children. and (8) Sue has two children. A relevant fact for the description of this comparison is the following. Let us imagine a speaker unaware of whether two or three children are required to be granted some family subsidy. He could normally say: "Sue has two 86 JEAN-CLAUDE ANSCOMBRE AND OSWALD DUCROT children. I think she can get the family subsidy" as well as "Sue has two children. I'm not sure she can get the family subsidy." He might also state: "Sue has some children. I think she can get the family subsidy". But it would sound bizarre to say: "Sue has some children. I don't think she can get the family subsidy" - a statement which would require a "but". As French "des", "some" thus demands that only a direct topos ''The more children one has, the more y" be applied, while "two" simultaneously allows for the use of the direct topos and its converse. This example illustrates the manner in which we are attempting to deal with quantitative operators and more generally, apparently objective sen• tences. Far from being a primitive fact, this "objectivity" would only be the result of a cancellation of argumentative constraints - a cancellation which, while leaving all the argumentative objectives open, generates the illusion that none exist. The informative aspect would therefore be only a by-product.

NOTES

1 Cf. on this point A. Ibrahim: "Y-a-t-il deux manieres de dire la meme chose", La nouvelle revue du Caire (1978), No.2. 2 Already fonnulated in O. Ducrot: "Peu et un peu", 1970. 3 The fonnulation will be found in Anscombre-Ducrot, 1983. 4 Here we are following a suggestion by R. Zuber. S In this paper, we only consider the case in which the comparative structure occurs with Peter as its topic. When it occurs with Mary as its topic, the equivalence of heights leads to a conclusion which could be drawn from "Mary is not tall". 6 See for example O. Ducrot et al. Les mots du discours, 1980. 7 On this notion, see O. Ducrot: Le dire et Ie dit, fmal chapter. s This is particularly obvious in all the works with a pedagogical vocation, and is not limited to grade-school grammars. As an example, here are the adjectives used to illustrate the comparative degree in the opuscu1es of the Que sais-je? series devoted to specific languages: B. Pottier, Grammaire de I'espagno/: "aimable", "grand"; A. Tellier, Grammaire de L'anglais: "grand"; D.J. Veyrenc, Grammaire du chinois: "grand", "cher"; P. Guiraud, La syntaxe du fraru;ais: "rouge", "vite"; G. Giraud, Grammaire du grec: "grand", "bon"; J. Allieres, Les basques: "vieux", "bon"; J. Varenne, Grammaire du sanskrit: "bon", "lourd", "petit". There is an exception: in his Physiologie de la languefraru;aise, G. Galichet takes "courageux" as the prototype of scalar adjectives. 9 In the case where Mary is the topic (case which is not examined in this paper), the sentence then stipulates that in the utterance, the sole converse topoi is to be applied to Mary. ARGUMENTATIVITY AND INFORMATIVITY 87

BffiUOGRAPHY Anscombre, J.C. (1973): "Meme Ie roi de France est sage", Communications, 20, p.40-82. Anscombre, IC. (1975): "n etait une fois une princesse aussi belle que bonne", Semantikos, 1, 1, p. 1-28. Anscombre, J.C. (1976): "n etait une fois une princesse aussi belle que bonne", Semantikos 1, 2, p. 1-26. Anscombre, J.C. (1984): "Argumentation et topoi", in Argumentation et valeurs, Actes du 5e colloque d'Albi, p. 45-70. Anscombre, IC., Ducrot, O. (1977): "Deux mais en franyais?" Lingua, 43, p. 23-40. Anscombre, J.C., Ducrot, O. (1983): L' argumentation dans la langue, Ed. Mardaga, Bruxelles. Ducrot, O. (1970): "Peu et un peu", Cahiers de iexicologie p. 21-52. Ducrot, O. (1973): La preuve et Ie dire, Marne, Paris, 1973. Ducrot, O. (1982): "Note sur l'argumentation", Cahiers de linguistique fr~aise, 4, p.143-153. Ducrot, O. (1985): Le dire et Ie dit, Ed. de Minuit, Paris. Ducrot, O. et al. (1980): Les mots du discours, Ed. de Minuit, Paris. Perelman, C., Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1970): Traite de l'argumentation, Ed. de l'Universite de Bruxelles, Bruxelles. JUDITH SCHLANGER

SAYING AND KNOWING

There are intellectual posltIons to which we cling without ever having decided about them. The question of non verbal thought seems to be one of those. Opinions are strongly divided about it, still there seems to be no real debate; convictions are expressed, but they fail to come to grip each with the other. This does not prevent the discussion from going on, as various polemical episodes keep reappearing, each of them stressing a different aspect. This kind of ever-conflicting situation, where opinions are strongly divided - there exists a non verbal thought, all thinking is necessarily verbal - keeps bringing forth new conflictual episodes. A good classical example of such an episode is the polemical reaction of Galton - a hundred years ago - to Max Milller's theory on mythological thought. Max Milller, one might remember, explains mythology through language, through the very fabric of language: there is a correlation between verbal units and mythological entities, and, more broadly, between the shape and structure of mythical thinking and its verbal dimension. In a way, he sees the mythological imagination as a mode or a state - something like a solid state - of linguistic reality. Galton is violently opposed to such a view, which explains a whole series of phenomena as by-products of language. His point is not mythological thinking as such. What he cannot accept is the primary role ascribed to the substance of language. Galton is convinced of the existence of what he calls "thought without words"; for him, this is not a marginal phenomenon, but on the contrary a central device in our intellectual make-up. For instance, he understands the workings of memory through the pattern of composite pictures, or superposed photographs, on which he spent a few years' work. In order to isolate physical types, Galton used to take several successive pictures on the same photographical plate; and this provides him with a model for the production of general ideas: a general concept is a set of memories mixed in a kind of fuzzy superposition, in such a way as to relate to all their individual components without being identical to any of them. This is a mechanistic and spatial representation of the working of our mind, and indeed Galton explains mental creation along the same lines: when ideas are waiting in the anteroom

89 90 JUDITH SCHLANGER of consciousness, they join together in different kinds of association, and some of these associations become eventually steady. It is quite clear that if Galton understands mental activity as the interplay of images, which associate, overlap, get nearer and farther one from the other inside some mental space, then he cannot accept Max Milller's view of language as a fundamental factor in the constitution of thought; and more specifically, in the case of myth, the view of language as the substance and contents of mythology. Let us leave now this particular example, and look at the more general claim. Nobody denies that the major part of our thinking activity is verbal and discursive: but some people insist that there also exists, along discursive thinking, a wordless cerebral activity that is a thought of its kind as well. A good example for this stand is Einstein, who used to be quite ironical about people who believe that one thinks only with words. It is of course a fact that in many domains - such as music, architecture, and others -, abstract activity is essentially non verbal. What is at stake is not that there exists a non verbal activity that is abstract, productive, important. What is at stake is whether such a non verbal activity has an intellectual cognitive function. If we bypass the classical although provocative question of the nature of invention in the domain of pure mathematics (is it as such a cognitive construct?), the issue concerns non verbal thought and its relation to knowledge: does this non verbal dimension pertain to knowledge, and how? In a marginal way, or as a main element? At the level of basic intuitions, of heuristics, of clarification and control? The question is not whether non verbal thinking exists at all, but how it relates to knowledge. Let us look at what the intuitions on both sides imply. Among those who stress the non verbal, the non conceptual, dimensions of thought and understanding, some consider this non verbal dimension as being articulate, and others consider it as mute. The non verbal aspect of thought is articulate when thought is seen as a specific space for syntactic operations. Herbert Simon's heuristic procedures, and generally speaking the whole range of problem-solving, imply that what takes place mentally is shaped by a kind of language, which includes a syntax and entails communication: and that this language is non verbal. Rudolf Arnheim's thesis on "visual thinking" is even more spatial, in the way it stresses the cognitive function of perception, which generates images and forms, symbols and abstraction. In Arnheim's view, the visual medium fulfills all the intellectual functions that are usually ascribed to the verbal medium; so that the verbal medium, far from being essential to the activity of SAYING AND KNOWING 91 thinking, plays but an auxiliary role. This brings forward the notion of a non discursive abstraction, a conceptless abstract thought If verbal thinking is understood as an articulate operating behavior, what comes into focus is the notion of abstraction. On the other hand, if one states that the non verbal aspect of thought is not articulate but mute, and cannot be put directly into words, them what comes into focus is the notion of intuition. The name of Bergson, and the tradition it symbolizes, can be useful here as kind of shorthand. If the intuitive core of philosophical vision goes much deeper than language, then the formulation of this vision will be its clothing, or its make-up. A deep intuition has to be formulated, expressed, expanded: this is part of the social constraints of communication; but it leaves us on the surface, and leads us no further. Besides, verbal clothing itself is said to be insufficient, ineffective, inade• quate. There are different ways of being dissatisfied with language, especially with natural language. It can be for 'baconian' reasons, because it interferes too much since its grid is too compelling; or, for the opposite reason, because it is amorphous and fuzzy. Some physicists consider conceptual language as a "semantic mud" that sticks to theoretical conceptualisation and weighs on it. Anyway, whether language is taken to task for being too interfering or for being too vague, it would clearly be a good thing, in order to think rigorously, to bypass its muddle - especially through formalisation. On one side, an essentially non verbal theoretical intuition gets poorer and distorted as soon as it is put into words; and on the other side, the right way to deal with a theory is to overcome verbal fuzzyness through formalisation. In between, words disturb. Let us now look at the other side, to those who stress that language, far from being a secondary substance that dims the sharpnes and rigour of thinking, is indeed the very medium of thought. They too speak from different points of view, and from various domains. One way of taking into account the verbal nature and texture of thought, is to acknowledge the weight of language in the shaping of reality. This is the perspective of linguistic : language shapes and interprets the world, and to belong to a linguistic community is to share its interpretation of reality as invisibly self-evident. Since meaning is accessible only through a linguis• tic community, the plural situation is a "natural" one, and everybody's outlook is necessarily partial. One recognizes here Sapir's and Whorf's perspective, and also, with a somewhat different inflexion, Trier's and Weisgerber's. Where Sapir and Whorf stress syntax as the grid of perception and conceptualisation, Trier and Weingerber, through their theory of 92 JUDITH SCHLANGER semantic fields, consider uppermost the lexicon, the network of relationships between terms, and the overwhelming strength of the context. By identifying the linguistic community of the mothertongue with the historical community of the national language, Trier and Weisgerber belong to the humboldtian romantic tradition. It is clear that this approach links very strongly the mental and verbal realms; but it does not pertain specifically to knowledge, inasmuch as abstract knowledge constitutes a special enterprise with a specific aim. Cassirer - heir to Humboldt as much as to Kant - is more directly concerned with the intellectual function of language as "middle world". The fact that he speaks about language in general, and not about the special strictures of the mothertongue, enables him to say that our abstract conceptual language shapes and builds from within the world we can know, which is by definition a construct. Another example of this intellectualist approach, which links the percep• tion of reality to verbal conceptualisation, can be found in Koyre's work, as well as in the relativistic history of science that stems from him. Although it may seem somewhat unusual to consider this history of science as a decision about the importance of language for knowledge, one can show that it emphasizes the scope of conceptual language in several ways. Since this history of science is and claims to be a history of scientific thought, it is mainly the study of conceptions, discussions, theoretical representations, the study of the whole intellectual framework of scientific development. It stresses the semantic dimensions of scientific activity at the cultural level, where it is necessarily concept bound, and therefore word-ladden. And since hypotheses and theoretical representations have changed all along, they are to be understood through their historical determinations. One can show, especially when reaching back into the past, how a theoretical universe is linked to past mental and intellectual frameworks. In this connection, scientific thought is seen through its context, through the whole horizon of intellectual discourse at a given time. Through numerous monographical studies and methodological essays, this relativist history of science has mainly focused on the historical and cultural dimension of scientific theories. By so doing, it has partially abolished the positivist distinction between the scientific venture and the other intellectual ventures whose aim is knowledge. Once they are considered as conceptual works, Galileo's or Kepler's conceptions become part of the conceptual works of their time, as discursive texts dealing with ideas, or, to quote Rousseau's expression, "des ouvrages de raisonnement". What may put them SAYING AND KNOWING 93 apart does not appear at this level, where the history of scientific thought is studied as an aspect or a mode of intellectual history. What all intellectual enterprises have in common is the need for conceptualisation and formula• tion. They all have to go through the verbal substance of thought. Let us go back to non verbal abstract activity and the question of its intellectual cognitive function. What is at stake here is the nature and scope of intellectual knowledge. It seems clear that the non verbal can fulfill some intellectual functions, but not all of them. There is definitely room for a non verbal abstraction and a non verbal intuition, but conception has to be verbal. And this is the point where knowing, as an intellectual activity and as the general venture of thought, is directly linked to language. At this level, language is more than the medium of conceptualisation: it is coextensive to the intellectual and cultural range of knowledge. I want now to underline briefly some aspects of this speculative function of conceptuallanguge. a) If it is to be relevant to intellectual knowledge, conceptualisation has to relate to some problematic concern. It usually relates to an acknowledged problematic frame, the normal frame of debates in such a field at this time. Sometimes, conceptualisation is linked to a conceptual displacement, as the established problematic is challenged or even rejected. Whatever the case, relevant intellectual activity is related to a problematic field, that gives any particular piece of reasoning its meaning and its scope. Outside of a problematic frame, be it an established one or a new one struggling for recognition, a conceptual utterance cannot be relevant to knowledge, since it is, properly speaking, meaningless. One of the disquieting limits of intellec• tual heuristics is precisely the question of meaninglessness. Any intellectual problematic brings forth immediately the sharpness of thinking into the texture of past problematics, of cultural memory, and of the history of meaning. One reason that makes it difficult to say that non verbal activity pertains directly to intellectual knowledge, is not only that the medium of reflection is verbal, but also, and more importantly, that the odds of know ledge are semantic. b) An idea focuses on a term, or on a set of terms. Those are often loaded terms, loaded by their present rational success in a given domain, or by the historical inheritance of their previous uses. Terms have, among other aspects and characteristics, a heuristic dimension. They enable us to point out something that has not yet be conceived, and has therefore neither place nor name. A new conception can take shape along such verbal schemes, borrow them or move them. If we could not borrow terms and notions, and tranfer partial languages from one domain to another, we could not conceive 94 JUDITH SCHLANGER something that would be different, which means that we could not think. At this level, it is difficult to see how what is non verbal, what is basically foreign to language, can enable us to explore thought and move on. The point is not only that discursivity needs terms, which is a technical necessity; it goes deeper, as any displacemennt of meaning is related to the historical and cultural accumulation of past meanings. In other words, it is possible to say new things intelligently because others have already spoken. What is at stake in this relationship between new meanings and previous words is the historical essence of thought. c) Conceptualisation is a process, and this discursive process is in itself an intellectual reflexive dimension. A new theoretical outlook does not turn up as an intuitive gift, instantaneous and complete, which only needs to be put into words in order to become the lineary exposition of an intellectual work. A new thought thinks itself through its own development. Through the ways and means of the discursive exposition, through adjustments and modifica• tions, even through the constraints of genre and mode, the intellectual process unfolds, changing some of its proportions or accentuations - and this discursive process is fundamental to any theoretical intuition. On the non verbal side can be found a strategy of means, such as, for instance, the trials and errors of problem-solving; but what happens in the process of semantic abstraction goes much further: it does really affect and shape the organisation and significance of what is being thought. Therefore the discursive develop• ment of thought, and the formulation of thought, is not a technical but an intellectual dimension of thought. If a real discussion on the verbal and the non verbal nature of thought is to take place, it has first of all to take into account the strength and scope of language. I have just underlined some aspects of conceptual language: problematics as a necessary frame of relevance, the fruitfulness of loaded and borrowed terms, the fruitful adjustments of discursivity as a process. This all points to what makes knowledge intellectually meaningful. Can something meaningless be relevant to knowledge? This starts another discussion, about knowledge: is it essentially intellectual or not? LAMBROS COULOUBARITSIS

DIALECfIC, RHETORIC AND CRITIQUE IN ARISTOTLE

The term "dialectic" is one of those words which philosophers have not stopped making use of since Antiquity, enriching it with such a variety of meanings that today, when we go to use it, we are deeply troubled. In Aristotelian terminology, it has become a plurivocal or equivocal term, a pollacMs legomenon. It is henceforth easy to understand that at the moment when contemporary philosophy undertook a spectacular return to Aristotelian methodology, it was very scrupulous in its use of it. These scruples are most clearly exemplified by Charm Perelman who, when he introduced the "new rhetoric" with L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, preferred to eliminate it from the theory of argumentation. 1 Moreover, it is in this context that argumentation subse• quently developed, claiming, as it did, to go beyond the field of rhetoric. Now, it is not without interest to remark that there is a certain hesitation in Perelman himself at that time: shortly before, in a lecture, he notes the existence of a "dialectical argumentation" and deems "philosophical dialogue par excellence to be dialectical" in that philosophical method cannot be founded upon intuitions and evidences considered to be irrefragable but rather upon conceptions generally considered to be granted and which are confronted and contrasted with each other.2 Furthermore, by basing himself upon Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations, where Aristotle distinguishes various types of speeches - didactic, dialectical, critical and eristic - without referring to rhetoric (cf. 1. 165b.1-5), Perelman supports the expression "dialectical argumentation". Paradoxically, three years later, in The New Rhetoric,3 this text by Aristotle no longer.appears. In its place, there emerges a critique of "the very spirit in which Antiquity busied itself with dialectic and rhetoric". Referring principally to Aristotle, Perelman explains that: Dialectical reasoning is considered as running parallel with analytic reasoning, but treating of that which is probable instead of dealing with propositions which are necessary. The very notion that dialectic concerns opinions, i.e. theses which are adhered to with variable intensity, is not exploited. One might think that the status of that which is subject to opinion is impersonal and that opinions are not relative to the minds which adhere to them. On the contrary, this idea of adherence and of the minds to which a discourse is addressed is essential in all the ancient theories of rhetoric.

95 96 LAMBROS COULOUBARITSIS

Our "rapprochement" with the latter aims at emphasizing the fact that it is in terms of an audience that an argumentation develops; the study of the opinionable, as described in the Topics, will have a place in this framework.4 In thus shifting the Aristotelian view of dialectic toward a rhetorical context in which the "opinionable" would have a place, Perelman ensures the theory of argumentation of the destiny recognized for it today. All the same, something seems to remain in the shadows of this development: what Perelman reveals as being an "impersonal opinionable" of dialectic and which he avoids examining thoroughly by not pursuing further a confronta• tion between dialectic and rhetoric in Aristotle. Now, when we know, on the other hand, that philosophical argumentation in Aristotle cannot be related back to rhetoric discourse, whereas on the contrary it seems bound to critical discourse (1tEtpacrtt1CJl) whose theory is established precisely in the Sophistical Refutations which The New Rhetoric disregards,S we may well wonder if the salvaging of dialectical argumentation by the new rhetoric does not, in some way, obliterate something important in Aristotelian dialectic. In order to answer such a question, it seems indispensable to clarify the relationships between dialectic, rhetoric and critique in Aristotle. It is to this preliminary task that we shall devote the lines which follow.

2. THE PRIMACY OF DIALECTIC While it is true that the first lines of the Rhetoric establish a correspondence between dialectic and rhetoric, as if these two disciplines were convertible one into another,6 in the remainder of this text, Aristotle emphasizes that rhetoric is only a part (~6ptov) of dialectic (1.2. 1356a.30-31). In other words, the close relation between these two technai and methodoi, even their resemblance (cf. 1356a.31), does not imply any identity, but only common points which safeguard their profound difference. Aristotle, moreover, establishes these points from the very beginning of his study of rhetoric. It indeed appears that these two disciplines pertain to questions which do not concern a specific science (one which is founded on a particular genre peculiar to it and studied by specialists), but are on the contrary accessible to all men (I.1.1354a.1-3; 2.1356a.31-33). It must be stressed that it is this possibility for all men to participate in these two different types of activity that explains their relationship, and not so much the existence of a common domain, since dialectic's field is more extensive than that of rhetoric. Thus, their resemblance may be summed up in this statement of Aristotle: "to a DIALECTIC, RHETORIC AND CRITIQUE IN ARISTOTLE 97 certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Now, the majority of people do this either at random or with a familiarity arising from habit." (1354a.4-7) Under these conditions, it is obvious that if dialectic and rhetoric can be produced by familiarity, it may be possible to discover the cause with a view to raising them to the rank of coherent technai (l354a.6ss). This is the delicate task that the Stagirite ascribed to himself and whose results, as we know, are con• signed to the two series of treatises which are, on the one hand, the First Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Refutations, and, on the other, the Rhetoric. No confusion may be made between them. In the well-known Sophistical Refutations, Aristotle asks for our indul• gence for the gaps that we might discover in his way of establishing dialectic: in this area, nothing precise had been written before him. This was not the case for rhetoric since the of his day were the inheritors of a long tradition which explains why this art had attained "a certain amplitude" (34.183b.33-36; 184a.7-b8). The importance of this affirmation increases by the fact that Aristotle himself immediately recognizes that even in the area of rhetoric, inadequacies persisted since rhetorical art was taught less than were the recipes of this art (l84a.lft). In his Rhetoric, he specifies that those who in his day busied themselves with the technique of discourse were mostly preoccupied with exterior problems aimed at influencing the judge (by pity, anger, the passions of the soul, etc.), and made no use of enthymemes which constitute, in the syllogistic mode, the rhetorical proofs and demonstrations (1354a.ll-18 and 1355a.2-8). In actuality, dialectical syllogism and enthymeme are indeed Aristotle's discoveries: they constitute the specificity of his dialectic and of his rhetoric as well. Moreover, he hastens to emphasize that the study of syllogism belongs to dialectic: to all dialectic or to a part of it. So that he who masters the syllogism and who establishes the origin and the manner of its production "will also be best skilled in the enthymeme, when he has further learned what his subject matter is and in what respects it differs from the logical syllogism." (1355a.8-14) In other words, for Aristotle, the syllogism constitutes the condition sine qua non enabling empirical rhetoric to transform itself into a technique or an authentic techne. That is why, at the end of the Sophistical Refutations, when he stresses the originality of his procedure, he refers to the syllogism: "regarding reasoning we had absolutely no earlier work to quote but were for a long time laboring at tentative researches." (34.184b.1-3) Henceforth the question which is posed is that of knowing what certifies the difference between dialectic and rhetoric in spite of this deep relationship in the order, on the one hand, of the 98 LAMBROS COULOUBARITSIS concern of every man about the examination and justification of an argument or the fact of defending oneself or of accusing someone, and, on the other hand, of the implementation of a circumstanced reasoning. In reality, even in the usage he establishes for the syllogistic mode, the Stagirite does not appear to accept a strict identity between dialectic and rhetoric. To the extent that rhetoric, for him, constitutes a part of dialectic, he speaks in reference to the latter about syllogism and induction,' and with regard to rhetoric, or enthymeme and example.8 Without going into details here about a question which touches upon the very application which Aristotle assigns the syllogistic mode, we may nevertheless note that while every enthymeme is a syllogism (dialectical), every syllogism (whether dialectical or otherwise) is not an enthymeme. By the same token, while every example approximates induction, the reverse is not obvious, since induction implies the constitution of a universal from particular cases, whereas the example implies the relation between similar cases of which one is more well-known.9 In other words, rhetoric's mode of unfolding is less far• reaching than that of dialectic, or, in any case, it is other with regard to occasionally comparable facts. Their difference is not so much inscribed in their reciprocal intention, as takes place in their relation to the sophistical,10 but mther in two different manners, two possibilities or potentials (aUV~tc;) for discovering the means of arriving at a judgment (Kplcnc;), starting with premises which, while not being true (contrary to scientific demonstration), are nonetheless probable (~oo~a.) (I.1355b.8-21; cf. 1355a.14-18; 1357a.7-21).11 From this point of view, two important elements emerge in order to assure rhetoric's specificity: the orator's effort to be as persuasive as possible (a<;wmO"toc;) and the discovery of persuasive reasons (m~a.vov) for each thing. According to the first of these elements, the rhetorical discourse is seen as being founded on enthymemes and on the use of examples; the two other founding dimensions being the data which is liable to reinforce the listener's adhesion: the character of the orator and the dispositions which he succeeds in instilling in the listener. When he inspires confidence by his honesty, the orator's character often turns out to be the main factor (KUptrota:t''lv) contributing to making the persuasive acceptable. But the frame of mind in which the listener finds himself is no less important, for judgments are not considered in the same way from the perspective of sorrow or of joy, of friendship or of hatred (2.1356a.1-19; b.18-25). This double subjectivity in the order of rhetorical activity is the one upon which Aristotle's predecessors based themselves. But Aristotle takes it up and even develops it, in Book II, DIALECTIC, RHETORIC AND CRITIQUE IN ARISTOTLE 99 along the lines of a systematic view founded on psychological analyses whose value cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, this essential element of rhetoric must not occult the other aspect which constitutes the Stagirite's originality: the formation of enthymemes and the use of examples are directly articulated with the second element which concerns the valorization of persuasive reasons for each thing, in other words, the ability to bring out "the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question" (1356a.19-20; cf. 1355b.25-34). Here the Stagirite succeeds in broadening reason's area of activity by penetrating contingent action's own particular field which is irreducible, according to him to scientific knowledge and demonstration. As it is already stressed in the Topics, the rhetor is he who is capable of considering what is persuasive in each thing and of neglecting nothing in this matter (VI.12.149b.26-27). When the notion that rhetoric's goal is judgment is associated with this (Rhetoric, II.1.1377b.20-21), one may deduce, along with Aristotle, that the use of persuasive discourses concerns judgment (II.18.1391b.7). Of course, in his opinion, not just any judgments are involved, but all those which concern the fact of counselling and dissuading, of lauding and blaming, of accusing and defending. In short, it is a matter of judgments belonging to the three types of discourse that he reserves for rhetoric: the deliberative, the judiciary. and the epidictic (Rhetoric, 1.3). It is thus in these areas that it is fitting to bring out enthymemes and examples in order to establish what is persuasive with a view to giving rise to a favorable judgment in the audience with respect to what is sought by the speaker. In this, the rhetoric's own particular domain is expressedly circumscribed: it is more concerned with questions which are of the particular domain of action. Now, if we bring this remark together with those we have reserved for the dispositions of the audience and for the speaker's character, we discover that the two elements which confer upon rhetoric its specificity are not independ• ent from praxis. This authorizes Aristotle to affirm that rhetoric is "an offshoot of dialectic and also of ethical studies [... which] may fairly be called political" (1.2.1356a.20-27). And when he takes up this very assertion further on, it is in order to say that if there is a tendency to convert dialectic, as well as rhetoric, into sciences, then the more we persist in this vein, and "the more we try to refashion dialectic as well as rhetoric, we are led towards sciences dealing with definite subjects and not only with discourse" (1359b.12-18). This is why he insists directly on the fact that the field of rhetoric is indeed that of politics in which action is central (4. 1359b.8ss.; 2.1358a.1-9). This means that even if some necessary propositions serving as premises for syllogisms can be brought out in rhetoric, the fact that it pertains 100 LAMBROS COULOUBARITSIS to questions concerning action, in which contingency reigns, clearly shows that more often than not the premises of enthymemes will have the character of probability (2, 1357a.22-23). All of these particulars, to which could be added others,12 sufficiently demonstrate that for Aristotle, a radical difference between dialectic and rhetoric exists. Rhetoric is that part of dialectic which applies principally to the domain of a particular type of action in which deliberative, epidictic and legal discourses reign. In this domain rhetoric could never claim to establish a scientific knowledge unless it lost is very essence and its ability to simultaneously take care of several areas of action. Besides, as we have seen, it is through this claim to some universality that rhetoric is most connected to dialectic from which it borrows its syllogistic status which confers upon it a hold in an area which, at frrst sight, escapes reason and which, in any case is irreducible to scientific knowledge. So that it would seem that the implication of rhetoric in the domain of action, through which it ensures its difference from dialectic, subverted, so to speak, its strict adherence to dialectic. This remark, which is enough to arouse caution when comparing dialectic and rhetoric in Aristotle, allows us nonetheless to understand why these two processes often give the impression of being identical. It is that, by its very essence, Aristotelian dialectic takes the interrogative form in that it supposes a choice between opposite views on a problemP Now, because contingency reigns in the domain of action - the prakton being possibly other than it is (ev&XOJ,1£YOY liAA,ro; EXEt) - this domain appears favorable to this type of discourse. When we speak, moreover, of action in this sense, it is not only a matter of action with an ethical character, but of any type of activity where a choice is involved, as for example in medicine or in strategy.14 In this domain, the peculiar elements of rhetoric (the effort exerted by the speaker in order to be as persuasive as possible, or the discovery of persuasive reasons) may have a fertile application. But in a general way, and following a typological approach on which Aristotle thrives, rhetoric appears to be a sort of dialectic for all of the areas where the agent attempts to establish a judgment through the use of persuasive discourse, which seems to be the case for all of the areas where the deliberative, epidictic and legal genres can be taken into consideration. It is in terms of this type of relation that the Stagirite ventures to speak of an antistrophical relationship between dialectic and rhetoric (Rhetoric 1.1.1354a.I). Now, this limitation upon the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric signifies that areas which are irreducible to rhetoric exist, while at the same time inferring, the extent that it is interroga• tive, an action of dialectic. It is thus, for example, that the problem of DIALECTIC, RHETORIC AND CRITIQUE IN ARISTOTLE 101 knowing whether a single or a multiplicity of principles exists in Phys. I, 2 extends beyond the domain of action and thus cannot, according to Aristotle, belong to rhetoric - otherwise the whole of his thought would be a sort of rhetoric. This means that for him, dialectic is coextensive not only with a multiplicity of functions and parts, one of which is constituted by rhetoric, but also, for this very reason, with its primacy with regard to rhetoric. This primacy indeed seems to constitute a crucial point in Aristotle's project: it alone can explain, on the one hand, the fact that rhetoric is qualified as a part of dialectic and that its modes of unfolding (enthymeme and example) belong to dialectical syllogism and induction, and, on the other hand, the fact that dialectic fulfills an important role in his thought in areas over which rhetoric has no hold. To conclude this fIrst part of our study, let us return to the point which brings dialectic and rhetoric together the most: the common use they have of a certain number of topoi, even if rhetoric makes use of a particular type of syllogism - enthymemes - which often unfold in an elliptical manner (assuming the major premise), and even if it limits itself to precise types of discourse (deliberative, epidictic and legal) (I, 2, 1356a.26ss). These so• called commonplaces (KOtVa) pertain to specifically different disciplines: law, physics, politic, etc. For example, says Aristotle, from the topos "more or less", a rhetorical enthymeme may be established as easily as a dialectical syllogism concerning these respective disciplines which, nevertheless, differ specifically without this preventing other syllogisms from being established - syllogisms which are more specific for each of them and irreducible to each other. Hence, it follows that the mastery of commonplaces will make no one competent in a given area, while the knowledge of premises peculiar to a genre is such that the better the choice will be as a science distinct from rhetoric and dialectic is developed. For, the Stagirite states, "if one succeeds in stating the required principles, one's science would be no longer dialectic or rhetoric, but the science to which the principles thus discovered belong." (1358a.25). In other words, dialectic and rhetoric, applied to a specific science, may come to repudiate themselves for the benefit of this very science, on the condition that its principles be established. To be sure, Aristotle does not say at this precise point in the text (which is connected to another passage to which we have alluded earlier [cf. 4.1359b.8-16]) how this conversion of endoxa into principles themselves can come about. And this silence seems to us to favor all sorts of misunderstand• ings and confusions. But the goal of his exposition here, it must be stressed, is not at all to indicate the modalities of this possible conversion, which 102 LAMBROSCOULOUBARnS~ belongs, in fact, to the delicate problematic of he establishment of principles; it is rather to emphasize the contrast which exists between, on the one hand, the particular disciplins with their own principles, and, on the other hand, the use of dialectic and of rhetoric which, by the commonplaces they use, may pertain to these disciplines without claiming to compete with the competence of those that possess them scientifically. By means of this contrast, Aristotle brings out the decisive importance (for rhetoric as well as for dialectic) of the commonplaces which confer precisely upon each of them their extensive and quasi-universal claim. This importance springs expressedly from what Aristotle says when he takes up the study of these topoi in the Rhetoric after having dealt with the essential elements of the rhetorical art (enthymemes, examples, three types of rhetorical discourses, character of the speaker, and dispositions of the audience): "Each of the main divisions of oratory has [ ... J its own distinct purpose. With regard to each division, we have noted the accepted views and propositions upon which we may base our arguments - for political, for ceremonial, and for forensic speaking. We have further determined completely by what means speeches may be invested with the required moral character. We are now to proceed to discuss the arguments common to all oratory." (11.18. 1391b.22--27). These topoi, which are common to the three types of rhetorical discourses, are also, for the most part, the commonplaces of dialectic, thus turning rhetoric over as part of dialectic. In order to better discern this kind of subordination of rhetoric to dialectic, it is fitting to study another part of dialectic which is different from rhetoric: that of critique (1t£lpaO"tl1CTl).

3. DIALECTICAL PROOF Aristotle uses several terms whose specifications are not always very clear, in order to take "critical" discourse into account: peirastike, exetastike, kritike, elenchos, epitimesis, etc. Since our study only aims at bringing out the generic character of dialectic with regard to rhetoric as well as to critique, the nuances between these various terms matter little. Among the various modes of critique, the only one which it would seem imperative to dismiss is apparent critique which unfolds during sophistic debates, and which the Stagirite calls agonistike, its syllogistic articulation being eristic. For the difference between authentic critique and the latter lies in the very intention of the critique's agent.IS So that, one is compelled to conclude that for Aristotle, sophistic critique only aims at an apparent wisdom, while authentic critique leads to the clarification of the debate with a view to knowledge. But DIALECTIC, RHETORIC AND CRITIQUE IN ARISTOTLE 103 here again it does not seem that its position is monolithic since critique may lead to a general knowledge, a sort of general culture, or to a more precise knowledge on the order of general principles. The fIrst type of knowledge is that of the learned man «(, 1t£1tO,tB£UIl£VO<;), the second, that of the philosopher (0

4. CONCLUSION By way of a very provisional conclusion, we can say that, in Aristotle, dialectic goes beyond the field of rhetoric, being that the latter is only a part of dialectic, with respect to another part which is accorded to critique, strictly speaking. The privilege of taking part in philosophical reflection and in all knowledge of a principial order in order to constitute a moment of the aporetic method34 falls to this second part of dialectic. This explains why in his Metaphysics, Aristotle compares philosophical and critical (1t£tpacm.~) procedures and passes over in silence any reference to rhetoric which appears as a dialectic belonging to the peculiar domain of action. Now, when we compare this view with that which captivated Perelman in 1955 concerning dialectic, we remark that he contrasts critical and dialectical dialogue. While he justly discerns that critical dialogue puts the examination of an argument into play in order to show its incompatibility with other arguments granted by the speaker, he adds that "the dialogue ceases to be critical and becomes dialectical, thus acquiring a constructive philosophical interest when, beyond the internal coherence of their discourse, interlocutors try to agree on what they consider to be true, or at least on the opinions which they recognize as being the most certain. The search for truth, as Plato conceived it, becomes, in Aristotle, an argumentation based on propositions that are not necessarily, but generally granted and whose conclusions are not obvious either, but consistent with common opinion." 35 In fact, by making dialectic a constructive discourse (the Platonic point of view), even though it is only a refutative procedure in Aristotle, and by reducing Aristotelian argumentation moreover to the taking up of common opinion, Perelman leaves the very specificity of Aristotelian dialectic in obscurity where it concerns science and philosophy. That is to say that when it finds its raison d' etre in the necessity of envisaging a problem according to all its pos• sibilities, in order to go beyond the opinions that are enunciated on its sub• ject. 36 Henceforth, one is compelled to wonder if, by instituting a "new rhetoric" instead of a "new dialectic", Perelman does not merely develop the rhetorical side of Aristotelian dialectic by obscuring, so to speak, another, no less fertile, aspect: that which its "critical" part conceals.37

NOTES

1 Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, La nouvelle rhetorique. Traite de I' argumentation, Vol. I, Paris, 1958, pp. 1-13, esp. pp. 6-8. DIALECTIC, RHETORIC AND CRITIQUE IN ARISTOTLE 109

2 Ch. Perelman, "La methode dialectique et Ie role de l'interlocuteur dans Ie dialogue", Entretiens philosophiques d'Athenes, Athens, 1955, pp. 179-183. 3 And when it does appear, it does so in an altogether different context. 4 The New Rhetoric, p.7. 5 This absence is already significant on its own, and allows us to understand, at least partially, the orientation that the "new rhetoric" takes: dissimulating, as we shall see, the critical part of the Aristotelian dialectic. 6 Once again the use of the term antistrophos registers a distance in the correspon• dence (Rhet. I.1.1354a.l) - which is limited, as we shall see, to the syllogistic character of rhetoric and by which Aristotle's rhetoric ensures its difference with the preceding rhetorics. 7 Cf. Top. I.12.105a.l0-19. See also our study "Y a-t-il une intuition des principes chez Aristote", Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 133-134, 1980, pp. 440-471. 8 Rhet.,I.2.1356a.34-b27. 9 Ibid., 1357b.26-36. 10 On this question, Aristotle sometimes speaks of a difference governed by proairesis. 11 On the meaning to assign to the endoxon, see our study "Dialectique et philosopbie chez Aristote", nlAoaoqnll, 8-9, 1978-1979, pp. 229-256, 231-232, where we speak of a "statement containing some value" or of a "generally accepted consideration". 12 On this question, see Pierre Hadot, "Philosophie, Dialectique, Rhetorique dans l'antiquite", Studia Philosophica, 39, 1980, pp. 139-166, 140-146, who nonetheless loses sight, as moreover most interpreters of Aristotle do, of the "critical" aspect of dialectic. 13 Cf. our study "Dialectique et philosophie chez Aristote", cited above, pp. 231-235. 14 See our study "Le probleme de la proairesis chez Aristote", Annales de l'Institut de Philosophie de l'UL.B., 1972, pp. 7-50. 1S On the matter of agonistike see in particular Top. Vn.5. 16 The importance of the learned man was first noted by P. Aubeneque, Le probleme de l' etre chez Aristote, Paris, 1962, Ch. Ill. As far as the limits of this interpretation, see our article "Dialectique et Philosophie chez Aristote", op. cit., pp. 238 ff. 17 Reported thus in the Politique. 18 Cf. our study "Sophisma et Philosophia chez Aristote", Annales de l'Institut de Philosophie de l' U L.B., 1978, pp. 7-38. 19 See our article "Dialectique et philosophie chez Aristote", op. cit., pp. 231 ff., where an analysis of the meaning and scope of this essential passage from Aristotle will be found. 20 See N°. 11 below. 21 Here it is a matter of a crucial point in Aristotelian dialectic: which we have established in our "Dialectique et philosophie chez Aristote", op. cit. n Indeed, we cannot lose sight of the fact that, for Aristotle, refutation is an inference which is contradictory to the beginning argument (Ref. Soph. 2.165a.38ff.; 6.168a.36ff.; 1O.171a.195, etc.). 23 See again "Dialectique et philosophie chez Aristote", op. cit. 24 Here we are paraphrasing the passage between 167b.1 and b.20. 2S Cf. J. Tricot, In ref. soph. (J. Vrin), p. 20 n.2. 26 Top.I.l.100b.21-23. 110 LAMBROSCOULOUB~~

27 I here paraphrase Ch. Perelman, "La methode dialectique et Ie role de l'interlocuteur dans Ie dialogue", op. cit., p. 181. 28 On this subject, see how he emphasizes his aporetic method in Metaph. B .1. 29 Cf. E. Berti, "Aristote et la methode dialectique du Parminide de Platon", Revue InternaliofllJle de Philosophie, 133-134, 1980. 30 Cf. L' avenement de la science physique. Essai sur la Physique d' Aristote, Brussels, 1980, pp. 131 ff., where we develop this problem in a more detailed manner. 31 Ibid., pp. 139 ff. 32 This study begins in Phys. 1.7, along the lines of an analysis of general becoming and ends in the institution of the principles of becoming according to the ousia. See our book, cited above, pp. 154ff. 33 Ibid., pp. 191 ff. 34 See our study "Dialectique et philo sophie chez Aristote", op. cit., pp. 243 ff. 35 Ch. Perelman, "La methode dialectique et Ie role de l'interlocuteur dans Ie dialogue", op. cit., p. 181. 36 Even if this knowledge established by the critique of preceding opinions and by the implementation of new methodological data appears retrospectively to be a new "opinion". 37 It is moreover significant that while histories of rhetoric are prevalent today, the history of dialectic is still neglected - in particular with regard to its critical aspect and its dogmatization repeated by various philosophical currents. MICHEL MEYER

TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC

1. THE CRISIS OF LOGOS: ARISTOTLE AND DESCARTES Aristotle was the ftrst thinker to propose a codification of Western rationality. It is true that Plato, against whom he nevertheless reacted, preceded him on certain points. The predicative theory of judgement gives form to the proposition, while scientiftc and dialectic syllogistic are the modes of production of propositions. The well-known principle of non-contradiction, which is the key of all argument and of all possible discursivity is found at the foundation of logos. How can such a principle be demonstrated without putting it into practice? Aristotle is without ambiguity: such a justiftcation cannot be furnished without begging the question, for logical demonstration rests on non-contradiction. Thus we have recourse to dialectic: Aristotle will validate his supreme principle by means of a hypothesis which brings to mind Descartes' "Evil Genius" in that he imagines someone contradicting his principle. If this principle cannot be justified directly, it can at least be established indirectly by refuting all possible refutations. The proof ad absurdum is an example of good dialectical argument in that, through propositional complementarity, by eliminating one of the branches of the alternative A or non-A, the opposite term necessarily remains. Here we ftnd verified that cherished idea of Aristotle's, in which the dialectic can, in some way, be the foundation of the scientific ideal of necessity. According to Aristotle, he who opposes the principle of non-contradiction is in a bad position precisely because he practices what he expressly rejects. By contradicting, he gives credit to non-contradiction with which, moreover, he wants nothing to do. The contradiction of the principle of non-contradiction being an untenable position, the principle in question triumphs by evicting the adversary. One could believe this to be the case at least on a first reading. How could Aristotle's imaginary contradictor be really troubled by his own incoherence given what he affirms about coherence: an affirmation which perpetuates itself as soon as it destroys itself? Propositional logic finds itself once again bereft of foundation. For we must see that Aristotle wished to impose a certain vision of discourse and of reason which we now know was to

111 112 MICHEL MEYER determine the history of thought up to the present by making judgement the minimal unity, i.e. the measure and the bearer of truth. The principle of non-contradiction does not just refer to the principle of identity. It also defines the cardinal form of logos as proposition, i.e. as a compound containing a subject and a category-attribute. It would be wrong to see in this principle merely a condition for the existence of logos; it is in fact much more than that. It characterizes the very structure of propositional discursivity and rationality. Let us examine this more closely. If we affirm something, say B, and can state something else, something different from B to the point of opposition, say non-B, we obtain a real discourse which implies, of course, the ability to utter more than a single and same thing. Therefore, B as well as non-B must be possible. But this will only be the case if a same subjacent reality is postulated for B and non-B of which it will be said that it is B or non-B. The subject will be called A, and B as well as non• B will become categories: the identity (thUS the permanence) of A will imply that B and non-B may be said to be in a relation of successive identification with respect to A. A cannot simultaneously be Band non-B if we want A to remain what it is, that is, A. At this point, predication refers to the identity of the subject: predicates and subjects are hardly conceivable without one another. Thanks to this, it can now be maintained without difficulty that contrary assertions are possible if they relate to a subject for which they are the categorization determining it as the subject that it is. By introducing the concept of subject, discourse as a plurality of different and opposed proposi• tions may henceforth be understood without any difficulty. And, as Aristotle was to explain to us in his theory of syllogism, thanks to the implementation of non-contradiction, propositional logos is able to generate propositions indefinitely. Nevertheless, we stumble against this principle as against something obvious. Propositionalism may be contested at its very roots by the philosophical incarnated in the incoherent contradictor that Aristotle imagines. How are we to face this "Evil Genius" who distills the poison of unsurpassable doubt? How are we to accept the very idea of the ultimate evidence of the first principles of propositionalism? These two questions are, in these very terms, those of Descartes. Descartes is always imagined to be a radical breaker of the tradition that preceded him and as explicitly opposing Aristotle. He is indeed so in regard to syllogistic, but the principles of syllogistic inevitably escape syllogistic because of the inevitable regression ad infinitum that would otherwise result from it. As for the break: which Descartes introduces, it is perhaps less total than Cartesian doubt TOWARD AN ANTIIROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 113 would give us to think. What Descartes obviously wants to institute is a foundation of propositional order incarnated in the deductive rationality both of discourse and of mathematics. Since evidence and its corresponding intuition sustain propositionalism, he must show why it is evident that evidence must impose itself as such. We know that the Cartesian thought is circular. Descartes puts into practice the logos which he wishes to found. He nevertheless gives something like a second life back to propositionalism at the dawn of modem times, that is, at a time which requires exactly the type of adaptation with which he inflects rationality. I will explain. The primacy of consciousness, which is affirmed in the famous cogito, has another function than the one that we usually accord to it. We usually associate Descartes with idealism and the birth of the subject. This is all quite true, but is not all. What does this famous birth of the subject really mean? Is the subject as a founda• tion not to be found in jUdgement? Why this anthropological shift? With its automatic syllogisms, the Aristotelian machinery could not integrate the idea of a general mathematization of nature which was echoed by the new science. But it is legitimate to wonder how the unity of Reason could be assured, for all that, by the concept of man as a foundation. The mathematization of logos is not the only thing that must become conceivable according to Descartes. There is also an increased rhetoricization of discourse which acts as a counterbalance to mathematization and which can only kill the scientificity of syllogism which was used by the Scholastics to say everything and anything. Scientific syllogism in Aristotle is opposed to rhetorical practice, thanks notably to ontology. Indeed, when judgement says that a certain A is B, it affirms what A is; and it is because it is necessarily this and nothing else that there is scientific syllogism. The ontological requirement is determinant for the scientificity of syllogism. It is henceforth understood that with univocity and plurivocity of being to found constraining or to explain the non-constraining character of an argument, the philosopher feels discomfort at facing the necessities of modem science which are not on the order of simple formal logic. But behind the movement of the Renais• sance there is more than a requestioning of empty formalism and of the syllogistic ontology inherited from Aristotle put in the service of theological conceptions of the cosmos. In the background, there is a realization that because everything may be expressed and rejected on opposite grounds, the famous constraining of argument is lost. Non-contradiction is not enough to materialize truth which pertains to another level of research (mathematical and observational perhaps, but certainly not formal, thus ontological in the way the Greeks and the thinkers of the Middle Ages understood it). What is 114 MICHEL MEYER therefore needed is another substance-foundation than the one that syllogistic sees in subjects of judgement and their purely rhetorical ontological relations. The word is out: once constraining is abandoned, logos is no more than rhetoric and this is exactly what is reproached of scholasticism. Moreover, there is a whole resurgence of rhetoric in the Renaissance. Foucault has reminded us of the extent to which similarity and resemblance dominated the intellectual processes of the sixteenth century. Descartes was to seek a new substance-subject in order to put an end to the rhetoricization of logos and to give a foundation for that mathematicization of the cosmos which he was to pursue. With resemblance and analogy everything is in everything, every• thing has a relationship with everything, everything - thus its contrary - can be said. It is bothersome that no answer is excluded because if a question is asked - an alternative - we should be able to eliminate one term of this alternative in order to give the other term as the answer. Henceforth a question cannot really be resolved; it will be indefmitely arguable if not indefinitely argued. Let it be noted that this destiny is inscribed, independent of the quolibet practiced in the medieval university, in Aristotelian syllogistic itself. "Aristotle's efforts to establish a theory of science evince [... J more than one difficulty on the essential points. There is a difficulty, first of all, with the very notion of science and with the distinction between science and dialectic: in the Topics, the two disciplines are both contrasted and linked, especially as to the knowledge of principles. And when in the Analytics Aristotle returns to this question of principles, he returns also, more or less explicitly, to dialectical processes, thus attempting, over and against his own very clear declarations, to found the necessary upon the probable." (J .M. Le Blond, Logique et methode chez Aristote, p. 147, Vrin, Paris, 3rd ed., 1973). This separation may well be necessary with Aristotle, it is nonetheless impossible and contamination between the two is inevitable. Descartes will thus combat the rhetoricization of logos, that is, quite simply, the, fact that questions perpetuate themselves in their answers which thus only appear to be solutions. Whence the problem of determining what a solution is: this will become the Discourse on the Method. Against a certain ontology, a new logic, a new Organon must be set up and founded. In order to locate the model of the out-of-the-question (i.e. the answer) when everything now constitutes question (a situation which Descartes sums up for us in his radical doubt and the motivations he provides for it), an answer is necessary which by expressing this universal problematization will suppress it at the same time. This, we know, will be the cogito. The affirma• tion of the primacy of consciousness, of the "I am thinking", is the position of TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 115 an out-of-the-question liable to resolve all debates, all possible questions - an Archimedian fulcrum which will allow one to decide whether an answer is an answer or not. Rhetorical errancy and soft humanism are finished: here is the die-hard [pure et dure], thus, the scientistic version of Reason which grants the thinking substance its full role. How will the cogito as unquestionable answer found the unity of the new rationality? Through reflexivity, through transference of property, the substance that I am will be the foundation of all substantification, of any subject of judgement, and, finally, of causality itself. What else does Descartes say in the Third Meditation? "For example, I think that a stone is a substance, or is a thing capable of existing independently, and I also think that I am a substance. Admittedly I conceive of myself as a thing that thinks and is not extended, whereas I conceive of a stone as a thing that is extended and does not think, so that the two conceptions differ enormously; but they seem to agree with respect to the classification "substance". Again, I perceive that I now exist, and remember that I have existed for some time; moreover, I have various thoughts which I can count; it is in these ways that I acquire the ideas of duration and number which I can then transfer to other things." (Descartes, Meditations of First Philosophy, transl. John Cottingham, pp. 30-31.) This text is of cardinal importance because it illustrates, better than any other text, the essence of philosophical reasoning: I am a subject, a substance; there are therefore subjects and substances which correspond to what I can conceive (clearly and distinctly), such as myself. I am the model of the answer because the I am is that which conditions all other answers, and so on. The answer is deduced each time from its reflexive thematicization which is autonomized by applying it to something else. Such is the meaning of the Cartesian foundation in the principle of reflexivity. This primacy given to anthropological substance restores to inference all of its force by transform• ing it in the most radical manner of all. From syllogistic, it will become causal. Mechanism is born. It too will become generalized into ontology. How is this movement to be understood? If I can say B from A as non-B, then A is identified by an alternative: since it is itself problematical, nothing stops us from saying non-A. The identity of A then indeed creates a problem and no wave of an ontological wand over a possible arrangement of the meanings of being, aimed at making opposites non-contradictory, will change anything whatsoever as to the reality of things. On the other hand, if I can form the idea of an unquestionable principle, I will have restored to the idea of subject all its force, and judgement - the proposition - will once again have become possible. I will be able to conclude that A is B. A therefore B. 116 MICHEL MEYER

Here, the model of the subject of judgement is substance. The inference clutches to a relation of substances - whence mechanism. What is causality if not the fact that A entails B unwaveringly and not non-B? The certainty of such a shift is reaffirmed and founded in the cogito. The cogito is indeed the birth certificate of the causality principle. The experience that the subject has of its own deducibility, caused by the objectivity of the concept of subject which authorizes it to call itself a thinking substance, is the source of all future experience which can therefore only be causal.

2. THE DEATH OF THE SUBJECT AND THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY

It is the same with subjects as it is with the rest: excess is always harmful [Ie trop nuit en tout]. With Descartes and his successors, the subject is seen as granting subjectivity a founding, constitutive, and (as Kant would say) transcendental role. What did Descartes accomplish in thus doing other than prevent rhetoric from encroaching upon the entire logos? When 1 say that he sought an answer to every possible question, one must not for an instant think that there is any concern with questioning in Descartes. On the contrary, all he wants is to put a stop to the rhetoricization which consists in questioning without ever being able to answer once and for all. Causality is solution and it is also science. This is sufficient to suppress interrogativity, which is considered a failure of the mind. Besides, what is doubt but an assertive mode of our thinking process? When 1 say to myself "I doubt", Descartes states, I cannot but conclude that 1 am. It is not because 1 doubt that I am, it is because 1 can say the one that 1 can affirm the other. We never stop affirming - even when we doubt. We do not really question, unless we make a rhetoric of assertivity out of this "questioning", in which case doubt would merely be the rhetorical question referring to the preliminary assertion that 1 think - the supreme condition of all possible assertivity. Thus no matter what may be said, we always fall back on the subject and its absolute identity: 1 can say that I am no matter what problem is posed. The subject prohibits all questions by being a priori the ultimate answer before any question is even asked. It is truly that A which subtends B as non-B, the opposite. No other subject has this force, for all can be denied with the exception of the fact that 1 am, for if 1 deny, I still think. Every question is necessarily rhetorical in that the subject renders any debate, for which it is not a priori the judge, impossible. By anticipation concerning the very nature of the question asked, the subject literally has the answer to everything. The subject is that authority of automatic closure of logos upon itself. Judgement ensures its perenniality as TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 117 absolute model. Once we realize that the Aristotelian subject does not prevent dialectic opposition which can, furthermore, disguise itself in syllogisms Gust like any proposition), we understand the deep significance of the anthropological redefinition of the subject, i.e. of the recentering of propositionalism in the classical age. If A is a real subject in a proposition like "A is B", it excludes its opposability which must confirm its identity. Now, according to Descartes, only the thinking subject possesses this property since it maintains itself through all negation. On the other hand, nothing prevents a judgement from being handed down upon rhetoricization with the possibility of having non-A with B like A with non-B as well as with B. The subject loses its identity through opposable predication and is no longer really the subject. The Aristotelian subject gives no guarantee of the power to face the rhetoricization of reason, especially as Aristotle accords acceptance to rhetoric and recognizes its right to use syllogism. As judging is nothing other than judging of the permanence of the subject beyond all possible discussion on the SUbject, the rhetoricization of logos destroys the idea of subject in its very function. Through the primacy of consciousness, of its necessity and, in general, of the transference through reflexivity of the concept of substance, the subject, born of the thinking subject, once again becomes possible. This subject is then the concept which restores validity to the proposition in which the out-of-question identity of this subject must be ensured. But the centuries passed, exhausting more and more the resources of Cartesianism. In the nineteenth century, under the critiques of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Darwin, the anthropological primacy collapsed, plunging thought into the confusion of the "trace" and the "lack" whose stigmata contemporary thought still bears in the depths of its irrationalism. How could the shock of History thus break the well-rounded closure of propositional logos? All contradictions are reducible if the locking mechanism is automatic: is not man as a foundation the identical mainstay of any contradictority that may arise? In fact, if it is not recognized that the change must always be integrated from the reduction of permanency which establishes its authority upon this historical becoming, it will not be under• stood that even though it is closed, the Cartesian model had to, in the end, renounce its theoretically indefinite perpetuation. The latter rests upon the nature of the Ego which effects the closure of logos. The Ego is thus the rhetorical authority through which rhetoric repudiates itself. This may seem a curious remark at fIrst reading. It must be reread and pondered. It means that the Ego functions by closing logos upon itself because it has an answer for 118 MICHEL MEYER everything, for every question. This implies the reducibility of all contradic• tions to the identical which absorbs them. But the Ego cannot admit itself to be a rhetorical authority because it functions the way it does precisely in order to prevent rhetoric from invading logos in order to establish itself as out-of-question before all problematization which should be taken into account as such. The Ego must be able to answer everything. But it can succeed in doing so only if it evacuates a priori the possibility of having true questions to which, directly or indirectly it does not have the solution or the resolution. Every problem encountered must be rhetorical in the sense that one usually speaks of the rhetorical question: it must be exclusively a purely formal question in that it refers back to some preliminary assertion which it vehicles by way of implication. By denying rhetoric, the Ego cannot recog• nize itself as rhetoric, i.e. as something that turns any new question back toward an old one to which it already knows the answer. Given a question that presents an opposition, the Ego that must face this alternative brings it back, by intuition or deduction, to what it is not: a pre-constituted solution. This process is well known under the name of rationalization or of that of derivation. The Ego suppresses the question which was a real question, resolving it by automatic suppression and thus transforming the dialectical relation instituted by the confrontation with the newness of the real into an implicit confirmation of that which is old, while at the same time, the Ego represses itself in doing so. Rhetoricization consists in displacing real questions, questions of the real, into questions to which one already has (intuition) or can recover (deduction) the answer. In the Ego, the unconscious is problematicity repressed and displaced into rhetorical problems and denied as such. Irreducible problematicity which weaves the web of the unconscious, manifests itself by a contradictority which is reabsorbed, processed, displaced, and rationalized by the Ego in the relation to the real - a problematicity that has its own sources in addition to everything that derives from historicization, that is, from temporalization springing from outer reality which must ceaselessly be refit to its reality coherence as such. It may come as a surprise to read that reality constitutes itself rhetorically. This is not the traditionally held image of the real. Independent from us, solid, invariable, permanent as well as the cause of many unexpected novelties, the real imposes itself as something that is not of the rhetorical order. However, this image of reality, which we will not contest, is not a given, but the result of a process that involves the Ego. The Ego is confronted with problems, alternatives and contradictions which it must answer. Opposition only makes sense with respect to answers which are TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 119 already granted, at least some of which are imbedded in the far reaches of ourselves, doubtlessly to our great relief. The continuity of the world requires precisely that any new question be reducible to an old one; if not, we will be confronted with a conflict which/or me is insoluble and the world will appear shattered [se presentera en rupture]. The continuous identity of reality therefore me3IlS nothing other than the assimilation of the new - of difference - to identity (which really is not identity except rhetorically) by means of a displacement which translates the problematic into the non-problematic, the unknown into the already known (or the knowable). It is not that we cannot accept the irreducible newness, but we must always be able to express it in relation to that which it is not in order to accept it as it is. This supposes a rhetorical transformation that rationalizes and recovers the opposition, turning it into a question that the Ego can discuss - a rhetorical question. Let us understand one another well: if the real can appear to the Ego as it is - renewed, unexpected, and identical in its solidity outside the subject - it is because the subject rhetoricizes and rationalizes the information, that is, coordinates it and, quite simply, names it and thus recognizes it. When we affirm that reality is constituted rhetorically, it is not a matter of content but rather of form, of the very possibility of a real which is stable because it is treated so by the Ego. In order for the real to indeed be the real, this rhetoric of the subject must be repressed by it. This entails a derhetoricization of reality which imposes itself in its objective identity. All of this follows from the fact that we must resolve the problems of existence, life, and survival, and that this ceaseless questioning of ourselves has to be elaborated collectively as well as individually, based on the experience of past resolutions, based upon the quasi-automatic suppression of the destabilization caused by the problematization of our commerce with the world. This problematization is, I repeat, not independent of us, for the problem only exists in relation to us. Once it is evacuated and rhetoricized by the Ego, the solution asserts itself as being independently valid, without any further reference to the problematic, i.e. to that which moves us and situates the real in relation to us. If the conscious Ego is often likened to the act of taking charge of the real, it can only be so once the relation between them is already played out, when they can be posited separately. Idealism and have defined themselves on the basis of the moment of which we speak, in order to reflect upon the subject's possibility to leave himself in order to approach the object and constitute it in its objectivity. Both were destined to fail because they posed a process-problem based on the results of that process. Thinking only in terms of results, idealism could no more retrieve the object than empiricism could 120 MICHEL MEYER the subject Subject and object being separated both for idealism and for empiricism, the question of the process of knowledge became insoluble. How could the real emerge from the Ego? How can the real engender its own perception, thus its own fracture? In short, the implications of the affrrmation that the Ego integrates the real into its independence are too often forgotten. And the implications are ideologization as well as all less specific forms of rationalization by which the reality of the real arises [surgit] while concealing something from us: an irreducibility that would destabilize us. In order for the Ego to accept the real as is, its looming appearance [surgissement] must be rhetoricized - an appearance which introduces difference or alterity: the question which, in the final analysis, is an "I question myself' [je m'interroge], since in it I am always in some way put back into question. Of course, there is still science: one tends to think that by accepting the newness of experience in its very irreducibility, it states the real non• rhetorically. Here, once again, one must be careful with respect to inherited images. A theory is rarely abandoned because of the authority of problems challenging it. A purely ad hoc process of integration and of partial revision takes place well before scientists, who have judged a theory irremediable, decide to abandon it for another. Resistance to problematization is to be found in science just as it is in the rest of our intellectual pursuits. In order to save a certain image of the real, science rhetoricizes questions by various means that range from neglect to conventional explanation through the declaration of irrelevance and factual minimalization without forgetting the challenging of factual interpretation which cannot be dissociated from the latter. Moreover, the Ego also ends up rejecting rationalizations which open onto incoherence and the inassumable just as it does onto the increasing impossibility to take into account new realities on the basis of old ones. The Ego, the subject, is the authority which mediates our corporeality, our instincts, our problematicity (in the broad sense), and that which is outside and opposes itself to the free flow of solutions which an inertia of our inner tendencies would find natural to put into practice. The world is only a problematizing one because it checks these solutions. The unconscious is woven with problems because the solution to them is impossible, in considera• tion of the fact that we are in the midst of things and beings, that life is not self-evident and that, consequently, the unconscious exists as insurmountable problematicity. Between this problematicity and that which puts us back into question from the outside (but in the early times, this in the same thing), there is the Ego. The closure of the Ego corresponds to the necessity of facing all TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 121 problematization which emerges both from the depths of our being and from outside necessities. It is easy to imagine that the equilibrium is fragile and that any pressure that is too strong from either side could entail breakages. To avoid this from happening, the Ego closures itself [se cloture], thus managing to live in a world which seems essentially stable to it. The infinite resolutive capacity of logos derives from this. But the infinitude of this automatism in resolution denies itself. Hence, the unconscious is the human condition of reality. The Ego must repress the part of itself which represses the problematic - suppressing it and turning it into pat answers. It must be the answering process and by itself respond to questions which cannot really be posed. In brief, the Ego is rhetorical in order to combat rhetoric, in order to provide itself a real. Because this rhetorical component cannot be expressed, it must be occulted. This explains the repression which splits the subject into conscious Ego and unconscious Ego. Thus, the Cartesian subject is only a subject in that it answers all possible questions ahead of time, thus to the extent that it places itself beyond all debates in the capacity of outside-the• debate. But the rhetoricization of all new problems in the uninterrupted continuity of subjectivity is hidden by the apodictic character of the affmna• tion of this subjectivity. One gets the feeling that science fulfills this rhetori• cal role while, at the same time, denying it. Consciousness, as it was to define modem subjectivity, was to allow rhetoric to function without having to be expressed as such. Once the breaking down of subjectivity as foundation was consummated in radical problematization, consciousness could not continue to cover the totality of the subject. And the unconscious emerged as the other side of the mirror - as negation of consciousness - with all of its rhetorical properties of condensation and displacement. The resurgence of rhetoric in the twentieth century has no other origin than the crisis of the subject. Psychoanalysis was to be the avant-garde of this renewal. It arises when we become aware of the role played by the rhetorical component of the Ego which closures its logos. But because it is not the Cartesian master of it, it cannot help but let this rhetoric appear as what it is. The subject is then unmasked. Rhetoric will not really be studied for itself until later. Through recognition of the role of rhetoric, the subject both saves and loses itself. As a Cartesian subject, the human subject, which is foundational, is dead; but, as an open articulation of the problematic, the subject can be understood to be at the crux of a new anthropology, even though the very problematic which concerns it cannot be thought of as such, precisely because there is no problematology as yet. Rhetoric remains understood under the definition which Plato and Aristotle, then Perelman, preserved for it, i.e. , the contradic- 122 MICHEL MEYER tority of propositions and not as a referral to a question which alone allows us to apprehend why, and in relation to what, opposition is possible. The defundamentalization of the subject defines post-modernity in all its aspects. It means that man is no longer Descartes' and Kant's "pure subject" in relation to which it is always something else. Vanity according to Thack• eray, or consciousness in the world according to Sartre: to be what one is not, and to not be what one is. Far from being able to resolve everything yet, the subject thus becomes, in tum, a problem (A and non-A) like anything else. Empiricism has taken over man who is like any object: the human sciences have become possible. But the bell tolls also for the pre-eminence of moral values which are rooted in man. Barbarity is not far off. But let us not misinterpret Nietzsche and Heidegger. What it is necessary to see clearly is that the problematization of the subject cannot be conceived as such, as long as we remain within the propositional model of logos, though it be without foundation. Utilitarianism, Darwinism, and pragmatism will be seen as sufficient and will "validate" such a logos which no longer maintains itself except by its tradition and efficacy. The problematic will be the inexpressible destiny of this logos, but this logos which only knows the positivity of the assertorial, or more precisely, can express and state only this positivity, even if it realizes that there are hollows in this cracked positivity. Henceforth, the problematization which affects the out-of-the-question which we were will still be thought according to propositional rationality which, for want of a foundation, cannot but open onto irrationalism. Heidegger, like Wittgenstein, will speak of silence. Sartre will continue to stake everything on conscious• ness and the cogito, but would be forced to insert alterity into the very definition he gives; this would lead him to the analysis of what he calls "bad faith". Derrida will treat man as a trace - but a trace of what? The ascendancy of the Cartesian subject and of the propositional model thus endures through its very negation. As for Lacan, he will make the subject the empty compart• ment in the network of signifiers - a lack which is never filled. Derrida calls it dif!erance, for this discrepancy of the self with itself is the essence of the subject. Structuralism encloses the subject in a network of which it is no longer the master: a Borgesian labyrinth in which it is lost and indefinitely searches for itself as a consciousness (a consciousness being, of course, consciousness of itself and not unconscious) - it is fundamentally its own mirror. It was, one should say more precisely, and all this is what these authors remind us. Man cannot be any of this any more, but what he is cannot be uttered, since he is what he is not - he is to the extent that he is always something other than himself. The irreversible course of time in which man is TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 123 projected, transcendence, all of these words hide poorly (behind their manifest truth) what they borrow from a past whose supercession can only be conceived in terms that prevent this supercession from taking place. We indeed remain within a mode of thought that we would like to evacuate but cannot. Problematicity is not approached otherwise than by alterity, contradic• tion, and the temporality which maintains the oppositions without in• coherency, as the formulation of the principle of non-contradiction indicates. The time and the cult of tradition, which cannot but must be superceded [indepassable mais a depasser), are thus found at the base of Heideggerian philosophy. But propositionalism, which denies interrogativity, is poorly equipped for apprehending it without distorting the new reality which it aims at conceptualizing. It brings it back to what existed but from which it nonetheless differs and assigns it a minus sign: A and non-A. Everything and its opposite, thus the absurd. Deprived of all foundation, even our existence is absurd. We have no ultimate reason to do one thing instead of its opposite. But all discourse on existence is also absurd - an absurdity which, of course, has been reinforced by the two World Wars which are the cause of Europe's decline. Everything in art - from literature to music - vehicles this idea of the lost identity of the stable and indubitable point of departure: the source of values, meaning and . The hidden order of art (to take up the title of Ehrenzweig's book) is a chaos which is organized and mastered thanks to a greater abstraction and figuration. It is the image of the modem world which has seen the ancient one collapse and fragmentation creep in where continuity once reigned. Our Peloponnesian Wars will have led us to the same abyss: there was once Rome as there is now America. Literature, music, and painting, to name only these, have expressed that death of the subject. The subject plays an essential role in literature: it gives to the narrative its unity - a sense, a direction which ties a beginning to an end; it totalizes a narration, it is the for whom and the to whom of the text. Once deprived of this fundamental role, subjects differ chapter after chapter. We see privileged points of view disappear and characters abound in epics that aim at reconstituting lost unity as in Joyce's Ulysses or today's South American novels. Meaning will henceforth be a problem since there is no overarching subject for the narrative. The narrative thus fragments, becoming more abstract and enigmatic in relation to a real which conserves, in spite of it all, a certain stability since we - each and everyone of us - are its subject. But the subject that I am is also my neighbor, and the I, by dint of being everyone, is no longer but a "man without qualities", a quotidian Ulysses whose only adventure is everyone's non-adventure, an aseptized and organized universe, 124 MICHEL MEYER more anonymous than ever. It is at this stage that literary criticism joins the Marxist criticism of the dehumanized and atomized world which mechanizes the subject. Work, once liberating for the protestantism of the individual entrepreneur, becomes enslaving, once again, when the enterprise grows, becomes capitalized and hierarchical by means of the factory. Through increased abstraction and the loss of stable and unique meaning, fiction, as in the nouveau roman, becomes non-story and becomes more and more problematized. In this, it reflects a relationship to the real which is perceived more and more problematically, thus throwing into question the possibility of apprehending it as such. The very resources of discourse undergo the ordeal. The language of fiction changes into the object of fiction itself because the rhetoric of the real asserts itself as rhetoric. It is a matter of maintaining the identity of the real through all oppositions that signify difference, change, and non-identity. A non-identity which is thought (of) rhetorically and is reabsorbed since difference is purely rhetorical: it expresses what is non-identical by presenting it metaphorically as identity. Rhetoric maintains the identity of the real by virtue of fiction. The work of art in general - aesthetics - could well be a response to the need to cultivate a rhetorical relationship with reality in order, precisely, to preserve its meaning as externalized and identical. By its rhetorical structure, the Ego fulfills this role, even when it is a producer and consumer of ideology. The problematization that was to affect discourse reflexively, without yet being able to understand itself as such, was to have as its effect the opening of modem culture to a plurality of meanings. Shattered identity must re• establish itself rhetorically, that is, as I have suggested, by the work of art, by form and by symbolization. Through the rhetoricization of the real (which grows quite generally so that reality in its very nature is maintained), the rhetorical component will assert and reveal itself in its role. The real which presents itself as rhetorical product discloses its imaginary and fictive unity which only the symbolic allows us to apprehend. Here is indeed an image which suits a broken real. But the closure of logos, finally representing what it is, unable to continue repressing itself in a putative opening which would ensure, as if by magic, the eternal continuity of the world, this identity of the world detaches itself from reality in order that it be instituted on the rhetorical level as a figurative identity. Reality is restored. This discrepancy, or difference, becomes the literality of the logos that states the real which is the same thing as the impossibility of stating the real in its own essential unity - in its evident unity. Literality is then itself the fiction of this logos. One cannot express things as they are without invoking what they are not. TOWARD AN ANTIIROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 125

Heidegger very rightly stated this, thus bearing witness to the concern of maintaining a certain logos - be it poetic, but never interrogative, and reflexively so - allowing man to grant himself a sense of the lost identity elsewhere. The world according to Being and Time is made up of sign referrals, directions for use which solidify as soon as they point out things. Identity as image, as figure, as sign, as fiction with respect to a real identity (therefore unconscious of being an identity) is still reality in its irreducible form - with, as its keystone, a rhetoric whose forgetting is finally forgotten [dont I' oubli est enfin oublie1 but whose interrogative nature remains unthinkable. The literal non-identity of the world would be dreadful if it could not be re-established at another level. And the price to be paid is this level of rhetoricization which the entirety of twentieth century thought - from Heidegger to Perelman - has circumscribed in a multiplicity of ways. The breakage of the world - its fragmentation - is thinkable thanks to this: the meaning we can see in the loss of meaning will constitute its explication in the discourse that expresses the real as broken. Contradiction? No, metaphor - the supercession of fragmentation in its articulation. We of course know that when a Joyce, for example, speaks of everyday existence like a mythical epic, he immediately raises the question of whether it is so because he considers it impossible or if, on the contrary, he demands that we see life for what it is: a heroic adventure for each of us, but banal for everyone else. It is a bit like the cinematographer who films scenes of violence which we cannot decide whether he is condemning or praising. To speak is indeed to evoke a question, an alternative, by means of the answer which alone is delivered to us. "Under the short story and the chronicle, behind the blurry or brutal visions which form an unfinished whole, something of a mystery which remains an enigma imposes itself whose secret must not be provided by the organizer of these estrangements [itrangements]: at the same time as the novel becomes a difficult reality, it becomes a myth." R.M. Alreres, Metamorphoses du roman, p. 133, Albin Michel, Paris, 1966). Here, the unified and coherent expression of the fragmentary along with the reflection of this discourse on itself is the proof of this rhetorical and mythical rees• tablishment of the whole. Abstract art is thus the most realistic (art) there is: it makes sense of the nonsense by giving it a form, an appearance. The unity of Gestalten is displaced outside the literality of works, therefore outside of that to which they refer. One must search and search elsewhere. This is what a symbolic system, which signifies literally nothing, forces us to do. Discontinuity results from the fragmentation of the literal and the figurative into a quest which is 126 MICHEL MEYER split off from the unity by rhetoric. "Discontinuity summons the notion of a world whose order is either absent or invisible", writes Ralph Heyndels in La Pensee fragmentee (Bruxelles: Mardaga, p. 22) - an alternative, a problem which may be summed up in the fact that a Gestalt is literally asked as the rhetorical and subjacent figure behind this discontinuity. The entirety of art becomes enigmatic by allowing itself to be apprehended as rhetorical or formal: what it represents (because it is represented) is not expressed but suggested, evoked, dispersed in a whole that literality can only announce. From the expressed, we move to the expression. The subject will be found everywhere - in the intentionality of language acts as well as in rhetoric in the broad sense - because, no longer "pure" as in Kant, subjectivity can finally be empirical, thus circumscribable. But subjectivity, which associates subjectively and sometimes with arbitrariness, is to be found especially in the receiver of works which no longer can have decipherable interpretations without an active intervention on his part. A hermeneutic act always results when something in the work abruptly confronts the receiver with the necessity of an interpretative demand. This receiver, reader, or listener must answer concerning the unity or the Gestalt of the work of which he has become the depositary. The whole so-called School of Reception (Jauss, Iser) has shown this, but by emphasizing one aspect which should be, nevertheless, correlated with Deconstruction (Derrida) which has tried to show how all works deconstruct their unity by moving all the literal of its expression toward the impossibility of expressing itself as work. The text is thus a plurality of intertexts. Deconstructivism loses sight of the receiver's role and reception loses sight of the reflexivity of rhetoric that finally expresses and signifies itself at the outcome of its autonomization. But the process at the base is the same: radical problematization which both removes us from the real and puts us back into question in the evidence of what we are with respect to the world, and, consequently, by this questioning, refers us to a multiplicity of possibilities. These possibilities, being enigmatic as they express literally something other than what they express, demand answers from those to whom they are intended: the audience. The work questions us even more, presents more of a problem, because it refers more to its problematicity, because it has rhetoric as its theme. "The novel itself, in its most recent forms, no longer attempts to represent a reality outside the work, but rather to lay bare the powers of writing as an operation upon language." (p. Van Rossum-Guyon, Critique du roman, p. 28, Gallimard, 1970). Because of this very fact, enigmaticity arises (it is indissoluble from the deconstruction of every answer about the meaning of the text), leaving us TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 127 with problematicity alone. The combination of these complementary aspects has become a fact in fiction itself, but not in theory which is still behind the times. Calvino, for example, in his novel, If on a winter night a traveler, presents a narration which is built on the introduction of the reader which disorients, breaks, and reorients the story. The book in the book and the reader in the book blend together. Moreover, Kafka already in the famous text of Parables brings to light the arising of rhetoric and what it implies for the apprehension of the signified. "Were you to conform to symbols you would yourself become symbol and thus liberate yourself from your daily woes. Another might say: I wager that there's a symbol in that, too. The first responds: you would win. The second says: Yes, but sadly only symbolically. The first: No. In reality. For symboli• cally, you have lost." Similarly, in The Test, we encounter the allegory of all literary modernity: the servant who gets hired because he cannot answer (because he does not even understand them) the employer's questions. It is of course the reader• the servant of literature - who can no longer pose the question about meaning and find an answer outside of this question. By understanding that the answer is the question itself, he passes his test as reader. He has understood that what was to be understood was problematicity itself as the one and only answer. But without a problematology that can express the problematic without reabsorbing it into the assertorial which abolishes it, the servant's answer is absurd and comprehension falls back on unavoidable incomprehension.

Generally, the problematization of the subject is also equivalent to that of the reader, the spectator, and the listener. "The claim of melody to represent the conscious Gestalt of music is seriously challenged in favor of a more profound meaning. Serialization discards every remnant of an identical sequence and systematically attacks every vestige of a surface Gestalt. [ ... ] The identity of temporal sequence as the principle of an acoustic Gestalt is paralleled in vision by the identity of spatial distribution. It is difficult to recognize an object if it is shown upside down, almost impossible if the spatial relationships between its elements are scrambled up. But this is precisely what happens in Picasso's portraits and in his arbitrary conglomera• tions of the human figure. I have argued that a total syncretistic vision that is undifferentiated in the arrangement of the details could transcend the chaotic impression and recognize the likeness and the inviolate wholeness of the human body." (A. Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order ofArt). 128 MICHEL MEYER

The literal, the appearance, that which shows itself the most directly, leads us to proceed further, demanding an interpretation because enigmaticity is this demand. The figurative of the literal is the articulation of a question and of an answer. Identity is the figurative: a question which is expressed in the fact of saying and which, for that reason, is never said (literally). Gestalten are no longer constituted but rather to be constituted. He who receives the artistic message knows full well that it is, as the term goes, "auto-referential" and that the gap it produces in relation to our references is meant to put us back into question. Thus the receiver becomes the producer of meaning - even of textuality - because he will have to structure it in its subjacent unity which is figured in and by the text. Because the work responds by question• ing (questioning its own meaning) and because the nature of a question is to refer to several possibilities for answering, the plurality of interpretations follows in entirely legitimate fashion. One could even say that if the meaning - in its unicity - still makes sense as a notion for the subject who receives the work, it is as question. Meaning as question is the answer to the question of the meaning insofar as the text always solicits its reader by a figurative demand. The content (thus the answer) varies; an answer which is all the more figurative because the text is literally enigmatic. The reader, the listener, the spectator are the respondents, just as an audience responds by agreement or disagreement

3. FROM PROPOSmONAUST IRRATIONAUSM TO PROBLEMATOLOGICAL RATIONAUTY At the dawn of the twentieth century, Western reason was shaken in its most solid foundations. In the final analysis, Descartes had given it the grounding that Aristotle had failed to find. Cartesian thought was nevertheless to repeat the circularity of the Aristotelian foundation. Reason could make reason of everything except of the fact that it must make reason of everything. What was to become of rationality once its initial weakness was perceived? It would become increasingly technical: since global rationality is impossible, there only remain partial and analytic rationalities adapted to limited ends even though these are often very complex. Adaptation to these ends was to be the byword of this Western rationality, impregnated as it was with the paradox of its existence beyond its successes. For analytic reason may well be efficient (since it is centered on discrete and circumscribed objectives), it is no less paradoxical in its very foundation. For the very reason that it is partial, partial rationality which expresses Western rationality is no longer TOWARD AN ANTIIROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 129 capable of calling it Reason at large. It nevertheless imposes itself as the rationality which prevails universally. Through the impossibility of being the rationality, partial rationalities are globally irrational. We have a model of rationality which is entirely fragmented and pragmatic and which, through its universalization, is credited with something that it cannot be. How could a reason which is no longer but partial become accepted as global without there being contradiction? Science and technology merge here at the heart of this analytic reason which is both impossible and terribly efficient: impossible as model and practical as directions for use. Reason collapses, a certain humanism disappears. We have moved from the man-subject to the man• object along with all the disastrous moral consequences which derive from it. Analytic reason is theoretical, and cynical or instrumental reason is practical.

Is it, as some claim, a legacy of from the beginning of the century? From the moment that discourse can only gloss endlessly upon the impos• sibility of all discourse, discursivity, through the reflection of its own fundamental problematicity escapes its former coherence for want of problematological discourse. Not only can it no longer be resolved, but it cannot be expressed. The propositional model is in-different to this move from the answer to the problematic. The silence in the last aphorism in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, like that associated with Being through the silent and attentive listening that it demands, according to Heidegger, points to the horizon. Thought, deprived of the possibility of resolving the questions it poses, cannot answer this challenge otherwise than by the impossibility of answering. This is nihilism. The other path has consisted in taking science as the resolutive model. Science resolves all questions without necessitating an anthropological foundation. This is positivism. Philosophy must not only study science, but also become science. If nihilism is contradictory in the very terms by which it must be formulated, logical empiricism - which is neither empirically founded nor logically valid - bears testimony to an identical self-defeating discourse. These two moments could not survive as such. But responding to an insurmountable crisis of propositional rationality, they displaced them• selves in other forms while maintaining, nevertheless, their own "principles." The two reactions to the radical problematization of Western thought proceed from a process perpetuated in contemporary reflection .- always with the same blinding. The death of the subject - which closely follows the death of God, as we know - is not conceived of in terms of problematization since only propositionalism is available. Propositional ism knows neither answer 130 MICHEL MEYER nor question but only the proposition, even when it questions or answers, which are two modalities distinguishable for it only by the psychological and intellectual activity which is implemented in it. For nihilism, answering has become impossible, while for positivism only science possesses efficacy in answering. These two conceptions will face off throughout the century. But what must be noted, instead, is that the fate always reserved for propositional logos continues to be decided on its own basis, without our feeling obliged to conceptualize the interrogativity of logos, thus to radically change what Western tradition has conceived as logos. Problematicization is not ap• prehended in itself but rather through the propositionalist prism along with the correlative question: can we still put forth propositions? Some answer no, others answer yes, by accepting efficacity, technical operatory, analytic and scientific reason. This very vision of what answering means has not been put into question in itself. This conception results from the disappearance of the pre-existing framework and of the limited headlong flight which a science with ungeneralizable mechanisms offers up very reassuringly in that its operationality rests on the partial and concentrated areas of the realms of masterable objects. All of this perhaps explains why the thought that issued from nihilism has hardly advanced any more than that born of analytic reason and logical empiricism. The fact that man ceases being what he was and institutes himself in a discrepancy with himself, in the non-identity with self, appears in different forms in structuralism, with Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and even with Sartre. When Sartre speaks of the for-itself as being that which it is not and as not being what it is, with "bad faith" as this very alterity in the tissue of consciousness, it is difficult to identify consciousness in its tradi• tional Cartesian texture. We could expound on the flight into history and into literature in order to face the impossibility of maintaining a non-absurd discourse upon the absurdity of existence. Western reason, Foucault says, owes its putative universality solely to the exclusion of all transgression: madness, the prison and sexuality each illustrate the cracks in this rationality which universalizes at little cost without being able to explain or at least which remains silent about what constitutes its margins. These areas, which classical reason was unable to integrate, should give birth to a new anthropol• ogy. The discrepancy with self in time is already to be found in Heidegger where the accent is on temporality which re-establishes non-identity without contradiction. But it is principally with Derrida and Lacan that this dis• crepancy can be discerned the best. With Derrida, it is differance, but above all absent presence (A and non-A); with Lacan, it is desire without saturation, thus a unconscious semiotized by the discrepancy without any identity TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 131 possible of the signifier and of that to which it refers. It could have therefore been hoped that the death of the subject as the death of the out-of-the-question which decides beforehand about all possible resolutions (making questioning rhetorical and propositionally redundant with respect to the assertability of the subject by itself) would, by undermin• ing this assertability, open the way for a problematology, thus for a non• propositional rhetoric in which the a priori would cease to be rediscovered. What is found according to propositionalism, is determined a priori. Mter all, if the out-of-the-question (the human subject in question) problematizes itself, and becomes in tum the subject of an alternative (A and non-A), one might hope that the foundation (with the help of problematization) would allow the latter to express itself in its very fundamentality. Nothing of the sort took place. The alternative and alternative couples have been integrated into more or less classical relationships (such as NA, BIB, etc.) which struc• turalism, from Levi-Strauss to Greimas, has delighted in [etre friandJ without really going beyond. However, the fact that man happens to be in question by ceasing to be out-of-the-question (which coincided with his general study and his multiple expression at numerous levels) should have alerted us to the presuppositions of the binary mechanism [de couplage]. Indeed, far from constituting an "epistemological break", the semioticization of human reality is part of a continuous evolutionary mechanism of inference whose problematological nature can no longer be doubted. What does it mean to infer? Aristotle expressed it well: produce a discourse from something other than what was supposed at the outset (First Analytics, I. l.24b. 18-22). Without such a difference between conclusion and point of departure, there is no inference. For if the conclusion, which is offered as the resolution of a question, is contained in the out-of-the-question, it cannot really be main• tained that anything whatsoever has been resolved. The essential difference to be respected so that in the final analysis there is a logos is what I call the problematological difference which demarcates questions from answers. It is the necessary and sufficient condition for there to be a solution and knowledge of the solution. For Aristotle, the vicious circle is a simple propositional matter, a link between propositions, a link which is not explained except, precisely, in circular fashion. Or, through the opposition of the known and the unknown, it is psychological: by moving in circles, one does not progress. And at the same time, it is necessary (as Stuart Mill would say against Aristotle's logic in the name of those very principles) that the conclusion be "contained" in the premises. In reality, the difference between the out-of-the-question and the question helps to establish the answer, and it 132 MICHEL MEYER is truly in problematological terms that the inferential discourse fmds the justification of its validity, of its fecundity, and, consequently, of its exist• ence. Moreover, like any discourse, the inference answers a question one has in mind, a question which is brought up by what one says as well as by the fact that one says it. But as soon as it was born, deduction lost the sense of its origins. As an establishing of problematological difference, it is nevertheless nothing more than the resolution of one question mediated through another to which there is already an answer. Put in very general terms, the answer is arrived at through a question of which it is not the solution. Otherwise, we would of course have a circle. We will have B rather than non-B because we have A (rather than non-A) at the beginning. This is the model of causal argument: with the out-of-the-question A, can one make a decision on the question B? If A is the subject and it is in question in turn, there is an Nnon-A, B/non-B relationship. A signifying B is at best an indication for concluding B, but nothing excludes the possibility that non-A be associated with B (or with non-B) as well. All of this has become problematical, but it will not be said: rather, we will prefer to specify that A is the sign of B and that A and B have a relation of significance between them. This is the sole propositionalist manner of facing the loss of constraint. To speak: regarding man of signifier and signified allows us to grasp the fact that man can be other (A and non-A) and that at the most, we can detect signs of what he is and no longer describe him with the unshakable Cartesian certainty of yesterday (i.e. exclude one of the possibilities, A or non-A). An inference, however, has never been more than a question that is resolved on the basis of another one, thus an answer that serves to resolve another question than the one to which it refers directly. The doubling of the literal and the figurative indeed constitutes an inference dependent on the reader. Rhetoric and argumentation merge in the underlying problematological mechanism which makes of each of them an inference. Man, who in structuralism works his way into the gap opened between signifiers and signified, is thus the sign of his inadequacy to himself - his truth and his non-truth. This means simply that he is problematized by problematization (the signifier) of the real (the signified), i.e. that the two no longer adhere but arbitrarily, as Saussure might have said. By this charac• terization, man is put into an alternative: he was A; now, because he is no longer the indisputable subject he was before, he can be non-A. He is rhetoricized. But for us this means, at a deeper level, that he is problematized. Rhetoricization is indeed that which prepares his problematological concep• tualization. For it is important to grasp that the birth of Man, like his death, TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 133 only constitutes a breakage by virtue of the very terms that are put to use. What could be more disruptive than a beginning or an end? But all of this takes place on a canvas of negation of questioning. By introducing strict causality, the classical mechanism needed man or even God as a sup• port/mainstay. When this causality disappears, (amongst other reasons because it is incapable of covering the entire modem and contemporary explanatory field), Man-foundation disappears in the wake of God's disap• pearance. Inference becomes flexible to the point that it ends up reflexively integrating the initial problematization upon which it rests. Failing to refer to types of problematics which inference resolves differently for different historical periods, it will appear to us that there are successive moments considered autonomous, distinct, fragmentary whereas they have a hand in the laws of questioning as these unfold historically. Man-foundation no longer has a raison d' etre when rationality becomes rhetoricized. As a result of a greater problematization. The closing of logos then passes through the thematicization of the field of argumentation. This closure thus becomes a rhetoric of reason, an ideologization which says itself [qui se dit]. Closure may then be perceived as unmasked on the individual (psychoanalysis) as well as on the collective (Marxism) level. But in thus doing, these "new rhetorics" reveal themselves immediately for what they are: guarantors of the closure of propositional logos. These guarantors are themselves closed rhetorically which is something that Popper denounced with regard to psychoanalysis and the ideological analysis of ideology, that is Marxism as well. The function of the rhetoricization of logos is to preserve the resolutive automatism of the latter. This in tum maintains the sophistic role of rhetoric which allows it to reduce any question to an "already there" answer. The fracture caused by the radical problematization of the last century is thus swallowed up in a purely rhetorical non-identity. It is perhaps to this phenomenon that we owe the survival of propositional logos. In spite of this, this logos cannot perpetuate itself, for a rhetoric which expresses itself as such may very well be also propositionalized (which circularizes the "solution''), it nevertheless reveals the essential fracture of which this logos suffers. Unmasked closure can only make reason, in spite of its denials, take the alternative to logos that is expressed inside logos into account. This forces reason to change itself in order to think itself through alternatives (alternatives which would no longer be some proposition existing before all question) this is to say that it is important to be atile to assume interrogativity as such from itself. Explaining, unveiling and autonomizing itself, rhetoric appears to fictively restore identity and, at the same time, to rip logos from its 134 MICHEL MEYER heretofore inexpressible closure. This is an insoluble contradiction for the breakage cannot simultaneously be said and denied constantly by this expression. This explains the illusory and precarious character of the rhetoricization of propositional logos, especially since this rhetoricization proceeds, moreover, according to the same propositional order which leads questions back to preliminary assertions. Henceforth, the rhetoric which develops in this logos can only be auto-confirmed as propositional and not integrate the opposition, the alternative in what it implements in a problematic way. The rhetoric of propositional logos checks this logos at the very moment and place which put the logos into question while cancelling it (the logos). Rhetoricizing logos can, in any case, dispense with the anthropological foundation born of mechanistic causality; it has been doing this since the beginning of the century. In order for the rationality of logos to survive this rhetoricization without perpetuating today's irrationalism, logos must become interrogative so that it can express its own problematization and, consequently, all other problematizations. What this rhetoricization shows is precisely the original flaw in propositional logos with its closures revealing themselves for what they are: rhetorical illusions which are merely sophistic, an identity of purely fictive reason which gives our rationality over to the chaos of unreason under the pretense of being capable of assimilating everything. The identity of Western reason implies the abandonment of propositionalism which has run its course in spite of its many avatars. On the other hand, remaining in an unchanged framework, we have no choice but to take note of the break - the breaks - which are, when all is said and done, nothing more than the problematological expressions of repressed historicity. If the anthropological moment is made absolute, outside of a wider historical context, the end of this moment will be the end of reason. This is exactly what Foucault's epistemology of the break [coupure] implies. With the death of man-foundation disappears a form of [la] rationality, but not rationality at large which changes appearance to allow man to not play the role of God any longer and to retrieve a perhaps more human location to redefine. If one considers the defundarnentalization of the subject as an end, one can but fall into pure nihilism or positivist illusion.

4. FROM ANTHROPOLOGY TO ETHICS The death of man, rigorously understood as the death of man-foundation, was to be nothing less than the announcement of the moral decline of the West whose political aspects were to be concretized, at least in Europe, by the two TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RHETORIC 135

World Wars. From the moment one ceases to treat the other as subject, the way to barbarianism is opened. Instrumentality in human relations has, of course, less terrible manifestations, but it is never but the consequence of the generalization of an exchange economy in which one gives only in order to receive and in which it is enough that taking advantage of the other be rational. Valueless and idealless materialism has thus been able to implant itself in other cultures, like in Japan, without really upsetting existing values, to the extent that, with us, there was nothing which could have contradicted anything whatsoever. On the other hand, other societies - like a certain Islam of today - which are both more fragile and more archaic in many respects, have preferred to reject the West. Perhaps the most appalling spectacle is that of our own dissolution and of ,a progression in cynicism with its cohort of sophists. Rhetorical awareness derives from a need for closure in broken logos. In this perspective, rhetoric swallows all opposition; it is assimilated into the sophistic by this function of automaticization of the resolutive. If, on the other hand, it is realized that rhetoric is in the service of insurmountable questions per se, automatism is broken and propositional logos becomes a true answer [repondre]. Sophist thought is spineless [moUe] and will fail to convince when it comes time to erect a rampart to protect the highest values like the rights of Man. Under these conditions, how will we defend the dignity of the human being who is scoffed at in so many areas in the name of sacrifices imposed by History and its radiant future. Have we, in the end, nothing other than a hazy and empty thought (attended, it is true, by a thousand rhetorical devices) to set over against historicism which indeed appears to represent the last substantial anthropology? On the other hand, how is one to accept such a conception of man which reduces him to a mere instrument at the service of a destiny which inevitably swallows him up? A rhetorical anthropology founds the right of the other to throw any answer back into question. It not only gives him eo ipso the right to free expression, to difference, it also confers upon him the freedom to put it into practice. Because each of us is both the questioner and the respondent, the respon• sibility which compels us to justify ourselves in consideration of these fundamental rights proceeds from their very exercise. And because this practice is ours as well as that of the other, the universality which respects the problematicity of the other will ensue necessarily. 136 MICHEL MEYER

BIBUOGRAPHY Grize, J.B. (1982): De la logique a l' argumentation, Droz, Geneva. Heyndels, R. (1985): La penseefragmentee, Mardaga, Brussels. Janicaud, D. (1985): La puissance du rationnel, Gallimard, Paris. Meyer, M. (1979): Decouverte etjustification en science, Klincksieck, Paris. Meyer, M. (1983): Meaning and Reading, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Meyer, M. (1985): "Pour une rhetorique de la raison", Revue Internationale de Philosophie, No. 155, fasc.4, Langage, argumentation et pedagogie. Meyer, M. (1986): De la problematologie, Mardaga, Brussels. Meyer, M. (1988): "The Interrogative Theory of Meaning and Reference" in Questions and Questioning, M. Meyer ed., De Gruyter, BerlinlNew York. Perelman, Chaiin (1977): The Realm ofRhetoric, Vrin, Paris. PAULRICOEUR

RHETORIC - POETICS - HERMENEUTICS

The following study arises from a lecture given in 1970 at the Institut des Hautes Etudes in Belgium in the presence and under the presidency of Professor Perelman. This lecture having never been published, it is an honor to be invited by his friends and disciples to join in the homage to the man who for several decades was the master philosopher of Brussels. The difficulty in the theme submitted here for investigation results from the tendency of the three disciplines of the title to overlap with one another to the point that they let themselves be led on by their totalizing aims at covering the entire terrain. What terrain? That of discourse, articulated in configurations with more extended meaning than the sentence. By this restrictive clause, I wish to situate these three disciplines at a higher level than that of the theory of discourse considered within the limits of the sentence. At this level of simplicity, the definition of discourse is not the object of my investigation, even though it constitutes its presupposition. I ask that the reader grant (in accordance with Benveniste and Jakobson, Austin and Searle) that the first unit of meaning in discourse is not the sign under the lexical form of the word, but rather the sentence, i.e. a complex unit which coordinates a predicate on a logical subject (or, using P. Strawson's categories, which unites an act of characterization by a predicate and an act of identification by positing a subject). Thus taken into employ in its basic units, language may be defined by the phrase: someone says something to someone about something. Someone speaks - a speaker makes something happen, that is, an utterance, a speech-act whose illocutionary force adheres to precise constitutive rules which alternately make of it a statement, an order, a promise, etc. Something about something: this relationship defines the statement as such, by uniting a meaning to a reference. To someone: the word addressed by the speaker to the interlocutor turns the statement into a communicated message. It falls to a philosophy of language to distinguish within these coordinated functions the three major mediations which make it so that language is not unto itself its own end: lhe mediation between man and world, the mediation between man and another man, the mediation between man and himself.

137 138 PAULRICOEUR

It is upon this common background of discourse, understood as a unit whose meaning is found on the level of the sentence that the three disciplines whose rival and complementary aims we will now compare stand out. Through them, discourse takes on its properly discursive meaning, that is, an articulation by means of units of meaning which are more vast than the sentence. The typology that we will try to institute is irreducible to that proposed by Austin and Searle: indeed, a typology of speech-acts in terms of the illocutionary force of utterances becomes established at the sentence level of discourse. Thus a new type of typology superimposes itself upon those of speech-acts, a typology of properly discursive, that is hyperphrastic, usage of discourse.

1. RHETORIC Rhetoric is the oldest discipline of the discursive usage of language. It was born in Sicily in the 6th century before our era. Furthermore, throughout his work and right up to its most compact expression under the title The Realm of Rhetoric, Professor Perelman took rhetoric for his guide in the exploration of philosophical discourse itself. A few major features characterize rhetoric. The frrst of these defines the center from which the aforementioned realm unfolds. When it comes time to assess the ambition of rhetoric to cover the entire field of the discursive use of language, this frrst feature should not be lost sight of. What defmes rhetoric first is certain typical situations of discourse. Aristotle defmes three which regulate the three genres of the deliberative, the judiciary and the epideictic. Three locations are thus designated: the assembly, the tribunal, and commemorative gatherings. Specific audiences thus constitute the privileged addressees of the art of rhetoric. They have in common the rivalry between opposite discourses between which it is important to choose. In every case, the idea is to get one judgment to prevail over another. In each of the named situations, a controversy calls forth the cutting edge of decision. One can speak in a broad sense of litigation or of a trial even in the epideictic genre. The second criterium of the art of rhetoric consists in the role played by argumentation, i.e. a mode of demonstration situated half-way between the constraint of the necessary and the arbitrariness of contingency. Between the proof and the sophism there reigns the probable argument whose theory Aristotle inscribed in dialectic, thus making of rhetoric the "antistrophe" , that is, the rejoinder of dialectic. It is precisely in the three aforementioned typical RHETORIC - POETICS - HERMENEUTICS 139 situations that it behoves us to isolate a reasonable discourse, half-way between the demonstrative discourse and the violence hidden in the purely seductive discourse. One can already see how argumentation may conquer, step by step, the entire field of (where the preferable calls for deliberation, whether it is a matter of ethics, law, or politics), and - we shall see this later, when rhetoric is carried to its limits - the entire field of philosophy as well. However, a third feature tempers the ambition to prematurely amplify the field of rhetoric: the orientation toward the listener is not at all abandoned by the argumentative regimen of discourse; the aim of argumentation remains persuasion. In this sense, rhetoric can be defined as a technique of persuasive discourse. The art of rhetoric is an art of operative [agissant] discourse. The speaker aspires to conquer the assent of his audience and, if the situation is appropriate, to incite that audience to act in the desired manner. In this sense, rhetoric is illocutionary and perlocutionary at the same time. But how does one persuade? A last feature helps us to state precisely the contours of the art of rhetoric surprised at the "seat" from which it radiates. The speaker's orientation toward the audience implies that he begins with conventional ideas that he shares with it. In this, argumentation hardly has any creative function: it transfers the agreement granted to premises onto conclusions. All of the intermediary techniques (which, moreover, can be very complex and refined) remain a function of the real or presumed agreement of the audience. Finally, we must say a word about elocution and style to which the modems have had far too great a tendency to reduce rhetoric. We cannot disregard them, however, precisely because of the orientation toward the listener. The figures of style, turns of phrase and tropes, extend the art of persuasion into an art of pleasing even when they are in the service of argumentation and do not sink into simple ornamentation. This description of the seat of rhetoric readily reveals its ambiguity. Rhetoric has never ceased to oscillate between a threat of a fall from grace and the totalizing claim in pursuance of which it aspires to equal philosophy. Let us begin with the threat of the fall from grace: all of the features that we have just described indicate that in discourse, there is a certain vul• nerability and a propensity toward pathology. The shift from dialectic to sophistry delineates, in Plato's eyes, the most important tendency of rhetoric. From the art of persuasion, one moves without transition to the art of deceit. The preliminary agreement upon acknowledged ideas shifts to the triviality of prejudice; from the art of pleasing, one moves to that of seducing which is 140 PAULRICOEUR none other than the violence of discourse. Political discourse is assuredly the most inclined to these perversions. What is called ideology is a form of rhetoric. But it must be said of ideology what is said of rhetoric: it is the best and the worst. The best the whole set of symbols, beliefs, and representations which, by way of acknowledged ideas, ensures the identity of a group (nation, people, party, etc.). In this sense, ideology is the discourse itself of the imaginary constitution of society. But this is the same discourse that takes a turn toward perversion as soon as it loses contact with the first account made concerning founding events and becomes a discourse justifying the established order. We are not far from the function of dissimulation and illusion which Marx denounced. It is thus that ideological discourse illustrates the decadent path of the art of rhetoric: from the repetition of the first foundation to justifying rationalizations, then to mendacious falsification. However rhetoric has two tendencies: that of perversion and that of sublimation. It is upon the latter that the totalizing claim of rhetoric asserts itself. Rhetoric stakes its all on the art of argumentation, along the lines of the probable, unrestricted by the social constraints heretofore described. The supersession of what we have named the typical situations (with their specific audiences) occurs in two stages. In the first stage, the whole human order can be annexed by the rhetorical field in that what is considered ordinary language is nothing but the functioning of natural languages in ordinary situations of conversation; now, conversation puts particular interests into play - particular interests really being those passions to which Aristotle devoted book two of his Rhetoric. Thus, rhetoric becomes the art of "human, all too human" discourse. But this is not all: rhetoric may claim the whole of philosophy for its magistery. We need only consider the status of frrst propositions in all philosophies: being hypothetically undemonstrable, they can only proceed from a weighing up of the opinions of the most competent, thus aligning themselves under the banner of the probable and of argumentation. This is what Professor Perelman maintained throughout his work. For him, the three fields of rhetoric, argumentation and frrst philosophy intersect I cannot say that this pretension to all-inclusiveness is illegitimate, and even less can I say that it is refutable. I simply want to stress two points: first, that it seems to me that rhetoric can free itself entirely neither from typical situations which isolate its generative seat, nor from the intention which defines its finality. Concerning the initial situation, it must not be forgotten that rhetoric has claimed the right to command the public use of the word in RHETORIC - POETICS - HERMENEUTICS 141 the typical situations described by the political, legal, and the festive assemblies. In relation to these audiences, that of the philosopher, by Perelman's own admission, can only be a universal audience, i.e. virtually all of humanity, or, at the least, its competent and reasonable representatives. It is to be feared that this extrapolation beyond typical situations corresponds to a radical change in the discursive realm. As for the finality of persuasion, it cannot be sublimated to the point of fusion with the disinterest of authentic philosophical discussion either. Indeed, I am not naive enough to believe that philosophers free themselves not only from the constraints but also from the pathology which infects our debates. It remains that the aim of philosophical discussion, in its most honest forms which prevail in the typical situations described above (if it is equal to what we have called the universal audience), transcends the art of persuasion and of pleasing. This is why it is necessary to consider other constitutional seats of discourse, other arts of composition and other aims of discursive language.l

2. POETICS

If we do not confine ourselves to opposing rhetoric and poetics (in the sense of writing with rhythm and versification), it may appear difficult to distin• guish between the two disciplines. If we return once again to Aristotle, poiesis means production or manufacturing of discourse. Now, is not rhetoric also an art of composing discourse, thus a pOiesis? Furthermore, when Aristotle considers the coherence which renders the plot of the tragic, comic, or epic poem intelligible, is he not saying that the assembly or juxtaposition (sustasis) of actions must satisfy verisimilitude and necessity (Poetics 1154a.33-36)? Even more surprisingly, does he not say that in pursuance of the meaning of the probable and the necessary, poetry teaches universals and thus proves to be more philosophical and of a more elevated character than history (1451b.5)? There can be no doubt then that poetics and rhetoric intersect in the region of what is probable. But if they thus intersect, it is because they come from different origins and make their way toward different goals. The initial place from which poetry radiates is, according to Aristotle, the fable or the plot which the poet invents when he borrows the material for his episodes from traditional narratives. The poet is an artisan not only of words and sentences, but of plots which are fables or fables which are plots. The localization of this nucleus - which I call the initial site of diffusion or of extrapolation of the poetic mode - is of the utmost importance for the 142 PAUL RICOEUR confrontation which follows. At fIrst glance, this site is very restricted, since it only covers the epic, the tragedy, and the comedy. But it is precisely this initial reference which allows the opposition between the poetic act and the rhetorical act. The poetic act is the invention of a fable-plot; the rhetorical act, an elaboration of arguments. Indeed, there is poetry in rhetoric to the extent that "finding" an argument (euresis in Book One of The Rhetoric) is the same as a true invention. And there is rhetoric in poetry to the extent that, for every plot, one can fInd a corresponding theme or thought (dianoia is Aristotle's expression). But the accent does not fall in the same place: the poet does not argue, stricto sensu, even if his characters argue; argument only serves to reveal the character in that he contributes to the progress of the plot. And the rhetorician does not create any plot or fable even if a narrative element is incorporated into the presentation of the case. Argumentation remains fundamentally dependent upon the logic of the probable, i.e. of the dialectic in the Aristotelian (and not in the Platonic or Hegelian) sense, and of the topic, i.e. of the theory of "loci" or topoi which are schemes of conven• tional ideas appropriated to typical situations. On the other hand, the invention of the fable-plot remains fundamentally an imaginative reconstruc• tion of the fIeld of human action - an imagination or reconstruction to which Aristotle applies the term mimesis, i.e. creative imitation. Unfortunately, a long, hostile tradition has led us to think of imitation as a copy or a replica of the identical. And thus we understand nothing in the crucial declaration of Aristotle's Poetics according to which the epic, the tragedy, and the comedy are imitations of human action. However, precisely because mimesis is not a copy but rather a reconstruction through creative imagination, Aristotle does not contradict himself. He explains himself perfectly when he defines mimesis by emplotment, and the plot itself as "the arrangement (sustasis) of incidents" (Poetics. chapter VI). What then is the initial nucleus of poetics? It is the relation between poiesis, muthos and mimesis, in other words, it is the relation "production/fable/plot!creative imitation". As creative act, poetry imitates to the exact degree that it engenders a muthos or a fable-plot. It is this invention of a muthos which must be opposed to argumentation, insofar as it is the generating nucleus of rhetoric. Whereas the ambitions of rhetoric fInd their limit in its attention to the listener and its respect for conventional ideas, poetics points to the breach of newness that the creative imagination opens in this fIeld. The other differences between the two disciplines issue from the last one. I have characterized rhetoric not only by its method (argumentation) but also RHETORIC - POETICS - HERMENEUTICS 143 by its relation to typical situations and by its persuasive aim. On these two points, poetics differs. The epic or tragic poem's audience is brought together by the recitation or by the theatrical representation. It is a people, no longer in their role as arbiters of rival discourses, but as people offered to the cathartic process exercised by the poem. Catharsis must be understood as an equiv• alent of medical purging and of religious purification: a clarification carried out by intelligent participation in the muthos of the poem. Catharsis must, finally, be opposed to persuasion. Contrary to all seduction or flattery, it consists in the imaginative reconstruction of the two basic emotions by which we participate in any great deed: fear and pity. Fear and pity are in turn metaphorized, in a way, by this imaginative reconstruction in which, thanks to muthos, the creative imitation of human action consists. Thus understood, poetics too has its seat of diffusion: the poiesis/muthos/mimesis nucleus. From this center, it can radiate and cover the same field as rhetoric. In the political domain, while ideology bears the stamp of rhetoric, utopia bears that of poetics to the extent that utopia is nothing other than the invention of a social fable capable, it is believed, to "change life". And philosophy? Is it not also born under the sun of poetics? Does not Hegel himself say that philosophical and religious discourses have the same content and differ only as the concept differs from representation (Vorstellung), a prisoner, as it is, of narration and of symbolism? Does not Professor Perelman vindicate me just a little bit in the "Analogy and Metaphor" chapter of The Realm of Rhetoric? Speaking of the creative aspect connected to analogy, the model, and the metaphor, he concludes in these terms: "[ ... ] philosophical thought, incapable of empirical verification, develops by an argumentation that aims to have certain analogies and metaphors accepted as central elements in a world view." (125) Conversion of the imaginary is the central aim of poetics. With it, poetics stirs up the sedimented universe of conventional ideas which are the premises of rhetorical argumentation. At the same time, this same break-through of the imaginary shakes up the order of persuasion, from the moment that it is less a matter of settling a controversy than of generating a new conviction. Henceforth, the limit of poetics is, as Hegel knew, the powerlessness of representation to equal the concept. 144 PAUL RICOEUR

3. HERMENEUTICS What is the initial seat of foundation and dispersion of our third discipline? I will start with the definition of hermeneutics as an art of interpreting texts. Indeed, a special art is required as soon as the geographical, historical, cultural distance which separates the text from the reader gives rise to a situation of misunderstanding which can only be overcome in a plural reading, that is, a multivocal interpretation. Under this fundamental condi• tion, interpretation - the central theme of hermeneutics - is seen to be a theory of multiple meaning. I will take up a few points concerning this initial insertion. First, why the insistence on the notion of text or of the written work? Is there not a com• prehension problem in conversation, in the oral exchange of the word? Is there not misunderstanding and incomprehension in what claims to be dialogue? Most certainly. But the face to face presence of interlocutors allows the play of question and answer to gradually rectify mutual understand• ing. With regard to this play of question and answer, a case can be made for a hermeneutics of conversation. But that would only be a pre-hermeneutics in that the oral exchange of the word does not reveal a difficulty that only writing gives rise to, that is, severed from its speaker, the meaning of discourse no longer coincides with the latter's intention. Henceforth, what the author wanted to say and what the text signifies undergo separate destinies. The text, which according to Plato's Phaedra is a sort of orphan, has lost its defensor which was its father, to confront alone the adventure of reception and reading. With regard to this situation, Dilthey, one of hermeneutics' theoreticians, wisely proposed reserving the term of interpretation for the comprehension of works whose discourse is fixed by writing or deposited in monuments of culture which lend to meaning the support of a sort of inscription. And now, what text? It is here that, if it must be distinguished from that of rhetoric or poetics, the originary place [lieu originaire] of the work of interpretation must be recognized. Three places have successively stood out. First, in our judeo-Christian culture, there was the canon of the Biblical text. This origin [lieu] is so decisive that many readers are tempted to identify hermeneutics with Biblical exegesis. This identification is not quite true, even in this limited framework [Le. the Bible], because exegesis consists in the interpretation of a well-defined text, whereas hermeneutics is that of a secondary discourse concerning the rules of interpretation. Nevertheless, this first identification of the originary place of hermeneutics is not without RHETORIC - POETICS - HERMENEUTICS 145 reason or effects. Our concept of "figure", as Auerbach analyzed it in his famous article, "Figura", remains largely tributary of the first Christian hermeneutics, applied to the reinterpretation of the events, characters, and institutions of the Hebraic Bible in the terms of the proclamation of the New Alliance. Then, the complicated edifice of the four meanings of the Scripture was developed with the Greek Fathers and the entirety of medieval her• meneutics. Four meanings which are four levels of reading: literal or historical, tropological or ethical, allegorical or symbolic, anagogic or mystical. Finally, for the moderns, a new biblical hermeneutics issued from the incorporation of classical philological sciences and ancient exegesis. It is at this stage that exegesis rose to its authentic hermeneutical level, that is, to the task of transferring the core of meaning that the texts took on with respect to a cultural situation, which has ceased to be ours, into a modern cultural situation. Here, we are beginning to see the outlines of a problematic not specific to Biblical or even, generally, religious texts: the struggle, as I described earlier, against misunderstanding born of cultural distance. Henceforth, to interpret is to translate a signification from one cultural context to another according to a putative rule of equivalence of meaning. It is at this point that Biblical hermeneutics merges with the two other modalities of hermeneutics. Indeed, already in the Renaissance, and espe• cially from the seventeenth century onwards, philology of classical texts constituted a second field of interpretation autonomous from the former one. Here, as in the former, the restitution of meaning revealed itself to be a promotion of meaning, a transfer, or, as I have just said, a translation in spite of, or even in favor of, the temporal or cultural distance. The problematic common to exegesis and philology proceeds from this special relationship between text and context in which the text can reputedly decontextualize itself, that is, free itself from its initial context in order to recontextualize itself in a new cultural situation, while preserving a presumed semantic identity. The hermeneutic task consists, then, in approaching this presumed semantic identity equipped solely with the resources of decontextualization and recontextualization of meaning. Translation, in the broad sense of the term, serves as model for this precarious operation. Recognition of the third seat of hermeneutics is an opportunity to better understand what this opera• tion consists of. We now are dealing with legal hermeneutics. A legal text is never without a process of interpretation - - which innovates within the lacunae of written law and especially in new situations not anticipated by the legislator. Jurisprudence thus provides the model of an innovation which is at the same time a tradition. It happens that Professor 146 PAULRICOEUR

Perelman is one of the most remarkable theoreticians of the relationship between law and jurisprudence. Now, the recognition of this third hermeneuti• cal seat is the opportunity also for an enrichment of the concept of interpreta• tion such as it has been instituted in the two previous seats. Jurisprudence shows that cultural and temporal distance is not only an abyss to be bridged, but a medium to pass through. All interpretation is a reinterpretation constitut• ing a living tradition. No transference, no translation without a tradition, that is, a community of interpretation. Such being the three-fold origin of the hermeneutical discipline, what relationship does it have with the two other disciplines? Once again, the phenomena ranging from encroachment and overlapping to a claim of all• inclusiveness come up for examination. Compared to rhetoric, hermeneutics also possesses argumentative phases in that it must always explain more for the purpose of understanding better, and also in that it behoves it to settle rival interpretations, and even rival traditions. But its argumentative phases remain a subset of a more vast project which is certainly not that of recreating a situation of univocity by thus settling in favor of a privileged interpretation. The example of the four meanings of the Scripture is, in this respect, very instructive; and, before the latter, the wise decision of the early Christian church to allow the four Gospels, whose differences in intention and organization are obvious, to subsist side by side. Faced with this hermeneuti• cal freedom, one could say that the task of an art of interpretation, compared to one of argumentation, is less to win acceptance for one opinion over another than it is to allow a text to signify as much as it can, not to signify one thing rather than another, but to "signify more", and thus to make us "think more" according to Kant's expression in the Critique of Judgment (mehr zu denken). In this respect, hermeneutics (whose project, I have said, is less to persuade than to open the imagination) seems to me closer to poetics than to rhetoric. It too calls upon the productive imagination in its demand for a surplus of meaning. Moreover, this demand is inseparable from the work of translation, of transfer, which is linked to the recontextualization of a meaning transmitted from one cultural space to another. But then, why not say that hermeneutics and poetics are interchangeable? This too may be said inasmuch as the problem of semantic innovation, as I liked to say in The Rule of Metaphor, is at the core of both of them. The initial difference must, however, be stressed between the applications of this semantic innovation in hermeneutics and its applications in poetry. I will reveal this difference in the very heart of poetry. Aristotle's insistence on identifyingpoiesis with the assembly or juxtaposi- RHETORIC - POETICS - HERMENEUTICS 147 tion of the fable-plot should be recalled. The work of innovation thus resides inside the unity of discourse which makes up the plot. Moreover, even though poiesis was defined as mimesis of action, Aristotle will no longer make any use of the notion of mimesis, as if it were enough to disconnect the imaginary space of the fable from the real space of human action. It is not a real action that you see there, the poetician suggests, but only a simulacrum of action. This disjunctive, rather than referential, use of mimesis is so characteristic of poetics that it is this sense which has prevailed in contemporary poetics where the structural aspect of muthos has been retained while the referential aspect of fiction has been abandoned. Against structural poetics, it is this challenge that hermeneutics takes up. I would like to state that the function of interpretation is not only to have a text signify something else or even signify everything it can and signify always something more (to take up the expres• sions already used), but its function is to unfold what I now call the world of the text. I readily admit that this task is not the one which romantic hermeneutics, from Schleiermacher to Dilthey, liked to emphasize. For them, it was a matter of reactualizing inspired subjectivity hidden behind the text in order to make themselves contemporary with that subjectivity and to equal it. That path is today closed. And it became so precisely by the consideration of the text as an autonomous space of meaning and by the application of structural analysis in this purely textual sense. But the alternative does not lie with a psychologizing hermeneutics or with a structural or structuralist poetics. If the back door of the text is closed, that is, the side of its author's biography, the front door, if I may say so (i.e., the side of the world which it discloses), is open. I am well aware of the difficulties in this argument which I defended in The Rule of Metaphor. Nevertheless, I maintain that the power of reference is not an exclusive feature of descriptive discourse. Poetic works point to a world as well. If this argument appears difficult to defend, it is because the referential function of the poetic work is more complex than that of descrip• tive discourse, and even, in a sense, quite paradoxical. Indeed, the poetic work only unfolds a world under the condition that the reference of descrip• tive discourse be deferred. The poetic work's power of reference then appears as a secondary reference by means of the deferral of the primary reference of discourse. The poetic reference may thus be characterized, as Jakobson has said, as an undoubled [dedoubtee] reference. There is some truth in the widely accepted thesis in literary criticism that in poetry, language only has a relationship to itself. By deepening the abyss that separates signs from things, 148 PAUL RICOEUR poetic language celebrates itself. It is for this reason that poetry is commonly held to be a discourse without reference. The thesis that I am maintaining here does not negate the preceding one, but rather is based upon it. It posits that the deferral of the reference (as defined by the norms of descriptive discourse) is the negative condition for a more fundamental mode of reference to be brought out. It will still be objected that the world of the text is yet a function of the text, its signified, or, in Benveniste's words, its intente. However, the hermeneutic moment is the work of thought by which the world of the text faces what we conventionally call reality in order to redescribe it. This confrontation may range from denial or even destruction (which is still a relation to the world) to the metamorphosis and the transfiguration of the real. It is here as it is with models in science whose ultimate function is to redescribe the initial explanandum. This poetic equivalent of redescription is the positive mimesis which is lacking in a purely structural theory of poetic discourse. The impact between the world of the text and, simply, the world, within the space of reading, is the ultimate stake of the productive imagina• tion. It engenders what I would dare to call the productive reference proper to fiction. It is with this task in mind that hermeneutics can, in turn, erect a totalizing, or even totalitarian, claim. Wherever meaning constitutes itself within a tradition and demands a translation, interpretation is at work. Wherever interpretation is at work, a semantic innovation is at stake. And wherever we begin to "think more", a new world is both discovered and invented. But this totalizing claim must, in its tum, be subjected to the trial of criticism. Hermeneutics only has to be brought back to the center from which its claim arose, that is, the foundation-bearing [[andateurs] texts of a living tradition. Now, the relation between a culture and its textual origins falls under another sort of criticism: the criticism of ideologies, illustrated by the Frankfurt School and its successors, K.O. Apel and J. Habermas. What hermeneutics tends to be unaware of is the more fundamental relationship between language, work, and power. For hermeneutics, it is as if language were an origin without origin. This criticism of hermeneutics at its very source becomes, at the same time, the condition by which the rights of the two other disciplines are recognized. We have seen that these disciplines radiate from different seats. In conclusion, it seems to me that one must leave each of these three disciplines undisturbed in their three respective birthplaces which are irreducible one to another. And there is no super-discipline which would RHETORIC - POETICS - HERMENEUTICS 149 totalize the whole field covered by rhetoric, poetics, and hermeneutics. Lacking this impossible totalization, one can only locate the noticeable points of intersection between the three disciplines. But each discipline speaks for itself. Rhetoric remains the art of arguing with a view to persuading an audience that one opinion is preferable to its rival. Poetics remains the art of constructing plots with a view to broadening the individual and collective imaginary. Hermeneutics remains the art of interpreting texts within a context which is distinct from that of the author and from that of the texts' original audience with a view to discovering new dimensions to reality. Arguing, fashioning [configurer], redescribing: such are the three major operations whose respective totalizing aims render mutually exclusive, but the finiteness of whose original sites condemns to complementarity.

NOTE

1 In The Realm of Rhetoric, Perelman affords a place to modalities of argumentation which confme to what I will later call poetics: the analogy, the model, and the metaphor. He also affords a place to interpretative procedures which pertain to what will later be held to be an illustration of the discipline of hermeneutics. MICHEL BEAUJOUR

RHETORIC AND LITERATURE

In the context of an homage to the memory of Chai'm Perelman, it is doubt• less legitimate to assume from the outset that the reader has a good knowledge of the structural and historical aspects of rhetoric. I will therefore not insist on the complexities which lay hidden under the word rhetoric, nor on the series of circumstances and ideological slippages which, following the Renaissance, led to the reduction of these complexities to a single "office": lexis-elocutio, that is, "style" or, more strictly speaking, tropes and figures, reduced in tum to the metaphor-metonymy binomial, then, fmally, to the presumed metaphoricity of all discourse. This progressive shrinking and dispersion of rhetoric are of great importance in the history of modem Western culture, particularly if one considers their relation to the advent of literature: we will take the concept of rhetoric in its widest definition - the one established in Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. By stressing the dialecti• cal topics of inventio and argumentation in general, the work of (Ch.) Perelman and (L.) Olbrechts-Tyteca forcefully contributed to re-establishing a balanced picture, especially in French-speaking countries where such a reorientation was urgently needed. Some recent works (Harry Caplan, Paolo Rossi, Frances Yates, etc.) have also restored to the realm of rhetoric the lost province of memory, particularly in its relations to invention, so that one may now speak of rhetoric without fear of the terrible misunderstandings that still prevailed in recent times when French-speakers were rediscovering "rhetoric" through Du Marsais and Fontanier, and even Jakobson and Lacan. My intention is not to show that any text in natural language (in reality, any speech act) is liable to a rhetorical analysis just because one can detect in it more or less well-formed arguments and make out figures of language and thought. Such an approach, which is indeed that of a part of rhetorically• based criticism, is bound to succeed: either it deals with texts - in particular, those currently called literary texts - written in the West during the long period when rhetoric was assiduously taught, or it analyzes modem texts produced after the decline of that teaching, or again it approaches exotic texts which escaped the influence of greco-latin rhetoric. Like grammar, rhetoric is, on the face of it, nothing more than the description of universally prevalent discursive practices to which neither the Greeks, nor the Romans, nor their

151 152 MICHEL BEAUJOUR cultural heirs have sole rights. To be sure, the creation of rhetorical art (like that of grammatical or logical art) is the result of circumstances peculiar to ancient Greek society and culture, and of the role played there by eloquence and the elaboration of mental tools oriented toward the analysis of language, thought and power in the context of a limited democracy. But this history is too well-known for us to dwell on it. It behoves us to stress, however, that the elaboration of a technique and the institutionalization of a rhetorical paideia bring about, at least in certain conventional contexts, a noticeable transforma• tion in the wild rhetoric which is revealed in the analysis of any speech act. In social circumstances that demand the production of "eloquent" discourses or texts, the use of arguments and figures (to restrict ourselves to essentials) is itself conventionalized and aestheticized. Thus it is with rhetorical art as it is with the other arts through which a human techne is analyzed, codified, and stylized: from that moment forth, the wish for efficiency is no longer separable from aesthetic judgements. An efficient speech can acquire an additional value, that of being beautiful. Experts (and all those who have a background in rhetoric are experts to some degree) know how to assess the effects of a discourse. They are also capable of analyzing it technically. In the rhetorical regimen, the production and judgment (if not, always the reception) of a discourse, are thus founded on a learned ability: each orator is a critic, and vice versa. And this technique is the prerogative of a whole class (or at least some members of that class), of a milieu which cultivates the eloquent word. This word is thus not first and foremost an individual gift, although inequality of talent is a recognized fact which rhetorical art must, as far as is possible, remedy. If the practice of language arts is an instrument of power within this dominant class, it is also apt to procure aesthetic satisfactions which certain individuals cultivate assiduously and with delight. The same would be true, mutatis mutandis, within medieval clericature, among learned gentlemen in the classical age, and right up to the late constitution of a literary profession in the West (when typography finally makes the book an object of wide consumption), and of a literature that will claim a status distinct from the practical and usual arts of language. This is to say that rhetoric precedes literature in all senses of the verb. It precedes it historically (if it is true that literature as such is a recent institu• tion), but it precedes it ontogenetically to the extent that rhetorical appren• ticeship was shared by the whole class of those who, by their social position, were apt, before the advent of literature, to become orators or poet'!; at diverse degrees of amateurism, that is, producers of texts (which were not purely RHETORIC AND UTERATURE 153 functional) meant to transcend the pragmatic situations which were thought to have given rise to them. Moreover, rhetorical paideia informs these texts at all levels. This training involves not only a deliberate and formalized implementation of topics and arguments and a "stylistic" choice marked by certain school conventions (to which can be connected diverse ideological conventions), but it requires above all that the text be functional and that it contain obvious pragmatic features: the texts can never own up to being gratuitous. They carry over from rhetoric a persuasive or at least didactic aim and a regard for the collectivity. Moreover, in the rhetorical regimen, the addresser of the text is in a sense always more than a simple individual: the whole culture - at least in the dominant version - is inscribed in the choice of premisses, topics, examples; and individual enunciation, which actualizes culture, also serves to perpetuate and to reinforce it. This is why modern ideologies concerning literature are such obstinate obstacles to our comprehension of the relationships which existed once between rhetoric (as paideia, art and matrix) and the production of elaborated texts. This should not be surprising since the advent of literature in the West (generally agreed to be situated around the 18th century) is concomitant with the gradual marginalization of the rhetorical institution inherited from the Ancients. To be sure, hostility toward rhetoric which, particularly in France, characterizes modernity, does not ipso facto lead to the disappearance of an art of speaking and of writing: our whole teaching of the Humanities attests to this. But, barring some exceptions (and these exceptions concern above all the "philosophical" genre as well as the scholarly discourses derived from the formal school essay), there is nowadays a wide gap between scholarly practices and that which is conventionally called literature, if only because the most visible part of literature - fiction - does not issue from models generally practiced in the school curriculum, and for good reason. The reasons for the divorce are indeed deeper. They seem to me to proceed from a dichotomy between what is public and teachable, on the one hand (Le. culture in the anthropological sense: knowledge, conventions, collective values, law, history, communication, etc.), and, on the other, what is private and in• dividual (one's own body, pleasure, the imaginary, idiolect, personal history, the unconscious). The latter, according to our dominant ideology, are conquered, are recovered from or against "commonplaces", received ideas, and the transmission of power and culture in general. If literature's authen• ticity, in its most quintessentially "literary" sector, be it the "novel" or "poetry", results from a struggle carried out by means of and on the field of writing, with the aim of bringing forth a truth - or at least a significance as 154 MICHEL BEAUJOUR free as possible from determinations and values heterogeneous to the individual project, then it follows that all rhetoric (which is, after all, only the cultural imperative specified in the domain of textual production) must be dismissed, denied, repressed, within modern literature, unless it is imple• mented with irony, parody, or paradox, in order to produce idiosyncratic effects. Indeed, rhetoric has never been a teaching of empty forms, or simple procedures to follow in order to discover the means of persuasion inherent in any given case. On the contrary, persuasion (which some have occasionally attempted to expel from rhetoric, either to turn it into a technique of the well• said and of the well-written, or, interestingly, to make it a "theory of the operations of verbal workings ... whose object is the constitution of works of which language is the element"l), persuasion, then implies operations - of invention, disposition, style - as well as contents, since it is performed in a specific cultural context and it appeals to a particular audience.2 After all, as Perelman stressed many times, the speaker must choose theses accepted by his audience as the premisses for his own argument. This is to say that all persuasion requires a fairly analytical knowledge of opinion, and this knowledge appears indispensable in any cases where the speaker is not complicit with his audience: it is a matter of bringing out beliefs and values of which the addressees are not always clearly conscious themselves. As Perelman points out: Among the points of agreement from which the speaker draws the starting point for his discourse, it is important to distinguish those which bear upon reality (i.e. facts, truths, and presumptions) from those which bear on the preferable (i.e. values, hierarchies, and the loci of the preferable).3 From that moment on, all Western literature, or at least older literature (which, following Marc Fumaroli and Renaissance humanists, I would prefer to call res literariif'), with its philosophical (ethical, political, etc.), cos• mographical, historical, even rhetorical works as well as its epics, drama, novels, and lyrical poems, appears every bit as much a receptacle of topoi (of reality and of the preferable, amongst others) as it is the result of using those topoi; both a treasure and the modalities of exploiting it to various ends, the least of which is not the increasing of capital for its investment into sectors which, at a given period and in a given genre, appear to be the most likely to procure dividends, i.e. heretofore unknown combinations. Rhetoric is also the locus of its dilapidation, even its devaluation through repetition, pedagogical usage, and loss of functionality. Since the Renaissance, the West has not RHETORIC AND UTERATURE 155 ceased being concerned about this erosion, which seems to lead to psittacism, to inflation, and to scarcity, to which it ceaselessly searches for a remedy: the most radical of which consists in getting rid of rhetoric and reducing literature to that which is uttered in anguish, verging on the ineffable and the incommunicable. The great cultural break, after which literature triumphs as value, and which according to Paul Benichou's phrase "consecrates the writer", is framed by a "before" in which all things literary of the past constituted a virtual treasure of invention that any writer could take advantage of, and an "after" in which each text claims either an auto-referential self-sufficiency or at least a reference, limited to the author and to the world as he "perceives" it, which would in principle exclude all the commonplaces which have gained authority by their ancientness and their frequent usage. From then on, in genres elevated to the status of "literature", invention ceases to be methodical research, ceases to be a regulated and systematic hunt through loci, and becomes a fortuitous encounter or an epiphany of the unprecedented in the course of an existential quest pursued at the risk of aphasia, endless repeti• tion, exhaustion and madness: pathological states whose stigmata become emblematic of an agon by means of which the writer attains the authenticity of transgressor and outcast, whose paradoxical status is opposed to that of men of letters, servile piece-workers whose facileness is at the cost of bondage to the rhetorical system, to commonplaces, to the copia and to copying. Henceforth, "true" literature distinguishes itself from the false by an "anxiety of influence" (Harold Bloom), by concerns about originality, even by a denial of intertexts and of topical matrices. Assuredly, "true literature" is only a narrow sector of literary production (that which is marked out, roughly speaking, by the various "French avant• gardes"), and it alone is radically affected by the historical break indicated above: perhaps one should reserve the word literature for it, despite the anathemas and sarcasms which - from symbolism to the present - French avant-garde movements have rained upon the putative referent of this word, doomed from the start to misunderstanding and polemics. The vast remaining sector could conveniently be referred to as letters. But post-rhetorical anxiety has even spread to users of proven formulae, to those scribblers or ecrivants (Roland Barthes) who, knowing nothing of the traditional procedures of rhetorical invention, are presently incapable of recognizing their own practices as bastardized variations thereof, and glory in the unparalleled difficulties encountered in their own "creation". Just as in the time of Aristotle, "the art which imitates by means of words only, whether in prose or 156 MICHEL BEAUJOUR verse, whether in one meter or a mixture of meters, this art is without a name to this day" ,S there is no longer a common name for the mass of writings, contemporaneous with literature, which are still produced according to a rhetorical or pararhetorical procedure: journalism, essay writing, political science, philosophy, sociology, psychology, etc. There are as many names as there are "disciplines" or opinions: fragmentation and specialization in the field of writing are distinctive features of the post-rhetorical regime. They seem inseparable from the evolution of culture in an advanced capitalist, technological and democratic society. The historical advent of literature has thus institutionalized, down to the taxonomy of letters, an obvious break with rhetoric and topics. Moreover, literature founds its ideology upon this break, which it enjoys acting out repeatedly. By attempting to exorcise rhetoric and imitation, post-romantic poetics eventually parody or repress them in favor of new skills whose dominant characteristic is the promotion of the individual singularity: peculiarity of subjective source (imagination, anamnesis, unconscious, etc.), individuality of the "gaze" turned upon the empirical world. Or else, along the lines of a more daring (but half-conscious) manoeuvre, rhetoric is subjected to modifications whose principal effect is to foreground (a hyperbole of the laying bare of devices so dear to the Russian formalists) the functioning of a disjectum membrum - invention, disposition, style, memory, even elocution - of the art which used to stipulate the procedures to follow in the elaboration of a text, without appearing as such in the finished work. This promotion of the fore-text (Jean Bellemin-Noel) is what I have called neoteny elsewhere. It is a ''regressive'' phenomenon which confers an unfinished, rough, premature physiognomy upon certain characteristic works of moder• nity.6 This is to say that repressed and diverted as it is from its persuasive function, reduced as it is to bare fragments, rhetoric sometimes returns in unexpected ways: it figures, paradoxically, in Mallarme's "disparition elocutoire" by which invention's lineaments represent themselves, as it often happens in "self-portraits". The promotion of a putative ''poetic thought" in "images" may also be mentioned. It is distinct from and contrasts with logical thought. Figuration (as in Freudian oneirology) plays the role of local generator, while the figures of thought (irony, allegory, hyperbole, etc.) supposedly substitute themselves for the processes of invention in order to engender the great syntagmatic of the poetic text, unless the places and images of memoria become in turn the matrix of texts which unfold the genesis of the writing subject or that of his culture. RHETORIC AND LITERATURE 157

It would be easy to multiply the variants and thus saturate the field of modem poetics which would then appear like a set of metamorphic versions of classical rhetoric. After all, these variants have a common characteristic already mentioned above: the forgetting or the refusal of persuasion, a refusal that may go as far as to invert the ideology according to which true literature, far from having a persuasive function, is not even communicative in its unpower [impouvoir), unless it becomes an inaugural break from all theses accepted by the public which, in tum, would lead to failure and reprobation. But, once again, an obvious fact must be insisted upon. When the various avant-gardes proclaim their aversion for rhetoric, and their aversion is shared by most literate people, and when, consequently, the old works produced in the rhetorical regimen cease to be read spontaneously and become a corpus for university specialists, at that very moment a great portion of the literary production remains persuasive, shifts to the topics of the preferable, of the honorable, or of the useful, refers to concrete (fidelity, loyalty, solidarity, honor) or abstract Uustice, truthfulness, etc.) values and to their opposites. The modem rhetorician (whether he be a historian of this art or one who strives to renew it) may know that many contemporary "essays" are of the legal, deliberative or epidictic (in all senses of the term) type, but the authors no longer do? It is doubtless not coincidental that this "forgetting" of rhetoric - a forgetting that affects even the practitioners of genres which traditionally resorted to argumentation and aimed at persuasion - is accompanied by a challenge to author and authority. Indeed, classical rhetoric is perceived as the matrix of a redundant and impersonal discourse that is destined to ostentatious psittacism (now modernity, as Jean Paulhan perceived so well, only feels at ease in terror, in distrust or abdication before "language": the writer must be compromised by what he writes or else he is but a man of letters), and at the same time felt as the poorly disguised exercise of an authority which horrifies. Rhetorical discourse authorizes itself by its own skillfulness, but it also exercises an impersonal and diffuse authority: a class authority, an ideological authority which stems precisely from the recourse to topics and authorities. This authority transcends each particular utterance and each author presents himself to his audience as mandated or "covered" by a truth established by the best minds of the past to whom the best minds of the present and of the future will have to adhere in tum. It is thus legitimate to wonder whether rhetoric, in spite of the imputations of frivolity and even of perversity which have weighed for a long time upon the art of arguing indifferently the pro and the contra, is not irremediably condemned in the 158 MICHEL BEAUJOUR practice of an elitist literature which has come to consider the contra as well as the pro as the sides of a self-same reaffmnation of outdated and iniquitous values, of a self-same reiteration of "commonplaces" which should really be subjected to doubt and deconstructed in order to make them own up to their participation in an ideology or even a Western onto theology of which rhetoric would never be more than a "technological" fall-out. It is possible. The examination of the contemporary literary sectors where rhetoric has obviously prospered, at the cost of occasionally abjuring its name, seems to confmn this analysis a contrario: those sectors are situated in authoritarian and even totalitarian ideological contexts. Thus the "roman a these" and socialist realism.s Let us frrst consider the latter whose definition is inscribed in the charter of the Union of Soviet Writers: Socialist realism is the fundamental method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands of the artist a true and historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. The true and the historically concrete in the artistic representation of reality must be combined with the task of reforming the ideas of the workers and of educating them in the spirit of socialism. It is readily apparent that the task of persuasion (reform, education) is subordinated to a truth (the knowledge of reality in its revolutionary develop• ment) and entrusted to a truthful representation, i.e. one in accordance with the laws of Marxism-Leninism. But what is most important to note here is that art (and in particular mimetic art which utilizes a "positive hero" as a vector of the perlocutory force of the message) is conceived as a persuasion toward good and is opposed in all respects to "art for art's sake" taken to be the dominant theory in the bourgeois regimen. That such a poetics now seems disgraceful should not mask the evidence that it is in conformity, mutatis mutandis, with the declared or implicit principles which have guided the production of the majority of literary texts from Antiquity to modernity and that, by its reduction of the adversarial dialogism inherent in ancient rhetoric, it is inscribed in the direct filiation of Christian eloquence. As for the "roman a these", I will comment here on the explicit epigraphs of Susan Suleiman's Authoritarian Fictions.9 Maurice Banes claimed a universal authority: "Literature, such as the masters have understood it, is an interpretation of life. It eliminates in order to prove". If to prove is a bit strong (there is confusion between apodictic logic and persuasive argumenta• tion), the rhetorical filiation remains fairly clear. Paul Nizan makes no bones about it: "All literature is propaganda [ ...J. For us, art is that which renders propaganda efficient, that which is capable of moving men in the very RHETORIC AND LITERATURE 159 direction we wish". The rhetorical tenninology is totally transfonned, but the substance remains. Eloquence is truly "that which is capable of moving men in the very direction we wish". As for the word propaganda, deliberately incongruous in the context of a poetics, it designates quite simply persuasion exercised by a power, be it only that of a revolutionary party. Moreover, the word is part of an enthymeme such as: "If all literature is propaganda, why should we communists be denied the right to do as everyone else?" To be sure, if the premise is correct ... But Aristotle would not contest the statement that "art is [ ... ] that which renders propaganda (persuasion) efficient". Unfortunately, here, art no longer altogether signifies techne, but rather "that which gets something across", the sugar coating on the pill, that which is not the ideological message itself reduced to its essential conceptual fonn. And this ornament includes ... the narrative, the characters, the dialogues, etc., in short all of that which, for Aristotle the poetician, constitutes an epic poem, a drama (or a novel). Here finally is Roland Barthes reflecting in uncharacteris• tic fashion and not without naivete upon the decline of the oeuvre athese. Then there is the modem question: why is there not (at least it seems to me) why is there no longer any art of persuasion - or of intellectual imagination? Why are we so cumbersome, so indifferent to mobilizing the narrative or the image? Don't we see that, as mediocre as they might be artistically, works of fiction nevertheless are best at shaking up political opinion? One would think that he had never been "Brechtian", that he had never read Aragon or Nizan and that he knows nothing about socialist realism. To be sure, he addresses "us", the leftist, non-communist intellectuals whose desire to persuade is a bit reluctant about the concessions that must be made in order to acquire fictive authority. And yet, we could do better (than Stil's novels or Vailland's plays?): if mediocre oeuvres a these persuade, then what might they do if they were good? But what is a "good" roman athese? Barthes' questions, like Barres' and Nizan's enthymeme and the argument of socialist realism, derive from a massive confusion which I have done nothing up until now to remove because it is too crucial for one to even think about undertaking its critique in a parenthetical clause. A secular and fundamental confusion which encumbers and nourishes Western reflection on letters, particularly since the rise of literature to the pinnacle of literary production. Now, this confusion was first avoided by Aristotle at a time when, it is true, the corpus to be considered was still thin and genres were apparently poorly established. One could do worse than to return briefly to his writings in order to get things straight. 160 MICHEL BEAUJOUR

Let us first recall pro forma that Aristotle wrote a Poetics and a Rhetoric separately and that they refer one to the other.l0 The Rhetoric is the theory of persuasive practice, while the Poetics treats the production of poetic works (essentially epic poems and dramas, then, incidentally, a great number of other diverse "genres" which, as we have said before, have not yet been given any collective name).l1 According to the Poetics, the poem has two essential aspects: the represen• tation of human actions (mimesis) and the modelling plot (muthos).12 Certain poems are recounted by a narrator who is present in his narration and who may (or may not) make his characters speak; others, like the dramatic genres, "represent human actions but do not utilize narration" (1449b, ch. 6). As everyone knows, Aristotle justifies the existence of poetry by the pleasure of representation (mimesis) which is, moreover, a common effect of several arts (painting, sculpture, music, dance, etc.). The specificity of poetic art results precisely from the representation of human actions by the construction of a well-formed plot which is carried out by characters. As such, mimesis and muthos have nothing to do with persuasion as far as Aristotle is concerned. Tragedy may well act upon the spectator's emotions, but it does so by provoking terror and pity, then purging the passions, whereas persuasion excites the emotions of the audience in order to instigate an action or at least create a disposition for action (perelman). But, very early in the Poetics (1448b, ch. 4), Aristotle introduces the idea that, from the outset, poets, according to the greater or lesser seriousness of their nature, constructed either noble deeds accomplished by good men (hymns, encomia, then epic poems and tragedies) or low actions ascribed to inferior characters (satire, comedy, burlesque). It is easy to see that this ethical, social and formal bipartition intersects the one which, in rhetoric, separates the encomia from the vituperation. In other words, if mimesis and muthos are in principle neutral, and are only justified by the pure pleasure procured from the representation of actions and a well-made plot (without moral incidence),13 this relative gratuity, or rather the function of ontological clarification and psychological purification attributed to the poem, risks turning surreptitiously into an educative function if the poem also presents dazzling examples of the best and of the worst as regards human actions and characters.14 Yet, if there still prevails a certain ambiguity as to the relation between mimetic poetry and the teaching of virtue, Aristotle's Poetics takes care not to subordinate poetry to persuasion. On the other hand (but this is an aspect internal to mimesis), the persuasive discourses of characters fall under the jurisdiction of rhetoric. That is why Aristotle's Rhetoric, like so many others RHETORIC AND UTERATURE 161 subsequent to it, seeks examples of eloquence in the epic poem and the drama. The statuts of plot and of narration remain to be examined as such. There thus exist works (said to be poetic) in which persuasion (either global or intradiegetic) is subordinated to the mimetic dominant In such a work the characters, even the narrator, may well construct their discourses with a view to persuasion by mobilizing all the resources of the rhetorical arsenal, yet their action does not, for all that, become a simple vector of persuasion between the addresser and the addressee of the text as a whole. For, though muthos might be a likely blueprint as well as a model, one cannot concede to Barres that it "eliminates in order to prove". It eliminates - in a pinch - in order to incite emotions and to procure the pleasure of (re)cognition which constitutes the specific benefit of good mimesis. But all "narratives" are not found in works with a poetic dominant. And it is for this reason that an almost inextricable confusion has become es• tablished over the centuries in which poetics and rhetoric were mingled. It will be recalled that in the Rhetoric (I ii 7-8, 1356 a and b), Aristotle states the following: Thus it appears that Rhetoric is as it were an offshoot of Dialectic and of the science of Ethics, which may be reasonably called Politics. [ ... ] For, as we said at the outset, Rhetoric is a sort of division or likeness of Dialectic, since neither of them is a science that deals with the nature of any definite subject, but they are merely faculties of furnishing arguments.

But - (and here we come to the heart of the matter) for purposes of demonstration, real or apparent, just as Dialectic possesses two modes of argument, induction and the syllogism, real or apparent, the same is the case in Rhetoric [ ... ]. Accordingly I call an enthymeme a rhetorical syllogism, and an example rhetorical induction. Now all orators produce belief by employing as proofs either examples or enthymemes and nothing else [ ... ]. Here, we will deal with the example which is "a sort of induction", a "relation [.•. J of part to part, of like to like, when both come under the same genus, but one of them is better known than the other" (I.ii.19-1357b). Thus, "to prove that Dionysus is aiming at a tyranny, because he asks for a bodyguard, one might say that Pisistratus before him and Theagenes of Megara did the same, and when they obtained what they asked for made themselves tyrants" (ibid.). Here, the examples are reduced to minimal narratives, liable to be developed and detailed according to the aimed-for contexts and audiences. The impor• tant thing is that, as regards persuasion, historically these "anecdotes" serve 162 MICHEL BEAUJOUR to establish a maxim like: "he who wants to tyrannize tries to protect himself'. Narration serves persuasion: the adversary may denounce the fragility of the induction or bring in counter-examples, but the aim is extra• textual. In works whose dominant is non-poetic in the Aristotelian sense, the presence of a plot or of an exemplary narrative has indeed worried modem theoreticians, especially those who, knowing virtually nothing about rhetoric, tend to reduce the literary thing to "poetry", no matter what definition they propose for this "function". One may indeed mistrust theories which, among uses of language, oppose a poetic (or aesthetic) pole and a communicative (or even persuasive) pole in order to measure the degrees of "literarity" or "poeticity" according to a more or less marked domination of the poetic function, or inversely, that of the communicative function. With certain modernists, poeticity may moreover be measured by the degree to which a text displays its self-production at the expense of meaning and mimesis. This seductive opposition (which is perhaps reducible to an imaginary opposition between that which is clear and that which is obscure) can at most serve to divide the space of modem literature. One can in no way agree that it delimits an outside and an inside of the "literary thing" because such an opposition would end up excluding the majority of the argumentative or systematic 15 texts in which the function of persuasive communication dominates. The narration-plot (muthos) may thus have two very different types of relation to rhetoric: it will sometimes have a dominant function and will strive principally to be mimetic-poetic, in which case persuasion appears only in a subordinate role in which it can even engender an argumentative "polyphony" which no intratextual authority may totalize or resolve; or muthos will have the subordinate role of example in a text with a persuasive dominant where it must lead to a unequivocal conclusion (since it serves as an argument) which is often made explicit by an intratextual authority clearly marked as such: it is for this purpose that the moral of a fable, the use of maxims, the commentary of an author or of a "positive hero"16 may serve. In principle, then, two great literary types exist.17 According to the periods and the ideological and social contexts, one or the other type enjoys greater prestige among those who have the power to constitute the literary canon and to pronounce judgement on the "literarity" of new productions. For example, in the eyes of the learned of the period studied by Marc Fumaroli (1550-1650), eloquence and the argumentative genres prevail over the mimetic-poetic genres, while, inversely, the establishment of literature increasingly favored poetics-mimetics. Genres with an argumentative RHETORIC AND UTERATURE 163 dominant thus tend to be excluded from "literature" in which certain texts are only tolerated by virtue of their being well-written, obscure or picturesque aberrations. It nonetheless seems that this tendency has recently been inverted, at least in France, due to the favor from which the "human sciences" and historiog• raphy have benefited. This is a promotion which entails a widening of the "literary" canon: the rhetoricaVargumentative works of the past (philosophy, history, or natural sciences) may henceforth be read not only as archives of somewhat outdated "facts" and "ideas", but especially as systematic texts whose epistemology or argumentative structure are intrinsically linked to the more or less conscious and conventional implementation of tropes and figures. From the research of Bachelard and Canguilhem to Foucault's archeology (which circumscribe the probability of an episterne through its major arguments and tropes) even to the work of a Derrida (who divulges a latent metaphysics in figures) a vast movement on the margins of scholarly and explicit rhetorical research undertaken independently by Perelman and a few Anglo-Saxon researchers contributes to the promotion of an attentive yet, at the same time, loose reading of the neglected areas of the rhetorico• argumentative archive. Meanwhile, contemporary argumentative texts which thoroughly exploit, against "positivism", the sophistic fallacies, the "liberties" of the rhetorico-poetic lexis and aU the ambiguities of the prob• able, the possible, increasingly acknowledge themselves to be "literary". This displacement is accompanied by a decline in the poetic-mimetic productions known as avant-garde. But this is perhaps a local mutation, particular to the French culture, whose weight and significance within Western "literature" remains to be evaluated and whose epistemological and socio-cultural determinations do not yet appear to us clearly. Let us merely note that rhetoric - like sophistics - enjoys renewed favor in historical and theoretical research and a new audience among writers who have discovered it to be a powerful means of undermining and eluding the monumentality of systematic philosophy and of challenging the metaphysics of representation, a genus of which mimesis and poetic expressivity are the species. But if it is so that mimesis and expression are henceforth the objects of a disfavor and a desperate undermining effort on the theoretical level, what then is the status of "poetry"? We will henceforth no longer take poetry in the Aristotelian sense of epic and dramatic mimesis, since this role has been assumed in a large part by the "novel" and the audio-visual media. But instead, we will take it in the sense, which in Aristotle and in all the great traditional Western poetics is marginal, 164 MICHEL BEAUJOUR of lyricism (expressive "song"), or else, in accordance with an ideology issuing from the encounter between esoteric symbolism and Heidegger, in that of an unveiling of being in language. It is legitimate to wonder, for the time being, how such a "poetry" which is in principle equally hostile to mimesis and to rhetoric situates itself in the Aristotelian bipartition and if its skewed position does not threaten the symmetry of the model sketched above. But before we reach that stage, let us recall that the dominant of pre• modern poetry itself was not exclusively mimetic and that an important fraction of lyrical poetry (so-called for its relationship to a musical accom• paniment) is in fact produced by the elaboration of locutionary and illocution• ary acts (request, interrogation, threat, encomium, deploration, refusal, wish, etc.) which are placed - fictively or not - in conventional socio-cultural contexts. Now, already with Aristotle (Poetics, 1451a, chap.8), these speech acts were claimed by rhetoric which has since passed them on to pragmatics. This kind of poetry thus falls essentially in the rhetorical sphere. It adds specific traits (meter, diverse forms) to a sometimes schematic and often fallacious argumentation. It is thus its "poetic" usage of lexis which, accord• ing to Aristotle and numerous epigones, forces this type of discourse to swing toward nonsense, i.e. toward a confusion of the argument and a "defunctionaiization" of the speech act (Rhetoric, 1404a, m, i, 9). Neverthe• less, this rhetorical poetry presents itself as a fictive persuasion or dissuasion which, with the help of enthymemes and examples, aims either at an inscribed addressee or at the addresser himself who is then supposed to soliloquize, deliberate or meditate in his heart of hearts. Lyrical poetry may well be a "second rhetoric": its status, like that of any meditative-deliberative soliloquy, is nonetheless ambiguous. Romantic ideologemes (self-expression, imagination, "objective correlative" of emotion) attempted to legitimize this pseudo-rhetorical non-narration and to carve for it a domain between mimesis and argumentation. That attempt ends up in a generalized subversion of rhetoric and mimesis: its vicissitudes delimit the poetic history of modernity. Moreover, the reading strategy which contemporary criticism designates by the pejorative term of rationalization, and which consists in searching for the "meaning" of a text by reducing it either to a mimesis (which the texts prevents from taking in spite of the suggestive enticements that it furnishes) or to a persuasive argument turns out to be too generalized a phenomenon for it to simply be chalked up to stupidity; and, inversely, modernist confusion is too ideological and too overdetermined by an intense will to not fall back into the double rut of RHETORIC AND liTERATURE 165 mimesis-narration and formal argument for us not to suspect (a suspicion confmned by the massive production and consumption of mimetic and argumentative works which are marginal to modernism) that the Aristotelian bipartition remains solidly anchored at the heart of our culture. This biparti• tion informs the "horizons of expectation" of the naive reader (who "understands nothing about modernism") as well as those of the modernist writer and reader, at least when the lauer, giving themselves over to a reprehensible listlessness, seek that "pleasure of the text" which Roland Barthes rehabilitated to a certain extent while at the same time opposing and subordinating it to the jouissance which texts appearing to be insoluble enigmas or flagrant nonsense would procure as they resist argumentative• mimetic reduction. The bracketing - or at least the bringing into question - of meaning, which focuses attention on the materiality of writing and defers sine die access to the mimetic or argumentative signified also draws attention to the "work of the signifier" even in old texts that are totally alien to moder• nism: this is a modem variant of rhetoric in which invention is conflated with elocutio. Nevertheless, there is an advantage with this telescoping (which produces a partial rhetoric) in that it renders the relative autonomy of lexis in relation to mimetic or argumentative intentionality manifesL Traditional rhetoric only accomplished this revelation timidly, due to its own ontological and practical overdeterminations. In Aristotle, the caution against excesses in "poetic style" and against its tendency to degenerate into nonsense aims to limit this autonomy: traditional rhetoric is as much a means of controlling rambling words and their constitutive elements as it is a means of facilitating their arrangement for argumentative and mimetic purposes. "Rhetoric", as we stated at the outset, is everywhere. It is in argumentation and in the refusal to argue, in the literary utterance and in its enunciation, in tropes and figures, in the fact that the writer wants to have his opinion shared and in the fact that his characters, if there are any, implore, threaten, deplore and manipulate each other. But many aspects of the text, and especially those of the mimetic/narrative text, remain foreign to rhetoric. As such, their narratology as well as their dramaturgy dominate persuasion which in turn becomes a pertinent element of the text, but one subordinated to muthos whose principal function is to procure a particular pleasure which is adminis• tered as much by "suspense" as by the alternating excitement and calming of the emotions. And if these emotions and suspense have been set into motion for specifically persuasive reasons, the argumentative structure underlying the muthos - which thus appears as a simple inductive example - must be sought. To be sure, the difference may appear minimal, even specious, but, 166 MICHEL BEAUJOUR all things considered, it allows one to bracket or resolve a whole series of problems in which modem criticism (at least criticism that stands outside the semiotic sphere) has been steeped and which all pertain to the extension, utility and purity of the literary thing. The answer depends on which side the texts are on. On the rhetorical side, they may be asked (with all the cir• cumstantial and contextual implications) to plead a case, or, paradoxically, they may be asked to tum against persuasion and expose the strings of argumentation, the scheming of figures and tropes, the loci of memory, i.e. the matrix of the argumentative text. And on the mimetic/narrative side, reversals (peripetiae) and emotions procured by human actions - noble or not - may be expected of them, unless, paradoxically, the undoing of muthos is exposed, the abulia, the degeneration, or the vanishing of the protagonist, the breaking down of the narration or of the drama is performed. Other options will occur, depending on whether certain elements are moved from one side to another. Rhetoric will always thrive on this, but perhaps, in the long run, literature will not. It is necessary, in conclusion, to stress the fact that rhetoric is not - as it is all too often believed - a "critical method" among others. Were it one, it would be reduced to description, taxonomy and history. To be sure, it is useful to analyze arguments, periodic sentences, figures and tropes, to find out what sorts of "rhetoric" prevailed at a given moment and which ideologi• cal tendencies were connected to them. As long as this task continues to appear in the eyes of some as somewhat esoteric and picky, it will have to struggle to impose its legitimacy. Inversely, rhetoric is not a global theory of the literary thing. We now know that the drama, the narrative, and, in part, lyricism escape its jurisdiction. Different from modem criticism which is essentially analytical, rhetoric remains, virtually, a theory of the production of argumentative texts and of that which is argumentative in poetic-mimetic texts. It will become so fully, once again, thanks to the work of Perelman and of a few others. True, it has been scattered into a thousand dispersed practices which have, on the face of it, little to do with literature. But this is precisely rhetoric's strength, for it constitutes a resource - even a challenge - to that which today endangers literature, namely the relative decline of letters within an audio-visual mass culture. Let it be noted that this decline threatens, first and foremost, the future of argumentation, since the functions of the narrative and of the mimetic drama have been taken over by the cinema and by television; those of lyrical poetry, by rock music and video. It seems to me that the resurgence of the rhetoric of language must be interpreted as a profound reaction (but faintly-perceived as such) to the dealphabetization of RHETORIC AND UfERATURE 167

the West, rather than as the creation of an additional specialization in the realm of literary studies. Thus perceived, the return to rhetoric invites us not only to take up the archive once again in its relation to the media and the mental tools available to each epoch, but especially to redefine the literary thing at a moment when it risks - in spite of libraries and data banks - becoming shortly a dead letter. Let us finally note, not without anticipated nostalgia, that a new rhetoric will surely develop upon the ruins of the literature which made us what we are. For if rhetoric preceded literature, it will, for symmetrical reasons, neces• sarily survive it in a post-literary culture.

NOTES

1 Jean-Louis Galay, Philosophie et invention textuelle, Paris, Klincksieck, 1977, p. 25. Here, oeuvre refers to the making of the end-product: ouvrage. 2 Perelman, as we know, added the idea that "discourse addressed to the universal audience aims to convince" to classical theory. The Rhetorical Realm, Paris, Vrin, 1977, p. 31. 3 Perelman, op. cit., p. 37. 4 Marc Fumaroli, L' age de I' eloquence, Geneve, Droz, 1980, pp. 17-2fl,. S Aristotle, Poetics ... 6 Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d'encre, rhetorique de I'autoportrait, Paris, Seuil, 1980, p.I25. 7 Chaim Perelman, The Rhetorical Realm, op.cit., p. 83: "Epideictic discourse nonnally derives from the edifying genre, for it is less concerned with bringing about immediate action than with creating a readiness for action which waits for the appropriate moment [ ... ]. Thus it is that all practical philosophy derives from the epideictic geme." 8 Cf. Susan Suleiman's excellent study, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, New York, Columbia University Press, 1983, and Rufus W. Mathewson, Jr., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, New York, Columbia University Press, 1958. 9 Suleiman stresses that numerous practitioners of this geme denied that they practiced it. A "roman a these" is that of an ideological adversary. 10 The Rhetoric of course refers also to the Organon, to the Poetics and generally to the Ethics. 11 The Poetics' orientation allows us, without stretching the point, to anachronisti• cally extend its sphere to the novel and the narrative cinema. 12 I am borrowing the model concept (modelling system) anachronistically from Iouri Lotman (La structure du tate artistique, Paris, Gallimard, 1973) in order to stress that Aristotelian muthos is not a simple "slice" of life or a segment of action but, on the contrary, the poet's active structuring of the mimetic material. 13 The Rhetoric (1371b) and the Poetics (1448b) indicate that the arts of imitation procure the dual pleasure of wonderment and of discovery: the imitated thing itself 168 MICHEL BEAUJOUR does not procure these pleasures, but "the recognition that the imitation and the imitated thing are identical in such a manner that we learn something." Pleasure of re• cognition or of pre-cognition by which we learn to either "see" better or to see into the future [prevoir). This is the educative pleasure peculiar to the drama, the epic poem and fiction. These pleasures are analogous to those obtained from the metaphor: a delayed pleasure derived from a difference which is then resolved in a resemblance. Thus the metaphor can represent a sort of "microcosm" of mimesis. This is what Derrida seems to be suggesting in a striking aside: ''now, if metaphor (or mimesis in general) aims at an effect of knowledge ... ". "La mythologie blanche" in Marges de la philosophie, Paris, Minuit, 1972, p.294. 14 We know that for the Greeks, the poet (Homer in particular) was a (good or bad) educator, and that epic and tragic poetry was constantly exploited by educators (the Sophists, for example) who found in them examples of virtue (arete). 15 Karlheinz Stierle, "L'histoire comme exemple, l'exemple comme histoire", Poetique 10, 1972, pp.176-195. 16 Historiography may, alternately, according to ideologies and contexts, belong to one or the other type of narration. 17 It would be good for the reader to refer to the introduction to Wilbur S. Howell's book, Poetic, Rhetoric and Logic, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1975. OUVIER REBOUL

THE FIGURE AND THE ARGUMENT

Can a figure of rhetoric be an argument? Can it be an element of argumenta• tion? In order to provide an answer, let us begin by defining what is under• stood by "figure of rhetoric". A figure, in general, is a stylistic procedure, i.e. a manner of expression which is both free and codified. The figure is free in the sense that one does not have to have recourse to it in order to communicate: "For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone!" (de Gaulle, address of 18 June 1940). To be sure, the author had no need of this repetition in order to make himself understood. The figure is codified because each figure constitutes a known structure which is transferable to other contents: the metaphor, the allegory. Thus, whoever is a bit knowledgeable (or a little pedantic) will recognize de Gaulle's figure for an epanalepse. To say that a figure is rhetorical is not a pleonasm, for a figure may only be poetic; and rhetoric and poetry are not the same thing, and do not have the same functions or instruments. If we refer to the great tradition going back to Aristotle, we may say that the essence of rhetoric is persuasion through discourse. A figure is thus not necessarily rhetorical and it is only so to the extent that it contributes to persuading. Thus, de Gaulle affirmed that "France is not alone" three times undoubtedly to express a pathetic tension contribut• ing to ethos (character which the orator must take on) and to pathos (action upon the audience's affectivity). As soon as it is rhetorical, the figure contributes to argumentation. It is clearly in this manner that the authors of The New Rhetoric understood it - those authors who strove to derive, and almost deduce, every known figure from a certain type of argument. Thus, repetition (cf. p. 504) would be the figure of sincerity, being connected to the argument of dissociation; the procedures of discourse are distinguished from spontaneity of discourse. In brief, in our example, de Gaulle's repetition would be a procedure meant to convince: a procedure which discourse is not. The consequence: a figure appearing as such, as purely gratuitous, is one which has missed its target, which prompts its audience to say: that is misplaced poetry (or humor)! The successful figure, on the other

169 170 OUVIER REBOUL hand, appears "natural", i.e. the most normal in the argumentative situation and context, the one in the absence of which one would think something had been lost. In brief, instead of seeing the figure as a "deviation" or expression, extrinsic to thought, it is made an element of thought, a means of fmding and proving, even if what it finds and proves is never more than probable. Just as is probable everything that results from argumentation. That is, in the end, almost everything. Now, this functional theory of the figure perhaps omits an essential element - I mean to say, pleasure. The pleasure which may derive from emotional disturbance or, on the contrary, from laughter, but which in any case constitutes a specific element of persuasion. In terms of this, there exists either a "well-placed" poetry or a "well-placed" humor. Olbrechts-Tyteca's The Comic of Discourse seems to me to correct what was too intellectualist in the theory, at least as regards laughter, by showing us the pleasure it may procure. Based on these remarks, I will attempt to answer the three following questions in order of increasing difficulty. First, in what ways do figures facilitate argumentation? Second, can the figure itself constitute an argu• ment? Third, is not the argument itself a figure, more or less?

1. FIGURES OF WORDS AND FIGURES OF MEANING I will classify the figures in the most traditional manner, which at least has the advantage of being clear: figures of words, meaning, construction and thought. Figures of words (or metaplasms) seem limited to poetry or else to the comical. Nevertheless, they must indeed play an argumentative role since the most rationalistic philosophers do not hesitate to use them, starting with Plato's paronomase: soma. sema. The force of expression results from the rhythmic repetition: -, -, as well as from the repetition of all the phonemes, except for 0 and e. The proof is in the fact that one need only to translate - "the body is a tomb" - in order for this force to disappear; however, the power of metaphor remains. In this type of figure, everything happens as if - an "as if' which quite exactly constitutes the figure - the arbitrariness of the sign were abolished, as if the sequence of phonemes responded to a sequence of thoughts to which it brought an added measure of proof, all the stronger for its unexpectedness. One may object that this example is unconvincing, that a pun can only be the argument of the simple-minded. Is this so certain? mE FIGURE AND mE ARGUMENT 171

Let us consider a figure as common as the derivation: "Brittany to the Bretons". It creates, at the outset, a feeling of legitimate belonging, along with a dissociation: that of the exclusion of non-Bretons or of fIrst-generation Bretons. But the figure only works by virtue of an initial consensus, or at least the existence of a problem. "Berry to the Berrichons", rather than convincing, would be ridiculous. Yet another example, and a much more serious one: that of etymology, which holds an eminent place in our culture and which, as an argument, is nevertheless of the same type and level. Hence, the etymology of "figure" could evoke a face - a face in the anonymity of the text -, or else, it could evoke fIction (fingere), or, better yet, a fIctitious face, a mask. This etymol• ogy has been played upon for all times - this etymology which is, moreover, whimsical, since figura, a technical term from Latin rhetoric, is but a tracing of the Greek schema which does not at all evoke masks or faces! Indeed, whether the etymology is exact or whimsical has little importance, for a word only has meaning in a given synchrony, and its signifIcance in another language (e.g. ancient Greek) does not in the least authorize a modifIcation of its defInition in ours. And yet, we have no hesitation in referring to etymology as to a choice argument; and when I say "we", I am thinking in particular of philosophers who do not hesitate to postulate an original language in which words would have an authentic meaning which it would suffice to retrieve in order to know. Thus, Heidegger, at almost every page ... Gilbert Dispaux (1984, p. 86), on this matter, cites Freud's opponents who claimed to refute him by arguing with the "etymological sense" of hysteria (derived from the Greek hystera, uterus), only to conclude that hysteria could "by defInition" only be a woman's illness! Etymology may be interesting, but, as an argument, it is nothing more than a cultural pun, a fIgure of words that is blind to itself as such. Figures of meaning, or tropes, appear more pertinent, closer to the technique of argumentation itself. Metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, oxymorons, hyperboles, etc. consist in the use of a term with a meaning that it does not usually have and which provokes a tension within the discourse. Here, I limit myself to the example of the metonymy. The metonymy consists in indicating a thing by another which is usually associated with it: "the throne and the altar", "the sword and the aspergil• lum". Its argumentative power is above all that of naming which emphasizes one aspect of the thing to the detriment of others. Thus, "the throne and the altar" is a valorizing metonymy, while "the sword and the aspergillum" is a 172 OUVIER REBOUL depreciatory one that reduces the army to the practice of extermination and that of the church to superstition. But, in any case, we associate one reality with another by playing on the feeling of familiarity that creates often that of evidence. Most symbols - cross, crescent, crown, tricolor - are on the order of the metonymy. And, metonymy may be considered to be a condensed argument that plays on the symbolic link. Figure of familiarity? It may, however, happen that the metonymy is new, surprising, in the sense that Ricoeur speaks of the "metaphore vive". "There are no Pyrenees any more", declared for the first time (in 1659?), must have produced this effect of surprise. "Pyrenees" is a metonymy for "border", with the connotation of a dangerous, hostile and almost insurmountable mountain range; there is, in addition, a metalepse, for the "there are no more" evokes the power of kings, capable of moving mountains. A living metonymy, for it tacitly introduces a new symbol, "the plain", that evokes peaceful communica• tion. But it is a symbol that the audience could nonetheless decipher. Familiarity, newness: like all figures of meaning, the metonymy oscillates between two rocks: the enigma and the cliche. A metaphor like "that fox", a synechoche like "a hundred heads to feed", a metonymy like "his hearth", are codified to the point that they are no longer figures. Their force of persuasion is only that of naming with all its reductiveness. To the contrary, a new figure is often enigmatic; its strength thus comes from the fact that it forces one away - if only for an instant - from received ideas. Every true figure of meaning keeps to the center in this tension between the mystery of the enigma and the familiarity of the clicM.

2. FIGURES OF CONSTRUCTION AND FIGURES OF THOUGHT Figures of construction concern the structure of the sentence or the sequenc• ing of sentences. Let us cite the ellipse, repetition, inversion, antithesis, etc. Here, once again, I will limit myself to one example, the chiasmus, which combines the antithesis and inversion (after Fontanier, Perelman calls it "reversion"). The chiasmus reinforces the antithesis by reversing the order of the repeated terms: XY- YX. Thus the two last lines of Comeille' s quatrain on Richelieu: Whether one speaks badly or well of the famous cardinal, Neither my prose nor my verse will ever speak a word: He has done me too much good that I would speak badly of him, He has done me too much evil that I would speak well of him. TIlE FIGURE AND TIlE ARGUMENT 173

Here, the chiasmus appears to be the development of a dilemma - whether I speak: well or badly of him, it will be unjust in both cases - the conclusion being: I am thus right in not saying anything. The perfect chiasmus seems thus to render the argument irrefutable. The chiasmus in thus in the service of what Perelman designates as a quasi-logical argumentation. Logical, because it seems to rest on an ineluctable alternative each term of which ends up in the same conclusion "to say nothing". Quasi, because in fact the alternative is not one: between "to speak: well" and "to speak: badly", there are indifferent and nuanced things one can say. Moreover, this is exactly what Comeille does! His chiasmus is inserted in a preterition by saying that he will say nothing about Richelieu, he does speak: of him and expresses the essential. The chiasmus, moreover, possesses another function related to what Perelman calls dissociation. Such as the famous chiasmus of . He speaks thus, against Feuerbach: To the contrary of German philosophy which goes from heaven to earth, it is from earth to heaven that we climb here [ ... J. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness." (German Ideology) Over and against the illusory couple of German ideology (Term I: earth, life I Term II: heaven, consciousness), Marx sets the couple which expresses the real hierarchy by inverting Term I and Term II. The argument's X-shape seems to provide him with the evidence of necessity. However, we find the same abuse of logic as in Comeille; indeed, is the alternative (consciousness determining life or life determining consciousness) really one? It is plausible that if life determines consciousness, then the latter transforms life, in response, etc. The chiasmus renders the argument dramatic. Or else comical, like Marx's answer to Proudhon: "Philosophy of misery or misery of philosophy?" But it simplifies it to the point of reductiveness. Figures of thought, of which the most well-known are the allegory and irony, are characterized by two features. First, they pertain not to a part of the discourse, but to the discourse as such; a sentence may contain a pun, but it is the entire sentence or a whole series of sentences that are ironic. Then, they are liable to multiple readings. A metaphor, ''This chief of State is the shepherd of this people", has only one sense, the figurative sense. While an allegory, like the parable of the good shepherd can be read in the literal sense or in the figurative. Just as an ironic sentence: "You are the phoenix ..... can be taken to the letter or as an antiphrasis. This double meaning has argumenta• tive value. Thus the allegory, like Plato's cavern or the sower of the Gospels, presents 174 OUVIER REBOUL a coherent narrative which seems self-sufficient. However, the audience is not satisfied: it suspects that it in fact is being told something else - but what? To our thinking, far from a clarification, the allegory states a message in veiled form, and for that very reason, it schemes. It is too often forgotten that there is a pedagogy of mystery; and this is allegory's force: it urges us to find out more. As for irony, its dual meaning explains its impact. Very often, its victim takes its message to the letter - "You are the phoenix ... " - which makes him ridiculous before the audience. But it happens that even the audience does not understand the antiphrasis right away. It is precisely this delay that produces the finesse of irony, and even its cruelty. Irony is undoubtedly the figure that adapts itself the easiest to argumenta• tion; at least that is the sense one gets in reading Perelman. According to him, let us remember, argumentation knows no contradiction in the narrow sense of the term. On the other hand, it works on the more nebulous, but more effective notion of incompatibility. For example, the logical principle of contradiction does not tell us if one can be (politically) both liberal and planning-oriented [dirigiste], or both democratic and elitist. Yet we deal with just this sort of incompatibility every day. Now, irony, by pretending to take the opponent's discourse to the letter, shows its deep incompatibility and renders it ridiculous. Thus, Napoleon III taking in hand the pamphlet that Victor Hugo wrote against him: "Well, gentlemen, here is Napoleon the Lesser by Victor Hugo the Great. .. ". This witticism may be decoded in several ways: he does not hurt me, he takes himself for Napoleon, etc. It was an argument, in any case. Let us yet mention two figures of thought related to utterances. First, the apostrophe: it is not the simple fact of addressing someone; writing "Dear Pierre" or Dear Mr. President" at the top of a letter is neither an apostrophe nor even a figure. The apostrophe occurs when we pretend to address someone other than our true audience. Technically, it was, as Quintillian said (IV.1.63), a figure of legal discourse which consisted in "turning to an other than the judge", in interpellating the accused himself, or someone absent, or the nation, or ancestors ... but precisely in order to better impress the judge. In brief, the apostrophe consists in imagining a fictitious audience in order to better persuade the real one. Like irony, but in another manner, it reinforces the link between the speaker and his public. The chleuasm pertains to the speaker himself. Through this figure, he pretends to accuse or to denigrate himself in order to better set up the audience. This form of auto-irony is thus part of ethos. The chleuasm may THE RGURE AND THE ARGUMENT 175 consist in going an accusation one better in order both to show its im• probability and that the accused is not bothered by it (cf. Angenot, p. 277). But it also has a more general function. This is the case for he who invokes his own incompetence in order to challenge someone else's competence. Thus, Sganarelle to Moliere's Don Juan: As for myself, sir, I have never studied like you, thank God, and no one could boast of having taught me anything; but with my little sense, my little judgment, I see things better than all the books ... The chleuasm of incompetence is far from being inoperable. Let us suppose that in a debate between philosophers, someone declares, "I, who understand nothing of philosophy, tell you that. .. ", he will be listened to and it is probable that his confession of ignorance will elevate him to the status of arbiter of competences. The force of the argument, the "thank God" of Sganarelle, comes, on the one hand, from the disdain, sometimes a bit justifies, toward those who are not specialists, at the risk of losing the "meaning" and the "judgment", and, on the other hand, from the idea, also justified, that philosophy (as with any other discipline) is not a game-preserve for philosophers only, that everyone is concerned by debates between specialists.

3. THE METAPHOR: A PRIVILEGED CASE We find this argumentative aspect of figures in the privileged case of the metaphor to which The New Rhetoric devotes a lengthy study. Like Ricoeur, the authors view the metaphor as a semantic impertinence contributing to the poeticization, or at least the increased expressiveness of discourse. But they analyze the impertinence itself as a condensed analogy, thus as an argument (cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric m.1O). To understand it, let us recall that the analogy itself is defined as a resemblance between two relations: the first of these, the theme, states what one means or wishes to prove; the second, the phore, states what one says in order that it may better be expressed or proven. Suppose the proverb, "One swallow ... " theme phore A One good piece of news C One swallow B does not guarantee happiness (is like) D does not make a summer 176 OUVIER REBOUL

We notice that the phore is in general more concrete, and in any case more familiar than the theme. And it is the resemblance between the two relations which allows us to infer the fourth term from the three others; in our proverb, we prove B given A, C, and D, since the relation between A and B resembles that between C and D: "one has no right to generalize". Metaphor occurs when analogy is condensed through the omission of certain terms. Suppose these three diagrams:

1) Allegory theme phore A C One swallow B D does not make a summer 2) Metaphor in praesentia: theme phore A This good piece of news C is but one swallow B D 3) Metaphor in absentia: theme phore A C This swallow B D We note that the metaphors are only understood thanks to a code which in this case is the proverb. Sometimes it is a matter of the linguistic code, when the metaphors are lexicalized: "this fox", .. this tiger"; or it is a matter of a cultural code as in: .. this thinking reed", "these paper tigers". In what respect is the metaphor an argument? The simplest answer consists in saying that it draws its strength from the analogy that it condenses. Thus, if I wish to reassure an old person anxious about death, I could tell him that it is only a kind of sleep, implying the following analogy:

theme phore A Death C Sleep B is to life is (like) D is to waking What is the resemblance between the relations? The normal, natural outcome: rest, requies. We will notice that the metaphor argues by being reductive; it reduces the resemblance to an identity by evacuating the difference (the sleep of death is without dreams and without waking... The metaphor lulls the THE FIGURE AND THE ARGUMENT 177 vigilance of the mind to sleep - that's for certain!}. Certain metaphors are polysemous, on the other hand, and thus orient argumentation in various directions. Thus Berkeley's ''What an ocean offalse learning" is open to several readings.

theme phore Relation A False learning C Ocean B Scholar D Swimmer Subject B Truth D Stream Antonym B Certainty D Terra firma Goal There is undoubtedly all this in Berkeley's statement, and more! This analysis allows us to understand that it is most desirable to refute on metaphor by another one. Thus, to the sleep argument, Hamlet answers, answers himself: "To die, to sleep! To sleep, perchance to dream ... " Furthermore, one may counter-argue by awakening a dead metaphor: "I buy everything at Printemps with my eyes closed" - ''When I open them, I go to the Louvre". [Les yeux fermes, j'achete tout au Printemps; Quand je les ouvre, je vais au Louvre.l Remaining with advertising jingles, let us recall certain ones pertaining to detergents: "gluttonous enzymes" [les enzymes gloutonsl.

theme phore A The enzymes (in this detergent) C Gluttons B absorb dirt (like) D devour We note that "gluttons" introduces, moreover, a hyperbole: the glutton devours everything, and could devour even more! Now, the argument was refuted by playing on the phore, both on the metaphor and on the hyperbole: the enzymes are so gluttonous that they even devour the material! It might be thought that the production of metaphor by condensing analogies is a scholarly and reductive explanation; fundamentally, this is what Ricoeur says (cf. p. 37). I will respond in two ways: first, thanks to resemblance, the metaphor lends the power of naming which is the basis of all argumentation (sleep, thinking reed, paper tigers, ... that thingamajig [ce machinl, de Gaulle once said at the UNO. It was undoubtedly not his best expressed statement, but it shows well the power of a word. After this, can we be content to say that the metaphor draws its strength from the analogy that it condenses? I think that on this point, Perelman omitted an important 178 OllVIER REBOUL aspect which is that in general, the metaphor is stronger than the developed analogy would be - the excess strength coming from the condensation itself between the theme and the phore. Thus in the witticism quoted by Olbrechts• Tyteca, "He runs after the witticism [mot d' esprit)" - "I'm betting on the mind [I' esprit)". No analogical diagram will ever account for the pleasure one feels and which gives this argument its strength. This pleasure of laughter and poetic emotion tends to transform resemblance into identity, the "is like" of analogy into that metaphorical "is" that enriches our vision of a thing by revealing its resemblance with another (cf. Ricoeur, p. 109). The metaphor is more than a simple argument by analogy.

4. THE ARGUMENT AS FIGURE

If we recapitulate the results of these analyses, we notice that the figure maintains two relations with argumentation. First, an extrinsic relationship: the figure facilitates argumentation, it captures and captivates attention, produces a memory, adapts the argument to the audience, etc. Then, there is an intrinsic relationship. The figure inserts itself in the web of argumentation. A paronomasia like "traduttor, traditor" or "CRS SS", seems to show that the resemblance between words attests to a relationship between things. A metaphor is a condensed analogy; irony suggests an argument ad absurdum, etc. In reality, these two functions of the figure are inseparable. The essence of rhetoric is to not distinguish feeling from understanding. This is why a figure is stronger than the argument it condenses. Is it possible now to reverse the problem and ask if the argument itself is not more or less a figure? In the studies on argumentation written in the manner of or after Perelman, it is practically never a matter of figures. This is because these studies do not in general turn upon real arguments (like an election brochure or a sermon by Bossuet), but upon arguments constructed by the author and for that very reason fictitious, approximate, purified of any emotional context. Conversely, a work like that of Marc Angenot, which deals with a corpus of pamphlets, shows that argumentation is indissociable from the figures it uses. Why indissociable? In order to answer, let us recall the essential features of argumentation - those which distinguish it from the logical demonstration. - First feature: one always argues in terms of a given audience. Examples of particular audience: youth groups, the Left, peasants; and of specialized TIlE FIGURE AND TIlE ARGUMENT 179

audience: a tribunal, a medical board, a synod, etc. For these very reasons, the premises of argumentation are not logical evidences, nor are they demonstrated facts, but rather propositions granted by the target auctience. The notion of objectivity gives way to that of consensus: a durable agreement of a certain public upon certain fundamental points.

In order to be effective, then, an argumentation must depend on this consensus. It must take into account the level of the audience and its expectations as well. Whence the role of figures. Thus the metaphor "gluttonous enzymes" is a condensed and adapted argument through analogy: 1) to the cultural level of the public at large, and 2) to the consensus of modem Western public concerning cleanliness and hygiene (cf. Oleron, 1983, pp. 28ft). Similarly, irony reveals an incompatibility (e.g. between the pretensions of a speaker and his acts) but by relying on the consensus that qualifies it as such: "What is capitalism? The exploitation of man by man. And socialism? The opposite." It is self-evident that a Marxist public will only see in this a bad play on words (on the meaning of "opposite"), while a non-Marxist public will find in it the condensed expression of an irresistible argument: you in no way eliminate exploitation, you merely change ex• ploiters. - Second feature: argumentation uses natural language. For that very reason, its terms are often vague or polysemous. Thus, the word "democracy" in a political or pedagogical debate. Even in a very intense economic debate, it happens that the word "francs" is used without making clear whether one is referring to floating [courant] or stable [constant] francs. Natural language: language that is naturally figured. First of all, because we use words in a sense which is not always the proper sense; then also, we do it without saying so, without even saying so to ourselves. It has happened that I have analyzed an article by an eminent economist in just such a manner (pascal Salin, Le Monde, 8.vii.80). He asked that the power of professors be re-established in the university councils. The basis of the argumentation is the following: university teaching is a product, univer• sity professors the producers, the students the consumers. The author then thrashes the current situation in which the product ends up being judged by the consumers who "by defmition are ignorant of the technical processes by which the product is manufactured". This argumentation uses a running metaphor (cf. O. Reboul, 1984, pp. 114ff), but without flagging it, without even being conscious of it From "professors are like producers", we slide to 180 OUVIER REBOUL

"professors are producers". - Third feature: the unfolding of an argumentation cannot have the unbend• ing rigor of a demonstration. If it does, it is only in its negative phases. In this domain (which, I will recall, is that of life), one can demonstrate that such or such bill is in conflict with the constitution, but not that a law would without fail have beneficial effects; one can demonstrate that a remedy does not cure everyone, but not that it will cure everyone. Thus the adage "my friend's friends are my friends" resembles mathemati• cal transitivity: a = b, b = c, therefore a = c. "Resembles" means that it does not possess, for all that, the logical necessity: one may be hostile to one's friend's friends, out of jealousy, for example. It is not that the adage is deceptive, it is rather that it is a sort of argued performative. When it is invoked, we usually mean this: I would like us to be friends, for in fact, we have a mutual friend. Figures based on apparent identity are of this type: "a franc is a franc", "a woman is a woman". They are not evidences (the predicate does not have the same meaning as the subject), but performatives in search of a justification in language. - Fourth feature: argumentation is polemical in its essence. It is always opposed, at least implicitly, to another argumentation which is liable to refute it; that of the defense attorney may refute that of the prosecutor, that of the left, that of the right, etc. May the scope of this affirmation be well understood. First of all, polemic does not necessarily signify conflictual. Here once again, etymology is deceptive. Polemics is not war. It is even exactly the opposite, since it substitutes a debate for a combat. As long as we keep talking, we won't kill each other! Next, to conceive of this polemical situation is not a skeptical attitude like "one argument is as good as the next". To conceive of it is to recognize that an argumentation is more or less valid without anyone in particular being absolutely valid. We can thus show that a cause is good or bad; but, good or bad, it remains a "cause", i.e. an opinion that matters for a group, which is not taken for granted, which must be argued. Here again, the feature inserts itself naturally into argumentation. Irony, more effectively than weighty and controversial demonstrations, ridicules the opposing speaker by emphasizing some one of his incompatibilities. The shortcut of the metaphor is the best argument that one can put forth against another metaphor. One can break with the argument of the economist, Salin, THE HGURE AND THE ARGUMENT 181 by showing that the tenns borrowed from economics, like "producers" and "consumers", cease to be pertinent in the area of teaching, that his view opens onto a pedagogy of passivity, etc. But one can also play his game: if students are consumers, then there are consumer organizations interested in "the technical processes by which the product is manufactured". This second type of objection is as effective as the first; perhaps more so. We may conclude that a figure is an argument as soon as it is impossible to translate, paraphrase or otherwise express it without weakening it I can now respond to the three initial questions. Yes, the figure facilitates argumentation. Yes, it contributes to argumentation. And, these two functions are almost always indiscernible - this indiscernibility being the very essence of rhetoric. Finally, yes, the argument itself may be a figure. More generally, it possesses the same status of imprecision, intersubjectivity, and polemic as the figure. It could be said that I am diminishing argumentation, stripping it of any chance of being logical and objective. I wish, on the contrary, that it seize this chance when it encounters it. But this is rarely the case. For the domain of argumentation is that of "life's actions", as Descartes said, a domain in which we hardly ever have logical evidences and objective certainties at out disposal, in which most truths are on the order of the probable and in which objectivity must make way for dialogue. And we dialogue with our whole being. Whence the figure.

BmLIOGRAPHY Angenot, Marc (1982): La parole pamphlitaire, Payot. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bude, 3 vols. Dispaux, Gilbert (1984): La logique et Ie quotidien, Minuit. Fontanier, Pierre (1968): Les figures du discours, Flammarion. Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie (1974): Le comique du discours, University of Brussels. Oleron, Pierre (1983): L' argumentation, "Que sais-je?", PUF, 1983. Perelman, Ch. and Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1976): Traite de l' argumentation (The New Rhetoric), University of Brussels and Vrin. Quintillian, Institution oratoire, Bude, 7 volumes. Reboul, Olivier (1984): La rhetorique, "Que sais-je?", PUF. Reboul, Olivier (1984): Qu' est-ce qu' apprendre?, PUF. Ricoeur, Paul (1975): The Rule ofMetaphor , Seuil. ROMAIN LAUFER

RHETORIC AND POLITICS

Theodorus:VVhatnarnes? Socrates: Sophist. statesman, philosopher. (Plato, The Sophist) In ancient Greece, which is generally considered to be the cradle of our culture, the expression "rhetoric and politics" meant a debate at the heart of philosophy - a debate which brought the philosopher and the sophist to grips with each other, a debate whose stake is the essence of the political. For common opinion today, the expression "rhetoric and politics" means the discourse of politicians: their favorite figures are catalogued, the words they pronounce are counted, sometimes even the way they are affected by the media is investigated. It is true that between these two periods, the very notion of rhetoric has evolved to the point that it merits the label of "limited rhetoric" [rMtorique restreinte].1 As for sophistry, it hardly means but the condemnation brought against false reasoning any more. Thus the classical categories seem to have become equally incapable of apprehending the essence of the political (how can what is henceforth in such a great part economics be reduced to discourse?), as its most exuberant manifestations (how to explain by classical rhetoric the generalization of spectacle politics, of the use of polls, of political marketing?). It is henceforth preferable to defer to science: economic science, political science, political sociology, etc. However all this science does not succeed in erasing the feeling that a crisis affects the very notion of politics, whether it is manifested by the idea of an end to politics, by that of the politics of the end of the world, or whether it translates into themes like the end of ideologies (depoliticization of the masses, the problem of relations between intellectuals and politics) or the Orwellian question of the meaning of 1984.2 l. We would like to propose that the current debate on the crisis of the political can be illuminated by the one which in Antiquity opposed philosophers and sophists. 2. That the modern State is founded on the negation of sophistry, that the reduced place afforded rhetoric can be understood in particular based on this a priori position and that the resurgence of concern for rhetoric consecrates the return of sophistry and thus the crisis of the modern State. 183 184 ROMAIN LAUFER

3. That rhetoric in its broadest defmition allows for a complete understand• ing of the current practice in the political realm. Such a program is, to be sure, too vast to be completely dealt with within the framework of one article. We will thus confine ourselves, after a brief inquiry into the classical position on the problem of the relations between rhetoric and politics, to showing how the notion of legitimacy system allows us to follow the destiny of this question into the modem world.3

I. THE CLASSICAL POSmON ON THE PROBLEM The opposition between philosopher and sophist (concerning the relationship between rhetoric and politics) is not summed up in an opposition between a politics unaware of rhetoric and a politics reducible to rhetoric. Plato himself must reserve a space for rhetoric in his politics. As for the sophist, he cannot avoid taking the presuppositions of all rhetoric into account.

1. Rhetoric in politics To the sophists who argue freely that rhetoric is the entirety of politics (as it is the entirety of every matter, moreover), Plato and Aristotle retort that it is but its auxiliary since politics is defined as a science, "the most authoritative of the sciences - some science which is pre-eminently a master-craft [architektonikus]".4 Even though Plato and Aristotle's assessments of rhetoric differ (in one, it is described as "the power to persuade the crowd and the populace by telling them stories, instead of instructing them", in the other it is "the most highly esteemed of the faculties" along with "strategy and domestic economy"), both agree that it is a technique subordinated to the science of politics. It could even be stated that rhetoric constitutes, along with violence, one of the principle means of political action - means which must absolutely remain subordinated to politics. S The parallel between persuasion and force is evoked by Aristotle when he says that it is as shameful to not know how to fight with words as it is to not know how to defend oneself with one's body.6 Thus, it seems that one can sum up the question of the place of rhetoric in politics for philosophers in two propositions: it is an instrument of political science; it is an alternative to the other instrument of power - force. This simple solution supposes that the two proposed distinctions (power/instrument of power, persuasion/force) be definable with clarity. Now, Plato must recognize that the regal science which affords access to this RHETORIC AND POLfTICS 185 knowledge is not the most widely possessed thing in the world:7 it will thus be difficult for him to impose himself in the eyes of the majority of the population. Young Socrates: Tell me about them You seem to look upon a strange sight. Stranger: Yes, strange until recognized! I was actually impressed by them myself at flrst sight. Coming suddenly on this strange cry of players acting their part in public life I did not know what to make of them. Young Socrates: What players can these be? Stranger: The chief wizards among all the sophists, the chief pundits of the deceiver's art. Such impersonators are hard to distinguish from the real statesmen and kings; yet we must distinguish them and thrust them aside if we are to see clearly the king we are seeking.8 By making rhetoric the entirety of politics, the sophist seals the confusion between power and its instrument, but also that between force and persua• sion, with the chance that certain individuals consider persuasion to be a way of avoiding violence while still others see it as the very manifestation of the rights of the strongest. The exposition of an argument of this type, moreover, leads Plato, at the beginning of the Republic to counter it with his vision of the ideal city. In "The Laws" (which is generally agreed to be a more realistic description of political functioning), Plato cannot do otherwise than to take into account the ignorance of the masses and to recommend the use of rhetoric to make them understand laws by preceding them with a persuasive discourse: "the prelude".9

2. The presuppositions of all rhetoric It is not like rhetoric to question its own presuppositions, even if it found it impossible to produce its effects without what we agree to call "contact of minds" [contact des esprits]: Argumentation never takes place in a void; it presupposes a contact of minds between the speaker and his audience: [ ... ] every society that recognizes the importance of such contacts strives to organize them and may even make them compulsory [ ... ] Sunday mass [ ... ] compulsory education [ ... ] the annual meeting of parliamentary sessions prescribed by the Constitution [ ... ] legal procedure ensures the plaintiff of the normal unfolding of the trial, even if the adversary is recalcitrant."IO Thus, behind rhetoric are profiled institutions composed of texts (the Bible, the Constitution, scholastic texts, codes), of the definition of interlocutors and that of their meeting places. All of rhetoric thus supposes a "legislation" 186 ROMAIN LAUFER defining the places, characters and canvasses for the social game rules which it institutes. We will consider certain of these presuppositions by distinguishing those which strictly concern places from those concerning arguments. a) From the point of view ofplaces The notion of rhetorical genre as defined by Aristotle may be interpreted as a form defined by a coherent set of presuppositions. Thus, in the legal genre, litigants face off before a tribunal about a conflict of law which opposes them; in the deliberative genre, an individual attempts to counsel another individual or an assembled group; in the epidictic genre, a speaker expresses an encomium or a condemnation before an assembly. The rhetorical genres describe the places for public speech in Athens: from the tribunal to the Agora. This description of the rhetorical genres leads us to a question of defini• tion: does each of these genres belong to political rhetoric? Certain scholars felt it necessary to dismiss the epidictic genre under the pretext that it did not suppose the opposition of two arguments. Charm Perelman replied by showing the fundamental role played by the celebration of values in the life of all political systems. 11 But if all the rhetorical genres are part of political rhetoric, then the question remains as to whether it is possible to define a rhetoric which is not political. Some answer "no", affirming that everything is political. To affirm the contrary, it is necessary to propose a criterion of demarcation. If the political is defined as that which pertains to the city, then the non-political can be defined as that which by right escapes it: private life. Thus the political/non-political opposition will correspond to the public/private opposition and non-political rhetoric will concern all the uses of speech which the city need not know anything about. Hence, the statement "everything is political" will be tantamount to a reassessment of the public/private separation. b) From the point of view of arguments As the manner in which Plato and Aristotle reserve a place for it at the heart of politics demonstrates, rhetoric may be inscribed at the heart of a philosophi• cal conception. It will then take on all the presuppositions of this conception: specifically, it will be defined by its submission to the science of the political. It may also appear as the manifestation of a purely sophistic approach. To clarify how the reference to sophistry constitutes a presupposition for such a RHETORIC AND POLmCS 187 rhetoric, it becomes necessary to consider how rhetoric and sophistry are articulated. In Gorgias, Plato declares that sophistry is to rhetoric (in the area of routine and flattery) as legislation is to justice (in the areas of techniques stricto sensu). It is possible to draw two conclusions from this comparison beyond the condemnation that it contains of the notions we are concerned with here: 1) the area of rhetoric and sophistry is that of the legitimacy of deeds; 2) what opposes rhetoric and sophistry is that the latter mimics and delineates a system of rules (i.e. legislation, which we can liken to what we shall call infra by the expression legitimacy system), while the former deals with the resolution of conflicts of legitimacy in concrete cases. Thus, paradoxically, it is sophistry which is on the side of the investigation of the very foundation of the rule system. But can sophistry and rhetoric be effectively separated? We have seen how we can speak of a non-sophistical rhetoric; it remains to be established that there is something in sophistry which escapes rhetoric. It would seem at frrst glance to not be true, since sophistry appears as an art of discourse. We cannot, however, forget that there exists a sophistical proposi• tion which cannot be reduced to a rhetorical proposition: the very proposition which states that everything is rhetorical. By this proposition, sophistry mimics the universality and the eternity of legislation, while rhetoric produces the discourse that expresses it for each particular occasion (or jUdgment). The very idea that sophistry mimics legitimate legislation supposes that it borrows its forms. The hypothesis could be proposed that, from this point of view, the history of sophistry follows that of philosophy like its shadow. Barbara Cassin has shown, for example, that the ontological affirmation that Parmenides imputes to the goddess as soon as she is heard as a discourse, not as a monstration, leads necessarily to the paradoxical formulations of Gorgias.12 She has shown, just as precisely, that Gorgias could not have made his statement without finding a philosopher to affirm something about being. Hence, one can deduce that all sophistry supposes a philosophy that precedes it. 13 What philosophy institutes is the fact that rights and justice can legitimately be founded on discourse. It is to the sophist to show that if one bases oneself on discourse, the legitimacy that results is entirely relative to the effect of this discourse on each individual's opinion. From this, there results the proposition that rhetoric, when it is attributed to a sophistry, possesses, as presuppositions, the discursive forms which result from the 188 ROMAIN LAUFER work of decomposition which that sophistry makes the philosophy it mimics undergo.14 It may be objected that such a proposition which makes sophistry a secondary discourse with respect to a philosophy derives from a conception of philosophy itself going back to Plato and Aristotle. This remark should inspire prudence in the interpretation of ancient texts, but it cannot apply to the study of modem conceptions of rhetoric toward which we will now tum: the latter are quite obviously situated in the post• Socratic and post-Aristotelian era.

n. RHETORIC AND POUTICS IN CONTEMPORARY LIBERAL SOCIETIES Contemporary liberal society can be characterized by three features: the place of reason, the place of political economy, and the place of law. While the Greek city gave birth to modem reason, modem reason leant legitimacy to the contemporary liberal State. Modem reason is post-Car• tesian. Situated after Aristotle, it no longer loses its time debating with sophistry: the latter is thought to have been refuted once and for all. Situated after scholastics, modem reason found in the cogito a means of breaking any link to rhetoric: since what is well-conceived is stated clearly, it suffices to start with a clear and distinct idea and to follow the order of reasoning in order to be perfectly convincing. With his Discourse on the Method, Descartes had once and for all (and for everyone, since good sense is the most widely possessed thing in the world) carried out the program of this rhetoric capable of convincing the gods and of which Plato conceived the necessity at the very heart of philosophy. is The very notion of political economy constitutes a Copernican revolution with respect to the Aristotelian notion of domestic economy (orkos homos). For Aristotle, domestic economy is dependent on the private sphere and therefore cannot be the place of politicS. 16 Liberalism realizes the marvel whereby at the very moment that economy becomes the place of politics par excellence, it escapes political rhetoric: it escapes rhetoric because it is the object of a science (political economy) and it escapes politics in the classical sense because this science deals with private behavior. Modem reason and political science thus complicate our investigation on political rhetoric by prohibiting rhetoric and privatizing politics. However, the notion of "State by right" intervenes to help us. Everything being subject to the law, it is in the text of the law that we can hope to find the explicit formulations of the presuppositions of all social action, and, in particular, of RHETORIC AND POLIT1CS 189 public rhetoric which is the object of our study. However, we will not approach law directly, but rather via the notion of legitimacy system.

1. Rhetorical presuppositions in the contemporary liberal system a) The notion of legitimacy system Legitimacy can be defined as follows: someone acts and this action turns out good or it turns out bad. If it turns out good, and no one objects, then there is nothing to be said. If it turns out bad, this means that someone objects. It is then necessary to state the reasons for one's deed: the discourse of legitimacy is found in this statement. If this statement belongs to a coherent discourse, we can say that a legitimacy system exists. This notion of a legitimacy system is directly deduced from 's proposition according to which there would be but three types of legitimacy: charismatic legitimacy, traditional legitimacy, and rational legal legitimacy. The question now arises as to whether this is an exhaustive list in which case we would be before a presupposition of all rhetoric, even of a theory which supposed some philosophical point of view, or whether this is a pmgmatic list subject to variation. We have maintained elsewhere17 that this is a theory by showing that in order for a legitimacy system to exist, it suffices to have a cosmology, itself divided in two places, at one's disposal: the place of origin of legitimate power (e.g. the sacred), and the place of application of this power (e.g. the profane). Charismatic legitimacy corresponds to the submis• sion of the profane to the sacred, traditional legitimacy to the submission of nature to traditional culture, and rational-legal legitimacy supposes the submission of culture to the laws of nature. With two cosmologies, there are therefore only three systems as the sacred can not be legitimately subjected to the profane. Let it be noted that in order to be sensitive to the consequences of such dichotomies, one must perceive them and thus wear special glasses: faith allows for the recognition of the presence of the sacred, respect ensures the status of tradition, science allows for the definition of a nature subjected to laws worthy of subjecting culture.

b) Legitimacy systems. law and violence Modernity happened when, at the moment of the French Revolution, a power founded on God and tradition was substituted by a power founded on reason, thus on the division between nature and culture. In order for nature to reign over culture, a science must state the law to which culture must subject itself in order to conform to nature. Political economy is that science; the right to 190 ROMAIN LAUFER own property that law. Let us now consider the interaction which we started to examine earlier, but left at a critical moment. What happens if he who receives the discourse of legitimacy is neither convinced nor persuaded? Following Max Weber, the State has the monopoly of legitimate violence: it follows that the use of force is prohibited to any other authority. If the conflict persists, it will be brought before a tribunal where the law will pass judgment. Will its verdict be accepted? Yes, by virtue of the legal principle that "no one can claim ignorance of the law" - a principle by virtue of which the State can legitimately use violence against all those who would be too ignorant or insufficiently sensible to have knowledge of it. This principle moreover ensures that since the discourse of legitimacy is at the outset in conformity with the law, it is usually useless to go before tribunals to practice that legal rhetoric which the circumstances demand in that case. This example shows how the existence of a well-developed legitimacy system ensures submission of political rhetoric (in the sense of public rhetoric) to a "most authoritative of sciences" (one which includes political economy), and how, for this authoritative science, rlletoric constitutes an alternative instrument of power to violence. c) The rhetorical genres peculiar to the liberal system The notion of legitimacy system also allows us to define the various rhetorical genres underlying the liberal system. First, it is necessary to state clearly that the basis of the liberal system is the society's separation into two sectors: the private sector in which the laws of nature reign, and the public sector whose role it is to discover these laws, to constitute them as laws of society, and to ensure their proper functioning: the Assembloo discovers and enacts the laws; the government, aided by an administration, implements them. Three situations result from this: 1. A contractor addresses a consumer (or a supplier) in the language of the law. (One need not, for example, be familiar with sales rhetoric: it disappears in the private sphere. Only the elements which could affect the value of contracts - like violence or fraud - will figure in a "public" discourse.) In case of conflict, this gives rise to the legal genre. 2. A politician addresses a group of governors or an assembly of citizens; the deliberative or epidictic genre is then utilized in what corresponds to the common notion of political rhetoric. RHETORIC AND POLmCS 191

3. As to the dialogue between the legitimate political authorities and the administrators, it is limited to orders that the latter must execute without discussion: this is the famous reserve duty.

2. The history of the presupposition of rhetoric in the contemporary liberal system The public/private separation constitutes the heart of the legitimacy system of liberalism. In the French legal system, this is evidenced by the existence of two orders of specialized jurisdiction. This division of duties requires a definition of a demarcation criterion: the criterion of administrative law. According to all accounts, this criterion has known three periods: that of the principle of public power (1800-1880/1900), that of the principle of Public Service (1880/1900-1945/60) and, since then, the crisis of the criterion. The move from one period to the next may be defined as a moment of crisis between two states of the free market system; the crisis of the criterion for its part, consecrates the crisis of the system itself. One can show that these crises correspond to the necessity of accounting for the organizational phenomenon (or, if you will, the bureaucratic phenomenon) which results from the growth of businesses and the development of public service. The very notion of organization is, in fact, antinomic with classical free market principles in that the latter are composed of the two principles of equality and freedom.1S Let it be noted that the legitimacy of an organization supposes the existence of a discourse such that the interests of the individual, of the organization and of the society are globally compatible. To such a discourse, we will give the name administrative language. In order for such a discourse to be legitimate in the heart of modem society, it must belong to the discourse of science. That is why it is important to define the epistemology correspond• ing to each of these stages. It can be shown that these stages correspond to the logical succession of the modes of legitimization of an action. If the latter is defined (phenomenologically) as "a change in appearance in that it is related to a cause", three ways of legitimizing an action may then be distinguished: a) Non-pragmatic legitimization This is a legitimization by means of the cause. If the cause is legitimate, the action is legitimate. For the system to function, one need only to be able to isolate the legitimate causes. This is what can be realized by the well- 192 ROMAIN LAUFER developed legitimacy system defined above. Its corresponding epistemology is that of Kant. In that epistemology, opinion has no place; rhetoric is therefore excluded from it. The science corresponding to it is classical political economy which ignores the notion of organization. b) Moderate pragmatic legitimization If confusion settles in between nature and culture, the legitimacy of the cause can no longer be ensured. There remains the possibility of legitimizing action by the change in appearance (pragmatism). However, this pragmatism will be moderate when there is a consensus on the measure of the change. This corresponds to the positivist epistemology which guarantees unity of measure by a hypostasis, "God Progress" (Auguste Comte), secularized, if need be, in the form of the collective conscience (Emile Durkbeim). Positivism supposes the separation between scientists and the public. The latter being the receiver of knowledge, he constitutes himself as a tribunal of this knowledge ("tribunal of universal good sense"). Opinion thus has a place in this system and a rhetoric must correspond to it - a dissymetrical one which characterizes pedagogy. However, to ensure the reign of rational-legal legitimacy, it is important to eliminate the term "rhetoric" and substitute for it the notion of a science of needs: thus, the university professor, the administrative specialist, the producer in an enterprise will all be precisely defined by their capacity for knowing the needs of their respective publics and the means of satisfying them.1 9 Let us remark that positivism supposes the existence of organizations which it legitimizes. Also that this system can only be maintained by the belief in progress: the progress of knowledge and the progress resulting from knowledge. c) Radical pragmatic legitimization If the belief in progress ceases and if the consensus on the unity of measure disappears, there remains but one solution: that of considering the measure of change in appearance to be an action. Henceforth any measure which has in it the power of passing itself off as legitimate will indeed be considered as such. Opinion then reigns over science: this is nothing other than the logic of sophistry. From the perspective of the form of the science, it corresponds to the radical confusion of nature and culture, i.e. the reign of the artificial. Science becomes the science of the artificial, i.e. according to Herbert Simon, systems analysis. Systems analysis can be defined as the fact of describing a complex reality with "circles" and "arrows". Thus, this mode of legitimiza- RHETORIC AND POLfTICS 193 tion supposes the existence of what we agree to call "complex organizations", i.e. those which cannot be represented other than by a method of simulation: systems analysis. If an action can be considered to be legitimized either by the origin of power, by its finality, or by its methods, the correspondence between these three modes of legitimization and the series "Public Power, Public Service, crisis of the criterion" can be verified. The crisis of legitimacy supposes legitimization by methods of power. These methods correspond both to radical pragmatism, and sophistry, and, in the framework of the ideology of science, to systems analysis.

3. The/orms o/rhetoric We can now follow the destiny of political rhetoric during the three periods. To illustrate our argument, it is possible to consider the history of the institutional status of political parties in France in that they represent, par excellence, the incarnation of the "taking of sides" [prise de parti] in political debate. During the frrst period, there is no legitimate rhetoric either in the private sector nor in the administration. Tribunals alone know the debates of lawyers, intended to elucidate the law's truth and to allow State power to be legitimately exercised upon that which eludes the presupposition which founds it. Political rhetoric, during elections and voting, is supposed to engage in conflict only rational individuals for whom the debate represents a procedure (itself rational) intended to discover the laws of nature.20 All during the nineteenth century, political parties only have an informal existence in the country as well as in the assemblies.21 During the second period, positivistic science allows for the legitimization of organizational functioning thanks to the recognition of the scientist's or the specialist's authority. The notion of rhetoric is manifested through the practice of pedagogy. This holds true for the public services (and, in par• ticular, that of public instruction) which constitute the locus of an intense rhetorical activity which obviously has a political significance: the construc• tion of a national consensus (Emile Durkheim). In order for pedagogy to be a rhetoric of science conforming to positivism, the very notion of rhetoric is banished from secondary education where it had survived until then. At the level of political life, this period corresponds to the development of organized parties whose propaganda activity is itself legitimized by the idea that political specialists who constitute the party have 194 ROMAIN LAUFER the pedagogy of the masses they represent as their role. From a legal point of view, the first organized parties date from the end of the nineteenth century and the official recognition of parties in the National Assembly dates from 1910. As for the private sector, even if firms become big enough that the positivist administrative language of "scientific management" establishes itself there, they remain small enough that this management can still be considered related to the private sphere and thus escapes the definition of political rhetoric. Let it be noted that law (whether public or private) remains the place of a public legal rhetoric (while being modified by the theory of public service or the creation of limited liability companies for example). The third period consecrates the crisis of law: the crisis of the limit between public and private. Henceforth, it is impossible to suppose that "no one is supposed to be ignorant of the law". To hold forth a legitimate discourse, it becomes impossible to anticipate the law and necessary to produce a discourse whose legitimacy resides only in the fact that it is actually accepted. We thus enter into the sophistic logic which consecrates the development of the "realm of rhetoric". However, the sophistic rhetoric corresponding to the crisis of legitimacy of the liberal system must mimic science; for this purpose, it will have systems analysis at its disposal. This analysis describes the world with "circles" and "arrows". Each organization (circle) will produce an image of the world made up of circles and arrows - an image which will constitute the web of its administrative language (called management). In this image, the "organization" circle addresses another circle: market or segment of market, or public or segment of public (often called targets). But since this image of the world does not possess intrinsic legitimacy, it will be necessary to ensure that the public considers the organization thus defined as legitimate. And thus another schematic of circles and arrows will be constructed (marketing public) which allows the organization to pragmatically ensure its legiti• macy.22 From the perspective of the institutionalization of parties, this period corresponds in France both to the recognition of their role by the Constitution of 1958 and to the development of political marketing. No longer able to be based on the knowledge of specialists in order to legitimately lend themselves to pedagogy of the masses, the parties must have recourse to polls to find out what their electors want and to define a program apt to attract their votes. Today's return to rhetorical studies corresponds to the crisis of the legitimacy system which had organized their disappearance. However, RHETORIC AND POLmCS 195 modem political rhetoric differs from that which Aristotle described in that it is linked to the development of the modem "systemic" bureaucracy. If marketing is the modem (bureaucratic) form of sophistry,23 and if all sophistry is dependent on the philosophy whose decomposition it mimics, it is logical to consider that modem rhetoric refers to an epistemology (systems analysis as the decomposition of Kantian science) where classical rhetoric referred to an ontology (the enthymeme as the decomposition of the syl- 10gism).24

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION By basing ourselves on the notion of the State by right, we have limited ourselves to considering the history of the presuppositions of political rhetoric from the perspective of what could be called the dominant ideology. This leaves aside an essential aspect of politics which is sometimes debated with regard to presuppositions, but not only in that framework. Thus, to conclude, we will make a few remarks about conflicts of presuppositions: 1. Where do other presuppositions come from: either from traditional and charismatic legitimacies (e.g. the ultra-royalists of the early nineteenth century), or from rational-legal legitimacy itself (e.g. Marxism). 2. The presuppositions springing from the rational-legal ties may be understood as the development of a dialectic between an individualist argument (symbolized by Adam Smith) which states that legitimate will is individual will, and a holistic argument (symbolized by Rousseau) which states that legitimate will is general will. It has been shown that the applica• tion of the Kojevian notion of "parathetic chatter" [bavardage parathetique] to the history of ideologies since the end of the eighteenth century allows us to account for this dialectic in the framework of a theory of argumentation: each new position being constructed from a process of refutation and supersession of the preceding positions.25 3. The struggle of presuppositions poses the problem of the choice between the use of force and the use of rhetoric. 4. Any political strategy relating to the struggle of presuppositions supposes that one will provide, within one's own presupposition, a representa• tion of that of one's opponent and of the manner in which these two presup• positions are articulated. This may take place by means of the play of oppositions such as appearance/reality, reality/desire, present/future, etc. 5. In terms of these representations, modes of action may be defined: the use of force (revolution, coup d'etat) in order to impose one's own presup- 196 ROMAIN LAUFER position, the provisional acceptance of the other's presupposlbon (e.g. reformism), escape from the political scene in order to establish the model of the desired presupposition in the local private sector (e.g. the experience of the utopists), etc. 6. Many characterize the present situation as corresponding to the end of ideologies, or the end of politics. This corresponds to the exhaustion of the "parathetic chatter" that is the long debate between individualism and holism, to the crisis of the public/private border, to the resurgence of sophistry in its modem (bureaucratic) form: marketing. To conclude, we may remark that the invasion of the public by the private is the invasion of the political, in the classical sense, by the economic (oikos nomos). This invasion seals the crisis of legitimacy of the liberal system and of the principles upon which it is based. We will recall General de Gaulle's wilful affirmation: "the Commissariat will follow" [l'intendance suivra]. We can well imagine the difficulty he would have had in recognizing that henceforth the Commissariat precedes.

NOTES

1 Gerard Genette, "La rhetorique restreinte", Communication No. 16, 1970. 2 See for example D. Kambouchner et al., "Le retrait du politique", Editions Galilee, 1983, and "Politique Fin de siecle", Traverse, pp. 33-34, January 1985. 3 We would like to thank Charles Leben, Yves Lichtenberger, and Michel Narcy for their precious advice in the areas of law and political institutions, of the practice of negotiation and of classical philosophy. 4 Plato, Statesman,259d. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics I.ii.4. 5 Plato, Statesman, 291e 6 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1355b. 7 Plato, Statesman, 297c, 301e. 8 Statesman 291.c. 9 Plato, Loeb Classical Library, Laws, Book X, n, p. 305. 10 Chaim Perelman, L' Empire Rhetorique, Vrin, p. 23. 11 Chaim Perelman, "Rhetorique et Politique", in Langage et Politique, Ed. Marcel Granston and Peter Mair, Bruylant, Brussels. 12 Barbara Cassin, "Si Parmenide", Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1980. 13 On the fact that the question of rhetoric is at the heart of the debate between philosophy and sophistry, see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, Brussels, pp. 35-38. 14 "Rhetoric is the analogue of the dialectic", Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1354a. 15 Plato, Phaedrus, p. 273: on this point about Cartesian thought and its consequences for the negation of rhetoric, see, for example Charles S. Pierce. "Descartes is the father of modem philosophy and of the spirit of Cartesianism - what differentiates him from the scholastics which he displaces may be succinctly formulated as follows: RHETORIC AND POLITICS 197

[ ... ] 3) the multifarious argumentation of the Middle Ages is replaced by a series of inferences which are often dependent upon not very obvious premises." Anticartesian texts, Aubier. Cartesian concepts are linked to the idea of the world like the written book in mathematical language. 16 Aristotle Politics, I, vn. 1. 17 Cf. Romain Laufer and Catherine Paradeise, Le Prince Bureaucrate: Machiavel au Pays flu Marketing, Flammarion, 1982. To be published in 1989 by Transaction Books (New Brunswick, USA) under the title "Marketing Democracy: opinion and media formation." 18 Laufer and Paradeise, op. cit. 19 "Positivism, as it developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, signals the most marked decline in rhetoric which was eliminated from the French lycee programs in 1885." Perelman, Le chomp de I' argumentation, Brussels, 1970, p.29. 20 On the history of counting in politics since the French Revolution, see Laufer and Paradeise, op. cit. "du vote au sondage", pp. 86-114. 21 "In reality, there is no true political party (1815-1875). Even at the heart of the Parliament, parties are inorganic." FranlrOis Borella, Les Partis politiques en Europe, Collection Point, Ie Seuil, 1984, p.1l4. 22 Cf. Romain Laufer and Alain Burlaud, Management Public: Gestion et Ugitimite, Dalloz 1980. 23 Cf. Laufer and Paradeise, op. cit. U On marketing as rhetoric, see Romain Laufer, "Marketing, Sophistique et Ugitimite", in Le plaisir de parler: Etudes de sophistique comparee (Actes du colloque "Qu'est-ce que la sophistique?" Cerisy, 7-17 September 1984. To appear). 2!1 Cf. Laufer and Paradeise, op. cit., pp. 289-345.