FROM METAPHYSICS TO RHETORIC SYNTHESE LIBRARY STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY, 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, Belgium 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. Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates the publishing programmes of D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr. W. Junk and MTP Press. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Originally published in French .as: De La Metaphysique a la Rhitorique Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles, 1986. printed on acid free paper All Rights Reserved © 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owners. TABLE OF CONTENTS 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 , Dialectic. Rhetoric and Critique in Aristotle 95 MICHEL MEYER 'Toward an Anthropology of Rhetoric 111 PAUL RICOEUR' Rhetoric-Poetics-Hermeneutics 137 MICHEL BEAUJOUR, Rhetoric and Literature 151 OLIVIER REBOUL ,The Figure and the Argument 169 ROMAIN LAUFER' Rhetoric and Politics 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 dialectics can render - services which Plato, 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 truth? Conviction is not demonstration, persuasion 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 truths. 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 Socrates. 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 justice, 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.