Rhetoric A–Z / What is rhetoric?

What is rhetoric?

Rhetoric is, in Aristotle’s words, the capacity to consider what may persuade in each particular situation. It is not primarily a set of tricks for speaking well, but a way of seeing and understanding how speech and writing try to move us, and so also an aid when we speak ourselves.

A word from Greek democracy

Etymologically, the word rhetoric finds its origins in ancient Greek, where rhêtorikê was fashioned out of earlier words such as rhêtôr (speaker) and rêma (what is said, a word). Whether rhetoric was invented, or rather discovered, by the ancient Greeks is a complex question, since we can assume that people have always tried to persuade one another, at least for as long as we have been able to speak. What we can say is that the Greeks themselves imagined the birth of rhetoric not only as a Greek affair, but as closely bound up with the emergence of ancient Greek democracy.

According to the great Roman orator and rhetorician Cicero, Aristotle told, in a work now lost, how rhetoric was born in the Greek colonies of Sicily after the people there had freed themselves from the ruling tyrant. In the popular assemblies, and not least in the popular courts, that were set up after the tyrant’s fall, it quickly became clear that the ability to speak well decided whether or not one’s views would be heard.

The art of persuasion?

Today, it is common to think of rhetoric as the art of eloquence or the art of persuasion, meaning that the discipline offers a collection of rules and tricks for fashioning beautiful and persuasive speeches for all occasions. In Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, the oldest surviving text to use the concept of rhetoric, the sophist Gorgias also claims that rhetoric teaches us the “ability to persuade”. With such an understanding of rhetoric, it is easy to think that research in rhetorical studies is focused on evaluating speeches, whether or not the speaker has spoken eloquently or convincingly, in order to sharpen our persuasive tools.

Plato’s disciple Aristotle, however, already pointed to the problems attached to any definition of rhetoric as the art of persuasion. Compared with the art of painting, which teaches us how to mix colours and achieve certain effects on the canvas, or the art of construction, which offers rules for building a sturdy foundation for a house, the art of rhetoric cannot offer rules that promise a certain outcome, since every speech situation is singular. What convinces someone at one point in time might not convince even the same person in another situation. The building of a house or the painting of a picture may also be affected by circumstances, but the physical world offers a higher degree of regularity, which lends itself to stable rules that produce similar outcomes.

Rhetoric as the capacity to consider

To solve this problem, that an art of persuasion cannot formulate rules that guarantee a certain effect as long as the user follows them, Aristotle offered another definition. To him, rhetoric became the capacity to consider that which aims at persuading in a specific situation. The Greek verb rendered as “to consider”, theôrêsai, is connected to the word theory, implying that for Aristotle rhetoric was not a theory of how a speaker should persuade, but one explaining how speakers attempt to persuade an audience.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

Aristotle, Rhetoric 1355b, trans. W. Rhys Roberts

When Aristotle wrote about ethos, pathos and logos, he was therefore offering a theoretical description of how speakers at the agora, in court and at the feast tried to persuade their audiences through their character, through the passions of the listeners, and through the available words, tropes and arguments, rather than a collection of rules for how we should persuade in the future. Although rhetoric has, since Aristotle’s time, largely been used as an art of speaking persuasively or eloquently, his limitation of rhetoric has greatly influenced how modern research in the discipline is conducted, with its focus primarily on understanding existing communication rather than prescribing how a message should be formulated.

This does not mean that rhetoric cannot help when producing new persuasive messages. But it is important to acknowledge the field and limits of rhetoric, which is why definitions such as “the art of speaking well” or “the art of persuasion” can be misleading.

What can rhetoric do?

But why, then, is rhetorical studies necessary? Are we not already aware of what we are saying, as well as why and how we are saying it? For a rhetorician, the answer is no. Even though the reasons for this ‘no’ vary, both historically and between different theoretical strands, returning to Aristotle offers one reason why this is the case.

In On Sophistical Refutations, Aristotle pointed to an inherent ambiguity and equivocity in language, which derives from the fact that the things in the world far outnumber the words we have to designate them. The same word must therefore be used to designate more than one thing. And since the function of words, at least according to Aristotle, is to allow us to speak about things even when they are not physically present, the lack of words and the abundance of things create a situation where misunderstandings about what we are speaking of may occur.

Of even greater importance, in Aristotle’s view, was that these ambiguities could be used by those of a sophistic mindset to further their own agenda. This is where Aristotle saw the need for rhetoric, since its aim should be, at least in its Aristotelian form, to investigate and explain how ambiguities and equivocities are used in politics, law and morality. And although many rhetoricians have critiqued, reimagined and expanded Aristotle’s understanding of language and rhetoric, most scholars in the field still maintain this basic thesis: rhetoric is needed because humans are not capable of fully grasping the functions and effects of language.

Rhetoric: seeing through language

Aristotle’s verb theôrêsai belongs to the vocabulary of seeing. That is why I describe rhetoric as the art of seeing through language, in three senses:

1. See it through. Working through a message part by part, from the situation to the finished speech. This is the rhetorical work process, and what you practise when you prepare something that matters.
2. See through it. Seeing through what is said, and revealing the meanings, interests and assumptions a message carries.
3. See by it. Looking at what tries to persuade through the concepts of rhetoric, as through a lens. This is rhetoric as theory, in Aristotle’s sense.

The three belong together. Whoever prepares a speech needs to see what the audience will see through, and whoever analyses needs concepts to see with. In all three, what is at stake is judgement, what Aristotle called krisis.