I keep thinking about the rhetoric vs. dialectic opposition that we’ve explored throughout the semester. It’s certainly apparent in Plato’s work, as Socrates is aligned with dialectic against what’s portrayed as the spurious rhetoric of the sophists. And the division survives through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as is best exemplified in the difference between George Trebizond (who clearly favored rhetoric) and Peter Ramus (who placed emphasis on the importance of dialectic by attributing to it both invention and arrangement). And obviously the dichotomy is still alive and well in academia today, since we have both rhetoric/communications and philosophy departments.
Why have rhetoric and philosophy eyed each other so suspiciously through the ages? And what does this suspicion achieve for us now? It seems to me that both parties engage in some unfair essentializing of the other. For instance, rhetoricians love to say that philosophy concerns itself with what is eternally true and unchanging, while rhetoric attends to the situational, the contextual, the kairotic moment. But is this really true? It was true in Ancient Greece, maybe. But today? Aren’t there philosophical systems that attain not to fixed and eternal truths but rather to truth as contextual, fluid, and evolving? I’m thinking, for example, of Existentialism, which certainly doesn’t posit a preconceived and always constant notion of truth, reality, or human nature. I sort of think that when rhetoricians classify philosophers as ever and always concerned with eternal truth, the rhetoricians are creating straw man arguments. And shame on them, since, as rhetoricians, they should understand logical fallacies.
Maybe we should stop being so quick to define ourselves against the other. What good is it doing any of us to mark our territory in this way?