I know everyone tends to get down on Ramus for destroying (or seriously hampering) rhetoric. Typically, we claim that his version of rhetoric impoverishes the tradition for subsequent generations, up through the Current-Traditional rhetoric of the 1950s.
As I read Ramus, however, I tried to make a more generous read, one situated in his historical context. I considered a few factors as I read: 1) Europe was emerging from a period of intellectual impoverishment. 2) There was a new intellectual emphasis on systemization of knowledge. 3) European governments were consolidating and expanding, providing greater legal and civic continuity in peoples’ lives.
Under these considerations, Ramus’ text seems at once deeply logical and progressive. His claim that philosophy and dialectic are responsible for invention and arrangement, that rhetoric is concerned with style and delivery holds a lot of water, ideologically situated. If thought occurs outside the realm of language, in a realm of pure Platonic forms, and if this thinking is standard across the stratum of human minds, philosophy has to be the realm of real thought. Philosophy, separate from language, is a systematized way to understand ‘real’ reality, and rhetoric is a way to represent that reality in text.
Of course, Ramus’ work doesn’t hold water in light of what we know about language today. Language not only changes ideas as they are formed and reformed in the symbol system; they also change the way we think. As Ong demonstrates in Orality and Literacy, people can only reason syllogistically once they’ve internalized literacy. The irony of Ramus’ treatise on rhetoric, then, is that the reasoning he uses to separate logic from language is only possible through the help of language, language from which he strips from reason.