Rhetoric

Demosthees acting in the use of the wordJean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouy (1842-1923).

Rhetoric has been, since its Aristotelian disciplinary foundation, the «science of discourse», giving it a persuasive purpose and having general issues as its object. Rhetoric immediately became, following its own matrix, literary theory and, therefore, a discipline of the series modernly called the science of literature. In a recent and very general sense, it is a discipline related to different fields of knowledge (literary science, political science, advertising, journalism, educational sciences, social sciences, law, biblical studies, music, etc.), which deals with to study and systematize procedures and techniques for the use of language, placed at the service of a persuasive or aesthetic purpose, added to its communicative purpose. Rhetoric has its origins in classical Greece, where it was understood, as suggested by the Latin word ars bene dicendi, as the technique of expressing oneself adequately to achieve the persuasion of the addressee. Etymologically, rhetoric is a Hellenism that comes from the Greek ρητορική [τέχνη], «rhetorikè (téchne)».

Rhetoric is configured as a system of processes and resources that act at different levels in the construction of a discourse. These elements are closely related to each other and all of them have repercussions in the different discursive fields.

Definition

In principle, rhetoric dealt with the spoken language, but its knowledge transcended written speech and powerfully influenced literature when the written word gained prestige in the imperial regime in Rome, although written speech is usually considered as a limited transcription or close imitation of oral speech, rhetoric has now experienced a great resurgence and its teachings are used in advertising, academia, politics, as well as in defending points of view during civil trials. On the other hand, thanks to the new audiovisual technologies we can talk about a rhetoric of the image, since through an image or video we can talk about something using rhetorical figures (metaphor, metonymy, prosopopeia, personification, etc.).

Rhetoric occupied an important place in the ancient and medieval educational system, and until romanticism its significance was crucial within the humanistic disciplines.

There are three complementary processes that make up the learning of rhetoric: the study of the precepts, the imitation of models and personal practice.

Personification of eloquence, engraving of the centuryXVprobably from Ferrara, Italy.

The composition of the speech

The elaboration of verbal discourse and its presentation before an audience are aspects that require attention to five dimensions that complement each other. Discourse is made up of the inventio, the dispositio and the elocutio;

• As for oral activity, the speech is configured by the memory and the actio.

Inventio (or invenio)

The purpose of this phase is to establish the contents of the discourse. The term inventio comes from the Latin invenire, which in turn comes from the Greek εὒρεσις, which means “finding”, since what it is about is that the speaker selects, finds, in a preset repertoire of topics those that are most appropriate to your exhibition. Mentally speaking, it is about invenire ("find") in memory, full of topoi or loci ("topics" or "places » common) own ideas or inherited from society in general, likely to be used in the discourse.

The typology of the rhetorical topic includes the following elements: person, thing, place, instrument, cause, mode, time, comparison and argumentation, to which must be added the literary topic , in the case of literary works.

Device

This Latin term is a translation of the Greek rhetorical concept known as τἀξις which means “disposition”. The purpose of this part of the discursive preparation is the organization of the elements of the inventio into a structured whole. The number of parts of speech and their order of appearance are relevant in this respect.

• As for the parties, speeches can present a bipartite structure (in which both parties maintain a reciprocal tension within the whole) or tripartite (in which linear development is supposed to be with principle, medium and end).

The tripartite structure, the most frequent, consists of an exordium or initial part that is intended to capture the attention (interest or favor) of the listener (captatio benevolentiae) and indicate to it the structuring of the discourse; a middle part with narratio (exposition of the matter and the speaker's thesis in this regard) and argumentatio (with the reasons that support said thesis); and, finally, a peroratio or recapitulation of what was said with appeals to the audience.

The structure of speech

Painting that illustrates the rhetoric, one of the seven independent artsPieter Isaacsz.

The exordium seeks to make the audience benevolent, attentive and docile. Its function is to signal that the speech begins, attract the attention of the receiver, dispel animosity, win sympathy, fix the interest of the receiver and establish the theme, thesis or objective.

The proposition is a brief and clear statement of the topic to be discussed.

The division is the enumeration of the parts that the speech will deal with.

The narration is the development or exposition, it is the most extensive part of the speech and tells the necessary facts to demonstrate the conclusion that is pursued. If the theme presents subdivisions, it is necessary to adopt a convenient order (partitio or divisio). In the partitio we have to strip the subject of the elements that should not be mentioned and develop and amplify those that should.

The argumentation is the part where evidence is adduced that confirms one's own position revealed in the thesis of the exhibition (confirmatio or probatio) and those of the thesis supported by the opposing party are refuted (refutatio or reprehensio), two parts that Quintilian considers independent, so that for him the forensic discourse would have five. Confirmation of the use of logical arguments and stylistic figures of emphasis. It is also an appropriate place for the postulate or statement without proof, as long as it does not weaken our credibility, for which it is necessary to resort to the postulate that is not true but plausible (hypothesis), in order to weaken the adversary by disorienting his credibility; the best thing in that case is to suggest it and not say it. A "rhetorical logic" or dialectic is used that has nothing to do with scientific logic, since its purpose is not to find the truth but to convince. It is based more on the credible than on the true, hence its link with demagogy. For monographic discourses focused on persuasion, ascending gradation structures are appropriate. In the case of journalistic discourse, the reader's tendency to abandon at the beginning recommends the use of the opposite structure: placing the most important thing at the beginning. Classical rhetoric recommends the Nestorian order for monographic argumentative discourses, 2,1,3: that is, firstly the moderately strong arguments, secondly the weakest and weakest and lastly the strongest.

The peroration is the part intended to incline the listener's will by arousing his affections, resorting to ethical or pragmatic motives and provoking his compassion (conquestio or conmiseratio ) and their indignation (indignatio) to attract the pity of the public and achieve their emotional participation, through pathetic stylistic devices; includes places of fortune cases: illness, bad luck, misfortunes, etc. It summarizes and synthesizes what was developed to facilitate the memory of the strong points and launch the appeal to the affections; it is a good place to launch a new, unexpected and interesting element, the argument-punch that reinforces all the others creating in the listener a positive and favorable final impression.

The arguments

There are three types of arguments that can be used in a discourse: those related to ethos, pathos and logos.

• Arguments linked to ethosThey are of an emotional and moral nature and concern the issuer of the speech; they are, in short, the attitudes that the speaker should take to inspire confidence in his audience. Thus, it must be shown:
  • Sensate and reliable: that is, able to give reasonable and relevant advice.
  • Honest: You must not hide what you think or what you know.
  • Nice: You must show that you are prepared to help your audience.
• Arguments linked to pathos: of purely affective order and linked mainly to the receiver of discourse. According to Aristotle, these arguments are based on arousing anger (worm) (πραότίος), hatred (μίσος), friendship (φιλία), fear (φόβος), confidence (θάρσος), shame (οασκος), indignation (τ). νεεσεσκος), gratitude (χεριος) and otherενος.
• Arguments linked to logos: arguments related to the theme and message of discourse itself; it enters here in the domain proper of dialectics and is used mainly deductives and analogs.

The order of the parts can be naturalis or artificialis. The ordo naturalis is the one that respects the very nature of the discourse without intentional alterations or the one that follows the tradition; the ordo artificialis , on the other hand, alters the usual order of the parts (for example, starting a story not at the beginning but at an advanced stage of the story, that is, in half res).

Elocutio

The elocutio affects the way to adequately express verbally the materials of the inventio ordered by the dispositio. Nowadays, the elocutio is what is called style.

The elocutio manifests itself through two aspects: qualities and registers.

• The eloquent qualities There are three: Puritas, Perspicuitas and ornatus.

La Puritas is grammatical correction in linguistic expression, which seeks, above all, to avoid barbarism or wrong word and solecismo or erroneous syntactic construction.

La Perspicuitas is the degree of understanding of the discourse, which opposes the obscuritas.

The ornatus it is intended to embellish the discourse with the use of the different literary figures. This is the main constituent of elocutio because around it rotate all the elements of the stylistic configuration. It consists of two basic trainers: the choice of words (see trophies and figures) and their combination (compositio).

• Them elocution records (generates elocutionis) are stylistic modalities that depend on the combination of eloquent qualities. Several can be identified but traditionally three basic models are spoken:

The genus humile or flat style is aimed at teaching; it is characterized by Puritas and the PerspicuitasAnd one ornatus undeveloped.

The genus medium or medium style pretends to delight; it is characterized by a greater presence of ornatus than in the previous one.

The sublime genus or high style seeks to move and the eloquent qualities are present to a maximum degree.

The composition

The compositio analyzes the syntactic and phonic structure of the statements, that is, their constituents and their different possibilities of distribution in the discourse. Thus, the syntactic compositio (focused on the sentence and its parts) and the phonetic compositio (focused on the combination of words in the sentence for phonetic reasons) are distinguished.

• La syntactic compositio: two types of style are distinguished: the loose style or followed and periodic style or period.

The first difference between the two is structural and logical-semantic: in the period there is a periodic structure that presents several parts with argumentative autonomy for each of them; On the other hand, in the loose style there is no such structure, so that the ideas follow one another until reaching the conclusion.

The second difference is of a rhythmic order: in the period we must take into account the numerus (the Latin correlate of the meter in poetry, which was based on the vowel quantities), while in the loose style this is irrelevant.

Memory

The memorization of the elaborated speech depends on two types of memory according to the classical writers: the memoria naturalis (the innate one) and the artificial memory, which implies a series of mnemonic procedures to facilitate memory.

Action

Also called pronuntiatio, it deals with the declamation of the speech, paying attention to the modulation of the voice and gestures, which must be in line with the content of that one.

Oratory genres

There are three genres of oratory speeches: the genus iudiciale (judicial or forensic genre), the genus deliberativum (deliberative or political genre) and the genus demonstrativum (demonstrative or epidictic genus).

• The genus iudiciale is the one that corresponds to the statements made before a judge with the objective of accusing or defending, in respect of a matter of the past, a case raised in terms of justice against injustice. Their poles are accusation and defense
• The genus deliberativum It was the one that corresponded to the speeches made before an assembly; he intended to advise or deter in terms of usefulness. In the face of the judicial genre, which focuses on past events, the topic of deliberative discourses is how to deal with a particular issue in the future.
• The genus demonstrativum It focuses on individuals who are concerned with praising or denouncing a public; it deals with past facts and addresses a public who has no capacity to influence the facts, but only to sense or dissent the way to present them to the speaker, commending or reproving them. It's focused on the beautiful and the opposite, the ugly. Its poles are, therefore, the praise or praise and the denus or vituperio.

In addition to these three genera, there are seven species (εἲδη): Swissing (προτρεπτικόν), deterrence (ἀποτρεπτικόν), laudatory (ἐγκωμιαστικόν), vituperadora (ψητικόν), accusatory ἐξεταστικόν). These species are present in all three genera. In the deliberative, since it seeks to convince the audience of a certain thesis, the most frequent are deterrence and deterrence. In the judicial, in which one must defend oneself against accusations or carry them out, the accusatory and exculpatory species predominate, and in the epidictic, which serves to reinforce the values of a community, laudatory and invective. Although they predominate more in certain speeches, the seven species are in the three genera. In a deliberative speech, the accusatory and the invective species can be used, for example, the politician who proposes a law can accuse his rival of something or inveigh against him in order to discredit him. In the same way, in judicial discourse, the invective and laudatory species are frequent. A well-known case is Cicero's speech Pro Archia Poeta in which there is extensive praise of poetry.

In the Middle Ages, the so-called arts were added to the previous ones: ars praedicandi (on the technique of preparing sermons), ars dictandi (or ars dictaminis , on the art of writing letters) and the ars poetriae (grammatical, metrical and rhetorical precepts for writing poetry).

History of rhetoric

Polimnia, muse of poetry-lyric-sacra, Roman work in marble of the centuryII.

Classical Athens

Sources for study

We can learn about Athenian rhetoric through the speeches left by great orators such as Demosthenes, Lysias or Isocrates. Herodotus and Thucydides in their works on history, in addition to events, also wrote speeches delivered by historical figures such as Alcibiades, Xerxes or Pericles.

From a theoretical point of view, the most important sources are the Rhetoric to Alexander written by Anaximenes of Lampsacus and the Rhetoric of Aristotle. The first work consists of a series of precepts on how to speak eloquently. The second work has a more philosophical approach. Faced with the Rhetoric to Alexander , which is of a practical nature, the Rhetoric of Aristotle is of a theoretical nature.

In Classical Athens there is no clear distinction between rhetoric and philosophy. For this reason, this last discipline must be taken into account. Tragedy and comedy, closely linked to the political, are also important to understand the rhetoric in Classical Athens.

Origins

Rhetoric was born in ancient Greece around the year 485 B.C. C. in the Sicilian city of Syracuse, when Gelon and his successor Hieron I expropriated the lands of its citizens to award them to members of his personal army. Later, with the advent of democracy and the overthrow of the tyrants, the injured parties sought to recover their properties, and this situation led to a series of lawsuits in which the importance of eloquence or the art of speaking well and persuasively to achieve the claimed recoveries. Thus, its origin is not linked to the literary but to the judicial, and closely related to the political: the public and free word is related to rhetoric.

The rhetoric was the first of the “seven liberal arts” of the Greek-Roman world, along with grammar, dialectics, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music.

Given the effectiveness of adequate oral argumentation, Corax of Syracuse, in the V century B.C. C. (around the year 450) developed a communication system to speak before the political assembly or before the courts with clearly persuasive purposes, which can be considered the first rhetorical treatise. A disciple of his, Tisias, spread it throughout Greece. This is how two of the three classic genres of rhetoric were born already in their genesis: the judicial and the deliberative. And soon a type of funeral eulogy speech was added in which it was a question of praising the virtues of the deceased, which can be considered the beginning of the third rhetorical genre, the demonstrative or epidictic that, later, would refer to any person not necessarily deceased, or to different aspects of life or society, from a positive or negative point of view.

The figures of these first two rhetoric teachers are quite obscure. No writing by them has reached our days, and their existence is known by mentions of later rhetors. There is a theory that Tisias and Corax were one person and not two. According to this theory, the first rhetor of antiquity would be called Tisias, the Corax or, in other words, Tisias the raven (κόραξ, κόρακος in ancient Greek meant raven). This eloquence quickly became an object of teaching, and was It was transmitted to Attica by merchants who connected Syracuse and Athens.

Philosophical foundations

Rhetoric soon proved its usefulness as a political instrument in the democratic regime, V century B.C. C., disclosed by teachers known as sophists, among which the best known were Protagoras of Abdera and Gorgias. For these rhetoric teachers who were also philosophers, there is no single truth and only credible things can be expressed with language (τὸ εἰκός). They highly valued the power of the word (λὀγος) which according to Gorgias is a great sovereign who with a very small and imperceptible body performs works of a divine nature.

This philosophy was heavily criticized by Plato. For both Plato and his teacher Socrates, the essence of philosophy rested on dialectic: reason and discussion gradually lead to the discovery of important truths. Plato thought that the sophists were not interested in the truth, but only in the way to convince, so he rejected the written word and sought personal dialogue, and the fundamental method of pedagogical discourse that he adopted was the dialogue between teacher and student.. But the great teacher of Greek rhetoric was Isocrates. He thought that rhetoric was a comprehensive training plan for the person that served to create model citizens; With his teaching system, precursor of humanism, he sought the ethical and political regeneration of Athenian society.

Aristotle, on the other hand, systematized most of this knowledge about the art of speaking and arguing in a work that he consecrated for this purpose, his Rhetoric. The great contribution of Aristotle's Rhetoric is his philosophical approach. The previous manuals, of which the only surviving copy is the Rhetoric to Alexander, consisted of practical advice on how to persuade. Aristotle's Rhetoric, on the other hand, makes theoretical reflections on persuasive language.

Rhetorical genres

«Plato and Aristotle» or the «philosophy». Marble board that comes from the north facade, lower register, of the Campanile of Florence.

As Solon established that everyone had to defend themselves in person before a court, the so-called logographers were created, who dedicated themselves to making speeches for those who did not know how to make them in exchange for a stipend: authors such as Antiphon, Lysias, who stood out for their naturalness and atticism, Iseo, famous for his skill in argumentation, and the most famous of them all, Isocrates, were logographers. They also had a stylistic concern and tried to ensure that the style of the speech adjusted to the personality and social condition of the person who had to memorize and pronounce it. There was also the figure of the sunegoros (συνήγορος) whose function was similar to that of a lawyer. Demosthenes acted as συνήγορος when he delivered his famous speech On the Crown.

In the V and IV a. C., the Athenian political system was the radical democracy that consisted in that every male Athenian citizen of legal age could expose in the Assembly (ἐκλεσία) his points of view on the affairs of the polis. To be able to speak in the Assembly it was necessary to be an excellent orator. For this reason, deliberative rhetoric developed in Athens.

The third rhetorical genre that developed in Athens was the epidictic, which encompasses speeches that take place on special occasions, for example, at a funeral, and whose main objective is to reinforce the values of a community. The most important Epidectic speech of Classical Athens is the Funeral Speech of Pericles.

Looking for Marco Tulio Cicerón, the great Roman speaker.

Rome

Already in Rome, rhetoric was highly perfected through the research and efforts of men of letters such as Cicero, who dedicated a substantial part of his work to the subject and made rhetoric the axis of his concerns. The texts De Oratore and La invención rétorica are fundamental by this author. Of the manuals of republican rhetoric, the Retorica ad Herennium, by an anonymous author, is preserved. In imperial times, within the framework of the second sophistry, Marco Fabio Quintiliano stands out, whose twelve books of Oratory Institutions represent the culmination of studies on the subject in the Roman world. It should be noted that in the republican era the deliberative genre flourished, while in the imperial era it was the epidictic genre that developed with great force. Notable is the work of Menander the Rhetor and his Two Treatises on Epidictic Rhetoric. Since rhetoric was a fundamental part of the education of every enlightened Roman, it is necessary to take it into account when reading all the intellectual production of the time.

The Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, of the three oratorical genres, the judicial, the deliberative and the epidictic, the deliberative and the epidictic genre entered into decline, that is, political and artistic oratory, since the militarization of the empire made the knowledge of oratory is useless; however, his knowledge was transferred to literature in general, which was notably twisted, losing much of its original inspiration and freshness. This was the conclusion of the great scholar of medieval literature Ernst Robert Curtius in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated into Spanish in 1955.

Contemporary period

Four photos of Adolf Hitler, September 1930.

Contemporary rhetoric has dispensed with oral discourse and, therefore, among the five phases of elaboration of discourse (invention, disposition, elocution, memory and action) of the last two of a practical nature, memory and action. It is currently considered to be useful for actors, lawyers, psychologists, politicians, advertisers, writers, salespeople and, in general, those who want to persuade or convince of something.

Nevertheless, rhetoric experienced a great renaissance in the second half of the 20th century as a scientific discipline with the rise from various currents of thought that have rediscovered its value for different disciplines; Heinrich Lausberg began by doing a great job of classifying the discipline with his Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik, translated as Elements of Literary Rhetoric in 1975; and his priceless Literary Rhetoric Manual, published in Spanish between 1966 and 1970 in three volumes; Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Ollbrechts-Tyteca published a fundamental Treatise on argumentation in 1958, translated into Spanish in 1994; the discipline created as a result of this book has since been called Argumentation Rhetoric or, sometimes, Neo-rhetoric; on the other hand, and alongside this so-called rhetoric of argumentation, a new neo-rhetoric has emerged, the contemporary rhetoric of figures, illustrated by Roman Jakobson, the µ Group (or Liège Group), Lakoff and Johnson, etc. that allowed linguistics and semiotics to develop in a social and cognitive orientation. The study of rhetoric as a cultural phenomenon has been profoundly renewed by the French historian of culture, Marc Fumaroli (Collège de France).

The invention, alone or in conjunction with the provision, is often called argumentation; elocution is subdivided, as theorists of antiquity had already determined, into a large number of points of view on the speech to be made (art of rhetoric) or on the speech already made (rhetoric as a science): on vocabulary (registers of the language), on rhythms and sonorities, on the form and structure of sentences (syntax, parataxis, hypotaxis, type of rhematic progression, period, comatic style, etc.).

Politics

In contemporary politics it is considered a strategic method of communication composed of fallacies and peroratives. Used in the speech as an appeal to the voter, using linguistic resources and misrepresenting the facts.