Page 330 - Gabrijela Kišiček and Igor Ž. Žagar (eds.), What do we know about the world? Rhetorical and argumentative perspectives, Digital Library, Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana 2013
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What Do We Know about the World?
paciousness of the ancient discipline; and to highlight those aspects and
characteristics which relate rhetoric to new media in an organic way.

2. Introduction

Rhetoric is a great survivor. It has escaped decades – if not centuries
– of moral resentment, scholarly rejection, and democratic suspicion and
remains ready and invigorated to re-enter the scholarly landscape and to
influence practices of social discourse. Undoubtedly, rhetoric has been
able to resist the attacks of those who considered it vague; superfluous;
manipulative; or outdated. With more than 2500 years of disciplinary
history, it gained considerable stamina to answer new challenges be they
social; political; technological; or scientific.

Classical rhetoric derives from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds
where it served as the universal science of the public sphere in which
right acting and right speaking were considered one. Although defined
as the art of persuasion, it has tended, with persuasive public speaking,
to outgrow always its original concern. Its genuine communicative, sym-
bolic and strategic characteristics; its references to both the public and
the personal; and its communicatively holistic nature have made rheto-
ric an interdisciplinary field of interpersonal, mediated and public dis-
course. In the classical tradition, a cultural ideal evolved, that of the “po-
litically and socially active polymath” (Halloran, 1994: 332). This cul-
tural ideal, regarded as the master of rhetoric, “was the man who had
interiorized all that was best in his culture and applied this knowledge
in public forums [...]” (1994: 331). The existence, of such a cultural ide-
al, suggested a worldview in which “values are coherent and the wisdom
of public can be fully mastered by one man” (1994: 331). Classical rheto-
ric was informed by a world of the acting community which, clearly, was
changed, mostly in the sense of coherence and eminence. As the original
sociocultural-political context of rhetoric was being reconfigured, the
discipline had to overcome several existentially critical phases. Howev-
er, there were two eras of rejection which turned out to be almost fatal.

According to Bender and Wellbery’s (1990) seminal article, both
the Enlightenment and Romanticism caused this rejection of rhetoric.
From the former’s perspective, rhetoric seemed empty, blurred, and dif-
fuse. Public discourse had to be freed of its individual interests; deprived
of rhetorical ambiguity, and magniloquence and passion. For Romanti-
cism, rhetoric had become a craft rather than the faculty of the genius, a
way of producing rather than creating. These two sets of attacks resulted
in the rejection of rhetoric’s classical tradition for the following reasons:
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