Week 8

Hello Classmates,

Ramus’s Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian is interesting because it expresses disagreement with many of the ideas put forth by Quintilian and Aristotle—like the placement of invention, order, and memory in the rhetoric vs. dialectic pools. Page 694 (as presented in Bizzell and Herzberg, 2001), notes “invention is a process which supplies arguments”—it is not the argument itself; rather it is dialectic. Page 682 (as presented in Bizzell and Herzberg, 2001) reads: “But the writings of these scholars [Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian] reveal that while they indeed collected a lot of material, they did not evaluate it sufficiently, for in some places I look in vain for a syllogism. And they did not arrange it in a sufficiently fitting order, for elsewhere I find a lack of method.” Not since our readings of Plato and Isocrates (in their qualms with the Sophist’s views) do I recall such a direct “attack” on the view of a rhetorician by another rhetorician. Ramus appears to stress delivery and performance, akin to the Sophist, and he disagrees that with Quintilian in that he thinks there is, at least in part, such thing as a universal argument (this idea seems to begin on page 690, as presented in Bizzell and Hezber, 2001). Overall, as evidenced on page 681 (as presented in Bizzell and Herzberg, 2001), Ramus’s efforts seem to be focused on defining rhetoric apart from other discipline and influences: “We shall distinguish the art of rhetoric from other arts, and make it a single one of the liberal arts, not a confused mixture of all arts; we shall see its true properties, remove weak and useless subtleties, and point out things that are missing.”

Thus, I think what Ramus might be saying is that the logic behind the argument is dialectic whereas the presentation, the argument itself, is the rhetorical component—that delivery and style constitutes rhetoric only? And, I think we, perhaps see a similar line of thinking, i.e., a distinction from logic and presentation, in Bacon’s work The Advancement of Learning (as presented in Bizzell and Herzber, 2001, p. 744), “It appeared also that logic differeth from Rhetoric, not only as the fist from the palm, the one close the other at large; but much more than this, that Logic handelth reason exact and in truth, and Rhetoric handleth it as is planted in popular opinions and manners.”

Thus, overall, as I think about this, I think we are seeing a push to return the term “rhetoric” back to the “cookery” Plato despised---but, I do not see it as a step backwards. We are still seeing a role for some of the deeper thoughts/implications that Plato and others valued—they are just being shifted more to the purview of “dialectic”; so we are still seeing the value of logic and reason.

So, though we are seeing some new ideas sprinkled in, overall, what I am seeing by Ramus and Bacon are largely attempts to reorganize ideas, which speaks to issue of classification—a large issue in (and a valuable tool in) technical communication.

Cris