Argument in Composition. John Ramage
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behavior under which one is obliged to offer a rationale that is both truthful and candid in one’s argument, it is assumed that one could offer such a rationale if challenged to do so. Moreover, the failure to be candid in an argument may potentially render one’s argument less efficacious. A competing argument that revealed what one had left unsaid or that called attention to alternative points one had glossed over could weaken audience adherence to one’s own as readily as if it had shown a falsehood.
The process of selection in ethics is homologous with what rhetoricians sometimes call the invention stage. The process of discovering and evaluating choices comprises much of the techne of rhetoric and ethics alike. As we saw earlier, Hans Blumenberg has associated this process with the “retardation” of time, including a concern to account for “circumstantiality,” the particular differences between one’s given situation and others to which one looks for guidance. While we previously emphasized the cognitive rewards associated with this rejection of parsimonious means of understanding, we would here emphasize the ethical compulsions for such a move. Where automaticity prevails, there is no place for either ethics or rhetoric. One can only do or say “what a person’s gotta do or say.” Without hesitation. Ethics and rhetoric require choice and choice implies deliberation. In reaching this conclusion we do not reject the notion that the proper end of ethical instruction is to render virtue a habit. Ethical habits of mind, as opposed to mere knowledge of ethical theory and history, are certainly proper ends of ethical instruction. But that is not to say that such habits are best exhibited by the alacrity with which people make their ethical choices. One can construe the notion of habit more broadly, rejecting a behaviorist emphasis on habit as im-mediate response to a familiar stimulus; one can include under ethical habits of mind the inclination to seek out the ethical dimension of one’s choices, the consideration of as many plausible alternatives as possible, and the thoughtful evaluation of those choices. By combining ethical instruction and rhetorical instruction with the latter’s emphasis on “procedural inventiveness” and disciplined examination of alternatives we can hope to improve ethical choices by complicating and increasing the number of choices our students have to select from. Instead of focusing on the rightness of one’s final choice, a rhetorically influenced ethic would emphasize the alternatives invented or discovered in the selection process and the unique responsivenes of the final choice to the particulars of one’s ethical dilemma. It’s here that the controversial nature of rhetoric is most obviously apparent.
For some, the test of ethical instruction lies precisely in helping students arrive in the most parsimonious manner possible at the Right Choice which is there and waiting for them; whatever detains one from recognizing and making that choice results from deficiencies in one’s character. Only if one believes that the best choice may be a product of the deliberations rather than an a priori that pre-exists those deliberations can a “retardation” of time, a refusal to “reduce entities beyond necessity,” be justified. At which point those who equate virtue with an unerring, quick twitch rejection of temptation will accuse one of relativism. For the moral absolutists—and certainly moral absolutism is an ethical position that significant numbers of people can and do take, however different their absolutes may be—the tests posed by Satan are true/false tests, not essay exams. One prepares for such a test by familiarizing oneself with the right answers, repeating them, memorizing them and then recalling them instantly when challenges present themselves. Only dullards have to deliberate and only infidels imagine that they might, by their own power of reason, come up with a better choice than the one prescribed by absolutes transmitted by some high priest’s literal reading of holy writ.
The failure of absolutism from the perspective of ethics qua rhetoric is a failure of the imagination.3 It’s the failure to imagine a reading of holy writ other than the one offered by whatever authority happens to control the pulpit. It’s the failure to imagine a ground of identification between oneself and whatever embodiment otherness has taken on. The failure of absolutism also involves a simple failure to notice things: The failure to notice that the answers derived from holy writ over the centuries change from time to time and from place to place, and the failure to notice that there is no court of appeal with binding authority to adjudicate differences among competing absolutes or to overturn the appeals of relativists. The major problem arising from the failure of ethical absolutisms is that they ultimately come full circle and return us to the place from whence ethics and rhetoric alike arise, the place where might makes right. Above all else, ethics and rhetoric share in their rejection of force as a means of resolving difference.
Rhetoric begins, as Burke argues, in acts of courtship, in the creation of a sense of identification between entities belonging to different classes—gender, socio-economic, political, etc. The obligations of ethics arise from the recognition of the self in others, the “thou-ness” of strangers toward whom one must act as one would wish to be acted upon. Absolutism creates a world of binaries—Us/Them, Good/Evil, Right Reading/Wrong Reading—and then offers no civilized means of overcoming those binaries. In fact absolutism counsels against parleying with, let alone identifying with, the Other. To maintain one’s faith in an absolutist view of the world, one must remain always within the borders governed by those absolutes. To leave the kingdom of one’s absolutes is to be challenged at every turn by strange ideas and customs and to have few resources for negotiating those differences. But we learned long ago from our Sophist forebears how to traverse multiple kingdoms and in the process multiple realities while hanging on to our sanity and our safety. If that most benign forebear of the absolutists, Plato, vanquished the Sophists in his dialogues, they in fact survived to argue another day and teach us how to do likewise. In a world beset by too much certainty about too many irreconcilable notions and too little willingness to set force aside and try courtship our students would be well served by ethical instruction infused by the spirit of the Sophists.
Notes
1. In using Perry’s framework for this discussion of student development, we do not mean to imply an uncritical acceptance of his theory. A number of trenchant critiques of Perry’s schema were mounted in the seventies and eighties, particularly by feminist scholars (e.g., Gilligan, Belenky, et al.) who noted the strong male bias of Perry’s research and its failure to account for gender differences. Women’s ways of knowing, we would acknowledge, are indeed different from men’s ways, particularly when it comes to ethical matters. That said, the reactions of college students, particularly entry-level students, male and female alike, to the challenges posed by classes focused on argument, appear to track those anticipated by Perry’s schema sufficiently well to use as a loose framework for the present discussion.
2. In the case of Fish v. Leo, we appear to be contradicting ourselves by declaring our preference for Fish’s argument. But keep in mind, the nature of their disagreement is more in the nature of a “meta-argument” than a regular argument, and as such the reason for our preference goes back to the fact that Leo offers no reason to “listen” to opposing arguments, while Fish specifically calls for a dialectic approach to disagreement like the one we are supporting here.
3. Absolutism as we use the term here is a mindset rather than an ideology or belief system. Within any religion, thus, there are absolutists who pretty much act as advertised. There are also imaginative folk who manage to reconcile their religious beliefs with a concern for the well being of even those who fail to share their beliefs.
The number of casualties of the 9/11 attacks had not yet been fixed, at slightly fewer than 3,000, at the time of Leo’s writing.
2 The History of Argument
Our goal in this chapter is not to present an exhaustive history of argument. Our goal is to construct a chapter about the history of argument that is optimally usable for contemporary teachers of argument. Certainly we have drawn from a number of many fine histories of rhetoric and of the teaching of writing, and our readers may consult our citations if they wish to explore those histories in greater depth. But in the brief space we have available for this discussion, we have aimed at economy over thoroughness, at usefulness over novelty. In order to make the following material as usable as possible, we have constructed a two-part chapter. In the first part we present a “slice” or core sample of pre-modern rhetoric in the