Philosophy & Rhetoric

Universality has become a predominant focus of critique. To take just three examples: the purported universality of Western values has been exposed as a major justification for violent imperial enterprises, feminist thought has exposed so-called universal norms as having a specifically masculine provenance and nature, and the study of whiteness has largely been the exposure of specifically white features of institutions, practices, arts, norms, and laws that have been taken to be universal and colorless. All these examples follow the general Marxian form of critique that is guided by the proposition that all existing universalities conceal a factional interest. Universalities that function effectively and guide common sense were called hegemonies by Antonio Gramsci to highlight the fact of their social power and their historical character. In the humanities and in many of the social sciences, the word "universality" will ring with this potential for critique.

For some philosophers, the word will raise not historical and political concerns but logical and ontological questions about universal concepts in general—whether one has ontological commitments to the existence of whatever it is that a category or class term names and what the logic is of the relation of particulars to universal concepts.

These common attitudes toward universality make it difficult to grasp what happens to the idea of universality in Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric. In the case of The New Rhetoric, the production of universals is not simply a historical production of practical [End Page 430] hegemonies. Neither is it strictly conceptual work. Instead, universalities are generated in specifically rhetorical events. The key to grasping the process in which universalities are produced is to correctly comprehend the way universal audiences take shape and carry out their work. However, The New Rhetoric trails a fairly long and sometimes uncomprehending tradition of commentary on the idea of a universal audience. There are two distinct strands in this tradition. One strand finds the idea to be incoherent and is represented by Henry Johnstone, in his early work (1978), John Ray (1978), Lisa Ede (1981), Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (1995), and more recently Randy Harris (2008) and Scott Aikin (2008). The essential critical maneuver of this approach is to find two incompatible notions in the concept of a universal audience—and then to dissociate them. So, Ray and Ede find that the universal audience is both constructed by a specific speaker in a rhetorical context and that it is independent of context: self-evident, timeless, and absolute. Harris finds that the concept is oriented both by audience, which can never generate true universality, and by the domain of the cognitive, which can, and so proposes attending to the logical and figurative structures of cognition that promise the universality that audiences as such will forever lack. Harris's interesting proposal is thought-provoking in many ways, and yet it seems to assume a conception of universality from which The New Rhetoric is trying to free itself, one that Ray and Ede also assume but one that Perelman (1984a) explicitly rejects and for which he offers the universal audience—properly and radically understood—as a replacement and cure.

Most recently, in a long and careful critique of the literature on the universal audience, Aikin (2008) has argued that the universal audience must be divided on the basis of two separate functions—pragmatic (convincing an audience) and epistemic (producing knowledge). Aikin holds that the conflation of these functions is responsible for the incoherence of the idea of a universal audience and so for much of the confusion surrounding the meaning of "universality." However, Aikin's solution seems to require taking both argumentation and the universal audience out of a new rhetorical framework and placing them back into a traditional epistemological framework, which itself depends on what appears to be, despite Aikin's trepidation about saying so, an inescapably metaphysical (if not Cartesian) grounding for normativity.

In fact, The New Rhetoric's studied refusal of this kind of dissociative maneuver partly defines the idea of rhetoric it is trying to develop. Argumentation justifies knowledge claims when those claims cannot be [End Page 431] established by appeals to epistemological...