Philosophy & Rhetoric

More than fifty years have passed since Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, and over forty have slipped by since the work was translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. The inversion of the title and subtitle in the French and English versions expresses well the chiasmic dynamic of the philosophy of rhetoric and the rhetoric of philosophy that defines the new rhetoric project. Its overall aim is essentially philosophical: "the justification of the possibility of a human community in the sphere of action when this justification cannot be grounded in a reality or an objective truth" (1969, 514). This project is announced as a departure from the Cartesian tradition and its grounding of reason in self-evidence that culminated in early twentieth-century logical positivism's inability to speak cogently about the kind of reasoning we are capable of in conditions of uncertainty and when the issues concern the motives from which we act, the goals we seek, and the constraints and attractions and practices and outlooks that hold us together in various kinds of communities. The new rhetoric project takes shape as a philosophy of rhetoric that transforms philosophical prejudices about what a logic of value judgments was supposed to accomplish.

In pursuit of this philosophical justification of human community, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca discovered the rhetorical tradition and its [End Page 301] millennia-long history of concern with reasoning about practical matters in conditions of uncertainty. They also retrieved the rhetorical topoi, those general forms of reasoning that had been neglected in modernity but which they reinterpreted and organized into a system of argumentative techniques that provided the shared rhetorical logic of argumentation—however, as a set of technical presumptions rather than a set of truth-preserving rules.

And yet though they insisted that argumentation proceeded by way of recognizable forms, they recognized that simply proceeding in accordance with these forms would not be sufficient for attracting the assent of reasonable people. The radical rhetorical move made in the new rhetoric project, and the reason one may justifiably title the project "The New Rhetoric" rather than "A Treatise on Argumentation" was the valorization of audience, of receptivity as a kind of rational agency. As The New Rhetoric puts it: all argumentation takes shape and develops out of a relation to an audience (1969, 5), and the quality of an argument is a function of the quality of the esprits that would assent to it (1969, 7). This led Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca into their complex task of describing the different forms of receptivity to arguments and their different kinds of quality. Most famous, or notorious, among them is the auditoire universel, an audience, or a form of receptivity, of the highest quality, a paragon receptivity that possesses all the capabilities and knowledge necessary for making the most reasonable judgments about the strengths of an argument.

However, these two moves—toward topoi and toward a reception theory of rationality—not only structure the new philosophy of rhetoric; they also define the new rhetoric as the rhetoric of philosophy. First, because philosophical reasoning, too, is judged by a universal audience and so brought within rhetoric's scope; and, second, because philosophical systems define themselves not only by way of the different universal audiences to which they appeal but also in terms of the different ways they dissociate and create philosophical pairs, which have a specific rhetorical logic described in §§90–92 of The New Rhetoric. Thus, the new rhetoric project as a whole is both a philosophy of rhetoric and a rhetoric of philosophy.

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's crossing of philosophy and rhetoric helped to open up an area of research that the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric has kept open for over forty years now. Perelman published his article "Rhetoric and Philosophy" in the first issue of the journal, and it is fitting that the journal now publishes this special issue on the new rhetoric after fifty years. The articles developed for publication here all bear in some way [End Page 302] on the shape of this contact...