Philosophy & Rhetoric

Philosophy and Rhetoric Undressed

There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor.

—Deleuze and Guattari

Efforts to mutually adjust wise thinking and elegant speaking have contributed to the development of at least two programs for rhetorical scholarship: (1) the treatment of philosophical writing as a species of civic discourse, or philosophy as rhetoric, and (2) more recent efforts to derive ultimate terminologies from the figural plane of political texts and performance, or rhetoric as philosophy. Although the later mode of inquiry continues to receive attention from rhetoricians,¹ the critical project of reading philosophy as a mode of politics is in need of further development. Considerations of philosophy as rhetoric tend to limit themselves to the task of revealing the persuasive motives and features of philosophical treatises, displacing efforts to coordinate rhetoric and philosophy with the more anxious project of confirming the "presence" of rhetorical motives in philosophical discourse. "Philosophical finesse," "philosophical style," "philosophical rhetoric," "metaphysical relève of metaphor"—all are thought to await exposure in the work of would-be thinkers.²

Revelations of this sort do not come cheap. Philosophers may be unmasked as rhetoricians only insofar as they produce texts bearing the recognizable marks of "philosophy." That certain works can be shown to privilege an identity of meaning within arguments aimed at a timeless readership—over and against efforts to coach situated audiences into bodies of identification—has become a precondition for the rhetorical study of philosophy as a genre of civic discourse. This brand of ideology critique is premised on the abstraction or, better still, the reification of "philosophy" as an exposable method apart from the more operative methods of its exposure. Critique becomes surgery, as Peter Sloterdijk well notes: [End Page 302]

Cut open the patient with the critical scalpel and operate under impeccably sterile conditions. The opponent is cut open in front of everyone, until the mechanism of his error is laid bare. The outer skin of delusion and the nerve endings of "actual" motives are hygienically separated and prepared. From then on, enlightenment is not satisfied, of course, but it is better armed in its insistence on its own claims for the distant future. Ideology critique is now interested not in winning over the vivisected opponent but in focusing on the "corpse," the critical extract of its ideas, which lie in the libraries of enlighteners and in which one can easily read about their grave falsity.

(1987, 16–17)

This unmasking procedure is not only a textual affair, but also an effort to diffuse the motivational and attitudinal lineaments of the "philosopher," which Alexandre Kojève clearly identifies:

in order to justify the philosopher's absolute isolation, one has to grant that Being is essentially immutable in itself and eternally identical with itself, and that it is completely revealed for all eternity in and by an intelligence that is perfect from the first; and this adequate revelation of the timeless totality of Being is, then, the Truth. Man (the philosopher) can at any moment participate in this Truth, either as the result of action issuing from the Truth itself ("divine revelation"), or by his own individual effort to understand (the Platonic "intellectual intuition"), the only condition for such an effort being the innate "talent" of the one making this effort, independently of where he may happen to be situated in space (in the State) or in time (in history).

(1991, 151–52)

Underlying this "highly motivated hunt for 'philosophy'" (Sloterdijk) and its corresponding pursuit of the "radical egoism of the philosophical life" (Kojève) is a systematic exclusion of texts and performances aimedat local pedestrian audiences yet crafted by those who might otherwise appear to be philosophers. The rhetorical study of minor political works by major Western thinkers has little, if any, precedent in the treatment of philosophy as rhetoric.³ The cost of this trained incapacity is twofold: as rhetoricians disavow their claim to artifacts closely resembling those they are uniquely suited to critique—e.g., public speeches, private letters, newspaper editorials, radio broadcasts, and the like—so also do they forgo their richest opportunity to contribute to...