Philosophy as Rhetoric

I hesitate to propose this idea here, but perhaps it will generate some interesting discussion. As I remarked in my "Philosophical Despair" post, I often struggle with dark thoughts as to just what philosophy is or what value that it has. Lately I've been toying with the idea that philosophy is a branch of rhetoric. Now it's likely that this thesis will cause irritation among many, as the discipline of rhetoric often has negative connotations, suggesting manipulation. It might even appear disappointing. However, if we go back to Aristotle, rhetoric is simply that discipline that studies all available means of persuasion. In persuading another person, I have to make reference to grounds and motives, and a philosophy can be seen as an elaborate presentation of a system of grounds. Kenneth Burke has made this point well. According to Burke, motives are always unfolded in ratios between act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. Throughout his magnificent Grammar of Motives, Burke shows how various philosophies privilege various elements of this pentad. Thus, for instance, Spinoza's Ethics places its emphasis on scene, insofar as it is causal relations among all the modes that are determinative. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason can be seen as placing its emphasis on the agent, with his claim that the subject gives itself his own law. Badiou's ontology places its emphasis on the act, with his claim that truth-procedures emerge out of the praxis of subjects bearing fidelity to an event. And so on. In each of these cases, a set of grounds is put forward designed to persuade persons in one way or another.

Now it seems to me that a philosophy strives to formalize the available arguments or means of persuasion present at any given point in time. That is, it strives to present what is presumed by these arguments in its most basic form. Along these lines, I think that there are two basic types of philosophy. On the one hand, there are those philosophies that ground the current state of things, or which strive to essentialize the order of being as it currently exists. I take it that these sorts of philosophies are what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as "State philosophies". For instance, in Hegel we discover that the State of Prussia is the highest embodiment of Spirit and his ontology effectively functions as an apology for this state, and in the work of figures such as Rawls and Habermas, we're given a formal presentation of the liberal subject and values of capitalist democracy, as if this subject were simply true a priori, rather than the product of specific historical circumstances. That is, such a philosophy naturalizes the contingent, treating other possibilities of being, other types of subjects, other values, as if they were not possible.

In his most recent work on "worlds", Badiou argues that existence in any situation is characterized by degrees of intensity, determining the degree to which something exists in a situation. This is a very different conception of "intensity" than what one finds in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, so it's important not to confuse the two. Take the current situation in the United States. Leftist politics has a very low degree of intensity in our contemporary situation. On television and newspapers, genuinely leftist voices are seldom presented. In the system of party politics, leftist politics is entirely absent. Bill Clinton has far more in common with George Bush, than he does with someone like Chomsky or Lenin. As a result, it is very difficult to make persuasive arguments from this position, because the situation doesn't have the resources to hear these sorts of arguments. Where these positions might have had a high degree of intensity during the great labor struggles in the United States, they are almost entirely invisible in our current situation.

It seems to me that this observation opens the door for another type of rhetoric. Every rhetorical field makes metaphysical assumptions, ontological assumptions, ethical assumptions, and political assumptions about what is possible and what is impossible, that it then evokes as "common sense" or the "obvious". When Aristotle said that the rhetorician studies the available means of persuasion, one of the points here is that arguments float about in the social world as the doxa of the time, defining the framework in which the rhetor might produce interpellations in his audience. Yet it seems to me that there is another type of rhetoric that doesn't address itself to an audience that is, but an audience that is yet to come. That is, this philosophical activity sets about trying to change the very co-ordinates of what is possible and impossible, what is speakable and unspeakable, within a situation, challenging the metaphysics of its time, our collective ontological assumptions, our ethical assumptions, our political assumptions, our aesthetic assumptions, in the name of making new arguments availabe for persuasion, and transforming that which has a very low degree of intensity in a situation shift to having a very high degree of intensity. Who is this subject yet to come? And what arguments does she need to transform the field in which we dwell?

In drawing philosophy closer to rhetoric, I'm trying to make the point that philosophy doesn't simply try to get at the truth of being, but rather that philosophy seeks to do something. A philosophy functions as a lense or a terministic screen through which I view the world, and thereby effects how I act and analyze the world. In reading a philosophy I am transformed as a subject. I am not a subject reading a philosophy. Rather I am a subject produced by an exchange of communication. I am different after reading Plato than I was before. I experience myself differently and I experience the world differently. I am a "superject" of that philosophy. So how is it possible to transform the distribution of the possible and impossible in a social field? What rhetorical acts transform such distributions?