I wish I had the eloquence of Quintilian or Erasmus so that I might better express effectively the things that went through my mind with this week’s readings (even with the pages and pages of notes).
What I seemed to see was that the original arguments of rhetoric as art versus being just a practical instrument used in civic discourse had not much changed from the age of Cicero and Quintilian, and – arguably – even from that Aristotle and Isocrates. What seemed to happen, is that it would be “arranged” and “re-arranged” (pun intended), often by the giving and taking away again the gifts of invention.
In the era of horrific violence we now call the Renaissance, “the very abundance of lore then available led to the perception of a need for simplification” (Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 119-20). George Trebizond, very practically, decided that invention was a “skill…acquired through experience alone” (116), defining rhetoric as something “pragmatic” and “indifferent to morality” (115).
To Agricola, invention merely provided “maxims” which supplied “the criteria by which an argument may be taken as valid and true. He separated invention for dialectic, taking away any idea of probability and argument, leaving (so he believed) certainty and assertions (125). They needed certainty in a world turned upside down – then as the debate over free will heated, Peter Ramus stepped in…
Ramus restricted invention in his quest to raise Scripture the last word in all argument – making argument completely unnecessary, transforming rhetoric into nothing more than “the vehicle for the transmission of [God’s truth] to an audience unprepared to accept it” (130).
In the seventeenth century, rhetoric and religion became inextricably tied s the art focused on moving men’s minds through their emotions. Bartholomeus Keckermann defined invention as a way to reorganize traditional doctrines “that [made] sense of them in terms of what he [saw] as the primary goal of rhetoric… ‘to move the emotions and the will of men’” (qtd. in Conley, 158).
But, in a time of scientific inquiry and constant political unrest, philosophers like Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes saw rhetoric – and it’s handmaiden, invention – in much the same light most people (not in this class, of course) view it today, as a dangerous manipulation of men’s minds.
Apparently, the old adage: necessity is the mother of invention, is more rhetorical than I realized.
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I very much enjoy watching a writer separate one topic from the 150 pages to explicate. I think you make an excellent point in following the shift in invention, and I hope you make it again in class. The only addition I would like to throw in probably falls under Doug's "feelings category." Regardless, my addition is that the idea that rhetoric was a “skill…acquired through experience alone” (116), defining rhetoric as something “pragmatic” and “indifferent to morality” (115) has always been the case. Both Aristotle and Isocrates stated that the parts of an orator one is not born with must be taught through experience, and, though they speak from and ivory tower of morality, I don't believe the practicing rhetors of the times were as concerned with morality as they were concerned with pragmatically making their point and moving their listeners.
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