Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture

By Walter J. Ong

This collection of essays by Walter J. Ong focuses on the complex and dynamic relationship between verbal performance and cultural evolution. By studying the history of rhetoric and related arts from classical antiquity through the age of romanticism to the modern period, Ong both illuminates the past and helps explain late-twentieth-century modes of expression.

Elegantly written and wide ranging, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology traces the evolution of devices used to store, retrieve, and communicate knowledge. Ong discusses diverse topics including memory as art, associationist critical theory, the close relationship between romanticism and technology, and the popular culture of the 1970s. This book also contains essays about Tudor writings in English on rhetoric and literary theory, the study of Latin as a Renaissance puberty rite, Ramism in the classroom and in commerce, Jonathan Swift's notion of the mind, and John Stuart Mill's politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780801466328

Book preview

1 Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness

I

Until the modern technological age, which effectively began with the industrial revolution and romanticism, Western culture in its intellectual and academic manifestations can be meaningfully described as rhetorical culture. Any number of scholars have borne witness to the pervasiveness of rhetoric in the West, such as Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Pedro Lain Entralgo, and the late C. S. Lewis. Near the beginning of his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, Lewis states that in rhetoric, more than in anything else, the continuity of the old European tradition was embodied, adding that rhetoric was older than the Church, older than Roman Law, older than all Latin literature and that it penetrates far into the eighteenth century.¹ He also notes that rhetoric is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors and thereupon surprisingly drops the subject forever, despite his avowal that the entire literary history he is writing is certainly…vitiated by our lack of sympathy on this point and that probably all our literary histories are similarly vitiated. (Significantly, the rhetorical age did not engage in writing literary histories.)

There has been a good deal of water under the bridge since this avowal, which remains the more impressive because it is so reluctant and so stubborn. Rhetoric is the anglicized Greek word for public speaking, and thus refers primarily to oral verbalization, not to writing. It comes from the Greek term rhema, a word or saying, which in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European wer, the source of the Latin verbum and of our word. All human culture was of course initially rhetorical in the sense that before the introduction of writing all culture was oral. This means not merely that all verbal communication—there are obviously other kinds of communication—was oral, effectively limited to sound, but also that the economy of thought was oral. For human thought structures are tied in with verbalization and must fit available media of communication: there is no way for persons with no experience of writing to put their minds through the continuous linear sequence of thought such as goes, for example, into an encyclopedia article. Lengthy verbal performances in oral cultures are never analytic but formulaic. Until writing, most of the kinds of thoughts we are used to thinking today simply could not be thought. Orality is a pervasive affair.

But when we say that Western culture until recently was rhetorical, we are saying something more specific than that it was oral. We mean also that Western culture, after the invention of writing and before the industrial revolution, made a science or art of its orality.

After the invention of script (around 3500 B.C.) the central verbal activity to which systematic attention was at first given was the art of public speaking, not the art of written composition. Scribes learned how to commit discourse to writing, but basically composition as such remained an oral matter. Early written prose is more or less like a transcribed oration, and early poetry is even more oral in its economy. This fixation on the oral diminished only slowly. From antiquity through the Renaissance and to the beginnings of romanticism, under all teaching about the art of verbal expression there lies the more or less dominant supposition that the paradigm of all expression is the oration. With the exception of the letter-writing taught in the medieval ars dictaminis, virtually the only genre of expression formally taught in schools was the oration, with its various parts, numbering from a minimal two to four or even seven or more. Even the art of letter-writing, maximized in the highly literate culture of the Middle Ages, was conceived of by analogy with an oration: as will be detailed in Chapter 3, the letter commonly began with the equivalent of the oration’s exordium, next set down the petitio or statement of what was to be asked for (corresponding to the oration’s narratio, or statement of what was to be proved), the reasons or proofs bearing on the petitio, the refutation of counter-reasons (in the oration, refutation of adversaries), and the conclusion.²

This focusing of attention on speech rather than writing we can now understand. In preliterate ancient Greek culture, as in probably every early culture, oral performance had been held in high esteem and cultivated with great skill. But it had not been possible to codify its procedures systematically, to produce a science or art of oratory. An oral culture can produce—that is, perform—lengthy oral epics, for these are made up of memorable thematic and formulary elements, but it has no way of putting together a linear analysis such as Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric. For an oral culture can produce lengthy verbalization only orally, and there is no way to compose an Art of Rhetoric on one’s feet. No one could remember it even if it could be so composed. Even today, when oral performance has the advantage of being able to echo the analytic writing styles and accompanying thought patterns which saturate us, it is still impossible to extemporize a lengthy scientific treatise orally with no reliance at all on writing. At best an oral culture can produce a set of memorable sayings or aphorisms pertaining to a subject. But a collection of sayings such as Feed a cold and starve a fever is hardly a treatise on medicine. With writing, attempts to organize such sayings in meaningful sequence, such as the Hippocratic Aphorisms, can begin to move toward the treatise form. Once writing made feasible the codification of knowledge and of skills, oral performance, enjoying the high prestige that it did, was one of the first things scientifically codified. To use an expression still current in the sixteenth century, oral performance was technologized (made into a techne or art), earlier by the Sophists, later by Aristotle and others.

Others cultures, too, once they had writing, at least in many cases gave systematic attention to oral performance. But there was a difference. What was distinctive about the organization of rhetoric among the Greeks was the close alliance of the art with another subject which, if we except a considerably later and much less developed discipline in India,³ was an exclusively Western invention: formal logic. Logic and rhetoric have always been uneasy bedfellows, but in the West they have been bedfellows nevertheless pretty well from the beginning. Coming out of an oral background, logic was regarded from antiquity on through the Middle Ages not as concerned simply with private thinking but rather as allied to dialectic. It was typically defined the way Cicero defines it, as ars disserendi or the art of discourse, an art of communication, not of solipsistic (and by implication wordless) thought such as is implied by the art of thinking—a favorite definition after the invention of print. There was a technical distinction between formal logic as necessary or scientific logic and dialectic as the logic of the more probable, governing debate or discussion, but this distinction was most often of little operative value.⁴ In effect, dialectic and logic came to the same thing, and dialectic or logic were commonly grouped together as the artes sermocinales, the speech arts.

Aristotle associates rhetoric closely with dialectic (he never uses as a noun the term logic—logike, in Greek—nor even the term logikē technē, logical art).⁵ Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic, for both have to do with things that do not belong to any one science. ⁶ Rhetoric covers any subject matter, for it is the faculty of discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion.⁷ The two means of proof in rhetoric, enthymeme and example, Aristotle defines by analogy with the two means of proof in formal logic, syllogism and induction. Topics or commonplaces he finds both in rhetoric and in dialectic.⁸

Rhetoric, moreover, for all practical purposes, from antiquity until the eighteenth century, included poetic. This it did often, though not always, in theory,⁹ and even more often in practice, for poetry enjoyed no particular status as an independent academic discipline whereas rhetoric enjoyed enormous academic prestige, so that any use of words for effects other than the strictly logical was thought of as formally governed by rhetoric.¹⁰ Because, as we have seen, rhetoric was closely allied with logic, the association of poetry with rhetoric tended to assimilate poetry, too, to logic all through the Western tradition until romanticism,¹¹ when this association was rather abruptly discredited.

Rhetoric and formal logic could not, of course, simply merge. As the art of persuasion, moving men to action, rhetoric is ordered to decision making. And often decisions must be made when the grounds for decision are not under full logical control. Rhetoric has to deal often with probabilities. Still, it drives toward the certainty of formal logic as far as possible. The computor cannot tell us everything we need to know to make a decision, but it is good to have it tell us all that it feasibly can. Given the existence of formal logic, rhetoric in fact availed itself of everything logic had to offer, as the history of both disciplines in the West abundantly shows. In cultures which did not have formal logic, rhetoric or its equivalent had to take other turns.

The relationship between rhetoric and logic over the ages has been partly reinforcing and partly competitive. Rhetoric overshadowed logic in the patristic age, yielded to it more or less in the Middle Ages (though rather less than even scholarly mythology today commonly assumes), and overshadowed it again in a different way in the Renaissance. The interaction of these two of the artes sermocinales is complex, sensitive to a great many forces in the culture—intellectual, pedagogical, social, religious, political, economic. Certain features of this interaction are the core subject of the studies here.

But there is far more to say than this book can attend to. Indeed the interaction of logic and rhetoric is far too large a subject ever to be exhausted. Since logic and rhetoric correspond to the basic polarity in life represented in other ways by contemplation (theory) and action, or intellect and will, and since logic and rhetoric have come into being not in the hollows of men’s minds but in the density of history, it is quite possible to analyze almost anything in Western culture (and perhaps in all cultures) in terms of its relationship to the logical and rhetorical poles. Needless to say, there is no total theoretical statement of the nature of either rhetoric or logic, much less of their interrelation. Conceivably such a statement might finally be achieved at the end of history, when rhetoric and logic would be outmoded.

With the advent of the age which from one point of view we call the technological age and from the other point of view the romantic age, rhetoric was not wiped out or supplanted, but rather disrupted, displaced, and rearranged. It became a bad word—as did many of the formerly good words associated with it, such as art, artificial, commonplace, and so on. Rhetoric was a bad word for those given to technology because it represented soft thinking, thinking attuned to unpredictable human actuality and decisions, whereas technology, based on science, was devoted to hard thinking, that is, formally logical thinking, attunable to unvarying physical laws (which, however, are no more real than variable human free acts). Rhetoric was a bad word also for those given to romanticism because it seemed to hint that the controlling element in life was a contrivance rather than freedom in the sense of purely spontaneous or unmotivated action, sprung up unsolicited from the interior wells of being. (In support of rhetoric, it might be noted that no such choice is possible: psychology can identify real motives always underlying the seemingly random or whimsical choice—which is precisely unfree because its motives are not under conscious control. Free action is not unmotivated action but action from motives consciously known.)

The displacement and rearrangement of rhetoric is, from one point of view, the story of the modern world. By now this great depository of culture has exfoliated into a variety of seemingly disparate things. In the academic world, for example, in one or another guise or avatar rhetoric is now taught in elementary and high school English courses, in freshman college English courses, in courses in marketing and advertising and creative writing (which is never entirely creative, but always to some degree persuasive, as Wayne Booth has so well shown ¹²). As persuasion, the operation of rhetoric has become in some ways more indirect (in marketing and advertising—though we must never underestimate the indirect methods of classical orators such as Cicero). Modern rhetoric has become more visualist than the older verbal rhetoric, not merely through the use of pictures for persuasion but also through the presentation of words as objects, with display type in display advertising. Until the early eighteenth century, it was at best extremely uncommon to find any sign display of lettered words as such: a tradesman’s name or business was not advertised in words on the outside of his shop; instead, the old iconography of the pretypographic world was used, an ivy bush for a tavern, a barber’s pole, a pawnbroker’s three balls, and to distinguish individual shops, easily represented and easily remembered designs such as a Cheshire cheese, a Turk’s head, three casks (the Triple Tun of Ben Jonson’s festive gatherings). In the new rhetoric words themselves are treated as designs and even as physical objects. Movies and television even set words in motion across a visual field, commanding their alphabetic components, like Ariel, to fly, / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curl’d clouds. But at the same time with the help of the electronic media words are also made more active aurally as a means of rhetorical persuasion in advertising jingles, mottoes, and slogans. In the present world, the relationship of persuasion to the totality of human existence thus differs radically from what it was in the past. But only those who have no knowledge of the changes in culture itself will think that the changes in the role of rhetoric have been chaotic. The history of rhetoric simply mirrors the evolution of society.

As might be expected if rhetoric is as central to the human lifeworld as it is made out to be, the historical development of rhetoric ties in with the stages through which the human consciousness evolves out of the unconscious as these stages are revealed in the myths successively asserting themselves through the history of art and literature and ritual and cultural institutions. These stages, which run both phylogenetically through human history and ontogenetically through the history of the individual, are described by various cultural historians in similar, if competing, fashions. Here I can do no more than indicate grosso modo some of the relationships of rhetoric to this psychic evolution, particularly in its phylogenetic or social phase, without attempting to arbitrate differences between the various psychologists and psychiatrists and cultural historians. I shall take as a point of reference the psychic states as described in Erich Neumann’s rich and insightful work, The Origins and History of Consciousness.¹³ Neumann treats both phylogenetic and ontogenetic psychic evolution.

The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (I) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with its tail in its mouth, as well as by other circular or global mythological figures, (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change), (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, to what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous kinship libido and emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering into new phases with the heightened individualism—or, more properly, personalism—of modern man).

These stages can be discerned in phylogenetic psychic evolution. Earlier culture finds itself bound to the earlier stages. Thus, the myths of earlier cultures are concerned more with the uroboros or its equivalent, later ones successively more with the Great Mother and on to the hero and finally the Osiris figure. Corresponding stages are to be found in ontogenetic or individual psychic history: the uroboros is the world of the infant, the birth of the hero that of adolescence, the transformation stage that of the adult (and correspondingl y for the intervening stages). The stages are traversed by both males and females, but in different fashions. Neumann’s structures constitute a revision of earlier suggestions of Freud and Jung (Jung wrote the Foreword to Neumann’s book) and of others. They are drastically oversimplified here. But they are representative of a vast amount of psychoanalytic thought and will serve provisionally here to indicate briefly some relationships of the history of rhetoric to the phylogenetic and ontogenetic history of consciousness.

Rhetoric clearly occupies an intermediary stage between the unconscious and the conscious. This is more than suggested in Aristotle’s statement that in rhetoric the equivalent of the formal syllogism of strictly scientific logical reasoning is the enthymeme.¹⁴ Since Boethius (c. 470–525), an enthymeme has commonly meant a scientific syllogism with one of the premises unexpressed, but for Aristotle it always means rather a subscientific syllogistic or parasyllogistic argument from probable premises to a probable conclusion—the kind of argument which ordinarily governs decisions regarding human actions. It is thought of as concluding because of something unexpressed, unarticulated: enthymema primarily signifies something within one’s soul, mind, heart, feelings, hence something not uttered or outered and to this extent not a fully conscious argument, legitimate though it may be. Aristotle’s term here thus clearly acknowledges the operation of something at least very like what we today would call a subconscious element.

From within our present intellectual milieu, Gilbert Durand, in his brilliant psychocultural study, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, points out that it is rhetoric which effects the transit from the polysemous sign language of symbols to the formalism of logic, where signs have a proper meaning. With rhetoric, man sets himself against fate: rhetoric is a movement of hope; an upward movement—a euphemism, Durand calls it, which will color in the large all the activity of formalization of thought.¹⁵ Rhetoric does not grow directly out of the preconceptual but is antithetic to it; it is not so fragmenting, however, as the logic toward which it moves will be. Rhetoric is less preoccupied with distinctions, rather more unifying. It works through the imagination, which euphemizes actuality through hyperbole and antithesis¹⁶ Rhetoric also schematizes what would otherwise be too fantastic into identifiable figures of style that can be made out to be simple embellishments on formal signification¹⁷ (this of course is never so formal as extreme analytic philosophers would make it out to be). Being thus intermediary between stages of the noetic world, rhetoric is full of ambiguities and thus difficult to study in depth, which is why, Durand regretfully suggests, it is given so little philosophical and anthropological attention. ¹⁸

In various ways which can only be touched on here, rhetoric as described by Durand and as seen historically through the studies in this book is intermediate in the psychic evolutionary processes discussed by Neumann. Rhetoric as a formal discipline arises, we have seen, out of the primary oral world, fixing attention initially on oral performance rather than writing even though it comes into being as a formal discipline only through the use of writing. To this extent, in its oral grounding, rhetoric stands on a psychologically primitive base. The three stages in the development of verbal communications media (oral, chirographic-typographic, and electronic) bear uneven resemblance to the Freudian psychosexual stages (oral, anal, and genital), as I have attempted to show in The Presence of the Word.¹⁹ Correspondence is least between the last stages, electronic and genital; in the first or oral stages, however, the resemblance is striking, though not so overwhelming as in the second (chirographic-typographic and anal). The world of primary oral (preliterate) verbalization in which rhetoric is rooted thus has some affinity with infantile and juvenile orality, with the world of the self-contained uroboros and of the overwhelming Great Mother. Rhetoric is typically an overwhelming phenomenon, implemented by what the classical world and the Renaissance called copia, abundance, plenty, unstinted flow. Out fears of it resemble our fears of the Great Mother, who swallows her children. One can drown in rhetoric. Its world is commonly and aptly described in the water symbolism associated with primitive impersonalist femininity.

But rhetoric has affinity also with the succeeding stages. It introduces the principle of opposites, differentiation, as had the myth of the separation of the world parents. It is part and parcel of the heroic age and its myths. The hero disappears as rhetoric falls somewhat into discredit. Romanticism, as we have suggested, marks the end of rhetorical culture. There are romantic heroes, but the romantic hero is always slightly preposterous. His rhetoric lacks the credibilty of that of Achilles or Ulysses or Aeneas or Roland or Milton’s Adam. Byron had it right: tongue-in-cheek is the best approach to both his romantic heroes, Don Juan and Childe Harold. Today the hero lives in his antitheses, typified in Samuel Beckett’s characters, whose verbalization is ostentatiously logical and whose rhetoric is secret.

Rhetoric at its most impressive peak was heroic and masculinizing through its association with puberty rites. In the West, as several of the studies in this book will detail,²⁰ the study of Latin had the characteristics of a male puberty ritual. Until romanticism matured, rhetoric as a formal discipline was studied as part of the study of Latin, for English as such was not a curriculum subject. When Latin gradually disappeared and concomitantly schools began to admit girls, formal rhetoric also disappeared. Today’s freshman rhetoric, even when it is called this, ordinarily bears only weak resemblance to the severe discipline of the past, which had been geared to ceremonial and taxing male polemic and the formation of diplomatic jousters. Renaissance educators, such as Sir Thomas Elyot, were particularly explicit in connecting the study of rhetoric to the development of masculine courage.

The ego dominance fostered by rhetoric is evident particularly in the Renaissance, which in many ways represents the phylogenetic high point of rhetoric development. The extreme egoism and egotism of the highly proficient, often baroque Renaissance rhetorician is typified in personages such as the Scaligers, whose genealogy itself, very likely, was the product of rhetoric rather than of ordinary procreation. Other comparable characters abound at this time, for example Justus Lipsius (first a Catholic, then a Protestant, then a Catholic again, and yet author of a famous work, De Constantia), Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541), even to a degree Erasmus himself, who contrasts on this point quite markedly with his friend St. Thomas More: More had far greater confidence in his own masculinity, though, with Erasmus, he also scorned formal logic with a passion and to this extent remained in the rhetorician’s camp. To these and a host of other real characters could be added Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Falstaff and Polonius and their congeners in Shakespeare, and countless others in the literature that represents and often spoofs this characteristic personality type of the age.

II

The studies in this collection, some first published here, others produced earlier, are not restricted to rhetoric in any narrow sense but concern its general ambience as well as some of its quite specific manifestations. For reasons indicated above, they include some reference to logic or dialectic and to poetry, the concomitants of rhetoric through the ages. Grammar, the third of the artes sermocinales, is treated only in passing, partly because I have covered some relevant aspects of grammar elsewhere,²¹ but chiefly to keep discussion within feasible limits. Grammar is very closely connected with writing (the term comes from the Greek techne grammatike, the art of letters of the alphabet) and its relationship to culture is a vast story all by itself.

The studies here move chronologically from the Renaissance, which fossilized much of the ancient oral past in certain stylistic phenomena, up to the present time. As the studies progress, they become less restrictively focused on rhetoric, in keeping with the suggestions above that rhetoric today has diffused itself in many forms through our culture and no longer has the neater contours of earlier, less exfoliated civilizations.

Chapter 2 shows the continuity of verbal expression during the English Renaissance with earlier speech and thought patterns before the invention of writing (and by implication similar connections in Continental European milieus). The third chapter gives a detailed report on the entire production of English-language books on rhetoric and poetic and literary criticism or theory during the Tudor age, from the late fifteenth through the beginning of the seventeenth century. The brief fourth chapter indicates the curiously central significance of the art of memory, which, with the help of writing and later of print, had been elaborated to provide special devices for the knowledge storage and retrieval demanded by oral cultures although these very devices had in fact been rendered obsolescent by the simple existence of writing and print.

The next chapters treat more directly the interrelationships between social institutions and modes of thought and expression. An institution as widespread as Learned Latin was more than merely a linguistic phenomenon. Learned Latin, the old classical Latin which remained in the schools after ancient Latin had fragmented in the home and nonacademic world into hundreds of vernaculars, was soon structured into a whole series of social institutions, some treated in Chapter 5 and others suggested in later chapters as occasion offers. Learned Latin was permanently aligned with the primary oral or rhetorical tradition and helped keep this tradition alive long past the development not only of writing but even of print. A language spoken by millions but only by those who could write it, Learned Latin paradoxically also built up an extreme deference for the written word which verged on superstition and was to affect the aims of lexicography down to our present day. Used only by males and under the sway of the old oral dialectical-rhetorical tradition, Learned Latin was a ceremonial polemic instrument which from classical antiquity until the beginnings of romanticism helped keep the entire academic curriculum programmed as a form of ritual male combat centered on disputation.

These effects of Latin suggest still further connections with cultural institutions. The use of Learned Latin and the self-image and style of life it automatically fostered tended to strengthen the wide-spread opinion that war was not only inevitable in human society but in many ways was even good. (It kept society from softness and effeteness—vices which can lead only to war!) If boys went to school to war ceremonially with each other (and with the teacher), combat was a necessary and admirable condition of existence. It is evident that this view of life helped keep the ideal of the hero, especially the martial hero, alive in men’s impossible dreams long after the social conditions of oral and residually oral culture which originally generated the fictional hero had disappeared.

In the intimate connection it sustains with the heroic age, Learned Latin—and the cult of dialectic and rhetoric which for historical reasons the use of Latin supported—is built into the social and psychological structures earlier mentioned here as studied by Neumann, Carl jung, and others. That is to say, the use of Learned Latin for scientific and scholarly thinking over nearly a millennium and a half had a great deal to do with the development of the collective and individual psyche in the Western European world. Indeed, since there are more or less contemporaneous parallels in other cultures which have used learned languages discrete from the vernacular, perhaps such languages belong to a certain stage in cultural and psychological development.

The sixth chapter undertakes to show one of the ways in which the academic tradition, dominated by the dialectic or logic which was a medieval legacy, projected itself into views of the cosmos in the sixteenth century: the actual tended to be defined as the logical and the readily teachable. In the Ramist movement, which came into being as an attractive simplification of the scholastic philosophy grown up with the universities, academic interpretation of actuality took on a form particularly appealing to the commercial mind, the following chapter suggests. By reducing metaphysics to something very like bookkeeping, Ramism in effect put all of actuality into ledger books and thereby developed its distinctive appeal for the upward-mobile commercial classes who were its chief proponents.

Moving into the eighteenth century, the chapter on Swift and the one on the critical theory