Contemporary vs. Classic Rhetoric

Per Lennie's request, this is sort of what I got, but now that I'm reading it, it doesn't seem like much help to me much less other people. Here's sort of how I'm understanding it. If St. Augustine replaced Truth with God--God is the thing that gives language meaning and what humans use language to uncover--then Nietzsche was set-up perfectly to disconnect language from the signifier--God in this case. Or rather according to Rich, Nietzsche replaced God with the new religion empirical truth, facts, whatever you want to call them. I'm reserving judgement on buying that but here's the argument. If you think back on the Nietzsche reading in B&H, or those of you who care about this minor point that the course doesn't really cover can read it in B&H, Nietzsche basically separates language from truth or any standard. Language really can't represent anything for Nietzsche. He really sets up Foucault and company. Based on our MOO discussion, this makes sense because God is backing up truth until Nietzsche in the 19th century. In fact, if you think of Bacon and Locke, they still pretty much seem to have this same conception of truth as God unknowable and ineffable but out there. Nietzsche comes along and says that God was just a fiction for an immature culture and we don't need God anymore--God is dead etc. etc. So no truth--knowable or otherwise--just language. So when he kills God, he simultaneously kills our ability to have language have some relationship with truth. God was the language/truth tether. So language is just floating out there--unthinkable. So Nietzsche, according to Rich I think, says that instead of knowing God and truth, we can know facts. Science replaces God and we get contemporary rhetoric. Historically it works really nicely except I sort of understand Nietzsche as throwing out God and replacing him with qualitative judgements, but I can see how those judgements could be facts. I can also see how those judgements could be interpreted as frames. Nietzsche's pretty metaphorical and really just a bridge, so this is a minor point and not worth arguing about.

So essentially, in Aristotelian terms, classical rhetoric relies on artistic truths: ethos, logos, pathos, but contemporary rhetoric relies on science and facts or inartistic proofs--those things that we can know for Artistotle or prove for us--to make its case. The only problem I have with this is that scientists will tell you that they don't rely on facts, but rather theories that work to explain the situation. If a better theory comes along that makes more sense given the situation, they'll adopt that theory. Sure scientists do rely on empirical evidence, but such evidence is meaningless unless they have theories to give them meaning or make them knowledge. And just like 21st century humanists, they understand that knowledge can change as we reframe it. So science as the new religion/pursuit of truth is really a popular conception of science, but rhetoric is really the study of persuading the general audience, so also I can see how that works too. I've got to say though, when I think of rhetoric in current practice in places like political speeches, I'm hearing mostly classical rhetoric. And definitely if you think of Foucault as a contemporary rhetorician as B&H does, he's not buying truth, God, or science. For Foucault it's language and culture and the interplay between the two. The only thing that gives language meaning is the frame we build around it. Perhaps Rich will weigh in on this post and clarify where I've undoubtedly misrepresented him and and/or this historical perspective on rhetoric.

Finally, I guess a little bit of the problem I'm having with replacing Truth with facts is that we haven't really moved forward, if such is the case. We aren't changing the nature of our understanding of language, we're only changing the basis. In other words, if it's just facts instead of Truth, we're just playing with aluminum bats, but we're still playing baseball. We aren't really moving forward. However, if there's just language and how we frame it, we've moved entirely off the diamond; the people who use language make the rules, the rules change all the time, and it's a much more empowering view of language or chaotic for some, but I think it works better until something else comes along. And perhaps I'm confusing rhetoric with communication theory in an unproductive way.

Kendall