Sophists Rule!

St. Augustine and Quintilian

Trace 3 elements of St. Augustine's rhetoric back to earlier rhetors. Also, relate how your 3 to 10 minute "video" project for next week is coming along. You might list key definitions here of the concepts you're relating, as well as the context in which you see yourself using this "video." That is, it's useful for our class, but can it help you in your final paper, in your teaching, in your workplace?


The underlying value in St. Augustine's writing is that both good and bad, or true and false, content can be equally persuasive, so it's important for good men to study rhetoric to spread the truth (about God is the implication). Not using rhetoric to spread truth leaves the truth "unarmed" and vulnerable to an attack by false rhetoric. This belief was why Plato attacked rhetoricians and/sophists so vehemently, because it allowed the spread of falsehoods. Aristotle was a little more practical and acknowledged that this could happen, but good rhetoricians could oppose them. Cicero also believed this. In fact, Quintilian is notable because he appears to be the only person we've read that didn't believe this. Yet, he wrote an entire essay "proving" how this couldn't happen. I personally wasn't convinced, but it's a charming idea to think that bad men can't speak well.

Likewise everyone discussed the proper way to educate young men in the practice of rhetoric, although with Plato and Aristotle it was more implied. Quintilian and St. Augustine both discuss how to teach rhetoric, although Quintilian spells out an elaborate curriculum and stresses both learning the rules (in part so one knows when to break them), studying and emulating experts, but in the proper way, and finally practicing. That's contrasted with St. Augustine who believed that learning rules wasn't bad as long as one had the time, but really just studying good examples and practicing was enough for him. I guess St. Augustine would love the "great book" curriculums. And he and Dr. Kemp would be great friends.

Finally, one minor issue that really struck me only because it seems so contemporary, is that both Quintilian and St. Augustine make a plea for a plain language movement. St. Augustine says, "And so when teaching, one should avoid all words which do not teach...." (465). He claims writers should do so even if they are incorrect. Later, he insists upon it. Likewise Quintilian wishes that "we were less afraid of words in daily use...." (380). Along the same lines they both criticize texts and speeches that are too long. St. Augustine says that one shouldn't say anything more than is required to gain the understanding of the audience. The only criticism Quintilian has for Cicero is that he was a little long-winded. In this regard, both St. Augustine and Quintilian advocated a relatively simple and pared-down style, relatively speaking. They were early TCers.

I think reading St. Augustine and Quintilian in the same week is interesting in that they both take this completely different tactic regarding the ethics question. St. Augustine is on one extreme saying that lots of evil men that will persuade audiences of bad and incorrect things are very good rhetoricians, therefore good men must be better rhetoricians--it's their sacred duty. On the other hand, Quintilian is saying basically that it's not a problem, because rhetoric is a good man speaking well and therefore bad men don't have the ability to do it. Their vices, foolishness, etc. keep them from doing it. Of course, he sort of skirts around the issue of using rhetoric to persuade people by claiming that's a ridiculous yardstick to judge rhetoric by. Basically good rhetoric is judged by how well one does it, not how many people it convinces. So he really doesn't respond at all to the charge that rhetoric used by a bad man is like a sword in the hands of a madman (Sor Juana's analogy not mine.) Although I find Quintilian's reasoning incredibly charming and enticing, ultimately I agree with St. Augustine. We good people need to get good at rhetoric so we can defend the truth. Even though my idea of truth and St. Augustine's are completely different, we agree that rhetoric can be used to spread it.

Finally, I've done virtually nothing on my video. I'm trapped in in-law purgatory on the high plains. It was all I could do to read St. Augustine. I already know something about enthymemes, but I do want to diverge from Aristotle's use of enthymemes. He believed, as I understand it, that enthymemes are effective because people recognized or at least agreed with the left-out premise of the truncated syllogism. In fact, the efficacy of the enthymeme depended on the audience's belief in the truncated part. I think, similar to Althusser's interpellation, that people hear enthymemes and agree with them because they don't understand the truncated part of the syllogism. It calls to them and sucks them in before they realize they've acquiesed. In fact, it's a way that modern day orators get audiences to subscribe to certain ideas, because they've left out the part that they might object to or they've left out the part that the rhetor doesn't want to say out loud. For example, when an interviewer asked Condoleezza Rice "Is Iraq involved in 911?" She replied, repeatedly, "the U.S. will seek out and destroy the perpetrators of 9/11" That's a truncated syllogism, an enthymeme, and the truncated part is that Iraq was involved in 9/11. Essentially she's saying: we will attack 9/11 perpetrators; Iraq is a 9/11 perpetrator; we will attack Iraq--only she never really said that, she implied it. In fact, she insists that she never claimed Iraq was involved in 9/11 yet she's on tape, repeatedly, saying just that using an enthymeme. Enthymemes allow politicians to convince audiences to go for policies that they otherwise wouldn't agree to, because it allows them to leave out language that would otherwise act as a red flag for audiences. Had Condoleezza Rice ever said that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, Americans never would have acquiesed to the invasion. Just before we invaded Iraq, several polls including the Gallup Poll indicated that 70% of Americans believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11.

I think the idea of the modern uses of enthymemes is incredibly useful for both our class and our students. We need to understand this idea to be critical consumers of information, but I'm not really going to discuss this in my paper.

Kendall