In Our Time - Rhetoric

Episode Date: October 14, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses rhetoric. Gorgias, the great sophist philosopher and master of rhetoric said, "Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplished most godlike works. It can banish fear and remove grief, and instil pleasure and enhance pity. Divine sweetness transmitted through words is inductive of pleasure and reductive of pain". But for Plato it was a vice, and those like Gorgias who taught rhetoric were teaching the skills of lying in return for money and were a great danger. He warned "this device - be it which it may, art or mere artless empirical knack - must not, if we can help it, strike root in our society".But strike root it did, and there is a rich tradition of philosophers and theologians who have attempted to make sense of it.How did the art of rhetoric develop? What part has it played in philosophy and literature? And does it still deserve the health warning applied so unambiguously by Plato?With Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London; Ceri Sullivan, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Bangor.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Gorgias, the great sophist philosopher and master of rhetoric, said, speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes most godlike works.

It can banish fear and remove grief, and instill pleasure and enhance pity. Divine sweetness transmitted through words is inductive of pleasure and reductive of pain. But for Plato, rhetoric was a vice, and those like Goghius who taught rhetoric were teaching the skills of lying in return for money and were a great danger.

He warned, this device, be it which it may, art or mere artless empirical knack, must not, if we can help it, strike root in our society. But strike root it did, and there's a rich tradition of philosophers and theologians who have attempted to make sense of it. How did the art of rhetoric develop? What part is it played in philosophy and literature?

And does it still deserve the moral health warning applied so unambiguously by Plato? With me to discuss rhetoric is Angie Hobbes, lecture in philosophy at the University of Warwick, Kerry Sullivan, senior lecture in English at the University of Wales, Bangor, and Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College University of London.

Angie Hobbes, when did rhetoric come into the West as a discipline. First of all, how would you define it? Well, as a working definition, how about the art of persuading a specific audience to specific actions and beliefs through the use of language? Previously, people had always been trying to persuade people

to do things specifically, but it's when it became a discipline and when it became something written down and discussed that we can begin to talk about it as rhetoric. Oh, yes, I mean, the art of speaking persuasively had been admired from Homer onwards, and we see Odysseus and Nestor in the Iliad in the Odyssey admired precisely that reason.

However, I think the ancients themselves thought that the art of rhetoric as a discipline arose in Sicily in the middle of the 5th century BC. There was a surge of litigation. There had been some land confiscations, a lot of people were going to court to try and claim their land back, and there was a need for rhetoricians

to help them compose their speeches before the jurors. and according to ancient legend, Korax and Tysius arose in Sicily to help train the people to speak persuasively in the forensic context. However, the rhetoric then moved to the Athenian democracy, and it seems to be that in the democracy of Athens that it really took root, because there had been the democratic reforms of Kleisthenes in about 508-507 BC, and then there had been the court reforms instigated by Fialtis in 462 BC. So there was a real need for skill at speaking in deliberative and forensic contexts. And the young men of Athens, if they wanted to get on, if they had political ambitions,

they needed to be trained in the art of speaking persuasively, and hence the origin of the sophists, these itinerant teachers of many disciplines, including rhetoric, to help young men get on in the world. one loop back to Sicily, why did they need rhetoric at that particular time? What did rhetoric give them that straightforward arguing with the men who pinched the land couldn't give them? Well, they were going to court. They had to persuade quite well. Presumably people had gone to, I'm not trying to catch out. I'm trying to lose. Presumably people have gone to court in the 6th century in the 7th century. Why did this happen then? Oh, sure. I mean, yeah, absolutely. But, as I said,

there was a particular surge in litigation at this time because of these particular land confiscations. So there was an extra need, and there was that extra impetus. People saw a means of getting money out of helping people compose their speeches and maybe compose them for them. And this developed into a system of thought and a system of speaking taken up by the people called the sophists and then introduced into Athens. Absolutely, yes. I mean, I think I would want to pick out two sophists in particular. We've got Protagoras who was very keen that one should argue both sides of a question. and the charitable view of what he was doing is that he's trying to get people to look at both sides of a case

to try and affect some kind of resolution of the conflict at issue. Now, Protagoras did not think there was any kind of objective truth, and in the absence of objective truth, the best we can hope for to guide our actions is good belief based, as I said, on this understanding of all the points at issue in a case. Now, opponents of Protagoras charged him with actually teaching his students to make the weaker argument the stronger. So you already get the suspicion of the manipulative powers of rhetoric. And Plato expressed his suspicion in very vehement terms and set in train the idea that rhetoric could be merely manipulative, it could be even lying, it could be deceptive, it was morally bad.

At the same time as in Athens, to the Athenian policy, at the same time as you were saying, the young men of Athens wanted to take on this skill, these disciplines in order to get on. Okay, yeah. I mean, in an early dialogue called the Gorgias, we certainly see Plato taking a very hostile view to rhetoric. This, again, the eponymous here of that, well, sorry, the eponymous character in the dialogue is Gorgias, another sophist who his accent was on the use of language as a kind of drug to persuade your audience into certain emotional states and certain beliefs. and Gorgias saw the power of speaking as a neutral art. It could be put to morally good or bad ends. Now, Plato presents a very hostile picture of him in that dialogue, and he draws a distinction between what he calls the sciences,

of which dialectic and philosophy are included as sciences and arts, and then what he put Plato terms Nax, which are a subdivision of flattery. And for Plato in the Gorgias, rhetoric is simply a subdivision of flattery, you're gratifying the expectations and desires of your audience. You are not interested in the truth. You maybe probably don't know what the truth is. However, in a later dialogue, the Fidorus,

we get Plato taking a slightly different view. He continues this attack on the sophists, but in the Fidurus he's keen that there could be an art of philosophic rhetoric, which knows about the truth and is aimed at directing the souls of the audience towards the truth. But his pupil, Thomas Hilley, his pupil, Thomas Hill, his pupil, Aristotle, is much more positive about rhetoric from the beginning on his great book about rhetoric. Can you explain Aristotle's position on this? Yes, Aristotle fundamentally, is interested in putting rhetoric at the heart of public life. Aristotle, unlike Plato, has a much greater sense of the importance of politics, of life in the community, and how philosophical or legal, or governmental or indeed aspects of morality

are worked out in the community. Whereas Plato, at least my reading of him, is always that politics for him is something that needs to take place so that the philosopher can arise and pursue truth. I mean, he's not actually terribly interested in what the vast amount of people in the community are doing in the laws he sees it as fundamentally most important.

people living with magic and bread and circuses while the philosophers go out and pursue their own activities. Aristotle sees this is much more important and so his rhetoric I think is one of the great cornerstones of our inheritance from the classical world of rhetorical thought for two reasons. The first is that he establishes the arts of language at the center of political life, of life in the community, of how we reach ideas of our, of what is best, what is most effective, how we persuade others, as Angie has saying. And secondly, Aristotle tries to define, because the rhetoric is, his book, the rhetoric, is actually an extremely boring book.

I mean, it is mostly a collection of methodologies of how you go about doing this, which are in many respects rather technical, so I don't advise any listeners unless they're incredibly keen to run out and try to get hold of a copy. But what he does is that he defines. the three elements of what rhetoric is going to consist of, which really from then on become the aspects that are used. And they are the ethos, the character of the speaker, not the actual intrinsic character,

but the public persona that is put forward in speech. Secondly, the logos, the reason, the argument itself, the intrinsic merits of the argument. And thirdly, the pathos, the means of persuasion, the means of raising the passion. And it's those three elements combined in various ways, which really are the basis of rhetoric subsequently. And how did Aristotle think that rhetoric could take us to virtue? Well, he's actually rather mixed about this. He doesn't state fundamentally that rhetoric is necessarily automatically a pursuit of virtue.

I mean, he's aware of its ambivalent character that it could be used, for good or bad. But his general argument is that if you have these three elements in the right proportion, that truth will likely emerge. That is that if the ethos of the character, the strength of the argument, and the right form of persuasion that doesn't excessively raise an audience, but leads it to a proper consideration of a topic, then truth should emerge. Carrie Solomon, what place did rhetoric have in the Roman world, moving from the Greek, a mere few centuries, to Cicero and Quintilian? What place did it have there? Skipping lightly over to Cicero and Quintilian in that happy way that rhetoricians have. They pick up the elements that Tom and you were talking about, but in a positive light, the political aspect of rhetoric is seen as not an abuse by the clever of the weak or stupid, the guy to be.

the people to be guided, but a way of negotiating, a way of understanding that your audience must be with you when you're attempting to govern them. It's one of the first times you start acknowledging your interlocutor. It's a politically democratic thing to do in that way. And it's a systematized way. So it's a formalized way of saying, I acknowledge, I, acknowledge you as being an important person to speak to. Can we contextualise at this moment? Cicero and Quintilian have a very serious effect on the way politicians pursue their speaking about and perhaps in the end therefore they're doing of politics at this time, not they?

People want to be taught by them, want to follow the best path of speaking, want to follow these forms. There isn't a sense that you're good at speaking because you're inherently good at speaking. You're naturally able to govern and speak well. There's a sense that you can be taught to govern. This is an egalitarian way of thinking about speech, not a sense that you're speaking in terms of something that is good inside. You're being pressed out, expressed in the way that we think of good speech, good literature,

but something which is a system that you can learn. So the texts that Cicero and Quintillian produced are pedagogic texts. primarily. So what did it give us a few examples of what these texts say that people should do? Think about the speak of the subject and the audience, as Tom was saying, the ethos, the logus and the pathos. Try and split your text down in terms of the elements

in the character that your speech down, it means the elements of the character that you're trying to appeal to. So the three big divisions in Roman rhetoric are judicial rhetoric, which appeals to the reason, and asks you to judge on the things that have happened in the past, deliberative rhetoric, which looks at the will, asks you to decide now for things that will happen in the future. And epictic rhetoric, which simply appeals to your passions. From, do you like something or not, from those splits,

from the sort of psychological understanding of what the situation is, come much more formalised ways, systematised ways, of creating appeals to your audience. So what sort of styles we're talking about around this time briefly before we move on, Angie and Tom, and what sort of styles do people have? I've heard about, I've read about, sorry,

the most of these Hellenistic style and other styles. It's now becoming, it's discipline with several branches and glosses and so on, and quite a big part of the curriculum of people who are learning how to get on in public life. Yes, I mean, in all the handbooks at this time, we seem to get a division of the art of rhetoric

into five main divisions, which is the art of discovering arguments, the art of, you know, discovering what you're going to say, the art of ordering your arguments into a specific arrangement, how to express your arguments, and how to use certain kinds of, style, whether it's very elaborate and formal and quite flowery in the Alexandrine fashion, or whether it's purer and more concise in the so-called attic fashion.

And then also the arts of memory, how to remember what you're going to say, various systems of minimomics, I can't pronounce that, and then the art of how to present it in public. So they all take these. In terms of the style, there's a lot of emphasis on, creation of particular prose rhythms, through periodic structure, through the repetition of certain words and phrases, through... Triplets. Absolutely through... The way the truth aligns. Absolutely through triplicates. There's an emphasis on euphony, how to create certain very pleasant sounds for the ear through assonance, through alliteration. And there's also emphasis on how to elaborate on a theme, through metaphor and simile, metonymy and so on. Within those divisions, as I said, we get these different kinds of style, some more formal, some more austere, some more flowery. Can you just place it in the academies of the time, Cicero's Academy, and the Academies of the Times?

Where does rhetoric sit? What Angiers said has given us a syllabus, really. Now, is that syllabus one which is engaged with by most young Romans wanting to go into public life and so on? Indeed, in many ways after Cicero, public life, the opportunities for public life in Rome decline, and rhetoric becomes increasingly an educational model. I mean, although it prepares people ostensibly for life in the polis, the opportunities for life in the polis under the emperors are restricted. So it becomes increasingly seen, certainly Quintilian is a good example of this,

as really principally an educational tool for the raising of the young. And in that respect, it becomes a much more a tool to develop the person, the moral character of the person. And rhetoric increasingly begins to take on an association by how the language arts moves us to be better people. In the way that Kerry was saying, not something that necessarily is intrinsic in us, but which develops that within us. But as Kerry was saying, Anders Andrews said, just want to get it absolutely clear for the listeners. You sat down, you heard of syllabus, you had to learn about this.

that, this, that, this, that. The here to learn that is different. I mean, many of the rhetorical handbooks ultimately have five or six thousand figures that they have to, that you master. A figure being, a mode of speaking which is appropriate to a particular type of occasion.

So that... Like the explanation, just delivered now. Like the explanation, just delivered now. There becomes three major categories of rhetoric. There's a form called the attic or philosophical or plain style, which is designed, seen as particularly good for philosophical discourse, often called Seneca rhetoric as well.

There is then a type of eloquencia from Cicero, Ciceronian rhetoric, which is designed as a perfect balance of form and matter. And then there's a third type, often used slightly derogatory, called Asiatic, which is an overabundance of pathos and overabundance of matter that overwhelms the speaker. What's already evident is the degree to which rhetoric is taxonomic art and how exciting that is.

You said that Aristotle's rhetoric was a very dull text because of the subdivision, subdivision, and clearly there are disagreements. You were both shaking your head, but it's this is radio. You've got to think of it like runner beans. You've got to have a trellis work

to be able to get your runnybrines to grow. And rhetoric provides that the endless faciparous nature of rhetoric provides that trellis work so that the splittings the more you split a subject down, the more likely it is you will be expert

in handling all aspects of that subject. So learning the 2000 schemes in Susan Brutus makes it much more likely that you're able to operate them. It's an engineered speech. Right. Now, I'm afraid I'm going to spring something else on your car. It's most unfair. Last time you'd skip a couple of centuries, there's a couple more to skip now.

We go to rhetoric in the... Sorry, Angie, classical world farewell. We go to the... We'll come back to it, in the rest of course. It's okay. But the early church fathers, Christianity comes in, as it were, how do they deal with rhetoric

in their scholasticism and in that conversation, I use that in, with God? How do they deal? How do they take on this enormously well-developed, Jerome has a very bad dream where he's told that he won't get into heaven because he's a Ciceronian, not a Christian, and backs off it rather worriedly. Augustine's rather braver. He sees rhetoric as arousing memories of what you already know.

Your knowledge of God is already there inside you, and rhetoric is an appropriately passionate thing to rouse the memory of that. It's a neoplatonic I say, waving to Andrew. It's a neoplatonic way of thinking. In addition, he looks at the Bible and says this is something which is part of our classical heritage. It's not a savage

text, a barbaric text. It shows the sorts of schemes and tropes that we have come to value. Angie. What's always interested me about Augustine is the way he also uses rhetorical techniques to try and solve certain doctrines.

disputes. So you have a, there's a theological controversy and you'll sometimes see our Augustine saying, well, but if we consider who this particular, the particular authors are talking to, what their motives are, what they're intending to achieve in this particular passage, if we put these particular pieces of doctrine into context, actually quite a few of these disputes can be resolved. Going back to what Tom was saying earlier about how the good, orator and rhetorician will consider the specific audience to whom they're talking and what particularly is going to persuade their emotions. And so that very particular use of rhetoric as a tool for theology, I think is fascinating.

Except isn't there a, I've come to Tom from a moment, isn't there a division here between those like Augustine who take on rhetoric and take on these disciplines, these manners, and the people who say, look, the thing is to talk directly to God, We're looking for the truth. We're looking for revelation, which is a completely different dimension of knowledge. Yes, rhetoric and logic always have floated around one another.

They've sparred with one another. And in antiquity from Aristotle, really, through the Ciceronian tradition, rhetoric came out on top. And during the Middle Ages, logic reasserts itself. And most medieval thinkers place rhetoric well below logic. Logic becomes the means by which the truth of sense. scripture might be more readily found. The language arts are seen, again, rather suspiciously in some ways, as Kerry has intimated,

until we get to the Renaissance when rhetoric then reasserts itself. And how does it reassert itself in a Renaissance, Angie? The Renaissance rediscovers it, but of course it's a different thing that it produces. Yes, to some extent, parts of Cicero and Quintilian had been known in the intervening period between the classical world and the Renaissance. Two things particularly happen. In the 14th century, Petraarch amongst others, discovered the letters and some of the speeches of Cicero.

They'd had some of his rhetorical treatises before, but they hadn't had the speeches and the letters on the whole. And then in the early 15th century, the whole of Quintilian is discovered. They only had little excerpts before. Now, the import of this is that these, the age is beginning to get a sense of the ideal to which Cicero and Quintilian were aiming, namely that of the good man skilled at speaking.

The person who, to be a good speaker, doesn't just have to know about the rhetorical tropes, but needs to be experienced in life, needs to know some philosophy and ethics, needs to know about political states of affairs. So this ideal of the orator-statesman philosopher emerges, they think, through the letters and speeches of Cicero and through the whole body of Quintillian's work and it's that rounded ideal, the so-called encyclic Pidea,

the well-rounded education, the well-rounded philosopher, statesman, orator, that's the chief result of this, I think. But it is restated in various books for the time, and for this purpose, our purpose of this concept, Erasmus with John Collett, the headmaster of a London school,

brought it into this country. And what did they bring in? And what are they saying that, Tom? Well, I think the way that the Renaissance takes up on rhetoric is very different from the way antiquity does it, and the reason is because of God. They start stressing the ethical side that comes through rhetoric much more. We've seen that in antiquity, the idea of appearing as good

is important within the language arts as a means of helping to persuade your audience. It seems to me that many Renaissance thinkers take it one further, and that is the arts of eloquence help to actually form you into a good person. Well, that's back to Aristotle, anyway, is it in some ways, except Aristotle is seeing this very much in terms of how you operate within the community. I think the Renaissance starts seeing how you might operate in terms of getting to know God, how you, that type of sense of personal revelation that you've meant,

how you work towards perfecting yourself to recover what was seen as the lost language of Adam. Yeah, but to keep it in a contained form, we're still talking about rhetoric, they're still writing about these are the rules, these are the way to speak, these are things you do, these are... Absolutely, absolutely. These are the disciplines. But the importance of therefore putting someone who is morally and ethically good in public positions is the key to Renaissance systems of education.

This is why you go through all of this. I'm just laughing because your anxiety to keep it focused, to keep it focused, to keep it focused is the anxiety of the Renaissance that there are too many tricks, too many things. Just a little trick too much of time. I'll let you end it later after the frame. But it does keep on expanding and sliding out of control of that way,

and particularly, I think, when you hit late 16th, early 17th century rhetoricians, who worry about sincerity, who worry about self-persuasion, and in particular worry about direct conversations with God, which may have been in some way mediated by human arts of language. So you have people like the ranters

or the Quakers claiming to have direct access, claiming to be at a degree zero of rhetoric, but then having their own speeches subject to rhetorical analysis. Can I come back in me? Because rhetoric is always spread out from philosophers and the law proposers into a more... And we have a wonderful example, of course,

in Renaissance England, in Renaissance London, with the playwrights, where you have playwrights, the most eminent, of course, being Shakespeare, using rhetoric in their speeches. And can you just give us an indication of that, saying the most best-known speech, to be or not to be? How is Shakespeare using rhetoric there? Modern actors often say that with to be or not to be, there's a pause just before they start,

and all the audience starts speaking it with them, half a second after what they're saying. I think you've got the same thing with Renaissance audiences. it's not calling on new statements about suicide or the relationship with God or what I should be doing as a son. It's calling on commonplaces which everybody has learnt at grammar school. And this is a... Can you just be more specific?

I've got the speech in front of me if you want to refer to it. Well, it starts with... Now it starts. I just want to know about the rhetorical devices going on. But it's... But it starts with the rhetorical advice. To be or not to be, that is the question. That's an eroticis.

He then moves it into being a hypoferra because he starts answering it. And he calls on the commonplaces of existence, the sorts of statements which you learn when you're reading Tacitus, when you're reading Bibi, which his audience will have learned. And they will not be thinking, oh, this is a terribly dull speech. We've heard all this stuff before. Why are we waiting until the end? they're thinking of it as a sort of operatic aria where they're doing it with him. Well, another classic example of that

would be surely at Mark Antonin's Friends' Romans' Countryman's speech. And there you get this wonderful use of the repetition of the sort of the light motif for Brutus as an honourable man. I think he says that three times. I think there's a fourth. Well, I think that actual phrase is used three times and then he uses he is an honourable man a fourth time. And it's beautifully punctuated in the speech.

It tells you how to read it, and it's extremely exciting. Of course, that's Shakespeare showing rhetoric being used for rather deceptive purposes, because obviously, Ante does not think that Brutus is honourable at all, but it's a fabulously composed speech on the devices that we were talking about. Indeed, it demonstrates the split that you're talking about between Seneca and Ciceroonian rhetoric. Had Shakespeare really gone to Stratford, play and Grammar School, which is not to finally prove, but taken for granted by most sensible folk,

he would have learned rhetoric. Absolutely. That would have been the majority of the curriculum. The language arts were at the center of what you did in Renaissance schools. You learned effectively to be eloquent. But when we're talking, Kerry was talking earlier before we pulled back a bit about the ranters and about this great breakup in the Middle East Civil War, which was a dispute of philosophy, theology,

family, all those sort of things. You had introduced the idea, reintroduced the idea of speaking directly and plainly to God. Yes. And this put rhetoric out of court, as well. Well, what the increasingly figures like the Rantors and indeed other radicals during the Civil War begin to feel is that eloquent language, this formal system of how one thinks through and then expresses language, becomes very suspect. It becomes seen as the prerogative of a certain class. It becomes seen as an instrument of control over both access to God but also over access to a variety of other social institutions,

particularly land. It becomes seen as increasingly the tool of a type of ruling class. And so they attack it. They argue that eloquent language is not a means to truth. It's actually a deception. It's a means to take us away. from God and that their fundamental, seemingly incredibly unstructured rant is actually much more of an authentic language. But it's also, it's continued in an extraordinary structured way when you have paradise loss and Satan has a glosing tongue.

His elaboration is proof of his deceit and it's back to Plato there. Kerry, do you want to comment on another design? Do you want to come in here? Well, I was going to say that, apropos of Milton, you've got, you've got Tom. Thomas Hobbes and his suspicion of the manipulative cynical uses to which rhetoric could be put to rouse a rabble and to create civil disorder and strife and it would work against the rule of the strong king. So as well as the poets such as Milton, you've also got the philosophers beginning to get slightly suspicious of rhetoric. We're starting to see a divorce in the late. 16th century between rhetoric and philosophy,

which earlier with Cicero and Quintilian there had not been. They're finding in the Royal Society. Absolutely, yes. Would you want to go back to the Rantus and say a second, Kerry, and say a little more to that about the religious language there? Before I go back to Angie's point. The difficulty of addressing God or describing God is true of all language, not just rhetoric.

Even plain style rhetoric has the problem that whatever you say will always be understatement. any form of linguistic approach to God will be anticipated by his ear, him as audience, and undercut. So that both the plain style of God in Milton is rhetorical just as much as the twisted figures of metaphysical poetry.

I think the 17th century comes to terms with the fact that it cannot get away from the located circumstantional, passional aspects of language and that the raw society is barking up the wrong tree, frankly, something which we don't get until the 20th. A recognition that language is located and circumstantial doesn't come back sensibly until the 20th century. So I think the late 17th, 18th, early 19th centuries show a rather,

naive attitude towards what language can be. But in many ways, I mean, the language arts as they move along always change. This argument between false rhetoric, language which is used to deceive and language which is used to authenticate a fine truth, has always been there. But as Angie said, it becomes much, much more pronounced in the suspicions of it, towards the end of the 17th century. But equally, then, there's a very strong reassertion of wit and eloquence in the 18. century was the figure like Pope, what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed. That belief

that form and matter go intrinsically together, not only what you're saying, but how you say it, is extremely important to discover the roundness of everything. But actually, Angie, you were talking about Locke and the philosophers of the 19th century there. Well, yes, I mean, carrying on from Hobbes' suspicion of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric, I guess the other philosopher one would want to highlight in the 17th century would be Descartes and the huge influence of his method on how people perceived the relation between rhetoric and truth. So for Descartes you need to start from self-evident truths and you need to move through sort of a geometric progression in your deductive argument to a conclusion which you can prove and it's not just

a matter of persuading your audience or appeals to their emotions. You use the same. method. Now the thinkers who were influenced by Descartes and he was massively influential very, very quickly, again take him as dividing a sort of wedge between philosophy and rhetoric. So as Tom was saying, by the time we get to the 18th century, we very much get divided camps on the relationship between rhetoric and truth and those who think that rhetoric is simply style and no substance and those who have more idealistic ambition. for it. It's interesting, all the way through. I mean, we're talking now, I mean, you've been very generous to hurtle through a couple of millennia so far. And there's been this part, is it

deceptive, is it merely manipulative, merely clever as it were, is it really getting a truth, is it a way to get up truth? And this came again in the 19th century in this country, Tommy. They didn't. When there's a very great need to go back to the classical past to discover how to be empire. And in the process of that, how do you speak if you're an empire as well as how do you rule, how do you organise your education forces and so and so forth? Yes, I think that by the 19th century rhetoric as the pinnacle of the curriculum is having its last gasp, really, and becomes in precisely the example that you've used increasingly seen as a means by which it becomes an instrument of control by way certain figures mark themselves out as a ruling class.

But having said that, I mean, famously Lord McCauley's Minute on India, where he sets up an educational system for India and thinks, what can we put it at? How can we teach the Indians our fundamental English values? And he settles on Shakespeare. I mean, Shakespeare becomes what the classics had been for England. And to some extent, that tradition still exists within India to this day, that belief in a language art.

But generally, rhetoric's coming in for a lot of bashing. And it's really coming in a lot of bashing force from science. I mean, science is, in a sense, what has overcome a type of increasingly emphasis on the technical as the best means to discover truth. Andrew? Well, yes, because in addition to what Tom's just been saying, though there's all these political uses of oratory in the 19th century,

there's still a huge amount of suspicion of rhetoric. And we get Disraeli calling Gladstone a sophisticated rhetorician, which seems to me to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, if ever there was one. But also in terms of what Tom was saying about the attacks from science, we get T.Huxley, attacking the opponents of Darwin for hiding behind aimless rhetoric and trying to conceal their own lack of scientific understanding and their own lack of understanding of what Darwin has done by what he calls aimless rhetoric.

So huge suspicion of rhetoric, even though in practice a lot of use of oratory. So why, I mean, you've got this double thing. And Tom, it's almost not quite, almost the last throw of rhetoric in the education. since the 19th century. And yet at the same time, so it, in that situationally, it has a good press. But a lot of people are saying it is mere rhetoric. Using it in the derogatory sense, it's almost always used today on a sophisticated. Can you address that, Kerry?

I'd probably disagree with Tom. PR, spin, media studies, literary criticism are direct offshoot of studying other people's speeches to find out what have been successful strategies in the past. The Institute of Oratorio, Quilletillian's 12-volume pedagogic text, has two books devoted to literary criticism. Some of the first times we've seen not the theory of how to speak, but a study of other people's speeches in detail. I think the 20th century is deeply interested in the way that the message is created in part by the medium.

So that this... But is this a continuation of rhetoric, Kerry? Are we used to... You're still talking about systematized methods of persuasion. It's just you don't use the word rhetoric anymore or you use it always in a majority of fashion. It seems to me a wonderful example of this

for our current environment would be the whole question of the place of Parliament. Because Parliament in a way is as an institution revert partly because it is a direct offshoot of the impact of rhetorical art. That is, groups of people get up and deliver speeches to one another and attempt to persuade one another.

And out of that, it is envisaged that the best form of government takes place. But what we're increasingly witnessing is a fear that this may not be actually, that actually it's committees, it is specialists who have particular forms of knowledge, which then they gather together and present. And so that feeling that that type of institution based on the rhetorical arts is that the center of our society has come under some strain. that is because rhetoric is increasingly perceived as being suspect, as we've said. But if we look back in mere 50 years, we still have two examples of what could be called the old rhetoric,

which fits into Plato, this is a device capable of vice and great lies, Hitler's rhetoric, and Aristotle this can lead you to truths and virtue. Churchill's rhetoric. Would you say that's fair, Angie? I certainly wouldn't, of course, think of Churchill's education. He would have been translating speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero and so on. And there was still a context for him to write and deliver the well-made, well-composed speech. Because what Kerry was talking about is the ways in which rhetoric is adapting to a sort of age of TV soundbites. And it's not disappearing, but it's adapting.

But Churchill was still living in an age where there were more opportunities for formal public speaking to a live audience. and there was still an enjoyment and appreciation of a well-made speech. Now, Churchill, to me, seems to be a perfect embodiment of what Quintilian says at the end of his great work. Quintilian says that at its best, the ideal orator uses rhetoric to motivate and inspire the citizen body in general and the military in particular and to defend truth and protect the innocent. And I'm sure that Churchill would have seen himself absolutely in that tradition. What about Hitler then, Tom? Well, I think Hitler is an example of, from a rhetorical point of view, of the extreme pathos,

that is that he uses the arousing of the passions, so to persuade his audience to a position which has limited truth in it. He forgets, as it were, logos and ethos. And this was always one of the things going back to antiquity that was fearful of this office, that pathos, that a rousing of passions without it being rooted with the others would lead to potentially a destructive art, a means to sway a mob. Demog...

Demog... It's... Demagogue. Instead of democracy, yeah. Indeed. Thank you. But a demagogue that's interested in Actio, in delivery, you think of Hitler as being someone you see moving large groups of people,

whereas you think of Churchill as being alone in that small broadcasting room underground I think we should remember that even if we are suspicious of rhetoric in some context at the moment, it has its roots in democracy. And to me, the vigour of a democracy in its institutions can partly be gauged by the vigour of its rhetoric. And if you understand how speeches are made, you know not to be deceived. Thank you. Didn't have time even to say your names.

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