Good Rhetoricians and Good Rhetoric

The Quintilian argues that one cannot be a good rhetorician without being a good person. Many critics of this statement would pick on what constitutes a good person, but my issue lies with the lackluster definition of a good rhetorician. What does it mean to be a good rhetorician, let alone a good person? The Quintilian says that a bad man, while perfectly capable of being competent in rhetoric, will never be able to quite reach the levels of “perfection” in rhetoric that a truly good man can.

But what constitutes mere competency versus perfection is questionable. Let’s take the traditional definition of a rhetorical situation as our framework here. Rhetorical situations consist of a situation in which you are trying not only to get your audience to agree with you, but also to take action on that agreement. So, according to the goals of the rhetorical situation, a good rhetorician is one that gets their audience to agree with them and take the action that the rhetorician desired.

So we’ve set out what it takes to be a good rhetor based on the goals of a rhetorical situation established above. Based on the threshold we’ve come up with though, what would it take to go past being merely competent, or merely good? Again, the writer of the Quintilian says that only good men reach the truest levels of “perfection” in rhetorical argument, and thinks that bad men can only be at the most basic levels of rhetorical efficiency. Yet getting your audience to agree with you and take action is a pretty black-and-white way to grade things — they’ll either agree with you and take the action you want them to, or they won’t. Whether or not the action they take and the idea you’re making them agree with is noble or ignoble is irrelevant.

Therefore, if we’re defining a “good” rhetorician as one that is merely efficient in carrying out their rhetorical purpose, then their being good or bad has no bearing on that goodness. And thus, a bad man with a talent for rhetoric can easily sow discontent in the world around him, despite what the Quintilian would have us believe. The section of the Quintilian that we looked at had fairly strong arguments for why good rhetoricians might speak on behalf of poor causes, and why good rhetoricians must, by default, be good people. As we’ve laid out though, the definition of a “good rhetorician” is at question here, and that shaky premise weakens the entirety of the work.