CREATIVE OBSESSION
Philosophic — Part One
Philosophy and Rhetoric Are Joined At the Hip
“The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry.”
The command to “question authority” would seem indispensable to rigorous inquiry. But to question authority is pointless, unless there is a correlative resort to authority. Any scientist or lawyer will tell you that in complex, sensitive and high stakes situations, adversaries will come to blows, without some fundamental, rationalizing agreement on authorities, whether that authority is the law of gravity or the law of contracts. And so I feel in step, when I cite Kant and Nietzsche (odd bedfellows) as the definitive authorities for humankind’s decisive encounter (win or lose) with the labyrinths of language, with these life-sustaining adaptations of the collective mind, our creation of meaning, or as the good philosophers more precisely envision it, “the arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry.”[1]
“Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.”[2]
The language of philosophy (par excellence) is the art of rhetoric.
Without question, philosophy is a serious (consequential) business of the understanding. Good (and widely understood) philosophy has, more than once, drawn civilization toward the flower of enlightened democracy, and meanwhile, bad philosophy is the demon midwife of all crimes against humanity, from the assassination of Socrates to the Holocaust. On the other hand, the act of philosophizing — which, like cloud-gazing, is a distinguishing pastime for otherwise occupied humans, from the aristocratic Plato to his Thracian slave — remains a boundless and airy undertaking of the imagination. Therefore, given that philosophy is a transaction of the understanding, it follows that the language of philosophy (par excellence) is the art of rhetoric.
The Original Sin
(Incidentally, did my syllogistically inspired ritual, just now, leave your stomach half-empty? Yes? So why does the formalization of philosophic insight tend to make us feel like somebody is feeding us loaves of Wonder Bread? When we are painfully honest and crystal clear, we come to the stultifying conclusion that in any argumentative or theoretical monologue, whether an airtight tour de force or a lousy load of leaky logic, we are ultimately “begging the question” presented by our unprovable postulates and incompletable (“Gödelian”) systems. This is, to say the least, a domain-shrinking realization and a problematic constraint. Likewise, in our naturally selected zeal to be logically impregnable, eternally correct, unshakably certain, and mono-theoretical — to be, that is, irrefutably and dramatically “universal” — if we allow our stated, unstated, and preconscious premises to become hopelessly meshed within the tentacles of a sumptuous, obscure construct, we may not appreciate the collapsing confines displaced by the dilapidating dialectics and stripped-down analytics, nor the implicit, moldering circularity entrenched so thoroughly throughout such suffocating, dressed-up Truth. And in the confusion, we invite gross error or the temptation — the original sin — to delve deeper into curve-fitting distinctions and superior obscurity.)
Thank you for allowing me to get that off my chest. To continue, I am of course referring to the art of rhetoric, in the sense of that distinguished, ancient practice of public discourse (and its scholarly progeny), held in orderly, peaceful, and public places by a sovereign people, as opposed to the base “rhetoric” of unschooled lawyers and mendacious politicians.
Rhetoric is a deliberate, collaborative, and incendiary art.
However, what is often less apparent, is that the rhetorical is not merely informed by the critical analysis of artistic modalities of speaking and writing. To paraphrase Nietzsche, rhetoric has also always existed as a preconscious art in our use of language.[3] In the protolinguistic recesses of the mind, especially among children and the young, rhetoric elicits a continuous aesthetic awakening (a precious radiance), as each person discovers words and webs that work and impress, concerning ever more intricate objects of increasingly intense interest.
Rhetoric is a deliberate, collaborative, and incendiary art. It complements the emergent consciousness, and for immeasurable millennia, it has imbued its primal form of meaning upon the human soul. So in lucid moments, I might freely imagine a group of inventive and intelligent Paleolithic teenagers, sitting around one of their amazing, manufactured fires, and in closeknit communication, they all came to understand that the figurative exclamation “YEE-aag!” would from then on signify a blazing “Hot-Mama!” and that “Umm-umm-BOH” would mean that somebody cool had gotten a little ying-yang. Later generations (tireless, creative youth) would similarly assimilate these exquisitely descriptive terms, while experiencing mind-blowing, aesthetic pleasure through their language’s communal usage, consistent grammar, and seemingly unbounded powers of expression.
But all beauty decays, and soon enough the repetitive uses, misuses, and habits of language will meld what was once rhetorically luminous into a loopy mash of moribund concepts.
The human power of rhetoric is “the essence of language.”
Nietzsche was characteristically circumspect regarding his choice of words. So it is all the more astonishing when he asserts flatly that “language itself is the result of purely rhetorical arts,” and that the human power of rhetoric is “the essence of language.”[4] For Nietzsche, and I might as well agree with him, we may write the dullest and the most precise abstracts, or fastidiously unbiased briefs, but there is no such thing as “neutral analysis” or an unrhetorical, “natural language.”[5] The root of the word “fire” presumably began as a very ancient figure of speech. Even the numeral 2, which seems so completely inert, is completely rhetorical. It is, after all is said and done, an incalculable improvement over the numeral formerly known as II, for conveying the mathematical construct of two-ness.[6]
A solidly ingrained, neo-natural language reflects (with proto-mathematical exactness) our most intractable habits of mind, those virtually invariant, everyday ideas we inhabit, without which we would be doomed to an autistic hell of ceaseless, faithless, mundane inquiry. That’s why the large, bright appliance on the ceiling is just another “light” and not a puzzling, metaphysical difficulty, like it was when we were six days old. And our inextricably fixed, supposedly a priori habits of mind (for example, that some “I” thinks, or that “I” am) are functions of (are “caused” by) perfectible (intercommunicable) and eternalistic (inalterable) linguistic s transposing patterns of experience.
When we attempt, by mere words, to affect existing habits of mind, we are engaged in the art of rhetoric.
Individual and communal experience is not the indeterminate set of every “real thing” or other sufficiently singular percept that has ever affected somebody’s brain. For a knowing species, “experience” is better expressed as a verb, a modifier, or something in between. It is whatever we happen to attain, sustain, restrain and retain, whereas underlying the unavoidable constraints and deficiencies of perception, memory, language and logic, the core function of thinking is inquiry (in general, the mind’s encounter with any sort of disequilibrium) and judgment (its correlative response).[7] Human intelligence acts upon mammoth aggregations of simple, complex, and profound judgments, which follows an adaptive, primordial obsession to advance finer pictures of our memories and more perfect habits of mind.[8] When such teleoaesthetic (regenerative and diverging) motives are in play, the exercise of the intellect may be called a “work of art.” When we attempt, by mere words, to affect existing habits of mind, we are engaged in the art of rhetoric.
[1] Nietzsche, F. W., Description of Ancient Rhetoric, (Gilman, S.L., et al., eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language (Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 3 [emphasis added].
[2] Id.
[3] See Nietzsche, F. W., Description of Ancient Rhetoric, op. cit., p. 21.
[4] Id. [emphasis added].
[5] Nietzsche, F. W., Description of Ancient Rhetoric, op. cit. p. 21.
[6] See Peirce, C. S., How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Buchler, J., ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (Dover, 1955), pp. 35–36, and Lowell Lectures on the History of Science, Wiener, P., ed., Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings (Dover, 1966), pp. 234–235.
[7] See Dewey, J., Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Harcourt, et al., 1938), Ch. VI-VII, accord, Burke, F. T., Dewey’s New Logic (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 136–146.
[8] In this sense, “perfection” is the collective apprehension of a more fully resolved, intrinsic purpose (akin to the perfection of legal interests), rather than a static and unexceptional notion of immutable flawlessness (like my fuzzy vision of a perfect circle).
[1] Nietzsche, F. W., Description of Ancient Rhetoric, (Gilman, S.L., et al., eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language (Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 3 [emphasis added].
[2] Id.
[3] See Nietzsche, F. W., Description of Ancient Rhetoric, op. cit., p. 21.
[4] Id. [emphasis added].
[5] Nietzsche, F. W., Description of Ancient Rhetoric, op. cit., p. 21.
[6] See Peirce, C. S., How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Buchler, J., ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (Dover, 1955), pp. 35–36, and Lowell Lectures on the History of Science, Wiener, P., ed., Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings (Dover, 1966), pp. 234–235.
[7] See Dewey, J., Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Harcourt, et al., 1938), Ch. VI-VII, accord, Burke, F. T., Dewey’s New Logic (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 136–146.
[8] In this sense, “perfection” is the collective apprehension of a more fully resolved, intrinsic purpose (akin to the perfection of legal interests), rather than a static and unexceptional notion of immutable flawlessness (like my fuzzy vision of a perfect circle).
