Blogora Classic: Aune on Weaver, March 26, 2005

March 26, 2005

Rhetorical Concepts V: Richard Weaver

Richard Weaver (1910-1963): The study of rhetoric as a cure for the cultural crisis engendered by science, industrial capitalism, and “mass” education/communication.

I. Life:
A. Grew up in Asheville, NC, and Lexington, KY. Attended U of Kentucky, where he joined the Socialist Party.
B. Attended Vanderbilt, where he studied with the Southern Agrarians (I’ll Take My Stand) John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate. They argued against modern science and industrial capitalism, defended an agriculture-based society like that of the Old South (but without slavery).
C. Taught at TAMU from 1937-1939, where he “encountered a rampant philistinism, abetted by technology, large-scale organization, and a complacent acceptance of success as the goal of life. Moreover, I was here forced to see that the lion of applied science and the lamb of the humanities were not going to lie down together in peace, but that the lion was going to devour the lamb unless there was a very stern keeper of order.” As he drove back to College Station in the fall of 1939 he realized he didn’t have to go back, and instead turned around and enrolled at LSU for his PHD.
D. Taught at U of Chicago for many years, primarily lower-level writing courses (which he enthusiastically volunteered for). Author of Composition: A Course in Reading and Writing (1957); Ideas Have Consequences (1948); The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953); and Visions of Order (1964).
E. Helped found Modern Age and National Review, as well as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (publisher of Intercollegiate Review—if you want a free subscription, ask me). Like Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind), he was a supporter of the “traditionalist” wing of American conservatism, as opposed to “libertarians” and “fusionists,” who were most concerned about free enterprise and anti-Communism, respectively. Traditionalists believe the central problem facing us today is cultural decay.

II. Some core ideas:
A. Defense of rhetoric:
1. “Language is sermonic”: a critique of the social-scientific, journalistic, and general semantics view that you can have neutral, “objective,” “scientific” communication. ALL acts of communication take a point of view and attempt to persuade

2. Healthy cultures have a balance of dialectic and rhetoric. “Dialectic is abstract reasoning on the basis of propositions; rhetoric is the relation of the terms of these to the existential world in which facts are regarded with sympathy and are treated with that kind of historical understanding and appreciation which lie outside the dialectical process” (Visions of Order, 56). Education or journalism that is only negative, always questioning assumptions is destructive.
3. My favorite definition of rhetoric (from his essay on the Phaedrus): “So rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain leading up to the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and only the soul have affection for. This is the truly justified affection of which no one can be ashamed, and he who feels no influence of it is truly outside the communion of minds. Rhetoric appears, finally, as a means by which the impulse of the soul to be ever moving is redeemed.”
B. A healthy culture:
1. Has a “tyrannizing image”: the idea of a culture’s excellence, embodied in ritual, scripture, literature, codes of conduct, enforced standards of value and exclusion: “A culture integrates by segregating its forms of activity and its members from those not belonging.” Culture satisfies a deep-seated psychic need. (Note that TAMU has the lowest crime/violence rate of any US university.)
2. A healthy culture has style: recognized in:
a. Elaboration: more than the merely functional—it is “over the top” in some way
b. Rhythm: clear marking of beginnings and endings
c. Distance: a sense of grandeur, monuments, courtesy

C. Types of argument:
1. Argument from definition: analysis of Lincoln: In dealing with slavery, other leaders looked to law, American history, or practical expediency. Lincoln asked: “is the negro a man?” William F. Buckley’s favorite definition of conservatism: “The true conservative is one who sees the universe as a paradigm of essences, of which the phenomenology of the world is a sort of continuing approximation.”
2. Argument from circumstance: basing conclusions on standards such as: will it work, is it useful? Analysis of Edmund Burke, who argued against firm principles in politics (the attack on Burke was part of a debate in American conservatism in the 1950's about the relevance of English conservativism to the American experience).
3. The abortion debate is a classic example of a conflict between argument from definition and argument from circumstance.

Posted by jim at March 26, 2005 03:37 PM