Abstract

328 RHETORICA Haixia W. Lan. Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way. Routledge, 2017. 228 pp. ISBN 9781472487360 At a 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute seminar on comparative rhetoric, twenty-five scholars spent a week together reading scholarship on comparative rhetoric of the recent past and charting out possible paths for the future. In their culminating statement, "A Manifesto: The What and How of Comparative Rhetoric," which appeared in Rhetoric Review in 2015 (34.3), they outlined best practices in the subfield, underscoring both the imperative to speak for and with the other and the need to cultivate self-reflexivity and accountability for such engagement. They further called on comparative rhetoric scholars to search for "simultaneity, heterogeneity, and interdependence" both within and between different rhetorical traditions and practices. Haixia Lan's Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way provides an example of what such best practices actually can look like and of how best to center comparative rhetorical studies on simultaneity, heterogeneity, and interdependence. Lan's monograph, consisting of five chapters together with an introduc­ tion and an epilogue, offers an in-depth comparative study of Aristotle (384322 BCE) and Confucius (551—479 BCE), two pivotal figures hailing from Greek and Chinese ancient cultures, respectively. While plenty of studies have focused on Aristotle and Confucius in the past, they tend to be informed by a philosophical and literary framework. Meanwhile, comparative rhetoric scholars have also studied Aristotle and Confucius, but none, in my view, has offered such a comprehensive study of these two thinkers as Lan has done, for which she must be commended. The introduction provides a succinct overview, laying out both its object of study (focusing on the similarities and differences in Aristotle and Confucius's rhetorical thinking) and its method of study (deploying a rela­ tional and contextualized approach that traverses disciplinary boundaries). Such a study, for Lan, not only presents comparative rhetoricians with a better opportunity to understand these two thinkers' singular contributions to the development of rhetoric but also enhances the prospect of a more felicitous exchange between the two cultures they represent and continue to influence and, better still, between East and West in the global contact zones of the twenty-first century. No less important, Lan's study also counters sticky bina­ ries that pit, for example, Aristotle's purported discourse of abstraction and linearity against Confucius's alleged discourse of pragmatism and circularity. It further problematizes past studies that focus exclusively on either differen­ ces or similarities but not both or that are long in overgeneralizations and short on contextualized or recontextualized engagements and discussions. Each of the five subsequent chapters provides a detailed and nuanced analysis of one central aspect of Aristotle and Confucius's rhetorical thinking. They together contribute to a portrait of two individuals being separated by time and space but joined by an unfailing insistence on hylomorphic thinking that Truth or tianming (the cosmic order) is enmattered in, and can be Reviews 329 actualized through, rhetorical practices; on engaging self, other, and the cos­ mos with an inclusive vision; and on conceptualizing ultimate realities with analogy, be it form (by Aristotle) or the way (by Confucius). For example, in Chapter One, Lan takes up rhetorical invention or the dynamic and mutually entailing relationship between language-in-use and knowledge-making. She characterizes Aristotle's views on episteme as knowledge of certainty, techne as knowledge of probability, and rhetoric as techne that intersects with episteme. In other words, Aristotle's rhetoric dwells in this in-between space where certainty and unpredictability join hands and dialectic and sophistical reasoning mingle with each other. Chapter Two, “Interpreting the Analects," takes its readers to Confucius, to the Analects, a collection of conversations between the Master and his students compiled by the latter after his death, and to the rhetorical dimension of his ways of knowing and speaking, the latter of which mani­ fests itself in Confucius's complex understanding of rhetorical invention, of the role language, audience, and context play in the making of probable or local knowledge. For Lan, developing an historical and interdisciplin­ ary understanding of rhetorical invention...