Abstract
436 RHETORICA disputation plainly shows. But debate—genuine debate— may seem both alien and undesirable to those whose recent histories have been marked by verbal coercion, deception, confrontation, and the exercise of mute power. "Debate" brings to mind not a means to arrive at consensus, but a zero-sum game with one winner who seeks victory "by any means necessary." That sort of "debate" is empirically real, of course; and not only in a post-dictatorship Europe or Africa. Even when consensus seems to have been attained, it is a fragile thing that more often than not deteriorates and turns into conflict. Think of the aftermath of the selection of Havel; or of the fact that it was not very long ago that the Polish parliament saw fit explicitly to forbid its members to carry firearms in the assembly chamber. I hasten to add that the actual practices of the United States Congress—or, for that matter, the British Parliament—are hardly paragons of the "civility" that is so important a part of civic virtue. So simply extolling "debate" as the preferred method of decision-making and conflict-resolution is not enough. We seem, then, to be brought to the verge of the sort of cynicism (if that is not too strong a word) that Professor Axer and his co-contributors want to purge from contemporary politics—particularly in countries that desire to put dictatorship behind them and foster democracy. We seem also to have stumbled on the old question of whether the humanities can humanize. But the answer to that question can be learned only if all of us, in good faith, do what we can to make sure that they do, even if we suspect that the answer we get may not be the one we wanted. It is to be hoped, then, that Axer and his colleagues will continue to teach and encourage us. Thomas Conley University of Illinois, Urbana JosefKopperschmidt, ed., RhetorischeAnthropologie: Studien zum Homo rhetoricus. München: Fink, 2000. 404 pp. Stefan Metzger and Wolfgang Rapp, eds., Homo inveniens: Heuristik und Anthropologie am Modell der Rhetorik (Literatur und Anthropologie 19), Tübingen: Narr, 2003. 274 pp. Peter D. Krause, ed., Rhetorik und Anthropologie (Rhetorik: Ein inter nationales Jahrbuch 23), Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004. viii + 201 pp. Recent rhetorical anthropology built on the model of philosophical an thropology faces an inherent dilemma: what one hand wishes to deliver homo rhetoricus in terms of universal capacities, the other hand snatches away. In fact this tension shapes the three rich collections reviewed here, which in combination mark what editor extraordinaire Josef Kopperschmidt considers the real reason for current interest in rhetoric: namely its anthro pology (Kopperschmidt, p. 13), and especially its sophisticated treatments Reviews 437 of the whole man constituted in a culturally situated language and in the interanimation of body and mind (a long-standing strength of German scholarship and popular culture, 1 should add). After ambitiously titling his collection Rhetorische Anthropologie: Studien zum Homo rhetoricus, for instance, Kopperschmidt backpedals from the project's apparent "ontological ambi tions" (Kopperschmidt, pp. 22-23). Although, Kopperschmidt protests, the "homo-" formula such as "homo-faber" and "homo-ludens" might imply claims about mankind's essential nature, it does not have to. We should simply consider homo rhetoricus one useful heuristic for characterizing hu mankind from a particular, and in this case rhetorical, perspective (p. 22). Metzger and Rapp rightly insist that the rhetorically informed homo inveniens is a modern creature distinguished by a focus on the new and the creative (Metzger/Rapp, pp. 7-9), but they also must struggle against their essentializing rubric, as well as the contribution of someone like Peter L. Oesterreich, who has flatly argued in these two venues ("Homo rhetori cus (corruptus): Sieben Gesichtspunkte fundamentalrhetorischer Anthropologie ", Kopperschmidt, pp. 353-70; "Selbsterfindung: Zur rhetorischen Entstehung des Subjektes", Metzger/Rapp, pp. 45-57) and elsewhere that man is a rhetorical being ideally subject to a universal, rhetorical anthropology (Kopperschmidt, p. 355). Then the eclectic and individually interesting articles in Volume 23 of Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch collected by Peter D. Krause under the rubric "Rhetoric and Anthropology" introduce questions of appropriate scope. Is the "rhetoric of x...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2006-09-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2006.0005
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