Abstract

Deep Rhetoric is addressed to philosophy and rhetoric. And, like the journal, its questions emerge from the problem of a long-standing and uncomfortable conjunction, the “and” that divides and joins in one stroke. Over the course of eight chapters or a “series of closely related essays” (8), Crosswhite argues for a redefinition of rhetoric's place within our society's ethical imagination (giving it new “rights” to reason, justice, and wisdom, rights usually given to philosophy) and thereby returns rhetoric firmly to its original arena, the human condition. Such a recovery of rhetoric, if not its empowerment, grounds Crosswhite's concern for questions that philosophy shares with rhetoric only in a kind of grudging détente. It also says a great deal about his claim that rhetoric may be (or perhaps was all along) philosophy's best critic, offering us other ways way of loving wisdom, seeking justice, and contending with violence.A note on “deep:” Crosswhite's “deep” is both a move against philosophy and a gesture toward going “beyond” rhetoric as an academic discipline. Rhetoric began—like philosophy—amid the conditions of humanity: our questions of virtue, community, and communication of both. Rhetoric's migration into a university setting says less about its essences (one being its connection to teaching) and more about how education has shifted away from a concern with those conditions (3). Moreover, as Crosswhite notes, rhetoric has not been treated well in American higher education; it has been especially damaged by “destructive elitist” attitudes that simplify the complex “communication capabilities” needed for social life (3). Yet if rhetoric can go or become “deep” enough, Crosswhite argues, if it can do what it has always done all those times institutions have tried to kill it off—respond to controversies “for a specific time and in a specific place,” ‘hosting’ them as honest and useful (6)—then it will thrive. In the end, Crosswhite is after this fully “critical, creative, and truthful” rhetoric (177).Crosswhite solidifies rhetoric's “rapprochement” with philosophy (177) in chapters 5 and 6, an extensive and productive reading of Heidegger. The work of that German philosopher/rhetorician is one of many shared substances between the two schools of thought that Crosswhite gives attention to throughout the book. A typical review would summarize those substances and their attendant chapters, moving toward an analytical climax. Yet a fair reviewer knows such a limited space cannot do justice to Crosswhite's dense arguments, especially about Heidegger. And also Crosswhite covers some old ground. I will not rehearse his expansion on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1969 work (chapter 7). Readers of this journal know that Crosswhite organized and oversaw a special issue in 2010 about the legacy of The New Rhetoric.Crosswhite's individual chapters are not as important as his work on concepts that bring rhetoric into its “deeper” self. Crosswhite argues for a retrieval of four concepts “from millennia of philosophical and theological reifications” (79).1 It is these concepts—transcendence, psychagōgia, logos, and humanism—that deserve a reviewer's (and reader's) attention. Their development throughout the essays shows in a more direct way how this book situates itself within rhetorical theory and the history of rhetoric and in relation to the progress that has been made in both of those arenas in the second half of the twentieth century. These concepts are not new to philosophy or rhetoric, but taken as a whole they define the “deepest” rhetoric.Crosswhite's rhetorical attention to these concepts highlights a significant difference between philosophy and rhetoric: he insists that rhetoric resist the urge for an epistemological telos, prominent in philosophy. Thus a “deep” rhetoric pursues a direction but acknowledges that such a pursuit consistently destabilizes any actual arriving. In that frame, Crosswhite expends the first one hundred pages or so (chapters 1 and 2) trying to name but not terminally define “deep rhetoric” through these concepts; the rescued concepts become mines in which Crosswhite repeatedly enters, not because he is looking for “gold” but because he wants to describe rhetoric as the work of mining. And so he claims rhetoric as a “way of being.” This claim is not new to rhetorical theory, but what makes Crosswhite's attempt so persuasive is the ambitiousness of the book as evidenced in the depth of the mining, which extends past the first two chapters, the concepts aiding his analysis of justice, violence, and wisdom. Along with this depth, the book's breadth also argues forcefully that one does not “study” rhetoric so much as live it, because its influence is felt across the human condition. That is what makes rhetoric philosophical or, better, what makes philosophy rhetorical. And the living is an entangled, material existence. Mixing humor and serious scholarship, for example, Crosswhite couples his close reading of Heidegger with an explanation of how silence and logos inhabit the manner in which he and his wife share a bed.Living amid others requires the practice of transcendence, the first of the key concepts. Crosswhite writes that rhetoric as transcendence is “a way we open ourselves to the influence of what is beyond ourselves and become receptive, a way we participate in a larger world and become open to the lives of others, a way we learn and change” (17). This participation is a meeting with each other “in language of some kind” (61), equal to “our being-in-logos” (56). In the eternal battle between rhetoric and philosophy, rhetoric's practice in the mundane (as opposed to philosophy's attachment to the ideal seen in Plato's heavenly visions) has been seen as a weakness. In Crosswhite's estimation this lack of heavenly transcendence is not a negative when seen through a different frame. Crosswhite argues that rhetoric is “something we are, not something we have” (61). This implies a different relationship to philosophy, one hidden by “knowledge” as a having. In addition, rhetorical transcendence has an “ethical force” because ethics is “constitutive of rhetoric” (107). That force certainly has something to do with “the good,” but it does not entail imposing that “good” on others through violence, physical or rhetorical. For Crosswhite the difference between an ethical transcendence and what he calls a “warrior theory of transcendence” is the latter's lack of restraint (117). This lack is best seen in Plato's description of Gorgias: he is a man who seeks “conquest and domination” along with wealth for himself (117), but ironically his rhetoric is not rhetorical enough. “Socrates' real charge against Gorgias's rhetoric is that it does not go deep enough” (124, emphasis his). In other words, rhetoric may have been a skill or “discipline” for the Sophist but not a manner of life and so less than ethical. That ethical manner of life is a constant communicative examination, a questioning of what we claim to know and put “under” our power. This opens us to something or someone else.This communicative examination is part of the second concept, psychagōgia. Translated as “leading the soul,” this Platonic notion is a “special power” of logos (different than its usual association with sophistic magic or spellbinding) that Crosswhite draws out from the gospel of John, known for its description of Logos as the Word of God. “Pros ton theon” (“toward the god”) becomes the lack of “possession or knowledge of an ultimate being” or “definite, certain, foreseeable, outcomes” (31) or a “not-having, a way of comporting oneself toward but not a way of actually knowing or grasping or achieving the goal” (30). This restraint is what makes this concept a rhetorical one rather than a philosophical one. Psychagōgia as a practice of “deep rhetoric” is “a life of pursuing and loving that stretches out toward wisdom but never arrives at it” (253). This “limited” power is a power “to which one must yield and not simply a power that one attempts to master and use for oneself” (133). Such a limitation makes rhetoric more ethical than its more end-orientated sister, philosophy. And a “deep rhetoric” internalizes this limitation on a primal level. One might suggest that what keeps philosophy grounded—that is, what prevents its heavenly transcendence—is its rhetorical “leading.”Psychagōgia is something “which we can never completely objectify” (131). This is because of its relation to logos, the third concept. Logos “moves in and against the semiotic languages of human beings; it makes them possible, but it works strongly against their certainties and ideologies” (79). Yet this “it” is not “a thing but a direction” (79). In terms of the gospel of John it is “the dynamic movement toward and into G-d,” and it must continue moving toward that which “will always exceed the forms of comprehension that lead toward it” (34). In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, rhetoric's “essence [as logos] is its onwardness” (79) or its experiencing of psychagōgia. This particular formation has implications for rhetoric as it continues its ethical turn. Rhetorical scholars have struggled indirectly with the content of rhetoric and so also with the content of its ethic. But if it is toward a good, if it is a leading toward, then rhetoric is not suspicious but in line with the w/Word as a calling toward. Such a leading toward enhances the power of language, a win for rhetoric.Or in Heidegger's thinking, rhetoric “is an awareness of” a logos, an awareness “deeper” that extends beyond the discipline, a “more original” logos of “communication, controversy, deliberation, and being-with-one-another—the essential sociality of Dasein” (195). This “ungrounded” logos (197) appears as Crosswhite pushes past what he sees as Heidegger's self-centered “authenticity” toward “a richer conception of logos and a more complex vision of sociality” (198). Conceptualizing “sociality” as that which is human, Crosswhite argues that human “beings” are not “simple entities, enclosed in themselves, but are movements toward and away from each other,” the world, themselves, and “whatever else their transcendence reveals” (174). These movements are both inherently rhetorical and ethical, movements toward a good.It is the movement of logos—the quintessence of rhetoric in a way—that violence puts to an end. And yet, in Crosswhite's opinion, rhetorical violence is often the response to physical violence. Here he contends with Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” suggesting that as much as it offers productive paths, it also is “intellectually traumatized” by the wars of the twentieth century and so is “an extreme example” of this tendency toward violence in response to violence (Benjamin argues for a divine violence that would overwhelm a mythic violence) (168–69). Crosswhite refuses any solution to violence (ontotheological or otherwise) and argues for a “suffering” rhetoric, one that experiences and endures violence (166). The best response to violence is a “deep rhetoric” that both prevents “overarching” theories and that is “carefully attuned” to a form of the human as sociality amid transcendence. Yet Crosswhite stumbles a bit here. At times his own analysis is as abstract as Benjamin's. More profoundly, although Crosswhite suggests that Benjamin needs a type of violence, many readers of Benjamin might disagree. Even if one accepts that Benjamin does indeed have such a need, the argument between the two is a larger one concerning rhetoric and religion. One cannot easily dismiss Benjamin's theological adherence to some form of messianic glory, Jewish or otherwise, merely because of the effects of war. And perhaps our lack of intellectual traumatization due to the wars of the twenty-first century says more than we let on. In the end, many religions answer violence with a “suffering” savior. Ironically, Crosswhite describes his response to violence as a more human, “less ultimate” work of justice and peace, a kenosis ironically not unlike that of the primary character in the gospel of John.On the other hand, Crosswhite's argument against violence certainly has value and legitimacy, and it grounds his central claim on a related subject: humans need to do more work (rhetorical and otherwise) to effect justice. However, when Crosswhite dabbles in religious rhetoric (along with the gospel on John, he draws on Augustine, Buddhist meditation, and the Hebraic tradition to develop his idea of rhetorical wisdom in the last chapter), he does not go deep enough. He draws from these rhetorical depths, but he seems to stop at moments when they could offer more. Ironically, as Crosswhite shows in his interaction with wisdom in the last chapter, it is religion in part that makes possible his most substantial critique of Heidegger, namely, that Heidegger does not go deep enough into human sociality. In fairness Crosswhite notes that he has worked to show the “formal similarities” of explicit religious rhetoric to his own “deep rhetoric” (366) but also admits he could only give a “preliminary account” of this relationship (367). In a less than generous reading, the whole book itself is only a “preliminary account” of a deep rhetoric, leaving readers wanting more. In a generous reading, this is exactly what a philosophical rhetoric is supposed to do: keep the conversation moving. In other words, as with most of our best scholarship, its strength is also its weakness.The last of Crosswhite's four concepts—humanism—certainly poses the questions that religion does but does not define the human exclusively in religious terms. Like a rhetorical justice, the “human” and its attendant wisdom is “for a time” (54). For Crosswhite, humanism is not about “realizing a specifically human essence,” such as rationality, but about “struggling for human dignity,” dignity here being understood as a freedom to develop (46). Deep rhetoric thus must “prevent its own humanism from congealing into something reified and dogmatic” (56). Humanism is not just dynamic but also ethical, limiting itself, and thereby making itself accountable to others. This is the human condition to which a deep rhetoric “aspires” (222), a condition achievable, yet always achieved kairotically, within time, space, and logos. Many rhetorical scholars could enthusiastically embrace this definition, mainly because it emphasizes both a looking back and a future orientation.In the end Deep Rhetoric is certainly a virtuous keystone (perhaps not yet a capstone) to the long process of “mining” within Crosswhite's thinking that began with his own dissertation on Heidegger nearly thirty years ago. It is also a broad survey of the ways in which rhetoric can and should become a different kind of philosophy, its own kind. The book is both deep and wide, and its movement steers us toward something that can be called good. If indeed this is a sustained direction for rhetorical theory in the future (and I hope it is), Crosswhite's book will be read for a long time.