Rhetoric: Its Natural Enemies

Every art and discipline must accept competition as a natural condition of life growing from the variant interests and aptitudes of different kinds of men. This competition may lead to the identification of "natural enemies" and, for the discipline of rhetoric, some of these are (1) the business man, who debases rhetoric by using fear and false promises to gain success, (2) the historian, who regards speeches as appearances which obscure reality or as storehouses from which information can be drawn, (3) the literarian, who either relegates rhetoric to a second class position, or confuses it with stylistics, (4) the communicologist, who frequently mistakes the part for the whole and attempts to provide statistical formulas for explaining rhetoric, and (5) the rhetorician, who either concerns himself with the "witness" rhetoric of demonstration or dehumanizes the art in his pendantic concern with its elements. Recently, one ancient enemy--philosophy--has been aligned with rhetoric in the publication of a new journal "Philosophy and Rhetoric," devoted to the scholarly trusts held in common by both disciplines. (JM)