Perelman, ad Hominem Argument, and Rhetorical ... - CompHacker

304 M. Lefflengthy treatise entirely devoted to ad hominem, Walton generates a complextypology of ad hominem schemes and offers norms for evaluating them (Walton1998).The differences among these positions are significant, and the second and thirdarise from within a complex program for argumentation studies that includesimportant rhetorical considerations. Nevertheless, all three bear a family resemblancethat discloses a common dialectical paternity, and the nature and significanceof that commonality emerges when we contrast dialectical and rhetoricalorientations toward the treatment of persons in argumentation. At the same time,this contrast also provides insight into Perelman’s thought and suggests someproblems that emerge in Perelman’s theory as it weaves between the borders ofrhetoric and dialectic.Brinton (1985, 1986, 1995) and Amossy (2001) have both noted that ethos inrhetoric is the counterpart of ad hominem in dialectical, and by borrowing andexpanding their analyses, we can place these two sister concepts in a relationship toone another that reveals four main points of contrast:1. Dialectical ad hominem dwells in the negative and deals with the Thou ShaltNots of argument. It identifies argumentative missteps that speakers shouldavoid and that hearers should be able to identify and expose. Rhetorical ethosfunctions as a resource for invention. It offers possibilities for speakers toconstruct favorable images of themselves, unfavorable images of opponents,and to do whatever else advances their purpose through reference to persons.2. Contemporary dialecticians treat ad hominem argument as part of a socialinteraction, but they limit the interaction to the argumentative exchange per seand its explicitly stated assertions. Broader aspects of the context that link withsocial, cultural or intertextual matters get bracketed. But in rhetoric thesematters are crucial, since, as Brinton says, the goal is for the speaker to embody‘‘the general ethos (character) of the society’’, and so the speaker seeks ‘‘toexpress our shared values, to think in terms of our common assumptions, toexercise good judgment, and to speak for us’’ (Brinton 1985, p. 55).3. Dialecticians assess credibility and authority in relation to the relevance andforce of assertions made about persons. Rhetoricians consider both what is saidand how it is said and often study credibility (or its opposite) as somethingenacted when speakers construct character-traits or character-types throughdiscursive performance.4. The goal of dialectic is to establish general criteria for assessing justified beliefor processes that justifiably resolve disputes, and as a consequence, dialecticalinquiry gravitates toward abstract types and structures of argument. In the caseof ad hominem, this leads to considerable effort in defining its characteristics,breaking it into species (e.g., direct, circumstantial, tu quoque, etc.), andspecifying norms for assessing its variants as they appear in different phases ofargumentation or in discussions with different purposes (with both phases andpurposes stipulated in abstract schemes). The goal of rhetoric is to develop acapacity for using and understanding argument in action, and as a result,rhetoricians tend to treat types and structures of argument opportunistically,123

Perelman, ad Hominem Argument 305turning them to their purposes as they engage particular cases and addressspecific audiences.Perelman, as we all know, quite consciously selects rhetoric and not dialectic asthe title for his project, and the contrasts I have just cited correspond to some of thereasons that explain his choice, since they underscore the rhetorical emphasis onargument as a situated act closely connected to an audience. In a passage I quotedearlier, Perelman makes it abundantly clear that he regards argument as related toaction that manifests itself in socially and psychologically determined situations,and for this reason, he insists that it entails interaction between and commitmentfrom the parties involved in argument and that what an arguer asserts cannot bedetached from the ‘‘person who makes it.’’ In these respects, Perelman not onlybreaks decisively away from the formalist model, but he also pushes beyond thelimits of informal logic and dialectic. 4Yet, the New Rhetoric does not provide the kind of dense and rhetoricallynuanced account of the role of persons in argument that Perelman’s commitmentsmight seem to require. The book makes only a brief and passing reference to theconcept of ethos, and the detailed analysis of act and person in argument (Part III,sections 68–73) reads like an inventory of tactics rather than a theory of howarguments relate to and make use of the person of the arguer. The key to thisanomaly, I believe, is found in the section devoted to the ‘‘Speech as an Act of theSpeaker’’ (III, 72), and I will soon turn to that section and give it close attention.Before doing so, I need to acknowledge that Perelman addresses the issue of adhominem argument in a compact and interesting section near the end of hisdiscussion of agreement as a starting point for argument (II, 28: 100–114).Perelman observes that, within his conception of argumentation, all argumentsare ex concessis or ad hominem. Whereas logicians distinguish between adhominem arguments, which are based human opinion, and ad rem arguments, whichare based on fact, Perelman regards facts as nothing other than points of agreementthat refer to the universal audience, and hence what others consider ad rem premisesare, for him, only a particular species of premises drawn from the agreement of theaudience. Moreover, since arguments directed toward the universal audience claimvalidity for all rational beings, Perelman suggests that we should call sucharguments ad humanitatem and consider them as a special class of ad hominemargument. But he almost immediately modifies this distinction by offering a view ofad hominem in a ‘‘narrow sense’’ that would only apply to instances in whichspeakers advance arguments that they know ‘‘to be without weight for the universalaudience.’’ This is an intriguing concept, but Perelman offers no explanation otherthan to give a short example, and he concludes his discussion with yet anotherdistinction. This time he separates argument ad hominem from argument adpersonam because the former deals with consistency or inconsistency in the beliefsof a particular audience, while latter involves a personal attack intended to discreditan opponent.4 Concerning this difference, see, for example, Van Eemeren and Grootendurst (1995b).123

306 M. LeffI find these observations both richly suggestive and bewildering. In about twopages of text, Perelman spills out an array of terms, some of them representing noveltwists on familiar definitions and conceptions, which suggest intriguing ways toreconsider the whole tribe of ad hominem appeals and to distinguish their rhetoricalincarnations from their manifestation in other guises. But since he does not flesh outany of his terminological maneuvers, the discussion seems incidental, and it has noapparent connection with the later and more extensive analysis of act and person inargument.That analysis appears in Part III and covers 35 pages divided into 6 headings. Thewhole of this discussion merits careful study by anyone interested in argumentsbased on the character and status of arguers, but for present purposes, I have timenow to deal with just one of the headings—’’The Speech as an Act of the Speaker’’(Sect. 72). It is here that Perelman touches most directly on the concept of ethos andmakes his sole explicit reference to the concept.The section begins by emphasizing the interaction between speaker and speechand makes the claim that it ‘‘is perhaps the most characteristic part of argumentationas opposed to demonstration’’ (317). Even with the qualifying ‘‘perhaps’’, this is astrong assertion, and we might expect some amplification or justification. Instead,however, Perelman proceeds, as he does elsewhere in the treatise, to cataloguetechniques and strategies of argument and to offer caveats about their use. Some ofthese refer to standard techniques for ethotic argument such as the need to gain therespect, goodwill, and sympathy of the audience and the corresponding effort todiscredit the character of adversaries, but a number of his points incorporate andstress rather specific performative considerations—e.g., the quality of a speaker’sargument influences the audience’s perception of the speaker; the speaker shouldconciliate the audience by demonstrating trust in its judgment; the speaker, whomust often act as mentor, should take care not stir up hostility toward himself bytreating the audience as though it is inferior; and the speaker should display a properattitude toward hearers by exercising restraint, discretion, and brevity and byavoiding arrogant displays of knowledge. These matters all refer to the situatedconduct of an arguer and his or her interaction with a specific audience, and theyindicate the limits of propositional analysis or abstract norms as standards forassessing the use of ethotic arguments, since neither propositions nor abstract normscan explain how a speaker establishes rapport with an audience in a particular case.Consequently, such observations about style and demeanor directly follow from andsupport Perelman’s claim that the speaker/speech interaction plays marks a crucialpoint of distinction between argumentation and formal logic. Yet, he does notamplify, illustrate, or reflect on any of these points, and he does not connect themwith his opening claim. Why not?No doubt, part of the reason comes from the plan of the New Rhetoric, whichsweeps through vast tracts of rhetorical lore so rapidly that little time is available forreflective moments. A less obvious, but perhaps more interesting reason, however,surfaces if we examine the one passage where Perelman explicitly mentions anddefines the concept of ethos: ‘‘What the ancients used to call oratorical ethos can besummed up as the impression which the speaker, by means of his words, gives ofhimself. Isocrates has this to say: ‘Never support to defend a bad cause, for the123

Perelman, ad Hominem Argument 307people will suspect that you yourself do the things which you aid others in doing’’’(319). This passage is somewhat confusing, and one of the problems is that itconflates two quite different versions of ethos. The first is Aristotelian, which treatsethos as a mode of proof entirely limited to the words uttered by the speaker. Thesecond is Isocratean, which incorporates the reputation of the speaker based uponthings said and done before beginning the speech.The specific, technical confusion is easily clarified, but the passage evidences amore fundamental problem about understanding the rhetorical tradition. Here aselsewhere, Perelman, regards that tradition as a seamless whole, and while this viewis not uncommon, it is also inaccurate. Classical rhetoric includes several variants,two of the most prominent of them being represented, on one side, by Aristotle, andon the other, by a tradition that stretches from Isocrates to Cicero and Quintilian,and from there to the Renaissance humanists. 5 Aristotle stresses the status ofrhetoric as an art and conceives rhetoric as a body of precepts organized in a more orless systematic fashion and directed toward discovering the means of persuasion.The other position, which Janet Atwill aptly calls the ‘‘eloquence tradition,’’ (1998)places emphasis on the person of the orator, regards the ‘‘art’’ as a useful butancillary part of the enterprise, and seeks its end in developing the flexible capacityto respond appropriately to the circumstances of particular cases.The general difference between these perspectives determines their conceptionsof ethotic arguments. The Aristotelian identifies techniques a speaker can use in theartistic construction of character but brackets contextual issues such as priorreputation because they are extrinsic to the art. The Isocratean seeks to understandhow to enact character in a particular case, and for this purpose, extrinsic concerns,such as prior reputation, necessarily enter into the equation, and knowledge oftechniques is regarded as less instructive than practice and the study of models.Perelman is hardly insensitive to the social and cultural dimensions ofargumentation, and as we have just noted, he openly acknowledges thatperformance is crucially important in the argumentative process. On the whole,however, his attitude is Aristotelian. He explains in the introduction of the NewRhetoric that his project ‘‘is mainly concerned with the structure of argumentation,’’and so it ‘‘will not therefore insist on the way in which communication with theaudience takes place’’ (6). And indeed the book methodically identifies andexplicates argumentative structures and techniques–and does so very effectively—but it does not provide thick descriptions of rhetorical practice; it does not show howthe argumentative techniques work as part of an integrated persuasive effort. As in adialectical treatise, examples, even when extended, serve to illustrate principlesrather than to stimulate heuristic insight or to serve as models for imitation.Given Perelman’s commitment to argument as situated action, it would seemimportant for him to supplement his Aristotelian scheme with an Isocratean interestin the workings of argument as it is actually conducted. That he does not do soopens a gap between his conception of the rhetorical tradition and its representationin the New Rhetoric. The problem, most certainly, is not a failure to deal with themain task he sets before himself, which is to provide a comprehensive and updated5 Concerning the variations in classical rhetoric, see Conley (1990, pp. 4–25).123

308 M. Lefftreatment of the techniques of rhetorical argument. Rather it is a failure to recognizethat the techniques provide only part of what is needed in order to understand howarguments behave. And 50 years after Perelman, I believe that we can most usefullyadvance his project by getting down to cases, and that is what I propose to do inconcluding this paper.Ruth Amossy (2001, p. 3), based on her own study of cases, has explained thatone of the key problems related to ethos has to do with understanding who has theauthority to speak within a specific set of circumstances—or to use her metaphor—who is allowed to hold the skeptron. The case I have chosen raises that issue in aparticularly vivid way, since it concerns a writer who belongs to a marginalizedclass and who uses ethotic argument to find a voice that remains distinctive butsufficiently adapted to the dominant culture to win an audience.In his essay, ‘‘Of Booker T. Washington and Others’’ (published in 1903 as achapter in Souls of the Black Folk), W.E.B. Du Bois attempted to chart a politicalprogram for African–Americans at troubled moment in their history. Subjected tothe racist ‘‘Jim Crow’’ laws in the South and systematic economic and socialexploitation throughout the nation, African–Americans were denied a meaningfulvoice in public deliberation and virtually excluded from political power. Only oneamong them–Booker T. Washington–had managed to gain recognition from thewhite establishment and the opportunity to speak across the racial divide.Washington, however, employed a rhetoric so thoroughly blended into theprevailing idiom of the white world that it seemed indistinguishable from it.Du Bois found Washington’s influence confining and sought to articulate astronger, more independent, and more critical message both to and from the Blackcommunity. To do so, however, he had to find a rhetorical vehicle for expressingdissent in a public sphere which then did not yet allow a public platform for AfricanAmerican dissent. In his essay, Du Bois sought to resolve this problem by workingthrough and against the grain of Washington’s constraining but authoritative ethos.The first three sentences of the essay subtly prefigure Du Bois’ purpose andstrategy. They read: ‘‘Easily the most striking thing in the history of the AmericanNegro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at thetime when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of astonishingcommercial development was dawning; a sense of doubt and hesitation overtook thefreedmen’s sons,–then it was that his leading began. Mr. Washington came, with asingle definite programme, at the psychological moment when the nation was a littleashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentratingits energies on Dollars’’ (Du Bois 1989, p. 30).The opening sentence establishes a narrative voice of for the author that isdistanced and removed from momentary distractions as it sweeps over a broadhistorical vista, and the style is impersonal, academic, clinically diagnostic. Fromthis vantage point, what strikes Du Bois is not Washington’s role as an agent, as anactive leader, but his inert placement along the historical landscape–his emergenceis not even an event, but a ‘‘thing’’. The impersonal and indirect construction of thesentence strongly suggests Washington’s passivity. Consider how different its forcewould be if it were cast in more active, and perhaps more normal, syntax, so that itwould read: ‘‘Mr. Booker T. Washington’s ascendancy is easily the most striking123

Perelman, ad Hominem Argument 309thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876.’’ In Du Bois’s version, bycontrast, Washington’s name emerges only at the end of the sentence, insulatedfrom the verb by a preposition, and his ascendancy appears less as the result ofsomeone acting in history than as something that simply happened in history.Finally, the temporal frame that Du Bois uses is rhetorically significant. Washingtonis viewed from within the context of events that have occurred since 1876–that is,since the end of Reconstruction and advent of Jim Crow–a low-point in African–American history. Washington’s ascendancy, then, corresponds with a regression inthe fate of his people.Passing over the second sentence for the moment, we can note that the thirdpresents Washington as a more active agent. Here his name appears at the beginningof the sentence and in the nominative position. But the stress falls not on whatWashington did, but upon the moment when he came on the scene. He was simplyin the right place at the right time, and insofar as he engaged in any independentaction, it was to ‘‘put forward a single definite programme’’ that was suited to thecircumstances. Washington, then, remains an essentially reactive figure; hisprogram adjusts to external forces without any effort to resist or alter them.These two sentences anticipate a number of key themes that persist through theessay: that Washington’s program is a passive accommodation to externalcircumstances; that his leadership is rooted in sources outside the African–American community; that it is excessively narrow and single-minded; and that ithas a decidedly regressive aspect.The second sentence also suggests some of these themes, but its most prominentfeature is the convoluted syntax; the word order is manipulated so that the sentenceis encased by the verb ‘‘began’’—which refers to Washington’s leadership. Thislong, complex sentence ultimately returns to its point of origin, since Washington’spassive but inescapable presence binds it at either end. The structure of this sentenceprefigures Du Bois’ strategy in the essay, which circles from and to Washington’shegemonic presence and develops a motif of entrapment that can be overcome onlythrough critical dissent.The full articulation of that strategy is far too detailed and nuanced to besummarized adequately in this presentation. But its main tendency can becondensed as follows: Washington’s authority is now so powerful and so singlemindedthat it has become a monolith silencing all criticism. But criticism is thevery essence of democracy, and so it is the duty of African Americans to seek otherleaders who will speak out, open public debate, and express their differences withWashington. And since Washington’s views correspond closely with those of thedominant white culture, when African Americans criticize him, they also enter intoa debate about ideas and policies that circulate in the mainstream of Americanpolitics. Consequently, criticism of Washington from within leads AfricanAmericans across the ‘‘veil’’ that separates them from the surrounding whitecommunity, and this activity draws them into a truly national forum for politicaldeliberation. The result, moreover, not only empowers African Americans but alsoreinvigorates the American political system, whose health depends up the freeexercise of criticism and dissent. Du Bois, in short, makes a claim for the skeptronby using and performing rhetorical themes that Americans recognize as essential123

310 M. Leffcomponents of their political culture, and he does this by starting within his owncommunity and contrasting his authorial ethos as an active agent for AfricanAmerican interests to the passive and thus ultimately counter-productive ethos heconstructs for Washington. 6In the course of this essay, Du Bois deploys many of the argumentativetechniques described in the New Rhetoric, and had I time enough and my readerpatience enough, we could work our way through the text to discover their presenceand appreciate how they work within the metabolism of Du Bois’ rhetoric. Thisexercise surely would improve our understanding of the essay, and it might alsoexpand our knowledge of rhetoric and argumentation, for it would allow us to seethings about argumentative performance that can hardly be described outside of thecontext of their use. In any case, however, an appreciation of the argumentativefunction of the author’s persona (of the persuasive interaction between ‘‘speaker’’and ‘‘speech’’) depends upon close attention to the text and a rather detailedunderstanding of its context. Knowledge of techniques of argument provides auseful resource for rhetorical inquiry, but in itself, it is insufficient to account for theembodied practices of rhetorical arguers.To put this point in other and more general terms, I am arguing that afundamental tension exists within Perelman’s project. On the one hand, he adopts athoroughly rhetorical perspective on argumentation when he insists on treatingarguments as situated action, but on the other hand, his analysis of argumentationfollows from a dialectically oriented system for identifying and classifying abstract,decontextualized argumentative techniques. Perhaps this tension already appears inthe opening sentence of the New Rhetoric, where Perelman and Olbrichts-Tytecaconnect their treatise ‘‘with the ancient tradition of Greek rhetoric and dialectic’’.This formulation suggests a conflation between two closely related but distinguishableapproaches to argument, and it might prove useful for us to understand thatdistinction as it is suggested in the body of the New Rhetoric and as it is exemplifiedin the scholarship of recent dialecticians and informal logicians. The dialecticalimpulse produces an inventory of argumentative strategies and outlines conditionsfor their appropriate applications, and as such, it offers a rough guide to thesprawling, divergent, and often bewildering array of practices that enter intorhetorical performance. Rhetoric and dialectic, then, are positioned to complementone another—dialectic gives some shape to rhetorical inquiry, while rhetoricprevents dialectical abstractions from perfecting themselves to the point that theylose contact with argumentative reality. Viewed from this angle, the tension in theNew Rhetoric reveals something more than a problem that needs correction. It alsosuggests that rhetoric and dialectic are sister arts (antistrophoi, to use Aristotle’sterm) that should interact with one another. We might view this relationship as onebetween dialectic as argument and rhetoric as persuasion or as one betweendialectical and rhetorical species of argument. But in either case, we can recognizethe need to sustain interest both in the storehouse of argumentative strategies and inthe particular cases where the strategies come to life as discursive performance.6 For a more fully elaborated rhetorical analysis of the essay see, Leff and Terrill (1995).123

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