THE BACKGROUND OF HUMANIST HISTORICAL LANGUAGE:

The Quarrel of Philosophy and Rhetoric

IN ORDER to write a history of the relations between rhetoric and history, it is necessary to grasp the triangular relationship of history, rhetoric, and philosophy, for the tension between philosophy and rhetoric dominates and gives shape to the rhetorical tradition; the quarrel of philosophy and rhetoric provides dynamic and direction in classical learning. This quarrel even antedates the arrival of the first teachers of rhetoric in Athens; the deep distrust of the philosophers for the rhetors is grounded in their awareness of the connection between rhetoric and the Sophists. Socrates in the Theaetetns contrasts the free philosopher, liberally educated, with the rhetorically trained advocate, "a servant ... continually disputing about a fellow-servant before his master" (172D). For Socrates the central error of both Sophists and rhetoricians is their obedience to intermediate and relative, rather than final and absolute ends. This error in turn has its source in a false ontology: the rhetors were followers of Heraclitus and Protagoras in so far as they conceived the cosmos as flux and man as the measure of all things. Socrates attacked them as part of a heterodox, a separatist movement in Greek thought. In the Gorgias Plato gives systematic expression to the Socratic exaltation of the philosopher over the rhetor: while the philosopher, he argues, is concerned with the sphere of the Eternally True which can be apprehended only through the operations of reason, the rhetors' only possible sphere of effectiveness is the realm of the probable (eikos) perceived through the senses and structured by phantasia and mimesis.

This contrast of priorities defined the debate in the history of classical philosophy long after Plato, and its radical separation of Reality and Appearance was reinforced by much of late classical and medieval theology — Neoplatonic, Gnostic, or Christian. Thus the history of rhetoric from the Socratic period to the Renaissance can be regarded as an unequal contest in which the metaphysical claims of the philosophers and theologians continually modify the rhetorical counterclaims rooted in Sophistic assumptions. The theory and structure of spoken and written discourse reflect the changing tensions between rhetorical exigencies and philosophical or theological axioms; at every crucial change in the temper of the Western intellectual tradition a new resolution of these conflicting demands alters the configurations of linguistics, literature, and pedagogy.

This quarrel of philosophy and rhetoric obviously has important repercussions in the theory and practice of history. In order to assess the effects of this tension, however, it is first necessary to establish the external analogues in the careers of rhetoric and historiography. For even on the surface the fortunes of rhetoric and history coincide: both alternate between stages where they played a vital part in a dynamic political situation and those where they were relegated to the schoolroom and the study. Thus rhetoric achieved its status as a profession in the active political and juristic atmosphere of fifth century Sicily after the fall of the tyrants; and it declined as the Greek polis decayed, forensic and judicial oratory becoming increasingly irrelevant means to the realization of public alternatives. History also flourished in Greece both during the period of vitality of the polis and during its earliest period of decline when political issues were still debated with vigor and relevance; but the hardening of the political arteries afflicted history as well.

This cycle is repeated in Rome and Renaissance Italy. Polybius, Sallust, and Tacitus; the Villanis, Bruni, and Machiavelli, are all partisans of genuine debate. There is an even more exact parallel of circumstance; the onset of serious rhetorical interest coincides in all three cases with the beginning of a still hidden but genuine political decline; the concern with rhetoric is part of a destructive self-consciousness which extends to the consciousness of the past in historiography as well as to contemporaneous political and educational roles. In fulfillment of Hegel's dictum that the owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk, the great historians — Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavelli — all share the bitterness of describing past ideals in the crepuscular light of the declining years of once vigorous polities which had nourished these ideals.

The main theme of this survey, however, is to show internal as well as external similarities between the career of rhetoric and that of history, and to demonstrate how these similarities reflect very basic relationships between the concept of language and the concept of history. If the tension between philosophy and rhetoric is the dynamic of the history of language theory in antiquity, the history of Greek historiography can be resolved into three dialectical stages. In the first stage, broad and undifferentiated aesthetic and philosophical purposes dominate Ionic historia. There is a second stage of "classical" definition in the fifth and fourth centuries in which both the rhetorical and historical disciplines become distinguished by a cluster of characteristics which are in part the characteristics of modern "historicism": there is a commitment to confront and to extract meaning, i.e. wide and prescriptive human significance, from the flux of events of discourse and action. In the third stage, aesthetic and metaphysical ends (philosophically or theologically defined) again dominate historiography, but in a synthesis which absorbs many of the aims and techniques of the second period. In the Roman development, the three stages again appear, but in a vastly compressed or confused order.

First, then, the problem of artistic form in historiography antedates any imposition of specifically rhetorical form; the historian's preoccupation with aesthetics is rooted in the very ground of all his investigations. Next, the development of rhetoric, as a self-conscious effort at control of aesthetic means and purposes based on the recognition of the instability of the language and action with which it deals, impinges on historiography as a movement which recognizes autonomy of expression and significance. Again style is related to the order of things, but here the primary focus is on the style and order which are human creations. When in the final period the conflict between philosophy and rhetoric grows stale, and the real opportunities for political activity dwindle, the...