Ouch!

Ouch!

While I was in complete agreement with much of what Ramus wrote throughout my reading of Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian, I kept finding myself feeling sorry for the long dead rhetorician Quintilian.

Ramus raises many good arguments about how and why Rhetoric has nothing to do with morality and that effective oration is in no way correlated to the good moral character of the rhetor. Ramus was quick to point out the flaws in Quintilian’s definition of an effective orator, “Quintilian decrees that there are five parts to the art of rhetoric - I shall talk about these afterwards - invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. He thinks there are no more and no less. Yet in no one of these parts does he fit in the moral philosophy which he now attributes to rhetoric. In fact this man was sadly lacking in a knowledge of dialectic. If he had learned from it that in every art and branch of knowledge one must seek out the true, proper, and primary causes of the subject, he would have decided that an orator should be defined quite differently, and he would have learned that he should speculate quite differently on the proper qualities of the arts.” (684)

As many of us have pointed out in previous blog posts, some of the most persuasive orators in history were far from being of good moral character. Undoubtedly Ramus could not foresee the rise of such men as Hitler, largely through his ability to persuade through oration, but he certainly understood Quintilian’s naivety in not understanding that rhetoric is as likely to be an effective tool for a good man as it is to be an effective tool for an evil man.