The Permanence of Wilbur Samuel Howell
For so many centuries, as the Roman Empire, rhetorical education prevailed for the most part in a continuum from Quintilian until the 16th century. Peter Ramus, the French academic protected by Henry II and martyred on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572, was one of the first to openly challenge Aristotle and Quintilian. Whether or not Ramus successfully critiqued those old masters on intellectual grounds, his teaching gained influence on the European Continent, in England, and in New World universities such as Harvard.
A few decades after Ramus's death, the philosophers Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes revolutionized the established, ancient approaches to knowledge. The ancients had taken for granted a kind of "communal" understanding expressed in the "commonplaces" or topoi. Most likely, these commonplaces were founded upon the great philosophers' observations of the societies around them. I'll give an example of the old kind of thinking from Aristotle's Rhetoric Book I Chapter 7: "But since often when people agree that both of two things are advantageous, they dispute over which is more so" (trans. Joe Sachs, Focus Publishing 2009, p. 154). We take Aristotle's authority upon his own society as relevant to our own. His wisdom may still apply today -- but Bacon and Descartes were not satisfied.
Bacon wanted empirical evidence to reconstitute itself with each thinker, while Descartes wanted the intellectual certainty that came from the thinker's own certainty in himself and God. Whatever their differences, Ramus, Bacon, and Descartes permanently shifted the grounds of Western rationality, and with it, the possibilities of Western rhetoric.
So few contemporary rhetorical scholars (by "contemporary" I mean 20th century and later) have grappled with the modernism of the 16th and 17th centuries. When I was a graduate student, I took multiple classes in rhetorical theory or history that were profuse in detail from the pre-Socratic Sophists until Quintilian, or perhaps (at the latest) St. Augustine ... and then began again in the 20th century. Even the most thorough rhetorical histories tend to disappear in the 19th century, with a certain lip service paid to 18th and early 19th century theorists such as George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and Richard Whately. I'm glad those teachers exposed to us these "middle" figures, but too often the historical consciousness of rhetoric ends with St. Augustine and begins in the 20th century.
When I think about trying to define "rhetoric" in the twentieth century, I almost falter. I tried to teach Rhetorical Theory at Northern Illinois University twice, in the fall semesters of 2017 and 2018 ... in the latter attempt I drew upon the work of Wilbur Samuel Howell.
Are you hip to Howell? I did not want to "skip" the centuries between Augustine and whomever you believe to have revived rhetoric in the twentieth century. How could I fill in those gaps for so many centuries? How could I remain faithful to the exceedingly complex tradition from Gorgias to Quintilian, while taking account of all the historical changes wrought by the Christian Church in Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Science?
I searched around, and found that Howell has translated Alcuin's treatise on rhetoric from the late 8th century.
Howell has written comprehensive and exhaustive histories of rhetoric and logic in England from 1600 to the early 19th centuries and translated Fenelon's Dialogues on Eloquence, what he calls the first modern rhetoric. To Howell, George Campbell made perhaps the greatest attempt to reconcile true, classical rhetoric with the "new logic" of Bacon and Descartes. One has to scrutinize Howell's work oneself to make one's judgment on the question.
I think the most important contribution Howell has made to contemporary rhetorical theory is his determinedly neo-classical distinctions between logic, rhetoric, and poetics:
Poetics refers to any fiction or mimesis of reality such as a drama, poem, novel, etc. Marc Antony's speech in Julius Caesar is an example of "rhetoric" nestled within the drama, and so the dominant paradigm for that "fictionalized" speech remains poetics, not rhetoric. Today poetics often gets classified into the world of "entertainment," but every fictional show or story always has a "message" to communicate.
Rhetoric, in Howell's sense, involves a direct, argumentative address to a popular audience. So if John F. Kennedy uses a fiction or fable about imagination and greatness in the context of a speech about space travel to the televised public, that would be "poetics" nestled in the greater paradigm of rhetoric. ... Or, even better, when Martin Luther King, Jr., imagines "one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers," King is employing poetics for the use of rhetoric. Most of what you see in the public sphere, on the internet, in the news, is rhetoric, because it aims to persuade the public through direct statement, not fictionalized story-telling.
Logic, in the pre-Bacon and pre-Descartes sense, is a direct argumentative address to a specialized audience (also dialectic or disputation). Even if today it refers to inquiry, demonstration, or the rules of inference, it still culminates in, and so forms a part of, some kind of communication to a learned audience.
By this reckoning, when we teach "academic writing" we are teaching a species of logic or dialectic, insofar as we ask students to assume an academic audience. If we were to ask them to write for a popular audience (which we sometimes do), that would be a genuine case of "rhetoric."
By this theory, poetics, rhetoric, and logic are all forms of communication with an audience to achieve specific purposes, etc. Just calling some discourse targeted to an audience and dependent on a situation is not sufficient to classify it as particularly "rhetorical" (Wayne Booth's "Rhetoric of Fiction" would thus be oxymoronic and impossible; Booth just has a special, audience-oriented slant on poetics).
Why do I make so much of Howell's distinctions? To me, Howell is an authority not only on rhetorical theory from 1600-1850, which, as I have claimed above, is a crucial period in the history of rhetoric. He may be wrong on any number of questions--for instance, I believe Howell underestimates Thomas De Quincey and the Romantic interpretation of rhetoric--but Howell has studied more closely than anyone else a longer duration of rhetorical theory, and he has done so both more faithfully to the classical tradition, and yet more flexibly to adapt to the new logics of England and France beginning in the 17th centuries.
Howell is a modernist, when compared to the ancient classical tradition, but a conservative, when compared to the radical and neo-classical rhetorical theorists of the twentieth century. For to "revive" an ancient (two thousand year old) paradigm unchanged, divorced from continuity with the present, is just as radical as starting anew, from scratch. Howell did not solve the problem of continuity in rhetorical theory from the 18th to the 20th centuries, but he posed the question more successfully than anyone, and no one will need, ever, to reproduce his labor.
Therefore, Howell poses a challenge to every modern rhetorical theorist -- have you accounted for the "new rhetoric" of Bacon and Descartes? Those who fail to answer Howell's challenge, implicitly or explicitly, have failed to truly innovate. All of us, blustering with our pretenses to the cutting-edge or avant garde, are still caught hanging at the end of the 18th century; we are still wrestling with the epistemology of rhetoric and truth, the paradox of an individualistic public, aesthetic questions of taste and expression -- most of all, how can we invoke a discipline of rhetoric when we both disavow the classical tradition and yet we still want to reclaim it? Surely, we cannot be operating in bad faith?
Surely not -- and this is why we need Wilbur Samuel Howell, the more so as we try to claim originality as rhetorical theorists today.