JAC Volume 14 Issue 1

Human understanding, reasonableness, and the interdependence—even identity—of rhetoric and hermeneutics: these seem tome the most resonant chords struck in JAC’s interview with Stephen Toulmin. Not long before Cosmopolis appeared, The Return to Cosmology examined a group of twen­tieth-century thinkers, among them Teilhard de Chardin and Gregory Bateson. Toulmin emphasizes that they restored systemic and teleological dynamics to desiccated fields that had lost their way in forests of subspecializations and micromethodologies. Through persistence in emphasizing collective uses of concepts and their ongoing evolution in contexts, Toulmin integrates, harmonizes, cross references, recontextualizes, and dreams of being one among the most recent creators of nova organa, with a glance back at Aristotle and Bacon, and aside to contemporary figures like Teilhard. Aristotle’s and Bacon’s are two of the better known precursors. The designation novum organon is apt, for a number of reasons. It emphasizes that in animating and orchestrating the instrument, creativity, the novum in the organon, comes into being. We can do with a few nova ova just now amid necromantic theories and theorists proclaiming the death of all matter human and humanistic.

Toulmin’s objections to proponents of literary analysis and criticism as sciences are reminiscent of L.A. Richards’ attempts to defend metaphor and rhetoric alike against the new sciences of logical positivism and linguistic philosophy. Defending rationality against the onslaught of postmodern theories, and noting that their decontextual, ahistorical contours are oddly scientistic, Toulmin provides additional sketches for reunifying and redefin­ing the relationships among philosophy, rhetoric, ethics, and logic. There is an edifying humor in the observation that a certain strand of modern Western thought has veered off the road of human companionship—mutual under­standing, contexts, and history—since Descartes, a line of descent (among solipsists) that links otherwise dissimilar figures. The genealogy includes Derrida, who on many counts would seem the arch nemesis of Cartesian mentalism. Similarly, we are reminded, Chomsky severed linguistic science from the larger contexts of human understanding and experience, and

manifests an aggressively dismissive attitude: “Anybody who asks about the evolutionary precursors of language doesn’t understand what language is.” Per contra, Toulmin affirms the merit of studies of alphabetic versus ideo­graphic cultures. Such studies can suggest subtle nuances in cognition and aesthetics that are shaped by language learning: “Learning to write in Chinese is much more like learning to paint.” In a similarly contextual appraisal, Toulmin illuminates the debates within contemporary linguistic science from the historicizing perspective of the evolutionary hinge point at which Descartes and Montaigne part company. Placed in this line of descent, the recent developments of logical positivism and analytic philosophy can be seen as only the most recent, and not the sole, source of the linguistic turn. It is precisely this impasse that has led logicians—and proponents of argu­mentation within speech communication, rhetoric and composition—to restore to argumentation that limber practical wisdom that Aristotle termed phronesis.

 Toulmin, Hermeneutics, and Theory

When Stephen Toulmin came to our Ph.D. program not long ago as Distin­guished Humanities Lecturer, we had little idea how rich a fulcrum he would provide for our integrated graduate programs in rhetoric, philosophy, and literature—an exemplum of the novissimum organon that he gives fuller exposition here. Among our local philosophers are those for whom “rheto­ric” has bad overtones. Yet they are nothing if not deeply interested in an argumentation that goes beyond p’s and q’s, in hermeneutics that goes beyond Heidegger, in forms of reasoning that are shared by rhetoric and philosophy and that link the sciences and the humanities. Many of our literary scholars and students had come to understand “rhetoric” as “theory,” and specifically postmodern theory, even though those who teach the first-year English course are familiar with the “other” rhetoric: Aristotle and Isocrates; Cicero and Augustine; Bain, Blair, Campbell, and Whateley; Burke and Young, Becker, and Pike; and of course “the Toulmin method.” The model of a novissimum organon amplifies the conceptual basis of local curricular ties that bind hermeneutics, logic, and rhetoric as forms of reason­ing and methods of self-understanding and discoursing shared by all disci­plines.

Toulmin’s eager revisionism with regard to “the Toulmin method” invigorated our thinking concerning the place of argumentation in our first-year composition course. In a three-semester sequence that integrates reading, writing, and critical thinking, we use the Toulmin method in concert with Aristotle’s topoi, Burke’s Pentad, Ricoeur’s interpretation theory, and tagmemics as prolegomena for reading as well as for the thinking and writing tasks that encompass a number of genres. Bacon and Montaigne mingle with Tillie Olsen and James Joyce; autobiography is aligned with history; both genres are tested against multiple concepts of the relationships among understanding, self-understanding, and reasoning. Graduate teaching assis­tants who had been struggling with the Toulmin method were refreshed to see Toulmin distancing himself from that method: c’est ne pas moi. At the same time, he urged them to use the parts that work, to find and design working parts, and not to be afraid of methods just because they are methods. These emphases place self-revision and self-revelation among the models for the kind of thinking and the modes of discourse that anovum organon should and can propound. “Once you get into ethics, politics, poetics, rhetoric, and the other things that Aristotle also regards as worth including in his entire series of linked projects, the thing becomes inescapably hermeneutic.” Representing argumentation as hermeneutic and hermeneutics as argument encourage palintropic thinking about discoursing, reasoning, and under­standing that merit special attention in an era that cries for central clearing houses, safe houses, and common languages (Berthoff, “Rhetoric”; Pratt). Finding patterns that connect is a taxing but also exciting challenge just now as we devise ways to opening up reasoning and discourse to academic disciplines and new student populations undergoing rapid metamorphosis, just as they were in the twenties, where Toulmin begins his account of the Cambridge years of G.E. Moore, l.A. Richards, and Wittegenstein.

Thinking extensively before setting pen to paper, and ample revision and editing thereafter are represented as self-revising abilities developed in order to save the reader work and thereby reduce the possibility of misunderstand­ing. Toulmin’s reader-friendly mode of exposition is instructively insepa­rable from the issues he addresses in this interview. As in the essays of Montaigne, the thought and exposition lead from a tributary into a stream. Dewey, Wittgenstein, Habermas, Liebnitz, and Descartes speak to one another in, through, and about their contexts, temporality, eras, and epochs. “What I found particularly unsatisfactory [about Wittgenstein] was his failure to pay any attention to the long-term intellectual significance of history.” These and other reflections upon Wittgenstein at Cambridge illuminate the many points at which the twenties parallels our own era: virtually opaque esoteric mystical theories cohabiting academia with multiculturalisms, linguistic turns, philosophies of science and sciences of philosophy warring over words and worlds. It was in a similar era of ignorant armies clashing by night that L.A. Richards took such pains to address rhetoric as a remedy for misunderstanding and its remedies (Berthoff, Richards, esp. 106-17). Like Toulmin’s, Richards’ self-designated task is expressly political and pedagogical; one parallel between the two eras is marked by their shared concern for reducing misunderstanding through practical uses of reason, for restoring contexts, and for understanding how concepts evolve within contexts.

Perhaps the widest circle of all in the perspectives Toulmin weaves together here concern the various and persistent rifts that eternally divide contextualists and decontextualists, evolutionary temporalists and atemporalists. In an odd brotherhood, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and Lyotard are linked by a rejection of context, causality, and history. They have lost the vehicle for considerations of ethics, politics, poetics, and rhetoric that Toulmin emphasizes are the quintessentials of phronesis, or practical wisdom (also see Cooper; Nussbaum). Mystical opaque theory is currently appealing to left-wing intellectuals at a time of widespread political disenchantment (Berthoff “Rhetoric”; Norris 25). Toulmin’s genealogy of postmodern theory joins other recent accounts of Lyotard as among the most recent exponents of a Kantian aesthetics that in radical figures such as Baudrillard leads inescapably to political quietism: “Any politics which goes along with the current postmodernist drift will end up by effectively endors­ing and promoting the work of ideological mystification, such as we find in Iran-Contragate or the Falklands war” (Norris 127). Programmatic mystifi­cation is, Toulmin observes, a far cry from the classical Pyrrhonists, whose Occamish razors sheared away with continuous questions that led them to examine how the current state of affairs came to be. Like Aristotle’s, Toulmin’s organon provides avenues for cross-referencing and practical application of such examinations, and it helps to guide discourse as well as to locate theory within an evolving conceptual world today. Teleology is an important element in the concept ofphronesis that was so central to Aristotle’s organon. It is not at all surprising that practical wisdom and some of its modern cousins such as dialogical hermeneutics and existentialism have been adopted as touchstones in recontextualizations of philosophy and rhetoric. Theory with a little t, after all, is simply the ability to see and think about, reflect upon. Children make great theorists because “they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as ‘natural.’ Chil­dren who remain discontent grow up to be emancipatory theorists, unable to conquer their amazement at what everyone else seems to take for granted” (Eagleton 34).

Toulmin emphasizes that new demands will be placed upon rationality and reason now that theory with a capital T has been dismantled. In the wreckage of postmodernisms, if dear Prudence is to come out and play she must have companions, instruments, a musical tradition, and license to compose and innovate. One knows oneself, Epictetus said, as a singer in a chorus in harmony with others. It is encouraging to see continuity, history, evolutionary progressions, and context receive an accent grave in this discus­sion. Social constructionist paradigms of the composing self and the com­posing process are superseding the process, cognitive, personal, and expres­sive models developed in the 1980s. Process and cognitive models, many claim, emphasize too strongly the isolated Romantic individual seeking truth and self within the mind, an emphasis that may be seen as leading to mechanistic or narcissistic isolation of writer and text alike (Crosswhite, Fishman and McCarthy, Tingle). These and other pitfalls of Romanticism are also being reappraised within reviews of the complex compound of social liberalism, democratized hermeneutics, epistemological minimalism and anti-idealism, and aesthetic libertarianism. Like Wittgenstein, who tended to “attack Descartes with Cartesian weapons,” Lyotard and his tribe “are really rejecting Descartes for Cartesian reasons. Beneath all this, Toulmin suggests, lies a regressive solipsism. In one of Wittgenstein’s early notebooks appears the query, “What is history to me? Mine is the first and only world.” Toulmin remarks that Wittgenstein did not really get around this narcissism until after 1930, and even after that, Toulmin finds his treatments of ethics and history unsatisfactory because they cannot provide the kind of under­standing that interests Toulmin most: an account of human reason that will incorporate an explanation of how concepts change. A radically Pyrrhonhist or Cartesian view, Toulmin points out, disallows the formulation of such an explanation. On this point they are much like radical postmodern theories of linguistic determinism that generate interrogative deconstructions of meaning and knowledge alike. “The Saussurian paradigm—a form of struc­tural-linguistic a priori—stands behind Baudrillard’s wholesale reduction of economic, political, and social issues to questions of symbolic exchange and the ‘dissimulating’ agency of the sign” (Norris 188). Cartesian and Wittgenstenian solipsism eschew “the historically changing character of argument forms and basic concepts.” It was upon reaching the limits of Wittgenstein’s world that Toulmin first conceived the goal of The Uses of Argument: to seek accounts of rationality and reasonableness.

Argumentation, Wittgenstein, and Pragmatism

The Uses of Argument was first received in England as “an antilogic book” and almost died at birth; yet, Toulmin recounts, it was soon being used “up and down the Mississippi Valley” and was selling well in unexpected quarters: speech and communication classes in argument, and then in composition courses. Not initially conceived as a work on rhetoric or argumentation, and certainly not as a model of either with classroom applications, it has enjoyed surprisingly long and happy life. In our uses of Uses we have found it by and large better adapted to the task of analyzing arguments than of creating them. But as in the quip that is as old at least as Cicero—that argumentation models are tools for dissecting and not for composing arguments—this has been true of most uses of argument from Aristotle to Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca. Toulmin’s self-revision on this point proved especially fruitful in discussions with our graduate teaching assistants. In our uses of Uses we had already cut the warrant loose so that more than one warrant could be found for a given argument, depending on shared values and diversity of audience views that could at times function like a group of floating koinoi topoi. Fully drawn contexts, we have discovered, permit several warrants—not any at all, but several—to mingle in many instances of argument and persuasion, just as Shakespeare’s plays operate on two levels at least: humor for the groundlings; more sophisticated syntax and lexicon for the educated. The tacit dimension (pace Polanyi) implied by warrants is a rich mine of inferences, interpreta­tions, and plural examinations of how any one argument functions. Thus we were well primed when Toulmin arrived on the scene to similarly loosen up backings by specifying the very different kinds there are.

In its original context, Uses arose as an investigation into argument in epistemology and in particular into empiricist epistemology from Locke to Kant, up to Mach and Russell and on through to G.E. Moore and his Cambridge generation. Wittgenstein’s arrival at Cambridge, and his recep­tion by G.E. Moore, has been recounted by I.A. Richards in an interview conducted with Reuben Brower: “Wittgenstein started asking Moore ques­tions. For the first time in our many years’ experience of Moore, Moore was submissive, gentle, doing his best to understand. It was a complete reversal. Mohammed was gone to the mountain. And from that moment came Wittgenstein’s dominance over Moore and over Cambridge” (Brower 10-11). How, Brower asks Richards, did meeting with Wittgenstein affect how he thought about language? Richards reports, “I was very negative. Wittgenstein was a personality who required utter devotion. People who saw much of Wittgenstein acquired what I irreverently christened ‘Saint Wittgenstein’s Dance.’ They twitched and they pulled faces and they stopped to stare upwards” (11). Of Moore, Richards recounts, “When Wittgenstein would start a sentence ten times, Moore would write it on his pad ten times up to the point where he broke it off. Absolute devotion. Most peculiar. It gave me the creeps” (11). This might seem irrelevant gossip were it not for the fact that Wittgenstein’s appearance on the Cambridge scene is generally regarded as an important shift away from the empiricist epistemology that Moore developed and toward the minimalist and analytic philosophy of language that led to the crippling demand that Toulmin defines: “that substantive arguments meet formal criteria of a sort that seemed to me (and to Aristotle) inappropriate.” If that criterion was not met then the Wittgenstenian maxim was invoked: “whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent.” Toulmin’s Reason in Ethics and Philosophy of Science were early attempts to redress the carving away at understandings of substantive argument that were reducing it to logical positivism or nothing.

It would seem that William James’ and Dewey’s pragmatism provide an American antidote and counterpart to the movement away from logical minimalism. Paradoxically, Toulmin notes, one aspect of Dewey’s emphasis parallels Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game: language functions within collective enterprises, “not just language but Lebensform provide situations within which different language games can operate.” Widely claimed as forefathers by contemporary neopragmatists such as Richard Rorty, James and Dewey invoked what today are termed social construction­ist models of language use. And yet, Toulmin observes, “Rorty still has a highly individualistic attitude toward all philosophical issues and even toward language; anybody’s welcome to invent their own language, so to say, and if you want to talk a different language that’s your privilege.” Once again, it seems, certain traces of Romantic expressivism and Cartesian solipsism have worked their way into ostensibly collectivist and ethically pragmatic theories. To get at this, Toulmin extends his gaze once again further back, to Descartes and the confinement that theoretical philosophy has imposed upon argumentation and the validity of arguments—since the seventeenth century (!)—within the narrow constraints of the Prior and PosteriorAnalytics of Aristotle. In other words, the modern confinement of logical argument is untrue to Aristotle and is no doubt one source of the modern association of Aristotle with logical formalism and syllogistic method. Toulmin argues for an alternate Aristotle, the Aristotle of the full organon , an Aristotle who has also been invoked in Martha Nussbaum’s recent readings of Aristotle’s ethics in terms of the concept of phronesis. Within rhetoric and composition, a similar emphasis has been defended by James Kinneavy, among others (Swearingen). In such an expanded vision of Aristotle, logic, language, and the human uses of human reason, rhetoric too receives amplification.

In what to me is among the most illuminating passages of the interview, Toulmin proposes, “Whether the argument was valid or not is a question that can be established and to which the answer can be given without peradventure, whereas once you get into ethics, politics, poetics, rhetoric, and the other things that Aristotle also regards as worth including in his entire series of linked projects, the thing becomes inescapably hermeneutic. What we call ‘rhetoric’ has to be understood as including dialectic, topics, all those bits of the discussion about argumentation that are not analytic. Whether it’s prudent to go on calling these things ‘rhetoric’ when there are still many people for whom the word rhetoric has all kinds of bad overtones, is another question” (21-22). Prudence long ago opined that rhetoric in the eyes of the beholder might indeed a harlot be. Yet as the teacher of the uses of the tropes and figures and reasonings, Dame Rhetoric with her sword and mirror simply reminds us, with the help of Prudence, that it is no more or less than ourselves that we see: all those long lost bits of the discussion that are not analytic.

University of Texas
Arlington, Texas