Organizer: Carine Defoort, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Chair and Discussant: Willard Peterson, Princeton University
The notion of "rhetoric" has varied widely throughout the Western tradition, ranging from the attempt to defend one's own claims implicit in every instance of communication to the explicit examination of one's verbal persuasiveness, the " téchne rhetoriké." Aside from these two basic senses specified by Aristotle at the outset of his book on rhetoric, the term has also come to stand for a specific approach to language and texts, distinguished from the traditional "philosophical" approach for its particular attention to the inevitable dependence and influence of all claims on their various cultural, emotional, political and linguistic contexts.
While in the West, "rhetoric" has recently been the object of renewed interest, in the field of Chinese studies it has received hardly any attention, partly because of the consensus that ancient China lacked a specific rhetorical téchne as it was established in Ancient Greece and transmitted throughout Western civilization. But few scholars would deny that Chinese texts are rhetorical in various senses or that studying them could profit from a rhetorical approach.
How can rhetoric be understood in relation to the Chinese corpus? What is rhetorical about these texts? In what sense would a rhetorical interpretation be instructive? Considering the revival of the rhetorical tradition in the West, discussion of these questions will be revealing, not only for the field of Chinese studies, but also for the ongoing controversy concerning the meaning of the term "rhetoric."
Light and the Mirror: Elements of Comparative Metaphorology
John-Paul Reding, University of Zurich
There is, in the Greek philosophical tradition, a great difference between the theoretical attitude to metaphor and the way in which metaphors are finally used. Although metaphors are theoretically banned from philosophical discourse in ancient Greece, Plato, the Presocratics, and even Aristotle rely very heavily on metaphorical expressions, and even seem to multiply them beyond measure. In ancient China, on the other hand, where the metaphorical way of arguing is not condemned, but rather encouraged, the amount of original and creative metaphors used in philosophical discourse is nevertheless astonishingly small. To explain this paradoxical situation, the author starts by examining several instances of "root-metaphors" (the metaphor of light and the mirror) common to both traditions. It is shown that the difference comes in with a different attitude to metaphor, itself conditioned by a different attitude to language and knowledge altogether. As the philosophical use of metaphors expresses itself already a basic attitude towards the problem of knowledge, the ideal the philosopher seeks to obtain is echoed in the very choice of the metaphor representing this ideal. If this metaphor happens to be the same in either tradition (as is the case with the metaphor of light examined here), it is developed in different directions. Cultural differences hence cannot globally be reduced to fundamental differences in the basic metaphorical apparatus of a culture, but rather to different attitudes to metaphor and to the problem of knowledge as a whole.
The Rhetorical Power of How to Call Things: Discussions of "Regicide"
Carine Defoort, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
The Chinese Masters have traditionally been read as "philosophy." One characteristic of this approach is the opposition between content and form. While the content is supposed to travel from one mind to another, little attention is paid to its means of transportation: the modes of expression through which the argument is conveyed. The "rhetorical" tradition, which questions this strict separation by calling attention to the inseparable connection of content and language, suggests an alternative approach to the classical corpus.
This presentation focuses on the power of language evolving from the judicious use of words in the Documents and Annals to the conscious exploitation of the expressions "suowei X" (what we call X) and "zhi/shi wei X " (what X refers to) in the Xunzi These expressions have been almost systematically neglected in the philosophical reconstructions of the Chinese discussions, if not simply abandoned in the process of translation.
The technique of revaluing a situation by renaming it will be presented through the discussion concerning regicide (shi)in these texts. Although at first sight the classical corpus may seem in remarkable agreement on the rejection of this act, the authors disagree on the evaluation of concrete historical events. The disagreement lies in the question of precisely what deserves to be called "regicide" or "reign." Rather than explicitly defending regicide by appeal to higher principles, discussion occurs in a subtle play of specifying terms to evaluate the events.
The Power of Suggestion: Rhetorical Strategies in Early Han Political Persuasion
Griet Vankeerberghen, Princeton University
In my paper I will focus on some of the rhetorical features of early Han political writing. Advisers to the throne, when wishing to promote a specific course of action or dispense general political advice, were bound by certain forms when presenting their discourses. Such formal constraints were generated by concrete examples of persuasions by contemporaries and historical predecessors, by general stylistic preferences of early Chinese culture, and by the specific socio-political context prevailing in early Han.
Perhaps the most salient of these formal features of early Han political addresses is the indirectness of expression. Often the real message was hidden behind a thick layer of flattery and self-depreciation, of historical and literary allusion. Rhetorical questions were frequently employed, in part because they allowed the speaker or writer to suggest conclusions without commitment to explicit statements. Starting from some concrete examples of early Han political writings I will examine the levels of directness of expression attained in these texts, focusing on the use of specific rhetorical techniques.
Underlying this paper is the view that rhetoric as applied to China should be a reconstructive effort that aims at determining the specific rhetorical features of persuasion in classical China (mostly in contradistinction to the Greco-Roman case), focuses on those genres and texts that are most obviously rhetorical (especially political persuasion), and pays attention to the historical position of a specific text within the network of rhetorical traditions.