Rhetoric, after all, is everywhere. Ask any rhetorician and he or she will agree. And yet, rhetoric itself, as a deliberate study or practice, is very much not everywhere, despite its incredible success producing scholars and teachers in great numbers.

I think part of the issue is that philosophers have had, since Socrates, a deep suspicion of rhetoric. Indeed, one can argue that Kant, Hegel, and their successors are popular in part because of their lousiness as rhetoricians. That said, it would be good if philosophers thought more about what kind of rhetoric has what kind of impact. If nothing else, they should dissect the phenomenon that they’re up against. Too often, philosophers interested in change will track the influence of “an idea” from Descartes or whoever up through the ages, but a better analysis would be to say that a particular rhetorical strategy had gained prominence and thence influence. Rhetorical strategies are harder to kill than ideas, and they shape the ideas we stumble on in our investigations of the world.

Kant, Hegel, and their successors are popular in part because of their lousiness as rhetoricians

A provocative idea!

Thanks for the response, Ian.

I think there's another way of thinking of this issue of rhetoric being everywhere and the study of rhetoric not being everywhere.

We (scholars but also writers and arguers in general) have internalized many of the lessons of rhetorical practice. Western education (there should be scare quotes all over the place here) is very much built upon rhetorical theory even if it doesn't always (or ever) explicitly recognize this foundation. Ideas of audience, persuasion, ethos - these are things we make use of every day, even if we're not studying them explicitly.

So, I guess rhetoric is everywhere and nowhere because many (not all) of the basic assumptions of rhetorical theory are built into our communicative modes. Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates are the spectres of Western education.

Alas, not an original one. The theory goes that Kant came upon his lousiness in the Critiques naturally but thereafter in German at least bad writing became a sign of "seriousness," "difficulty," etc. and praised for its own sake.

Jim, thanks for the response and sorry it got stuck in spamville for two months!

You're right that rhetoric is an unseen hero, so to speak. But it's interesting to note that other fundamentals are so much more frequently mentioned or discussed even in casual conversation. If we think about the old trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, it's only rhetoric that people misunderstand, misconstrue, or ignore so frequently. Or think of mathematics instead. Why is that we acknowledge these other foundations, which are also built into our basic modes?

I had completely forgotten what I wrote. :)

Many rhetoricians would answer your question with one word: Ramus. But most would also agree that Ramus stands in for a complicated tradition of rhetoric's restriction. We could even blame the Enlightenment for labeling rhetoric as ornamentation (covering over truth), but there are plenty of culprits. The bottom line is that rhetoric has always had a fraught relationship with "truth," and grammar and logic have had a much easier relationship with the "t" word.

Also, I think Bender and Wellbery's The Ends of Rhetoric (collection of essays) does the best job of explaining both of the things we're talking about. For B and W, the onset of modernity signals a return of rhetoric as "rhetoricality" (their word). While rhetoric is a set of practices, rhetoricality is a "generalized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience." Perhaps this is why we don't talk about it. It's more embedded than the other two thirds of the trivium.

At any rate, it was great to continue this conversation, no matter how long it took!

Jim, it's certainly true that rhetoric suffered a "dark period" that perhaps still afflicts it. I suppose it goes back not just to the Enlightenment, but to Socrates. Your suggestion that the relationship with truth troubles rhetoric most is its tendency to parry with truth, but it's also true that persuasion (and indeed manipulation) are often discussed matters in business, psychology, and other areas, yet hardly ever in terms of rhetoric. And yet, when I first advanced my theory of procedural rhetoric, it was the psychology and cog-sci folks who found it worth engaging with first; the rhetoricians are still catching up.

I'm willing to be swayed, but I never found B&W's concept of rhetoricality persuasive (as it were). It seemed to me like a strange attempt to whitewash everything into rhetoric. The "always already rhetorical" move doesn't leave me with either theoretical or practical tool. It just feels like a parlor trick.