Брой 4
Michelle K. Bolduc, David A. Frank
Abstract. This article provides a much clearer conceptualization of argumentation and its relationship to time than can be found in The New Rhetoric and serves as a bookend to Perelman’s 1949 article, “Philosophies premières et philosophie regressive” in the Swiss journal Dialectica.
Keywords: Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric, argumentation, temporlity.
Коментар върху„За темпоралността като характеристика на аргументацията“ на Хаим Перелман и Люси Олбрехтс-Титека
Мишел К. Болдук, Дейвид А. Франк
Абстракт. Тази статия предлага по-ясна концептуализация на аргументацията и нейната връзка с времето така, както е представена в „Нова реторика“, и служи като преход към анализ на статията на Перелман “Philosophies premières et philosophie regressive”, публикувана през 1949 г. в швейцарското научно списание „Диалектика“.
Ключови думи: Перелман, Олбрехтс-Титека, Нова реторика, аргументация, темпоралност.
“The last third of the twentieth century”, Gerard Hauser writes, was marked by “a flurry of intellectual work aimed at theorizing rhetoric in new terms” (2001, 1). The year 1958 was key in this flurry, with five major works appearing on a rhetorically inflected philosophy and theory of argumentation: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (on the relationship between the vita contemplativa and vita activa); Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (on the role of tacit knowledge, emotion, and commitment in science); Stephen Toulmin’s Uses of Argument (on the use of argument in nonformal contexts); Walter Ong’s Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (on the history of the separation of rhetoric and logic); and Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique [The New Rhetoric] (on a rapprochement of rhetoric and logic). These books mark a “rhetorical turn” in twentieth-century thought.
Of the five, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s work had the greatest influence on rhetorical theory in the twentieth century. Indeed, we believe the post-World War II rhetorical turn is best codified in The New Rhetoric, as it responds to the postwar crisis of reason with a rhetorical system designed to extend reason into the vita activa, grant the role of tacit knowledge and commitment in knowledge, display the importance of argumentation as a counterpart to formal logic, and bridge the separation Ramus made between rhetoric and logic (Frank and Bolduc 2004; Frank 2007). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca were among a host of thinkers who sought to redress the failure of reason to address questions of ethics and the world of the living.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric was the result of a ten-year collaboration, one that sought to set forth a system of argumentation designed to persuade embodied audiences. According to Perelman’s daughter, Noemi Mattis-Perelman, the final product was over 2,000 pages; the press required the collaborators to condense it to 738 pages. The rather underdeveloped, elliptical writing in The New Rhetoric may be due to space limitations. Concurrent with the 1958 publication of The New Rhetoric, Perelman alone and with Olbrechts-Tyteca published articles on the relationship between thought and action (Perelman,“Rapports théoriques de la pensée et de l’action”), classical and romantic topoi in argument (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, “Classicisme et romantisme”), pragmatic argument (Perelman, “L’argument pragmatique”), and the role of time in argumentation (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, “De la temporalité comme caractère de l’argumentation”).
These articles remain unavailable to an English-reading audience. They provide a more thorough explanation of several key concepts of the new rhetoric project than can be found in The New Rhetoric. In this essay, we contextualize and then provide a translation of “De la temporalité comme caractère de l’argumentation” [“On Temporality as a Characteristic of Argumentation”], which was first published in a special issue of the Italian journal Archivio di filosofia devoted to time. This article provides a much clearer conceptualization of argumentation and its relationship to time than can be found in The New Rhetoric and serves as a bookend to Perelman’s 1949 article, “Philosophies premières et philosophie regressive” in the Swiss journal Dialectica. It constitutes, in essence, Perelman’s philosophical justification of his turn to rhetoric (see our commentary and translation [Frank and Bolduc 2003]).
In “On Temporality”, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca develop a theme that may seem banal to a twenty-first century reader or academic: The oppositions we notice between classical demonstration, formal logic, and argumentation may, it seems, come back to an essential difference: time does not play any role in demonstration. Time is, however, essential in argumentation, so much so that we may wonder if it is not precisely the intervention of time that best allows us to distinguish argumentation from demonstration.
However, the thesis they advance was striking at the time, providing Western thought with an answer to the post-World War II crisis of reason.
In the aftermath of World War II, many thinkers traced the rise of totalitarian ideology to the constricted view of reason that prevailed before the war, which limited it to the vita contemplativa and logical positivism, placing questions of value and ethics beyond its jurisdiction (Delacampagne 1999; Judt 1998). Perelman, before he made his rhetorical turn in 1947–1948, was a confirmed logical positivist, concluding in his 1945 De la justice that there were no reasonable standards that could be used to justify one value over another (1963: 57–59). He joined many post-war intellectuals in a collective despair about the capacities of reason.
Perelman, in one of his later essays, places Parmenides’ vision of a time- less, “ontological monism” at the center of the twentieth-century European philosophical heritage (1979: 62). The Western and classical view of time can be traced to the great poem of Parmenides who, using the method of demonstrative deduction, “eliminated time from his ontology by appealing to the logical features of language and thought; in effect, he argued that time cannot be the object of any possible thought and consequently does not exist” (Turetzky 1998: 10). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gottlob Frege, A. J. Ayers, logical positivists, and analytic philosophers built upon this heritage, which dominated the prewar vision of reason. This vision placed reason beyond the pale of experience and lived time, beyond what Bergson termed “durée”, which dealt with the actual and left open the possibility of an unknown future.
Time played a fundamental role in the postwar critique of totalitarian movements and the prewar constriction of reason to apodictic logic. Hannah Arendt, in Origins of Totalitarianism, described the logic deployed by the Nazi movement and identified the characteristics of totalitarian thinking, which put ideas and action beyond the reach of time and change. Arendt crystallized three elements unique to totalitarian thinking. First, totalitarian thinking provides complete explanation, irrespective of the vagaries of time: “The claim to total explanation promises to explain all historical happenings, the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future” (1958: 470).
Second, totalitarian thinking is not affected by experience, as nothing new can evolve or arise to challenge totalitarian principles. Third, totalitarian thought and thinking are “emancipated” from “experience through certain methods of demonstration” (1958: 470). Ideological thinking “orders facts into an absolutely logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality” (1958: 470). In totalitarian societies, logical deduction rules, and the connections between and among premises are fused, closed, and resistant to experience.
Perelman detected the influence of the prewar definition of reason that limited its domain to the questions posed by logical positivism and excluded values in the rise of totalitarian movements. He understood that in the wake of World War I, positivism and rationalism represented attempts by philosophers to separate reason from emotion and values, the latter considered the product of metaphysical idealism, irrationality, and religion. Perelman (1949) also isolated the profound weakness in logical positivism, which “completely disarmed” those who sought values for proper action (the vita activa). Before the war, Perelman noted, “We lived with a certain unease at the Free University because we were not able to use a positive doctrine to oppose fascist slogans, dogmatism, fanaticism, or the appeal to force that these doctrines advocated” (1949: 46). In reconstituting, if not rescuing, reason, philosophers in the immediate years after World War II sought to challenge the limited definition of logic and rationality sponsored by logical positivism.
The challenge brought to the fore the relationship between time and reason, a foundational consideration in the new rhetoric project generally and more specifically in “On Temporality”. This relationship is opaque in The New Rhetoric, but Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca make clear their project is concerned with extending reason beyond the sphere of the vita contemplativa to the vita activa. Although “On Temporality” responds to totalitarian thinking, it was also a timely critique of American and European philosophy of the 1950s.
As John McCumber writes, American philosophers, chilled by McCarthyism, limited themselves “to the pursuit of true sentences (or propositions or sentences)” (2001, xix), purposefully avoiding current events or things political.“On Temporality”explicitly, if not boldly, announces that argumentation, as an expression of reason, is the counterpart to demonstration, offering to the vita activa the tools of logic available for the vita contemplativa.
The distinctions Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca make between vita contemplativa and vita activa and demonstration and argumentation have led some commentators to the conclusion that the new rhetoric project frames them as sets of binaries, with nothing in common. Perelman and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s strong indictment of Descartes, demonstrative logic, and the classical tradition of philosophy suggests to Frans Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst an “ill-considered prejudice that for the analysis of argumentation logic has nothing to offer (1992: 4). Others believe the new rhetoric ultimately defaults to Enlightenment thinking with its “universal audience”, which is interpreted as an audience that applies timeless and eternal standards of rationality (Ede 1981).
The New Rhetoric and “On Temporality” develop an argumentative expression of reason sharing much with demonstrative and apodictic logic. The relationship is familial, with argumentation and demonstration sharing the essential characteristics of reason. In describing the terminology of argumentation, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca used the phrase quasi-logical argumentation (arguments using the schemas of logical or mathematical demonstration) to nest both argumentation and demonstration within the house of reason. The key difference between the two is Bergson’s durée, duration or lived time, and Eugène Dupréel’s intervalle, the space between premises and the steps of reasoning.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca only mention Bergson once in the article. Yet, Bergson’s philosophy of time and comedy were highly influential in the French-speaking world before and after World War I (Guerlac 2006: xiii), and they had a significant influence on the new rhetoric project. Bergson argued that science and math had failed to account for the role time played in human experience and offered the notion of durée as an alternative that better captured it. Bergson’s translators complain there is no direct equivalent to durée in English (Gunn 1920: 70; Guerlac 2006: xiii). The literal translation is “duration”, but Bergson meant far more than a bracketed period of time. Bergson set durée off from the empty time [temps vide] of mathematics and geometry and used the term to refer to the human encounter with the variegated planes of time. Humans do not experience durée as a “unilinear, actual, succession, but a tiered range of different actual rhythms” (Mullarkey 2006: 27). Bergson’s “theory of the planes of durée” sees time as a “stratified system of temporal rhythms running at different rates, each a condensation of other temporal rhythms” (Mullarkey 2006: 27). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca assume a Bergsonian vision of time, unfolding its meaning in the realm of argumentation when they discuss the planes of time within argumentation.
Dupréel, a mentor to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, provides many of the philosophical touchstones of the new rhetoric project (Perelman 1932: 1947, 1948). His teachings and writings highlight the multiplicity of values: he argues that the tension between and among values is worked out through dialogue and emphasizes that reason itself and the very tools of thought may evolve (Brown, Collinson, and Wilkinson 1996: 206). Out of this constellation of ideas emerged Dupréel’s notion of intervalle, cited by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca at a critical juncture in “On Temporality”, and labeled “original” by important thinkers (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 611).
The notion of intervalle is the indeterminate wedge between cause and effect, the space between items in a hierarchy, which Dupréel argued was missing in classical thought (Cache and Speaks 1995: 22). Dupréel does not deny cause and effect reasoning, nor the need for order, but insists that causes and effects must be separated to preserve free will. If there weren’t an element of indeterminacy in causation or the construction of order, there would be no space for liberty, creativity, or evolution. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca import the notion intervalle into the new rhetoric project to chart a course between demonstration and aporia in argument. In so doing, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca extend Dupréel’s realism by acknowledging the existence of logical patterns and the necessity of order. However, unlike the rationalists, they do not place patterns of logic and order beyond human time, and unlike radical skeptics, they do not devalue apodictic logic and justified hierarchies. With Dupréel’s notion of intervalle, they identify a realm in which demonstrative and argumentative reason overlap.
The relationships between and among premises and conclusions in formal logic and analytic philosophy are not affected by the passage of time. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca do not argue, however, that the structure of formal logic is meaningless; rather, they suggest that it is changed and altered as it enters durée. In the new rhetoric’s constellation, the audience is a construction of the speaker who is affected by exigencies; similarly, reason and logic are constructions yielding to the forces of time and context. Ambiguity and controlled equivocation are built into the system of logic set forth by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca.
In “On Temporality”, the characteristics of Perelman and Olbrechts Tyteca’s model of argument come into view. Their model is plastic, open to modification, and does not have pretentions of formal laws. Their model begins with the analogy of argument as a “succession of knots” within a larger flow of human consciousness. These knots are expressions of reasons that have both diachronic and synchronic meaning. Both the object of argument and its logic are affected and shaped by a preceding history, the exigencies of the moment, and visions of the future. Argument is carried out within planes of time that overlap. Operating within the limits of time, those who engage in argument must make choices, as advocates will never command all of the reasons and proofs available or necessary on a given issue. There are precedents and models one can rely on to launch an argument, but because inertia rather than good reason may impel an advocate to use them, they may be subjected to interrogation.
There are two specific argumentative techniques Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca develop in this article, quasi-logical arguments and dissociation. These arguments draw on the logical presuppositions of demonstration but incorporate the effects of the forces of durée and intervalle. Timeless and time-bound rules of rationality are joined in this technique of argument. For all their disparagement of demonstration’s evasion of time, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca devote a paragraph of “On Temporality” to a neutral description of the role of the timeless in the logic of argumentation. However, they are quick to note how the timeless dimensions of demonstrative reason are modified when they enter time.
The second technique, to which they devote a significant section of part 3 of The New Rhetoric, is dissociation. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1963) claimed their notion of dissociation was among the most novel insights of their project. The larger aspiration of the new rhetoric is to envision a universe in which opposites can coexist. To achieve this aspiration, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca point out that the law of noncontradiction is only relevant in formal systems because true contradictions do not arise in the realm of durée, action, and intervalle. According to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, only in timeless systems must one choose between opposites. In time-bound systems, on the other hand, there are no contradictions but rather incompatibilities, which can coexist in and over time precisely because one can satisfy incompatible demands over time. The process of dissociation brings opposites together in time to seek a creative restructuring of their relationship and account for a need to act.
Situated audiences judge these techniques the use of argumentative reason, calling on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca to take up the discipline of rhetoric. Those who argue, according to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, seek to persuade a concrete audience, those who are experts, and a universal audience. The last, a notion causing the greatest confusion and controversy in the new rhetoric’s system, is the vision an orator has of what a universal audience would find reasonable. Even this vision of universality, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca conclude, is affected and limited by the time and place occupied by the orator.
“On Temporality” provides a philosophical grounding for argument, thereby marking an evolution in the thinking of Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca. It complements Perelman’s 1949 “Regressive Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy”, which did the same for rhetoric. “Regressive Philosophies” points toward “On Temporality” in its conclusion, which argues: “A proponent of regressive philosophy is held to a certain mod- esty in his affirmations: the future does not belong to him, his thought remains open to unforeseen experience” (Frank and Bolduc 2003: 204). “On Temporality” was written after a decade-long study of rhetoric and argu- mentation and offers the precision and rigor that some critics find lacking in The New Rhetoric. The following translation is meant to offer English readers an opportunity to consider how Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca developed their philosophy of argumentation, one moving reason into the world of action and values.
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