What are words good for?

Technology

Words are ubiquitous. They are everywhere. We use them so frequently, and they are so ingrained into the fabric of our reality that we sometimes forget they are there. Language is to us as water is to fish. In his commencement speech at Kenyon University in 2005, David Foster Wallace relayed the story to the left to the graduating class.There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?

“What the hell are words,” we might have asked, before someone thought to invent a word for them. But someone did invent a word for them, and with that invention came the birth of rhetoric. Before we had a word for words, in other words, we couldn’t really even start talking about what they are for or how we could use them more effectively. And while we were thinking and talking about words long before Aristotle, he was probably one of the first to use the term, and ultimately wrote a book about it called, simply, Rhetoric. In that book he says that rhetoric is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” ^[1] For our purposes, rhetoric is the art of using words. I omit the persuasion part of it because I think it goes without saying that words, by their nature, make a claim about reality, and that for the most part, we hope the people who read those words believe our claims. That is persuasion, and I’m going to go out on a limb by claiming that it is what we do whenever we use words. Persuasion is what words are good for, and rhetoric provides us with a comprehensive framework for how to use them.

Primarily then, words are tools. They are tools for representing stuff that isn’t there, or even aspects of things that are there but that might not be recognizable to others. They stand for stuff. Words can be used to recall the past, to speculate about the future, to explain the present, to describe the distant, or to offer an alternative view of the present. But it is because of this very feature, that they can represent things that are absent, that they aren’t trustworthy, and that they are often referred to disdainfully as “just words” or “mere words.” As a technology, they were mistrusted from the very beginning, especially when in their written form. Plato, for instance, believed that writing would ruin our memory, and that rhetoric would ruin our thinking.

Truth

This mistrust really boils down to the fact that words can be used to lie. And not only that, the lie might not be an outright or obvious lie, it may only slightly misrepresent. “In itself, the word is less than the thought, the thought is less than the experience.” – Vimalakirti-sutraIf we think of representing as presenting something that has already been presented once, then to misrepresent is merely to not present the thing the second time as well as it was presented the first time. In some small sense, we are doing that a little bit anytime we use words,  since the second presentation is inevitably not exactly the same as the first presentation. The words, we sometimes say, “don’t do it justice,” or in other words, the words are never quite the truth.

For Aristotle, good rhetoric was rhetoric that most accurately expressed the truth. For the sophists, whose rhetoric Aristotle was critical of, good rhetoric was rhetoric that persuaded the audience of anything, regardless of how accurately it represented some monolithic truth. For the sophists, there existed multiple truths, as in the blue dress/yellow dress controversy. An antinomy arises when these truths seem like they cannot coexist with each other, and yet they do. And this was the case with the dress: it was either blue or yellow, and at the same time it was both blue and yellow.

Aristotle’s belief no doubt is derived from the view his mentor, Plato, had on the truth, which was that there was some ultimate form of things, which was only imperfectly represented in the actual things, which was in turn only imperfectly represented in the words that describe them. For Plato, there was the perfect form of beauty, for instance, so that when we say something is “beautiful,” in his view, we mean that it approximates some truly existing perfect but inaccessible form of the beautiful. Aristotle, while recognizing that any representation of beauty is inadequate, also recognizes that some words or combination of words can get closer to it than others. His conception still held that there was only one true beauty, while the sophists would be more inclined to agree with a statement like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” or in other words, there are always multiple truths to any given experience.

With which rhetoric are we concerned with then, Aristotle’s or the sophist’s? For this handbook, the answer is both, primarily because in the view of this text, no rhetoric is complete that excludes one or the other.

Some scholars have mentioned that there exists a patriarchal and perhaps Eurocentric bias in rhetoric as we know it due to the centrality and persistence of the element of persuasion in definitions of the term, and the inclusion of the “multiple truth” paradigm goes a long way toward alleviating that characterization. In fact, one of the first and most successful practitioners of rhetoric was not a man, but a woman: Cleopatra. The success Cleopatra enjoyed by employing the rhetorical principles taught to her by the self-proclaimed Sophist Philostratus, suggests, then, that rhetoric has not historically been strictly patriarchal. The rhetoric we are concerned with here is not a confrontational rhetoric, but rather a way of using words to reduce conflict in a nonviolent way, to foster inclusivity, and to facilitate the pursuit of all truths.

At its most basic, following the Greek root verb eirein, to rhetoric is to say, and this handbook is a collection of tools that are designed to help you say things well in writing.