Idealism and Early-American Rhetoric

17th- and 18th-century philosophical separation of the reflecting mind from reality often resulted in a hostility towards rhetoric. However, this article demonstrates that American idealism yielded a rich conversation about rhetoric's place in the search for divine knowledge. Using Kenneth Burke's theory of attitudes' linguistic dialectical constitution, this article closely analyzes two 18th-century idealist philosophies (those of Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Johnson of Connecticut) and their related rhetorical theories. Seeing the interaction between the American idealist philosophical and rhetorical traditions leads us to reconsider the impact of idealist philosophy on the entire tradition of American rhetorical practice and theory.

Introduction

As the story goes, during the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophy and rhetoric went separate ways. The western philosophical tradition began to depict the world as an object distinct from people's mental and verbal representations. For Richard Rorty this division happened because of the 17th-century theoretical creation of our "glassy essence," the invention of the mind as a reflecting substance set against the reflected world (42-5). For Stanley Fish this division resulted from a belief that language "faithfully reflects or reports on matters of fact" (474). Doubtless, in these two centuries, people developed numerous epistemologies that separated the knowable world from the knowing mind: empiricism and common-sense realism, for instance. Doubtless, these epistemologies tended to accompany, if not account for, a skepticism towards rhetoric. For reasons that Rorty and Fish point out, a belief in language as representation tends to undercut any sense that language constructs people's worlds. One has to wonder what promise there is for an essay proposing to discuss one such 18th-century philosophy-idealism-and its relationship with rhetoric. Judging by the pattern of division between philosophy and rhetoric, by the privileging of the former over the latter, by the prevailing assumption that philosophical inquiry locates truth while rhetoric presents it, one might conclude that early-American idealism was in many ways hostile to any rhetorical theory or practice that did not carefully reflect a truth acquired without language's meddling interferences. And there would be good reason for this conclusion. Such an essay might be very short.

A close examination of idealist philosophy in the American tradition demonstrates, however, that the relationship between this epistemology and rhetorical theory is far more developed than the previous reflections allow. In 18th-century American idealism, there is more than hostility and skepticism towards rhetoric. Taking up many of the same assumptions that led others to a suspicion or even denigration of rhetoric, American idealism consistently held to the belief that there is a representable verity in the divine intellect. American idealism also posited that these divine mental forms could be recreated in the human mind and then represented, however imperfectly, in language. Among other things, this supposition led to the Puritan insistence on the plain style, an emphasis grounded on the assumption that simple, unadorned language would not interfere with the discursive reflection of God's order. American idealism also led to concerns about how language and rhetoric participate in the process of acquiring and then transmitting knowledge of divine revelation. God communicates both through the word and the world. Ministers rely almost entirely on the former medium. As a result, rhetorical presentation must have some epistemological function. And so we arrive at the first contribution that American idealism made to rhetorical theory in the 18th century: a developed discussion about how language functions as an epistemic device for acquiring and communicating the divine mind among limited human intellects in a fallen world. As I will illustrate in my analyses that follow, this discussion afforded rhetoric much more than a mere representative function. Rhetoric was often imagined as a manner of locating, not just revealing, truth. In some cases, rhetoric was cast as a way to get near truth by building inferentially on contingent propositions. In some cases, certain rhetorical contrivances appeared to invoke or to indicate the presence of some divine light shining through a discursive performance. In some cases, certain rhetorical appeals seemed necessary for bridging the gap between a fallen human psyche and the majesty of God's intellect.

While early-American idealism certainly contributed to theories about how rhetoric works epistemically, this philosophy also had another distinctly rhetorical dimension. Early-American idealism did rhetorical work in specific circumstances by encouraging people to inhabit certain dispositions. To discuss this latter contribution, I turn to Kenneth Burke's analysis of various philosophies, idealism included. Burke discussed philosophies as the rhetorical "'critical moment[s]' at which human motives take form" (318). Idealisms, for instance, propose that the knower (in Burke's terms, the "agent") can apprehend spirit, the oversoul, or any ideal ("justice," "truth," "virtue," etc.) existing in an unchanging realm beyond the contingent and fallen space of human affairs. Idealisms focus on the knower's efforts to apprehend truth rather than on the truth itself. This privileging of agent makes idealism a particularly enabling philosophy. By knowing the ideal, one arrives at "good action." In this regard, idealisms foreground epistemology in order to arrive at morality (172-3). In Immanuel Kant's philosophy, for instance, "moral action is rooted in the ideas of God, freedom, and immortality" (196). Though idealist philosophies tend to emphasize epistemology, in that emphasis, they construct an attitudinal syntax that favors the knowing subject with access to a knowable and unchanging good. In the end, the search for truth is really about the construction of motive. As my analyses will demonstrate, Burke's observations about idealism can easily be extended to address the American tradition, where idealism rhetorically emphasized agent and morality.