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Rhetoric is a from of discourse that is used to great effect (hylomorphically) in Shakespeares plays and while style is important in all speeches of magnitude there is no doubt that Shakespeare shares the Greek passion for appreciating the power of the argument in a rhetorical speech. For Both Shakespeare and the Ancient Greek philosophers, Rhetoric has three important constituents: a theory of style, a theory of composition and a theory of argumentation, as well as specific rational criteria relating to what counts as a a good argument. By the time we arrive at the period of the Renaissance Rhetoric had established itself as an important aspect of both theatre and political speeches given by monarchs, Princes and men of importance. Indeed the Renaissance may well have been the Golden Era for the discipline of Rhetoric because, as Paul Ricoeur pointed out in his work, “The Role of Metaphor”, the discipline began to lose its connection to rationality at the end of the 19th century, eventually being reduced to a stylistic ornamental feature of discourse. This decline is reminiscent of what happened to Psychology at approximately the same time when it abandoned its ties to Philosophy in favour of a purely theoretical endeavour attempting to apply a scientific methodology to, firstly, consciousness and, secondly, to physical behaviour. This severed its status as a discipline transcending all three genre of the sciences (theoretical, practical, and productive).
The method of elenchus of Socrates was certainly rhetorical in the classical sense of the term, following carefully the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in accordance with a central focus upon the Form of the Good, which is primarily the concern of the Practical and Productive Sciences. The waning influence of Kant in the early 1800’s probably contributed to the marginalisation of Philosophy in relation to both the disciplines of Rhetoric and Psychology, and it might also have hastened the process of secularisation and the withdrawal of respect for institutions such as The Church and Political Authorities. The work of Freud attempted briefly to reawaken a number of themes of Philosophical Psychology with the implication the discipline of Psychology was Trans-scientific and demanded the integration of thought spanning different disciplines from the theoretical, practical and productive sciences. Freud identified a deep sense of Discontentment with his civilisation-building attempts, and returned to an an ancient theme from Plato that, what was in the human psuché, could be more clearly seen writ large in the civilisations he had created.
G J Herder’s work on Shakespeare captured a hint of the suggestion that our Western Civilisation was in decline in his testament to “this great creator of History” whose “soul was growing older every day”:
“The customs and categories of the age wither and fall like autumnal leaves.”
Wittgensteins later Philosophy was definitively anti-Hegelian, recognising the contribution of Freudian Psychoanalysis and pointing to the conceptual confusion of many science based Psychological theories. His analysis of the importance of “seeing something as something” was an attempt to give an account of the power of perception to organise the world: a capacity that might be related to the power of metaphor to “redescribe reality”. Totalitarian tyrants had earlier in the century used the power of language to redescribe reality in their use of normative moral language, and given the magnitude of this upending of the moral order and lack of commitment to the Truth, this resulted in a de-stabilisation of Western Civilisation. Hannah Arendt charted carefully the events leading up the emergence of fascist and communist tyrants and situated this phenomenon in a wider context where the “new men of a new age” manifested a restless desire to reject many traditions of the past.
We recall the speech of John of Gaunt in Richard II where he likened the state of England to a patient lying on a death-bed, and also the subsequent speech of Richard relating to the “death of Kings”. One interpretation of Arendts work on the “Origins of Totalitarianism” is that the new men of the age felt a growing sense of desperation and as a consequence proceeded to replace ancient traditions and ideas with something new in an attempt to fill the political, moral, aesthetic and religious vacuums that were appearing all over the Western World.
Stanley Cavell, the Harvard Aesthetics Philosopher pointed to a growing sense of discontentment with Modern Art and diagnosed this state of affairs in the following terms:
“The essential fact of the modern lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that the relation has become problematic.”
Cavell points out that History will not disappear until it is perfectly acknowledged. In this respect this phenomenon resembles the Freudian phenomenon of the “Return of the Repressed” in which the residues of a past trauma continue returning to consciousness until an adequate memory of the trauma is formed.
One of the historical changes we have witnessed in our modern regression is the phenomenon of an organised loneliness, where we no longer live in hope for a better future, but rather attempt merely to survive the onset of this continued sense of desperation. This is all very tragic but our modern tragedies do not resemble the Ancient Greek accounts of classical tragedies where once the scene has been put before our eyes, an appropriate redescription of reality suggests itself, and the pedagogical lessons to be learned become obvious. It is almost as our civilisation is on its death-bed and we are waiting for our last breath and the last extinction of the last light.
Heidegger, in the name of the lost meaning of the Ancient Greek term, aletheia, points to the role of technology usurping the spirit of the human with its instrumentalised colonisation of our life-worlds. We have argued in previous works for the redescription of our “Modern Age” in terms of “The Age of Discontentment”, and noted that it indeed difficult to seek to rehabilitate the classical emotion of awe and wonder and the experience of the sublime when we appear to have become enslaved by our unnecessary desires and fears.
Kant claims that Poetry holds the first rank among the Arts and if this is the case then it is more likely that we might encounter experiences of the sublime in this arena of activity. The Rhetorical Poetry of Shakespeare in our modern world, then, raises an interesting question with its transcendental spectacles of events of magnitude in the past and characters with gravitas: the question, namely, posed by Herder of the soul of Shakespearean art “aging”. Perhaps the Socratic tragedy will never age because of its explicit confrontation with the powers of Evil such as the Sophistry Socrates combatted where debaters used rhetoric to make the worse argument seem the better. This message is implicit in many of Shakespeares plays but perhaps in the end Philosophical ideas are more potent antidotes to Sophistry than aesthetic ideas. The Merchant of Venice is an interesting play to consider in this context, because Shylock is a Sophist from the past encountering Portia, the figure pointing to our futures, rejecting the rhetoric seeking its pound of flesh and an upending of the system of justice. It does seem however that the Platonic Tragedy of the trial and last days of Socrates has not aged whilst it is not yet clear whether or not Shakespeares soul will age on the road to the Kantian Kingdom of Ends.