No one since Richard McKeon and Kenneth Burke has done more for rhetoric than Wayne Booth. Booth passed away several weeks ago. To mention his most important works:

The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961, 1983
Now Don't Try to Reason With Me: Essays... 1970
A Rhetoric of Irony, 1974
Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, 1974
The Company We Keep, 1988
The Vocation of a Teacher, 1988

I've learned most from his book,_Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent_. In that work he takes on the philosophical problem of facts vs. values. More specifically, the question raised is whether we can ever, in a practical sense, settle for statements of fact and not in some way imply certain unacknowledged values. However, I am not posting here today to celebrate his illustrious career, but to call your attention to a set of distinctions that most certainly help all readers of this blog with the point of discussing the art of rhetoric.

Occasion 6: entitled To Those Who Do Not Teach English...(105-128), in his collection of speeches entitled _The Vocation of a Teacher_, Booth
explain his highly refined sense of the art of rhetoric. It repays our close attention.

"Sub-rhetoric": When we educate young people to read, write, think, talk and listen we empower them to do bad things. Only literate people can be really dangerous. The reason is that they are equipped then to use a tool to serve their private ends. For Booth, whenever you say something on the order of 'empty rhetoric' or 'clever use of language' what you are referring to is the deceitful use of language, of trying to have it your way against norms of social order. For those of you too young to remember Nixon's Checkers speech, the late president brushed off the insinuation that he was crooked by saying that the little dog that his young daughters delighted in was indeed a gift that he had not returned, or something to that effect. The speech was a triumph in that it allowed him to avoid less comfortable topics.

"Mere-rhetoric": When someone believes in something, say abortion as a cause or the desirability of someone being elected for office, that person may use 'mere rhetoric' in order to promote that cause or person. It is roughly equivalent to selling a product. Now, you might actually believe in the value of the product and there are many products of high value: dental floss, doors and windows, clean water, etc. Selling the public on a war may also require the art of mere rhetoric.

But Booth had a very refined mind. So there was a place for two higher order rhetorics, Rhetoric-B and Rhetoric-A, which also could be used to accomplish various specific ends. First Rhetoric-B:

"Rhetoric-B": This is rhetoric as understood by Aristotle and Cicero. It was an art of the probable. It involves a specific ability or talent for finding the means of perusasion. What makes the rhetorician a talent is that he or she is capable of finding what will work in a given situation and in such contexts where science and expertise have no place. The rhetorician discovers the case itself, not by adding some color and dressing to the mix, but by means of inquiry. The point here is that some people are just good at finding solutions to problems or saying the right thing on the right occasion. That is called the art of discovery.

"Rhetoric-A": The formal definition of this art is as follows: The art of appraising the warrants for assent in any symbolic exchange. Each part of the definition can be handled in turn: Appraising means the evalution of the force or validity of an argument; Warrants means the motives or reasons for advancing a line of argument or a choice; Assent means that if I value my point of view I must also leave room for yours--even when I disagree, I can assent to your claim to have a warrant; Symbolic exchange means that all thinking is better thought of as informed discussion rather than lucid Cartesian steps from premise to conclusion. Symbolic exhange is assent to the process of allowing others to give voice to their concerns and in that process discovering common ground, or not.
Such openness is more characteristic of the rhetorician that the craftiness usually associated with the term.

If we follow Booth in this analysis, then I think you will hold with me that rhetoric is the first art of arts: it rightly is the architectonic productive art.

MGGreer