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THE RENAISSANCE REDISCOVERY OF intimacy
By Kathy Eden
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-18462-3
Chapter One
A Rhetoric of Intimacy in Antiquity
If the humanists, as we will see in later chapters, rediscover a rhetoric of intimacy as part of their revival of antiquity, the ancients they revive did not themselves discover this rhetoric all at once. For the earliest rhetoricians gave their attention almost exclusively to the more public forms of oratory practiced in the law courts and the assembly and not to more private forms of communication, such as the letter. Indeed, it is not until the first century CE, as we will also see, that rhetoricians begin to address these neglected genres as part of their treatment of the ars rhetorica.
Among these earliest rhetoricians who lack a theory of letter writing is Aristotle, whose Rhetoric is arguably the Greek manual with the greatest impact on both Roman rhetorical theory and that of the Renaissance humanists. Well known to Cicero in the first century (BCE) and again to Erasmus in the sixteenth but unknown to Petrarch in the fourteenth (except perhaps in a plodding and partial Latin translation), the Rhetoric is, in spite of its unambiguous oratorical orientation, key to the discoveries and rediscoveries that are the focus of this book. For without addressing the letter, the kind of discourse eventually associated most closely with rhetorical intimacy, the Rhetoric does address a fundamental feature of letter writing that establishes the groundwork for later epistolary theory: writing itself.
Countering the accusations of his teacher Plato in Gorgias and Phaedrus, Aristotle defends writing in the Rhetoric over and against oral discourse. And he mounts his defense in terms that will prove decisive for epistolary theory and practice. "[W]riting avoids the necessity of silence," Aristotle claims (3.12.1; Kennedy 255–57), "if one wishes to communicate to others [who are not present], which is the condition of those who do not know how to write." Locating the origin of writing in the problem of distance—spatial distance—Aristotle distinguishes the style appropriate to writing, a lexis graphike, from an oral, agonistic style, a lexis agonistike. Again, the key factor is distance.
Agonistic style, characteristic of two of the three kinds of oratory (political or deliberative and legal), is designed to accommodate audiences in the assembly or the larger law courts where listeners are situated at some physical remove from the speaker. While such audiences require, on the one hand, an energetic delivery with all the skills of performance, they are, on the other, only distracted by intricate argument and precise detail. The listener's ear, in other words, misses the refinements appreciated by the reader's eye. Aristotle's third type of oratory, epideictic oratory, in contrast, is meant to be read rather than heard and consequently allows for more precision and detail. "Written style is most exact (akribestate)," Aristotle explains, whereas
the agonistic is very much a matter of delivery.... On comparison, some written works seem thin when spoken, while some speeches of [successful] orators seem amateurish when examined in written form. The cause is that [their style] suits debate. Thus, things that are intended for delivery, when delivery is absent, seem silly, since they are not fulfilling their purpose.... The demegoric [i.e., agonistic] style seems altogether like shadow- painting; for the greater the crowd, the further the distance of view; thus, exactness (akribe) is wasted work and the worse in both cases.... As a result, the same orators are not successful in all kinds of speeches. Where there is most need of performance, the least exactness (akribeia) is present. This occurs where the voice is important and especially a loud voice. The epideictic style is most like writing; for its objective is to be read. (Rhetoric 3.12.2–5; Kennedy 255)
Drawing a sharp distinction between two kinds of style that characterize his three kinds of oratory, Aristotle bases these distinctions on the perspective of the audience, how near or far they are from the source of the discourse—the speaker or the written word—and therefore on how much detail they can take in. While the one kind of style furthers the agonistic aims of debate, the other, lacking this adversarial agenda, regularly fosters the expression of more benign feelings. For this same reason, Aristotle contends, epideictic oratory also enjoys greater structural and thematic freedom (3.14.1–4). But if an epideictic speech may include elements that do not strictly speaking belong to the matter at hand—that are, in Aristotle's words, xena or foreign rather than oikeia (3.14, 1415a7; Kennedy 261)—the reader, like the single judge, can nevertheless still readily distinguish between "what pertains [i.e., belongs] to the subject (to oikeion tou pragmatos) and what is irrelevant" (3.12.5, 1414a13; Kennedy 256). Throughout the Rhetoric, as we will see shortly, Aristotle comes back to this notion of belonging.
A regular fixture of the rhetorical tradition by Cicero's day, Aristotle's division of oratory into three kinds corresponds roughly to an older, Platonic triad that it seems to have replaced. This replacement is worth noting because it reflects the longstanding affinity of epistolary writing with not just epideictic oratory but conversation (Gr. dialogos; Lat. sermo). With both of these, it shares structural and thematic flexibility. With the former, however, it also shares the expectation of being read. Fully in favor of a flexible discourse, Plato nevertheless prefers speaking and listening to reading and writing.
In a late dialogue not incidentally called the Sophist (222CD), Plato therefore identifies the third type of discourse alongside the political (demegorike) and the legal (dikanike) as proshomiletic instead of epideictic, rejecting the sophistic display that will figure so prominently in Aristotle's rhetorical theory. Centuries later, Quintilian reminds his own readers of Plato's philosophical arguments in favor of conversation, which Quintilian Latinizes as sermocinatrix (Institutio oratoria 3.4.10–11). He will also refer in passing to the deep connection between the letter and conversation (epistola and sermo)—a connection on which Cicero, Seneca, and Demetrius, as we will see, ground their epistolary theory (9.4.19–21).
Departing from his teacher in featuring epideictic oratory (at the expense of proshomiletic or conversational discourse), Aristotle characterizes its style, as we have seen, as graphic rather than agonistic. On the other hand, Aristotle looks beyond these subdivisions to a stylistic excellence applicable to all three kinds of oratory when he calls for appropriateness, to prepon (Rhetoric 3.12.6). Famously translated by Cicero into Latin as decorum (Orator 70; De officiis 1.94), this virtue or excellence of style informs equally the argument advanced (logos), the emotions aroused (pathos), and, most important for an emerging rhetoric of intimacy, the character (ethos) created by the speaker or writer (Rhetoric 3.7.1). As it pertains to character, moreover, Aristotle qualifies this most successful style as oikeia (3.7.4). Lacking this quality, a speech of any kind will fail to create either the vividness or the credibility that persuades audiences (3.7.7, 3.2.13).
Routinely conflated by subsequent theorists with appropriateness or to prepon, as we will see in more detail later in this chapter (see below, p. 45), the stylistic quality of being oikeion takes the oikos, understood as both family and property, as its point of departure. In the Politics, Aristotle upholds the status of family and property, famously defending these two dimensions of the oikos—legal and affective—against Plato's attack in the Republic. As witness for the defense, Aristotle invokes Hesiod's Works and Days (1.2, 1252b9–11; cf. Works and Days 405): "First and foremost a house, a wife, and an ox for the plow." In keeping with this Hesiodic pronouncement about belonging and having belongings, Aristotle emphasizes the deep psychological attachment that defines our relation to the oikos. Holding all things in common, including wives, children, and belongings, Aristotle argues (2.3, 1261b33–1262a13), denies the basic human need to care for what is one's own.
In the first book of the Rhetoric, on the other hand, Aristotle assumes both private ownership and a family structure, and he builds these assumptions into his topics for argumentation. Among these topics, Aristotle includes a brief discussion of wealth as a commonly acknowledged source of happiness. This discussion includes in turn a brief survey of the various kinds of property that constitute wealth, introducing a number of distinctions that will shape centuries of both legal and literary theory. In contrast to possession (ktesis), use (chresis), and enjoyment (apolausis), Aristotle explains, actual ownership—"whether things are oikeia or not"—"depends on who has the right of alienation (apallotriosai), and by alienation I mean gift and sale" (1.5.7, 1361a21–22; Kennedy 59). What is oikeion, in this context, is what legally belongs to me and to no one else. Its opposite is allotrion, what belongs to somebody else and not to me.
Whereas the first book of the Rhetoric features to oikeion as a legal concept, the second book foregrounds its affective dimension, taking into account that our emotional relations are every bit as topical for the orator as our proprietary relations (2.4.28). Among our emotional attachments is one that Aristotle identifies as oikeiotes, often translated as intimacy. Treated at much greater length in his ethical works, oikeiotes figures as a subset of the larger category of philia, often translated as friendship but pertaining more generally to the whole range of close affective attachments. In his fuller treatment in the Nicomachean Ethics, in fact, Aristotle acknowledges that there are degrees of oikeiotes determining the claim that any attachment makes on us (9.2.9–10). Assuming that we feel closest to those with whom we live in more or less day to day physical contact, Aristotle theorizes a common humanity that renders even strangers oikeioi and philoi—near and dear (8.1.3–4). On the other hand, he concedes, it is hard to share intimately (oikeios) in the joys and sorrows of many other people (9.10.5).
When in the third book of the Rhetoric Aristotle turns from matters of proof to matters of style, his qualification of the most excellent style as oikeia (3.7.4) retains both legal and affective dimensions. For Aristotle begins by reminding his readers not only that style provokes deep feelings but also that these feelings are aptly analogized to our affective responses to either those with whom we belong, that is, our fellow citizens, or those with whom we do not belong, namely, strangers (3.2.2–3). Prose style in general is less strange or "foreign" than poetry and so uses, alongside metaphor, words that are at once kyria and oikeia (3.2.6, 3.7.7). Language so qualified contributes to the credibility of the speech because it effectively establishes the speaker's character (3.7.4, 3.7.7). For Aristotle, in fact, the stylistic quality of intimacy or belonging fosters the expression of character as the singularly most compelling source of persuasion.
A key factor in Aristotelian rhetorical theory, where it is closely aligned with style, and especially a style that is oikeia, character or ethos may also figure prominently in the prehistory of rhetorical and hermeneutic intimacy because of its own prehistory. Denoting physical location before it becomes a psychological construct, ethos pertained first to the place or habitat most natural for an animal—its "haunt"—and only thereafter to the place where a person feels most at home. In keeping with this early meaning, Homer, for instance, refers to the return of the sows to their etheia (Odyssey 14.411) and to the absent Odysseus as etheios (Odyssey 14.147). In this second reference, the term is applied affectionately by the loyal servant Eumaeus to a master he believes is far away. Such an application indicates that the affection that attaches to those who belong with us is not eradicated by physical distance. Indeed, as it applies to animals as well as to humans, ethos in its earlier sense demarcates what one scholar of the term calls "the center of belonging." Rooted etymologically in Indo- European *swedh, root of Latin suus and suesco—"one's own"—ethos may also retain something of a proprietary sense: what belongs to me, in the sense of my property, as well as to where I belong. In this sense, then, ethos is conceptually aligned with the oikos, an alignment reinforced, as we will see, by the eventual translation of what is oikeion in Greek by what in Latin is suum (see below, p. 26).
In the Poetics, meanwhile, Aristotle exploits this alignment between ethos and oikos to explain the diversity of poetic styles. Whereas the dramatic agents occupying the very heart of Aristotle's argument undertake their tragic actions as a consequence of their choices and their choices as a consequence of their ethical and intellectual qualities, the tragic poet himself, we learn in the Poetics (chapter 4), also makes a choice, only his is between the higher and the lower verse forms—the heroic, for instance, rather than the satiric (4, 1448b24) or the tragic rather than the comic (4, 1449a2–6); and he does so as a consequence of his character. Aristotle first attributes this choice of style to not just the poet's ethos but the more intensified oikeion ethos. Then, later in the same chapter, Aristotle substitutes this telling phrase with an equally striking variation: oikeia physis (4, 1449a3–4), the poet's innermost nature. For Aristotle, in other words, artistic expression through style is inevitably "intimate" or oikeia; its haunt is the character of the poet.
Without offering an explicit theory of either letter writing or rhetorical intimacy, then, Aristotle lays the groundwork for a theory of style that will in time further the aim of the letter writer to express his innermost thoughts and feelings. As we have seen, this Aristotelian style is graphic, responsive to distance, and designed for nonadversarial exchange. It not only allows for structural and thematic flexibility but actively calls for intricate detail. Alongside to prepon but distinct from it, to oikeion is oratory's chief stylistic virtue—one that retains the legal and affective dimensions of belonging as well as its deepest roots in the character or ethos of the writer.
Like Aristotle, Cicero has no place for epistolary rhetoric in his rhetorical manuals. Not even those newly recovered and highly revered by the humanists, such as De oratore, the Orator, and Brutus, include letter writing in their treatments of the art. Also like Aristotle, Cicero divides oratory into three kinds and associates epideictic oratory with reading (De or. 2.341). Unlike Aristotle, however, Cicero, through Antonius in De oratore, registers some disdain for these display pieces—mere entertainments on which the Greeks lavish attention but for which the Romans have little time or patience. On the other hand, Cicero does have Antonius acknowledge the opportunity in such speeches not only to uphold virtue but to express character (2.343). Throughout the rhetorical works of his maturity, Cicero focuses on this expression of character. For nothing helps an orator's case like the ability to—in Antonius's words—exprimere mores (De or. 2.184).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE RENAISSANCE REDISCOVERY OF intimacy by Kathy Eden Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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