Richard M. Weaver

“ The structures reared by man yield to the corroding tooth of time. These marble walls must molder into ruin; but the principles of constitutional liberty, guarded by wisdom and virtue, unlike material elements, do not decay. Let us devoutly trust that another Senate in another age shall bear to a new and larger Chamber, the Constitution vigorous and inviolate, and that the last generations of posterity shall witness the deliberations of the Representatives of American States still united, prosperous, and free. ”

“ It goes without further demonstration that Lincoln transcended the passions of the war. How easy it is for a leader whose political and personal prestige are at stake to be carried along with the tide of hatred of a people at war, we have, unhappily, seen many times. No other victor in a civil conflict has conducted himself with more humanity, and this not in some fine gesture after victory was secured—although there was that too—but during the struggle, while the issue was still in doubt and maximum strain was placed upon the feelings. ”

“ Democracy is a dialectical process, and unless society can produce a group sufficiently indifferent to success to oppose the ruling group on principle rather than according to opportunity for success, the idea of opposition becomes discredited. A party which can argue only from success has no rhetorical topic against the party presently enjoying success.
The proper aim of a political party is to persuade, and to persuade it must have a rhetoric. As far as mere methods go, there is nothing to object to in the argument from circumstance, for undeniably it has a power to move. ”

“ In the province we are considering, man is free to the extent that he knows that nature is, what God expects, what he himself is capable of. Freedom moves on a set of presuppositions just as a machine moves on a set of ball bearings which themselves preserve definite locus. It is when these presuppositions are tampered with that men begin to grow concerned about their freedom. One can well imagine that the tremendous self-consciousness about freedom today, which we note in almost every utterance of public men, is evidence that this crucial general belief is threatened. ”

“ A sentence from the First Inaugural Address will give us the conservative’s view of pragmatic jurisprudence: “I do suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts which stand unrepealed, than to violate any of them, trusting to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional.” [115] The essence of Lincoln’s doctrine was not the seeking of a middle, but reform according to law; that is, reform according to definition. True conservatism can be intellectual in the same way as true classicism. ”

“ When one asserts that the Romans had a “high standard of moral virtue which made them the easy masters of their race,” one is affirming a doctrine of causality in a sweeping way. If one had to stop and “prove” that moral virtue makes one master, one obviously would have to start farther down the ladder of assumption. But these things were not in the area of argument because progress was positive and that meant that some things have to be assimilated as truths. Men were not condemned to repeat history, because they remembered its lessons. ”

“ All things considered, rhetoric, noble or base, is a great power in the world; and we note accordingly that at the center of the public life of every people there is a fierce struggle over who shall control the means of rhetorical propagation. Today we set up “offices of information,” which like the sly lover in the dialogue, pose as non-lovers while pushing their suits. But there is no reason to despair over the fact that men will never give up seeking to influence one another. ”

“ Burke was magnificent at embellishment, but of clear rational principle he had a mortal distrust. It could almost be said that he raised “muddling through” to the height of a science, though in actuality it can [84] never be a science. In the most critical undertaking of all, the choice of one’s source of argument, it would be blindness to take him as mentor. To find what Burke lacked, we now turn to the American Abraham Lincoln, who despite an imperfect education, discovered that political arguments must ultimately be based on genus or definition. ”

“ It is not always safe for the layman to generalize about the value of specific sociological findings, but I am inclined to think that this is verbiage, resulting from analysis pushed beyond any useful purpose. There is a real if obscure relationship between the vitality of what one is saying and the palatability of one’s rhetoric. No rhythm, no tournure of phrase, no architecture of the sentences could make this a good piece of writing, for its content lies on the outer fringe of significance. It is the nature of such pedantry to habit itself in a harsh and crabbed style. ”

“ One must suspect the same today of many who ask us to place our faith in the neutrality of their discourse. We cannot deny that there are degrees of objectivity in the reference of speech. But this is not the same as an assurance that a vocabulary of reduced meanings will solve the problems of mankind. Many of those problems will have [23] to be handled, as Socrates well knew, by the student of souls, who must primarily make use of the language of tendency. The soul is impulse, not simply cognition; and finally one’s interest in rhetoric depends on how much poignancy one senses in existence. ”

“ This is the right to assume that precedents are valid, that forms will persist, and that in general one may build today on what was created yesterday. What mankind has sanctified with usage has a presumption in its favor. Such presumption, it was felt, instead of being an obstacle to progress, furnishes the ground for progress. More simply, yesterday’s achievements are also contributions to progress. It is he who insists upon beginning every day de novo who denies the reality of progress. Accordingly, consider the American orator in the intellectual climate of this time. ”

“ This order is necessarily a hierarchy leading up to the ultimate good. All of the terms in a rhetorical vocabulary are like links in a chain stretching up to some master link which transmits its influence down through the linkages. It is impossible to talk about rhetoric as effective expression without having as a term giving intelligibility to the whole discourse, the Good. Of course, inferior concepts of the Good may be and often are placed in this ultimate position; and there is nothing to keep a base lover from inverting the proper order and saying, “Evil, be thou my good.” ”

“ Without rhetoric there seems no possibility of tragedy, and in turn, without the sense of tragedy, no possibility of taking an elevated view of life. The role of tragedy is to keep the human lot from being rendered as history. The cultivation of tragedy and a deep interest in the value-conferring power of language always occur together. The Phaedrus, the Gorgias, and the Cratylus, not to mention the works of many teachers of rhetoric, appear at the close of the great age of Greek tragedy. ”

“ It is a truth easily seen that all dialectical terms make presumptions from the plain fact that they are “positional” terms. A writer no sooner employs one than he is engaged in an argument. To say that the universe is purposeless is to join in argument with all who say it is purposeful. To say that a certain social condition is inequitable is to ally oneself with the reformers and against the standpatters. ”

“ It requires an unusual degree of humility to see that the solution to our problem may have to come from someone outside our number, perhaps from some naïve person whose advantage is that he can see the matter only in broad outline. Professions and bureaucracies are on guard against this sort of person, and one of the barriers they unconsciously set up is just this one of jargon. If certain government policies were announced in the language of the barbershop, their absurdity might become overwhelmingly apparent. ”

“ This we shall call base rhetoric because its end is the exploitation which Socrates has been condemning. We find that base rhetoric hates that which is opposed, or is equal or better because all such things are impediments to its will, and in the last analysis it knows only its will. Truth is the stubborn, objective restraint which this will endeavors to overcome. Base rhetoric is therefore always trying to keep its objects from the support which personal courage, noble associations, and divine philosophy provide a man. ”

“ The lover is, moreover, jealous of the possession of property because this gives the beloved an independence which he does not wish him to have. Thus the lover in exercising an unremitting compulsion over the beloved deprives him of all praiseworthy qualities, and this is the price the beloved pays for accepting a lover who is “necessarily without reason.” In brief, the lover is not motivated by benevolence toward the beloved, but by selfish appetite; and Socrates can aptly close with the quotation: “As wolves love lambs, so lovers love their loves.” ”

“ It presents to the whole family of man the question of whether a constitutional republic or democracy—a government of the people by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration according to organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. ”

“ There are in existence many technological factors which themselves constitute an argument from circumstance for one-party political rule. Indeed, if the trend of circumstances were our master term, we should almost certainly have to favor the one-party efficiency system lately flourishing in Europe. The centralization of power, the technification of means of communication, the extreme peril of political divisiveness in the face of modern weapons of war, all combine to put the question, “What is the function of a party of opposition in this streamlined world anyhow?” ”

“ The richness of the literary art diverts attention from the substance of the argument.
But a work of art which touches on many profound problems justifies more than one kind of reading. Our difficulty with the Phaedrus may be that our interpretation has been too literal and too topical. If we will bring to the reading of it even a portion of that imagination which Plato habitually exercised, we should perceive surely enough that it is consistently, and from beginning to end, about one thing, which is the nature of rhetoric. ”

“ Now as we take a general view of Lincoln’s habit of defining in its relation to his political thought, we see that it gave him one quality in which he is unrivalled by any other American leader—the quality of perspective. The connection of the two is a necessary one. To define is to assume perspective; that is the method of definition. Since nothing can be defined until it is placed in a category and distinguished from its near relatives, it is obvious that definition involves the taking of a general view. ”

“ As long as terms stand for identifiable organs of government, the citizen feels that he knows the world he moves around in, but when the forces of government are referred to by these bloodless abstractions, he cannot avoid feeling that they are one thing and he another. ”

“ In sum, we see that Lincoln could never be dislodged from his position that there is one genus of human beings; and early in his career as lawyer he had learned that it is better to base an argument upon one incontrovertible point than to try to make an impressive case through a whole array of points. Through the years he clung tenaciously to this concept of genus, from which he could draw the proposition that what is fundamentally true of the family will be true also of the branches of the family. ”

“ If the Southern people regard the Negro only as an animal, how do they explain their attitude toward the slave dealer?
You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little Negroes, but not with the slave dealer’s children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. ”

“ Now the attitude of the noble lover toward the beloved is in direct contrast with that of the evil lover, who, as we have seen, strives to possess and victimize the object of his affections. For once the noble lover has mastered the conflict within his own soul by conquering appetite and fixing his attention upon the intelligible and the divine, he conceives an exalted attitude toward the beloved. ”

“ Hence a “style” in speech always causes one to be a marked man, and the public may not be so much impressed—at least initially—by what the man is for or against as by the fact that he has a style. The way therefore to avoid public comment is to avoid the speech of affection and to use that of business, since, to echo the original proposition of Lysias, everybody knows that one must do business with others. From another standpoint, then, this is the language of prudence. These are the features which give neuter discourse an appeal to those who expect a scientific solution of human problems. ”