[Backstory: the third and final essay sting for my students in our program of teasing out the nature of research. What bugged me is how the format lent itself to a uniform presentation of all the disciplines: you know, that thing with no faults, the thing that’s saving the world.]

So, I’m still thinking about our very interesting discussion about the rhetorical form of the lectures we’ve been hearing. I’m strongly considering incorporating Aristotle’s Rhetoric into my History of Ancient Philosophy class in the fall, so it’s something that’s been on my mind. I’d argue that considering the rhetorical goal or shape of any speech is always a crucial part of being thoughtful about it; this includes anything from an ad on tv, to a serious academic lecture, a novel or story–and you guessed it, Socrates’ rhetorical goal is on the table as well.

Here’s a website you might be interested in looking at, that discusses different classical rhetorical forms, the sort of website that comes out of nowhere with its 12pt TNR font and seems almost gnomic: it claims that epideictic writing is about praise or blame; unlike exegetical writing, which just lays out an idea, the point in epideictic writing is to say something is good or bad. Encomiums praise a man, Vituperations blame him.

The notion that there’s a rhetorical form where you just praise something (say, in terms of awesomeness), and one where you just blame someone (the classical form for what haters do), is really interesting to me. It seems immediately recognizable: most political hacks pick a side and spend all their time hating on the other, while allowing no one to blame their own side. I know several people who get paid to do this, and I know they’re more thoughtful than this, but the job pays them to be attack dogs, and they enjoy being good at it. Which in turn confuses me. What do they actually think? But it’s not only pleasant to do, people find it pleasant to read: hence Fox News and The Huffington Post.

Where do our own lectures fall? I’m not sure. Last Tuesday I brought up the form of paean: in the earliest sense, this is a speech in praise to one of the Greek gods (thanks, Oxford Classical Dictionary); from this comes the specialized sense of expression of solemn triumph or exultation, esp. after a battle (thanks, Oxford English Dictionary); now generally just, a speech of all praise and no blame (ibid).

I think that to call our lectures paeans, is me being slightly too rhetorical. It looks like in the specialized sense (which is always useful to hold onto when we’re trying to make a real distinction), a paean is too strong of an expression of praise for what we’ve been hearing. (Ok, except for that Belgian Public Health video with all the animation. That was some serious triumph.) Maybe a better word is panegyric: I found a quotation from some Frenchmen named Littré (one of those annoying internet quotations that you can’t track down to a primary source), that contrasts a panegyric to a eulogy: even the eulogy, the speech you make when someone dies, about their life and character, includes both praise and blame.  A panegyric (thanks OED, you’re the best) is all praise, in public or written down, about any old thing, no blame. This sounds more like it. The temptation to present one’s field as all good is not only strong, but natural, and just; though to be sure, as you all pointed out, since you believe yourself to have already made your choice, praise for someone else’s field is de trop (recall your frequent charge of boredom).

But our real rhetorical problem remains: a speech of all praise, even if it’s sensible praise, is at best one-sided; at worst, it euthanizes thought. (I want better public discourse, for instance, than Fox News or the Huffington Post.)

Is there a rhetorical form, properly rhetorical, where you both praise and blame the same thing? Or when you do that, do you automatically leave the realm of rhetoric, and enter deliberation, or even enter into inquiry itself? Under what ordinary circumstances do we find ourselves both praising and blaming? If we could find a rhetorical model for this, we’d be on the way to picturing what more thoughtful, and even more paideutic (look it up) lectures look like.