On the Term "Dunamis" in Aristotle's Definition of Rhetoric
The term dunamis, by which Aristotle defines rhetoric in the first chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, is a “power” term, as its various meanings in Aristotle’s corpus—from vernacular ones like “political influence” to strictly philosophical ones like “potentiality”—attest.1 In the Rhetoric, however, dunamis is usually translated as “ability” or “faculty,” a designation that, compared to other terms that describe persuasion in ancient Greek poetics and rhetoric (such as “bia” [“force”] or “eros” [“seduction”]), marks rhetoric as a neutral human capacity rather than the use of language entangled in the vagaries of violence and desire.2 John Kirby calls Aristotle’s definition “one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of language: to redefine rhetoric, not as the use of peitho but as the study of peitho” (1990, 227). The presumption of rhetoric’s ethical neutrality implied by dunamis has indeed become commonplace in interpretations of Aristotle’s treatise itself and of rhetoric as a social phenomenon. As George Kennedy puts it in his authoritative translation of the Rhetoric, “Aristotle was the first person to recognize clearly that rhetoric as an art of communication was morally neutral, that it could be used either for good or ill” (1991, ix). In this article, I would like to probe another, perhaps not so reassuring, implication of dunamis as a term for rhetoric—that as “an ability to see all available means of persuasion,” it does not need to become (or emulate) practical oratory. In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle’s terminology, however neutral it may appear, constitutes an intellectually and politically motivated act of naming that severs rhetorical knowledge from historically specific rhetorical practices and thereby erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy.
Aristotle's Knowledge of Athenian oratory
In the Rhetoric Aristotle frequently illustrates the points he is making with examples drawn both from oratory and from other literary genres. Although some of these citations have been used to date the work, they have never been systematically examined. It is the contention of this article that, when Aristotle gives examples from speeches, he quotes exclusively from epideictic works, and that this fact tells us much both about the circulation of written speeches at Athens and about the preoccupations of Aristotle and his pupils.
Tria Genera Causarum
The early handbooks of rhetoric compiled by Tisias and Corax and their successors seem to have been directed entirely at successful speaking in courts of law. This was the art that Strepsiades set out to learn in the Philosopher's Thinking-shop; this, Isocrates complains, was the only object of technical writers on rhetoric before his time; and Aristotle, when he wrote the chapter that stands first in hisRhetoric, made just the same complaint: τ⋯ς αὐτ⋯ς oὔσμς μεθ⋯δoυ περι τ⋯ δημηγoρικτ⋯ και δικανικ⋯ και καλλιoνoς και πoλιτικωτ⋯ραςτ⋯ς δημηγoρικ⋯ς πραγματειας oὔςηρ ἤ oὔσης ἤ τ⋯ς περι τ⋯ ςυναλλ⋯γματα, πει μ⋯ν ⋯κεινης oὐδ⋯ν λ⋯γoυγι, περι δ⋯ικ⋯ξεσθαι π⋯ντες πειρ⋯νται τεχνoλoγειν. The art as the Sophists practised it was by no means so limited in its application: many of them were accustomed to playing the parts of statesmen and diplomats as well as of educators; and the most notorious field for their powers of oratory was of course the lecture or ⋯πιδειξις. But the systems of rhetoric that they devised and taught did not cover their own practice; and forensic oratory, as well as seeming the most commonly necessary kind at that time, was also, it must be said, the easiest to reduce to rule. Gorgias, it is true, professed to teach a rhetoric of more extended application, by means of which his pupils would be able to produce conviction in any public assembly;* but we must conclude that this wider field was at least very imperfectly treated in all the technical systems of the time. Plato shortly describes the position thus:μ⋯λιστα μ⋯ν πως περι τ⋯ς δικας λ⋯γεται τε και γρ⋯φεται τ⋯χνῇ, λ⋯γεται δ⋯ και περι δημηγoριας ‧ ⋯π ι πλ⋯o≠ δ⋯ oκ⋯κoα.