Haskins, Ekaterina V. (2004). Endoxa, epistemological optimism, and Aristotle's rhetorical project. Philosophy and Rhetoric 37 (1):1-20.
Aristotle s crucial role in institutionalizing the art of rhetoric in the fourth century BCE is beyond dispute, but the significance of Aristotle s rhetorical project remains a point of lively controversy among philosophers and rhetoricians alike. There are many ways of reading and evaluating Aristotle s Rhetoric that depend on the philosophical, theoretical, and pedagogical purposes of the scholar.1 Most philosophical and rhetorical exegeses of the Rhetoric, however, while focusing on the text s connections to Aristotle s corpus and to the rhetorical tradition before and after Aristotle, seem to lack a critical perspective on Aristotle s relationship with his cultural con text. Yet, like other parts of Aristotle s encyclopedic intellectual endeavor, much of Rhetoric s cultural content was provided by endoxa, reputable or received opinions.
Since G. E. L. Owen s essay Tithenai ta phainomena (1961) many scholars have accepted the claim that endoxa, rather than empirical observations, are the source of Aristotle s own philosophical principles. The linguistic turn within Aristotelian studies has drawn attention to the role of facts of language and ordinary experience within Aristotle s philosophical method. As a result, a view of Aristotle as a hard-core empiricist has given way to a picture of a humanist who is attuned to the nuances of his cultural milieu.
Still, this new portrait fails to take into account that Aristotle s manner of selecting and categorizing his linguistic resources allows him to transform what we would consider cultural beliefs into natural, and hence, atemporal premises. This pattern can be explained by Aristotle s epistemological optimism, in itself a blend of several cultural assumptions about perception in general and vision in particular, the func tion of language, and the cyclical nature of human history. Part of this essay s objective, then, will be an explanation of these components of Aristotle s epistemological optimism. By appreciating Aristotle s differ ence on these issues from our modern assumptions, we will be in a better position to understand why Aristotle relies on endoxa on all three levels of philosophical discourse (theoretical science, moral philosophy, and productive arts of poetics and rhetoric). Aristotle remains consistent in his treatment of endoxa throughout; rhetoric, however, presents a major chal lenge to Aristotle s epistemological optimism and his conception of lan guage. I shall argue that Aristotle recognized this challenge and that he answered it by isolating proofs and rhetorical genres from their linguistic medium (lexis), and postulating linguistic transparency (saph¯ eneia) as a stylistic norm.
Aristotle s openness to appearances (phainomena) and opinions (endoxa) was accorded prominence especially thanks to the work of G. E. L. Owen and Martha Nussbaum. Owen was first to defend a linguistic translation of Aristotle s phainomena as ordinary beliefs and appearances against the then-prevalent rendition observed facts. In so doing he asserted the crucial impact of the philosophers cultural context on the formation of speculative discourse. Owen (1961) nonetheless demanded that phainomena be understood as empirical observations in Aristotle treatises on biology and meteorology (84 86), so as to preserve the methodological and epistemological distinctions between inquiries into the natural world, on the one hand, and the world inhabited by human agents, on the other.
Nussbaum (1986) went much further than Owen in asserting the role of phainomena and endoxa in Aristotle s inquiry. Unlike Owen, Nussbaum sees no fundamental difference between experiences of a philosopher and linguistic expressions of cultural beliefs and interpretations his discursive data from which Aristotle constructs his philosophical accounts. Nussbaum s chief (and highly influential) claim is that Aristotle s method is marked by a deep concern for the experiential world of his fellow men and their lan guage. Aristotle s philosophical insights into the human condition, on this reading, echo and amplify classical Greek tragedy, despite the austere dic tion of Aristotle s extant treatises. Owing to this openness to the world of ordinary beliefs, Aristotle seems to depart from the Eleatic and Platonic distrust of human discourse, whether mundane or poetic
Nussbaum reads Aristotle s departure from Plato and Parmenides with regard to appearances as an indication of a profound commitment to the ways of his cultural and linguistic milieu. Referring to Aristotle s key passage on endoxa in the Nicomachean Ethics,2Nussbaum suggests:
Viewed against the background of Eleatic and Platonic philosophizing, these remarks have . . . a defiant look. Aristotle is promising to rehabilitate the dis credited measure or standard of tragic and Protagorean anthropocentrism. He promises to do his philosophical work in a place from which Plato and Parmenides had spent their careers contriving an exit. He insists that he will find his truth inside what we say, see, and believe, rather than far from the beaten path of human beings (in Plato s words) out there. (1986, 242 43)
Because Aristotle aspires to set down appearances articulated by his linguistic community, Nussbaum reasons, he elevates the epistemo logical status of everyday utterances even as he seeks to order them. Citing the praise of the natural human desire to know in the opening of the Meta physics, she proposes that Aristotle differs from the ordinary person in the agora only in the thoroughness and the dedication with which he presses, in each area, the human demand to see order and to make distinc tions (1986, 261). Nussbaum s account, however, leaves out the sources of Aristotle s epistemological optimism. Aristotle s optimism about the human desire and aptitude for learning and his philosophical process of making distinctions cannot be separated from his culturally and histori cally rooted beliefs about perception, language, and human history. The remainder of this section, then, reviews the epistemological, linguistic, and cultural underpinnings of Aristotle s trust in endoxa.
First, one must take into account Aristotle s theory of perception and vision. Human psuche- for him is a kind of a mirror of the real, as the pas sage in On the Soul suggests: In a way, the soul is all the things that there are. For the things that there are can be either perceived or thought; and understanding is in a way the things understood, and perception, the things perceived (431b21 23). Perception for Aristotle is not a complex process involving external stimuli affecting our neurological apparatus. Like other ancient Greeks whose theories of perception survived for posterity, Aristotle developed his own in the absence of knowledge about the existence of the nervous system, or of the anatomical structure of the eye, the auditory ap paratus, and the brain (Beare 1962). Unlike many of his philosophical pre decessors and contemporaries, however, Aristotle was confident in the ability of human senses to perfectly grasp all the relevant aspects of the phenomenal world. For him, perception is an act of grasping objects and qualities that exist independently of our presence or attention. Aristotle believes that most human beings are perfectly equipped to form adequate perceptual awareness of things out there. Our senses are like a wax-block that receives an imprint of the sensible form of the object of perception (On the Soul 424a17 24).
The process of collecting and ordering endoxa thus amounts to reconstructing the true signification of words and assertions. As T. H. Irwin argues, when Aristotle assembles endoxa in his inquiries, he is interested not in a speaker s communicative intent or in a particular assertion s mean ing for an audience at a specific point in time, but in the degree of truthful ness of this assertion vis-à-vis other assertions regarding the same (extra-linguistic) subject. Irwin explains Aristotle s acceptance of ordinary beliefs as an initial step of an inquiry aimed at the reconstruction of es sences: He multiplies assertions to make clear the relations of the subject and the properties talked about. His ontology determines his account of the structure and nature of assertions. . . . His criteria for counting assertions are guided by the real natures that are signified (1986, 252 53)
Accordingly, the wealth of linguistic statements about the world can be distilled to a set of definitions that would both elucidate the nature of things and explain this nature to others. Denyer summarizes the remark able rationale for preserving endoxa as a way of reaching truth: Aristotle is loath to abandon any respectable opinion and deny it outright as containing not a glimmer of truth. He prefers instead to resolve the conflicts among respectable opinions by giving a judiciously qualified formulation of the issue, so that at least in some sense and to some degree each side will turn out to have been correct. . . . By his judiciously qualified formulations, Aristotle brings out the various truths behind the conflicting opinions, and shows them all to be mutually consistent. Moreover, by finding some truth behind even the false opinions that some have adopted, Aristotle can give, in fine style, what he calls the explanation of the falsehood. (1991, 209 10)
Aristotle s method is anthropocentric insofar as it relies on the idea of the human psuche as a mirror of the phenomenal world. However, this does not make Aristotle into a cultural relativist or symbolic constructionist. On the contrary, as Burnyeat suggests, Aristotle believes that what he presents in his treatises is not just a preferred ordering of humanly constructed knowledge, but a mapping of the structure of the real (1981, 126).
Aristotles established status as an arbitrator is therefore a coun terpart of the rational reformulation of received opinions. The former can also sanction the latter, with a result of granting status to received opinions that are politically and culturally partisan. One is less likely to sense bias when the subject of discourse is the shape of the heavens or the reproduc tive system of the fish, but when the issue is politics, Aristotle s position may strike most modern readers as strange or even offensive:
By nature, of course, female and slave are distinct. . . . Among the barbarians, however, the female is in the same position as the slave. But that is because there is nothing among the barbarians with the natural capacity to rule, and their community is that of male and female slave. Therefore it is reasonable for Greeks to rule barbarians, say the poets supposing that to be barbarian and to be a slave are by nature the same thing. (Politics 1252a34)
The reference is to Euripides Iphigenia in Aulis (1400 1401), and Aristotle cites it quite nonchalantly. The endoxon itselfreflects contempo rary Greek attitudes, as exemplified by poets and tragedians of the classi cal period. However, many readers are likely to ask why Aristotle, ordi narily critical of ill-conceived and empirically dubious claims made by the Greek tradition and/or by philosophical rivals, uncritically accepts these notions (which do not, on the face of it, seem to be endoxa necessary as premises to a philosophical argument)? (Ober 1998, 305 6n). Aristotle takes this opinion for granted, indeed as a backing for his own claim, and so precludes the opportunity of questioning the historical circumstances of its performance as well as its political intention. A politically freighted statement has transformed into a fixed assertion. As Havelock puts it, the narrativized usage has turned into a logical one (1986, 105).
This essay explored the underpinnings of Aristotle s epistemological opti mism in order to dispute the claim about the anthropocentrism of Aristotle s endoxic procedure (defended by Martha Nussbaum) and to show how this procedure serves as not only a mechanism for mapping out the real but also a way of constructing and defending the borders between different areas of knowledge. The main contention of this essay has been that Aristotles at tention to popular beliefs and expressions as a discursive substratum of philosophical inquiry is motivated not by his respect for culturally situated opinions, but by a belief in the ability of the human species as a whole to accurately perceive the world and in the function of language to render perceptions clearly.
Epistemological optimism and the conception of language it supports permit Aristotle to treat a variety of culturally embedded discourses as materials for articulating the principles of sciences and moral philoso phy. Even poetry becomes in Aristotle s rendition a vehicle for represent ing human action in general, rather than a form of Greek cultural self-definition. It is only in the Rhetoric that Aristotle s naturalistically conceived hierarchy of knowledge and his notion of language as a trans parent medium are threatened by the exposure to popular audiences and democratic cultural practices. Indeed, out of the entire Aristotelian corpus, the Rhetoric may be the best indication that endoxology becomes vulner able once it is thrust back into the context out of which it arose.