The Philosophy of Rhetoric

by Ivor A. Richards

Our communication is limitedby misunderstanding. Rhetoric, as Professor Richards defines it, is the study of misunderstanding and its remedies. The conventional rules of the old rhetoric and the formulations of scientific language have narrow application to conversational speech; Professor Richard's definition of rhetoric is based on a practical how do words work in discourse? To answer this question, he examines the interaction of words with each other and with their contexts, showing how a continual synthesis of meaning, or "principle of metaphor", gives life to discussion. It is through comprehension of the way meaning changes in discourse that we can better control and animate our use of words, and so decrease misunderstanding.

Genres: Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Language, Communication, Linguistics

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

British literary critic Ivor Armstrong Richards helped to develop Basic English, a constructed language that British linguist Charles Kay Ogden introduced in 1930 and that uses a simplified form of the basic grammar and core vocabulary of English; he also founded the movement of New Criticism, a method of literary evaluation and interpretation that, practiced chiefly in the mid-1900s, emphasizes close examination of a text with minimum regard for the biographical or historical circumstances of its production.

Clifton college educated this influential rhetorician; the scholar 'Cabby' Spence nurtured his love of English. His books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, proved founding influences. The concept of "practical criticism" led in time to the practices of close reading, what is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism. Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

An argument for the importance of context in determining the meaning and effectiveness of a word, or sentence, or piece of writing. Richards inveighs against the what he calls the Cult of Usage, which maintains that words have single, fixed and correct meanings, arguing that this leads to snobbishness and exclusion. He also suggests that the view that writers should always strive for transparency and simplicity mistakes a special case of writing (science) for the norm. In these ways, he anticipates many of the maxims of the current teaching of writing. In addition, he writes beautiful, tightly controlled, often very funny prose himself.

And yet my feelings remain a little mixed. Richards begins by claiming that rhetoric should be the study of misunderstanding, but I don't see how he develops that idea. Instead he just seems sidetracked into disputing specific misunderstandings that irk him. And he has a tendency to argue against opponents who don't seems especially compelling thinkers—not exactly straw men, but close. So while I admire bits and pieces of his book, I'm not as impressed by the book as a whole.

Something to check off the "should have read decades ago but onlyl got around to now" list.

[Quiver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richards makes many valid points, but there are two key messages to be taken away from his lectures:

1. Words do not have fixed meanings; context lends words meaning. So when we write or read or listen, the focus should not be on ‘the right words’ but on understanding the surrounding words and the combination that they create.

As the movement of my hand uses nearly the whole skeletal system of the muscles and is supported by them, so a phrase may take its power from an immense system of supporting uses of other words in other contexts.

Richards introduces a lovely word for this: interinanimation.

Everywhere in perception we see this interinanimation (or interpenetration as Bergson used to call it). … I extended this view to include not only the other words uttered with it, but also unuttered words in various relations to it which may be backing it up though we never think of them.

The underlying idea here is that words have a whole host of associative meanings that, whilst not uttered, are present, and how these associative meanings come together will determine our overall impression of a text.

2. Metaphors are made up of two parts that Richards calls the tenor and the vehicle, and that work together to create meaning. The novel idea is Richards’ emphasis on the ground of the metaphor, the common characteristic that allows the metaphor to make sense.

His example: the legs of a table. The ground of the metaphor is a leg’s ability to hold something up (rather than, for example, to walk, kick, suffer from arthritis etc.).

He recognises that the ground of more complex metaphors sometimes slides along as the text progresses, and that as such we should follow along rather than rigidly insist on the original ground.

And for a most optimistic ending, I offer you the following quote on the mind's search for order:

So far from verbal language being a “compromise for a language of intuition”—a thin, but better-than-nothing, substitute for real experience—language, well used, is a completion and does what the intuitions of sensation by themselves cannot do. Words are the meeting points at which regions of experience which can never combine in sensation or intuition, come together. They are the occasion and the means of that growth which is the mind’s endless endeavour to order itself.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very intriguing, informative book which I know I'll dip into again and again. It primarily explores the central place of metaphor in language, and likens language and music to each other. "Words are not a medium in which to copy life. Their true work is to restore life itself to order." Like music, language is necessary "for the ordering of the circuit of our Soul which hath fallen out of Harmony, and the bringing thereof into concord with itself." (from Plato's Timaeus).

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this book is dated (1936), Richards makes many points that still need making today, and he makes them with stylistic grace and delightfully dry humor. I will return to passages many times for reminders of simple points and also for the pleasure of reading his prose.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the two lectures on metaphor, Richards coins terms to help explain the constitute parts of a metaphor: where ‘tenor’ (often also referred to as ’topic’) was the principle subject, and ‘vehicle’ is for what it resembles. He suggests that without such terms it became impossible to study and discuss metaphor, which would become as slippery as solving square-roots in your head.

He suggests that for all their complexities, it was better to attempt to understand “how metaphor works (or thought goes on)” and be exposed as incorrect, rather than do nothing, provided that, he stresses, “we do not mistake our theories for our skill, or our descriptive apparatus for what it describes.” In other words, something is better than nothing, but something is not everything.

He does not favour ‘good’ or ‘bad’ metaphors, noting that there are many interpretations to every metaphor, and that is the whole point. When we read poetry, we know that there is a hidden meaning, but not what it is, so we must experiment with simple and complex ideas to see what suits. Moreover, far-fetched metaphors, that strain credibility, are treated as a mistake by some are, for the Surrealists, the whole point, where frisson and doubt and curiosity are paramount. If, when reading poetry the images don’t go together smoothly, and the gap between them is too great, tension is created, and that tension is “the spring of the bow, the source of the energy of the shot, but we ought not to mistake the strength of the bow for the excellence of the shooting; or the strain for the aim. And bafflement is an experience of which we soon tire, and rightly.”

Overall, Richards set the path for many others to follow, creating definitions and terminology that would assist the discourse regarding metaphor for decades to come. For this his work is important research for metaphor study. It is however, heavily weighted towards poetry review, and too early to take into account the cognitive import of metaphors. Nonetheless, a satisfying read.

[Sanjuro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richards' lectures are, in a sense, difficult to review. At times they are unfocused, and this led me to skim here and there. When they are focused, they are extremely helpful. My attention to this book came from reading Soskice's book on metaphor, where she compellingly engages with Richards and resurrects his views as a way to critique newer theories of metaphor. In fact, this book, and Soskice's "Metaphor and Religious Language," can serve as excellent companions for anyone looking to be solidly grounded in sophisticated thinking on the subject. Because this is a book of lectures, it is meant to be more paraenetic than academically precise, but it can be read in a long afternoon and is a full of important insights.

[Eric Estrada · Rating 3 out of 5]

For how few morsels of knowledge there were in this book I did not find it worth the constant droning on and on. This book was awash with vague conclusions and claims to be a philosophical study when in reality it felt like years of notes loosely stringed together. The book fit nicely into my recent reading spell of works focusing on communication and being understood more accurately, but this left me wanting.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is actually a collection of lectures on rhetoric and metaphor. Sometimes the author is all over the place and sometimes he makes good points. But I guess I expected more in-depth analyses.

[Jeff Keehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for my Literary Criticism course at Penn State.

[Antony · Rating 2 out of 5]

A quite entertainingly written view on language, of its time.

[Meredith is a hot mess]

NTS found on this list:

https://bookauthority.org/books/best-...

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

In many of its formal aspects, Richards’ book seems to foreshadow Austin’s How To Do Things With Words: a collected series of lectures proposing a project that deconstructs itself as it unfolds. There are also significant differences, of course: Richards is concerned with establishing a “new Rhetoric,” not speech-act theory (24), and he seems a bit more aware of how his project undermines itself: "What follows is unavoidably abstract and general in the extreme. It may therefore rather illustrate the difficulties of communicating with such highly abstract language than achieve as much communication as we would wish. If so the fault will not lie, I hope and believe, either in my stupidity or in our joint stupidity. It will lie in the abstractness of the language" (26). Richards’ wants his new rhetoric to be “a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (3)—a study different from the more agonistic, divisive “old” rhetoric established by Aristotle (24). Additionally, “[W]here the old Rhetoric treated ambiguity as a fault in language, and hoped to confine or eliminate it, the new Rhetoric sees it as an inevitable consequence of the powers of language and as the indispensable means of our most important utterances” (40). Ambiguity and deviation from “normal” language usage is for Richards a key facet of language (90). This is one spot where Richards seems to already include some of the deconstruction of Austin’s project practiced by Derrida in “Signature Event Context.” Because he is suspicious of the “superstition” of "Usage" as the basis of meaning, Richards finishes his lectures by focusing on the metaphorical bases of language, thought, and experience: “The processes of metaphor in language … are super-imposed upon a perceived world which is itself a product of earlier or unwitting metaphor” (108-9). This seems to place Richards in a tradition preceded by Augustine and—more directly—Coleridge, and eventually followed by de Man’s Allegories of Reading. Despite Richards occasional recourse to simplistic notions of understanding and language’s subservience to thoughtful users, his attempt to “re-discover that the world [and the language through which we perceive it] … is … a fabric of conventions” (41), and thus to position his new rhetoric as “the central discipline of education” (86), is a noteworthy one given the later trajectory of twentieth-century rhetoric.

[Anthony Svajda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Information on metaphor for rhetoric. Not a book I would recommend for light reading.