ABSTRACT
As we learned in the previous chapters, realist commitments vary in their assumptions about reality and about how rhetoric engages with, embodies, and animates the things of the world. This has certainly been the case when rhetoricians have turned their attentions to language, which of all of rhetoric’s subject matters lends itself most immediately to realist questions and concerns. Whereas sophistic and postmodern rhetorics tend to forward a tragic view of logos in which, through speaking, we come face-to-face with the limits of language to represent reality,1 Aristotle, as we saw in the previous chapter, offers a sense of logos as emerging out of an intertwining relationship between art (technē) and nature (phusis). Aristotle’s conception of logos is less concerned with representation than revelation-logos is the way human beings are; it is our primary way of disclosing our worlds as worlds, as places of meaningful relation with others and of concernful dwelling and deliberation. For Aristotle, logos cannot be anything tragic because it constitutes the condition of possibility for human beings and communities, making possible our being-with one another. For all of their differences, however, each of these conceptions of language (representational and revelatory) rests upon similar realist assumptions about the world. In particular, each assumes that language and knowledge take shape in response to the recalcitrance of things and forces outside of the control of human beings. For representational conceptions of language, this recalcitrance takes the form of linguistic constraints limiting language’s capacity to capture the full plentitude of reality through speech and discourse. In revelatory conceptions such as Aristotle’s, recalcitrance emerges out of the existential horizons that make possible speaking as such. For Aristotle, language reveals things-it allows the world to light up for us in different ways-but it never reveals things completely; something is always missed or held in reserve when the logos manifests worlds. In other words, while they each share a sense of the recalcitrance of logos, the representational and revelatory accounts of language arrive at this realization from different directions, one grounded in epistemology and the other in ontological claims about the nature of human being and being-with others. These two inections of rhetorical realism, while complimentary, make a great deal of difference for how proponents of either approach come to understand rhetoric and language: whether it is
tragic to not know or whether it is enough to disclose our worlds, however imperfectly, to others through speaking or discoursing. Epistemological and ontological forms of realism yield different results depending on how rhetoricians inhabit and think within them.
