The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle

Douglas Robinson

Description

Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of energy and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of pistis, "persuading-and-being-persuaded," in Aristotle and zhi, "governing-and-being-governed," in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess's "ecosophical" deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle.
Preface

1. Mencius and Aristotle as “Deep-Ecological” Theorists of Rhetoric

2. The Group Subject of Persuasion

3. Energy Channeled through Body Language

4. The Circulation of Social Value

5. Conclusion: Aristotle and Mencius on Ecosis

Notes
Glossary
References
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la psychologie
• Philosophie antique
• Ancient philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438461083
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

THE DEEP ECOLOGY OF RHETORIC IN MENCIUS AND ARISTOTLE
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
THE DEEP ECOLOGY OF RHETORIC IN MENCIUS AND ARISTOTLE

A SOMATIC GUIDE
DOUGLAS ROBINSON
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Ryan Morris
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robinson, Douglas, 1954– author.
Title: The deep ecology of rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle : a somatic guide / Douglas Robinson.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2016. | Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015027115 | ISBN 9781438461076 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438461083 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Mencius—Criticism and interpretation. | Rhetoric, Ancient. | Aristotle—Criticism and interpretation. | Persuasion (Rhetoric)—History—To 1500.
Classification: LCC B128.M324 R63 2016 | DDC 181/.112—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015027115
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
1 Mencius and Aristotle as “Deep-Ecological” Theorists of Rhetoric
2 The Group Subject of Persuasion
3 Energy Channeled through Body Language
4 The Circulation of Social Value
5 Conclusion: Aristotle and Mencius on Ecosis
Notes
Glossary
References
Index
Preface
Scope of the Study
This book explores a confluence of five different fields of study, namely rhetoric, deep ecology, somatic theory, Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy, and Mencius and early Confucianism:
rhetoric (§1.1) is traditionally the study of persuasion, and specifically of the structures and forms of persuasive discourse; the deep ecology of rhetoric suggests a broader and more holistic understanding of persuasion, or “persuasivity” ( to pithanon ), as part of the circulation through groups of evaluative affect-becoming-conation (see the Glossary )
deep ecology (§1.1): as founded by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, deep ecology is the study of the “Self-realization” of the ecological self, a concept derived from a number of sources, including Zen Buddhism, Spinoza, and Gandhi; lurking behind his conception of Self-realization as “realizing inherent potentialities,” however, is Aristotle’s notion of the entelekheia or entelechy; qì -driven moral maturation or self-realization is also Mencius’s focal concern
somatics (§1.2): somatic theory studies the circulation of evaluative affect through groups as the primary channel of social regulation; to the extent that the deep ecology of rhetoric is an affective social ecology, it is specifically a somatic ecology, or what I call in §4.12 a somatic exchange
Aristotle (§1.2–3, §1.5): the Athenian philosopher (384–322 BCE), considered the most important Platonist thinker after Plato himself, and in many ways more important, as he turned his master on his head—in ways that are remarkably reminiscent of Mencius, his near-contemporary
Mencius (§1.3–5): the Chinese philosopher (ca. 372–ca. 303 BCE), considered the most important Confucian thinker after Confucius himself, and in many ways more important, as he expanded and complicated the basic Confucian concepts in salutary ways
The sequence in which those fields appear in the list reflects something like my expertise and argumentative priorities in this book: I admire Mencius and Aristotle, consider myself something of a follower of both, but I am very far from being an expert in either, or in classical Chinese or Attic Greek; I mostly construct the two thinkers as guides to my main concern, namely the deep somatic ecology of rhetoric. I do firmly believe that my reading of the two contemporaries is fundamentally on target—that I am not willfully distorting their thought to suit my argumentative purposes—but I am not a trained Sinologist, Hellenist, or Sino-Hellenist. I have put in the requisite time with the bilingual dictionaries and other lexical tools designed specifically for the study of classical Chinese and Attic Greek, as well as with the last few decades of scholarship (in English) on both thinkers; my research assistant Rico Chung and various Chinese friends and colleagues have tracked down and in some cases translated important scholarly sources for me in Chinese; I have engaged the various English translations critically, even perhaps tenaciously, reading them stereoscopically against both the originals and (here and there) their classical commentators; and my Acknowledgments record my great debt to the scholars of ancient Greek, classical Chinese, and both philosophical traditions who have checked my claims about both the meanings of words and phrases in context and the philosophical positions both thinkers adopt. My readings of specific passages are on the whole tendentious, and perhaps lean more toward the radical than toward the conservative; but I would not call them idiosyncratic. My reading of Aristotle is closely aligned with the readings offered by Nancy Sherman (1989) and Jeffrey Walker (2000, 2008), for example; and my reading of Mencius is closely aligned with those offered by Roger T. Ames (1991, 2002a), Shun Kwong-loi 信廣來 (1997, 2002), Huang Junjie 黃俊傑 (2001), and James Behuniak Jr. (2005). I also occasionally find the temerity to disagree with these experts—but only, it seems to me, on occasions when I think they have not pursued their own lines of interpretation consistently or insistently enough. Even so, my claims about the thought of Aristotle and Mencius are not intended, and should not be taken, as authoritative (let alone exhaustive) interpretations. They are, rather, strongly suggestive of a radically new theorization of rhetoric—and, more broadly, of what I call “ecosis/icosis” (§1.1; see the Glossary).
I’m certain that readers with expertise in either Mencius, classical Chinese, and Confucian thought or Aristotle and Attic Greek will find much to pick at in my claims; and the usual acknowledgments disclaimer applies a fortiori here, that any egregious errors in my readings of the two thinkers or their wordings should be attributed to my own stubbornness rather than any gaps in the knowledge of the scholars who checked them for me. I’m hoping, however, that the light those readings shed on the deep somatic ecology of rhetoric will be bright enough and novel enough that readers will be able to set any reservations they may harbor about my Mencian and Aristotelian expertise aside.
In fact my deepest expertise lies in somatic theory, especially somatic theories of translation, literature, and rhetoric and composition, on which I have published extensively for over two decades, beginning with The Translator’s Turn (Robinson 1991) and running more recently to Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (Robinson 2008), Translation and the Problem of Sway (Robinson 2011), First-Year Writing and the Somatic Exchange (Robinson 2012), Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture (Robinson 2013a), Feeling Extended (Robinson 2013b), and Schleiermacher’s Icoses (Robinson 2013c). What I have found in Mencius and Aristotle in researching and writing this book is not only kindred somatic theorists from more than two millennia ago but deep somatic ecologists whose understanding of human social interaction everywhere complicates and occasionally derails my own.
Acknowledgments
I originally wrote this book on Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric—no Mencius—at the University of Mississippi, where my colleague in Classics, Jonathan Fenno, read the whole manuscript carefully once, and then met with me several more times to discuss various new claims I wanted to make about Aristotle’s Greek. Many of the subtler philological points I make in my discussion of Aristotle are thanks to Jonathan; and after he had pointed me toward the phonological convergence in Attic Greek between oikos and eikos , I had a long conversation at the Nida School of Translation Studies in Misano, Italy, with John Schwandt, classics professor at New Saint Andrews College, who honed my understanding of the phonology behind the convergence.
When I moved to Hong Kong and decided to rewrite the book as a comparative study of Mencius and Aristotle, I ended up receiving a lot of help from scholars of Chinese philosophy, Chinese-English translation, and Chinese-English comparative literature, from both Hong Kong and the Mainland. Especially helpful while I was researching the classical Chinese were Zhu Lin ( 朱琳 ) of Hengshui University ( 衡水学院 ), John Wang ( 王瓊 ) of Jinan University ( 暨南大學 ), and, from the English department at Lingnan University ( 嶺南大學 ), my colleague Ding Ersu ( 丁爾蘇 ) and my M.Phil. student Franziska Cheng ( 鄭安儀 ); all four also read the entire manuscript and made helpful comments. Rachel Lung ( 龍惠珠 ) in the Lingnan Translation department and Wang Chunhong ( 汪春泓 ) in the Lingnan Chinese department also commented usefully on the entire manuscript. Shun Kwong-loi ( 信廣來 ), Chair Professor of Chinese philosophy and head of New Asia College ( 新亞書院 ) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong ( 香港中文大學 ), read and commented on a conference paper I built around his tracing of the three historical phases of interpretations of xìng 性 (condensed here into §4.3).
As the new comparativist version of the book began to take more or less coherent shape, I began to presen