The deep ecology of rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle: a somatic guide

340 Pages·2016·1.948 MB·English

by  Aristoteles;Aristotle;Mencius;Mengzi;Robinson, Douglas

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
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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 vii
1 Mencius and Aristotle as “Deep-Ecological” Theorists of Rhetoric 1
2 The Group Subject of Persuasion 51
3 Energy Channeled through Body Language 107
4 The Circulation of Social Value 157
5 Conclusion: Aristotle and Mencius on Ecosis 247
Notes 259
Glossary 283
References 297
Index 307

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 philoso-
phy, and Mencius and early Confucianism:
rhetoric (§1.1) is traditionally the study of persuasion, and spe-
cifically 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 evalu-
ative 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 “realiz-
ing 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 evalu-
ative 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
vii
viii Preface
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 Men-
cius 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 think-
ers; my research assistant Rico Chung and various Chinese friends and col-
leagues 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 pas-
sages are on the whole tendentious, and perhaps lean more toward the
radical than toward the conservative; but I would not call them idiosyn-
cratic. 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
Preface ix
temerity to disagree with these experts—but only, it seems to me, on occa-
sions 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 Transla‑
tor’s Turn (Robinson 1991) and running more recently to Estrangement and
the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (Robinson 2008), Transla‑
tion and the Problem of Sway (Robinson 2011), First‑Year Writing and the
Somatic Exchange (Robinson 2012), Displacement and the Somatics of Post‑
colonial 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 Men-
cius—at the University of Mississippi, where my colleague in Classics, Jona-
than 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