Doug Brent

It has been twenty years since Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike brought out their challenging and revolutionary book, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Though cast in the mold of a rhetorical handbook, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (like many of the best rhetorical handbooks, including Aristotle's Rhetoric) attempted to do more than relay the accumulated rhetorical wisdom of its age in a predigested form suitable for students. It was an attempt to synthesize a complete rhetorical system, a system that in some ways built on and in some ways departed from the classical model. Arguing that "Profound changes are taking place in the system of Western values that has for centuries guided conduct" (8), Young, Becker and Pike wanted to rethink rhetoric from its foundations, using concepts borrowed from problem-solving theory, game theory, dialogic communication, linguistics, and Carl Rogers' nondirective therapy. Out of these materials they created a rhetoric that they claimed offered new goals, new ways of creating ideas, and new ways of managing the rhetor-audience relationship.

I would like to focus primarily on Young, Becker and Pike's use of Rogerian principles. I see this as their most interesting, possibly most enduring, and certainly most controversial contribution to modern rhetoric, a contribution that escapes the bounds of the eighteen pages in which they explicitly discuss Rogers and subtly but pervasively dominates the entire work. The propriety and the pedagogical utility of Young, Becker and Pike's "Rogerian" rhetoric has been debated before, by Andrea Lunsford, Diane C. Mader, and Lisa Ede among others. This debate has centered chiefly on two questions: whether Rogerian rhetoric as developed by Young, Becker and Pike is genuinely different from Aristotelian rhetoric and on whether it is fair to its main source, Rogerian therapy. This debate is far from trivial and it is far from closed; this article to some extent will continue it. But it is time to step back and, from our twenty-year vantage point, ask some larger questions that enclose and put into perspective these more local questions of fairness to sources.

To do so, let us look at Young, Becker and Pike's version of Rogerian rhetoric both in its historical context and in the context of the larger rhetorical system that they sought to construct. If we can identify the various strands of rhetorical, philosophical, and linguistic assumptions from which their rhetoric was woven, we may be able to understand more clearly the reasons for its successes and failures. More usefully, we will be able to identify which of those assumptions have shifted since 1970. This will provide a basis for answering what I think is the most important question: is there anything of Young, Becker and Pike's rhetoric that is still valuable, and if so, can we disentangle those features from the ones that we can no longer live with? In short, is there anything of Young, Becker and Pike's vision of a new rhetoric for the 1970's that we can use to build a new new rhetoric suited to the 1990's?

Foundations of Young, Becker and Pike's Rhetoric

Young, Becker and Pike's Rogerian rhetoric can be traced to a number of overlapping sources. Its goals come from the "new rhetoric" movement that was gathering momentum in the speech communication community and to a lesser extent in the mainstream of philosophical rhetoric. Its methods are indebted to a cluster of conflict management theories centering on the work of Anatol Rapoport but ultimately traceable to the General Semantics movement. Young, Becker and Pike fit these ideas, which deal primarily with the management of the rhetor-audience relationship, into a larger rhetoric that includes a complex inventional system and a (somewhat less interesting) system of managing arrangement and style. Where these pieces come from and how they fit together explains the uniqueness of the book as well as its shortcomings.

Young, Becker and Pike's rhetoric grew out of a widespread dissatisfaction with both the goals and the methods of classical rhetoric. In the modern world, opportunities for platform speaking have become fewer and opportunities for interpersonal communication, such as international relations and labor negotiations, have expanded. It has also become clear that emotional reactions and mutual hostility can make communication difficult or impossible. Perhaps most important, the advent of nuclear weapons has made conflict resolution not just an ideal but a matter of human survival. In response to these social forces, the speech communication specialists of the fifties and sixties began to shift their interest from persuasion, the traditional goal of rhetoric, to the promotion of mutual cooperation. In 1967, Herbert Simons spoke for a large portion of the rhetorical community when he claimed that "The emphasis of the new rhetoric is on problem-solving or problem-reduction rather than persuasion; on mutually satisfactory resolutions of differences rather than victory for one party" (58).

At the time when Young, Becker and Pike were writing Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, this movement, which formulated itself around philosophical foundations such as the work of Martin Buber, was coming to be known as the "dialogic communication" movement. Johannesen, attempting in 1971 to trace the outlines of this movement, defines it thus:

The essential movement in dialogue is turning toward, outgoing to, and reaching for the other. And a basic element in dialogue is "seeing the other" or "experiencing the other side." One also does not forego his own convictions or views, but he strives to understand those of the other and avoids imposing his own on the other. (375)

The overriding impulse of rhetoric in the sixties, then, was to create a rhetoric of social cooperation. This was not a new goal of rhetoric. It is the goal that Kenneth Burke set in A Rhetoric of Motives when he defined rhetoric as "the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols" (43). It dates back to Cicero, who claimed that it was oratory that led man out of his brutish existence and created social communities (De Oratore I.viii.33). But the speech communication specialists of the day were keenly aware that the job had expanded since Cicero's time, and that the traditional tools of rhetoric no longer seemed fully adequate to perform it.

Classical rhetoric, of which Aristotelian rhetoric is the paradigm case, depends heavily upon using shared opinions as a means of bridging gaps between the speaker and the audience in order to persuade. The enthymeme, the heart of Aristotelian rhetoric, is built on the audience's opinions; the rhetor must understand what premises the audience will accept and then work from these to the conclusions that he wishes them to reach. As Kenneth Burke puts it, "Some of their [the audience's] opinions are needed to support the fulcrum by which he [the rhetor] would move other opinions" (56).

Classical rhetoric, however, provides only fairly general methods of discovering what these opinions are. Aristotle's detailed discussions of the characters of various types of men, what sort of opinions they may have, and what will move them to various emotions, is founded on the assumption that human beings are basically similar and that such general guidelines can afford reasonably accurate predictions of this or that particular audience. This assumption of common values forms the ground upon which communication begins, a ground, as Lunsford has pointed out, that classical rhetoricians could assume to be safely in place before rhetorical activity begins.

However, the expanding modern world has called this assumption into question. As Young, Becker and Pike put it, "As a result of rapid and mass means of communication and transportation, our world is becoming smaller, and all of us are learning to become citizens of the world, confronting people whose beliefs are radically different from our own and with whom we must learn to live" (8). Thus the human race has begun to resemble the "state of Babel after the Fall"‑-an image that Young, Becker and Pike borrow from Burke to use in their first chapter. It was this increasing awareness that other people have not only different opinions but entirely different systems of opinions, different worldviews, that impelled Young, Becker and Pike to look for new methods of bridging gaps between people.

This, then, was the rhetorical climate in which Young, Becker and Pike sought to create a new rhetoric designed "to induce changes that will result in greater cooperation among men" (223). In search of new tools for this new job, Young, Becker and Pike turned to the discipline of conflict resolution as represented by the work of Anatol Rapoport. Rapoport's most direct influence was Carl Rogers; however, behind both of these writers we can clearly see the presence of another powerful force of post-war language theory: General Semantics. This heritage is the key to understanding both the best and the worst of what Young, Becker and Pike tried to do for rhetoric.

Assessing the relationship of Carl Rogers' work to Aristotle, Diane C. Mader wryly suggests, "Since the number of references to Hayakawa is infinitely greater than the references to Aristotle, perhaps further research is needed to determine whether Rogers is a general semanticist" (320 n.). Many a true word has been spoken in jest. Roger's work is everywhere indebted to the view of language and of social interaction that informs the work of Hayakawa and other General Semanticists: the view that evaluation, and evaluative language, often hinders communication. Concerned about the same interpersonal conflicts that concerned the dialogic communications movement, Hayakawa and his colleagues argued that many of the problems of social cooperation could be solved if people could avoid having their thoughts conditioned by evaluative language. In Language in Thought and Action, Hayakawa states that "To delay one's reactions and to be able to say 'Tell me more,' and then to listen before reacting‑-these are practical applications of some of the theoretical principles with which this book has been concerned" (232).

This, raised to another order of magnitude, is Rogers' therapeutic program. To heal the client, the therapist must listen, say "Tell me more," restate and reflect back what he hears in purely descriptive language, and never evaluate. To evaluate is to threaten, and to threaten is to block communication. The therapist must be content to open the channels of communication and let the client do his own healing.

It was Rogers himself who first began to move both this technique from the purely therapeutic into the political realm. In his 1951 essay "Communication: Its Blocking and Its Facilitation," Rogers suggests optimistically that political conflicts such as labor disputes or international hostilities might be lessened if each party attempted to restate the views of the other until each was satisfied that the other had truly understood them. Rogers, however, proposed only a first step. The political debate is not the same as the therapeutic situation, in which any attempt by the therapist to put forward views would destroy the entire process. To resolve a political debate, the participants must take more direct action in order to meet each other's minds. Anatol Rapoport, more directly interested in political conflict than in psychotherapy, added other ingredients that take this line of development closer to the orbit of social rhetoric.

Rapoport's program, outlined in Fights, Games and Debates, adds two more moves to Rogers' system. After the participants in a debate have used Rogers' techniques to establish trust, the next step is for each to delineate the region of validity in the opposing view. This concept also finds much of its support in General Semantics, a debt that Rapoport acknowledges in his forward to Fights, Games and Debates. One of the reasons that Hayakawa insists so strongly on avoiding snap judgments and evaluative language is that he believes it blinds us to areas of truth in other positions:

Statements made in everyday conversation, even if based on slipshod inferences and hasty overgeneralizations, can usually be found to have some modest degree of truth-value. To find the needle of meaning in the haystacks of nonsense that the other fellow is talking is to learn something, even from the apparently prejudiced and uninformed. And if the other fellow is equally patient about looking for the needle of meaning in our haystacks of nonsense, he may learn something from us. (232)

In Rapoport's scheme, however, this move is primarily strategic: "Showing examples which support the opponent's point of view is a continuation of our message to him that he has been heard and understood" (287).

The last move is borrowed from game theory. A paradigm case in game theory is the "prisoner's dilemma" in which two participants must each choose a course of action without communicating. The game is such that choosing on the basis of self-advantage invariably leads to disaster for both parties. The only way to achieve a payoff is for each to assume that the other is more or less like himself and will choose in the same way. This provides a way of predicting the other's responses and permitting a mutually advantageous outcome. Rapoport suggests that international tensions have an overwhelming and tragic resemblance to the prisoner's dilemma. "It is impossible for the players to do the mutually advantageous thing, because there is nothing in their experience that allows them to make the assumption of similarity, which might solve the dilemma to the advantage of both" (308). The last move in Rapoport's system is to make this assumption of similarity on the basis of trust, hoping that this display of trust will induce the other to do the same for you.

It is not hard to see why Young, Becker and Pike seized on Rapoport's blend of Rogerian therapy, game theory, and General Semantics. Rapoport's goals were very like the goals of rhetoric in 1970‑-to use discourse to achieve social cooperation. Moreover, Rapoport's system provided a specific program to achieve those goals. Rhetoric is primarily an architectonic art. Without a techne, without some sort of rational guidelines for action, a rhetoric is just a bag of wind. Rapoport's was a system, based on modern social science but intended for the arena of political action, that could put meat on the bones of the dialogic principle. It could show how to tease out the areas of similarity that classical rhetoric treats as prerequisites. It could show not just what rhetoric should do but also how to do it.

Young, Becker and Pike weave Rapoport's ideas deeply into the fabric of their rhetoric. Long before they explicitly discuss Rogerian rhetoric in chapter 11, they begin to articulate the view that we are relentlessly (but perhaps not incurably) divided creatures. In the early chapters, in which Young, Becker and Pike concentrate explicitly on the ways in which a writer as an individual can develop her own solutions to problems (a feature of the book that I will evaluate in more detail later), the dominant theme is alternative ways of knowing. Using examples of conflicts that came about through ignorance of differing worldviews, standards of behavior and social norms, Young, Becker and Pike lead their audience to internalize an idea that will be fundamental to their rhetorical program: there are many ways of understanding the world, each with its own areas of validity. Their "tagmemic heuristic," which consists of seeing an item as a particle, a wave or a field, also fits into this plan of showing students that there is more than one way to see anything. When, in chapter 8, Young, Becker and Pike finally move on to the business of communicating with the reader, we are prepared for their discussion of how to find shared features to use as bridges between writer and reader. "Rogerian" strategy, finally revealed as a fully operational system in chapter 12, appears as the culmination of a philosophy and a habit of mind that the authors have been building from the start.

Aside from the fact that they embed it in a larger rhetorical program, the major unique contribution of Young, Becker and Pike to the evolving Rogerian system is to adapt it to written discourse. In its original therapeutic context, Rogerian rhetoric is highly oral; Rogerian practitioners depend on the face-to-face, literally "dialogic" relationship to enable the immediate positive feedback that is the foundation of Rogerian technique. In its pure form, Rogerian interaction requires the therapist to keep restating the client's position and to check frequently to see if the client is satisfied with the restatement. But written composition, descended distantly from classical platform speaking, retains many of the constraints associated with monologue. Therefore Young, Becker and Pike must accept a considerable dilution of the reciprocity fundamental to Rogerian argument:

In written argument, then, especially great care must be taken to state [the opponent's] position well the first time. Furthermore, since the opponent is not present, he cannot state your position for you; you must state it yourself, pointing out its regions of validity and invalidity just as you did with his. Written argument thus lacks the flexibility of oral argument. (282-83)

Young, Becker and Pike have been criticized for attempting to use a basically dialogic system to meet dialogic goals in an inherently monologic medium (Ede 46). Certainly the result is even less truly "Rogerian" than Rapoport's. Yet even if Young, Becker and Pike's system has had to sell a great deal of its dialogic birthright in order to get on in the world of social action and written rhetoric, we can at least say that it is more dialogic, more cooperative, with its Rogerian influence than it would have been without it. In particular, Young, Becker and Pike manage to retain the dialogic emphasis on reciprocal change. Their quasi-Rogerian system, as they point out to their readers, "may well involve changes in both your opponent's image and your own" (282).

It was perhaps unfortunate that, unlike Rapoport, they decided to call the entire system "Rogerian Rhetoric." The effort of proving this label to be an oxymoronic misnomer has distracted scholarly attention from what I think is the real question: is this synthesised "new" rhetoric a genuinely useful contribution to rhetorical theory? Can it do, and do well, things that are still worth doing and which cannot be done equally well with the "old" rhetoric? Now that we have teased apart the philosophical threads in Young, Becker and Pike's fabric, perhaps we are in a better position to decide which to accept and which to discard.

Rogerian Rhetoric in the 1990's

Young, Becker and Pike's overarching goal, a rhetoric of social cooperation founded on dialogic principles, is as important now as it was in the 1970's. Although the "dialogic communication" movement is no longer in the forefront of rhetorical inquiry, it has faded not because its goals have been superseded but because they have become so accepted that there is little need to argue for them. Connors, Ede and Lunsford's Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, for instance, is a recent and highly influential collection that is everywhere informed by the conviction that the purpose of rhetoric is not simply to persuade but to discover knowledge in a cooperative dialectic between rhetor and audience. John Gage's essay in that collection, "An Adequate Epistemology for Composition: Classical and Modern Perspectives," speaks for many contemporary rhetoricians:

Rhetoric can be viewed as dialectical . . . when knowledge is seen as an activity, carried out in relation to the intentions and reasons of others and necessarily relative to the capacities and limitations of human discourse, rather than a commodity which is contained in one mind and transferred to another. (156)

Rhetoric is designed not just to move another to a predetermined position but to "resolve real questions of disagreement" (158).

There are, however, profound difficulties with the route that Young, Becker and Pike chose to travel toward this goal. For Gage, the problem is chiefly Young, Becker and Pike's unfortunate opposition of Rogerian and traditional rhetoric, an opposition that suggests that traditional rhetoric was entirely eristic rather than dialectical. Gage, Lunsford and others have successfully argued that this opposition is overstated. For me, however, the more serious problem is that since Young, Becker and Pike wrote Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, the role of rhetoric has expanded even further, in keeping with new ideas about the relationship between language and knowledge. A rhetoric of social action is no longer enough; we are searching as well for an account of rhetoric that considers it as a communal medium in which thought grows. Young, Becker and Pike's shortcomings in this regard arise from the very aspect that also made their work so exciting: their debt to Carl Rogers and Anatol Rapoport, and the linguistic assumptions, traceable to General Semantics, that underpin those theories.

As I have pointed out, Rogerian theory is predicated on the existence of a non-evaluative language with which the therapist (or rhetor) can restate the client's (or audience's) views in a non-threatening manner. Young, Becker and Pike downplay to some extent Rogers' insistence on total non-evaluation. To search for areas of validity in another's position (as opposed to unconditionally treating the entire position as valid, as a therapist would) is clearly to evaluate, and Young, Becker and Pike do not really try to pretend that it isn't. But their rhetorical program, like Rogers' therapeutic program, is still based on the assumption, descended from General Semantics, that it is possible to describe phenomena in a more or less neutral language. To do otherwise is to induce a sense of threat and block communication.

It is now very difficult to share this belief in a language of neutral description. Richard Weaver recognized its impossibility many years ago. No language, he argues in "Language is Sermonic," can be without tendency, for the terms we use to describe a phenomenon‑-what Kenneth Burke, making a similar point, calls our "terministic screens"‑-also impose an evaluation. This view of language is replicated in the philosophy of science by writers such as Thomas Kuhn, who argue that even the most apparently objective scientific observations are conditioned by the language in which they are phrased. It is now firmly embedded in the set of linguistic assumptions that rhetoric takes with it into the 1990's.

We can see this assumption demonstrated by the very examples that Young, Becker and Pike use to demonstrate the opposite. To illustrate their point, Young, Becker and Pike reproduce two discussions of the third edition of Webster's dictionary. The first is obviously highly evaluative:

We have seen a century and a third of illustrious history largely jettisoned; we have seen a novel dictionary formula improvised, in great part out of snap judgments and the sort of theoretical improvement that in practice impairs; and we have seen the gates propped wide open in enthusiastic hospitality to miscellaneous confusions and corruptions. (205)

In contrast, Young, Becker and Pike provide the following alternative description of the same dictionary:

We are in a different language climate from that in which the Second Edition was prepared. Since then, linguistics has been recognized as a science. This dictionary is the result of a scientific or "test-tube" approach, an impersonal photographing of English speech.

Young, Becker and Pike call this a neutral description that provides only "verifiable information." But when seen through more modern lenses, the second passage, while avoiding the overt hostility of the first, appears to be just as evaluative. It describes the dictionary with what Weaver would call "God-terms" such as "scientific" and "impersonal," and it clearly evaluates it in a positive light. In short, it is simply rhetoric‑-friendly rhetoric, but rhetoric that still evaluates and advises. Language, we now believe, provides no other options. Young, Becker and Pike have, in short, invested heavily in a linguistic assumption that seems to us now to be virtually defunct and which is disproved by their own examples.

The feminist critique of Rogerian rhetoric reveals an additional problem with this injunction to forestall emotion. In "Feminist Responses to Rogerian Argument," Phyllis Lassner reports that her women students felt confused, frustrated, and even angry when they tried to implement Rogerian rhetoric. To a man brought up in the classical tradition of forthright debate, advice to temper emotion and to listen sincerely to an opposing viewpoint may provide much-needed leavening. To marginalized women who are only now learning to resist the dominant discourse of society and establish their own, such advice may seem like an injunction to continue a self-effacing, tentative rhetorical stance that reminds them far too much of their historical powerlessness. In 1970, before feminism had established a powerful critical voice, it would not have been hard for three men to assume that classical rhetoric needed cooling off without noticing that there was another discourse in the game that perhaps needed heating up. But we can't live with those assumptions now.

This sort of problem is partly one of emphasis. Some of Rogers' later interpreters such as Maxine Hairston (whose text, A Contemporary Rhetoric, was used in Lassner's class) have seemed to recommend a totally detached and accepting stance. But Young, Becker and Pike do not in fact suggest that we must accept an opposing position, but only that we do not blind ourselves to it by hasty judgment. Their apparent distrust of emotional language would not be difficult to moderate in a pedagogical setting: we could take Rogers' advice to avoid flat-out confrontation without assuming that emotional or evaluative language is always bad. But their attitude to language is related to another, deeper objection to Young, Becker and Pike's rhetoric. The injunction to avoid evaluative language is a symptom of a conviction, deeply held by the General Semanticists, that it is possible and desirable to separate thought and language.

The General Semantic program for social rehabilitation was based on teaching people how to think without letting labels and categories get in the way. It was cooperative in its goal, which was to get people to think and act together, to understand and borrow from each others' truths, but much of its methodology was individualistic. The basis of thought, it was supposed, is the individual mind in direct contact with reality, unmediated by words‑-thinking "extensively" rather than "intensively." To think in words is to be trapped by their connotations and emotional attachments. Words come later, when meanings are to be shared.

We have now almost totally rejected this dichotomy. Modern concepts of the relationship between thought and language are more heavily indebted to writers such as Michael Polanyi and Kenneth Burke, who treat language as the very ground of thought. The words we use may be "terministic screens" that block out certain concepts and focus our attention on others; yet they are also indispensable tools to think with, without which man is not fully human. The human being is by nature a symbol-using animal who "emerges into personality by first mastering whatever tribal speech happens to be its particular symbolic environment" (Language as Symbolic Action 53).

Necessarily related to this the role of language in thought is the role of other people in thought. Mastering one's tribal speech is part of a process of developing one's mind as part of a community. In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, Wayne Booth articulates the profound implications that this view has for rhetoric. Rhetoric emerges as a means of knowing as well as a means of acting, as a way in which we build each others' minds by mutual sharing of beliefs. The self is not just an isolated being; we cannot come to know anything through an individual interaction with the universe or through an individual probing of ourselves. Rather, the self is "a field of selves": "It is essentially rhetorical, symbol exchanging, a social product in process of changing through interaction, sharing values with other selves. Even when thinking privately, 'I' can never escape the other selves which I have taken in to make 'myself,' and my thought will thus always be a dialogue" (126). Thus for Booth, although persuasion must be subordinated to a higher ideal, that ideal is not simply social cooperation but also mutual inquiry. Rhetoric does not contain a heuristic procedure; it is a heuristic procedure by which we develop our identities and our knowledge.

Karen Burke LeFevre develops this line of thought in her more recent work, Invention as a Social Act. Taking as her philosophical foundation the work of Geertz, Vygotsky, Buber and others, LeFevre argues that "Invention is a dialectical process in that the inventing individual(s) and the socioculture are co-existing and mutually defining" (35). Invention, according to this view, must be social from its roots. It is not a process that can be carried out before communication commences; rather it must be performed through the act of communication, the writer developing her own beliefs through contact with the beliefs of others.

It is with respect to this epistemic goal that Young, Becker and Pike's rhetoric is both at its strongest and at its weakest. The Rogerian perspective does indeed suggest that both participants in a debate can, and should, be changed through the process of mutual inquiry. This is one of the features that I praise it for earlier in this article. However, Young, Becker and Pike are also trapped by a stage model of rhetoric, the prewriting-writing-editing model that dominated the composition theory of the time. This model is predicated on the conviction that thinking can be done first privately with little recourse to language or to other people, and only later adjusted and polished through dialectical interchange.

As a result, Young, Becker and Pike's view of invention is cut off from the cooperative aspects of Rogerian rhetoric. Although the first section of the book prepares the reader for Rogerian rhetoric by articulating the concept of differing but equally valid worldviews, the influence does not work the other way: Young, Becker and Pike's inventio is individualistic, not dialogic. It is a way of "discovering information, forming concepts, seeing relationships, and analyzing and solving problems prior to the act of communicating" (xii; my emphasis). Although they acknowledge the influence of the reader, they treat her mostly as a selecting tool, as a means of deciding what is most interesting from among what the writer already has to say: "As he discovers how others differ from him, the writer begins to see what he has to write about that is original, interesting and even important. His message emerges from the unique features of his image of the world" (30). In other words, it is the writer's unique, personal experience of the world‑-to use LeFevre's term, his "atomistic" consciousness‑-that is being stressed, an experience that is set against the reader's rather than being developed through it.

While acknowledgement of the audience is slight in this section, acknowledgement of prior sources is nonexistent. "Invention," LeFevre points out, "builds on a foundation of knowledge accumulated from previous generations, knowledge that constitutes a social legacy of ideas, forms, and ways of thinking" (34). The writer develops knowledge not only through contact with the audience, or with various audiences, but also by tapping into earlier texts‑-in short, by reading. But this idea plays no part in Young, Becker and Pike's attitude to invention. The idea that interpretation is inevitably a child of the writer's intellectual intercourse with others‑-even the elementary idea that many of the writer's insights might arise from his reading‑-is never mentioned.

Its inventional component cut off from the communal sharing of ideas that Rogerian rhetoric would seem to offer, Young, Becker and Pike's rhetoric is thus too much a means of getting across a position already formed, too little a means of forming a position mediated by dialogue from its inception. Rogers feeds Young, Becker and Pike's dispositio, suggesting stages through which an argument should proceed, but it cannot form a ground for a fully dialectical inventio.

Is Rogerian Rhetoric Worth Preserving?

It is tempting simply to discard Rhetoric: Discovery and Change and move on, treating it as an interesting stage through which rhetoric has passed. The entire first seven chapters take us down what we now feel to be the wrong road, depicting invention as an atomistic rather than a social process. The most powerful inspiration for the system, Rogers' therapeutic system, is profoundly arhetorical, and requires extensive rebuilding to function in a rhetorical climate. Finally, the dialogic basis of Rhetoric: Discovery and Change is inherently difficult to transfer to the monologic world of print. As Lisa Ede asked me in a personal letter, why not find a "more positive, less troubled" source for a new rhetoric?

Despite its profound limitations, the idea of a new rhetoric that incorporates some of Rogers' insights refuses to be shaken from the collective mind of our discipline. Even the persistent need to denounce Rogerian rhetoric every few years testifies to its attractiveness. This attractiveness, I believe, stems from the fact that we still do not have anywhere else such a well-articulated combination of dialogic principles combined with a practical set of techniques for implementing them.

The next closest technique for implementing an epistemic dialogue is pro-con argument. Thomas Sloane has recently argued that Cicero's rhetoric is based on pro-con argument at its foundations. In De Oratore, Cicero states that the way to arrive at the "stasis" of a case--the question on which it turns--is to argue both sides until every possibility has been brought to light. This ability is fundamental to the making of the perfect orator:

If there has really ever been a person who was able in Aristotelian fashion to speak on both sides about every subject and by means of knowing Aristotle's rules to reel off two speeches on opposite sides on every case, . . . and who to that method adds the experience and practice in speaking indicated, he would be the one and only true and perfect orator. (III.xxi.80)

This process is not only the heart of forensic rhetoric, Cicero and Sloane argue, it is the paradigm of all rhetoric, and it is a humanizing, liberalizing process that forces the debater to survey all available perspectives.

This view has much to recommend it, and it seeks to accomplish many of the same things that Young, Becker and Pike's rhetoric seeks. Rogerian rhetoric in practice often turns into a form of pro-con reasoning, as it does in Nathaniel Teich's account of how it can be used in the composition classroom. But there is a fundamental difference between pro-con reasoning drawn from a forensic model and pro-con reasoning drawn from a therapeutic model. The goal of forensic debate, from the point of view of the advocate, is always to win. As Antonius puts it in Cicero's dialogue, "Whatever consideration is likely to prove more helpful than embarrassing I decide to discuss; wherever I find more harm than good I entirely reject and discard the topic concerned" (II.xxiv.102). In forensic rhetoric, an advocate will never change sides and argue for the opposite, for his basic position on the matter is already established by which side of the debate pays him. Likewise, a participant in a formal debate is simply assigned a side, affirmative or negative, on which to argue. This is a rhetoric designed to find arguments for a predetermined cause, not a rhetoric designed to establish basic propositions cooperatively.

This unilateral process is, of course, embedded in a larger process in which truth, or as near an approach to truth as we can hope to attain, ultimately falls out of the opposition of rigid positions. Between the poles of forensic binary logic sits the judge, impartial and committed only to extracting from the interplay of arguments a judgment that is as fair and reasonable as possible. Yet the judge sits outside the process of debate itself. If, as Weaver has argued, we are all rhetoricians and judges at the same time, all seeking to advise each other on the best sort of beliefs and the best sort of conduct, we cannot count on being able to play the role of the impartial judge listening from outside the arena of debate. The possibility of change, of shifting not just the grounds of argument but the basic propositions that each of us believes, must be open to the arguing parties themselves. It is this possibility, and the mechanism for achieving it, that distinguishes therapeutic from forensic rhetoric and hence from much of what has gone before in the classical tradition.

Only in Platonic dialectic does the classical tradition approach the dialogic ideal. The interplay of ideas in Socratic dialogue presupposes the potential of either party to shift position. In the Gorgias, Socrates explains the rationale for his method of discussion in terms that paint him as the ideal Rogerian communicator:

What sort of person am I? One of those who are happy to be refuted if they make a false statement, happy also to refute anyone else who may do the same, yet not less happy to be refuted than to refute. For I think the former a greater benefit, in proportion as it is of greater benefit to be oneself delivered from the greatest harm than to deliver another. (17)

If all parties to disputes maintained this attitude, Rogerian rhetoric would be unnecessary. But, like the common ground presupposed by the Aristotelian enthymeme, this attitude of readiness to be changed is an ideal that must be created rather than presupposed. Even Plato presupposed it only within the philosophical community, not in the wider society within which rhetoric must operate. The sense of threat created by Socratic probing and refutation is precisely what Rogers points to as a barrier to communication in everyday life, and what Young, Becker and Pike's rhetoric is designed to circumvent.

This does not mean, of course, that a Rogerian rhetoric must be set against classical rhetoric. The recent movement to search classical rhetoric for dialogic elements--a movement led by the Connors, Ede and Lunsford collection‑-can be complementary, not antithetical, to modern perspectives such as Rogers'. But it does mean that Rogerian rhetoric genuinely has something to offer us. Even though we have to accept considerable dilution of Rogers' therapeutic ideas if we are to use them in a rhetorical framework, the direction set by Rogers focusses the dialectics of rhetoric on cooperation in a way that even a rehabilitated, dialectical version of classical rhetoric does not.

Where Do We Go from Here?

If it is desirable to incorporate some of Carl Rogers' insights into a new rhetoric, how should we proceed? I have already answered a large part of that question in exploring the General Semantics influence on Young, Becker and Pike's rhetoric. First we need to ameliorate Rogers' simplistic notions of non-evaluative language. Even if Rogerian therapy requires these notions, rhetoric does not. The core of Rogers' insight, stripped of false dichotomy and positivistic thinking, is simply that non-threatening language is preferable to overt negatives. This is no more than a piece of rhetorical common sense that dates back to Aristotle and which we do not need Rogers to explain to us. But the Rogerian frame of mind, particularly as adapted by Rapoport, will also reinforce one of Booth's prime rhetorical edicts: "the command to pay as much attention to your opponent's reasons as you expect him to pay to yours" (149). This kind of rhetoric is based, not on non-evaluation, but on a different kind of evaluation from that into which we often fall in everyday life: an explicit, conscious search for areas of validity in others' views.

To further develop a truly Rogerian inventio, we must rely less heavily on atomistic problem-solving techniques than do Young, Becker and Pike. Instead we must blend Rogerian insights with those of modern social rhetoricians such as Booth and LeFevre. They have already done a great deal of work in showing how we make each others' minds in the ongoing conversation of mankind. LeFevre in particular has shown how writing, seemingly a monologic creation of an individual, is really a dialogic process in which the individual creates with the help of many other voices that criticize and inspire during the process of creation. What Rogerian rhetoric can do for this emerging social rhetoric is to provide an additional method by which rhetors can explore alternative points of view by attempting to restate and reflect them to another's satisfaction.

The most difficult challenge facing a Rogerian rhetoric, that of bringing it to bear on the world of print, can be partially solved by thinking of print as dialogic, not just in its initial stages when the writer is forming her ideas with the aid of others physically present, but also in the much larger sense that every text is informed by, and is a reply to, countless others that have gone before. By adopting the Rogerian frame of mind in his writing, a writer will be encouraged to explore honestly the regions of validity in other texts, to treat them as complex works of another human mind and to try to express as clearly as possible in his own writing the ideas to which he is replying.

We may not want to call the entire system "Rogerian" rhetoric, for Rogers' ideas would form only part of a system that is informed by a great many rhetorical and philosophical strands (as was Young, Becker and Pike's earlier version). In a sense, we could do without Rogers altogether; we could build a rhetoric on a blend of dialogic philosophy in general (with reference perhaps to writers such as Buber) and writerly common sense. But Rogers' idea of rhetoric and therapy provides an important focus, a kind of metaphor that pervades the entire system. By remembering the original therapeutic basis of the system, we can keep alive for ourselves and our students the sense of contact with and respect for other human beings that is so often lost in writing, with its illusion of distance and objectivity.

The most important uses of the Rogerian metaphor may be ethical and pedagogical. Rhetorical systems have always been seen as a training for citizenship in general as well as for practical persuasion. The type of rhetoric that we develop and pass on to our children will influence what kind of human beings those children become. If we want citizens who can listen with understanding and consciously work to relax the barriers that a sense of threat erects between people, we could do worse than to expose them to a rhetoric informed by Rogerian principles. Even if they do not find them of immediate, practical use in winning debates‑-as we in fact hope they do not, for "winning" is not the point of Rogerian principles‑-perhaps they will learn to think with the cooperative philosophy that lies behind them.

In conclusion, then, Young, Becker and Pike's Rogerian rhetoric is not exactly a rhetoric for these times. It shows its age; it is a practical and a social rhetoric, but not quite the epistemic rhetoric that we have come to require. But Carl Rogers' insights remain powerful nonetheless. If coupled with a more social approach to invention and a less dichotomous approach to evaluation and description, they can still provide a focus for a reformed rhetoric of cooperation appropriate for the last decade of the twentieth century.

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