Vico's Ars Topica: Ethical Rhetoric, Probabilistic Reasoning, and Education for Civic Judgment

Vico, as we know, does not restrict imagination to the aesthetic. He argues that imagination and memory are at their strongest in adolescence and should inform the development of the eloquence required for the development of arguments. He distinguishes between those forms of intelligence which are guided by the objective rationality we see in logic and scientific reasoning, which aim for an exactness of conclusion, and that of an empirical reasoning which makes its judgments in respect to probability.

The world of the probable is not governed by exact solutions but by the development of arguments, which he calls “the art of topics". The practice of Law is an example of this art, for it works through the development of arguments for specific circumstances which can lead to specific judgments in relation to those circumstances. In this process a series of judgments is laid down as a basis for further similar arguments in relation to somewhat different circumstances, it being the task of prosecution and defence to persuade judge and jury that probability is, on balance, on their side. Both rely upon rhetoric whose primary purpose is persuasion. Vico says:

Nature and life are full of incertitude; the foremost, indeed, the only aim of our “arts” is to assure us that we have acted rightly. Criticism is the art of true speech; ‘ars topica’ of eloquence. Traditional “topics” is the art of finding “the medium”, i.e., the middle term: in the conventional language of scholasticism, “medium” indicates what the Latins call ‘argumentum’. Those who know all the ‘loci’, i.e., the lines of argument to be used, are able (by an operation not unlike reading the printed characters on a page) to grasp extemporaneously the elements of persuasion inherent in any question or case. (1990, p. 15)

There are two important and related themes in the above passage. First, the idea that finding the lines of argument is similar to gaining the meaning of a printed page suggests that the practice of eloquence is a skill in Polanyi’s sense of particulars grasped tacitly under the direction of a desired end: the skill takes the form of an orientation deriving from a number of different aspects that are integrated into a wholeness of response appropriate to the desired outcome. Secondly, it is the guidance of philosophy, the “true speech”, that provides the assurance that we are appropriately governed by the aim of “acting rightly”, since rhetoric itself may be used perversely in the causes of vested and selfish interests.

Of course, acting rightly itself must adjust to each different situation, and this is the function of the underlying philosophical critique incorporated into rhetoric in the identification of inconsistencies and the distorting presence of unethical motivation. Perhaps Vico himself does not dwell sufficiently upon the morality of rhetoric; but he would not be surprised that his third stage of human decline with its motto of equality, in which a truth is given simply by the assertion of belief of the speaker, has become the underlying logic of dictators and their followers, a total identification of one with the other which has become such a defining characteristic of the modern, political world.

He points to the example of Cicero, whose speeches attempted to comprehend all the many and diverse perspectives on an issue, including that of opponents, to present the fullest possible defence of the judgments that show we have acted rightly. But, whilst Cicero’s methodology remains the true way, we may ask: does not the barbarism of reflection, with its absence of the underlying moral code derived from reflection on a guiding morality, totally undermine the idea of rhetoric as a force for good? The Devil can quote scripture for his own ends. The world’s political landscape is replete with the deceptions of a rhetoric whose essential purpose is persuasion, often through the mere assertion of authority. A major educational task in this respect is, therefore, to reveal the immorality that lies in such a practice.

We must allow learners to examine examples of such counterfeit rhetoric to show the manipulations undertaken to promote the speaker’s authority. We should ask students to examine a variety of both past and present examples to come to some conclusion as to what may be allowed or not in an ethically guided rhetoric that follows Cicero’s example of attempting a wholeness of perspective. The result of a sense of a whole would be akin to method of procedure followed in the Arts in which a direction of argument is evolved among the particular parts.

Proper argument, therefore, integrates the three kinds of truth to which humanity can aspire. The ethical-aesthetic concern of an identity of wholeness is associated with the evidence which an objective rationality can provide, and both unite in the pragmatism of an applied understanding. It is clear, also, that this activity is inherently social, a common sense being established in the interchange of ideas of those committed to the task of living in society. An education that follows the nature of what has to be learned must, then, proceed through discussion of the topics that present themselves in civic and political life - questions of authority and of freedom, of individual and society, of learning from the past and the shape of the future. Once more, the method of teaching would depend upon the comparison of cases, showing examples of different practices and beliefs with the aim of promoting the tolerance of diversity within the possible existence of an agreement on the topic of what it is to be fully human. Note, however, that the major purpose of such discussions is, not the assertion of conclusions itself, but the learning of the ways of procedure of considered argument which form a general skill.

An aesthetic rationality argues from examples. There is every reason to think that the infant’s first forays into the world comprise the noting of examples that precede the presence of a general concept; in the early thought of mankind, thunder is identified as the example of the expression of a god; rhetoric, the case study of an issue, and the essay proceed through the selection of examples. All these are ways of making sense of our being in the world. They differ fundamentally from the data employed in mathematics and science: we might argue, for example, that the numbers 7 and 1009 are examples, but they are so only in the sense defined by an overarching system - the logic of numbers - learning the concept of number is not a creative leap from 7 to 1009: it is given in the system.

But Blakes’s hierarchy of examples, in which we proceed in leaps from the object of the thistle to the grey old man, then to a paradise that subsequently leads to Infinity, reveals the human search for a different kind of order of interconnectedness, that of an inner wholeness at one with the world, so that inner and outer reality are in accord. For the most part, of course, our lives do not reach such a full coordination, but the aesthetic is the orientation towards that whole, and, now and then, we get a glimpse of something greater than our selves. The modern barbarism of reflection is the Myth of a Technology, whose power lies in its determination of the human future without reference to human concerns of right or wrong. It has its prophets and money is to be made. In their view we no longer need to look beyond ourselves to that which may define us, for we are the makers of the world and our selves within it. The system will provide us with an identity, and we will need a password that must not be shared.