Reading chapter 4 from Crowley and Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students, I found myself questioning, and perhaps a little confused by, the relationship between the topics and the stasis questions, which were the focus of our discussion last week. It would seem, by the authors’ discussion, that both the topics and the stasis questions are inventive devices, ways to find what is at issue in an argument, but to a great degree, they seem to be very similar. How do we distinguish one from another?
Perhaps it is the likeness in wording of the common topics and the stasis questions that serves to confuse. For example, the first of the common topics that were categorized by Aristotle seeks to examine whether or not something has occurred, precisely what the stasis questions of conjecture do. The second common topic looks at whether something “is greater or smaller than another thing” (120). In this case, it appears that the rhetor is engaged in evaluation, again an issue raised by the stasis questions, specifically those of quality. Last, the third common topic asks “what is (and is not) possible” (120). To me that invokes the stasis questions regarding policy, with the questions helping the rhetor decide if a need for a policy or change in a policy is called for. Do the common topics then generate from this discussion a closer look at what policy should then be put into place, with the decision ultimately resting on the question of whether or not enacting such a policy is possible?
In trying to understand how these two invention systems work, I keep coming back to this question: Are the stasis questions the means by which the rhetor finds his way to the common topics for a particular issue? In other words, we employ the stasis theory to find the point at which an argument arises for an issue. This would make sense when we define the term topic, as the text does, as “the location where arguments are located.” So, the stasis questions help us find our way to the common topics? Then we use the common topics to discover the proofs that will best support the rhetor’s position? And yet, Crowley and Hawhee point out that ancient rhetoricians’ use of the term topic bears little resemblance the manner in which we use the term today (118). Hmm! Perhaps fatigue is taking a toll, but did anyone else find themselves somewhat challenged by this seeming overlap. Does anyone see an effective means of distinction between the two?
Okay, so then let’s move on to the commonplaces. Crowley and Hawhee tell us that in ancient times the terms topics and commonplaces were used interchangeably, but they opt to make a distinction between them. They refer to the topics as “any specific procedure that generates argument, such as definition and division or compare and contrast” and the commonplaces as “statements that circulate within ideologies” (118). While I don’t wish to return at this point to the topics, this definition seems to point toward the common modes of writing--just an observation.
Somehow, though, the commonplaces seem to make more sense and appear more useful. In fact, as I continued to read the segments of the chapter dealing with the commonplaces, I kept thinking that the commonplaces sounded an awful lot like assumptions, facts or statements that require no proof because they are generally accepted to be true or are taken for granted. Alas, I then came upon the authors’ assertion that “[c]ommonplaces are, literally, ‘taken for granted’—they are statements that everyone assumes already to be satisfactorily proven” (131). So it looks like I am on the right track there.
Argument then is apt to originate from the location where these assumptions are not accepted, which leads to another important realization—audience must not be overlooked in argumentation. Since Crowley and Hawhee note that the “persuasive power of rhetorical commonplaces depends upon the fact that they express assumptions held in common by people who subscribe to a given ideology” (132), then to make these assumptions without confirming that this commonly held belief exists may lead to a challenge of those assumptions. And perhaps this begins to answer the question that is posed within the rhetorical activities on p. 152, that is, what happens when a commonplace is not commonplace enough?
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