Rhetoric and Perspectivism

At this stage, it is interesting to observe that, if Habermas’ strategy referred above, – and, that tries to establish a clear alternative to the philosophy of consciousness (and, that according to him characterizes the essential of modernity) by promoting, whit the valuation of the communicative dimension, the passage to an intersubjective paradigm – it mobilizes the various contribution of hermeneutics, of analytical philosophy and of pragmatics, it leaves the rhetorical dimension undamaged in its traditional configuration of something beyond rationality, always instrumentally thought in the sphere of the theory of communicative action.
Of the two of rhetorics registers, the topological and the persuasive, that tradition has considered diverse and, even divergent, Habermas only retains the register of the persuasion that he tries to rethink in a logical-argumentative perspective. Language is not recognized as having the dynamic that the topological dimension establishes, through several metamorphoses, but only the effects that one wishes to obtain by means of it. Philosophical Discourse of Modernity this option is well expressed through the opposition between rhetorical success and logical coherence; in this option the topological is identified to the literary, and the argumentative is reduced to the sphere of validity. By opposing the intercomprehensive use of language and its fictional use, the Habermasian conception points toward an unfolding of levels in which rhetoricity of language is always of secondary importance, its elements being “tamed, as it were, and enlisted for special purposes of problem solving”. (Habermas, 1987, p. 209). The traditional distinction of trope and persuasion is, in this way, chosen by Habermas, who shapes it as an opposition between the rhetorical and the argumentative, submitting the former to the ornamental and superfluous, and the latter to the literal and necessary.
2.3. It is not a very interesting opposition, if I may say so, even unbearable (c.f. Carrilho 1992 § 12). Nevertheless, it points more toward a programatic restoration of the project of modernity that to the effective understanding of the conflicts that have influenced and defined it. The reason being that it demands a more daring change of paradigm that the one provided by intersubjectivity, or rather, it demands that intersubjectivity itself be conceived in perspective which is not strictly communicational but, in an articulative manner, communitarian and rhetorical. It is, in his sense, that I refer to a rhetorical turning point: this turning point is based on the conviction that the reformulation of the articulation rhetoric / rationality stimulates a sui generis selectivity that enables not only the discrete abandoning of numerous themes but, the creative establishment of new philosophical problems and problematics.
What we are trying to argue is that this rhetorical turning point can resist the strategies of philosophical dissolution as long as it keep a distance from the scientist paradigm of rationality, but also that it enables the understanding of the singularity of the philosophical work through its renewed articulation between its problemmatizing activity and its argumentative practice. The evaluation of these aspects is essential to the configuration of philosophy as a complex rhetorical device impossible to dissociate from the use of natural language and circumscribed, by the ballast of tradition as well as by the dynamic of the community, that is, by historicity and context. This perspective allows, yet another understanding of the philosophical conflictuality, in the line which it is possible to conceive rationality as a space of inscription and development of cooperative and antagonistical conflicts, inhabited by rationality games whose diversity is stressed by matrices that, eventually, regulate them. It is in this point that, as I have already tried to show (c.f. Carrilho, 1992), interrogativity reveals its essential function, namely by the positivity with which it intervenes at the level of the problems, by the dynamic it suggests in the register of argumentation and by the demand of pluralism it introduces in the understanding of rationality. The so-called “crisis” of rationality points toward, if we want to avoid its most persistent impasses, the convenience of understanding rationality in a plural and not-reductive manner, that is, as a game of rationalities understood as a practice of diversities and not as an approach of a pre-established model. Rationality in the singular appears here merely as the field of the game, in which several positions confront each other as to their explicative pretensions, their heuristical potentialities: rationality is in this sense, not the space of erasure of conflictuality as, to a certain extent, the tradition of modernity has always stated but, its explicitation. We must, therefore, associate the idea of game of rationalities to that of matrices of rationality, that is, of perspectives which rule those games and orient their progression, their orientation and the meaning of their moves. The conceptions of rationality are always, on way or the other, that is, implicitly or explicitly, conceptions of intersubjectivity oriented by a ruling idea: for instance, by the idea prediction / proof the scientific matrix, by the idea of test / corroboration the epistemological matrix, by the idea of tradition the hermeneutical matrix. Not even the minimal conceptions of rationality, as neopragmatic, can do without this orientation: in Rorty it is found in the idea of conversation. Each of these ideas can orient one practice of rationality: but, it does not mean that it can occupy all the space of rationality imposing a model of submission and mechanisms of rejection to other practices. What modernity teaches us is, in fact, that it may want to do it, but it cannot.