Friday, May 26, 2023

Notes on C. Jan Swearingen, "Under Western Eyes"

Swearingen, C. Jan. “Under Western Eyes: A Comparison of Guigucian Rhetoric with the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle,” Guiguzi, China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary, translated by Hui Wu, Southern Illinois UP, 2016, pp. 113-152.

Swearingen, in this wide-ranging chapter in Hui Wu's translation of Guiguzi (鬼谷子), focuses mainly on comparisons between pre-Socratic Greek philosophers/sages and their counterparts in early China, then moving on to comparisons of Socratic/Platonic and Aristotelian views of rhetoric and Guiguzi and other classical Chinese philosophers. Early on, she admits that this is a fraught exercise, risking the kind of colonialism that has recently been heavily criticized in comparative studies generally: "Some find the very idea of comparison fraught with Eurocentrism. Others object to a form of intellectual colonization that accompanies any attempt to bring the Other into a familiar line of vision" (122). But, she counters, "Comparison has long stood in a pairing with contrast; placing the two studies together activates a dialectic between sameness and difference that is compatible with both early Greek and early Chinese methods of discussion and of reasoning" (122). She worries that "the relentless race to establish alterity-based studies of difference, drawing upon models of colonialist hegemony, has brought with it another set of exclusions. Addressing this problem, recent studies have begun to adapt a both-and approach to comparative and contrastive rhetorical studies through developing methods of reading both ways, a double vision" (122). While admitting the dangers of applying Western theory and concepts to Chinese discourse (and discourse about discourse), she asks, "[W]hat if we begin turning the looking glass in the other direction, and ask the Chinese text, and Chinese reader, to see the parallels from within their culture and its lexicon" (143)? What if, perhaps she's asking, instead of comparing Chinese rhetoric to Greek rhetoric, we compare Greek rhetoric to Chinese rhetoric?

Much of this chapter bounces back and forth between ancient Greek and Chinese thinkers and (if it's safe to use the word) rhetoricians, highlighting similarities and differences in not only what they said and how they said it, but in their relations with their predecessors and their successors. She argues, for instance, that Aristotle was less of a "disciple" of Plato than Mencius was of Confucius (148). At the same time, she points out similarities between Aristotle's Rhetoric and Guiguzi in their emphases on audience, also suggesting that the focus on audience and "emotional" appeals in both texts led to criticism of their rhetorics (145). Ultimately, though, she suggests that their fates were quite different: 

Aristotle’s accounts of audience psychology are recognized in the West as among the earliest, and as forerunners to the study of psychology, which did not emerge until much later. Guiguzi’s focus on the prediction of audience reactions was one of the grounds for his dismissal from the Chinese classics. (144)

There's a lot going on in this chapter that I don't think I can adequately summarize, such as comparisons between how early Pre-Socratics and the Daoists viewed the world, "the One," "Being and Not Being," etc. I want to jump to the end, though, where Swearingen comes back to the challenging of translation, interpretation, and comparison of Chinese and Greek rhetorics/traditions. She quotes Stephen Owen, who points out that part of the challenge of comparing/translating from, for instance, Greek to Chinese comes from the fact that 

the precise force of the Greek words is in many cases a matter of great scholarly debate and ultimately inseparable from the history of the interpretation of these words in Latin and the vernaculars [as well as being inseparable from the transformations of those words as they were naturalized within the literary traditions of the vernaculars]. (149, bracketed comment is Swearingen's)

Based on this issue, Swearingen asks, "How could we ... engage in an exercise in multiple definitions: if it is not appropriate or clarifying to name 'rhetoric' as such in Chinese contexts, what should we call it? How might these alternate definitions begin to help us explore once again what we name when we call rhetoric 'rhetoric'" (150)? In the end, she suggests, "[i]t may be that the best way to teach and study rhetoric is to observe its practice, not to theorize its general contours, even though there are within Guiguzi’s representations many emerging names for kinds of speech, speakers, and interlocutors or audiences" (151). (And this is where I'm going to end, though she doesn't quite end there.)


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