TRADITION: A VOICE FROM THE PERIPHERIES1

Jerzy Axer
Warsaw University

“Who better than you to talk about tradition,” wrote Michael Leff,
tempting me to accept the honor of addressing the Conference on
the Status and Future of Rhetoric Studies to be in Chicago by the
Alliance of Rhetoric Societies. Like a skilful Devil, he appealed to
my vanity and my laziness. I could take pleasure in the honor of
speaking to you for many months—the job was a long way off. In
the end, though, the time was nearly up and I had to consider what
I would try and interest you in. So many have talked about tradition
superbly and at great depth. And thousands discuss it shallowly and
stupidly.
I nervously started leafing through the ancient writers, losing
my self-confidence by the minute. After a few days I decided to call
Michael Leff and explain that maybe a year ago, I could have said
something about tradition, but today nec res nec verba suppetunt,
and he (the consummate commentator of Cicero’s De oratore) would
be sure to add non esse laudandam infantiam eius cui verba non
desint rem tamen ignorat . . . And then release me from my promise.
Since the time difference between Warsaw and Chicago is seven
hours, I decided to take a bath before I called. I submerged myself in
bubbles and turned on the water to keep it properly warm. Suddenly,
the water pipes made a sound like a hiccup or a cough, and straight
out of the faucet came a tightly rolled wad of paper and set sail
across the bath water. It can only be—I thought—a letter from the
Sea Devil. Sindbad the Sailor received such letters before every long
voyage to his next catastrophe. Just in time —I thought—for me to
abandon my trip across the Ocean (in Poland we call it “the leap over
the puddle”). Only this wasn’t a letter from the Sea Devil, but lost
fragments from Book Three of Cicero’s De oratore, which thus came
to me out of the blue (down the chimney, probably the same one that
Santa Claus uses when he halts his reindeer next to our roof).
Advances in the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 9, 2006. ISBN 0–9760737–2–2, ISSN
1536–2426, electronic ISSN 1936–0835. © 2006 by the American Society for the
History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.
258 JERZY AXER

I will quote this priceless relic of the great rhetorical tradition in

its English translation so that its momentous content can be placed
immediately in academic circulation, avoiding the usual disputes and
discussions among classical philologists as to the meaning of the Latin
phrases, which modern academic culture has in fact radically resolved
by replacing the Latin and Greek originals with English translations.

“I expect,” said Scaevola with his characteristic elegance, “the time will come
someday when it becomes clear that society and the state prefer to devote money
and effort to educating true specialists. Oratory will be a specialization just like
the profession of a soldier and it will turn out that you are wrong, Crassus, to think
that broad culture is necessary for practicing rhetoric. Our art will triumph because,
without claiming to be some kind of super-science, it will bring a fair income and
satisfaction to politicians and lawyers, leaving decent citizens alone.”
“I know very well,” Crassus replied, “my dear Scaevola, that such a view may
achieve substantial success in the future due to people’s natural tendency to avoid
anything difficult and requiring long learning. But I find it hard to believe that such
pragmatization could eliminate the divine yearning felt by those whose spirits have
looked beyond Plato’s cave for at least a moment. It is the desire to find something
constant, a dreaming about the ideal, even if it is impractical and impossible to
attain.”
“And what would you say,” Scaevola asked, “if the times changed so much that
regardless of what was burning in the orator’s soul, the auditorium would force him
to put out that fire? Antonius was right when he said recently that the orator is nothing
without the audience’s support. You argued yourself that the essence of success lies
in kindling emotions in the listeners, and that this is achieved by awakening similar
emotions in oneself. Do you really wish future orators so ill, wanting them to stoop
to the level of the ignorant crowd, devoid of taste, knowledge and hearing? To share
its passions and ideas?”
“I know,” Crassus replied, “it is not the actor who educates the viewer, but the
viewer who educates the actor. I also realize that broad culture and a philosophical
education would be worthless for associating with people completely insensitive to
intellectual arguments, who had none but primitive desires and passions. But even if
our world came to an end, the value of the immortal formulae, rules and principles of
human communication, harder than marble though they are constructed from words,
would not come to an end. These are patterns of reference for anybody in the future
who wishes to come out of the darkness into the light, instead of watching shadows
on the wall, and to name things in their wonderful uniqueness and unfathomable
repeatability.”
“Nevertheless,” Scaevola insisted, “even if we manage to erect verbal structures
more magnificent than the most beautiful temples of Rome, one can easily imagine
that a time will come when teachers and students born in tribes and peoples whose
existence we cannot even sense today, will reach the conclusion that tradition is not
a value, but a threat. Then, the principles and norms we create will be treated as an
unjust attempt at promoting a certain outlook on life and a certain aesthetics at the
 TRADITION: A VOICE FROM THE PERIPHERIES 259

cost of an infinite variety of outlooks and aesthetics that will emerge in the future, or
already exist beyond the horizon of our world. Then, will those whom you have set
your hopes on, those desiring to escape from the Platonic cave, profit in any way from
referring to our words and thoughts?”
“There is a simple answer to that,” Crassus said. “Namely, . . .”

And that’s where the manuscript from my bathtub ended abruptly.

I’m neither an expert on speech and communication nor on
contemporary culture, and I know next to nothing about the United
States. I was raised in a society that knew political oppression and
totalitarian violence, but had never even heard of the political
correctness that oppresses you. I stood no chance, then, of success in
front of the kind of audience you are. No shared world, no chance for
shared emotions. But now I had that ancient text and could act like
any normal classical philologist: reconstructing and reproducing the
interrupted flow of thought of an ancient author. That’s something I
can do, it’s exactly what I was taught to do.
Thus, quaerendum est: Why did Crassus think he had a simple
answer to the now banal accusation that longstanding rhetorical
tradition, the tradition of rhetorical studies in which specific authors
and specific works constitute road signs, was politically incorrect? Why
did he think it would be easy to quash any fears that one’s own tradition
would preclude other traditions, that the equality of political cultures,
attitudes and desires of different nations, different communities within
one nation, and different people within each of those communities,
would make the very concept of tradition useless?
I thought that maybe he had planned to offer the following
arguments. Each time rhetoric is reborn, it will have to transform from
a technical instruction, from the science of composition, into a study
not indifferent to historical precedents, it will have to combine the
field of speech and communication with philosophy and theory of
literature. Then it will be possible to resolve the issue of a canon by
way of some sort of compromise, to write books in which the choice
of texts and authors will be decided not by magnificence of style, but
by criteria of ability to create knowledge and organize society—such
an ability in a sense as universal as possible. It will also be possible in
these anthologies to place in a central position texts once considered
marginal—criticizing and blowing to pieces the canon itself from the
inside, so to speak: Vico, the Sophists, Nietzsche, Derrida, versus
260 JERZY AXER

Cicero, Plato and Erasmus. The monolith of rhetorical tradition with

holes drilled in it and sticks of dynamite stuck inside them.
Then I realized that my bookshelf housed an anthology, (The
Rhetorical Tradition, Boston 1990) whose reasoning looked to me
twelve years ago, when I got it, not far from that. No, Crassus could
never have considered such a compromise as being a simple and
obvious solution!
That’s when I thought: Either you believe in tradition, or you don’t.
Faith in tradition means faithfulness to certain signs and rejection of
others. The guarantor of that tradition is something outside me—this
is what I have to feel if I want to retain respect for my choice. This
is God, and in the social dimension—one’s native land. Therefore,
tradition means my tradition, divided from and by its nature separate
from other traditions. I used to like this simple thought.
If the Russians hadn’t withdrawn the rest of their army from Poland
in 1991, I probably would still like it. If I were a Chechen, I would be
willing to die with such a declaration on my lips. But today I am no
longer able to take refuge in my Eastern European historical memory. I
can no longer repeat like a prayer the formulae of an Aesopean oration
of the persecuted; the luxury of easy communication with deceased
generations has been taken away from me. And that’s when I thought
the best thing to do would be to read De oratore carefully once again.
What is this book really about? The relations between being a
citizen and being a person, between being an artist and a philosopher, the
borders between pragmatism and striving for perfection. It is also a book
about the contradiction, impossible to evade, between the individual
and society, between public activity and instinct of self-preservation,
between renouncing activity and preserving one’s dignity.
It is also a book about dreams: Dreams of an ideal reconciliation
between reason and art, of unity between the person speaking and the
person listening; of a civil society born of the word. The arguments that
Cicero uses, the road along which he leads the reader, is not a simple
profession of faith in a single tradition and a single interpretation of that
tradition. This is more of a multiple-voice chorus, in which some voices
resound more strongly and others more quietly as the work develops.
The only certain thing is that the writer deeply believes in his diagnosis
and his dreams. He believes in them the more strongly the more he feels
the world is threatened, and the more alien it seems.
 TRADITION: A VOICE FROM THE PERIPHERIES 261

Reading De oratore, we return to the sources of a certain

teaching tradition. This is the republican and civic tradition.
At the same time, it is a tradition that, while not questioning
democracy, assumes that the aim of teaching is to create an elite.
At the foundation of such teaching lies a belief in culture’s constant
capacity for renewal through reinterpretation and reformulation
of one’s own tradition while maintaining absolute openness—or
even—a grasping readiness to draw from the tradition of others.
After all, Cicero constantly robs and sucks dry the Greeks, turning
into Roman things something that just a generation earlier had been
alien and foreign to the Romans.
Thus, De oratore has to be read like a manifesto and a journal
at the same time. This is a manifesto calling for salvation for civil
society, in which the orator—actor veritatis—would play the role
of the moderator of a compromise saving democracy, a constantly
repeated ceremony of republican initiation. The author of this
manifesto is the greatest master of the living word that Mediterranean
culture has ever produced, an artist aware of his greatness, confident
that he can influence not only the audience of his time, but also
future generations. The journal layer in this work, on the other hand,
comprises the shocking confession of a failed politician, a student of
murdered teachers, who realizes that the same fate awaits him at some
point in the future. Both the manifesto and the journal were written by
a man who combined a multiple-theme rhetorical tradition and carried
out a new synthesis of discourse and knowledge.
This is the kind of tradition that can be useful to us today—in
the global world. We need that sort of tradition particularly in those
moments when we feel like the passengers of a luxury liner where
nobody is able to say where we’re coming from or going to, and the
crew have forgotten the name of their home port.
With this conviction, when I was president of the International
Society for the History of Rhetoric, I proposed that the program of this
organization’s congresses include a new, permanent element: the Past
Present Forum. This was an invitation to colleagues dealing with the
history of rhetoric—which is the mission of this society—to believe
once more that the distant past can help in better understanding and
diagnosing what happened later. I have always thought the “distant
mirror” effect to be especially desirable.
262 JERZY AXER

Faith in the value of this effect, in its educational effectiveness,

was also behind everything I have written and said about the need to
create a new educational theater. Let me paraphrase my own text:2

“I see the sense of creating programs containing a core curriculum and based on
the so-called Great Books, provided that we can use them as a scenario for an open
educational theater. If it is true that the teacher must undergo transformation from a
magister into a rhetor; if it is true that the latter’s mission is not to persuade and to
impose specific interpretations on texts, but to explore an open network of obligations
that keeps the question of meaning open as a locus of debate, we are dealing with a
purely rhetorical task . . . .
The speaker—teacher from the educational theater must seek, predominantly,
a new principle for establishing contact with the audience. He is no longer a priest
opening the door to the temple, nor does he have at his disposal free admission
tickets to the salons. His role has become totally different, and if he is to be effective,
then he should regard himself as a castaway in an alien world, the sole survivor of
a catastrophe, the relic of a tribe annihilated by a deluge. His task is to proclaim
a message in a renascent world. No legal regulations or coercion will guarantee
him success among those who were born in this new world. Such success may be
obtained only by resorting to deceit. The new Quintilian must be simultaneously a
new Machiavelli. Socrates must once again become a jester, but this time much more
comical than the one who accosted people in the streets of Athens. This is our sole
chance, if we are not to bore our listeners to death before we die too . . . .”

Such were the slogans under which we founded the liberal education
movement in its Eastern European version, with encouragement and
support from Nicholas Farnham’s Educational Leadership Program.
Today, it comprises a network of interdepartmental individual studies
in the humanities centers at the leading universities of Poland and
countries east of Poland, and a network called the Artes Liberales
Academy, educating young faculty from the region. A new type
of discourse and faith in a multiple-voice tradition—constantly
undulating but anchored in Socratic dialogue, is the guiding principle
behind these activities, which some consider crazy.
In everyday practice, this means we are trying to treat the
traditional Mediterranean classical rhetorical canon as obligatory,
without removing from it or contesting even those elements that
contemporary pedagogy is inclined to criticize as being contrary to
the attitudes we would like to shape in our students. On top of such a
foundation we are adding a layer of texts from authors of lesser rank,
but who are linked to the local regional cultural tradition. In our case,
these are writers, orators and theoreticians active over the past ten
 TRADITION: A VOICE FROM THE PERIPHERIES 263

centuries in the region that today is Poland and, more broadly, in the
region of Central and Eastern Europe. Only then comes the time for
groups of authors, broken up into many variants, who have lost faith
in the canon, questioned it, criticized it or replaced it with their own
proposals.
What I consider fundamental here is consenting to our listeners
making their own choices and constructing their own hierarchies
within tradition. Before doing so, however, they should not be offered
a canon of compromise, castrated, tamed, imposing politically
correct—or in our view the most fitting—corrections and shifting of
accents. Let these be texts of the highest artistic standard, reflecting
the historical order in which they appeared. Let a wise and forbearing
teacher used them as scripts in the educational theater, respecting
and accepting the reactions and proposals of students endowed with
personality and sensitivity. And may God deliver us from any other
kind of student.
I have told you what practice we adopted in the community we
have managed to build, and how we are trying to continue it. I can
easily imagine other strategies, where from the very start the axis
of conversations between master and pupil would be the idea of
questioning the canon, or proposals for an alternative canon to the
Greek-Roman tradition. I can even easily imagine that the educational
theater could be replaced with a special variant: putting tradition on
trial. I am unable to condemn this, but neither am I able to feel any real
liking for such conduct.
Since the manuscript found in the bathtub ended abruptly before
Crassus managed to present his defense of tradition, everyone has to
find their own formula on their own responsibility.
As for me, I’m sure that our generation, and the younger generation
after us, could attempt to write a De oratore of the 21st century. Like
the original, it has to be a manifesto but also a diary. The diary will bear
witness to the terrible experiences of the 20th century. Remember—
our teachers were killed, our books and libraries burned, our language
was corrupted, and the human tendency to dream was abused on
an unheard-of scale. The manifesto, on the other hand, is essential
if we want to continue to practice ars rhetorica and encourage our
students to do the same. The formula can be simple, like Cicero’s or
Quintilian’s.
264 JERZY AXER

So, let’s declare we still believe that power over words supported
by a thorough education can protect—at least some people—from
marginalization in the world of commerce, from a cooling of the
heart in the world of mass media, from loss of contact with reality
in the virtual world. Let’s confirm that we want to trust tradition.
Because it is our task to constantly rinse the sand of what was
with the water of what is, in the hope that what is left at the bottom
of the basin will be flecks of gold, in amounts sufficient for paying
a deposit on the future.

Postscript

Accepting the honor of the invitation to speak at the Conference

on the Status and Future of Rhetoric Studies, I realized that I owed
it to my membership in a regional community with a very special
culture and political memory. That is why I chose a self-ironic
essay as the form of my address. In this context, I also parodied my
own attitude as a reader of the anthology The Rhetorical Tradition:
Readings from the Classical Times to the Present.
Not only Prof. Walker’s witty reply to my address, but primarily
the subsequent reaction of Patricia Bizzell, were best proof for me
that the tone I had used had been understood correctly. Patricia
Bizzell’s lecture shortly after the conference, given at the Center for
Writing and the Interdisciplinary Minor in Literacy and Rhetorical
Studies, University of Minnesota, of which she devoted the second
part to the rhetorical tradition and its plurality (with a broad
reference to my address), shows how real political correctness
opens up the mind.
Patricia Bizzell interpreted the hidden message of my address
with great sensitivity. She also said some fine words about my
ideological stance: “I am not sure he really understood all of the
implications of that phrase [political correctness] for American
academics.” She was absolutely right, let me add: I pretended to
understand less than I actually did, because my real adversary was
not, and is not, of course, the Rhetorical Tradition, but the attitude
towards tradition in my peripheral community. A caricaturized
version of political correctness, not experienced and not internalized
but treated like an ideology applied from the outside, does not
 TRADITION: A VOICE FROM THE PERIPHERIES 265

give a community new strength but takes away its traditional

cohesiveness.
My main emphasis was on issues that Patricia Bizzell understood
very well, and even added the punch line in my stead:

Axer also had interesting things to say about that. . . . So, it may be, he didn’t
use this metaphor, but it may be a way of trying to explain, the way I understood
it was, it’s almost as if tradition were the gene-pool, the intellectual gene-pool,
that preserves ideas through hard times, ideas that we may read later. And then
they’ll be there for us to draw on, share, and pass down to our students. So, for
him, clearly, tradition did have a positive quality.3

Today, three years later, my text will be read in a different context.

On the one hand, its occasional character is gone, while on the
other, in Poland the concept of “tradition” and restoring the canon
in education has become part of the propaganda and political
platform of the political option that won the last elections. Neither
the language used in this platform, nor the proposed educational
concepts, have anything in common with the kind of “educational
theater” that I believe in. That theater is based not on ideology but
on pietas, or, as Prof. Walker was good enough to say (referring to
a thought of Santayana’s), “loyalty to the sources of one’s being.”
After some thought, however, I decided not to change anything in
the text. Ultimately, Sidera manibus Aethiopi tacta non nigrescunt,
as the Romans used to say. What I have just written, I hasten to
correct. I used this proverb once before, and was accused of a lack
of political correctness by my American friends. Therefore, I will
put it differently: Cum duo faciunt idem, non est idem.

Notes

1. The text below, with the exception of the “Postscript,” was presented as a
plenary address opening the Conference on the Status and Future of Rhetoric Studies
held in Chicago by the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies at Northwestern University,
September 11–14, 2003. It was part of a dialogue whose other part was the reply of
Jeffrey Walker. The “Postcript” references Prof. Walker’s reply and responds to a
subsequent exchange with Prof. Patricia Bizzell.
2. See Axer 2003, 190.
3. Bizzell 2003, 27–28.
266 JERZY AXER

References

Axer, Jerzy. 2003. “The Reader as an Actor: The Canon of World Literature and
Educational Strategy (East-Central European Case Example).” Rhetoric of
Transformation, ed. Jerzy Axer, 188–96. Warszawa: OBTA UW&DiG.
Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg, eds. 1990. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings
from the Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford-St.Martin’s.
Bizzell, Patricia. 2003. Future Directions for Rhetorical Traditions. A Lecture
presented by the Center for Writing and the Interdisciplinary Minor in Literacy
and Rhetorical Studies. Ed. Elizabeth Oliver. Speaker Series, 23. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota.