Tseng Yueh-nung on rhetoric education

My dissertation has been on hold for quite a while for a number of reasons, but during midterms week at my school (or "fall break," as I like to call it), I had a little extra time to work on some diss-related stuff.

One of the things I've been working on besides lining up some interviews is working through some of the beliefs/theories behind the general education program as it was established at Tunghai in the 1950s. From what I've read, the idea of general education was quite revolutionary in Taiwan because of the strong emphasis that most programs placed on specialization. In fact, general education was controversial, even at Tunghai, because some people believed it took precious time and energy away from specialized teaching and research. Tunghai's first president Tseng Yueh-nung wrote an article entitled "A Simple Explanation of General Education" (Hongtong jiaoyu qianshi 宏通教育淺釋) that was published in 1955 in a collection entitled Collected Writings on the History of Chinese Learning (Zhongguo xueshushi lunji 中國學術史論集).

After describing the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, he says the following about the rise of rhetoric:

希臘羅馬政治即臻全盛，日中則昃。於是道德淪亡，人懷自競之心，挾數任術，以獵取功名而致富貴。雄辯學 (rhetoric)，逐為必修之科。整體教育反失去重心，一時消極與失望，詭詐與荒瑩，籠罩全歐，不可救藥，如是者數百年。

My rough translation (feel free to make fun of it--better yet, give me suggestions for corrections):

Once Greco-Roman government reached its full prime, the sun at its zenith began its decline. Whereupon, morality was lost, and the competitive hearts of men harbored many tricks to allow them to pursue fame, wealth, and rank. The study of eloquence (rhetoric) gradually became a required subject. Education as a whole, in contrast, lost its center of gravity; at the same time, pessimism and despair, cunning and dissolution hung over all of Europe beyond redemption; thus it remained for hundreds of years.

I felt for a while that this take on rhetoric, which arguably had some effect on how Tseng saw the mission of general education at the university level, grew out of a combination of a Confucian and a Cartesian distrust of eloquence or of disputation as a way of finding the truth. (I should also not neglect to mention Tseng's Christianity--he was a Quaker.)

Recently, however, some more specific sources from late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain have come to my attention as a result of Karen Whedbee's two recent articles in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Whedbee traces the negative reputation that classical rhetoric developed in those centuries to the anti-democratic histories that were written about ancient Greece. Some of the language of those anti-Athens histories seems echoed in Tseng's comments about the effects of rhetoric on education and morality in the classical world. A typical quote, from John Gillies, describes the rhetor in these terms:

He who could best flatter and deceive them [the lower classes] obtained most of their confidence. With such fatal qualifications, the turbulent, the licentious, and the dissolute, in a word, the orator who most resembled his audience commonly prevailed in the assembly, and specious or hurtful talents carried off the awards due to real merit. (qtd in Whedbee, "Reclaiming" 74)

I don't know if Tseng had access to writings like Gillies's, though, while he was studying in England. Or perhaps the source of Tseng's 'history' of rhetoric is more recent that Gillies, who was writing in the 1780s.

Works Cited

Tseng, Yueh-nung 曾約農. "Hongtong jiaoyu qianshi" 宏通教育淺釋 [A Simple Explanation of General Education]. Zhongguo xueshushi lunji 中國學術史論集 [Collected Writings on the History of Chinese Learning]. Vol 4. Taipei: Zhonghua wenhua chuban shiye weiyuanhui, 1955. 1-12.

Whedbee, Karen E. "Reclaiming Rhetorical Democracy: George Grote's Defense of Cleon and the Athenian Demagogues." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.4 (2004): 71-95.

----------. "The Tyranny of Athens: Representations of Rhetorical Democracy in Eighteenth-Century Britain." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 33.4 (2003): 65-85.