Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestley, trained as he was ‘not in the theatrical debate of Parliament, but in the plain speech of dissenting-academies’, ⁵³ in his Letters to Burke (1791) represents that aspect of the radical reaction to Burke which used the Reflections as a means for elaborating the distinction between eloquence and reason in the reciprocally transvaluing rhetorics of clarity and obscurity. In the Letters, Priestley claims that excessively emotional texts like Burke’s could have potentially disastrous effects, since contemporary readers would be neither inclined to make nor capable of making rational judgments. Recalling his earlier Lectures and the equivocal consequences of invoking the passions, he claims the danger of Burke’s intemperate book is founded on the fact that ‘[a]n oppressed people do not… in general see anything more than what they immediately feel’.⁵⁴ Sight, traditionally the faculty of reason, is here overthrown by the power of feeling, influenced, as it were, less by the sun than by the ‘obscure rays’, the ‘dark or invisible rays’ or ‘heat-rays of the solar spectrum’ (OED) discussed by contemporary scientists.

For Priestley, while his unique focus on associationist psychology in works like A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism is meant to demonstrate new possibilities for clear communication and persuasion, the diverse nature of individual and cultural experiences and associations renders language and its effects more indefinite. The intra- and inter-cultural relativity of association, the consequence of slippery signification and the varieties of personal and cultural experience, called for careful procedures at this crucial moment in history: ‘[o]bjects appear in very different lights to different persons, according to their respective situations, and the opportunities they have of observing them’.⁵⁵ In his discussion of the new rhetoric James Engell has called attention to this problem for linguistic universality and the stability of association, arguing that

[m]uch of the new rhetoric depends on a realization that words are imperfect and slippery signifiers. This helps to explain the neoclassical and eighteenth-century obsession with clarity - not that writers and critics trusted words, but that they distrusted them and their possible abuses so much.⁵⁶

In Priestley’s analysis, though Burke’s ‘sublimely rhetorical’ style succeeds in achieving an astounding level of ‘eloquence’, he fails to sustain this careful sensitivity and fails in the field of ‘sober reasoning’.⁵⁷ In this argument, Priestley perpetuates the same Lockean principle which Tom Furniss claims Burke inverted: ‘Burke shares Locke’s anxiety about the abuses of language which exploit its arbitrary nature, but while Locke urges that discourse be stripped of its figuration, ambiguity, and obscurity… Burke celebrates such devices and effects’.⁵⁸ Priestley points out his difference with Burke disingenuously, invoking the suspicion of ‘rhetoric’ and claiming that Burke has in him ‘more of the rhetorician than of the reasoner’, making the connection of church and state ‘a subject of popular declamation, rather than of dispassionate reasoning’.⁵⁹ Invoking the Lectures again, Priestley admonishes Burke to change his style, ‘and assume the character of a philosopher, and not that of a mere rhetorician’.⁶⁰

But Priestley’s Lectures show that he was well aware of the positive and indeed necessary function of rhetoric in progressive information and enlightenment, and his appropriation of a common association between rhetoric and sophistry is therefore itself a contradictory use of a rhetorical figure. This contradiction can be resolved somewhat if we consider that for Priestley Burke’s ‘rhetoric’ is, properly, the negative, misinforming rhetoric of obscurity. Referring to Burke’s veneration of tyrannical establishments by virtue of their age, Priestley asserts:

[p]rejudice and error is only a mist, which the sun, which was now risen, will effectually disperse. Keep them about you as tight as the countryman in the fable did his cloak; the same sun, without any more violence than the warmth of his beams, will compel you to throw it aside, unless you chuse to sweat under it, and bear the ridicule of all your cooler and less encumbered companions.⁶¹

In Priestley’s figurative schema, just as traditional institutions are associated with the negative charge of obscurity, so the advancing light of the rhetoric of clarity is positively dispelling the clouds of false religion: ‘I mean the growing light of the age, in consequence of which we are more and more sensible of the absurdity of the doctrines… of your church’.⁶² And just as Paine transfers the association of light with religion into an association with the practical advancement of knowledge, the dismantling of oppressive political establishments, and the development of an egalitarian and scientific epistemology, so does Priestley adopt the language of his enemies, and employ it to a subversive end: ‘[t]hese great events, in many respects unparalleled in history, make a totally new… aera in the history of mankind. It is, to adopt your own rhetorical style, a change from darkness to light, from superstition to sound knowledge, and from a most debasing servitude to a state of the most exalted freedom’.⁶³ The rhetoric of clarity is here brought to an informative level of metarhetorical reflexivity or self-consciousness concerning its relation, both in style and in figurative content, to the obfuscating ‘eloquence’ or sophistry from which it consistently distinguished itself. But in this program of reciprocal figuration, even the ironic adoption of the rhetoric of obscurity merely served, in a manner that recalls Longinus’s self-defeating criticism of Isocrates, to call attention to the interchangeability of the two rhetorics.