Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian
Ramus's goal is to show that many of the categories that Aristotle came up with regarding rhetoric, which Cicero and Quintilian and others followed, are either arbitrary or actually false, because the divisions divide the subject at the wrong joints. I think Ramus is, for the most part, right, though he is being a little more strict than the subject matter allows [per Aristotle].
Ramus says: Quintilian has added all kinds of things to rhetoric that do not belong to it. Rather, these things might be necessary in rhetoric, e.g., grammar, or must exist in the good orator, e.g., virtue, but these are not what rhetoric itself is about, as an art. Ramus identifies rhetoric with what earlier writers call eloquence, limiting its scope to style and delivery. Invention, order, and memory, he says, belong more properly to dialectic (which ends up being very similar to philosophy). In this way, rhetoric seems to be separated from both the audience and the pisteis of the argument. This makes sense, but only so long as it is remembered that rhetoric [eloquence] is nothing without dialectic as its counterpart [per Aristotle]. Ramus evidently believes that rhetoric can be taught apart from dialectic, even though speeches and even literature and poetry are constructed out of both. Dialectic and rhetoric work together in "stirring the emotions and causing delight" (Newlands 124), but training in ethics is the better place to go to learn about the emotions properly.
There are only ten kinds of things which can be said (invention): causes, effects, subjects, adjuncts, opposites, comparisons, names, divisions, definitions, witnesses (Newlands 112). Aristotle and Quintilian make a huge muddle by naming all kinds of other supposed classes and subclasses.
The real divisions are between rhetoric and dialectic, each with its parts; and then the parts of dialectic, being invention and arrangement [memory seems to drop out here]; and then the ten topics which comprise invention. [These are the effects; the thoughts about topics and arrangement are what dialectic is really about, I think.]
Since Aristotle said that rhetoric is not science, he gets into the bind of saying that scientific proof is not argument, for which Ramus takes him to task. Ramus makes a better case, in making argument part of dialectic rather than rhetoric, so that science has more of a place. [cf. Bacon?]
Quintilian thought that "there is no fixed art of arrangement which can be formulated for all matters; here he is seriously wrong [says Ramus]. For there is a fixed theory of syllogism and artistic method, common to everything which can be treated with order and reason." [cf. Bacon?] (125). [But if audiences do not always respond well to order and reason, then this theory must take particular audiences into account, and it therefore would have trouble being a "fixed" theory.]
Tropes are figures and need thought to exist, but they are about words, not thoughts. Figures of thought are different than tropes, and perhaps should not be called figures at all (because of keeping dialectic and rhetoric in different categories).
Ramus is careful to distinguish the tropes [= word substitutions which provide "change of meaning"] from other kinds of stylized diction, e.g., onomatopoeia is important to style but it is not a trope. Substitutions that do not provide changes of meaning are not tropes, e.g. antonomasia and periphrasis. The tropes which remain are four:
Metaphor - substitution by similarity
Synecdoche - substitution of part for whole, part for part, etc., of the same subject
Metonymy - substitution by adjuncts (not things that are similar, but things that are found together, e.g., cause-effect)
Irony - substitution by dissimilarity [ironic metaphor?] or disjunction [ironic metonymy?] [is ironic synecdoche possible?]
The ways to learn R include analysis (considering others: listening, watching, reading) and genesis (practice doing it).