On the Necessity of Eloquence

ABSTRACT

In the founding of modern philosophy, Descartes, Locke, and Kant excluded eloquence from the pursuit of right reasoning, good sense, and critique. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, lost the ancient principle of eloquence as “wisdom speaking.” We may recover the connection between philosophy and eloquence by going back to the humanist tradition of the Renaissance, the summation of which can be found in Vico’s thought. To this revival of eloquence, we may add Hegel’s advancement of the Delphic precept of self-knowledge in his Phänomenologie des Geistes, through his concept of the speculative sentence. Self-knowledge has stood at the center of philosophical inquiry throughout the history of philosophy, and it remains today as the essence of human wisdom.