Thomas M. Conley, in Rhetoric in the European Tradition, teaches that "public discussion, where options were debated and consensus sought, was evidently the traditional way in which decisions were reached" (2). In other words, people have been talking each other into things for a very long time.
The type of rhetoric may change, so the story goes, but not the actual idea of "elaboration and rearticulation" (24). Yet, it is arguable that what we are looking at via the Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates is not just four types of argument, but four distinct personality types persuading us toward their own particular worldviews.
Gorgias, for instance, with the heart of either a politician or a dictator (not sure which), may have called himself a teacher, but he taught the manipulation of audience - not the enlightenment, and a "unilateral transaction between an active speaker and a passive audience" (6) sounds a little like a drug deal to me.
Protagoras, to a lesser extent, and Isocrates, on the other hand, were truly teachers. For them it was not about manipulating the audience nor about finding some immutable Truth - which "for all practical purpose, was held by Protagoras to be inaccessible" (5). For the teacher-personality, rhetoric becomes a way to get everyone on the same civically-minded page.
Plato was a born philosopher. For him, rhetoric was finding and communicating that greater Truth grasped "only by the lover of wisdom who apprehends them as a result of divine inspiration or by recollection ... of them as they were viewed by the soul before birth" (8). I'm guessing he believed he was one such blessed "lover."
Aristotle, Plato's genius student-who-could, felt that rhetoric stood on its own as an art form: reason for reason's sake. Like Isocrates, and Protagoras before him, Aristotle looked at public discourse as the art of seeing possibilities (technically: "probabilities"). Unlike the teachers of art, however, Aristotle was the the artist, with the artist's devotion to product - and not what the product could necessarily bring to the community at large.
Rhetorical style then, I think it can be argued, is a reflection of the personality and the values of the rhetor. Conley's "four basic models" (24), may reflect four possible personality types of thinkers who often are instrumental in changing our world. I haven't yet decided if this thought comforts me or not.
Monday, August 31, 2009
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