I found this article very accessible, and I can see how rhetoricians can find commonplaces useful. (I thought the comment about rhetoricians needing to be skilled at tracking down suitable proofs for their arguments, like hunters and fishermen tracking down prey, an amusing and apt comparison!) I also thought that the distinction made between modern topics and rhetorical commonplaces went a long way to helping me understand how commonplaces worked--and I agree, having ideas familiar to an entire community/country/etc to draw from when making a argument can be extremely effective. The examples presented by the authors also worked well to illustrate their ideas. I am also glad that the authors made the statement that commonplaces do not have to be true to exist or to be powerful in language.
While commonplaces are clearly useful, I also see how they could be over-used by a rhetorician because of their high accessibility. An argument based entirely on these commonplaces, particularly the ones used most frequently, would lose effectiveness quickly and would put the arguer in danger of being seen as a fraud. Cliché comes to mind. Perhaps in Greece the frequent use of commonplaces was encouraged as a result of the repetitive oral tradition of the time, but I have a feeling that many of today's audiences would oppose the idea of commonplaces if they realized the frequency in which they are used, particularly in manipulation.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
slight backtracking, I hope
This is a little late, hopefully not too late.
In Book One, last week on Tuesday (I think; time blurs), we discussed the passage on my page 30, about enthymatic proofs, handbook writers and the court system. In my translation (an older version of Kennedy) "... these writers say nothing about enthymemes, which is the 'body' of persuasion, while they give most of their attention to matters external to the subject; for verbal attack and pity and anger and such emotions of the soul do not relate to fact but are appeals to the juryman."
I believe this section to be about the inability of casual thinkers and teachers (and I believe Aristotle is comparing handbook writers to casual or careless thinkers and teachers) to consider the societal and further-reaching consequences of immediate manipulation. To my understanding enthymemes themselves do contain a significant appeal to ethos or pathos, meaning that they will appeal to the emotions of the jurists, but that there is also a limited appeal to logos (Aristotle's favorite of the species of appeal), specifically in the fact that a manipulation of enthymemes requires societal analysis. In order to recognize the species of logic used in a particular enthymeme (which does not, itself, have to be logical; logic is a relationship between premises and conclusion, logical is the net result of the argument), the examiner has to be very aware of what does appeal to the audience (which Aristotle appears to believe is an important part of enthymatic thinking) and also what kind of reason underlies the particular societal reasoning cited by the arguer. Aristotle loves to go into lists anytime he can with types of appeals, so things like 'for the greater good' or 'the benefit of many' arguments might serve here, if the arguer was capable of identifying the specific interests involved and what assumptions they make about group members (in this case, of people who will be benefited by the good in question and members of the many.) Aristotle does mock the emotional appeal which 'warps' a jury (and who would warp a ruler before using it; though, in the case of a judge and jury, he has little faith in their ability to discern truth in any objective sense), but enthymatic argument, given that it maintains the ability to deal in abstractions (like the location of the warrant of any argument, for a group of people, and more importantly for him, the long-view of the effects of any particular decisions-- he picks up his Plato here, because law-maker can decide and no one else is objective enough) does not have to suffer his onus as long as it can predict beyond the first stirrings of emotional effect on the target audience.
Of course, this means that enthymemes are a species of argument that manipulates pathos and ethos using logos, and since Aristotle believes logos to be the better of that triad, I think this is accurate.
But I reserve the right to be wrong, at any time, but hopefully not fatally so.
In Book One, last week on Tuesday (I think; time blurs), we discussed the passage on my page 30, about enthymatic proofs, handbook writers and the court system. In my translation (an older version of Kennedy) "... these writers say nothing about enthymemes, which is the 'body' of persuasion, while they give most of their attention to matters external to the subject; for verbal attack and pity and anger and such emotions of the soul do not relate to fact but are appeals to the juryman."
I believe this section to be about the inability of casual thinkers and teachers (and I believe Aristotle is comparing handbook writers to casual or careless thinkers and teachers) to consider the societal and further-reaching consequences of immediate manipulation. To my understanding enthymemes themselves do contain a significant appeal to ethos or pathos, meaning that they will appeal to the emotions of the jurists, but that there is also a limited appeal to logos (Aristotle's favorite of the species of appeal), specifically in the fact that a manipulation of enthymemes requires societal analysis. In order to recognize the species of logic used in a particular enthymeme (which does not, itself, have to be logical; logic is a relationship between premises and conclusion, logical is the net result of the argument), the examiner has to be very aware of what does appeal to the audience (which Aristotle appears to believe is an important part of enthymatic thinking) and also what kind of reason underlies the particular societal reasoning cited by the arguer. Aristotle loves to go into lists anytime he can with types of appeals, so things like 'for the greater good' or 'the benefit of many' arguments might serve here, if the arguer was capable of identifying the specific interests involved and what assumptions they make about group members (in this case, of people who will be benefited by the good in question and members of the many.) Aristotle does mock the emotional appeal which 'warps' a jury (and who would warp a ruler before using it; though, in the case of a judge and jury, he has little faith in their ability to discern truth in any objective sense), but enthymatic argument, given that it maintains the ability to deal in abstractions (like the location of the warrant of any argument, for a group of people, and more importantly for him, the long-view of the effects of any particular decisions-- he picks up his Plato here, because law-maker can decide and no one else is objective enough) does not have to suffer his onus as long as it can predict beyond the first stirrings of emotional effect on the target audience.
Of course, this means that enthymemes are a species of argument that manipulates pathos and ethos using logos, and since Aristotle believes logos to be the better of that triad, I think this is accurate.
But I reserve the right to be wrong, at any time, but hopefully not fatally so.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Aristotle: Language and the Sophists
Reading through book 2 (I'm about halfway done) I'm particularly struck by two things. First, Aristotle seems to believe that everything is classifiable. In doing this, and in his belief that rhetoric is powerful and useful and worth teaching, he shows a great faith in language. It's as though language can account for everything—for our emotions; for any situation in which people find themselves; for the many different kinds of people, their thoughts and their reasons for feeling the way they do. But I can't help feeling this exhaustive approach is limiting, because while the outline of the work is logical, the way that it proceeds is very digressive, to the point where much of it is hardly about rhetoric at all, at least to a modern reader. Of course this is a very old text, and its intended audience and purpose will always be a question. Writing then was different than it is now, though speech was certainly systemetized; perhaps if we could hear him talk all of this would seem more logical and less digressive. Or maybe digression was considered part of A's brilliance; different cultures at different times value different modes of expression. Like the way some middle and far eastern languages value metaphor more highly than the spare, direct style that we prefer in American English.
Second, A generalizes freely, and often uses the words "all" and "everyone" to prove a point by claiming concensus. I'm sure this is cultural, the Greeks view of the individual in society being much different from our own. But it struck me as very un-sophistic, while his faith in language seems sophistic. A has certainly come some distance toward the sophists from Plato by acknowledging rhetoric's practicality and separating it from morality, but he doesn't have their sense of contingency. For A, even though he's not an Athenian and would've had an "outsider's" perspective to some degree, there don't seem to be cultural differences that would demand a speaker to practice his art differently. Even in the way he drifts so far away from rhetoric and into general human observation, A doesn't acknowledge other cultures or points of view. Maybe this is because this was written with the more narrow purpose of teaching an Athenian man to speak in the Athenian assembly, where there are only other Athenian men. But surely if these other perspectives were part of his consciousness he would've mentioned something outside of Athens, or at least its possibility.
Second, A generalizes freely, and often uses the words "all" and "everyone" to prove a point by claiming concensus. I'm sure this is cultural, the Greeks view of the individual in society being much different from our own. But it struck me as very un-sophistic, while his faith in language seems sophistic. A has certainly come some distance toward the sophists from Plato by acknowledging rhetoric's practicality and separating it from morality, but he doesn't have their sense of contingency. For A, even though he's not an Athenian and would've had an "outsider's" perspective to some degree, there don't seem to be cultural differences that would demand a speaker to practice his art differently. Even in the way he drifts so far away from rhetoric and into general human observation, A doesn't acknowledge other cultures or points of view. Maybe this is because this was written with the more narrow purpose of teaching an Athenian man to speak in the Athenian assembly, where there are only other Athenian men. But surely if these other perspectives were part of his consciousness he would've mentioned something outside of Athens, or at least its possibility.