Okay so I know this is late again, but oh well.
So Aristotle's Rhetoric Book 1 both blows me away, and at the same time pulls me back down and makes me scoff at it. The way he goes about in analyzing and breaking down the art of Rhetoric and argument is extremely interesting. I would like to say that he is really ahead of his time on this aspect, but at the same time I'm wondering why it didn't occur earlier. Why was he the first one to really sit down and question and look at what compels us to discourse, and how rhetoric is involved in constructing our discourses with our audience? Why didn’t anyone question it before? I thought humanity was the questioning sort, instead of complacent?
However, what troubles me with Aristotle's Rhetoric is how organized, and yet completely disorganized it is at the same time. His tangents are incredibly long and drawn out, and he offers no explanation of if and how they tied in to his analysis of Rhetoric. His tangents on the whole goodness and how and what is good is all well and good, but why does it belong in here? Also, his lack of perspective really bothers me. He continually states that what is good is essentially everything opposite of one’s enemies. But what about the perspective of one’s enemies? Isn’t everything that is good to them opposite of the other? What then is good? Does Aristotle believe that there is no inherent goodness, and instead that goodness is relative? But then his other discussions about goodness seem different than this, which he is contradicting himself.
Which brings me to what really grinds my gears about Aristotle. I want consistency. I want to be able to look at a passage and say “Yes, this is exactly what Aristotle means and he will always means this.” I also want clarity in his writing. And both of these things seem to be missing all throughout his reading.
But I guess this is what makes it interesting, and still talked about and argued on today?
“His tangents on the whole goodness and how and what is good is all well and good, but why does it belong in here?”
ReplyDeleteI’d guess that Aristotle’s attempts to define both happiness and goodness in his books are based on his efforts to help train rhetoricians on human behavior and the sources of their behavior, the idea that people act on their sincere beliefs, and once one knows what people value and upon which premises they base their own behavior and thinking, then one can know better how to create the conditions for optimal persuasion and communication.
I think this effort plays right in with his generalizations about human psychology. Indeed his definitions sometimes contradict themselves, but as we discussed in class, the situations (values and beliefs and perceptions of goodness) are in constant flux. The conditions reflect his approach, it seems to me.
We all want consistencey from the people we are learning from. It's human nature to want to contain and label information, to want others to package it for us so that we can grasp it easily. However, as we all know, that isn't how writing and thinking works. If Burke wrote all of books in order to figure out what he was thinking about language, rhetoric and dramatism, then hit the delete button on all that came before that moment of clarity, we'd be missing out on a bunch of interesting stuff, and we'd have no idea how he got here. Similarly with Aristotle. I try to to grasp him in one passage, or part, but look at the whole. It often finally makes sense, and the meandering seems to serve a purpose-he strings us along on his thought process, so that we may not just see where he ended up, but know how he got there, and how we got there ourselves.
ReplyDeleteDaniel, you want it both ways. First you say, wow, he was the first, and then you say, wow, what a mental mess.
ReplyDeleteLet me submit that one follows from the other. The man was literally making this up as he went along. He didn't have a manual. My thinking is that THINKING itself was a bit buggy back in the early days of literacy. Literacy, as McLuhan and Ong and Lanham and others have said, greatly aided what we would think of as a coherent, organized management of ... well ... ideas. Orality has its charms, but it's not that good for lining up coherent ideas or promoting consistency, except maybe in oral poetry in which bards said the same lines over and over for decades, and had all kind of mnemonic devices and verbal cues to arrange their ideas.
Plato used the dialogue, which was a bit of a cop out since his organizational structure was what he was highly familiar with, the conversation. Aristotle had to invent analysis and spread it out in prose. Did nobody before Aristotle analyze anything? I genuinely don't think so, not to any significant degree. This was an historical original. To criticize him for blurry writing is like criticizing Galileo for missing Uranus.