Comparative Theory Issues - Essay Example

Comparative Theory This study acts as a cautious beginning for the analysis of mushrooming literacy and rapidly increasing secondary orality. The pressures and possibilities of fourth-century B.C. literacy and for modem electronic communication systems remain completely different in many ways. With a radical change in peoples perception. However, a strange characteristic remains in common: the dominance of oral discourse has become more important since film and video have become dominant symbol systems than at any other time since the ancient period. Modern revolutions in ways of thinking have taken place, and they resemble in substantial ways the revolutions in thinking of the fourth century B.C. These revolutions occur with great pain and difficulty and have made a lot of people angry, including Plato to a limited extent in the ancient era, and literacy hounds such as Allan Bloom to a great extent in the present era. The belief persists now that visual texts are inherently inferior to written texts, a belief that has gone through many permutations since the invention of the camera and that has resulted in discussions about the nature of "realism." The unexamined belief in the inferiority of visual texts continues to saturate the academy in the United States. Many people now will routinely acknowledge the idea that film and video are "artistic" media. However, their own responses to these media often indicate that these newer symbol systems are not in fact taken as seriously as symbol systems such as print or painting or music. The most compelling evidence for this marginalization of newer discourse technologies lies in their integration in general education requirements. They are regarded as peripheral concerns, unrelated to the study of print texts. Aristotelianism," as it has been called derives from print culture. The grammar of film and the grammar of video have not been integrated into enough film. Classical Rhetoric is a discipline that teaches man the rules and principles of fluent expression, knowing and doing good, master certain techniques and familiarizing himself with the good, the True and the Beautiful. It involves the study of fundamental principles of political philosophy, ethics and traditional psychology. It assists the learner to give a political speech and also learn elements of good character (Corbett, 1990) Beginning at a young age with practice in imitating the writing of others, rhetoric study extends in later years into the specific study of persuasive expression. There is no better place to begin this latter kind of study than with Aristotle's Rhetoric. Aristotle taught that there were three elements of communication: the speaker, the audience, and the speech itself. In fact, his book is broken down into three parts, one on each of these elements of rhetoric. Aristotle adds the three kinds of persuasive speech: political speech, legal speech and ceremonial speech. In political speech, the audience is some body of decision-makers like a political assembly. Its subject is the future, and its object is to move the audience to take some course of action. The end of this kind of speech is suitability, which is a kind of good. Political rhetoric, therefore, is highly moral or ethical in character. (Atwill, 1998) In a legal speech, the subject is the past, and the object is the determination of what has or has not in fact happened. A lawyer arguing a case in court would be an example of a legal speaker, although anyone who argues to an audience about past events would count as a legal speaker. The end of legal speech is the determination of the truth, making it very logical in nature. A ceremonial speaker would address the present and would concern himself with the present honor or dishonor of someone. He would engage in the praise or blame to achieve his object. The person giving an eulogy and certain kinds of sermons would engage in this sort of rhetoric. Because of its ceremonial nature (which is why it is often referred to as the rhetoric of display), ceremonial rhetoric is considered to have an emphasis on the aesthetic; in other words, on the beautiful. That is what sets Aristotle's Rhetoric apart from other books on persuasive expression, and what warrants our attention to it today. Though they put more emphasis on technique, modern books on speaking and writing lack necessary things to a truly persuasive expression. Thus one has to go back to the ancient to comprehend on self persuasiveness in terms of expression. In addition to the three kinds of speech studied in rhetoric, there are also three modes of rhetoric which are ethos (referring to the character of the speaker), logos (referring to the strengths and weaknesses of our arguments) and pathos (referring to the emotions of the audience) In each of these divisions of rhetoric-the three elements, the three kinds of speech, and the three modes of persuasion-Aristotle emphasizes not only technique, but something relevant about human nature. That is what sets Aristotle's Rhetoric apart from other books on persuasive expression, and what warrants our attention to it today. According to Barret (1987) the necessity of reinterpreting classical rhetoricians is held by changes provoked by our emerging awareness of secondary orality and lies within the recognition of secondary orality conditions. with at least two immediate complaints arising in writers such as, Isocrates and Plato. The first is a disagreement that secondary orality forms consciousness. The second is an unhappiness that many writers and learners experience when they see Gorgias, Isocrates and Plato placed on the same plane. This placement appears to contradict all the known "facts" about Plato, as well as the common sense of many interpreters, who take it as a given that Plato is superior in knowledge, in text, and therefore as a person., while it is easy to grant that Plato exerted more influence over the centuries than did Isocrates or Gorgias, it is helpful in making the sophists' writing and teaching understandable to us to put Plato on the same plane as Gorgias and Isocrates for the interpretive moment or longer. Plato has not been made superior to all his peers because his work was inherently superior; he has been made superior because his work was appropriated in various strands of thought for particular reasons. Plato railed against the old-fashioned treatment of language as it appeared in the out-of-step Homeric poems-texts which dominated fourth-century Greek thought and educational practice to a degree we tend to forget Plato's agenda consisted partly in transferring the power of the spoken and written-down Homeric poems to a language that was more abstract and less antiquated. Plato wanted to change what we now call "the canon." Similar to Isocrates, he fully exploited writing with both of them realized that they needed to be writers and that encoding with the new technology presented a force that could not be ignored to the status of an addition or a decoration.(Barret, 1987) Today rhetorical theory is greatly influenced by both the research results and research methods of the behavioral sciences and by speculations of literary criticism as by ancient rhetorical theory. Early rhetorical theorists attempted to turn the study of rhetoric into a social science that allowed a foretelling analysis of human behavior. The much known interdisciplinary scholars of symbol systems, such as Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), Hugh Duncan, and most notably Kenneth Burke (1897-1993), influenced a new age band of rhetorical scholars drawn from various disciplines to fully understand the trend of human communication in all its aspects. While ancient rhetorical scholarship had focused primarily on rhetoric as oral speech, contemporary rhetorical theorists are interested in the idea of human symbolic behavior both spoken and written word as well as music, film, radio, television, etc. Burke defined as the use of symbols to induce cooperation in those who naturally respond to symbols. Current rhetorical theory borrows heavily from cultural, performance, and design studies with its topic of interest to current scholars being the relationships between rhetoric and gender, together with the studies of non-traditional or alternative rhetorics, and rhetorics of science, technology, and new media. Nietzsche sees the concept of rhetoric as an extraordinary development since its context has the actual differences between the ancients and moderns rhetoric. By citing Locke's he characterizes the moderns as disapproving of rhetoric. Locke sees knowledge as a function of perception and the combination of simple ideas. Though Language is not directly related to knowledge; he says that it is used to communicate knowledge cautioning that great care should be taken while making use of words so as to convey precise ideas while expressing certain undoubted truth which the mind might be contented with in its search for true Knowledge. This positions rhetoric in opposition to knowledge. He introduces another opposition to clearly characterize the difference between the moderns and the ancients by pointing out that rhetoric arises amongst people who still live in mythic images and who have not yet experienced the unqualified need of historical accuracy. This opposition between a mythic culture and a historical culture is developed in The Birth of Tragedy (De Man, 1979) It is clear that everyone finds that the critical-historical spirit of our culture has so affected him that he can only make the former existence of myth credible to himself by means of scholarship, but without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement. Myth alone saves all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollonian dream from their aimless wanderings. The images of the myth have to be the unnoticed omnipresent demonic guardians, under whose care the young soul grows to maturity and whose signs help the man to interpret his life and struggles. Even the state knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation that guarantees its connection with religion and its growth from mythical notions. (Blair, 1989) Nietzsche takes issue with the belief that there is a "natural" language, whose use corresponds with the reality. he claims that there is no natural use of language saying it is based on the truth upon the essence of things. His argument refers to a disjunction between perception and linguistic representation, to the impossibility of accurate representation: Nietzsche then claims that if language does not accurately represent reality, it must consist the manner in which we stand toward them, power of persuasion. He refers language as rhetoric since it desires to convey only an opinion and not knowledge reason being that knowledge never expresses something but completely displays a characteristic appearing to be prominent to it. He concludes by pointing out that language is created by the individual speech artist, but it is determined by the fact that the taste of many makes choices Locke on the other hand believed that experience is the primary source of knowledge. And objects are built up out of the basic sensations of light, color, touch and temperature. These can be developed into more complex forms or ideas by associating one sensation with another through principles of similarity and difference etc. He believed that the mind, from birth, was like a "blank slate", onto which nature and reality can be truthfully inscribed. This passive approach to perception, which is at the heart of empirical psychology, especially behaviorism, ignores perception's active, constructive and circular character. His ideas were very influential in USA Constitution formulation. He was opposed to the idea of the Divine right of Kings, because unlike the rationalists and neo-Platonists, promoting this view, his empiricism did not accept such things as innate ideas or rights. For him, everything was a product of experience, and in this Locke echoed the ancient idea that "what is in the intellect was first in the senses". A main problem with empiricism is its claim that the "primary" qualities of shape, size, motion etc., resemble and correspond with reality as it is in itself something we could never actually check, because we can't step outside our minds to compare their contents with a supposed reality beyond the mind: all we have access to is what is in our minds. By contrast, Locke sees sensations or "secondary" qualities of color, taste, touch, temperature and hence art, as resembling no such reality: they are products only of the mind and so are entirely subjective lacking (controversially) any testable basis for judgment. (Crawford, 1988) Modern rhetoric focuses issues in rhetorical theory through an extended treatment of the rhetorical appeal, a frequently used but rarely discussed concept at the core of rhetorical analysis and criticism, which shun the standard Aristotelian approach. The approach treats ethos, pathos, and logos as modes of appeal; Nietzsche uses common, accessible language to explain the concept of the rhetorical appeal-meaning the use of language to plead and to please. He supplements his ideas with volumes of practical and theoretical approaches to the construction and analysis of rhetorical messages and brief and readable examples from popular culture, academic discourse, politics, and the verbal arts References Atwill, J. (1998): Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Cornell UP, Ithaca. Barrett, H (1987): The Sophists: Rhetoric, Democracy, and Plato's Idea of Sophistry., CA: Chandler and Sharp, Novato. Blair, Sander, L (1989): Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language: Oxford University Press, London Corbett, E. (1990): Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student 3rd ed.: Oxford, New York Crawford, C. (1988): The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language.: de Gruyter, Berlin De Man, P. (1979): "Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric." Symposium 28, Yale University Press, New Haven. Read More