Reflective Blog Post 1

Of the theorists explored so far, I believe that Aristotle has presented the most complete and coherent view of rhetoric, both as a tool for discourse and as an epistemic method. While Plato provided a model of rhetoric that also served these dual purposes, he privileged rhetoric as a tool for teaching as opposed to a tool for public discourse and viewed it as uncovering a transcendental truth when used in an epistemic manner. Epistemology in the Platonic and Aristotelian notions of rhetoric is one of the clearest points of divergence for the two philosophers: knowledge for Plato is transcendental and must be remembered from our time with the divine prior to birth; Aristotle, however, believed that “only scientific demonstration and the analysis of formal logic can arrive at absolute truth” (Bizzell and Herzberg 170).

This rigorous and systematic way of looking at the world allowed Aristotle to view rhetoric for public discourse in a much more organized, concrete, and practical way than Plato. For example, Plato believed the rhetorician “must know the truth about all the particular things of which he speaks” and “understand the nature of the soul” before even beginning to practice rhetoric (Bizzell and Herzberg 167). Such standards would vastly undercut the uses of rhetoric in public life and would make the number of Platonic rhetoricians limited. Aristotle, however, classified the various places in society where rhetoric belonged, the types of arguments to use in each scenario, and understood that rhetoric’s focus on probable knowledge did not have to be a weakness.

While Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric as a tool for various classifiable uses best fits how I am beginning to understand rhetoric, his approach still feels incomplete and far more like a general framework for other thinkers to build off of. Sophists like Gorgias, while predating Aristotle, present a conception of rhetoric that I would like to see incorporated in a more systematized, Aristotelian manner. In his Encomium of Helen, Gorgias mentions that “through the agency of words, the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own” (Bizzell and Herzberg 45). This notion of one’s agency being limited by language is compelling to me, but seems underdeveloped by the Sophists. It reminds me of the concept of hegemony, where societal and cultural norms can limit people’s agency without the explicit use of force. I am excited to see how thinkers beyond Aristotle and the Sophists build upon their thoughts to create a conception of rhetoric more in line with how we experience it today.