Reflective blog post

To begin, I can already say that I think of the three philosophical viewpoints toward rhetoric we have read, the one I identify with most is Aristotle. To summarize and then explain later i'll say that I think the Sophists were onto something good when they identified the relative nature of knowledge/understanding, which is more so connected to the way in which you can never pin down how someone is going to understand and therefore express their understanding of the world around them/issues they may encounter. Plato, for me, was a bit limiting and cynical in his expression of rhetorical rules. I understood his concern that morality is something that must always be considered in rhetorical practice, but I think his push for the existence of  "absolute truth" was his fear of immorality poisoning rhetoric manifesting in a way that produced a limiting philosophy. Aristotle seems to balance the two by stating that there is a right and wrong, but those are entirely contingent upon the situations that are being presented.

The major premise that the Sophists developed was the idea that "knowledge relies solely on sense perception and is therefore necessarily flawed"(Bizzell 1) I think this is the perfect baseline to reflect how I feel about rhetoric because at its core, knowledge is exclusively based in how we intake it. When I say this I mean that we see a flower and it is yellow, so we now understand that that specific flower type can be yellow. However, within this there is error because someone else could see the same flower and say "no, that flower is..." and who's to say that their answer is less right than your own depending on how they are truly perceiving the flower (this is assuming they're not just being an asshole and saying it's some random color for no reason). This is just one example of the relativity issue. Now, Plato is much more strict with his perception of the world basically stating that there is a singular truth to everything whether someone understands it or not "Plato believed that transcendent truth existed" (Classical rhetoric 2). For me, this belief is inefficient because if one person believes they are the holder of the transcendent truth and another person also believes they hold the transcendent truth, there comes a gridlock. He attempted to rectify the moral issue that comes with a relativist view, but he honestly created a new issue of someone being able to say that they're the one who is "ultimately" right. Aristotle then comes to the scene and shows us that rhetoric, as an art form, is "a moral but practical art grounded in probability or the contingent nature of things." (CRT 2). Aristotle's adherence to the notion of morality in rhetoric seems to pull itself from the concerns of Plato who seems to be concerned with human fallacy, but then with the contingent nature of things we see traces of Sophistry. For me, Aristotle plays the part of someone who says relative understanding is a human quality, therefore we must ensure that good is the focus of all rhetorical endeavors, and the only way to achieve this is by looking at things on a case by case basis.