Tuesday, January 27, 2015
The choice to be rhetorical,....and emoji's? Jared's random tangents
Kelly,
We talked about your line about the Serious being unaware that they are performing rhetoric, and I spun off of that to say that perhaps the Serious are those who don't care that they are performing rhetoric, or rather, that they are unwilling to acknowledge it. The reason I said that is that I think we can choose to be or not be rhetorician. I'm imagining a slew of protests from the class to the effect of "No, we are all practicing rhetoric whether we like it or not, and a rhetorician is one practicing rhetoric". What I mean by this is the right to choose rhetorician as a title, and to choose to think in the rhetoric mindset. People can choose not to participate in our rhetoricious ways (yeah I made up the word rhetoricious, you can tar and feather me for it). I also totally agree with your theory of John being a Serious representation in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I think this supports my argument as well. What makes us label John a Serious person? John chooses to have his bike fixed by "professionals" even though he knows he could learn to fix it himself, in a similar fashion as I think the Serious person may leave being rhetorical to the professionals. Sure they still practice rhetoric (just as John is still a practicing biker) but they choose not to think about the subject further. Ignorance is comfortable. With that being said, I'm still perplexed by what lessons in rhetoric this novel has to offer. Other than being made of rhetoric, I'm still a little unclear on how to interpret it as a rhetorical analysis. While of course I see the connection to John being a Serious person and Robert the more philosophical (or I suppose rhetorical one) I feel strained to see further connections. I'm not even sure if I would have seen that as a connection had it not been pointed out, so I continue to wonder "Am I missing something?"
I hope that didn't feel like I was trying to tear up your argument, because I wouldn't of had anything to build off of if it wasn't for your theory. I'm kinda piggy-backing off of your hard work and intelligence in attempt to be an intellectual parasite. ;) <-------(super random tangent, emoji's are rhetoric and arguably a part of our language at this point, so nobody judge me for using one. :P.....or two.
ALSO,
Based on Fish's discussion of how rhetoric has built cities and stopped wars etc. through the use of reason and eloquence, I'm starting to think of rhetorician's a bit like reasoners and eloquent thinkers. Anyone have any thought on this?
-Jared
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Hi Jared,
ReplyDeleteThank you for what you had to say – It’s definitely interesting! No, it’s okay, I didn’t feel attacked :). I did immediately want to argue with you though (because what you had to say didn’t line up with my way of thinking), but then I settled into a deep thinking mode where I was (and still am) thinking more about what you said and whether or not it makes sense to me. Here are my own thoughts (and anyone is free to respond to me :) ):
The more I think about it, the more I believe that The Rhetorical Man and the Serious Man are concepts used among people who practice and use rhetoric in their daily lives to describe different types of people in real life. I think where I was going with my original post is that according to the Rhetorical lens, the Serious Man is someone isn’t aware they are performing rhetoric whereas the rhetorical man is someone who is aware and is actually performing rhetoric because they are training themselves to think rhetorically. However. …. I just revisited Kim’s post that Doug pointed to that discussed more about who the rhetorical man is and I want to rethink what I said. I wonder if maybe the serious man is someone who does not feel emotion and thinks logically about things in a very machine-like way. I wonder if maybe the serious man is someone who harbors ethos and logos as their values but does not think to use pathos too (or maybe they just cannot harbor emotion for some reason – like it’s not apart of their biology to feel emotion) while the rhetorical man is someone who practices ethos, pathos and logos (and either they’ve trained themselves to use all three or it simply comes naturally to them when they converse or write to other people).
In a sense I agree with you that the serious man is someone who may not be willing to accept rhetoric, but if they’re ignoring the pathos part of their correspondence with other people, wouldn’t that make them in-human to some degree? I mean …. I feel like no matter how we talk or write to other people, emotion will always be there to some extent unless we have some sort of psychological disorder.
Thank you,
Kelly Kinney