Rhetorical Man & Serious Man

Before I dig into the specifics of the prompt, I’d like to say who I think the “serious man” and the “rhetorical man” are. I feel like the serious man is someone who is not aware that they are performing rhetoric. They believe that there is an ultimate truth and one true way to go about any solution or thinking of how things are. They do not think about language beyond what they have been conditioned to believe. The rhetorical man, however, looks more closely at language and understands that “truth” means something different for different people. There is no universal truth or understanding that somehow sidesteps the constructed truths among different disciplines, and so they work on forming conversations with other people within and outside their way of thinking.

This may be a bit of tangent (but a trait of rhetorical man I suppose), but when I read a Discourse article last semester, it talked about different conversations among people in different disciplines/Discourse communities as well as people within the same Discourse community. Persig’s book made me wonder one thing: Is a purpose of rhetoric to help ease conversations between different lenses and to perhaps improve communication between people of different mindsets with respect to their varied situations?  

And if that is a purpose of rhetoric, can finding common values among different lenses establish a type of common ground in which can help make transfer of information easier during times of conflict?

As I think about that last paragraph, I’m immediately struck with a thought: I wonder if John from Persig’s reading could represent the serious man and the narrator could represent the rhetorical man. I suppose I make this distinction between the two people in the text because the narrator seemed to have a very rhetorical/multiple lens/Discursive language whenever he would try to explain things to other people. His son commented on how strange his language was in relation to everyone else and occasionally he had to restrict his way or talking (or discourse) for John and Sylvia when he felt that his explanations were too much for the situation. Also, the narrator made a comment about how John was not willing to see the rationality behind maintaining his motorcycle and because of that mindset, I wonder that could provide further evidence for what he could be the serious man in this book.

In terms of people in my own experience that could follow the serious man and the rhetorical man  … I cannot think of anyone other than instructors or myself (to some extent I think …) for the rhetorical man and so I think will speak more broadly about the rhetorical man in my life. I think the rhetorical man are people who have made the rhetorical turn. In other words, they are aware that they are actors and/or people who help get something to happen through their actions. In this instance, I think the rhetorical man could be any one of us at the end of this course. On the contrary, I think the serious man are people who do not understand the purpose of rhetoric and/or are not thinking critically about language and its relationship with the audience. I believe those people could be my non-writing major friends. They understand what they’ve learned as “truth” and probably don’t understand that other disciplines may have a different way for classifying what they’ve been taught. I think the people who are between serious man and rhetorical man are the people who are just entering this rhetorical lens of the writing major (e.g the people right now in class). They do not yet understand the basics of rhetoric or its purpose, but they’re being immersed in the language and are beginning to put the pieces together.