Why so serious?

Kelly,

I'm glad someone else can identify with the serious man, because I'm starting to think I might be one. It's not something I'd have expected considering my major. I love writing and language, I love telling a story, and I love how everything weaves together, so I expected studying rhetorical concepts to be right up my ally. For me I think the distinction between rhetoric and philosophy has become a hangup in my mind. The lines between these thought processes are blurred, but when I try to find out where that blurry line relatively falls, the line seems blurrier still. It's as if the two are apart of the same thought process in spite of being separated schools of thought. They appear to me like twins; one dons a mask and claims difference from his brother. I think perhaps this is the reason that it feels like a fight not to reject this subject and by my own definition, become a Serious man. I'm trying not to do that though. There's the looming fear that being a serious person automatically damns me as a bad student (Pirsig did say phaedrus liked his bad students best, so maybe that's why I've always gotten along with my professors...But I digress).

Kelly, I'm impressed in how you defined the rational and narrative paradigm, and I wish I could take an equally elegant stab at it. The paradigm to me is another illusive concept. While I see it as a way of thinking that views life as a primarily story based event while remaining analytical and rational as the story forms, I'm still lost in the point of it all. This is what drives me crazy about philosophy and rhetoric, this unending spinning of concepts and ideas. I hate having questions I can't have answers to, and I find that this is a consistent theme in rhetoric.

I'd also like to mention that I'm interested in what Locke said about words not only being the signs of ideas but also the start of many. Which is an interesting thought. Considering I think in English, it seems very strange to consider what sort of thought process (if any) we could have without a language to express them. While Locke wasn't saying that these are the only roots of thought, it still felt that without language, thought wouldn't have a leg to stand on. However, don't we think of children as having thoughts before they can communicate properly? Also, would we likewise agree that even though dogs don't know a human language, that they still have minds filled with unique thought?

-Jared