Rhetoric

thanks for downloading the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to BBC co uk gorgish the great sophist philosopher and master of rhetoric said speech is a powerful Lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes most godlike works it can banish fear and remove grief and instill pleasure and enhance pity divine sweetness transmitted through words is inductive of pleasure and reductive of pain but for Plato rhetoric was advice and those like Gorgas who taught rhetoric were teaching the skills of lying in return for money and were a great danger he warned this device be it which it may art or mere artless empirical knack must not if we could help it strike root in our society but strike rooted did and there's a rich tradition of philosophers and theologians who have attempted to make sense of it how did the art of rhetoric develop what part is it played in philosophy and literature and does it still deserve the moral health warning applied so unambiguously by Plato with me to discuss rhetoric is Angie Hobbes lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick Kari Sullivan senior lecturer in English at the University of Wales Bangor and Thomas Healy professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College University of London Angie Hobbes wended rhetoric I come into the into the West as a discipline understand first of all how would you define it well it's a working definition how about the art of persuading a specific audience to specific actions and beliefs through the use of language previously people had always been trying to persuade people to do things specifically but it's when it became a discipline and when it became something written down and discussed that we can begin to talk about it as rhetoric oh yes I mean the art of speaking persuasively had been admired from Homer onwards and we see Odysseus and Lester and Iliad and the Odyssey at Martha's per se precisely that reason however I think the ancients themselves thought that the art of rhetoric as a discipline arose in Sicily in the middle of the fifth century BC there was a surge of litigate there had been some land confiscations a lot of people going to court try and claim their land back and there was a need for rhetorician x' to help them compose their speeches before the jurors and according to ancient legend core accent Issus arose in Sicily to help train the people to speak persuasively in the forensic context however the it then rhetoric men moved to the Athenian democracy and it seems to be that in the democracy of Athens that it really took root because there had been the done--what democratic reforms of Cleisthenes and the in about five or eight 507 BC and then there had been the court reforms instigated by Ephialtes and 462 BC so there was a real need for dillert speaking and deliberative and forensic contexts and the young men of Athens if they wanted to get on if they had political ambitions they needed to be trained in the art of speaking persuasively and hence the origin of the Sophists these itinerant teachers of many disciplines including rhetoric to help young men get on in the world just one loop back to Sicily why did they need rhetoric at that particular time what did rhetoric give them that straightforward are arguing with with the men who pinched the land couldn't give them well they were going to court they had to persuade quite presumably people are going to go no trying to catch are I'm sure the only people gone to God in the sixth century BC in the seventh century why did this happen then oh sure I mean yeah absolutely but as I said there was a particular surge in litigation at this time because of these particular land confiscations so there was an extra need there was that extra impetus people saw a means of getting money out of helping people compose their speeches and maybe compose them for them and this developed into a system absord a system of speaking taken up by the people called the Sophists and then introduced into Athens absolutely I mean I think I would want to to pick out two Sophists in particular you've got Protagoras who was very keen that one should argue both sides of a question and his the charitable view of what he was doing is that he's trying to get people to look at both sides of a Kay to try and effect some kind of resolution of the conflict at issue now pro tigress did not think there was any kind of objective truth and in the absence of objective truth the best we can hope for to guide our actions is good belief based as I said on this understanding of all the points at issue in a case now opponents of Protagoras charged him with actually teaching his students to make the weaker argument the stronger so you already get the suspicion of the manipulative powers of rhetoric and Plato expressed his suspicions in very vehement terms and set in train the idea that rhetoric could be merely manipulative it could be even lying it could be deceptive it was a morally bad at the same time as another toward the Athenian polish that the same time as you're saying the young men of Athens wanted to take on this skill these disciplines in order to get on ok yeah I mean in an early dialogue called the gorge yes we certainly see Plato taking a very hostile view to rhetoric this again the eponymous here of the word sorry the eponymous character in the dialogue is gorgeous another sophist who his accent was on the use of language as a kind of drug to persuade your audience into certain emotional states and certain beliefs and gorgeous saw the power of speaking as a neutral art it could be put to morally good or bad ends now Plato presents a very hostile picture of him in that dialogue and he draws a distinction between what he calls the sciences of which a dialectic and philosophy are included as Sciences and an arts and then what she played her terms knacks which are a subdivision of flattery and for Plato in the Gorgias rhetoric is simply a subdivision of flattery or gratifying the expectations and desires of your audience you are not interested in the truth you maybe probably don't know what the truth is however in a later dialogue buffy dress we get Plato taking a slightly different view he continues this attack on the Sophists but in the feeders he's keen that there could be an art of philosophic rhetoric which is which knows about the truth and is aimed at directing the souls of the audience towards the but his pupil Thomas in his pupil Tommy and his pupil Aristotle was much more positive about rhetoric from the beginning on his great book about erotic can you explain Aristotle's position on this yes Aristotle fundamentally is interested in putting rhetoric at the heart public life our subtle unlike Plato has a much greater sense of the importance of politics of life in the community and how philosophical or legal or governmental or indeed aspects of morality are worked out in in the community whereas Plato at least my reading of him is always that politics for him is something that needs to take place so that the philosopher can can arise and pursue truth I mean he's not actually terribly interested in the what the vast amount of people in the community are doing in the laws he sees it as fundamentally most people living with magic and bread and circuses while the Philosopher's go ahead and pursue their own activities Aristotle sees this is much more important and so his rhetoric I think is one of the great cornerstones of our inheritance from the classical world of rhetorical thought for two reasons the first is that he establishes the arts of language at the center of political life of life in the community of how we reach ideas of what is best what is most effective how we persuade others as as Angie has saying and secondly Aristotle trusted fiix rhetoric is his book the rhetoric is actually an extremely boring book and it is mostly a collection of methodologies of how you go about doing this which are in many respects rather technical so I don't advise any listeners unless they're incredibly keen to run it and try to get hold of a copy but what he does is that he defines the three elements of what rhetoric is going to consist of which really from then on become the the aspects that that are used and they are the ethos the character of the speaker not the actual intrinsic character but the public persona that is put forward in speech secondly the logos the the reason the argument itself the intrinsic merits of the argument and thirdly the pathos the means of persuasion the means of raising the passion and it's those three elements combined in various ways which really are the basis of rhetoric subsequently and how did I sort of think that rhetoric could take us to virtue well he's actually rather mixed about this he doesn't state fundamentally that that rhetoric is necessarily automatically a pursuit of virtue I mean he's aware that of its ambivalent character that it could be used for good or bad but his general argument is that if you have these three elements in the right proportion that truth will likely emerge that is that if the ethos of the character the strength of the argument and the right form of persuasion that doesn't excessively raise an audience but leads it to a proper consideration of a topic then truth should emerge carrousel and what blasted rhetoric have in the Roman world moving from the Greek a mere few centuries to Cicero and quintillion what place did it have that skipping lightly over to sit around quintillion in that happy way that rhetorician 's have they pick up the elements that Tom and Angie were talking about but in in a positive light it the the political aspect of rhetoric is seen as a not an abuse by the clever of the weak or stupid the guy to be the people to be guided but a but a way of negotiating a way of understanding that your audience must be with you in sin when you're attempting to govern them it's it's one first times you start acknowledging your interlocutor it's a politically Democratic thing to do in that way and it's a systematized way so it's a formalized way of saying I acknowledge you as being an important person to speak to we contextualized this moment Cicero and quintillion have a very serious effect on the way politicians pursue their speaking about and perhaps in the end a for their doing of politics at this time today people want to be taught by them wanted to follow the best path of speaking want to follow these forms there isn't a sense that you're good at speaking because you're inherently good at speaking you you're naturally able to govern and speak well there's a sense that you can be taught to govern that this is a an egalitarian way of thinking about speech not a sense that you're speaking in terms of something that is good inside you being pressed out expressed in the way that we think of good speech good literature but something which is a system that you can learn um so that the text fits caesarian quintillion to produce bergna's is it our pedagogic text primarily so what it give us a few examples of what these texts say that people should do think about the speaker the subject in the old and and and and the audiences as tom was saying the ethos the locus and pathos try and split your text down in terms of the the elements in the character that your speech challenge them into the Ehlert's elements of the character that you're trying to appeal to so the three big divisions in Roman rhetoric our judicial rhetoric which appeals to the reason and asks you to judge your things that have happened in the past deliberative rhetoric which looks at the will asks you to decide now for things that will happen in the future and epideictic rhetoric which simply appeals to your passions from do you like something or not from those splits that sort of psychological understanding of what the situation is come much more formalized ways systematized ways of creating appeals to your audience so what sort of stars we're talking about Ron this time briefly before we move on Angie and Tom and what sort of styles the people have unheard of I'd already about sorry the most of these Hellenistic stars and other stars what it's it's now becoming its discipline with several branches and glosses and so on and quite a big part of the curriculum of people who are learning how to get on in public life yes I mean in all the handbooks at this time we seem to get a division of the art of rhetoric into five main divisions which is the art of in discovering art arguments the art of you know discovering what you're going to say the art of ordering your arguments into a specific arrangement how to express your arguments and how to use certain kinds of style whether it's very elaborate and formal and quite flowery in the alexandrine fashion or whether it's pure and more concise and with the so-called attic fashion and then also the arts of memory how to remember what you're going to say various systems of minimal exciton sat but and then the art of how to present it in public so they all they all take these in terms of the style there are there's a lot of emphasis on creation of particular prose rhythms through periodic structure through the repetition of certain words and phrases through on it absolutely the way the truth the life absolutely through triplicates there's the an emphasis on youth aney how to create certain very you know pleasant sounds for the ear through assonance through alliteration and there's also emphasis on how to elaborate on a theme through metaphor and simile met on imme and so on within those divisions as I said we get these different kinds of style some some more formal or some austere some more flowery Tom can you just place it in the academies of the time Cicero's Academy and the academies of the word is rhetoric sit what Angie said has given us a syllabus really now is that syllabus one which is engaged with by most young Romans wanting to go into public life and so on indeed in many ways after sis public life or the opportunities for public life in Rome decline and a rhetoric becomes increasingly an educational model I mean although it prepares people ostensibly for life in the polis the opportunities for life in the palace under the Emperor's are are restricted so it becomes increasingly seen certainly quintillion is a good example of this as really principally an educational tool for the raising of the young and in that respect it becomes a much more a tool to develop the person the moral character of the person and rhetoric increasingly begins to take on an association by how the language arts moves us to be better people in the way that Carrie was saying not something that necessarily is intrinsic in us but which develops that within us but as kareo saying under danger so just want to get it absolutely clear that listen if you sat down you had a syllabus you were to learn about this that this therapist that the who delivered well differently I mean many of the rhetorical handbooks ultimately have five or six thousand figures that they have to the it you you mastering a figure being a mode of speaking which is appropriate to a particular type of occasion so that like the explanation just delivering that like the explanation just deliver that there becomes three major categories of rhetoric there's a form called the attic attic or philosophical or plain style which is designed seen as particularly good for philosophical discourse often called cynic and rhetoric as well there is then a type of eloquent eeeh from Cicero Ciceronian rhetoric which is designed as a perfect balance of form and matter and then there's a third type often use slightly derogatory called asiatic which is an overabundance of pay fast and overabundance of of matter that overwhelms the speaker okay what's already evident is the degree to which rhetoric is taxonomic art and how exciting that is you said that Aristotle's rhetoric was a very dull text because of the subdivision subdivision movement clearly there are disagreements yeah you are both shaking your head but yeah this is radio I got to sit like runner beans you've got to have a trellis work to be able to get your runner beans to grow and rhetoric provides that the endless end Asifa Sybaris nature of rhetoric provides that trellis work so that these splittings what the more you split a subject down the more likely it is you will be expert in handling all aspects of that subject so learning the 2000 schemes in in Susan Brutus makes it much more likely that you're able to operate them it's an engineered speech right now I'm afraid I'm going to spring something else in your case most on fire last time you skip a couple of centuries there's a couple more to skip now we go to we go to rhetoric in the just sorry on G classical world farewell we go to the week we'll come back to it in restaurants it's okay but the the early church fathers Christianity comes in as work or how would how did they deal with rhetoric in because in in in their scholasticism and in that conversation I use I didn't know with God how do they deal how do they take on this this enormous Lee well-developed discipline Jerome has a very bad dream where he's told that he won't get into heaven because he's a Ciceronian not a Christian and backs off it rather worriedly Augustine's rather brave um he sees he sees rhetoric as arousing memories of what you already know um your knowledge of God is already there inside you and rhetoric is an appropriately passional thing to round with the memory of that it's a Neoplatonic I say say waving to Angie it's a mere platonic way of thinking um in addition he looks at the Bible and says this is something which is part of our classical heritage it's not a savage text a barbaric text it shows the sorts of schemes and tropes that we have come to value Angie what's always interested me about Augustine is the way he also uses rhetorical techniques to try and solve certain doctrine disputes so you have a there's a theological controversy and your sometimes see our Augustine saying well but if we consider who this particular the particular audio authors are talking to what their motives are what they're intending to achieve in this particular passage if we put these particular pieces of doctrine into context actually quite a few of these disputes can be resolved going back to what tom was saying earlier about how the good orator and rhetorician will consider the specific audience to whom they're talking and what particularly is going to persuade their emotions and so that very particular use of rhetoric as a as a tool for theology I think it's fascinating I think cept isn't there isn't current tomorrow isn't there a division here between those like Agustin who take on rhetoric and take on this these disciplines these manners and the the people who say look the thing is to talk directly to God we're looking for the truth here we're looking for Revelation which is a completely different dimension of knowledge yes rhetoric and logic always have floated round one another they've sparred with one another and in antiquity from Aristotle really through the Ciceronian tradition rhetoric came out on top and during the Middle Ages logic reasserts itself and most medieval thinkers place rhetoric well below logic logic becomes the means by which the truth of Scripture might be more more readily found like the language arts are scenes again rather suspiciously in some ways as kerry has intimated until we get to the Renaissance when rhetoric then reasserts itself and how does it research suffer international surgery what what is it what are the wrestlers rediscovers it but of course it's a different thing that it produces yes what's to some extent parts of Cicero and quintillion had had been known in the intervening period between the classical world in the Renaissance to things particularly happen in the 14th century patriarch amongst others discovered the letters and some of the speeches of Cicero they'd had some of his rhetorical treatises before but they hadn't had the speeches and the letters on the whole and then in the early 15th century the whole of quintillion is discovered they only had little excerpts before now that the import of this is that these are the age is beginning to get a sense of the ideals to which Cicero and quintillion were aiming namely that of the good man skilled at speaking the person who to be a good speaker doesn't just have to know about the rhetorical tropes but needs to be experienced in life needs to know some philosophy and ethics needs to know about political states of affairs so this ideal of the orator statesman philosopher emerges they think through the letters and speeches of cicerone through the whole body of quintillions work and it's that rounded ideal the so called arm in cyclic Paideia the well-rounded education the well-rounded philosopher statesman orator that's the the chief result of this I think but it is restated in various books for the time and for this purpose a pose of this concept the Erasmus with John collet dad master of a long school brought it into this country eaten what did they bring in and what are they saying that well I think there's a the way that the renaissance takes up on rhetoric is very different from the way antiquity does it and and the reason is is because of God they start stressing the ethical side that comes through rhetoric much more we've seen that in antiquity the idea of appearing as a as good is important within the language arts as a means of helping to persuade your audience they it seems to me that many Renaissance thinkers take it one further and that is the arts of eloquence help to actually form you into a good person well that's part of it is in some ways except ours Aristotle is seeing this very much in terms of how you operate within the community I think the Renaissance starts seeing how you might operate in terms of getting to know God how you that that type of sense of personal revelation that you've met men how you meet how you work towards perfecting yourself to recover what was seen as the lost language of Adam yeah but to keep it in a contained we're still talking about rhetoric they're still writing about these are the rules these way to speak this is absolute is that absolutely absolutely these are the discipline but the importance of therefore putting someone who is inherit is is morally and ethically good in public positions is the key to Renaissance systems of education this is why you go through all of this because nothing because your anxiety to keep it focused to keep it focused is the anxiety of the Renaissance that will happen soon there are new tricks just keep on expert expanding and sliding out of control of that way and particularly I think when you hit late 1630 17th century a rhetorician who worry about sincerity who worry about self persuasion and in particular worry about direct conversations with God which may have been in some way mediated by human arts of language and so you have people like the ranters or the Quakers claiming to have direct access claimed to be at a degree 0 of rhetoric but then having their own speeches subject rhetorical analysis I come back and be because rhetoric is always spread out from the philosophers under the law proposes into a merger and we have a wonderful example of course in Renaissance England in Renaissance London with the playwrights where you have playwrights eminent waspy sheiks but using rhetoric in their speeches and can you just give us an indication of that saying the most best known speech to be or not to be how it's Shakespeare using rhetoric their modern actors often say that would to be or not to be there's a pause just before they start and all the audience starts speaking it with them half a second after what they're saying I think you've got the same thing with renaissance audiences it's not calling on new statements about suicide or the relationship with God or what I should be doing as a son it's coming on common places which everybody has learnt at grammar school and this is a this is not so you just be more specific hmm I've got the speech in front of me okay wonderful well it starts with now it starts I just want to know about what the rhetorical devices going well it's it but it starts with the rhetoric implies to dupe to be or not to be that is the question that's a narrow tesis he then moves it into being a high-poverty cuz he starts answering it and he calls on the commonplaces of existence the sorts of statements which you learn when you're reading testers when you're reading bippy which his audience will have learnt and that they will not be thinking oh this is a Terry dull speech we've heard all this stuff before why are we waiting until the end they're thinking it as a sort of operatic aria where they're doing it with him bland gee honey well another classic example of that would be surely at mark Antony's friends Romans countrymen speech and there you get this wonderful use of the repetition of the sort of the light motif er for Brutus is an honorable man I think he says that three times I think there's a four there's a fort well I think that actual phrase is used three times and then he uses he is an honorable man a fourth time and this it's beautifully punctuated in the speech it it tells you how to read it and it's extremely exciting of course that's Shakespeare showing rhetoric being used for other deceptive purposes because obviously and she does not think the Brutus is honourable at all but it's a fabulously composed speech on the devices that we were talking about indeed it demonstrates the split that you're talking about between silicon and Ciceronian rhetoric Shakespeare really gone to Stratford a player in grammar school she's not finally proved but taken for granted by most sensible folk he would have learned to rhetoric very that would have been the majority of the curriculum the language arts were that at the center of what what you did in Renaissance schools you learned effectively to be eloquent but when we talking Kerry was talking earlier before we pulled back a bit about the ranters and about this great breakup in the middle is a civil war which was a disputable Asif E theology or family all those sort of things you had introduced the eye they reintroduce the idea of speaking directly and plainly to God yes and this would this put rhetoric out of quarters well what the increase in equated figures like the ranters and indeed other radicals during the Civil War begin to feel is that eloquent language this formal system of how one thinks through and then expresses language becomes very suspect it becomes seen as the prerogative of a certain class it becomes seen as an instrument of control over both access to God but also over access to a variety of other social institutions particularly land it becomes seen as increasing these a tool of a type of ruling class and so they attack it they they argue that eloquent language is not a means to truth it's actually a deception it's a means to take us away from God and that their fundamental seemingly incredibly unstructured rant is actually much more of an authentic language but it's also it's continued in an extraordinary structured way when you have Paradise Lost and Satan has aglow zng tongue his elaboration is proof of his deceit and it's back to Plato there Carrie do you want to comment on others and you want to come in here you could well I was going to say that um I prepare of Milton you've got you've got Thomas Hobbes and his suspicion of the the manipulative cynical uses to which rhetoric rhetoric could be to put to rouse a rabble and to create civil disorder and strike strife and it would work against the the rule of the strong King so as well as well as the poets such as Milton you've also got the the philosophers beginning to get slightly suspicious of rhetoric we're starting to see a divorce in the late 16th century between rhetoric and philosophy which earlier with Cicero and quintillion there had not been founding the rules of social absolutely yes if you want to go back to the runt ISM so for a second carry and say a little more to that about religious language that before I go back to Angie's point the difficulty of addressing God or describing God it's true of all language not just rhetoric even plain style rhetoric has the problem that whatever you say will always be understatement any form of linguistic approach to God will be anticipated by his ear him as audience and undercut so that the both the plain style of God in Milton is rhetorical just as much as the twisted figures of metaphysical poetry I think the 17th century comes to terms with the fact that it cannot get away from the the located circumstantial passional aspects of language and that the Royal Society is barking up the wrong tree something which we don't get until the 20th a recognition that language is located and circumstantial doesn't come back sensibly until the 20th century so I think the world I think the late 17th 18th early 19th centuries show a rather naive attitude towards what language can be but in many ways and in the language arts as they move along always change this argument between false rhetoric like language which is used to deceive and language which is used to authenticate find truth has always been there but as Angie said it becomes much much more pronounced in the suspicions of it in towards the end of the 17th century but equally then there's a very strong reassertion of wit and eloquence in the 18th century was a figure like Pope what oft was thought but Nair is so well expressed that belief that true that form and matter go intrinsically together not only what you're saying but how you say it is extremely important to discover the roundness of everything but actually Angelou were talking about Locke only philosophers of the learning of 18th century though well he has been carrying on from Hobbes's suspicion of the relationship between in rhetoric I guess the other philosopher one would want to highlight in the 17th century would be Descartes and the huge influence of his method on how people perceived the relation between rhetoric and truth so for Descartes you need to start from self-evident truths and you need to move through sort of a geometric progression and your deductive argument to a conclusion which you can prove and it's not just a matter of persuading your audience or appeals to their emotions you use this method now the the thinkers who has influenced by Descartes and he was massively influential very very quickly again take him as dividing a sort of wedge between philosophy and rhetoric so as Tom was saying by the time we get to the 18th century we very much get divided camps on the relationship between rhetoric and truth and those who think that rhetoric has simply style and no substance and those who have more idealistic ambitions for it it's interesting all the way through I mean talking now I mean you've been my generous to hurtle through a couple of millennia so far and it's there's been despite is it deceptive isn't melibea merely manipulate merely clever as it were is it really getting it true is it a way to get at truth and this came again in the 19th century in this country told me they didn't when there's a very great need to go back to the classical past to discover how to be Empire and in the process of that how do you speak if you are an empire as well as how do you rule how do you organize your education forces and so on and so forth yes I I think that the like in by the 19th century rhetoric as the pinnacle of the curriculum is is having its last gasp really and it becomes in precisely the example that you've used increasingly seen as a means by which an insta comes an instrument of control by way certain figures mark themselves out as a ruling a ruling class but having said that I mean famously Lord colles minute on India where he sets up a educational system for for India and thinks what what can we put it at how can we teach the Indians are fundamental English values and he settles on Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare becomes what the the classics had been for for England and to some extent that that tradition still exists within India to this day that that belief in a language art but but generally people the rhetorics coming in for a lot of mashing and it's really coming in a lot of bashing force from science I mean science is in a sense what has over common type of increasingly emphasis on the technical as the means the best means to discover truth Angie well yes because in addition to what Tom's just been saying that there's also though there's all these political uses of oratory in the 19th century there's still a huge amount of suspicion of rhetoric and we get Disraeli Colin Gladstone a sophistical rhetorician which seems to me to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black if ever there was one but also in terms of what Tom was saying about the attacks from science we get th Huxley attacking the opponents of Darwin for that for hiding behind aimless rhetoric and trying to conceal their own lack of scientific understanding and their own lack of understanding of what Darwin has done by what he calls aimless rhetoric so huge suspicion of rhetoric even though in practice a lot of use of oratory so why I mean you've got this double thing and Tom it's almost a lot almost not quite almost the last throw of rhetoric in the education shit's in Nice century and yet at the same time so it nuts institutionally it has a good press but a lot of people are saying it is mere rhetoric and using it in the robbery to sense it's almost always used today on this sophistical can you ex can you address that Kerry I probably disagree with Tom um PR spin media studies literary criticism are direct offshoots of studying other people's speeches to find out what have been successful strategies in the past these two Shiratori of quintillions 12-volume pedagogic text has two books devoted to literary criticism some of the first times we've seen not the theory of how to speak but a study of other people's speeches in detail I think the 20th century is deeply interested in the way that the message is created in part by the medium so that this this generation of rhetoric always you're still talking about systematized methods of persuasion it's just you don't use the word rhetoric anymore or you use it always in a pejorative fashion it seems to me a wonderful example of this for our current environment would be the whole question of the place of Parliament because Parliament in a way is as an institution Reverb partly because it is a direct offshoot of the impact of rote rhetorical art that is groups of people get up and deliver speeches to one another and attempt to persuade one another and out of that it is envisaged that the best form of government takes place but what we're increasingly witnessing is a fear that this may not be actually that it actually it's committees it is of specialists who have particular forms of knowledge which then they gather together and present and so that feeling that that type of institution based on the rhetorical arts is at the center of our societies is come under some strain and I think that is because rhetoric is increasingly perceived as being suspect as you've as we've said but if we look back in their 50 years we have we still have two examples of what could be called the old rhetoric which fits into Plato this is a device a capable vice and great lies hitler's rhetoric and aristotle this can lead you to truth and virtues Churchill's rhetoric would you say that's fair energy I certainly wouldn't of course think of Churchill's education he would have been translating speeches of demosthenes and Cicero and and so on and there was still a context for him to write and deliver the well made well composed speech because of what Kerry was talking about as the ways in which rhetoric is adapting to a sort of age of TV Sun bytes and it's not disappearing but it's adapting but Churchill was still living in an age where there were more opportunities for formal public speaking to a live audience and there was still an enjoyment and appreciation of a well made speech now sir Churchill to me seems to be a perfect embodiment of what quintillion says at the end of his great work quintillion says that at its best the ideal orator uses rhetoric to motivate and inspire the citizen body in general and the military in particular and to defend truth and protect the innocent and I'm sure that Churchill would have seen himself absolutely in that tradition what about Hitler Anton well I think Hitler is an example of from a rhetorical point of view of the extreme pathos that is that he uses the rousing of the passions so to persuade his audience to a position which is has limited truth in it he forgets as it were logos and ethos and this was always one of the things going back to antiquity that was fearful of this office that that that that pay for start arousing of passions without it being rooted in with with the others would lead to potentially a destructive art a means to sway a mock demo demo go come it's just it's chemical instead of democracy and thank you but a demagogue that's interested in i in actio in delivery you think of Hitler as being someone you see moving large groups of people whereas you think of Churchill as being alone in that small broadcasting room underground I think we should remember that even if we're it's suspicious of rhetoric in some context the moment it has its roots in democracy and art to me the vigor of a democracy and its institutions can partly be gauged by the vigor of its rhetoric and if you understand how speeches are made you know not to be deceived thank you didn't have time even to say your names we hope you've enjoyed this radio 4 podcast you can find hundreds of other programs about history science and philosophy a BBC code at UK forward slash Radio 4

Channel: Tacotopia Chess

Views: 38,929

Rating: 4.8996863 out of 5

Keywords: Rhetoric, Plato, Aristotle, Philosophy

Id: 0ZSzS5Oq5dw

Length: 42min 8sec (2528 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 01 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/hurf_mcdurf]

So... I'm listening to this with headphones in the dark and the creepy breathing into the mic at about 8:20 nearly made me piss myself.