Hi all,
Thanks Dave B. for reminding us of this ...
> RHETORIC IS AN ART, Aristotle began, BECAUSE IT CAN BE REDUCED TO A
> RATIONAL SYSTEM OF ORDER.
>
> That just left Phaedrus aghast. Stopped. ...ZAMM p.324
I agree with Phaedrus - that's "an asshole statement" from Aristotle. I
didn't think much about it when I first read it, but it's actually quite
interesting to analyse the statement.
Aristotle probably considered that EVERYTHING can be reduced to a rational
system of order - this was his art, and it is the art of the "Church of
Reason". What bothers us is that we have come to consider art as something
NON-RATIONAL. That's why Avid's theorizing on art has drawn hostile fire.
I'm not even sure what Aristotle may have meant by "art". Maybe it doesn't
translate well from ancient Greek to modern English.
Maybe it will simplify things to just leave it out ...
RHETORIC [snip] CAN BE REDUCED TO A RATIONAL SYSTEM OF ORDER...
That reads a bit better - it's a starting point for teaching rhetoric.
Whether we consider that positively or negatively depends on what we mean by
"CAN BE REDUCED". The teacher who believes in teaching rhetoric by teaching
the students rules of grammar etc. would put it thus:
1. RHETORIC [can be distilled down] TO A RATIONAL SYSTEM OF ORDER
Opponents of this view would focus on the word "REDUCED" and thus say:
2. RHETORIC [is diminished by reducing it] TO A RATIONAL SYSTEM OF ORDER
I believe that Phaedrus saw that both statements were true.
The Church or Reason knows how to formulate and teach rules, and this is
useful. Phaedrus even added some rules of his own. This was demonstrated
when he got his student unstuck when he told her to "...start with the first
brick". As the narrator of ZAMM, Pirsig does something similar helping Chris
write a letter home. First he has Chris randomly write a list of interesting
items to put in the letter, leaving the job of arranging them for later. A
student would do well to take careful note of these useful "tricks of the
trade".
However, the Church of Reason doesn't have the proper framework for dealing
with the second formulation. It knows how to formulate and teach rules, but
that's not enough. You can learn and apply all the rules and still not
produce good rhetoric. That's what Phaedrus was teaching his students!
That's the deficiency of SOM in a nutshell - the obsession with fitting
everything to rules and definitions.
A common wisdom of the SOM says "if it walks like a duck and quacks like
a duck ...".
...well it simply isn't true.
It can waddle and quack, have feathers too, and that still doesn't make it a
duck. Our world is full of fake products manufactured to fit a definition,
but failing to match the true quality of the original.
I feel that the solution to this lies in our understanding of rationality
itself. SOM equates rationality with the dialectic. I have consistently
pointed out in this forum how one can follow religiously follow the
dialectic to absurdity.
IMHO, the MoQ solution is to widen the scope of rationality beyond the
dialectic.
Any takers?
Jonathan
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