Philosophy vs Rhetoric

I absolutely disagree with Lanham's idea of the progression from philosophers to rhetoricians with the advent of the internet. I think that the physical written word (i.e. in books) is imperative to knowledge and learning for many reasons. I think that we should preserve communication on paper, and books aren't going anywhere with their widespread use. Yes, people communicate more rapidly through the internet, but does that really make communication more effective?

With books, a sense of grammar is required, and it helps teach and remind people of the grammatical rules that have been invented and preserved throughout time. No, maybe not every person off of the street can write a paragraph using commas exactly correctly. However, people do, or should, know that a period comes at the end of a sentence to separate ideas.

The internet, on the other hand, makes grammar rules nonessential, which I think is a mistake. Even within this blog, I could spell every word wrong, use no punctuation or capitalization, and there would not be anything telling me that I had done something wrong unless I clicked the spell-check button.

I do see that the internet is extremely helpful and invaluable in many ways, but I also believe that it is often misused, overused, and that it has no comparative worth against books.

There are still philosophers today, and there were philosophers even before the advent of standardized writing. Likewise, rhetoric and rhetoricicans have existed, and will continue to do so. Like the internet and books, I do not think that the two can be compared against one another, but that they maintain two separate identities and characteristics.

I believe that philosophers do search for the more abstract and rhetoricians look more within interpersonal ideas. However, I do not think that there would even be a such thing as rhetoricians without philosophers, who develop their ideas on their own, and who must have created a uniform language in the first place for rhetoricians to use.

Humanism

In my opinion, humanism is searching for the ultimate "good" life, but that can never actually be attained. If you are supposed to be working towards a better life, then there is no way to actually achieve the "best" life, because there is always something better.

I do not believe that humanism is possible among entire societies. I do believe that humanism can exist within individual people trying to better their lives, but there are even restraints to that perspective. If a person is constantly trying to be a better person, there is only so much he or she can do, regardless of the resources they have at hand. Too much in society is dependent upon others, and so it is impossible to try to objectively make life better.

I believe that everyone should try to live by humanism, to a degree. I think that if people were more determined to make their lives, as well as the lives of others, better collectively, then the world would, in turn, be better. I think that people should try to commit random acts of kindness whenever they can, which I personally try to live by as well. I think that by making other people happy, you can make yourself happier, and if everyone lived by that, then everyone would be happier.

However, even though I am an optimist, I am also realistic. I know that most people do care about themselves first, and others second, if (sadly) at all. But I believe that even caring a little bit about others and going out of your way just a little bit could help to propel the idea of humanism throughout our society.

Using Rhetoric as a Teacher

I never really thought about rhetoric as being an important aspect of my life, but I guess I see now that I never really recognized how often different forms of rhetoric are used. I definitely see that people use persuasion in more ways than what they consciously recognize, and I think that I'll be able to use that to my advantage when I'm a teacher.

I won't necessarily be trying to persuade my students into doing something, though teachers do hope to get their students animated about their subject matter. However, I think that it would be more important for me to teach my students how to use rhetoric themselves. I am a big believer in class discussions, and I think that it would be really interesting to teach my students how to use the different components of rhetoric within their discussions.

I think that it's obvious that people subconsciously use forms of rhetoric all the time to try to prove their point or to convince people to do something or think something. I think that if I taught my students how to recognize these forms of rhetoric, they could use them to their advantage. They could argue their own points better, and they could recognize persuasion techniques being used on them.