Post #4

Post #4 ARCS and RT 9.11.14

It is interesting how the text admonishes us from the fact that “thorough examination of an issue has been known to cause rhetors to change their minds,” based on conjunctures, degrees, and possibility.  And this begs the question as to what is good and what is bad in society, and how any society can really determine how those are judged and how they can be allocated out with opinions.  We understand now that virtue played a large role in not only accuracy of a rhetor’s argument, but also in his potential and actual success with his argument. 

            When examining how Aristotle approached his argument in Phaedrus, how dignity must be a factor in any argument, a trait that every rhetorician must possess it is curious how we as a society have gone so far away from that foundational concept.  We tend to believe that lying, cheating, and misleading (especially in politics) will get us what we want, and it will get us where we want.  Often we creating an argument, even at times in an academic setting, people will exaggerate their claims, and fail to show respect to their counterpart.  People can get hasty, forget their composure and not conduct themselves in an appropriate way.  Perhaps that is evidence of our lack of understanding of rhetoric—most of us have heard of ethos, pathos, and logos, we get that there is a system, a method to creating an argument, but I do not believe that most of us know why.  In our discovery of Aristotle and the other classic rhetors we keep going back their principles, their virtues.  The common phrase, “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” might be an appropriate contemporary correlation—that dignity and honesty must come through in any argument, but they must always been an honest intention, not a façade to woe an audience.