Rhetoric Blog 1

I found two specific ideas proposed by the authors in the first two chapters the most compelling and inspiring.
The first one is that rhetoric is the art of being better citizens and that it is a way of strengthening democracy. Crowley and Hawhee affirm on the first chapter that in ancient Athens and Rome “the study of rhetoric was equivalent to the study of citizenship” (1); and later on, they say “In this book (…) we aim to help our [readers] become better citizens” (7). Additionally, on page six they state that they are concerned with the fact that people are ignoring the reality of disagreement and that this tendency to keep silent diminishes the quality of democracy.
For me, these two statements give a lot of sense to taking the effort to study rhetoric. On the one hand, it makes it current, pertinent, and important to our daily lives. On the other, it takes away that malicious idea of rhetoric as a tool only used to satisfy the interests of a certain group or a specific person.
I really thought that rhetoric was only used to convince another of my point of view. I was taught it was a way of persuading us to consume without limits, or used by politicians to brain wash our minds and make us vote for them. I wasn’t aware that, instead, it can be used with a noble objective such as achieving agreement to benefit the common good. Understanding and learning how ancients really thought helped me see rhetoric in a different way, in a way that is more exciting and motivating.
The second concept that drew my attention was the power of language. I found very interesting the fact that ancient people didn’t think of language as the representation of thought. The authors affirm that “ancient rhetoricians were not so sure that words only or simply represented thoughts.” (22). Instead, they believed that it had the power to persuading and moving to action. (23).
I can’t help thinking about what a teacher once taught me about the ancient thought. It was in the middle of the course called History of Philosophy. We were studying the classics and reading the Iliad and the Odyssey. He sustained that before writing appeared, Greeks believed that words had the power to create. At that time the Iliad and the Odyssey were only tales, part of the oral tradition of the people. Since there was no writing, people didn’t associate the stories to books or symbols. Instead, they believed that the story itself, while being told, was creating those events. For them, language created the reality of Achilles’ and Ulysses’ adventures. This makes me think a lot about the power that language has in our lives and how aware we need to be to really use it for our own good.
All in all, the text book made me think that rhetoric can help us be better members of our communities. It can accomplish that by giving us the tools to deal with disagreement in a peaceful way and allowing us to accept it as inevitably. Moreover, it reminded me that we, as citizens, have the power to create the society in which we would like to live in.