What's Of The Western Rhetorical Tradition?

By Author: Mark Gary
Total Articles: 61
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Then there is the thorny issue of this binary that perpetually separates the where and the what. In using the where to further interrogate the what, I do not intend to characterize their underlying assumptions in opposite terms. Any claim that one or the other rhetorical tradition is shaped by either the "what" or the "where" question alone is untenable, no matter how analytically tempting, because rhetorical traditions and practices are simply too complex and heterogeneous to allow for any wholesale, clear-cut generalizations.

A few brief "counterexamples" in each case might suffice to point to the complexities or heterogeneities involved. Sophistic rhetoric in fifth-century BCE Greece rejected the existence of an absolute or final truth, and it gave priority to Discount Shoes community-specific customs and laws over the nature of things or Plato's ultimate Form in determining what was good, useful, and true. This sophistic emphasis on the cultural, linguistic contingency of meaning, often branded in its time and beyond as "irrational" or even "magical," bears a striking ...
... resemblance to the underlying assumptions associated with the "where" question. The prominence of causal thinking in ancient Greece did not dampen the interests in developing analogical or correlative concepts. For example, Aristotle reported the Pythagorean Table of Opposites in the Metaphysics, and he further redeployed the basic idea of columns of correlated opposites to help him carry out explanatory work in a variety of contexts, including cosmology, embryology, and physics. And the Renaissance witnessed a palpable shift away from the absolute to the provisional and away from the certain to the probable, as part of the overall humanist enterprise to remake the world.

Fast-forwarding to our own times, the rise of feminist rhetoric as well as ethnic and minority rhetoric not to mention Western postmodern sensibilities that have abandoned any allegiance to foundational truth or transcendental origin represents another example of how we have challenged the what's of the Western rhetorical tradition, which, for Shoes Online a long time, have served as a stand-in for the absolute, final truth about rhetoric. Our study of these other rhetorical practices demonstrates a commitment to engaging the actual practices carried out by marginalized and underrepresented groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, to bring about social, cultural, and political changes.

It would be equally unsustainable to claim that the Chinese have never before asked the "what" question or appealed to its underlying ideology. For example, the school of Mohism, especially of Later Mohism in ancient China, was very much concerned with discovering sources of knowledge, developing a rational system of argumentation, and formulating some necessary standards that can be used to classify and to carry out deductive and inductive reasoning. These kinds of concerns resemble the (Western) mode of thinking that puts a premium on rest and permanence over process and becoming.

To state the matter another way, the epistemic emphasis on process and becoming (the where) in ancient China still had to contend with, and further recast, the concern for the origins or sources of things (the what) in such fields as science and medicine. Turning our attention to modern China, at the turn of the twentieth century many Chinese intellectuals looked to the West as the source for the cure that could save China from endless humiliation and subjugation. This discursive turn to the West represents a dramatic repudiation of traditional Chinese ideologies, which were being seen as effete, out of date, and unfit for modern China; and it signals a readiness to embrace a rational, causal ideology of the West. Of course, what actually transpired on the ground was a process of transformation, appropriation, and reinvention, and any claim for a categorical divide between what is Chinese and what is foreign is an epistemological impossibility.