A thought on Rhetoric

This isn't a full post, but I wanted to write something today--if only to post more things this month than last month.

There are two processes that describe reactions to words--Amelioration and Pejoration. The first is when attitudes toward a word improve, the latter is when they degrade. For example, many curse words are ameliorating, becoming more and more acceptable in society-at-large.

"Rhetoric" on the other hand, has pejorated. Chances are that when you hear or read the word "rhetoric", your gut reaction is negative--because obviously "Rhetoric" is hollow and meaningless and meant to trick you. How terribly Platonic of you.

Aristotle defined Rhetoric as (roughly) "the power of determining for any given situation the best means of persuasion." I wish to point out that, while "power" is a translation of the original word, it is the best available translation. If you think about it, though, power is neither good nor evil. Power is, essentially, amoral. It is capable of being used towards evil ends, or toward good ends.

Moreover, I want to point out that when you are attempting to persuade anyone, you are employing rhetoric in one form or another. It isn't trickery, it's the honest application of a means to achieve a desired result--whether that result is a good one or a bad one depends upon what you seek to achieve.

Found Elsewhere #1

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."

--Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
Tom Stoppard

Found in Comic Books #1

I realize that I just posted something, but I love this quote so much that I wanted to put it up.

Another day down the mines of our lives. We drink 'til we stink and smoke 'til we choke because that's how we get things done, you and me. Spending our lives making things and making things out of our lives, because anything else would be dull as hell and we're damned if we're going to sit at the other end of whatever years we get saying, well, what the fuck was that for? Years of scars, lipstick and tears, and every day the dawn comes on we turn our eyes up in surprise, saying, "There's that goddamn sun again."

Heavenside 98.3 FM

DON'T GO TO SLEEP.

--Doktor Sleepless, Warren Ellis

Rule Theory

I'm a big Aldous Huxley fan. This started about the time I read Brave New World (Junior Year of high school) and has continued onward from then. This is primarily because one of the central philosophical principles of my later life occurred to me while reading BNW.

This principle is as follows: It is through the rules a person adheres to that that person makes progress in life.

It might seem strange to you for someone who's a self-described anarchist to espouse the primacy of "rules." I'd point out that this springs from a misunderstanding of "Anarchism," but I'll play along, and explain that the problem might lie in your understanding of rules.

Rules are not simply boundaries and limitations; they are guides for systems to form. This is the principle of Emergence. Look at Chess--it is only through the presence of the dozen or so rules that govern the game that the millions of different arrangements for the pieces are possible.

The rules you choose to live by are what enable you to accomplish anything. If you accept traffic laws, probability dictates that you are much more likely to be able to make it from point A to point B. If you don't accept them, then chances are your movement will be impeded, either by solid objects in your path or the enforcers of those same laws.

By the same token, however, a rule has no existence if it is not accepted by anyone. This is related to an idea originating from Walter J. Ong, the most intellectually famous graduate of my college--words have no existence outside of the minds of people, the markings on the screen before you are not words, but the seeds of words that only blossom into existence when you take the time to read them.

The same goes for rules; if a rule is not enforced by one person upon another (even if the enforcer and the enforcee are the same person) then it has no existence--it is not ontologically valid. Only scientific laws can have any validity outside of their meaning for human beings, and that presupposes that they're right.

So, if we accept that rules are only meaningful insofar as they're enforced, what does that mean?

I'm not entirely certain, personally. I'm beginning to suspect that it means that ethical choices might also be aesthetic choices. But this leads me to ground that someone I respect has already covered, so I will let his words speak instead:

The nameless of which we are all part does dream form and the highest attribute
any form may possess is beauty, the nameless then is an artist. Therefore, the problem is not one of good or evil, but one of aesthetics. You may ask then “How am I to know that which is beautiful and that which is ugly, and be moved to act thereby?”

--Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

Of course, I don't mean "aesthetics" or "beauty" in a shallow sense--I am, first and foremost, insterested in the aesthetics of a good story. The rules you choose to live by are what defines who you are--it needn't be a conscious choice, but the things you will do and the things you will not do are (equally) your own, personal rules. They are the boundaries of the story you wish to tell and be the central character of.

Beyond that, it means that all "Laws" are subjective. They're rules we all agreed on, and continue to agree upon. If a law were to suddenly not be enforced, then it would cease to be meaningful--it is only through the consent of the governed and the governing that they exist. But because we enforce these rules on ourselves by choosing not to do certain things, that makes "the governed" the more important of the two parties involved in the process.

This is the root of my anarchism--people will break laws they do not agree with, and they will live by rules that are not enforced by an outside force. Therefore, theoretically speaking, laws are less important than the rules that people accept without coercion. If we could teach people to internalize the rules necessary for society to emerge from a mass of people, why have laws?

Of course, I admit that this is theory, and as unlikely as a mole of one element spontaneously turning into a mole of another. But the possibility is there.

The Nature of Knowledge

It would be wrong to say that Information is Knowledge.
It is also wrong to say that Knowledge is Intelligence.

So the question that plagues the more psychologically-focused philosophers remains: How do we know anything? What is "knowing"?

Consider: When Literacy was introduced, people did not say "the book says..." They said "The Truth of the Book is..."

This fits in with the legend of King Thamus, as told in Plato's Phaedrus, which states:

..this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

This runs counter to what many of us think of when we think of literacy--we believe that the information contained in writing can be "reassembled" into knowledge, which can be properly used with intelligence. To the ancients, this would seem like idiocy: If we don't know facts, ourselves, how can we be said to know anything.

This is the old "New Media are Evil" reaction--epitomized by the distrust of television, rock 'n' Roll, and the Internet. (Perhaps "Reductio ad New Media?")

But we can't say that there is no such thing as knowledge or intelligence, anymore, or that we are less intelligent and knowledgeable than our forebears. Instead, I would argue that we're more distributed. Knowledge isn't composed of "facts" anymore, but of the processes necessary for acquiring the desired facts.

A knowledgeable individual might have access to a larger number of individual facts than the average person. Nowadays, though, "knowledgeable" is getting closer to "intelligent": better able to correlate facts and discover new ones, able to allow the sum of what they know be greater than the individual facts that they hold in their memory.

(Note to self: Cease trying to be clever when using the words "New Media.")

Found on Youtube #1

I enjoy strange things; my friend Steve found this on YouTube. The video is actually extremely well put-together.

Note: I did not make this or have any hand in making this. When I post a video I had a hand in, you'll know.

Puzzles

I, like a number of you others out there in internet-country, am going into finals this week. I'm overworked and feel as if I'm entering the last, long stretch of a grueling race.

I usually try to choose subjects which complement one another--one of the benefits of Jesuit Education is the emphasis on epistemological interconnectivity. That is, the Jebbies like to think that there's a lot of crossover in between the various subjects. I wasn't sure I believed in it until I put a copy of the T-distribution diagram into my notes for Phenomenology.

It wasn't a fluke--I discovered that the bell-curve shape t-distribution was a perfect graphic match for the Phenomenological (specifically Husserlian) conception of time as it relates to human observers.

For those of you who are having trouble with this, I want you to think of a bell-curve, draw it out if you'd like. Divide it vertically through its tallest part. On the furthest right side, write "THE FUTURE." On the furthest left side, write "THE PAST." on the vertical line going right through the middle write "NOW."

If you were to remove the bell-curve shape, you'd have the standard idea of time. An axis stretching from what was to what will be, along which we move; a filmstrip that passes through our minds showing us the world around us.

This is not time.

Mentally add the bell-curve again. On the right slope of the curve write "protention" with a right-pointing arrow, and on the left slope write "retension" with a left-pointing arrow.

We protend--that is, we expect, we assume--that which has not happened yet. The dropped plate will fall to the floor; its destruction is protended more weakly, being further in the future, happening "after" the fall.

We retain--which is not to say that we remember--that which has just happened; we may or may not remember it at some point in the future, but it has not yet quite faded from our minds.

This has very little to do with the t-distribution, which is a tool for extrapolating probability based on the results of data taken previously. But the occurrence of that shape--the cresting wave that is, for me, both "Now" and "might be"--struck me as a fascinating occurrence.

Perhaps I'm just seeing illusory correlations, but they seem to be significant in some way, if not outright meaningful. And if they are not significant in the outside world (as the shape of the wave is not significant in the outside world) they are epistemologically significant, being inherent in the way people structure their knowledge of the world and of ourselves.