Considering Persuasion

Last updated on: March 31, 2008 at 4:05 pm by jonathanjonesuiwdpt

Considering Persuasion 2008-03-31T16:05:46-05:00 jonathanjonesuiwdpt

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To follow previous brief thoughts on political order and civic virtue and community, the social knowledge embodied in the organic formation of civic community under the obligations of law must also be anchored in generational morality.

The common law that comes from community convention tends to contain within it information that cannot be brought effectively by constitutional guidance and legislative action: how conflicts in a given place arise and might be resolved, what justice could be defined as in a particular dispute, and the definitions of rational expectation for legal recourse. An open-ended, flexible response of law and discourse, in other words, is not effective when legislation or constitution remain the sole authorities. Those attempts to remake an order with little concern for culture and history are a disservice to the very idea of community because the new code casts aside, possibly quite irrationally, accumulated knowledge and prejudice. This knowledge is the product of the often long and difficult search over time for community agreement.

This view of a fragile, generational knowledge codified by law coincides with the purpose of “good” communication because both negotiate community agreement to standards and codes of conduct. The difference is that law must rely upon coercion. This raises the obvious issue: can virtue be coerced? Does it lose its meaning and its organic, persuasive power with the application of force? This is certainly a debatable question. But assume this thought experiment: natural phenomena cannot be explained adequately by superstition or speculation. Logic is likewise insufficient to explore our complex existence. Humans, then, need rhetorical back and forth to uncover some understanding of humanity and its limitations. The search for universal values requires ideas, experiences, and the words to express and hear. A population that is willing to negotiate the meaning of virtuous, with an eye toward succeeding generations, serves their community well.

They are recognizing what is persuasive, assessing the audience situation, and harnessing their aptitudes to utilize the tools of communication at their disposal. Here, concepts of rhetoric are an instrumental discipline that one must hope has an ethical means, employed to discover and illuminate transcendent truth. Following this thought experiment, rhetoric is important because humans are continuously presented with many formidable, seductive, but ultimately empty moral temptations. The natural moral law, meaning the moral truths we can know by reason, is a kind of global grammar by which the world can rationally discuss its future. Discourse permeates human lives. If language is unexamined or thought to be at root meaningless and arbitrary, there is danger in an unawareness of how language functions. It is possible to become victims to language through the manipulations of its masters.

What remains through the uncertainly is what may be awkwardly termed the “higher law.” When contemplating what the good life means, Augustine is comparable to Aristotle in that he left both a practical and a philosophical groundwork for students of classical rhetoric to ponder. His famous work On Christian Doctrine is a meditation upon and a guide to the procedures of discovery that may lead to truth, a truth that may have more than one single facet or method of interpretation. Christian truth, mysterious and pre-existing, has nothing to fear from rhetoric and philosophy: “If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared: rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted for our use.” In addition to forcefully arguing pursuits of the mind (even the pagan ones) need not have negative impact on doctrine or the evolution of dogma, he went further by approving of the Aristotelian line of thought that it is proper to adjust to the audience. Augustine, it can be argued, even agreed with Plato on no insignificant measure of substance: book one of On Christian Doctrine, for example, takes the Platonic perception that there exists in the world, seen and unseen, objects and signs. What is noteworthy is that the theologian builds upon a “spiritual” idea of a hugely influential non-Christian without a comprehensive or fundamental condemnation of pre-Christian concepts of the soul. Without compromising his beliefs, he sought to persuade by calmly listening, understanding, and appealing to human rationality and the very natural desire to worship that which is greater than ourselves.

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