Mythos and Logos

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Nomos or Logos?

Expansion West

Using West, Gilyard argues for a rhetorical education that promotes democratic values and fosters civic literacy in students. A major component of this education is what West describes as tragicomic hope. I’ve been trying to think of an analogy to explain tragicomic hope. As a mom, a Latina, a grad student, and teacher I know I have it because I would not be able to function under those constraints if I didn’t. But can I explain it?

Since it is much harder to define than tragedy, I’ll start by giving some definitions of comedy. Plato asserts that comedy is a mixture of pleasure and pain. Aristotle sees comedy as a lower art, a ridiculous mode. Freud in The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious claims that when we joke we are releasing a subconscious desire for the taboo (but he did a lot of cocaine). Bakhtin presents us with perhaps the most relevant definition of comedy as it relates to social constructs. Bakhtin’s carnival and the theatre of the grotesque attribute a political power to comedy. Comedy can create chaos and overturn power structures. Tragedy on the other hand, may not hold this power. Tragedy allows the bad guys to win, comedy makes fun of the bad guys, stuffs them into the gym locker, takes their picture, and posts it all over the internet. As soon as those in power become buffoons, they cease to have power. Tragicomic hope then intersects these two meanings. Even in the face of utter despair, racism, hatred, or death, the tragicomic figure continues to hope for a shift a movement into a chaotic upheaval- a revolution.

This concept used in the composition classroom situates the academic environment as always political “ensconced rather tamely in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist norm” (Gilyard 29). Therefore, consciously and transparently addressing the politics at play in the classroom allows for student agency. Gilyard terms this prophetic pragmatism, which is the reliance on the prophetic witness his students bring to the classroom and the application of this witness. Students can give witness to their struggles with issues of race, gender, spirituality, and any other identity that matters to them. This witness may be used in the composition classroom and in rhetorical education as a basis of critical inquiry and application of crucial aspects of civic literacy. By intersecting Marxism, prophetic Christianity, and pragmatism, West is enacting a sort of tragicomic hope that what matters to students will manifest in their work, will give students intellectual power and will foster social activism.

Fishing in Dark Waters

In our week of new TA orientation this month, several of our core writing mentors and instructors made it a point to articulate that a genre-based writing curricula, unlike the teaching of the 5-paragraph essay format, focuses on the use value of student writing which guides students to use writing as a way to get things done with words and images, as opposed to the exchange value of student writing which conditions students to write the requisite number of words in correct form in exchange for a grade.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

From David Foster Wallace 2005 Commencement Speech at Kenyon College

When student writers are conditioned and limited to particular structural formats guided by a strict rulebook of prose and grammar, the circumstances imposed or forced on them exemplify the tragic, insofar as the reality and the possibility that exist in the world are nullified by adherence to a pervading sense of order which MUST be followed. Students swim along in the water they are tossed in, paying attention to format, following rules, and receiving grades. This forced necessity, or anagke, to use the Greek term, elicits the comic response (in individuals who are paying attention) as an antidote.

True comedy is an acknowledgement of our limitations, insofar as it pokes fun at or satirizes a reality that constrains us. Cornel West posits that seriousness that can be made light of is mediated by the element of hope, exemplified by his discussion of African American humanism. In facing up to a country that bills itself as the world’s greatest democracy, a bastion of freedom that built itself up on the foundations of slavery, genocide, and racism, it is the very idea of equal treatment under the law that gives U.S. citizens hope (balancing reality against possibility). Developing curricula that encourages students to explore these murky waters of hate, hypocrisy and imperialism in order to understand the world we live in is vital to composition pedagogy.

As teachers of composition, we should feel compelled to encourage our students to fish in dark waters. The essence of learning for teachers and their students, as it was for Socrates, is realizing how little we know, and be willing to share and exchange in that dialogue with our community. Pragmatism is valuable in this endeavor. Keith Gilyard asserts, “Pragmatism can defend itself fairly well, and its ultimate value, particularly for teachers, lies in disturbing, complicating, and challenging otherwise totalizing views of truth, power, and society” (13). Our words matter, and writing should be a social and community practice.

HOT

Where, when, how and why did you start writing? The first legible word I ever wrote was HOT on the back of my bedroom door in black crayon. I’m not going to lie on the couch and deconstruct that act for you, but I am going to bring light to the fact that even a toddler sees power in words.

Gilyard attempts to move from a critique of West’s debatable underlying connections to Marxism to assert that West’s interpretation of “tragicomic hope” is from the reference of African American Humanism and Christianity. West affirms that “tragicomic hope” was a tool (prophetic pragmatism) for African Americans to survive culturally, morally and, spiritually intact under oppression. Situating “tragicomic hope” in African American music, West suggests power is taken from the oppressor. In a sense always reminding the oppressor that its victims are fully aware of their mistreatment, hate it, but continue to survive intact. This assumption of voice gives to a people whose voice the oppressor is vehemently trying to mute a bullhorn. Composition is a venue for voice and as a teacher of composition one should then facilitate acquisition of the skills that would allow students to present their voice “come what may.”

Nutshell Definition of Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the gloss of my lipstick gleaming on my plump lips, where my last word dangles, and your eyes mesmerized and fixed, make your decision to kiss me or call me a whore.

On Composition & Parataxis, Quantum Physics, & Tragicomic Hope

In order to understand the world, we must learn to question it. We start with a superficial why, as in Mommy, why is the sky blue? Then as we grow into ethical consciousness, we ask a deeper why, as in Mommy, why does the sky have to be blue? which then leads to questions of how one might re-imagine the sky as a wholly different color. As teachers of composition, our job is to provide the resources and opportunities with which students can first ask the superficial, then the deeper whys about writing in a given genre, which will ultimately lead to the kinds of how questions that empower students to re-imagine and re-purpose writing to meet their individual needs. If we skip the deep why stage of questioning, we never get to the empowering how - only to an automated responsiveness enacting the established paradigm.

This re-imagining, re-purposing is at the center of Cornel West's prophetic Christianity. Contradictions are not glossed over but antagonized until a dialectical synthesis emerges: the empowering how. We do not arrive at such an empowerment through hypotaxis - the linear, vertical, deductive progression of inquiry and argument, which prefigures a conclusion, arrives there consequentially, skipping the deep why stage between theoria and praxis. We do not cherry-pick the Biblical verses that fit our prefigured ideology. Instead they emerge through a paratactic re-imagining, an associative re-purposing in which seemingly hidden strands reappear in the new light of a contemporary context colored by our active engagement with the text and the world.

Newtonian physics is only good for shorthand stereotypical observation, as are genres and modes. You can teach a child intro, thesis statement, body, conclusion - or that what goes up must come down, and that child might ask why, and you might say organization or gravity, and eventually (hopefully) that child might ask - regarding physics - if what goes up must always come down, and if you say yes you'll be lying, because some of what goes up never comes down, and there's a chance some of it is on the other side of the universe by the time you try to answer, unless you go about measuring it with your hypotactic instruments, bending it to your will. Then, under the force of your deduction, the behavioral potential of matter regresses to a logic any infant can understand and obey (e.g. 5-paragraph essays). Sometimes, that kind of explanation, understanding, instruction is all we feel we have time for.

But the truth is we can't afford not to see the world as it is on the quantum level, where the vaguest of gestures disrupts universes within universes - where genres are fluid concepts made all the more fluid or rigid with every word we use to de/refine them. And if we can get our students to question first on a superficial, then on a deeper level why something is, we might be able to get to the empowering how of writing in the world.

First we must understand the tragedy - the hypotactic, linear, vertical, consequential trajectory of a given situation. We must recognize its boundaries as such, but we must also understand these boundaries as conventional constructions - as made and capable of being un/remade. Here is where the force of parataxis, association, prophetic imagination - comedy - reconfigures logos into nomos, narrative, human triumph.

We must remind our students that they are the wrench that tightens the bolts or grinds the gears. The agents of stasis or change. Study the machine. Then maintain, re-purpose or break the sonofabitch.

Keith Douglas wrote, "To be sentimental or emotional now is dangerous to oneself and to others. To trust anyone or admit any hope of a better world is criminally foolish, as foolish as it is to stop working for it."

"Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."--Viktor E. Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning

I mentioned the concept of "delusion of reprieve" in class the other day while we were discussing Cornel West's notion of "trigicomic hope." Just as Frankl equates trigicomic hope or the delusion of reprieve to explain why the interned Jews remained relatively passive(he himself was interned for five years), West uses trigicomic hope in relation to African Americans' use of song. Here, the African American song becomes the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael. West argues, "The brutalities and atrocities in human history, the genocidal attempts in this century and the present-day barbarities require that those who accept the progressive and prophetic designations put forth some sense of the tragic."

While I'm not a teacher, I think that most composition curriculum should encourage the exploration the consequences of hatred, prejudice and discrimination. I think it should be every teacher's goal in the classroom to help their students "...accept the progressive and prophetic designations [in order to] put forth some sense of the tragic."

It is the idea of a small child walking into the gas chamber saying a prayer or the enslaved African American singing in the fields that moves us towards change. And it is the recognition of the tragic and the ability to empathize with trigicomic hope that helps us create a more perfect democracy.

Nutshell Definition of Rhetoric

My definition of rhetoric is strongly influenced by readings in 542. Chuck really made us focus on trying to define rhetoric, even though we all agreed that our definitions would always be changing.

Personally my definition of rhetoric combines the theories of Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle. I like Isocrates' idea that good rhetoric is something that is natural, learned, and nurtured. In this sense, rhetoric seems more like a bear cub learning to hunt with its mother – born knowing it's need for food and specifically meat for survival, taught how to watch the river for oncoming fish, and over time through repetition, the hunt is perfected to a point of sustainability for the bear. This process is both passive and active, requiring flexibility and dedication. Isocrates' organic interpretation of rhetoric and the relativist values that encompass it, seem more practical and forgiving than Plato's “absolute truth.” I also like that Isocrates advocates for the use of written rhetoric for education. As an aspiring editor and writer who understands that without written text I would never get a job, I feel that while oral rhetoric is more important for immediate interaction, written rhetoric is necessary in order for us to interact with our past.

In a nutshell, for me, rhetoric is not simply “a circumscribed set of skills,” a form of persuasion, dialectic, a speech, “a phantom part of politics,”or based on strictly epistmeme (Plato, Gorgias, 463d). I would define rhetoric as an adapted form of dialectic that derives from the Aristotelian Canons but differs primarily in domain, applicability, and continuity. Ultimately rhetoric is an artistic, adaptable, public, and organic mode of swaying the soul towards the rhetorician's perceived truth via both oral and written forms.

Oh Well...

“In the eyes of Cornel West, one must take culture seriously in any effort to develop effective praxis” (Gilyard 23). For West, the exemplar of tragicomic hope is “the African American humanist tradition, artistic production that promotes the vitality and vigor of African American life” (Gilyard 23). African American culture is represented in these artistic productions, but did the artists consciously and purposefully represent this culture? Some perhaps did while others perhaps didn’t. Maybe Richard Wright intended his writing to reflect marginalism, but maybe Zora Neale Hurston didn’t intend to reflect humanism in her writing. West doesn’t stipulate, and really, since he is coining the terms he attributes to the four traditions of African Americans and identifying which famous African Americans to categorize accordingly, it doesn’t seem to matter. But this makes me curious about purpose and the rhetorical situation and how dialogue regarding both occurs in the composition classroom.

West says, “…comic release is the black groan made gay. Yet this release is neither escapist nor quietistic. Rather, it is engaged gaiety, subversive joy and revolutionary patience…” (Gilyard 25). This release has the potential to transform, to yield action. It is a rhetorical release in response to a rhetorical situation created by being part of the black culture. But did the artists of these productions set out to create their art in direct response to the rhetorical situation created by being part of the black culture? Or was their purpose to create the art that they wanted to create for themselves whether or not that art consciously reflected their culture or responded to the rhetorical situation created by that culture? If they had been assigned a rhetorical situation, would their productions have been as effective?

These questions have the potential to open up the number of rhetorical situations presented to students in the composition classroom, and frankly, they have to potential to provide students with more freedom. Students could not only choose their topics but their genres as well. This would provide students with the opportunity to create writing that is truly relevant to them and that is still rhetorically effective without being contrived. This would provide students with the opportunity to carve out their own curriculum (within manageable reason of course), a curriculum that they will find more rewarding and hopefully feel more invested. In the classroom, teachers and students of composition would have to engage in more dialogue with one another; this lends itself to critical thinking and creativity. Currently, making writing more relevant to students is an important approach in the composition classroom; Gilyard’s insights into West might just provide a deeper approach to this current approach. Personally, the more engaged students are with the writing process, the more engaged I am with the reading process. This could be a win-win situation for all parties.

Rhetoric in a nutshell

My nutshell definition of rhetoric: Rhetoric is a tool that we use, sometimes consciously sometimes unconsciously, that helps us shape the situation at hand, including how the situation should be interpreted.

Composition and Tragicomic Hope

Much of Gilyard's chapter can be applied in the teaching of composition. Gilyard points out that Emerson, recognized by West "as the most important forerunner of American pragmatism," valued "self-definition and people's perceptions" over knowledge created by philosophers.

Presumably, West also favors self-definition and participation in knowledge creation over knowledge created elsewhere and pressed upon students. If we are to value self-definition, then composition instructors must validate the knowledge students bring into the classroom with them. Otherwise, we are not helping students to compose, putting different things together into 1 cohesive whole, but giving them a whole and teaching them to swallow it, which is not composition at all and does not foster critical intelligence. As composition instructors, we would do better to make fostering critical intelligence our goal rather than having students create error free compositions. In West's analysis of Dewey, he says that Dewey's guiding purpose was "to demystify and defend critical intelligence.to render it more and more serviceable for the enhancement of human individuality, that is, the promotion of human beings who better control their conditions and thereby more fully create themselves"

(9). For me, language and composition are intrinsically tied to the "enhancement of human individuality." Now this may be because I am not a math teacher, but I think the composition classroom is the best place to help students figure out how to "control their conditions" and to "create themselves" through the expression of their own voice.

I realize that I haven't said anything about tragicomic hope. I am still struggling with the concept and how to tie it concretely to the teaching of composition.

Tragicomic hope is defined "as the ability to laugh and retain a sense of life's joy-to preserve hope even while staring in the face of hate and hypocrisy-as against the falling into the nihilism of paralyzing despair." I can't really think of another profession as marked by tragicomic hope than that of the profession of teaching. Of course, that may be because I am a teacher. Year after year, we are told that the education system isn't working that we are not adequately preparing students for the real world.

Teachers are both blamed for the inadequacies of students and hailed as heroes fighting for our future against huge obstacles, apathy not the least of these. Yet, year after year teachers go back and keep trying. We know that in some ways we are like Sisyphus, but sometimes we know that we can push that boulder just high enough to make a difference. Perhaps without the notion of tragicomic hope, there would be no teachers.

What is rhetoric? Dang i don't even know mija!

I’d like to start this post by quoting Martin Luther King Jr. I took this excerpt from Strength to Love, which is a collection of his most prolific sermons. King writes, “Sincerity and conscientiousness in themselves are not enough. History has proven that these noble virtues may degenerate into tragic vices. Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity” (46). I participated in a panel today at the Albuquerque Cultural Conference. I think in all the panel was successful but I had a very emotional and visceral response to a few things that occurred during the session. This response surprised me because I think of myself as a very patient and logical person but I have this hotheaded Latina side to me as well. I’d like to take this post to contextualize my response and show how I may use it in my scholarship. I think deconstructing my emotional reaction may lead to a working definition of rhetoric.

First here is what happened:

Emotional Response 1: As I sat down in front of the panel audience I realized that I was the only person of color in the entire room. I only attended two panels, the one right before mine and then my own. The panel before me had two people of color but they were not in the room anymore, so it was just me. This happens to me a lot in academic settings and I’ve become accustomed to it. It has been a long time since that has bothered me but in this case because this was a cultural conference I had the expectation that there would be a diverse audience. There wasn’t. I felt a little nervous all of a sudden and so I read through the notes I had taken and took a deep breath.

Emotional Response 2: Early in the discussion I had made the point that it is not up to community organizers to interpret the needs of a community but rather they provide resources to the community to help community members to discover needs, interpret those needs, and articulate those needs. One of the panelists, who agreed with me, expanded on this idea further. She used the curandera as an analogy. The curandera does not heal but rather she provides medicine and it is up to the body to heal. This same panelist took issue with using the word “help.” She asserted that instead we should use the word “serve.” What I wanted to say was “You is loca lady. I do not need to be healed and I do not want you to serve me.” But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything about that directly mostly because I felt frustrated and angry about it and this was not the time or place to get into an argument over a single word here or there. This thinking frustrates me because it is sincere and comes from a place of wanting to be conscientious. I don’t know how to counter sincerity. What I do know is that my culture and my people are not broken. We do not need to be healed. There is nothing wrong with how our culture functions, but we help with learning how to navigate systems of power that are foreign to us yet control much of our lives. To me using the word help is absolutely okay. Where I come from, help means, “I help you, you help me” “I got your back, you got mine”, whereas “serve” means “I am a missionary who is going to serve you and save you.” Serve continues the savior narrative. I’m not implying that this panelist meant harm with what she was saying, because she didn’t, however, perhaps her choice of words needs to be better situated to her intentions.

Emotional Response 3: One panelist made the point that to be trusted by a community then community organizers must learn the language of that community. Another panelist added that community organizers must also learn as much as they can about the community’s culture. I agree with these two ideas in theory, however, I argued that a community organizer entering a different culture must be careful not to exoticize the culture and turn it into a commodity- financial or emotional (as in I am exchanging a service to make my self feel better). The conversation then shifted to how we must find connections, commonalities, and intersections between our cultures. I agree with this in theory but we also need to be okay with the fact there are major differences. An outsider will never be fully integrated into a culture and they shouldn’t try to be or expect to be. These two sentiments, learning about culture and finding commonalities between two cultures, are problematic. We need to drop the anxiety over being different. I once again did not speak up. I stopped myself from saying anything because I didn’t want to offend anyone. Because I saw on the audience member’s faces that they so desperately want to serve. In contrast however, I also saw an appropriation of culture. I saw their turquoise necklaces and flowy linen shirts with Mexican embroidery. And I said nothing.

So what does this all have to do with rhetoric? Well I ask, were my emotional responses fair? I’m not sure. Maybe not. Maybe I can’t complain about it because I didn’t do anything to correct the situation. But I didn’t feel it was my place to correct anything. I looked at the context I was in, the social setting, the political reality, the sincere faces, the rhetorical situation of the conference and decided that this was not a place to make the arguments I wanted to make. I am not bashing the conference or the panelists, or even the audience. There were good intentions all around. I want to merely look at how I reacted and connect this reaction to my scholarly work. Language is powerful and the ability to use language effectively gives us power. I decided not to use language. I decided that it was better to save that for another day. I think this may be a jumping off point for my research interests this semester. And finally, here is the definition of rhetoric I have so far: The power and ability to discern when, why, and how to use language.

Nutshells and Cornels

My usual answer to "What is rhetoric?" is The Philosophy of language use. This usually gets a confused blink or two, and a deeper, long-winded explanation. The biggest challenge that I have found to answering the question is the various misconceptions out there of what Rhetoric is. Indeed, even the misconceptions are not uniform. Some people see Rhetoric as referring specifically and only to speeches, while other people seem to hold desperately onto the notion that rhetoric simply means nonsense catch phrases that politicians use.

There are several interesting ideas I got out of the Gilyard article. I am new to looking at Pragmatism, but I like the idea that "Pragmatism holds suspect the search for philosophical foundations and binds philosophy to social and historical circumstances. It restlessly interrogates received and conventional wisdom." All too often people hold on to old views, in society, education, religion, etc. simply because they were once seen as the Truth. If this is made suspect in the search for current usefulness, I can see how it would terrify some people. I find the questioning far more useful, though.

One point that jumped out at me in relation to education was "teachers and students must create new knowledge through inquiry and transaction. Even a student pursuing study independently is not being given knowledge; he or she is claiming it". I particularly like this, as I am always trying to get students to view knowledge in this way. Some students I deal with in the ABE program all too often say that they "have to be there" for one reason or another (parole, judge, family, etc.) but usually not in the capacity of claiming knowledge. Even, as teachers are well familiar with, with the old idea of a student claiming that a teacher "gave them a grade" rather than that student having earned a grade.

When the article moved into focusing more on West's Christian framework, I started to get lost. I am unsure how prophetic Christianity can embody existential freedom, as my understanding of existentialism is that reality is basically what we make of it and what we do should be good for ourselves and others, and that is the driving force; whereas prophetic Christianity holds to a promised future under set rules to be met for that purpose.

Teaching the Tragicomic

In teaching writing, one emphasizes the importance of “angle” or “voice” or “hook” because is at the core of what makes writing good. It is what primes the pump of the rhetorical situation. It informs the piece and inspires both writer and reader. So, it is the form, the shape that words create, that is the telos of writing. A text is sparked by ideas, but they are junior to the order of the words that convey them. This is reflected in our copyright laws which protect the precise relationships of the words in a text, not the ideas they convey. So, if teaching composition is a matter of helping a writer learn to sculpt an idea in words, it follows that understanding how ideas can be dismantled (a tragic matter if the idea is dear or binding) and reconstructed (a comic response that realigns the debris) builds imaginative muscle, the womb of angle and voice.

Gilyard’s comments on West’s tragicomic hope operate on literal and figurative planes to illustrate this. Art it is the comic, healing response to life’s sharp edges; it reworks the steel to make a tool from the weapon. In West’s words, it is African American music - a “sad yet sweet indictment” of the tragic circumstances of oppression - that enables a “melancholic yet ameliorstic stance” in the face of its dispiriting force. Similarly, Susan Jarratt suggests that historians who engage with this bittersweet process can embolden society to do the same. She argues that this tragic exposing and comic exploring was at the heart of Sophistic rhetoric. To learn it opens space for dis-courses - a forging of new paths – which can lead to new understandings of old information. Why else write - why else teach one how to?

Sober Discourse

sobriety, n.

3. Staidness, gravity, seriousness; soundness or saneness of judgement, etc. (OED)

A definition I’m currently working on/with (or maybe it’s working on me…):

Rhetoric is the dynamic (and credible, convincing, compelling) application of creative process to reason and language through which humans make things happen to achieve human goals. It is used by human agents who operate on the assumption that they can and should effect change in the world and use it to create their own (and our) place in it. (this is kind of a mash-up of Bacon, Bazerman, Burke, Aristotle, Fish, and Isocrates, among others)

As I was thinking about what rhetoric is and what it does, I was drawn back to Isocrates in Against the Sophists and his observation that sophists are “men who inculcate virtue and sobriety.” His understanding that, “the art of using letters remains fixed and unchanged, so that we continually and invariably use the same letters for the same purposes, while the reverse is true of the art of discourse.” The symbols used to represent words remain consistent; the path taken by the rhetor to arrange the words in order to create meaning is what is significant to the art of rhetoric, as well as the understanding of what is fit for the occasion. Beyond these two attributes, Isocrates also states that ability is a component of natural talent and formal training. This articulation of the structure of rhetoric by Isocrates includes the concepts of phronesis, kairos, and dunamis as essential to the process of reasoned discourse. Practical wisdom facilitates the creative art, understanding the proper occasion and the timing enhances the capacity of discourse to perform its intended function, and skillful knowledge of the rhetor grounds the discourse in valid, epistemical reason. Sound, sane judgement is what Isocrates refers to when he uses the term sobriety in reference to discourse. “Inculcating virtue and sobriety” distinguish the underpinnings of Isocrates’ view of rhetoric, and in Antidosis, he states, “discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul.” Isocrates recognizes the ethical responsibility of the rhetor.

Even though the common understanding of rhetoric has been debased to a pejorative common usage of the term, my personal bias is that rhetoric can still be a powerful tool for change when we engage in and teach its thoughtful application.