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.
The true prophetic Christian would not be bound by a set of dogmatic rules but would rather, as in liberation theology, use the framework of Christian thought (universality, fair distribution of goods, social justice, compassionate and fair political and economic practices etc.) as an operational strategy. If you are interested in what an existential Christianity may look like, you might want to read A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene. The main character is an atheist Christian. It makes sense in the book :)
ReplyDeleteI figured the basic confusion I was facing with that portion of the text was 1 part baggage, and 1 part an incomplete picture of the philosophies. My study on Existentialism focused on Sartre (go figure, right?) Thanks for the nudge in that direction, Genevieve, I will look into it.
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