Quotes
“Thus, in the Platonic vision,
rhetoric is either terrible or trifling–truth’s enemy or its simpleton
servant.” Willard, Charles Arthur. Liberalism and the Problem of
Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. University of Chicago
Press. 1996. p. 9.
"This is a very simple conundrum. Societies grow into systems. The
systems require management and are therefore increasingly wielded, like a
tool or a weapon, by those who have power. The rest of the population is
still needed to do specific things. But the citizens are not needed to
contribute to the form or direction of the society. The more 'advanced'
the civilization, the more irrelevant the citizen becomes.
"We are not quite so advanced as that, but neither are we so far off. Our
professional elites have spent the last half century arguing over
management methods, as if these were the only proper areas of political
interest. If we could bring ourselves to think of reason as merely one of
several management techniques and as something separate from the
democratic process, our understanding of the situation would be quite
different. In truth, if there are solutions to our confusion over
government, they lie in the democratic, not the management, process. And
essential to this is the reactivation or destreamlining of the assemblies.
The reestablishment of true popular gatherings is one of the few easy
actions available to the citizen. All it would require is a realization in
the public mind that the decision-making process--that is, the process of
creating national policy--is profoundly different from the administrative
process. The two have no characteristics in common. One is organic and
reflective. The other is linear and structured. One attempts to waste time
usefully in order to understand and to build consensus. The other aims at
speed and delivery." Voltaire's Bastards, John Ralston Saul, Vintage
Books, 1992, pp. 261-2.
“Reason and will are equally foundational but ultimately irreconcilable
principles of the legal order. They are reconciled in practice, but not in
theory....
Some contemporary legal scholarship seeks a position between these two
poles, holding for intellectual coherence in a compromise that does not
appeal simply to a practice of judicial statesmanship. These theorists
tend to attack the traditional abstractness of both reason and will. What
is abstract appears either as empty or, even worse, as a mere cover for
very particular interests. Abstract reason may be only a false appearance,
for example, of patriarchal interests; abstract will, only a false
appearance of class-based, economic interests. Opposed to this dialectic
of the abstract and the particular, these theories seek compromise in
ideas of narrative, discourse, and communities of interpretation. On this
view, law is founded in an historically specific discourse that gives
shape simultaneously to individual identity and community values.” Kahn,
Paul. The Cultural Study of Law. University of Chicago Press. 1999. pps.
22-3.
"If democracy is a continuing discourse, as Dewey said, then one problem
of modernity is to thwart attempts to bring the process to a halt. In that
spirit, even the reader who is ill-disposed to rhetorics of science can
entertain a rhetoric for modern democracy. And those who want to maintain
some version of realism against the various rhetorics of science can
nonetheless entertain the claim that the rhetoric-versus-reality trope
nourishes despotic discourses. Surely Mr. Goebbels has proved that
rhetoric is as real as anything else. Despotism and fanaticism always come
wrapped as Truth, and they are most insidious when they ignore, conceal,
or deny their own rhetorical character." Willard, Charles Arthur.
Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern
Democracy. University of Chicago Press. 1996. p. 10.
"The modern technocrat attempts at all costs to initiate any dialogue.
Thus he is able to set, in the first sentences of any exchange, the
context of the theoretical discussion about to take place. In written
arguments briefing books play the same role. The intended audience
unthinkingly accepts the parameters laid out. It is then caught up in the
coil of the resulting logic and kept busy rushing back and forth between
the questions and answers which the predefined structure imposes. In the
process it feels the satisfaction produced by simply keeping up or the
despair of inferiority if it does not. There is no time for reflection or
consideration of the basic parameters.
"We have difficulty linking the Jesuits' intellectual approach with that
of the technocrats because we believe that formal eloquence was central to
rhetoric. Modern argument doesn't rely upon the modulated qualities of the
voice. Nor does it attempt to seduce by pleasing. There is no artifice. We
are not enhanced by its appearance. In fact, modern argument is usually
ugly and boring. The awkward bones of facts and figures are there as signs
of honesty and freedom. The charts and graphs lay out lines of
inevitability, which always begin in the past and advance as a simple
matter of historical fact calmly into the future. There is no appearance
of guile.
"But this awkward, boring surface is the new form of elegant phrasing. The
facts, the figures, the historic events used to set the direction of lines
on graphs are all arbitrarily chosen in order to produce a given solution.
To this is added an insistence that the constant questioning involved in
modern argument is proof of its Socratic origins. Again and again the
schools which form the twentieth century's elites throughout the West
refer to their Socratic heritage. The implication is that doubt is
constantly raised in their search for truth. In reality the way they teach
is the opposite of a Socratic dialogue. In the Athenian's case every
answer raised a question. With the contemporary elites every question
produces an answer. Socrates would have thrown the modern elites out of
his academy." Saul, John Ralston. Voltaire's Bastards. Vintage Books.
1992. p. 116.
Examples
Statement of Point
Interlocking both primary societies
shows politics as a natural thing as every society within the conceptscape
is continually redefining itself from within and without. Struggle,
cooperation, toleration and infiltration are all necessary aspects of
various phases of societies in interaction. Politics is, moreover, a
concommitant of every knowing and caring act as these create an alliance
or an aversion with a degree of strength anchored in each knowing act’s
web. Under the Socratic regime of truth politics was relegated to the
non-excusable, but the pretense to sameness under truth repeatedly fell
from its pedestal into the nasty differences of all meaning’s myriad
interests.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations