Ouch, Ramus! That argument was
blistering. One quote especially jumped out at me:
“Yet now Quintilian follows
Aristotle’s and Cicero's confusion of dialectic and rhetoric.
Indeed he makes it worse by fabrications of his own, and by including
in his teachings all the dispute concerning all the arts he had read
or heard something about---grammar, mathematics, philosophy, drama,
wrestling, rhetoric. We shall distinguish the art of rhetoric from
the other arts, and make it a single one of the liberal arts, not a
confused mixture of all arts.”
I'm seeing another shift in our
'rhetorical landscape' (that simile works really well for me, and
helps me place where we're at). First we had the Sophists, and then
saw a shift into rhetoric in pedagogy and politics. With Augustine we
had the shift into Christian rhetoric. And now we see a shift in the
way rhetoric is defined and used—as a separate entity unto itself.
It marks a definite shift from the Sophists studying and using
rhetoric in all subjects as a means to solved problems. I do find it
funny that Ramus defines rhetoric as an art—to me it seems that his
iron definition of what rhetoric is or isn't suggests that Ramus
views it more of a science.
I think Ramus' piece essentially reminded me of the diversity of rhetoric, more so, all the perceptions that can be had regarding the subject. In the same sense, everyone's a critic. If rhetoric wasn't a multidimensional subject, we wouldn't have this separation and development. From the Sophists to today or between classical, medieval and now renaissance rhetoric, the subject itself is all encompassing and cannot be refined to any specific definition. While I found Ramus' piece pretty entertaining to read, I felt it was almost too critical. I'd like to see the lens turned on him.
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