Weaver

The reading starts talking about Weaver’s views on rhetoric with addressing what Weaver believed the body was composed of. The body has a body, mind, and soul. The soul is the part that blends “intellectual, emotional and spiritual unity” together to make “the highest self”(160). The next part talks about Weaver believing in three kinds of knowledge. They are ideas, the shallowest level, beliefs and generalizations, the second level, and the highest level, the metaphysical, which also incorporates the other two levels. Truth is found in the metaphysical dream where the material ideas/things conform to widely accepted beliefs/ideals.

Next the article talks about culture. It is not culture as we think of and study, such as the way a group dresses, what they eat, what they do for fun, etc… Weaver talks about culture having a tyrannizing image. This is the ideal of cultural perfection that a group tries to obtain. This image allows people to be “ordered” or labeled in society, depending on how close they come to being like the tyrannizing image.

Rhetoric and dialectic are talked about next. Dialectic deals with universals and abstractions. It is not involved or applied to the actual world. It does not have the intention to move people to act differently or believe something. Weaver believes rhetoric helps to “move” people. It moves them towards believing something or believing in some value. It relates to the real world, by acknowledging present circumstances, but strives toward something universally better. Rhetoric can be used to move people to act good or to act evil. It is persuasive. The books talks about dialectic primarily aiming to create a type of understanding, but it does not relate the concept to real world circumstances.

Weaver believes some types of arguments are better than others. He calls genus and definition the best type of argument because it deals with unchanging ideals. Other arguments he talks about are arguments by similitude, cause and effect, authority and testimony, and rhetorical-historical. Rhetorical-historical combines dialectic and rhetoric because it uses “a definition of genus or principle and a reference to historical circumstances”.

Weaver also goes on to talk about sentence structure and word usage in speeches which qualify the speaker to be the type of speaker that he is. Though this may be “off” from what Weaver talks about, I think diction is very important in the speech. Churchill lost me as part of his attentive audience by the words he chose to use. Because he chose to use such derogatory colloquial terms in times where respectful word should have been used, he lost credibility in my eyes. Sentence structure and word usage can have the same effect on an audience. The last part of the article talks about the decline of rhetoric. I thought it was interesting to have Dr. Fishman assign us an essay where it bashes rhetoric teachers of today.