Plato's conflicted chariot within Aristotle's reasons for action...

This one was a lot.

Kate was right in that I found Aristotle’s main points easier to piece together during the first reading than Plato, whose colorful metaphors seemed only to fit together for me in retrospect, as colors obscure individually make sense on a canvas. Along the same track I thought Aristotle's ideas more precise, which in comparing to Plato and his love for absolute truth also made me flip back and forth quite frequently as I was reading. 

            One of the chapters I spent a lot of time thinking about was number 10, beginning on page 200.  Specifically, Aristotle's list of reasons for action on pg. 201 made me immediately question the motives of all of my own actions. The overwhelming nature of this kind of catalog made me inherently suspicious of its accuracy, but it helped to group these seven into two halves, as Aristotle does, saying on pg. 201 “(Our) actions will really be due to one of the causes mentioned—either reasoning or emotion…”, and then go back to the seven reasons and put each in context. This duality within each of the seven reasons reminded me a lot of Plato’s chariot pulled by one dark horse and one light. I found it fascinating to hold this up to Aristotle’s seven reasons, to see how it is this (conflicted, as Plato might say) personal interplay between our individual halves (of emotion and reason, as Aristotle might say) within the seven reasons for action Aristotle describes essentially determines not only our reputations, but our destinies. 

            The making and constituency of our characters gets a large part in Aristotle’s discourse, but I felt it was shafted in that he mostly thought it reasonable to aim to ignore it in the course of hearing rhetoric. While the logic in this is hard to refute, as both Aristotle and other blog posts have noted it’s all but impossible to ignore our preconceptions and surroundings stimuli. As a human being, striving toward perfect reasoning and perfectly rational thought is beneficial, to a degree. But I feel even within rhetoric our prejudices and biases, bound to us as tightly as an unruly dark horse to a chariot, should be not only explored to understand their benefits and flaws, but embraced for them.

p.s.  About halfway through, the notes I was keeping in the margins became quite disjointed, and in referring back to the ‘tree’ outlining Aristotle’s views in the introduction to Rhetoric, I found a lot of main points, but not much of an order.

It helped me a lot to use this, an outline that follows Aristotle’s own progression. Coupled with my own notes, it made things click in the framework I think Aristotle meant them to click in.