The Big Picture

Boethius lays out a detailed account of rhetoric and its components in An Overview Of The Structure Of Rhetoric.  The most revisited theme of this text is the three species of rhetoric: judicial, demonstrative, and deliberative.  Through this cyclical overview, we see these three branches as types of appeals that ultimately make rhetoric effective in different situations.  Demonstrative is the closest to what we have been talking about so far, where the speaker has a definite objective in mind and aims to persuade the audience toward that objective.  Judicial is persuasion that is primarily aimed at figures of authority (as in a court case), while deliberative is less reliant on persuasion and discusses general issues that the public can debate.

Boethius hit me with a pondering point in the very beginning that speaks to the way we dissect these rhetorical texts.  “[Readers] may investigate each of the separate parts of the act and ignore the final product.” (488) Looking back on the classical era, I’m not sure that I can say what the “big picture” of rhetoric looks like.  Not that I’m trying to pin down a definition, we know that’s futile.  But we immerse ourselves in so many varying theories that it’s almost impossible to step back and view the final product of an era.  I don’t know that this is necessarily a “serious error” as Boethius states, but it is a little unfortunate that in reading these texts we inevitably incorporate our own epistemology and lose objectivity.  Perhaps this is true of all texts, and the human condition.  After all, can there really ever be a “final product” of rhetoric?