Influences on Rhetoric

The introduction to the Enlightenment touched on some areas of study that influence rhetoric that I didn't (consciously) realize were relatively new fields. For instance, "as experimental science and inductive reasoning replaced deductive logic as the standard of inquiry, the Ramistic distinction became moot" (792). Psychology seems to have had the greatest impact on Enlightenment rhetoric as Bacon, Descartes, and Locke all touch on mental faculties to an extent. "The rhetorical theories of the Enlightenment are intimately linked to the intellectual and social developments that shaped the modern world" (792). This notion of real-world application and influence is a relief to me as the seemingly ungrounded study of rhetoric up until the Enlightenment period has been a source of frustration. The rise of democracy and its predominance is also something that I am looking forward to seeing influence rhetoric in this next era of study.

The Royal Society actually seems like a group of insane people who want us all to go back to speaking like neanderthals. However, I empathize with their want to make rhetoric less about superfluous words and more about the message, but I think their desire to create a "real character" language is perhaps taking it a bit too far. Locke seems like a great intermediate for this opposition.

Locke's teachings on rhetoric make the most sense to me, by far, of any of the rhetoricians we've studied up until now. He emphasizes the idea that words should be used to describe things, and that when a word is used, a specific thing is materialized in the hearer's mind. What I find the most pleasing about Locke's views on rhetoric is the practicality of them. He pushes for a specific concisity, while also realizing that words mean different things to different people, and that "gold" brings forward the image of many things to many people. He stresses that a man "is fain often to use twenty words, to express what another man signifies in one" (826). He also realizes that "words have very uncertain significations" (823). Therefore, some men will need to use the twenty words to convey what another man could say in one because their grasp of language is not the same as his counterpart.