Rhetoric and Art of War
Yesterday I have received an article and a book about rhetoric, specifically about inventio. It has ruined everything I thought I knew about it and made be interested in the stuff. For example I have thought about rhetoric as an art to put your ideas in a nice way, but after 1/3 of the book I have another perception - rhetoric is a weapon to influence people decisions (or even the way they think about ideologies).
Classical (western) rhetoric consists of several parts: inovatio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, actio.
Inovatio is concerned about system or methodology of discovery of proper arguments (like basic framework), which resembles Laying Plans, Waging War and THE USE OF SPIES in SunTzu Art of War.
Dispositio talks about organization of arguments or strategy. In SunTzu you can find about it in ATTACK BY STRATAGEM, TACTICAL DISPOSITIONS, WEAK POINTS AND STRONG.
Elocution's primary idea is to lay out concepts and ideas into sentences or - MANEUVERING, THE ARMY ON THE MARCH.
Memoria and Actio related to oral exercises, like speech, gestures and so on, so it is irrelevant in writing.
If you carefully study ideas in both Classical rhetoric and SunTzu Art of War - you will get a feeling that they are laid out according to some universal principles, which could be interpreted to come to life because of physical, biological and chemical structure of human brain.
The only big difference between rhetoric and art of war is this:
While "receiver" of rhetoric attack must understand at least half of what is being said to be intimidated or manipulated, when going to war you can just drop few bombs and arguments will be very clear. Which is the reason probably why you want to kill stupid people, when you see that your arguments are not working on them ;)
4 comments :
man, stop to read this rhetoric books ;)
i have already read it - too late ;)
m
that's the problem ;), they infuence on you
that's the reason why i am reading them instead of watching sitcoms ;)
m
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