Attempt to Situate my Own Rhetoric Position
“Rhetoric” may have been argued from Plato’s re-creation of Socrates's dialogue with Gorgias as persuasion, but it should be more clearly articulated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the environment or opportunity to persuade. Aristotle understood that in that environment, rhetoric was simply a tool that may be used within a social setting to engage and reveal one author’s point of view, and that no actual persuasion may actually take place -- in other words, even with skills used by the Sophists who were aware of the articulation and gestures appropriate to public oration, no techné was guaranteed to produce a result of real persuasion. Further, as Aristotle explained for all tools, rhetoric could be used for good or evil (only virtue was exempt from this possibility) and therefore may include components of logos, pathos, and ethos but would not necessarily be “reasonable” in the agora . Because of these limitations of the ancient discussions of rhetoric, we must look to somethin...