Peter Ramus, PP. 674-697
From these readings, I find it interesting
that Ramus tried to attack all the ancient rhetors such as Aristotle, Cicero,
Quintilian, and others. I quite agree with him even though his idea violates
the tradition. His central idea was reasoning ability is innate from human
beings, this violates’ Aristotle’s idea that people need to learn reasoning
from classical rhetoric (p. 675). One reason I agree with him is that I have
the sense that I am able to reason without learning. For instance, while someone
said offensive words to me, I was able to reason why he would say something
like that, whether he tried to provoke me or irritate me or made a bad joke. Ramus
also proposed the idea that one should create his or her own pursuit of
knowledge instead of trying to learn it from someone else (p. 676). I really
like this idea because I believe creating your own knowledge is more
progressive and less conservative than studying from traditional guidelines. Ramus’
idea mainly focus on the use of dialectic so that he values less on speech
style and delivery, which is another interesting part of him, because he is
quite the opposite to Aristotle. I especially agree with Ramus’s idea that
orator doesn’t have to be a good man or equipped with moral philosophy. Though
I do agree that moral philosophy benefit the rhetor with good reputations and
good connections in community. Sometimes, even the orator have good moral
standard, he wouldn’t succeed in his career. Take Scorates as an example, he is
a virtuous and skilled rhetor but he tried to point out everybody’s evil or
deceptive actions and put everybody on the spot, and eventually someone accused
him guilty of doing bad things, which eventually lead to his accusation and
death. Even though Socrates did the right thing by telling people their
weakness, but he also hurt their feelings which is, I would say, inappropriate
or unbeneficial to his rhetorical situation, because we all know nobody is
perfect, so why bother pushing people to their limits just to prove you are
right? Besides what right meant for one person may differ for another person.
This is why I think sometimes a bad person can be a successful rhetor, because
even when a person is not entirely ethical, his ability to sense whether the situation
is helping him could make a great deal of his rhetoric to his audiences. One
thing I like about Ramus’s argument in his Rhetoric against Quintilian is that
he didn’t talk about knowledge he didn’t understand, nor created knowledge out
of the thin air, which is why I liked him because this shows he is very
practical. He talked about unpredictable darkness in Aristotle’s books such as
predicaments, enunciations, and abundance of propositions (p. 681). He said
these ideas are deep and confusing thus he wouldn’t talk about them in his
argument. Though this could also be a weakness for his argument because since
he only talked about the knowledge he know or has heard of, he may exclude many
valuable knowledge outside of his knowing, just like he did with Aristotle and
Cicero’s complicated ideas.
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