"The once and future queen"

Whew. This one was a bit of a struggle. Maybe it's the fact that I've had a long, long day; maybe it's the fact that I'm very much over undergrad entirely and have come down with a severe case of senioritis. I'm not quite sure.

Maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee today, or maybe I’ve been out of the blog game too long... but Perelmen, for the majority of “The Realm of Rhetoric” seems to be overcomplicating an already overcomplicated idea and writing himself into circles. His writing style just seems a little excessive, overly ornate, with several sentences that run over six lines long.

But enough on style; Perlemen’s distillations of the most prominent philosophers actually seem quite accurate, besides being overgeneralized. These are all familiar names that we, as university writing majors, have come to know very well. As Perelmen says, Socrates seems to also suggest, at certain points, that the realm of rhetoric is exclusive to philosophers, to those in the “high ground” of thought and not the average person. Perelmen ponders Socrates rhetoric, wherein the rhetor must always strive towards some sort of truth to make his argument legitimate and something more than simply “the effects of language, the charm of the word, and a resort to flattery” (154). Both Socrates and Plato seem somewhat idealistic in their definitions of rhetoric.

Then, in comes Descartes with his response: “The attempt to elaborate a philosophy wherein all these would be either self-evident or compellingly demonstrated leads to the elimination of all forms of argumentation and to the rejection of rhetoric as an instrument of philosophy.” Mic drop.

I’m not entirely sure when Perelmen’s own opinion of rhetoric begins and the famous philosophers’ ends. But, honestly, I am so tired that most of this sounds like gibberish to me…

For example, this is one sentence: “Having noted the theological background of the conception of science, both with Bacon and wish Descartes, and having underscored the paradoxical and hardly admissible aspect of the Cartesian imagination, which would subject all opinions to the same criterion of self-evidence as mathematical theses, we should point out that even Descartes had to trust opinions for his provisional morality.” Sixty words in one sentence.

The same idea could have been expressed in much simpler terms: “Considering science’s roots in theology and the perspectives of Bacon and Descartes, all opinions must be subjected to the scientific theory.” Done, in a third of the words, without much significance lost. The last clause is somewhat arbitrary, since provisional morality is always based upon speculation; Descartes makes it clear throughout his Meditations that he cannot truly be sure about his opinions on morality, which lies outside of the realm he determined to be his absolute truths.

I do, despite his wordiness, appreciate the author’s distinction between mathematical “truth” and self-evident “truth,” although we have encountered the same opinion numerous times in this class, written much more eloquently.

But then, he quickly loses me again in a tangle of musings about the reconciliation of different, seemingly opposing paradigms. As a grand finale, Perlemen provides us with perhaps the worst definition of rhetoric that has ever been written: "the once and future queen of the human sciences."

Let's just say this one wasn't as moving as some of the other readings for me.