Comparative Rhetoric and also Confucius

So I ended up reading both articles, because I'm a bit tired and read completely the wrong article first. So I'll try to type up a response to both articles in this post. 

First, the article I was actually supposed to read: "Reflecting Encounters: Illustrating Comparative Rhetoric."

I found the evolution of rhetoric throughout history fascinating, from the unabashed "it's not like western rhetoric so they don't have rhetoric" to "let's analyze it by comparing it to western rhetoric" to the current movement of actually trying to study foreign rhetorics within the contexts of their own cultures.

The problem with the early studies of rhetoric is that they were trying to analyze rhetoric as a separate phenomena from the culture, when this was completely the wrong way to go. To use an example of Chinese rhetoric, the other article I read clearly states that, "it is impossible to overstate the danger of examining a work written in ancient China, such as the Analects, as if it were a work independent of its complex historical, cultural, or political backgrounds" (Ding 144). Rhetoric, as pretty much any other aspect of a culture, is an evolution that is affected by many outside influences, and can't be analyzed just in itself.

It is hard to try to completely understand a foreign culture without the bias that is the experiences the viewer has with their own culture. The powerful influence that Western rhetoric still has today still hinders the understanding of foreign forms of rhetoric. We do not necessarily give ancient Chinese rhetoric the same attention that we give ancient Greek rhetoric -- during my searches for non-Western rhetoricians I did not find much information that demonstrated the varieties in Chinese rhetoric, such as the differences between Confucius and the different set of Chinese canons, as we could easily find the differences between Plato and Aristotle. While a massive improvement has seemed to take place from when we first started to seriously analyze non-traditional forms of rhetoric, the fairly recent speech from Malea Powell and even our own class discussions show that the deficiency model is still strong in comparative rhetoric. 

In particular, I found the argument against seeking a sort of "universal rhetoric" interesting. It's similar to a conversation we had in my Anthropology class about language, and what we could potentially lose if we should ever develop a universal language -- while we would all be able to communicate and understand each other better, we would also be unintentionally burying the many years of history and culture that helped build up that language, whether that language be literal language or rhetoric. The question becomes what is more important, the roots of our histories, or mass communication.

And since I have no answer for that, I shall take the opportunity to make an uncomfortable segeway into the next article, the one I didn't have to read but accidentally did anyway: "Confucious's Virtue-Centered Rhetoric: A Case Study of Mixed Research Methods in Comparative Rhetoric."

I found it fascinating that Confucious felt that rhetoric should be based barely on words at all, but action. I initially thought the silence canon in Egyptian rhetoric was strange, but this takes the cake -- a rhetoric system that is basically "actions speak louder than words." In a way it makes sense -- the way Confucius thought about rhetoric, rhetoric wasn't for settling small disputes or elections, but establishing a long term rule and trust over people. or in the author's words, "its goal is not just persuasion but willing accommodation, submission, and obedience" (Ding 151). Perhaps it was largely because of the chaotic political period that Confucius lived in, for his ideas seem to settle around that you only get one chance to earn the people's trust, there's no reelections. 

Because of Confucius's strict ideas of rhetoric belonging to men of virtue, it seems that it could take literally a lifetime to build up enough character before becoming a man of virtuous enough conduct to earn public trust. Many political systems would be quite different if those who wanted to earn public appointments had to live by that system!

Questions:

1. Do you think trying to establish a universal rhetoric could be problematic to cultural traditions? 

2. What would a debate in Confucius style of rhetoric look like?