The Rhetoric of “Yes We Can”
The Rhetoric of “Yes We Can”
Darío Villanueva outlines the history and significance of the rhetorical tradition and highlights the striking persistence of the power of the word in American politics. Even in our high-tech age, a three-word tagline -"Yes We Can"- carries devastating clout. The Greek sophists -the original masters of rhetoric, notorious for their appetite for influence rather than truth- would be both impressed by the abiding power of their art, and dismayed that, in the Gutenberg Galaxy, it has become a blunt instrument.
Centuries before our time, the Greeks considered the question of how to speak so as to sway the hearer's mind with the power of words. The first to examine the ways in which we relate to one another through language, the Greeks wrote detailed treatises laying bare the sinews of human communication, and their experience of language and the laws they inferred from it gave rise to Rhetoric, the art or science of the public speaker. The father of rhetoric was said to be Corax, who lived in the closing third of the fifth century BC in the Greek city state of Syracuse in Sicily; his disciple Thysias was credited with bringing his rhetorical discoveries to mainland Greece.
Once there, rhetoric was appropriated by the so-called "sophists." The history of the term is riven with self-contradiction. Etymologically, "sophist" means "bearer of truth," but its modern meaning is the exact opposite: a sophistry-the stock-in-trade of politicians-is a plausible but spurious argument in support of a falsehood.
True rhetoric, however ─Aristotle urges in the introduction to his Rhetoric─ is by no means sophistic. Discussing the uses of the discipline, Aristotle begins with the proclamation that rhetoric educates the common citizen and shapes his spirit, and is a useful way of advancing truth and justice, which in the natural course of things would "prevail over their opposites" if it were not because their advocates are sometimes
Darío Villanueva outlines the history and significance of the rhetorical tradition and highlights the striking persistence of the power of the word in American politics. Even in our high-tech age, a three-word tagline -"Yes We Can"- carries devastating clout. The Greek sophists -the original masters of rhetoric, notorious for their appetite for influence rather than truth- would be both impressed by the abiding power of their art, and dismayed that, in the Gutenberg Galaxy, it has become a blunt instrument.
Centuries before our time, the Greeks considered the question of how to speak so as to sway the hearer's mind with the power of words. The first to examine the ways in which we relate to one another through language, the Greeks wrote detailed treatises laying bare the sinews of human communication, and their experience of language and the laws they inferred from it gave rise to Rhetoric, the art or science of the public speaker. The father of rhetoric was said to be Corax, who lived in the closing third of the fifth century BC in the Greek city state of Syracuse in Sicily; his disciple Thysias was credited with bringing his rhetorical discoveries to mainland Greece.
Once there, rhetoric was appropriated by the so-called "sophists." The history of the term is riven with self-contradiction. Etymologically, "sophist" means "bearer of truth," but its modern meaning is the exact opposite: a sophistry-the stock-in-trade of politicians-is a plausible but spurious argument in support of a falsehood.
True rhetoric, however ─Aristotle urges in the introduction to his Rhetoric─ is by no means sophistic. Discussing the uses of the discipline, Aristotle begins with the proclamation that rhetoric educates the common citizen and shapes his spirit, and is a useful way of advancing truth and justice, which in the natural course of things would "prevail over their opposites" if it were not because their advocates are sometimes