The Power of Words – Rhetoric and Reality

Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation). Last week, I shared an excerpt titled – ‘The Power of Words – Do We Use Language or Is Language Using Us’ from the book titled ‘The Argument Culture’ by Deborah Tannen. In this episode we drew attention to the fact that when we think we are using language, language is simultaneously using us and it invisibly molds our way of thinking. Now, SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation) to the ones paying heed, is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of your attention, because, ‘Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to’. Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour. This week I bring to your attention an excerpt titled – ‘The Power of Words – Rhetoric and Reality’ from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein. This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world. The Power of Words – Rhetoric and Reality Georgias of Leontini, was born shortly before 480 B.C.E. in Leontini, in what is now Sicily. Georgias placed into the Greek theatre of ideas some of the fundamental issues in philosophy, with which we still grapple today. His subject matter has an unusually modern ring. One of the Sophists special skills was rhetoric, the art of presenting an argument so as to convince the listener. Georgias invented a lecturing style that involved conducting his lectures in the form of a debate. He would take first one side, then the other, and then give a supporting speech for either side, emphasizing the arbitrary, cut-and-combine nature of language. Plato complained that Georgias’ speeches could make “small things seem large and large things seem small by some power of language and new things seem old fashioned and vice versa.” But this emphasis that Georgias and the other Sophists placed on rhetoric was not just related to swaying political opinion. It came from a realization that the relationship between speech and “truth” is far from simple. Speech is not just a matter of presenting the facts, since considerable reorganization of the “facts” is involved in the way they are selected and sequenced. It was this difference between rhetoric and reality that lead Plato to contrast rhetoric with philosophy and to condemn it. Georgias held that when we communicate, we never exchange the thing but only the word for it, which is always other than the thing itself. So, every word introduces falsification of the thing it refers to, and this means that one can never reproduce reality and that any claim to be able to do so is a deception. But since this is exactly what all words claim, then all words are deceptions. If this is so, then the person who communicates best deceives most. While in the modern world this thought has a faintly political ring to it, the ancient Greeks lived in days before television. Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link: https://humanjourney.us/development/the-axemakers-gift-james-burke-robert-ornstein Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s. Namaste!