Rhetoric, Beauty, and the Sublime

Opening questions

Opening questions

• What is beauty?

Opening questions

• What is beauty?• Where is it?

Opening questions

• What is beauty?• Where is it?• What connects beauty and rhetoric?

Rhetoric and aesthetics

“…one of rhetoric’s functions is to celebrate the what there is an imagine what has yet to be” (Poulakos, 94)

Rhetoric and aesthetics

• Aesthetics is concerned with how perception affects feeling, mood, attitude (and from there, sometimes, action).

Rhetoric and aesthetics

• Aesthetics is concerned with how perception affects feeling, mood, attitude (and from there, sometimes, action).

• Rhetoricians can use aesthetic principles to shape experience

Rhetoric and aesthetics

• Aesthetics is concerned with how perception affects feeling, mood, attitude (and from there, sometimes, action).

• Rhetoricians can use aesthetic principles to shape experience

• And public discourse can, itself, be a kind of art

A tension between rhetoric and aesthetics

• According to some, art is concerned with producing aesthetic arrest: a moment of meditative stillness where you are simply in awe of the radiance of the thing

A tension between rhetoric and aesthetics

• According to some, art is concerned with producing aesthetic arrest: a moment of meditative stillness where you are simply in awe of the radiance of the thing

• Rhetoric, by contrast, is concerned not with stillness but with action.

Two aesthetic modes

Two aesthetic modes

Beauty:

Two aesthetic modes

Beauty: pleasure by one’s perception of the wholeness, harmony, and radiance of an encountered thing; beauty comes from fitness, proportion, grace

Two aesthetic modes

Beauty: pleasure by one’s perception of the wholeness, harmony, and radiance of an encountered thing; beauty comes from fitness, proportion, grace

Sublime: pleasure taken in the face of the overwhelming and threatening; that which cannot be contained.

Rhetoric and aesthetics

Rhetoric and aesthetics

• The authority of rhetoric “issues from the principle of topical preference” (Poulakos, p. 90)

Rhetoric and aesthetics

• The authority of rhetoric “issues from the principle of topical preference” (Poulakos, p. 90)

• “This is rhetoric at its most elemental: highlighting some things and placing other in the shade” (Ibid).

Rhetoric and aesthetics

• The authority of rhetoric “issues from the principle of topical preference” (Poulakos, p. 90)

• “This is rhetoric at its most elemental: highlighting some things and placing other in the shade” (Ibid).

• Rhetoric always says: “This is worthy of attention… it must be put ahead… it has priority” (92)

Rhetoric and aesthetics

Rhetoric and aesthetics

• Note how beauty “calls” and then compels the witness to speak

Rhetoric and aesthetics

• Note how beauty “calls” and then compels the witness to speak

• Rhetoric that acknowledges beauty “in the midst of it all” affirms the capacity to “articulate visions of perfection” and “to communicate subjective feeling as if they were objective truths”