- Weaver offers a rhetorical theory that features values, ethics, and culture as core concepts
- Socialist as an undergrad; went to Vanderbilt and associated with the Southern Agrarians, who opposed science, rationalism in seeking a return to the agrarian Old South.
- Cultures are defined by their attitudes toward experience
- The cultural center is the tyrannizing image, a kind of ideal goal
- Humans have three parts:
- body: base physical form, pleasure seeking, sensory driven
- mind: four modes of apprehension
- emotional/aesthetic
- ethical
- religious
- rational/cognitive
- ideas
- beliefs
- metaphysical dream
- soul: integrated capacity of the other parts
- Humans are symbol users
- Humans are free agents of choice
- Like Plato, believes in an absolute metaphysical truth
- Hence his dismissal of fact and focus on truth
- Language is the means to access the truth of the metaphysical dream through dialectic and rhetoric (Aristotelian structure)
- Positive terms correspond to physical objects
- Dialectical terms represent intangible essences
- Dialectic can discover logical truths, but they exist in a vacuum and do not connect to action. (No ought can be extracted from an is.)
- Trusting all to dialectic (like Socrates) leads to social withdrawal and thus subversion
- Rhetoric is the complement for dialectic to fix this problem
- Rhetoric is truth plus artful presentation
- Rhetoric thus is not value-neutral; it is right or wrong depending on its coherence with the good, true, ideal
- Rhetoric is not epistemic (truth-making); truth is discovered through other means and then communicated correctly or distorted
- Rhetoric manifests in:
- sources of argument hierarchy (frames through which the world is understood):
- Genus and definition (most ethical)
- Similitude
- Cause and effect
- Authority and testimony
- Rhetorical-historical
- grammatical categories (sentences, words, parts of speech)
- ultimate terms (god terms, devil terms, charismatic terms)
- Culture is eroding, mostly because of a decline of rhetoric
- its teaching is debased
- language has become relative
- rhetoric has become focused on utility rather than truth
- A revitalization of rhetoric is necessary to restore culture, because it is the vehicle of communication
- A corresponding rhetoric teacher who is largely responsible for students' fate is needed for such a revitalization.
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