Language and rhetoric
How words persuade, reveal and deceive.
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The Greeks invented rhetoric and were immediately suspicious of it. Thucydides fills his history with speeches, some of them the best political prose ever written, and lets the reader see how each one worked on its audience. Plato’s Gorgias asks whether a skill at persuasion that does not care about truth is worth having, and answers no. Aristophanes’s Clouds shows the school where young men learn to win any argument, and Athens laughed, and later killed the man the play had mocked.
Aristotle took the subject seriously enough to write two treatises, on rhetoric and on poetry, and the Organon, his logic, is the attempt to separate the arguments that are valid from the ones that only sound so. Augustine, a professor of rhetoric before his conversion, wrote On Christian Doctrine to ask whether a preacher may use the tricks he had been paid to teach.
The moderns worry about language from the inside. Locke has a whole book on the abuse of words. Berkeley says most philosophical problems are language gone wrong. Swift’s Houyhnhnms have no word for lying and cannot understand what one is for. The theme comes to a point in the twentieth century, in Orwell’s Newspeak and in the philosophers who decided that the limits of language are the limits of the world.
