Witness our culture in the throes of crisis.

No one understands how the French Revolution gave rise to the Killing Fields, the Soviet Gulag, the Cold War, the rise of American hegemony, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Mass Consumerism. We just wanted a just and equitable society; we wanted a world where anyone might feel at home.

What happened?

We can begin with how we are disposed to deal with the appearances. According to Thomas Farrell in his reading of Aristotle's logical works, there a many ways to understand the appearances. The first systematic form of inquiry is called the analytic method. The analytic approach seeks to connect subject and predicate, to show relationships of cause and effect, to answer the questions posed by four causes: formal, efficient, material, and final. The materials of this type of analysis are not subject to human choice and decision.

The second cognitive path is called dialectic. This approach deals with common opinions or, at least, accessible opinions held by many, most, or the most illustrious members of a community. Dialectic goes to work when something must be resolved at the highest levels of abstract thought: Justice is the rule of the strong vs. justice is recognition of the rights of the many. The method of dialectic, at least in the classical world, worked in terms of collection and division.

The third cognitive path, rhetoric, works by making sense of the appearances by expressing them as 'proposed themes and arguments, inviting decision, action, and judgment.' In so far as the world we experience is already ordered in some way it may present "curiosities for analysis" or "anomalies for synthesis"--that is, the work of analysis shows how something 'unique' is really another configuration of what is common, while that which is odd can be integrated into the whole-the work of dialectic. So what is the typical response of the rhetorician? Phenomena are taken in such a way that they can be considered as objects for choice and avoidance. In other words, when our own wishes are engaged enough to lead to action, and action is then formulated as a strategy that can be articulated through emotion, conviction and judgement, then you have someone doing rhetoric and not merely studying its conditions.

The power of Farrell's work, especially _Norms of Rhetorical Culture_(1993), is the suggestion that we might find a way to reclaim the proper forum for asking: how can we reconcile our lives with the horror we have witnessed?

MGGreer