Title: General Semantics and Public Speaking: Perspectives on Rhetoric Comparing Aristotle, Hitler, and Korzybski
Abstract: THERE ARE MANY WAYS of looking at human behavior. As a result we may have psychologies, rather than psychology. The same is true of geometry. Euclid's way of looking at the patterns and forms of measurement is but one along with the geometries of Lobatchevsky and Riemann. Similarly, there are many philosophies. One has merely to mention the names of Plato, Leibniz, Dewey, and Croce. In this paper I shall be urging that rhetoric or the art of public speaking is not to be evaluated from one point of view only, but from many. In doing that I shall try to show simultaneously where and how general semantics contributes one other way of looking at the purposes and functions of speechmaking. In the attempt to describe what it is that students of public speaking and general semantics are trying to do, using the method of contrast, I shall focus on three orientations or perspectives of rhetoric as they appear in three books: Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, Aristotle's Rhetoric, and Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity. I take the third book as the most complete statement of general semantics and its relation to rhetoric. Let me begin with Adolf Hitler. There is no special chapter on public speaking in Mein Kampf but in the sections on in the Reynal and Hitchcock edition there is a host of specific, rule-of-thumb injunctions for the speaker which grow out of Hitler's assumption that in a world of weak men the role of the leader is the basis of politics and all human affairs. The major tenets of Hitler's art of public speaking might be summarized this way: That you must always exaggerate your claims, even if fantastically; that you must never concede the slightest justice to your opponent's cause, else men will begin to doubt yours; that your platform, once formulated, must remain fixed; that you must hammer away always at a single idea; that the continued iteration of it will finally induce belief; that there is nothing so likely to be believed in the end as the daring and the unimaginable. (1) But if these are Hitler's strategies, what is his over-all view of their use? What is this art to be used for? He has been quite explicit and I quote him [Hitler] directly. Propaganda's task is ... not to evaluate the various rights, but far more to stress exclusively the one that is to be represented by it. It has not to search into truth as far as this is favorable to others, in order to present it then to the masses with doctrinary honesty, but it has rather to see its own truth uninterruptedly. (2) The more modest, then, its scientific ballast is, and the more it exclusively considers the feelings of the masses, the more striking will be its success. This, however, is the best proof whether a particular piece of propaganda is right or wrong, and not the successful satisfaction of a few scholars or 'aesthetic' languishing monkeys. (3) His Minister of Enlightenment, Herr Goebbels, has perhaps best summed up the position in these words: Propaganda should not be in the least respectable; nor should it be mild or humble; it should be successful. (4) There is no point here in telling you what this attitude towards rhetoric has accomplished; there is relevance only in an attempt to characterize it. This is the Rhetoric of Power. We have here the bald statement of one who thinks of public speaking in terms of those tactics, strategies, maneuvers which will get the user what he wants. It is the utterly practical attempt to organize whatever means exist to mobilize the 'minds' of the audience. Mein Kampf can thus be conceived as a ready reference for those conscious ways of making the speaker's position more efficient, (5) of those modes of approach which will command acceptance for one's own doctrine. This is the Rhetoric of Power in which only the end-result is of importance. …
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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