Rhetoric and education: an interpretative proposal of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22458/ie.v21i31.2695Keywords:
Rhetoric, Education in the antiquity, The Young, Epidicitic discourse, Ethos, MimesisAbstract
During the fourth and fifth centuries BC, in the city-state of Athens, a lively debate developed around the question: how to educate? The mechanisms inherited from education, Homeric poetry and gnomic wisdom, began to be replaced by systematic theories of education. However, one of its greatest theorists, Aristotle, bequeathed us an incomplete theory due to the disappearance of the Politics books that contained his theory of education. In this article it is proposed that part of this theory can be reconstructed by making an interpretation of Rhetoric that focuses on the greek problem of education. It will be argued in favor of the following hypothesis: On Rhetoric contains sketches of a theory of education. Three arguments will be developed: 1) On Rhetoric contains a theory of education, because the young ones, one of the characters analyzed by Aristotle, are not a political entity. This implies that Aristotle does not think rhetoric only as embedded in politics, but also as having an educational scope. 2)The epidictical discourse theorized in On Rhetoric has an educational character, since its purpose is to transform the behavior of the young according to the canons established by the Aristotelian theory of education. 3) Show that there is a parallelism between word and music, both key concepts of the fragmentary theory of education outlined in Politics and On Rhetoric. Thus, it is concluded that the On Rhetoric complements the educational theory proposed in Politics by Aristotle.
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