Post-structural Purpose

John Duffy’s “The Good Writer: Virtue Ethics and the Teaching of Writing” reached my eyes and brain with eerily perfect timing, and, as a result, I have a lot to say about it.  But let me start off by saying: I loved this essay!  I feel like it’s both necessary and timely in light of Trump’s election (alongside America’s polarized, divisive political and ideological climates) and the fact that I will be a teacher of composition and argumentation at CSUN this fall.  Moreover, Duffy’s essay connected so many disparate rhetorical “dots” for me; it’s almost as if the beginning of the semester’s discussions (on Aristotle, in particular) have folded back onto themselves at the semester’s end.

            Duffy, at several points in his essay, very rightly cites the fact that the study of ethics (and the more loaded terms “virtue” and “vice”) has all but disappeared from the rhetorical conversation and study.  Religious issues aside, teachers very rightly do not wish to make their students feel indoctrinated or brainwashed into the teacher’s system of beliefs.  Duffy’s answer—rhetorically speaking—involves new conceptualizations of argument as more than “winning and losing, authority and control” (10).  Furthermore (and this was perhaps my favorite part of the essay), Duffy adds:

                        …when we teach students to include counterarguments in their papers, considering seriously opinions, facts, or values that contradict their own, we are teaching, potentially, the most radical and transformative behavior of all: we are asking students to inhabit, at least for a while, the perspective of The Other and to open themselves to the doubts and contradictions that attach to any worthwhile question.  In teaching counterarguments, we are teaching the rhetorical virtues of open-mindedness and intellectual generosity. (10)

Sadly, “open-mindedness and intellectual generosity” are seemingly debatable virtues in the year 2017, when even the President of the United States appears incapable of accepting a modicum of counterargument or counter-anything.  However, teachers exist in a privileged position of (grade-based) power that can be used for good or ill, and, clichés be damned, teachers can and should be the change they want to see in the world.  Or, to actually quote Ghandi, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html).

            Ghandi, MLK, and Aristotle share a common theme of nonviolence, but only the first two receive much attention as such.  Aristotle, however, pioneered the nonviolent form of confronting (and persuading) The Other, and we now call this (often condescendingly) rhetoric.  Furthermore, not since studying Aristotle’s old texts have I seen any substantive discourse on the place of ethics (virtues vs. vices) in the study of rhetoric, and I’ve certainly not seen any commentary on the nature of happiness and its place in argumentation.  Duffy ends the drought:

For Aristotle, the supreme good, the summum bonum, the end to which all other ends contribute, is what he calls eudaimonia, typically translated as “happiness,” “well being,” or “flourishing,” though a better rendering might be Hursthouse’s idea of eudaimonia as “the sort of happiness worth having,” by which she means the happiness that comes from a life of purpose. […] Aristotle’s ethics in this sense are teleological, meaning they assume there is a purpose, or telos, for all things, living and nonliving. […] Human beings, too, have a purpose, and that “distinctly human” activity, that which separates us from knives, plants, and horses, is rationality, the ability of humans to exercise reason. (5-6)

I can think of no better intellectual approach to rhetoric and, indeed, life—everything is an argument, after all.  And in an age of instant-everything, atheism, and existential ennui, I believe we would do well as a society to adopt a belief that there is a greater, unseen purpose behind reality as we know it.  This belief need not be religion-based; rather, postmodern/post-structural faith should simply acknowledge the fact that each individual human—in and of theirself (intentionally gender neutral)—is limited to one (short) time and place in human history, but is capable of transcending those limits through a space-time ripple effect that begins with one’s self.