Aristotle argues that each type of rhetoric has its place in time. Deliberative is concerned with the future. Epideictic is concerned with how things are currently. And judicial is concerned with the past. This struck me as interesting because in Aristotle's mind, the judicial rhetoric is concerned with who did what and whether or not it was illegal.
The connection I made in my head was to Socrates, Plato, and those wily horses. Memory seems to still be bound up with morality. In other words, in Plato the goodness of a person's soul is determined by how much Truth they can remember seeing from their chariot.
In Aristotle, the goodness of a person is determined again by remembering, but this time it's remembering what happened at the crime scene (maybe I'm watching too much Law & Order).
Can I say that they both involve looking backward or at least remembering?
I also see connections to composition instruction later, shall we say 18th and 19th century, for all you modern rhetoric scholars out there, where the focus on writing was not about functionality or function literacy but about preserving or "remembering" the cultural values about how someone should act.
Therefore the questions that are taking shape for my paper are whether or not contemporary writing instruction (or rhetoric) is still intertwined with remembering values (current traditional anyone?) or if perhaps it has come to focus more on epideictic or deliberative rhetoric, in the simplest Aristotelian sense. Also, what are the consequences of this shift, if there is one?
Do we lose our morals if we forget our past?