So we go from Socrates' assertion that a rhetor must know the quality and content of each of his listeners' souls to "teenagers are horny and crazy, old people are bitter, and people in the middle are just right, like the middle bear's stuff in Goldilocks". That seems like quite a change. I'm going to take a risk here and say that Aristotle realized it was a tad impractical to have to know the character of souls before you could speak to someone (or a group of someones). So he's done the hard work for his students and figured out what one needs to know before working out the best rhetorical strategies based on whether you are addressing the Athens chapter of the Young Democrats or the Veterans of the Peloponnesian War.
It seems ridiculous to make these generalizations (and insulting depending on how old you are!) but I think this categorizing and listing makes people feel like they have a chance of getting a handle on how to use this rhetoric thing. Like we talked about in Modern this week: people want a guide, a grid, a bulleted list of rules to follow. As scholars in training we have to follow certain rules too; until we get tenure we're constrained to write a certain way.
I've been trying to get my students to question this acceptance of rules using the "rules" of visual design as an example. Instead of questioning, though, they just want me to tell them what to do to get an A.
It seems like it may have been easier to teach students the arts of the Rhetoric and the arts of Oratory when the student knew there was a chance that they would need to be defending themselves in court someday and could die if they did a bad job. Is there some way that this could be re-instituted?
I wonder too how much students want to think about composing their arguments: it would certainly be easier to look up just th right form to put together in a great big book of argument, and you know what it looks like and sounds like for the audience. Could you imagine being Aristotle's student though, with this system? Not written down? EEEP!