Reading Aristotle made me realize just how old I actually am. According to Aristotle, “The body is in its prime from the age of thirty to thirty five,” (153) so apparently my body is in its prime, but not for much longer. However, Aristotle also tells us that the prime of the mind is “age forty-nine” (153). I wish someone had told me about this before I applied to grad school in my thirties. I won’t even make it to retirement while my mind is in its prime!
All jokes aside, what interested me particularly about book two is the expansiveness of Aristotle’s subject matter. That is, Aristotle’s view of education involves all parts of what he would call the development of the student. Lectures on topics such as kindliness, shame, pity, and envy suggest to me that Aristotle viewed education as a holistic endeavor. So, if students are not developing the whole self, they are not developing.
In his introductions to the various chapters, Kennedy notes how Aristotle’s text does not directly address the use of that chapters content upon rhetoric itself. But, I would argue, that perhaps that lack of specificity gives us a more complex view of rhetoric. That is, we can read rhetoric as something perhaps more postmodern – rhetoric is something that acts. In that case, understanding the complexities of anger might be really important for us. That is, in producing texts (and maybe even bodies as texts) that go into the world and do something, we need to understand the way those bodies work.
Kennedy tells us, “chapters 2-11 taken as a whole, provide an introduction to psychology (at least to conventional psychology of Aristotle’s time) that could give the speaker better insight into human motivation…” (114). While Aristotle does, at certain times, read as fairly prescriptive (yes, I read about the 28 types of enthymemes), I do think that Aristotle has a pretty expansive view of the way that rhetoric works. The introduction of his psychology suggests that rhetoric is more than just tools students have. Rather, students using Aristotle’s rhetoric must understand the way the humans work together. They must be educated in the way that humans act in order to create language that acts (rhetoric).