Rhetorical man

The Duck asked me to write something about how and why people use figures of speech without thinking about them. Of course, most people use figures of speech without knowing anything about rhetoric, and in fact rhetoric itself came about as a codification of what good speakers already did without studying rhetoric.

This touches on a subject of which I am woefully ignorant, namely—but let me unpack it slowly. Language itself is a thing of wonder. It stands at the interface between man’s immaterial and material sides as an artificial specification on the side of the imagination. Man naturally knows the world first through his senses, which inform his interior powers of imagination and memory, which in turn supply material to the powerful light of his immaterial intellect. At the point where the intellect gazes into the phantasm, where immaterial and material must work together, language intervenes as an instrument whereby reason can order the imagination and the imagination can better present itself to reason. Children who learn language undergo a mental revolution; reasoning and art and everything else we think of as special to man comes with language, precisely because language acts at the joint, so to speak, between what is unique to man and what he shares with the animals.

The written word normally signifies a spoken word, but even the spoken word is first the imagined word. Even when we are not speaking to others we often speak to ourselves, and even when we are not “hearing” words inside our heads our language is nonetheless organizing our thoughts. Deaf people can have true language without speech, because the word is in the imagination before it is in speech. But the imagined word itself is first the word understood—the intellectual word. Not only are concepts associated with particular signs, but our way of thinking about a thing then because the way of signifying of the sign; for example, our way of thinking about motion becomes the way of signifying of the verb, and our way of thinking about a substance becomes the way of signifying of a noun. Similarly, and as a result, logical relationships between our thoughts become grammatical relationships between our words, as when a verb takes a noun as its direct object.

All this is remarkable enough. Our words become incarnate, so to speak; the immaterial clothes itself in the material, imposes meaning and order, and by so doing it transforms our material brains in a marvelous and documentable way. But something further happens at the same time.

Beyond what reason imposes, there seems to be already an analogy between material and immaterial things that language can seize onto. Many words that all have similar consonants create a sense of unity about a sentence, and so convey the impression of thoughts that hang together. The balance of parallel phrases persuades us that the thought behind them is beautifully structured. Ending an essay with the same words and phrases that began the essay creates an impression of completion even when no real completion has happened. Just as a straight line really is like “linear” thinking in some analogous way, rhetorically powerful speech really is like powerful thought—again, in some analogous way.

Because language itself occurs at the very interface between immaterial and immaterial, it was inevitable that this analogous relationship between the two would come out in language. Without reflection, grammatical man became rhetorical man—or rather, the two came into being simultaneously as linguistic man—or rather, man came to be man.

That at least is my own reflection on what happens all the time all around us. But as I say, this is a realm of marvels even for the true philosopher, much less for an ignoramus like the present author.