A Jaynesian understanding of consciousness and its implications for rhetoric...

A Jaynesian understanding of consciousness and its implications for rhetoric also helps explain the deep distrust of rhetoric that emerges at the same time rhetoric itself does. From the first writings overtly discussing persuasion as a civic art, we also see attacks on rhetoric as a practice that disregards the truth, can make what is bad seem good, and has an uncanny power to enrapture an audience. One of the best examples of this sort of skepticism is in Plato's dialog The Menexenus, in which Socrates describes the effects of hearing a speech praising the virtues of Athens. Although he knows that much of what the speaker says is exaggeration and distortion, Socrates says he felt himself transported to another realm - an "out of body" experience that affects his very perception of the world around him. The usual understanding of this sort of allegation about rhetoric's spellbinding power over an audience is that it is simply a poetic description of the sensation that we all experience today: the ability of powerful words to move us in unexpected ways, ways that often go beyond the logical or didactic. But I suggest that if Jaynes is right about the time frame for the development of consciousness, such descriptions by rhetoric's critics may be less poetic than usually thought, and much closer to the actual experience of early audiences of the relatively new art of rhetoric. If full consciousness in Greece emerged only after the Homeric era, would we not expect that for several generations after its advent, the power of language would indeed seem mysterious, almost mystical? Wouldn't there continue to be a collective social memory of language as something that came from the gods? I suggest that the early apprehension about rhetoric's near magical powers are not simply metaphorical amplifications, but descriptions of how audiences, only lately emerging from a bicameral world, would have experienced hearing an orator with the ability to artfully use language to move them.

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