Carolina QuotesNeuter discourse is a false idol.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 24.
- work
- The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)
- year
- 1953
- locator
- p. 24
Cite this record
“Neuter discourse is a false idol.” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E1479C725D. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e1479c725d
More from Richard M. Weaver
Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.
Today we have media … which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant. … It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of the organs of public information to leave no one deceived about the nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all. The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. … One of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civilization, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just this substitution of sensation for reflection.
The disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relationship here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the marketplace, and there is no surer way to fail than to dogmatize and moralize about things.