One of the most fascinating aspects of both Elder Bednar’s
speech and Socrates’ dialogue is the implementation of conceit in their argument.
Conceits are extended metaphors that pervade the entirety of the discourse.
They are powerful vehicles for achieving the end goal of all rhetoric – a call
to action.
Nevertheless, to understand the real value of the conceit, we
must understand what the speakers want the audience to do.
On the one hand, Elder
Bednar who wants to spread the gospel throughout the world. Therefore, he wants
each person in the audience to be more active in spreading the gospel. On the
other, Socrates, a proponent of techne,
wants his audience to understand the potency of techne in their own lives. Socrates tries to persuade people to
develop techne because of its
inherent value. To better illustrate the extent to which he wants to spread the
gospel, Elder Bednar integrates a conceit in his rhetoric of a flood that could
sweep the Earth with the gospel. This conceit helps address one of the biggest
concerns that Elder Bednar things (and rightly so) the audience has with
spreading the gospel – inconsequential efforts. However, this conceit helps
Elder Bednar prove that if everyone who heard that speech did a comfortable
amount of sharing on their social media accounts, we would see tremendous,
consequential results.
Socrates did essentially the same thing. Throughout his dialogue,
he compares evilness to ugliness. He does this to help create an aversion to
evil actions (poverty, disease, etc). Unfortunately, as averted from ugliness as the audience may be, it will
regardless befall everyone. This condition engenders a desire for a cure. The
cure, Socrates argues, is the arts or techne.
By helping the audience understand that the arts can cure the inevitable ugliness or evil in life, he fosters
within the audience a desire to develop a techne.
Thereby, he, and similarly Elder Bednar, realize the goal of rhetoric – call
to action.
The last sentence of your post really stood out to me. It was interesting to see that as much of "truth" and not rhetoric these two men praise, they both employ rhetoric heavily in their speeches, in addition to truth, fact, and knowledge.
ReplyDeleteI loved Elder Bednar's speech. I thought his approach and Socrates approach were different in a couple of areas.
ReplyDelete1. Socrates prefers to speak to the individual, not groups.
2. Socrates started at the most fundamental parts of someone's belief and built upward, Elder Bednar assumed that his audience already believed his words, or at least all shared the same fundamental values because he started somewhere in the middle.
It was interesting to me to notice some of the differences