The Berlin Paper

Here, I will discuss briefly “The New Rhetoric,” one of three major theories of pedagogy James Berlin discusses in his lengthy essay, “Contemporary Composition.”
The New Rhetoric, for me, was most interesting of the three methods Berlin discussed, not least because I mostly disagree with its major tenets, but also that, of all teaching methods I’ve been exposed to, it is perhaps the most frequently practiced. For the New Rhetoritician, Berlin says, truth is “dynamic and dialectical, the result of a process involving the interaction of opposing elements.” Unlike to Plato’s assumption that truth is embodied in natural “forms” which are meant to be discovered by an intricate method of philosophizing, the relation between these opposing elements are “created, not pre-existent and waiting to be discovered.” Because truth as such is undiscoverable through sense impressions – to do that, it needs to be organized and structured – truth is, in the context of communication, an element highly subjective and ungraspable, or suspicious, but through the interchange of messages from one person to another.
Before I attack this argument, it may be well if I stated, first, that I’ll make no attempt to misrepresent Berlin by connecting him with this view, though he seems to approve of it. I myself am not totally adverse to it. I agree, for instance, with their view that truth is in a constant state of flux, and that, being such an elusive substance, any resolution to discover a viable truth would no doubt rely on a communal effort. There are, however, different kinds of truths and different elements to those truths, each which appear to be appropriated uniquely to their relative contexts. The New Rhetoric’s is a perspective that allows for little in the interpretation of those truths’s that are most elementary yet elusive, which are the spiritual truths. I disagree with their view that communication is necessarily designed for the purpose of arriving at truth. Some forms are, and others are not. I believe that human beings apprehend a crucial truth through experience; racial integration, for instance, spread the bounds of the culture’s tolerance and, I think, civilized it to a great extent, all by the simple means of familiarity.