Nathaniel A. Rivers. "I Told U So! Classical and C’I Told U So! Classical and Contemporary Ethos and the Stabilization of Self." The Responsibilities of Rhetoric. Ed. Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2010.
Classical notions of ethos work (intentionally or not) to stabilize a specific notion of the self as singular, insulated and authentic. Ethos, in Aristotelian schemes, is a tool for revealing this stable self to an audience. I critique this construction of ethos in order to explore other ethical constructions that are more reflective of rhetorical notions or conceptions of “self.” Cognitive scientist Andy Clark’s notion of the “soft self” offers an opportunity to reconsider ethos as relatively stable and self-authored. Clark’s work gives voice to the “role of context, culture, environment, and technology in the constitution of individual human persons.” A notion of the self constituted through the “mingling” of various contextual and contingent elements specifically invokes the sophistry of Gorgias and the productive, shape-shifting rhetoric he enacts. Refiguring ethos in this, we find rhetoric responsible not just for the transmission of selves but for their very constitution.
