![]() ![]() Unfortunately, the knowledge that initiates you into judging speech cannily can also be construed as lessons in lying-an uneasy fact to which I shall return.īut I have put the cart before the horse. To top it off, for your last seminar, not only of your freshman year but again of your senior year, you will read a dialogue by Plato, the Phaedrus, in which questions of love, rhetoric, and truth are intertwined. You will spend time in the language tutorial distinguishing and analyzing the rhetorical deceptions of language and forming judgments about them. ![]() Perhaps such a colorless lie is better than a blazingly scarlet one, perhaps it is not. To recognize this and similar lies you have to know some facts, and to judge their seriousness you have to have some appreciation of rhetoric.įor the bravado of rhetorical overstatement seems to be a species of the so-called white lie. That “old” tradition of dedicating this opening lecture to you, the freshmen-I made it up myself and it is only three years old. Although you may have allowed the talk of the world to persuade you that “being judgmental” is a social sin, judgments are what you are intended to render-on the words of others, though above all on your own.įor example, this lecture is entitled “Telling Lies.” “What,” you are intended to ask yourselves, “is she up to?” Is she going to start us off here by giving lessons in lying? Or, what is worse, by preaching honesty to us, good people all? If she is so preoccupied with telling lies, that’s perhaps what she does.Īnd in fact l have already engaged in false speech. Whether you are speaking or listening, you are intended to hear and to judge. ![]() The first lecture of the school year is, by an old tradition, dedicated to the freshmen among us. We should learn to cultivate the unwillingness to tolerate the unwitting, untold lie in the soul, and the wit and wisdom to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance into the telling lies that reveal truth. ![]()
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