Three Diverse Styles And Approaches Create More A Cross-talk Than A Dialogue

By Author: Solo Chen
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The logic of each communicative theory its representation of authority, dialogue, and act is echoed in its style and genre of writing. Confucian social and cultivated virtue depends on gentle, instructive dialogue, one respectful of the traditional enactments of authority. Daoist diversity thrives on riddle, irresolvable paradox, and ambiguity, implying that dialogue is ineffective in affecting the world. Finally, Legalism's belief in the fair force and legitimacy of law comes as reasoned essays. The cultural conditions involved in imagining the political other are embedded in style as well as in idea. The Analects, a set of layered dialogues in which Confucius leads his interlocutors, reflects Confucian concern with becoming and with Juicy Couture Necklaces close human relationships. Confucian communication prescribes an orderly relationship between teacher and student, the relationship of father and son.

The other in relationship is acknowledged, usually with respect, but always within defined cultural parameters. Like Plato's later dialogues, ...
... dialogues in the Analects work toward a truth; but they seek the truths of the earlier dynasties, not an unworldly truth, and they seek truthful action in the world, not simply contemplation. Certainly, the Analects bears no similarity to the skeptical dialogues of earlier Plato, committed to revealing and refuting cultural flaw. The ambiguity, irony, and poetic play of the Daodejing echoes its engagement with possibility and change; the demands of its style create a reader relationship that requires struggle, engagement, and diverse interpretation. The Daodejing's rhetorical authority lies in making the act of interpretation into an irresolvable inquiry, a quandary without certainty or truth, and in so doing, engaging other minds in the world of the Dao. The HanFeizi, a series of reason-based argumentative essays and the only one of these texts that deals explicitly with Juicy Couture Watch persuasion, warns ministers that rhetorical acts are dangerous, even though the essays themselves are fully engaged in persuading a ruler that the law is a means of escaping the negotiation of difference (Lyon, "Rhetorical"). In making law the sovereign and legitimate act of state, Han Fei's style approximates the logic of systemic law.

Three diverse styles and approaches create more a cross-talk than a dialogue. The differences in style, concepts, and cultural purpose, all of which have centuries of play-out, create alternative discursive regimes talking across each other, not engaged in understanding each other. The enmity of their reactions to one another shows that they have very different relationships to empathetic audiences than they do to resisting audiences. In writing about communication within authoritarian states, classical Chinese theorists describe processes different from goal-driven persuasion: the Analects advocates' open-ended remonstration and Han Fei describes persuasion as a dangerous precipice where ministers straddle the mean to avoid angering the ruler. Still, when moving from the political discourse of the ruler's court with face-to-face interactions and legally and culturally mandated hierarchies, the Chinese theorists engage in more vitriol. If court culture involves the Other-in-relationship and respectful engagement, that is not true for the Other-of-a-different-discursive-regime. When the Analects describes the law as creating people without "a sense of shame" and implies that Daoists are mad; when the Daodejing calls ritual "the thinnest veneer of doing one's best and making good on one's word" and argues that laws create lawlessness; and when Han Fei diminishes the Confucian values of wisdom and worth, and usurps and rewrites Daoist concepts such as wuwei, they all are engaging the Other, the Other-of-a-different-discursive-regime, the "hawkers of knowledge" who threaten their advocated form of life. Unlike their communication to the Other-in-relationship, the communication is adversarial, at cross-purposes. In written texts, they do not attempt to sway scholars of different views, but rather to diminish their projects. In early China, differences among scholars seem more hostile than those expressed in political communication.