Persuasion, Self-Persuasion and Rhetorical Discourse.

This article discusses self-persuasion as a phenomenon similar to interpersonal rhetorical discourse. Arguments to persuade refer to situations where both logical and psychological appeals are used, whereas in arguments to convince, logical appeals are chiefly used. The distinction may best be thought of as one between attitude-establishing and knowledge-establishing characteristics of the argument. The rhetoric of persuading involves genuine argument and risk, the commitment of the self to the full implications of a philosophical dialectic. The rhetoric of persuading reveals the existential self, the self which includes not only all that is ordinarily meant by integrity but also the self willing to set aside all ego defenses in order to gain awareness from a reading by another, the self that is manifested with every one of the significant choices of life. Author Maurice Natanson emphasizes the importance of the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic. He suggests that traditional rhetorical theory has ignored the link between dialectic and rhetoric, that by itself rhetoric is blind, for it has not truth but combined dialectic and rhetoric that constitute an instrument for reapproaching the multiple problems of politics, ethics, linguistics and literary criticism.