Oct 6, 2018 04:05 AM
https://aeon.co/ideas/decorum-is-an-unfa...dical-core
EXCERPT: . . . But things look different if we return to the idea’s more radical origins, in the Greco-Roman world. For the ancients, decorum was not identical with politeness or good manners. It made room for disruptive or impassioned speech – indeed, the very kind of speech that today might be branded as lacking in decorum. Historically, decorum has been a much richer and more challenging idea than its modern usage would suggest.
Cicero gives us the best sense of decorum’s richness. He did more than anyone in ancient Rome to develop the concept, and it sits at the heart of his ethical and rhetorical theory. Cicero defined decorum not as an inflexible code of conduct, but as the fit between an action and a moment, or between words and a rhetorical situation. To speak decorously is to say precisely what the moment demands.
To be sure, Cicero acknowledges that decorum should be governed by sensus communis, ‘the sense of the community’. He associates the capacity to meet the moment with the virtue of moderation. But the moderation that matters here is a dynamic moderation, a constant process of attuning and adjusting. Decorum is the wisdom the orator uses ‘to adapt himself to occasions and persons’. Asking whether words have decorum is another way of asking what this circumstance and this audience call for. As a result, there is no decorum in the abstract, and scarcely any way to specify ahead of time which words will qualify. Acting with decorum is more like walking a tightrope than following an etiquette handbook.
So decorum is a game of high-stakes uncertainty. Cicero’s experience of both success and failure in the Forum taught him that remarkable speech and the pleasure we take in it tend to border on excess, ugliness and aversion. This might be a metaphor that’s striking without becoming absurd, or a long, periodic sentence that strains our attention. Alternatively, decorum might require actions that are breaches of propriety under normal circumstances, but are transmuted into appropriate ones under pressure.
One telling instance comes in Cicero’s most important work of rhetorical theory, the dialogue De Oratore or On the Orator. One of the characters, the senator Marcus Antonius, is describing his successful defence of an old general on trial for maladministration. ‘I called forward the grieving old man, dressed in mourning clothes,’ Antonius recalls. And then, prompted ‘by deep grief and passion … I ripped open his tunic and exposed his scars.’ What would ordinarily be an outrageous act of public exposure becomes, at the right moment, the moving crux of a successful defence....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/decorum-is-an-unfa...dical-core
EXCERPT: . . . But things look different if we return to the idea’s more radical origins, in the Greco-Roman world. For the ancients, decorum was not identical with politeness or good manners. It made room for disruptive or impassioned speech – indeed, the very kind of speech that today might be branded as lacking in decorum. Historically, decorum has been a much richer and more challenging idea than its modern usage would suggest.
Cicero gives us the best sense of decorum’s richness. He did more than anyone in ancient Rome to develop the concept, and it sits at the heart of his ethical and rhetorical theory. Cicero defined decorum not as an inflexible code of conduct, but as the fit between an action and a moment, or between words and a rhetorical situation. To speak decorously is to say precisely what the moment demands.
To be sure, Cicero acknowledges that decorum should be governed by sensus communis, ‘the sense of the community’. He associates the capacity to meet the moment with the virtue of moderation. But the moderation that matters here is a dynamic moderation, a constant process of attuning and adjusting. Decorum is the wisdom the orator uses ‘to adapt himself to occasions and persons’. Asking whether words have decorum is another way of asking what this circumstance and this audience call for. As a result, there is no decorum in the abstract, and scarcely any way to specify ahead of time which words will qualify. Acting with decorum is more like walking a tightrope than following an etiquette handbook.
So decorum is a game of high-stakes uncertainty. Cicero’s experience of both success and failure in the Forum taught him that remarkable speech and the pleasure we take in it tend to border on excess, ugliness and aversion. This might be a metaphor that’s striking without becoming absurd, or a long, periodic sentence that strains our attention. Alternatively, decorum might require actions that are breaches of propriety under normal circumstances, but are transmuted into appropriate ones under pressure.
One telling instance comes in Cicero’s most important work of rhetorical theory, the dialogue De Oratore or On the Orator. One of the characters, the senator Marcus Antonius, is describing his successful defence of an old general on trial for maladministration. ‘I called forward the grieving old man, dressed in mourning clothes,’ Antonius recalls. And then, prompted ‘by deep grief and passion … I ripped open his tunic and exposed his scars.’ What would ordinarily be an outrageous act of public exposure becomes, at the right moment, the moving crux of a successful defence....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/decorum-is-an-unfa...dical-core