Speak Truth Plurally

On the heels of my previous post, I read an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education with Scott L. Newstok which led me to his 2016 essay in that publication, "How to Think Like Shakespeare." He urges many of the rigors of the Renaissance (precision, inventiveness, and empathy) as a template for present-day habits of the mind: communication, collaboration, and creativity.

In explaining the complete meaning of rhetoric he writes:

In the Renaissance, the rhetorical tradition encouraged such "play of the mind" through the practice of disputation. Students had to argue from multiple perspectives rather than dogmatically insist upon one biased position.
Once you are familiar with Shakespeare’s training in disputation, you can easily see how it would lead to the verbal give-and-take that constitutes the heart of drama. As Zadie Smith marvels: "Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing. ... In his plays he is woman, man, black, white, believer, heretic, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim. ... He understood what fierce, singular certainty creates — and what it destroys. In response, he made himself ... speak truth plurally." Now that’s the kind of critical thinking you should aspire to: speaking truth plurally.

I think that aligns pretty well with Chimamanda Adichie's avoiding the danger of only one story.

His reasoning for the value of rhetoric:

Antonio Gramsci described education in this way: "One has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts." You take it for granted that Olympic athletes and professional musicians must practice relentlessly to perfect their craft. Why should you expect the craft of thought to require anything less disciplined? Fierce attention to clear and precise writing is the essential tool for you to foster independent judgment. That is rhetoric.


Renaissance rhetoric achieved precision through a practice that might surprise you: imitation. Like "rhetoric," "imitation" sounds pejorative today: a fake, a knockoff, a mere copy. But Renaissance thinkers — aptly, looking back to the Roman Seneca, who himself looked back to the Greeks — compared the process of imitation to a bee’s gathering nectar from many flowers and then transforming it into honey. As Michel de Montaigne put it:
"The bees steal from this flower and that, but afterward turn their pilferings into honey, which is their own. ... So the pupil will transform and fuse together the passages that he borrows from others, to make of them something entirely his own; that is to say, his own judgment. His education, his labor, and his study have no other aim but to form this."