Rhetoric & Rationalism

It’s common to think of rhetoric as a gloss on top of ’true’ thinking, mere packaging for the intellectual content of our ideas. From some of the Platonic dialogues it seems like rhetoric, (or sophistry, which Plato made into an insult) is a foil to rational thought, an alternative tradition which privileges aesthetic value - elegance of expression - over content. (I seem to remember hearing a podcast [probably this one] about how Deleuze and Guattari suggest that as a better criterion than Occam’s Razor for choosing a scientific explanation.)

In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman mentions this as a possible difference between the media of oral and written culture: when things are said, they must be constructed to be beautiful; when written, people care more about how much sense they make.

There may be a similar idea with mishna and gemara: could this be why the gemara so often reinterprets a pithy mishna to a clunky but more consistent reading?

And of course the underlying, mischievous idea that one is not necessarily better - they are just different forms of knowledge.