Marketing Guru David Berkowitz (not that David Berkowitz – and can you imagine how tired he is of saying that) wrote a very nice review of Elements of Persuasion on his blog. Check out the rest of his site. If you are in marketing – and who in business isn’t – you’ll find it well worth your time.
David says that he originally thought we were stretching a metaphor by including a fifth element – Space – in our list of elements and he’s not sure why Earth relates to Hero. Couldn’t Water relate just as well?
Good points. In the hopes of drawing him into debate (we like what he has to say so we’d like him to say some of it here) we point out two things.
1) We didn’t add a fifth element. Pythagoras did – though he called it IDEA. Actually, since Empedocles (from whose writing our classic Greek elements come) was a student of Pythagoras, no one added the fifth element – it was Empedocles who forgot to include one of the five on his list.
2) We aren’t using the Greek Elements as metaphors – at least not only metaphors. They are for us – as they were for the pre Socratic Greek philosophers who originally used them – ideas in the Platonic sense of the term. In more modern terms they are psychological states. Because Story is not only what, but how we think, the elements allow us to link breakthroughs in cognitive psychology to practical story strategies and perceive those strategies holistically.
Clearly we haven’t explained this connection adequately, so in following posts we will talk more about this. Thanks David for bringing it up. We appreciate the feedback.
Thanks for the clarification, Richard. I would have done well to take better notes on the intro chapter, and I appreciate you continuing the discussion here.
Posted by: David Berkowitz | September 27, 2007 at 06:03 AM