UC Irvine

What is the soul, and what can a world do to it? Reading Aristotle through Heidegger, I argue that human being is rhetorical: a moved mover to whom every situation is disclosed, in an attunement, as a field of potentialities for actualization. Part I reconstructs the actualization chain, from perception through phantasia, doxa, and emotion to action, with phantasia at its temporal center, holding past, present, and future in one narrative. The chain spirals: each pass sediments the ground of the next, so that a history of engagement becomes the disposition from which a being next perceives. Rhetoric, then, is the working of an entity—a speaker, a river, a designed world—upon that field; it reshapes not what the soul does but what it perceives, takes-as-true, and desires. Part II develops Rhetorical-Ontological Diachronic-Recursive Analysis (RODRA), which traces that chain across repeated passes through a designed world and reads what each pass leaves behind. Two worlds bring their player to rhetorical incorporation by opposite routes. Gnomes & Goblins, miniaturizing the player within its forest, breaks the world and keeps the player; Red Dead Redemption 2, seizing the player's agency, breaks the player and keeps the world—ontological violence, worked by conscription. What separates them is not medium but route: the discrepancy a world opens between what it shows and what the player brings to it, and the work of phantasia that discrepancy demands. Part III turns to a virtual hospital built for biomedical-engineering students and deployed across three quarters to 241 of them, who reported presence and still preferred the plainer copy beside it—a world holding everything to see and nothing of worth to complete. A laboratory study then sets eye closure and gaze deviation beside a seven-item self-report across thirty-six film-viewing episodes; in nine, the eyes stayed steady while the retrospective verdict said bored: the shape of Heidegger's second form of boredom, in which one is bored with a situation while passing the time inside it, demonstrated rather than measured. A virtual world attunes without determining, and it does so by hacking the soul of those who step into it.