The Art of Rhetoric · Part 3 · The three means of persuasion · B2–C1
Pathos: The Emotions of the Audience
Part 3 of The Art of Rhetoric: we do not judge in the same way when we are angry and when we are calm. Aristotle studied the emotions so that a speaker could move an audience honestly, as far as the facts deserve. Emotive language and register (neutral and emotive words, make someone feel, move someone to, stir up, calm down), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Making people feel. Sometimes that means tears, sometimes anger, sometimes calm.
It can be. In logic we called it the appeal to pity. Tonight we ask when emotion is honest.
Aristotle wrote that we do not give the same judgement when we are pleased and when we are pained, when we love and when we hate. So in the second book of the Rhetoric he studied the emotions one by one: anger and calm, friendship and enmity, fear and confidence, shame, kindness, pity, indignation, envy and emulation. For each, he asked three questions: what state of mind people are in, whom they feel it towards, and on what grounds.
He also criticised the handbook-writers of his day, who taught tricks for working on the judges’ feelings and said little about the argument. Making a judge angry or envious, he said, is like bending the ruler you are about to measure with. Honest pathos fits the facts: it helps the audience feel what the situation really deserves.
The historian Thucydides tells the story below. It happened in 427 BCE, during the war between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides admits that he wrote the speeches as he thought the speakers would have spoken, keeping as close as he could to the general sense of what was actually said. So we have his version, not their exact words.
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