Rhetoric
Aristotle's c. 350-330 BC three-book treatise on persuasion — the founding text of Western rhetorical theory and a major source for ethical-political thought
Tradition: Classical Greek philosophy / rhetorical theory
Persuasion has three modes — through character (ethos), through emotion (pathos), and through reasoning (logos) — and the Rhetoric analyses each in systematic detail
Aristotle's Rhetoric is the founding text of Western rhetorical theory and one of his most influential works in non-philosophical fields. The three books treat: (1) the means of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos), the three rhetorical genres (deliberative, forensic, epideictic), and the role of the enthymeme as the rhetorical syllogism; (2) the emotions (anger, friendship, fear, shame, etc.) and how the speaker addresses them, including extensive ethical-psychological material that is one of Aristotle's major treatments of the passions; (3) style, arrangement, and the proper conduct of the speech. The work is the principal Greek source for systematic theory of persuasion and shaped the entire subsequent Western tradition of rhetoric, communication, and political-ethical analysis. Modern attention has particularly focused on the ethical-psychological material in Book 2 as a major component of Aristotle's moral psychology, complementary to the Nicomachean Ethics.
Author
Editions cited
- Rhetoric (composed c. 350-330 BC); modern critical edition W.D. Ross (Oxford Classical Texts, 1959); standard English W. Rhys Roberts in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton UP, 1984); recent English George A. Kennedy, Aristotle: On Rhetoric (Oxford UP, 1991, 2nd edn 2007)
School Embodiments
The Rhetoric's systematic-philosophical analysis of persuasion — the careful taxonomy of means, genres, emotions — is rationalist applied to a domain (political-public speech) that earlier philosophers (Plato) had treated as opposed to philosophy.
"Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic; both are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science." (Rhetoric, I.1)
Aristotle is realist about the actual practice of persuasion — what really moves audiences, what really persuades, what really constitutes ethos, pathos, and logos.
"Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible; second, by working on the emotions of the audience; third, by the speech itself, in so far as it proves or seems to prove." (Rhetoric, I.2)
The work is pragmatic-realist about its subject: persuasion is a real practical art with identifiable principles and identifiable failures, and these must be studied as they actually are.
"In every art, the better practitioner studies not only what should be the case but what is the case; rhetoric is no exception." (Rhetoric, I.2)
Aristotle inherits from Plato (Gorgias, Phaedrus) the question whether rhetoric is a real art or a knack — and gives a different answer (yes, it is a real art) while engaging Plato's framing.
"Plato treated rhetoric as a knack opposed to philosophy; I shall show it is a counterpart of dialectic, with its own proper structure." (Rhetoric, I.1, against the Gorgias)
Book 2's treatment of the emotions — anger, friendship, fear, pity, indignation — is one of the great early-modern philosophical accounts of the felt structure of emotional life.
"Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification toward what concerns oneself or toward what concerns one's friends." (Rhetoric, II.2)
The work draws heavily on observation of actual rhetorical practice in the Greek polis — courts, assemblies, ceremonial occasions — and develops its theory from the data.
"What I have here described is what actually moves Greek audiences in the actual settings where speech matters; the principles are abstracted from the practice, not imposed on it." (Rhetoric, methodological)
The hylomorphic framework — matter and form, the proper means to a given end — runs through the Rhetoric's account of speech as the proper form actualising the matter of persuasive content.
"Every speech has matter (the subject) and form (the means by which it is presented); both must be properly arranged for persuasion to result." (Rhetoric, I.3)
Internal Tensions
The Rhetoric's status as a work of philosophy versus a work of rhetorical training has been debated since antiquity. Modern interpretations (Rorty, Garver, Halliwell) have recovered the philosophical depth of the work — particularly the moral-psychological material — against earlier dismissive readings that treated it as a manual.
I. Time
The temporal unfolding of the speech — beginning, middle, end — and the temporal occasion in which it operates.
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II. Space
The space of political-rhetorical performance: the assembly, the law court, the ceremonial occasion.
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III. Matter
The embodied speaker, audience, and the material content of the speech; embodied emotion as the matter of pathos.
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IV. Observer
The audience whose conviction is the goal; the orator whose performance produces it; the philosophical theorist (Aristotle) who analyses the practice.
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V. Energy
The emotional and intellectual energies that the speech mobilises in the audience.
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VI. Information
The discrete content of arguments, the structured emotional appeals, the catalogue of rhetorical techniques.
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Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Rhetoric resolves each dilemma
48 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 9 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.