The overarching purpose of these blogs still eludes me. They seem to be an informal forum to hash out ideas and practice pathetic techniques, in the hope that they become both more and less...pathetic. But then we are graded on them making them immediately formal - a sort of polished hypothesis. I probably should just read the assignment description again.
As for the purpose of this specific entry, as I began with a frustrated digression, I will track my thoughts on the give-and-take between anger and calm upon the mortal mind.
Relying heavily on pathos, as well as on ethos or logos, can ruin an argument. Aristotle makes this point early in his Rhetoric that you need the correct combination of all three principles to be the most persuasive to your audience, and to inherently, find the truth. So I feel safe in saying putting too much reliance in one, shorts the others.
Anger and calm cannot fully exist in the same mind since "...the frame of mind that makes people calm, it is plainly the opposite to that which makes them angry..." (ch 3, ln ~1380b). So just like moderating ethos, pathos and logos, a rhetor must stray from sole/heavy dependence on one emotion. He suggests this later on in the passage:
"Hence Philocrates, being asked by someone, at a time when the public was angry with him, 'Why don't you defend yourself?' did right to reply, 'The time is not yet.' 'Why when is the time?' 'When I see someone else calumniated.'" (ln ~1380b, 10)
In the illustration, the public figure Philocrates refused to defend himself since his accusers were acting out of anger alone. He chose to wait to plead his case to them once they had redirected their anger and let a bit of calm in. He did this because Philocrates knew the mind of those judging him were tainted with fresh emotion and would react rashly and unjustly to his situation (whatever that may have been). It appears that, in the Aristotelian perspective and in my mind the correct one, decisions made in the initial flooding of one's mind by an extreme emotion are rash and hasty and do not qualify for his meaning of the use of pathos as a rhetorical tool. Use emotion - by all means - but use balanced emotion.
Philocrates knew in order to get a fair assessment from his peers he needed to let the initial emotion subside and give time for the calm to swim amongst the anger and dilute it to a more reasoned level. He needed to apply kairos to their emotional level in order to be able to present his actions/argument before the public in a reasoned manner, allowing for time and his words to supply a sense of calm to the public's anger.
I guess my general thought here is that the interplay between anger and calm described in Aristotle's third chapter is a sort of loose paradigm for guiding interaction between emotion in the mind of your audience. So it follows that the ethical responsibility of a rhetor to put his/her audience in the correct emotional state (combonation of anger and calm) when presenting an argument to them in order for them to arrive at a collectively good decision.
Some modern rhetors solve this problem by making the anger self-replicating: they give you something to look for in your own life that makes you angry again. This is part of the power of some feminist rhetoric about living with your captors: you can't look at your husband over and over and eventually just throw up your hands. You look at him over and over and you find fresh ways he chains you to the sink (or whatever).
ReplyDeleteThat's why I can't agree with you on using balanced rhetoric. Balanced rhetoric sustains itself in the long term better than pure jeremiad, but if you can get your audience to participate in making themselves angry, give them an emotional touchstone -- I wonder if viciousness and hyperbole don't work better. The Tea Party is sustaining itself much better than the feminist movement on this kind of self-feeding anger, but it's got a lot in common with the rhetorical strategies of the second wave. Every time a Tea Partier sees a Democrat or blue policy, I don't think there's a moment of pause before anger. They've learned to associate feelings of anger with a specific body of people rhetors want them to be angry at, NOT at what those people can do to them. The same with some parts of the feminist movement -- groups like Radicalesbians talked about the "woman-identified woman" and often advocated total abandonment of male society, up to and including living out in the woods and turning lesbian as a political statement. Men had eclipsed what they had actually done to these women and become an emotional touchstone: men were dangerous even in potential. This kind of rhetoric also works great as a distancing tactic, since if you think men or Democrats are all evil you aren't going to get to know one to check.
I think you hit on a really important point here that Aristotle doesn't directly mention: kairos. Although for each emotion he talks about the conditions which have to be met for the rhetor to arouse the certain emotion, I think in reality, much of the emotion that you'll want to rouse is going to be what is relevant in the time. An obvious example is 9/11: we'd have a natural reaction of fear, anger, and pity, enough to start a war that would, in the end, be pretty bad for our country. Taking advantage of the kairos of the situation would be the only way to arouse those emotions of the American people enough to go to war. If they were to try to get people to go to war with those same emotions and tried to use purely rhetoric, there's no doubt it would fail. I think Aristotle (might) say that the people inciting war at the time of 9/11 weren't being very ethical... if we look at the logical reasoning now, logos wasn't much of what we were paying attention to.
ReplyDeleteGood comments here. And Stewart, despite your frustrated digression, you have the hang of the blog!
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