Rhetoric and Emotion

## Citation

Kastely, James L. "Rhetoric and Emotion." *A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism*, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted, 2004, pp. 221-237.

## Summary

The place of emotion in rhetoric and rhetorical appeals:

* In *De Oratore*, Cicero's Crassus argues for the importance of emotion
* Philosophers like Kant who insist that action should be based on reason rather than emotion

Or a third alternative: "Arguing that any account of thought seeking to do justice to the complexity of the human mind needs to challenge the original dichotomy that analytically separated reason from emotion. In place of this dichotomy, reason is seen as developing out of a subject's emotions. This defense shifts the concern away from the usurpation of reason's authority by emotion to the way in which emotion can become a source of self-knowledge for the subject and to the role of emotion in constituting subjects who can be citizens." (222)

Kastely brings in Gorgias's *Encomium to Helen* as an exemplar of rhetoric's ability to engage and transform emotion, but a power that is not restrained, since Gorgias is ultimately only concerned with effectiveness of argument.

Ciring Bernard Williams, Kastely notes "Our deepest convictions are not simply or primarily products of logical thought. Rather, tehy arise out of our having lived particular lives and are inescapably tied to those lives. Second, these principles do not feel as if they were deliberately adopted; instead, they feel as if they are givens for us. They are part of the fabric of our lives, and we feel their authority in our emotional responses." (223)

Emotion as the enactment of a person's attitude towards the world, just as much as who or what we choose to love/fear/envy/pity. "When seen as an integral component within the practice of judgment, emotion can come to be something other than the tyrannical force that Gorgias celebrates and that Kant sought to outlaw. **Instead, emotion can be a source of knowledge, enabling both discrimination and action, and any account of thought that hopes to be adequate to the complexity of the human mind needs to go beyond an understanding of reason as a transpersonal or formal mode of inference and incorporate emotion in an appropriate way**." (223)

-Logos/logic alone does not suffice for rhetoric, because rhetoric is interested in consequences and consequences are often emotional; an audience might be persuaded of the rightness of an argument but still not do anything - in this case, argument has failed as rhetoric. "For an argument to work rhetorically, it must engage an audience in such a way that they are moved to act (even if that action is only to make a certain judgment), and to do this, it must speak to their ethical and emotional investment in a particular situation." (224)

Ethos and pathos become essential, not just supplementary, modes of persuasion. Emotions "form part of a complex liminal mode of human response that plays a crucial role in how we understand and act in the world." \*224)

This ties into the audience-centered and situation-specific/attentive nature of rhetoric; it's looking not just to discover logical proofs, but to invent based on the ethical and emotional commitments of a given audience in a given situation - and in ways that enable judgment.

"If an audience is to credit the reasoning of a speech, it must trust the practical wisdom, the virtue, and the good will of the speaker. Speakers who appear deficient in any of these three qualities will rightly raise an audience's suspicion and undermine their own credibility." (225)

-ETHOS!

"To understand the operation of a particular emotion, Aristotle locates three concerns: 'for example, in speaking of anger, what is their *state of mind* when people are angry and against *whom* are they angry, and for what sort of *reasons*'. Thus, emotions are intentional, directed toward an object, and [...] the intentional object of an emotion is a person and not a proposition. The emotions that interest Aristotle's rhetor are those that structure the relations between people. So when an Aristotelian rhetoric explores the possible emotions within a situation, it is exploring how people should feel towards others in that situation." (225)

"An inartistic rhetoric seeks to impose a set of feelings on an audience, remaking the audience in the image desired by the rhetor for his or her own purposes. Through this imposition of emotion, the rhetor warps the audience, for the audience is no longer using the values to judge appearance nor assessing the appropriateness of their response; instead, they are moved by those emotions imposed by the rhetor. In substitution the rhetor's values and feelings for those of the audience, rhetoric's function of guiding audiences is lost. [...] In contrast, when an audience uses their emotions as one criterion with which to asses a speech, they assume the role of judge. An audience that takes on the role of judge becomes active and is not as easily subject to manipulation as it would be were it a mere passive spectator. And it is only by exercising the role of judge that an audience can perform its function of determining what it should do or think in a particular situation. The integrity of rhetoric as a practice requires an audience to become active and to internalize deliberatively the complex structure of reasoning that a rhetor has embodied in the speech." (226)

"Jonathan Lear argues that to interpret an emotion involves more than simply translating a figurative discourse into a conceptual discourse. Rather, the interpretation of an emotion is simultaneously the completion of its effort at expressing its idea. For Lear, one of the central purposes of psyhoanalysis is to guide analsands to a more complicated and hence healthier understanding of the drives that underlie and, to some degree, fuel neuroses. [...] Like an act of persuasion, an analytic interpretation must go beyond simply being right; it must become effective for the analysand, and that means that the interpretation must have emotional resonance for the analysand." (228)

The goal of persuasion: "To allow an audience to see the world differently." (229)

"Emotions are responses to the world that carry with them beliefs about the world and perceptions as to its present state. Anger, fear, joy, and the rest of the emotions enact attitudes provoked by the perceived nature of a particular situation. Thus, Lear labels them 'orientations,' and he claims 'emotions are, by their nature, attempts at rational orientation toward the world. Even an archaic expression of emotion is an archaic attempt at rationality.'" (230)

-It matters what feelings feel feelings - cf. Donna Haraway's *Staying with the Trouble*

"The impulse of an emotion toward rational expression also suggests two openings for rhetoric. First, an emotion's implied rationality creates a text that can be interpreted, and thus the emotion can become an index to a person's subjectivity. Second, since subjects cannot access this archaic reasoning through introspection, a different method of inquiry is needed. A method is needed that can offer the subject an interpretation that discloses the impulses at the base of key emotions. When rhetoric invents or discovers the *logos* appropriate to the *pathos* of a situation, it helps guide an audience to a decision by offering concepts that allow an audience to have a more fully organized idea of what their feelings sought to express. Through their interpretations, rhetors create conditions for conversations that can become a means to explore emotion." (231)

Love as key emotion in the formation of human subjectivity - Lear, via Freud - as the baby learns to differentiate self from not-self, the world is constituted by its ability to be lovable. Relationships define, constitute, sustain reality - cf. Socrates' myth in *Phaedrus*.

-Also compare with Sedgwick's reparative reading? Conferring plenitude, openness to hope and possibility - and, in turn, forgiveness a la Arendt?

"The possibility of growth implies the equal possibility of regression. For the individual to develop an increasingly individuated and autonomous subject, the world must offer the right mixture of support and frustration. It must, to use Lear's words, be a good enough world. It must be a world that offers and requires that one learn how to respond in an ongoing process of adjusgment to situations that are both independent of a subject's will but not totally indifferent to it. The world must permit individual subjects to recognize their places in it. Frustration can then become a stimulus to growth as subjects seek fuller explanations for why they feel as they do, which, in turn, allow them to understand better who they are." (234)

"When the world proves not supportive but hostile, and the individual subject lacks the encouragement through a healthy and reasonable frustration to grow, the subject can simply refuse to discriminate between a self and a powerful or threatening other. When this happens, the subject abandons the project of attempting to interpret or understand the world and seeks to merge with rather than differentiate from powerful authority." (234)

-This is where reparative reading comes into play - would Sedgwick take reparative reading to be an alternative to the merging?

"The rhetor's place is not to bring people together to form a unity; rather, the rhetor needs to speak or write in such a way that conditions are created in which the individual subjects, as they make their judgments, can constitute themselves as a unity as and hence constitute themselves as a community." (235)

-Again, not an imposition of order, but an enabling of the audience to create those conditions for themselves

"The responsibility of the audience is to decide. In their decision they invent their identity." (235)