Pathos

5 Key excerpts on "Pathos"

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  eBook - ePub

  Rhetorical Public Speaking

  Social Influence in the Digital Age

  • Nathan Crick(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9     Pathos

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003316787-9

  In the Greek rhetorical tradition, Pathos refers to the use of emotional appeals to persuade an audience. Whereas ethos persuades by the character and logos persuades by reasoning, Pathos persuades by producing an emotional response in an audience that makes it favorable to one thing and/or unfavorable to another. The essence of Pathos is vivid description, not logical exposition. Whenever one gives formal reasons, detailed accounts, or logical analysis, one is using logos; the appeal of logos is to one’s cognitive belief structure based in propositions and facts. Pathos, by contrast, gives “life” to those beliefs. For example, a speaker can use logos to give a formal cost–benefit analysis for why addressing poverty helps people’s lives at the same time that it improves the economy and cuts crime. But one can also describe the squalor of living in a slum, the diseases that beset a hungry child, the lost potential of dying addicts, and the success story of a person who discovered their inner potential through the help of a teacher. Pathos thus incorporates elements of narrative and style to sculpt powerful images that live in people’s imaginations and make them feel ideas that logic can only explain. The best rhetoric, then, will always balance the use of Pathos with a more reasonable logical analysis. There is nothing wrong with exaggeration when it is done for the purposes of getting an audience engaged and enthusiastic about an issue that it may have otherwise thought important. One must simply supplement this enthusiasm with the kind of practical judgment that can be produced only through long and careful forethought and analysis.1

  Fortunately, a good narrative can easily combine reason and emotion in such a way to reconcile the tension between logos and Pathos. As many of the examples used in this book have shown, public speakers rarely restrict themselves to making explicit claims that are grounded in empirical data and warranted by logical reasoning. More often than not, their claims are embedded in narrative stories. These stories may be personal, moral, historical, fictional, or demonstrative, but as stories

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  Preaching the New Testament as Rhetoric

  The Promise of Rhetorical Criticism for Expository Preaching

  • MacBride(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wipf and Stock

    (Publisher)

  Pathos —one which stirs the emotions, rather than merely dissecting the text as if it were another logos argument. One can almost imagine the dry, expository stereotype expounding Gal 4:15 (“What has happened to all your joy? I can testify that, if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me”): “Paul describes their former joy in an obviously hyperbolic fashion. The Greek word for “torn out” is particularly illuminating, as it’s the same word used in Mark’s gospel for the friends of the paralytic digging through the roof . . . ”

  Post-Enlightenment preaching, with its focus on rational, deductive argument (i.e., a bias toward logos ), has often lost contact with the other two modes of proof. It is our intention here to argue for the recovery of sermons which reflect the type of appeal being made in the text. To do this, we must turn to the question of what Pathos was intended to achieve, both in an ancient speech and in Paul’s epistles.

  The function of Pathos

  The function of Pathos in rhetoric was not without controversy, most fundamentally over whether the emotions should have a role in persuasion. Plato, in his earlier works, saw emotions as “an inferior, unwanted feature of discourse” because of their lack of rationality. 596 Later, he came to concede (reluctantly) that they did contribute to persuasion, but argued that appeals to the emotions should be in service of persuading audiences of what is just , rather than to manipulate audiences to the speaker’s own ends. 597 This contrasted with his view of Gorgias’ approach to rhetoric, which was simply to persuade irrespective of justice.598 In other words, if emotional appeal had any place in rhetoric then it should be harnessed for good.

  Aristotle seems to have had a more positive take on Plato’s view.599 Although he thought that prior handbooks had focused too much on “the arousing of prejudice, compassion, anger, and similar emotions” rather than dealing with rational proof,600 he still thought Pathos an important aspect of proof, despite its misuse.601 His reasoning was that the emotions influence the judgment of the audience:

  For the judgements we deliver are not the same when we are influenced by joy or sorrow, love or hate.602

  The emotions are all those affections which cause men to change their opinion in regard to their judgements . . . [such as] anger, pity fear, and all similar emotions and their contraries.603

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  The Realms of Rhetoric

  The Prospects for Rhetoric Education

  • Joseph Petraglia, Deepika Bahri, Joseph Petraglia, Deepika Bahri(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  One’s existence is communal because of the “his- torically informed and common ways that members of a community see, inter- pret, and become meaningfully involved with things and others, thereby sustaining a world of common sense and common practice” (448). Emotion is critical to praxis, “for it is by way of our emotions and the ‘moods’ that they sustain that we come to see, interpret, and involve ourselves with the world” (448). Moreover, “we must put our emotions to use to change how it is that we are seeing, interpreting, and involving ourselves with the world” (449). P. Christopher Smith (1998) argues that it is precisely these relationships, embedded in Pathos, that are the ground of rhetoric and thus the appropriate site for applying the “hermeneutic of original argument.” That is, the source of rhetoric is in the embodied interactions of those being rhetorical together: Originally, the minds or souls, . . . of the participants in the logos, the argument, were not disconnected from the lived, bodily experience of what they were hearing and undergoing, but were, like those dancing to the music they hear, rooted in that bodily experience. From this it follows that originally, the logos, or the sequential reasoning of what was said vocally, was inseparable from the bodily Pathos or feelings which it simultaneously communicated and in which it was set. (4–5) Pathos often is explained purely in terms of being a mode of proof that relies on appeals to the emotions. This is true, but incomplete. Emotional appeals work, because they invoke affective relationships that exist between individuals being rhetorical with each other. The Heideggerian explanation in particular features emotions as grounded in and a condition of people’s rela- tionships with each other. So to the extent that Pathos works as a proof, that is because it is first a fundamental feature of people’s relationships themselves.

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  Medical Understandings of Emotions in Antiquity

  Theory, Practice, Suffering. Ancient Emotions III

  • George Kazantzidis, Dimos Spatharas(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  To the widely differing connotations borne by modern European ‘passion’ words, briefly indicated above (alongside which we should put those borne by the terms ‘passive’ and ‘passivity’) we should add those of the Greek derivatives ‘pathetic’ and ‘pathology’ — and of course of the English word given by the transliterated form ‘Pathos’ itself. The Greek term is notoriously plural in translation, too. To ‘passion’ we may add as possibilities ‘affection’, ‘affect’, ‘suffering’, ‘experience’, ‘ailment’, ‘disease’ 1 — and, of course, ‘emotion’. There is a growing body of recent work on the emotions in the ancient world, which, however, has tended either to consider the methodology with which one should approach the study of the emotions or to explore individual particular emotions (or both), rather than to investigate the core conception of Pathos itself. 2 Relatedly, there has been (with some exceptions) little discussion of the issue of translation just mentioned: much recent work does not question, or at least does not find seriously problematic, the equation — which, as I shall argue, is fundamentally distortive — of the Greek Pathos with the modern English term ‘emotion’. 3 So, what is a Pathos, and a Pathos of the soul (psuchê) in particular? And what is it, especially, at the points where philosophical analysis interacts with medical understandings? Quite a lot has been written about the pathê psuchês, both in Galen and in the Hellenistic philosophical background that precedes and coexists with Galen, especially in relation to Stoic ethics and theory of action, as well as to the discourse of the ‘therapy of the soul’, or cure of the passions or affections. This chapter will also consider both Galen and that philosophical background, but will aim to do two things less often attempted, but of considerable interest for the history and development

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  Teaching Arguments

  Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response

  • Jennifer Fletcher(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 ). With Pathos, the focus is on the audience’s state of mind.

  A good step toward helping students conduct a finer-grained analyses of Pathos is to brainstorm a list of emotions as a class. This activity can also help build academic vocabulary while alerting students to the subtle connotation differences between related words. We start with the simple—happy, sad, scared, angry—and work toward nuance. After generating our list, students classify the emotions through a List, Group, Label activity.

  Classroom Activity: Pathos List, Group, Label

  If you’ve used List, Group, Label before (Taba 1967 ), you know it’s a great way to help students make connections among ideas or terms. I like to use this sorting exercise as a prereading activity or to help students organize review material for tests. Here are my directions for a Pathos List, Group, Label.

  Directions to Students: Below is a list of human emotions writers may appeal to when using Pathos to persuade their audience. You may work on your own or with others to organize related emotions into categories that make sense to you. Then give each category a label that describes its contents. Avoid overly general labels (e.g., “positive emotions” or “negative emotions”).

  outrage	pity	amusement	dejection
  rage	envy	confidence	despair
  guilt	shame	resolution	pain
  wrath	joy	satisfaction	irritation
  indignation	excitement	hilarity	hostility
  fury	bitterness	contentment	annoyance
  desire	agony	bliss	resentment
  discontent	alarm	fascination	distrust
  depression	insecurity	anxiety	determination
  distress	shock	doubt	perplexity
  regret	terror	suspicion	tranquility
  dismay	dread	curiosity	enthusiasm
  cowardice	grief	bravery	serenity
  apprehension	worry	confusion	oppression

  Students already know from their work with literature how challenging it can be to identify and describe the emotional vibe of a text—what in literary analysis we often talk about as the tone or the mood. Completing the Pathos List, Group, Label helps students grow beyond a vague understanding of this appeal. When my students say that a writer is using Pathos, I always ask, What kind

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