Rhetoric

Summary

Aristotle's Rhetoric opens with a provocation: rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic, not a knack for flattery. Against the handbook writers of his day, who taught tricks for rousing juries and said nothing about argument, Aristotle insists that the art lies chiefly in proofs, above all the enthymeme, a syllogism drawn from probabilities and signs that a popular audience can follow. He defines rhetoric as the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion, and he likens it to medicine, whose task is not to guarantee a cure but to do everything the case allows. He also answers the charge that persuasion is dangerous: like strength, health and wealth, speech can be misused, yet a person who cannot defend himself with reason is more shamefully helpless than one who cannot defend himself with his limbs. Book I distinguishes three kinds of oratory by their audience and time: deliberative speech advises an assembly about the future and aims at the expedient; forensic speech accuses or defends before a court about the past and aims at the just; epideictic speech praises or blames before spectators in the present and aims at the noble. For each kind Aristotle gathers the common opinions a speaker must know: the parts of happiness and the goods men seek, the topics of public policy, the nature of virtue for praise, and the motives, pleasures and circumstances of wrongdoing for the courts, ending with the non-technical proofs such as laws, witnesses, contracts and oaths. Book II turns to the other two proofs the spoken word provides. The speaker's character persuades when he shows good sense, good moral character and goodwill. The hearer's emotions persuade because people judge differently when angry or calm, friendly or hostile, so Aristotle defines anger, calmness, friendship, enmity, fear, confidence, shame, kindness, pity, indignation, envy and emulation, each by its object, its grounds and the state of mind in which it arises. He then sketches the characters of youth, old age and the prime of life, and the effects of birth, wealth and power, before returning to argument: examples, maxims, the common topics of the possible and of degree, and twenty-eight lines of proof together with the fallacies that imitate them. Book III treats style and arrangement. Good style must be clear and appropriate, neither mean nor inflated; metaphor gives clearness, charm and distinction; rhythm, periodic sentences and liveliness bring an idea before the eyes. The work closes with the parts of a speech, reduced at bottom to two, statement and proof, with introduction and epilogue serving them.

Plot or Argument

• Book I.1-3: The counterpart of dialectic

  Aristotle criticizes earlier handbooks for neglecting argument, defines rhetoric as observing the available means of persuasion, names the three artistic proofs (character, emotion, argument), introduces the enthymeme and example, and divides oratory into deliberative, forensic and epideictic kinds by audience, time and end.

• Book I.4-8: What assemblies deliberate about

  The deliberative speaker must know finance, war and peace, defence, imports and legislation, and the ends people pursue: happiness and its parts (good birth, friends, wealth, health, beauty, honour, virtue), degrees of good and expedient, and the kinds of constitution.

• Book I.9: The materials of praise

  Epideictic oratory draws on the virtues (justice, courage, temperance, magnificence, magnanimity, liberality, gentleness, prudence, wisdom) and on amplification, which shows a deed to be noble by its circumstances.

• Book I.10-15: Wrongdoing and the courts

  Forensic oratory requires an account of why and against whom men do wrong, of pleasure as a motive, of written and unwritten law and equity, of degrees of injustice, and of the non-technical proofs: laws, witnesses, contracts, evidence under torture and oaths.

• Book II.1-11: The emotions of the judge

  Because decisions shift with feeling, the speaker must show good sense, virtue and goodwill and must understand anger and calm, friendship and enmity, fear and confidence, shame, kindness, pity, indignation, envy and emulation, each defined by its object, grounds and frame of mind.

• Book II.12-17: Ages and fortunes of the hearer

  Character sketches of the young (passionate, hopeful, trusting), the elderly (cautious, cynical, small-minded about money) and those in the prime of life, followed by the dispositions produced by good birth, wealth and power.

• Book II.18-26: Common topics and lines of proof

  Topics shared by all three kinds (the possible and impossible, past and future fact, greater and less), the use of examples, fables and maxims, twenty-eight lines of enthymematic proof, and nine sources of sham enthymemes, with notes on refutation.

• Book III.1-12: Style

  After a brief look at delivery, Aristotle requires clarity and propriety, discusses current and strange words, metaphor and simile, frigidity, correct Greek, dignity, rhythm, periodic structure, and the devices that make sayings lively by setting things before the eyes; written and spoken styles differ.

• Book III.13-19: Arrangement

  A speech needs only statement and proof, though custom adds introduction and epilogue; Aristotle treats exordium, the handling of prejudice, narration, proof, interrogation and the four tasks of the epilogue.

Characters

• The handbook writers, foil

  Earlier compilers of 'arts of rhetoric' whom Aristotle faults for teaching how to arouse prejudice and pity while saying nothing about enthymemes.

• Isocrates, contemporary orator and teacher

  Athenian rival educator whose speeches Aristotle cites repeatedly as examples of amplification, periodic style and argument.

• Gorgias, sophist cited for style

  Leontine orator whose poetic prose and far-fetched figures Aristotle treats as a cautionary example of frigidity.

• Theodectes, orator and tragedian

  Associate of Aristotle whose speeches and plays supply many illustrations of lines of proof in Book II.

• The judge (krites), the hearer

  Aristotle's term for anyone a speaker must persuade, whether juror, assemblyman or spectator; the emotions and characters of Book II are studied from the judge's side.

Lessons

• Argument is the body of persuasion

  Aristotle calls proof the substance of the art and everything else an accessory. The enthymeme reasons from what is usually true to a conclusion a crowd can follow in a few steps, which means a speaker who wants to move people must still give them reasons. Students can test their own speeches by stripping away tone and asking what the enthymeme actually is.

  • Why does Aristotle complain that the earlier handbooks said 'nothing about enthymemes'?
  • Take a recent advertisement or campaign slogan: what unstated premise does it rely on its audience to supply?
  • Is an argument from probability weaker than a demonstration, or simply suited to different questions?

• Why a good speaker must be able to argue the other side

  Aristotle says we must be able to persuade on opposite sides, not to make people believe what is wrong, but to see clearly what the facts are and to refute an unfair opponent. He adds that true and better things are by nature easier to prove. The art is morally neutral as a capacity yet ordered toward truth in its proper use.

  • How can practising both sides of a debate serve truth rather than relativism?
  • Do you agree that truth is 'practically always easier to prove'? When might it not be?
  • What safeguards does Aristotle place around a power that can be used unjustly?

• Character that is shown in the speech itself

  Ethos for Aristotle is produced by what the speaker says, not borrowed from reputation: hearers trust one who displays good sense, good moral character and goodwill. A speaker who lacks any one of the three may be competent yet untrustworthy, or honest yet foolish, or wise yet indifferent to his hearers. The point joins rhetoric to ethics and to the formation of real virtue.

  • Which of the three qualities is hardest to fake over a long acquaintance?
  • Why does Aristotle insist that ethos come from the speech rather than prior reputation?
  • How does Proverbs' description of a wise tongue compare with Aristotle's speaker of good sense and goodwill?

• Emotions are judgments that can be reasoned with

  Book II treats anger, fear, pity and envy not as blind forces but as responses to how a situation appears: anger answers a perceived unjustified slight, fear a mental picture of coming harm, pity undeserved misfortune. Because emotions rest on appearances, a speaker can rightly correct a false appearance or wrongly manufacture one, and a hearer can learn to ask whether a feeling fits the facts.

  • According to Aristotle's definition, what would have to change for an angry person to become calm?
  • Where does legitimate appeal to pity end and manipulation begin?
  • Do Aristotle's portraits of the young describe you fairly? Which line rings truest or least true?

• Clarity as a courtesy to the hearer

  Book III begins with the principle that speech failing to convey a plain meaning fails at its basic task. Aristotle prizes metaphor because it lets hearers grasp something new quickly, yet he mocks Gorgias's overreaching figures. Style is a matter of fitness to subject and audience, which makes it an exercise of judgment rather than ornament.

  • Find one metaphor in Book III's examples that works and one Aristotle calls frigid. What separates them?
  • Why does Aristotle say metaphor cannot be taught by one man to another?
  • Rewrite a paragraph of your own to be clearer without becoming flat.

Context

Rhetoric mattered enormously in fourth-century Athens, where citizens argued their own cases before juries of hundreds and policy was decided by speeches in the Assembly. Professional speechwriters and teachers such as Isocrates flourished, and handbooks of rhetorical technique circulated. Plato's Gorgias had attacked rhetoric as a knack of flattery aiming at pleasure rather than good, while his Phaedrus imagined a true art grounded in knowledge of souls. Aristotle's treatise takes up that challenge: it treats persuasion as a real art with a rational core, tied to dialectic, ethics and politics.

Composition

Ancient tradition reports that Aristotle taught rhetoric while still in the Academy, partly in rivalry with Isocrates, and lists an early dialogue on rhetoric, the Gryllus, now lost. The surviving treatise appears to contain layers written over many years, probably begun in the Academy period and revised in the Lyceum after 335; the dating is uncertain. Book III, on style and arrangement, may originally have circulated as a separate work. Like Aristotle's other treatises, it reached later readers through the edition of his school writings associated with Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BC.

Reception

Cicero and Quintilian drew on Aristotelian rhetoric, though the Rhetoric itself was less read in antiquity than later Latin handbooks. In the Arabic tradition it was grouped with the logical works, and Averroes commented on it. Latin translations, including William of Moerbeke's in the thirteenth century, brought it into scholastic study, often alongside ethics and politics. Renaissance humanists printed and translated it widely, and modern rhetorical study, including the vocabulary of ethos, pathos and logos used in classical schools, rests on it.

Comparisons

• Gorgias

  Socrates in the Gorgias calls rhetoric a form of flattery comparable to cookery; Aristotle replies by making the enthymeme the core of the art and comparing rhetoric instead to medicine, which does what the case allows.

• Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII

  The Phaedrus demands that a true orator know the kinds of soul and match speech to each; Book II's catalogue of emotions and ages of life reads like Aristotle's attempt to supply that knowledge.

• Poetics

  The Poetics sends the reader to the Rhetoric for thought (dianoia), and Rhetoric III returns the favour on diction and metaphor; together they show Aristotle separating persuasion from imitation while sharing an analysis of pity and fear.

• The Nicomachean Ethics

  The virtues listed for praise in Rhetoric I.9 and the definitions of emotions in Book II overlap the Ethics, but the Rhetoric works from common opinion about the virtues rather than the stricter analysis of the Ethics.

• Pericles' Funeral Oration

  Thucydides' Pericles delivers the most famous epideictic speech of Athens; reading it against Rhetoric I.9 shows amplification and praise of a city's character at work.

• On Christian Doctrine

  Book IV of Augustine's treatise adapts classical rhetoric for Christian preaching, keeping the duties of teaching, delighting and moving while subordinating eloquence to wisdom drawn from Scripture.

• Politics and the English Language

  Orwell's attack on stale metaphor and vague abstraction restates Rhetoric III's demand for clarity and fitting metaphor for an age of political euphemism.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The Rhetoric is not a medical work, but medicine is Aristotle's favourite comparison for an art that works with probabilities and individual cases, and his own father was a physician. The treatise uses fever as its example of an infallible sign in diagnostic reasoning, cites Herodicus's regimen as health not worth envying, and defines emotions such as anger and fear as pains bound up with judgments and mental images. Book II's emotions and ages of life are a frequently cited early source in the history of the psychology of emotion and of cognitive accounts of feeling; reading them as clinical psychology would be an anachronism.

• Book I, Ch. 1

  Rhetoric is compared with medicine, which aims to bring a patient as near health as possible and can treat well even those who will never be sound.

  Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors
• Book I, Ch. 2

  Medicine theorizes about classes of patients rather than about Socrates or Callias individually; later, fever is the example of an infallible sign of illness, while fast breathing is a fallible one.

  Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors
• Book I, Ch. 5

  Bodily excellence is defined as health that allows free use of the body; Herodicus's anxious regimen is mentioned as 'health' no one would congratulate.

  Ancient Medicine
• Book II, Ch. 2-11

  Definitions of anger, calm, fear, confidence, shame, pity, indignation and envy as pains or pleasures arising from how events and persons appear.

  Mind Body Neurosis Anxiety
• Book II, Ch. 12-14

  Character sketches of youth, old age and the prime of life, including the young's desires compared to sick people's fits of hunger and thirst and the cautious coldness of the elderly.

  Aging Senescence

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Choose a school policy you would like changed and draft three short versions of the same proposal: one leaning on ethos, one on pathos, one on logos. Then write a fourth that integrates all three and identify its enthymeme.

• Dialogue

  Write a dialogue in which Socrates, fresh from the Gorgias, presses Aristotle on whether the definition of rhetoric as 'observing the available means of persuasion' leaves room for flattery.

• Essay

  Using Book II, Ch. 2-3, analyse a famous speech that calms an angry audience, showing which grounds of anger the speaker removes or reframes.

• Classroom

  Collect five metaphors from a week of news headlines and grade each against Book III's standards of clearness, fitness and freshness.

Further Reading

• On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, Aristotle, trans. George A. Kennedy

  A modern annotated translation with extensive introduction and notes.

• De Oratore, Cicero

  Cicero's dialogue on the ideal orator, indebted to Aristotelian rhetoric.

• Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian

  The Roman programme for educating the good man skilled in speaking.

• Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.)

• Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the Rhetoric, Larry Arnhart

• Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Edward P. J. Corbett

  A classroom-oriented textbook built on Aristotle's categories.