Rhetoric

Overview

The Rhetoric is about two hundred and fifty pages in three books, and like most of Aristotle it is lecture material rather than a finished treatise: compressed, repetitive in places, and organised by the shape of the subject rather than by any wish to be readable.

It exists because of an argument. Plato’s Gorgias had denied that rhetoric is an art, on the ground that it produces conviction without knowledge and aims at pleasing rather than at improving, and the Phaedrus had allowed that a genuine art of speaking might exist if it were founded on knowledge of the truth and of the kinds of soul. Aristotle takes up the challenge and builds the art.

His strategy is to define rhetoric as a faculty of seeing rather than of doing. It is the counterpart of dialectic: as dialectic finds arguments on any subject, rhetoric finds the available means of persuasion in any case. That makes it neutral between good and bad causes, which is exactly the feature Plato objected to, and Aristotle defends it by pointing out that the same is true of medicine and of every other capacity, and that a man able to argue both sides can at least tell when he is being cheated.

Book III sits oddly. It is on style and arrangement, it overlaps with the Poetics, and some scholars think it was originally separate.

The argument

Book I: the kinds of speech and their topics. Aristotle begins by criticising the handbooks in circulation, which he says concentrate on the emotional tricks of the courtroom and ignore the one thing that matters, the argument. The enthymeme, he insists, is the body of persuasion.

He then sets out the three means of proof. Ethos, the character of the speaker, which must be established by the speech itself. Pathos, the state into which the hearer is put. And logos, the argument in the words themselves. All three are technical, in his sense, meaning they are produced by the art rather than found ready-made like witnesses and contracts.

Then the three genres, distinguished by audience and by time. Deliberative speech addresses an assembly about the future and argues from the advantageous and the harmful. Forensic speech addresses a jury about the past and argues from the just and the unjust. Epideictic speech addresses a spectator in the present and deals in praise and blame. Each has its own topics, and Aristotle supplies them: for deliberative, the subjects an assembly actually decides, revenue, war and peace, defence, imports and legislation, together with an account of what happiness consists in, since that is what advantage is measured against.

The forensic material is the fullest. He classifies wrongdoing, examines the motives people act from and the states of mind and conditions in which they act, and treats the non-technical proofs, laws, witnesses, contracts, torture and oaths. There is a fine passage on equity, which he says exists to correct the law where its generality has failed, since a lawgiver cannot foresee every case.

Book II: emotions, character and argument. The first half is the great innovation. Aristotle takes each emotion a speaker may need to produce or dispel and defines it, then asks three questions: what state people are in when they feel it, whom they feel it towards, and on what grounds. Anger, calm, friendship, enmity, fear, confidence, shame, kindness, pity, indignation, envy and emulation each get this treatment. The definitions are precise enough to be argued with; the one of anger, as a desire for conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight, has been quoted and disputed for two millennia.

Then character: how the young, the old and those in their prime differ, and how the rich, the well-born and the powerful do, so that a speaker can address the audience actually present.

The second half turns to the argument forms. The enthymeme is the rhetorical counterpart of the syllogism, and it differs in two ways: it proceeds from premises that are probable rather than necessary, because human affairs do not admit of necessity, and it leaves premises unstated when the audience can supply them, which is what makes it feel like a shared conclusion rather than an imposed one. The example is the counterpart of induction. He then gives the common topics available to any speech, twenty-eight of them, and a list of fallacies.

Book III: style and arrangement. Clarity is the chief virtue of prose style, and it is achieved by using current words in their ordinary senses. Prose should not be poetry; metaphor is the one poetic resource proper to it, and Aristotle repeats his claim from the Poetics that a command of metaphor cannot be taught and is the mark of natural talent. He treats rhythm, arguing that prose should have rhythm without metre, and period structure. On arrangement he is brisk and slightly impatient: strictly a speech needs only a statement of the case and the proof, and the handbooks’ elaborate divisions are largely padding.

How to read it

Read Book I chapters 1 to 3, all of Book II chapters 1 to 11, and Book III chapters 1 to 4. That is the definition, the three proofs, the genres, the emotions and the treatment of style.

Read the emotions systematically rather than skimming them. Take anger and work through the three questions Aristotle asks of it, then check the definition against a case you know. This is the part of the book that still does work.

Read the Gorgias first if you can. The Rhetoric is an answer to it, and the answer only registers if you have felt the force of the accusation.

Watch the enthymeme. The insight that persuasion works by leaving something for the hearer to supply is the most useful thing in the book and applies to advertising, argument and journalism as directly as to a speech in an assembly.

The standing objection is the one Plato made and Aristotle acknowledges: an art of finding the available means of persuasion is available to liars. Aristotle’s reply, that a capacity is not to be blamed for its misuse and that the truth has a natural advantage, is not obviously adequate, and it is worth deciding whether it is.

Questions it raises

• Is rhetoric an art or a knack? Aristotle’s defence is that it is a faculty of observation, neutral like medicine. Does that answer the Gorgias?
• He says the truth and justice are naturally stronger than their opposites. Is there any evidence for that, and does his own book assume it?
• Persuasion through emotion is given a third of the treatise. Is appealing to an audience’s fear or pity a legitimate part of argument or a contamination of it?
• The enthymeme works by leaving premises unstated. Does that make it a form of reasoning or a form of complicity?
• Character is called the most effective means of persuasion and must be produced within the speech. What follows for a culture where reputation precedes every speaker?
• Equity corrects the law where its generality fails. Who decides when it has failed?