Pathos
Any audience is always and already in some emotional state whenever a rhetor addresses them. Even apathy is an emotional state.
Part of rhetorical analysis is trying to figure out what emotional state the rhetor thinks the audience is in, as that assumption will determine how the rhetor appeals to the audience's pathos. But that is just the beginning. Any good rhetor will seek to bring the audience to undergo numerous changes in their emotional state. For example, let's say a mathematician is addressing an audience of know-it-all students. She assumes the audience is complacent in their know-it-all-ness, and so must come up with a problem that will perplex and agitate them, triggering a shift from calmness to anger at their inability to solve what should be solvable. Then the rhetor could show them a way to solve it such that the emerging state of fear (at not being able to solve a problem) back to confidence). Here some of the more common emotional states and their opposites (most of these are given in Aristotle's Rhetoric): fear---confidence love---hate anger---calmness admiration---envy indignation---pity charity (generosity)---selfishness (stinginess) complacency/resignation/cynicism---awe/wonder One way "in" is to see what actually triggers the experience of these emotional states: what has to happen to who in order for the emotion to arise? Figuring that out will help you to analyze how rhetor's succeed or fail to impact an audience and "move" them from one mood to another. For instance, if someone is indignant about someone unjustifiably and undeservedly receiving a benefit (the emotion most democrats felt as a result of the 2004 election), how could you shift that person into feeling pity for the very same person they felt indignant about?
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Theoretical background
To understand pathos, consider that we are always already within a
mood, state-of-mind, or emotion. Because it is always there (waiting for us, so to speak) it is for the most part invisible to us. And it is from this invisible "location" that our moods direct our attention, guide the judgments we make, and determine our reactions. Beginning to notice what mood we are always already in gives us access to listen for what mood someone else is in, namely, whoever we intend to address in a given rhetorical act. If it is so that we are always already addressing someone in a particular mood (but don't know it), then if we look closely at what we have written, we may begin to "see" the mood we project our addressee to have. Furthermore, we can begin to see how successful we are in inviting our addressee to step into that mood and in shifting that initial mood into other states. Crucial, and unfortunately often overlooked, is that the rhetor must be committed to carry the addressee through various shifts in mood. If there is little or no interest on the rhetor's part, little or no shifting actually occurs (reinforcing the mood of complacency, perhaps, but quite unintentionally) Sometimes such shifts may be an increase of intensity of the same mood, or an incremental movement to an opposing mood, or total leaps between moods, which in turn triggers its own shift. Now, the actual physical person reading your writing may enter your discourse not already in the mood you project them to have. As a writer, you need to account for that possibility (true, some writers don't care, assuming that the reader will do backflips to enter the world of the writer--e.g., James Joyce), and so work to invite any given audience to begin to step into the mood you project. However, if you begin with a mood most all people are likely to be in to some degree, then you've found your way. What might such a mood be? The highly rhetorical philosopher Martin Heidegger claimed that the fundamental and interconnected moods human beings are always already in includes: concern for how things will turn out (the concern for looking good), fear/anxiety surrounding the inevitability of death (there's something wrong here--"can I trust this situation?"), and the certainty we have for what we already know (being right, "is this right/true or wrong/false?). (I would actually add complacency to the set of fundamental moods listed above--most people are anesthetized, caught up in coping with everyday life, and not walking around in authentic awe and wonder about the magnificence of being alive in the present...) Each of us, the argument goes, engages in our everyday lives with these moods in the background. The various spectrums of emotion that irrupt are various expressions of these moods. |