The Emotions’ Impact on Audience Judgments and Decision-Making in Aristotle’s Rhetoric

Abstract

Early in Book I of his Rhetoric, Aristotle claims that audiences are persuaded when led by a speech to feel emotion. We do not give the same judgment when grieved as we do when we are rejoicing, or when being friendly as when we are hostile. It would seem, then, that emotions ground judgment. But Aristotle never explicitly addresses the question of how emotion comes to affect judgment. The answer to this question lies in the social nature of Aristotle’s account of the emotions and the structure of intentionality that this implies. In this paper, we draw out both the social account of the emotions and the type of intentionality that this reveals. Part I explores the ways in which the account of the emotions in the Rhetoric is other-regarding. In each case, emotional responses find us outside of ourselves in the world, navigating difficult interpersonal matters that can be understood and converted to sources of persuasion. Anger is directed toward others, for example; fear is of others. The common element here is the social nature of the emotions. Building on this account, we turn in Part II to argue that the mainstream concept of intentionality is insufficient to capture social emotions as presented by Aristotle in the second book of his Rhetoric. What is required is a different model of intentionality that captures the move from individual existence to social existence. Social emotions are embedded in social interactions and thus such emotions require a structure of intentionality that is both other-directed and directed back on the agent. The nature of this structure is illustrated by modelling it on a game. This understanding of full intentionality then presents the foundation for what we call ‘person worth’ (or person value—the value or worth that is assigned to people, things, and even situations), developed in Part III of the paper. Here, we discuss the personal worth of the speaker or arguer, who comes to a sense of self-value through what is reflected back from an audience. Each emotional state involves deliberation about the agent’s social situations and the expectations they have of others and that others have of them. Individuals thus strive to maintain a sense of emotional coherence with respect to these social situations and the judgments made with respect to them. And this in turn involves matters of ethos. From our study of emotion in the Rhetoric, we see that Aristotle’s theory of argumentation is richer and more complex than often imagined. He embeds emotions into intentional social interactions in the context of argumentation that addresses the mind-set of a deliberative audience in order to influence that audience’s beliefs and actions. In this sense emotions are other-accessible and de-privatized.