DawgNotes

In this teaching, rhetoric is public. Topoi – or topics – were common topics of the day, or "places to look" for arguments, beginning points for public deliberation. We might think of these as prompts, or structural devices such as comparison. Aristotle divided the topics into categories: ethical, where he included political, logical and physical. Rhetoric is concerned with the first two.

Aristotle viewed dialectic as dealing with generalities and rhetoric more with specifics. Similary, he viewed the nature of the law at two levels. At the general level, the deliberative level, the law was to be made as specific as possible and to allow the least room for interpretation by the judges, “…but it is necessary to leave to the judges the question of whether something has happened or has not happened, will or will not be, is or is not the case; for the lawmaker cannot forsee these things” (31).

The end of rhetoric has been translated as "persuasion" but the Greek word, pistis can also be translated as belief, or proof. These are all similar in that they indicate agreement beyond mere assent. Aristotle classified the pisteis available through speech into three catagories: "some are in the character [ethos] of the speaker, and some in disposing the listener in some way [leading the hearers to feel emotion, pathos], and some in the argument [logos] itself, by showing or seeming to show something” (37). Importantly, with respect to the character of the speaker, this was not a reputation the speaker brought to the occasion, but rather a quality indicated through the speech itself. In Book 2, Aristotle offered three things that made a speaker persuasive, beyond logical demonstrations. "These are practical wisdom [phronesis] and virtue [arête] and good will [eunoia]; for speakers make mistakes in what they say or advise through [failure to exhibit] either all or one of these” (121). Several chapters of Book 2 are dedicated to explaining various emotions (states of mind) in hearers and the potential effects for the speaker, with additional chapters showing how the status of different hearers (young, old, prime of life, wealthy, powerful, of good birth) can affect receptivity.

Beyond the classifications of speeches and persuasive means, Aristotle may be most well know for the rhetorical syllogism, or enthymeme. In Book 1, he writes: “I call a rhetorical syllogism an enthymeme, a rhetorical induction a paradigm” (40). All logical persuasion proceeds from one of these. Aristotle believed that style and delivery were of secondary importance to the substance of an argument, which has been interpreted to say that he privileged rational (logos) appeals over those of ethos or pathos. This emphasis on logic is consistent with an audience familiar with dialectic, but also consistent with Aristotle's interest in science, and his belief that precision in language could ensure the response of the audience.

The enthymeme is a strucutre where conclusions proceed from premises. The rhetorical paradigm is inductive, drawing from many instances to a general conclusion. But Aristotle understood the limits of an audience, so he emphasized that for rhetoric, there should be few premises (specifically, fewer than a primary syllogism in dialectic. The conclusions should come from too far back, nor should all the steps be included, because both a long argument or a repetition of the obvious is tiresome to the audience (or hard to follow). Aristotle explains that the reason some "uneducated" speakers seem to be more effective is because of their emphasis on the immediate and direct.

In Book 3, Aristotle discusses style, delivery, and arrangement. Again, he focuses on clarity: “let the virtue of style be defined as ‘to be clear’…and neither flat nor above the dignity of the subject, but appropriate” (221). There should be a balance between plainness and poetry, and an appropriate use of figures such as metaphor. Delivery includes volume, pitch, and rhythm (again the classifications), while style includes sentence structure, diction and word choice.

In Chapter 15 of Book 3, under the category of taxis, Aristotle discusses how to repel a prejudical attack. These questions of what it as issue would later develop into stasis theory. Kennedy comments that Aristotle's placement of this analysis under arrangement, rather than under invention, may have been why his Rhetoric wasn't much studied in later antiquity and the Byzantine periods (266).

Plato and Isocrates had more influence on the Romans than Aristotle, partly because his works were lost after he left the Peripetic school to one of his pupils. Cicero recovered that work, and followed Aristotle in the five part process for composing a speech. Aristotle never actually outlines the five step process we know as the canons of rhetoric. It was later rhetors who extrapolated the principles and summarized them in five categories.