 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Stage Directions – Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics. So, you've heard of Aesop, right? The Greek guy with all the fables involving animals? It turns out that Aristotle is one of the earliest sources to mention him. He relates the following anecdote. Aesop was in the island city-state of Samos, home of Pythagoras, pleading the case of a city leader who was accused of exploiting his position for money. Aesop, of course, had a fable ready for just this occasion. It seems there was this fox who was trapped in a hole by a river. Fleas started sucking his blood, and the poor fox had no defence. Then a hedgehog happened by, and offered to scatter the fleas away. No thanks, said the fox. The fleas are all full of my blood. If you chase them away, other fleas will just come and they'll still be hungry. In the same way, concluded Aesop, my client is already rich, so you may as well leave him alone, better than replacing him with a poorer man who would have reason to steal more of your money. Now that, my friends, is rhetoric. Aristotle tells the story to illustrate the use of fables, just one of many techniques he explains in his work, The Rhetoric. In The Rhetoric, Aristotle takes up the themes we saw Plato exploring in dialogues like the Gorgias. In the ancient Greek world, and especially in democratic Athens, public speaking was one of the most important skills an educated gentleman could possess. It was a path to political power, and would also come in handy if you were ever involved in a court case. So, already before Plato, as we saw when we looked at the Sophists, numerous authors had turned their attention to the skills and techniques needed to persuade an audience. Gorgias was only one such author. Many others are mentioned in Aristotle's rhetoric. So, this is one area where Aristotle was no pioneer. He may have been the first to write about logic and zoology, the first to write a systematic treatise on the soul, and so on. But, when he turned his attention to rhetoric, he was adding one more volume to a shelf full of treatises on the subject. Of course, when Aristotle can't claim to be a pioneer, he does the next best thing, he complains that everyone who has come before him got it all wrong. In this case, he blames previous rhetoricians for covering only part of the subject. They mostly tell you how to whip up emotion in an audience. This is an important rhetorical technique. As we'll see, Aristotle too discusses it in some depth. But, the rhetoricians have missed out something even more important, namely the classification and study of what Aristotle calls enthememes. These are arguments that are designed not to prove a proposition, but simply to persuade an audience. Aristotle's greatest contribution to the study of rhetoric will be a classification of these enthememes, or persuasive arguments. Incidentally, I should mention that Aristotle's criticism of his predecessors has led some scholars to worry about the rhetoric as it has come down to us. Can this beginning part, where he chastises authors of rhetorical textbooks for concentrating on emotion, really belong to the same original work as the careful discussion of emotion that comes later on? Another problem is that the third and final book of the rhetoric suddenly adds a long discussion of style and metaphor, which doesn't seem to be part of the plan envisioned in books 1 and 2. So, as with works like the Metaphysics, there is concern that our rhetoric is not a text composed by Aristotle so much as a later compilation of Aristotelian material. I won't get into this any further, except to say that I don't see the point about emotions as very problematic. The criticism of the predecessors is not that they focus on emotions, but that they focus only on emotions, which is only one of several topics a good study of rhetoric would include. Because Aristotle puts enthememes, not emotion, at the center of his story, he sees rhetoric as a discipline that is closely related to logic. In his logical works, Aristotle discussed demonstrative arguments, which prove things with complete certainty, and also dialectical arguments, which argue from agreed premises. Now, in the rhetoric, he tackles another kind of argument, arguments that are persuasive. Along with these enthememes, the good rhetorician needs to be able to use examples. The fable used by Aesop is an example, not an enthymeme. Aristotle compares the use of examples to the use of induction in the proper philosophical sciences. Someone doing zoology might observe common features of pigeons and chickens, and reach a better understanding of birds through induction. Similarly, Aesop asks his audience to think that someone who is already sated is less likely to do us harm, whether that someone is a blood-sucking flea or a blood-sucking politician. But it's the enthememes that tend to provoke the most interest among philosophical readers of the rhetoric. What does it mean for an argument to be merely persuasive? Well, it's easy to see why enthememe differs from demonstration. A demonstrative argument must be based ultimately on first principles, deal with universal necessities, and so on—all the constraints we met back in episode 36. By contrast, Aristotle actually discourages the rhetorician from building a long chain of inferences to reach his conclusion, since this will just confuse the audience. And a rhetorician will deal with some particular decision or case, not universal necessities. It's harder, though, to see the difference between enthememes and dialectical arguments. A dialectical argument is one based on merely agreed premises. You might agree the premises just for the sake of argument, but more typically we choose premises that are reputable and widely acceptable, so-called endoxa, whether or not they are definitely true. An enthememe does something very similar by appealing to premises that the audience will find compelling, whether these are true or not. Perhaps the right way to think about this is that an enthememe is just a type or class of dialectical argument. After all, in rhetoric, we do not just choose any old reputable premises, we argue on the basis of what will persuade the specific audience before us. Aristotle tells us, for instance, what young people or old people are apt to find convincing, to help us tailor our arguments to our target audience. Also, dialectical arguments can concern any topic, even abstract ones like metaphysics or the soul. Enthememes, by contrast, deal with practical questions. Thus, Aristotle says that rhetoric is akin to ethics or political philosophy as well as logic. Just as in ethics, we use reason to deal with a specific practical situation, so in rhetoric we try to adapt our arguments to the case we are arguing and the audience that confronts us. Since rhetoric, like ethics, is concerned with the infinitely variable practicalities of individual cases, Aristotle cannot offer us ready-made arguments that will work in every context. Instead, as in ethics, he offers us rules of thumb, strategies that tend to be useful in many contexts. He calls these by the Greek word topoi, which means places. The word probably comes from a memory trick used to recall all the various rhetorical tropes. You might imagine yourself walking around Athens and associate each type of enthememe with a place in the city. Aristotle discusses this trick in another text called on memory. Dialectic in general uses this same technique of remembering argument types, which can be filled out with detail to be applied to the case at hand. This is why Aristotle's work on dialectic is called the topics. If you've been wondering about that since the first Aristotle episode, then I'm sorry for leaving you in suspense for so long. In the case of rhetoric, the so-called topoi would include things like invoking precedent, itemizing the possible results of a proposed course of action to show that all are unwelcome, using wordplay based on the names of the people involved in a case, or appealing to the audience's base desires if the opponent has appealed to their noble desires, and vice versa. So there are many types of rhetorical argument. But overall, there are only three kinds of rhetoric because there were three contexts in ancient Greek society that called for rhetorical speech. First, you might speak in a court setting, whether in a lawsuit or a criminal case. Second, there were more explicitly political contexts, as when you are trying to persuade the Athenian assembly to make some decision. Third and finally, you might speak in praise or blame of a specific person, for instance in a funeral oration. Aristotle calls the types of rhetoric corresponding to these contexts, forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. In none of the three types would you restrict yourself to enthymemes. Audiences get bored with strings of unbroken argument. Rather, you would scatter them through your speech, along with examples and other material, for instance a narrative of how a crime was committed when you are prosecuting a court case. Whatever the topic, what you're aiming at is not to prove your case beyond all doubt, though that would of course be great if you could do it. Rather, you're just trying to show that your case is the more likely one. Aristotle's discussion of forensic oratory doesn't use the standard innocent until proven guilty. It's more like, he's probably guilty, and that's good enough for us. So you might defend your client by saying, would he start a fight with that other man as he's accused of doing? My client is small, and small men don't usually start fights with bigger men. Or you might, you know, say something about a fox and a hedgehog. In addition to tipping the balance of probability with arguments and examples, you have two other tools at your disposal. It's very important to get the audience to think that you, the speaker, are credible. So Aristotle gives advice on how to make oneself seem virtuous and trustworthy before an audience. The other tool is that good old standby whipping up emotion. This leads Aristotle to give his most in-depth discussion of the emotions in Book II of the Rhetoric. What he's really interested in here, as so often, is underlying causes. What is it that makes people angry or induces them to feel pity? He shows himself a keen student of human psychology, observing for instance that we get angry when we are insulted, and we get angrier if the insult comes from a friend than from an enemy. A knowledge of these causes will help us provoke an audience into pity, fear, anger, and so on, in order to bring that audience onto our side when making speeches. Now, I know what you're thinking. Isn't it pretty underhanded to persuade someone by manipulating their emotions? In fact, why isn't Aristotle being just a bit more judgmental here? Pretty much everything I've described him saying could have been said by a sophist. You can imagine Aristotle's old teacher Plato sitting in the corner listening in tight-lipped annoyance as Aristotle teaches us how to argue on both sides of any argument, just as Gorgias and Protagoras did, and how to appeal to the audience's emotions as well as their reason. But of course Aristotle isn't claiming, with Gorgias and Protagoras, that rhetoric is the greatest of human arts. For him, rhetoric is a necessary tool in Greek society and thus one worth understanding, but, unlike demonstration and even dialectic, it does not help discover the truth. On the bright side, Aristotle claims that those who argue for the truth tend to be more persuasive, all else being equal. Still, a rhetorician will argue whatever case it falls to him to defend, and the more skilled he is, the better the chance of his winning. In this respect, it seems Gorgias was right to compare rhetoric to boxing. It is a technique that can be used in both good causes and bad. This doesn't mean, however, that any device used to persuade people counts as rhetoric. Aristotle mentions a number of arguments which seem to be enthymemes but don't qualify because they are downright fallacious. Enthymemes merely persuade rather than proving something to their audience, but that doesn't mean that they are allowed to be invalid. Rhetoric may not be philosophy, but, like philosophy, and boxing for that matter, it does have rules. The rhetoric has a number of things in common with one final Aristotelian work I want to look at, the Poetics. Like the rhetoric, the Poetics seems incomplete since it famously lacks a discussion of comedy and deals mostly with tragedy. Again, like the rhetoric, it deals with the style and structure of a whole type of discourse and grapples with the topic of human emotion. Finally, it too has a political context. This is less obvious with the Poetics than with the rhetoric, but remember that Plato's discussion of poetry came in his political masterwork, the Republic. Aristotle himself discusses music, which for the Greeks is closely linked to poetry, in the final book of his politics. His purpose there is to discuss education, and it's interesting to note that along the way he mentions one of the most famous ideas expressed in the Poetics, that poetry can give rise to a kind of purging, in Greek katharsis. In fact, Aristotle doesn't say nearly as much about katharsis as you might expect, given how famous the idea is. If anything, he says more, though still not much, while dealing with education in the politics. The political and educational purposes of poetry remain mostly tacit in the Poetics. The work falls most neatly into the area of philosophy we call aesthetics. What Aristotle is out to do in most of the Poetics, or at least the part that has come down to us, is to tell us what makes a beautiful or pleasing poem. He tells us at the outset that there are various types of poetry, just as he mentions different types of rhetoric in his work on that topic. Aristotle's habit of providing classifications is on display here, as is his interest in the purposes and structures of things. For most of the surviving Poetics, he discusses the purposes and structures of tragedy, though a brief discussion of epic poetry features at the end. If you were to summarize Aristotle's attitude towards tragedy in five words, you would say, he knows what he likes. He has firm views on what makes for good tragedy, and he names names, expressing admiration for Euripides, while in the epic context he's a big fan of Homer. He defends both of them against would-be literary critics, while complaining about other authors. Euripides delivers what a good tragedian should. His works purge the audience of emotions such as pity and fear. As it happens, Aristotle also discussed pity in the rhetoric. There, he told us that a pitiable story is one that we can imagine happening to ourselves. He's thinking along these lines in the Poetics, when he tells us that the tragic poet should not depict a bad man striking good fortune, or bad fortune befalling a man so excellent that we cannot relate to him. Nor should they show a bad man getting the bad fortune he deserves, since this won't be met with sympathy. It's comedy that properly deals with bad people. Tragedy is a grander enterprise, and should depict people who are better than average. A decent but basically normal man, Aristotle's famous tragic hero, should have some dramatic turn of fortune for the worse, by means of a reversal or sudden discovery. This unleashes the torrent of pity and fear in the audience which will purge them of their emotions, and thus give them pleasure. This then is the purpose of tragedy, what we've learned to call its final cause. And, as we've also learned, formal causes are tailored to serve final causes. Just as the form or structure of a giraffe serves its biological purposes, so the form of a tragedy should relentlessly serve the aim of generating pity and fear. For Aristotle, this is achieved not so much by depicting characters or spectacles of such-and-such a sort. He wouldn't be impressed by method actors or special effects. He instead lays all his emphasis on plot, and insists that a good plot has a unity of action which proceeds in a plausible and straightforward way towards the moment of reversal or discovery. He enumerates the parts of a tragedy and argues that they need to form a unified whole, just as the parts of a giraffe do. This notion was influential much later, when playwrights in modern Europe expanded on it to include the idea that a play should be unified in terms of time and place as well, rather than changing the setting from scene to scene. This idea doesn't arise in Aristotle, but it's not too far from the spirit of his poetics. The implicit and occasionally explicit conversation partner throughout the poetics is, of course, Plato. Aristotle never has the Republic far from his thoughts as he writes, and one can read the poetics as a subtle response to the aesthetic theory of that dialogue. One of the most striking differences is also one of the most basic. Where Plato complains that poetry is an imitative art, and thus an art removed from reality, Aristotle observes more cheerfully that imitation, or mimesis, is naturally pleasing to all men. Our delight in imitation goes hand in hand with our delight in learning. The reason we enjoy poetry is that all men desire to know, as Aristotle says at the beginning of his metaphysics. Here Aristotle seems to turn on its head a challenge made to Socrates in the Republic, when Glaucon says that people who enjoy things like the theater, the so-called lovers of sights and sounds, are like philosophers in their desire to learn. Socrates responds with a rigorous distinction between philosophers who seek knowledge of what is and these sight lovers who are content with what both is and is not. Aristotle seems to be more relaxed about this. He's happy to see both impulses as part of the same natural human tendency. This is only one of innumerable cases in his writings where Aristotle engages closely with Plato. He doesn't just vaguely allude to Platonist ideas, he writes with specific dialogues, even specific passages in mind. He apparently expects his reader to know Plato well, since he often responds to the dialogues without bothering to say explicitly that he is doing so. Of course, Aristotle is usually thought of as an anti-Platonist. As I've said before, he excuses himself for attacking Plato with the famous remark that truth is dearer than our friends. But this doesn't do justice to the subtlety of Aristotle's relationship to his master. That's the topic I'm going to look at next week in a very special interview which will mark the 50th episode of the podcast. So please join me, and not one, but two friends to get at the truth about Aristotle's attitudes towards Plato here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.