Evoking an audience’s emotions in order to use them as a means of persuasion. In the Rhetoric Aristotle distinguishes three types of persuasive appeal: ethical; emotional ( pathos ), which depends upon putting the audience into a fit state of mind; and logical ( logos ), which depends upon the forms of proof or apparent proof. The orator has to study the emotions in order to know how to arouse them; toward that end Aristotle provides one of the first systematic treatments in the West of emotions and of the types of audience-members with which they are associated and consequently in which they are most readily aroused. As should be evident, there is a close relation between ethos and p., which continued to be exploited in the long trad. of writing “characters”—brief moral-psychological essays usually meant to assist orators with audience analysis. Too, the study of p., as seen in Aristotle and in later writers on religion and “physics,” is relevant to discussions not only of the “soul” ( psyche) but also of medicine; in the latter the subject became assimilated to the “humors”—mainly physical elements which gave a character or personality-type a propensity toward certain behaviors. With the rise of 18th-c. science, the newly established discipline of psychology began drawing to itself these formerly dispersed treatments of the emotions and contributed to the narrowing of the sense of the term “p.” to merely the pitiable or sad. It is this abuse of the original sense of p. which is more properly linked to sentimentality The importance of p. as a means of persuasion—or as it is commonly referred to today, audience appeal—has never diminished in the study of rhet., or in rhetorical approaches to poetry. In the latter study, the traditional link between p. and the figures of speech—Aristotle, for example, claims that anger demands hyperbole —undergirds such modern stylistic approaches as “reader response” crit. and “rhet. of affect.” The locus classicus of the general link between poetry and p. remains the Aristotelian theory of catharsis, but here it is theorized that the arousing of emotions (pity and fear) in an audience at a tragedy is aimed not so much at persuasion toward an argumentative point as at purgation of the emotions themselves.
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