Rhetoric   

various forms of government-only, however, to the extent demanded by
the present occasion; a detailed account of the subject has been given
in the Politics.
Rhetoric
By Aristotle
Written 350 B.C.E Part 1
We have now considered the materials to be used in supporting or
opposing a political measure, in pronouncing eulogies or censures, and
for prosecution and defence in the law courts. We have considered the
received opinions on which we may best base our arguments so as to
convince our hearers-those opinions with which our enthymemes deal,
and out of which they are built, in each of the three kinds of
oratory, according to what may be called the special needs of each.
But since rhetoric exists to affect the giving of decisions-the
hearers decide between one political speaker and another, and a legal
verdict is a decision-the orator must not only try to make the
argument of his speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must
also make his own character look right and put his hearers, who are to
decide, into the right frame of mind. Particularly in political
oratory, but also in lawsuits, it adds much to an orator's influence
that his own character should look right and that he should be thought
to entertain the right feelings towards his hearers; and also that his
hearers themselves should be in just the right frame of mind. That the
orator's own character should look right is particularly important in
political speaking: that the audience should be in the right frame of
mind, in lawsuits. When people are feeling friendly and placable, they
think one sort of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile, they
think either something totally different or the same thing with a
different intensity: when they feel friendly to the man who comes
before them for judgement, they regard him as having done little
wrong, if any; when they feel hostile, they take the opposite view.
Again, if they are eager for, and have good hopes of, a thing that
will be pleasant if it happens, they think that it certainly will
happen and be good for them: whereas if they are indifferent or
annoyed, they do not think so.
There are three things which inspire confidence in the orator's own
character-the three, namely, that induce us to believe a thing apart
from any proof of it: good sense, good moral character, and goodwill.
False statements and bad advice are due to one or more of the
following three causes. Men either form a false opinion through want
of good sense; or they form a true opinion, but because of their moral
badness do not say what they really think; or finally, they are both
sensible and upright, but not well disposed to their hearers, and may
fail in consequence to recommend what they know to be the best course.
These are the only possible cases. It follows that any one who is
thought to have all three of these good qualities will inspire trust
in his audience. The way to make ourselves thought to be sensible and
morally good must be gathered from the analysis of goodness already
given: the way to establish your own goodness is the same as the way
to establish that of others. Good will and friendliness of disposition
will form part of our discussion of the emotions, to which we must now
turn.
The Emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect
their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such
are anger, pity, fear and the like, with their opposites. We must
arrange what we have to say about each of them under three heads.
Take, for instance, the emotion of anger: here we must discover (1)
what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with
whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry
with them. It is not enough to know one or even two of these points;
unless we know all three, we shall be unable to arouse anger in any
one. The same is true of the other emotions. So just as earlier in
this work we drew up a list of useful propositions for the orator, let
us now proceed in the same way to analyse the subject before us.