You have already seen a true thing said and not received. A proof was on the table; the hearer was tired, or hostile, or lost at the second sentence; nothing followed in the room. You have also seen the reverse: a speech that moved people, and later you could not say what had been shown. Rhetoric begins in those two failures. Grammar can succeed, and logic can succeed, and the hearer still not see it.
Kearns’s Introduction already named the second failure from the other side, and asked how the art itself is to be kept from serving falsehood.
Much human discourse also involves persuasion, since even if we express the truth to someone they may not be persuaded then we have not shown them the relevant truth. This assumes that what we are expressing is true, but, of course, sometimes it is not. What is it that persuades someone to accept something as true? How can we best find means to persuade others of something true? How can we safeguard truth from the art of persuasion which anyone skilled in can use to convince us of something false?
This lesson takes those questions as the reason the third art exists, and as the reason it is not a license to win.
Aristotle opens the Rhetoric by pairing the art with dialectic, not with a science of one subject. Both deal with things that can go either way. Then the working definition:
Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.
Not the art of winning. The first work is to see what can be said, in this case, for these hearers. The function of the art, he adds, is not simply to succeed in persuading, but to discover the means of coming as near such success as the circumstances allow — as medicine’s function is not simply to make every patient quite healthy. A speech may be well made and still fail with this crowd. That does not mean the art was something else.
Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic.
Counterpart is not replacement. Rhetoric uses probable and audience-situated speech: the enthymeme, which is a kind of syllogism for matters that can be otherwise, often with a premise the hearers already supply; the example, which is a kind of induction. Demonstration, when it can be had, remains demonstration. The speaker who has only a proof, and no care for these hearers in this case, has stopped at logic and called the job done. The speaker who has only heat, or only figures, has not yet practiced this art. He has practiced a rival of it.
The art is ordered to the true and the good, not to sophistry. Aristotle is explicit that we study how persuasion can be used on opposite sides not in order that we may in practice employ it both ways — “for we must not make people believe what is wrong” — but in order to see the facts and to confute unfair argument. What makes a man a sophist is not his faculty but his moral purpose. Things that are true and things that are better are, by their nature, practically always easier to prove and easier to believe in. That is the hope this course keeps. It is also why the art must be learned: before some audiences, even the exactest knowledge will not by itself produce conviction, because argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are hearers one cannot instruct as one instructs a geometer.
Of the means of persuasion that the speech itself furnishes, Aristotle names three. Ethos is in the speaker as the speech shows him trustworthy — not a reputation imported from outside the oration. Pathos is in putting the hearer into a certain frame of mind, because we do not judge the same when pleased and when pained. Logos is in the speech when we have proved a truth or an apparent truth by suitable arguments. Houser, who treats rhetoric before logic in his textbook, likewise begins from three appeals. This course uses Aristotle’s names. The practice application will drill them on real speeches. This page will not.
The hearer’s job also divides the art. A speech that asks an assembly what to do is not the same as a speech that asks a jury what was done, or a speech that asks a gathering to praise or blame. Deliberative, forensic, epideictic: three species because three offices of the hearer. (Roberts’s English for the first and third is “political” oratory and “ceremonial oratory of display.”) Arrangement and style come after invention, because figures without a case are a box of ornaments. The application follows that order, with Augustine’s three offices — to teach, to delight, to move — kept as offices of showing, not as a substitute for showing.
If empty debate is already your trouble — fluency without a claim that can be meant — you may have been sent here sooner than the default order. Do this work. Then return to grammar and to logic. Rhetoric cannot show a hearer what has not been said, and cannot be ordered to the true if you cannot yet tell what follows. The default remains: grammar, then logic, then this art.
Kearns’s book promises a treatment of persuasion after language and logic. Finished chapters on rhetoric are not yet in the attached file. This lesson uses the Introduction’s questions and Aristotle’s definitions; it does not invent a later Kearns account.
Continue to Into Ars Rhetorica.