Ep. 247: Aristotle on Rhetoric and Emotions (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 247 is something like, how does the art of rhetoric relate to philosophy? We read Aristotle's rhetoric, written around 335 BCE, specifically book one, chapters one through six, and book two, chapters one through five, and 18 through 22. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, who, in demanding a bodyguard, is probably plotting tyranny in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:30 Seth: Mmm. This is Seth Paskin angry with a desire for revenge over a perceived belittling in Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan speaking in Enthymemes because I want to be persuasive in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:44 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey seeking not to persuade by anger or envy or pity in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Mark: Hoo ha. More Aristotle.

0:55 Wes: Wow.

0:57 Mark: I suggested this. I was excited about reading this.

0:59 Dylan: So you're not allowed to say hoo ha. More Aristotle.

1:04 Mark: That's not a negative. It was just my tone. I couldn't summon the hoo ha that was in my heart.

1:11 Seth: That expression does not accord with my understanding and feelings about the matter, Mark. And does not.

1:16 Dylan: You're not being very persuasive.

1:18 Wes: No, I think the word hoo ha is an equivocation on two different meanings.

1:22 Seth: He was trying to do. What is it? An Al Pacino impression from Scent of a Woman.

1:27 Dylan: This whole beginning makes me recall that there isn't anything about tone in the

1:31 Seth: book in what we read.

1:32 Wes: Well, this book. Three. Style.

1:35 Dylan: Yeah, style. Okay, fair enough.

1:36 Wes: We'll get to tone eventually if we're

1:38 Mark: giving our quickie phenomenology of this. I listened to the entire book as an audiobook, most of it first. So I did hear some of the stuff, like sometimes you should speak in a lower tone, and sometimes they do have stuff like that later. That's not what we focused on. I got almost nothing out of it. I was, like, waiting for the part because we were trying to figure out a reading selection, and I'm just like, no, no, this is not what I was expecting. This is not. So it wasn't until I bore down and Wes recommended first this George Kennedy translation, which is a very scholarly one.

And I tried that and enjoyed his intro. Was enjoying it, but was going really slowly because it's very much stop and talk about some translation issue in the footnote for a half a page kind of thing, and then switched to the Joe Sachs and much more. Enjoyed that and Actually getting into it and coming to it now. Now I feel. Yeah, I'm really glad that I read this. But it was more so than the Poetics. This was a hard slog for me.

2:31 Wes: Yeah, The Sachs is better, more readable. The Kennedy is the standard translation, I think, used by scholars at this point. But it's hard to read because he's trying to illustrate what's being translated from the Greek and putting in brackets for words that kind of have to be filled in by context. And, I mean, Sachs is pretty literal himself, but much more readable.

2:52 Seth: I just wonder whether it's ever worth reading Aristotle directly or should we just read secondary sources or, you know, like, there should be a ban on studying Aristotle unless your purpose in doing so is to make it understandable for normal people. That. Or maybe because these are supposedly lecture notes and what have you, that it would make more sense to hear it and to have it performed versus trying to read it. Because it's just. It can get so difficult. And yet when you see people break it out and, you know, Aristotle. Yeah. There's three ways you can do this.

It's this, this, and this. Of those three things, there are two methods. The summaries are always very clear and concise. And then when you get to the text, you're like, where is that? I thought our last addition of the poetics that we used that. That one was very different than rhetoric as far as readability and structure direct from the text, but without explanation and context. I think I would have struggled with this one.

3:47 Dylan: I definitely would recommend not starting Aristotle with the rhetoric. There are other books of Aristotle that I would start with. I think part of that is you get used to reading him. And that structure that you just referred to, Seth, of saying, basically, and these are the parts of this and this and this. That characteristic of Aristotle is all through this, especially as you get a couple chapters into each book. That said, I found it. I wouldn't call it readable. What I think is valuable about reading it is, you see, to me, how much he's talking about rhetoric as a component of the way of figuring things out in the world. And even though he's talking about persuasive speech, this whole parallel with dialectic and stuff like that, which I understand is in the secondary literature, is just really interesting.

4:37 Wes: Yeah. I think you're getting at something central there because you'll call rhetoric the counterpart, Right. To dialectic. I think even today, you know, rhetoric is sometimes a pejorative term, and we wonder whether it means manipulation of an audience, the kind of manipulation that can be used for. To persuade them of something true or false and even just or unjust, or whether there is a place for rhetoric. If we're thinking about, especially in book two, where we think about appeal to, you know, part of it, as we'll see, you know, is just reasoning, as in dialectic, but part of it is an appeal to emotion.

Part of it's the use of the kind of character, the Persona that you're conveying as you speak and the credibility that adds. But. But the question is, I think, if we've been conditioned, especially as people who study philosophy, to think that our arguments should be strictly about reasons, then what place is there for an appeal to emotion, for instance? And if there is a place for appeal to emotion, is that a means justifies the end sort of thing, is that, okay, I'm trying to persuade them of something true and they're hoi polloi and they're not really capable of understanding sophisticated arguments.

So I'm just going to do this kind of manipulative thing, but I'm going to lead them down the right track. Or maybe it's something more than that. Maybe emotions really do have a legitimate place, not just in persuasion, but in justification. And I think that might be related to stuff we've done on Hume and the theory of moral sentiments, where there's the argument that sentiments actually are important to determining what's ethical and what's not ethical, for instance. So that's the really fascinating part of this to me, that question of the role of emotions, whether they have a legitimate place in justification or persuasion.

And then the other part of it is just the meaning of the enthymeme. That's the star of the show, really, when it comes to reasoning.

6:43 Mark: It might be helpful to put this a little in the context of Plato, because we did the Gorgias and then the Protagoras, which were both arguments with Sophists, people who claim to teach the art of rhetoric. And by the time of Aristotle, there was, according to the, I guess, the Kennedy intro, what Aristotle's writing here was reacting to a guy named Isocrates, not to be confused with Socrates, but Isocrates, who is a sophist, whose school was competing with Plato's school that Aristotle belonged to. So this was on the one hand, trying to maybe give some moderation, or I guess there's scholarly dispute about is Aristotle arguing directly against Plato?

Because I just re listened to our performance of the Gorgias, and Gorgias himself in that Dialogue says to Socrates, it's a tool. Rhetoric is a tool. And just like teaching someone boxing, like, that's teaching them a skill. And if someone learns boxing and then goes and beats up their parents and the weak and all this, you shouldn't blame the boxing teacher. That's not the boxing teacher's fault. It's just a tool can be used for good or evil. And that seems exactly the way that Aristotle goes with this. On the other hand, though, I didn't actually read the Sachs intro, but I think he starts that whole thing off, since the Sachs book has Gorgias followed by this text was making more of an argument that Aristotle was more continuous with what Plato was arguing, that.

That he was kind of giving the upside that Plato sort of implicitly refers to. Is that worth spelling out?

8:13 Dylan: I think it's worth pointing out that there's a conversation in Plato about the use of persuasive speech. And I think the way you characterized it is not too far from at least the appearance of it. And Socrates in a number of places calls rhetoric basically a kind of cookery. It denies that it's an art. And so at the very least, even if you are to make the argument that there's something genuinely continuous about Aristotle versus Plato, you're going to have to have Plato come up with a way to understand that Plato is understanding rhetoric in the way you say something as an art and not as flattery.

That might be true. I mean, you know, the evidence that I would think of to look at is just the way in which the dialogues are written and even the way that Socrates speaks. Sometimes he speaks in myths and stuff like that. The way he's doing that is meant to be persuasive, and therefore it's. It is a skill, a art, and not merely flattery.

9:11 Wes: The substance of the critique. Right. Is. And Mark, since you revisited this, maybe you can tell us more, but is there's no real techne to it. There's no real art or science. It's not like the rhetorician has mastered some subject and is trying to teach us about it. So that's one. They don't know what they're talking about. And this is the sort of, you know, in our Poetics episode, we mentioned that this is part of the criticism that Plato also makes of poetry. Tragedians don't really know what they're talking about either. And yet they manipulate people's emotions to think that certain things are true anyway.

And that's what rhetoricians do. And then the second part of it is that flattery manipulation part. So that part of the problem is that it can be used for the wrong ends. Right. It could be used to persuade people of anything. But then one might also think it, regardless of whether you think you're arguing for some truth and trying to lead people down that path, it may just be a really poor habit of thinking to give to someone. The rhetorical mode just may be bad for people, may be bad for people's souls, regardless of the ends. Maybe the ends don't justify the means.

Mark, was there anything else you wanted to remind people of from Gorgias?

10:27 Mark: Yeah, that it doesn't have any subject matter all its own. It's the typical Socratic argument about the shoemaker makes shoes. And what does the speech maker make? Well, I mean, he makes speeches, but what's the purpose of that? Well, it's to kind of give people more social power. So the rest of the dialogue ends up being, is that a good thing to give people more social power? That maybe if your soul is in bad shape, then having more social power actually isn't good, even if it gets you out of punishment and things like that. But it's always tricky, of course, in a Platonic dialogue, like, does Plato really straight up agree with what Socrates says, or is he kind of giving the pro and the con?

Because both those dialogues are ones where he gives the interlocutors in some part of it, some pretty substantial speeches. And one of them in fact says, oh, Socrates, like if you were to go in front of a jury and had to convince them of your innocence, you would be convicted straight away. Like, obviously using irony, because that's. That's what happened with Socrates, that it would have been good for him. And so that seems to be what Aristotle, like, he specifically says in some points in here that this is to be used for good, that this is to be used to understand when other people make arguments and it's to be used defensively.

We live in a democracy in Athens, and if you're going to participate in the legislative process, you're going to be wanting to argue that the city should do good things rather than bad things. If you are in a court of law, this is sort of the most immediate thing. You're going to need to argue your innocence or that of your friends. And if you're. The third type was if you're giving a public speech praising or blaming someone, then you're going to want to do that accurately. Maybe Aristotle is less concerned than Plato with the dangers of that because he thinks that people are naturally bent toward the good.

Right. That common opinion actually is right most of the time. Which sounds very different than Plato, that, you know, no, the forms are real. Everything that we perceive is a mere shadow. And so maybe that's the difference that Aristotle can be a little more confident in. Yes, mobs can be confused, they can make wrong decisions. But if you just demonstrate in a very honest way the strength of your position, then they'll probably see it.

12:33 Dylan: It's a little bit more than an honest way. Right. Because when you say it that way, it makes it seem like there's a neutral position. And I think that's one thing that as we go through it, it's clear that Aristotle thinks part of rhetoric is speaking to people in the right way about the right sorts. I'm just on this business about using rhetoric well or ill. You know, the little quip that I had at the beginning is a piece of what he says about this. In the very, very first book when he's talking about speaking in front of juries. He says one ought not to lead the juror astray by provoking him into anger or envy or pity, since that would be as if someone made the very thing crooked that he was about to use as a ruler.

So at the beginning of this book, Aristotle recognizes it's perfectly possible to use rhetoric and these techniques, these ways of doing things, to make the unjust speech the stronger. But as we noted, he understands that the art is distinct from how the art is used straight up.

13:34 Wes: You know, as Mark was saying, he does seem to think that the true is just by nature more convincing. We can discuss that more. I don't think that's true. I don't think the true is actually more convincing to people in general. And I think that especially in political thinking, their ability to reason and think falls apart and they enter into a rhetorical mode. As we see everyday, speech and thinking is littered with enthymemes. And even though they are modeled on a syllogism and they're just leaving out a premise, as it will probably go into more detail about that, leaving out a premise or premises, it's that gap which is the problem.

In a way, it's the thing that seems most reasonable about rhetoric, the enthymeme that I think is the most problematic because it's those left out assumptions which are supposed to be obvious to everyone and not needing to be stated, which often actually do need to be stated and examined and have a large role in the everyday reasoning that is rife with prejudice. And error. What's left out is often just prejudice.

14:39 Dylan: Aristotle definitely has a kind of, I don't know if it's rosy disposition with respect to the natural inclinations of human beings. He says people naturally reach out to know more things they want to learn. And there's something about that that feels common, but it's not clear to me that that's always true. Just like Wes was saying that it's not so clear that the true is the most persuasive thing.

15:08 Mark: Is it relevant here that most of the time rhetorical speeches are about specifics, whereas dialectic, the kind of thing that the Socratic method, what philosophy is trying to do by establishing general truths through reason. Right. Socrates is always saying, no, no, don't just give me an example. Good shoes are good. I want to know what goodness is. That's exactly what you're not in the public square arguing rhetorically. So whereas maybe Plato might agree that if you are shown one of these general truths of what truth and justice and the kind of things he's concerned about are, then your soul will be led toward that unless there is something actively, your ego or whatever that's actively blocking the way.

But as to, you know, did this person commit a crime or not, what was the long term economic effect of this policy that we had? Like, I don't know that human nature is drawn toward the truth in that way.

15:57 Wes: I mean, one way to think about this is to think about the enthymeme and what's left out. So the enthymeme, which I think is just, it's derived from en thumos. Right. It's something that's not stated. It's left in the mind of the spirit, Thomas being spirit, but I think also being translatable as mind. So. And what's left out, if we take any syllogism as an example, but let's do the classic one, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. It would be odd to state any argument in that way. And so often it's just left out.

And this happens in every day when most people reason they're doing exactly this, they're doing enthymemes. And they would say, you know, yeah, of course, Socrates is mortal, Socrates is a man. Or of course Socrates is mortal, all men are mortal. They wouldn't state every single premise. And then if you think about what goes on in, say when people are writing about politics, the average newspaper column, for instance, if you're talking about questions of justice and injustice and morality, and immorality. There's no room to get into the philosophy of that.

So all the theoretical stuff is just left in the background. So the discourse of the rhetorical speeches themselves are like one big enthymeme where the scientific and theoretical stuff, just for practical purposes, has to be left to the side, not just because the audience is incapable of understanding that and would be bored by that and so couldn't be persuaded by that, but because there's simply anyway for practical purposes. You know, you have to sort of cut things off somewhere. And this is a problem I experience with my writing. I think about what am I writing?

Am I trying to do something philosophical here, or am I trying to write an essay for a broader audience? Because I always get into the weeds. And once you get into the weeds, making a transition from rhetoric to something more scientific in the broader sense of science, something more technical.

17:57 Dylan: I want to take up that question of what kind of boundary you cross with regards to persuasion, because I think that there's a rhetoric to the scientific speech. I tend to agree that there isn't a neutral ground in talking about persuasive speech, and that something pretty close to there isn't a neutral ground. There's just poorly persuasive speech and more persuasive speech.

18:19 Wes: I think that's a good point, because if the gap in the enthymeme, it's theory, it's models, and the model's never complete, and the theory is always revisable. So the rhetorical element in science, I think, has something to do with what's still left to be investigated and worked out.

18:37 Seth: When we first brought up the topic of reading the rhetoric, you know, obviously it naturally aligns to Gorgias and taking that into account. But I wanted to sort of circle back to this idea that Aristotle says in the rhetoric that what is true and what is just has a certain innate amount of persuasiveness. And so you're always going to be more persuasive if you speak, you know, what's true or what's just. But he's sort of acknowledging the reality that that's not sufficient or may not be sufficient to convince the audience that it in fact is true, but also perhaps convince the audience to take action.

So, Wes, I completely agree with what you said about moral sentiment in the beginning. And what I wanted to ask was, is Aristotle's attempt here a more nuanced version of articulating how people actually interact with each other in these. These kind of contexts, or is it a more nuanced version of what Plato was doing? Or is it more just a straight up. Could we say that Plato just missed the boat? The way that Plato talks about dialectic and the search for truth is something that's either so only philosophical or so only unrealistic, that this is just a straight up refutation of it.

Is it a refinement or a refutation?

19:53 Mark: I mean, a lot of the time in both those Platonic dialogues, the Gorgias and the Protagoras, is taken up by fights over how people are going to talk. You sophists don't give me your long speeches. You have to engage in my way of asking you questions and maybe you'll just say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, Socrates, until you contradict yourself. And that is a super unrealistic model to think that anybody is going to follow you in that way. It is very different for us because whether Socrates is talking about philosophy or Socrates and Aristotle are talking about rhetoric, they're both talking about oral things where we have in mind.

We just don't have that many opportunities to give persuasive speeches in that way. And certainly what we're doing now does not count, I don't think, because it's one on one for the most part, or one one to many. What we do is more written. And I would think that if you're trying to figure out how you're going to, in your persuasive writing papers or on the Internet, say, convince somebody of something, as soon as you go into the towers of texts and trying to spell out a long argument, it seems like it does become problematic.

21:04 Seth: This is very real and vibrant to me, because when we studied Plato on rhetoric, I think you guys probably don't remember, but I talked about how I felt like somebody who's spent a large part of my career in marketing, that rhetoric was maligned and abused. And, you know, I was defending rhetoric from the Socratic attack. To me, when I read Aristotle's rhetoric, it's very much almost like a handbook for how to do marketing in some respect. And it resonates very strongly with me, the whole notion that rhetoric involves two or more participants and that acknowledging the place from which your audience is coming, what they understand, and then tailoring your message to them so that they, for the purposes of not just communicating what you're trying to communicate, but also to do it in a way that's persuasive, I think is spot on.

I mean, to me this is critical. And it also frames the whole notion of how rhetoric functions in society between actors that could conceivably be peers or superior and inferior, or like, if you're speaking to an audience that doesn't understand your frame of reference or your background, how do you change the way that you speak in order to be persuasive? And he's talking about strategies and ways to do this, not necessarily for the purposes of subversion of the process or deception, but just if you think about right now where we're in this midst of this societal turmoil, where there are people saying, you can't speak to my experience.

You don't understand my experience. And it's like, okay, well, if I don't share the same common background with you, if I don't have the same frame of reference to the same values, if I don't understand the meaning of things quite the same way you do, how can you frame something to me to be persuasive? How can you convince me by speaking in a language that I can understand, right, that it just points to the need to accommodate your audience, whether that be one person or thousands?

23:04 Wes: So I think we should also think of this conflict between the rhetorical and the rational against the background of 20th century philosophical developments, which tended towards the idea that reason falls apart and everything is reducible to rhetorical moves, right, which is a subset. It's related to the idea, and we've seen this with Foucault and post structuralism and deconstruction, but the idea that justice, in a way or the social, is reducible to power relations, and that reason is just one more arrow available in the rhetorical quiver, and it amounts to an assertion of a kind of power.

So thinking here in terms of different kinds of compulsions. So this also goes back to our episodes on ethics, where to be stuck in heteronomy, right, is to be under the compulsion of one's desires in relation to things outside of us, right? We're compelled to eat the pizza because we have no self control. And then there's the compulsion of the good or of rationality, where that, in a way, is supposed to be a kind of, paradoxically, a kind of freedom to be able to reason about such things, to be able to see what's good for me, and to say no to the pizza, that's a different kind of compulsion.

So the question is whether the compulsion that we get from reason, the idea of a deductive truth that's irresistible, is reducible to these other forms of compulsion. Is it just another power relation? Does it just turn out to be heteronomy as well, does reason ultimately, is it reducible to rhetorical moves? So that's an idea that has been actually tremendously influential, and it's been influential within academia, and now it's seeped into today's politics, where the idea is that reason isn't enough, because in a way, what's prior to reason and truth is the good and certain assumptions about the good.

25:05 Mark: Can you just clarify for listeners what you mean by heteronomy being slave of multiple masters? It sounds like what you were saying.

25:13 Wes: Hetero is other as opposed to autonomy, and this is big in Kant, but heteronomy as opposed to being unfree, because I am a slave to the objects of desire outside of me, I just

25:25 Mark: want to contradict what I was just saying. And of course, when we read this, and we're going to try to use our persuasive skills, we're mostly going to be doing this in writing. Of course, there are many, you know, we can use this to analyze the speeches of public figures and things. And that was actually very productive for me to think about, you know, whether it's lawyers in law court or public figures giving their speeches to, you know, argue that we should pursue a general legislation path of one or another, or praise and blame, like those two things that Aristotle mentions as two of the three kinds besides the law courts of speech, I think really get combined in the political speech that you're trying to praise everything that your party is doing and blame the other side.

And you're also trying to establish, you know, sometimes in specific terms we should pass this law and this law, but more often in general terms, we should pursue this policy. It's complicated because knowing your audience, of course, these politicians have a particular audience, right? They're speaking to their base, or maybe this particular speech is not to their base. They're trying to address the nation in the light of a national tragedy or something. But since every audience is going to be much broader than what Aristotle had in mind, then, you know, maybe Joe Biden was trying to.

I don't know how successfully. I didn't actually see this interview, but the thing that he was called out on of if you don't vote for me, you ain't black. And he was talking to a black interviewer.

26:44 Wes: If you don't see the difference between me and a Republican, you ain't black. Something like more like that.

26:49 Mark: Yes. I mean, clearly he was trying to follow Aristotle's advice. He was talking to this black interviewer with a black audience. And I don't know if it resonated it mostly seemed like people who he was not aiming at, but nonetheless are witnessing this speech that then jump all over things.

27:06 Wes: He got flack from both sides.

27:08 Mark: But this seems all too common. Like if you're preaching to your base and you call the other side deplorables, like probably your base is, yeah, they are deplorables. Yay. But yet that followed Hillary around for the rest of her campaign, yet people try to do the same to Trump anyway. Did you guys find Aristotle talking about rhetoric this way? Illustrative in any way of what politicians are trying to do?

27:32 Seth: Yeah. So let's focus on what he says about the three elements that impact the persuasiveness of the speech. There's the enthymeme itself, the argument itself. There's the character of the speaker, at least how the character, the speaker is perceived by the audience, and then there's the attitudes and disposition of the audience itself. In reading this, I'm thinking one, something I heard many, many years ago which was like, it's 10% what you say, 30% how you sound and 60% how you look. Right? It's the whole. This is why Jack Kennedy beat Nixon in that first televised debate.

Right? Because Nixon looked horrible on television or whatever, but. Or the medium is the message. You know, it's this idea that the argument itself, to rely on your audience to just focus on the content of your argument and then persuade themselves based on your reasoning is it's certainly not a strategy for winning in politics and it's probably not a strategy for winning any anywhere else with respect to public debate. But the idea that we see right now how many politicians just absolutely, you know, in this post factual world that we live in, they just gloss the facts.

They gloss. It doesn't even matter the truth of what's being said. In fact, the content of what's being said doesn't matter. I was reading that and thinking about demagoguery and populism, that if somebody can come along with a message that resonates with the audience, even if it's not true, and by virtue of tying into those attitudes and feelings that the audience already holds, it's very easy to persuade them because you're basically just suggesting something Aristotle says you really don't want to convince somebody 100%. You want them to immediately know where you're going as soon as you start your argument.

Like that's the best case scenario is they already know where you're going to head, but they feel like they're working it out themselves. And I think it very much describes the way in which a lot of political rhetoric works these days.

29:34 Dylan: The only thing I quibble about, Seth, is you said twice these days. But isn't it just reading this just tell you that it's the way it always has worked, at least for 2,500 years.

29:43 Seth: I mean, sorry, I'm just living now, so I can only judge on what I'm saying when I say these days. I mean the stuff I'm seeing and hearing. And by the way, it's not unique to the right or the left or one or the other. You know, I think I've told you this before, that my wife is kind of addicted to CNN's Way of Covering things. And it's very much the same. They're leading the witness, as it were. Right. They're pandering to a certain kind of base. And that's why it's just tedious. But what's the alternative?

30:09 Wes: Speaking of tedious, shall we dig in?

30:14 Mark: We can put it off no longer.

30:16 Wes: Give us a quote.

30:17 Mark: Start us, Wes.

30:18 Wes: Maybe we should start by saying what the enthymeme is and giving some examples. I started us out on that.

30:25 Mark: Yeah. We basically have three. Just to clarify our reading sections that we did. This beginning of book one, which is mostly the kind of stuff we've been talking about, you know, good rhetoric versus bad rhetoric. The different settings that you would do it in, lays out the three character, the content and the state of disposition of the hearer. That's all in that first five chapters. Then in book two, we have this whole essay on the emotions that we need to get into of basically analyzing what it is to understand the character of the audience and how that might be changed.

Because emotions are things that involve judgments. It's not just people that come in grumpy or something like that. All that's part of it. And then the third part is toward the sort of the middle of the end of book two is this stuff where he really gets into what enthymemes are and how those are different than maxims and how those are different than syllogisms and. Yeah, so let's get some of that technical stuff from basically our third selection.

31:22 Wes: It's a little bit weirdly structured because he'll mention enthymemes up front. And then we don't really get a lot of examples until book two towards the end. But I think what we've done so far is we've talked in broad terms about this distinction between. And relatedness between rhetoric and dialectic, or rhetoric and Reason. So the Kennedy breaks this up into little sections. I can't remember if this acts, does this, but it's in book one, chapter one, part three, where he calls enthymemes the body of persuasion. And then, I think, moves on. You know, I did a little searching on.

Yeah, I just looked up YouTube videos on enthymemes just because I wanted to figure out actually how to pronounce the word. And then I. I went down a really fascinating rabbit hole of little rhetoric lessons where people still actually talk about enthymemes and the way in which they're such a common part of our speech. So some good examples. One is from the Big Lebowski, where he says, does this place look like I'm fucking married? The toilet seats up, man. Or you're majoring in art. Do you want to be able to eat? Or something like that? So in the second one, the premise that's left out is that you could say that there are many different premises left out, but the most generic way to put it is that being an art major means that you're not going to make any money, and that's what you're in college to do.

32:49 Dylan: You need to make money for your life, and you're in college to help move your life along. So you're making a stupid choice.

32:55 Wes: Yeah, I did a really poor job of explaining that. But the point is that not only is this our standard mode of reasoning, leaving out the bulk of our premises, but our speech is littered with it. It's a common part of everyday speaking. And I just wanted to reinforce that, because people might think that this is all just about what you get up to do when you're doing public speaking, but it's actually a habit of mind and a habit of speaking that we're always in, I think, because we're always

33:22 Mark: in a context with assumed shared body of belief.

33:26 Wes: Right.

33:27 Mark: And we're trying to just move each other with regard to one particular, probably.

33:33 Wes: Right.

33:33 Mark: And if we can do so using a cliche, he actually, the maxims are typically the components of enthymemes. Here he thinks, which is strange, given what I was just saying about how we're mostly arguing up particulars.

33:48 Wes: What chapter are you looking at? Mark 20 is induction 21 is maxims. Okay.

33:54 Seth: Yes.

33:54 Dylan: The point was that the maxim, it can become an enthymeme if as long as you put the reason there. So an example that he gives is, there's no one among men who is free, then that's a maxim. But if you can make it into an enthymeme. If you say then for he is a slave either to money or to fortune, and that together makes it an enthymeme.

34:15 Mark: And in fact, both of those parts seem to be maxims. That's what he was pointing out. Like, you could even just say all men are slaves to money or fortune, and that would be a maxim. And so that's the kind of most effective, I think kind of enthymeme or the paradigmatic is if you can string those two together. Like, because everybody's going to agree with the maxims. They're all tried and true cliches. And if you can use one to argue for another, it almost seems like these have to be things that they. Since you could say it by itself, maybe things that they already maybe agree with, but you're calling their attention to it, right? Kind of like Plato recollection.

34:47 Dylan: There's that reasoning that's going from the universal to the particular, right? You're making it persuasive by the implication that, well, you can gather up all these particulars into that universal, so that you get people saying, well, you know, I'm mortal, so therefore X or Y.

35:03 Seth: I wanted to be cautious about using the term maxim just because the syllogistic structure and because we're not talking about modal speech and syllogisms. The way you think of all things are this, some things are that, but instead it's more like usually stuff this or that. It doesn't necessarily have to be a maxim or some kind of pithy cliche. Just any two declarative sentences can be put together in some respect, and they gain persuasive power by virtue of being paired together and it becomes an enthymeme. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a maxim or a cliche or a tenant or something like that. It can be something very simple as well.

35:40 Mark: So maybe using maxims, using cliches, using things from literature is an additional point over and above. But in explaining what enthymeme is, he's mostly using things like this.

35:49 Seth: Yeah.

35:50 Mark: Example I found from Euripides. This is chapter 21, page 225 in the no man who is right thinking by nature should ever let his children be educated to be outstandingly wise. So that's a maxim by itself. The whole enthymeme is. You say that and then you say for gar is the Greek preposition there. Apart from any other lazy inclination they acquire, they incur a resentful jealousy from their neighbors. So there's the Reason, which that part does not seem like a maxim in our sense. Right.

36:19 Wes: Let's say what premise is being left out there? Even though it's really simple.

36:23 Mark: So if we put it in the correct order, people who are too wise will be lazy and incur resentful jealousy. And then the second premise, that's missing, therefore, don't let your children be educated to be outstandingly wise. So what's the missing premise?

36:38 Seth: That those things are bad? That they would incur.

36:41 Mark: Yeah, which it seems like that's just built into the wording choice. Right? You wouldn't say lazy, right?

36:48 Seth: No, but it's built into the structure of how enthymemes work for Aristotle, which is, if you're doing it properly, you should have a shared, as you mentioned earlier, mark, kind of like a shared set of assumptions. Your audience, you don't have to say that having people resent you because you're lazy. You shouldn't have to state that as a premise. That's right. If you do, then you're in a very different kind of rhetorical situation.

37:13 Wes: So some of them are obvious, but not all of them. So the obvious, the other, just to reiterate the one with the clearest example, I think these examples are murkier than the example of all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal. Where you can point to one of the left out premises and say, okay, that could be treated as too obvious to state. It's all too obvious to state, really. But in the case that Dylan already read, and it's just a little bit below, there is no one among men who is free, for he is a slave either to money or fortune.

So all men are a slave to money or fortune. To be a slave to money or to fortune is not to be free. So that's the unstated premise, but it sounds almost tautologous. But it's not right. Because really freedom there is a kind of equivocation. It's the freedom that we normally think of as being a slave, as in literally being a slave, or being unfree, as in, you know, literally having one's liberties taken away, as opposed to this more psychological or ethical version of unfreedom, which is almost really metaphorical. So the missing premise there, which seems to be almost so obvious that it's tautologous, is actually an extension of a metaphor.

And as we know that reasoning from analogy or reasoning from metaphors is often illegitimate, you set up a comparison which doesn't, in detail, really work.

38:36 Mark: I like that you use the word heteronomy for that Metaphorical version, even if it literally applies, you would not go to some actual slaves and oh, I see, you're suffering from some heteronomy. They would beat the crap out of

38:47 Dylan: you in chapter 20, just before this. Because in chapter 21 he's talking about maxims as enthymemes. I want to just point out that enthymemes are part of means of persuasion. So at the beginning of 21 he's going to talk about the particular topics of the means of persuasion. And the common means of persuasion are two in kind. Example, an enthymeme for a maxim is part of an enthymeme. We were just talking about maxims and in the section here in 20 he spends time talking about examples both of analogies and of stories or fables. It's persuasive by analogy as well.

You can see how they are working the way similar to the way the maxims are, but they don't have the same structure that a maxim does. That's analogous to a syllogism and therefore an example of an enthymeme. But they're working by way of a kind of reasoning that is in line with. Well, for the most part this, I guess it's analogy. This is the bottom of 223 he is giving an example of fables. You know, examples are of two forms. One form of an example is to describe events that have happened in the past and one is to make them up oneself. Of the latter one kind are analogies and the other are fables such as those by used of Aesop and the Libyans.

He says an analogy is the sort of argument Socrates used, as if someone were to say that people chosen by lot ought not to be rulers, since that would be the same sort of thing as if one chose athletes by lot, not the ones with the ability to compete, but whoever won the lottery, or if whichever one of the sailors chose by lot had to steer the ship as if it had to be by lottery the winner and not the one with knowledge. This is an interesting example because it's exactly the kind of thing Socrates does and exactly the kind of reason why you would see why Socrates or Plato would be anti democratic in the strong form of democracy in which leadership was drawn by lots and saying that, well, you know, we should pick people who have capability towards being good leaders kind of thing.

40:50 Mark: Can we get a little clearer on what the example means there? That this is a. I think it was a Stanford Encyclopedia article really pulls these apart as that he talks about something like what we would call induction, which is this example. Whereas induction, the way we talk of, you know, if you're reading Hume, induction is we see a bunch of particulars and we generalize that from like, now we see a bunch of swans that are white, therefore probably all swans are white. But, you know, we're kind of leaving it open. There could be a black swan. It's what science does. And the more examples you get, the more different places you look for examples, the more thorough you are, the better. The induction.

41:26 Seth: The.

41:27 Mark: Whereas this is an induction for Aristotle is supposed to be something that's more like a deduction. Right. It's more certain because you're taking one individual within a genus and trying to say something about another individual within that genus, because the first one is a great example. So I think that you could do that by analogy, or you could do that. Do we get a good example of an example here?

41:50 Wes: You have to go back to the book one, early part of book one, Right. For examples of that.

41:55 Dylan: And the distinction between an example and an analogy. It's going to become blurred, right?

42:00 Seth: Would it? I mean, I thought for him, an example is an actual historical. Like if you said, in the case of the shortly following what you just read, Dylan, he's talking about how to respond to some dictators. And if you said, look at what happened in Sparta when so and so came to power, people thought they were going to be safe and instead they got enslaved. Right. That is more powerful than telling the horse fable about the horse asking the man for revenge against the stag. And then the man gets up on the horse, which in turn is even at least more persuasive than I would say, an analogy.

I think there's a ranking of efficacy as far as the persuasiveness is concerned, but he definitely prioritizes historical examples over fables and analogies. But this is what I was trying to get at earlier, Taking seriously the notion that an enthymeme is a syllogism like this with an unstated premise. And we know syllogisms particularly are of the sort. All of this or some of this. I feel like there's a way in which you can think about the enthymemes as syllogisms which describe, as he says, likelihoods or possibilities, but not in terms of most.

Right. Which gets into the modalities about some and all. But instead say something like, usually, often heroes act like this. So John is acting like this, and you say, okay, well, we could infer from that that John's a Hero or Jane's a hero or something like that. Whatever the structure is, that helps me make some sense of kind of this notion of the syllogistic structure, but divorcing it from. Not didactic. What's the word?

43:37 Dylan: Dialectic.

43:37 Seth: Dialectic, sorry.

43:38 Wes: So this goes back to chapter two, I think he talks about the fact that enthymemes are derived from probabilities and signs.

43:47 Mark: This is book two, chapter two, or

43:49 Wes: book one, chapter two. Okay, just looking for a good example here. I know there's the one with the milk, right? The milk being a sign of something.

43:57 Dylan: 1356 B is where he says an enthymeme is a syllogism. An apparent enthymeme is an apparent syllogism. But that's not quite what you wanted. You wanted to get to specific examples.

44:08 Wes: Examples of signs. Yeah.

44:09 Mark: Are examples. Types of syllogisms. It's so terrible. That example is the technical term we are exploring and of course we want examples of examples.

44:19 Wes: Well, sign is the semeion is what we're looking at right now, not paradigm. So they're related.

44:26 Dylan: But yeah, signs are not examples.

44:28 Mark: Are they enthymemes or are they a different thing than enthymemes?

44:31 Wes: Because they are premises. They in enthymeme. So, but if someone were to state that there is a sign that someone is sick for he has a fever, or a woman has given birth for she has milk, that is a necessary sign. So you see that a woman has, you know, breast milk, and necessarily the conclusion is she has given birth. So I think these signs are really amounts of forms of. Well, they can amount to forms of causal reasoning.

45:02 Dylan: The strongest ones are. Right?

45:04 Wes: Yeah, the strongest ones. So he calls some necessary and some not.

45:09 Seth: The section you're talking about, Wes, is on 141. It's 1357 B at the very top there.

45:15 Dylan: He says, while some of the premises from which enthymemes are stated are things necessarily so, most are things that are so for the most part. And enthymemes are based on likelihoods and signs. So it is necessary for the former pair to. To be the same as the latter. Then this whole section is exactly what you described.

45:33 Wes: And then some signs are related as particularly universal. Some are related as the converse of that.

45:41 Dylan: Let me read a little bit of this because it's actually pretty clear. So a likelihood is something that happens for the most part, though not in the unqualified sense in which some people define it, but as applied to things that admit of going different ways, has the relation to the Thing about which it is likely that the universal has to the particular among signs, one sort has the relation that one of the particulars has to the universal, but the other has the relation that one of the universals has to the particular of these. A necessary sign is a criterion, but the non necessary kind has no name to indicate the difference.

By necessary I mean signs from which a syllogism comes about. And hence a sign of this sort is a criterion. For whenever people think it is not possible to refute what has been said, they believe they are offering a criterion to that has been conclusively demonstrated, since the boundary and a conclusion are the same thing in ancient tongue.

46:31 Seth: Well, keep going, because the next example I think makes it clear.

46:35 Dylan: Yeah. The kind of sign that is as the particular to the universal is, for example, like this. If one were to say that since Socrates was wise and just, it is a sign that the wise are just, this is a sign, but a refutable one, even if what is said is true, since it does not form a syllogism. But if one were to say, for example, that since someone has a fever, it is a sign that he is sick, or that since a woman has milk, it is a sign that she has given birth, this is necessary among signs, that is what a criterion alone is for only it, if it is true, is irrefutable.

The kind of sign that has the relation to the universal, of the universal, to the particular is, for example, if one were to say that since someone is breathing rapidly, it is a sign that he has a fever. And this too is refutable, even if it is true, because it is also possible for someone who does not have a fever to be short of breath.

47:26 Mark: I figured out what was confusing me, which is induction. So on page just a couple pages earlier, where you're looking at page 139, there's a footnote. Footnote 14. The word epagoge is translated induction only here, only with reluctance. Aristotle defines the word as the transition from particulars to universals that's in the topics. But he never uses it to mean a mere generalization made acceptable by an accumulation of particulars. Like that's what Hume would mean, the universal, something intelligible, wholly and precisely present in a single perceptual experience of a particular.

And for grasping at a single instance is sufficient. That's what I was thinking. Example was instance. Even if more facilitates discovery, nothing needs to be built up from separate pieces of evidence, since acts of epagoge reveal the universal through its being evident in the particular so this is actually talking about something that's in different texts. And this is what I was kind of excited about, that it looked like Husserlian phenomenology, where you're grasping essences somehow by looking at particulars. But then he says Sachs clarifies that's not what he means in rhetoric.

What he means in rhetoric is what you guys are talking about. An example, paradigma in rhetoric is an alleged fact or invented illustration, which may serve as one type of sign that something general is true.

48:38 Wes: I think it bears thinking about Kripke a little bit too, right? And the stereotype by which we fix things. So the assumption is that we see a tiger, the tiger has stripes. We don't need to see more than one tiger to conclude. We see this structured whole and we say, okay, this is a type of thing, we automatically jump to that conclusion. And the stripes themselves. We don't consider that something accidental. I mean, it could be. It could turn out to be the case that some tigers don't have stripes. But as a way of fixing our referent to a natural kind, we just notice the fact that things are formal and organized, and we expect a generality to arise out of that.

In other words, part of this is our faith that things will turn out to be kinds, that things will turn out to be universalizable. And then we'll fix on certain qualities which we assume that that will be universalizable. But even if they don't turn out to be, that's okay, because all we were doing was fixing the kind, and the kind itself exists. And then we'll figure out that trying to correlate qualities to that kind is going to be more complicated. And that will have to get us into deep theory and into the deeper structure of things. So the same thing holds for water and H2O induction is a more naive way to describe that process.

As if we had to see a bunch of examples and then build it up, it's really quite gestalt, you know, we just see one thing.

50:10 Seth: That's a really good point, Wes, that he says at some point, too, that you shouldn't have to provide multiple examples. In fact, if you spend more time giving more examples, it means it's less persuasive, less well structured. As far as an act of speech, you are relying on the audience to grasp that universal from the single example and not persuading them by virtue of giving them multiple examples that they can. Then they see if it's happened seven times before, it'll happen again. You just should Be able to give it the rhetorical force of a single example.

50:41 Wes: And it does lead to the operative word that I was using a stereotype. So this. One of the words I used before was prejudice. Part of what fills in the gaps to enthymemes are these sorts of things. So it does lead to lots of errors. He's giving examples of signs that work necessarily, and some that just not always true. It doesn't really follow that if Socrates is wise and just then that everyone who's wise is just, well, it's suggestive. Right? It suggests that thesis, but really that's something to be explored and tested. In other words, it suggests a hypothesis, it suggests a premise for an experiment, and it could be true.

And we're probably inclined to think that there's some relation based on that one instance, but it's definitely not necessarily the case. And someone who's exploring the issue would just start, okay, well, what about this person who's wise and was not just. And then someone will say, well, then they weren't really wise. And then you get into the meaning of wise and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

51:39 Seth: Thinking about the context in which you would say something like that. Yeah, it's an invitation to explore if you're in a dialectic conversation. But if I was employing this, if somebody was accused of a crime or accused of being unjust, and I was able to convince you that they were wise, then I would deploy this and say, well, Socrates was wise and he was also just. And I would be trying to plant in your mind the seed of doubt that somebody who is wise could be unjust. That would be the way in which that would be used.

52:10 Wes: And based on likelihood, right?

52:11 Seth: Based on likelihood, like you would think.

52:13 Wes: Yeah, it's probably. It's less likely that someone who's wise would be unjust. And that probably is a good assumption.