Ethos & Rhetoric – Fall Asleep To Aristotle’s PR Tips

Ethos, Aristotle’s favorite way to sound legit, anchors this slow, snoozy trip through rhetorical persuasion. Ideal for anyone hoping to out-argue insomnia with ancient logic and a deeply credible bedtime story.

Transcript

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast where I help you learn a little and sleep a lot.

I'm your host Benjamin Boster and today I'm going to read through a couple of Wikipedia articles that are related to each other.

The first one is about ethos and the second one is about rhetoric.

Ethos is a Greek word meaning character that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community,

Nation,

Or ideology,

And the balance between caution and passion.

The Greeks also used this word to refer to the power of music to influence emotions,

Behaviors,

And even morals.

Early Greek stories of Orpheus exhibit this idea in a compelling way.

The word's use in rhetoric is closely based on the Greek terminology used by Aristotle.

In his concept of the three artistic proofs or modes of persuasion alongside pathos and logos.

It gives credit to the speaker or the speaker is taking credit.

Ethos is a Greek word originally meaning a custom place,

As in the habitats of horses,

Custom,

Habit,

Equivalent to Latin mores.

Ethos forms the root of ethikos,

Meaning morality,

Showing moral character,

As an adjective in the neuter plural form ta ethika.

In modern usage,

Ethos denotes the disposition,

Character,

Or fundamental values peculiar to a specific person,

People,

Organization,

Culture,

Or movement.

For example,

The poet and critic T.

S.

Eliot wrote in 1940 that the general ethos of the people they have to govern determines the behavior of politicians.

Similarly,

The historian Orlando Fidges wrote in 1996 that in Soviet Russia of the 1920s,

The ethos of the Communist Party dominated every aspect of public life.

Ethos may change in response to new ideas or forces.

For example,

According to the Jewish historian Ari Kromf,

Ideas of economic modernization,

Which were imported into Palestine in the 1930s,

Brought about the abandonment of the agrarian ethos and the reception of the ethos of rapid development.

In rhetoric,

Ethos,

Credibility of the speaker,

Is one of the three artistic proofs,

Pistis,

Or modes of persuasion,

Other principles being logos and pathos,

Discussed by Aristotle in rhetoric as a component of argument.

Speakers must establish ethos from the start.

This can involve moral competence only.

Aristotle,

However,

Broadens the concept to include expertise and knowledge.

For the most part,

This perspective of ethos is the one discussed the most by schools and universities.

Ethos is limited in this view by what the speaker says.

Others,

However,

Contend that a speaker's ethos extends to and is shaped by the overall moral character and history of the speaker.

That is,

What people think of his or her character before this speech has even begun.

According to Aristotle,

There are three categories of ethos.

Pronesis,

Useful skills and practical wisdom.

Arete,

Virtue,

Goodwill.

Eunoia,

Goodwill towards the audience.

In a sense,

Ethos does not belong to the speaker,

But to the audience,

And it's appealing to the audience's emotions.

Thus,

It is the audience that determines whether a speaker is a high or a low ethos speaker.

Violations of ethos include,

A speaker has a direct interest in the outcome of the debate,

E.

G.

A person pleading innocence or a person pleading innocence of a crime.

A speaker has a vested interest or ulterior motive in the outcome of the debate.

The speaker has no expertise,

E.

G.

A lawyer giving a speech on spaceflight is less convincing than an astronaut giving the same speech.

Completely dismissing an argument based on any of the above violations of ethos is an informal fallacy.

The argument may indeed be suspect,

But is not in itself invalid.

Although Plato never uses the term ethos in his extant corpus,

Scholar Colin Bjork,

A communicator,

Podcaster,

And digital rhetorician argues that Plato dramatizes the complexity of rhetorical ethos in the Apology of Socrates.

For Aristotle,

A speaker's ethos was a rhetorical strategy employed by an orator whose purpose was to inspire trust in his audience.

Ethos was therefore achieved through the orator's good sense,

Good moral character,

And good will,

And central to Aristotelian virtue ethics was the notion that this good moral character was increased in virtuous degree by habit.

Ethos also is related to a character's habit as well.

The person's character is related to a person's habits.

Aristotle links virtue,

Habituation,

And ethos most succinctly in Book II of Nicomachean Essex.

Virtue,

Then,

Being of two kinds,

Intellectual and moral,

Intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching,

While moral virtue comes about as a result of habit,

Whence also its name,

Ethica,

Is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word's ethos,

Habit.

Discussing women and rhetoric,

Scholar Carlin Corse Campbell notes that entering the public sphere was considered an act of moral transgression for females of the 19th century.

Women who formed moral reform and abolitionist societies and who made speeches,

Held conventions,

And published newspapers entered the public sphere and thereby lost their claims to purity and piety.

Crafting an ethos within such restrictive moral codes,

Therefore,

Meant adhering to membership of what Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner have theorized as counterpublics.

Crafting an ethos within such restrictive moral codes,

Therefore,

Meant adhering to membership of what Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner have theorized as counterpublics.

While Warner contends that members of counterpublics are afforded little opportunity to join the dominant public and therefore exert true agency,

Nancy Fraser has problematized Habermas' conception of the public sphere as a dominant social totality by theorizing subaltern counterpublics,

Which function as alternative publics that represent parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses,

Which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities,

Interests,

And needs.

Though feminist rhetorical theorists have begun to offer ways of conceiving of ethos that are influenced by postmodern concepts of identity,

They remain cognizant of how these classical associations have shaped and still do shape women's use of the rhetorical tool.

Joanna Schmerz draws on Aristotelian ethos to reinterpret the term alongside feminist theories of subjectivity,

Writing that,

Instead of following a tradition that it seems to me reads ethos somewhat in the manner of an Aristotelian quality,

Proper to the speaker's identity,

A quality capable of being deployed as needed to fit a rhetorical situation,

I will ask how ethos may be dislodged from identity and read in such a way as to multiply the positions from which women may speak.

Rhetorical scholar Kate Ronalds' claim that ethos is the appeal residing in the tension between the speaker's private and public self also presents a more postmodern view of ethos than links credibility and identity.

Similarly,

Nedra Reynolds and Susan Jarrett echo this view of ethos as a fluid and dynamic set of identifications,

Arguing that these split selves are guises,

But they are not distortion or lies in the philosopher's sense.

Rather,

They are deceptions in the sophistic sense,

Recognition of the ways one is positioned multiply differently.

Rhetorical scholar Michael Halloran has argued that the classical understanding of ethos emphasizes the conventional rather than the idiosyncratic,

The public rather than the private.

Commenting further on the classical etymology and understanding of ethos,

Halloran illuminates the interdependence between ethos and cultural context by arguing that to have ethos is to manifest the virtues most valued by the culture to and for which one speaks.

While scholars do not all agree on the dominant sphere in which ethos may be crafted,

Some agree that ethos is formed through the negotiation between private experience and the public,

Rhetorical act of self-expression.

Karen Burke Lafarve's argument in Invention as Social Act situates this negotiation between the private and the public,

Writing that ethos appears in that socially created space,

In the between,

The point of intersection between speaker or writer and listener or reader.

According to Nedra Reynolds,

Ethos,

Like postmodern subjectivity,

Shifts and changes over time,

Across texts,

And around competing spaces.

However,

Reynolds additionally discusses how one might clarify the meaning of ethos with rhetoric as expressing inherently communal roots.

This stands in direct opposition to what she describes as the claim that ethos can be faked or manipulated,

Because individuals would be formed by the values of their culture and not the other way around.

Rhetorical scholar John Otto also suggests that ethos is negotiated across a community and not simply a manifestation of the self.

In the era of mass-mediated communication,

Otto contends one's ethos is often created by journalists and dispersed over multiple news texts.

With this in mind,

Otto coins the term intertextual ethos,

The notion that a public figure's ethos is constituted within and across a range of mass-media voices.

In Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos,

Scholar Coretta Pittman notes that race has been generally absent from theories of ethos construction,

And that this concept is troubling for black women.

Pittman writes,

Unfortunately in the history of race relations in America,

Black Americans' ethos ranks low among other racial and ethnic groups in the United States.

More often than not,

Their moral characters have been associated with a criminalized and sexualized ethos in visual and print culture.

The ways in which characters were constructed is important when considering ethos or character in Greek tragedy.

Augustus Tabor Murray explains that the depiction of a character was limited by the circumstances under which Greek tragedies were presented.

These included the single,

Unchanging scene,

Necessary use of a chorus,

Small number of characters limiting interaction,

Large outdoor theaters,

And the use of masks,

Which all influenced characters to be more formal and simple.

Murray also declares that the inherent characteristics of Greek tragedies are important in the makeup of the characters.

One of these is the fact that tragedy characters were nearly always mythical characters.

This limited the character,

As well as the plot,

To the already well-known myth from which the material of the play was taken.

The other characteristic is the relatively short length of most Greek plays.

This limited the scope of the play and characterization so that the characters were defined by one overriding motivation toward a certain objective from the beginning of the play.

However,

Murray clarifies that strict constancy is not always the rule in Greek tragedy characters.

To support this,

He points out that the example of Antigone,

Who,

Even though she strongly defies Creon at the beginning of the play,

Begins to doubt her cause and plead for mercy as she is led to her execution.

Several other aspects of the character element in ancient Greek tragedy are worth noting.

One of these,

Which C.

E.

Garten discusses,

Is the fact that either because of contradictory action or incomplete description,

The character cannot be viewed as an individual,

Or the reader is left confused by the character.

One method of reconciling this would be to consider these characters to be flat or typecast instead of round.

This would mean that most of the information about the character centers around one main quality or viewpoint.

Comparable to the flat character option,

The reader could also view the character as a symbol.

Examples of this might be the Eumenides as vengeance,

Or Clytemnestra as symbolizing ancestral curse.

Yet another means of looking at character,

According to Tycho von and Howald,

Is the idea that characterization is not important.

This idea is maintained by the theory that the play is meant to affect the viewer or reader scene by scene,

With attention being only focused on the section at hand.

This point of view also holds that the different figures in a play are only characterized by the situation surrounding them,

And only enough so that their actions can be understood.

Garrett makes three more observations about a character in Greek tragedy.

The first is an abundant variety of types of characters in Greek tragedy.

His second observation is that the reader or viewer's need for characters to display a unified identity that is similar to human nature is usually fulfilled.

Thirdly,

Characters in tragedies include incongruities and idiosyncrasies.

Another aspect stated by Garrett is that tragedy plays are composed of language,

Character,

And action,

And the interactions of these three components.

These are fused together throughout the play.

He explains that action normally determines the means of characterization.

For example,

The play Julius Caesar is a good example for a character without credibility,

Brutus.

Another principle he states is the importance of these three components' effect on each other,

The important repercussion of this being a character's impact on action.

Augustus Tabor Murray also examines the importance and degree of interaction between plot and character.

He does this by discussing Aristotle's statements about plot and character in his Poetics,

That plot can exist without character,

But the character cannot exist without plot,

And so the character is secondary to the plot.

Murray maintains that Aristotle did not mean that complicated plot should hold the highest place in a tragedy play.

This is because the plot was,

More often than not,

Simple and therefore not a major point of tragic interest.

Murray conjectures that people today do not accept Aristotle's statement about character and plot because to modern people the most memorable things about tragedy plays are often the characters.

However,

Murray does concede that Aristotle is correct and that there can be no portrayal of character without at least a skeleton outline of plot.

One other term frequently used to describe the dramatic revelation of character in writing is persona.

While the concept of ethos has traveled through the rhetorical tradition,

The concept of persona has emerged from the literary tradition and is associated with a theatrical mask.

Roger Cherry explores the distinctions between ethos and pathos to mark the distance between a writer's autobiographical self and the author's discursive self as projected through the narrator.

The two terms also help to refine distinctions between situated and invented ethos.

Situated ethos relies on a speaker's or writer's durable position of authority in the world.

Invented ethos relies more on the immediate circumstances of the rhetorical situation.

In pictorial narrative,

Ethos,

Or character,

Also appears in the visual art of famous or mythological ancient Greek events and murals,

On poetry,

And sculpture,

Referred to generally as pictorial narrative.

Aristotle even praised the ancient Greek painter Polygnathus because his paintings included characterization.

The way in which the subject and his actions are portrayed in visual art can convey the subject's ethical character,

And through this the work's overall theme,

Just as effectively as poetry or drama can.

This characterization portrayed men as they ought to be,

Which is the same as Aristotle's idea of what ethos,

Or character,

Should be in tragedy.

Mark D.

Stansbury O'Donnell states that pictorial narratives often had ethos as its focus,

And was therefore concerned with showing the character's moral choices.

David Castriata,

Agreeing with Stansbury O'Donnell's statement,

Says that the main way Aristotle considered poetry and visual arts to be on equal levels was in character representation and its effect on action.

However,

Castriata also maintains that Aristotle's opinion,

That his interest,

Has to do with the influence that such ethical representation may exert upon the public.

Castriata also explains that,

According to Aristotle,

The activity of these artists is to be judged worthy and useful above all because exposure of their work is beneficial to the polis.

Accordingly,

This was the reason for the representation of character,

Or ethos,

In public paintings and sculptures.

In order to portray the character's choice,

The pictorial narrative often shows an earlier scene than when the action was committed.

Castriata explains that ancient Greek art expresses the idea that character was the major factor influencing the outcome of the Greeks' conflicts against their enemies.

Because of this,

Ethos was the essential variable in the equation,

Or analogy between myth and actuality.

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion.

It is one of the three ancient arts of the discourse,

Trivium,

Along with grammar and logic,

Dialectic.

As an academic discipline within the humanities,

Rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform,

Persuade,

And motivate their audiences.

Rhetoric also provides heuristics for understanding,

Discovering,

And developing arguments for particular situations.

Aristotle defined rhetoric as the faculty of observing,

In any given case,

The available means of persuasion.

And since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law,

For passage of proposals in the assembly,

Or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies,

He called it a combination of the science of logic and the ethical branch of politics.

Aristotle also identified three persuasive audience appeals,

Logos,

Pathos,

And ethos.

The five canons of rhetoric,

Or phases of developing a persuasive speech,

Were first codified in classical Rome,

Invention,

Arrangement,

Style,

Memory,

And delivery.

From ancient Greece to the late 19th century,

Rhetoric played a central role in Western education in training orators,

Lawyers,

Counselors,

Historians,

Statesmen,

And poets.

Scholars have debated the scope of rhetoric since ancient times.

Although some have limited rhetoric to the specific realm of political discourse,

To many modern scholars it encompasses every aspect of culture.

Contemporary studies of rhetoric address a much more diverse range of domains than was the case in ancient times.

While classical rhetoric trained speakers to be effective persuaders in public forums,

And in situations such as courtrooms and assemblies,

Contemporary rhetoric investigates human discourse writ large.

Rhetoricians have studied the discourses of a wide variety of domains,

Including the natural and social sciences,

Fine art,

Religion,

Journalism,

Digital media,

Fiction,

History,

Cartography,

And architecture,

Along with the more traditional domains of politics and the law.

Because the ancient Greeks valued public political participation,

Rhetoric emerged as an important curriculum for those desiring to influence politics.

Rhetoric is still associated with its political origins.

However,

Even the original instructors of western speech,

The sophists,

Disputed this limited view of rhetoric.

According to sophists like Gorgias,

A successful rhetorician could speak convincingly on a topic in any field,

Regardless of his experience in that field.

This suggested rhetoric could be a means of communicating any expertise,

Not just politics.

In his Encomium to Helen,

Gorgias even applied rhetoric to fiction by seeking,

For his amusement,

To prove the blamelessness of the mythical Helen of Troy in starting the Trojan War.

Plato defined the scope of rhetoric by discarding any connotation of religious ritual or magical incantation,

Simply taking the term in its literal sense,

Which means leading the soul through words.

He criticized the sophists for using rhetoric to deceive rather than to discover truth.

In Gorgias,

One of the Socratic Dialogues,

Plato defines rhetoric as the persuasion of ignorant masses within the courts and assemblies.

Rhetoric,

In Plato's opinion,

Is merely a form of flattery,

And functions similarly to culinary arts,

Which mask the undesirability of unhealthy food by making it taste good.

Plato considered any speech of lengthy prose aimed at flattery as within the scope of rhetoric.

Some scholars,

However,

Contest the idea that Plato despised rhetoric,

And instead view his dialogue as a dramatization of complex rhetorical principles.

Socrates explained the relationship between rhetoric and flattery when he maintained that a rhetorician who teaches anyone how to persuade people in an assembly to do what he wants,

Without knowledge of what is just or unjust,

Engages in a kind of flattery that constitutes an image of a part of the art of politics.

Aristotle both redeemed rhetoric from Plato and narrowed its focus by defining three genres of rhetoric—deliberative,

Forensic,

Or judicial,

And epidectic.

Yet,

Even as he provided order to existing rhetorical theories,

Aristotle generalized the definition of rhetoric to be the ability to identify the appropriate means of persuasion in a given situation,

Based upon the art of rhetoric.

This made rhetoric applicable to all fields,

Not just politics.

Aristotle viewed the antheming based upon logic,

Especially based upon the syllogism,

As the basis of rhetoric.

Aristotle also outlined the generic constraints that focus the rhetorical art squarely within the domain of public political practice.

He restricted rhetoric to the domain of the contingent or probable—those matters that admit multiple legitimate opinions or arguments.

Since the time of Aristotle,

Logic has changed.

For example,

Modal logic has undergone a major development that also modifies rhetoric.

The contemporary Neo-Aristotelian and Neo-Sophistic positions on rhetoric mirror the division between the Sophists and Aristotle.

Neo-Aristotelians generally study rhetoric as political discourse,

While the Neo-Sophistic view contends that rhetoric cannot be so limited.

Rhetorical scholar Michael Leff characterizes the conflict between these positions as viewing rhetoric as a thing contained,

Versus a container.

The Neo-Aristotelian view threatens the study of rhetoric by restraining it to such a limited field,

Ignoring many critical applications of rhetorical theory,

Criticism,

And practice.

Simultaneously,

The Neo-Sophists threaten to expand rhetoric beyond a point of coherent theoretical value.

In more recent years,

People studying rhetoric have tended to enlarge its object domain beyond speech.

Kenneth Burke asserted humans use rhetoric to resolve conflicts by identifying shared characteristics and interests in symbols.

People engage in identification,

Either to assign themselves or another to a group.

This definition of rhetoric as identification broadens the scope from strategic and covert political persuasion to the more implicit tactics of identification found in an immense range of sources.

Burke focused on the interplay of identification and division,

Maintaining that identification compensates for an original division by preventing a strict separation between objects,

People,

And spaces.

This is achieved by assigning to them common properties through linguistic symbols.

Among the many scholars who have since pursued Burke's line of thought,

James Boyd White sees rhetoric as a broader domain of social experience in his notion of constitutive rhetoric.

Influenced by theories of social construction,

White argues that culture is reconstituted through language.

Just as language influences people,

People influence language.

Language is socially constructed and depends on the meanings people attach to it.

Because language is not rigid and changes depending on the situation,

The very usage of language is rhetorical.

An author,

White would say,

Is always trying to construct a new world and persuading his or her readers to share that world within the text.

People engage in rhetoric anytime they speak or produce meaning.

Even in the field of science,

Via practices which were once viewed as being merely the objective testing and reporting of knowledge,

Scientists persuade their audience to accept their findings by sufficiently demonstrating that their study of experiment was conducted reliably and resulted in sufficient evidence to support their conclusions.

The vast scope of rhetoric is difficult to define.

Political discourse remains the paradigmatic example for studying and theorizing specific techniques and conceptions of persuasion or rhetoric.

Reviews

Whatever you were talking about put me right out. 😂
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