Rhetorica:
Won't Somebody Please Think of the Pathetic?
—Part I

The less grave reason of the two is that, while we all have some direct familiarity with most of them, emotions are extremely difficult to thoroughly analyze, understand, and classify. In a way, emotions are very like colors. A few basics are more or less universally recognized: Sorrow, fear, anger, and happiness seem to form the black, white, red, and green¹ of our emotional palette. However, from there, the taxonomy becomes controversial surprisingly quickly. In 1980, psychologist Robert Plutchik diagrammed varieties and intensities on emotion on a flower-shaped model² based on eight kinds of emotion, and this is useful so far as it goes, but it is easy to question the details. Are “interest” and “acceptance” really feelings? Is there always an element of surprise in disapproval? Is there genuine continuity between pensiveness and grief? And so on.

“Wicked”—Etymologically, Maybe³

The other and more serious issue with pathos is that it may be the most fertile of all the seed-beds of fallacy. We discussed over forty sophistries in our series on that subject; a quarter, if not more, were substitutions of emotion for thought—emotions like envy, delight, pride, pity, rage, shame, and anxiety. Probably most of us have learnt by experience that we are not always in tip-top intellectual shape when overwhelmed by a strong emotion, of whatever kind.

Moreover, whether the relevant fallacies themselves are emotional or not, they are likely to be chosen for emotional reasons—an anger or a jealousy that makes every tool feel legitimate, a longing or a fear that seems to supersede all rules. What, in the end, distinguishes the rhetorician’s “appeal to pathos” from the sophist’s “making the worse appear the better cause”?

But We Draw the Line at “False”

Simply this: some emotions are appropriate to some circumstances, while others are not. Sadness befits a funeral. Joy befits a coming-of-age ceremony. Anger befits the revelation of an injustice.

This does not necessarily reflect on the character of people who do or don’t feel the “appropriate” emotion under given conditions. The reasons for that are always going to be highly individual, at least as likely to be biochemical as anything else, and as a rule, deeply private. (For instance, complicated feelings about a family member, perhaps one who sincerely means well and has caused a great deal of hurt, can interfere with our usual emotions no end.) In any case, policing the feelings of others is generally as unproductive as it is appallingly rude.

Fortunately, such policing is not the rhetorician’s job! The appeal of pathos is made to the appropriate emotions that he—being a gentleman—courteously assumes others feel. If they do not feel them, could that be because they are mere brutes, insensitive to the delicate matters of the spirit, worthy of the hosts of Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron? Well, possibly; lots of things could be true. But there are a multitude of other, perfectly innocent reasons they might not feel such-and-such an appropriate feeling—and remember, one of the things being a gentleman means is resolving not to take unfair advantage. The problems may be as big and permanent in their effects as a poor upbringing, an under-funded school, or a neurological disability, or they may be as trivial as a bad night’s sleep that interferes with the ability to feel any emotion fully. No matter; others’ private affairs, especially their private weaknesses and failings, are not the rhetorician’s professional interest. He will address himself to the man before him as far as necessary, and to the best version of that man as far as possible—not least because he knows that sometimes, someone believing that you can be better is just what you need to begin trying to be better. (He also knows that this doesn’t always work; it didn’t work for Frodo, whose sense of compassion and decency led among other things to Gollum finally biting off one of his fingers. That is what keeps mercy honest—in other words, what keeps it mercy, since it is otherwise tempted to become mere strategic favor to future allies, instead of kindness given because it is needed.)

What about appeals to particular emotions?

Go here for Part II.

¹If you’re thinking something like “Why not red, yellow, green, and blue? Aren’t those the primary colors?” Those are primary when we’re talking about teaching children color names or preparing paints; but here, what we want are the most widely-recognized emotions, and it is that criterion which makes a feeling less or more universal. Black, white, red, and green are among the most common color-words in the world cross-linguistically, so for our purposes, they “count as” the primary colors.
²That is, it is shaped like a flower, and its eight almond-like parts are described as “petals”—yet the whole is usually known as Plutchik’s wheel.
³According to one theory, the word wicked is ultimately traceable to a stem from Old Norse, víkja, meaning “to turn, bend, move” (which is related to the native English verb wick in the sense “to siphon away [of liquids, especially sweat]”). On this theory, wicked originally meant something close to “twisted up, malformed.”

Gabriel Blanchard has worked for CLT since 2019. He lives in Baltimore, MD.

If you enjoyed this piece, check out our series Great Works and Authors, completed a couple of years ago: It introduces all the men and women (and anonymous works) that populate the CLT Author Bank, from authors of remote antiquity like Homer, Seneca, and St. Gregory of Nyssa, through Medieval luminaries like St. Hildegard of Bingen, the Nibelungenlied, and Bartolomé de Las Casas, all the way down to modern authors like Jonathan Edwards, Oscar Wilde, and Elie Wiesel. Thank you for reading the Journal.

Published on 24th April, 2025. Page image of a celebration of Holi, “the festival of colors,” in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. A few different versions of this Hindu holiday’s backstory exist, but it is generally celebrated as a triumph over evil, darkness, and suffering; it is often also associated with romantic love, with forgiveness, and with crossing India’s usually-strict caste lines. Its best-known festival practice, depicted here, is splashing colors (usually in powdered form) onto both things and people. (Along with the equally gaudy Salvation Mountain, popular musician Ke$ha used Holi symbolism in the music video for her single “Praying.”) This photo was originally taken by Wikimedia Commons contributor Sachinghai09, and modified by contributor Radomianin; it was made available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license (source). Today’s author thumbnail is of the costume used for the character of Marvin the Android in the television adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, originally photographed by flickr user Mewhen123 and made available under a CC BY 2.0 license (source).