Rhetorica:
Won't Somebody Please Think of the Pathetic?
—Part II
By Gabriel Blanchard
Pathos is not a simple appeal to make; it touches the roots of all human experience.
“Oh, You’re an Eighties Band? Name Every Feeling”
Sticking with the analogy of color we used last week, we may identify some emotions a trained rhetor should have as part of their oratorical “palette.” These are feelings he should be capable of not just recognizing (which requires only the gift of vocabulary), but evoking.
Insofar as rhetoric’s usual purpose is to persuade, we can classify these emotions on a spectrum from cool to warm. Cool emotions are those that prompt us to hesitate, delay, or rethink; at coldest, they stop us in our tracks. Warm emotions prompt us toward action, and the warmer the emotion, the swifter the action is prompts us to. At hottest, these emotions can become quite blind, urging us to do absolutely anything rather than nothing.1 In the list below, cool emotions are listed in cool-colored type—the blue end of the spectrum—while warm emotions get warm-colored type—towards the red end. (You will notice that, although this list is informed by our “primary” list of sorrow, fear, anger, and joy, it is far from identical with it, and different forms of some of these feelings can be either cool or warm, depending on the circumstances.) Emotions of about the same “temperature” are listed together.
- shock
- contentment; boredom
- grief; horror; awe
- anxiety; confusion
- remorse; gratitude; shame
- pity; defiance; contempt
- indignation; delight
- rage; panic
Cool Feelings Have Are Feelings Too
Since, as noted, the usual function of rhetoric is to persuade, and persuasion is normally oriented toward taking action, it may be natural to assume the warm emotions are the “important ones,” and the cool emotions are sort of optional extras. However, this is much too simplistic. For one thing, a rhetor who is, so to speak, found out as one who can elicit pity, panic, or indignation from a crowd, but cannot make them feel confusion, contentment, or grief, is thereby exposed as doing what he does by means of cheap tricks learned by rote, not one with real insight into how human feelings operate. (Unfortunately, this does not make him a whit less dangerous to the unwary, or entirely deprive him of power even with many who know in principle that his talk is cheap; but we can’t stop now for a full examination of the black magician.)
The Riders gazed up at Théoden like men startled out of a dream. Harsh as an old raven's their master's voice sounded in their ears after the music of Saruman. But Saruman for a while was beside himself with wrath. He leaned over the rail as if he would smite the King with his staff. To some suddenly it seemed that they saw a snake coiling itself to strike.
The other big reason the cool emotions are an important part of the rhetor’s arsenal is this: Sometimes, the thing you want to persuade people to do is stop.
There can be many reasons for this, bad and good and indifferent. Rage and panic, the two hottest emotions, tend for that very reason to be the most blind; they are thus, ironically, those with the greatest tendency to abruptly convert their energy into shock, remorse, and grief, by means of the simple machine3 of ill-considered action.
A Practical Manual for Manipulating People’s Emotions
is not something we would offer if we could; incidentally, it is also not something we can offer. “How emotions work” is not something easily and concisely explainable in the space of a blog post! Experience, observation, and reflection are more useful here—which does mean that the most gifted practitioners of rhetoric are usually found at a sort of midpoint between those who have been doing it the longest and those who are literally the oldest. Occasionally, they are joined by people with a profound, uncommon gift for empathizing with others, though this is quite exceptional. There are also certain “tricks of the trade” that are of use to the practicing rhetor (for instance, short, simple sentences tend to stimulate warmer feelings, while lengthy sentences with many sub-clauses and modifiers foster cool ones better), but we will come back to this kind of surface-level technique later on.
Finally, note once more how this brings us back to the importance of imaginative sympathy and magnanimity (it is not quite, but it is nearly, impossible to understand a thing or person if you despise it or them). If you can’t fathom why someone would find X important, the behavior of people who value X will be opaque to you, much as the behavior of Balaam’s donkey was opaque to Balaam.
1“Burma!” “Why’d you say ‘Burma’?” “I panicked.”
2The division of The Lord of the Rings into a “trilogy”—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers (from which this selection comes), and The Return of the King—is well known, but this was the publisher’s choice, and Tolkien was dissatisfied with it. However, he did of his own volition divide The Lord of the Rings into six “Books,” distinguished with Roman numerals I through VI; the volumes of the “trilogy” are simply the three pairs of Books, I-II, III-IV, and V-VI (though Books III and IV, the halves of The Two Towers, have no internal “connective tissue” in plot, setting, or characters). Allusions to “book three,” regardless of spelling, therefore run the risk of being ambiguous or confusing unless clarified.
3Simple machines (“simple” here essentially means “having one or very few parts”) are those that operate by changing the direction, intensity, or precision of force that human beings are able to apply to objects. The lever, for instance, changes the intensity of force that we can bring to bear in attempting to lift an object, and the inclined plane changes the force’s direction, while the wedge (or hand-axe) changes its precision—imagine trying to split a log by just hitting it with your hands.
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, first of all, thank you for reading the Journal. Second, you may be interested in our other content here—our ongoing series Texts in Context, which posts on Mondays (as Rhetorica here posts on Thursdays), chronicles the basics of Western history in order to provide background for the many names on the CLT Author Bank.
Published on 1st May, 2025.