Archives for April 2016

Aristotle: Rhetoric. Joe Sachs translation. Newburyport: Focus Philosophical Library, 2008.

Larry Arnhart: Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the “Rhetoric.” DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1981.

 

Note: This is the first of two essays on the Rhetoric and Arnhart’s commentaries, bringing out somewhat different aspects of both. The second review will be found under the title “Aristotle on Rhetoric.”

 

Aristotle’s treatise on rhetoric imitates rhetoric as he understands it. Repeatedly, he identifies a feature of rhetoric and then illustrates it by the kind of argument he makes. And he does make arguments. Although today we pair the word “rhetoric” with such adjectives as “mere” and “empty,” Aristotle regards rhetoric as possessing rational content.

“Rhetoric is the counterpart”—the antistrophe—”of dialectic.” Both come within the knowable experience of “all men” and neither belongs to a “definite science” (1354a). As human beings simply, all of us discuss statements and test them; we all defend ourselves and accuse others. Rhetoric is an art, “the means of persuasion” (1354a). As Arnhart puts it, art involves knowledge, as does science, but unlike science it aims at a practical end; one might add that science understood as `technology,’ which is very scientific, is nothing other than science made artful, as the etymology of the word itself suggests.

Arnhart spells out the problem Aristotle addresses: “The rationality of rhetoric becomes especially dubious if scientific demonstration is taken to be the sole model of valid reasoning.” More, to demand scientific precision of all reasoning gives political speech a task it cannot bear. By that criterion, “the political itself becomes irrational” (4)—a realm of prejudice and passion, nothing more. Can politics be redeemed from this suspicion? Aristotle sets out to do so, in a series of arguments that parallel the Socratic-Platonic defense of the rational content of myths.

Aristotle criticizes previous writers on rhetoric for having missed rhetoric’s rational character by failing to discuss enthymemes—premises that are not self-evident truths but probabilities, or else “signs” of other things. By a “sign” Aristotle means roughly what we mean by evidence; if a woman has milk it is a sign that she has given birth (1357b). Enthymemes give rhetoric its rational content. In the spirit of the contrarian, he goes so far as to call a speaker’s appeals to emotions inessential to the rhetorical argument itself—”merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case” (1354). It is “sound law and custom” to forbid such appeals in law courts; “you might as well warp a carpenter’s rule before using it” (1354a). Nonetheless, Aristotle will in fact go on to discuss the emotions themselves in the center of the treatise, perhaps knowing that a speaker needs to understand the persons to whom he addresses his arguments, however well-grounded they may be.

The mention of a law forbidding personal appeals enables Aristotle to comment on the character of law itself, which provides the frame for political speaking, whether in an assembly or a court. Lawmakers attempt to “leave as little as possible up to those doing the judging” for the very good reason that the lawmakers themselves are likely to `study up’ on the subject-matter of the particular law they are making; left to themselves, the many citizens to whom the law applies are unlikely to know as much as those who make the laws know. Also, the lawmakers “have considered things for a long time, while judgments of cases are made on the spur of the moment. Finally and most important, the lawmakers exercise their practical judgment with regard to “future and universal matters,” not merely a single case that comes before them. This longer range and more general view makes them less inclined than judges—especially judges acting in assemblies, the kind that convicted Socrates, the man of reason—to judge in accordance with “love and hate and private advantage” (1354b), as judges and juries may do. Law inclines toward reason.

But the very generality of law—the way in which it is rational, which often imitates the way in which science is rational—makes it a less than infallible guide to particular circumstances. To be authoritative, law must (as we now say) be applied to the specific case. What has happened here? What is possible or impossible to have happened? Here we need judges, like it or not.

Here is where enthymemes come in, being arguments with some rational content that are applicable to particular cases. Aristotle then introduces a nuance: a law against appealing to emotions makes sense in law courts more than it does in assemblies because in law courts the judges judge the interests of others, whereas in the assembly “the judge is making a judgment about his own interests” (1354b). “Human beings are adequately directed toward what is true by nature, and for the most part hit upon the truth” (1355a); if they did not, they wouldn’t survive for long. Indeed, “things that are true and things that are just are by nature stronger over their opposites,” so if the true and just things do not prevail it is the speakers’ fault, not the audience (1355a). Political speakers need not attempt to instruct their audience, inasmuch as “there are people whom one cannot instruct” and human beings in courts or in assemblies are adequately grounded in more or less sound opinions, anyway. So, as Arnhart remarks, Aristotle distinguishes rhetoric from pedagogy on the one hand and from sophistry on the other. A speaker must know how to argue both sides of a question not in order to mislead—”we ought not be persuasive about corrupt things” (1355a)—but in order to see facts clearly and to be ready to refute an unjust argument (Arnhart, 4-5). Rhetoric is easily confused with sophistry because both use many of the same techniques of persuasion, but they differ in “intention” (1355).  The existence of sophistry makes knowledge of the rhetorical art all the more needed. In cases not of persuasion regarding judgment of policies but of persons, one needs rhetoric to defend oneself. “It would be absurd if being incapable of defending oneself with the body were a shameful thing, but it was not shameful to be incapable of doing so with speech, which is more distinctive of a human being than the use of the body” (1355b). And, as Arnhart puts it, “One possesses rhetoric as an art only when one knows the reasons for the success of some techniques of persuasion and the failure of others” (15). Rhetoric thus entails reason both in its substance, insofar as it deploys enthymemes, and in its techniques.

“Rhetoric may be defined as a power of seeing in any given case the means of being persuasive” (1355b). Persuasion has three dimensions: exhibition of the personal character of the speaker, establishing his credibility; putting the audience into the right disposition by appealing to the appropriate emotions; and proof “or apparent proof” of the substance of what the speaker says (1356a). Enthymemes enter in with the third dimension. Aristotle recalls that rational or logical argument can be inductive, proceeding from particulars to a general conclusion or syllogistic, deducing particular conclusions, including recommended actions, from first principles. In the art of rhetoric, examples are the staple of inductive argument, enthymemes that of syllogism. The speaker must know not only these kinds of argumentation but also choose them according to the audience; he must know his audience, even as a doctor must know his patient. He must especially know the opinions of his audience, as they will determine the range of claims likely to be judged plausible by that audience.

In addition to knowing his audience, the speaker must also know the three kinds of rhetoric: “advisory” or “deliberative,” appropriate for assemblies deliberating on policy; forensic, appropriate when addressing judges; and “display,” appropriate for such as weddings, funerals, and civic ceremonies and commemorations. Each of these kinds of rhetoric aims at a particular kind of action: to choose or refuse an action in the case of political speech; to attack or defend someone in the law court; and to praise or censure someone or something, at a civic ceremony. In terms of time, political rhetoric aims at the future, forensic rhetoric aims at the past, and display rhetoric aims at the present. Finally, each form of rhetoric aims at a purpose: political rhetoric seeks to persuade the audience that a certain action will bring advantage or harm; forensic rhetoric seeks to show that a given judgment of a past action is just or unjust; and display rhetoric seeks at persuading listeners of the beauty or shamefulness of the persons or events the occasion is intended to bring to mind. One notices that justice is central to forensic rhetoric but subsidiary to considerations of advantage and disadvantage in political speech. As Arnhart remarks, “the enthymeme combines reasons and passion”–logos, ethos or character, and pathos or emotion; this suggests that pathos or emotion can be made amenable to reason (10). Further, “For Aristotle, good style is not merely ornamentation, since the goodness of the style is determined by how well it satisfies the natural desire of listeners of learning through reasoning” (12). While rhetoric isn’t directly instructive, it can educate indirectly with prudent appeals to the better angels (or, as the Greeks would say, demons) of our nature.

Aristotle now turns to the first of the three kinds of rhetoric. Regarding advisory or political rhetoric, he distinguishes it from knowledge about politics or political science, which he treats in the Politics. Rhetoric is an art or a sort of power or capability, not a form of knowledge. Political deliberation consists of several topics: finances or what we now call political economy, war and peace, military defense, imports and exports, and legislation. Although Aristotle doesn’t deploy the term `geopolitics,’ he knows what it is, and commends its study; similarly, respecting legislation, he commends the study of `comparative politics’ to learn “what forms of government [are] in use among other peoples, and what sorts fit what sorts of people” {1360a). In addressing all of these topics, the speaker should aim at the “target” all human beings desire, namely, “happiness and its parts”—the latter consisting of bodily goods such as health, beauty, and strength, along with such external goods as children, friends, riches (1360b). Citizens desire these goods for themselves and also for the political community generally. “The political or deliberative orator’s aim is the advantageous; deliberation seeks to determine not ends but the means to the end” (1362a). Aristotle takes a decidedly `tough’ view of what human beings actually regard as good, observing that we incline to choose our own good above those of others, given the fact that when we act when no one is looking we choose the good for ourselves, but “it is not thought that one would choose to do good [to others] unnoticed” (1365b). “Everyone is persuaded by what is advantageous,” less so by what is just (1365b). In political terms, the advantageous is what preserves the existing regime. The ruling principle of democracy is freedom, of oligarchy riches, of aristocracy education and custom, of tyranny self-preservation.

Averting his readers’ eyes from such considerations, Aristotle considers the topics of display speeches. These center on the beautiful—understood in the moral sense, the beautiful or well-ordered soul–and the virtues needed to achieve it—the ones described at length in the Nicomachean Ethics. In contrast to the advantageous, “the greatest virtues would necessarily be those that are most useful to others” (1366b). The virtues do not anticipate those of Christianity in every particular. For example, “taking vengeance on one’s enemies rather than reconciling with them, because repayment in kind is just and what is just is beautiful, and it befits a courageous person not to be bested,” numbers among the virtues (1367a). Exaggeration “comes in reasonably in speeches of praise, since it has to do with preeminence, and preeminence is among the beautiful things” (1368a). The art of rhetoric in display speeches consists largely in such exaggeration, whereas political speeches depend mostly on examples, “since we judge what is going to happen by making surmises based on what has happened before” (1368a).

Not so in forensic rhetoric. Here is where enthymemes come to the fore. To establish the probabilities upon which enthymemes rest in legal cases, one needs to know the nature and number of incentives for wrong-doing, the state of mind of wrong-doers, and the kinds of persons who are wronged, along with their condition. Aristotle defines injustice as “doing harm willingly contrary to law,” which for the purposes of arguing in court consists of “particular law”—”the written law by which people are governed”—and “common law”—”those unwritten laws that seem to be agreed to by everyone” (1368b), law which “comes from nature” (1373b). Culpable acts of harm-doing entail choice, knowingly doing wrong without being forced. The several reasons for making harmful choices stem from character defects (examples include “a person with a soft character… taking easy options” and “an ambitious person [being] unjust for the sake of honor”), but these are choices nonetheless. The same goes for the “conditions” of the wrong-doer. For example, riches and poverty do not cause crime; badly-governed desires cause crime. All uncoerced actions, good or bad, arise from thinking something good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant.

“Desire is an appetite for what is pleasant,” and pleasure consists of “a certain kind of motion of the soul, a sudden and perceptible resettling into its proper natural condition” (1370a). Habit being a sort of second nature, acts too are pleasant, including the habitual and initially painful exertions of athletics. Desires may be irrational (as we now say `instinctual’) or they may be “combined with reason” (1370a). Aristotle disagrees with John the Apostle, who judges the heart to be desperately wicked. The desires and their associated pleasures can range from bodily necessities to “learning and being in a state of wonder” (1371a). “Everything that is like and akin to oneself is pleasant,” and “everyone is necessarily a lover of self to a greater or lesser extent”; human beings love and take pleasure in the things that are “their own”—flatterers, friends, children (1371b). There is no crime in that.

The criminal states of mind occur when our self-esteem partners with feelings of impunity. A position of power, the belief that the act will go undetected, the belief that there will be no penalty or a light one all contribute to crime. If you are poor and ugly, Aristotle observes with a touch of unkind humor, you might commit adultery on the belief that you will never be detected, or indeed suspected. On a more grandiose scale, the tyrant may calculate that “there is no punishment equal to the benefit” (1372a). “But those who most of all believe it to be in their power to commit injustice without penalty are people who have ability at speaking, have practical skill, have experience in various conflicts, if they also have a lot of friends and are rich” (1372a). As for the criminals’ victims, they are often over-trusting and easygoing souls, people who let their guard down. Also, the friendless and the tongue-tied have a target on their backs. And “there are also injustices that shame prevents the victims speaking about, such as violations of the women in their households” (1373a). To establish as facts these states of mind and these conditions in a forensic speech goes a long way to building the probabilistic groundwork for an enthymeme.

As for just and unjust actions, they violate either the particular, written law of a community or the unwritten, common law of nature (“for there is something that all men have a notion of as naturally just and unjust, even if there is no unanimity or agreement among them” regarding its exact content) (1373b). Unjust actions violate one or both of these kinds of law, and do injustice “either to one definite person”—adultery, assault—”or to the community”—refusing to serve in the army (1373b). Reasoning comes into the arguments here, too, because proof of adultery or assault (for example) may not lead to a just conviction or at least not to a severe penalty if there are extenuating circumstances (not knowing the sexual partner was married, understandably fearing that the person you assaulted was a threat to your own safety). Equity “makes up for the defects of a community’s written code of law,” laying hold of “the sort of justice that goes beyond the written law” (1374a). Misfortunes and mistakes do not amount to criminal offenses, and it is the business of the forensic orator who speaks in behalf of the defendant to establish such circumstances in the minds of the judges, “so that the decent thing may prevail” (1374b). The reverse of extenuating circumstances are exacerbating ones: an act so deeply unjust that no established punishment adequately fits the crime. In such cases the forensic orator must ask the judges to lay it on.

In arguing a court case, the orator needs to understand not only how to use enthymemes but also how to use the “non-technical” means of persuasion: laws, witnesses, contracts, tortures, and oaths (1375a). By `using’ laws as a means of persuading judges, Aristotle means appealing to the letter of the law when it supports your case and appealing to the unwritten “common law” when it doesn’t. Indeed, “it is the mark of a better man to use and stand by the unwritten laws rather than the written ones” (1375b), inasmuch as the unwritten laws hew more closely to justice and equity. As for cases in which torture has been used as a means of persuasion, Aristotle remarks that “no truth can be placed in evidence under torture” (1377a).

In Book II Aristotle turns to considerations of character or ethos. “Since rhetoric is for the sake of a judgment… it is necessary not only to look to the argument, so that it will be demonstrative and persuasive, but also to present oneself as a certain sort of person and prepare for a certain sort of judge; for it makes a big difference as far as persuasion is concerned, in deliberations especially and secondly in trials, what sort of person the speaker appears to be and how his hearers assume he is disposed toward them, and moreover, whether they themselves might happen to be disposed in some particular way” (1377b). The speaker must make an impression on his hearers as a person of good sense, good moral character, and good will. Only these thing will win their trust. This consideration requires the speaker to understand not logic but the emotions, indeed the passions. Aristotle proceeds to enumerate and describe these, as they relate to persuasion.

Anger comes first because so much of oratory consists in arousing moral indignation in an audience, whether in the assembly or the courtroom. Anger is the passion most closely associated with justice; it is “a desire, accompanied by pain, for revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one friends” (1378a). Along with this pain comes a pleasure, namely, “the expectation of revenge” (1378b). We feel this passion especially when we are belittled, and even more when belittled by those they respect or want to be respected by. Aristotle shrewdly notices that forgetting a person’s name will incur such anger. “The orator will have to speak so as to bring his hearers into a frame of mind that will dispose them to anger and to present his adversaries as guilty of such charges and possessed of such qualities as do make people angry” (1380a). A speaker must also know how to calm an angry audience, precisely by avoiding any statement that appears to belittle (in modern misusage, `condescend to’) them. “Even dogs make it clear that anger stops toward those who show humility by not biting people who squat down” (1380a). For their part, human beings “are lenient with those who are never insolent, mocking, or belittling toward anyone, or not toward honest people, or not toward people of their own sort (1380a).

This leads Aristotle to discuss feelings of friendship and enmity. “Liking” someone means “wanting someone to have the things one believes are good, for that person’s sake and not one’s own” (1381a). Causes for liking someone include being the friend of a friend, being a hater of those you hat, being one who supports himself and not a parasite, being temperate and “not unjust,” being one who “stay[s] out of other people’s business,” easygoing, “adroit at teasing and being teased,” and being one who praises you for your “good attributes, especially those [you] fear [you] do not possess” (1381a-b). People “like those who hold them in serious regard in any way” and also those “who desire the same things” (1381b). Those with the opposite characteristics arouse enmity.

Fear is “a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future, especially the imminent future (“we all know we shall die, but give it no thought because death is not close at hand” (1382a). Aristotle again displays his tough-minded aspect, observing that “since most people are worse rather than better, unable to resist a chance to gain, and cowardly amid dangers, it is for the most part a frightening thing to have oneself at the mercy of anyone else” (1382b). Fear consists of our reaction to the opposite of the pleasure associated with anticipated revenge, as “all frightening things are more frightening when there is no chance for those who have transgressed to set things right” (1382b). An orator may invoke fear or counteract it by inspiring confidence—this by minimizing his hearers’ vulnerabilities or by whipping up their anger. In this way, anger and fear have a subtle relationship, the one counteracting the other; if one often uses anger to counteract fear, anger may become a habitual follow-up passion to fear.

It is noteworthy that all of the emotions Aristotle discusses in this section of the Rhetoric involve thumos, the `spirited’ aspect of the soul. Shame and shamelessness involve the spirited passion of self-regard. Like belittling, we feel it most sharply “in relation to those whom people have regard for” (1384a). Self-regard also enters in when we receive kindness, which we most appreciate from “those who stand by us in poverty or in exile” (1385a). We pity the most those like ourselves, and feel indignation at the “undeserved prosperity” of those unlike ourselves, such as “the newly rich” (1386b). Envy we reserve for the good fortune of equals. So too with emulation, the distinction being that when we envy we want to pull the other guy down, and when we emulate we want to pull ourselves up to his level. Friendship can survive emulation, but not envy.

Aristotle’s down-to-earth description of the emotions in the context of his treatise on rhetoric likely occasioned Thomas Hobbes’s esteem for the Rhetoric—the only Aristotelian book on ethics and politics Hobbes praised. In discussing character, Aristotle similarly eschews the careful theorizing seen in the Nicomachean Ethics for a descriptive account relevant to his topic. Character consists of the emotions and the soul’s moral qualities, its virtues and vices, which incline it to “will and do” the actions seen as `characteristic’ of the person (1388b). An orator especially needs to understand character as it relates to the various conditions of his audiences—his listeners’ time of life and also their fortune (social status, wealth, power).

“The characters of young people are dominated by desires,” about which “they are changeable and fussy” (1389a). The young are also “spirited and quickly provoked,” loving honor much and victory more. They love money much less. They are over-critical and over-trusting, in both cases because they have little experience with evil. Generally, “the young are as overheated by nature as others are by drinking wine” (1389a). Appeals to hope galvanize them because “for the young there is a lot of future and a short time gone by” (1389a). They “prefer to perform beautiful deeds rather than advantageous ones, because they live by character more than by reasoning” (1389a). “They believe they know everything and are completely sure about it all,” thus inclining more to insolence than to malice (1389b). The elderly are just the opposite—unsure of themselves, “assum[ing] the worst about everything,” distrustful “because of their experience” (1389b). “They love like people who are going to hate and hate like people who are going to love” (1389b). Small-souled, desiring nothing great, stingy because they know how easy property is to lose, they are “cowardly and afraid of everything before it happens” (1389b). They seek advantage, not beauty, “for the advantageous is good for oneself while the beautiful is good simply” (1340a). They “live in memory rather than in hope” (1340). They appear to be temperate, but only because their desires have faded; they complain a lot. Men in their prime hit the Aristotelian mean between these extremes, “judg[ing] people by the truth of the situation,” guided by both the beautiful and the advantageous, in balance, both brave and temperate (1389b). They are the best audience a speaker can have.

As to external good, the good of fortune, those of “good birth” are ambitious and take pride in their ancestors, although a speaker should not assume that a new generation equals its distinguished forebears: “in the generations of men, just as in what is brought forth by the earth, there is a certain harvest, and sometimes, when the stock is good, extraordinary men are produced for some time, and then things go back the other way” (1490b)—I give you the Churchill family, among others. As for wealth, “rich people also believe they deserve to rule, since they believe they have the things that make someone deserve to rule” (1391a). In this as in much else, “the character of a rich person is that of a fortunate fool” (1391a). Men of political power, on the other hand, “are more ambitious and more manly in their characters than rich people,” and also “more energetic on account of being in a position of responsibility, forced to look out for what affects their power” (1391a). With some humor, Aristotle notes that while good fortune generally makes us “more arrogant and more inconsiderate,” it also inclines us to piety and “respect for divine power, in which they believe because of events which are really he result of fortune” (1391a-b).

Having concluded his assessment of character and fortune, Aristotle veers somewhat abruptly back to the art of rhetoric, and therefore back to reasoning. One uses persuasive speech to “lead to decisions” (1391b), whether speaking to an individual or a group. In doing so, the speaker invokes what Aristotle calls “topics”: whether a thing is possible or impossible, and how big or small the good thing he praises or the bad thing he condemns or warns against seems. The speaker deploys two kinds of rhetorical forms: enthymeme and example. While the “topics” involve inflating or deflating hopes and fears, the forms lead the audience to intellectual discipline, to the coherent limits of action. On this and similar points in Aristotle’s presentation, Arnhart offers an excellent general observation: Emotion or pathos “is essential for rhetorical proof so long as it enters as zn integral part of enthymemematic reasoning” (23).

Example “has the nature of induction, which is the foundation of reasoning” (1393b). Proceeding from the particulars to the general, examples consist either of actual past facts or inventions; the latter consist of analogies or fables. Concurring with Plato’s Socrates, Aristotle regards fables as “well suited to public speaking” because invention is easier than finding facts. “One ought to make [fables] up in the same way as analogies, if one is able to see the point of similarity, and philosophic pursuits make it easier to do this very thing” (1394a) because philosophic reasoning sees the general in the particulars; it classifies, seeks the nature of things. When a speaker “has no enthymemes,” examples must suffice as his reasons for action. But “when one does have enthymemes” he should use examples as “a follow-up to them,” a sort of illustrative testimony to their validity (1394a). Aristotle considers maxims a form of example, amounting to a premise or a conclusion of enthymeme but with the connective logical tissue removed. Maxims “make speeches reflect character” because “the person stating the maxim reveals the universal basis of his choices, so if the maxims are sound, they make the speaker appear as someone with a sound character” (1395b).

Enthymemes themselves rest on four things: likelihoods, examples, criteria, and signs. Both likelihoods and examples in operate on the principle of resemblance: Your listeners know or firmly believe one thing to be so, and you show them that what you maintain resembles those known things. By “criteria” Aristotle means things necessarily and always so—unlike likelihoods—and by “signs” things “universally or in particular” so—again, a more convincing basis for an argument than a likelihood or an example, but less convincing than a “criterion” (1402a). Enthymemes make sense in forensic speech because they are addressed to judges, that is, to persons in authority expected to exercise judgment in practical matters rather than to philosophers who require rigorous proofs in support of theories.

In Book III Aristotle addresses the more strictly technical or artful dimensions of rhetoric, the “wording and arrangement” of speeches (1403a). While “the just thing would be to aim at nothing more in a speech than that it not cause pain, but not cause pleasure either, since it is just to argue one’s side by means of the facts themselves,” the “corrupt condition of the citizens” requires speakers to concern themselves not only with the style of their speeches but their own style of speaking (1404a). Aristotle steadfastly recommends moderation here, too: speak in a “natural,” not a “contrived” manner; use metaphors sparingly; “keep a careful eye out for the mean” when deploying epithets (1405b). He catches Gorgias saying to a swallow, “when it let its excrement go falling down on him, in the best tragic tone: `Shame on you, Philomena'” (1406b). Better to avoid such risible pretentiousness and confine one’s speech to what is “easy to read and easy to say” (1407b). “Wording will have appropriateness if it conveys feeling and character and is proportioned to its subject matter” (1408a). Simplicity and elegance will carry the day, but verbosity will leave your listeners behind, and leave them glad to be there. Arnhart remarks, “For Aristotle, good style is not merely ornamentation, since the goodness of style is determined by how well it satisfies the natural desire of listeners for learning through reasoning” (12).

Witnesses to Henry Clay’s speeches in the United States Senate found the spoken versions more impressive than the printed ones. Clay, they said, wooed his audience like a lover, and few lovers’ speeches seem persuasive when reduced to cold print. Aristotle knows that, too. Wording suitable for writing ought to exhibit precision; words suitable for debate should “convey character and feeling” (1413b). This is most true in speeches for assemblies, less true in speeches for law courts. “Wording suited to public assemblies is in every way like scene-painting, since the bigger the crowd is, the farther off is the view, and hence in both cases precise detail are a waste of effort and make things appear worse” (1414a).

Aristotle’s recommended structure for a speech supports reasonable argument: first state your case, then prove it. In political speeches, that means stating what we now call the `position’ to be defended or attack; in courtroom speeches, stating what the story you will tell is about—as a poet would do at the beginning of a play or an epic; and in display speeches, stating whether you come to praise Caesar or to bury him. Narratives in speeches “should be designed to reveal a state of character” by saying “what sort of choice this is, what sort of character is present and what sort of choice it is in turn by what sort of end it aimed at” (1417a). Mathematical treatises do not consist of states of character because they demonstrate necessity, not choice; “there is no that-for-the-sake-of-which in them” (1417a). Socrates, who brought philosophy down from the heavens of pure theory, engaged in exactly such telos-oriented speech. Aristotelian moderation appears again in his advice not to over-use reason itself, not to overload a speech with enthymemes but to “mix in other things” (1418a), including jokes but especially irony, which “is a more suitable style for civilized people than clowning” (1419b).

Aristotle concludes the Rhetoric with a discussion of the way to conclude a speech. The four elements of a successful conclusion are, first, “setting up the listener to be favorable toward oneself and unfavorable toward one’s opponent”; exaggerating and understating; “getting the listener to certain state of feeling”; and reminding the listener of the main points of one’s argument (1419b-1420a). Aristotle has deployed each of these elements not so much in his conclusion but throughout the book. For example, he began by exaggerating the rational content of rhetoric before correcting his own exaggeration in the central sections. And he has returned to the main points of his argument repeatedly, giving the impressions of an argument, and a writer, balancing several elements of a complex subject in a way that does justice to all, and to the whole. “To be successful in rhetoric,” Arnhart remarks, “good men must see to it that they are not naïve” (26). Unlike sophists, who attempt to make the weaker argument seem stronger, “Aristotle sharpens the ability of the rhetorician to discern the superiority of the stronger over the weaker argument” (69).

Arnhart emphasizes the rational content of political rhetoric. In this he may engage in a bit of what Aristotle considers salutary exaggeration. Aristotle himself associates the most rational form of rhetoric with forensic speech, not political or “advisory” speech, which focuses on character. In this Arnhart shows himself to be a genuine American, a citizen of the country his founding rhetorical act, the Declaration of Independence, consists of an enthymematic syllogism, and leaves proofs based on character to the test of God.