Well, I don't know if you all have noticed, but I am kind of a pathos junkie. Whenever I'm reading a text by one of these bigwigs I'll be like, "yes... but where is the emotion?" Finally, with Cicero, it seems I have found my champion. This crusader of emotion and audience stirred me to the core and brought me to some interesting revelations. For the first time it seems like we have someone who has embraced the connection between logos and pathos and seems to side more with the necessity of pathos and ethos than the facts and logic that goes with logos.
In a perfect world where we are all robots, the premise of only thinking through logic and reason makes complete sense. Yet, sadly, this is not the case and we have this squishy body, with these things called feelings, which usually tend to take over our brain. When we come into contact with the world, we encounter it through our senses, and our feelings are the first things that process the world.
When someone is talking, we process their words and relevance to us through our feelings. An example of this is in Cicero's section on compassion, where he writes, "Lastly compassion is awakened if the hearer can be brought to apply to his own adversities, whether endured or only apprehended, the lamentations uttered over someone else, or if, in his contemplation of another's case, he many a time goes back to his own experience" (334).
We process words and their logic by how they make us feel. Whenever I read an essay, it seems that I always pay more attention to what I currently believe, placing more emphasis on those sections than the others. I shape my text in a sense from my own preconceived notions. This is not to say that I don't acquire new material because I do, or I would never have come to school in the first place, but whenever I do acquire new intel, I do it through my own personal lens which shapes the text I am reading. Now, this brings me to the question of audience that I have and am curious about.
My question is, how does the audience in writing and oral presentations differ? Throughout this essay, I was picturing the court scenes and the two men, Crassus and Antonius, waging war for the connection and hearts of the audience. It seemed that Antonius won through his clever tactics and knowing when to use delicacy and when to push for a stronger emotion. But, the way that he was able to do this was to guide the audience towards a conclusion through careful demonstration, a calm voice, and logical proofs, leading to the establishment of his client's character and the connection of emotion to the argument. In this day and age though, we usually don't read an essay from start to finish, especially if doing research. Instead, what we do is pick the sections that we are most interested in and include them into our vision, much like what I have done with my dedication to pathos. Coincidentally the text might be misconstrued and the message completely warped by the individual's previous perception.
So, with oral presentation I can see how the audience can be influenced and it seems that Cicero was the master at it, but in writing, I wonder how much effect emotion has? We definitely see the effect of active versus passive voice, the effect of a passionate writer, but does this even matter anymore? If we are all going right for the individual facts of the argument, rather than the broad concept, does pathos even matter? And if so, do we have to change our presentation in order to express this emotion?
Your post reminds me of Sarah Mclachlan singing in the background of a commercial with wounded animals that have been abandoned, where the rhetoric is dripping with pathos. If pathos did not matter now, I think that the whole of commercial advertising would not exist. How many of our desires are linked with pathos? In a world where we are encouraged to give into our desires and where everything we want is advertised so aggressively towards us I believe that pathos might be the most important now. It is rare to see data and graphs in commercials, or on billboards, or on Pinterest, or Facebook, instead what people are seeing is a very attractive man/women or a child leaving for college. These pathos ridden messages encompass modern rhetoric. As far as writing goes, think of Hallmark Cards, or text-messages, I agree these are not the works of great rhetors but they are how we use rhetoric now. A text at three am is as much situated rhetorically as Cicero's speeches in a courtroom, without ever having to read what it says. Maybe the writing does not have a particular way of using pathos, but I think the scene itself, whether a commercial or a booty-call, is still vastly important in thinking about how emotional persuasion is still and will always affect us.
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