Persuasion in Democratic Politics

The Components of Rhetoric

According to Aristotle, rhetoric is "the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion." He described three main forms of rhetoric: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. In order to deliver a good persuasive speech one must able to use all three successfully. Ethos (Greek for 'character') refers to the trustworthiness or credibility of the writer or speaker. There are four characteristics used to measure the ethos of a speaker: trustworthiness, similarity, authority, and reputation or expertise.

When hearing a speech, an audience is more likely to believe someone that they can trust. If the audience trusts you then they believe what you are telling them is true. We can look at examples of the use of ethos in speeches made by two of the greatest orators of the modern era. On August 28, 1963, in front of 250,000 civil-rights supporters, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Dr. King used ethos to his advantage when he gave this speech. He portrayed this effectively because he himself was an African American, and he knew exactly what kind of segregation and discrimination his black brothers and sisters were experiencing. King gives an example by saying, "We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities…as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one." ⁶ Dr. Martin Luther King addressed to the people such real and visual examples of things happening in the Black community, that many people finally began to look at the situation in another point of view.

On March 28, 2008, Senator Barack Obama gave his speech on race, A More Perfect Union ". It's in his use of ethos that Barack Obama excels. Here are a few lines from this passage: "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived the Depression to serve in Patton's army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations." ⁷ He conveys the sense that he personally embodies and actually, in some sense, is the American dream.

In these two examples we can see some of the four characteristics of ethos: trustworthiness, similarity, authority, and reputation. An audience is more likely to be persuaded by someone they trust. Trustworthiness can be measured by concepts like: the person's honesty; is he ethical or moral, is he generous, or benevolent. Your audience tends to trust you more if you are a member of a group with which these qualities are often associated such as a pastor or a firefighter. The audience is more likely to be receptive to persons to whom they can identify with. Some characteristics you might share with your audience are age, race, gender, socio-economic status, citizenship, and personality. The more you are like your audience the more likely they will be willing to accept your message. The greater a person's authority the greater the chance that the audience will be inclined to listen and be persuaded. Authority comes in many forms ranging from organizational authority, political, religious, and educational authority, just to name a few. Lastly, expertise is what you know about your topic and reputation is what your audience knows that you know about your topic. If your ethos is high and well established from the beginning then you have your audience from the very beginning but if you are not able to do this then the speaker may have a harder time getting the audience's attention or persuading anybody.

For Aristotle, the most important means of persuasion was logos. ⁸ In Greek, logos can mean simply "word," "the underlying point that makes sense or meaning behind everything else," or it can mean "logic, reason, rational thinking." ⁹ Logos essentially is the reasoning or logic behind an argument. A speaker uses logic after he has established his character or ethos. A speaker uses two types of logic: one is induction where the listeners come to their own conclusions and the other is deduction. In deduction the speaker uses very specific examples in their speech. When using deductive reasoning, speakers often use enthymemes, which are syllogisms in which one of the premises is not stated leaving the listeners to fill in the blanks. A categorical syllogism consists of three parts: the major premise, the minor premise and the conclusion. For example: All men are mortal: Socrates is a man: Socrates is a mortal.

An example of logos can be found in President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor address to the nation, "A Day That Will Live in Infamy". This speech was given in response to the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. This is the speech in which he asks America for permission to join the war effort during World War II. The use of logos was FDR's main selling point in this speech. When he stated "The Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace" ¹⁰, he used rationality to describe the realness of the situation and the animosity between the two nations. Another use of logos in this speech is when the President lists all the different places that Japan attacked on December 7. He lists each one as an individual place and does not place any more importance on any one place over the other.

The word pathos is derived from the ancient Greek word for "suffering" or "experience" ¹¹. In Aristotle's - "On Rhetoric"-, he identified seven sets of emotions with each pair representing opposite sides. Some of these are: anger and calmness, fear and confidence, kindness and unkindness, and envy and emulation. The goals of a persuasive speaker are to:

• Be aware of the wide range of emotions,
• Decide which emotions to evoke,
• Learn how these emotions can be evoked in your audience.

Aristotle knew that in order to persuade an audience, their emotions must be linked to the arguments of that particular speech. By making your audience more susceptible to being persuaded, you will make your audience more likely to be able to understand your perspective, accept your claims, and more likely to react to a call to action. When evoking emotions the speaker must evoke those that are appropriate to the context of your speech. If you are successful in using pathos well you will be able to accomplish the goal of a persuasive speech which is to get the audience behind you and feeling the emotions that you are trying to appeal to. Those who are not successful at establishing pathos will find that the audience will be more likely to find fault in your arguments and will not invest in your cause.

We can look at President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for examples of pathos in a presidential speech. Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. In his speech, he honored the soldiers that had died in the Battle of Gettysburg. The speech is charged with emotionally charged words such as "hallow", "unfinished work" and "that these dead shall not have died in vain" ¹². The use of these words helped the audience feel what he was feeling. He draws on the audience's own emotions to make his point. Another moment in time were we can see how pathos is used to the speaker's benefit was in Pope Urban II's speech given at the Council of Clermont, in 1095, where he addressed a great crowd and urged all to go to the aid of the Greeks and to recover Palestine from the rule of the Muslims. When he said, "Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. That land which as the Scripture says "floweth with milk and honey," was given by God into the possession of the children of Israel Jerusalem is the navel of the world; the land is fruitful above others, like another paradise of delights." ¹³ After this speech was given the First Holy Crusade was launched.