Agency of Emotions in Rhetoric

In my tracing of Aristotle's concept of audience in his piece On Rhetoric, I was swept into thinking a lot about the agency emotions play in how we respond to rhetoric.

Aristotle views emotional content in rhetoric as purposefully misleading to the audience and outwardly speaks against its use, "For it is wrong to warp the jury by leading them into anger or envy or pity; that is the same as if someone made a straightedge rule crooked before using it" (30). Aristotle presents emotional content in rhetoric as a means of falsifying the audience's objectivity, a manipulation employed by the speaker to sway the audience. But I would argue that emotional content still has its place in rhetoric, although its presence, I agree,  is not always welcomed. For example, according to Aristotle, a prosecutors ploy of anger against an accused murderer would be considered a unjust persuasion of the jury against this man (31). Besides the ethical problem in the persuasion of the jury's emotions in the man's right to a fair trial, the jury is equally prone to the defense's emotional ploy of pity for this innocence of this person. In fact if we employ Aristotle's ethics outlined in On Rhetoric, hardly any court cases, if any, that take place in America are objective because we depend so readily on the impact of emotions in discourse. But while this dependence on emotions might remove our objectivity, does it not also open a certain agency in rhetoric? Must emotions be equated as Aristotle presents them with irrationality?

Think about the power emotions play in a poet's performance of their verse. These emotions are what allow us to better understand their position. These emotions have agency in their ability to provoke thought through the audiences connection and involvement in the speaker's verse. And while this emotional content certainly influences how we judge good poetry from bad, where would poetry be without emotion?  In Aristotle's outline of Pisteis, he states "[There is persuasion] through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence" (38). And here he does not condemn this persuasion, even though the character the speaker displays for his audience is just as subject to manipulation as the emotional content of his speech. Further more how does one understand the Character of the orator if not through his diction? Is diction not a result of the speaker's emotion? Finally Aristotle's recognition of the persuasion emotions have on rhetoric proves their agency in showing that an audience's judgemnt can never be an entirely objective, because the human condition responds to emotions first and rationality second.

-Sophia Koehler-Derrick