A Probable Logic: Emotion, Sensation, and Persuasion in Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic
Writing at the end of the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas has this to say of rhetoric: “its focus is the “affairs of men, [where] there is no such thing as demonstrative and infallible proof, and we must be content with a certain conjectural probability (coniecturalis probabilitas) such as that which an orator employs to persuade” (Summa theologica 1a.2ae.105.2 ad 8). While logic (represented by the demonstrative syllogism) and dialectic (represented by the topical or dialectical syllogism), might allow one to understand natural phenomena that occur with regularity, they have little to say, according to Aquinas, about the highly variable behavior of human beings. Rather, it is rhetoric and poetic that deal with human questions, such as civic decision making and the praise of virtue and blame of vice. For Aquinas, these disciplines represent a probable logic that relies on enthymemes, examples, and description to interpret and respond to human behavior. While logic and dialectic reason from the unchanging principles of the world, rhetoric and poetic rely on the senses, on human emotions, and most of all on probability.
Aquinas’s focus on probability as an integral aspect of rhetoric and poetics was not unique—it had antecedents in elements of 12th and 13th century Latin culture (such as the artes poetriae), in Arabic commentaries on and responses to the Aristotelian corpus, and in the Aristotelian texts translated into Latin by William of Moerbeke and earlier scholars. While historians of rhetoric have examined many related elements of 12th and 13th century intellectual cultural, including the evolution of the commentary and literary tradition (Minnis and Scott 1988), the influence of Arabic intellectual traditions on the Latin West (Boggess 1970, 1971; Black 1990), the introduction and diffusion of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the medieval universities and beyond (Briggs 1999, 2007; Copeland 2014a, 2014b), among others, less understood is how the relationships between probability, rhetoric, and poetics were reinterpreted in light of these events. This study seeks to fulfill this challenge, bringing together recent research on the reintroduction of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, scholarship in the history of sensation and emotion, and new analyses of under-studied texts and figures such as Hermannus Alemannus, Brunetto Latini, and Giles of Rome.
A Probable Logic: Emotion, Sensation, and Persuasion in Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic argues that the fundamental change in the rhetorical and poetic theories of the 12th and 13th centuries is an increased emphasis on probability and verisimilitude, achieved through appeals to less-rational modes of reasoning such as sensation, emotion, and authority. As I have argued in my recent (2017) article “Rhetorical Deliberation, Memory, and Sensation in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas,” Aquinas sees memory and sensation as key elements of rhetorical reasoning, because they are the human faculties that provide the raw material of probabilistic judgment. In this project, I expand on my past work to better understand the place of these and other modes of non-rational reasoning and appeal in the poetic and rhetorical doctrines of the 13th century. Drawing from artes poetriae, epic poems, Scholastic philosophy, commentaries on logical and rhetorical theory, and other texts, this project argues that in the 13th century rhetoric was increasingly positioned as a counterpart to dialectic that rationalized and imposed order upon less-than-rational forms of persuasion and reasoning.
Recent scholarship has emphasized the important roles that sensation play in rhetorical theory in classical (Hawhee 2011, 2017) and more contemporary contexts (Hawhee 2015; Panagia 2011; Jay 2011). Likewise, the work of Mary Carruthers (2009, 2013) and Rita Copeland (2014a, 2014b) has directly explored the relationship between rhetoric, beauty, and emotion in the medieval period. My project extends and contributes to this work, focusing on a condensed period of intense change in medieval rhetorical theory. Thus, with this project I aim to contribute to two thriving research areas within the broader field of history of rhetoric—theories of sensation and the history of emotions—by investigating the relationship of each to probability and persuasion. It is my hope that while specialists in medieval rhetoric will be drawn to the synthesis in the early chapters and the detailed analyses of the individual cases, scholars in contemporary rhetorical theory may also find inspiration in the discussions of how probable reasoning interacts with appeals to authority and emotion.
Chapter Outline: In the first chapter, I begin by offering a (necessarily) condensed history of rhetoric in the Middle Ages, with emphasis on how rhetoric interacted with logic and dialectic. In this chapter, I also identify some of the advances and concerns that will structure the rest of the book: the association of rhetoric with common audiences (rather than elite ones), the privileging of description as a mode of achieving believability and verisimilitude in rhetorical and poetic theory, the identification of rhetoric with the consideration of contingent scenarios and sense knowledge, the changing focus of rhetoric as a mode of understanding and controlling the emotions, and the application of these elements to civic life through the authoritative ethos of the speaker or author. These concerns roughly outline the following chapters, each of which addresses one of these questions in greater detail.
For instance, Chapter 2 draws from newly translated Arabic commentaries on and adaptations of Aristotle's Rhetoric, as well as the writings of Hermanus Alemannus, Brunetto Latini, and others to explore the shift from rhetoric as an aspect of learned eloquence toward an intellectual operation accessible to people of all educational backgrounds. Contributing to ancient and on-going debates about natural versus learned eloquence, I argue that these authors identify rhetoric not as an elite form of discourse associated with literary or oratorical production, but rather with the types of arguments people of all backgrounds engage in daily to solve common problems. This shift, I contend, sets the stage for later developments that distance rhetoric from a humanistic pursuit of eloquence and move it toward an accessible mode of reasoning attuned to non-rational persuasion. I will present material from this chapter at the upcoming Rhetoric Society of America conference.
Chapter 3 argues that during the 12th century, poetic composition positioned probability as a key factor in the composition of persuasive poetic discourse, in many ways setting the stage for similar developments in rhetorical theory occurring in the 13th century. Building from the observations of the previous chapter, I argue that rhetoric and poetics shifted their focus from primarily stylistic concerns toward inventional ones. The result of this shift, however, was not the neglect of rhetorical style. Rather, drawing inspiration from the ancient progymnasmata, style itself becomes a vehicle to achieve realistic and believable description—that is, style and invention work together to highlight the probability of the described actions, lending the composition a sense of realism. Drawing from the works of authors such as Matthew of Vendôme, Alan of Lille, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, I show that each consistently privileges verisimilitude achieved through skillful description, highlighting how sensory and emotional responses to language must necessarily motivate both rhetoric and poetic. I am currently revising a version of this chapter for resubmission to Rhetorica.
In Chapter 4, I turn my attention to the writings of Aquinas, one of the earliest medieval authors to refer extensively to the Rhetoric. Drawing widely from Aquinas's corpus, I show how his division of different types of knowledge leads to an understanding of rhetoric as a necessarily contingent process of reasoning directed toward civic, social, and political matters. I further show that rhetoric, understood in this way, is key to Aquinas's theory of deliberation (as constructed across his writings) and that Aquinas's approach to deliberation is heavily Aristotelian, drawing particularly from ideas in the Rhetoric. Bringing together sense memory, experience, and common belief, this process of decision making provides the necessary material to generalize from experience and examples. A version of this chapter has been published in Philosophy and Rhetoric.
Chapter 5 examines one section of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae—his discussion of the passions—through text-mining and digital concordances. In this chapter, I show that the majority of Aquinas's citations of the Rhetoric occur in this section, clustering especially around his discussions of fear, hatred, and anger. These citations reveal the increasingly logical ends of rhetoric: Aquinas does not attempt to instruct one in how to appeal to the emotions, but rather seeks to analyze emotion as a set of culturally situated behaviors, demonstrating the need to understand human behavior in terms of probability. Building from observations in the previous chapter, I also argue that emotion is fundamentally integrated into the rhetorical framework Aquinas offers. Emotion is understood through sense knowledge, through recall of specifics, and through a common storehouse of social values that allow conclusions about emotional response to be drawn through reason. Research from this has been presented at the International Society for the History of Rhetoric Conference, and I am presenting related material at the upcoming National Communication Association conference.
Chapter 6 focuses on Giles of Rome's interpretation of the pistis of ethos. Following Aristotle in defining ethos as an appeal made with respect to the speaker, Giles breaks from this interpretation by reversing Aristotle's theory of ethos as it relates to entechnical proof. While Aristotle maintains that ethos must not be based on pre-existing opinions about the speaker (an appeal Aristotle would consider atechnical), Giles suggests the opposite, as Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter have observed (2009). Thus, for Giles, ethos is always a function of received notions about the character and reputation of the speaker. Drawing from his commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the politically-motivated De Regimine Principum, I contend that Giles views ethos as auctoritas, embracing the idea that reputation should contribute to persuasion. Adopting his teacher Thomas Aquinas’s framework for understanding rhetoric causes him to understand judgments about a speaker’s character and actions as key to successful rhetorical reasoning that relies on probability. As such, claims to authority, and ethos more broadly, must be attentive to the past actions and behavior of any speaker or author.
In the final, concluding chapter, I synthesize the previous studies, reflecting on the importance of key events, such as the reintroduction of the expanded Organon by Arabic thinkers and the translation movement associated with William of Moerbeke, on the changing rhetorical culture of medieval Europe and their eventual reception in the Renaissance.