Aristotle's Art of Rambling

Okay, the title is a bit harsh. Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric isn't actually bad, but I wouldn't give it many accolades either.

I've occasionally thumbed through Aristotle in the bookshops and usually thought, "nope". His stuff just seems interminably... dense. But Rhetoric seemed like an easy enough subject, and my random perusal in the shop encouraged me that this would be as good a choice as any for starting out on a philosopher I've too long neglected. And, once again, the deciding factor was that it was very cheap.

First I need to say a few words about the published edition. This one's from Collin's Classics rather than my usual Penguin, and whatever Aristotle himself had to say, I would strongly discourage anyone from reading this particular version. For starters, physically the book isn't great : it's got a very stiff paperback cover, which makes it unnecessarily difficult to read unless you're the sort of thoughtless brute who makes a great big crease in the front cover or the spine. Second, while the introduction is decent enough (actually better than some Penguin ones in being properly concise), there are no footnotes, frequent typos, and worst of all, too many sentences are mangled into incomprehensible nonsense by a bad translation*. A good edition would at least explain that parts of the original text are damaged or the meaning is unclear, but there's none of that with this one.

* Which is this one, though whether this online version also contains the same garblings I've not checked.

Strangest of all is the dictionary at the back. This appears to be generic to the series, containing a list of terms which aren't found anywhere in this book at all. 

On to Aristotle's text itself. It took me quite a while to get into this. I made the mistake of trying to read it, like other philosophical texts, very carefully, poring over every sentence for meaning and consistency. This simply doesn't work : Aristotle makes many sweeping claims in throwaway sentences without any justification whatsoever, which often feel contradictory to the rest of the text*. Trying to read this as a Socratic dialogue, where each statement is so distilled that advancement is incremental to the point of being almost tautologous, is completely the wrong approach. I got on much better when I just read it more like a regular text and stopped worrying about every minor contradiction or undeveloped point, because there are just too many of them.

* In particular he variously describes wealth as something good and desirable, something you should actively flaunt, and then goes on to describe the wealthy as "prosperous fools".

And Aristotle definitely does ramble – a lot. He covers a huge range of topics besides the titular rhetoric, passing over such things as the nature of government, definitions of the various emotions, and what it means to live a good and happy life, all at breakneck speed. Often these are at best tangential to the main topic, and sometimes downright outlandish :

The most important and effective qualification for success in persuading audiences and speaking well on public affairs is to understand all the forms of government and to discriminate their respective customs, institutions, and interests. 

Hands up who thinks the most important thing about persuasion is to understand government ? It may have made more sense in ancient Greece with its multitude of different government types, I suppose. But statements like this abound, often unjustified and yet, paradoxically, still discussed in far too much depth to be of use to the topic ostensibly at hand. He veers wildly between the trivial and obvious, the complex but underdeveloped, and the downright cryptic. As a text, it's a bit of a Jackson Pollock.

Somebody told me that the question-and-answer technique of the Socratic method is no more than a technique for winning arguments. This is categorically untrue. If you actually read beyond the bestselling titles of the Republic or Laws (which are most definitely using the technique as a, uh, rhetorical device), you soon find that many Socratic dialogues are openly inconclusive. In a few, even Plato has Socrates come off the worst. And sure, if you use this method in bad faith you just get leading questions, but the way Plato did it was with a ruthless focus the like of which is utterly lacking in Rhetoric. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, Plato undeniably stayed on topic. Aristotle's approach appears to be more "bull in a china shop".

Perhaps worst of all, though, is that Aristotle's text is often dry and downright boring. A particularly hideous example of the sheer ugliness of the text :

We will now consider the various elementary classes of enthymemes. (By an ‘elementary class’ of enthymeme I mean the same thing as a ‘line of argument’.) We will begin, as we must begin, by observing that there are two kinds of enthymemes. One kind proves some affirmative or negative proposition; the other kind disproves one. The difference between the two kinds is the same as that between syllogistic proof and disproof in dialectic. The demonstrative enthymeme is formed by the conjunction of compatible propositions; the refutative, by the conjunction of incompatible propositions.

It's not all like this or I'd have given up by page two. Still, I could overlook this were the central topic anything other than "how to make things appealing to people"*; the irony here being acute. It does, however, steadily improve throughout. As I say, overall it's not actually bad, but there are certainly some very bad bits in it.

* For a much more rhetorical look at rhetoric, you can do worse than this video.

What exactly does Aristotle have to say ? Given the rambling potpourri structure it seems appropriate to try and divide this into two categories : rhetoric and everything else.

Not Rhetoric

Manual labour : I've long wondered why the ancient Greeks and Romans held the ordinary folk in such low regard. Aristotle sheds no light on this, if anything confusing the situation even further. Indeed his attitude seems positively schizophrenic. He dismisses manual labour as being ignoble because it's a form of servitude that puts the worker at the "beck and call" of other people. Farmers on the other hand are fine because they work to provide for themselves as well as other people. Well, that's self-consistent, I guess, but he also praises the skills of certain actors, and the Greeks in general were proud of their artistic accomplishments more broadly. Yet if art itself was praised the profession itself was frequently demeaned as being little better than prostitution. And what instead Aristotle would have preferred those doing "menial" jobs to do instead, how he thought everyone else would cope if they stopped, I don't know. It's all tremendously strange.

Correlation and causation : Perhaps more interestingly there are a few passages which hint at the crucial understanding that correlation doesn't directly imply causation. Not always though. For instance, he thinks the poor are (somewhat justifiably) greedy because they haven't got enough money, whereas the rich prefer other vices because financially they're solvent. It doesn't occur to him that maybe the rich are rich only because they're greedy anyway and that having more wealth will just lead to a desire for even more. 

Elsewhere he fares better. Not every vicious man is a thief, he says, but every thief is a vicious man (the example may be wrong but the principle is sound). Similarly, he thinks that young men act improperly not from youth itself but because of their "appetites", which just happen to be more voracious when young : but anyone with such appetites will act similarly regardless of age. That is, he identifies a deeper root cause than the superficial "blame it on the youth" approach. He's also very keen to stress that while some things are certain, others are merely probable. A reoccurring theme is that if one thing is demonstrated to happen, then things which are more probable to occur very likely will as well. This makes for rather circumstantial reasoning when dealing with persuasion, but it at least points to grey thinking rather than a simplistic black-and-white approach.

An honest cynic : That's cynic with a small c, in the modern sense of the word. Aristotle often takes a dim view of humanity in general and has his fair share of bigotry. Anything men do is naturally better than what a woman does, he says. And while the young are too ill-tempered and uncontrollable, the old are too lethargic and despondent to form proper judgement (he particularly despises the old, quoting a random and bizarre proverb that you should "never show an old man kindness"). Only men of age around 30-50 have proper reasoning faculties. Yeah, right. And even leaving aside his preferred targets for discrimination, he doesn't think much of people as a whole :

Since most men tend to be bad — slaves to greed, and cowards in danger — it is, as a rule, a terrible thing to be at another man’s mercy... life on the whole is a bad business.

On the other hand, he's perhaps more honest than Plato in accepting the existence of malevolence. There are people, he says, who form the right opinion but act in known discordance with morality because they detest their opponents so. For Plato this was an impossibility. No-one knowingly does evil, he says, with everyone doing a sort of moral calculus to weigh up the results of what they want to do. They could be mistaken in their judgment for sure but never deliberately do wrong. Aristotle's view is, I think, much the more realistic, though as for his opinion that nobody desires impossibilities... well, he didn't have Brexiteers to contend with.

Natural law : One of my biggest disappointments in Plato was the lack of discussion about how we behave when the law itself is wrong. Apart from the throwaway line that "bogus laws have no claim to be obeyed" this is something he barely touches. Of course he goes on at enormous length about how we can find the best people to make the best laws, but as to what we do when we find a law is wrong, he  squirms away from answering. Aristotle, on the other hand, accepts from the off that laws will never be perfect, never be able to account for every detail, and can never be absolute. That, he says, is why he need arbitration, to properly determine not only if the law was broken but if breaking the law was justified (Cicero was of like opinion, very much insisting that the context of an action was crucial to whether it was morally right or not). There is a higher sort of natural law, a Platonic form of justice, which must always be obeyed – but to expect to be able to write all this down is just not possible.

Here Aristotle reveals a distinctly Machiavellian streak. He describes how we can argue either way whether we should stick to the letter of an agreement :

We may argue that a contract is a law, though of a special and limited kind... and that the law itself as a whole is a of contract, so that any one who disregards or repudiates any contract is repudiating the law itself. Further, most business relations — those, namely, that are voluntary — are regulated by contracts, and if these lose their binding force, human intercourse ceases to exist. 

If, however, the contract tells against us and for our opponents... we do not regard ourselves as bound to observe a bad law which it was a mistake ever to pass: and it is ridiculous to suppose that we are bound to observe a bad and mistaken contract. Again, we may argue that the duty of the judge as umpire is to decide what is just, and therefore he must ask where justice lies, and not what this or that document means. Moreover, we must see if the contract contravenes either universal law or any written law... whichever way suits us. 

I can only imagine Plato's response if he ever heard he star pupil claiming such. First, his jaw would have dropped in horror. Then, he'd have roused himself to wrath and chased him out of the city with a whip. Nevertheless, this is maybe not too inconsistent : we can argue that contracts are good and binding if they agree with "natural law" (inasmuch as we can ever determine what that is) but useless bits of paper if they don't. But no such defence is possible for Aristotle's following comments on torture, which nakedly argue that we can either say it's "infallible" or that "people under torture tell lies quite as often as truth" depending only on what's to our advantage; he makes similar remarks on the value of taking an oath. This is the sort of adoption of rhetoric for its own sake that Plato would never have tolerated. Ironically, many of Plato's own texts are of infinitely greater literary appeal !

Rhetoric

Which leads on to the main topic. Anyone wanting to read Rhetoric for the titular content is well advised to skip books one and two entirely and go straight to book three. The first two contain some perfectly good advice but it's somewhat indirect. For example, Aristotle says that pleasure is a change of state in relative terms from worse to better, not any absolute state of being : knowing this can help you describe why something felt good to someone, for example. Likewise anger is the mere wish to cause injury while true hatred is the wish for non-existence. And pity is something we feel for those we associate with or feel close to, not, unlike certain people, something we readily feel for total strangers or those far removed in time. He also notes "emulation" as a sort of anti-jealousy : we all desire to be like the people we like.

All this section becomes an interesting and perhaps useful guide to inducing specific emotions, but little is said about how to use these to actually persuade people. Aristotle says that there wasn't any existing treatise on rhetoric, so fair enough I guess, but as any sort of practical guide it tends to spread itself a bit thin. It covers the golden rule of giving a presentation (know your audience) only implicitly, noting that different types of speech are appropriate to different circumstances and venues. For example if you want to flatter someone, praise them for having virtues they themselves openly admire; if you want to interrogate, try to force simple yes-or-no answers that can't be evaded. All well and good, but it's very, very general : all breadth and no depth, covering really all sorts of rhetoric rather than anything specific.

Which is very far to say that it contains nothing of value at all. Far from it ! Below are a selection of choice highlights that seem to be to be broadly appropriate in any sort of persuasive endeavour. Some of these, you may well think, are obvious. But believe me, at this point I've say through literally thousands of presentations and a very good many of them were, frankly, just no good. Sure, some of these may become obvious when they're written down – but they're anything but self-evident. This is definitely a situation where raising to consciousness that what naturally good speakers tend to do anyway, can be of wider benefit to those who aren't so fortunate.

• Be simple. Make your meaning clear and unambiguous. You can (and should !) use simile and metaphor (which is more impactful) and analogy, and it's okay to be lively; use also contrasting opposites where possible But your core message has to come through loud and clear. It should ideally be both immediately understandable but also novel. Be austere and and as brief as possible, but not one word shorter than necessary. On no account at all try and be poetic.
• Likewise, make your talk feel natural, like it's something you've just thought of. Hence the need to use ordinary language as much as possible. Of course, you do have to frame this to suit your audience though, but regardless, illustrate your point with commonly-accepted truths. Everyone likes agreeing with each other.
• Be a master of spin. Aristotle is pretty shameless about how describing the same things in different ways can give very different interpretations. E.g. someone can either be a "pirate" or merely a "purveyor"; thieves can be said to "plunder" or only to "take"; something might be described as a "crime" or just a "mistake". The thing may be the same but the implications radically different. This is another case of apparent contradictions, with Aristotle sometimes as firm as Plato in decrying the need for rhetoric at all, but at other times warmly embracing it. The ideal, of course, is that we use this great talent for the greater good, manipulating people into being better than themselves.
• And yet... facts, facts, facts ! These are his watchword. You must have something to base your argument on, even if it's a character assassination. For example to demonstrate intentionality, prove that your target committed similar actions multiple times, so they cannot claim ignorance. 
• If you use examples at the start, use many : people will be expecting you to draw a wider conclusion, so you'll need to support it with several instances. But if you reach that conclusion by other means (logical deduction and so on), then you only need to use one example at the end, to demonstrate that your conclusion holds water. Giving many at this point could become confusing.
• Oratory matters. The intonations and body language of a talk can embed more meaning than the written word. It might be faster to read the same text but it can contain less information than the spoken word; a skilled orator can make it sound as though they're giving more messages than they actually are.
• More than knowing your audience, Aristotle advises to remember the classic maxim of "know thyself". Different sorts of speech are appropriate for different speakers, especially age-related : the elder statesman approach looks strange in a novice. 
• You can use humour, but it should be sophisticated : the ironical man, he says, jokes for himself, whereas the buffoon jokes for others. That is, make sure the audience is laughing with you, not at you, remain dignified and in control. Make yourself one of the audience; we all want to be like comrades, and shame is only effective when it comes from someone we respect. We also want to emulate and compete only with those who we see as being on an equal footing so as to give us a fair chance. Don't make yourself seem hugely inferior or superior to your audience. Be relatable.
• In a talk, follow a clear structure. In particular, give people a sense of when it's going to end (this is especially relevant to a modern audience !), because this helps people to concentrate : if they have no sense of how long you'll go on for, their minds will wander. Again, I've slept through many a talk because of this very deficiency.
• If you have to describe something that might be intuitively implausible, then you have two options. Either you describe it in plausible terms to make it more readily believable, or openly admit that it's implausible. A related point is that if you have to cover something complicated, your audience may more readily believe you if you concentrate on describing the easier-to-understand consequences instead.
• Pre-emptively debunk probable counterarguments. Try and control the narrative in a debate, forcing your opponents to respond on your terms. If you need to be abusive, use the third person to duck responsibility. If you're questioning someone one-on-one, don't frame the conclusion you want as a question, but simply state it so they have to respond to it rather than refuting it. 

Some of these are certainly questionable, of course. It's probably okay to throw in the odd moment or two of poetical-style flair if you can deliver it well, just don't overdo it. Being "abusive in the third person" is not great : far better to abuse the argument – and you can, sometimes, publicly abuse an argument – than the person. There are even times, of course, when outright invective against evil men is a damn good thing, though this is by far the exception than the norm in most sorts of speech. And of course, insisting on a very particular structure where you can use many examples at the start but should only use one at the end is definitely too rigid, though it's not a bad guideline.

I can generally give a pretty good talk these days. As a chronic introvert who hates talking to strangers, I get an adrenaline buzz out of it. Echoing recommendations from another speaker, my two biggest pieces of advice are : 1) Be emotional; 2) Practise obsessively. The last is fairly obvious. When you can say your entire talk without really thinking about it, when you can ad lib ad nauseum regardless of any slip-ups you make, then you're ready. You should be actually bored of delivering your talk when practising before you do it for real.

On being emotional, this is more aimed specifically at scientists. What I mean by this is to try and actively convey enthusiasm and, even more importantly, interest above all else. Other emotions can be used when necessary; if an experience was frustrating, make the audience experience that too, while if you were amazed or surprised by something, try and make the audience a little shocked as well. I find it helps to give it a theatrical, deliberately exaggerated edge; if you need to disparage something, try and do it in good humour so the audience doesn't believe you hate whoever came up with whatever you're attacking*. God knows I've made that mistake. 

* And you really shouldn't hate them. Even if they've done something impressively stupid, it's likely that you yourself will have done something equally stupid in your own investigations at some point.

A stand-up comedian once explained how he simply pretended to be a different person to overcome stage fright, so by enacting a "presentation persona" which isn't the real you, inauthenticity can have benefits. And chances are, you'll need to exaggerate your own feelings to make the audience react to them : being subtle about it is much harder. Moreover, forcing yourself to exaggerate forces you to stay in control. That way, since you're not really feeling an actual sense of boredom when you recount that time you downloaded a million files and they were all empty, when someone asks you a serious question you can easily dial it back and return to answering perfectly rationally. And exaggeration has the yet further benefit of engendering confidence.

But don't overdo it. It should all be an act. You should express things you felt at the time, but you shouldn't actually be feeling those same emotions in front of a crowd, only pretending. After all, if the audience knows your pretending (and they will), they'll see that you're enthusiastic – why else, after all, would you bother putting on a show ?

I digress now too far from Aristotle so it's time to end this. As my first foray into his work, overall I quite enjoyed it. Maybe one day I'll try another text, but I definitely wouldn't choose a Collins edition.