Summary Of Aristotle's Rhetoric

Aristotle uses his book Rhetoric, to teach his audience about the means of which we go about persuading others. He expands on this idea by speaking about the three means of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos. Each book is focused on the three different modes of persuasion, with this paper mainly focusing on the second one, pathos, and more specifically, the section on friendship. Through Aristotle’s Rhetoric, we can better understand how friendship arises, what the purpose of friends are in rhetoric, and what causes enmity.

Before we can explore the purpose of friendship while engaging in rhetoric, we first must define what friendship means to Aristotle. He lays it out perfectly by saying, “We may describe friendly feeling towards anyone

as wishing for him what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake but for his, and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things about” (Rhetoric). By saying this, it shows that friendship is not only reciprocal goodwill to each other, but trying to make those good things happen for the other person. Aristotle also tells his audience that friends share the excitement in what is pleasurable, and pain for those things that are not. The love between friends cannot be selfish, but must be solely and completely for the sake of the other.
It is also worth mentioning that in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics he also distinguishes perfect friendship from the two imperfect types of friendship. Imperfect friendship are those that are based on utility or pleasure. While there can be usefulness and pleasure in a friendship, that is not its main goal. That being said, true friendships are those that occur between two people who are alike in virtue and desire:
This pleasure and pain of his will be the token of his good wishes for you, since we all feel glad at getting what we wish for, and pained at getting what we do not. Those, then, are friends to whom the same things are good and evil; and those who are, moreover, friendly or unfriendly to the same people; for in that case they must have the same wishes, and thus by wishing for each other what they wish for themselves, they show themselves each other’s friends (Rhetoric)
This illustrates that a friend feels the same way we do regarding our likes and wishes. In the context of rhetoric, that may be why it is easier to convince someone who you consider to be a true friend because you already hold so many of the same virtues. Knowing that it becomes harder for us to engage in rhetoric with someone who is of wicked nature because they cannot be friends with someone due to them being lovable and good (Nicomachean Ethics, pg 222). Therefore, we must find other ways to make a compelling argument to a person of such nature, or become their friend, not because of your good nature, but by some other mean. Aristotle tells us that we also feel some form of friendship towards those to tell us what we want to here:
And we also feel friendly towards those who praise such good qualities as we possess, an especially if they praise the good qualities that we are not too sure we do possess (Rhetoric).
By using such a method towards someone, we are able to acquire their friendship without compelling through our good nature. That being the case, we can use friendly nature and forms of flattery to appeal to our audience and better convey our argument.

Now that we understand what it means to engage in friendship, we must explore how we obtain it.