Abstract
This essay argues that the history of rhetoric is a crucial resource for illuminating the theoretical importance of emotion in, for instance, reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging. Taking its cue from two recent histories of rhetoric – Rita Copeland’s Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (2021), and Benedict Robinson’s Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson (2021), which together trace thirteen centuries of the history of rhetoric, this essay reads these histories with one eye on their theoretical significance. It does so by extracting five theoretical vignettes concerning the role and value of emotion based on Copeland’s and Robinson’s histories of rhetoric: (1) emotional invention; (2) emotional style; (3) emotional knowledge; (4) emotional action; and (5) emotional judgement. In reading history in this way, i.e. for its theoretical significance, the essay seeks to carve out a middle space between theory and history, and thus offer a way of doing theoretically-minded history or historically-responsive theory.
INTRODUCTION
There are two histories that have remained, until now, separated more than they ought to be: the histories of rhetoric and emotion.Footnote1 I say “until now” because the publication of two recent books, by Rita Copeland and Benedict Robinson,Footnote2 will help reverse the trend, revealing just how much rhetoric and emotion are intertwined, and how much there is to gain by relating them together. Both Copeland and Robinson show, in different and complementary historical periods (Copeland roughly from 500 CE to 1500 CE, and Robinson from 1500 CE to 1800 CE), how we learn a great deal about the history of emotion by tracing its treatment in the theory and practice of rhetoric, and how we can also write new histories of rhetoric – bringing out its significance differently – by focusing on the central role of emotion in it. The two books are important in their own right, but together, they are even more impressive, for, in relating rhetoric and emotion in the way they do, they not only illuminate our understanding of rhetoric and emotion, both historically and theoretically, but they also generate new ways of seeing the relations, again both historically and theoretically, between law, literature, religion, pedagogy, ethics, and politics.
In what follows, and taking my cue from these two books, I look at how attention to the history of rhetoric offers us ways of understanding the theoretical importance of emotion in, for instance, reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging. I will thus be extracting, from these wonderfully detailed histories, theoretical vignettes, or more generalised scenes of the role and value of emotion, which articulate the theoretical significance of these histories. In doing so, I am hoping to demonstrate how engagement with historical scholarship is theoretically generative. This essay, then, is part of an attempt to read history in a particular way: respectful of historical detail, as well as of the way accounts of the pasts always remain constructed and contested, this kind of reading always keeps one eye fastened on the theoretical importance of history-making. The essay thereby seeks to dwell in the middle space between theory and history, practicing a kind of theoretically-minded history or a historically-responsive theory.Footnote3
There are five theoretical vignettes examined in this essay, with the first three drawing more on Copeland’s history, and the second two more on Robinson’s (though there are also all kinds of overlaps and echoes between them): (1) the first uncovers the role of emotion, recognised by theorists and practitioners of rhetoric, as an art of inventional reasoning, of particular importance to forensic oratory, i.e. an art of finding arguments in certain cases; (2) the second, which became, over time, more historically prevalent than the first, especially in the rhetorical practice of letter-writing and poetic composition in the High Middle Ages, examines the relation between emotion and style, with emotion being found to infuse the practice of a certain kind of reading (or listening) that is said to be of ethical importance; (3) whereas the first, and to a lesser extent the second, are closely related to the influence of Cicero, the third is based on the recovery of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the 13th century, and offers an account of emotion as a mode of political knowledge; (4) the fourth, and moving at this point into the territory covered more by Robinson, and thus further away from the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods, zooms in on emotion as a kind of cognitive, embodied, and situated action (which also has much in keeping with Aristotle’s influence); and, finally, (5) the fifth vignette explores the complex relations between emotion and narrative, with emotion being modelled as the circumstantial judgement of character (enabled by emotions colouring the motives of actions of those who are being judged), and with literature enabling, training, and complicating this process in all kinds of ways, thereby helping us to reflect on how we judge and what it means to judge well.
The history of rhetoric is vital to the excavation of all five of these theoretical vignettes, and thereby to recognising the significance and diversity of roles emotion plays. And we may well ask: why is the history of rhetoric so valuable for these purposes? Both Copeland and Robinson offer some answers to that question: for instance, Copeland notes that “rhetoric is closer to the contingencies of experience than virtually any other field,” and, as such, rhetoric reaches deeper into the pragmatics of communication than other optics might (such as “argument,” or “reasoning,” or “poetics,” or “aesthetics”).Footnote4 Robinson, in turn, also recognising the close relation between rhetoric and the pragmatics of communication, emphasises how rhetoric is a deeply social (relational, interactive, and communal) art, and thus one that helps us situate emotion socially, avoiding the mistake of taking an abstracted, individual, un-situated mind – a brain in a vat – as the object of inquiry. Rhetoric, it seems, orients us both more contextually – into scenes of communication, with all kinds of ethical and political stakes in them – while also helping us remember that reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging is always a relational phenomenon.
In addition, in both Copeland and Robinson there is recognition of the relations between rhetoric, in theory and practice, and the history of literary and poetic forms: rhetoric, in turns out, has often been the driver of formal innovation in literature and poetry (and these domains are, after all, where emotional engagement is often not only needed, but where emotional response is especially intense). This is not to say that rhetoric thereby remains enclosed in the rather elite practices of literary and poetic writing and reading; in fact, by tracing the rhetorical roots of literature and poetry, and by recognising that much of the practice of rhetoric is aligned with the history of democracy, and with appeals to power made by those most marginalised in societies (the poor, the enslaved, the migrants, the colonised – all of whom often have nothing more than speech to fight with), we also bring the histories of literature and poetry back down to earth.Footnote5 Rhetoric, in other words, domesticates and politicises what might otherwise become a rather self-indulgent and a-political history of emotion in the writing and reading of literature and poetry.Footnote6
There is also another, more prosaic perhaps, reason for why rhetoric is so illuminating a historical guide to the importance of emotion in reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging. And that is the intimate relation between rhetoric and pedagogy. To study the history of rhetoric is also, in many ways, to study pedagogical history.Footnote7 So much of the theory of rhetoric is generated as part of a pedagogical program – of the training of orators, but not only (for instance, also military generals, preaches, or monarchs). Rhetorical theory and practice are intertwined with learning to write letters, learning to preach, learning to lead armies, learning to give counsel, learning to be an advocate, learning to craft legislation, or learning to adjudicate cases.Footnote8 And pedagogy is often more illuminating – of practices of reasoning, reading, knowing, and judging – than direct attention to those practices: by seeing how advocates, for example, are trained to develop certain skills, we may more easily spot those skills being exercised in practice. The pedagogical anchor of rhetoric, then, is one of the reasons why it is such a useful historical looking-glass, but also why it is so theoretically generative (in the context of this essay, of our recognition of the variety of ways in which emotion is theoretically important). To put it another way, without delving into the history of rhetoric, we lose – or so this essay argues – a crucial resource in recognising how important emotion is, for instance, to reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging.
EMOTIONAL INVENTION
The fate of Cicero’s influence on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages is crucial to Copeland’s history of rhetoric. In Copeland’s account, Cicero and his legacy forms a backdrop to the recovery of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the 13th century. To understand the significance of that moment, Copeland tells us, one needs to see it in light of the influence that Cicero, rather than Aristotle, had on both the theory and practice of rhetoric. This story, however, is itself complicated: it moves, for example, from the early influence of Cicero’s De Inventione (his youthful text, written shortly after he left his school studies, around 87 BCE), where the emphasis is on the first canon of rhetoric – i.e. invention – and where emotion, as we shall see in a moment, has a most secure place right at the heart of the practice of reasoning, through to a reading of Cicero that introduced a split between substance and style (and thus also a split between emotional invention and emotional style), with the latter becoming more prominent, though less in theory, and more in practice (in letter writing or poetic composition). When it came onto the scene, in the 13th century, Aristotle’s Rhetoric caused a sea-change, but one can only understand why when one sees how Cicero was read, taught, and practiced prior to (though also somewhat after) the 13th century.
Ostensibly, read in this way with Cicero as a backdrop, this is a story about the loss of the importance of emotion: from its secure place in the heart of reasoning, as emotional invention, to its marginalisation, as an element of style, until it is rescued again by Aristotle’s treatment of it in his Rhetoric. However, that is not the only or the best way to read Copeland. From the perspective of unearthing the theoretical significance of her historical work, there is another way. One of Copeland’s most important contributions is to show that this alleged “marginalisation” of the importance of emotion, as part of style rather than invention, is only an apparent one: style is, in the Middle Ages, elevated to enormous significance, including, vitally, ethical significance. This is visible, however, less in explicit theories (which, whether in Stoic or Neoplatonic treatment, tend to characterise emotion as an obstacle to good reasoning), than in practice, and in related pragmatic rhetorical manuals. The recovery of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the 13th century may, then, from a certain perspective, reposition the importance of emotion – now seen to be at the heart of knowledge, including political knowledge (as we will see below) – but this is not to say that what it replaces, emotional style, is not important in its own way. Thus, in a kind of roundabout way, Copeland does show – at least I am suggesting we read her as showing – through careful readings of rhetorical practice in sources that are not often read, that both emotional invention and emotional style treat emotion as vitally important, though in distinct ways.
Copeland’s starting point, in this first narrative arc of her book, begins with Cicero’s De Inventione. To be properly appreciated, though, this starting point needs to be preceded by an account of the context a little bit further back in time. As noted above, Cicero wrote the De Inventione soon after finishing his studies. From what we know, these were studies in the enkyklios paideia – literally “the rounded education” – which included training in “grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and in most cases, astronomy.”Footnote9 Within the study of rhetoric, students proceeded through the five canons of rhetoric: invention; arrangement (or design); expression (or style); memory; and delivery. Students would thus learn: (1) first how to generate the possible arguments for a speech (also referred to as the “topics” or places from which an argument could be developed); (2) how to then arrange these arguments in a certain order; (3) how to express them, deploying which stylistic devices (which figures or tropes); (4) how to remember them; and finally (5) how to deliver them (how to perform them, e.g. with what gestures, postures, or movements of the body, and what tone of voice, etc.). Many aspects of this education (for instance, the organisation of speeches into three different kinds – forensic, deliberative, and epideictic; or the analysis of a speech into five parts, including the prologue, the narration, the argument, the rebuttal, and the conclusion) persisted throughout the ages – over millennia – and were so deeply embedded that, unless you know of them, they are often invisible (they are not spoken of explicitly, but they are recognisable if you know what to look for). Indeed, one cannot really write the histories of reasoning, argument, or debate, or the histories of law, literature, religion, and much else, without acknowledging the long-standing influence of rhetorical pedagogy on those practices.
There are two aspects of this rhetorical pedagogy that are especially crucial. The first is the series of rhetorical exercises known as the progymnasmata. First referred as part of a rhetorical education in the 4th century BCE’s Rhetorica ad Alexandrum (probably composed by one of Alexander’s tutors),Footnote10 these exercises become the standard curriculum by the 1st century CE, but they are also already very popular at the time of Cicero’s education (1st century BCE). The exercises of the progymnasmata involve the students actively working within certain forms, reworking, extending, and improvising upon examples from classical sources, such as fables, poetic tales, histories, as well as anecdotes and proverbs, arguments in refutation, comparisons, extensions of some stock theme, impersonations, descriptions of imaginary art works, the composition of speeches in answer to certain questions, e.g. “Should anyone marry?”, the composition of speeches in certain imaginary cases or on certain ceremonial occasions, and the composition of speeches in argument for or against the introduction of a certain law.Footnote11 It is not an exaggeration to say a great deal of literary innovation – but also many of the forms of legal writing too – has its roots in attempting, often playfully, these rhetorical exercises, known to every schoolboy (and it was mainly male students who had the privilege) for millennia.Footnote12 As scholars have shown, many, if not really all, of these rhetorical exercises involve the emotions in complex ways: the declamatory exercises (the composition of speeches in imaginary cases and on ceremonial occasions – the controversiae and the suasoriae, respectively) – are especially emotionally-involving, requiring students to take on the persona (including the voice, the body posture, the gestures) of all kinds of imaginary and real figures, and thus offering a kind of training in being able to imagine the emotional lives of others, which might also be characterised as a form of civic education.Footnote13
A second, perhaps even more significant, element of rhetorical education – especially insofar as it was designed, as it was to an extent, to train future advocates, representing clients in court – was what is known as the “stasis” (or dispute, strife) theory. Often traced back to Hermagoras of Temnos, writing sometime in 150 BCE, this involved identifying the key issue in a case, and ideally an issue that would help, once debated and resolved, restore peace and justice to the community. This is a theory that developed over time, arguably influencing both Roman civil procedure and common law pleading, as well as a great many literary genres (e.g. Shakespeare’s plays),Footnote14 but it was also a theory that has remained remarkably stable over so many centuries. For instance, its four main types of issue – conjectural, as when there is a question around whether a certain act (e.g. a killing said to be a murder) occurred at all; definitive, as when the question is not whether the killing happened but whether, it having happened in a certain way falls within the definition of murder; qualitative, the most complex of all,Footnote15 as when, having agreed on the killing and the definition of murder applying, the issue is whether the act might still be justified (and thus not said, in the end, to be wrong); and jurisdictional, a kind of desperate, final resort, where the competence of the court to hear the alleged is put in question – remain recognisable in legal practice even today. So do many of the other elements of stasis theory, e.g. arguments over the interpretation of laws, such the letter vs. the spirit of legislation. Though not well-known by contemporary legal theorists, or even all legal historians, stasis theory, and its development over many centuries, is a crucial part of the story of law and its reasoning practices.
Stasis theory is also crucial to Cicero’s De Inventione. In fact, what we know about Hermagoras’s treatise, On Stasis, we know from Cicero’s text, as well as from the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a rhetorical training manual composed at the same time as De Inventione, and for many centuries attributed to Cicero himself. This is important to know, because the art of invention, or the finding of arguments, is designed with the stasis theory in the background: the arguments to be found are arguments related to the potential key issues affecting a case. De Inventione is a very practical text, written one imagines to some extent for Cicero’s own benefit, given his plans to practice oratory in the courts and in other public fora – reminding him what kinds of arguments he can deploy in relation to what kind of issue. It is, in turn, in these various arguments – marshalled to cumulatively add up to persuade a jury about how to resolve the relevant issue – where emotion plays a crucial role. This is, then, what is meant by emotional invention: the practice of drawing on emotions to make arguments in relation to the relevant key issue in a case. As Copeland notes, to approach emotion in this way, as the “resource for and product of invention,” is to place emotion at the centre of “reasoning about a case”; it is to theorise it “as a problem of logic, ethics, and psychology that helped to support the whole of the rhetorical edifice.”Footnote16
How exactly was this so? What role, in theory and practice, did Cicero – drawing on and extending the prevalent stasis theory in which he was trained – give emotion in the art of invention, and thus in the practice of finding arguments on the key issue in a case? The answer Copeland gives us, in her reading of Cicero, is a fascinating one. It is an answer that zooms in on one way of understanding emotion, namely as a “temporal upheaval,” a commutatio, a kind of temporary mental disturbance.Footnote17 One can see how, from one perspective – especially a more philosophical one that thinks of philosophy as a kind of therapy (e.g. Stoic, Platonic and Neoplatonic) for dealing with the vicissitudes of fate – emotion, understood in this way, becomes something negative: it becomes an obstacle to the good life, which is ideally peaceful, and not troubled by upheavals and disturbances. Hence also why – in theory – the history of emotions understood as temporary upheavals and disturbances is such a negative one. But in practice for the advocate in the courtroom, and in rhetorical manuals (as De Inventione was), emotion as affectio or commutatio, was an incredibly helpful argumentative tool. This is why paying attention to rhetorical history (in practice, and in its rhetorical manuals), is so crucial, and why it cannot be replaced by or represented by a history of philosophy. The deeply pragmatic interests of rhetoric reveal to us an understanding of the importance of emotion that the history of philosophy – with its interests in a recipe for a good life, a peaceful, reflective, and undisturbed lifeFootnote18 – simply does not.
For an orator, and thus from a rhetorical point of view, the idea of emotion as a temporary upheaval or disturbance is so important because it is understood, at the time (though arguably still today), as such an effective mode of proof. It is the temporariness of the emotion that makes it so plausible as a motive for an act. The appeal to an emotion, by the orator, as the content of the motive of an act makes it ideal for generating an argument, whether that be in cases where the issue is conjectural, definitive, or (indeed, especially) qualitative (the link to jurisdictional issues is perhaps less obvious). What is crucial to see here, and what Copeland points to, is how recognition of the particular rhetorical history of emotion, allows us to see another kind of significance of emotion, which the philosophers do not see (or see only as a danger or an obstacle): whereas the fleetingness and the disturbing quality of emotion – its “contingency,” its “unpredictability,” it being such a circumstantial “accident” – does not appeal to the philosophers, and is indeed derided by them as an obstacle to the good life, from the perspective of a practising advocate almost nothing else is as valuable: “it is in its very contingency that emotion serves as a permanent topic of invention.”Footnote19 As Copeland says further:
Thus, the very spontaneity of passion, like the unpredictability of ignorance or accident, is an element of legal reasoning in which the orator can find an argument. Emotion is part of the structural underpinning of topical invention, recurring as a key term across the topical system.Footnote20
EMOTIONAL STYLE
As indicated above, Copeland’s story of the fate of Cicero’s legacy points to how key a role emotion plays in it: certain attitudes to emotions (understood as temporary disturbances) develop amongst the philosophers, and so emotions disappear from theory – at least high theory, or philosophy. Emotions come to be treated, instead, as matters of style. But although the story might have stopped there, in Copeland it does not: Copeland works hard, historically, to show that if one looks at sources not often looked at – at pragmatic rhetorical manuals, and at practices such as letter writing and poetic compositionFootnote23 – that one then sees how emotion comes to be recognised as important in another way, namely, as a mode of experiencing style when reading and listening, and one that is of ethical significance. As with the idea of emotions as temporary disturbances, which avoided displacing rhetorical practice by philosophy, this historical excavation also involves attention to rhetorical practice on the ground. It is, once more, through the history of rhetoric that we come to see a vital role for emotion – even when it is relegated, seemingly, to the apparently marginal matter of style.
The key question, as formulated by Copeland, here is: how did style, infused as it was with emotion, come to be recognised as having ethical significance? This was a vital question for the early Christian rhetoricians – Augustine being the most famous – and indeed Augustine’s De Doctrina christiana (written between c. 395 and c. 425) is often treated as the starting point for a new synthesis between Christianity and Ancient rhetoric. As Copeland shows, if one reads the late imperial handbooks of rhetorical practice (from the 4th and 5th centuries), Augustine’s text appears as much less of a watershed: it is more a means of continuing a certain tradition (which recognised the role of emotion in the experience of style). But even if it is not so much of a watershed, Augustine is still a useful bridge, and offers a way into the 6th century, and later, works that Copeland focuses on. The key reason for that is that Augustine looks for how rhetoric can be “a necessary tool of Christian instruction and evangelising,”Footnote24 and in particular, for how he treats style, understood as the bearer of emotion, as a means of reading Scripture. As Copeland says, this is the result less of what Augustine explicitly says, and more because of how he structures his book – De Doctrina christiana – putting the texts first, and then analysing (or reading) them via knowledge of stylistic devices.Footnote25 Style, then, becomes a way of reading – but because the text in question is the Scripture, and because style is understood to be imbued with emotion, so emotional style becomes a way of reading Scripture the way it ought to be read: passionately.
In this way, the significance of emotion shifts, from being at the centre of oratical practice, where it is a means of finding arguments in relation to key issues in a case, to being at the centre of ethical reading, where to read ethically comes to mean being moved by what one reads and thus, crucially, forming a “bond of textual affection.”Footnote26 For Augustine, as Copeland shows, it is a primary duty of the preacher to be emotionally moved by the text:Footnote27 resembling, to an extent, an orator, who must himself be emotional in order to generate the same emotions in his audience,Footnote28 the preacher must be moved, but this time not in order to get the decision he wants from the jury, but in order to generate the same love for Scripture in his flock. Style is crucial to this, for it is via stylistic devices, which again are the bearers of emotion, that one comes to cultivate this textual love. This is more a matter of practice than it is a matter of theory: the taxonomy of stylistic figures and tropes might help to explain, to a degree, how one can reach a certain emotional effect, but really (and this is part of what makes it difficult to excavate historically), the magic here happens in the transference of an emotional experience from the preacher to the audience in any one act of interpreting and reading, such that it is the style of the text that serves as the emotional meeting point of preacher and worshipper, or of interpreter and reader. It is this affective preaching/interpreting and affective reading, via the text’s style, that infuses monastic practices after Augustine, and that thereafter influences the works in the 6th century and beyond, which are all designed to show “how to read a text for the love of it: that is, in unveiling the text’s rhetorical [especially stylistic] secrets, they teach love of the text.”Footnote29 This, as Copeland says, is “an ethics of emotional reading,”Footnote30 all enabled by a certain approach to style as emotional.
Thus, for instance, in the 6th century, Cassidorus’ Expositio psalmorum, which is a commentary on the psalms, offers a rich taxonomy of figures of speech and thought, identifying no less than 105 such stylistic figures.Footnote31 Indeed, Cassidorus’ general definition of figure is, for present purposes, remarkably apt, for he conceives of figures as akin to “facial expressions,” such that to read a text is like reading a human face.Footnote32 Reading the faces of others is very much a matter of interpreting their emotional state, and thus, by analogy, reading a text, by experiencing its figures (its elements of style), becomes a kind of emotional reading. What Cassiodorus does, with great patience, is to identify the different affective valences of different stylistic figures in the psalms. Each figure, thus, becomes a vehicle for a different kind of emotional effect. The figure of synathroesmos, for instance, in Psalm 11, as when the psalm says “Save me, O Lord, for there is now no saint: truths are decayed from among the children of men,” is explained as collecting “together the many things that he [the prophet] fears,” and thereby “is considered one of the most violent” figures “because many things and many crimes are heaped together.”Footnote33 An even more striking example comes from Psalm 57:
Their madness is according to the likeness of a serpent: like the deaf asp that stoppeth her ears: which will not hear the voice of the charmers; nor of the wizard that charmeth wisely. God has broken their teeth in their mouth: the Lord has broken the grinders of the lions. They shall come to nothing, like water running down; he hath bent his bow till they be weakened.Footnote34
It is this prospect of an ethical reading, and one that can be shared as between interpreter and reader, that rescues the significance of style, but also, simultaneously, showcases for us one of the ways that emotion can be so important, namely: as enabling, via language, a certain way of reading and listening, and ultimately a certain way of relating emotionally with others. Beyond Cassiodorus, Copeland shows how this is so in the works of Isidore and Bede, in the 7th and 8th centuries, as well as, considerably later, and more ambiguously, in Onulf of Speyer’s Rhetorici colores (dated to sometime after 1114). Onulf’s reading of stylistic figures, says Copeland, “mines every capacity of rhetorical style to exhort and terrify,” but he is also wary of the power of style, which, when not wedded to the devotion of a particular text (the Scripture), can “perturb the devout, calm, monastic atmosphere.”Footnote36 Onulf relies heavily, for his rhetorical knowledge, on the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and as such, this obviously not being a Christian text, raises once more the spectre of the question of the ethics of emotional style: which style is good? Which, when one recognises the link between emotion and style, is like asking: Which emotions are good for the soul?
Onulf’s work here lies at a kind of historical crossroad, which comes to be very concerned with the particular emotions that ought to be, and can be, served by particular figures of style, not so much in the service of Christian devotion (of the love of text), but more in terms of a more general spiritual therapy, of cultivating the emotions that are good for one’s soul. This is where what Copeland calls “the pragmatic rhetorics of the High Middle Ages” come into their own, refashioning the genre of the epideictic speech (a speech made in praise or blame of something or someone), so as to generate certain kinds of emotions. The vehicles for emotional style here are not speeches, or indeed readings of texts, but instead letter writing and poetic composition, and accompanying rhetorical manuals serving those arts. As Copeland says, these arts were approached as ones that can “stir the spirit, to spark desire, and even at times to give sensory therapy”; this was emotional style as a “kind of emotional healing.”Footnote37 Writers of letters and poems looked to these rhetorical manuals to learn the art of stirring certain emotions, while the writers of these rhetorical manuals turned to the history of rhetoric, and in particular the canon of style, to show these letter writers and poets how style could put readers or listeners (for letters were also designed to be read aloud to their listeners) in a certain mood – a mood that was good for their soul.
Examples of these rhetorical manuals come from the 11th to the 13th centuries, accompanied by anthologies of letters and poems. Thus, for instance, De ornamentis verborum (c. 1067–1096), a rhetorical manual written by Marbod, at the relevant time a magister at the cathedral school of Angers,Footnote38 offers examples of stylistic devices “calibrated to link that device with some kind of…mood.”Footnote39 Similarly, Alberic’s Brevarium (c. 1077–1080), “the earliest medieval work to apply traditional rhetorical doctrine to the purpose of letter writing,”Footnote40 relates certain figures, often with certain aural effects on the listener, with certain emotional states or moods, such as mildness, generosity, affability or courtesy, and sympathy, which are linked to paranomasia, adnominatio, repetitio, and contentio.Footnote41 According to Copeland, the arts of letter writing and poetic composition, and their pedagogy, reach their apogee in the 13th century, with the forms laid down by Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Guido Faba.Footnote42 Copeland shows, with patient readings, how these and other works of the period treat stylistic figures as “tools for generating emotion,” teaching writers “how to elicit emotional response through sensuous and often charged sound effects (mainly the figures of speech) through topical thought lodged in stylistic effects (the tropes).”Footnote43 These lessons, in turn, are internalised by the poets – writing poetry that gives pleasure to the souls of lovers, or, as in Chaucer, self-consciously turning style once more into an object of ethical inquiry: is style good for the soul, or does it corrupt it, after all?
For present purposes, what is crucial about how Copeland reads these works – and, indeed, that she reads them at all, treating them as important sources in the history of rhetoric – is that they reveal a dimension of the importance of emotion. On the back of these sources, we can say: emotion resides in language, with different devices of language being correlated (for instance, by sound, or other sensuous effects), with certain kinds of emotional states or moods, and these, in turn, can be of ethical or psychological importance. They can, for example, constitute a certain kind of reading practice, which, in a certain religious context (but one can also imagine a legal institutional one, e.g. reading the Magna Carta, a constitution, or a bill of rights), takes on ethical importance, for it inculcates a certain emotional attitude to it (e.g. love). This is not ethically or politically straightforward, for excessive textual worship can be both dangerous to the individual and to the relevant community. But it may be possible to excavate here a form of reading with love that retains a certain distance from the text, if not also moderate scepticism or respectful doubt – the love of friendship, for instance, as conceptualised by Simone Weil, involves both need and distance.Footnote44 If that were possible, we might ask: what styles of language are conducive to generating a reading of the text as if it were a friend, of reading with the love of friendship, rather than, say, with obsessive, blind love? This possibility raises the more general prospect of linking emotional styles and virtues: insofar as emotional styles – stylistic devices as carriers or invokers of certain kinds of emotions – are linked to certain emotional states or moods, which may be good for the soul, we can see how emotional styles might be correlated with – the virtues of a good legislator, for example, or of a good judge, or a good citizen.
Legal language, on this view, takes on importance as a potential creator of certain kinds of emotional communities – of officials operating in certain kinds of moods as a result of reading certain kinds of texts, but also of citizens relying on certain linguistic devices to create certain kinds of affective relations between each other. Thus, one can begin to speak, via style, of the emotional profiles of legal forms. On this approach, emotional styles create certain forms of life, whether between government and citizen, or between citizen and citizen.
EMOTIONAL KNOWLEDGE
As noted above, Copeland’s reading of the history of rhetoric in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages builds up, in the early chapters of her book, to the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the 13th century, discussed in the later chapters. Knowing, as we do now, some of what occupied the minds of practitioners and theorists of rhetoric in the preceding centuries – initially, with emotional invention, and later, and increasingly, with emotional style – that rediscovery is now more likely to strike us as a momentous occasion. Aristotle’s Rhetoric catapulted emotion back into the centre of culture – especially academic, scientific culture – but in a particular way. The understanding of emotion as an engine of invention and as a medium of style continued to murmur away in the background, but what becomes loud and clear with Aristotle, is something else: a form of knowledge, initially of the orator in Greek courts, but later of a scholar or indeed of a political advisor or ruler, of the emotions of a community. According to Copeland, for Aristotle, emotions were “a core principle of persuasion in public matters,” and thus he provides “a systematic account…of what the emotions are, how to know them, and how to marshal them in one’s audience.”Footnote45 This knowledge of emotion – or this emotional knowledge – is deeply embedded in political and communal life: emotions are what constitute social life, and this is indeed what the orator, or the scholar of politics, or the political advisor or ruler, needs to know. To see this, we need to turn briefly to how Copeland reads Aristotle on emotion in his Rhetoric, and then how she conveys its legacy, as a knowing practice, in the most successful and influential of the medieval mirror of princes: the De regimine principum of Giles of Rome (c. 1277–1281).Footnote46 The task here is not to reiterate Copeland’s historical insights, but instead to read them with one eye on their theoretical significance: what does her historical work reveal about the importance of emotion to knowledge, and knowledge of what exactly?
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, first delivered as a series of lectures in the 350's BCE, and then written up in the 330's BCE, is, as Copeland notes, a theoretical text: it is less a pragmatic manual, as it is a taxonomic or analytical text, cataloguing and categorising different kinds of speeches, and the elements of proof, style, and arrangement important to each one.Footnote47 As Copeland reads this manner of exposition, to make this move is already to position rhetoric less as a mere means of persuasion, and more as an object of knowledge: a knowledge of what is likely to be persuasive in certain contexts of practical reason. If he is to be persuasive – and it is, once again, a “he” in Ancient Greece – then the orator needs to know certain things. It turns out, interestingly, that a lot of what the orator needs to know revolves around the emotions. It includes, for instance, knowing how to express a certain ethos – a certain character of the speaker – and it includes knowing the conventional patterns of emotion an audience might feel (pathos), where those patterns include what kinds of judgements emotions might implicate or lead to, and what kinds of relations those emotions are embedded in.
The key, indeed revolutionary, treatment of the emotions in the Rhetoric is in Book 2: it is here that Aristotle produces “the earliest account of audience psychology, a comprehensive exploration of pathos, emotion: what produces emotions in people, and how a speaker can exploit the emotions present or possible in an audience in order to effect persuasion by making arguments that draw on emotional disposition.”Footnote48 Aristotle here examines fourteen emotions (including anger and calmness or satisfaction; fear and confidence; shame; kindliness; pity and indignation; and envy), knowledge of which is so valuable to an orator. What is crucial here is not which emotions Aristotle examines, but how he examines them, and in particular, how socially situated his analysis of each emotion is. It is also important – and I shall return to this in the section below on “emotional judgement” – that, in his treatment of these emotions, Aristotle treats them as necessary ingredients of judgement. There is thus, in this Book 2, an implicit theory of judgement as emotional, and this is important to excavate (as I do below). For now, in this section, my focus is on the quality of the orator’s knowledge of the emotions that an audience might experience, and especially their situational and social character.
As Copeland notes, what is striking about reading Aristotle on emotion in his Rhetoric is that “the emotions at stake here are those that involve other subjectivities who are part of a civic framework.”Footnote49 Aristotle is interested in “what beliefs, interactions, and awarenesses actually cause emotions”Footnote50 in our interactions with others. Emotion, for Aristotle – in the Rhetoric, for there are arguably different treatments of emotions in the Nichomachean Ethics, or in the De Anima – is treated “as the experiential equipment of civic life rather than,” for instance, “as destructive impulses to be overcome.”Footnote51 Knowing emotion, understood in this way, is a kind of political knowledge: “Knowing and mobilising the passions of an audience is an expression of the speaker’s political understanding.”Footnote52 And it is this approach to emotion that, as Copeland stresses, “was to give medieval readers in the Latin West a new way of articulating – and indeed theorising – the function of emotion in persuasive discourse.”Footnote53
As we shall see later, this approach to emotion by Aristotle was to become crucial also for theorising the mind in the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods, as well as for the history of literature. Indeed, Aristotle’s concrete, situational, and social approach to emotions was made not only for political knowledge – for the kind of knowledge needed by political advisors and political rulers – but also for makers of stories, and thus for literary knowledge. When Aristotle describes anger, for instance, he situates it as a response to, and desire to retaliate for, a perceived slight, made to one by a particular individual. Aristotle describes the different kinds of slight there might be – contempt, spite, insult, scorn, disrespect – and is careful to include, in his description, what might be motivating those who issue the slight. Aristotle also digs deep into the mind of the person who perceives the slight (already, importantly, a cognitive act – the emotions, for Aristotle, are cognitive) – for instance, to get angry one needs to have some sense of superiority that one takes to be damaged by the perceived slight.Footnote54 These are subtle, concrete, and nuanced accounts of both individual psychology and social dynamics, with emotions being nestled in little social dramas, or scenes of interaction, of individuals with certain characteristics, generating change in each other and in their relations. One can readily see how knowledge of anger, understood as above, would be both useful politically (knowing the above about anger, one could generate anger in one’s audience when this was thought to be useful) as well as for the practice of literature.
It was precisely this link between emotion and politics – of emotional knowledge as a kind of political knowledge – that was to prove so influential in the medieval period, following William of Moerbeke’s translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the 1260s. One of the principal drivers of this influence was the commentary on the Rhetoric produced in the early 1270s by Giles of Rome. As Copeland notes, Giles places “rhetoric squarely in the ambit of ethics and politics,” presenting rhetoric as a kind of “‘logic’ of ethics and politics,” thereby connecting Aristotle to “the emergent importance of moral science, political theory, and practical theology among university scholars.”Footnote55 To think of rhetoric as a kind of logic was not, for Giles, to say that rhetoric was subordinate to dialectic: on the contrary, rhetorical knowledge, which, as above, is a deeply emotional knowledge, has “its own legitimate form of cognition, its own audience, and its own subject concerns.”Footnote56 Indeed, rhetoric, along with poetics, is just what the complex, contingent, ambiguous, and often contradictory arenas of ethics and politics need.
The other principal driver – and one that reached a much wider audience than his commentary – was Giles’ De regimine principum (c. 1277–1281), a work he wrote a few years after the commentary. It is this mirror of princes that was to carry “the Aristotelian emphasis on audience psychology and social ethics, as well as the conception of emotion as a property of politics”Footnote57 well into the Middle Ages and beyond (its survival – as a 13th century text – in 300 manuscripts is an indication of that). Based on his understanding of the “passions as a genuinely political force,” Giles turns “Aristotle’s idea of contingent persuasion through the emotions into a program of contingent rule and self-rule for the prince.”Footnote58 This program is remarkably comprehensive, covering the care of the self (in Book 1), the rule of the household (in Book 2), and the governance of the state (in Book 3). Giles personalises, domesticates, and politicises Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and his principal means for doing so are the emotions: Giles both moves his reader (his text can be thought of as an emotional oration), and he shows his reader how they can move themselves and others.
For Giles, this emotional knowledge begins with the self. One first must be able to rule oneself, and to do that, one has to know which emotions are good for one’s soul, and how to generate them. But even here, at an ostensibly personal level, what Giles emphasises is the social and political dimension of the emotions good for the self: love is the key emotion, but this is a love of the common good, inspired by knowledge of how the Romans loved their res publica.Footnote59 The prince must learn how to generate this love in himself, and once he can do that, he can also generate it in others. The prince, then, is “the one who will use the emotions persuasively on himself and others, to shape his own judgements and those of his subjects,” and it is precisely this “activation of emotion in the prince that takes us,” says Copeland, “into the heart of Giles’ transformation of Aristotelian rhetoric.”Footnote60 Giles takes Aristotle’s circumstantial analysis of particular emotions, and transforms them into the kind of political knowledge a political ruler needs: generating the right kind of emotions, and the right balance between emotions, in himself, and thereafter, creating a political community with the same emotional hierarchy and balance. The examples are legion – some involving direct applications of Aristotle’s analysis (of anger, for instance), while others extending the analysis into emotions Giles himself promotes as important at all three levels of rule (self, household, and community). An example of the latter is what Giles says about hope, and how he relates hope to good law-making:
We may show in four ways how it befits kings and princes to conduct themselves fittingly in relation to hope, and to hope for what is to be hoped, and to attempt what is to be attempted… Hope, first of all, concerns the good, for what concerns evil is not hope but fear. Second, hope involves difficulty, for although in any good there may be love or desire, nevertheless hope does not exist unless in relation to a good that is difficult. No one is said to be hopeful unless the desired good is arduous and difficult of attainment. Third, hope arises in relation to a future good; concerning present goods there is no hope, although there can be joy and delight. Fourth, hope arises in relation to a good that is possible; for one does not hope but rather despairs about what is impossible. These four considerations, the good, the difficult, the future, and the possible, ought to be most relevant to kings and princes. For since kings and princes are proposers of laws…it is for them to hope for the good.Footnote61
EMOTIONAL ACTION
Aristotle is also a key figure for Robinson’s history of rhetoric. Interestingly, though, whereas Copeland places more exclusive emphasis on the Rhetoric itself, Robinson reads the approach to the emotionsFootnote62 in Aristotle’s Rhetoric in tandem with his Poetics and especially his De Anima, his work on the movement of the soul. This is important, for it allows Robinson to give a distinctive account of emotion: as something deeply related to the movements of bodies, and to the way those movements are oriented and guided by a dynamic cognition of others and the environment. This dynamic cognition includes the work of the imagination, and thus an important part of Robinson’s account of emotion, building on Aristotle, concerns how emotion and imagination collaborate in the movement of bodies amongst other bodies and within certain ecologies. This account, however, is by no means confined to Robinson’s reading of Aristotle: indeed, Robinson’s historical point is to trace its survival and transformation in the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods. It turns out that in those periods, what animates both the practice of philosophy and literature is a thoroughly rhetorical legacy. This is a legacy, however, that is often submerged – not explicitly acknowledged – and thus one that can be made visible only by recognition of the underlying, common approach to emotion. It is a certain approach to emotion – as emotional action (though also, as we shall see in the next section, emotional judgement) – that carries, sometimes surreptitiously, the influence of rhetoric into philosophies of mind and the making of literature.
Robinson situates emotion as part of a science of the soul – a science that extends to the study of living animals, and to the ways in which they interact with the environment as they actively navigate their way through the world.Footnote63 This is a world-engaging and deeply embodied approach to the emotions. In the language of contemporary cognitive science, it resembles – as Robinson is very much aware – enactive, extended, ecological, and embodied approaches to cognition.Footnote64 To approach the emotions in this way is not, however, to neglect or sideline rhetoric: quite the contrary, part of what makes Robinson’s historical insight so valuable is that he connects the arts of communication with the sciences of the soul, and beyond, all the way to contemporary cognitive science. This is done precisely via a reading of Aristotle – covering both his Rhetoric and his Poetics, as well as his De Anima – and seeing how Aristotle’s works imbued the work of the Early Modern and Enlightenment period.
For Aristotle, to recall, in his Book 2 of the Rhetoric, to study emotion meant to study social life: little dramas or scenes of interaction between persons. Further, it meant treating the emotions as cognitive: the emotions that were generated in these interactions were means of understanding and responding to others and the world. Emotions, then, on this view, are a kind of intelligent and relational (or intelligently relational) action: they are ways of apprehending others and the world, and a way of responding to those apprehensions. They are also ways of investing the world with meaning and value. The 17th century philosophers that Robinson mentions in his book – such as Spinoza, Malebranche, Hobbes, Descartes, all of whom can be read as philosophers of emotion – as well as those he considers in more detail – such as Thomas Wright, and his Passions of the Minde (1604) – pick up this legacy of Aristotle’s approach to emotion in his Rhetoric. But they also combine it with Aristotle’s approach to the movement of the soul in his De Anima.
For many of these 17th century thinkers, emotion was understood as a “value-laden appraisal,” and even more basically, as “amongst primary capacities of animal life…a way in which living beings negotiate their worlds.”Footnote65 Emotion was closely tied to the way the world appears when we act: “it is one of the living animal’s most important perceptual capacities.”Footnote66 Importantly, though, this perceptual orientation, or perception-in-action, was not mere sensation: to see emotion as (perceptual) action, and thus as action that orients itself in the world, but also to see (perceptual) action as emotional, is to see it as a form of intelligent engagement, “endowing it [the world] with force, meaning, and value.”Footnote67 The key to emotional action being approached as a form of intelligent engagement was imagination: and, as Robinson shows, one of the most important contributions of the 17th century, though also beyond – in the Scottish philosophical tradition, especially in David Hume and Adam Smith – was the theorisation of the intimate relationship between emotion and imagination in action (often, precisely, situated, concrete, social, and interactive action).
The importance attributed to the relationship between imagination and emotion came also, in part, from Aristotle, but this time his De Anima. In that work, Aristotle is interested in how things appear to bodies in movement. These appearances are theorised as imagined by living beings, while at the same time being imbued with appetite, or being related in some way to desires and emotions. Thus, an animal that is thirsty might imagine a river, and it is this appetitive imagining that makes that animal move towards the river (similarly, though, being triggered to imagine a river might generate the desire to drink: the relationship between emotion and imagination is not one way, but rather complex and dynamic). Emotions are ways of acting that are akin to these appetitive imaginings, and thus work in tandem with imagination in various ways. Emotion, on this view, is very far from a temporary disturbance or an obstacle to reasoning: it is, as Robinson puts it, “a basic, bodily-perceptual sense,” a way of “seeing and knowing,” the way in which a living animal actively orients themselves in the world, apprehending its objects and features as meaningful and valuable to it in various ways (whether they be something to avoid or something to move towards).Footnote68 Thus, a sheep that sees a wolf, sees not just a wolf, but “something harmful to itself,” which it then reacts to by running away and warning others around it; emotional seeing is a kind of “estimation,” a “seeing-as”:Footnote69 it is an intelligent, value-imbued, action-related seeing, and one that works in tandem with the imagination. As the living animal acts, its emotions work together with its imagination to render the world apprehendable to it, closing certain actions off, while opening others, as part of an overall strategy of survival and flourishing.
Although this is a basic capacity, it is also this that constitutes the bedrock from which more complex cognitive tasks are performed (by animals or by humans). Thus, the images – the estimations, forms of seeing-as – built by the imagination, when it acts, and imbues the world with force, meaning, and value, have histories (they form part of an animal’s emotional, embodied, and imaginative memory), and they can also be creative, in that they can synthesise past images into new collocations and new series, thereby also featuring in the complex tasks of planning and deliberating (Aristotle speaks explicitly of imaginative deliberation, and says that no living being can think without an image). Further, the images that are generated are not static pictures – they are, instead, “estimations,” sketchy, almost guess-like gropings, appearances of varying density and detail made in the course of action.Footnote70 It is, then, these emotion-imagination combinations, which vary in complexity, that are part of action, or, as Robinson puts it, that are “caught up in the flow of actions.”Footnote71 Emotional action is seen as world-orienting and imagination-involving, and therefore highly intelligent – both in animals and in humans.
Crucially, when this approach to emotions, in the sciences of the soul, is combined with Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and also his Poetics, where, as we have seen, emotions were already understood to be part of scenes of social life, or little interactive dramas, then the way to know and study these emotions is to situate them in concrete narratives. It is by carefully describing such scenes, where persons, interacting with each other, orient themselves and react to each other via the emotions, that we can come to understand and study the emotions. And it is precisely this that brings the 17th and, later, the 18th century philosophies of the mind together with literary and poetic theory and practice. For, on this view, literature (including drama and poetry, and the soon to become popular novelistic art) is a vital means of knowing emotion, precisely as emotional action. Emotions, one might say, have plots: they can be known by being plotted, and thus by seeing them as part of events. Emotions can be known, but only narratively, requiring the sciences of the soul and the philosophies of mind to work together with the genres and devices of literature.
Very importantly, though, this also means recognising limits to one’s knowledge of the emotions. It is one of the distinctive virtues of Robinson’s book that he shows, throughout it, how 17th and 18th century thinkers recognised this, speaking of the emotions as “infinite” and “countless.”Footnote72 If emotions are so closely tied to actions, and can only be known narratively, and if there are – as there indeed are – countless such narratives – these collocations of circumstances, situations, contingencies, and accidents – then there are also countless emotions. All we can do – although this is also no small thing – is keep producing different kinds of narratives that allow us to see more, and name more, emotions. Narrative offers, as Robinson notes, a “way of knowing the passions at the limits of taxonomy and language.”Footnote73 To narrate, Robinson says further, “is to practice a kind of knowledge, rendering actions knowable by tracing them to their motivating passions and rendering passions knowable by their placement in a field of actions,”Footnote74 but this narration is also endless, with our insights into emotions reliant on the way in which those narratives are told. Literature, on this approach, is no mere optional add on to the sciences and philosophies of bodies, minds, and souls: it is, instead, an absolutely integral and necessary part of them, offering a means of actively inquiring into, and discovering, the complexity of action. And this is all because of the recognition of the confluence between rhetoric and emotion: initially historically, as in the above story of the inextricability of emotion and action, and thereafter, when read with one eye on its theoretical importance, also in theory, as a means of understanding both emotion and action.
EMOTIONAL JUDGEMENT
The above concept of emotional action may seem to be far away from legal practice. But it is not at all. It is intimately connected to the way that judgement (not only in law, of course, but perhaps especially in law) is perceived in the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods, both in terms of how judgement works, but also in terms of the ethics of judgement – how it ought to be done, and how it can be trained to be done better. Law, after all, by virtue of its exposure to a constant stream of new narratives (new scenes of human drama in courts), can be understood to be a kind of rhetorical and literary art of describing and evaluating actions in circumstances. Although it is not part of Robinson’s aim to unearth this link to legal practice, there are numerous hints throughout the book that it could be done. For example, Robinson discusses Sir Francis Bacon’s orientation, in his Advancement of Learning (1605), towards “vivid circumstantiality,” and thus “vivid narrative as a means of knowing both actions and passions,”Footnote75 which might well be linked to his legal experience. Equally, Lord Kames’s later, but similar, interest in “ideal presence,” a rhetorical concept, of lively, vivid narrativising,Footnote76 could be related to his treatment of equity in Scots law. Both could be understood to be part of a rhetorical history of legal judgement, which expresses itself in the ever more refined descriptions of facts in case reports, including the inclusion, in appellate cases, of multiple, often differing, descriptions and narratives. Legal judgement, in might be said, as it emerges in 17th and 18th century England and Scotland (to mention just two contexts), comes to be inseparable from a rhetorically-inspired circumstantial analysis and evaluation of emotional action.
But here we must proceed a little more slowly, working our way back first to what we mean by “emotional judgement,” including both how it works and how it might work better. A key concept in this respect is character. That this is a key concept for the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods cannot be doubted. Robinson observes this at various times in his book,Footnote77 helpfully stressing the links between character and action, e.g. the etymology of character, from the Ancient Greek, is that of a distinctive mark (as indeed in the typographical, printed character), and thus character is understood as accessible via certain distinctive, visible marks, for instance actions in certain circumstances. This harks back to the Ancient Greek character arts, which are themselves closely tied to the rhetorical tradition: thus, Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil, and the one chosen to run the Lyceum after Aristotle, writes little character sketches, which build up character portraits from anecdotal and comical scenes of action by that person.Footnote78 This character-writing becomes hugely popular in the Early Modern period, both in France and England, also infusing the practice of drama in this period.Footnote79
From the perspective of a focus on emotional judgement, this rhetorical approach to character – which is of course a deeply evaluative term – is crucial. To judge, on this view, is to narrate a character, building up a portrait of a person’s character by depicting that person’s action in certain circumstances (or series of circumstances). The emotions are crucial to this process because, as we have seen above in the concept of emotional action, it is the emotions that make the actions intelligible as actions: action is inseparable from emotion, and equally emotion from action. Thus, the process of judgement – we can call it emotional judgement – is the art of constructing and at once evaluating character, by telling narratives in which actions are coloured by emotions in certain circumstances. At stake in judgement is character: it is by constructing and then evaluating their character that we judge other persons. However, character is not some free floating and abstract set of attributes of a person: rather, character is only made visible – only made describable, constructable, and evaluable – by being narrated, i.e. by being described as emotional action. This is part of what attention to the history of rhetoric teaches us.
And this is all well and good and shows once again how crucial literature – and the art of narration – is to the practice of judgement. But a question quickly arises: is this construction and description of character, via emotional action, really judgement? Does it not sound more like advocacy: the art of narrating character as part of a prosecution or a defence of someone? Is this really how judgement ought to be done – as if it was but a mode of advocacy? The question is a really important one and goes to the heart of our understanding of judgement. What, if anything, does judgement add to advocacy? And how can a rhetorical approach to emotion help us understand what that might be?
Here we must go back to the idea, mentioned in the above section on emotional action, that there are limits to our knowledge of emotion, and that those limits are set by the kinds, including quality, and indeed quantity, of narratives that we tell and are exposed to. To study the emotions, as we saw Robinson showing us, for the 17th century and 18th century philosophers, was to appreciate and practice the art of narration. Further, this task was endless: our insight into emotion, our knowledge of emotion, was dependent on how well we narrated and how many different narratives we told. The better narratives we had, and the more of them, the more we could know about the emotions – the more we could name, for instance. This, as was noted above, was a deeply rhetorical understanding of the emotions, harking back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, combined with his Poetics and his De Anima. But what is to narrate well, and what kinds of narratives did the study of emotional action need? This difficult question, it turns out, is also vital to the one asked immediately above: what is it that constitutes good judgement? What is it that judgement adds to advocacy?
It is precisely because of the nagging intuition that there was something too quick about the link between the construction of character and its evaluation – that to describe and narrate it is already to evaluate it – that the narrative arts come to matter to judgement in a certain way. The point is that the narrative arts can, if done well, slow down and complicate judgement. Unlike with advocacy, which paints one portrait of character, so as to persuade the audience, a judge is faced with at least two opposing narratives, and two opposing portraits of character. That judge ought not to be immediately persuaded by either, but instead, the judge ought to engage in the task of weighing and balancing the rival narratives and character portraits, potentially also generating others. Judgement, in other words, can, and ought to, become inspired by the spirit of inquiry in the sciences of the soul: aware that this is an inquiry that is always limited, for our knowledge of emotion is limited – dependent on the narratives we tell about it – what comes to be important, for judgement as much as for science, is generating multiple narratives, and cultivating the ability to move between them, all so as to slow judgement down, making it more careful, more circumspect, less liable to immediate capture by any particular really powerful narrative.Footnote80
Here, the ethics of judgement can take a leaf from the way the sciences of the soul are done: Wright, for instance, speaks of the importance of investigating the emotions in an “undogmatic” manner, “weighing perspectives, noting unresolved issues” and “marking his own claims as speculative.”Footnote81 This self-reflexivity – this willingness to recognise that one’s own claims may be fragile – is a crucial part of this mode of inquiry, and this way of writing (and ultimately also judging). It makes its appearance in the period in many different ways: for instance, in Montaigne’s rhetorically-inspired practice of essay writing, where his own character, as an essayist, is very much at stake, and where, relatedly, he writes and rewrites his claims, subjecting them to active, generatively-sceptical examination, not forcing the objects of his writing into any “consistent frame,” but instead exploring them, observing himself observing, domesticating his abstractions by situating them in open-ended circumstances, and thus treating both his objects of inquiry, and himself, as a means for “rhetorical invention.”Footnote82
Closely related to this self-reflexive, recycled, reworked, and multiple circumstantial inquiry is the dual emphasis on both distanced observation and situational sensitivity in the work of the 18th century Scots, especially Hume and Smith, and thereafter, in the early novels of the period (in Richardson, in Fielding, and in others). This is a story that needs to be carefully and slowly unpacked, and Robinson gives us plenty of resources with which to do that. Thus, in the case of Hume, for instance, Robinson shows how Hume combines the rhetorical concepts of vividness (related as this is to the vivid and moving images that the orator needs to conjure up for the audience) with the importance he ascribes to distancing, i.e. to the need for departing from one’s own situation, and taking up a general point of view. The arts of sympathy, in this respect, are the arts of judgement: they combine producing vivid narratives with stepping back, generating multiple such narratives, mindful of the possibility of telling different narratives from different perspectives. In many ways, as Robinson shows, this is precisely what constitutes the difficult task of being a critic, someone who has taste:Footnote83 there is a kind of delicacy of taste, acquired through practice, and refined in conversation with others, where the critic is both attuned to the details of particulars, while always also remaining at a certain remove from them.Footnote84 If anything, this is even more evident in Smith, who displays these arts of sympathy, taste, and judgement in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, carefully describing little situations, eagerly engaging with their complexities – their capacities to be told and retold in different ways – and stressing both the capacity to imagine and describe situations as well as, at once, the capacity to change and shift between perspectives (including the almost impossible third-perspective of the impartial spectator).Footnote85
What the emerging novels of the period – such as Richardson’s Clarissa, or Fielding’s Tom Jones – then do, inspired as they are by this philosophical discussion of the arts of sympathy, taste, and judgement – is craft narratives that train and cultivate these arts, complicating and slowing down the proclivity of judgement to rush to evaluate. It is telling that they do this often in the form of the exchange of letters: as others have shown,Footnote86 this epistolary form contributes to the capacity to generate multiple and shifting perspectives, colouring and then, from a different perspective, re-colouring action emotionally, so as to construct character in a different way. Actions need not have one motive, these writers tell us: as Robinson observes, they are a “way of complicating an account of the workings of the will by acknowledging the multiple and sometimes conflicting motives that come together in the production of an action.”Footnote87 By deploying various literary and narratological devices – including stretching out the time of the relevant action to be considered far beyond one act, and into the life of a person, but also showing how complex characters are, how they are made up of conflicting and contradictory motives and dispositions – literature cultivates the delicacy of judgement. And it is these arts, too, that then need to be cultivated by judges – including in legal contexts: judges need to be like the critics of the period, exposing themselves to multiple narratives, and thus multiple ways of portraying character, so as to help them to hesitate, to dwell more in uncertainty, not to rush to evaluate, and thus – essentially – to judge. To judge emotionally, on this view – to practice the art of emotional judgement – is not just to recognise that when we judge what we judge is character, made via descriptions and narratives of emotional action; it is also to recognise that to judge well is to judge patiently, hesitantly, carefully, with sensitivity and responsiveness to both the power of narrative and to the value of its multiplicity and complexity. Literature can, and does, take this to lengths that legal practice cannot: literature pushes the art of judgement to its very limit, sometimes setting up narratives that make judgement almost impossible. But although legal judgement cannot afford such experimentation – it must, after all, judge, no matter how difficult the task – it does well to nevertheless learn literature’s lesson: that judgement is hard, necessarily hard, in part because our knowledge of emotion is necessarily limited. This is the great lesson, as I read Robinson telling it, of the 17th and 18th century philosophies of mind, sciences of the soul, and literary practices.
CONCLUSION
There are many theoretical futures of emotion that the history of rhetoric opens up – or so I hope this essay has shown. Of course, each of the above theoretical vignettes is just that: a vignette, and thus but a sketch of the variety of ways in which emotion is vital to reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging. The point has been to give a sense of how theoretically generative historical scholarship is, and thus how much can be gained by historically-responsive theorising. More specifically, the aim has also been to begin to understand why the history of rhetoric, in particular, is such a resourceful guide to exploring the most complex of our practices, of vital importance of course also for legal scholarship: reason, knowledge, interpretation, action, and judgement, amongst others. We have seen how the history of rhetoric is so important in part because it illuminates the theoretical importance of emotion in particular ways – how it relates emotion to the generation of arguments, to ethical reading, to political knowledge, to the body and its intelligent movement through the world, and to the process and difficulties of judgement. The history of rhetoric opens many new doors for theory, and no less so for legal theory. Indeed, I wager, there is hardly anything more theoretically exciting and more theoretically productive than digging, in new ways, into the past.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Maksymilian Del Mar
Maksymilian Del Mar is Professor of Legal Theory and Legal Humanities at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Hart 2020) and a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities (2020).
Notes
1 I have written this essay on the occasion, by which I am greatly honoured, of being invited to join the Editorial Board of Law & Literature. This is a journal by which I have long been inspired, and it is a surreal and unrivalled pleasure to be given the chance to contribute to it, no matter how modestly. My great thanks to the General Editors both for the invitation and for helpful questions on the argument in this paper.
2 Rita Copeland, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: OUP, 2021; hereinafter cited as “Copeland”), and Benedict Robinson, Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson: Literature and the Sciences of Soul and Mind (Oxford: OUP, 2021; hereinafter cited as “Robinson”).
3 This is a space which I first attempted to carve out, in collaboration with Michael Lobban, in our collection on Law in Theory and History: New Essays on a Neglected Dialogue (Oxford: Hart, 2016). The challenge there, for us, as I understood it, was to show how theoretically generative engagement with history can be. This essay is part of an ongoing attempt to try to meet that challenge.
4 Copeland 2.
5 There are some wonderful examples of important, relatively recent political re-readings of the rhetorical tradition, e.g. from a feminist perspective, see Susan C Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).
6 In general, throughout this piece, I refer to “literature” in a general sense of an art of narrative, character, and expression, while referring occasionally to specific literary devices or forms. In doing so, I do not mean to underestimate how contested the frame of “literature” (or indeed “poetry”) is both theoretically and historically – in that respect, keeping in mind this paper’s focus on rhetoric, it would be interesting to explore how what is considered to be “rhetoric” in certain times and places influences what is considered to be “literature.”.
7 See, e.g. Jeffrey Walker, The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity (Columbia: The University of South Caroline Press, 2011). The history of pedagogical cultures, in turn, offers a meeting ground upon which the histories of law and literature often meet, with the forms and techniques of both often arising out of common pedagogical practices: see, e.g. on the 13th century, Jennifer Jahner, Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
8 Perhaps even with learning to wrestle! For a fascinating account of the relations between rhetorical concepts and pedagogies of wrestling, gymnastics, and athletics, see Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). Hawhee’s book opens up the prospect for an embodied history of the relations between rhetoric, pedagogy, law, and literature.
9 Thomas Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 30.
10 Ibid., Conley 31.
11 See George Kennedy, ed. Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
12 An example is the very form of the case: the case report, as introduced by Edmund Plowden and Edward Coke in the 16th century, is a kind of essay, and the essay form, as invented, arguably, by Michel de Montaigne, is again a form that emerges from rhetorical roots, e.g. an extension of improvisation on a commonplace. The form of the case report, especially when it has multiple judgements, is a kind of mini cornucopian text, a version of the Erasmian celebration of copia, and thus part of the tradition of the forms and practices of varietas: see, e.g. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and William Fitzgerald, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
13 See, e.g. Joy Connolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Erik Gunderson, Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
14 See e.g. Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Lorna Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
15 And also arguably the most played with in Early Modern drama: see Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); and Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and its Continuity (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1983). I confess that it was reading Altman and Trimpi that first opened my eyes to the possibilities, both theoretical and historical, of relating law, literature, and rhetoric.
16 Copeland 23.
17 Copeland 24.
18 See also Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995).
19 Copeland 26.
20 Copeland 27.
21 James Fredal, The Enthymeme: Syllogism, Reasoning, and Narrative in Ancient Greek Rhetoric (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020).
22 On this, see also the important role of superfluous details to the making of realism: Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in his The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141–148.
23 Rather than, interestingly, courtroom arguments. The historical reason for this is complex: Copeland suggests that “The jury system declined in favour of a formulary-inquisitorial procedure, and much (although certainly not all) rhetorical instruction was aimed a newer breed of legal functionaries who sought compressed technical treatises” (Copeland 44). On this view, a certain kind of legal oratory died in Late Antiquity, brought to end by changes in civil procedure, which became more bureaucratic and formulaic, leaving little room for the kind of rhetorical narration that the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans (in the pre and early Republican period) became such artful craftsmen in. Although I cannot explore it here, this feels like an inadequate argument: the narrative arts do not just disappear when things get formal or bureaucratic – all contexts, though in different ways, need the narrative arts. For a recent discussion, see Julie Stone Peters, Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), especially her chapter 3 (e.g. her discussion of Jean de Jandun); and see also Caroline Humfress, Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
24 Copeland 62.
25 Copeland 63–64.
26 Copeland 59.
27 See Copeland 83.
28 A view that has a long history in Ancient rhetoric, see e.g. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Book 6, where Quintilian says: “it is as if the very soul and life of this profession [oratory] is in the emotions…in terms of arousing emotions, the essence, in my opinion, is that we [orators] ourselves are moved” (see Copeland 84).
29 Copeland 83.
30 Copeland 83.
31 Copeland 76.
32 See Copeland 78–79.
33 Copeland 79–80.
34 Copeland 81.
35 Copeland 82.
36 Copeland 101.
37 Copeland 107.
38 Copeland 113.
39 Copeland 115.
40 Copeland 117.
41 See Copeland 118.
42 Copeland 120.
43 Copeland 133.
44 See Simone Weil, “Friendship,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Sian Miles (London: Penguin), 281–289.
45 Copeland 156.
46 Copeland, it must be added, extends her inquiry of the legacy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric much beyond that – encompassing its effect on the “political poetics: of Dante, Chaucer, and Hoccleve, as well as the arts of preaching, but I shall restrict myself here to Aristotle’s legacy in the work of Giles.
47 Copeland 158.
48 Copeland 159.
49 Copeland 163.
50 Copeland 163.
51 Copeland 164.
52 Copeland 165.
53 Copeland 165.
54 See Copeland 161–162.
55 Copeland 189.
56 Copeland 191.
57 Copeland 203.
58 Copeland 204.
59 See Copeland 219–220.
60 Copeland 220.
61 Copeland 225.
62 Robinson’s chosen term is, in fact, not emotion but “passion.” As he explains, compared to “passion,” “emotion” is a much more recent invention – a 19th century term, which has since come to dominate the landscape (though this is also being challenged by the term “affect”). For the purposes of this paper, I have chosen to stay with “emotion,” as that is also the term used by Copeland. But it is important to note that part of the value of historical scholarship is unearthing the worlds of words in particular historical moments and periods, which had their own distinctive networks of associations. Having said that, it is also important to note that Robinson does not advocate any sharp distinctions between “passions” and “emotions” – although they do offer “partly distinct semantic terrains,” they are nevertheless also “partly overlapping” (Robinson 17). For more on the history of the language of emotion, see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
63 For more on the neglected history of animal rhetoric, including the complex relationship between ways of conceiving of animal behaviour, experience, and intelligence, and rhetoric, see e.g. Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2016) and AC Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
64 Robinson notes that he is inspired by readings in recent cognitive science, citing work by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Jesse Prinz, and Andy Clark (see Robinson 17). For a good introduction to the importance of recent cognitive science to the study of literature, which has enormous relevance to understanding legal reasoning, see Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
65 Robinson 29.
66 Robinson 29.
67 Robinson 31.
68 Robinson 32–33.
69 Robinson 40.
70 For more on the quality of these estimations, see, e.g. Dorothea Frede, “The Cognitive Role of Phantasia in Aristotle” in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 279–296; and Ned O’Gorman, “Aristotle’s “Phantasia” in the “Rhetoric”: “Lexis,” Appearance, and the Epideictic Function of Discourse” 38, no. 1 (2005): 16–40.
71 Robinson 51.
72 Robinson 48–49.
73 Robinson 53.
74 Robinson 73.
75 Robinson 86.
76 See Robinson 156–7.
77 For example, Robinson 66–73.
78 See, e.g. Sonia Pertsinidis, Theophrastus’ Characters: A New Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). For connections to Ancient Greek literature, see Koen De Temmerman, Crafting Characters: Heroes and Heroines in the Ancient Greek Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
79 See e.g. recently, Harry Newman, “CharacterTM: Character-writing, Drama, and the Shape of Literary History.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2021): 142–177.
80 This insight, i.e. as to how judgement needs the multi-perspectival, and thus how the pedagogy of judgement needs training in shifting between perspectives, need not be confined to this period, and emerges arguably also in other contexts, e.g. in the play of colour in the Ancient Roman declamations. For a brief discussion, and initial attempt to connect this to common law reasoning, see Maksymilian Del Mar, “Emotion Experiments in Legal Thought” CAL: Critical Analysis of Law 5, no. 2 (2018): 178–195.
81 Robinson 104.
82 Robinson 108–1089.
83 For more on the relation between taste (or sense more generally) and judgement in this period, see David Summers, The Judgement of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
84 See Robinson 166–174. It is telling in this respect that Lord Kames writes a book on the Elements of Criticism (1762). The discerning critic is also, possibly, the equitable judge.
85 See Robinson 174–177.
86 For example, Stephanie Degooyer, ““The Eyes of Other People:” Adam Smith’s Triangular Sympathy and the Sentimental Novel,” English Literary History 85, no. 3, (2018): 669–690.
87 Robinson 182; and see generally on Richardson 177–185.