Pathos may be the most commonly used rhetorical tool in our everyday lives. Everyone, whether they know it's pathos or not, employs emotional appeals constantly. It can be through commercials and advertisements, conversations, or practically any other form of communication. Human beings are emotional beings; our complex feelings are what make us human. A lot of times these emotions are played upon in order to achieve a certain outcome.
Take for example a conversation with a friend that might go something like this:
"Pretty please will you come with me?"
"No, I don't want to."
"Please, if you love me or value our friendship at all, you'll come."
I think most of us have been on either one or both sides of this situation at some point in our lives. If you are the friend who doesn't want to go somewhere alone and asking simply doesn't yield the desired answer, you turn towards other means of persuasion. You start to use pathos. Usually, playing the affection card works because the other person starts to feel guilty and perhaps like a bad friend if they say no. If your friend agrees to accompany you after you ask the second time, you have successfully used the rhetorical strategy pathos to get what you want. It's that simple.
That is why I find pathos so interesting. It can be used very simply like in the situation above, or in more complex situations such as debates or advertisements. If anyone watched the second GOP debate the other night, each of the candidates introduced themselves not only as politicians (or political outsiders), but as people with families and interests. If anyone wants to cry, watch one, two, or all three of these commercials:
Phone company.
Hair Donation
Life Insurance
Of course there are many other different emotions to appeal to such as fear, longing, happiness, and love. Once you learn about pathos, it's so easy to see it everywhere you go. I have begun to analyze things, looking for instances that play towards emotions, that I may not have thought twice about before. Have you?
I like how you introduced the concept and pathos and used a commonly heard use of pathos as an example. I also enjoyed how you added videos to further show the use of pathos in everyday life.
ReplyDeleteI think it is interesting that you say that Pathos is the most used logic today, because I have never thought of it as that. I had always thought of logos as the most used, but now that I think about it, it is probably more likely that it be pathos as we can use pathos in the most informal arguments, like in your example.
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