Affect and Intention in Rhetoric and Poetics

Abstract

Contemporary affect theory has challenged traditional assumptions about human reason. Since Plato, Western culture has seen human behavior according to a sharp Reason/Emotion binary. Reason promises a pure efficacy to determine action. Affect, in contrast, disables reason’s competence.  Challenges to Plato’s binary argue that reason is not primary, in human action and thought, but secondary. Affective systems operating usually below consciousness determine in advance what comes to be claimed as “reason.” Aristotle’s attention to this question led him to develop, in place of a Reason/Emotion binary, a “phantasia/belief” alternative, one in which affect plays a role in phantasia , or the “animal, ” “emotion” side of the dyad, governed by affectively attuned non-linguistic cognition, and also a role on the “reason,” “belief,” or “human” side, where linguistically mediated beliefs shape human cognition. Reason and emotion, rather than being separate, overlap on Aristotle’s account. Moreover, his understanding of this overlap can be seen in his analysis of narrative production in the Poetics and in his account of persuasive discourse in the Rhetoric .