The history of ethos
What is ethos?
. In “Varieties of Ethical Argument,” Jim Corder defines several types of ethos, including generative ethos. Generative ethos, he claims, is the most important of the five categories he describes. In his article, Corder shows how generative ethos can sometimes incorporate both a sense of the past and a sense of the future in a text. An understanding of the dynamic of generative ethos includes a sense of how “present actions thrust themselves into the future,” how generative ethos can sometimes resist espousing a “bound” or singular viewpoint that leaves the discourse without a final resolution or answer(s), and how generative ethos can sometimes act as an element of transformation as the reader’s qualities emerge as one progresses through a text and also as the reader works her way through the argument reflectively. Additionally, generative ethos can sometimes act as a tool of identification yet retain the author’s convictions (114-126).
Generative ethos moves “toward completeness but beyond closure.” It makes a world within the text for both the speaker and hearer/reader. Corder writes that he does not support the idea that a writer/speaker can send a clear, singular message to a recipient, though she can limit meanings by the words chosen, but neither does he support the idea that once a message is spoken or written that it leaves the speaker or writer. The message is always integrally related to the speaker or writer. He quotes Walter Ong’s statement that “all words projected from a speaker remain, as has been seen, somehow interior to him, being an invitation to another person, another interior, to share the speaker’s interior, an invitation to enter in, not to regard from the outside.” “Our words never leave us,” Corder writes, “the message is not separate from the speaker.” Generative ethos creates the speaker and creates her world; it invites the hearer into that world. Speaking is not simply about communicating a message, but about creating identification, understanding, and a shared world (126-127). Generative ethos is commodious when other types of ethos, such as gratifying ethos, are not. It is commodious whereas practices such as speaking in unknown tongues that cannot be interpreted by hearers are not. Finally, because generative ethos creates a world for the hearer to join, it must be said that truth is made out of what is incomplete or partial (127-129).
Situating Ethos
Ethos does not lend itself to any single definition throughout the history of rhetorical theories. To briefly take into context a few of the ways that ethos has been defined in the past might help when trying to understand how viewing rhetoric as epistemic and ethos as generative are grounded in the resistance to or the expansion of some older models of ethos. Furthermore, ethos is defined in terms of the ideologies of the age, as Tita Baumlin notes in “A Good (Wo)man skilled in speaking: Ethos, Self-Fashioning and Gender in Renaissance England” where she describes how Queen Elizabeth rhetorically inscribed a place of authority for herself while remaining, at least marginally so, within the cultural boundaries assigned to women. Elizabeth’s “self-fashioning” of a public self, or her “Renaissance ethos” as Baumlin defines it, was formed at the juncture between “authority” and the “other” (253). “Ethos as the site of ideological battle,” Baumlin writes, “will always show traces of capitulations to, and exploitations of, both authority and the Other” (253). In Queen Elizabeth’s case, she wielded great power as the monarch, but it was hers only if she openly recognized that she was a member of the “other” (254). She had to invoke the limitations placed on the “other” in order to subvert them (254). As this example shows, the study of ethos within the contexts of its histories and practices in the past reveals the deeper ideological issues that problematize the way rhetoric gets theorized today.
In my opinion rhetoric is a means of creating knowledge; that is I think it is epistemic. Not only do the arguments that result in the creation of knowledge show how persuasion operates within discourse communities, but the nature of the arguments intended to persuade potential converts to the ideologically-based practices of a community are a challenge to their existing values, beliefs, and means for creating knowledge. Such challenges may cause the audience to critically reflect upon their own ideologies and the contexts that inform those ideologies.
Ethos, in my opinion, is an inextricable part of every communication. For the rhetor it is an area of argument that calls her motives and sense of a “true self” into question as she constructs points of identification and points of challenge for her perceived audience in order to articulate a course of action that supports the ideology and the vision of reality for which she will try to communicate and argue. Ethos is both a transformative tool and a transformative art. It is a combination of charisma, authority, wisdom, mystery, faith, imagination, reality, spirit, body—of all the things, tangible and intangible, that draw us into deeper engagement with another person. The world that the rhetor creates through ethos, the shared world Corder describes, is the place where writer and reader or speaker and listener exist together. Theresa Enos writes:
What Buber calls the Between is what Burke calls consubstantiation. It is a presence, an emergence. Out of this presence emerges ethos that makes identification and a shift in one’s identity possible. That is what we call persuasion in action. But the means is through identification and not a stance that depends on logos. (111)
The shared world for writer and reader is by no means unchangeable, but is constantly being reinvented for both. It is a place where a reader becomes willing to be influenced (111).
In The Art of Rhetoric, when Aristotle describes ethos as a means of argument, he does so with the assumption that ethos is to be adjusted according to the reality of the audience at the time of the actual speech. Ethos is not a static tool but a dynamic construction that bridges the orator’s art, her attempts at preparation, and the unpredictable reality of an audience grounded in a particular time and place. A co-generated ethos is created anew for each reader each time the text is read because not all readers will respond to the same points of identification or will mold themselves into the type of reader to whom the author speaks (Enos 99). Transformation occurs as the co-generated ethos between writer and reader increases in complexity and depth through the medium of the text.
While epistemic rhetoric is concerned with what happens in the minds and personalities of the rhetor and audience which can occur anywhere, classical and medieval rhetoricians tied the practice of rhetoric to specific physical locations and contexts. In The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle lays out the three main types of speeches: epideictic, judicial, and deliberative. The first occurs in public gatherings to venerate particular persons, the latter two occur within the courts and political arena. St. Augustine would add a fourth location to these three in the medieval period: the pulpit. By the 20th-century, however, viewing rhetoric as only occurring within certain types of speeches given in certain locations is expanded to understanding rhetoric as possibly occurring everywhere, in all situations, and in written texts as well as spoken.
Lloyd Bitzer’s 1968 “The Rhetorical Situation” is an often-cited text used for describing the rhetorical situation as it occurs in the natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence that demands utterance. Language becomes rhetorical when the situation invites the need for a persuasive response. In Bitzer’s opinion the situation, the context, is so controlling that we should consider it the ground for all rhetorical activity (219). The journey from classical rhetorical theories to current ones is essentially a journey from the pragmatic speech in a court, political arena, public assembly, or pulpit toward an investigation of epistemologies and the philosophies that inform them. Further, modern rhetorics explore how and why speech and/or writing and/or visual materials are persuasive and have an effect upon the audience/reader/viewer who often do not share the same temporal location.
This is just the beginning of my discussion. Above are excerpts from my dissertation, easily accessible through the University of Arizona's library.