When I was in grad school, a fellow grad student remarked that every Rhetoric dissertation was about how the rational/irrational split was wrong. While slightly hyperbolic, it wasn’t entirely wrong. In fact, I think it’s still fairly accurate.
There are two major problems with the rational/irrational split (both pointed out by Wayne Booth in Modern Dogma). The first is that it’s an accurate description of two completely opposed ways of approaching problems: through logic or feeling. Booth pointed out that many people privileged the “rational” approach, which was defined incoherently and largely through negation (a rational argument has certain surface features, such as an unemotional tone or appeal to numbers and data, which is assumed to signify how the rhetor thinks), but other people denigrated the “rational” approach, privileging emotion and passion. His point was that we didn’t solve the many problems created by the binary by flipping the privilege. The binary was wrong.
It seems to me that work in cognitive science did a good job on dismantling the binary—there isn’t a binary between rational and its presumed associations (thinking, objectivity, neutrality, unbiased) and irrational and its presumed associations (feeling, subjectivity, prejudice, biased). After all, cognitive biases are cognitive.
This still leaves the second problem with the split—the narrative that all major Western philosophies relied on the split until the 20th century. I think it’s fair to say that it became hegemonic in Western philosophy at a certain point, but that point was much more recent than many people think. My crank theory is that people who wrote influential histories of philosophies relied on that frame, and so themselves imagined that all philosophies could fit within it (e.g., Russell—Booth’s example–, but also Durant, and various nineteenth century figures). Since it fits neatly with the cognitive bias of naïve realism, it resonates with people, and so it’s the one you’re likely to hear if you stop someone on the street.
While there are major figures who can fit in that frame (e.g., Plato), but others who only sort of do (while Augustine was very a believer in the mind/body split, he didn’t diss feeling). Various figures in the British Enlightenment didn’t accept the binary of emotional or unemotional, let alone denigrate “emotion.” Many argued or assumed that “sentiments” benefitted deliberation, although “passions” inhibited it (but passions weren’t bad, exactly—they had/have their place).
Aristotle is often assumed to be an adherent of the rational/irrational split, and certainly several translations try to make him fit it, but what he meant by alogos and logos doesn’t map neatly onto irrational and rational. The “logos” of a text, for Aristotle, is the “argument” (probably an enthymeme in public discourse—that is, rhetoric as opposed to philosophy or math).
In the book we call Rhetoric (I wish we called it The Craft of Rhetoric, as I think that’s a more accurate and useful translation) Aristotle appears to be all over the place about emotion, but I think it starts to make sense if we keep in mind that the term “pathos” doesn’t mean either “irrational” or “emotion” (as we use those terms), and he didn’t think a text could have only one. Ethos, pathos, and logos are always in play. Aristotle was mostly interested in the taxonomy of deliberative, forensic, and epideictic (and most interested in the first and last of those three). And I can’t help but read him as making an argument similar to the British Enlightenment philosophers—that various “emotions” (however we define them) function differently in the three genres. Aristotle was interested in methods of public deliberation that led to good policies, trials that resulted in the truth, and effective ceremonial orations. (Except when he wasn’t, as in the weird passage about testimony gained through torture.)
I happened to read Aristotle after taking a class in which we read selections from Thucydides. Thucydides has several situations in which rhetors reflect on rhetoric, on how publics should reason about policies, and there are several points that come up (some repeatedly) that influenced my reading of Aristotle. I’ll mention two.
First, several speakers disagree about whether publics should make decisions in anger. The rhetors who argue we should (such as the un-named Corinthian and Stheneslaides in the “Debate at Sparta” and Cleon in the “Mytilenean Debate) are advocating policies of which Thucydides clearly disapproves. The people who argue we should not make decisions in anger (Archidamus, Diodotus, Pericles) are all rhetors whom Thucydides identifies as wise, insightful, and reasonable, ad they are advocating policies of which Thucydides approves. They are not unemotional speakers, and they do appeal to emotions (because, who doesn’t?). They all speak, for instance, of their fears, such as Archidamus saying that he feared that the war with Athens would last generations (it did). They argue for taking time to deliberate, and to consider the issue. Archidamus, speaking after the un-named Corinthian has tried to use the timeless strategy of shaming Sparta into war by saying it’s only procrastination and cowardice that causes them to delay, says:
“And the slowness and procrastination, the parts of our character that are most assailed by their criticism, need not make you blush. If we undertake the war without preparation, we should by hastening its commencement only delay its conclusion: further, a free and a famous city has through all time been ours. The quality which they condemn is really nothing but a wise moderation; thanks to its possession, we alone do not become insolent in success and give way less than others in misfortune; we are not carried away by the pleasure of hearing ourselves cheered on to risks which our judgment condemns; nor, if annoyed, are we any the more convinced by attempts to exasperate us by accusation. We are both warlike and wise, and it is our sense of order that makes us so.” (I:84)
The second theme that comes up is not to confuse genres. That’s particularly strong in the “Mytilenean Debate” when Cleon has argued for genocide of Mytileneans, using arguments of guilt and innocence. He says that reopening the debate about what to do is “causing a delay which is all in favour of the guilty, by making the sufferer proceed against the offender with the edge of his anger blunted; although where vengeance follows most closely upon the wrong, it best equals it and most amply requites it.” (3:38). His opponent, Diodotus, points out that this isn’t a trial, but a deliberative assembly, and so the decision should be made in terms of what is often translated as “expediency”: “the question before us as sensible men is not their guilt, but our interests.” We should make policy decisions in light of “the good of the country.” (3:44)
Thucydides doesn’t say we should never engage in questions of guilt and innocence (and he is also not saying he doesn’t care about justice), but that deliberative assemblies are about pragmatic deliberation. Making policy decisions in the midst of anger, arrogance, factionalism, vengeance inhibits deliberation, and leads to bad decision. That isn’t an argument that we should never be angry and so on–it’s about genre.
Thucydides’ ideal rhetor is Pericles, and it’s interesting that we get three different kinds of speeches from him: Aristotle’s taxonomy. The speech about how to respond to Sparta’s demands is deliberative, and it’s about pragmatic considerations. The speech he gives when he’s been attacked by Cleon is an apologia, a defense speech, and it’s about motive and emotions. And the “Funeral Oration” is epideictic, and it’s a flag-waving tearjerker.
It seems to me that Aristotle is imagine rhetoric in similar ways. He doesn’t have a binary of emotional/unemotional, but he has a sense about place and genre, and sees those different genres as doing different work.
The final point I’ll make is that both Thucydides and Aristotle seem to assume not a binary, but a different emphasis, in deliberative rhetoric v. both judicial and ceremonial. The goal of a deliberative speech is not to persuade but to participate in deliberation. Of course, there’s a sense in which one wants to persuade people to one’s point of view, but advocates of deliberation in deliberative setting emphasize the goal of “considering” the situation. Judicial and ceremonial are much more about persuasion, about making a one-sided case. It isn’t a binary, as I said, but a question of emphasis.
And it has nothing to do with how we now think about rational/irrational people or arguments.