Historical Rhetorics/Should We Read Quintilian?/Katula, Richard A. "Quintilian on the Art of Emotional Appeal." ''Rhetoric Review'' 22.1 (2003): 5-15. Print.

Katula uses Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, Book VI, to examine how emotional appeal is useful for an orator, taking particular notice of legal situations. The author explains Quintilian’s perception of the role of orator in the courtroom: “The specific task of the advocate/orator, Quintilian believes the reason he has been hired, begins after the facts and arguments have been discovered. As he struggles to win the judge’s mind, the advocate knows that he must also win the judge’s heart” (8). In this sense, it appears that the author fins Quintilian’s arguments particularly helpful to law students and sets up the emotional appeal as something that can easily slip into the realm of manipulation.

Katula describes six rules for the orator when utilizing emotion (10): 1. Know the emotions 2. Imagine and feel the emotion himself (creates eloquence) 3. Describe the scene as the client experienced it (visiones) –make the client see it again 4. Take care to not awaken “emotions which either do not naturally arise form the case or are stronger than the case would suggest” 5. Mimic his lawyer’s emotion – synchronizing creates a unified display 6. Speak in the voice of the client, not his own voice

In addition to the rules, “the orator must also understand the subtleties of taste and timing of an emotional appeal” (11) this requires the orator to know his audience and play to that audience effectively. This article seeks to express a practical application of emotional appeal in Quintilian’s work, attempting to draw emotion out of the field of psychology and into what he (seems to) considers more useful locations like law.

Katula stresses that “rhetoricians since Aristotle have understood the necessity to reinforce reason with passion” (7) and he highlights Quintilian as a classical rhetorician who strategized emotional appeals, primarily in Book VI of Institutio oratoria. Quintilian’s emotional appeals created an emotional “climate” that was designed to sway a judge’s heart, rather than to convince a judge’s mind, and in this “power to sway the judge’s ‘feelings’ lies the soul of rhetoric” (8). Quintilian’s perception of ethos as “affectus” and pathos as “moral behavior,” in contrast to Cicero’s division of these distinct oratorical responsibilities into “to charm (ethos)” and “to move (pathos),” constitute a “continuum of degrees of the same quality rather than separate modes of proof” (9). When moral behavior and emotional appeals combine, Quintilian’s orator effectively causes the judge to not only be swayed by the appeal, but to desire to be convinced by the argument based on belief, rather than reason. Katula organizes Quintilian’s strategies for emotional appeal into six rules; first, the advocate must be “emotionally literate,” the advocate must sincerely be affected by the emotion “himself,” the advocate must make the judge(s) sincerely feel the emotion themselves, the advocate must exaggerate for emotional emphasis, the client and advocate must align their identities to “create in the courtroom an emotional climate that they hope will become contagious,” and last, the advocate “should speak, not in his own voice, but in the voice of his client,” so that the judge’s goodwill towards the advocate could extend to the client (9-11). According to Katula, Quintilian would define emotional appeal as the ability to embody the emotional state that the advocate wants to create within others in order to win a favorable response, not for the moral good of the individual, but for the benefit (good) of the community.

"Quintilian on the Art of Emotional Appeal” by Richard Katula

Katula provides context for his work by noting that though emotion has been a source of discussion widely throughout the fields of psychology and rhetoric, but that such scholarly discussion has not included “the art of making an emotional appeal,” an issue he strives to change through his look at the work of Quintilian and his theory of emotional appeal expressed in six rules. According to the author, scholarship on emotion has been divided into a line of inquiry that focuses on the how emotion is used in human behavior, an inquiry that involves the need to define emotion and understand its implications on the mind, and into a line of inquiry that determines the effects of how emotions are displayed, an inquiry that involves determining how emotion effects decision-making and understanding how one not only discovers the art of creating emotional appeals but it also is concerned with how one applies the art in persuasion. Katula notes that rhetoricians believe that orators may very well discover how to use and apply emotion (i.e. “figurative language, if not through the planned use of facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, etc….”), but that scholars of rhetoric have shunned the idea of classifying the art of emotional appeal(6). Before he provides Quintilian’s recommendations on how to employ emotional appeal in his succinct format of six rules, he carefully notes that Quintilian worked from the premise that understanding and using emotional appeal could be learned and that to do so, one need only harness his imagination. Katula’s six rules are as follows: Rule One dictates that the advocate must know, understand and practice his emotions; Rule Two, possibly derived from Cicero, instructs that the advocate to be able to use her/his imagination and to genuinely feel the emotions involved; Rule Three recommends that the advocate must be able to depict the issue at hand just as it happened to her/his client; Rule Four commands that the advocate should be able to express the authenticity of the pain and the fear of the victim(s); Rule Five mandates that the advocate's client must be able to express the same level of emotions as her/his advocate in order to create an effective “emotional climate that they hope will become contagious”; and Rule Six instructs that the advocate speak in the voice of her/his client as a scaffolding technique to Rule Five (10).