Pathos (parvae animae I ex III)

Humans have always seen themselves as more than simply bodies. We often talk about our social, psychological, emotional, and physical needs. We separate our souls from our bodies. In the Classical period, depending on whom you asked, you would hear a different set-up for who we are. The Romans saw us as corpus (body), spiritus (life-essence), and anima (soul). The Greeks devided who we are as people even further: pathos (emotion, and base feelings), ethos (character and morality), and logos (intellect).
The Greek divisions are still obvious in our common dialectic. We speak of logic, a purely intellectual faculty. We speak of ethics, those things that tell us who we are as people. And we use words such as sympathy (feeling the same), pathetic (something emotional), and telepathy (distant feeling).
Today, I should like to investigate the idea of pathos more fully.
As previously mentioned, pathos would be what we would label today as emotion. Ancient rhetoricians, and even rhetoricians of today, often appealed to pathos in their speeches. Orators appealed to the people's emotions, striking into them fear of their opponents, pity for themselves and pride for what the speaker is referring to.
The great Cicero often appealed to the Pathos of his listeners, conjuring up such stirring anecdotes that his audience, often the senate or other politicians, would feel compelled out of emotional duty, to side with him. After reading countless speeches about how evil and menacing Cataline was, it was obvious why the Cataline conspiracy was such a big deal in Roman history.
Similarly today, we are appealed to pathetically by our entertainment we enjoy. We watch a movie where a character faces insurmountable odds and comes out on top and we feel elation. No person back in 1976 who saw Rocky could have watched the dramatic ending without feeling inspired. Movies like Rudy, Remember the Titans, and Radio all make us feel a certain sense of euphoria and determination to fulfill our own possibilities. Stories such as Romeo and Juliet, Antigone, or Oedipus Rex, on the other hand, make us feel miserable and give us a sense of dysphoria.
Elementary, Middle and High Schools, corporations and other social groups hire "motivational speakers" who speak strictly to our pathos, inspiring us by giving us feelings of our own possibilities.
Similarly, in Ministerial circles, the pathos is commonly evoked (as are the ethos and logos, but more on those later). A priest, pastor or minister often times preaches sob stories, or inspiring tales to get us to make a change in our behavior. Does this work? Of course it does. Who, when reading about the faithful servant who worked all his life and felt unaccomplished was revered by large masses post mortem, or the disadvantaged child whose faith was rewarded, can help but want to be a better person?
Is this wrong? Should our sermons and homilies draw us to change based on our easily swayed emotions? Personally, I should think that we ourselves can make ourselves more immune to this kind of rhetoric. However, I do acknowledge that if the world is already driven by pathetically inclining people to adhere to one's specific ideologies, then those who are in the congregation are just as viable subjects for pathetic rhetoric as any other people.
So, yes, we are often swayed to be better servants because of our emotions and feelings. However, this is not wrong. In fact, I would argue that the tool of pathetic rhetoric is aptly fitted to reach out to those who are highly inclined to pathological suggestion.

Spes

Most of my posts tend to be fairly academic. I'm going to try to stray away from that for today.
I'd like to talk about hope today, the forgotten virtue. Love and faith are always lauded and given so much attention, but hope is usually glossed over.
But why hope? What virtuous merit does hope have? I believe that faith is the virtue meant for the scientist and the scholar, and love is the virtue meant for the miserly. But hope is the virtue of the artist. Hope is the poet's virtue.
It is the artist--the writer, the painter, the sculptor, the poet--that truly sees life for what it is. So many philosophers have sat on their high chairs and hypothesized about life and its purpose, but the ones that have truly captured our attention are the ones who speak to us. The ones who know the human heart and speak with the eloquence of a person whose soul is more than cold steel and mechanics.
This is the way that we work as humans. We aren't machines. We don't calculate and plan. We don't always do what's rational. We have more needs than simply a suitable climate and food and water.
The artist truly thinks with his soul. His art does not depict something mathematically articulate or scientifically unique. It depicts true human essence. The artist knows what true emotion is.
So it is that the artist also knows how depressing life truly is. We are surrounded by greed, lust, pride, wrath, gluttony, sloth, and envy. We destroy others' lives for our private benefit. We walk all over those we think under us. We treat humans like common tools. We scorn, despise and hate other people because of how they were born. We wage war against others for nothing other than to make sure we feel secure.
How are we supposed to find any requiem in this despairing life? We live for maybe a hundred years and die, and that's it. The poet sees through the crap that we have hidden our true insecurities within and comes to one of two conclusions: all life ans society is a sham and there is nothing worth anything, or that there must be more to life than what we see.
This is why hope is the virtue of the poet. Hope gets us through the truly depressing. Hope tells us that there must be more to our existence than a short chance to become whatever we can in a few decades. Hope tells us our fifteen minutes of fame is not the greatest extent of who we can be. Hope tells us that all our efforts are not in vain. Hope tells us that there is some bright future waiting for us. Hope is the forgotten virtue, but the virtue that will truly make everything worth it.

Quid Homo?

Several things recently have called me to ponder what it means to be human. Apparently this is Darwin's 200 year birthday and 150 year anniversary of his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle. And President Obama's visit to the Notre Dame campus to deliver a graduation speech called the issue of human life into question. Additionally, certain movies as of recent have made me ponder what it is to be human.
It seems that humans have always pondered our being. The writers of the Bible viewed humans as the culmination of God's creation, even as being in the image of God. Greek philosophers pondered what separates us from the animals via the virtues. The Hindus and Buddhists believed that the human form was the highest form our souls could take and the only one by which we could ascend to Nirvana. Jesus refers to God as our father. Athanasius says we are made in the image and likeness of God. Thomas Aquinas refers to man as the rational animal.
Today the question is even more relevant. Genetic research shows us that we are only separated from apes by a fraction of our DNA pattern. But beyond this, the ethical problems of science denote how we conceive of the human person. Stem cell research is highly controversial. Cloning is taboo and certain medical operations are viewed as wrong.
Despite all the efforts modern scientific thought uses to show that human kind is not special, it is clear that most people don't believe that. It is as Pope John Paul II said when he declared that the Darwinian formula does not account for the sacredness of human kind. We all believe, deep down inside of us, that human beings are something greater than bags of flesh. We strive to accomplish great feats. We seek to demonstrate our individuality, our uniqueness, our special essence that identifies us as being a separate specie of the human genus. We write books, paint portraits, film movies, build towers and monuments. We seek to know everything. We look to the skies and ponder the vastness of space. We look inside of us and ponder the human mind and body. We traverse the oceans, deserts, jungles and plains detailing the vegetation and animals we discover. We markedly separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom by the vast intellectual, emotional, creative and spiritual quests we undertake.
It seems to me that most of humanity has conceived of humans as being composed of at least a soul and a body. The Greeks viewed the highest part of the soul, the Logos, as the part that lived on past life. The Romans viewed the Anima as separate from the Corpus and the Spiritus, and the part that makes us who we are. Christians view the body and soul as parts of a whole person. Buddhists and Hindus view bodies as temporal but our essence as existing afterward. Even today, we speak of perhaps being "spiritual" but not "religious."
Even in our horror we can note how the body and soul are necessary parts of the person. From time immemorial we have been frightened of disembodied spirits. Vampires, on the other hand, are soulless bodies. Other undead, such as Frankenstein's Monster, mummies and zombies are also soulless bodies. In traditional horror (as of late, horror has focused more on the grotesque and disordered rather than on the genuinely unholy) the villain has always been some unholy, fractured human.
However, lately, there seems to have been a question as to whether or not this is legitimate. Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that during the Englightenment we lost the idea of having a purpose, a telos, for our morals. However, the philosophers of that time failed to explain adequately why we would have universal laws. For all the trying, they never fully explained to what end humans are moving. Here I feel the famous pseudo-theologian C. S. Lewis' explanation of a natural law that denotes a God comes into play. All humans have inside of us a something that pushes us toward universal ends. We all have similar morals, similar goals, similar emotions for similar things. We all have souls that guide and direct us.
Thus, I have concluded that the human is not a simple body. We are not merely animals. We are not a rung on the ladder of evolution. We are the culmination of all things. We all have inside of us an essence, a great something that distinguishes us from every other creature. Our minds and thoughts, our drives and inklings, and our very selves are distinct and unique.