Painful passions and their treatment in Aristotle’s Rhetoric

Abstract

This article addresses the importance of passions and their component of pain and pleasure in Aristotle's ethical reflection. Then, and assuming these antecedents, it analyzes anger and calm from the point of view of Rhetoric, to finally deal with the other painful passions described in this work in a broader way, in search of common aspects. He argues that Rhetoric provides important tools not only to provoke or mitigate a passion, but also to be able to redirect it in a way that is useful for a good speaker in the face of citizen improvement. This implies conceiving the passions, which have an eminently individual character at their origin, also as shared by a community. From the analysis of these texts and the consequences that derive from the study of painful passions, it is possible to extract valuable elements that allow us to enrich our understanding of those aspects that influence community and political life, especially in consideration of the forefront that such passions are acquiring in difficult historical conditions, as it occurs in practice with the current pandemic situation that we have had to face globally.