Pathos - the rhetorical appeal to human emotion. While ethos reflects on the rhetorician and logos on what is logical and ordered, pathos utilizes that which can be shared beyond social, political, and economic considerations, the very emotions that form bonds between people. As stated by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, “People respond emotionally when they or those close to them are praised or threatened” or when “their values are reinforced or threatened” (170-171).
Despite the idea that the modern world values logical arguments, or logos, over emotional displays, one only need look at any election, regardless if it is for local mayor or American President, to see that facts are usually only the numbers shuffled like a three-card monte in order to provoke an emotional reaction, with almost no difference between sides in terms of results.
It is the commonality of emotion that not only makes it the easiest concept to employ to groups of people, but also what grants it the most inherent rhetorical power. Two mothers of vastly different socio-economic and educational backgrounds will find common ground over the desire to protect and provide for their children just as two hunters with different reasons to hunt will feel the same emotions as they make their kill.
Upon exploring the rhetorical concept of pathos as it relates to the modern world through the collection of fans, or more colloquially known as fandoms, of Harry Potter and The Walking Dead, we discovered that one thing keeps people coming back, whether through the decades spanned by Harry and his friends or the gruesome and nihilistic existence of the survivors of The Walking Dead: shared pathos.
It may be difficult to think that a person can share an emotional connection with a reanimated, yet still rotting, hungry shambling thing that, by the way, wants to dine of your face, but as Martyn Pedler states in his analysis of The Walking Dead cable television series, “From the legless woman Rick (Andrew Lincoln) puts down to the once-mother, still scrabbling at the door of her family home on blind instinct – The Walking Dead’s zombies are just so goddamn sad” (The Walking Dead: Zombie Pathos).
While logic and facts exist outside of humanity, seeing as gravity would still pull in the absence of human beings to perceive it, and ethos is strengthened in an individual’s experiences and educational explorations, pathos is shared. Speaking for Aristotle, Crawley and Hawhee say, “emotions are communal in the sense that they are usually excited by our relations to other people” (175). In this, the rhetorical use of pathos provides humanity with evidence that we are much more similar than we are different.