THE EMOTIONS CATALOG

When someone makes you angry during an argument, whose fault is that?

Yours, for losing control? Theirs, for pushing your buttons? Or is something more interesting going on—something structural, predictable, even useful? Aristotle thought emotions weren't accidents. They have triggers, targets, and conditions. An angry person doesn't just feel anger in the abstract. They feel it toward someone, for a reason, under specific circumstances. Change any of those elements and the emotion changes with it.

This insight led Aristotle to do something no philosopher had done before: he cataloged human emotions with the precision of a naturalist classifying species. Book II of his Rhetoric systematically analyzes what makes people angry, calm, fearful, confident, ashamed, or indignant. Chapter 7 established that emotional appeal is legitimate when it reflects truth. This chapter goes deeper. If you're going to evoke emotions ethically, you need to understand how they work. You need the catalog.

ANGER AND ITS OPPOSITE

Aristotle begins with anger because it's the most rhetorically useful emotion. An angry audience is an audience ready to act. They want revenge, correction, justice. Channel that energy toward your opponent, and you have powerful allies. But anger is dangerous too. Misdirected, it turns against you. Overdone, it exhausts itself into numbness.

What makes people angry? Aristotle's answer is specific: perceived slights. Someone treats you with contempt, shows spite, or insults your honor. The slight must feel undeserved. If you know you earned the criticism, you feel shame, not anger. But if the attack seems unfair, if someone who has no right to judge you judges you anyway, then anger rises.

Notice the components. The slight must be conspicuous, meaning public or at least known. Private insults sting, but public humiliation burns. The person who slighted you must have "no call" to do so—they must lack standing or authority. We don't get angry when a teacher corrects us (we might feel shame), but we get furious when a peer condescends.

Aristotle then analyzes who gets angry and at whom. People get angrier when they're already in pain—sick, poor, frustrated. They get angrier at friends than strangers because friends should know better. They get angrier at those who mock rather than those who simply oppose, because mockery denies the seriousness of what matters to them.

The opposite of anger is calmness, praotēs. Understanding how to calm anger is just as important as understanding how to evoke it. People calm down when they realize the slight wasn't intentional, when they see the offender suffering, when time passes and the pain fades, or when they achieve some form of revenge. A speaker who wants to defuse an angry audience can work with any of these: show the offense was misunderstood, demonstrate consequences already suffered, or offer symbolic redress.

FEAR AND CONFIDENCE

Fear is the emotion of anticipated evil. Something bad is coming, and you can't stop it. Aristotle notes that fear requires uncertainty—if the bad thing is certain and immediate, you don't feel fear but something closer to despair. Fear lives in the space between safety and doom.

What do people fear? Death, of course, but also pain, old age, poverty, disgrace. They fear powerful enemies and people who have already harmed them. They fear most when they're vulnerable: weak, isolated, lacking resources. And here's a key insight: they fear most when they have something to lose. The desperate, having lost everything, often stop feeling fear. It's those with stakes who worry.

Roosevelt's famous line is a masterful use of fear against itself. He acknowledges the fear his audience feels—the bank failures, unemployment, economic collapse. But he redirects that fear away from the economy and toward fear itself. The enemy isn't the Depression; the enemy is paralysis. This reframing gave Americans permission to act rather than cower.

The opposite of fear is confidence, tharsos. Confidence arises when dangers seem distant, when you have resources to meet them, when you've survived similar challenges before. A speaker who wants to inspire action must often build confidence first. Churchill did this relentlessly during the Blitz: acknowledging the danger but emphasizing British resilience, past victories, the justice of the cause. Fear paralyzes; confidence mobilizes.

SHAME AND SHAMELESSNESS

Shame is the pain of being seen badly. Not just criticized—seen. Shame requires an audience, real or imagined. You feel shame when people whose opinion matters to you witness your failure, your weakness, your moral lapse. The physical response is distinctive: you want to disappear, to hide your face, to become invisible.

Aristotle lists the things that cause shame: cowardice, injustice, licentiousness, meanness. But the key variable is who's watching. We feel shame before those we respect and admire, those who might tell others, those whose judgment we can't dismiss. We feel less shame before strangers or people we consider beneath us—which is why powerful people sometimes behave shamefully toward those they think don't count.

The rhetorical use of shame is obvious: show your audience that they're being watched, that their behavior is visible, that people they respect will know. This is why public commitment works. It's why naming and shaming campaigns can change behavior. But shame is a dangerous tool. Overused, it breeds resentment. Misapplied, it punishes the wrong people. And it can backfire: someone shamed too deeply may abandon their community rather than reform.

The opposite, shamelessness, isn't simply the absence of shame. It's the rejection of the audience's authority to judge. The shameless person doesn't care what you think because they don't grant you standing to evaluate them. This can be pathological—the sociopath who lacks normal social responses. But it can also be strategic: the reformer who refuses to be ashamed of positions the majority condemns because they believe the majority is wrong.

PITY AND INDIGNATION

Pity, eleos, is the pain we feel at undeserved suffering. Someone experiences evil through no fault of their own—illness, accident, injustice—and we respond with compassion. Aristotle notes that pity requires imaginative identification: we feel pity when we can imagine ourselves or our loved ones in the same situation. If the suffering seems too distant or alien, pity doesn't arise.

That pairing is revealing. Pity and indignation are moral emotions, both responding to the gap between desert and outcome. When bad things happen to good people, we feel pity. When good things happen to bad people, we feel indignation. Both emotions presuppose that the world should be fair and respond with pain when it isn't.

Rhetorically, pity is evoked through concrete detail—the specifics of suffering that allow the audience to imagine and identify. The child separated from parents. The worker whose pension vanished. The patient denied treatment. Abstract statistics generate concern; specific stories generate pity. And pity motivates action: we want to help, to remedy, to restore the balance.

Indignation motivates differently. It wants to punish, to strip away unearned advantage, to restore fairness through correction rather than assistance. The corrupt official enjoying ill-gotten wealth. The nepotism that promotes the incompetent. The cheater who wins. These images provoke indignation, and indignation drives audiences toward reform, regulation, retribution.

ENVY AND EMULATION

Envy is the pain of seeing others possess good things we want for ourselves. Unlike indignation, envy doesn't require that the other person be undeserving. They might fully merit their success. We envy them anyway, because their success highlights our lack.

Aristotle observes that we envy our equals—people similar enough that comparison is natural. We don't envy the gods or kings; the distance is too great. We envy neighbors, colleagues, rivals. Their success feels like our failure precisely because we're so alike. If they achieved it, why couldn't we?

Envy is generally considered ugly, and speakers rarely want to evoke it directly. But understanding envy helps in two ways. First, it explains resistance to certain arguments. If your proposal benefits people the audience envies, they may oppose it regardless of its merits. Second, envy can be redirected into its more respectable cousin: emulation.

Emulation, zēlos, is the pain of seeing others possess good things—but paired with a desire to obtain those things yourself rather than to deprive the other person of them. The envious person wants their rival to fail. The emulous person wants to rise to their rival's level. Both emotions arise from the same comparison, but emulation channels the energy constructively.

A skilled speaker can transform envy into emulation by shifting the frame. Don't focus on what the rival has; focus on how they got it. Don't emphasize the gap; emphasize the path. "They succeeded through hard work and persistence—qualities available to anyone willing to commit." This reframe preserves the motivating comparison while redirecting it from resentment to aspiration.

THE CATALOG IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE

Aristotle's twenty-four-hundred-year-old analysis maps perfectly onto modern persuasion. Social media platforms have become laboratories for emotional manipulation, deploying these triggers at scale—often without the ethical considerations Aristotle would have insisted upon.

Consider how anger works online. Aristotle's formula—perceived slight from someone who lacks standing—explains why outrage spreads so efficiently. A celebrity tweets something tone-deaf about an issue they know nothing about. The standing mismatch (famous but ignorant, speaking about something that affects ordinary people) triggers immediate fury. The slight feels conspicuous because social media makes everything public. Platforms that optimize for engagement have discovered, empirically, what Aristotle theorized: anger is the most shareable emotion.

Fear operates similarly. Political advertising has always used fear, but digital targeting makes it surgical. A campaign can show rural voters ads about urban crime while showing suburban parents ads about school safety—each hitting the proximity and personal relevance elements Aristotle identified. The fear formula (close + likely + personal) explains why "this could happen to you" narratives outperform statistics, why local crime stories generate more fear than national data, why politicians invoke "your family" rather than "families in general."

Shame has found new expression through public accountability campaigns. When Aristotle noted that shame requires an audience whose opinion matters, he couldn't have imagined audiences of millions. Viral callouts work because they satisfy every element of his analysis: the behavior is made conspicuous, the audience is vast and includes people the target respects, and the values invoked are ones the target claims to share. The same dynamics explain why public shaming sometimes backfires—when targets decide the shaming audience lacks standing to judge them, shame transforms into defiance.

Advertising has always understood pity and its cousin, indignation. Charity campaigns make suffering concrete and personal (the named child rather than the statistic) because Aristotle was right: pity requires identification. Pharmaceutical ads show relatable people facing undeserved illness. Political ads evoke indignation by showing undeserving beneficiaries of opponents' policies—the fraudster collecting benefits, the corporation paying no taxes while "you" struggle. The emotional logic is ancient; only the delivery mechanism is new.

Envy drives much of influencer culture. Lifestyle content works precisely because we envy our near-equals, not distant celebrities. The influencer who seems "just like us" but lives a better life triggers comparison in ways that movie stars don't. Smart marketers transform that envy into emulation by emphasizing the path ("I started where you are") rather than just the destination. The emotion is the same one Aristotle analyzed; the medium is Instagram instead of the Athenian agora.

USING THE CATALOG ETHICALLY

Aristotle's catalog is a tool, and like all tools, it can be misused. The same techniques that evoke legitimate anger at real injustice can manufacture outrage at imaginary offenses. The same methods that inspire appropriate fear can create panic over nonexistent threats. Knowing how emotions work gives you power, and power requires responsibility.

The ethical standard from Chapter 7 still applies: emotions should fit the facts. Evoke anger when something genuinely deserves anger. Evoke pity when suffering is genuinely undeserved. Evoke fear when danger is genuinely real. The catalog helps you do this effectively, but effectiveness isn't the ultimate measure. Truth is.

There's also the question of proportion. Even when an emotion is appropriate, it can be evoked excessively. Yes, this injustice deserves anger—but does it deserve the fury you're generating? Yes, this danger warrants concern—but does it warrant the terror you're stirring? Skilled speakers calibrate intensity to situation. They evoke what's needed, not more.

And consider your audience's wellbeing. Emotions are exhausting. Sustained fear is debilitating. Constant anger corrodes. A speaker who keeps audiences in perpetual emotional arousal isn't serving them; they're exploiting them. The goal is to move people toward truth and action, not to keep them in a state of permanent agitation.

Aristotle's catalog is two and a half millennia old, and human emotions haven't changed. We still feel anger at slights, fear at threats, shame before audiences, pity for the suffering, envy toward rivals. Understanding these patterns makes you more effective as a speaker. But it also makes you responsible for how you use what you understand.

THE FORMULAS IN ACTION

Aristotle analyzed each emotion into components—and components can be worked. The ethical speaker uses these formulas not to manufacture feeling but to surface emotions appropriate to the situation. The formulas also work in reverse: change an element and you change the emotion.

Consider anger. Aristotle's formula: slight + undeserving target + offender who lacks standing. Miss any element and anger doesn't quite ignite. "This company, which profits from your labor and promises to treat you like family, has decided you don't deserve a living wage." Each phrase hits a different element. Now reverse it to calm anger: reframe the slight as unintentional ("They didn't know how that would land"), elevate the offender's standing ("They've earned the right to make this call"), acknowledge the target's contribution ("We weren't entirely blameless"). Change any element and anger diminishes. This isn't excusing genuine wrongs—it's right-sizing emotional responses when they've grown beyond what the situation warrants.

Fear has its own formula: proximity + likelihood + personal relevance. Make danger feel close in time and space, probable rather than merely possible, and personal rather than abstract. "Climate change" is distant; "Your city's reservoir will be empty within ten years" is immediate. "Rising crime rates" is abstract; "Three home invasions on this street last month" is concrete. Confidence—fear's opposite—reverses these. Remind people of their resources ("We've faced worse and prevailed"), point to allies ("We're not alone"), recall past successes ("Remember 2019? Same people said it couldn't be done"). Appropriate confidence enables action that fear would paralyze.

Pity requires undeserved suffering of significant magnitude. Both elements matter. Show that victims did nothing to deserve their fate and that the suffering is substantial, not trivial. Most powerfully, connect victims to the audience: "This could be your neighbor. Your child. You." When audiences see themselves in sufferers, pity becomes personal and motivates action.

Shame is the riskiest formula—it can alienate as easily as motivate. Aristotle's analysis: anticipation of disgrace before people whose opinion matters, for failing to meet shared values. The key word is shared. "You believe in fairness. But look at what we've allowed." This works when the audience already holds the value they're not living up to. If they don't already care about what you're shaming them for, the appeal backfires into resentment. Shame imposed from outside creates enemies, not converts.

The formulas aren't manipulation; they're analysis. Understanding the structure of emotions lets you evoke what the situation genuinely warrants—and lets you recognize when others are manipulating those structures for purposes the emotions don't serve.