Ethos involves Arete, Phronesis and Eunoia. So what we're going to do in this video is talk about Arete. Now, Arete is often defined as virtue or excellence. So for example, both the Iliad and the Odyssey talked about the Aretes of the heroes. The odes of pindar talk about heroic virtue, right? So our modern notion of virtue might be private, right, private sense of virtue, but Greek Arete was fundamentally public, so Arete was excellence others could see. This could be excellent in athletic competitions and battles and public debates, but you could see someone excelling, and we still kind of have this sense for the excellence of a charismatic speaker. So in the US we still kind of have a sense for the Arete of president John Kennedy. So in Kennedy's prime, he was seen as exemplifying the values of youth and vigor and hopefulness. All those traits that we as Americans wanted at that time. And I like talking about Kennedy here because it sort of shows that Arete's display and not necessarily true, or at least not necessarily true when we're talking about ethos. Kennedy was plagued by crippling back problems, okay. At times he required a back brace, other times he required crutches, sometimes he had to turn to pills and medicine, right, he was a mess, but the image of him was so powerful. And Ethos is, thus, the presentation of yourself as credible, as excellent. And in this way, I think Arete can get us into a discussion of speaker passion. because you know, for most audiences passion is that special virtue of speakers, right? She's so passionate about her subject. The speaker performs their excitement about an idea. And performance is the keyword here. So I'll work with people who gets frustrated when the talk isn't going the way that they like. And they're like, I can't do this. I just don't feel passionate about this subject. Well, tough, get there, okay? Audience can't see inside your soul. They just see what you do. If passion is there, wonderful. It still needs to show up in delivery. If passion is a bit lacking, so what? It's you still need to look passionate and invested, right. How many great talks have you seen where the speaker looks bored? Mm-hm. Right, so in many ways speaker passion is like character acting. Right, when thinking about Arete, you're performing you're best you. Okay, so how do you perform yourself as passionate? I think imitation and practice are the first places to go to. So first I would say, find a model. Someone who looks passionate when they speak and then when you look at them, what are they doing? Really get in there and analyze their actions. When it comes to passion or Arete, myself, I drift to those speakers who can convey their passion in sort of a professorial way, right. I'm a professor, not a pastor, okay. So I like professor models, I would like to get better at sermon-like speeches, I don't think I do those as well as I would like. But for right now, I think more professor models, teacherly models. So if I'm speaking about rhetoric, or debate, I want to demonstrate my profound commitment to speeches pedagogical mission, helping people convey their ideas. I believe in that deeply, I see that as a noble pursuit and I look around and I find other academics that talk about their studies in similar ways. And I think Neil De Grasse Tyson is a master at this. In his response, he gives multiple quick examples showing his mastery of Newton's corpus and each one of these examples is interesting and accessible and you really get the sense that he understands Newton deeply. And he's able to make his illustrations basic and clarifying, right? He doesn't have to hide behind complexity or behind jargon. So that's all great, but really, I find his mannerisms fascinating, right, watching his performance. At times, he speaks in a rather relaxed tone. And then at other times, he's jumping around with this fiery intensity. His gestures go very big and then he counterbalances them with these small, tight little gestures. And when he digs into his concept, his words are so clipped and sharp, they just demonstrate this intense love of the topic, right? No one can watch that clip and say, Tyson lacks Arate, he lacks passion. So in watching Tyson, I can start to imitate some of his traits, right? Specific things that he's doing with his hands and his movements. Now, do I look like Tyson when I'm passionate? I don't know, a little bit. But watching him gives me tools and ideas to practice with. So you can do that, you can look for that model of imitation but you might also showcase your passion with an aside. So from a performance perspective, I'm a real big believer in sort of the engagement aside. So here is where you sort of step outside the flow of the speech, you kind of put a pen on what you are talking about and you go off on a controlled tangent. So these are like 10 to 15 second chunks where I just to get talk about how excited I am by the idea. Sort of mini disc course dropped into the talk. And it shapes my wording, so I'll say stuff basically that's revealing an inner state, an emotional state. So I'll say stuff like, this is such a fascinating idea, I love this. Or so when we get into this, this blows my mind. So I'm saying what what supposedly is going on emotionally so on and so forth. And I'll often throw in a shuffle step and I just I know what it looks like to perform excitement on an idea, at least for ten to fifteen seconds and it looks I can barely contain myself, trust me. I can contain myself on that, okay? Now, does planning and showcasing my emotional investment in a topic mean that I don't truly feel it? No, not at all, right? In the performance, I'm trying to capture what I actually look like when I truly sound passionate. And practice here is key. So the other recommendation is, as you practice, try to perform your passion in different ways. Find what works best, what sounds best. Again, I'm performing my own identity. It's the easiest character acting you can do, okay? So please don't take my comments here to say that you should fake emotion. I think that requires much more advanced acting skills. And it's ethically dubious, I suppose there's that also. Maybe that's not why you want to do it. But in performing my ethos, performing my Arete, my passion, I'm also aware of how much audiences want to see that speaker virtue. They want to see engagement, investment. They want to see you be passionate. Just give to them, okay. So, this need to see Arete was important in Aristotle's time, and it's just as important for us today. [MUSIC]
