Pathos (πάθος) — a Greek term derived from the verb paskhein (“to suffer,” “to undergo,” “to experience”), it designates what a being receives or undergoes passively, in contrast to what it does actively. Its semantic field spans “passion,” “emotion,” “affection,” and “suffering”: the state in which something is acted upon by an external force. In Aristotle’s logic and physics, pathos names the category of affection or transient quality, opposed to action (poiein). In the Rhetoric, Aristotle makes pathos one of the three means of persuasion, alongside logos (rational argument) and ethos (the speaker’s character): to persuade through pathos is to dispose the listener’s mind by arousing emotions such as pity, fear, or indignation. In the Poetics, the tragic pathos — the suffering enacted on stage — contributes to katharsis, the purgation of the passions. Stoic ethics treats the pathe (plural) as disturbances of the soul, grouped into four kinds — desire, fear, pleasure, and distress — mistaken judgments that the sage must root out in order to attain apatheia (freedom from passion); this stance opposes Aristotelian metriopatheia, which prescribes moderating rather than suppressing the affects. Hegel, in turn, employs the German Leidenschaft (passion) to name the subjective force that, driven by particular interests, unwittingly carries out the ends of reason in history. Closely related concepts are apatheia, ethos, and poiein.
← Glossary