Seeing (the Other) Through a Terministic Screen of Spirituality: Emotional Integrity as a Strategy for Facilitating Identification

• Main Author: Slater, Jarron Benjamin
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2012
• Subjects: Kenneth Burke; rhetoric; emotion; identification; terministic screens; ethos; ethics; emotional integrity; Aristotle; Robert Solomon; spirituality; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3219; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4218&context=etd

Although philosopher Robert Solomon and rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote in isolation from one another, they discuss similar concepts and ideas. Since its introduction in Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives, identification has always been important to rhetorical theory, and recent studies in emotion, such as Solomon's, provide new insight into modes of identification—that human beings can identify with one another on an emotional level. This paper places Solomon and Burke in conversation with one another, arguing that both terministic screens and emotions are ways of seeing, acting, engaging, and judging. Hence, terministic screens and emotions affect ethos, or character, both in a specific moment and over periods of time as they are cultivated through habit. Because emotions influence ethos, it is important for a speaker to cultivate the right emotions at the right time—Solomon's notion of emotional integrity. Emotional integrity facilitates Burkean identification between speaker and audience because it enables human beings to see the other as synecdochically related to themselves, a part of the whole. Hence, this paper ultimately argues that a speaker will improve his or her ethos by cultivating emotional integrity.