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Anger and Pity

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Submitted By naughtonj7
Words 700
Pages 3
Jamie Naughton
Dr. Lisa Coleman
English 4383.1
4 September, 2014
Anger and Pity For all those who have had a rough day at the “office,” this one’s for you. We’ve all been there. We are swamped, we have deadlines, we are on edge, and there’s that one guy that lights the fuse and you explode. When you get home, you think through what happened and what made you angry, and you realize it wasn’t necessarily the person doing anything that they wouldn’t normally have done; it’s just the fact that you took it a certain way because of your own emotions and ideas about what should have happened. If you can understand what has happened to elicit this emotion, maybe you can control it, recreate it in others, and use it to stir emotions in others as a form of persuasion. Aristotle touches on how and why people feel certain emotions and what state of mind people are in when these emotions take control of them. Two of these emotions, anger and pity, Aristotle lectured on and are prominent in Wiesel’s “The Perils of Indifference.” Knowing that anger and pity would appeal to his audience, Wiesel wields them in the form of pathos creating a persuasion that people can subconsciously agree with. So what makes people angry? Aristotle states that people “become angry whenever they are distressed; for the person who is distressed desires something” (118). What is it we desire? We desire a multitude of things. Wiesel desires for mankind to be anything but indifferent, because “indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger” (Wiesel, “The Perils of Indifference”). To elaborate on what Wiesel is trying to say, I feel that when there is anger, things will be done, but when there is indifference, people will stand by, watching, and not care of the outcome because it is not their loved ones in danger. The way that Wiesel uses this though to prompt the audience into persuasion

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