4. Values, Emotions and the Epidictic Genre

The Treatise maintains the positivist link between values and emotions. The following passage on emotions is perhaps the key to understanding the role of values in Perelman’s philosophy. In a clever dissociation, the New Rhetoric pushes « passions » out of the picture in favor of values:

Note that passions, as obstacles, are not to be confused with passions that serve as support for positive argumentation, and which will usually be qualified with a less pejorative term, such as value, for example. (Ibid., p. 630; emphasis added)

See also the quote above (§2.4): the role of values is to « move » the audience. But, on the other hand, if values are opposed to facts (§2.2), and emotions are facts, then values should be opposed to them.

The notion of value refers to issues of subjectivity, emotion, and, semantically, to all the orientations (or biases) constitutive of ordinary language. The words that express values are words that carry argumentative orientations, constituted in antonymic pairs.

4.1 Does the epidictic genre have a special status in relation to values?

According to the TA, values and truth are acquired through different processes, group values ​​are acquired through education and language. In this sense, the epidictic genre specifically deals with values; it does not allow contradiction. Its specific social function is to strengthen the adherence of the group to its common founding values, “without which the discourses aimed at action could not find leverage to move and rouse their listeners” (1977, p. 33).
Constantly reconstructed in epidictic encounters, where they are subject to a quasi-axiomatic treatment, values find their application in the two argumentative genres properly called, the deliberative and the judicial.
The deliberative and judicial genres are argumentative genres, aimed at collective decision making in situations of conflicting positions. According to Perelman, the epidictic genre has a very different status, it does not admit contradiction; its object is the reinforcement of adherence to group values in order to trigger action, V. Emotion:

Without [values] discourses aimed at action could not find leverage to move and stir their listeners (1977, p. 33).

4.2 The Epidictic Discourse on Values is Not Unanimous

While insisting on the irreducible contradictions that prevail in the field of values, Perelman thus removes values from actual social contradiction by making the epidictic genre inherently unanimous.
The epidictic genre can be made to exclude blame and limit itself to praise, through literary and social conventions that align homage to living and dead men and women with the hagiography of saints. These conventions are no different from those that require a group to erect statues to its heroes and saints and not to its villains and demons.
In the case of the epidictic genre, it is the social framework of the discourses of homage and veneration that, if anything, precludes counterdiscourse, not the nature of eulogy with its perfect counterpart, blame. The devil’s advocate always has a role to play, even in cases of canonization. If the eulogy of the deceased is unanimous, it is not because there are no opponents or because the opponents have nothing to say, but because the convention of mourning they keep them silent; the new generation can be trusted to turn the great men and values of older generations into villains.
The epidictic praise of virtue ceases to be unanimous as soon as it is given a precise content.

Apart from the specific conventional practice of mourning, the epidictic genre is defined by the two antagonistic acts of language, praise and blame. These acts define not so much a genre as a position (footing) that can be taken in both political and legal discourse.