I cannot read texts at the moment because I've misplaced my reading glasses and my eyes are sore and tired from working yesterday and today without them. So a quote about something that has puzzled me from 'The Call for Rhetoric' by David Merce, which is published in this magazine:

Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions might serve as another starting point for those interested in the elaboration of this distinction between feelings and emotions. While Nussbaum is more interested in distinguishing among emotional states than I am, her distinction between conscious and unconscious emotions might be another way of addressing the distinction between feelings and emotions that I’m suggesting here .... There is also a very difficult sentence in Book II of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1379a) that posits both “emotions/passions” and “underlying passions/emotions”: proodopoieitai gar hekastos pros tein hekastou orgein hupo tou huparchontos pathous. Freese translates this as “for the passion present in his mind in each case paves the way for his anger” ... Kennedy, following Grimaldi’s discussion of the passage in Aristotle: A Commentary, translates it as “for each [person] has prepared a path for his own anger because of some underlying emotion” .... What I’m trying to identify as “feelings” may also be related to Aristotle’s notion of an “underlying emotion,” but I am not certain that what “underlies” an emotion is simply another emotion. What both Nussbaum and Aristotle share is a sense that, with some effort, emotions can be distinguished one from the other; they also share the suspicion that there is something about emotions that slips out of our noose of categorization. There is something (I call them/it “feelings”) that resists being distinguished.

I'm not sure what this has to with the decline of rhetoric.