Arendt and Rhetoric

In his 1924 lectures Heidegger turns to describe human life by using Aristotle's Rhetoric and rhetorical language as a starting points. With a long lasting attention, Heidegger insists on this crumbling-movement as a model to describe the ethical realm, to understand the meaning of good, virtue, right, concluding that in human life any practical value cannot exist beyond rhetorical contingency. Human interaction, inside language, withstands any type of enclosure, always remains open. Hence political life, inside language, can be defined as the range of actions aiming at managing to keep this opening. These actions are persuasive actions.

This essay explores Hannah Arendt's contribution to our understanding of the rhetorical as opposed to the aesthetic quality of public speech, with an emphasis upon her conception of opinion and glory. Arendt's focus on the revelatory quality of public action in speech is widely understood to preclude or seriously limit its communicative aspect. I argue that this is a misunderstanding, and that accepting it would reduce speech not merely to the discussion of a sharply limited set of topics, but to no topics at all. Public action is speech that reveals the speaker as " answering, talking back and measuring up to whatever happened or was done. " Such revelatory speech is most appropriately judged by the standard of the glorious and the inglorious. Because such speech must inform as well as reveals, so does glorious or great speech rise to the level of greatness in part because of what is said, to whom, where, and how. Arendt's understanding of this is shown to have significant parallels to the ordinary language philosophy of Stanley Cavell. Of the major political theorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries , none appears more promising as a theorist of political rhetoric than Hannah Arendt. Her radicalised Aristotelian conception of political action restores public speech to its central place in political life without, in the style of some proponents of deliberative democracy, reducing that speech to a set of abstract commitments uttered to and by members of an ideal-ised moral/political/rational community. Arendt does not simply celebrate public speech as a form of action; she also seeks to improve our understanding of what such speech entails. Her distinctions between action, on the

The following dissertation project seeks to answer the question what it means to call a thing rhetorical. Contemporary rhetorical theory currently places more emphasis upon the relations between speakers, hearers and act or form of speaking itself, rather than the things of which speakers and hearers speak about. Such an orientation makes the relation between speaking and the things with which we deal and of which we speak unclear. I argue, in contrast, that rhetoricity, or a thing's capability of being-rhetorical, indicates a spoken relation to things that can become otherwise in shared time. The spoken relation is not simply a matter of symbols or representations; it expresses and makes manifest speakers' and hearers' concrete, present and immediate relation to the world. Rhetoricity expresses human beings' existence and experience with things as they are in everydayness initially, generally and for the most part.

What The Human Condition was for the Vita Activa, is The Life of the Mind for the Vita Contemplativa. But this last project, a trilogy in fact, was not completed by Arendt and perhaps therefore less known by the public. In this paper I try to understand Arendt's rather obscure last works by positioning them in the dichotomy between philosophy and politics. Along the way, many interesting themes will be explored, such as Arendt's evaluation of Stoicism, her sympathy for the Socratic method of thinking and the importance of Kant's aesthetic philosophy for the possibility of a meaningful public domain.

ORGANON, 2018

This paper offers an outline of practical and theoretical relations between truth and rhetoric. A point of departure for considerations to follow are philosophical theories of the sophists, Plato, and Aristotle as well as modern commentators of political rhetoric. I argue that the predominantly rhetorical nature of contemporary culture is inextricably bound up with the controversial issue of political deception, its definition and function. I refer to the theories of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida pertaining to the following issues: a relation between acting and lying, mass deception, and self-deception in totalitarian states. I further propose that classical ethics developing from Plato, Aristotle and Kant fails as a basis for the analysis of political and social processes in democratic societies. Key to grasping these processes is rhetoricas an art of persuasion-which has nothing to do with the traditional true-false dichotomy.

Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An Ontological Encounter, 2004

This essay picks up where Heidegger left off in his 1924 course on Aristotle's "Rhetoric." I put the 1924 course in conversation with Aristotle's "Rhetoric." The yield is an ontology based on Aristotle's definition of rhetoric as "an ability in each particular case to to see the available means of persuasion.

The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, 2000

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, composed during the seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma.

The work of Aristotle plays a central though profoundly ambivalent role in the development of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt's thought. Both hold Aristotle's theoretical tendencies largely responsible for the decline of Western thought and culture. Whereas Heidegger faults him for consolidating a " metaphysics of presence " that would have overshadowed the temporality and thus historicity of Being in such a way as to conceal the Seinsfrage, Arendt criticizes his supposed confusion between poiêsis, praxis and theôria, a confusion that would have strengthen the Platonic " substitution of making for acting ". Yet, they both see in Aristotle's practical philosophy resources to elaborate their prognosis to overcome the crisis of modernity. To do so, they reinterpret Aristotle's ethical and political texts in order to highlight the importance of the movement and temporality of human existence against a theoretical stance that would supposedly bind our humanity within lifeless and fixed concepts. This hermeneutics thus implies a reinterpretation of Aristotle's definition of the human being as " zôon logon echon " and " zôon politikon " (Pol. 1252b-1253a). The purpose of this paper is to show how Heidegger and Arendt's recoveries and reinterpretations of Aristotelian praxis is indeed rooted in a prior interpretation of the meaning of human logos, and to show some limits of these reappropriations. Ultimately, I argue that their shared bias in favor of a finite temporality, and hence movement of praxis, blinds them to the dynamic structure of being that, according to Aristotle, determines praxis: activity (energeia). The question of " logos echein " Heidegger's interpretation of logos exceeds by far his early treatment of Aristotle. However, his critique of the definition of man as zôon logon echon as one which reduces human being to a mere subjectum to which is simply added the characteristic of logos – a critique that is made at least from Sein und Zeit to Die Frage nach dem Ding 1 – has its origin in his first works on Aristotle 2. As for Arendt, she was deeply influenced by Heidegger's teachings on Aristotle in the 1920's, and is much indebted to Aristotelian political thought for her own understanding of political speech and action. But despite this same reference and this influence, which are apparent in some of their common grounds, their interpretations of logos are quite different. How, then, do Heidegger and Arendt interpret Aristotelian logos according to the definition oh human being as zôon logon echon? It must be stated at first that they both reject the traditional understanding of logos as " reason " perpetuated by the Latin translation of the definition, animal rationale. They both assess that this translation and the tradition that carried it correspond to a radical occlusion of the Greek experience of logos they try to recover. Nevertheless, they disagree on the very nature of this experience.

2010