Philosophische Hermeneutik: Reflektoren der rhetorischen Tradition

According to its self-conception, hermeneutics maintains a close relationship with the rhetorical tradition, thereby distancing itself from the demand – most present in occidental philosophy – of drawing a strict parting line against all rhetoric. Rather, hermeneutics explicitly unravels the manifold parallels between rhetoric and its own approach. As well as rhetoric, hermeneutics analyzes the various ways of linguistic mediation and disclosure of sense. In its reflection on the fundamental conditions of understanding, 20th century philosophical hermeneutics – as represented by Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricœur – focuses on the capacity of speech and on the performative dimension of talking with one another. Both rhetoric and hermeneutics take recourse to the universality of language as being irreducible to – and transgressing – any particular area of experience. Based on this ubiquity of language, hermeneutics envisages the determination of human essence by analyzing social contexts of concrete discursive situations. In Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricœur this insight relies not least on an intense discussion of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Yet at the same time, these authors remain skeptical towards rhetoric understood as the art of persuasion, thereby implying a constant potential of violence and misuse of power. Thus, they point to the dangerous possibility of an independent and self-satisfying rhetoric that would give up any factual claim to truth, obliterate any authentic performance of the self and content itself with advocating common opinion. In this sense, hermeneutics’ reception of rhetoric entails – besides the often-emphasized affinity – also a kind of skeptical distancing.