Rhetoric Today
Reading Aristotle After Heidegger
In his book on Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that there are three and only three distinct contexts for the use of persuasion: political speech, forensic speech, and ceremonial speech.
Political speech concerns what we should do in the future.
Forensic speech concerns the truth or falsehood of that which has already happened.
Ceremonial speech concerns the present moment. Does X deserve praise or blame now?
To make Aristotle’s thesis work, you have to broadly expand the categories of politics, forensics, and ceremony. Politics is about anything having to do with collective action; forensics—no longer reserved for the courtroom or the legal order—is about anything having to do with the past; and ceremony requires no pomp: the present moment itself is always already ceremonial.
Maybe you think Aristotle is too rigid, his categories arbitrary. Why aren’t there four categories of rhetorical circumstance? Or two?
But even if we accept Aristotle’s distinctions—and I’m amazed that he came up them more than two millennia ago—the strongest critique comes from Heidegger.
Heidegger argues in Being and Time that past, present, and future are not three distinct modes of relating to the world, but three overlapping and interpenetrating ones. Time itself is ecstatic, in his words, standing outside of itself. Past conditions future; future conditions past. The present is what we arrive at and at the same time what we are always fleeing. If Heidegger is right, then all speech is at once political, forensic and ceremonial.
This makes rhetoric a much more complex task than it ever was; because how we should act, how we should evaluate the present, and how we should understand what happened in the past cannot be separated from each other. History is political; politics is forensic; and everything is ceremonial.
A good speech—Aristotle thought—should be governed by a single goal. But if Heidegger is right, we can never have one crisp, single goal. The veracity of the past, the desirability of a future course of action, and the praise-worthiness of the present moment are embedded in one another.
To assess the present is always also to adjudicate the past and advocate for the future.
P.S.—Here’s my latest mega thread on Carl Schmitt. And here’s a reflection on my project of writing 2,000 tweets on 20 of my favorite thinkers.
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