Rhetoric

In the argument developed in The Chattering Mind, rhetoric is theorized not as mere ornamentation or technique of persuasion but as a fundamental mode of disclosure — a way of seeing what is available and persuasive within a given situation. Drawing on Heidegger's early reading of Aristotle, rhetoric is repositioned as ontologically oriented: in its search for pistis (credibility, belief), it cannot avoid verging on aletheia (truth-as-unconcealment). This is because rhetoric operates through and upon doxa — the preexisting, publicly shared interpretedness of the world — which both enables perception of circumstances as "given" and harbors within it the constant possibility of a more originary disclosure. Rhetoric, on this account, is not opposed to truth but is a mode of its pursuit under the conditions of already-being-in-a-world saturated by prevailing opinion.

The critical edge of this account lies in its ambivalence. Doxa as the medium of rhetoric is simultaneously the condition of possibility for any "right view of a matter" and the site where pseudos (falsehood) characteristically overwhelms the pull toward aletheia. Rhetoric thus mediates the tension between authentic Rede (Discourse) and inauthentic Gerede (idle talk): it can cultivate the kind of opinion that opens toward unconcealment, but it equally risks collapsing into sophistry — the mere reproduction of prevailing interpretedness. Heidegger's retrieval of this Aristotelian framework is itself modeled on the Greek struggle against sophistry, casting genuine philosophical discourse as the labor of wresting original interpretedness from beneath the sedimented weight of Gerede.

This concept appears exclusively in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, where it serves as a hinge between two of the source's organizing frameworks: the phenomenological pair of Original Interpretedness / Prevailing Interpretedness, and the question of how Language structures the subject's access to reality. Rhetoric, positioned here, is an extension of the concept of Original Interpretedness: just as Heidegger's method aims to retrieve original meaning from within the inherited sedimentation of Prevailing Interpretedness, rhetoric aims to cultivate a doxa that is not merely complicit with prevailing opinion but oriented toward uncovering. The concept thus sits at the intersection of Language (as the pre-given medium of shared intelligibility) and Alienation (the subject's constitutive capture within a signifying or discursive order it did not author): rhetoric is the practice that navigates this capture without dissolving it.

Relative to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, rhetoric functions as a specification rather than a critique. Where Language, in the Lacanian frame, names the structure that "uses" subjects and simultaneously founds and robs them of being, rhetoric names the situated, practical activity through which a subject attempts to work within that structure toward disclosure. Similarly, where Ideology names the structural operation by which social reality is constituted through non-knowledge and jouissance, rhetoric occupies the ambiguous zone between ideological reproduction (sophistry as Gerede) and ideological critique (authentic Rede that retrieves original meaning). The concept does not resolve this tension but maps it, making rhetoric a practical analogue to the phenomenological task of uncovering that Heidegger assigns to philosophy itself. The cross-reference to Repetition may also be operative here: the sophist's rhetoric repeats prevailing doxa without transformation, while genuine rhetoric "repeats" in the Heideggerian-retrievive sense — going back to recover what was always already available but covered over.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.178)

In its search for pistis, rhetoric cannot help but verge on aletheia... rhetoric aims to cultivate a certain type of doxa: It aims to discover and develop what Heidegger calls 'the right view of a matter'

The phrase "cannot help but verge on aletheia" is theoretically loaded because it makes the orientation toward truth structurally necessary rather than incidental — rhetoric is not accidentally truth-seeking but constitutively so, even as it works through doxa. The coupling of pistis (credibility/belief) with aletheia (unconcealment) installs an ontological telos within what is ordinarily treated as a merely strategic practice, and "the right view of a matter" names the threshold concept between opinion and disclosure that anchors the whole argument.