Rhetoric and Discourse

Rhetoric and Discourse, as formulated in this passage, names the structural articulation between persuasive speech (Rede) and the dialectical movement toward authentic philosophical inquiry in Heidegger's analysis of everyday discourse. Rhetorical practice — the Rede und Widerrede of speech and counterspeech — is not merely a social or pedagogical technique but a structural moment on a communicative trajectory: it generates the for-and-against (Für- und Gegensprechen) that, when properly sustained, opens onto dialectical Durchsprechen (speaking-through) and eventually onto the genuine philosophical disclosure of authentic Rede. The concept thus locates rhetoric as the initiating, agonistic stratum of discourse, the dynamic of position and counter-position that makes logos generative rather than merely referential.

Crucially, this trajectory also contains its own internal risk. The structural non-coincidence between "the said" (das Gesagte) and "the about-which" (das Worüber) means that rhetorical circulation — the very energy of for-and-against — can become self-sustaining: the said keeps moving while the about-which drops away, producing the degraded forms of Gerede (idle talk) and sophistic deception. Rhetoric and Discourse therefore names both the productive pole of communicative disputation and the structural threshold at which language may tip into dissimulation. The concept is simultaneously a genealogy of philosophical speech and a diagnostic of its perennial failure.

This concept belongs to the argument in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive (p. 204), which situates Heidegger's analysis of Rede within a conceptual history of everyday talk. Its most direct cross-referential anchor is Gerede: the concept of Rhetoric and Discourse precisely names the structural upstream condition from which Gerede descends. Where Gerede is defined by the severance of "the said" from "the about-which" and the sham clarity that results, Rhetoric and Discourse identifies the moment prior to that severance — the agonistic, for-and-against movement of rhetorical practice that can still pass through the about-which or can lose it. Rhetoric and Discourse is thus an extension and a genealogical specification of the Gerede concept: it tells us not merely that idle talk exists, but what kind of communicative energy decays into it.

The concept also intersects with Dialectics as a cross-reference: the Für- und Gegensprechen of rhetorical practice is precisely the agonistic structure that Lacanian and Hegelian dialectics also exploits — the dynamic of positions pushing against each other and potentially transforming. Yet where Lacanian dialectics marks the limits of resolution (the non-dialectizable remainder, the surplus that resists sublation), Heidegger's framing here locates the limit differently: in the structural gap within logos itself between what is said and what it is about. Rhetoric and Discourse thus sits at the intersection of Dialectics, Gerede, Language, and Authenticity/Inauthenticity — it is the communicative hinge between genuine philosophical Rede and its fallen double.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.204)

In the speech and counterspeech of rhetorical practice (Rede und Widerrede), Heidegger sees an impulse toward the speaking for and against that is characteristic of theoretical disputation (Für-und Gegensprechen)

The quote is theoretically loaded because it identifies Rede und Widerrede (speech and counterspeech) not as mere debate but as the structural "impulse" (Antrieb) toward Für- und Gegensprechen — a term that spans both rhetorical persuasion and the for-and-against structure of dialectical disputation, thereby linking rhetoric to the philosophical tradition as a continuous, if precarious, communicative movement rather than a separate or merely ornamental practice.