Rhetorical Hermeneutics

Rhetorical Hermeneutics, as theorized in McCormick's reading of Heidegger's 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric, designates a radical reorientation of rhetoric away from its conventional understanding as a technical art of persuasion (a technē aimed at producing effects in an audience) toward its function as the primary mode through which Dasein interprets itself in its everyday being-with-others. On this reading, rhetoric is not something applied to pre-given social situations; rather, it is constitutive of them. The basic stratum of rhetoric, for Heidegger's Aristotle, is doxa — the unreflective, communally shared "view" or opinion that structures how things appear to people in their ordinary, pre-theoretical dealings. Doxa is not error or distortion to be corrected by philosophy; it is the positive ground of everydayness, the shared horizon within which Dasein already finds itself disclosed.

This means that rhetoric, properly understood, operates at the ontological level: it articulates the self-understanding that Dasein always already has by virtue of inhabiting a shared world of language and communal sense. Rhetorical Hermeneutics is thus not interpretation about everyday talk from an external standpoint — it is the interpretive structure immanent to that talk itself. The concept marks rhetoric as fundamental ontology avant la lettre: before any explicit act of understanding, the rhetorical fabric of doxa has already pre-interpreted being-there for the beings who inhabit it.

This concept appears in McCormick's source (samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, p.173) as part of a conceptual history of everyday talk, and it sits at the intersection of several of the corpus's canonical concerns. Its most direct relationship is with Phenomenology: the move Heidegger makes — grounding rhetoric in Dasein's being-with-one-another rather than in a subject's intentional acts — is precisely the kind of ontological deepening that phenomenology in the Heideggerian vein attempts. Yet Rhetorical Hermeneutics also quietly contests the phenomenological tradition in the way the corpus critiques phenomenology more broadly: rather than privileging the self-disclosure of sense to consciousness, it locates the interpretive ground in the pre-reflective, communal space of doxa, which is structural and shared rather than experientially first-personal.

The concept also resonates with Ideology and Language as the corpus defines them. Doxa as communal, unreflective "view" occupies a structural position analogous to ideology's operation below the level of conscious belief — it is the horizon within which things appear, not a belief one chooses to hold. Similarly, the claim that rhetoric is the hermeneutic of being-there itself echoes the Lacanian insistence that Language is not an instrument subjects wield but the structure that wields them. Rhetorical Hermeneutics can thus be read as a pre-Lacanian specification of what the corpus theorizes more formally: that the subject's self-understanding is always mediated by a symbolic-rhetorical fabric that precedes and constitutes it. It is an extension of Phenomenology into the domain of communal sense-making, and a historical forerunner to the corpus's treatments of Language and Ideology as constitutive rather than merely representational structures.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.173)

Rhetoric is nothing other than the interpretation of concrete being-there, the hermeneutic of being-there itself. That is the intended sense of Aristotle's rhetoric

The phrase "nothing other than" is doing decisive theoretical work: it performs a reduction that strips away every technical, instrumental, or decorative understanding of rhetoric and identifies it exclusively with "hermeneutic" — a term that places interpretation, not persuasion, at rhetoric's core. Coupling "hermeneutic" with "concrete being-there" further insists that this interpretation is not abstract or philosophical but ontologically embedded in the everyday existence of Dasein itself, making rhetoric indistinguishable from Dasein's primary mode of self-disclosure.