Heidegger on Rhetoric: An Existential Deconstruction of the Notion of Communication

Abstract

This paper attempts to show how Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric can be interpreted usefully to understand the existential dimension of communication. Heidegger’s treatment of communication as a phenomenon is ontologically broader as he locates it within the existential analytics of Dasein. Taking Heidegger’s 1924 Marburg lecture, Being and Time and other texts dealing with the problem of the being of language as theoretical sources, this study first presents the importance of Heidegger’s conception of rhetoric and then shows how this throws light on the ontological aspects of communication as such. Human beings in their basic mode of existence as being-in-the-world and speaking-with-one-another is always already in communication through language. If rhetoric is a way of having the existential view about how matters present themselves in a particular manner by virtue of speaking about it with-one-another, then it is in the region of the doxa of people. Further, how existential communication works in our concrete life is demonstrated through a rhetorical analysis of the film Blow-Up.