Rhetoric as Critique: Towards a Rhetorical Philosophy

Introduction: Philosophy and Critique

Since its emergence as an independent discipline – distinct, that is, from rhetoric and other fields – philosophy has been deemed the preeminent science for liberating people from their misconceptions, false beliefs, and prejudices. As such, and in agreement with its self-understanding as enlightenment, philosophy is constitutively related to critique (see Jaeggi and Wesche, 2009a: 10), be it in the form of a critique of mere opinions in the name of justified true beliefs, a critique of myths and religion in the name of a universal logos, or a critique of the contingency of social and political institutions in the name of transcendental ideals. From Socrates admonishing his fellow citizens to care not for glory and riches but for truth and their souls to Immanuel Kant’s framing of transcendental philosophy as a critique of pure reason; from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to Michel Foucault’s genealogical critique, which lays bare the connection between social forms of power, modes of subjectivation, and epistemic justification; from feminist epistemology to standpoint theory (see Haraway, 1988), which analyses the perspectival character of practices of knowledge – critique is at the very centre of philosophy.

This is still true today. Despite the oft-voiced accusation that critique has lost its edge and become normatively indifferent (see Latour, 2004) or has fallen prey to a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (see Felski, 2012), or the frequently invoked ‘end of critique’ in the face of social, political, and economic conditions that – according to the notorious TINA principle (‘There is no alternative’) – seem to be without alternative and therefore beyond criticism (see Jaeggi and Wesche, 2009a: 7), ¹ we are currently experiencing a renewed interest in the conditions and possibilities of critique. ² What those evincing such an interest have in common is the desire for a revived and strengthened critical theory of society: not only as a theoretical toolkit for analysing social, political, economic, technological, etc. developments in times of global crises but also as a critical practice (see Harcourt, 2020) and life-form capable of forging new alliances and generating broadened forms of solidarity.

There are strong differences, though, as to the orientation and goals of their respective approaches. According to Jaeggi and Wesche (2009b: 8–9), the current discussion revolves around the following issues: (1) the relationship between the critique of the old and the possibility of the new – that is, the question whether criticism can confine itself to fulfilling a purely negative function (as, for example, in the ideology-critical gesture of unmasking and exposure) or whether it must also take on a positive role (by making constructive suggestions as to what may be done to change things for the better, for instance); ³ (2) the standards of critique – that is, the question whether the standards by which critique operates are universal or must be reconstructed from contingent norms already existing in a given form of life or society; (3) the standpoint of the critic – that is, the question whether critics occupy an epistemologically privileged position or are inevitably entangled in the social conditions they criticize; and (4) the relation between theoretical analysis and critical practice – that is, the question of the relationship between the critic as theorist and the critic as social actor. To this list we propose to add (5) the mode of subjectivation – that is, the question of whether the criticizing subject precedes the critical practice or is constituted by it in the first place (for example, in the sense of Kant’s [1996] definition of enlightenment as ‘the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’ [p. 17; trans. modified]); and (6) the motivating force of critique – that is, questions concerning the various motives and affective dispositions that drive people to take a critical stance, be it in a theoretical sense or in a practical form through, for example, acts of resistance or civil disobedience.

Among these issues, the question of the normative standards of critique is at the forefront of the debate and also serves as a criterion for distinguishing various models of critique. Against this background, and in view of the tradition of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth differentiates between three politically and philosophically legitimate forms of social criticism: (1) construction, (2) reconstruction, and (3) genealogy. A fourth form of criticism, criticism through revelation, which – in a Platonic manner – appeals ‘to an experience of religious or cognitive clarity in order to advance [. . .] a realm of generally binding values’, is rejected by Honneth (2009: 46), since it defies any justification. The most dominant approach to social criticism today is probably construction. Here, the goal is to work out – via the construction of a fictive ideal state, such as John Rawls’s veil of ignorance – ‘a bundle of principles capable of general agreement [. . .] that can then be used to criticize the institutional order of a society’ (Honneth, 2009: 47). Reconstruction, by contrast, accepts ‘only those principles or ideals that have already in some way gelled in a given society’ and therefore ‘count as legitimate resources of social criticism’. It is thus an immanent form of critique, for here ‘normative claims or ideals are to be reconstructed from within social reality itself; their transcending character allows the existing social order to be subjected to justified criticism’ (Honneth, 2009: 47). The task of critique, then, is to judge social conditions, power relations, norms, theories, concepts, life-forms, etc. in terms of their conforming to the possibilities and norms implicit in them.

From this point of view, critique consists, as it were, in ‘taking measure’ by comparing what is being criticized with normative standards and principles (or procedures to define these principles) that are somehow withdrawn from the actual critical practice (see Vogelmann, 2017) – regardless of whether these standards are rationally constructed or immanently reconstructed (see Särkelä, 2017: 223). As historical experience shows, however, normative principles and ideals not only change over time but can also be distorted or perverted to serve disciplinary and regressive ends. Genealogy, as developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, addresses this problem, showing that normative ideals, such as freedom, equality, or even truth, have always been (and still are) part of social struggles for power and interpretative hegemony. Yet genealogy is, at least according to Honneth (2009), incapable of providing normative justification; it is ‘in a certain sense a parasitical critical procedure’ that depends on constructive or reconstructive critique for its functioning (p. 48). ⁴

This reduction of genealogy to a purely ‘parasitic’ tool of critique misses a crucial point. As regards constructive and reconstructive forms of critique, the problem is not so much that norms and values can deviate from their supposedly original meaning as that the models of construction and reconstruction separate the method of obtaining critical standards from critical practice itself, thus subscribing to a kind of dualism (see Särkelä, 2017: 220). In doing so, they presuppose that the method of critique is detachable from both critical practice and the person of the critic. For the genealogist, by contrast, there is no external standpoint of neutrality. Instead, she finds herself inextricably embedded in those conditions and practices she seeks to analyse. According to Saar (2002, 2009), genealogy, as understood by Nietzsche and Foucault (Foucault, 1997: 315), brings these aspects into relief. It does so by making use of a specific rhetorical and narrative mode of (re)presentation that problematizes the entanglement between the person of the critic and the criticized field, between the norms guiding the critique and the criticized object, as well as by reflecting on the place from which the genealogist speaks and on the conditions that make her speaking possible in the first place.

This brings genealogy close to rhetoric; like the latter, it is usually not seen as an independent form of critique but as a supplementary one at best. We, by contrast, defend the position that rhetoric is a form of critique in its own right. Following the idea – found in, among others, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault – that critique must reflect on its own methodological premises and resist the temptation to locate itself outside the social and theoretical practices it seeks to analyse, we argue that rhetoric makes it possible to conceive of critique as a self-reflective and self-transformative practice capable of addressing both the ‘critical activity of “doing critique”’ and the ‘theoretical activity of reflecting on or formulating theories of critique’ (Vogelmann, 2017: 101). ⁵ Adopting a rhetorical perspective would allow critique to reflect on its own limitations from within the critical process and to question itself as well as its epistemic and normative orders of justification, forms of practice, and subject positions in terms of its dependencies and entanglements. Moreover, a rhetorical perspective would point to the fact that critique is not only articulated discursively but also always embodied in non-discursive practices (Garcés, 2006). Given all these benefits to be gained from adopting a rhetorical perspective, it is surprising that, while there is no lack of proposals that think of critique as practice (see e.g. Celikates, 2018; Jaeggi, 2018; Sonderegger, 2019; Stahl, 2013), rhetoric has so far not been considered a possible starting point for such an approach.

This is not to suggest that rhetoric has been denied all critical potential; nor do we seek to brush aside the repeated attempts that have been made throughout the course of the history of Western thought to retrieve rhetoric’s critical edge – from ancient philosophy to Renaissance philosophy and Vico (2020), to Romanticism and Nietzsche (1989b), to Barthes (1994), Derrida (1978b, 1982), Blumenberg (2010), Ricœur (1977), and others (see Foss et al., 2002). ⁶ But these attempts have been largely confined to the realms of literary criticism, hermeneutics, cultural history, and historiography, with a particular focus on the doctrine of tropes and figures, especially metaphor. In other words, whereas modern philosophy has, at least since Kant, ⁷ been defined as the critical science par excellence, rhetoric has been either denied any critical function whatsoever or tolerated only in the field of literature and literary criticism. ⁸ In contrast to this view, we argue that rhetoric can take on a critical role precisely because it has functioned as a constant counterpart to philosophy since the latter’s emergence as an independent discipline in ancient Greece. In its conflict with philosophy, rhetoric has time and again pointed to the impossibility of separating validity claims from their individual genesis and the social contexts in which they are realized and operate. As we see it, rhetoric can assume a threefold role: first, as an antagonistic counterpart to philosophy that forces the latter to identify and justify its critical standards; second, as a reflective practice that accounts for the intrinsic entanglement between the critic and the criticized field, between the criticized object and the norm guiding the critique; and third, as a mode of address that reflects on the position of the speaking subject and its addressees, allowing us to think of critique as a discursive practice that, rather than being preceded by a subject, both transforms and constitutes it. If we succeed in integrating the rhetorical perspective into philosophy and thus, as it were, in rhetorizing philosophy, we end up strengthening not only rhetoric as a genuine form of critique but also philosophy’s capacity for critical self-reflection and self-transformation.

To make our thesis plausible, we proceed in four steps. First, we sketch out the opposition between philosophy and rhetoric from antiquity to Nietzsche’s provocative claim that all speech and language is inherently rhetorical. Second, we discuss the idea of a rhetorization of philosophy, arguing that it assumes the form of a critical self-reflection or, to use Walter Benjamin’s term, a ‘de-positing’ (Entsetzung). Third, we turn to the philosophizing subject, which does not precede critical practice but is constituted and transformed by it. The rhetorical perspective shows that the philosophizing subject can never fully embrace its entanglement in local, particular forms of life, languages, social contexts and conflicts. As a programmatic outlook, we conclude by proposing five reference points for a rhetorical philosophizing that meets its own standards of critique through the consistent integration of a rhetorical perspective: the historical world, the philosophizing subject, its addressees, the non-philosophical, and truth-telling. ⁹

Rhetoric and Philosophy in Dispute

Since their beginnings in Greece in the 5th century bc, philosophy and rhetoric have stood in an ambivalent relationship to one another. More often than not, they are considered antagonists, shaping their respective disciplinary contours via a critique of the other. ¹⁰ Usually, it is philosophy that seeks to distance itself from rhetoric by countering the situational and context-dependent approach of rhetoric with a universal claim to truth. As the common reproach goes, whereas philosophy strives for truth and sound knowledge (episteme), rhetoric is concerned not with truth but with the manipulation and instrumentalization of opinions (doxai) or with what only seems true to most people. The question of how to distinguish true statements from mere opinions or ‘felt’ truths, to take up a notorious phrase from the post-truth debate, is not even posed by rhetoric. Against the plethora of different opinions and interpretations that make up the polity and, at the same time, threaten it, philosophy aims at the argumentative justification of truth and tries to arrive at validity claims that every reasonable person must accept if they want to avoid getting pushed out of the realm of rational discourse and justification.

But even if this self-image were true, philosophy would face a fundamental dilemma. For as soon as it attempts to defend its position, it must necessarily resort to what it wants to exclude as unreliable and misleading: rhetoric. For in order to justify certain validity claims, a particular, historically situated and bodily subject must articulate them in a conflictual public situation and defend them against possible objections. Needless to say, there is no utterance that is not clad in a specific rhetorical form – from ordinary language to the formal language of logic – so that, ultimately, there is no neutral way of representing and communicating things. ¹¹ As Quintilian already points out, there is nothing in language that is not ‘expressed by figures’, since every thought inevitably is articulated in a specific verbal form (1996: IX 1, 12). Moreover, as a discursive argumentative practice, philosophy not only takes place in oral or written form but also assumes a specific literary format (dialogue, treatise, meditation, poem, aphorism, letter, confession, etc.) that in turn affects what it says. ¹² If, on the other hand, philosophy refused to justify its claims publicly, it would exclude itself from the realm of reasons. For reasons must always be put into language so that they enter public discourse and others have the chance to challenge them. As a mere contemplative activity, philosophy would, like the one who denies the law of non-contradiction in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, resemble a plant – it would have to remain silent (Met. 1006a 13–15).

From a rhetorical point of view, philosophy is thus trapped in a vicious circle. If it wants to assert its claim to truth and enforce its own epistemically privileged position, it has to avail itself of linguistic and rhetorical means. If, on the other hand, it rejects rhetoric as a mere technique that is at odds with the pursuit of truth and argues instead for a pre- or non-linguistic access to truth, it excludes itself from the realm of reasons because reasons and justifications must be put into language in order to count as such. In this sense, philosophy is ‘the continuous attempt to escape from rhetoric, without ever being able to be completely victorious in this effort’, as Ijsseling (1981: 188) argues, following Nietzsche, Derrida, and others. Or as Quintilian puts it much earlier: whenever philosophy tries to defend and assert itself, it must resort to ‘the weapons of rhetoric and not of philosophy’ (Quintilianus, 1996: XII 2, 5), thus drawing precisely on what it deems extraneous or even opposed to itself.

Over the course of its history, philosophy has devised a number of strategies to avoid or resolve this dilemma. One of the most prominent ones is to reduce language to a neutral instrument for expressing thoughts that does not affect the truth of things or the knowledge we may gain about them. Where this neutralization of language cannot be accomplished, it is regarded as a mere embellishment that could be done away with without compromising the validity or significance of the thought in question. If, on the other hand, philosophy acknowledges the irreducibility of language – for example, when Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argues against John Locke that even his critique of rhetoric has to make use of rhetorical devices and thus fights ‘eloquence with its own weapons’ (Leibniz, 1996: III, x, §34) – it attempts to cope with this dilemma by distinguishing between two forms of rhetoric: on the one hand, a deceptive, mendacious rhetoric of persuasion, manipulation, and seduction and, on the other hand, a rational, truthful rhetoric of argumentation, dialogue, and the pedagogical cultivation of the soul based on philosophy. ¹³

At least since the philosophy of the Enlightenment, linguistic precision and immediate evidence have been regarded as the central paradigm for reliable knowledge and as the criterion for rejecting rhetoric. An utterance must be clear and specific, and it must make do without any unnecessary embellishment. Even those who acknowledge that rhetorical tropes and figures cannot be avoided altogether argue that they should have no say in matters of truth and knowledge, or else should be reduced to a bare minimum (see Locke, 1979: III, x, §34). Philosophy thus presents itself as a critique of language, capable of resolving all the problems and conflicts to do with the ambiguity and obscurity of concepts. While empiricist and pragmatic positions, ranging from Thomas Hobbes and Locke to the late Ludwig Wittgenstein, argue in favour of a philosophical critique of ordinary language, rationalist philosophies consider the reformability of natural languages limited, demanding instead the establishment of an ideal, universal language that is unmarred by the imperfections and ambiguities of natural languages – a request that can be traced from René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to the Logical Empiricism of the Vienna Circle.

This is not to deny that philosophy and rhetoric have, despite their antagonistic relationship, repeatedly entered into dialogue over the course of their shared history and addressed similar questions from different angles, thus complementing each other. ¹⁴ But it is only with the increased reflection on the linguistic character of the relationship to ourselves, to others, and to the world – along with the insight into the rhetorical constitution of language – that we can speak of a ‘return’ or ‘rediscovery’ of rhetoric. On a theoretical level, this return of rhetoric is sparked by the linguistic turn of the 20th century, in the course of which all important philosophical strands – analytic philosophy, pragmatism, structuralism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology – acknowledge the irreducibility of language when it comes to analysing epistemological and ontological questions. ¹⁵ On a societal and political level, the renewed interest in rhetoric is fuelled by the insight into the need to analyse the mechanisms of a society shaped by mass media, such as radio, print, television, and, most recently, social media, and their respective strategies, reaching from traditional forms of public relations, marketing, and propaganda to newly emerging forms, such as shit storms, filter bubbles, and echo chambers (see Cosentino, 2020; Hendricks and Vestergaard, 2019).

Against this background, Bender and Wellbery (1990) speak of a ‘modernist return of rhetoric’, where rhetoric is no longer understood as a rule-based technique or an artistic doctrine but as a common rhetoricity that cannot be mastered by any explanatory meta-discourse: ‘Rhetoric is no longer the title of a doctrine and a practice, nor a form of cultural memory; it becomes instead something like the condition of our existence’ (Bender and Wellbery, 1990: 25). From this it also follows that there is no ‘outside’ of language and speech – neither in terms of a language-free standpoint we could adopt nor in terms of a full and exhaustive description of language. For all explanations that concern language always already make use of language (see Wittgenstein, 1999: §120).

The paradigmatic predecessors of these transformations, which bring to the fore the rhetorical constitution of human existence, ¹⁶ are Friedrich Nietzsche’s revaluation of the relationship between language and rhetoric and Charles S. Peirce’s program of a generalized rhetoric that aims at further developing classical rhetoric in the context of various scientific disciplines (see Peirce, 1978: 153–5). While the modern critique of rhetoric is essentially based on the separation of language from rhetoric – that is, on the theoretical possibility of a ‘rhetorical zero-point’ in language – Nietzsche’s (1989a) dictum ‘language is rhetoric’ (p. 23) unmistakably underscores language’s rhetorical constitution: ‘There is obviously no unrhetorical “naturalness” of language to which one could appeal; language itself is the result of purely rhetorical arts’ (Nietzsche, 1989a: 21). In this way, Nietzsche (1989a) radicalizes and generalizes the insight into the original rhetoricity of language already present in Giambattista Vico, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and early Romanticism: ‘What is usually called language is actually all figuration’ (p. 25). This discovery is accompanied by a transformation of the relationship between rhetoric and language. Rhetoric is no longer deemed a technical skill applied to a language that exists independently of it; instead, it comes to be seen as something that is already inherent in language and speech. As a consequence, what is commonly called rhetoric – in the sense of a system of learnable rules and practices that has been developed and systematized since antiquity – is primarily a making-explicit of those conflicts and forces that are always already at play in language and speech (see Nietzsche, 1989a: 21). Understood as a theory and practice that reveals and reflects on the fundamental processes of language, cognition, and affect, rhetoric is no longer an external method or technique applied to language but rather becomes a radicalized form of critique of language and cognition that operates from within.

Such an understanding of rhetoric as critique is radical – not because it undermines the foundations of our knowledge but because it leads to a heightened form of reflexivity. Precisely because we cannot reason and argue outside linguistic-grammatical structures and schemata, they can become the object of permanent reflection. Precisely because it is not possible to adopt a neutral standpoint outside language, the situatedness of our own speaking comes into view. Precisely because speaking implies a subject that is both the origin and effect of social institutions and practices, issues of power and authority are paramount (see Posselt and Flatscher, 2018: 100).

Rhetorizing Philosophy

From the perspective of rhetoric, any philosophy that confines itself primarily to the process of giving and asking for reasons remains pre- or uncritical insofar as it is unable to reflect on either the social and historical contexts in which it is embedded or the pragmatic, ethical, and political implications of its own speaking. To become critical or rhetorical, philosophy must consistently reflect on the contingent conditions of possibility of its own speaking (including its own historically transmitted, usually Eurocentric vocabulary), without situating these conditions outside the critical practice itself. Thus, a critical or rhetorical notion of philosophy radicalizes Nietzsche’s methodological insight gained from genealogy – namely, that any conceptual categorization of the world is always already part of a complex history of interpretations and appropriations. Moreover, and in the sense of early Critical Theory (see Horkheimer, 1982; Marcuse, 1989), it alerts us to the fact that the world in which we live and which we encounter as a ‘natural’ reality is always also materially and discursively fabricated through strategies, procedures, and mechanisms that in turn can be described in rhetorical terms. Thus, critique is never just a theoretical standpoint but a practice, exercise, or attitude that involves the critic herself.

If our thesis – that philosophy is neither the only nor the privileged locus of critique and that rhetoric (precisely because of its conflictual relationship with philosophy) is a decisive resource for strengthening critique – is correct, we must ponder the possibility of a rhetorical form of philosophizing. This means neither understanding philosophy as rhetoric by analysing the rhetorical procedures and means philosophy must use if it wants to justify and assert its claim to truth nor understanding rhetoric as philosophy by exploring the philosophical foundations and implications of rhetoric. ¹⁷ In other words, it is not about explaining philosophy through rhetoric or vice versa. By contrast, a rhetorically informed philosophizing, as we see it, would have to make the complex tension between philosophy and rhetoric its permanent and productive reference point, without reducing one to the other.

To further clarify the possibilities of such a rhetorical philosophizing, it is helpful to recall once again the antagonistic nature of the relationship between both disciplines. As Foucault (2010) notes, the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric is ‘a relationship of strict contradiction, of constant polemic, of exclusion’, by which philosophical discourse, ‘no matter whether in written or oral form’, ‘demonstrates, asserts, and constitutes its permanent connection to the truth’ (p. 352). Here, we once again come up against the dilemma already mentioned – namely, that philosophy’s very gesture of constituting itself through the exclusion of rhetoric inevitably relies on, and thus remains bound up with, the latter. In this sense, the logocentric philosophy of the West is haunted not just by a ‘forgetfulness of language’ (Gadamer, 2004: 418) but by a forgetfulness of the fact that language is first of all speech, a practice that has its own efficacy, transforming the speaking subject and the situation to which the latter’s speech responds (see Hetzel, 2011b). If, however, it is precisely rhetoric that reflects and accounts for the efficacy and force inherent in all speech, then a rhetorical perspective on philosophy makes possible the critical investigation of those processes of exclusion and delimitation through which philosophy seeks to constitute itself as true and rational discourse, as Derrida (1981a, 1982) shows with the examples of writing and metaphor. ¹⁸ In this sense, rhetoric is not simply the ‘other’ or the ‘outside’ of philosophy; it is what allows us to address and critically reflect on the demarcations drawn between the two disciplines.

To conceptualize rhetoric as a form of critique is to open up a rhetorical perspective within philosophy and to enable philosophy to develop a critical relationship to itself. Such a critical self-understanding goes beyond traditional conceptions of critique in that it no longer clings to the attempt to define general conditions of possibility of critique that allow one to distinguish categorically between the critic, the standards of critique, and the object of critique. Consequently, a rhetorical form of philosophizing is critical in that it conceives of philosophy as an open and agonistic practice that never fully catches up with itself (in the sense of some self-explanatory unity). In terms of a redefinition of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, it is a matter neither of actualizing an understanding of rhetoric as a theory of tropes and figures or the art of manipulation nor of generalizing rhetoric in the sense of a ‘universal form of human communication’ (Gadamer, 1986: 17). Rather, if we are to ‘“rhetorize” philosophy’, we must take our cue from what Foucault (2000) says in the discussion following his lectures on ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’:

The problem is to reintroduce rhetoric, the rhetorician, the fight of discourse into the field of analysis; not to carry out, like the linguists, a systematic analysis of the rhetorical procedures, but to study the discourse, even the discourse of truth, as rhetorical procedures, as manners of winning, to produce events, decisions, battles, victories. (Foucault, 1994: 634; our trans.) ¹⁹

Such a ‘rhetorization’ of philosophy falls short, however, if it is merely designed to reinforce the agonistic and polemical character of philosophical discourse, as Foucault, still under the strong influence of Nietzsche, seems to suggests in his 1973 lectures. The rhetorization of philosophy should not be understood as an intensification of the long-time conflict between rhetoric and philosophy, nor as the replacement or abolition of philosophy by rhetoric. Rather, to rhetorize philosophy means to make the constitutive tension between philosophy and rhetoric the permanent reference point of critical reflection. Following Benjamin’s (1991) and Menke’s (2018) notion of an ‘Entsetzung des Rechts’, as well as Derrida’s (1992) influential reading of Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’, we suggest that one think of the rhetorization of philosophy in terms of a de-positing of philosophy. ²⁰ The rhetorization of philosophy is not the suspension of philosophy or the sublation of the difference between philosophy and rhetoric but a becoming self-reflective of this difference. Just as the Entsetzung of law, according to Menke (2018), ‘consists in reenacting within law the contradistinction between law and the non-legal with which law engenders itself’ (p. 40), so the becoming self-reflective of philosophy reiterates and performs within philosophy the contradistinction between philosophy and the seemingly non-philosophical that is constitutive of philosophy. A rhetorical philosophizing internalizes and reflects on what philosophy forgets (and perhaps must forget) in order to function smoothly as a professional academic discipline – namely, that it constantly brings about the non-philosophical from which it so desperately seeks to distinguish itself (see Menke, 2018: 40).

Consequently, to rhetorize philosophy is to reintroduce into philosophy that which the latter must exclude as its ‘other’ if it is to assert itself as the primary form of argumentation and the preeminent means of establishing the truth. Crucially, a rhetorical philosophizing does not suspend philosophy’s claim to truth and validity, as, for example, Ijsseling (1981) seems to suggest when he writes that in ‘the rhetorical style of reading the question about truth is disregarded’ (p. 188); ²¹ nor does it claim to be able to realize a philosophical discourse that is entirely free of power and coercion. What we are aiming at with the concept of a rhetorical philosophizing is, rather, the productive unfolding of the contradiction that philosophy must necessarily distinguish itself from and immunize itself against the seemingly non-philosophical that it constantly produces in the form of rhetoric or literature. From the perspective of a philosophy that takes into account its own rhetoricity, there is no text or discourse that is not rhetorical; and neither is there a rhetorical or discursive practice that does not imply universal claims to truth and validity. Therefore, to consider philosophy and rhetoric in their mutually conditional relationship and to understand them as critical-reflective practice involves two tasks: the first is to carry out with due precision the (theoretical) procedures of systematic analysis, objective reasoning, and impartial evaluation; the second – taking into account the forces arising from the textuality, materiality, and discursivity of philosophy – is to undergo the (practical) procedures of exercise, test, and examination that modify and qualify the philosophizing subject.

The Philosophizing Subject

The focus thus shifts to the function and role of the philosophizing subject, which is dependent on linguistic-rhetorical means and procedures in order to articulate the truth in its own name. However, while it has been widely acknowledged, at least since the linguistic turn, that language plays a crucial role in the constitution and construction of our social world, the same cannot be said of the language-using subject. More often than not, it is conceptualized as a neutral author-subject that is neither affected nor transformed by the textual and discursive practices it performs (such as reading, interpreting, commenting, publishing, disseminating, archiving, etc.). ²² In the context of a rhetorical philosophizing, however, the subject can no longer be described as a neutral language user. Rather, we are dealing with a bodily subject that is constituted and transformed by the discursive practices in which it is involved – practices that equally encompass linguistic and non-linguistic, affective and cognitive, material and institutional aspects.

This change of perspective can be illustrated by turning to the dispute between Foucault and Derrida over the status and function of madness and dreaming in the course of Descartes’s argument of doubt. In his reply to Derrida’s (1978a) critique of History of Madness, Foucault (2006a) proposes a ‘double reading’ of Descartes’s Meditations as ‘demonstration’ and ‘exercise’ that both affects and modifies the meditating subject. ²³ According to Foucault (2006b), as demonstration, the Meditations are ‘a group of propositions [. . .] which each reader must run through if he wishes to experience their truth’; as exercise (in the sense of the Greek askesis), the Meditations constitute ‘a group of modifications [. . .] which each reader must carry out, and by which each reader must be affected, if he wishes in his turn to be the subject enunciating this truth on his own account’ (p. 563). Demonstration is necessary to learn the truth; exercise is needed to be able to tell the truth in one’s own name. In other words, demonstration as the dominant paradigm for learning the truth has to be supplemented and modified by exercise, while exercise or askesis as the prevalent paradigm for telling the truth in one’s own name has to be supplemented by demonstration. As a consequence, it is, ultimately, no longer possible to distinguish strictly between a purely demonstrative discourse and an ascetic discourse; rather, both demonstrative and ascetic elements are operative in every text – though to various degrees of explicitness.

Importantly, this double reading applies not only to ‘practical texts’ (such as the Meditations) but also to texts that present themselves as purely ‘theoretical’ or ‘demonstrative’ (see Posselt, 2019: 36). Needless to say, philosophical texts are more than the concepts they use, their propositional content, their argumentative structure, or logical syntax; and they are more than their style and the figures they employ. Against the claim that arguments and concepts can be removed from their discursive and historical context and advanced independently of them, a rhetorical philosophizing insists on the necessity of a double reading of philosophical texts as demonstration and exercise that changes, transforms, and qualifies the subject – without being able to reduce one of these aspects to the other. ²⁴ In this sense, texts such as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philos ophicus or Rudolf Carnap’s ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language’ are neither more nor less demonstrative or practical than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions or Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals – at best, they are so in a different way. The notion of philosophical argumentation – and of linguistic communication in general – as the practice of giving and asking for reasons (see Brandom, 1994) falls short in that reasons can never be viewed in isolation but only within the concrete discursive context in which they appear and make their claim to truth and validity. This is not to say that truth and argumentative validity could simply be ignored or suspended – for instance, by proclaiming a supposedly ‘post-truth age’. Rather, it is a matter of arriving at a ‘radicalized’ notion of truth and argumentation by reflecting critically on what philosophy must exclude, presuppose, or dehistoricize in order to assert its claim to truth, validity, and rationality.

In terms of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, this means the following. Just as rhetoric shows a tendency to deteriorate into a mere technique if it concentrates exclusively on the strategic efficacy of speech, so philosophy faces a similar danger if it reduces critique to a reproducible technique of logical-conceptual analysis or to a strategy of small-scale conceptual problem-solving, as, for example, in various strands of analytic philosophy. A rhetorical philosophizing, on the other hand, brings into play a concept of argumentation and argumentative practice that draws its consistency and strength precisely from its critical reflection on the tension between rhetoric and philosophy. Philosophy thus conceived not only interrogates its own presuppositions and blind spots but also carries out a critical genealogy of its concepts, methods, and the subject and speaker positions that go along with them. It addresses its situatedness and reflects on the position from which it speaks, the mediality and materiality of its speaking, the authoritative and subjectifying effects of its discourses and academic rituals, and the norms and power relations in which it is embedded and which enable and constrain it. In other words, a rhetorical philosophizing meets its task of criticizing unjust or reified forms of life and its corresponding epistemic and normative orders by permanently reflecting on and questioning its own standards of argumentation, forms of articulation, discursive strategies, and corresponding subject positions (including the philosopher as a white, male, all-knowing, and universally competent subject).

Conclusion: Prospects for a Rhetorical Philosophizing

Two concerns have guided our reflections so far: first, the newly awakened interest in models of critique that conceive of critique not only as an analytic-theoretical undertaking but as a (social and discursive) practice that takes into account its own (social, material, economic, etc.) conditions and restrictions; second, the proposal to think of rhetoric as a form of critique that realizes its critical potential precisely in its constitutive entanglement with philosophy. Whenever in the course of their shared history philosophy and rhetoric enter into a dispute, a conversation, or a dialogue, what is at stake is the conflicting validity claims of these disciplines, as well as the nature of their relationship. Just as rhetoric cannot be reduced to a mere technique to manipulate the audience, so philosophy does not exhaust itself in solitary, language-free contemplation. If philosophy is to be able to permanently question and sharpen its own concepts and methods, it has to rely on rhetoric for this mode of self-reflection. Thus, rhetoric confronts philosophy’s claim to produce perennially valid knowledge with the contingency of philosophical languages, speaker positions, and means of representation. In doing so, it must formulate its tactical interventions and theoretical-methodical insights in terms of generalizable concepts and validity claims, all the while problematizing the ultimate failure of such claims.

While the rationalistic mainstream of philosophy, especially in its analytic form, still clings – implicitly or explicitly – to the ideal of a transparent language and a neutral speaker-position, a rhetorical philosophizing reflects not just on the historical development of philosophical concepts and systems but also on the performativity of its own speaking – including the norms and conventions of rationality, argumentation, and reason implicit in this speaking. The rhetorical perspective alerts us to the fact that philosophy remains an arena of unsolvable conflicts about meaning that cannot be controlled from a neutral meta-position.

The relationship between a rhetorical philosophizing and rhetoric is critical in that a rhetorical philosophizing does not abjure the philosophical claim to truth and normative validity but takes in rhetoric’s lesson that such a claim can never be fully met. Only by adopting such a critical attitude will philosophy be able to remain true to itself in its infidelity – that is, in its liaison with rhetoric. That is to say, philosophy cannot be thought independently of the contexts in which it is embedded and from which, at the same time, it constantly seeks to differentiate itself. Among these contexts are philosophy’s relationships to (1) the historical world, (2) the philosophizing subject, (3) its addressees, (4) the non-philosophical, and (5) truth-telling.

(1) From a rhetorical perspective, the factual world to which philosophy seeks to refer cannot be thought independently of the linguistic, discursive, and social practices through which it is constituted. In the sense of early Critical Theory, rhetoric reminds us that the factual world is also a historical, fabricated, and, therefore, contingent world. (2) The rhetorical viewpoint also makes us sensitive to the situatedness of the philosophizing subject, which, with its particular embodied standpoint, idiosyncrasies, and passions, can be understood as both the origin and performative effect of its utterances. However universal a validity claim may purport to be, it is uttered in a concrete historical situation by a bodily subject that can never completely control its language and the effects it produces (see Butler, 1997: 15). Accordingly, rhetoric as critique would be, above all, the critique of the reduction of the philosophizing subject to a mere passage point on the way to trans-subjective and transhistorical truth and validity claims. (3) In addition, the internalization of the rhetorical perspective makes it possible for philosophy to clarify its reference to its addressees, to become aware, so to speak, of the stage on which it stands, and to include its audience in its reflections. In this sense, philosophy always goes hand in hand with public outreach and intervention. (4) As the ‘other’ of philosophy, rhetoric points to the discursive procedures and mechanisms through which philosophy must distinguish itself from the seemingly non-philosophical (literature, politics, religion, science, everyday life, etc.). The critical self-reflection of philosophy that the internalization of a rhetorical perspective makes possible does not aim at doing away with this difference but tries to show that philosophy can never completely immunize itself against non-philosophical discourses and modes of truth-telling. (5) From this it follows that philosophy is but one among many forms of truth-telling and speaking the truth – and perhaps not even the primary, paradigmatic, or foundational form; consider, for example, such speech acts as giving testimony, making a promise, or taking an oath. Consequently, it is also necessary to focus on those discursive practices that constitute and legitimize the philosophizing subject as one that is qualified and legitimized to tell the truth. ²⁵

This list does not claim to be systematic or exhaustive. Rather, we suggest using these aspects as starting points for further elaboration of rhetoric’s relation to philosophy and its critical potential. Such a reconsideration and redefinition of the paradoxical yet constitutive relationship between rhetoric and philosophy is not tantamount to a rejection of ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’, ²⁶ and neither does it entail the refusal of all claims to validity and truth. A philosophy, however, that – in its attempt to align itself with the social and natural sciences – disregards its genuine linguistic-rhetorical constitution and reduces philosophical practice to technical procedures of rational justification, logical analysis, or small-scale strategies of problem-solving, inevitably runs the risk of abandoning its critical attitude and claim. Against such a narrow understanding of philosophy, we propose a rhetorical philosophizing that permanently reflects on the conditions of its speaking, the position from which it speaks, and the language and concepts it uses. This in no way implies that philosophy can be identified with, let alone reduced to, the historical, discursive, material, and social conditions of its production. Rather, it means that philosophical theories, concepts, and arguments can be assessed neither independently of the conditions under which they have been developed nor outside the practices and procedures that turn us into epistemic, ethical, and political subjects in the first place. Therefore, a rhetorical philosophizing is more than a rhetorical reading practice that confronts the validity claims of philosophical texts with the linguistic, stylistic, and representational devices used. A rhetorical philosophizing does not renounce the pursuit of truth and the possibility of justification but perceives validity claims in the context of the materiality of linguistic performatives, discursive confrontations, and concrete speaker positions, thus endowing them with philosophical and scientific rigour.