How to Understand the Fusion of Rhetoric and Hermeneutics

At first glance, rhetoric and hermeneutics are quite different things.¹ Rhetoric deals with argument and persuasion. Hermeneutics addresses examination and understanding. But on closer inspection the two fuse together in ways that make them inseparable.

Common Traits

Both rhetorical and hermeneutical reflection take the form of considering existing practice.² Already in the earliest surviving rhetorical theory from Plato and Aristotle, the theoretical discussion takes the form of reflection on rhetorical practice.³ Similarly, the Sophists and Socrates both show a concern for how the “art of understanding” practically expresses itself, even if this is not a full-fledged hermeneutical theory in its own right.⁴ In addition, “the theoretical tools of the art of interpretation (hermeneutics) have been to a large extent borrowed from rhetoric.”⁵

Common Aims

Characteristically, rhetoric refuses to admit as acceptable acceptance only what one can fully prove empirically.⁶ Instead, rhetoric “defends the probable.”⁷

And in fact, rhetoric is everywhere and even directs efforts to establish empirical proof. This direction shows itself in any number of ways, as when scientific inquiry finds itself attracted to a particular line of research because of the particular utility seen or hoped for there.⁸

And so too is the nature of interpretation. For “no less universal is the function of hermeneutics” because “everything … is included in the realm of ‘understandings’ and understandability in which we move.”⁹

In this way,

the rhetorical and hermeneutical aspects of human linguisticality completely interpenetrate each other. There would be no speaker and no art of speaking if understanding and consent were not in question, were not underlying elements; there would be no hermeneutical task if there were no understanding that has been disturbed and that those involved in a conversation must search for and find again together.¹⁰

Conclusion

Understanding comes about by dialog. That dialog that moves toward understanding can, of course, happen among multiple people. But it can also happen

• within oneself;
• between oneself and a text; or
• among oneself, a text, and the tradition that mediates between these two.

Yet wherever this movement toward understanding shows itself, the dialog also shows its fundamentally rhetorical character. The dialog expresses the search for “existing means of persuasion” (Aristotle, Rhet. 1355b)—whether of oneself or of someone else. And it is only in seeking and finding such means of persuasion that disturbances in understanding can be resolved.

1. Header image provided by Vanessa Ives. ↩︎
2. H.-G. Gadamer, “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (affiliate disclosure; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 21. ↩︎
3. Gadamer, “Hermeneutical Reflection,” 21–22. ↩︎
4. Gadamer, “Hermeneutical Reflection,” 22. ↩︎
5. Gadamer, “Hermeneutical Reflection,” 24. ↩︎
6. Gadamer, “Hermeneutical Reflection,” 24. ↩︎
7. Gadamer, “Hermeneutical Reflection,” 24. ↩︎
8. Gadamer, “Hermeneutical Reflection,” 24; Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (affiliate disclosure; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). ↩︎
9. Gadamer, “Hermeneutical Reflection,” 24–25. ↩︎
10. Gadamer, “Hermeneutical Reflection,” 25. ↩︎