Rhetoric

Rhetoric (ancient Greek ῥητορική (τέχνη) rhētorikḗ (téchnē), German 'Redekunst') is the art of speech. It was already known as a discipline in ancient Greece and played a prominent role especially in the opinion-forming processes of Athens and other poleis. The task of speech is to convince the listener of a statement or to persuade him to take a certain action. As the art of speech, rhetoric provides the means for this; as the theory of persuasion, it analyzes them. In this respect, rhetoric always contains a double task and should be both art and science. On the one hand, it is about the art of convincing people of a view or persuading them to act, and on the other hand, it is about the science of effective speech.

Even before the first explicit theory of persuasion was elaborated by Aristotle, the practice of teachers of rhetoric existed and manuals of it existed. The ability to handle the art of oratory knowledgeably and successfully was considered so important that the entire educational system (the so-called paideia) of antiquity was geared towards training a future orator. In this respect, rhetoric was not a subject among others, but the guiding subject to whose needs all others had to be oriented. The system of rhetoric was developed and taught in schools on the model of the court speech.

The rhetoricians belonged in part to the Sophist movement and legitimized persuasion with the view that truth did not exist or, if it did, was unknowable. In the Middle Ages, rhetoric, along with logic and grammar, was part of the trivium of the canon of the Seven Liberal Arts that had been created in antiquity.

The disdain for rhetoric finally came from the Enlightenment, which strove for unconditional truth, and even more from Romanticism, which was concerned with the authenticity of feelings. In addition to their other strategies of persuasion, which are capable of manipulating the judgement of the addressee, their work with ossified conventional topoi also led to this, since these also confirm existing prejudices by linking up with actual or even only supposed experiences of the addressee. Since then, rhetoric has no longer been regarded as the goal and proof of education, but as a medium of deceit and untruth. Its knowledge was now regarded above all as a necessary tool for analyzing and criticizing its strategies. The 20th century dictators' misuse of rhetoric for propagandistic purposes did the rest. Both the recourse to rhetorical practice and the use of anti-Semitic topoi or stereotypes (e.g., "eternal Jew," "Wandering Jew," "corrosive Jewish spirit," "Jewish avarice," "Jewish world conspiracy," etc.) by Adolf Hitler and other National Socialist leaders such as the Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (Sports Palace Speech), as well as the great political significance that rhetoric acquired in the socialist dictatorships as so-called socialist rhetoric, which had to support the authority of the regime and its representatives with a special socio-political choice of words and interpretation of political conditions in the sense of the state ideology, contributed decisively to their further discrediting.

Rhetoric was now regarded, especially in the Federal Republic of Germany, by representatives of subjects such as political science, sociology and educational science, as a dangerous weapon of demagogy, which could only be rendered harmless by imparting knowledge of its psychological foundations, the understanding of its mechanisms of action and the appropriate evaluation of its consequences. The imparting of this knowledge and competence had to take place within the framework of an educational concept, which had to focus on education for democracy. In this context, it is of decisive importance to see through rhetorical strategies and techniques as well as to critically confront traditional topoi, prejudices, narratives and stereotypes that continue to be used unquestioned.

Scholarly works on rhetoric - especially since the middle of the 20th century - are predominantly concerned with conversation as well as with questions of speech and conversation pedagogy; their research comes, among others, from speech science, linguistics (especially the use of language in advertising speech), psychology, pedagogy and sociology.

Concept of rhetoric

Rhetoric has always been both a teaching and a practice of art, both a social practice and its theory. Until the 17th century, a differentiation was made between rhetorica or rhetorica docens as a term for theory ("oratory") on the one hand, and oratoria, eloquentia or rhetorica utens for practice ("eloquence") on the other. In the 20th century, the terminological distinction between General Rhetoric (for theory) and Applied Rhetoric (for practice) became established in the German-speaking academic field. Rhetoric trainers and guidebook authors, however, largely ignore this.

This "double character of rhetoric", which generally contributes to the confusion of terms, was summarized by Richard Albrecht by explaining that rhetoric is understood as "on the one hand and in general the intention and proposition of speech action as a linguistic phenomenon, on the other hand and specifically the science of public speech (art)".

Applied rhetoric is understood as the discipline of practical speech. In doing so, someone consciously or unconsciously makes use of the rules and techniques formulated in the historically developed system of general rhetoric. As a concrete guide to verbal as well as written communication, it includes the training and practice of effect-oriented speaking, behavior and writing. Today, it incorporates the findings of speech science and speech training as well as the findings of psychology and linguistics (language teaching). Applied rhetoric refers above all to the practice of speaking in business, politics and in court; however, therapeutic conversation or private controversy are also influenced by it. Since it refers not only to the monologue, but also to the dialogue, it also deals with dialectics (in the Socratic sense) and is sometimes referred to as conversational rhetoric (see speaker education).

Non-European Rhetoric

"If the word, concept, and thing 'rhetoric' are a European invention, then strictly speaking one can only speak of rhetoric in the sense of a specific art doctrine in the European culture (or cultures) and those influenced by it (or them). But because there is a more or less reflected oratorical practice in all societies and cultures, it is legitimate to explore it and to search for rhetorical analogous theorems and rules outside the European rhetorical tradition in a methodically careful extension and transfer of one's own conceptions."