What is "Telling the Truth" Really?

The following is an opinion and informative essay on the article "'Telling the Truth:' Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Rhetorical Discourse Ethic" by Ned O'Gorman.

Foundational Statement

Bonhoeffer's theological ontology produced a view of communication that is political, plural, ordered, and democratic, mirroring the broad view of communication found in ancient thinkers.

Summary of Argument

The journal begins with a brief description of who Dietrich Bonhoeffer is and why he is relevant to rhetoric. Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived from 1906 to 1945, when he was hanged in a Nazi concentration camp. During his life, he was a theologian, spiritual writer, author of fiction and poetry, and central figure in the protestant church struggle against Nazism. The author then begins putting Bonhoeffer's article "Telling the Truth" into the appropriate context in rhetorical theory. The author devotes a considerable amount of time to this since Bonhoeffer was not considered a rhetor and did not discuss rhetor per say.

This article focuses on the two parts of Bonhoeffer's believe system that led to his beliefs on Truth: his ontology that is social and his vision of human sociality through his intense engagement with the political cries of the time. O'Gorman believes that Bonhoeffer's basic conception of telling the truth rotates on two axes: sociality and time. So O'Gorman divides his paper into two sections: Situating Being and Time in Bonhoeffer and A Rhetoric Vision: Bonhoeffer on "Telling the Truth."

The first section opens with definitions, according to Bonhoeffer, of being. Once the author establishes that Bonhoeffer believes being is relative to other (God) and self, he then concisely gives a clear picture of the point of this section. "Others are always prior to self; the self is dependent upon others for selfhood. Thus the ground of being is simultaneously transcendent and immanent. It is transcendent because the ground of being resides outside the self in the Other and others. It is immanent because the Other and others discovered in the particular stories of Christ and in one's concrete neighbors, respectively" (233). Bonhoeffer describes his few of being as not I-You, or self-other, but self-others. He cannot view self, except through the Other and others. Clearly is views are Christocentric.

The second section being by setting the stage for Bonhoeffer's article "Telling the Truth," which was written while he was in a Nazi concentration camp. Bonhoeffer presents that telling the truth is relational and associative. The author beings by labeling his view of Bonhoeffer's ontology as communitarian, but rejects that for rhetorical. He says, "Rhetoric offers a model of communication that is situated in the context of community - in contradistinction to a model based on the dialogic I-You interaction or the impersonal mass mediated dissemination model.

In the rhetorical model speaker, audience, subject matter, context, culture, language, and time dynamically interact to produce the event of communication. Furthermore, the event of communication in turn reproduces and reconstitutes the community" (239). Bonhoeffer says there are three points that address truth telling:a) By perceiving who causes me to speak and what entails me to speakb) By perceiving the place at which I standc) By relating to this context the object about which I am making some assertion (242).So Truth becomes relative to these controls.

The concluding thought for this essay is Bonhoeffer's idea of communication challenging contemporary theorists, teachers, and practitioners of rhetoric and discourse ethics to consider again the importance of the question of good, a concept most often seen as irrelevant, impossible, or tyrannical.

Terms
Some terms that may be new that are used in this essay follow. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of being. Interlocutors are some people who take part in a conversation, often formally. Christocentric is having as the theological focal point the teachings and practices of Jesus Christ. Sein is being. Da is there. Dasein is there-being.

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