JCR 28 (November 2005) 224-248
"Telling the Truth:" Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Rhetorical Discourse Ethic Ned O'Gorman This essay claims that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's discourse ethic, developed most fully in his prison essay "What is Meant by 'Telling the Truth'?," reveals rhetoric as a rich ethical approach to communication. Although Bonhoeffer never directly engaged texts belonging to a traditional rhetorical corpus, his theological ontology produced a view of communication that is political, plural, ordered, and democratic, mirroring the broad view of communication found in ancient thinkers like Isocrates, Aristotle, and Cicero. I argue that unlike most contemporary accounts of discourse ethics, Bonhoeffer's concept of ethical communication is dependent upon a model or method only in a secondary sense. It is primarily derived from a vision ofthe good. Bonhoeffer's dependence upon this vision not only distinguishes his work from most contemporary theory in discourse ethics, but challenges such theories to probe the visions ofthe good that underlie the various methods and models of ethical communication they offer Key words: speech ethics, rhetoric, being, time, Bonhoeffer, Heidegger "Indeed here already it hecomes apparent how very difficult it is to say what actually constitutes a lie."— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "What is Meant By 'Telling the Truth'?"
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ietrich Bonhoeffer was a scandalous thinker. He was a devout Christian who ransacked in Nietzsche-like fashion traditional notions of truth and lies. He was a critical scholar of the Bihle who helieved it was the unique Word of God. He was a cosmopolitan and sophisticated twentiethcentury intellectual who thought in a radically Christocentric way. He was intensely politically engaged, but spoke often of