Abstract

A. Introduction In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates suggests that rhetoric is not only implicated in the continual pursuit of truth, but it is also the study of how truth is made known in (276a). Socrates warns Phaedrus not to suppose that because words are that they have therefore become reliable and permanent (275d). For Socrates, when living speech is down it becomes transformed or objectified into a representation of the real. In Socrates' view, living speech is a state of interiority, an articulation of self-understanding; when speech is alienated from its dialogic context it becomes discourse. Although Socrates argues that one must be exceedingly to believe that written words can do anything more than remind oneself what one already knows, this simple-minded approach to writing provides a means of exploring how discourse produces what Martin Heidegger calls a commemorative meaning. For Heidegger, discourse preserves the remembrance of an event; dead discourse reminds us of the event of living speech because it bears the design and inscribes historical occurrences. character of living speech does not change in its articulation; its character does not begin as an object, does not end as an object, and does not consist of any essential qualities of an object. In Part I of this paper I explore the impact of Heidegger's idea of discourse upon the traditional concept of style to argue, in accordance with Heidegger, that style is a reminder of living speech; style is a disclosure of incarnate thought, the presencing of a human's being that is structured by a two-fold process: first, a standing forth or unconcealing of its presence; and second, a holding back or concealing of its presence. Traditionally, discussions of style have been limited to representational theories of discourse that see style either solely in terms of outward appearance, beautiful form or in terms of some combination that sets form into a bipolar opposition with content. However, Heidegger's argument is that the traditional view of art as an aesthetic object is not adequate. In order to retrieve style from the confines of bipolarity, Heidegger develops a model of art that is based upon his disclosive theory of truth; his theory of art effectively removes beauty as a criterion for understanding art. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger develops a non-aesthetic approach to a work of art by arguing that truth, rather than beauty, is the origin of a work of art; his essay also suggests the outlines of a non-representational