Abstract
Plato’s Socrates has discovered what happens in rhetoric: The hearer is made a subject by the speaker, but she remains free to deliver her own judgements. Rhetoric and philosophy have the same origin. According to the understanding of the lógos by the Sophists, the lógos lost any ontological commitment it had prior to the thinking of Heraclitus. Platon gave philosophía the normative and heroic meaning of transcending the logós-space, while rhetoric uses the lógos-space for arbitrary ends. Aristotle provides a comprehensive descriptive phenomenology of rhetoric. Yet he appears to be convinced that in the Athenian democracy public speech is used to defeat one’s adversary without any decency. Plato and Aristotle both failed to perceive that the base of the Athenian democracy was not liberty, but political equality. Plato and Aristotle use a sophisticated rhetoric in order to obtain a leading power over political (Plato) and metaphysical discourses (Aristotle). Their rejection of the Athenian isonomía-demokratía created the need for oligarchy to build a perfect state, a kind of original sin to discredit authentic democracy.
