Abstract

Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a New Possibility for Being Human provides an unprecedented study of the ideas and methodology originally developed by the thinker Werner Erhard, and presented in a course called The Forum, a course that has since evolved further and is offered today by Landmark Worldwide. The book is a comparative analysis that demonstrates how Erhard's rhetorical project and the philosophical project of Martin Heidegger each illuminate the other. The central claim of the authors is that the dialogue of The Forum--presented here in the form of a transcript of an actual course that took place in San Francisco in December of 1989--functions to generate a language which speaks Being, that is, The Forum is an instance of what is called ontological rhetoric: a technology of communicating the unspoken realm of language that allows its listeners to create a new possibility for being human in the world. The purpose of this book is to show that this is actually accomplished in The Forum, and to demonstrate--with Heidegger's thinking presented in a series of "Sidebars" and "Intervals" alongside The Forum transcript --how Erhard did it in 1989. Through placing Erhard's language use alongside Heidegger's, the authors not only have illuminated the work of both thinkers; they also have made this extraordinary form of rhetorical pedagogy available for interdisciplinary study.