Speaking Hermeneutically: Understanding in the Conduct of a Life

By John Arthos

John Arthos discovers and promotes an organic reciprocity between rhetoric as a humanist practice and hermeneutics as a theoretical comportment. Although these two traditions have a long and rewarding collaboration, it is only now that we begin to realize their potential for radically remaking the way we think and speak as social animals. Arthos marries the performative competencies of rhetorical practice with the circularity of hermeneutic understanding in a way that redefines the syntax of a humanist education in the twenty-first century. As a counter to the linear, technical rationalism that permeates common culture and educational praxis, Speaking Hermeneutically shows how a hermeneutically inflected rhetoric can lead to refashioning habits of thought and speech, the constitution of personal identity, the conventions of social engagement, and the deliberative practices that form the basis of public institutions. Arthos adapts the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur to a series of classic rhetorical texts and landmark political moments, modeling the revitalized interchange of traditions in a way that will be accessible to scholars and students in both fields of inquiry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611172065

John Arthos

John Arthos is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and the John and Christine Warner Chair at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. He is also the author of The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics.

Book preview

Speaking Hermeneutically

Studies in Rhetoric/Communication

Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor

Speaking Hermeneutically

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Understanding in the Conduct of a Life

John Arthos

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The University of South Carolina Press

© 2011 University of South Carolina

Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011

Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012

www.sc.edu/uscpress

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Arthos, John, 1956–

Speaking hermeneutically : understanding in the conduct of a life / John Arthos.

p. cm. — (Studies in rhetoric/communication)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-1-57003-968-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Rhetoric—History.

2. Rhetoric—Theory, etc. 3. Hermeneutics. I. Title.

PN183.A78 2011

808'.001—dc22

2010038913

Chapter 3, Transitive Agency: Between Person and Text, is a redacted version of The Humanity of the Word: Transitive Agency in Humanism and Hermeneutics, International Philosophical Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2006): 477–91. Chapter 6, Instigating the Event of Understanding: John Jay Chapman in Public and Private, is a redacted version of Chapman’s Coatesville Address: A Hermeneutic Reading, Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 2 (2002): 193–208.

ISBN 978-1-61117-206-5 (ebook)

In memory of Michael Leff

Here something turns in on itself. Here something coils in on itself but does not close itself, for it uncoils itself at the same time. Here is a coil, a living coil, like a snake. Here something catches itself at its own end. Here is a commencement that is already completion. | Martin Heidegger, Principle of Reason

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Contents

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Series Editor’s Preface

Preface: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Involutions

Part 1   Dissolving Binaries

  1   We can not consecrate: Between Word and Flesh

  2   The Space of Deliberation and the Time of Decision: Discursive Reciprocities of Self and World

  3   Transitive Agency: Between Person and Text

Part 2   The Circle of Reflection

  4   The History and Structure of the Circle

  5   Thinking Out Loud: The Involutions of Newman’s Mind

  6   Instigating the Event of Understanding: John Jay Chapman in Public and Private

  7   In the Garden of the Tuileries: The Circularity of Narrative Understanding

  8   The Hermeneutic Text: An infinite web of motivations

Part 3   The Matrix of Broken Parts

  9   Three Distances

10   A House Divided: Contingent Judgment and Rhetorical Competence

11   John Brown’s Body: Pathologies of the Social Imaginary

Afterword: Theory, Practice, and Comportment

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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Series Editor’s Preface

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In Speaking Hermeneutically, John Arthos proposes to explore the relation of rhetoric and hermeneutics. In so doing, he emphasizes that the version of rhetoric that he examines here is that of the humanist tradition in the West. The version of hermeneutics he proposes, derived from Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, is a theoretically precise set of principles stressing finitude, prudence, process, and dialogue, keeping always in mind the circular finitude of discourse. Arthos rejects the view that rhetoric is confined to speaking, or production, and that hermeneutics is confined to listening, or reception. Instead, he claims, hermeneutics is a theoretical orientation to a rhetorical practice.

According to Arthos the human experience, the hermeneutic experience, is always circular, balanced between the particular and the general, both of which always inform each other in our existence. Our experience is self-conscious and self-reflexive, rendering us at once agent and witness, at large in time that stretches ahead and behind. In some sense conscious of or driven by our sense of fragmentation, we use language to patch together a sense of self and world.

Arthos works out the implications of what it is to understand the conduct of life hermeneutically in detailed theoretical reflections and in a series of case studies—Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg; Anthony Trollope’s Dr. Wortle’s School; John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua; John Jay Chapman at Coatesville, Pennsylvania; Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence; the Emancipation Proclamation; Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and House Divided speech; and John Brown’s raid on the national armory at Harpers Ferry. The mix is grounded, reflective, engaging, and illuminating.

THOMAS W. BENSON

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Preface | Rhetoric and Hermeneutics

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In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel’s triadic series … expressed merely the essential spirality of all things in their relation to time. | Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Years ago I was asked by a prominent rhetorical scholar what hermeneutics has to offer rhetoric that rhetoric does not already have. The question contains a legitimate disciplinary point. Rhetoric as a pedagogy in its venerable two-thousand-year history has done quite well enough as a rich heuristic for discursive invention and civic practice all on its own, thank you very much, and does not need the help of some fashionable continental import. Hermeneutics rode along with the French and German theory invasion of the last decades, bringing some weighty intellectual credentials, promising theoretical heft for rhetoric’s thin academic profile.¹ Nevertheless I was caught a bit off guard by the question, stammered something incoherent, and subsequently, in private, steadily improved my answer. Seriously, though, over time I have begun to realize that the suspicion embedded in the question is unwarranted. First of all hermeneutics as a traditional discipline grew out of rhetoric and continues to feed from it as an inexhaustible source of learning, as child to parent. Indeed after some decades of exposure, after more fashionable trends have begun to fade, it now begins to show some of the same remarkable resilience as rhetoric itself: Precisely at the time when it might seem that hermeneutics, with theory generally, should be fading slowly over the horizon … hermeneutics seems to have survived … in part because it is so protean and polymorphous that if repressed in one form it returns in another.² Second, the benefit works in both directions. Just as the work quietly underway in rhetorical studies seeds a fuller appreciation of the hermeneutic situation, so the radical achievements of a discursive ontology only promote the place of rhetoric in the ongoing broad reconfiguration of knowledge. We ought not to look at hermeneutics as a competitor but as an ally in challenging reigning antirhetorical paradigms that still hold mainstream culture in their grip.³

But the relation has suffered from a lack of clarity over the decades since the introduction of the idea of hermeneutics into American scholarship. If the concept has continued to have an allure for a variety of disciplines, people appear not quite to know what to do with it.⁴ Critical and cultural theorists have distanced themselves from it as a veiled traditionalism, social scientists continue to want to reduce it to a method,⁵ and more traditional rhetoricians hold the suspicion I began my account with.⁶ In rhetoric studies (its natural home), although it has continued to demonstrate a magnetic pull, it acts still mainly as a somewhat amorphous heuristic.⁷ Hans-Georg Gadamer, who developed the broad potential of hermeneutics out of some preliminary thought experiments of Martin Heidegger, came to acknowledge more and more the foundational role of a humanist rhetorical paideia for hermeneutics, but he never developed this connection in the way he had hoped.⁸ In proposing my own approach to this relationship, I am going to discard the usual orientation of rhetoric and hermeneutics as horizontally aligned disciplines (as speaking to listening, or writing to interpretation) and instead propose a vertical alignment of perspective and practice—hermeneutics as a theoretical orientation or depth dimension and rhetoric as the education in and performance of discursive identity.⁹ This reorientation will allow me to show that the two are intertwined in such a way that it would be impractical to separate them into discreet disciplinary functions.

Prior to articulating this relationship, I want to stipulate a limitation of definition that I hope will diffuse some distrust. Instead of Dilip Gaonkar’s framing of a universalizing hermeneutic rhetoric (the incredibly engulfing discipline), the hermeneutic connection to rhetoric I want to develop operates under a delimited set of cultural presuppositions, theoretical parameters, and disciplinary commitments.¹⁰ Its claims to universality are bounded by this set of interests and perspectives. The perspective I am describing places this comprehensiveness in a very specific conceptual nexus—the theory of the hermeneutic circle developed in the Protestant appropriation of exegetical training in the Latin West. Underlying this approach to education are a fundamental commitment to the idea of human community (oekumene), a theoretical grounding in the limits of human finitude, and a polemical rejection of the rationalist binaries of Enlightenment thought. The rhetoric to which this hermeneutics belongs is the humanist pedagogy that developed in the West as a cultivation of social competencies through the study of discourse.

Thus I do not claim to teach rhetoric from a hermeneutic perspective as a universal prescription.¹¹ It is a body of thought that seeks to locate and revive an undercurrent of Western tradition covered over by the dominant paradigms of technical rationality and methodological science. It espouses a quite specific set of theoretical and practical principles, and it aims to cultivate a sensibility attached to that frame of reference. Just the attachment of rhetoric to what is essentially a theory of cognition is a radical delimitation. Rhetoric has survived over time as a repertoire of tropes, as an armament of argument schemes, or as a prescriptive tradition of oral competence—fluid, adaptable resources for invention or speculation. Pinning it down to a nuanced and specific theory of understanding narrows its domain considerably, and does so without any ambition for exclusivity. This caution is not meant to attenuate the value I am claiming for hermeneutics but rather to limit its range to its proper modesty.

The hermeneutics I am concerned with here is also delimited by its provenance, which centers on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s humanist appropriation of Martin Heidegger’s ontology and which, as it continues to develop, has close ties with German and French phenomenology and later continental discourse theory. Its continental and American reception has been partly critical, and that critique is now part of its identity.¹² The contemporary elevation of the term hermeneutics derives from this distinctive stream of thought, which is to be recognized for its historical location and particular voice. The hermeneutics that it denotes, and the inflection of rhetoric it promotes, flow through this very specific cultural passageway, and its contribution must be understood within this history.

Having acknowledged these limitations, it is also important to correct the opposite assumption that hermeneutics is a specialized practice or a regional discipline, let alone a method or tool.¹³ Without drawing special attention to the fact, Gadamer will often speak of a hermeneutic experience, hermeneutic consciousness, hermeneutic understanding, or hermeneutic perspective. I would even go so far to say that there is something like a hermeneutic sensibility, an approach to human, social, and societal matters that is committed to a sense of irremediable finitude, an aptitude for prudential process, a commitment to dialogic openness, a refusal to separate the ethical, aesthetic, and epistemic, and most especially an intimate familiarity with the circular finitude of temporal discourse. Elements of this sensibility belong recognizably to someone trained in rhetoric, but there is here a greater specificity of training in and commitment to an integrated nexus of epistemic and ontological principles and relations.¹⁴ In sum the hermeneutic delimitation is both narrow and broad, a more historically and intellectually specific orientation, and a broad relevance of application.

So what is the relationship of hermeneutics to rhetoric that I wish to illuminate? A historical answer would be long and complex, but the conceptual answer I wish to defend can be precise: hermeneutics is a theoretical orientation to a rhetorical practice. As I will lay out over the course of this book, this is not a simple theory-practice relationship but is itself caught up in the circular structure of hermeneutic understanding. As I have noted above, my definition departs from the standard parallelism introduced by Schleiermacher for rhetoric and hermeneutics as, respectively, the arts of speaking and listening, or of discursive production and reception, which most current-day definitions echo.¹⁵ It is also not forwarded explicitly by Gadamer, who says different things about the relationship at different points, and is only suggested in Heidegger’s early rhetoric lectures.¹⁶

To be sure, on the surface hermeneutics can appear merely to echo or overlap with rhetoric. (This certainly is what my interlocutor must have had in mind.) The binding of eloquence to truth, the orientation to the particular case, the location of proofs in the sensus communis, the standard of probability (eikos), the principle of scopus (point of view),¹⁷ the comprehension of the whole in the part, the reregistration of ethos and pathos to logos, the dialectic of convention and invention, and so forth are the humanist ground upon which Gadamer erects an approach to experience or understanding. But Gadamer’s project is not so much a transposition as a transmutation. He wanted to recognize the immanence of Heidegger’s radical subversion of the Enlightenment paradigm in a tradition that had existed and continued to exist alongside of it, but only immanent, because the subversion was the unrealized self-awareness that lay dormant in that older tradition. That is why hermeneutics does not offer something to rhetoric that it does not already have; it turns its use in a particular direction. Its framing brings out what is latent in humanist rhetorical practice as a manner of critical self-awareness. Hermeneutics develops a consciousness of and approach to human rhetoricality¹⁸ as an ontological condition. It is at one level a metaconsciousness that Gadamer called wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein, the vigilance over and intervention in a being that is intractably discursive. Hermeneutics becomes a heightened theoretical awareness of discursivity as it emerges from rhetorical practice. It exists in relation to it not as an external theory, but as a theoretical comportment.¹⁹ This chiasmatic relation is as yet undertheorized in both rhetoric and hermeneutic scholarship.²⁰

In other words hermeneutics is not merely a second-order theory that helps give rhetoric an ontological footing. The integrated relation of a reasoned practice to a reflective comportment is circular or, more precisely, involuted. Like rhetoric, hermeneutics cannot be principally an academic theory, as if there are, or perhaps should be, particular kinds of people who practice it, and someone demonstrating hermeneutic competence is not principally an academician who is supposed to have a particular competence denied to others.²¹ A hermeneutic sensibility is cultivated in order that asking questions that preoccupy everybody have a chance of being asked in a certain way.²² Even though there is a constant demand for the second-order task of conceptual clarification, hermeneutic self-awareness merges with life practice, so that it seems better to speak of achieving a theoretical consciousness (Gadamer, PH, 57).

In formulating the relationship in this way, I am privileging Gadamer over Ricoeur insofar as Gadamer took the text-reader relationship as a metaphor for all understanding, while Ricoeur stayed closer to the more literal function of hermeneutics as a theory of textual interpretation.²³ A number of rhetoric scholars come close to the schema I have proposed, but most remain within Ricoeur’s more literal approach to hermeneutics. This line of derivation is crucial in its reception history. Steven Mailloux, for instance, is essentially a Ricoeurian: Hermeneutics deals with interpretation focused on texts…. Interpretation can be defined as the establishment of textual meaning.²⁴ Thus, on the one hand, he suggests something close to the chiasmatic relation I am proposing in speaking of the practical inseparability of rhetoric and hermeneutics: Hermeneutics is the rhetoric of establishing meaning and rhetoric the hermeneutics of problematic linguistic situations.²⁵ Yet although he treats rhetoric broadly as the linguistic constitution of culture, he regards hermeneutics in a more narrowly disciplinary way, which removes it from the radical ontological implications of Heidegger’s innovation.

It is only over the course of this book that I can work out the structure of the theory-practice dialectic I am pointing to here, but I can sketch out the path I will take in doing so, and this path has as its coordinates three themes—dialectic, circularity, and finitude.

From Dualism to Dialectic

Hermeneutics has only been one actor in the broader movement of dissociation from the dualist mindset endemic to Western rationalism, what Walter Jost calls the disabling oppositions of modernity.²⁶ But it takes a unique approach to this effort, developing a kind of transitivity that undermines conventional polarities by confusing, straddling, and bleeding their boundaries: All the boundaries are blurred—between the things as well as between the things and ourselves.²⁷ It does not do this out of any taste for subversion, but rather because it finds these tensions in the natural work of language. Starting with the subject/object split, the dichotomy from which all the rest flow, the basic hermeneutic principle is that truth is not an object, but a relation (Gadamer, TM, 358). To give some sense of this kind of relationality, here is a representative list of binaries with hermeneutic footnotes:

Table of binaries (annotated)

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These Western binaries give way to hermeneutic relations that form in generative tension and reciprocity in an elegantly coordinated system of discursive relations, what Gadamer calls a speculative unity (TM, 469–75). First hermeneutics works at bringing these tensions to the surface, and then it brings them to bear on the practice that it is describing. It is easy to see how the resources of the rhetorical tradition were useful for this project, since rhetoric had formed its own grammar at the margins of categorial compartments, softening the oppositions of knowledge and opinion, emotion and reason, thought and expression, character and reason. But hermeneutics’ greatest borrowing from rhetoric, partly from its reading tradition but also partly from Aristotle’s ethics (which Gadamer associated with rhetoric), was the circle of understanding. That methodological principle of ancient interpretive practice receives new life in Hegel and nineteenth-century German historicism, overwriting binary modes of thought with the circularity of historical understanding.

The Double Reflection of the Circle

Hermeneutics conceives the developing structure of meaning as simultaneously transcending linear temporality, diffusing agency across subject and substance, and exploiting the double perspective of a reflective consciousness. Heidegger’s subversion of the apparatus of instrumental rationalism proposed a relucent-prestructive movement of temporal being embodied and performed in a logos inimical to the primacy of intentionality and presence. Reflection, practice, agency, and context are now folded into a unitary existential structure that runs transversally across the plane of being.

Gadamer continued to develop Heidegger’s circle with an even greater emphasis on the transposition of rhetorical agency to Sprache (living discourse), because Gadamer the humanist rhetorician had a much stronger commitment to the sociality of understanding. Part of Gadamer’s innovation was to rearticulate Heidegger’s vision in terms of the language of rhetorical humanism, which made the crucial point that the new epistemology was not an original beginning but a response of tradition itself.⁴⁶ In so doing Gadamer returned the prodigious German encounter with the Enlightenment worldview to the modesty of its rhetorical competence, not in a reductive fashion but as a specific application, a carrying over of Heidegger’s ontological transformation to the secular vocabulary of civic education. In doing this he kept the circuitous movement between rhetorical practice and hermeneutic theory without erasing their difference.

Finitude

The fact that there is practice at all and not just theory, the fact that we live in the realm of the particular and only gesture toward the ideal, the fact that we need to reason practically rather than just contemplate, is because we are finite, historically situated, material beings bounded by mortality, formed by interests, passions, and perspectives, and left to work out our meanings and identities with frail and compromised capabilities. Finitude is not a break superimposed on the structure of the circle of understanding but its very architecture. Because we must think in succession, marry the future to the past, create virtues out of habits, and outwit a tunnel vision, we cobble together a temporal identity out of borrowed parts and improvised bindings. In contrast with the dream of the absolute that drives our idealist and positivist urges, a finite hermeneutic understanding manages a kind of reflective awareness that always arrives, as it were, too late (Gadamer, TM, 490).

These three foci of hermeneutic-rhetorical identity structure the three parts of the book that follow. The destruction of a binary world leads to the hermeneutic circle of understanding, and the circle is manifest as the factical relation of theory and practice. The introduction to this study is a kind of preamble; a summary description of what I am calling the involuted structure of hermeneutic understanding. This idea underlies the approach to hermeneutics I advocate, one that balances the Gadamerian effort to locate understanding in culture and language with the Ricoeurian effort to return effective rhetorical agency to the person. The subsequent chapters offer examples, elements of a hermeneutic approach to rhetoric corresponding to these three themes.

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Abbreviations

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A note on references to Gadamer’s works: Where it was useful to add the original German in the text, I have given the page citations as follows: (TM, 357; WM, 363), for example. Where I have chosen to translate from the German text myself rather than quote the published English version, the quotation is in English, and the citation referenced is the original (WM, 363).

Introduction

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Involutions

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By forming the thing, it forms itself. | Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

I take up within myself what is meaningful, like the bead that slips from the petal’s lip into its dark ground, so that what is thought at the end of my seeing or hearing continues to be fed by the whole of that experience. In such cases a great deal is lost with each step away from the roots that feed it, because the things that involve oneself in this way are not transportable, in the authority of their experience or the fullness of that knowledge. The deepest understanding is soaked in the occasion of its birth; it emerges out of a situation and speaks to it. It only knows itself in its peculiar adhesion to life, the building up of a thousand plaited threads of experience and insight.¹

On the other hand, the thought is a mark on a life or community or culture, as a dye on a thread, a brand on the flesh, a stain absorbed into the compacted depositions of experience that remain. Those things that enter into and out of our thoughts have a kind of half-life, having leeched into the soil now for generations. They linger like a residue in the inflection of a voice, in the scent of old linen, in the trail of kind acts. These things add up by increments, and constitute as much as anything else what counts for experience. It may be that they never go away.

So here there is a kind of opposition that I want to try to resolve. How to square this difference, the impotence of communication and the power of memory or institution? It is too easy to talk about this in terms of works or culture, even though those things certainly describe the perdurance of experience beyond individuals, because if we do we’ve already left the realm that I just promised to stay close to. The answer is, it strikes me with the force of conviction, that I ought not to try to square them, at least initially; that they are marked by difference.

In the first case, the intimacy of understanding is precisely and to that extent its value. This is particularly the case with respect to the loss of something dear, because the loss makes present the thing in its wholeness, just outside of the history and so at the same completely available to it. Here can be seen the distance this experience has from the theory of the work, which says that the work’s identity is first to be loosed from the context of its origin in order to be available to every new context. In the case I am considering, the loss is precisely what is at issue. That is the point of the loss, of the meaning that the loss contains, that something infinitely precious has been lost. It is the immediacy of the inside/outside relation that grants a complete knowledge perhaps even for the first time.

Now this does not mean that I cultivate that loss and refuse to give it up; that would be a pathology. But one acknowledges the loss as a loss, and so one does what one can, and this means that insofar as I am able to understand and honor what I know is slipping away, that that becomes a kind of responsibility. I ask myself, what is it that has been lost, and what can be done in the face of that loss? The answer to these questions may in fact draw a connection to the second situation, that it might at least become in some way a contribution to the things that do persist. It seems inescapable that the depositions and accretions and sedimentations of experience actually build and increase the thickness and even the beauty of life; hence we speak of the wealth of experience. And in a way the second experience comes around full circle to the first, since one of the things that we bring to any experience is precisely this depth of experience, so that the greater the contribution of the second, the deeper the first. (I wonder about this, though, since the most charged and lasting impressions belong to my youth.)

We are still left with two incorrigibly different things, in the sense that the second supports the first and their relation is not reversible, but at least they have been brought into contact with one another. This is important because it is precisely in coming to terms with the difference between the two in the irreplaceability of what was lost, the insufficiency of any memorial, on the one hand, and the need to do what one can in the face of the loss, on the other, that we are in a position to mea sure and understand the difference.

The Personal Structure of Time

There is one kind of understanding in