Hermeneutical Rhetoric

## Citation

Leff, Michael. "Hermeneutical Rhetoric." *Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time*, edited by Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 196-214.

## Summary

Leff positions his proposal of a Hermeneutical rhetoric" as a counterpart to Steven Mailloux's "rhetorical hermeneutics," which Mailloux develops in *Rhetorical Power*. Leff summarizes, "[Mailloux's] argument begins with debates about theory and meaning in literary studies, and although he extends his interests into the domain of politics, his focal point remains the problem of interpretation per se and his dominant referent is literary texts. The adjective-noun relation in rhetorical hermeneutics indicates this emphasis. Mailloux, that is, works through rhetoric to generate a more sophisticated conception of the hermeneutic enterprise." In contrast to this, Leff wants to "reverse the orientation so that the stress falls on rhetoric. [...] **The focal interest here centers on rhetorical practice as manifested in texts that directly and overtly engage political circumstances.** [...] **To put the point simply: where Mailloux asks how rhetorical strategies enter into hermeneutic activity, I ask how hermeneutical strategies enter into the production of political rhetoric.**" (197) The emphasis here is on invention, not merely the description that Mailloux takes to be the end of rhetorical hermeneutics.

Leff finds an ally in Mailloux against Gaonkar's conception of rhetoric and hermeneutics, which artificially separates production and interpretation. As Mailloux reminds us, these cannot actually be separated, and contemporary rhetoric recognizes that there is no trans-historical/trans-cultural "meaning" to be found within a text, but rather that it is culturally dependent, undermining the binary of production and interpretation.

Turn to *imitatio* as a model for how reading interpretation enters into rhetorical production - see Robert Terrill's essay on "Mimesis, Duality, and Rhetorical Education" for the history and use of *imitatio* as an exercise in rhetorical education. Basically, the purpose is not pure imitation or mechanical reproduction, but to use exemplars as inventional resources for creating new discourse. Leff invokes Rita Copeland to describe the palimpsest-like relation between model and new production - "the old text leaves it simpression on the rhetor's product, but the rhetor's productive act has left its interpretative impression on the original." (20) And as Terrill describes, this circulation between past and present develops cultural literacy in the student.

The affordances and limits of Mailloux's rhetorical hermeneutics: "This position has greater power for diagnostic and descriptive purposes than for invention. Rhetorical hermeneutics can provide thick descriptions of how interpretative practices change at different times and in different rhetorical communities, but it offers no account of how members of a community can invent new interpretative strategies while remaining within that community. In other words, Mailloux teaches us how we enter into rhetorical situations, but his program does not consider how we can alter them." (203)

-Maybe in my own words - Mailloux sidesteps the Bitzer/Vatz question of rhetorical situation; Bitzer might be aligned with textual realism and Vatz with readerly idealism. But Mailloux throws out both enterprises and refuses a compromise, instead preferring to focus on how interpretations come to be at all. (Not what a text *means*, but how any interpretation of its meaning comes to *happen*.) But Leff wants to continue to push for the rhetoric in all of this, the question of what can we *do* with knowledge.

### A Case Study in Hermeneutical Rhetoric

Leff reads Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in relation to the Declaration of Independence as a model of hermeneutical rhetoric. First he surveys the different readings that have been done of the opening lines, in which Lincoln invokes the language of the Declaration of Independence; his purposeful choice of *this* document in the founding of America is purposeful, pointing to a particular identity of America that he wants to promote (as opposed to using the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution as his temporal anchor). Likewise, his use of the phrase "all men are created equal" does something different from the statement of self-evident fact that the Declaration of Independence does; instead, Lincoln places this in a stress position in his sentence, making it a proposition to which the United States are particularly dedicated. With this accomplished, **"Having established the Declaration as a point of reference (in fact, as the originary point of reference for the nation), Lincoln is constrained by that document, but he can also open space to reinterpret it and redefine the nation. Thus, the rhetorical power of the Gettysburg Address, in some large measure, results from the circulation of influence between Lincoln's words and the words of the original he both copies and reinvents."** (205-206)

Leff continues by attending to the context of Lincoln's previous uses of the Declaration of Independence in his speeches. In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln similarly attempts to re-read the Declaration, and Douglas pushes back on Lincoln's interpretation that "all men are created equal" points to the moral hypocrisy of slave-owners by arguing that the Founding Fathers never had black people in mind when writing, and that attempting to argue such a thing makes Lincoln a distorter of the original document, arrogantly assuming he knows better than the Founders.

Lincoln's response is a further exercise in hermeneutical rhetoric, arguing that the Founders did not mean that all men were equal already, nor that they had the power to make them so... but rather, that this equality was a goal that should be worked towards. Leff describes: "The principle of equality is not a statement of fact, but a maxim - a truth that we ought to use in measuring and directing our actions. [...] **The meaning of the maxim is not fixed at the moment of its utterance but develops in and through the nation's history.**" (209) (Compare with John Arthos's *Speaking Hermeneutically* which sees understanding as that which we work towards all of our lives)

The difference between a self-evident truth (which does not require proof) and a proposition (which can be true or false); by framing "all men are created equal," Lincoln does not go on to question that proposition, but positions the Civil War as testing whether a nation dedicated to this proposition is able to survive. "All men are created equal" is a statement that can't just be repeated, it must be revisited by each generation and rededicated to it, making it relevant to the historical and cultural circumstances of the present. Hermeneutical rhetoric is necessary in order to perform this reinterpretation. Edwin Black's analysis of the word "dedicate" as it appears six times in the speech, tracking its shifting meaning and how it negotiates a relationship between the past and present people - not just the fallen soldiers, but the Founders of the country too. Memorials are not all that are called for; but also "projecting their spirit into the future and dedicating themselves to the still unfinished work." (211) Not just imitation, but invention.