Speaking Hermeneutically

## Citation

Arthos, John. *Speaking Hermeneutically: Understanding in the Conduct of a Life*. University of South Carolina, 2011.

## Book Review

By Stacey O'Neal Irwin, published in *Rhetoric & Public Affairs*, vol. 15, no. 3, 2012, pp. 555-558. Link to Project Muse text.

## Preface

What do rhetoric and hermeneutics have to do with each other? Hermeneutics develops out of rhetoric, and even though most American scholars in critical and cultural theory don't seem to know what to do with it - nor even traditional rhetorical scholars - hermeneutics should be seen as an ally, not a competitor, in pushing back against the antirhetorical paradigms in mainstream culture.

"In proposing my own approach to this relationship, I am going to discard the usual orientation of rhetoric and hermeneutics as horizontally aligned disicplines (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 education in and performance of discursive identity." To show that they are intertwined, practically inseparable.

Rhetoric, for Arthos, is "a nuanced and specific theory of understanding," which delimits its power and reach and claims to exclusivity. (xiii) Likewise, his hermeneutics is more specifically Gadamer's, as developed alongside French and German phenonenology and the critique it garnered across the continent and in America. That said, "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. [...] I would even go so far as 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. [...] **In sum the hermeneutic delimitation is both narrow and broad, a more historically and intellectually specific orientation, and a broad relevance of application.**" (xiii)

"Hermeneutics is a theoretical orientation to a rhetorical practice." Not simply a theory-practice relationship, but one bound up in the hermeneutic circular structure itself. Hermeneutics does not offer something to rhetoric, but 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." (xiv) Focus on Gadamer over Ricoeur, since Gadamer took the text-reader relationship as a metaphor for all understanding, while Ricoeur was more literal in treating hermeneutics as a theory of textual interpretation.

Three themes over the course of the book: dialectic, circularity, and finitude.

### From Dualism to Dialectic

Hermeneutics is just one actor in breaking down the binary, dualist mindset in Western rationalism, but it is unique in the development of a transitivity that works by "confusing, straddling, and bleeding [...] boundaries" (xv). "The basic hermeneutic principle is that truth 'is not an object, but a relation.'" (xv-xvi, quoting Gadamer)

"First hermeneutics works at bringing these tensions to the surface, and then it brings them to bear on the practice that it is describing." (xvi)

### The Double Reflection of the Circle

"Part of Gadamer [the humanist rhetorician]'s innovation was to re-articulate 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." (xvii)

### Finitude

The reason for practice and not just theory is because of our finitude. "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'" (xvii, quoting Gadamer).

\*Philosophy and science, respectively?

## Introduction

The relation between memory and communication, the sense that something is lost and the impotence to do anything about it.

Per Gadamer, "interpretation doesn't *occur* as an activity in the course of life, but *is* the *form* of human life." Understanding takes a lifetime - "We do not understand something until we have learned to come to terms with it, and we come to terms with it by the life that unfolds subsequently as a kind of active reflection on it. Our life is precisely an articulation of our understanding." (3)

"The transitivity of person and world that results from this alternating current of acting and suffering does not stop at the border of a life. The same impulse and dynamic is at work in the development of the relationships that constitute social and ethical forms." (4)

"Understanding is normally a cognitive act, a state of mind, or a personal attribute. Life in the sense of 'a life lived' or 'human life' is neither a cognitive act, a state of mind, nor a personal attribute, but something that contains them. [...] To say 'understanding is the form of life' establishes a reciprocity that has a leveling effect on the categorical orders. One is not contained in the other, but defines its being. It cannot be an attribute, as that would establish a subordination absent in the copula." (5-6)

Understanding - "what stands under us is what is happening all the while we are making our way in the world *by* that progress. We go as far as the path made for our going forward, and this path is made in going forward. [...] **Our lives are works of understanding; we work to understand our life. To separate activity and product in this instance is to make a category error.**" (6)

### Three Involutions

**Between the particular and the general**

**The double reflection**

**The Matrix of Broken Parts**

## Chapter 1: "We can not consecrate": Between Word and Flesh

Gettysburg as an exemplar of the "consubstantiation of the material and the narrative [...] attached directly to the trauma of violence, the effects of which are never simply material, since its harm is aimed at its narrative effects [...] In this close configuration of act and interpretation, it is hardly possible to separate the deed, the intention, and the result. [...] Gettysburg will thus serve as a vivid case for the fraught dialectic of word and act." (15)

"We have here the counterposing pattern that will emerge at several points in this study, that event and interpretation exist only in their reciprocity. The materiality of the event pulls insistently toward its particularity, the need to come to terms pulls the event toward generality. [...] What I want to do in this reflection is to think about the materiality of Gettysburg, and how it resists or yields to its interpretive history." (16)

In the Gettysburg Address, four months after the battle and at a time when the land in and around the town still bore very visible marks of the battle, Lincoln's speech "[asks] his audience to take up and extend the dedication of the soldiers. [...] The universal and the particular. Ideas and ideals *must* bring themselves into true with their material cost; this needs to be and is a constant negotiation." (17)

"Reading" Gettysburg, Lincoln "saw it against the background of modern Western European history, of the failure of European nations to institute a democratic form of government that would realize the Enlightenment ideals of equity and freedom. [...] that the American Revolution was that prodigious first effort at implementation, the placement of a theory in a practice; and that Lincoln's moment of the Civil War was the actual test of its possibility, when the same old conflicts of interest that ensnared Europe were in effect recapitulated internally, when the forces for self-determination and mutual cooperation clashed." (19)

In the speech, Lincoln telescopes out from particularity to generality, both in place and time - moving from "a portion of that field," to "battle-field" to "nation" to "any nation." Two temporal localities are being situated in the speech, too - "the general present of the war and the particular present of the dedication." Both are contingent and could have resolutions and effects in any direction. "The 'decision' of this 'moment of decision' exhibits a curiously equivocal agency. On the one hand, it is clearly up to the Union to rededicate itself to the effort of nationhood. On the other hand, the decision of the war lies in the hand of fate. The moment of decision therefore balances tremulously between will and chance, necessitating a tone of fateful resolve." (20-21)

"The temporal lines that Lincoln draws are therefore from his speech back to the war effort and forward to a civil union. These are not static lines tracing existing relations but the drawing implement of a speech-act actualizing that relation." (21) Constitutive?

"In any case the speech-act cannot then be treated merely as an interpretive act, if it in fact functions to further the action that the battle advanced. The question posed at the beginning of this chapter about the occlusion of the event by speech holds less weight if the speech is understood to be integral to the prosecution of the war. Hermeneutically speaking, there is always suspicion about binary oppositions between words and acts, and further hermeneutics works hard to avoid demoting interpretation to a secondary function" - again, recall Gadamer's words that Interpretation isn't just an activity, it *is* the *form* of human life. (21) In the speech, Lincoln minimalizes the speech-act of the dedication itself, in favor of "[advancing] the cause through the dedication, articulating the significance of the loss of men and gain of battle." (22)

"What Lincoln was doing serves as an illustration of hermeneutic self-understanding - that interpretation is caught up in the web of signifying acts that continually shape our place and identity. [...] It is not that interpretation supersedes the event, but that interpretation multiplies those links." (22)

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

This chapter takes up Heidegger's conception of being in time and Dasein; "Barta-Smith argues that the enormous impact on intellectual culture of Heidegger's construal of being as time acted as a corrective to our cultural indoctrination in the Cartesian worldview of the *res extensa*, but at the same tie it amplified another Western distortion," that of seeing the body and world as a distraction or starting point, with affect as the antagonist of reason. In spite of this, Arthos argues that Heidegger can recoup himself, by attending to Dasein as just as much about space as time. "The dialogic interpenetration of self, other, and world, I would like to suggest, is much closer to the world of the fishermen of the Trobriand Islands than perhaps Bitzer had intended. (25)

"Hermeneutic time-space exists as the finite medium of our concernful dealings with the world, but also as the medium through which we come to understand ourselves, or as Merleau-Ponty says, what we encounter 'on the way to subjectivity.' [...] What is added here is an element of reflection, a movement beyond merely the readiness-to-hand of time and place as the texture of our lives, to an interchange or conversation, a process of exchange by which one builds up a sense of oneself." (25)

"We know that discourse bleeds into the world, into the recesses of our minds, into our institutions and power arrangements, and that by a kind of reflux *they* turn back into *it*, but how are we able to probe the depth of that collaboration? This may not be a task immediately attaching itself to the pragmatics of rhetorical application, but we should not therefore insulate ourselves from the question. I am going to suggest that a hermeneutic sensibility will help us continue to be alive to this understanding, and that this understanding may then seep into our rhetorical practice." (25)

Arthos reads Trollope's novel *Dr. Wortle's School* as an example of how "the *things* of this novel - teacups, country parsk, deeds of will, marriage rings - collide with the issues upon which the story turns in such a way that the concrete materiality of the world, what Heidegger called the thingness of the thing, intertwines with the texture of our symbolizations, deliberations, and decisions." (25)

In this novel, and in another Trollope novel, a character's walk in the park in order to make a fateful decision - the openness of the park corresponds to the openness of possibility, but by the time the character returns to an interior, domestic space, their thoughts seem to be resolved. The importance here is not just the temporal dimension of the decision-making, but the spatial as well - the embodied solitude of the characters, their presence in the world. "What is at work is [...] a kind of correspondence, what Merleau-Ponty calls 'a concordance with the world.' This correspondence is not in the way of congruity between a symbol and its unnamed referent but is a coincidence, a point of convergence. [...] The correspondence is at the deepest level a productive relationship between a physical and mental journey" (28).

In the conversation between Peacocke and Mrs. Peacocke, attention is drawn to the material only when conversation turns away from the materiality of tea-time; "The physical description is not just a narrative strategy to hold the moment of suspense. The concrete things are somehow intimately related to her alarm and his decision all the way down." (30) And the attention to the domestic is the stakes of the conversation, what the Peacockes stand to lose if their secret past is outed.

When the vicar is told about the Peacocke's marital relations, he similarly asks for space of time to make his determination of what should be done. But his original decision (to fire the Peacockes and replace them with less scandalous instructors) is reversed - "what causes this movement is precisely not the kind of inward reflection that references one's private conscience since, as Wortle himself later admits, 'We are, all of us, joined together too closely to admit of isolation such as that.' [...] What happens first to Wortle, and then to his wife, and finally by the end of the novel to the neighboring vicar, is that the world intrudes on these isolated judgments 0- the persuasive effect of argument and circumstance, unexpected twists and turns in the narrative, complex motives, competing goods and values, and most of all the effect of other human beings." (32)

## Chapter 3: Transitive Agency: Between Person and Text

The chapter begins with Pierre Charron's 16th century treatise on prudence and the development of a good citizen, which Arthos takes to be an exemplar model of the relation between person and text in hermeneutics. The model is less a person who picks flowers to fashion them into a crown, and more a bee that takes in the essence of a flower in order to transform it within its body into a new substance; this transubstantiation is at the heart of how agency is developed. Arthos also draws on Vico, who conceives that "humans and human institutions exist in a kind of transitivity in relation to each other," in which phronesis is not a possession of the individual, but rather a perpetual exchange between self and world, self and other. (35)

For Gadamer, "'The ideal of eloquence... implies that a person is in a fundamental way what he says and writes.'" (36) What to make, then, of Stockton's infective surface reading, the reader who is dildo'd by the author? In other words, to what extent is the author responsible for their text's agency?

"The agency of the rhetorical exchange lies not exclusively in the willing intention of the speaker but is distributed throughout the transaction itself, and that transformation is as likely to do with the person as the world of the discourse." (36) Gadamer privileges the individual over the collective, not wishing to subsume the particular into the general - an embrace of Kant (not using people as a means, but acknowledging them as ends in themselves) and a distancing from Hegel and Heidegger. And also finds its model in Plato's Socrates - "The Socratic inquiry, no matter how far it leads into the abstractions of metaphysics, is rooted in existential imperatives, that is, in the consciousness of the transitivity of self and act." (37) For Socrates (and Gadamer, reading Plato) individual ability or knowledge is not good in itself, but is judged as good "in terms of an understanding of what one's own existence is for the sake of." (37, quoting Gadamer)

For Gadamer, theoria (contemplation) "'is not so much the individual momentary act as a way of comporting oneself, a position and condition. It is 'being present' in the lovely double sense that means that the person is not only present but completely present.' [...] The language of this description echoes faithfully the description of play in *Truth and Method*. The region is the region of the game that diminishes subjective agency, and the participation is the participation of the *Schauspiel*, the sharing of being from many sides." (38, quoting Gadamer)

### Embodiment and Participation

Two fundamental principles of philosophical hermeneutics: "the reciprocal determination of the abstract and the concrete (allegiance to Hegel) and the embodied nature of human understanding (the influence of Christian humanism). If we place along a horizontal axis Gadamer's statement that someone trained in the humane studies 'does not possess a special knowledge, but in his person... is the embodiment of' that training, and on a vertical axis the claim that there is a 'reciprocity between our conceptual efforts and the concrete in life experiences,' the point of intersection is where Gadamer's more nuanced understanding of 'person' will be found." (39)

Both axes "[juxtapose] theory and knowledge on the one side with concrete life experience and personal embodiment on the other, but the arguments are not made in the same conceptual framework." In the horizontal axis, relation between theory and practice is one of generality and particularity - Aristotle. In the second case, language is not conceptual, but is experiential - "the idea of embodied experience is about the intersection of history in character. Whereas the abstract and the concrete are dialectically involved in both history and character, in embodied experience history is concentrated in a locus of being - a person *carries* history, enacts and manifests its concretion." (39)

Arthos thus "suggests a model of agency located between the two conventional alternatives of subject-object dualism and the dissolution of the cogito." (39) For the first, per Heidegger, setting up subject vs. world and proving it presumes what is at issue; instead, for Heidegger, Dasein's Being-in-the-world emphasizes the interdependence of subject and world. "When Gadamer uses the word *person*, he is referring [...] to the mutually constituting sharing of agency of self, other, and world, what he calls *das Wir-sein*." (40) This person's agency is not "an emancipated individual with the full integrity of enlightened reason, but [...] a humble participant in a practical enterprise." (40)

For Gadamer, substance not as a Greek philosophical concept, but Hegel's sense of a substantial person, someone who matters. Gadamer quoting Rilke, "'Substance is the "spirit which is capable of uniting us"'" (41). Arthos explains, "The individual is not precious because of what he or she alone has, but what he or she carries of all of us, and that is injured by anyone's harm. Gadamer's humanism, like the humanism of Petrarch or Vico, is about the constitution of value in teh human as an achievement of culture. A person of substance is precious for their own sake and as someone who carries culture forward. Neither a point of articulation nor a sovereign subject, humanity is constituted step by step in every concrete act by every human being." (41)

From dialectic to dialogue, dialogue is important because it happens in participation and sharing. "The privilege attendant on being human is not principally as the agent or initiator but as a being granted the capacity to hear and respond, both in the present encounter and across the sweep of time. Language is the pivot of historical becoming, leveraging what sweeps in from behind: 'To dwell in language means *to be moved* in speaking about something... *we are moved* in the space of freedom.'" (41-42) In this conception, language itself is not at issue - against a Nietzschean reading of language that subsumes individuality into collectivity and the social, that participation is what makes us human, "the community of agreement that arises from linguistic exchange." (42) (Compare with Arendt, for whom language also makes a world, and love's power to forgive which destroys the world that gets in-between us?)

### The Remainder

Individual personhood, then, is always understood in relation. "By this logic I am truly more myself in my uniqueness to the extent that I open myself to what is other than myself. What is unique is gestated in the exchange." (43)

"The catch or irritation that causes the rude collisions of self, other, and world is fully constitutive of human being - it is the engine that drives the entire enterprise. **It is finitude**." (43, emphasis added) Compare with Burke, on humility/discounting - the perpetual readiness to acknowledge human limitations and forgive what they are. **The ethos of Gadamerian participation is Burkean humility.**

### The Return to Humanism

Gadamer reads Vico's *sensus communis* in connection with Hegel's *Geist* and Arthos connects this to the Charron passage the chapter opened with. Gadamer further reads Vico as "a theory of pietist education, which was the cultivation of rhetorical commonplaces [...] designed to create predispositions or 'predilections' of a 'living knowledge.'" (44) Rhetorical education!

"We enter this perpetual exchange as privileged participants. If in a game of badminton the focus is on the shuttlecock, still we ourselves are always in that movement and lend our ingenuity to its adventure. This ambiguous role of being the pivot and not the goal is the person. If language is a kind of alembic for the transmutation of the stuff of life, then being myself and not another is what sparks the gap between word and thing, the initial irritation that moves the game." (44) Because we are ourselves and not another, language. And because participation in language, human. (Per Gadamer, "Language speaks us, rather than we it" and "thinking means unfolding what consistently follows from the subject matter itself," yet speech "is the exchange between you and me." Again, compare with Burke in which language creates or constitutes the human)