On Speaking and Writing

M. V. Kramer

12/29/2014

On Speaking and Writing

From Rhetoric to Hermeneutics

Introductory Notes

We, as contemporary Western citizens and subjects, navigate a world intent

on swaying thought. In fact a point often lent to the credibility of a philosophical

education is that philosophy allows one to deconstruct subversively implanted

arguments and see through to the inhering logic, and in so doing disarm the latent

influence. By ‘deciphering’ the hidden messages, as it were, one can more accurately

assess the nature of a given argument. The modus operandi for this process of

decryption has typically fallen to a technical sort of deductive calculus—a system of

logically valid or sound inferences and relations—in order to interpret the true

content of a claim.

For all the practicality in such an approach (instrumental in providing a

specialized language for philosophers and philosophy students, thus forging

collegial and community bonds while lending an air of legitimacy to the professional

pursuit of this highly abstract and economically negligent field), I’ll be investigating

an alternative practice with a relatively obscure contemporary standing—that of

rhetoric. Having evolved from the sophistry of the ancient Greeks, to technical

manuals of the Romans and Medieval period, to an ancillary ubiquity in recent

literary studies, rhetoric has come to be ill-‐understood or downright disregarded in

the present philosophic scene. It’s retention as a historical curiosity discharges the

2

interpretive possibilities of this perennial discursive discipline. Beyond bringing

more exposure to rhetoric and its key concepts, moreover, I’ll also investigate the

neighboring textual and philosophical discipline of hermeneutics, mainly in its

recent manifestations via Heidegger and Gadamer, looking to the central themes of

this ostensible art of interpretation. These examinations will be projectively

grounded as springboard for ethical injunction, as offering regulatory spirit for

greater global consciousness; the force with which these topics impel an ethical

stance, however, could hardly be construed akin to anything like logical necessity.

Before jumping into the substantive minutiae of the topics at hand, however,

a word or two must be stated concerning the context and conceptual framing

against and within which this treatment finds itself. That is, a sense of the field is

necessary for greater relief of the figure, to metaphorize with gestalt imagery.

Having received formal instruction in the analytic program of philosophy for these

past few years I’ve come to a marked level of inculcation, far over and above what

my interests had permitted me prior. As such, a logical bent has pervaded my

thought processes and, in a remarkably phenomenological degree, stifled my

capacity for creative prose composition. While I grant that this feature of my

education may be entirely anecdotal, and thus epistemologically immaterial, it is a

feature of immediate and direct consequence for my daily experience and that

awareness leeches itself into both my work and my personal relationships. A

stunted mind is an unsatisfied mind is a tendentious mind. From this limited

perspective, though, a writer extrapolates to what they presume is a matter of

3

greater consequence. One takes faith in the notion that solipsistic concerns can

resonate across bodies, regions, disciplines, and even cultures.

This essay will be an exercise in both overcoming the self-‐consciousness that

vies against lurking mechanisms of conformity (an effort which will largely operate

in the background, lest it become more journalistic than it already seems), and an

investigation into areas of knowledge that might prove therapeutic for the self and

its culture. To that extent, this will be a meditation of sorts. The personal, though,

must give way to the political; the extent to which purely academic or epistemic

thought segregates one’s body and mind from honest engagement with the world

one is living in is the extent to which society, as a collective, suffers from apathy and

inevitable incompetence. However unavoidable specialization and a division of

labor (intellectual and otherwise) may be, a foundation ought be consolidated and

an ideal striven for. Rhetoric and hermeneutics, as disciplines focused on the

universal phenomena of persuasion and understanding, might very well prove

invaluable in appraising the vitality of an ethical life.

Rhetoric

The importance of rhetoric to the contemporary Western person lies in a

similar (if not the same) sphere to the original domain of human life within which it

was restricted for the Greeks—that is, as a practical matter in the civic or public

sphere. More precisely, the world now has reached critical mass for linguistic bodies

amongst a linguistic background, each and every one bearing some perspective and

thus some slightly different understanding of the whole pieced together to form

4

‘reality’ as we know it; as such, in a deluge of individuated lexicons and idiolects,

some grounds for communication must be established lest each person feel entitled

to a quasi-‐private language that contents itself with talking at cross-‐purposes to any

strange or abrasive interlocutor. No more obvious example is given than the level of

interaction occurring online, in Youtube comments or on internet forums, where a

discussion is at any point subject to derailment by a ‘troll,’ or some such belligerent

party intent on coercing control of the flow of conversation.1 Playing off the affects

of the audience, there is surely a rhetorical edge to the ploys of such discursive

pranksters, though they may not see it as technical or practical.

It was the seed of such trollish behavior that brought repudiation from the

outset of systematic Western philosophizing, which would seem to offer a

countervalence to any commending account of rhetoric and should thus be

dispelled, or at least tackled early on. In Plato we find an antipathy toward rhetoric

in the form of sophistry, often held as a mode of argument that seeks to ‘make the

weaker stronger,’2 bending the terms and truths of a discussion to fit the whim of

the speaker. That is to say, there is a tendency in the Sophists to preserve doxa

(opinion) at the expense of episteme (knowledge). This construal would, however,

discount the methodological bases for sophistry, akin to logic or dialectic, insofar as

the Sophists “produced a sort of atemporal model, a configuration of

1 The phenomenon of the ‘troll’ in cyber-‐discourse would merit an entire monograph in its own right. 2 To paraphrase Aristotle’s remarks of Protagoras.

5

epistemological and ethical elements that were extraordinarily favorable”3 to

rhetorical development.

Two points make possible the free play of a rhetorical discourse as

juxtaposed against the dialectical development toward sound episteme: probability

(as introduced via the Pythagoreans) and relativity (as embodied in the Protagorean

slogan, “man is the measure of all things”). Moreover, the latter seems to

complement the former to the extent that relativity, as “radical phenomenality,”4

institutes an epistemological domain wherein “truth coincides with what is likely or

probable.”5 This can also be understood in a slightly different light through Jennifer

Richards’s appraisal of the Sophists, who see that “rhetoric is not a means to

communicate persuasively ‘truths’ discovered through philosophical enquiry.

Rather, it is a means to knowledge and understanding in the absence of a priori

truth.”6 Refiguring the prior problem of rhetoric to make a weaker argument seem

stronger than it is, we can instead appreciate this tactic to the extent that each

individual—in recognizing matters to be such-‐and-‐such and configurable through

language in such-‐and-‐such way, subject to the whim of composition—is tasked with

the challenge of presenting one’s argument in the strongest light and in so doing

shed the light of personal understanding onto and into a receptive audience.

Through grasping one’s own understanding and communicating it effectively one

expands and deepens the understanding of the hearer/reader.

3 Renato Barilli, Rhetoric (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), tr. Giuliana Menozzi, p. 4. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Rhetoric (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), p. 22.

6

The figure of Gorgias exemplifies, not the sort of measured suspicion of

Protagoras stemming from an admission of probabilistic nebulousness, but rather a

full thrust toward the antithetical, the “’speaking against,’ of antilogiae.”7 As Gorgias

asserts in On Not-Being, “Nothing exists; … even if it exists it is inapprehensible; …

even if it is apprehensible, still it is without a doubt incapable of being expressed or

explained”8—dissolving “ontology, epistemology, [and] logic”9 in succinct fashion.

While such sentiments are naturally inciting for one upholding the positive

inversions of these statements (e.g. Plato), Gorgias’s stance is ultimately one of

“emotional and passional power,”10 using the intoxicating11 aspect of language to

subvert intellectual capacity. By this emphasis, however, he skews the tripartite

spheres of rhetorical influence—docere (intellectual), movere (emotional), and

delectare (attentional)—toward movere to the detriment of docere. Without having

full recourse to the technicalities of Plato’s critique of sophistry in his Gorgias, one of

his salient criticisms arises internal to rhetoric as a discipline itself, insofar as any

practice of it which seeks pleasure and gratification while dismissing knowledge as

an end treads the line leading into outright deception—justifiable only by a

superficial view of the field. Which is to say, defense of one’s viewpoint—no matter

how idiosyncratic with respect to general opinion—needn’t veer into outright

manipulation of an audience for dishonest ends.

7 Barilli, p. 5. 8 The Older Sophists, p. 42; quoted in Barilli, ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Comparable to “farmacon, almost a drug” (Barilli, ibid.).

7

It’s in Phaedrus, however, that Plato allows the possibility of philosophical

credibility in rhetoric. While he hardly goes out of his way to explicitly extol the

virtues of rhetoric, he perhaps offers consolation as to what a philosophical rhetoric

might keep in mind. According to the Platonic Socrates of Gorgias, “the proper

function of rhetoric is self-‐denunciation,”12 which bears loose continuity with his

stance in Phaedrus. In arguing against the coldly formalized rhetoric of Lysias’s

approach to love, Socrates/Plato upholds the value of an “impassioned lover”

“because he is motivated, not by lust, but by a desire to know the ‘idea’ of the Good

which he sees represented in his beloved.”13 Despite the proficiency demonstrated

in the former formal approach, Socrates’s subsequent eloquence is “divine,” without

basis in either a memorized speech or a technical handbook, and thus establishes

Plato’s “distinction between good and bad rhetoric, or rather between eloquence

and rhetoric.”14 Plato goes yet further, giving his infamous argument against all

writing for the fact that it “atrophies memory,”15 with the corollary thought that

“only the reasoning process, represented in living speech or dialogue (logos), …

makes us truly ‘remember’ what and who we are.”16 Never going quite so far as to

discount the cognitive, affective, and technological benefits of writing as a whole,

these concerns will be picked up again in contemporary hermeneutical thought.

Rhetoric finds its explicit analytic credibility in Aristotle, understood by him

as an art (techne) of persuasion. It, moreover, is similar to then-‐developing

12 J. Richards, p. 27. 13 Ibid., p. 28. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 29. 16 Ibid.

8

conceptions of logic in its subsequent adaptations by succeeding thinkers—in the

Peripatetic school following Aristotle, rhetoric was understood in an instrumental

manner, being a method or methodology for achieving particular goals in civic fora.

The Stoics, on the other hand, recognized the suffusion of rhetoric across spheres of

life—just as they recognized the ubiquitous presence of logic in thought and

philosophy—and thus we see in Cicero and Quintillian the raising of rhetoric to a

formal system that acts as core to oratorical education.17 The Aristotelian

instrumentality of rhetoric, however narrow its scope, resulted in the dissection of

certain rhetorical tropes and techniques. After the manner of the Organon,

consisting of the six works that acted as the core logical corpus for centuries to

come, Aristotle’s Rhetoric recognizes a pattern of discourse comparable to the

logical syllogism—that of the enthymeme.

The syllogism could stand for brief description, if only to contextualize the

enthymeme. Consisting of two premises and a conclusion which necessarily follows

from those premises, with major, minor, and middle terms, the Aristotelian

syllogism provided the foundation for logical abstraction up until the pioneering

revitalization of deductive calculi by Frege in the late nineteenth century. Through

airtight inferential relations it was felt that the course of thought could be reliably

depicted so as to insure the retention of truth from certain givens to surmisable 17 Arguably, oration can be seen as just one form of instrumentality, and is thus collapsible to the narrow Peripatetic view of rhetoric; however, to the extent that all activity aims toward some end and thus requires instruments to those ends, the broader conception of rhetoric is warranted insofar as people lead social lives which require linguistic interaction with fellow opinionated beings. While the field and its exclusive notions might occupy an admittedly meager space in the grand epistemic canon, rhetoric might be construed as a “metadiscourse” (or as a hermeneutic) by which particular speech/linguistic acts are interpreted and understood.

9

realities, thus expanding the scope of knowledge. But as Sebastian Rödl notes in his

own sustained study of logical form, “the grammatical form of a thought cannot be

identified with the system of its deductive relations,”18 if only by the emptiness

(substance-‐lessness) inherent to abstract manipulation. The enthymeme, unlike the

syllogism which renders explicit all aspects of the argument, leaves out either a

premise or the conclusion and thus leaves it up to the audience/reader to fill it in by

their own judgment. An adroit rhetorician, however, would pose the argument in

such a way as to keenly insinuate the thought required for greatest impact, be it

rational or emotional. Hence a certain background in sociology and psychology

would prove instrumental to a rhetorician just as much immersion in the formalized

aspects of argumentation.

Beyond the device of the enthymeme is thus also the communicative staple of

connotation—that, no matter the degree of mastery, usage and tactful obscurity is

not without its recourse to topoi (‘places’ of general knowledge). Such a feature is

nowhere more obvious than in usage of the term ‘rhetoric’ itself; once understood as

a foundational aspect of education (via the Medieval university’s liberal arts

trivium) or public speaking, the term is now associated with specious sophistry,

purposefully arcane jargon, or even just plain nonsense. Usage over time inheres

such tones to the topos of meaning, called upon in particular contexts and reinforced

through repetition—so it is that terms become loaded, become memes that inspire

certain affects in one’s audience. This inflection requires a degree of social

consciousness and interpersonal perception, arguably innate and thus difficult to 18 Categories of the Temporal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), tr. Sibylle Salewski, p. 7.

10

teach, though it can be refined given exercise and gradual awareness. A certain

degree of acculturation is required in order to gauge audience and community

expectations and response, demonstrated in Wittgenstein’s shift in usage of ‘logic’ to

‘grammar’ during his years composing the Philosophical Investigations—given the

associations with Fregean deductive logic at that time, Wittgenstein sought to

distance himself from such connotation. A cognizance of circumstance pervades the

compositional proclivities of one self-‐conscious enough, or even just generally

conscious enough to heed popular insinuation.

Thus despite Aristotle’s figurative qualification19 of the enthymeme’s logical

void, there is an acknowledged introduction of instability into the act of speaking or

the process of argumentation which will be picked up in the revival of rhetoric in

the twentieth century, by a figure such as I. A. Richards. In The Philosophy of

Rhetoric, in which he hopes to establish rhetoric as “a study of misunderstanding20

and its remedies,”21 he is declaiming against those like the former Archbishop

Whately who, in his own rhetorical treatise, claimed that rhetoric “be taken not as

an Art of discourse but as the Art—that is to say, as a philosophic discipline aiming

at a master of the fundamental laws of the use of language,”22 only to provide

another catalog of prudential rules and shorthand heuristics for effective 19 Or possible quantification. 20 Cf. against Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, 4.112:

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

21 I. A. Richards, p. 3. 22 Ibid., p. 7.

11

persuasion. Richards traces this sort of rhetorical feint, or the conceptual basis for it,

to Aristotle, whose “failure to recognize the deeply ambiguous character of

language, and more specifically, to understand the nature of metaphor itself and its

omnipresence in language”23 [emphasis added] led to an excessively analytic, and

thus declarative approach. While in Poetics Aristotle does note the place of

metaphor as being exceptional, requiring an eye appraising of comparison, Richards

sees this as the origin of the underappraisal of metaphor as being “a sort of happy

extra trick,”24 given short shrift despite its immense importance.

Much of what I. A. Richards has to say of metaphor comes in response to

pernicious misconceptions endemic to the teaching of writing, speech, and language

as a whole, such as the “Proper Meaning Superstition”25 or the “Usage Doctrine,”26

both positing that there exist correct meanings to words that must be upheld in all

instances lest one fall into dismal confusion and indecency and resign oneself to

being a poor writer. Richards, however, would controvert this sentiment insofar as

he sees metaphor to be the “omnipresent principle of language,”27 by which we

would readily understand that signifiers (the words consisting of marks, being

symbols) are assigned multiple meanings across contexts and are the basis by which

a poetic or even simply figurative mode of expression is made possible—with brute

representation or correspondence being the most primitive form of figuration.

Polysemy, as the multiplicity of meaning, is thus rampant in ordinary usage, seen

23 J. Richards, p. 117. 24 I. A. Richards, p. 90. 25 Ibid., p. 11. 26 Ibid. p. 51. 27 Ibid., p. 92.

12

most especially in idioms, expressions, figures of speech, and turns of phrase

(‘hungry enough to eat a horse,’ ‘dead tired,’ ‘ice cold,’ ‘sorry to be tardy to the

party,’ to ‘turn a phrase’ itself, etc., etc.). What someone in a technical discipline—

requiring fixed words that are interchangeable between contexts without sacrificing

or altering any meaning—might loath has been celebrated and marveled at in the

arts and humanities, if only for the fact that such proliferation seems so tightly

woven into the fabric of human experience.

What has come to consummate the 2,500 year lineage of rhetoric as a

discipline, integrating as it does philosophic origins and tensions with functional

appraisals of communicative patterns and tropes, has been the emergence of

rhetoricality as a feature of discourse, thus breaking the once-‐insulating boundaries

that relegated rhetorical theory to formal oratory and civic public speaking. Starting

with I. A. Richards and picked up by structuralists/post-‐structuralists such as

Roland Barthes and Paul de Man, there is a drawing of attention “to rhetoric as a

metalanguage which takes as its object the epistemological instability of language,”

with rhetoric now defying the forced rigidity of an “ideological object.”28 Once acting

as integral tool in maintaining both educational and political structure of European

society, “Rhetoricality, by contrast, is bound to no specific set of institutions” and

“manifests the groundless, infinitely ramifying character of discourse in the modern

world.”29 It has become “something like the condition of our existence”30—a

scholarly estimation convergent with the very impetus lying behind the essay at 28 J. Richards, p. 131. 29 John Bender and David E. Wellbery, The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, p. 25; quoted in J. Richards, p. 131. 30 Ibid.

13

hand. By this aggrandizing venture out from the confines of historical rhetoric, the

discipline thus sheds the former pigeonholing of an art of persuasion into a domain

that can properly be called hermeneutic—interpretive at core, concerned with

understanding, expanding beyond speech into the text and life.

Hermeneutics

Latent31 to the prior section on rhetoric is the distinction between the

practical and the theoretical, to which ancient and Medieval thought lumped

rhetoric with the former and which recent modern thought has expanded it into the

latter. Hans-‐Georg Gadamer takes this division as a critical point in his essays

concerning the place of hermeneutics with respect to the natural sciences, where he

notes:

The oscillation of an expression like hermeneutics between a theoretical and a practical meaning is encountered elsewhere too. For example, we speak of logic or its lack in our day-‐to-‐day intercourse with our fellow human beings, and by this we are not at all referring to the special philosophical discipline of logic. The same holds true for the word rhetoric, by which we designate the teachable art of speaking, as well as the natural gift and its exercise.32

This “natural gift” was another point of criticism for Plato against rhetorical

practice, seen as a “knack”33 for oration that ultimately had no basis in knowledge

and thus defied a capacity for learning; the change of heart by Aristotle in regards to

this pedagogical point, however, ultimately hinges on the practical implications of

31 If only for the fact of not being rendered in explicit terms, or brought to narrative focus beyond tangential insinuation. 32 “Hermeneutics as a Practical and Theoretical Task,” in Reason in the Age of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), tr. Frederick G. Lawrence, p. 114. 33 J. Richards, p. 30.

14

rhetoric which stem from capacities for prohairesis (“‘preference’ and ‘prior

choice’”34) and phronesis (“practical reasonableness”35) in the human being.

To briefly detour to historical precedence, hermeneutics possesses at least a

surface isomorphism with respect to rhetoric, insofar as the formative methodology

of hermeneutics paralleled the notion of rhetorica docens: “a pedagogically

motivated network of critical terms, practical devices, prudential rules, and

semitheoretical formulations regarding a set of interrelated topics.”36 While the

topics of rhetoric concern things such as “psychology of audience” and “sociology of

opinion,”37 biblical and, later, legal hermeneutics concerned itself with reclamation

of original spiritual or linguistic meaning and coherency of text between fragment

and document, discourse and world. Gadamer, to a certain extent following from

Heidegger in this regard, makes the case that hermeneutics (at least as it has

developed into the twentieth century) is a field of practical importance rather than a

theoretical curiosity fixated on arcane discursive procedures and dry taxonomies.

Hermeneutics, devoted as it is to a study of “interpretation, explication,

translation, or even only with understanding,”38 appears all too liable to the pitfall of

a universally encompassing metadiscourse: that claims made under its auspices

escape falsification. Such a notion, directly imported from enquiry in the natural

sciences, takes on a different flavor in the context of the human sciences and, from

34 “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” in Reason…, p. 91. 35 “Hermeneutics as a Practical and Theoretical Task,” p. 115. 36 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 27. 37 Ibid. 38 “Hermeneutics as a Theoretical and Practical Task,” p. 111.

15

them, into human life. This descent of dissemination—admittedly simplified for

depiction—gives greater sense to the evolution of hermeneutics from a purely

theological, jurisprudential, or linguistic enterprise to a philosophical and

humanistic project. Gadamer notes,

Even Schleiermacher, the founder of the more recent development of hermeneutics into a general methodological doctrine of the Geisteswissenschaften [the human sciences], appeals emphatically to the idea that the art of understanding is required not only with respect to texts but also in one’s intercourse with one’s fellow human beings.39

It is a mediating discipline prone to universality, resonant with rhetoric to the

extent that one can recognize Aristotle’s Rhetoric as “present[ing] more a

philosophy of human life as determined by speech than a technical doctrine about

the art of speaking.”40 It is via the suffusion of interpretation that concerns with its

art, and the practice of that art, becomes paramount.

But it must be asked what the object, or purpose, of hermeneutical research

pursues, over and above the unlimited range of human affairs and artifacts. It’s

impetus lies precisely in the same motivation for a logical ur-‐tongue, a cipher-‐like

omnilingua, just as a heuristic system of rhetorical devices seeks to codify the

methods by which listeners lend credence and sympathy to an adept speaker. Unlike

logic, which takes a presumptive stance toward collapsing difference and variability

into univocality, a hermeneutic acknowledges polysemy and metaphor as primitives

in discursive practice.41 Without going so far as a boundless relativism, though, texts

39 Ibid. 40 Gadamer, ibid., p. 119. 41 Problems concerning polysemy in hermeneutics are taken up by Paul Ricouer in The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1974),

16

and events have their symbolic contexts according to grounds or origins—archai

(sing. arche). “Now interpretation refers not only to the explication of the actual

intention of a difficult text,” which one might presume to be hegemonic in a logical

or univocal system, but rather it “becomes an expression for getting behind the

surface phenomena and data.”42 Thus arises the viability of seemingly eccentric

philosophical modalities (expressive/rhetorical forms found in many Continental

thinkers), over and against the presumed authority of status quo, representational

systems (the ‘heterodox’ dominance of Analytic forms in English-‐language

philosophy); it is the capacity of poetry to exist in a realm conciliatory to science.

An excellent exercise in such uncovering, in a returning to the ground of

meaning, can be found in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art.”43 Of particular

note is his incisive account of historical modes of conceiving objecthood/thinghood:

that of subject-‐predicate, sense-‐data, and matter-‐form. Heidegger takes the

lattermost conception to be of greatest importance for his inquiry, if only for its use

in “all art theory and aesthetics.”44 It is a view which “appeals to the immediate view

with which the thing solicits us by its looks (eidos)”45; much of what inspires this

view, however, comes about via the human being’s intimate relationship to

“equipment,” being the objects of use and practicality that define identity and

station in the world, and thus conflates the status of useful objects with that of art

esp. “The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as Semantic Problem,” pp. 62-‐78. 42 “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” p. 100. 43 In Poetry, Language, Thought (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1971), tr. Albert Hofstadter, pp. 17-‐86. 44 Ibid., p. 27. 45 Ibid., p. 26.

17

objects. The view of the object as constituted by sense-‐data, famously discussed by

the modern empiricists, doesn’t quite meet the mark given its abstraction from life:

“We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises … we

hear the storm whistling in the chimney, … the three-‐motored plane, … the

Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkwagen.”46 This view of the thing as

“aistheton,” makes the object “press too hard upon us,”47 and is an “encroachment

on the thing-‐being of the being”48 as much as the notion of matter-‐form. The subject-‐

predicate relationship, taken from the substance-‐accident metaphysic, has a special

place with reference to logical schemata. Heidegger cheekily asks, “Who would have

the temerity to assail these simple fundamental relations between thing and

statement, between sentence structure and thing-‐structure?”49 The doubtful

veracity of this objective form, stemming from it being “as correct and demonstrable

in every case” as the prior two conceptions, deserves special examination for its

importance in analytic convention.

Thought as propositional, and thus logical discourse, naturally begins with

pre-‐given ideas and experiences. But even this distinction is derivative, according to

Heidegger; to distinguish between the thought and the event within which it is

situated, and thus only subsequently extricable from, is to theorize beyond the

immediate. He emphasizes the importance of what he refers to as the “fore-‐

46 Ibid., p. 25. 47 Ibid., p. 26. 48 Ibid., p. 29. 49 Ibid., p. 23.

18

structure of understanding,”50 being by its nature visceral and practically reflexive

(in the sense of coming by way of instinct, or second nature51). Much in the way that

an experienced craftsman doesn’t need to cognize every aspect of the process of his

crafting as he crafts, so too does the human being arrive at propositional

understanding (“assertion”) via this prior, immediate ground of experience. “Fore-‐

structure means, then, that human Dasein is characterized by an interpretive

tendency special to it that comes be-‐fore every statement— … always under threat

of being concealed by the fact that propositional judgments tend to take center

stage.”52 Being in the world53 is thus defined by its script-‐like quality—algorithmic,

patterned, or procedural—where a hermeneutic stance seeks to reveal or disclose

these patterns of thought and behavior such that they come to fuller appreciation

both to oneself and others. Whether this appreciation leads to modulation of activity

or is simply a perpetual task for understanding, as it were, is subject to contention.54

Hermeneutics, ultimately, is a task of translation; or better yet, transposition.

That is, through the process of interpretation a meaning is transmitted55 via an

50 Being and Time (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1962), trs. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, p. 192. 51 Or perhaps ‘first nature’ would be most appropriate. 52 Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), tr. Joel Weinsheimer, p. 93. 53 A phrase used generally here, not to be necessarily confused with Heidegger’s technical “Being-‐in-‐the-‐world.” 54 Heidegger, for one, seems to be of a mind that elicitation of authenticity has no causal relation to one’s capacity for conceiving one’s situation; the body and heart will do as it will, put poetically. 55 One must be weary of the Cartesian ‘container’ view of thought and understanding. As Heidegger explicitly reminds us, “Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, such as opinions or wishes, from the interior of one subject into the interior of another. Dasein-‐with is already essentially manifest in a co-‐state-‐of-‐mind and a co-‐understanding” (Being and Time, p. 205).

19

enlivening—a proposed transposing—into and becoming the understanding of the

audience. There is a necessary degree of reorganization that must take place,

obscuring and emphasizing according to both predisposition and contingent

realities. This is not to presuppose the supremacy, or even the importance of the

intended meaning, for dissociation of meaning from context would imply an

atomistic perspective rather than a holistic one which hermeneutics engenders.

Rather, to draw on Heidegger’s formulation in Being and Time of the “existential-‐

hermeneutical ‘as’,”56 there is an empathetic suggestion in the offering of one’s

position; that you, as a kindred hermeneutical being, might ‘try on’ the view as you

would travel to a new place or work at a new craft or hobby. While one comes from

an immutable, “factical” background, be it of ideas or experiences, one’s power to

project identity into the future allows for an expansion of self into understanding of

another and another’s situation.

An assertion calls for retort, however, lest it be met with silence and thus

implacable indifference. It’s in this proleptic quality, this exigency for dialectic or

conversation, that hermeneutics gains any traction as a field of ethical value. We

might say that latent to each proposition is the response—that each interpretation

is pregnant with another, an antithesis within the thesis. This response needn’t be a

negation or contradiction, by any means (though the negative often comes most

readily), but might rather come in the form of elaboration, as intuitive leap to

presupposition or implication. The leap to presupposition can be seen as That is, in being present (as the transcendental possibility of communication) there exists a primordial zone of traversal and appropriation across which sharing takes place and is implicit to. 56 Being and Time, p. 201.

20

transcendental (in that it is the premise by which the judgment is made possible),

while implication is deductive (in that it follows or is derivable from the judgment).

What is brought forth or disclosed in this process, though, is a further exposure of

the ground of interpretive capacity in its manifestation via linguisticality—that, to

paraphrase Lacan, language speaks through us as temporal beings and perpetuates

both the conflict and accord that basks in its own whims and dances. Tying back in

to Heidegger, there is a crucial sense in which “all art, as the letting happen of the

advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry”57; that “language itself,”

as a “projective saying”58 in which the world of experience discloses the brute and

incursive earth via a metaphorizing act of naming, “is poetry in the essential

sense.”59 There is here, then, the interweaving of rhetoricality with

hermeneuticity—a complementarity of critical stances by which reason achieves

greater lucidity, via history, theory, and practice, of its own machinations.

We might, lastly, want to call to mind another distinction of discursive stance,

neatly depicting the poles of rhetoric against logic or of hermeneutics against the

natural sciences, and that would be a distinction of suspicion against doubt. The

skeptical doubt of a scientist, for instance, takes debunking as a central task—the

inability to measure against established modes of thought and knowledge,

falsification extending beyond experimental spheres into the experiential (cognitive,

affective, and visceral) world—which, though essential when combating an

obstinate dogmatism that threatens well-‐being or just plain ol’ grounded

57 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 70. 58 Ibid., p. 71. 59 Ibid., p. 72.

21

equanimity, ultimately terrorizes a mind into docility before an (often presumed)

epistemic authority. In short, rather than empowering a mind to think for itself, it

offers weapons branded with the sigil of the cause that it tacitly imposes. The critical

suspicion of the artist, on the other hand—admittedly beyond the ken and pale of

most folk, requiring a forceful invitation and conducive disposition—seeks

ulteriority, assumptions and presumptions left unspoken and administered via

brute perpetration of ideology and philosophy alike.

What is of utmost value, though, is a route and process toward self-‐

understanding, and through that into understanding in general. Gadamer’s writes, in

speaking of Fichte’s idealistic system: “Construction, production, generation are

transcendental concepts describing the inner spontaneity of self-‐consciousness and

its self-‐unfolding. Only in this way may there be a real self-‐understanding on the

part of thought.”60 What is required is not so much a corrective episteme to the doxa

of what might appear natural, authoritative, or self-‐evident, but rather a paradoxa

that exposes and challenges the uncritical acceptance of opinion; that the

entertaining and devoted engagement with a question, to continue the ruminative

air of Heidegger, can be of a mood altogether removed from seeking a solution. I

would add to this, according with the stance of a hermeneutic of suspicion, that

destruction, sabotage, and polemic can also be the corrective lenses by which one

comes to recognize the error in one’s ways, while remaining aware of the positions

one endorses in doing so. Nosce te ipsum still holds weight.

60 “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” p. 103.

22

Concluding Remarks

Benjamin wrote in his follow-‐up to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction,” “[Mankind’s] self-‐alienation has reached such a degree that it can

experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”61 From

this steady and gradual (though occasionally explosive) process of dehumanization

we have wrought chaos upon the ecological order of our sole natural habitat—the

planet Earth, Gaia. One step in allaying the exponential destruction of our only

home, though admittedly meager in the grand scheme of social relations and power

dynamics, consists in the very project I’ve hoped to sketch in this essay through

revisiting authors lost to departmental constrictions and the inevitable erosive

erasure of time. More exactly, that in rendering patent (through rhetoric and

hermeneutics, on the level of speech and textual discourse) what is latent and,

arguably, unspeakable even, the process of understanding both abets and deceives

the “exigence of reason for unity”62; building and dismantling the edifice produced

by and honoring human thought.

Rather than a universal logic, however, which might seek to subjugate all

forms of understanding according to that same exigence for unity, what is required

is a patience for misunderstanding, for disentanglement of misplaced aggression via

conflict and confusion, a magnanimity of attitude and intellect that can both

compose itself according to inner principle and to outer reflection. In short, a

perennial ethic that has persisted since the dawn of written language, manifested in

61 In Illuminations (New York, NY: Schocken, 1969), p. 242. 62 Gadamer, “On the Philosophic Element in the Sciences and the Scientific Character of Philosophy,” in Reason…, p. 19.

23

iconic and iconoclastic figures of historical greatness as well as in the most

exuberant people we come across in our daily lives. It is a practice, a project,

captured in intuition and imagination, rather than inert symbol and atemporal

idolatry. Claude Levi-‐Strauss, of all people, recognized the dangers in crushing the

creative drive and will to proliferation, when he saw that,

the progressive welding together of humanity and the physical universe, whose great deterministic laws, instead of remaining remote and awe-‐inspiring, now use thought itself as an intermediary medium and are colonizing us on behalf of a silent world of which we have become the agents.63

In obeying the dictates of reason we’ve exceeded the wildest expectations in erasing

ourselves from the picture; first mentally and experientially, soon physically and

vitally. But only through living can understanding find its reference, only in

experience can truth come to light. For all the loose ingenuity a prose piece of this

nature—of a piece with a purely academic essay—might require, its spirit only

prevails for the time that you, and I, draw breath. Only time will tell if, and when,

this millennia-‐long experiment of civilization might end; until then, as Gandhi said,

we must be the change we hope to see in the world, and the first step begins with

understanding.

63 Claude Levi-‐Strauss, Tristes Tropique, p. 391.

On Speaking and Writing

Documents

Transcript of On Speaking and Writing