DISCUSSION STRING BEGINS HERE:

Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 10:21:27 -0400 (EDT)

From: Michael Hyde

Dear John and Other Distinguished Colleagues:

Here are some initial thoughts concerning the Gadamer quotation.

1. Let us keep in mind that the quotation comes from an essay celebrating and defending Heidegger's theory of "poetic" or "essential" thinking.

2. If one is going to critique the "social" implications of the quotation, then I hope one first demonstrates more than a second hand understanding of this theory. Gadamer also seems to ask for such courtesy in the essay, especially when defending Heidegger from people like Habermas (who is not mentioned explicitly).

3. Let us also keep in mind that Gadamer, although a very devoted fan of Heideggerian thinking, warns in the introduction to his TRUTH AND METHOD that what "philosophy" needs at the present time is not further inquiry into the question of Being, but instead practical applications that can advance the well-being of sensus communis.

4. Finally, we must keep in mind that (as far as I know) Gadamer's response to his warning in T&M has continued to be quite abstract and academic.

I trust I have not merely stated the obvious with these four points.

Michael Hyde

Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 18:37:51 -0400 (EDT)

From: John Arthos

Dear Michael & all,

Could I take a partial stab at your points 1 and 4?

Point 1 (thinking): Is it possible that Heidegger's movement away from philosophy toward thinking takes us a step closer to engagement, via Gadamer's 'formal indications'? Here's how:

Point 4 (abstract and academic): When Raymie McKerrow tried to invert the phrase "rhetorical criticism" to "critical rhetoric" (Central States, 1989), I think he was trying to encourage the drift of rhetorical scholarship from a second-order to a first-order practice. The critic as "inventor" is "more than an observer of the social scene" (101). Critic as performer is no longer an objective expert looking on, but directly engaged in the constitution of the body politic. This point is underlined when McKerrow contrasts Philip Wander's and Lentricchia's idea of praxis. McKerrow doesn't necessarily wish "academics to take to the streets as practicing revolutionaries" (Wander's perspective), but for them to become Foucault's "specific intellectuals," and McKerrow quotes Lentrichia's definition of 'practicing' scholar, "one whose radical work of transformation, whose fight against repression is carried on at the specific institutionial site where he [she] finds himself [herself] and on the terms of his [her] own expertise, on the terms inherent to his [her] own functioning as an intellectual" (108).

It seems to me that this still leaves "critical rhetoricians" doing second-order work, still, to use McKerrow's own language, acting as "readers of the social condition," still doing criticism. And I wonder if hermeneutics doesn't provide a way out of this almost unavoidably second-order attribute of criticism. Gadamer's version of Heidegger's "existential knowing" is formulated in the following way: "Interpretation doesn't occur as an activity in the course of life, but IS the FORM of human life" (from: A Ricoeur Reader). This lifts hermeneutic practice out of observer status by definition, and we don't have to play semantic games with the critical enterprise. Even though Gadamer's best writing on phronesis is abstract and theoretical, it lends itself to practice by establishing the proper framework for existential thinking.

John Arthos

Send a message to the listserver at arthos+gadamer@denison.edu.