DISCUSSION STRING BEGINS HERE:

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

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)

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

What follows are brief notes by panel members about topics they wish to bring to the roundtable at NCA. Please feel free to let their topics evoke a response to the listserve.

Craig Smith:

One of the points I hope to make about Gadamer is that he is highly derivative. I almost always consider him a secondary source on the points that he is making.

Michael Hyde:

I intend to key on the hermeneutical phenomenon of "acknowledgment." What would one's life be like if no one acknowledged your existence? I address this question in my new book, THE CALL OF CONSCIENCE (U. of South Carolina, Feb. 2001) and extend the examination in the book's companion volume (ACKNOWLEDGMENT: A PHILOSOPHICAL AND RHETORICAL INQUIRY, in progress). Gadamer on "acknowledgment" warrants both praise and blame.

I'd like to add to the possibilities for discussion, the still enormously suggestive, and still enormously ambiguous relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics in Gadamer's work. It never ceases to surprise me how frequently rhetoric pops up, especially when Gadamer is discussing the Greeks, and their importance to his thought. The following quote is from his "intellectual autobiography" at the beginning of Hahn's wonderful book on Gadamer in the Library of Living Philosophers series:

>From the Greeks one could learn that thinking in philosophy does not, in order to be responsible, have to adopt as system guiding the thought that there must be a final grounding for philosophy in a highest principle; on the contrary, it always stands under the guiding thought that it must be based on primordial world experience, achieved through the conceptual and intuitive power of the language in which we live. (9)

Notice he says that the "primordial world experience" is not ours for the having, but must be ACHIEVED, "through the conceptual and intuitive power of the language in which we live ( clearly rhetoric)." My question, which I think is also implicit in much of Gadamer's work, is HOW is understanding acheived through rhetoric. The understanding I'm referring to here is none other than the sort of "hermeneutical experience" that is the holy grail of philosophy, not only in Gadamer, but also in the Heidegger in the early twenties, where rhetoric is also featured very prominently.

John Arthos to Craig Smith:

I can't wait until November to address your provocative suggestion that Gadamer is primarily derivative. First, I want to agree with you, in the sense that what so often sounds original in Gadamer turns out to be refried beans. Gadamer has admitted as much, sometimes defensively - "to all those who are not ready for the work of reflection but can only regard one's research as 'positive' if something new is produced." I don't want to argue on behalf of refried beans, although I think they are unfairly maligned, but instead to suggest three ways in which Gadamer's work is innovative in regards to the question of engagement.

1. On the engagement and communication nexus, the intervention of Gadamer in hermeneutics is crucial. He continues to move the emphasis decisively from I to We, a move that Heidegger initiated but that needed to be brought forward. My sense is that Heidegger and Gadamer display an unmistakable inclination in opposite directions vis-a-vis community and self. They represent to me the two sides of Luther, who was temperamentally conflicted about community, finding it by a paradoxical movement inward - the community of God is a deferral of community, discovered in the soul thrust back upon itself. Ekhart's words evoke Heidegger's side of Luther's equivocation:

"…You must depart from all crowds and go back to the starting point, the core [of the soul] out of which you came. The crowds are the agents of the soul and their activities: memory, understanding, and will, in all their diversifications. You must leave them all: sense perception, imagination, and all that you discover in self or intend to do. After that, you may experience this birth-but otherwise not-believe me! He was not found among friends, nor relatives, nor among acquaintances. No. He is lost among these altogether."

Gadamer falls out on the opposite side of this, emphasizing solidarity and conversation. In continuing the movement away from subjectivity, both Cartesian and Romantic, Gadamer articulated a praxis much more grounded in a living, present community of dialogue. I think this makes him important to our field in his own right. His themes, at least their articulation, lend themselves more readily to legal and political theory, diplomacy, peace studies, etc.

(This relevance to the field is not necessarily all positive, since a naivete in Gadamer's position may be ours as well. His failure to grapple sufficiently with the distance between society and community encourages a too simple orientation to communication.)

2. Another thing Gadamer does differently that is important to communication and engagement in a world of incommensurate values is his effort to see how far hermeneutics can be secularized. The recent American scholarship on the early Heidegger (Van Buren, Sheehan, Christopher Smith, Caputo) is making increasingly clear what Gadamer said all along, that Heidegger was always searching for God. Much of the time Heidegger was reading primal Christianity back into the Presocratics, and what Gadamer tried to do, because of his allegiance and ground in Plato, was to reverse the procedure, and think Christianity and scholasticism from the side of the ancient Greeks. It is an open question whether he succeeded, and whether Luther is still prior, but he helps US trace the path of a hermeneutics that promotes a sense of appropriateness, phronesis, and judgment that can stand on its own. With Nietzsche always in the wings, I find Gadamer helpful in this regard.

3. Finally, doesn't Gadamer extend Heidegger's appropriation of Aristotle's phronesis to a new level? Isn't this why so much secondary literature concerns itself with the question of Gadamer and praxis? Gadamer himself makes this claim for himself: "What I taught above all was hermeneutic praxis." Certainly he doesn't take it far enough, but at least he has begun that conversation.

John Stewart (Oct. 8, 2000) wrote:

I'm not hooked very deeply by the "derivative or not?" question. Seems to me that responses to a question like that are completely dependent on whether one believes any idea(s) can be "new" or, perhaps, whether Bakhtin was right about every utterance being crucially responsive, and whether newness or innovation might not be an intrinsic good. I resonate with Gadamer's suggestion that an appropriate test is what an insight "comes to in its being worked out."

Currently I'm finding Gadamer most helpful when he writes about hermeneutics as practical philosophy, because I've been doing some reading, thinking, writing and teaching about practical theorizing. _Reason in the Age of Science_, _The Enigma of Health_, and_Praise of Theory_ all include some helpful materials. For what As contributions to efforts to mediate continuing disconnects between what are sometimes called different 'mind sets,' 'methodological orientations,' 'research preferences,' 'philosophies of inquiry,' or perhaps 'scholarly styles.' I'm surprised, for example, to hear "science and the humanities" still used in consequential and often divisive conversations on my campus, by folks who you think would appreciate more how problematic and misleading those terms are. I'm noticing how fruitful interdisciplinary research and teaching ideas often get side-tracked or scuttled when people get down to some of the 'short strokes' and come to believe that they may 'think too differently' to collaborate. I'm frustrated by the continuing need to reassure undergrads (especially) that the department's "theory" courses are not frightening and are useful. I'm disappointed at the continuing tendency to marginalize research with a clear practical or applied focus. I'm restive about the narrow way "practical theory" has gotten defined for the purposes of the upcoming special issue of COMM. THEORY on this topic. It seems to me that Gadamer offers some therapeutic ways to think about and engage in discourse around these ideas.

Right now I'm most focused on "control" as one distorting telos in a variety of enterprises with "scientific" identities--e.g., medicine and most interpersonal communication research. I'm also exploring how autobiography can function as the discursive bridge between 'theory and practice' conceived as separate.

Currently I'm putting together a fairly traditional convention paper on these matters. Is that what others are doing? Or will our exchange here--provided that it develops more--centrally influence what we do when we're f2f in Seattle next month?

John S.

John Arthos wrote in response to Allen Scult (10/30/00):

Allen,

Responding to your interest in Gadamer's rhetorical understanding. I happened to run across your CSSJ article on Perelman (1976), and it seemed to me that you were trying to work out the metaphor of the universal audience, asking the same question ("how?") that you are asking about Gadamer's rhetorical understanding. Am I right about this? For Perelman, the rhetor invents arguments to win the adherence of both a particular and a universal audience, the two working in tandem to test the validity of the argument. In your wonderful application of Perelman's theory through an imagined dialogue, your rhetor concludes that the universal audience is a "rhetorical conscience":

'Rhetor': It sounds like it's my conscience. It's in me, but it's not really mine.
'Perelman': Precisely; the universal audience is your rhetorical conscience.

Doesn't this work in a similar way to Gadamer's sensus communis? I've always been a bit confused about the transition in Truth and Method from the sense of tact and judgment in the early chapters to the kind of relational knowledge that is common to both Gadamer and Perelman. Does Gadamer, for instance, agree with Perelman that reason is not at all a faculty? Perelman is explicit: "But my conception of reason differs from the classical conception. I do not see it as a faculty in contrast to other faculties in man. I conceive of it as a privileged audience, the universal audience" (Perelman, 1967, p. 82). Reason IS the universal audience! Or is this just overstatement? And for Gadamer, does Bildung not nurture a faculty?

Now, for Perelman there is a judge, a philosopher on the one side, and an audience on the other. This at least suggests that a relational knowledge has a certain structure. Similarly for Gadamer, does his dialogue retain the Socratic structure of interlocutor and student, or are we heading toward a collective understanding, analogous to a collective memory (the conversation that we are) ? This is what trips me up. If understanding is subordinated to argumentation, who understands? Ricoeur says, "Who remembers, when one speaks of collective memory? Is it an abuse of language? Or a metaphor?" For Perelman, is it the judge or the audience who understands? For Gadamer, who is it the community who comes to an understanding, and what does that mean, in practical terms?

Allen Scult responded (10/30/00):

John graciously asked about a possible connection between Gadamer and my Perelman piece on the Universal Audience. One of the quandries that Perelman left us in ( much as did Plato) is: Can genuine, truth-seeking, taking -account- of -the- other rhetoric be somehow practiced within the traditional rhetorical forms of the speaker-audience relationship, or does it require some other form which is explicitily dialogical?

And, if the truth be told, aren't the so called dialogical, conversational forms we have come up with ( including Platonic dialogue) really feeble attempts to escape the brute reality of the rhetorical situation, especially its hierarchical dynamics of power? One of us is presumed ( presumes) to know in ways that the other does not, and the "dialogue" proceeds accordingly. The difference is in the way we understand the formation of the heierarchy-- how we should properly construct it. I see that as both a hermeneutical and rhetorical question combined.

I mean to suggest that discourse has an essentially hierarchical structure, constructed by the participants, that there is a way to construct the hierarchy that is most condusive to understanding, and I will argue that Gadamer would agree with me.

I am not sure of the format I want to use to argue that, but I'll know it when I see it.

MICHAEL HYDE to JOHN ARTHOS:

John: I must take the liberty of jumping in here. My intention is to remind us of a forgotten controversy. Writing to Allen you quote all these wonderful and kind words from Gadamer. But where does he ever take the time to bring his philosophical musings to the "real" world where they can be tested out in a well-developed case study that offers more than a reading, for example, of Plato or Aristotle. All of this theory is making this Jewish rhetorical critic a bit ill.

ALLEN SCULT to MICHAEL H:

Dearest Michael,

Gadamer doesn't do "theory," he does philosophy. Philosophy isn't written to be "tested in case studies," but to be thought. As a thinker, Gadamer has given us a great gift in his fusion of the contemporary philosophical horizon with Plato.

Dearest, Dearest Allen:

Well, it looks like that you and I are once again going to have a "loving struggle" (Jaspers) at NCA. Given my great respect for you as a calm and openminded soul (who still continues to have your head too far up Heidegger's butt), I want to inform you that I will take issue with your false distinction between theory and philosophy by turning to the hermeneutical notion of "acknowledgment" (via both Heidegger and Gadamer) and what I understand it requires when doing philosophy/theory and, of course, rhetorical criticism.

[ALLEN SCULT asked for the citation from Heidegger]

MICHAEL HYDE wrote to ALLEN SCULT:

In the "Letter on Humanism" (BASIC WRITINGS), Heidegger writes: "Every affirmation [of Being] consists in acknowledgment. Acknowledgment lets that toward which it goes come toward it" (p. 137). In other words, acknowledgment is the very thing that is going on when the phenomenologist engages in what Heidegger in various works (e.g., DISCOURSE ON THINKING; WHAT IS CALLED THINKING) terms the "releasement" of "essential thinking": "letting beings be" what they are (that is, how they actually "disclose" themselves in their presencing). Acknowledgment, in other words, is an act that "opens" one to the subject matter at hand, whereby, as Heidegger puts it, one answers the call of Being in a moment of "thanks." Remember, for Heidegger, "truth" is the disclosing or opening of what is. This way of being attuned to things ("openness") is the sine qua non of Gadamer's theory (T&M) of "hermeneutical conversation" whereby the participants "are less the leaders than the led." Acknowledgment is an ethical act, a way of openning up and bringing about a "dwelling place" (ethos) where collaborative deliberation might improve judgment. Acknowledgment is a life-giving gift: What would one's life be like if no one acknowledged his/her existence. I hope all this makes sense and is helpful. I discuss the matters in much depth in my book and in a number of other "in press" publications. My comments for our panel are drawn from these publications.

JOHN STEWART wrote:

> I hope the combatants (is this the right term?) will have purused > Gadamer's "Praise of Theory" so there's a fresh memory of some of what > *he* says about theory and philosophy, and that our ever-passionate > colleague Michael will also have looked at G's _The Enigma of Health_ to > see if he can find, *not* a "case study" but a clear engagement with some > "practical," "applied," "real world problems" that I know have been of > interest to Michael, too. In "Theory, Technology, Praxis," for example, G > has at least a bit to say about medical diagnoses and treatments, > especially as an example of "the relationship between theory and > practice." In addition, a PhD student of mine in nursing just told me > today that G's point about medical intervention being, not curative in an > instrumental way, but "an attempt to restore an equilibrium that has been > disturbed" (p. 36) echoes what Florence Nightingale insisted, > and Florence was certainly no ivory-tower philosophical hermeneut.

ALLEN wrote to JOHN S:

"Combatants" is NOT the right term when adhering to Jaspers' notion of "loving struggle." Also: Your citations are, of course, wise and important and, hence, your point is well taken. Gadamer (certainly much more than Heidegger)is aware of Cicero's argument against philosophy; hence G's introduction in T&M that philosophy must return to the world of everyday praxis to justify its theoretical (theoria: seeing; vision) take on matters. And when G attempts to do this in his writings his philosophical jargon is more relevant. But the extent of Gadamer's practical turn is, at least for me, too little and timid. Perhaps if he took rhetorical criticism more seriously, he wouldn't slight rhetoric the way he does in his ongoing debate with Derrida: The art of rhetoric "is that which is other than the factical matter of our propositions," "that which possesses the purely operational and ritual function of exchange through speaking, whether in oral or written form," and thus a "pseudotext" that "is devoid of meaning." ("Text and Interpretation" in DIALOGUE AND DECONSTRUCTION: THE GADAMER-DERRIDA ENCOUNTER). Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics certainly has application to such concerns as health, ethics, and related concerns, but if this application is to be really meaningful, it needs to pay more careful and consistent attention to the practical matters it is talking (musing) about.

JOHN A wrote to MICHAEL HYDE:

Gadamer relates somewhere that when he was teaching at Boston College in the 1980s, the auditorium would be filled to overflowing for his lectures, but few came from the philosophy department; enthusiasm came from the political science departments, medical, history, psychology, and religion students. I think people are drawn to him because hermeneutics lends itself so easily to application. I found this to be the case last year when I was drawn into the process of institutional assessment at my former university. The assessment methodology had obviously been drawn from a business model inspired by corporate gurus like Peter Drucker. You may have experienced something like MBO (Management by objectives), which works as described by Tony Raia using the following four steps: (1) the formulation of clear, concise statements of objectives; (2) the development of realistic action plans for their attainment; (3) the systematic monitoring and measuring of performance and achievement; and (4) the taking of the corrective actions necessary to achieve the planned results. From my perspective, watching the process unfold, this sort methodology was seriously flawed when brought into a university enterprise, and I saw how useful it would have been to remodel the approach along hermeneutic lines. I was small cheese in a big boat coming too late to the party, so this wasn't going to happen, but you get my point. What impressed me at the time was how suggestive hermeneutics was for this situation. At the same time, and for the same reasons, I think we have to get the theory part right, or else we'll run aground. Now it may be that we should be doing more of both theory and practice at the same time, adjusting one to the other, learning from the interaction. I remember this argument some years ago in the field of communication with regards to theory and criticism. Scott, Cherwitz and others were accused of doing too much theory and we were all encouraged to do more criticism. It was a healthy admonishment. But I don't think we have to fault Gadamer; just go about the business of application.

John, I've used MBO to run several Senate campaigns. It works very, very well using poll data for one of the assessment tools.

JOHN A. wrote to CRAIG S:

That might actually be a good comparison. A Senate campaign, although it has practices and traditions, is an ad hoc effort that has a clear beginning and ending point, from staffing to office space to budget to campaign season. A university has layers of tradition and history extending back and forward, and the question there is, at what point and how do you enter the conversation -- it's the hermeneutic circle.

JOHN S wrote to JOHN A:

> I may be mis-"hearing," John, but I hear in your post the very > understanding of theory and practice that Gadamer worked hard to > counter. As I understand his perspective, it would be incoherent to > accuse someone (seriously) of being "too theoretical." Theorizing is > always already practic(ing). A line from the paper I'm bringing to our > panel is, ". . .theory is fundamentally articulated practice or > practice-made-articulate. It is practice rendered linguistically, > practice embodied in discourse, practice given linguistic wings, practice > granted speech." So while I agree that G's views could clearly have > improved the university process you were part of, I'd have a different > view, I think, of how and why. >

ALLEN wrote:

This is getting interesting!

I think it was Weinsheimer in his Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory who said that philosophical hermeneutics as Gadamar "theorized" it is marked by its "uselessness." I've always understood this to really mean use-ful in the most philosophical sense; that is by not being ideologically driven by the politics of application. Philososophy at its best is characterized by its integrity, its commitment to the life of the mind as indeed being an intellectual and spiritual displine which stands on its own ( at least) two feet, without having to answer to the trends of poltical correctness.. I think Gadamer needs to be read as standing firmly in that tradition.

In short, I think I agree with John Stewart, and would like very much to discuss the quote from his paper as one of the "texts" we take account of in our discussion of this issue. If we could also have some citations from In Praise of Theory, from Michael on acknowledgement, and from other whose referencing I might have overlooked, I can begin to look forward to Sunday morning.

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