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By Michael J. Hyde |
Jan 1, 2008
refers to the essential capacity of human beings to understand and give expression to the world in meaningful ways. The term also refers to the study of the methodological principles and rules that govern acts of interpretive understanding and the compositions they produce (from texts and works of art to the intersubjective domains of meaning that inform and guide the interpersonal dynamics of a given culture). This second understanding of hermeneutics presupposes its first and more existential function. One cannot study a composition unless it already exists in some form. As the anthropologist Clifford
Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, 1973) notes, A good interpretation of anything—a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society—takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation (p. 19).To speak of the heart of some matter is to refer to its essential or most vital part(s), that which enables it to be what it is. A hermeneutical investigation of a given composition, in other words, is directed toward getting at the truth of the composition. The oldest and perhaps best-known application of hermeneutics—biblical interpretation or the exegesis of Scripture—provides a classic example of what this task entails.
Biblical Hermeneutics
The simple truth in question is that of God's Word, which—as in the King James Bible—was uttered in the begining when God created the heaven and the earth (Gn. 1.1). With the tradition of Jewish mysticism—Kabbalah—which originated in the late twelfth century, one is taught, however, that the common translation of the first line of Genesis is, in fact, a mistranslation, for the actual words in Hebrew can be read another way: With a beginning, [It] created God (Elohim), the heavens and the earth. The truth of God is more than the story that unfolds throughout the Old and New Testaments. His is the Word, ours the paraphrase, writes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (God in Search of Man, New York, 1955, p. 160). And with this Word—the source from out of which the potential to begin was first created—we are given something that can be understood (paraphrased) symbolically as God, but whose truth transcends, as an ongoing process, even the richest and most reverent meaning of this word. Infinity is the term commonly associated with the meaning of this process. For the Kabbalist, however, the process, referred to as Ein Sof, is not restricted by infinity; rather It created it. Commenting on the hermeneutical problem involved here, Rabbi David Cooper (God Is a Verb, New York, 1997) remarks: Indeed, we have suddenly run out of words because the idea of ‘trans-infinite’ is a logical absurdity. What can go beyond infinity. This is Ein Sof (p. 67).With this example of biblical hermeneutics, one sees how the activity of interpretative understanding may also be conceived as a matter of translating, explaining, and asserting or saying. These specific functions of hermeneutical analysis have their etymological roots in the Greek verb hermneuein (to interpret) and the noun hermneia (interpretation). In ancient Greek mythology, it is the wing-footed messenger god, Hermes, who is credited with the initial enactment of these functions, whereby the words of the gods are communicated in a form that human intelligence can comprehend. Commenting on this Hermes process, Richard Palmer (Hermeneutics, Evanston, Ill., 1969), further clarifies the nature of hermeneutics when he notes that with this process something foreign, strange, separated in time, space, or experience is made familiar, present, comprehensible; something requiring representation, explanation, or translation is somehow ‘brought to understanding’—is ‘interpreted’ (p. 14).Especially in the case of biblical hermeneutics, one receives instruction in how the process of interpretation is made possible by the human capacity for awe, which is the cardinal attitude stressed in the Old Testament; and with this particular way of experiencing the world a person is drawn toward the heart of some matter of concern. Awe is evoked not in moments of calculation but rather in moments of being open to and in rapport with the truth of what one is witnessing. In a moment of awe, one's relationship to the world is that of respecting beings by letting them be what they are. The moment is holy, for now the manner in which one experiences the presence of things is most like the saying that first acknowledged life and called it into being: And God said, Let there be light (Gn. 1.3). In moments of awe, things speak in mysterious ways. The experience is humbling. It is a time of wonder, of finding oneself in a place for acquiring wisdom. According to Rabbi Heschel: There is only one way to wisdom: awe. Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you. The loss of awe is the great block to insight (p. 78). Caught up in wonder and awe, we are in the state of being asked, the state where one is addressed and acknowledged (Where art thou Gn. 3.89), where one is thereby given the opportunity to respond and be accountable (God said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am Gn. 22.1), and where one's capacity for moral feeling is called forth and directed (And now what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear thy Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart (Dt. 10.12).Biblical hermeneutics stresses the moral quality of what it is doing as it translates, explains, and expresses the awesome and wonderous nature of the Word. As just noted, this quality of interpretive understanding is related to the heart, which is a gift: I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord (Jr. 24.7). In the Old Testament, the use of the term heart is generally associated by rabbinic scholars with moral consciousness or conscience and the emotions such as fear, guilt, joy, and love that oftentimes come with it. In returning God's favor of acknowledgment, we ought to be, at the very least, conscientious as we try to know together (Gk. sun-eidsis; Lat. conscientia) with God and others all that is right, true, good, and just. In the New Testament, this heartfelt way of knowing is emphasized by the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 810) when discussing how people with whom we disagree should still be treated with tolerance and patience as ways to reform.Notice then that with biblical hermeneutics, the interpretive challenge of getting to the heart of the matter is essentially a matter of the heart (or conscience)—that gift of moral consciousness that enables us to remain open to, such that we can judge fairly, the goodness of all that stands before us. Made as it is by a creature who is mortal, however, such judgment is not infallible; its paraphrase may be utterly mistaken because of cultural and psychological influences (The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it Jr. 17.9). The gift that enables us to be awestruck by all that we may witness is ever in need of instruction. In both Judaism and Christianity, this educational task gives rise to the hermeneutical enterprise of casuistry, which is specifically concerned with casus conscientiae or cases of conscience. [See Casuistry.] In their extensive treatment of the topic (The Abuse of Casuistry, Berkeley, 1988), Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin note that the goal of casuistry is to register descriptions of moral behavior in which moral precepts and the details of action are looked at together in order to determine how a person, concerned to act rightly, should make a judgement of conscience in a specific kind of situation. Casuistry thus exhibits genealogical links to the Aristotelian tradition of practical reasoning (phronsis). [See Phronsis.] Hence, in any of its cases of conscience one expects to see ‘rhetorical’ analyses whose powers of persuasion [depend] not merely on their intrinsic content but also on the circumstances in which they [are] put forward: for example, on being advanced by ‘people of good judgment’ (phronimoi), and on finding ‘reasonable and understanding hearers’ (p. 257).Hermeneutics and Rhetoric
The paraphrase of the Word (as seen in the parables of the New Testament, for example) admits the practice of rhetoric into the hermeneutical process. In his discussion of the relationship between these two arts, the philologist and founder of modern hermeneutic theory, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 -- 1834) (Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, Missoula, Mont., 1997, p. 97), points out that hermeneutics at once depends upon and presupposes composition, whether spoken or written. Schleiermacher associates the composition of a text with the art of presentation (rhetoric), an art that enables the author to explicate his or her subject matter so that it may be understood by others. Hence, Schleiermacher maintains that hermeneutics and rhetoric are intimately related in that every act of understanding is the reverse side of an act of speaking [or writing], and one must grasp the thinking that underlies a given statement (p. 97).The hermeneutical task being emphasized here defines a fundamental goal of Schleiermacher's theory of interpretive understanding. In order to gain the fullest access to the intended meaning in a given text, the reader must attempt to reconstruct and reexperience the distinctive mental processes that were at work in its composition. Schleiermacher points to the author's particular style as a major source of evidence for comprehending these processes: Thoughts and language are interwined, and an author's distinctive way of treating the subject is manifested by his organization of his material and by his use of language (pp. 148149). An appreciation of the rhetorical competence that informs the text is therefore needed by the interpreter.Adhering to Scheiermacher's take on the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric, one might wonder whether there was rhetorical competence at work when With a beginning, [It] created God, the heavens and the earth. If so, then anyone who attempts a paraphrase of Its Word should be seen as a type of rhetorical critic. With Schleiermacher, however, one must be careful in advancing this ambiguous claim. Rhetorical criticism is naturally an effort in rhetorical competence: the critic is involved in the process of crafting a composition that is intended to be persuasive but which is also devoted to cultivating judgment and practical wisdom in others. In contrast, Schleiermacher maintains that hermeneutics, which he sought to elevate to the art of a scholarly discipline, is basically a philosophical endeavor; it deals only with the art of understanding, not with the [interpreter's] presentation of what has been understood (p. 96). Yet, as Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (The Hermeneutics Reader, New York, 1990) notes, the problem here is that by excluding from its agenda the element of presentation, hermeneutics cannot fulfill the task that Schleiermacher envisions. For the art of the philologist consists largely in generally accepted procedures, assumptions, verbal strategies, an institutionalized body of knowledge and the tacit agreement on standards for hermeneutic competence. The presentation of one's understanding is an integral part of the art in question (p. 12). Indeed, the art of understanding, dedicated as it is to advancing the hermeneutic competence of those interested in being part of its scholarly enterprise, must itself employ the practice of rhetoric to disclose clearly and to justify any truth claim regarding the authorial intentions of a given text. Convincing and persuading, writes Hans-Georg Gadamer (Philosophical Hermeneutics [PH], Berkeley, 1976), are obviously as much the aim and measure of understanding and interpretation as they are the aim and measure of the art of oration and persuasion (p. 24).In its relation with the art of understanding, rhetorical competence must be acknowledged as something more than an object of study, something more than a passageway of stylistic signposts directing the reader back to the subjective confines of an author's thought. Of course, rhetorical competence can include a concern with the author's subjective thought; but Schleiermacher's exclusive focus on this goes against the grain of the rhetorical intentionality that is at work in the text and that, as aimed by the author, is directed toward the other as hearer, reader, and audience. In short, the rhetorical competence that informs a text leads hermeneutics in the direction it must go to reach out to and engage others so that its declared understanding of a particular subject matter can be shared, agreed with, or disputed. This is how hermeneutics achieves practical significance: by returning, with the help of rhetoric, from the workings of the mind to the everyday world of situated, practical concerns.Audience Reception and Response
The whole enterprise of hermeneutics—from the interpretive understanding that is needed to compose and present a work of art to the interpretive understanding that is needed to compose and present a critical response to the work—is a rhetorical process of meaning formation that would be impossible without the active participation of audiences. Hans Robert Jauss (Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Minneapolis, 1982) emphasizes this point when he notes that: In the triangle of author, work, and public, the last is no passive part, no chain of mere reactions, but rather itself an energy formative of history. For it is only through the process of its mediation that the work enters into the changing horizon-of-experience of a continuity in which the perpetual inversion occurs from simple reception to critical understanding, from passive to active reception, from recognized aesthetic norms to a new production that surpasses them. (p. 19) Implied in Jauss's assessment here—especially as it emphasizes the hermeneutic phenomenon of perpetual inversion—is a requirement of interpretive and rhetorical competence on the part of those audience members who are attempting to form a critical understanding of a work of art. According to Barbara Herrnstein Smith (On the Margins of Discourse, Chicago, 1978), such competence provides a way for works to endure as something other than vivid historical artifacts in that it enables one to comprehend how works serve as metaphors and parables of an independent future—that is, how they continue to have meanings independent of the particular context that occasioned their composition, which will inevitably include meanings that the author did not intend and could not have intended to convey (p. 151). Furthermore, the competence being emphasized here would be at work whenever an audience was engaged in the critical task of determining whether or not a new production had surpassed recognized and accepted norms and, in turn, whether or not the aesthetic and sociopolitical implications of the new production warranted any respect and allegiance. [See Reception theory.]The specific factor in the hermeneutical and rhetorical process of meaning formation that keeps a work alive is that of the hearer, reader, and audience. With the lessons of biblical hermeneutics in mind, one might think of the interaction here as having something of a spiritual nature. Seeking the life-giving gift of acknowledgment, the author's work calls out Where art thou and awaits a response (Here I am!) from those who are interested and competent enough to keep the conversation going about the meaning and significance of the pertinent issue(s) at hand. A work without a receptive audience is a work whose truth remains mute. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863) provides a classic example of this point. With this address, delivered as it was within a situation fraught with social, political, and economic problems and filled with immense heartbreak over the loss of life, Lincoln initially emerged as rhetorical failure in the pragmatic and immediate sense. In the long run, however, we have come to know better: with this masterpiece of rhetorical competence that, according to Gary Wills (Lincoln at Gettysburg, New York, 1992) remade America as it set forth a revolution in thought and speech, we witness a work of art whose distinctive and appropriate use of grammer, syntax, signs, tempo, topics, figures, tropes, emotion, narrative, and argument itself creates a dwelling place or character (thos), of eulogized time and space, an opening in the midst of immense suffering where there is still hope to be found as we acknowledge the devotion and courage not of individuals dressed in blue or gray but, as Lincoln tells us, of those brave men, living and dead, who struggled here and who would have us realize that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. The form and content of Lincoln's Address are inextricably bound together in a rhetorical disclosure of conscience that calls for assistance in building a common thos—dwelling place, character, ethic—for the nation. [See thos.] The Gettysburg Address is rationally designed and arranged so to have us acknowledge and know together (conscientia) something of the truth of being-with-and-for others, of feeling at home in their company, and of treating them in a just and moral way. In short, and in hermeneutical terms, to dwell with Lincoln at Gettysburg is to learn how important it is to have a heart that is open to the world and, hence, to the experience of wonder and awe that shows itself in acts of commitment, courage, and sacrifice. Further, might it be said that with such an interpretive reading of the Gettysburg Address, one is getting at the heart of its being, its truth, its genuine meaning and significance This might also explain why the Address has become a rhetorical touchstone: in speaking as it does about a time and place wherein wounded humanity begged for relief and wherein such relief called for the medicaments of a variety of healing emotions and virtues that are known to make human beings feel and do good, the Address offers a fitting response to a situation of crisis (war and its many horrible consequences). Perhaps the Gettysburg Address remains alive today because its hermeneuticalrhetoricalmoral message is essential to the well-being of a public who, in being able to understand its teachings and rejoice in putting them into practice, continues to be receptive to the message's appeal and, hence, to its meaning and significance.Meaning, Significance, and the Hermeneutical Situation
In speaking about the hermeneutical and rhetorical relationship that exists between the author's work and present and forthcoming audiences, I have continued to employ the phrase meaning and significance as a way of explaining how it is that the work's truth is able to endure over time. In Validity in Interpretation (VI, New Haven, 1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (AI, Chicago, 1978), E. D. Hirsch, Jr., makes much of the difference between those two major terms. Meaning, writes Hirsch, is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable (VI, p. 8). Only by keeping this distinction in mind, argues Hirsch, can one hope to offer a valid interpretation of a given text. Validity requires a norm—a meaning that is stable and determinate no matter how broad its range of implication and application. A stable and determinate meaning requires an author's determining willAll valid interpretation of every sort is founded on the re-cognition of what an author meant (VI, p. 126). Or to put it another way: If an interpreter did not conceive a text's meaning to be there as an occasion for contemplation or application, he would have nothing to think or talk about. Its thereness, its self-identity from one moment to the next allows it to be contemplated. Thus, while meaning is a principle of stability in an interpretation, significance embraces a principle of change (AI, p. 80).What was said above about the meaning and significance of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is consistent with Hirsch's directives. Rhetorical critics generally agree that this short but robust and revolutionary Address was intended to be a call of conscience directed toward the uniting of the nation and encouraging its moral integrity and growth. The obviousness of this meaning required temporal distance from a blood-soaked and haunting battlefield in order to rise above the blinding prejudices of the day such that Lincoln's determining will could be properly identified. Lincoln addressed a particular situation with a rhetorical strategy that accommodated cultural differences and directed people to think about humankind in more universal terms. He spoke not only to the actual consciousness of his immediate audience but also to the potential consciousness of forthcoming generations who, with continuing experience and education, could develop the practical wisdom and interpretive competence that is needed to prevent, or at least heal, the horrible wounds of war. Hence, the applicability (significance) of the meaning of Lincoln's Address: it continues to speak and thus to have something to say to people who have yet to overcome completely their violent tendencies but who nevertheless have the hermeneutical, rhetorical, and moral capacities to understand and develop a feeling for the importance of cultivating unity and peace.Although the Gettysburg Address is a text that can help illustrate Hirsch's take on the relationship between meaning, significance, and the validity of interpretation, I suspect that he nevertheless would object to the way I phrased the last point. For, according to Hirsch, It is natural to speak not of what a text says, but of what an author means, and this more natural locution is the more accurate one (VI, p. 244; emphasis added). This claim reflects Hirsch's opposition to the program of philosophical hermeneutics that is rooted in the works of such twentieth-century philosophers as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. This program advocates a theory of meaning that is not confined to the intentions of an author and that stresses how any act of interpretive understanding unfolds within a hermeneutical situation where texts do, in fact, speak to those who are willing to remain open to what these texts have to say.Unlike Hirsch, whose appreciation of hermeneutics reflects the philologist's methodological interest in validity, Heidegger (Being and Time [BT], New York, 1962) emphasizes the term's more primordial and existential association with the essential capacity of human beings to understand and give expression to the world in meaningful ways. Heidegger's ontological assessment of this event of interpretive understanding unfolds as an answer to a question: what is the meaning, the truth, of Being For Heidegger, Being refers not merely to a thing but rather to the coming to presence of that which is. Being is more of a verb (to be) than it is a noun (a name for things: for example, that thing called a book); it is active, not static. For something to be means for it to be revealed, disclosed, made manifest—time and again. This is Being's way, that which must be thought through as much as possible so as to come to a genuine understanding of its meaning and truth, of how the world presents itself to human consciousness, with its capacity for interpretive understanding.Heidegger's philosophy, from beginning to end, unfolds as a hermeneutic discourse on Being. He initiates his project by offering a phenomenology of human existence. Phenomenology is a way of thinking devoted to interpreting, analyzing, and describing how the immediate content of experience actually presents itself. It seeks to disclose with demonstrative precision the appearing or presencing of some phenomenon, to let that which shows itself [phainesthai] be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself (p. 58). Phenomenology, in other words, attempts to generate a discourse that is especially attuned to the way in which some phenomenon happens to how it reveals or manifests itself within the temporal horizon of human understanding. The discourse of phenomenology assumes the task of disclosing a phenomenon's own disclosure, its being and truth. It may thus be said that phenomenology is a truth-telling activity; for as Heidegger points out in his discussion of the matter, truth happens first and foremost as a disclosing of the world, as a revealing or uncovering of the givenness of something that is perceived to be (pp. 256273).What Heidegger is referring to here is not the truth that may be disclosed in some verbal judgment (The sky is blue), in some epistemic correspondence of some reified proposition with some equally reified state of affairs. The truth of such as disclosure presupposes a more original happening of truth, a more original instance of disclosing: the actual presencing of that which shows itself and thus gives itself for thought and understanding. This is the truth (of Being) that Heidegger is after; his phenomenology is directed toward a hermeneutic assessment of how this primordial showing and giving take place. Heidegger comes to describe this task as requiring one to listen to the call of Being. Moreover, he tells us that in order to do this [t]he point is not to listen to a series of propositions, but rather to follow the movement of showing (On Time and Being, New York, 1972, p. 2). This may sound a bit strange. How is it that this showing callsHermeneutic phenomenology goes about telling the truth by letting-something-be-seen with its discourse. Heidegger (On the Way to Language, New York, 1971) identifies such a disclosing or evocative use of discourse with what he defines as the essential being of language (logos): its saying power, its capacity to speak by pointing to and showing us something (pp. 122124). Language speaks, insists Heidegger, and it does so especially in those discourses that warrant praise for being revelatory and perhaps even awe-inspiring because of the way in which they call forth and disclose their subject matter, thereby enabling us to better our understanding and appreciation of what is being talked about. So, for example, in order to understand and appreciate what Lincoln is trying to tell us with his Gettysburg Address (a most evocative discourse, to be sure), we must listen not only to him (which of course we can no longer do) but also to the power of his language as it displays a capacity for making manifest certain matters of importance, for saying something to us by showing us what this something is thought to be. If the Gettysburg Address is to speak to us in a truthful manner, this, at the very least, is what it must do: through an act of saying, of showing, it must give us something to understand. Heidegger reminds us that the oldest word for saying is logos: Saying which, in showing, lets beings appear in their ‘it is’ (p. 155; BT, p. 56). The saying power of language is what enables any discourse to give expression to things that call for attention. Heidegger further reminds us that the word for saying is also the word for Being (logos). Indeed, Being is constantly disclosing and showing itself in how things are, in the presencing of all that lies before us, in the circumstances of life that call for thought. The truth of Being is a saying, a showing, a phenomenon that gives itself for understanding. This is what Heidegger is referring to when he speaks of the call of Being: that primordial saying whose showing is thought provoking. And this is why Heidegger tells us that if we are to listen attentively to this call, we must follow the movement of showing so as to let whatever concerns us speak for itself. [See Logos.]Heidegger hears and answers the call differently than Hirsch does, who, as noted above, restricts hermeneutics to the issue of validity: determining the original and stable verbal meaning intended by an author. For Heidegger, however, the hermeneutical situation that is present whenever one tries to uncover such willed meaning is more complex than acknowledged by defenders of objectivity and validity. As it emerges and takes form in the world of everyday concerns, meaning is not something that is simply willed and intended by some author; rather, any speech act operates in an already established realm of intersubjective understanding that speaks of what things are according to the established points of view and prejudices that are operating at the time and that constitute the tradition of the time and that constitute the tradition of the author's culture. Moreover, as Ricoeur (Interpretation Theory, Fort Worth, Tex., 1976) points out, with any speech act there emerges a dialectical process that is already at work within a tradition and that refers to the meaning or truth of something that may yet have to be articulated and comprehended by the majority of the culture's members. This dialectic is borne in the ways in which [d]iscourse refers back to its speaker at the same time it refers to the world. This correlation is not fortuitous, since it is ultimately the speaker who refers to the world in speaking. Discourse in action and in use refers backwards and forwards, to a speaker and a world (p. 22). Ricoeur thus argues that the meaning of a text is not simply behind the text but rather, and more importantly, in front of it. Meaning is not something hidden, but something disclosed as an author makes use of tradition and his or her own creative abilities to project a world. Hermeneutics has less than ever to do with the author and situation. It seeks to grasp the world-propositions opened up by the reference of the text. To understand a text is to follow its movement [its saying and showing] from sense to reference: from what it says, to what it talks about (pp. 8788). Texts speak and thereby show us a world. The ongoing debate over whether the Constitution of the United States supports a woman's right to abortion, for example, is based in part on how legal scholars interpret the way this text speaks of a world wherein such matters as freedom of choice and privacy are deemed essential to humankind.With his emphasis on the intention of an author, Hirsch fails to account for this process of world disclosure. Hence, although his theory is instructive in alerting us to how, for example, the Gettysburg Address is steeped in the hermeneutic and rhetorical capacities of its author, his theory marginalizes the fact that Lincoln offers only an interpretation of a world whose true meaning may still lie beyond what Lincoln was able to put into words. Although I have suggested above that the acknowledged significance of the Address lends support to how wise Lincoln was with his interpretation of the meaning of the world in question, the fact still remains that without this world the issue of what Lincoln meant with his Address would not arise. Of course, an author's intended meaning gives critics something to think and write about, but this meaning is only one factor in a hermeneutical situation whose enduring nature is dependent on the receptivity of potential interpreters who, with additional time and experience, may be able to correct and extend an author's assessment of the meaning of a world that, for whatever reason, continues to warrant attention with all that it has to say. Hirsch contends that this understanding of the hermeneutical situation exposes interpretation theory to the problem of relativism since it collapses the distinction between meaning and significance by insisting that the meaning of some matter can evolve and thus change over time. But such relativism, one should realize, would not merely be a game of throwing the truth up for grabs. On the contrary, the project of philosophical hermeneutics at issue here is dedicated to getting to the heart and thus to the truth of some matter. With time and changing circumstances, this truth may disclose itself to people who are better prepared to receive, understand, and express it in a rhetorically competent manner such that others, too, can put its meaning to good use. The project of philosophical hermeneutics, in other words, is more aligned with what was described earlier as the rhetorical enterprise of casuistry than with the anything goes attitude of relativism.Rhetorical Competence and Ideology
Hence, we return once again to the relationship that exists between hermeneutics and rhetoric—a relationship wherein, according to Gadamer (PH), rhetoric is not primarily a theory of forms, speeches, and persuasion, but instead is the practical mastery or knowhow that people have for making known to others that which is understood (p. 20). Or to put it in more Heideggerian terms, rhetoric serves as a basis for the everydayness of Being with one another, or what Heidegger also designates as publicness (BT, pp. 149168). Although Heidegger associated this realm of common sense and common praxis with the breeding ground for the evils of conformism, he also was inspired by Aristotle (384 -- 322 bce) to see it as providing the necessary background for coming to terms with who we are first and foremost as social beings and for determining whether or not our extant ways of seeing, interpreting, and becoming involved with things and with others might be changed for the better. Hence, like Aristotle, Heidegger (Sein und Zeit, Tbingen, 1979) admits that rhetoric can play a valuable role in rousing the emotionally attuned interests of people and guiding them in a right and just manner (in der rechten Weise, p. 139; cf. BT, p. 178). This is how rhetoric helps to promote civic engagement and civic virtue and how it thereby lends itself to the task of enriching the moral character of a people's communal existence by encouraging collaborative deliberation about contested matters. Gadamer (Truth and Method, New York, 1991) describes this rhetorical process as defining a hermeneutical conversation that is directed toward the understanding of the truth of some matter and thus wherein the people conversing are far less the leaders of it than the led (p. 383). Rhetoric is not simply an art given over to manipulation, deception, and selfish motivation; although as is all too often seen in the ideological realm of politics, for example, it certainly can be made to serve such purposes. It was rhetoric, after all, with grammar, which first set forth interpretive protocols; hermeneutics by contrast puts these means to more general ends.In what is perhaps the most influential critique of the project of philosophical hermeneutics, Jrgen Habermas makes much of the ways in which this project, especially as it is defined by Heidegger and Gadamer, fails to provide a precise methodology for critiquing those interpretations that inform the rhetoric of a given ideology and that dogmatically assert a world-view without satisfying what Habermas (Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge, Mass., 1990) identifies as the validity conditions of the ideal community of communication wherein the competence of communicative rationality can thrive. These conditions include:- (1) choosing a comprehensible expression;
- (2) intending to communicate a true proposition;
- (3) expressing intentions truthfully; and
- (4) choosing an appropriate expression with respect to the dialogical situation at hand.
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