Prologue and Introduction to Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time

cle Jost, waiter 1822233 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII TN#: User ID: 1111111111 Article Article Call#: en Q) (.) ·- 2: Q) Preferred Delivery: English Bryan ALD-STKS 5N Book/Journal Title: 104 PickupLibrary: c:' ALDERMAN Rhetoric and hermeneutics in our time : a reader/ Book Author: .c ·s:: Status: wpj@virginia.edu Other Info: Q) +-' C I c:' co s.c ·....J Copyright Information: Volume: Yale UP NOTICE: This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17, United States Code) Year: Policy: Pages: Date Needed: 03/15/2019 Article Author: 1997 Un kn OWn Walter Jost and Michael Hyde ~ :J Article Title: 3 CD :::::, ,........ 0 CD -· < CD '< Faculty Email Address: VIRGO: 0 () C Dept Address: Cf) ~ BD241 .R457 1997 Location: Dept.: 0 < "< (/) ,........ 00 0 "r en -.... m 0 Prologue and Introduction )> ::l.. -· -CD 0 Email Address: wpj@virginia.edu waiter Jost Department: English Bryan 104 University of Virginia Alderman Library Interlibrary Services PO Box 400109 160 N. McCormick Road Charlottesville, VA 22904-4109 Yale Studies in Hermeneutics Joel Weinsheimer, Editor Editorial Advisory Board Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: AReader Zygmunt Bauman Robert Bernasconi Gerald L. Bruns Fred R. Dallmayr Ronald Dworkin Hans-Georg Gadamer Edited by Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Clifford Geertz FrankKermode Richard Rorty Mark Taylor Yale University Press New Haven and London Rhetoric and hermeneutics in our time : a reader / edited by Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde. ALD BO 241 .R457 1997 Copyright© 1997 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Flinted in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Rhetoric and hermeneutics in our time : a reader/ edited Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde. p. cm.-(Yale University studies in hermeneutics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0--300-06836--0 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Hermeneutics-History-20th century. 2. Rhetoric-PhilosophyHistory-20th century. I. Jost, Walter. II. Hyde, MichaelJ. III. Series. BD241.R457 1997 121' .686--dc21 96-45205 CIP A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 For our parents: Wally and Jeanne Jost and Claire Hyde Contents A word has meaning against the context ofa sentence. A sentence has meaning against the context ofa language. A language has meaning against the context of aform oflife. AJann oflife has meaning against the context ofa world. A world has meaning against the context ofa word. -Stanley Cavell, The Senses ofWalden Prologue xi Introduction: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Places Along the Way by Walter Jost and Michael]. Hyde 1 Part I. Locating the Disciplines 1 Rhetoric and Hermeneutics by Hans-Georg Gadamer translated by Joel Weinsheimer 45 2 Rhetoric-Poetics-Hermeneutics by Paul Ricoeur translated by Robert Harvey 60 3 Qn the Tragedy of Hermeneutical Experience by Gerald L. Bruns 73 vii Prologue At mid-century E. R. Curtius, adverting to the study of rhetoric in his magisterial European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, boldly pronounced not only that "as an independent subject, it has long since vanished from the curriculum" but that "in our culture, rhetoric has no place."l Only a few years later, related sentiments were expressed by the Oxford scholar C. S. Lewis. Lewis was, among other things, a Renaissance specialist for whom the modem ignorance of rhetoric as a subject of study presented the single greatest obstacle to our properly approaching the literature of the distant past.2 For Lewis, as for Curtius, the ancient system of rhetorical topoi, speech genres, levels and types of style, and so on had long ago "penetrated all literary genres," becoming the "common denominator" (ELLM 70) of European literature, even its very foundation (despised by many as a "cellar"; ELLM 79), whose classical and medieval sources needed to be understood for an appreciation of the Western literary legacy. Certainly neither Curtius nor Lewis was seeking to reintroduce rhetoric as an independent university pursuit, although both possessed the literary historian's knowledge of the once-pervasive influence of rhetoric acros~ the liberal arts curriculum. Nevertheless, while the ancient Xj x ii , Prologue I Prologue coin of rhetoric may always have been valued by a knowledgeable few, rhetoric itself was considered by most to have gone out of circulation long before, to have become effaced, ineffective, above all anachronistic-which is to say backward, out of its proper time. Half a century after Curtius's assessment, the fortunes of rhetoric have so been reversed that another Renaissance scholar, Richard Lanham, has observed that "during the last twenty years, rhetoric has moved from the periphery to the center of our intellectual focus."3 Arm in arm with what we have come to know as the art of interpretation-or hermeneutics-rhetoric enables a new understanding of understanding as well as new modes of comprehension and exchange between familiar and distant texts, across intellectual boundaries, and into foreign literatures, new curricula, and changing canons. The title of this book, accordingly, can be understood as virtually tautological, for ours is a time in which rhetoric and hermeneutics have achieved a parallel influence and momentum (if not always willing acceptance) across the academic horizon. Indeed, in light of the massive social, cultural, intellectual, and economic conflicts defining both the modern and postmodern age, it can no longer occasion much surprise that these two disciplines should have inspired and continue to inspire such widespread and diverse response. After all, both rhetoric and hermeneutics thrive, each in its own way, on the conflicts of interpretations and opinions that now enliven every field of endeavor in or out of academe. They thrive as well on a practical "being-in-the-world" (as Heidegger calls it) that for some is skeptical and resistant and for others receptivefilled with anxiety, to be sure, but filled also with, in Richard Bernstein's words, "a perennial impulse of wonder. "4 Our aim in this volume is to show the novice and expert alike what some versions of contemporary rhetoric and hermeneutics look like and to propose how the two can be thought of together, for each not only presupposes but extends and corrects the other. In spite of the flourishing of sophisticated debates in monographs and journals over the definition and scope of each of these terms, no one until now has initiated a dialogue between thinkers interested in both rhetoric and hermeneutics. Such a dialogue seeks to clarify the points of contact and separation of the two and their common principles, problems, and aims, as well as their different means and strategies. Hermeneutics has become in our time variously a philosophical, literary, and critical problematic. It is at once a problem of method, broadly conceived (hermeneutic phenomenology, reader-response criticism), of philosophic claims to truth (the interpretive nature of human being), and of the skeptical resistance to both method and truth (the epistemological instability of being, language, self, and so on, or the exposure of the threat of systematic, ideological distortion in our communication).5 Herme- r neutics did not always command such scope; it evolved (in a nonteleo~ogical way, as Jean G ron din has noted)6 from a chiefly exegetical concern with the Bible, a concern that first extended to all texts, then to all probl~ms of ~nderstanding in the so-called human sciences, and finally to the ph1losoph1c c~ncern with understanding and interpretation as such. These methodolo~cal and philosophical views were developed over ~he ninet~enth and tw~ntieth · chi e fly by German thinkers-Friednch Schleiermacher, Wilhelm centunes Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamerartly in response to the philosophical totalizations oflmmanuel ~ant, ~· .w. Hegel and Edmund Husserl. Having appropriated part~ of this. tradit10n and corrected some of its errors, contemporary hermeneutics pro~d~s ~evolutionary directions for study not only in philosophy b.u~ ~c.ross the.disciplme~, and, in our view, it pr~mise~ furt~er insigh.ts and possibilities, particularly as 1~ is drawn into closer discuss10n with rhetonc. r rh e t one, · 1·twas , again , Curtius who noted (with scholarly understateAs 1or t) that "Germans appear to have an innate distrust of it" (ELLM 62)-a ::ark that perfectly captures Kant's and Hegel's dismi~sive comments abo~t rhetorical topics and tropes but that is misleading when it comes to Ga~ame~ s later recognition of the vast common ground beru:e~n our two subjects: I would like to see more recognition of the fact that this is the re~l~ herm~ne~tics shares with rhetoric: the realm of arguments that are convmcmg (whic~ is not the same as logically compelling). It is the realm of practice and hum~m~ · l "7 Gadamer's allusion here to the realm of practice and humamty. m mgenera. general suggests the genuinely dauntin~ scope of :hetori~ and hermeneutics~ It is a realm, however, whose range is entirely consistent with Roman.and ~en aissance conceptions of rhetoric and increasingly so with philoso~hical, literary and critical conceptions of hermeneutics, reminding us that neither rhet~ric ~or hermeneutics can ever be a strictly proprietary project. Rather, each is intrinsically a transdisciplinary effort whose most creative work may lie not ~e- " hind us but in the present and future, especially as rhetoric an~ hermeneutics come to be better understood as mutually constitutive enterpnses. Most readers interested in a book like this will affirm the centrality of rhetoric and hermeneutics to human praxis. But they will also admit the difficu~ti. · volved in identifying J'ust what these contested concepts mean. As edifd fi .. th es m tors, we have tried to avoid both a dogmatic imposition o e mt10ns on e one hand and a laxity of conception on the other. We do not suppose that. our readers are experts in either field, nor that they (any more than our cont~butors !) can or should be expected to agree about how ~est :o de~ne rhetoric or hermeneut lCS. · I n fact , 1·n these two disciplines conceived m their fuller forms, d' such attempts at essentialist definitions have already been ruled out by the is- i. xiii xiv Prologue ciplines themselves. Our practice has rather been to use both terms as rhetorical topics of invention-that is, as indeterminate concepts whose intellectual histories. and u.ses can.be employed to suggest new lines of inquiry. This openness avmds philosophically unwarranted ontologizing or reifying of the terms' meanings as well as a flat-footed collapsing of either term into the other. Indeed, even those theologians (e.g., Schleiermacher, Bultmann), philosophers and critical thinkers (e.g., Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas, L~can, Foucault), and more "literary" thinkers and critics (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Burke, Derrida, de Man) who explicitly use or invoke the two disciplines and their histories cannot offer ready answers about what the disciplines entail and how they might be thought of together. In Kierkegaard, for e~ample, all ~hetoric or public speaking, "all persuasiveness, all bargaining, all dire.ct attent10n by means of one's own person,"B is consistently consigned to the Junk heap of public opinion and manipulation-in other words, convicted of the age-old charge of pandering to the masses. And yet throughout Kierkegaard's work, one finds elaborate and thoughtful theory and practice of indirect communication and truth as subjectivity. In word and deed if not in name, then, Kierkegaard throws rhetorical persuasion and hermeneutic interpretation into passionate embrace. Historically, this and similar disorienting maneuvers make for a complex, even fragmented narrative for our two disciplines, a complexity far beyond any neat summary to which our essays could (or perhaps should) aspire. Nevertheless, as a way of moving closer here to defining topically (or pragmatically) the two concepts, we offer a further line of thinking that illustrates how the relations between rhetoric and hermeneutics have been obscured. Because the title of this book directs attention to the importai:ce of ti~e (and timin~) in rhetoric and hermeneutics, let us tum briefly to Heidegger s account of time as a way of indicating the unforeseen advantages that might be gained by thinking about rhetoric and hermeneutics together. In The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time, Theodore Kisiel recounts Heidegger's gradual breakthrough, over approximately twelve years, to a new conce~tion ~f time. This new account not only organizes but grounds Heidegger s entire transcendental analysis of Dasein;9 Kisiel, retrieving Heidegger's 1922-23 terminology, designates it "the kairology of Being."10 As students of philosophical hermeneutics are aware, Heidegger's profound innovation challenges the adequacy of our everyday notion of time as chronos, the strict succession of punctual "nows" that fade as if eternally into the past and the future. In stark contrast, Heidegger reveals temporality as the very structure of human being or, more accurately, of the ontological structure Prologue of human being as "care" (Sorge)-that which enables us to respond to (or rather toward) our own possibilities. The toward in this formulation signals the ontological priority of the future against any mythic punctilious present in Heidegger's account of temporality; it is futural "possibility" that constitutes our "anticipation" and that activates our ongoing "retrieval"-or, as Gadamer and Ricoeur put it, our "appropriation"--of the past. In this way, our present is always already (primordially) endowed with both the past and the future in the project of our possibilities. Thus Kisiel: ''A new and different sense of time concentrated on the moment which is at once my unique lifetime. How? By 'at once' (equiprimordially) forerunning the possibility of my death and repeating the possibility of my birth (heredity, inheritance, heritage)." 11 Time or "temporality" as kairos, therefore, which Heidegger derives chiefly from the early Christian concern with the "fullness of time"-the Second Coming as an existential rather than neutral or objectively given moment-is configured not as a horizontal forced march but as a self-appropriating circle of understanding and care. Now, the point here is that what remains lurking in Kisiel's account of Heidegger's kairology of Being is the fact that kairos, as students of rhetoric ar~ aware, is a vintage rhetorical concept deriving from pre-Socratic drama, philosophy, and oratory, particularly that of Pythagoras, Empedocles, and (implicitly) Gorgias. In Greek drama and literature kairos embraced various meanings: brevity, proportion or moderation (as in Hesiod's "Observe good measure, and proportion [kairos] is the best of all things"), what is suited to the moment, the expedient, effective, correct, or appropriate. 12 In later rhetorical theory kairos was elaborated as the "appropriate" (to prep on), "decorum" (e.g. in Cicero), and Renaissance-humanist sprezzaturra, all three of which involve the orator's practical ability to adapt to circumstances and audiences without relying on theoretical rules.13 Originally, however, kairos referred to the principle and power (dunamis) by which the opportune moment calls forth an intuitive, appropriate response from the rhetor (instead of the rhetor initiating an action after conscious assessment of the situation). It is a power ofinvention or discovery (heuresis) irreducible to calculation and logic that ends the stasis of contending logoi at the critical moment in which decision and action are demanded. As such kairos remains beyond the control of the rhetor, coming rather as a gift or even magic (goetia). In short, the emphasis falls on kairos as receptivity; in later theory it falls on to prepon and decorum as artful activity. To be sure, Kisiel shows that Heidegger himself is not unaware of the link between rhetoric and kairos, at least as this link appears in Aristotle's Rhetoric. Given his taskof tracking Heidegger, however, who seems never to have mentioned (for example) Pythagoras or Gorgias in his courses or in his writings in xv xvi Prologue the twenties, it is understandable that Kisiel would not speculate on possible connections to these thinkers. Still, the fact remains that potentially interesting but unseen affiliations hold between the pre-Socratics and Heidegger, especially regarding Heidegger's own considerable emphasis on "listening to" and hearing the call of conscience (in Being and Time) and the call of Being and oflanguage (in his later writings). This would seem to resemble Gorgias's stress on rhetorical invention as a power that one receives, chiefly by listening and hearing rather than by speaking.14 More important, on such an angle of approach we conceivably gain a perspective by which to measure how selectively (and perhaps unwittingly) Heidegger has drawn from the rhetorical tradition of kairos to inform his own philosophical hermeneutics. Whether the objection voiced by many to the later Heidegger is correct-that a kind of quietist passivity threatens to preclude practical thought and action-nevertheless, an active passivity is quite familiar to the early, and foreign to the later, kairotic tradition of rhetoric. This passivity diminished as kairos developed in Aristotle and Cicero, who emphasized enthymematic probabilities, civic responsibilities, the rhetor as agent, topics as agency, and invention as a human initiative. Thus Kisiel (selectively) notes: "Almost perversely, Heidegger's interest in rhetoric gravitates toward [hearing], in which speaking has its end. For spealdng finds its completion in the communication, in being received or accepted by the auditor who undergoes or 'suffers' the speech. A seemingly marginal topic, the 'suffering' and resulting 'passion' (Gr. pathos) of the listener, is made central." 15 In fact, this gravitation to hearing retrieves Gorgias's invaluable contribution to the history and theory of rhetoric and hermeneutics, although at the same time it risks losing the active involvement of speaker in the rhetorical situation. Dimly and from afar, then, rhetorical reverberations of the hermeneutic of time as kairos suggest what otherwise specialist attention to hermeneutics alone, or to rhetoric alone, conceals: namely, that our very being-in-the-world is inseparably hermeneutical and rhetorical in complex ways and that a multifaceted speaking as well as listening constitutes our situation. Our own time is an epoch of corporate capitalism and technologism, of vulgarization and breakdown. But it is also a time of deep reflection on linguistic interpretation: on persuasion, "conversion" across paradigms orworldviews, propaganda, and more invidious forms of deception and power, as well as on forms of the electronic word and the new multimedia. It is, accordingly, a time in which we need both to listen to and to discuss what Gadamer calls the "deep inner convergence" between rhetoric and hermeneutics,16 David Tracy makes this same point in his chapter in this volume: "It now seems clear that hermeneuti- Prologue cal thinkers must both acknowledge and engage rhetorical theories and vice versa. "17What in tum seems called for (appropriate to) such a time, therefore, what has seemed fitting to the editors and authors involved in this book, is the need to open up newtopoi for debate and discussion, new connections and extensions that have not yet been brought fully to light. For Aristotle, dialectic was "critical" (Metaph. 1004b 17-27), while its "counterpart," rhetoric, was exploratory and "inventional" in its use of topics to investigate and determine a given matter. To many of the contributors to this volume, the task at hand now includes identifying hermeneutics (in its modem forms) as a further counterpart to rhetoric and rhetoric to hermeneutics and seeing both as features or dimensions of all thought and language, not only as the special methods or abilities of political praxis. In this way this book is meant to encourage the general drift of thinking about the relations of rhetoric and hermeneutics, and particularly to provide some of the signposts by which those identified with one discipline can make their way to and within its counterpart: . In other ways as well the book is intended to remmd us that rhetonc and hermeneutics are themselves supremely kairotic, that is, temporal, situated, and motivated enterprises. In this regard our appropriation of each discipline by means of the chapters in this book is itselflimited and motivated in two obvious ways. First, we sought scholars working in several different disciplines, and we are confident that we have located those whose chapters represent some of the most interesting and provocative work being done today. Second, our editorial effort is itself temporal because historical, a product of our own "effective historical consciousness" (Gadamer) behind or in addition to our authors' own divergent heritages. In our introduction, and in our selection of the chapters that follow, we have been guided by an implicit faith in or acknowledgment of a middle way between the so-called metaphysics of presence and the mise-en-ab£rne that is asserted by some to be its only alternative and by a rhetorical concern with conscience and possibility as found, for example, in Heidegger and Levinas as the place of places. Within the limits of our choices and commitments, we believe that these chapters, both in how our authors interpret and argue and in what they discuss, profitably reflect on, even as they reflect, contemporary preoccupations. Of course, we recognize that the reassuring phrase "our time" threatens to become a self-deceiving shibboleth, for it is in fact a deeply problematic expression. What value is the appeal to "our," some will ask, ifit does not.dir~ctly, aggressively, even single-mindedly feature the oppressed and margmalized, the non-Western, the colonized, women, children-in a word, the Other?We are aware that.what the term our in the title designates is potentially paradoxical. What "we;, seem to share in this time, what is common to us, is our sense of xvii xviii Prologue Prologue fracture and incommensurability, precisely a lack of common places and possibly a diminishing common interest in discovering them. In addressing this plight as an opportunity for action, however, our authors do bridge some of our shared gaps and aporias without trying to minimize or deny them. In this way they seek to reconstitute themselves, and their readers, without recourse to fix-it-all theories or damn-it-all skepticisms. · \ In fact, this metaphor of bridging is employed by Gadamer and others to define hermeneutics: "Hermeneutics may be defined as the attempt to overcome [the] distance in areas where empathy [is] hard and agreement not easily reached. There is always a gap that must be bridged."18 Less figuratively, we propose to follow Gerald Bruns's exemplary practice of calling hermeneutics "a family of questions about what happens in the understanding of anything, not just of texts but of how things are. "19 Such a move allows for both a familiar typology of hermeneutics-as "method, philosophy, and critique"-as well as for the scope of its historical manifestations (classical, Enlightenment, romantic, modem, postmodem).20 As philosophy, hermeneutics interprets not only human being but being in all its manifestations as interpretive understanding (uncovering "as-structures," i.e., seeing something-as-something, "seeingas"); hermeneutics discusses what it is to reveal die Sache selbst beyond the reach, as Richard Bernstein has put it, of both an impossible objectivism and a vicious relativism (although no one has shown exactly how this is accomplished). As method, hermeneutics codifies the more or less indeterminate rules and procedures of the interpretation of texts and text analogues, transferring Gadamer's insights into the work of art to the understanding ofhistmy and all texts. And as social critique, hermeneutics offers a means of challenging the manifest content of all messages; hermeneutics claims to be able to police its own claims to truth, maximizing the possibilities for freedom from distortion (although the issues involved, for example, in the Gadamer-Habermas debate have hardly been resolved). ll Following Bruns, we can also think of rhetoric as comprising a family;i questions about what is involved in influencing oneself and others regarding (the interpretation of) any indeterminate matter.21 Precisely because rhetoric operates within the realm of the indeterminate, it is characterized by a fundamental instability, the "play" within its scope of possibilities for meaning and action that Richard Lanham rather awkwardly calls a "bi-stable oscillation."22 In other words, the rhetorician ranges between the poles of conflicting possibilities for argument and appeal and aims at what Robert Frost calls "a momentary [which is to say timely, kairotic] stay against confusion." In rhetoric this play repeats itself in all of rhetoric's features. The rhetorical topic, for example, is equivocal, or two-termed, or contradicted by another topic, and it is · If a standing indeterminacy. The rhetorical trope upsets always 1tse . the literal .. I ·t· decenters conceptual argument, and calls into question empmca Propos1 IOU, h 'd f t' . I first principle. Argument occurs on eit er s1 e o11 a ques IOU, fact an d ratIOna . ·1· . g a position but only for a moment, until it starts up a over agam. b sta I izm ' Id h tyle to substance and back to style, from word to wor ' t eory to pracF . an d cons t't 1 u t·mg each .romsic ,s et non, a continuum of possibilities blurring mto tice, 0 ther-word unto world without end. · ou r hyper-rhetorical times ' many .promoters of rhetUnfortunate Iy, even m . . d h eutics would transform this play among situated ( weltltche) "f one an ermen .h poss1'b'l't' 1 1 ies, this movement between movement and stasis, . into I e1t · er a ree al' la "of (non)positions said to be merely arbitrary and fictiona or mt~ a tot Ifarian politics of power whose options are reduced to coercion and will: In our view this alternative is false and barren, although ce~ainly both ~~Im and about . ower are part of, and I.1m1·ts to , rhetoric · Instead , what 1s charactenstic fhe rhetorician is her ability deliberately to choose an appropria~e stance, more · part , wi'thout doubt ' by listening to the situation-now. given ach.ieve d m . h and d ess l 'ndeterminacy now to closure and decmon, as t d to open-en e n ' . d e articular case requires. Too often this situated competence is enslave to :niquelynonrhetoricalinterests, fascinations, fashions, and a~endas. Ourown t against this confusion acknowledges the deeper rhetoncal truths of desconstruction ay . wh'l , , · g wi'th Corne! West in his assessment of our contem1 e JOllllll . . . . .. 't t· . "I th1's world-weary period of pervasive cymc1sms, mh1hsms, porary s1 ua IOn. n d I terrorisms, and possible extermination, there is a longing ~or norms an va ues that can make a difference, a yearning for principled resistance and struggle . ht. "23 that can change our desperate p I1g Above all, both rhetoric and hermeneutics occupy the realm of the. n~nexert and nontheoretical, as Victoria Kahn explains in Chapter 7. This ~s :he ~eld of everyday action and thought, the contested ~remises of our. sh1ftmg home. Expert theory of any kind isolates aspects of this field for special treatment, building its structures of observations, ideas,.rules, and laws, but a~ways at the risk ofleaving behind those myriad indetermmate parts that ~omb.me to k th W hole man or woman, the whole action or event or s1tuatIOn or ma e up e d h d · ·fi story or life, however much we argue about its character an s ape .an s1gm cance, and however much such wholes are riddled with gaps, aporias, and ~b. l1'ke hermeneutics ' returns us to this contested and hfimte sences. Rh e t one, £ of everyday existence, in comparison ~th ~hich ~II the~ry, thoug arwhole reaching and powerful in its appropriate uses, is existentially thm an~ ~eeble. In our time hopeful signs are emerging. Gradually we are re~ogmzmg that rhetoric and hermeneutics offer the means for a renovated liberal. education-a distinctly rhetorical paideia (in Lanham's phrase) whose value mheres xix Prologue xx xx i Prologue not in theory, nor in a fixed canon, nor in excessive worry over lack of consensus on what is taught, nor even, as Mark Turner urges, in the common cognitive structures of our pervasive metaphorizing.24 Rather, rhetorical education inheres in how we understand and interpret the indeterminate wholes of our practical lives, those concrete indeterminacies whose interpretations are aided by theory only when that theory cleaves to the matrix of shared, if contested, everyday beliefs, values, experiences, emotions, events, metaphors, images, and narratives with which rhetoric and hermeneutics are uniquely concerned. We need to concentrate on what we are conflicted about and how we become conflicted about such things. In our view this orientation to "how" is cultivated chiefly by rhetorical and hermeneutic training in interpretation and persuasion; it is stabilized (for the moment) in our varied understandings of our own and others' dynamic traditions. In our time, accordingly, rhetoric and hermeneutics should be understood to range from specific arts whose handbooks articulate rules and strategies of invention, address, and application to the broadest possible conceptions of rhetoricality (in Bender and Wellbery's phrase) and rhetoricity (in Charles Altieri's) as dimensions of human existence.25 Like Lanham and others in our time, we believe-pace Curtius and Lewis-that rhetoric and hermeneutics can reclaim not only their former exalted place in a liberal-arts curriculum but also the nonfoundational grounds of the curriculum itself, of the whole curriculum as a shifting panorama of everyday, indeterminate wholes requiring our interpretations and identifications. Indeed, we believe that only rhetoric and hermeneutics, properly redefined, can show how the principled subject-matter disciplines presuppose the nonexpert realm of praxis and practical reasoning and how they must, in the beginning and in the end, be responsible to them. This is the overall orientation of the chapters that follow. The introduction is broadly designed to locate the major themes explored more deeply in the subsequent chapters. Roughly parallel with the division of the introduction, the book is divided into four sections. This scheme provides sites for rhetoric and hermeneutics to interact with and influence each other. Part I locates different versions of or approaches to the rhetorical and hermeneutic situation and the competences required by them. Part II suggests ways to think about those competences as matters for both invention and application, including ways to think about these terms as mutually implicative. Part II naturally leads to Part III in the way that topics naturally lead to arguments and their premises and further suggests that arguments and narratives (like topics and tropes) presuppose one another in various ways. On the surface Part IV correlates less closely with the fourth section of our introduction. But at a deeper level each investigates where the "possibility of morality" resides. Particularly in our own time, rhetoric and hermeneutics have been concerned with the importance of conversation in our everyday lives, a truth that was brought home to us again and again in the course of this work through talks with Joel Weinsheimer. .From the beginning Joel offered encouragement, suport and practical wisdom, which we are pleased to acknowledge here. We pl 'thank John Campbell of the University of Washington, Richard Harvey a so f u· · . Brown of the University of Maryland, Ed Block, Jr., o Marquette mver~1ty, d Wendy Olmsted of the University of Chicago for their thoughtful readmgs m . ~ f the introduction. Finally, we express our gratitude to our manuscnpt e or, ;usan Laity, for her unfailing good sense in matters of style. and~~spositio. . N less essential to rhetoric and hermeneutics are the d1spos1tion of chanty O and the attitude of play. Our families provided both, encouraging us to do this work but requesting us on occasion to stop-for which gifts, among many others, we thank them. NOTES 1 E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953; rpt. 1990), 62. Hereafter cited in the text as ELL~. . c. s. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth CentunJ (Oxford: Oxford Umvers1ty 2 Press, 1954), 61. 3 Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts . .. . (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 71. 4 Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethzcal-Polttical Horizons of Modemity!Postmodemity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 28. . . 5 There are numerous, widely available anthologies and other collections m hermeneutics across the disciplines; most contain useful bibliographies. For helpful overviews of the historical and intellectual ranges of hermeneutics, see Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modem (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Henneneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 170-228. For some specifically literary uses, see William v. Spanos, ed., Martin Heidegger and the Que~tion of ~ite~ature: Toward a Postmodern Literary Hermeneutic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). 6 Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 3. 7 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960); Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), 568. For a helpful bibliography of rhet~ri~al s~holarship, see Winifred Brynat Homer, ed., The Present Stat~ of S~holars~zp in ~1storical and ContemporanJ Rhetoric, rev. ed. (Columbia: Umvers1ty of M1ssoun Press, 1990). 8 Spren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 221. 1. Prologue xx ii xx i ii Prologue 9 Dase in is a term of art that does exact, useful work for Heidegger, but which we can render here as "human being." 10 Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 421. 11 Ibid., 438. 12 See William H. Race, "The Word [Kairos] in Greek Drama," in Transactions ofthe American Philological Association, ed. Douglas E. Gerber, vol. 3 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981), 197-213. Other helpful works include Mario Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freeman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954); G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Jacqueline De Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), and The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, trans. Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Edward Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), esp. 73-74; Dale L. Sullivan, "Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief," Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992), 317-32; and Eric E. White, Kaironomla: On the Will-to-Invent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Given its provenance in rhetoric, it is significant that kairos does not appear in F. E. Peters's historical lexicon, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York: New York University Press, 1967), for the constellation of values it elevates-time, contingency, invention, adaptation to audience and occasion, persuasion-are just the values philosophers from Plato to Hegel have resisted. 13 On sprezzaturra see Victoria Kahn, "Humanism and the Resistance to Theory," Chapter 7, this volume. See also Lanham, Electronic Word, 148. For a different approach to the term, see Frank Kermode, The Sense ofan Ending: Studies in the Theory ofFiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 46-50. 14 This line of thought is pursued in interesting ways by Stanley Cavell in The Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, expanded edition), 88: "Walden, in its emphasis upon listening and answering, outlines an epistemology of conscience." 15 Kisiel, Genesis, 296-97. 16 Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion," in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 55. 17 David Tracy, "Charity, Obscurity, Clarity: Augustine's Search for Rhetoric and Hermeneutics," Chapter 12, this volume. 18 Gadamer, "Hermeneutics of Suspicion," 57. Heidegger glosses hermeneuein as "the exposition which brings tidings because it can listen to a message": Martin Heidegger, "Dialogue with a Japanese," in Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 29. 19 Gerald L. Bruns, "On the Tragedy of Hermeneutical Experience," Chapter 3, this volume. 20 See Josef Bleicher, ContemporanJ Hermeneutics: Hemieneutics as Method, Philos- ophy, and Critique (London: Routledge, 1980). . . In Aristotle's Rhetoric: A TheonJ of Civic Discourse (New York: Oxford Umve~s1ty 21 91) 7 George Kennedy has something like this in mind when he wntes: h d th Press, 19 , , "Rhetoric, in the most general sense, is the energy inherent in emotion an . oug t, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to mfluence their decisions or action." 2 . 2 Lanham, Electronic Word, 82. Corne! West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of P~agmatisr:1 23 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 4. Cf. Henry State~; Wittge~stem and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 126-27: If there 1s any skepticism in Derrida, it is a moral not an epistemologic.al skeptic'.sm~not a doubt about the possibility of morality but about an idealized picture of s~ncentythat takes insufficient account of the windings and twistings of fear and desire, weakne~s and lust, sadism and masochism and the will to power, in the mind of the most smc.ere man." For compatible accounts, see Richard Bernstein, The New Constellatwn; Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1992). Lanham, Electronic Word, esp. chaps. 4 and 7; Mark Turner, R~ading Min~s: T~e 24 Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Pnnceton Un~vers1ty Press, 1991). For related accounts see Walter Jost, Rhetorical Thought in John Newman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), esp. chap. 6: HennY · " dD 'd "'A Comprehensive View': The Role of Rhetoric in Liberal Education.; a~ aVI Bromwich, Politics By Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 4. 25 John Bender and David E. Wellbe1y, eds., The Ends of Rhetoric: ~is.to'~}, The~ry, Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Charles Altien, Rhetoncs, Rhetoricity, and the Sonnet as Performance," Tennessee Studies in Lit~ra:ure 25 (1980): 1-23. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, Chapter 1, this volume. i ~---------1111 ', Introduction Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Places Along the Way Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Our purpose in this introduction is twofold. On the one hand we propose several ways in which rhetoric and hermeneutics might support each other-that is, contribute to thinking about the philosophic character as well as the practical strategies involved in both interpretation and persuasion. On the other hand we seek to set forth general lines of inquiry and argument that are explored in the chapters that follow and that we hope will stimulate readers of this book to further questions and inquiries of their own. As our means of structuring both our chapter and the book as a whole, we explore four sites or places (topoi) at which rhetoric and hermeneutics intersect: first, the situated competences of the two; second, the fundamental and correlative capacities of invention and application; third, the mutual implication of arguments (topics) and metaphor and narrative (tropes); and fourth, the call of conscience understood as the topos of topoi, the place of places that opens up the human world "as" a world of values, commitments, ideals, agendas, interests, and needs and that, in so doing, summons us to ourselves and to others. More specifically, we focus in the first and last sections on Heidegger and Levinas, respectively, and in the second section on Gadamer and Vico, as r ~---------------·:;, Introduction Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde central figures responsible for opening up many of the issues currently at stake. The third section includes in its discussion such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, who have been unfortunately neglected by those interested in rhetoric and hermeneutics. The introduction culminates in' a speculative meditation on the concept of conscience as a topical "first principle" for both disciplines. With this concept, in other words, we are suggesting neithera self-evident truth nor some determinate (e.g., religious) content, nor even a "universal topic" of the type sought by Vico, but rather what might be called a "temporal topic" of the sort investigated by Kenneth Burke or Mikhail Bakhtin. Although we do not explicitly refer to conscience in the first three sections, the concept underwrites our entire effort, for we argue that conscience is the sine qua non underwriting all rhetorical and hermeneutical thought and activity. RHETORIC AND HERMENEUTICS: SITUATED COMPETENCES Because of the contingency of human existence, we inhabit a world where the practice of rhetoric is genuinely necessary. The point has been made by many theorists, among them Hans Blumenberg: "Lacking definitive evidence and being compelled to act are the prerequisites of the rhetorical situation."! Indeed we are rhetorical beings, creatures who are capable of dealing symbolically with particular matters that we recognize as pressing and that require careful deliberation and judgment, but whose meaning and significance are presently ambiguous, uncertain, and contestable. The history of rhetoric defines a tradition made up of a vast array of observations describing the ways symbolic action has taken form in such situations. This tradition is also marked by an equally vast array of theoretical prescriptions based on these observations that promote rhetoric to the status of an art and that offer direction for cultivating the ability to engage this contingency-what we might call our rhetorical competence. One of the earliest accounts of the importance of such competence for establishing and maintaining our social well-being is offered by Isocrates: "Because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other what we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts; and, generally speaking, there is no institution devised by man which the power of speech has not helped us to establish. For this it is which has laid down laws concerning things just and unjust, and things honorable and base; and if it were not for these ordinances we should not be able to live with one another. "2 As exemplified here, associating rhetorical competence with the creation and preservation of a community's moral ecology is a commonplace of the rhetorical tradition, one that works as a majo~ source oflegitimation for teachers of rhetoric. When "the power to persuade becomes the all-too-easy target it is made out to be in, for example, Plato's Gorgias and Sophist and later in Descartes, Loc~<e, K~nt, and Heg~l, this cometence is dissociated from its declared connection with the morality of a com~unity or culture (and more broadly with the human orientation to ideals as guides for behavior). The rhetorical tradition has had much to say about rhetorical competence in the narrower sense: the civic-minded power to persuade. Conceptualized in terms of the canons of the art of rhetoric, for example, rhetorical competence has been specified as a proficiency in handling the five stages of composing and presenting a speech: inventio (invention), dispo~it~o (arran~emen:), elocutio (expression), memoria (memory), and pronuntiatw or actw (dehve ), as well as an ability to handle the formal divisions of the speech: exordium (i:roduction), narratio (narration), partitio (division), confirmatio (proof), refittatio (refutation), and conclusio (conclusion). Most importan.t, these canons and divisions serve to organize arguments from the substantive facts and issues of the case, the emotions of the audience, and the character of the ~ .. Knowing how to put these things to use when confrontmg the contmg~nt demands of a situation may facilitate a person's attempts to be persuasive (what one critic has called the "external" goals of the practice), but for the ancients, rhetorical competence could also function as an integrative social influence between the self and others (the "internal," ethical-political goal of the practice).4 Beginning with the Sophists, training ~n rhetorical com?etence has had as one of its internal goals increasing peoples chances of gettmg an equal hearing for their ideas such that they and their contributions might be recognized and respected as important to the sociopolitical w~rkings of.a comm~nity. 5 Moreover, as Aristotle would have us understand m expandmg on this point, the service provided to the community by its members' rhetorical petence extends beyond mere persuasion to include the development of Judgment (krisis) and practical wisdom (phronesis). Rhetorical competence lends itself to collaborative deliberation and reflective inquiry (including the selfdeliberations of individual members). In the rhetorical situation an audience is not set at a distance. Rather, it is acknowledged, engaged, and called into the space of practical concerns. By facilitating civic engagement, rhetorical competence helps sustain and enrich the knowledge of any public, and thus a c~mmunity's own c_ompetence. Through the deliberative rationality of rhet~ncal practices, a community can recognize itself and judge whether to admit the 6 epistemological and moral claims of those who are attempting to influence it. :om- ...... Introduction Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde central figures responsible for opening up many of the issues currently at stake. The third section includes in its discussion such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, who have been unfortunately neglected by those interested in rhetoric and hermeneutics. The introduction culminates in a speculative meditation on the concept of conscience as a topical "first principle" for both disciplines. With this concept, in other words, we are suggesting neither a self-evident truth nor some determinate (e.g., religious) content, nor even a "universal topic" of the type sought by Vico, but rather what might be called a "temporal topic" of the sort investigated by Kenneth Burke or Mikhail Bakhtin. Although we do not explicitly refer to conscience in the first three sections, the concept underwrites our entire effort, for we argue that conscience is the sine qua non underwriting all rhetorical and hermeneutical thought and activity. RHETORIC AND HERMENEUTICS: SITUATED COMPETENCES Because of the contingency of human existence, we inhabit a world where the practice of rhetoric is genuinely necessary. The point has been made by many theorists, among them Hans Blumenberg: "Lacking definitive evidence and being compelled to act are the prerequisites of the rhetorical situation."l Indeed we are rhetorical beings, creatures who are capable of dealing symbolically with particular matters that we recognize as pressing and that require careful deliberation and judgment, but whose meaning and significance are presently ambiguous, uncertain, and contestable. The history of rhetoric defines a tradition made up of a vast array of observations describing the ways symbolic action has taken form in such situations. This tradition is also marked by an equally vast array of theoretical prescriptions based on these observations that promote rhetoric to the status of an art and that offer direction for cultivating the ability to engage this contingency-what we might call our rhetorical competence. One of the earliest accounts of the importance of such competence for establishing and maintaining our social well-being is offered by Isocrates: "Because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other what we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts; and, generally speaking, there is no institution devised by man which the power of speech has not helped us to establish. For this it is which has laid down laws concerning things just and unjust, and things honorable and base; and if it were not for these ordinances we should not be able to live with one another." 2 As exemplified here, associating rhetorical competence with the creation and preservation of a community's moral l gy is a commonplace of the rhetorical tradition, one that works as a major eco o h "h d " source oflegitimation for teachers of rhetoric. W en t e power to persua e, becomes the all-too-easy target it is made out to be in, for example, _Plato s Gorgias and Sophist and later in Descartes, Loc~e, K~nt, and Heg~l, this comtence is dissociated from its declared connect10n with the morality of a com!:unity or culture (and more broadly with the human orientation to ideals as guides for behavior), . The rhetorical tradition has had much to say about rhetoncal competence in the narrower sense: the civic-minded power to persuade. Conceptualized in terms of the canons of the art of rhetoric, for example, rhetorical competence has been specified as a proficiency in handling the five stages of composing and presenting a speech: inventio (invention), dispo~it~o (arran?eme~t), elocutio (expression), memoria (memory), and pronuntiatw or actw (d~hve ), as well as an ability to handle the formal divisions of the speech: exordium (i~roduction), narratio (narration), partitio (division), confirrnatio (proof), refutatio (refutation), and conclusio (conclusion). Most importan~, these canons and divisions serve to organize arguments from the substantive facts and issues of the case, the emotions of the audience, and the character of the speaker. 3 . • Knowing how to put these things to use when confrontmg the contmg~nt demands of a situation may facilitate a person's attempts to be persuasive (what one critic has called the "external" goals of the practice), but for the ancients, rhetorical competence could also function as an integrative socialinfluence between the self and others (the "internal," ethical-political goal of the practice).4 Beginning with the Sophists, training ~n rhetorical com~etence has had as one of its internal goals increasing peoples chances of gettmg an equal hearing for their ideas such that they and their contributions might be recognized and respected as important to the sociopolitical workings of_a comm~nity.5 Moreover, as Aristotle would have us understand in expandmg on this point, the service provided to the community by its members' rhetorical ~ompetence extends beyond mere persuasion to include the development ofJudgment (krisis) and practical wisdom (phronesis). Rhetorical competence lends itself to collaborative deliberation and reflective inquiry (including the selfdeliberations of individual members). In the rhetorical situation an audience is not set at a distance. Rather, it is acknowledged, engaged, and called into the space of practical concerns. By facilitating civic engageme~t, rhetorical competence helps sustain and enrich the knowledge of anypu~hc, ~nd thus a c~mmunity's own competence. Through the deliberative rationality of rhet~ncal practices, a community can recognize itself and judge whether to admit the 6 epistemological and moral claims of those who are attempting to influence it. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction Hence, in its very functioning, rhetorical competence gives expression to the communal character of the self's existence and in so doing allows all concerned to "know together" (Gr. sun-eidesis; Lat. con-scientia ). For us as for the Greeks, maintaining the health of our communal existence requires nothing less. There is another art, however, in addition to rhetoric, that asks us to attend to the nature and importance of rhetorical competence (again narrowly defined). It is the art of understanding, or hermeneutics, an art that, as the philologist and founder of modern hermeneutic theory Friedrich Schleiermacher points out, "at once depends upon and presupposes composition," whether 7 spoken or written. Here Schleiermacher associates the composition of a text with the art of presentation (rhetoric), an art that enables the author to explicate his 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."8 The hermeneutical task being emphasized here defines a fundamental goal of Schleiermacher's theory ofinterpretive 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. He writes: "Thoughts and language are intertwined, and an author's distinctive way of treating the subject is manifested by his organization of his material and by his 9 use of language. " An appreciation of the rhetorical competence that informs the text is therefore needed by the interpreter. It seems fair to say, then, that the hermeneut is herself something of a rhetorical critic. With Schleiermacher, however, one must be careful in advancing this ambiguous claim. For the Greeks, as for many contemporary theorists, rhetorical criticism is naturally an effort in rhetorical competence broadly understood: the critic is deeply 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.1° In contrast, Schleiermacher maintains that hermeneutics is basically a philosophical endeavor; it "deals only with the art of understanding, not with the [interpreter's] presentation of what has been understood." 11 Yet, as Kurt Mueller-Vollmer notes, this position is not without its problems: "Schleiermacher viewed hermeneutics as the 'art of understanding' where 'understanding' is elevated to the art of a scholarly discipline .... However, it seems doubtful whether hermeneutics, by excluding from its agenda the element of presentation, can still fulfill the task which Schleiermacher envisions. For the art of the philologist consists largely in generally accepted procedures, assumptions, verbal strategies, an institutiona.lized body of knowledge and the tacit agreement on standards for hermeneutic competence. The presentation of one's understanding is an integral part of the · "12 art in quest10n. . In fact, then, hermeneutics and rhetoric are more intimately related than Schleiermacher believed, for what he failed to realize was that 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 a~'d to j~sti:J any truth clai1:1 re~ar~ing the authorial intentions of a given text. Convmcmg and persuadmg, wntes Gadamer, "are obviously as much the aim and measure of understanding and interpretation as they are the aim and measure of the art oforation and persuasion."13 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 comp~tence can include a concern with the author's subjective thought; but Schleiermacher's exclusive focus on this goes against the grain of the deeper (less subjectivistic) rhetorical intentionality that we now recognize is at work in the text. As Calvin Schrag reminds us: "The distinctive stamp of rhetorical intentionality is that it reaches out toward, aims at, is directed to the other as hearer, reader, and audience. This intentionality illustrates not the theoretical reflection of cognitive detachment but rather the practical engagement of concrete involvement."14 The rhetorical competence that informs a text leads hermeneutics in the direction it must go to reach out 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. . . One might describe this returning as a homecommg for hermeneutics, since the everyday world that it now inhabits, as Heidegger has shown, is the place where the art of understanding is first practiced. 15 Befor~ it is converted into the abstract and formal rules, logics, and laws of theoretical knowledge, with its penchant for "knowing-that," human understanding assumes the more primordial and performance-based form of a perso_n's "knowi~~-~ow" to deal with the immediacy of his or her everyday, goal-directed actIVIties. As creatures of know-how, that is, with the tacit and unreflective ability to cope successfully with our problems, we embody and exhibit a hermeneutic compe- !i Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction tence for coming to see and involve ourselves with the world. This competence or interpretive outlook is one of "circumspection," concern with the world in such a way that it becomes and remains useful for our purposes. Here things first manifest themselves as "equipment." With the writing of this introduction in mind, for example, we approach our computers not as objects present to our eyes but as instruments and materials of workreadyto our hands. As they come into the "circumspective interpretation" of our know-how, we appreciate the computers as tools that, when handled well, facilitate a specific task. Heidegger terms this the "existential-hermeneutical 'as"' of primordial understanding (know-how): it is the original, albeit unthematized and nonverbalized, articulation (Rede) of our everyday, situated comportment with environed things (BT 200-20lff.). We live lives that necessitate the hermeneutical competence of such comportment in order to be skilled at living, to do what is appropriate to perform a job well. Hermeneutical competence is productive of and maintained by the practical wisdom (phronesis) that is based in a given culture's "hermeneutical situation" (its world of perspectival understanding) and that forms the habit of right insight into human action.16 The relation between rhetoric and hermeneutics is rooted in this existential situation of circumspective concern. Rhetoric, too, is a type of know-how, a complex competence that gives expression, among other things, to our ability to be persuasive, to make known the useful and the inexpedient, the fitting and the improper, the just and the unjust, thereby enabling us to engage others in collaborative deliberation about contestable matters. In this way the know-how of rhetorical competence not only draws from a culture's historically based hermeneutical situation, it also contributes to the advancement of this intersubjective domain of understanding. In Heidegger's terms, the know-how of rhetorical competence must therefore be appreciated as having much to do with "the everydayness of Being with one another," with our "publicness." Heidegger credits Aristotle's Rhetoric with providing "the first systematic hermeneutic" of this communal character of existence. Moreover, like Aristotle, Heidegger would have us understand how our everyday way of being with others defines a realm of emotional orientations and attachments (i.e., moods) that are constantly "attuning" us to situations we are a part of and that are forever unfolding before our eyes. Hence, in offering a gloss of the Rhetoric, Heidegger writes: "Publicness ... not only has in general its own way of having a mood, but needs moods and 'makes' them for itself. It is into such a mood and out of such a mood that the orator speaks. He must understand the possibilities of moods in order to rouse them and guide them aright [i.e., in a right or just manner]" (BT 178).17 Philosophy has long been critical of rhetoric because of its association with : The criticism ically has a Platonic ring to it: by catering to an aµdi. . . b' d emot10n. , ences emoti'ons , rhetoric inhibits people from developmg mtelhgence ase on a rational knowledge (episteme) of reality; it thereby enc~urages the mass~s to become "the greatest of all sophists ·"18 From the standpomt of hermeneutic .. ontoIogy, however, this view of the matter. is far too negative and simplistic. v Heidegger makes clear in his analysis of mood, the fundamental work. . .. f r o~ u , fh man emotion have an important role to playm the constitut10n o exmgs o u . . h Id " " · That is , emotions provide the perspectives for. seemg t e .wor as penence. . interesting, as something that matters and that warrants mterpretat10n. ByVIrtue of this function, we are able to comport with things and with oth.ers. Human emotion must therefore be seen as something that informs and gi;es f, t the "circumspective interpretation" of the primordial understandmg OCUS O h • d" of know-how. Or as Heidegger puts it: "Understanding always as its moo (BT182). . As a type of know-how, rhetoric is perforce associated with the herme~eutical workings of emotion. If rhetoric is to perform its most worthy function of t ·ng to move people toward situated goods, it must cast a concerned eye_ on h : its public is circumspectively and thus emotionally involved with the immediate situation. This is how the orator maximizes the chance that those comprising his or her audience will take. an interest in ~hat is being said, so that they too may have a say in determinmg whether the1~ extant ways. of seeing, interpreting, and being involved with things and with oth~rs might be changed for the better. Without the formation of such a common mterest, collaborative deliberation is all but impossible. · Heidegger is correct: the orator (by which we mean more generally any rhetorically competent individual in any practical setting) m~st u_nderst~nd the possibility of moods in order to rouse them a~d guid_e them _ma nght or JUSt manner. Such rhetorical competence operates m the 1mmed1acy of the present, in the lived space of the here and now, in the existential and prac~ically oriented world of know-how. Rhetoric offers an interpretive understandmg of this world; it articulates and thus makes explicit something about how people are faring in their everyday relationships with things and other~ and how they might think and act in order to understand better and perhaps improve a ~articular situation. The interpretive understanding that belongs to rhetoncal discourse thereby shows itself as a "derivative mode" of the primordial, he~meneutical "as" of circumspective interpretation. Heidegger discusses this derivative mode of interpretive understanding in terms of how it operates as an "assertion," as "apophantic" discourse (apophansis: to make manif~st) t~at points out something by predicating it in a definite way, such that what 1s bemg talked about can be communicated and shared with others (BT 196-99). typ' Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction Now, rhetorical discourse certainly makes use of assertions. All the more do the discourses oflogic and science. There is, however, an important difference between the apophantic mode of operation of these latter and related discourses and that of rhetorical discourse,19 Heidegger directs us toward an under~tanding .of this diffe~~nce with his analysis of how the assertions oflogic ~nd scienc~ b~ng about a levelling of the primordial 'as' of circumspective rnterpretahon (BT 198-201). One sees this phenomenon unfolding, for example, when physicians, trained to abide by and express the scientifically oriented "voice of medicine," engage in the practice of "properly" writing up a patient's medical case history. Medical case histories are rooted in the "illness stories" of patients. Such stories, according to Eric Cassell, "are different from other stories because they almost always have at least two characters to whom things happen. They always have at least a person and that person's body ."20 Of these two characters, it is the body, the rhetorical-hermeneutic place (topos) where disease dwells, that must assume priority as a matter of interest to the physician. Dir~cted by this priority, the physician can now begin constructing a story that will-or at least should, so far as his peers are concerned--cut like a scalpel through the personhood of the patient, thereby leaving intact only those portions of the patient's history that can be used to make a good case about some disease, in some body, in some bed. Medical case histories mark out an effort in dissection directed toward offering a depersonalized perception and account of the patient. They are prized for their self-effacing objectivity and efficiency, both of which are registered via the antiseptic language of"disease theory" and what it has to say about such things as angina pectoris, rheumatic mitral valvular disease, and oat cell carcinoma of the lung. Medical case histories employ a language that tells a body story, not a person story. From the standpoint of medical science, these two stories are not meant to go together. They employ different language games, their respective characters are incommensurate. Indeed, the idiosyncratic subjectivity of the "person" gets in the way of the scientific objectivity of the "body." When this occurs, the medical matter may become too time-consuming, too existential, too uncertain and opinionated. The Hippocratic Law tells us: "There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. "21 Medical case histories offer stories that are Law-abiding. Those of us who have benefited from a physician's ability to tell such a story can testify to its importance. When complaints surface, however, they often ~ear on the fact that, during an encounter with the medical profession, the patient was treated by physicians whose scientific conditioning and outlook blinded them to the difference between physiology and life. What tends to be forgotten when such blindness occ~rs is that_ratients are peo~le and should b.e treated as people. A diseased body 1s also a lived body that bnngs to the medical encounter a host of personal concerns, involvements, and values (a world of know-how) that the patient may wish to have taken in.to account in the design of a treatment. Patients have the right to d~ t~is; they have the right to. a:firm who they are while in the presence of Med1cme. As suggested above, 1t 1s this large dimension of the patient's humanity that is left out of the picture of a body story. Here, then, is an instance of th.e leveling of the primo~dial "as" of circumspective interpretation. The assert10ns of a body story pornt out and redicate their object in a restrictive way. Their apophantic mode of opera~on, as Heidegger would say, "no longer reaches out into a totality of involvements" (BT 200), into the patient's, or person's, hermeneutically informed world of know-how. One may, ofcourse, speak of the rhetoric of body stories. Determining how a text means is a genuine rhetorical concern. But in this case, what is actually being referred to is a mode of discourse that has been dislodged from that world in which rhetoric's genuine calling originates. Rhetoric makes its living first and foremost in the world oflmow-how. It discovers the materials that are needed for its work from how people are involved with the everyday concerns and contingencies of life. Here the available means of persuasion are found, and people await the acknowledgment of their particular interests by those who engage them in collaborative deliberation about contestable matters. The effectiveness of rhetoric is dependent on its staying in touch with this emotionally attuned realm of praxis, of the person. For only then can it attend to, with the hope of clarifying and improving, its audience's active relationships with things and with others. Rhetoric's apophantic mode of operation is directed by this hope; its assertions must tell of the world of know-how. Hence, in its most elucidating and epiphanic moments, it is not uncommon for the assertions of rhetoric to assume a poetic nature. Heidegger tells us that "poetry, creative literature, is nothing but the elementary emergence into words, the becoming uncovered, of existence as being in the world [of know-how]. For the others who before it were blind, the world first becomes visible by what is thus spoken."22 In Heidegger's sense a poetic interpretation can serve rhetoric well. When used in an appropriate, fitting, and engaging-that is, rhetorically competent-manner, a display of poetic or hermeneutic competence may help us improve the ways others are presently seeing, interpreting, and involving themselves with the situational matters at hand. In short, as a type of knowhow or hermeneutl.cal competence, the practice of rhetorical competence must cultivate in others the practical wisdom that is advanced and sustained by such competences and that no community can afford to be without. The so- IO Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde cial, political, and moral welfare of our everyday Being-with-others, of our publicness, is a major concern of rhetoric. There are, of course, less noble ways of thinking about rhetoric. In his description of how publicness defines a world of common sense and common praxis, for instance, Heidegger tends to emphasize its "mass"-like (Plato), "crowd"-like (Kierkegaard), and "herd"-like (Nietzsche) propensity to bring about a mindless conformity in its adherents. That rhetoric can and does play a role in sustaining our publicness is undeniable. With Heidegger, then, it can be said that those who theorize and practice the orator's art are involving themselves with a techne whose way of being admits more than a modicum of inauthenticity (uneigentlichkeit).23 A similar assessment of rhetoric is announced by Gadamerwhen he speaks of the art as "that which is other than the factical matter of our propositions," as "that which possesses the purely operational and ritual function of exchange through spealdng, whether in oral or written form," and thus as a "pseudotext" that "is devoid of meaning."24 Rhetoric, to be sure, is capable of existing in such a fallen state, and the teachings of philosophical hermeneutics can be employed to remind and warn us of this fact. But these teachings also enable us to develop an appreciation of how rhetoric admits a competence for addressing others such that, when the situation calls for it, they can be roused and guided "in a right or just manner." RHETORICAL INVENTION AND HERMENEUTIC APPLICATION In this section our immediate task is to shed some light on how-that is, with what specific intellectual, emotional, and imaginative means-people become active in rhetorical and hermeneutic situations, what it means for them to become competent as strategic readers and speal<ers. What specifically gives their activity intellectual, as well as moral, discipline and resolve in the face of indeterminacy? The question is at once methodological and existential, concerned with intellectual skill and competence (or tact) motivated and informed by ready moral commitment and conscience-what one literary thinker has aptly described as "competence, supported by an instinct."25 Accounts of rhetoric and hermeneutics in our own time offer various approaches to this problem, but one locus classicus, Gadamer's Truth and Method, 26 reflects on, and embodies, both rhetoric and hermeneutics in ways that critics have not explicitly thematized, and that will allow us to suggest how figures like Vico and Burke, along with Gadamer, help us to think out new connections.27 It is significant that Gadamer begins Truth and Method by appropriating central concepts of the humanist tradition (Bildung, sensus communis, judg- Introduction II t taste) for these have been rhetorical preoccupations from the Sophists menAnd ' it is' significant that Gadamer turns to Vico at th e b egmnmg · · of h'1s obn. k and again in the afterword, and that he focuses on Vico's major treatise 00 , . d' t' on rhetoric and rhetorical education, De nostri tempons s:u ~'arum ra wne (On the study methods of our time, 1709) ,28 For Gadam~r, V1co makes~ good starting point" (TM 19) in considering the problematic of herm~neutics by suggesting how the defense of rhetoric against "criti~al" (Cartesian, deduc. ) hilosophy might be extended to the understanding and defense of her· aims · tive P · · p h'l meneutics against latter-day versions of rat10nahst 1 osoph y. Rh etonc at "the grasp and moral control of the concrete situation" (TM_ 21)'. not at abuniversal knowledge ("science" and its attendant expertise), JUSt as hert st rac, h · meneutics does: "Practicallmowledge .... is directed towards t e concrete.s1~uation. Thus it must grasp the 'circumstances' in their infinite variety. :his .1s what Vico expressly emphasizes about it" (TM 21). Students of rhetonc_will recognize in those circumstances what ancient rhetoricians called the penstaseis or circumstantia of a case-the occasion, audience beliefs and values, the unique array of facts-toward which orators directed all their efforts. We might generalize and say that such rhetorical doctrin~s ha~e alwa~s already operationalized many of the contemporary hermeneuh~ (_ph1losoph1cj reflections on praxis, while the latter deepen and extend tra~1ti~nal rh,etonca~ theory in ways not yet appreciated. Either way, the quest10n 1s ~ot ~hat 1s ah: stractlytrue or right?" but 'What is true or right or good in this umque c~se? Even this formulation suggests a division in ldnd between the two quest10ns, as if the general question were about (philosophic, nonrheto~cal) t~th, an~ the specific question about passing probabilities (mere rhetonc). Against this division Cicero in De oratore has both Crassus and Antonius bridge the split by requiring the general as well as the particular to become the_ subject matte~ of oratory, insofar as the orator prevents philosophic abstracb~n from se~enng its ties to practical and public concerns, "the manners, nunds, and hves of mankind." The holistic ground of the ethical-political is accessible to all, what Vico called sensus communis: "the real power of eloquence is such, that it embraces the origin, the influence, the changes of all things in t~e world, ~11 virtues, duties, and all nature, so far as it affects the manners, mmds, and hves of mankind."29 Gadamer's position is similarly unified, for, like Cicero's an~ Vico's,. it st~bilizes the general in the particular, in the circumstances ~f ones ~wn ~1tuation, time and place: Theory-with-a-capital-Tis returned to diverse ~1stoncal practices, and hermeneutic philosophy does its best work by helpmg other fields keep themselves tethered to specific common enterprises and the contest of beliefs and values comprising them. In fact, there is an important parallel that Introduction I2 I3 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde goes undiscussed both in Truth and Method and among students of hermeneutics generally. This is the parallel between what Vico identifies as the fundamental activity of rhetoric, namely inventio, seeing the available means of persuasion (Methods 14); and what Gadamer calls "the fundamental problem of hermeneutics," namely applicatio, the always provisional fulfillment of distanciated meaning in the interpretive act (TM 307ff.). The sort of parallel we are suggesting is hinted at in Bacon's Advancement ofLearning (1605), where Bacon defines rhetorical invention in a way that Vico approved, as "remembrance ... with an application"-and which, in the spirit ofVico, we can philosophically deepen and bring full circle by defining hermeneutic application as "remembrance-with an invention."30 Such a move is also implicitly sanctioned by Gadamer in his afterword to Truth and Method: "I would like to see more recognition of the fact that this is the realm hermeneutics shares along with rhetoric: the realm of arguments that are convincing (which is not the same as logically compelling). It is the realm of practice and humanity in general .... The arts of rhetoric and argumentation (and their silent analogue, thoughtful deliberation with oneself) are at home here. If rhetoric appeals to the feelings, as has long been clear, that in no way means it falls outside the realm of the reasonable. Vico rightly assigns it a special value: copia, the abundance of viewpoints" (TM 568).31 In other words copia, "the abundance of viewpoints" constituting the mate'rial of sensus communis and the source of rhetorical invention, was, in the classical rhetorical tradition that Vico appropriated, the source of the ars topica, the art of topics (in our own time we might call topics the art and ability of Heidegger's "hermeneutic-as" or Wittgenstein's "seeing-as").32 Allowing for a distinction between tacit and unthematized "first-stage" topics and consciously organized and deployed "second-stage topics,"33 we can say that conscious rhetorical invention is remembrance by means of (second-order or reflective) topics and the application of their content to a new case or text. Hermeneutic application, accordingly, is the remembrance of cases or texts with a topical invention. What then, more specifically, are topics, and what might such a parallel suggest for both rhetoric and philosophical and literary hermeneutics? In the rhetorical tradition topics has always named a more or less tacit, more or less articulatable ability to negotiate social and cultural "identifications" (to use Kenneth Burke's term) or sensus communis (to use Vico's). Topics are the places-issues, values, commitments, beliefs, likelihoods-that we hold in common with others, that we dwell in and argue over, and that we use reflectively to find the issues and premises of a specific case. The source of their power resides in the fact that they are Janus-faced. Horizontally or temporally they retrieve orrecall the past and yet are applied toward an indetermi- d future (thus topics as such cannot be accused of political con. 11 nate present an . 11 · 1th hA ·stotlemayhaveheldasmuch).34Vertica yormte ec1· servatism, a oug n are terms propositions, figures, fables, cases of some genera ity they tua11.Y bal £ · d etermmacy · · · 'econdary for it varies wit· h th e kin d of m m (their ver orm is s ' . .fi which they are involved)35 that are accessible to all of those engaged m s?eci. c rticulars· in this way they escape the charge of social ehtconcrete cases an d Pa , . 1 d · · ·ty The philosopher Bernard Lonergan 1s a neg ecte . .. . ism or academ1c preciosi . . l h 'thout himself mentioning the rhetoncal tradition, appreciates . " thm<erw o, wi · d from and then work on, sensus commums: Common sense, how topics raw , . unlike the sciences, is a specialization in the particular ~n concrete. It is 'th ut being general for it consists in a set of msights that remam mmon wi o , . . h . h ·t t' t 'l there is added at least one further ms1g t mto t e si ua 10n a comp1et e, unt i . . . 1 1 . d once that situation has passed, the added msight is no onger re ed an, h an, sense at once reverts to its norma1 state of'mcomplt e ed vant so th at co mmon '"36 Hence topics are insights that are kept incomplete and whose very eness. d d' ·th' w ficiency enables inquirers to deploy their un erstan mg wi m a ne . · Th' ·tuation is one they do not yet fully understand and need to ex• • l 'll fi d d situat10n. is si plore to persuade others, and themselves, of what they JOmt y wi n an :o~- make persuasive within that space. . . Implied in such an account is a further tension. Rheton:ians often speak ~f - t ge topics as an art (techne) or systematic techmque, whose form is second s a . all £ ·1· · th the compilable list of general headings and propositions -too- ami ia~ m . e . f h ton·c and whose downward tendency is toward memonzahon h istmy o r ·e 1 e, On the other hand first-stage topics can be the £ocus of a and mech amca us . ' d d ·f · cultivated faculty (dunamis) or sense or skill or function, whose upwar n tis a self-levitation into romantic genius and mystery but whose proper, nonrule· ·s as we have said practical competence and more or less governe d exercise i , ' . h tacit conscientiousness and know-how (instinct).37 The tension between t es~ ·n Vico· "Those who [instinctively] know all the loci two aspects can b e h eard l · . [topoi], i.e., the lines ofargument to be used, are able (by an operation not unlike reading the printed characters on a page) to grasp extemporaneously the elements of persuasion inherent in any case or question" (Methods 15) ..To grasp extemporaneously is to have achieved, through diligence and educat10n (Bildung), an essentially uncodifiable ability of discernment, ~f taste, of deco'T' t h th' b'li'ty however as Vico and others also wished to do, one is a i , , . b rum . .10 eac must refer students to second-stage lists, examples, and ex~rc1se.s t~ learn y creative imitation. This tension should be instructive, but it penodically collapses into a dichotomy favoring one side or the other. . . As list and teachable technique, for example, second-stage topics provide a repertoire of responses to practical aporias, a relatively stable inventory of Introduction I4 IS Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde :ont:adictmy historical or social thought and behavior to which the thoughtful mqmrer turns for re-sources-sources that can be used again and again on opposite sides of a question as new problems occur. Aristotle's Rhetoric I 3-15 and II, 1-25-in other words, no less than two-thirds of the book-is ju~t such a general inventory, one that Aristotle recognizes can be added to or sub-. tracted from as the scene of its employment changes. More specific inventories or catalogues in principle would include all "how-to" manuals: The Federalist Papers, or Benjamin Cardozo's Nature of the Judicial Process, or Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, or any number of such texts normally unrecognized as "rhetorics," that is, as collections of topical resources for situated practical thought. When topics (as list or repertoire) get too uniformly or finely determined in their meanings, however, they cease to function as rhetorical places and become something else, namely mere facts, or principles of a determinate inquiry, or ideology. Pursued productively, these generate or otherwise become a part of abstract knowledge or science and its expertise, produced from selected stable and recurrent aspects of some greater indeterminate whole and pursued apart from that whole and its competing interpretations. (In truth, all theory must be taken to some extent topically in order to be of practical use.) ~erformed ineptly or ~ophistically, however, the application of theory to practice. be~ets a ~askolmkov, whose claim to bring a "new word" is no longer a topical mventlon but rather a brute coercion that crushes all inquiry and situated competence under the hatchet blows of the isolated individual will.38 Here, authentic ideals of conscience are no longer responsible to shared, if contested, places. Instead, they are perverted into simple success or failure in the assertion of one's own or another's power. Less extreme versions of the will-to-power and the politics of topical rhetoric similarly refer invention to personal preference and already defined interests. In contrast, genuine topics help us discover what we saywe ought to be interested in, what our" ownmost" s~tuation is not yet understood to be (and never totally understood to be), by VIrtue of our refusal to permit them to freeze into either determinate principles or unprincipled determinisms. We do tliis by staying open to analogical extrapolations of what is already known or done or believed. In this regard the art of topics must resist attempts to freeze it into determinate lists rules "knowledge," and stay open, byway of application, to novel ideas, ima~es, and narratives. 39 First-stage topics, as a natural competence and cultivated ability to discern the new by means of (or in) the old, is an ability ultimately beyond all codifiable arts of rhetoric. As such, first-stage topics tend to lose coherence and identity and to shade off into the particularities of a "well-stocked mind," a "liberal ed- . " laims to omnicompetence, and (historically) a creativity aligned ucation, c LL 1· h · f with romantic expressivism and, at tlie other end of uie me, a ermetic re~ la oflanguage. Pursuing topics intelligently, we can get, for example, Hei~e yger's later meditations on the way poetry opens up a region (~egend) or g e (Ort) hitherto unsuspected in daily thought and speech: topics underl Pac 1 40 stood now at the level of world disc osure. . . B contrast, Ivan Karamazov's Grand Inquisitor pursues. top1~s m. ~ ~ay th t ~ecisively forecloses intelligence. For the Grand Inquisitor, mqms1tivene:s is not rhetorical inquiry into the indetermin~te nature ~f God or man but d gmatic imposition, not by anti-rhetoncal coerc10n but by hyperrath er o h " d' " f rhetorical (sophistical) seduction, aiming to relieve t e au ie~ce o ~ankind of its burden of thought and freedom-which is to say, its genumely en-ended situation in the world. On Ivan's account the natural human de0 ~ d ·nventively to the call of conscience is not reduced to the suc~ ~ ~oo 1 hl ·I to master others but imperceptibly removed from the pu 1c cess or £aI ure h · "41 L h re and hidden behind a cloud of"miracle, mystery, and aut onty. ess !tr:me versions of this approach convert topics into the negotiable agre~ments of interpreting communities deciding-as if it were a matter for dec~sion-in what conscience will be said to consist. By contrast, an authe~tlc · acknowledges the already inhabited spaces of our own endunng · dt f t op1c 5 acknowledgments (our forms oflife) while insistin~ on o~r contmue es mg f these according to the call of a shareable conscience mformed-and cor;ected-by the full panoply of established thought an.d v~lue ~n the wo~ld, which is to say, across forms of life. In this respect topics 1s an mexhaus~ble · onti'nuously "all" of the relevant means of persuas10n. power to examme c . Thus Vico states that "the most eulogizing epithet that can be given to a speech is that it is 'comprehensive': praise is due to a speaker who has l.eft nothing untouched, and has omitted notliing from the argument, nothmg which may be missed by his listeners" (Methods 15). Now, in hermeneutic applicatio, Gadamerian "prejudices," sele~te~; and organized within what Heidegger calls "forestructures ~f understanding (~T 191), effectively function as first-orderinventional top~i ofour unders~and1~g and interpretation of ourselves and the worl~. Wh,~n it com~s to reading dis: tanciated texts, as Gadamer explicitly recogmzes, tlie ~raspmg of the mean ing of the text takes on something of the character of an mdependent productive act, one that resembles more the art of the orator than the process of mere listening."42 Philosophic treatises that account fo~ these structures can t~us profitably be taken up within the history of rhetonc as well as ~er~eneu~ics, while their actual uses by these philosophers are also rhetoncal mvent10ns 43 themselves, within and upon the sensus communis of those involved. For I I ! ~---------------1111 ,~s I6 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction Gadamer, as for Vico and Cicero, the paradigm for application and invention alike is law. The problem to be solved is the relation: subsisting between an established but distant rule or text and a novel and urgent case. The question becomes this: If we cannot be said to "apply" what we do not in some sense already have, and yet if new prejudices and a new situation preclude mechanical replication of the old rule in our possession, how then is application undertaken? In what sense do we "have" our traditions and texts? And why should their employment be called inventive ?44 It may seem an impoverished answer to recall that the possession of a topical ability resists theoretical formulation, that this ability of invention/application consists of incomplete insights that only find completion in the judgment of those involved in concrete situations-in other words, that we are, in Blumenberg's phrase, "beings of deficiency" whose impoverishment, however, is our virtu. 45 For this is as close as we come to formulating what will never fully formulate. The hermeneutic reader employs her topical prejudices to explore, say, a distanced text, in that way disclosing new topics (and sometimes "old" topics in new ways) in texts that often seem placeless, strange, or eccentric (atopon) to the reader. 46 To borrow Bakhtin's term, the "exotopic" text is not strictly or wholly "elsewhere" but rather enters our horizon and offers further unforeseen topics that cut across the bias or horizon of the inquiring reader. In this way retrieval of the old is equally an unfolding of the new, for although one has in one sense "had" both the text and the topics used in approaching it, the two together disclose new applications, new places, for inquiry and action. 48 A statute, for example, unfolds over time by prompting hitherto unthought trajectories of extrapolation, often analogical, while a poem can assume new effects by pointing out new implications of standing words, thoughts, and actions. 4; In this regard the single, historical common term that brings invention and application together is the "appropriate." In Greek rhetoric the rhetor aims at finding to prepon, what is right and fitting for the situation, which in Cicero . and Quintilian becomes "decorum," the master principle of rhetoric analogous to ethical prudentia or phronesis-that right judgment in practical cases that Gadamer celebrates in Aristotle, Vico, and the humanist tradition and that has often been referred to as "tact."49 In hermeneutics, similarly, the appropriate becomes "Appropriation": in Heidegger; Ereignis is the "event of Appropriation" that comes as a gift to the alert listener, the gift of what is atopon; in Gadamer, it is the fusion of horizons that are never, as Bruns notes, "unified or identical or subsumed into a higher or wider perspective" ;50 and in Ricoeur, appropriation is a "making-our-own" (Aneignung) of what we only imperfectly had before and what incorporates a dialectic between reader and I7 · t an t to ideolocrical text res1s o~ domination by the subject over the . text. Ricoeur . . writes: "Far from saying that a subject, who already ma~ters his o_wn b~m~-mroiects the a priori of his own understandmg [topoi, preJud1ces] the-worId , P ; . d f d interpolates this a priori in the text, the revelat10n of new mo es o "r fl'£ ,, . an d · g-or ifyoupreferWittgensteintoHei egger,new 10rmso 1 e -gives bem , . . h' lf "51 the subject new capacities [newtopot] for lmowmg _imse .. In this way hermeneutic application, like rhetoncal topics, uses an established sensus communis to work toward a new but nonunitary (nontotaliz~d) sensus co mmun •Js-to find commonly acceptable ways to tolerate and inqmre . within plural senses and plural communities. ~he ~rtue ofb~ngi~g rhetonc to bear on this issue, as Charles Altieri points out m his chapter m this volume, resides in the way that rhetorical doctrine keeps us tied to inexpert matters and values common in principle to all, to debate and contest over our places, and, as Wendy Olmsted notes in her chapter in this vo~ume, to in~ere~ces and argut e .. g , in analogical extensions of aformofhfe. Rhetonc bnngs us backbto mens, a language of agents and agencies in which questions abou~ who w_e are ecome repeatedly reworked in the places where we ':"o~k. To?1cs ~rovide an orientation and an ability to handle both settled social identifications and pos'bl novel perspectives and values and in that way resist self-complacency }' , SI e d h' with meaning and history outside of the reach of power an ~t 1cs-po 1tics, The virtue of bringing hermeneutics to bear on rhetonc, conversely, ~e' d s1 es, as Palmer, Schrag , and Bruns variously recognize in their respective d cha ters in this volume, in the way that hermeneutics opens newtopoi of rea ing ~nd reception. Topoi such as "appropriation/ap_plication," for exa~~l~, transform the problematic of ancient inventio, or of e1ghte~nth-:ent~1?' cntIcism" (another term of the humanist tradition) by suggestmg h1stonc1zed extensions of rhetorical practice. That is, where rhetoric can threaten to dissolve ·ts different kinds of "stay against confusion" in sheer "momentariness," ver:ions of Heidegger's "moment of Appropriation" place rhetorical action wit~in historical time and its abiding (if contested) calls of conscience. The question then becomes: How do we discriminate among those calls, and which do we respond to? RHETORICAL ARGUMENT AND HERMENEUTIC DISCLOSURE We have said that when we think of topics solely in their received classical sense as second-o;der topical catalogues or systems of invention, we are likely to reach a false estimate of their character and worth. The reason is that the notion of "system" is often taken to privilege concepts, beliefs, proposition~, rules, and logical arguments by which a rhetor actively intervenes in a rheton- i1 Introduction I8 I9 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde cal and hermeneutic situation.52 Regarding decisions to be made, moreover, such systems aim at consensus through judgment, while, regarding the act of reading or interpretation, they tend to presuppose stable narrators and to frame readers as more or less subservient to traditions and texts, as well as to supposedly stable semantic meanings or authorial intentions.53 The opposite. tack is to take topics as a generalized ability or dimension of creative strategizing always already in play in thought or language beyond authorial control (i.e., eclipsing the author altogether). On that approach any independent identity or integrity for the concept tends to be denied. In "The Rhetoric of Temporality," for example, Paul de Man perceives an antinomy in romantic rhetoric between a purportedly stable symbol and a pervasive and unstable allegory aligned with other figures and ultimately with irony. In his view all of us are constrained to opt for the latter, explicitly subordinating systematic and traditional topoi to the service of those disorienting and disruptive figures and tropes. 54 "Rhetorical intervention" gives way not to rhetorical-hermeneutic "disclosure," the evocation of the contested hermeneutic "as-structures" of our existence and world, but to deconstructive "deferral," the endless questioning of any authoritative grounds for meaning. Against what is arguably most important in the rhetorical tradition, de Man threatens to reduce "rhetoric" to an unstable figurality in which topics and proofs ("ideas") are subordinated to and finally subsumed by unauthorized and unstable tropes ("images"),55 while the hermeneutics of reading is similarly reduced to the grammatical iterability of signifiers (dif.ferance). Like Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, Kenneth Burke travels a parallel but fundamentally different route from de Man. Burke too explores the interplay between "idea" and "image," but in a way that he finds consistent with the pragmatic bent of classical rhetoric rather than with the transcendental tum of romantic expressivism. Burke writes: "In keeping with the genius of Hazlitt's expression, 'ideas of the imagination,' we began thinking that there should be a term for ideas and images both. 'Titles' (or 'epithets') seemed to meet the requirement. For the rhetorician uses 'titles' (either imaginal or ideological) to identify a person or a cause with whatever kinds of things will, in his judgment, call forth the desired response. He will select such titles in accordance with the bias of his intention and the opinions of his audience. But what are such titles (or 'entitlings' or 'identifications') but another term for the Aristotelian 'topics,' which shift so easily and imperceptibly between ideas and images that you wonder how the two realms could ever come to be at odds ?"56 On this view topics are not only memory places whose images enable systematic storing ofinformation, as de Man suggests; nor are they exclusively generators of commonsense opinions (doxa) and probable arguments (en- doxa).51 Rather, they are what Michael Leff has called "mobile strategies that promote the substance of inquiry."58 They are inventional re-source~ for persuasion or identification that generate or open onto a range of matenals: from concepts and arguments at one end, whos~ purpose is t~ sup~ort claims persuasively and whose excellence is prudentta or phronesis; to images, tropes, and figures at the other end, whose purpose is to "disclose,'' "evoke''. or "show forth" (epi-deixis) the topical first principles of all thought ~n~.ac~10n :,a~her than to argue, and whose excellence is not rational phroneszs ( msight, nght ·udgment) but an unrationalizable kairos (timeliness, appropriateness) at{uned to the situation that one encounters. 59 For de Man, again, this range of idea and image is an opposition that quickly collapses into the hegemony of untrustworthy figures (as symbol collapses into irony, as ontologic~ g~ammar gives way to strategic rhetoric), destabilizing any claims to authont~tive persuasiveness or proof.GD But for Burke and others the range of rhetoncal materials generated by topoi remains a continuum-a holding-in-tension-of the sort caught by another American grammaticus-rhetoricus, ~tanley Cavell: "My interest, it could be said, lies in finding out what my beliefs mean'. ~nd learning the particular ground they occupy. This is n~t the same. as pr~:dmg evidence for them. One could say it is amatterof making them eVIdent. The continuum, in short, is equally a rhetorical and hermeneutic one, between topics commonly received as places for arguments ~"providing evi~ence"), and tropes and other techniques used as means of disclosure, the display of "worldly" phenomena in Heidegger's sense ("making them evident"). This conception of things extends far beyond the dei:t~c s:lf-display of ~anguage .. It is not possible to demonstrate here Burkes msight that classical rhetoncians recognized and used a similar continuum of rhetorical materials. Dispositio and narratio, for example, were for the ancients not merely artificial embellishments, much less (merely or exclusively) unstable pitfalls for authors and audiences, but rather substantive resources in league if not always on a level with arguments for maldng one's case.62 Regarding that genre of r~et.o~c most steeped in these techniques of showing (of narratio )-namely epideictic rhetoric-Quintilian has said: "Indeed I am not sure that this is not the most important department of rhetoric in actual practice" (I~stittttio 2.1.1~). !he question we are after now is how to rethink rhetorical topics and tropes m hg~t of contemporary hermeneutic reflection on the dis~losure that occ~rs m understanding and interpretation. To bring out what 1s at stake, we wish to shift the discussion from the more familiar level of textual interpretation to a more foundational level of understanding our "world" as the understanding of practical "forms oflife." . . . . In Cavell's distinction, it may be noticed, the author hmts that g1V1ng eVI- F Introduction 20 2I Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde deuce (via arguments) and making evident (via images, tropes, examples, fables, analogies, snippets of conversation, hypotheticals, and much else besides )63 operate together on two different levels. The firstis the more common level of our "beliefs" and their uses in typical problem cases or texts interpreted within stable forms oflife and their language games (following Cicero, Vico, and Gadamerwe can think of a law case as the paradigm). The second is the deeper level of the "grounds" or basis of these beliefs that locate a form of life in the first place. 64 What we wish to sketch out here, if only programmatically, is that on this more "foundational level," tropes and other nonlogical strategies initially evoke or show forth the world in ways inseparable from, but not reducible to, logical arguments and proofs. Like de Man, in other words, Cavell and Burke recognize that world (whether immanent or transcendent) can no longer be thought of as a self-presence made manifest in, for example, the symbol. But for these latter thinkers, as for Heidegger, world does not wash away in endless figurality. As David Tracy has put this last point: "A rhetoric of the tropes cannot simply replace persuasive argument [topics ]."65 Perhaps plate tectonics offer an apt metaphor for the condition we are in: continents shift, yet we do not tumble into the ocean for all that. On the contrary, what stability we enjoy is owing to our grounds being free enough to adjust in response to ongoing change (though not, of course, without considerable psychic disturbance). In our own dynamic times it may appear retrograde to reintroduce a term like "world" or a phrase like "grounds of our beliefs." But Wittgenstein provides us ,vith an exemplary practice of such retrieval and application when he speaks in this way: "Something must be taught us as a foundation."66 Like Cavell, Wittgenstein is proposing no facile foundationalism when he speaks of foundations: "The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing" (OC 166); or again: ''At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not well-founded" (OC 253). How do we square these seemingly contrary statements in a way that illuminates both rhetoric (i.e., inventional topics and the arguments and tropes they generate) and hermeneutics (the retrieval, application, and appropriation of "atopic" and "exotopic" texts and traditions)? One of Wittgenstein's responses to our question is this: "Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement" (OC 378). The rhetorical-hermeneutic version of this is to say (1) thatthe paradigm of deliberative rhetoric is from the beginning based on an epideictic rhetoric of tropes, examples, and narratives, just as (2) explicit hermeneutic interpretation is always already grounded in the concemful understanding of one's horizonal articulations (Rede )~that is, in how the world appears always already structured or "jointed."67 Of course here the question becomes: What does Wittgenstein mean by "acknowledge- " hat sorts of things are "acknowledged" rather than "known," and how t w inen, l 1·k ? Throughout On Certainty we encounter examp es i e doth eycome to be ·So · h · l .. ''Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I get up? T ere is tus. l I . ly don't This is how I act" (OC 148). In The Claim of Reason no w1y. simp . k h Stanley Cavell extends considerable effort to show that we do not now t at h human beings are in fact human in the way, for example, that we know ;~a;:his narrow yellow object on the desk is a pencil.68 In neither ~avell ~or Wittgenstein, however, is this an attempt to circ~~vent or wayl? m~estigation of fundamental beliefs and practices. Rather, it is th~ rev~rse. their works ·tute a rhetorical-hermeneutic showing-forth, a disclosmg by means of ti cons · no t . t' a d application of arguments and examples; tropes, a d'isc1osmg mven 10n n . ) onl of the beliefs we hold but of the practices we engage m (or that ~ngage us in re world in which we live. Cavell and Wittgenstein both offer, m short, a " nfession" or testimonial of how the world appears to them (qua me~be~ of ac;ulture or form oflife) and by extension to us: "All the philosopher, this kmd of hilosopher, can do is to express, as fully as he can, his world, and attract our Pd. ·d d attention to our own."69 For, when the authors say we do not know un ivi e b . h · · · t that we have two feet or that another person is a human emg, t eir aim is o point out that our relations to these matters are more stable than the terms . knowledge and argument allow. Such an epideixis-as-confession, we have indicated, does not preclude ~ving reasons why the terms know and knowledge do not apply. In On ?ertamty Wittgenstein gives two such reasons. First, there are no ~rgu~entative premises we could cite that are better established than the claim bemg made about feet or people and that would make the claims a product of a~gument. ~econd, any attempt to doubt the claim presuppos~s experience with doubtmg an; claiming, that is, presupposes involvement m a language game an~ a form life as already given, thereby contradicting itself. Such argumentation and example giving are hardly apodictic proofs; they are also not (nor were they meant to be) epistemological defeats of skepticism. Rather, they are modes of a hermeneutic-rhetorical disclosure that brings grammar (rules, structures, conditions of meaning) and rhetoric (contingency, response) together. Such appeals do not so much lead to rhetorical conclusions as constitute rhetorical topoi and tropes-shared, agreed-upon places and anecdotes and e~amples and stories within which reasoning and arguing, claiming and concludmg t~ke place and within which "doubting" and "knowing" are ~rst .de~ned,. but which are not themselves susceptible to any final argumentative 1ustificabo~, the attempt at which would clearly lead to an infinite regress. They are neither rational nor irrational but that which locates both; doubt about the~ pres~pposes them. They are agreements "in judgments" (OC 140)70 and m practice Introduction 11 23 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde ("forms of life"; PI 241), what Cavell calls agreements in our "attunements" (CR 32 passim). If what rhetoricians call the rhetoric of "good reasons" ultimately fails at these deeper levels, fails because what will count as good and what will count as reasons are the very issues at stake, then the by-now familiar questions return: What do we say to someone who believes in slavery, or denies basic freedoms to women or children or homosexuals or other races? How does a religious believer speak to an unbeliever and vice versa? Wittgenstein places such questions in an explicitly rhetorical setting: 'Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic .... I would 'combat' the other man,-but wouldn't I give him reasons? Certainly, but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion"(OC 611, 612). Or again: "I can imagine a man who had grown up in quite special circumstances and been taught that the earth came into being 50 years ago, and therefore believed this. We might instruct him: the earth has long ... etc.-We should be trying to give him our picture of the world. This would happen through a kind of persuasion" (OC 262). What kind of persuasion does Wittgenstein mean? For persuasion here cannot be construed as the antithesis to criteria, rules, arguments, knowledge, insofar as we have indicated that actual employment of grammatical criteria, arguments, and so on themselves always involve rhetorical occasions and appropriateness of response among practical speakers: contingent rhetorical occasions are the fuller settings within which philosophic criteria are derived and from which they can never be free (except in Theory). Although Wittgenstein does not extrapolate on this point, a provocative but unfortunately neglected essay by the philosopher Raphael Demos entitled "On Persuasion" (1932) anticipates many of the later claims forwarded by philosophers as diverse as Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and Charles Taylor.71 Against sheerly relativistic ("ethnocentric") notions thattheory "creates" its facts simpliciter, and thus circularly confirms itself in a prison house not oflanguage but of cultural practices, Demos argues both that divergent theories or worldviews may equally explain the "facts" and that "to explain facts is not enough; a the01ymust be true" (OP 226). Again, such truth is not an easy matter of superior arguments, since the very ideas of argument and reason are contested. For Demos, as for Wittgenstein, the superiority of one theory or worldview over another resides rather in the "cumulative force of minute considerations" (OP 228); ultimately "it is a conflict between patterns. Persuasion is not a mechanical process, but a living growth in which elements are gradually assimilated, and ultimately modify those very tissues which assimilate them" (0 P 228). 72 . h h ments and reason giving require tropes, What is per~uas10nd, sucl tt agtraor!:d our beliefs and practices? For Demos stones an sty e O d · examp1es, , f " 1· ·ng" the pattern of accumulate part1cu1 l . . matter o our rea 1z1 persuasion is a . f th' pattern beyond merely intel ectua is " . " coming to an expenence o larsd- t d'ng- and this realization is achieved by evocation : un ers an 1 h discussion among individuals is futile is that what Often the reason why so muhc h d not Evocation is the process by which · . · 'dly t e ot er oes . f ·ewpoint in such a manner that it one person reaIizes VIVI , f vividness is c;teihed; it~~t:t :::~;:~:;:r;u::nt is the way by which an individbecomes rea or e pu · . . fact an argument has much less perual experience is made common p~opertyf, ienxpe~e~ce The enumeration of all the . ,. th the vivid evocat10n o an . d suas1ve iorce an d . t ·ts opposite can never be complete ; fa theory an agams I . . f relevantpomts m avor o . . t. II its concreteness and in all its signififar more effective is it to state a V1ewpl om ma t become relevant only after this implications, and then stop; t 1e argumen s cant ) 73 stage has been completed (OP 229 . . h . first that one realizes something vividly, and There are two pomts ere.. ;, tt " r "whole" within which everyalizes 1s a pa ern ° . 11 d "systems" or the "inherited second t h at w hat one re h t Wittgenstem ca e l thing else ma ms sense, w a . dl l dge· ''We do not learn the d" (OC 94) of our practice an mow e . backgroun . . . . d ments b learning rules: we are taughtjudgpractice of ma~ng emp1~ca:hgother ·u~gments. A totality of judgments is nwnts and t~eir conn,~7~~ 140)· ''Wh~n we first begin to believe anything, made plausible to us . , ·t· ·tis a whole system of propositions. . . ot a smgle propos1 10n, I what we b e11eve 1s n h l )" (OC 141 ). "It is not single axioms that (Light dawns gradually ~ver thew ~ e. hi h conse,quences and premises give 'k b . s it is a system m w c " OC 142) Charles Taylor terms such patterns stn e me as o viou ' one another mutual support ( · "hypergoods "that is, those "f k "whose supports are our ' l our mora ramew~r s '. . . f oods that we believe deserve admiration d . h -in short that belong to "strong evaluations or mtmhons o ~ b d r own desires an WIS es , and adherence eyon ou f the others we have treated, ad. h 74 For Tay1or as or human bemgs as umans. . f ct1·cal reason and also consists f rks 1s a matter o pra ' h herence tot ese ramewo h 1 b t 'th this addition: that there be an in the vivid realization of so~e w o eA, uBWIA 'th Cavell this transition (or ' . · "· erting from to · s WI "epistemic gam m conv . . ter) ersonal confession and story: persuasion) for Taylor is grounde~ m .(mt ~t·ons It aims to establish, not . . a reasonmg m rans1 1 . "Practical rea~~mn.g ... is b l t 1 but rather that some position is superthat some position is correct a so u e y, . . biographical narf gument has its source m " " h' f, ior to some other : T is orm o ar . . . . rbecause we have lived a . . d th t certam view1s supeno a a d . g and hence as epistemic rative. We are convince transition which we understand as error-re ucm . 24 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction gain. I see that I was confused about the relation of resentment and love, or I see that there is a depth to love that I was insensitive to before. But this doesn't mean that we don't and can't argue. Our conviction that we have grown morally can be challenged by another. It may, after all, be illusion. And then we argue; and arguing here is contesting between interpretations of what I have been living. "75 After Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Cavell, after Saussure and Derrida and de Man, such deictic (disclosive) rhetoric can never again be understood as the unmediated presencing of self or world: in different ways all of these thinkers have established the differential "as"-structures of our praxis and perception and the historical multiplicity and contest concerning which of those structures will count (however momentarily) as "true." Topics or tropes may function as places or evocations but not as irrefutable arguments or transparent symbols of a transcendent order. To allow this, however, is not to stop investing in our arguments, nor (per impossible) to attempt to do without them altogether. Rather we look to bring our talk back "home" (to use the postromantic language of Wittgenstein and Cavell) to the realm where our arguments (including nonfictional examples and fables) actually cause the work of the world to be undertaken (and challenged) in the first place. We return to practices and their recalcitrant conditions of action and reaction, as John Dewey long ago advised. Thus we can agree with Richard Bernstein that Derrida, for example, "is always encouraging us to question the status of what we take to be our center, our native home, our arche"; but we also must not forget, as many are inclined to do, Bernstein's further notice: "In one of his most beautiful and loving essays, his homage to Levinas (from .whom he appropriates so much), Derrida writes of-this time playing off Heidegger against Levinas-the respect for the other as what it is: other. Without this acknowledgement, which is not a knowledge, or let us say without this 'letting be' of an existent (Other) as something existing outside me in the essence of what is (first in its alterity), no ethics would be possible. "76fo the following section we seek to further Derrida's playing off of Heidegger against Levinas, keeping both in the region (place) of the rhetorical notion of home, that is, as the ongoing search for a community's nonfoundational practices. THE CALL OF CONSCIENCE We spoke of such a homecoming earlier when we noted how the rhetorical competence that informs a text directs the "art of understanding" back to its existential and hermeneutical origins, to the everyday world of situated concerns and practices. Here rhetoric discovers the materials (topics) that are ·ate a lication of know-how. Here evocaneeded for its timely and approptnal lapti·ponships with things and with others f r comportmen re . d. 1 ou persuasive . arguments aimed at collaborative deliberation tive isp£ ays rth oand . .. f are set oti al' wisdom are mven . t e d . In discussing these related actiVIties . ho and prac c 'th the hel of hermeneutical theory, our aim as rhetoric.al ~omp~tence wiwa how t?e enterprises of rhetoric and hermeneubeen to mdicate ma small hy £ the illumination of both. With this goal in tics can be thought of toge'td er or fi al matter that although it has implicitly , . d . d e now wish to consi er one n min , rt w d ur entire . di scuss10n, . h as yet to be specifically detaile as a77comsuppo int e of o reference £or th ese enterprises . That matter is conscience. . .. b mon po f . 1 b .d that rhetoric's lifelong troubles, its ongomg cntique y It may air y . e s~ h rt . interpretation of the call of conscience adhy begm wit a ce ain d d h' " Ph .1 i osop , . voice . " ofthi's call comman e is ser78 The "prop hetic vancedGbyd" Socrates. . h h e tookto me an that his life's calling must be that of (23b) whic vice to othe philosop . , h'ical Ii£e" (28e) ' of "elucidating the truth" for others "l di th ea ng . them "not to think more of practical advantages an b . ,, ( c) "I am" said Socrates to those (29d), and encouragmg l 36 11 of ... [their] m~ntalandmor~nw;h~ ;~:~s of th~ youth," ... a gift from God" who accused him of cor~~p-~hg did not believe it to be true, for "the voice," his t dhi'mfromcommittinganywrongdo(31a).Hecouldnotsayt isi de l ke up an preven e . 1. out of the question as was any mdaemon, a ways spo call ca~~[c ii~g,:::rupted" as theywer~ by the teaching (40a-b). When t~ volvement in the politics of P ' . h killed in the oratorical 1 nt but unwise, w o were s ings of those wh~ w:re e oque ar ument defeat the stronger" by employing Practice of making the weaker g d d h "(17h-18b) but d ked out with fine wor s an p rases , "flowery language . . . ec . en a ed themselves in such a crowdd who as evidenced by who apparently felt no shame as th~y g g . d . ble rhetonca1 exercise, an , pleasing an uncon;c10na . threat to his life. Unfortunately, Socrates Socrates' trial, co~l pose a se~ou~is defense, accordingly, he had little troudid not escape this threat. ~~nng " man on earth who conscientiously ble admitting to his fellow citihzens that . nod democracy and flatly prevents a ' .h . any ot er orgamze . from taking place in the state to which he opposes eit er you OInd illegaIities great many wrongs a . h h. Ii£ The true champion of justice, if he belongs, can possibly escape wiht i~ e. t necessarily confine himself to intends to survive even for a s ort time, mus . dI l'ti s alone" (3le-32a). private hfe an eave po i : fhemlock and Plato assumed his mentor's When Socrates drank his dram. o . . was more or less set. From that "calling," the destiny of the ~he~~nt~a~tr::t::re favorably of the orator's art ht b these two Greeks, by time forward, those who wish p . would have banswer to charges of sop~istry br~~gle (a~d a whipping boy) for clarifying how rhetoric will not serve on y as ave ic 25 Introduction 26 27 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde the more or less rhetorical arguments of philosophers. Rhetoric has a necessary and legitimate role to play, not only in creating, sustaining, ·and correcting the (im)moral ecology of the body politic, but also in illuminating our contested (topical) nature as human beings. With what it has to tell us about the call of conscience, philosophical hermeneutics provides a way for rhetoric to affirm and develop this point. As students of his works are well aware, Heidegger makes much of the matter in B<:ing and Time. Here one learns that the call (Ruf) of conscience is itself made possible by what Heidegger describes as the essential meaning of human being (Dasein): "temporality." As selves who are always in the process of becoming that which we are, time is of the essence. For Heidegger, the call of conscience arises from the temporality of our existence and summons us to become authentically concerned with this essential nature of our being, to assume the personal and ethical responsibility of affirming our freedom through resolute choice. Being and Time is devoted in great part to describing how this is so. The description, to say the least, is quite involved. Given the space limitations of this introduction, accordingly, we shall discuss only a few of Heidegger's observations, which help establish how the call of conscience, hermeneutics, and rhetoric are related. Conscience calls: we begin here. With Heidegger's ontological assessment of the matter, however, it becomes clear that the call of conscience is something other than what the discourses of religion and morality would have us believe. Indeed, according to Heidegger, conscience calls, but the sound of its voice is silence-the silence of our ongoing "projective" involvement with the temporal process of becoming and understanding what we are: our possibilities. "The discourse of the conscience never comes to utterance," writes Heidegger; "Only in keeping silent does the conscience call" (BT 342-43). This call, then, is not to be confused with some existent institutionalized discourse that speaks to us of the good and the bad. Rather, the call of con-· science is always already at work before any practical prescriptions and injunctions are announced, for the call discloses itself first and foremost as "the giving to understand" of human being's temporality, of its existence, of its openness to Being. The call of conscience is this disclosure; it thereby exhibits that formal structure of discourse (Rede) whose function is to point out, uncover, and make manifest something about the world.79 The call of conscience is a primordial saying (logos) that originates in the temporal openness of that being (Dasein) whose concern for its Being enables it to perceive and care enough about what it is hearing. Maintaining a rhetorical outlook on this matter, it can also be said that the call of conscience operates topically: what it discloses, evokes, shows forth with its "saying" is the human being's funda- . h ld the way it is always "on the way'' (unterwegs) ·11 b . ·ts life but is "not yet." The call of .,.,ental placement m t e wor ' '" di hat can or WI em 1 toward understan ng w l presupposed by all others; its saying t't t s a commonp ace 1 conscience cons I u e f .t the source of our inventiona rethe openness o our exis ence, opens us t o h' ·n most dramatically in moments of anxietysources.. We are attuned to t is sayi g . th verydayworld of circumspective 1 d ilyprogress m e e d d 'f t stopped altogether by occurrences when, for examp e, our .a . w how 1s 1mpe e , 1 no . h' concern and k no stomed routines and relat10ns ips (e.g.' a serious illn~ss) that o~; :~~; for an anxious moment, we must with things and with others. en, t' li £or-Being for then we are called · h · ·ty f ur poten ia ty' confront the aut entic1 o 'ob'li . t me the responsibility of affirming . . t our poss1 I ties, o assu 1 (' upon to antic1pa e h . d thus to become personal y 1.e., auh resolute c oice, an d our free d om t h rou g . f meaningful existence in or er to . 1 d 1·n the re-creat10n o a thentically) mvo ve . h' l'£ -giving activity is, for Heidegger, to l' To engage m t is I e h 11 f cience-a call that makes its presrestructure our IVes. ndedtot eca o cons . d d have hear an respo f h" nd that thereby arouses Dasem . h "th momentum o a pus a . d ence known wit e . truth of its temporal existence and with the eto become concerned with ~he h. eaningful way.so The call of confli . g this trut m some m . cisive challenge o vm b'l'ty to discover those invent10nal reds calls on our a I I 'bl . h . l t ·n for the time being a respons1 e science, m ot er wor ' sources (topics) whose matena can sus ai dis;:t form oflife. . . , b 'lity to hear and respond to the call of conHeidegger descnbes Dasem s a I" ting to have a conscience." In want.h . ible manner as a wan science m a respons r rce must come to terms wit our · however we peno ing to have a conscience, 11 of conscience has the character of an guilt. According to Heid~gg~r, . e ca most potentiality-for-Being-its-Self; appeal to Dasein by callmg it to o·wnt 't wnmost Being-guilty" (BT314). f f mmonmg1t 01 so b and this is done yway o su ht u in the temporal and topical process o As beings who are always caug p pe the guilt that we are. . b h f ture we can never esca making chmces a out t e . ~ ' rtain existential possibilities, we are necesFor in choosing and actuahzmg ce lves we are our possibilities, the ·fi . h And because, as se ' h' sarily sacn cmg ot ers. f f i·ssion Conscience calls us tot is £ guilty o acts o om · . . ·1 ,, r "to hear the call authentically, s1gmsacrifice mak es us orever . . . f "Bemg-gm ty, ior b ontological s1tuat1on ° . ki t' ,, whereby choices must e fies bringing oneself into a factical ta. ~g;:t i;:t our "essential Being-guilty made (BT 341). Hence, H~ideg~elr p01din'ts· cor the possibility of the 'morally' dc . . d' 11 th existentia con ion u is, eqmpnmor ia Y, e , . h t . c r morality in general an 10r 1 t a is, io ·1 , h 'morally evi £ . all The primordial 'Being-gm ty good and forth at Of t e r · h t th' may take ache Y· lf,, the possible 1orrns t a is. . l'ty lready presupposes it foritse · cannot be defined by morality, smce mora I a "Th i:s Introduction 28 29 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Like the call of conscience that summons us to it, "Being-guilty is more primordial than any knowledge about if' (BT 332). Conscience calls us to assume the responsibility of affirming our freedom through resolute choice; it thereby summons us to deal with our guilt. Heidegger emph~sizes that this constitutes a "personal" undertaking on the part of a human bemg; but he also admits that it has much to do with others. Responding to the call is not an act that detaches a human being "from its world" and isolates it "so that it becomes a free-floating 'I."' On the contrary, the resoluteness that shows itself with one's response "is always the resoluteness of some factical Dasein at a particular time." Wanting to have a conscience is a situated o.ccurrenc~ that "brings the Self right into its current concernful Being-alongside what 1s ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous Being with Others" (BT 344)-in other words, that makes a human being a human being, one who engages responsibly in the things and affairs of his or her world. But now the se~f is in the p~sition of taking on the additional responsibility of becoming a v01ce of conscience for those who are willing to hear, as it makes use of the inventi~nal resource's (tropes, stories, arguments) that have been deemed appropnate for evoking a worldview and maldng a case. Abiding by what Heidegger notes about "the [authentic] solicitude which leaps forth and li~erates:" such a voice ~ust maintain whatit considers its own correct point of VIew, while at the same time encouraging, byway of"considerateness" (Rucksicht) and "forbearance" (Nachsicht), an authentic response from the Other. In Heidegger's terms, the goal here is to have all concerned "devote themselv~s to the same affair in common," "become authentically bound together," and m that way enable each other to disclose the situation at hand (BT 159). In Heidegger's analysis of the call of conscience, we learn how the resolute self is responsible for bringing about an authentic community by calling upon others to assume the responsibility of affirming their freedom through resolute choice. In doing this, the resolute self not only displays a willingness to test be~ore ~thers the integrity of its affirmed authenticity-a test that Heidegger mamtams must be taken time and again-but also engages others in the related tasks of trying to cultivate all that is good in their heritage, such that they too might have a say in the establishing of their collective destiny. Summarizing this entire process, Heidegger notes: "Only in communicating and in struggling [with others] does the power of destiny become free" (BT 436). We submit that such an interpersonal engagement directed toward the cultivation of community is something that calls for what we have been describing.in this chapter as the practice of rhetorical competence-a practice that, as ~e1de~er once put,~t, has a role to play in the ethical task of guiding us "in a nght or 3ust manner. Rhetoric offers itself as a response to the contingent de- mands of a situation; it functions with an eye and ear attuned to the needs of rs· in the midst of disputational contexts it provides an opportunity for colothe ' l d . laborative choice; its ultimate aim is not merely manipu atio~ an. persuas10~ but the enactment of deliberation and judgment and the cultivation of practi1 ·sdom and kairotic appropriateness. Rhetoric, in other words, helps procivic engagement and civic virtue; it thus lends itself to thetask of enric~. the moral character of a people's communal existence. Or to put all this mg hat differently: in the hands of one who has heard the call of conscience somew f b " and who is now willing to test the integrity of his chosen point o view y communicating" and "struggling" with others, rhetoric can sound a call that acknowledges our comportmental relationship with things and ~th others and that summons us to choose, to act, and perhaps to change our hves for the better. Upon hearing this call we may, of course, find its voice :o b~ "gui.lty" of maintaining a wrong point of view. Yet, to the extent that this v01c~ disp~ays " nsiderateness" and "forbearance" toward us, it nevertheless proVIdes time co l fh . . and space for an authentic response such that a codisc osing o t e s1tuat10n :0: becomes possible. Conscience calls a person to choose, to make a decision about some matter of interest. Rhetoric helps to ensure that the integrity and "truthfulness" of this decision are brought before the Other to be shared, tested, agreed with, or disputed. Heidegger would have us remem~er that human e~~tenc~ is marked with an indelible communal character: The world of Dasein 1s a withworld [Mitwelt]. Being-in[-the-world] is Being-with Others" (BT 155). Rhetoric pays homage to this essential feature of the Self's existe~ce, of its way of "dwelling" here on earth. As beings who are capable ofheanng and res~onding to the call of conscience, we also have an obligation to dwell rhetoncally. Our Being-with Others demands as much. Heidegger has little to say about the ways and means of this obligation. In developing his philosophy he is more concerned with discove~ng ~ow the. ~elf can enter into a genuine "conversation" with Being than he 1s with detailmg how the self can display a competence for initiating and sust~ning such. a conversation with others.Bl As a practice that by its very nature 1s other-oriented, rhetoric is inclined to be on the lookout for philosophies that speak highly of the importance of acknowledging and caring for the other. Within the tra~tion of philosophical hermeneutics, we know of no one more devoted to this task than Emmanuel Levinas. For here is a philosopher who would have us understand that the call of conscience originates not in "the temporality of Being" but rather in "the temporalityof the interhuman," in the "f~ce-to-fac~" encounter between the self and the other. This encounter, accordmg to LeVInas, defines the primordial domain of ethics-a domain where the self, exist- 30 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction ing as it does in constant "proximity" to the oth . I . trying to come to terms with th th er, I~ a ways rn the situation of e o erness or altenty of th th .h e o er, wit what t h e self can never totally be in mind and bod . embedded in life that forms the existent1'al by, .Witfhalal ~ndamental difference b as1s o wrms of .al . . ecause its mere presence "calls into question" th If' . soc1 cntique know-it-all attitudes. Levinas equate th· e sedi s egmst tendencies and .I h s is never-en ng eve t f . wit 1 t e call of conscience-a call h . . . n o questioning I . . w ose vmce s1gmfies "th s1stance to my powers" and t " I . e reve ahon of a re. o my g onous spontaneity a 1· . b . " h f s a ivrng eing. 82 T e distinctiveness of the other th l , e s 1eerness O its "£ " . h f d ace, raises t e issue of accountability: Am I being 1·ust 'th WI my ree om to d d · h Otherness calls upon the self to attest to the artic I o an . sa~ ~ at I will? Levinas puts it this way: p u ar subJeChVIty that it is. I am defined as a sub· r ·ty , ~ec IV! , as a smgular person as "I " . exposed to the other. It is my in bl d . ' an ' precisely because I am escapa e an mcontrovertibl other that makes me an individual "I "S ti I b e answerability to the to the extent that I agree to de . d oh mt ecome a responsible or ethical "I" pose or et rone myself t bd' centrality-in favor of the vulne bl ti - o a icate my position of ra e O ier The ethic I "I" · b a is su jectivity precisely in so far as it kneels before the th .... 'fl . . o er, sacr1 cmg its O 1I·b h pnmordial call of the other I wn erty to t e more · · · · can never escape the fact th h h mantled a response from me before I afflr at t e ot er has demand. 8.3 m my freedom not to respond to his de- . . With the call of the other, of conscience th If. manner of Adam Ab rah dM " ' e se is obliged to respond in the ' am, an oses· Here I am "£ call, the self's situation becomes "religi~ "84 Th ' hor your sake. With the e ot er warrants considerateness and forbearance (He'd ) ubs. ! egger , to e sure· but 't I d thy for the plight of its body, for its pain and suffi ' . ~: so es~rves sympaflesh" is nowhere developed in Heide , h enng. . e expenence of"the Levinas on the other ha d gger s ermeneuhc reading of the call. ' n , cannot say enough ab t 1't S h of:u · teeped in the Hebraic tradition of biblical exegesi's h . t ' em erpretst e a fth h for unconditional devotion to its oft f d ce o e ot er as calling writes Levinas "comes to b1'rth t. en imI· es esperate needs. "Morality," ' no rn equa ity but . th f: h . gencies that of serving th tl ' rn e act t at rnfinite exi, e poor, 1e stranger the widow and h verge at one point of the universe "85 Th' '. . h ' t e orphan, con. 1s pornt1s t e other, who f:aces the self and issues a call. Heidegger is attuned to a call that makes its wa throu " ' self's) existence. Levinas hears it different!Y' th/c II on: s OW11" (the from the other. Like Derrida d R' . a o conscience comes whether these two perce tion an !Coeur, we think it worth considering lh Still, what Levinas has to ~ay a~o:;t~: ;:coe~1s_:s Levinas seems to suggest,86 o ace encounter offers a signifi- cant extension of Heidegger's all-too-brief treatment of how the call of conscience is related to the indelible communal character of human existence. It is tempting to see this extension as providing further support for the importance of recognizing the worth of our rhetorical competence-a competence that aids the self in its attempts to aclmowledge others and engage them in collaborative deliberation. But Levinas refuses to grant such support. For he equates rhetoric with "ruse, emprise, and exploitation," and accuses its "enthusiasm" for "eloquence" as being a much too common occurrence that inhibits our ability to hear the one true "discourse" that never goes away: the primordial call of the other, the saying (logos) of the face, the call ofconscience.87 If there is any way to salvage a positive assessment of rhetoric in Levinas's thought, it comes from one ofhis many essays ("Everyday Language and Rhetoric Without Eloquence") devoted to elucidating the importance of the saying of the face. Levinas's phrase "rhetoric without eloquence" seems to suggest that the former of these two can exist without the latter. Clearly, not all rhetoric is eloquent in the obvious senses of the word. In the context of Levinas's essay, however, we might conceive of such a noneloquent rhetoric in an untraditional way. Might it be the case that the saying of the face-that which calls into question the self's freedom and beckons it toward the other-is itself a rhetoric without eloquence, the most primordial rhetoric of all? Levinas does not say. Hermeneutics, rhetoric, and conscience. Heidegger helps us understand how these things go together, but he could have said more. Levinas helps to remedy this deficiency, but not without ridiculing rhetoric. Heidegger stops short in commending this art. Levinas goes too far in condemning it. In this introduction we have tried to overcome both these tendencies and establish a middle ground between them. The chapters that follow may be read as providing additional directives for advancing this project. NOTES 1 Hans Blumenberg, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric," trans. Robert M. Wallace, in After Philosophy: End or Transformation? ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 441. 2 Isocrates, Anti dos is, trans. G. Norlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 253---56. 3 For a historical treatment of these matters, see Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Ne~ York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4 See Eugene Garver, Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). JI 31 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction 5 John Poulakos, "The Possibility of Rhetoric's Early Beginnings," the Van Zelst Lecture in Communication, Northwestern University, School of Speech, May 14, 1991. 6 See Aristotle's Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), bk. I, 1354a, 1355a-b; bk. II, 1381a. Also see Aristotle, The Politics ofAristotle, trans. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1252b30, 1253al3-15, 1253a29-30, 128lbl-6. For comprehensive treatments of Aristotle's theory of rhetoric, see, for example, W M.A. Grimaldi, Studies in the Philosophy ofAristotle's Rhetoric (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983); Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), and Garver, Aristotle's Rhetoric. 7 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Henneneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977), 97. 8 Ibid., 97. 9 Ibid., 148-49. 10 See Michael J. Hyde and Craig R. Smith, "Hermeneutics and Rhetoric: A Seen but Unobserved Relationship," Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 34 7--63. 11 Schleiermacher, Henneneutics, 96. 12 Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, "Introduction" ("Language, Mind, and Artifact: An Outline of Hermeneutic Theory since the Enlightenment"), in Mueller-Vollmer, ed., The Henneneutics Reader: Texts ofthe Gennan Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1990), 12. 13 Hans-Georg Gadamer, "On the Scope and Function ofHermeneutical Reflection," trans. G. B. Hess and R. E. Palmer, in Gadamer, Philosophical Henneneutics, ed. David E. Llnge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 24. See Chapter 15 (retitled) in this volume. 14 Calvin 0. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 198-99. 15 See, for example, Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harperand Row, 1962 ), 95-122. Hereafter cited in the text as BT. For lucid analyses of Heidegger's thinking on this point, see W B. Macomber, The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger's Notion of Truth (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), esp. 34-44; and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Beingin-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), esp. 184-214. 16 Heidegger describes the ontological structure of a culture's hermeneutical situation as consisting of a "fore-having," a "fore-sight," and a "fore-conception." The fore-having is the realm of possibilities that a culture makes available to its members in advance of any particular act of interpretation that may be performed by a member of the culture. This intersubjective realm of understanding constitutes the parameters of being wherein the members of the culture learn to think and behave in ways that other members can sensibly comprehend. The fore-sight is an abstraction of the fore-having; it originates when members of a culture appropriate the cul- ll , r havi·ng and , in so doing ' formulate specific "points tures1ore. of view'' . that guide I · the d · of a ce rt am · obJ·ect · Consequently' these pomts of VIew interpretat10n . are a so .m a · bnng·to vance of any part'I cular act of interpretation; they are the orientations weA" of what t he scenes of l· nterpretation that allow us to make sense . . we see. . dpre1udice "for example, is an antic representation of what 1s here bemg designate ~nt~lo ·~ally as a point of view (the fore-sight ofunderstandi~g). ~he fore-concept10n 1s h!, we structure the linguistic possibilities of our fore-sight m ~dvance o~ an act ~f interpretation. A categorical system that, for example, is used m conduct'.ng a sc1·fi · tor a rhetorical analysis is an example of fore-conception. (See entI c expenmen . . " ,, (£ h . ore- aVIng, T 188-95.) All interpretation operates withm the forestructure ' · l t 1core-conception) of understanding. As interpretation develops underrore-s1g 1 , ' d d' l · £ U . derstanding shows itself in both a synchronic an iac 1romc orm. nstand mg, un . . d d' · . 1s · synchronic in that any particular act of mterpretive un derstan d mg . erstan . b mg d1s · g of language at a specific moment in time; it becomes situation . . .oun . a struct unn Understanding is diachronic because, once it is situated by i_nte~retatio~,. it goes be ond the particular interpretation and contributes to the h~stoncal trad1t10n. tha~ y Ianguage through time · (See Paul Ricoeur, The Conjhct of Interpretatzons. moves . . , H ermen ettti·cs, ed · Don Ihde [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern. Umvers1ty Essays in d 27-96· and Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse an · 1974] Press , esp. ' 976] ) ' zus C!,f Meamn · g [Fort Worth·. Texas Christian the Surp . . University Press,. 1 . .h .,., I t gether the synchronic and diachronic d1mens10ns of understandmg (wit f ia rnn o , . I . t· 1 · correspond"mg 1corestructure) constitute the hermeneutica s1tua ion• o any t l1err • , lture and of human existence in general. The meamng of human existence, given cu ·th" th as it develops in and through interpretive understanding, al~ays occurs ~ m e hermeneutical situation. The same can be said about a persons hermeneutical com- ~ petence. ... d ht l 7 The bracketed phrase here corresponds to the original German: . m er rec en W · "s e Martin Heidegger, Sein und 'Zeit (Ttibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979), e1se. e h " · ht " 138-39. While Macquarrie and Robinson translate the p rase as ang , we suggest that a less condensed translation is mor_e appropri~te. The German recht can refer to the moral sense being emphasized m our readmg (as when, for e~ampl~, · t me · htrechtvon dir" 1f one 1s one says " es 1s , "it's wrongorunfairofyou"). Moreover, . to credit Heidegger's gloss of the Rhetoric as being right, just, a~d fair, then our suggested translation is appropriate because, for Aristotle, rhetonc has a moral role to play in the workings of the polis. . 18 Plato, The Republic ofPlato, trans. Francis M. Cornford (New York: Oxford Umver,, sity Press, 1979),XXI, vi,487b-497a. . 19 For a discussion, see Walter Jost, "Philosophic Rhetoric: Newman and Heidegger, in Gerard Magill, ed., Discourse and Context: An Interdisciplinan1 Study ofJohn HenrtJ Newman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 54-80: 20 E · J c with Patients, volume 2: Clinical Technique . (Cambndge: nc . asse11 , "'alking " · h" d MIT P 1985) '15. What is being noted about medical case histones mt 1s an ress, ' I d "M d" . e wme, the following paragraph is based on an analysis in Michae J. Hy e, • ! 34 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction Rhetoric, and the Euthanasia Debate: A Case Study in the Workings of a Postmodern Discourse," Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 201-24. 21 W. H. S. Jones, Hippocrates (Law), Vol. 2 (London: William Heinemann, 1923), sec.4. 22 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems ofPhenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 171-72. 23 See, for example, Michael J. Hyde and Craig R. Smith, "Aristotle and Heidegger on Emotion and Rhetoric: Questions of Time and Space," in The Critical Turn: Rhetoric and Philosophy in Postmodern Discourse, ed. Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993 ), 68-99. These authors, like many others, fail to consider how Heidegger's ontological assessment of the "the call of conscience" works to question this common interpretation. For an essay that develops this point, see Michael J. Hyde, 'The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and the Question of Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric 27 (1994): 374-96. We discuss the call of conscience later in this introduction. 24 Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Text and Interpretation," trans. Dennis J. Schmidt and Richard Palmer, in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 106. Perhaps this unflattering conception of the orator's art has something to do with Gadamer's "encounter" with Derrida, that postmodern rhetorician who, as evidenced in his contributions to the encounter, is unreceptive to Gadamer's hermeneutical way of getting at the "truth" of a text's subject matter. 25 David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989 ), 265. 26 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrlieit und Methode (Tiibingen: J.C. B. Mohr, 1960); Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), 568. Further references in the text will be to this edition, cited parenthetically as TM. 27 In a review of Truth and Method (abridged as "Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method," trans. and ed. Marvin Brown, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 13 [Summer 1980]: 160-80; the original review first appeared in Gi.ittingische Gelehrte Anziegen, 218, nos. 3-4, [1966]), Klaus Dockham makes a similar point (161). But Dockhorn's emphasis throughout (and Gadamer's emphasis in his approving reference to Dockhorn's review in Chapter 15, this volume) falls on emotion (pathos). As we explain below, this potentially reinforces the tired misconception that rhetoric's task in life is chiefly to manipulate feelings for personal gain. Our emphasis here falls on logos--or more accurately, on the competence or know-how involved in locating and exploring topics to find the substance (logos), as well as the ethos and pathos, of a specific case. This is what Ernesto Grassi (after Vico and Heidegger) calls "topical philosophy," and what Kenneth Burke makes central both to his grammar and rhetoric of motives. 28 Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Further references in the text will b.e t~ . this edition, cited parenthetically as Methods. For an excellent. ~ccount of V~co's thought, which has influenced our project here, see Donald Ph1hp Verene, Vicos Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), esp. chap. 6, "Rhetoric." 29 Cicero, On Oratory and Orators, trans. and ed. J. S. Watson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 213. 30 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: J.. M. Dent and Sons, 1973), 127, emphasis added. See also Victoria Kahn, "Humamsm nd the Resistance to Theory," Chapter 7, this volume. 31 ;ee also Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics," Chapter 1, this volume: "Admittedly, what Vico was argumentatively defending is the educative function of rhetoric, always living-though less in the actual practice of eloquence and the expertise that values it than in redirecting the rhe~orical tra~ition t~ readin~ classical texts." As hinted earlier, this account of rhetonc cuts agamst Heidegger s interest in the pathe in Aristotle's Rhetoric, inasmuch as antic feelings (and ontological moods) in Heidegger tend to become dissociated from the practical activity required of the speaker to discover what is relevant and persuasive in so~e conti~gent case (or text)-in a word, from rhetorical inventio. For a concrete 1llustration of what we are suggesting here and what Gadamer is talking about, see David T~ac)'.: "Charity, Obscurity, Clarity: Augustine's Search for Rhetoric and ~e:m~neutics, Chapter 12, this volume: "Thus the paradox: a proper hermeneutics 1s simultaneously a new rhetoric of discovery or invention." 32 See Methods, 15: "Criticism is the art of true speech; 'ars topica,' of eloquence [copia, copiousness]." Cf. Cicero, Topica, 386-87. Also Ernest~ Grassi, ."Criti~al Philosophy or Topical Philosophy? Meditations on the De nostri. tempons s~ud1~nun ratione," in Giambattista Vico: An International Sympostum, ed. G1org10 Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore: John~ Hopkin~ University ~ress, 1969); Victoria Kahn's chapter, this volume; and Calvm Schrags chapter, this vo~ume: "Not only is there the otherness of the interlocutor/addressee/reader, there 1s also the otherness of the topoi, the topics, which have to do with the plethora of beliefs, practices, and institutions that congeal into a variety of forms oflife." 33 See Theodor Viehweg, Topics and Law, trans. W. Cole Durham, Jr. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993), 22-23: . ''When one stumbles upon a problem somewhere, one can of course simply pr.oceed in the manner that arbitrarily selects views [topoi] at will more or less ma tnal and error fashion .... Observation teaches us that in everyday life we nearly always proceed in this way. Also, in such cases more precise investiga~ion ~ould sl~ow that certain leading views guide the particular orientation at the time m question. But these are not made explicit. For purposes of overview we will call this procedure first stage Topics. . "The uncertainty of this approach is readily apparent, and makes it understand- 35 36 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction able that one seeks a resource which in it . as a repertoire of views Th . . s simplest form would always be available · us anse topoz-catalog w ·11 f, · "' . s. e WI re er to a procedure that uses this type of catalog as second t 34 S G sage 1op1cs." ee arvei~Aristotles Rhetoric 81 35 Ibid., 82: "The diversity ofansw'ers . iven b a topic in Aristotle's Rhetoric P ' g y commentators to the questio. n, 'What is · , suggests not confu · b t h s1on u t e possibility that what topics are and how they fun t' .h and the manifold on wh· ~1;hnvarywit thepurposeforwhichtheyareemployed IC ey are used" For add'ti I ]· h . Richard McKean "Creat1·VI·ty d th C . I ona ig t on topics, see ' an e ommon ] "Ph·z "'T' • • Pace, z osophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 199-210· Nancy Stru ' ever, iopics m Risto " H' (1980): 66-79; Walter Jost "Teachin the . ry, zstory and TheonJ 19 Education," Rhetoric Soci~ty Quart!rz 2~or;~: Character, Rhetoric, and Liberal Leff, "Recherchesamericainessurl 1·y '" I~ter 1991): 1-16; and Michael C. . h, d es ieux, mLzeux Commu t . , , cltc es, e . Christian Plantin (B .. Ed' . . ns, opoi, stereotypes, 36 B dL ans. ihons Kime 1993) 506-17 emar onergan, Insight: A Study of Human U;d , . . Philosophical Library, 1970), 175. erstandmg, 3d ed. (New York: 37 See Quintilian, lnstitutio Oratoria trans H E B University Press, 1985), vol 2· 5 1~ 100· '.. . ..u~ler, 4vols. (Cambridge: Harvard . But as it is not in itself sufficient to know that all proofs are drawn fro . ··th. m ei er persons or thi I h f ngs, ... so le w o has learned that arguments must be dr awn rom antecedent cont will not be sufficiently instructed . th k 1 ' emporary or subsequent facts m e now edge of the method of handling arguments to understand what arguments are to be drawn fr th . each particular case· especially as th . . om e circumstances of .1 . ' e maJonty of proofs are t b r d. cia circumstances of individ I dh o e wun m the spe. .h ua cases an ave no c pute, and therefore while they th onnex10n wit any other disare e strongest a I th I t all , ' re a so e east obvious, since, whereas we derive what is com mon o cases from gene I I h cover for ourselves whatev . 1 ra ru es, we ave to dis(257-59 ). The nuanced sens;;il:~pecu '.ardt~ the case which we have in hand" unforeseen places: what the Fr hreqlul1lreb y topics is echoed again and again in enc ca e on sens Pascal' · d fi man's "illative sense " Polanvi' "t 't k I ' s espnt e nesse, Newrs ac1 now ed " d h h ' subtilitas applicandi. ge, an t e ermeneutic tradition's 38 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punisl ton, 1989), 222,224. iment, ed. George Gibian (New York: Nor·39 For good examples of this see Albert R J d ' . onsen an Steph Ti I . h . (B k en ou mm, T e Abuse of Casuistry: A History ofMoral R 1988). easonmg er eley: University of California Press, 40 In"TheTopologyofBeing,"inOttoPii eler . . . , trans. Daniel Magurshak ands· dgBg b' Martin Heideggers Path of Thinking, igmun ar er (At] t' H' hi d ties Press, 1987) 227-42 P" I r an IC ig an s, N.J.: Humaniand th' 1· (' ' ' ogge er reiers to poetrv l . ,, ( ·1 m <Ing m Heidegger's senses of these terms) as an .. emp acmg topologizi ) "E 1 interrogate what has been th ht d' ng : mp acement means to oug regar mg the unthought . 't 11 t h ought to be expressed in wo d" (238) F . . m I , to a ow the unr · or a s1m1lar discuss· th t · 1· . wn a exp 1c1tly adverts to the rhetorical tradition see Ott P" " ' o oggeler, Metaphysics and the Topology of Being in Heidegger," in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), 173-85; also William L. Nothstine, '"Topics' as Ontological Metaphor in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory and Criticism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 151-63; Michael R. Heim, "Topics, Topicality and the New Topos," Philosophy Today (Summer 1981): 131--38; and idem, "Philosophy as Ultimate Rhetoric," Southern Joumalof Philosophy 19 (Summer 19Sl): 188: "The common cultural context, prior to argumentative or judgmental assertion, is explored as the site where meaning appears .... This is the topos of existential rhetoric, the indexical Da of Dasein." 41 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 1992), 255. 42 "Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique," Chapter 15, this volume. 43 See Viehweg, Topics and Law, 30: "Interpretation is a part of Topics"; also Walter Jost, "Philosophic Rhetoric: Newman and Heidegger," in Discourse and Context, 54-80. 44 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 324--30, 518ff.; and idem, "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics," Chapter 1, this volume. 45 Hans Blumenberg, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric," After Philosophy, 428-58. It is this selfsame incompleteness that Richard Lanham keeps in the forefront of his OW!l rhetorical consciousness when, discussing the rhetorical problem of how we know when to stop amplifying some subject matter, he writes: "When we come to the crucial question of when enough is enough, of when brevitas should supervene, the rhetorical [as theoretical-technical] wisdom is bankrupt. ... You decide [rather] by that broad range ofintuition which the rhetorical paideia trained you for but never could specify" (The Electronic Word: DemocractJ, Technology and the Arts [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 75). See also Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992), 111: "Without a simple origin the very process of discovery of legal principles from within the no mos will ... involve invention." 46 See Gadamer's essay, "Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique," Chapter 15, this volume. 47 See Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 99. 48 This reading counters that of John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), who reads Gadamer as a latter-day Enlightenment philosoph resistant to contingent rhetorical commonplaces and provisional truths. 49 For an excellent account see Michael Leff, "Decorum and Rhetorical Interpretation: The Latin Humanistic Tradition and Contemporary Critical Theory," Vichiana 3 (1990): 107-26. 50 Gerald L. BIJins, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modem (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 237. J7 Introduction 38 39 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde . 51 Paul Ricoeur, "Appropriation," in Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 192. 52 Cf. Roland Barthes, "The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Memoire," in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 22: "Aristotle's rhetoric is above all a rhetoric of proof, of reasoning, of the approximative syllogism (enthymeme); it is a deliberately diminished logic, one adapted to the level of the 'public,' i.e., of common sense, of ordinary opinion." Also Burke, "The Rhetorical Situation," 268: "I never cease to marvel at the systematic treatment of'persuasion' in the Rhetoric of Aristotle. I have in mind his way of listing the 'places' (topics, topoi) which a speaker can utilize in the attempt to persuade or dissuade, to praise or blame, to build up a character or to smear him, and the like. But the whole process was so deliberate it didn't seem to cover kinds of situations which were not characterized by the clear, formal purposiveness that classical books on rhetoric were primarily concerned with." 53 Cf. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960; rev. 1990), and Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). For a critique of such a rhetoric ofreading, see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 ), 3, 164 and passim. 54 Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric ofTemporality," in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-91. See also "The Rhetoric of Tropes (Nietzsche)" and "The Rhetoric of Persuasion (Nietzsche)" in de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 103-18; 119-31. 55 De Man, "Rhetoric ofTemporality," 189, 191. 56 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969),86. 57 For an example of speaking of topics this way, see Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994), 39: "The greatest authors take over the role of 'places' in the Canon's theater of memory, and their masterworks occupy the position filled by 'images' in the art of memory." 58 Michael Leff, "Recherches americaines sur !es lieux" (author's original). 59 For Vico's similar views, see Donald Phillip Verene, Vicos Science of Imagination, 159ff., 172, passim; also Ernesto Grassi, "Rhetoric and Philosophy," Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976): 200-216. 60 For what we take to be de Man's inadequate gloss on Burke's project, see "Semiology and Rhetoric," in Allegories of Reading, 8. See also Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory" in de Man, The Resistance to Theo11; (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), esp. 14-21. 61 Stanley Cavell, "Knowing and Acknowledging," in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 241. For Cavell's challenge to de Man's disjunction of grammar and rhetoric (or, said otherwise, de Man's collapse of .. r meanin into rhetorical instability simpliciter)' see "The dt What?)" in Themes Out of School: grammaticalcond1tionsfo . . go t r (Poht1cs as ppose o · ' Politics oflnterpre a ion . . fCh' ago Press 1980) 27-59. For a simi1c , ' (Ch' go· Umvers1tyo Effects and Caus~s i~a . ee Michel Me er, Rhetoric, Language, and Jar attempt ~o un.1te top1~s and trl~~::~ ~tate Universi; Pre;s, 1994), esp. 155-56. Reason (Umvers1ty Parle PenhnsyD O'B .on Reorienting Rhetoric: The Dialectic of ch account see Jo n · am ' ) 62 For one su . , . k· lvania State University Press, 1992 . List and Sto11J (Umvers1ty Par . Penni t· tions" subsection of"The Availabil63 See Stanley Cavell, "The Styhl'el of thle ,~.veMszugsatWe Mean What We Say? 71: "There · t · 's Later P 1 osop 1y, m bles and propositions so striking (the way lines are in poityof W1t~gens .e1kn are questions, JO es, para , th tthey stun mere belief." ifl · ) etry a . b Ch rles Altieri Canons and Consequences: Re ectwns 64 A similar tack is pursued y a. Id l (,E ton Ill . Northwestern University "l aginatwe ea s vans , .. . l F, on the Ethzca orce OJ m . d'f£ rent levels of embedding to our social Press, 1990), 87 passim, who recogmzes I e 65 ~:~s;;::: :z:a;:~~:s~nd Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Cambridge: 62. d H W · lt H arpe rand Row' 1987), . . d GE M.Anscombean G . . von ngi' 66 Ludwig Wittgenstem, On CertaAznty, e .(N~w York: Harper and Row, 1969), sec. trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. nscom e b "B th Interpretation" in Pragmatist 449. Hereafter cited as OC. enea ' R' h d Shusterman 67 For support, see IC ar . k. ~rt (Oxford- Basil Blackwell, 1992), 114-35; Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Re~~zn i;;actical Celeb~ation ofEpideictic," in Rhetoric and Lawrence W. Rosenfield, The d U of Rhetoric, ed. Eugene E. White in Transition: Studies in the Nature a~ s.es p 1980) 140 k 1 . State Umvers1ty ress, , . . wz·ttgenstein Skepticism, Morality and (University Par : Pennsy ~am~.r R 1 C ll The Claun o1 eason. ' 68 Stan ey ave , . . Press 1979). Hereafter cited as CR. Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford.Umvers1ty f M, d rn Philosophy" in Must We Mean 11 "Aesthetic Problems o o e ' 69 Stanley C ave , . " l A .1 b'lity of Wittgenstein's Later PhilosoTie vai a I . ? 96' also see idem, vVhat We say. , c . It contains what serious confession h " 71- "Wittgenstein chose conress1on. . . . t th P y, . f tation and a willingness to correc em must: the full acknowledgementAlo ~e~~'Rh t .n.·c·s Rhetoricity and the Sonnett as O . l " Cf Charles hen, e ' . (l980)· 3· "Both Wittgenstem and give t 1em up. · . ,, r, Studies in Literature 95 Performance, ennesseef 1 th t 'tis rhetoric rather than logic that becomes 'd ke power U cases a 1 . . and D ern a ma . . e the contradictions appear mthe central focus of philosophicalbmqdmrylon.c al 1·mples". and Richard Shuster. . . t tology ase on og1c s , escapable in an empmc1s on. . 1 R . " Philosophy and Phenomenological "W'tt enstein and Cnhca easomng, fh' man, 1 g b 1986)· 102· "Wittgenstein confessed that much o is own . ding his audience or readers to see a parResearch 47 (Septem er . . ·. philosophical argumentation is. JUSt persua h the critic tries to persuade his · particular way muc as ticular phenomenon m a . l ' 'Wh t I'm doing is also persuasion. If a k fart in a particu arway. readers to see a wor o d·fT "and I say"There is a difference," I am per"Th re is no 1 1erence, . someone says, , e , l k at it like that."' See also Ludwig suading; I am saying I don t want you to oo .u • • 40 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde Introduction Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, n.d.), 27. Such argumentation is not paradigmatical!y deliberative in nature but epiphanic or epideictic in an extended sense-a showing forth. On the epiphanic in modern art and literature, see Charles Taylor, Sources ofthe Self: The Making ofthe Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 418-93. 70 See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), sec. 242. Hereafter cited as PI. 71 Raphael Demos, "On Persuasion," The Journal of Philosophy 29 (April 1932): 225-32. Cited in the text as OP. 72 For a similar holistic account of truth, see John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar ofAssent, ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 73 Cf. PI 122: "A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words.-Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions.' Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases." See also Altieri, Canons and Consequences, 97-98. On the relation of"vividness" to "vivacity" in George Campbell and David Hume, and to enargeia in Aristotle, see Walter Jost, "On Concealment and Deception in Rhetoric: Newman and Kierkegaard," Rhetoric Society Quarterly (Winter-Spring 1995): 51-74. 74 In The Claim ofReason, 111, Cavell develops his own version of this line of thought: "But now we are thinking of convention not as the arrangements a particular culture has found convenient, in terms of its history and geography, for effecting the necessities of human existence, but as those forms of life which are normal to any group of creatures we call human, any group about which we will say, for example, that they have a past to which they respond .... Here the array of 'conventions' are not patterns oflife which differentiate human beings from one another, but those exigencies of conduct and feeling which all humans share. Wittgenstein's discovery, or rediscovery, is of the depth of convention in human life; a discovery which insists not only on the conventionality ofhuman society but, we could say, on the conventionality of human nature itself, on what Pascal meant when he said 'Custom is our nature' (Pensees, #89)." 75 Taylor, Sources ofthe Self, 72, emphasis added. This would seem to be Demos's position; it is similar to Ronald Dworkin's view that Judge Hercules will seek the most comprehensive legal theory available, one that both makes sense of the facts and that "goes on" with the overall project of law consistent with the best political view of justice. Although Wittgenstein's position need not, at all points, entail the idea that there is one "best account" of myriad "forms oflife" (one might have, for example, motivations other than "epistemic gain" for wanting to persuade someone to one's own worldview), much of what Wittgenstein says allows for Taylor's line ofargument, without which, as Richard Harvey Brown has argued, one forfeits all hope of exposing any forms of consciousness as false: "Such a forfeiture iJ displayed in Peter Winch's essay, 'Understanding a Primitive Society' (1970), in which Winch 'b'li of cross-cultural anthropological comparison" virtually precluded the poss1 I tyE n the Invention Legitimation, and Uses C' · D'scourse· ssays o ' as i~1c t . . . of Chicago Press, 1989],41). For more on this (Social Science . ifS . l 1'.heorty [Chwago: Umvers1ty o ocza . h' I M 'll ' chapter Ill t IS VO ume. ll t· n· The Ethical-Political Horizons of issue, see Steven ai ouxs . The New Conste a to . h . 7 6 Richard Bernstem, . IT p 1992) 183 184-85, emp as1s d 't (Cambndge· M ress, , , M.odernity!Postmo ermDern y 'd a, ''Afte ~ord"toLimitedlnc (Evanston, Ill.: Northadded. See also Jacques western University Press, 1988). 77 Much of what follows here. is ba;;ho: ~, . h l J H de "The Call of Conscience: ~~il~so;hy, and Rhetoric, 27 (1994): Heidegger a;d t~l ~u;~~o~a~l of ;o:~ci~nce: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the. Eu)374-396, an b on I(Ce I ' bia· Umvers1ty . . of South Carolina Press, forthcommg' thanasia De ate o um . . f th t essay On conscience understood as a . I d vised vers10n o a · (C which me u es a re . l Th ht in John Henry Newman orhetorical topos, see Walter Jost, RI·hetponca 19::)g esp. chaps. 2 and 7. For the au. 'ty f South Caro ma ress, ' lumbia: Umvers1 . ,, . "o kssomewh atascan'tas does for Augustine; see David Tracy, thors, "conscience wor . , S h ,. r Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, b 'ty Cl ·ty· Augustme s earc 1,0 b . . "Charity,13 0 scun h. l , me·a~ Cantas th en, as b othethosandlogos, willalsoproveto f e . . '1 e ofd·1scovery (i'nventio) for both the signs o eros Chapter I , t ts vo h ut · . l pnncip . the centra new r e onca . h I . f th pagans and the signs of agape m in the search for true wisdom m t e c ass1cs o e the new classics, the Scriptures." . . b d Pl to's Apology, trans. Hugh Tref h. · t rpretation 1s ase on a 78 Our discussion o t is m e if Pl t d Edith Hamilton and Huntdennick, in Plato, The Collected Dialog~es o. pa o, e 1.961) . p · ton Umvers1ty ress, · ington Cairns (Pnnceton: nnce 196 wh ere h e d'scusses the "pointing out" characdT'me 1 . 79 See Heidegger, Being an t . , f' H 'd d Wittgenstein on these and reF mpanson o et egger an . ter of discourse. or a co Bein in the World: Wittgenstein and HetIated matters, see Stephen Mulhall, On g ) (L ndon· Routledge, 1993 , deggeron Seeing Aspects o. . h S l · 1'.h Development of Heidegger's ConEclipse oift e elf: e I . 80 Cf. Michae Zimmerman, . . ) 75. "The phenomenon . . (A h . Ohio Umvers1ty Press, 1981 , · cept of Authenticity t ens. . h th power of self-correction. In 'fl th t human existence as e ll of conscience test! es a h . t los and move towards its fu h n beings have t elf own e si'bilities: existence yearns to Aristotelian terms, uma z . t O b come open to our pos manifestation. Our te os is e . h t oral openness is dissatisfied with he truthful. ... Conscience is the sign t at our emp functioning deficiently." k h fth's point· see for example, Paul Ri'd typically ma e muc o 1 ' ' . 81 Critiques ofHe1 egger 1-' Bl (Chicago· University of Chicago h t Kat ueen amey · l f 'It (of being-in-debt), Heidegger coeur, Oneself as Anot er, r.ans. Press, 1992), 349: "By stressmg the onto ogy o gm t readily attaches to the idea of 1 t mmon sense mos ff dissociates himsel rom w ia co l -th tone is responsible as a debtor! h ·t · ed to someone e se a h debt,nameyt at1 isow . bl' "R'chardBernsteinmaintainst at finally, that being with one another is pu h1.c. ~ ctvirtually"closesoffthespace d _ ,, · l H ·degger because ts proJe d t' that can foster human solidarity an there is a "danger wit 1 e1 . . for attending to the type of thmking an ac mg 4I 42 Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde community." Hence Bernstein would have us remember what he feels that the later . Heidegger forgets: "Our dialogue, and communicative transactions, are not only with Being itself, but with other human beings." "Heidegger on Humanism," in Richard Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 208,219. For a response to this kind of objection, see Fred Dallmayr, Language and Politics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 191. 82 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 84. 83 Emmanuel Levinas, "Ethics of the Infinite," trans. Richard Kearney, in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 62-63. 84 Levinas develops this point throughout his philosophy; see, for example, his Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 85-122; and his Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Kluwer, 1991), 144-65. 85 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 245. 86 See Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas," in his Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79-153; and Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, esp. 297-356. 87 See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 70-72, and "Everyday Language and Rhetoric Without Eloquence," in his Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 135-43. Part I locating the Disciplines