Reading, rhetoric, rhythm

Abstract

This paper considers reading a hermeneutical co-respondence with understanding’s becoming. It describes how understanding’s plurality is caught up in the dialogical interplay of reading, rhetoric, and rhythm characteristic of hermeneutic engagement. Reading positions a reader in relationship with a text¹ seeking participation in the matter under consideration. As such, its potential for creating new understanding lies in a reader’s ability to attend to unfamiliar forms of expression and engage with the speculative nature of sense and sense-making. Rather than reduce hermeneutic practice to an unmoored relativism, reading hermeneutically fosters a radical responsibility that comes with the uncertain and difficult labor of speculative thinking.

Keywords:

• Philosophical hermeneutics
• radical responsibility
• speculative thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The word text is used broadly to denote any material requiring interpretation to be intelligible.

2 Philosophical hermeneutics, as opposed to classical hermeneutics with its focus on text interpretation, is oriented to the broader question of the mode of being of understanding in all interpretive encounters (Gadamer, 2007).

3 Paul Celan (1995) was a Romanian surrealist poet.

4 Creative evolution is the practical activity of life’s vital impulse. It is the continuous and progressive movement of “a reality making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself” (Carr, 1919, p. 116).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melissa Freeman

Melissa Freeman is Professor of Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methodologies at the University of Georgia, USA. Her research into philosophically-informed traditions has been to understand the variety of analytical strategies used to make sense of the world, to disrupt conventional ways of thinking about research, and to open up new trajectories for research and evaluation. Her most recent book is Modes of Thinking for Qualitative Data Analysis (2017).