Out of the Cave of the Cyclops

ABSTRACT

Despite the deep respect that readers continue to discover in the great twentieth-century texts of hermeneutics, the academic career and reputation of Gadamer's philosophical version has fallen into the shadows; it seems a long time since the heady days that it could claim universality as an intellectual koiné. This decline is a genuine shame, because at the peak of its reputation it held out the promise of returning the power of humanistic judgement to greater recognition against the domination of method in an age of technique. Gadamer teased out the unreflective meta-logic of the Western traditions of prudence as an alternative paradigm and powerful antidote to our rationalist excesses. This paper offers one strategy for salvaging that effort and recuperating an important role for philosophical hermeneutics in the academy.

Notes

1 Professor Dallmayr’s comments were made at the North American Society for Hermeneutics (NASPH), Boston, 2015. Figal’s January 15, 2015 resignation was reported by PressePortal. www.presseportal.de/pm/7169/2927823.

2 The world-wide resurgence of interest in Paul Ricoeur in the last decade complicates this picture, but that is either an aftershock or a modest rekindling, and we will only learn which of the two it is in the future.

3 Gadamer, “Conflict of Interpretations: Debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer”, 220.

4 A good example of an important regional influence is the Canadian Hermeneutic Institute, which is composed mainly of health practitioners who are using hermeneutics to combat the onslaught of mechanized, instrumentalized health care in Canada. It maintains and nurtures a vibrant community of scholarship.

5 Gadamer, The Gadamer Reader, 427.

6 Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 59.

7 Burns, “Alcuin”.

8 Dockhorn, Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik.

9 This un-copyrighted work is available from several open-source archives. For example, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100138548.

10 Stebbins, Delsarte System of Oratory, xxvii–xxviii.

11 Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 75.

12 Graff et al., The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition.

13 Aly, “The Scientist’s Debt to Rhetoric”, 590.

14 Wichelns, “Purposes of Rhetorical Criticism”, 23.

15 For a sense of the depth and breadth of this scholarly tradition, see Lucaites, Condit, Caudill, Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader.

16 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 56; Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society.

17 Walls, “In/Between Programs”, 213.

18 Gadamer, “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutics”, 25.

19 Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 119.

20 Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 123–24.

21 This direct dependence on the trivium comes from no less an authority than Aristotle. See John Watt, „Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Enkyklios Paideia in Syriac“, 46.

22 Gadamer, “The Expressive Power of Language”, 348–52; “Die Ausdruckskraft der Sprache: Zur Funktion der Rhetorik für die Erkenntnis“, 149–63.

23 Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition; Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 17–44; Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance; Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance; Tracy, “Charity, Obscurity, Clarity”, 254–74. The locus classicus of this intertwining is perhaps Melanchthon’s “Eloquentiae Encomium”, a lecture that is, to my knowledge, not translated yet into English. Melanchthon, Declamationes. 

24 I supplement this Western classical account with the history within Jewish tradition in Arthos, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 32–40.

25 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 196.

26 Keith, “Identity, Rhetoric and Myth”, 96.

27 Wallace, “The Fundamentals of Rhetoric”, 9.