The Enlightenment, once inextricable from the question of revolution in general and the French Revolution in particular, has (post–twentieth century) come to signify the negative telos of a certain form of reason and a particular itinerary of instrumental rationality brought to its barbarous conclusion. On the other hand, enlightenment, particularly as it was discussed and debated as an answer to the eighteenth-century question “What is this present we inhabit?” was far more complex and contested than its present function as shorthand for hypertrophic subjectivity. Much work has sought to complexify the Enlightenment, particularly the caricatured amalgam that serves as a foil against which the “postmodern” is posited. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich’s volume, Enlightenment in National Context, assembles portraits of multiple enlightenments emerging from different socio-political contexts, providing portraits ranging from the Scottish to the Italian to the Dutch, Bohemian, and Russian enlightenments, among others.^[1]

Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment takes a different tack by instead differentiating mainstream, moderate, and radical enlightenments.^[2] While many narratives take the late Enlightenment for enlightenment as such, Israel argues that this later period “was basically just one of consolidating, popularizing, and annotating revolutionary concepts introduced earlier.”^[3] This earlier “radical enlightenment” saw a shift from confessional conflicts that left faith, tradition, and authority intact toward a deeper challenge of “everything inherited from the past—not just commonly received assumptions about mankind, society, politics, and the cosmos but also the veracity of the Bible and the Christian, or indeed any, faith.”^[4] The influential and controversial political, theological, and ethical thought of Baruch Spinoza, taking on an itinerary and life of its own as Spinozism, played a central role. While the notion of radicality carries with it an undergirding evaluative authenticity that can be problematic, radical also indicates the root, the fundamental. In this sense, the early figure of Spinoza serves as a central character in later conversations about enlightenment thought, particularly through the constructed or animated figure of pantheism that invariably arose in late-
eighteenth-century debates about enlightenment.

The Pantheism Controversy (Pantheismusstreit), on its face a debate about whether renowned author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a Spinozist, involved many luminaries of the time. Active participants included Lessing’s close friend Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the leader of the charges against Lessing.^[5] The controversy later drew in Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder, among others. Of course, the stakes of the debate extend far beyond Lessing’s personal beliefs, addressing at heart both the radical thought of Spinoza and the broader considerations central to the German Enlightenment, particularly the relation between reason and religion, between philosophy and theology. The Pantheism Controversy in the context of Enlightenment Germany provides an interesting moment by which to examine rhetoric’s place, scope, and role. This general context and period—oft characterized as one of many nadirs in rhetoric’s history, particularly from a vantage point presupposing the golden age of ancient oratory as zenith—was replete with lively public debates and exchanges oriented toward a broader, popular audience. While at first appearing as an esoteric literary feud, this moment not only provides a way to reevaluate the practices that constitute rhetoric in accounts of its history but also opens the reevaluation of the broader relation between enlightenment and rhetoric.

This chapter examines the Pantheism Debate, including the initial personal correspondence between Mendelssohn and Jacobi after Lessing’s death, the making public of the exchange in popular publication, and the eventual drawing in of a somewhat reluctant Immanuel Kant. These three moments, the core and early elements of an even wider-ranging controversy, provide an opportunity to interrogate the conventional wisdom that rhetoric in this time and context not only wanes but becomes entirely subsumed by the imminent Romantic turn toward aesthetics and poetics. The Pantheism Controversy serves as a particular site in which the lively embodied practices of rhetoric in public debate and exchange not only concern the stakes of a historical period examining its own present through the question, “What is enlightenment?” but also further carry out, demonstrate, enact, and perform those very considerations before a broader interested public audience. In sketching out these contours, I start with a brief examination of the underlying question of rhetoric in the German Enlightenment and then move to a brief overview of the subject matter on which the debate is focused: the figure of Spinoza and one reductive version of his thought that goes by the name of Spinozism. Mendelssohn and Lessing, both key players in the Enlightenment and central characters in the Pantheism Controversy, not only forged a close and important friendship (an important relationship undergirding the controversy) but, furthermore, can be read as rhetorically inflected thinkers on their own. I then turn from select key moments of the Pantheism Controversy proper toward the twin implications of a more robust role for rhetoric in the German Enlightenment and (borrowing from Stephen H. Browne) an ending accent upon the texture of memory.^[6]

Rhetoric in the German Enlightenment

In the history of rhetoric, the German Enlightenment receives at most a footnote. In accounting for rhetoric’s increasing turns toward writing, composition, and publication (secondary rhetoric) in supplanting the predominantly oral tradition (primary rhetoric), George Kennedy’s narrative evocatively traces conspicuous moments in rhetoric’s history where a slippage between primary and secondary rhetoric occurs—a refrain he associates with the Renaissance Italian term letteraturizzazione.^[7] And yet, at the same time, Kennedy reverts to a conventional account of rhetoric in the German Enlightenment, noting:

While this characterization prompts debate on many accounts (as some recent scholarship has addressed, particularly on the characterization of Kant’s attitudes toward rhetoric), Kennedy’s specific characterization of rhetoric’s subsumption under poetics in the German Enlightenment provides an interesting point for further reexamination. Not only was rhetoric a continuing field of pedagogy at this time, but if we count as rhetoric the public practices of lively exchange, debate, and controversies taking place through popular journals and publications, then rhetoric not only survived but perhaps even flourished in the context of the German Enlightenment.

Thomas Conley notes that between 1750 and 1850, over two hundred handbooks on declamation and elocution appeared in German.^[9] Even if one restricted examination to handbooks, treatises, and courses in rhetoric during the German Enlightenment, rhetoric hardly slips away quietly, overtaken by poetics. While rhetoric oftentimes appears as a fine art, alongside poetry, it exists (and persists) as a subject with distinct form, function, and operation. Courses in Germany and Prussia were titled “rhetoric,” professorship lines existed in rhetoric, and the orations of the rhetorician Cicero, in particular, were both analyzed and recited toward the goal of speaking in Latin as a Roman—not to mention the increasing turn toward the vernacular language for both speaking and writing to forge elegant styles and modes of address suitable to the German language.

The history of rhetoric oftentimes privileges treatises explicitly on the topic at the expense of lively practices that could otherwise operationally define what happens to rhetoric in quite a different light in any given period. For practical reasons of scope, definition, and available archive, one can hardly object too strongly on these grounds as a matter of general principle or method. However, particularly in the case of the German Enlightenment, lively public debates on topics of popular interest flourished. If we carry forward a restricted definition of rhetoric (e.g., taking Athenian public oratory as exemplar) in order to conclude that rhetoric waned or died out in later periods such as the German Enlightenment, then we risk obscuring and occluding the myriad forms rhetoric has taken in adapting and calibrating to different socio-political configurations. Instead of a moribund endeavor, rhetoric actually exhibits vitality: adaptability, tenacity, and fortitude.

In “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” Kant defines enlightenment as the release from self-incurred tutelage, and the injunction of enlightenment as to exercise the public use of reason at every point “as a scholar before the reading public.”^[10] Moses Mendelssohn’s essay, “On the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” appeared in the same publication, the Berlinische Monatsschrift, shortly before Kant’s essay.^[11] Often presently read on its own for Kant’s public/private distinction, Kant’s essay was just one of many that appeared in response to the same prompt: “What is enlightenment?” This question had emerged in a footnote in Friedrick Zöllner’s 1783 article on civil unions, and the prompt provoked the subsequent exchange in one of the foremost Enlightenment popular journals, which was associated with the Mittwochgesellschaft or the Wednesday Society, a learned society composed of friends of the Enlightenment in Berlin.^[12] While Kant’s answer might appear to us as the most well-known (now largely excised from this context and conversation), at the time it was not necessarily taken as the most authoritative, and it appeared alongside and in conversation with other well-respected authors’ views. This debate, generally consisting of the question, “What is this present in which we are participating?” not only takes up the question of enlightenment but also enacts its own undertaking in speaking as a scholar before a reading public, in Kant’s terms. These authors are undertaking enlightenment as they are speaking of enlightenment in its different modalities.

This conversation, before an interested reading public, characterizes an embodied social practice (a certain form of public address) more than a private or highly specialized, technical philosophical exchange. Kant furthermore defines publication as a form of public address, as “an instrument for delivering speech to the public,” in “On the Wrongfulness of Unauthorized Publication of Books.”^[13] Enlightenment was a topic of debate, about which there was much disagreement (including whether it was a worthy goal or admirable ethos in the first place). As Joachin Whaley notes, “the learned tomes of the Republic of letters had been replaced by the journals of the educated classes, journals which were the most important medium of the Enlightenment in Protestant Germany.”^[14] Along these lines, the context and particular changes therein require a recalibration of what we consider rhetoric in order to avoid occluding lively and vital practices that do not prima facie resemble classical oratory. The Pantheism Controversy offers one site for such a recalibration of rhetoric, contrary to treatise-focused conventional wisdom, providing a narrative for how it was flourishing under different forms rather than meeting its demise.

The initial phases of this particular public controversy took place within a year or two after the enlightenment essays, bearing directly on the same question. While beginning as a private epistolary exchange about Lessing after his death, it expanded publicly, and the eventual influence and impact—from Kant to Schelling to Hegel—can hardly be overestimated.^[15] Under the auspices of Lessing’s beliefs, Jacobi’s allegations and attacks upon Lessing implicate precisely nothing short of enlightenment writ large. If Lessing was a Spinozist, a pantheist, and, through acrimonious association, an atheist, then enlightenment would, likewise, be impugned. So, not only does this seemingly esoteric and remote controversy offer a way to detect signs of life for an ostensibly dead rhetoric, it furthermore provides a site where the Arendtian gambit “to think what we are doing,”^[16] through this self-titled present of the Age of Enlightenment, was at stake. Before turning to the actual exchange marking the start of the Pantheism Controversy, a short contextual excursus on the emergence of the labels Spinozist and Spinozism might prove useful.

On Spinoza and Spinozism (Preface to the Debate)

In many ways, we are still trying to come to terms with the writings of Baruch Spinoza—despite (or even exemplified by) Slavoj Žižek’s exasperated rejoinder to Gilles Deleuze, “Is It Possible Not to Love Spinoza?”^[17] This question only emerges intelligibly rather recently—a product of a turn in contemporary continental theory—with Deleuze’s work Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, in particular, at the helm.^[18] For centuries the question was quite the inverse—“How could anyone (at least publicly) associate themselves with such a dangerous thinker?” In certain circles, an epithet hardly could take a more pointed form than Spinozist. Spinoza was always an outlaw thinker, to be sure, especially in his own time. Deleuze wrote, “while it sometimes happens that a philosopher ends up on trial, rarely does a philosopher begin with excommunication and an attempt on his life. . . . It is said that Spinoza kept his coat with a hole pierced by a knife thrust as a reminder that thought is not always loved by men.”^[19] Most have to work toward such infamy—Spinoza was formally censured by the Sephardic community in Amsterdam for expressing his inchoate iconoclastic views on nature and scripture before he even got started, philosophically speaking.

Spinoza (1632–1677) was born and raised in Amsterdam in the Jewish community. His early education included Hebrew and rabbinic studies. His parents—conversos, outwardly Catholic—retained and practiced secretly their Jewish faith. After becoming increasingly skeptical of not only Judaism but established religion in general, and becoming increasingly uninterested in following in his father’s footsteps in the family business (importing dried fruit), Spinoza broke with the Jewish community and refused to repent for his “monstrous”^[20] behavior, which resulted in his official excommunication in 1655 at the age of twenty-three. His major writings appeared within the slim span of seventeen years, from 1660 to his death in 1677. The enduring labels of Spinoza, Spinozist, and Spinozism acquired their inextricably negative valences in the wake of the Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus,^[21] published anonymously and bearing the imprint of a fictitious printer, in 1670.

This work, taking as its aim a radical reconsideration of Scriptural exegesis and distinguishing a philosophical orientation from a theological one, was met with such colorful depictions as “the most dangerous book ever published” and “a book forged in hell . . . by the devil himself.”^[22] So much has been and can be said about this monumental philosophical work, yet the present concern involves the lateral questions of what Spinoza came to mean, how Spinozism came to be invoked, and what was involved in labeling someone as a Spinozist, for these associations emerge once again in the context of the Pantheism Controversy, over one hundred years later.

In Ethics,^[23] Spinoza redefines God, moving from a traditional Judeo-Christian anthropomorphic creator to an infinite, uncaused, and unique substance. From rather Cartesian premises and definitions, Spinoza advances the conclusion that since God is the only substance, everything must be in God and with God as the immanent cause of all. Tabling several important distinctions and technical debates, this idea is basically reduced to pantheism—all is one, God is in all things. While the implications of this recalibration of God, nature, and the human are radically contentious on their own, the controversial Theological-Political Treatise adds a second important element to our construction of Spinozism/pantheism. In reorienting scriptural exegesis away from the sanctity of the word and toward more practical moral lessons, and in distinguishing divine from ceremonial law toward a defense of philosophical freedom that does not threaten the social order but forms its stable basis, Spinoza directly challenges fundamental theological principles and practices.

Deleuze proclaims, “No philosopher was ever more worthy, but neither was any philosopher more maligned and hated.”^[24] Deleuze’s sweeping account of Spinozism includes not only “a single substance having an infinity of attributes,” nor just “all creatures being only modes of these attributes or modifications of this substance,” but even further, the “triple denunciation of ‘consciousness,’ of ‘values,’ and of ‘sad passions.’”^[25] The epithet of Spinozism was formed from a simplification and reduction of the Ethics and his political philosophy in the Treatise, with the added antipathy from detractors, in order to accuse the target of materialism, immoralism, and atheism.

Jonathan Israel examines the unquestionable importance of Spinoza by going beyond the particular thinker and works, tracing the way they connect up to several strains of deistic, naturalistic, and atheistic systems of thought in a network of radical enlightenment. This alternate network from within the Enlightenment has, historically, been far overshadowed by and contraposed to the moderate Enlightenment that followed it, which left the state and religious institutions intact. Israel claims:

Thus, the Pantheism Controversy is far more important than zeroing in on some ephemeral debate about whether Lessing confessed his Spinozism to Jacobi. The public work that “Spinoza” performed in eighteenth-century German-Prussian contexts went right to the core of the political stakes of the question, “What is enlightenment?”

On Mendelssohn and Lessing

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is considered a central figure of both the German Enlightenment and the Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment. The relation between these two titles is considerably complex, but according to Gottlieb, the conventional arguments range from Mendelssohn as a successful synthesizer of Judaism and enlightenment to a partially successful reconciler between theology and reason to holding the two in separate, irreconcilably suspended animation.^[27] Unsurprisingly, what makes this range of interpretations possible is precisely the same fulcrum that allows his work to be interpreted in radically contradictory ways and that allows him to be both revered and criticized from an array of positions, all at the same time. Not incidental to the question at hand, the radical thinking of Spinoza—in particular, as Michael Mack writes, his “questioning of theology as political obfuscation, which serves to cover up social injustices”^[28]—precisely helps to pave the way for the Jewish Enlightenment’s critique of rabbinic elite and hierarchical politics.

Mendelssohn, albeit not at his initiation, became embroiled in a few public debates and controversies. The Lavater affair^[29] involved Johann Caspar Lavater’s challenge to Mendelssohn’s enlightened theology and the attempt to convert him to Christianity. A debate on the civil rights and status of Jewish people inspired Mendelssohn to contribute, resulting in another challenge to his Judaism and another attempt to claim that his thinking is closer to Christianity, resulting in Mendelssohn’s masterpiece, Jerusalem (published in 1783).^[30] Another pivotal work, Morning Hours, emerged from within the context of the Pantheism Controversy.^[31] By all accounts, these hardly civil public controversies took quite a toll on Mendelssohn’s health and well-being (reportedly he developed a nervous ailment of sorts, plaguing him from the Lavater affair until his death). These events provide a cautionary note to both the idealization of civil public debates and the exaltation of the sometimes acrimonious nature of the exchanges. Mendelssohn was a formidable participant and opponent in all three of these important public controversies, but not to his own physical and psychological benefit.

No stranger to rhetoric and public debate, Mendelssohn even wrote of rhetoric explicitly in the essay “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences”^[32] in the 1761 collection Philosophical Writings. In sketching out the nature and relation between the fine arts and sciences, which all move us in profound ways, Mendelssohn’s first order of division distinguishes the fine sciences (belles lettres) as ones trafficking in arbitrary signs, and the fine arts (beaux arts), natural signs.^[33] Signs are natural, in Mendelssohn’s account, “if the combination of the sign with the subject matter signified is grounded in the very properties of what is designated” and, furthermore, involve the expression of “emotion by means of the sounds, gestures, and movements appropriate to it.”^[34] Signs are arbitrary when such a natural connection is absent, when they have “nothing in common with their designated subject matter, but have nonetheless been arbitrarily assumed as signs.”^[35] The passage on rhetoric, not without complexity, difficulty, and influence of its own that will have to be merely glossed here, is intriguing, bearing directly not only on this question of rhetoric in Enlightenment Germany but also on the connection to the central practices of debate and exchange in the learned journals:

As belles lettres, both poetry and rhetoric concern a liveliness, evoking many senses and attributes at once, one oriented toward entertainment, the other toward persuasion. Not only was Mendelssohn a lively participant in many public debates and controversies, but also his philosophical thought actually included explicit treatment of the topic of rhetoric.

If Mendelssohn is named the father of modern Jewish philosophy, then Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) is credited as the father of modern German theater. A few key aspects of his biography indeed call Spinoza to mind: an early path of theological studies; a turning away from the expected course of life; a restless movement from locale to locale, having trouble in finding a place, a home, a suitable and enduring living; an untimely end to a life replete with controversy, and so on. This hardly makes one a Spinozist, however. Lessing’s legacy emanates from a tremendous corpus of comedies, dramas, poetry, and aesthetic treatises forged, through Hannah Arendt’s phrase, in “dark times,” surrounded by a sense of vexatious, evil misfortune.^[37] He sought to make the theater his pulpit, much to the dismay of his family and other members of the clergy since the theater was considered a powerful, dangerous, and potentially corrupting force.

Lessing and Mendelssohn met in 1754, “and it was through Lessing that Mendelssohn profited not a little as a writer, critic, and as a man.”^[38] After Mendelssohn provided Lessing with a manuscript for comments, Lessing surprised him with a published copy, having secured its publication in secret. This work, in part inspired by Lessing and Mendelssohn’s collaborative reading and conversations about Spinoza, includes two dialogues defending Spinoza as mediary between Descartes and Leibniz (these dialogues Mendelssohn later revised and published with other works in the aforementioned volume, Philosophical Writings^[39]). The following year, the two collaborated on the essay entitled “Pope: A Metaphysician!,” which in some sense ridiculed the Berlin Academy’s prompt as to whether Alexander Pope was a metaphysician.

Lessing furthermore encouraged Mendelssohn to translate one of Rousseau’s essays, helping him along the path toward the role of popular philosopher in the sense of making available, through translation and review essays, the works of enlightened thinkers in different languages. Mendelssohn, whose first language was Yiddish and who studied biblical Hebrew from his youth, was also accomplished in Latin, German, French, and English, among other languages, and was known for his brilliant style. According to Zeydel, Lessing “set Mendelssohn on his feet as a German author and publicist and called his attention to the advantages of the modern languages.”^[40] Lessing did not stay in any one place too long, but to Berlin (Mendelssohn’s permanent residence from an early age to his death), Lessing returned several times. Their close friendship persisted largely through correspondence when not in each other’s direct company. Often noted is Lessing’s portrait of Mendelssohn, surely the model for Nathan the Wise.^[41]

Lessing was always shrouded in controversy, not the least due to his polemical mode of engagement. He wrote essays for Voss’s Gazette, attacking the imitation and exaltation of all things French. A longtime critic of Lessing erroneously attacked him on account of an ostensible mistake concerning an archaeological matter, provoking a controversy “that was waged fast and furiously for some months, until at last Lessing silenced his adversary.”^[42] While librarian for the Court of Brunswick at Wolfenbüttel, Lessing published and edited some work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments.^[43] According to Zimmern, the “publication drew down upon Lessing a fury of rancorous abuse, and involved him in a vortex of controversy that lasted till his death.”^[44] Leading the charge against Lessing, insisting that Lessing was the author hiding behind someone else’s name, J. M. Goeze attacked Lessing while his wife lay dying. Lessing’s relentless response, a series of fourteen letters known as Anti-Goeze,^[45] outmaneuvers his opponent in just about every way.

The Pantheism Controversy

While Lessing had participated in many spirited controversies on theological and philosophical matters, the greatest public debate in which he was imbricated took place after his death. Lessing died in February of 1781. To put this even into sharper context, consider that it happened just a few months before Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason would debut at the Easter Leipzig Book Fair. The Pantheism Controversy, one of the most significant public controversies of the Enlightenment, centered upon Lessing’s alleged confession to Jacobi that he was a Spinozist, a pantheist, and in common association at the time, an atheist. The major events comprising the early stages of the Pantheism Controversy unfolded along the following timeline:

After Lessing’s death in 1781, Mendelssohn was planning on writing a tribute to his great friend, to be included in the work Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God—a work comprising his morning lessons for his son and a few others. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi learned of Mendelssohn’s plan through a mutual friend and wanted to catch Lessing’s close and unsuspecting friend off guard with the revelation of Lessing’s confession of Spinozism. Jacobi was hardly a friend of the Enlightenment, and had on several occasions taken the opportunity to reject its general tenets—in particular that theology can have a rational basis—in favor of an approach to Christianity based on a notion of faith not synthesized through rationality. He even tried to draw Kant into a public debate by charging that the Critique of Pure Reason^[51] was allied with Spinoza (Kant did not take the bait). Thus, Jacobi is often characterized as a figure of the Counter-Enlightenment and, at least on first glance, he used charges of Spinozism to foster debates that put this question of “enlightenment” in question.

Upon hearing of Mendelssohn’s tribute, and (I would surmise) discomfited at the thought of the opportunity for Mendelssohn to characterize their epistolary exchange (although Mendelssohn agreed not to publicly reveal their correspondence), Jacobi rushed to print On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn in September of 1785.^[52] If Mendelssohn’s best friend, unable to tell Mendelssohn directly, actually moved away from enlightenment theism and toward being a Spinozist, pantheist, and atheist, then the German Aufklärung (Enlightenment) would be, by association, discredited. Jacobi’s account is interesting—the inquiry about Mendelssohn’s writing plans at least forms (whether a likely ruse of not) an interesting constructed occasion for Jacobi’s revelation. Jacobi writes to Mendelssohn, recounting the dialogue. Jacobi “recounts” the scene how after Lessing reads a poem Jacobi hands him (supposedly an unpublished writing of Goethe), Lessing does not react in offense as Jacobi had expected:

The account continues the next morning when Lessing senses Jacobi’s discomfort about the Spinoza conversation but basically depicts his forthrightness and intellectual honesty with admiration. Jacobi insists on defending a personal God and recourse to faith, the mortal leap. After the account of the confession and ensuing lively discussion, Jacobi summarizes his own position in the following postulates:

The Counter-Enlightenment inflections of this summary should emerge fairly strikingly: the rejection of the systems of rational proof and demonstration in theological matters, the charge that such rationalism invariably strips away the tenets of true theology (revelation, faith), and corresponding rejection of the enlightenment synthesis of reason and theology (which in Protestant Germany took the particular form of reconciling the Leibniz-Wolffian rationalism into “enlightenment theology” from the Christian side). Of course, it is telling that Jacobi’s work concludes with an extensive quote from Lavater (one of Mendelssohn’s early antagonistic interlocutors).

Mendelssohn, by all accounts unaware of the appearance of Jacobi’s work, proceeded with Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God, with an ending tribute to Lessing and without mentioning the exchange with Jacobi. Part of Morning Hours is an elegant paean to common sense, which provides a general orientation to Mendelssohn’s approach. In Lecture X, after an allegorical dream in which the figure of Reason adjudicates disputes between Common Sense (sensus communis) and Contemplation (contemplatio), Mendelssohn summarizes,

After laying out the fundamental epistemological principles of enlightened theism (in which common sense plays an important role), Mendelssohn addresses philosophies that threaten to undermine such principles. Under this aim, Mendelssohn attempts to address Jacobi’s charges of Lessing’s Spinozism obliquely by adding a lecture on pantheism and then two lectures on Lessing’s position as one of “purified pantheism.”^[56]

In Lecture XIII, Mendelssohn addresses pantheism and Spinoza’s thought. Mendelssohn provides his own take on Spinozism and pantheism as holding that

Such is Mendelssohn’s take on hen kai pan, which he admits has adherents but also goes against the common sense, and furthermore fails to make an internal distinction from within substance (conflating self-supporting and self-subsisting). Lectures XIV and XV specifically move to Lessing’s beliefs, the former comprised of an animated dialogue that Mendelssohn carries out with his departed friend and the latter focused on Mendelssohn’s defense of Lessing’s service to religion and “refined pantheism.”^[58] This refined reading of Lessing’s pantheism and appreciation of Spinoza, in Mendelssohn’s account, defends Lessing’s spirit of inquiry and ensures us it does not threaten theology but can indeed be consistent and reconciled on practical grounds.

After learning of Jacobi’s On Spinoza, its treatment of their private correspondence, and characterization of Lessing, Mendelssohn furiously set out to strike back with To Lessing’s Friends, his final work. Mendelssohn, of frail constitution from the nervous ailment that afflicted him, finished the manuscript on December 20, 1785, and insisted on delivering it to the publisher in person. Mendelssohn fell ill, to die only a few days later, on January 4, 1786. While certainly adding dramatic flourish to an oftentimes uneventful narrative of publication, this turn of events eventually became a part of the controversy itself, for Mendelssohn was much revered. According to Gottlieb, the Jewish shops all closed in his honor until after the funeral, where hundreds of attendees, both Jewish and Christian, paid their respects.^[59]

In To Lessing’s Friends, all bets are off: Mendelssohn provides his own take on his correspondence with Jacobi, obviously no longer needing to honor the request to keep their conversation private. In setting up his rejoinder to Jacobi’s account, Mendelssohn proclaims, “We could confidently leave the author of Nathan to his own defense. Even were I Plato or Xenophon, I would be weary in speaking in defense of this Socrates. Lessing and hypocrite, the author of Nathan and blasphemer—whoever can think these things together is able to think the impossible, and he can just as easily think Lessing and blockhead together!”^[60] Mendelssohn continues, running through possible scenarios for why Jacobi proceeded in the manner he did and seemed bent on portraying Lessing as a Spinozist, a pantheist, and an atheist.

Mendelssohn’s account emphasizes his close friendship with Lessing, how he knew of Lessing’s refined pantheism (as articulated in Morning Hours), and that he would hardly react in shock (which Jacobi seemed to expect of Mendelssohn). What surprised him is that Lessing, if we are to believe Jacobi’s account, would confide in a relative stranger what he would keep from a dear friend, and, even more perplexing, that Lessing (if we are again to follow Jacobi’s account) would lay out his position in such a plain, unremarkable, and almost juvenile fashion. Mendelssohn describes Lessing’s appearance in Jacobi’s account rather as “a shallow atheist, not a student of Hobbes or Spinoza, but some sort of childish jokester who enjoys kicking aside whatever is important and dear to his fellow man.”^[61] Jacobi is the only one in his depiction making any sort of rational argument between the two (with all intended irony).

Mendelssohn cannot publicly discount Jacobi’s account, for as Mendelssohn states, Jacobi is of good repute and “all of Mr. Jacobi’s friends and acquaintances praise his rectitude and his heart even more than his mental gifts.”^[62] Mendelssohn finally arrives at the only sensible and plausible hypothesis for what took place regarding this alleged confession: Lessing was clearly taking the piss out of Jacobi, so to speak. The shallow recounting of a paper-thin position, underdeveloped and unsubstantiated claims without warrants, and uncritical praise of that ghastly poem Prometheus^[63]—hardly the Lessing Mendelssohn recognized. Something in that scene struck familiar with Mendelssohn, vaguely calling to mind Mendelssohn’s previous interlocutors’ stratagems to secure his salvation in conversion to Christianity (in both the Lavater Affair, and the controversy with Cranz resulting in Jerusalem).^[64] Jacobi, seeing Lessing in a diminished spiritual state, “in this distressing, confused, state of mind,” must have sought to “cure him of his illness—like a skillful doctor, he ventured to aggravate the malady somewhat in the beginning, in order to be able to cure it more effectively afterward.”^[65] Mendelssohn’s account of this alternative agenda in the confession, borders on delight:

Hence the insistence of Mendelssohn’s vouching for the veracity of Jacobi’s account via his virtue of rectitude, at the expense of his “mental gifts.”^[67] Jacobi was tactically outmaneuvered, which Mendelssohn reveals (with a wink) “to Lessing’s friends,” to those who would recognize here the Lessing they knew. Sensing the maneuver, and seeking to make an example of Lessing, Jacobi switches strategies in service of the same general aim of pious rectitude: “to make the example of Lessing into an edifying warning to all the other wiseacres—so that they might seize the remedy that they could not renounce without giving up every means of escape.”^[68] According to Mendelssohn, this account not only explains Lessing’s actions through Jacobi’s account but also Jacobi’s actions in escalating the epistolary exchange into a public controversy.

Unfortunately, the enjoyable wit and thorough schooling (particularly toward the end, when Mendelssohn breaks it down for Jacobi regarding the relation between Judaism, Spinoza, and reason) that characterize Mendelssohn’s reply is irrevocably overshadowed by the tragic fact that it literally did him in upon his return from delivering it to the publisher. The nature of his death, given the nervous ailment that developed during the Lavater Affair, soon turned toward charges that Jacobi’s provocation and incitement to controversy contributed to Mendelssohn’s demise. Kant is repeatedly asked by Biester (of the Berlinische Monatsschrift) and some of his friends to intervene in the controversy—some presuming on Mendelssohn’s behalf, others on Jacobi’s side, still others presuming an underlying concord between the two—finally resulting in Kant’s contribution “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” in October of 1786. Like the enlightenment essay, this deceptively short and ostensibly straightforward essay belies its vexatious complexity. In this essay, Kant, for the most part, supports Mendelssohn’s position (with some distinctions attuned to his critical philosophy) and finds Jacobi’s reversion to faith deeply suspect and dangerous. The ending movement, however, connects to the broader political concerns of enlightenment, namely focusing on freedom of thought. Not a matter of weeks before this essay appeared, Friedrich II (Frederick the Great) died and the imminent succession of Friedrich Wilhelm II loomed over the particularly anxious conclusion reaffirming the enlightenment principles that would soon (as vaguely anticipated) come under attack.

On its face as esoteric and occasional a work as imaginable, Kant’s inaugural rector address at Konigsberg in October of 1786, entitled “On the Philosophers’ Medicine for the Body,” addressed the Pantheism Controversy again, but from an intriguingly different angle. In this address, given in Latin as per ceremonial protocol, even as lectures, courses, and writing moved increasingly toward the German, Kant discusses the task of philosophy in relation to the faculty of medicine. While the doctor should help the mind by means of treating the body, the philosopher assists the body by means of a mental regimen. Largely connecting to themes from his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (published later in 1798, but comprised of his own textbook created for the popular course on anthropology that he developed and had taught for decades), Kant discusses the need to care for the body and how the body and mind interconnect in myriad ways.

The death of Mendelssohn forms a central case and example for the address. Kant states, “Eulogizers of the great man Mendelssohn put the blame for his death in one way or another on the learned men who got him involved in a dispute with them.”^[69] While Kant was not sympathetic with Jacobi on many accounts, he did not find these allegations supportable: “In my judgment, however, no one should be accused of such an atrocious crime. What was at fault, rather, was the very way of life that much lamented man adopted.”^[70] Due to his various ailments, Mendelssohn’s doctors prescribed him a course of “strict temperance,” which, as paradoxical as it might sound, he took too far into “such abstemiousness that he kept himself always hungry so as to avoid the slight and usually transitory discomforts of the stomach that follow a proper meal.”^[71] This asceticism, abnegation of the body, Kant identifies as the real culprit—for Mendelssohn was “exhausted by excessive temperance.”^[72] Following the same reasoning that the philosopher’s ultimate target is treating the body (through the mind), properly nourishing the body with food, with social exchange, and with debate (even bordering on the acrimonious) is of utmost importance. Abnegation of the body, excessive abstemiousness, and ascetic denial of the physical harm both the body and, subsequently, the mind. While Kant did not side with Jacobi’s position in the “Orientation” essay (as Jacobi had hoped), Kant did end up dismissing the allegations that Jacobi’s instigation of the Pantheism Controversy, in breaking Lessing’s alleged confession, bore any responsibility for Mendelssohn’s untimely death. It was, according to Kant’s address, Mendelssohn’s unrelenting self-denial (and thus, to a certain degree, denial of this embodied world) that was to blame.

On Memory

While the Pantheism Controversy features two central enlightenment questions—the still-underexamined implications of Spinoza’s thought and the relation between reason and theology—this all takes place through the question of memory, generally, and how to remember Lessing, in particular. The forensic questions of whether Lessing actually confessed, or whether he was actually a Spinozist, or even whether Mendelssohn or Jacobi got Lessing (or Spinoza, for that matter) right are rather beside the point. The greatest public controversy involving Lessing took place after he was already dead. This does not remove him as an interlocutor, however, since he takes the form of an animated participant of ongoing conversation (as in Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours) or as a memory invoked toward the aim of providing a cautionary tale against enlightenment reason (Jacobi’s On Spinoza).

Evelyn Moore places Lessing’s polemical exchanges squarely within the rhetorical tradition, even though conventionally Lessing hardly receives even a footnote therein. Unlike the type of analysis systematic treatises afford, these polemical exchanges show that indeed rhetoric “did not die a quiet death but was very much alive in polemical tracts, and Lessing was a pivotal figure in a culture dominated by argument and disputation.”^[73] Hannah Arendt’s essay “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing” gets to the heart of Lessing’s rhetorical inflections but via a slightly different, yet compatible, route. Worth quoting in full, Arendt notes:

In characteristic Arendtian fashion, deeply and irrevocably rhetorical observations are made without explicit evocation of the word or the discipline. Here, Arendt’s portrait of Lessing’s humanity involves a philosophically unorthodox rhetoric-as-epistemic approach. As she notes, “if he [Lessing] had been confronted with the Platonic alternative of doxa or aletheia, of opinion or truth, there is no question how he would have decided.”^[75] When faced with misfortune and dark times, instead of turning away from the work to a sanctuary of private fraternity, Lessing embraced this world, the realm of the political, in cherishing discourse, debate, and exchange.

What is at stake here concerns how we remember Lessing, how he is narrativized through a controversy that not only posits him as content but also evokes his spirit in an ultimately fitting form. An interlocutor par excellence, Lessing in his final controversy—replete with polemics and intrigue—enacted the very public discourse and exchange that connects his legacy to larger-scale questions of the political. Mendelssohn’s gesture in “To Lessing’s Friends” gives his friend and collaborator the last laugh, but also provides the swan song by which we remember Mendelssohn, through the figure of friendship. His dying act is a defense in commitment to his friend’s memory. Quite the contrary to a narrative of rhetoric’s decline, rhetoric took a lively, popular, public, and contentious form through the practices of public controversy in the German Enlightenment in general and strikingly in the particular drama of the Pantheism Controversy.

Notes

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.” Translated by Clara and Richard Winston. In Men in Dark Times, 3–31. New York: Mariner Books, 1970.

———. Prologue to The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Browne, Stephen H. “Review: Reading, Rhetoric, and the Texture of Public Memory.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 237–65.

Conley, Thomas M. Rhetoric in the European Tradition. New York: Longman, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.

Gerrish, B. A. “ The Secret Religion of Germany: Christian Piety and the Pantheism Controversy.” Journal of Religion 67, no. 4 (1987): 437–55.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Satyros and Prometheus. Edited by Alexander Tille. Translated by John Gray. Glasgow: Glasgow Goethe Society, 1898.

Gottlieb, Michah. Introduction to Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, by Moses Mendelssohn. Edited by Michah Gottlieb. Translated by Curtis Bowman, Elias Sacks, and Allan Arkush. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011.

———. Prefatory Note to Selections 1, 2, and 3 of Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, by Moses Mendelssohn. Edited by Michah Gottlieb. Translated by Curtis Bowman, Elias Sacks, and Allan Arkush. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011.

Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. “From Jacobi’s On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn.” In Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, edited by Michael Gottlieb, 127–39. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2011.

Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 7–20. Translated by Lewis White Beck. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997.

———. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen N. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

———. “On the Philosophers’ Medicine of the Body.” In Anthropology, History, Education, edited by Gunter Zoller and Robert B Louden, 182–91. Translated by Mary Gregor. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

———. “On the Wrongfulness of Unauthorized Publication of Books.” In Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor, 23–35. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” In Religion and Rational Theology, edited by Allen Wood, 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kennedy, George A. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Origins from Ancient to Modern Times. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephram. Nathan the Wise. Translated by Adolph Reich. London: A. W. Bennett, 1860.

Mack, Michael. “The Fate of Political Theology: Reflections on Shmuel Feiner’s ‘The Jewish Enlightenment.’” Journal of Religion 81, no. 1 (2007): 79–89.

Mendelssohn, Moses. “From Morning Hours, Or Lectures on the Existence of God.” In Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, edited by Michael Gottlieb, 140–52. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2011.

———. “From To Lessing’s Friends.” In Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, edited by Michael Gottlieb, 153–71. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2011.

———. Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism. Translated by Allan Arkush. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983.

———. “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences.” In Philosophical Writings, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, 169–91. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

———. “On the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Translated by James Schmidt. In What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt, 53–57. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.

———. Philosophical Writings. Edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Moore, Evelyn. The Passions of Rhetoric: Lessing’s Theory of Argument and the German Enlightenment. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.

Nadler, Steven. A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Porter, Roy and Mikulas Teich. Introduction to The Enlightenment in National Context. Edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Reimarus, Hermann Samuel. Fragments. Edited by Charles H. Talbert. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1970.

———. Ethics. In The Collected Writings of Spinoza, vol. 1. Translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Spinoza, Baruch. Theological-Political Treatise. 2nd ed. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001.

Whaley, Joachim. “The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany.” In The Enlightenment in National Context, 106–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Zeydel, Edwin H. “Moses Mendelssohn, 1729–1929.” German Quarterly 3 (1930): 55–60.

Zimmern, Helen. “Lessing.” In The Dramatic Works of G. E. Lessing. London: George Bell and Sons, York Street, 1878.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Is It Possible Not to Love Spizona?” In Organs Without Bodies, 29–36. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Roy Porter and Teich Mikulas, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 7.

Ibid., 4.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), a figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, took issue with the Enlightenment defense of rational theology. Frederick Beiser summarizes Jacobi’s general position: “Reason . . . was not supporting but undermining all the essential truths of morality, religion, and common sense. If we were consistent and pushed our reason to its limits, then we would have to embrace atheism, fatalism, and solipsism. . . . In short, we would have to deny the existence of everything, and we would have to become . . . ‘nihilists.’” According to Jacobi, the only way to evade nihilism was to take a leap of faith. See The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 47. His relationship with Lessing dates to his publication of Woldemar in 1779, which brought about a meeting between the two. (See B. A. Gerrish, “The Secret Religion of Germany: Christian Piety and the Pantheism Controversy,” Journal of Religion 67, no. 4 (1987): 437–55.)

Stephen H. Browne, “Review: Reading, Rhetoric, and the Texture of Public Memory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 237–65.

George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric & Its Christian and Secular Origins from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 3, 14, 45, 130, 294.

Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 275.

Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (New York: Longman, 1990), 244.

10.

Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Politics of Truth, trans. Lewis White Beck, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 7–20 (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 31.

11.

Moses Mendelssohn, “On the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” trans. James Schmidt, in What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions,” ed. James Schmidt, 53–57 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).

12.

James Schmidt, “Introduction: What is Enlightenment? A Questions, Its Context, and Some Consequences,” in What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Answers to Twentieth Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt, 1–44 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 2.

13.

Immanuel Kant, “On the Wrongfulness of Unauthorized Publication of Books,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, 23–35, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 30.

14.

Joachim Whaley, “The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, 106–17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 110.

15.

While seemingly an esoteric exchange on an ephemeral topic, Beiser notes the tremendous influence of the Pantheism Controversy in three areas: an increased popularity of Spinozism in Germany, an increasing accessibility and popularity of Kantianism, and the creation of a fracture in the Aufklärung (see The Fate of Reason, 44–45).

16.

Hannah Arendt, prologue to The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5.

17.

Slavoj Žižek, “Is It Possible Not to Love Spinoza?” in Organs Without Bodies, 29–36 (New York: Rutledge, 2004).

18.

Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988).

19.

Ibid., 6.

20.

Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton University Press, 2011), 8.

21.

Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 2nd edition, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001).

22.

For a thorough discussion of the context and reception of Spinoza’s Treatise, see Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell, xi, 239.

23.

Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Writings of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

24.

Deleuze, Spinoza, 17.

25.

Ibid., 17.

26.

Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 12–13.

27.

Michah Gottlieb, introduction to Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, by Moses Mendelssohn (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011).

28.

Michael Mack, “The Fate of Political Theology: Reflections on Shmuel Fiener’s ‘The Jewish Enlightenment,’” Journal of Religion 81, no. 1 (2007): 78–89.

29.

Michah Gottlieb explains in his prefatory note to Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible that on February 26, 1764, Johann Casper Lavater and friends went to Moses Mendelssohn’s home seeking to make clear his view of Christianity. After expressing his desire to keep the conversation private, Mendelssohn expressed respect for Jesus on the grounds that Jesus did not claim to be divine. In 1769, shortly after reading Charles Bonnet’s (1720–1793) Palingenesis, in which the divine revelation of Jesus’s miracles were used as a basis to argue in favor of the immortality of the soul, Lavater publicly called upon Mendelssohn to refute Bonnet’s argument. Embarrassed by this call, which placed him in the delicate situation of having either to refute Christianity or renounce his Judaism, Mendelssohn turned the argument back to Lavater with a “masterful” public letter in which he contrasted Lavater’s “intolerant Christianity” with “tolerant Judaism,” 3–4.

30.

Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983).

31.

Moses Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God, in Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, ed. Michael Gottlieb, 140–52 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2011).

32.

Moses Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences,” in Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, 169–91 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Ibid., 177.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 178.

Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing,” in Men in Dark Times, 3–31 (New York: Mariner Books, 1970).

38.

Edwin H. Zeydel, “Moses Mendelssohn, 1729–1929,” German Quarterly 3 (1930): 56.

39.

Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

40.

Ibid.

41.

Gotthold Ephram Lessing, Nathan the Wise, trans. Adophus Reich (London: A. W. Bennett, 1860).

42.

Helen Zimmern, “Lessing,” in The Dramatic Works of G. E. Lessing (London: George Bell and Sons, York Street, 1878), xxiii.

43.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Fragments, ed. Charles H. Talbert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1970).

44.

Zimmern, “Lessing,” xxviii.

45.

Ibid., xxix.

46.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “From Jacobi’s On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn,” in Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, ed. Michael Gottlieb (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2011), 127–39.

47.

Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, 140–52.

48.

Moses Mendelssohn, “From To Lessing’s Friends,” in Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, ed. Michael Gottlieb (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2011), 153–71.

49.

Immanuel Kant, “On the Philosophers’ Medicine of the Body,” in Anthropology, History, Education, ed. Gunter Zoller and Robert B. Louden, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 182–91.

50.

Immanuel Kant, “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking,” in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

51.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen N. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

52.

Jacobi, On the Doctrine of Spinoza.

53.

Ibid., 132.

54.

Ibid., 137.

55.

Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, 143.

Ibid., 150.

Ibid., 143.

Ibid., 152.

Gottlieb, introduction to Moses Mendelssohn, xviii.

60.

Mendelssohn, To Lessing’s Friends, 154.

61.

Ibid., 157.

62.

Ibid., 158.

63.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Satyros and Prometheus, trans. John Gray, ed. Alexander Tille (Glasgow: Glasgow Goethe Society, 1898).

64.

Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983).

65.

Mendelssohn, To Lessing’s Friends, 160.

Ibid., 161.

Ibid., 158.

Ibid., 161.

Kant, “Philosophers’ Medicine,” 185.

Ibid.

Ibid., 189.

Ibid.

Evelyn Moore, The Passions of Rhetoric: Lessing’s Theory of Argument and the German Enlightenment (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).

74.

Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times,” 27.

75.

Ibid., 26.

Chapter 2

A Rhetoric of Sentiment

The House the Scots Built

Ronald C. Arnett

This chapter announces a sense of otherness, a view of the Enlightenment that is otherwise than convention. This treatise stresses the Scottish Enlightenment as an alternative to the conception of the Enlightenment given life on French soil. The uniqueness of this version of an alternative Enlightenment model found identity in a particular time and place, eighteenth-century Scotland. The social and temporal geography of eighteenth-century Scotland functioned as a rhetorical warrant that legitimized claims for social change that transformed a people and a region and gave rise to what we now term the Scottish Enlightenment. The lived experience of this inimitable moment in Scottish history revealed the power of talented persons in conversation, generating a creative moment and a place that was truly “crowded with genius.”^[1]

Introduction

The Scottish Enlightenment united philosophy and practical change, yielding a rhetorical milieu that countered the French obsession with abstract universalism. Stephen Toulmin argues that warrants link data to a claim, giving rationale for why one should attend to a given claim.^[2] Scotland, as a communal context, was crowded with genius and functioned as a rhetorical warrant that legitimized the claims of social change. Rhetorical influence attributed to a community is a position articulated by Calvin Schrag;^[3] the community makes possible what can be communicatively understood. A specific community can offer a context or warrant for creative thinking that is otherwise than convention. The Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century found life within three major cities that nourished communities of creative thought and application: Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh.

In order to explicate this distinctive context of the Scottish Enlightenment, I offer four perspectives that illuminate the importance of this peerless orientation. First, I review Immanuel Kant’s classic essay, which opens the conversation on the Enlightenment writ large.^[4] Second, I recount a review by C. Jan Swearingen of one of Alexander Broadie’s works, published in Philosophy and Rhetoric;^[5] Swearingen announces important communication discipline connections to the Scottish Enlightenment. Third, I examine Alexander Broadie’s book, The Scottish Enlightenment.^[6] Finally, I turn to James Buchan’s popularized description of the lived experience of a people at a given time in Scottish history, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment.^[7] Buchan’s work offers dramatic insight into the Edinburgh community of the eighteenth century that performed as a warrant for claims that gave birth to a creative moment termed the Scottish Enlightenment. I have separated the discussions on works by Kant, Swearingen, Broadie, and Buchan in order to render distinctly different impressions of this particular time and place. The notion of the Scottish Enlightenment is best understood as an inventive era, textured with multiple facets and dimensions. However, whatever the perspective on this historic period, there is agreement that the geographical context legitimized the rhetorical prowess of that moment, giving rise to what we now call the Scottish Enlightenment.

This chapter serves as an overture to the Scottish Enlightenment, providing an impressionistic image of the sensations, sentiments, and feelings that constitute this particular historical context. The heart of the Scottish Enlightenment rests in sensations and sentiments that shaped a given people and their ideas, generating innovation in economics, church life, governance, and ethics. The Scottish Enlightenment displays the rhetorical power of theory and practice in action, offering witness to the unity of philosophy and practicality. The Scottish Enlightenment yielded enlightened hope without falling prey to a conception of progress that is oblivious to unintended consequences, the inevitable shadow side of change.

Kant’s Essay

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in his classic essay “An Answer to the Question: What is the Enlightenment?” offers a recipe for the coordinates of an enlightened good life or, put differently, the elimination of a non-enlightened life of laziness, cowardice, and self-incurred immaturity. Kant stressed the practice of independent thinking and internal self-dialogue that precludes blind allegiance to authority. Kant wrote:

Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Self-incurred is this inability if its cause lies not in the lack of understanding but rather in the lack of the resolution and the courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.^[8]

Kant framed the Enlightenment as a demand that human beings “finally learn to walk.”^[9] For Kant, thinking is not only what defines humanness; it is the essential “vocation” of every human being.^[10] Revolutions seek to unseat autocratic despotism, making room for freedom that entails public space for thinking and rational discernment. Such a world necessitates reading, civic participation, discussion of ideas, and a desire to keep the public domain a home of multiple opinions. Kant’s understanding of the Enlightenment included the civic duty of paying taxes to the government; only unjust actions of a government that deny the organization of free discussion can legitimize acts of rebellion.

Guardians of the people must discard thoughtless immaturity and commit themselves to reasoned thought in the public square, forgoing the temptation of “Imperial Diets.”^[11] Authority, particularly law, must rest in “the collective will of the people.”^[12] Religious issues, human freedom, and the space for multiple ideas in the public domain must be protected and energized by the metaphor of “tolerance” that endorses a struggle against the “barbarity” of lack of patience for any position that is not one’s own.^[13] Kant ends his classic essay with an emphasis on freethinking, reasoning that enlightens the public sphere and ensures civic freedom. Such thinking assumes that the human being, in the time of the Enlightenment, “is now more than a machine.”^[14] The human must exercise the dignity of autonomous thought, acting and thinking freely within an Enlightenment conception of the world. For Kant, the Enlightenment was not an era; it was a space that was filled with illumination resulting from ongoing independence of thinking. Unrestricted action and freedom in one’s thinking are human responsibilities; we are caretakers of the public domain.

Enlightenment thinking embraced a heightened awareness about the importance of diverse ideas required in the shaping of the public domain and the necessity of autonomy of thought. For example, Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) wrote as supportive-thinking spectators about the ideas that gave rise to the French Revolution in 1789. Both Rousseau and Kant are historically central to the Enlightenment, which according to most sources began around 1650, shortly after the conclusion of the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Spain was then less protected and eventually lost northern territory to France in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. This action moved France into a position of considerable dominance in Europe, becoming the epicenter of the Enlightenment.

Kant wrote within a milieu of change and the growing power of France. He based his contribution on independence of thinking, which was akin to other scholars calling for autonomous responsive thinking—Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), and Rousseau in France and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704) in England. Their insights provided a backdrop against which the Scottish Enlightenment gathered its unique identity. Literacy in eighteenth-century Scotland hovered at about 75 percent of the population in 1750.^[15] Scotland’s literacy, democratic public education system,^[16] free trade with England after the Act of Union in 1707, and close ties to the intellectual life of France transformed this poor country into a scene of intellectual revolution. The exchange of ideas and rhetorical uniqueness of Scottish Enlightenment thinking shapes C. Jan Swearingen’s 2010 responsive review of Alexander Broadie’s book, A History of Scottish Philosophy.

Swearingen’s Communication
Perspective on Broadie

Alexander Broadie is internationally known as a scholar of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is currently Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow and the holder of the academic chair once held by Adam Smith. Swearingen responded to Broadie’s book, A History of Scottish Philosophy, in a 2010 Philosophy and Rhetoric essay.^[17] Swearingen stated that Broadie is a prolific scholar on Scottish philosophy and life. Swearingen listed a number of scholars known as philosophers of rhetoric during the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid.^[18]

Swearingen notes that normative convention indicates that Kant eventually rebuked the philosophy of David Hume (1711–1776).^[19] However, Broadie offers a different version, suggesting that Kant had actually only made more sophisticated the ideas of Hume.^[20] Swearingen also emphasized the importance of the common sense philosophers, such as Hutcheson and Reid, who textured the Scottish Enlightenment with their version of natural philosophy. Swearingen acknowledged that Broadie provides a historical sweep in his work that yields an interpretive key to understanding the historical context that gave rise to ideas that shaped the Scottish Enlightenment. For instance, the Scot’s remarkable achievements of the eighteenth century can be traced back to John Duns Scotus (1266–1308),^[21] a thirteenth-century Franciscan, and to important documents that shaped the intellectual structure of that time, such as the Declaration of the Clergy (1310)^[22] and the Declaration (or Letter) of Arbroath (1320).^[23] These works shaped “the present-day Scottish nationalist party [which] has adopted the Declaration of Arbroath as its ancestral sanction and campaign motto”^[24]—Together we can make Scotland better. Ideas that empowered the Scottish Enlightenment had an indisputable sense of homegrown depth.

Swearingen states that Broadie stressed that Scotus understood the importance of the human mind and intellect and the volatile power of will.^[25] Scotus’s empirical observation, a hallmark of the common sense school, offers a transition from his insights to John Mair (1467–1550). Both Scotus and Mair “taught that the senses and the will are evidence of God’s creation of and presence in the mind, that emotion, sense, will, and reason are part of a whole and necessary to one another.”^[26] Mair advanced Scotus’s ideas of empirical senses and the role of emotion and will.^[27] Mair taught logic and dialectic at the University of Paris in the sixteenth century before he returned to Scotland and the University of Glasgow. Mair was one of the first to articulate a political theory that suggested the importance of the deposing of a king when he is unresponsive to a people. Mair’s ideas had roots in the thirteenth-century insights of Scotus.^[28] Swearingen contended that Mair played a significant role in the shaping of independent Reformation thinking in the sixteenth century.

Mair wrote on the cusp of historical change; he was known as one of the last scholasticists but was also open to emerging humanistic thinking. Mair’s role as a teacher was incredibly powerful. George Buchanan (1506–1582), one of his students, became the tutor to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592).^[29] Mair brought forth new Latin and humanistic themes to the curriculum from the work of Erasmus’s Handbook of the Christian Soldier in 1503 to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678 and to the revival of Cicero’s classic speeches. As the sixteenth century yielded to the seventeenth century, as Swearingen reports from Broadie’s work, there was an absence of figures equal to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and René Descartes (1596–1650).^[30] The Scottish philosophy was shaped by significant intellectual figures throughout Europe. The religious and political wars between Scotland, England, and Ireland led, in the seventeenth century, to a call for religious toleration and tempered doctrines, with people such as Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) being on the edge of this moment of change.

Hutcheson was a Presbyterian minister who brought philosophical, practical, and rhetorical significance to the University of Glasgow from his deep Irish roots.^[31] Those who preceded Hutcheson at Glasgow emphasized natural law; however, Hutcheson, his student Adam Smith (1723–1790), and Thomas Reid (1710–1796) were interested in the “science of man” from a common sense perspective; natural law discussion thus gave way to a stress on common sense.^[32]

Swearingen reminded her readers that some contend that the Scottish Enlightenment impacted the framers of the Declaration of Independence. Controversy continues around Gary Wills’s Inventing America, which argues that Francis Hutcheson, not John Locke, influenced Jeffersonian thinking and language.^[33] This assertion underscores Broadie’s contention that the common sense philosophy of Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid filled philosophical gaps in early American intellectual thought, Broadie asserting that there was a Scottish accent in early intellectual and structural documents that framed the emerging country.^[34]

Swearingen concludes with Broadie’s argument against an unsophisticated understanding of Adam Smith’s achievements.^[35] Some state that Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (published in 1759) is centered on a concept of “sympathy” that is then abandoned in The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776) in favor of the notion of “self-interest.”^[36] Such an analysis is unduly simple, missing the interplay of self-interest and sympathy in common sense philosophy. Swearingen’s review concludes with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and moral theory in the Scottish Enlightenment, preparing the way for our further discussion of Broadie’s work, The Scottish Enlightenment, as a counter to the primacy of the French Enlightenment.^[37] The French grounded the Enlightenment in universal language, whereas the Scots grounded it on local soil, offering an intellectual contribution to the West that was otherwise than universal abstraction.

Broadie’s The Scottish Enlightenment

Eighteenth-century Scotland rests under the contested term, Scottish Enlightenment;^[38] Broadie affirms the term as representative of a unique and creative moment that continues to impact the Western world. The major figures that shaped the Scottish Enlightenment were imaginative innovators who brought forth new theoretical perspectives and philosophical insight, thinkers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), Thomas Reid, James Hutton (1726–1797), and Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823).^[39] This Scottish age generated a creative surge of thinking with practical influence that began with two essential features of the Enlightenment proper: (1) autonomous thought and (2) the social necessity of tolerance. The Enlightenment writ large includes an innovative Scottish contribution that transformed eighteenth-century Scotland.

Scotland lost its royal court to London during the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and joined the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 out of economic necessity. The late seventeenth century in Scotland also experienced one disastrous harvest after another, which was particularly demanding for such a poor country. Prior to this set of demands, there was the development of three Scottish universities, formed in the Pre-Reformation period: the University of Saint Andrews, Fife, in 1411/1412, the University of Glasgow, Glasgow, in 1451, and Kings College, Aberdeen, in 1495. These universities were followed a century later by the founding of the University of Edinburgh in 1583. A number of professors from the University of Paris returned to Scottish universities, including Edinburgh, to shape the intellectual life of Scotland, preparing the foundation for what we now call the Scottish Enlightenment. For example, John Mair was a professor of theology in Paris (1506–1517); he later served as the principal at the University of Glasgow from 1518 to 1523. The eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment roots commenced centuries earlier, as the work of Mair testifies. The Scots had a number of enlightened “literati”^[40] and public institutions of education, law, church, and literary and scientific societies that claimed local and international recognition.^[41] Additionally, the Scottish culture had both a “high” and “popular” dimension, which textured their insights with acumen from their own local soil.^[42]

Many assert that the Enlightenment is the movement from darkness; Broadie contradicts this position, stressing the judgments of one of the most significant scholars that Scotland ever produced, John Duns Scotus, whose short passage on the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary argued for conception without original sin and generated great anger in the Church. Yet, his position on Immaculate Conception eventually became official Church doctrine in 1854, guided by Pope Pius IX. Scotus was beatified by Pope John Paul II on March 20, 1993. The Enlightenment was not a struggle against a darkness of limited intellectual work, but rather a rebellion against blind allegiance to authority. Brilliant and creative thinkers from this earlier stage (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) such as Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225–1274), Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (1285–1347/1349) provided intellectual tools that permitted the Enlightenment to later flaunt the importance of “critical analysis” and “critical reflection.”^[43] Some assert that the Enlightenment was an era driven by theory, not by practice; Broadie again counters, contending that theories gave rise to practical changes in church life, independence of thought, ethics no longer adhering to blind authority, explication of the possibilities and the limits of rationality, and a conception of modern financial capital.

The Scottish Enlightenment and the Enlightenment in general gave rise to the middle class. Increasing independence gave shape to an age of criticism, creative thinking, and the use of terms such as heresy, deism, skepticism, and atheism in public debate. Those who found themselves on the wrong side of debate still suffered serious consequences; however, debate was at least possible. The commitment to autonomous reason called for constant improvement and progress. Yet, from the Scottish Enlightenment there was no sense of this utopianism; even Smith’s view of division of labor, which increased productivity, acknowledged the danger of losing the meaningfulness of work. Additionally, philosophers such as David Hume reminded us that even as we seek progress within the human soul, there is home for “irrepressible irrationalism” that fights such optimism.^[44]

The Importance of Sociogeography

The Scottish Enlightenment arose out of a commitment to historiography in the sixteenth century, led by significant Scottish authors such as Mair, George Buchanan,^[45] and John Knox (1514–1572).^[46] Major historians in eighteenth-century Scotland included David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, as well as Church historians such as William Robertson (1721–1793).^[47] The ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were the products of two centuries of historical work that textured an understanding of the interplay of “imagination,” “intellect,” and practical application.^[48]

The Enlightenment in Scotland emerged from a period of great austerity, narrowness, and the intolerance of the Episcopalian Church to a period of an “enlarged mentality” that united theory and practice within a social milieu of tolerance.^[49] Interestingly, when Hume talked about history, he never assumed that a historian could rid himself of prejudice. The writing of history had another task––the public explication of events, framing the why of human events from a particular point of view. The dynamics of the Scottish Enlightenment were shaped by a creative mixture of provincial and cosmopolitan tones––attending to the local environment and the larger world.

This standpoint on the writing of history worked under the rubric of “conjectural history.”^[50] Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) first used this term as a way of explaining observation via a position.^[51] His orientation of conjectural history was not far from David Hume’s insights on the importance of prejudice in historical writing.^[52] The telling of stories from an acknowledged perspective also led to terms that we now question, such as Adam Ferguson’s use of “primitive” and “rude” societies, terms that he used in explicating movement of progress in history.^[53] Broadie contends that the difference between conjectural and scientific history is that the former is a story told from a given perspective that is publicly confessed. The Scottish Enlightenment embraced sentiment, not pure rationality, a position that was manifested in their view of historical writing.^[54]

Conjectural history led Smith to talk about the various stages of human progress, moving from “hunter-gatherers” to the “pastoral,” “agricultural,” and then “commercial stage[s].”^[55] From the standpoint of conjectural history, it is not the accuracy of these stages; rather it is the telling of the story of the human condition from a given standpoint in order to make sense of the notion of progress. Smith, however, resisted the belief of progress as “linear or inevitable”—“Two steps forward may be followed by one step back, or even three.”^[56] The goal of conjectural history was to describe progress as “‘most simple’ and ‘most natural,’ even if the description is not necessarily ‘most agreeable to fact.’”^[57] Smith and others wrote history in an era defined by progress without falling prey to a perspective akin to historical determinism.^[58]

Progress Void of Undue Optimism

Two concepts, morality and civic life, were driving forces in the Scottish Enlightenment and can be found in the works of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith—all known for their work in the realm of morality, along with Adam Ferguson and John Millar (1735–1801) who stressed the importance of civil society. The literati of the Scottish Enlightenment had two principle models: Thomas Hobbes of England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of France, with the former understanding the nature of human life as defined by perpetual war and the latter understanding the human being as an innocent left to grapple with a problematic State.

The danger of war and the cautions about the power of the State led to what was called experimental method of reasoning.^[59] Ferguson and Smith provide concrete examples of this approach, framing experiment as direct observation of social life. They recognized both the fragility of human life and the necessity of a civil society charged with eradicating, or at least managing, corruption. Ferguson was cognizant of Scotland’s distrust of England and England’s suspicion about Scotland, particularly after the Jacobite Rebellion (1745–1746),^[60] as he was writing Essay on the History of Civil Society. Distrust of authority was carried forward in argument between Smith and Ferguson on the question of the military. Ferguson contended that civic virtue requires a standing militia with an expectation that each man must give service time to the militia. This communal commitment to a militia gave clarity to patriotism as a shared higher ideal, a more cosmopolitan perspective than the commercial hope of self-interest alone.^[61]

Smith wrote in the time of Kant and during an emphasis on “sympathy” of “spectators.”^[62] Kant articulated a trilateral relation of “spectator,” “agent,” and “recipient,” with each dependent upon the importance of “sympathy,” a feeling or passion toward the other.^[63] The notion of an impartial spectator was necessary in the creation of human imagination, providing distance from ideas that we advocate as agents or encounter as recipients. In order to nourish the notion of sympathy between and among persons in the interplay between spectator, agent, and recipient in the making of good judgments, the Scottish Enlightenment turned increasingly to education and discussion of civic virtue. Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) was a central figure in the articulation of well-rounded education.

A person can of course achieve eminence in his field by concentration only on that one field. But there is a price to be paid for such emphasis, or the person becomes, in Stewart’s dismissive phrase, a “literary artisan,” that is to say, the mental equivalent of the labourer whose physical exertions are of such a nature as to lead to a distorted body in (or with) which the person can never feel comfortable.^[64]

The Scottish Enlightenment embraced broad general education as a pragmatic necessity if both sympathy and good judgments were to prevail.

The connections of sympathy, good judgment, and education took place in an era in which the Church and the call for independence of thought were not natural allies. The Kirk, the governing body of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, had a record of systematic intolerance for those who questioned authority. However, change was underway as the Enlightenment ushered in an “Age of Toleration” and the “Age of Emancipation” for those who were not Christian, giving Jews a “greater degree of civil liberty.”^[65] Religious life was altered by moderate religious thinkers such as Hutcheson, whose gentle opposition to the Kirk was accompanied by the more critical insights of Hume, who argued against the possibility of a rational defense for the existence of God.

Hume never called into question the existence of God; his theology, which critiqued rational proof of God, was closer to the heart of Calvinism than was understood during his lifetime.

I think Hume’s position on matters of religion is the same as his position on matters of metaphysics and morals. He was a skeptic. In particular he was skeptical about the power of reason to provide demonstrations of many things that we find ourselves believing. He speaks about the frailty of reason, and about our tendency to give it tasks for which it is simply not fitted. The problem with discussions within natural religion is the tendency of reason to take flight into regions where it utterly lacks the support of experience.^[66]

Hume advanced the argument that polytheism was more appropriate for the Enlightenment than monotheism, due to its multiplicity of perspectives. Hume’s most significant work on religion was Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which appeared in 1779, three years after his death. Hume did not deny the existence of God or of miracles; he repeatedly stated that there is no rational proof for either. Even at the point of his death, Hume continued to annoy many who contended that his positions represented blatant heresy against the Church. To the chagrin of many, Hume seemingly died happy. Hume also angered some conservative churchmen with his friendships with William Robertson and Hugh Blair (1718–1800), both moderate clergymen.^[67] “One might even see their [Hume, Robertson, and Blair’s] friendship as a celebration of the Enlightenment virtue of tolerance, for the credulity that Hume found in Blair and the incredulity that Blair found in Hume could not shake the bond of affection.”^[68] Friendship among persons of differing views was central to the Enlightenment value of tolerance and congruent with the Scottish Enlightenment stress on human sentiment.

The Scottish Enlightenment was the home of sentiment, offering a dwelling for the creative expression of painters, writers, architects, gardeners, and musicians.^[69] For instance, creative attention toward everyday existence shaped the work of painters such as Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798), who followed Hutcheson’s efforts to dismiss the supernatural. Hamilton engaged the arts with direct reliance upon lived experience. The Scottish Enlightenment also stressed a rhetorical connection to sentiment. George Campbell’s work on the Philosophy of Rhetoric, published in 1776, reminded us of great orators who brought ideas and actions together. To a degree, the historians of the Scottish Enlightenment were rhetoricians propelled by ideas and lived experience, which, when understood together, constituted public evidence. Thomas Reid proposed clarity between the sign and the signified, assisting with knowledge of experiential public evidence.^[70] He articulated the necessity of distance to keep sign and signifier from collapsing into one another. Akin to the interplay between Hutcheson and Hamilton, the paintings of Sir Henry Raeburn represented the philosophical insights of Reid.^[71] There was a consistent theme in the Scottish Enlightenment—the uniting of theory and practice within a framework of human sentiment.

Hutcheson was a major leader in moving the notion of sentiment into university life. He was elected to the philosophy chair at Glasgow in 1729, where he emphasized aesthetic and moral senses. Following this stress on sentiment, Hume’s understanding, “Of the Standard of Taste,” framed issues of affection and elegance in moral judgment, giving us five standards of a critic functioning in the role of a spectator attentive to the following sentiments: (1) practiced understanding of taste, (2) practiced use of critical powers, (3) practiced differentiation of similar objects, (4) practiced rejection of relational connections that can taint judgment, and finally (5) practiced engagement of good sense.^[72] For Hume, a “good critic” offers “the true standard of taste and beauty” through the following qualities: “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice.”^[73] In each one of Hume’s standards for sentiment, we discern practices akin to “picturesque,” ideas that connect to lived life and bypass the safety of abstraction.^[74]

The emphasis on lived experience additionally manifested itself in major scientific inventions during the Scottish Enlightenment—for example, James Watt’s improved version of the steam engine, Thomas Reid’s work with non-Euclidian geometry, and James Hutton’s understanding of geological change.^[75] The Scottish Enlightenment united the practical and the philosophical, engaging human nature via sentiment. From the work of Reid, to Hume, to Adam Smith, sentiment is a major guide. Broadie argues that the Scottish Enlightenment can be defined by “the drum beat of sentiment.”^[76] Another concrete metaphor for describing the Scottish Enlightenment is “the age of the earth.”^[77] In an era of natural philosophy, the integration of the practical and the theoretical framed understanding of lived experience.

The nineteenth century, according to Broadie, brought us close to what we call the Scottish Enlightenment. He refers to this time as a “sad anti-climax,” a time that lost the ambiance necessary for nourishing a disproportionate number of geniuses.^[78] For Broadie, what drove the Scottish Enlightenment was not just intellectual geniuses, but a “close-knit unity” of persons.^[79] As people found increased space between one another, the creative energy dissipated and then died. Broadie’s critique recounts how a pragmatic magic perishes when families no longer stand together at a kitchen sink and wash dishes. The mechanical assistance of the dishwasher loses an unscripted creative space, leaving the household with one less location that offers an opportunity to rub shoulders; common places assist in generating ideas for potential genius in the everyday of human life. Such an emphasis on sociality of the Scottish Enlightenment is otherwise than the unquenched desire for individual autonomy. The emphasis on the importance of sociality continues with the work of James Buchan’s stress on “crowded with genius.”^[80]

Existential Engagement in the
Scottish Enlightenment

Buchan provides a dramatic look at daily life in Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, continuing the theme of creative spatiality with his title, Crowded with Genius. Buchan begins his story with a depiction of the Highland Rebellion of 1745 and the French Revolution of 1789, in an era when Edinburgh “ruled the Western intellect.”^[81] Edinburgh, a city once known primarily for bigotry, violence, and poverty, became an intellectual power during the Scottish Enlightenment. John Buchan called the battle of Culloden Moor (1746)^[82] the “last fight of the Middle Ages;”^[83] this confrontation began Edinburgh’s entrance into the modern world defined by international commerce, good laws, loyalty, and virtue among persons. Edinburgh was peopled with intellectual celebrities: David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and Hugh Blair. Interestingly, in 1755 the famous Encyclopédie of French philosophers, edited by Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), was contemptuous of Scotland; however, by 1762, Voltaire considered Scotland a center of taste in all arts.^[84] Edinburgh had become more important than Oxford and Cambridge combined. Indeed, the city was a place crowded with genius and rapidly changing.

A City Torn Asunder

In the year 1745, the city of Edinburgh had forty thousand people without a royal court (lost to London in 1603), had combined Scottish and English parliaments since 1707, and had developed little manufacturing. Edinburgh was principally a city of lawyers and churchmen, with the attorneys attending the Court of Session and the clergymen joining the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. There were nine Presbyterian churches, each with two ministers. There were also two banks, both of which survive today, as well as two newspapers—one Whig and the other Jacobite. In 1708, the parliamentary Union with England destroyed the formal administration of Scotland and politically empowered the Edinburgh Town Council, which was run as an oligarchy^[85] ever since James VI (1473–1513). The purpose of the council was to maintain peace among three groups: the guilds, the Kirk, and the Presbytery.^[86] The confines of Lawnmarket and High Street were densely populated; the sight of wood burning and peat smoke provided impetus for the area’s nickname—Auld Reekie, or Old Smokey—a place of few public buildings and little bread to eat; it remained, at that time, a city with Medieval character and smell. The intellectual foundations of Edinburgh, however, were present years prior. The courts, the Kirk, and the college provided a threefold foundation for the intellectual ascendance of Edinburgh. There was political debate in Scotland when the Whigs rejected authority from the Crown and wanted influence to come from the public itself.^[87] The city had been mainly Protestant since John Knox, a leader of the Scottish Reformation, imported both the creed and doctrines of John Calvin from Geneva, Switzerland, to St. Giles, Scotland, in the 1560s. This set of theological commitments was set against the royal House of Stuart since the time of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587).^[88] John Knox and Edinburgh contended against monarchs of divine-right and the Roman Catholic Church.^[89] The other political side of Edinburgh was composed of the Jacobites (named from the Latin for James), who supported the House of Stuart and their “sacramental and eternal right” to rule over Scotland.^[90] The Revolution of 1688 ended Stuart government in Edinburgh and put the Stuart court in exile. After the revolution, the Episcopalian church was disestablished. The former Episcopalians became Jacobites. London was determined to punish Edinburgh, leading Lord Provost George Drummond (1687–1766) to state that Edinburgh was held together by fear and hatred. The Jacobite/Whig debate continued with David Hume contending that the city, without a merchant class, could only prosper by defeating both the Jacobites and Whigs, with the former being a political defeat and the latter requiring a religious downfall.

The tension between Britain and Scotland continued to increase after the revolution. Charles Edward Stuart (1720–1788), the grandson of James VII of Scotland and II of England and leader of the Jacobite Rebellion, was living in exile under the protection of the French court in 1743. He led the Jacobites who were landing from France in 1745 under the direction of the Earl of Mar. Former Lord Provost George Drummond was in charge of the defense party. This effort by Drummond, at the age of fifty-eight, launched his political career as Lord Provost of Edinburgh once again.^[91] The Lord Provost, Archibald Stewart (elected in 1744), did not know what to do in the midst an invasion. Drummond, on the other hand, took his volunteers and marched to the castle in a political gesture that stopped the invasion.

Ground for Liberal Sentiments

The Jacobite rebellion of 1745, led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, could not take the castle. On October 31, Prince Charles Edward left, demoralized, and abandoned his expedition. Then, on November 26, 1746, Drummond once again became Lord Provost, with the old Provost Stewart being tried for neglect of office. The Jacobite rebellion transformed Edinburgh and brought forth names such as Adam Ferguson and Hugh Blair,^[92] who stressed “unionism.”^[93] Societally, the rebellion simultaneously invited acts of romantic nostalgia and philosophical pessimism. David Hume wondered if civilized life was “unfit for the Use of Arms.”^[94]

The fight for Edinburgh was not just against the Stuarts but in the name of intellectual and religious freedom, as well. For example, on December 23, 1696, Thomas Aikenhead, a student at the college, was indicted by the Court of Justiciary for blasphemy. The Lord Advocate claimed that Aikenhead repeatedly spoke of Christian theology as a “rapsodie of feigned and ill-invented nonsense.”^[95] This eighteen-year-old boy in Presbyterian Edinburgh was hanged until dead on January 8, 1697. This case haunted Edinburgh for a century, calling into question responsive attention to the privacy of conscience—an ongoing political controversy between the Jacobites and Whigs. The ecclesiastical wars initiated conflict between a “rigid Calvinism which saw any deviation in doctrine or conduct as a mortal threat to the whole community, and a new conviction of the privacy and variety of consciousness.”^[96] An emphasis on privacy of conscience privileged skepticism over knowledge “revealed through scripture”^[97]—such thinking led to the effort to excommunicate David Hume and Henry Home (1696–1782) by the General Assemblies of 1755 and 1756. At that time, the Kirk had assumed many civil and judicial functions and worked from an agenda of religious strictness.^[98] Lord Provost Drummond was dispirited until the General Assembly was joined by a new generation of leaders born after 1690. One could finally sense the possibility of bridging the gap between Presbyterianism and the new ideas emerging out of the college. For instance, Robert Wallace (1697–1746) suggested that the way to repel the power of the Deists was with their own weapon––reason.^[99] Wallace was at first persecuted for this perspective, but then, in 1742, he became the moderator of the General Assembly. He brought the famed English evangelist George Whitefield^[100] (1714–1770) to Scotland; such actions of public tension and debate revealed the seemingly restless power of change in Scotland.

At the University of Glasgow, Andrew Carlyle (1722–1805), in 1743, found his liberal sentiments gaining ground under the influence of Francis Hutcheson, who brought a preoccupation with issues of virtue, a perspective contrary to Thomas Hobbes’s view that human beings were totally selfish. Hutcheson claimed that the human’s principle virtue was “disinterested benevolence.”^[101] Hutcheson was a utilitarian who connected good conduct to the beautiful and the pleasurable, which he associated with the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Buchan understood Hutcheson’s system as more akin to “aesthetic imagination” and “reasoning intellect,” unlike “the philosophy of the sentimental novelist.”^[102] Some felt Hutcheson abandoned the modern project by underestimating the power of reason; in actuality, he assisted with a Scottish stamp on the Enlightenment with his emphasis on the senses, both moral and aesthetic.

One of those countering Hutcheson’s continuing commitment to philosophy that was attentive to God’s world was Hume, an emerging intellectual hero willing to plumb “the darkness of intellectual despair.”^[103] Hume was known for his commitment to skepticism and suspicion. He founded no school, left no major successor, and was denied the privilege of a professorship. He offered an alternative to the common sense school that he deemed too dependent upon a “benevolent deity” and “disreputable prejudices.”^[104] Hume sought to rediscover the importance of human emotion. He seemed to be working, in some strange way, out of a tradition more akin to Francis Bacon or Sir Isaac Newton, who had rejected and abandoned a priori arguments that constituted the Middle Ages. Bacon and Newton embraced an experimental method that intrigued Hume, who was interested in establishing a new science of ethics, which he connected to a “New Scene of Thought.”^[105] Hume believed the human mind could be completely known. Hume was interested in knowledge and causation connected to a sense felt by the mind. Reason had been given a heightened importance that Hume wanted to dethrone. On this matter, Hume and Hutcheson had significant kinship.

Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects was published in three books or volumes—the first two were published in 1739 and the third in 1740, followed by a cool and hostile reception; he then decided to follow the path of Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Steele (1672–1729), who in London had become known for their work with a new convention, essays.^[106] Hume understood reading an essay as an invitation to watch a powerful mind at leisure. As Hume turned to essays, he then wrote books in parts, and all the while he spent a great deal of time reading the work of Montesquieu. Even with all his writing and reading, Hume was unable to secure a chair of logic at Glasgow. Adam Smith was the outgoing professor and did not support Hume, who was hurt by Smith’s actions. Hume’s work branched out further into a category perhaps better known as philosophical history. Interestingly, according to Alexander Carlyle, Hume sought no followers, not even in the young ministers; he did not try to convert anyone. However, if Hume had to choose between the High-Flyers and the Catholic Church, he might have actually chosen Roman Catholicism, preferring superstition to Protestant enthusiasm. One could sense the defeat of the Highlanders as one experienced a more relaxed political censorship, resulting in an increasing number of subscriptions for theater attendance.

One of the controversial plays of the time was John Home’s (1756) Douglas. Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) called it a foolish play.^[107] The play begins during the time of the Danish invasion. The audience finds Lady Randolph committed to her second husband and still mourning the death of her first husband, Lord Douglas, who was killed in battle along with her son. The sequence of events in the play are as follows: (1) Glenalvon, a nephew of Lord Randolph, is in love with Lady Randolph; (2) there is an attack, and Lady Randolph is saved by an unknown young man, who is actually the young Douglas; (3) when Glenalvon discovers that young Douglas and Lady Randolph are lovers, Douglas kills Glenalvon; (4) Douglas is then killed by Lord Randolph, and Lady Randolph throws herself off a high rock; (5) and finally, Lord Randolph sets off to battle the Danes, assuming he will leave his body on the battlefield. The criticism of the play is that it is not a Shakespearean tragedy but rather a form of pioneer romantic literature. Those supportive of the play stressed two central themes: (1) “civic patriotism” and (2) clergy belief that such values must ground “politeness and modernity.”^[108] Criticism revolved around the “ridicule of prayer.”^[109] For John Witherspoon (1723–1794) and the High-Flyers, it was a scandal that a clergyman could write any play, regardless of the moral character and message of the play. On January 5, 1757, the Edinburgh Presbytery castigated the playhouse, resulting in individuals such as Thomas Carlyle, who supported the morality of Douglas, being called before the Presbytery.

By 1766, the moral controversy about plays waned; the Canongate theater was no longer simply about ethics but concerned the making of significant money. Subscriptions were increasing and changes were happening in the lives of the supporters of Douglas. John Home had to resign his parish charge; he then lived off the patronage of others. The moderate clergy, however, began to assume more power, finding power from London. In 1762, Blair was installed in the High Kirk; his sermons were a necessary part of a visitor’s trip to Edinburgh. He was appointed to the position of professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the college. David Hume stayed in Scotland, as did William Robertson, who in 1762 was installed as the principal of the college. Robertson then had control over both the Kirk and the college until the late 1770s when civil rights questions arose in regard to Scottish Catholics.^[110] Creative change and debate defined Edinburgh.

Fifty years after the union with London, Edinburgh was prospering, and the Jacobites were a spent force. Prince Charles Edward Stuart had retreated and was in exile, comforted by drink and “undignified attachments.”^[111] In Edinburgh, the argument for union had been won in Scotland; problems were moving to London as Scotland became a place of economic, intellectual, and civic life shaped by the sentiments of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Sentiments—Origins and Structures

Buchan suggests that perhaps the last and greatest of the major works of the era was Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments; the book appeared in 1759, the year a number of British military victories over the French in both Europe and North America occurred. The book was more accessible than Hume’s Treatise and less “precious” than Hutcheson’s Inquiry.^[112] By the time of Smith’s death on August 4, 1790, it was stated that he had moved from the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow into a focus on trade and finance. Both David Hume and Adam Smith privileged the notion of human instinct over reason. Smith is best known for The Wealth of Nations; however, throughout his life, he was concerned with the practices of morality within an emerging commercial society. Buchan, like Broadie, argued against those who suggested that the Theory of Moral Sentiments concerned sympathy and The Wealth of Nations centered on selfishness. In particular, H. T. Buckle (1821–1862) made such a suggestion, which has not held scholarly water. There is unity in Smith’s thought; one must understand the ongoing unity between sympathy and selfishness.

Smith was born June 5, 1723, at Kirkcaldy, never knew his father, and was often sick; at the University of Glasgow, Smith found himself under the spell of Francis Hutcheson’s lectures. Smith’s agile mind was equipped with knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, and Italian. His first major essay dealt with astronomy; he understood philosophy as an effort to make sense out of chaos and to hold things together––“philosophy as tranquilizer.”^[113] Many of Smith’s major metaphors were more literary than social scientific: “impartial spectator,” “invisible hand,” and “propensity to barter and truck.”^[114] By 1751, Smith was appointed professor of logic and rhetoric at Glasgow. He was not only a brilliant mind but also a graduate of Oxford University, which appealed to many, including Henry Home, who sought a commitment to both a Scottish national culture and a cosmopolitan obligation to business and law.

Smith recognized an organic connection between commerce and prose. He used the philosophical method of Montesquieu of applying logic in the examination of a few historical facts, constructing a “chain of cause and reasonable effect.”^[115] Smith was an optimist with an imagination for human potential. Both he and Hume stressed the importance of “sympathy” and “fellow-feeling.”^[116] The major contribution to ethics made by Smith assumed that “self-examination” was not our first step in understanding morality. Smith assumed that we first judge others’ morality and then judge ourselves.^[117] Smith’s understanding of sympathy was more practical than that of Hume. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was both anti-authoritarian and deeply optimistic and was easier to understand and believe than Hutcheson’s notion of “moral faculty.”^[118] Smith’s work aligned with ancient Stoic philosophers, as they organized propensities for selfishness. Smith understood society as a “self-managing organism,” in which the individual was assimilated within “external moral authority.”^[119]

Moral sentiment and concern for origins and lineage were vital parts of the Scottish Enlightenment. In September 1759 in Moffat, a small town considered the Spa of Scotland, John Home met James MacPherson, a Highlander and published poet who was the collector of the Ossian texts composed of epic and traditional poems.^[120] According to Buchan, Ossian poems, which were thought to be translations of ancient Gaelic texts, were “a vulgar literary fraud.”^[121] Even the High-Flying ministers and preachers viewed the Ossian poems with suspicion. However, what Edinburgh needed was a masterpiece with local roots. Richard Sher, a modern scholar of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, writes that Ossian was “a poetical response to a political crisis.”^[122] However, some considered the work of MacPherson, who was referred to as the “Sublime Savage” by Boswell, to be equivalent to a literary Frankenstein, emphasizing an ugly sense of origins. MacPherson attended the University of Aberdeen in 1752; even in college he was disliked for his overbearing spirit. MacPherson’s project offered a picture of the authentic Highlander. Hugh Blair stressed the issues of “tenderness” and “sublimity” present in the poems;^[123] indeed, there was a morbid atmosphere reflected in the poems of Ossian. The notion of the sublime was significant in the Scottish Enlightenment—important to Adam Smith, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and to Edmund Burke, the Irish writer and politician. Additionally, the insights of Rousseau were termed “sentimental sublime.”^[124] MacPherson’s work, of course, continued to be criticized as not originative and thus unfitting within a literary genre where the words sentimental sublime and civic sentiment united. MacPherson offered an artificial view of sentiment; many were susceptible to the ruse because sentiment is at the heart of the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, even manifested in physical structures.

The second half of eighteenth-century Edinburgh generated great changes after the “Jacobite rebellion and Presbyterian theocracy.”^[125] The town historian Hugo Arnot (1749–1786) described the development of New Town in Edinburgh. Perhaps one of the most important papers to come out of Edinburgh was a pamphlet entitled “Proposals for Carrying on Certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh.”^[126] The document worked under assumptions framed by Montesquieu––concentrating people in capital cities with the hope of increasing their commercial appetites. One of the major contributors early on to this project was six-time Lord Provost of Edinburgh, George Drummond. The fact that he could be a great benefactor announced that something other than an aristocracy was now in control of Scotland. Drummond arose from modest means, finding fortune through good and hard work. “If George Drummond was no hero, he was a man for his age. In Drummond, the Scots come down to earth;”^[127] he was the master designer of new structures that furthered the sentiment of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The Peace of Paris that concluded the French war was celebrated in Edinburgh on March 29, 1763. The New Town was eventually carried forth by twenty-one-year-old James Craig in 1766, who brought Edinburgh into the eighteenth-century middle class of Europe. Unfortunately, in 1772, there was a banking crisis in Scotland and London that brought the project to a halt. Fortunately, at the end of the American war in 1783, the project was in full swing once again, with families from the country moving into the New Town, followed by their lawyers. Edinburgh was becoming a paradox, a reminder of a Dickensian world, with two different socioeconomic parts of the city. Edinburgh reflected a city with a “divided destiny” of the highly educated and the poor—representing the best and the worst of modernity.^[128]

In Search of Freedoms

The first freedom that was sought in Scotland was economic; during the Jacobite occupation in Edinburgh in 1745, the Highlanders would hold up pedestrians for a penny.^[129] The new Scotland was becoming an argument between those who understood the importance of luxury and opulence and those like Sir James Steuart Denham (1712–1780),^[130] who called for a Sparta of frugal needs, a “Spartan communism.”^[131] Steuart’s position did not romantically view commerce as a magic solution. “Public authority . . . must intervene to protect the fragility of modern systems.”^[132] Steuart was impressed by the Spartan system of “longevity, consistency and simplicity.”^[133] Steuart’s work was quoted by Hegel and Marx and applauded by Adam Ferguson, who spent many of his adult years as a military chaplain. Ferguson understood that conflict and society go hand in hand. Provost George Drummond, in 1759, appointed Ferguson to the chair of natural philosophy, after which Ferguson mastered physics in three months in order to teach it.^[134] Ferguson was deeply committed to Scotland, defending the play Douglas and promoting Ossian poetry; he understood the fragility of institutions and societies and the importance of local soil. Ferguson’s work on An Essay on the History of Civil Society was an effort to bring forth a moral public and virtue that recognized the pragmatic necessity of connection with Britain. Ferguson became a kind of Scottish Cato in his later years. On the other hand, Adam Smith acknowledged the modern fact of commercial life of luxury and opulence and was greatly influenced by Hume and Hutcheson, more so than Ferguson, whose commitment to a Spartan world shaped his commitments to both Scotland and Britain.

The diversity of positions within the public domain made Edinburgh alive with concern for ideas and others: conversations shaped by ideas and sentiment. Buchan offers the example of the changes between Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell (1740–1795) during Johnson’s visits to Edinburgh.^[135] The two were like oil and water; Johnson disliked Adam Smith and loathed David Hume and particularly detested Boswell, who was deeply committed to Scotland and regretted its union with Britain. Yet, at the end of his life, Johnson, in one of his narratives, discussed his visit to Scotland and talked about the “college for the deaf and dumb” that was operated by Thomas Braidwood.^[136] Johnson was hard of hearing; he was so impressed with their work that when he talked about the experience, he was moved to tears. Edinburgh was crowded with genius that extended into concern for others.

As Edinburgh entered the eighteenth century, people like Adam Smith and David Hume reflected a “bachelor society.”^[137] However, the eighteenth century was also “the women’s century” within Scotland.^[138] In retrospect, one witnesses the role of Jacobite women in the Forty-Five Rebellion as “brilliant” and “striking.”^[139] The admission of women was understood as an emerging maturity of Edinburgh. Women were admitted to the college lectures in 1745; in 1710, public dancing was introduced in Edinburgh. Into this world of increasing inclusion came gaiety and social improvement. Women began to alter their appearance from the national plaid of yesteryear. Under the philosophical influence and the insights of Montesquieu and Rousseau, Edinburgh began to take seriously the importance of a proper education for young women.^[140] John Millar, in his book Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, also assisted in bringing women into the discussion of Scottish philosophy. Additionally, the French Revolution in 1789 further altered the public position of women. The Scottish sentiment included ideas of inclusion and attentiveness to practical advancement.

Earth and Sentiment

At that time, Edinburgh was increasingly known for practical advances; in medicine, people came from around the world to study at the University of Edinburgh, including such eventual luminaries as Charles Darwin (1809–1882). The idea for a charity hospital was indeed a part of Edinburgh’s imagination, but it was not until George Drummond, in his first term as Lord Provost, that the project materialized. Drummond proposed using financial stock from a fishery company that was being liquidated; the money was transferred to the voluntary hospital. Drummond, along with others, provided managerial skill to bring the medical school tools that brought Edinburgh “money, students and royal patronage.”^[141] Early in the nineteenth century, Dr. Robert Knox was performing dissections on human bodies with all the controversy that one might expect with such scientific advancement. The greatest advancement in Scotland during the eighteenth century was in agriculture: Rotation, cereals, and crops became routine. Additionally, experimental farmers like James Hutton, in his book The Theory of the Earth, pointed to the importance of a rural economy and the recognition of the value of volcanoes and earthquakes in the maturation of events in nature. Dr. Johnson’s gloom in his understanding of nature was countered by Hutton’s theory, which linked Blair’s understanding of sublime to nature itself.

An interesting episode regarding sentiment occurred in early 1766 when David Hume persuaded Rousseau to accompany him to England. Hume had offered Rousseau exile in a secure sanctuary in Staffordshire. Rousseau had been run out of France.^[142] By June 1766, Rousseau began experiencing complete paranoia and thought Hume was attempting to do him harm; yet it was Hume who had assisted him, pointing to the conclusion, “Sensibility became in the end a prison, from which the exits were paranoia (Rousseau), consumption (The Man of Feeling) or suicide (Werther).”^[143] Sentiment is both the legacy and ultimately the bane of the Scottish Enlightenment, according to Buchan.

With the decline of a robust and natural sentiment, individuals like Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831), a ruthless lawyer, a Tory pamphleteer, and an author known for bringing forth the sentimentalized novel The Man of Feeling, assisted in the downturn of energy in the Scottish Enlightenment. The notion of sentiment began early on with the work of Smith, traced back to the Roman historian Tacitus (56AD–120AD),^[144] and had propelled eighteenth-century social invention via Smith, Hutcheson, Hume, and Ferguson, which was corrupted through commercialization. Robert Fergusson (1750–1774) later wrote a satire of The Man of Feeling; he may not have liked the work, but he lived the lifestyle—dying early in life after following confused moral values and an ongoing commitment to drink. He was buried without a headstone, with one later provided by Robert Burns (1759–1796), who appreciated his work. Burns was considered an example of pure genius. However, Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), the final romantic author from Edinburgh, who had seen Burns with luminaries such as Adam Ferguson, John Home, and James Hutton, stated that Burns was no genius, just an exemplar of a lifestyle. Sentiment had moved from a noble philosophical heritage, to literary pulp fiction, to the invitation of a lifestyle that was destructive of self and other.

The Scottish Enlightenment—an invitation to an egalitarian democratic world and a world of ideas put into action was, at best, a paradox. Even in 1779, the Whigs were still at their mean-spirited best, attempting to relieve the Roman Catholics of civil rights that they had labored for under the Reformation, giving rise to the so-called Gordon riots. The excesses of terror in France came close to Scotland; even romantic radicals like Robert Burns had to recant “liberal sentiment” with the rise of Jacobinism.^[145] In 1793, the British Convention of Delegates of the People came to Edinburgh; their task was to press for universal suffrage and, at the same time, “Lord Braxfield invented a crime of unconscious sedition [stating] . . . ‘Let them bring me prisoners, and I’ll find them law.’”^[146] Scotland was increasingly becoming a myth. It took Sir Walter Scott, an architect of modern Edinburgh, to catapult Scotland and its ancient capital into the romantic center of the world—“Through him it is possible the experience the history of Edinburgh twice: once as disaster, and once as daydream.”^[147] Great ideas and action had morphed into literary myth.

The creative genius of the Scottish Enlightenment came from the doing; the rhetorical warrant for change emerged from a community of poverty, desire for social change, and commitment to general education that included the highest percentage of literacy in Europe. The rhetorical warrant for conceptual and practical change died when the gaze of too many turned to the task of reifying the genius of a previous moment and past accomplishments. This rhetorical solidification of a myth became a death gaze, moving Scotland from the creative application of theory and practice to celebratory rhetoric about Scottish Enlightenment accomplishments. Self-congratulatory rhetoric led the shift from crowded with genius to a place crowded with rhetoric, of self-affirmation based on lineage and heritage. The rhetorical death of genius comes from a rhetoric based upon pedigree that bypasses the needed creative work that seeks to turn creative otherness into the banality of the expected, the predictable, the routine. Rhetorically, what is lost is a commitment to a dwelling that is crowded with innovative productivity that demands meeting local, creative, and cosmopolitan insights. The rhetoric shifts from learning and doing to telling, leaving only an antiquarian understanding of genius and creative productivity. The rhetoric of telling and the desire to control, to colonize a creative moment, moves a people from learning from the Other into a milieu that atrophies into acts of possession and posturing—moving from the praxis of genius to a rhetoric of self-congratulatory pretentiousness.

Notes

Bibliography

Arnett, Ronald C. “Civic Rhetoric—Meeting the Communal Interplay of the Provincial and the Cosmopolitan: Barack Obama’s Notre Dame Speech, March 17, 2009.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 4 (2011): 631–71.

Broadie, Alexander. A History of Scottish Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

———. The Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2007.

Buchan, James. Crowded with Genius, the Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

Cort, Franklin E. T he Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early America. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What Is the Enlightenment?” In What Is Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, 58–64. Edited by J. Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1784/1996.

———. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press, 1790/1951.

———. The Metaphysics of Morals. Edited by M. Gregor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1797/1996.

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———. Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994.

———. The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.

———. The Self after Postmodernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

Swearingen, C. Jan. Review of A History of Scottish Philosophy, by Alexander Broadie. Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 2 (2010), 186–99.

Tanner, Roland J. “Cowing the Community? Coercion and Falsification in Robert Bruce’s Parliaments, 1309–1318.” In The History of the Scottish Parliament, edited by K. M. Brown and R. J. Tanner, 50–73. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

Toulmin, Stephen E. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1958/2003.

James Buchan, Crowded with Genius, the Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

Stephen E. Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1958/2003).

Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986); Schrag, Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994); Schrag, The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992); Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Also see, Ronald C. Arnett, “Civic Rhetoric––Meeting the Communal Interplay of the Provincial and the Cosmopolitan: Barack Obama’s Notre Dame Speech, March 17, 2009.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 4 (2011).

Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is the Enlightenment?” in What Is Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1784/1996).

C. Jan Swearingen, review of A History of Scottish Philosophy, by Alexander Broadie, Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 2 (2010).

Alexander Broadie is the first scholar whose scholarship covers the full seven centuries of Scottish philosophy. Broadie is professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of Glasgow, the first Henry Duncan Prize lecturer (1990–1993) in Scottish Studies at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Gifford Lecturer at Aberdeen (1994). In 1991, Broadie was both elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was appointed chair of Philosophy at The University of Glasgow—the same chair that had been occupied by Adam Smith. In 2007, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Blaise Pascal University for his contributions to Franco-Scottish relations in the field of the history of philosophy. See “Alexander Broadie,” from the Gifford Lectures website, accessed May 10, 2013, www.giffordlectures.org/Author.asp?AuthorID =213; Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2007).

Buchan, Crowded with Genius.

Kant, “Answer to the Question,” 58.

Ibid., 59.

Ibid.

Ibid., 61.

Ibid., 62.

Ibid.

Ibid., 63, emphasis added.

15.

Susanne Kord, Women Peasant Poets in Eighteenth-Century England, Scotland, and Germany: Milkmaids on Parnassus (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 40.

16.

Franklin E. Cort, The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 2.

17.

Swearingen, Review.

18.

David Hume is intentionally not in this list as he was denied chairs at both the University of Edinburgh in 1744 and the University of Glasgow in 1764. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “David Hume,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/276139 /David-Hume.

19.

Swearingen, “Review.”

20.

Broadie notes that David Hume, along with Adam Smith, was one of the most well-read and influential scholars of the Republic of Letters, a group of writers who committed their work to the public domain. Additionally, Hume was a leading Scottish historian of the eighteenth century alongside Smith, Kames, Turnbull, and Ferguson. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 14, 44.

21.

John Duns Scotus was a Franciscan philosopher, scholar, realist, and theologian who introduced the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which argues that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was conceived without original sin. Additionally, Scotus contended that “Incarnation was not dependent on the fact that man had sinned, that will is superior to intellect and love to knowledge, and that the essence of heaven consists in beatific love rather than the vision of God.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Blessed John Duns Scotus,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/173846/Blessed-John-Duns-Scotus.

22.

The Declaration of the Clergy (1310) declared Scotland in favor of King Robert Bruce. The document, which repeatedly stresses leadership determined by the Scottish citizenship, argues that England, or more specifically the king of England, does not have the authority to declare the Scottish king. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 28. The four versions of the Declaration of the Clergy, preceding The Declaration of Arbroath, made between 1309 and 1310, were written in an effort to persuade European clergy and monarchs of Robert I’s royalty. Roland J. Tanner, “Cowing the Community? Coercion and Falsification in Robert Bruce’s Parliaments, 1309–1318,” in The History of Scottish Parliament, ed. Keith M. Brown and Roland J. Tanner, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 59.

23.

The Declaration (or Letter) of Arbroath argued for papal recognition of Scotland’s right to name its own leaders. See Swearingen, Review, 189. The Declaration of Arbroath asserted the independence of Scotland following Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. The declaration was composed by the Scottish Parliament in Arbroath Abbey, a historic county in Scotland founded in 1178 by King William I, and sent to the pope at Avignon, France. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Arbroath,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com /EBchecked/topic/32366/Arbroath.

24.

Controversy surrounding the Declaration of Arbroath is due to its “hype” rather than its “reality.” Since it has become the modern motto for the Scottish Nationalist Party, “moderates in Scotland today often respond with reserve to its invocation.” See Swearingen, Review, 189.

25.

Although not stressed by Swearingen, Scotus offered an alternative reading to Augustine’s understanding of will. See Swearingen, “Review.”

Ibid., 190.

Ibid.

Ibid., 189.

Michel de Montaigne was the French writer whose Essais (Essays ) marked a “new literary form.” His Essays are among the “most captivating and intimate self-portraits ever given, on a par with Augustine’s and Rousseau’s.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Michel de Montaigne,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/390476 /Michel-de-Montaigne.

30.

Swearingen, “Review.”

31.

Francis Hutcheson designed the new curriculum in moral philosophy while he was a professor at Glasgow, a curriculum which was adopted by all of Scotland’s universities. It replaced the dark view of human nature with “doctrines of humankind’s innate love of virtue and liberty.” See Swearingen, “Review,” 193–94.

32.

Ibid., 195. Common sense philosophy, as framed by Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid, challenged Rousseau. These philosophers defied the state of nature defined by Rousseau on the grounds that it was unscientific because, according to their own historical and scientific observations, humans have always, first and foremost, by their nature, formed societies for their individual betterment and collective good.

33.

Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978/2002).

34.

Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy.

35.

Swearingen, “Review.”

36.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 121.

37.

Swearingen, “Review”; Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment.

38.

Some argue that the Scottish Enlightenment consisted solely of the eighteenth-century Scottish contributions to political economy, history, and moral philosophy; others claim that mathematics and the natural sciences were crucial as well. See Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment.

39.

Broadie notes that Hume, Smith, and Ferguson are leading eighteenth-century Scottish historians; additionally, they made leading contributions to the philosophical culture of Scotland. See History of Scottish Philosophy, 44. Broadie credits Thomas Reid, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow and a member of Aberdeen’s Philosophical Society, as the “deepest of the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment.” See Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 30. Reid was both a mathematician and a writer of the nature of the mind and human action, as well as a scholar of rhetoric and jurisprudence. James Hutton, the “father of modern geology,” earned a Doctorate of Medicine from the University of Leiden in 1749. Hutton’s leading contribution was his research on the age of the heart, which he defined, against religious scrutiny, as having no beginning and no end. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 209–11. Sir Henry Raeburn, one of the best portraitists in Europe alongside Allan Ramsey, reflected a distinction between “what we see and what we know”; Raeburn was influenced by the writings of Thomas Reid and represented human nature as “individuated” to each person. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 174.

40.

Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 13.

41.

Some international institutions include the Republic of Letters, the Moderate Party—which disapproved of the traditional harshness of Scottish Calvinism—and the Rankenian Club in 1717.

42.

Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 14.

43.

Ibid., 20.

44.

Ibid., 42.

45.

George Buchanan, a Scottish humanist and educator, critiqued the Church during the Reformation for its corruption and inefficiency. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “George Buchanan,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/82825/George-Buchanan.

46.

John Knox, considered the leader of the Scottish Reformation, set the moral tone for the Church of Scotland and shaped Scotland’s democratic government. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “John Knox,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked /topic/320580/John-Knox.

47.

William Robertson, a Presbyterian minister and Scottish historian, is regarded, along with David Hume and Edward Gibbon, as one of the most important British historians of the eighteenth century. Robertson completed his studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1741 and was ordained a minister in the Church of Scotland. He became a member of the church’s General Assembly in 1746, holding a leading position in the moderate party for many years. His reputation as a historian emerged with his first major work, The History of Scotland, During the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI, published in 1759. He was appointed principal of the University of Edinburgh and historiographer royal for Scotland. His works reflect his interest in social theory, stressing the importance of material and environmental factors in determining the course of civilization. Although influential in the nineteenth century, his writings received little attention during the twentieth century. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “William Robertson,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/505591/William-Robertson.

48.

Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 47.

49.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1790/1951), 136–37.

50.

Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 72.

51.

Dugald Stewart, under the influence of Thomas Reid, became a major exponent of the Scottish common sense school. Stewart was educated and taught at the University of Edinburgh, where he was appointed professor of philosophy in 1785, replacing Adam Ferguson in the chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, holding this position until 1820. Stewart’s major works include Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, (published in three volumes emerging in 1792, 1814, and 1827), Outlines of Moral Philosophy (published in 1793), Philosophical Essays (published in 1810), and Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (published in 1828). See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Dugald Stewart,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/566015/Dugald-Stewart.

52.

Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 72–73.

Ibid., 69.

Ibid., 75.

Ibid.

Ibid.,76.

Ibid., 77.

Ibid.

Ibid., 81.

The Jacobite Rebellion, often referred to as the Forty-Five Rebellion, was the final rebellion in a series of such in support of exiled Stuart King James II and his followers after the Glorious Revolution. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Jacobite,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/299035/Jacobite. English distrust lasted nearly a decade after the Jacobite Rebellion. In Scotland, this distrust seemed to be misplaced, and Adam Ferguson wrote on the subject as part of a wide debate among the literati. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 91.

61.

Smith was not completely opposed to militias but disagreed with Ferguson, who charged that a replacement of militia with a standing army would threaten civil liberty. Rather, Smith saw the standing army as a “category of ‘division of labor.’” See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 92.

62.

Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 101.

63.

Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. M. Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1797/1996).

64.

Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 109.

65.

Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 115.

66.

Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 136

67.

William Robertson, alongside William Cullen, John Robinson, Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith, founded the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1783. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 57. Hugh Blair was the first occupant of the chair of rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh University and was minister of the Hugh Kirk of St. Giles, providing intellectual underpinnings for the Enlightenment. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 22. Both Blair and Robertson served as members of the Select Society in 1754, a debating society on the principles of Jacobitism. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 26–27.

68.

Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 150.

69.

Ibid., 151.

70.

Ibid., 169.

71.

Hamilton was a pupil of Hutcheson’s at the University of Glasgow. Hutcheson’s philosophy was naturalistic—Hutcheson believed in God but believed that it was possible to construct human virtues without resorting to revelation. Hamilton’s paintings depicted the supernaturalism of the Homeric narratives, which was thought to be intentional according to Hutcheson. Hamilton and Hutcheson both fit into a secular and humanistic orientation. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 155–56.

72.

Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 178.

Ibid., 184.

Ibid., 185.

Ibid., 186.

Ibid., 198.

Ibid., 209.

Ibid., 218.

Ibid., 219.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius.

81.

Ibid., 1.

82.

The Battle of Culloden Moor (April 16, 1746) was the last battle of the Forty-Five Rebellion. The Jacobites, under Prince Charles Edward, were defeated by British forces under William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. The battle lasted only forty minutes and resulted in bitter defeat for the heavily outnumbered Jacobites; as many as one thousand of five thousand Highlanders were killed by the nine thousand Redcoats, who lost only fifty men. The Highlanders fled, and British troops killed another one thousand men during the following weeks. Prince Charles wandered over Scotland for five months before escaping to France. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Battle of Culloden,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com /EBchecked/topic/146084/Battle-of-Culloden.

83.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 1.

84.

Ibid., 2.

85.

An oligarchy is a government ruled by the few where power is despotic. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Oligarchy,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/427558/oligarchy.

86.

A hierarchy of courts controls the Church of Scotland. Beginning with the Kirk sessions, congregation affairs are governed. The Presbytery covers the group of parishes, and finally the General Assembly hosts clergy and lay representatives annually to discuss key issues. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Scotland,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/529440/Scotland/44556/Languages.

87.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 17.

88.

Mary Queen of Scots (1542–1567) whose “unwise marital and political actions” were the cause of rebellion among the Scottish nobles. Mary was forced to flee to England, where she was deemed a threat to the English throne and was eventually beheaded. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Mary,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/367467/Mary.

89.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 18.

90.

Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 19.

91.

Drummond was elected Lord Provost in 1725, 1746, 1750, 1754, 1758, and 1762; each term lasted two years.

92.

Hugh Blair was a Scottish minister and university professor best known for his four-volume Sermons, the first of which was published in 1777, and for his lectures on rhetoric and fine arts. He was licensed to preach in 1741 and began ministering at the Canongate church in Edinburgh in 1743. In 1757, he was given an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews and in 1758 was promoted to the cathedral of St. Giles (the High Kirk of Edinburgh), the most important charge in Scotland. In 1759, he began, under the patronage of Henry Home, Lord Kames, to deliver a successful course on composition, which led to his appointment as chair of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh in 1762. See in Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Hugh Blair,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/68746/Hugh-Blair.

93.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 54.

Ibid., 55.

Ibid., 56.

Ibid., 57.

Ibid.

Henry Home, Lord Kames, was appointed a judge in the Court of Session in 1752. He became a lord of justiciary in 1763. Home is best known for his three-volume work Elements of Criticism (published in 1762). See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Henry Home,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/310597/Henry-Home-Lord-Kames.

99.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 65.

100.

George Whitefield was a famous English evangelist in mid-century Edinburgh who reignited a preaching style that was popular during the persecution of the later Stuarts. See Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 67.

Ibid., 70.

Ibid., 71.

Ibid., 75.

Ibid., 76.

Ibid., 80.

Ibid., 85–86.

Samuel Johnson is regarded as one of the “greatest figures of eighteenth-century life and letters.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Samuel Johnson,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/305432/Samuel-Johnson. Johnson was critical of Adam Smith and disliked David Hume. See Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 232.

108.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 108–9.

Ibid., 110.

Ibid., 116.

Ibid., 118.

Ibid., 119.

Ibid., 125.

Ibid., 126.

Ibid., 131.

Ibid., 136.

Ibid.

Ibid., 138.

Ibid., 139.

Ibid., 141.

Ibid., 142.

Ibid., 145.

Ibid., 160.

Ibid, 163.

Ibid., 174.

Ibid., 176.

Ibid., 183.

Ibid., 206.

Ibid., 208.

Sir James Steuart Denham was a “leading Scottish economist who was the leading expositor of mercantilist views.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Sir James Steuart Denham, 4th Baronet,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/157672/Sir-James-Steuart-Denham-4th-Baronet. Unlike Smith and Hume, Steuart explores three divisions of society—pastoral, agrarian, and commercial—which progress due to rising population and surpluses in trade. See Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 215.

131.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 212.

132.

Ibid., 215.

133.

Ibid., 216.

134.

George Drummond, six-time Lord Provost of Edinburgh, became a commissioner of customs in 1715 and city treasurer by 1717. He worked to establish the medical school at the college and helped to found the Royal Bank of Scotland while managing the General Assembly of the Church.

135.

Samuel Johnson’s visit to Edinburgh left an impression on posterity, but he had little to say about Scotland. Boswell, who had met Johnson in 1763, had wanted to establish and introduce Johnson to the Scottish people as well as vice versa. For twelve weeks, Johnson and Boswell, along with one of Boswell’s servants, Joseph Ritter, traveled Scotland.

136.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 240.

Ibid., 241.

Ibid.

Ibid., 243.

Beginning with Montesquieu and then Rousseau, Edinburgh made contributions to the philosophy of women, including God’s purpose for women, the proper education for women, the differences between men and women, and the institution of marriage. See Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 260.

141.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 287.

142.

Rousseau was exiled from France in early 1766 on account of his atheist beliefs. See Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 304.

143.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 304.

144.

Tacitus was a “Roman orator and public official, probably the greatest historian and one of the greatest prose stylists who wrote in the Latin language. Among his works are the Germania, describing the Germanic tribes, the Historiae (Histories ), concerning the Roman Empire from ad 69 to 96, and the later Annals , dealing with the empire in the period from ad 14 to 68.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Tacitus,” www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/579997/Tacitus.

145.

Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 337.

146.

Ibid., 338.

147.

Ibid., 340

Chapter 3

Before the One and the Other

Ethico-Political Communication and Community

Pat J. Gehrke

Before the One and the Other: Ethico-Political Communication and Community

Ethics, communication, and politics have had an intimate connection since even before Aristotle explicitly wedded the three. Contemporary communication theorists and ethicists, especially those influenced by Continental European thought, have often been accused of abandoning one or more of this ancient trinity. At the same time, all our models, theories, and principles of ethics, communication, and politics are in contestation today, and even the most foundational premises are up for grabs.

Two questions thus emerge from our condition:

Why is it that, since at least the 1960s, ethics, communication, and politics have been undergoing a crisis of legitimacy and definition?
What openings does this crisis provide for us to think about ethics, communication, and politics differently?

This chapter argues that the dominance of philosophies of One has produced the current crisis and that the turn to philosophies of the Other, such as that of Emmanuel Levinas, will not provide satisfactory redress. Instead, I turn toward a highly restrained minimalist ontology of community, offering an alternative path for the study of ethics, politics, and communication.

Philosophies of One

Communication theories and ethics commonly depend upon either a philosophy of One or a philosophy of the Other. Philosophies of One ground their understanding of beings and being-together upon a unitary or unifying vision of Being. A philosophy of One is perhaps most clearly and prominently featured in humanist communication theories and ethics, which posit an intrinsic or innate substance to the Human and usually imbue that substance with some positive value.^[1] To claim that each human holds an innate common substance is not merely to say that we share a condition of being-in-the-world, but also to insist upon something that marks out the distinctive nature (and often positive value) of the human subject. Kate Soper defines humanism as the appeal to “the notion of a core humanity or common essential features in terms of which human beings can be defined and understood.”^[2] While not necessarily the only philosophies of One in the study of communication ethics and theory, humanist philosophies do tend to amplify the importance of the unity of humanity by virtue of their explicit calls to embrace or realize a substantive human nature as foundational for theoretical and ethical inquiry.

A philosophy of One is properly understood as such when its theories or maxims are drawn from the unifying oneness—that is, the innate nature or substance—that would bind all beings, or at least all humans, into a shared essence, purpose, or origin. In Plato, this might be found in the Phaedrus’s structure of the soul. In Aristotle, the philosophy of One emerges in De Anima in the discussion of the undying and undifferentiated reason of the nous in the human soul. Twentieth-century American communication ethics and theory often returned to such concepts of human unity and oneness. Craig Baird, for example, argued that innate human reason was central not only to ethics and communication but also to communication pedagogy and all other forms of communication research.^[3] Indeed, throughout the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first century, communication scholars have returned to claims of the human good, the human potential, or human nature.^[4]

In some cases, a philosophy of One will begin with a multiplicity, but such philosophies figure multiplicity as a problem or disturbance that either facilitates or inhibits the unity that grounds the philosophy of One. Even many theorists who begin with the principles of democracy or community depend upon a philosophy of One to give democracy a telos or object (such as the working out of the end of history or the enabling of innate human dignity) or to give community a substantive bond or shared principle (such as the maturation of an ideal human psyche or the realization of the shared soul). Such philosophies figure the community of humans as grounded upon something that bonds humans together as one blood or one being and thus subordinates every operation of politics, ethics, and communication to that essence (as in their appeals to the value or nature of “the human community”).

Philosophies of One have received significant criticism from many communication ethicists and theorists in the past five decades. In America, such criticism began in the 1960s with the arrival of existential thought in communication studies.^[5] While existentialists often claimed that philosophies of One fundamentally misunderstand the ontology or predicament of being-in-the-world, they expanded their arguments to include claims that the drive toward human dignity or a unifying community masked race, gender, culture, and class biases that inform those unitary philosophies.^[6]

Before moving on to philosophies of the Other, I should note that distinguishing between philosophies of One and philosophies of the Other can be often difficult and contentious. Communication ethicists and theorists critical of philosophies of One have increasingly gravitated toward philosophies of the Other, but some such philosophies are themselves based upon a unified theory of human nature or innate qualities of Being that reflect a philosophy of One. Even strongly dialogical theories of communication ethics sometimes rely upon a substantive uniformity among the subjects in consideration. An easy example from early twentieth-century communication theory and ethics can be found in discussion theorists such as James McBurney and Milton Dickens.^[7] The goals of their proposed conversational and proto-dialogical theories of discussion were the fuller realization of human potential and the adaptation of human psyches to normative principles of mental health (i.e., a model of the human mind in its ideal or perfected nature). While later theorists often valorized difference, they organized such difference into particularities that sublated otherness under some similarity or oneness. Hence, they shared a vocabulary with theories of the Other, but not a philosophy.

Even the later existential dialogism of Martin Buber, arguably the most frequently cited dialogical communication ethic, is the subject of an extended argument about the connection between dialogic ethics and philosophies of One in Levinas’s Outside the Subject and Proper Names.^[8] As I desire not to take up the issue at any great length in this forum, let it suffice to say that one can assemble a case for the existence or governance of a philosophy of One in the work of Martin Buber and many other philosophers of the Other, but at least ostensibly or by their own understanding, they propose an alternative to philosophies of One. Thus, rather than being bogged down in the debate over the status of Buber’s philosophy, we may acknowledge that merely because a philosophy begins with the Other does not guarantee that it will not return to a philosophy of One.

Philosophies of the Other

Philosophies of the Other find their grounds in encounters with another (or the Other). While sometimes also labeled philosophies of alterity, I want to reserve the possibility of distinguishing these particular philosophies from those that may make alterity central but do not find their grounding in reference to the Other or an other. One of the most influential and recognized philosophies of the Other is the work of Levinas. The dominance of the encounter with the Other in Levinas and his insistence upon not fusing others or the two (the other who approaches me and the me called out by the other) into one make his work a particularly prime example of a philosophy of the Other. In such philosophies of communication and ethics, a perhaps phenomenal, perhaps counterfactual dyadic encounter becomes the model for ethics (the encounter of two, of the Other and me). Contrary to the theorization of dyads in philosophies of One, Levinas’s philosophy of the Other operates through the priority of the Other as an infinitely alterior Other before which one inclines.^[9] Rather than emphasize or rely upon the unitary vision of a philosophy of One, Levinas’s philosophy of the Other places all emphasis on the prioritization of the Other in a dyadic alterity that, by his argument, interrupts the fusion that would make these two into One. In Levinas and similar philosophies of the Other, the entire experience of ethics relies upon the Other that confronts me and the priority of the Other. This asymmetry and the unidirectional obligation (I am obligated for the Other, but there is no reciprocal obligation)^[10] may enable philosophies of the Other to avoid returning to a philosophy of One, but also models all further considerations of politics, community, and justice on this original dyad.

Scholars appealing to philosophies of the Other often reference dissatisfaction with philosophies of One as the reason for their consideration.^[11] In many cases philosophies of the Other do indeed avoid many of the criticisms leveled against philosophies of One, but they do so at a significant cost. Communication ethicists and theorists grappling with the thinking of ethics under philosophies of the Other find it particularly difficult to extend the philosophy to include the simple fact that life is not lived in dyads. As T. A. Carlson notes, Levinas’s ethic “actually resists an articulation of community.”^[12] While Levinas does attempt an explication of community and justice, he calls them the limit of responsibility and the introduction of a contradiction that always risks integrating the Other into a “we.”^[13] Positing justice and community as the emergence of a third (the other to the Other), as an addendum to the first dyad of the Other and me, creates a philosophy of community and justice that makes every relation always a dyad or some combination of dyads. Thus, the ethics of the Other as this other before me becomes the model for thinking of justice and community.^[14] Even in the third, the relations between the three are figured as an incomplete triangle composed of only two dyads: the Other and me; the other-to-the-Other and me. Justice for Levinas is thus the problem of competing incommensurable dyads.

Additionally, philosophies of the Other most often require particular qualities or characteristics of the two persons in the encounter (the Other and me). Levinas, for example, insists that the Other must be human and cannot be animal or any other substance.^[15] Such an insistence is difficult to understand if not predicated upon something that is innately or at least uniquely human. What is it about the approach of a human other that so uniquely sets it apart from the approach of a nonhuman other? If it is to be found in a unique quality of that approach, then there seems little way to avoid falling back into either a philosophy of One that would imbue every human with some unique quality manifest in the approach of a human Other (such as reasoned autonomy in Immanuel Kant) or a dialectical philosophy in which a third term or operation sublates the approach, the Other, and me into an organization or specified relationship. In moments of Levinas’s writing that fold together the approach of the specific Other before me and the approach of the face of God, there is a hint that a dialectical movement has sublated alterity and unicity to a divine alterior or perhaps an alterior divine. Scholars of Levinas have been struggling for years with these dimensions of his work, and it remains one of the most problematic elements of his philosophy.^[16]

Philosophies of One certainly provide little salve to those who find such faults with philosophies of the Other, and likewise contemporary critics of philosophies of One have been attracted to philosophies of the Other, but often find that their reliance upon a dyadic model leaves them unable to address the fact that life occurs in disparate multiplicity. Where this leaves us today is with two largely unsatisfactory philosophies grounding the majority of communication ethics and theory.

being-in-the-world as being-together^[17]

If we understand the problem of philosophies of One as their unification of dispersed entities into singular identity and the problem of philosophies of the Other as their inability to deal with the fact that experience always occurs in disparate multiplicity, then perhaps a logical place to start is with these experiences of dispersion, disparateness, and multiplicity, and with the possibility of this phenomenal being-together providing an alternative to both a philosophy of One and a philosophy of the Other for communication ethics and theory.

Elsewhere, I began a consideration of the ways in which Kant’s writings on community in both his metaphysics and his morals might establish an a priori duty to community, in contrast to the priority of autonomy that neo-Kantians so often read in Kant.^[18] While Scott Stroud may be correct to point out that the Kantian moral system gives priority to autonomy and the centrality of that priority to the moral philosophy of perhaps Kant and certainly most Kantians,^[19] the more important observation is that Kant’s establishment of noumenal principles for both metaphysics and ethics is predicated first upon phenomenal necessities, one of which is the phenomenal necessity that being in the world is being-together. To put it in plainer language, before one can establish ideal principles, even in Kantian terms, one must begin with the simple fact of being-in-the-world. If Stroud is correct that Kant and the Kantians attempted a divide between his theoretical and practical philosophies that would make this conclusion untenable, then this may do much to explain the detriment that much modern philosophy has inherited from the Kantians.

This observation, however, does not tell us much about that simple fact of being, though it does place the simplicity of mundane being as antecedent to all our theories and philosophies of Being. Risking some repetition of my previous work, let us begin with Kant’s three analogies of experience: durability of substance, causation, and community. Kant begins not with the noumenal or ideal structure of the world but with the fact of experience, or perhaps more precisely, the facticity of being without presumption of any particular form or content of being. This simplest of facts—there is being, or more simply, there is—precedes any knowing or seeing,^[20] but this does not make being into the arche of the world. Quite to the contrary, as Kant’s metaphysics argues, any particular being is only possible as being-together.

Since I have already worked this issue out at length in the previous essay, I will only briefly review its operation here. A being in the world can only be as a result of its distinction from not just another being and not an Other being, but a multiplicity of other beings in time and space. A being requires being, which is not so much a tautology as the necessity of a sheer status as being. Every thing, a word, a thought, a rock, a person, must have a sheer status of being in order to become a thing and then that thing. If a being requires a sheer status of being, then also it requires a position in time and space. All beings (objects, things, people, thoughts) can only be by virtue of being then and being there. A being must be in the world, or perhaps more accurately we should say in a world, even the being of a thought or experience.

Yet, as Kant noted, we have no direct experience of either time or space, so in order for something to have a position in time and space, its reference cannot be time or space themselves. To place a specific being in time and space with reference only to time qua time and space qua space would require that time and space as themselves become beings, that they would become things in the world. Instead, we depend upon the relative positioning of beings to other beings for any particular being to have its position in time or space. Any being that exists can exist because it is given a position in time and space by virtue of being coexistent but not identical with other beings in the world. The blue shirt that floats by is on the man wearing it, who is now further to my right than three minutes ago, when the draft slightly ruffled the papers on my desk as I typed, and as I was typing a few lines earlier, the woman in red was whispering something to the man beside her, who sat in the chair ahead of me while I thought how to end this sentence. No being, material or otherwise, nothing that is, was, or will be, can be except as being in distinction and coexistence with other beings, and this distinction and coexistence gives each its very possibility for being, including the possibility of the being of experience.^[21]

This requisite fact of phenomenal coexistence Kant called community, but the term community here carries none of the baggage that would bind it to the common, the shared, or the bond of blood. It was not until much later in his groundwork for agency and morals that Kant would propose a particular type of rational community of beings imbued with moral agency. Even in the work of Kant, a figure often championed as the strongest advocate of the foundational nature of the ideal rational agent in ethical thought, there is a being that must precede rational agency as the necessary condition of all beings—animal, vegetable, mineral, ephemeral. Being is the simple fact that being is being-in-the-world, but the world and being are only given by the multiplicity of beings that give each being its position in time and space.

By now the importance of the lowercase of being as discussed here is already clear. This is no grand, foundational, or prescriptive Being. This is not a being with any particular substance, form, nature, or quality. This certainly is not a rational Being or a shared Being or even a human Being but is instead first and foremost sheer being. This is being that precedes every attempt to give to beings some Being that would define, separate, bond, gather, or organize them. This is the sheer being of being-together in the world.

The emphasis on the sheer reflects my attempt to distinguish this being from all those theories of Being that would seek to insert some quality or content at the origin of beings. Indeed, even the event of death or alienation from the self or the separation of man from the divine rely first on the possibility of experience, the possibility of sheer existence, which can only occur as being-together. To place it in terms of the philosophies of One and the philosophies of the Other, before there can be a unifying principle or the establishment of dyads, there is first an anarchic multiplicity. Language here fails us, for even multiplicity would imply multiplication from, as if there was an operation of reproduction (multiplication is, after all, an operation that produces a product from multipliers) or perhaps an operation of division (such as multiplication through division, as with mitosis).^[22]

While multiplicity is a popular word to describe being-together, we might likewise use a phrase such as dispersed beings or a term like community. These present no less of a problem than multiplicity, as dispersion would imply a field or substrata onto which beings are dispersed and community has for so many centuries been tethered to the in-common that would give beings a common meaning, unity, or substantive connection. The etymological problems are significant, not only because we strive to be cautious about how we respond to being-together but also because they demonstrate how our thinking of being is deeply embedded in philosophies of One. Here multiplicity must be understood without reference to either the count or the mass, a nonsingular, noncount noun that is not yet aggregated into a mass or stuff. Before Being or a being, prior to the One and even the approach of the Other, is the not-yet denotative community.^[23]

Let us consider this anarchic community in its most restrained sense: that sense given to it by Kant’s metaphysics of the undetermined and indeterminate fact of being-together. This minimal notion of community is the community that makes possible all particular beings, any particular in time and space but demands nothing of the relations between these particulars except that they exist as relations. To put it as plainly as I can, we owe our being to the fact that we are being-together (being-as-relation), but that together or that relation does not require any specific arrangement, organization, philosophy, structure, substrata, content, or relationship. Of course, being-together can only occur as being particulars in relation at a given moment of space and time, which means that being together requires that some kind of relation or organization or arrangement exists, but all those arrangements (be they of species, race, nation, region, religion, phyla, etc.) are posterior to the first community that is the minimal community of being-together as the relation of every particular in space and time to every other particular in space and time, ad infinitum. To put it perhaps another way, it is not by virtue of a relation or by virtue of a philosophy or a structure of relations that being is possible, but by virtue of relation qua relation, relationality, the simplest and most minimal notion that being is being-together.

This first community, being-together, is not without ethical impact. Perhaps one of our greatest losses in the history of ethical thought is that neo-Kantians and even Kant himself could not restrain their ethical thinking in the way that they restrained their understanding of metaphysics. Or perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that we have overlooked that ethics are already emergent in the metaphysics. Only by making the Human something uniquely different could each human be excused from owing its singular existence to the same fundaments upon which every other being in space and time depends. Even Levinas sought to make such exception by imbuing only humans with the possibility of experiencing ethical obligation and, perhaps even more importantly, insisting that only a human or the divine manifest by a human can evoke ethical response. If we seek to think of ethics without the pregiven nature, structure, or idea of the Human, all of which would turn us back into a philosophy of One or, at best, a philosophy of the Other, then we cannot start with the Human. We likewise cannot start with humans or a human. Prior to being a human, one is first a being that is being-together. The co-creation of the Human and humans, a human and another human, makes every human a human by virtue of (and hence in debt to) being-together with the not-human. The human and nonhuman are posterior inventions of beings parsing out and organizing relations in response to the first condition of anarchic community: the facticity of being as being-together.

Many philosophers of ethics and communication are struggling today to think of an ethic that starts with this simplest and most minimal ontological claim: being is being-together. If this basic claim holds merit, then this most simple and mundane minimal ontology is not an ethic (i.e., one among others) but the answer to why there is ethics at all. The question is not one of ethics before ontology or ontology before ethics but understanding that the simplest requirement of being is relationality, the condition of being together, being-as-relation, owing to this first community one’s very possibility not only to say “I” but to exist in the world, to be called you or thou or it. The first obligation, the obligation that at every moment is the beginning of being, is being obligated by this debt, by owing being to being-together, by owing being to every other being, every moment and event in time and space, without exception and without measure.

Thus, before any ontology of Being, there is first the ethics-ontology/ontology-ethics of being-together. Prior to a notion of finitude, prior to a calling of the divine in the face of another human, prior to the instantiation of a category of rational beings, prior to ecological interdependence, there is the ontological obligation that my possibility of being is owed to an anarchic community—being is owed to being-together. This is not any particular community or even a philosophy of community but the basic simple community that every object in space and time requires for its position in space and time.

At his best, Kant taught us that while objects in space and time must exist in space and time, we cannot know much of anything about the structure of space or time. We might make pragmatic philosophies for the navigation or measurement of things and their changing relationships in space and time, but space and time themselves cannot become objects of experience. Kant did not even promise that the three analogies of experience (durability, causation, community) would reveal any substantive content.^[24] In fact, he argued that it only matters that something like durability exists, not what is durable or how durability is maintained. Similarly, the analogy of causation stated only that something like causation or change must occur, not that causation or change are governed by any greater principles or structures that would give them a logic or substance. So also with community, we can only know that something like community must exist, not that there is any necessary structure, function, or content to that coexistence.

A few works on Kant have drawn an analogy between the community in Kant’s physics and the idea of community in ethics,^[25] but no such comparative mode is required. In fact, these moves (including my own earlier attempt) miss perhaps the most important implication of Kant’s metaphysics—an implication from which Kant himself turned away: The community in Kant’s metaphysics is already a community of obligation. Ethics is already in play.

At the risk of overemphasis, I will try to expound upon the depth and breadth of the obligation in this anarchic community. There is no object, no thing, no element, no idea, no substance, no material, in time and space to which I do not owe existence. My existence, indeed the very existence of my entire world, is owed to every one of these things, without qualification, without exception, and without measure. No calculus or logic, no division of the obligation emerges from this community, but only this sheer obligation: my being is given to me at every moment and in every place by every other thing, before I can even think it. An entire world, the entire world of my experiences, is similarly a world to me only by virtue of every being, every thing existing in relation; not because it exists in relation to me but because it exists as a relation to every other thing, and I exist only as a relation to each and to all. Thus, not only my existence but also the existence of a world that I experience and perceive is owed first to the community of every other being in time and space. All is owed to all.

While being requires being-together, it does not require any particular organization or order in that together. Thus, beings—all things in the world—owe the particulars of their being to the relative (and relatively arbitrary) position they are given by every other thing and not to any subsequent philosophy or structure or organization of relationship that would organize, divide, unify, or even name a being. Those particulars of a being in the world are posterior to the first debt; each being owes its possibility to be not to those specific relative positions but to the anarchic community. Obligation is not obligation to a relation but obligation to relationality. To put it another way, the minimalist ontological ethical commitment is not an obligation to a community but obligation to community: to being-together. Not even proximity (a particular organization in time or space) would divide up or give form to this obligation. Being-together makes no distinction between the obligation distant or far, past or future, but calls obligation to all these simultaneously, infinitely, and perhaps even in contradiction. That we will parse those, make logics to divide their shares, and organize our relations of obligation is the necessary violence that gives birth to language, thought, and justice.

The height of the obligation of being-together is amplified by an implication of the metaphysics that is, perhaps, not yet explicitly clear. If every thing in space and time is given its possibility for existence by being in relation to every other thing in space and time, then every position in space and time must be occupied by only one particular, and no other particular can occupy that moment of space and time. Every particular in space and time at every moment is unique and singular. This fleeting thing, this thing here and now, can only be now and here, and no other thing can be at this place and this time. Thus, each thing at each moment is irreplaceable, owing its irreplaceable uniqueness to its being-together with every other unique, irreplaceable thing in every other moment of time and space.

The obligation of being-together is thus an obligation not only to community but also to the community of singular beings being-together without any necessary structure, order, or philosophy to that together. We are each of us bound to every other thing (animal, vegetable, mineral, ephemeral) irreducibly, inextricably, infinitely, and again at every moment. My obligation emerges at every moment, every instance, again and again, never ceasing and never subsiding, as my being is given to me over and over by the community of singular beings-together.

If the ethics of being-together sounds entirely impractical, it is because the practical always presumes a particular relation, a dividing up of this obligation, weighing out its contradictions, and making choices. The problem is not so much with being-together as with the fact that ethics demands choosing, and choosing only occurs in the face of specific contested options. By virtue of the fact that we are always infinitely obligated by the very possibility of being and that this infinite obligation makes no distinction between our obligation to any particular thing, and that there is no organizing principle or philosophy for either the together of being-together or the obligation intrinsic to being, we are bestowed with the necessity of choosing without a calculus or philosophy for choice. The contradictions, the tensions, the doubling-backs that make ethics impractical are what make ethics both necessary and possible. Ethics emerges by virtue of the fact that nothing is decided by ontology, that there is no guiding principle to being-together, that we must choose, we must make choices, take leaps into the world for which we are always responsible and we can never know to be ethical.

If ethics were practical, then it would not be ethics at all. If it were merely a matter of following a credo, obeying a set of rules, operating along a calculus, approximating a normative principle, then ethics and life would never be a question of choice but only a question of knowledge and application. Epistemology would conquer ethics. We have inherited this error in our philosophies and our language. Consider that the term right holds for us so many functions that would connect truth, morality, and obligation together as one idea: To be right about something, to do the right thing, and to have a right are conflated in the history of Western philosophy from even before Socrates’s reasoning soul.

Yet, ethics are at the same time all about practice; they are about nothing other than being-together in the action of the everyday, in the simplest being of being-together, here and now. As such, the overwhelming ethical call of community is the call of every moment of being. There is not an instant in which being is not given to us again by virtue of being-together. I am always dependent and always owing this moment of being to the being-together of every instance in time and space, and so every action is always a response to this basic ontological fact. Ethics is in every second of practice, every small move, choice, gesture, word, and thought. As such, the ethics of being-together is nothing but an ethics of practice in the everyday, even if it is in some sense impossible.

COMMUNICATION ETHICS being TOGETHER

These four words—communication, ethics, being, and together—offer us no particular order of operations. Perhaps we might interject “as” to read “communication ethics as being together,” or we might move the “as” to read “communication as ethics being together,” or move around the words to read “communication being ethics together” or “ethics together being communication,” and none of these could plainly be called wrong.

Communication is not an addendum to ethics or being-together, but being-together is already a moment of communication; the communication of the sheer ontology of being-together is not the communication of words, sentences, symbols, signs, gestures, or all our theories of communication, but an exposition of singular being as being-together. The first communication in every moment of being is the exposure of the sheer ontology of community, the exposure of all to all that gives to each being and every other being its singularity and possibility of existence—as Jean Luc Nancy stated in The Inoperative Community, “the communication of community itself.”^[26]

While Nancy’s insistence on communication as the exposition of being-together and being-singular may be compelling, it does not provide much guidance to those concerned with moments of communication in which we must choose what we say, how we say it, when, where, to whom, and so on. Though many contemporary philosophers of ethics purposefully defer such issues, communication theorists and ethicists are afforded no such luxury. Hence, at great risk of distorting the force of the philosophical position advanced, I will attempt to explore some implications for communication ethics and theory without imposing a particular structure or philosophy onto that which can have no philosophy and no structure other than its emergence at every moment.

Let us begin with the simple proposition that all action is reaction; every statement is only made in response. This is not reaction to just a particular situation but always first reaction to infinite anarchic community. The responsive “I” comes in Levinas’s thought from the approach of the Other,^[27] but prior to the Other’s approach is the anarchic community, the sheer being of being-together. In every moment, when we respond, we respond to, as, in, and for this infinite community of singular beings, even before the approach of the Other. There is, then, no less a call to this moment here than to any other moment, nor to this other before me as to every other. At every moment, we are called to respond, or more accurately, to be responsible for this community of singular beings being-together.

The traditional ethicist would place before us now some dilemma or situation that requires us to come to an ethical choice: Nazis come knocking on the door while the Jewish family hides in my basement; the pharmacist who withholds the medicine that I cannot afford to buy my dying child, and so on. Each of these scenarios mistakes ethics for a set of specific relationships that are deployed in an effort to generate or test a model for ethical action. Is there a contract or a universal rationality that obligates me simultaneously to tell the truth to this Nazi and to protect this Jewish family; to provide the medicine to my child and not to steal from the pharmacist? The ethical is masked in such considerations of contracts and axioms, but also recedes in the thinking of obligation and response in an abstracted locality, even if every response and every obligation requires its locality to occur. When the ethicist builds such a scenario, the counterfactual structure sets aside the very thing that imbues us with responsibility: the infinite community of singular beings. Lived experience never confronts one with these scenarios because we always live in the disparate multiplicity of all, to which we bear an infinite and unyielding obligation. Every smile, every gesture, every small choice, every move evokes the entirety of our obligation to being-together.

An act of communication, a saying, a choosing of what is said, is thus a choosing of the mode of response to the community of singular beings—a response as much to that which gives us the very possibility of response as to the persons and circumstances found in locality. When we say “yes,” or even a simple “please,” or when we orate on matters of grand public affairs and international politics, in all these cases and every other, we engage the entirety of the community of all beings in time and space, even those that we will never know or encounter. Each response, then, is a living of the responsibility, an ethos, an ethic, a choosing of living and responding that is at that moment the particular making of a world. The question is not which response is ethical but which ethic is in the response, which living and being, what world is in the making of that response.

Today we face ethics of response that would cover over everything that makes being and choosing possible, replacing the absolute obligation of anarchic community with a contract, an identification, a unity, a bond, a dialectic, Humanity, reason, the divine, and all those other expressions of philosophies of One and philosophies of the Other. Can there be anything more urgent right now than to interrogate this repetition of the general horizon of our age that has hurled us into a world in which everything is in danger and nothing exists except in the service of such tyrannies?

Tyranny is not the most accurate word, but it does spur the consideration of the ethico-political at stake in this discussion. Nancy’s depiction of the ethico-political, of a community-politics without telos or arche, gives us one narrative of how we can live together and make necessary and impossible choices.^[28] Under philosophies of One, the political is guided by the theological (or at least pseudo-theological, as in humanist ontology). This theologico-politics makes all singular beings and all life slave to the extension and repetition of a philosophy of One. Whether it be a philosophy of human essence, an interpretation of divine will, or the expansion and reproduction of “market democracy,” each turn returns to the philosophy and feeds all things to it, without exception and without any choosing or ethical struggle, except to overcome the resistance offered by the excess of the existent.

Communism and Nazism are but two examples of the theologico-political in operation, but no less so is the operation of current Western market democracies and all their dreams of the end of history and the liberation of man, from the progressive disciples of John Dewey to the neoconservatives inspired by Francis Fukuyama. In the politics of these philosophies, all things yield to the articulation of an ideal, a telos, or a unity. To contrast the ethico-political to the theologico-political is to contrast a politics without telos or unity to all those systems of relations that grind the community of singular beings being-together into one substance, into a community of commonality. The question, however, is not how to hold everything apart as monads. Each is always already dependent on every other, but being-together in every moment emerges again and again, asking us to take up the political anew each time, without reservation, without hesitation, and without reliance upon what might have come before.

Contrary to philosophies of the Other, an ethico-politics of community ties up singular being with singular-being in being-together at every moment; each tying and unraveling at the same moment, calling us to take up the act of tying once again. Every choice, every little motion of the eye, each small word, is another chance to take up the tying again. The ethico-political takes up the tying in each moment—not to tie us together with knots, not to give us a common bond, but to tie again and to tie only for that moment and in that moment, in response to all being-together.

Such a politics refuses justification for ideologies, projects, and agendas in a way that might appear contrary to many cherished and vital political projects of the twenty-first century. The problem is not that being-together is insensitive to the immediate material suffering of beings in the world. To the contrary, the obligation imposed by anarchic community at every moment commands us to rend our very souls over the suffering of every singular being—all things in time and space—without exception or priority. Yet, it commands us to respond now, in this moment, to all being-together, and gives us no maxim or program for that response. The ethico-political thus requires of us response in every moment, but it commands likewise that we take responsibility for every choice, every injury, every pain, without exception or excuse. Not only for our neighbor, not only for the human, not only for all those living now and to come, but to all, without exception and without measure.

Communication is no different in this regard, and the ethico-political does not excuse us from the needs of the communicative. The question becomes, however, how do we put communication to work in the movement of tying while suspending the impulse toward a philosophy of One? How is it that this ethico-political understanding of communication might help one colleague who asked me about its usefulness in convincing his local planning board to change zoning ordinances? The problem is not so much with the question of the ethico-political call of being-together, but more in the presupposition that communication must be about the accomplishment of the goals of persuasion or identification. Let us consider rephrasing the question: How might the ethico-political call of being-together help us to understand the way in which each moment calls us to take up the tying with all other beings and also with those here and now at this moment? In what way might we think about a communication that opens us to the exposition of singular beings at every moment? How might I speak as such an exposure and a listening?

Answering any of these questions in a substantive way would impose a philosophy on the response, would presume to answer the question of tying based on a substantive model, a theologico-politics. Yet, perhaps the questions themselves make the answer, or they are the answer in the making. Ethico-political communication of being-together retreats from the advancement of project, telos, or fusion, instead taking up the process of tying, without any particular philosophy or end for the tying except to leave open the tying once again. It may seem odd that an ethic and politic of communication that begins with the proposition that there is no substance to being other than the phenomenal necessity of being-together would end at a place that appears so similar to the claim that Henry Johnstone made a number of years ago.^[29] The call here, however, is for a communication that would open in every way to the tying in every moment, not merely to keep the conversation going, but to allow at every moment for the configurations, relations, connections, and positions to be taken up anew, without resentment, and without demand.

What kind of communication would enable such an opening? How could one answer this except in the moment? What could possibly be said of this movement and this moment that would not demand the interrogative? Is the next step in this process a case study that would exemplify this operation? Does any such opportunity exist today, or is there no politics without telos in circulation? Could such a case study be done without the fantasy of producing a model for that which is without model? Is communication inextricably connected to the theologico-political philosophies of One? Here, on the brink of social and ecological collapse, on a planet tortured by unitary visions and theologico-politics, what more important question could communication ethicists and theorists ask than this: Can we think differently from that which has led us to this dangerous precipice?

Notes

Bibliography

Arnett, Ronald C. “The Responsive ‘I’: Levinas’s Derivate Argument.” Argumentation and Advocacy 40 (2003): 39–50.

Baird, Craig A. “Speech and the New Philosophies.” Central States Speech Journal 13 (1962): 241–46.

Benso, Silvia. The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000.

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “The Rhetorical Implications of the Axiology of Jean Paul Sartre.” Western Speech 35 (1971): 155–61.

Carlson, T. A. “Ethics, Religiosity, and the Question of Community in Emmanuel Levinas.” Sophia 37 (1998): 42–71.

Davis, Diane. “Greetings: On Levinas and the Wagging Tail.” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 29, no. 1 (2009): 711–48.

Dickens, Milton. “Discussion, Democracy, Dictatorship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33 (1947): 151–58.

Diehm, Christina. “Facing Nature: Levinas Beyond the Human.” Philosophy Today 44 (2000): 51–59.

Fischer, Norman. “The Concept of Community in Kant’s Architectonic.” Man and World 11 (1978): 372–91.

Gehrke, Pat J. “Being for the Other-to-the-Other: Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics.” Review of Communication 10 (2010): 5–19.

———. “Community at the End of the World.” In Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality. Edited by Kathleen Glenister Roberts and Ronald C. Arnett. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

———. “The Ethical Importance of Being Human: God and Humanism in Levinas’s Philosophy.” Philosophy Today 50 (2006): 428–36.

———. The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.

———. “Turning Kant against the Priority of Autonomy: Communication Ethics and the Duty to Community.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 1–21.

Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on ‘Humanism’ (1946).” Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi. In Pathmarks, 239–76. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Hyde, Michael J. The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

Johnstone, Christopher Lyle. “Ethics, Wisdom, and the Mission of Contemporary Rhetoric: The Realization of Human Being.” Central States Speech Journal 38 (1981): 177–88.

Johnstone, Henry W. “Toward an Ethics of Rhetoric.” Communication 6 (1981): 305–14.

Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Edited by Paul Carus. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1912.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe and Jean Luc Nancy. Retreating the Political. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Laycock, Henry. “Object.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 edition), published October 1, 2002, revised August 4, 2010. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed May 26, 2013. plato.stanford.edu/entries/object/.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by Seán Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

———. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Boston,: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.

———. Outside the Subject. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.

———. Proper Names. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

———. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Lipari, Lisbeth. “Listening for the Other: Ethical Implications of the Buber-Levinas Encounter.” Communication Theory 14 (2004): 122–41.

McBurney, James H. “Some Contributions of Classical Dialect and Rhetoric to a Philosophy of Discussion.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 23 (1937): 1–13.

McKay, Thomas J. “‘Critical Notice’ of Words without Objects.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (2008): 301–24.

Nancy, Jean Luc. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

———. The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

Nilsen, Thomas R. “Free Speech, Persuasion, and the Democratic Process.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 44 (1958): 235–43.

Scott, Robert L. “Some Implications of Existentialism for Rhetoric.” Central States Speech Journal 15 (1964): 267–78.

Shell, Susan Meld. The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Soper, Kate. Humanism and Anti-Humanism. LaSalle, IN: Open Court, 1986.

Stroud, Scott. “Kant on Community: A Reply to Gehrke.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 157–65.

Van de Vate, Dwight. “Reasoning and Threatening: A Reply to Yoos.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 8 (1975): 177–79.

Vetlesen, Arne Johan. “Relations with Others in Sartre and Levinas: Assessing some Implications for an Ethics of Proximity.” Constellations 1, no. 3 (1995): 358–82.

Wright, Tamara, Peter Hughes, and Alison Aimley. “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas.” Translated by Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright. In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, 169–73. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Martin Heidegger explains this commonality among various humanisms: “However different these forms of humanism may be in purpose and in principle, in the mode and means of their respective realizations, and in the form of their teaching, they nevertheless all agree on this, that the humanitas of homo humanus is determined with regard to an already established interpretation of nature, history, the world, and the ground of the world, that is, of beings as a whole.” See Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (1946), trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, 239–76 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 245.

Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (LaSalle, IN: Open Court, 1986), 11.

Craig A. Baird, “Speech and the New Philosophies,” Central States Speech Journal 13 (1962): 244.

A detailed analysis of this trend can be found in Pat J. Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009). For just a few examples, see Dwight Van de Vate, “Reasoning and Threatening: A Reply to Yoos,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 8 (1975): 177–79; Thomas R. Nilsen, “Free Speech, Persuasion, and the Democratic Process,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 44 (1958): 235–43; Christopher Lyle Johnstone, “Ethics, Wisdom, and the Mission of Contemporary Rhetoric: The Realization of Human Being,” Central States Speech Journal 32 (1981): 177–88.

For examples of early existential communication ethics and theory, see Robert L. Scott, “Some Implications of Existentialism for Rhetoric,” Central States Speech Journal 15 (1964); Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetorical Implications of the Axiology of Jean Paul Sartre,” Western Speech 35 (1971): 155–61.

Some of the best examples come from intersectionality and black feminist scholars such as bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw, but also can be seen in moments of Michel Foucault’s debate with Noam Chomsky. In communication studies, one can note William Utterback’s criticism of the violence/reason dichotomy, Parke Burgess’s examination of the coercion/force distinction, Janice Norton’s critique of the trope of identification, Nakayama and Krizek’s call for a politics of the interstice, and a plethora of similar materials.

James H. McBurney, “Some Contributions of Classical Dialectic and Rhetoric to a Philosophy of Discussion,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 23 (1937): 1–13; Milton Dickens, “Discussion, Democracy, Dictatorship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33 (1947): 151–58.

Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); see chapters 2 and 3.

See Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittbsurgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 40.

10.

For an explication of Levinas’s critique of reciprocity, see Arne Johan Vetlesen, “Relations with Others in Sartre and Levinas: Assessing some Implications for an Ethics of Proximity,” Constellations 1, no. 3 (1995): 358–82.

11.

For example, Ronald C. Arnett, “The Responsive ‘I’: Levinas’s Derivate Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 40 (2003): 39–50; Michael J. Hyde, The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); Lisbeth Lipari, “Listening for the Other: Ethical Implications of the Buber-Levinas Encounter,” Communication Theory 14 (2004): 122–41.

12.

T. A. Carlson, “Ethics, Religiosity, and the Question of Community in Emmanuel Levinas,” Sophia 37 (1998): 42.

13.

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 157–61.

14.

For a more detailed explication, see Pat J Gehrke, “Being for the Other-to-the-Other: Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics,” Review of Communication 10 (2010): 5–19.

15.

See Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 152–53; Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, and Alison Aimley, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” trans. Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, 169–73 (New York: Routledge, 1988).

16.

See Silvia Benso, The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), 200; Diane Davis, “Greetings: On Levinas and the Wagging Tail,” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 29, no. 1 (2009): 711–48; Christina Diehm, “Facing Nature: Levinas Beyond the Human,” Philosophy Today 44 (2000): 51–59; Pat J. Gehrke, “The Ethical Importance of Being Human: God and Humanism in Levinas’s Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 50 (2006): 428–36.

17.

The grammatically inappropriate use of the lower case here and elsewhere emphasizes the reference to the simple fact of phenomenal being and sets apart the term from the sense of Being that would imply a grander or more unifying ontology than this chapter pursues.

18.

Pat J. Gehrke, “Turning Kant against the Priority of Autonomy: Communication Ethics and the Duty to Community,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 1–21.

19.

Scott Stroud, “Kant on Community: A Reply to Gehrke,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 157–65.

20.

Even if one insists upon the possibility of the middle voice (“knowing knows” and “seeing sees”), which would distinguish knowing from a being that knows, the knowing still must exist; the seeing still is in its seeing, which is to say that even without the prerequisite of a subject, there is the prerequisite of being (sheer existence), though this does not require any particular type or form of being. The middle voice merely avoids the idea that there must be a subject, but not that something must be, that is, that there must be being. Language makes this difficult to say, as the middle voice is anathema to our way of speaking and thinking, but I struggle for some (over)simplicity in saying that seeing sees still relies on the being of seeing.

21.

It might be more accurate here to say the possibility of anything other than undifferentiated uniformity, but this point is quite trivial since a constant and undifferentiated experience would be impossible to distinguish from no experience at all. Additionally, the experience of undifferentiated uniformity is logically problematic, as such an experience already requires the distinction of an experiencing being from the experienced uniformity, which would deny that the experience was purely of undifferentiated uniformity in the first place.

22.

In biology, the term mitosis describes the process of one cell dividing into two cells with identical genomes.

23.

For an excellent discussion of the problems of noncount nouns, mass, and stuff, see Thomas J. McKay, “‘Critical Notice’ of Words without Objects,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (2008): 301–24. For a more abbreviated introduction, see Laycock, Henry, “Object,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 edition), published October 1, 2002, revised August 4, 2010, ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed May 26, 2013, plato.stanford.edu/entries/object/.

24.

See Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Paul Carus (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1912).

25.

Norman Fischer, “The Concept of Community in Kant’s Architectonic,” Man and World 11 (1978): 372-91; Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

26.

Jean Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 60.

27.

See Arnett, “Responsive ‘I.’”

28.

See Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political (New York: Routledge, 1997); Jean Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); also Pat J. Gehrke, “Community at the End of the World,” in Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality, ed. Kathleen Glenister Roberts and Ronald C. Arnett (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

29.

Henry W. Johnstone, “Toward an Ethics of Rhetoric,” Communication 6 (1981): 305–14.

Chapter 4

Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis

An Essay on Time and Relation

Lisbeth Lipari

How do we recognize ethical moments when we stumble across them? And even when we do, how do we lean into them rather than turn away? What makes it possible for us to think, listen, and speak with ethics rather than about it? So often we think of ethics as something external to us—a decision or action to make or not, like violating a commandment, speaking out of turn, or doing something when “we know better.” But as dialogic ethics instruct, ethics is not “out there” in a world we can chose whether or not to participate in; ethics is always already embedded and present in our relationships with others.^[1] This is one reason that ethical codes, credos, rules, guidelines are not enough—they can reinforce the idea that ethics is an exteriority outside the self. Moreover, they imply that the self is separate and apart from the world and that ethics is merely a chosen add-on to our being rather than the substance of being itself.

But as scholars of communication, we know that ethics are not outside the self—that both ethics and the self are deeply embedded in our dialogic relations with others. As Emmanuel Levinas writes, “discourse conditions thought, for the first intelligible is not a concept, but an intelligence whose inviolable exteriority the face states in uttering the ‘you shall not commit murder.’ The essence of discourse is ethical.”^[2] We know, moreover, that the ways we communicate about ethics matter because, among other reasons, words and metaphors resonate with presuppositions that have ethical implications—a “war on drugs” morphs readily into a war on drug users; calling students “consumers” casts education in economic terms.^[3] In this chapter, I explore some ethical implications of our discourses about time and communication in order to consider whether and how some of our unexamined language habits may lead us to think more about ethics than with ethics. In particular, I investigate how the spatial metaphors we use to talk about time and dialogue may, inadvertently, curtail our ethical horizons.

If, as Levinas writes, “the relationship with alterity is neither spatial nor conceptual,” then what could it be?^[4] In what follows, I tentatively respond to Levinas with an idea about the relationship with alterity being temporal and embodied rather than spatial and conceptual. But this temporality must be understood as a nonlinear phenomenon that is accomplished in relation to and with the other. That is, unlike binary conceptual models of time, such as the pairings of chronos/kairos, diachrony/synchrony, objective/subjective, and quantitative/qualitative time, here we will address time not as “the achievement of an isolated and lone subject, but . . . [as] the very relationship of the subject with the other.”^[5] Such a relational and generative way of thinking may thereby enable us to relinquish linear, spatial, and mechanical models of communicative interaction in favor of nonlinear, musical, and embodied models wherein temporality and communication ethics are enacted, and perhaps even accomplished, by speakers and listeners in concert.

Time

We typically think of time spatially—as an indistinct but insistent river flowing eternally from past to present to future or as the four dimensional geometry of Einstein’s space-time wherein time is irretrievably linked to space. Spatial conceptions of time are also deeply embedded in our thinking about dialogue. Thought of as a back-and-forth series of turns (i.e., rotation in space), dialogue appears as a sequence of separate individual word-objects that we volley back and forth like a tennis ball: If by chance one of us misunderstands or misspeaks, we pick up the ball and resume the volley. In this way, the conduit metaphor depicts dialogue in spatial terms wherein not just content, but time itself, moves linearly from point to point, in one direction: from past to present to future. Echoes of spatiality can be heard in many of our metaphors for dialogue, such as point, position, side, foundation, and floor, as well as in face-to-face, back channeling, uptake, and triangulation, to name but a few examples. What is lost in these spatial conceptions of dialogue are thus the incessant intrusions of thoughts and interruptions, the disjointed overlaps, and the strategic and poetic ambiguities that tend to characterize dialogue. Depicted spatially as linear movement back and forth, dialogue appears to be a relatively straightforward process of succession, wherein one person speaks at a time and each utterance is followed by a responding utterance, and so on. But of course dialogue is rarely so neat and tidy; often people speak at the same time, interrupt one another, think about something else while others are speaking, get lost in thoughts and memories, or imagine a future that is yet to exist. Was time always understood in largely spatial terms?

In the Euro-American tradition, the conflation of time and space may be traced back to the ancient Greeks’ inquiry into the relationship between time, motion, and change. Time became important for the Eleatics when the question of whether, how, and why things change led to an argument between Parminedes and Heraclitus about being versus becoming—was the universe always in flux, in a state of ever-changing becoming in time, or is the universe and everything in it a vast, unchanging, and timeless still-point? Ever since Aristotle, Western thinking about time has been rendered spatially, conceived as a succession of nows that flow unidirectionally from past to present to future. In the words of Aristotle, the present time is the indivisible “extremity of the past (no part of the future being on this side of it) and also of the future (no part of the past being on the other side of it).”^[6] The now stands still like a stone in the river of time. For Aristotle, time was “merely the way we ‘measure motion,’ the way we ‘measure the difference between before and after,’ that is, reduce our descriptions of motions to statements of the sequence of change.”^[7] And with the invention of calendars and sundials that measured time by movements in space, the spatial model of time was complete.

During the Enlightenment, however, things got a bit more complicated, and for Kant, as perhaps for Descartes, the question of time was more complex. For Kant, time and space were not simply concepts that describe objects—such as the quantity or quality of flowers in the garden. Rather, the concepts of time and space were the a priori formal conditions of all phenomena that could not be derived from external experience. Time, for example, could not be perceived as passing or calculated as a measurement were it not for the already existing conception of time in consciousness. Similarly, space must exist prior to the named objects that exist within it. Because both time and space were presupposed in the core pure concepts, Kant argued that time and space were super pure concepts upon which everything else depended. He wrote, “In order that certain sensations should be related to something outside me (i.e., to something in another place of space from that which I find myself) . . . the representation of space must already be there.”^[8] Similarly, Kant argued that “time is not an empirical concept that is somehow drawn from an experience. For simultaneity or succession would not themselves come into our perception if the representation of time were not given a priori.”^[9] As an example, Kant describes how the concept of causality could not exist without a prior idea of time in the form of a beforehand and an afterward. According to Charles Sherover, Kant was perhaps influenced by previous conceptions of time—such as Newton’s differentiation between an absolute and a relative time and Descartes’s 57th principle, which distinguished time and duration. Kant suggested a third form of time that was neither quantifiable nor systematic but was “a temporal human perspective within which [objects] appear and within which cognitions are sought; for objects appear to us in our anticipations, memories, plans, and recollections and it is only within this non-quantifiable range of temporal experience that the attempt for systematic and mathematical cognitive description may arise.”^[10] This, according to Sherover, led Kant to associate time with human freedom rather than with the linear spatiality of clock time.

Anyone who has ever been “lost in thought” knows that life experiences rarely conform to clock time. Painful experiences last too long and pleasures are far too fleeting. And intentionally focusing our attention on a single phenomenon (whether of meditation, study, or speech) for even ten minutes can either seem like forever or be a short-lived blur. Similarly, a conversation may seem like an eternity or fly by in a flash. In the early part of the twentieth century, the philosopher Henri Bergson disputed the idea that time could be rendered in terms of mechanistic quantification as a continuous linear movement through space. Rather, Bergson conceived of time without space—without quantification and measure—and considered temporal experience a “confused multiplicity” that he called durée. “Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.”^[11] As an example, Bergson describes how, when we listen to a symphony, we perceive the notes of a musical phrase not as discrete spatial intervals, but as sounds melting together into an organic whole. He writes, “Even if these notes succeed one another, we perceive them in one another. And their totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one another because they are so closely connected.”^[12] Spatial conceptions of time, argued Bergson, imply counting, homogeneity, and infinite divisibility, whereas human consciousness does not experience time as a series of equally spaced intervals that can be isolated from one another and arbitrarily divided into discrete entities.

Near the same time that Bergson was theorizing nonlinear temporality, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure was busy theorizing language as semiotics, the study of signs in society. Saussure separated language into two separate parts, language (langue) and speaking (parole). To Saussure, langue is the “true and unique object of linguistics,” while the activity of speaking (parole) has “no place in linguistics except through their relation to language.”^[13] Having expelled speaking from the school of linguistics, Saussure turned his attention to language as a system with two temporal aspects, one synchronic and the other diachronic. Saussure rendered both temporal aspects in spatial terms, conceiving synchronic language to be a largely static, immutable system of rules, laws, and regularities and conceiving diachronic language as a mutable body of sound and meaning that evolves over time. In this way, Saussure’s linguistic synchronic and diachronic binary reinforced the prevailing linear, spatialized notion of time: linguistic diachrony was the horizontal x axis of time that moves from left to right, and linguistic synchrony was the vertical y axis of structural elements that cohabitate a given moment of time. Today, we live in Saussure’s rather than Bergson’s world, and the temporality of dialogue is implicitly, if not explicitly, thought of in diachronous spatial terms wherein utterances “follow one another” in a linear stream of discourse. But was the temporality of dialogue always thus?

Kairos

Two concepts from the ancient Greek language give us insight into the relation of ethics and temporality: the words kairos—most superficially understood as right timing or the opportune moment—and akroasis—translated as listening and invoking the idea of secret, esoteric teachings. Although both terms kairos and akroasis were important to the Pythagoreans and other pre-Socratics, and both are related to ideas of harmony and balance, only the term kairos remains a part of the Western rhetorical apparatus. But as we will explore below, thinking about kairos as a relation with alterity that accomplishes temporality enables us to consider kairos as an ethical response that arises from akroasis—from a listening attunement that transcends binary oppositions and the presumed spatial linear progressions of past, present, and future. From this perspective, kairos is a nonlinear way of synchronous listening and speaking, a dialogic midwifery that, as an ethics, can give birth to speech.^[14] Thus, in the ethical encounter, listening does not merely follow speech; it also draws speech forth. The ethical relation is thus a temporal, embodied, and intersubjective process, an achievement accomplished by weaving the weft of kairos into the warp of akroasis.

The pre-Socratic concept of kairos seems to have originated in the context of two ancient art forms: archery and weaving.^[15] The former use of kairos pertained to a narrow passage for or wound from an arrow, and the latter pertained to the passage of threads (the weft) through strands (or warp) of fiber in the making of cloth. The term is also found in the works of ancient Greek poets Homer, Pindar, and Hesiod and is defined variously as “‘symmetry,’ ‘propriety,’ ‘occasion,’ ‘due measure,’ ‘fitness,’ ‘tact,’ ‘decorum,’ ‘convenience,’ ‘proportion,’ ‘fruit,’ ‘profit,’ and ‘wise moderation.’”^[16] Later, the term kairos made its way into the heart of rhetorical theory, first through Isocrates’s and later Aristotle’s school of rhetoric.^[17]

As an ethics, calling kairos an “opportune moment” seems to cultivate a flavor of opportunism that would violate an ethics of alterity that demands we renounce our claims and prerogatives. Similarly, some scholars relate kairos to ethics via the idea of prepon, or propriety and decorum, in a way that may sound to modern ears more calculating than virtuous. Isocrates, for example, called upon speakers to “always monitor your speech and actions so that you make the fewest mistakes possible. It is best to make use of perfect opportunities, but since these are hard to identify, elect to fall short rather than overstep the mark.”^[18] Isocrates claimed kairos was difficult to learn because the goodness of speech stems from its having “a share in what is opportune [kairos], appropriateness of style, and originality.”^[19] The emphasis on propriety and right timing has led some scholars to conclude that kairos is a kind of situational, pragmatic, or relativist ethics.^[20] Laurent Pernot, for example, describes kairos as a Greek idea of situational ethics that varies depending on context.^[21] This is perhaps what leads Pernot to lament a lack of “truth or justice defined once and for all” for rhetoric in the classical age.^[22] In the Roman era, kairos, like so many other rhetorical concepts, took on an ethically questionable form of strategic instrumentalism as a techne, or skill to be honed.^[23]

Toward the late-mid-twentieth century, however, American scholars of rhetoric came to develop a more nuanced conception of kairos as “a concept far richer and complex than saying the right thing at the right time.”^[24] To Michael Carter, for example, ethics was crucial to the kairos of the pre-Socratics who sought to produce ethical judgments in “a relativistic universe . . . Gorgias and the other sophists were not the skeptics and opportunists that the Platonic tradition has painted them.”^[25] Similarly, Sheri Helsley describes “a generative kairos” that “exhibits rich ethical implications in addition to its epistemological and rhetorical facets.”^[26] To Michael Harker, “kairos is a term that reminds us of the ethical responsibility that accompanies the project of evaluating context.”^[27] Because of the improvisational and generative dimensions of kairos, some scholars link it to Lloyd Bitzer’s concept of exigence in the rhetorical situation.^[28] Focusing here on Bitzer’s beautiful conception of discourse as being called forth by exigence, we will leave aside the question of whether an ethics of urgency can indeed be an ethics.^[29]

As had Isocrates done with kairos, Bitzer identifies exigency as drawing a “fitting response” from the rhetor, a speaking that is timely, appropriate, proper, and in keeping with the circumstances. To Bitzer, exigency is “an imperfection marked by urgency” that calls forth speech.^[30] Exigence works in combination with audience and other constraints such as beliefs, facts, traditions, interests, motives, and so on, to call forth what Bitzer calls a “fitting response.”^[31] Bitzer gives us Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and asks us to imagine the speech without the exigence of the situation (i.e., bloodstained ground from a civil war that caused terrible losses on both sides). Such a “groundless” speech would, in Bitzer’s mind, “lose its profound rhetorical value.”^[32] It is not clear, however, whether there might not be numerous fitting responses to any given exigence, and whether each would yield a comparably ethical response. Indeed, we might ponder the question of whether, while constraints and audience certainly shape what might be deemed a fitting response, Lincoln’s call that “these dead not die in vain” was necessarily more fitting than a speech of vengeful war mongering or the pronouncement of a truce.^[33] As a more recent example, Bitzer asks us to imagine a president who gives a national address without speaking to the day’s significant circumstances (such as an enemy acquiring an atomic bomb), instead waxing on poetically about his own rural childhood. To Bitzer, “the critic of rhetoric would have said rightly, ‘he missed the mark; his speech did not fit, he did not speak to the pressing issues.’”^[34] But again it is not clear how or to what end, rather than simply whether, a rhetor responds to a situation’s exigence. Thus we are left questioning whether exigence as kairos can be an ethics. Simply put, are prepon, fit, decorum, and relevance enough? Or is there something more?

For the most part, contemporary rhetorical discussions about kairos and ethics tend to eschew the relational and dialogic models of communication in favor of an emphasis on individual agency and action wherein kairos concerns the doing of speech and speaking. As John Poulakos claims, “Clearly, the notion of kairos points out that speech exists in time; but more important, it constitutes a prompting toward speaking and a criterion of the value of speech. In short, kairos dictates that what is said must be said at the right time.”^[35] Sipiora emphasizes an individual and agentive notion of kairos by quoting an excerpt from Aristotle: “Know the critical situation in your life, know that it demands a decision, and what decision, and train yourself to recognize as such the decisive point in your life, and to act accordingly.”^[36] Similarly, James Kinneavy and Catherine Eskin link kairos with an ethics of equity that stems from Aristotle’s ethics.^[37] Following Kinneavy, Harker connects kairos to pedagogy and the ethical dimensions of argument with the rhetor as agent.^[38] As depicted thus, kairos largely involves the agency of individuals who speak—as if speakers only speak. But is it necessarily so?

Akroasis

Like kairos, the term akroasis (from the Greek for hearing, Ακρόασις) also received attention by the Pythagoreans. Unlike kairos, however, it received far less attention from either classical or modern rhetoricians. A stray trace of its existence is preserved, however, in several versions of the Progymnasmata, one of the early preparatory manuals of classical rhetoric.^[39] According to Pernot, “the rhetorical exercises are an ancient practice” that can be traced to the Sophists.^[40] One extant version of the Progymnasmata dates from the first or second century CE and is attributed to Ailios Theon. In addition to exercises in such familiar forms as narrative, topos, encomium, and so forth, there are an additional five supplementary exercises that include reading, listening (akroasis), and paraphrasing. Although little is written about the listening exercises, there is evidence that attention to the sonic and musical dimensions of speech was emphasized at this same time by professors such as Dionysios of Halikarnassos, a follower of Isocrates who instructed students on matters of melody, rhythm, and harmony and “the placing of words and clauses so that the flow of sounds produces a striking auditory impression. Style is seen as a succession of phonetic and even musical effects.”^[41] A similar trace is found in C. Jan Swearingen’s investigation of pre-Socratic rhetorical styles that move in the liminal soundings between song and speech as well as in Hermogenes’s system of style that attends to musical aspects of sound such as order, cadence, and rhythm.^[42]

While little is found of akroasis elsewhere in antiquity or present-day rhetorical study, the lack of evidence does not prove nonexistence. After all, the words acroamatic and acroma both pertain to esoteric oral teachings that can be heard only by initiates in secrecy. Furthermore, as Gemma Corrida Fiumara attests, the ancient Greek word logos itself contains seeds of listening; without it, the logos can only be a deformed yet arrogant mutant, constantly saying-without-listening.^[43] Similarly, Heidegger argued that the conception of logos that undergirds most Western philosophy is so dominated by an emphasis on speech and speaking that we have not only forgotten how to listen to others but also forgotten how to listen to the being of language itself.^[44] In his analysis of a fragment from the pre-Socractic philosopher Heraclitus, Heidegger foregrounds the idea of listening and hears in the fragment an injunction to listen to language itself. Typically, the Heraclitus fragment is translated as something like this rendition by Jonathan Barnes: “Listening not to me but to the account, it is wise to agree that all things are one.”^[45] But in characteristically idiosyncratic style, Heidegger translates the same phrase as: “When you have listened not merely to me, but when you maintain yourself in hearkening attunement, then there is proper hearing.”^[46] And what is proper hearing? Heidegger decries any idea of hearing rendered as “acoustical science,” and in contrast describes proper hearing as “paying thoughtful attention to simple things.”^[47] As he writes,

Mortals hear the thunder of the heavens, the rustling of woods, the gurgling of fountains, the ringing of plucked strings, the rumbling of motors, the noises of the city—only and only so far as they always already in some way belong to them and yet do not belong to them. . . . So long as we only listen to the sound of a word, as the expression of a speaker, we are not yet even listening at all. . . . We have heard when we belong to the matter addressed.^[48]

As we will return to later in the chapter, it is important to note the paradoxical nature of Heidegger’s “proper hearing” as both a presence and absence and note here that his idea of proper hearing both is and is not belonging. It is not belonging in the sense of identifying, agreeing, collecting, or binding. But it is belonging in the sense of letting be or disclosing. To Heidegger, belonging gathers together that which lies before us, both as revealed and as concealed. Thus Heidegger’s “proper hearing” is, paradoxically, a calling forth of the said and the unsaid: “To name means to call forward. That which is gathered and laid down in the name, by means of such a laying, comes to light and comes to lie before us.”^[49] Perhaps, in this way, Heidegger’s “proper hearing” can be thought of as something like kairos as akroasis, or listening as a calling forth of what is gathered before us.

Kairos as Akroasis/Listening as Speaking

One exception to the relatively individualistic and speech-centric approach to kairos is found in Debra Hawhee’s idea of kairotic bodies. Drawing on the generative dimensions of kairos and taking a cue from Dale Sullivan’s notion of inspiration, Hawhee develops a rhetorical perspective that underscores the relational, nonlinear, and embodied dimensions of kairos.^[50] She writes:

If the notion of inspiration is considered somatically as the act of breathing in, or a commingling of momentary elements, kairotic inspiration may be usefully figured in terms of kairos as aperture, except this time the opening may not necessarily lie ‘out there’ in circulating discourses or on the body of a foe. Rather, the rhetor opens him or herself up to the immediate situation.”^[51]

While never so explicitly stated, Hawhee’s description of kairos suggests itself as an ethical relation enacted through an openness that cannot be anything other than listening. This is kairos as akroasis, an ethical, relational opening where the synchronic movement of inspiration emerges not from an individual speaking into the correct moment of a succession of moments, but from a rhythmic conjunction that bridges the out-breath of speaking with the in-breath of listening. In contrast to kairos as a “right” or “opportune” moment that fits within the diachronic spatial paradigm, nonlinear and embodied perspectives on kairos open the door to the ethical potency of listening. A beautiful description of the nonlinear temporality of kairos is described by Carolyn Eriksen Hill:

In a Pythagorean cosmos, a kairotic event is an instantaneous now that embeds the whole episode. Every circumstance has its own continually transforming moments that resonate with others, so kairotic openings are indeed points of present time tied to all other moments, past and present, which have unfolded qualitatively in the time of this situation. Kairotic happenings are single events containing multiple ones.^[52]

One of the few scholars to follow Heidegger into the elusive mysteries of listening is the Italian philosopher Fiumara, who calls listening “the other side of language.”^[53] To Fiumara, listening is the doubly derided and thoroughly squandered half of logos, one which “belongs to the very essence of language.”^[54] The half-formed logos, argues Fiumara, “excommunicates anything that ‘normal’ rationality is unable to grasp or systematize.”^[55] Contrasting the strength of listening to the power of speaking, Fiumara warns of the ability of the half-formed logos to so thoroughly dominate, master, and destroy its other half that coexistence, let alone cohabitation, will be impossible. She asks us to resuscitate language from the “desolate limbo of listening . . . where any attempt to listen is viewed as the sad and humble practice of those who could not possibly excel in cogent articulations.”^[56] Fiumara describes the courage required for listening “with sufficient strength to sustain blows of any kind and remain alert.”^[57] That is to say that listening “could actually come across like a storm and overwhelm us . . . listening involves the renunciation of a predominately molding and ordering activity; a giving up sustained by the expectation of a new and different quality of relationship.”^[58]

As a means to resuscitate listening, Fiumara suggests a maieutic approach, one that gives birth to speech by way of listening. Fiumara’s maieutic, listening-centered approach is strong enough to welcome the nascent word without lapsing “into imitative conformity with standard rationality. By only listening to what is obvious and easy to decode, we cannot really say that we listen or know.”^[59] Similarly, the feminist theologian Nelle Morton describes how listening others to speech is itself an ethics. She writes, “we empower one another by hearing the other to speech. We empower the disinherited, the outsider.”^[60] How resonant Morton’s phrasing is with Levinas’s ethical directive that we respond to the face as the “widow, the orphan, and the stranger” who “commands me as Master” from “a dimension of height.”^[61] Morton’s reflection that “clever techniques seen as positive agents for creation and change are not good for the kind of hearing that brings forth speech,”^[62] is similarly comparable to Martin Buber’s vision of true dialogue as “a matter of renouncing the pan-technical mania or habit with its easy ‘mastery’ of every situation.”^[63] Thus the empowerment of kairos as akroasis is a listening others to speech that can reverse authoritative normative social arrangements that either silence others and refuse to listen.

But it is not only that the voice of the other calling requires a listener to be complete; it is that, more radically, without a listener the speaking simply may not occur. Morton describes how, as a young doctor, C. G. Jung worked with women who would not speak. With patience and perseverance, Jung found a way to connect with the women by imitating their gestures and movements until finally they began to speak. Morton writes how Jung “had touched the place where the connection had been broken. But he did this through their language and not the language of the doctors. He had heard them to speech.”^[64] Jung’s actions might thus be described in Heidegger’s paradoxical presence of absence: “A listener can only ‘enter’ in a way which is at once paradoxical and committing: by taking leave, by standing aside and making room.”^[65] Thus, the ethical openness of kairos is achieved through akroasis, a musical temporality (time as tempo, timing, and rhythm) that listens, rather than a spatial temporality (time as linear succession or calculation) that speaks.

To both Heidegger and Levinas, time was not something humans lived within but was the very fabric of being itself. To Heidegger, time is Dasein, being in the world. Time “enables the mind to be what it is,” and “Dasein is itself time.”^[66] To Levinas, time is relational and intersubjective, “time is a new birth.”^[67] Time is thus not separate from life; it is life itself. So how does listening, akroasis, relate to time? Here we must connect a few dots. To Levinas, time is accomplished by the ethical encounter with alterity. As Levinas describes it, “the ‘movement’ of time understood as transcendence toward the Infinity of the ‘wholly other’ does not temporalize in a linear way. . . . It makes a detour by entering into the ethical adventure of the relationship with the other person.”^[68] And as I have described elsewhere, listening is the source of the ethical relation with alterity:

Listening is a form of co-constitutive communicative action fundamental to dialogic ethics. That is, listening is neither a secondary subordinate process that follows and flows from speech, nor is it a futile gesture. Rather, listening is the invisible and inaudible enactment of the ethical relation itself; upon it, everything depends.^[69]

If we can transpose Levinas’s time as nonlinear transcendence of alterity into an ethics of listening, then, perhaps, we can begin to hear the harmonic strains of kairos and akroasis. One clue comes from Mozart’s description of how musical ideas come to him seemingly from nowhere, tout ensemble: “I [do not] hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once (glitch alles zusammen).”^[70] That is, before he lays it out in the linear succession of musical notation, Mozart hears everything all at once, a flowing undifferentiated gestalt that is later transformed into linear sequence. Thus our persistent insistence on linear spatial conceptions of language and time betray us by “giving a fixed form to fleeting sensations.”^[71]

In his critique of linear temporality, Bergson argued that our experience of duration is betrayed by language, which freezes, isolates, and segments the flow of consciousness. Because language is temporally linear, with each word, sentence, paragraph following another in sequence, it is easy to take consciousness as comparably linear. A nonlinear temporality of language has been well theorized by Soviet psychologists and dialogic philosophers, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Alexander Luria, V. N. Volosonov, and Lev Vygotsky.^[72] Luria, for example, theorized speech as a transformation of consciousness wherein the initial stages of speech are an integrated gestalt without temporal sequence or differentiated parts. Luria’s model does not depict speech as a simple conversion of thoughts into words. Rather, it describes how complex, nonlinguistic conceptual intuitions are gradually transformed into full-blown, grammatically correct, speech. As he describes it, “There is every reason to agree with Vygotsky that thought is completed, rather than embodied in speech and that the transition from thought into speech involves several stages.”^[73] Thus, rather than merely reflecting preexisting thoughts, the Soviet psychologists saw language as a process that transforms a gestalt of nonlinear consciousness (not unlike Bergson’s dureé) into the linear, sequenced expressions of speech. Vygotsky gives a wonderful example of the instantaneous flash-like intuition of meaning that arises conterminous with speaking:

Thought, unlike speech, does not consist of separate units. When I wish to communicate the thought that today I saw a barefoot boy in a blue shirt running down the street, I do not see every item separately: the boy, the shirt, its blue color, his running, the absence of shoes. I conceive of all this in one thought, but I put it into separate words.^[74]

Similarly, in our dialogic interactions, language and consciousness often blur the linear and nonlinear as our speaking shifts between verbal tenses, creating a past for a future that has not yet become, while our imaginations project a future that we remember and which thus becomes our past. In Faulkner's famous words, “the past is never dead. In fact, it is never past.”^[75] Our past lives inside us as echoes of past, present, and future voices that blend and interact to make us who we are. Moreover, these displacements in time are not unusual; we use them daily to interpret ourselves and each other, to recount stories, to ponder imponderables, and to shift between subjunctive worlds. As the scholar of self-as-storyteller Roy Schafer describes psychoanalytic narrative, one “works in a temporal circle . . . backward from what is told . . . and forward from various tellings of the past to constitute that present and that anticipated future.”^[76] Furthermore, as listeners, our inner ears stitch and sew meanings outside of linear time with a reversal of beginning and end, as the first words uttered inevitably become the last heard and understanding unfurls in a flash of comprehension. This psychological temporality of listening is akin to Wallace Martin’s “Janus faced reader” who is “always looking backward as well as forward, actively restructuring the past in light of each new bit of information.”^[77] Thus, the view of time as a linear, insistent river flowing eternally from past to present to future obscures the many ways the lives of our minds are a tangle of braided melodies, rhythms, recapitulations, and syncopations of memory and anticipation, sparkling with occasional echoes of the present moment. Nevertheless, the prevailing view of both time and language as largely linear and spatial phenomena continues to limit and condition us to thinking about (rather than with) ethics. What follows is an illustration of kairos as an ethical achievement enacted by the openness and attunement of akroasis.

Exemplum

As an illustration of the way akroasis can be woven into kairos, an example from a recent event at my university may be useful. More than a thousand students, staff, and faculty from all over campus were assembled in a large auditorium for a discussion of recent events involving racism, sexism, and homophobia on campus. The assembly had been organized around a formal program that offered short speeches and a small=group dialogue session, but little public dialogue beyond a thirty-minute open microphone period in which community members were invited to speak. And speak they did. Truths that had been uttered only behind closed doors were, for the first time, spoken aloud before the whole community—stories of abuse, neglect, and humiliation as well as confessions of guilt, ignorance, repudiation, and greed were spoken by the brave, face-to-face with the whole community. It was an epic, heroic event—staggeringly real and genuinely uncomfortable, sad, and frightening. The audience, some many hundreds, sat in rapt silence, listening. Occasional sobs, nose blowing, and applause punctuated the heartfelt discourse, and speakers continued to rise and step up to the line waiting for their turn at the microphone.

Not surprisingly, thirty minutes quickly turned into ninety, and at this point, the president of the college turned to the collective and attempted to conclude the day’s events. There were protests by students and faculty, but the president and several other faculty members argued that the program was over and that we should respect the clock and conclude our gathering in order to allow everyone to return to classes and attend to their work. It was at this moment, thick with tension and uncertainty, that the director of our library, a bold and spirited Alabaman, stood before the group and declared in her tuneful southern dialect: “The library is closed and will remain closed until everyone in this room who wishes to speak has an opportunity to do so.” The room erupted in applause, and the dialogue continued unabated for at least four more hours. It was both a traumatic and a healing experience for the college community.

Why call the librarian’s speaking kairos? Because she was thinking with ethics, attuned to the sound of the unspoken. She heard what had not yet been expressed, resisted the dictates (dicta) of clock time, and heeded the invocation to listen. This was speech spawned from listening, which in turn spawned more listening. As Fiumara writes, “A listening dialogue is fertile inasmuch as it is willing to ignore time measures; the maieutic word, in fact, can only be expressed at just the right moment and with a philosophical patience that makes for a renunciation to bargain on matters of precedence.”^[78] In this example, our librarian obeyed the call to patience and resisted the measure of precedence and the clock. Her speaking and listening were in the service of ethics as an opening to alterity. Thus, we might say that kairotic temporality involves the rhythmic aspects of timing, coordination, syncopation, repetition, punctuation, and so forth, as well as the tensed aspects of grammar and narrative time and the nonlinear psychological movements where “the past and present lie ‘at once’ in temporality.”^[79]

This example of the librarian’s akroatic kairos runs counter to an exigence defined primarily as a fitting response. For where Bitzer so eloquently describes how “rhetorical discourse is called into existence by situation,” he is mistaken in the claim that “the clearest instances are strongly invited and often required.”^[80] For perhaps at times the response is invited, but quite often, as in the case of the librarian, it may need to be usurped by a keen listener attuned to the paradoxical absence as presence. Moreover, as Levinas reminds us, the encounter with the other is always an exigence, always an urgency, expressed in the face of the other who commands me, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Implications

To the Sophists and Aristotle, kairos was future-faced; an intervention in a wound or imperfection aimed at a target to change the future. But as an ethics, kairos must serve a less strategic and instrumental purpose and more of a harmonized temporality that emerges from a quality of attunement and listening. As an ethics, kairos cannot be anticipated, as much as we would like to predict it, point to it, organize it, categorize it. What is right about timing may only be perceptible with an open attunement to the nonlinear temporality of the moment. The time is thus not right in the sense of a universal truth or correctness, nor as an accuracy, nor as an opportunity. Kairos is an ethical achievement that emerges from the confluence of listening and speaking with contingency and conflict.^[81] That is, listening is generative of kairos as an ethical attunement, an opening to the nonlinear interpenetrations of past, present, and future. Kairos is special speech because it is given birth to by way of listening.

But of course, we live our lives for the most part in linear diachronous time. Our daily activities are ordered into sequences that take place in one moment followed by another—everything from raw to cooked eggs, from crawling to walking to running, or from match to flame to smoke occurs in diachronous succession. Furthermore, there are recurring cycles of generalized (i.e., not mechanically exact) quantifiable periodicity everywhere in nature, from the monsoon season to the parturition of a fetus, and even lifespan can be calculated as a ratio between heart beat and size. So life without diachronic time is impossible. But at the same time, life is not clockwork, and human beings are not (yet?) machines.

As scholars such as Kinneavy, Poulakos, Phillip Sipiora and others have demonstrated, the rightness of the kairotic moment is contingent and emergent, arising from the singularity of circumstance rather than the totality of rule or procedure. But the moment is not a frozen motionless moment in a moving succession of moments. As described above, measured clock time, or diachronic temporality, limits us to spatial thinking wherein language and time are conceived of solely in linear sequential terms, leading to the kind of amnesia that forgets to remember that the past is never past and that the voices and thoughts we hear are never purely our own. Still further, the diachronic view leads to an erroneous conception of discursive thought in terms of tensed and linear syntactically structured language. But kairos is not a property or quality of an utterance. It is not a kind of arête or techne. It is not a judgment of perfection, the perfect word, or a perfect moment. Instead, kairos describes the quality of a response, a synchronized responsive moment of choreographed belonging—what Heidegger calls a gathered hearkening.

Thus kairos is not like the rightness of a mathematical equation or the rightness of an accurate bull’s-eye or the rightness of compliance with a law. It is not the rightness of a chosen moment or a perfect word uttered at the perfect instant. Neither can kairos be strategized, planned ahead for, or discovered retrospectively. It is not a property or quality of persons, of words, or of worlds. Rather, kairos is an ethical virtue inextricable from listening; it is an attunement to others and the dance of circumstance. It is not timely in the mechanical sense of efficiency or serendipity, a well-timed shot into a goal or a timely intervention into the future in the nick of time. Instead, the ethical temporality of kairos is the nonlinear music of a moment choosing us.

Notes

Portions of this chapter have been excerpted from chapters six and eight of Lisbeth Lipari, Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2014).

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10.

Sherover, Are We In Time?, 50.

11.

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by R. L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001, 50.

12.

Ibid., 100.

13.

Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 232, 18.

14.

Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985); G. C. Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (New York: Routledge, 1990); Lisbeth Lipari, “The Vocation of Listening: The Other Side of Dialogue,” in After You, ed. Axel Liégeois, Jozef Corveleyn, and Marina Riemslagh, 15–36, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium CCLVIII (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 2013).

15.

Eric Charles White, Kaironomia: On the Will to Invent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas, 2004).

16.

Phillip Sipiora, “Introduction: The Ancient Concept of Kairos,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and Praxis, ed. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin, 1–22 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 1.

17.

James L. Kinneavy, “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric and Praxis, ed. John D. Moss, 79–105 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1986), 80.

18.

David Mirhady and Yun Lee Too, trans. Isocrates I (Austin: University of Texas, 2000), 164.

19.

Ibid., 64.

20.

White, Kaironomia; Michael Carter, “Stasis and Kairos: Principals of Social Construction in Classical Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 7, no. 1 (1988): 97–112; Sipiora, “Introduction.”

21.

Laurent Pernot, Rhetoric in Antiquity, trans. W. E. Higgins (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2005), 13.

22.

Ibid.

23.

Dale L. Sullivan, “Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 317–32.

24.

Sheri L. Helsley, “Kairos,” in The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition from Ancient Times to the Information Age, ed. Theresa Enos (New York: Garland, 1996), 371.

25.

Carter, “Stasis and Kairos,” 105.

26.

Helsley, “Kairos,” 371.

27.

Michael Harker, “The Ethics of Argument: Rereading Kairos and Making Sense in a Timely Fashion,” College Composition and Communication 59, no. 1 (2007): 94.

28.

Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1, no.1 (1968): 2.

29.

As Žižek notes, a sense of urgency often “necessitates a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns.” Slavoj Žižek, “Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency,” In These Times, January 27, 2006, inthesetimes.org/article/2481/jack_bauer_and_the_ethics_of_urgency.

30.

Bitzer, “Rhetorical Situation,” 6.

31.

Ibid.

32.

Ibid., 10.

33.

Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address,” Abraham Lincoln Online, accessed July 23, 2013, www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm.

34.

Ibid.

35.

John Poulakos, “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 16, no. 1 (1983): 40–41.

36.

Sipiora, “Introduction,” 17n1.

37.

James Kinneavy and Catherine R. Eskin, “Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” Written Communication 17, no. 3 (2000): 432–44.

38.

Harker, “The Ethics of Argument.”

39.

Malcolm Heath, “Theon and the History of the Progymnasmata,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 43, no. 3 (2002): 129–60.

40.

Pernot, Rhetoric in Antiquity, 146.

41.

Ibid., 138.

42.

C. Jan Swearingen, “Song to Speech: The Origins of Early Epitaphia in Ancient Near Eastern Women’s Lamentations,” in Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks, ed. Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley, 213–25 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004).

43.

Fiumara, The Other Side of Language.

44.

Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

45.

Jonathan Barnes, ed., Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), 50.

46.

Heidegger, Early Greek, 67.

Ibid., 65.

Ibid., 65–66.

Ibid., 73.

Sullivan, “Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief.”

51.

Hawhee, Bodily Arts, 71.

52.

Carolyn Eriksen Hill, “Changing Times in Composition Classes: Kairos, Resonance, and the Pythagorean Connection,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and Praxis, ed. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin, 211–25. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 216.

53.

Fiumara, The Other Side of Language.

Ibid., 30.

Ibid., 19.

Ibid., 67

Ibid., 90.

Ibid., 122.

Ibid., 158.

Morton, The Journey Is Home, 128.

61.

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 214.

62.

Morton, The Journey Is Home, 206.

63.

Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 39.

64.

Morton, The Journey is Home, 209.

65.

Fiumara, The Other Side of Language, 144.

66.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1962), 197; Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. Ingo Farin and Skinner (New York: Continuum, 2011), 47.

67.

Levinas, Time and the Other, 81.

68.

Ibid., 33.

69.

Lisbeth Lipari, “Rhetoric’s Other,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 45, no. 3 (2012): 242.

70.

Edward Holmes, The Life of Mozart, Including His Correspondence (New York: Harpers, 1845), 267–68.

71.

Bergson, Time and Free Will, 59.

72.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1973); V. N. Voloshinov, “The Word and Its Social Function,” in Bakhtin School Papers, ed. Ann Shukman, trans. Joe Andrew, 139–52 (Oxford: RPT, 1983).

73.

Alexander R. Luria, Language and Cognition, ed. James V. Wertsch (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1981), 151.

74.

Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Alex Kozulin (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986), 251.

75.

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 73.

76.

Roy Schafer, “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 25–50 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 48.

77.

Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 127.

78.

Fiumara, The Other Side of Language, 134.

79.

Heidegger, The Concept of Time, 49.

80.

Bitzer, “Rhetorical Situation,” 8.

81.

Carter, “Stasis and Kairos”; Hawhee, Bodily Arts; Helsley, “Kairos,” 371.

Otherness: Place and Space

The Pantheism Controversy

Rhetoric in the German Enlightenment

On Spinoza and Spinozism (Preface to the Debate)

On Mendelssohn and Lessing

The Pantheism Controversy

On Memory

Notes

Bibliography

A Rhetoric of Sentiment

Introduction

Kant’s Essay

Swearingen’s Communication Perspective on Broadie

Broadie’s The Scottish Enlightenment

The Importance of Sociogeography

Progress Void of Undue Optimism

Existential Engagement in the Scottish Enlightenment

A City Torn Asunder

Ground for Liberal Sentiments

Sentiments—Origins and Structures

In Search of Freedoms

Earth and Sentiment

Notes

Bibliography

Before the One and the Other

Before the One and the Other: Ethico-Political Communication and Community

Philosophies of One

Philosophies of the Other

Notes

Bibliography

Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis

Time

Kairos

Akroasis

Kairos as Akroasis/Listening as Speaking

Exemplum

Implications

Notes

Bibliography

Swearingen’s Communication
Perspective on Broadie

Existential Engagement in the
Scottish Enlightenment