Bruce Krajewski
“One only speaks about understanding when it is not obvious.”
—Hans-Georg Gadamer (Gadamer 2005, 60)
The Greek god Hermes, the messenger and god of thieves, the giver of laws and the alphabet, is a key figure for thinking about the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric. The necessity of a messenger, a translator, between the world of gods and mortals seems to confirm Friedrich Schleiermacher’s famous comment that misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, meaning that misunderstanding is the norm for discourse rather than the exception. What the gods wish to say to human beings is not self-evident, and human discourse directed to the gods often takes the form of complicated prayers and hortatory speech. What is being communicated will be more often than not, on this view, lost. These misunderstandings can produce tragic results, à la Macbeth (Burnham Wood coming to Dunsinane), or comic ones, such as described in the essays by J. L. Austin. See what Austin has to say about some everyday oddities in “Pretending” (Austin 1990). Or, think of a comic strip with one character holding an old-fashioned thermometer in one hand, and saying, “It looks as if I will have to take your temperature in an uncomfortable place,” and the potential thermometer-receiver responds, “Do you mean Boise, Idaho?”
People can be tickled by the discovery of ambiguity, by mis-takings (in the sense that one can take something in the wrong, or right, way); others, like some philosophers, can be exasperated by language that does not achieve a normative level of clarity and consistency. Hermeneutics and rhetoric exist in the space between opacity and transparency, between incomprehensibility and self-evidence, between reason and linguistic anarchy. There are those who want to get to the point as quickly as possible, and others who enjoy detours and dead ends. Similarly, there are those who want to say that words have particular, perennial meanings to which we anchor our reality, and those who are less attached and view language as unattached to human ends and plans and desires. Martin Heidegger claims, for example, that language is not human (Heidegger 1985).
Since ancient times, rhetoricians have recognized that words get away from us, escape our grasp, mean more than we knew possible, or more than we can ever know. A good example here might be the Marx Brothers’ film A Day at the Races, in which Chico sells Groucho a tip on a horse by offering him a code book, then a master code book to explain the code book, then a guide required by the master code, then a sub-guide supplementary to the guide. The viewer imagines a kind of Borgesian labyrinth of interpretation from which one might never exit, which is the philosopher’s nightmare, the lawyer’s dream, and the comedian’s shtick or bit.
Language carries with it the potential of trickery. Language carries a reputation that stems, in part, from Hermes, known in the ancient world as a slippery character—not only fleet-footed in overt ways, but inventive, improvisational, impish. Hermes is, as Jacques Derrida describes him, a wild card (Derrida 2004, 97). As a child, Hermes tied leaves and branches to his feet to conceal his footprints from Apollo when Hermes was in the middle of stealing some of Apollo’s cattle. Concomitant with Hermes’ mercurial nature is his association with things hermetic, esoteric. In the ancient world, many people associated Hermes with occult wisdom. Think here of Hermes Trismegistus.
One had reason to fear utterances in the ancient world. They could be enchanting, prophetic, magical (de Romilly, 1975; see also Plato’s Symposium at 215e). Gorgias, one of the key Sophists in the tradition, underscores the power of words on human beings in his Encomium on Helen, a text exemplary for its invention, cunning, and its exploration of hypotheses for the purpose of (self-) entertainment.
Hermeneutics itself derives from the Greek verb hermeneuein. As Martin Heidegger explains, the verb is related to the noun hermeneus, which is referable to Hermes, the one who brings the message of destiny. Hermeneuein means to bring what is hidden out into the open; it is the practice of interpretation. Hermes is the god of writing and magic. He is Thoth, the Egyptian character mentioned in the Phaedrus, the Platonic dialogue that focuses on ancient concerns about communication, particularly writing (see Carson 1986). Socrates insists that speaking is preferable to writing, due to what is called “the weakness of the logoi” (Gadamer 1980, 104–105). Our words get away from us, out of our control. They do not remain stable, permanent, certain. People say things about us, and then those people are sometimes unavailable for rebuttal. In the Apology, for instance, Socrates would prefer to cross-examine the people who have spoken about a Socrates he does not recognize or acknowledge, a pseudo-Socrates who has taken on a life. Some people in the ancient world counted Socrates among the Sophists.
As Hans-Georg Gadamer points out, with the arrival of Plato and his philosophical school, rhetoric and interpretation fall into disrepute as modes of deception and unredeemable relativism. Socrates and Plato initiate a propaganda campaign to reject rhetoric, and to convince people that only philosophers can provide absolutely the path to the good and the true. Gadamer writes:
Recently, it seems, some of my colleagues have been trying to “save my soul” from such dishonest things as rhetoric! They think that hermeneutics is no noble pursuit and that we must be suspicious of rhetoric. I had to reply that rhetoric has been the basis of our social life since Plato rejected and contradicted the flattering abuse of rhetoric by the Sophists. He introduced dialectically founded rhetoric in the Phaedrus, and rhetoric remained a noble art throughout antiquity. Yet one wonders why today everybody is not aware of it.”
(Gadamer 1984, 74)
One reason not everyone is aware has to do with the success philosophers have had in their campaign against rhetoric. In Plato’s Counterfeit Sophists by Håkan Tell (2012), he ties the Sophists’ intellectual ostracism to Plato’s and Aristotle’s misrepresentation and suppression of competing articulations of philosophy. While wanting to promote the Socratic/Platonic dialectic, ancient philosophers sought to characterize the Sophists as a group separate from the past but utterly like-minded outsiders who, motivated by greed, wandered into Athens and other Greek towns seeking to valorize relativism and political expediency. Like Hermes, the Sophists are not from a particular place. They shuttle from one place to the next, selling themselves frequently to a young, elite class, offering up the magical power of words, the formulas for persuasion. To put it in the infamous terms, Sophists could make the weaker argument the stronger. Even when they did not go that far, the philosophers accused the Sophists of presenting many sides of an argument in a nonpreferential way—the practice of dissoi logoi (see Krajewski 2012). This negativity toward Sophism on the part of the self-proclaimed philosophers, according to Hans Blumenberg, “probably had more important consequences than the positive dogmas of the part of the history of [Plato’s] influence called ‘Platonism’” (Blumenberg 1981, 106; English translation in Blumenberg 1987, 431).
To appreciate more fully the power of the Socratic–Platonic–Aristotelian smearing of the Sophists, you could do worse than to look at this passage from David Brooks in a 2006 New York Times piece:
Read Plato’s Gorgias. As Robert George of Princeton observes, “The explicit point of the dialogue is to demonstrate the superiority of philosophy (the quest for wisdom and truth) to rhetoric (the art of persuasion in the cause of victory). At a deeper level, it teaches that the worldly honors that one may win by being a good speaker … can all too easily erode one’s devotion to the truth—a devotion that is critical to our integrity as persons. So rhetorical skills are dangerous, potentially soul-imperiling gifts.” Explains everything you need to know about politics and punditry.
(Boyarin 2007)
No one can deny that for centuries rhetorical manuals mention the importance of winning, of verbal triumphs, or what ends up being labeled eloquence. Yet, numerous figures in the history of rhetoric felt obliged to polish rhetoric’s image, frequently by insisting that good rhetorical training included good ethical training (e.g., Quintilian’s vir bonus or Wayne Booth’s ethical rhetor). Many writers succumb to the temptation to link rhetoric with kairos (saying the right thing before the right audience at the right time, or Plato’s Statesman, where the phrase is finding the right word at the right moment), with phronesis (practical wisdom), and sophrosune (intelligence) as a way to counter philosopher’s depictions of Sophists as unprincipled scoundrels. Reactionary as this makeover has been through the centuries, the David Brook’s quotation and the one by Gadamer given earlier (Gadamer 1984) demonstrate the ongoing success of philosophy’s campaign against rhetoric. Even some figures in contemporary continental philosophy (e.g., Emmanuel Levinas) have been unfriendly to rhetoric.
The philosophers have also been able to cloak their distaste for people in general, evident most tellingly in Plato’s allegory of the cave. It is not difficult to understand why rhetorical appeals to audiences strike philosophers as cheap, compromising efforts to win people over. What the historians of rhetoric do not tell you is that the ancients, including some lauded figures in the history of rhetoric like Aristotle and Cicero, also had a vexed relationship with audiences. Jesus himself, in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 4, verses 11 and 12, tells the disciples: “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive; and may indeed hear but not understand.” It is Jesus’ intention that the general public not understand what he is saying. That is his explanation for speaking in parables, riddles. As Frank Kermode comments on this section of the gospel: “Only those who already know the mysteries—what the stories really mean—can discover what the stories really mean” (Kermode 1980, 3).
On more familiar rhetorical territory, Nancy Worman in Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens reminds us of Aristotle’s distaste for audiences. This ought to strike historians of rhetoric and students of rhetoric as startling, given that students of rhetoric almost always develop instantaneous distaste for what is called the elitism of Socrates and Plato, especially after a reading of the Republic, and then turn for solace to Aristotle, who remains the ruling figure and idol of most Anglophone composition classrooms. Nancy Worman begins by citing a passage from Aristotle’s Rhetoric at 1390a:
The old like the young are inclined to pity, but not for the same reason; the latter show pity from humanity, the former from weakness, because they think that they are on the point of suffering all kinds of misfortunes …. This is why the old are querulous, and neither witty nor fond of laughter…. Such are the characters of the young and older men. Since all people are willing to listen to speeches which harmonize with their own character and to speakers who resemble them, it is easy to see what language we must employ so that both ourselves and our speeches may appear to be of a particular character.
Worman’s commentary on this passage: “The speaker forges a bridge between himself and the audience members by matching his type to theirs, or at least by de-emphasizing differences and playing to their prejudices and inclinations” (Worman 2008, 284). “It suggests that the speaker will have to undertake some careful molding of his persona and subject matter to make both palatable to his audience” (Worman 2008, 285). The gentle, technical term for all of this is kairos, attempting to say the right thing, to the right audience, at the right time. Instructors of rhetoric and composition encourage students to become chameleons, to alter their ethos and logos depending upon some sort of rapid and amorphous analysis of audience.
According to Worman’s account, pleasure is what ought to but cannot be avoided in oratory, owing to audience corruption (Worman 2008, 295). Aristotle declares at the outset of his discussion of rhetoric that style, delivery, and everything they entail are all “outward display aimed at pleasing the hearer” (Worman 2008, 296). Aristotle posits that the persuasive performance depends on forging an emotional and ethical bond between speaker and audience motivating the recognition that the speaker necessarily deceives, and the audience members, being corrupt and fatuous, participate eagerly in the deception. Aristotle’s account does not tell us about the full range of potential audience responses, such as a context in which the audience is well aware it is being told a tall tale (see Hesk 2000).
Similarly in Quintilian, the orator guides audiences and “puts them right.” The orator is to be a manager of audiences, a kind of administrator.
Some historians and teachers of rhetoric forget that both Quintilian and Aristotle make it plain that oratory is not for the masses, but for those few born with natural advantages. Quintilian cites the characteristics necessary: voice, strong lungs, good health, stamina, and good looks (Book I and Book X of the Institutes, for instance). He says that he does not want a pupil who has a weak and womanish voice. Quintilian encourages teachers to deceive those few permitted proper instruction in rhetoric. “Sometimes the student should compete, and more often than not think he is the winner” (Book II). Finally, Quintilian reminds his readers that orators practice esotericism. Quintilian writes about “the speaker’s plan and hidden artifice” and follows that with an aside: “The only art is that which can only be seen by an artist.” That is, the audience is unaware of the speaker’s plan or designs on the audience.
Cicero, Quintilian’s model for rhetorical education, called the Roman people “deaf” (Everitt 2001, 70). In his De Officiis, Cicero boasts about the orator’s power to deceive the audience, and couches that in terms of a duty. He says that the advocate’s business was to present arguments that look like the truth even if they were not true [patroni est non numquam verisimile, etiamsi minus sit verum, defendre] (Powell 2004, 25). After one of his trials, Cicero is alleged to have said that he threw dust in the eyes of the jury, meaning that he helped to acquit a guilty man.
The ancient rhetoricians recognized the importance of appearances, and for obvious reasons emphasized in their treatises that they wanted orators to be virtuous and morally upright people. This cover-up has succeeded for over two thousand years, and seemed to have slipped past Gadamer’s radar. Even if we accept the cover-up as an expression of some salubrious intention, would we not have to judge the accuracy of the claim that learning rhetoric results in virtuous speakers, writers, and audiences? At this point, many years into the mass education of students in composition and speech classrooms, we would expect the world to be overflowing with eloquent speakers and writers. Yet, as Michael Cahn notes: “Just as medicine promises the healing of bodily affliction, so rhetoric promises to make better speakers of its students. This promise is, so to speak, rhetoric’s birth certificate. It is also its death sentence, since it is, as we all know, quite impossible to make every student into a successful speaker. As a result, rhetoric must protect itself from its failures and from the uncertainties of life which call into question its disciplinary standing. It must emphasise its success and hide its failures” (Cahn 1993, 74).
One of those failures linking rhetoric and hermeneutics that some would prefer not be mentioned appears in Jean Grondin’s biography of Gadamer (2003a), where readers learn that Gadamer had no problem shifting his academic discourse from “Heil Hitler” when the National Socialists were in power, to speaking about workers in glowing terms when the Soviet Union had control over East Germany during the time Gadamer was employed at the University of Leipzig after World War II. As a student of phronesis, Gadamer knew how to adjust his discourse. Gadamer’s disciples experience cognitive dissonance over such pieces of evidence, wanting to applaud Gadamer for his skills in application, a much-praised aspect of Gadamer’s most famous book Truth and Method, while experiencing simultaneously discomfort about the ways in which some uses of kairos look for all the world like collaboration.
What is the relationship between hermeneutics (interpretation) and persuasion (rhetoric)? Law and religion can shed light on this relationship. In most kinds of legal and scriptural interpretation, authors build cases from precedent. Precedent is another way of acknowledging previous interpreters of a text. In short, the practice of the law consists of a middle way between certainty and anarchy. The earlier interpretations work toward solidifying the persuasion. Cases build on one another, inform each other. Lawyers, judges, and officers of the court all act generally on the basis of previous practices and decisions. Yet, those practices and decisions are subject to modifications and alterations in light of new circumstances and interpretations.
Peter Goodrich has become one of the most prominent, and perhaps most controversial, contemporary legal theorists. One of Goodrich's major claims is that the law lacks an authorizing moment of genesis, one like the story of Moses receiving the law from God on Mount Sinai. Nonetheless, those working for the law continue to point backward to some legitimizing episode, as if it existed, but has been forgotten:
Legal discourse and the texts through which it gains its positive formulations are simple representations of a primary speech that preexists and authorizes the legal textual community. That origin is hidden, distant, and dark. It is the logos, the source or oracle of law that our authors variously name as God, nature, time immemorial…. Just as the constitution binds invisibly—it is simply “how things are”—so the discourse of law remembers and repeats an ideal that is ever elsewhere, an origin or absolute other into whose face we may never look.
(Goodrich 1992, 70)
This point applies to a larger matter in rhetoric’s history. Rhetoric begins in the mythic world, when gods and humans did things, but then the actions by those gods and humans faded from memory, but the importance of those figures persisted in a different way. Peitho, the ancient Greek verb “to persuade,” serves as a salient example. Peitho is the name of a goddess, and this goddess has a number of stories connected to her existence. Over time, the narratives of seduction, marriage, and cleverness (mētis) linked to Peitho fell into the background. Peitho lost its capitalization, but continued life as a verb, and the verb’s meaning became disassociated from Peitho the goddess. This process of nouns transforming to verbs, and mythic happenings converted to secular purposes happens several times in the history of rhetoric. A mythic tradition is supplanted by a non-mythic one, but the terminology and pieces of the context live on. Portions of the Peitho-persuasion narrative are forgotten, sometimes in a way homologous to that described by Nicole Loraux (2006) in her book The Divided City that explains a curious moment in the history of ancient Athens when the citizens agreed to take an oath promising to remember to forget the unforgettable civil war (stasis) as a political form of letting bygones be bygones, interrupting the cycle of violence, shifting attention toward a future with an imposed foggy linkage to its past.
We can now loop back to the law, and Goodrich’s point about forgetting. What has been forgotten by the public and the legal community is that the law is rhetorical through and through. Thus, the status of the law is no different from that of literature. In an article entitled “Of Law and Forgetting: Literature, Ethics, and Legal Judgment,” Goodrich says, “[B]oth historically and philosophically, literature or more properly rhetoric as criticism is the discipline most appropriate to the analysis of the linguistic practice of judgment and law” (Goodrich 1994, 201). What ought to cause rhetoricians to perk up at this point is Goodrich’s talk of rhetoric as a tool, an instrument of analysis. On this count, Goodrich appears little better than Brian Vickers with Vickers’ tropes as instances of “rhetoric as a coherent system” (Vickers 1989, xi). However, what happens if we try to think of rhetoric not as a tool, nor as a system, but, say, as a way of making one’s way in the world? Or: Rhetoric not only as a strategy of talking, but perhaps also a way of silencing others, as might be the way to view rhetoric’s founding moment with Korax and Tisias? At times, Goodrich leans in that direction. In Reading the Law, he sketches the rhetorical tradition and says, “We therefore openly acknowledge that the following outline favours a critical rhetoric and concentrates on those aspects of the rhetorical tradition which come closest to political criticism in its classical sense of the study of arguments related to the historical situation and immediate needs of the community (polis) to which the speech or discourse is addressed” (Goodrich 1986, 171–72). Goodrich wants to distinguish “critical rhetoric” from rhetoric in the same way that literary people like to make a distinction between “critical theory” and mere theory. This distinction introduces what Gadamer calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Gadamer suggests that a “critical rhetoric” would be an oxymoron. Gadamer says, “Rhetorica and critica are two competing approaches, insofar as rhetorica is obviously based on common sense, on the probability of arguments insofar as they are well received and assured by appearances. On the other hand, the critical attitude stands against appearances, on the side of the new physics, with its insistence on method” (Gadamer 1984, 55). In short, when rhetoric becomes a methodology, it stops being rhetoric for Gadamer. If Gadamer is right, it is difficult to know how to rescue Goodrich's “critical rhetoric.”
The political move Goodrich advances presupposes rhetoric's link to democracy, the old peitho versus bia distinction, or persuasion versus physical force (e.g., torture). To persuade is democratic, to force, tyrannical. To convince us of his point, Goodrich appeals to the famous story of rhetoric’s genesis, the story of Korax. Goodrich’s reading of the episode is as follows: “According to the classical authors, rhetoric was the invention of Corax of Syracuse and it was defined…, as the art of speaking well before the law courts of the newly established democratic assemblies of Sicily and Greece. The most important factor to be noted from this claim to an origin is that rhetoric emerges as a discipline at the same time as the political form or system of democracy replaces the earlier monarchies and oligarchies of the heroic age” (Reading the Law, 172). Note that Goodrich has altered the narrative about the genesis of rhetoric, for instead of attributing rhetoric's beginnings to a person, Korax, Goodrich posits that the beginning is the “emerg[ence] of a discipline,” as if a school of rhetoric accompanies the story of Korax’s emergence as a speaker (the school comes later). Another reading of this Korax episode comes from Gerald Bruns: “The overthrow of tyranny produced democracy, which conferred the right to speak on everyone, but Korax saw that with everyone talking and no one being heard, no one had dominion. It is in the midst of democratic clamour that Korax rises and persuades the crowd to be silent. Moreover, he teaches others how to do the same. In fact, Korax had been counselor to the tyrants. The whole lesson of rhetoric, it turns out, is not how to speak but how to render others speechless” (Bruns 1984, 29). In Bruns’s view, rhetoric is not at first about democracy, heterogeneity, heteroglossia, the airing of competing viewpoints, but the moment when the majority becomes silent so that another voice, one voice, can be heard. This angle on rhetoric permeates hundreds of years of medieval handbooks devoted to the artes praedicandi. Furthermore, Korax’s movement from counselor to the tyrants to democratic hero might need rethinking. Today, we might call a person like Korax a career civil servant, someone who manages to attach himself to power regardless of who is in control.
As a way to capture the salient features of this intersection of hermeneutics and rhetoric, the reader could conjure up the differences in biblical hermeneutics between Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Maimonides believes that biblical interpretation should reside with a small group of insiders and be kept out of the hands of “the vulgar,” meaning the masses. He emphasizes scripture’s obscurity and opacity. Maimonides insists that a puzzled reader or listener requires keys to locks that can be provided only by hierophants. On the other side of this divide is Spinoza, who advocates that scriptural interpretation could be achieved by anyone willing to learn some biblical history and the original languages. Interpretation need not depend upon a select group with special standing within the religion. Spinoza also dispenses with the notion of divine authorship. Spinoza insists that the authors of scripture were flawed human beings without special authority or knowledge of God. When one encounters a particularly odd or difficult scriptural passage (skandalon), Spinoza recommends an immanent reading. Other parts of scripture might illuminate the odd or puzzling part. In a sense, Spinoza endorses a view that scripture is self-interpreting. Current scholarship on the matter, particularly the work of Jonathan Israel, credits Spinoza with democratizing impulses in the category of hermeneutics and rhetoric, though those impulses came at a price for Spinoza and his followers.
Interpretation of scripture remains a primary concern of many students of hermeneutics. Conflicts of interpretation over what counts as scripture constitute one of the more painful intersections of hermeneutics and rhetoric. One need only recall the Inquisition, the Reformation, or contemporary declarations of jihad. More advanced students of biblical hermeneutics will be familiar with the contributions of Maimonides, Spinoza, Martin Luther, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Rudolf Bultmann, Gillian Rose, Regina Schwartz, and John Milbank—to list only a few. Martin Heidegger’s Catholicism, according to some scholars, influenced Heidegger’s approach to hermeneutics, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s student, published Truth and Method in 1960. That work has become a rich source for many people to rethink scriptural interpretation. Fans of Gadamer’s Truth and Method sometimes cite Gadamer’s inclusive approach to thinking about how understanding takes place, how one gains experience, where experience does not mean only an encounter with scripture, but also could apply to an encounter with the law, with a work of art, with another person.
Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one forces me to do so. This is the parallel to the hermeneutical experience. I must allow tradition's claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. Someone who is open to tradition in this way sees that historical consciousness is not really open at all, but rather, when it reads its texts “historically,” it has always thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand, so that the criteria of the historian's own knowledge can never be called into question by tradition. Recall the naïve mode of comparison that the historical approach generally engages in. The 25th “Lyceum Fragment” by Friedrich Schlegel reads: “The two basic principles of so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the commonplace and the axiom of familiarity. The postulate of the commonplace is that everything that is really great, good, and beautiful is improbable, for it is extraordinary or at least suspicious. The axiom of familiarity is that things must always have been just as they are for us, for things are naturally like this.” By contrast, historically effected consciousness rises above such naive comparisons and assimilations by letting itself experience tradition and by keeping itself open to the truth claim encountered in it.
(Gadamer 1989, 361)
Gadamer directs his readers to the importance of tradition, to appreciating one’s place in a world that one did not make, the debts one has to people who came before, to people one does not know and, in some cases, cannot know. A couple of years before his death, Gadamer said that “rhetoric is the overarching concept for everything that has to do with the other” (Gadamer 2005, 60).
Jean Grondin claims that “Gadamer’s thought is directed towards an understanding of rhetoric” (Grondin 2003b, 137). Much like Blumenberg, Gadamer speaks of rhetoric as an inherent part of the human condition: “Rhetoric belongs to being human” (Gadamer 2005, 49). In one sense, rhetoric signals human vulnerability in the face of continual conditions in which one does not know, in which one is at a loss, but not at a loss for words. Gadamer: “If the other misunderstands me, then I must speak differently until he understands me” (Gadamer 2005, 62). Rhetoric becomes a kind of discursive, improvised band-aid over the gap/wound, named “insufficient reason,” separating humans from certainty. For Gadamer, rhetoric shows us that “no one can have the last word” (Gadamer 2005, 60).