This paper pays tribute to Thomas Jennings Pace, whose teaching and scholarship in the philosophy of communication left a lasting mark on those fortunate enough to study with him. Drawing on the intellectual traditions Pace transmitted across decades of teaching, the paper explores three interlocking philosophical frameworks central to his work: the General Semantics tradition of Elwood Murray, with its concern for self-reflexiveness and the dangers of runaway feedback loops in human thinking; the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, particularly his embodied account of perception and language; and the largely underappreciated Continental philosophy of speech of Georges Gusdorf, whose Speaking positioned authentic human communication as an ontological and ethical act. Together, these traditions illuminate a distinctly “Pacean” vision of speech as simultaneously human science and rhetorical art.
This essay explores relational pedagogy through a phenomenology of relational encounter, emphasizing attentive listening and sustained presence as central to human connection. Drawing on the life, writings, and mentorship of my father, Communication professor Thomas Jennings Pace, Jr., I examine his framework for “moving closer together,” a guiding approach to relational engagement that developed across his life. His philosophy of communication was realized as a praxis grounded in curiosity, attentiveness, and intersubjective openness, creating space to engage with and recognize the perspectives and experiences of those he encountered. Experiencing his distinctive approach and way of relating to others shaped my own way of being, which continues to inform how I mentor and build relationships with students. Through narrative accounts from his life and after his death, the essay traces how relational pedagogy unfolds, offering opportunities for mutual recognition and understanding to sustain our shared humanity.
The contributions of Thomas J. Pace to my scholarship, teaching, and view of Communicology are many and varied. As a scholar of General Semantics, Dr. Pace introduced me to Alfred Korzybski’s concepts of the un-speakable and the speakable, which Lanigan systematized as the tropes of asyndeton (the nameless voice) and prosopopoeia (the voiceless name). I have used these concepts in several articles/publications. I also had many discussions with Dr. Pace regarding the structural differential and subsequently used this concept to introduce the General Semantics concept of abstraction in courses such as Interpersonal Communication and Introduction to Communicology. The General Semantics concept of the real (expressed in such aphorisms as, “the map is not the territory,” and “the word is not the thing”) also contributed to my initial understanding of Karl Jaspers’ concept of the cypher. Further, Dr. Pace introduced me to Rolf von Eckartsberg’s existential-phenomenological research and specifically life-world interviews, which I continue to use in my teaching. In my paper, I will discuss these concepts and practices and how they helped shape my own Communicology.
This essay is intended to commemorate the life and teaching of Thomas Jennings Pace, my teacher and a dear friend. He preferred to be addressed as Tom, though he is regarded as something of a parental figure to many graduate students of communication at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He initiated me into the philosophy of communication and set me on a path exploring its many fruitful applications in the human science of communicology. Here, I trace some of the origins of my research to their foundations in Tom’s pedagogy.
This article serves as an homage to my former teacher and mentor, Dr. Thomas Jennings Pace, in the doctoral program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in the Philosophy of Communication program. I trace my interpersonal encounters with Tom over the years to my own research and teaching trajectory. I claim that Tom’s way of being-in-the-world prompted me to focus on the important events of speaking in their originary, aesthetic modes of articulation. I chronicle my research on the aesthetics of communication and the relevance of the sounding voice to Tom’s example as an event of speaking.
Several years ago, I read an opinion piece in a college newspaper where the student writer called for suppressing free speech because it was harmful, or worse, hateful. The article’s title was “Hate Speech vs. Freedom of Speech.” The writer’s opinion exhibited a trend growing in higher education that free speech and free expression were somehow anti-American and anti-education. It is precisely this sentiment that Jordi Pujol’s book, The Collapse of Freedom of Expression, addresses. This review essay engages explicitly with chapter two of Pujol’s book and freedom of expression in higher education today. Today’s freedom of expression on college campuses is one step removed from the larger public sphere, which bears on the future of democracy. However, this future may be imperiled by how America’s students engage with freedom of expression in their educational environments. Indeed, Pujol suggests, “Freedom of expression is one of the most emblematic buildings on the skyline of democracy” and “Threats to a building’s integrity can come from external actors or from internal flaws in construction.” Often, the cultures that create drastic societal changes have their foundations in education environments, where ideas germinate. Sorting the outside forces from the subversive actors can be difficult given that education encourages change and growth, sometimes at the risk of threat to its own survival.
The modern social, political, and legal concept of free speech traces its roots to the classical liberalism of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke (1632-1704), Adam Smith (1723-1790), Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), and others. Classical liberalism, with its understanding of free speech, individual liberty, economic freedom, and the rule of law, has been an important shaper of the United States in particular and Western democracy in general. However, these concepts have not remained static. Each historical moment brings about a re-examining and renegotiating of these principles. Our current historical moment is no exception to this. Many of the “culture wars” over the last twenty years have centered around questions around the intersection between sincerely held religious beliefs and freedom of speech.
If you are anything like me, you might imagine the “public sphere” and the “private sphere” similar to the self-monitored dynamic of “private thoughts” or “public thoughts.” Private thoughts are meant for us and no one else. If we shared them, they would often lead to embarrassment and possibly other consequences. Public thoughts, in comparison, we can communicate without harm socially; these are self-decided and monitored. This, but on a larger than personal scale, might have been the goal of the public sphere in France and America, but that’s not what happened. Pujol instructs that the American and French stories of Jefferson and Locke place the natural law of the land as the decider and not the individual. This leads to a singularity of discourse where Pujol states that “Arendt saw human plurality (equality and differentiation) as the basic condition for both action and discourse”. Neutrality and plurality of voice are essential to a free discourse, the public sphere of communication as currently understood has instead a positivistic imposition and singularity.
For secular and religious communicators alike, the interplay of faith and reason has been an ongoing topic of deliberation. Interest in these themes continues in Jordi Pujol’s The Collapse of Freedom of Expression: Reconstructing the Ancient Roots of Modern Liberty in the context of a crisis of listening and a chaos of speech in the public sphere. Pujol’s project explores the meaning of free speech and freedom of expression to identify the boundaries and limits of these terms and to understand how we might navigate the extremes that arise. In particular, the book analyzes external and internal threats to freedom of expression: censorship and ideological imposition, respectively. The latter is relevant to Chapter 19, “Repairing the Relationship between the Secular and the Sacred,” which focuses on the role of religion in contemporary problems of free speech. Pujol acknowledges that many controversial issues involve religious voices today, with implications on our understanding of faith and reason. After reviewing Pujol’s call to reintegrate faith and reason, this essay points to dialogic courage and tenacious hope as communicative virtues that can aid in fruitful friendship between the secular and sacred in the public sphere.
Jordi Pujol’s book, The Collapse of Freedom of Expression: Reconstructing the Ancient Roots of Modern Liberty 1, is situated within the larger conversation of free speech. For example, conversations of free speech usually fall within the categories of government, religion, media, and culture. However, Pujol focuses his argument surrounding the historical, philosophical and theological perspectives of free speech and how understanding it from these perspectives provides alternative modes of engaging with each other. This article outlines his arguments in Chapter 7, “A Fabricated Notion of Tolerance,” which is focused on the notion of tolerance. Then, it explores the connection of tolerance to communication ethics. This chapter continues the conversation of the liberal tradition of freedom of expression and potential contradiction that this tradition poses. Pujol outlines two definitions of the idea of tolerance and provides implications for each definition. This article concludes by connecting Pujol’s argument of tolerance to communication ethics.
This article is an extended discussion of Jordi Pujol’s chapter “Reframing Freedom of Expression as A Human Good” in his book The Collapse of Freedom of Expression. Pujol proposes that human good is the one, if not the only, pedestals on what he calls as freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is tied to the human good in a way that the human good should be expressed through the freedom of expression and vice versa. We call it “freedom of expression” because it promotes the good for Others. If there is no good for Others, then it is not the freedom of expression.
