Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewCivic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature. Florian Fuchs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. Pp. 319.Bruce J. KrajewskiBruce J. KrajewskiUniversity of Texas at Arlington Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreStorytelling is human life’s mode of intelligibility. In Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy, Gerald Bruns says it is human life’s “only” mode.1 Stories, like texts, produce more meanings than we know what to do with. But are texts themselves agents of interpretation, of meaning, of action in general? Florian Fuchs wants his readers to think so. Let’s imagine this is Fuchs’s prima facie evidence: “Short forms [e.g., fables] draw us into their force field by demanding that we respond and react to what they signal and that we then cope with real-world issues on their behalf” (17).Everyday people living “everyday lives,” as Fuchs groups us in the same paragraph as the evidence above, will likely have a hard time with an inanimate object “demanding” anything, even if that thing is a fascinating fable. It becomes fascinating only when we everyday humans, the tellers, readers, performers, and makers of stories, engage with the fable, which Fuchs admits by the end of page 17: “Reading them [e.g., fables] renders the world inescapably present.”However, Fuchs wants texts to have “agency.” He asks us to believe that a fable is Schrödinger’s cat, a thing not seen, but somehow both dead and alive, inert and capable of agency simultaneously. Such is the talk of the university seminar rather than of the street, not that Fuchs is the first to use such discourse about literature. Stéphane Mallarmé precedes Fuchs in this line of discourse. See, for example, Hans Blumenberg’s chapter “The Empty World Book.”2 Blumenberg is a key authority for some of Fuchs’s theses, and in “The Empty World Book” chapter, Blumenberg reveals what happens when you play Mallarmé’s game to the end. We do not end up back at everyday life.Another key figure for Fuchs’s book is Aristotle, the Aristotle of the Topics, of commonplaces. In everyday life in much of the United States, it is common to come across pharmaceutical language, such as “Side effects of Chlofinetide are uncommon, and include headache, nausea, vomiting, death, etc.”3 Many readers will likely twig to this truncated list of side effects from pharmaceutical advertisements. The list takes a recognizable form, call it conventional. If you wanted, you could add more potential maladies from memory. You recognize this form’s existence, as Ralph Berry says, “not the way you would recognize an old acquaintance, but what must happen (or not) with a new government.”4 That is, this form calls for your attention as part of your relationship with Chlofinetide. You are supposed to act (call a doctor), if something happens during your interaction with the drug. Your life might depend on it.The form that you probably recognized is what Aristotle calls a topic. Aristotle’s musings on topics play a vital role in Civic Storytelling. Topoi are “places” from which arguments can be discovered or invented. In other words, topics orient an audience and offer bits to talk about. Topics are more than nutrition for arguments.In the Aristotelian tradition, topics also go by the name commonplaces—words, phrases, ideas, places that will be familiar to someone besides yourself. Things usually follow from bringing up a commonplace. It is why you might venture mentioning the weather when in a closed elevator with someone else. The weather throws open a topic for discussion. From weather, the other person might respond with a subtopic, say, rain, the wind, thunder, fog (if you happen to be visiting San Francisco).Fuchs extends philosopher Robin Smith’s 1997 commentary on the Topics5—from Smith’s evidence gathered from Aristotle’s Rhetoric—to have readers imagine the Topics “as a handbook conceived for discussions among all members of the polis” (38). But Fuchs is not happy with the open-endedness of that description. He has a less expansive vision in mind, though he claims it is Aristotle’s intention. Thus, a mere three sentences later, Fuchs constricts Aristotle’s intended audience to, at best, a few people: “the Topics had in mind a one-to-one discussion between a philosopher or expert and one or a few members of the public” (38).This uneven one-to-one exchange—remember Fuchs thinks it vital that the “philosopher or expert” lead the interaction—is modeled on the Socratic method. Fuchs ignores a long history of objections to this method, such as philosopher Kojin Karatani’s assertion in Transcritique that the Socratic method describes an asymmetrical relationship that is really a monologue by Socrates.6 We also have Melissa Lane’s essay on irony,7 which more than suggests that Socrates is a dissembler.Fuchs’s hope for civic storytelling is based on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, in which Arendt argues for a need to become human again, an achievement possible “through a form of narrating or storytelling that she labels the ‘enacted story.’” An “enacted story” is a melding of “knowledge, persuasion, fiction, and the speaker’s corporeal here and now” (215). Fuchs wants readers to follow Arendt’s lead, in part because he credits Arendt with resurrecting the ars topica—“the ars topica seen as a continuation of the original Socratic method” (216).For all the learning on display in Civic Storytelling, especially about argumentation, Fuchs refuses to pursue opposing voices in his tsunami of claims. Readers miss out on what Fuchs might have said, for instance, about some “experts” in political science who have engaged with Arendt. Two oppositional voices can be found—first, in J. Peter Euben’s Platonic Noise. Euben writes, “For all her glorification of Athenian politics Arendt is maddeningly elusive about what that politics was about.” Second, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin asks, “What does [Arendt] imagine as the content of political speech and action and why is this question so difficult to answer from her text?”8Granted, Fuchs would have had to go searching for those “experts,” but he also had an Arendt critic in his scholarly neighborhood: Hans Blumenberg. Fuchs sprinkles Blumenberg’s authority throughout Civic Storytelling (e.g., 105–6). However, Fuchs steers clear of the Blumenberg who derides Arendt. In Rigorism of Truth, reacting to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Blumenberg says that the Arendt who thanks an interviewer for addressing her as a political scientist instead of a philosopher “is completely insensitive to the political.”9 Yet Fuchs wants Arendt to be our political guide.One crucial thing to understand about Civic Storytelling is that the book postpones explaining its title until the end. The book’s largest chunk is devoted to Fuchs’s opening question: “Why did short narrative forms such as the novella, fable, and fairy tale suddenly, yet widely emerge throughout Europe and the Americas in the decades around 1800?” (9). For reasons that go unexplained, Fuchs sidesteps asking this same question of, say, ancient Greece, where one could encounter Heraclitus’s apothegms, the laconic discourse of Sparta, and Aesop’s fables. Now, Fuchs entertains Aesop in his book, but only to dismiss the original Aesop in favor of the Aesop’s “rediscovery” by Kleist and Hölderlin (69–71).The book’s best part is “Perception: The Fairy Tale as Topical Archive,” focused on Walter Benjamin. Unlike other chapters, Fuchs builds his case here with examples before making assertions. Fuchs traces Benjamin’s research into fairy tales, linking Benjamin’s scholarly work to his son. “[Benjamin] relived his own childhood by observing and documenting his son Stefan, spent a decade writing the various versions of the Berlin Childhood—a kind of autobiographical fairy tale book—studied infant phenomenology, wrote radio pays, riddles, and stories for children, as well as reviews of children’s books, puppets, and toys” (182). Benjamin’s studies caused him to think of fairy tales in the way a cook would a reduction. Over time, in countless retellings, fairy tales lose their connection to an author, to a geographical location, and extraneous parts of the tale fall away, leaving behind the narrative’s core.The book’s least successful section is the commentary on Hito Steyerl, innovator of the essay documentary. Fuchs presents Steyerl’s views as unquestionable truths. For instance, Fuchs remarks that Steyerl has noticed a “problem”: “a general discontent with fiction” (227). A global discontent? Can we verify the matter, say, through polls, by data about widespread declining sales of fiction? Has literacy plummeted? What about academia’s contribution to the “problem” by classes in “creative nonfiction,” aka alternative facts? Fuchs avoids engaging Steyerl in the kind of Socratic dialogue he champions via Arendt.Surprisingly, Fuchs foresees world-changing possibilities emerging from Steyerl’s work, then describes her method “as working toward ‘finding ways to improve situations’” (234). Improve them how? Where? How will she judge when the improvements have taken place? Who will benefit? In any event, based on Fuchs’s commentary, Steyerl is not suggesting undoing capitalism, or directing people to a particular political movement.Knowledge of ars topica, of “enacted stories,” of civic storytelling—none of these will save the day, any more than they could for the notorious philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had an affair with Arendt, Heidegger’s student in the 1920s. Heidegger taught numerous seminars on Aristotle, a sage about rhetoric and audiences, prior to World War II, and Heidegger still couldn’t read the room in National Socialist Germany. In 1945, when the de-Nazification committee of Albert Ludwig University deposed Heidegger, he said: “I am cognizant how much hangs upon … the manner of my speech itself, which has generally been reputed of obscure and impenetrable idiom… . The prospect is even more daunting as I am overwhelmed by how unequal I am to the task at hand, since it is clear that all explanations I have hitherto rendered have fallen short of the mark of persuasion.”10Notes1. Gerald L. Bruns, Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 71.2. Hans Blumenberg, The Readability of the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), 250–70.3. Chloefinetide is not an actual drug, but is an invention for illustrative purposes.4. Ralph M. Berry, “In Which Henry James Strikes Bedrock,” Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 1 (April 1997): 61.5. Aristotle, Topics: Books I and VIII, trans. Robin Smith (Oxford University Press, 1997).6. Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 68–69.7. Melissa Lane, “The Evolution of Eirōneia in Classical Greek Texts,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 31 (Winter 2006): 53–54.8. J. Peter Euben, Platonic Noise (Princeton University Press, 2003), 41. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 337.9. Hans Blumenberg, Rigorism of Truth: “Moses the Egyptian” and Other Writings on Freud and Arendt, ed. Ahlrich Meyer, trans. Joe Paul Kroll (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 47.10. Michael A. Peters, Heidegger, Education, and Modernity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 28. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/727673 Views: 51Total views on this site HistoryPublished online September 28, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewStanley Cavell. Here and There: Sites of Philosophy, ed. Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary, and Sandra Laugier. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2022. 336 pp.Bruce J. KrajewskiBruce J. Krajewski Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 49, Number 2Winter 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722418 Views: 102Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewHans Blumenberg. St. Matthew Passion. Trans. Helmut Müller-Sievers and Paul Fleming. New York: Cornell University Press, 2021. 246 pp.Bruce J. KrajewskiBruce J. Krajewski Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 49, Number 1Autumn 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721174 Views: 65Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“Who died and made you king?” Many philosophers and followers of Plato will, without blinking, respond that Plato made them philosopher-kings. Some disciples of Plato acknowledge that this position can be embarrassing. Thus, we have texts like Jonny Thakkar's Plato as Critical Theorist, which struggles to justify philosophers as rulers by squeezing Plato's assertions under Lady Liberty's aegis, as if they had been part of her inclusive couture all along. Parallel projects to keep Plato as high priest include jettisoning the philosopher-king model while peddling the eminence of a Platonic process; say, the Socratic method. For example, Jill Frank in Poetic Justice reads the Republic (577a) as a repudiation of philosopher-kings in favor of people who want a little informed “conversation” with those “awakened to reflection.” The “awakened” seem to include gentle souls like Wayne Booth but not critics of Plato like Kojin Karatani, who denies that Plato and Socrates converse. In Transcritique, Karatani rejects the notion of Platonic “dialogues.” Karatani calls works like the Republic “dramatic monologues,” where Socrates gets to set up the rules for interaction, and woe awaits anyone who contradicts himself or Socrates.Tae-Yeoun Keum's book falls into the second category in Plato fandom. She is interested in process, in how Plato uses myths. That is the first portion of her work. The second portion lays out a history of great thinkers who modeled their political treatises on a myth-enriched Plato. She accomplishes her task in a thorough and unabrasive fashion. Keum's extraction and examination of myths from the Republic sometimes seem like teeth floating in water on a nightstand where an elderly scholar might also place spectacles; we obtain thereby a new perspective on the topic. Recognizing that myths “may be much more deeply entrenched in our way of life than we might think,” Keum balks at the interpretive tradition that insists Plato's is “a rational and critical enterprise divorced from myth.”As one of her guides for reconnecting Plato's myths to the Republic's aims, Keum turns to Hans Blumenberg, a key philosopher who argues that mythos and logos are synonyms. For Blumenberg myth counts as a response to a primal scene of terror. Myth is a rational response to questions that do not, at first, have answers. Keum: “Philosophy's reliance on mythological expressions revealed a deeper need to impart meaning to reality through narratives that are reworked, time and again, to frame the unfamiliar and inexplicable in terms of the familiar and significant.” Myths depend on topoi, commonplaces that feel comfortable. Keum is attuned to the role figuration plays in politics. Thus she is swimming against the scholarly tide that wants to rinse philosophy and politics clean of elements that seem to contribute to opacity or to irrationality. Keum advocates “an inclusive stance on what counts as philosophical writing,” so that Plato's myths remain part of the Platonic corpus. Her faith in pluralism might appear admirable—ill will is not a characteristic of Keum's book—but needs to be juxtaposed to some work off of Keum's radar. For example, it would be illuminating had Keum's lengthy consideration of Ernst Cassirer, including Cassirer's famous meeting with Martin Heidegger in Davos in 1929, been juxtaposed to Geoff Waite's reading of that meeting (see Political Theory, October 1998). With Waite in the picture, Keum could have leaned into Heidegger's statement: “The ‘doctrine’ of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying.” Even after parsing Plato's myths with care, we are still not at the “doctrine.”

When Klemperer's diaries became public in the 1990s, editors mostly excluded the material about film to keep the publication a manageable size. This new edition restores entries from between June 1929 and April 1945 with a focus on what Klemperer describes as one of his “addictions”—watching movies. Film scholars will be happy to have Klemperer's glosses on films both famous and forgotten. Almost everyone knows The Blue Angel, but not The Three from the Filling Station (1930), which outgrossed it at the box office. Klemperer despises the first talkies in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Awful (scheusslich) is his word for them—as jarring, he says, as a voice coming from a burning bush. He finds them disturbingly artificial and argues that film must become an expressive art, like ballet, and be carried by music, or else it will become an obnoxious dead mechanism (and disgusting as well).This edition includes more than Klemperer's reports on his avid film-going. Some of them are quite personal. An entry for 1931 concerns how “helpless” his partner Eva's severe depression has left him feeling. That same year, he reports the torment “that I have grown old and no longer have any career prospects” as a scholar. It may be that the social and political context of Klemperer's life will attract the most readers. By the first part of 1933, Klemperer was already writing: “I will never trust Germany again.” It was in 1933 that he realized Hindenburg was a puppet and that Hitler was being recast by newspapers as a “statesman” and “genial diplomat.” By the end of 1938, all “non-Aryans” were banned from cinemas, and despite his self-identification as a Protestant, Klemperer was classified as a Jew. Matters grew, as the Germans say, immer schlimmer, worse and worse. During the horrific bombing of Dresden in mid-February 1945, Eva and Victor were able to escape from the city. They tore the Jewish star from their clothes and disappeared into the crowd. A few days later, at a soldier's invitation, they were in Klotzsche, north of central Dresden, in a movie theater, watching Das war mein Leben (That Was My Life).

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewHans Blumenberg. History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader. Trans. Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll. New York: Cornell University Press, 2020. 609 pp.Bruce J. KrajewskiBruce J. Krajewski Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 47, Number 4Summer 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/714515 Views: 187Total views on this site For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Research Article| April 01 2019 Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage by Hans Blumenberg Blumenberg, Hans, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Savage, Robert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 152 pp. Bruce Krajewski Bruce Krajewski Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2019) 25 (1-3): 423–424. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7312333 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bruce Krajewski; Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage by Hans Blumenberg. Common Knowledge 1 April 2019; 25 (1-3): 423–424. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7312333 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| January 01 2017 Der lange Sommer der Theorie: Geschichte einer Revolte, 1960–1990 Felsch, Philipp, Der lange Sommer der Theorie: Geschichte einer Revolte, 1960–1990. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015), 327 pp. Bruce Krajewski Bruce Krajewski Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2017) 23 (1): 111. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3692405 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bruce Krajewski; Der lange Sommer der Theorie: Geschichte einer Revolte, 1960–1990. Common Knowledge 1 January 2017; 23 (1): 111. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3692405 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 by Duke University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Chapter 7 Hermeneutics and Politics Bruce Krajewski, Bruce KrajewskiSearch for more papers by this author Bruce Krajewski, Bruce KrajewskiSearch for more papers by this author Book Editor(s):Niall Keane, Niall KeaneSearch for more papers by this authorChris Lawn, Chris LawnSearch for more papers by this author First published: 23 October 2015 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118529812.ch7Citations: 1 AboutPDFPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShareShare a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Summary Interpretation and politics merge in one the famous story of Joseph's power of dream interpretation in the Hebrew Bible. Rome's College of Augurs reinforces the entwinement of interpretation, power, religion, and folklore that one can also find in the earlier context of the Delphic Oracle. Augury reminds us that understanding happens in the context of an event, a context that presupposes one is missing something, lacking the necessary vision or foresight, and help is called for. Most of the contemporary scholars who write about philosophical hermeneutics, the tradition which includes Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, are allergic to politics in the proletarian sense of that word. Party politics and parliamentarian procedures receive almost no attention in the secondary literature on contemporary hermeneutics. Assertion about the political incompetence of philosophy opens the door to an esoteric tradition in philosophy that includes Plato's "secret doctrine", and stretches back to Pythagoras and Heraclitus. References Biemel, Walter and Hans Saner (1990) Martin Heidegger-Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel: 1920–1963, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Google Scholar Blumenberg, Hans (1987) " An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric," in After Philosophy, ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Scholar Bruns, Gerald (1989) Heidegger's Estrangements, New Haven: Yale University Press. Google Scholar Bruns, Gerald (1984) " Figuration in Antiquity," in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Google Scholar Cavell, Stanley (2012) " Stanley Cavell on Close Listening," https://jacket2.org/commentary/stanley-cavell-close-listening. Google Scholar Cavell, Stanley (2010) Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 10.1515/9780804775083 Google Scholar Cavell, Stanley (1994) A Pitch of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar Fried, Gregory (2000) Heidegger's Polemos: From Being to Politics, New Haven: Yale University Press. 10.12987/yale/9780300080384.001.0001 Google Scholar Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1992) " The Political Incompetence of Philosophy," in The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics, 364–370, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Google Scholar Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1989) "Back from Syracuse?" Critical Inquiry, 15.2: 427–430. 10.1086/448491 Web of Science®Google Scholar Grondin, Jean (2003) Gadamer: A Biography, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Google Scholar Heidegger, Martin (1986) Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 15, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Google Scholar Karatani, Kojin (2003) Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 10.7551/mitpress/6897.001.0001 Google Scholar Krajewski, Bruce (2011) "The Dark Side of Phronēsis: Revisiting the Political Incompetence of Philosophy," Classica (Brazil) 24.1/2: 7–21. 10.14195/2176-6436_24_1 Google Scholar Marder, Michael (2010) " Political Hermeneutics, or Why Schmitt is Not the Enemy of Gadamer," in Consequences of Hermeneutics, ed. Jeff Malpas and Santiago Zabala, 306–323, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Google Scholar Rosen, Stanley (1987) Hermeneutics as Politics, New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar Schmidt, Dennis (2008) " Hermeneutics as Original Ethics," in Difficulties of Ethical Life, ed. Dennis Schmidt and Shannon Sullivan, New York: Fordham University Press. Google Scholar Strauss, Leo (1952) Persecution and the Art of Writing, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Google Scholar Swindal, James (2012) " Review of Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx," in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Sept. 4 (http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/33022-hermeneutic-communism-from-heidegger-to-marx/). Google Scholar Vattimo, Gianni and Santiago Zabala (2011) Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, New York: Columbia University Press. Google Scholar Waite, Geoff (2004) " Salutations: A Response to Zuckert," in Gadamer's Repercussions, ed. Bruce Krajewski, 256–306, Berkeley: University of California Press. Google Scholar Waite, Geoff (1996) Nietzsche's Corps/e, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Google Scholar Žižek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso. Web of Science®Google Scholar Citing Literature A Companion to Hermeneutics ReferencesRelatedInformation

Continental philosophers and their followers seem to be, for the most part, untroubled by the machinations, lies, political accommodations, inactions, and ethical breaches by major figures in that tradition. This does not lead to recognition of irony by the scholars who then recommend these major figures as guides for ethics. Catherine Zuckert goes so far as to that “philosophical dialogue and textual hermeneutics are essentially ethical” (GR, 234). Cavell has chosen to declare an ethics as well. The theme of “moral perfectionism” that one can find in many of Cavell’s books, particularly the works dealing with the repositioning of Thoreau and Emerson, is part of an ongoing project to locate something “American” in concerns about “moral perfectionism” and the everyday. We even have a book about what “Christians might learn from [Cavell].” Stanley Bates can serve as a representative of a chorus of writers who not only embrace Cavell as someone presenting an ethical viewpoint, but who also have become proponents of that viewpoint. Bates has no hesitation in claiming on Cavell’s behalf a connection between ethics and politics: “Cavell is interested in the dimension of moral life that must be lived by an individual within a political setting, a life that a ‘good enough’ state of political justice makes possible, but that is not, and cannot be, determined by rules” (SCE, 42-43). Bates ends his essay by telling us that in at least one important way, Cavell is like Nietzsche, and it seems as if Bates intends that to be a positive comparison. Bates seems free of any knowledge of Nietzsche’s posthumous “political setting” in the National Socialist period.

While finding material to admire in The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic, I present a trio of significant presuppositions within Professor Kastely’s text in order to show that they are wrong, or, at least, questionable. It’s difficult to imagine a reader of his book who could deny the author’s profound concern for justice, for example. However, the misguided, well-intentioned can, at times, be a greater danger than obvious opponents bent on our demise. It will become clear that Kastely and I work in the same state, but do not live in the same political neighborhood.What interests Kastely from the opening pages of his text is “the philosophical importance of rhetoric” (ix). Now, this runs smack into extensive evidence in Håkan Tell’s Plato’s Counterfeit Sophists. Tell’s homework reveals that the distinction between philosophers and Sophists did not exist in fifth-century texts. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle worked overtime to establish distinctions, to set boundaries, and to insist on a hierarchy of disciplines that persists with Kastely’s help.It’s an ugly story we get from Tell. The philosophers were here first—according to the philosophers. The lie about chronology is compounded by a charge that the Sophists are interlopers in Athens, interested in filthy lucre instead of the truth. The Athenian philosophers decide to stain the Sophists, for example, through defamatory stories that the foreigners “hunt” the young men of Athens, and, like prostitutes, charge money for interactions with the young men. The self-proclaimed philosophers’ counteroffer to the young, aristocratic men is a life that might be less than human. Gerald Bruns describes the philosophical life meant to function as a model for disciples of Athenian philosophy, what one can expect by renouncing sophistry: “Socrates, barefoot in the snow, standing for hours in meditation without the slightest bother, drinking the night through without getting drunk, spending the night in bed with the most beautiful man in Athens without getting an erection” (Bruns 14).The launching pad for Kastely’s text requires an acceptance of a several preconditions, such as that Socrates and Plato endorse dialogue and dialectic. My counterproposal, following Kojin Karatani, is that Plato’s dialogues, while looking for world-like conversations, are monologic (Karatani, 69). Many rhetoricians know that the dialogues turn out to be long stretches of Socrates speaking followed by an interlocutor’s response of panu ge, or something similar, phrases that are usually read as ongoing agreement, reluctant or otherwise.Kastely issues contradictory statements on the topic. At one point, Socrates exhibits “gentleness” (81, 113, 114), but in other contexts is said to shame interlocutors. At other points, Kastely offers evidence that Plato/Socrates hold audiences in contempt through various depictions that refer to the public as children, sheep, or worse (see Republic 488b, 590e–591a, 598c, and Kastely 42, 117, 180, and 189).Nancy Worman asserts: “The language that characterizes Socrates and his opponents shares more with the kind of parodic, insulting usage found in mimes, Attic comedy, and oratorical invective than it does with historical prose writing that depicts public speakers” (Worman 154). Platonic exchanges tend to denigrate and reconfigure interlocutors who do not accept the rules of the game set out by the philosophers (Karatani, 70).The philosopher Hans Blumenberg contends that the philosophical insult extends over the Republic: “The viewers of the ideal [thinking here of the figure who leaves the cave and then returns as representative of philosophy], the owners of the actual, have constantly found it easier to deride others who wanted to see with their own eyes than to show them what they could gain if they ceased to want only what is available physically” (Blumenberg 20).We have no shortage of scholars who want to read the Republic straight, adding in, where hermeneutical problems crop up, excuses about “Socratic irony.” Anyone working with Platonic texts ought to be aware of evidence pointing toward a deliberate Platonic agenda of esotericism described in the Seventh Letter. Plato: “We did not use such plain language as this—it was not safe to do so—but we succeeded by veiled allusions in maintaining the thesis that every man who would preserve himself and the people he rules must follow this course, and that any other will lead to utter destruction” (332d). In the same letter, Plato more than suggests a hermeneutical method that anticipates esotericism whenever a reader encounters a text by someone “serious,” and Plato fashioned himself “serious” (see 344 c & d in the letter).Arthur Melzer confirms Plato’s esoteric elitism (Melzer 21), using 341e as the proof text. I do not propose that Kastely has missed the boat on Plato’s esotericism, though some evidence points that way, such as the comment that Plato does not have a “fixed position he is trying to disguise” (35), or a line about those who “whisper in the ear of power” (17). Kastely then constricts options to an either/or: “This leads to a stark choice: either philosophy reconciles itself to being an esoteric form of discourse, persuasive only to a very limited number of practitioners and hence irrelevant to political life, or it discovers a way to speak to the multitude who are not philosophers.” Plato did not intend to make philosophy’s code “open source.” Kastely writes, “The philosopher becomes politically active in response to human need. If this seems like a convoluted understanding of philosophy, it is helpful to remember that it is an account of philosophy intended to explain to a non-philosophic audience the peculiar and privileged authority that should be granted to philosophy to rule” (155).Kastely: “The allegory of the cave establishes the legitimacy of philosophic rule—it is the tale of a humble and reluctant king who is moved by a sense of social responsibility to assume a burden of leadership for the benefit of a people” (141). Kastely feels that he cannot have his rhetoric without marrying rhetoric to philosophy, naming philosophy master of the household and asking rhetoric to sign a prenuptial agreement. “There’s a need for an unequal distribution of power in the city” (91), Kastely asserts. Kastely’s “heroes” are philosophers, in part because “philosophy, as Plato imagined it, is an arduous pursuit that requires a rare combination of intellectual ability and tremendous stamina of which few are capable” (xv). From Kastely’s perspective, you and I are here to obey the practitioners of esotericism. We are the “they” of this sentence: “They need to obey rulers, even if they do not fully understand them” (133).Thus, I conclude with a question that discloses my political neighborhood, one illegal in the United States since 1954. The question comes from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (15.4): “It must be stressed that it is precisely the first elements, the most elementary things, that are the first to be forgotten…. In the development of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which the necessity of the existence of this division disappears?”