Abstract
“A good philosophical education,” Robert Sokolowski has taught us,
must avoid artificial problems. It must address and clarify important things and distinguish them from one another. Moreover, a good philosophical education should clarify a lot of important things and … should not try to address grandiose problems … such as ‘Is there really an external world?’
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Notes
Robert Sokolowski, “Acquiring the Philosophical Habit,” Theology Today 44 (October 1987), 322.
E.g., Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), xiii. Hereafter cited as P,Q,&D.
Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 5.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 260. As I note in the main text, my essay is an extended reflection on this passage, with the goal of investigating a notion of rhetorical judging that I take from it. Thus, all phrases given in quotation marks but without a page reference, on the pages that follow, are from this passage.
Ibid.,261.
Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978), xv.
Ibid., xv.
Ibid., xvi.
Ibid., xvii, 65.
P,Q,&D.,ix.
A further limitation is occasioned by locating a phenomenology of communication within auditory in contrast to “signed” communication. This limitation is in keeping with phenomenological social science’s generally accepted orientation towards “participation observation.” Briefly stated, this means that investigators should limit themselves to studying phenomena for which they have evidence gained in lived experience. Analysis of the “intelligent persuasion” developed by communicators in, e.g., American Sign Language, may well uncover the same features as we find in this analysis of communicating by auditory rhetorical persons. But I am unprepared to participate in communicating within the ASL medium, and so I refrain from assuming such congruence.
Consideration of these reasons reveals an initial and a basic distinction between communicating and using language: communicating requires two activities that interact. Although we focus here on auditory communicating (speaking and hearing, always taken as mutually implicating), that also is so for writing and reading, or, touching and being touched. Language use, however, does not require hearing (etc.) what is used.If we consider language as the sedimentation of past communicating (as I do here) we take it as a product of dialogical practice, rather than as a thing given to us as a natural aspect of the world—such as mountains and the weather at the beginning of time, prior to changes in them wrought by practices devised in dialogical practice. Thus although language use does not require interactivity, any language which is used is founded on such activity. To ignore that founding would place language study in the situation Husserl analyzed in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (tr. D. Carr; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
Designating communicating as a “state of affairs” may seem odd. There are two precedents for this usage: Husserl notes in the “Prolegomena” to the Logical Investigations (tr. J. N. Findlay; New York: Humanities Press, 1970, § 62) that he uses “the words ‘objectivity,’ object,’ thing,’ [Sache] etc., always in the widest sense… an object of knowledge may as readily be what is real as what is ideal, a thing [Ding] or an event or a species or a mathematical relation, a case of being or of what ought to be.” (Cf. Experience and Judgment (ed. L. Landgrebe, tr. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), § 65).Emile Durkheim (in The Rules of Sociological Method, 8th ed., tr. S. A. Solovay and J. H. Mueller; New York: The Free Press, 1966) advises researchers to “treat social facts as things.” That advice is usually construed along positivistic lines, but joining Durkheim’s advice to Husserl’s usage suggests another, more phenomenological, reading: social “things” can be subject to analysis that is as rigorous and open to intersubjective validation as physical and formal “things,” or, as conceptual and sensory “states of affairs.”
“Picturing,” in P,Q,&D, 4.
John Brough noted, in discussion of this point, that not all visual picturing features resemblance. In other words, the extent to which “non-representational art” includes the second of the four elements that Sokolowski discusses—“something appreciated as pictured”—is minimal. Likewise, I would add, some auditory communicating that is more expository than rhetorical—more engaged in describing distinctions amenable to sensory evidence, than in persuading us of a proposed significance of those and other sorts of distinctions in a particular “predicament”—does include that second component. My analysis here, however, focuses on rhetorical judging, rather than expository picturing, and I argue that the second element (“something appreciated as pictured”) is minimally efficacious—even, not present—in that communicative activity.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid. The brief designations follow Sokolowski’s reference to “the picture, the pictured, and the one who takes something as a picture.”
Ibid. There is of course a visible object that emerges as I write, but that object is not “something pictured.” There is no “something pictured” in rhetorical judging because there is no “something appreciated as pictured” that would be acknowledged as an individual (a unified phenomenon) preceding this written object. Sokolowski notes that there is a “network of presences, absences, and displacements” that “must be philosophically unraveled” in regard to “pictorial structures” such as ideographs, maps, and diagrams that are not picturings (ibid., 23). Similarly, communicative objects that are constituted in written rather than sounded words, and that present accounts rather than pictures, need appropriate philosophical analysis which I do not undertake in this investigation.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 6.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and tr. D. E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 62.
I am thinking here of the recognition of Being and language as different resources in Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, and the tendency in recent theorizing to reduce the former to the latter. I have argued elsewhere that Husserl neglected the extent to which possibilities inherent in Being can be actualized in language, as well as in more palpable modes of engagement in the lifeworld. Heidegger (e.g., when claiming that “Language is the house of Being,” but also noting that “Thinking [silent judging] accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation.” (“Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 193) and Gadamer (e.g. when claiming that “Being that can be understood is language” (Truth and Method, ed. G. Barden and J. Cumming (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 432) preserve a distinction that is especially important when we seek to bring about changes in how we see and say.We stretch language—that is, exercise its poetic rather than deictic capacities— whenever the emergent objects in our communicative activity lack the second element of the four that Sokolowski identifies. If Being were not more commodious than language, however, we could not expand the actuality of the present by drawing creatively on possibilities inherent in Being. Although neglecting that commodiousness does not diminish it, that neglect (or denial) does diminish our abilities to propose alternative ways for human being which exceed present actualities. Wittgenstein’s well-known claim that the limits of our language are the limits of our world does not rule out the possibility of expanding those limits, through creatively engaging Being. On the other hand, in exploiting that commodiousness we are constrained by what Erazim Kohák calls the “hardness” or “recalcitrance” of “reality.” [Idea and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 175, 190].I would argue that Husserl’s non-conflation of the differences between language and Being and his awareness of both the enabling and constraining efficacy of Being, despite his (to my mind, unfortunate) neglect of communicative activity, provides a powerful alternative to the tendency, in much contemporary theory, of becoming enmeshed and even immersed in the status quo as it is present in language. For aspects of that argument, see “Noetic Insight and Noematic Recalcitrance,” in Phenomenology of the Noema, ed. J. J. Drummond and L. Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992) and “Realism and Idealism in the Kuhnian Account of Science,” in Phenomenology of Natural Science, ed. L. Hardy and L. Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992). Sokolowski strengthens that alternative by retaining Husserl’s focus upon “the affairs themselves” and emphasizing the importance of distinctions and differences in the details of “the affairs themselves,” if we are to investigate those affairs in depth.
P,Q,&D, 6.
Ibid., xiv.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
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Langsdorf, L. (1996). Everything is in the Detail: On the Humanness of Rhetorical Judging. In: Drummond, J.J., Hart, J.G. (eds) The Truthful and the Good. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1724-8_5
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