Speaking Hermeneutically: Understanding in the Conduct of a Life (review)

In the 1996 film “Jerry Maguire,” the character of Dorothy Boyd, played by Renée Zellweger, says “You had me at ‘hello.’” I feel the same way about John Arthos’s text, Speaking Hermeneutically: Understanding in the Conduct of a Life. In many cases, a book’s title is a nugget of things to come and a promise to be fulfilled. For this text, the title says so much more, because it creates a stance that John Arthos upholds and strengthens through each of the book’s three parts. From the Preface to the Afterward, he patiently, not laboriously, shares his vision for a world where the canons of rhetoric meet hermeneutic interpretation and intertwine to form something new, something interesting, and certainly something useful, as we think about the mediated life of reader and the rhetorical text in today’s world.

In 1979, in an essay in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Michael J. Hyde and Craig R. Smith noted that the link between rhetoric and hermeneutics had not been sufficiently explored. And in these last thirty years the quantity of scholarship on this topic continues to be thin. Arthos’s work goes far to push these two disciplines in a direction of continued collaboration through clear historical textual analysis and illustration. But first things first.

Arthos provides the reader with an introduction that both sets the stage for his thinking and explores some of the opposition that rhetoric and hermeneutics, as a joint effort, have faced over the years in academic circles. He moves from Gadamer to Dante to Hegel to illuminate the historical back matter for the story of these two foundations: rhetoric and hermeneutics. The introduction is a light touch, just enough to catch us up so we can jump in and join Arthos on his journey toward understanding the role of hermeneutics as a humanist practice.

Arthos spends Part 1 of the book rigorously illuminating and considering three texts: the Battle of Gettysburg and the rhetoric surrounding that historical event, including Lincoln’s speech; Anthony Trollope’s English novel Dr. Wortle’s School; and the late Renaissance rhetorician Pierre’s Charron’s piece on prudence. He interweaves these pieces with ideas from scholars of hermeneutics like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hans George Gadamer to form a circling or overlapping of each text to seek clarifications that “show how hermeneutic subversion of the reader-text dualism is already present” (45) in rhetorical and humanist culture. His analysis here is clear and illuminating and the foundation of his argument throughout the book.

Part 2 is bookended with a thorough exploration of two hermeneutic underpinnings, the circular structure that threads throughout hermeneutic philosophy, and the meaning of the language of textuality, with several examples of how these underpinnings work. Specifically, I found the section that explored Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” to be an important contribution to the book, because Arthos breaks down the political anxiety surrounding the historical event to explore clearly the narrative of the larger conversation of the rhetoric of abolition, the nexus of the speech act, and the hermeneutic “play” of the indeterminacy and amplification in a text. As Arthos notes, “Understanding is thus an event in being. The form of our relation to the world that emerges out of this circularity is what Gadamer calls hermeneutic experience”(63).

I think that one thing Arthos does particularly well is the exploration of hermeneutic finitude as a way of understanding the many facets of our world. Finitude, the very real condition of being human, of having a life that ends, grounds much of this appropriately placed final section of the book. Gadamer explores this notion of finitude in great depth in his work, but Arthos pulls out specific themes that speak to rhetorical tension. One example comes from a juxtaposition of Lincoln’s two inaugural addresses. The unstable meaning of a speech act in the present, as well as the...