Augustine for the Philosophers: The Rhetor of Hippo, the Confessions, and the Continentals

Epilogue

173 Calvin L. Troup ePilogue What makes Augustine a worthy interlocutor for rhetoric and philosophy of communication? The conversations among continental philosophers, Augustine, and present scholars remind us that old books are valuable not because they are old but because they introduce questions not otherwise available into considerations of present issues.1 These essays suggest remarkable philosophical consultations with Augustine on phenomenology , language, ethics, hermeneutics, and rhetoric. Summarizing Augustine’s philosophical usefulness, Karl Jaspers notes Augustine’s contributions regarding personal consciousness: his exploration of memory, his work on existential certainty and uncertainty, and his inquiry into temporality, all of which resonate with his hermeneutic studies.2 Furthermore, we are challenged by Augustine’s philosophical inclinations to open, extend, and expand thought and practice.3 Considering the problems of modernity, we begin to get a glimpse into why Augustine may serve us so well. To correct an error with a strong hold on popular consciousness demands much. And Augustine is disproportionately committed to practical philosophy; that is, he works rigorously from hermeneutics through rhetoric into practice.4 Therefore, this epilogue considers basic problems in modernity to which continental philosophy responds, discusses the role of hermeneutic phenomenology and rhetorical hermeneutics together as a constructive philosophical antidote to modernity , and recounts reasons why Augustine is formative for continental philosophers who are pertinent to ongoing work in hermeneutic phenomenology and rhetorical hermeneutics today.5 174 f Augustine for the PhilosoPhers Modernity, as a complex of dominant ideas and practices with which we have been living for several hundred years, is formidable. The continental scholars whose conversations with Augustine we consider in this volume are widely known for tracing the contours of modernity. They have long recognized the philosophical failures of modernity for human life, society, culture, and thought. each one grapples, in his or her own distinct way, with the philosophical vacancy of the modern age and seeks viable responses. Modernity is the metanarrative of which Jean-François Lyotard speaks in The Postmodern Condition, and he famously defines the “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”6 Reduced to a label, the banal duplication of “metanarrative” in critical literature ultimately reinforces the power of modernity, which careens on by sheer inertia without substantial ethos and without the ultimate philosophical ground it claims, but not without evil consequences. The historical conditions in which twentieth century continental philosophers worked—including two world wars and a worldwide depression —impressed upon them the evils of modernity. The woes they came to know had been known to people in previous ages, but modernity extended worldwide the degree, efficiency, and force of these woes and the atrocities perpetrated during the twentieth century. Like myriads of people living in europe at the time, they experienced and witnessed in person unmitigated pain and suffering wrought by the application of modernity’s core tenet: a belief in the supremacy of scientific methods and technological solutions. This highlights one of the basic problems of modernity, overextension: a presumption that methods of science and technology should be extended into all corners of existence and as the answers to all human questions. That is, modernity believes that humans can use scientific methods and techniques to “improve” the consciousness, conduct, and culture of other human beings. Daniel J. Boorstin explains, “By reasoning from the technological to the political and the social, we have been seduced into our own kind of mistaken, if prematurely encouraging, conclusions.” By way of example, he observes, “it may be within our power to provide a new kind of grain and so cure starvation in some particular place. But it may not be in our power to cure injustice anywhere, even in our own country, much less in distant places.”7 Boorstin suggests limits: We must learn, at the same time, to accept John Adams’ Law (that political wisdom does not significantly progress, that the problems of society, the problems of justice and government, are not now much more soluble than ePilogue f 175 they ever were, and hence the wisdom of the social past is never obsolete) while we also accept Arthur Clarke’s Law (that all technological problems are substantially soluble, that “anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough,” and hence the technological past is always becoming obsolete).8 But modernity, which can bear no rivals, rejects John Adams’ Law despite the fact that we...