Albert B. Fernandez
Selected Papers from the 23rd Annual Conference of
the Association for Core Texts and Courses, April 2017
An excess of history is detrimental to life.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The theme of the 2017 conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses was “Bridging Divides, Crossing Borders, Community Building: Core Texts, Liberal Arts, College and the Human Voice.” That covers a lot, but it would seem that the divide to be bridged that is most manifest to those of us who teach core texts is the one between contemporary students and Western authors from before the Enlightenment, especially when it comes to moral and political discourse. “I don’t think that Socrates or Plato have anything to say to me,” is what I heard a student say not long ago. And this paper originated in a discussion at Shimer College in Chicago during which a member of the faculty expressed dismay at knee-jerk student repudiations of Aristotle’s qualified endorsement of slavery jn ancient Athens, which can be found in Book 2 of “The Philosopher’s” Politics. That colleague went on to suggest that our students should be provided with more historical background, which would place them in a better or more informed position for passing judgment on the political opinions of Aristotle. As an alternate way of responding to such student rejections of ancient minds, I proposed asking such students: “What would you say to Aristotle (who is present in this classroom)?” To be followed by “And, what do you suppose, based on Aristotle’s text, would be his response to you?” This paper maintains that the approach proposed by me is more likely to bridge the divide between the contemporary student or reader and the old books than historical contextualization.
“Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?” These are the opening lines of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers (3). Actually, there is a tradition, a long-evolving school of thought, that has been devoted to plumbing that well, to bridging the gap between the present and the ancient. It’s called “hermeneutics.” Hermeneutics answers to the deeply rooted desire to communicate with the long-dead ancestors, without misprision or distortion of what they had to say. To ask a student to attempt to converse with an author is very much within the tradition of hermeneutics, and could be said to capture its essence, or to adapt it for the classroom.
Hermeneutics is itself a deep well, going back at least to early Christians attempting to understand what they had begun to call “The Old Testament” in such a way that it would be reconciled with the Gospels. This art or science of interpretation, applied to Judaeo-Christian and eventually to pagan texts, came to be called “hermeneutics,” after the messenger god, Hermes. The awareness of a difference between the moral ideas and practices of the Hebrews and those of the Christians was the embryonic form of historical consciousness. Yes, the Greeks may be credited as the originators of historiography, but note how Plato and Aristotle, and even Herodotus and Thucydides, though they are aware of historical events, when they comment on someone’s teaching or opinion, always treat it as if it did not matter how long ago or how far away those ideas were conceived.
Of course there is value in historical contextualization, although some exponents of the “Great Books” type of core curriculum have claimed that “The Great Books teach themselves,” and the original Robert Maynard Hutchins curriculum for the University of Chicago excluded historical study from the undergraduate curriculum (and was not implemented largely because of opposition from the history department). Awareness of historical and philological knowledge helps to forestall the “presentist” fallacy, which can take several forms. Most often, presentism is based on an unexamined assumption that the ancestors were “folks just like us.” But presentism can also take the form of underscoring historical or cultural difference, while at the same time imposing gross caricature on the past. The paradigm of what we might call “snotty presentism” would be the Enlightenment philosophes who regarded Medieval Christendom as an aggregate of “superstitions” that reason had simply superseded. Today, the kind of presentism that is probably most often brought up is the application of our modern moral values and judgments to persons who lived in the distant past. It is also the most debated kind, since rejection of such transhistorical judgments implies rejection of their grounds, which may be upheld as natural law, international law, universal human rights, or common decency.
It is easy to come up with examples of the value of contextualization–historical, biographical, bibliographical . . To properly evaluate Aristotle’s conditional acceptance of slavery the student should know that in all civilizations, not just Western civilization, slavery was a well-established institution, a way of life; that the Athenian economy was utterly dependent on slavery; that slavery in Athens was a lot less harsh than in Sparta, and that, not just in Greece, slavery was the routine fate of prisoners of war, Indeed, such historical awareness makes it possible to see that Aristotle, in condemning the indiscriminate enslavement of war captives, may have been the first Western thinker to recognize a group other than one’s own as what we would now call “oppressed.”
Yet there is a danger in contextualization, in that it can lead to evasion of the reality that we have the text because there was once a person or persons of flesh and blood who were trying to say something, however much they were cobbling and quoting from others, and that something, moreover, may be such as to call into question our own cherished ideas and values. Elucidation through contextualization can approach a mode of understanding in which what persons say and do is much like natural phenomena that can be accounted for as caused by historical, biographical, and/or cultural factors or forces. With the help of evocations of historical distance, whatever the ancestor said that clashes with modern values can be disposed of as . . . just the sort of thing that people thought in those days. Thus if presentism inclines toward the assumption that everybody’s folks like us, the complementary fallacy is to assume that people who can only be read about today are like Martians, and we can’t possibly understand them in the way that my classroom question points to. It may be that modern education has had the effect of making the presentist fallacy recede, while unintentionally promoting the alienating fallacy, the fallacy of regarding the other as a being one could never understand, which ensues from the application of a strict empiricism to human subjects (“The only thing we can say about those people is. . .”) . On campuses today, one recurrently hears declarations in the form of “No one who is not an X, Y, or Z could possibly understand the experience of an X, Y, or Z,” which unwittingly echo attitudes toward other cultures that were rife before the advent of cultural anthropology and that played into racist and orientalist attitudes (“For who can understand the dark peoples of the vast . . “etc.).
The view that the classics “have nothing to say” to contemporary students is entirely compatible with regarding them as objects of scientific investigation. Hans Georg Gadamer, a disciple of Martin Heidegger and the great 20th-century hermeneuticist, had this to say about scholarly contextualization:
We think we understand when we see the past from a historical standpoint —i.e. transpose ourselves into the historical situation and try to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find in the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves. Acknowledging the otherness of the other in this way, making him the object of objective knowledge, involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth. (Truth and Method 303)
How much of an evasion contextualization can be may be appreciated if we imagine addressing a student in class who says something unconventional in this way: “Well, John or Jill, it’s understandable that you’re saying that, considering your background” Of course that would be an insult, because it implicitly denies that the speaker is the agent of what s/he says. The question, “What would you say to Aristotle, who is part of this class?” is not just a tactic for eliciting commentary on a text, but is also intended to work as a channeled appellation, a relayed call reminding the student that there is another person here, a dead but speaking ancestor, who is addressing you and who should not be buried a second time. On this point, Gadamer echoes Hegel:
The experience of the Thou manifests the paradox that something standing over against me asserts its own rights and requires absolute recognition, and in that very process is “understood.” (xxxv, op. cit.)
Awareness of the shortcomings of scholarly contextualization emerged within the hermeneutic tradition after Hegel and during Romanticism, when Friedrich Schleiermacher distinguished between what he called “grammatical” understanding and the “psychological” kind. By the former he meant supplying background, the art of the footnote, responding to questions like “Whom did the Athenians refer to as a ‘mechanic’?” and by the latter, psychological understanding, responding to the sort of question that arises not when we do not understand vocabulary or reference but when we understand the words but not their intent or when we wonder how anyone could have seriously written such a thing.
Schleiermacher began to see that the two forms of hermeneutic differ not only in what they attend to but also in their very mode of understanding. It was Wilhelm Dilthey, later in the 19th century, who fully theorized the difference. For Dilthey, the explanatory mode of the natural sciences is the establishing of cause-effect relations, but in what he was the first to call the “human sciences” (Geisteswissenschaften), the explanatory mode consists of showing relations between part and whole, which Heidegger eventually dubbed “the hermeneutic circle.” In trying to account for a natural phenomenon, we collect data and concatenate factors that cause or impel the phenomenon. But if we’re trying to understand a person, or a fictional personage, the details concerning them are not likely to be “data” but rather statements or socially meaningful actions that will in themselves require interpretation, guided by reference to the whole, to the overall psychology or “character,” which, in turn, needs to be revised so as to fit in new details, in the manner of a progressively crystallizing pattern.
The sociologist Max Weber performed a very similar sort of operation in attempting to portray “ideal types” of persons in bygone social milieus, such as the protestant follower of the work ethic in the 17th century, constructing the type by tacking back and forth between psychological speculation and textual and other kinds of source material, in contrast to the statistical sociology of Emil Durkheim, which followed the classic inductive approach of establishing empirical data and then drawing inferences from it. Contrasting the two kinds of social science, Weber wrote:
In the case of “social systems” (as opposed to “organisms”) we are in a position not only to formulate functional interrelations and regularities (or “laws”), but also to achieve something which must lie forever beyond the reach of all forms of “natural science” . . . .What we can do is to “understand” the behavior of the individuals involved, whereas we do not “understand” the behavior of, say, cells. All we can do in the case of cells is to grasp their behaviour in functional terms . . . . (Selections 18-19).
And as José Ortega y Gasset asserts in his interpretive biography of the painter Francisco de Goya, “The primary function of the facts is to obligate us to imagine hypotheses that would account for them”(31). Hermeneuticists do not necessarily look for what an author intended or had in mind. They may rather seek in a work an originary meaning that was in the mind of not only one author. For Gadamer, who died in 2002, what hermeneutics attempts to retrieve is what he calls the hermeneutic “horizon” (302 & passim) or universe of meanings available to an author or authors at a given time and place. Schleiermacher’s idea of “grammatical” hermeneutics was similar to Gadamer’s pursuit of the “horizon” in that it looked for formerly available shared meanings, but Schleiermacher’s method for “psychological” heremeneutics, for understanding the psychology of old authors and poets was not like Gadamer’s. It was very much like the one that in the twentieth century Jorge Luis Borges satirized in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (36): the interpreter is to become the author. According to Scleiermacher, readers are to abnegate themselves, to purify themselves of all modern, personal ideas or assumptions that would interfere with what he actually calls “divination” of the ancestor’s meaning.
Nowadays, when presentist distortions or burial by contextualization are detected in an academic discussion, or when contemporary political themes are perceived as being brought up too readily, a common admonition is that we should “read the text in its own terms “ “In its own terms” . . . But by now hermeneutics recognizes that to attempt to “read a text in its own terms” is as chimerical as Pierre Menard becoming Cervantes himself. All understanding is translation. It may be the greatest insight of hermeneutic thought that the meaning of the old books is neither irretrievable in that “bottomless” well nor to be summoned like a spirit in an act of divination. Rather, the thoughts of the ancestors are brought out of concealment in a dialog between the reader and the text, which proceeds circling back and forth between the expectations of the former and the challenges that spring from the latter.
Schleiermacher and Dilthey, as well as Gadamer, take for granted a will to understanding, and even reverence, on the part of students and readers. It’s revealing in this connection that the earliest versions of “Great Books” courses appeared during the First World War, and were intended for American troops before they were sent to Europe, the idea being that if they read the Great Books they would be more motivated to fight the Huns, notwithstanding that, as you may have noticed, the Great Books are loaded with Huns. Today most of us who teach classic texts expect and have a right to expect that will to understanding on the part of students. But, as for reverence, that was then, this is now. We cannot expect or make it a requirement for the baccalaureate degree that students agree, or approve of, or admire any book, or author, or work of art, or for that matter, of Western civilization (and vice-versa). But, if disapproval is to be the outcome of a contemporary student’s encounter with Western or other classics, let it be deep disapproval. Let it be based on as deep as possible an understanding, which may well be an understanding of where the final, irreconcilable differences lie.
Gadamer, like previous hermeneuticists, assumes that students and readers of the classics will be on board with Western Civilization. He published his magnum opus, Truth And Method, in 1960, just a few years before the outbreak of the culture wars. Yet his theory is well suited to accommodate adversarial readers. He conceives of hermeneutic understanding as something that arises from conflict. For Gadamer, the hermeneutic encounter happens when the text, in his phrasing, “brings us up short,” or “pulls us up short” (268 & passim) that is, when we come across something that we can’t make sense of, either because the meaning is obscure or because we cannot understand how anybody could have said such a thing. For Gadamer, that isthe most valuable thing in a text, that is the learning opportunity, not because the reader is necessarily going to end up agreeing with what is being said, but because if we do not shield ourselves from being “brought up short,” the experience will make it possible to understand a psychology or a situation or a thinking that we did not understand before the shock of the text.
Within two years of Thomas Kuhn bringing the study of crises into the historiography of science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Gadamer was seeing that the reading of texts in their historical alterity consists, most importantly and fruitfully, of paradigm challenges. To understand the thought that “brings us up short” requires exertion to see “how what is being said could be true” (292, 297), or rather, that to understand consists of seeing how something could be true, with what meanings, on the basis of which premises, within what horizon.
The sense of “being brought up short” is not distant from “feeling offended,” and seeing how the thought that makes us feel offended could be true is precisely what is prohibited within the narrowness of ideology, any ideology in the pejorative sense of the term intimated by Karl Marx and later worked out by Karl Mannheim. To understand, even in the sense of understanding how something could be true, is not the same as to concur. Agreement with Aristotle’s quasi-defense of slavery is not likely from a student brought up in a modern democratic culture that in countless ways, popular and esoteric, including Kant’s categorical imperative, communicates that the quintessence of the human being is freedom. But reading Aristotle’s Politics trying to see in what way he might be speaking truth can lead to learning that for him, and for many of the ancestors, hierarchy is natural, as natural as freedom was for Rousseau.
Besides modern biases or “prejudices”—a term that Gadamer, following Heidegger, redefines as nothing but the starting point for any understanding–that might impede coming to terms with minds like Aristotle’s or Rousseau’s, there are other influences in our classrooms that work against focusing on “what brings us up short” and getting as close and personal as the question that has been my point of departure invites. There is the dominance in academia, in spite of Hutchins and others, of the late nineteenth century science-oriented model of university study, sometimes called “the German Model” (not in the same sense as in economics), which goes back to Emil Durkheim and other originators of “human sciences” such as sociology and cultural anthropology, and which casts the professor, even the professor of humanities, more as a specialized scholar and researcher than as a teacher and Socratic questioner. The dispassionate professionalism prescribed for all branches of study by the late-nineteenth-century model dovetails with the wish to avoid unseemly contention in the classroom, which can grow into a form of what Plato called “misology.” Additionally, the tail-wagging-the-dog importance of recruitment and retention in contemporary American colleges likewise discourages discussions in which students can get upset. And yet in the humanities and in social thought, it is not possible to take seriously many of the questions raised by major authors—what is justice? what is virtue?—without risking distress and angst among students. Sticking to scholarly contextualization, however, is a way to bypass such potential hot spots.
There is yet one more influence that works against hermeneutic and, in general, humanist approaches, that cannot pass unmentioned here, because of the directness of its challenge and because of the genuine forcefulness of its arguments. If hermeneutics can be thought of as an attempt to recover presence, albeit in the imperfect form of a ghostly interlocutor, it hardly needs saying that it is vigorously challenged by postmodernist philosophy and literary theory. The additional space it would require to rehearse the arguments against the possibility of recovery of originary meaning, is, however, not really needed in this context, because ultimately, the reason for hermeneutics, for attempting to recover authorial meaning, is not that it’s the best way of reading, or that it results in more complete or more reliable interpretations, or that the recovery of authorial presence is even fully achievable, or any reason that arises from literary theory and criticism. The reason for being of hermeneutics is ethical. Irreducibly, every text refers to a person or persons of flesh and blood who were trying to say something. And to try to understand what they said is a matter of respect for the dead.
REFERENCES Aristotle. Politics. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. In The Basic Works of Aristotle Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Trans.James E. Irby. In Labyrinths. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. W. Glen-Doepel, Joel Weinsheimer, and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1997. Mann, Thomas. Joseph and His Brothers. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Everyman’s Library-Knopf, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Tr. Adrian Collins. New York: Liberal Arts-Macmillan, 1957. Ortega y Gasset, José. Goya. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1962. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics and Criticism: And Other Writings. Ed. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: University Press, 1998. Pg. 9 & passim Weber, Max. “The Nature of Social Action.” In Weber: Selections in Translation. Trans. E. Matthews. Cambridge: University Press, 1978.
(c) Albert B. Fernandez
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