Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, Second Edition, With a
Foreword by Robert B. Pippin, Yale University Press, New Haven and
London, 2003
Review by Costică
Brădăţan
The first edition of Stanley Rosen's
Hermeneutics as Politics appeared in 1987 from Oxford University
Press and, soon after that, established itself as a distinct voice in
the -- already at that time -- hot debate over post-modernism. The
second edition of the book has just come out from Yale University
Press, with an enthusiastic Foreword by Robert B. Pippin. As Pippin
rightly notices, Hermeneutics as Politics -- setting aside any
other purposes -- also serves as a "fine introduction to the
philosophical world of Stanley Rosen" (vii). In agreement with
Pippin's remark, this short review is not so much a presentation of
Rosen's book (no presentation, however faithful or detailed, would
succeed in conveying the sense of "richness" one gets on actually
reading this book), as an attempt to say a few things about the
specific "flavor" of Rosen's "philosophical world," as it reveals
itself in Hermeneutics as Politics.
The book is a collection of five studies
unified by two "closely related themes":
First:
the cluster of contemporary movements which we are now accustomed to
call "postmodernist," although they understand themselves as an attack
on the eighteenth century Enlightenment, are in fact a continuation of
that Enlightenment. Second: hermeneutics, the characteristic obsession
of postmodernism, has an intrinsically political nature, which,
especially in the United States, is rapidly being concealed by an
encrustation of scholasticism and technophilia." (p. 3)
The first chapter ("Transcendental
Ambiguity: The Rhetoric of the Enlightenment") is mainly a discussion
of Kant's complex (and often ambiguous) role in the formation of our
image about the Enlightenment. The second chapter ("Platonic
Reconstruction") offers a critical -- and, I would add, supremely
ironical and humorous -- reading of Derrida's reading of Plato. Then,
the third chapter ("Hermeneutics as Politics") is a comparative study
of Alexander Kojève and Leo Strauss. The forth chapter ("Theory and
Interpretation") is a historical study into the complex relationship
between hermeneia and theoria. Finally, the fifth
chapter ("Conversation and Tragedy") is a (very) critical discussion
of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and of some of
Michel Foucault's ideas about power and truth.
*
An invaluable key to understanding properly
Rosen's approach is to be found, I suggest, in the following note he
drops somewhere towards the end of the book: "My own 'deconstructions'
of some contemporary doctrines have been undertaken not as part of a
return to the past but in the service of philosophia perennis."
(p. 181) To be "in the service" of a perennial tradition of wisdom is
to understand one's own philosophical enterprise simply as a link
within a long "golden chain" of great thinkers and systems of thought,
a chain connecting one's individual thinking to the most remote
beginnings, that is, to a set of archetypal truths and immemorial
meanings, of which one has to be a faithful pursuer. What does it all
begin with? With the gods, of course. Seen in this light, Rosen's
mysterious remark in the Introduction certainly makes more sense: "We
do not wish to achieve notoriety among humans at the expense of being
excluded from the company of the gods." (p. 18) In other words,
philosophy should not be about (insignificant) things of our time,
because we live in corrupted epochs: the true role of philosophizing
is -- by a proper understanding of the tradition -- to get us
connected to the ultimate roots of wisdom, as closer to the gods as
possible. Surely, such a way of thinking is not a very common one in
today's philosophical literature, but who says that Stanley Rosen is a
common philosopher?
As one who
has access to the ultimate truths, the philosopher's task is certainly
a tremendously important one. Among other responsibilities, the
philosopher has to know not only what to say to the others (i.e., to
the non-philosophers), but especially what not to say: "In
order to save philosophy, one must remind the potential philosopher of
its fearless and divinely mad nature, but one must also guard against
'maddening' the general populace, and in particular the
'intellectuals,' by encouraging them to believe that they are
themselves divinely mad." (p. 137)
To put it differently, being a philosopher
is vivere periculosamente to the highest degree. Thanks to his
special relationship with the gods, the philosopher has to "translate"
their commands into the recognizable language of a community or other.
As such, philosophy is, properly speaking, the "divinely mad" art of
putting the celestial into those forms that can be reasonably grasped
by the common understanding of the non-philosophers. Moreover, in so
doing, the philosopher's work inevitably acquires a political
dimension:
divine
commands either found or dissolve communities. The interpretation of a
divine command is necessarily a political act. This link between
hermeneutics and politics can be broken only by anarchy or silence, in
which case the recipients of divine revelations are transformed form
citizens into hermits, wondering in their respective private deserts,
and so at the mercy of the adjacent political authorities. (p. 88)
As a consequence, one
of the central notions in Rosen's book is that of the profoundly
political character of philosophy. The whole Chapter Three is
specifically about that, but -- in some form or other -- this notion
is present virtually everywhere in Hermeneutics as Politics. I
do believe that one of the major merits of Rosen's book lies precisely
in having developed this notion, and that some of its most interesting
pages are those dedicated to the (Hegeliano-Kojèvian) idea of the
homogeneous "world-state".
The view of a "golden chain" subtly pointing
(and connecting us) to the ultimate roots of wisdom results in the
complementary notion that history is necessarily a process of
corruption and decay. As it were, the good things are always at the
beginning. There is nothing good to be expected from the present, not
to say anything about the future. As such, one of the recurrent themes
of Rosen's book is that of decadence. Very much in agreement with
Nietzsche (with whom, I think, he has profound affinities), Rosen
traces the manifold presence of decadence in our current ways of
thinking:
The
popularity of hermeneutics in our own time is …a sign not of our
greater understanding but of the fact that we have lost our way… What
we call freedom today is all too frequently the result of a failure to
think through the corruption of finitude by history. This is why I
called postmodernism an extreme form of decadence. As so decadent, we
lack the self-confidence of Kant, which has been dissipated after the
last great effort by Hegel into positivism on the one hand and
existential ontology on the other. (p. 139)
The anatomy of
decadence can be easily carried out in various fields of our social,
intellectual and emotional life. This is, for example, how decadence
works in the field of writing: "Writing becomes initially more
exquisite, and the increased subtlety of language stimulates a
corresponding increase in the subtlety of reading. By a gradual
process of what looks like an increase in sophistication but is in
fact a narrowing of range and loss of creative impetus, writing
becomes more and more like reading: art deteriorates into criticism."
(p. 143-4)
A characteristic form of manifestation of
decadence is, for Rosen, through hermeneutics. Art deteriorating into
criticism actually means "the advent of hermeneutics" (p. 144). In the
chapter titled "Theory and Interpretation," Rosen describes with
extreme acuity how it has become increasingly more difficult to
distinguish between theory and interpretation, to the extent that,
finally, there is no difference left between the two ("Amidst the
plethora of hermeneutical theories, what it means to be a theory is a
matter of interpretation." [p. 160]). With magisterial and compelling
stylistic force, Rosen depicts the process through which hermeneutics
has turned from a theological discipline into a terrestrial and
prosaic one, to the point of becoming a modern form of sophistry,
incessantly offering explanations about everything and nothing:
The
initial purpose of hermeneutics was to explain the word of God. This
purpose was eventually expended into the attempt to regulate the
process of explaining the word of man. In the nineteenth century we
learned, first from Hegel and then more effectually from Nietzsche,
that God is dead. In the twentieth century, Kojève and his students,
like Foucault, have informed us that man is dead… As the scope of
hermeneutics has expanded, then, the two original sources of
hermeneutical meaning, God and man, have vanished, taking with them
the cosmos or world and leaving us with nothing but our own garrulity,
which we choose to call the philosophy of language, linguistic
philosophy, or one of their synonyms. If nothing is real, the real is
nothing; there is no difference between the written lines of a text
and the blank spaces between them. (p. 161)
I am not saying that
Rosen is "right." At any rate, it would take much more than a book
review to prove that he is "wrong." What I am observing, instead, is
that he is one of the most interesting philosophers living today, and
-- certainly -- one of the last embodiments of a long and fruitful
tradition of Platonic thinking, according to which the good things
occurred sometime "in the beginning," closer to the gods, and that, if
we are to do something meaningful with our lives, we have to look for
them in the right place.
*
Although Stanley Rosen refuses any
methodological commitment, arguing constantly (and "methodically," I
was about to say) against the "obsession with method" (p. 145), he
nevertheless has a "method" to which he resorts again and again in his
book: his method is irony. There is a sense of supreme,
compelling and overwhelming irony in Hermeneutics as Politics.
Irony is, I would say, the driving force behind Rosen's approach, and
certainly it is what gives this book one of its unmistakable flavors.
In a definitely Platonic spirit, Rosen puts irony at the very heart of
his philosophical enterprise: being ironical is a matter of sanity of
the philosophical discourse, and the capacity of ironical thinking is
a sign that one is on the right track. Nothing escapes the ironist's
merciless gaze -- as it were, through his eyes one can see things as
they really are, and have instant access to their actual worth. For
example, in this book one can come across devastating passages like
this one: "Derrida, who apparently identifies the self with the modern
doctrine of subjectivity, which he believes himself to have
deconstructed, has on his account, no self. As a consequence, he has
no knowledge." (p. 56) Or: "If the world is a text written by
difference, it is a tale by an idiot, a nonsubjective subjectivity
or idiot savant, hence a tale full of sound and furry, signifying
nothing." (p. 66) In a similar vein, Rosen suggests that
post-modernism -- for all its outstanding merits -- has a major
defect, namely, its very existence: "despite my criticism of
postmodernist thinkers, I feel the force of their enterprise, and
recognize the sense in which I am one of them. I ask them only to
grant me that the distinction between postmodernism and modernism is
absurd." (p. 17) He talks about "the subtle fantasies of contemporary
philosophers of modal logic" (p. 130), the "seriously playing
theologians" (p. 17), and about Plato being "entirely too evasive for
Derrida's net." (p. 61) He notices that "what looks like subtlety on
Derrida's part is in fact a misunderstanding" (p. 85), and makes
innocent comments like this one: "Despite his [Derrida's] often
extraordinary eye for the significant detail, not to mention his
exorbitant taste for the superfluous complexity…" (p. 57) Above all,
the author of Hermeneutics as Politics proves to be a
world-class polemicist and a philosopher who has not only the gift of
style (which is not a small thing in an age that praises
unintelligibility and empty formalism alike as good philosophical
writing), but also the courage to defend what is -- by most current
standards -- undefendable: "Philological sobriety is a very admirable
quality, but it pales into historical insignificance in the face of
philosophical madness, and by this last expression, I mean, of course,
genuinely philosophical madness, not the idiosyncrasies of café
intellectuals." (p. 94)
Stanley Rosen's style is witty without being
affecté, and concise in the good tradition of the French
moralists: "Despite his lectures at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes,
Kojève was not a professor. It is not easy to say exactly what he was,
although he preferred the term 'god.'" (p. 92). To conclude, Rosen's
stylistic mastery allows him to drop -- en passant, as it were
-- brief remarks (like the following one) that are able to
faithfully capture the essence, as well as the functioning rules, of
our whole way of (academic) life: "[Leo] Strauss was an extraordinary
scholar who knew so much more than his colleagues that they regarded
him as incompetent." (p. 108)
this text was published in Metapsychology
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