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Hermeneutics as Politics
Hermeneutics as Politics, perhaps the most important critique of post-modern thought ever written, is here reissued in a special fifteenth anniversary edition. In a new foreword, Robert B. Pippin argues that the book has rightfully achieved the status of a classic. Rosen illuminates the underpinnings of post-modernist thought, providing valuable insight as he pursues two first, that post-modernism, which regards itself as an attack upon the Enlightenment, is in fact merely a continuation of Enlightenment thought; and second, that the extraordinary contemporary emphasis upon hermeneutics is the latest consequence of the triumph of history over mathematics and science.
“Perhaps the most original and philosophically important critical account of hermeneutics—of its philosophical status and historical development—to appear since Gadamer’s Truth and Method. ”— Choice
“A philosophical polemic of the highest order written in a language of unfailing verve and precision. . . . It will repay manyfold the labour of a slow and considered reading.”—J. M. Coetzee, Upstream
“Perhaps the most original and philosophically important critical account of hermeneutics—of its philosophical status and historical development—to appear since Gadamer’s Truth and Method. ”— Choice
“A philosophical polemic of the highest order written in a language of unfailing verve and precision. . . . It will repay manyfold the labour of a slow and considered reading.”—J. M. Coetzee, Upstream
240 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1987
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About the author
Stanley Rosen
67 books34 followersStanley Rosen was Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy and Professor Emeritus at Boston University. His research and teaching focused on the fundamental questions of philosophy and on the most important figures of its history, from Plato to Heidegger.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 9, 2024
The shift from the public to the private, from politics to existential ontology, are like stages in the psychoanalysis of the enlightened European bourgeois, who is liberated from his neuroses at the cost of his soul.
One finds at the beginning of modern philosophy the intention of regulating discourse, or of preserving the distinction between theory and interpretation, by appeal to a natural standard of desire or passion. Whether this standard is conceived in physiological or voluntative terms, however, it is soon aborted by the steady triumph of the doctrine of historicity, or the view that even desire is a concealed discursive interpretation… Nature is no longer completed but is rather produced by art.
I want to maintain that human speech is superior to writing because it is closer to silence. … By this I mean two things. First, in addressing human beings, as Socrates points out in the Phaedrus, the speaker knows when to keep silent, whereas writings do not. Second, writing is “garrulous” precisely for the reason that Derrida prefers it to speech. Writing, as it were, cannot stop talking, because, as the “trace” of absence, it has no idea where it is, and in fact, as detached from the guidance of speech, it is nowhere. But this is not to support the thesis that the excellence of speech is to keep talking in the presence of the illumination of Being. Speech is the living presence, not of Being, but of the speaker to himself, of intellect or Geist, not of form. And Geist is accessible to itself only as myth: so at least Socrates teaches us in the Phaedrus. If I, as the “receptivity” of form that must necessarily be formally indeterminate, am present to myself as speech, then speech is “formally” the presence of absence.
As soon as we put the point in this way, we understand how close Aristotle’s doctrine of the passive intellect is to Plato, despite the former’s dislike of myth. It is the mistake of modern epistemology and the “philosophy of mind” to think that I can be present to myself as a formal structure, namely, the artifact of epistemological analysis. On the other hand, one can say that it is the peculiar insight of late modern Continental linguistic philosophy to have developed, but also to have narrowed, the Aristotelian notion of man as the talking animal, in such a way as to allow the following conclusion: the closer I come to formal structures, and the more I talk about them, the more I conceal them—that is, the more I replace the web of forms or Ideas by the web of concepts or linguistic constructions. … if I bespeak the world, I do not bespeak speaking. This was Kant’s crucial insight, except that he lost it by transforming it into an artificial construction in its own right: the transcendental ego. The greatest barrier separating Kant from Plato disappears as soon as we recognize that transcendental doctrine is a myth and also that to recognize it as such is not to abolish the psyche but to return it to itself.
One finds at the beginning of modern philosophy the intention of regulating discourse, or of preserving the distinction between theory and interpretation, by appeal to a natural standard of desire or passion. Whether this standard is conceived in physiological or voluntative terms, however, it is soon aborted by the steady triumph of the doctrine of historicity, or the view that even desire is a concealed discursive interpretation… Nature is no longer completed but is rather produced by art.
I want to maintain that human speech is superior to writing because it is closer to silence. … By this I mean two things. First, in addressing human beings, as Socrates points out in the Phaedrus, the speaker knows when to keep silent, whereas writings do not. Second, writing is “garrulous” precisely for the reason that Derrida prefers it to speech. Writing, as it were, cannot stop talking, because, as the “trace” of absence, it has no idea where it is, and in fact, as detached from the guidance of speech, it is nowhere. But this is not to support the thesis that the excellence of speech is to keep talking in the presence of the illumination of Being. Speech is the living presence, not of Being, but of the speaker to himself, of intellect or Geist, not of form. And Geist is accessible to itself only as myth: so at least Socrates teaches us in the Phaedrus. If I, as the “receptivity” of form that must necessarily be formally indeterminate, am present to myself as speech, then speech is “formally” the presence of absence.
As soon as we put the point in this way, we understand how close Aristotle’s doctrine of the passive intellect is to Plato, despite the former’s dislike of myth. It is the mistake of modern epistemology and the “philosophy of mind” to think that I can be present to myself as a formal structure, namely, the artifact of epistemological analysis. On the other hand, one can say that it is the peculiar insight of late modern Continental linguistic philosophy to have developed, but also to have narrowed, the Aristotelian notion of man as the talking animal, in such a way as to allow the following conclusion: the closer I come to formal structures, and the more I talk about them, the more I conceal them—that is, the more I replace the web of forms or Ideas by the web of concepts or linguistic constructions. … if I bespeak the world, I do not bespeak speaking. This was Kant’s crucial insight, except that he lost it by transforming it into an artificial construction in its own right: the transcendental ego. The greatest barrier separating Kant from Plato disappears as soon as we recognize that transcendental doctrine is a myth and also that to recognize it as such is not to abolish the psyche but to return it to itself.
December 23, 2022
A bit out of my depth with this, but still some gripping and lucid breakdowns of major thinkers from Plato to Derrida, as well as the many ways in which certain a priori or foundational assumptions keep repeating themselves throughout history in different guises. Only 4 stars since my unfamiliarity with many of the names mentioned in this book leaves me unprepared to either fully appreciate many of Rosen's arguments or criticize them properly.
April 12, 2008
Yeah, pretty much don't read this one unless you have to.
September 22, 2014
The only sophisticated critique of Leo Strauss ever written. Also a very sensitive reading and defense of what makes Strauss important. One of the finest critiques of postmodernism out there.
May 7, 2021
keys open doors!!!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews