Hermeneutic Interpretation of Rhetoric/Social Action: A Philosophical Lens

• In Event: Understanding Discourses of Stability and Change

Abstract

This work discusses opening the rhetorical/social action text of female activists in the early 1900s who sought to attain equality for African Americans in the areas of education, social justice, and labor rights. Using dialectical hermeneutics to consider the structure of experience, this paper considers issues in achieving historical consciousness of/with a text. Historical consciousness does not cover over the tension between past and present; it requires one to view the “otherness of the past.” An interpreter’s hermeneutic situation places him/her between strangeness and familiarity, between recognizing the objectivity of what has been handed down to us and the fact that one belongs to that heritage.

The openness of experience is structured through questioning. Questioning presupposes openness (not knowing the answer) while also necessarily specifying the boundaries of the question/response. The text is an interpreter’s partner, aiding one in finding one’s way through this give-and-take it the task of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics brings the text out of alienation as a fixed static form into the living present, filling the question that called the text into being.

“True saying” occurs in everyday life between people who understand each other—and allows the “unsaid” to unify with the “said.” Hermeneutics requires the unsaid to join with the poetical said for understanding to occur. The fusion of horizons of the text (past) and interpreter (present) permit something to arise that did not previously exist. Horizons are always in motion, not static. An interpreter considers that horizon of the text against that of his/her own time-horizon (which is always already a mediation of both horizons); understanding signifies gaining a new historical horizon. Drawing upon the text of social action/rhetoric of persons who went before us, we can gain insight into how we can continue to shape our democratic society.

Author

• Pat Arneson, Duquesne University