Persuasion, Reflection, Judgment

Rodolphe Gasché

Description

As one of the most respected voices of Continental philosophy today, Rodolphe Gasché pulls together Aristotle's conception of rhetoric, Martin Heidegger's debate with theory, and Hannah Arendt's conception of judgment in a single work on the centrality of these themes as fundamental to human flourishing in public and political life. Gasché's readings address the distinctively human space of the public square and the actions that occur there, and his valorization of persuasion, reflection, and judgment reveals new insight into how the philosophical tradition distinguishes thinking from other faculties of the human mind.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Persuasion (Aristotle)
1. A Truth Resembling Truth
2. Probability or Necessity
3. Logos, Topos, Stoikheion
Part II. Reflection (Heidegger)
4. Breaking with the Primacy of the Theoretical
5. The Genesis of the Theoretical
6. Beyond Theory: Theoria, or Watching Over What Is Still to Come
Part III. Judgment (Arendt)
7. The Space of Appearance
8. The Wind of Thought
9. A Sense of the World
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Phenomenology

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253025852
• Langue: English

Extrait

PERSUASION, REFLECTION, JUDGMENT
STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
Consulting Editors
Robert Bernasconi
John D. Caputo
David Carr
Edward S. Casey
David Farrell Krell
Lenore Langsdorf
James Risser
Dennis J. Schmidt
Calvin O. Schrag
Charles E. Scott
Daniela Vallega-Neu
David Wood
PERSUASION, REFLECTION, JUDGMENT
Ancillae Vitae
Rodolphe Gasch
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Rodolphe Gasch
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gasch , Rodolphe, author.
Title: Persuasion, reflection, judgment : Ancillae Vitae / Rodolphe Gasch .
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Series: Studies in Continental thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016055936 (print) | LCCN 2017008457 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253025531 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253025708 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253025852 (eb)
Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenology. | Aristotle. | Persuasion (Rhetoric) | Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. | Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975. | Judgment.
Classification: LCC B829.5 .G37 2017 (print) | LCC B829.5 (ebook) | DDC 110-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016055936
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Persuasion (Aristotle)
1. A Truth Resembling Truth
2. Necessity or Probability
3. Logos, Topos, Stoikheion
Part II. Reflection (Heidegger)
4. Breaking with the Primacy of the Theoretical
5. The Genesis of the Theoretical
6. Beyond Theory: Theoria , or Watching Over What Is Still to Come
Part III. Judgment (Arendt)
7. The Space of Appearance
8. The Wind of Thought
9. A Sense of the World
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS of this book correspond to a three-day seminar on Aristotle s Rhetoric that I conducted in 2008 at the University of Chile in Santiago. These lectures were published in 2010 in book form in a Spanish translation under the title Un arte muy fr gil: Sobre la ret rica de Arist teles by Metales Pesados Libros (Santiago, Chile). I thank Rogelio Gonzalez for his translation and, above all, Pablo Oyarzun for the generous Prologue with which he prefaced the book. The original English version of Chapter 3 has been published under the title , , in Internationales Jahrbuch f r Hermeneutik , ed. G. Figal, T bingen; Mohr Siebeck, 2009, pp. 147-169. Chapter 4 in the section on Heidegger s conception of theory and reflection is the Andrew Schuwer Lecture that I gave in 2009 on the occasion of the Annual Conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Arlington, Virginia. It has been published under the title The Duplicity of the Theoretical: On Heidegger s First Freiburg Lectures in Research in Phenomenology , 40, 1, 2010, pp. 3-19. I thank Koninklijke Brill NV for the permission to republish this essay. Chapter 5 is based on the paper I presented at an international conference on TheorieTheorie at the Interuniversity Center in Dubrownik, Croatia, in 2009. A first version of it was published in German under the title Nur Hinsehen oder h tendes Schauen? Zu Heideggers lebensweltlicher Begr ndung der Theorie in TheorieTheorie: Wider die Theoriem digkeit in den Geisteswissenschaften , eds. M. Grizelj and O. Jahraus, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011, pp. 417-431. Two three-day seminars on Heidegger s conception of theory, one at the Centro de Filosofia das Ci ncias at the University of Lisbon in 2009, the other at the University of Chile, Santiago, made it possible to finalize the texts that now make up the second section. Some of the chapters from the last section of the book, devoted to the question of judgment in Hannah Arendt, have been delivered as talks on several occasions. Versions of what has now become Chapter 8 have been presented as talks at the Graduate Center (CUNY), at the Goethe Universit t in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, at Roanoke College (on the occasion of the annual meeting of The North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics in 2014), and at the University of Tokyo, Japan (also in 2014). Part of Chapter 9 was the subject of a talk at the Cardozo Law School, New York, on the occasion of a conference in 2012 on Kant s Critique of Judgment . It has been published under the title Is a Determinant Judgment Really a Judgment? in Washington University Jurisprudence Review , 6, 1, 2013, pp. 99-120.
PERSUASION, REFLECTION, JUDGMENT
INTRODUCTION
E ACH OF THE THREE SECTIONS of this book-on persuasion in Aristotle, reflection ( Besinnung ) in Martin Heidegger, and judgment in Hannah Arendt-comes with its own introduction. Each section can, thus, be read on its own and without regard for the order in which it is presented. Yet, apart from the fact that the order in which these studies follow one another is chronological, the essays, though they do not explicitly build upon or derive from one another, are interrelated in many ways and, ultimately, pursue one question, one major concern. These prefatory remarks, which I keep to a minimum, are intended to explain this common concern and to sketch out, however schematically, the ways in which the essays might relate to one another.
Let me start with the subtitle of the book. Ancillae Vitae suggests that the topics explored in the three studies that it comprises, namely, on persuasion, reflection, and judgment, are ancillary to life. They are held to be the maidservants or the handmaidens of life or, rather, of a certain understanding of life. I borrow the expression from Hannah Arendt, who, in her essay Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World, qualifies Jaspers s philosophy as one that has lost both its humility before theology and its arrogance toward the common life of man. It has become ancilla vitae . 1 In other words, Arendt introduces the expression to distinguish the role of philosophy in Jaspers s thought from that assigned to philosophy in the Patristic and Scholastic tradition that took philosophical thought to be ancilla theologiae . In conformity with the Patristic tradition, which considered Christian wisdom the mistress of philosophy, Petrus Damiani coined the term ancilla theologiae when faced with an internal debate in Christianity in which the partisans of dialectics, or philosophy, claimed that only rational argumentation could decide questions of faith. Even though Scholasticism interprets the ancillary role of philosophy in a more positive light later on-holding philosophy s autonomy to be the inevitable condition for it to be able to provide theological thought with the required universal and formal principles-philosophy remains dependent on theology inasmuch as the ultimate ground of the conditions of cognition is considered to lie with revelation. 2
Jaspers himself does not resort to the term in question to characterize his own thought, but Arendt justifies her use of it as a way to interpret his conception, not of a life of thought or of a life dedicated exclusively to thinking, but of a thinkingly (lived) life [ denkerisches Leben ], a life lived in a constant interchange with thought. 3 Arendt points out that thinking is understood here as a kind of practice between men, not a performance of one individual in his self-chosen solitude. 4 It is thus a thinking that is not aloof with respect to common life but, rather, immanent to it. If this is so, furthermore, it is because what Jaspers considers to be the common life of man is itself not void of all forms of thinking. In any event, a thinkingly lived life is not practical simply in a pragmatic sense, as if it were the application of some theory; rather, it is practical insofar as it is intrinsically tied to the historical and political furtherance of what Jaspers calls limitless communication between the living (but between the living and the dead, as well). As is clear from Arendt s essay, the context for both her and Jaspers s conception of thinking and philosophy insofar as it is at the service of life is Kant s The Conflict of the Faculties . Kant, in that work, is still somewhat willing to concede an ancillary relation of philosophy to the higher faculty of theology-as long as it can keep its autonomy and its commitment to truth-and observes that the question remains of whether philosophy carries the torch in front of her lady [rather] than her train behind. 5 Arendt, however, leaves no doubt that philosophy can become ancilla vitae only on the condition that it is she who carries the torch and that the torch is that of thought. 6 Indeed, the expression ancilla vitae signifies a radical turn away from all theological and religious concerns and an emphasis on life here and now, not an otherworldly life but an exclusively worldly life. Furthermore, the life that philosophy serves is ordinary life- the common life of man -a life from which thought is not absent, as a certain philosophy holds. To refer to philosophy as ancilla vitae is, thus, not only to emphasize that it is at the service of common life, and of what within this life itself is a thinking concern with life, but also to advocate a kind of philosophy d