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)

 

 

© 2003 Costica Bradatan

 

 

Costica Bradatan (PhD,
University of Durham [UK], 2003) is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Cornell
University’s Knight Institute, where he teaches philosophy and literature, and
does research on a project dedicated to "the anatomy of novelty" in
the history of Western philosophy. Bradatan has a book manuscript under review
(The Other Bishop Berkeley. An Experiment in Philosophical Historiography),
and is the author of two recent books (both in Romanian): An Introduction to
the History of Romanian Philosophy in the XX-th Century (Bucharest, 2000)
and Isaac Bernstein’s Diary (Bucharest, 2001).

Categories: Philosophical