Philosophy of Communication Ethics

The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Series In Communication Studies
General Editor: Gary Radford, Department of Communication Studies,
Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey.

The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Communication Studies publishes

scholarly works in communication theory, practice, history, and culture.

Recent Publications in Communication Studies

Ronald C. Arnett and Pat Arneson (eds.), Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity
and the Other (2014)
Pat Arneson, Communicative Engagement and Social Liberation: Justice Will
Be Made (2014)
Erik A. Garrett, Why Do We Go to the Zoo?: Communication, Animals, and the Cultural-
Historical Experience of Zoos (2013)
Philip Dalton and Eric Kramer, Coarseness in U.S. Public Communication (2012)
Catherine Creede, Beth Fisher-Yoshida, and Placida Gallegos (eds.), The Reflective,
Facilitative, and Interpretive Practices of the Coordinated Management of Meaning
(2012)
Jolanta Aritz and Robyn C. Walker, Discourse Perspectives on Organizational
Communication (2011)
S. Alyssa Groom and J. M. H. Fritz, Communication Ethics and Crisis: Negotiating
Differences in Public and Private Spheres (2011)
R. C. MacDougall, Digination: Identity, Organization, and Public Life (2011)
Deborah Eicher-Catt and Isaac E. Catt (eds.), Communicology: The New Science of
Embodied Discourse (2010)
Dan Cassino and Yesamin Besen-Cassino, Consuming Politics: Jon Stewart, Branding,
and the Youth Vote in America (2009)

On the Web at http://www.fdu.edu/fdupress

Philosophy of Communication Ethics

Alterity and the Other

Edited by Ronald C. Arnett and Pat Arneson

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Philosophy of communication ethics : alterity and the other / edited by Ronald C. Arnett and Pat
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ISBN 978-1-61147-707-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-61147-708-5 (electronic)
1. Other (Philosophy) 2. Communication—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Arnett, Ronald C., 1952-
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 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix

I: Otherness: Place and Space 1

1 The Pantheism Controversy: Rhetoric, Enlightenment, and Memory 3
G. L. Ercolini
2 A Rhetoric of Sentiment: The House the Scots Built 25
Ronald C. Arnett
3 Before the One and the Other: Ethico-Political Communication
and Community 55
Pat J. Gehrke
4 Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis: An Essay on Time and Relation 75
Lisbeth Lipari

II: Otherness and Justice 95

5 Communication, Diversity, and Ethics in Higher Education 97
Brenda J. Allen
6 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for
Communication Ethics: Juliette Hampton Morgan’s Advocacy
for Racial Justice 103
Pat Arneson
7 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship in Interpersonal and
Mexican-U.S. Relations: A Case Study of The Three Burials of
Melquiades Estrada 129
Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

v
vi Contents

8 Resolutions of Regret: The Other in the Evolution of a State

Apology for Slavery 153
John B. Hatch
9 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single
Man: Communication Ethics, Social Differences, and Alterity in
Media Portrayals of Homosexuality 183
Lester C. Olson

III: Otherness and Contextual Divergence 213

10 Organization as Other: Professional Civility as Communicative
Care for Institutions 215
Janie M. Harden Fritz
11 An Example of the Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics
Analysis in a Newspaper Article 233
Alain Létourneau
12 Leisure and the Other: Philosophy and Communication Ethics 253
Annette M. Holba
13 Saving the Nation: Redemptive Ethos and the Moral Figure of
the Refugee 271
Andreea Deciu Ritivoi
14 Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood under the Regime
of Antidepressant Medicine 285
Isaac E. Catt

Afterword: Machiavelli’s Question Mark and the Problem of Ethical

Communication 305
Gerard A. Hauser
Index 315
About the Contributors 323
 Acknowledgments

I, Ronald C. Arnett, offer my thanks and gratitude to Duquesne University,

the Spiritan community, and my colleagues in the Department of Communi-
cation & Rhetorical Studies. I am deeply thankful to Susan Carr, senior
graduate research assistant, for her outstanding work and her thoughtful at-
tentiveness on this project. Additionally, I am deeply appreciative of the
important work of Gary Radford, Harry Keyishian, and Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press as well as of Brooke Bures and Rowman & Littlefield
Publishing Group in the field of philosophy of communication. I offer thanks
to my colleague Pat Arneson for her commitment to philosophy of communi-
cation and communication ethics centered in this undertaking. Finally, I am
thankful for colleagues in the field of communication who continue to push
the boundaries of study and practice of communication with their attentive-
ness to cultural and theoretical diversity.
I dedicate this work with thanks and appreciation to my family, Millie,
Adam, Aimee, Rich, Alexa, and Ava.
I, Pat Arneson, echo Ron’s thanks. This project emerged in part from the
twelfth National Communication Ethics Conference at which scholars con-
sidered “Communication Ethics: Attending to the Other.” I would like to
thank the administrators of Duquesne University’s McAnulty College and
Graduate School of Liberal Arts NEH Endowment Fund as well as the Com-
munication Ethics Center in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical
Studies at Duquesne University for their financial support of the conference.
I would also like to recognize Rita McCaffrey and Brian Gilchrist for their
work helping to create a successful conference. Special thanks to Ron

vii
viii Acknowledgments

Arnett for inviting me to work with him on this project and to Susan Carr for
her diligent and careful assistance. Thanks also to the contributors of this
volume for the care taken in expressing their ideas.
I dedicate this work to my Grandma, who taught me more than words can
say.
 Introduction

Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the Other offers a unique

and timely contribution to the study of communication ethics. This series of
chapters articulates unequivocally the intimate connection between philoso-
phy of communication and communication ethics. This scholarly volume
assumes that a multiplicity of communication ethics exists within social
spheres. What distinguishes one communication ethic from another is the
philosophy of communication in which a particular ethic is grounded. Philos-
ophy of communication is the core ingredient for understanding the impor-
tance of and the difference between and among various approaches to com-
munication ethics.
The position assumed by this collection is consistent with Alasdair Mac-
Intyre’s insights on ethics. In A Short History of Ethics he begins with one
principal assertion—philosophy is subversive. 1 If one cannot think philo-
sophically, one cannot question taken-for-granted assumptions. In the case of
communication ethics, to fail to think philosophically is to miss the bias,
prejudice, and assumptions that constitute a given communication ethic.
Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the Other engages the
reality of Otherness in a diverse, panoramic sense of communicative engage-
ments. We witness in the following chapters a textured understanding of the
variances that define this historical moment. Otherness in the twenty-first
century is a commonplace rhetorical interruption, demanding that we learn
from difference.
This volume is an exploration of value-laden metaphors that examine the
social and pragmatic connections among three major areas of inquiry: philos-
ophy of communication, communication ethics, and the Other. Each chapter
considers a particular nuance of this conceptual interplay. The volume overt-
ly assumes a bias that Otherness matters. Otherness, alterity, and concern for

ix
x Introduction

the neighbor are at the core of philosophies of communication that undergird

this examination of communication ethics. Otherness, situated within a phi-
losophy of communication, functions as a thoughtful sense of “why” for
engaging particular communicative practices, which are manifested more
conventionally within the term communication ethics. This volume assumes
that Otherness is the core value within a philosophy of communication that
yields practices attentive to what a number of scholars have referred to as
“the third” or “the neighbor.”
The chapters within this volume begin with a basic assertion that Other-
ness matters. The diversity of chapters offers insight into multiple ways of
understanding and engaging Otherness. The chapters, as a set, framed within
texture and difference, explicate an impressionistic picture of communication
ethics and Otherness. The interaction of philosophy of communication, atten-
tiveness to Otherness, and communication ethics is the central issue of hu-
man sociality on a planet challenged by financial, social, cultural, and envi-
ronmental precarity.
The significance of Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the
Other is that it crystallizes the connections between philosophy of communi-
cation and communication ethics. This connection has been highlighted by
Seyla Benhabib in Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodern-
ism in Contemporary Ethics as well as by authors such as Ronald C. Arnett in
Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warn-
ing and Hope. 2 The uniqueness of this volume is the overt connection be-
tween philosophy of communication and communication ethics. Our hope is
that the linkage between communication ethics and philosophy of communi-
cation will be solidified and promoted by this series of chapters. This linkage
has historical connections with the work of Richard L. Johannesen, who
aligned freedom and responsibility, 3 and the Southern States Communication
Association, which instituted the Philosophy and Ethics of Communication
Interest Group. Additionally, the biannual conference on communication eth-
ics held at Duquesne University emphasizes the intersection of philosophy of
communication and communication ethics. This volume aligns communica-
tion ethics and philosophy of communication.
Communication scholars, educators teaching communication classes, and
students attending universities are three groups of persons who will find the
chapters that compose Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the
Other to be of interest. The chapters are accessible to diverse audiences. The
book invites scholars and educators to use this project as an introduction to
multiple perspectives for inquiry about intersections of philosophy of com-
munication, communication ethics, and the Other.
This volume assumes the natural linkage of philosophy of communica-
tion, communication ethics, and the Other, with the notion of alterity as an
essential consequence. Alterity assumes a radical sense of difference; it im-
 Introduction xi

plies something alien to taken-for-granted assumptions about the human con-

dition. We consider the engagement of alterity as fundamental for communi-
cative understanding in the twenty-first century. The ethical prescription for
communicators in the twenty-first century is the meeting of and learning
from radical alterity. 4 We contend that our three major metaphors—philoso-
phy of communication, communication ethics, and the Other—are dwellings
for alterity and radical difference. There is no one philosophy of communica-
tion, no single communication ethic, no unitary Other. Each of these terms is
a holder of difference and a call for learning.
Philosophy of communication in a postmodern moment can be under-
stood as one of many positions that begin with bias, prejudice, and standpoint
of content. We must understand alterity, the radical sense of difference, that
grounds an Other. Studying philosophy of communication is a communica-
tive art of discerning what matters to oneself and to others. A philosophy of
communication informs one’s approach to interaction and works as a fulcrum
that gives energy, direction, clarity, and strength to one’s communication.
Philosophy of communication reminds us that content matters. Radical alter-
ity suggests that there are multiple forms of content that we can call philoso-
phies of communication—they are the communicative engines for what mat-
ters. For instance, one can understand capitalism and communism as
contrasting philosophies of communication that find their origins in differing
assumptions about the good life engaged in the marketplace. This example
yields clarity about the association between communication ethics and phi-
losophy of communication.
We understand communication ethics as value-laden philosophies of
communication. Communication ethics is the evaluative house that discerns
the significance—the weightiness—of a given communication issue. In an
era of narrative and virtue contention, there is no agreement on the supreme
importance of one communication ethic. There are multiple communication
ethics, each suggesting difference in value given to communicative assump-
tions. A communicative ethic is a value-laden philosophy of communication
that gives weight to issues and events. When we find ourselves shocked over
what another considers important, we are face-to-face with differences in
what matters, witnessing contrasting communication ethics.
In essence, we view philosophy of communication and communication
ethics as two forms of alterity, two gatherings of radical difference that
demand our understanding and learning. In this historical moment we cannot
assume that the Other will hold a similar philosophy of communication or an
isomorphic communication ethic. Radical alterity, or extreme otherness, does
not begin with the person we meet; it commences in what we contend matters
in content and value. We dwell within otherness, a diversity of positions that
we bring to the Other. This position on communication does not glorify
process, but returns to content. If we want to meet the Other, we must learn
xii Introduction

what philosophies of communication and ethics matter to the Other, as well

as to ourselves.
A caricature of the study of communication is that if only we can find the
correct processes, we will guide the discourse properly. However, processes
are not neutral, and they, too, are types of philosophies of communication.
Process is a foreground issue that is helpful after communicative partners
have done the background work of understanding what content and values
matter to one another.
This project, Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the Oth-
er, is a humanities case study of alterity of philosophy of communication and
communication ethics in social action. Our task is to underline the interplay
of content and values that matter in the meeting and the learning from the
Other in an era defined by otherness.

A PREAMBLE TO THE CHAPTERS IN PHILOSOPHY OF

COMMUNICATION ETHICS: ALTERITY AND THE OTHER

This project is composed of thoughtful chapters that speak clearly for them-
selves on the value and necessity of meeting Otherness. The intent of this
preamble is to assist the reader in understanding our stress on alterity as
radical otherness. We offer a brief glimpse of the subject of each chapter and
end by underscoring the connections between philosophy of communication
and communication ethics in the meeting of the Other. Radical differences
begin, accompany, and transform our communication with one another in a
time of otherness and offer a pragmatic reminder to learn from difference.
The chapters are grouped into three theoretical gatherings. The first series
of chapters addresses “Otherness: Place and Space.” The second sequence
turns to “Otherness and Justice,” and the third moves to “Otherness and
Contextual Divergence.” We understand questions of place, space, justice,
and contextual divergence as ways of interrogating an existential communi-
cative fact: Content and values matter, and they are inherent in our diverse
conceptions of what is of communicative importance. Before offering an
initial overture on each chapter, we pause to offer thanks to our colleagues
for their participation and their willingness to invite readers into the Philoso-
phy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the Other. The rationale for this
shorthand is to offer an overt counter to the normative assumption that com-
munication is centered on process. Contention begins with differences that
arise from dissimilar content and value positions and standpoints.
 Introduction xiii

OTHERNESS: PLACE AND SPACE

G. L. Ercolini, in “The Pantheism Controversy: Rhetoric, Enlightenment, and

Memory,” addresses content and value questions centered on the Enlighten-
ment. Her chapter defies the natural attitude that there was ever only one
version of the Enlightenment. Ercolini begins this section with a specific
reminder that there are multiple strands and arguments within the horizon of
what we call the “age of reason.” Her chapter is an exemplar of Otherness,
explicating that historical moment as an argument situated within the Panthe-
ism Controversy centered on content and values that matter differently to
others.
Ronald C. Arnett, in “A Rhetoric of Sentiment: The House the Scots
Built,” continues a stress on diversity in the Enlightenment. The chapter
explores the particular contributions of the Scots to what is now termed the
Scottish Enlightenment. Their perspective on the Enlightenment was nour-
ished via the interplay of the particular and the cosmopolitan, along with
their attentiveness to the importance of human sentiment. The creativity of
this historical moment was eventually rendered ineffectual as otherness of
thought and practice yielded to normative rhetoric of possession and reifica-
tion. When one attempts to make a set of ideas neat and without frayed edges
and void of contention, difference in content and value gives way to confor-
mity of perspective and expectation.
Pat J. Gehrke, in “Before the One and the Other: Ethico-Political Com-
munication and Community,” moves us from the question of the Enlighten-
ment while continuing a thematic examination of crowdedness and commu-
nity. He suggests a primordial understanding of community that has no spe-
cific spatial or temporal dimensions, vibrantly living within an organic fact—
we are being-together. Gehrke suggests otherwise than a conventional under-
standing of community in order to describe a primordial reminder for our
continuing existence. By challenging the content of our normative view of
community, Gehrke invites the reader into a value structure that reshapes our
conception of life together.
Lisbeth Lipari, in “Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis: An Essay on Time and
Relation,” stresses otherwise than a fitting response determined by the com-
municative agent alone. She conceptualizes Otherness, reminding us of lis-
tening as an organic communicative first principle. Such listening moves
speech from an act of imposition to responsiveness. Lipari implies that the
rhetor is first a listener, attending to the speech in a given historical moment
tied not to a particular person but to a given historical question. Lipari ad-
dresses the ethical relation as a temporal and embodied interplay of kairos
and akroasis that constitutes a temporal ethical space. Listening attends to
content and values centered in Otherness and lived by another, giving us
xiv Introduction

opportunity to understand what at first glance is often rejected due to our

own ignorance.

OTHERNESS AND JUSTICE

Brenda J. Allen, in “Communication, Diversity, and Ethics in Higher Educa-

tion,” offers a pragmatic aide-mémoire of the organic linkage between diver-
sity and communication ethics. This historical moment requires attentiveness
to multiple vantage points and communicative engagement with social, polit-
ical, and academic issues. Diversity inherently invites creativity and insight
as we engage differing perceptual standpoints. Diversity and difference are
privileged terms in an era of contrasting content, perspectives on content and
the value attached to what matters.
Pat Arneson, in “Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for
Communication Ethics: Juliette Hampton Morgan’s Advocacy for Racial
Justice,” explores the significant civil advocacy work of Juliette Hampton
Morgan. Arneson lends insight into a demand for justice as a societal com-
mitment. Arneson textures this historical account with the phenomenological
philosophy of Tymieniecka, revealing the power of benevolent sentiment in
action. Arneson offers insight into content and value that does not rest with
an analytic perspective of rational agreement. We are more than rational
creatures and less when benevolent sentiment is rejected for possessive acts
of control.
Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose, in “The Ethical Challenges of
Friendship in Interpersonal and Mexican-U.S. Relations: A Case Study of
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” give us insight into a film that
unites the macabre and unfortunate demanding characteristics of life dis-
rupted from its routine and ethical sensibilities. The Otherness is the interrup-
tion, the denial of routine, and the odd interplay of a strangeness of action
that simultaneously illuminates the power of human friendship. The content
and values reflected in this analysis suggest that Otherness emerges from the
unexpected. There are regrettable limits to modernity’s love of efficiency.
John B. Hatch, in “Resolutions of Regret: The Other in the Evolution of a
State Apology for Slavery,” combines self-oriented image restoration and
commemoration with Other-oriented recognition and reconciliation by exam-
ining Virginia’s 2007 apology for slavery. Virginia paved the way for other
states to issue apologies that focused almost entirely on acknowledging the
mistreatment of black Americans, while recognizing their achievements in
the face of oppression. Hatch reminds us that contention over content and
values that matter does not fall within a neat timeline. At times, one must
make present what others have forgotten in order to awaken them from the
slumber of thoughtlessness.
 Introduction xv

Lester C. Olson, in “Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A

Single Man: Communication Ethics, Social Differences, and Alterity in Me-
dia Portrayals of Homosexuality,” examines two disparate versions of Isher-
wood’s A Single Man, the 1964 novel and the 2009 film version. Olson
asserts that the latter engages in symbolic violence, unreflectively decon-
structing Isherwood’s authentic artistic achievement in the novel. Olson con-
tends that the film undermines Isherwood’s artistic legacy by falsely repre-
senting his work and defaming his literary sensibility. Olson offers a textured
read of contention over content and values. His chapter foregoes the impulse
to conceptualize an either/or world, reminding the reader of the richness of
difference over standpoints that matter. He takes us beyond normative taken-
for-granted assumptions of applause/agreement in the thoughtful engagement
with creative contention.

OTHERNESS AND CONTEXTUAL DIVERGENCE

Janie M. Harden Fritz, in “Organization as Other: Professional Civility as

Communicative Care for Institutions,” proposes an unconventional glimpse
at the notion of organizations. Fritz engages the organization as an Other, an
alterity that offers a dwelling for human participants. The organization func-
tions as an ethical third that can call individual communicators on multiple
sides of issues into account, inviting them to nurture a common space of
engagement. Fritz frames a content and value perspective on organizations
that challenges an individualistic culture without falling into a collective
posture. Her chapter does not rely upon perspectives, but rather reminds the
reader of responsibilities.
Alain Létourneau, in “An Example of the Plurality of Levels of Commu-
nication Ethics Analysis in a Newspaper Article,” points to the multi-layered
nature of bias. He unmasks the multiplicity of communication ethics present
in a series of newspaper articles centered on the theme of fracking. This
chapter points to an otherness that results in dismissal of contrary perspec-
tives. The reader is reminded of a basic journalistic task in a world of narra-
tive disagreement—there is more than one perspective on content and value,
and the differences should be made public.
Annette M. Holba, in “Leisure and the Other: Philosophy and Communi-
cation Ethics,” counters a culture that markets and sells recreation but that
consistently fails to transform the communicator, with the outcome being
placation and amusement. Holba renders a conceptual picture of leisure as
other than conventional commercial exploitation. Leisure requires respect for
the uniqueness of that which one engages; the return cannot be calibrated or
predicted. In the doing of leisure, one finds a reward that is otherwise than
xvi Introduction

expectation. Holba takes the reader to the doing of content and value that
contrasts with a culture bent on recreation and consumerism.
Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, in “Saving the Nation: Redemptive Ethos and the
Moral Figure of the Refugee,” takes us to an otherness that reveals the
complexity of hypertextuality in human lives. Ritivoi details a world of
multiple identity formations and linkages. She situates her theoretical expli-
cation in the moral crisis of Nazi Germany and post–World War II Germany.
We witness in the chapter a redemptive ethos of identity reformation. This
chapter exposes a postmodern reality of hypertextuality. Ritivoi reminds us
of an existential authenticity—identity is not singular; it involves multiple
places of content and values, oftentimes at odds with one another.
Isaac E. Catt, in “Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood under the
Regime of Antidepressant Medicine,” suggests an alternative reading of the
pharmaceutical industry’s reliance upon mood-altering substances. He thinks
otherwise than the immediacy of a Western culture bent on imposition of
change. He reminds us of our communal responsibilities in discourse with
one another, which can summon hope and realignment of persons in commu-
nity. Catt’s chapter is an open challenge to content and values solidified in
smug self-assurance and then marketed within a mantra of progress that
rejects questioning.
We now invite you into conversation with our colleagues and Gerard A.
Hauser’s “Machiavelli’s Question Mark and the Problem of Ethical Commu-
nication.” We leave the last word to Hauser; he is an exemplar of philosophy
of communication and communication ethics thoughtfulness. His career has
been an ongoing examination and, when needed, challenge to reified content
and values within Western society. His afterword is an archetype of thought-
generating scholarship. We should expect no less from a colleague whose
most recent book, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political
Agency, was the recipient of two major awards: the James A. Winans and
Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in
Rhetoric and Public Address from the National Communication Association
and the Rhetoric Society of America’s 2013 Book Award. 5 Good colleagues
and good chapters remind us that there is much to learn—diversity matters,
and our meeting of Otherness is the creative heart of this historical moment.
The content of philosophy of communication and the values of communica-
tion ethics matter; we do not agree on them, but they fuel our communicative
lives. Meeting the Other begins as we acknowledge the otherness all around
us housed in content and values that matter ever so differently to many of us.

NOTES

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the
Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1967).
 Introduction xvii

2. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contem-
porary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992); Ronald C. Arnett, Communication Ethics in Dark
Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 2013).
3. Richard L. Johannesen, “Diversity, Freedom, and Responsibility in Tension,” in Com-
munication Ethics in an Age of Diversity (155–86), edited by Josina M. Makau and Ronald C.
Arnett (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
4. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other (London: Continuum, 1998/
2006).
5. Gerard A. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnett, Ronald C. Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warn-
ing and Hope. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013.
Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary
Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Hauser, Gerard A. Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2012.
Johannesen, Richard L. “Diversity, Freedom, and Responsibility in Tension.” In Communica-
tion Ethics in an Age of Diversity, 155–86. Edited by Josina M. Makau and Ronald C.
Arnett. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. London: Continuum, 1998/2006.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the
Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1967.
 I

Otherness: Place and Space

 Chapter One

The Pantheism Controversy

Rhetoric, Enlightenment, and Memory

G. L. Ercolini

The Enlightenment, once inextricable from the question of revolution in

general and the French Revolution in particular, has (post–twentieth century)
come to signify the negative telos of a certain form of reason and a particular
itinerary of instrumental rationality brought to its barbarous conclusion. On
the other hand, enlightenment, particularly as it was discussed and debated as
an answer to the eighteenth-century question “What is this present we inhab-
it?” was far more complex and contested than its present function as short-
hand for hypertrophic subjectivity. Much work has sought to complexify the
Enlightenment, particularly the caricatured amalgam that serves as a foil
against which the “postmodern” is posited. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich’s
volume, Enlightenment in National Context, assembles portraits of multiple
enlightenments emerging from different socio-political contexts, providing
portraits ranging from the Scottish to the Italian to the Dutch, Bohemian, and
Russian enlightenments, among others. 1
Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment takes a different tack by instead
differentiating mainstream, moderate, and radical enlightenments. 2 While
many narratives take the late Enlightenment for enlightenment as such, Israel
argues that this later period “was basically just one of consolidating, popular-
izing, and annotating revolutionary concepts introduced earlier.” 3 This earli-
er “radical enlightenment” saw a shift from confessional conflicts that left
faith, tradition, and authority intact toward a deeper challenge of “everything
inherited from the past—not just commonly received assumptions about
mankind, society, politics, and the cosmos but also the veracity of the Bible
and the Christian, or indeed any, faith.” 4 The influential and controversial
political, theological, and ethical thought of Baruch Spinoza, taking on an
3
4 G. L. Ercolini

itinerary and life of its own as Spinozism, played a central role. While the
notion of radicality carries with it an undergirding evaluative authenticity
that can be problematic, radical also indicates the root, the fundamental. In
this sense, the early figure of Spinoza serves as a central character in later
conversations about enlightenment thought, particularly through the con-
structed or animated figure of pantheism that invariably arose in late-
eighteenth-century debates about enlightenment.
The Pantheism Controversy (Pantheismusstreit), on its face a debate
about whether renowned author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a Spinozist,
involved many luminaries of the time. Active participants included Lessing’s
close friend Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the leader of
the charges against Lessing. 5 The controversy later drew in Immanuel Kant
and Johann Gottfried Herder, among others. Of course, the stakes of the
debate extend far beyond Lessing’s personal beliefs, addressing at heart both
the radical thought of Spinoza and the broader considerations central to the
German Enlightenment, particularly the relation between reason and religion,
between philosophy and theology. The Pantheism Controversy in the context
of Enlightenment Germany provides an interesting moment by which to
examine rhetoric’s place, scope, and role. This general context and period—
oft characterized as one of many nadirs in rhetoric’s history, particularly
from a vantage point presupposing the golden age of ancient oratory as
zenith—was replete with lively public debates and exchanges oriented to-
ward a broader, popular audience. While at first appearing as an esoteric
literary feud, this moment not only provides a way to reevaluate the practices
that constitute rhetoric in accounts of its history but also opens the reevalua-
tion of the broader relation between enlightenment and rhetoric.
This chapter examines the Pantheism Debate, including the initial person-
al correspondence between Mendelssohn and Jacobi after Lessing’s death,
the making public of the exchange in popular publication, and the eventual
drawing in of a somewhat reluctant Immanuel Kant. These three moments,
the core and early elements of an even wider-ranging controversy, provide an
opportunity to interrogate the conventional wisdom that rhetoric in this time
and context not only wanes but becomes entirely subsumed by the imminent
Romantic turn toward aesthetics and poetics. The Pantheism Controversy
serves as a particular site in which the lively embodied practices of rhetoric
in public debate and exchange not only concern the stakes of a historical
period examining its own present through the question, “What is enlighten-
ment?” but also further carry out, demonstrate, enact, and perform those very
considerations before a broader interested public audience. In sketching out
these contours, I start with a brief examination of the underlying question of
rhetoric in the German Enlightenment and then move to a brief overview of
the subject matter on which the debate is focused: the figure of Spinoza and
one reductive version of his thought that goes by the name of Spinozism.
 The Pantheism Controversy 5

Mendelssohn and Lessing, both key players in the Enlightenment and central
characters in the Pantheism Controversy, not only forged a close and impor-
tant friendship (an important relationship undergirding the controversy) but,
furthermore, can be read as rhetorically inflected thinkers on their own. I
then turn from select key moments of the Pantheism Controversy proper
toward the twin implications of a more robust role for rhetoric in the German
Enlightenment and (borrowing from Stephen H. Browne) an ending accent
upon the texture of memory. 6

RHETORIC IN THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT

In the history of rhetoric, the German Enlightenment receives at most a

footnote. In accounting for rhetoric’s increasing turns toward writing, com-
position, and publication (secondary rhetoric) in supplanting the predomi-
nantly oral tradition (primary rhetoric), George Kennedy’s narrative evoca-
tively traces conspicuous moments in rhetoric’s history where a slippage
between primary and secondary rhetoric occurs—a refrain he associates with
the Renaissance Italian term letteraturizzazione. 7 And yet, at the same time,
Kennedy reverts to a conventional account of rhetoric in the German Enlight-
enment, noting:

In Germany, rhetoric became the victim of romantic aestheticism and the

idealization of poetry. Immanuel Kant, whose influence dominated German
philosophy throughout the nineteenth century . . . describes oratory as exploit-
ing the weakness of the hearers and dismisses the art of rhetoric as worthy of
no respect. 8

While this characterization prompts debate on many accounts (as some re-
cent scholarship has addressed, particularly on the characterization of Kant’s
attitudes toward rhetoric), Kennedy’s specific characterization of rhetoric’s
subsumption under poetics in the German Enlightenment provides an inter-
esting point for further reexamination. Not only was rhetoric a continuing
field of pedagogy at this time, but if we count as rhetoric the public practices
of lively exchange, debate, and controversies taking place through popular
journals and publications, then rhetoric not only survived but perhaps even
flourished in the context of the German Enlightenment.
Thomas Conley notes that between 1750 and 1850, over two hundred
handbooks on declamation and elocution appeared in German. 9 Even if one
restricted examination to handbooks, treatises, and courses in rhetoric during
the German Enlightenment, rhetoric hardly slips away quietly, overtaken by
poetics. While rhetoric oftentimes appears as a fine art, alongside poetry, it
exists (and persists) as a subject with distinct form, function, and operation.
Courses in Germany and Prussia were titled “rhetoric,” professorship lines
6 G. L. Ercolini

existed in rhetoric, and the orations of the rhetorician Cicero, in particular,

were both analyzed and recited toward the goal of speaking in Latin as a
Roman—not to mention the increasing turn toward the vernacular language
for both speaking and writing to forge elegant styles and modes of address
suitable to the German language.
The history of rhetoric oftentimes privileges treatises explicitly on the
topic at the expense of lively practices that could otherwise operationally
define what happens to rhetoric in quite a different light in any given period.
For practical reasons of scope, definition, and available archive, one can
hardly object too strongly on these grounds as a matter of general principle or
method. However, particularly in the case of the German Enlightenment,
lively public debates on topics of popular interest flourished. If we carry
forward a restricted definition of rhetoric (e.g., taking Athenian public orato-
ry as exemplar) in order to conclude that rhetoric waned or died out in later
periods such as the German Enlightenment, then we risk obscuring and oc-
cluding the myriad forms rhetoric has taken in adapting and calibrating to
different socio-political configurations. Instead of a moribund endeavor,
rhetoric actually exhibits vitality: adaptability, tenacity, and fortitude.
In “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” Kant defines
enlightenment as the release from self-incurred tutelage, and the injunction
of enlightenment as to exercise the public use of reason at every point “as a
scholar before the reading public.” 10 Moses Mendelssohn’s essay, “On the
Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” appeared in the same publication, the
Berlinische Monatsschrift, shortly before Kant’s essay. 11 Often presently
read on its own for Kant’s public/private distinction, Kant’s essay was just
one of many that appeared in response to the same prompt: “What is enlight-
enment?” This question had emerged in a footnote in Friedrick Zöllner’s
1783 article on civil unions, and the prompt provoked the subsequent ex-
change in one of the foremost Enlightenment popular journals, which was
associated with the Mittwochgesellschaft or the Wednesday Society, a
learned society composed of friends of the Enlightenment in Berlin. 12 While
Kant’s answer might appear to us as the most well-known (now largely
excised from this context and conversation), at the time it was not necessarily
taken as the most authoritative, and it appeared alongside and in conversation
with other well-respected authors’ views. This debate, generally consisting of
the question, “What is this present in which we are participating?” not only
takes up the question of enlightenment but also enacts its own undertaking in
speaking as a scholar before a reading public, in Kant’s terms. These authors
are undertaking enlightenment as they are speaking of enlightenment in its
different modalities.
This conversation, before an interested reading public, characterizes an
embodied social practice (a certain form of public address) more than a
private or highly specialized, technical philosophical exchange. Kant further-
 The Pantheism Controversy 7

more defines publication as a form of public address, as “an instrument for

delivering speech to the public,” in “On the Wrongfulness of Unauthorized
Publication of Books.” 13 Enlightenment was a topic of debate, about which
there was much disagreement (including whether it was a worthy goal or
admirable ethos in the first place). As Joachin Whaley notes, “the learned
tomes of the Republic of letters had been replaced by the journals of the
educated classes, journals which were the most important medium of the
Enlightenment in Protestant Germany.” 14 Along these lines, the context and
particular changes therein require a recalibration of what we consider rheto-
ric in order to avoid occluding lively and vital practices that do not prima
facie resemble classical oratory. The Pantheism Controversy offers one site
for such a recalibration of rhetoric, contrary to treatise-focused conventional
wisdom, providing a narrative for how it was flourishing under different
forms rather than meeting its demise.
The initial phases of this particular public controversy took place within a
year or two after the enlightenment essays, bearing directly on the same
question. While beginning as a private epistolary exchange about Lessing
after his death, it expanded publicly, and the eventual influence and impact—
from Kant to Schelling to Hegel—can hardly be overestimated. 15 Under the
auspices of Lessing’s beliefs, Jacobi’s allegations and attacks upon Lessing
implicate precisely nothing short of enlightenment writ large. If Lessing was
a Spinozist, a pantheist, and, through acrimonious association, an atheist,
then enlightenment would, likewise, be impugned. So, not only does this
seemingly esoteric and remote controversy offer a way to detect signs of life
for an ostensibly dead rhetoric, it furthermore provides a site where the
Arendtian gambit “to think what we are doing,” 16 through this self-titled
present of the Age of Enlightenment, was at stake. Before turning to the
actual exchange marking the start of the Pantheism Controversy, a short
contextual excursus on the emergence of the labels Spinozist and Spinozism
might prove useful.

ON SPINOZA AND SPINOZISM (PREFACE TO THE DEBATE)

In many ways, we are still trying to come to terms with the writings of
Baruch Spinoza—despite (or even exemplified by) Slavoj Žižek’s exasperat-
ed rejoinder to Gilles Deleuze, “Is It Possible Not to Love Spinoza?” 17 This
question only emerges intelligibly rather recently—a product of a turn in
contemporary continental theory—with Deleuze’s work Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy, in particular, at the helm. 18 For centuries the question was quite
the inverse—“How could anyone (at least publicly) associate themselves
with such a dangerous thinker?” In certain circles, an epithet hardly could
take a more pointed form than Spinozist. Spinoza was always an outlaw
8 G. L. Ercolini

thinker, to be sure, especially in his own time. Deleuze wrote, “while it

sometimes happens that a philosopher ends up on trial, rarely does a philoso-
pher begin with excommunication and an attempt on his life. . . . It is said
that Spinoza kept his coat with a hole pierced by a knife thrust as a reminder
that thought is not always loved by men.” 19 Most have to work toward such
infamy—Spinoza was formally censured by the Sephardic community in
Amsterdam for expressing his inchoate iconoclastic views on nature and
scripture before he even got started, philosophically speaking.
Spinoza (1632–1677) was born and raised in Amsterdam in the Jewish
community. His early education included Hebrew and rabbinic studies. His
parents—conversos, outwardly Catholic—retained and practiced secretly
their Jewish faith. After becoming increasingly skeptical of not only Judaism
but established religion in general, and becoming increasingly uninterested in
following in his father’s footsteps in the family business (importing dried
fruit), Spinoza broke with the Jewish community and refused to repent for his
“monstrous” 20 behavior, which resulted in his official excommunication in
1655 at the age of twenty-three. His major writings appeared within the slim
span of seventeen years, from 1660 to his death in 1677. The enduring labels
of Spinoza, Spinozist, and Spinozism acquired their inextricably negative
valences in the wake of the Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus, 21 published
anonymously and bearing the imprint of a fictitious printer, in 1670.
This work, taking as its aim a radical reconsideration of Scriptural exege-
sis and distinguishing a philosophical orientation from a theological one, was
met with such colorful depictions as “the most dangerous book ever pub-
lished” and “a book forged in hell . . . by the devil himself.” 22 So much has
been and can be said about this monumental philosophical work, yet the
present concern involves the lateral questions of what Spinoza came to mean,
how Spinozism came to be invoked, and what was involved in labeling
someone as a Spinozist, for these associations emerge once again in the
context of the Pantheism Controversy, over one hundred years later.
In Ethics, 23 Spinoza redefines God, moving from a traditional Judeo-
Christian anthropomorphic creator to an infinite, uncaused, and unique sub-
stance. From rather Cartesian premises and definitions, Spinoza advances the
conclusion that since God is the only substance, everything must be in God
and with God as the immanent cause of all. Tabling several important dis-
tinctions and technical debates, this idea is basically reduced to pantheism—
all is one, God is in all things. While the implications of this recalibration of
God, nature, and the human are radically contentious on their own, the con-
troversial Theological-Political Treatise adds a second important element to
our construction of Spinozism/pantheism. In reorienting scriptural exegesis
away from the sanctity of the word and toward more practical moral lessons,
and in distinguishing divine from ceremonial law toward a defense of philo-
sophical freedom that does not threaten the social order but forms its stable
 The Pantheism Controversy 9

basis, Spinoza directly challenges fundamental theological principles and

practices.
Deleuze proclaims, “No philosopher was ever more worthy, but neither
was any philosopher more maligned and hated.” 24 Deleuze’s sweeping ac-
count of Spinozism includes not only “a single substance having an infinity
of attributes,” nor just “all creatures being only modes of these attributes or
modifications of this substance,” but even further, the “triple denunciation of
‘consciousness,’ of ‘values,’ and of ‘sad passions.’” 25 The epithet of Spinoz-
ism was formed from a simplification and reduction of the Ethics and his
political philosophy in the Treatise, with the added antipathy from detractors,
in order to accuse the target of materialism, immoralism, and atheism.
Jonathan Israel examines the unquestionable importance of Spinoza by
going beyond the particular thinker and works, tracing the way they connect
up to several strains of deistic, naturalistic, and atheistic systems of thought
in a network of radical enlightenment. This alternate network from within the
Enlightenment has, historically, been far overshadowed by and contraposed
to the moderate Enlightenment that followed it, which left the state and
religious institutions intact. Israel claims:

The question of Spinozism is indeed central and indispensable to any proper

understanding of Early Enlightenment European thought. Its prominence in
European intellectual debates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
tury is generally far greater than anyone would suppose from the existing
secondary literature . . . there has been a persistent and unfortunate tendency in
modern history to misconstrue and underestimate its significance. 26

Thus, the Pantheism Controversy is far more important than zeroing in on

some ephemeral debate about whether Lessing confessed his Spinozism to
Jacobi. The public work that “Spinoza” performed in eighteenth-century
German-Prussian contexts went right to the core of the political stakes of the
question, “What is enlightenment?”

ON MENDELSSOHN AND LESSING

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is considered a central figure of both the

German Enlightenment and the Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment. The rela-
tion between these two titles is considerably complex, but according to Gott-
lieb, the conventional arguments range from Mendelssohn as a successful
synthesizer of Judaism and enlightenment to a partially successful reconciler
between theology and reason to holding the two in separate, irreconcilably
suspended animation. 27 Unsurprisingly, what makes this range of interpreta-
tions possible is precisely the same fulcrum that allows his work to be inter-
preted in radically contradictory ways and that allows him to be both revered
10 G. L. Ercolini

and criticized from an array of positions, all at the same time. Not incidental
to the question at hand, the radical thinking of Spinoza—in particular, as
Michael Mack writes, his “questioning of theology as political obfuscation,
which serves to cover up social injustices” 28—precisely helps to pave the
way for the Jewish Enlightenment’s critique of rabbinic elite and hierarchical
politics.
Mendelssohn, albeit not at his initiation, became embroiled in a few pub-
lic debates and controversies. The Lavater affair 29 involved Johann Caspar
Lavater’s challenge to Mendelssohn’s enlightened theology and the attempt
to convert him to Christianity. A debate on the civil rights and status of
Jewish people inspired Mendelssohn to contribute, resulting in another chal-
lenge to his Judaism and another attempt to claim that his thinking is closer
to Christianity, resulting in Mendelssohn’s masterpiece, Jerusalem (pub-
lished in 1783). 30 Another pivotal work, Morning Hours, emerged from
within the context of the Pantheism Controversy. 31 By all accounts, these
hardly civil public controversies took quite a toll on Mendelssohn’s health
and well-being (reportedly he developed a nervous ailment of sorts, plaguing
him from the Lavater affair until his death). These events provide a caution-
ary note to both the idealization of civil public debates and the exaltation of
the sometimes acrimonious nature of the exchanges. Mendelssohn was a
formidable participant and opponent in all three of these important public
controversies, but not to his own physical and psychological benefit.
No stranger to rhetoric and public debate, Mendelssohn even wrote of
rhetoric explicitly in the essay “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and
Sciences” 32 in the 1761 collection Philosophical Writings. In sketching out
the nature and relation between the fine arts and sciences, which all move us
in profound ways, Mendelssohn’s first order of division distinguishes the
fine sciences (belles lettres) as ones trafficking in arbitrary signs, and the fine
arts (beaux arts), natural signs. 33 Signs are natural, in Mendelssohn’s ac-
count, “if the combination of the sign with the subject matter signified is
grounded in the very properties of what is designated” and, furthermore,
involve the expression of “emotion by means of the sounds, gestures, and
movements appropriate to it.” 34 Signs are arbitrary when such a natural con-
nection is absent, when they have “nothing in common with their designated
subject matter, but have nonetheless been arbitrarily assumed as signs.” 35
The passage on rhetoric, not without complexity, difficulty, and influence of
its own that will have to be merely glossed here, is intriguing, bearing direct-
ly not only on this question of rhetoric in Enlightenment Germany but also
on the connection to the central practices of debate and exchange in the
learned journals:

Since a combination of many words, based upon reason, is called “a state-

ment,” we can arrive quite naturally at the well-known definition by Baum-
 The Pantheism Controversy 11

garten: a poem is a sensuously perfect statement. This definition has at the

same time provided the occasion to locate the essence of the fine arts generally
in an artistic, sensuously perfect representation. Poetry distinguishes itself
from rhetoric by means of the ultimate purpose. The main, ultimate purpose of
poetry is to please by means of a sensuously perfect statement, while that of
rhetoric is to persuade by means of a sensuously perfect statement. 36

As belles lettres, both poetry and rhetoric concern a liveliness, evoking many
senses and attributes at once, one oriented toward entertainment, the other
toward persuasion. Not only was Mendelssohn a lively participant in many
public debates and controversies, but also his philosophical thought actually
included explicit treatment of the topic of rhetoric.
If Mendelssohn is named the father of modern Jewish philosophy, then
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) is credited as the father of modern
German theater. A few key aspects of his biography indeed call Spinoza to
mind: an early path of theological studies; a turning away from the expected
course of life; a restless movement from locale to locale, having trouble in
finding a place, a home, a suitable and enduring living; an untimely end to a
life replete with controversy, and so on. This hardly makes one a Spinozist,
however. Lessing’s legacy emanates from a tremendous corpus of comedies,
dramas, poetry, and aesthetic treatises forged, through Hannah Arendt’s
phrase, in “dark times,” surrounded by a sense of vexatious, evil misfor-
tune. 37 He sought to make the theater his pulpit, much to the dismay of his
family and other members of the clergy since the theater was considered a
powerful, dangerous, and potentially corrupting force.
Lessing and Mendelssohn met in 1754, “and it was through Lessing that
Mendelssohn profited not a little as a writer, critic, and as a man.” 38 After
Mendelssohn provided Lessing with a manuscript for comments, Lessing
surprised him with a published copy, having secured its publication in secret.
This work, in part inspired by Lessing and Mendelssohn’s collaborative read-
ing and conversations about Spinoza, includes two dialogues defending Spi-
noza as mediary between Descartes and Leibniz (these dialogues Mendels-
sohn later revised and published with other works in the aforementioned
volume, Philosophical Writings 39). The following year, the two collaborated
on the essay entitled “Pope: A Metaphysician!,” which in some sense ridi-
culed the Berlin Academy’s prompt as to whether Alexander Pope was a
metaphysician.
Lessing furthermore encouraged Mendelssohn to translate one of Rous-
seau’s essays, helping him along the path toward the role of popular philoso-
pher in the sense of making available, through translation and review essays,
the works of enlightened thinkers in different languages. Mendelssohn,
whose first language was Yiddish and who studied biblical Hebrew from his
youth, was also accomplished in Latin, German, French, and English, among
12 G. L. Ercolini

other languages, and was known for his brilliant style. According to Zeydel,
Lessing “set Mendelssohn on his feet as a German author and publicist and
called his attention to the advantages of the modern languages.” 40 Lessing
did not stay in any one place too long, but to Berlin (Mendelssohn’s perma-
nent residence from an early age to his death), Lessing returned several
times. Their close friendship persisted largely through correspondence when
not in each other’s direct company. Often noted is Lessing’s portrait of
Mendelssohn, surely the model for Nathan the Wise. 41
Lessing was always shrouded in controversy, not the least due to his
polemical mode of engagement. He wrote essays for Voss’s Gazette, attack-
ing the imitation and exaltation of all things French. A longtime critic of
Lessing erroneously attacked him on account of an ostensible mistake con-
cerning an archaeological matter, provoking a controversy “that was waged
fast and furiously for some months, until at last Lessing silenced his adver-
sary.” 42 While librarian for the Court of Brunswick at Wolfenbüttel, Lessing
published and edited some work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus known as the
Wolfenbüttel Fragments. 43 According to Zimmern, the “publication drew
down upon Lessing a fury of rancorous abuse, and involved him in a vortex
of controversy that lasted till his death.” 44 Leading the charge against Less-
ing, insisting that Lessing was the author hiding behind someone else’s
name, J. M. Goeze attacked Lessing while his wife lay dying. Lessing’s
relentless response, a series of fourteen letters known as Anti-Goeze, 45 out-
maneuvers his opponent in just about every way.

THE PANTHEISM CONTROVERSY

While Lessing had participated in many spirited controversies on theological

and philosophical matters, the greatest public debate in which he was imbri-
cated took place after his death. Lessing died in February of 1781. To put this
even into sharper context, consider that it happened just a few months before
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason would debut at the Easter Leipzig Book Fair.
The Pantheism Controversy, one of the most significant public controversies
of the Enlightenment, centered upon Lessing’s alleged confession to Jacobi
that he was a Spinozist, a pantheist, and in common association at the time,
an atheist. The major events comprising the early stages of the Pantheism
Controversy unfolded along the following timeline:

• Lessing’s alleged confession to Jacobi (June, 1780)

• Lessing’s death (February, 1781)
• Correspondence between Jacobi and Mendelssohn (1785)
• Jacobi publishes On The Doctrine of Spinoza, In Letters to Mr. Moses
Mendelssohn (September, 1785) 46
 The Pantheism Controversy 13

• Mendelssohn publishes Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of

God (October, 1785) 47
• Mendelssohn publishes To Lessing’s Friends, An Appendix to Mr. Jaco-
bi’s Correspondence on the Doctrine of Spinoza (December, 1785) 48
• Mendelssohn’s death (January, 1786)
• Kant delivers “On the Philosophers’ Medicine of the Body” (October,
1786) 49
• Kant publishes “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?”
(October, 1786) 50

After Lessing’s death in 1781, Mendelssohn was planning on writing a trib-

ute to his great friend, to be included in the work Morning Hours, or Lectures
on the Existence of God—a work comprising his morning lessons for his son
and a few others. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi learned of Mendelssohn’s plan
through a mutual friend and wanted to catch Lessing’s close and unsuspect-
ing friend off guard with the revelation of Lessing’s confession of Spinoz-
ism. Jacobi was hardly a friend of the Enlightenment, and had on several
occasions taken the opportunity to reject its general tenets—in particular that
theology can have a rational basis—in favor of an approach to Christianity
based on a notion of faith not synthesized through rationality. He even tried
to draw Kant into a public debate by charging that the Critique of Pure
Reason 51 was allied with Spinoza (Kant did not take the bait). Thus, Jacobi is
often characterized as a figure of the Counter-Enlightenment and, at least on
first glance, he used charges of Spinozism to foster debates that put this
question of “enlightenment” in question.
Upon hearing of Mendelssohn’s tribute, and (I would surmise) discomfit-
ed at the thought of the opportunity for Mendelssohn to characterize their
epistolary exchange (although Mendelssohn agreed not to publicly reveal
their correspondence), Jacobi rushed to print On the Doctrine of Spinoza in
Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn in September of 1785. 52 If Mendelssohn’s
best friend, unable to tell Mendelssohn directly, actually moved away from
enlightenment theism and toward being a Spinozist, pantheist, and atheist,
then the German Aufklärung (Enlightenment) would be, by association, dis-
credited. Jacobi’s account is interesting—the inquiry about Mendelssohn’s
writing plans at least forms (whether a likely ruse of not) an interesting
constructed occasion for Jacobi’s revelation. Jacobi writes to Mendelssohn,
recounting the dialogue. Jacobi “recounts” the scene how after Lessing reads
a poem Jacobi hands him (supposedly an unpublished writing of Goethe),
Lessing does not react in offense as Jacobi had expected:

Lessing: “I took no offense. I did that long ago, and at first hand.”

I (Jacobi): “You know the poem?”

14 G. L. Ercolini

Lessing: “I have never read the poem, but I consider it good.”

I (Jacobi): “In its own way, I do too; otherwise I would have not shown it
to you.”

Lessing: “I mean it in a different way. . . . The viewpoint from which the

poem was written is my own viewpoint. . . . The orthodox concepts of
divinity are no longer for me. I cannot bear them. Hen kai pan [one and
all]! I know nothing else. The poem also runs in that direction and I must
confess I like it a lot.”

I (Jacobi): “In that case you would be more or less in agreement with
Spinoza.”

Lessing: “If I should name myself after someone, then I know no one
else.”

I (Jacobi): “Spinoza is good enough for me, but what poor salvation we
find in his name!”

Lessing: “Indeed! As you wish. . . . And yet. . . . Do you know of

something better?” 53

The account continues the next morning when Lessing senses Jacobi’s dis-
comfort about the Spinoza conversation but basically depicts his forthright-
ness and intellectual honesty with admiration. Jacobi insists on defending a
personal God and recourse to faith, the mortal leap. After the account of the
confession and ensuing lively discussion, Jacobi summarizes his own posi-
tion in the following postulates:

1. Spinozism is atheism.
2. The Kabbalistic philosophy . . . is, as philosophy, nothing but underde-
veloped or newly confused Spinozism.
3. The Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy is no less fatalistic than the Spin-
ozistic philosophy and leads the persistent inquirer back to the first
principles of the latter.
4. Every path of demonstration ends in fatalism.
5. We can only demonstrate similarities. Every proof presupposes some-
thing that has already been proven, the principle of which is revela-
tion.
6. The element of all human knowledge and activity is faith. 54

The Counter-Enlightenment inflections of this summary should emerge fairly

strikingly: the rejection of the systems of rational proof and demonstration in
 The Pantheism Controversy 15

theological matters, the charge that such rationalism invariably strips away
the tenets of true theology (revelation, faith), and corresponding rejection of
the enlightenment synthesis of reason and theology (which in Protestant
Germany took the particular form of reconciling the Leibniz-Wolffian ration-
alism into “enlightenment theology” from the Christian side). Of course, it is
telling that Jacobi’s work concludes with an extensive quote from Lavater
(one of Mendelssohn’s early antagonistic interlocutors).
Mendelssohn, by all accounts unaware of the appearance of Jacobi’s
work, proceeded with Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God,
with an ending tribute to Lessing and without mentioning the exchange with
Jacobi. Part of Morning Hours is an elegant paean to common sense, which
provides a general orientation to Mendelssohn’s approach. In Lecture X,
after an allegorical dream in which the figure of Reason adjudicates disputes
between Common Sense (sensus communis) and Contemplation (contempla-
tio), Mendelssohn summarizes,

Whenever my speculation seems to carry me too far off the high road of
common sense, I stop and try to orient myself. I look back at the point at which
we started and I try to comprehend my two guides. Experience has taught me
that common sense tends to be right in most cases, and that reason must speak
quite decisively in favor of speculation if I am to forsake the former and follow
the latter. Indeed, it must be clear to me how common sense could have
strayed from the truth and taken the wrong track if I am to be convinced that its
persistence is mere obstinacy. 55

After laying out the fundamental epistemological principles of enlightened

theism (in which common sense plays an important role), Mendelssohn ad-
dresses philosophies that threaten to undermine such principles. Under this
aim, Mendelssohn attempts to address Jacobi’s charges of Lessing’s Spinoz-
ism obliquely by adding a lecture on pantheism and then two lectures on
Lessing’s position as one of “purified pantheism.” 56
In Lecture XIII, Mendelssohn addresses pantheism and Spinoza’s
thought. Mendelssohn provides his own take on Spinozism and pantheism as
holding that

all things are mere modifications of the infinite substance. No thought of the
infinite can attain reality in and apart from its being. . . . God, says the
Spinozist, is the single necessary, and also the only possible, substance. Every-
thing else lives, moves, and is not outside God. Rather it is a modification of
the divine being. One is all and all is one. 57

Such is Mendelssohn’s take on hen kai pan, which he admits has adherents
but also goes against the common sense, and furthermore fails to make an
internal distinction from within substance (conflating self-supporting and
16 G. L. Ercolini

self-subsisting). Lectures XIV and XV specifically move to Lessing’s be-

liefs, the former comprised of an animated dialogue that Mendelssohn carries
out with his departed friend and the latter focused on Mendelssohn’s defense
of Lessing’s service to religion and “refined pantheism.” 58 This refined read-
ing of Lessing’s pantheism and appreciation of Spinoza, in Mendelssohn’s
account, defends Lessing’s spirit of inquiry and ensures us it does not threat-
en theology but can indeed be consistent and reconciled on practical grounds.
After learning of Jacobi’s On Spinoza, its treatment of their private corre-
spondence, and characterization of Lessing, Mendelssohn furiously set out to
strike back with To Lessing’s Friends, his final work. Mendelssohn, of frail
constitution from the nervous ailment that afflicted him, finished the manu-
script on December 20, 1785, and insisted on delivering it to the publisher in
person. Mendelssohn fell ill, to die only a few days later, on January 4, 1786.
While certainly adding dramatic flourish to an oftentimes uneventful narra-
tive of publication, this turn of events eventually became a part of the contro-
versy itself, for Mendelssohn was much revered. According to Gottlieb, the
Jewish shops all closed in his honor until after the funeral, where hundreds of
attendees, both Jewish and Christian, paid their respects. 59
In To Lessing’s Friends, all bets are off: Mendelssohn provides his own
take on his correspondence with Jacobi, obviously no longer needing to
honor the request to keep their conversation private. In setting up his rejoin-
der to Jacobi’s account, Mendelssohn proclaims, “We could confidently
leave the author of Nathan to his own defense. Even were I Plato or Xeno-
phon, I would be weary in speaking in defense of this Socrates. Lessing and
hypocrite, the author of Nathan and blasphemer—whoever can think these
things together is able to think the impossible, and he can just as easily think
Lessing and blockhead together!” 60 Mendelssohn continues, running through
possible scenarios for why Jacobi proceeded in the manner he did and
seemed bent on portraying Lessing as a Spinozist, a pantheist, and an atheist.
Mendelssohn’s account emphasizes his close friendship with Lessing,
how he knew of Lessing’s refined pantheism (as articulated in Morning
Hours), and that he would hardly react in shock (which Jacobi seemed to
expect of Mendelssohn). What surprised him is that Lessing, if we are to
believe Jacobi’s account, would confide in a relative stranger what he would
keep from a dear friend, and, even more perplexing, that Lessing (if we are
again to follow Jacobi’s account) would lay out his position in such a plain,
unremarkable, and almost juvenile fashion. Mendelssohn describes Lessing’s
appearance in Jacobi’s account rather as “a shallow atheist, not a student of
Hobbes or Spinoza, but some sort of childish jokester who enjoys kicking
aside whatever is important and dear to his fellow man.” 61 Jacobi is the only
one in his depiction making any sort of rational argument between the two
(with all intended irony).
 The Pantheism Controversy 17

Mendelssohn cannot publicly discount Jacobi’s account, for as Mendels-

sohn states, Jacobi is of good repute and “all of Mr. Jacobi’s friends and
acquaintances praise his rectitude and his heart even more than his mental
gifts.” 62 Mendelssohn finally arrives at the only sensible and plausible
hypothesis for what took place regarding this alleged confession: Lessing
was clearly taking the piss out of Jacobi, so to speak. The shallow recounting
of a paper-thin position, underdeveloped and unsubstantiated claims without
warrants, and uncritical praise of that ghastly poem Prometheus 63—hardly
the Lessing Mendelssohn recognized. Something in that scene struck familiar
with Mendelssohn, vaguely calling to mind Mendelssohn’s previous interloc-
utors’ stratagems to secure his salvation in conversion to Christianity (in both
the Lavater Affair, and the controversy with Cranz resulting in Jerusalem). 64
Jacobi, seeing Lessing in a diminished spiritual state, “in this distressing,
confused, state of mind,” must have sought to “cure him of his illness—like a
skillful doctor, he ventured to aggravate the malady somewhat in the begin-
ning, in order to be able to cure it more effectively afterward.” 65 Mendels-
sohn’s account of this alternative agenda in the confession, borders on de-
light:

Our friend, who may well have gotten wind of Mr. Jacobi’s sincere purpose
quite quickly, was roguish enough to confirm the opinion that Mr. Jacobi had
formed of him. He may have also taken some pleasure in the ingenuity with
which Jacobi was able to expound and defend Spinoza’s doctrine. . . . There-
fore he played the attentive pupil with consummate skill, never contradicting,
agreeing with everything, and only seeking to get things going again by means
of some sort of joke when the discussion seemed to be coming to an end. . . .
Hence the affectations, platitudes, the pleasure in bad verse that was so unnat-
ural to Lessing. 66

Hence the insistence of Mendelssohn’s vouching for the veracity of Jacobi’s

account via his virtue of rectitude, at the expense of his “mental gifts.” 67
Jacobi was tactically outmaneuvered, which Mendelssohn reveals (with a
wink) “to Lessing’s friends,” to those who would recognize here the Lessing
they knew. Sensing the maneuver, and seeking to make an example of Less-
ing, Jacobi switches strategies in service of the same general aim of pious
rectitude: “to make the example of Lessing into an edifying warning to all the
other wiseacres—so that they might seize the remedy that they could not
renounce without giving up every means of escape.” 68 According to Men-
delssohn, this account not only explains Lessing’s actions through Jacobi’s
account but also Jacobi’s actions in escalating the epistolary exchange into a
public controversy.
Unfortunately, the enjoyable wit and thorough schooling (particularly to-
ward the end, when Mendelssohn breaks it down for Jacobi regarding the
relation between Judaism, Spinoza, and reason) that characterize Mendels-
18 G. L. Ercolini

sohn’s reply is irrevocably overshadowed by the tragic fact that it literally

did him in upon his return from delivering it to the publisher. The nature of
his death, given the nervous ailment that developed during the Lavater Af-
fair, soon turned toward charges that Jacobi’s provocation and incitement to
controversy contributed to Mendelssohn’s demise. Kant is repeatedly asked
by Biester (of the Berlinische Monatsschrift) and some of his friends to
intervene in the controversy—some presuming on Mendelssohn’s behalf,
others on Jacobi’s side, still others presuming an underlying concord be-
tween the two—finally resulting in Kant’s contribution “What Does It Mean
to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” in October of 1786. Like the enlightenment
essay, this deceptively short and ostensibly straightforward essay belies its
vexatious complexity. In this essay, Kant, for the most part, supports Men-
delssohn’s position (with some distinctions attuned to his critical philosophy)
and finds Jacobi’s reversion to faith deeply suspect and dangerous. The end-
ing movement, however, connects to the broader political concerns of en-
lightenment, namely focusing on freedom of thought. Not a matter of weeks
before this essay appeared, Friedrich II (Frederick the Great) died and the
imminent succession of Friedrich Wilhelm II loomed over the particularly
anxious conclusion reaffirming the enlightenment principles that would soon
(as vaguely anticipated) come under attack.
On its face as esoteric and occasional a work as imaginable, Kant’s inau-
gural rector address at Konigsberg in October of 1786, entitled “On the
Philosophers’ Medicine for the Body,” addressed the Pantheism Controversy
again, but from an intriguingly different angle. In this address, given in Latin
as per ceremonial protocol, even as lectures, courses, and writing moved
increasingly toward the German, Kant discusses the task of philosophy in
relation to the faculty of medicine. While the doctor should help the mind by
means of treating the body, the philosopher assists the body by means of a
mental regimen. Largely connecting to themes from his Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View (published later in 1798, but comprised of his own
textbook created for the popular course on anthropology that he developed
and had taught for decades), Kant discusses the need to care for the body and
how the body and mind interconnect in myriad ways.
The death of Mendelssohn forms a central case and example for the
address. Kant states, “Eulogizers of the great man Mendelssohn put the
blame for his death in one way or another on the learned men who got him
involved in a dispute with them.” 69 While Kant was not sympathetic with
Jacobi on many accounts, he did not find these allegations supportable: “In
my judgment, however, no one should be accused of such an atrocious crime.
What was at fault, rather, was the very way of life that much lamented man
adopted.” 70 Due to his various ailments, Mendelssohn’s doctors prescribed
him a course of “strict temperance,” which, as paradoxical as it might sound,
he took too far into “such abstemiousness that he kept himself always hungry
 The Pantheism Controversy 19

so as to avoid the slight and usually transitory discomforts of the stomach

that follow a proper meal.” 71 This asceticism, abnegation of the body, Kant
identifies as the real culprit—for Mendelssohn was “exhausted by excessive
temperance.” 72 Following the same reasoning that the philosopher’s ultimate
target is treating the body (through the mind), properly nourishing the body
with food, with social exchange, and with debate (even bordering on the
acrimonious) is of utmost importance. Abnegation of the body, excessive
abstemiousness, and ascetic denial of the physical harm both the body and,
subsequently, the mind. While Kant did not side with Jacobi’s position in the
“Orientation” essay (as Jacobi had hoped), Kant did end up dismissing the
allegations that Jacobi’s instigation of the Pantheism Controversy, in break-
ing Lessing’s alleged confession, bore any responsibility for Mendelssohn’s
untimely death. It was, according to Kant’s address, Mendelssohn’s unrelent-
ing self-denial (and thus, to a certain degree, denial of this embodied world)
that was to blame.

ON MEMORY

While the Pantheism Controversy features two central enlightenment ques-

tions—the still-underexamined implications of Spinoza’s thought and the
relation between reason and theology—this all takes place through the ques-
tion of memory, generally, and how to remember Lessing, in particular. The
forensic questions of whether Lessing actually confessed, or whether he was
actually a Spinozist, or even whether Mendelssohn or Jacobi got Lessing (or
Spinoza, for that matter) right are rather beside the point. The greatest public
controversy involving Lessing took place after he was already dead. This
does not remove him as an interlocutor, however, since he takes the form of
an animated participant of ongoing conversation (as in Mendelssohn’s Morn-
ing Hours) or as a memory invoked toward the aim of providing a cautionary
tale against enlightenment reason (Jacobi’s On Spinoza).
Evelyn Moore places Lessing’s polemical exchanges squarely within the
rhetorical tradition, even though conventionally Lessing hardly receives even
a footnote therein. Unlike the type of analysis systematic treatises afford,
these polemical exchanges show that indeed rhetoric “did not die a quiet
death but was very much alive in polemical tracts, and Lessing was a pivotal
figure in a culture dominated by argument and disputation.” 73 Hannah
Arendt’s essay “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing” gets to
the heart of Lessing’s rhetorical inflections but via a slightly different, yet
compatible, route. Worth quoting in full, Arendt notes:

Lessing, however, rejoiced in the very thing that has ever—or at least since
Parmenides and Plato—distressed philosophers: that the truth, as soon as it is
uttered, is immediately transformed into one opinion among many, is con-
20 G. L. Ercolini

tested, reformulated, reduced to one subject of discourse among others. Less-

ing’s greatness does not merely consist in a theoretical insight that there can-
not be one single truth within the human world but in his gladness that it does
not exist and that, therefore, the unending discourse among men will never
cease so long as there are men at all. A single absolute truth, could there have
been one, would have been the death of all those disputes in which this ances-
tor and master of all polemicism in the German language was so much at home
and always took sides with the utmost clarity and definiteness. And this would
have spelled the end of humanity. 74

In characteristic Arendtian fashion, deeply and irrevocably rhetorical obser-

vations are made without explicit evocation of the word or the discipline.
Here, Arendt’s portrait of Lessing’s humanity involves a philosophically
unorthodox rhetoric-as-epistemic approach. As she notes, “if he [Lessing]
had been confronted with the Platonic alternative of doxa or aletheia, of
opinion or truth, there is no question how he would have decided.” 75 When
faced with misfortune and dark times, instead of turning away from the work
to a sanctuary of private fraternity, Lessing embraced this world, the realm of
the political, in cherishing discourse, debate, and exchange.
What is at stake here concerns how we remember Lessing, how he is
narrativized through a controversy that not only posits him as content but
also evokes his spirit in an ultimately fitting form. An interlocutor par excel-
lence, Lessing in his final controversy—replete with polemics and intrigue—
enacted the very public discourse and exchange that connects his legacy to
larger-scale questions of the political. Mendelssohn’s gesture in “To Less-
ing’s Friends” gives his friend and collaborator the last laugh, but also pro-
vides the swan song by which we remember Mendelssohn, through the figure
of friendship. His dying act is a defense in commitment to his friend’s memo-
ry. Quite the contrary to a narrative of rhetoric’s decline, rhetoric took a
lively, popular, public, and contentious form through the practices of public
controversy in the German Enlightenment in general and strikingly in the
particular drama of the Pantheism Controversy.

NOTES

1. Roy Porter and Teich Mikulas, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
2. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity
1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
3. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 7.
4. Ibid., 4.
5. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), a figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, took
issue with the Enlightenment defense of rational theology. Frederick Beiser summarizes Jaco-
bi’s general position: “Reason . . . was not supporting but undermining all the essential truths of
morality, religion, and common sense. If we were consistent and pushed our reason to its limits,
then we would have to embrace atheism, fatalism, and solipsism. . . . In short, we would have to
 The Pantheism Controversy 21

deny the existence of everything, and we would have to become . . . ‘nihilists.’” According to
Jacobi, the only way to evade nihilism was to take a leap of faith. See The Fate of Reason:
German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 47.
His relationship with Lessing dates to his publication of Woldemar in 1779, which brought
about a meeting between the two. (See B. A. Gerrish, “The Secret Religion of Germany:
Christian Piety and the Pantheism Controversy,” Journal of Religion 67, no. 4 (1987): 437–55.)
6. Stephen H. Browne, “Review: Reading, Rhetoric, and the Texture of Public Memory,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 237–65.
7. George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric & Its Christian and Secular Origins from An-
cient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 3, 14,
45, 130, 294.
8. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 275.
9. Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (New York: Longman, 1990),
244.
10. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Politics of
Truth, trans. Lewis White Beck, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 7–20 (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1997), 31.
11. Moses Mendelssohn, “On the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” trans. James Schmidt,
in What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions,”
ed. James Schmidt, 53–57 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
12. James Schmidt, “Introduction: What is Enlightenment? A Questions, Its Context, and
Some Consequences,” in What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Answers to Twentieth
Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt, 1–44 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1996), 2.
13. Immanuel Kant, “On the Wrongfulness of Unauthorized Publication of Books,” in Prac-
tical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, 23–35, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of
Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 30.
14. Joachim Whaley, “The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany,” in The Enlightenment in
National Context, 106–17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 110.
15. While seemingly an esoteric exchange on an ephemeral topic, Beiser notes the tremen-
dous influence of the Pantheism Controversy in three areas: an increased popularity of Spinoz-
ism in Germany, an increasing accessibility and popularity of Kantianism, and the creation of a
fracture in the Aufklärung (see The Fate of Reason, 44–45).
16. Hannah Arendt, prologue to The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1958), 5.
17. Slavoj Žižek, “Is It Possible Not to Love Spinoza?” in Organs Without Bodies, 29–36
(New York: Rutledge, 2004).
18. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1988).
19. Ibid., 6.
20. Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of
the Secular Age (Princeton University Press, 2011), 8.
21. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 2nd edition, trans. Samuel Shirley (In-
dianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001).
22. For a thorough discussion of the context and reception of Spinoza’s Treatise, see Nadler,
A Book Forged in Hell, xi, 239.
23. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Writings of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans.
Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
24. Deleuze, Spinoza, 17.
25. Ibid., 17.
26. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 12–13.
27. Michah Gottlieb, introduction to Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christian-
ity, and the Bible, by Moses Mendelssohn (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011).
28. Michael Mack, “The Fate of Political Theology: Reflections on Shmuel Fiener’s ‘The
Jewish Enlightenment,’” Journal of Religion 81, no. 1 (2007): 78–89.
22 G. L. Ercolini

29. Michah Gottlieb explains in his prefatory note to Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on
Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible that on February 26, 1764, Johann Casper Lavater and
friends went to Moses Mendelssohn’s home seeking to make clear his view of Christianity.
After expressing his desire to keep the conversation private, Mendelssohn expressed respect for
Jesus on the grounds that Jesus did not claim to be divine. In 1769, shortly after reading Charles
Bonnet’s (1720–1793) Palingenesis, in which the divine revelation of Jesus’s miracles were
used as a basis to argue in favor of the immortality of the soul, Lavater publicly called upon
Mendelssohn to refute Bonnet’s argument. Embarrassed by this call, which placed him in the
delicate situation of having either to refute Christianity or renounce his Judaism, Mendelssohn
turned the argument back to Lavater with a “masterful” public letter in which he contrasted
Lavater’s “intolerant Christianity” with “tolerant Judaism,” 3–4.
30. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Ar-
kush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983).
31. Moses Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God, in Moses
Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, ed. Michael Gottlieb, 140–52
(Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2011).
32. Moses Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences,” in Philo-
sophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, 169–91 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
33. Ibid., 177.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 178.
37. Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing,” in Men in Dark
Times, 3–31 (New York: Mariner Books, 1970).
38. Edwin H. Zeydel, “Moses Mendelssohn, 1729–1929,” German Quarterly 3 (1930): 56.
39. Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
40. Ibid.
41. Gotthold Ephram Lessing, Nathan the Wise, trans. Adophus Reich (London: A. W.
Bennett, 1860).
42. Helen Zimmern, “Lessing,” in The Dramatic Works of G. E. Lessing (London: George
Bell and Sons, York Street, 1878), xxiii.
43. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Fragments, ed. Charles H. Talbert (Minneapolis, MN: For-
tress Press, 1970).
44. Zimmern, “Lessing,” xxviii.
45. Ibid., xxix.
46. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “From Jacobi’s On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr.
Moses Mendelssohn,” in Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the
Bible, ed. Michael Gottlieb (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2011), 127–39.
47. Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, 140–52.
48. Moses Mendelssohn, “From To Lessing’s Friends,” in Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on
Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, ed. Michael Gottlieb (Waltham, MA: Brandeis Univer-
sity, 2011), 153–71.
49. Immanuel Kant, “On the Philosophers’ Medicine of the Body,” in Anthropology, Histo-
ry, Education, ed. Gunter Zoller and Robert B. Louden, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 182–91.
50. Immanuel Kant, “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking,” in Religion and
Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
51. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen N. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
52. Jacobi, On the Doctrine of Spinoza.
53. Ibid., 132.
54. Ibid., 137.
55. Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, 143.
56. Ibid., 150.
 The Pantheism Controversy 23

57. Ibid., 143.

58. Ibid., 152.
59. Gottlieb, introduction to Moses Mendelssohn, xviii.
60. Mendelssohn, To Lessing’s Friends, 154.
61. Ibid., 157.
62. Ibid., 158.
63. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Satyros and Prometheus, trans. John Gray, ed. Alexander
Tille (Glasgow: Glasgow Goethe Society, 1898).
64. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Ar-
kush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983).
65. Mendelssohn, To Lessing’s Friends, 160.
66. Ibid., 161.
67. Ibid., 158.
68. Ibid., 161.
69. Kant, “Philosophers’ Medicine,” 185.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 189.
72. Ibid.
73. Evelyn Moore, The Passions of Rhetoric: Lessing’s Theory of Argument and the Ger-
man Enlightenment (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).
74. Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times,” 27.
75. Ibid., 26.

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Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, edited by
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———. Philosophical Writings. Edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1997.
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 Chapter Two

A Rhetoric of Sentiment
The House the Scots Built

Ronald C. Arnett

This chapter announces a sense of otherness, a view of the Enlightenment

that is otherwise than convention. This treatise stresses the Scottish Enlight-
enment as an alternative to the conception of the Enlightenment given life on
French soil. The uniqueness of this version of an alternative Enlightenment
model found identity in a particular time and place, eighteenth-century Scot-
land. The social and temporal geography of eighteenth-century Scotland
functioned as a rhetorical warrant that legitimized claims for social change
that transformed a people and a region and gave rise to what we now term the
Scottish Enlightenment. The lived experience of this inimitable moment in
Scottish history revealed the power of talented persons in conversation, gen-
erating a creative moment and a place that was truly “crowded with genius.” 1

INTRODUCTION

The Scottish Enlightenment united philosophy and practical change, yielding

a rhetorical milieu that countered the French obsession with abstract univer-
salism. Stephen Toulmin argues that warrants link data to a claim, giving
rationale for why one should attend to a given claim. 2 Scotland, as a commu-
nal context, was crowded with genius and functioned as a rhetorical warrant
that legitimized the claims of social change. Rhetorical influence attributed
to a community is a position articulated by Calvin Schrag; 3 the community
makes possible what can be communicatively understood. A specific com-
munity can offer a context or warrant for creative thinking that is otherwise
than convention. The Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century found

25
26 Ronald C. Arnett

life within three major cities that nourished communities of creative thought
and application: Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh.
In order to explicate this distinctive context of the Scottish Enlighten-
ment, I offer four perspectives that illuminate the importance of this peerless
orientation. First, I review Immanuel Kant’s classic essay, which opens the
conversation on the Enlightenment writ large. 4 Second, I recount a review by
C. Jan Swearingen of one of Alexander Broadie’s works, published in Phi-
losophy and Rhetoric; 5 Swearingen announces important communication
discipline connections to the Scottish Enlightenment. Third, I examine Alex-
ander Broadie’s book, The Scottish Enlightenment. 6 Finally, I turn to James
Buchan’s popularized description of the lived experience of a people at a
given time in Scottish history, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlighten-
ment. 7 Buchan’s work offers dramatic insight into the Edinburgh community
of the eighteenth century that performed as a warrant for claims that gave
birth to a creative moment termed the Scottish Enlightenment. I have separat-
ed the discussions on works by Kant, Swearingen, Broadie, and Buchan in
order to render distinctly different impressions of this particular time and
place. The notion of the Scottish Enlightenment is best understood as an
inventive era, textured with multiple facets and dimensions. However, what-
ever the perspective on this historic period, there is agreement that the geo-
graphical context legitimized the rhetorical prowess of that moment, giving
rise to what we now call the Scottish Enlightenment.
This chapter serves as an overture to the Scottish Enlightenment, provid-
ing an impressionistic image of the sensations, sentiments, and feelings that
constitute this particular historical context. The heart of the Scottish Enlight-
enment rests in sensations and sentiments that shaped a given people and
their ideas, generating innovation in economics, church life, governance, and
ethics. The Scottish Enlightenment displays the rhetorical power of theory
and practice in action, offering witness to the unity of philosophy and practi-
cality. The Scottish Enlightenment yielded enlightened hope without falling
prey to a conception of progress that is oblivious to unintended conse-
quences, the inevitable shadow side of change.

KANT’S ESSAY

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in his classic essay “An Answer to the Ques-
tion: What is the Enlightenment?” offers a recipe for the coordinates of an
enlightened good life or, put differently, the elimination of a non-enlightened
life of laziness, cowardice, and self-incurred immaturity. Kant stressed the
practice of independent thinking and internal self-dialogue that precludes
blind allegiance to authority. Kant wrote:
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 27

Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity

is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance
of another. Self-incurred is this inability if its cause lies not in the lack of
understanding but rather in the lack of the resolution and the courage to use it
without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your
own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment. 8

Kant framed the Enlightenment as a demand that human beings “finally learn
to walk.” 9 For Kant, thinking is not only what defines humanness; it is the
essential “vocation” of every human being. 10 Revolutions seek to unseat
autocratic despotism, making room for freedom that entails public space for
thinking and rational discernment. Such a world necessitates reading, civic
participation, discussion of ideas, and a desire to keep the public domain a
home of multiple opinions. Kant’s understanding of the Enlightenment in-
cluded the civic duty of paying taxes to the government; only unjust actions
of a government that deny the organization of free discussion can legitimize
acts of rebellion.
Guardians of the people must discard thoughtless immaturity and commit
themselves to reasoned thought in the public square, forgoing the temptation
of “Imperial Diets.” 11 Authority, particularly law, must rest in “the collective
will of the people.” 12 Religious issues, human freedom, and the space for
multiple ideas in the public domain must be protected and energized by the
metaphor of “tolerance” that endorses a struggle against the “barbarity” of
lack of patience for any position that is not one’s own. 13 Kant ends his classic
essay with an emphasis on freethinking, reasoning that enlightens the public
sphere and ensures civic freedom. Such thinking assumes that the human
being, in the time of the Enlightenment, “is now more than a machine.” 14
The human must exercise the dignity of autonomous thought, acting and
thinking freely within an Enlightenment conception of the world. For Kant,
the Enlightenment was not an era; it was a space that was filled with illumi-
nation resulting from ongoing independence of thinking. Unrestricted action
and freedom in one’s thinking are human responsibilities; we are caretakers
of the public domain.
Enlightenment thinking embraced a heightened awareness about the im-
portance of diverse ideas required in the shaping of the public domain and
the necessity of autonomy of thought. For example, Kant and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712–1778) wrote as supportive-thinking spectators about the ide-
as that gave rise to the French Revolution in 1789. Both Rousseau and Kant
are historically central to the Enlightenment, which according to most
sources began around 1650, shortly after the conclusion of the Thirty Years
War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Spain was then less protected and
eventually lost northern territory to France in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in
28 Ronald C. Arnett

1659. This action moved France into a position of considerable dominance in

Europe, becoming the epicenter of the Enlightenment.
Kant wrote within a milieu of change and the growing power of France.
He based his contribution on independence of thinking, which was akin to
other scholars calling for autonomous responsive thinking—Montesquieu
(1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), and Rousseau in France and Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704) in England. Their in-
sights provided a backdrop against which the Scottish Enlightenment gath-
ered its unique identity. Literacy in eighteenth-century Scotland hovered at
about 75 percent of the population in 1750. 15 Scotland’s literacy, democratic
public education system, 16 free trade with England after the Act of Union in
1707, and close ties to the intellectual life of France transformed this poor
country into a scene of intellectual revolution. The exchange of ideas and
rhetorical uniqueness of Scottish Enlightenment thinking shapes C. Jan
Swearingen’s 2010 responsive review of Alexander Broadie’s book, A Histo-
ry of Scottish Philosophy.

SWEARINGEN’S COMMUNICATION
PERSPECTIVE ON BROADIE

Alexander Broadie is internationally known as a scholar of the Scottish En-

lightenment. He is currently Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the Univer-
sity of Glasgow and the holder of the academic chair once held by Adam
Smith. Swearingen responded to Broadie’s book, A History of Scottish Phi-
losophy, in a 2010 Philosophy and Rhetoric essay. 17 Swearingen stated that
Broadie is a prolific scholar on Scottish philosophy and life. Swearingen
listed a number of scholars known as philosophers of rhetoric during the
heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Francis Hutcheson, Adam
Smith, and Thomas Reid. 18
Swearingen notes that normative convention indicates that Kant eventual-
ly rebuked the philosophy of David Hume (1711–1776). 19 However, Broadie
offers a different version, suggesting that Kant had actually only made more
sophisticated the ideas of Hume. 20 Swearingen also emphasized the impor-
tance of the common sense philosophers, such as Hutcheson and Reid, who
textured the Scottish Enlightenment with their version of natural philosophy.
Swearingen acknowledged that Broadie provides a historical sweep in his
work that yields an interpretive key to understanding the historical context
that gave rise to ideas that shaped the Scottish Enlightenment. For instance,
the Scot’s remarkable achievements of the eighteenth century can be traced
back to John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), 21 a thirteenth-century Franciscan,
and to important documents that shaped the intellectual structure of that time,
such as the Declaration of the Clergy (1310) 22 and the Declaration (or Letter)
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 29

of Arbroath (1320). 23 These works shaped “the present-day Scottish nation-

alist party [which] has adopted the Declaration of Arbroath as its ancestral
sanction and campaign motto” 24—Together we can make Scotland better.
Ideas that empowered the Scottish Enlightenment had an indisputable sense
of homegrown depth.
Swearingen states that Broadie stressed that Scotus understood the impor-
tance of the human mind and intellect and the volatile power of will. 25
Scotus’s empirical observation, a hallmark of the common sense school,
offers a transition from his insights to John Mair (1467–1550). Both Scotus
and Mair “taught that the senses and the will are evidence of God’s creation
of and presence in the mind, that emotion, sense, will, and reason are part of
a whole and necessary to one another.” 26 Mair advanced Scotus’s ideas of
empirical senses and the role of emotion and will. 27 Mair taught logic and
dialectic at the University of Paris in the sixteenth century before he returned
to Scotland and the University of Glasgow. Mair was one of the first to
articulate a political theory that suggested the importance of the deposing of
a king when he is unresponsive to a people. Mair’s ideas had roots in the
thirteenth-century insights of Scotus. 28 Swearingen contended that Mair
played a significant role in the shaping of independent Reformation thinking
in the sixteenth century.
Mair wrote on the cusp of historical change; he was known as one of the
last scholasticists but was also open to emerging humanistic thinking. Mair’s
role as a teacher was incredibly powerful. George Buchanan (1506–1582),
one of his students, became the tutor to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). 29
Mair brought forth new Latin and humanistic themes to the curriculum from
the work of Erasmus’s Handbook of the Christian Soldier in 1503 to Bun-
yan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678 and to the revival of Cicero’s classic
speeches. As the sixteenth century yielded to the seventeenth century, as
Swearingen reports from Broadie’s work, there was an absence of figures
equal to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and René
Descartes (1596–1650). 30 The Scottish philosophy was shaped by significant
intellectual figures throughout Europe. The religious and political wars be-
tween Scotland, England, and Ireland led, in the seventeenth century, to a
call for religious toleration and tempered doctrines, with people such as
Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) being on the edge of this moment of change.
Hutcheson was a Presbyterian minister who brought philosophical, practi-
cal, and rhetorical significance to the University of Glasgow from his deep
Irish roots. 31 Those who preceded Hutcheson at Glasgow emphasized natural
law; however, Hutcheson, his student Adam Smith (1723–1790), and Thom-
as Reid (1710–1796) were interested in the “science of man” from a common
sense perspective; natural law discussion thus gave way to a stress on com-
mon sense. 32
30 Ronald C. Arnett

Swearingen reminded her readers that some contend that the Scottish
Enlightenment impacted the framers of the Declaration of Independence.
Controversy continues around Gary Wills’s Inventing America, which argues
that Francis Hutcheson, not John Locke, influenced Jeffersonian thinking and
language. 33 This assertion underscores Broadie’s contention that the com-
mon sense philosophy of Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid filled philosophical
gaps in early American intellectual thought, Broadie asserting that there was
a Scottish accent in early intellectual and structural documents that framed
the emerging country. 34
Swearingen concludes with Broadie’s argument against an unsophisticat-
ed understanding of Adam Smith’s achievements. 35 Some state that Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (published in 1759) is centered on a
concept of “sympathy” that is then abandoned in The Wealth of Nations
(published in 1776) in favor of the notion of “self-interest.” 36 Such an analy-
sis is unduly simple, missing the interplay of self-interest and sympathy in
common sense philosophy. Swearingen’s review concludes with an emphasis
on the relationship between aesthetics and moral theory in the Scottish En-
lightenment, preparing the way for our further discussion of Broadie’s work,
The Scottish Enlightenment, as a counter to the primacy of the French En-
lightenment. 37 The French grounded the Enlightenment in universal lan-
guage, whereas the Scots grounded it on local soil, offering an intellectual
contribution to the West that was otherwise than universal abstraction.

BROADIE’S THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT

Eighteenth-century Scotland rests under the contested term, Scottish Enlight-

enment; 38 Broadie affirms the term as representative of a unique and creative
moment that continues to impact the Western world. The major figures that
shaped the Scottish Enlightenment were imaginative innovators who brought
forth new theoretical perspectives and philosophical insight, thinkers such as
David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), Thomas Reid,
James Hutton (1726–1797), and Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823). 39 This
Scottish age generated a creative surge of thinking with practical influence
that began with two essential features of the Enlightenment proper: (1)
autonomous thought and (2) the social necessity of tolerance. The Enlighten-
ment writ large includes an innovative Scottish contribution that transformed
eighteenth-century Scotland.
Scotland lost its royal court to London during the Union of the Crowns in
1603 and joined the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 out of economic
necessity. The late seventeenth century in Scotland also experienced one
disastrous harvest after another, which was particularly demanding for such a
poor country. Prior to this set of demands, there was the development of
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 31

three Scottish universities, formed in the Pre-Reformation period: the Uni-

versity of Saint Andrews, Fife, in 1411/1412, the University of Glasgow,
Glasgow, in 1451, and Kings College, Aberdeen, in 1495. These universities
were followed a century later by the founding of the University of Edinburgh
in 1583. A number of professors from the University of Paris returned to
Scottish universities, including Edinburgh, to shape the intellectual life of
Scotland, preparing the foundation for what we now call the Scottish Enlight-
enment. For example, John Mair was a professor of theology in Paris
(1506–1517); he later served as the principal at the University of Glasgow
from 1518 to 1523. The eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment roots
commenced centuries earlier, as the work of Mair testifies. The Scots had a
number of enlightened “literati” 40 and public institutions of education, law,
church, and literary and scientific societies that claimed local and interna-
tional recognition. 41 Additionally, the Scottish culture had both a “high” and
“popular” dimension, which textured their insights with acumen from their
own local soil. 42
Many assert that the Enlightenment is the movement from darkness;
Broadie contradicts this position, stressing the judgments of one of the most
significant scholars that Scotland ever produced, John Duns Scotus, whose
short passage on the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary argued for
conception without original sin and generated great anger in the Church. Yet,
his position on Immaculate Conception eventually became official Church
doctrine in 1854, guided by Pope Pius IX. Scotus was beatified by Pope John
Paul II on March 20, 1993. The Enlightenment was not a struggle against a
darkness of limited intellectual work, but rather a rebellion against blind
allegiance to authority. Brilliant and creative thinkers from this earlier stage
(twelfth and thirteenth centuries) such as Thomas Aquinas (1224/
1225–1274), Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (1285–1347/1349) provided
intellectual tools that permitted the Enlightenment to later flaunt the impor-
tance of “critical analysis” and “critical reflection.” 43 Some assert that the
Enlightenment was an era driven by theory, not by practice; Broadie again
counters, contending that theories gave rise to practical changes in church
life, independence of thought, ethics no longer adhering to blind authority,
explication of the possibilities and the limits of rationality, and a conception
of modern financial capital.
The Scottish Enlightenment and the Enlightenment in general gave rise to
the middle class. Increasing independence gave shape to an age of criticism,
creative thinking, and the use of terms such as heresy, deism, skepticism, and
atheism in public debate. Those who found themselves on the wrong side of
debate still suffered serious consequences; however, debate was at least pos-
sible. The commitment to autonomous reason called for constant improve-
ment and progress. Yet, from the Scottish Enlightenment there was no sense
of this utopianism; even Smith’s view of division of labor, which increased
32 Ronald C. Arnett

productivity, acknowledged the danger of losing the meaningfulness of work.

Additionally, philosophers such as David Hume reminded us that even as we
seek progress within the human soul, there is home for “irrepressible irration-
alism” that fights such optimism. 44

The Importance of Sociogeography

The Scottish Enlightenment arose out of a commitment to historiography in

the sixteenth century, led by significant Scottish authors such as Mair,
George Buchanan, 45 and John Knox (1514–1572). 46 Major historians in
eighteenth-century Scotland included David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam
Ferguson, as well as Church historians such as William Robertson
(1721–1793). 47 The ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were the products of
two centuries of historical work that textured an understanding of the inter-
play of “imagination,” “intellect,” and practical application. 48
The Enlightenment in Scotland emerged from a period of great austerity,
narrowness, and the intolerance of the Episcopalian Church to a period of an
“enlarged mentality” that united theory and practice within a social milieu of
tolerance. 49 Interestingly, when Hume talked about history, he never as-
sumed that a historian could rid himself of prejudice. The writing of history
had another task––the public explication of events, framing the why of hu-
man events from a particular point of view. The dynamics of the Scottish
Enlightenment were shaped by a creative mixture of provincial and cosmo-
politan tones––attending to the local environment and the larger world.
This standpoint on the writing of history worked under the rubric of
“conjectural history.” 50 Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) first used this term as a
way of explaining observation via a position. 51 His orientation of conjectural
history was not far from David Hume’s insights on the importance of preju-
dice in historical writing. 52 The telling of stories from an acknowledged
perspective also led to terms that we now question, such as Adam Ferguson’s
use of “primitive” and “rude” societies, terms that he used in explicating
movement of progress in history. 53 Broadie contends that the difference be-
tween conjectural and scientific history is that the former is a story told from
a given perspective that is publicly confessed. The Scottish Enlightenment
embraced sentiment, not pure rationality, a position that was manifested in
their view of historical writing. 54
Conjectural history led Smith to talk about the various stages of human
progress, moving from “hunter-gatherers” to the “pastoral,” “agricultural,”
and then “commercial stage[s].” 55 From the standpoint of conjectural history,
it is not the accuracy of these stages; rather it is the telling of the story of the
human condition from a given standpoint in order to make sense of the
notion of progress. Smith, however, resisted the belief of progress as “linear
or inevitable”—“Two steps forward may be followed by one step back, or
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 33

even three.” 56 The goal of conjectural history was to describe progress as

“‘most simple’ and ‘most natural,’ even if the description is not necessarily
‘most agreeable to fact.’” 57 Smith and others wrote history in an era defined
by progress without falling prey to a perspective akin to historical determi-
nism. 58

Progress Void of Undue Optimism

Two concepts, morality and civic life, were driving forces in the Scottish
Enlightenment and can be found in the works of Hutcheson, Hume, and
Smith—all known for their work in the realm of morality, along with Adam
Ferguson and John Millar (1735–1801) who stressed the importance of civil
society. The literati of the Scottish Enlightenment had two principle models:
Thomas Hobbes of England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of France, with the
former understanding the nature of human life as defined by perpetual war
and the latter understanding the human being as an innocent left to grapple
with a problematic State.
The danger of war and the cautions about the power of the State led to
what was called experimental method of reasoning. 59 Ferguson and Smith
provide concrete examples of this approach, framing experiment as direct
observation of social life. They recognized both the fragility of human life
and the necessity of a civil society charged with eradicating, or at least
managing, corruption. Ferguson was cognizant of Scotland’s distrust of Eng-
land and England’s suspicion about Scotland, particularly after the Jacobite
Rebellion (1745–1746), 60 as he was writing Essay on the History of Civil
Society. Distrust of authority was carried forward in argument between Smith
and Ferguson on the question of the military. Ferguson contended that civic
virtue requires a standing militia with an expectation that each man must give
service time to the militia. This communal commitment to a militia gave
clarity to patriotism as a shared higher ideal, a more cosmopolitan perspec-
tive than the commercial hope of self-interest alone. 61
Smith wrote in the time of Kant and during an emphasis on “sympathy”
of “spectators.” 62 Kant articulated a trilateral relation of “spectator,” “agent,”
and “recipient,” with each dependent upon the importance of “sympathy,” a
feeling or passion toward the other. 63 The notion of an impartial spectator
was necessary in the creation of human imagination, providing distance from
ideas that we advocate as agents or encounter as recipients. In order to
nourish the notion of sympathy between and among persons in the interplay
between spectator, agent, and recipient in the making of good judgments, the
Scottish Enlightenment turned increasingly to education and discussion of
civic virtue. Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) was a central figure in the articula-
tion of well-rounded education.
34 Ronald C. Arnett

A person can of course achieve eminence in his field by concentration only on

that one field. But there is a price to be paid for such emphasis, or the person
becomes, in Stewart’s dismissive phrase, a “literary artisan,” that is to say, the
mental equivalent of the labourer whose physical exertions are of such a nature
as to lead to a distorted body in (or with) which the person can never feel
comfortable. 64

The Scottish Enlightenment embraced broad general education as a pragmat-

ic necessity if both sympathy and good judgments were to prevail.
The connections of sympathy, good judgment, and education took place
in an era in which the Church and the call for independence of thought were
not natural allies. The Kirk, the governing body of the Presbyterian Church
of Scotland, had a record of systematic intolerance for those who questioned
authority. However, change was underway as the Enlightenment ushered in
an “Age of Toleration” and the “Age of Emancipation” for those who were
not Christian, giving Jews a “greater degree of civil liberty.” 65 Religious life
was altered by moderate religious thinkers such as Hutcheson, whose gentle
opposition to the Kirk was accompanied by the more critical insights of
Hume, who argued against the possibility of a rational defense for the exis-
tence of God.
Hume never called into question the existence of God; his theology,
which critiqued rational proof of God, was closer to the heart of Calvinism
than was understood during his lifetime.

I think Hume’s position on matters of religion is the same as his position on

matters of metaphysics and morals. He was a skeptic. In particular he was
skeptical about the power of reason to provide demonstrations of many things
that we find ourselves believing. He speaks about the frailty of reason, and
about our tendency to give it tasks for which it is simply not fitted. The
problem with discussions within natural religion is the tendency of reason to
take flight into regions where it utterly lacks the support of experience. 66

Hume advanced the argument that polytheism was more appropriate for the
Enlightenment than monotheism, due to its multiplicity of perspectives.
Hume’s most significant work on religion was Dialogues Concerning Natu-
ral Religion, which appeared in 1779, three years after his death. Hume did
not deny the existence of God or of miracles; he repeatedly stated that there
is no rational proof for either. Even at the point of his death, Hume continued
to annoy many who contended that his positions represented blatant heresy
against the Church. To the chagrin of many, Hume seemingly died happy.
Hume also angered some conservative churchmen with his friendships with
William Robertson and Hugh Blair (1718–1800), both moderate clergy-
men. 67 “One might even see their [Hume, Robertson, and Blair’s] friendship
as a celebration of the Enlightenment virtue of tolerance, for the credulity
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 35

that Hume found in Blair and the incredulity that Blair found in Hume could
not shake the bond of affection.” 68 Friendship among persons of differing
views was central to the Enlightenment value of tolerance and congruent
with the Scottish Enlightenment stress on human sentiment.
The Scottish Enlightenment was the home of sentiment, offering a dwell-
ing for the creative expression of painters, writers, architects, gardeners, and
musicians. 69 For instance, creative attention toward everyday existence
shaped the work of painters such as Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798), who
followed Hutcheson’s efforts to dismiss the supernatural. Hamilton engaged
the arts with direct reliance upon lived experience. The Scottish Enlighten-
ment also stressed a rhetorical connection to sentiment. George Campbell’s
work on the Philosophy of Rhetoric, published in 1776, reminded us of great
orators who brought ideas and actions together. To a degree, the historians of
the Scottish Enlightenment were rhetoricians propelled by ideas and lived
experience, which, when understood together, constituted public evidence.
Thomas Reid proposed clarity between the sign and the signified, assisting
with knowledge of experiential public evidence. 70 He articulated the neces-
sity of distance to keep sign and signifier from collapsing into one another.
Akin to the interplay between Hutcheson and Hamilton, the paintings of Sir
Henry Raeburn represented the philosophical insights of Reid. 71 There was a
consistent theme in the Scottish Enlightenment—the uniting of theory and
practice within a framework of human sentiment.
Hutcheson was a major leader in moving the notion of sentiment into
university life. He was elected to the philosophy chair at Glasgow in 1729,
where he emphasized aesthetic and moral senses. Following this stress on
sentiment, Hume’s understanding, “Of the Standard of Taste,” framed issues
of affection and elegance in moral judgment, giving us five standards of a
critic functioning in the role of a spectator attentive to the following senti-
ments: (1) practiced understanding of taste, (2) practiced use of critical pow-
ers, (3) practiced differentiation of similar objects, (4) practiced rejection of
relational connections that can taint judgment, and finally (5) practiced en-
gagement of good sense. 72 For Hume, a “good critic” offers “the true stan-
dard of taste and beauty” through the following qualities: “strong sense,
united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison,
and cleared of all prejudice.” 73 In each one of Hume’s standards for senti-
ment, we discern practices akin to “picturesque,” ideas that connect to lived
life and bypass the safety of abstraction. 74
The emphasis on lived experience additionally manifested itself in major
scientific inventions during the Scottish Enlightenment—for example, James
Watt’s improved version of the steam engine, Thomas Reid’s work with non-
Euclidian geometry, and James Hutton’s understanding of geological
change. 75 The Scottish Enlightenment united the practical and the philosoph-
ical, engaging human nature via sentiment. From the work of Reid, to Hume,
36 Ronald C. Arnett

to Adam Smith, sentiment is a major guide. Broadie argues that the Scottish
Enlightenment can be defined by “the drum beat of sentiment.” 76 Another
concrete metaphor for describing the Scottish Enlightenment is “the age of
the earth.” 77 In an era of natural philosophy, the integration of the practical
and the theoretical framed understanding of lived experience.
The nineteenth century, according to Broadie, brought us close to what
we call the Scottish Enlightenment. He refers to this time as a “sad anti-
climax,” a time that lost the ambiance necessary for nourishing a dispropor-
tionate number of geniuses. 78 For Broadie, what drove the Scottish Enlight-
enment was not just intellectual geniuses, but a “close-knit unity” of per-
sons. 79 As people found increased space between one another, the creative
energy dissipated and then died. Broadie’s critique recounts how a pragmatic
magic perishes when families no longer stand together at a kitchen sink and
wash dishes. The mechanical assistance of the dishwasher loses an un-
scripted creative space, leaving the household with one less location that
offers an opportunity to rub shoulders; common places assist in generating
ideas for potential genius in the everyday of human life. Such an emphasis on
sociality of the Scottish Enlightenment is otherwise than the unquenched
desire for individual autonomy. The emphasis on the importance of sociality
continues with the work of James Buchan’s stress on “crowded with gen-
ius.” 80

EXISTENTIAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE

SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT

Buchan provides a dramatic look at daily life in Edinburgh during the Scot-
tish Enlightenment, continuing the theme of creative spatiality with his title,
Crowded with Genius. Buchan begins his story with a depiction of the High-
land Rebellion of 1745 and the French Revolution of 1789, in an era when
Edinburgh “ruled the Western intellect.” 81 Edinburgh, a city once known
primarily for bigotry, violence, and poverty, became an intellectual power
during the Scottish Enlightenment. John Buchan called the battle of Culloden
Moor (1746) 82 the “last fight of the Middle Ages;” 83 this confrontation began
Edinburgh’s entrance into the modern world defined by international com-
merce, good laws, loyalty, and virtue among persons. Edinburgh was peopled
with intellectual celebrities: David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson,
Adam Ferguson, and Hugh Blair. Interestingly, in 1755 the famous Ency-
clopédie of French philosophers, edited by Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), was contemptuous of Scotland;
however, by 1762, Voltaire considered Scotland a center of taste in all arts. 84
Edinburgh had become more important than Oxford and Cambridge com-
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 37

bined. Indeed, the city was a place crowded with genius and rapidly chang-
ing.

A CITY TORN ASUNDER

In the year 1745, the city of Edinburgh had forty thousand people without a
royal court (lost to London in 1603), had combined Scottish and English
parliaments since 1707, and had developed little manufacturing. Edinburgh
was principally a city of lawyers and churchmen, with the attorneys attending
the Court of Session and the clergymen joining the General Assembly of the
Church of Scotland. There were nine Presbyterian churches, each with two
ministers. There were also two banks, both of which survive today, as well as
two newspapers—one Whig and the other Jacobite. In 1708, the parliamen-
tary Union with England destroyed the formal administration of Scotland and
politically empowered the Edinburgh Town Council, which was run as an
oligarchy 85 ever since James VI (1473–1513). The purpose of the council
was to maintain peace among three groups: the guilds, the Kirk, and the
Presbytery. 86 The confines of Lawnmarket and High Street were densely
populated; the sight of wood burning and peat smoke provided impetus for
the area’s nickname—Auld Reekie, or Old Smokey—a place of few public
buildings and little bread to eat; it remained, at that time, a city with Medie-
val character and smell. The intellectual foundations of Edinburgh, however,
were present years prior. The courts, the Kirk, and the college provided a
threefold foundation for the intellectual ascendance of Edinburgh. There was
political debate in Scotland when the Whigs rejected authority from the
Crown and wanted influence to come from the public itself. 87 The city had
been mainly Protestant since John Knox, a leader of the Scottish Reforma-
tion, imported both the creed and doctrines of John Calvin from Geneva,
Switzerland, to St. Giles, Scotland, in the 1560s. This set of theological
commitments was set against the royal House of Stuart since the time of
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587). 88 John Knox and Edinburgh contended
against monarchs of divine-right and the Roman Catholic Church. 89 The
other political side of Edinburgh was composed of the Jacobites (named from
the Latin for James), who supported the House of Stuart and their “sacramen-
tal and eternal right” to rule over Scotland. 90 The Revolution of 1688 ended
Stuart government in Edinburgh and put the Stuart court in exile. After the
revolution, the Episcopalian church was disestablished. The former Episco-
palians became Jacobites. London was determined to punish Edinburgh,
leading Lord Provost George Drummond (1687–1766) to state that Edin-
burgh was held together by fear and hatred. The Jacobite/Whig debate con-
tinued with David Hume contending that the city, without a merchant class,
38 Ronald C. Arnett

could only prosper by defeating both the Jacobites and Whigs, with the
former being a political defeat and the latter requiring a religious downfall.
The tension between Britain and Scotland continued to increase after the
revolution. Charles Edward Stuart (1720–1788), the grandson of James VII
of Scotland and II of England and leader of the Jacobite Rebellion, was living
in exile under the protection of the French court in 1743. He led the Jacobites
who were landing from France in 1745 under the direction of the Earl of Mar.
Former Lord Provost George Drummond was in charge of the defense party.
This effort by Drummond, at the age of fifty-eight, launched his political
career as Lord Provost of Edinburgh once again. 91 The Lord Provost, Archi-
bald Stewart (elected in 1744), did not know what to do in the midst an
invasion. Drummond, on the other hand, took his volunteers and marched to
the castle in a political gesture that stopped the invasion.

Ground for Liberal Sentiments

The Jacobite rebellion of 1745, led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, could
not take the castle. On October 31, Prince Charles Edward left, demoralized,
and abandoned his expedition. Then, on November 26, 1746, Drummond
once again became Lord Provost, with the old Provost Stewart being tried for
neglect of office. The Jacobite rebellion transformed Edinburgh and brought
forth names such as Adam Ferguson and Hugh Blair, 92 who stressed “union-
ism.” 93 Societally, the rebellion simultaneously invited acts of romantic nos-
talgia and philosophical pessimism. David Hume wondered if civilized life
was “unfit for the Use of Arms.” 94
The fight for Edinburgh was not just against the Stuarts but in the name of
intellectual and religious freedom, as well. For example, on December 23,
1696, Thomas Aikenhead, a student at the college, was indicted by the Court
of Justiciary for blasphemy. The Lord Advocate claimed that Aikenhead
repeatedly spoke of Christian theology as a “rapsodie of feigned and ill-
invented nonsense.” 95 This eighteen-year-old boy in Presbyterian Edinburgh
was hanged until dead on January 8, 1697. This case haunted Edinburgh for a
century, calling into question responsive attention to the privacy of con-
science—an ongoing political controversy between the Jacobites and Whigs.
The ecclesiastical wars initiated conflict between a “rigid Calvinism which
saw any deviation in doctrine or conduct as a mortal threat to the whole
community, and a new conviction of the privacy and variety of conscious-
ness.” 96 An emphasis on privacy of conscience privileged skepticism over
knowledge “revealed through scripture” 97—such thinking led to the effort to
excommunicate David Hume and Henry Home (1696–1782) by the General
Assemblies of 1755 and 1756. At that time, the Kirk had assumed many civil
and judicial functions and worked from an agenda of religious strictness. 98
Lord Provost Drummond was dispirited until the General Assembly was
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 39

joined by a new generation of leaders born after 1690. One could finally
sense the possibility of bridging the gap between Presbyterianism and the
new ideas emerging out of the college. For instance, Robert Wallace
(1697–1746) suggested that the way to repel the power of the Deists was
with their own weapon––reason. 99 Wallace was at first persecuted for this
perspective, but then, in 1742, he became the moderator of the General
Assembly. He brought the famed English evangelist George Whitefield 100
(1714–1770) to Scotland; such actions of public tension and debate revealed
the seemingly restless power of change in Scotland.
At the University of Glasgow, Andrew Carlyle (1722–1805), in 1743,
found his liberal sentiments gaining ground under the influence of Francis
Hutcheson, who brought a preoccupation with issues of virtue, a perspective
contrary to Thomas Hobbes’s view that human beings were totally selfish.
Hutcheson claimed that the human’s principle virtue was “disinterested be-
nevolence.” 101 Hutcheson was a utilitarian who connected good conduct to
the beautiful and the pleasurable, which he associated with the greatest hap-
piness for the greatest number. Buchan understood Hutcheson’s system as
more akin to “aesthetic imagination” and “reasoning intellect,” unlike “the
philosophy of the sentimental novelist.” 102 Some felt Hutcheson abandoned
the modern project by underestimating the power of reason; in actuality, he
assisted with a Scottish stamp on the Enlightenment with his emphasis on the
senses, both moral and aesthetic.
One of those countering Hutcheson’s continuing commitment to philoso-
phy that was attentive to God’s world was Hume, an emerging intellectual
hero willing to plumb “the darkness of intellectual despair.” 103 Hume was
known for his commitment to skepticism and suspicion. He founded no
school, left no major successor, and was denied the privilege of a professor-
ship. He offered an alternative to the common sense school that he deemed
too dependent upon a “benevolent deity” and “disreputable prejudices.” 104
Hume sought to rediscover the importance of human emotion. He seemed to
be working, in some strange way, out of a tradition more akin to Francis
Bacon or Sir Isaac Newton, who had rejected and abandoned a priori argu-
ments that constituted the Middle Ages. Bacon and Newton embraced an
experimental method that intrigued Hume, who was interested in establishing
a new science of ethics, which he connected to a “New Scene of Thought.” 105
Hume believed the human mind could be completely known. Hume was
interested in knowledge and causation connected to a sense felt by the mind.
Reason had been given a heightened importance that Hume wanted to de-
throne. On this matter, Hume and Hutcheson had significant kinship.
Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the
Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects was published in
three books or volumes—the first two were published in 1739 and the third
in 1740, followed by a cool and hostile reception; he then decided to follow
40 Ronald C. Arnett

the path of Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Steele (1672–1729),

who in London had become known for their work with a new convention,
essays. 106 Hume understood reading an essay as an invitation to watch a
powerful mind at leisure. As Hume turned to essays, he then wrote books in
parts, and all the while he spent a great deal of time reading the work of
Montesquieu. Even with all his writing and reading, Hume was unable to
secure a chair of logic at Glasgow. Adam Smith was the outgoing professor
and did not support Hume, who was hurt by Smith’s actions. Hume’s work
branched out further into a category perhaps better known as philosophical
history. Interestingly, according to Alexander Carlyle, Hume sought no fol-
lowers, not even in the young ministers; he did not try to convert anyone.
However, if Hume had to choose between the High-Flyers and the Catholic
Church, he might have actually chosen Roman Catholicism, preferring super-
stition to Protestant enthusiasm. One could sense the defeat of the Highland-
ers as one experienced a more relaxed political censorship, resulting in an
increasing number of subscriptions for theater attendance.
One of the controversial plays of the time was John Home’s (1756) Doug-
las. Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) called it a foolish play. 107 The play
begins during the time of the Danish invasion. The audience finds Lady
Randolph committed to her second husband and still mourning the death of
her first husband, Lord Douglas, who was killed in battle along with her son.
The sequence of events in the play are as follows: (1) Glenalvon, a nephew of
Lord Randolph, is in love with Lady Randolph; (2) there is an attack, and
Lady Randolph is saved by an unknown young man, who is actually the
young Douglas; (3) when Glenalvon discovers that young Douglas and Lady
Randolph are lovers, Douglas kills Glenalvon; (4) Douglas is then killed by
Lord Randolph, and Lady Randolph throws herself off a high rock; (5) and
finally, Lord Randolph sets off to battle the Danes, assuming he will leave
his body on the battlefield. The criticism of the play is that it is not a Shake-
spearean tragedy but rather a form of pioneer romantic literature. Those
supportive of the play stressed two central themes: (1) “civic patriotism” and
(2) clergy belief that such values must ground “politeness and modernity.” 108
Criticism revolved around the “ridicule of prayer.” 109 For John Witherspoon
(1723–1794) and the High-Flyers, it was a scandal that a clergyman could
write any play, regardless of the moral character and message of the play. On
January 5, 1757, the Edinburgh Presbytery castigated the playhouse, result-
ing in individuals such as Thomas Carlyle, who supported the morality of
Douglas, being called before the Presbytery.
By 1766, the moral controversy about plays waned; the Canongate theater
was no longer simply about ethics but concerned the making of significant
money. Subscriptions were increasing and changes were happening in the
lives of the supporters of Douglas. John Home had to resign his parish
charge; he then lived off the patronage of others. The moderate clergy, how-
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 41

ever, began to assume more power, finding power from London. In 1762,
Blair was installed in the High Kirk; his sermons were a necessary part of a
visitor’s trip to Edinburgh. He was appointed to the position of professor of
rhetoric and belles lettres at the college. David Hume stayed in Scotland, as
did William Robertson, who in 1762 was installed as the principal of the
college. Robertson then had control over both the Kirk and the college until
the late 1770s when civil rights questions arose in regard to Scottish Catho-
lics. 110 Creative change and debate defined Edinburgh.
Fifty years after the union with London, Edinburgh was prospering, and
the Jacobites were a spent force. Prince Charles Edward Stuart had retreated
and was in exile, comforted by drink and “undignified attachments.” 111 In
Edinburgh, the argument for union had been won in Scotland; problems were
moving to London as Scotland became a place of economic, intellectual, and
civic life shaped by the sentiments of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Sentiments—Origins and Structures

Buchan suggests that perhaps the last and greatest of the major works of the
era was Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments; the book appeared in
1759, the year a number of British military victories over the French in both
Europe and North America occurred. The book was more accessible than
Hume’s Treatise and less “precious” than Hutcheson’s Inquiry. 112 By the
time of Smith’s death on August 4, 1790, it was stated that he had moved
from the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow into a focus
on trade and finance. Both David Hume and Adam Smith privileged the
notion of human instinct over reason. Smith is best known for The Wealth of
Nations; however, throughout his life, he was concerned with the practices of
morality within an emerging commercial society. Buchan, like Broadie,
argued against those who suggested that the Theory of Moral Sentiments
concerned sympathy and The Wealth of Nations centered on selfishness. In
particular, H. T. Buckle (1821–1862) made such a suggestion, which has not
held scholarly water. There is unity in Smith’s thought; one must understand
the ongoing unity between sympathy and selfishness.
Smith was born June 5, 1723, at Kirkcaldy, never knew his father, and
was often sick; at the University of Glasgow, Smith found himself under the
spell of Francis Hutcheson’s lectures. Smith’s agile mind was equipped with
knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, and Italian. His first major essay dealt
with astronomy; he understood philosophy as an effort to make sense out of
chaos and to hold things together––“philosophy as tranquilizer.” 113 Many of
Smith’s major metaphors were more literary than social scientific: “impartial
spectator,” “invisible hand,” and “propensity to barter and truck.” 114 By
1751, Smith was appointed professor of logic and rhetoric at Glasgow. He
was not only a brilliant mind but also a graduate of Oxford University, which
42 Ronald C. Arnett

appealed to many, including Henry Home, who sought a commitment to both

a Scottish national culture and a cosmopolitan obligation to business and law.
Smith recognized an organic connection between commerce and prose.
He used the philosophical method of Montesquieu of applying logic in the
examination of a few historical facts, constructing a “chain of cause and
reasonable effect.” 115 Smith was an optimist with an imagination for human
potential. Both he and Hume stressed the importance of “sympathy” and
“fellow-feeling.” 116 The major contribution to ethics made by Smith assumed
that “self-examination” was not our first step in understanding morality.
Smith assumed that we first judge others’ morality and then judge our-
selves. 117 Smith’s understanding of sympathy was more practical than that of
Hume. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was both anti-authoritarian and
deeply optimistic and was easier to understand and believe than Hutcheson’s
notion of “moral faculty.” 118 Smith’s work aligned with ancient Stoic philos-
ophers, as they organized propensities for selfishness. Smith understood soci-
ety as a “self-managing organism,” in which the individual was assimilated
within “external moral authority.” 119
Moral sentiment and concern for origins and lineage were vital parts of
the Scottish Enlightenment. In September 1759 in Moffat, a small town
considered the Spa of Scotland, John Home met James MacPherson, a High-
lander and published poet who was the collector of the Ossian texts com-
posed of epic and traditional poems. 120 According to Buchan, Ossian poems,
which were thought to be translations of ancient Gaelic texts, were “a vulgar
literary fraud.” 121 Even the High-Flying ministers and preachers viewed the
Ossian poems with suspicion. However, what Edinburgh needed was a mas-
terpiece with local roots. Richard Sher, a modern scholar of eighteenth-
century Edinburgh, writes that Ossian was “a poetical response to a political
crisis.” 122 However, some considered the work of MacPherson, who was
referred to as the “Sublime Savage” by Boswell, to be equivalent to a literary
Frankenstein, emphasizing an ugly sense of origins. MacPherson attended
the University of Aberdeen in 1752; even in college he was disliked for his
overbearing spirit. MacPherson’s project offered a picture of the authentic
Highlander. Hugh Blair stressed the issues of “tenderness” and “sublimity”
present in the poems; 123 indeed, there was a morbid atmosphere reflected in
the poems of Ossian. The notion of the sublime was significant in the Scot-
tish Enlightenment—important to Adam Smith, in the Theory of Moral Senti-
ments and to Edmund Burke, the Irish writer and politician. Additionally, the
insights of Rousseau were termed “sentimental sublime.” 124 MacPherson’s
work, of course, continued to be criticized as not originative and thus unfit-
ting within a literary genre where the words sentimental sublime and civic
sentiment united. MacPherson offered an artificial view of sentiment; many
were susceptible to the ruse because sentiment is at the heart of the origins of
the Scottish Enlightenment, even manifested in physical structures.
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 43

The second half of eighteenth-century Edinburgh generated great changes

after the “Jacobite rebellion and Presbyterian theocracy.” 125 The town histo-
rian Hugo Arnot (1749–1786) described the development of New Town in
Edinburgh. Perhaps one of the most important papers to come out of Edin-
burgh was a pamphlet entitled “Proposals for Carrying on Certain Public
Works in the City of Edinburgh.” 126 The document worked under assump-
tions framed by Montesquieu––concentrating people in capital cities with the
hope of increasing their commercial appetites. One of the major contributors
early on to this project was six-time Lord Provost of Edinburgh, George
Drummond. The fact that he could be a great benefactor announced that
something other than an aristocracy was now in control of Scotland. Drum-
mond arose from modest means, finding fortune through good and hard
work. “If George Drummond was no hero, he was a man for his age. In
Drummond, the Scots come down to earth;” 127 he was the master designer of
new structures that furthered the sentiment of the Scottish Enlightenment.
The Peace of Paris that concluded the French war was celebrated in
Edinburgh on March 29, 1763. The New Town was eventually carried forth
by twenty-one-year-old James Craig in 1766, who brought Edinburgh into
the eighteenth-century middle class of Europe. Unfortunately, in 1772, there
was a banking crisis in Scotland and London that brought the project to a
halt. Fortunately, at the end of the American war in 1783, the project was in
full swing once again, with families from the country moving into the New
Town, followed by their lawyers. Edinburgh was becoming a paradox, a
reminder of a Dickensian world, with two different socioeconomic parts of
the city. Edinburgh reflected a city with a “divided destiny” of the highly
educated and the poor—representing the best and the worst of modernity. 128

IN SEARCH OF FREEDOMS

The first freedom that was sought in Scotland was economic; during the
Jacobite occupation in Edinburgh in 1745, the Highlanders would hold up
pedestrians for a penny. 129 The new Scotland was becoming an argument
between those who understood the importance of luxury and opulence and
those like Sir James Steuart Denham (1712–1780), 130 who called for a Sparta
of frugal needs, a “Spartan communism.” 131 Steuart’s position did not ro-
mantically view commerce as a magic solution. “Public authority . . . must
intervene to protect the fragility of modern systems.” 132 Steuart was im-
pressed by the Spartan system of “longevity, consistency and simplicity.” 133
Steuart’s work was quoted by Hegel and Marx and applauded by Adam
Ferguson, who spent many of his adult years as a military chaplain. Ferguson
understood that conflict and society go hand in hand. Provost George Drum-
mond, in 1759, appointed Ferguson to the chair of natural philosophy, after
44 Ronald C. Arnett

which Ferguson mastered physics in three months in order to teach it. 134
Ferguson was deeply committed to Scotland, defending the play Douglas and
promoting Ossian poetry; he understood the fragility of institutions and soci-
eties and the importance of local soil. Ferguson’s work on An Essay on the
History of Civil Society was an effort to bring forth a moral public and virtue
that recognized the pragmatic necessity of connection with Britain. Ferguson
became a kind of Scottish Cato in his later years. On the other hand, Adam
Smith acknowledged the modern fact of commercial life of luxury and opu-
lence and was greatly influenced by Hume and Hutcheson, more so than
Ferguson, whose commitment to a Spartan world shaped his commitments to
both Scotland and Britain.
The diversity of positions within the public domain made Edinburgh alive
with concern for ideas and others: conversations shaped by ideas and senti-
ment. Buchan offers the example of the changes between Dr. Samuel John-
son and James Boswell (1740–1795) during Johnson’s visits to Edinburgh. 135
The two were like oil and water; Johnson disliked Adam Smith and loathed
David Hume and particularly detested Boswell, who was deeply committed
to Scotland and regretted its union with Britain. Yet, at the end of his life,
Johnson, in one of his narratives, discussed his visit to Scotland and talked
about the “college for the deaf and dumb” that was operated by Thomas
Braidwood. 136 Johnson was hard of hearing; he was so impressed with their
work that when he talked about the experience, he was moved to tears.
Edinburgh was crowded with genius that extended into concern for others.
As Edinburgh entered the eighteenth century, people like Adam Smith
and David Hume reflected a “bachelor society.” 137 However, the eighteenth
century was also “the women’s century” within Scotland. 138 In retrospect,
one witnesses the role of Jacobite women in the Forty-Five Rebellion as
“brilliant” and “striking.” 139 The admission of women was understood as an
emerging maturity of Edinburgh. Women were admitted to the college lec-
tures in 1745; in 1710, public dancing was introduced in Edinburgh. Into this
world of increasing inclusion came gaiety and social improvement. Women
began to alter their appearance from the national plaid of yesteryear. Under
the philosophical influence and the insights of Montesquieu and Rousseau,
Edinburgh began to take seriously the importance of a proper education for
young women. 140 John Millar, in his book Origin of the Distinction of Ranks,
also assisted in bringing women into the discussion of Scottish philosophy.
Additionally, the French Revolution in 1789 further altered the public posi-
tion of women. The Scottish sentiment included ideas of inclusion and atten-
tiveness to practical advancement.
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 45

EARTH AND SENTIMENT

At that time, Edinburgh was increasingly known for practical advances; in

medicine, people came from around the world to study at the University of
Edinburgh, including such eventual luminaries as Charles Darwin
(1809–1882). The idea for a charity hospital was indeed a part of Edin-
burgh’s imagination, but it was not until George Drummond, in his first term
as Lord Provost, that the project materialized. Drummond proposed using
financial stock from a fishery company that was being liquidated; the money
was transferred to the voluntary hospital. Drummond, along with others,
provided managerial skill to bring the medical school tools that brought
Edinburgh “money, students and royal patronage.” 141 Early in the nineteenth
century, Dr. Robert Knox was performing dissections on human bodies with
all the controversy that one might expect with such scientific advancement.
The greatest advancement in Scotland during the eighteenth century was in
agriculture: Rotation, cereals, and crops became routine. Additionally, ex-
perimental farmers like James Hutton, in his book The Theory of the Earth,
pointed to the importance of a rural economy and the recognition of the value
of volcanoes and earthquakes in the maturation of events in nature. Dr.
Johnson’s gloom in his understanding of nature was countered by Hutton’s
theory, which linked Blair’s understanding of sublime to nature itself.
An interesting episode regarding sentiment occurred in early 1766 when
David Hume persuaded Rousseau to accompany him to England. Hume had
offered Rousseau exile in a secure sanctuary in Staffordshire. Rousseau had
been run out of France. 142 By June 1766, Rousseau began experiencing com-
plete paranoia and thought Hume was attempting to do him harm; yet it was
Hume who had assisted him, pointing to the conclusion, “Sensibility became
in the end a prison, from which the exits were paranoia (Rousseau), con-
sumption (The Man of Feeling) or suicide (Werther).” 143 Sentiment is both
the legacy and ultimately the bane of the Scottish Enlightenment, according
to Buchan.
With the decline of a robust and natural sentiment, individuals like Henry
Mackenzie (1745–1831), a ruthless lawyer, a Tory pamphleteer, and an au-
thor known for bringing forth the sentimentalized novel The Man of Feeling,
assisted in the downturn of energy in the Scottish Enlightenment. The notion
of sentiment began early on with the work of Smith, traced back to the
Roman historian Tacitus (56AD–120AD), 144 and had propelled eighteenth-
century social invention via Smith, Hutcheson, Hume, and Ferguson, which
was corrupted through commercialization. Robert Fergusson (1750–1774)
later wrote a satire of The Man of Feeling; he may not have liked the work,
but he lived the lifestyle—dying early in life after following confused moral
values and an ongoing commitment to drink. He was buried without a head-
stone, with one later provided by Robert Burns (1759–1796), who appreciat-
46 Ronald C. Arnett

ed his work. Burns was considered an example of pure genius. However, Sir
Walter Scott (1771–1832), the final romantic author from Edinburgh, who
had seen Burns with luminaries such as Adam Ferguson, John Home, and
James Hutton, stated that Burns was no genius, just an exemplar of a life-
style. Sentiment had moved from a noble philosophical heritage, to literary
pulp fiction, to the invitation of a lifestyle that was destructive of self and
other.
The Scottish Enlightenment—an invitation to an egalitarian democratic
world and a world of ideas put into action was, at best, a paradox. Even in
1779, the Whigs were still at their mean-spirited best, attempting to relieve
the Roman Catholics of civil rights that they had labored for under the
Reformation, giving rise to the so-called Gordon riots. The excesses of terror
in France came close to Scotland; even romantic radicals like Robert Burns
had to recant “liberal sentiment” with the rise of Jacobinism. 145 In 1793, the
British Convention of Delegates of the People came to Edinburgh; their task
was to press for universal suffrage and, at the same time, “Lord Braxfield
invented a crime of unconscious sedition [stating] . . . ‘Let them bring me
prisoners, and I’ll find them law.’” 146 Scotland was increasingly becoming a
myth. It took Sir Walter Scott, an architect of modern Edinburgh, to catapult
Scotland and its ancient capital into the romantic center of the world—
“Through him it is possible the experience the history of Edinburgh twice:
once as disaster, and once as daydream.” 147 Great ideas and action had
morphed into literary myth.
The creative genius of the Scottish Enlightenment came from the doing;
the rhetorical warrant for change emerged from a community of poverty,
desire for social change, and commitment to general education that included
the highest percentage of literacy in Europe. The rhetorical warrant for con-
ceptual and practical change died when the gaze of too many turned to the
task of reifying the genius of a previous moment and past accomplishments.
This rhetorical solidification of a myth became a death gaze, moving Scot-
land from the creative application of theory and practice to celebratory rheto-
ric about Scottish Enlightenment accomplishments. Self-congratulatory rhet-
oric led the shift from crowded with genius to a place crowded with rhetoric,
of self-affirmation based on lineage and heritage. The rhetorical death of
genius comes from a rhetoric based upon pedigree that bypasses the needed
creative work that seeks to turn creative otherness into the banality of the
expected, the predictable, the routine. Rhetorically, what is lost is a commit-
ment to a dwelling that is crowded with innovative productivity that demands
meeting local, creative, and cosmopolitan insights. The rhetoric shifts from
learning and doing to telling, leaving only an antiquarian understanding of
genius and creative productivity. The rhetoric of telling and the desire to
control, to colonize a creative moment, moves a people from learning from
the Other into a milieu that atrophies into acts of possession and posturing—
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 47

moving from the praxis of genius to a rhetoric of self-congratulatory preten-

tiousness.

NOTES

1. James Buchan, Crowded with Genius, the Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment
of the Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
2. Stephen E. Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1958/2003).
3. Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1986); Schrag, Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between (Al-
bany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994); Schrag, The Resources of Rationality: A
Response to the Postmodern Challenge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992);
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Also see,
Ronald C. Arnett, “Civic Rhetoric––Meeting the Communal Interplay of the Provincial and the
Cosmopolitan: Barack Obama’s Notre Dame Speech, March 17, 2009.” Rhetoric & Public
Affairs 14, no. 4 (2011).
4. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is the Enlightenment?” in What Is
Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James
Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1784/1996).
5. C. Jan Swearingen, review of A History of Scottish Philosophy, by Alexander Broadie,
Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 2 (2010).
6. Alexander Broadie is the first scholar whose scholarship covers the full seven centuries
of Scottish philosophy. Broadie is professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of Glasgow,
the first Henry Duncan Prize lecturer (1990–1993) in Scottish Studies at the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, and a Gifford Lecturer at Aberdeen (1994). In 1991, Broadie was both elected to
the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was appointed chair of Philosophy at
The University of Glasgow—the same chair that had been occupied by Adam Smith. In 2007,
he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Blaise Pascal University for his contribu-
tions to Franco-Scottish relations in the field of the history of philosophy. See “Alexander
Broadie,” from the Gifford Lectures website, accessed May 10, 2013, www.giffordlectures.org/
Author.asp?AuthorID =213; Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Bir-
linn, 2007).
7. Buchan, Crowded with Genius.
8. Kant, “Answer to the Question,” 58.
9. Ibid., 59.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 61.
12. Ibid., 62.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 63, emphasis added.
15. Susanne Kord, Women Peasant Poets in Eighteenth-Century England, Scotland, and
Germany: Milkmaids on Parnassus (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 40.
16. Franklin E. Cort, The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early
America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 2.
17. Swearingen, Review.
18. David Hume is intentionally not in this list as he was denied chairs at both the University
of Edinburgh in 1744 and the University of Glasgow in 1764. See Encyclopædia Britannica,
s.v. “David Hume,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/276139 /
David-Hume.
19. Swearingen, “Review.”
20. Broadie notes that David Hume, along with Adam Smith, was one of the most well-read
and influential scholars of the Republic of Letters, a group of writers who committed their work
to the public domain. Additionally, Hume was a leading Scottish historian of the eighteenth
48 Ronald C. Arnett

century alongside Smith, Kames, Turnbull, and Ferguson. See Broadie, History of Scottish
Philosophy, 14, 44.
21. John Duns Scotus was a Franciscan philosopher, scholar, realist, and theologian who
introduced the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which argues that Mary, the mother of
Jesus, was conceived without original sin. Additionally, Scotus contended that “Incarnation
was not dependent on the fact that man had sinned, that will is superior to intellect and love to
knowledge, and that the essence of heaven consists in beatific love rather than the vision of
God.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Blessed John Duns Scotus,” accessed May 10, 2013,
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/173846/Blessed-John-Duns-Scotus.
22. The Declaration of the Clergy (1310) declared Scotland in favor of King Robert Bruce.
The document, which repeatedly stresses leadership determined by the Scottish citizenship,
argues that England, or more specifically the king of England, does not have the authority to
declare the Scottish king. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 28. The four versions of
the Declaration of the Clergy, preceding The Declaration of Arbroath, made between 1309 and
1310, were written in an effort to persuade European clergy and monarchs of Robert I’s royalty.
Roland J. Tanner, “Cowing the Community? Coercion and Falsification in Robert Bruce’s
Parliaments, 1309–1318,” in The History of Scottish Parliament, ed. Keith M. Brown and
Roland J. Tanner, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 59.
23. The Declaration (or Letter) of Arbroath argued for papal recognition of Scotland’s right
to name its own leaders. See Swearingen, Review, 189. The Declaration of Arbroath asserted
the independence of Scotland following Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English at Ban-
nockburn in 1314. The declaration was composed by the Scottish Parliament in Arbroath
Abbey, a historic county in Scotland founded in 1178 by King William I, and sent to the pope
at Avignon, France. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Arbroath,” accessed May 10, 2013,
www.britannica.com /EBchecked/topic/32366/Arbroath.
24. Controversy surrounding the Declaration of Arbroath is due to its “hype” rather than its
“reality.” Since it has become the modern motto for the Scottish Nationalist Party, “moderates
in Scotland today often respond with reserve to its invocation.” See Swearingen, Review, 189.
25. Although not stressed by Swearingen, Scotus offered an alternative reading to Augus-
tine’s understanding of will. See Swearingen, “Review.”
26. Ibid., 190.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 189.
29. Michel de Montaigne was the French writer whose Essais (Essays ) marked a “new
literary form.” His Essays are among the “most captivating and intimate self-portraits ever
given, on a par with Augustine’s and Rousseau’s.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Michel
de Montaigne,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/390476 /
Michel-de-Montaigne.
30. Swearingen, “Review.”
31. Francis Hutcheson designed the new curriculum in moral philosophy while he was a
professor at Glasgow, a curriculum which was adopted by all of Scotland’s universities. It
replaced the dark view of human nature with “doctrines of humankind’s innate love of virtue
and liberty.” See Swearingen, “Review,” 193–94.
32. Ibid., 195. Common sense philosophy, as framed by Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid, chal-
lenged Rousseau. These philosophers defied the state of nature defined by Rousseau on the
grounds that it was unscientific because, according to their own historical and scientific obser-
vations, humans have always, first and foremost, by their nature, formed societies for their
individual betterment and collective good.
33. Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1978/2002).
34. Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy.
35. Swearingen, “Review.”
36. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 121.
37. Swearingen, “Review”; Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment.
38. Some argue that the Scottish Enlightenment consisted solely of the eighteenth-century
Scottish contributions to political economy, history, and moral philosophy; others claim that
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 49

mathematics and the natural sciences were crucial as well. See Broadie, Scottish Enlighten-
ment.
39. Broadie notes that Hume, Smith, and Ferguson are leading eighteenth-century Scottish
historians; additionally, they made leading contributions to the philosophical culture of Scot-
land. See History of Scottish Philosophy, 44. Broadie credits Thomas Reid, professor of moral
philosophy at Glasgow and a member of Aberdeen’s Philosophical Society, as the “deepest of
the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment.” See Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 30. Reid
was both a mathematician and a writer of the nature of the mind and human action, as well as a
scholar of rhetoric and jurisprudence. James Hutton, the “father of modern geology,” earned a
Doctorate of Medicine from the University of Leiden in 1749. Hutton’s leading contribution
was his research on the age of the heart, which he defined, against religious scrutiny, as having
no beginning and no end. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 209–11. Sir Henry
Raeburn, one of the best portraitists in Europe alongside Allan Ramsey, reflected a distinction
between “what we see and what we know”; Raeburn was influenced by the writings of Thomas
Reid and represented human nature as “individuated” to each person. See Broadie, History of
Scottish Philosophy, 174.
40. Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 13.
41. Some international institutions include the Republic of Letters, the Moderate Party—
which disapproved of the traditional harshness of Scottish Calvinism—and the Rankenian Club
in 1717.
42. Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 14.
43. Ibid., 20.
44. Ibid., 42.
45. George Buchanan, a Scottish humanist and educator, critiqued the Church during the
Reformation for its corruption and inefficiency. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “George
Buchanan,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/82825/George-
Buchanan.
46. John Knox, considered the leader of the Scottish Reformation, set the moral tone for the
Church of Scotland and shaped Scotland’s democratic government. See Encyclopædia Britan-
nica, s.v. “John Knox,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked /topic/
320580/John-Knox.
47. William Robertson, a Presbyterian minister and Scottish historian, is regarded, along
with David Hume and Edward Gibbon, as one of the most important British historians of the
eighteenth century. Robertson completed his studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1741 and
was ordained a minister in the Church of Scotland. He became a member of the church’s
General Assembly in 1746, holding a leading position in the moderate party for many years.
His reputation as a historian emerged with his first major work, The History of Scotland,
During the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI, published in 1759. He was appointed
principal of the University of Edinburgh and historiographer royal for Scotland. His works
reflect his interest in social theory, stressing the importance of material and environmental
factors in determining the course of civilization. Although influential in the nineteenth century,
his writings received little attention during the twentieth century. See Encyclopædia Britanni-
ca, s.v. “William Robertson,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/
505591/William-Robertson.
48. Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 47.
49. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press,
1790/1951), 136–37.
50. Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 72.
51. Dugald Stewart, under the influence of Thomas Reid, became a major exponent of the
Scottish common sense school. Stewart was educated and taught at the University of Edin-
burgh, where he was appointed professor of philosophy in 1785, replacing Adam Ferguson in
the chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, holding this position until 1820. Stewart’s major
works include Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, (published in three volumes
emerging in 1792, 1814, and 1827), Outlines of Moral Philosophy (published in 1793), Philo-
sophical Essays (published in 1810), and Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man
50 Ronald C. Arnett

(published in 1828). See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Dugald Stewart,” accessed May 10,
2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/566015/Dugald-Stewart.
52. Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 72–73.
53. Ibid., 69.
54. Ibid., 75.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.,76.
57. Ibid., 77.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., 81.
60. The Jacobite Rebellion, often referred to as the Forty-Five Rebellion, was the final
rebellion in a series of such in support of exiled Stuart King James II and his followers after the
Glorious Revolution. See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Jacobite,” accessed May 10, 2013,
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/299035/Jacobite. English distrust lasted nearly a decade
after the Jacobite Rebellion. In Scotland, this distrust seemed to be misplaced, and Adam
Ferguson wrote on the subject as part of a wide debate among the literati. See Broadie, History
of Scottish Philosophy, 91.
61. Smith was not completely opposed to militias but disagreed with Ferguson, who charged
that a replacement of militia with a standing army would threaten civil liberty. Rather, Smith
saw the standing army as a “category of ‘division of labor.’” See Broadie, History of Scottish
Philosophy, 92.
62. Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 101.
63. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. M. Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1797/1996).
64. Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 109.
65. Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 115.
66. Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 136
67. William Robertson, alongside William Cullen, John Robinson, Hugh Blair, Adam Fer-
guson, and Adam Smith, founded the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1783. See Broadie,
History of Scottish Philosophy, 57. Hugh Blair was the first occupant of the chair of rhetoric
and belles lettres at Edinburgh University and was minister of the Hugh Kirk of St. Giles,
providing intellectual underpinnings for the Enlightenment. See Broadie, History of Scottish
Philosophy, 22. Both Blair and Robertson served as members of the Select Society in 1754, a
debating society on the principles of Jacobitism. See Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy,
26–27.
68. Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 150.
69. Ibid., 151.
70. Ibid., 169.
71. Hamilton was a pupil of Hutcheson’s at the University of Glasgow. Hutcheson’s philos-
ophy was naturalistic—Hutcheson believed in God but believed that it was possible to con-
struct human virtues without resorting to revelation. Hamilton’s paintings depicted the super-
naturalism of the Homeric narratives, which was thought to be intentional according to Hutche-
son. Hamilton and Hutcheson both fit into a secular and humanistic orientation. See Broadie,
History of Scottish Philosophy, 155–56.
72. Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment, 178.
73. Ibid., 184.
74. Ibid., 185.
75. Ibid., 186.
76. Ibid., 198.
77. Ibid., 209.
78. Ibid., 218.
79. Ibid., 219.
80. Buchan, Crowded with Genius.
81. Ibid., 1.
82. The Battle of Culloden Moor (April 16, 1746) was the last battle of the Forty-Five
Rebellion. The Jacobites, under Prince Charles Edward, were defeated by British forces under
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 51

William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. The battle lasted only forty minutes and resulted in
bitter defeat for the heavily outnumbered Jacobites; as many as one thousand of five thousand
Highlanders were killed by the nine thousand Redcoats, who lost only fifty men. The Highland-
ers fled, and British troops killed another one thousand men during the following weeks. Prince
Charles wandered over Scotland for five months before escaping to France. See Encyclopædia
Britannica, s.v. “Battle of Culloden,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com /
EBchecked/topic/146084/Battle-of-Culloden.
83. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 1.
84. Ibid., 2.
85. An oligarchy is a government ruled by the few where power is despotic. See
Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Oligarchy,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/
EBchecked/topic/427558/oligarchy.
86. A hierarchy of courts controls the Church of Scotland. Beginning with the Kirk sessions,
congregation affairs are governed. The Presbytery covers the group of parishes, and finally the
General Assembly hosts clergy and lay representatives annually to discuss key issues. See
Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Scotland,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/
EBchecked/topic/529440/Scotland/44556/Languages.
87. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 17.
88. Mary Queen of Scots (1542–1567) whose “unwise marital and political actions” were
the cause of rebellion among the Scottish nobles. Mary was forced to flee to England, where
she was deemed a threat to the English throne and was eventually beheaded. See Encyclopædia
Britannica, s.v. “Mary,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/
367467/Mary.
89. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 18.
90. Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 19.
91. Drummond was elected Lord Provost in 1725, 1746, 1750, 1754, 1758, and 1762; each
term lasted two years.
92. Hugh Blair was a Scottish minister and university professor best known for his four-
volume Sermons, the first of which was published in 1777, and for his lectures on rhetoric and
fine arts. He was licensed to preach in 1741 and began ministering at the Canongate church in
Edinburgh in 1743. In 1757, he was given an honorary doctorate from the University of St.
Andrews and in 1758 was promoted to the cathedral of St. Giles (the High Kirk of Edinburgh),
the most important charge in Scotland. In 1759, he began, under the patronage of Henry Home,
Lord Kames, to deliver a successful course on composition, which led to his appointment as
chair of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh in 1762. See in Encyclopædia
Britannica, s.v. “Hugh Blair,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/
68746/Hugh-Blair.
93. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 54.
94. Ibid., 55.
95. Ibid., 56.
96. Ibid., 57.
97. Ibid.
98. Henry Home, Lord Kames, was appointed a judge in the Court of Session in 1752. He
became a lord of justiciary in 1763. Home is best known for his three-volume work Elements of
Criticism (published in 1762). See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Henry Home,” accessed
May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/310597/Henry-Home-Lord-Kames.
99. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 65.
100. George Whitefield was a famous English evangelist in mid-century Edinburgh who
reignited a preaching style that was popular during the persecution of the later Stuarts. See
Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 67.
101. Ibid., 70.
102. Ibid., 71.
103. Ibid., 75.
104. Ibid., 76.
105. Ibid., 80.
106. Ibid., 85–86.
52 Ronald C. Arnett

107. Samuel Johnson is regarded as one of the “greatest figures of eighteenth-century life and
letters.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Samuel Johnson,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.
britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/305432/Samuel-Johnson. Johnson was critical of Adam
Smith and disliked David Hume. See Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 232.
108. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 108–9.
109. Ibid., 110.
110. Ibid., 116.
111. Ibid., 118.
112. Ibid., 119.
113. Ibid., 125.
114. Ibid., 126.
115. Ibid., 131.
116. Ibid., 136.
117. Ibid.
118. Ibid., 138.
119. Ibid., 139.
120. Ibid., 141.
121. Ibid., 142.
122. Ibid., 145.
123. Ibid., 160.
124. Ibid, 163.
125. Ibid., 174.
126. Ibid., 176.
127. Ibid., 183.
128. Ibid., 206.
129. Ibid., 208.
130. Sir James Steuart Denham was a “leading Scottish economist who was the leading
expositor of mercantilist views.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Sir James Steuart Den-
ham, 4th Baronet,” accessed May 10, 2013, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/157672/Sir-
James-Steuart-Denham-4th-Baronet. Unlike Smith and Hume, Steuart explores three divisions
of society—pastoral, agrarian, and commercial—which progress due to rising population and
surpluses in trade. See Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 215.
131. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 212.
132. Ibid., 215.
133. Ibid., 216.
134. George Drummond, six-time Lord Provost of Edinburgh, became a commissioner of
customs in 1715 and city treasurer by 1717. He worked to establish the medical school at the
college and helped to found the Royal Bank of Scotland while managing the General Assembly
of the Church.
135. Samuel Johnson’s visit to Edinburgh left an impression on posterity, but he had little to
say about Scotland. Boswell, who had met Johnson in 1763, had wanted to establish and
introduce Johnson to the Scottish people as well as vice versa. For twelve weeks, Johnson and
Boswell, along with one of Boswell’s servants, Joseph Ritter, traveled Scotland.
136. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 240.
137. Ibid., 241.
138. Ibid.
139. Ibid., 243.
140. Beginning with Montesquieu and then Rousseau, Edinburgh made contributions to the
philosophy of women, including God’s purpose for women, the proper education for women,
the differences between men and women, and the institution of marriage. See Buchan,
Crowded with Genius, 260.
141. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 287.
142. Rousseau was exiled from France in early 1766 on account of his atheist beliefs. See
Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 304.
143. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 304.
 A Rhetoric of Sentiment 53

144. Tacitus was a “Roman orator and public official, probably the greatest historian and one
of the greatest prose stylists who wrote in the Latin language. Among his works are the
Germania, describing the Germanic tribes, the Historiae (Histories ), concerning the Roman
Empire from ad 69 to 96, and the later Annals , dealing with the empire in the period from ad
14 to 68.” See Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Tacitus,” www.britannica.com/EBchecked/
topic/579997/Tacitus.
145. Buchan, Crowded with Genius, 337.
146. Ibid., 338.
147. Ibid., 340

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnett, Ronald C. “Civic Rhetoric—Meeting the Communal Interplay of the Provincial and the
Cosmopolitan: Barack Obama’s Notre Dame Speech, March 17, 2009.” Rhetoric & Public
Affairs 14, no. 4 (2011): 631–71.
Broadie, Alexander. A History of Scottish Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2009.
———. The Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2007.
Buchan, James. Crowded with Genius, the Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the
Mind. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Cort, Franklin E. T he Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early
America. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001.
Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What Is the Enlightenment?” In What Is En-
lightenment: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, 58–64. Edited
by J. Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1784/1996.
———. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press, 1790/
1951.
———. The Metaphysics of Morals. Edited by M. Gregor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1797/1996.
Kord, Susanne. Women Peasant Poets in Eighteenth-Century England, Scotland, and Germa-
ny:Milkmaids on Parnassus. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003.
Schrag, Calvin O. Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986.
———. Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between. Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1994.
———. The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.
———. The Self after Postmodernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Swearingen, C. Jan. Review of A History of Scottish Philosophy, by Alexander Broadie. Phi-
losophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 2 (2010), 186–99.
Tanner, Roland J. “Cowing the Community? Coercion and Falsification in Robert Bruce’s
Parliaments, 1309–1318.” In The History of the Scottish Parliament, edited by K. M. Brown
and R. J. Tanner, 50–73. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Toulmin, Stephen E. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1958/2003.
 Chapter Three

Before the One and the Other

Ethico-Political Communication and Community

Pat J. Gehrke

BEFORE THE ONE AND THE OTHER: ETHICO-POLITICAL

COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNITY

Ethics, communication, and politics have had an intimate connection since

even before Aristotle explicitly wedded the three. Contemporary communi-
cation theorists and ethicists, especially those influenced by Continental Eu-
ropean thought, have often been accused of abandoning one or more of this
ancient trinity. At the same time, all our models, theories, and principles of
ethics, communication, and politics are in contestation today, and even the
most foundational premises are up for grabs.
Two questions thus emerge from our condition:

1. Why is it that, since at least the 1960s, ethics, communication, and

politics have been undergoing a crisis of legitimacy and definition?
2. What openings does this crisis provide for us to think about ethics,
communication, and politics differently?

This chapter argues that the dominance of philosophies of One has pro-
duced the current crisis and that the turn to philosophies of the Other, such as
that of Emmanuel Levinas, will not provide satisfactory redress. Instead, I
turn toward a highly restrained minimalist ontology of community, offering
an alternative path for the study of ethics, politics, and communication.

55
56 Pat J. Gehrke

PHILOSOPHIES OF ONE

Communication theories and ethics commonly depend upon either a philoso-

phy of One or a philosophy of the Other. Philosophies of One ground their
understanding of beings and being-together upon a unitary or unifying vision
of Being. A philosophy of One is perhaps most clearly and prominently
featured in humanist communication theories and ethics, which posit an in-
trinsic or innate substance to the Human and usually imbue that substance
with some positive value. 1 To claim that each human holds an innate com-
mon substance is not merely to say that we share a condition of being-in-the-
world, but also to insist upon something that marks out the distinctive nature
(and often positive value) of the human subject. Kate Soper defines human-
ism as the appeal to “the notion of a core humanity or common essential
features in terms of which human beings can be defined and understood.” 2
While not necessarily the only philosophies of One in the study of communi-
cation ethics and theory, humanist philosophies do tend to amplify the impor-
tance of the unity of humanity by virtue of their explicit calls to embrace or
realize a substantive human nature as foundational for theoretical and ethical
inquiry.
A philosophy of One is properly understood as such when its theories or
maxims are drawn from the unifying oneness—that is, the innate nature or
substance—that would bind all beings, or at least all humans, into a shared
essence, purpose, or origin. In Plato, this might be found in the Phaedrus’s
structure of the soul. In Aristotle, the philosophy of One emerges in De
Anima in the discussion of the undying and undifferentiated reason of the
nous in the human soul. Twentieth-century American communication ethics
and theory often returned to such concepts of human unity and oneness.
Craig Baird, for example, argued that innate human reason was central not
only to ethics and communication but also to communication pedagogy and
all other forms of communication research. 3 Indeed, throughout the twentieth
century and continuing into the twenty-first century, communication scholars
have returned to claims of the human good, the human potential, or human
nature. 4
In some cases, a philosophy of One will begin with a multiplicity, but
such philosophies figure multiplicity as a problem or disturbance that either
facilitates or inhibits the unity that grounds the philosophy of One. Even
many theorists who begin with the principles of democracy or community
depend upon a philosophy of One to give democracy a telos or object (such
as the working out of the end of history or the enabling of innate human
dignity) or to give community a substantive bond or shared principle (such as
the maturation of an ideal human psyche or the realization of the shared
soul). Such philosophies figure the community of humans as grounded upon
something that bonds humans together as one blood or one being and thus
 Before the One and the Other 57

subordinates every operation of politics, ethics, and communication to that

essence (as in their appeals to the value or nature of “the human commu-
nity”).
Philosophies of One have received significant criticism from many com-
munication ethicists and theorists in the past five decades. In America, such
criticism began in the 1960s with the arrival of existential thought in commu-
nication studies. 5 While existentialists often claimed that philosophies of
One fundamentally misunderstand the ontology or predicament of being-in-
the-world, they expanded their arguments to include claims that the drive
toward human dignity or a unifying community masked race, gender, culture,
and class biases that inform those unitary philosophies. 6
Before moving on to philosophies of the Other, I should note that distin-
guishing between philosophies of One and philosophies of the Other can be
often difficult and contentious. Communication ethicists and theorists critical
of philosophies of One have increasingly gravitated toward philosophies of
the Other, but some such philosophies are themselves based upon a unified
theory of human nature or innate qualities of Being that reflect a philosophy
of One. Even strongly dialogical theories of communication ethics some-
times rely upon a substantive uniformity among the subjects in consideration.
An easy example from early twentieth-century communication theory and
ethics can be found in discussion theorists such as James McBurney and
Milton Dickens. 7 The goals of their proposed conversational and proto-di-
alogical theories of discussion were the fuller realization of human potential
and the adaptation of human psyches to normative principles of mental
health (i.e., a model of the human mind in its ideal or perfected nature).
While later theorists often valorized difference, they organized such differ-
ence into particularities that sublated otherness under some similarity or
oneness. Hence, they shared a vocabulary with theories of the Other, but not
a philosophy.
Even the later existential dialogism of Martin Buber, arguably the most
frequently cited dialogical communication ethic, is the subject of an extended
argument about the connection between dialogic ethics and philosophies of
One in Levinas’s Outside the Subject and Proper Names. 8 As I desire not to
take up the issue at any great length in this forum, let it suffice to say that one
can assemble a case for the existence or governance of a philosophy of One
in the work of Martin Buber and many other philosophers of the Other, but at
least ostensibly or by their own understanding, they propose an alternative to
philosophies of One. Thus, rather than being bogged down in the debate over
the status of Buber’s philosophy, we may acknowledge that merely because a
philosophy begins with the Other does not guarantee that it will not return to
a philosophy of One.
58 Pat J. Gehrke

PHILOSOPHIES OF THE OTHER

Philosophies of the Other find their grounds in encounters with another (or
the Other). While sometimes also labeled philosophies of alterity, I want to
reserve the possibility of distinguishing these particular philosophies from
those that may make alterity central but do not find their grounding in refer-
ence to the Other or an other. One of the most influential and recognized
philosophies of the Other is the work of Levinas. The dominance of the
encounter with the Other in Levinas and his insistence upon not fusing others
or the two (the other who approaches me and the me called out by the other)
into one make his work a particularly prime example of a philosophy of the
Other. In such philosophies of communication and ethics, a perhaps phenom-
enal, perhaps counterfactual dyadic encounter becomes the model for ethics
(the encounter of two, of the Other and me). Contrary to the theorization of
dyads in philosophies of One, Levinas’s philosophy of the Other operates
through the priority of the Other as an infinitely alterior Other before which
one inclines. 9 Rather than emphasize or rely upon the unitary vision of a
philosophy of One, Levinas’s philosophy of the Other places all emphasis on
the prioritization of the Other in a dyadic alterity that, by his argument,
interrupts the fusion that would make these two into One. In Levinas and
similar philosophies of the Other, the entire experience of ethics relies upon
the Other that confronts me and the priority of the Other. This asymmetry
and the unidirectional obligation (I am obligated for the Other, but there is no
reciprocal obligation) 10 may enable philosophies of the Other to avoid re-
turning to a philosophy of One, but also models all further considerations of
politics, community, and justice on this original dyad.
Scholars appealing to philosophies of the Other often reference dissatis-
faction with philosophies of One as the reason for their consideration. 11 In
many cases philosophies of the Other do indeed avoid many of the criticisms
leveled against philosophies of One, but they do so at a significant cost.
Communication ethicists and theorists grappling with the thinking of ethics
under philosophies of the Other find it particularly difficult to extend the
philosophy to include the simple fact that life is not lived in dyads. As T. A.
Carlson notes, Levinas’s ethic “actually resists an articulation of commu-
nity.” 12 While Levinas does attempt an explication of community and justice,
he calls them the limit of responsibility and the introduction of a contradic-
tion that always risks integrating the Other into a “we.” 13 Positing justice and
community as the emergence of a third (the other to the Other), as an adden-
dum to the first dyad of the Other and me, creates a philosophy of community
and justice that makes every relation always a dyad or some combination of
dyads. Thus, the ethics of the Other as this other before me becomes the
model for thinking of justice and community. 14 Even in the third, the rela-
tions between the three are figured as an incomplete triangle composed of
 Before the One and the Other 59

only two dyads: the Other and me; the other-to-the-Other and me. Justice for
Levinas is thus the problem of competing incommensurable dyads.
Additionally, philosophies of the Other most often require particular qual-
ities or characteristics of the two persons in the encounter (the Other and me).
Levinas, for example, insists that the Other must be human and cannot be
animal or any other substance. 15 Such an insistence is difficult to understand
if not predicated upon something that is innately or at least uniquely human.
What is it about the approach of a human other that so uniquely sets it apart
from the approach of a nonhuman other? If it is to be found in a unique
quality of that approach, then there seems little way to avoid falling back into
either a philosophy of One that would imbue every human with some unique
quality manifest in the approach of a human Other (such as reasoned autono-
my in Immanuel Kant) or a dialectical philosophy in which a third term or
operation sublates the approach, the Other, and me into an organization or
specified relationship. In moments of Levinas’s writing that fold together the
approach of the specific Other before me and the approach of the face of
God, there is a hint that a dialectical movement has sublated alterity and
unicity to a divine alterior or perhaps an alterior divine. Scholars of Levinas
have been struggling for years with these dimensions of his work, and it
remains one of the most problematic elements of his philosophy. 16
Philosophies of One certainly provide little salve to those who find such
faults with philosophies of the Other, and likewise contemporary critics of
philosophies of One have been attracted to philosophies of the Other, but
often find that their reliance upon a dyadic model leaves them unable to
address the fact that life occurs in disparate multiplicity. Where this leaves us
today is with two largely unsatisfactory philosophies grounding the majority
of communication ethics and theory.

being-in-the-world as being-together 17

If we understand the problem of philosophies of One as their unification of

dispersed entities into singular identity and the problem of philosophies of
the Other as their inability to deal with the fact that experience always occurs
in disparate multiplicity, then perhaps a logical place to start is with these
experiences of dispersion, disparateness, and multiplicity, and with the pos-
sibility of this phenomenal being-together providing an alternative to both a
philosophy of One and a philosophy of the Other for communication ethics
and theory.
Elsewhere, I began a consideration of the ways in which Kant’s writings
on community in both his metaphysics and his morals might establish an a
priori duty to community, in contrast to the priority of autonomy that neo-
Kantians so often read in Kant. 18 While Scott Stroud may be correct to point
60 Pat J. Gehrke

out that the Kantian moral system gives priority to autonomy and the central-
ity of that priority to the moral philosophy of perhaps Kant and certainly
most Kantians, 19 the more important observation is that Kant’s establishment
of noumenal principles for both metaphysics and ethics is predicated first
upon phenomenal necessities, one of which is the phenomenal necessity that
being in the world is being-together. To put it in plainer language, before one
can establish ideal principles, even in Kantian terms, one must begin with the
simple fact of being-in-the-world. If Stroud is correct that Kant and the
Kantians attempted a divide between his theoretical and practical philoso-
phies that would make this conclusion untenable, then this may do much to
explain the detriment that much modern philosophy has inherited from the
Kantians.
This observation, however, does not tell us much about that simple fact of
being, though it does place the simplicity of mundane being as antecedent to
all our theories and philosophies of Being. Risking some repetition of my
previous work, let us begin with Kant’s three analogies of experience: dur-
ability of substance, causation, and community. Kant begins not with the
noumenal or ideal structure of the world but with the fact of experience, or
perhaps more precisely, the facticity of being without presumption of any
particular form or content of being. This simplest of facts—there is being, or
more simply, there is—precedes any knowing or seeing, 20 but this does not
make being into the arche of the world. Quite to the contrary, as Kant’s
metaphysics argues, any particular being is only possible as being-together.
Since I have already worked this issue out at length in the previous essay,
I will only briefly review its operation here. A being in the world can only be
as a result of its distinction from not just another being and not an Other
being, but a multiplicity of other beings in time and space. A being requires
being, which is not so much a tautology as the necessity of a sheer status as
being. Every thing, a word, a thought, a rock, a person, must have a sheer
status of being in order to become a thing and then that thing. If a being
requires a sheer status of being, then also it requires a position in time and
space. All beings (objects, things, people, thoughts) can only be by virtue of
being then and being there. A being must be in the world, or perhaps more
accurately we should say in a world, even the being of a thought or experi-
ence.
Yet, as Kant noted, we have no direct experience of either time or space,
so in order for something to have a position in time and space, its reference
cannot be time or space themselves. To place a specific being in time and
space with reference only to time qua time and space qua space would
require that time and space as themselves become beings, that they would
become things in the world. Instead, we depend upon the relative positioning
of beings to other beings for any particular being to have its position in time
or space. Any being that exists can exist because it is given a position in time
 Before the One and the Other 61

and space by virtue of being coexistent but not identical with other beings in
the world. The blue shirt that floats by is on the man wearing it, who is now
further to my right than three minutes ago, when the draft slightly ruffled the
papers on my desk as I typed, and as I was typing a few lines earlier, the
woman in red was whispering something to the man beside her, who sat in
the chair ahead of me while I thought how to end this sentence. No being,
material or otherwise, nothing that is, was, or will be, can be except as being
in distinction and coexistence with other beings, and this distinction and
coexistence gives each its very possibility for being, including the possibility
of the being of experience. 21
This requisite fact of phenomenal coexistence Kant called community,
but the term community here carries none of the baggage that would bind it to
the common, the shared, or the bond of blood. It was not until much later in
his groundwork for agency and morals that Kant would propose a particular
type of rational community of beings imbued with moral agency. Even in the
work of Kant, a figure often championed as the strongest advocate of the
foundational nature of the ideal rational agent in ethical thought, there is a
being that must precede rational agency as the necessary condition of all
beings—animal, vegetable, mineral, ephemeral. Being is the simple fact that
being is being-in-the-world, but the world and being are only given by the
multiplicity of beings that give each being its position in time and space.
By now the importance of the lowercase of being as discussed here is
already clear. This is no grand, foundational, or prescriptive Being. This is
not a being with any particular substance, form, nature, or quality. This
certainly is not a rational Being or a shared Being or even a human Being but
is instead first and foremost sheer being. This is being that precedes every
attempt to give to beings some Being that would define, separate, bond,
gather, or organize them. This is the sheer being of being-together in the
world.
The emphasis on the sheer reflects my attempt to distinguish this being
from all those theories of Being that would seek to insert some quality or
content at the origin of beings. Indeed, even the event of death or alienation
from the self or the separation of man from the divine rely first on the
possibility of experience, the possibility of sheer existence, which can only
occur as being-together. To place it in terms of the philosophies of One and
the philosophies of the Other, before there can be a unifying principle or the
establishment of dyads, there is first an anarchic multiplicity. Language here
fails us, for even multiplicity would imply multiplication from, as if there
was an operation of reproduction (multiplication is, after all, an operation
that produces a product from multipliers) or perhaps an operation of division
(such as multiplication through division, as with mitosis). 22
While multiplicity is a popular word to describe being-together, we might
likewise use a phrase such as dispersed beings or a term like community.
62 Pat J. Gehrke

These present no less of a problem than multiplicity, as dispersion would

imply a field or substrata onto which beings are dispersed and community
has for so many centuries been tethered to the in-common that would give
beings a common meaning, unity, or substantive connection. The etymologi-
cal problems are significant, not only because we strive to be cautious about
how we respond to being-together but also because they demonstrate how
our thinking of being is deeply embedded in philosophies of One. Here
multiplicity must be understood without reference to either the count or the
mass, a nonsingular, noncount noun that is not yet aggregated into a mass or
stuff. Before Being or a being, prior to the One and even the approach of the
Other, is the not-yet denotative community. 23
Let us consider this anarchic community in its most restrained sense: that
sense given to it by Kant’s metaphysics of the undetermined and indetermi-
nate fact of being-together. This minimal notion of community is the com-
munity that makes possible all particular beings, any particular in time and
space but demands nothing of the relations between these particulars except
that they exist as relations. To put it as plainly as I can, we owe our being to
the fact that we are being-together (being-as-relation), but that together or
that relation does not require any specific arrangement, organization, philos-
ophy, structure, substrata, content, or relationship. Of course, being-together
can only occur as being particulars in relation at a given moment of space
and time, which means that being together requires that some kind of relation
or organization or arrangement exists, but all those arrangements (be they of
species, race, nation, region, religion, phyla, etc.) are posterior to the first
community that is the minimal community of being-together as the relation
of every particular in space and time to every other particular in space and
time, ad infinitum. To put it perhaps another way, it is not by virtue of a
relation or by virtue of a philosophy or a structure of relations that being is
possible, but by virtue of relation qua relation, relationality, the simplest and
most minimal notion that being is being-together.
This first community, being-together, is not without ethical impact. Per-
haps one of our greatest losses in the history of ethical thought is that neo-
Kantians and even Kant himself could not restrain their ethical thinking in
the way that they restrained their understanding of metaphysics. Or perhaps,
it would be more accurate to say that we have overlooked that ethics are
already emergent in the metaphysics. Only by making the Human something
uniquely different could each human be excused from owing its singular
existence to the same fundaments upon which every other being in space and
time depends. Even Levinas sought to make such exception by imbuing only
humans with the possibility of experiencing ethical obligation and, perhaps
even more importantly, insisting that only a human or the divine manifest by
a human can evoke ethical response. If we seek to think of ethics without the
pregiven nature, structure, or idea of the Human, all of which would turn us
 Before the One and the Other 63

back into a philosophy of One or, at best, a philosophy of the Other, then we
cannot start with the Human. We likewise cannot start with humans or a
human. Prior to being a human, one is first a being that is being-together. The
co-creation of the Human and humans, a human and another human, makes
every human a human by virtue of (and hence in debt to) being-together with
the not-human. The human and nonhuman are posterior inventions of beings
parsing out and organizing relations in response to the first condition of
anarchic community: the facticity of being as being-together.
Many philosophers of ethics and communication are struggling today to
think of an ethic that starts with this simplest and most minimal ontological
claim: being is being-together. If this basic claim holds merit, then this most
simple and mundane minimal ontology is not an ethic (i.e., one among oth-
ers) but the answer to why there is ethics at all. The question is not one of
ethics before ontology or ontology before ethics but understanding that the
simplest requirement of being is relationality, the condition of being together,
being-as-relation, owing to this first community one’s very possibility not
only to say “I” but to exist in the world, to be called you or thou or it. The
first obligation, the obligation that at every moment is the beginning of
being, is being obligated by this debt, by owing being to being-together, by
owing being to every other being, every moment and event in time and space,
without exception and without measure.
Thus, before any ontology of Being, there is first the ethics-ontology/
ontology-ethics of being-together. Prior to a notion of finitude, prior to a
calling of the divine in the face of another human, prior to the instantiation of
a category of rational beings, prior to ecological interdependence, there is the
ontological obligation that my possibility of being is owed to an anarchic
community—being is owed to being-together. This is not any particular com-
munity or even a philosophy of community but the basic simple community
that every object in space and time requires for its position in space and time.
At his best, Kant taught us that while objects in space and time must exist
in space and time, we cannot know much of anything about the structure of
space or time. We might make pragmatic philosophies for the navigation or
measurement of things and their changing relationships in space and time,
but space and time themselves cannot become objects of experience. Kant
did not even promise that the three analogies of experience (durability, caus-
ation, community) would reveal any substantive content. 24 In fact, he argued
that it only matters that something like durability exists, not what is durable
or how durability is maintained. Similarly, the analogy of causation stated
only that something like causation or change must occur, not that causation
or change are governed by any greater principles or structures that would
give them a logic or substance. So also with community, we can only know
that something like community must exist, not that there is any necessary
structure, function, or content to that coexistence.
64 Pat J. Gehrke

A few works on Kant have drawn an analogy between the community in

Kant’s physics and the idea of community in ethics, 25 but no such compara-
tive mode is required. In fact, these moves (including my own earlier at-
tempt) miss perhaps the most important implication of Kant’s metaphysics—
an implication from which Kant himself turned away: The community in
Kant’s metaphysics is already a community of obligation. Ethics is already in
play.
At the risk of overemphasis, I will try to expound upon the depth and
breadth of the obligation in this anarchic community. There is no object, no
thing, no element, no idea, no substance, no material, in time and space to
which I do not owe existence. My existence, indeed the very existence of my
entire world, is owed to every one of these things, without qualification,
without exception, and without measure. No calculus or logic, no division of
the obligation emerges from this community, but only this sheer obligation:
my being is given to me at every moment and in every place by every other
thing, before I can even think it. An entire world, the entire world of my
experiences, is similarly a world to me only by virtue of every being, every
thing existing in relation; not because it exists in relation to me but because it
exists as a relation to every other thing, and I exist only as a relation to each
and to all. Thus, not only my existence but also the existence of a world that I
experience and perceive is owed first to the community of every other being
in time and space. All is owed to all.
While being requires being-together, it does not require any particular
organization or order in that together. Thus, beings—all things in the
world—owe the particulars of their being to the relative (and relatively arbi-
trary) position they are given by every other thing and not to any subsequent
philosophy or structure or organization of relationship that would organize,
divide, unify, or even name a being. Those particulars of a being in the world
are posterior to the first debt; each being owes its possibility to be not to
those specific relative positions but to the anarchic community. Obligation is
not obligation to a relation but obligation to relationality. To put it another
way, the minimalist ontological ethical commitment is not an obligation to a
community but obligation to community: to being-together. Not even prox-
imity (a particular organization in time or space) would divide up or give
form to this obligation. Being-together makes no distinction between the
obligation distant or far, past or future, but calls obligation to all these simul-
taneously, infinitely, and perhaps even in contradiction. That we will parse
those, make logics to divide their shares, and organize our relations of obli-
gation is the necessary violence that gives birth to language, thought, and
justice.
The height of the obligation of being-together is amplified by an implica-
tion of the metaphysics that is, perhaps, not yet explicitly clear. If every thing
in space and time is given its possibility for existence by being in relation to
 Before the One and the Other 65

every other thing in space and time, then every position in space and time
must be occupied by only one particular, and no other particular can occupy
that moment of space and time. Every particular in space and time at every
moment is unique and singular. This fleeting thing, this thing here and now,
can only be now and here, and no other thing can be at this place and this
time. Thus, each thing at each moment is irreplaceable, owing its irreplace-
able uniqueness to its being-together with every other unique, irreplaceable
thing in every other moment of time and space.
The obligation of being-together is thus an obligation not only to commu-
nity but also to the community of singular beings being-together without any
necessary structure, order, or philosophy to that together. We are each of us
bound to every other thing (animal, vegetable, mineral, ephemeral) irredu-
cibly, inextricably, infinitely, and again at every moment. My obligation
emerges at every moment, every instance, again and again, never ceasing and
never subsiding, as my being is given to me over and over by the community
of singular beings-together.
If the ethics of being-together sounds entirely impractical, it is because
the practical always presumes a particular relation, a dividing up of this
obligation, weighing out its contradictions, and making choices. The problem
is not so much with being-together as with the fact that ethics demands
choosing, and choosing only occurs in the face of specific contested options.
By virtue of the fact that we are always infinitely obligated by the very
possibility of being and that this infinite obligation makes no distinction
between our obligation to any particular thing, and that there is no organizing
principle or philosophy for either the together of being-together or the obli-
gation intrinsic to being, we are bestowed with the necessity of choosing
without a calculus or philosophy for choice. The contradictions, the tensions,
the doubling-backs that make ethics impractical are what make ethics both
necessary and possible. Ethics emerges by virtue of the fact that nothing is
decided by ontology, that there is no guiding principle to being-together, that
we must choose, we must make choices, take leaps into the world for which
we are always responsible and we can never know to be ethical.
If ethics were practical, then it would not be ethics at all. If it were merely
a matter of following a credo, obeying a set of rules, operating along a
calculus, approximating a normative principle, then ethics and life would
never be a question of choice but only a question of knowledge and applica-
tion. Epistemology would conquer ethics. We have inherited this error in our
philosophies and our language. Consider that the term right holds for us so
many functions that would connect truth, morality, and obligation together as
one idea: To be right about something, to do the right thing, and to have a
right are conflated in the history of Western philosophy from even before
Socrates’s reasoning soul.
66 Pat J. Gehrke

Yet, ethics are at the same time all about practice; they are about nothing
other than being-together in the action of the everyday, in the simplest being
of being-together, here and now. As such, the overwhelming ethical call of
community is the call of every moment of being. There is not an instant in
which being is not given to us again by virtue of being-together. I am always
dependent and always owing this moment of being to the being-together of
every instance in time and space, and so every action is always a response to
this basic ontological fact. Ethics is in every second of practice, every small
move, choice, gesture, word, and thought. As such, the ethics of being-
together is nothing but an ethics of practice in the everyday, even if it is in
some sense impossible.

COMMUNICATION ETHICS being TOGETHER

These four words—communication, ethics, being, and together—offer us no

particular order of operations. Perhaps we might interject “as” to read “com-
munication ethics as being together,” or we might move the “as” to read
“communication as ethics being together,” or move around the words to read
“communication being ethics together” or “ethics together being communi-
cation,” and none of these could plainly be called wrong.
Communication is not an addendum to ethics or being-together, but be-
ing-together is already a moment of communication; the communication of
the sheer ontology of being-together is not the communication of words,
sentences, symbols, signs, gestures, or all our theories of communication, but
an exposition of singular being as being-together. The first communication in
every moment of being is the exposure of the sheer ontology of community,
the exposure of all to all that gives to each being and every other being its
singularity and possibility of existence—as Jean Luc Nancy stated in The
Inoperative Community, “the communication of community itself.” 26
While Nancy’s insistence on communication as the exposition of being-
together and being-singular may be compelling, it does not provide much
guidance to those concerned with moments of communication in which we
must choose what we say, how we say it, when, where, to whom, and so on.
Though many contemporary philosophers of ethics purposefully defer such
issues, communication theorists and ethicists are afforded no such luxury.
Hence, at great risk of distorting the force of the philosophical position
advanced, I will attempt to explore some implications for communication
ethics and theory without imposing a particular structure or philosophy onto
that which can have no philosophy and no structure other than its emergence
at every moment.
Let us begin with the simple proposition that all action is reaction; every
statement is only made in response. This is not reaction to just a particular
 Before the One and the Other 67

situation but always first reaction to infinite anarchic community. The re-
sponsive “I” comes in Levinas’s thought from the approach of the Other, 27
but prior to the Other’s approach is the anarchic community, the sheer being
of being-together. In every moment, when we respond, we respond to, as, in,
and for this infinite community of singular beings, even before the approach
of the Other. There is, then, no less a call to this moment here than to any
other moment, nor to this other before me as to every other. At every mo-
ment, we are called to respond, or more accurately, to be responsible for this
community of singular beings being-together.
The traditional ethicist would place before us now some dilemma or
situation that requires us to come to an ethical choice: Nazis come knocking
on the door while the Jewish family hides in my basement; the pharmacist
who withholds the medicine that I cannot afford to buy my dying child, and
so on. Each of these scenarios mistakes ethics for a set of specific relation-
ships that are deployed in an effort to generate or test a model for ethical
action. Is there a contract or a universal rationality that obligates me simulta-
neously to tell the truth to this Nazi and to protect this Jewish family; to
provide the medicine to my child and not to steal from the pharmacist? The
ethical is masked in such considerations of contracts and axioms, but also
recedes in the thinking of obligation and response in an abstracted locality,
even if every response and every obligation requires its locality to occur.
When the ethicist builds such a scenario, the counterfactual structure sets
aside the very thing that imbues us with responsibility: the infinite commu-
nity of singular beings. Lived experience never confronts one with these
scenarios because we always live in the disparate multiplicity of all, to which
we bear an infinite and unyielding obligation. Every smile, every gesture,
every small choice, every move evokes the entirety of our obligation to
being-together.
An act of communication, a saying, a choosing of what is said, is thus a
choosing of the mode of response to the community of singular beings—a
response as much to that which gives us the very possibility of response as to
the persons and circumstances found in locality. When we say “yes,” or even
a simple “please,” or when we orate on matters of grand public affairs and
international politics, in all these cases and every other, we engage the entire-
ty of the community of all beings in time and space, even those that we will
never know or encounter. Each response, then, is a living of the responsibil-
ity, an ethos, an ethic, a choosing of living and responding that is at that
moment the particular making of a world. The question is not which response
is ethical but which ethic is in the response, which living and being, what
world is in the making of that response.
Today we face ethics of response that would cover over everything that
makes being and choosing possible, replacing the absolute obligation of an-
archic community with a contract, an identification, a unity, a bond, a dialec-
68 Pat J. Gehrke

tic, Humanity, reason, the divine, and all those other expressions of philoso-
phies of One and philosophies of the Other. Can there be anything more
urgent right now than to interrogate this repetition of the general horizon of
our age that has hurled us into a world in which everything is in danger and
nothing exists except in the service of such tyrannies?
Tyranny is not the most accurate word, but it does spur the consideration
of the ethico-political at stake in this discussion. Nancy’s depiction of the
ethico-political, of a community-politics without telos or arche, gives us one
narrative of how we can live together and make necessary and impossible
choices. 28 Under philosophies of One, the political is guided by the theologi-
cal (or at least pseudo-theological, as in humanist ontology). This theologico-
politics makes all singular beings and all life slave to the extension and
repetition of a philosophy of One. Whether it be a philosophy of human
essence, an interpretation of divine will, or the expansion and reproduction of
“market democracy,” each turn returns to the philosophy and feeds all things
to it, without exception and without any choosing or ethical struggle, except
to overcome the resistance offered by the excess of the existent.
Communism and Nazism are but two examples of the theologico-political
in operation, but no less so is the operation of current Western market de-
mocracies and all their dreams of the end of history and the liberation of man,
from the progressive disciples of John Dewey to the neoconservatives in-
spired by Francis Fukuyama. In the politics of these philosophies, all things
yield to the articulation of an ideal, a telos, or a unity. To contrast the ethico-
political to the theologico-political is to contrast a politics without telos or
unity to all those systems of relations that grind the community of singular
beings being-together into one substance, into a community of commonality.
The question, however, is not how to hold everything apart as monads. Each
is always already dependent on every other, but being-together in every
moment emerges again and again, asking us to take up the political anew
each time, without reservation, without hesitation, and without reliance upon
what might have come before.
Contrary to philosophies of the Other, an ethico-politics of community
ties up singular being with singular-being in being-together at every moment;
each tying and unraveling at the same moment, calling us to take up the act
of tying once again. Every choice, every little motion of the eye, each small
word, is another chance to take up the tying again. The ethico-political takes
up the tying in each moment—not to tie us together with knots, not to give us
a common bond, but to tie again and to tie only for that moment and in that
moment, in response to all being-together.
Such a politics refuses justification for ideologies, projects, and agendas
in a way that might appear contrary to many cherished and vital political
projects of the twenty-first century. The problem is not that being-together is
insensitive to the immediate material suffering of beings in the world. To the
 Before the One and the Other 69

contrary, the obligation imposed by anarchic community at every moment

commands us to rend our very souls over the suffering of every singular
being—all things in time and space—without exception or priority. Yet, it
commands us to respond now, in this moment, to all being-together, and
gives us no maxim or program for that response. The ethico-political thus
requires of us response in every moment, but it commands likewise that we
take responsibility for every choice, every injury, every pain, without excep-
tion or excuse. Not only for our neighbor, not only for the human, not only
for all those living now and to come, but to all, without exception and
without measure.
Communication is no different in this regard, and the ethico-political does
not excuse us from the needs of the communicative. The question becomes,
however, how do we put communication to work in the movement of tying
while suspending the impulse toward a philosophy of One? How is it that this
ethico-political understanding of communication might help one colleague
who asked me about its usefulness in convincing his local planning board to
change zoning ordinances? The problem is not so much with the question of
the ethico-political call of being-together, but more in the presupposition that
communication must be about the accomplishment of the goals of persuasion
or identification. Let us consider rephrasing the question: How might the
ethico-political call of being-together help us to understand the way in which
each moment calls us to take up the tying with all other beings and also with
those here and now at this moment? In what way might we think about a
communication that opens us to the exposition of singular beings at every
moment? How might I speak as such an exposure and a listening?
Answering any of these questions in a substantive way would impose a
philosophy on the response, would presume to answer the question of tying
based on a substantive model, a theologico-politics. Yet, perhaps the ques-
tions themselves make the answer, or they are the answer in the making.
Ethico-political communication of being-together retreats from the advance-
ment of project, telos, or fusion, instead taking up the process of tying,
without any particular philosophy or end for the tying except to leave open
the tying once again. It may seem odd that an ethic and politic of communi-
cation that begins with the proposition that there is no substance to being
other than the phenomenal necessity of being-together would end at a place
that appears so similar to the claim that Henry Johnstone made a number of
years ago. 29 The call here, however, is for a communication that would open
in every way to the tying in every moment, not merely to keep the conversa-
tion going, but to allow at every moment for the configurations, relations,
connections, and positions to be taken up anew, without resentment, and
without demand.
What kind of communication would enable such an opening? How could
one answer this except in the moment? What could possibly be said of this
70 Pat J. Gehrke

movement and this moment that would not demand the interrogative? Is the
next step in this process a case study that would exemplify this operation?
Does any such opportunity exist today, or is there no politics without telos in
circulation? Could such a case study be done without the fantasy of produc-
ing a model for that which is without model? Is communication inextricably
connected to the theologico-political philosophies of One? Here, on the brink
of social and ecological collapse, on a planet tortured by unitary visions and
theologico-politics, what more important question could communication
ethicists and theorists ask than this: Can we think differently from that which
has led us to this dangerous precipice?

NOTES

1. Martin Heidegger explains this commonality among various humanisms: “However

different these forms of humanism may be in purpose and in principle, in the mode and means
of their respective realizations, and in the form of their teaching, they nevertheless all agree on
this, that the humanitas of homo humanus is determined with regard to an already established
interpretation of nature, history, the world, and the ground of the world, that is, of beings as a
whole.” See Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (1946), trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in
Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, 239–76 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
245.
2. Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (LaSalle, IN: Open Court, 1986), 11.
3. Craig A. Baird, “Speech and the New Philosophies,” Central States Speech Journal 13
(1962): 244.
4. A detailed analysis of this trend can be found in Pat J. Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of
Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2009). For just a few examples, see Dwight Van de Vate, “Reasoning
and Threatening: A Reply to Yoos,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 8 (1975): 177–79; Thomas R.
Nilsen, “Free Speech, Persuasion, and the Democratic Process,” Quarterly Journal of Speech
44 (1958): 235–43; Christopher Lyle Johnstone, “Ethics, Wisdom, and the Mission of Contem-
porary Rhetoric: The Realization of Human Being,” Central States Speech Journal 32 (1981):
177–88.
5. For examples of early existential communication ethics and theory, see Robert L. Scott,
“Some Implications of Existentialism for Rhetoric,” Central States Speech Journal 15 (1964);
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetorical Implications of the Axiology of Jean Paul Sartre,”
Western Speech 35 (1971): 155–61.
6. Some of the best examples come from intersectionality and black feminist scholars such
as bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw, but also can be seen in moments of Michel Foucault’s
debate with Noam Chomsky. In communication studies, one can note William Utterback’s
criticism of the violence/reason dichotomy, Parke Burgess’s examination of the coercion/force
distinction, Janice Norton’s critique of the trope of identification, Nakayama and Krizek’s call
for a politics of the interstice, and a plethora of similar materials.
7. James H. McBurney, “Some Contributions of Classical Dialectic and Rhetoric to a
Philosophy of Discussion,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 23 (1937): 1–13; Milton Dickens,
“Discussion, Democracy, Dictatorship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33 (1947): 151–58.
8. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1994); Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); see
chapters 2 and 3.
9. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittbsurgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969),
40.
 Before the One and the Other 71

10. For an explication of Levinas’s critique of reciprocity, see Arne Johan Vetlesen, “Rela-
tions with Others in Sartre and Levinas: Assessing some Implications for an Ethics of Proxim-
ity,” Constellations 1, no. 3 (1995): 358–82.
11. For example, Ronald C. Arnett, “The Responsive ‘I’: Levinas’s Derivate Argument,”
Argumentation and Advocacy 40 (2003): 39–50; Michael J. Hyde, The Call of Conscience:
Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate (Columbia, SC: University of
South Carolina Press, 2001); Lisbeth Lipari, “Listening for the Other: Ethical Implications of
the Buber-Levinas Encounter,” Communication Theory 14 (2004): 122–41.
12. T. A. Carlson, “Ethics, Religiosity, and the Question of Community in Emmanuel Levi-
nas,” Sophia 37 (1998): 42.
13. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Boston: Kluwer Aca-
demic Publishers, 1991), 157–61.
14. For a more detailed explication, see Pat J Gehrke, “Being for the Other-to-the-Other:
Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics,” Review of Communication 10 (2010): 5–19.
15. See Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 152–53; Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, and
Alison Aimley, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” trans.
Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed.
Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, 169–73 (New York: Routledge, 1988).
16. See Silvia Benso, The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2000), 200; Diane Davis, “Greetings: On Levinas and the Wagging Tail,” JAC: A
Journal of Composition Theory 29, no. 1 (2009): 711–48; Christina Diehm, “Facing Nature:
Levinas Beyond the Human,” Philosophy Today 44 (2000): 51–59; Pat J. Gehrke, “The Ethical
Importance of Being Human: God and Humanism in Levinas’s Philosophy,” Philosophy Today
50 (2006): 428–36.
17. The grammatically inappropriate use of the lower case here and elsewhere emphasizes
the reference to the simple fact of phenomenal being and sets apart the term from the sense of
Being that would imply a grander or more unifying ontology than this chapter pursues.
18. Pat J. Gehrke, “Turning Kant against the Priority of Autonomy: Communication Ethics
and the Duty to Community,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 1–21.
19. Scott Stroud, “Kant on Community: A Reply to Gehrke,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39
(2006): 157–65.
20. Even if one insists upon the possibility of the middle voice (“knowing knows” and
“seeing sees”), which would distinguish knowing from a being that knows, the knowing still
must exist; the seeing still is in its seeing, which is to say that even without the prerequisite of a
subject, there is the prerequisite of being (sheer existence), though this does not require any
particular type or form of being. The middle voice merely avoids the idea that there must be a
subject, but not that something must be, that is, that there must be being. Language makes this
difficult to say, as the middle voice is anathema to our way of speaking and thinking, but I
struggle for some (over)simplicity in saying that seeing sees still relies on the being of seeing.
21. It might be more accurate here to say the possibility of anything other than undifferen-
tiated uniformity, but this point is quite trivial since a constant and undifferentiated experience
would be impossible to distinguish from no experience at all. Additionally, the experience of
undifferentiated uniformity is logically problematic, as such an experience already requires the
distinction of an experiencing being from the experienced uniformity, which would deny that
the experience was purely of undifferentiated uniformity in the first place.
22. In biology, the term mitosis describes the process of one cell dividing into two cells with
identical genomes.
23. For an excellent discussion of the problems of noncount nouns, mass, and stuff, see
Thomas J. McKay, “‘Critical Notice’ of Words without Objects,” Canadian Journal of Philos-
ophy 38 (2008): 301–24. For a more abbreviated introduction, see Laycock, Henry, “Object,”
in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 edition), published October 1, 2002,
revised August 4, 2010, ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed May 26, 2013, plato.stanford.edu/
entries/object/.
24. See Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Paul Carus (Chicago: The
Open Court Publishing Company, 1912).
72 Pat J. Gehrke

25. Norman Fischer, “The Concept of Community in Kant’s Architectonic,” Man and World
11 (1978): 372-91; Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation,
and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
26. Jean Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991), 60.
27. See Arnett, “Responsive ‘I.’”
28. See Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political (New York:
Routledge, 1997); Jean Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1998); also Pat J. Gehrke, “Community at the End of the World,” in Communication
Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality, ed. Kathleen Glenister Roberts and Ro-
nald C. Arnett (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
29. Henry W. Johnstone, “Toward an Ethics of Rhetoric,” Communication 6 (1981):
305–14.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnett, Ronald C. “The Responsive ‘I’: Levinas’s Derivate Argument.” Argumentation and
Advocacy 40 (2003): 39–50.
Baird, Craig A. “Speech and the New Philosophies.” Central States Speech Journal 13 (1962):
241–46.
Benso, Silvia. The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “The Rhetorical Implications of the Axiology of Jean Paul Sartre.”
Western Speech 35 (1971): 155–61.
Carlson, T. A. “Ethics, Religiosity, and the Question of Community in Emmanuel Levinas.”
Sophia 37 (1998): 42–71.
Davis, Diane. “Greetings: On Levinas and the Wagging Tail.” JAC: A Journal of Composition
Theory 29, no. 1 (2009): 711–48.
Dickens, Milton. “Discussion, Democracy, Dictatorship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33
(1947): 151–58.
Diehm, Christina. “Facing Nature: Levinas Beyond the Human.” Philosophy Today 44 (2000):
51–59.
Fischer, Norman. “The Concept of Community in Kant’s Architectonic.” Man and World 11
(1978): 372–91.
Gehrke, Pat J. “Being for the Other-to-the-Other: Justice and Communication in Levinasian
Ethics.” Review of Communication 10 (2010): 5–19.
———. “Community at the End of the World.” In Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopol-
itanism and Provinciality. Edited by Kathleen Glenister Roberts and Ronald C. Arnett. New
York: Peter Lang, 2008.
———. “The Ethical Importance of Being Human: God and Humanism in Levinas’s Philoso-
phy.” Philosophy Today 50 (2006): 428–36.
———. The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth
Century. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.
———. “Turning Kant against the Priority of Autonomy: Communication Ethics and the Duty
to Community.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 1–21.
Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on ‘Humanism’ (1946).” Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi. In Path-
marks, 239–76. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Hyde, Michael J. The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia
Debate. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Johnstone, Christopher Lyle. “Ethics, Wisdom, and the Mission of Contemporary Rhetoric:
The Realization of Human Being.” Central States Speech Journal 38 (1981): 177–88.
Johnstone, Henry W. “Toward an Ethics of Rhetoric.” Communication 6 (1981): 305–14.
Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Edited by Paul Carus. Chicago: The
Open Court Publishing Company, 1912.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe and Jean Luc Nancy. Retreating the Political. New York: Routledge,
1997.
 Before the One and the Other 73

Laycock, Henry. “Object.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 edition),

published October 1, 2002, revised August 4, 2010. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed
May 26, 2013. plato.stanford.edu/entries/object/.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by Seán Hand. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
———. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Boston,: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1991.
———. Outside the Subject. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
———. Proper Names. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
———. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Lipari, Lisbeth. “Listening for the Other: Ethical Implications of the Buber-Levinas Encoun-
ter.” Communication Theory 14 (2004): 122–41.
McBurney, James H. “Some Contributions of Classical Dialect and Rhetoric to a Philosophy of
Discussion.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 23 (1937): 1–13.
McKay, Thomas J. “‘Critical Notice’ of Words without Objects.” Canadian Journal of Philos-
ophy 38 (2008): 301–24.
Nancy, Jean Luc. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991.
———. The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Nilsen, Thomas R. “Free Speech, Persuasion, and the Democratic Process.” Quarterly Journal
of Speech 44 (1958): 235–43.
Scott, Robert L. “Some Implications of Existentialism for Rhetoric.” Central States Speech
Journal 15 (1964): 267–78.
Shell, Susan Meld. The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Soper, Kate. Humanism and Anti-Humanism. LaSalle, IN: Open Court, 1986.
Stroud, Scott. “Kant on Community: A Reply to Gehrke.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006):
157–65.
Van de Vate, Dwight. “Reasoning and Threatening: A Reply to Yoos.” Philosophy and Rheto-
ric 8 (1975): 177–79.
Vetlesen, Arne Johan. “Relations with Others in Sartre and Levinas: Assessing some Implica-
tions for an Ethics of Proximity.” Constellations 1, no. 3 (1995): 358–82.
Wright, Tamara, Peter Hughes, and Alison Aimley. “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview
with Emmanuel Levinas.” Translated by Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright. In The
Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and David
Wood, 169–73. New York: Routledge, 1988.
 Chapter Four

Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis

An Essay on Time and Relation

Lisbeth Lipari

How do we recognize ethical moments when we stumble across them? And

even when we do, how do we lean into them rather than turn away? What
makes it possible for us to think, listen, and speak with ethics rather than
about it? So often we think of ethics as something external to us—a decision
or action to make or not, like violating a commandment, speaking out of turn,
or doing something when “we know better.” But as dialogic ethics instruct,
ethics is not “out there” in a world we can chose whether or not to participate
in; ethics is always already embedded and present in our relationships with
others. 1 This is one reason that ethical codes, credos, rules, guidelines are not
enough—they can reinforce the idea that ethics is an exteriority outside the
self. Moreover, they imply that the self is separate and apart from the world
and that ethics is merely a chosen add-on to our being rather than the sub-
stance of being itself.
But as scholars of communication, we know that ethics are not outside the
self—that both ethics and the self are deeply embedded in our dialogic rela-
tions with others. As Emmanuel Levinas writes, “discourse conditions
thought, for the first intelligible is not a concept, but an intelligence whose
inviolable exteriority the face states in uttering the ‘you shall not commit
murder.’ The essence of discourse is ethical.” 2 We know, moreover, that the
ways we communicate about ethics matter because, among other reasons,
words and metaphors resonate with presuppositions that have ethical impli-
cations—a “war on drugs” morphs readily into a war on drug users; calling
students “consumers” casts education in economic terms. 3 In this chapter, I
explore some ethical implications of our discourses about time and commu-
nication in order to consider whether and how some of our unexamined
75
76 Lisbeth Lipari

language habits may lead us to think more about ethics than with ethics. In
particular, I investigate how the spatial metaphors we use to talk about time
and dialogue may, inadvertently, curtail our ethical horizons.
If, as Levinas writes, “the relationship with alterity is neither spatial nor
conceptual,” then what could it be? 4 In what follows, I tentatively respond to
Levinas with an idea about the relationship with alterity being temporal and
embodied rather than spatial and conceptual. But this temporality must be
understood as a nonlinear phenomenon that is accomplished in relation to
and with the other. That is, unlike binary conceptual models of time, such as
the pairings of chronos/kairos, diachrony/synchrony, objective/subjective,
and quantitative/qualitative time, here we will address time not as “the
achievement of an isolated and lone subject, but . . . [as] the very relationship
of the subject with the other.” 5 Such a relational and generative way of
thinking may thereby enable us to relinquish linear, spatial, and mechanical
models of communicative interaction in favor of nonlinear, musical, and
embodied models wherein temporality and communication ethics are en-
acted, and perhaps even accomplished, by speakers and listeners in concert.

TIME

We typically think of time spatially—as an indistinct but insistent river flow-

ing eternally from past to present to future or as the four dimensional geome-
try of Einstein’s space-time wherein time is irretrievably linked to space.
Spatial conceptions of time are also deeply embedded in our thinking about
dialogue. Thought of as a back-and-forth series of turns (i.e., rotation in
space), dialogue appears as a sequence of separate individual word-objects
that we volley back and forth like a tennis ball: If by chance one of us
misunderstands or misspeaks, we pick up the ball and resume the volley. In
this way, the conduit metaphor depicts dialogue in spatial terms wherein not
just content, but time itself, moves linearly from point to point, in one direc-
tion: from past to present to future. Echoes of spatiality can be heard in many
of our metaphors for dialogue, such as point, position, side, foundation, and
floor, as well as in face-to-face, back channeling, uptake, and triangulation,
to name but a few examples. What is lost in these spatial conceptions of
dialogue are thus the incessant intrusions of thoughts and interruptions, the
disjointed overlaps, and the strategic and poetic ambiguities that tend to
characterize dialogue. Depicted spatially as linear movement back and forth,
dialogue appears to be a relatively straightforward process of succession,
wherein one person speaks at a time and each utterance is followed by a
responding utterance, and so on. But of course dialogue is rarely so neat and
tidy; often people speak at the same time, interrupt one another, think about
something else while others are speaking, get lost in thoughts and memories,
 Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis 77

or imagine a future that is yet to exist. Was time always understood in largely
spatial terms?
In the Euro-American tradition, the conflation of time and space may be
traced back to the ancient Greeks’ inquiry into the relationship between time,
motion, and change. Time became important for the Eleatics when the ques-
tion of whether, how, and why things change led to an argument between
Parminedes and Heraclitus about being versus becoming—was the universe
always in flux, in a state of ever-changing becoming in time, or is the uni-
verse and everything in it a vast, unchanging, and timeless still-point? Ever
since Aristotle, Western thinking about time has been rendered spatially,
conceived as a succession of nows that flow unidirectionally from past to
present to future. In the words of Aristotle, the present time is the indivisible
“extremity of the past (no part of the future being on this side of it) and also
of the future (no part of the past being on the other side of it).” 6 The now
stands still like a stone in the river of time. For Aristotle, time was “merely
the way we ‘measure motion,’ the way we ‘measure the difference between
before and after,’ that is, reduce our descriptions of motions to statements of
the sequence of change.” 7 And with the invention of calendars and sundials
that measured time by movements in space, the spatial model of time was
complete.
During the Enlightenment, however, things got a bit more complicated,
and for Kant, as perhaps for Descartes, the question of time was more com-
plex. For Kant, time and space were not simply concepts that describe ob-
jects—such as the quantity or quality of flowers in the garden. Rather, the
concepts of time and space were the a priori formal conditions of all phe-
nomena that could not be derived from external experience. Time, for exam-
ple, could not be perceived as passing or calculated as a measurement were it
not for the already existing conception of time in consciousness. Similarly,
space must exist prior to the named objects that exist within it. Because both
time and space were presupposed in the core pure concepts, Kant argued that
time and space were super pure concepts upon which everything else de-
pended. He wrote, “In order that certain sensations should be related to
something outside me (i.e., to something in another place of space from that
which I find myself) . . . the representation of space must already be there.” 8
Similarly, Kant argued that “time is not an empirical concept that is some-
how drawn from an experience. For simultaneity or succession would not
themselves come into our perception if the representation of time were not
given a priori.” 9 As an example, Kant describes how the concept of causality
could not exist without a prior idea of time in the form of a beforehand and
an afterward. According to Charles Sherover, Kant was perhaps influenced
by previous conceptions of time—such as Newton’s differentiation between
an absolute and a relative time and Descartes’s 57th principle, which distin-
guished time and duration. Kant suggested a third form of time that was
78 Lisbeth Lipari

neither quantifiable nor systematic but was “a temporal human perspective

within which [objects] appear and within which cognitions are sought; for
objects appear to us in our anticipations, memories, plans, and recollections
and it is only within this non-quantifiable range of temporal experience that
the attempt for systematic and mathematical cognitive description may
arise.” 10 This, according to Sherover, led Kant to associate time with human
freedom rather than with the linear spatiality of clock time.
Anyone who has ever been “lost in thought” knows that life experiences
rarely conform to clock time. Painful experiences last too long and pleasures
are far too fleeting. And intentionally focusing our attention on a single
phenomenon (whether of meditation, study, or speech) for even ten minutes
can either seem like forever or be a short-lived blur. Similarly, a conversation
may seem like an eternity or fly by in a flash. In the early part of the
twentieth century, the philosopher Henri Bergson disputed the idea that time
could be rendered in terms of mechanistic quantification as a continuous
linear movement through space. Rather, Bergson conceived of time without
space—without quantification and measure—and considered temporal expe-
rience a “confused multiplicity” that he called durée. “Pure duration is the
form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets
itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former
states.” 11 As an example, Bergson describes how, when we listen to a sym-
phony, we perceive the notes of a musical phrase not as discrete spatial
intervals, but as sounds melting together into an organic whole. He writes,
“Even if these notes succeed one another, we perceive them in one another.
And their totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although
distinct, permeate one another because they are so closely connected.” 12
Spatial conceptions of time, argued Bergson, imply counting, homogeneity,
and infinite divisibility, whereas human consciousness does not experience
time as a series of equally spaced intervals that can be isolated from one
another and arbitrarily divided into discrete entities.
Near the same time that Bergson was theorizing nonlinear temporality,
the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure was busy theorizing language as semi-
otics, the study of signs in society. Saussure separated language into two
separate parts, language (langue) and speaking (parole). To Saussure, langue
is the “true and unique object of linguistics,” while the activity of speaking
(parole) has “no place in linguistics except through their relation to lan-
guage.” 13 Having expelled speaking from the school of linguistics, Saussure
turned his attention to language as a system with two temporal aspects, one
synchronic and the other diachronic. Saussure rendered both temporal as-
pects in spatial terms, conceiving synchronic language to be a largely static,
immutable system of rules, laws, and regularities and conceiving diachronic
language as a mutable body of sound and meaning that evolves over time. In
this way, Saussure’s linguistic synchronic and diachronic binary reinforced
 Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis 79

the prevailing linear, spatialized notion of time: linguistic diachrony was the
horizontal x axis of time that moves from left to right, and linguistic synchro-
ny was the vertical y axis of structural elements that cohabitate a given
moment of time. Today, we live in Saussure’s rather than Bergson’s world,
and the temporality of dialogue is implicitly, if not explicitly, thought of in
diachronous spatial terms wherein utterances “follow one another” in a linear
stream of discourse. But was the temporality of dialogue always thus?

KAIROS

Two concepts from the ancient Greek language give us insight into the rela-
tion of ethics and temporality: the words kairos—most superficially under-
stood as right timing or the opportune moment—and akroasis—translated as
listening and invoking the idea of secret, esoteric teachings. Although both
terms kairos and akroasis were important to the Pythagoreans and other pre-
Socratics, and both are related to ideas of harmony and balance, only the
term kairos remains a part of the Western rhetorical apparatus. But as we will
explore below, thinking about kairos as a relation with alterity that accom-
plishes temporality enables us to consider kairos as an ethical response that
arises from akroasis—from a listening attunement that transcends binary
oppositions and the presumed spatial linear progressions of past, present, and
future. From this perspective, kairos is a nonlinear way of synchronous lis-
tening and speaking, a dialogic midwifery that, as an ethics, can give birth to
speech. 14 Thus, in the ethical encounter, listening does not merely follow
speech; it also draws speech forth. The ethical relation is thus a temporal,
embodied, and intersubjective process, an achievement accomplished by
weaving the weft of kairos into the warp of akroasis.
The pre-Socratic concept of kairos seems to have originated in the con-
text of two ancient art forms: archery and weaving. 15 The former use of
kairos pertained to a narrow passage for or wound from an arrow, and the
latter pertained to the passage of threads (the weft) through strands (or warp)
of fiber in the making of cloth. The term is also found in the works of ancient
Greek poets Homer, Pindar, and Hesiod and is defined variously as “‘sym-
metry,’ ‘propriety,’ ‘occasion,’ ‘due measure,’ ‘fitness,’ ‘tact,’ ‘decorum,’
‘convenience,’ ‘proportion,’ ‘fruit,’ ‘profit,’ and ‘wise moderation.’” 16 Later,
the term kairos made its way into the heart of rhetorical theory, first through
Isocrates’s and later Aristotle’s school of rhetoric. 17
As an ethics, calling kairos an “opportune moment” seems to cultivate a
flavor of opportunism that would violate an ethics of alterity that demands
we renounce our claims and prerogatives. Similarly, some scholars relate
kairos to ethics via the idea of prepon, or propriety and decorum, in a way
that may sound to modern ears more calculating than virtuous. Isocrates, for
80 Lisbeth Lipari

example, called upon speakers to “always monitor your speech and actions
so that you make the fewest mistakes possible. It is best to make use of
perfect opportunities, but since these are hard to identify, elect to fall short
rather than overstep the mark.” 18 Isocrates claimed kairos was difficult to
learn because the goodness of speech stems from its having “a share in what
is opportune [kairos], appropriateness of style, and originality.” 19 The em-
phasis on propriety and right timing has led some scholars to conclude that
kairos is a kind of situational, pragmatic, or relativist ethics. 20 Laurent Per-
not, for example, describes kairos as a Greek idea of situational ethics that
varies depending on context. 21 This is perhaps what leads Pernot to lament a
lack of “truth or justice defined once and for all” for rhetoric in the classical
age. 22 In the Roman era, kairos, like so many other rhetorical concepts, took
on an ethically questionable form of strategic instrumentalism as a techne, or
skill to be honed. 23
Toward the late-mid-twentieth century, however, American scholars of
rhetoric came to develop a more nuanced conception of kairos as “a concept
far richer and complex than saying the right thing at the right time.” 24 To
Michael Carter, for example, ethics was crucial to the kairos of the pre-
Socratics who sought to produce ethical judgments in “a relativistic uni-
verse . . . Gorgias and the other sophists were not the skeptics and opportu-
nists that the Platonic tradition has painted them.” 25 Similarly, Sheri Helsley
describes “a generative kairos” that “exhibits rich ethical implications in
addition to its epistemological and rhetorical facets.” 26 To Michael Harker,
“kairos is a term that reminds us of the ethical responsibility that accompa-
nies the project of evaluating context.” 27 Because of the improvisational and
generative dimensions of kairos, some scholars link it to Lloyd Bitzer’s
concept of exigence in the rhetorical situation. 28 Focusing here on Bitzer’s
beautiful conception of discourse as being called forth by exigence, we will
leave aside the question of whether an ethics of urgency can indeed be an
ethics. 29
As had Isocrates done with kairos, Bitzer identifies exigency as drawing a
“fitting response” from the rhetor, a speaking that is timely, appropriate,
proper, and in keeping with the circumstances. To Bitzer, exigency is “an
imperfection marked by urgency” that calls forth speech. 30 Exigence works
in combination with audience and other constraints such as beliefs, facts,
traditions, interests, motives, and so on, to call forth what Bitzer calls a
“fitting response.” 31 Bitzer gives us Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and asks
us to imagine the speech without the exigence of the situation (i.e., blood-
stained ground from a civil war that caused terrible losses on both sides).
Such a “groundless” speech would, in Bitzer’s mind, “lose its profound rhe-
torical value.” 32 It is not clear, however, whether there might not be numer-
ous fitting responses to any given exigence, and whether each would yield a
comparably ethical response. Indeed, we might ponder the question of
 Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis 81

whether, while constraints and audience certainly shape what might be

deemed a fitting response, Lincoln’s call that “these dead not die in vain”
was necessarily more fitting than a speech of vengeful war mongering or the
pronouncement of a truce. 33 As a more recent example, Bitzer asks us to
imagine a president who gives a national address without speaking to the
day’s significant circumstances (such as an enemy acquiring an atomic
bomb), instead waxing on poetically about his own rural childhood. To Bit-
zer, “the critic of rhetoric would have said rightly, ‘he missed the mark; his
speech did not fit, he did not speak to the pressing issues.’” 34 But again it is
not clear how or to what end, rather than simply whether, a rhetor responds to
a situation’s exigence. Thus we are left questioning whether exigence as
kairos can be an ethics. Simply put, are prepon, fit, decorum, and relevance
enough? Or is there something more?
For the most part, contemporary rhetorical discussions about kairos and
ethics tend to eschew the relational and dialogic models of communication in
favor of an emphasis on individual agency and action wherein kairos con-
cerns the doing of speech and speaking. As John Poulakos claims, “Clearly,
the notion of kairos points out that speech exists in time; but more important,
it constitutes a prompting toward speaking and a criterion of the value of
speech. In short, kairos dictates that what is said must be said at the right
time.” 35 Sipiora emphasizes an individual and agentive notion of kairos by
quoting an excerpt from Aristotle: “Know the critical situation in your life,
know that it demands a decision, and what decision, and train yourself to
recognize as such the decisive point in your life, and to act accordingly.” 36
Similarly, James Kinneavy and Catherine Eskin link kairos with an ethics of
equity that stems from Aristotle’s ethics. 37 Following Kinneavy, Harker con-
nects kairos to pedagogy and the ethical dimensions of argument with the
rhetor as agent. 38 As depicted thus, kairos largely involves the agency of
individuals who speak—as if speakers only speak. But is it necessarily so?

AKROASIS

Like kairos, the term akroasis (from the Greek for hearing, Ακρόασις) also
received attention by the Pythagoreans. Unlike kairos, however, it received
far less attention from either classical or modern rhetoricians. A stray trace of
its existence is preserved, however, in several versions of the Progymnasma-
ta, one of the early preparatory manuals of classical rhetoric. 39 According to
Pernot, “the rhetorical exercises are an ancient practice” that can be traced to
the Sophists. 40 One extant version of the Progymnasmata dates from the first
or second century CE and is attributed to Ailios Theon. In addition to exer-
cises in such familiar forms as narrative, topos, encomium, and so forth,
there are an additional five supplementary exercises that include reading,
82 Lisbeth Lipari

listening (akroasis), and paraphrasing. Although little is written about the

listening exercises, there is evidence that attention to the sonic and musical
dimensions of speech was emphasized at this same time by professors such
as Dionysios of Halikarnassos, a follower of Isocrates who instructed stu-
dents on matters of melody, rhythm, and harmony and “the placing of words
and clauses so that the flow of sounds produces a striking auditory impres-
sion. Style is seen as a succession of phonetic and even musical effects.” 41 A
similar trace is found in C. Jan Swearingen’s investigation of pre-Socratic
rhetorical styles that move in the liminal soundings between song and speech
as well as in Hermogenes’s system of style that attends to musical aspects of
sound such as order, cadence, and rhythm. 42
While little is found of akroasis elsewhere in antiquity or present-day
rhetorical study, the lack of evidence does not prove nonexistence. After all,
the words acroamatic and acroma both pertain to esoteric oral teachings that
can be heard only by initiates in secrecy. Furthermore, as Gemma Corrida
Fiumara attests, the ancient Greek word logos itself contains seeds of listen-
ing; without it, the logos can only be a deformed yet arrogant mutant, con-
stantly saying-without-listening. 43 Similarly, Heidegger argued that the con-
ception of logos that undergirds most Western philosophy is so dominated by
an emphasis on speech and speaking that we have not only forgotten how to
listen to others but also forgotten how to listen to the being of language
itself. 44 In his analysis of a fragment from the pre-Socractic philosopher
Heraclitus, Heidegger foregrounds the idea of listening and hears in the
fragment an injunction to listen to language itself. Typically, the Heraclitus
fragment is translated as something like this rendition by Jonathan Barnes:
“Listening not to me but to the account, it is wise to agree that all things are
one.” 45 But in characteristically idiosyncratic style, Heidegger translates the
same phrase as: “When you have listened not merely to me, but when you
maintain yourself in hearkening attunement, then there is proper hearing.” 46
And what is proper hearing? Heidegger decries any idea of hearing rendered
as “acoustical science,” and in contrast describes proper hearing as “paying
thoughtful attention to simple things.” 47 As he writes,

Mortals hear the thunder of the heavens, the rustling of woods, the gurgling of
fountains, the ringing of plucked strings, the rumbling of motors, the noises of
the city—only and only so far as they always already in some way belong to
them and yet do not belong to them. . . . So long as we only listen to the sound
of a word, as the expression of a speaker, we are not yet even listening at
all. . . . We have heard when we belong to the matter addressed. 48

As we will return to later in the chapter, it is important to note the paradoxi-

cal nature of Heidegger’s “proper hearing” as both a presence and absence
and note here that his idea of proper hearing both is and is not belonging. It is
not belonging in the sense of identifying, agreeing, collecting, or binding.
 Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis 83

But it is belonging in the sense of letting be or disclosing. To Heidegger,

belonging gathers together that which lies before us, both as revealed and as
concealed. Thus Heidegger’s “proper hearing” is, paradoxically, a calling
forth of the said and the unsaid: “To name means to call forward. That which
is gathered and laid down in the name, by means of such a laying, comes to
light and comes to lie before us.” 49 Perhaps, in this way, Heidegger’s “proper
hearing” can be thought of as something like kairos as akroasis, or listening
as a calling forth of what is gathered before us.

KAIROS AS AKROASIS/LISTENING AS SPEAKING

One exception to the relatively individualistic and speech-centric approach to

kairos is found in Debra Hawhee’s idea of kairotic bodies. Drawing on the
generative dimensions of kairos and taking a cue from Dale Sullivan’s notion
of inspiration, Hawhee develops a rhetorical perspective that underscores the
relational, nonlinear, and embodied dimensions of kairos. 50 She writes:

If the notion of inspiration is considered somatically as the act of breathing in,

or a commingling of momentary elements, kairotic inspiration may be usefully
figured in terms of kairos as aperture, except this time the opening may not
necessarily lie ‘out there’ in circulating discourses or on the body of a foe.
Rather, the rhetor opens him or herself up to the immediate situation.” 51

While never so explicitly stated, Hawhee’s description of kairos suggests

itself as an ethical relation enacted through an openness that cannot be any-
thing other than listening. This is kairos as akroasis, an ethical, relational
opening where the synchronic movement of inspiration emerges not from an
individual speaking into the correct moment of a succession of moments, but
from a rhythmic conjunction that bridges the out-breath of speaking with the
in-breath of listening. In contrast to kairos as a “right” or “opportune” mo-
ment that fits within the diachronic spatial paradigm, nonlinear and embod-
ied perspectives on kairos open the door to the ethical potency of listening. A
beautiful description of the nonlinear temporality of kairos is described by
Carolyn Eriksen Hill:

In a Pythagorean cosmos, a kairotic event is an instantaneous now that embeds

the whole episode. Every circumstance has its own continually transforming
moments that resonate with others, so kairotic openings are indeed points of
present time tied to all other moments, past and present, which have unfolded
qualitatively in the time of this situation. Kairotic happenings are single events
containing multiple ones. 52

One of the few scholars to follow Heidegger into the elusive mysteries of
listening is the Italian philosopher Fiumara, who calls listening “the other
84 Lisbeth Lipari

side of language.” 53 To Fiumara, listening is the doubly derided and

thoroughly squandered half of logos, one which “belongs to the very essence
of language.” 54 The half-formed logos, argues Fiumara, “excommunicates
anything that ‘normal’ rationality is unable to grasp or systematize.” 55
Contrasting the strength of listening to the power of speaking, Fiumara warns
of the ability of the half-formed logos to so thoroughly dominate, master, and
destroy its other half that coexistence, let alone cohabitation, will be impos-
sible. She asks us to resuscitate language from the “desolate limbo of listen-
ing . . . where any attempt to listen is viewed as the sad and humble practice
of those who could not possibly excel in cogent articulations.” 56 Fiumara
describes the courage required for listening “with sufficient strength to sus-
tain blows of any kind and remain alert.” 57 That is to say that listening “could
actually come across like a storm and overwhelm us . . . listening involves
the renunciation of a predominately molding and ordering activity; a giving
up sustained by the expectation of a new and different quality of relation-
ship.” 58
As a means to resuscitate listening, Fiumara suggests a maieutic ap-
proach, one that gives birth to speech by way of listening. Fiumara’s maieut-
ic, listening-centered approach is strong enough to welcome the nascent
word without lapsing “into imitative conformity with standard rationality. By
only listening to what is obvious and easy to decode, we cannot really say
that we listen or know.” 59 Similarly, the feminist theologian Nelle Morton
describes how listening others to speech is itself an ethics. She writes, “we
empower one another by hearing the other to speech. We empower the disin-
herited, the outsider.” 60 How resonant Morton’s phrasing is with Levinas’s
ethical directive that we respond to the face as the “widow, the orphan, and
the stranger” who “commands me as Master” from “a dimension of
height.” 61 Morton’s reflection that “clever techniques seen as positive agents
for creation and change are not good for the kind of hearing that brings forth
speech,” 62 is similarly comparable to Martin Buber’s vision of true dialogue
as “a matter of renouncing the pan-technical mania or habit with its easy
‘mastery’ of every situation.” 63 Thus the empowerment of kairos as akroasis
is a listening others to speech that can reverse authoritative normative social
arrangements that either silence others and refuse to listen.
But it is not only that the voice of the other calling requires a listener to be
complete; it is that, more radically, without a listener the speaking simply
may not occur. Morton describes how, as a young doctor, C. G. Jung worked
with women who would not speak. With patience and perseverance, Jung
found a way to connect with the women by imitating their gestures and
movements until finally they began to speak. Morton writes how Jung “had
touched the place where the connection had been broken. But he did this
through their language and not the language of the doctors. He had heard
them to speech.” 64 Jung’s actions might thus be described in Heidegger’s
 Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis 85

paradoxical presence of absence: “A listener can only ‘enter’ in a way which

is at once paradoxical and committing: by taking leave, by standing aside and
making room.” 65 Thus, the ethical openness of kairos is achieved through
akroasis, a musical temporality (time as tempo, timing, and rhythm) that
listens, rather than a spatial temporality (time as linear succession or calcula-
tion) that speaks.
To both Heidegger and Levinas, time was not something humans lived
within but was the very fabric of being itself. To Heidegger, time is Dasein,
being in the world. Time “enables the mind to be what it is,” and “Dasein is
itself time.” 66 To Levinas, time is relational and intersubjective, “time is a
new birth.” 67 Time is thus not separate from life; it is life itself. So how does
listening, akroasis, relate to time? Here we must connect a few dots. To
Levinas, time is accomplished by the ethical encounter with alterity. As
Levinas describes it, “the ‘movement’ of time understood as transcendence
toward the Infinity of the ‘wholly other’ does not temporalize in a linear
way. . . . It makes a detour by entering into the ethical adventure of the
relationship with the other person.” 68 And as I have described elsewhere,
listening is the source of the ethical relation with alterity:

Listening is a form of co-constitutive communicative action fundamental to

dialogic ethics. That is, listening is neither a secondary subordinate process
that follows and flows from speech, nor is it a futile gesture. Rather, listening
is the invisible and inaudible enactment of the ethical relation itself; upon it,
everything depends. 69

If we can transpose Levinas’s time as nonlinear transcendence of alterity into

an ethics of listening, then, perhaps, we can begin to hear the harmonic
strains of kairos and akroasis. One clue comes from Mozart’s description of
how musical ideas come to him seemingly from nowhere, tout ensemble: “I
[do not] hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it
were, all at once (glitch alles zusammen).” 70 That is, before he lays it out in
the linear succession of musical notation, Mozart hears everything all at
once, a flowing undifferentiated gestalt that is later transformed into linear
sequence. Thus our persistent insistence on linear spatial conceptions of lan-
guage and time betray us by “giving a fixed form to fleeting sensations.” 71
In his critique of linear temporality, Bergson argued that our experience
of duration is betrayed by language, which freezes, isolates, and segments the
flow of consciousness. Because language is temporally linear, with each
word, sentence, paragraph following another in sequence, it is easy to take
consciousness as comparably linear. A nonlinear temporality of language has
been well theorized by Soviet psychologists and dialogic philosophers, in-
cluding Mikhail Bakhtin, Alexander Luria, V. N. Volosonov, and Lev Vy-
gotsky. 72 Luria, for example, theorized speech as a transformation of con-
86 Lisbeth Lipari

sciousness wherein the initial stages of speech are an integrated gestalt with-
out temporal sequence or differentiated parts. Luria’s model does not depict
speech as a simple conversion of thoughts into words. Rather, it describes
how complex, nonlinguistic conceptual intuitions are gradually transformed
into full-blown, grammatically correct, speech. As he describes it, “There is
every reason to agree with Vygotsky that thought is completed, rather than
embodied in speech and that the transition from thought into speech involves
several stages.” 73 Thus, rather than merely reflecting preexisting thoughts,
the Soviet psychologists saw language as a process that transforms a gestalt
of nonlinear consciousness (not unlike Bergson’s dureé) into the linear, se-
quenced expressions of speech. Vygotsky gives a wonderful example of the
instantaneous flash-like intuition of meaning that arises conterminous with
speaking:

Thought, unlike speech, does not consist of separate units. When I wish to
communicate the thought that today I saw a barefoot boy in a blue shirt
running down the street, I do not see every item separately: the boy, the shirt,
its blue color, his running, the absence of shoes. I conceive of all this in one
thought, but I put it into separate words. 74

Similarly, in our dialogic interactions, language and consciousness often blur

the linear and nonlinear as our speaking shifts between verbal tenses, creat-
ing a past for a future that has not yet become, while our imaginations project
a future that we remember and which thus becomes our past. In Faulkner's
famous words, “the past is never dead. In fact, it is never past.” 75 Our past
lives inside us as echoes of past, present, and future voices that blend and
interact to make us who we are. Moreover, these displacements in time are
not unusual; we use them daily to interpret ourselves and each other, to
recount stories, to ponder imponderables, and to shift between subjunctive
worlds. As the scholar of self-as-storyteller Roy Schafer describes psychoan-
alytic narrative, one “works in a temporal circle . . . backward from what is
told . . . and forward from various tellings of the past to constitute that
present and that anticipated future.” 76 Furthermore, as listeners, our inner
ears stitch and sew meanings outside of linear time with a reversal of begin-
ning and end, as the first words uttered inevitably become the last heard and
understanding unfurls in a flash of comprehension. This psychological tem-
porality of listening is akin to Wallace Martin’s “Janus faced reader” who is
“always looking backward as well as forward, actively restructuring the past
in light of each new bit of information.” 77 Thus, the view of time as a linear,
insistent river flowing eternally from past to present to future obscures the
many ways the lives of our minds are a tangle of braided melodies, rhythms,
recapitulations, and syncopations of memory and anticipation, sparkling with
occasional echoes of the present moment. Nevertheless, the prevailing view
 Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis 87

of both time and language as largely linear and spatial phenomena continues
to limit and condition us to thinking about (rather than with) ethics. What
follows is an illustration of kairos as an ethical achievement enacted by the
openness and attunement of akroasis.

EXEMPLUM

As an illustration of the way akroasis can be woven into kairos, an example

from a recent event at my university may be useful. More than a thousand
students, staff, and faculty from all over campus were assembled in a large
auditorium for a discussion of recent events involving racism, sexism, and
homophobia on campus. The assembly had been organized around a formal
program that offered short speeches and a small=group dialogue session, but
little public dialogue beyond a thirty-minute open microphone period in
which community members were invited to speak. And speak they did.
Truths that had been uttered only behind closed doors were, for the first time,
spoken aloud before the whole community—stories of abuse, neglect, and
humiliation as well as confessions of guilt, ignorance, repudiation, and greed
were spoken by the brave, face-to-face with the whole community. It was an
epic, heroic event—staggeringly real and genuinely uncomfortable, sad, and
frightening. The audience, some many hundreds, sat in rapt silence, listening.
Occasional sobs, nose blowing, and applause punctuated the heartfelt dis-
course, and speakers continued to rise and step up to the line waiting for their
turn at the microphone.
Not surprisingly, thirty minutes quickly turned into ninety, and at this
point, the president of the college turned to the collective and attempted to
conclude the day’s events. There were protests by students and faculty, but
the president and several other faculty members argued that the program was
over and that we should respect the clock and conclude our gathering in order
to allow everyone to return to classes and attend to their work. It was at this
moment, thick with tension and uncertainty, that the director of our library, a
bold and spirited Alabaman, stood before the group and declared in her
tuneful southern dialect: “The library is closed and will remain closed until
everyone in this room who wishes to speak has an opportunity to do so.” The
room erupted in applause, and the dialogue continued unabated for at least
four more hours. It was both a traumatic and a healing experience for the
college community.
Why call the librarian’s speaking kairos? Because she was thinking with
ethics, attuned to the sound of the unspoken. She heard what had not yet been
expressed, resisted the dictates (dicta) of clock time, and heeded the invoca-
tion to listen. This was speech spawned from listening, which in turn
spawned more listening. As Fiumara writes, “A listening dialogue is fertile
88 Lisbeth Lipari

inasmuch as it is willing to ignore time measures; the maieutic word, in fact,

can only be expressed at just the right moment and with a philosophical
patience that makes for a renunciation to bargain on matters of prece-
dence.” 78 In this example, our librarian obeyed the call to patience and re-
sisted the measure of precedence and the clock. Her speaking and listening
were in the service of ethics as an opening to alterity. Thus, we might say that
kairotic temporality involves the rhythmic aspects of timing, coordination,
syncopation, repetition, punctuation, and so forth, as well as the tensed as-
pects of grammar and narrative time and the nonlinear psychological move-
ments where “the past and present lie ‘at once’ in temporality.” 79
This example of the librarian’s akroatic kairos runs counter to an exi-
gence defined primarily as a fitting response. For where Bitzer so eloquently
describes how “rhetorical discourse is called into existence by situation,” he
is mistaken in the claim that “the clearest instances are strongly invited and
often required.” 80 For perhaps at times the response is invited, but quite
often, as in the case of the librarian, it may need to be usurped by a keen
listener attuned to the paradoxical absence as presence. Moreover, as Levinas
reminds us, the encounter with the other is always an exigence, always an
urgency, expressed in the face of the other who commands me, “Thou shalt
not kill.”

IMPLICATIONS

To the Sophists and Aristotle, kairos was future-faced; an intervention in a

wound or imperfection aimed at a target to change the future. But as an
ethics, kairos must serve a less strategic and instrumental purpose and more
of a harmonized temporality that emerges from a quality of attunement and
listening. As an ethics, kairos cannot be anticipated, as much as we would
like to predict it, point to it, organize it, categorize it. What is right about
timing may only be perceptible with an open attunement to the nonlinear
temporality of the moment. The time is thus not right in the sense of a
universal truth or correctness, nor as an accuracy, nor as an opportunity.
Kairos is an ethical achievement that emerges from the confluence of listen-
ing and speaking with contingency and conflict. 81 That is, listening is genera-
tive of kairos as an ethical attunement, an opening to the nonlinear interpene-
trations of past, present, and future. Kairos is special speech because it is
given birth to by way of listening.
But of course, we live our lives for the most part in linear diachronous
time. Our daily activities are ordered into sequences that take place in one
moment followed by another—everything from raw to cooked eggs, from
crawling to walking to running, or from match to flame to smoke occurs in
diachronous succession. Furthermore, there are recurring cycles of general-
 Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis 89

ized (i.e., not mechanically exact) quantifiable periodicity everywhere in

nature, from the monsoon season to the parturition of a fetus, and even
lifespan can be calculated as a ratio between heart beat and size. So life
without diachronic time is impossible. But at the same time, life is not clock-
work, and human beings are not (yet?) machines.
As scholars such as Kinneavy, Poulakos, Phillip Sipiora and others have
demonstrated, the rightness of the kairotic moment is contingent and emer-
gent, arising from the singularity of circumstance rather than the totality of
rule or procedure. But the moment is not a frozen motionless moment in a
moving succession of moments. As described above, measured clock time, or
diachronic temporality, limits us to spatial thinking wherein language and
time are conceived of solely in linear sequential terms, leading to the kind of
amnesia that forgets to remember that the past is never past and that the
voices and thoughts we hear are never purely our own. Still further, the
diachronic view leads to an erroneous conception of discursive thought in
terms of tensed and linear syntactically structured language. But kairos is not
a property or quality of an utterance. It is not a kind of arête or techne. It is
not a judgment of perfection, the perfect word, or a perfect moment. Instead,
kairos describes the quality of a response, a synchronized responsive mo-
ment of choreographed belonging—what Heidegger calls a gathered heark-
ening.
Thus kairos is not like the rightness of a mathematical equation or the
rightness of an accurate bull’s-eye or the rightness of compliance with a law.
It is not the rightness of a chosen moment or a perfect word uttered at the
perfect instant. Neither can kairos be strategized, planned ahead for, or dis-
covered retrospectively. It is not a property or quality of persons, of words, or
of worlds. Rather, kairos is an ethical virtue inextricable from listening; it is
an attunement to others and the dance of circumstance. It is not timely in the
mechanical sense of efficiency or serendipity, a well-timed shot into a goal or
a timely intervention into the future in the nick of time. Instead, the ethical
temporality of kairos is the nonlinear music of a moment choosing us.

NOTES

Portions of this chapter have been excerpted from chapters six and eight of Lisbeth Lipari,
Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement (University Park, PA: Penn State
University Press, 2014).
1. Ronald C. Arnett, Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of
Warning and Hope (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013); Michael J.
Hyde, Openings: Acknowledging Essential Moments in Human Communication (Waco, TX:
Baylor University Press, 2012); George Cheney, Daniel J. Lair, Dean Ritz, and Brenden E.
Kendall, Just a Job?: Communication, Ethics, and Professional Life (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2009).
2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 216.
90 Lisbeth Lipari

3. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003); Cheney, Just a Job.
4. Levinas, Time and the Other, 84.
5. Ibid., 39.
6. Aristotle, Physics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, 214–394 (New
York: Modern Library, 2001), 321.
7. Charles M. Sherover, Are We In Time? And Other Essays on Time and Temporality, ed.
Gregory R. Johnson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 8–9.
8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Edin-
burgh: Cambridge University Press, 1998), version B, sec. 38, p. 157
9. Ibid., B, 46, 162.
10. Sherover, Are We In Time?, 50.
11. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Translated by R. L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001, 50.
12. Ibid., 100.
13. Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Seche-
haye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 232, 18.
14. Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985); G. C. Fiumara, The
Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (New York: Routledge, 1990); Lisbeth
Lipari, “The Vocation of Listening: The Other Side of Dialogue,” in After You, ed. Axel
Liégeois, Jozef Corveleyn, and Marina Riemslagh, 15–36, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theolog-
icarum Lovaniensium CCLVIII (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 2013).
15. Eric Charles White, Kaironomia: On the Will to Invent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1987); Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin:
University of Texas, 2004).
16. Phillip Sipiora, “Introduction: The Ancient Concept of Kairos,” in Rhetoric and Kairos:
Essays in History, Theory and Praxis, ed. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin, 1–22 (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 1.
17. James L. Kinneavy, “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric
and Praxis, ed. John D. Moss, 79–105 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America,
1986), 80.
18. David Mirhady and Yun Lee Too, trans. Isocrates I (Austin: University of Texas, 2000),
164.
19. Ibid., 64.
20. White, Kaironomia; Michael Carter, “Stasis and Kairos: Principals of Social Construc-
tion in Classical Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 7, no. 1 (1988): 97–112; Sipiora, “Introduction.”
21. Laurent Pernot, Rhetoric in Antiquity, trans. W. E. Higgins (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America, 2005), 13.
22. Ibid.
23. Dale L. Sullivan, “Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78
(1992): 317–32.
24. Sheri L. Helsley, “Kairos,” in The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition from
Ancient Times to the Information Age, ed. Theresa Enos (New York: Garland, 1996), 371.
25. Carter, “Stasis and Kairos,” 105.
26. Helsley, “Kairos,” 371.
27. Michael Harker, “The Ethics of Argument: Rereading Kairos and Making Sense in a
Timely Fashion,” College Composition and Communication 59, no. 1 (2007): 94.
28. Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1, no.1 (1968): 2.
29. As Žižek notes, a sense of urgency often “necessitates a suspension of ordinary ethical
concerns.” Slavoj Žižek, “Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency,” In These Times, January 27,
2006, inthesetimes.org/article/2481/jack_bauer_and_the_ethics_of_urgency.
30. Bitzer, “Rhetorical Situation,” 6.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 10.
33. Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address,” Abraham Lincoln Online, accessed July
23, 2013, www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm.
 Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis 91

34. Ibid.
35. John Poulakos, “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric
16, no. 1 (1983): 40–41.
36. Sipiora, “Introduction,” 17n1.
37. James Kinneavy and Catherine R. Eskin, “Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” Written Com-
munication 17, no. 3 (2000): 432–44.
38. Harker, “The Ethics of Argument.”
39. Malcolm Heath, “Theon and the History of the Progymnasmata,” Greek, Roman, and
Byzantine Studies 43, no. 3 (2002): 129–60.
40. Pernot, Rhetoric in Antiquity, 146.
41. Ibid., 138.
42. C. Jan Swearingen, “Song to Speech: The Origins of Early Epitaphia in Ancient Near
Eastern Women’s Lamentations,” in Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks, ed. Carol S.
Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley, 213–25 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
2004).
43. Fiumara, The Other Side of Language.
44. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi
(New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
45. Jonathan Barnes, ed., Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), 50.
46. Heidegger, Early Greek, 67.
47. Ibid., 65.
48. Ibid., 65–66.
49. Ibid., 73.
50. Sullivan, “Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief.”
51. Hawhee, Bodily Arts, 71.
52. Carolyn Eriksen Hill, “Changing Times in Composition Classes: Kairos, Resonance,
and the Pythagorean Connection,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and
Praxis, ed. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin, 211–25. (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2002), 216.
53. Fiumara, The Other Side of Language.
54. Ibid., 30.
55. Ibid., 19.
56. Ibid., 67
57. Ibid., 90.
58. Ibid., 122.
59. Ibid., 158.
60. Morton, The Journey Is Home, 128.
61. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 214.
62. Morton, The Journey Is Home, 206.
63. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 39.
64. Morton, The Journey is Home, 209.
65. Fiumara, The Other Side of Language, 144.
66. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Mal-
den, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1962), 197; Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans.
Ingo Farin and Skinner (New York: Continuum, 2011), 47.
67. Levinas, Time and the Other, 81.
68. Ibid., 33.
69. Lisbeth Lipari, “Rhetoric’s Other,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 45, no. 3 (2012): 242.
70. Edward Holmes, The Life of Mozart, Including His Correspondence (New York: Harp-
ers, 1845), 267–68.
71. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 59.
72. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, MI:
Ardis, 1973); V. N. Voloshinov, “The Word and Its Social Function,” in Bakhtin School
Papers, ed. Ann Shukman, trans. Joe Andrew, 139–52 (Oxford: RPT, 1983).
73. Alexander R. Luria, Language and Cognition, ed. James V. Wertsch (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1981), 151.
92 Lisbeth Lipari

74. Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Alex Kozulin (Cambridge, MA: Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology, 1986), 251.
75. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 73.
76. Roy Schafer, “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T.
Mitchell, 25–50 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 48.
77. Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1986), 127.
78. Fiumara, The Other Side of Language, 134.
79. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, 49.
80. Bitzer, “Rhetorical Situation,” 8.
81. Carter, “Stasis and Kairos”; Hawhee, Bodily Arts; Helsley, “Kairos,” 371.

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Aristotle. Physics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon, 214–394. New
York: Modern Library, 2001.
Arnett, Ronald C. Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warn-
ing and Hope. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by R.W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor,
MI: Ardis, 1973.
Barnes, Jonathan, ed. Early Greek Philosophy. New York: Penguin Classics, 1987.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Translated by R. L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001.
Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1968): 1–14.
Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Carter, Michael. “Stasis and Kairos: Principals of Social Construction in Classical Rhetoric.”
Rhetoric Review 7, no. 1 (1988): 97–112.
Cheney, George, Daniel J. Lair, Dean Ritz, and Brenden E. Kendall. Just a Job?: Communica-
tion, Ethics, and Professional Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Eliot, T. S. “Burnt Norton.” In The Four Quartets, 13–20. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943.
Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
Fiumara, Gemma Corrida. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Harker, Michael. “The Ethics of Argument: Rereading Kairos and Making Sense in a Timely
Fashion.” College Composition and Communication 59, no. 1 (2007): 77–97.
Hawhee, Debra. Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece. Austin: University of
Texas, 2004.
Heath, Malcolm. “Theon and the History of the Progymnasmata.” Greek, Roman, and Byzan-
tine Studies 43, no. 3 (2002): 129–60.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1962.
———. Early Greek Thinking. Translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi. New
York: Harper & Row, 1984.
———. The Concept of Time. Translated by Ingo Farin, with Alex Skinner. New York: Contin-
uum, 2011.
Helsley, Sheri L. “Kairos.” In The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition from Ancient
Times to the Information Age, edited by Theresa Enos, 371. New York: Garland, 1996.
Hill, Carolyn Eriksen. “Changing Times in Composition Classes: Kairos, Resonance, and the
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New York Press, 2002.
Holmes, Edward. The Life of Mozart, Including His Correspondence. New York: Harpers,
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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood.
Edinburgh: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Kinneavy, James L. “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric.” In Rhetoric and
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Kinneavy, James, and Catherine R. Eskin. “Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.” Written Communi-
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Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso
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———. Time and the Other. Duquesne University Press, 1987.
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———. “The Vocation of Listening: The Other Side of Dialogue.” In After You, edited by Axel
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 II

Otherness and Justice

 Chapter Five

Communication, Diversity, and

Ethics in Higher Education
Brenda J. Allen

This chapter relates traditional concepts of ethics and communication to

contemporary concerns about diversity in higher education in order to sub-
stantiate a call for members of academia to become more mindful about the
ethical implications of how we make decisions. I present examples of situa-
tions during which we explicitly or implicitly engage in ethical decision-
making processes, and I illuminate ways that we might neglect to consider
diverse perspectives on mundane issues in academia. The chapter clarifies
why diversity is an especially pressing issue in this era of moral complexity
within society in general and in higher education specifically. The chapter
explores the potential of applying ethical communication perspectives and
practices to our efforts and concludes with recommendations.

COMMUNICATION ETHICS IN ACTION

A college committee charged with choosing between two excellent candi-

dates for a post-doctoral position selected the person with the least teaching
experience. They had not included teaching experience (or lack thereof) as a
criterion; however, they created it as a tiebreaker during their deliberations.
The post-doc position, they reasoned, would allow the candidate an opportu-
nity to hone her teaching abilities. Although this approach may seem logical,
the committee neglected to consider other criteria that also would have been
logical. The other candidate had a stellar teaching record as an instructor in
the college, and she welcomed the opportunity of the post-doc position be-
cause it would free her to develop her research program and to seek a tenure-
track position. Thus, the committee could have considered teaching experi-
97
98 Brenda J. Allen

ence as a positive attribute. In addition, the unselected candidate’s dossier

clearly indicated that she is African American. Given the college’s stated
goal to diversify faculty, the committee might have chosen the candidate in
hopes of advancing that goal. When queried, the chair stated that the commit-
tee never considered either of these perspectives.
When I was an associate dean, one of my duties involved serving as the
ad hoc chair of the ethics committee for the undergraduate advising office in
the college. Across several cases, I noticed a pattern of students from one
country 1 being charged with plagiarism. As I listened to the background of
those cases, I discerned cultural issues that may have been related to stu-
dents’ attitudes and actions. It seemed that some of their behaviors aligned
with ways that members of their culture demonstrate respect by quoting
authors verbatim. 2 Moreover, these students may not have fully understood
what plagiarism meant. However, the procedures, policies, and penalties for
plagiarism did not allow for these dynamics.
The above examples exemplify issues related to communication, ethics,
and diversity that this chapter discusses. Within higher education, faculty and
staff often need to make a wide variety of decisions; for instance, they en-
gage in deliberations about academic dishonesty, personnel processes, ad-
missions policies, curriculum, budgets, financial aid, and so forth. Moreover,
these decisions may implicitly or explicitly encompass aspects of diversity,
such as racial identity and nationality. Because diversity has become a major
topic in higher education, we should consider the multidimensional relation-
ship between ethics and diversity during decision-making processes. Such
processes could benefit from the principle that “diversity is positive, advanta-
geous, and helpful to individuals, institutions, and society.” 3 Within this
chapter, I offer preliminary ideas for how to incorporate this principle in
order to foster and enhance diversity and inclusion within institutions of
higher education.
The Credo on Ethical Communication from the National Communication
Association states: “Questions of right and wrong arise whenever people
communicate. Ethical communication is fundamental to responsible think-
ing, decision making, and the development of relationships and communities
within and across contexts, cultures, channels, and media.” 4 In our increas-
ingly diverse world, ethical communication warrants special consideration.
As Josina M. Makau and Ronald C. Arnett explain, “Communication ethics
in an age of diversity requires the will and ability to listen carefully, to pursue
and practice mutual respect, invite reciprocity and inclusiveness, and to live
openly and responsibly with the dialectical tensions inherent in commonality
and difference.” 5 Before I elaborate how we might adopt these attitudes and
behaviors as we make decisions, I must clarify why diversity matters.
 Communication, Diversity, and Ethics in Higher Education 99

COMMUNICATION ETHICS IN AN AGE OF DIVERSITY

Diversity is a complex, sometimes contested term that often refers in higher

education to social identity groups that have strong salience in the United
States, due to a history of oppression, domination, and resistance (e.g., gen-
der, race, class, sexual orientation, and ability status). Diversity in higher
education often denotes an ethical imperative for providing access to, and
being more inclusive of, members of traditionally underrepresented groups.
These foci arise mainly from a variety of developments that include projec-
tions that current racial-ethnic minority groups will outnumber whites on
college campuses in the near future. 6 In addition, as the world shrinks, con-
cerns about globalization have heightened pressure to prepare students to be
global citizens. Also, increasing numbers of international students, persons
with disabilities, and veterans are attending college, while traditional college-
aged students are the most diverse generation in terms of religious affiliation
in U.S. history, with self-identifications ranging from strict fundamentalist to
atheist or agnostic. 7 As many universities respond to these and other
changes, they are striving to accommodate and optimize the potential of
more diverse student bodies. Their strategic plans often specify goals that
necessitate decision making about a range of issues, including inclusive cur-
ricula, admissions, marketing, and academic integrity and recruitment and
retention of diverse students, faculty, and staff.
To facilitate accomplishing these goals, members of higher education
should consider a “diversity-affirming ethical orientation” that “prescriptive-
ly promotes diversity in decision making.” 8 To describe this approach, An-
tonette Aragon and Edward Brantmeier coined the term “diversity ethics,”
which is “premised on the principle of diversity affirmation or the notion that
difference and multiplicity are positive, good, and beneficial to the institu-
tion, society, humanity, and the planet.” 9 They elaborate: “In this conception,
differences along the lines of race or ethnicity, gender, class, religion, lan-
guage, sexual orientation, ability, or nonconformity are considered positive
attributes.” 10 They contend that if our decisions were guided by diversity
ethics, deliberations about what is right or wrong would advantage diversity
over sameness. Aragon and Brantmeier enjoin us to consider whether deci-
sion making helps to perpetuate the status quo or promote positive social
change, and they encourage us to embrace diversity “as positive and collec-
tively beneficial for institutional flourishing and change.” 11 They also invite
us to entertain the following questions: “Do we value what is different, or do
we want to assimilate it? Do we understand the limited nature of our knowl-
edge paradigms and how they are historically and contextually constructed?
Do we actively seek out and integrate the diversity that just might be vital for
institutional and societal sustainability?” 12 This diversity ethics framework
has strong potential for effecting change in higher education.
100 Brenda J. Allen

To optimize the potential of diversity ethics, decision makers should en-

act principles of ethical communication, including “truthfulness, fairness,
responsibility, personal integrity, and respect for self and other.” 13 They also
should “promote communication climates of caring and mutual understand-
ing that respect the unique needs and characteristics of individual communi-
cators.” 14 However, to be effective, decision makers will need to create a
context for connecting diversity and ethics before they engage in decision-
making processes.
First, they need to acknowledge, justify, and communicate the need for
diversity ethics by heightening awareness and increasing knowledge about
diversity issues in higher education. Because ethical decision making re-
quires adequate knowledge about the issues at hand, members of higher
education will be able to make equitable decisions only if they have knowl-
edge and awareness of relevant issues. Fortunately, a growing body of
knowledge exists about perspectives and best practices regarding the types of
diversity-related issues cited earlier, including relationships between stu-
dents’ cultural values and academic integrity, 15 and recruiting and retaining
faculty of color. 16
Second, decision makers in higher education should gather, share, and use
communication tools for ethical decision making. Primary among these is
dialogue, “a dimension of communication quality that keeps communicators
more focused on mutuality and relationship than on self-interest, more con-
cerned with discovering than with disclosing, more interested in access than
in domination.” 17 As Marvin T. Brown asserts, “If we connect ethics and
diversity through a creative dialogical process, then we can discover how our
different assumptions, observations, and values offer significant resources
for making decisions.” 18 Participants might entertain such questions as:
“What are the criteria for determining rightness and wrongness? What values
ought to guide decisions? Who will benefit from decisions? And what will
the impact be for certain groups, individuals, the institution, or society as a
whole?” 19 Within the discipline of communication, a wealth of information
and insight about dialogue exists that can facilitate decision-making process-
es. 20
Finally, members of the academy should also seek to gain knowledge
about ethical perspectives, which can help them not only to make good
decisions but also to identify and define problems, think systematically, and
view issues from diverse vantage points. 21 For instance, the Markkula Center
for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University advocates ethical decision mak-
ing “that is guided by moral principles and values, such as respect for per-
sons, justice, and compassion. It does not tell people what to think; but
rather, tells people what to think about in making ethical decisions.” 22
These are a few preliminary ideas for taking a diversity-affirming ethical
orientation to decision making in higher education. Returning to the two
 Communication, Diversity, and Ethics in Higher Education 101

scenarios at the beginning of this essay, imagine how they might have un-
folded if group members and their colleagues had applied this approach. The
college committee might not only have recognized the viability of the
African American candidate during their discussion but, if they had been
proactive, might also have entered the process with clear diversity-affirming
criteria that would have informed their deliberation from the start.
Similarly, a diversity ethic might have directed the college committee on
academic dishonesty to engage in dialogue with the foreign students under
review to understand their rationale for their behaviors. Even better, a diver-
sity ethic might have guided the committee and their colleagues to analyze
processes that professors use to educate students about plagiarism to ensure
that faculty members understand cultural differences and that they speak to
those differences explicitly in their policies, provide clear examples, ac-
knowledge the potential for cultural differences, and refer students to on-
campus resources. The committee also could develop and implement re-
courses that rehabilitate rather than punish students. The committee’s work
functions as an exemplar of the academy’s need to engage in decision-mak-
ing processes that recognize the value of diversity ethics. The academy must
take proactive measures to optimize the creative potential resulting from the
interplay of attentiveness to ethics and diversity.

NOTES

1. I will not name the country because I do not want to stigmatize it.
2. Richard L. Henderson, Absael Antela, and Norman St. Clair, “Ethics and Values in the
Context of Teaching Excellence in the Changing World of Education,” Journal of College
Teaching and Learning 7, no. 3 (2010).
3. Antonette Aragon and Edward J. Brantmeier, “Diversity-Affirming Ethics and Critical
Epistemology: Institutional Decision Making in Community Colleges,” New Directions for
Community Colleges 148 (2012): 40.
4. National Communication Association, “NCA Credo for Ethical Communication,” www.
natcom.org/uploadedFiles/About_NCA/Leadership_and_Governance/Public_Policy_Platform/
PDF-PolicyPlatform-NCA_Credo_for_Ethical_Communication.pdf.
5. Josina Makau and Ronald Arnett, Communication Ethics in an Age of Diversity (Illinois:
University of Illinois, 1997), 336.
6. Chronicle of Higher Education, College 2020: Students (Washington, DC: Chronicle of
Higher Education, 2009).
7. Pond, Allison, Gregory Smith, and Scott Clement, “Religion Among the Millennials,”
Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, February 17, 2010, www.pewforum.org/Age/Religion-
Among-the-Millennials.aspx.
8. Aragon and Brantmeier, “Diversity-Affirming Ethics,” 40.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 41.
12. Ibid., 49.
13. National Communication Association, “Credo.”
14. Ibid.
15. Aragon and Brantmeier, “Diversity-Affirming Ethics.”
102 Brenda J. Allen

16. Uma Jayakumar et al., “Racial Privilege in the Professoriate: An Exploration of Campus
Climate, Retention, and Satisfaction,” Journal of Higher Education 80, no. 5 (2009).
17. Richard Anderson, Kenneth N. Cissna, and Ronald C. Arnett, The Reach of Dialogue:
Confirmation, Voice, and Community (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1994), 2.
18. Marvin T. Brown, “Concepts and Experience of the ‘Valuing Diversity and Ethics
Workshops’ at Levi Strauss and Company,” in Ethics in International Management, edited by
Brij Nino Kumar and Horst Steinmann, 243–58 (New York: de Gruyter, 1998), www.
workingethics.com/valuesanddiversity.html.
19. Aragon and Brantmeier, “Diversity-Affirming Ethics,” 40.
20. For example, see Exploring Communication Ethics: Interviews with Influential Scholars
in the Field, ed. Pat Arneson (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); Makau and Arnett, Communica-
tion Ethics.
21. Craig E. Johnson, Ethics in the Workplace: Tools and Tactics for Organizational Trans-
formation (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007).
22. Communication, Diversity, and Ethics in Higher Education, “A Framework for Think-
ing Ethically,” Santa Clara University. Revised May 2009. www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/
decision/framework.html.

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nal of Higher Education 80, no. 5 (2009): 538–63.
Johnson, Craig E. Ethics in the Workplace: Tools and Tactics for Organizational Transforma-
tion. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007.
Makau, Josina M., and Ronald C. Arnett. Communication Ethics in an Age of Diversity.
Illinois: University of Illinois, 1997.
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. “A Framework for Thinking Ethically.” Santa Clara
University. Revised May 2009. www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/framework.html.
National Communication Association. “NCA Credo for Ethical Communication.” Approved by
the NCA Legislative Council, November 1999. www.natcom.org/uploadedFiles/About_
NCA/Leadership_and_Governance/Public_Policy_Platform/PDF-PolicyPlatform-NCA_
Credo_for_Ethical_Communication.pdf.
Pond, Allison, Gregory Smith, and Scott Clement. “Religion Among the Millennials.” Pew
Forum on Religion & Public Life. February 17, 2010. www.pewforum.org/Age/Religion-
Among-the-Millennials.aspx.
 Chapter Six

Tymieniecka’s Benevolent
Sentiment as Ground for
Communication Ethics
Juliette Hampton Morgan’s
Advocacy for Racial Justice

Pat Arneson

Many authors approach the study of moral discourse from a purely theoreti-
cal perspective, identifying intellectual theories that are then to be applied in
behavioral practice by human actors. Viewing communication ethics as an
abstract theory to be applied hides the myriad demands within any particular
situation. Dating back to antiquity, Aristotle realized that a theoretically dis-
tanciated view of virtue was misguided. In the ancient tradition, ethike prag-
matia was essentially a form of practical wisdom (phronesis), a manner of
being ethical rather than simply knowing the theories that one may choose to
engage or not engage. 1 In a similar manner, Joseph Kockelmans asserts that
the study of ethics is “an attempt to come to a critical understanding of our
basic moral experiences from the perspective of our most primordial human
experience.” 2 One’s morality is communicated in one’s conjoined linguistic
and corporeal expressivity.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka proposed an ontopoietic cosmology, or a phe-
nomenology of life, in her works, an approach that is necessarily interwoven
with the possibilities of human communication. Daniela Verducci explains
that Tymieniecka offered a phenomenology united with a hermeneutics of
development. She clarifies that Tymieniecka presented a “pre-ontological
position of being, that in which being generates itself and regenerates; from
this point of view, she untangled the logos, which presides over the evolution
103
104 Pat Arneson

of the life of being, indicating it, with a term of her own coinage, as ‘onto-
poiesis,’ that is ‘production/creation of being.’” 3 Within phenomenology,
apprehending “new spheres of givenness is a necessary step in the progres-
sion of intuitive attunement.” 4 This avoids an emphasis on inner subjectivity
as separate from societal and ethical realms. Tymieniecka posited an ethical
position that takes the vital impulse of human creativity, rather than cogni-
tion or belief, to be the organizing principle for human interaction with the
lifeworld. 5 In so doing, she offered ground for understanding human commu-
nication ethics.
This chapter begins with a brief overview of Tymieniecka’s scholarship,
identifying the genesis of the moral sense within her work. Her ethical posi-
tion is grounded in the creativity of the benevolent sentiment, which drives
the moral sense. Reading her work through the lens of human communica-
tion reveals that a person’s experience is compelled by aesthetic, moral, and
intellectual meaning-bestowing faculties. The moral sense promotes commu-
nal life, in which moral valuation and judgment emerge. The social sphere
provides a space in which to deliberate for the common good. Being true to
oneself requires reflection upon the constraints that compel or restrain one’s
moral behavior. Tymieniecka provides philosophical insight into a communi-
cation ethics that theoretically illuminates Juliette Hampton Morgan’s advo-
cacy for racial justice in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus protest of
1955 through 1956. Hampton exhibited a moral sensibility driven by the
benevolent sentiment in her interactions with others.

IDENTIFYING THE MORAL SENSE IN

TYMIENIECKA’S SCHOLARSHIP

The moral sense is a facet of the human station in Tymieniecka’s phenome-

nology of life. Her cosmology is primarily available in her four-volume
Logos of Life. 6 Those ideas are supplemented by her numerous other publica-
tions that trace the intensions and extensions of these lines of thought. Gary
Backhaus provides a concise overview of Tymieniecka’s prolific scholar-
ship. 7
During the 1960s, Tymieniecka identified the cosmological orientation of
her work. Her metaphysic sought to discover the inner workings of logos. To
the dismay of some scholars and the curiosity of others, her work tends to
draw from varying traditions that are frequently and fundamentally at odds
with one another. Tymieniecka’s cosmology is distinct from both pure meta-
physics and ontology.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Tymieniecka crafted her phenomenolo-
gy of life, primarily published in Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of
Phenomenological Research—a volume she edited since its inception in
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 105

1971 until her death. Extending the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Tymieniecka reached beyond intentional consciousness and
the preconscious lived-body to discern how constitutive systems of meaning
emerge. She inscribed meaning within the entire expansion of life, not sim-
ply attributing meaning to the human realm. Tymieniecka examined the
sense-bestowing capacities of life in its evolutional construction, delving into
ontopoiesis (first makings).
Tymieniecka asserted that the inner workings of life are expressed in the
creative function that emerges from the vital sphere. The creative function in
the human condition is the hinge to logos. The fundamental creative function
has been covered over by a bias on cognition. Covering over the creative
function masks the genesis of meaning. Her approach recognizes the onto-
poietic generation of all life at various stations. The human station cannot be
separated from how humans are embedded in the givenness of life. Given-
ness cannot be limited to a cognitive process; givenness is the constructivity
of life that flows through the creative forge of humans.
In the 1990s, Tymieniecka intensified her scrutiny of the sciences and
articulated a complementarity between her articulation of ontopoiesis and the
scientific paradigm of self-organizing, dynamic systems. She combined the
language of ontopoiesis (phenomenological meanings) with the language of
open dynamic systems in her metaphysic. In the 2000s, she articulated her
phenomenology of life with particular attention to the spiritual sphere and
role of the sacred in her cosmology.
Tymieniecka explained life as the expansion of logos. In short, recursive-
ly the vital sphere (Imaginatio Creatrix) initiates logos, forcing the existen-
tial sphere, concurrently prompting the social sphere of the human condition.
The human station reveals meaning-bestowing functions: The creative-imag-
inative origin urges the aesthetic, moral, and intellective senses. At the peak
or human crown of life, life recedes through an individual quest for spiritual
(the sacred, enfolding back to include the moral) development, inspired by a
desire for transcendence. Drawing from her work, an embodied communica-
tion ethic emerges from the benevolent sentiment, which drives the moral
sense.

Meaning-Bestowing Faculties

While, as Martin Heidegger noted, the human being may be thrown into the
life-world without having a choice, Tymieniecka allowed that a person indi-
vidualizes oneself in one’s ever-unfolding faculties within circumambient
life-conditions. This occurs in four functions of the human station in her
logos of life: vital (creative/imaginative origin) and the meaning-bestowing
faculties of aesthetic, moral, and intellective 8 (which I read as comprising
multiple modes of awareness). Verducci explains, “The nature of meaning of
106 Pat Arneson

development, thus, are enclosed in that new platform of the ontopoiesis of

life, which is metaphysical but also ontic, inasmuch as it grasps the being in
the moment in which, while ‘it generates itself’ as being, it also manifests the
logos in its continuous ‘making itself be.’” 9 This section seeks to discern how
this happens in Tymieniecka’s work, an articulation that strenuously resists
linear form.
For Tymieniecka, meaning is given in the vital level by creative/imagina-
tive origin. Her works point to three meaning-bestowing faculties in the
human being’s (spiritual) experience: aesthetic, moral, and intellective facul-
ties. Human life is suspended on this threefold ordinance. 10 Each of these
three faculties is explicated below.
The Aesthetic/Poetic Sense. The significance of human beingness to the
all-of-life is that people create meaning. People engage in aesthesis to forge
the invention of meaning. Imaginatio Creatrix of the vital sphere prompts the
aesthetic or poetic sense-bestowing function in human life. Joy (feeling one-
self alive) functions to bring the self into one with the living temporal system
(the vital sense) and to release inventive imagination (the poetic sense). Gary
Backhaus explains: “The vital sense is the immediate enjoyment of life’s
potency, which expresses the ‘animal’ [survival] phases of life’s progress—
kinesthesis, drives, feelings, desires, sensations, or any immediacy of em-
bodiment. . . . [W]e witness our vital vigor as it vacillates between enthu-
siasm and indifference.” 11 Poetic sense emerges in the vital dimension. The
poetic sense creates a vision of life beyond the necessities. The aesthetic
sense and its joy, which is manifest in all of one’s concrete experiences,
provides for existential self-expansion. Existential self-expansion can only
be accomplished through communicative interactions. The inventive function
(poetic sense) allows a person to open possibilities for “unfolding a meaning-
ful existential script within the intersubjective network of life” 12 and for
transcending social schemas that in their framing function limit the expan-
sion of life.
The Moral Sense. Life is a dynamic system. The construction of society is
an outgrowth of human life. Individuals must be able to question socially
prescribed laws, codes, and norms as part of this constructive process. The
moral sense emerges through Imaginatio Creatrix and refers to the capacity
of human inventiveness to reinterpret or reorganize the world from the
ground of freedom. Reorganizing a social world “entails creatively forging
an image of the common interest of other beings.” 13 For Tymieniecka, the
moral sense foregrounds the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive and prompts a
person toward bearing responsibility for all living things.
In Tymieniecka’s cosmology, values do not originate in acts of intention-
ality. Rather, values originate in processes of valuation. While cognition
attends to the ideality of objects, moral valuation considers “the dynamics
and context of unpredictable, ever changeable, complex passions, interac-
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 107

tions, and currents of events.” 14 For Tymieniecka, moral valuation is about

interrogating a life experience rather than aiming at the ideality of a principle
or object. During interrogation, people scrutinize the varieties of elements
within a situation from a number of perspectives. For Tymieniecka, “meas-
ure” or valuation is the principle of “giving each their due” and “occurs
through the valuation of acts, feelings, emotions, actions, and attitudes in
trans-actional situations.” 15 This allows people to reconcile moral difference
not as a synthesis, but as offering a conclusion that transcends the initial
perspectives through valuation to organize social life differently.
The Intellective Sense. The intellective sense functions to propagate sche-
mas that provide a system of reference for maintaining patterns of order such
as principles, forms, categories, and structures. The intellect enables an intel-
ligibility of the basic structures of human life. The intellective is joined with
the poetic and moral functions. Society co-emerges with these functions in
“the establishment of social forms of life, laws, justice, and the entire set of
rational ideals that govern societies.” 16 Kathleen Haney explains, “We
live . . . through the instruments we have drug into being such as language,
medicine, politics, religion, and so forth.” 17 We create the schemas that
shape our social structures. In turn, those social structures shape our interpre-
tive understandings.
Tymieniecka explained that in relying on their intellective sense, people
have artificially separated the natural life of plants and animals with its
embedded laws and rules from the human life with its own freedoms. People
have created a world privileging the life of human beings, often disregarding
other life forms. “The human individual is the core of the preoccupations of
human science, morality, and the socio-civic laws, regulations, and structures
and, paradoxically, they are all founded on the [incomplete] assumption
of . . . man’s autonomy with respect to his circumambient conditions.” 18 This
artificial bifurcation places natural life at odds with human life, instead of
recognizing that they are coextensive with one another. Human life enjoys
freedoms that allow one to encourage and strengthen one’s autonomy. Con-
currently, human life is lived out in various networks of connectivity: “[t]he
intersubjective provides ballast for the self-individuating principles.” 19 Peo-
ple communicatively negotiate the strands of freedom and connectivity in
their relationships with others.
For Tymieniecka, aesthetic, moral, and intellective senses provide hu-
mans with the innate capacity to resist the force of constructed schemas of
the status quo. People can draw upon their creative impulse to engage in
“authentic recovery” of “original ciphers.” 20 This allows people to trace and
(re-)generate meanings that are imbued throughout layers of her metaphysic.
Human culture is comprised of the artifacts of individual creations that are
generated from the life force. The aesthetic, moral, and intellective senses—
potentially interpreted in a multiplicity of ways—enable individuals to be-
108 Pat Arneson

stow meaning. The meaning-bestowing significance of the moral sense in the

human station of Tymieniecka’s cosmology of life stems from benevolence.

The Significance of Benevolence in the Moral Sense

Tymieniecka’s communication ethics derives from the human creative func-

tion, which is the prototype of moral action. Her work “The Moral Sense: A
Discourse on the Phenomenological Foundation of the Social World and of
Ethics” serves as the primary source for her discussions on this matter. Mo-
rality is an ontological dimension of humanity.

[T]he moral conduct of human beings . . . is the gist of man’s intersubjective

existence. . . . Whether we are aware of the theoretico-ethical significance of
our conduct, our conduct is lived by us as moral conduct. The significance of
our moral conduct toward the Other is, however, not a mere social (gregarious)
one. On the contrary, it reaches deep down with implications and direct deci-
sions into matters of life and death for both ourselves and the other. That
means that moral conduct as “moral” reaches into our individual vital/existen-
tial progress. In fact, it is the moral significance that constitutes one of the
major lines of man’s self-interpretation in existence. 21

Intersubjective experience is grounded in conduct that is fundamentally mo-

ral (moral, immoral); one cannot be amoral in her expressivity.
The subliminal synergies of the soul (benevolence, congenital innocence
of heart, and generosity) “may be kindled and may surge as passions which
inundate the field and fill the human soul with good will towards all human-
ities.” 22 Benevolence is a “‘prompting for . . .’ moment, a germinally mean-
ing-bestowing significance.” 23 The benevolent sentiment does not indicate
the content of the act of benevolence. Benevolence holds the prompting for
indication as a proficiency to be embodied in one’s communicative experi-
ence. One engages aesthetic contemplation and intellective functions to fix
“the Good as the ultimate directedness of the moral sense.” 24 The sense of
the good of the other is continually repeated in benevolence.
The moral sense is urged by benevolence. Benevolence is not a sensation,
feeling, or emotion. Benevolence “is an experiential instance sui generis.”
Following the British Moralists, Tymieniecka calls benevolence a “senti-
ment.” 25 Benevolence pushes the impulse for unique expression into the
context of a particular situation. This spontaneity brings in and expands a
special significance for human life.
The benevolent sentiment transforms one’s “appreciation of interaction—
or interrelation in feelings, emotions, tendencies—with the Other” 26 by fill-
ing the interaction with concern for the importance of the Other’s self-inter-
ests. Acknowledgment of the Other is consistent with a tendency to value the
Other’s self-interest over one’s own. This “gives benevolence its crucial
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 109

significance to be concerned with what we call the ‘good’ of the Other, our
own good, or the Good in general.” 27 Benevolence activates the moral sense
toward goodness.
The benevolent sentiment spontaneously associates with the interpretive
function of the aesthetic sense; benevolent subjects find the sentiment “en-
joyable.” 28 Some people may cognitively think that surrendering one’s own
interests to the interests of others would not bring fuller corporeal enjoyment.
However, Tymieniecka asserts that there is a counterbalancing experiential
factor that is essential to establishing the moral interpretation within human
interaction. What one loses in the “existential transactional circuit” is gained
in the moral enjoyment of benevolence, “which surpasses all other types of
joys by giving value to our own being as experienced by us and thereby
strengthening our existential force by self-confidence, self-reliability, and
ultimately self-worthiness.” 29 Communicators strengthen their existential
force in benevolence!
Benevolence can take either a constructive or a malefic orientation. The
moral enjoyment that accompanies the exercise of moral sense is identified
as either positive or negative enjoyment. Positive enjoyment is “benevolence
as oriented for the ‘good’ of the Other.” 30 In a morally benevolent sentiment,
the human is penetrated by “‘self-contentment,’ ‘self-satisfaction,’ [and]
‘self-respect.’ These moral sentiments generated by the exercise of the moral
sense are amplified by releasing the sentiments of ‘self-reliance,’ ‘security,’
and self-‘worthiness’ deposited in one’s own inaccessible and autonomous,
indestructible moral force.” 31 The positive orientation of the benevolent sen-
timent promotes constructiveness; the negativity of the malefic orientation
obstructs the constructive course of the Other.
Negative enjoyment is a “malefic deviation from the promptings of be-
nevolence, which turns against the life-interest of the Other.” 32 Evil is ac-
companied by negative enjoyment. “The malefic propensity in the sentiment
and its exercise produces also an aesthetic enjoyment, but of a negative
sort,” 33 resonating with Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfor-
tunes of others). Tymieniecka recognized that “the moral subject, in benevo-
lent acting finds his own reward! In evil-doing, his own punishment.” 34 She
acknowledged recursive consequences in one’s actions (e.g., what goes
around comes around, a person reaps what he sows, etc.).
Communication ethics scholars often lament the loss of sensitivity to the
moral sense within people’s everyday interactions. Within the entire spec-
trum of the human condition, the moral sense is the most vulnerable. The
expansion or shrinking of the moral sense does not spontaneously emerge.
Tymieniecka asserted that this is a complex issue, driven by a question of
one’s “inward struggle to preserve and cultivate” moral enjoyment in the
midst of “all the other adverse inclinations and propulsions.” 35 The cultiva-
110 Pat Arneson

tion and exercise of benevolence fulfills one’s beingness. She pointed to

moral valuation as the means to choice within this inward struggle.
Moral Valuation. Tymieniecka denied the moral experience as either an
intellectual or an affective perception and seeks a third way. The intuitive
factor gives valuative experience its moral significance. Moral significance is
connected with the spontaneous sentiment of benevolence brought in by the
moral sense. Intuition is fundamentally moral. 36 Valuation or measure is a
selective experience, morally significant in what is foregrounded in selectiv-
ity. The valuative process engages justifying reason. Justifying reason (i) is
the result of deliberation in which benevolent sentiment (moral self) makes
its presence and (ii) directs the decision. 37
For civilization to continue, people must work together in finding the
value of things. Tymieniecka explained:

For ethics, you cannot talk about principles and norms of behavior unless you
find a measure against which these principles and rules should be distributed.
Whether it be justice, honesty, sincerity, or whatever, there will be the need to
measure its degree. The great question is the question of measure. This is what
we have completely lost amidst our marvelous technological progress . . . the
principles of measure can be in life itself through self-individualization in
existence. 38

The idea of self-individualization within Tymieniecka’s ontopoietic cosmol-

ogy balances the cognitive with the affective perceptual capacities.
Within The Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the Ontopoiesis of
Culture (Book 3 in her Logos and Life series), Tymieniecka showed how
self-individualization unfolds within culture. Self-individualization, as the
vehicle of poiesis, grounds the differentiation of all living beings as well as
human “beingness.” 39 The first principle of the logos (also identified as the
“first principle of becoming and beingness” 40 and the “first principle of the
ontopoiesis of life” 41) is the balance of impetus and equipoise. Impetus refers
to “the original impetus” or Imaginatio Creatrix, while equipoise emerges
when dissociating aspects of the logos of life prompt new associations to be
constructed in human creativity. Impetus and its effects must be balanced
with equipoise: associating, dissociating, and re-associating are central to
creativity. The ontopoiesis of life is “punctuated by logos’ constructive
rhythm of impetus and equipoise.” 42
The forward-pushing impetus and reverse logoic moments are balanced in
equipoise. For humans, memory and knowledge (which take numerous
forms) are the central valuation of the impetus/equipoise balance. Valuation,
for Tymieniecka, “constitutes one of the major functions of consciousness,
and is equal in life significance to the intellect.” 43 Each expression of human
creativity challenges the logoic force as if to question whether one is free to
move beyond the inevitable. People seek “the opening of a promise” 44 in life.
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 111

Humans are able to inscribe change within the natural order through creativ-
ity. The self-in-the-world begins with self-awareness and extends into the
world by articulating one’s will, judgments, acts, and choices in the construc-
tion of one’s life-project. The basic moral experience is fundamentally relat-
ed to consciousness in corporeal performance; moral experience is only sec-
ondarily cognitive.
Deliberation. Tymieniecka punctuated (“knots” 45) the exercise of judg-
ment in communicative engagements within the human station of her phe-
nomenology of life. Communal life is promoted in the moral sense; commu-
nal networks rejuvenate a person’s identity. The benevolent sentiment spurs
deliberation, which provides justifying reasons to the moral sense. The jus-
tifying reasons within a conflict are balanced within “the axis of right/
wrong.” 46 On my reading, the sentient body is the moral axis.
Social consensus does not ground morality; neither does an individual’s
position of social power. Social morality is grounded in discerning valuation.
The interactions in which people generate rules about how to take others into
consideration through valuation ground social morality. A person exists as
“self-individualization-within-a-communal-network,” 47 the primary social
structure within Tymieniecka’s cosmology. Although individuals seek to
control social conditions, an interesting paradox emerges.
There is a stress in the social world upon autonomy and independence of
individuals. This is seen in the emphasis on freedom of choice, self-direction,
and respect for individual needs. People seek to have their rights recognized
and also require that the conditions for exercising those rights be available.
These rights “form the operative ‘nervous system’ of social life.” 48 An elab-
orate legal system (laws, regulations, procedures) protects these rights across
public and private spheres. Societal institutions including education, religion,
and politics have pledged to honor and perpetuate these rights as valid social
structures.
Paradoxically, this prerogative is undermined in actual practices when
societal institutions are perceived as limiting one’s choices. People within
institutions, “while pretending to implement these laws, are in fact intent on
ignoring, abusing, and violating them; that is, there is a widespread effort to
neglect the moral axis upon which the very essence of intersubjective soci-
ability is suspended.” 49 The average person is “caught in a dilemma between
dutiful obedience to the law and the voice of moral conscience denying its
validity.” 50 In this form of moral dilemma, the poietic qualities of possibility
are limited by extant social structures.
Although moral valuation occurs within the intersubjective context, moral
valuation is “operated by the innermost core of the individual’s conjoined
meaning-bestowing faculties.” 51 A person’s aesthetic, moral, and intellective
faculties are interwoven to introduce a “moral point of view” into one’s
interpretation of others’ actions and life-events. 52 Self-interest may hinder
112 Pat Arneson

one’s ability to be impartial in making a decision. The benevolent sentiment

dominates one’s tendencies of self-interest, despite a person’s efforts to resist
the presence of the benevolent impulse. One cannot escape the benevolent
presence.
Two interactants can often take different valuative stands, revealed in
each person’s communication toward or about the other’s behaviors, inter-
ests, or attitudes. Taking all faculties into account, a person must “express his
own stand, his own perspective” in “the probity of judgment,” which neces-
sarily introduces a “mode of appreciative sincerity” 53 (either supportive or
critical). In actual practice, one’s moral sensitivity is shaped by one’s suppor-
tive or critical interpretation of the other’s acts, attitudes, and conduct within
“a wider circuit of life-affairs.” 54 One’s interpretation and exercise of justice
toward others involves assessing their behaviors (“passing a verdict” 55). A
“‘sympathetic’ attitude” toward the other, a recognition of the merits of her
actions, and an “indulgent attitude toward the ‘human weaknesses”’ 56 is
counterbalanced in “an appropriately tuned receptive ‘communication’ with
other subjects.” 57 One’s response is an indicator of one’s moral stand. A
particular attunement may lead to a repetitiveness that molds one’s con-
science and behaviors.
In ordering one’s repetitious behaviors, intellect is but one of the ideas
contributing to how relevance is established in moral deliberation. Tymie-
niecka also departs from privileging either the physiological (vitalistic) or the
pragmatic (utility). 58 For her, relevance indicates a “fitness” or “compossibil-
ity,” wherein elements come together in an existentially dynamic process of
“life-significant coordinations.” 59 Coordinating facets requires “fusing to-
gether and yet keeping apart . . . the human subjects that create the social
order—however provisory, evolving, and fragile.” 60 The meaning of action
lies “in the entire complex of senses as it emerges in the performance.” 61 A
person can never be aware of the full significance of her actions, where they
begin and end.
In considering how judgment works within the moral sense of self-inter-
pretive individualization, Tymieniecka drew upon five phenomenological
tenets. First, the genesis of the life-world is the milieu in which relevant ideas
are understood (“hermeneutics of life” 62). Second, intersubjective interac-
tions occur within the functions of the individual (“ontic reference” 63). Third,
human functions are differentiated from the moral sense in interactions
(“anthropology of the meaning-bestowing” 64). Fourth, a metaphysical per-
spective of “human strivings and nostalgias” 65 gives meaning to human ex-
perience (“metaphysics of freedom” 66). Fifth, a social ordering of human
existence is present within the universal life-system (“cosmology of the indi-
vidualized order” 67). Within this orchestration, the benevolent sentiment is
intuitionally “oriented to the surrender of self-interest to the common interest
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 113

of other beings.” 68 With surrender comes risk: One takes a risk each time she
enters into communication with another person.
The most immediate contact a person can have with a topic, situation, or
other person is surrender. Kurt Wolf explains that surrender implies total
involvement, including cognition, love, “identification, the importance of
everything that comes to the attention of a person in such a state, the suspen-
sion of received notions, and the risk of being hurt.” 69 Surrender is not
achievable by an effort of the will and can work in two ways—as “surrender
to morality” or “the morality of surrender.” 70 The morality of surrender
refers to a theory of the idea of surrender. Drawing from Tymieniecka, Wolff
advocates that a person be true to herself and surrender to morality as her
morality of surrender. 71 Tymieniecka requires that “To be true to ourselves
means we must seek the hidden reasons that prevented us from acting moral-
ly so that we can tighten the knots of our beingness.” 72 Virtue is the exercise
of this capacity. In virtue, the subliminal moral ideal is united with delibera-
tions of the will carried out in behavioral engagements within the social
complex.
Within Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life, the moral sense endows
“the human intersubjective matrix of actions with moral meaningfulness.” 73
A person’s experience is compelled by one’s aesthetic, moral, and intellectu-
al meaning-bestowing faculties. The benevolent sentiment inspires moral
sense (meaning-bestowing) and drives people to contribute to the social
world. Interactants often communicate from different valuative standpoints,
requiring them to work together to draw from the benevolent sentiment to
discern a good. One may accept a moral code defined by society but not
enact the tenets of that prescribed morality in one’s everyday life. Humans
are free to make individual choices. This freedom strengthens and encour-
ages the autonomy of the individual. At the same time, life is lived out in
networks of connectivity guided by deliberation. “The intersubjective pro-
vides ballast for the self-individuating principles.” 74 Theoretical speculation
from a scientific distance insufficiently accounts for the richness of one’s
contingent experience and the genesis of moral sense, which is expressed in
one’s corporeal and linguistic expressivity. Morgan’s embodied communica-
tion ethic may be understood as emerging from Tymieniecka’s benevolent
sentiment.

MORGAN’S ADVOCACY FOR RACIAL JUSTICE

And then I saw—on the bus I think—Jane Addams’ classic question, “Who if
not you? When if not now?” So I went at it. 75
—Juliette Hampton Morgan
114 Pat Arneson

Figure 6.1. Juliette Hampton Morgan. Source: Birmingham, Alabama, Public Li-
brary Archives.

Zygmunt Baumann writes that life has become liquid. 76 The implication for
philosophers of communication is that we have to grasp our understandings
of humanity in a dynamic and integrated way. A person must be compre-
hended in the whole-of-life; one’s self-individualizing reveals aspects of the
social complex as well as other aspects of life. Bauman notes that “History is
philosophy’s fulfillment; the truth of philosophy finds its ultimate test and
confirmation in its acceptance and recognition, in the words of philosophers
becoming the flesh of the polity.” 77 This section examines the situation of
Juliette Hampton Morgan (1914–1957) in Montgomery, Alabama, drawing
upon ideas constituting Tymieniecka’s benevolent sentiment, which provides
ground for Morgan’s communication ethics. Specific attention is paid to the
period of 1955 through 1957, surrounding the bus protest by African
Americans in her community.
Morgan was a seventh-generation Southerner and a third-generation Ala-
bamian, born into a prominent family in the Montgomery community. 78 Like
most affluent Southern white women in the 1940s and 1950s, she enjoyed
entertaining, had many friends, and loved literature, theater, and music. Mor-
gan also had a passion for politics. “She was an educated and conscientious
person who took exception to the racial customs into which she was born.” 79
Leslie W. Dunbar, director of the Southern Regional Council during that
time, observed “it is difficult to convey to persons who did not live in the
South [in the 1950s] . . . a feeling of how it was.” 80 Reverend Robert S.
Graetz wrote, “It’s hard to imagine that simply going to a meeting could be
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 115

an act of courage. But in the mid 1950s, a white person taking part in an
integrated organization in the South defied all social mores and jeopardized
the principles that controlled every aspect of life.” 81 Morgan’s understanding
of equality was ahead the socio-cultural practices of that time.
A vocal proponent of civil rights, Morgan was the first white woman in
Alabama to persistently and publicly speak out against racial segregation. 82
She believed that “white privilege constituted moral evil as well as political
injustice.” 83 As a scholar of the humanities, she understood that the creative
function is the hinge to logos. If she could convey meaning in a creative way,
she could aid in the ontopoietic generation of life.
At the level of humanity in Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life, “life
attains a degree of individualization by which it gains consciousness of itself
and explicates itself as capacity,” including “the capacity to recognize, select,
and bring to realization his own ontological virtualities.” 84 Morgan felt that
her voice could make a difference in the way humans beings acted toward
and responded with one another. As early as 1939, she was writing letters to
the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser regarding civil injustices. She
worked against passage of the Boswell Amendment in 1946, designed to
restrict Negro voting in Alabama by requiring, in part, that voter registration
be limited to “those who can read and write, understand and explain any
article of the Constitution of the United States in the English language” 85 to
the satisfaction of a county registrar. In 1953, Morgan wrote a letter to the
Montgomery Advertiser protesting the white supremacy slogan printed on
ballots in Alabama, referring to the slogan as “an insult to the colored races
and a disgrace to the white.” 86 When asked by a friend what compelled her to
write that letter, Morgan shared some ideas from recent reading she had
done, adding, “And then I saw—on the bus I think—Jane Addams’ classic
question, ‘Who if not you? When if not now?’ So I went at it.” 87
Morgan went at it in all areas of her life, whether she was acting as a
member of the Fellowship of the Concerned, 88 the Alabama Human Rela-
tions Council, 89 or alone. Morgan advocated freedom of speech for all
views, 90 and during World War II she urged people to get involved in the
political system. 91 She wrote letters to influential people, acknowledging “I
do not expect you to agree with me in these views, but I do want you to know
them.” 92 In her place of work, Morgan supported the effort against “stand up
integration.” 93 This practice of de jure segregation in public libraries re-
moved all tables and chairs from the building to minimize interactions of the
races in reading areas. 94 The aesthetic, moral, and intellective meaning-be-
stowing activities of the city fathers would not go unmatched by the onto-
poietic sense-making capacities of the city mothers. The creativity of the
benevolent sentiment drives the moral sense, compelling one to reflect upon
constraints that compel or restrain moral behavior.
116 Pat Arneson

In striving to “take command of the roads of individual and social human

development,” Morgan realized what Tymieniecka understood as “the delin-
eation of a new ontopoietic groundwork for human development [that] has in
itself clearly definable consequences of orientation.” 95 And yet, as President
Truman’s Presidential Committee on Civil Rights’ explosive report entitled
To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil
Rights indicated, “moral dry rot” results when democratic ideals conflict with
discriminatory practices. 96 Moral dry rot was exposed in Montgomery in late
1955.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for disorderly conduct
because she refused to give up her seat when the bus driver “sought to
equalize seating [for an increasing number of white passengers] . . . by asking
some of the Negroes to move to the rear.” 97 Recognizing the social sphere as
a space to deliberate for common good, on December 12, 1955, Morgan
wrote another letter to the editor. She exercised her poietic creativity in
writing, for as historian Taylor Branch notes “only the rarest and oddest of
people” 98 were able to recognize the boycott as an opening for possibility.
Even people “who believed segregation was wrong could not imagine active-
ly opposing it.” 99 For most citizens of Montgomery, Tymieniecka’s Imagina-
tio Creatrix was covered over by intellective meaning, hiding the possibility
for social change.
Morgan could not separate herself from her embodied communication
ethic. She suffered from panic attacks and, consequently, she used public
transportation. These experiences gave her insights that many of her friends,
neighbors, and colleagues were unaware of. One day, when a black woman
paid her fare, customarily leaving the bus to re-enter through the back door,
the white bus driver pulled away. Morgan immediately pulled the emergency
cord and demanded that the bus driver open the door so the black woman
could enter the bus. “No one on the bus, black or white, could believe what
they were seeing. In the days that followed, Morgan pulled the emergency
cord every time she witnessed such injustices.” 100 Each expression of crea-
tivity challenged the logoic force beyond the status quo. Logos balances
equipoise and impetus to allow fresh interpretations to emerge. A sense of
aliveness and creation of a new way of acting (aesthetic) and the inventive-
ness to forge a new world in common interest with other people (moral) were
present in her recognition of schemas for maintaining social order (intellec-
tive). These joined in Morgan’s communication with the bus driver who,
stunned by the request of a white woman, complied with her demand. Asso-
ciating, dissociating, and re-associating are central to creativity.
Tymieniecka acknowledged that a person may take a constructive or ma-
lefic orientation toward the benevolent impulse. People expressed a malefic
orientation (a manifestation of evil) in obstructing Morgan’s constructive
course of action. “White passengers would mock . . . [Morgan] as she got off
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 117

the bus. Her own mother told her she was making a fool of herself and
tarnishing the family’s good name.” 101 A constructive orientation toward the
benevolent impulse guided Morgan; she sought to expand her moral sense to
fulfill her beingness and struggled to cultivate moral enjoyment in the midst
of adversity. Moral valuation emerges in the communal life as a deliberative
process that then directs one’s decisions. Her letters prompted contemplation
in others.
Martin Luther King Jr. explained that initially “the Sermon on the Mount,
rather than a doctrine of passive resistance . . . inspired the Negroes of
Montgomery.” 102 Then on December 12, 1955, seven days after the protest
began, the Montgomery Advertiser printed a letter by Juliette Morgan, a
“reclusive and normally private librarian.” 103 She wrote,

I have heard some bus drivers use the tone and manners of mule drivers in the
treatment of Negro passengers. . . . Three times I’ve gotten off the bus because
I could not countenance treatment of Negroes. . . . I should have gotten off on
several other occasions. Twice I have heard a certain driver with high seniority
mutter quite audibly “black ape.” I could not tell whether the Negro heard or
not, but I did and felt insulted. 104

In her letter, Morgan compared the bus protest to Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt
March. 105 King and his colleagues began to reflect on Morgan’s comments
about Gandhi. 106 In Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, King
credited Morgan with a shift in people’s thinking about the protest. He wrote,

[I]n the first days of the protest . . . the phrase most often heard was ‘Christian
love.’ . . . As the days unfolded, however, the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi
began to exert its influence. . . . About a week after the protest started, a white
woman who understood and sympathized with the Negroes’ efforts wrote a
letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser comparing the bus protest
with the Gandhian movement in India. . . . Nonviolent resistance had emerged
as a technique of the movement, while love stood as the regulating idea. 107

Historian Lawrence Reddick noted: “Up until that time expressions from
white people had been to belittle the protest. . . . They said it wouldn’t last
long and didn’t mean anything. Her letter grasped the significance of it [the
protest] and helped give many people a sense of history.” 108 Morgan called
for a public discussion of moral valuation in her letter.
Morgan’s letter communicatively foregrounded deliberation: “we ought
to be working out plans to span the gap between segregation and integration
to extend public services—schools, libraries, parks—and transportation to
Negro citizens.” 109 She acknowledged her self-individuation but also pressed
others to realize that moral valuation emerges in communal life. She wrote,
“This may be a minority report, but a number of Montgomerians not entirely
118 Pat Arneson

inconsequential agree with my point of view.” 110 Morgan sought to build a

surge of good will in others toward the good of all.
Although she experienced ostracism, she understood she was not alone.
Other people in Montgomery supported a similar social good. Jean Read
shared her appreciative interpretation of Morgan’s moral position with her in
a letter. She wrote to Morgan: “I am very proud to be your friend. . . . I am
sure many people agree with you whole heartedly but not many would have
the courage to write their views as you have—You have my admiration now,
more than ever.” 111 With surrender to a good comes risk. Self-interest may
override one’s expression of particular meanings. Yet risk, fear, and courage
are joined. The prompting-for moment of benevolence is driven to expand
the moral sense in others as well as oneself. The courage to speak one’s mind
always frees someone else to speak theirs.
Morgan wrote letters to the editor as an example to others, in the hope of
helping them transcend fear and speak out against segregation. She wrote to
her friend James Dombrowski, president of the interracial Southern Confer-
ence Education Fund: “There are thousands who want to change our old
order but they are afraid of speaking out. I believe that is our biggest prob-
lem—overcoming the fear of decent white people.” 112 The play of language
present in humor aids in reconnecting an individuated person with commu-
nity. While living in Heflin, Alabama, and writing for the Cleburne News,
Morgan received a supportive letter from a like-minded citizen: “Some of my
friends . . . kid me about them coming for me. . . . One thing I am very much
afraid of, is that when the mob comes, they will trample on [my neigbhor
lady’s] shrubbery and we will all end up in some serious trouble.” 113 The self
is pulled from community to self-individuation and back to community. Lan-
guage alters the strength of fear, and the play in humor aids one’s inventive-
ness in forging a new world of common interest. Communal networks reju-
venate a person’s identity.
Following her letter of December 12, 1956, Morgan made a promise to
Dixie Lou Fisher, superintendent of the Montgomery public library, not to
write any more letters against segregation. However, Morgan continued to
write letters to the editor on behalf of The Montgomery Humane Society
using a pseudonym. 114 She bestowed meaning in those letters by aesthetical-
ly interweaving the moral with the intellectual, connecting “great suffering
among humankind that needs to be alleviated” with the neglect of animals
often committed in thoughtlessness. 115 What one interprets to be relevant in a
given situation is discerned as what Tymieniecka referred to as a “compos-
sibility” 116 within the dynamic facets of life.
In February of 1956, Autherine Lucy was the first African American to
enroll at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Morgan’s alma mater. 117
Even though Morgan was aghast at what Lucy had to endure, she continued
her newspaper silence. In January of 1957, Buford Boone, editor of the
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 119

Tuscaloosa News, was invited to deliver a speech to the White Citizens

Council, an extreme segregationist group often referred to as the “uptown
Klan.” 118 He later printed his comments as an editorial in the newspaper. 119
Boone believed “the problem of segregation and integration is one that needs
to be discussed rationally, fully and intelligently,” standing his ground even
as audience members booed and heckled him. 120 He expressed “no quarrel”
with the Citizens Council members “for making any legal and ethical fight
you might choose to make to preserve a system which you honestly think is
just and right. That is your unquestioned privilege in a democracy. . . . But if
others are refused the same privilege . . . I believe a great mistake will have
been made.” 121 In supporting freedom of speech and accepting the Council’s
unlikely invitation, Boone supported creative deliberation about the social
situation.
On January 8, 1957, Morgan mailed a private letter of support to Boone
about his speech the previous week. Boone asked Morgan if he could publish
her letter in the newspaper. 122 She was aware of the consequences her resis-
tance might bring. Morgan viewed white privilege as the “fault line of
American democracy” 123 and considered racial justice a Christian impera-
tive. An earlier letter she wrote asserted that segregation was un-Christian
and “the citizens of Montgomery should do something about it.” 124 The
response to her letter was decisive: Morgan was terminated from her job at a
local bookstore. Tymieniecka asserted that the moral sense holds a dimen-
sion of memory that provides a register of items to draw upon in the creative
process. Publishing the letter to the Tuscaloosa News meant Morgan could
lose her job. Yet, her love for her job “put her at risk of behaving like Lillian
Smith’s ‘thumb-sucking liberals,’ those who desert the cause when the cost
becomes too high. The thought sickened her.” 125 She engaged in valuation,
deliberatively reflecting upon the dimensions of the situation. “What good
was any job if silence was the price of keeping it? How could she live with
her equivocation if she avoided this crisis? . . . Didn’t she have a responsibil-
ity, she asked herself, to model what she had asked others to do?” 126 For
Tymieniecka, the moral meaning-bestowing faculty, prompted by the benev-
olent sentiment, guides a person toward a responsibility for the all-of-life in
one’s valuation of acts, feelings, emotions, actions, and attitudes.
In seeking the opening of a promise in life, Morgan did not recognize any
other possible alternative but to print the letter. She had lived in the South her
entire life and “clearly understood the southern way of life. . . . [S]he knew
exactly who she was, where she had come from, and what her conscience had
compelled her to do. The price of remaining in Montgomery was to accept
the unacceptable—to publicly recant what she had written. . . . But [in so
doing] she would be left with nothing, not even her dignity, and she could not
do it.” 127 Although attentive to risk, her constructive moral benevolence
granted her self-respect and self-worth.
120 Pat Arneson

Mary Stanton, Morgan’s biographer, imagines that “[w]ith an aching

head, a dry mouth, and gripping stomach spasms, Juliette made her deci-
sion.” 128 One of Morgan’s friends shed light on the letters Morgan wrote as a
fundamental expression of her being: “I don’t think she really wanted to
write those letters. She suffered after each one and regretted it when it was
printed. And yet when the issue rose anew, she did it again. She did it
because she had to.” 129 Virginia Durr, one of Morgan’s friends and allies in
seeking social justice, was incited by the “ambiguities, paradoxes and contra-
dictions” 130 of Southern life. Durr explained that Morgan “had this flame of
beauty and anger against injustice. She felt it so in her soul, and could not
rest from fighting it. . . . She had to the end a sort of childlike quality of
impulsiveness and total acceptance of the people she loved.” 131 Morgan was
attentive to the subliminal synergies (benevolence, congenital innocence of
heart, generosity) that Tymieniecka asserted guide life’s potency (kinesthe-
sis, drives, feelings, desires, immediacy of embodiment).
Morgan’s letter praised Boone for his criticism of the University of Ala-
bama in its treatment of Autherine Lucy. She contrasted his bold stand with
the cowardly behavior of most white Southern men. She commented: “I had
begun to wonder if there were any men in the state—any white men—with
any sane evaluation of our situation here in the middle of the Twentieth
Century, with any good will, and most especially with any moral courage to
express it.” 132 The editor did not offer her the opportunity to alter her original
letter, and Morgan did not request to do so. Morgan’s mother would there-
after refer to her daughter’s letter as her “death warrant.” 133
The letter was published in the January 14, 1957, issue of the Tuscaloosa
News. Similarly to Boone, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his journalism,
Morgan “kicked the teeth” of the mob. 134 The reaction to her letter was swift.
Lynne Olson wrote, “Violent as the reaction was to her [December 12, 1955]
letter in the Advertiser praising the boycott, it did not compare with the
uproar over this one.” 135 Morgan’s depiction of Southern white men as “cow-
ardly, really made them determined to get her at all costs, thereby proving
her words.” 136
The Citizens Council “launched a relentless campaign” against Mor-
gan. 137 The telephone at the library and in her home rang constantly with
lewd and threatening telephone calls. 138 White residents of Montgomery tore
up their library cards in front of her and boycotted the library. 139 She was
taunted by teenage boys who humiliated her in public and in front of her
library staff. Even some of her so-called friends thought Morgan to be men-
tally ill and demanded she be fired. 140 Although administrators at the library
disagreed with Morgan’s views, they took the position that she had expressed
them as a private citizen. They refused to terminate her; doing so would
violate her First Amendment rights. 141 She agonized over the knowledge that
her moral stand was causing trouble for people she loved. Morgan suffered in
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 121

private; scarcely anyone outside of white Montgomery knew what was oc-
curring. Morgan’s mother, Lila Bess Olin Morgan, shared with a friend that
her daughter had become a “complete Pariah.” 142 Anxiety and depression
weakened Morgan’s nerves, and she was granted a temporary leave from her
job at the library. 143
Morgan wrote a postcard to her aunt, reflecting “I wish there were things I
could have added or worded more tactfully [in the January 14, 1957, letter],
but I’m trying to forget that for now and profit by it next time.” 144 At the
same time, she “loved Montgomery and resented being ostracized for obey-
ing [her] . . . conscience.” 145 In Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life, “hu-
manity is principally entrusted to his creative acts.” 146 Morgan found herself
“faced with the task of conceiving of a new horizon of meaning.” 147 Given
Morgan’s state of depression, she faced a daunting task in determining how
to craft meaning that would be interpreted by others as innovative with
respect to racial equality.
On the night of July 15, 1957, a cross was burned on Morgan’s front
lawn. This was a terrifying experience for Morgan, who lived with her moth-
er. Stanton explains, “Flaming crosses were known to be the Klan’s ‘first
warning.’ Visits from ‘wrecking crews’ were subsequently scheduled if first
warnings went unheeded.” 148 On July 17, 1957, Morgan’s mother called the
library to resign Morgan from her position. That night, Morgan, leaving a
note on which she had written “I can’t go on,” took her own life with an
overdose of sleeping pills. 149 Although the exact circumstances of her death
are unknown, “the city’s black citizens, including King, and its sympathetic
whites, believed that Juliette Morgan had been persecuted to death.” 150
After Morgan’s death, Mary Y. Dobbins, one of her friends, described her
as a “rare spirit” who was “alive to the cause of justice.” 151 Her resistance
was a “sensitive barometer, or conscience, for people like you and me.” 152
Morgan “brought joy into any gathering she attended. It is significant that she
was loved and admired by many who did not share her views on segrega-
tion.” 153 She brought a sense of aliveness to others. One writer shared that
since Morgan “took the teachings of Christianity seriously, it was perhaps
inevitable that she should cry out against racial injustice.” 154 Tymieniecka’s
understanding of benevolent sentiment offers insight into Morgan’s commu-
nicative ethic, conveyed in her linguistic and corporeal expressivity.

IMPLICATIONS

Tymieniecka offered an ethical ground that emerges with the vital impulse of
human creativity. The creativity of the benevolent sentiment drives the moral
sense, which is expressed both corporeally and linguistically. She asserted
that aesthetic, moral, and intellective meaning-bestowing faculties shape life
122 Pat Arneson

in the human station. Moral valuation and judgment emerge through deliber-
ation to promote a good in communal life. The benevolent sentiment drives
people to contribute to the social world.
This ground for communication ethics is recognizable in the life of Juli-
ette Morgan, who expressed her right to free speech in Montgomery, Ala-
bama. She attended to the benevolent sentiment in her expression of moral-
ity. This ethical ground prompted her efforts to creatively change the mean-
ing of equality in her public and private communication with others. People
respond to the call for communication ethics in postmodernity by being
attentive to threats of injustice to Others, exposed by the benevolent senti-
ment.

NOTES

1. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York: Bobbs-Merrill,

1962).
2. Joseph J. Kockelmans, “The Foundations of Morality and the Human Sciences,” in
Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research 15 (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1983), 381–82.
3. Daniela Verducci, “Examining Development from the Ontopoietical Perspective,” trans.
Sheila Beatty, Phenomenological Inquiry: A Review of Philosophical Ideas and Trends 31
(2007): 17.
4. Jadwiga S. Smith, “Tymieniecka’s Vision of Phenomenology through the Encyclopedia
of Learning: Phenomenology World-Wide,” Phenomenological Inquiry: A Review of Philo-
sophical Ideas and Trends 27 (2003): 216.
5. Nancy Mardas, “Following the Golden Thread: A Journey through the Labyrinth of
Tymieniecka’s Logos and Life,” Phenomenological Inquiry: A Review of Philosophical Ideas
and Trends 27 (2003): 48.
6. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Book 1: Creative Experience and the Cri-
tique of Reason, in Analecta Husserliana 24 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988);
Logos and Life, Book 2: The Three Movements of the Soul, in Analecta Husserliana 25 (Dor-
drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988); Logos and Life, Book 3: The Passions of the Soul
and the Elements in the Ontopoiesis of Culture: The Life Significance of Literature, in Analecta
Husserliana 28 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990); Logos and Life, Book 4:
Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason, in Analecta Husserliana 70 (Dor-
drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000).
7. Gary Backhaus, “Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason: Logos and
Life Book 4 by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka,” Review of Metaphysics 56 (2002): 464.
8. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “The Moral Sense: A Discourse on the Phenomenological
Foundation of the Social World and of Ethics,” in Analecta Husserliana 15 (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1983), 23, 26, 76n27.
9. Verducci, “Examining Development,” 17.
10. Tymieniecka, “The Moral Sense,” 23, 26, 76n27; see Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “Lo-
gos’ Timing in Life—Fabulating History,” in Analecta Husserliana 90 (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2006), xix; Pat Arneson, “A Creative Turning: Communicative Partici-
pation in Tymieniecka’s Logos of Life,” Empedocles: European Journal for Philosophy of
Communication, 4:2 (2012): 153–167.
11. Gary Backhaus, “Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka: The Trajectory of her Thought from Eidet-
ic Phenomenology to the Phenomenology of Life,” Phenomenological Inquiry: A Review of
Philosophical Ideas and Trends 25 (2001): 39–41.
12. Ibid., 39.
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 123

13. Ibid., 42, 41.

14. Ibid., 40–41.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 44, 43.
17. Kathleen Haney, “Tymieniecka’s First Philosophy,” in Analecta Husserliana 105 (Dor-
drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2010), 87.
18. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Book 4, 243; Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “Theme: The
Triumph of Imagination in the Critique of Reason,” in Analecta Husserliana 83 (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), x.
19. Haney, “Tymieniecka’s First Philosophy,” 89.
20. Mardas, “Following the Golden Thread,” 43, 44.
21. Tymieniecka, “The Moral Sense,” 6.
22. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life Book 3, 123.
23. Tymieniecka, “The Moral Sense,” 27.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 25–26. Benevolence can be traced in the philosophies of various intellectuals. See
D. D. Raphael, British Moralists: 1650–1800: Selected and Edited with Comparative Notes
and Analytical Index by D. D. Raphael, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett , 1991). Volume 1
includes Thomas Hobbes, Richard Cumberland, Ralph Cudworth, John Locke, Lord Shaftes-
bury, Samuel Clarke, Bernard Mandeville, William Wollaston, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph
Butler, John Balguy, and John Gay. Volume 2 includes David Hume, David Hartley, Richard
Price, Adam Smith, William Paley, Thomas Reid, and Jeremy Bentham.
26. Ibid., 26.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 27.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 29.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 28.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 31.
35. Ibid., 32.
36. Ibid., 22.
37. Ibid., 21.
38. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, interview by Ivanka Rainova, The World Phenomenology
Institute, 1993, updated December 1, 1999, www.phenomenology.org/interview.html.
39. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Book 3, ix–xiii; Tymieniecka, interview; Eric Grillo,
“Book Review: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.). Logos and Life, Book 3: Phenomenology of
Life as the Starting Point of Philosophy,” Phenomenological Inquiry: A Review of Philosophi-
cal Ideas and Trends 22 (1998): 66, 67.
40. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Book 4, 38.
41. Ibid., 39.
42. Tymieniecka, “Logos’ Timing,” xiii.
43. Tymieniecka, “The Moral Sense,” 15.
44. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Book 4, 39, 443, 440; Mardas, “Following the Golden
Thread,” 51.
45. Tymieniecka, “Logos’ Timing,” xiii.
46. Backhaus, “Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka,” 41.
47. Ibid., 22.
48. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “The Theme: The Human Being—Individual and Moral—as
the Articulating Factor of the Human Sciences,” in Analecta Husserliana 15 (Dordrecht: Kluw-
er Academic Publishers, 1983), x–xi.
49. Tymieniecka, “Theme: The Triumph of Imagination,” x–xi.
50. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Book 3, 121.
51. Tymieniecka, “The Moral Sense,” 23.
52. Ibid.
124 Pat Arneson

53. Ibid., 32–33.

54. Ibid., 34.
55. Ibid., 35.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 72n15.
59. Ibid., 73n15.
60. Ibid., 75n24.
61. Ibid., 75–76n25.
62. Ibid., 77n33.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., 25.
69. Kurt H. Wolff, “Surrender to Morality as the Morality of Surrender,” in Analecta Hus-
serliana 15 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 495.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. Backhaus, “Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka,” 42.
73. Haney, “First Philosophy,” 89.
74. Ibid.
75. “A Southern Profile: She Named Protest Movement,” n.d., n.p., The Southern Patriot,
ca. September 1960, in Lila Bess Olin Morgan (1895–1977) Family Papers, Alabama Depart-
ment of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.
76. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000).
77. Ibid., 46.
78. “Juliette Hampton Morgan: A White Woman Who Understood,” in the organization
website Teaching Tolerance: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, curriculum re-
source, www.tolerance.org/lesson/juliette-hampton-morgan-white-woman-who-understood.
79. Patterson Toby Graham, A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama’s
Public Libraries, 1900–1965 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 100.
80. Leslie W. Dunbar, Republic of Equals (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966),
17.
81. Robert S. Graetz, Montgomery: A White Preacher’s Memoir (Minneapolis, MN: For-
tress Press, 1991), 5.
82. Mary Stanton, Journey Toward Justice: Juliette Hampton Morgan and the Montgomery
Bus Boycott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 105.
83. Ibid.
84. Verducci, “Examining Development,” 17.
85. Alabama Department of Archives and History, “Alabama Moments in American Histo-
ry: Boswell Amendment,” www.legislature.state.al.us/CodeOfAlabama/Constitution/1901/CA-
245898.htm.
86. Juliette Morgan, letter to the editor [“Get Out and Vote!”], Montgomery Advertiser, July
29, 1946, 4.
87. “A Southern Profile,” n.p.
88. Stanton, Journey toward Justice, 151; see Virginia Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The
Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, ed. Hollinger F. Barnard (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1985), 242–44.
89. Graham, A Right to Read, 100.
90. Juliette Morgan, letter to the editor [“A National Menace”], Montgomery Advertiser,
July 3, 1939, 4.
91. Juliette Morgan, letter to the editor [“Our Big Chance to Lose”], Montgomery Advertis-
er, January 8, 1943, 4; Juliette Morgan, letter to Mr. Dobbins, Tuscaloosa, Alabama (June 28,
 Tymieniecka’s Benevolent Sentiment as Ground for Communication Ethics 125

1946) in Lila Bess Olin Morgan (1895–1977) Family Papers, Alabama Department of Archives
and History, Montgomery, Alabama.
92. Juliette Morgan, letter to Senator John Bankhead, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC (Janu-
ary 30, 1946) in Lila Bess Olin Morgan (1895–1977) Family Papers, Alabama Department of
Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.
93. Graham, A Right to Read, 3.
94. Ibid.; Stanton, Journey toward Justice, 153.
95. Verducci, “Examining Development,” 21.
96. Charles Erwin Wilson, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Commit-
tee on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947), 139.
97. Joe Azbell, “5,000 at Meeting Outline Boycott; Bullet Clips Bus,” Montgomery Adver-
tiser, December 6, 1955, 1.
98. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1988), 144.
99. Graham, A Right to Read, 130.
100. “Juliette Hampton Morgan: A White Woman Who Understood.”
101. Ibid.
102. “A Southern Profile,” n.p.
103. Graham, A Right to Read, 101.
104. Juliette Morgan, letter to the editor [“Lesson from Ghandi”], Montgomery Advertiser,
December 12, 1955, 4.
105. Ibid.
106. Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New
York: HarperCollins, 1994), 77.
107. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York:
Harper and Row, 1958), 67.
108. Stanton, Journey Toward Justice, 2.
109. Morgan, letter to the editor [“Lesson from Ghandi”], 4.
110. Ibid.
111. Jean Read, letter to Juliette Morgan (ca. December 12, 1955), in Lila Bess Olin Morgan
(1895–1977) Family Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery,
Alabama.
112. Juliette Morgan, draft letter [“Revised Letter”], June 9, 1952, in Lila Bess Olin Morgan
(1895–1977) Family Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery,
Alabama.
113. Will T., letter to Juliette Morgan, Heflin, Alabama (July 7, 1949), in Lila Bess Olin
Morgan (1895–1977) Family Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Mont-
gomery, Alabama.
114. Juliette Morgan [pseudonym, Mrs. J. J. Cough], letter to the editor [“Unto the Least of
These”], Montgomery Advertiser, May 8, 1956, in Lila Bess Olin Morgan (1895–1977) Family
Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.
115. Ibid.
116. Tymieniecka, “The Moral Sense,” 73n15.
117. Buford Boone, “Editorial: What a Price for Peace,” Tuscaloosa News, February 7, 1956,
1.
118. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 300.
119. Buford Boone, “Editorials: Segregation and Integration,” Tuscaloosa News, January 6,
1957, 4.
120. Boone, “Editorials,” 4; see Stanton, Journey Toward Justice, 194.
121. Boone, “Editorials,” 4.
122. Buford Boone, letter to Juliette Morgan, Montgomery, Alabama, January 11, 1957, in
Lila Bess Olin Morgan (1895–1977) Family Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and
History, Montgomery, Alabama.
123. Stanton, Journey Toward Justice, 121, 136, 161.
124. “Juliette Hampton Morgan: A White Woman Who Understood.”
126 Pat Arneson

125. Stanton, Journey Toward Justice, 178.

126. Ibid., 195.
127. Ibid., 201.
128. Ibid., 195.
129. “A Southern Profile,” n.p.
130. Stanton, Journey Toward Justice, 206.
131. Ibid., 207.
132. Juliette Morgan, letter to the editor [“Stand Overdue”], Tuscaloosa News, January 4,
1957, 4.
133. Stanton, Journey Toward Justice, 195.
134. “The Pulitzer Prizes,” Montgomery Advertiser, May 5, 1957, 1.
135. Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Move-
ment From 1830 to 1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001), 128.
136. Ibid.
137. Virginia Foster Durr and Patricia Sullivan, Freedom Writer: The Letters of Virginia
Foster Durr (New York: Routledge, 2003), 137.
138. Abel Plenn, “Report on Montgomery a Year After: The Buses Are Integrated and Run-
ning, But Despite an Outward Calm the Future Relationship between Negroes and Whites is
Tensely Undecided,” New York Times Magazine, December 29, 1957, 11, 36, 38.
139. Mary Stanton, “Juliette Hampton Morgan,” in Encyclopedia of Alabama, Alabama Hu-
manities Foundation, 2013, article published June 30, 2008, updated March 1, 2012, www.
encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1581; “A Southern Profile,” n.p.
140. “Juliette Hampton Morgan: A White Woman Who Understood.”
141. “A Southern Profile,” n.p.
142. Lila Bess Morgan, letter to L. G. Payne, Bellflower, California (March 28, 1960), in Lila
Bess Olin Morgan (1895–1977) Family Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History,
Montgomery, Alabama.
143. Plenn, “Report on Montgomery a Year After,” 11, 36, 38.
144. Stanton, Journey Toward Justice, 163.
145. Ibid., 166.
146. Verducci, “Examining Development,” 21.
147. Ibid.
148. Stanton, Journey Toward Justice, 198.
149. Juliette Morgan, suicide note, in Lila Bess Olin Morgan (1895–1977) Family Papers,
Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.
150. Graham, A Right to Read, 102.
151. Mary Y. Dobbins, letter to the editor [“Miss Juliette Morgan”], Montgomery Advertiser,
July 25, 1957, 4.
152. Mary Graeme Dobbins, “Woman of the Week: Miss Morgan Finds Library Stimulat-
ing,” Montgomery Examiner, June 9, 1955, 10.
153. “A Southern Profile,” n.p.
154. Ibid.

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 Chapter Seven

The Ethical Challenges of

Friendship in Interpersonal
and Mexican-U.S. Relations
A Case Study of The Three
Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is
thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been
declared to be that at which all things aim.” 1 If Aristotle was correct—
descriptively or prescriptively—in his formulation of the ethical basis of
human life, why is so much of our experience not merely dreary, but punish-
ing? Material reality places profound constraints on our ability to realize the
good. We age, get sick, and die. But why is achieving the good in human
relationships so difficult? Why is it so hard for us to get along with our
friends and neighbors?
In this chapter we use a movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
(hereafter, Three Burials), to examine the ethics of friendship, primarily in
the interpersonal realm, but also, and necessarily, in the political sphere. 2
The aim of this analysis is to illuminate some of the possibilities and chal-
lenges of achieving these values, as well as the meanings of the values at
stake. We are guided in this enterprise by insights gleaned from Austin
Babrow’s Problematic Integration theory and by writings on communication
and ethics, particularly works by William Rawlins and Ronald C. Arnett,
Janie M. Harden Fritz, and Leeanne M. Bell. 3 Following Herbert Blumer’s
notion of sensitizing concepts and Victoria Chen and W. Barnett Pearce’s
view of case study, we hope to unpack the relational and ethical significance
129
130 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

of Three Burials at the same time that the film deepens and thickens our
appreciation for ideas drawn from the several theoretical schemes. 4

PROBLEMATIC INTEGRATION AND THE

ETHICS OF FRIENDSHIP

Babrow’s Problematic Integration (PI) theory locates communication, evalu-

ative and probabilistic (associative) meanings, and their dynamic interrela-
tionships, at the center of human being. 5 In other words, the theory posits
that mind, meaning, and action arise out of two basic orientations. In one, we
form meanings by associating objects of thought (e.g., things, people, ideas
with attributes; antecedents and causes with acts and consequents). These
associations are termed probabilistic orientations because they are held with
varying strength, from the certainties of taken-for-granted assumptions to
various degrees of perceived likelihood to hazy, irresolvable uncertainty. A
second dimension of meaning in the form of evaluation joins associative
meanings; objects of thought and their associations are understood in terms
of their implications for well-being. While the two orientations are dynami-
cally interrelated, they are distinct, and this distinction is of the utmost im-
portance in human experience. 6 Consider, for example, the range and signifi-
cance of situations in which our beliefs conflict with our desires. No account
of human being—mind, meaning, and action—is sufficient without these
orientations and their relationship at its core.
These ideas are, of course, characteristic of Western ways of understand-
ing human being, with roots in antiquity. For instance, Aristotle’s opening of
his inquiry into ethics, quoted at the start of this chapter, expresses the
valuative character of all human action. Elsewhere, in the very first sentence
of his inquiry into the nature of being, or “first philosophy,” Aristotle ex-
presses the central importance of probabilistic (associative) meanings: “All
men [sic] by nature desire to know.” 7 The nature of and relationship between
these orientations has been the subject of investigation and debate for millen-
nia, and it is neither the purpose of PI theory nor of this case study about the
ethics of friendship to survey, much less sort out, these issues. However, two
questions are particularly relevant to this chapter.
One vitally important question in ethical practice and analysis is whether
we are to understand the good in universal or contextual terms. 8 Perhaps the
most influential (and controversial) exemplar of the former, Immanuel
Kant’s deontological “categorical imperative,” has long been a beacon in the
search for universals (ironically, though, in Western thought). 9 Contrasting
ethical theories and practices hold that the good depends on context. Notably,
in their effort to rehabilitate casuistry after centuries of disrepute, Albert
Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin argue that their approach can provide a vital
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 131

middle ground between rigidity and relativism; casuistry involves examina-

tion of cases under the assumption that general moral principles must be
evaluated for their relevance to the particular situation in question, a process
that is understood to be fundamentally rhetorical. 10
PI theory offers a perspective on ethics that is complementary with ca-
suistry. As noted above, it posits evaluation, the judgment of goodness (or its
antithesis), as inherent to communication and consciousness. 11 In other
words, PI theory holds that evaluation, and hence ethics (as well as aesthetics
and more mundane judgments of goodness), is one of two constitutive di-
mensions of sense- or meaning-making. In other words, meaning always
entails evaluation. This is most obvious in words that manifestly entangle
evaluation in their very definition. 12 In other cases, evaluative meaning is
harder to notice. For example, a grain of sand on a beach only appears to
have no evaluative meaning because of its apparent inconsequentiality. Shift
the context, such as a grain of sand in the eye, and evaluative meaning
becomes palpable (including, by contrast, neutrality). Hence, PI theory as-
serts that all talk, all sense-making, inescapably entails evaluation. We are
never further than the threshold of ethics. Shift the context still more, such as
a grain of sand in the eye of an ill-equipped laborer, and we find ourselves
squarely in the realm of morality.
While the good is often pursued or experienced relatively mindlessly (i.e.,
when it is effortlessly and unambiguously conceived/accessible), evaluative
sense-making or judgment is often elusive. PI theory suggests that this is the
case when the good is uncertain, unlikely, unattainable, or braided with the
bad. In any case other than mindless, unreflective experience, however, the
good is an irreducibly, actively communicative construction. The moment we
attempt to articulate the good marks the commencement of this constitutive
process. Moreover, from the standpoint of PI theory, the history of ethics
(along with other practices and areas of study, such as aesthetics, politics,
law, economics, and religion) is the story of humankind grappling through
discourse with the unfinalizeable construction of the good. 13 Even absolutes
must be interpreted in context. 14 Fundamentalists and foundationalists of
every stripe must ascertain the situated meaning of their precepts (e.g.,
Which teaching of Christ or Mohamed is most pertinent in situation X? What
would the founding fathers rule about Y?). The factiousness in human history
teaches us nothing if not that such questions thus far have admitted no final
answers. 15 But just as the good has not yet revealed itself in universally
recognizable, universally applicable form, it becomes meaningless to the
extent that it loses its meaning across contexts: to the extent that it ap-
proaches relativism. 16 Hence, reminding ourselves of our conception of the
good and asserting its cross-contextuality, as in epideictic rhetoric, are both
vitally important discursive activities. 17
132 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

The second question, related to but distinguishable from the preceding

one about universalism versus contextualism, asks what the character of
distinctively relational ethics is. Several recent works have examined ethics
in personal relationships. Sally Planalp and Julie Fitness have offered a
search for basic and potentially universal ethical principles amid the constitu-
tive features of close personal relationships (e.g., connection and inclusion,
respect and dignity, interdependence and mutuality). 18 However, as it pro-
ceeds, their thoughtful exposition soon recognizes a variety of challenges to
the specifying of such universals. Planalp and Fitness also note that ethical
conflicts arise in the dialectical tensions that are thought to constitute close
personal relationships, such as the opposing values of connection and inter-
dependence on the one hand and autonomy and privacy on the other. 19
In their recent text, Arnett and colleagues draw on Emmanuel Levinas
and Martin Buber to argue that the center of interpersonal ethics is concern
for the relationship. 20 This concern entwines responsibility and distance. The
seed of ethics is one’s responsibility for the other. Interpersonal responsibil-
ity entails “attending to the responsibility appropriate for a given relation-
ship.” 21 Thus, interpersonal responsibility means one thing for the relation-
ship between student and teacher, something else for neighbors, and still
another thing for friends.
What are the responsibilities of friendship? Rawlins offers several perti-
nent ideas. 22 For one, he argues, friendship requires the continual exercise of
moral will in the sense that we choose our friends. We might contrast this to
neighbors in capitalist society, relationships that arise as epiphenomena asso-
ciated with choice of residence. Extending the example, neighbors need not
be concerned for one another’s well-being (beyond what it might mean for
their own well-being) nor are they committed to ongoing learning about one
another, whereas concern for one another and ongoing learning about one
another are, according to Rawlins, two other important forms of relational
responsibility—two precepts in his analysis of the ethics of friendship. He
also identifies several other responsibilities as particularly important in
friendship as compared to other sorts of relationships. Along with the three
already noted, two others appear to be especially pertinent to our reading of
Three Burials: Friends behave in honest and trustworthy ways with one
another, and friendship is a conscientiously interested relationship.
Hence, in a variety of specific ways, responsibility is central to relational
concern and the ethics of friendship. However, Arnett and colleagues argue
that a vital counterpoint to responsibility is distance. 23 Their argument par-
tially coincides with Rawlins’s exposition of what he calls the dialectic of
individuation and participation: “Individuation involves activities that recog-
nize the boundaries identifying us as a distinct entity separate from others.
Participation involves activities incorporating us with others and identifying
us as a relational entity connected with others.” 24 Drawing on Levinas, Ar-
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 133

nett and colleagues emphasize, moreover, that our very distinctness—our

difference itself—is the seed of our responsibility to the Other. 25
Arnett and colleagues and Rawlins argue that relational partners use di-
alogue and narrative in ongoing efforts to live relational responsibility and
difference. 26 These efforts often encounter significant challenges tied to par-
ticularities of context. For instance, in comments that resonate with PI theo-
ry, Rawlins explains that the ethics of friendship must be worked out in
“lived circumstances, historical and structural constraints, material condi-
tions, discursive closure, and foiled imaginations.” 27 Dialogue is essential to
efforts to construct moral life in context. Three Burials offers powerful illus-
trations of these processes, but it also probes beyond them. It does so by
raising profound questions in the context of friendship in an age of struggles
over borders, the political embodiment of articulations of self and Other. For
students of communication, dialogue, the co-construction of ethics, cosmo-
politanism, and the like, Three Burials is thus a provocative meditation on
the prospects of integrating ethical aspirations with expectations, or proble-
matic integration. 28 It illuminates micro-practices of friendships that embody
PI in the ethics of intimacy as well as broader moral and political quandaries
of the day. Thus, we turn now to a case study of the ethics of friendship as
depicted in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

EXCAVATING THE IDEALS AND CHALLENGES

OF FRIENDSHIP IN THREE BURIALS:
FILM SYNOPSIS

Three Burials begins as a nonlinear telling of the story of a friendship be-

tween two cowboys working on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico. In
brief vignettes, we see Pete Perkins as foreman on a cattle ranch hiring
Melquiades Estrada, a Mexican who is in the United States illegally, as a
cowboy. Mel and Pete become friends. Their relationship is deepened im-
measurably when Mel makes Pete a gift of his fabulous horse. In another
brief segment, Pete arranges for his friend to meet for a tryst with the young
wife of a Border Patrol officer. And in yet another scene, Mel shares pictures
of his own wife and family back home in Jimenez, Mexico. He also asks Pete
to promise to return his body for burial in Jimenez if he dies on the U.S. side
of the border, saying, “I don’t want to be buried on this side among all the
fucking billboards” (such as one outside a mobile-home sales lot announcing
“Liberty means freedom from high interest rates”).
Woven into the story of this friendship are scenes depicting Mel being
mortally wounded and hastily buried by Mike Norton, a brutally enthusiastic
rookie Border Patrol agent, after Norton mistook the cowboy’s shots at a
coyote for an attack. The body is located a week later. The local sheriff,
134 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

Belmont, assumes that Melquiades was an illegal involved in drug trafficking

and shows no interest in locating and notifying his kin or in finding his killer.
Despite Pete’s request to be given the body, Melquiades is reburied, this time
in a pauper’s grave in a local Texas cemetery. His whitewashed rebar and
lath grave marker bears the inscription, “Melquiades—Mexico.”
Pete’s lover, Rachel, having overheard Mike’s supervisor and Sheriff
Belmont talk about the shooting and agree to let the matter lie, tells Pete the
name of Mel’s killer. Pete confronts Belmont, who refuses to investigate the
killing despite Pete’s demand for justice. Pete then kidnaps Mike and forces
him to disinter Mel’s body. The trio then set out on a quixotic journey to
return Mel to his family for burial in Jimenez.
The remainder of the film depicts the story of this passage. Vestiges of the
men’s former lives fall away, and ethical choices become as stark as the
landscape. Pete compels Mike to dress Mel’s corpse in his best clothes, dress
himself in Mel’s work clothes, drink water from Mel’s pitcher and cup, and
then travel with Pete and his friend’s decaying corpse across the desolate
beauty of west Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, in search of Mel’s home and
family. As the sheriff gives chase, at one point, Belmont has the fugitive Pete
in his rifle sight. Rather than shoot Pete in the back, the sheriff gives up the
pursuit and departs for a vacation (to Seaworld, we are told). Mike’s wife,
LuAnn, who now knows that her “unredeemable” husband killed Mel, de-
cides to leave Texas and her husband altogether and return to her native
Cincinnati. Pete also loses Rachel, who refuses to leave her husband to join
Pete in Mexico.
Eventually, the trio finds the woman Mel claimed to be his wife. They
learn that she is married to another man. She denies having known Mel and
asks them to leave before causing trouble with her (current) husband. Pete
and Mike also learn that the town of Jimenez was a lie or fantasy. Reaching
the area where they expected to find Jimenez, they see the ruins of an aban-
doned homestead, which Pete decides, in a break with reality or the culmina-
tion of Mel’s dream, is in fact his friend’s hometown. Mike and Pete rebuild
part of a ruined house, and Pete has Mike bury his friend. In a climactic
scene, Pete places in the fork of a tree a picture of Mel standing behind the
woman and children he claimed were his family. Pete then forces Mike at
gunpoint to kneel in front of the picture and ask Mel for forgiveness. Mike’s
terror gives way to heartfelt remorse and a plea for forgiveness. The next
morning, Pete departs on a donkey, leaving Mike the beautiful horse that had
been Mel’s gift to his friend. As Pete rides away, Mike yells, “You gonna be
alright?” And the film ends.
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 135

PI IN THE ETHICAL PRACTICES OF FRIENDSHIP

The personal bond between the movie’s main protagonists is a powerful

metaphor for the ethical ideals and possibilities of friendship—both private
and public—as they arise in and are challenged by important social and
political-economic constraints. 29 The film provokes us to think about these
ideals, thereby confronting facile conceptions of the good, by its many chal-
lenging inversions of everyday expectations, value judgments, and relatively
thoughtless integrations of these dimensions of meaning. In other words, PI
operates on two levels: within the film, as characters face the exigencies of
their lives, and as challenges to the reactions and sense-making of audience
members.

Friendship as the Continual Exercise of Moral Will

Rawlins argues that “becoming and remaining friends with others is an on-
going voluntary achievement that involves the continual exercise of moral
will by each friend.” 30 In other words, friendship is neither biologically de-
termined by blood relations nor compelled by legal covenants such as mar-
riage. 31 It is a voluntary choice, involving the free expression of reason and
intention. As noted in the quotation from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
that opened this chapter, actors’ conceptions of the good guide freely chosen
actions. Volitional actions, such as those composing voluntary relationships
like friendship, are thus inherently moral acts; they express, constitute and
embody actors’ understandings of the good. As enduring relationships,
friendships require ongoing moral action.
Friendship’s embodiment of choice as an expression of moral will is a
significant theme in Three Burials. Choices are particularly significant be-
cause they so often involve actions that defy substantial counterforces. For
instance, the expression of moral will is illustrated in Mel’s and Pete’s
choices to become friends despite the hierarchy of a supervisor-worker rela-
tionship, the obstacles of their cultural differences, and Mel’s tenuous resi-
dency as an illegal alien. Although nontrivial, these obstacles are small in
contrast to many others Mel and Pete surmount as friends. To appreciate the
latter, they must be seen in the context of the political economy of the
Mexican-U.S. borderlands.
Mel’s gift to Pete of a wonderful horse (Pete attests, “It’s the best horse I
ever saw.”) perfectly contradicts values that are commonly taken for granted
on the U.S. side of the borderlands with Mexico: the avarice and acquisitive-
ness of consumer culture. Homeless and living outside the law, Mel nonethe-
less gives his more secure and affluent friend the vaquero’s most valuable
possession. His gift is all the more poignant as an inversion of values because
of Mel’s grace, the palpable ease with which he bestows the gift; Mel tells his
136 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

friend not to return the horse after a ride because Pete’s name is already
branded on the animal’s mind.
Although Mel’s gift to Pete is great, the most significant exercise of moral
will in the film is Pete’s attempt to honor his friend’s wish to be buried in his
hometown in Mexico. This undertaking is unusually powerful even at a
superficial level; Mel must disinter his friend’s corpse for a second time, well
over a week after the killing. 32 But more importantly, this decision sets Pete,
his friend’s corpse, and Mel’s killer, the captive Border Patrol agent, Mike,
on a journey that inverts many elements of the typical illegal border crossing
narrative: from the United States to Mexico, eluding U.S. agents intent on
keeping the fugitives within the United States, for friendship and family (and
ultimately for justice; more on this below) rather than for work (and despite
the legal system), and ultimately resulting in the repatriation and redemption
of the Mexican at the cost of everything for the U.S. citizen, Pete. 33 By the
end of this journey, Pete has not only lost his friend, but he is also a stateless
fugitive who has given away his friend’s wonderful gift and has lost the
fantasy that he was “the only one” for his lover. In short, Pete exercises
incredible moral will at every step of the journey to return his friend to his
home. As in many other ways, some discussed below, Pete’s exercise of
moral will involves so many reversals of the typical narrative of illegal
immigration that passive viewing and complacency are impossible. The
viewer is impelled toward ethical deliberation.
The inversions of the typical narrative and the exercise of extraordinary
moral choice challenge us to rethink the meaning of our friendships. If, as
Rawlins argues, the ethics of the relationship are rooted in the choice to be
friends, Mel and Pete’s example prompts us to ask what our friendships
actually reveal about our moral will. 34 To the extent that we become friends
because of proximity, similarity of outlook, and shared leisure pursuits, these
relationships reveal an easy virtue. In other words, it takes little moral will to
be friends with those with whom it is easy to forge such bonds. These
relationships take on substantial ethical meaning to the extent that they con-
front PI, such as surmounting ambivalence in choices between weighty, com-
peting values, or acting in the face of uncertain or highly unlikely success.

Concern for the Friend’s Well-being for that

Person’s Own Sake

In Rawlins’s analysis, another point on the ethical compass of friendship is

“mutual concern for the other’s well-being for that person’s own sake.” 35
This, too, is an important theme in Three Burials, in ways both obvious and
subtle. At a superficial level, Pete’s concern for Mel’s wish to be buried
among family in his hometown occupies so much of the film that it might
seem to dwarf any expression of Mel’s concern for his friend. Mel’s most
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 137

significant act toward Pete is, as we have said, the gift of his horse. In this, it
might be asserted that Mel does not so much show concern for Pete as
generosity, giving Pete the pleasure of a marvelous horse; as we have said,
from one vaquero to another, there can be no greater gift. But someone in the
reduced circumstances of an illegal alien has relatively little scope—neither
opportunity nor motive—for enacting concern for a U.S. citizen. Moreover,
in terms of the arc of the story, when Mel’s life is cut short, he is deprived of
the time and the opportunities a longer life would have provided to show
caring and concern for his friend.
By contrast, Pete shows concern and caring for Mel in many ways. He is
apparently devastated by his friend’s death, sitting alone in his room, brush-
ing off a visitor who brings condolences and .223 shells found near the scene
of Melquiades’s shooting. Pete asks to have Mel’s body released to him for
burial, pursues evidence (the bullet shells) that might reveal the identity of
the killer, confronts the sheriff several times about his investigation, and
ultimately kidnaps the killer when it is clear that the authorities are uninter-
ested in justice. But, even in comparison to these strong reactions to his
friend’s killing, Pete’s efforts to return Mel to his home show exceptional
caring.
Somehow, although he gives every appearance of being at home in west
Texas, Pete must recognize the significance to Mel of being far from home
and family, in alien land and culture. Pete must not merely understand, but
care about, Mel’s wishes. The meaning of friendship—and of a friend’s
request—provides the grounds for this empathic concern. Moreover, Pete
cares for Mel’s corpse in several scenes that do not merely challenge, but
overturn, our ordinary understandings of devotion and propriety. In so doing,
they add urgency to the ethical questions at the heart of the film.
Images of the treatment of Mel’s corpse are gruesome, but they are partic-
ularly striking when Pete unearths the corpse that has been decomposing,
without refrigeration, for well over a week, picks foraging ants off of the
moldering body, sets the corpse’s head on fire to dislodge remaining ants,
infuses the corpse with antifreeze to preserve it, and combs hair from the
rotting scalp. Audience members cannot help being repulsed by these im-
ages, but they also cannot easily doubt the loving concern that motivates
Pete’s actions. PI theory suggests that strong ambivalence prompts reflection
on both expectation and desire. In this case, the jarring contrast of loving and
abhorrent action, the confrontation of goodness and evil, requires us to con-
front the question of right and wrong. In other words, Pete’s treatment of his
friend’s corpse pushes us outside the role of passive, complacent viewers to
active judges of morality.
In the spirit of this push, the film can also be taken as a challenge to an
important element of Rawlins’s analysis of the ethics of friendship. Specifi-
cally, he argues that “the giving of friends is not a matter of self-sacrifice—a
138 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

denial of our self and our well-being in helping our friend. The giving of
friends simultaneously reflects self . . . and other’s interests.” 36 Through the
act of giving, he says, one more fully realizes oneself as friend and so
achieves greater fulfillment of one’s humanity. 37 But Three Burials raises the
question of whether it is always possible to be friends without self-sacrifice.
Moreover, it demands us to consider whether “friendship” would be an espe-
cially valued relationship without self-sacrifice. In this we are reminded of
Arnett and colleagues’ insistence that distance is essential to relational con-
cern, and Levinas’s insistence that the very alterity is the seed of our respon-
sibility. 38 Willing self-sacrifice for the benefit of the Other constitutes un-
sparing responsibility through the embrace of distance, valuing the Other
completely by ignoring the value of the self.
These considerations lead us to agree with Rawlins’s analysis of the self’s
fulfillment through giving to a friend, but to demur on the issue of self-
sacrifice. Especially in situations involving unequal resources, when one
friend has much more than the other, it is hard to see friendship in anything
other than sharing and at least some self-sacrifice on the part of the person
with more assets. It is also hard to see anything particularly significant in
such sharing.
The act of giving is meaningful to the extent that what is given has value
for both recipient and benefactor. In other words, no matter how valuable the
gift is to the recipient, if it costs the benefactor nothing, its meaning as a gift
is diminished. This is precisely the reason that Melquiades’s gift of his horse
to Pete is so significant. It is also precisely why Pete’s gift to Mel is so
significant; Pete loses everything, except perhaps his life, to bring Mel’s
body to his home. But there is a deeper gift in this journey. Pete does not risk
everything simply by exhuming his friend and crossing the border illegally.
In terms of the law, his most significant act is kidnapping a federal agent.
This act is also the basis for the most profound caring he shows for Melqui-
ades.
Pete puts Mike through an ordeal in which the killer is beaten several
times; is forced to disinter his victim; eats, sleeps, and shares a horse with the
rotting corpse; vainly attempts to escape from his captor by running for hours
across the scorching desert sand with nothing to protect his bare feet except
pieces of his pant legs; continually fears for his life at the hands of his
kidnapper; and nearly dies from a rattlesnake bite. Mike, the young, strong,
overenthusiastic representative of U.S. border policy, is completely un-
manned by the much older Pete. His nose is broken by the woman who saved
his life after the snakebite (and whose nose Mike had broken earlier in the
film as he beat her to the ground after an illegal crossing into the United
States). And this Border Patrol agent, brimming with testosterone and brutal-
ity, is himself forced by circumstances to cross the border, but from the
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 139

United States to Mexico, to return his victim’s body to his home and to beg
for forgiveness.
Why does Pete subject Mike to this ordeal? Is it merely for revenge or
punishment? In the end, Pete brings Mike to sincere remorse. When Mike
finally apologizes, kneeling at the foot of an ancient tree where Mel’s picture
is hung, it is as if he is at the foot of the cross, begging forgiveness of the
innocent savior who died for Mike’s sins. Pete evidently believes in Mike’s
redemption, calling Mike “son” as he leaves him Mel’s fabulous horse and
rides away on a donkey. Mike’s redemption also is evident in the concern he
shows for Pete, calling out after him, “You gonna be alright?”
Mike’s salvation has two deeper meanings, we believe. One has to do
with the idea that friendship is the continual exercise of moral will (see
above), the other with the caring shown for a friend. Consider first Pete’s
choice to bring Mike to repentance and redemption. The act of killing is, of
course, antithetical to acts of friendship. How are we to respond to such an
act? Is it a greater good to condemn or to forgive? The choice marks out
antithetical pathways following a grievous breach. Condemnation leads to
the complete severing of human relationship. Forgiveness redeems the vital
human bond. Although Three Burials depicts the latter, it ends only after
Pete gives Mel’s horse to his killer and rides away with nothing remaining of
his former life except the donkey he rides. Aside from this, the ending is
open. Once again, we are pushed out of the role of passive viewers and into
the position of having to arrive at our own moral stance. In friendship, we
must often act in highly ambiguous situations and often in the face of great
ambivalence. By acting in the face of powerful PI, we do not merely choose,
but embody, and thereby constitute the good.
In addition to the question of choice and the exercise of moral will, the
story of Mike’s redemption has another vital meaning having to do with the
value of caring for our friends. In bringing Mike to sincere remorse for
killing Mel, Pete cares for his friend by resurrecting the meaning of his life
and death. How is this so? Mel’s life and death are threatened with meaning-
lessness because of his invisibility as an illegal alien. A host of factors
contributes to such invisibility: the need to take on a false identity, a deval-
ued native language, a life of constant movement in pursuit of agricultural or
other low-wage jobs, and the conspiratorial indifference of local and federal
officials in response to an illegal immigrant’s killing. 39 On the latter point,
recall Mel’s second burial, by governmental authority, in an incompletely
marked grave (“Melquiades—Mexico”). Here we are reminded of a Woody
Guthrie and Martin Hoffman song about illegal farm workers who died
nameless during deportation, to be remembered only as “deportees.” 40
The invisibility of migrant agricultural workers threatens to erase the very
meaning of Mel’s life and death. But his friend, Pete, cares about him; Pete
cares enough to act against the complacency that would erase the meaning of
140 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

Mel’s life. To reclaim this meaning, Pete commits aggravated kidnapping

(his most significant crime) and then forces Mel’s killer to disinter and dress
his victim (a figurative resurrection), wear his work clothes and drink from
his cup (forced identification), live with the rotting corpse, carry him back to
Mexico, remake his home, and bury him. In these ways, Mike and audience
members are confronted with the enormity of Mel’s life and death.
When Mike finally admits his guilt and begs for Mel’s forgiveness, both
men are redeemed. Mike regains his humanity and Mel the significance of
his life and personhood. Mike learns the hardship of Mel’s life and his own
responsibility to fellow human beings. The latter lesson is reflected not only
in Mike’s repentance but also in his asking after his deliverer’s welfare as
Pete rides away. Mel is no longer just another dead Mexican who crossed the
border illegally. He is a human being forced away from home and family,
perhaps by dire circumstances, but surely a person deeply abused by misfor-
tune, misunderstanding, and apathetic and derelict authority. Mel is re-
deemed as a person deserving the care and concern—the responsibility—of
family, friends, and the broader community.
Of course, as noted above, Pete achieves this most profound act of caring
for his friend at enormous cost to himself. This reversal, which purchases so
much for a friend, like the many other inversions in Three Burials, is provoc-
ative. As noted above, this self-sacrifice can be understood as the ultimate
acceptance of difference and responsibility. Moreover, PI theory suggests
that the ambivalence evoked by the film seems designed to encourage view-
ers to engage in ethical analysis, to clarify and weigh competing values, to
weigh benefits and losses for self and other. Friendships deepen and become
more significant to the extent that participants put themselves on the line. In
other words, Rawlins may overstate the significance of what he calls the
“mutual gifting of two freedoms” as constitutive of friendship. 41 This mutual
gift might be the ideal only in situations of comfort and plenty. By contrast,
when we are faced with want, when material and other goods are unequally
distributed or are generally scarce, friendship asks, if not more, something
else: sharing of ourselves even if doing so is costly, even if all we have to
share is a back to lighten the other’s burden.
Maintaining our separateness in situations involving shared poverty and
gross disparities in affluence hurts not only the other, but us. But the chal-
lenge addressed here has far broader significance; it reaches to the encom-
passing social-political-economic order. Indeed, here we are reminded of a
passage in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath in which the narrator speaks of
the power of unity among the poor and dispossessed and the threat this
represents to the affluent:

In the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the
tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 141

listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these
two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the
anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here “I lost my land” is
changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—“we
lost our land.” The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed
as one. And from this first “we” there grows a still more dangerous thing: “I
have a little food” plus “I have none.” If from this problem the sum is “We
have a little food,” the thing is on its way. 42

In analyzing the film in the way we have, we expect some readers to

demur. Ethical analysis is not easy, nor has it led to universalizable proposi-
tions. For instance, one may argue that, in giving all that he has to redeem
Mike and thereby the meaning of Mel’s life and death, Pete has endangered
himself, perhaps putting himself in a position in which he himself will have
to rely on the charity of others. This view is consistent with the Judaic code
related to charity. In the Talmudic view, charity “is as important as all the
other commandments put together.” 43 Even people in need are expected to
give to others in greater need, but not if doing so would make the benefactor
dependent on charity. The confrontation with this precept raises perhaps the
deepest ethical question of the film. It asks the viewer whether it is better to
preserve the self at the cost of accepting a friend’s loss of self. This question,
depicted so concretely at the level of a close personal relationship, reflects its
broader relevance to the morality of the great disparity in wealth that charac-
terizes the Mexican-U.S. border. So at the heart of the film is a vital question
about the ethics of friendship: the extent to which we care for our friends and
act on that caring. The ambivalence we feel at seeing Pete so reduced by
what he has given Mel and Mike prompts us to consider this question at the
level of interpersonal relationships and perhaps at the level of international
relations.

Friendship Requires Ongoing Learning about Each Other

Readers who have seen Three Burials know that the foregoing has understat-
ed the moral complexity at the heart of the film. They know Pete eventually
learns that Mel’s hometown, Jimenez, as well as his wife and family, may
have been fantasies, much as the reality of Mexico as a home is fantasy for
the millions who are forced into the life of illegal immigration by economic
privation. This revelation profoundly challenges any calculations about
Pete’s caring and sacrifices for his friend. It also asks us to think about yet
another ethical precept.
Rawlins argues that another “ethical requirement of friendship involves
ongoing learning about each other.” 44 But Pete and Mel have limited time to
get to know one another. We as viewers know little of what Mel learns about
Pete, but we watch as Pete learns that Mel appears not to have had the wife
142 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

and family he claimed and that Jimenez, too, appears to have been a fiction.
Was Mel lying? Or was his truth obscured by the distortions forced on his
life, identity, and relationships by illicit residency and migrant life? These
constraining dynamics necessarily limited what these friends could learn
about one another, thus constraining the chances for their mutual understand-
ing.
This raises vital questions about the ethical potential of friendship. As
Rawlins says, “creating understandings and ongoing learning is a relational
and ethical necessity to remain connected and to meet our friends on their
own terms where they are in their own lives.” 45 But it is impossible for
people forced across the border as illegals to be experienced by U.S. friends
in the context of the formers’ home lives in Mexico. It is also impossible for
U.S. citizens to experience Mexican illegal immigrants in the context of their
life in the United States because people forced into this situation have ex-
tremely limited scope for living life on their own terms. American citizens
can meet and get to know only people who are living outside of themselves,
just as they are living outside their home.
Rawlins’s analysis allows us to see that the constraint in situations like
these raises a significant moral challenge for friendships:

Knowledge about our friends has ethical implications. . . . As friends we want

justice for each other within our friendship as well as in our everyday lives
transcending our bond. Understanding our friends’ changing needs helps ad-
dress our demands for justice and persists as a crucial ethical component of our
discourse. 46

If Pete cannot ever experience his friend on his own terms because Mel can
never live life completely on his own terms, Pete can never understand Mel’s
needs. Pete’s capacity to act on behalf of Mel’s well-being is thus limited.
Perhaps Mel’s fantasy life is as real as any he might have in such a soul-
depriving marginal existence. By the same logic, U.S. citizens, too, have
only a limited context for understanding the life and being of an immigrant
living illegally in this country, not only because of the obvious issue of
mobility, but more fundamentally because of the profound constraints on the
immigrant’s being. U.S. natives, too, appear to be stymied even if we want to
befriend, know, and act on behalf of illegal immigrants.
Absent access to Mel’s life, both because of his being an illegal alien
immigrant and because he has died, Pete has little on which to base his
judgments of how to act on behalf of justice for Mel. Here again we are
reminded of Arnett and colleagues’ insistence on the Levinasian idea that
difference is essential to the ethics of relationships. 47 For Levinas, the Face
of the Other is emblematic of an existent that is forever beyond our compre-
hension, and this very difference is the wellspring of responsibility. 48 In stark
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 143

contrast to the parallel relationship that currently exists between the United
States and Mexico, despite the profound limits on his understanding of his
friend, Pete adopts an extremely self-sacrificing path to justice and redemp-
tion. In so doing, Pete redeems not only the meaningfulness of Mel’s life; he
brings Mike to recognize something of the meaning of the life he had taken
and thereby fosters Mike’s reborn humanity. And even more striking than the
contrast between the way that Pete acts on behalf of his friend and the
relationship between the United States and Mexico, Pete acts not merely
despite the insurmountable limits in his understanding of Mel; Pete acts in
pursuit of what may be a fantasy, perhaps a lie, even after the apparent
illusion is revealed.

Friends Behave in Honest and Trustworthy Ways

with One Another

Rawlins argues that, interwoven with the other ethical qualities of their rela-
tionship, friends are honest; they behave in trusting and trustworthy ways
with each other. 49 Was Mel dishonest in telling Pete about his home and
family in Mexico? Was he unethical in asking Pete to return him to a fiction-
al hometown? The film treats Mel’s (dis)honesty ambiguously. PI theory
suggests that, just as in the case of ambivalence, uncertainty prompts ethical
reflection. For example, in the broader context of the film, we might ask,
“What are the facts in a borderland so rife with dishonesty?” Indeed, there is
little apparent honesty in the depicted borderlands, save for that of Mel’s gift
to Pete and Pete’s redemption of Mel and his killer. Another way to say this
is that the only certain truth in the film is the two friends’ generosity toward
one another despite their difference. 50
Along these lines, another stark contrast or inversion suggests itself. Until
the very end of the film, when he seems to have broken with reality at the
location he deems Mel’s home, Pete consistently acts with perfect certainty
or assurance, despite what appear to be striking uncertainties, value conflicts,
and the like. Perhaps the only way to act ethically in situations as fraught
with irreducible uncertainty and ambivalence as this one is to make a choice
and embody it to its fullest. By contrast, if one hesitates, one diminishes the
uncertain or conflicting values. Perhaps moral deliberation beyond the point
at which one has given due consideration to each potential value or choice is
moral evacuation. Truth and honesty are acts of will or joint enactments of
relationships such as friendship, rather than mere reflections of something
external to the self or the relationship. In other words, the film seems to ask,
“Is the possibility of friendship negated by the dishonesty of the borderlands
(and by extension, the Mexican-U.S. relationship)? Or is friendship only
possible in such a land through acts of generosity or pure selflessness?”
144 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

Friendship as Conscientiously Interested Relationship

Rawlins ends his analysis of the moral compass of friendship by arguing that,
in living up to the other specific ethical values, “friendship is a conscien-
tiously interested relationship.” 51 In other words, “we are partial to our
friends. We regard and treat them in thoughtful and special ways as they do
us, which creates a distinctive ‘ethical pull.’” 52 This caring and concern for
friends “goes beyond what is characteristic and expected of people general-
ly.” 53 Importantly, however, Rawlins notes that showing special regard for
our friends is not without limits. Although “genuine devotion to a particular
group—family, neighborhood, ethnic community, ethnic group, club—is in
itself morally good, . . . [it] becomes morally suspect . . . when it involves a
deficient stance towards others.” 54 In other words, partiality toward friends
should not cause us to disregard others’ needs or deprive them of what is
good.
It is vital to note the unclarity and potential moral conflict here: Precisely
who merits our partiality? This question is especially significant in light of
arguments against partiality. For example, ethicist Peter Singer challenges us
to extend the circle of our “caring to encompass Mother Earth and all her life
forms.” 55 But if we are to draw borders that locate those who will receive our
partiality, they are not easily drawn. Moreover, how ought this partiality to
be expressed? What is meant by “a deficient stance” toward others? How
does one show partiality, which is morally good, without depriving others
not among our favored group? The very “finitude” that “typically limits our
concrete opportunities for devoted service to particular others” sharpens the
ethical tension between partiality to our family, friends, or community and
fairness to all. 56
Three Burials encourages viewers to reflect on the above questions relat-
ed to the ethic of partiality to our friends. The film’s depiction of the pro-
found devotion of a friendship provides a stark contrast to the relationship
between the United States and Mexico. Mel asks Pete to return his body to
his homeland, and Pete elevates this commitment to satisfying his friend’s
desire above all other considerations, including national borders, laws, per-
sonal security, love, and a host of other social mores or demands. Contrast
this with the relationship of the United States to illegal immigrants from
Mexico. National policy demands that aspiring immigrants (and migrants)
arrive legally and enforces substantial barriers to illegal entry, with the result
that crossing the border is physically arduous and often quite expensive and
dangerous. Those who are able to cross successfully, but illegally, must live
in hiding until they can develop a false identity and must work at quite
undesirable jobs, often as temporary workers (e.g., the traditional stoop labor
following maturing crops), for low and often subminimum wages, without
benefits, all the while vulnerable to unscrupulous labor practices, raids by
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 145

immigration officers, and deportation. Those able to secure fake identifica-

tion pay taxes that will never benefit them (e.g., payments to Social Secur-
ity). 57 Moreover, immigration laws stymie movement back and forth across
the border, thus denying illegal immigrants the opportunity to visit family
and friends, no matter the exigency.
In short, Pete’s journey to return his friend to Mexico provides a powerful
foil; it illustrates the ideal of friendship, of a caring and generous relationship
between U.S. and Mexican citizens, and thus contrasts strikingly with the
narrow, callous, and often corrupt realities of the current U.S.-Mexican rela-
tionship. Insofar as we are able to understand the friendship between these
two cowboys, friends who seem to share far more than the difference im-
posed by a national border, we are provoked to think about how we treat our
friends. Do we show them the partiality that our relationship warrants?

CONCLUSION

The main purpose of this chapter was to examine the ethics of friendship in
the interpersonal realm by applying to a recent film insights drawn from
writings about ethics and about the challenges of valuative orientations.
Through these efforts, we have tried to remain mindful of a lesson in the
recently published Handbook of Communication Ethics; George Cheney and
colleagues point out that many of the chapters challenge the notion that
ethics is a “sphere of thought, discussion, and practice” separate from other
realms of communication theory and praxis. 58
Our analysis of Three Burials understands the film as ethical provocation.
At the level of interpersonal relationships, it asks the viewer to consider the
ethics of friendship in a world of permeable boundaries, profound inequal-
ities, and systemic injustice. For these reasons, as we have tried to suggest in
much of the foregoing, Three Burials challenges us to understand that the
ethics of interpersonal friendship are bound with those of international
friendship. Of course, there are reasons to be wary of the latter idea. One
might well ask whether it makes sense to think of the associations between
two nations as a friendship. Conservative analysts often reject the idea, para-
phrasing Lord Palmerston’s 1848 speech in the House of Commons: “Na-
tions have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies but only perma-
nent interests.” 59 But what are permanent interests, and how ought they to be
pursued? Do they have invariant meaning in an ever-changing world? Might
efforts to cleave inflexibly to one construction of national interest undermine
that very interest? One obvious example of this is the argument that a narrow
and inflexible commitment to freedom for its own citizens puts the United
States in the position of endangering freedom elsewhere in the world, which
in turn engenders hostility and threat to freedom at home.
146 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

Even more concretely, U.S. policy toward illegal immigrants from eco-
nomically troubled Mexico is thought to protect domestic jobs and national
law, but it also creates an underclass of worker-residents without rights. And
what do we make of national interests when they conflict? For instance, the
United States is committed not only to freedom but also to justice. These
twin values are thought to be mutual guarantors, or perhaps mutual require-
ments. Can the United States claim to uphold the value of justice when so
much of its economy (e.g., agriculture, construction, service) is heavily reli-
ant on the labors of illegal immigrants whose lives are profoundly, inhu-
manely constrained by the realities of illegal residence?
Three Burials raises even more fundamental ethical questions than those
noted above. In its depiction of Mel and Pete’s friendship, it asks us to reflect
on several related questions: Who is a friend? To whom can I show partial-
ity? Is partiality possible, and in particular, is it advisable in an era of global-
ization? When borders, traditional nation-states, traditional ways of organiz-
ing are challenged by globalizing economic, social, political, and communi-
cation structures, what are we to make of relationships? In a constantly
evolving reality of permeable, flexible, dynamic borders, when the pace and
scope of change are accelerating, who can we call a friend, and what can
friendship mean? Can we afford to be partial, or should we treat the entire
globe as our friend? Can we afford to let the meaning of friendship wash
away in the global ocean of others when so much is at stake? Is the meaning,
the significance of friendship, all the more profound in the new global real-
ity? In these ways and more, Three Burials provokes us to meditate on who
and what we will be to one another.
Three Burials is also a provocation to action. Pete’s actions on behalf of
his friend ultimately redeem Melquiades. They also appear to redeem his
friend’s killer. 60 Without Pete’s actions, both men appear to be lost. Superfi-
cially, the film might be taken to ask us to choose between the amoral
indifference of the sheriff and its counterpoint in the ideal of Pete’s heroic
sacrifice. This false choice is as self-defeating as is the reduction of Mexican-
U.S. relations to a conflict between the sovereignty of national borders and,
say, the basic human right to fair working conditions. A more promising
response is suggested in Jonsen and Toulmin’s defense of casuistry:

At the end of the day, then, all reflective moral traditions keep it in mind that
the kernel of moral wisdom consists, not in a hardline commitment to princi-
ples which we accept without qualification, but in understanding the human
needs and relations that are nurtured by a life of reflective moral action. With
that preoccupation, the practical task is to apply general moral rules, and other
ethical considerations, to new and more complex sets of circumstances, in
ways that respect these human needs. 61
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 147

As we understand the film, Three Burials has challenged us to undertake just

such an analysis of the ethics of friendship in the late modern world.

NOTES

1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Book I, trans. W. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2009), 3. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the National Communication
Association conference, Washington, DC, November, 2013. The authors thank Ronald C.
Arnett for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
2. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, directed by Tommy Lee Jones (New York:
Sony Classics, 2005), DVD.
3. Ronald C. Arnett, Janie M. Harden Fritz, and Leeanne M. Bell, Communication Ethics
Literacy: Dialogue and Difference (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008); Austin S. Babrow,
“Communication and Problematic Integration: Understanding Diverging Probability and Val-
ue, Ambiguity, Ambivalence, and Impossibility,” Communication Theory 2, no. 1 (1992);
Austin S. Babrow, “Problematic Integration Theory,” in Explaining Communication: Contem-
porary Theories and Exemplars, ed. Brian B. Whaley and Wendy Samter (Mahwah, NJ: Law-
rence Erlbaum, 2007); William K. Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical and Political Potentials of
Friendship,” in The Compass of Friendship: Narratives, Identities, Dialogues (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2009), 175–200.
4. Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspectives and Method (Engelwood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 147–52; Elizabeth B. Gill and Austin S. Babrow, “To Hope or to
Know: Coping with Uncertainty and Ambivalence in Women’s Magazine Breast Cancer Arti-
cles” Journal of Applied Communication Research 35, no. 2 (2007); Victoria Chen and W.
Barnett Pearce, “Even if a Thing of Beauty, Can a Case Study Be a Joy Forever? A Social
Constructionist Approach to Theory and Research,” in Social Approaches to Communication,
ed. Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz (New York: Guilford Press, 1995).
5. Babrow, “Communication and Problematic Integration”; Austin S. Babrow, “Uncertain-
ty, Value, Communication, and Problematic Integration,” Journal of Communication 51, no. 3
(2001).
6. Babrow, “Communication and Problematic Integration”; Babrow, “Uncertainty, Value,
Communication.”
7. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. W. David Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1924/rev. 1958), 1: Book I, chapter 1; The Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/
metaphysics.html.
8. See the brief discussion of the universal-particular and global-local in George Cheney et
al., “Encountering Communication Ethics in the Contemporary World: Principles, People, and
Contexts,” in The Handbook of Communication Ethics, ed. George Cheney, Steve May, and
Debashish Munshi (New York: Routledge, 2011), 4–7.
9. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New
York: Harper & Row, 1964).
10. Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral
Reasoning (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), see especially chapter 1, 13,
16–17.
11. Babrow, “Uncertainty, Value, Communication”; Babrow, “Problematic Integration The-
ory.”
12. For example, labels for criminal and beneficent acts; see Hilary Putnam, “The Entangle-
ment of Fact and Value,” The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 28–45.
13. See Michael J. Hyde, “Ethics, Rhetoric, and Discourse,” in The Handbook of Communi-
cation Ethics, ed. George Cheney, Steve May, and Debashish Munshi (New York: Routledge,
2011): 31–44; W. Barnett Pearce, Communication and the Human Condition (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989).
148 Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose

14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald
G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004).
15. Also see Austin S. Babrow, “Using Problematic Integration Theory, a Perspective on
Communication and Human Suffering, to Promote Dialogue Across Spiritual and Other World
Views” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association,
Chicago, 2007).
16. One way to appreciate the latter issue is by analogy to the cross-contextuality of “knowl-
edge”: value relativism is like the condition of having no long-term memory. Each moment is a
new context, each encounter unlike any before. Experiencing the world in this way is profound-
ly debilitating. See Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York:
Touchstone, 1998).
17. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, chapter 9; Hyde, “Ethics, Rhetoric, and Discourse”;
Chaїm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation
(South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).
18. Sally Planalp and Julie Fitness, “Interpersonal Communication Ethics,” in The Hand-
book of Communication Ethics, ed. George Cheney, Steve May, and Debashish Munshi (New
York: Routledge, 2011).
19. Leslie A. Baxter and Barbara M. Montgomery, Relating: Dialogues and Dialectics
(New York: Guilford, 1996); Sandra Petronio, Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2002); William K. Rawlins, Friendship Matters: Communication, Di-
alectics, and the Life Course (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1992).
20. Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy, 119–33.
21. Ibid., 126.
22. Rawlins, Compass.
23. Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy, 123–26.
24. Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical,” 27.
25. Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy.
26. Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy; Rawlins, Compass.
27. Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical,” 175–76.
28. For further discussion of the co-construction of ethics and cosmopolitanism, also see K.
Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006); Pearce,
Communication.
29. George Cheney, Steve May, and Debashish Munshi, eds., The Handbook of Communi-
cation Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2011).
30. Emphasis in original; Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical,” 176.
31. See also Rawlins, Friendship.
32. The scene’s power is enhanced by its contrast with a twilight baseball game in the
background. America’s wholesome pastime is thus juxtaposed with what are abhorrent and
surely criminal acts.
33. There are also inversions in Mike’s story: the irredeemable is saved through genuine
repentance (but more on this below); the brutal enforcer of U.S. border-crossing policy must
himself cross the border into Mexico as a prisoner and return his victim to his homeland to be
saved.
34. Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical,” 176–77.
35. Emphasis in original; Ibid., 177.
36. Ibid., 177.
37. Also see Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone,
1971); Gregory J. Shepherd, “Communication as Transcendence,” in Communication As Per-
spectives on Theory, ed. Gregory Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2006), 22–30.
38. Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality
and Infinity (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
39. Elva T. Hart, Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review
Press, 1999).
40. Woody Guthrie, music by Martin Hoffman, “Deportee” (also known as “Plane wreck at
Los Gatos”), The Official Woody Guthrie Website (Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. and The
 The Ethical Challenges of Friendship 149

Richmond Organization-Ludlow Music, Inc. (BMI), 1961), www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/

Plane_Wreck_At_Los_Gatos.htm.
41. Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical,” 178.
42. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1967),
165.
43. Benjamin Balint, “Christianity in Judaism,” in Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions,
ed. Yudit Greenberg (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007).
44. Emphasis in original; Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical,” 180.
45. Ibid., 181.
46. Ibid.
47. Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy, 123–26.
48. Levinas, Totality.
49. Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical,” 181–82.
50. Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy.
51. Emphasis in original; Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical,”182.
52. Ibid., 183.
53. Ibid. Rawlins cites L. A. Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1980).
54. Ibid.
55. Planalp and Fitness, “Interpersonal,” 135.
56. Rawlins, “Embracing Ethical,” 183.
57. Shikha Dalmia, “Illegal Immigrants Are Paying a lot More Taxes than You Think,”
Reason Foundation, May 1, 2006, reason.org/news/show/122411.html; Travis Loller, “Many
Illegal Immigrants Pay Up at Tax Time,” USA Today, April 11, 2008, usatoday30.usatoday.
com/money/perfi/taxes/2008-04-10-immigrantstaxes_N.htm.
58. Cheney et al., “Encountering Communication Ethics,” 2.
59. Robin Lustig, “Chanson d’amour,” Robin Lustig ‘Trying to make sense of the world’
(blog), The World Tonight, March 28, 2008, www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldtonight/2008/03/
chanson_damour.html.
60. Viewers who see the U.S. criminal justice system as skewed in the direction of punish-
ment rather than rehabilitation are likely to see this, too, as a provocative element in the film.
61. Jonsen and Toulmin, Abuse of Casuistry, 343.

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Arriaga, Guillermo. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones.
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———. “Communication and Problematic Integration: Milan Kundera’s ‘Lost Letters.’ in The
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———. “Uncertainty, Value, Communication, and Problematic Integration.” Journal of Com-
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———. “Problematic Integration Theory.” In Explaining Communication: Contemporary The-
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———. “Using Problematic Integration Theory, a Perspective on Communication and Human

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 Chapter Eight

Resolutions of Regret
The Other in the Evolution of a State Apology for Slavery

John B. Hatch

RESOLVED by the [Virginia] Senate, the House of Delegates concurring,

That the General Assembly hereby acknowledge with profound regret the
involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans,
and call for reconciliation among all Virginians. 1

In 2007, 141 years after slavery was abolished through the ratification of
the Thirteenth Amendment, Virginia led four Southern states in passing reso-
lutions to apologize for slavery. 2 These resolutions constituted a decisive
turnaround from the widespread rejection of a one-sentence slavery apology
resolution proposed at the national level by U.S. Representative Tony Hall a
decade earlier. 3 Apparently, the times had changed. Indeed, the Maryland
resolution claimed, “It is time . . . to acknowledge the role the State played in
maintaining the institution of slavery and its attendant evils.” 4 But how, the
rhetorical analyst must wonder, did it finally become time (kairos) to ac-
knowledge the evils of an institution that ended more than a century ago—
and what are we to make of these collective resolutions of regret? Through
the lens of contemporary apologia theory, such apologies typically are
viewed as devices for damage control or crisis management, responses to the
exigence of a marred public image or degraded reputation—in short, a rheto-
ric of (self-)defense. However, despite the perennial utility and prolific pro-
ductivity of this ever-expanding generic tradition, apologia offers too myop-
ic a view of these resolutions in two respects. First, it assumes a relatively
clear and present crisis of image that requires damage control or defense in
the courts of public opinion; yet no such exigence is apparent in the case of
the state slavery resolutions. Second, apologia per se too readily margi-

153
154 John B. Hatch

nalizes the Other as an ethical end in would-be apologies such as Virginia’s

resolution. Indeed, how can self-defense capture the essence of the recent
slavery resolutions when it was black legislators, in seeking an apology from
their states to African Americans, who introduced most of them? 5 The role of
the Other in generating apologies from the representative body of a state
bespeaks a need to move ethics from the periphery to the center of apologetic
theory and criticism.
With the emergence of public/political reconciliation apologies since the
1990s, such a shift has been underway in the work of a handful of rhetori-
cians, including myself, Jason A. Edwards, Jane W. Yamazaki, Keith M.
Hearit, and others. 6 In this chapter, building upon my research in Race and
Reconciliation, 7 I place ethics at the center of apology analysis by elevating
Other-restoration and relationship-restoration to the same level of importance
as image restoration in apologetic discourse and by applying this threefold
focus to the first state apology for slavery. I begin by acknowledging recent
developments in apologia theory that enlarge its axiological reach and in-
crease its precision for identifying the dynamics at work in public apologies.
I then note how the apologia tradition’s center of gravity—restoring the
image of the apologist or the party represented (the self)—still tends to skew
analysis of reconciliation apologies. To correct this imbalance, I propose a
framework in which (a) the Other (recipient) or the relationship between Self
and Other may be the appropriate and/or actual center of gravity in an apolo-
gy, and (b) rhetorical agency is ever in play among apologists, apologies’
recipients, and the relationship between them. To the extent that the wronged
Other’s need for restoration comes in focus, the balance of critical attention
shifts from effectiveness to ethicality.
With this shift in view, I consider ethical standards for assessing would-
be reconciliation apologies. Particularly salient is what I have called the
tetrad—a set of four constitutive values in reconciliation discourse, which
also serve as rhetorical frames. 8 What gives ethical weight and substance to
such framing values, I argue, is attentiveness to the Other as much as (or
more than) the self and the relationship. Likewise, rhetorical analysis apply-
ing this foursquare ethical grammar of reconciliation to an apology may
achieve greater ethical clarity and depth by attending to the tri-fold aims of
apologetic discourse.
I do just that in a study of the Virginia apology resolution as it evolved
through three versions. My analysis reveals a rhetorical act that bridges apo-
logia and genuine apologizing, partly filling the perspectival gap between the
African American Other and the racially invisible (yet historically white)
collective Self. While Virginia’s apology is imperfect, I conclude that this
bridge from racial apologia to apology made it easier for subsequent state
apologies to fully cross over from image restoration to Other-restoration and
reconciliation.
 Resolutions of Regret 155

ENLARGING THE FRAME, CENTERING ETHICS: FROM

APOLOGIA TO APOLOGY AND RECONCILIATION

Despite important developments in the rhetorical study of apologies, the

most thoroughly developed and influential frameworks still tend to keep the
classical notion of apologia—rhetorical self-defense—at their center, 9 while
adding new strategies (or ethical considerations) to the periphery. For exam-
ple, William Benoit expanded apologia into a theory of image restoration or
image repair, adding accounts strategies and Burkeian mortification to the
toolbox of apologetic discourse while still treating such discourse as image
repair for the individual or collective self. 10 Similarly, Keith Michael Hearit
presents apologizing as one substrategy of apologia and refers to it as one of
“five distinct prototypical stances that company officials make use of to
defend their actions,” 11 despite having noted that “apologies acknowledge
guilt and present the accused as defenseless.” 12 This contradictory account
bespeaks a critical approach caught in transition and not yet fully retooled to
address those contemporary public apologies that are motivated first and
foremost by ethical concern for the Other and/or the social good of a just and
harmonious relationship. Undoubtedly, presenting oneself as defenseless (or,
more to the point, presenting one’s acts as morally indefensible) may serve as
a kind of indirect defense in the long run, yet this rhetorical operation surely
aims more directly to honor the moral code that has been broken, to acknowl-
edge injustice and the harm done to the offended party, to assuage that harm,
and ultimately to promote reconciliation with that party. In other words,
taking responsibility and expressing remorse or regret for hurt caused to the
Other can be an end in itself rather than just a means to some other end; it
may reflect atonement as a goal, rather than mortification as a mere “strate-
gy” (as in Benoit’s theory). 13
Recently, some rhetoricians have countered the tendency to treat all apol-
ogetic discourse as species of apologia centered in the threatened/damaged
image of the individual or collective self. In a study of Japan’s serial apolo-
gies for World War II atrocities, Jane W. Yamazaki concludes that apologia
as traditionally understood cannot adequately account for the success or fail-
ure of apologies that work at “rebuilding fractured relationships and effecting
reconciliation between nations.” 14 Jason A. Edwards proposes a new subgen-
re, “community-focused apologia” (later renamed “collective apology”),
which aims to effect healing between communities divided by past injustice
rather than to restore an image. 15 Similarly, Joy Koesten and Robert C.
Rowland draw upon the Jewish tradition of teshuva (repentance) to propose
the rhetoric of atonement as a “purgative-redemptive” subgenre of apolo-
gia. 16 In my own work, I have suggested that the concept of apologia itself is
too deeply vested in a monologic or self-serving approach to the exigence of
real or alleged wrongdoing to serve as the generic umbrella for all apologetic
156 John B. Hatch

discourse—and that reconciliation, as a dialogic, secondary genre that is

relationship-oriented and Other-directed, is a more fitting lens through which
to examine some apologies. 17
In addition to shifting the focus of apology theory away from self-defense
and self-image repair, some recent studies highlight how rhetorical agency is
at play among apologists and their recipients/respondents. Lisa Storm Villad-
sen argues that representative apologies for collective historical offenses ex-
emplify intersubjective agency through epideictic acts of acknowledgment in
light of societal values that they articulate (and potentially reformulate) in an
effort to repair strained relations. 18 Yamazaki argues that some public apolo-
gies are co-produced in negotiations between apologists and those to whom
they apologize. 19 Taking this line of thinking further, I would add another
player to the mix. As humans co-construct relationships, a kind of subjectiv-
ity and agency inheres in the relationships themselves. For instance, a mar-
riage relationship is subject to the vows, rituals, and patterned interactions
that constitute, respect, shape, and possibly break the marriage; at the same
time, the relationship takes on a patterned life and personality of its own,
constraining each partner’s expression of feelings or desires, perhaps at some
cost to their individual well-being (while potentially enhancing individual
well-being over the long run). Thus, like each party to a relationship, the
relationship itself is both active agent and vulnerable subject that can be
violated or damaged.
To crystallize the conceptual shifts traced above, I propose that apologetic
discourse (broadly conceived) potentially serves any of three equally signifi-
cant aims: (1) restoring the image of the rhetor or the party she or he repre-
sents (the core aim of apologia), (2) restoring the face of the party that has
suffered a violation of right or well-being (the core of genuine apologizing),
and (3) restoring the relationship between these two parties (the essence of
reconciliation). In the long run, these aims are interdependent (e.g., restoring
the face of the Other tends to have positive consequences for one’s own
image and the relationship), and undoubtedly, most apologetic discourse re-
flects mixed motives; yet typically, one of these three entities will prove to be
the center of gravity in a given apology. Furthermore, the rhetorical situation
may render any one of these aims most salient. 20 Perhaps most important, the
ethics of the situation may give priority to a different aim from that which
evidently motivates the rhetor’s apologetic response.
In the case of a massive and egregious violation of human rights, such as
slavery and segregation in the United States, there is a clear ethical burden to
restore due esteem and honor to those who have been deprived of human
dignity and (ab)used as objects, as well as to work for reconciliation so that a
relationship of mutual respect and collaboration for the common good may
come to displace residual master/slave, abuser/abused, and resultant accused/
accuser relations between the parties. Such cases call for apologies that
 Resolutions of Regret 157

thoroughly acknowledge the wrong and its effects, ideally accompanied by

some form of restitution to assuage those harms. Left unredressed, such a
grievous collective wrong leaves behind an ethical exigence far deeper and
more enduring than any image crisis faced by the generation that perpetrated
that wrong.

An Ethical-Critical Framework for Examining

Reconciliation Apologies

The potential shift from Self to Other at the center of apology invites rhetori-
cal critics to shift the balance of attention from ontology (effects) to axiology
(ethics). In Race and Reconciliation, I characterize public reconciliation
apologies as a kind of epideictic performance, enacting and producing re-
deemed character (ethos), restoring integrity between avowed communal val-
ues and actual practices by denigrating the wrongful actions, taking respon-
sibility for them, and paying due respect to those who have been wronged. 21
Thus, the values that need to be restored in practice among the parties to an
apology are the standards against which its strategic rhetorical choices ought
to be measured. Certainly, an “apology” bearing signs that its core aim is
self-defense or restoring the image of the represented party may be read as a
pseudo-apology (apologia masquerading as apology). However, even an
apology that is “genuine” (in its conscious intention) may fall short of that
aim by failing to adequately address one or more value that has been violated
and needs restoration. By what values, then, might recipients of apologies for
egregious offenses judge the adequacy of such apologies as speech acts of
would-be restoration? How should critics assess such apologies?
Hearit and Borden identify the following ethical standards by which to
judge apologetic discourse: truthfulness, sincerity, timeliness, voluntariness,
inclusiveness (addressing all stakeholders), and contextual appropriateness. 22
This list is particularly apropos to Hearit’s focus on crisis management cases.
However, in rhetorical efforts to reconcile groups divided by a historical
legacy of oppressive and dehumanizing actions, other values come into focus
as well. In my study of popular and scholarly reconciliation discourse, I
identified the following “tetrad” of broad, polysemic values (or value-con-
stellations) that recur in tension, controversy, and conversation: truth, agen-
cy, justice, and peace. 23 These appear to be constitutive values—an ethical
grammar of reconciliation—that must together motivate a reconciling apolo-
gy if it is to be fully satisfactory in the long run. 24 Each value pertains
especially to one of four rhetorical thrusts in an historical apology. That is,
recipients expect such apologies to (1) reflect and produce a thoroughly
truthful acknowledgment of history, (2) honor their agency through proper
recognition of their wronged ancestors and acknowledgment of their voices
in the present, (3) offer a just atonement that regrets and corrects old wrongs,
158 John B. Hatch

and (4) reconcile their relationship in a way that engenders substantial peace
(which entails a sense of well-being in community and ultimately depends on
truth, justice, and inclusive agency—as in the Hebrew notion of shalom).
Each of these four values constitutes a desired good (or aim) in reconcili-
ation; each of them may also frame its project rhetorically. Drawing upon the
work of Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye, 25 I have argued that apologies,
forgiveness, and other constituents of reconciliation may be framed realisti-
cally (or “ironically” in Frye’s parlance), romantically, tragically, or com-
ically. 26 While a realistic orientation treats truth about history and present
circumstances as the consummate value to pursue, the romantic sees the
moral exigence of conflict primarily through a desire to promote heroic agen-
cy (the power of free choice and creative action transcending circum-
stances). 27 Moreover, while the tragic frame measures actions against inflex-
ible standards of justice or universal rights that govern human interaction, the
comic apprehends and values a harmonious oneness or interconnectedness of
(human) beings, which belies their misguided enmity and cruelty toward one
another and warrants peace. 28
Although the four value-constellations—truth (factuality, historicity, sin-
cerity, and so on), agency (responsibility, freedom, grace, etc.), justice (fair-
ness, right, law), and peace (unity, harmony, civility, and the like)—frequent-
ly come to be at odds in the wake of a serious violation, on closer examina-
tion, they are interdependent and each intrinsic to the common good in soci-
ety. 29 Ethically coherent apologies, then, should attend to all four values and
be informed by each; reconciliation is as much a project of knitting together
disparately framed narratives as it is a matter of bringing together parties in a
kind of relational healing. 30 For example, reconciliation in the fullest sense
transforms a tragic view of injustice (measured against laws or principles)
into a tragicomic understanding, in which injustice is as much the harming of
concrete persons with whom one is humanly connected as it is a violation of
abstract rights. 31 Like the restorative justice movement, reconciliation re-
places a fixation on offenders’ guilt or innocence and potential punishment
with a focus on victims’ needs for acknowledgment of harm (by offenders)
and negotiated restitution to repair the harm. 32 That being the case, reconcili-
ation calls for an apology that attends to the harms suffered by the offended
party more than an apologia for the damaged or threatened image of the
offenders.
Combining this tetrad of values with the triad of personal/relational en-
tities that an apology may restore, we have a sevenfold set of ends by which
to judge the ethics of a historical, collective apology. It would be more
accurate, however, to combine them multiplicatively, as there are three pri-
mary subjects/agents to which—and from whose perspective—each of the
four values may be applied: self, Other, and relationship. I have previously
gestured in this direction, arguing that the parties to past injuries and con-
 Resolutions of Regret 159

flicts tend to approach the possibility of reconciliation with divergent orienta-

tions. While former victimizers tend to find irresistible both comic correc-
tives (e.g., color-blindness) and romantic framings (fixated on individuals’
agency to transcend the past), victim-survivors typically are weighed down
by memories of all-too-real victimization and goaded by a tragic compulsion
to balance the scales of justice. 33 The heart of reconciliation, then, is the hard
work of reframing the rhetorical situation such that unjust and divisive social
arrangements can be re-formed collaboratively, with the roundness of per-
spective and depth of perception that come from seeing together through
multiple lenses—including the perspective of the Other. 34 On the victim-
survivors’ part, the key to forgiveness is comic-romantic reframing. Having
acknowledged the pain caused by violation and one’s justifiable anger at
injustice, one enters what psychologist Robert D. Enright calls the “work”
phase of forgiveness—learning to see the shared humanity of the offender,
beyond negative differentiations of “evil” or “the enemy”—followed by a
decision to release resentment, in faith that this choice can overcome the
offense and restore one’s damaged agency so as to pursue restorative justice
in collaboration with the offender. 35 Such a reframing process may precede
(and prepare the way for) an apology and reconciliation; conversely, it may
follow from (and be facilitated by) an apology.
If an apology for a heinous collective crime is to foster ethical reconcilia-
tion, it too must demonstrate reframing by representatives of the perpetrating
party: thoroughly acknowledging the truth about the violation (including
responsibility, intentionality, and its deleterious effects on the victims) and
rendering judgment on the deed as a blatant violation of human rights and
relevant values (rather than comically minimizing it as a mistake or romanti-
cally calling for a simple transcendence of past pain). 36 In other words, a
moral apology for an egregious wrong should be both realistically and tragi-
cally inflected, yet without denying the common humanity and shared fate of
the two parties or their capacity to act redemptively in the present for a
different future. The latter are the victim’s prerogative to emphasize, not the
victimizer’s, 37 yet they cannot be gainsaid by either.
In short, reconciliation requires that both offenders and offended parties
attend to the Other (with attendant risks to self-certainty and self-justifica-
tion), even going so far as to see through the Other’s eyes. In the case of
apology, it is by attending to and empathizing with the violated Other that the
apologizing party begins to apprehend the painful truth of what has been
done and the awful weight of its injustice. Such awareness also fosters an
appreciation for whatever agency the victimized party has already displayed
in the face of great obstacles, along with gratefulness for any measure of
restraint, goodwill, and peace making that the victim has displayed toward
the victimizer. Rather than presuming on the victimized party’s transcendent
agency as though it were owed to the apologizing party (e.g., “get over the
160 John B. Hatch

past and move on”; “forgive and forget”), an ethically coherent apology
honors any constructive, conciliatory expressions of agency shown by the
victims/survivors—as a gracious gift. 38 Such recognition provides a kind of
symbolic justice since it restores the intrinsic human dignity of those whose
social dignity was formerly stripped away: it not only acknowledges their
victimization but also recognizes their survival—indeed, their triumph—as
moral agents.

The Other-ing of Apology in State Slavery Resolutions

In this light, we can begin to understand why representatives of the recipients

of proposed legislative apologies—black legislators—would introduce reso-
lutions apologizing for slavery and its legacy. They were not proposing apol-
ogies so that their white colleagues or the legislative bodies as a whole could
restore an image of white innocence or win favor from black constituents.
Rather, as representatives of the Other to whom these apologies would be
directed, the black legislators sought the acknowledgment and recognition
that would do justice to their people’s historical, psychological, economic,
and cultural burden of suffering and, in the process, offer due respect to
blacks as moral agents who survived despite the difficulty of thriving in a
long-racist, and still thoroughly racialized, society. They believed that such
an official acknowledgment in itself would contribute to the healing of their
people and the nation, establish a warrant for attending seriously to blacks’
claims about the lingering economic effects of slavery and racism, and facili-
tate dialogue regarding what redress might be needed to assuage those ef-
fects. 39
With some variations in emphasis, the recent state apologies do focus on
acknowledgment and recognition: acknowledging a historical pattern of hei-
nous actions toward African Americans and recognizing their sufferings,
struggles, survival, and triumph in the face of that history. Regarding the
three parties or entities an apology may aim to restore, the Virginia apology
is a study in contrast with those offered after it in Maryland, North Carolina,
and Alabama—for the Virginia legislature evidently counterbalanced acts of
Other-restoration (for Native Americans and African Americans) with at-
tempts at image restoration (for the state). The resolution celebrates Virgin-
ia’s contributions to the founding of American democracy and the ideals of
human equality and inalienable rights—thereby bolstering its image—nearly
as much as it denigrates its oppressive practices in violation of those hal-
lowed principles; it satisfies white legislators’ desire for societal image resto-
ration in order to leverage the racial acknowledgment and contrition desired
by blacks. The apologies from Maryland and subsequent states, by contrast,
give little or no attention to restoring the image of the state in whose name
 Resolutions of Regret 161

they offer regret, instead focusing almost entirely on a rehearsal of wrongs

done to the Other.
Below, I examine and compare versions of the trailblazer—Virginia’s
resolution—as a case study in the evolution of the slavery apology from the
aim of restoring the Self’s image toward the ethical aim of restoring the
Other. I consider what the Virginia resolution acknowledges, how it frames
this acknowledgment (in terms of the tetrad), and how it speaks of the collec-
tive Self (the state, particularly the white citizens of the past) and Other
(African Americans, to whom acknowledgment is directed).

VIRGINIA’S RESOLUTION AND ITS EVOLUTION

Virginia’s resolution broke through a decade of American resistance to legis-

latively apologizing for slavery. The breakthrough did not come easily, di-
rectly, or completely; the resolution does not directly apologize. It took four
years of behind-the-scenes work for Senator Henry D. Marsh (Democrat
from Richmond) to finally introduce this resolution into the majority-Repub-
lican General Assembly in January of 2007. 40 Delegate A. Donald McEachin
(who, like Marsh, is black) sponsored an identical resolution (HJR 728) in
the House. The proposed resolution stated that the Virginia legislators “here-
by atone” for slavery. 41 In reaction, some legislators seized upon the word
atone, charging that Marsh and McEachin were angling for reparations. After
trying unsuccessfully to assuage these fears, Marsh changed the word to
“acknowledge with contrition.” 42 The Senate unanimously approved this ver-
sion on February 5, 2007, whereupon it was sent to the House. There, it
encountered greater resistance; Republican Delegate John M. O’Bannon III
of the House Committee on Rules thoroughly rewrote the resolution and
offered his amended version as a substitute. 43 Judging the new version to
have preserved at least the core intention of the original, Marsh and McEa-
chin decided to submit it to a conference committee comprising members of
both houses. The conference committee evidently hammered out a very
amenable compromise: Its version won unanimous approval in the House
and Senate on February 24, 2007. 44 Below, I examine that approved version
as an interweaving of variegated and somewhat contradictory rhetorical ac-
tions. In a subsequent section, I compare the final version with the two
versions that preceded it.

The Official, Approved Resolution: Regret

Leveraged by Celebration

The unanimously approved resolution reveals contradictory interests among

Virginia’s legislators, a delicate dance of framing and reframing, and the
negotiated character of reconciliation apologies. It also sets a pattern of re-
162 John B. Hatch

membrance, regret, and resolve, a generic plotline for subsequent apology

resolutions to follow. Before it does either of these things, however, Virgin-
ia’s resolution reveals the need to locate historical apologies in commemora-
tive time, to find occasion for collective regret in a mutually recognized
occasion of remembrance.
Because the apology was not prompted by a clear and present crisis
calling for image restoration through mortification, it required a fulcrum to
leverage its epideictic statement of regret. The Virginia legislature seized
upon such a fixed point in the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of
Jamestown, the state’s and nation’s first permanent English settlement. As
the state was preparing to celebrate this historic origin, it made sense to atone
symbolically for the original sin of race-based slavery and oppression that
was present even there in Jamestown. In Marsh’s original resolution, this
commemorative connection comes almost as an afterthought, buried in a
subordinate construction within the last of eighteen Whereas clauses that
build the case for a resolution of atonement. In the approved version, howev-
er, this celebratory occasion becomes the focus of the first clause: “WHERE-
AS, 2007 marks the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settle-
ment in the Americas, at Jamestown.” 45 Thus, being the first to break
through legislative resistance to apologizing for slavery, Virginia’s resolu-
tion won adequate support only by counterbalancing contrition (the dominant
tenor of Marsh’s version) with celebration (the predominant tendency in
commemorative rhetoric). In other words, it combines tragic and romantic
views of the past.
The tragic frame, as conceptualized by Kenneth Burke, measures human
actions against inflexible moral order—whether natural, supernatural, or so-
cietal—and demands that guilt be expiated through some form of sacrifice,
symbolic or otherwise. 46 The romantic frame, as I have conceptualized it,
highlights heroic agency, valorizing humans’ capacity to transcend circum-
stances and accomplish good. The second clause of the resolution clearly
establishes a romantic frame: “WHEREAS, the legacies of the Jamestown
settlement and the Virginia colony include ideas, institutions, and a history
distinctive to the American experiment in democracy, and a constellation of
liberties enshrined in the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Virginia and
United States Constitutions.” 47 By implication, Virginia’s ethos is that of a
basically good agent, a hero in propagating fundamental American values of
liberty, democracy, and human rights. Reading ahead, we find that the seven-
teenth clause turns the commemorative clock forward to complete the circle
of collective self-regard that romantically frames Virginia’s historical reflec-
tion: “In recent decades, Virginia’s affirmation of the founding ideals of
liberty and equality have [sic] been made evident by providing some of the
nation’s foremost trailblazers for civil rights and electing a grandson of
slaves [former governor Douglas Wilder] to the Commonwealth’s highest
 Resolutions of Regret 163

elective office.” 48 Here Virginia is a heroic agent of liberty and equality, first
by propagating these ideals and then by affirming them in practice. Clearly,
then, image restoration is one of the goals toward which the apology aims. If
the white-supremacist Virginia of bygone days was guilty of crimes against
African Americans, those crimes are a departure from its true self: a leading
agent of liberty and equality.
That the resolution thus uses bolstering as a strategy to restore Virginia’s
image is no news; indeed, it is par for both commemoration and apologia.
Rather, what renders the resolution morally and rhetorically significant is
that the preponderance of its content recalls actions contrary to Virginia’s
espoused ideals and frames these actions in tragic terms as flagrant viola-
tions of universal principles. This is a significant move for a legislative body
addressing its past. While public apology has recently come into vogue in the
United States as a way for individuals and organizations to address their
failures and wrongful actions (as many observers have noted), 49 the domi-
nant individualism and present-future orientation of American culture have
presented a formidable barrier to apologizing for collective actions by past
generations, particularly so historically distant a transgression as slavery.
Virginia partly breaks through this barrier by rendering judgment on its pat-
tern of oppression and discrimination toward African Americans (and Native
Americans, who were added to the resolution after the House received the
Senate-approved version).
Since the second Whereas clause celebrates Virginia’s seminal role in
American democracy, the stage now needs to be set for denigrating Virgin-
ia’s sins. The third clause does this by rehearsing the principles that its most
celebrated son, Thomas Jefferson, is famed for declaring: human equality
and the “‘unalienable rights’” to “‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi-
ness.’” 50 Then, the fourth Whereas clause turns to the tragic truth: “despite
the ‘self-evident’ character of these fundamental principles, the moral stan-
dards of liberty and equality have been transgressed during much of Virgin-
ia’s and America’s history.” The next clause, in turn, names the transgres-
sions (“the maltreatment and exploitation of Native Americans and the im-
moral institution of human slavery”) and characterizes them in tragic terms
as “directly antithetical to and irreconcilable with the fundamental principles
of human equality and freedom.” 51
One would now expect some recounting of these offenses; however, the
resolution here pivots from collective Self (the state of Virginia) to the first
Others who were wronged: Native Americans. Virginia recognizes them as
the first Americans and honors them as agents, over the course of four
Whereas clauses. The resolution recalls their early encounters with the
Jamestown settlers, their kindness in providing them food and then aiding
their survival over the first winter, and later Native American leaders’ dili-
gent efforts “to preserve and protect their heritage, history, and culture,” even
164 John B. Hatch

sending their children to be educated in Oklahoma and Kansas “when public

education was denied” to them in Virginia. 52
After this important digression to recognize the prior presence and endur-
ing agency of Native Americans (a return to the romantic, but this time in
framing the Other), the resolution now turns to the task of acknowledging its
tragic transgressions against them and African Americans (in Whereas
clauses 10–15). In addition to the denial of education mentioned in clause 9,
the resolution here names various legal restrictions Virginia enacted against
Native Americans, including the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which effec-
tively denied the Native American ancestry of people with mixed African
blood. 53 Beginning with the twelfth Whereas, the resolution focuses exclu-
sively on the mistreatment of Africans, starting from the Atlantic slave trade,
which brought millions of them as “involuntary immigrants” 54 to such places
as Jamestown, where the first African slaves of the North American colonies
arrived. Virginia may have led the way in establishing American democracy,
but it also bears the dubious distinction of having pioneered the use of
African slaves in North America. The resolution goes on to acknowledge that
the “Peculiar Institution” was unique among the world’s forms of slavery for
its permanent reduction of humans to chattel, “like inanimate property or
animals.” 55 Clause 14 acknowledges that the nation not only violated its own
espoused values, but also destroyed the moral and cultural ethos of Africans
through brutality, dehumanization, removal of names, elimination of heri-
tage, and destruction of families. The fifteenth Whereas clause squarely
closes the frame of tragic judgment around America’s and Virginia’s legally
sanctioned slavery practices, declaring them “the most horrendous of all
depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our
nation’s history.” 56 The clause does not bring closure to Virginia’s self-
judgment simply at the point where slavery ends; rather, it includes the fact
that “the abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination,
enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward
Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and
racial misunderstanding.” 57
Lest tragic judgment overwhelm Virginia’s capacity to celebrate and reaf-
firm its shared values, the resolution now turns to the possibility of redemp-
tion for a state whose redeeming qualities purportedly persist. Clause 17, as
noted before, cites Virginia’s recent contributions to civil rights (through
individuals who led in this struggle, and through the election of the nation’s
first black governor). But before returning to this larger frame of romantic
commemoration, the General Assembly recognizes that Virginia needs re-
demption, reconciliation, and a decisive, regretful turn from past ways. The
resolution states that “the most abject apology for past wrongs cannot right
them; yet the spirit of true repentance on behalf of a government, and,
through it, a people, can promote reconciliation and healing, and avert the
 Resolutions of Regret 165

repetition of past wrongs and the disregard of manifest injustices.” 58 Note

that repentance here is presented more as a hopeful possibility than as a
heavy obligation; the resolution has turned from judgment toward faith in the
triumphant agency of a fundamentally good society. Indeed, two clauses
further down, the resolution issues an ethically and grammatically conflicted
call:

WHEREAS, the story of Virginia’s Native Americans and the enslavement of

Africans and their descendants, the human carnage, and the dehumanizing
atrocities committed during colonization and slavery, and, moreover, the faith,
perseverance, hope, and endless triumphs of Native Americans and African
Americans and their significant contributions to this Commonwealth and the
nation should be embraced, celebrated, and retold for generations to come. 59

In effect, responsibility for the atrocities is elided through the lack of an

appropriate predicate (e.g., “should be remembered”) after “slavery.” Thus,
the romantic call to celebrate minorities’ virtues and achievements eclipses a
tragic call to sorrowful and contrite remembrance.
If Virginia (as a basically good, if flawed, agent) and its unconquered
minorities are heroes in a historical drama, it nonetheless remains for Virgin-
ia’s leaders (and citizens) to conquer the demons of the past. At the climax of
this morality play, in a tragicomic Act, they resolve to triumph over these
evils: “RESOLVED . . . That the General Assembly hereby acknowledge
with profound regret the involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploita-
tion of Native Americans, and call for reconciliation among all Virgin-
ians.” 60 Citing Jamestown’s four hundredth anniversary, the legislators also
“call upon the people of the Commonwealth to express acknowledgment and
thanksgiving for the contributions of Native Americans and African
Americans to the Commonwealth and this nation, and to the propagation of
the ideals of liberty, justice, and democracy.” 61 If the General Assembly has
clearly displayed an impulse to restore Virginia’s image, it has nonetheless
also acknowledged the mistreatment and sufferings of the Other(s) within its
borders, recognized and appreciated their positive contributions as loyal citi-
zens in the face of this mistreatment, and promoted reconciliation among its
diverse citizenry.
A critic applying Benoit’s widely cited framework might say that the
Virginia apology simply combines two strategies of image restoration—mor-
tification and bolstering. 62 However, the fact that its sponsors were black
Democrats and the fact that the bolstering moves emerged only when a white
Republican wrote a substitute resolution both support my reading of the
apology as a manifestation of differing goals (not strategies) in tension.
Aiming toward (though admittedly not fully attaining) a morally coherent
reconciliation, Virginia’s statement of acknowledgment and regret attends to
the face of the Other as much as it attends to the historical reputation of the
166 John B. Hatch

predominantly white state. Admittedly, it does leave the door wide open to
read this symbolic act, at bottom, as apologia in the service of image restora-
tion. It would be more precise, however, to characterize the resolution as
embodying a rhetorical dance of deferral that its African American sponsors
found necessary to disarm white colleagues’ resistance and edge Virginia
toward becoming the first state to officially apologize (in some form) for
slavery.
Yamazaki contends that apologies aimed at reconciliation require negoti-
ation among apologists and recipients. 63 Villadsen shows that rhetorical
agency in representative apologies is problematized by the uncertainty and
complexity of audience mandate among those represented. 64 Virginia’s slav-
ery resolution exhibits both complications. The General Assembly purport-
edly represents all of Virginia’s citizens; through its black and other minority
members, it represents diverse peoples as well. It was the white majority of
the past that perpetrated atrocities against Virginia’s politically and socially
disempowered minorities; it is their descendents, if anyone, who should ten-
der an apology. Yet white representatives’ agency to speak on direct behalf
of those descendants is diluted by the large numbers of white constituents
who disclaim collective or trans-generational responsibility, particularly
those whose ancestors immigrated after abolition or even after segregation.
Nonetheless, the General Assembly itself can coherently apologize to
African Americans (and Native Americans), for it was the laws of Virginia
that kept race-based slavery and segregation in force; the Virginia govern-
ment, and especially its legislature, is an enduring body that bears definitive
responsibility for the oppressions of the past. Yet that Assembly now consists
of blacks as well as whites, and it was blacks who introduced the apology
resolution into the Senate and House (potent support for Yamazaki’s claim
that an apology’s recipient may, in fact, act as its “co-producer”). 65
That is why this resolution cannot be treated primarily as image-restora-
tion rhetoric. While it does incorporate image restoration for the tacit white
majority (the collective political agent of Virginia’s past oppressions), it also
embodies a distinct, irreducible aim toward recognition of, and reconciliation
with, the Other who was oppressed. Like the Truth and Reconciliation Com-
mission in South Africa, 66 Virginia’s apology resolution is a product of polit-
ical compromise, expressing ugly truths and seeking to promote reconcilia-
tion while still making concessions to a white majority. Below, I examine
that compromise more closely, albeit indirectly, by comparing the final ver-
sion of the resolution (discussed above) with the original Senate-approved
version (submitted by Senator Marsh) and the substitute version written by
Representative O’Bannon for the House.
 Resolutions of Regret 167

Negotiating Celebration, Remembrance,

Regret, and Reconciliation

In Race and Reconciliation, I proposed that an ethically coherent reconcilia-

tion apology would incorporate all four elements of the tetrad—truth, agen-
cy, peace (or unity or harmony), and justice—and disclose their interdepen-
dence, implicitly at least. Typically, one or more of these will serve as a tacit
framing device (realistic, romantic, comic, or tragic, respectively) for other
values, yet reconciliation brings forth frame-changes and frame-combina-
tions as parties seek to incorporate the Other’s perspective and see the matter
whole, with depth perception (e.g., tragicomically). To further complicate
matters, where agency is concerned, one must ask whose agency: that of the
purportedly repentant party, of the apology’s recipient, or of some other
party? The difference matters, in that proper recognition of agency, with
accompanying dignity and respect, is a form of justice. There is justice in
regarding the victims as superior moral agents vis-à-vis the offenders’ ac-
tions; there is justice in taking responsibility for having committed offenses
and for repairing the damage caused; there is justice in giving victims pride
of place and voice for determining the necessary reparative actions and de-
ciding whether to extend or withhold forgiveness. With this standard of
Other-ing in mind, let us compare the differing versions of the Virginia
apology.
First, all three versions of the apology resolution do incorporate all four
elements of the tetrad. All the versions, moreover, devote the greatest propor-
tion of content to reciting historical truths; they seek above all to remember
and acknowledge a checkered past in a realistic frame. They also give the
least amount of attention to peace, unity, or reconciliation among Virginia’s
diverse peoples. In all three versions, reconciliation appears toward the end,
named as a hoped-for outcome of acknowledging Virginia’s transgressions
and recognizing the contributions of those against whom the state trans-
gressed. O’Bannon’s amended substitute version and the final version do
allude to reconciliation near the beginning when they speak of the Common-
wealth and nation as continuing to strive toward the “‘more perfect union’
that is the aspiration of our national identity and charter” and refer to the
Declaration of Independence as “the foremost expression of the ideals that
bind us together as a people.” 67 Note, however, that it is ideals, truths, and
rights that here bind Virginians and Americans together; these are the prov-
ince of justice and the tragic frame (as opposed to a common soul or spirit,
interdependence, or mutuality—emblems of the comic). All three versions
highlight the impartial standards of justice embodied in the founding docu-
ments (the original version doing so the least) and devote much attention to
the injustices of slavery and other oppressive practices in Virginia’s history
as measured against those standards. Where slavery, segregation, and dis-
168 John B. Hatch

crimination are concerned, little or no attempt is made to minimize or excuse

these injustices.
Yet the three versions portray the truths of history somewhat differently,
both in their value framing and the ways in which they attend to Virginia’s
racial Other. The original version consists of a long litany (some thirteen
Whereas clauses) of abuses perpetrated against Americans of African de-
scent; the frame is realistic, a rehearsal of history, yet with strong tragic
overtones carried by phrases such as “brutalized, humiliated, dehumanized,”
“virulent and rabid racism, lynchings, disenfranchisement,” “legally sanc-
tioned deprivation of African Americans of their endowed rights,” “the worst
holocaust of humankind,” and so forth. 68 Somewhat surprisingly, this tale of
racial terror submerges agency, both black and white. History happened;
horrific brutalities happened; a black holocaust happened. Africans and, lat-
er, African Americans are repeatedly acted upon, yet the perpetrators of these
violations are never identified. This version, drafted by a black man, thus
elides the historical bond between whiteness, the “Peculiar Institution,” and
segregation. Moreover, it relies almost solely upon agentless predicates, with
Virginia and the United States appearing less as the villains of slavery’s
tragic drama than as its stage. Evidently, it exemplifies the dance of deferral
that the marginalized Other so often finds necessary to gain acceptance or
maintain influence in the halls of power.
Not surprisingly, the subsequent versions of Virginia’s resolution main-
tain this deflection of attention from the agents of slavery and racist discrimi-
nation. Moreover, unlike the original resolution, which thoroughly frames
the past as a tragic history (with African Americans as the victims and
Virginia and the United States as the scene), the later versions somewhat
problematically bring the romantic frame to bear on the past as well:
O’Bannon’s House-amended version and the final version add clauses in
which Virginia is an active agent of good. On the other hand, these two
versions rightly portray African Americans both as victims of and as victors
over oppression, more than the original does. The House amended version
includes this recognition early on, in the third Whereas clause:

despite the acute hardship, conflict, cruelty, and oppression that characterized
those first encounters and interactions, Virginians of native, European, and
African descent persevered and made indispensible contributions to the survi-
val of the colony, the founding of our good Commonwealth and nation, and
the forging of our national character and culture. 69

While inclusion of racial Others in the commemoration of heroic agency may

be taken as a kind of other-ing, this romantic treatment of all the parties
erases any tragic distinction between white oppressors and oppressed people
of color by means of a construction rendering “hardship, conflict, cruelty and
 Resolutions of Regret 169

oppression” as a common plight, with no particular perpetrators in view. 70

The clause preceding it cites “the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity that has
uniquely defined America;” 71 together, the two clauses establish a comic
vision of underlying kinship belying any real distinction between villains and
victims. 72 That comic orientation in the O’Bannon version returns at the
conclusion of the Whereas section and the beginning of the Resolved section:
Three clauses in a row each contain the word diverse or diversity as well as
contributions or achievement of the diverse peoples cited.
O’Bannon’s amended version, then, romantically-comically contains the
damning truths found in its middle section. The cancer of slavery and racism
are present in Virginia’s history, but they are removable tumors, not a metas-
tasizing growth that infects the entire body politic. Virginia, with its comical-
ly intermingled, diverse peoples, is an agent of good; the cruel cancer of
slavery and racism is an impersonal and removable evil. In the second Re-
solved clause, this version does acknowledge and express regret for Virgin-
ia’s “role in sanctioning the immoral institution of human slavery, in the
historic wrongs visited upon native peoples, and in all other forms of dis-
crimination and injustice” but softens the force of the acknowledgment by
characterizing these wrongs as “rooted in racial and cultural bias and mis-
understanding.” 73 Here, the comic (which treats misdeeds as a product of
error, especially of misunderstanding) 74 ameliorates the tragic. While such
frame-combining is a positive development in reconciliation as a whole,
within an apology it suggests a hedging of acknowledgment vis-à-vis the
Other.
Undoubtedly, that is why the final version, which draws upon both earlier
versions, omits these comic portrayals of harmonious diversity as well as
references to errors and misunderstandings being the root of Virginia’s trans-
gressions. The final version exhibits less romantic-comic bolstering, instead
allowing its tragic appraisals of past actions to stand more stark and uncon-
tained. Certainly, its vision is not as bitterly tragic and backward looking as
the original. In Marsh and McEachin’s version, African Americans find “the
struggle to overcome the bitter legacy of slavery long and arduous, and for
many African Americans the scars left behind are unbearable, haunting their
psyches and clouding their vision of the future and of America’s many attrib-
utes.” 75 The original version thus presents victims’ perspective (and implies
that this vision may be overly clouded with the pain of the past). The final
version, however, incorporates a victorious survivor view, in which Native
Americans and African Americans implicitly see some of the fruits of their
labor, as agents of their own and society’s well-being. In this way, the Oth-
er’s perspective is partly co-opted—refocused on triumph over adversity—so
that the state’s image may be seen in a better light.
The latter version also omits the original version’s expressed concern that
there is a widespread impulse to deny the history of slavery or responsibility
170 John B. Hatch

for it. In its twelfth Whereas clause, Marsh and McEachin’s version accus-
ingly laments:

WHEREAS, acknowledgment of the crimes and persecution visited upon oth-

er peoples during World War II is embraced lest the world forget, yet the very
mention of the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” to former slaves or the
existence of racism today evokes denial from many quarters of any respon-
sibility for the centuries of legally sanctioned deprivation of African
Americans of their endowed rights or for contemporary policies that perpetu-
ate the status quo. 76

Furthermore, in its sixteenth Whereas clause, the original version warns that
“the story of the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, the human
carnage, and the dehumanizing atrocities committed during slavery should
not be purged from Virginia’s history or discounted.” 77 Thus, the original
thoroughly conveys a victim’s passion for truth, acknowledgment, and ac-
countability on the part of the perpetrator, as well as the fear that the heirs of
past oppression would gladly forget or deny the history of their wrongdoing
in a comic-romantic rush to a guilt-free future unhindered by debts from the
past. (This concern proved to be justified, as Delegate Frank Hargrove re-
sponded to the proposed resolution by saying that blacks needed to “get
over” slavery.) 78 By contrast, the final version—a product of negotiation
between those who do prefer to leave the past behind and those whose vision
is fixed on it (as well as legislators at points in between)—heads off these
accusations and warnings by simply doing the right thing: acknowledging
“with profound regret” the wrongs of the past and calling for ongoing re-
membrance both of the “dehumanizing atrocities” and the definitively human
contributions made by those who were so oppressed. 79
At the same time that the legislators “do the right thing” in this regard,
their resolution thoroughly dilutes a significant implication of Marsh and
McEachin’s version: a need for reparation to the descendants of African
American slaves (i.e., material restoration for the Other). Without calling for
reparation directly, the original version establishes warrants for it by citing
the economics of slavery and racism and their effects up to the present: “The
Atlantic slave trade was a lucrative enterprise, and African slaves, a prized
commodity to support the economic base of plantations in the colonies;”
“after emancipation . . . African Americans soon saw the political, social, and
economic gains they made during Reconstruction dissipated by virulent and
rabid racism;” and “the vestiges of slavery are ever before African American
citizens.” 80 We have seen that this version refers to the broken promise of
“40 acres and a mule” and originally stated that Virginia’s legislators “hereby
atone for” slavery (a word taken by opponents to signify reparation). 81 The
potential demand for reparations is the specter that has haunted slavery apol-
ogies ever since Tony Hall introduced his resolution in 1997 and President
 Resolutions of Regret 171

Clinton decided not to issue a presidential apology for slavery. 82 Fear of

reparations demands pushed Virginia’s resolution back from expressing
atonement to acknowledging “with contrition,” and O’Bannon’s substitute
version very pointedly added that “even the most abject apology for past
wrongs cannot right them, nor can it justly impute fault or responsibility to
succeeding generations or justify the imposition of new benefits or bur-
dens” 83 —a clear reference to reparations. While this disclaimer was struck
from the final version, the resolution still achieved passage only by softening
“contrition” to “profound regret.” 84
While all three versions acknowledge the state’s historical transgressions
against African Americans, challenge Virginians to retell and celebrate
African Americans’ significant contributions, and call for reconciliation
among all Virginians, it is only the original, offered by African American
representatives, that cites “the perpetual pain, distrust, and bitterness of many
African Americans,” 85 which could be “assuaged” by this acknowledgment.
Only the original clearly implies that the psychological, cultural, and eco-
nomic legacy of history is so powerful as to merit material efforts to amelio-
rate its impacts. Atone is a tragic word, suggesting sacrifice or payment to
purge away sin; regret, however, can align with the comic as well as the
tragic, potentially expressing empathy for another’s suffering without hold-
ing oneself answerable for causing (and now removing) it. This change in
framing persuaded opponents of the resolution to support it. Their most vocal
member, Delegate Hargrove, explained his turnaround by saying that the
final version expressed regret “without apologizing for anything.” 86 Thus,
the apology does not actually apologize, and the resolution defers any war-
rant for reparation.

CONCLUSION: CROSSING OVER FROM IMAGE

RESTORATION TO OTHER-RESTORATION

With its “profound regret,” Virginia’s resolution does a delicate tragicomic

dance toward healing without fully taking responsibility for the wounds. The
perspective, voice, and material need of the wronged Other are incorporated
yet muted; the much-needed Other-ing of apology is left incomplete. Yet
Virginia’s unanimous acknowledgment of wrongdoing was a sufficient move
in the right direction to win the public approbation of its black sponsors in
both houses. Marsh observed that it incorporated “the best features of both”
the House and Senate resolutions, and McEachin stated that he was “very
happy with it,” adding that “‘Missouri and Maryland may be nipping at our
heels, but we’re No. 1’” among the states in apologizing for slavery. 87 In-
deed, while Virginia legislators were hashing out their resolution, officials in
172 John B. Hatch

Mississippi and the National Council of State Legislatures had contacted

them to learn from their experience.
Besides being the first resolution to express acknowledgment and regret
for a state’s role in slavery and subsequent racism, Virginia’s rhetorical
response to the legacy of slavery and racism is significant in that it estab-
lished a bridge from apologia (image restoration) to apology and reconcilia-
tion (attending to the Other and promoting healing) and from self-celebratory
commemoration to regretful remembrance. Being the first to cross that Jor-
dan, it bridged the two sides by combining its black sponsors’ constructions
of tragic and contrite remembrance with white representatives’ reconstruc-
tions of such remembrance and their proposed expressions of admiration for
the state’s legacy of leadership, diversity, and founding ideals—while muting
racial responsibility for slavery and its legacy. Virginia’s apology also com-
bined a moral occasion for regret with a commemorative occasion to remem-
ber, relying upon the latter—the four hundredth anniversary of Jamestown—
to warrant an apology now for slavery.
Thus, regarding the question of how (at long last) it became “time to
apologize,” one answer is that the Virginia General Assembly found a way to
lend substance and gravity to such belated apologizing: It inscribed a new,
grave epitaphios 88 for Virginia’s ancestors onto a commemorative mile
marker. Commemoration is a rite that cycles through its own liturgical calen-
dar, ever renewed by the perpetual need and desire to ground and justify
present identities and values in a celebrated, foundational past. Likewise, the
deepest moral principles—among them, the right to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness—are widely believed to transcend particular historical
times. The Virginia resolution renews commitment to these principles as it
decries their egregious violation through four centuries of its history. Thus, it
is able to celebrate the state’s original declarations of these principles while
expressing regret for its “original sin” of transgressing them from the begin-
ning. In this form—the product of compromise hammered out in conference
committee—Virginia’s resolution gained passage and became a bridge to
facilitate other states’ passage from denying/neglecting slavery’s legacy to
officially remembering and regretting that legacy. 89 Indeed, the unifying
phrase that emerged from Virginia’s negotiations—profound regret—be-
came the common watchword of the apologies to follow.
To their credit, those states that followed in Virginia’s footsteps evidently
left image restoration behind, building their monuments of contrition and
their memorials to suffering/triumphant African Americans “on the Other
side,” firmly grounded in the call to acknowledge harm done to (and recog-
nize the agency of) the Other and to promote reconciliation through a respect
for cultural differences and common human rights. Maryland, North Caroli-
na, and Alabama found no occasion to praise their heritage; rather, the heavy
weight of history, the gravity of slavery, and subsequent discrimination
 Resolutions of Regret 173

against black people occupied their full attention and buried any impulse to
bolster the state’s image by praising its ideals or its achievements in propa-
gating those ideals. Thus, their resolutions are purer exemplars of the collec-
tive, historical reconciliation apology. 90 For instance, rather than tying the
timing of its acknowledgment to a commemorative occasion, the Maryland
resolution simply states that “it is time” to acknowledge its role in slav-
ery 91—implying that it is high time to attend to the yawning gap between its
espoused values and its historical practices. The North Carolina and Alabama
apologies not only retain this relative purity of focus and aim but also greatly
magnify the historical litany of slavery and its legacy, describing both in
much greater detail. North Carolina even broaches the A-word, daring to say
that it apologizes to African Americans, literally.
These facts, I would argue, indicate a de facto shift from image restora-
tion to Other restoration as the primary task—the center of gravity—of the
slavery apology. Before the pendulum of a state’s epideictic discourse on
race can come to a relative rest at reconciliation between parties, it must
swing from self-regarding commemoration to Other-regarding acknowledg-
ment. Apologizing is a necessary, but not sufficient, element in this discourse
of reconciliation. Its effectuality for reconciliation depends on an ongoing
willingness to engage the Other in meaningful dialogue concerning further
acknowledgments that may be needed, reparations that would most meaning-
fully lend substance to the apology and redress the injustice, 92 and conditions
that may facilitate forgiveness. In response to the successful passage of the
Maryland resolution he sponsored, Senator Nathaniel Exum spoke of his
desire to promote racial reconciliation and commented: “‘I hope this leads to
some dialogue, because that’s what we really need.’” 93 When Florida issued
its own slavery apology early in 2008, its white Republican governor, Char-
lie Crist, made a more daring (and surprising) comment—suggesting that his
state should consider offering reparations to African Americans. 94 Both of
these statements indicate awareness that an apology is only one move in a
negotiated, open process of healing and restoration. Apologies go awry, how-
ever, when they present reconciliation as a virtually foregone conclusion. As
we have seen, the House Committee version of Virginia’s apology almost
assumed reconciliation by presenting a comic portrayal of multicultural to-
getherness (and shared suffering/oppression) at Jamestown. The final resolu-
tion emerged as a compromise between this version (grounded in a misty
myth of origins) and the original version, which recounted the original sin of
slavery in stark historical detail.
Nonetheless, just as Virginia bears the distinction of being the first Eng-
lish colony, with the first permanent English settlement in North America, it
also gained the distinction of being the first state to apologize for slavery. In
that sense, Virginia’s resolution may be the most important apology for
slavery in the United States 95—capturing and combining America’s dispar-
174 John B. Hatch

ate racial perspectives, as well as regathering fragmented moral impulses

(toward historical truthfulness, future-directed agency, the distinctions of jus-
tice, and the harmonies of peace) into a larger ethical whole. Virginia paved
the way for others to express thorough contrition for race-based slavery and
discrimination. Likewise, this chapter’s analysis of the Virginia resolution
paves the way for examining subsequent slavery apologies primarily through
the lens (and by the standards) of Other-restoration and reconciliation rather
than image restoration.
Inevitably, image management is ever in play, yet it need not be the
predominant aim of an apology, nor should it automatically be regarded as
such by rhetorical critics. Surely, reconciliation apologies for such heinous
crimes as slavery should not be reduced (by rhetors or critics) to means of
image restoration. They are restorative, yes, but it is restorative justice they
should seek—and justice requires that the victims, who were devalued and
dehumanized, become the focus of recognition, respect, and restoration. The
prerogative to accept an apology (or not) is theirs; only they have the right to
decide whether to extend forgiveness; the call to reconciliation must recog-
nize their essential standing in the community and their contribution to its
common good. Rhetoric works to (re)constitute community, and a commu-
nity of ethical coherence can only be restored to the extent that the victims in
its midst—the Others—are restored. That is, or should be, one of the irredu-
cible aims of apology.

NOTES

1. Acknowledging with Profound Regret the Involuntary Servitude of Africans and the
Exploitation of Native Americans, and Calling for Reconciliation among All Virginians, S J
Res. 332 [ER], 2007 Va. Gen. Assem., leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?071+ful+
SJ332ER.
2. The other states that passed resolutions in 2007 are Maryland, North Carolina, and
Alabama. Arkansas’s Legislative Council, which oversees state government between legisla-
tive sessions, also passed a resolution.
3. See John B. Hatch, “Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in
the Rhetoric of Race Relations,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (2003).
4. A Senate Joint Resolution Concerning Slavery in Maryland, S J Res. 6, 2007 Md. Gen.
Assem., mgaleg.maryland.gov.
5. North Carolina was an exception in that a prominent white legislator (Senate Majority
Leader Tony Rand) introduced its resolution. See Lynn Bonner and Benjamin Niolet, “Senator
Proposes Slavery Apology; Rands Resolution Gains Swift Support,” News & Observer, April
4, 2007, A1.
6. John B. Hatch, “Beyond Apologia: Racial Reconciliation and Apologies for Slavery,”
Western Journal of Communication 70 (2006); Jason A. Edwards, “Community-Focused Apo-
logia in International Affairs: Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's Apology,” Ho-
ward Journal of Communications 16 (2005); Jason A. Edwards, “Apologizing for the Past for a
Better Future: Collective Apologies in the United States, Australia, and Canada,” Southern
Communication Journal 17 (2010); Jane W. Yamazaki, “Crafting the Apology: Japanese Apol-
ogies to South Korea in 1990,” Asian Journal of Communication 14 (2004); Keith Michael
 Resolutions of Regret 175

Hearit, Crisis Management by Apology: Corporate Response to Allegations of Wrongdoing

(New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006).
7. John B. Hatch, Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice (Lanham, MD:
Lexington, 2008).
8. Ibid.
9. B. L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves: On the
Generic Criticism of Apologia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973).
10. While Benoit originally proposed a theory of image restoration, he subsequently shifted
to a language of image repair since the former term inaccurately suggests a return to an original
state (when in fact an image is always somewhat changed by undergoing damage and discur-
sive efforts to repair that damage). See William L. Benoit, Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies: A
Theory of Image Restoration Strategies, SUNY Series in Speech Communication (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995); William L. Benoit, “Another Visit to the Theory of
Image Restoration Strategies,” Communication Quarterly 48 (2000).
11. Hearit, Crisis Management by Apology, 15. Emphasis added.
12. Ibid., 4. Emphasis added.
13. Benoit, Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies.
14. Jane W. Yamazaki, “The Failure of Japanese Apologies for World War II,” Internation-
al and Intercultural Communication Annual 27 (2004), 169.
15. Edwards, “Community-Focused Apologia”; Edwards, “Apologizing for the Past.”
16. Joy Koesten and Robert C. Rowland, “The Rhetoric of Atonement,” Communication
Studies 55 (2004), 84, 69.
17. See Hatch, “Beyond Apologia.”
18. Lisa Storm Villadsen, “Speaking on Behalf of Others: Rhetorical Agency and Epideictic
Functions in Official Apologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 (2008), 43.
19. Yamazaki, “Crafting the Apology,” 168.
20. For example, if a corporation has been wrongly accused of negligence leading to harm
and its relationship with key publics has been damaged, the most appropriate response (and
best means to reconciliation with those publics) may be an apologia—defense—that reveals the
falsity of the kategoria. See Halford R. Ryan, “Kategoria and Apologia: On Their Rhetorical
Criticism as a Speech Set,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982).
21. Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 93–94.
22. Hearit, Crisis Management by Apology, 64. (This chapter is coauthored by Sandra Bor-
den.)
23. Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 136–47.
24. While Kenneth Burke’s pentad (scene, act, agent, agency, purpose) is an ontological
grammar of human motivation, the tetrad is a parallel axiological grammar of motivation. I
have shown that the project of reconciliation discloses the interdependence of these values and
gives rise to terms such as restorative justice and restorative truth, which attempt to capture the
fullness or roundness of its ethical aim. See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1969); Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 136–41.
25. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History, 3d ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1957).
26. Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 145–49. If one approaches Frye through the terministic
screen of Burkean dramatism—viewing literature as a stock of orientations to life—one may
reasonably suppose that, along with the comic and tragic frames so thoroughly explored and
explicated by Burke, “ironic frame” and “romantic frame” represent definitive and significant
orientations to human existence and public discourse. However, the term “realistic frame” may
be more serviceable here than “ironic frame,” especially given the much broader and fuller
sense of the term irony in Burke. See Burke, Grammar, 511–17.
27. My conception of the romantic frame (in light of reconciliation) differs from that pro-
posed by Camille Lewis to account for fundamentalist Christian rhetoric. On the other hand, it
comports with Rowland and Jones’s analysis of Obama’s DNC keynote address as romantic.
See Camille K. Lewis, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and
the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism, Studies in Rhetoric and Religion (Waco, TX: Bay-
176 John B. Hatch

lor University Press, 2007); Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “Recasting the American
Dream and American Politics: Barack Obama’s Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic
National Convention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007).
28. See Burke, Attitudes, 4–5, 37–43, 166–75; Barry Brummett, “Burkean Comedy and
Tragedy, Illustrated in Reactions to the Arrest of John Delorean,” Central States Speech Jour-
nal 35 (1984).
29. See Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 136–41.
30. Ibid.
31. Hatch, “Reconciliation.”
32. For a brief explication of the concept of restorative justice by one of its seminal theo-
rists, see Howard Zehr, “Restorative Justice: The Concept,” Corrections Today, December
1997. For a more in-depth examination, see Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: A New Focus for
Crime and Justice (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1990). The work of South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission was premised on restorative justice principles: see Elizabeth Kiss,
“Moral Ambition within and Beyond Political Constraints: Reflections on Restorative Justice,”
in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis
Thompson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
33. Hatch, Race and Reconciliation, 153–54. For a detailed discussion of the social-psycho-
logical effects of victimization and how they influence perceptions of ethical exigencies in
reconciliation, see also pp. 95–98.
34. Ibid.
35. Robert D. Enright, Suzanne Freedman, and Julio Rique, “The Psychology of Interper-
sonal Forgiveness,” in Exploring Forgiveness, ed. Robert D. Enright and Joanna North (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 53–54.
36. For an outstanding treatment of what makes for morally coherent and effective (victim-
healing and relationship-reconciling) apologies, see Aaron Lazare, On Apology (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
37. In other words, forgiveness is a choice that victims may make when they are ready, a
choice that should be healing and empowering for the victim; it is a gift, not an obligation owed
to an offender (even if the offender is repentant). See Robert D. Enright, Forgiveness Is a
Choice: A Step-by-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope (Washington, DC:
APA LifeTools, 2001); Everett L. Worthington Jr., “The Pyramid Model of Forgiveness: Some
Interdisciplinary Speculations about Unforgiveness and the Promotion of Forgiveness,” in
Dimensions of Forgiveness: Psychological Research & Theological Perspectives, ed. Everett
L. Worthington Jr. (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 1998).
38. Such honoring is richly exemplified in Hall’s 1999 apology for slavery in West Africa;
see Hatch, “Beyond Apologia.”
39. For example, after the passage of Maryland’s apology, its black sponsor, Senator Na-
thaniel Exum said, “‘I hope this leads to some dialogue, because that’s what we really need. . . .
This is just a start.’” On introducing the resolution, Exum had admitted that he would have
preferred to pursue reparations, but was “being practical” given the unpopularity of the idea.
Kelly Brewington, “‘Profound Regret’: House of Delegates Passes Resolution Acknowledging
State’s Part in Slavery,” Baltimore Sun, March 27, 2007; Jill Rosen, “Slavery: African-
Americans in Maryland and Elsewhere Are Seeking a Formal Apology for Its Painful Legacy,”
Baltimore Sun, February 25, 2007: F1.
40. Atoning for the Involuntary Servitude of Africans and Calling for Reconciliation among
All Virginians, S J Res. 332, 2007 Va. Gen. Assem., leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?071+
ful+SJ332; Jenny Jarvie, “Formal Slavery Apologies Debated,” Los Angeles Times, March 19,
2007: A7.
41. Atoning for the Involuntary Servitude.
42. Tyler Whitley, “Slavery Apology Language Altered: ‘Contrition’ Replaces ‘Atone’;
Potential for Reparations Is Issue,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 30, 2007.
43. Acknowledging the Contributions of Varied Races and Cultures to the Character of the
Commonwealth of Virginia, and Expressing Profound Regret for Slavery and Other Historic
Wrongs, S J Res. 332 [H1]: Amendment in the nature of a substitute, 2007 Va. Gen. Assem.,
leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?071+ful+SJ332H1.
 Resolutions of Regret 177

44. Acknowledging with Profound Regret.

45. Ibid.
46. Although he seldom uses the term “tragic frame” per se, Burke explicates tragedy as an
orientation or principle across numerous works. See Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change:
An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 195–97,
274–94; Burke, Attitudes, 37–39; Burke, Grammar, 38–41; Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion:
Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 4–5, 172–272.
47. Acknowledging with Profound Regret.
48. Ibid.
49. See for example Roy L. Brooks, “The Age of Apology,” in When Sorry Isn't Enough:
The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks
(New York: New York University Press, 1999); Hearit, Crisis Management by Apology, La-
zare, On Apology.
50. Acknowledging with Profound Regret. (Internal quotations from the Declaration of
Independence).
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid. As the resolution explains, the Racial Integrity Act “institutionalized the one drop
rule”; moreover, it “required a racial description of every person to be recorded at birth and
banned interracial marriages, effectively rendering Native Americans with African ancestry
extinct.” The resolution elaborates: “these policies have destroyed the ability of many of Vir-
ginia’s indigenous people to prove continuous existence in order to gain federal recognition and
the benefits such recognition confers.”
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Benoit, Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies, 95.
63. Yamazaki, “Crafting the Apology.”
64. Villadsen, “Speaking on Behalf of Others.”
65. Yamazaki, “Crafting the Apology,” 168.
66. For an outstanding rhetorical analysis of how reconciliation figured in that process, see
Erik Doxtader, “Making Rhetorical History in a Time of Transition: The Occasion, Constitu-
tion, and Representation of South African Reconciliation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4 (2001).
67. Acknowledging the Contributions; Acknowledging with Profound Regret.
68. Atoning for the Involuntary Servitude.
69. Acknowledging the Contributions.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. As conceptualized by Burke, the comic frame views human agents with humble irony,
highlighting the underlying consubstantiality, interdependence, and interconnectedness they so
often fail to recognize across their dividing lines. Compared with the tragedy, comedy takes
violations (of taboos, rights, and laws) more lightly, treating them as correctible errors rooted in
misrecognition rather than punishable sins rooted in evil. See Burke, Attitudes, 39–44, 166–75;
Burke, Grammar, 511–14.
73. Acknowledging the Contributions.
74. See Burke, Attitudes toward History, 4–5; Brummett, “Burkean Comedy and Tragedy.”
75. Atoning for the Involuntary Servitude.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Bob Gibson, “Slavery Resolution Rewritten: Committee Passes Statement of ‘Regret,’”
Clover Herald, February 1, 2007.
178 John B. Hatch

79. Acknowledging with Profound Regret.

80. Atoning for the Involuntary Servitude.
81. Ibid.
82. “Clinton Opposes Slavery Apology,” in When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over
Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York
University Press, 1999), 352.
83. Acknowledging the Contributions.
84. Acknowledging with Profound Regret.
85. Atoning for the Involuntary Servitude.
86. Hargrove also noted that the resolution “expresses the sentiment of most Virginians and
probably most Americans, so I voted for it.” Gibson, “Slavery Resolution Rewritten.”
87. Bob Gibson, “Lawmakers Pass Roads, Slavery Bills,’” Daily Progress, February 5,
2007.
88. For a treatment of the classical genre of epitaphios, see Edward Schiappa, Beginnings of
Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
89. For example, North Carolina Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand cited Virginia’s exam-
ple as the inspiration for introducing his state’s resolution, and Alabama largely copied the
original Virginia resolution. Bonner and Niolet, “Senator Proposes Slavery Apology”; Phillip
Rawls, “Riley Says He Would Sign Slavery Apology,” Associated Press State & Local Wire,
April 21, 2007: A1.
90. For the texts of these resolutions, see A Senate Joint Resolution Concerning Slavery in
Maryland; A Joint Resolution Expressing the Profound Regret of the North Carolina General
Assembly for the History of Wrongs Inflicted Upon Black Citizens, S J Res. 1557, 2007
session, www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2007/Bills/Senate/HTML/S1557v3.html; Apologizing for the
Wrongs of Slavery; Expressing Profound Regret for Alabama’s Role in Slavery; and Express-
ing Intent That This Resolution Shall Not Be Used in, or Be the Basis of, Any Type of
Litigation, H J Res. 321, 2007 Ala. Legis., www.legislature.state.al.us/Searchableinstruments/
2007RS/Resolutions/HJR321.htm.
91. A Senate Joint Resolution Concerning Slavery in Maryland.
92. Seen through the restorative justice paradigm, reparation or restitution is about collabo-
ratively and creatively finding a way to restore the well-being of victims, the community, and
(in the process) offenders, rather than strict legal compensation. While the most recent state
apology resolutions combine a direct apology with a disclaimer against being a basis for
lawsuits, some key advocates of reparations to African Americans no longer see the issue
through the tort model, viewing it rather as a matter for legislatures to propose and negotiate,
with the public good (rather than legal defense) in view. See Apologizing for the Wrongs of
Slavery; A Concurrent Resolution Apologizing for the Wrongs of Slavery and Expressing New
Jersey’s Profound Regret for Its Role in Slavery, ACR270, 212th Legis., www.njleg.state.nj.us/
2006/Bills/ACR/270_I1.HTM; Roy L. Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for
Black Reparations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Alfred L. Brophy, Repara-
tions: Pro & Con (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
93. Brewington, “Profound Regret.”
94. Josh Hafenbrack and John Kennedy, “Florida Legislature Makes Formal Apology for
Slavery,” South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com, March 26, 2008.
95. One might also argue the greater importance of a later apology for slavery, in light of its
national scope: Apologizing for the Enslavement and Racial Segregation of African-
Americans, H.R. 194, 110th US Cong., House, www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=hr110-
194.

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Benoit, William L. Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies: A Theory of Image Restoration Strate-
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 Chapter Nine

Public Memory of Christopher

Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man
Communication Ethics, Social Differences,
and Alterity in Media Portrayals
of Homosexuality

Lester C. Olson

“For the homosexual, as long as he lives under the heterosexual dictatorship,

the act of love must be, to some extent, an act of defiance, a political act.” 1
Christopher Isherwood wrote his observation concerning homosexual love
and contemporary U.S. politics on a stray paper scrap, which he found again
while checking his page proofs for Christopher and His Kind (published in
1976). Isherwood might have had in mind a commonplace problem for mi-
norities facing tyrannical majorities within ostensibly democratic cultures.
His observation serves as an epigram for this chapter, encapsulating as it
does his concerns about the political predicament that homosexual men,
however diverse, must negotiate in dealing with the politics of public hetero-
sexuality. Here I use the expression public heterosexuality, not to refer to any
particular individuals invested in a specific sexual predilection, but rather,
more fundamentally, to an inherited ideology, which, through public repre-
sentations, undergirds immodest claims to inhabiting, enacting, or constitut-
ing a better way of life than others. 2 I considered the expression hegemonic
heterosexuality instead as a means of negotiating patterns of defensiveness
by readers who are heterosexual and who view themselves as exceptions to
the problematic ideology. Yet I wanted to keep public in the expression to
foreground the factor of facades as opposed to practices in private settings. A
vital feature of Isherwood’s powerful 1964 novel is his lancing of such

183
184 Lester C. Olson

superior pretensions with wit, wry humor, and, at times, grace, by mirroring
them symbolically in the homosexual character of George, who sometimes
mischievously reverses them against his interlocutors.
George’s character is suffused with what Joan Didion describes in her
classic 1961 essay “On Self-Respect” as a “certain toughness, a kind of
moral verve.” Self-respect should not be confused with convictions concern-
ing one’s own merits nor even self-esteem. Rather, self-respect, as Didion
describes it, entails a mindfulness of one’s frailties and limitations as well as
strengths and potential. “People with self-respect have the courage of their
mistakes,” she explains, adding that “they display what was once called
character.” Didion notes, “The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to
do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough;
has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett
O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.” Didion sum-
marizes, “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-
respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love
and to remain indifferent.” On the other hand, Didion observes, “If we do not
respect ourselves, we are . . . forced to despise those who have so few
resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our
fatal weaknesses.” 3 During the 1960s and 1970s, a self-respecting homosex-
ual would have been an oxymoron or a performative contradiction to most
readers because of commonplace stigmas attending homosexuality—stigmas
imposed by religion as sinful, by legal systems as criminal, and by psycho-
logical institutions as pathological. This central oxymoron animates
George’s transgressions against public heterosexuality.
Today, in 2013, at least thirty-five years after Isherwood wrote that mem-
orable line on a paper scrap, possibly to be tossed away, his naming of a
“heterosexual dictatorship” could still be considered an accurate character-
ization of the predominant political circumstances confronting gay men in
the United States, where I have written this chapter concerning Isherwood’s
original novel, A Single Man (published in 1964), a theatrical performance of
it (produced in 1990), and Tom Ford’s film ostensibly “based on” it (pro-
duced in 2009). The contours of heterosexism and homophobia have changed
during the intervening decades, most notably with regard to state-level legis-
lation concerning both nondiscrimination and bias crime laws as well as an
increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage. In 1964, there were no such
laws anywhere in the United States for homosexuals. Only as recently as
2009 has the federal government enacted bias crime laws, however, and it
has yet to enact nondiscrimination laws in employment. These political
circumstances make precarious the lives of homosexuals. Isherwood’s ap-
proach in the novel was not merely a reaction pressing back against the
heterosexual dictatorship, but rather a firm, gentle affirmation of the homo-
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 185

sexual’s life despite it. The overall spirit of the work is to assert a homosexu-
al presence in a life-affirming way despite oppressive, hostile conditions.
In this chapter, I must risk offending public heterosexuality as an inherit-
ed hegemonic ideology with all of its diversity, while endeavoring to expli-
cate the powerful rhetoricity of Isherwood’s brilliant novel because it ex-
poses, ridicules, and mocks this ideology with wry, sardonic, and merciless
humor. In other words, I must negotiate recurring rhetorical problems of
communicating about an acknowledged literary masterpiece in gay history
and culture under the watchful eyes, or surveillance, of the very ideology that
Isherwood confronted via his novel at a time when its contours were even
more severe than they are today, however still oppressive and sadistically
cruel. So I should mention the capacity of public heterosexuality to project its
own hostility onto gay authors in ways that can trivialize the work, as exem-
plified by one contemporaneous reviewer’s shallow commentary that Isher-
wood’s portrait of the Strunks demonstrates his dislike of people, even
though George eventually demonstrates a model of compassion for Mrs.
Strunk, so apparently lacking in her self-serving performances toward him.
So permit me to ask, as a gay scholar living under this “heterosexual dictator-
ship,” whose disgraceful misrepresentations of homosexuals in film was ex-
tensively documented in The Celluloid Closet in 1987, 4 what does it mean
when an apparently well-intentioned homosexual filmmaker does our ene-
mies’ work for them by reproducing damaging stereotypes and other con-
tours of heterosexism and homophobia? Who profits in what specific ways
from the film ostensibly based on A Single Man?
Although the popular 2009 film version of A Single Man suggests that it
was based on the original 1964 novel with the same title by Christopher
Isherwood, the film, almost a half century later, does consequential symbolic
violence to Isherwood’s achievement in the novel in ways that constitute a
false and potentially harmful memory of it. While I do not doubt that the
filmmaker presented his work as an homage to Isherwood’s novel, such
rhetorical recognition is what makes the film’s symbolic violence, in Pierre
Bourdieu’s sense, appear legitimate, however insidious on inspection. 5 Spe-
cifically, the film introduces invidious stereotypes of homosexual men that
do not appear anywhere in the novel and that Isherwood was careful to avoid
in his literary works, as exemplified by A Single Man. Arguably, it was
precisely Isherwood’s endeavor to portray a life-affirming homosexuality
that diminished his novel’s appeal for popular audiences beyond a diverse
gay readership, who have tended to recognize his novel as a brilliant literary
achievement, as indeed it is. It could be argued, moreover, that the film
detracts from Isherwood’s artistic legacy in a way that falsely represents his
work and defames his literary sensibility. Yet the Gay and Lesbian Alliance
Against Defamation recognized the film with a national award. The recurring
homage by homosexuals makes the symbolic violence, which consequential-
186 Lester C. Olson

ly appears honorific, especially harmful as a rhetorically constructed public

memory and commodity. 6
This chapter draws on my personal experiences of the 1964 novel, a 1990
theatrical performance, and the 2009 film to consider the communication
ethics of media representations, social differences, and alterity. In the pro-
cess, the chapter contemplates how the allure of aesthetics and freedom of
artistic license can collide with a responsible ethic of accurate representations
of Isherwood’s novel and its portrayal of members of a minority culture.
Andrew Holleran and Ben Walters have each detailed numerous discrepan-
cies between the novel and the film. 7 My concerns here center primarily on
revisions of three kinds during adaptation of the novel into a film: George’s
altered character, the transformed narrative action introducing a loaded gun
and George’s suicidal impulses, and, above all, a pervasive shift in perspec-
tive from a comic to a tragic frame, in Kenneth Burke’s sense, in which the
comic frame presumes that humankind is mistaken rather than deliberately
cruel, oppressive, or evil. 8 As Anne Demo explains, “The comic frame privi-
leges audiences by providing a unique vantage point from which to see the
inaccuracies of a situation.” 9 While developing my arguments, the chapter
will consider a 1990 theatrical performance of the novel because the perfor-
mance illustrates some potential resources that could have been employed in
the film’s adaptation but were not, much to its detriment. The problems that
arise in the film are not simply a result of the different medium, but rather
specific decisions made during adaptation, even though films address public
audiences in communal spaces in ways that differ from novels and even
DVDs, which can be viewed in relatively private settings and personal rela-
tionships.
As a critic of Isherwood’s A Single Man, I will identify some specific
qualities that make it a masterpiece to a diverse gay readership, despite its
having been received in disdainful ways by apparently heterosexual review-
ers at the time of its 1964 publication and later. Yet, in the same commentary,
I will also underscore why Tom Ford’s 2009 version of A Single Man in film
is dissatisfying to me in that it distorts salient features of Isherwood’s literary
achievement to the extent that it could defame the author, however inadver-
tently, in the process of offering an homage to him. People who have seen the
film, but have not read the novel, are invariably surprised to learn that there
is no gun in the novel. They are further astonished to learn that the central
character’s actions are not the sustained working through of a prospective
suicide in progress. Both the gun and the contemplation of suicide, however
central to the film, cannot be found anywhere in the novel. There is, then, the
irony of the film having garnered considerable renewed attention to Isher-
wood’s literary achievement and having literally raised the value of his
works (my signed first editions are now worth upwards of half a grand),
while deflecting attention from precisely the qualities that made the original
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 187

novel so extraordinary. Placing these works in juxtaposition enables me to

explore critically qualities that make for an exemplary novel and a deplorable
film.
It is possible to use each of these three artistic works intertextually to
assess the others, not simply to size up which of them is the better artistic
work, which Colin MacCabe has dismissed as an “intellectually dull and
unproductive question” in cinema studies. 10 Instead, more importantly, it
becomes possible to discern why or, in other words, to identify what factors
account for their relative value and strengths. 11 In this chapter, I suggest that
a basic change in the audience’s vantage was a key to altering the novel’s
comic frame in the film, while the theatrical production’s earlier use of
omniscient voiceovers preserved it. In the film, viewers need more voice-
overs to represent the limited omniscient narrator’s commentary and to ac-
cess George’s rich inner life and rebellious perceptiveness, his resilience, his
other-centeredness, and, above all, his delightfully wicked humor regarding
laughable public heterosexuality. In the novel, George recognizes that he has
been made monstrous by public heterosexuality, which he contests, mirrors,
and reverses via various rhetorical maneuvers, even as he takes some pleas-
ure in certain heterosexuals’ exaggerated fears of him: “Among many other
kinds of monster,” George says, “they are afraid of little me” (27). 12 Regard-
ing monster making, Edward J. Ingebretsen asks, “How does one make a
monster, and why?” Then, Ingebretsen notes astutely, “The more interesting
question, then, is not who the monsters are but what sorts of social work do
they make possible?” 13 To these two sensible questions, I would add, What
might society look like from a monster’s perspective, were the monster, as in
George’s case, aware of society’s misuses for him? Isherwood’s novel in-
vites readers to explore this last question and to inhabit George’s standpoint,
from which they can experience alterity. Whether diverse readers are well
prepared to do so depends, in part, on whether they have likewise been the
targets of such social misuses as others or whether they have been the benefi-
ciaries of such misuses. In the latter case, how might public heterosexuality
respond to having a social mirror held up to reveal how its monstrous face
appears to subordinated others?
It is not a matter of my asserting a naïve realism to celebrate the novel
over the film, however much the novel’s verisimilitude may have resonated
in open-ended ways with the lived experiences of its oppressed, yet diverse,
predominantly homosexual readership during the 1960s and 1970s. The nov-
el invites readers to identify with George’s character to inhabit vicariously
his disruptive insights concerning his oppression and apparently amicable
insurrection against it. 14 Isherwood was aware of a rhetorical constructedness
to literary works, however much they might represent lives with fidelity and
insight. And it is not a matter of my producing a disquisition systematically
listing discrepancies and correspondences among these works. Instead, I
188 Lester C. Olson

want to center on the rhetoricity of each work by noticing how key revisions
during adaptation of the novel into a film constructed a fundamentally differ-
ent set of rhetorical appeals to active audiences. Isherwood’s novel was not
written to please public heterosexuality, but rather to embarrass it for its not-
necessarily-deliberate cruelties and foibles, much to the pleasure of its pre-
dominantly homosexual readership. In contrast, the film was directed more
broadly to a diffuse audience whose members are called upon regardless of
sexuality to engage “a love story” across consequential social differences as
somehow universal to humankind. 15 To be sure, certain components of the
original novel do this, too, dealing as all these works do with aging, mortal-
ity, anger, love, and compassion.
To explore the rhetoricity of these works, I focus primarily on their com-
municative relationships to diverse audiences by asking, for example, What
specific rhetorical techniques do these works employ to play on their audi-
ences’ sensibilities? How do each of these works position their audiences as
spectators, witnesses to, and vicarious participants in the narrative action?
What sorts of potential critical responses, attitudes, and personal engage-
ments—both thoughtful and affective—do these works endeavor to elicit
from diverse audiences? Let me begin with my experience of the novel as a
brilliant literary achievement before turning to a theatrical rendition and then
the recent film to explore how differences among them could warrant my
concerns about the film’s retrograde politics and its exploitation of a usable
past, however exceptional the acting by Colin Firth, Matthew Goode, and
Nicholas Hoult and however beautiful the cinematography. In the conclu-
sion, I speculate on how to interpret the recent revisionist uses of the novel as
public memory by moving beyond a simple factor of profit, which surely
mattered for addressing a broad range of contemporary audiences, to contem-
plate the film’s specific cultural, ideological treatment of a mis-usable past.
Why, I wonder, do so many contemporary commentaries from gay, lesbian,
and queer viewers applaud the 2009 film, given what I will argue are its
serious failings vis-à-vis the 1964 novel?

ISHERWOOD’S NOVEL, A SINGLE MAN

I first encountered Isherwood’s novel, A Single Man, twenty years after its
initial 1964 publication in London and New York. So, I cannot render an
account of how, as a reader, I experienced it at the time of its initial release in
1964. I would have been nine years old, ancient though I now appear to my
students. However, in late winter 1984, while I was a graduate student, I read
Isherwood’s novel for the first time on a flight returning from a research trip
to London. As Isherwood’s biographer, Peter Parker, explains, “George,” the
central character, is “a single man in the legal sense that he is unmarried, in
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 189

the euphemistic sense that he is homosexual, and in perhaps in the most

important sense of all: that he is an outsider.” 16 The novel was so deeply
moving that I did something unusual for me. I immediately reread it. The
extraordinary encounter seemed even more poignant during my second read-
ing as I noticed and appreciated Isherwood’s meticulous attention to details
of consequence.
Each detail mattered to the book’s overall impact, from the description
and location of George’s small, cottage-like home with his partner, Jim, to
his sometimes offhanded remarks in which a single line captured his sensibil-
ity. George and his partner, Jim, “loved” the small home “because you could
only get to it by the bridge across the creek; the surrounding trees and the
steep bushy cliff behind shut it in like a house in a forest clearing. ‘As good
as being on our own island,’ George said” (20). The novel positions George
and his partner within the larger local community, and yet deliberately apart
from it, their modest home connected literally, and the couple metaphorical-
ly, to the neighborhood by only a rickety bridge. This location is symbolical-
ly fitting inasmuch as they participate in their community as different, with-
out belonging. The limited omniscient narrator notes, “This is a tightly
planned little house. [George] often feels protected by its smallness; there is
hardly room enough here to feel lonely” (12). After Jim’s untimely death,
George deflects neighbors’ polite inquiries about him with ease, explaining
in one cogent sentence: “They are inquisitive but quite incurious, really”
(29). Such are the privileges of public heterosexuality, to be incurious about
others. “Shaggy with ivy and dark and secret-looking,” the same house was
“just the lair you’d choose for a mean old storybook monster” (20–21).
My initial experience of Isherwood’s novel resembled that of David
Garnes, who apparently did read A Single Man near the date of its initial
1964 release. Decades later in 2000, Garnes generalized, “If I were to make a
list of the books that have mattered most to me, Christopher Isherwood’s A
Single Man would figure near the top. When I first read the novel many years
ago, its influence on me was enormous because of the matter-of-fact, positive
presentation of the main character’s homosexuality.” Garnes amplified,
“What I remembered more than anything about A Single Man, however, was
that Isherwood had created in this novel an intelligent character whose homo-
sexuality was presented in a natural and life-affirming way. I had never read
a book quite like A Single Man.” 17 Neither had I.
In 2004, gay author Edmund White recognized A Single Man as Isher-
wood’s “masterpiece” and “the founding text of modern gay literature” in the
Times Literary Supplement, an assessment he repeated verbatim a half
decade later in the New York Times Book Review. 18 White acknowledged,
“The story is almost banal but the observations of society and of the protago-
nist’s psychology are cool and funny in the best Isherwood manner.” 19 Caro-
lyn G. Heilbrun has represented A Single Man as a “comic masterpiece” and
190 Lester C. Olson

“a triumphant use of the homosexual theme.” 20 John Lehmann noted in his

1987 memoirs that A Single Man “has been very much praised, and is
thought by many to be Christopher’s masterpiece.” According to Lehmann’s
memoirs, he wrote a letter to Isherwood in 1964 to commend his novel by
commenting, “You’re funny in a new way, a sour, sardonic, merciless way,
and it seems to me just to suit the person you’ve become.” 21 Isherwood
considered A Single Man “the best thing I have ever written. This was the
only time when I succeeded, very nearly, in saying exactly what I wanted to
say.” 22
In 2010 in the Chronicle of Higher Education, James J. Berg and Chris
Freeman remarked, “In his 1964 masterpiece A Single Man, the protagonist,
George, is an intelligent, heartbroken, somewhat cynical mouthpiece for Ish-
erwood. In the new film adaptation, as portrayed by Colin Firth, George
plays the same function for the first-time writer/director Tom Ford.” Yet it
bears noticing that Isherwood and Ford addressed themselves to very differ-
ent audiences via the novel and film respectively. Berg and Freeman contin-
ue, “George, like Isherwood, is appalled by the tyrannical majorities of the
world, what Isherwood called ‘the Enemy.’ Among these enemies are
George’s straight-laced neighbors and their obnoxious children; local and
national politicians; and even those at the college, which is ‘a clean modern
factory, brick and glass and big windows, already three-quarters built.’” 23
Even though Isherwood drew on his own experiences in his novels
through characters that he usually named Chris, or Christopher, Isherwood
distinguished himself from George. In a 1970 interview, for instance, Isher-
wood stressed that he did not explore George in A Single Man in an autobio-
graphical manner: “It’s extremely unwise to identify me too much with
George,” mainly because George is “a person of enormous stoicism, and his
kind of stoicism is quite foreign to my nature.” 24 Yet Isherwood later ac-
knowledged some specific autobiographical correspondences in a 1973 inter-
view by Winston Leyland, especially with regard to teaching in California
college settings: “The things I make George say in the classroom are the
things that I would say.” 25 There is an authorial identification with and
investment in George at a circumspect distance. More than a few critics have
suggested that tensions in Isherwood’s relationship with his intimate partner,
Don Bachardy, and “being forced to imagine living alone forever” was a
“triggering” factor behind writing A Single Man. 26
As for Lehmann’s list of humorous devices in the novel, his memoir
mentioned, for one illustration, “I think that anyone who has been through
the experience of teaching English literature at an American college will find
the description of a class on an Aldous Huxley novel uncannily life-like and
indeed humorous in just the right quiet way.” 27 The sustained classroom
scene and dialog furthered Isherwood’s exploration of what it means to deal
with aging and the prospect of death via the classical story of Tithonus, a
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 191

handsome mortal who was given immortality by Zeus in response to a re-

quest by a goddess who loved Tithonus. But Zeus did not give him eternal
youth, because she forgot to request that (62–66). So Tithonus gradually
“became a repulsively immortal old man” whose voice got “shriller and
shriller, until suddenly one day he turned into a cicada” (65). Andrew Holle-
ran explained that the classroom dialog is in the novel “because the issues the
fable deals with—love, immortality, youth, old age—are the same ones
played out in Isherwood’s account of what is to come: the professor’s last
day on earth.” 28 But the novel progresses with the noteworthy difference that
the novel dealt with homosexual love in the United States, not ancient
Greece. So, before the class, George mused about his students’ depersonal-
ization of him in the modern educational factory: “They don’t want to know
about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as
well be a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a
dish” (51).
Although my experience of the novel paralleled Garnes’s and although
Isherwood’s novel has routinely risen to the top of lists of great gay novels,
as Berg and Freeman suggest, 29 our engagements with it were not universal
patterns for audiences’ encounters with A Single Man. The reception under
public heterosexuality was not appreciative. The Catholic Herald character-
ized the novel as “a horrible little book” in an assessment that I will discuss
later in the chapter. 30 Moreover, Richard Jacobs generalizes in The Penguin
History of Literature that Isherwood’s career illustrates “a paradigmatic re-
treat from the political to the personal” to trivialize his later novels, A Single
Man among them. Jacobs continues, “A Single Man is notable for sexual
candour [sic]. Beginning with a bowel movement and ending with a genital
spasm . . . it may be candid but, if the novel is embarrassing, it is not for this
candour [sic] but because of its manifest dislike of people, its governing
impulse of a disgust that is a projected self-disgust.” 31 In response to Ja-
cobs’s assertions, James J. Berg observes that “A more dispassionate descrip-
tion of the novel’s beginning and end would be that it starts with George
waking and ends with his supposed death.” 32 In reply to Jacobs’s assertion
that Isherwood’s “characters are stereotypically drawn” in A Single Man,
which I experience as inaccurate, Berg replies simply that “he does not offer
any evidence of his claim.” 33
Malcolm Bradbury likewise discussed A Single Man in The Modern Brit-
ish Novel, characterizing Isherwood’s novel as “a work of vivid present-tense
neurosis, [it] is a tale of a historyless [sic] America and the portrait of a
single man who cannot build a full identity and has chosen not to mature.” 34
Berg precisely describes Bradbury’s account as “a homophobic reaction to
the late Isherwood” and one based in discredited psychological theories con-
cerning homosexuality as arrested development. 35 An even more virulently
homophobic assessment was penned by Richard G. Hubler in the Los An-
192 Lester C. Olson

geles Times in 1964 with the demeaning title, “Disjointed Limp Wrist Saga.”
Hubler uses words like “retchings” [sic] and “resentment” to describe
George’s inner life and “perverted lebensraum” for his expectations. Hubler
characterizes the “defense mechanism built up for the homosexual” as being
“both feeble and disgusting.” He describes Isherwood’s literary stature as
“virtually invisible” and his writing as “little more than competent.” 36
Experienced homosexuals might know that when public heterosexuality
endeavors in such sustained, hostile ways to trivialize an author’s literary
work, as did Jacobs, Bradbury, and Hubler, it is possible that the novel is
doing something exceptionally well. Such hostile commentaries serve as a
testament today to Isherwood’s courage. In Isherwood’s novel, George is
projecting his precise perceptions of public heterosexuality’s self-serving
delusions back onto the ideology, making its pervasive commonplaces and
failings both evident and public, not his self-loathing. It could be argued
perhaps that George evades genuine intimacy or friendship with his neigh-
bors by not expressing his disagreeable views directly to them, unwilling to
risk conflict. Instead, he carefully contains them beneath his generally stoic,
amiable exterior and ironic detachment. George does not confront them via
parrhēsia by speaking his truth to their power. 37 Rather, for survival, he only
engages them with politeness while challenging them internally though a rich
and self-sustaining inward life. In other words, an interpretation that George
evades intimacy and enacts hypocrisy would be simplistic in underestimating
the cruel power of the “heterosexual dictatorship” within which George has
learned to live and survive, because direct confrontation more often than not
results in heterosexuals’ misuses of privilege and power to retreat behind a
fragile facade of guilt, hurt feelings, and defensiveness, if not much worse.
It is tempting to suggest that A Single Man is powerful, in part, because it
gives access to what could be considered one early 1960s homosexual man’s
double consciousness, an expression first articulated by W. E. B. DuBois in
The Souls of Black Folk in 1907 and thus usually associated specifically with
the racial oppression of black people in the United States. Yet the idea of
double consciousness has been developed and extended by many intellectu-
als from minority communities. “Double consciousness,” as James Darsey
notes, “implies a complexity of vision, the necessity for members of subordi-
nate subcultures always to know the rules of the dominant culture as well as
of their subculture.” 38 George’s thoughts shift between specific views that he
ascribes to public heterosexuality and his own critical engagement with this
ideology, between the public rules for civility and his annoyances because of
them.
Alternatively, perhaps George’s sensibility might be called subjugated
knowledge, an expression advanced by Michel Foucault, whose second sense
of subjugated knowledge defines it as “a whole set of knowledges that have
been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated:
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 193

naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required
level of cognition or scientificity.” He adds, “it is through the re-appearance
of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified
knowledges, that criticism performs its work.” Yet George’s inner knowl-
edge is that of a homosexual professor, whose views as a college teacher are
not disqualified, as evidenced by his lively classroom interactions with stu-
dents. But his views as a homosexual could be dismissed inasmuch as they
are not adapted to public heterosexuality—he is unapologetic, rebellious, and
spirited in his defiance. 39 In this regard, there might be an odd, rough parallel
with the life of Foucault, whose works are oftentimes celebrated and evoked
critically as a result, in part, of his professorial prestige, usually without any
mention of his homosexuality, which was surely a vital fount for his rich
insights. Yet Foucault made few public comments concerning his homosexu-
ality, characterizing it euphemistically in public as “friendship as a way of
life,” as in his 1981 interview. 40
George’s stance is not so much passive alienation as it is an active dis-
identification from public heterosexuality, 41 or an ongoing, internalized in-
surrection against it informed by his subordinated knowledge of public
heterosexuality and its perils for himself and, laterally, for others who are
similarly situated within the dictatorship. In other words, because Isher-
wood’s novel was addressed to a predominantly homosexual readership in
the 1960s and 1970s, George’s inner life is not merely fulfilling an ego-
function directed only to himself to sustain himself, 42 as a sort of silent
protest rhetoric. More fundamentally, through George’s character, Isherwood
offered his audiences a perspective on political and social oppression that he
shared with others within an oftentimes vilified, criminalized, and patholo-
gized minority. In the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse homosexual readership was
invited to participate vicariously in George’s comprehension of his oppres-
sive situation, his skillful negotiation of it, and his anger.

A THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE OF A SINGLE MAN

A few years later, in late summer 1990, I was back in London for another
research trip. I learned that A Single Man was being performed as a play at a
theater located on the outskirts of London. As I used mass transit to travel to
the performance in Greenwich Theatre at Croons Hill, London, I pondered
how A Single Man could be staged, since so much of its potency depends on
accessing George’s inner life, the privileged audience’s vantage so vital to
the comic frame. According to Burke, “The comic frame should enable peo-
ple to be observers of themselves, while acting. Its ultimate would not be
passiveness, but maximum consciousness.” 43 As Isherwood expressed it, the
limited omniscient narrator’s voice is that of George’s “Id, or by God. It
194 Lester C. Olson

knows things about him which he does not know.” 44 Throughout the novel,
this vantage provides the audience with access to George’s resilient sensibil-
ity, especially his anger of a specific variety that is only possible for a man
with confidence in his own intrinsic worth, or what Didion describes as “self-
respect.” 45
Part of what I love about George, in fact, is his anger suffused with his
self-respect and his mindfulness of its perils. With incisive wit and merciless
humor, he rants, he fumes, he seethes in response to heterosexism and the
rampant consumer capitalism of his time (e.g., see 36–38, 83), and I love him
for it. His outrage extends even to the college or university as a clean “mod-
ern factory.” As another instance, a bemused George ponders a local news-
paper editor’s campaign against “sex deviants,” like George: “They are eve-
rywhere, he says; you can’t go into a bar any more, or a men’s room, or a
public library, without seeing hideous sights. And they all, without excep-
tion, have syphilis” (36). Today, of course, they would all have HIV-AIDS.
George punctures inherited stereotypes that homosexual means diseased or
pathological. In Isherwood’s novel, a sustained target for laughter and
wicked humor consists of the worries, fears, and delusions of public hetero-
sexuality as projected onto homosexuals, not George.
Throughout the novel, George enacts in his musings varied symbolic
reversals suggesting tacitly, in the process, that homosexuals can live moral
and fulfilling and spiritual lives, 46 despite the perils of public heterosexual-
ity’s narcissism, superficiality, and psychological dysfunctions, which
George notices sometimes with evident pleasure. In other words, George
gives back to public heterosexuality for its ownership some demeaning
stereotypes projected so routinely and ruthlessly onto homosexual men, rec-
ognized as scapegoats for public heterosexuality’s failings. Isherwood under-
stood something about the dominant group’s capacity for authoritarian pro-
jectivity and its sometimes cruel misuses for others. Instead of characterizing
such conduct as evil or sadistic, however, he eviscerated it with bemused
insight and various symbolic reversals rendering the stereotypes not only
ludicrous but also revelatory of the profoundly mistaken views he firmly
ascribed to public heterosexuality. In a symbolic reversal, which mirrored
public heterosexuality’s tolerance of homosexuality, George reflects, “Not
that one isn’t broad-minded, of course; let them write about heterosexuality if
they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly
bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful” (85). Substitute the word homo-
sexuality for heterosexuality in George’s archly ironic thought and the ex-
pression becomes a familiar commonplace in liberal tolerance, which George
mirrors to mock it. Such symbolic reversals of public heterosexuals’ tolerant
attitudes, in aside after delightfully naughty aside, endear George to a homo-
sexual readership weary of heterosexism and homophobia. I will illustrate
and support this claim concerning George’s reversals and mirroring more
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 195

thoroughly later in the chapter as they pertain to certain differences between

the novel and the film.
In staging the novel, there was, moreover, the matter of the novel’s am-
biguous conclusion. What if this were George’s last day of life? He might, as
he dozes, experience a deadly blood clot. “Let us suppose this, merely,” the
narrator requests while observing, “(The body on the bed is still snoring).
This thing is wildly improbable” (185). As the novel was going through press
editing, one of the publishers “thought that the ending should be more explic-
it: does George die or not?” 47 Yet this ambiguity precisely conveys what it
means to George to live and love at fifty-eight years old, keenly aware of his
mortality. As Chris Freeman has observed, Isherwood’s diaries at midlife
during the 1960s comment on “how a person ages, fearing his own decrepi-
tude as he watches so many of his friends suffer and die.” 48 Isherwood’s
novel deals with what his biographer has called “that most important of
subjects: what it is to be alive.” 49 That subject of life becomes urgent for
George after his younger life partner’s death. In the novel, despite the recent,
untimely death, George embraces life. “I am alive, he says to himself. I am
alive! And life-energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite”
(104).
The stage performance of A Single Man in 1990 was brilliant. 50 A voice-
over during the live performance represented the omniscient narrator and
rendered George’s inner life, and the same technique made it possible to
preserve the ambiguous conclusion. The performance captured, too, how
mundane life as a homosexual couple can be—for example, by portraying
George and his partner Jim jostling for space before the bathroom mirror in
too small a room. These words from the novel were read by the omniscient
voiceover while performers pantomime the deeds:

Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small
space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing
past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bath-
room mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies
by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in
rage or in love—think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave,
everywhere, behind them! (12)

While I was researching this chapter, I learned that Alec McCowen, who
played George, viewed his performance as his coming out play and that his
partner, Geoffrey Burridge, had died a few years earlier in 1987 from com-
plications of AIDS.
As I sat in the theater after that performance, I experienced a poignant
realization that, in my mid-thirties, I had for the first time in my life experi-
enced a respectful play centering on a homosexual man’s life. George was
not rendered in a way that reproduced any convenient, demeaning stereo-
196 Lester C. Olson

types for homosexual men so commonplace in public life at that time and
even now. I cannot express now how powerful—both upsetting and mean-
ingful—that realization was for me. The audience does not laugh at George
as clown-like or ineffectual (as in Tea and Sympathy, Some Like It Hot,
Vanishing Point, or Birdcage). George is neither deranged nor psychologi-
cally dysfunctional (as in Rebecca, Rope, Suddenly Last Summer, or A Beau-
tiful Mind). George is not isolated and almost totally without friendship (as in
Brokeback Mountain). Nor does George tragically end his own life by sui-
cide (as in Advise and Consent, Victim, or The Children’s Hour). The ending
of George’s life is not a sadistically cruel murder in ways that are so formula-
ic and apparently gratifying to public heterosexuality, to judge from myriad
films and novels that pander to the ideology (as in Rebel Without a Cause,
Walk on the Wild Side, The Detective, Freebie and the Bean, and especially
Cruising). George is neither hypersexualized and amoral (like Brian in Queer
as Folk) nor nearly devoid of any evident sexuality (like Will in Will &
Grace). The novel and the play both consist simply of one mundane day of
George’s life while he was grieving the loss of his partner, taking stock of
what it means to face midlife suddenly alone, but with friends, and, ultimate-
ly, in moments, rekindling his capacity for renewed sexuality and possibly a
new love.
Later, as I learned more about Isherwood’s life and works, I came to
appreciate that this firm refusal of familiar stereotypes was almost certainly
deliberate on his part. In 1947, Isherwood wrote a letter to Gore Vidal criti-
cizing the manuscript’s conclusion of The City and the Pillar, written in 1946
and published in January 1948, for its tragic ending in which the homosexual
character suffers greatly. The original version of Vidal’s novel ends catas-
trophically with a homosexual murder of a former lover. Isherwood’s entire
December 19, 1947, letter to Vidal deserves to be read, but here I will note
that Isherwood pressed firmly on the matter of the political ramifications of
literary representations as “propaganda” and the potential harms from repro-
ducing demeaning stereotypes of homosexuals to gratify mainstream audi-
ences. Then, having endeavored to raise Vidal’s consciousness concerning
the disconcerting ramifications of his novel’s formulaic conclusion, Isher-
wood asserts: “Homosexual relationships can be and frequently are happy.
Men live together for years and make homes and share their lives and their
work, just as heterosexuals do. This truth is particularly disturbing and
shocking even to ‘liberal’ people, because it cuts across the romantic, tragic
notion of a homosexual’s fate.” 51 Having criticized Vidal’s work, Isherwood
adds, “I am really lecturing myself, because I, too, have been guilty of
subscribing to the Tragic Homosexual myth in the past, and I am ashamed of
it.” 52
In light of this correspondence, it is noteworthy that Isherwood dedicated
A Single Man to Vidal, which Vidal reciprocated later with a dedication to
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 197

Isherwood in Myra Breckenridge. 53 Moreover, Isherwood permitted Vidal to

use another brief excerpt from the same letter’s introduction as a favorable
blurb for the dust jacket of Vidal’s 1948 novel. Though I do not know
whether Vidal replied to Isherwood’s letter criticizing the conclusion, Vi-
dal’s biographer has suggested that “Isherwood, it seemed to Vidal, preferred
propaganda to artistic integrity,” 54 a view that is difficult to reconcile with
Vidal’s apparent willingness to consider revising the novel’s conclusion for
its republication in London. 55 It would be accurate that Isherwood used the
term “propaganda” in his letter to Vidal to underscore the rhetoricity of any
literary work with ramifications for political and social issues of the day.
It was Isherwood, moreover, who, having been entrusted by E. M. Forest-
er, the internationally acclaimed author of A Room With a View, Howards
End, and A Passage to India, with reading an unpublished manuscript for
Maurice in the 1930s, urged Forester to revise the conclusion, rather than put
into circulation yet another tragic ending, this time one in which the lovers
part company with no prospect of ever seeing one another again. 56 Forester,
in fact, revised the novel along the lines that Isherwood had urged so that the
central characters left England for France in search of a better life. Though
Maurice was not published until 1971, after Forester’s death, “the impact of
such a major writer” as Forester “authoring a gay romantic novel—and one
with that rarity, a happy ending—is difficult to underestimate,” observed
Richard Canning. 57 Of course, pandering instead to the dominant culture’s
demeaning and formulaic stereotypes by adapting his consciousness to public
heterosexuality could have translated into greater fame, appreciation, and
profitability for Isherwood among mainstream audiences. But, as a matter of
self-respect, Isherwood refused such terms for success. Indeed, a key compo-
nent of the power of A Single Man is that George’s inner life is deliberately
not adapted to pleasing public heterosexuality. Instead, he ridicules it with
incisive humor suffused with richly warranted anger. No wonder Jacobs,
Bradbury, and Hubler were bothered.

THE FILM BASED ON A SINGLE MAN

Isherwood’s stance in 1947 bears remembering today because public recog-

nition and success in exchange for pandering to the dominant culture’s
stereotypes is endemic even today, as exemplified, I believe, by the film
ostensibly based on A Single Man. In general, film producers do have artistic
latitude for creative engagement with literary works whenever they engage in
adaptation, a word that, Colin MacCabe suggests, “refers to a film that relies
for some of its material on a previous written work and the word differen-
tiates such films from films produced from an original screenplay.” 58 With
adaptations, filmmakers are not under an obligation to comply with every
198 Lester C. Olson

detail of literature, as though fidelity or, more generally, being true to the
spirit of the work, is of paramount importance. It is possible to consider each
work for its own artistic merits, or lack thereof. However, if there is a depar-
ture from the literary work in the process of translating it into film as a
medium with its distinctive resources (a process that Tom Gunning refers to
as “textual transformations”), 59 presumably it would be for the purpose of
strengthening rather than diminishing a literary work’s achievement. Gun-
ning details several components of this process of “textual transformations,”
which I elide here in the interest of concentrating, above all, on character,
narrative, and framing.
Filmgoers likewise have artistic latitude for appreciation of the producers’
sometimes disappointing efforts with great literature. Dudley Andrew ob-
serves, “Fidelity is the umbilical cord that nourishes the judgments of ordi-
nary viewers as they comment on what are effectively aesthetic and moral
values. . . . If we tuned in on these discussions, we might find ourselves
listening to a vernacular version of comparative media semiotics.” 60 As one
such ordinary viewer, I was so dissatisfied with the film ostensibly based on
A Single Man that, after the initial viewing, a hapless friend who had gone to
see it with me found himself discussing it with me over dinner for more than
an hour and a half. He thought the film was wonderful. In contrast, I recog-
nized it as a travesty. So, our dialog was heartfelt and sustained. Though my
friend is almost a decade older than me, he had not read Isherwood’s novel
(despite my having made a gift to him of one of my few cherished, hardback,
first editions). So, I infer that part of the differences in our engagements with
the film had to do with expectations for the film insofar as they were in-
formed by having read the novel or not. But I do not believe that factor
accounts entirely for the differences in our critical commentary on the film.
Certainly, it is accurate that the acting in the film was exceptional, the cine-
matography was aesthetically pleasing, and the leading men were sensuous
and handsome.
Yet both the character of George and the narrative were deeply disturbing
as rendered in the film when juxtaposed with the novel. There is no reason to
believe that George in the novel is in the closet, though he apparently is in
the film. In the novel, George does not linger over a female secretary’s
perfume appreciatively, as he does in the film. More important, George’s
relationship to Charlotte, who goes by Charley, is friendship, not a frustrated
heterosexual romance (as rendered at too much length in the film in ways
that astute critics have accurately characterized as having “de-gayed” the
novel). The film’s promotional materials—both the initial poster and the
trailers—featured George’s relationship, not to Jim, but to Charley. Peter
Knegt observes, “While the heterosexualized poster for Tom Ford’s not-so-
heterosexual ‘A Single Man’ caused a wee stir last week, it seems the recent-
ly released trailer has just re-enforced those complaints.” 61 Ben Walters,
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 199

whose review encapsulates several discrepancies between the novel and the
film, notes that “this is not Isherwood’s Charley, though it might be some-
thing like how she would fantasize about her life.” 62 Among other discrepan-
cies, Walters notes George’s palatial home (“a capacious modernist construc-
tion, by the architect John Lautner”), which Andrew Holleran has likewise
described as a significant change: “In Isherwood’s novel, the house George
inhabits with Jim is so small two people cannot enter the kitchen side by side;
in the movie he lives in something out of Architectural Digest and drives a
beautiful Mercedes.” 63
In the novel, moreover, readers encounter George’s anger at the arrogant
narcissism that public heterosexuals sometimes bring to their interactions
with self-respecting homosexuals, exemplified by George’s neighbors, Mr.
and Mrs. Strunk, each of whom represents a different strand of liberal toler-
ance for the homosexual. Mr. Strunk, in George’s imaginings, “tries to nail
him down with a word. Queer, he doubtless growls. But, since this is after all
the year 1962, even he may be expected to add, I don’t give a damn what he
does just as long as he stays away from me” (27). After lingering over what
psychologists might make of such a remark, George mischievously savors “a
photograph” of a youthful Mr. Strunk in his football uniform, when he “used
to be what many would call a living doll” (27). In contrast, Mrs. Strunk’s
self-serving beneficence concerning what she views as his pitiable homosex-
uality triggers George’s well warranted, yet bemused rage, intensified and
suffused by his grieving (see 27–29). As George sees it, “she is trained in the
new tolerance, the technique of annihilation by blandness. Out comes her
psychology book—bell and candle are no longer necessary” (27). George
incisively caricatures Mrs. Strunk’s affectation of acceptance, which is sel-
dom more than a fragile facade: “Here we have the misfit, debarred forever
from the best things in life, to be pitied, not blamed . . . it’s so sad; especially
when it happens, as let’s face it[,] it does, to truly worthwhile people, people
who might have had so much to offer” (28).
In the novel, George believes Mrs. Strunk to be a hypocrite, who elevates
her own worth by diminishing his. The reader has no available resources to
size up the accuracy of George’s perceptions, while in the film, in contrast,
he is so emotionally unstable that viewers are likely to align themselves with
her heartfelt concerns for his well-being. In the novel, George continues at
some length to inhabit a worldview that he ascribes to Mrs. Struck to mock
her liberal tolerance via his naughty ventriloquism of her: “Let us even go so
far as to say that this kind of relationship can sometimes be almost beauti-
ful—particularly if one of the parties is already dead, or, better yet, both”
(28). Ultimately, George muses defiantly, “Your exorcism has failed, dear
Mrs. Strunk. . . . The unspeakable is still here—right in your very midst”
(29). At least one book reviewer misunderstood Isherwood’s critique of Mr.
and Mrs. Strunk’s liberal tolerance. In a 1964 review by Sir Thomas Willes
200 Lester C. Olson

Chitty under a pseudonym, Thomas Hinde, in the Times Literary Supple-

ment, the reviewer was so invested in liberalism that he not only missed
Isherwood’s point but also aligned himself explicitly with such liberalism:
“The heterosexual view of homosexual married couples, however tolerant, is
something of a compound of amusement and pity.” 64 In the film, viewers
needed voiceovers to access George’s perceptiveness and wry mockery of
laughable public heterosexuality with its artifice and selfish uses of others as
props for their worth. None of this is easily available to the film’s viewers
unless they remember the novel, having read it, and fill it in for themselves.
In Burkean terms, the novel remains firmly within a comic frame’s sen-
sibility that humankind is mistaken, not evil, while the film careens toward a
tragic frame. As Burke explained, the comic frame “is neither wholly euphe-
mistic, nor wholly debunking—hence it provides the charitable attitude to-
wards people that is required for the purposes of persuasion and coopera-
tion.” 65 In both the novel and the film, George ultimately shows compassion
for Mrs. Strunk—not merely personally but also for the ideological inheri-
tance reproduced through her (116). In the absence of George’s thoughts,
however, the film diminishes the underlying factors that informed his earlier
annoyances and the significance of his subsequent compassion. In other
words, in the novel, Mrs. Strunk becomes emblematic of pitiable public
heterosexuality in yet another symbolic reversal, which reflects her earlier
attitudes back on her with a humane spirit.
Moreover, the film portrays an incoherent, narcissistic George who is so
self-indulgent and wallowing in his excessively romantic grief that he con-
templates suicide—apparently a favorite ending for homosexual characters in
films made for mainstream audiences. George selects and lays out suitable
attire for his funeral, including his tie, with instructions for a Windsor knot.
Then he dramatically enacts taking a pistol to his head. It is a small detail
perhaps, but headless corpses are seldom displayed in coffins, much less with
fashionable ties. So the audience laughs at George’s incoherent cowardice as
he fails to pull the trigger and continues to laugh as he poses with the gun,
concealing himself within a sleeping bag on his bed, as though the bag would
contain the carnage. No wonder Andrew Holleran’s friend, who attended the
film with him, whispered impatiently, “Can’t he just die,” and Holleran
admitted “hoping the gun would go off accidently” presumably to put the
audience out of its misery. 66
The film does worse than merely transform the novel’s rhetorical appeal
into a retrograde politics replete with maudlin, demeaning stereotypes. The
addition of numerous elements in the film depicting suicide by handgun does
symbolic violence to George’s character and to Isherwood’s legacy as a
novelist. It is unlikely that Isherwood would have condoned the film’s use of
stereotypes such as George’s emotional instability, excessive romanticism,
and suicidal behavior for the central homosexual character. The closest Isher-
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 201

wood’s novel came to such embarrassing nonsense was a single bemused

sentence when George reflects on the hazards of dining alone, which, he
worries, might be one more potentially fatal step toward an overdose of
sleeping pills (113). In the novel, the only line concerning suicide has a
bemused, humorous quality altogether absent from the film: seldom has din-
ing alone seemed so “deadly dangerous” (113), an exaggeration with come-
dic effect. Since he was a pacifist who left Britain for the United States in the
company of W. H. Auden at the outset of World War II, it is inconceivable
that Isherwood would have welcomed the film’s revisions in which George is
packing heat.
In the novel, despite sorrow, George is other-centered and socially aware.
He worries about an untenured professor’s likely experience of retaliation,
losing his job, for having disagreed with another tenured professor (84–86).
George pays a visit to Doris who is dying at a nearby hospital; he devotes
time for her, despite her having had a sexual liaison with Jim (96–102). He
goes to the gym to exercise and experience camaraderie (105–9). At the gym,
George reflects, “How delightful it is to be here. If only one could spend
one’s entire life in this state of easygoing physical democracy” (109). All
these moments of sociability in the novel are excised in the film to portray a
pitiably lonely old man devastated in the aftermath of loss, one who, as
Kenny Potter concludes, needs a friend. In the novel, however, George has
friends. In addition, the film introduces a hustler at the liquor store, a charac-
ter that cannot be found anywhere in the novel, as if, for representations of
homosexuals to be credible, we require a figure suggesting the demimonde.
At the same time, the erasure of George’s justifiable outrage at his patron-
izing neighbor with her apparently phony friendship is disturbing in that this
alteration and others along those lines transform George’s character in funda-
mental ways. It is George’s neighbor who, in his imaginings, wonders wheth-
er Jim was a “substitute” for real love (29), not Charlotte. It is inconceivable
to me that George could have selected Charley to be a close friend had she
held such silly views, which nonetheless spill out of her mouth in the film. In
the novel, George is determined to deal with his grief and his life predica-
ment with his self-respect intact, mindful of the oftentimes inane delusions
that heterosexuals so routinely project during interactions with homosexuals.
The presumably fake friendships that heterosexuals like George’s neighbor
enact are only one more part of the arsenal of ruthless dominance that suf-
fuses heterosexism and, in its practical ramifications, is almost as virulent as
overt hatred. So, in the novel, George does not inform his neighbors of Jim’s
death because their phony pity would have been unbearable (28). Yet, as the
novel progresses, George musters compassion and acceptance for his neigh-
bor and others like her (116), rising above their disdain for him by his own
recognition of their human frailties and the errors in their psychology books.
They are merely mistaken.
202 Lester C. Olson

Sometimes high praise for gay novels can be discerned in assessments

from hostile outlets. As cited earlier, the Catholic Herald characterized Isher-
wood’s novel as a “horrible little book” that “would be less nauseous if the
homosexuality of [George] were less taken for granted as part of a complete-
ly normal pattern—and ‘normality’ not so obviously regarded as something
slightly devious.” 67 That observation encapsulates precisely yet another mar-
velous strength in the novel that is missing in the film. George muses on
heterosexuality as being merely animalistic in a way that symbolically mir-
rors and reverses heterosexuals’ arrogant presumptions of moral superiority.
For instance, they buy suburban homes as “breeding grounds,” and so their
influx into the community damages the previously pleasant neighborhood in
yet another symbolic reversal, mirroring the way that heterosexuals typically
deplored the arrival of homosexuals next door as somehow detrimental to
communal life (18–19). Although in life, homosexuals are regularly por-
trayed as animalistic, heterosexuals are animalistic in the novel. “So the tots
appeared, litter after litter after litter” (19). Surely a part of the pleasure in the
original novel was the wry mockery with which Isherwood lances the preten-
sions of public heterosexuality to an exclusive claim on living a morally rich
or worthy or spiritual life based in specific sexual practices.
I wish these were the only demeaning stereotypes and examples of pan-
dering to public heterosexuality via the film, but they are not. In the novel,
for example, Jim’s family in rural Ohio does indeed invite George to attend
Jim’s funeral, as, of course, any reputable farm family would have done for
his friend. George declines the invitation, the caller “becoming a bit chilled
by George’s laconic Yes, I see, yes, his curt No, thank you, to the funeral
invitation—deciding no doubt that this much talked of roommate hadn’t been
such a close friend after all” (126). In the film, instead, a family member
discretely informs him of Jim’s death and excludes him from Jim’s funeral as
only for “family.” In the film, there is an unimaginative reproduction of
urban stereotypes for misrepresenting rural culture as somehow less sophisti-
cated or worthy than urban life. As a gay man who grew up among farmers
of modest means, I found this change particularly offensive. But perhaps this
is because I know farm men with eighth-grade educations whose ethical
sophistication exceeds that of their ostensibly cosmopolitan urban counter-
parts.
This difference between the novel and film is consequential, in part,
because in the novel George does not relate with any trust to public hetero-
sexuality, having learned defensively to distrust it for its history of abusive
and dictatorial habits. George wears his emotional armor well. This is not to
condemn George’s psychology as an individual, but rather more precisely the
systemic impositions on it by public heterosexuality. Yet, one of the power-
ful features of both the novel and the film is George’s relationship to Kenny,
his student, with whom he has too much to drink, goes skinny-dipping in the
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 203

ocean and is nearly pulled by an undertow into its depths, and, through it all,
experiences a mutually flirtatious reawakening of his capacity for sexual
desire and possibly love. George becomes momentarily vulnerable. These
scenes in the film are among the most powerful and sensually portrayed,
rendering both Kenny’s apparently ready availability for sex and George’s
struggles with his temptations, which he restrains with evident reflection and
sensible effort. It is one of the few, well-rendered erotic moments in the film,
made more powerful by the intricate interplay of taboos, stemming from their
roles as teacher and student, as well as the intergenerational chasm separating
them, plus the nakedness and frank homosexual attraction.

CLOSING THOUGHTS ON GAY LITERATURE

AS A MIS-USABLE PAST

In commenting on adaptations of literary works for films, Tom Gunning

focuses on a practice that consists “precisely of claiming a relationship to a
preexisting text, staking a claim or filiation to a specific work (or sometimes
even works),” a practice that he provisionally terms “literary appropriation.”
Gunning suggests that “The primary question then becomes what does this
film’s appropriation of a literary text do: for the viewer, for the scholar, and
perhaps most intriguingly, for the film-makers?” 68 MacCabe generalizes,
“The cinema promotes a new form of adaptation in which the relation to the
source text is part of the appeal and the attraction of the film.” 69 Given the
chasms of differences between the original novel by Christopher Isherwood
and the film ostensibly based on A Single Man, what does the claim of an
affiliation with the novel do for the film’s producers, viewers, and scholars?
Surely one simple part of an answer is that the film capitalizes on the
justly deserved fame of the novel and its author’s literary reputation in order
to deliver up an audience of consumers already aware of the literary achieve-
ment. But I imagine that the contemporary viewers’ relationships to the novel
and author via the film is much more complicated than this simple economic
relationship might suggest, however fundamental exploiting the past in this
commercial regard doubtless was for the film’s producers. A lot of contem-
porary viewers, it seems, have never read the novel. So they experience it
primarily through the film. In this regard, the film has the value of raising
awareness of the novel and increasing the commodity value of Isherwood
and his legacy. The economic value of my cherished hardback first editions
has soared, especially my autographed copies. Andrew comments, “A film
based on a prominent novel will do more than cite the author; it will graphi-
cally feature that famous name so as to let its aura spread to envelop the other
names listed, underwriting the production by association.” 70
204 Lester C. Olson

Yet another simple answer, in part, was suggested by a commentator on

the New York Times review of the film, who remarks, “No doubt a phalanx of
gays are flocking here to award this movie 5 stars . . . but this thunderous
cavalcade of emotional 5 stars seems to indicate to me more ‘relief’ that there
are relatable gay events in this movie (to a rather starved minority) rather
than the inherent quality of the movie itself.” 71 In this view, enthusiasm for
the film is simply a byproduct of the relatively few films available for a
public keenly interested in works featuring a gay theme, a public anxious to
embrace almost any effort. I am reminded of Joan Oxenburg’s commentary
in a documentary version of The Celluloid Closet that, referring to the gay
and lesbian community, “we are pathetically starved for images of our-
selves.” 72
Another, deeper answer might reside in considerations of history, culture,
and what is sometimes termed a “usable past,” an expression coined by
Michael Kammen to underscore representations of the past as constructed for
uses in the present. 73 Beyond the profit motive in addressing a captive audi-
ence, what might be at stake in present uses of the past, appropriating a
novel, A Single Man, for a film with the same title? Another commentator on
a New York Times film review ascribed a perspective to “Corinne Golden-
berg” who “is disappointed in another period piece that fails to relate to a
contemporary audience, stating: Why must we torture ourselves with de-
pressing accounts of closeted homosexuals, inevitably doomed to a fate of
death and destruction?” 74 To this apt question, with which I agree, I would
add that this specific, depressing account of a “period piece” introduced the
closet and the definite death into a 1964 novel wherein neither can be found.
Instead, there was a poignant, ambiguous ending at a moment of George
going to sleep after the professor had experienced a capacity for rekindled
love and sexuality and renewed hope (see 181–82). Closer to the mark re-
garding a “period piece” is another comment in the same review that the film
was “[s]ingularly overrated” and “[n]owhere close to Isherwood's devastat-
ing novel. However, [it] looks pretty.” 75
In two separate interviews with Tom Ford and Julienne Moore after the
public criticism over having “de-gayed” the film, both the film director and
the actress, who played Charley, commented rather defensively that they had
sought to universalize a love story, in part to give the film appeal beyond gay
viewers who constitute only a niche market. After underscoring industry
standards that limit what a trailer can depict for cinema and still be widely
distributed, Ford affirmed, “I’m perfectly proud of the fact that I’m gay. I
don’t define myself by my sexuality. For me, this is not a gay movie, this is
not a straight movie. This is a movie about love.” 76 But this alteration is
precisely the problem. As one consequence of universalizing a love story, the
film shifts attention, from the systemic predicament that George consciously
engages as formidable to him as a self-respecting homosexual, to a focus,
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 205

instead, on his merely personal, individual crisis. Even the beauty of the
scenic cinematography mitigates George’s recognition of his bleak predica-
ment, specifically as a homosexual, though it is possible that the contrast
heightens differences between his emotional state and the landscape.
It is as though the film decapitated the novel by reducing George to his
handsome surfaces and excising most of his interior life. The filmmaker’s
endeavor to universalize a love story is consequently more vulnerable than
was the novel to Richard Jacobs’s criticism about making the political mere-
ly personal. It should be acknowledged that Isherwood was also somewhat
concerned that his novel not be treated simply as a gay novel. But rather than
universalize it, he sought to shape the novel to represent a life predicament of
minorities within an ostensibly democratic culture, whose practical politics
with a tyranny of the majority were de facto dictatorships for racial minor-
ities, Jews, and homosexuals. 77 It is precisely that position, as severely op-
pressed, that the film’s universalization of a love story erases, to its detri-
ment.
More generally, what does it mean today that so many of the finest gay
novels, not only Isherwood’s A Single Man but also James Baldwin’s Gio-
vanni’s Room and E. M. Forester’s Maurice, were written before Stonewall
in 1968, which is routinely represented in queer histories today as the wa-
tershed moment in gay liberation struggles? How could it be even remotely
plausible that a watershed of sea-changing proportions could have happened
only after such landmark literary achievements? Does this observation sug-
gest anything about atemporality as well as the virtual absence of a historical
and cultural sensibility among recent generations? Might viewers be suscep-
tible to misrepresentations of a past because educational systems have done a
poor job of familiarizing people of diverse sexualities with an inclusive and
accurate history—not only of literature, but of diverse lives? Would faulting
the audiences be simplistic and misplaced criticism?
As a possibly related matter, why has there been—with the few excep-
tions usually written by gay men of my generation or the one before mine—
such a general outpouring of enthusiasm within diverse queer communities
for the film “based on” A Single Man? 78 What does it mean that the Gay and
Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has recognized the film with an award,
when the film may well detract from the reputation of an accomplished gay
author? 79 Should self-respecting gay men and our apparent allies applaud a
film that, as I have suggested, may have done our enemies’ work for them?
Should we applaud a film that has transformed a brilliant literary achieve-
ment in 1964 into a series of demeaning stereotypes and formulaic narrative
techniques almost fifty years later in 2009?
These are difficult, unpleasant questions to consider even briefly—be-
cause I believe enthusiasm for the film may reveal something disconcerting
about public memory loss and what, in a playful rephrasing of a now popular
206 Lester C. Olson

expression, might be termed a mis-usable past? Does the film evidence a

resurgence of entrenched self-loathing among queers (á la late-1960s Boys in
the Band), in which exaggerated fears of isolation, loneliness, and a suicidal
impulse seem credible, provided, of course, that it is projected safely into the
past in a way that diminishes the courage, tenacity, and resilience of homo-
sexual men in the 1960s? Does enthusiasm for the film evidence ageism
within queer communities in which younger is somehow better, against all
odds, even if the contours of heterosexism and homophobia have shifted in
large part because of a valor that Isherwood and his contemporaries practiced
at a time when they were condemned by religion, legal systems, and psycho-
logical institutions, however oppressive political circumstances remain? At
the same time that the film mis-ascribes to an accomplished gay author a
retrograde politics, which reproduces invidious stereotypes and narratives
that Isherwood would never have employed in 1964, and he actively criti-
cized in the manuscripts of Vidal and Forester, the recent film ironically—
and pathetically—is responsible for reproducing those retrograde politics and
damaging stereotypes in the present, for profit, while projecting them into a
revisionist past, a past in which, in reality, courage, humor, and a comic
frame were essential for survival with one’s self-respect intact. Let us ponder
what that may mean, not only for communication ethics, social differences,
and alterity, but also for gay men and our allies today.

NOTES

This chapter is dedicated to William Santee.

Excerpts from A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood © 1964, Christopher Isherwood.
Used with permission.
1. Christopher Isherwood, as quoted in Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life Revealed (New
York: Random House, 2004), 693. The earliest reference that I have found to Isherwood’s
published use of the expression, “the heterosexual dictatorship,” was in Christopher Isherwood,
Kathleen and Frank (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 380: “Despite the humiliations of
living under a heterosexual dictatorship and the fury he has often felt against it, Christopher has
never regretted being as he is. He is now quite certain that heterosexuality wouldn’t have suited
him; it would have fatally cramped his style.” In a 1973 interview, Isherwood commented on
the ramifications of his writing Kathleen and Frank for his own “coming out” and quoted this
passage in an interview published in James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, Conversations with
Christopher Isherwood (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 109. On the Dick
Cavett Show in 1977, Isherwood expressed a preference for the terms homosexual, fag, and
queer, rather than gay, affirming, “I believe in using the words thrown at us by our enemies.”
Quoted in Tanya English, ed., Cue: Greenwich Theatre (Croons Hill, London: n.d. [1990]),
issue 139. Out of a measure of deference to his wishes, I have used the term homosexual at
many junctures in this essay, except when I am quoting another author, referring to myself, or
dealing with a much later historical moment referencing the past (e.g., gay novels, gay history
and culture, etc.). The term queer has changed so much over the decades in academic literature
as to be misleading for the 1960s and 1970s. So I have seldom used the term here, although I
am sympathetic to certain of its political uses in academic writings and settings.
2. On ideology, see John B. Thompson, “Ideology and the Social Imaginary,” in Studies in
the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 16–41.
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 207

3. Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1968), 142–48, quotations on 145, 143, and 147; the essay was originally published
in 1961 in Vogue.
4. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. (New York:
Harper & Row, 1987), which became the basis for a documentary, The Celluloid Closet (Cul-
ver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 2001).
5. On symbolic violence, see Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); John B. Thompson, “Symbolic Violence,” Studies in the
Theory of Ideology, 42–72.
6. For a sample of germane rhetoric scholarship on public memory, see Kendall Phillips’s
Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008); Stephen Howard
Browne, “Reading, Rhetoric, and the Texture of Public Memory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech
81, no. 2 (1995): 237–50; Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction
of Identity in Old Pasadena,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 1 (1997): 1–27; Bradford
Vivian, “Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative Politics on September
11, 2002,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 1 (2006): 1–26; Thomas R. Dunn, “Remember-
ing Matthew Shepard: Violence, Identity, and Queer Counterpublic Memories,” Rhetoric &
Public Affairs 13, no. 4 (2010): 611–52; Brent Allen Saindon “A Doubled Heterotopia: Shifting
Spatial and Visual Symbolism in the Jewish Museum Berlin’s Development,” Quarterly Jour-
nal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 24–48.
7. Andrew Holleran, “The Sloth of Sadness,” Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 17, no.
2 (2010): 48–49; Ben Walters, “The Trouble with Perfume,” Film Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2010):
14–17.
8. Kenneth Burke, “Comic Correctives,” in Attitudes Toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1937, reprinted 1959 and 1984), 166–75.
9. For a concise commentary on the comic frame, see Anne Theresa Demo, “The Guerrilla
Girls’ Comic Politics of Subversion,” Women’s Studies in Communication 23, no. 2 (2000):
133–57; reprinted in Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope, Visual Rhetoric: A
Reader in Communication and American Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008): 241–56,
quotation on 242; Adrienne E. Christiansen and Jeremy J. Hanson, “Comedy as a Cure for
Tragedy: Act Up and the Rhetoric of AIDS,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996):
157–70.
10. Colin MacCabe, “Introduction,” in Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner,
eds., True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 8.
11. I touch on this critical practice in Lester C. Olson, “Concerning Judgment in Criticism of
Rhetoric,” Review of Communication 12, no. 3 (2012): 251–56, though analogs can be drawn
among works that are not adaptations, as is the case in the instance of the novel and film based
on A Single Man.
12. Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 27.
13. Edward J. Ingebretsen, “Monster-Making: A Politics of Persuasion,” Journal of
American Culture 21, no. 2 (1998): 25–34, quotations on 25 and 29. Thanks to Thomas R.
Dunn for calling my attention to this essay many years ago.
14. On realism in cinema studies, especially in André Bazin, see Daniel Morgan, “Rethink-
ing Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (2006): 443–81.
15. Gregg Shapiro, “A Singular Man: Tom Ford Talks to the B.A.R. [Bay Area Reporter],”
Bay Area Reporter, Dec. 24, 2009. www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=film&article=704.
16. Parker, Isherwood, 623.
17. David Garnes, “A Single Man, Then and Now,” in The Isherwood Century: Essays on
the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood, ed. James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, foreword
Armistead Maupin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 196–202, quotations on
196 and 198.
18. Edmund White, “Tale of Two Kitties” [Review of Peter Parker’s biography], Times
Literary Supplement (London), June 4, 2004, Issue 5279, pg. 3; quoted in James J. Berg,
“Introduction,” Isherwood on Writing: Christopher Isherwood, ed. James J. Berg (Minneapo-
208 Lester C. Olson

lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 27. Edmund White, “A Love Tormented but Trium-
phant,” New York Times Book Review, Dec. 12, 2010, p. 15.
19. White, “Tale of Two Kitties,” 3.
20. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Christopher Isherwood (New York: Columbia University Press,
1970), 13.
21. John Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir (New York: Holt, 1987),
102 and 103.
22. Isherwood, as quoted in Berg and Freeman, see interview with Winston Leyland,
“Christopher Isherwood Interview [1973],” in Conversations, 107, xiv, similarly 66 and 87.
23. James J. Berg with Chris Freeman, “Isherwood the Multiculturalist,” Chronicle of High-
er Education 56, no. 18 (2010): B13–15.
24. Berg and Freeman, see interview with Derek Hart, “A Fortunate, Happy Life [An inter-
view of Isherwood in 1970]” in Conversations, 54.
25. Berg and Freeman, see interview with Winston Leyland, “Christopher Isherwood Inter-
view [1973],” in Conversations, 107. On this matter, see also Berg, “Introduction,” Isherwood
on Writing, 8.
26. For instance, see White, “A Love Tormented,” 15.
27. Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood, 102–3.
28. Holleran, “The Sloth of Sadness,” 48.
29. The lowest assessment that I am aware of was at number 33 of 100 by Triangle Publish-
ing, “The 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels,” www.publishingtriangle.org/100best.asp. This
ranking was published in the June 22, 1999, issue of The Advocate and has been widely
circulated by numerous outlets. I recall, but cannot locate, an earlier assessment in the top 6
along with James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.
30. Mary Vaughan Cuddon, “Tragi-comic Tale of a Saint and Sinner,” Catholic Herald,
Nov. 27, 1964, 6. The reviewer does not even list the book’s title among those considered in the
review.
31. Richard Jacobs, Penguin History of Literature (London: Penguin, 1994), 7: 240; quoted
by Berg in Isherwood on Writing, 16.
32. Berg, Isherwood on Writing, 17.
33. Jacobs, Penguin History, 7: 242–43. Both comments by Jacobs and Berg are in Berg,
Isherwood on Writing, 17.
34. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993), 232.
35. Both comments by Bradbury and Berg are in Berg, Isherwood on Writing, 18.
36. Richard G. Hubler, “Disjointed Limp Wrist Saga,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 2, 1964,
B15.
37. Michel Foucault explores parrhēsia in The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédérick Gros, trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).
38. James Darsey, “‘The Voice of Exile’: W. E. B. DuBois and the Quest for Culture,” in
Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation, ed. J. Michael Hogan (Colum-
bia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 93–110, quotation on 97.
39. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 78–108, quotations on 82.
40. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in The Essential Works of Foucault
1954–1984, Volume One—Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1997), 135–40.
41. Krista Ratcliffe explores dis-identification, a concept that she ascribes to Diana Fuss, in
Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 2005), see especially 48, 53, and 60–66.
42. Richard B. Gregg, “The Ego-Function of the Rhetoric of Protest,” Philosophy & Rheto-
ric 4, no. 2 (1971): 71–91.
43. Burke, “Comic Correctives,” 171.
44. Christopher Isherwood as quoted in Parker, Isherwood, 618.
45. Didion, “On Self-Respect.”
46. With regard to spirituality, Victor Marsh claims that “Isherwood theorised [sic] the
writing of religion in his essay ‘The Problem of the Religious Novel’, yet it is in the least
 Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood’s Novel, A Single Man 209

overtly religious text, A Single Man, where the influence of his training in the Ramakrishna
Vedanta tradition is seamlessly integrated.” See Victor Marsh, “On ‘The Problem of the Relig-
ious Novel’: Christopher Isherwood and A Single Man,” Literature & Theology 24, no. 4
(2010): 378–96, quotation on 378. In contrast, S. Nagarajan has claimed that “A Single Man is
not a religious novel if we adopt the definition of such a novel provided by Isherwood himself
in his article on ‘The Problem of the Religious Novel.’ It gives us the portrait neither of the
saint nor of the saint-to-be” in “Christopher Isherwood and the Vedantic Novel: A Study of A
Single Man,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 3, no. 4 (1972): 63–71,
quotation on 70.
47. This was among Alan Collins’s misgivings, according to Parker, Isherwood, 633.
48. Chris Freeman, “Too Much Information!” Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 18, no. 2
(2011): 31.
49. Parker, Isherwood, 635.
50. The play, A Single Man, was adapted by Michael Michaelian and directed by Waris
Hussein for performance at the Greenwich Theatre at Grooms Hill, London, from June 21 to
August 4, 1990.
51. The letter from Isherwood to Vidal deserves to be read and can be found with commen-
tary in the biography by Parker, Isherwood, 500. I have silently corrected the version in Parker,
who wrote “Many men” instead of “Men,” though, in a way, his revision is accurate, too. A
somewhat shorter version can be found in Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 1940–1996
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 61–62. For Isherwood’s initial impressions of Vidal, whom
he had only recently met, see Christopher Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 1939–1960, ed.
Katherine Bucknell (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 401. Thanks to Sue Hodson of the
Huntington Library for providing me with a photocopy of Isherwood’s letter and looking for a
reply to it from Vidal, November 30, 2012. Though Isherwood’s letter explicitly requested a
reply from Vidal, the collection of his papers at the Huntington does not hold one, nor does the
collection of Vidal’s papers at Harvard University.
52. Isherwood, as quoted in Parker, Isherwood, 500.
53. For Isherwood’s response to the dedication, see Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography
(New York: Doubleday, 1999), 584.
54. Ibid., 256.
55. Ibid., 276–77; also see Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood, 77.
56. Parker, Isherwood, 533; Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 1929–1939
(New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1976), 127; Richard Canning, “Tomb with a View,” The
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 16, no. 2 (2009): 10; Joshua Adair, “‘Christopher Wasn’t
Satisfied with Either Ending’: Connecting Christopher Isherwood’s The World in the Evening
to E. M. Forster’s Maurice,” Papers on Language & Literature 48, no. 3 (2012): 302–31,
especially 311–13.
57. Canning, “Tomb with a View,” 10.
58. There is a substantial body of scholarship on adaptation of novels into film. Particularly
useful is Colin MacCabe et al., eds., True to the Spirit, quotation on 3; Robert Stam and
Alessandra Raengo, eds., Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film
Adaptation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); James Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). Thanks to Randall Halle and Jane Feuer for
recommending these resources to me.
59. Tom Gunning, “Literary Appropriation and Translation in Early Cinema,” in True to the
Spirit, 41–57, especially 42–43.
60. Dudley Andrew, “The Economies of Adaptation,” in True to the Spirit, 27–40, quotation
on 27.
61. See Peter Knegt, “A Tale of Two Trailers: The De-Gaying of ‘A Single Man,’” Indie-
wire, Nov. 9, 2009, www.indiewire.com/article/a_tale_of_two_trailers_the_de-gaying_of_a_
single_man.
62. Walters, “The Trouble with Perfume,” 15.
63. Ibid., 16; Holleran, “The Sloth of Sadness,” 49.
64. Sir Thomas Willes Chitty under a pseudonym, Thomas Hinde, “George and Jim,” Times
Literary Supplement (London), Sept. 10, 1964, Issue 3263, p. 837.
210 Lester C. Olson

65. Burke, “Comic Corrective,” 166.

66. Holleran, “The Sloth of Sadness,” 48.
67. Cuddon, “Tragi-comic,” 6; quoted in Parker, Isherwood, 634.
68. Gunning, “Literary Appropriation,” 43 and 44.
69. MacCabe, “Introduction,” 5.
70. Andrew, “The Economies of Adaptation,” 27.
71. Comment 67 on Manohal Dargis’s film review, “A Love That Speaks Its Name: A
College Professor’s Fateful Day,” New York Times, Dec. 10, 2009, movies.nytimes.com/2009/
12/11/movies/11singleman.html.
72. The Celluloid Closet (Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 2001).
73. Michael G. Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition
in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 6.
74. Comment 55 on Dargis, “A Love That Speaks Its Name.”
75. Comment 9 on Dargis, “A Love That Speaks Its Name.”
76. Shapiro, “A Singular Man”; Nick Haramis, “Julianne Moore on the De-Gaying of ‘A
Single Man,’” BlackBook, Feb 3, 2010, www.blackbookmag.com/article/julianne-moore-on-
the-de-gaying-of-a-single-man/15773.
77. See, for examples, quotations of Christopher Isherwood in Berg and Freeman, Conver-
sations, xiv, 44 and 121–22.
78. There have, of course, been some exceptions. A review that comes especially close to
my own assessment of the film, though with a delightful sense of humor toward its limitations,
is Holleran, “The Sloth of Sadness,” 48–49.
79. “On January 14, 2010, the film was nominated for, and later won, Outstanding Film—
Wide Release at the 21st GLAAD Media Awards.” “A Single Man,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/A_Single_Man_(film); original reference: “21st Annual GLAAD Media Awards
(2010)—English Language Nominees,” www.glaad.org/mediaawards/21/nominees.

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 III

Otherness and Contextual

Divergence
 Chapter Ten

Organization as Other
Professional Civility as Communicative
Care for Institutions

Janie M. Harden Fritz

Workplace communication is an ethical matter, holding implications for in-

stitutional and personal flourishing. 1 Professional civility as communicative
virtue at work 2 can be understood as an organizational communication ethic
manifesting in communicative practices that attend to the Other in organiza-
tional contexts. One Other in the professional civility framework is the insti-
tution or the local home 3 within which organizational members find a place
of contribution through their work. Attending to the local home is a facet of
professional civility grounded in a perspective of care for institutions. 4 Care
for institutions involves thoughtful engagement of an organization’s horizon
of possibilities and a thoughtful, deliberate phenomenological turning toward
key facets of organizational experience.
Phillip Selznick offers a broad conceptualization of institutions that cap-
tures a variety of human enterprises and activities within its compass: “The
term ‘institution’ may refer to a group or a social practice.” 5 Social forms,
whether a group, practice, or both, become institutionalized through taking
on “a distinctive character or function, becom[ing] a receptacle of vested
interests, or [being] charged with meaning as a vehicle of personal satisfac-
tion or aspiration.” 6 Selznick makes a distinction between organizations and
institutions, but notes that “a given enterprise need not be solely either one or
the other.” 7 The key for institutional existence rests with degree of expend-
ability—that is, the extent to which a given enterprise, group, or organization
is infused with value beyond a given task that is carried out by that entity is
an indicator of institutionalization. 8 If the enterprise can be readily “given up

215
216 Janie M. Harden Fritz

or refashioned in response to practical or instrumental demands,” 9 it is not an

institution. Organizations can be more or less institutionalized. 10
From a professional civility perspective, the organization or institution
stands in the role of an Other in need of supportive undergirding of its
function, mission, and participants. 11 Institutions and organizations are con-
stituted by and for human beings, drawing their existence and character from
human activity and interaction. Organizational communication scholars have
emphasized the structuring work of interactive and linguistic microprocesses,
which bear the constitutive power of communication to construct organiza-
tions and their environments. 12 Communication constitutes organizational
processes and structures that constrain and enable organizational actors. 13
Indeed, communication is organizing, according to both François Cooren 14
and James Taylor and Elizabeth Van Every. 15 The consequences of language
occurring within organizational contexts are well documented and nontrivial,
suggesting the need for attentiveness to the nature of utterances produced in
the workplace setting 16 and framing communication in organizational set-
tings as a deeply ethical matter 17 for both institutions and their participants.
Institutions, according to Alasdair MacIntyre, 18 are necessary to reach the
telos of human flourishing. Institutions foster the achievement of external
goods necessary to support virtuous practices that issue in achievement of
characteristically human ends. 19 In the case of professional civility, for in-
stance, the organization is a “good” of professional practice that permits
achievement of human purposes supported by the professions. 20 Organiza-
tions are not invulnerable, however, and summon us to tend to them with the
care that we extend to human Others. Such care embraces a unity of contrar-
ies; in the context of human relationships, care is both burden and blessing,
simultaneously suffering and joy. 21 Such is also the case with institutions and
organizations; they are symbols and instantiations of the best and worst that
humankind can be, testament to both remarkable successes and abject fail-
ures of human striving.
Selznick reminds us of the fragility of institutions, which are vulnerable
to diverging from their publicly stated purpose—what some term “mission
drift” 22—through an erosion of the values that make up their “distinctive
character.” 23 In such cases, it may be said that concern for the mission
statement is replaced by concern for the balance statement. For this reason, I
have warned elsewhere 24 of the importance of careful reflection and atten-
tiveness when offering suggestions for organizational change, following
Selznick’s recommendation for “principled” 25 revision. Such reflection
points toward the need for care for institutions, the organizations and associa-
tions that support the labor, work, and action of human persons in the gestalt
of public and private life.
A professional civility approach to organizational flourishing encompass-
ing a perspective of care for institutions recognizes the importance of protect-
 Organization as Other 217

ing and promoting the local home 26 as a place hosting productivity generated
by the persons who participate in the work of the organization. 27 Care for
institutions involves a recognition of the organization as Other and is enacted
by organizational participants through communicative practices protecting
and promoting various goods leading to institutional flourishing. 28 Care for
the organization or institution as Other is the responsibility of organizational
leaders and of other organizational participants—paraphrasing Marie Baker-
Ohler and Annette Holba’s work on dialogue as the labor of care in human
relationships, 29 care for institutions is a shared labor dedicated to the ongoing
durability of structures necessary for human survival. It is within this context
that I offer this reflection on the organization as “Other” and on care for the
institutional/organizational Other through practices of professional civility—
professional civility as communicative care for institutions.
This chapter offers further development of a perspective on care for insti-
tutions initially articulated in the context of women’s leadership in educa-
tional institutions 30 and extended into the professional civility framework
elsewhere. 31 I begin with brief consideration of theoretical perspectives that
point to a conceptualization of organization as Other, offer a perspective on
care for institutions, and then turn attention to practices of professional civil-
ity that provide communicative care for the organization as Other.

ORGANIZATION AS OTHER:
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

An understanding of organization as Other is not uncommon in everyday

experience and discourse. From a phenomenological perspective, organic
entities other than human beings, such as pets and plants, become and remain
personified as vital elements of the human environment. Nonorganic entities,
either created by human work, 32 such as ships and cars, or environmentally
emergent, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, also become “persons,” not only
being granted distinctive identity through naming but also receiving from
those who recognize that identity an attentiveness beyond that paid to the
merely mechanical or technical. Indeed, the role of inanimate objects as
welcomed presences in a life is one characteristic highlighted as differentiat-
ing the philosophy of Levinas from that of Heidegger. 33 Our phenomenologi-
cal worlds are teeming with Otherly life, existents accompanying us as we
engage an existential response to the human condition. 34
Organizations as ephemeral, yet substantial and influential, formations
become Other through the communicative attention of human persons in
contexts of temporal enactment of institutional activity/activities. Because of
the ongoing and interactive nature of organizational action, some conceptual-
izations of organizations move toward a “process” understanding of “orga-
218 Janie M. Harden Fritz

nizing,” directing attention away from organizations as containers or static

entities. 35 Nonetheless, organizations readily become personified as pheno-
menologically discrete entities, initiators and recipients of messages and ac-
tions, actors in ongoing stories of public life, players in the historical unfold-
ing of nations and countries. This personification, along with other types of
identification and “entity construction,” happens at the micro level of interac-
tion and at the larger macro level of public message generation.
At the micro level—by means of everyday utterances, stories, responsive
actions, and initiated behavior—organizations are given existence and life
and are constructed as possessing distinctive, particular attributes. 36 For ex-
ample, employees are able to identify an organization’s key characteristics in
order to assess its attractiveness. 37 Some theorists, working from a cognitive
perspective, posit a “personality” approach to organizations, 38 which posits
that persons come to view organizations as having particular personality
traits.
At the macro level, the organization is constructed through image man-
agement by persons charged with projecting and protecting a particular
brand, identity, and/or reputation to internal and external publics. 39 The early
work of James March and Herbert Simon on organizational prestige 40 sug-
gests that organizations have varying degrees of visibility in the larger soci-
ety and are more or less successful in achieving their goals, both attributes
suggesting the potential for an organization to take on an Other-like identity
beyond a legal understanding of the corporate person. 41 Each of these treat-
ments holds implications for organizational and institutional health and
points in the direction of care for institutions as Other.

CARE FOR INSTITUTIONS

An initial perspective on care for institutions 42 drew on the work of Baker-

Ohler and Holba 43 on the communicative labor of care, along with the work
of Julia T. Wood, 44 in the context of women’s communicative leadership in
educational institutions. The contested area of leadership differences be-
tween men and women raised many questions about how women approach
the work of leadership. The research of Marlene Fine and of Marina Tomàs,
Jose Manuel Lavie, Marie del Mar Duran, and Cristina Guillamon suggests
that women often choose to engage positions of leadership in order to make a
difference in the world 45 and/or to be of service to the larger unit. 46 These
findings, when connected with the work of Baker-Ohler and Holba, suggest a
perspective of care for institutions marking women’s administrative leader-
ship that could be applied to women’s leadership in institutions of higher
education. This approach, however, does not need to be limited to women’s
leadership; care for institutions is everyone’s responsibility. Care for institu-
 Organization as Other 219

tions will manifest in different ways, depending on the requirements of roles

designed to define particular domains of responsibility that permit coordina-
tion of activities on behalf of a particular institution. Public roles are neces-
sary for institutional and organizational functioning and flourishing, provid-
ing guidelines for task performance and enactment of organizational relation-
ships. 47 Acknowledgment of the value of roles is consistent with the concep-
tual framework of care for institutions.
The initial broad conceptual perspective of care for institutions included
the need to see beyond immediate presenting problems occurring in institu-
tional contexts, the importance of taking a long-term view rather than a short-
term view of organizational health, 48 and a rejection of the equivalent, in
organizational terms, of temporary comfort reflective of a therapeutic re-
sponse in the interpersonal context. 49 Organizational citizenship was offered
as one of the theoretical foundations of care for institutions and later became
part of the closely associated professional civility framework. 50 The impor-
tance of Arendtian action 51 was another conceptual key in care for institu-
tions. In the context of higher education, such leadership “is a form of action
that recognizes the value of the public sphere, nurturing a learning commu-
nity that equips persons with the cultural capital and resources to participate
in public life.” 52 This type of leadership is directed toward solving problems
in the larger world and finds engagement in the lived experience of a distinc-
tive educational home. 53
Baker-Ohler and Holba reviewed the literature on care as they conceptu-
alized care as dialogic labor, highlighting definitions from philosophy,
psychology, and feminist theory. 54 The definitions of Bernice Fisher and
Joan Tronto and of Patricia Benner and Judith Wrubel that they drew upon
seem particularly fruitful for extending a perspective on care for institutions
beyond the framework of institutions of higher education. Following the lead
of Baker-Ohler and Holba, I turn to these scholars’ insights for further devel-
opment of a perspective on care for institutions.
Fisher and Tronto note that care involves activities of maintenance, con-
tinuation, and repair of our world, with the goal of living well in that world. 55
This definition works well with that of Benner and Wrubel, who highlight
care as connecting people to the world. 56 These conceptualizations of care
resonate with understandings of institutions and organizations articulated by
MacIntyre, who finds institutions necessary to support practices promoting
human flourishing. 57 Activities of maintenance, continuation, and repair sug-
gest that institutions need different types of care and that caring for institu-
tions can be undertaken in multifaceted ways. Maintenance suggests endu-
rance with good health; continuation suggests a concern and hope that an
institution might endure through time; repair recognizes the reality of bro-
kenness and failure in need of correction and restoration. All of these modal-
ities of care involve communicative action—the communicative labor of
220 Janie M. Harden Fritz

care 58 directed to and engaged for institutions. Through activities of commu-

nicative care for institutions, persons are connected to elements of the world
created and instantiated by human beings. 59
Elements of institutions requiring care can be connected explicitly to
elements of the professional civility framework of productivity, place, and
persons and can be read through the lens of Fisher and Tronto and Benner
and Wrubel. An organization’s reputation and culture connected to produc-
tivity, its mission and identity as a place, and its internal environment and
climate that affect persons in the organization are all three in need of care.
Neglect of these elements will lead to decreased organizational flourishing
and will increase the likelihood of organizational failure. 60
Professional civility’s attention to productivity as an organizational good
ensures the viability of an organization’s reputation and culture and thus
manifests as care for institutions. As organizational members focus attention
on communicative routines that honor and encourage task accomplishment, 61
they enact care for institutions. Organizations live and die by their reputa-
tions for excellent products, processes, and/or services; the work institutions
and organizations do is the engine for their success. A culture of productivity
makes attention to the task more likely, establishing a concern for work as
part of the warp and woof of an organization’s fabric, weaving patterns of
maintenance, continuation, and repair through an institutional narrative, con-
necting its members to a quest for excellence.
Professional civility’s attention to place, or the local home, 62 ensures the
viability of an organization’s mission, identity, and internal environment and
thus manifests as care for institutions. Messages that provide appropriate
support for an organization’s direction and purpose, distinctiveness, and val-
ues all manifest care for institutions. An organization’s mission and identity
are hallmarks of institutionalization, leading to the likelihood of an organiza-
tion’s enduring through time, while the internal environment works from the
inside out 63 to maintain institutional mission and identity, a common center 64
that connects persons to the institution.
Professional civility’s attention to persons ensures the viability of an or-
ganization’s interpersonal climate and thus manifests as care for institutions.
As members honor each other in their roles, protecting and promoting rela-
tionships that are accountable to the local home, 65 they care for institutions.
As persons within organizational roles carry out their tasks within a particu-
lar place, routines of respect provide appropriate interplay of distance and
closeness, permitting relational variations to emerge within the horizons of a
particular organizational culture. 66 In response to inevitable challenges stem-
ming from human error, relational repair becomes a task of responding to a
long-term focus on institutional health.
 Organization as Other 221

PROFESSIONAL CIVILITY AS CARE FOR INSTITUTIONS:

PRODUCTIVITY, PLACE, AND PERSONS

This section reviews the professional civility perspective as laid out in recent
work on the topic, 67 highlighting elements of that theorizing that speak spe-
cifically to issues of productivity, place, and persons. Each good of the
professions finds its origin in the history of the professions as practice within
the ongoing narrative of professions in general and within the specific history
of a given profession. 68 Professional civility as communicative virtue at work
protects and promotes these goods, and by so doing, manifests as communi-
cative care for institutions by supporting institutional maintenance, continua-
tion, repair, and connection of members to a guiding organizational narrative.

Productivity

Professional civility’s background focus is productivity, or a focus on the

task. The history of professions as a tradition of practice highlights the im-
portance of labor worth being done as a key focus of the professions. Profes-
sional work operates as the work of a craft when excellence in task accom-
plishment is recognized. Communicative practices that support and encour-
age good work, offer correction when work is not up to standards, and offer
praise for craft excellence all support and contribute to an organization’s
external reputation and internal culture. 69
Professional civility protects and promotes productivity at a number of
levels. Managers are accountable for how they enact performance evalua-
tions, encourage task accomplishment, offer constructive criticism, and
match word and deed. 70 To the extent that managers offer feedback that
provides ways to improve, protects employees’ face, and encourages perse-
verance, managers offer hope and possibility to employees, thereby promot-
ing engagement in the task and productivity and decreasing the appearance of
cynicism emerging from unmet high expectations. 71
Peers are also accountable for supporting productivity in the workplace.
Peers encourage productivity by offering conversation that is supportive and
uplifting. Smalltalk taking place at the right time and manner contributes a
welcome respite from task engagement and refreshment for participants, who
regain strength to return to productive task accomplishment. 72 Obsessive
complaint that focuses attention on a problem without moving to constructive
options for solution moves attention away from productivity. For example,
co-rumination, or talking excessively and negatively with a peer about a
problem, leads to a number of negative outcomes, including increased physi-
cal and psychological stress. 73 Problematic communicative patterns in the
workplace, such as incivility, bullying, ostracism, and tokenism, 74 detract
from productivity and compromise care for institutions.
222 Janie M. Harden Fritz

The work of Anne Mancl and Barbara Penington on the phenomenon of

“tall poppies” in the workplace explores communication that demeaned or
“cut down” the productivity of highly successful women in organizational
discourse. 75 Their findings provide a close look at how deconstructive com-
munication in the workplace takes place in response to productivity. This
“dark side” of organizational communication can be contrasted with the find-
ings of Pamela Lutgen-Sanvik, Sarah Riforgiate, and Courtney Fletcher, who
explore positive communicative experiences with others in the workplace. 76
One of the themes in Lutgen-Sandvik et al.’s work is that of recognition for
successful task accomplishment and the positive feelings evoked by others’
recognition of coworkers’ personal accomplishments. These studies provide
concrete examples of practices to avoid and practices to adopt in order to
provide communicative care for institutions, promoting maintenance, contin-
uation, and repair and providing connection to a larger project to which all
contribute their efforts.

Place

Organizational hiring, socialization, and mentoring are key practices of pro-

fessional civility. 77 Each of these practices offers communicative care for
institutions. Each of these processes is a task taken on by organizational
leadership and, at times, peers. 78 Attention to these processes is a way of
attending to the organization as Other, ensuring continuity of participation
and constructive enactment of the organization’s mission—activities of
maintenance, continuity, repair, and connection.
Hiring for mission increases the likelihood of a strong person-organiza-
tion fit. 79 One’s professional skills alone are insufficient to ensure a positive
contribution to the work environment; a match between organizational and
individual values and a willingness to protect and promote the organization’s
direction 80 are an integral part of constructive participation in an organiza-
tion. Managers sensitive to a postmodern moment 81 recognize the impor-
tance of particularity of place and are attentive to these issues.
Organizational socialization 82 instills in new members the importance of
organizational mission and identity. As new members learn about the organ-
ization, they are invited to take on a new identity. The potential clash be-
tween professional and institutional identity may be mitigated by the meta-
phor of “a guest in the home.” 83 Professionals who assume the identity of a
guest acknowledge time with the organization as limited, but nevertheless
enact respect for an institution to which they do not owe primary allegiance.
Care for institutions involves respect for a place one cannot love, but to
which one owes professional accountability.
Mentoring as a public activity ensures that all will receive the benefit of a
formal, organizationally accountable relationship. 84 When left to only infor-
 Organization as Other 223

mal or chance mentoring opportunities, new employees may find themselves

without the advice and support of seasoned veterans who know the organiza-
tion well and can offer guidance and counsel in times of uncertainty. If new
employees have little in common with incumbents, and therefore no personal
basis on which to form a relationship, mentoring may not emerge spontane-
ously. Furthermore, informal mentoring may not focus on the organization’s
interests. Formal mentoring relationships ensure that the organization’s mis-
sion, identity, and culture remain the primary focus of the mentoring rela-
tionship. 85
Part of communicative care for institutions involves the unity of contrar-
ies of support and dissent. 86 Organizations must, at times, undergo change in
response to external or internal events. Such change may be envisioned
imaginatively within the horizon of the organization’s mission limits and
suggested through insights that preserve the organization’s narrative as a
community of memory. 87
Organizations are shaped by messages exchanged within them, which
construct the context for productivity, relational engagement, and under-
standings of others in the environment. 88 In this manner, organizational par-
ticipants’ experience of the organizational context is influenced by communi-
cation in the organizational context. Just as the “poppy clippers” in Mancl
and Penington’s study hurt productivity, so do these critics of productive
others became “architects of organizational atrophy,” shrinking the pheno-
menological space and lowering the phenomenological ceiling of the organ-
ization. 89 As employees avoid destructive communicative practices and
adopt constructive communicative practices, they care for the “place” by
ensuring its maintenance and continuity, offering repair through constructive
dissent, and constructing a context for contributions, thereby connecting or-
ganizational members to the larger institution.

Persons

In the context of protecting and promoting persons, professional civility’s

domain manifests most clearly at the level of interpersonal communication in
human relationships. Civility, originally conceptualized as communicative
virtue at the interpersonal level of interaction, 90 is the raw material of which
professional civility is formed. The context of the organization shifts the
conceptualization of civility into domains particular to the story of the pro-
fessions.
The flourishing of persons in the human condition involves labor, work,
and action. 91 In the organizational context, both persons and institutions may
flourish together under the right conditions. As persons enact their role-
related requirements and contribute to institutions through productivity, part
of the human telos is enacted.
224 Janie M. Harden Fritz

Persons in organizations form a variety of relationships, ranging from the

relatively role-bound to the close and personal. 92 From a professional civility
perspective, organizational relationships are accountable to the particular
place within which they are situated. 93 In the organizational context, friend-
ships, or blended relationships, 94 take the form of a public friendship, ac-
countable to the organization as a “third party.” 95
In today’s historical moment, the overlap or blurring of public and private
space threatens to compromise the value of both spheres. 96 In order to protect
and promote persons in organizations, recognition of boundaries defining
work relationships is necessary. Although close friendships can be an impor-
tant source of social support in the workplace, excessive private connection
can lead to ostracism and exclusion 97 and associated problematic outcomes
for both persons and institutions.
A professional civility perspective works from the understanding that one
does not have to like those with whom one works. 98 In a historical moment
of virtue contention and difference, it is likely that one will have a number of
commitments different from those of fellow employees, as well as a number
of commonalities. Forgiveness, 99 distancing in order to work effectively with
disliked others, 100 and identifying strategies that assist when relational diffi-
culties arise 101 are practices of professional civility that protect and promote
persons in organizational settings. Institutional maintenance, continuity, and
repair do their work through interpersonal processes; in turn, such processes
connect participants to the local home.

IMPLICATIONS: OTHERNESS AND ORGANIZATIONS

Communicative care for institutions emerges from the professional civility

framework and encompasses elements of the maintenance and continuity of
institutional mission and purpose, responsive repair, and institutional connec-
tion through communicative attentiveness to goods of productivity, place,
and persons. The organization as Other calls forth care for institutions mani-
fested through practices of professional civility. Each good in the profession-
al civility framework defines a domain of institutions requiring care; as pro-
fessional civility attends to these goods, care for institutions takes shape in
the form of embodied communicative practices.
Concern for productivity sustains organizational reputation through main-
tenance of mission and vision, ensuring continuity and focusing attention on
tasks, thus permitting repair and restoration of relationships and institutional
processes as a natural outgrowth of success. Connection emerges through
personal contributions of members toward institutional success. Communica-
tive practices that protect and promote the “place” of the organizational/
institutional home ensures maintenance, continuity, and repair through
 Organization as Other 225

thoughtful communicative practices of constructive dissent and ongoing sup-

port; a larger mission connects persons to the organization through socializa-
tion and mentoring. Attentiveness to persons against a background of ac-
countability to the institution focuses the meaning and purpose of relation-
ships in ways that keep organizational health primary—thereby assisting
relational health, as well—ensuring maintenance, continuity, and repair
through restorative communicative practices, reestablishing connection to the
organizational purpose and mission.
Professional civility understood as communicative care for institutions
focuses attention on the organization as Other, an Other that calls forth the
concern and thoughtful attention of its many participants. Communicative
practices attentive to goods of productivity, place, and persons enact care for
the entities that provide human communities with necessary enablements and
constraints oriented to human flourishing. Communicative care for institu-
tions announces the importance of participation in and contributions to the
larger public sphere of human endeavors, the inevitability of responsibility
for ongoing maintenance, continuity, and repair of institutions that connect
human beings to the ongoing project defining the human condition.

NOTES

1. Janie M. Harden Fritz, Professional Civility: Communicative Virtue at Work (New

York: Peter Lang, 2013); Janie M. Harden Fritz, “Ethics Matters: Why Ethical Communication
Makes a Difference in Today’s Workplace,” in Workplace Communication for the 21st Centu-
ry: Tools and Strategies that Impact the Bottom Line, ed. Jason Wrench (Westport, CT: Praeg-
er, 2013), 39–60.
2. Fritz, Professional Civility.
3. Ronald C. Arnett, Dialogic Education: Conversation about Ideas and between Persons
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).
4. Janie M. Harden Fritz, “Women’s Communicative Leadership in Higher Education,” in
Communicative Understandings of Women's Leadership Development: From Ceilings of Glass
to Labyrinth Paths, ed. Elesha Ruminski and Annette Holba (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2012), 3–25; Fritz, Professional Civility.
5. Phillip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Commu-
nity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Original work published 1992.
6. Ibid., 233.
7. Ibid., 232.
8. Ibid., 233.
9. Ibid., 234.
10. Ibid., 243.
11. Fritz, Professional Civility.
12. Karen Ashcraft, Timothy R. Kuhn, and François Cooren, “Constitutional Amendments:
‘Materializing’ Organizational Communication,” Academy of Management Annals 3, no. 1
(2009): 1–64; Brittany L. Collins, Rebecca Gill, and Jennifer J. Mease, “Explaining Tensions in
Workplace Relationships: Toward a Communicative and Situated Understanding of Token-
ism,” in Problematic Relationships in the Workplace, Vol. 2, ed. Becky L. Omdahl and Janie
M. Harden Fritz, (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 190–212.
226 Janie M. Harden Fritz

13. Katherine Miller, “Communication as Constructive,” in Communication as . . . Perspec-

tives on Theory, ed. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2006), 31–37.
14. François Cooren, The Organizing Property of Communication (Amsterdam, Nether-
lands: John Benjamins, 2000).
15. James R. Taylor and Elizabeth J. Van Every, The Emergent Organization: Communica-
tion as Site and Surface (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000).
16. Fritz, Professional Civility.
17. Fritz, “Ethics Matters.”
18. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
19. Ibid.
20. Fritz, Professional Civility; Bruce A. Kimball, The “True Professional Ideal” in Ameri-
ca: A History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995); William M. Sullivan, Work and
Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America (New York: HarperCollins,
1995); William M. Sullivan, Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in
America, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2005).
21. Marie Baker-Ohler and Annette M. Holba, The Communicative Relationship between
Dialogue and Care (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009).
22. Mark H. Moore, “Managing for Value: Organizational Strategy in For Profit, Nonprofit,
and Governmental Organizations,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2000):
183–204.
23. Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth, 333.
24. Fritz, Professional Civility, 164–68.
25. Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth, 338.
26. Arnett, Dialogic Education.
27. Fritz, Professional Civility.
28. Ibid.
29. Baker-Ohler and Holba, The Communicative Relationship.
30. Fritz, “Women’s Communicative Leadership.”
31. Fritz, Professional Civility.
32. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
33. Robert John Sheffler Manning, Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger: Emmanuel Le-
vinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1993).
34. Arendt, The Human Condition.
35. Patricia M. Sias, Organizing Relationships: Traditional and Emerging Perspectives on
Workplace Relationships (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009); Ruth C. Smith, “Images of Organ-
izational Communication: Root-metaphors of the Organization-Communication Relationship,”
Presentation, Annual Convention of the International Communication Association, Washing-
ton, DC, May 27–31, 1993; Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks,
CA: 1995).
36. Cooren, The Organizing Property; Taylor and Van Every, The Emergent Organization.
37. Jane E. Dutton, Janet M. Dukerich, and Celia V. Harquail, “Organizational Images and
Member Identification,” Administrative Science Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1994): 239–63.
38. Jerel E. Slaughter, et al., “Personality Trait Inferences about Organizations: Develop-
ment of a Measure and Assessment of Construct Validity,” Journal of Applied Psychology 89,
no. 1 (2004): 85–103.
39. Stuart Albert and David A. Whetten, “Organizational Identity,” in Research in Organ-
izational Behavior, ed. Larry L. Cummings and Barry M. Staw, 263–95, vol. 7 (Oxford,
Elsevier Limited, 1985; Alan Clardy, “Organizational Reputation: Issues in Conceptualization
and Measurement,” Corporate Reputation Review 15, no. 4 (2012): 285–303.
40. James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958).
41. See, for instance, Steven Gerencser, “The Corporate Person and Democratic Politics,”
Political Research Quarterly 48, no. 5 (2005): 625–35.
42. Fritz, “Women’s Communicative Leadership.”
43. Baker-Ohler and Holba, The Communicative Relationship.
 Organization as Other 227

44. Julia T. Wood, Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1994).
45. Marlene G. Fine, “Women Leaders’ Discursive Constructions of Leadership,” Women’s
Studies in Communication 32, no. 2 (2009): 180–202; Marina Tomàs, et al., “Women in
Academic Administration at the University,” Educational Management Administration and
Leadership 38, no. 4 (2010): 487–98.
46. Tomàs, et al., “Women in Academic Administration.”
47. Fritz, “Women’s Communicative Leadership”; Fritz, Professional Civility.
48. Fritz, “Women’s Communicative Leadership,” 26.
49. Janie M. Harden Fritz, “Christian Approaches to Communication Scholarship and Peda-
gogy,” in Faith and the Media: Reflections by Christian Communicators, ed. Dennis Cali
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2010), 77–95; Fritz, “Women’s Communicative Leadership.”
50. Fritz, Professional Civility.
51. Arendt, The Human Condition.
52. Fritz, Professional Civility, 24.
53. Fritz, “Women’s Communicative Leadership.”
54. Baker-Ohler and Holba, The Communicative Relationship.
55. Fisher, Bernice, and Joan Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring.” In Circles of
Care, edited by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson, 35–62 (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1990).
56. Patricia Benner and Judith Wrubel, The Primacy of Caring (Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley, 1989).
57. MacIntyre, After Virtue.
58. Baker-Ohler and Holba, The Communicative Relationship.
59. Arendt, The Human Condition.
60. Fritz, Professional Civility.
61. Ibid.
62. Arnett, Dialogic Education.
63. Stephanie A. Groom, Janie M. H. Fritz, and Ronald C. Arnett, “Examining Organiza-
tional Reputation from the Inside Out,” presentation, International Conference on Reputation,
Brand, Identity and Competitiveness, Oslo, Norway, May 31–June 3, 2007.
64. Ronald C. Arnett, Communication and Community: Implications of Martin Buber’s
Dialogue (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986).
65. Janie M. Harden Fritz, “Protecting and Promoting Workplace Relationships: Profession-
al Civility,” in Problematic Relationships in the Workplace, Vol. 2, ed. Becky L. Omdahl and
Janie M. Harden Fritz (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 257–66.
66. Fritz, Professional Civility.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 146–50.
71. Ronald C. Arnett and Pat Arneson, Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community,
Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999);
Fritz, Professional Civility.
72. Fritz, Professional Civility, 151.
73. Jennifer Byrd-Craven, et al., “Co-ruminating Increases Stress Hormone Levels in Wom-
en,” Hormones and Behavior 53, no. 3 (2008): 489–92; Jennifer Byrd-Craven, Douglas A.
Granger, and Brandon J. Auer, “Stress Reactivity to Co-rumination in Young Women’s Friend-
ships: Cortisol, Alpha-amylase, and Negative Affect Focus,” Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships 28, no. 4 (2011): 469–87.
74. Becky L. Omdahl and Janie M. Harden Fritz, eds., Problematic Relationships in the
Workplace, Vol. 2 (New York: Peter Lang, 2012).
75. Anne C. Mancl and Barbara Penington, “Tall Poppies in the Workplace: Communica-
tion Strategies Used by Envious Others in Response to Successful Women,” Qualitative Re-
search Reports in Communication 12 (2011): 79–86.
228 Janie M. Harden Fritz

76. Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, Sarah Riforgiate, and Courtney Fletcher, “Work as a Source of
Positive Emotional Experiences and the Discourses Informing Positive Assessment,” Western
Journal of Communication 75, no. 1 (2011): 2–27.
77. Fritz, Professional Civility.
78. Kathy E. Kram and Lynn Isabella, “Mentoring Alternatives: The Role of Peer Relation-
ships in Career Development,” Academy of Management Journal 28, no. 1 (1985): 110–32.
79. Fritz, Professional Civility.
80. Ronald C. Arnett, Janie M. Harden Fritz, and Leeanne M. Bell, Communication Ethics
Literacy: Dialogue and Difference (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009).
81. Ronald C. Arnett and Janie M. H. Fritz, “Sustaining Institutional Integrity: Management
in a Postmodern Moment,” in Institutional Integrity in Health Care, ed. Ana Smith Iltis (Dor-
drecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2003), 41–71.
82. Michael Kramer, Organizational Socialization: Joining and Leaving Organizations
(Malden, MA: Polity, 2010).
83. Fritz, Professional Civility, 158.
84. Fritz, Professional Civility.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
87. Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy.
88. Steve Duck, Megan K. Foley, and D. Charles Kirkpatrick, “Uncovering the Complex
Roles behind the ‘Difficult’ Coworker,” in Problematic Relationships in the Workplace, ed.
Janie M. H. Fritz and Becky L. Omdahl (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 3–19; Fritz, Profession-
al Civility.
89. Fritz, Professional Civility, 169.
90. Ibid., ch. 3.
91. Arendt, The Human Condition; Fritz, Professional Civility.
92. Patricia M. Sias, Organizing Relationships: Traditional and Emerging Perspectives on
Workplace Relationships (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009).
93. Fritz, “Protecting and Promoting”; Fritz, Professional Civility.
94. Kennan Bridge and Leslie A. Baxter, “Blended Relationships: Friends as Work Asso-
ciates,” Western Journal of Communication 56, no. 3 (1992): 200–225.
95. Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy; Fritz, “Protecting and Promot-
ing”; Fritz, Professional Civility, 28.
96. Ronald C. Arnett, “Professional Civility,” in Problematic Relationships in the Work-
place, ed. Janie M. Harden Fritz and Becky L. Omdahl (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 233–48.
97. Patricia M. Sias, “Ostracism, Cliques, and Outcasts,” in Destructive Organizational
Communication: Processes, Consequences, and Constructive Ways of Organizing, ed. Pamela
Lutgen-Sandvik and Beverly Davenport Sypher (New York: Routledge, 2011), 145–63; Patri-
cia M. Sias, “Exclusive or Exclusory: Workplace Relationships, Ostracism, and Isolation,” in
Problematic Relationships in the Workplace, Vol. 2, ed. Becky L. Omdahl and Janie M. Harden
Fritz (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 105–21.
98. Fritz, Professional Civility.
99. Sandra Metts, William R. Cupach, and Lance Lippert, “Forgiveness in the Workplace,”
in Problematic Relationships in the Workplace, ed. Janie M. Harden Fritz and Becky L. Om-
dahl (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 249–78; Vincent R. Waldron and Dayna N. Kloeber,
“Communicating Forgiveness in Work Relationships,” in Problematic Relationships in the
Workplace, Vol. 2, ed. Becky L. Omdahl and Janie M. Harden Fritz (New York: Peter Lang,
2012), 267–88.
100. Jon A. Hess, “Distancing from Problematic Coworkers,” in Problematic Relationships
in the Workplace, ed. Janie M. Harden Fritz and Becky L. Omdahl (New York: Peter Lang,
2006), 205–32.
101. Jon A. Hess and Katelyn A. Sneed, “Communication Strategies to Restore Working
Relations: Comparing Relationships that Improved with Ones that Remained Problematic,” in
Problematic Relationships in the Workplace, Vol. 2, ed. Becky L. Omdahl and Janie M. Harden
Fritz (New York: Peter Lang), 235–56.
 Organization as Other 229

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 Chapter Eleven

An Example of the Plurality of

Levels of Communication
Ethics Analysis in a
Newspaper Article
Alain Létourneau

What should count as a communication ethics analysis of a given newspaper

article? Instead of defining communication ethics and analysis separately, I
argue that this syntagm, or connection of words, has to be taken as a whole,
meaning that what counts here is not the ethical and the analytical as taken
separately, but instead to see them as being a dynamic unity.
The difficulty of method here goes with levels of language that have to do
with description, evaluation, and prescription. 1 A moral language is suscepti-
ble to being described because, in common language, values, norms, princi-
ples, and other evaluative and prescriptive criteria or sentences are used,
referred to, and can be quoted. Since we are ourselves both ethical and moral,
somehow meaning via these terms reflectively enables distance between our-
selves and referred values, and having relationships to and involvements
toward specific elements, we have to admit ethical and moral involvements
that might, might partially, or might not correspond to the values and norms
that are involved in this or that given language. 2 As historical, linguistic, and
social beings studying human phenomena that are also historical, linguistic,
and social, we are not in a situation of pure neutrality or exteriority to these
human phenomena, even though difference is unmistakable and a total fusion
with the other that we try to understand would be neither possible nor desir-
able. 3
The above implies that when we are studying discourses, we can try to
locate ethical and moral elements in the given piece, whether it is a speech
233
234 Alain Létourneau

from an honorary speaker or an article in a newspaper. Thus, these moral

elements will be about other things, contextual problems most probably; here
it is the very concrete situation of people having to accept or refuse shale gas
in their communities, in their own field or property. In our specific case,
complications arise also because there is not only the author of the article but
the sources that are quoted by the article, on top of the fact that the article is
referring to events that are different but connected to these sources and
voices. As we will see, the way sources situate other proponents in a debate
has its importance, especially in a controversy like the one we have here.
Stereotyping of adversaries has always been recognized as an argumentative
trick that is frequently used in the treatment of intractable issues, even if it is
a trick that might not be desirable. 4 In this chapter I suggest that this framing
of the adversary is quite developed on both sides. It is hard to look at such a
controversy without discussing what the newspaper article is talking about,
since equity of treatment cannot be detached from the material and human/
social content of the situation handled by the piece. I analyze a newspaper
article to show by example what plurality of levels of analysis can be consid-
ered and what can be safely said about them. 5
A different level of discussion would be to aim for the evaluative (e.g., to
evaluate the piece); however, evaluation is closely intertwined with prescrip-
tion. On one side, prescription implies evaluations, and on the other side,
evaluations require criteria that can also be formulated as demands. For
instance, normative theories of the press furnish us ways to speak at the
evaluative level, while being prescriptive at the same time. 6 This implies the
question of how the article can be situated in considering the roles of the
press, which can be distinguished in different ways and requires taking into
account a metadiscourse about the press itself. Does the press have mostly a
monitorial role or something else? 7 We will see later that fluctuations can
occur relative to these criteria, even if other ones are stable: This is the case
whether we take quantitative and/or qualitative approaches. 8
Among those criteria are those of the journalist’s ethic, which includes an
ability to be fair in the representation of different sides, in this case in an
open and profound disagreement. Fairness and adequacy, the equitable treat-
ment and the “truth” value of a piece, are classical criteria. What is the value
of the presentation of the empirical and material controversy itself? This also
gives the opportunity for moral expressions, involvement of the parties with
values, and ways by which the parties envision the other party. In other
terms, actors of a dispute give voice to specific values in their discourse. If
we are to judge adequacy, we will need to refer to other sources of informa-
tion to be able to contextualize, explain, and situate the particular piece we
are analyzing. In that respect, the article never intended to inform us of the
whole issue. Its aim is covered by its title, “Drilling Debate in Cooperstown,
NY is Personal.” But it can certainly be helpful to have some of the knowl-
 Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics Analysis 235

edge required about the field of practices and realities it reports about (people
having to deal, one way or the other, with new techniques of natural gas
extraction in the soil that will affect their circumstances) for us to make our
own judgment not only about the journalist’s treatment but also about the
issue at hand on the field. The same goes for fairness, since a balanced
evaluation of that point requires knowledge of the positions in play. In the
process of ethical analysis, one level is the article’s treatment of the topic:
how each side of the controversy is presented. For instance, people inter-
viewed might feel betrayed or badly represented in the article. This can be
felt as much on one side as on the other, or on both. One specific angle that
we have here regards treatment of the Other. But in our case, we have at least
two Others, each being the other’s Other. The article’s fairness has to do with
this treatment of the Other questioned by the article on both sides—and also
globally for the readers, a third level of Otherness involved here. On top of
that, the Other is portrayed in the discourse of the proponents/opponents; this
portrayal is part of the ideological and symbolic, but sometimes more direct-
ly material, warfare that takes place between the parties. When a party or
person is ridiculed, caricatured, or badly represented by another group or
person, it shows that the controversy exceeded the limits of a polite discus-
sion to become something much more profound. This way of portraying the
adversary might be diversely evaluated in its importance and value, but still
this is one level of analysis that can be taken into account and described.
As a general theoretical statement, I would have to situate myself into a
pragmatism that is mostly influenced by the classics (Peirce, James, Dewey,
and Mead), even though it is a pragmatism revisited with hermeneutics (Gad-
amer and Eco) and critical theory (Habermas and Honneth). 9 I also am under
some influences of Conversation Analysis and everyday discourse ap-
proaches: We have to be cautious and attentive to what is actually said. For
the theory of values, I refer to Dewey’s theory, valuation acts; values are the
elements that are actually valued, and the explicit has to have some priority
in the analysis. 10 We need a focus on discourse; values show themselves in
communication contents. This being said, allusion and indirect assertion, and
even negative or privative statements of values, are also possible, as we will
see in the article.

COMPLEXITY OF THE SITUATION

We have to start by asking: What is the goal pursued by this particular

article? And what do we expect it to give us? In general, some help for
answering those questions might come by situating the genre of the article.
Here the nature of the presentation in question is not clearly cut as being
either a report on a given situation or a comment on it. But it certainly is
236 Alain Létourneau

closer to a report or inquiry than to a column or editorial. We have a piece

that presents a controversy that has economic, scientific, social, and ecologi-
cal dimensions; it divides the people as any controversy does, and the article
gives us a better knowledge of that controversy, at least on the human side,
while touching also on the economic and the value of the natural landscape.
The paper should certainly provide us with some background elements, even
with limits of available space. Should it give us information only or go
further and aim to help make us able to form our own ideas about the issue?
Should it give voice to people involved or stop at presenting facts?
The simpler way of summarizing the discussion about levels of analysis
might be to give a simple enumeration in the form of a list. By the list in
itself, we can easily see why it is impossible to really fulfill the task of
answering to all these questions in the present document—priority has to be
given to some levels over the others. Notably, a choice has to be made on
what we will retain as the most relevant criteria. In particular, the choice we
are going to make is to focus on the strengths and value of the article as a

Table 11.1. Levels of a communication ethics analysis of a given article’s dis-

course.

Questions asked Criteria

How is the material, social/economic/ecological Supposes an independent and
controversy portrayed? sufficient knowledge of the
object-domain of the article
How is the political dimension of the conflict (same as above)
portrayed?
How are the persons represented and given Some criteria of fairness and
voice? adequacy
How are moral involvements of people The moral language, values, and
represented? norms used by the actors
How is the relative importance of the positions Fairness and adequacy
represented?
How does each camp see the other as a means of Treatment of the Other and of the
decoding the gravity of the dispute? Other’s Other
How do we evaluate the whole of the piece in Relevance of the elements
terms that take into account the dispute? presented by the piece
What criteria can be used to evaluate the piece as Functional and minimal criteria
a whole, and which ones are really relevant? usually associated with the free
press: to inform, entertain, and
advertise
Principles in contemporary
normative ethics of the media:
monitorial role, facilitative role,
radical role, and collaborative role
 Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics Analysis 237

piece: it shows us people and gives us a chance to better understand them and
the issue at hand. I will not put the focus on the last series of questions and
criteria that refer to more complex and normative requirements, along with
some background limits (see table 11.1).

THE CONTROVERSY DISCUSSED:

BACKGROUND ELEMENTS

The text of the article is not sufficient to get the whole picture, but the online
version does feature a hyperlink that leads to background information. 11 For
the purposess of this chapter, let us provide some details about the issue.
Shale gas is natural gas that is stuck inside rock formations. Gas has to be
extracted by a relatively new technology called hydrological fracturing, or
fracking; after a vertical insertion, a pipe or series of pipes intervenes hori-
zontally by pushing into the rock formation, under heavy pressure, water
mixed with chemicals assembled according to secret formulas owned by the
gas or service companies operating the drilling operation. These chemicals
are followed by sand; this process collects the gas, but it is clearly implied
that liquids and solids stay in the ground and surrounding soil.
This technology, then, comes, for many actors, with some risk to the
environment, especially water contamination as a result of the pressurized
liquids that are used to push gas out of its rocky envelope. Minimization and
maximization of these risks might then emerge in argumentative stances. It is
possible that some of the gas and the polluted water used will infiltrate
deeper, touching and contaminating water sources, including aquifers. In
some cases, that possibility might not be probable, but we can understand
that there is a whole gray area between those two situations, providing in
many cases grounds for caution. This polemic is present throughout North
America, in the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, and it also
rages in Quebec. The Marcellus Shale formation covers a good part of the
northern United States, including New York and a smaller part of Canada.
On the other side of the debate are the calls for energy independence (espe-
cially in the United States), the fact that natural gas is relatively less polluting
than oil, and the needs of energy consumption. See figure 11.1 to situate the
distribution. 12
The historical context of this particular kind of exploitation is the relative
scarcity nowadays of easily accessible fossil fuels, on which our economies
largely depend. Demand for new fossil fuels on a global scale is growing at
an increasing rate, especially with the emerging giants of Brazil, China,
India, and Russia. These countries seem well advanced in the process of
joining, or even surpassing, the so-called developed nations, as users and
sometimes providers of fossil fuels (e.g., Russia).
238 Alain Létourneau

Figure 11.1. The World Shale Gas Map. Source: US EIA (Energy Information
Administration).

Now that the easily accessible resources in fossil fuel are less and less
sufficient at the global level, companies and countries rely on less easily
accessible ones, among which are offshore resources in deeper water and the
tar sands in many places, such as Canada. Among the unconventional fossil
fuels, shale gas is on the rise, it is seen as giving the United States a better
chance at energy sufficiency. Figure 11.1 shows where the shale gas forma-
tions are in the world; we can see that North America has a great deal. North
Dakota and Pennsylvania are particularly important on the global scale. Spe-
cialists assert that this development will continue, for instance in Pennsylva-
nia, for the next twenty years. When we have these elements in mind, we can
look at the article with different eyes, since a fuller background understand-
ing helps us to put in perspective what is presented.
But since this is an evolving discussion, we also need to stay current on
papers, articles, and videos that are posted and published about this ongoing
issue. The article examined here is only one piece in a long and continuing
series; more recent ones present, for example, the benefits and protections
that can be obtained by people on the basis of collective bargaining. 13 A
more recent EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) report in Wyoming has
also sparked discussions and fed further debate, this time on the other side of
that “fence.” 14 There was also recently an occupation of a mobile home park
that had been bought for the extracting of Susquehanna River water in Piatt
Township, Pennsylvania, for the purpose of future fracturing. 15 A quite strik-
ing video has also been posted that we can call “militant,” clearly positioned
 Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics Analysis 239

against the developments on LinkTV about the whole of Marcellus Shale. 16

And, a recent film with movie stars Matt Damon and Frances MacDormand
(directed by Gus Van Sant) has gained attention by portraying a small com-
munity visited by a team of corporate representatives. It certainly helps us
see even more clearly the kinds of posturing that can occur in the country-
side, even if embellished with a good bit of dramatization. 17

THE ARTICLE

“Drilling Debate in Cooperstown, NY, Is Personal,” by Peter Applebome, is

a web document dated November 29, 2011. The paper copy had a similar but
slightly different title, “A New York Village’s Debate Over Drilling Turns
Personal,” and was posted on pages 1 and 18 of the first fascicule section of
the Sunday Edition of the New York Times on November 30, 2011. 18 The
newspaper article has one map and three photographs—two of the same
woman, Kim Jastremski, who is concerned about the threat of ecological
damage, and one with a woman on the other side of the issue, but both
women are photographed once with an animal in the picture. What the article
does globally is give voice to two women representing respectively the pros
and cons of shale gas investigations and exploitation near their homes in the
countryside; for the pros, the exploratory drilling is right on her farm (of
course with her permission and a signed contract), and for the cons, it is in
the immediate neighborhood of town and county. This way the paper gives a
personal twist to the story, inside of which the values of each person will
appear in relation to the topic at hand and more generally in relation to what
it is to live in the countryside. It is two cultures, two ways of life, and two
ways of seeing the problem that are thus contrasted.
Let us then look at the article, paragraph by paragraph. 19 We will have to
pay close attention to the distinction between the article and the sources
quoted or used by the journalist along the way. At the end, a summary of the
values involved in the actors’ words, as they are reported by the newspaper,
will help take the whole into consideration.
While starting readily with one of the persons involved, the article’s first
part deals mostly with social media, and also more traditional flyers or let-
ters, as they affect the people on the issue.

Paragraph One

The paper leads with personal and shocking details: Kim Jastremski received
a letter, represented by the article as similar to a threat, requesting that she
cease protesting gas drilling. She and ten others received the unsigned letter,
whose authors were compared in that way to Nazis—the menace is clear:
240 Alain Létourneau

They and their children are declared “watched.” Upon analysis, this innuendo
seems clearly dangerous.

Paragraph Two

We learn that the letter was “computer-generated,” “unsigned,” and sent to

multiple opponents: The use of information technology here takes on darker
aspects. On the other side of the fence, Jennifer Huntington, a farmer, is
introduced in the article; she saw comments online calling on people to stop
buying her dairy products. Water will be poisoned, and because of that “her
house will fall”: Yes, but this online gossip is probably not a menace, even if
it seems to be one in the writing of the piece. Accusations of being sellouts,
and even prostitutes, are made very much public. Why?—obviously because
people have been accepting money from gas companies in exchange for their
collaboration. Upon analysis, the text has not told us that the process is only
at the exploratory phase by the gas companies, not yet at the exploitation
phase; this can be seen further down in the text, when it is said that exploita-
tion will probably never come to Cooperstown.

Paragraph Three

It is only after these two paragraphs, which are clearly personalizing the issue
(as we find often in newspapers), that some description is given of the con-
text: details about the technology and the situation in the eastern United
States, with many communities “passing or considering bans,” meaning
towns and villages forbidding the use of the technology on their territory. In
small towns, fracking became the “defining, nonnegotiable political issue.” 20
We come back to ill will in a personal manner, and this determination comes
up repeatedly to define the nature of the debate. Upon analysis, emphasis is
not on the fact that many places do allow shale gas exploitation.

Paragraph Four

The newspaper article says a lot about communities divided, suburbs and
villages on one side against backcountry and farmers on the other, economic
aggravation and social media processes amplifying the issue, a point indirect-
ly asserted when it is written that people obtain “instant access to limitless
information” affirming their viewpoints.

Paragraph Five

Gas companies are opposed to people; the first group has money, but the
people have the number and intensity to dominate local discourse. The two
main sides have changed, now it is companies and people as the opposing
 Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics Analysis 241

forces showing dangers of ecological threat, especially water contamination.

But then the paper shifts the attention: A councilman of the nearby town of
Otsego, New York, says three things. First, there is no arguing with a person
opposed to hydrofracking (meaning they are dogmatically fixed to their ide-
as). That councilman delayed taking a position until “he eventually supported
changes to the town’s land-use law that would prohibit fracking, but he still
faces opposition from a slate of antifracking candidates.” Second, there is no
debate or conversation, a kind of repetition of the first point. Third, the
fracking debate grew in importance to the point of “hijack[ing] everything
else,” signifying that this debate has engulfed all others. Upon analysis, these
points show clearly that this discussion is now presented as a “dialogue of the
deaf,” meaning there is no real dialogue or debate; it is a dispute, each side
reinforcing its arguments by mirroring sources.

Paragraph Six

Upon analysis, we understand that New York at this time intends to allow the
process of gas drilling with some regulations, and that some hearings are
planned before an upcoming decision.

Paragraph Seven

Details are given about the Marcellus Shale, the rock formation that covers
Pennsylvania, described as very shallow in Cooperstown, a situation that is
asserted as limiting severely the possibilities of exploitation in the region.
Upon analysis, the article is downplaying the force and the relevance of the
critics’ stance, but not directly.

Paragraph Eight

Reference is given to the town’s website. The actual declaration on the web-
site, consulted November 8, 2011, says that the board of trustees of the town
supports all efforts to stop natural gas drilling. The article, for its part, says
that the town’s website advocates a statewide ban. This is implied by the
city’s statement, but is not as clear-cut or strong as it is made out to be. The
New York Times paragraph mentions the city of Middlefield, very close by,
as one of the first to ban gas drilling by changing its master plan. However,
when we consult Middlefield’s documents, we see that a moratorium was
expressly required by that city, in Resolution 9 of 2010, in reference to
neurotoxins, an element never mentioned by the New York Times; Resolution
10 goes further and calls for a repeal of a New York law that exempts gas
companies from complying with parts of the Clean Water Act, among other
laws. 21
242 Alain Létourneau

Paragraph Nine

We learn that thirty antifracking candidates are running for office in Otsego,
New York, in November 2011. The detail re-emphasizes the strength of this
opposition, mentioned previously in the article. A second part of the article
permits the reader to get closer. We get the opinion of two woman protago-
nists, along with details of their lives, which give a very personal turn to the
article. Upon analysis, the article increasingly moves to disclosure of person-
al perspectives.

Paragraph Ten

Bringing us back to the level of everyday life, the author characterizes the
dispute as circulating like electric current. Jastremski followed her husband
to that town because he found employment at the State University of New
York in Oneonta. She believed that she had found “the perfect place” for her
family, “replete with chicken coops, beehives and a vegetable garden.” A
process of affirmation takes place here by the journalist; first, he clearly
identifies the values held by the person: Not only did she think she had found
the perfect place but she also had moved back onto family-owned land. Upon
analysis, the article indirectly relativizes the value by alluding to the ridicu-
lous characterization of her position: replete with chicken coops. This carica-
ture of a “perfect place” gives the article a humorous twist.

Paragraph Eleven

Jastremski is described by the article as becoming “wrapped up in fracking

politics,” another detrimental qualification. This is because she became
aware of the possibilities of leases. “Now she says she stays up crying at
night,” a reference that directly shows what is valued by the person by
naming the elements: the possibility of polluted water, an industrialized land-
scape, the prospect of leaving a home with a plummeting value. Clean water,
the value of a natural landscape, and the economic value of the house are
clearly asserted values. She said that she understood the economic pressures
on farmers, but does not excuse people who want drilling on their land; she
goes even further in what follows, taking a clear standpoint.

Paragraph Twelve

The article gives a long quote from Jastremski. Individuals might not be
greedy, but they are absorbed in what she calls corporate greed. They see
dollar signs everywhere instead of the big picture—that they are harming
their neighbors. Upon analysis, this is a strong example of framing the adver-
sary, setting how they are portrayed. 22
 Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics Analysis 243

Paragraph Thirteen

The article provides a brief presentation of Jastremski, who holds a PhD. She
is uncomfortable with discord, like the conflict with a mother in the gym
“who stood to gain from a gas lease” but felt silenced.

Paragraph Fourteen

The article then moves to the other side, represented in the person of Hunt-
ington, a farmer with 500 cows, who sued the town of Middlefield in Sep-
tember 2011 seeking to overturn its drilling ban, arguing that only the state
has the right to ban fracking. Clearly, the other side of the argument is
introduced here by presenting a personal context to the issue. This will be
pursued from paragraphs fourteen through twenty.

Paragraph Fifteen

Huntington felt she had to remove her daughter from the local school in
which she herself had studied as a child. Partly because of anti-fracking
activism in schools, including a movement to ban fracking on school
grounds, and the demographic changes, a dairy farmer’s daughter seemed to
her to be out of place. This is alluding indirectly to the fact that the daughter
would be known as a daughter of a supporter of fracturing.

Paragraph Sixteen

The article implies that farmers see their opponents as “comfortable urban-
ites,” “retirees,” and “second-home owners” unknowledgeable about “the
economics of farming and . . . the safety of drilling.” Farmers’ economic
difficulties are obviously evoked here. The opponents are represented as
comfortable urbanites.

Paragraph Seventeen

Technology issues are introduced. Huntington refers to a “methane digester,”

introduced by her family in 1984, which produced natural gas from manure
to heat a local nursing home; she also refers to the “co-generation unit”
added seven years later, which supplied electricity for their farm. Upon anal-
ysis, here a confidence in technology is indirectly expressed, by experience
of precedents. This implies that she knows more about the scientific side;
without saying so, the opponents are framed as not knowing the expert tech-
niques.
244 Alain Létourneau

Paragraph Eighteen

“This land and my family are my life,” Huntington said. “We probably use
three to four million gallons of water to feed my cows. I’m not going to spoil
something I need to make my living and for future generations to come.”
Upon analysis, this implies the following: She knows and trusts the validity
of the scientific-technological approach to the issue and sees herself as a
responsible person for her generation and the next, which is coherent with a
sustainable development perspective. There is a clear affirmation of the value
of the land, and she presents herself as knowing what is best and as being
environmentally responsible, which is also an important attribution of value.

Paragraph Nineteen

“Proponents of fracking say that many farmers are on the verge of losing
their property.” Upon analysis, this part continues to explicate the economic
side of the issue for farmers.

Paragraph Twenty

The economic side for farmers is explained by Huntington, who is continual-

ly quoted by the journalist. She uses the term “pastoral poverty.” She ex-
plains that there are farmers struggling to retain “land that’s been in their
family for 100 to 200 years. People like the landscape, but it is people living
in poverty that are maintaining what they like to look at.” Upon analysis, the
sense of belonging to the land by the families, as something to hold onto,
clearly valued, is expressed. Farmers are presented as maintainers of land-
scape; a valuation of farmers themselves, we could say they are showcased as
being at the service of nature’s outlook, of which urbanites are beneficiaries.

Paragraph Twenty-One

The article then mentions other businesses. They fear that an industrialized
landscape would be detrimental and “antithetical” to Cooperstown’s tourism.
Upon analysis, industrial landscape effects and outlooks would be negative
for tourism; it is a countervalue to be avoided. As we can see, starting with
this paragraph and through the next one, voice is given back to the oppo-
nents.

Paragraph Twenty-Two

Opponents have proposed a boycott of businesses that do not oppose frack-

ing. Reports are circulated via e-mail by the opponents, identifying cars or
trucks possibly involved in gas leasing seen at neighbors’ residences. People
 Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics Analysis 245

reporting against each other seems like an activity with a harassment quality.
Some farmers say fracking could ruin them. Siobhan Griffin, an organic
dairy farmer, cited a letter from the Park Slope Food Co-op in New York
City, which explained that the organization’s members would refuse to pur-
chase goods from areas permitting fracking. Upon analysis, the article shows
that the farming community is not unified on the issue because the organic
farmers are siding with the neo-residents. They are presented as boycotting
businesses and exerting pressure.

Paragraph Twenty-Three

According to the article, drilling proponents view professionals and retirees

as “antigrowth fanatics, opposing a once-a-year music festival proposed in
nearby Springfield, wind turbines proposed for Cherry Valley, even addition-
al Little League fields.” Here we see how some issues are amalgamated, as
ideological posturing, in an antigrowth, opposing-everything movement.
Antigrowth is becoming a more important label nowadays. However, it is
hard to assess the value of the report, here, as to its relative importance in the
whole; it is asserted as important. Upon analysis, we find here another case
of framing of the adversaries, this time with the countervalue of antigrowth
fanatics and ideology-driven people.

Paragraph Twenty-Four

“People on both sides say the ill will probably goes beyond fracking.” We
can see that this is the introductory paragraph to the conclusion.

Paragraph Twenty-Five

“At one time, people in Cooperstown could disagree, but it was never per-
sonal,” said Catherine Ellsworth, who writes a column in a local weekly
newspaper and supports drilling. “Now it’s more like they want what they
want, . . . There’s no sense we’re in this together. But I guess that’s not just
here. Society has changed, and Cooperstown has changed along with it.”
This comment by a citizen and local journalist ends the article, between past
and present. Upon analysis, the deterioration seems to be clear. By its ab-
sence or negativity, the value of community life is at risk.

As we will see in the two following tables that summarize our results, the
values portrayed and the framings of the others and of oneself by others (or
by oneself) occupy quite a bit of space in the article. This process involves
the values proposed by both proponents and opponents of the fracking tech-
nology. I distinguish reciprocal framings from valuing acts, even though they
are quite related. In fact, to frame in bad terms some adversary is to allow a
246 Alain Létourneau

specific kind of value expression, which is particularly salient if we think of

the Other’s representation in a piece. I talk about values and countervalues
that are negatively asserted when the discourse puts values in contrast and
implies by its positive assertions of elements some other elements indirectly
required in the assertion itself. Table 11.2 will show how this works.
These values say a lot about culture, about the ethos of the people con-
cerned. There is some overlap between them, which is not showcased as such
by the article: Value of the land itself, however it is named and understood.
Two important values are implied by the article as a whole, elements that are
showcased at the bottom of the table. 1) The paper presents a somber image
of the debate. 2) It also gives place, by contrast, to a reference to something
that seems to have disappeared completely: a sense of community, even
though this was never clearly affirmed. We might wonder if these elements
would be enough to stimulate a dialogue between these opposing positions.
Reciprocal framings, showcased in table 11.3, indicate resistance would be
strong.
As we can see, there is a relative superiority in the number of frames
qualifying negatively one side against the other. One main proponent is

Table 11.2. Values positively or negatively asserted in the article.

Values Counter-values
Values affirmed by She found the perfect Industrial landscape that
Jastremski place; she moved back comes with drilling.
onto family-owned land.
Clean water, natural
landscape, economic value
of house (all under attack).
Values affirmed by herself Confidence in technology
and her group by and of herself as an expert.
Huntington Shows herself as
environmentally
responsible.
Sense of belonging to the
land by the families, as
something to hold onto.
Valuation of farmers,
showcased as being at the
service of nature’s outlook,
even in their poverty
The debate itself is seen throughout the article as dispute, discord, ill will,
nonnegotiable issues, no dialogue with opponents, no debate or conversation; conflict
has hijacked everything else and personal clash occurs.
“There’s no sense we’re in this together”: privatively asserted value of community as
required and lacking. In the past, “it was never personal.”
 Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics Analysis 247

presented more as a victim than the other is; in fact, this is done by referring
to her own speech acts (as reported). They both seemed to have a lot to say
against the other group, but the negative predicates are more numerous
against the urbanites, from and against Huntington, than they are from and
against Jastremski and their relative group. In a corresponding way, as we
can see in the first table, there are more values associated with Huntington
than those we find associated with Jastremski. Few countervalues are as-
serted, and only on one side of the fence. The pro-fracturing side is thus
given a little more exposure and more positive values than the other side,
despite the appearance of equity in the treatment, which gives both sides
some exposure. In that sense, the image given is not neutral, even though it
does present both sides sufficiently to give us a good idea of the social split.
Table 11.3. Summary of reciprocal framings involved

Frames Counter-frames
The others framing With other opponents, she was Ridicule of her position:
Jastremski (against “threatened” and compared with she is “replete with chicken
gas fracturing) Nazis; she is “watched.” coops” (secondary sources
alleged by article).
Framing the others The proponents are sucked into
“by” Jastremski greed, see dollar signs
everywhere, do not see the big
picture, and harm their
neighbors.
The others framing Treated as being a sellout, She was publicly abused,
Huntington (proponent prostitute. targeted on web
of fracturing) documents, and had her
business threatened with
boycotts.
Framing the others by The other side was presented
“other proponents” as antigrowth and ideology-
driven people.
Framing others by Urbanites and retirees against a
Huntington music festival, wind turbines,
and Little League

TOPOI OF DISCUSSION

If we see dialogue as a complex process in which recognition of the Other

should be present and systematically sustained, we can see that, as it is
portrayed here, the Other is on the adverse side of a battle; she is qualified
with detrimental attributes, but not recognized by the different proponents as
manifesting important values, or as somehow embodying those values.
Frames are quite radical and harsh and they go both ways. The question of
248 Alain Létourneau

whether there is nevertheless in the field and in practice some dialogue and
some recognition of the Other on those issues is not really treated. We are
inclined by the article to think that if it exists, it is at best marginal.
If we look for such things as dialogues on gas fracturing, we might find
appeals to dialogue, for instance, by the American Petroleum Institute, but
experiences of the kind in the authentic sense are not easily found. 23 Some
“opponents” that also appeal to dialogue do recognize some values on the
other side, while still calling for restraint and protections, for instance, as the
Sierra Club of Michigan does. 24 Let us say that appeals seem really situated
and politically opinionated somewhere from the start.
But is it the place of a newspaper article to propose mediation or delibera-
tive processes to get ahead in the debate? A normative vision of the news-
paper could respond in the affirmative to such a question—for instance, if we
say that the press has a facilitative or even a radical role. Of course, in the
second case, it would be more militant than in the first. 25 At the reading of
the article, such an enterprise would seem doomed to failure anyway. We
could surmise that it is hard to demand of an article that it propose a practical
way of leading people out of such a protracted issue. What it does is to show
us the abyss between the parties.
For an ordinary reader of written media, this piece can introduce us to a
discussion that is grave and important; it has some quality and diversity in it,
representing and documenting both sides, their circumstances and views,
helping us understand some personal situations involved that might be (or
might not be) typical. And again, if we look at it from a normative stand-
point, we could find it lacking on many counts.
If the monitorial role is assumed by the piece, but with imperfections, let
us forget completely in this case about a facilitative role or a radical role that
a newspaper article could play. 26 Moreover, if we consider the classical
opposition in communication ethics between procedure and substance, here
the procedural aspect of dialogue or deliberation is completely missed, while
substance on given issues is also not treated as something other than ideolog-
ical posturing. 27 Values are presented and discredited almost as soon as they
are entered into the “conversation.”
One formula of criteria to express the monitorial role would be to say that
the article should give adequate and sufficient information on the issue and
on the context. It should help us to be able to appreciate the situation, includ-
ing adequate knowledge of the controversy. We cannot say it informs the
reader thoroughly on that point because we ourselves have to supplement it,
in light of the lack of information and technical data, if we want to under-
stand the debate. The human side seems to be given here as a way to avoid
entering into the scientific and technical detail.
Another formulation of that same monitorial role would be that fairness
of exposure should be given to both sides of the issue. At a first reading, we
 Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics Analysis 249

will have this impression with this article because obviously each side is
reflected, or has a kind of representative. Both sides seem to have had their
share of verbal or personal media abuse: direct or indirect threat and carica-
tures of self as urbanites, sellouts, and so on. And both sides seem to be
expressing themselves quite fairly. But one side is more able to express its
own positions, strengths, and values than the other. By presenting the sides as
equals and creating an effect of balance, the journalist seems to aim at fair-
ness, but in the end, the pros obtain more space to develop their point, their
position seems stronger, posed with a person’s confidence and assertion.
Only the pro side gets to express its vision of itself in a positive way. The
second reading shows a priority given to one side, and we have seen that this
has some quantitative basis. But is this the final word on the issue? Some
qualitative reception of the paper as a whole is also important. If we keep
quantity of references and exposure as our main criteria, we will not evaluate
the piece in the same way as we would if we had balanced it with a qualita-
tive outlook. Said otherwise, even if there is a little more space given to one
side, we still can see a little of both sides.
When humans are involved, some human treatment would be adequate:
this might look good as a criterion when we look at the article and other
similar documents. That part seems well done in the article. But that obvious
consideration of the human side might not be so helpful because it also
prevents the paper from taking any side. Otherness of the other, here, does
not help; here it helps to neutralize the discussion instead of getting ahead
with it, and it does this by fixing each other’s Other in a determined and
seemingly unmovable position.

REFLECTION AND EXPRESSION OF THE VALUES

HELD BY THE PARTIES INVOLVED

The preceding analysis shows clearly that expressions of value are present in
this article, and it helps us understand the nature of the situation. But the
article does not manage to formulate the dilemma represented by these op-
posing values. I would also suggest that value issues are obscured in carica-
turing each side and in framing detrimentally the other’s Other. Each side
gets to caricature the other side by using countervalues that play a rhetorical
role in an attacking position. It is given only as a space of expression for the
parties, but ends up stonewalling them into dogmatic posturing, which might
or might not be completely adequate. This also adds up with the already
noted fact that the antifracking side is more criticized than the pro-fracking
side. Here, we could say that the otherness of the Other is not fully respected,
while at first glance the opposite seems to be true. This fluctuation in the
250 Alain Létourneau

evaluation says a lot about the complexity of the criteria involved and the
difficulty in deciding among them.

IMPLICATIONS ABOUT SOCIETAL POLITICAL BIAS

It can be argued that the text helps us know the conflict better, again mostly
by personalizing the issue. A first reading might give us this impression. But,
on the contrary, we could argue that this article, instead of fighting against
societal political biases, just reinforces them. By showing the entrenched
positions and by characterizing the present debate as “dispute,” “ill will,” and
similar characterizations, we only get the image of two dogmatisms facing
each other. At the same time, once analyzed, the article does show some
shared values that are not really exploited in the article, notably the same
desire on both sides to repair a lost sense of community.

NOTES

1. Alain Létourneau, “Definition and Prescription as Classifiers of Arguments: A Compari-

son of Two Models for Analysing Arguments, Sproule (1980) and Toussaint-Ducasse (1996),”
in Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumenta-
tion, ed. F. Van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, David Godden, and Gordon Mitchell, 1076–88 (Am-
sterdam: Sic/Sat-Rosenberg, 2011).
2. Alain Létourneau, “Towards an Inclusive Notion of Dialogue for Ethical and Moral
Purposes,” in (Re)Presentations and Dialogue, ed. François Cooren and Alain Létourneau,
17–36 (Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2012).
3. More than a century ago, the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey helped us under-
stand that social understanding of social phenomena has a hermeneutical dimension, requiring
both recognition of and differentiation with the Other that is under study. The historical world
to which we arrive is therefore constructed. In a similar but different sense, Max Weber, with
the notion of Wertfreiheit, showed and emphasized the difference between the values toward
which the researcher is oriented and the values of the social actors that we try to grasp in a
Verstehende Soziologie, in a stance that is not “neutrality,” against some translators from the
past (J. Freund being one of them). See Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical
World in the Human Sciences, ed. R. Makreel and F. Rodi, vol. 3, Selected Works (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 2010), which contains a translation of Der Aufbau der Geschich-
tliche Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften from 1910. See also Max Weber, The Vocation Lec-
tures: Science as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation, ed. D. Owen and T. B.
Strong.(Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2004).
4. Ray Lewicki et al., eds., Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts: Concepts
and Cases (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003).
5. Peter Applebome, “Drilling Debate in Cooperstown, NY, is Personal,” New York Times,
October 30, 2011, print edition, 1, 18.
6. Clifford G. Christians, et al., eds., Normative Theories of the Media (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2009).
7. Ibid.
8. John Cresswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Approaches
(Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 2008), Kindle edition.
9. Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung [The Struggle for Recognition]. Franfurt: Suhr-
kamp Verlag, 1994/2012; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
10. John Dewey, Theory of Valuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).
 Plurality of Levels of Communication Ethics Analysis 251

11. Under “Energy and Environment,” specifically the heading “Natural gas.” See topics.
nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/natural-gas/index.html?inline=nyt-
classifier.
12. Source of the map: United States Department of Energy, The Wikipedia Commons,
2011.
13. For instance, see “New Value for Land in Rural Ohio,” www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/
us/mineral-leases-give-boost-to-rural-ohio.html?pagewanted=all.
14. See “In Land of Gas Drilling, Battle for Water That Doesn’t Reek of Fizz,” www.
nytimes.com/2012/06/02/us/in-land-of-hydraulic-fracturing-a-battle-over-water-pollution.html.
15. See ecowatch.org/2012/riverdale-residents-blockade-fracking-water-withdrawal-constru
ction-road-to-save-their-community/.
16. See “Fracking Hell: The Untold Story,” www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_
embedded&v=dEB_Wwe-uBM.
17. Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant, Hollywood, Universal Pictures, Focus Fea-
ture, 2012, 106 minutes.
18. The article was accessible as of April 18, 2013, for reading and testing at www.nytimes.
com/2011/10/30/nyregion/in-cooperstowns-fight-over-gas-drilling-civility-is-fading.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=0.
19. Applebome, “Drilling Debate.”
20. At this point, the article moves from page 1 to the beginning of page 18.
21. Middletown and Cooperstown: the second includes the first, inside Otsego County.
22. The notion of frame to which I refer here is twofold. Inside the content of the analysis, I
use the term only to describe the way parties to the dispute portray each other under striking
images, which are often simplistic in their content. Framing can also be used to describe more
generally the way the dispute itself is constructed, structured, and typified by the article taken
as a whole. I will have to take up the latter issue later. One excellent book about frames is
Martin Rein and Donald Schön, Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy
Controversies (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
23. Reed Porter, “API Supports DOE Dialogue on America’s Vast Natural Gas Resources,”
api.org/news-and-media/news/newsitems/2011/jun-2011/api-supports-doe-dialogue.aspx.
24. “Hydraulic Fracturing: Talking Points,” The Michigan Sierra Club, michigan.sierraclub.
org/democracy/Fracking%20Talking%20Points%20-%20Fall%202011.pdf.
25. Christians, et al.
26. Christians, et al.
27. On procedure versus substance, see Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), especially chapter 7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Applebome, Peter. “Drilling Debate in Cooperstown, NY, is Personal.” New York Times, Octo-
ber 30, 2011.
Christians, Clifford G., et al., eds. Normative Theories of the Media. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2009.Cresswell, John. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed
Approaches. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 2008.
Dewey, John. Theory of Valuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Vol. 3 of
Selected Works. Edited by R. Makreel and F. Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2010.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. London: Bloomsberry Academics, 1960/2004.
Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992/1998.
Honneth, Axel. Kampf um Anerkennung [The Struggle for Recognition]. Franfurt, Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1994/2012; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Létourneau, Alain. “Definition and Prescription as Classifiers of Arguments: A Comparison of
Two Models for Analysing Arguments, Sproule (1980) and Toussaint-Ducasse (1996).” In
252 Alain Létourneau

Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumenta-
tion. Edited by F. Van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, David Godden, and Gordon Mitchell,
1076–88. Amsterdam: Sic/Sat-Rosenberg, 2011.
———. “Towards an Inclusive Notion of Dialogue for Ethical and Moral Purposes.” In
(Re)Presentations and Dialogue. Edited by François Cooren and Alain Létourneau, 1-36.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012.
Lewicki, Ray et al., eds. Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts: Concepts and
Cases. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003.
Rein, Martin, and Donald Schön. Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable
Policy Controversies. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Russell, Nick. Morals and the Media. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006.
Weber, Max. The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation. Edited
by D. Owen and T. B. Strong. Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2004.
 Chapter Twelve

Leisure and the Other

Philosophy and Communication Ethics

Annette M. Holba

A life in which leisure is understood and experienced is a life that honors and
respects the other. A commitment to leisure weds philosophy and ethics into
a practice that creates dynamic and dialogic meeting spaces that have the
potential to transcend difference. Leisure begins in a contemplative starting
place described by Josef Pieper as a “philosophical act.” 1 This philosophical
act cultivates a spirit of selflessness designed to exemplify hermeneutic hu-
mility 2 and a particular recognition of the other. Leisure as a philosophical
act holds one accountable to the other without demand. Similar to Emmanuel
Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy,” 3 leisure enables one to turn toward the
other in humility, honor, and respect, which is an embodiment of a virtue
ethic of being.
As a philosophical act, leisure transforms one’s interiority and prepares
one to respond to the call of the other constructively. The practice of leisure
in one’s life enables one to productively engage silence, where one experi-
ences the present and the now; happiness, which is found through contempla-
tion and considered the ultimate beatitude; 4 and contemplation, one’s move-
ment in wonder. Leisure connects one to the vita contemplativa and the
philosophical act, enabling a meeting with the other in an ethical communi-
cative space. This chapter explores how leisure is a catalyst that brings to-
gether an interplay of the self and other and philosophy and ethics. After a
short section defining leisure philosophically, this chapter considers ethics
and the other through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as first philoso-
phy. Next, this chapter explores Josef Pieper’s virtue ethics, where leisure is
the spiritual and contemplative key to turning toward the other. Finally, the
chapter ends with a discussion about how leisure provides the space for
253
254 Annette M. Holba

interplay between philosophy and ethics to cultivate the communicative be-

ing by enriching a space for engagement of dialogue and dialectic. Beginning
with a basic discussion defining leisure, a shared understanding of leisure is
offered.

LEISURE

Leisure is a term and a concept that is misunderstood. There has been much
attention to this word and its action throughout history and from multiple
world paradigms and traditions. 5 One thing these positions on leisure have in
common is the acknowledgment of its importance to the human condition;
however, the idea of leisure is wrought with conceptual and multidimension-
al differences. For some philosophers, leisure is the first principle of all
action 6 and the mother of philosophy. 7 For other philosophers, leisure is the
counterpart to a contemplative life that seeks presentness; 8 for others, leisure
is the foundation of culture. 9 These accolades describing leisure are, for the
most part, celebrating the deep philosophical and wise actions embedded
within its moral tradition.
Some philosophers and theorists have alternative perspectives on leisure
that might touch on these kinds of accolades but take a different approach to
it entirely or totally dismiss the attribution of any kind of moral value to it.
For example, Chris Rojek, a contemporary social and economic philosopher,
positions leisure as a catapult for developing emotional intelligence and emo-
tional labor especially related to social and economic environments. 10 Others
simply interpret leisure to be the idle use of one’s time and equate it without
distinction to entertainment and relaxation. 11 So we see that there are diverse
perspectives on leisure that sometimes complement and sometimes contra-
dict other positions.
For the purpose of this chapter, leisure is defined closely to the position of
the ancient philosophers who charged it to be a high intellectual activity and,
similar to Josef Pieper’s understanding of leisure, as a philosophical act
originating from within a contemplative spirit. The difference between Piep-
er’s understanding of leisure and the position presented in this chapter is that
Pieper’s leisure leads one to the divine, to God. In the position of this chap-
ter, leisure is a philosophical act that cultivates one’s interiority in a herme-
neutic humility that permits one to be open to the other and to the possibil-
ities of any given moment. There is no attachment to a religious position—
though leisure in a philosophically secular sense still maintains elements of
festivity and celebration that can be sacred or secular.
Activities of leisure remain separate from the pressures and distractions
of working for a living and physical daily sustenance. Leisure does not need
to be equated with privilege or economic class. Leisure is an embodied
 Leisure and the Other 255

activity of the mind that permits one to get lost in wonder and in the excite-
ment of phenomenological learning and seeing. It cannot be totalized be-
cause it is open and responsive; there is freedom and liberation when one
engages leisure.
Leisure is not tied to a particular activity. Leisure is a mindset; it is an
approach to an activity that permits a corporeal mindfulness in which one
feels leisure in the body as well as in one’s interiority (secular) or soul
(sacred). Anyone can do leisure and there is no required equipment. One can
lose oneself in one’s mind listening to music in a way that lets the composi-
tionality be foregrounded while one seeks to see the intervals and the mean-
ings that become the music. One might focus on what one hears, the instru-
mentation, the individual instruments, the harmony and melodies, the inter-
val augmentation, the modulating keys, the dynamics, the tonalities, the fugal
aspects, and the conversation of the composition. And then there is more—
the historical moment, the questions concerning the individual composer,
tensions between competing composers at the time of the writing of the
composition. One need not play an instrument to experience music as a
leisure activity. One needs only to contemplate and permit the body to be-
come involved in the activity; one corporeally experiences the music.
There are other kinds of leisure activities that permit and require the use
of instruments. Whether sports, reading, painting, walking, or swimming,
one can engage these activities as leisure or as recreation. In leisure, the
focus of attention is key, which is a contemplative attention and attunement
to ideas of what one is doing. One is driven by the experience. In recreation,
one is driven by other things, such as chronos (kronos), competition, or
getting to some thing, getting to the next thing. In leisure, that kind of telos is
not present; in leisure, telos is open and time becomes outside of time, driven
by kairos and collapsing any sense of kronos. 12 In leisure, time is an ontolog-
ical experience as the experience of time falls away in the doing or playing.
Playing an instrument can be recreation or leisure, and the key to understand-
ing the activity as one or the other is the approach one takes to the act.
This is most assuredly a short description of leisure, and it points to a
different kind of conceptualization from the contemporary framing of leisure
through the leisure and tourism industry. In an effort to commoditize leisure
(for business owners to make money off of it and for everyday people to
purchase it), American culture has obscured leisure from the understanding
of it as a philosophical act. Today, leisure is more often considered like a
coffee break or a vacation, activities that hold short-term reprieve from the
commotion of everyday living. As the rest of this chapter suggests, leisure
holds far more import to the human condition—because leisure as a philo-
sophical act can provide the cultivation needed and be the catalyst in some
cases for an ethically imbued and philosophically infinite existence. Consid-
256 Annette M. Holba

ering leisure through the lens of the ethical reminds us of its most valuable
contribution to the cultivation of humanity.

ETHICS AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY AND THE OTHER

Our responsibility toward the other is neverending. Emmanuel Levinas artic-

ulated that we are never released from it.

Responsibility deriving from no guilt; a gratuitous responsibility responding to

a commandment not to leave the other alone is his or her last extremity, as if
the death of the other, before being my death, concerned me; as if in that
death—invisible to the other who is exposed to it—I became by my indiffer-
ence the accomplice while I could do something about it. 13

The idea that our responsibility to the other is never removed from us
changes how we see the world around us; we are then called to engage the
other in an ethical manner that places priority of the other above all other
commitments and desires. Our connection to and responsibility for the other
is a social relationship that Levinas describes as “infinite responsibility for
the other.” 14 The approach toward the Other is made possible only by the
Other, where the I is in the presence of the face of the other with a “total
uncoveredness and nakedness of defenseless eyes . . . a disquietude of con-
sciousness, seeing itself, in all its adventures, a captive of itself . . . [and]
forbids me my conquest.” 15 Through this relationship, we realize that the
infinite is not the object of contemplation; rather, contemplation resides with-
in in the infinite. This infinite space is an ethical space that is cultivated by
leisure; leisure has the potential to transform this space into an ethically
responsible communicative space. Situating recreation as an object (which is
totality) and leisure as a subject (which is infinite), it becomes clear that
leisure is a philosophical act that can transform individuals and the commu-
nicative landscapes in which one ethically meets the other.
A moral conscience reveals freedom in judgments toward the other.
When a moral conscience resides in pure desire, we experience totality,
which means we are separated from the possibility of infinity and, conse-
quently, of leisure. When desire permeates toward the other, it is unquench-
able, and this unquenchability opens us to the other, and simultaneously we
become disinterested and turn away from ourselves. 16 This desire is not agent
driven and worldly; it is the exercise of moral exigency. We can only exer-
cise our moral exigency through disinterestedness, which is the outcome
when we turn away from agency. Morality transcends in an authentic dis-
interestedness toward the other, which is a responsibility that transcends
separateness, enabling us to reach toward and beyond the exteriority and
interiority of the other.
 Leisure and the Other 257

In other words, according to Levinas:

An openness of the self to the other, which is not a conditioning or a founda-

tion of oneself in some principle . . . but a relation wholly different from the
occupation of a site, a building, or a settling oneself . . . reveals all its meaning
only in the relationship with the other, in the proximity of a neighbor which is
responsibility for him, substitution for him . . . it is disinterestedness, excluded
middle of essence, besides being and non-being. 17

In this ethical condition, we lose ourselves in the other; we lose ourselves in

otherness that transcends and privileges the relationship between the I and
the other. This kind of transcendence is not easy for human beings situated
within worldly totality. The idea of having an inner discourse, a communica-
tive space where one can contemplate, enables the I to understand its own
situatedness. The habituation and practice of this kind of inner discourse
allows the I to turn toward the face of the other in an infinite consciousness,
ensuring this proximity as a responsibility for the other. Responsibility is an
anchor, which situates the responsibility of the I for the other as first philoso-
phy in Levinas’s ethical theory, and this lays the groundwork for understand-
ing how leisure can transform the I/Other relationship.

Responsibility

Language is embedded in responsibility. As we seek the other, we already

announce a relationship that is born within an ethical responsibility toward
the other. There is no reciprocal demand of the other, and yet individuals are
derivative essences of the other. This derivation is unique, as Levinas sug-
gests the ethical relation begins with answering the call of the other; in this
response, the I becomes. 18
In responsibility, we understand that we are here for the other. As embed-
ded agents responsible to the Other, we are derivative of another’s existence,
as Levinas reminds us; it is not that the I is derivative of the other in exis-
tence, but the I is derivative in its response to the other. 19 We exist with the
other when we respond toward the other. The I finds its identity when re-
sponding to the other, and Levinas reminds us that without caring in respon-
sibility for the other, one “puts one’s own identity at stake.” 20 Therefore, to
find one’s self, for Levinas, one first responds to the other.
Responsibility for the other is an “inescapable and nontransferable” turn-
about from an “every man for himself” attitude; this places the priority of the
“for-the-other” as a “radical turnabout . . . an encounter with the face of the
other.” 21 When we turn to the face of the other, there is an interior dialogue,
an inner discourse that becomes an inter-discourse, discourse between the I
and the other. Recognizing this inter-discourse as our responsibility to the
other is important to an ethical existence. In this inter-discourse there is a
258 Annette M. Holba

serious play involving ideas that begin with inner discourse. Inter-discourse
is life-giving because it is through this inter-discourse that the I is derived
from the other.
Contemporary media environments that have been described as fast-
paced and the cult of fast 22 pose dangers to this kind of inter-discourse as
well as its counterpart, inner discourse. Inner discourse is necessary, yet it is
often an afterthought or fully ignored, especially in American culture, where
speed and the idea of more is privileged and taking care of one’s interiority
has been obscured or eliminated completely. 23 Leisure teaches us to engage
in serious play and cultivates that inner discourse; it is perhaps one of the
only spaces left in American culture where inner discourse can be experi-
enced. Without inner discourse, inter-discourse is likely not achievable, and
if it is, it will more likely be destructive than constructive.
As thinking agents in a consumption-driven environment, we find it diffi-
cult to focus on our priorities, assuming we are able to prioritize. 24 When we
are engaged intellectually and actively with inner discourse and inter-dis-
course, we become alive in the world. In this living engagement, we lose
ourselves and our interestedness; we become disinterested, and in this dis-
interestedness, we are able to turn toward the other in humility. Turning
toward the other in this fashion fully engages us in the world with others—
the turning presupposes an ethicality that undergirds our communicative en-
actments. Disinterestedness in this way permits the kind of engagement that
there is in the play in leisure. It is only when we are fully at play that we are
more fully alive with and to the other. Leisure provides the intellectual and
embodied space from which we can engage the other in humility, and in this
engagement the self and the other are celebrated.
Leisure privileges alterity in that as one engages contemplative action, the
freedom to turn away from agency and turn toward the other is nurtured
through a disinterestedness that permits reflection and openness. If we em-
brace responsible disinterestnedness toward the other, ethics begins to inform
our communicative behaviors.
Inner discourse and inter-discourse permit one to be in a synchronic pres-
ence with the other that does not need to conform or become a consensus.
The I enters into thinking or thought of the other. Entering into this relation-
ship shapes intellectual play through a poiesis already committed to an ethi-
cal relation with the other.
There is an exchange of ideas within inter-discourse, and this involves an
intellectual activity that creates a presence so that the cultivation of one’s
field of knowledge is ongoing. Engaging otherness in this way is not a
common practice in a world driven by impressions, façades, and chronologi-
cal temporality. The increase of phatic communication due to technological
advancements has left human beings with little to say; however, we must
 Leisure and the Other 259

continue to seek and explore realms for nurturing conversation, dialogue, and
dialectic.
It seems as though there is no limit to the development and advancement
of all kinds of technologies that influence and obstruct everyday communica-
tive lives. New media technologies that are invented to bring human beings
closer together are in reality more likely to become barriers that keep human
beings from communicating with each other, human to human. Martin Hei-
degger felt that communicating through talk was fundamentally human and
an activity in which people experience that notion of being with another. 25
When we begin to communicate through virtual environments and cyber-
spaces, something fundamentally changes with the notion of being with, and
this experience might well be the beginning of the end of being with in
general.
Diverse philosophical perspectives help us to understand the nature and
need for leisure in our lives as these relate to the consequences of leisure—
how leisure affects our relations with the other. Different philosophical tradi-
tions pursue questions that consider how human communicative beings come
to understand the agility and flexibility that is needed to negotiate contingen-
cies in our environment. In order to transcend these contingencies, a pheno-
menological seeing becomes necessary, potentially enabling us to see beyond
these matters and become healthier communicators. This kind of seeing bey-
ondness can recuperate our communicative condition, which nurtures our
Being.

SEEING BEYOND

Seeing beyond takes practice because it is difficult to focus one’s attention in

this fashion, especially in mediated environments that seek to disrupt and
control our attentions. We experience the interhuman through our relation-
ships with others—unimpeded by uncertainties, contingencies, changing
technologies, fear of the unknown, and so forth. So, the idea of a phenomen-
ological seeing takes our full-body experience into the experience of other-
ness and enables us to make a communicative turn away from these negative
realities.
Contemplation enables phenomenological seeing and permits a return-to-
the-things-themselves, which cultivates a natural attitude. Our natural atti-
tude emerges out of a life in which leisure is practiced and habituated. To-
gether with corporeal experience, leisure provides the ground from which we
can engage the other in a textured and responsive manner. Leisure gives us
something to talk about that rises above the superficiality of gossip and other
kinds of flat and empty communication. When we experience our environ-
ments, we do so corporeally as we experience ourselves with others, some-
260 Annette M. Holba

times in known and other times in unknown places. Through the togetherness
of our mindfulness approach and our physical bodies, we connect, blend, and
cross over ideas and traditions. Our corporeal experiences and our natural
attitudes transcend and propel our movement and discoveries. Experiencing
leisure moves us to transcend the mundane and opens us up to new ideas and
potentiality.
We construct social realities so that we can live with others—by choice.
Even if we want to be hermits or if we intentionally want to live outside of a
traditional social order, we still need to communicate with others; we are still
social beings. It is that need to be social, to live with others, that becomes
primordial to our existence. So, seeking leisure through our understanding of
our responsibility for the other enables us to start outside ourselves so that we
can seek inside ourselves. Human freedom makes the idea of otherness chal-
lenging to us, especially in a world confronted by difference and indiffer-
ence, distractions, and violence. Though we never can be released from the
violence of otherness, we start there; this condition is inescapable. In recog-
nizing this inescapabilty, starting with the other becomes a priority—leisure
is one kind of activity that enables us to constructively participate in and
from that ethical starting place.
Accepting leisure as a virtue ethic also provides balance to this turning
toward the other by turning toward the self in relation to the other through a
reflexive virtue ethic. Introducing the ethical philosophy of Josef Pieper into
this discussion foregrounds his commitment to leisure as having philosophi-
cal ground and his moral stance on the importance of virtues in our lives.
Leisure cultivates virtues. While Pieper’s theological perspective is ever-
present in his writings, theological positioning is not of central application in
this chapter. Related to leisure, Pieper’s virtue ethics can be considered com-
plementary to Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy in that they both point to
understanding leisure as being transformative to the self and the other—not
only to be life-giving but also to be life sustaining.

VIRTUE ETHICS, JOSEF PIEPER, AND THE OTHER

Virtue ethics is an ethical perspective that is different from principle-based

(consequentialisms/utilitarianism) or duty-based (deontological) ethics in
that a principle or duty implies a judgment about right and wrong actions or
the notion of actions or principles that are either good or evil. 26 A virtue ethic
emphasizes individuals and judges persons’ traits and/or their volition when
considering actions or decisions. In applying a virtue ethic, one asks the
question, what would so-and-so do? which means that we determine what to
do based upon what we think a person of high moral character or virtue
might do in the same case.
 Leisure and the Other 261

Virtue ethics as an ethical system was prevalent during the classical

Greek era, the foundation of Western cultures. In the Nicomachean Ethics,
Aristotle is interested in the end of all human action; he wanted to know what
was the highest good that a human being could achieve, and he saw this
highest good being achieved through human action and interaction—action
between people. 27 A virtue is a “beneficial disposition, habit, or trait which a
person possesses or aspires to possess.” 28 Even though deontological ethics
also includes this aspect, this is only part of a virtue ethic framework. Virtue
ethics also include a grounding in particular character traits, and these traits
reveal a distinction between doing and being. Aristotle’s basic question had
to do with asking what shall I be instead of focusing on what shall I do, the
latter being the concern of deontological ethics, the former of virtue ethics.
Aristotle would see that an ethic of being encompasses an ethic of doing.
An action does mean that a person holds a particular trait—sometimes
people act for reasons other than morals or a sense of right and wrong that
attaches to their character traits. Sometimes people act outside of a particular
moral impulse, which means that how we act is situated within exteriority
that can potentially avoid interiority. A virtue ethic, as described in this
chapter, involves both interior and exterior aspects, both being and doing.
Josef Pieper’s virtue ethics help to make this distinction clearer even
though he did not quite illuminate virtue ethics in this light; he did not fully
suggest that virtue ethics encompass both being and doing. However, Josef
Pieper’s virtue ethics lays a groundwork for identifying leisure as a virtue
ethic of being.
Josef Pieper was born in 1904 in Germany, where he would later attend
the Gymnasium Paulinum. It was during his studies at the Gymnasium when
he came upon the work of Thomas Aquinas, who would come to have a great
influence on his philosophy. A central aspect of Pieper’s philosophy is his
emphasis on leisure tied to virtue ethics. By exploring Pieper’s philosophy on
leisure, human virtue, contemplation, and humility, the relationship between
leisure and the other can be foregrounded and applied to our contemporary
environment. We begin with Pieper’s understanding of human virtue because
it is the heart of his body of scholarship that explicitly informs human com-
municative behaviors.

Leisure

In Pieper’s philosophy, leisure is a catalyst for catharsis. 29 Leisure releases

one from self-oppression, liberating one from imposed limits while remain-
ing open to what is possible. Pieper connects leisure to celebration, festival,
and worship. These are activities that lead one to the divine. He described the
action of leisure as beginning within a contemplative frame where one is
removed from work, and while leisure is actually hard work, it is a different
262 Annette M. Holba

kind of work, one that is responsible for cultivating one’s interiority, the
human spirit. Pieper sees leisure as a philosophical act and argues that in the
doing of leisure, one makes a commitment—it becomes a habit or a practice
in one’s life. 30 It is the practice of leisure that enables cultivation and trans-
formation of the human spirit, or interiority. It is the practice of leisure that
enables one to philosophize and to wonder.
Wonder permits playful engagement with ideas, permitting one to see
beyond what is there, beyond the obvious and the emotional. 31 Wonder de-
scribes the kinds of action that envelop play in the engagement of leisure.
While the idea of leisure being transformative is either under-acknowledged
or linked to the divine, it does provide a starting place from which we can
reexamine and understand leisure. Leisure cultivates one’s ability to philoso-
phize and nurture one’s being—it is a commitment to a contemplative world-
view that enables development of human virtue.

Human Virtue

Pieper’s ethics and philosophy revolves around four key virtues that he refers
to as the cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. 32
Prudence for Pieper is the mother of all virtues; he referred to it as the
“genitrix virtutum.” 33 Pieper understood prudence differently from the con-
temporary popular understanding that often depicts it as being timorous,
small-minded, and characterized by self-preservation. In popular culture to-
day, prudence is also considered to be selfishness or rigidity in perspective
and experience. For Pieper, prudence is the understanding that the good
presupposes one’s knowledge of one’s reality; this means that the actions one
takes fit the reality of the situation and that they are appropriate to the real
situation in which one is embedded either intentionally or unintentionally. 34
This means that one takes action that is right and good because one knows
the reality of a given situation. To know and understand one’s reality, one
must be able to see beyond the obvious and through an openness; one must
be able to philosophize—to wonder.
Our contemporary understanding of prudence is much weaker than Piep-
er’s. His perspective requires humility and attention. For him, prudence is a
noble characteristic that seeks what is good. Prudence in this light becomes
elevated to a higher characteristic, and it is not tied to worldly things, events,
or conditions.
The second cardinal virtue for Pieper is justice. Justice, as a habit (habit-
us), suggests that one renders to the other what is due in deliberate fashion. 35
Pieper’s understanding of justice is consistent with Plato’s understanding,
which reflects the sentiment that each person should receive what is due
based upon his or her actions; one gets what one deserves. Pieper suggested
that justice cannot develop outside of or separate from moral convictions; it
 Leisure and the Other 263

is not independent of morality. 36 Pieper situated justice as part of a human

story, which means it is entangled within a moral context and within lived
action. Justice pertains to an idea of righteousness; it is not limited to right
doing but also right being, “to be just as well.” 37
Fortitude is the third cardinal virtue that presupposes a vulnerability. Ac-
cording to Pieper, “all fortitude stands in the presence of death,” which
implies one’s readiness to die or to fall or to experience battle. 38 One takes
risks in fortitude, and these risks can lead to martyrdom. Having fortitude
does not mean one is fearless. Fear is actually a factor in the fortitude of
endurance. In fortitude, one stands up for the good and the right; fortitude
enables one to move with one’s fear and endure aspects of suffering. For
Pieper, fortitude is accompanied by suffering; they are counterparts. One
does not give up in fortitude; one simply endures and continues in strength,
pressing forward and pursuing the good.
The fourth cardinal virtue of Pieper’s, temperance, is actually related to
the previous three. Temperance refers exclusively to an active person, not the
action; temperance suggests that one looks inward, seeking to take an ac-
count of oneself. 39 But again, in contemporary American culture, temperance
holds a different meaning. Today, temperance is considered the moderation
of vices; for Pieper, there is much more to it. The telos or aim of temperance
requires a person to search her or his interior self, and as a result of this
seeking, put oneself in order. Temperance permits cultivation of this interior
space.
Virtues develop character and guide human beings through their engage-
ment in the world, and leisure cultivates virtue through contemplative en-
gagement. Through prudence, leisure assists understanding of one’s own
reality. Through justice, leisure engages thoughtful, reflective consideration
through one’s story entangled within a moral context. Through fortitude,
leisure calls forth an interior strength for one to continue in the face of fear
and suffering. Finally, through temperance, leisure involves the interior land-
scape where one engages in inner seeking. Each of these virtues can be
cultivated in leisure shaped by reflective and contemplative action.

Contemplation

The last sentence in Pieper’s book Happiness and Contemplation sums up

his understanding of contemplation: “contemplation does not rest until it has
found the object which dazzles it.” 40 In this statement, Pieper suggests that
contemplation is a commitment to an idea that is driven by a passionate
seeking of something. In contemplation, one can remain “longer without
fatigue or distraction” in an activity that, in essence, steps out of time. 41 As
one focuses on this thing that dazzles the mind, things become apparent that
previously were not; there comes a “great sureness of insight.” 42 For Pieper,
264 Annette M. Holba

contemplation and the vita contemplativa mark the difference between a

happy person and a person who cannot find happiness. The happiness that
Pieper describes is that kind of ultimate happiness that is sacred—for he
argues that a worldly contemplation, one that seeks a worldly happiness, can
never satisfy a human being’s desire to find happiness. Pieper describes this
kind of insatiable happiness as the “banality of happiness.” 43
Contemplation is an activity of the mind and body that attends to an idea
in a way that manifests embodied sentiments. In a most serious and sacred
sense, contemplation is the key to Pieper’s divine happiness—any other hap-
piness is short-lived, superficial, and common. Leisure begins in a contem-
plative spirit and opens the mind and body to a world of ideas in a commit-
ment that runs deep and focused. Contemplation permits a way of seeing that
is typically obscured by busy-ness if one lacks the commitment. Today, in
our fast-paced mediated and image-driven environment, finding time for the
contemplative experience is challenging. However, integrating leisure into
our lives enables the practice of contemplation to become a habit that devel-
ops humility. Through contemplation, leisure opens communicative practices
to the development of humility in one’s approach to the world.

Humility

Humility is a reflective characteristic. To espouse more clearly the idea of

humility in Pieper’s virtue ethics, the couplet of hermeneutic humility is
helpful. Hermeneutic humility involves a contemplative spirit and permits
one to philosophize. To engage the philosophical act in leisure, according to
Pieper, one ought to enter into this experience through a humble hermeneutic
mindset. Hermeneutic humility opens to prudent discoveries, experiences,
encounters, and ways of approaching one’s life. As the positioning of herme-
neutic humility is cultivated, one can better understand fortitude and endu-
rance through suffering.
Hermeneutic humility protects the good and holds it in highest regard.
The good to which this refers is the responsibility for the other that fully
emerges from openness and hermeneutic humility. When this condition is
present, our selflessness foreshadows the experience and limits the desire to
be driven by individual agency. Leisure cultivates hermeneutic humility be-
cause of contemplative engagement and being open to the possibilities of the
other. In this openness, turning toward the other is our first priority.
Before moving forward with a discussion about how one can turn toward
the other through leisure, clarifying the connections between the above meta-
phors is necessary to foreground the argument that leisure can be a catalyst
for ethical engagement with the other. Leisure, as a philosophical act, is
distinctly different from recreation, relaxation, entertainment, and any other
form of engagement that is not work. Leisure has a rich philosophical tradi-
 Leisure and the Other 265

tion tied to the good life, wisdom, and virtue that make it stand out from
other kinds of action. Leisure cultivates human virtue because it begins from
and is tied to the inner landscape of a human being. Consequently, leisure
can be considered a virtue ethic because it encompasses an ethic of being
(interior) and an ethic of doing (exterior). An ethic of being relies upon
tending to one’s interiority or inner landscape through contemplation, and an
ethic of doing involves humility in all of one’s actions. These aspects of
leisure as a virtue ethic enable an ethical turn toward the other.

TURNING TOWARD THE OTHER THROUGH LEISURE

Cultivating the philosophical act of leisure as a practice in our lives helps to

shape these virtues that Pieper illuminates in his philosophy. This is where
philosophy meets ethics with the concern and care of the other in mind.
Prudence, the mother of all virtues, enables the realization of identifying and
reaching one’s fullest potential in the presence of the other situated within a
hermeneutic humility paved with justice, fortitude, and temperance. That the
engagement of leisure requires an absence from the world might be some-
what uncomfortable, but it is in this uncomfortability that temperance and
fortitude become constitutive of one’s being. In the philosophical act of
leisure, the communicative being is shaped through a commitment to virtue.
Aristotle told us that the ethical relation between human beings is the
foundation of all knowledge. 44 Levinas’s idea of the significance of ethics as
first philosophy implies that ethics is the ground upon which we engage
otherness and that it is central to meeting the other. Levinas’s position of
ethics as first philosophy suggests that we begin with the other and set aside
self-will and agent-driven motives. We recognize the difference between self
and other and set it aside so that we might engage the other in a space where
meaning can be co-created. Leisure is based upon that same kind of differ-
ence. In order to do leisure, one needs to distinguish the difference between
leisure as a philosophical act and the everyday noise of work, recreation, and
other kinds of activities. Leisure acknowledges this same kind of difference,
and this experience moves human engagement toward transformation, mani-
festing a hermeneutic humility permitting turning toward the other in humil-
ity and a being of openness to the possibilities.
The world keeps us busy. Technology enslaves our actions and attentions.
We become caught up in those technological gadgets that keep us away from
the other even though they purport to connect us with the other. In this
violent obsession with quick, fast, and shorthand communication with others,
our attention is squarely focused on ourselves and the next task we might
accomplish. But this focus of attention dismisses the relationship with the
other—we cannot tend to the other if we fail to be in the presence of the
266 Annette M. Holba

other, as characterized by a hermeneutic humility that is open, responsive,

and genuine. Leisure reminds us of the other and helps us to pave a way
toward the other embedded within a philosophical and ethical commitment.
Agency and technology are just two conditions marked by interestedness
or agency that is constitutive of a nonreflective consciousness, which is a
consciousness absent of the other. Turning toward the other within a respon-
sibility can remedy this condition and replace it with a disinterestedness
embedded within a hermeneutic humility constructed through the virtues of
prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Pieper suggests that the active
life is balanced by recognizing our responsibility for the other, emphasizing
the interplay between being and doing.

IMPLICATIONS: COMMUNICATION ETHICS

AND PRACTICING LEISURE

Leisure is a philosophical act experienced in both the vita contemplativa and

the vita activa; it cultivates our interiority and enables us to respond to the
revelatory call from the other—this call ruptures our agency. Within pheno-
menological experiences, we negotiate between “passive and active moments
of possibility.” 45 In these moments, the nature of leisure is revealed, and it is
where we can find ourselves in a conceptual freedom that negotiates, inter-
venes, and expresses ideas to us. This condition involves liberation through
poiesis, but we are always in contention with competing deceptions and
tempting diversions within our environments. Once we lose the ability to
transcend these diversions, we become dangerously close to being alienated
from our potential, and we risk losing our way toward the other.
These dangers are unnatural conditions, and the openness to the possibil-
ities of the not-yet are crippled. This is the condition in which we lose
ourselves, and through this experience, our capacity to know what we have
lost is also lost. In this condition, the what-we-might-have-been is shattered
and, often, annihilated. To save ourselves from this annihilation, we can turn
toward leisure to recondition our selves. Our bodies enact the possibility of
self-disclosing to others; this self-disclosure occurs through corporeal hab-
its. 46 A life in which leisure is practiced enables the body to build construc-
tive habits of existence, habits that are open to what might be as well as to the
other in multiple ways.
In a final note, leisure as a philosophy of the mind and body is reminis-
cent of Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus (341 BCE–270 BCE) suggested that
contemplation was a pleasure of the soul. In the Vatican Sentences, Epicurus
stated that life is wasted if it does not have time for leisure. His notion of
leisure as a contemplative experience emphasized pleasure, rather than the
hard work that Aristotle described. 47 In his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus
 Leisure and the Other 267

indicated that it is never too late; we can never be too old to learn about the
health of our soul and to replace any emptiness with leisure. 48 Some popular
misunderstandings of Epicurean philosophy consider it to be driven by he-
donism only. But Epicurus emphasized the seeking of wisdom through pleas-
ure; his pleasure is not a worldly or bodily pleasure. The pleasure that he
advocated was a pleasure for the sake of itself, and it involved acts of con-
templation, modesty, and moderation. 49 This Epicurean insight paints a pic-
ture of an experience informed by contemplation, modesty, and moderation
that diverges from and passes beyond sensual pleasures toward a life with a
peaceful soul. In the Epicurean spirit, leisure provides enriching potential for
our human condition.
Through leisure, the embodied consciousness is “the occasion whence we
enact communicative praxis . . . [that] demands philosophical considera-
tion.” 50 This is where there emerges an a-whereness that negotiates between
our finite bodies and the infinite possibilities when we open to hermeneutic
humility. 51 A-whereness “accounts for both the passive and active moments
of possibility. It allows for descriptions of world disclosure” 52 In this sense,
to be truly free in turning toward the other, leisure provides a way to cultivate
an ethically laden corporeal openness of our thoughts and deeds, thus bring-
ing together philosophy and ethics as a natural bridge to the other.

NOTES

1. Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009/1952),
77.
2. Ramsey Eric Ramsey, The Long Path to Nearness: A Contribution to a Corporeal
Philosophy of Communication and the Groundwork for an Ethics of Relief (Amherst, NY:
Humanity Books, 1998), 74–78.
3. Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, trans. Seán
Hand (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), 75–87.
4. Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press,
1998), 13.
5. Chris Rojek, The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time (Los Angeles: Sage,
2010); Annette Holba, Philosophical Leisure: Recuperative Praxis for Human Communication
(Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2007); Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture.
6. Aristotle, Politics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, 1127–1324
(New York: The Modern Library, 2001).
7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
8. Thich Nhat Hanh, You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment (Bos-
ton: Shambhala Books, 2012).
9. Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture.
10. Rojek, The Labour of Leisure, 3.
11. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Mentor Books, 1899/
1952).
12. Charles Guignon and Kevin Aho, “Phenomenological Reflections on Work and Leisure
in America,” in The Value of Time and Leisure in a World of Work, ed. Mitchell R. Haney and
A. David Kline, 25–38 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).
13. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. M. B. Smith (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1999), 127.
268 Annette M. Holba

14. Ibid.
15. Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” in To the Other: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, trans. A. Peperzak (West Lafayette, IN:
Purdue University Press, 1993), 110.
16. Ibid.
17. Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
University Press, 1969), 181.
18. Ronald C. Arnett, “The Responsive ‘I’: Levinas’s Derivative Argument,” Argumenta-
tion and Advocacy 40, no. 1 (2003): 39–50
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 40.
21. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other (New York, Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1998), 202.
22. Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (New York: Harpe-
rOne, 2004).
23. Ibid.
24. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class; Honoré, In Praise of Slowness.
25. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
26. Thomas Beauchamp, Philosophical Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1982); Stephen Toulmin, Reason in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press, 1968).
27. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
28. Beauchamp, Philosophical Ethics, 150.
29. Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture.
30. Ibid.
31. Linda Weiner and Ramsey Eric Ramsey, Leaving Us to Wonder: An Essay on the
Questions Science Can’t Ask (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005).
32. Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1954/2007). Citations are to the 2007 version.
33. Ibid, 3.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues.
37. Ibid., 63.
38. Ibid, 117.
39. Ibid.
40. Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, 109.
41. Ibid., 101.
42. Ibid., 100.
43. Ibid., 14.
44. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, 689–934
(New York: Modern Library, 2001).
45. Relationship Re Ramsey, The Long Path to Nearness, 9.
46. Ramsey, The Long Path to Nearness.
47. E. Brown, “Contemplative Withdrawal in the Hellenistic Age,” Philosophical Studies
137, (2008): 79–89.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Ramsey, The Long Path to Nearness, 62.
51. Ibid., 76.
52. Ibid., 77.
 Leisure and the Other 269

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. Metaphysics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon, 689–934.
New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
———. The Nicomachean Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
———. Politics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon, 1127–34. New
York: The Modern Library, 2001.
Arnett, Ronald, C. “The Responsive ‘I’: Levinas’s Derivative Argument.” Argumentation and
Advocacy 40, no.1 (2003): 39–50.
Beauchamp, Thomas. Philosophical Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1982.
Brown, Eric. “Contemplative Withdrawal in the Hellenistic Age.” Philosophical Studies, 137
(2008): 79–89.
Guignon, Charles and Kevin Aho. “Phenomenological Reflections on Work and Leisure in
America.” In The Value of Time and Leisure in a World of Work. Edited by Mitchell R.
Haney and A. David Kline, 25–38. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.
Hanh, Thich Nhat. You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment. Boston:
Shambhala Books, 2012.
Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Holba, Annette M. Philosophical Leisure: Recuperative Praxis for Human Communication.
Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2007.
Honoré, Carl. In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. New York: HarperOne,
2004.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. Translated by M. B. Smith. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999.
———. Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
———. “Ethics as First Philosophy.” In The Levinas Reader. Translated by Seán Hand, 75–87.
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1989.
———. “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite.” In To the Other: An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Andrew Peperzak, 88–120. West Lafayette,
IN: Purdue University Press, 1993.
———. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne Uni-
versity Press, 1969.
Pieper, Josef . The Four Cardinal Virtues. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1954/2007.
———. Happiness and Contemplation. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 1998.
———. Leisure, the Basis of Culture. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1952/2009.
Ramsey, Ramsey Eric. The Long Path to Nearness: A Contribution to a Corporeal Philosophy
of Communication and the Groundwork for an Ethics of Relief. Amherst, NY: Humanity
Books, 1998.
Rojek, Chris. The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010.
Toulmin, Stephen. Reason in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Mentor Books, 1899/1952.
Weiner, Linda and Ramsey Eric Ramsey. Leaving Us to Wonder: An Essay on the Questions
Science Can’t Ask. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2005.
 Chapter Thirteen

Saving the Nation

Redemptive Ethos and the Moral
Figure of the Refugee

Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

The classical category of ethos has had an enduring relevance for rhetorical
theory and for analytic applications. At the same time, this concept is notori-
ously complex and even confusing, especially since a competing vocabulary
that includes terms like identity, role, self, or position has also steadily
emerged over the past few decades. In this chapter, I focus on a particular
aspect of the classical notion of ethos, one that is usually ignored by scholars:
its implicit ethnocentrism. The Greek ethos was, fundamentally, the ethos of
a citizen already authorized to deliberate in public. To speak of the ethos of a
woman or of a noncitizen would have made no sense in the context of the
classical Greek polis, where women, slaves, and foreigners had no public
voice. Contemporary analyses, however, ignore this peculiarity. Elsewhere, I
have discussed it fully, 1 probing its origin and cultural background, but in
this chapter I look at its consequences for understanding a contemporary
political problem: the reparation of a damaged national ethos in the aftermath
of historic conflagrations.
At the end of World War II, the morally and politically compromised
German identity desperately needed legitimation. The presence of Allied
troops and the de-Nazification programs were not enough to create quickly a
genuine political transformation. 2 Rather, when it took place, the political
transformation of the new German states, from the former Third Reich to
democracies, was an internal development that depended crucially on the
Germans’ ability to create their own postwar moral order and a new postwar
political ethos. 3 The former political exiles were a critical resource in this

271
272 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

endeavor. During the war, they had fashioned themselves and were perceived
abroad as the “other Germany.” They were those who resisted Hitler and
were therefore not contaminated by the “stench of blood and disgrace,” in
Thomas Mann’s words, 4 which clung to those who remained at home. Legiti-
mation through exiles is not without its problems or contestations. In Germa-
ny, the exiles’ claims to moral and political superiority were often dismissed
by those who had chosen the so-called path of inner migration and opposed
Nazism at home. Nevertheless, in Martin Jay’s terms, in Germany, “once the
dust settled in the 1950s, . . . it was apparent that the relative victors were . . .
[those] who had ‘run away,’ rather than the moral pygmies who defensively
claimed that they had stayed ‘at their posts.’” 5
My argument in this chapter is that the exiles’ victory, to use Jay’s term,
was the product of their ability to position themselves discursively as moral
rescuers of their nation. This also implied that their nation was redeemable.
The political refugees offered it a new credibility on the international scene.
What strategies did they use to achieve such an important and difficult task?
More importantly, how was their achievement philosophically possible, giv-
en the paradoxical situation in which they were? I argue that what the former
political refugee offered was a redemptive ethos. To understand the rhetori-
cal making of this ethos, we must also move beyond the classical legacy and
supplement it with a different heuristic that allows us to avoid any proble-
matic cultural baggage.
The analysis I offer focuses on the provocative case of postwar Germany,
and specifically on Lisa Fittko’s political activity when she was a refugee in
Germany, as recounted in her memoir Escape Through the Pyrenees. 6 Fittko,
née Ekstein, was born in 1909 in Uzghorod, then part of the Austrian-Habs-
burg Empire. She was the daughter of a Jewish avant-garde writer and died in
2005 in Chicago. After spending most of her childhood in Budapest and
Vienna, she moved to Berlin with her family, where her father’s connections
enabled her to enter the entourage of the Weimar intelligentsia. Fittko, how-
ever, preferred a different milieu and eventually joined the underground
communist movement. At the age of twenty-four, she was reprimanded and
then nearly shot for failing to raise her arm in the Hitler salute at a rally and
for admonishing a policeman who was beating another man. She was already
being pursued by the Gestapo when a couple of fellow communists with
whom she had been distributing manifestos betrayed her. To save her life she
fled the country, first to Czechoslovakia, then to Switzerland and Holland,
and in 1938 to France. In France she met and married Hans Fittko, a fellow
communist who was also pursued by the Nazis because of his antifascist
articles. The couple became key players in the operations organized by Var-
ian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee to assist the escape of several
European artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution. Fittko published
two autobiographical books and numerous interviews, while also being fea-
 Saving the Nation 273

tured in two documentaries. Her memoir Escape Through the Pyrenees was
named in Germany as the Political Book of the Year, while the author was
awarded the Distinguished Medal of Merit, First Class.
Most studies of the wartime German exiles offer an unflattering perspec-
tive when it comes to assessing their political mission. Commonly described
as ineffective politically, unable to influence the foreign policy of the Allied
states, torn by internal strife, dominated by strong but idiosyncratic personal-
ities as political actors, the German exiles have received mostly unfavorable
reviews. 7 Fittko’s successful memoir prompts me to rethink this view and
perhaps to ask a different question: How do we measure the political impact
of exiles? I ask this question in the context of a philosophical rather than
historical concern.
Fittko positioned herself in a complex network of relations involving
nations (Germany and France), the community of German exiles, and com-
munist organizations with which she was affiliated during the war. It was not
specifically a German ethos, but her uniquely individual one, that constitutes
the persuasive appeal of her memoir. Even when presenting herself as a
German, Fittko chose strategies of positioning designed to allow her to avoid
the charge of guilt leveled collectively against the German nation. This was
especially important, given the perception of the Germans during and after
the war. 8 When presenting herself as an exile, she chose strategies of posi-
tioning designed to identify her as a powerful political actor, rather than a
helpless refugee needing assistance from a foreign state or organization. This
was important, given the representation of the refugee, emerging in the after-
math of World War II as a pathetic, lost, creature, reduced to her bare human-
ity and entirely at the mercy of her saviors, the countries where she had found
refuge.

THE CITIZEN’S ETHOS

Contemporary analytic applications that draw on the concept of ethos often

conflate it with the more modern notion of identity (and sometimes, its
cognate, selfhood). Dana Anderson has rightly pointed out that, no matter
how connected they might be in contemporary culture, identity and character
(which he employs as a direct substitute for ethos) remain “distinct forms of
persuasive self-presentation.” 9 Jan Swearingen has warned against the con-
flation of ethos and identity, insisting that it leads to anachronisms. 10 The
Greeks, for instance, were not concerned with the authenticity of ethos—
whether the image of the rhetor reflected an authentic identity, accurate and
recognizable in other situations, or whether it was made up to suit particular
purposes. According to Swearingen, “Aristotle neither defines nor implies
the notion of selfhood, authenticity, or essential identity for the speaker or
274 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

actor, a univocal ‘true’ self that contrasts with the voice and character taken
on for rhetorical speech and acting.” 11 In the Aristotelian tradition, the main
source of ethos was the moral character of the speaker, usually established as
a series of characteristics: practical wisdom, virtue, and goodwill. The com-
plete list is longer, and includes courage, temperance, magnanimity, liberal-
ity, gentleness, prudence, and justice. 12 While these features might seem
general enough, and therefore one could expect to see them valued in other
cultures and historical periods as well, how they would be established and
recognized was dependent on the specific moral and ethical climate of the
Greek society. What kind of knowledge did the rhetor need to display in
order to appear wise? What kind of moral choices would he need to promote
in order to appear virtuous? How would he establish goodwill? To these
questions, the Greeks had specific answers provided by cultural norms and
societal practices in conjunction with theoretical rhetorical systems. For in-
stance, the use of carefully chosen general observations and, especially, val-
ue judgments—such as “to die for your country is better than to live under
foreign occupation”—could suggest to an audience that the speaker was
capable of making the right moral choices, in pleading that a defendant be
acquitted, for instance. Likewise, knowing what not to say—such as not
mentioning previous defeats in trying to mobilize an audience to support a
new war—indicated the speaker’s awareness of the social decorum, and thus
recommended him as discerning and well-intentioned. Virtue was defined by
Aristotle as “a capacity that provides and preserves goods.” 13 The nature of
such goods has been the subject of much debate, while the rest of the defini-
tion offers frustratingly vague information: Virtue is praiseworthy and can
convince an audience to accept the speaker’s arguments because “it is a
capacity that benefits in many ways, and great ways, and in all sorts of ways
on all sorts of matters.” 14 The Greeks recognized virtue in the context of
common beliefs about what would constitute a particularly beneficial good:
for instance, actions done for the sake of another rather than the agent’s own
sake. 15
There clearly was a hierarchy of virtues in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with
practical wisdom ranked high. Aristotle described practical wisdom (phrone-
sis) as “a calculative and rational capacity” to identify what is beneficial for a
community in a given situation. 16 But how would an audience recognize that
the rhetor had identified what is beneficial for it in that particular situation,
other than by relying on already established cultural norms that would pair
exigencies with adequate responses? In its reliance on virtues, defined not in
the abstract terms of a moral theory, but as ethical conventions shared by a
community, ethos was a key dimension of a discourse aimed at persuasion: It
grounded such discourse in the “judgment of ethical particulars” and was
thus “virtually co-extensive with the activity of judgment that partly defines
citizenship.” 17
 Saving the Nation 275

To a resident of Athens, the moral features on which ethos was con-

structed appeared to have a distinct Greek essence because they belonged to
an ethnocentric moral, political, and discursive universe that often defined its
identity in contrast to the outsiders, the “barbarians,” and that often used the
comparison to place the Hellenic world above all other ones. The Greeks’
ethnocentricity comes through in an apocryphal story about Aristotle’s en-
counter with a learned Jew, attributed to Clearchus, one of Aristotle’s stu-
dents, and referenced by the historian Josephus. In this story, the Jewish man
deeply impressed Aristotle, especially through his endurance and self-re-
straint. In the rendition of Clearchus, “the skills of the cultivated Jew came
not from being steeped in biblical texts but from his time spent in the compa-
ny of numerous learned Greeks,” such that “the esteem felt for him expresses
itself as praise for his Greekness.” 18 As Gruen further puts it, it is the
“‘Greek’ qualities that serve as the measuring rod.” 19
This is not an isolated or merely piquant anecdote. In the Letter to Aris-
teas, Jewish philosophers are portrayed as superior to the Greeks because the
former have internalized properly the tenets of the latter. 20 When they ap-
peared generous to others and willing to recognize their qualities, the Greeks
were merely pleased to be rediscovering themselves. This narcissism had
strategic advantages for establishing not just the ethos of individual speakers
but also a national ethos based on the self-depiction as a superior nation.
Such an ethos is unavailable to a nation compromised on the international
arena, no matter what illusions of grandeur it might still entertain.

THE POLITICAL FIGURE OF THE REFUGEE

The political refugee coming out of World War II constituted a particular

political category: the Displaced Person who no longer belongs to any na-
tional community and falls not only outside the legal domain defined by
nation-states but also, for this reason, outside a moral order. Paradoxically,
for such individuals, not even human rights play a role, because, as Hannah
Arendt explains, the very notion of the Rights of Man was the conceptual
product of a political order based on nation-states. 21 While refugees nominal-
ly represent the target audience for human rights intervention, the very rein-
forcement of human rights depended on political institutions that could only
operate within the boundaries of a nation-state. These institutions could no
longer function in the war-torn political landscape. Jeffrey Isaac writes: “The
crisis of the nation-state, which first emerged in the aftermath of World War
One and deepened in the second world war, was a crisis of the very idea of a
“necessary coincidence between national membership and political citizen-
ship. Those who were refugees or stateless thus became rightless, ‘foreign-
276 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

ers’ beyond their borders and in strange lands where they were outside the
law and denied full legal recognition.” 22
Giorgio Agamben has argued that political mechanisms are impotent
when it comes to helping refugees because such mechanisms are attached to
a national order and reflect state policies, while refugees fall outside such
categories:

The reasons for this impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of
bureaucratic machines, but in the basic notions themselves that regulate the
inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the legal order of the nation-
state. . . . That there is no autonomous space within the political order of the
nation-state for something like the pure man in himself is evident at least in the
fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of the refugee is always consid-
ered a temporary condition that should lead either to naturalization or to repa-
triation. 23

Refugees have a nationality—whether still recognized by a state or not—and

the heroic quality of a victim. What the refugee can do is breathe moral life
back into the nation that embraces her, precisely by allowing the nation to
restore the humanity of the refugee and of those she represents. To study the
rhetorical mechanisms through which this reversal is effected, we need to
move beyond a list of values to a more flexible, and more cultural neutral,
analytic framework. To this end, I introduce positioning theory.
Originally proposed by social psychologists Rom Harré and Bronwyn
David, positioning theory argues that “an individual emerges through the
processes of social interaction, not as a relatively fixed end product but as
one who is constituted and reconstituted through the various discursive prac-
tices in which they participate.” 24 Positioning represents “the discursive pro-
cess whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjec-
tively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines.” 25 The process of
positioning rests on three categories: (1) “positions,” defined as “a cluster of
rights and duties to perform certain actions with a certain significance as acts,
but which also may include prohibitions or denials of access to some of the
local repertoire of meaningful acts”; 26 (2) “socially meaningful and signifi-
cant performances”; 27 and (3) story lines, defined as “episodes . . . [that] tend
to follow already established patterns of development” and are “expressible
in a loose cluster of narrative conventions.” 28 What makes particular perfor-
mances meaningful and significant, according to Harre and Moghaddam, is
their “illocutionary force,” the way in which they adhere to standards of
adequacy and appropriateness, based on relevant precedents and on their
consequences.
While positioning theory provides the theoretical frame for my analysis, I
study strategies of positioning by looking at the use of naming devices—
expressions of self-reference, as well as phrases employed in reference to the
 Saving the Nation 277

exile and her nation—in relation to particular events depicted in the story,
especially the situation prior to the departure, the arrival in the new country,
and the defection.

A HERO AND A LOSER

Mostly known for its account of Walter Benjamin’s final days and the fate of
his last manuscript, Fittko’s memoir is a story about the life of German
refugees conceived as a category that brings together the famed and the less
famed, the politicos and the Jews, anyone who had left Nazi Germany and
had to cope with the adversity of exile. She uses the term German sparingly
as a generic umbrella term. In the scenes describing life at home prior to her
emigration, she uses naming devices that differentiate carefully among vari-
ous positions individuals occupied within the German nation. Against the
approaches that invoke the German character or the German soul, she stress-
es difference within the German nation. Germans are differentiated accord-
ing to their economic status, profession, views and beliefs, and membership
in political organizations or institutions.
To be German, by this account, is a complicated cluster of positions,
which includes different social and political categories and, most important-
ly, moral values. Fittko places herself in this complex network of relations,
among members of the same generation, active political dissidents, artists
and intellectuals, the Nazi establishment, family members, and friends. Her
position evolves from that of an outsider in wartime Germany to a witness to
social and political problems who feels morally compelled to intervene and
becomes as an actor determined to remedy the country’s ills. This position
crystallizes as a result of how she relates to other Germans and of the moral
and political identity she develops through these relationships. For example,
she presents herself as not sharing her family’s political orientation—that of
the Weimar intelligentsia. She also does not identify as a Jew, any references
to her Jewish origin being patently absent. She also does not identify with an
ideological platform, despite later becoming a communist.
The meaningful performance that positions Fittko in this moral order is
her participation in a Nazi rally—out of sheer curiosity, as she later recounts.
On this occasion, she witnessed a man being brutally attacked. This event
awakens her social and political consciousness and compels her to become a
political actor. Her political awakening is thus defined as a moral obligation
and a gesture of solidarity with a fellow German (it does not even come up
whether the man could have been Jewish), rather than an ideological re-
sponse to Nazism. By defining herself as a political actor in moral terms,
Fittko can claim particular positions, and the rights and responsibilities in-
volved. She deems herself responsible for the fate of a good Germany, de-
278 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

fined through the symbolic topos of the “happy Berlin” 29—a Germany that
needs to be defended against the “Nazi menace.” 30 But assuming such duty
also implies that there are other Germans who also oppose Nazism. Thus, the
storyline of complacency and submission, associated with the Germans dur-
ing the war, is replaced with one of victimhood and active struggle, thus
allowing Fittko to situate herself in a national community that can also elicit
compassion and even respect, not just outrage and condemnation.
German is first featured in her memoir as a generic national category
when she refers to those who left Germany. This shift has a double purpose:
(1) to level temporarily the diversity and thus to emphasize the common fate
of those who had to leave Nazi Germany; and (2) to suggest that generic
national categories often reflect an external point of view, in this case that of
the foreign nations receiving the emigrants. Thus used, the term marks the
transition to the next section, the exiles’ lives in France, where they are
routinely identified mainly through their national origin, with no concern for
other kind of identifications. While willingly situating herself in the collec-
tive generically identified as “German emigrants,” Fittko also presents her-
self as passive recipient, as a victim: “We were caught in the same trap as
tens of thousands of German emigrants.” 31
By 1938, many German intellectuals and political emigrants had been
stripped by the Nazis of their German citizenship, and they now found them-
selves stranded in the country they had thought would offer them safe refuge,
in desperate need to escape one more time. The naming devices used in this
section to identify the German émigrés as members of a category (rather than
particular individuals) reflect the viewpoint of the French (both officials and
society in general). This external perspective, the one of the host country, is
marked through the use of the French expressions for the reference in ques-
tion. As seen by the French, the German émigrés are ressortisants alle-
mands,” 32 les boches, 33 sales boches. 34 National origin positions them in
relation to the host country, France, more than their refugee status does.
Fittko creates a progression in the positioning of the emigrants by the French,
from the “enemy aliens” 35 to “simply Germans,” 36 to “spies,” 37 and in the
end to “probably Nazi parachutists.” 38 This is a progression which undoes
the earlier careful differentiation of the German nation according to social
class, political stance, or generational affiliation, and which recategorizes all
the émigrés into an amorphous collective, Germans, in order to equate them
with Nazis.
This positioning of the refugees into one indiscriminate grouping appears
all the more illegitimate when contrasted to the internal diversity of the
group, as Fittko describes it. Against the approaches that invoke the German
character or the German soul, she stresses difference within the German
nation. German people are differentiated according to economic status, pro-
 Saving the Nation 279

fession, views and beliefs, and their belonging to particular political organ-
izations or institutions:

1. “I joined the Socialist Students League” 39

2. “I was standing by at an election when members of the Reichstag
paramilitary group beat up a handful of Communists with canes,
clubs, and brass knuckles. Appalled, I thought, they’re just like the
Steel Helmets, and I felt that I was a coward, that I must do something
to stop the brutality” 40
3. “[I saw how] brown-shirted mobs callously murdered their political
opponents and tried to terrorize the city” 41
4. “It was also a happy Berlin, the Berlin of my memory” 42
5. “I’m learning—and not in your Romanische Café” 43
6. “We stood ready to defend it (the . . . fair and inspiring . . . Berlin)
from the Nazi menace” 44
7. “I felt I belonged in none of these categories” 45

The emphasis in this episode is on social categories: intellectuals, stu-

dents, artists, workers, police, military, and the underground communist or-
ganization. To be German, by this account, is a complicated cluster of posi-
tions. Being German includes admirable and despicable individuals, heroes
and cowards, Weimar intellectuals and politicians, the proletarian and the
military. These positions define Germany as a place of despair but also of
happiness, a place of poverty as well as of exuberant artistic life, of repres-
sion as well as of courageous political opposition.
Fittko and émigrés like her lost the possibility of choosing their own
positioning strategies, and thus of defining their own identities, when they
were relegated indiscriminately to the default category of nationality. Such
positioning of the émigrés into one indiscriminate grouping appears all the
more illegitimate when contrasted to the internal diversity of the émigré
group, as Fittko describes it:

Most of the women were apolitical Jewish emigrants who had sought asylum
in France from persecution at the hands of the Nazis. They were confined
along with us, the political refugees of the Nazi opposition, many of whom had
fled to escape death and torture. And then there were the Reichsdeutschen,
German citizens with valid passports who had for themselves on French
soil . . . when war broke out. Naturally, there were Nazis among them. 46

The list offered by Fittko exposes the pitfalls of positioning in terms of

national origin—which lumps together Nazis and anti-Nazis, Jews and their
oppressors, racial and political refugees. But by showing the absurdity of
such a default categorization of all refugees as Germans and therefore as
Nazis, Fittko can also indirectly challenge the idea of collective guilt. Indeed,
280 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

in recounting her stay in the French internment camps, Fittko emphasizes the
fact that Germans, too, were victims of the concentration system devised by
the Nazis. In May 1940, the French government ordered the arrest and intern-
ment of all émigrés. Many émigrés used the term “mousetrap” to describe the
camps in which they were interned as the German army advanced. 47 Thus,
the flight to France functions as a significant performance—the escape be-
comes entrapment, and what was initially a safe refuge turns into a reason to
flee again. Fittko plays on the well-established motif of the helplessness of
the refugee, but in doing so she manages to remind the reader that the help-
lessness was also that of some Germans, not just of Germany’s victims.
In the escape scene, the very fact that the crossing includes Walter Benja-
min is significant because it features German exiles helping other German
exiles, thus challenging the depiction of the refugee being rescued by a
foreign benefactor. After delivering Benjamin and a woman named Gurland
with her son, Fittko returned to France and continued for several more
months to guide other refugees across the mountains. In the scene describing
the crossing of the Spanish border, she captures the exceptional nature of the
émigré as a political actor by positioning herself in relation to other refugees,
whose powerlessness becomes a way of stressing her power. Fittko uses the
technique of contrast in the positioning of Benjamin—she calls him “old”
while also acknowledging that he was only forty-eight; describes him as the
typical scholar, “with the intellectual scholar’s head and the searching gaze
behind thick lenses,” 48 just before recounting his ridiculous attempt at imper-
sonating a French sailor. References to Benjamin depict him as inept socially
even though impressive intellectually, as helpless physically even though
resolute morally. One paragraph captures this mix especially well: “What a
remarkable man! I thought. Crystal-clear thinking, an unfaltering inner
strength, and at the same time a hopelessly awkward, clumsy fellow.” 49
The technique of contrast allows her to position Benjamin as helpless
while also positioning herself as his helper. At the same time, capitalizing on
the presence of a major intellectual as a character in the escape scene, Fittko
draws attention to the significance of her mission—to assist the rescue of
European luminaries whose lives were endangered by Nazism. She focuses
on a symbolic detail: a big briefcase holding the writer’s last manuscript.
Benjamin is described as willing to give his own life to save the manuscript
in the briefcase. But from her perspective, the briefcase is “a monstrosity,” so
heavy that carrying it makes the trip harder, whether or not it might constitute
a precious vestige of German Kultur trying to survive. For Fittko, the rescue
has a different stake: it is individual lives rather than documents or ideas—
and Benjamin’s is not more important than those of other exiles. In Fittko’s
words: “I had my hands full guiding our little group upward. Philosophy had
to wait until we were over the mountain. I was busy rescuing some human
beings from the Nazis.” 50
 Saving the Nation 281

Fittko’s euphoria, when the crossing is complete, goes beyond the actual
practical achievement: “I stood for a moment and watched as they started
down the bumpy road. . . . It’s high time for me to get going, I thought, and
started back. . . . I wasn’t tired. It had all been so easy—I was lighthearted,
and the whole world with me.” 51
Caught between the universality of the political refugee and the German
guilt, 52 Fittko dealt with the challenge of positioning herself and the German
ethos by taking advantage of the two horns of this dilemma. She used the
position of refugee, depicted as helpless victim, to re-infuse German identity
with humanity, and then also used the position of political refugee, depicted
as courageous actor, to restore an image of the democratic, anti-Nazi Ger-
man.
Reflecting on the political activity of German political exiles during
World War II, scholars have often wondered: Could the exiles have done
more, or acted differently, to fight Nazism? Perhaps if the exiles had been
more united, they could have had a deeper impact. Perhaps if their political
thinking had been more consistent or more attuned to the views of other
national groups abroad, they could have built more powerful, and thus more
effective, alliances. Other accounts draw attention to the remarkable heroism
of the exiles and indeed consider surprising even their limited success, given
the conditions of the fight. But the success of political exiles can also be
measured by the impact they had on their home countries in the aftermath of
the political transformation, after the war in Germany. As narrative scholar
Paul John Eakin has argued, when we read an autobiography, “we repeat in
our imaginations the rhythms of identity experience the autobiographical
narratives describe.” 53 Germans reading Fittko’s memoir were invited to
experience the Nazi past from the perspective of fellow nationals who had
opposed it, not joined it. While the de-Nazification programs forced Germans
to atone for the evil committed by their nation collectively, Fittko offered an
alternative, politically more convenient, basis of identification. She revealed
another side of German identity, brave and democratic, compassionate and
humane. Lisa Fittko did not save Walter Benjamin and she did not rescue his
final manuscript, but she wanted readers of her memoirs to understand that
she did a lot more. When she accepted the Distinguished Merit Award from
President Richard von Weizsäcker in the name of the German resistance (not
herself or the German exiles), she contributed to the moral redemption of her
nation.
The concept of a redemptive ethos allows us to understand difficult rhe-
torical predicaments such as the one faced by post–World War II Germany,
as well as to move beyond some of the conceptual entanglements of the
classical concept of ethos. I rely on positioning theory to develop an analyti-
cally more flexible template, but also for avoiding the strong link between
ethos and moral virtues, a link that becomes especially problematic when we
282 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

are dealing with a society in a moral crisis. By replacing moral virtues with a
moral order—the category favored by positioning theory—I hope to obtain a
more generous space of reflection and critique. Individuals like Lisa Fittko
were not merely strategic in the postwar rehabilitation of Germany, but genu-
ine supporters of a German rebirth. Her message of optimism and faith is the
most important dimension of a redemptive ethos.

NOTES

1. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Intimate Strangers: Foreign Intellectuals and American Politi-
cal Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
2. Mary Fulbrook, The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918–1990 (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1991).
3. Ibid., 312.
4. Quoted in Martin Jay, Cultural Semantics. Keywords of Our Time (Boston: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 87.
5. Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to
America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 326.
6. Lisa Fittko, Escape through the Pyrenees. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1991).
7. See Yossi Shain, The Frontiers of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Jean Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile:
The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (London: Verso, 2006).
8. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (Fordham University
Press, 2001).
9. Dana Anderson, Identity’s Strategies: Rhetorical Selves in Conversion (Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 91.
10. Jan Swearingen, “Ethos: Imitation, Impersonality, and Voice,” in Ethos: New Essays in
Rhetorical and Critical Theory, ed. James S. Baumlin and Tita Baumlin (Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1994), 116.
11. Ibid.
12. Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 9, in The Complete Work of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Trans-
lation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2, Bolingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1984).
13. Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, in The Complete Work of Aristotle, The Revised
Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2, Bolingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 1366a37.
14. Ibid., 1366a36–1366b1.
15. Ibid., 1366b36–13667a4.
16. Ibid., 3.16.9.1417a23–27.
17. Stephen Halliwell, “The Challenge of Rhetoric to Political and Ethical Theory in Aristo-
tle,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Amelie Rorty Oksenberg (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 178.
18. Erich Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2011), 312.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 316.
21. Hannah Arendt, “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man,” in The Portable Hannah
Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003).
22. Jeffrey Isaac, “Situating Hannah Arendt on Action and Politics,” Political Theory 21,
no. 3 (1993): 509–10.
23. Giorgio Agamben, “We, Refugees,” Symposium 49, no. 2 (1995): 116.
 Saving the Nation 283

24. Rom Harré and Brownyn Davis, “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves,”
Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 20 (1990): 3.
25. Ibid., 4.
26. Ibid., 5–6.
27. Ibid., 6.
28. Ibid.
29. Fittko, Escape, 2.
30. Ibid., 3.
31. Ibid., 30.
32. Ibid., 7.
33. Ibid., 11.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 7.
36. Ibid., 11.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 2.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 3.
42. Ibid., 2, my emphasis.
43. Ibid., 3.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 7.
46. Ibid., 12.
47. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 442.
48. Fittko, Escape, 32.
49. Ibid., 45.
50. Ibid., 47.
51. Ibid., 89.
52. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2000).
53. John Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2005), 130.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben Giorgio. “We, Refugees.” Symposium 49, no. 2 (1995).

Anderson, Dana. Identity’s Strategies: Rhetorical Selves in Conversion. Columbia, SC: Univer-
sity of South Carolina Press, 2007.
Arendt, Hannah. “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man.” In The Portable Hannah Arendt,
edited by Peter Baehr. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics. In The Complete Work of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford
Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Volume Two. Bolingen Series LXXI. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984.
Eakin, John Paul. How Our Lives Become Stories. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Fittko, Lisa. Escape Through the Pyrenees. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991.
Fulbrook, Mary. The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918–1990. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991.
Gruen, Erich. Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Halliwell, Stephen. “The Challenge of Rhetoric to Political and Ethical Theory in Aristotle.” In
Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, edited by Amelie Rorty Oksenberg. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996.
Harre, Rom and Brownyn Davis. “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves.” Journal
for the Theory of Social Behavior 20 (1990).
284 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

Isaac, Jeffrey. “Situating Hannah Arendt on Action and Politics.” Political Theory 21, no. 3
(1993).
Jaspers, Karl. The Question of German Guilt. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2000.
Martin, Jay. Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Palmier, Jean Michel. Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America
London: Verso, 2006.
Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu. Intimate Strangers: Foreign Intellectuals and American Political Dis-
course. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Shain, Yossi. The Frontiers of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State. Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Swearingen, Jan. “Ethos: Imitation, Impersonality, and Voice.” In Ethos: New Essays in Rhe-
torical and Critical Theory, edited by James S. Baumlin and Tita Baumlin. Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1994.
 Chapter Fourteen

Communicology and the Ethics of

Selfhood under the Regime of
Antidepressant Medicine
Isaac E. Catt

Perhaps there are others who can relate to my mother’s didactic rhetoric,
which frequently took the form of cultural clichés, such as “Misery loves
company.” It was a warning that I should stay clear of other people who
would unnecessarily embroil me in their problems. “Mind your own busi-
ness,” she would say, and “Let others tend to their business.” Out of respect
and admiration, I listened, heeded her admonitions and grew up thinking that
every person has a mind, each mind a separate and unrelated entity not
responsible to the others. This sort of cognitive behavioral therapy for her
children seemed practical, even if Norman Vincent Peale tacitly informed it.
The colloquialisms of our egocentric culture subtly reify the tendency to
understand mental issues, among others, as purely individual in origin and
warranting individual treatment. Moreover, we have never been able to shed
the illusion that mind and brain are identical. Here, and against my mother's
advice, I ask my readers to worry with me. I hope the undertaking is not too
steep a hill to climb, another thing she warned me about.
When I present conference papers and public lectures on the present
topic, I am always asked personal questions in subsequent interpersonal en-
counters and in hushed confidential tones, so let me be explicit from the
beginning: I am not depressed, and neither is anyone in my family. Unfortu-
nately, most of us know someone who suffers from depression. Maybe it is
someone for whom we have deep concern. Perhaps the worries of this world
are already sufficient, even overwhelming, so that my suggestion of taking
on yet another one may seem an unnecessary and unacceptable burden. How-

285
286 Isaac E. Catt

ever, it is this very anxiety of existence at the roots of our social experiences
that motivates this project.
I do not believe that a problem as widespread as depression is merely an
individual issue. Nor do I believe that it is a biological malady. With the
exceptions of organ donations upon death and organ transplants, we do not
normally share our bodily organs. We do share our minds, because the mind
is social and a result of communication. Depression is a problem of mind.
However, my focus is not as much on depression itself as it is on the issue of
therapy, and specifically the medicalization of the illness that renders it a
disease. I am not the first to say that we live in an era of depression. 1 Yet, if
the problem of depression is ubiquitous, then so is its treatment. The genesis
of my worry is in personal observations of people who suffer from this
human pathology and who have sought a medical cure, specifically through
antidepressant medicines. Here is a succinct description of the medicine:
“Antidepressants are drugs that treat depression and improve the symptoms.
The main types of antidepressants are tricyclic antidepressants, selective se-
rotonin reuptake inhibitors, monoamine oxidase inhibitors and other atypical
antidepressants.” 2
Where antidepressants are involved, the medical community has readily
dismissed the significance of patient claims to being numbed or drugged, but,
on the face of it, this is indeed strange. After all, the patients are drugged.
Drugs often numb or stupefy the body. Treatments of symptoms of this mood
condition are founded on the experience of being drugged. I worry because I
have perceived changes in personality and altered interpersonal communica-
tion among those whom I know to be on antidepressants. Some of them are
self-described as mellowed out, dazed, or numbed. These symptoms of the
supposed cure of their illness seem quite similar to symptoms of people I
have known who self-administered illegal drugs or alcohol. I began to ques-
tion whether my associates and friends were better off on drugs than they
might have been with a more traditional communication-centered psycho-
therapy. Certainly, I do not wish to make choices for someone else; their
ethics must remain their own. Nonetheless, their choices may be more con-
strained by the morality of the dominant paradigm of wellness codified in the
cultural milieu than they may recognize. Bringing attention to this is my
purpose. Perhaps, my work may contribute to informed choices of alternative
treatments.
Few of us enjoy watching people suffer, especially if those sufferers
count among those invested with our affections. Yet, it seems that we have
given up on a cure for this illness, as evidenced by the fact that depression is
no longer theorized. The symptoms are now assumed to be identical with the
disease, and therapy is as close as the prescription pad. An easy fix is encour-
aged. Still, I wonder whether the course of least resistance is the right one.
Whatever else it might be, surely the right path remedies the illness both
 Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood 287

where it is manifest experientially and in a mode of treatment that can be

ethically defended. Antidepressant medicine meets neither of these necessary
and sufficient conditions.
The dominant cultural message is that depression is solved by taking a
pill, but what if the message is more problematic than it is portrayed to be?
What if the treatment has little or nothing to do with a cure? What if the
widely accepted myth of a chemical imbalance in the brain at the roots of
depression is unproven in research? What if the treatment only represses the
illness, indefinitely postponing an encounter of the suffering self with the
social world? What are the ethics of selfhood under these conditions?
Who has the right to raise these questions? The divisions of thought and
practice of a culture are first institutionalized and then, in a subterranean
tautology, are taken to be incontrovertible proof of their legitimacy. A pre-
vailing discourse assures boundaries and consecrates authority to speak. 3 In
this context, it is important that we be able to think for ourselves, even if it is
difficult to confront the dominant paradigm with critical discourse. There are
few realms where this could be more important than in situations involving
health. In short, I do not accept the convention that problems of human
consciousness should be left to a particular natural, social, or human science,
especially not a discipline that would subtract the social and cultural world
from consideration of matters of mind. Moreover, it is not a zero-sum game;
several paradigm and disciplinary perspectives are of value. I would main-
tain, though, that communication is most susceptible to being ignored, partic-
ularly because it is not well understood in the profundity of its existential
occurrence at the very roots of conscious experience.
I am a communicologist and will therefore confront the issues at hand
from this perspective. Assuming that it is more deeply understood than com-
mon sense usually affords, communication is a vital problematic of depres-
sion and its treatment. I maintain that depression is a problem of mind that
occurs in the social world, not merely in the central organ of the body's
nervous system. Treatment for depression should encounter the illness in the
realm of its occurrence. Mind is in the communication matrix of the person-
al-social-cultural world, not merely in the brain.
Communicology, the human science of embodied discourse, is inclusive
of the social science of communication (information theory) and has solid
historical roots in several disciplines, but especially philosophy and psychia-
try. 4 Unfortunately, as it now takes the brain to be the material object and
origin of consciousness and ignores mind as a semiotic (cultural-social) and
phenomenological (embodied-personal) construction, psychiatry is at risk of
losing its relevance to the human sciences. 5 It is regrettable, if not shameful,
that psychiatry has largely abandoned its rich historic interest in human com-
munication. 6
288 Isaac E. Catt

The dominant practice of psychotherapy now ignores the communication

matrix as the meaningful (social-intersubjective) context of mind. Instead, it
has reverted to Cartesian thinking aptly characterized as psychologism and
biologism. Ironically, the recent history of the discipline is one of repression,
of forgetfulness. The mental illness called “major depressive disorder” is an
exemplary case. 7 The dominant treatment for this disorder is antidepressant
medicine, which actually serves the superficial and shortsighted therapeutic
purpose of repressing illness. 8
If this is the age of depression, then it is also the age of prescription drugs.
I have described this elsewhere as a Cartesian Weltanshchauung, or world-
view, at odds with the Lebenswelt, the life-world. 9 The underlying biologism
of antidepressant medicine promotes a static image of ethical being—the
tacit idea of a universal consciousness—and thus subverts the rhetorical pos-
sibility of being ethical—embodied practices where ethics inhere. 10 I sub-
scribe to the biological fact that we are organically more similar than differ-
ent. However, as a semiotic phenomenologist I do not subscribe to the idea
that mind is sufficiently generalizable as to be devoid of conscious (embod-
ied) experience. 11
I find the evidenced-based care upon which basis the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Disorders (DSM) is founded ethically challenged in
regard to depression. This document, now in its fifth edition, guides psychiat-
ric as well as psychotherapeutic care. 12 My discussion unfolds in three steps.
First, I consider the semiotic coding of depressive experience. Depression is
codified by its medicine, and the very real risk is that the experience is now
mystified by another name, antidepressants. I describe the extent of antide-
pressant use in the United States. Of particular note is the disconnection
between scientifically based clinical practice and the prevalence of prescrip-
tions. Second, I deconstruct the sign depression as it is coded under the
regime of biomedicine. The evidence shows that the myth of chemical imbal-
ance in the brain that is ostensibly corrected by serotonin reuptake inhibitors
(SSRIs) and other related drugs can be supported only by reliance on
pseudoscience. Third, I bring a philosophy of communication ethics to con-
sideration of these matters as it may be derived from communicology. Semi-
otic phenomenology, the paradigm exemplar of this critical position, seeks to
open up a clearing for authentic choices.

SEMIOTICS OF DEPRESSION: ANTIDEPRESSANT

USE IN THE UNITED STATES

In this step of the chapter, I describe how depression is witnessed through a

medically constructed code. The illness is seen through the lens of a disease
 Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood 289

model in which the patient’s conscious experience of a social world becomes

epiphenomenal.
Several phenomenological studies attest to the dark experience of depres-
sion. 13 It does not take a cynic to deduce that the world is largely a loveless
sphere. Of course, the focus of depression is not on the life-affirming, loving
relationships that many of us are able to experience as solace for a world at
best neutral and too often dismissive of personal existence. It is difficult to
see positive aspects of living through a window of gloom and despondency.
The extent of the misery is documented, and the prospects are grimly por-
trayed. The World Health Organization (WHO) associates depression with
about 850,000 suicides per year, describes depression as a leading cause of
disability in the world and estimates that depression may become the second
leading cause by 2020. 14 The National Center for Health Statistics, under the
auspices of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), produced a three-year
study of depression covering the period of 2005–2008. 15 It actually depicts
depression indirectly, by inference from the extent of antidepressant con-
sumption. Let me introduce a few important findings from this report, keep-
ing in mind that the five years that have transpired from the date of the study
would only add to the numbers. The report’s data are in italics followed by
my additional commentary.
Eleven percent of Americans aged twelve and over take antidepressants.
Importantly, antidepressants are not recommended for anyone under age
twenty-four, the elderly are cautioned about consuming them, and women
who are pregnant should not take them. The impulse to suicide is a historic
concern and was literally carried out by teenagers on antidepressants in sev-
eral instances, notably by hanging. Doctors prescribing the medicine ask
family members or friends to keep a close eye out for radical changes in
behavior that might indicate suicidal tendencies in the early stages of drug
use. It should be noted that the threat of suicide is already a possibility of
depression. Severe birth defects have been found in infants born of pregnant
women who took antidepressants.
Sixty percent of Americans taking antidepressant medication have taken it
for two years or longer, and 14 percent have taken it for ten years or more.
Once on the drugs, there is anxiety about going off the medicine for fear of
the recurrence of the depressive experience. The problem is that this makes it
difficult to determine whether or when it would ever be appropriate to cease
taking the medicine and declare that the self is cured. The route to normal,
nonmedicalized existence is rendered especially difficult by what drug pro-
ponents rationalize as discontinuation syndrome. This is a euphemism for
drug withdrawal.
Antidepressants are the third most common prescription drug taken by
Americans and the single most frequently used drug by those aged eighteen
to forty-four. The extent of use is not accounted for by depression alone
290 Isaac E. Catt

because the drug is also prescribed for other maladies, some of which are
assumed to be related to depression, such as anxiety, panic disorder, and
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Doctors are allowed to prescribe vir-
tually any legal drug, regardless of the use for which it is initially intended.
The psychopharmacological industry has a long and sordid history of per-
suading medical professionals to prescribe these drugs for an increasing va-
riety of maladies unrelated to research or to approval by the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA).
The rate of antidepressant use by Americans increased 400 percent be-
tween 1988 and 2008. While we wait for recent data, we may safely assume
that increases in use have continued to occur in the last few years. Research
shows that the rate of depression climbs during economic downturns such as
the most recent recession. As depression elevates as a national statistic, so
does intake of antidepressants. Personal identity suffers. The longer a person
is unemployed, the less likely are the chances of regaining employment. The
depression only deepens. It is known that depression is socially contagious in
marriages and other living arrangements with significant others. Living in
close proximity with a despondent loved one is depressing. Being diagnosed
with a mental illness further lessens the likelihood of employment. Depletion
of income during unemployment decreases the prospects of pursuing psycho-
therapy. And, of course, it may have been depression on the job that contrib-
uted to being unemployed in the first instance.
Almost 25 percent of American women aged forty to fifty-nine are on
antidepressants. Women are twice as susceptible to depression as men and
are more likely to seek treatment.
Less than 30 percent of persons taking the drugs saw a mental health
professional in the last year. Consumers of antidepressants are, for the most
part, not under continuing care and monitoring by a mental health profession-
al. Once on the drugs and once compliance is regularized, the therapeutic
intervention is usually finished. At this point, the best that can be said is that
psychiatrists monitor prescriptions, their job reduced to medical mainte-
nance. Other studies confirm and extend the CDC research.
It is estimated that 25 to 50 percent of undergraduate college students in
America are on antidepressants. 16 A significant number of this group would
appear to fall under age twenty-four, the cutoff below which the drugs are not
normally recommended for fear of suicidal ideation. Many of these students
take the drugs to allay stress, some of them on the advice of their parents who
see the drugs as a strategy of prevention.
Especially startling are these data: Four out of five of all prescriptions
filled by pharmacists contain antidepressants. Seventy-three percent of the
prescriptions for antidepressants are given to patients who have not been
diagnosed with depression. 17 Nonspecialists, not psychiatrists, write 80 per-
cent of prescriptions for these drugs. 18
 Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood 291

One expert reviewer refers to an epidemic at hand, but not an epidemic of

depression. To the contrary, it is the use of these drugs that is the epidemic. A
comparison may be helpful. Recall that polio was a widespread disease that
was finally treated by a historic scientific breakthrough, the Salk vaccine.
Polio was nearly eradicated and now shows up very rarely in the world.
Perhaps the conclusion here is that the prevalence of the depression disease
warrants the enormous and growing consumption of a drug cure. Not so. The
history of the drugs shows that the tail wags the dog; it is the drugs that have
produced depression as a medical disease of sadness.
Depression was nearly unheard of just a few decades ago. No other real
medical epidemic in history has been less susceptible to treatment than de-
pression. As the availability of drugs increases, the rate of depression expo-
nentially skyrockets. 19
Questions of ethics are an implicit thread in the foregoing. The alarming
quantitative data cited so far takes on profound significance when a critical
eye is turned toward the scientific evidence for antidepressants.

DECONSTRUCTING THE SEMIOTIC CODE:

EXPOSING PSEUDOSCIENCE

In this step of the chapter, I examine the construction of the medical reality of
depressive disease. The accepted view is simply not supported by scientific
evidence.
The story of science justifying antidepressants and related drugs is an
eye-opener that I briefly render here. A principal and recurring theme is the
availability of chemicals and very creative imaginations put to work on how
they might be used for profit. This point bears repeating: The chemicals
existed, then massive research was conducted to discover how they might be
used. Initial research reported failed attempts to positively alter brain chemis-
try as a cure for depression and other illnesses. The link was then reported as
successful, even while citing the published reports that said the opposite.
Further research referred to the aforementioned secondary articles and the
false rendering of the facts simply snowballed over time. The myth of a
biological basis for sad social relations was promoted. Contrary research
findings and known dangers of the drugs were not reported. Research was
twisted to fit desired outcomes. Economic interests figured heavily. The
pharmacology industry entered the professional medical scene and influ-
enced doctors, medical journals, schools of psychiatry, the American Psychi-
atric Association (APA), the DSM, and medical school textbooks. Doctors
were paid large fees and treated to exclusive vacations if they agreed to
promote the drugs. They were also paid to sign their names to legitimate the
supposed science of proprietary research produced by the industry. Medical
292 Isaac E. Catt

journals reported ostensibly objective research that was actually written by

physicians employed by drug companies. Schools of medicine were given
large grants to turn their heads from what they knew to be improper influ-
ence. Psychiatrists committed to psychoanalysis, and other interpersonally
oriented psychotherapies, were booted out of major medical communities
and taken off the committees that would write the DSM. Effectively, the
DSM evolved into a manual for drug prescriptions. Psychotherapists who
objected and who had promoted communication-based approaches lost their
influence, their chance to compete for grants, opportunities for advancement,
and even their employment. Biology became the unquestioned basis of psy-
chiatry in medical textbooks. Generations of students-turned-professionals
were now committed to their acquired expertise and could recite the evidence
for the myth of the magic bullet pill. On the whole, they are not an audience
that readily welcomes the heretofore hidden facts. They are quick to conse-
crate the disciplinary boundaries of their profession and remind any critics
that only they have the required educational credentials to speak to these
matters. However, the facts do not support their assumptions.
The idea of a chemical imbalance in the brain that is corrected by SSRIs
and other psychotropics is a widely believed but false myth. The truth is that
the drugs create an abnormality in the brain’s functioning where none previ-
ously existed. There is no proof and never was that depressed persons have
less serotonin available in the brain than persons who are not depressed.
Beyond this, the cost of this perspective should be taken into account. The
whole existential problem of a self in relation to its world is lost in psycholo-
gism and biologism, the reduction of a person to his or her brain chemistry. 20
By contrast, the phenomenology of depression experience leads us to
place communication front and center. Alienation from other people is a
recurrent theme. It is difficult to express the paradox of incommunicability:
of being somehow excommunicated, wanting back in, but being helpless to
return to normal human semiotic relations. Now, the medicine justifies the
alienation, making it possible to be with others but without truly engaging
them in discourse. Sooner or later, patients come around to acceptance of the
self as a product, not of human interaction, but of brain chemistry. Karp
surmises: “The prevailing cultural view is that a healthy revision of self is
best accomplished through a revision of one’s biochemistry.” 21 Of course,
the salient advantage of such scientism is that it can proceed without a
scientist. The doctor does not codify signs of illness but rather counts re-
sponses to a questionnaire such as the Hamilton Depression Scale or other
instrument that pretends to scientific measure. Curiosity no longer grounds
psychiatric practice; there is nothing to investigate. A real patient need not be
physically present for a doctor to render a diagnosis. If the responses to the
depression protocol meet the DSM standards, the patient need not have a
name or a body. Thinking about depression is no longer required. The rules
 Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood 293

of the egocentric Weltanschauung and the prescribed passive role of the

depressed person in the contemporary Zeitgeist have rendered a theory of
depression irrelevant. Reflection on the meaning of a person’s illness is
obsolete. Mental illness can be treated regardless of whether it is understood.
The symptoms, once individualized by psychologism and blamed on the
brain by biologism, are not seen to signify anything about the communication
matrix in which the patient’s conscious experience of social life is embedded.
All of this may be quite invisible to a patient who is suffering from depres-
sion. The patient wants help and as soon as possible. A quick fix is an
efficient technology suited to our era. It may be too readily assumed that the
doctor’s diagnosis leads in a linear causal chain to a happy prognosis. It is
doubtful that the patient is fully cognizant of potentially stepping onto a train
without a stop, no final destination of wellness in sight—what is more likely
is that increasing adjustments and augmentations of a drug regimen may
become a way of life. The pill solution may come as considerable relief. The
advent of having to wallow in the mud of conflict with a psychotherapist who
demands an account of things difficult to recite is circumvented. Insurance
companies will pay for only a few talk sessions. The pill is science, after all,
not mere conversation that proceeds indefinitely. It may be felt by the patient
that being sad is an unnecessary burden in a technologically advanced soci-
ety. Though patients are numbed by the drug, taking out both highs and lows
of emotion may seem preferable to them to unrelenting despondency, loss of
identity, passivity and the like. The depression is always there (or rather
here) but is ostensibly conquered by the objective will of chemical science.
What precisely happens to the will, personal resolve, and esprit de corps,
the desire to be an essential part of the social world? Is it replenished? Or, is
it simply transferred from self to brain where they are then unified as one? A
good deal of respectable research shows that the drug consumer is self-
persuaded to believe in the medicinal effect. In fact, most of the clinical trials
that have been conducted have not shown any beneficial effect from the
drugs. 22 There is a distinct difference between what quantitative research
might generalize and actual clinical significance. Kirsch and his expert col-
leagues conducted meta-analyses, studies of the studies that have been done
on the effectiveness of SSRIs. These meta-studies confirm that the positive
effects of antidepressants are induced by placebo, not the drugs themselves.
Results of clinical trials indicate a statistical difference of 1.8 between the
drugs and placebo. As Kirsch indicates, less than 2 percent is of no signifi-
cance clinically. 23 Moreover “the ‘clinical value’ of an antidepressant is just
not part of the FDA’s criteria for approving it.” 24 The effects of placebo are
so powerful that patients given any pill fared just as well in clinical studies as
those who took the antidepressants.
The narrative concerning a chemical imbalance in the brain at the roots of
depression is not true, but is indeed mythical. As Valenstein showed in
294 Isaac E. Catt

excruciatingly rigorous research, there has never been evidence proving that
people who are depressed have different amounts of serotonin or norepineph-
rine in their brains from those who are not depressed. 25 Keep in mind that the
diagnosis of depression does not involve a test for chemical imbalance. To
the contrary, it is based on verbal responses to a general protocol designed on
the basis of the DSM category of depressive mood disorder.
The psychopharmacological industry’s public relations campaign in favor
of these drugs is a monumental success. 26 In the United States, the manufac-
turers are allowed to market their medicine directly to consumers. Potential
consumers are advised in numerous television commercials to, in so many
words, instruct their doctors in the drugs they need. It is one of the most
successful rhetorical efforts ever conducted. The chemical imbalance story is
now a cultural truism. It will take a major paradigm shift to upset this deeply
ingrained belief. Once accepted, the appeal to the authority of science, even
if the science is false, is a difficult barrier to transcend.
Interestingly, all websites of the drug companies state explicitly that the
causes of depression are not precisely known. Additionally, they agree that it
is not known why or how the antidepressants work. Nevertheless, they com-
monly allege that “each antidepressant class affects the levels of chemicals in
the brain called neurotransmitters, which are thought to be involved in regu-
lating mood” (my italics). 27 In other words, the diagnosis of depression is
ultimately a result of administering the drugs; a tautology of post hoc ergo
propter hoc prevails. Subsequent trips to the doctor, should there be any, are
to check on the drug regime for compliance. If the patient is better as evi-
denced by satisfactory responses to questions asked, it is assumed that the
disease was there but is now subdued. The medicine creates the disease.
Small wonder, then, that the growth of the malady has increased dramatically
since the advent of the drugs. To reiterate, before that time, depression was
an exceedingly rare diagnosis.

EMERGENT ETHICS IN A COMMUNICOLOGY

OF SELFHOOD

In this third step, I bring phenomenology to bear, exposing a tension between

the sign depression as medically codified and its conscious experience.
Communicology takes a human science approach to discourse that may
prove helpful to persons who face the issue of depression and treatment.
There is an inevitable tension obtaining between the semiotic sphere, where
all thought is in signs, and living consciousness, where thought is embodied
in practices. In semiotics such experience is understood as semiosis, the
action of signs in discourse by which a sign mediates experience, yielding
incessantly to subsequent signs. Once we accept one sign, such as depression
 Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood 295

conceived as a biological disease, then it is easier to accept subsequent signs

that lead to chemical treatment. A chemical problem such as an imbalance of
serotonin or noradrenalin in the brain should logically be treated by chemical
adjustments. Thoughts about self and social world are shaped by sign boun-
daries. Signs rule things in and things out. Signs are like the skin, at once
enclosing and disclosing, separating self from others and conjoining self with
others. The brain disease model excludes the conscious experience of the
patient, while appearing to be concerned with it. No single sign occurs be-
cause it is sign relations, signs nested in systems of signs called codes that
bear down upon consciousness. Codes are then systems of signs along with
rules for their use. Depression is not seen as such because its experience
disappeared with the exclusion of its phenomenology. That is, psychotherapy
is given, at best, secondary and brief attention. The drugs are the foremost
and lasting issue.
Closely related to semiosis is intentionality in phenomenology. Phenome-
nologists understand consciousness as a worldly phenomenon; to exclude
objects of consciousness is to exclude consciousness itself. All consciousness
is consciousness of. The sign-experience tension is a source of ambiguity in
everyday existence, particularly noted here in the semiotic realm of mental
health and phenomenological realm of illness. Phenomenology’s task is to
interrogate the “natural attitude” that represses this tension through ongoing
description, reduction, and interpretation of this relationship. 28 I have de-
scribed the natural attitude in this case as medicalization of a mental illness.
Phenomenological reduction was a deconstruction of the antidepressant code
for depression, which showed it to be a false consciousness. Phenomenology
perpetually returns us to originary, which is to say communicative, con-
sciousness. 29
I have made a distinction in previous work between disease and illness. 30
Without question, a depressed person is ill. My argument is that the illness is
repressed by antidepressants. This perspective is in some ways consistent
with anthropological studies of the medical world, except for the fact that
such studies may accept the biological premise and then add considerations
of culture to it. 31 Illness from this perspective is the experience of a malady
that remains the disease proper. First comes the reality of the disease, next
comes its experience. Let us pause to reflect on the phenomenalism at work
here.
The philosophic presuppositions are Cartesian and difficult to justify. The
biomedical point of view equates consciousness and the brain. We are asked
to accept the concept of a universal consciousness. Culture is then a tardy
addendum to human awareness. Consciousness is first and communication
with the world is second. Consciousness precedes experience. Communica-
tion is epiphenomenal. Experience is unidirectional and linear, flowing from
the brain to the world. Finally, the body is presupposed in limbo between the
296 Isaac E. Catt

brain and the world, obedient to the former with incidental incorporation of
the latter.
Now, this bifurcated philosophy of self and world is very convenient in
the short run because it serves the interests of every player on the “field,” to
employ a technical term from Bourdieu. 32 If consciousness originates in the
brain, the study of human beings may be strictly localized, rendered a materi-
al object, and then owned by neuroscientists. That is, in fact, the case as the
discourse on these matters is now nearly the exclusive province of medical
psychiatry. Research in this area is heavily financed by grants, and the mon-
ey goes to that which is generally understood to be natural science proper,
not to human science. Psychotherapy, the traditional human science ap-
proach, employed talk as a qualitative treatment for an affective problem on
the presupposition that emotions inhere in communicative relations. Psycho-
analysis, for example, focuses on conflicts internalized from social circum-
stances. By contrast, neuroscience suggests that there is a quantifiable deficit
in the brain, the supposed center of consciousness. If consciousness is univer-
sal, it can be treated as such with little or no regard for self, significant other,
social group, or cultural mores. It is important to be quite clear about this. In
his phenomenology of depressive experience, Karp puts the issue concisely:
“Research about a feeling disorder that does not get at people’s feelings
seems, to put it kindly, incomplete.” 33
The American definition of depression and its subsequent diagnosis and
treatment is now conquering the planet. Antidepressants are prescribed
worldwide and increasingly in third world countries. Mind is assumed to be
identical with the brain, which is of course universal. The pill is the answer
for depression everywhere for all peoples. 34 Indeed, antidepressants are as-
sumed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be an instrument of
democracy. The WHO has already said a third of the world’s population is
depressed, a body, name, and person being nonessential to the diagnosis and
presumably the subsequent prescription of drugs. The brain is assumed to be
the arbiter of social being, so the antidepressants are believed to move pa-
tients into activity, bodies of passivity finally employable and made useful.
Consider the ethical agents involved in the enterprise as a whole and
including the APA, WHO, FDA, CDC, medical schools, pharmaceutical in-
dustries, psychiatrists, medical doctors and other prescribers of medicine,
health insurance companies, the media, and organizations such as the Mental
Health Alliance. Then, in this vast, global, and powerful institutional matrix,
there is the patient, a self in the world, whose relational being or selfhood is
eclipsed in a ubiquitous and bewildering maze of money, medical authority,
pseudo-science and popular myth. No doubt many are ill, but the choice of
context for diagnosis and treatment is pre-inscribed by the dominant medical
conception. From a semiotic point of view, ethical being is already deter-
mined in the depression discourse; authentic choosing is a feeble option in
 Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood 297

relation to the pre-coded paradigm of choice. The sign disease that is at-
tached to the illness condenses and absorbs it, ruling out all alternative per-
spectives.
I should like to conclude this enterprise by considering something nearly
absent in discussions of depression and treatment: the conscious experience
of being drugged by antidepressants. First, the experience of depression was
excluded. Second, the experience of being on the prescribed medicine was
not studied. Or, more precisely, the medical concern was with possible ad-
verse side effects of the prescriptions but not the experience, per se. It is
important to realize that earlier drugs caused severe side effects. Though later
drugs did much better with unintended effects in the short-run, they remain
unstudied for their long-term effects. Keep in mind that despite the myths
perpetuated around them, antidepressants have no disease-specific effects of
any kind.
If the APA and the DSM had not essentialized the symptoms of a disease
from a medical point of view, perhaps doctors could read them as phenomen-
ological signs worthy of alternative and contextual coding. Witnessing
changes of appetite, insomnia, loss of energy, restlessness and irritability,
feelings of worthlessness and guilt, difficulty in making decisions, and suici-
dal thoughts, 35 it seems odd not to consider in a valid diagnosis the everyday
communicative matrix in which the patient exists. Clearly, the medical cod-
ification of disease disciplines and enforces an unnatural diagnosis based in a
manufactured link of these symptoms to a presupposed, but imaginary,
chemical problem in the brain. Only by not being attentive to the patient can
such a diagnosis proceed. In every symptom mentioned, we have an issue of
discordant worldly experience where consciousness begs to be compre-
hended as consciousness of; whereas, in every case and as a whole, the
diagnosis and treatment defy context. In fact, the medical diagnosis de-con-
textualizes everyday experience. 36
There are few studies of the experience of being on SSRIs. Empirical
phenomenological investigations 37 of depression have been conducted, but
there are fewer than a handful that have considered what it is like to be on the
prescription regimen. Drawing upon these avant-garde ventures, an interest-
ing comparison can be made between experiencing depression and experi-
encing the antidepressants. 38 The APA, DSM, and other sources already
mentioned attempt to get at the essence of depression, but in politically
invested descriptive language. The phenomenology of depressive experience
depicts it as a problem of selfhood intrinsic to communicative relations with
the world. In particular, Karp specifically concludes that “depression, at its
root, is a disease of disconnection.” 39 Carefully and insightfully probing the
essential structure and lived-body meaning of the illness, Karp accepts the
disease label but puts it in context by reference to “a cultural chemistry that
catalyzes depression.” 40 It is a problem that manifests as social isolation,
298 Isaac E. Catt

“separation from others,” “an inability to connect,” in which the person is

disconnected and yearning “for just such connection.” 41 Karp is not the first
to express the fact that “our very humanity is a product of social connection”
and the warning that it “can easily erode if we are denied human contact.” 42
In short, normal selfhood exists, at least in ideation. It is a condition of
relative concordance of, in, and with the social world. This presupposition of
axiomatic existence has substantive value because on its foundation the va-
lidity of consciousness is verified and the truth of experience is affirmed. 43 It
is the basis for the experience of health.
It is against the idea of normal communicative relations that illness is, if
you will, normally comprehended. In fact, it is only in the rare circumstances
in which our communicative matrix is experientially problematized that we
seek professional assistance outside of our family, neighbors, and work com-
panions on whom we rely for a sense of self and of common mores. Research
puts this rate of seeking professional help at about 10 to 30 percent of the
time, or, in other words, we rely upon our communicative matrix to resolve
health issues 70 to 90 percent of the time. 44 So, now the question arises as to
whether a regime of antidepressants returns extraordinarily sad persons to
normal. Does it connect the disconnected? Does it qualitatively improve
communication?
We have expectations based on our experiences with people who are on
drugs, including alcohol. In the normal course of things, it is anticipated that
intoxication is an aberration and harmony will return when sobriety con-
quers. No doubt many who consume antidepressants are relieved to be on a
path that is perceived as curative. Remember, however, that relief is the
result of the placebo effect, that the drugs do not cure a disease, and that there
is a real risk of being on the medicine for an indefinite period of time.
Moncrieff, whose work was shortlisted for the best work on mind in 2010,
argues convincingly that the disease-centered model should be completely
abandoned because it is based in a falsehood. In its place, she advocates a
drug-centered model analogous to drinking alcohol for social phobia because
this is a more honest portrayal of what is actually happening in antidepress-
ant use. 45 Keep in mind that the efficacy of the drugs is based on a tautologi-
cal inference. Karp supports this analysis:

It certainly would affirm psychiatry as a “medical” specialty if it could be

demonstrated that affective disorders have as clearly an organic source as
diabetes, epilepsy, or heart disease. However, a plainly organic etiology has
never been established in the case of uni-polar depression. That people some-
times feel better after taking antidepressant medication is hardly definitive
evidence that depression is caused by an underlying physical pathology. Such
logic would require us to say that the individual who feels better after a glass
or two of wine with dinner was de facto suffering from some biological im-
pairment corrected by the alcohol. 46
 Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood 299

Indeed, the drug’s presumed efficacy is based on a logical fallacy; the

“disease” is tacitly defined by what the brain lacks, that is, antidepressants.
The drugs create a chemical balance, thus a chemical imbalance must have
been the cause of the problem. The fallacy is post hoc, ergo propter hoc:
after this, therefore, because of this. In a state of stupefaction, their emotions
are leveled out. They are now disconnected by means of chemicals; intoxica-
tion is substituted for social isolation and disconnection. On the analogy with
alcohol or several illicit drugs, the suffering person is now a victim deprived
of volition in any meaningful sense, a medical patient whose obligations to
the world of others are short-circuited by treatment of a postulated alien
element in the brain. Interpersonal “others are anonymous,” “empathy with
them unnecessary,” “feeling untouchable,” “disengaged,” “detached,” “not
responsible,” “a passive observer of events,” “not too high and not too low,”
“lacking in depth,” “the dial turned down,” “no feel for feelings,” “unmoved
by others,” “distanced from events,” “not needing anything,” “no sexual
desire,” “lost sense of agency,” and “unable to reach out to others,” the
victim-patient is now in a self-satisfied disconnected world. These are the
self-reported signifiers of being on SSRIs in phenomenological studies refer-
enced earlier. 47
At a philosophical level, the biologism that underwrites the brain disease
model of depression further disconnects an already alienated body from the
interpersonal world by failing to account for the normal vitality of relational
selfhood. The depressed person’s moral choices and ethical actions are pro-
scribed by the exclusion of scientific data (self-expressions) as capta (self-
perceptions) about an experienced life-world. Such is the potential of talk
therapy. The communicative relationship of a patient and therapist (as acta-
speaking and listening) is excluded as a model of dialogue. Existential com-
munication, the essential goal of human verbal and nonverbal expression, is
denied its opportunity. At the level of practice, the potential of a human
science of communication is supplanted by mere information exchange in a
medicalized environment. 48 Depression is a problem of the communicative
relations of self and world and must be treated as such.
In a more profound sense than she could have imagined or her culture
condoned, my mother was right. Misery loves company. We suffer discon-
nection and desperately require it. We desire what we do not want. Depres-
sion’s paradoxical misery is unrequited meaningful companionship. In a
postmodern age replete with multi-phrenic selves, our focus is on reflections
and refractions where “nothing gold can stay.” 49 Fascinated with prisms, lost
in the technologies of self, incessantly deferring to scientism, nothing quite
lights our way. The medicine for our most common illness—depression—
prolongs our suffering, enabling and rationalizing resistance to meaningful
encounter, a resistance which is the very source of our malaise.
300 Isaac E. Catt

Against the persistent grain of narcissistic culture, we must eventually

realize that sadness is not a result of not loving the self enough. Nor can love
be found in the medicine cabinet. We have yet to learn that communication is
all about the experience of the other.
There is no alternative source of love except in communication with the
other.

NOTES

1. Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the
Contemporary Age (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010/1998).
2. “Antidepressants,” accessed March 10, 2013, www.drugs.com/drug-class/anti
depressants.html.
3. Isaac E. Catt, ed., “Pierre Bourdieu: A Sign,” special issue, American Journal of Semiot-
ics 22, no. 1–4 (2006).
4. Deborah Eicher-Catt and Isaac E. Catt, Communicology: The New Science of Embodied
Discourse (Madison Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). See also the
website of the International Communicology Institute (ICI): www.communicology.org.
5. Isaac E. Catt, “Communicology and Narcissism: Disciplines of the Heart,” Journal of
Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 4, no. 4 (2002): 389–411.
6. Loren Mosher, “Are Doctors Betraying Their Patients?,” Psychology Today (September
1, 1999): 5, www.psychologytoday.com/articles199909/are-psychiatrists-betraying-their-
patients?page=5.
7. American Psychiatric Association, “Depression,” accessed June 8, 2012, www.
psychiatry.org/mental-health/key-topics/depression.
8. Isaac E. Catt, “Communicology and the Worldview of Antidepressant Medicine,” in
“Semiotics and Worldview,” ed. Isaac E. Catt, special issue, American Journal of Semiotics 28,
no. 1–2 (2012): 81–103.
9. Ibid.
10. Richard L. Lanigan, Phenomenology of Communication: Merleau-Ponty’s Thematics in
Communicology and Semiology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 3–17.
11. Isaac E. Catt, “The Signifying World Between Ineffability and Intelligibility,” Review of
Communication 11, no. 2 (2011): 122–44. See also Isaac E. Catt, “Korzybski and Charles
Sanders Peirce,” in Korzybski and . . . , eds. Corey Anton and Lance Strate (Austin, TX:
Institute for General Semantics, 2012).
12. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). (Washington, DC:
American Psychiatric Association, 2013.
13. For an exemplary study, see David Karp's Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnec-
tion, and the Meanings of Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Karp writes from
the perspective of symbolic interaction, which is part of the pragmatism tradition, the essence
of which is semiotic phenomenology (James, Peirce, Dewey, Mead, Morris).
14. World Health Organization (WHO), “Mental Health: Depression,” accessed May 15,
2012, www.who.int/topics/depression/en/.
15. L. D. Pratt, J. Brody, and Quiping Gu, “Antidepressant Use in Persons Aged 12 and
Over: United States, 2005–2008,” NCHS Data Brief, number 76, Hyattsville, MD: National
Center for Health Statistics. 2011, accessed June 1, 2012, cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db76.
html.
16. R. Kadison, “Getting an Edge: Use of Stimulants and Antidepressants in College,” New
England Journal of Medicine 353, no. 11 (2005): 1089–91.
17. See also Bornfeld, Steve, “Antidepressants Most Popular Prescription Medication in
U.S.,” Las Vegas Review Journal, August 22, 2011, accessed May 15, 2012, www.
reviewjournal.com/life/health/antidepressants-most-popular-prescription-medication-us.
 Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood 301

18. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “Prescriptions for Antidepressants
Increasing among Individuals with no Psychiatric Diagnosis,” August 4, 2011, accessed June 5,
2012, www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2011/mojtabai_antidepressant_prescrip
tions.html.
19. Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010).
20. I summarize a considerable body of literature in this section of the chapter. See Isaac E.
Catt, “Communicology and Worldview” cited above. A number of recognized experts within
psychiatry and psychology trace these matters: See Alain Ehrenberg, cited above, as well as the
following: Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Dis-
ease (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010); Irving Kirsch, The Emperor's New Clothes: Ex-
ploding the Antidepressant Myth (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Ethan Watters, Crazy Like
Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (New York: Free Press, 2010); Joanna Mon-
crieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2008); Elliot Valenstein, Blaming the Brain: The Truth about Drugs and
Mental Health (New York: Free Press, 1998). These sources supplement growing research
available in academic journals that is opening the path to a reconsideration of the dominant
drug paradigm in psychiatry, if not an outright revolt against it.
21. Karp, Speaking of Sadness, 81.
22. Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 28.
23. Ibid., 30.
24. Ibid.
25. Valenstein, Blaming the Brain, 132–36.
26. See Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression, for an enlightening history of the industry’s
public relations campaign to sell the chemical imbalance in the brain story.
27. “Depression Treatments,” Pristiq.com, www.pristiq.com/depression-treatments.aspx?
source=google&HBX_PK=s_antidepressants&o=47362258|223601699|0&skwid=
43700003070516905&13942.949999999999.
28. Isaac E. Catt, “Communicology for an Era of Precarity: A Research Paradigm for Inter-
rogating the Confluence of Social Structures and Human Experience,” in Prekarisierung und
Flexibiliierung [Precarity and Flexibility], ed. Rolf Dieter Hepp (Munster: Westfalisches
Dampfboot, 2012).
29. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2012/1945). Merleau-Ponty announces his argument for the communicative
ground of consciousness from the very beginning of this text: “The phenomenological world is
inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which establish their unity through the
taking up [la reprise] of my past experiences into my present experiences, or the other person's
experience into my own” (lxxxiv). In the concluding passage of his Preface he states: “All
forms of knowledge are supported by a ‘ground’ of postulations, and ultimately upon our
communication with the world as the first establishing of rationality” (lxxxv).
30. Catt, “Communicology and Worldview.”
31. See for example Arthur Kleinman, Leon Eisenberg, and Byron Good, “Culture, Illness,
and Care: Clinical Lessons for Anthropologic and Cross-Cultural Research,” Focus 4 (2006):
140–49.
32. Isaac E. Catt, “Pierre Bourdieu’s Semiotic Legacy: A Theory of Communicative Agen-
cy,”American Journal of Semiotics 22, nos. 1–4 (2006): 31–54.
33. Karp, Speaking of Sadness, 12.
34. Watters, Crazy Like Us.
35. These are the symptoms specified by the American Psychiatric Association, www.
psychiatry.org/mental-health/key-topics/depression.
36. This de-contextualization of living context by means of antidepressants is particularly
devastating when it is imperialistically imposed on unsuspecting cultural others. See Vieda
Skultans for a specific phenomenology of this in an intercultural situation: “From Damaged
Nerves to Masked Depression: Inevitability and Hope in Latvian Psychiatric Narratives,” So-
cial Science and Medicine 56 (2003): 2421–31. I have pursued this aspect of the issue in
several public lectures and conference papers.
302 Isaac E. Catt

37. The word empirical is frequently and too casually used as a reference to quantitative
research. The Greek term empirikos actually refers to experience, that which is closest to lived-
body consciousness. Thus, quantification is distinctly nonempirical activity, and in that quality
rests its utility—its abstraction from experience. Empirical phenomenology examines embodi-
ment of signs, which is the production of meaning.
38. My proceeding analysis surmises a good deal of reading in this area. See exemplary
studies by Ehrenberg, Skultans, and Karp referenced above, as well as the following: Pamela
Joan Aselton, “The Lived Experience of College Students Who Have Been Medicated with
Antidepressants,” (Dissertation: University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Open Access Disserta-
tion Paper, 2010), 235, scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertation/235; Jay Teal,
“Nothing Personal: An Empirical Phenomenological Study of the Experience of Being-on-an-
SSRI,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 40 (2009): 19–50; Virginia Moreira, “Critical
Phenomenology of Depression in Brazil, Chile and the United States,” Latin-American Journal
of Fundamental Psychopathology 4, no. 2 (2007): 193–218; R. Kadison, “Getting an Edge: Use
of Stimulants and Antidepressants in College,” New England Journal of Medicine 353, no. 11
(2005): 1089–91.
39. Karp, Speaking of Sadness, 178.
40. Ibid., 177–78.
41. Ibid., 26–27.
42. Ibid., 27.
43. Isaac E. Catt, “Communicology and Human Conduct,” Presidential Address to the
Semiotic Society of America, 37th Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, November 3,
2012, forthcoming in Semiotica.
44. Kleinman, Eisenberg, and Good, “Culture, Illness and Care.”
45. Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure.
46. Karp, Speaking of Sadness, 79.
47. Ehrenberg, Skultans, Karp, Aselton, Teal, Moreira, and Kadison.
48. Isaac E. Catt and Deborah Eicher-Catt, “Communicology: A Reflexive Human Sci-
ence,” in Communicology: The Science of Embodied Discourse (Madison Teaneck, NJ: Fair-
leigh Dickinson University Press, 2010 [also distributed by Rowman & Littlefield]), 15–29.
See also Isaac E. Catt and Deborah Eicher-Catt, “Semiotics in Mainstream Communication
Studies: A Review of Principal USA Journals in the Context of Communicology,” Review of
Communication 12, no. 3 (2012): 176–200.
49. Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Poets.org, www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/
prmMID/19977#sthash.vEde3dT2.dpuf, originally published in The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed.
Edward Connery Lathem, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1979).

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mental-health/key-topics/depression.
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html.
Aselton, Pamela Joan. “The Lived Experience of College Students Who Have Been Medicated
with Antidepressants.” Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2010. Open
Access Dissertation Paper.
Bornfeld, Steve. “Antidepressants Most Popular Prescription Medication in U.S.” Las Vegas
Review Journal, August 22, 2011. Accessed May 15, 2012. www.reviewjournal.com/life/
health/antidepressants-most-popular-prescription-medication-us.
Catt, Isaac E. “Communicology and Human Conduct,” Presidential Address to the Semiotic
Society of America, 37th Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, November 3, 2012.
———. “Communicology and Narcissism: Disciplines of the Heart.” Journal of Applied
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———. “Communicology and the Worldview of Antidepressant Medicine.” American Journal
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———. “Communicology for an Era of Precarity: A Research Paradigm for Interrogating the
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rung [Precarity and Flexibility], edited by Rolf Dieter Hepp, 260–74. Munster: Westfalis-
ches Dampfboot, 2012.
———. “Korzybski and Charles Sanders Peirce.” In Korzybski and . . . , edited by Corey
Anton and Lance Strate, 69–99. Austin, TX: Institute for General Semantics, 2012.
———, ed., “Pierre Bourdieu: A Sign,” Special issue, American Journal of Semiotics 22, no.
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———. “Pierre Bourdieu’s Semiotic Legacy: A Theory of Communicative Agency.”
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———. “The Signifying World Between Ineffability and Intelligibility.” Review of Communi-
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Communicology: The Science of Embodied Discourse, edited by Deborah Eicher-Catt and
Isaac E. Catt, 15–29. Madison Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010
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———. “Semiotics in Mainstream Communication Studies: A Review of Principal USA Jour-
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176–200.
“Depression Treatments.” Pristiq.com. www.pristiq.com/depression-treatments.aspx?source=
google&HBX_PK=s_antidepressants&o=47362258|223601699|0&skwid=
43700003070516905&13942.949999999999.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). (Washington, DC: American
Psychiatric Association, 2013.
Ehrenberg, Alain. The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the
Contemporary Age. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010/1998.
Eicher-Catt, Deborah and Isaac E. Catt, eds. Communicology: The New Science of Embodied
Discourse. Madison Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010.
Frost, Robert. “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Poets.org., www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/
19977#sthash.vEde3dT2.dpuf. Originally published in The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Ed-
ward Connery Lathem, 2nd rev. ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1979.
Greenberg, Gary. Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease. New
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Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “Prescriptions for Antidepressants Increas-
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2012, www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2011/mojtabai_antidepressant_
prescriptions.html.
Kadison, R. “Getting an Edge: Use of Stimulants and Antidepressants in College.” New Eng-
land Journal of Medicine 353, no. 11 (2005): 1089–91.
Karp, David. Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meanings of Illness.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Kirsch, Irving. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. New York:
Basic Books, 2010.
Kleinman, Arthur, Leon Eisenberg, and Byron Good. “Culture, Illness, and Care: Clinical
Lessons for Anthropologic and Cross-Cultural Research.” Focus 4 (2006): 140–49.
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municology and Semiology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988.
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New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.
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193–218.
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Latvian Psychiatric Narratives.” Social Science and Medicine 56 (2003): 2421–31.
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 Afterword
Machiavelli’s Question Mark and the
Problem of Ethical Communication

Gerard A. Hauser

In the summer of 2012, Duquesne University hosted its biennial Communi-

cation and Ethics conference. Its theme was “Attending to the Other.” Many
of the chapters in Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the
Other grew from that conference, and its theme colors a number of the
book’s entries.
As with most stimulating conferences, the Duquesne theme posed a pro-
ductive ambiguity. What did the planners mean by Attending? Were they
suggesting that there is an ethical responsibility to pay attention to the Other,
as perhaps one might regard partners in a communicative exchange as be-
yond rude for acting as if they were autonomous while they engaged one
another, ignoring the reciprocity requirements such a relationship depends on
to sustain it? Or perhaps they meant it more narrowly in the sense of focusing
on the Other as a being who, in some way, issued a call to which the person
addressed has an ethical responsibility to reply?
The theme’s interpretive challenge was compounded by the ambiguity of
Attending’s titular partner, Other. In one sense, the Other might refer to
anyone in general other than oneself. Or perhaps it refers to the marginalized
or, more extremely, those who exist as refugees without personhood on
which their (human) rights depend. But the term also reminds us that com-
munication qua communication is always, in some respect, addressed. To
communicate is to do so with somebody, even if that somebody is only
vaguely on the communicator’s horizon of awareness and little more than an
abstraction, lacking in perceived thoughts and feelings of a person or group

305
306 Gerard A. Hauser

known and present to him or her. Communication, as Pat Gerhke reminds us

in chapter 3, requires the other.
These initial invitations for ways to think of communication at least flirt
with (if not invite outright) the trivializing of the Other, on the one hand, into
all who are not the self, which commits the logical fallacy of proving too
much, and on the other hand, the advancing of an ethical essentialism that
subordinates communication to an a priori ontology, metaphysics, epistemol-
ogy, or cosmology and that runs contrary to the political, social, and cultural
realities of the modern era. This is not a small consideration, as the range of
chapters in this volume illustrate. Ronald C. Arnett’s discussion of the Scot-
tish Enlightenment in chapter 2, for example, illustrates the premium that
Enlightenment placed on the classical empiricists’ observational methods
that guided its thought on social life. Importantly, Scottish Enlightenment
speculations on society as self-regulating involved avoiding ethical imperial-
ism, which would neither accommodate the sympathy necessary for moral
approbation in civic life nor advance relationships across religious and cultu-
ral divides, relationships that were necessary for a smoothly functioning
marketplace. In a different vein, Andreea Ritivoi’s rethinking of ethos in
terms of positioning theory, in chapter 13, moves away from anchoring ethos
in the absolutes of virtues, a practice which become problematic during times
of moral crisis, and toward the calculus of a moral order more accommodat-
ing of the situational nature of ethics and rhetoric’s concern for adapting to
situations of radical contingency.
The demise of ethical essentialism is a story of a world defined by its
diversity, which has been told many times since the rise of civil society, its
scene as an arena between the state and the family, and in particular since
Machiavelli. Isaiah Berlin 1 has made the point that Machiavelli planted a
permanent question mark in the path of all assertions of ultimate ends. When
Machiavelli ripped away the hypocritical mask whereby humans say one
thing but do another, he, more importantly, revealed that when men and
women act as if they assume the two ideals underwriting what they say and
do (verba and actio) are compatible or perhaps even one and the same and,
therefore, not open to question, they are acting in bad faith. Machiavelli calls
the bluff of traditional Western morality by revealing an insoluble dilemma:
It is possible to live with internal contradiction; it is possible for each end
held sacred and inviolable to be contradicted by another, held equally sacred
and inviolable; it is possible for entire value systems to collide without hope
of rational arbitration.

For those who look on such collisions as rare, exceptional, and disastrous, the
choice to be made is necessarily an agonizing experience for which, as a
rational being, one cannot prepare (since no rules apply). But for Machiavelli,
at least in The Prince, The Discourses, Mandragola, there is no agony. One
 Machiavelli’s Question Mark and the Problem of Ethical Communication 307

chooses as one chooses because one knows what one wants, and is ready to
pay the price. 2

Since neither the church nor the laboratory nor speculative reason can
offer a final solution, Machiavelli’s advice to his prince, whether intended or
not, undermines the quest for an ultimate answer to the question of how
humans should live. If more than one valid answer is possible, then “the idea
of the sole, true, objective, universal human ideal crumbles.” 3 The infection
of doubt thenceforth threatens all monistic constructions. The only antibody
would seem to be retreat to the security of one ideal as the true goal, with its
accompanying consequence that no cost is too high to insure it is reached.
The second and third sections of this volume provide stunning evidence that
the spirit of monism is alive and kicking, and they advance multiple perspec-
tives for an ethical (possibly equally monistic) standpoint in its face. On the
other hand, if how we live is solely a matter of choice, then the path leading
to empiricism, pluralism, tolerance, and compromise is equally possible, as
some of these same studies show.
The ramifications of Machiavelli’s question mark surround us in whatev-
er frame we choose to border our image of human life. Monism is a choice,
but it is not a decisive one. Today’s questions are, in that regard, reminiscent
of those Adam Smith wrestled with in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 4
Smith shared the Enlightenment’s concern with a virtuous society. Con-
fronted with the reality of a civil society in which conflicting moral, political,
and economic interests were cast in relationships of mutual dependency,
Smith recognized a subtle but important shift in social organization from the
Western tradition of civic virtue.
The ideal of civic virtue that permeated Greek and Roman political
thought emphasized the role of the individual as a public person. A virtuoso
public performance that commanded respect, including an oratorical tour de
force, was a personal accomplishment and a sign of arête for the Greeks and
virtú for the Romans. Sociologist Adam Seligman observes that since civic
virtue projects itself as conformity of particular wills to the general will, its
moral vision is of personal will and action regulated by the sovereign author-
ity of the political community, not the sovereign or despot. 5 He goes on to
explain that the community’s political authority does not refer to the obvious
sociological fact that it is the source of morality but that the community
exists as morality. At its heart, the civic virtue tradition locates social good
by subjugating the private self to the public realm. 6 This line of thought
continues into the present era, as the work of Hannah Arendt illustrates. 7 By
contrast, the eighteenth-century Scottish moralists saw the moral basis of
society as a private ideal. A civil society was one in which individual respon-
sibility for actions toward others could be counted on to exceed pure ex-
308 Gerard A. Hauser

change value because, as Adam Smith argued, humans are naturally inclined
to benevolent sentiments toward one another.
Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments 8 developed a psychology based
on a person’s ability to project him or herself into the situation of the other.
Smith argued that sentiments, which condition our approval or disapproval of
actions and, therefore, guide actions, arise from our ability to imagine, based
on personal sensations, the pain or sorrow or joy we would experience were
we in the other’s situation. 9 The capacity to project ourselves into the other
person’s situation bears equally on explaining approval or disapproval of
another’s opinions. It is not just that we accept or reject the opinions they
hold, but our approbation or disapprobation comes from their capacity to
arouse our sympathy. Moreover, since the aroused sympathy is internal to the
judging individual, it actually is approval of what he or she personally holds
true. Even in those cases where a person’s opinions imitate views of the
powerful, the wealthy, or current fashion, Smith regarded the locus of ap-
proval as internal to the individual, by “the man within the breast, the ab-
stract and ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct.” 10
Smith’s doctrine on sympathy carried over into the public arena of civil
society, for which benevolent sentiments ultimately were responsible for
guiding conduct. Enlightenment thinkers recognized that in civil society you
did not have to like those with whom you interacted; so long as interactions
in the complex web of human dialogue were marked by tolerance and kind-
ness, differences could be overcome. 11 Unlike the tradition of civic virtue, in
which a person’s merit was established by public conduct, in the civil society
tradition, the quality of relations with strangers found its basis in the individ-
ual self rather than a person’s public being. Individual actions were seen and
judged by others, not in terms of virtuosity, as they are in the civic virtue
tradition, but in terms of propriety. Smith contended that when we judge
matters of conduct, we are like a spectator who “must endeavor, as much as
he can, to put himself in the situation of the other.” 12 This observation was
generalized in the impartial spectator as arbiter of social passions, leading to
generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship, and esteem
“even towards those who are not particularly connected with ourselves.” 13
The impartial spectator provides a referent outside the individual subject
whose judgment insured the virtue, first, of personal conduct by freeing the
individual from purely subjective and self-interested understandings of con-
duct. As such, this imagined judge gathers our approbation, even in our
personal judgment of our own conduct:

We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and
impartial spectator would examine it. If upon placing ourselves in his situa-
tion, we thoroughly enter into all the passions and motives which influenced it,
 Machiavelli’s Question Mark and the Problem of Ethical Communication 309

we approve of it, by sympathy with the approbation of this supposed equitable

judge. If otherwise, we enter into his disapprobation, and condemn it. 14

Smith’s model founded morality within the individual and then carried its
belief in benevolence to provide guidance for the self-regulation of society. It
presented the impartial spectator as a guarantor of virtuous public actions
that accommodated differences without being blinded to personal interests or
blinded by them. The pursuit of interests was thought to counterbalance the
stronger passions that, if left unchecked, would produce the tyranny of feudal
lords who kept their vassals in economic servitude and would produce the
injustices of avarice and ambition that interfered with free association and
commerce. 15 The natural inclination to advance one’s interests within the
“marketplace” of civil society inevitably brings one’s interests into competi-
tion with those of others, and here the communal other of the impartial
spectator, internalized as the “invisible hand,” 16 offers the rational basis for
comparing and reaching a just resolution. Smith’s words on this point de-
serve repeating because they reflect confidence in a public exchange guided
by a morality that accepts difference as inherent to public life:

Before we can make any proper comparison of those opposite interests, we

must change our position. We must view them, neither from our own place nor
yet from his, neither with our own eyes nor yet with his, but with the eyes and
from the place of a third person, who has no particular connexion with either,
and who judges with impartiality between us. 17

Smith founds public order on the private morality of internalized community

standards that become the basis for “approbation”—the approval bestowed
by the impartial spectator—and provide for “fellow-feeling.” They are the
foundation for our “sense of propriety,” which elicits “sympathy” for the joys
and sorrows of others and allow us to judge the moral quality of their acts as
well as our own. 18
Certainly not all Enlightenment thinkers were in agreement with Smith’s
specific views on moral sentiments. However, his views are representative of
the new ideas then emerging about economy, public opinion, and moral
conduct, whether considered separately or as interlocking components, as
expressing society’s identity apart from the state and, moreover, as establish-
ing social coordination as self-regulation within domains independent of
government. This bears significantly on the ethics of communication with
regard for the Other.
Since Greek antiquity, the insight and the fraught terrain of communica-
tion has been its attitude toward the world as grounded in contingency. Greek
thinkers theorized the role of practical (as distinct from academic and philo-
sophical) communication as occurring under circumstances that were marked
by uncertainty, usually did not permit certainty, and often required a deci-
310 Gerard A. Hauser

sion. They were concerned with the construction of a human world, one that
might be otherwise and that could be shaped by molding public sentiment to
act in a particular way through the force of the better argument. In this world
of contingencies, certain traits of mind and performance mattered. Since a
world of contingencies lacks hard and fast rules for conduct, they understood
that intelligent and virtuous choice was subject to situational considerations.
They valued insight that provided guidance for conduct in the given case 19
and accorded ethos (attribution of moral character) to those who demonstrat-
ed habits (hexis) of phronesis (prudence), arête (virtue), and eunoia (good
will toward the other). They recognized the conditional nature of choices
based on doxa—common beliefs and opinions, not the opinions of experts or
knowledge of absolute truth—since decision making in a democracy was by
ordinary citizens who were not necessarily experts on the subject at hand and
since contingencies did not permit the certainty of absolute truths.
Although Western thinking about communication has been grounded on
contingency, Machiavelli’s question mark was not part of its founding equa-
tion. Rhetoric’s ancient origins offered accounts—both in theory and prac-
tice—of public discourse tempered by the relative ethnic homogeneity
among those who were engaged in public deliberation and the common val-
ues they might use as touchstones to resolve differences. In The Liberal
Temper of Greek Politics, Eric Havelock offers translation of portions of an
oration written by Thrasymachus. 20 It provides a glimpse into the thought of
ancient Athenians and an opportunity to hear what this figure, once freed
from Plato’s ventriloquism that renders him an unscrupulous pleader, actual-
ly thought about governance. Since the oration was to be delivered by an-
other, the speaker in this excerpt might be taken as a representative figure for
how Greeks thought about resolving differences. The speaker addresses his
audience as divided by conflict that war has intensified through personal
disasters. Their leaders have told them grand things about their city, while
their lived experiences have been dire. The oligarchs have encouraged them
to blame their misfortunes on the gods or fortune rather than the policies of
those in charge. And thus factions have formed around false issues that keep
them divided. He continues:

They [contesting factions] think their discourses are mutually antithetical but
are not aware that the policies pursued are identical, nor that the discourse of
their opponents is inherent in their own. Ask yourselves, going back to the
beginning: what is it that both sides are looking for? In the first place there is
the issue of the constitution of the fathers; this, which throws them into confu-
sion, can be grasped mentally with the greatest of ease and is supremely
something in which citizens have community. Thus (a) as to matters beyond
our own cognition we must of necessity depend on the discourse of olden
times to tell us about them; and (b) as to anything that came within the purview
 Machiavelli’s Question Mark and the Problem of Ethical Communication 311

of the older generation we must ascertain from the men with the informa-
tion. 21

The speaker points to a common heritage that offers guidance to both sides:
A shared constitution established by the city’s fathers gives them commu-
nity; the discourses of the past give guidance when matters seem to defy
reason; history and other sources of information also offer instruction on
issues the elders confronted. In short, there are shared cultural resources that
resolve differences into unity and offer guidance both sides can accept when
dealing with contingency because, at their core, the antagonists are one.
Machiavelli’s question mark signifies the demise of such unifying re-
sources as the defining conditions of communication. Catapulted from con-
tingency into radical contingency, we now experience life as increasingly
complex networks of actors defined by those attributes that accentuate their
diversity rather than their unity. Radical contingency makes associations
fragile and shared commitment to agreements tenuous, often because rela-
tions and issue resolution are defined in terms of efficacy. It is comparatively
easier to attend to the Other when the Other is of our own tribe than when she
or he is definitively different. It costs very little to extend ourselves to those
with whom we share bonds of affiliation that define us monistically. We do
not have to challenge our core beliefs, alter our core behavioral principles, or
risk our sense of self by considering the possibility that what we believe may
actually be false.
In the absence of consensus on core assumptions, the idea that things
could be otherwise means that all things are possible, and if all things are
possible, who is to say that one mode of conduct is ethically superior to
another? Doesn’t ethical probity depend on the standpoint of the actor? Cer-
tainly interpreted in a means-ends calculus, the telos of action that prizes
achieving one’s goal would seem to ratify the validity of a self-interested
standpoint. That orientation, however, would lead to the Hobbesian night-
mare of each against all that was the bête noire to which Locke, Montes-
quieu, and Rousseau responded by reintroducing the idea that humankind
forms a community of sorts constituted under natural law and in existence
prior to society, which is itself prior to the government. Their refutation of
the Hobbesian identification of society with its political organization posited
the idea of civil society as a third arena, independent of the family and the
state, engaged in conscious acts of self-management that were integrated
with the state.
The idea of civil society raises an alternative by conceptualizing a buffer
between, on the one hand, the ideology of the state that defines the person’s
meaning in terms of a political identity, or the ideology of the church that
defines the person’s meaning in terms of a paradisiacal afterlife, and on the
other hand, the family that finds the meaning of life in satisfying private
312 Gerard A. Hauser

needs and desires. It is that area in which a society is defined by the diversity
of its members engaged in all manner of practices of self-regulation—in the
marketplace, in the polis, and in moral relations. Machiavelli’s question mark
brings us to awareness of the agonizing choices among incompatible alterna-
tives in social practices, or worse still, in one’s personal public and private
life (which now, in a postmodern era, becomes increasingly difficult, if not
impossible, to keep apart). On this reading, there is no escaping the ethical
problem of attending to the Other, and of its centrality to community.
At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, the problem of communication
ethics today is akin to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s challenge of Christian disciple-
ship rendered in his contrast between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” In
Discipleship, he writes about the Christian Church as having succumbed to
“cheap grace,” grace without the cross. 22

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance; it is

baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord’s Supper without
confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is
grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living,
incarnate Jesus Christ. 23

Cheap grace costs nothing. It comes from hearing the gospel as giving you
forgiveness once you acknowledge your sins, giving you the consolation of
forgiveness without imposing a demand for taking up Christ’s cross. In the
face of evil, it opens the door for rationalizing retreat instead of running the
risk of consequences from taking a stand, rationalizing standing on the side-
lines, confident that by faith alone one’s failed efforts are excused when the
combat with evil is placed in the hands of God. By contrast, “costly grace”:

comes to us as a gracious call to follow Jesus; it comes as a forgiving word to

the fearful spirit and the broken heart. Grace is costly, because it forces people
under the yoke of following Jesus Christ; it is grace when Jesus says: ‘My
yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ 24

Christians can only defeat evil with “costly grace,” attained through the
discipleship dictated by the Sermon on the Mount. The price of following
Christ’s homily, whose political trajectory leads to activism and passive re-
sistance, is high: “Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.” 25
Similarly, as Austin S. Babrow and Lindsey M. Rose argue in chapter 7,
there is no credit in easy virtue. It requires little moral will to be friendly to
those with whom it is easy to form bonds of affiliation, those who share a
monistic construction of the good and the just. The more difficult path is in
tending to the needs of those who cost us something, who are the Other who
threatens our position, who may not reciprocate by acknowledging our at-
 Machiavelli’s Question Mark and the Problem of Ethical Communication 313

tempts to listen, to offer hospitality, to extend recognition, or to set aside

personal advantage for a common good.
Radical contingency entails risks. The incongruities of public and private
life defy rational solution (since one person’s reason is another folly or even
madness) and at once beckon tolerance and cooperation while insisting that
integrity demands opposition. In the face of the violence begotten by intoler-
ance and the firm belief in their justification by those who subject the Other
to violence, easy virtue offers appeasement as the efficacious thing to do.
There is a difference, however, between questions that use efficacy as the
sole criterion and those that, by whatever calculus virtue is gauged, ask what
is the virtuous thing to do when one adopts an Other-regarding stance.
As this volume shows, there are multiple ways to formulate a philosophy
of communication ethics, but such a philosophy must attend to the Other.
The insoluble dilemma of Machiavelli’s question mark, however, should
caution us against seeking a position with universal force or that results in
normative unity. Rather, it should remind us that ethical contradictions do
not pose a paradox but are part of the human situation. Machiavelli’s ques-
tion mark should also keep us mindful that open communication works
across and between the seams of ideological commitments that produce unre-
solvable dilemmas and offers hope of finding solutions to problems that each
can live with for his or her own reasons. The commitment to communicate is,
after all, a reaffirmation that to be is to be in relationship with the Other and
commitment to a relationship of a certain sort: it is a commitment to commu-
nity.

NOTES

1. Isaiah Berlin, “A Special Supplement: The Question of Machiavelli,” New York Review
of Books, November 4, 1971, www.nybooks.com/50/Machiavelli.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th ed., ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L.
Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1790/1976).
5. Adam Seligman, “Animadversions upon Civil Society and Civic Virtue in the Last
Decade of the Twentieth Century,” in Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, ed. John A.
Hall (London: Polity Press, 1995), 200–204.
6. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995),
204–24.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
8. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments.
9. Ibid., 10–13.
10. Ibid., 153.
11. Seligman, “Animadversions upon Civil Society,” 204.
12. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 21.
13. Ibid., 38.
14. Ibid., 110.
314 Gerard A. Hauser

15. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1977/1997).
16. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 184.
17. Ibid., 135.
18. Ibid., 16–34.
19. See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy
and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 290–317.
20. Erik Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1957).
21. Ibid., 232–33.
22. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans.
Martin Green and Reinhard Krauss, vol. 4, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis: Augsburg
Fortress Press, 1937/2001).
23. Ibid., 44.
24. Ibid., 45.
25. Ibid., 87.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Berlin, Isaiah. “A Special Supplement: The Question of Machiavelli.” New York Review of
Books, November 4, 1971. www.nybooks.com/50/Machiavelli.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Discipleship. Vol. 4 of Dietrich Bonheoffer Works. Edited by Geffrey B.
Kelly and John D. Godsey. Translated by Martin Green and Reinhard Krauss. Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1937/2001.
Havelock, Erik. The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1957.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1977/1997.
Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philoso-
phy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Seligman, Adam. “Animadversions upon Civil Society and Civic Virtue in the Last Decade of
the Twentieth Century.” In Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison. Ed. John A. Hall,
200–223. London: Polity Press, 1995.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 6th ed. Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1790/1976.
Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
 Index
a-whereness, 267
Aberdeen, 26, 31, 47n6, 49n39; University
of Aberdeen, 42
action, xii, xiv, 35, 46, 66–67, 75, 80, 107,
108, 109, 112, 113, 130, 135, 146, 158,
162–163, 186, 188, 216, 217–218, 219,
223, 254, 258, 260–261, 261–262, 262,
262–263, 265, 274, 276, 294, 299,
307–308, 309, 311
adequacy, 234, 248, 249
aesthetics, 4, 9, 11, 30, 35, 104, 105,
105–106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 116,
121, 131, 186, 198; aesthetic
imagination, 39; aesthetic sense, 35, 39,
106, 107, 109
agency, 81, 84, 162–163, 163–164, 165,
166, 167, 168, 168–169, 172, 174, 256,
258, 266, 274, 296, 299;
communicative agent, xiii; human
agent, 33, 159–160, 177n72, 264; moral
agency, 61; rational agency, 61, 81;
rhetorical agency, 154, 156, 157–158,
160, 166
akroasis, xiii, 79, 81–82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88
Alabama, 104, 114, 115, 118, 122, 160,
172–173, 174n2
alterity, ix, x–xi, xi, xii, xv, 58, 59, 76, 79,
85, 88, 138, 186, 187, 206, 258; radical,
x–xi
antidepressant medicine, 286, 287, 288,
289–290, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297,
315
297–298, 299, 301n36
apology, xiv, 153–154, 155–156, 157–161,
161, 162, 163, 164, 165–166, 167, 169,
170–171, 171–172, 173–174, 175n20,
176n39; public apology, 154, 155, 156,
163; reconciliation apology, 154, 157,
161, 167, 173
Aquinas, Thomas, 31, 261
Arendt, Hannah, 7, 11, 19, 20, 219, 275,
307; dark times, 11, 19, 20
Aristotle, 55, 56, 77, 79, 81, 88, 103, 129,
130, 135, 261, 265, 266, 273–275;
Nicomachean Ethics, 129, 135, 261
Arnett, Ronald C., x, 98, 129, 132,
132–133, 138, 142, 306
A Single Man: film, xv, 184–188, 197–205,
205, 206; novel, xv, 184, 185–188,
188–193, 203, 205, 206; theatrical
production, 184, 186, 193–197
atheism, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20n5, 31,
52n142, 307
atonement, 155, 157, 162, 171
authority, 3, 26, 27, 31, 33, 34, 37, 42, 43,
48n22
Babrow, Austin, 129, 130, 312;
Problematic Integration theory, 130,
131, 140, 143
Bacon, Francis, 29, 39
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 85
beaux arts, 10
316
Being, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 259
being-in-the-world, 56, 57, 60, 61
being-singular, 62, 66, 67, 68
being together, xiii, 56, 59, 60, 61–63,
64–65, 66, 67, 68–69
belles lettres, 10, 11, 41, 50n67, 51n92
belonging, 82, 83, 89, 244, 279
benevolence, 39, 108, 108–109, 110, 118,
119, 120, 123n25, 309; benevolent
impulse, 112, 116, 117; benevolent
sentiment, xiv, 104, 105, 108, 108–109,
110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 121,
122, 308
Benhabib, Seyla, x
Benoit, William, 155, 165, 175n10
Bergson, Henri, 78–79, 85–86; durée, 78,
86
bias, ix, xi, 57, 105, 164, 169, 185
Bitzer, Lloyd, 80–81, 88; exigence, 80–81,
88, 153, 155, 157, 158; fitting response,
xiii, 80–81, 88; rhetorical situation, 80,
156, 159
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 312; cheap grace,
312; costly grace, 312
Broadie, Alexander, 26, 28, 28–29, 30, 31,
32, 36, 47n6, 47n20, 49n39
Buber, Martin, 57, 84, 132
Buchan, James, 26, 36, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45;
Crowded with Genius, book, 26, 36;
crowded with genius, concept, 25, 36,
37, 44, 46
Buchanan, George, 29, 32, 49n45
Burke, Edmund, 42
Burke, Kenneth, 155, 158, 162, 175n24,
175n26, 177n72, 186, 193, 200; comic
frame, 158, 159, 167, 169, 170, 171,
173, 177n72, 186, 187, 193, 200, 206;
mortification, 155, 162, 165; romantic
frame, 159, 162, 167, 168, 169, 170,
175n26; tragic frame, 158, 162, 167,
171, 177n46, 186, 200
Burns, Robert, 45–46
care, 140, 215, 216–217, 218, 218–220,
221, 221–222, 222, 223, 224, 225, 258,
265
charity, 141
Cheney, George, 145
Index
choice, 65, 65–66, 67, 68, 69, 110, 111,
113, 176n37, 260, 306–307, 310, 312
Cicero, 6, 29
citizenship, 274, 275
civil society, 33, 306, 307, 308, 309, 311
collective self, 154, 155, 161, 162, 163
commemoration, xiv, 163, 164, 168, 172,
173
common sense, 15, 20n5, 28–29, 29–30,
39, 48n32, 49n51, 287
common space, xv
communication ethics, ix, ix–xi, xii, xiv,
xv, xvi, 56, 57, 59, 66, 76, 103, 104,
105, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 122, 186,
206, 215, 233, 248, 288, 312, 313
communicative matrix, 287–288, 293, 296,
297, 298
communicology, 287, 288, 294
community, xiii, xvi, 25, 38, 55, 56, 57, 58,
59–60, 61, 61–64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 118,
174, 189, 245, 307, 309, 310–311, 311,
312, 313; anarchic, 62, 63, 64, 67, 69
conjectural history, 32–33
consciousness, 9, 38, 77–78, 85–86, 105,
110–111, 115, 131, 193, 196, 197, 256,
257, 266, 267, 277, 287, 288, 294–295,
295–296, 297, 298; double
consciousness, 192
contemplation, 15, 108, 117, 253, 256,
259, 261, 263–264, 265, 266–267
content, xi, xi–xii, xii, xiii, xiv–xv, xv, xvi,
60, 61, 62, 63, 76, 108
continuation, 219–220, 221, 222
cosmopolitan, xiii, 32, 33, 42, 46, 133
creativity, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 25, 25–26, 30,
31, 32, 35, 36, 41, 46, 100, 101, 104,
105, 105–106, 106, 107, 108, 110–111,
115, 116, 119, 121, 121–122, 158
crisis, xvi, 55, 153, 162, 275, 282; crisis
management, 153, 157; image crisis,
157
crowdedness, xiii
Darwin, Charles, 45
decision making, 97, 98, 99–101
Deleuze, Gilles, 7–8, 9
deliberation, 110, 111, 112, 113, 117, 119,
121–122, 136, 143, 248
 Index
democracy, 56, 68, 119, 160, 162, 163,
164, 165, 296, 310
depression, 285–286, 286–287, 287, 288,
288–289, 289–290, 290–291, 291–293,
293–294, 294–295, 296–297, 297, 298,
299
Descartes, René, 8, 11, 29, 77, 288, 295;
57th principle, 77
description, 233, 240
Dewey, John, 68, 235, 300n13
dialogue, 57, 75–76, 76, 79, 81, 84, 85, 86,
87, 100, 133, 156, 160, 173, 217, 219,
241, 246, 247, 248, 253, 254, 259, 299,
308; dialogic ethics, 57, 75, 85; internal
self-dialogue, 26, 257
difference, ix, x, x–xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 57,
98, 99, 133, 140, 142, 186, 188, 206,
224, 233, 253, 254, 260, 265, 277, 278,
309; radical, x–xi, xii
Dionysios, 82
disease, 286, 288, 291, 294, 295, 297, 298,
299
disparate multiplicity, 59, 67
distance, 33, 35, 132, 138, 220, 233
divergence, xii
diversity, xiii, xiv, xvi, 97, 98, 99–100,
100–101, 169, 172, 311. See also
ethics, diversity ethics
doxa, 20, 310
Drummond, George, 37–38, 38, 43, 45,
51n91, 52n134
dwelling, xi, xv, 35, 46
dyad, 58, 59, 61
Edinburgh, 26, 31, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43,
43–44, 45, 51n92, 51n100, 52n135,
52n140; University of, 31, 45, 46,
47n18, 49n47, 49n51, 50n67, 51n92
efficiency, xiv, 89
Einstein, Albert, 76
emotion, 10, 29, 39, 107, 108, 119, 254,
262, 293, 296, 299
Enlightenment, xiii, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13,
15, 18, 19, 20n5, 25, 26, 27–28, 30, 31,
34, 34–35, 39, 50n67, 77, 306, 307,
308, 309; age of reason, xiii; Counter-
enlightenment, 13, 14, 20n5; French
Enlightenment, 30; German
Enlightenment, 4–5, 5–6, 7, 9, 10, 13,
317
20; Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala),
9–10; radical enlightenment, 3, 9;
Scottish Enlightenment, xiii, 25, 25–26,
28, 28–29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
35–36, 36, 41, 42–43, 45–46, 48n38,
306
epistemology, 15, 65, 80, 306
ethico-political, 68, 69
ethics, xi, 31, 39, 42, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60,
62–63, 64, 65–66, 66, 67, 75–76, 79,
79–80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 87–88, 88, 97,
98, 100, 103, 110, 129, 130, 131–132,
145, 154, 157, 158, 253–254, 256, 257,
258, 260, 260–261, 262, 264, 264–265,
266, 267, 305, 306, 307, 309, 311, 312,
313; diversity ethics, 99–100, 101, 286,
287, 288, 291, 296, 299; ethical end,
154; ethical response, 62, 79; ethical
third, xv; ethics of friendship, 129, 130,
132–133, 136, 137, 141, 142, 145, 147
ethnocentric, 271, 275
ethos, xvi, 7, 67, 157, 162, 164, 246,
271–272, 273, 273–275, 281, 306, 310;
redemptive ethos, xvi, 272, 281–282
evaluation, 130, 131, 235, 250
existential authenticity, xvi
fairness, 234–235, 248–249
Ferguson, Adam, 30, 32, 33, 36, 38, 43–44,
45–46, 48n21, 49n39, 50n61
Fiumara, Gemma Corradi, 82, 83–84, 87
forgiveness, 134, 139, 140, 158, 159, 167,
173, 174, 224, 312
Foucault, Michel, 70n6, 192–193
fracking, xv, 237, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244,
245, 249
framing, 106, 154, 159, 161, 164, 167, 168,
171, 198, 234, 243, 245, 245–246, 249,
251n22, 255; reframing, 159, 161
freedom, x, 8, 18, 27, 43, 106, 107, 145,
146, 158, 163, 255, 256, 258, 260, 266
French Enlightenment. See Enlightenment
French Revolution, 3, 27, 36, 44
friendship, xiv, 35, 129, 132, 133, 135,
136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141–142, 143,
144, 145, 146, 192, 193, 196, 224, 308
Germany, xvi, 5, 7, 9, 15, 21n15, 261,
271–273, 277–278, 279, 279–280,
318
281–282; language, 5–6, 11, 18, 20;
nationality, 277, 278, 281; Nazi, xvi,
277, 278, 279, 280; professorship, 5.
See also Enlightenment
Glasgow, 26, 29, 31; University of, 28, 29,
31, 35, 39, 40, 41, 47n6, 47n18, 48n31,
50n71
God, 8, 14, 15, 29, 34, 39, 48n21, 50n71,
52n140, 59, 254, 312
good, 108, 109, 113, 121, 129, 130, 131,
135, 139, 216, 217, 220, 221, 224, 225,
261, 262, 264, 274
good life, xi, 26, 265
Hall, Tony, 153, 170, 176n38
Hargrove, Frank (delegate), 170, 171,
178n86
Hauser, Gerard, xvi
Heidegger, Martin, 70n1, 82–83, 83,
84–85, 89, 105, 217, 259
Heraclitus, 77, 82
hermeneutics, 103, 112, 235, 250n3, 253,
254, 264, 265, 266, 267
higher education, 97, 98, 99, 100, 218–219
Highlander, 40, 42, 43, 51n83
historical moment, ix, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, 224,
255
Hobbes, Thomas, 28, 33, 39, 311
Home, Henry, 38, 42, 51n92, 51n98
Home, John, 40, 42, 46; Douglas, 40, 44,
221
hope, xvi, 26, 219
horizon, xiii, 68, 76, 121, 215, 220, 223,
305
human condition, xi, 105, 109, 217, 223,
225, 254, 255, 267
humanities, xii, 108
Hume, David, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34–35, 36,
37, 38, 39–40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47n18,
47n20, 49n39, 49n47, 52n107, 52n130;
A Treatise of Human Nature, 39, 41
humility, 253, 254, 258, 261, 262, 264,
265, 266, 267
Hutchinson, Francis, 28, 30, 33, 34, 35, 39,
41–42, 44, 45, 48n31–48n32, 50n71
Hutton, James, 30, 35, 45, 46, 49n39
hypertextuality, xvi
Index
identity, xvi, 59, 271, 273, 275, 277, 281;
identity [of person], 111, 118, 217, 257,
290, 293; identity formation, xvi;
organizational identity, 218, 220, 222,
223
illness, 286, 288, 291, 292–293, 295, 297,
298
image, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160–161,
163, 165, 169, 173, 218, 273; image
repair, 155, 156, 175n10; image
restoration, xiv, 154, 155, 160, 162,
163, 165–166, 172, 172–173, 174,
175n10, 281
imagination, 33, 39, 42, 86, 106, 133
institution, 44, 98, 99, 100, 111, 215–216,
217, 218, 219–220, 222, 223, 224,
224–225
intellective sense, 105, 105–106, 107, 108,
111, 115, 116, 121
inter-discourse, 257–258, 258
interpersonal, 219, 220, 223, 224, 299;
ethics, 132; relations, 129, 141, 145
interruption, ix, xiv
intuitive attunement, 104
Isherwood, Christopher, xv, 183, 184–185,
186, 188, 189–192, 193–195, 196–197,
197, 199–200, 200–201, 202, 203, 206
Isocrates, 79–80, 82
Israel, Jonathan, 3, 9
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 4, 7, 9, 12, 13,
14, 15, 16–19, 20n5
Jacobite, 37–38, 41, 43, 44, 50n82, 51n83
Jacobite Rebellion, 33, 38, 43, 50n60
Jefferson, Thomas, 30, 163
Johannesen, Richard, x
Johnson, Samuel, 40, 44, 45, 52n107,
52n135
justice, xiv, 58–59, 64, 80, 104, 107, 110,
112, 120, 121, 134, 136, 137, 142,
142–143, 146, 157–158, 159, 160, 167,
174, 262, 262–263, 263, 265, 266, 274
kairos, xiii, 76, 79–81, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87,
87–88, 88, 89, 153, 255
Kant, Immanuel, 4, 5, 6–7, 12, 13, 18–19,
21n15, 26, 27–28, 28, 33, 59, 59–60,
60–61, 62, 63–64, 77–78, 130; “An
Answer to the Question: What Is
 Index
Enlightenment,” 6, 26
Kennedy, George, 5
Kirk, 34, 37, 38, 41, 51n86, 51n92
Knox, John, 32, 37, 49n46
labor, 31, 50n61, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221,
223
Lavater, Johann Caspar, 10, 15, 22n29;
Lavater Affair, 10, 17, 18
leadership, 217, 218–219, 222
learning, ix, xi, xii, xvi, 46, 132, 141–142,
255
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 11, 14, 15
leisure, xv, 253–256, 256, 257, 258,
259–260, 261, 261–262, 263, 264,
264–265, 266, 266–267
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 4–5, 7, 9,
11–12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 19–20
Levinas, Emmanuel, 55, 57, 58–59, 62, 67,
75–76, 84, 85, 88, 132, 138, 142, 217,
253, 256, 257, 260, 265; Outside the
Subject, 57; Proper Names, 57
Lincoln, Abraham, 80–81; Gettysburg
Address, 80
listening, xiii, 79, 82, 83, 83–84, 85, 86,
87–88, 88
local, 30, 32, 42, 46; local home, 30, 215,
217, 220, 224; local soil, 30, 44
Locke, John, 28, 30, 311
logos, 82, 84, 103, 104, 105, 105–106, 110,
115, 116
Machiavelli, 306–307, 310, 311, 312, 313
MacIntyre, Alasdair, ix, 216, 219; A Short
History of Ethics, ix
maintenance, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224,
224–225
Mair, John, 29, 31, 32
Marcellus Shale, 237, 238, 241
Marsh, Henry D., 161, 162, 166, 169, 170,
171
Marx, Karl, 43
Mary, Queen of Scots, 37, 51n88
Maryland, 153, 160, 171, 172–173, 174n2,
176n39
McEachin, A. Donald, 161, 169, 170, 171
meaning-bestowing faculties, 104, 105,
105–106, 108, 111, 112, 113, 115, 119,
121
319
memory, 5, 19, 20, 86, 110, 119, 148n16,
185, 223; public memory, 186, 188, 205
Mendelssohn, Moses, 4–5, 6, 9–10, 11–12,
12, 13, 15, 15–17, 17–19, 20, 22n29,
22n30; Jerusalem, 10; Morning Hours,
10, 13, 15, 16, 19; “On the Question:
What Is Enlightenment?,” 6
mentoring, 222, 222–223
metaphysics, 34, 59–60, 62, 64, 104, 105,
106, 107, 112, 306
mission, 216, 220, 222, 223, 224–225
modernity, xiv, 39, 40, 43
monster-making, 187
Montaigne, Michel De, 29, 48n29
Montesquieu, 28, 40, 42, 43, 44, 52n140,
311
moral, 30, 34, 59–60, 61, 97, 103, 108,
109, 111, 112, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121,
131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 139, 141, 142,
143, 144, 146, 172, 174, 233, 234, 254,
256, 260, 261, 262, 263, 271–272,
274–275, 276, 278, 280, 281–282, 299,
306, 307, 309, 310, 312; moral crisis,
282, 306; moral force, 109; moral
judgment, 35; moral order, 275, 278,
306; moral sense, 35, 39, 104, 105,
105–106, 106, 107–108, 108, 109,
109–110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119,
121; moral valuation, 106–107, 110,
111, 117, 121, 277; morality, 20n5, 33,
41, 42, 65, 103, 107, 108, 111, 113,
122, 131, 141, 165, 263, 286, 306, 307,
309
Morgan, Juliette Hampton, xiv, 104, 113,
113–117, 117, 117–121, 122, 137
Nancy, Jean Luc, 66, 68
narrative, 3, 7, 20, 133, 136, 186, 188, 198,
205, 206, 220, 221, 223; disagreement,
xv; and virtue contention, xi
national, 271, 275, 275–276, 278, 279, 281
National Communication Association, xvi,
98
nationality, 276, 279
Newton, Isaac, 29, 39, 77
New York, 237, 239, 241, 242, 245;
Cooperstown, 239, 240, 241, 244, 245,
251n21
320
North Carolina, 160, 172–173, 174n2,
174n5
O’Bannon, John M., 161, 166, 167, 168,
169, 171
obligation, 58, 62–63, 64–65, 67, 69, 165,
176n37, 277
ontology, 55, 63, 65, 66, 68, 104, 108, 115,
157, 175n24, 255, 306
ontopoiesis, 104, 105, 106, 110
ontopoietic, 103, 105, 110, 115, 116
optimism, 32, 282
organizational citizenship, 219
organizational hiring, 222
Other, ix, x–xi, xi–xii, xii, xv, xvi, 33, 46,
57, 58–59, 60–61, 62–63, 67, 68, 108,
108–109, 118, 122, 133, 138, 142, 154,
155, 156, 157, 158–159, 160, 161,
163–164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 168–169,
170, 171–172, 172–173, 174, 201, 215,
216, 217, 218, 222, 224, 225, 245,
247–248, 249, 250n3, 253, 254, 256,
257, 257–258, 259, 259–260, 261,
264–266, 266, 267, 305–306, 309, 311,
312, 312–313
other-ing, 167, 168, 171
Otherness, ix–x, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 46,
57, 249, 258, 259, 260, 265; extreme, xi
oxymoron, 184
Pantheism, 4, 7, 8, 13, 15, 16; Pantheism
Controversy (debate), xiii, 4–5, 7, 8, 9,
10, 12, 18, 19, 20, 21n15
Parmenides, 19
Pearce, W. Barnett, 129
pedagogy, 5, 56, 81
performative contradiction, 184
Pernot, Laurent, 80, 81
phenomenology, xiv, 103–104, 215, 217,
218, 223, 255, 259, 266, 287, 288, 289,
292, 294, 295, 296, 297, 299, 300n13,
302n38; of life, 103, 104, 105, 111,
113, 115, 121
philosophies of One, 55, 56–57, 58–59, 59,
61, 62, 63, 68, 69
philosophies of the Other, 55, 56, 57,
58–59, 59, 61, 63, 68
philosophy of communication, ix, ix–xii,
xii, xvi, 313
Index
phronesis, 103, 274, 310
Pieper, Josef, 253, 254, 260, 261, 261–262,
262–263, 263–264, 264, 265, 266
place, 4, 11, 25, 26, 167, 217, 220, 221,
222–223, 224, 225
plagiarism, 98, 101
Plato, 16, 19, 56, 262, 310; Platonic, 20, 80
plurality, 234
poetics, 4, 5, 42, 76, 81; poetic sense, 106,
107; poetry, 5, 11, 44. See also aesthetic
sense
poiesis, 110, 258, 266
politics, 3, 55, 57, 58, 67, 68, 69, 70, 107,
111, 114, 131, 169, 183, 188, 191, 193,
196, 197, 200, 205, 206; political, 3, 6,
9, 10, 18, 20, 29, 115, 129, 133, 135,
140, 146, 154, 183, 184, 188, 191, 193,
196, 197, 200, 205, 206, 240, 242, 248,
250, 271–273, 275, 275–276, 277, 278,
279, 279–280, 281, 306, 307, 311, 312
Pope, Alexander, 11
positioning theory, 276, 281, 282, 306
possession, xiii, xiv, 46, 261
postmodern, 3, 122, 222, 299, 312
Poulakos, John, 81, 89
pragmatism, xvi, 235, 300n13
praxis, 47, 145, 267
precarity, x
prejudice, ix, xi, 32, 35, 39
prepon, 79, 81
Presbytery, 37, 40, 51n86
prescription, 233, 234
Problematic Integration theory. See
Babrow, Austin
process, xi–xii, xii, 217
professional civility, 215, 216, 216–217,
219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225;
persons, 220, 221, 223–224, 224, 225;
place, 220, 221, 222–223, 224,
224–225; productivity, 220, 221–222,
223, 224–225
progress, xvi, 26, 31–32, 32–33, 52n130,
106, 108, 110
proper hearing, 82, 82–83
proximity, 64, 257
public heterosexuality, 183–184, 185, 187,
188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197,
200, 202
public opinion, 153, 309
 Index
Pythagoras, 79, 81, 83
Race and Reconciliation, 154, 157, 167
Raeburn, Sir Henry, 30, 35, 49n39
rationality, 3, 13, 31, 32, 67, 84, 301n29
Rawlins, William, 129, 132–133, 135, 136,
137–138, 140, 141–142, 143, 144
reason, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 15, 17, 19, 20n5, 29,
34, 39, 41, 56, 68, 110, 111, 113, 129,
135, 307, 311, 313
reconciliation, xiv, 154, 155, 155–156,
157–158, 159, 161, 164, 165–166, 167,
169, 171, 172, 172–173, 174, 175n20,
175n24, 177n66
recreation, xv–xvi, 255, 256, 264, 265
redemptive ethos. See ethos
refugee, 272, 273, 275–276, 277, 278,
279–280, 281, 305
regret, 153, 155, 158, 161, 162, 164, 165,
169, 170, 171, 171–172
Reid, Thomas, 28, 29–30, 30, 35, 48n32,
49n39, 49n51
relationality, 62, 63, 64, 148n16
repair, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224,
224–225
reputation, 218, 220, 221, 224
Resolved clause, 165, 169
respect, xv, 100, 156, 157, 167, 172, 174,
184, 194, 197, 199, 201, 204, 205, 206,
220, 222, 253
responsibility, x, 58, 67, 69, 80, 100, 106,
119, 132–133, 138, 140, 142, 155, 157,
158, 159, 165, 166, 167, 169–170, 171,
171–172, 217, 218–219, 225, 256, 257,
260, 264, 266, 305, 307
responsiveness, xiii
restoration, xiv, 154, 157, 170, 173, 174,
219, 224; image restoration, 154, 155,
160, 162, 163, 165–166, 172, 172–173,
174, 175n10; Other-restoration, 154,
160, 173, 174; Relationship-restoration,
154
restorative justice, 158, 159, 174, 175n24,
176n32, 178n92
rhetoric, xiii, 4–6, 7, 10, 11, 19, 20, 25–26,
28, 29, 35, 41, 46–47, 49n39, 79, 80,
81, 81–82, 83, 88, 131, 157, 174,
185–186, 187–188, 193, 197, 200, 271,
272, 274, 276, 281, 288, 294, 306, 310;
321
professorship, 5
Robertson, William, 32, 34, 36, 41, 49n47,
50n67
roles, 219, 220, 234, 271
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11, 27–28, 33, 42,
44, 45, 48n32, 52n140, 52n142, 311
Saussure, Ferdinand, 78–79
Schrag, Calvin, 25
Scotland, 25, 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 33, 36, 37,
41, 42–43, 43–44, 45, 46, 48n22,
49n39, 51n83, 51n86, 51n92
Scott, Sir Walter, 46
Scotus, John Duns, 28–29, 31, 48n21,
48n25
segregation, 115, 116, 117, 118–119, 121,
156, 164, 166, 167, 168
self-defense, 153, 155, 156, 157
self-incurred immaturity, 26–27
self-interest, 30, 33, 100, 108, 111, 112,
118
Selznick, Phillip, 215, 216
semiotics, 78, 198, 294, 300n13
sentiment, 26, 32, 35–36, 41, 42–43, 44,
45–46, 262, 264, 308, 310; benevolent.
See benevolent sentiment; human
sentiment, xiii, 35; liberal, 39, 46;
moral, 42, 109, 309
shale gas, 234, 237, 238, 239, 240
signs, 10, 35, 66, 78, 288, 292–293,
294–295, 297
slavery, xiv, 153–154, 156, 160, 161, 162,
163, 164, 165, 166, 167–168, 169,
170–171, 171–174
Smith, Adam, 29–30, 30, 31, 32, 32–33,
36, 40, 41, 41–42, 44, 47n6, 47n20,
48n32, 49n39, 50n61, 50n67, 52n130,
307, 308, 309; Theory of Moral
Sentiments, 30, 41, 42, 307, 308;
Wealth of Nations, 30, 41
socialization, 222, 225
Socrates, 16, 65
Sophists, 80, 81, 88
space, xiii, xiv, xv, 27, 36, 60–61, 62–63,
64–65, 66, 67, 69, 76–78, 104, 116,
186, 223, 224, 253–254, 256, 257, 258,
263, 265
spectator, 27, 33, 35, 188, 308; impartial
spectator, 33, 41, 308, 309
322
Spinoza, Baruch, 3–4, 7–9, 9, 10, 11, 13,
14, 15, 16, 17, 19; Ethics, 8–9;
Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus, 8, 8–9
Spinozism, 4, 7, 7–9, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 19, 21n15
standpoint, xi, xii, xv, 32
Stewart, Dugald, 32, 33–34, 49n51
subjectivity, 3, 104, 156, 301n29
subjugated knowledge, 192
sublime, 42, 45
suicide, 186, 196, 200–201, 289
surrender, 112, 113, 118
Swearingen, C. Jan, 26, 28, 28–29, 30, 82,
273
symbolic violence, xv, 185, 200
sympathy, 30, 33, 34, 41, 42, 306, 308, 309
symptoms, 286, 293, 297
telos, 3, 56, 68, 69, 70, 216, 223, 255, 263,
311
temporality, xiii, 25, 76, 78, 79, 85, 86, 88,
89, 106, 217, 219, 258; linear, 85;
nonlinear, 78, 83, 85, 88
tetrad, 157, 158, 161, 167; agency, 157,
162–163, 163–164, 165, 166, 167, 168,
168–169, 172, 174, 177n72; justice,
157–158, 159, 160, 167, 174; peace,
157–158, 159, 167, 174; truth,
157–158, 159, 163, 166, 167–168, 169,
170, 174
third, the, x, xv, 58, 224, 309
time, 60–61, 62, 63, 64–65, 66, 67, 69, 76,
76–79, 80–81, 83, 85, 86–87, 88, 89,
153, 157; diachronic, 88, 89
tolerance, 22n30, 30, 32, 194, 199, 307,
308, 313
topos, 81, 278
Toulmin, Stephen, 25, 130, 146
Index
Tymieniecka, Anna-Theresa, xiv,
103–104, 104–105, 105–106, 106–108,
108, 109, 109–110, 110–111, 112–113,
114, 115, 116, 121; Imaginatio
Creatrix, 105, 106, 110, 116
valuation, 104, 106–107, 110, 111, 119.
See alsomoral valuation
value, xii, xiii, xiv–xv, xv, xvi, 9, 99, 100,
106, 154, 157–159, 162, 164, 167, 168,
172, 173, 233, 234–235, 239, 242, 244,
245, 245–246, 247–248, 248, 249, 250,
254, 274, 277
Virginia, xiv, 153, 154, 160–161, 161,
161–165, 165–166, 167–168, 169,
170–171, 171–174, 177n53;
Jamestown, Virginia, 162, 163–164,
165, 172, 173
virtue, xi, 33, 39, 103, 113, 261, 262,
262–263, 265, 266, 281–282, 306, 307,
308, 310, 313; communicative virtue,
215; virtue ethics, 253, 260, 260–261,
264, 265, 274
Voltaire, 28, 36
Watt, James, 35
Whereasclause, 162, 163–164, 165, 168,
169, 170
Whig, 37–38, 38, 46
Whitefield, George, 39, 51n100
wonder, 253, 255, 262
work, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 223, 261,
266
World War II, xvi, 115, 155, 170, 201, 271,
273, 275, 281
Žižek, Slavoj, 7, 90n29
 About the Contributors

Brenda J. Allen (PhD, Howard University) is a professor of communication

and the associate vice chancellor of diversity and inclusion at the University
of Colorado, Denver.

Pat Arneson’s research examines issues of human communication from

philosophical perspectives. She is author of Communicative Engagement and
Social Liberation: Justice Will Be Made; editor of Perspectives on Philoso-
phy of Communication (2007), and Exploring Communication Ethics: Inter-
views with Influential Scholars in the Field (2007); and coauthor (with Ro-
nald C. Arnett) of Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and
Interpersonal Relationships (1999). She has published over forty-five book
chapters, journal articles, encyclopedia entries, and research reports. Her
work appears in journals, including Integrative Explorations: Journal of Cul-
ture and Consciousness, International Journal of Listening, Women’s Studies
in Communication, Free Speech Yearbook, First Amendment Studies, Com-
munication Law Review, Communication Studies, The Review of Communi-
cation, The Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de
Communication, and Journal of the Association for Communication Admin-
istration among others.

Ronald C. Arnett (PhD, Ohio University, 1978) is chair of and professor in

the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and the Henry
Koren, C.S.Sp., Endowed Chair for Scholarly Excellence at Duquesne Uni-
versity. He is the author/coauthor of nine books and three edited books. His
most recent books are An Overture to Philosophy of Communication: The
Carrier of Meaning and Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah
Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope, which was awarded the 2013 top

323
324 About the Contributors

book award from the Philosophy of Communication Ethics Division of the

National Communication Association.

Austin S. Babrow (PhD, University of Illinois) is professor of communica-

tion studies at Ohio University. His teaching and research focus on the inter-
section of communication, uncertainty, and values, and particularly the social
construction of the uncertainty and the profound values associated with
health, illness, and risk. He has also begun to explore environmental commu-
nication as well as spiritual and ethical wisdom, communication, and human
suffering.

Isaac E. Catt, PhD, (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 1982) is im-

mediate past president of the Semiotic Society of America and visiting schol-
ar, Simon E. Silverman Phenomenology Center and Department of Commu-
nication and Rhetorical Studies, Duquesne University. His award-winning
published research centers on the conjunction of American pragmatism and
European philosophy focused in the human science of communicology,
semiotics and phenomenology. His recent book, Communicology: The New
Science of Embodied Discourse, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson Uni-
versity Press (coedited with D. Eicher-Catt ).

G. L. Ercolini is an assistant professor of speech communication and rheto-

ric at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the intersec-
tion of the history of rhetoric, enlightenment rhetoric, contemporary rhetori-
cal theory, and the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. Her current
book-length project reexamines Immanuel Kant's treatment of rhetoric.

Janie M. Harden Fritz (PhD, University of Wisconsin, Madison) is a pro-

fessor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Du-
quesne University. Her scholarship focuses on civility and incivility in work-
place relationships, institutional identity and mission, and religious commu-
nication. She is the author of Professional Civility: Communicative Virtue at
Work (2013), coeditor (with Becky L. Omdahl, PhD) of Problematic Rela-
tionships in the Workplace and Problematic Relationships in the Workplace,
Vol. 2 (2006, 2012), coeditor (with S. Alyssa Groom) of Communication
Ethics and Crisis: Negotiating Differences in Public and Private Spheres
(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), and coauthor (with Ronald C.
Arnett and Leeanne M. Bell) of Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue
and Difference (2009).

Pat J. Gehrke is an associate professor in the Program in Speech Communi-

cation and Rhetoric and the Department of English at the University of South
Carolina. His research focuses on communication ethics, the history of com-
 About the Contributors 325

munication and rhetoric in America, and theories of public rhetoric. His most
recent book is The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rheto-
ric in the Twentieth Century (2009).

John B. Hatch (PhD, Regent University) is associate professor of communi-

cation studies at Eastern University. His book Race and Reconciliation: Re-
dressing Wounds of Injustice won the Top Single-Author Book Award from
the NCA Communication Ethics division. He has published articles on racial
reconciliation, dialogic rhetoric, religion, and culture.

Gerard A. Hauser is College Professor Emeritus of Distinction, Department

of Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has authored
or edited six scholarly books and numerous scholarly articles and chapters
dealing with rhetoric, including “Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics
and Public Spheres” (1999), recipient of the National Communication Asso-
ciation's Marie Hochmuth Nichols Book Award, and Prisoners of Con-
science: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency (2012), recipient of the Rhet-
oric Society of America’s book award. He is editor of the journal Philosophy
and Rhetoric.

Annette M. Holba (PhD, Duquesne University, 2005) is an associate profes-

sor jointly appointed to the Department of Communication and Media Stud-
ies and Department of History and Philosophy at Plymouth State University.
She is the author/coauthor of three books, three edited books, and numerous
scholarly articles, served as guest editor for Listening: Journal of Communi-
cation Ethics, Religion, and Culture, and is the editor-elect for Qualitative
Research Reports in Communication.

Alain Létourneau is a full professor at the Philosophy and Applied Ethics

Department, Université de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada. For more than fif-
teen years, he has been working on questions of ethics in communication
settings, more recently focussing on questions of environmental governance.
Newspaper articles, public opinion formation questions and socio-technical
controversies have been studied for a number of papers, books, grants, and
events.

Lisbeth Lipari is an associate professor in the Communication Department

of Denison University. Her book Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an
Ethics of Attunement is forthcoming.

Lester C. Olson is a professor of communication and women’s studies at the

University of Pittsburgh, where he specializes in public address, visual rheto-
ric, and rhetorical criticism. His books include Emblems of American Com-
326 About the Contributors

munity in the Revolutionary Era (1991), Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of

American Community (2004), Visual Rhetoric (2007), and Human Rights
Rhetoric (2012). His essays concerning Audre Lorde’s public advocacy can
be found in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1997, 1998, 2011), Philosophy
and Rhetoric (2000), American Voices (2005), Queering Public Address
(2007), The Responsibilities of Rhetoric (2010), The Literary Encyclopedia
(2011), and Standing in the Intersection (2012).

Andreea Deciu Ritivoi is a professor of rhetoric in the Department of Eng-

lish at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include rhetorical
theory and Continental philosophy, narrative and identity, exile and transna-
tionalism, and argument and controversy. Ritivoi is the author of Yesterday’s
Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity (Rowman and Littlefield 2002),
Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (2006), and
Intimate Strangers: Arendt, Marcuse, Sonzhenitsyn, and Said in American
Political Discourse (2014). She is also the editor of Interpretation and Its
Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz (2004) and Outrage!
Art, Controversy, and Society (with Richard Howells and Judith Schachter
2012). Additionally, Ritivoi is the editor of Storyworlds, a journal of narra-
tive studies

Lindsey M. Rose (PhD, Ohio University) is an online adjunct professor for

Ohio University. She employs qualitative research methods to explore issues
in health communication, community organizing, and pedagogy.