JAC Volume 13 Issue 1

Perhaps it is because I read this book last spring during the riots in Los Angeles or because of the nightly news parade of students arrested for carrying weapons to schools much closer to my home that I welcome a pedagogy that seeks to place the control and power available through words in students' hands—a pedagogy that, as Crusius paraphrases Burke, seeks "not to eliminate conflict, but to make it a contest of words rather than bullets." This second book in the NCTE Teachers Introduction series is both the promised introduction as well as a response to the series first book, Sharon Crowley's A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction. Crusius offers a readable orientation to a difficult interpretive theory but, much more than that, he offers philosophical hermeneutics as a pedagogical approach which, unlike deconstruction, finally encourages its users to strive for consensus and make decisions, especially in the arena of public discourse.

Of course, most composition pedagogies—be they process, Marxist, deconstructivist, a combination, or from some other base—insist they empower the student. Crusius uses the first section of his essay to set forth the types of hermeneutics and several topoi of philosophical hermeneutics, then employs that delineation to show how this style of interpretation differs in crucial ways.

Philosophical hermeneutics "holds that interpreting is not so much what human beings . . . do, but rather what all human beings are." Crusius attempts to hold to this basic premise throughout. He claims that interpretation is fundamentally grounded in experience, language, and the temporal process of being. The dependence on process moves interpretation into postmodernity and away from foundational or metaphysical beliefs, and away from the subject/object dichotomy, but not to a rejection of Being itself. Crusius follows Heidegger in asserting that language is "the source of all knowledge and truth." At the same time, he contends that we also know through a kind of preunderstanding, based on our experience immersed in a given world. This preunderstanding develops along with language into foresight which reaches out ahead of us as a preorientation making any observation "theory-laden." Here Crusius retrieves the hermeneutic circle, positing that we needn't ask how one understands: "The longstanding problem of how a mind can grasp a thing is shown to be what it is: a pseudoproblem." One understands because one (pre)understands. This whole line of explanation, of course, is certainly open to question. Luckily, philosophical hermeneutics advocates reflection on its own basic premises.

Crusius combining of process, preunderstanding, and language with the important concepts of Dasein (human-being-in-the-world) and Mitsein (being with others) focuses the essay on dialectic and dialogue, the means by which truth as defined by philosophical hermeneutics is disclosed. And the truth is a "situational or contextual" one. Finally, this approach to understanding relies on what Crusius calls "the experienced person and practical judgment." Experienced humans must be willing to examine their own prejudices and allow those prejudices to be altered in the quest for phronesis, the talent, as Isocrates described it, "to arrive generally at the best course."

I think that there is much to question throughout the first section of the book. Some examples: the yoking of non-conceptual knowing with a dependence on language for knowing, knowing because we know, and the often methodical presentation of a non-methodical project. Admittedly, the author is struggling against space constraints; agreeing with him may be easier if one reads more of the books listed in the excellent suggesed-readings section. However, if we can muzzle our deconstructive urges at this point, we may move into the second section of the text and return to how this way of interpreting differs from others. Crusius wants to distinguish philosophical hermeneutics from deconstruction, a negative/depth hermeneutic which he depicts as hostile to dialogue and without any answers, contingent or otherwise, except that we must escape our traditions and heritage. Further, without the impetus toward phronesis, deconstruction equalizes all interpretations, and decision making is endlessly deferred. Conversely, philosophical hermeneutics holds an uneasy attraction for tradition, not dismissing yet not accepting uncritically. Rather, it retrieves effective history, that which is relevant today. And experience, tradition, prejudice, and dialogue are all pressed into the service of making decisions.

Bringing in Marxism (and Freudianism and other -isms), the author asserts that urging one to accept these perspectives is merely to exchange one ideology for another; in fact, it is a destructive move back to a foundational ideological perspective because these projects dissect all ideologies except their own, which are conferred a priori status. (Crusius discussion of convergences/divergences with Berlin [60-73] is a very interesting read.)

Finally, process pedagogy can in a sense separate itself from writing when it focuses on input and outputs and methods. Crusius notes that some of the expressive and problem-solving schools, in their search for general heuristics, discount the broad background of the student—that same experience, tradition, culture matrix which philosophical hermeneutics is so vitally concerned with. He finds his view a much-needed expansion of more constricted notions of process. Crusius thus offers alternatives to both negative and scientistic pedagogies; more importantly, philosophical hermeneutics invites a reflexive examination of itself, and allows us to select what we find relevant and useful at the moment of examination.

In closing, I want to return to the empowerment of students. If we can accept philosophical hermeneutics enough to use it, we can offer students a means to power. First, philosophical hermeneutics can free us of the endless deferral of meaning and decision making. In linking this interpretive stance with rhetoric and composition pedagogy, the author suggests centering classes on public discourse and work which examines prejudices, evaluates reasons, and arrives at a consensus or at least an understanding of points of disagreement. A second point relates to one of the topoi discussed: homelessness. Early in the text Crusius reviews how the subject/object dichotomy also places the contemplative subject in Western tradition outside, a homeless being. This homelessness is exacerbated by a rejection of metaphysics and God. Without presence, logic, and religion to cling to, students are uprooted and in need of a source of power and direction. The predominant images of Los Angeles were two: people pillaging, burning, and shooting, or people congregating in the churches. While we can't offer students a foundational truth, we can offer something other than a technology of firearms as a power and a source of at least some feeling of control. We can offer them the projects of other-examination and self-examination as means of change both within the self and within the public arena.