Search

The essay addresses the definition and status of public intellectuals in relation to the work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Accepting the definition of Richard Posner, it suggests that (i) most people in the humanities are not, and need not imagine they are, public intellectuals and that (ii) Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has gradually become a public intellectual.

It is often argued that a shared culture, or at least shared cultural references or practices, can help to foster peace and prevent war. This essay examines in detail and criticizes one such argument, made by Patrick Leigh Fermor, in the context of his discussing an incident during World War II, when he and a captured German general found a form of agreement, a ground for peace between them, in their both knowing Horace's ode I.9 by heart in Latin. By way of introducing the sixth and final installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” this essay proposes that Leigh Fermor's narrative be understood in terms of commerce, rather than consensus. It concludes by examining Ezra Pound's use of the word commerce in his poem “A Pact” (“Let there be commerce between us”) to define his relationship with his “detested” and “pig-headed” poetic “father,” Walt Whitman.

In this guest column, the author argues, first, that being at the place of an event does not guarantee that one understands what is going on and, second, that something's happening with or to me does not guarantee that I understand what has occurred. He shows that it is generally assumed that the best descriptions of oneself are those given by oneself and, further, generally felt that allowing for the possibility that better descriptions than one's own have been produced by others is comparable to surrendering a civil right. He concludes instead that allowing for that possibility is commendable and shows its application to an aspect of the life of Louis XVI that historians and ideologists of revolution have widely ridiculed.

People who talk about interpretation often suggest that what is interpreted must offer some kind of resistance, in quasiphysical terms. The physics entailed by such suggestions is never fully specified, and for a good reason: it is purely nonexistent. This essay presents arguments against physical fantasies in interpretation, very current in the humanities and the social sciences, and offers a different picture of interpretation. The picture has two parts: interpretation is described as a way of dealing with intentions, motives, purposes, linguistic noises, actions, meanings, and so forth, relative to all sorts of stuff; and interpretation is a default condition, rather than an optional acquired talent.

This essay puts forth an argument against the notion that we collect things. It probes the notion of collecting experiences though it refrains from developing any theory of experience. It claims that nothing, no thing, is intrinsically collectible. Some attention is paid to the notion of intangible collecting and to the connection between collection and catalogue. The essay recommends that collections should be understood as we understand human actions, that is, bearing in mind the reasons, motives, and intentions of collectors, and concludes by defining collection as a practice following from the belief that certain voluntary acts can induce experiences in other people. It also suggests that this is all the theory about collections that we will ever need.

Tamen's essay is one of a group of responses to Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour's article “Morality or Moralism?” which advocates our “sensitization” to nonhuman things. Tamen examines the picture of universal reciprocation that Hache and Latour propose, according to which, when I “bow at” (acknowledge) things, some things bow back at me, and I must treat whatever bows back as if it were like me. Unlike James Lovelock, a passage from whose work they discuss, Hache and Latour understand this picture in a sense that is essentially “honorary.” The picture or premise they propose sets up, they admit, “a promising misunderstanding.” Tamen offers two arguments in response: one against as-if locutions and another against the very notion of setting up a misunderstanding. But it is good news, Tamen concludes, that sensitization cannot be set up. To what extent we would want a “revival of scruple” to succeed is a serious question, the answer dependent on how much scruple about which things and for what reasons. However pleasing the Hache/Latour or Lovelock picture, it is easy to imagine an intemperate degree of scruple, requiring agonies of continual debate and calculation of the minutest consequences of our acts and the most unlivable alternatives.

This essay offers a discussion of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Its main thesis is a development of Aristotle’s remark that “there is a natural disposition for the true.” If there is such a disposition, most current interpretations that emphasize either the idea that rhetorical arguments are an exception to logical arguments or the idea that logical arguments are rhetorical in nature can be proved false. If so, arguments in political assemblies and courts of law need not be considered in any diminished way— they are no more and no less rational than any other arguments.

The essay discusses the presumption of one's singularity, the uniqueness of one's time, the picturesqueness of one actions, and the capacity of human beings, whether corporately or individually, to begin everything or indeed anything again from scratch. Such presumptions are indeed present in some varieties of contemporary fanaticism, but, more to the point, it is suggested that the feeling of doing something for the first time is the oldest feeling in the world.

“To be sure,” Wittgenstein once remarked, “there is justification; but justification comes to an end.”1 Judging from the testimony of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, here is how the problem of the justification of competing claims concerning the status of Schleswig-Holstein came to an end, in or about late 1863: “There are only three men who have ever understood it—one was Prince Albert, who is dead; the second was a German professor, who became mad. I am the third—and I have forgotten all about it.”2 Of course, the matter of SchleswigHolstein did not end in this way, courtesy of Otto von Bismarck (mostly): it provisionally ended with a brief war between Prussia and Denmark (in 1864), and then it provisionally ended again with another brief war (between Prussia and Austria) in 1866. The fact remains that Palmerston nicely describes the end of a problem, and hence the end of an argument, by describing the elimination of all of those who in respect to this particular problem were endowed with the power to articulate competing claims. Given that, in Palmerston’s version of the Schleswig-Holstein affair, there were only three such people, the fact that one died, the second went insane, and the third forgot what was supposed to be the case, effectively ended the problem as such.

(1998). Kinds of Persons, Kinds of Rights, Kinds of Bodies. Law & Literature: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 1-32.