In any event, because Obama went to Harvard Law School, perhaps it is fitting to have one of the locals investigate Obama's years at Harvard Law School. Obama was deeply involved in the HARVARD LAW REVIEW (HLR), serving one year as the president, a role that Kloppenberg describes as being the editor-in-chief. Kloppenberg decided to read the issues of HLR during Obama's years at Harvard.
Not surprisingly, Kloppenberg finds numerous intellectual fashions of the times reflected in those issues of HLR, especially in the discussion notes. I also tend to read discussion notes, so I can understand why he is alert to them. As a result of digging out the sources referred to in the discussion notes, Kloppenberg helpfully explains certain intellectual fashions of the times. I found his discussion of John Rawls, who of course is a Harvard professor, very informative. But Kloppenberg's discussion of Jurgen Habermas leaves something to be desired, as I will explain momentarily.
Kloppenberg shows that Obama is fond of likening our give-and-take about the U.S. Constitution to a conversation. To understand the import of the term "conversation" with reference to the U.S. Constitution, we need to remember that some people such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas prefer to think of the Constitution as a document that contains original intents, which would seem to preclude any further conversation about its meaning. For originalists such as Thomas, the original intents should be determined and should be determinative in guiding our considerations.
But how should we proceed to determine the original intents? The very process of ferreting out the original intents in itself an interpretive act. As Kloppenberg notes, the highfalutin' term for interpretation is hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the process by which we compare and contrast different possible meanings of a given text and try to form judgments about them.
Walter J. Ong, S.J., has nicely expressed the ubiquitous character of hermeneutics in the title of his article "Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the "I'" that was originally published in the journal ORAL TRADITION, volume 10 (1995): pages 3-26. (All back issues of this journal are available at the Oral Tradition website maintained by the University of Missouri.)
As a result of the ubiquitous character of hermeneutics, all human knowing and understanding, including modern science, is based on hermeneutics (or interpretation).
Following the thought of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. (who served as Stillman Professor at Harvard in 1971-1972), in his book INSIGHT: A STUDY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (1957; 5th ed. University of Toronto Press, 1992), I would point out to Kloppenberg that we can describe the processes and cognitive operations by which we compare and contrast different possible knowledge claims as hermeneutics (or interpretation). In short, the processes and cognitive operations of human knowing and understanding involves hermeneutics. Understood in this way, hermeneutics is the name of the game -- and the only game in town.
Kloppenberg himself is also very fond of using the term "conversation" as a way to describe the give-and-take of debate in our representative democracy. In light of the prominence of the term "conversation" in this book, I would like to have seen Kloppenberg discuss Habermas's discourse ethics more fully than he does. For a fine discussion of Habermas's discourse ethics with reference to the conversation of modern science and Thomas Kuhn's work, see William Rehg's book COGENT SCIENCE IN CONTEXT: THE SCIENCE WARS, ARGUMENTATION THEORY, AND HABERMAS (MIT Press, 2009).
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