After Kant: Re-thinking Hermeneutics and Aesthetics

Abstract

Generally speaking, political science an intellectually chal lenged discipline. As I have noted elsewhere, despite important advances in the history of philosophy, many of which have influ enced scholarship in diverse branches of the humanities, much of political science remains in a pre-Kantian epistemological slumber. Happily, however, as Anne Norton's and Ian Shapiro's texts testify, the discipline not bereft of critically-oriented intellectuals. Both texts effectively address the conceptual poverty and epistemological myopia that have afflicted the discipline since its found ing period at roughly the turn of the twentieth century. 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, & and The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences are fiercely intelli gent texts. They share a dual focus in that the two operate in both critical and programmatic registers. They treat not only what has been largely lacking in the discipline's theory-building and eval uation but also suggest how the lack can be addressed. Although the texts differ markedly in style ? Norton, borrowing from Martin Luther, articulates her arguments as a series of polemi cal theses, while Shapiro's writing more reminiscent of Max Weber's juristic style, dialectically stating arguments and their refutations ? they share the position that the methodological rigor associated with political science's dominant empiricist epistemology an ambiguous achievement. While each of the texts articulates a major theme, the significance of interpretation and the priority of problems over methods for Shapiro and the pervasiveness of aesthet ics for Norton, neither a continuous narrative. Norton's fragments are presented as separate theses, while Shapiro's breaks are a func tion of the separate studies that his various chapters represent. Importantly, however, both Norton and Shapiro share an apprecia tion of the critical undermining of empiricist conceits that derives from the position that language action rather than mere reference, which developed in the language philosophies of John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It well to recall, however, that the AustinianAVittgenstinian insistence on the significance of the con text of an utterance or statement (which Shapiro especially elabo rates) has been famously radicalized by Jacques Derrida, who points to the instability of such contexts (an issue I treat later in my review).1 In what follows, I draw inspiration from the critical insights of both texts, focusing first on the hermeneutics-politics relation ship Shapiro explores and the problem-oriented injunction he defends, and then on the implications of the aesthetic-politics relationship central to one of Norton's theses. I then offer some critical reflections that I see as altering and radicalizing the pro grammatic directions toward which both texts aim. To set up those reflections, I summon an earlier but remarkably like minded critique of empiricist methodology, Sheldon Wolin's, written during the height of the behavioral revolution in political science. Wolin's critical intervention important here because he evokes a conceptual persona, Immanuel Kant, who I think needs to be brought into the critical conversations that Norton and Shapiro evince. Writing during a Cold War and Vietnam War-influenced period of intense turmoil within the U.S. political culture at large, as well as within academic institu tions, Wolin sought to redeem the tradition of political theory.2 He indicted the behaviorist trend in political science for its methodism, for exhausting the space of political education with methodological details to the neglect of a historically informed and politically engaged knowledge. Significantly, Wolin, like Shapiro, rejects the radical separation between theo retical commitments and facticity. As Wolin puts it, Perhaps facts are somehow molded by the logical forms of fact-stating language3 (similarly, Shapiro, edified by an earlier Yale intel lectual, Norwood Russell Hanson, evokes the famous Hanson remark that facts are theory-laden). But apart from what he shares with Shapiro, Wolin's turn to Kant anticipates the issues I want to join with Shapiro and Norton. Despite his recognition that facts are theory-laden, and his appreciation of the language-as-action perspective, Shapiro retains a strong commitment to a more or less referential model of the language-reality relationship. He argues for an interpretive supplement that, because it context sensitive, makes reality more present rather than fugitive (to evoke Shapiro's imagery). In contrast, heeding the Kantian epistemological revolution, Wolin firmly rejects traditional explanatory political analysis, based on a model of objectivity that privileges detachment, fidelity to fact and deference to intersubjective verification by a community of practitioners. He asserts that rather than presum ing a pre-given world of objects and points of observation, knowledge judgments are predicated on a contingent context. Method [in the sense in which empiricists construct it], he writes, is not a thing for all worlds. It presupposes a certain Happily, however, as Anne Norton's and Ian Shapiro s texts testify, the discipline not bereft of critically oriented intellectuals.