Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope: Contemporary Implications of the Scottish Enlightenment
Autor Ronald C. Arnett Cuvânt înainte de Thomas M. Lesslen Limba Engleză Paperback – 23 ian 2022
WINNER, 2022 National Communication Association Top Single-Author Book of the Year in the Communication Ethics Division!
Tenacious hope, the heart of a just and free society
During the Enlightenment, Scottish intellectuals and administrators met the demands of profit and progress while shepherding concerns for self and other, individual and community, and family and work. Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope captures the “unity of contraries,” offering the Scottish Enlightenment as an exemplar of tenacious hope countering the excesses of individualism. Ronald C. Arnett reveals two stories: the struggle between optimism and tenacious hope, and optimism’s ultimate triumph in the exclusion of difference and the reification of progress as an ultimate good.
In chapters that detail the legacies of Lord Provost George Drummond, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, Adam Ferguson, and Sir Walter Scott, Arnett highlights the problematic nature of optimism and the ethical agency of tenacious hope. Arnett illustrates the creative union of education and administration, the ability to accept doubt within systems of knowledge and imagination, and an abiding connection to local soil. As principles of progress, free will, and capitalism swept Europe, proponents of optimism envisioned a world of consumerism and absolutes. In contrast, practitioners of tenacious hope embraced uncertainty and compassion as pragmatic necessities.
This work continues Arnett’s scholarship, articulating the vital importance of communication ethics. Those seeking to discern and support a temporal sense of the good in this historical moment will find in this timely work the means to pursue, hold, and nourish tenacious hope. This insightful theorization of the Scottish Enlightenment distills the substance of a just and free society for meeting dangerous and uncertain times.
Tenacious hope, the heart of a just and free society
During the Enlightenment, Scottish intellectuals and administrators met the demands of profit and progress while shepherding concerns for self and other, individual and community, and family and work. Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope captures the “unity of contraries,” offering the Scottish Enlightenment as an exemplar of tenacious hope countering the excesses of individualism. Ronald C. Arnett reveals two stories: the struggle between optimism and tenacious hope, and optimism’s ultimate triumph in the exclusion of difference and the reification of progress as an ultimate good.
In chapters that detail the legacies of Lord Provost George Drummond, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, Adam Ferguson, and Sir Walter Scott, Arnett highlights the problematic nature of optimism and the ethical agency of tenacious hope. Arnett illustrates the creative union of education and administration, the ability to accept doubt within systems of knowledge and imagination, and an abiding connection to local soil. As principles of progress, free will, and capitalism swept Europe, proponents of optimism envisioned a world of consumerism and absolutes. In contrast, practitioners of tenacious hope embraced uncertainty and compassion as pragmatic necessities.
This work continues Arnett’s scholarship, articulating the vital importance of communication ethics. Those seeking to discern and support a temporal sense of the good in this historical moment will find in this timely work the means to pursue, hold, and nourish tenacious hope. This insightful theorization of the Scottish Enlightenment distills the substance of a just and free society for meeting dangerous and uncertain times.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809338535
ISBN-10: 080933853X
Pagini: 298
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.41 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN-10: 080933853X
Pagini: 298
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.41 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Notă biografică
Ronald C. Arnett is professor and chair of the department of communication and rhetorical studies at Duquesne University and the Patricia Doherty Yoder and Ronald Wolfe Endowed Chair in Communication Ethics. He is the author or coauthor of over a hundred scholarly articles and twelve books, the coeditor of seven books, and the recipient of eight book awards, including recognition for Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethicsand Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope.
Extras
1. Communication Ethics: The Necessity of Tenacious Hope
The central coordinates that guide this interpretive project’s examination of the Scottish Enlightenment are optimism and tenacious hope. Optimism is a stance of a consumer, unreflectively assuming existence will conform to one’s expectations. Additionally, this project unmasks optimism as paradigmatically bound to a singular direction, a predetermined course for the good. Tenacious hope, on the other hand, requires responsible individual action as one discerns how to navigate an understanding of the good nurtured by a unity of contraries, a theme long present in Scottish intellectual life. Alexander Broadie repeatedly reminds readers that the intellectual climate of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment has deep roots and a rich history; he traced the origin of that creative moment to John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308) and his embedded sense of individuality, connected to and situated within faith and locality. Tenacious hope is a unity of contraries embracing individuality within responsible engagement in a social context. A unity of contraries assumes that competing goods naturally require reflection. One must thoughtfully seek temporal resolution of differences as one discerns a direction of a good. Perhaps the most common examples of the unity of contraries include concern for self and other, individual and community, and family and work. In the case of the Scottish Enlightenment, the sentiment of locality includes place and a phenomenological sense of presence in tension with commitments to an emerging “not yet.” Locality is a sentiment that can render phenomenological meaning long after one no longer dwells in a given place.
Individual responsibility dwells within locality, which frames the story-centered action of tenacious hope. The Scottish Enlightenment was an “age of sentiment,” which includes love of Scottish soil and habits of the heart that nourish and shape identity. This position defines locality as reflective of empirical and phenomenological sentiment, which informs distinctiveness and direction. This work, From Optimism to Tenacious Hope: Communication Ethics and the Scottish Enlightenment, defines the Scottish Enlightenment as an effort to temper the increase of optimism in modernity’s embrace of progress. The enactment of tenacious hope as a unity of contraries composed of tensions between the sentiment of locality and the “not yet” of progress in commercial life is differentiated from the unidirectional demand of optimism. Unlike the consumeristic demand of optimism, tenacious hope necessitates responsibility within locality, a perspective contrary to the provincial and its abstract disregard of the different.
Introduction
The Scottish Enlightenment, generally spanning the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has substantial connections with an Aristotelian world responsive to an existential fact: mistakes often emerge from excess and/or deficiency. Too much or too little tied to a single direction gives rise to ideological extremes. A communication ethic must attend to the dangers of excess and deficiency, framing a dwelling place of tenacious hope composed of a unity of contraries. The Scottish Enlightenment rejected excessive abstract philosophical assurance about a single direction and theory; such confidence attempts to walk above the conflicting interplay of the local and the “not yet.”
This chapter proceeds in four sections. The initial section, “Locality and the Other,” engages the historical context of the Scottish Enlightenment by clarifying differences between two central performative metaphors: optimism and tenacious hope. These archetypes steer a communication ethic in contrasting directions. The second section, “The Limits of Optimism,” situates the faulty social project of optimism through the lens of the French Enlightenment scholar Voltaire and an American scholar, Christopher Lasch. The third section of this chapter, “The Absurdity of Tenacious Hope,” counters optimism displayed in the thoughtlessness of a consumer expectation about progress. The final section of this chapter, “Communication Ethics: Tenacious Hope as Progress and Restraint,” outlines the Scottish Enlightenment as a nexus of locality and emerging change via commercial growth.
The Scottish Enlightenment’s embrace of locality extended creativity well beyond its borders: imagination begins with and responds to local ground. Roger Emerson stressed the importance of context in the Scottish Enlightenment, arguing that any scholarship inattentive to locality is mistaken. This project examines the Scottish Enlightenment as a witness to communication ethics as tenacious hope, a unity of contraries that embraced the sentiment of local soil and the “not yet” of that historical moment, which resists unreflective confidence of optimism. The tenacious hope of that historical moment embraced locality without minimizing the significance of an emerging and enlarged conception of the world. It countered the ideological certainty of a single optimistic conviction. The Scottish Enlightenment points to a communication ethic of tenacious hope that dwells within a unity of contraries, ever wary of conviction without question. When this creative tension of competing goods ended, this historical moment ceased to propel persons and ideas creatively.
Locality and the Other
The Scottish Enlightenment informs us of an ongoing communication ethics drama: a unity of contraries between moral life and commercial growth, with each tempering the other. The optimism of progress requires a pragmatic check on its singularity of purpose, lessening the social danger of self-righteous imposition upon another. In the West, progress and optimism about commercial life vied for the status of a first principle in the eighteenth century. Worldviews shape understanding; they offer fundamental standpoints that color and frame a definitive assessment of existence. Discussion of worldview invokes the German notion of Weltanschauung, which suggests a perceptually local conception of existence that facilitates a unique manner of comprehension. Alexis de
Tocqueville, in his defining work on the local character of the United States, Democracy in America, offered a performative description of optimism within the United States: “Most of them [Anglo-Americans] think that the knowledge of one’s self-interest well understood is enough to lead man toward the just and the honest. . . . I do not say that all these opinions are correct, but they are American." Such optimism is the forerunner of Alasdair MacIntyre’s emphasis on “emotivism” that functions as decision-making by personal preference, facilitating individualism that seeks to stand above the constraints of social life.
Tocqueville defined individualism as a primary propeller of action within the West: “That word ‘individualism,’ which we have coined for our own requirements, was unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in their days every individual necessarily belonged to a group and no one could regard himself as an isolated unit.” Individualism, as an effort to stand above social constraints, is a “moral cul-de-sac,” propelled not by a unity of contraries, but by singularity of direction. Individualism attempts to stand above all social constraints and restraints. From a pragmatic communication ethics perspective of a unity of contraries, “enlightened self-interest” unites the tension of individual advancement and the necessity of social and group considerations. The goal, according to Tocqueville, was to combine one’s own well-being with that of one’s fellow citizens. Without question, the effort to restrain optimism, progress, and the emerging sense of individualism has historic roots. The Scottish Enlightenment offers a social witness to an effort to temper blind allegiance to the commercial enterprise, defended under the guise of progress.
The term “Scottish Enlightenment,” coined by William Robert Scott in 1900, announced a macro understanding of an educational dwelling spanning from 1688 to the last decades of the eighteenth century. Scott argued that the educator Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was a major initiator of this movement. He was “the prototype of the Scottish Enlightenment, that is, the diffusion of philosophic ideas in Scotland and the encouragement of speculative tastes amongst the men of culture of the generation following his own.” Hutcheson’s influence offered stress on the local and free will as a voluntary commitment to others, propelled by a love of God. Such a position guided Scottish universities and the emerging moderate sensibilities of the Kirk. The fact that the Church of Scotland, the legal system, and the educational system remained intact after the Act of Union in 1707 fueled the Scottish Enlightenment with the creative tension of a unity of contraries.
The Scottish educational milieu represented a particular Enlightenment expression, with other versions present in Germany, England, the Balkans, Scotland, and Spain. Within the West, four major Enlightenment configurations emerged: Germany, England, France, and Scotland. In Germany, the impact of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus gave rise to a new movement questioning authority, tradition, and theology; he offered a new and coherent philosophy rooted in naturalism and secularism, which gained traction in the universities and the courts. In England, the best-known contributions of the Enlightenment originated in the empiricism of Newton and Locke, which not only defined the “High Enlightenment” in England but also spread across Europe in a frenzy of anglomanie. In France, early acceptance of the empiricism of Descartes later yielded to contentious debates over the growing philosophy of deism and challenges to miracles. In Scotland, scholars such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid promoted the virtues of freethinking and tolerance of ideas within the public domain while encouraging practical application. Despite the distinctions among these national enlightenments, Jonathan Israel suggested that an “intellectual cohesion” of creative scholarship and invention defined “the Enlightenment” as a breaking out of old paradigms. The collective Enlightenment embraced a love of progress, with the Scottish version being reluctant to embrace such a myth fully.
This project differentiates optimism from tenacious hope in a manner that parallels Annette Holba’s contrast between recreation and leisure. She equated recreation with a consumer fetish of sheer entertainment dependent upon something or someone other than one’s own initiative. Leisure, on the other hand, requires proactive responsibility for learning and participation. Leisure necessitates an active contribution, an immersed engagement with activities such as music and the arts. Recreation, contrarily, calls forth passive reliance upon something or someone who is “supposed” to entertain “me.” Leisure obliges practice and involvement that leads to creative work. Leisure, like tenacious hope, compels an embodied contribution that embraces Emmanuel Levinas’s repeated statement of responsibility: “If not me, then whom?” and “Here I am.” Both leisure and tenacious hope acknowledge a responsibility of “unending obligation” for performative action and practice.
The opposing and competing public coordinates of optimism and tenacious hope within a given historical moment announce the power and influence of hypertextuality. Umberto Eco described hypertextuality as “link[ing] every node or element of its repertory, by means of a multiplicity of internal cross-references, to a multiplicity of other nodes.” Hypertextuality assumes that a single event is understandable via contrasting tensions that explicate differences within a similar occurrence. Communication ethics tied to tenacious hope of a unity of contraries offers a hypertextual story of multiple practices/communicative behaviors. As Hannah Arendt contended, behavior becomes part of public understanding only after articulated within a story-centered form—in the case of tenacious hope, a hypertextual story. The Scottish Enlightenment assumes differing practices within a conceptual hypertextual story inclusive of locality and commercial growth—a unity of contraries that frames the possibility of tenacious hope.
Within the Scottish Enlightenment, both material poverty and intellectual ambition shape the background for a productive public hypertextual story of progress and resistance to its lure. Paul Ricoeur’s description of narrative as the interplay of part and whole includes the creative movement back and forth between the unity of contraries of particularity and larger background. Tenacious hope works within such a narrative: the local and the emerging commercial moment of eighteenth-century Scotland called forth public recognition of the limits of optimism and ultimately acquiesced to the spell of undue optimism and a singular direction.
The Limits of Optimism
The use of the term “optimism” in everyday conversation assumes a future more advanced than today; such a perspective adopts a consumer demand for the new. Optimism unchecked generally equates with a thoughtless anticipation of a glowing tomorrow. This orientation faced critique in movies such as Pleasantville and The Truman Show. The cliché of life being a glass half full is the posture of optimism, which embraces an unswerving confidence in the future. A counter to this orientation even appears in popular periodicals, such as Psychology Today: “Research shows that tempering a sunny disposition . . . might be the best way to build resilience and achieve one’s goals.” Challenging unchecked optimism has contemporary and historical roots. As religion began its decline during the Enlightenment, optimism continued its ascent under the secular guise of progress. Optimism in the Enlightenment brought forth a secular modern trinity of efficiency, individual autonomy, and progress, which linked confidence with an abstract conception of the “not yet.”
Optimism is an obsession with a future good that one expects and, indeed, existentially demands, placing responsibility on existence, not on one’s own actions. The limits of optimism shape the thematic testimony of numerous scholars. For instance, Levinas, whom many consider the principal ethicist of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, repeatedly referenced quotes from the Old Testament in an effort to forestall unfettered optimism. The call of ethics and responsibility requires active participation without an optimistic guarantee of success or reward, which defies consumer anticipation. The consumer perspective of optimism linked to progress was a natural and regular companion within the emerging commercial world of eighteenth-century Scotland. A major thread of optimism rests with Hutcheson’s theory of human behavior and his emphasis on benevolence. Optimism coincides with a consumerism of anticipation, a focus on the “not yet.” The Scottish Enlightenment did not eradicate the gleeful enthusiasm of the consumer in a commercial world, but it did attempt to temper and resist its full influence.
[end of excerpt]
The central coordinates that guide this interpretive project’s examination of the Scottish Enlightenment are optimism and tenacious hope. Optimism is a stance of a consumer, unreflectively assuming existence will conform to one’s expectations. Additionally, this project unmasks optimism as paradigmatically bound to a singular direction, a predetermined course for the good. Tenacious hope, on the other hand, requires responsible individual action as one discerns how to navigate an understanding of the good nurtured by a unity of contraries, a theme long present in Scottish intellectual life. Alexander Broadie repeatedly reminds readers that the intellectual climate of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment has deep roots and a rich history; he traced the origin of that creative moment to John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308) and his embedded sense of individuality, connected to and situated within faith and locality. Tenacious hope is a unity of contraries embracing individuality within responsible engagement in a social context. A unity of contraries assumes that competing goods naturally require reflection. One must thoughtfully seek temporal resolution of differences as one discerns a direction of a good. Perhaps the most common examples of the unity of contraries include concern for self and other, individual and community, and family and work. In the case of the Scottish Enlightenment, the sentiment of locality includes place and a phenomenological sense of presence in tension with commitments to an emerging “not yet.” Locality is a sentiment that can render phenomenological meaning long after one no longer dwells in a given place.
Individual responsibility dwells within locality, which frames the story-centered action of tenacious hope. The Scottish Enlightenment was an “age of sentiment,” which includes love of Scottish soil and habits of the heart that nourish and shape identity. This position defines locality as reflective of empirical and phenomenological sentiment, which informs distinctiveness and direction. This work, From Optimism to Tenacious Hope: Communication Ethics and the Scottish Enlightenment, defines the Scottish Enlightenment as an effort to temper the increase of optimism in modernity’s embrace of progress. The enactment of tenacious hope as a unity of contraries composed of tensions between the sentiment of locality and the “not yet” of progress in commercial life is differentiated from the unidirectional demand of optimism. Unlike the consumeristic demand of optimism, tenacious hope necessitates responsibility within locality, a perspective contrary to the provincial and its abstract disregard of the different.
Introduction
The Scottish Enlightenment, generally spanning the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has substantial connections with an Aristotelian world responsive to an existential fact: mistakes often emerge from excess and/or deficiency. Too much or too little tied to a single direction gives rise to ideological extremes. A communication ethic must attend to the dangers of excess and deficiency, framing a dwelling place of tenacious hope composed of a unity of contraries. The Scottish Enlightenment rejected excessive abstract philosophical assurance about a single direction and theory; such confidence attempts to walk above the conflicting interplay of the local and the “not yet.”
This chapter proceeds in four sections. The initial section, “Locality and the Other,” engages the historical context of the Scottish Enlightenment by clarifying differences between two central performative metaphors: optimism and tenacious hope. These archetypes steer a communication ethic in contrasting directions. The second section, “The Limits of Optimism,” situates the faulty social project of optimism through the lens of the French Enlightenment scholar Voltaire and an American scholar, Christopher Lasch. The third section of this chapter, “The Absurdity of Tenacious Hope,” counters optimism displayed in the thoughtlessness of a consumer expectation about progress. The final section of this chapter, “Communication Ethics: Tenacious Hope as Progress and Restraint,” outlines the Scottish Enlightenment as a nexus of locality and emerging change via commercial growth.
The Scottish Enlightenment’s embrace of locality extended creativity well beyond its borders: imagination begins with and responds to local ground. Roger Emerson stressed the importance of context in the Scottish Enlightenment, arguing that any scholarship inattentive to locality is mistaken. This project examines the Scottish Enlightenment as a witness to communication ethics as tenacious hope, a unity of contraries that embraced the sentiment of local soil and the “not yet” of that historical moment, which resists unreflective confidence of optimism. The tenacious hope of that historical moment embraced locality without minimizing the significance of an emerging and enlarged conception of the world. It countered the ideological certainty of a single optimistic conviction. The Scottish Enlightenment points to a communication ethic of tenacious hope that dwells within a unity of contraries, ever wary of conviction without question. When this creative tension of competing goods ended, this historical moment ceased to propel persons and ideas creatively.
Locality and the Other
The Scottish Enlightenment informs us of an ongoing communication ethics drama: a unity of contraries between moral life and commercial growth, with each tempering the other. The optimism of progress requires a pragmatic check on its singularity of purpose, lessening the social danger of self-righteous imposition upon another. In the West, progress and optimism about commercial life vied for the status of a first principle in the eighteenth century. Worldviews shape understanding; they offer fundamental standpoints that color and frame a definitive assessment of existence. Discussion of worldview invokes the German notion of Weltanschauung, which suggests a perceptually local conception of existence that facilitates a unique manner of comprehension. Alexis de
Tocqueville, in his defining work on the local character of the United States, Democracy in America, offered a performative description of optimism within the United States: “Most of them [Anglo-Americans] think that the knowledge of one’s self-interest well understood is enough to lead man toward the just and the honest. . . . I do not say that all these opinions are correct, but they are American." Such optimism is the forerunner of Alasdair MacIntyre’s emphasis on “emotivism” that functions as decision-making by personal preference, facilitating individualism that seeks to stand above the constraints of social life.
Tocqueville defined individualism as a primary propeller of action within the West: “That word ‘individualism,’ which we have coined for our own requirements, was unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in their days every individual necessarily belonged to a group and no one could regard himself as an isolated unit.” Individualism, as an effort to stand above social constraints, is a “moral cul-de-sac,” propelled not by a unity of contraries, but by singularity of direction. Individualism attempts to stand above all social constraints and restraints. From a pragmatic communication ethics perspective of a unity of contraries, “enlightened self-interest” unites the tension of individual advancement and the necessity of social and group considerations. The goal, according to Tocqueville, was to combine one’s own well-being with that of one’s fellow citizens. Without question, the effort to restrain optimism, progress, and the emerging sense of individualism has historic roots. The Scottish Enlightenment offers a social witness to an effort to temper blind allegiance to the commercial enterprise, defended under the guise of progress.
The term “Scottish Enlightenment,” coined by William Robert Scott in 1900, announced a macro understanding of an educational dwelling spanning from 1688 to the last decades of the eighteenth century. Scott argued that the educator Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was a major initiator of this movement. He was “the prototype of the Scottish Enlightenment, that is, the diffusion of philosophic ideas in Scotland and the encouragement of speculative tastes amongst the men of culture of the generation following his own.” Hutcheson’s influence offered stress on the local and free will as a voluntary commitment to others, propelled by a love of God. Such a position guided Scottish universities and the emerging moderate sensibilities of the Kirk. The fact that the Church of Scotland, the legal system, and the educational system remained intact after the Act of Union in 1707 fueled the Scottish Enlightenment with the creative tension of a unity of contraries.
The Scottish educational milieu represented a particular Enlightenment expression, with other versions present in Germany, England, the Balkans, Scotland, and Spain. Within the West, four major Enlightenment configurations emerged: Germany, England, France, and Scotland. In Germany, the impact of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus gave rise to a new movement questioning authority, tradition, and theology; he offered a new and coherent philosophy rooted in naturalism and secularism, which gained traction in the universities and the courts. In England, the best-known contributions of the Enlightenment originated in the empiricism of Newton and Locke, which not only defined the “High Enlightenment” in England but also spread across Europe in a frenzy of anglomanie. In France, early acceptance of the empiricism of Descartes later yielded to contentious debates over the growing philosophy of deism and challenges to miracles. In Scotland, scholars such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid promoted the virtues of freethinking and tolerance of ideas within the public domain while encouraging practical application. Despite the distinctions among these national enlightenments, Jonathan Israel suggested that an “intellectual cohesion” of creative scholarship and invention defined “the Enlightenment” as a breaking out of old paradigms. The collective Enlightenment embraced a love of progress, with the Scottish version being reluctant to embrace such a myth fully.
This project differentiates optimism from tenacious hope in a manner that parallels Annette Holba’s contrast between recreation and leisure. She equated recreation with a consumer fetish of sheer entertainment dependent upon something or someone other than one’s own initiative. Leisure, on the other hand, requires proactive responsibility for learning and participation. Leisure necessitates an active contribution, an immersed engagement with activities such as music and the arts. Recreation, contrarily, calls forth passive reliance upon something or someone who is “supposed” to entertain “me.” Leisure obliges practice and involvement that leads to creative work. Leisure, like tenacious hope, compels an embodied contribution that embraces Emmanuel Levinas’s repeated statement of responsibility: “If not me, then whom?” and “Here I am.” Both leisure and tenacious hope acknowledge a responsibility of “unending obligation” for performative action and practice.
The opposing and competing public coordinates of optimism and tenacious hope within a given historical moment announce the power and influence of hypertextuality. Umberto Eco described hypertextuality as “link[ing] every node or element of its repertory, by means of a multiplicity of internal cross-references, to a multiplicity of other nodes.” Hypertextuality assumes that a single event is understandable via contrasting tensions that explicate differences within a similar occurrence. Communication ethics tied to tenacious hope of a unity of contraries offers a hypertextual story of multiple practices/communicative behaviors. As Hannah Arendt contended, behavior becomes part of public understanding only after articulated within a story-centered form—in the case of tenacious hope, a hypertextual story. The Scottish Enlightenment assumes differing practices within a conceptual hypertextual story inclusive of locality and commercial growth—a unity of contraries that frames the possibility of tenacious hope.
Within the Scottish Enlightenment, both material poverty and intellectual ambition shape the background for a productive public hypertextual story of progress and resistance to its lure. Paul Ricoeur’s description of narrative as the interplay of part and whole includes the creative movement back and forth between the unity of contraries of particularity and larger background. Tenacious hope works within such a narrative: the local and the emerging commercial moment of eighteenth-century Scotland called forth public recognition of the limits of optimism and ultimately acquiesced to the spell of undue optimism and a singular direction.
The Limits of Optimism
The use of the term “optimism” in everyday conversation assumes a future more advanced than today; such a perspective adopts a consumer demand for the new. Optimism unchecked generally equates with a thoughtless anticipation of a glowing tomorrow. This orientation faced critique in movies such as Pleasantville and The Truman Show. The cliché of life being a glass half full is the posture of optimism, which embraces an unswerving confidence in the future. A counter to this orientation even appears in popular periodicals, such as Psychology Today: “Research shows that tempering a sunny disposition . . . might be the best way to build resilience and achieve one’s goals.” Challenging unchecked optimism has contemporary and historical roots. As religion began its decline during the Enlightenment, optimism continued its ascent under the secular guise of progress. Optimism in the Enlightenment brought forth a secular modern trinity of efficiency, individual autonomy, and progress, which linked confidence with an abstract conception of the “not yet.”
Optimism is an obsession with a future good that one expects and, indeed, existentially demands, placing responsibility on existence, not on one’s own actions. The limits of optimism shape the thematic testimony of numerous scholars. For instance, Levinas, whom many consider the principal ethicist of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, repeatedly referenced quotes from the Old Testament in an effort to forestall unfettered optimism. The call of ethics and responsibility requires active participation without an optimistic guarantee of success or reward, which defies consumer anticipation. The consumer perspective of optimism linked to progress was a natural and regular companion within the emerging commercial world of eighteenth-century Scotland. A major thread of optimism rests with Hutcheson’s theory of human behavior and his emphasis on benevolence. Optimism coincides with a consumerism of anticipation, a focus on the “not yet.” The Scottish Enlightenment did not eradicate the gleeful enthusiasm of the consumer in a commercial world, but it did attempt to temper and resist its full influence.
[end of excerpt]
Cuprins
Contents
PART I. A TALE OF TWO STORIES1. Communication Ethics: The Necessity of Tenacious Hope
Part II. COORDINATES OF CREATIVE INNOVATION
2. Scottish Education: Ethics and Productive Change
3. Lord Provost George Drummond: Architect of Imaginative Space
PART III. SCHOLARSHIP AND LOCALITY
4. Adam Smith: Commercial Life and Caution
5. David Hume: Scholarship and Skepticism
6. Thomas Reid: Common Sense and Undue Clarity
7. George Campbell: An Integrative Rhetoric
8. Adam Ferguson: Discerning Intersections
PART IV. THE REIFYING GRASP
9. Sir Walter Scott: The Fragility of Commemoration
10. Communication Ethics and Marginalization: The Dark Side of Progress
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Recenzii
“Drawing directives from the Scottish Enlightenment, Ronald C. Arnett provides a stunning analysis of the related phenomena of optimism and hope and their role in securing the well-being of one’s personal and communal existence. The analysis serves as a foundation for a theory of communication ethics. As in the past, so in the present; Arnett breaks new ground in the scholarship of this specific field of inquiry.”—Michael J. Hyde, author of The Interruption That We Are: The Health of the Lived Body, Narrative, and Public Moral Argument
“Not just hope, but tenacious hope presupposes my immemorial responsibility toward the life of the Other. Hope, not optimism, tells of necessary engagement, unending participation, co-implication with the Other, of inexorable responsibility towards that Other. ‘If not me, then whom?,’ asks Ronald C. Arnett, evoking Emmanuel Levinas—in the face of the Other there is no shelter, no escape. This study by Arnett showcases major figures from the Scottish Enlightenment, with its local context inspiring his own communication ethics meditations on the implications for the human condition at large, calling forth social change for today.”—Susan Petrilli, author of Sign Studies and Semioethics: Communication, Translation and Values
“Ronald C. Arnett’s splendid new book affirms Buchan’s judgment that the Scottish Enlightenment was ‘crowded with genius.’ It offers the reader two gifts. First, it takes this crowd of genius and, with great clarity, identifies its leaders and its north star: tenacious hope. Second, it sets forth tenacious hope as a lens the modern reader can use to avoid naïve optimism and rhetorical pessimism. Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope belongs on the bookshelf of scholars and the public.”—David A. Frank, coeditor of Rhetoric in the Twenty-First Century: An Interactive Oxford Symposium
“In his wonderful book on the contemporary implications of Scottish Enlightenment, Arnett shows us how to remain vigilant in a world that we are actively contributing to destroy. In response to the danger of optimism, which he associates with the blind belief in the deceptive myth of unchallenged progress, Arnett proposes what he calls the absurdity of tenacious hope, a form of hope that invites us to acknowledge and cultivate the unity of contraries where the pursuit of competing goods—concern for self and other, individual and community, economy and environment—always requires reflection and caution. A must-read for whoever wants to better understand how communication ethics could help us rebuild our world one interaction at a time.”—François Cooren, author of Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism
“In this exhaustively researched book, Arnett extends his larger historical investigations into modernity’s confrontation with communication ethics to the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. Arnett explores a diverse range of scholars whose work emerges in tandem with the astonishing rise from devastating Scottish poverty to 75 percent literacy in less than a century. The resulting communication ethic, which Arnett calls ‘tenacious hope,’ creates a unity of contraries that mitigates the self-righteous assurance of materialist progress with reluctance and concern about its social consequences. Far from lionizing these thinkers, however, Arnett also examines the dark side of this movement, which includes its provinciality, racism, and an unquestioned faith in markets. Arnett’s text is a welcome reminder of alternative ethical pathways for our half-blind current historical moment, with its inveterate faith in technological innovation and the next newest thing.”—Lisbeth A. Lipari, author of Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement
“The Scottish Enlightenment is too often ignored in philosophical and rhetorical circles. Ronald C. Arnett’s detailed study represents the finest engagement to date of the Scottish intellectual scene and its intersection with rhetoric, communication, and ethics. Arnett persuasively demonstrates to us that this neglected period has much to teach us about our contemporary conundrums with tradition, diversity, and hope for a better future.”—Scott R. Stroud, author of Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric
“Not just hope, but tenacious hope presupposes my immemorial responsibility toward the life of the Other. Hope, not optimism, tells of necessary engagement, unending participation, co-implication with the Other, of inexorable responsibility towards that Other. ‘If not me, then whom?,’ asks Ronald C. Arnett, evoking Emmanuel Levinas—in the face of the Other there is no shelter, no escape. This study by Arnett showcases major figures from the Scottish Enlightenment, with its local context inspiring his own communication ethics meditations on the implications for the human condition at large, calling forth social change for today.”—Susan Petrilli, author of Sign Studies and Semioethics: Communication, Translation and Values
“Ronald C. Arnett’s splendid new book affirms Buchan’s judgment that the Scottish Enlightenment was ‘crowded with genius.’ It offers the reader two gifts. First, it takes this crowd of genius and, with great clarity, identifies its leaders and its north star: tenacious hope. Second, it sets forth tenacious hope as a lens the modern reader can use to avoid naïve optimism and rhetorical pessimism. Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope belongs on the bookshelf of scholars and the public.”—David A. Frank, coeditor of Rhetoric in the Twenty-First Century: An Interactive Oxford Symposium
“In his wonderful book on the contemporary implications of Scottish Enlightenment, Arnett shows us how to remain vigilant in a world that we are actively contributing to destroy. In response to the danger of optimism, which he associates with the blind belief in the deceptive myth of unchallenged progress, Arnett proposes what he calls the absurdity of tenacious hope, a form of hope that invites us to acknowledge and cultivate the unity of contraries where the pursuit of competing goods—concern for self and other, individual and community, economy and environment—always requires reflection and caution. A must-read for whoever wants to better understand how communication ethics could help us rebuild our world one interaction at a time.”—François Cooren, author of Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism
“In this exhaustively researched book, Arnett extends his larger historical investigations into modernity’s confrontation with communication ethics to the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. Arnett explores a diverse range of scholars whose work emerges in tandem with the astonishing rise from devastating Scottish poverty to 75 percent literacy in less than a century. The resulting communication ethic, which Arnett calls ‘tenacious hope,’ creates a unity of contraries that mitigates the self-righteous assurance of materialist progress with reluctance and concern about its social consequences. Far from lionizing these thinkers, however, Arnett also examines the dark side of this movement, which includes its provinciality, racism, and an unquestioned faith in markets. Arnett’s text is a welcome reminder of alternative ethical pathways for our half-blind current historical moment, with its inveterate faith in technological innovation and the next newest thing.”—Lisbeth A. Lipari, author of Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement
“The Scottish Enlightenment is too often ignored in philosophical and rhetorical circles. Ronald C. Arnett’s detailed study represents the finest engagement to date of the Scottish intellectual scene and its intersection with rhetoric, communication, and ethics. Arnett persuasively demonstrates to us that this neglected period has much to teach us about our contemporary conundrums with tradition, diversity, and hope for a better future.”—Scott R. Stroud, author of Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric
Descriere
Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope captures the “unity of contraries,” offering the Scottish Enlightenment as an exemplar of tenacious hope countering the excesses of individualism. Ronald C. Arnett reveals two stories: the struggle between optimism and tenacious hope, and optimism’s ultimate triumph in the exclusion of difference and the reification of progress as an ultimate good.