Judgment, Rhetoric, and the Problem of Incommensurability: Recalling Practical Wisdom.

• Author: Bruner, M. Lane
• Position: Book Reviews

Judgment, Rhetoric, and the Problem of Incommensurability: Recalling Practical Wisdom. By Nola J. Heidlebaugh. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001; pp. xiii + 171. $29.95.

In her investigation of "active artistic judgment," as opposed to the hegemonic form of "spectator judgment" promoted by modernist epistemologies, Nola Heidlebaugh takes her readers through a useful review of the most important inventional resources devised by classical rhetoricians in their attempts to work through apparently incommensurate discourses. Her extended discussions of sophistic invention, commonplaces, Aristotelian topics, phronesis, and Ciceronian stasis and antithesis are all useful lessons in the history of rhetoric and classical attempts at dealing with the ideational and material violence accompanying assumed certainty in the socio-political realm. Given the wide range of responsible caveats scattered throughout the text, the argument holds firm: there are numerous inventional resources at the disposal of those willing to temporarily bracket their first principles for the sake of reason. Just who those people are and how practical her suggestions might be for engaging in real world argument ation remain matters of dispute, but for those with the good will to dialogue confrontation can be creative.

This is a pleasantly hopeful book with Gadamerian flair, although it may prove a bit too hopeful and a little too unclear argumentatively for the tastes of some readers. While Heidlebaugh's manuscript is a very useful study of inventional procedures at the disposal of those with the good will to engage in dialogue filled with interesting discussions on a wide range of thinkers including Protagoras, Gorgias, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Thomas Kuhn, Alasdair MacIntyre, Martin Heidegger, and Richard Rorty, some might hope in vain for a more direct engagement with critics of dialogue and good will such as Jacques Derrida. If active artistic judgment is conceived as being available to practically wise rhetors that is one thing, but if it is conceived as being available to the general public and in the day to day argumentation of self-interested entities it is entirely another. Good will and dialogue are arguably the flowers of politics, but not its root and branch. The root and branch are self-interested systems of disciplinary power "naturally" resistant to threats to their self-interested premises and values. This interesting book could have been...