hermeneutics, history and memory

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Toronto Libraries] On: 08 October 2014, At: 13:54 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpdh20 Hermeneutics, history and memory Peter Seixas Professor and Canada Research Chair a a Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy , University of British Columbia , Vancouver, Canada Published online: 01 Jun 2011. To cite this article: Peter Seixas Professor and Canada Research Chair (2011) Hermeneutics, history and memory, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 47:3, 443-446, DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2010.531529 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2010.531529 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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Page 1: Hermeneutics, history and memory

This article was downloaded by: [University of Toronto Libraries]On: 08 October 2014, At: 13:54Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Paedagogica Historica: InternationalJournal of the History of EducationPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpdh20

Hermeneutics, history and memoryPeter Seixas Professor and Canada Research Chair aa Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy , University of BritishColumbia , Vancouver, CanadaPublished online: 01 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Peter Seixas Professor and Canada Research Chair (2011) Hermeneutics,history and memory, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 47:3,443-446, DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2010.531529

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2010.531529

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Hermeneutics, history and memory

Paedagogica Historica 443

Although the German and Latin versions of this textbook are similar in basic content,they differ in its presentation to the distinct categories of intended readership. Ruf isshown to stand at the threshold between the spheres of practical or body-based proce-dural knowledge and book-centred academic knowledge.

Moving away from medicine, Donal R. Kelley’s essay offers a brief yet informativeoverview of the nature of legal education in the early modern period. He demonstratesthe longevity of Justinian’s Institutes and Digest as pedagogical resources in theRenaissance. In this period educators also drew on scholastic and humanistic modelsto deliver their pedagogy and were attracted by the innovative methods of Ramus.

Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer examines the role of textbooks on elementary Latinconversation and catechisms in facilitating confessional compromise and conflict. Shefinds that colloquies tended not to entrench confessional polemics but served as animportant device for considering complex positions. She demonstrates that the breed-ing ground for sectarian prejudice in a pedagogical environment can be located morereadily in catechetical instruction. Emidio Campis’ article explores the teaching careerof Peter Martyr Vermigli in Zurich between 1556 and 1562 where he was “divinarumliterarum professor” at the Schola Tigurina. Campis finds that this environment wasone which facilitated vigorous publication activity on the part of Vermigli.

The final article of the volume is placed in a section of its own “ApproachingModernity: A Perspective from the History of Education”, and remains the sole articledealing with the eighteenth century. Jürgen Oelker’s specific subject is elementarytextbooks in this period and the theory of the learning child.

This book offers a valuable and informative exploration of scholarly knowledge asmanifested in the form of the textbook in early modern Europe. It is particularly strongin describing the nature of pedagogical works deployed in a university setting. It isalso especially useful for scholars interested in university teaching in the Holy RomanEmpire and Italy during the sixteenth century. The volume is particularly detailed inits treatment of the content of pedagogical works. Given the physicality of the objectsof study, more consistent consideration of questions of form and materiality mighthave proved rewarding. This is not to say that these matters are ignored – indeed theyare the focus of a number of the articles. Similarly, greater consideration of the natureof textbook usage among students would have been worthwhile. In conclusion, thisbook offers a wealth of informative discipline-orientated case studies and ultimatelyprovides a broader sense of the nature of the textbook in early modern Europe.

Richard KirwanSchool of History, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland

[email protected]© 2011, Richard Kirwan

DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2010.513094

Hermeneutics, history and memory, by Philip Gardner, London and New York,Routledge, 2010, 199 pp., £24.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-415-35338-0

I am a historian. I have tried to read Paul Ricoeur a few times. Without success. So Iwas delighted by an author’s introductory promise (p. 9) of a volume whose subtitlecould have been “Ricoeur for historians” (suggesting readers like me are“dummies”).

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Page 3: Hermeneutics, history and memory

444 Book reviews

The central problem for history, as Gardner lays it out, is the tension, indeed aprima facie contradiction, between its claims of truth and its method of interpreta-tion. Without truth, history collapses into fable or myth. But without interpretive revi-sion, historians’ work is largely over and done with. Most of the time, historians arecontent to let this unresolved contradiction lie beneath the surface and carry on withtheir day-to-day work in the archives (Gardner’s picture of historians’ daily lives isset almost entirely in the archive). But occasionally, as has been the case with thechallenges of postmodernist scholars of the past 25 years, they are forced to confrontthe problem head on. “Welcome or not then, the option of simply ignoring the wildhorse of methodology has become progressively more difficult in recent years…”(pp. 3–4).

In addressing this central conundrum, Gardner argues that the work of Paul Ricoueris crucial. In order to come back to the problem of history, Gardner takes us on “detours”through hermeneutics, Ricouer and memory: the detours comprise the book.

Gardner’s style is that of a historian more than a philosopher, and perhaps that isas it should be, addressed, as it is, to practising historians who may have vestigial resis-tances to theory. Gardner proceeds by accumulating well-selected quotations, some-times repetitive in respect of their basic points, a method at times reminiscent of DavidLowenthal’s encyclopaedic The past is a foreign country (on a smaller scale). In manyinstances, when I went to record a keenly insightful passage, I found myself dealingwith a quotation from another work. Nevertheless, the steady accretion has a rhetoricaleffect, a power that a simple, clear statement of the problem and the argument might not.

After setting up the problem in the first chapter, Chapter 2, “History and Herme-neutics”, leads us through a history of continental philosophy, tracing the lineage ofhermeneutics from Schleirmacher, through Dilthey to Gadamer, laying the groundworkfor Ricoeur (though the latter two were twentieth-century contemporaries).

Gardner introduces the key idea of the historicity of life, attempting to move theconceptualisation of the core problem of history beyond epistemology to ontology, asan encounter with the past that is directed towards a difficult and problematic media-tion across time. Quoting Gadamer, “We are always situated in history … I mean thatour consciousness is determined by real historical becoming in such a way that it doesnot have the freedom to situate itself over against the past” (p. 55). In my reading, itis not clear that Gardner (or any of the theorists he explores) actually escapes theepistemological questions: even in their reformulation, ontology and epistemology arebound up with each other. Peculiar, then, that Gardner does not refer to the work ofJoern Ruesen, whose recent writing lies in the tradition of Dilthey and Gadamer, andwho has much to say on this very issue.

In Chapter 3, “History, Hermeneutics and Ricoeur”, which should be the core of abook that promises an explication of Ricoeur, things become more obscure. Here,Gardner enumerates some key terms, which, he argues, lie at the heart of Ricoeur’sconceptual power. “Attending to this vocabulary and its attendant methodologicalentailments is not likely to be a matter of changing our working practices radically,but rather of systematizing and clarifying their good aspects, and identifying andmodifying their bad” (p. 87).

The first of these terms is distanciation: “the condition for the enterprise ofhistory” (p. 88). Why is distanciation so fundamental? In everyday conversation, thatis, dialogue with people who occupy our own temporal moment, we confront anempathetic challenge to understand their intentions and their meanings. But that chal-lenge is contained within the assumptions of human beings occupying a shared

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Page 4: Hermeneutics, history and memory

Paedagogica Historica 445

moment in time, a shared present. In contrast, when we encounter a written text thatsurvives from another era, the nature of the task changes fundamentally, as a directconsequence of the disjunction between the time of its creation and our own: distan-ciation. In order to arrive at an understanding of the text, we need to work on recon-structing the milieu in which it was written in the first place. The text should help usto do that. This challenge, which does not have to be entertained for oral exchange ina shared present, plunges us into the process of doing history. The hermeneutic circlerevolves around this process: we cannot understand the text – as a piece of a pastwhose ways of living and thinking we do not share – without knowing about its wholehistorical context, and yet we depend on the text, and others like it, to build our knowl-edge of the context (see also p. 118).

But this is not the end of the hermeneutic circle (or Ricoeur’s variant, the herme-neutic arc). Indeed, it seems to spin again and again, in slightly different forms, withrelated but distinct meanings, so that some readers may, like me, have a difficult timesorting out whether we are covering the same ground from a different direction, orwhether we are in new territory altogether. The next terms tied to the hermeneutic circleare “explanation” and “understanding”: “the hermeneutic arc allows [Ricoeur] toconceptualize more closely the reciprocal movement of explanation and understandingin interpretation” (p. 81). “Understanding” is directed towards the thoughts, values andintentions of historical actors, the empathetic orientation exemplified by Collingwood.“Explanation” is directed towards larger changes and developments. The divide is repli-cated by the distinction between “reasons” (of historical actors) and “causes” (of histor-ical events) and again by the juxtaposition of the German “Verstehen” and “Eklarung”.

Ricoeur, as quoted by Gardner, draws the relationship between the two poles:

… understanding has nothing to do with an immediate grasping foreign psychic life orwith an emotional identification with a mental intention. Understanding is entirelymediated by the whole of the explanatory procedures that precede it and accompany it.(p. 84)

Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia, among others who have written recently about“sublime historical experience” and the “presence” of the past, are not cited orconfronted in these passages. Rather, Gardner moves along to another of Ricoeur’sfundamental concepts to bring “understanding” and “explanation” into relationship witheach other in the discipline of history: that of “narrative”. The transition here, again,is not entirely clear: the spinning of the hermeneutic circle can produce a dizzying effect.The chapter ends with thoughts (rather than arguments) on the relationship betweennarrative and life: both “share the quality of a fundamental temporality” (p. 86). Thecoherence of narrative, linked to the past by “conformity to the documents” (p. 87),characterises history as interpretation. Gardner does not explore what such “conformity”entails.

Distanciation, understanding, explanation, narrative, temporality and, finally, thehermeneutic circles which draw them all into relationship with each other: this chapterpokes at Ricoeur in a way that leaves the reader who has tripped on the three volumesof Time, narrative and history unsatisfied and hungry for more: not necessarily moretext, but more clarity.

While I welcomed a guide through the complexities of Ricoeur, even when leddown some dead ends, my trust was tested in the penultimate chapter, “History andMemory.” Gardner opens:

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Page 5: Hermeneutics, history and memory

446 Book reviews

Unlike history, which is predicated … upon the recovery of meaning in the face of thedistance, difference and dislocation that separate present from past, memory operating inliving human consciousness establishes intimate and continuous connection between thetwo. (p. 89)

He treats memory, here, largely as an individual, psychological phenomenon, but thatdoes not prevent him from slipping into discussion of writers such as Pierre Nora andMaurice Halwachs who consider memory within cultural and social frameworks. Attimes, Gardner conflates memory and oral history (p. 90), leading him to slide from adiscussion of memory to problems of transcription (pp. 92–93). But memory is not thesame as oral history. The use of living people’s testimony as a source is a techniquefor doing history, subject to methodological considerations analogous to using otherkinds of sources, each posing distinctive problems. At other times, Gardner treats“memory” exclusively (but only implicitly) as the memory of someone being inter-viewed by an oral historian (e.g. p. 112).

The chapter thus confuses oral history, memory and testimony. And still, there arefelicitous pearls of insight to be found: “If history deprecates memory, it lays waste toits wellspring. If memory ignores history, it squanders its credibility” (p. 115).

In conclusion Gardner asks his historian readers, was it worth the effort to takethis “detour” through epistemology and methodology? Yes, he concludes, withRicoeur as the guide and hermeneutics as the central concept. I enjoyed the ride, butit would have been better to have the windscreen wipers turned on. I also wonderedwhy Gardner, who is located in a school of education, does not have anything to sayabout the implications of hermeneutics for history education. It seems to me thatthese are twofold. First, they would involve developing students’ understandings ofboth the latitudes of, and limitations on, interpretation, in dealing with historicaltraces and, as well, the construction of historical narratives: an education in historicalepistemology. Second, they would promote students’ understandings of their ownhistoricity, their embeddedness in historical processes: an education in historicalontology. The latter would require students understanding the “big pictures” ofhistory; both their own agency, and the structural limitations on that agency. Or, inGardner’s (p. 62) words, “the enduring complexities which attend our best attempts tounderstand ourselves in time, and time in ourselves”.

Peter SeixasProfessor and Canada Research Chair

Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia,Vancouver, Canada

[email protected]© 2011, Peter Seixas

DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2010.531529

Ontplooiing door communicatie: Geschiedenis van het onderwijs aan doven enslechthorenden in Nederland, by Marjoke Rietveld-van Wingerden and CorrieTijsseling, Antwerp, Garant, 2010, 270 pp., €35.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-90-441-2608-2

This Dutch-language title roughly translates as Unfolding through communication:History of education for deaf and hearing-impaired people in the Netherlands. It

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