"Practical criticism"

I always found it odd that I.A. Richards used Coleridge's phrase "practical criticism" to describe the method of his interpretation, because Richards' sense of "practical" cannot translate into Coleridge's so easily. This is because it is very specifically tied to a notion of communication that is more technical and more reified than Coleridge's. For Coleridge, language is logos, the revelatory word. For Richards, it is a thing, a medium. This is not to say that Richards thinks language cannot provide access to God. It means that Coleridge and Richards are going in opposite directions: Coleridge wanted to restore to the task of criticism (in the face of its proliferation in the literary magazines) its spiritual and philosophical basis. Making it more precise was only a means to this. Thus the language itself does not communicate in Richards sense. It conveys one up to the Almighty, even if it takes place here on earth. For Richards, the primary goal is communication irrespective of what is revealed. Though this is perhaps an overemphasis of where he really stands, this goal needs to be stressed in order to get at the real sense sense of the word "practical." He specifies it quite clearly:

That the one and only goal of all critical endeavors, of all interpretation, appreciation, exhortation, praise or abuse, is improvement in communication may seem an exaggeration. But in practice it is so.

-Practical Criticism, 10.

All this theorizing about the purpose of language is useless when we look at the actual method we employ when we go about reading: in practice, practically, its only motivation is to bring out the meaning in the phrase under consideration. Value judgments as to what it has produced come only afterwards. The whole thing turns on a distinction between theoria and praxis, and the fact that in any theorizing or evaluating there will always already be a practical act of reading that has taken place. There, in the space and time of that reading, which can always be reconstructed, took place the act of practical criticism.

People often say that practical criticism is defined by its claims to empirical objectivity. This is not so much false as it is misleading, because it fails to emphasize that phenomenon that Richards is always after: the reading that would be necessary to make a value judgement and that value judgements always presuppose. It is not really that this reading must have been empirical as that it must have taken place and had a definite, specifiable structure that we can always put back together. The call for practical criticism, then, is a call that people be accountable for the linguistic character of what they say, the practical act of reading that anything they say requires. In this sense, it is a call to recognize the alterity of language and its non-naturalness. Indeed, Richards will reinscribe this naturalness back into it by claiming that this linguistic site is fully recognizable (or not liable to play--thus the language with which Richards deals is not textual in the sense in which Derrida uses this word), but this I think can only be fully understood when we grasp that it stems from this sense of the practical. It isn't that Richards is an idealist when it comes to the nature of the linguistic element his mode of analysis presupposes so much as it is that the practicality of this mode, its call back to the precise structure of alterity always already related to in any act of language, happens to require a model of that alterity as a communicability that can be received totally.

...so gilt es...

Insofern Anschauen oder Denken hier erwähnt werden kann, so gilt es als ein Unterschied, ob etwas oder nichts angeschaut oder gedacht wird. Nichts Anschauen oder Denken hat also eine Bedeutung; beide werden unterschieden, so ist (existiert) Nichts in unserem Anschauen oder Denken; oder vieldmehr ist es das leere Anschauen und Denken selbst; und dasselbe leere Anschauen oder Denken also das reine Sein. -- Nichts is somit dieselbe Bestimmung oder vielmehr Bestimmungslosigkeit und damit überhaupt dasselbe, was das reine Sein ist.

-Wissenschaft der Logik (Lehre vom Sein), Kap. 1, B (Nichts)

I'll never get over this odd turn in Hegel's Science of Logic. It appears when he says "so gilt es als ein Unterschied:" it will count for us as a distinction or difference. Insofar as we can speak of Anschauen oder Denken, intuition or thinking, it will count for us whether something or nothing is intuited or thought. We'll count the difference between thinking of nothing and thinking of something (nichts oder etwas), that we can only suppose. And suppose specifically by speaking, by mentioning or referencing: erwähnen, seeking out or referring to something. Insofar as we can refer to intuition and thinking here, it will matter for us that either something or nothing is intuited or thought. Insofar as we can seek out a distinction, the distinction will count for us. By virtue of the distinction's merely being possible, it will count. The faith in the rationality or cunning of logos and dialectic here is a little too much for me. We'll seek out this distinction, and if we can seek it out--regardless of whether it actually counts or not--it will count for us. Therefore, nothing is or exists (es ist, es existiert): if there is this distinction for us, nothing exists at least in that distinction. Therefore it immediately passes into being. Nothing is not nothing just as much as pure being is nothing, because and only because this distinction between something and nothing in thinking is possible. Where does this distinction come from? Derrida will inscribe it precisely in this unthought possibility that Hegel seems so confident will begin his dialectic, in its pure virtuality without being and even without nothingness--but precisely not as a thought. For Derrida, this "...so gilt es..." is Hegel thinking differance.

Existence (and The Hermeneutics of Facticity)

Facticity and existentiality: the alternation between these terms is a constant feature of every analysis in Being and Time, and tracking their appearance and disappearance, their use and their constant reinterpretation is a great way to ensure that one reads that treatise attentively. But existentiality, despite Heidegger's efforts, can be said to remain underdeveloped there--no doubt because it is intrinsically hard to think and the later parts of the treatise that would give it a fuller and more explicit definition are missing. This of course does not mean that it is not thought in Being and Time, or that it is not developed and investigated as a structure, just that it is often less foregrounded in propositional statements and definitions than facticity. Supplementing this lack are the refinements made to it immediately afterward in Was ist Metaphysik?,  and especially with respect to Sartre's interpretation of existence in the Brief über den "Humanismus," that place heavy emphasis on interpreting existence as ek-sistence, standing-outside-of-itself. But perhaps this refinement is a bit too rigid with respect to what Heidegger is getting at in Being and Time, and therefore less helpful. What is needed is, of course, a good reading of Being and Time--in which ek-sistence as existence is indeed fully developed--but also perhaps a look at the earlier, clumsier lecture notes. In these Heidegger is less interested compared to his published texts for rigor with respect to how he speaks of being (not caring as much, that is, whether he says the obviously wrong phrase "being is"), and thus he is more likely to define it explicitly in a sort of rough and ready fashion. This brings it more into relief as a phenomenon  equiprimordial (gleichursprunglich) with facticity: because Heidegger does not have to talk about it with respect to Sartre's interpretation of it (which more and more should not be dismissed as a misinterpretation but a necessary interpretation and modification), it is seen more clearly as interconnected with facticity. All this is to say that a reading of the following sentences from the 1923 Freiburg course The Hermeneutics of Facticity could seriously help the reading proposed above:

The being of factical life is distinctive in that it is in the how of the being of its being-possible. The ownmost possibility of be-ing itself which Dasein (facticity) is, and indeed without this possibility being "there" for it, may be designated as existence.

-Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 12.

Existence leaps out of the facticity which it is or exists as (one begins to see how tough it is to talk about this stuff explicitly). This makes phenomena like historizing in Being and Time open out into its existentiality and not remain just a sort of mode of authenticity that emphasizes facticity, which is precisely the most necessary and most fruitful way to think about it. Furthermore, we see how the hermeneutical task is itself really a making-the-

phenomenon-exist for us:

It is with respect to this authentic be-ing itself that facticity is placed into our forehaving when initially engaging it and bringing it into play in our

 hermeneutical questioning. It is from out of it, on the basis of it, and with a view to it that facticity will be interpretively explicated. The conceptual explacata which grow out of this interpretation are to be designated as existentials.

-Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 12.

In short, it is helpful to drive the term "existence" back into the

 phenomenon, its co-belonging with facticity, in order to get a handle on it--and in fact this itself is the task of hermeneutics for Heidegger. Like with Kant, just collecting terms together, or even dividing them up in order to explicate them ("ek-sistence") does not release what is gotten at by the terms into any significant understanding. If Heidegger does this after Being and Time, it is perhaps because he considers this hermeneutical task preparatory to the thinking to be carried out in that treatise. But what bears upon this is the relation between the hermeneutical task and the phenomenology he carries out there--which he specifies in the introduction.