Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope: Contemporary Implications of the Scottish Enlightenment - Softcover

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. 

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...