Dealing With the 'Brute Facts' of Obama

Since the so-called “hermeneutic turn,” initiated and sustained by that Teutonic proclivity for ratiocination, we’re told that everything—on the page and off the page—is a text, and therefore it’s interpretation all the way down. As philosopher James K. A. Smith explains it: “There is no uninterpreted reality, no brute facts passively sitting there to be simply and purely seen. Rather, we see the world always already through the lens of an interpretative framework governed by ultimate beliefs. We could say that we always already see the world through a worldview.”

Two recent intellectual biographies reveal that neither the left nor the right have privileged access to the brute fact of Barack Obama. Our forty-fourth president is a text whose meaning is slippery to admirers and adversaries alike. On the left, there’s Harvard historian James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama—a title that plays on the inscripted nature of his subject. Kloppenberg interprets Obama as a specimen of American philosophical pragmatism: