The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History (Variorum Collected Studies) 9780754659990

Citation preview

Also in the Variorum Collected Studies Series:

R EDWARD CRANZ (Ed. Nancy Struever)

Reorientations of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance

MARCIAL. COLISH Studies in Scholasticism

PAUL F. GRENDLER

Renaissance Education Between Religion and Politics

JAMES J. MURPHY

Latin Rhetoric and Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

STEPHEN GERSH

Reading Plato, Tracing Plato From Ancient Commentary to Medieval Reception

JOHN MONFASANI

Greeks and Latins in Renaissance Italy Studies on Humanism and Philosophy in the 15th Century

W. KEITH PERCIVAL

Studies in Renaissance Grammar

RONALD G. WITT

Italian Humanism and Medieval Rhetoric

BENJAMIN G. KOHL

Culture and Politics in Early Renaissance Padua

JOHN MARENBON

Aristotelian Logic, Platonism, and the Context of Early Medieval Philosophy in the West

DONALD R. KELLEY

The Writing of History and the Study of Law

GABRIEL NUCHELMANS (Ed. E.P. Bos)

Studies on the History of Logic and Semantics, 12th-17th Centuries

JOHN MONFASANI

Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy Selected Articles

VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES

The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History

Nancy S. Struever

The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History

O Routledge

S^^ Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition © 2009 by Nancy S. Struever Nancy S. Struever has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Struever, Nancy S. The history of rhetoric and the rhetoric of history. - (Variorum collected studies series ; no. 934) 1. Rhetoric - Philosophy. 2. Rhetoric and psychology. 3. Historiography - History. I. Title II. Series 808'.001-dc22 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009923685 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-5999-0 (hbk)

VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS934

CONTENTS Introduction

ix

Acknowledgements

xx

PART 1: RHETORIC AS INQUIRY I

The pertinence of rhetorical theory and practice for current Vichian scholarship Bollettino del Centra di Studi Vichiani 33. Soveria Mannelli, 2003

II

Topics in history History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 19. Middletown, CT, 1980

III

Subtilitas applicandi in rhetorical hermeneutics: Peirce's gloss and Kelly's example Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, eds W. Jost and M.J. Hyde. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997

IV

Dilthey's Hobbes and Cicero's rhetoric Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour ofHeinrich F. Plett, eds P.L. Oesterreich and T.O. Shane. Leiden: Brill, 1999, pp. 233-261

V

Political rhetoric and rhetorical politics in Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) Rhetoric and Renewal in the Latin West 1100-1540: Essays in Honour of John O. Ward, eds C.J. Mews, C.J. Nederman andR.M. Thomson. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003

VI

VII

Alltaglichkeit, timefulness, in the Heideggerian program Heidegger and Rhetoric, eds D.M. Gross and A. Kemmann. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005 Historical priorities Journal of the History of Ideas 66. Philadelphia, PA, 2005

67-83

66-79

215-231

1-28

243-258

105-130

541-556

CONTENTS

vi

PART 2: THE RHETORIC OF GENRES VIII

Lorenzo Valla: Humanist rhetoric and the critique of the Classical languages of morality Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. J. Murphy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983

IX

Fables of power Representations 4. Berkeley, CA, 1983

X

Proverbial signs: formal strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi Annalid'Italianistica2. Chapel Hill, NC, 1984

XI

Pasquier's Recherches de la France: the exemplarity of his medieval sources History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 27. Middletown, CT, 1988

XII

Shakespeare and rhetoric Rhetorica 6. Berkeley, CA, 1988

XIII

The conversable world: eighteenth-century transformations of the relation of rhetoric and truth Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature, eds D.H. Bialostosky andL.D. Needham. Bloomingtom, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995

XIV

Ethos and pathos in Ruskin's rhetoric; Florence and his aesthetic politics Gli Anglo-americani a Firenze: Idea e Costruzione del Rinascimento, ed. M. Fantoni. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1999

XV

Rhetoric: time, memory, memoir A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, eds W. Jost and W. Olmsted. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004

191-206

108-127

94-109

51-59

137-144

233-249

79-88

425-441

PART 3: RHETORIC AND THE DISCIPLINES XVI

Petrarch's Invective contra medicum: an early confrontation of rhetoric and medicine Modern Language Notes 108. Baltimore, MD, 1993

659-679

CONTENTS

vii

XVII Rhetoric and medicine in Descartes' Passions de I 'dme\ the issue of intervention

196-212

XVIII Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere (1681): a legal opinion on the use of Aristotle in medicine

322-336

Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. H.F. Plett. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993

Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, eds C. Blackwell and S. Kusukawa. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999

XIX

Hobbes and Vico on law: a rhetorical gloss New Vico Studies 19. Atlanta, GA, 2001

Index

63-85 1-5

This volume contains xx + 336 pages

PUBLISHER'S NOTE The articles in this volume, as in all others in the Variorum Collected Studies Series, have not been given a new, continuous pagination. In order to avoid confusion, and to facilitate their use where these same studies have been referred to elsewhere, the original pagination has been maintained wherever possible. Each article has been given a Roman number in order of appearance, as listed in the Contents. This number is repeated on each page and is quoted in the index entries.

INTRODUCTION Part 1: Rhetoric as Inquiry My historical interests have always been reflexive, as investigations into the history of inquiry itself, and my primary aim has been to distinguish rhetoric as a mode of inquiry, as a second, Classical formation, oppositional to philosophy, and developing in a rich, disheveled tradition of theories and pedagogical practices, manuals. In the late twentieth century the discussion of inquiry modes transpired within an atmosphere of theoretical, critical ferment, within, indeed, a context of academic "culture wars," contests about basic "Humanistic" motives and values, where the culture warriors, to varying degrees, shared a common innovative strategy, the "linguistic turn"; that is, they shared a strong conviction that the material of inquiry into human capacity and act is language, as it is set out and experienced in discursive events and practices. Certainly, this was the premise of my first book, The Language of History in the Renaissance (1970), which considered the effect of rhetorical premises and habits for Humanist historiography. 1 I I have included only the last of my four Forschungsberichtungen, all, obviously, reflecting on the linguistic turn: "Historiography and linguistics" (1979); "Historical discourse," in the Handbook of Discourse Analysis (1985); "The place of the history of rhetoric in intellectual history: the Early Modern example" (1998), and "The pertinence of rhetorical theory and practice for current Vichian scholarship" (2003). All four bibliographies review the states of the question, the major issues of the engagement with language experience as the material evidence for historical inquiry. The bare premise, that the evidential matter is language experience, is a basic assumption that the historical experience itself is shared, the stuff of mediation, discursive negotiations of values, processes, institutions, authority. Rhetoric's egregious interest is in the mediated, negotiated nature of the evidence, the negotiations even of the values and status of the self. 1

Not included are several articles that dealt with the effect of trends in language study on contemporary Humanist inquiry: "The study of language and the study of history" (1974); "Classical investigations" (1974); "Philosophical problems and historical solutions" (1987); "Classical rhetorical topics and contemporary historical discourse" (1992). The linguistic turn, perhaps, is now in the process of being challenged by a "neuronic," or neurotic turn.

x

INTRODUCTION

My conviction is that the movement from linguistics to discourse analysis to rhetoric represents a progress as well as a refinement, narrowing of interests. For, rhetoric has an aptitude, an economical selective capacity to sort powerful motives that enables, paradoxically, expansiveness, inclusiveness in research. Appealing to a Peircian strategy of definition of the nature of a specific inquiry I argue that rhetorical "beliefs" generate "habits of action" in inquiry that make it anti-solipsist to the bone. For, rhetoric's task of persuasion is an absorption with reception that gives rhetoric its investigative edge; as Heidegger points out - it functions inside politics. Thus rhetoric is devoted, and devoted primarily, to the investigation of civil things, G. Vice's cose civili, with "civil" encompassing a range of human capacities and actions, the events of being-with-others; it is an interpretative capacity, a civil hermeneutic. And thus the focus on Vichian rhetorical interests illumines his innovative contributions to civil inquiry This civil interest is at the expense of the uncivil; or, civil definition precedes and schools the moral. The devotion to the civil gives rhetoric a peculiar talent for criticism of the expressions, the aspirations and fissures of individualist moralistic ideologies. Rhetoric, in short, is an original, and significant, linguistic turn; ideas, things come to us mediated by words, texts, that is, come to us mediated, the products of civil process. Further, any reflexive consideration is an exercise in judgement; one does not take for granted the ease, the directness of communication between inquiry modes and the civil events they attempt to account for. I assume difficulty; the inquirer's first responsibility is for the elegance and use of the formal protocols of the inquiry itself. Yet I assume as well that there is a case for rhetorical inquiry as less likely to fail, as processing with more civil tact, thus as less necessitarian in its habits, more open to expansive possibilities. II "Topics in history" (1980). The occasion for this paper was a conference on Hay den White's Metahistory, a publication which was an event both in the academic culture wars and in the Anglophone revival of rhetoric, and, as well, a provocative insertion of rhetorical interests in the critical account of modern (primarily nineteenth century) historiography. The paper questions White's exclusive focus on figurative production, on the "cognitive" effects of metaphor; in it I claim that this elides the rhetorical concern with reception, and thus with the "political," and I make a case for the central importance of rhetorical, or topical argument in historiography.2

2 Not included is "Irony and experimentation in Hayden White's Metahistory" (1993), which contrasts White's thematization of irony as one of K. Burke's "Four Master Tropes" in Metahistory with his own use of irony as an expansive, experimental tactic.

INTRODUCTION

xi

III "Subtilitas applicandi in rhetorical hermeneutics: Peirce's gloss and Kelly's example" (1997). Gadamer recalls subtilitas applicandi as one of three hermeneutic values in the eighteenth century; to define rhetoric as inquiry is, normally, to define it as hermeneutic, a vital interpretative mode; and, rhetoric's concern with civil issues strongly motivates a concern with application. In G.A. Kelly's work on the history of political thought, Kelly does not specify his program as "rhetorical"; yet he frequently engages in rhetorical analysis of political-oratorical texts; Kelly's thick pragmatic political concerns contrast with and correct White's exclusively "literary" approach, he has a sophisticated awareness of the range of use of political theoretical arguments for use, for the pragmatic possibilities of actual intervention, application in political work; particularly ingenious is his critical sense of the political dysfunction of the arguments of nostalgia, of the virtues of liberal irony. IV "Dilthey's Hobbes and Cicero's rhetoric" (1999), addresses the recurrent, indeed, obtrusive topicality of Dilthey's intellectual historical initiatives in the discussion. E. Garin, for example remarks Dilthey as model in his memoir, "Sessanta anni dopo" in his Filosofia come sapere storico. Most certainly the expansive philosophical interests helped strengthen the early formulation of intellectual historical program, as well as the different contributions of disciplinary allegiances to the history of ideas. Dilthey argued in his Weltanschauung und Analyse that the recapture of Roman notions of dominion was one of the three major strands of Renaissance Classicism. Addressing this claim allows us to take advantage of Dilthey's ingenious connection of the work of Renaissance Humanists such as Valla and Vives with the innovations of Hobbes. This, in turn, allows us to revalue the Early Modern exploitation of the rhetorical critique of Roman politics to be found, primarily, in Cicero's severe pessimism. V "Political rhetoric and rhetorical politics in Juan Luis Vives" (2003). By far the largest portion of the scholarship of the history of rhetoric is devoted to the tradition itself, to the pedagogical practices and texts, manuals. One of the most accomplished scholars of the tradition is John O. Ward; yet, perhaps his major contribution has been to the contest over the nature of medieval as opposed to Renaissance rhetoric; B. Vickers speaks of medieval fragmentation, Renaissance unity, Ward of the comprehensiveness, unity of medieval work as opposed to Renaissance academic fragmentation. The values he attributes to medieval rhetorical theory, I would claim, surface again in the sixteenth century Humanist Vives' strong critique of medieval Scholastic dialectic dominant in the University of Paris, a critique, I argue, linked to his strong political-rhetorical engagements.

xii

INTRODUCTION

VI "Alltaglichkeit, timefulness, in the Heideggerian program" (2005). An anomaly in the current discussion is the philosopher Martin Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric in his SSI924 lectures, Die Grundbegriffe der aristotelische Philosophic; here Heidegger uses the Rhetoric to gloss Aristotle's major texts - the Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics. Heidegger's reading of the Rhetoric is, arguably, the best twentieth century account, with its careful exposition of the deep structure of rhetoric's political functioning: rhetoric as "the first fundamental hermeneutic of the dailyness of living together." The paper emphasises that for Heidegger temporality is crucial to the definition of "being with others," thus crucial for rhetorical program.3 VII "Historical priorities" (2005). This paper was one of several in this issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas considering S. Camporeale's contribution to Renaissance intellectual history. Camporeale's brilliant account of Valla's rhetorical revival owes much to his mentor E. Garin, who was, in turn, much influenced by Dilthey.4 For Camporeale insists on seriousness: Valla's rhetorical interests were rooted in his strenuous revisionary program in theology and ecclesiology; Christian politics motivated rhetorical analysis; it is, I contend, a natural association of rhetorical and revisionary motives. Like F. Edward Cranz, Camporeale hypothesized deep, fundamental reorientations in medieval and Renaissance thinking. Camporeale argues for radical change in Humanistic, or rhetorical theology, a radicalism often effaced in our current discussion. Part 2: The Rhetoric of Genres Generic constraints can be inquiry protocols. For example, some of the more important innovations of Renaissance Humanism transpire in "familiar" genres: the familiar letter, the soliloquy, the interior dialogue, lyric poetry, invective, the Montaignian essay. My basic argument is that proper strategies of moral inquiry engage familiar skills: thus Iris Murdoch's "attention, articulation,

3 I have not included my contribution to the Festschrift for Marc Fumaroli, "Rhetorical definition: a French initiative," in Republique des Lettres; Republique des Arts. Geneva: 2008, 613-31. Fumaroli, of course, is as devoted to giving an account of the civil focus, the effectivity of rhetoric in the Renaissance and Baroque period ; certainly his work affirms the Heideggerian assumption that rhetoric functions inside politics. 4 I have not included "Garin, Camporeale, and the recovery of Renaissance rhetoric" (2004), a contribution to a symposium in Camporeale's honor at Johns Hopkins University. Here I discuss in greater detail his scholarly context. And, while the word "rhetoric" scarcely passes Cranz's lips, the strong affinities of F. Edward Cranz and Camporeale's interests in radical change become clear in F. Edward Cranz, Reorientations of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance, N. Struever, ed. (2006).

INTRODUCTION

xiii

appropriation"; Murdoch contends in the excellent The Sovereignty of Good that most philosophical concepts are too big, too clumsy to capture the vital, small, frequent choices that constitute the texture of moral engagement. That the rhetoric of familiarity was central to Humanist innovation in ethical inquiry was the premise of the first chapter, "Petrarchan ethics; inventing a practice" in Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (1992). I argue that Petrarch's collection, Le familiari, was his hegemonous genre, obviously inspired by Cicero's collections, but giving at once a preview and review of contemporary inquiry, and, delivering his notion of the necessity of a sharp revision of inquiry in general.5 And here I must acknowledge my deep obligation to the brilliant revisionary work of B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985); Williams' critique of the systemic moralism that persists in contemporary philosophy reformulates for me the perspicacity of rhetoric's constructive opposition.6 VIII "Lorenzo Valla: Humanist rhetoric and the critique of the Classical languages of morality" (1983). This early paper begins a long engagement with genre study as central to the history of inquiry. It is a commonplace for historians of Early Modern inquiry to assume the Humanist exchange of correspondence was an originary and vital form of scholary exchange, inclusive, expansionist. But, another topos is to deplore their ad hominem politics. Yet, in the case of Valla, I argue, the invectives develop an aggressive claim to seriousness, personal responsibility, in the general philosophical-theological discourse. IX "Fables of power" (1983). Primarily focused on Vichian etymologies, the paper argues that etymologies are of great rhetorical interest, not only for the intensity of their commitment to simple language structures, but for their 5 Theory as Practice includes longer versions of "Metaphoric morals" (1982), an account of Cusanus' expansive figurative strategies, and "Lorenzo Valla's grammar of subject and object" (1987), which attempts to describe the rhetorical weight of grammatical categories; it includes as well essays on Machiavelli, Erasmus, Montaigne. 6 In "Rhetoric and philosophy in Vichian inquiry" (1985),! contrast the usefulness of Williams' philosophical sensitivity to generic dysfunction in academic ethics with M. Mooney's Vico and the Tradition of Rhetoric (1985) which claims an academic rhetoric as sole source of Vichian rhetorical influence. From another perspective, "The rhetoric of familiarity: a pedagogy of ethics" (1998), describes an undergraduate course where the practice of familiar writing -journal entries, letters, essays - constitutes the students' moral work, replaces academicism. Again not included is "Montaigne's Ciceronian pessimism" (2002), where I develop M. Fumaroli's argument that the Montaignian familiar essay is an extrapolation from Cicero's familiar letters; what Montaigne finds of particular use is the Ciceronian pessimism; it is Cicero's ability to address public issues in an intimate manner that is of interest as nourishing an engaged, severe critique - "private humors" reading politics.

xiv

INTRODUCTION

claim for the perdurability of civil, historical argument: "[a]n etymology is a primitive experience of an originary social decision; etymology collectively deals in meanings not only as 'intended,' but as accepted; the individual acts of deriving denned in the word are exemplary acts of historical reception, and they illumine a typology of assent..." X "Proverbial signs: formal strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi" (1984). The proverb, topos, maxim, aphorism is a basic formal resource in rhetorical argument. Guicciardini's Ricordi offer Classical texts as vernacular wisdom. The proverbs do not overvalue princely invention, but insist on a realistic grasp of community beliefs; they are not moralistic formulae, but possibilities for inducing a state of cognitive alertness to particularly dysfunctional political discourse. Guicciardini gives, perhaps, a subtle corrective of Machiavelli's Classicism. XI "Pasquier's Recherches de la France: the exemplarity of his medieval sources" (1988) The exemplum is another basic rhetorical argumentative resource, but as subject to historical shifts in strategies of use as the proverb. Here the change is away from J.-M. David's "classical" use of the historical event of individual prowess to stipulate a civic virtue for the heroic citizen, towards David's "medieval" use of a story to illumine a shared truth, a consensual frame. Indeed, Pasquier develops the medieval tactic to critique the "untoward" classicism of Machiavelli. XII "Shakespeare and rhetoric" (1988). The paper argues that Shakespeare (and Stoppard) possess, in excess, the essential theatrical skill as a basic oral/aural - simply rhetorical - competence. Dramatic sensitivities depend, not at all, on academic empowerment; thus speculation about Shakespeare's intellectual training only shifts attention away from an appreciation of his skills. Shakespeare, and Stoppard, are able to hear, restate, and challenge academic sounds. Here Freccero has made an exemplary argument: in Dante's Divine Comedy, certainly dramatic, terza rima sponsors Trinitarian argument, not the reverse: " the entrelacements of rhyme scheme and triadic verse structures privilege thematic entrelacements, Trinitarian formulations." XIII "The conversable world" (1995). This is an abridgement of a longer essay published in Rhetoric and Truth (1985). The story of the Modern replacement of rhetoric as academic discipline by literature and literary criticism can also be read as a migration of rhetorical strategies and roles. The succession ShaftesburyHume-Austen narrates a migration of criticism not simply to a new academy, nor to a non-academic community, but to a fictional one, the Austenian sodality of

INTRODUCTION

xv

female arbitrers. Henry James could be read as an admirer of Austen's depiction of gender competence.7 XIV "Ethos and pathos in Ruskin's rhetoric; Florence and his aesthetic politics" (1999). This is another Modernist migration of rhetoric. Ruskin produced the arguably most influential nineteenth century program of reception of medieval/Renaissance art. His art criticism, I claim, is a complete rhetorical, that is, "civil" practice. That is, he engages and describes artistic values as community accomplishment, an engagement that is made perfectly clear even in his popular guides, Mornings in Florence and St. Mark's Rest. XV "Rhetoric: time, memory, memoir" (2004). This paper considers the interrelations of a rhetorical capacity - memory - and a rhetorical engagement - temporality - with the memoir as genre. I argue that the memoir can play a significant role in the history of inquiry. Focussing on the succession: Vice's Vita scritta da se medesimo, Croce's Contribute alia critica di me stesso, and R.G. Collingwood's Autobiography, the essay defines the memoir as organization of past experience by past experience, and claims the rhetorical design of the inquirer's memory of his own past experience can articulate a program of the investigation of the past. The historical inquiry initiatives of all three are not only described but shaped, made pertinent, by the rhetorical reconstruction. At the same time, the memoir is inimitable. The investigation is utterly dependent on memory work; the work is utterly independent; it instructs us in isolation; it tells us we have to do our own memory work. Part 3: Rhetoric and the Disciplines Rhetoric and Medicine. Early Modernity represents a period of strong, sometimes quite specific, sometimes diffuse, changes in the structure, goals, and procedures of disciplines. Recognising the sometimes specific, sometimes diffuse role of rhetoric in this narrative illumines not simply the history of inquiry, but the peculiar force of the rhetorical intrusions. Thus, medicine is a secondary interest in a number of Early Modern programs, but the intrications of rhetoric and medicine are particularly strong; exploring the connections of rhetorical and medical developments engages the issues of their devotion to coordinate goals: 7

I have not included "Translation as taste" (1981), again addressing the eighteenth century as a period of important transitions for rhetoric as inquiry; the paper argues the pragmatic implications of translation programs. Joseph Spence's Pofymetis, as a handbook for collectors of antiquities, defines acts of translation as contributions to the development of taste as social competence. The transfer of Latin antiquities to English collections is a component, schooled by rhetorical aesthetic rules, of a kind of civil, or aristocratic, dominance.

xvi

INTRODUCTION

cure of the body/body politic. And it expands as well our sense of their heavy psychological and practical, interventionist engagements. Consider, for example, in the still canonic Classical medical texts the expressions of the need of medicine for rhetoric: the doctor must have a discourse of cure, he must be able to persuade the patient, build confidence in his cure. And, certainly, both disciplines, deeply committed to establishing body/mind, body/soul connections, are concerned with the passions as the source of function/dysfunction, phenomena that generate difficult semiotic interpretative tasks. And, finally, rhetoric and medicine are afflicted by status: two shaky disciplines, both engaged in persuading the public of their worth.8 XVI "Petrarch's Invective contra medicum: an early confrontation of rhetoric and medicine" (1993). Once more, a brilliant Classicizing attack on the Scholastic establishment as dysfunctional. This polemic is counter-intuitive in that Petrarch faults medical practice as too concerned with rhetoric, too little engaged with empirical diagnosis and cure. Still, a comparison of the speculation of Petrarch with the almost contemporaneous "Scholastic" philosopher/physician Pietro d'Abano reveals they share a remarkable range of interests, values, strategies; both, for example, are committed to a (rhetorical) notion of decorous, apt response; both emphasize (like rhetoric) mind-body relations.9 XVII "Rhetoric and medicine in Descartes' Passions de I'dme: the issue of intervention" (1993). Descartes claims that his perspective is that of a "physicien" which I argue is ambiguously physicist/physician, evoking the medieval/Renaissance medicus with scientific pretensions. The focus on the passions attempts to define a primary domain of body/soul, body/mind relations of Humanist and proto-scientific inquiry, of physics, physiology, medicine, ethics, and, indirectly, rhetoric. I argue that Descartes' account delivers a counter-intuitive result of his dualism: it tends to reify dangerous liaisons where

8

"The discourse of cure" (1995), gives an overview of the enduring and untidy interconnections of medicine and rhetoric, and suggests that the connections illumine a very wide range of practical and theoretical issues. It emphasizes that fraught, intractable problems persist, and that, alas, Cartesian theorizing introduced more intractabilities. 9 I have not included "Medicine as polemic; Bertini's Difesa della Medicina (1699)"; (to be published in a collection on Early Modern rhetoric and medicine, eds S. Fender, N. Struever. The Difesa is a highly rhetorical exercise: it employs a declamatio, the ps.-Quintilian "/ Gemini malattr within a declamation, a debate in utramque partem of attack and defense of medicine. It is notable in its disinterest in defining medicine as a proto-science; rather, it confronts an "essential contest": the vexing, seemingly ineluctable gap between medical theoretical gains and practical application.

INTRODUCTION

xvii

the interdependence of mind and body is a double jeopardy, prejudicing both medical and ethical (discursive) cure.10 XVIII "Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere (1681): a legal opinion on the use of Aristotle in medicine" (1999). Di Capoa's Parere, as a legal opinion on the advisability of regulation of medicine is an obviously rhetorical genre, but it provides a substantial history of medicine that, by demonstrating the uncertainty of medicine, denies the possibility of regulation; it is an Academic (skeptical) attack on academicism, balancing a lack of piety towards ancient authority with a severe critique of modern. There are highly rhetorical attacks on logical pretension; he both disputes Aristotelian medical theory and incorporates Aristotelian biological propositions; often we find more a rhetorical use of history than a historical use of rhetoric.11 Rhetoric and Law. In the rhetorical tradition, the very rich interrelations of Roman rhetorical and legal interests are prominent; Cicero made clear that rhetoric is essential to a legal career; rhetorical-legal hermeneutics furnished a considerable body of historical-political speculation in the Latin tradition. XIX "Hobbes and Vico on law: a rhetorical gloss" (2001). Both Hobbes and Vico engaged in a strong revision of Classical political theorizing; both regarded law as a crucial domain for political speculation; both insisted on the resistance of law to philosophical colonization; both developed a politics of impurity and movement. Their revisions, their insistence, were motivated in part by their rhetorical strategies of critique; we can find in Hobbes' account of common law echoes of rhetorical accounts of Roman law. For Hobbes, revision follows from his redesign of agency; the new account is invested by the tenets and tactics of his "rhetorized psychology," reflecting his appropriation of Aristotle's Rhetoric, described by L. Strauss; again, a psychology of the compromised, impure. For Vico, revision is rooted in his rhetorico-legal hermeneutic, which imposed

10

I have not included "Rhetorique et philosophic naturelle du 17e siecle; le cas de Marin Cureau de La Chambre" (2000); again, in a very large, eclectic domain of Early Modern inquiry, Cureau de La Chambre, a "courtly" physician, argued the political use of two major explanatory theses of human capacity: first, animal intelligence, the basic, shared potential for knowing; second, our basic vulnerability, the character of the passions; the account of the passions replicated in part rhetorical descriptions available. 11 I have not included "The medical-theoretical background in Naples of Vice's New Science" (1997). The various Neapolitan academies are certainly a Vichian context; the speculations of academicians such as Lionardo di Capoa, T. Cornelius, F. D'Andrea in physics, physiology, chemistry inform the discussion of body/mind, body/soul relations, and are pertinent to Vichian social theory, in a discussion redolent of both rhetorical and medical theorizing.

xviii

INTRODUCTION

a focus on large-scale institutions, processes. In Vico, more than in Hobbes, laws are regarded as formulaic, processual, reactively interventionist: rhetoric discloses forms, developments, practices, creating a narrative of impersonal agency.12 The article revisits the issues raised in the first bibliographical article cited in this collection on "The pertinence of rhetoric." While Vico uses, but does not mention, rhetoric in the New Science, his employment of the hermeneutic found in the Roman rhetorical and legal texts develops a thick description of civil phenomena; it is exemplary not of a "philosophical," nor a "literary," but of a rhetorician's rhetoric. Hobbes and Vico reappear, linked again, in my latest manuscript Rhetoric, modality, modernity (2008). I return to the Peircian description of inquiry as a set of beliefs generating habits of action in inquiry, but now arguing the absolutely basic, primary importance of a belief in, a proclivity for a modality, and for the defining contrast of rhetoric's proclivity for possibility with philosophy's for necessity. It is a proclivity so generative of inquiry strategies that it reorients our sense of investigational accomplishment, and queries inquiry's interventions in the general political discussion. Rhetoric as an alternate Classical formation sponsored an oppositional inquiry, where the benefit of its modal proclivity is expansiveness, as a structured doubleness of habits of mind. For, first, possibilities define: thus J. Hintikka's claim that only the inclusive consideration of alternate "possible worlds" clarifies concepts. Second, defining, then posing possibilities is the expansive pragmatic task of rhetorical-political strategies of intervention. To place rhetoric as Modern, I resort to R. Pippin's argument that philosophy gives the most economical account of Modernist inquiry, that is, for Modernism as a post-Kantian search for autonomy - that is, from both metaphysical pretension and empirical positivism - thus for the task of establishing the conditions of possibility of knowledge. And thus Pippin's unique capacity for explaining rhetoric's unique capacity for Modernist renewal. Hobbes and Vico, I contend, seceded from the slide from Classical political philosophy to Enlightenment 12

I have not included the electronically published "The impersonal in Vice's Classicism" (ISPF-Lab, 1-2005), nor, indeed, a series of articles, all concerned with Vichian inquiry, all pertinent in some measure to the definition of rhetoric as inquiry: "Classical investigations" (1974); "Vico, Valla, and the logic of Humanist inquiry" (1976); "Vico, Foucault, and the strategy of intimate investigations" (1984); the "Rhetoric and philosophy in Vichian inquiry" (1985), mentioned above; "Vico in Post-Modern philosophy" (1990); "Vice's philosophy of language", in the De Gruyter encyclopedia, Sprachphilosophie (1992); "Humanism and science in the context of Vichian inquiry" (1993); "The definition of Europe in Vichian inquiry" (1996). This block of articles obviously covers a rather extensive range of intellectual historical issues. Just as Dilthey finds Hobbes' work raises intriguing issues about his Renaissance antecedents, so Vichian inquiry, awkwardly read as either Enlightenment or anti-Enlightenment, suggests we "redo" the Classicism of Early Modernity, indeed, tests our sense of the modernity of Early Modernity.

INTRODUCTION

xix

theory; Bernard Williams, moreover, argues that Modern political philosophy is still, in general, Classical, Enlightened, retrograde. Therefore, while I argue the Modernity of Hobbes' and Vice's Early Modernity, I claim no triumphalist narrative. They subsist, rather, as J. Hintikka's "unrealized possibilities" in the discussion, that is, as a source of critique. Thus rhetoric's renewed task: the critique of philosophy's unfortunate affinities for necessity, thus determinism, that weakens, damages political thinking. The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD January 2009

NANCY S. STRUEVER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following individuals, institutions and publishers for their kind permission to reproduce the articles included in this volume: Rubbettino Editore, Soveria Mannelli (for Article I); WileyBlackwell, Oxford (II, XI, XV); the Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (II, XI); Yale University Press, New Haven, CT (III); Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden (IV); Brepols Publishers NV, Turnhout (V); State University of New York Press, Albany, NY (VI); University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA (VII); James Murphy, University of California, Davis, CA (VIII); University of California Press, Berkeley, CA (VIII, IX, XII); University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC (X); Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA (XIII); Bulzoni Editore, Rome (XIV); The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD (XVI); Walter de Gruyter, Berlin (XVII); and Emory University, Atlanta, GA (XIX).

I

THE PERTINENCE OF RHETORICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE FOR CURRENT VICHIAN SCHOLARSHIP

Introduction. The nature of the connection between Vico's rhetorical profession and Vico's new science is an enduring issue in historical scholarship. However, the first, and most obvious step is to recognise that modern scholars do not share definitions; a monolithic rhetoric, definitive, stable, does not exist. The historical shifts in interests and values within the rhetorical tradition confront the fractured status of contemporary rhetorical theory. The purpose of this paper is to sketch three major current initiatives of rhetorical theorising, and to suggest the usefulness, or dysfunction, of each of these schools for an account of Vico's rhetorical engagements in the New Science. The three schools are: Philosophers' Rhetoric. This is a strong presence in Vichian studies; Ernesto Grassi gives both a provocative definition of «rhetoric as philosophy^ and the thickest account of Vico's rhetoric as philosophical. The difficulty is that mainstream (non-Grassi) philosophical definitions of rhetoric carry with them the freight of philosophical judgements, goals and antipathies. Rhetoric thus can be caught up in a network of explanation and justification that distorts and diminishes its capacities, or trapped in a tissue of begged questions. Literary Critics' Rhetoric. The loose academic confederation of literary criticism, critical theory, the various French schools of interpretation has colonised rhetoric. On the one hand, it makes sweeping claims for the epistemological range of rhetorical figures; on the other hand, the epistemology is, by and large, a failed, post-Cartesian moment, inappropriate for the analysis of anti-Cartesian Vichian initiatives. Rhetoricians' Rhetoric. My contention will be that this is the most valuable initiative, as least dominated by current inappropriate intellectual fashions and disciplinary ideologies. It is, essentially, a theory of practice, and it defines the task of rhetorical inquiry as analysing the premises, procedures and values of historically specific discursive practices. 1. Philosopher's Rhetoric. Ernesto Grassi attempts a fundamental reorientation in the historiography of Renaissance thought; he poses new

I 68

questions which will generate new answers. The slogan, «rhetoric as philosophy» designates a Humanist response that represents a revolutionary change in intellectual strategies. In his Rhetoric as Philosophy, he defines Humanism as an initiative hypothesizing «(1) the primacy of 'topical' philosophy [...] over 'rational philosophy', and (2), the primacy of rhetoric - as imagistic and effective speech [...] over rational speech [...]»1. It is «a philosophy which comes from and consists of the problematic of the word»2. And, he insists «Vico's thought is the culmination of the Humanist tradition»3. Yet, behind Grassi, Heidegger, who was both mentor and colleague at Freiburg 4 . Thus the echoes of Heidegger in Grassi: «the specific problem of Humanist philosophy [...] is how, when and through what mode of language 'being-there' experiences the claim of Being»; the solution is that «'being-there' (Daseiende) [...] can respond to the various demands only through metaphoric expression, in order to discover itself in its own historicity» 5. Thus Humanism's rhetorical initiative values Dasein, the life-world of cares, appeals, responses. And, behind Grassi's rhetoric, Heidegger's. Why does Heidegger in his course, «Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie», use Aristotle's Rhetoric to gloss the basic philosophical texts, the Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics? Heidegger's lectures develop his discovery in the text of an acute, comprehensive view of language that enables a major revaluation of the elements of Aristotle's general program. «Dass wir die aristotelische 'Rhetorik' haben ist besser, als wenn wir eine Sprachphilosophie hatten» 6. At this point in his career, he felt the need to revise the history of philosophy in order to resituate himself in that history. In this revisionary account of Hellenic thought, he discovers what P. Christopher Smith will call an «originary» discipline, rhetoric, that controls and invests the «originary» argument, the Hellenic practice of political negotiations of public values; Heidegger privileges rhetoric as prior to, or perhaps forcings the later, specialised growth of philosophi1

E. GRASSI, Rhetoric as Philosophy; The Humanist Tradition, Pennsylvania State University Park, 1980, p. 8. 2 ID., Renaissance Humanism; Studies in Philosophy and Poetics, Binghamton, 1988, p. 37. 3 ID., Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism; Four Studies, Binghamton, 1983, p. 38. 4 Grassi speaks of a close relationship after 1928 for several years, in «Prologue», Renaissance Humanism, cit. pp. XII f. ^ ID., Renaissance Humanism, cit. pp. 112-13; p. 29. 6 M. HEIDEGGER, Grundhegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophic, SS (= Sommer Semester) 1924; the text is the notes of Walter Brocker, Herbert-Marcuse-Archiv, p. 45, see p. 43.

I THE PERTINENCE OF RHETORICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE

69

cal dialectic and logic for their theoretical tasks7. This reverses an emphasis in history of thought where we have used philosophical definitions of rhetoric to stigmatise its pragmatic, practical, taking-care motives as «relativist», theoretically suspect. But the later Hellenistic rhetorical manuals we refer to, Heidegger argues, represent a diluted, demoted discipline, a discipline put in its place by philosophy and by scholastic motives; only Dilthey, he says, recognised the powerful influence of the premises and procedures of an originary rhetoric in intellectual history8. In the SS 1924, «Rhetorik ist nicht anderes als die Auslegung des konkreten Daseins, Hermeneutik des Dasein selbsts»9. This becomes in Sein undZeit «Rhetorik [ist...] die erste systematische Hermeneutik der Alltaglichkeit des Miteinanderseins»10. In his revision rhetoric is the «first» discipline, in so far as it gives an account of the rich texture of the early and all-encompassing «Speaking and Hearing Together», as opposed to the later, derived and specialised dialogue on scientific fact and theory of dialectic, and the syllogistic production of logical truth of apodeixis. Heidegger insists that «Die Griechen existierten in der Rede», in the eloquence of the assemblies, courts, the oratory of the games11. Rhetoric controls the «Miteinanderreden» that reveals, construes «M/teinandersein»\ it gives an account of the polis as the potentiality of life, the authentic life12. In effect, Heidegger develops at length the rhetorical moments Grassi revalues as characteristic of Humanist philosophy. Noteworthy are the brilliant discussions in lectures 14.7 and 15.7 of Aristotelian theories of the emotions, such as his account of «fear» in politics, its temporicity, its relation to deliberation. His claim that «noein [...] ist kein reines», is, in fact, the basic premise of Grassi's rhetorical philosophy13. Grassi's innovation, I will argue, was to replicate, - it is uncertain whether he had access to the notes of SS 1924 -, the Heideggerean fullness of the originary rhetorical discipline in its expansive, inclusive notion of language and discursive capacity, and to use it to write an expansive, inclusive history of ideas. Yet, while Grassi published Heideg7 P. Ch. SMITH, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument; Demonstration, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, Evanston, 1998; the chapter 'Heidegger and the Recovery of Aristotle's Rhetoric is particularly useful, pp. 13-34. 8 M. HEIDEGGER, Grundbegriffe..., cit, pp. 41-42; p. 70. 9 /&0&. Im Sein-in-der-^>0& sieht Aristoteles das eigentliche Leben des Menschen (46).] Also rhetoric, in action, construes political life, constitutes community, koinoma (49); rhetoric claims to be politics (136). And there is no gap between nature and culture in its work: "Die Begriffe vom Sein-in-derpolis haben ihre Grundlagen in den Naturbegriffen" (241). In the lectures of July 3 and 4 (207-219) we find, then, Heidegger's zealous intrication of the biological texts such as the Parts of Animals and the Motion of Animals with the Rhetoric in his discussion of the passions as life capacity. And in the final lectures of July, he uses the Rhetorics account of political life as movement to gloss the Physics, with its account of nature as the principle of motion and change, arche kineseos kai metaboles (200bl2, GA 18, 284), with its intrication of dynamis> entelechia, and energeia (195). At all points, I shall argue, Heidegger's investigation of life confronts and deals with issues of time. Heidegger's rhetoric studies language as it lives in Alltaglichkeit (62). Alltaglichkeit is the vital time dimension of Dasein. 1. Heidegger's Account of the Nature of Rhetorical Inquiry: Rhetoric as Life Science Daft wir die aristotelische "Rhetorik" haben, ist besser, als wenn wir cine Sprachphilosophie hatten. —Heidegger, SS 1924

What is the place of Heidegger's definition in the twentieth-century revival of rhetoric, and how does his sense of time help define this place? Pierre Aubenque has claimed that the Rhetoric delivers a fully rhetorized

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

107

psychology, with the elements already organized in topics for use in argument.2 Just so, at all points, Heidegger intricates the life capacities— passions (pathe), desire (orexis), choice (prohairesis), habit (hexis), and cares (Besorgen)—with the basic strategic concerns of rhetoric: belief (pistis), opinion (doxa), shared opinion (endoxa), commonplaces (topoi), and rhetorical argument (enthymeme). Thus, for example, enthymeme etymologically discloses its roots in thymosy "affective desire," "heart" (128). Heidegger's careful, even cautious working through of the key terms is vital to the innovatory moments in his account. Thus his lectures on doxa (136-158) are crucial for the account of politics to be derived from discourse. The assertion that the rhetor's purpose is to push Dasein into doxa is essential to the understanding of a continuous pragmatic engagement with time, Alltaglichkeit (136). Heidegger understands the Aristotelian relation between pistis and doxa (from De anima 428a 20-21: one can't hold an opinion without belief; here belief is, perhaps, the psychological state of holding an opinion). He employs as well the equivocation of pisteis, both as means or proofs, and as ends—beliefs or convictions. Then, pisteuein is doxa coming to speech; pistis is not pure belief, but that which speaks for a thing to win belief (118). The doxa and endoxa furnish the topoi as both maxims and as principles of argument, which in turn act as premises, protaseis in the enthymeme (133-134); they also are the energizing conclusions arrived at, held. Any proposition, any argument functioning within the political domain functions for belief, very like C. S. Peirce's belief as "energized knowledge"; functions, in short, as Jasagen, affirmation (137). Heidegger claims doxa is the way we have life in time, not a Wissen, science: "Die doxa ist die Weise, in der wir das Leben in seiner Alltaglichkeit da haben" (138).3 Note the implication of discursive action in Heidegger's definition of doxa as Orientierung, with orientation as a kind of refocusing task. Heidegger grasps, then, the source of rhetoric's strength is its concern with articulation, Aussagen, the speaking-out, the speaking-to, speakingfor, in the community (109-136). Being-with-one-another demands less internal acquiescence or silent rejection than specific, timely articulations of the current state of endoxa in the speaking-hearing community. Rhetoric needs Aubenque's rhetorized psychology, which is not enclosed in a timeless, theoretical domain; Aristotle's definitions of the passions, for example, are sentences to be employed in political negotiation. Like Klaus Dockhorn, Heidegger sees rhetoric not as a tradition of teaching manuals, but as a formation, indeed, the second, alternate formation to philosophy in the classical period. Dockhorn claimed that of Aristotle's three kinds of proof—ethos, pathos, and logos—which pertain respectively to speaker, audience, and text, the proofs ethos and pathos exhaust the category of the "commonsense," the intersubjectively shared

VI 108

communal beliefs contained in the koinoi fofoi.4 For Heidegger, ethos and pathos constitute speech, legein (165), and legein is the "Grundbestimmung des Daseins selbst in der konkreten Weise seines Seins in seiner Alltaglichkeit" (114). Aristotle's Rhetoric is a compendium of early Greek endoxa (45), that is to say, a comprehensive list of historically shared beliefs. Thus Heidegger follows Aristotle carefully in devoting so much space and time to the discussion of ethos and pathos. He recognizes the accounts of ethos and pathos as valuable descriptions of Hellenic assumptions; the endoxa embed the constructs prominent in the history of Greek philosophy, the constructs that furnished the topic of these lectures; the rhetorically revised list will thus revise this history. Thus Heidegger on the history of philosophy. Now compare Michel Meyer on the history of rhetoric. Meyer thematizes this history as simply a succession of shifts in dominance in the relations of the three complementary concerns of ethos, pathos, and logos.5 Heidegger certainly does not bog down in the purely technical consideration of the peculiarly rhetorical as opposed to dialectical instruments. This is, of course, a standard way of denigrating rhetoric in the ordinary confrontations of rhetoric and philosophy. For Heidegger rhetoric is not a techne, the inauthentic definition (114), but a potentiality for theorizing, a dynamis tou theoresai (1355b26, GA 18, 122). It is a potential, with all its peculiar time-fraughtness, not an energeia, an actuality. It is not a complete Wissen; it does not give all information—in spite of all those manuals (113-114)! It thus describes the radical incompleteness, the unending, timeridden task of politics. And just so, Michel Meyer has argued the "problematological" nature of rhetoric, claiming that it flourishes in the lack of system, or failure of systemic thought. Meyer has defined politics as in constant motion, as the process of negotiating differences and distances through discursive interventions. Politics as the task of negotiation presumes no end to differences, or alterations, no end to the need to link the shared beliefs of the community to an indefinite range of particular cases, no end to politics, in short.6 All the Aristotelian stipulations of legein as pithanon (116), or rhetoric as defense/attack as opposed to dialectic as test, maintenance of argument (1354a3-ll), mark rhetoric as irrevocably timebound. 2. Rhetoric and Politics: Time and Motion Studies

If life, then motion, kinesis (286). If motion, then time. If the basic concern of life studies is movement, Sein-a/s-Bewegfsein (286), then the primary strategies of rhetoric must deal with time. The lectures devoted to pathos can be seen as a long meditation on 1378al9-21: "The emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements [kriseis] and that are also attended by pain and pleasure." Again,

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

109

Heidegger grasps the emphasis on change, and therefore time. In his account of Aristotelian psychology, kinesis gives the authentic DaCharakter to Dasein, the vital place-time of Being (287). Thus, the ontological significance of the passions lies in our capacity for change, the Verdnderllchkelt of Being. Passion itself is both motion and a cause of motions; it is a capacity for altering: veranderliche Beschaffenheit (167).7 Of Aristotle's notion that passions alter judgements, Heidegger observes that this is where passions intrude on logos—here articulated judgements, although frequently translated by historians of philosophy as "reason" (248). But passions are not Wissen, static knowledge, but Befindlichkeiten, dispositions (232). Most importantly, passions are dispositions oriented on others' dispositions that define our in-the-worldness (178): "Das eidos der pathe ist ein Sichverhalten zu anderen Menschen, ein In-der-WeltSein" (207). The rhetor, as politician, must become oriented to the hearer's dispositions (121, 250) in order to do his work, ergon, which is to bring Dasein into doxa, make us "take to heart" an opinion. Thus logos functions only in a Dasein defined as a lively practice of doxa, and of cares, and of passions. Heidegger's account of Aristotle's rhetoric, then, describes a radically timeful practice of changes, alterations designed to take account of past, present, and future in the respective genres of judicial, epldeictic, and deliberative oratory. Thus in lectures July 14 and 15 (246-261) Heidegger claims that Aristotle's account of the passion of fear, phobosy reveals Greek genius, a genius that in particular possesses great sensitivity to temporal dimensions of affect, Heidegger points out that pathos is "already there" (246) as Boden, "ground" (262). Yet Aristotle defined fear as "a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture \fhantasmata\ of some destructive or painful evil in the future" (1382a21-22). Fear becomes present to us not by direct experience, aisthesis, but through our imagination, phantasia\ fancies replace sensations as stimulus (250-251). Note the discursive mode: existence is an announcement, and it is announced through signs, semeia, not facts; the semeia furnish the Da-Charakter of fear (103). And Heidegger notes the peculiar tense, voice, and mode of fear: the tense is future, the voice is subjunctive, the mode is the possible. It is still not really here and it might not happen; yet it still has an intimacy, or nearness: "ein Nicht-Dasein im Sichnahern zu sein" (253). And Heidegger is much taken by Aristotle's grasp of the capacity of fear to inaugurate and stimulate political-rhetorical action: "fear sets us thinking what could be done," or "fear makes us deliberators," phobos bouleutikous poiei. It is a balance of hope and fear that makes the hearer a political actor, articulating choice: kaitoi oude'is bouleuetal pen ton anelpiston (1383a6-8, GA 18, 259-260). Thus fear as belief (pistis), a basic articulation in play in politics, as well as fear as pathos, disposition, is essential to rhetorical analysis

VI 110 and crucial to settling affairs. The political domain is one of labile balances, fantasies of the future (fantasies that also structure memory), subjunctive formulations—radical tinkerings with time. 3. Time is of the Essence: Heidegger's Formulation of Alltaglichkeit

Heidegger's fascination with time fits with his revisionary account of the staple Hellenic philosophical terms such as ousia, as being or essence, and, indeed, time becomes the essence, metaphorically speaking, of the SS 1924 project. Heidegger contrasts the philosophic obsession with the search for timeless truths, for eternal certainties, aei on (140) with rhetoric's concern for Zeitlichkeit, the timely, the timeful. Rhetoric handles, discloses the "Miteinandersprechen im Sinne des alltaglichen Miteinanderredens" (155), not some pure, monologic, theoretical usage. Because of its interest in Aussagen, articulation, speaking-out to someone, rhetoric develops an account of life in its dailiness, its timefulness, its radical specificity of time, its care for tense: "Being itself as care and care-full speech is timely, it cares for the still not-at-hand, speaks about the already-appeared, investigates that which is now with us!' ["Das Sein in sich selbst als Besorgen und besorgendes Sprechen ist zeitluh, besorgt das noch-nicht-Vorhandene, spricht iiber das schon-Geschehene, betrachtet das Jetzt-Daseiende" (131).] This, of course, is a Heideggerian explication or justification of the three rhetorical genres: the deliberative, which deals with future policies; the judicial, which deals with past justice or injustice; and the epideictic, which secures the shared values of the present. While the genres seem to separate time and task, the orator actually integrates them. There are necessary connections of deliberation, judgement, and praise as speech acts in politics; the emphasis is on the intrication, simultaneity of generic issues and political issues, interests in actual performances, and timely intrusions. Smith argues that Aristotle seems to claim that deliberations are only about time; thus Smith cites the Rhetoric (1356a4-6): to take counsel is to deal with "what appears susceptible of being either way... for no one deliberates about what is incapable of having been otherwise, or being otherwise in the future, or being otherwise now."8 With the naming of the three genre tenses—"having been," "being in the future," "being now"—Aristotle is, in effect, underscoring that deliberation is timeful, and that tenses imply modalities (cf. 125). Time, in short, places. The classical rhetorical shift in interest is toward people living in concrete situations (im eigentlichen kairos) as investigative object (59). Kairos is in Hellenic treatises the primary canon of the rhetorically valuable. Kairos is both measure of time, the moment, and the response to the moment, the appropriate strategy, to prepon, and in Latin, what is fitting,

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

111

quod decet, for dealing with the radical contingency of practical life. Thus, the force and breadth of the rhetorical interest in time affects Heidegger's notion of the other major investigational interests of the Greeks. The June 27 and 30 lectures (183-199) give an account of the basic concepts of the Nichomachean Ethics, but the peculiar and revisionary perspective is that of time and timedness, timefulness of action and decision, and the source of this perspective is Aristotle's Rhetoric. Kairos is the character of Besorgen, the indispensable—and rarely translated into Greek—term of Heidegger's account of the Aristotelian Grundbegriffe (140). Kairos, in Heidegger's account, qualifies the hegemony of needful care, Besorgen, the careful prudential strategies, phronesis (183), in the domain of interactive practices, praxis (180): "Die Handlung selbst hat ihr telos im kairos' (189). Thus, when Heidegger claims that ethics needs chronos> but "Die Zeitcharakter der ethike liegt in pollakis? frequency, and not Dauery "duration" (194), he not only reorients the ethical project away from a consideration of timeless foundational values, but radically affirms the operational value of rhetoric's canon of kairos. Thus, the equation of the most frequently invoked term in reading Aristotelian ethics, the "mean," meson, with kairos—"Die meson fur die praxis ist der kairos' (144)—is, in effect, a sharp commentary on the virtue of prudence.9 Heidegger finds it significant that Aristotle shifts the construct of meson from medicine to ethics (185); health as meson becomes meson as kairos, and appropriateness is moral health. Meson, as the mean, Mitte, had been constantly evoked as absolute norm in the tradition of Aristotelian philosophy; there it is a value to be described geometrically, arithmetically, that is to say, exactly described (185). But Heidegger focuses on the Aristotelian distinction between Mitte as object and Mitte as agent's capacity, meson pros hemas, and here Mitte is integrated with kairos, and it is not to be arrived at in a geometrical mode. Rather meson is Jeweiligkeit (temporal particularity—"particular while") in respect to the agent, for Dasein is eve* jewei/iges (respective) Dasein (201). In the same lectures Heidegger gives a timely reading of Aristotle's hexis, "habit." Hexis is the Grundbestimmung of arete (185), basic to the definition of virtue, excellence. Here Heidegger is most ingenious in deploying the basic Aristotelian concepts of dynamis, entelechia, and energeia to represent the movements of potency and actualization in life phenomena, in the phases of morality. That hexis is a dynamis, Gefajltsein (185), a potential for having, is crucial for Aristotelian ethics. Habit is not pure duration, but is timebound, acquired and lost. Habit is also the "energeia, das eigentliche Da, das Gegenwartigsein des Habenden und des Gehabten"; it is the presencing, contemporizing of having (174-175), and, in particular, the having of hekaston, specific pathe as dispositions (192).

VI 112 Habit is recurring response to socially constituted opinions, or; is a specific having, or holding of constitutive dispositions. As dynamis, it is a potentiality forming, therefore, a very thick texture of predispositions to choice. In one of many etymological strategies, Heidegger asserts that passions transpire, they are life modes of active and passive, for passions are not simply enduring, undergoing, suffering, pathesis, but also an active makmg,poiesis, a fulfillment, energeia (192, cf. 325). Hexis helps us grasp the being of pathe; hexis is "em Wie despathos' (184), and the movement, or lack of movement, from potency to act describes a basic dimension of moral agency. And, just as the connection kairos/meson, the relation of hexis/ pathe" reveals the rhetorical gloss. Heidegger concentrates not on timeless virtues but on the potentiality of Dasein to reorient in changing discursive circumstances. The mean is grounded in an Orientiertsein (187). Rhetoric handles orientations as transfers, interactions of speaker and hearer; the mean is effect and effecting. Note the qualifications: the dunamis in each mesotes is for each moment, Augenbllck (188); we are not dealing with routine, but a Freihalten, a "freeholding" (190). If the time dimension of ethike is pollakis, the habits are products of "offer Durchmachens? frequently transpiring, or undergoing (191). AUtaglichkeit becomes the primary qualification of ethical life in its ineluctable particularity: "Ofter ist gerade dasjenige, was die Zeitlichkeit des Daseins charakterisiert" (191). Heidegger's concern is with iterability, with repetitiveness as challenge in political life. Timefulness pervades rhetorical argument structure as well. The elements of argument are timeful—the shared beliefs, which make up the premises, are revisable, have a Revisionsfahigkeit, as opposed to the episteme which is not revisable (138). The passions of the hearer, the sich-befindet (262) as orientiert are occasions of revisions. And Heidegger notes Aristotle's grasp of the timely virtue of the enthymeme, the foreshortened rhetorical argument, for the audience "takes more to heart" short chains of argument, not elaborate demonstrations (133). Oratory requires the continuous, unremitting effort in connecting the doxa, endoxa, and topoi (commonplaces of commonsense) in the premises with particular cases, with, indeed, an indefinite range of specific occasions: political as well as physical occasions (Physics, 201b27-202a9; GA 18, 317-318). The invocation in argument of the indefinite, the boundless, apeiron (292), a reusability, undermine philosophical arguments devoted to maintaining stability, eternity, and duration. Any philosophical theory of depth or abstraction is late, derived, only applied to the originary overt, surface occasions of politics. Thus Heidegger implies our foundationalist accounts of Greek ethics are late, extraneous applications of the Grundbegriffe. There is nothing fundamental or early about foundationalist projects; the

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

113

life phenomena described in rhetoric's timeliness do not stand under theoretical axioms (132). In fact, it is dailiness that destroys theoretical complacency as a boast of isolation from time.10 The antimentalist concerns of Heidegger's rhetorical psychology are thus of a piece with his antifoundationalist moments. For continuous motion implies continuous impurity. Heidegger notes carefully Aristotle's attribution of the passions to the whole person, not just to the soul (122, 192, 197). The formula Seele as ousia specifies the Sein eines Lebenden, both notes and relegates Aristotle's entification (30), and seems to correspond to Heidegger's later rejection of the model of mind as a "cabinet of consciousness," an enclosed, autonomous intellectual functioning.11 In Aristotle's life science the concern is the whole living being, the human life. Indeed, one of the benefits for Heidegger of the rhetorical account is its inclusive psychology, a continuum of contiguous, interactive life faculties and actions (194-219). "Mind is not at all pure." [Das noein des Menschen ist kein reines (202).] It is dependent upon imagination, among other faculties, and imagination is, of course, dependent upon bodily sensation; imagination is the Boden of noein (199).12 Thus impurity supports Alltaglichkeit, timefulness, as hermeneutical focus; impurity prejudices pure duration. 4. Alltaglichkeit as Qualification of Miteinandersein

In the SS 1924 program, temporality corrodes foundationalism, and Alltaglichkeit is the catalytic agent of temporality. In the definition of rhetoric in Being and Time Alltaglichkeit is the primary qualification of Miteinandersein. Rhetorical interests thus must support equal and heavy emphasis on temporality and interaction. Alltaglichkeit defines everydayness not as "ordinary" but as "timefulness," the timely character of practical life: it designates the continuous, if intermittent, repetitious demands of daily life, its iterability. "Miteinandersein" stipulates as primitive, ineluctable, living-with-one-another. Man is not self-sufficient (96); life, any life, is there (da) for another being (241). And Heidegger finds a basic account of this interpersonality in Aristotle's chapters on the passions. Here there is an illuminating similarity to an early modern strategy of rediscovery of rhetoric as politics. Like Hobbes before him, Heidegger defines the passions as intrinsically social, interpersonal, rather than simply physiological ("em Sichverhalten zu anderen Menschen" [207]).13 Paul Dumouchel—perhaps he would cite the Heidegger text as well if he were aware of it—claims the originality of Hobbes in recognizing that to attribute an emotion to a person is a performative, a political deed, not a description of an internal state of a subject.14 For Dumouchel, "the emotions are social in the sense that they are not the means, but the being of

VI 114 human living together. The fact that we have an affective life, is not the cause, it is the fact that we are not completely independent of one another." [Le fait que nous ayons une vie affective, plutot que cause, est le fait que nous ne sommes pas des Itres completement independents les uns des autres.]15 And Meyer insists on Aristotle s insight—and this repeats Hobbes as well—that passions are our reactions to our representations and to the presentations of us by others.16 Just so, Heidegger was much impressed by Aristotle's account of the fearsome men, the phoberoi, those who create fear, as a telling account of both the relations of one city, polis, to another as well as of the relations of individuals within the polis. The phoberoi define a whole bearing of Miteinandersein; indeed, they are "most characteristic" of the polis. Heidegger admired the subtlety of Aristotle in claiming that the gentle, praoi, and the ironic, eirdnes, as uncertain, and unstable are more to be feared than the obviously dangerous (256-263). But this intriguing discussion of passion as function must be related at all points to Heidegger's recovery of Aristotle's insight that fear is inextricably engaged with the future tense and subjunctive voice, with the noch nicht da. At no point does the Heideggerian discussion wander far from the considerations of demands of time. Consider the politics of hearing. The obdurately timeful domain of discourse is reception. To speak is to address a hearer, the hearer defines the speaker's task: "Das Sprechen sein telos hat beim 'Horer,' beim akroates" (123). Or another formulation: "Das akouein, 'Horen,' 1st die eigentliche aisthesis" (104)—the hegemonous perception? Hearer relations writ large are politics. Heidegger's close attention to the phenomenology of hearing explores temporality as qualifying response, and focuses on living-withone-another as it transpires. Heidegger has an acute sense of rhetoric's intense commitment to the priority of hearing over speaking; notice his frequent uses of the Rhetoric as offering analysis of the different possibilities of Sich-befinden of the hearer (169). Of course, very early in the Rhetoric Aristotle insists on the primacy of the hearer in determining the rhetorical telos (1358bl). The repetitive, meticulous accounts of hearer activity in SS 1924 raise the issue of hearer responsibility. And similarly, Barbara Cassin has illumined the passage in Metaphysics 1006a24-26 on dialectic (here this takes in all dialogic argument), where Aristotle stresses that the responsibility for the success of an argument rests with the listener, hypomenon, rather than with the speaker or demonstrator, apodeiknys.17 In no sense does this Aristotelian account of the listener give us a sense of a monologic, timeless address, univocally constraining a single, necessitated response (the inadequate philosophical model); rather, Heidegger's rhetorical model deploys politics as changes, alterations in hearing. Heidegger perhaps responds to more of the Rhetoric text than he cites in his characterization of rhetoric as hermeneutic.18

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

115

When Heidegger claims that the Rhetoric gives us the Greek endoxa—interactively generated opinions (45)—he proffers another way of defining the rhetorical pragmatic focus on audience capacity, and the Greek genius for pragmatics. Thus the perspicacity of Heidegger s recovery of the Rhetoric, for the Rhetoric brilliantly summarizes the Greek ingenuity in giving a very thick account of the essentially conflicted listeners^ the divided responsibilities and demands of the audience, relentlessly time bound, embedded in specific problematics of context. In just this way, Greek dramatic texts supply evidence for Greek ingenuity. In, for example, the Acharnians, Aristophanes dramatically represents the audience as pulled both by the ties of democratic citizenship and by investigative (philosophical?) loyalties, responding to both communal conviction and to the individual truths of philosophical formation, as hearing both as a citizen and as a member of a theater audience, with its topical, place-oriented isolation. Just so, in this particular lecture series Heidegger attempts to recover a Greek rhetoric as an explanatory mode for hearing, for the Rhetoric describes the process of formation and reception of endoxa. Since it is the case that "das legein [ist] die Grundbestimmung des Daseins selbst in der konkrete Weise seines Seins in seiner Alltaglichkeit" (114), and that rhetoric is "die Auslegung des konkreten Daseins, die Hermeneutik des Daseins selbst" (110), rhetoric thus focuses properly on all the discursive possibilities subsisting in the "Alltaglichkeit des Daseins" (114). Therefore, a prime value of the rhetorical program is timefulness,

II. MEDITATIONS ON TIME 1. Making a Place for Rhetoric in the History of Inquiry Es gilt nicht Neues zu sagen, sondern das zu sagen, was die Alten schon meinten. —Heidegger, SS 1924

Aristotle's Rhetoric is for Heidegger in the SS 1924 lectures primarily a mode of investigation: he must make a place for it in the history of Greek inquiry. Heidegger's work thus involves layers of temporality: rhetoric in history illumines history. In SS 1924 he speaks with the voice of one construing a fresh, more precise intellectual history (cf. 219-221). For Heidegger, rhetoric has three important, and somewhat counterintuitive qualities: rhetoric is "better than a Sprachphilosophie" (117); it is not simply a purely formal verbal techne; and it exists inside politics. The combination insures that rhetoric is a most basic hermeneutic of "Dasein selbst" since the vital life capacity is discursive. Aristotle took into account a strong, pre-Platonic program not simply to be aligned with the work of

VI 116

the early Sophists and rhetors (108-109). What Heidegger observes is the perspicacity of the relation of Aristotle to Sophistic. Aristotle may, as Aubenque claims, both have as principal object of his work the refutation of the Sophists, and, at the same time, take over the Sophistic (Gorgian) assumption—and this is manifest in Heidegger's account of his rhetoric as the hermeneutic of Miteinandersein—that discourse is the instrument of existential relations, an assumption that denies the thesis that language simply communicates "things"—an assumption, Aubenque claims, that is the source of the Sophists' unique power. Rather, speech and rhetoric work with intentions and judgements.19 Heidegger's assertion that rhetoric is "inside politics" is thus not the same as calling rhetoric the "handmaiden of politics"; it is an ontological position.20 If anything, Aristotle's Rhetoric pushes Sophistic notions further; rhetorical dynamis contrasts with Sophistic, Heidegger claims, as it is oriented to all the possibilities of persuasion, where Sophistic is devoted to the unbedingt, the absolute, definite conviction: unbedingt zu uberzeugen (115). But this defines rhetoric as research, and sophistry as morally relativist.21 While the relation of Aristotelian rhetoric and Sophistic presents a rather fruitful ambiguity, what is vital for Heidegger the philosopher is the relation of the Rhetoric to Platonic inquiry. Aristotle "corrects" Plato, and the Rhetoric in particular has great revisionary force. Heidegger claims there is a simple, and dysfunctional, continuity in Hellenic inquiry—the philosophers are the true Sophists (136)—but that Aristotle broke new ground, moved past Plato when he improved upon the early Greek definitions (26, 223-224). Plato "misses" Dasein (37), but Aristotle "gets Socrates right" (184); Aristotle also gives a better account of Greek doxa (140). But, alas, we have lost this originary Hellenic rhetoric presented so carefully and fully by Aristotle; rhetoric in Hellenistic and medieval times became a school discipline (110)—the array of pedagogical practices and school manuals that is the primary interest of the historiography of rhetoric today. In Heidegger's account rhetoric constitutes a high point in Greek inquiry, preceding loss, fulfilling, correcting past moments. True, Heidegger's careful analysis of the lengthy treatment of the passions in book 2 of the Rhetoric accompanies his claim for the heavy influence of rhetorical Affektenlehre on the Stoa (122), as well as on Christian theology from the patristic period through Thomas and Luther (177). But, Heidegger observes, only Wilhelm Dilthey has recognized this vital historical initiative.22 If we return to the epitaph, "What is valuable to say is only that which the Greeks earlier meant," this last sentence of the lecture notes proclaims, I would argue, the liberation of Heidegger from the standard accounts of Hellenic thought, with their deleterious effects on German philosophy. Heidegger has arrived at and presented a different sense of

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

117

development, of the change through time in Hellenic inquiry. He sees that those who claim Aristotle gave a philosophic account of rhetoric, if by that they mean a Platonic one, are wrong. Aristotle's account of rhetoric reverses the philosophic emphases, discounts the motives, and corrects our modern notions of the historic presence of rhetoric. 2. Time in and as Discipline

The Rhetoric corrects as well Heideggerian inquiry, thus raising the issue of timely development in his thought. It is truly piquant that Heidegger's account of rhetoric, by purveying such an acute critique of the standard history of Greek philosophy, enables, to a certain extent, the Heideggerian philosophical innovations he will produce in Being and Time in 1927. While Heidegger may have thought he had effaced rhetoric in his new philosophical program of Being and Time, rhetoric effectively colonized his philosophy from within. I have argued that a careful reading of the Rhetoric allowed Heidegger to exploit its initiatives as a powerful revisionary force in his account of Greek inquiry. But also, the rhetorical focus on Alltaglichkeit reinforces Heidegger's important effort in the exploration of time and temporality. Heidegger not only has a strong commitment to give a perspicacious account of inquiry in time, he has the strongest possible commitment to temporality as qualification and object of intellectual life. The lectures demonstrate that for Heidegger it is important to grasp how inquiry modes have changed over time. But, it is even more important to grasp that time itself furnishes the most pressing of our problems; the road to the problematic of death, thus authenticity, in Being and Time is through Alltaglichkeit. Heidegger is assigning in SS 1924 not simply the place of rhetoric in Aristotelian inquiry, and the place of Aristotelian rhetoric in Hellenic inquiry, but the place of Heidegger in the history of inquiry in general, a temporality Heidegger awards himself. The important values, then, of rhetorical accounts of experience and rhetorical judgments drawn from these accounts are qualities of incarnate, interactive timefulness.23 Rhetorical inquiry is corrective because of its temporal values, that is, time is corrective. Again, dailiness destroys theoretical complacency (130-131), and theory grows out of Alltaglichkeit (66). Heidegger cites and paraphrases Aristotle's linkage of rhetoric and dialectic: neither constitutes an episteme, in the usual sense of science, Wissen. For both, the modality is the possible, the topic is the probable; rhetoric as offshoot, paraphyes, of both dialectic and ethics, displays the practical "cares," pragmatism, that makes it the antistrophe of dialectic (125-130). The intervention, intrusion of rhetorical time occurs between Heidegger's simple notation that Aristotelian episteme deals with the

VI 118 timeless, aei on (140) and Heidegger's odd qualification in the last lecture: "Ich verstehe gar nicht den Seinscharakter der episteme, wenn ich nicht das Wovon [pros ti] in Betracht ziehe" (324).24 It is not simply that rhetoric is not a science, science itself has been problematized by Heidegger's exploration of rhetorical inquiry It is as if the rich rhetorical descriptions of political capacities and actions have destabilized for Heidegger the heavy, pervasive insistence of Aristotle and his commentators on the value and methods of scientific certainty Thus Heidegger's reading of the Rhetoric affects the balance between stable episteme and labile paideia Aubenque has described in Aristotle. Rather than absorption in a timeless truth, rhetorical discipline depends on dailiness; rhetorical practice makes public, offenbar, or sichtbar (136), the true, Wahry in the verisimilar, wahrscheinlich (122), a seeming that by its nature cannot stand still, lose its temporal particularity. The daily speech, legein, that is its object is Grundbestimmung (an emphasis on enunciation [114]), but does not define, horizein, in the sense of producing the stable definitions of logic. Logos as horismos is not alltaglich (36), and in this defining activity the inquirer somehow steps outside of time. Heidegger thus problematizes the task of definition of concepts, the ostensible subject of SS 1924. The suppleness, not to say ingenuity of Heidegger's enterprises in unsettling definition are frequently concessions to the timeful. Unsettling are the various comparisons to medicine: rhetoric, like medicine, does not address particular individuals, Socrates or Callias, but the possibilities of (political) therapy (122); thus both disciplines invent problematic. But rhetoric, unlike medicine, does not have a domain of specific expertise, is not a techne (114); rhetoric functions outside of expertise. Further, Aristotle's insistence that the doctor must acknowledge the distance between knowledge of healing and healing itself (cf. De anima 433a3-6), between treatise and action, becomes Heidegger's insistence (addressing the rhetor?) that life as praxis has nothing to do with techne (183); rhetorical pragmatism is investigation, not instrument. If we characterize rhetoric as a life science, we do not assert its scientific ambitions, but call attention to its devotion to life. Again, this life not at all "wild and deep and mystical." Observe the complexity of the relations of the disciplines: Heidegger's rhetoric exists inside politics, which deals with the authentic life. Yet while psychology is the "Lehre vom Sein des Lebenden," the politician is not simply a psychologue (101). And while the concepts of politics are rooted in nature (241), the rhetorician is not simply a physiologue (220221), since his domain is always, usefully, limited to Rede (139). Then, in our definitions of disciplines, we have become anachronistic; Greek bios is not understandable to modern biology (74). We must set aside our mod-

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

119

ern notions of ethics and politics (64-67); we must contemporize, that is to say, update, rethink our rhetoric (123). For the implication is that when we lost Greek rhetoric, we lost Greek politics. 3. Modern Times: Specific Twentieth-Century Revisions of Time There is no mechanical truth in saying the past determines the future, rather than the future the past.

—C.S —C.S.. Peirce, Peirce, "Repl "Replyy to th thee Necessitarians" Necessitarians"

A. Manifolds In Blattner's account, Dasein's temporality is a "non-sequential manifold of future, present, and past/' a complex simultaneity. The innovations in theory of time division 1 of Being and Time represent the very fundamental commitment in Heidegger's theory to a temporal manifold, rather than to a linear sequence of past, present, and future "nows." The intellectual historical question to be addressed is, to what extent do the Aristotelian rhetorical initiatives described in SS 1924 prepare us for Heidegger's definitions in Being and Time, and, what is the relation of these rhetorical tactics to the descriptive psychology of Dilthey's and Husserl's phenomenology in Heidegger's formation? Rhetorical therapy disengages the theorist from idle, that is, inappropriate, speculation. Where in the contemporary philosophy of ordinary time discussions proceed, Heidegger saw, within the horizon of an "apriori, mathematical projection of nature,"25 as opposed to this, Heidegger in SS 1924 found a very different account of temporality within the political parameters of the Rhetoric. A Hellenic focus on life and motion and on the interruptive demands of being-with-one-another—enhanced by rhetorical devotion to occasions of speaking-out and listening-for—enables a sense of time as simultaneous, intricated, experientially complex. According to Blattner, our time, Heidegger discovers, if accounted for minutely, is not at all ordinary, not at all the contentless, vapid flow of a succession of nows stipulated for our philosophy by the contemporary mathematical models.26 Similarly, in SS 1924 Aristotle "improves on" Plato in his rhetorical account of the experience of time; the definitions produced are a Greek ontology in nucey of being in motion (321). I have argued that the rhetorical account that intricates the tasks of genres and the tenses of topics projects a temporality much closer to a manifold than to a linear sequence. The subtleties of Heidegger's temporality require, of course, far more than a rhetorical influence. Yet the motives of Heideggerian temporality cohere with the rhetorical contestation of the entification tactics of Hellenic philosophy, the depictions of

VI 120

being as an occurrent entity, described in a series of nows.27 In the Heideggerian definition of tense in Being and Time the future is not "out there," off someplace, nor is the past.28 The future does not equal a location, a now in a succession of things, but "coming to be" as process. What is important is what Heidegger emphasized in his account of Aristotle in SS 1924: potentiality. Aristotle's dynamis, is reformulated in Being and Time as a "pressing ahead into," "for the sake of which."29 Purposiveness, readiness, and ambition are key concepts;30 they are potentialities, capacities rather than complete, finished actualities (contrast Aristotelian energeia). And, as for the definition of the past, affectivity is central—the facticity of the past is a lingering, affect is schon da31—recall Heidegger's delight in the intricate presentation of tense in Aristotle's account of the effect of fear in SS 1924. At the same time habit, with its connotations of duration, and past presence, is described in SS 1924 as process, as a "present-ing," a Gegemuartigen desHabenden (175). This is of a piece with his stipulation of the Greek focus on the present as a "making present" (192). In the Rhetoric and in Being and Time, passions, potentialities, and habits are ineluctably temporal, yet at the same time blurring, undermining the neat divisions of a flow of past, present, and future linearity. Further, there is no sense in which Heidegger's use of the Aristotelian terms in SS 1924 develop a stable pastness of the text, a philologically established dead letter. On the contrary, the aim is to use Aristotle in a temporal manifold, by means of a manifold. Perspicacity is particularized use. Unless an etymology illumines this use it is ignored, it disappears. Further, there is a suggestive compatibility of Smith's emphasis on the "original" argument of Hellenic culture as matrix with Blattner's account of Heidegger's "originary" temporality as explanatory core. In Blattner's account, crucial is the sense of Dasein' care32 which, as an "original" time, explains or roots our abstractions of world time, or ordinary time, just as Smith makes a claim for Heidegger's genius in focusing on the "original" argument of the Greeks as logically and chronologically prior in generating and encompassing both late modes: dialectic as dialogue on scientific matters, and logic as demonstration, apodeixis. The experience of time is at the heart of concern, Besorgen, in Being and Time, just as in SS 1924 AUtaglichkeit is the primary qualification of beingwith-others as object of rhetorical research. It is the virtue of rhetoric that it discloses this structure, and, in doing so, clarifies some temporalities of Dasein. Blattner notes Dasein does not usually experience abstract, contentless moments; it confronts not nows that require later interpretation, but nows that are appropriate or inappropriate (kairos again), for choices.33 Indeed, the tendentiousness of rhetorical kairos has a corollate in the fractiousness of care.

VI Alltaglichkeit, Tunefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

121

Alltaglichkeit, as starting point for Heidegger's meditations on time, is both ante- and anti-Platonic, a catalyst, precipitating new redescription tactics in handling life experience. It is a temporality defined in rhetoric's concentration on public oratory, Rede, as constitutive of the actions and formulae of public life (54). To be sure, Blattner points out that Being and Time—apolitically?—erodes Alltaglichkeit into everydayness, ordinariness, and thus must erode rhetoric.34 Yet it is in Being and Time that Heidegger claims that Alltaglichkeit as timeful character of Dasein in its living-withanother defines rhetorical hermeneutic. Therefore Heidegger's fascination with the Rhetoric becomes, first in SS 1924, and then in Being and Time> a series of elaborations of the timeful as modifying care, and reception. The dispositions of the hearer in Dasein s authentic life build political life. But there is a loss of problematic: note how Heidegger, in defining in SS 1924 the three rhetorical genres, the three tasks of Aussagen, emphasizes tense as qualifying task; since the deliberative, juridical, and epideictic are simply divisions of political work, they, with their specific tense preoccupations, both share and connect political time frames. Politics requires simultaneous consideration of past, present, and future dimensions of political action and choice. In politics there is no pure present, no unmotivated future, no isolated past. It is a political manifold—public and accessible. The rhetorical interest, then, is the reverse of idealist formalism, and thus there is a strong realist aspect to Heidegger's early formulations, the reverse of the Kantian temporal idealism Blattner finds in Heidegger.35 B. Realism in Aristotle, Dilthey, and Husserl? The SS 1924 lectures can be seen as glossing not only the later temporality of Being and Time, but the descriptive psychology of Dilthey and the phenomenological epoche of Husserl of Heidegger's immediate philosophical background. Recall Heidegger's claim that only Dilthey had recognized the historical importance of Classical rhetorical Affektenlehre (178). Heidegger appreciates Dilthey's historical tact; but also there is throughout the 1924 lectures a "Diltheyan" concern for time as intrusive, pervasive, qualifying life capacities and actions. Rudolf Makkreel has noted Dilthey's temporality as realist; Dilthey's time is derived from an InneiDerden^ an inner or reflective awareness, rather than from a Kantian representative consciousness, Vorstellen, which produces subjective time in the forms of a linear sequence of contentless nows. "Dilthey," according to Makkreel, "rejects t h e . . . claim that time is the ideal form of inner experience. Inner experience is not phenomenal like outer experience. Because, according to Dilthey, inner experience is real—it consists of facts of consciousness which are indubitable—time also must be real."36

VI 122 In the collection Dilthey and Phenomenology, both Makkreel and David Carr link temporalities of Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger as an investigative initiative of importance, an initiative that rejects linearity, the very linearity that the "manifold" that Blattner describes subverts. But, once again, I would argue that Heidegger's use of Aristotle's Rhetoric in SS 1924 is pivotal to his development. There is, indeed, a curious temporal manifold in Heidegger's inquiry itself. The past, Aristotle's Rhetoric^ enables Heidegger's contemporized rhetoric, and critiques as well a future in respect to Aristotle: Dilthey's hermeneutic of Heidegger's immediate past. And by using Aristotle's Rhetoric to gloss Aristotle, a contemporary restatement glossing a received Aristotle, Heidegger can employ the rhetorical formulae to articulate the centrality of Dasein as living-in-theworld, as well as the centrality of life experience in inquiry in his own theory, andm Aristotle—demonstrated in his intrication of the biological texts such as Parts of Animals with the Rhetoric in the lectures. Again, Heidegger's claim that for Aristotle life is nothing "wild or deep or mystical" evokes the tone of Dilthey's assertions that the fundamental concepts are those of life itself.37 Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger focus on time for us, on a manifold of lived, not conceptualized time; recollect Heidegger's discussion of the Aristotelian mean as "for us." The Rhetoric in SS 1924 not only glosses Aristotle's philosophy, in its present historical guise, but gives a classical justification for the investigative habits of the psychological and phenomenological research of the early twentieth century of Heidegger's immediate past. C. SS 1924 and SS 1925: "The History of the Concept of Time" There is one more connection to be made in Heideggerian inquiry into time. In Kisiel's account of SS 1925, "The History of the Concept of Time," time is, again, the temporality of Dasein, and again, rhetoric's Alltagllchkeit offers a way into the problematic.38 Recalling Dilthey, time is not outside, a framework for world events, but something "whirring away" inside consciousness.39 But this is a consciousness ready to be defined as Dasein, as a manifold of co-original structures, ways of being; for example, care as a primary structure (totality), of the constitution of being of Dasein.40 In these lectures there is a brief, but significant, intrusion of rhetoric, where Heidegger defines rhetoric as "the first part of logic, rightly understood,"41 and there are diffuse echoes of the rhetorical formulae of SS 1924: there is the connection of language, life, and truth, since life is language capacity (the Aristotelian zoon logon echon)\ thus life capacity is political capacity, and thus discourse as social practice, Miteinanderreden, has priority over language as concept.42 In short, there is in SS 1925 a recollection of a rhetorical politics of language, an investigational initiative that underwrites the politics of time.

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefolness, in the Heideggerian Program

123

4. Special Effects of the Rhetorical Connection: Politics First

It is the use of Aristotle's Rhetoric that is consequential. To give prominence to the Rhetoric in the Aristotelian oeuvre in a series of lectures on the Grundbegriffe is notable—surely there were not many philosophy courses in the German universities that did so. But when Heidegger uses the Rhetoric to elaborate or oppose the hoary philosophical usages we have derived from the major texts, he generates some specific, critical effects. Most specific is the critique of time. The quintessentially rhetorical initiative in the development of temporality is the focus on the politics of time, and thus on the reach of the construct kairos, appropriateness. Heidegger underlines the subtle contrast between two Aristotelian statements. First, ethics belongs to politics: "Die Ethik gehort in die Politik" (127). Second, rhetoric is inside politics: "Rhetorik... steht innerhalb der politike" (134). The first statement conveys, to my mind, a Heideggerian claim for the dependency of ethics on politics. Contrary to the philosophic, or Platonic, assumption that ethics as a domain of inquiry encompasses politics, and ethical issues as originary and enduring enclose political problematic, Heidegger defines the Hellenic politics as the care of our authentic being, the Dasein im Miteinandersein (64). Politics encloses ethics. The second statement, that rhetoric is inside politics, affirms that far from being a mere technical mastery, rhetoric is the investigation of the possible political uses of technique. Rhetoric provides the hard investigative edge of political inquiry in its capacity to theorize, and give an account of the basic transactions of politics; it is intrinsic, not dependent. The basic operations of politics are described in Rhetoric 2: the creation, alteration, and reception of doxa, endoxa, pathe, prohairesis, pisteis, and krisis exhaust the limited repertoire of political acts. Thus the claim that rhetorical material does not stand under, or derive from theoretical axioms; insofar as rhetoric locates elemental functions specifically, it epitomizes political action, rather than supplements a general preexistent theory. Or rhetoric, in terms of Hellenic task, is prephilosophical in a strong sense. Heidegger is placing in time theoretical work; it is not useful to regard as a primordial situation an event in investigation. The integrated political/rhetorical interests thus have as source of their competence a peculiar tact in addressing time, confronting the basic elements and operations in their temporal particularity. What philosophy attacks as rhetorical relativism is, in the Hellenic politics of SS 1924, an inquiry into relatedness, an extraordinary sensitivity to the constraints of time in Dasein's living-in-the-world. Political time is minute. First, meson, the mean, when defined as Jeweiligkeit, is functional, not immoral. Dasein as discursive, as absorbed, attuned ability, experiences only appropriate or

VI 124 inappropriate nows, the right time or the wrong time to choose to act— within its authentic domain, its Alltaglichkeit, made public by rhetoric. And Dasein engages choices socially constituted in time by the community of agents with which Dasein shares a public world: they are coordinated social practices.43 Heidegger notes Aristotle's transfer of the concept of meson from medicine; but the extra, rhetorical interest is in the moment of listening particularity, the temporal dimension of speaking change. Second, Heidegger notes the constancy of change, alteration. The basic nature of passion as disposition is changeability, changing and being changed. And thus, as we have observed, the coherence of Heidegger's account with Meyer's account of Aristotle in his insistence that politics is not the guardian of consensus, but the constant negotiation of the differences—differences caused by the passions that can change, alter judgments. Politics, according to SS 1924, in confronting and undertaking these tasks of discursive negotiation constitutes the authentic life. Rhetoric gives us the means for and the analysis of authenticity. And there is no part of the political that does not manifest the constraints of time. In sum, a Heideggerian politics of time appears, even if briefly, in SS 1924—a politics perhaps hypothesized by Arendt in her early fascination with Heidegger. Heidegger's special, and transitory, political effects are addressed in Stanley Fish's The Trouble with Principle. Fish cites Charles Taylor's claim that in response to the growing multiculturality, we are all going to need in the years to come "inspired adhoccery": "The solutions to particular problems will be found by regarding each situation of crisis as an opportunity for improvisation and not as an occasion for application of rules and principles."44 Or, perhaps, as an occasion for the improvisation of connections between shared beliefs and particular cases—an occasion for rhetorical, topical argument, in short. Fish finds principles troubling, when it is the case that it is locating principles which is troubling, not easy; there is very little experience of principles. Where can one locate the thought of a moral principle? Duration is obscure; enduring moral principles are enclosed in, prejudiced by the episodes of speaking-out of the Aristotelian doxa, endoxa. What is disseminated in political discourse is not pure, rational principles, but passionate principles, or, indeed, passions, dispositions themselves. Jacqueline de Romilly's La douceur depicts, for example, the strength and persistence of the value of sweetness as disposition and value in the communal history of antiquity, an enduring thematic in classical politics.45 Fish engages the very political issues Heidegger tries to illumine by means of the Aristotelian rhetoric. The weakness of Fish's argument, indicated in his later rejection of adhoccery, is that he fails to take sufficiently into account temporality as a factor in legal and political transactions. The rhetorical perspective, ineluctably temporal, does take into

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

125

account first, the importance of sensitivity to time, and second, that the difficulty lies not in proclaiming, but in confecting stable values, a difficulty Aristotle responds to in his pervasive preoccupation with relating universal to particular. Another rhetorician has noted this: Cicero, in the De legibus, explores the relation of law to particular cases; it is not so much that the enduring principles of Roman law must be neatly applied to, fitted to, particular cases; rather, great ingenuity must be used in particular cases so as not to damage the shared beliefs that prop, and necessarily so, the continuous identity of the Roman state in Roman law. Thus Cicero suggests the frailty, rather than solidity of the law. And just so Vico, another rhetorician, points out the timely figurative strategies, the creative fudging of language in legal fictions to convey to the populace the continuity and integrity of the grossly episodic law of the state. The problem with the geometrical, mechanical definitions of meson, for example, is thinness or emptiness, and this is the direct result of a philosophical desire to empty life experience. But in SS 1924 rhetorical kairos as meson in practice counters meson as theory, timeless and naive. Heidegger claims that the time dimension of ethics is frequency, pollakis; frequency as quality is explained by rhetoric as punctuations, reiterations of orientations, alterations of dispositions, and intrusions of speaking on listening that both multiply and complicate the modalities of choice. The study of language as it lives in Alltaglichkeit (62) is a consideration of the experience of time, a thick texture of articulated habits, dispositions, and opinions. Thus the discussion sets aside the philosophical staples—freedom and necessity—as insufficiently fine grained, apolitical in their articulation. But to say that man is im eigentlichen kairos (59), that Dasein is immerjewei/iges Dasein (246), that the mean equals kairos as a manifold of circumstances, Gesamtheit der Umstande (171)—all this complicates politics enormously; it is ineradicably pessimist as perspective. Not relativist, pessimist: Heidegger gives us all those subtle accounts of the possibilities of hearer-activity that constitute politics; what is wholly lacking is any suggestion of stable political solutions. This rhetorical pessimism, a strong critique of the naively optimist theory that Heidegger confronts in the standard accounts of Aristotle, attracts him, and changes his mind. 5. Conclusion: The Uses of the Quarrel of Rhetoric and Philosophy

The Rhetoric, then, does three things for Heidegger: it recaptures the original Greek argument in all its incarnate, patho-logical complexity, the matrix of all further conceptual and methodological development; it expresses the Hellenic endoxa, and thus serves as an intellectual history; and, most crucially, it furnishes a way into, an analysis for, the account of

VI 126

life as authentic, the political life. What many philosophers stipulate as a weakness must be redescribed as a strength. The philosopher may see in rhetoric an amoral fixation on discursive persuasion with no sense of timeless truths. But rhetoric's analytic strength lies in its limitation to discursive action and capacity. The rhetorical focus on Aussagen, speaking-out, and on listening as timebound social practice pointed to a range and quality of discursive experience that philosophy had not simply regarded as of little interest, but actively distrusted. It is precisely this focus on the ineradicably timely actions of speaking and listening that is effaced by our theoretical fascination with textuality and its supposed transcendence, its undecidability as immortality—a fascination that is selfgratulatory, perhaps. Its strength is its self-limitation to acts of articulation: it rejects the odd premise that there are "unarticulated thoughts" of a "cabinet of consciousness" —that apolitical piece of furniture. That rhetoric is inside politics, and not an autonomous formal techne, ensures its integrity as an investigative capacity, giving an account of constitutive acts. Further, if Blattner is correct that Alltaglichkeit is later eroded by the philosophical program of Being and Time, and slides into everydayness, ordinariness, and inauthenticity, in the 1924 lectures the extraordinary emphasis on Hellenic political rhetoric as originary matrix is at the same time an emphasis on Alltaglichkeit as timeful, or the solvent of eternity, the mode of eroding the timeless. Timeful politics, whose concepts are in nature, substantiate Heidegger's use of the Physics to express an ontology of oscillation between and transformation of potency and act, dunamis and energeia, rather than an ontology of stable entities, universal, beyond time and off stage, beyond living space and time. This, I would argue, is of crucial interest for Being and Time. And Blattner asserts that, even later, Heidegger had absolutely no interest in eternity.46 The use of the Rhetoric is ambitious: there is a reversal of the priorities of the history of philosophy. In SS 1924 Heidegger is using the Rhetoric not simply to gloss the Aristotelian Grundbegriffe, but to force a radical revision of our notion of Aristotle's place in Hellenic inquiry. Thus, for example, a very minor tactic of definition, with rhetorical overtones, pointing to a telos kata ton kairon (140), glosses Heidegger's very large claim that there is nothing teleological about Aristotle: "Aristoteles hatte keine 'teleologische' Weltanschauung" (82). Further, Heidegger, perhaps not self-consciously, is using Aristotle's rhetorical revisions as a model or prototype for his own revisions. It is a little alarming to see how intricated the Aristotelian and Heideggerian programs are in SS 1924— it is very difficult to separate his admiring account from his own revisionary ambitions. Most certainly, the later relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics is a troubling one. My claim is simply that

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

127

rhetorical hermeneutics enabled him to give lucid, deft accounts of basic political elements in SS 1924. Kisiel claims that SS 1924 offers us an "embarrassment of riches." Certainly it is a felicitous moment in Heidegger's development, with the felicity, perhaps, explaining its effacement in later political philosophical moments. What is truly embarrassing is that it remains, arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric. The rhetoric presented reorients, comments on our Platonic temptations of philosophy. It has critical force in the review of philosophical investigation. It leaves intact the statements of philosophical assumptions, goals, and values but represents them in a typically rhetorical fashion, that is to say, in a fluctuating mass of changes, changeability, ironies, negotiations of differences, and perversities. SS 1924 is an episode in the quarrel of rhetoric and philosophy transpiring entirely within the work of a single thinker, as a stage in the development of his own thought. And the primary issue at stake is time, and the inadequacy of the available philosophical language to account for time. And while one intellectual historical question is the relation of the meditations on time of SS 1924 to the powerful amplifications of temporality in Being and Time, another issue is the relative thinness of the development of these notions of political time in either Heidegger's subsequent work or in twentieth century philosophy in general. Is it the case that our political philosophy is difficult because it is insufficiently rhetorical?

NOTES 1. P. Christopher Smith, in his Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), may claim that rhetoric, in its control of the early, all-encompassing Hellenic discursive practice, has such a critical competence as gloss. Unless otherwise noted, intext citations refer to Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie: Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1924^ Gesamtausgabe, vol. 18, ed. Mark Michalski (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002), hereafter cited as GA 18. 2. Pierre Aubenque, "Logos et pathos: Pour une definition dialectique des passions," in Corps et ame: sur le De anima d'Aristote, ed. Cristina Viano (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 37-49. See as well Leprobleme de Vetre chez Aristote, where Aubenque calls rhetoric a "practical anthropology" (Paris: Presses universitaire de France, 1994), 261-62. 3. There are, I would argue, illuminating parallels between the Modernist philosophical revisionisms of Peirce s pragmatism and Heidegger's rhetorical revisionism of SS 1924: both diagnose similar dysfunctions in philosophical Ian-

VI 128 guage. See, in particular, Peirce s "Fixation of Beliefs," and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," in Writings, vol. 3 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 4. Klaus Dockhorn, review of Gadamers Wahrheit undMethode, 1st ed., in Gottingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 218 (1966): 169-206. 5. Michel Meyer, ed., Historic de la rhetorique des grecs a nos jours (Paris: Librairie Generate Francaise, 1999). 6. Meyer, "Postface," in Aristote: Rhetorique; des passions (Paris: Editions Rivages, 1989). 7. Or, even more strongly, "Pathos eine Bestimmung des Seienden mit dem Charakter der Veranderlichkeit" (195). Then, pathos is also defined as a kind of hexis (habit), which adds another time dimension (183). 8. Smith, Hermeneutics of Original Argument, 214. 9. Compare the highly rhetorical account of meson in Nichomachean Ethics 1106a26f. 10. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 490. In his glossary entry for "Alltaglichkeit" he notes Heidegger's earlier focus on "the surface existence of an accentuated accent of life" in WS 1919-20, and on the "overtly temporal" sense of life in SS 1924 (274—275); Aristotle's Rhetoric simply gives Heidegger a different terminology and argument for surface overtness. 11. William Blattner, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 47 fn. 12. Cf. De anima 403a3-10. Heidegger seems to disregard the passages in the De anima (408b20f, 413b25f, 429b, 430al6) on the eternity, purity, and separability of the mind as an Aristotelian lapse. 13. We have, of course, Leo Strauss on Hobbes's utilisation of Aristotle's Rhetoric. The Political Philosophy ofHobbes; Its Basis and Genesis, trans. E. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), reprint of Oxford edition of 1936, esp c.3. But we should also note that Heidegger was a close reader of Dilthey, and Dilthey's account of Hobbes emphasizes his psychological perspicacity: Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, in Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1960), vol. 2, 360-390. 14. Dumouchel, Emotions: Essai sur le corps et le social (Paris: Synthelabo, 1995), 87. GA 18, 46-47: passions are not states of the individual soul but qualifications of life-in-the world. 15. Ibid., 92. 16. Meyer, "Postface," in Aristote: Rhetorique; des passions, 136. 17. B. Cassin and M. Narcy, La Decision du sens; Le livre gamma de la metaphysique d'Aristote (Paris: Vrin, 1989), 185f.

VI Alltaglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program

129

18. Besides the passage on short chains of argument (1357a3-4), there are, for example, 1356al4-20, 1395B5-7, and 1357al5-17, which deal with the effects on the hearer. 19. Aubenque, Le probleme de Vetre chez Aristote, 94-95, 104. 20. Ibid., 118. 21. Heidegger distinguishes between Rhetoric and Sophistic in their connection to politics and ethics. Note the odd historical observation: "Die Sophistik ist der Erweis fur den Tatbestand, dafi die Griechen der Sprache verfallen sind, die Nietzsche einmal die 'sprechbarste aller Sprachen nannte" (109). 22. There is a very long list of patristic and scholastic authors influenced by rhetorical theory of the passions. The reference to Dilthey's Weltanschauung und Analyse indicates, I feel, a possible source for some of Heidegger's psychological readings of the Rhetoric (178). 23. See Smiths chapter, "Embodied Argument as Patho/LogicaT in Hermeneutics of Original Argument, on incarnation as motif in Aristotle, 217-90; contrast Blattner, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism, on the temporal vacuity of Heidegger's discourse, 121-22. 24. Again I would suggest that Peirce s pragmatism illumines the placement as well as the essential temporality of science of Heidegger. See his "Reply to the Necessitarians," Monist 3 (1893): 526-570. 25. Blattner, Temporal Idealism, 123, 127, 129. 26. Ibid., 127. 27. Ibid., 106. 28. Ibid., 107. Cf. Louis Mink, "On the Writing and Rewriting of History," in Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene Golob, and Richard Vann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 93: "We also know, that the past is not there at all. Events don't withdraw from the present to the past as an actor withdraws from the stage to the wings." 29. Blattner, Temporal Idealism, 109. 30. Ibid.,107. 31. Ibid., 112. 32. Ibid., 92, 120, 127-128. 33. Ibid., 132. 34. Ibid., 62. 35. Ibid., 229. 36. Rudolf Makkreel, "The Overcoming of Linear Time," in Dilthey and Phenomenology, ed. Rudolf Makkreel and John Scanlon (Washington: University

VI 130 Press of America, 1987), 142. The other pertinent articles are David Carr, "The Future Perfect: Temporality and Priority in Husserl, Heidegger and Dilthey," 125f, and Frithjof Rodi, "Dilthey's Concept of Structure in the Context of 19thcentury Science and Philosophy," 107£ 37. Rodi, "Dilthey s Concept of Structure," 114-115. Still, Dilthey did not approve of "biologism," Darwinism, etc.: "The material passes over the boundaries of the knowable." 38. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 321, 156. 39. Ibid., 319. 40. Ibid., 156: "The cogito sum of Descartes, to the extent that it is explicated, is directed precisely toward the determination of the cogito, and the cogitare, and leaves out the sum" Dasein is not, then, a Cartesian subject, "a subject that only incidentally provides itself with a world," 305. 41. Ibid., 264. 42. Ibid., 264-265. 43. Blattner, Temporal Idealism, 67, 73, 131-133. 44. Stanley Fish, "Boutique Multiculturality," in The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 63. Fish is careful to note that he does not endorse adhoccery, 65. 45. It is de Romilly's rhetorical intelligence that allows her to depict the persistence of the value of "sweetness" as disposition in antiquity. La douceur dans la pensee grecque (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1979). 46. Blattner, Temporal Idealism, 266.

VII

Historical Priorities One of the morals of Christopher Celenza's excellent The Lost Italian Renaissance is, simply, that an impoverished sense of philosophy delivers an impoverished history of philosophy. Salvatore Camporeale's enriched sense of philosophy, responsive to his strong positions on philosophy of religion, invests his brilliant work on Lorenzo Valla; the work marks a historiographical advance, for the innovative account of Valla makes a new case for the seriousness, intrinsic merit of humanistic thought of the fifteenth century. I will argue that Camporeale's early focus in Umanesimo e teologia on Valla's rhetorical investments is crucial to his later accounts of Valla's strong contributions to Renaissance thought. Here Camporeale's devotion to the task of defining a "rhetorical theology" or a "humanistic theology" is an exemplary instance of a much broader initiative in intellectual history: an initiative that exploits the very rich resources of the rhetorical tradition for considering, and contesting, the positions of traditional philosophy. In the same work, Celenza raises another pertinent, major issue when he contends that a history of serious inquiry requires a pragmatic sense of inquiry as both responsive to and intrusive in surrounding dispositions and actions; it must give an account of what a mode of inquiry does, in time—its applications and its failures—misfires.1 Celenza proposes a combination of social and intellectual historical methods, thus developing a sense of intellectual communities and their allegiances and contests: focusing, for example, on the constraints of orthodoxy and the temptations of honor. Celenza's historiographical survey gives a wonderfully detailed context for Camporeale's work. While Camporeale rarely indulged in programmatic statements, a pragmatic bent, a basic pragmatic allegiance informs both the topics and procedures of his account of Renaissance classicism. I suggest an analogue: just as modern intellectual history adds pragmatic value to "internalist" history of philosophy, so rhetoric encases, motivates the vital philo1 Christopher Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance; Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy (Baltimore, 2004), 66f.

Copyright 2005 by Journal of History of Ideas, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

VII 542

sophical critique Camporeale finds in Valla. The investigative "agency" of humanist rhetorical philologues co-opts the activity of modern intellectual historians in focusing on response, effect, appropriatenesss, and application. The opposition—"history of philosophy/intellectual history"—gains new life in the discussions of Renaissance humanism. For the philosopher, it is the distressing case that the intellectual historian is not so much too little disciplined in philosophy as too humanistic, too engaged with moral-aesthetic affect. I would contend that Camporeale's pragmatic historical effort represents another degree of interest: it is itself ambitious as serious inquiry in that it takes its place in a historical chain of classical replications: the originary Hellenic stipulation of rhetoric as the "practical" dialogic partner of "pure" philosophy; the humanist retrieval of classsical rhetorical pragmatic aspirations and techniques; and Camporeale's retrieval of the retrieval. In his use of humanist rhetorical hermeneutic as strategy in his reformist philosophy of religion, his practice is making a case for the case the humanists made. And, as I have argued earlier, there is a sense in which Camporeale's is a retrieval of an earlier twentieth-century retrieval. Camporeale's narrative of Renaissance rhetorical innovation and inclusion fits with a particular twentieth-century narrative that revises the standard history of Hellenic thought to reorder the historical relations of rhetoric, logic, and dialectic.2 Thus, in the Summer Semester 1924 lectures, "Die Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophic," Martin Heidegger employs Aristotle's Rhetoric to gloss the major philosophical texts of metaphysics, physics, politics, and ethics. Heidegger hypothesizes an "original argument" as transpiring within the political discourse of the courts, assemblies, and the oratory of the games; and, the original discipline that studied and regulated this discourse was rhetoric. With the Aristotelian definition of man as the political animal possessing language, with language as the mode of political capacity and action, rhetoric becomes Heidegger's "first fundamental hermeneutic of the dailyness (timefullness) of living together."3 Rhetoric illumined the domain of Dasein, of being-in-the-world, of historically specific existence. Heidegger claimed this Hellenic rhetoric functioned entirely within politics; he resisted the notion that rhetoric was an "autonomous linguistic discipline." Logic and dialectic are later, derived disciplines: logic working monologically, ascertaining the 2

"Garin, Camporeale, and the Recovery of Renaissance Rhetoric," MLN, 119, Supplement (2004), S47-S55. 3 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London,1962), 178; (Sein und Zeit, 7th ed., 138-39). Heidegger's SS1924 lectures are edited by Mark Michalski in Gesamtausgabe, II Abteilung: Vorlesingen 1919-1944, Bd. 18, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 2002).

VII Camporeale, Valla, Humanism, and Theology

543

principles of science; dialectic controlling the philosopher's dialogue on basic theoretical concerns of inquiry.4 True, the motivation of Heidegger's revised history of Hellenic philosophy was to determine a new position for Heidegger himself in philosophy; and true, this historical generosity to rhetoric and politics was effaced in his later work.5 But his stipulation of rhetoric as originary and inclusive discipline of the basic political-ethical concerns contests the error of the Hellenic philosophers' in their pejorative definition of rhetoric, the definition which is the source of the dominant matrix of classical formation, "the quarrel of philosophy and rhetoric." Heidegger's motive was inclusive, to retake for philosophy the modes and issues of Hellenic rhetoric. He regarded the philosophers' definition of rhetoric as wrong as an exclusionary moment, a search for philosophic purity, abstract integrity, that excludes, relegates messiness, all topics not amenable to method, to rhetoric as impure, relativist, inferior. For the intellectual historian, this philosophical definition and this claim for purity is troublesome; it would appear that the issues of politics, medicine, law, and even ethics elude the strategies of philosophical probity, resist purity in so far as they are unresponsive to philosophic anxieties. A thin, if rigorous delimitation of philosophical interests leaves the historian with the task of amanuensis to a professional guild, and deprives him of precisely the task of explaining historical interest. But rhetorical habits of action in inquiry, as directed to discursive effects are intrinsically pragmatic in motive; they dispense an entirely different tone, quite different from a philosophical-theoretical pragmatism that keeps its distance from persuasive effects, application. Camporeale's Valla The Heideggerean Hellenic history argues: if originary, then inclusive. It is this capaciousness of the rhetorical disposition that Valla recognises, and Camporeale recognises in Valla. Valla, in a statement Celenza cites, admires the orator's engagement with discursive effect. And indeed, the rhetorical preoccupation with discursive effect, regarded as moral flaw by philosophy, is an investigative strength, not weakness. Rhetoric, of course, embraces the impurity of the events of production and reception of texts; it studies even the 4 P. Christopher Smith, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument; Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (Evanston, II., 1998) furnishes an excellent account of Heidegger's recovery of Aristotle's Rhetoric. 5 However, Ernesto Grassi, associated with Heidegger for many years as student and colleague, can be read as developing the rhetorical-philosophical initiative Heidegger effaced; see his Rhetoric as Philosophy; The Humanist Tradition (University Park, Pa., 1980), and Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism; Four Studies (Binghamton, N.Y., 1983).

VII 544

odd, untoward events of the delivery of pure theory, philosophic enunciation. And, for Camporeale, there is the clear benefit to his intellectual historical initiative that rhetorical canons and tactics are impatronized, embedded in the Renaissance investigative vocabulary. It would be anachronistic for the modern historian of the Renaissance to eschew rhetorical instruments of analysis. Camporeale describes how Valla's rhetorical interests not only unify his investigative concerns, but render them perspicuous; Camporeale thus engages the array of Valla's argumentative tactics as well as his "literary" enhancements. And the primary rhetorical canon of "decorum" is a historical disposition: its insistence on locating the terms and arguments appropriate to time, place, and person not only establishes goals of representation, but founds the historical sensitivity to the inappropriate, anachronistic that informs Valla's philological skill. Valla's investigative program integrates methodological, religious, and importantly, political aims and strategies. The Dialecticae disputationes (DD) as, primarily, a radical critique of metaphysical language, is a critique of Scholastic theology. The Adnotationes, as a new hermeneutic of the word, establishes our sense of the presence of the word, of the performance of evangelising in the early Christian community. And the Defalso credita donatione denounces as it describes philologically the communication activities of specified later historical church communities as nonevangelical. In her very fine paper, Regoliosi explains that, in many ways, the supposed methodological critique of the DD is the most radical theological statement Valla makes. She argues two very strong points: first, Valla's text is "the means he employed to shake medieval philosophy at the root, to denounce its limitations and its failures." Second, Valla's strong critique of philosophical discourse is a strategy in his political program of ecclesiastical reform. Regoliosi rightly emphasises Valla's claim for the lack of "dicibilita" of philosophic universals: the incapacity of our language, ruled by consuetudo communis, to signify rarefied constructs of philosophy. The ulterior motive of the DD is to refound theological language within the domain of the faculties and actions of life. This Regoliosi characterizes as the "deontologizing" of language; this is necessary, because the philosophical representations impair, even preclude our understanding of the revelation. And, therefore, this Scholastic theology impairs the evangelical function, the kerygma, the existential events of enunciation clearly describable in rhetorical terms. This Scholasticism, of course, contrasts with Valla's rhetorical theology, based on its true assessments of language and discursive capacities as regulated by usus communis. Regoliosi remarks on Valla's distinction between God philosophized and God revealed, and this is the foundation of his philological project in the Adnotationes as an act of piety. It is at this point that Camporeale's inquiry connects with the Diltheyan proclivities of the forma-

VII Camporeale, Valla, Humanism, and Theology

545

tion of his mentor, Eugenio Garin. Valla's philological critique is a sophisticated strategy in a "phenomenological" approach to religion, as the redescription of religious experience. I have argued in an earlier paper a similar strategic connection between Heidegger's Diltheyan approach in the Winter Semester 1920-21 lectures on the Pauline Galatians and Thessalonians, aimed at obtaining access to the life-world of early Christianity, and his later Summer Semester 1924 recovery of Aristotle's Rhetoric.6 Both Camporeale's Valla and Heidegger have serious hermeneutical issues that can furnish a motive for an expansive rhetorical recovery. This does not accord with Copenhaver's claim that "Valla did not want to improve philosophy, he meant to shrink it and hold it within the precincts of rhetoric." 7 Rather, in both Heidegger and in Valla's work the new rhetoric coalesces with the hermeneutic program to reinvigorate the major issues of spirituality and ecclesiology, issues that have profound implications for a "philosophy of religion." When Camporeale emphasizes the usefulness of Valla's rhetorical hermeneutics in exploring and expounding New Testament teachings on church organization and the nature of spirituality, he does not argue that these rhetorical interests "shrink" philosophy of religion to, simply, the reflective mode of Christian belief. Rather, he points to the substitution for an undiscerning school vocabulary and syntax of a retrieved New Testament discourse, efficacious in the reacquisition of early Christian problematic. Valla's philosophical philology expands the Christian discussion by renewing its language, revising the major terms, restoring some of the ancient vigor of contest with non-Christian terms and issues. Thus the evangels are read as evangelizing; here there is a strong rhetorical concern with the apperception of audience, of discursive effect. Paul's tissue of imperatives, vocatives, apostrophes is read as the evangel evangelizing, the performance of the word that defines the community. This constitutes the exemplary experience, so fundamental to reformed religious thought of the Renaissance, the experience fides ex auditu. Valla's discussion of the Pauline discourse places the notion of "authority" in a different, if still authenticating, context. The word of God through his messenger Paul has the specific characteristics of Pauline argument and figure—the medium is the message. And, the presence of the Galatians or Ephesians in the New Testament is a placeholder for the fifteenth-century Italian Christian Valla addresses. The notion of "metanoia" as "do think again" is an enunciative basis of a sacrament, or a sacramental status of an enunciation. Valla's focus is on use, on the "speech acts" of consolation, exhortation, praise; statements of "flesh" 6 "Garin, Camporeale, and the Recovery of Renaissance Rhetoric," S50-51. The Winter Semester Lectures can be found in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, II Abt., Bd. 60, Phdnomenologie des religiosen Lebens (Frankfurt am Main, 1995). 7 Brian Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, History of Western Philosophy 3 (Oxford, 1992), 223.

VII 546

and "spirit" are exemplified in corporeal events, the issues of fleshly life. It is an approach that assimilates, not rejects, the tensions, oppositions, contradictions of religious experience. Camporeale closes his account of Valla's text on the donation of Constantine by citing and glossing Valla's claim that "nihil magis oratorium scripsi" Here Camporeale refers, I would argue, to both Valla's selfdesignated rhetorical role, and to his rhetorical skill as inquirer. It is his eschewal of philosophical language, the reiterations of the Adnotationes' meticulous account of the copiousness, subtlety, affective reach of evangelical, Pauline discourse that informs the vital opposition of evangelical to imperial Christian politics in the text. And since rhetoric is the essential art of community and communitarian goals, its exercise authenticates Valla's own political-rhetorical task, as civis romanus: the philological exercise is an effort to renegotiate discursively the status and institutions of the church through the contestation of the Constantinian imperial structures by the primitively evangelical models.8 The political terms—slavery, liberty—must be apperceived in their values in the scheme of redemption. In an intriguing, counterintuitive strategy, the Donation explicates Christiana libertas, the Dialecticae disputationes law and legality, the lex latina. For, politics invests the Dialecticae Disputationes as much or more than it informs the Donation, since the text grounds language in the life-experience of a community of speaker-hearers. The notions of communis usus, consuetudo communis described the community origin of good, indeed, possible, capacious discourse; in Valla's work, the law, the structure of community is more apparent in language study than in ecclesiology. In turn, the Adnotationes stipulates the life of the word in its original reception; it delivers an enriched sense of the copiousness, subtlety, affective reach of Pauline and then patristic formulations, an originary Christian rhetoric. And, the Donation polemicizes the issues within the fifteenth-century discussion, shifts the focus to the politics of Christian presence, and poses the contrast of imperial/evangelical as describing a necessary current choice, a choice demanding political action on the part of Valla's contemporaries. Camporeale and Cranz Camporeale's rhetorical pragmatism, then, on one level illumines use, function in Valla's inquiry, and on another, refines our sense of the subtletly, sophistication of his arguments. What I would now claim is that a comparison of Camporeale's work on Valla and F. Edward Cranz's work on Cusanus is remarkably suggestive; their work is mutually responsive, reinforcing in mak8 Salvatore Camporeale, "Lorenzo Valla e il Defalso credita donatione; Retorica, Liberia ed Ecclesiologia nel '400," in Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo, Riforma, e Controriforma; Stuidie Testi (Rome, 2002), 566,563.

VII Camporeale, Valla, Humanism, and Theology

547

ing a case for the vitality of fifteenth-century inquiry. They describe for us two different modalities of the importance, the power, and the elegance of work that falls outside the parameters of "traditional" philosophy and the design of historical traditions represented in the terms such as Platonic, Aristotelian, Neoplatonic. Here, I would argue, Cranz's work on Cusanus and the Cusan experiments in radically different genres of inquiry is entirely compatible with Camporeale's very different premises and strategies. Indeed, the investigations of both are remarkable in their clarification of the issues at stake in the intellectual historiography of the fifteenth century. Cranz, like Camporeale, studies hermeneutics, the strategies of interpretation, and Camporeale, like Cranz, focuses on the diffuse, practical applications of hermeneutical insights. But where Camporeale's pragmatism is political, a strong commitment to the reach of interpretation strategies in religious speculation and in the practices of the church, Cranz's pragmatism is, I would argue, Peirceian: it concerns solely the habits of action in inquiry itself, the development of categories and practices of investigation by the Renaissance readers of the ancients. Cranz's work is in the quintessentially rhetorical domain of reception. There are two major assumptions informing Cranz's work: first, the ancients are "lost"; after a fundamental reorientation of the categories of thought circa AD 1100, thinkers, such as Cusanus, "could not go back"; the ancient categories of "being" and "knowing" are no longer accessible.9 Cranz asks us to accept his pessimistic judgment that the reorientation is so thorough, so severe, that we as moderns can't understand ancient categories: our readings inevitably, even unwittingly, invest them with modern categorial values.10 In Cranz's early work, this entails not a working hypothesis of a difficulty to be surmounted, but a claim for an insurmountable barrier to a full account of ancient thought. In his later work, the poignancy of the historical distance functions primarily as a constraint on the historian's naivete, on his simple acceptance of the model of the standard history of philosophy plot of Western continuity, of a continuous, essentialist tradition with its variations— Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic, and the like. Anselm is his major figure; in no way whatsoever could Cranz deem any of Anselm's propositions as "footnotes" to Plato, or to Aristotle. Cranz describes the changes in Anselm's thinking and notes them as occluded; they are invisible even to him. The reorientation, in premise and process, neither 9 F. Edawrd Cranz, Nicholas ofCusa and the Renaissance, ed. Thomas Izbicki and Gerald Christiansen (Aldershot, 2000); see "A Common Pattern in Petrarch, Nicholas of Cusa and Martin Luther," 155, 162. 10 1 am appealing primarily to some unpublished texts, soon to appear in Reorientations of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance, forthcoming in Ashgate's Variorum series.

VII 548

assumes nor functions in an ancient world of being and knowing. The ancients' "conjunctive" model of the relation of knower to known—here Cranz often cites the formulas of Aristotle's De anima—is effaced. Rather, the postAnselmian thinker in his "disjunctive" model starts from a symbolic structure of meanings and intentions, a domain of words and concepts radically disjoined from both natural and divine "reality." At the same time, while the conjunctions, connections of ancient inquiry are gone, they are still "read," nostalgically, by the post-Anselmians, and importantly, they are believed, read as having an ultimacy and immediacy of great value—they are read "affectively," not "scientifically."11 Thus Cranz returns several times to the passsage in Anselm's Proslogion that relates Anselm's anxiety: his successful proof of the existence of God is unaccompanied by affect—and, he despairs— why can I not feel it?12 The second assumption is something of a hidden agenda: Cranz is antimodern; he dismisses the importance of Cartesian innovations and Descartes as founder of modern philosophy; Descartes is simply one of the epigoni of an Anselmian and Abelardian revolution. In this revolution, the ancient inheritance underwent a transmutation in order that its estranged categories could function in the twelfth-century context, or indeed, serve as a source of new creation in serious speculation.13 It is a paradoxical situation that draws gain out of, and only out of, loss. Cranz published two accounts of fifteenth-century readings of the ancients: Cusanus of Psuedo-Dionysius and Valla of Quintilian, as well as refining in an unpublished paper a study of "Petrarchan Paradoxes" of reading. Cusanus' interpretation14 of Pseudo-Dionysius engages the discussion of the "Beyond" (epekeind), as theologically central. Yet Cusanus, Cranz argues, develops an entirely new position. The world of being and knowing, and thus the continuity of knowing with "vision," the juncture of human rational knowledge with spiritual union and immediacy, is lost. But, Cranz claims, Cusanus is the first "to have started from the new world of meanings and intentions and to have reached the Absolute." The new "intensive self" has replaced the immediacy of the old "extensive self" with its own isolate authentication. Solipsism is power. The loss has stimulated an inventive, an exciting inquiry. But what is of primary interest for the student of Renaissance thought is 11

Cranz, "A Common Pattern," 167, cf. 159. Cranz, "A Common Pattern," 158-59. Cranz cites and glosses the passage from Anselm's Proslogion XIV, Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt (Edinburgh, 1946-81), I, 111, 8f., several times in his longer papers. 13 Cranz, "A Common Pattern," 165. 14 "Nicolaus Cusanus and Dionysius Areopagita," in Nicholas of Cusa and the Renaissance, 130. 12

VII Camporeale, Valla, Humanism, and Theology

549

the compatability of Cranz's and Camporeale's initiatives. Their cases for the brilliance of their protagonists' work are at the same time justifications for their own scholarly methods that can specify with great acuity these strategies; the two programs exemplify a modern historiographical advance. The difficulty started by this dual project is, of course, that it seems quite dismissive of a range of Renaissance thinkers; there is nothing encyclopedic, compendious about their work; minor figures are minor. But the dismissiveness has its source in their goal of defining novel excellence. Both focus on hermeneutics, on strategies of interpretation, but both are committed to finding hermeneutical strategies, interpretations that heroically restate value. Camporeale engaged Valla's program of radical critique of specific, available historical versions: of Roman law, of the New Testament, of the Christian church, and as well, it seems, of the entire tradition of philosophical dialectics. Cranz defines new positions in the history of thought, strong revisions that may claim the status of radical version, primary gloss. His thesis assumes the earlier, profound change of Anselm, and looks for the post-Anselmian strategies that read through the veil of change and thus originate new response to a cumulative problematic; it is a search for notions of ancient Christianity, aggressively reformulated, that will be of contemporaneous use. Camporeale carefully recapitulates Valla's displacement of a dysfunctional philosophical method by rhetorical premises and tactics. Philosophy, it seems, offers no adequate tools for the history of philosophy because of its misapprehension of the very structure and process of the workings of language communities. It is Camporeale's own rhetorical sensitivity to the coherence and reach of Valla's rhetorical program that founds his account of the ingenuity of Valla's reform program. For Camporeale, the Dialecticae disputationes is a moment in the history of philosophy that discriminates the particular philosophical wrong turns that prove deleterious to speculation on human capacity and action. It specifies precisely terminological flaws, justifying the condemnations in preface IV of the Elegantiae of philosophy as the source of theological error. And, of course, it is Valla's historically specific, dense account of the evangelical language community that explains Valla's place in history, and makes us recognize the many reiterations of Valla's descriptions in the evangelism of Erasmus and Luther. In contrast to Camporeale's clear choice of simple recapitulation of Valla's rhetorical method, Cranz notes that in dealing with Cusanus "we find ourselves methodologically strained." The metaphysical ambition of the Pseudo-Dionysian and Cusan texts is such that "nothing very serious can be said about Dionysian Beyond (epekeina) or Cusan Absolute within the framework of a secular, rational history." The implication is, that the premises of such a history beg the question of such concepts' usefulness. In Cranz's formulation, the "Ground" is "a meta-statement following upon an estab-

VII 550

lished symbolic structure." No statement made within the symbolic structure can apply to it; but, the constructs of Ground and Absolute both follow upon, and yet, are "above" the symbolic structures and guarantee them.15 In another text, "Cusanus' Use of Pseudo-Dionysius," Cranz elaborates: "ft]he main problem, as I see it, is that in intellectual history we commonly work within a single language of understanding, the scholar's language: within it we can state the position of two or more thinkers, even when they disagree. But the Beyond for Dionysius and the Absolute for Cusanus generate two radically different structures which cannot be compared within a single scholar's language."16 True, the notion "single scholar's language" itself provokes difficulty: it is not simply the radical Anselmian change that defeats, it is our own investigative ambition working with, assimilating, that paradigm that prevents understanding. This comment on method, of course, reiterates Cranz's notion of the fundamental reorientation as occluded, invisible in the texts. There is no single "science" that encompasses Aristotle, Anselm, and our historical work. Aristotle's science of the De anima 111,4 429b30: "The intellect is somehow potentially the intelligibles, but it is none of them till it intellects . . . ," is lost to Anselm, forcing him to read the ancient accounts of modes of knowing, "not scientifically, but affectively." Cusanus, starting from the Anselmian position, develops a new genre of inquiry, and Cranz's account of that generic shift is, I would argue, another phenomenological, post-Diltheyan initiative that focuses on life-experience: recall Dilthey's aphorism: "All our fundamental categories have their source in experience."17 What the historian gains is a very refined sense of the assumptions and strategies of the actual investigations of thought after AD 1100 no longer overlaid by recourse to the simplistic aphorisms of Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and the like beliefs of the standard narrative, and thus avoiding the question-begging of the standard history of philosophy that employs these tags. The Cranz initiative also deploys a powerful sense of loss as innovation, and innovation as loss: a new hermeneutic tactic grows from frustation; affective conviction, as we see in Anselm, does not necessarily accompany logical success. But the Diltheyan impetus, or Cranz's affective interest, indicates another version of rhetorical historiographical effectiveness. The word "rhetoric" scarcely passes Cranz's lips, but his descriptions of the strategies of Cusan texts are rhetorically astute, in so far as they describe sharp generic changes in textual strategies, delivering insight. The treatment of "mysticism" is ex15 16

137.

"Nicolaus Cusanus and Dionysius Areopagita," 111. "Cusanus and the Use of Pseudo-Dionysius," in Nicholas ofCusa and the Renaissance,

17 See Frithjof Rodi, "Dilthey's Concept of Structure," in Dilthey and Phenomenology, ed. Rudolf Makkreel and John Scanlon (Washington, D.C., 1987), 114-5.

VII Camporeale, Valla, Humanism, and Theology

551

emplary: Cranz's tactic is to close-read the rather flat-footed, edifying prose, delivered by disarms with great clarity of argument; Cranz notes Cusanus' meticulous arrangements of relations of key terms—mysticism demystified. Cranz's account of mystical address also notes the intimacy, the demands on the reader of its peculiar directness, its eschewal of Scholastic habits of argumentative address. This suggests an underlying connection of Cranz and Camporeale's work with other initiatives in our Renaissance historiography, initiatives of contextualization that are experiential, empirical in some very strong sense. There are two major assumptions of Camporeale's version of Valla's notions of reform: first, the importance of the presence of the text; enunciation as presentation. Thus the issue: how do New Testament events of production and reception overlay, stipulate the actions of succeeding Christian communities? Second, the insistence on rhetoric as politics: the Christian message, and the messengers, were vital "civic" carriers of Christian value, immediately investing all forms, issues of contemporary Italian institutions and practices. But it is in the strong readings of Cranz and Camporeale of Petrarchan innovation that their compatability is most evident, and their connections to new initiatives in intellectual history most obvious. Both stress the affective dimension of intellectual action. Certainly, rhetorical strategies have the capacity to specify the generic innovations of Petrarch's letters. The letters reveal a brilliant hermeneutic achievement, the crafted, self-conscious retrieval of the Ciceronian rhetorical-political project, much transformed, of course. Petrarch's rediscovery of the letters reveals Petrarch as attuned to the Ciceronian use of the familiar letters as hegemonous genre of preview and review of political, philosophical, literary inquiry, and, in his retrieval, Petrarch as changing the tone and direction of "philosophical," serious debate. The letters occur in an idiosyncratic register of performance that values or revalues certain habits of action in inquiry. The exigencies of intimate exchange—which constrain and inspire at every point in the Ciceronian texts—require the kind of virtue that underpins Judith Shklar's definition of the (able) philosopher as "constantly self-aware, and self-correcting."18 The letter exchanges are anchored in a self-conscious usage that, at its best, blocks the temptation of "self-forgetfulness" that accompanies "objectivity" as investigative program, a program that fails, by and large, to secure the trust, the necessary response of sincerity that is the moral parameter of successful ethical inquiry. Petrarch's use of the Ciceronian letters is perhaps the paradigmatic example of a transforming appropriation by Cranz's post-AD 1100 "intensive self." The work of Cranz and Camporeale compatibly suggests, then, a positive 18 Judith Shklar, Political Thoughts and Political Thinkers, ed. Stanley Hoffman, (Chicago, 1998), 353.

VII 552

trend in intellectual historiography of "inclusive contextualization" of high cultural texts. The Heideggerean revision of Hellenic intellectual history mentioned earlier claims rhetoric, as an original discipline, is the original context for philosophic inquiry, and by defining an inclusive rhetorical-philosophic discipline, suggests as well an inclusive historiography. This, in part, is corrective of Celenza's identification of rhetoric as philosophical method; by not simply "promoting" rhetoric to philosophy it offers instead consideration of the critical impact of integrating rhetorical concerns with the hegemonous values of "purity" specified by philosophers in the history of thought. Cranz and Camporeale pursue diverse strategies of "inclusive contextualization" then. But where, precisely, do their investigations fit in current historiographical discussions? First, neither can be assigned a secure place on either side of the current debate on the propriety of using "Medieval" or "Renaissance" as a rubric, defining the dominant modality of fifteenthcentury inquiry. Rather, their work glosses the debate as a disguised contest between historians of philosophy that secure merit only in schools, systems, and the intellectual historians who locate value in a wide range of genres. Cranz, by insisting on the radical break, strong disassociation of ancient from post-Anselmian thought forces us to consider how to specify post-Anselmian modes of innovation, and asks us to rethink the possibilities and limits of "tradition" in the sense of a single linear narrative from Hellenic thought to the present. What, he asks, of intrinsic classical interest survives Anselm? Cranz's fifteenth-century initiatives illumine and react to an earlier, fundamental transition, a transition that questions the limits of our "classicality," and questions as well the very possibility of "imitation" of the classics as Renaissance capacity. Copenhaver may be astute is terming "Renaissance" as only a chronological designation; still, etymologically, it signals rebirth, as a recuperative, hermeneutic novelty. Cranz's project—to define new positions, the "creative mis-readings" of Cusanus and Valla—is based on the assumption that in their work the earlier AD 1100 categories are not transforming but transformed;19 the energy, directness, power are Cusanus' and Valla's in finding a new position within the new symbolic structure; they do not "imitate" the ancients; they reorient to new uses Anselm's reorientation; they problematize the Renaissance as mere retrieval. At the same time, Cranz's Petrarch is not merely dismissive of scholastic logic and Scholastic Latin, but deeply critical of the inadequacy of the Scholastic's post-Anselmian categories for explication of human capacity and value. And Cranz as antimodern also undercuts the novelty, importance of Cartesian initiatives, and poses questions of not simply the originality, but the perspicuousness of the post-Cartesian 19 "The Transmutation of Platonism in the Development of Nicolaus Cusanus and Martin Luther," in Nicholas ofCusa and the Renaissance, 169.

VII Camporeale, Valla, Humanism, and Theology

553

moment, and the usefulness of its epistemological assumptions to historical work in premodernity. Then, Camporeale's rhetorical pragmatism contributes to a revaluation of motives, dispositions of early sixteenth-century religious reformation; at the same time, he asks us to develop a sharper, more contestatory sense of what was at stake in reform; he particularly wants us to repudiate certain strong distinctions between Southern and Northern European movements. His program is a historiographical advance as an inclusive gesture; Valla's folding in of rhetorical interests, analysis projects the issues of dialectic and argument, of hermeneutic as reception into the general political and ecclesiological discussion. Again, it is Camporeale's political motives that drive his rhetorical research. Making a case for Valla's programmatic seriousness is essential to Camporeale's twentieth-century reform initiative. Camporeale, Cranz, and Intellectual History Cranz and Camporeale are historians of Renaissance historical investigations. In this sense they are Burckhardtian in mode; the important strategies of the past are those defining "pastness." And, both, by their acuity in description of historical-critical modes, rework the notion of Renaissance as not simply naive Classical rebirth, but as containing strong anticlassical, or unclassical, moments. Copenhaver remarks the importance of a Renaissance "philologized philosophy" for late Renaissance appropriations of classical thought.20 This suggests not simply grammar in the service of philosophy, but indicates a different narrative, placing the Renaissance not as a lapse, an interval between two strong rationalist moments of Scholasticism and Cartesianism, but as continuous with the "philosophical philology" of Giambattista Vico that authenticated his history as new science. Vico's program has its anticlassical moments as well: first in his repudiation of the moralisms, the individualist moral wisdom of the "solitary philosophers," Stoic and Epicurean, that pervade the standard classical educational formation; second, in his strong antipathy to the research results of the classical antiquarianism of his seventeenth-century predecessors. Both Cranz and Camporeale pursue historical interests that are to them of the utmost seriousness; Camporeale is committed to specifications of theological innovation, Cranz to a history of ideas that assumes and tries to comprehend—an almost incomprehensible—capacity for radical change. Both work to map the shifts in the basic notions of human capacity and incapacity— perceptive, rational, linguistic. The task of mapping capacity, certainly in the premodernWestern tradition that Celenza and Copenhaver engage, requires, I 20

Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, 356.

VII 554

have argued, revisiting the quarrel of rhetoric and philosophy. The intellectual historians, when taking on the history of philosophy as one of their tasks, should assume, not the radical separateness or hegemony of philosophy, but that rhetoric and philosophy coexist in an ancient and enduring relationship of supplement, symbiosis, or at least, fruitful contest. To be sure, the positive contributions of rhetoric to the history of high culture have received recent emphasis, even exaggeration. But the usefulness of that exaggeration lies in a much enriched sense of what constitutes the most inclusive and most discriminating strategies of the discussion of a particular period. Rhetoric as hermeneutic offers to the intellectual historian an interpretative moment that gains authority by contextualising the basic instruments of philosophical analysis, the terms and chains of reasoning of purity, by reading past exchanges as lived experiences of production and reception that can be queried.21 And in turn, it queries present engagements; this is not so much "presentism" as the acknowledgment of the ineluctability, the durability of community transactions as constraining investigative capacity. Cranz's inclusive, affective reading of the post-Anselmian "intensive self" as a pervasive controlling model of disjunction is suggestively explanatory of the elegaic, disjunctive in Renaissance visual culture, and as well, strongly revisionary of the standard notion of the novelty of Cartesian consciousness. Camporeale's exposition of Valla's account of Constantinian program revamps imperialism as a powerful attack on Christian capacity, liberty. Then, Celenza remarks Valla's assertion of libertas dicendi as orator's value.22 But for Camporeale, this is a liberty as obligation: if a pertinent argument can be articulated, it must be articulated. What I have suggested is a peculiar sympathy of rhetoric and intellectual history as inquiry modes. I have argued for the competence of rhetorical habits of action in inquiry for radical critique: pragmatic critique, of course, of discursive effect and therefore of production, but as well a technical capacity to assess internal argument and topic. Then, critique is a particular interest of rhetoric and intellectual history; a duty of the intellectual historian—perhaps as opposed to the historian of philosophy—is to distinguish critical factors; it must recognize and reassemble the attacks on philosophical orthodoxies within the philosophical discussion, as well as within other genres of great perspicacity and skill. Bernard Williams, in his last book, Truth and Truthfulness, by describing the Thucydidean achievement, tried to define history's devotion to the truth. At one point, he considers H. V White's program in Metahistory, angrily 21 For example, Lodi Nauta, in "William of Ockham,and Lorenzo Valla; False Friends, Semantics and Ontological Reduction," Renaissance Quarterly, 56 (2003), 613-51, argues against defining Valla as Nominalist, at one point "because Valla does not seem to have any specifically Realist opponents in mind," 623. 22 Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance, 88.

VII Camporeale, Valla, Humanism, and Theology

555

dismissed by Momigliano and others as antitruth; Williams argues for the "truth" of White's claim that rhetoric structures the narratives, and thus the reception, of the great nineteenth-century historical texts. But then, Williams, counterintuitively, makes a strong argument for rhetoric's critical usefulness, an argument not to be found in White. He claims "Rhetoric is particularly disposed to set free the various suspects from the wrong side of the Platonic divide, carrying with it ideas of manipulation and force, and the implication that there are almost in the nature of the case, rival speakers, (or if not, that is because one has got rid of the others)."23 This notion of rivals and riddance returns us to Heidegger's claim that originally (and usefully) Hellenic rhetoric functioned (entirely) inside politics. Rhetoric is indispensable to the intellectual historians' recuperation of the contests of the past, and thus, of the degree of political seriousness, pertinence of high cultural quarrels. Intellectual history needs not simply rhetorical technical skills of analyzing discourse and its effects, but the motives and values of rhetoric: its contrarian impulse, its dedication to expositing the thick impurity of the life-experiences as matrices of texts. Camporeale is certainly attuned to Valla's possession of rhetorical values, motives, and techniques of critique. Cranz's argument is that Cusanus' program is critical as well, contending within and with the Anselmian system; Cusanus' protagonist, the Idiota, as investigator used a range of sensitivities to false issues, bad questions, jejune strategies, and with great rhetorical tact, Cusanus as Idiota turns to new genres of inquiry and exposition in his effort to recapitulate Christian freshness and truth. Further, Williams's verb "set free" implies "rescue," and thus suggests a different critical value. The constant, pervasive danger of the philosophical mode of purity is exclusion, narrowing of theme and strategy. The rhetorical tradition preserves the elements of chance, contingency, the rebarbative motives repressed, discarded in philosophical work. Rhetorical rescue implies that the critique is not simply of faults of system, syntactic/logical flaws, but of topics, in the sense of maxims, principles of arguments, as misappropriated, mislaid. The systems, perhaps, carefully stored certain values and experiences in the wrong place. The strength of rhetoric, on the other hand, is that it serves as a treasure house of the relegated, the great depository of the occasions and strategies of chance, contingency rejected by philosophy as not amenable to method. Thus, if one tires of Cicero's thin accounts of classical republican theory, one can always repair to the Adfamiliares for an acute rhetorical analysis of Roman republican failure. 23 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness; An Essay in Geneaology (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 242.

VII 556

Failure is, indeed, a rhetorical speciality. It is significant that Williams concludes Truth and Truthfulness with an invocation of a philosophical perspective of a "strong [Nietzschean?] pessimism" that will function in a program of hope, not despair. This is a theme of his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy as well. But this returns us to Burckhardt; not the triumphalist Burckhardt of Western Civ 101, but Lionel Gossman's Burckhardt, strongly critical of the nineteenth-century academic institutions and programs that Celenza deplores in their effect on Renaissance scholarship. Gossman's Burckhardt, again, as severe critic of modernity: if the Italian Renaissance is the "firstborn" of modernity, it is of an age of appalling dysfunction.

VIII

Lorenzo Valla: Humanist Rhetoric and the Critique of the Classical Languages of Morality A consideration of rhetoric and ethics in the oeuvre of Lorenzo Valla suggests a much larger project that would study the cluster of rhetorical canons, premises, and strategies as they guide both the ethical inquiry of the Renaissance humanists and the ethics of humanist inquiry. Valla's rhetoric, recall, is exemplary of Renaissance rhetoric as ambitious, as an embedding strategy, analogous to Quintilian's tactic of integrating grammar and dialectic, psychological theory and general reading, within a single course of rhetorical training, a training that is more than a pedagogical episode, indeed, represents and invests a life-long engagement. As ambitious, Valla's rhetoric is not simply late embellishment but early procedure, and his rhetorical clarifications make a powerful contribution to his definition of successful inquiry; as inclusive, his rhetoric includes the rhetor's own behavior, affects moral conduct as well as ethical insight. The project would stipulate two very rich forms of interrelationship: it would focus on the connection between rhetorical and ethical theory, and thus study the humanist appeal to rhetorical assumptions in their revisionist program of critique of classical ethics; it would also assume a connection that is usually expressed as a stricture, that is, that rhetorical and ethical practice are inseparable. In turn, the definition of praxis as topic of inquiry could support a further claim about mode of inquiry; the project would stipulate a heuristic relationship between modern rhetorical analytic competence and Renaissance rhetorical performance, and thus require the modern historian to resort to contemporary rhetorical techniques in or-

VIII

der to analyze the humanist discursive practice that is the evidence for humanist behavior, their conduct of inquiry. The project then would be a history of the discursive practice as well as theory of humanist investigators, with special reference to ethical issues. Lorenzo Valla (1407- 1457), astute in theory and aggressive in practice, scholar and polemicist, philologue and pamphleteer, interested as much in religious substance as literary form, is an easy choice for initiating a study of humanist rhetoric and ethics. Valla's De vero falsoque bono, as an exercise in ethical theory, is a very strong instance of humanist revisionism that makes constant appeal to rhetorical premises in the development of a new ethical lexicon and syntax. This is an obvious point, and I shall merely suggest as particularly illuminating the passages in the later versions of the De vero bono, which Professor Lorch has identified as related to the contemporaneous revisions of his Dialecticae disputationes (1444 - 1449). * Here we find rhetorical canons of accessibility, flexibility, and responsiveness, and the rhetorical privileging of ordinary, natural usage over arcane, esoteric choice, used to locate a series of faults in the classical ethical lexicon and to suggest remedies for the faults. One must recall that one of the contexts of Valla's reworking of the Dialecticae disputationes and the De vero bono is his close reading of the more complete Quintilian manuscript.2 His is a critique of the use of words in propositions, of malfunctioning definitions, and his rhetoric is a Quintilianesque discipline that provides the analytical axioms and techniques for resolving equivocations and confusions; Valla then combines rhetorical with Christian postulates to construct a filter to screen out undesirable classical discursive and hence cognitive practices. In the De vero bono, then, Valla has his protagonists in the dialogue, the "Stoic," "Epicurean," and "Christian" personae, exemplify or subvert errors in classical ethical usage: reifications, concealed or self-deceived figurative uses, tautologies, and false attributions of 1. See the preface of Prof. M. Lorch's edition of Valla's De vero falsoque bono (Bari, 1970), pp. xlix ff.; hereafter cited as DVB. Most other citations from Valla's works are from Opera Omnia (Basel, 1540, rpt. Turin, 1962); hereafter cited as 00. The DVB variants of ms. y, which Lorch relates to the Dialecticae disputationes version, focus on such issues as quid est bonum? substantiane an actio an qualitas (DVB, 62; 00,654—58); virtutem non esse medium inter duo extrema (DVB, 98; 00,660,665 - 66). 2. See S. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla; Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972), p. 75 f.; he claims that the Parisian manuscript Valla acquired in 1443 was "senza dubbio piu coretto e molto meno lacunoso" than the manuscript he already possessed, p. 76.

192

VIII LORENZO VALLA

transitivity or intransitivity. This series of lexical faults locates for Valla the sources of instability in the foundation of premise and motive of classical ethics. Thus, for example, the lengthy attack on Aristotelian "moderation" as virtue Valla assigns to Antonio da Rho is an attack on the tendency of Aristotelians, for the logical purpose of purifying, or regularizing, the terms of their arguments, to transform relation constructs ("the mean") into entities ("moderation"), and thus to make empty forms into moral imperatives.3 Similarly, Valla resists the temptation to attribute substance to bonum, which is rather, as he has Vegio say, an actio; his resistance is rooted in Valla's general tactic of reduction of all predicaments germane to the sphere of human events from the Aristotelian ten to two, qualitas and actio.4 The false strategy of reification is behind another dysfunctional classical practice, the unselfconscious use of trope as deviation from normal use; Valla argues, again through da Rho, that virtue is called a good only through metonymy.5 But da Rho argues not only against the classical dialectical prejudice for hypostatization, but in defense of a rhetorical bias for a contextualist attribution of virtue and vice, according to "nature and the lives of men," to "time and place," — separatim et vices, to specific context — "melius itaque singulos actus et singulas res iudicamus."6 Valla employs contextualism, which finds expression in the canons of rhetorical decorum, to confute Aristotelian reifications, then; but further, Valla asks us to distinguish contexts, to look to an inclusive, generic contextualism for the attribution of generic virtue, as opposed to the specificity of contextualist reference for the characterization of particular acts. Here proper definition stems "ex perpetuitate ac frequentiore usu actionum," rather than from deduction of place in a philosophical system of formal relations.7 In characterizing Valla's ethical lexicon, while we must note that 3. DVB, 95 f.; 00,665-66. 4. DVB, 62; 00,654 -58; Valla uses the third predicament, substantia, sparingly. 5. DVB, 112; "Quin etiam si recte estimemus, ne bonum quidem virtus dicitur, nisi per metonomiam sive hypallagen ut domus, ager, divide bona sunt quia bonum parant, que est voluptas." 6. DVB, 96-97; "Eadem hora subinde temperatus et intemperatus, prope dixerim milies et milies eadem hora recte aut secus facere possum; adeo unicum verbum laudari vel vituperari solet." 7. DVB, 100; "Nam liberalis, parcus, avarus, prodigus non ex singulis actibus nominatur, licet ex singulis actibus laudari vituperarive possint, sed ex perpetuitate ac frequentior usu actionum; nee earum parvitate, mediocritate, magnitudine et, ut dixi, mensura sed ratione atque scientia." 193

VIII

his rhetorical canons specify a flexible, ad hoc approach to ethical judgments, they also stipulate economy as perspicacity in the definition of virtues; but classical ethics, Valla complains, errs in that it redounds in tautological virtues, forfortitudo, iustitia, and caritas have the same structure, the same force.8 But economy does not preclude commodiousness; in another lexical strategy, in the discussion of the predicaments "action" and "passion" in the Dialecticae disputationes, Valla suggests a significant enlargement of the domain of human activity, of transitivity, in his reduction of passion to action: to feel a passion is no different from knowing a danger, he claims.9 Here I would suggest he anticipates the tactic of Descartes, who characterizes certain passions as "juste et honnete," as part of an ethical competence, in his treatise on Les passions de Vdme; in both cases the revised lexical force serves to enlarge the ethically charged domain to include these states of mind.10 Economy, inclusiveness, but also austerity: the most serious challenge to an ethical lexicographer is to avoid a threadbare optimism. Valla combines rhetorical canons of definition, one of the major argumentative topoi, with an austere Christian doctrinal stance to assert that the one truly vital activity, the supremely relevant transitivity, is a possession of God; for example, man's love of God cannot be defined as a product of a human aim, since it has a divine source, and so is an effect of divine ordinance.11 The proper function of religious or metaphysical hypotheses in Valla's theory is to deny human omnicompetence while asserting, in a precise manner, human responsibility. Valla also uses rhetorical premises, of course, to revise the structure or syntax of argument as well as the lexicon of terms employed in argument. Both Vasoli and Camporeale have discussed this structural revision of syllogism, of the schemes of consequence; the program expresses, on the one hand, a growing lack of faith on Valla's part in the usefulness of the elaborate technical accomplishments, 8. DVB,99', 00,663 f. 9. 00, 679,686: "Quid enim patior si diligor, aut timeor, aut audior, aut etiam vocor, nisi audio, in audio iam actio est; est igitur ut dicebam, pati actio; quoniam sentire passionem perinde ut actio est; ut intelligere periculum." Valla goes on to discuss howpassio can be a qualitas as well. 10. Descartes's argument assumes the veridical nature, the immediacy and autonomy of the passions pertaining only to the soul; see in particular pp. 45 -46, 146, 150,158 in Les passions de Vdme (Paris, 1953). 11. DVB, 114-15; 00,668; see also Valla's Defensio questionum in philosophia, ed. G. Zippel, Italia medioevale e umanistica 13 (1970), 86. For the variety of arguments drawn from the meaning of a term, ex nota, see, for example, Cicero, Topica ii. 9 f. 194

VIII LORENZO VALLA

the refinements of the structures of valid inference of late medieval logical formalism, and on the other, a growing interest in the concrete depiction of the conventions and rules of discourse that affect reference in some significant way.12 The structure of the Elegantiae, a grammar for rhetoricians, is illustrative of Valla's antiformalism, for the Elegantiae eschews syllogistic rigor for an unsystematic, "topological" approach. Recall that the rhetorical topoi are organized in lists, not systems; a topos is an armamorium of flexible, responsive debating tactics, a series of argumentative wrestling holds; just so, the Elegantiae represents a list of lexical maneuvers, initiatives derived from historical discursive events, a repertoire that the reader as author may draw from at will in response to specific discursive demands. This accessibility helps explain its enormous popularity in the Renaissance, but it also indicates how the form as well as the content of the Elegantiae supports the hegemony of invention over judgment, how it asserts the priority of discovery of issue and the cultivation of a taste for a variety of approaches as opposed to an investment in technical virtuosity in the formal criticism of validity, an initiative that remains a characteristic of humanist inquiry through Vico.13 It is Valla's stress on the importance of social convention and authorial intention that controls his critique of the logical structures of argument. The firm relegation of dialectical forms to a subordinate role in the construction of discourse, as well as the stipulation of the hegemony of consuetude, custom, are, of course, Quintilianesque motives. But I would suggest that Valla projects, in his concern with the depiction of the force of discursive conventions in controlling meaning, a new encapsulating frame for the relation between inference and reference. Valla, in fact, presses the critique of logic to the point of forming a "rhetorical theory of truth": that is, discursive exchange establishes a proposition as "true," accepted as immune, self-standing.14 Rhetorical inclusiveness would entail the stipulation 12. See C. Vasoli, LaDialettica e la retorica dell'Umanesimo; Invenzione e'metodo' nella cultura delXV e XVIsecolo (Milan, 1968), "Filologia, critica, e logica in L.V.," pp. 28 -77; and Camporeale, L.V.; Umanesimo e teologia, pt. 1, "Dialettica e retorica," pp. 33—87; "Riscoperta di Quintiliano," pp. 89 -146. 13. DVB, 113: "At quanto satius erat oratorie quam dialetice loqui! Quid enim ineptius philosophorum more ut si uno verbo sit erratum tota causa periclitemur? At orator multis et variis rationibus utitur, affert contraria, exempla repetit, similitudines comparat et cogit etiam latitantem prodire veritatem." 14. For a contemporary discussion of a "rhetorical theory of truth," see L. Apostel, "Further Remarks on the Pragmatics of Natural Languages," in Pragmatics of Natural Languages, ed. Y. Bar-Hillel (Dordrecht, 1972), p. 16; as in the Valla passage above,

195

VIII

that a general pragmatic theory (of the relation of word to user) must include, surround a general semantic theory (of the relation of the word to extra-linguistic referent). This is not simply a devaluation of the obligatory force of arcane deductive schemata, but a new, or at least a polemical, valuation of discursive contextual force. To be sure, this is a matter of Valla's practice as well as his theory; certainly in his choice of the dialogue as moralizing genre we are made to see that a frame of speaker's intentions and debating convention encapsulates the argumentative structures of inference; insights are expressed within a matrix of beliefs and allegiances. But his pragmatic bias may claim theoretical refinement; Valla's subtle distinction between specific and general contextual force perhaps anticipates the modern distinction of Saul Kripke between speaker's reference and semantic reference.15 If we recall Valla's separation of the act of general definition of virtue from the act of specific attribution of virtue, we can appreciate his sensitivity to the different kinds of contextual force, of the types of obligation that govern the creation of meaning. But where Kripke's distinction functions to explain ambiguity, Valla's awareness of the contingency of types of reference on types of intention represents a more positive, or naive, attempt to exploit a linguistic capacity, the ability to select context. And the ethical value of Valla's distinction lies in its specification of ethical domain as well as semantic scope; thus definition and attribution of virtue are two separate types of responsibility, and the responsible inquirer does not call a specific activity by a general name, ascribe infelicitously, breaking an understanding. This theory, then, is a theory of practice: it suggests that Valla's most basic innovations are not those in theme or subject matter, but those in the canons of proper practice and relevant rule in serious, "true" is related to "conviction"; "A proposition is called by Hintikka self-sustaining if it is immune to certain types of criticism; (if it can be shown that there are no types of arguments an addressee would accept that would lead from premises he also accepts to the negation of the proposition mentioned)." 15. S. Kripke, "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2 (1977), 255 -76; Kripke distinguishes between a general and a specific intention on the part of the speaker; where the semantic referent is by a general intention of the speaker to refer, "the speaker's referent is given by a specific intention, on a given occasion, to refer to a certain object," p. 264; the references may not coincide, but one reference functions in the domain of semantics, the other in the domain of pragmatics, speech acts. Recall Valla's observations on disjunction of reference in notes 6 and 7.

196

VIII LORENZO VALLA

ethically charged, debate; his contributions are more to the theory of well-motivated ethical inquiry than to ethical theory. There is, indeed, an analogous and illuminating Renaissance initiative that appears in the political-historical discourse of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Machiavelli changed not so much the subject matter as the rules for the discussion of political history: the "content" is not new, the political structures and narrative examples that illustrate them are traditional, but the shift is in the rules that constrain the discussion of political structures and historical events, the conventions that stipulate what is appropriate or inappropriate for debate. To summarize our brief consideration of Valla's discursive theory: since language is presumed by the humanists to be a mirror of nature, a change in language strategies and values is necessarily a change in truth discovery procedures and values.16 Further, proper use of language, tactful discursive interventions, can dissolve ethical as well as metaphysical knots. Valla's procedures not only force the rejection of the reifications of the Aristotelian and Stoic moral lexicon as producing "inappropriate," sterile debate, but sponsor a shift to "ordinary" issues as.well as language, that is to say, issues both intractable and highly sensitive, such as the question of the moral uses of pleasure. Thus when we turn to focus on Valla's discursive practice, his conduct of inquiry, we notice a powerful combination of motives: Valla's penchant for intractable issues gives rise to highly motivated quarrels; at the same time, Valla's rejection of many of the elaborations of formal logical structures insures that the conduct of the argument will be less formal, less rule-bound. The result is a discourse that deals with intractable issues in a less restrained manner. To investigate humanist ethics of inquiry by means of analysis of this discursive conduct, I would suggest, raises immediately the modern issue of genre and of generic organization of discourse in a very interesting way. Genette has claimed that genre was originally, and correctly, a problem of mode or "voice" in classical culture; that is to say, generic definition was primarily a definition based on the consideration of the relation of the discourse to the speaking subject, to the enunciative situation.17 But further, Stierle has claimed that the 16. For a debate on whether the "unproblematic" classical impalcatura dominated all semantic theory through the Renaissance, see P. Rossi, "Linguisti d'oggi e filosofi del Seicento," Linguae stile 3 (1968), 1 -20. 17. G. Genette, "Genus, 'types,' modes," Poetique 32 (1977), 389-421; see also R. Dupont-Roc, "Mimesis et enonciation," in Ecriture et theorie poetiques (Paris, 1976), on Greek notions of genre as mode, pp. 6- 14.

197

VIII

study of genre should be more concerned with the establishing of the discursive identity of author and reader than with self-closed structures of textual coherence: the student must focus on the discourse's historical place in the context of contemporaneous speech activity, in the process of production and reception of texts, rather than seek to establish the lack of self-contradiction of the content of an isolate text. For, Stierle points out, the reader is never content to simply "perceive" a text, but organizes it into discourse, puts it in its place in a historical spectrum of discursive activity; thus each reader addresses the issue of the institutionalization, of the normative stablization of discursive behavior, and thus judges the text's subversive or conservative bent.18 Within the range of humanist discourse, two of the most important and most political genres are the invective and the "academic" letter; as genres, they are modes of control of speech as exchange, modes that define the horizon of expectations of the reader as well as project the values and channel the force of the speaker's argument. Both function, then, as modes of exchange in a variety of issues, to structure humanist inquiry: the invective, with its premise of malevolence of receptors, communal disjunctions, and the letter—with, normally, the premise of the benevolence of the receptor—which functions as one of the important modes of diffusion of learning before the advent of the learned journal. The object of a generic analysis would be the definition of the roles of locutor and receptor in letter and invective, the relations to previous and successive modes of discourse, and the structure of argument as it shapes role and theme. I shall focus on invective as genre since it represents a difficult but essential topic in the study of rhetoric and ethics in humanism; their verbal combat may not be elevating, but it is integral. And invective, to be sure, constitutes an extraordinarily thick rhetorical experience: invective demands the production of highly stylized, "rhetorical" texts that argue the rhetorical identity, competence, of the protagonists by raising issues about grammatical, lexical, and discursive practices that are considered to be controlled by rhetorical canons, and which in turn produce rhetorical values in speech activity. In Valla's invective there are, of course, the expected Christian themes: the assertion of militant Christian heroism or of equally militant defense against charges of Christian heresy. But the militancy relates to 18. K.-H. Stierle, "Identite du discours et transgression lyrique," Poetique 32 (1977), 422-41. 198

VIII LORENZO

VALLA

a peculiar domain of Christian discourse; his shift into high gear of invective is related to his shift to a new sphere of investigation of the biblical text. Here Valla abandons the hypothesis of a received text for that of a problematic text, resituated in a social domain of scribal error and scholarly stupidity. "I emend not the Holy Scripture," he states, "but the interpretation of the Holy Scripture"; not Jerome's doctrine, but the competence of the historical communities of scribes and the ascription of direct personal responsibility are at issue.19 In both his invective tactics and in his initiatives of textual criticism, Valla embarks on a redefinition of the role of the author/ speaker, and in both cases we find the premise of contextual relevance taken seriously. The primacy of usage in determining reference develops a sensitivity to role, to the responsibility of the user of words; humanist quarrelling is itself a direct effect of the seriousness of the contextualist hypothesis. The humanist lexicon of textual emendation is a lexicon of praise and blame, as Rizzo has pointed out; the vocabulary underlines the obligation of purification, the duty of rejection of corruption.20 Valla's initiatives in biblical textual criticism are part not only of the history of the development of philological science, but also of a general revaluation of intellectual, or verbal, currency from cheap to dear. His New Testament investigations are a serious statement that an accessibility that is cheaply earned is less valuable than one that is dearly won; he requires an investment in expensive, strenuous strategies. The mental frame that recognizes the merit of the most difficult reading as potentially the most historically sound is entirely different from that which attempts to simplify all passages by recourse to a theological system, to self-gratulatory, circular reasonings. We see, then, a change in the structures of obligation and constraint, in the rules that emphasize both the responsibility and the vulnerability of the discussants. Thus, Valla may claim that he addresses vitia, not homines, but the ad hominem component, for example, his description of Poggio Bracciolini as an elephant doing more damage to his own side in retreat than to the enemy in advance, is a necessary extension of the generic rule that enunciative situation is relevant context.21 Whereas in the scholastic disputatio the conventions demanded that the speaker address "impersonally" the prob19. AntidotiinPogium,Lib. l,in00,268 -69. 20. S. Rizzo,// lessicofilologico degli umanisti (Rome, 1973). 21. Antidoti in Pogium, Lib. 1, in 00,253,268.

199

VIII

lem of constructing a logical/ontological system or of filling in details of a given, approved system, the task for the humanist author of invective assumes personality as parameter, that he must refuse to divorce what is said from how and why it is said. Of course, Valla's use of the dialogue form in invective also underlines authorial intervention as praiseworthy or blameful, as having ethical implications.22 But it is unenlightening for Reynolds and Wilson to speak of the "vain and aggressive" nature of Valla as marring his scholarship; "vanity" is less an adequate explanation of personal motive than an effect of social situation, a result of being forced to function in rough discursive games.23 Also, there is difficulty in the current reading of Renaissance rhetorical initiatives as "opportunistic"; Jardine speaks of Baconian "presentation," divorced from the mission of the discovery of truth and from the rigors of Bacon's discovery procedures as thus freely exploitative, unrestrainedly manipulative, and therefore "opportunistic"; opportunism represents a new, irresponsible consciousness of role.24 Bacon, to be sure, concentrates on narrowly defined issues of power and tactics of domination and mastery. But the fifteenth-century humanists are less rugged individualists than embattled communitarians. Humanist invective needs a hypothesis not of "possessive individualism" but of "possessive intellectualism"; invective rules treat erudition as a personal acquisition or possession and insure the fragility, vulnerability of the inquirer, subject to constant revaluation: a very different kind of responsibility from the scholastic allegiances to a domain of immutable ideas agreeably expressed. Humanist contextualism represents loss as well as gain; we tend to view the discovery of the philological construct of anachronism, the prime contextualist tool of text criticism, as pure gain, but it is impossible to separate context as gain from relativism as loss when the loss is a loss of ingenuousness, of intellectual innocence, and where the struggle for purity of text is inevitably a struggle for reputation. 22. See C. Nisard, Les Gladiateurs de la Republique des Lettres au XV*, XVIe, et XVHe sticks (Paris, 1860), 1.207. 23. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (London, 1974), p. 126. See E. Veron, "Linguistique et sociologie," Communications 20 (1973), p. 246-96; Veron claims that "motive" is not an internal state but a public method utilized to decide the social existence or nonexistence of the action. 24. L. Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 15-16. 200

VIII LORENZO VALLA

Within invective, the configuration of the receptor's or audience's role changes as well; whereas the scholastic disputatio had presumed and elaborated an ahistorical logical and ontological structure, and hypothesized a homogeneous, well-motivated community of inquirers, the humanist invective presumes a heterogeneous community of well- and ill-motivated inquirers who address historical issues of convention, usage, allegiance, and style. While the use of the dialogue form in an invective would seem to direct the accusation of malevolence to a particular receptor, the invective actually functions so as to involve a general audience as well in the attribution of malevolence. It was a widespread, enduring practice of the humanists to describe with precision and violence a very wide range of intellectual perfidy; consider the roster of antagonists in Boccaccio's defense of poetry in the Genealogie deorum, for example.25 While the invective seems to appeal to the ideal judgment of a universal readership, the existence of an ideal readership is neither described nor confirmed. The invective dialogue, after all, publicizes a private quarrel; the arguments, which concern social usage, inevitably pertain to communities, groups; and the extent to which the audience as community is accomplice in the adversary role is left imprecise, unclear in an unsettling manner. The issue of receptor role arises in the noninvective genres, such as the De vero bono, as well. Valla's description of his role as that of a "David" confronting a "Goliath" is again an assumption of generalized hostility that places in question at the outset a model of easy consensus and deliberately creates a distance between author and audience.26 Then his repudiation of the Epicurean point of view, in this and in other texts, may simply be a standard Christian defense against charges of unorthodoxy. But what, precisely, did he intend his readers to do with the personae, which he insists over and over again are thefictaepersonae, of Stoic and Epicurean? Within and without this dialogue, his reader is the recipient of subtle and not so subtle tactics of subversion: thus the Epicurean persona, in particular, seems inadequately undermined, not exploded. His apologetic strategy, pointing out that the Stoic and the Epicurean of the dialogue as "fictions" obviously had nothing to do with the staunch Christians appointed the roles, may actually simplify, make easier, the reader's 25. G. Baccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, ed. V. Romano (Bari, 1951), 2, chap. 14. 26. DVB,3.

201

VIII

task of coming to terms with the radical doctrine he has the Epicurean espouse. Valla uses disjunction heuristically: note, he claims, "dum pro Epicureis loquor, Stoicum agere."27 The counterfactual personae confront the reader's expectations and by denying normal positions, by distancing, force fresh consideration of the arguments. The task of the audience, set by Valla, is the discovery of something new, divergent from the familiar Neo-Aristotelian notions of virtue as informed by Stoic prejudices; certainly Valla, in addressing his contemporaries, is both self-conscious and proud of the novelties of the De vero bono*8 Iser has described the innovative force of fictions for an audience in this way in his essay in Rezeptionsdsthetik, The Implied Reader: The reader discovers the meaning of the text, taking negations as his starting point; he discovers a new reality through a fiction which, at least in part, is different from the world he himself is used to, and he discovers the deficiencies inherent in prevalent norms and in his own restricted behavior.29

The adversary relation, which the invectives utilize, is essential to the task of innovation. Valla's notion of rhetorical decorum requires a psychologistically sound mode of expression for the plausible psychological story he has devised in his invective to convey his moral precepts. Like Quintilian, Valla postulates the necessary violence, the necessary pleasure of discursive practice; new insight is not achieved by means of a calm consensus or a mild didacticism.30 Discourse is not only the vehicle of insight, but its working is the metaphor for the workings of the soul; forceful, varied discourse, rather than formal logic, is the best evidence of the useful activity of mind. His new moral doctrine is, I would maintain, a psychologistically clever Christian Epicureanism, and the rhetorical canon of decorum underwrites a coherence among natural feeling, discursive practice, and ethical insight; that is to say, self-discovery proceeds through the production and reception of discursive strength and sweetness.31 In this way the rhetorical analysis of humanist discursive prac27. Ibid. 28. Valla, Letter to Tortelli, cited by Lorch, DVB, xlviii; see also 00,2.84. 29. W. Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, 1978), p. xiii. 30. See Quintilian, Institutio Oratorio, V. 14 f; VI, pref.; recall that Valla incorporated V. 8 -14 in the Dialecticae disputationes. 31. Apostel (see note 14) distinguishes between the monologic and dialogic models of language competence; just so, I would maintain, Valla shifts easily from a dialogic model of language to a notion of morality as dialogue-constructed. Recall DVB, 91:

202

VIII LORENZO VALLA

tice may contribute to the historical definition of humanism as a complex of roles, disciplines, pedagogic institutions, and civic initiatives; contribute, that is to say, to a nonvacuous definition of humanism as "transitional." For within the context of the late Renaissance changes in method, Valla loses credit as a mere precursor. Jardine is correct in stipulating that late Renaissance methodologists, and Bacon in particular, separate out the function docere from the rhetorical triad that includes movere and delectare; Valla's emphasis on the latter two functions argues against Valla as a precursor of early modern methodologists, points rather to Valla as a practitioner of the both flighty and enduring trade of fictional subversion in the manner of Rabelais, or Defoe, or Swift.32 Subversion as a program, in turn, undermines the characterization of humanists as either epigonior "forerunners"; and humanist discursive practice in general gives evidence of "transitional," separate, identity: the practice is no longer bound by the communicative and role conventions of the medieval university with its formalized disputations, theological institutions of docere; but its teaching roles and communicative modes do not yet possess the professional resonances of early modernity; the pedagogic and research institutions described in Ramism, Protestant scholasticism, Jesuit reform, encyclopedism, are not yet in place. Nor is a humanist such as Valla prototypical of a city-centered, "civic" humanism or an "aulic," courtly humanism; rather, he represents a fifteenth-century humanism that is freer, less structured — structured, as a matter of fact, by actions of dispute and exchange; the ties and bonds are those of highly communicable quarrel and friendship: their structures are the structures of genre. Both the invectives and letters as genres mark the lines of allegiance in disputes and thus provide a map of the social bonds of the humanist community of inquiry. Their social bonds are ties of partisanship in disputes, which are, by and large, disputes over language use, connection to social conventions. The political structure of humanism is not a simple reflex of a Renaissance political-social structure, but an internal structure, a function of their own social needs and technical accomplishments. It is possible to draw a map of the significant bonds of the humanist community based on the ties and "Nunquid hie persuadebit aliis quod non persuaserit sibi? Num audientes ad iram misericordiamque commovebit, nisi prius eisdem se affectibus permoverit?" 32. DVB, 3: "magna vis oratoris in delectando est." See Jardine, Francis Bacon, chap. 1.

203

VIII

antagonisms of the various issues. The thicker lines, reinforced by many alliances, would represent the dominant structures, the norms and values that invest the community; a list of hypotheses defended would be a list of their major contested social, ethical values. Recall that the sixteenth-century epistolary preface of Carlowitz to Valla's invective against Poggio in the Basel Opera provides a defense of verbal combat as a legitimate part of inquiry. Rhetorical education, discursive practice are law-worthy, the preface claims, apt for regulation; they need to be recalled to the severity of discipline that had produced the ingenuity and energy invested in verbal combat in Valla's time, which Carlowitz contrasts with the invidious present and its negligence and inertia.33 The preface, in short, supports Perelman's hypothesis that epideictic is the central genre of rhetoric and that praise and blame constitute the essential rhetorical exercise of affirmation of values and of creating intensified adhesion to values.34 In the preface, epideictic function — praise of virtue, blame of vice — underwrites invective as a useful institution, vere germana exercitatio, as a simulacrum of combat, pugna, which prepares for real combat, justa pugna.35 This part of our project has required, then, a shift in focus from the reassertion of the dictum that eloquence is power to the analysis of the practice of eloquence as the practice of power. The humanists as a community are united not only by ties of alliance but also by relations of domination and submission. The sixteenth-century scholars such as Dolet and Scaliger made their reputations by attacking the powerful, not the weak; only Erasmus could feed Dolet's reputation.36 Then, granting these motivations, consider the shifts in structure, tone, and point of view in the very broad Renaissance genre of treatises of advice and counsel; shifts in actual power rela33. 00, 249 f.; Carlowitz's preface was quite popular in the early sixteenth century and appeared in several more editions. 34. Charles Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, La nouvelle rhetorique (Paris, 1958), 1.62 ff. 35. 00, 251; recall W. Ong on ritual combat as a dominant form in academic curricula for a millennium and a half, in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca, N. Y., 1971), p. 17. 36. An interesting project would be the history of the reception of the Elegantiae as text, as receptive strategies manifest themselves in the various abridgements, epitomes, editions, and in the literature of erudition in general; one could employ M. Foucault's techniques of revealing discursive structures as power structures; on the wider implications of Foucault's methods see L. Bersani, "The Subject of Power," Diamriw (Fall, 1977), 1-21. 204

VIII LORENZO VALLA

tions in the community at large may not necessarily be symmetrical with shifts in verbal tactics of the projection of power in the literature of good counsel. Invective is simply the extreme case that tests rhetoric as ethical, where most genres affirm rhetoric as having its own politics, and stipulate as a necessary attribute of an intellectual elite rhetorical virtuosity. Let me suggest, in conclusion, three tentative hypotheses for a rhetorical analysis of the relation of rhetoric and ethics in Renaissance humanist inquiry: hypotheses that are tentative but that, I must admit, sound self-evident. First, gross shifts in the problematic of inference and reference, that is, problems of unrecognized ambiguity or equivocation, of false reifications, of tautologies, of reductive definitions, as well as shifts in the notion of the structure of argument, shifts largely under the influence of rhetorical canons and premises, have implications not only for the critical program, but for the discursive performance of the humanists; that is to say, not only for the issues of inquiry but also for the institutionalization, the social conduct, of inquiry. Thus Valla's program of demonstrating that classical moral language is equivocal, reified, reductive, and tautologous affects humanist pedagogic, research, and publication practices. Second, we must, therefore, investigate the political structure of humanist inquiry; it is not enough to simply specify some vague political goals, to speak of "civic humanist" imperatives; rather, a precise analysis of changes in rules of debate, in the constraints on discourse, is needed. We must also be able to confront the cases wherein the conduct of inquiry undermines or subverts the ostensive goals, or even the cases wherein seemingly subversive behavior actually contributes to success. Then, on the premise that "good politics gives rise to good inquiry," the definition of political structure of inquiry defines the proper domain for the consideration of prescriptive or normative rules of inquiry, for raising ethical issues as issues of social structure, of the discipline of a community of inquirers. Third, conduct, discursive practice itself, can be a source for the redefinition of goals; invective, for example, forces a very rich and detailed experience of responsibility on the inquirer. Then, the form of conduct reinforces one of the most important perspectives of humanist inquiry, which has strong ethical as well as intellectual implications. For the humanist perspective is both social and historical in an interesting way. On the one hand, humanists recognize a temporal 205

VIII

dimension of social bonding, a recognition motivated by both critical program and investigative behavior; both define the community of inquirers as a historical one, both focus on continuities and discontinuities in the investigation of the past. Conduct also generates a grasp of the historical dimension of moral imperatives; a moral dictum is not a mere axiom, but an experience, an inductive conclusion, at least for the party of the "Ancients." On the other hand, the ties of language are not simply ties of individual to individual, of, say, classical author to modern reader, but of one social usage to another, later one; linguistic ties are social ties, bonds that communicate social imperatives and connect two societies, not two individuals. And this is certainly the strong ethical charge carried by Valla's investigation of usage, consuetudo, and the ordinary usage of the populace at that, as the most important canon of propriety. The humanist model of reading is not that of isolate reader confronting an isolate text, but of a continuity of acts of interpretation on the part of a later society confronting an earlier one: learning is in structure social, and historical, and ethical.

206

IX

Fables of Power MICHAEL FOUCAULT claims that a privileged topic for history is the history of disciplines, since they control the generation of very important types of discourse, discourse which shapes general rationale and choice, discourse which is "powerful."1 Etymology, as quasi-discipline, generates etymologies, as brief narratives; these narratives, however, are embedded in an extraordinary range of scholarly and non-scholarly contexts, and are employed to bolster a very dishevelled array of arguments. And, as stories describing wr-events of naming, they are necessarily highly speculative, "fictive"; Malkiel speaks of "the unavoidable admixture of strong doses of subjectivism," and his judgments of specific etymologies range from "provocative, reconnoitering," to "mystic, neoromantic. "2 An inclusive model of etymologizing is one of simple confabulation: the etymologies are intellectual fables, stories we tell each other. Yet etymological discourse is of peculiar diagnostic value for the Foucaultian historian: etymologies have spoken directly to the issues of the power or force of words, and have related the force to political incident, to originary civil decisions; they can be myths of founding events, and they are evidence of fabling activity, scholarly fictions of connection.3 I will argue that a history of etymological practice reveals a very sharp and suggestive antinomy: analysis of the discourse of "classical" etymologizing uncovers a layer of egregious narrative realism: a policy which asserts the quintessentially "historical" nature of linguistic force, and the quintessentially "linear" nature of social identity. But "modernist" etymologizing finds this narrative fundamentalism disturbing and rejects it. I maintain that the modernist subversion of narrative fundamentalism constitutes a cession of a domain of proper investigative interest, and is a subversion, or abdication, of intellectual range and disciplinary power. In the history of etymology we note that from the beginning, etymological practice was power-play. The search for the root, etymon, from which the word in question was derived was, as a search for origin, origo, a search for the power, vis, force of a word.4 Further, the etymology I shall call "classical," and which dominates through the early modern era, was primarily a discursive resource, a persuasive technique, rather than descriptive research: as rhetorical figure it served a poetic, elocutionary function of amplification and ornament, and was a kind of metaphorical liberation, or expansion of meaning; as topos or line of argument, it had an inventive function in debate. Etymology as the argument from definition

IX

or notatio of Aristotle and Cicero was powerful because the discovery of the etymon exposed and energized the true or originary force of the word, the vis vocabuli;5 later, Isidore of Seville explained that when you see whence arises a name, you then understand its force, and Bernard Silvestris asserted that etymology reveals divine and rules human action, divina aperit et practica humana regit.6 Less pretentiously, as the figure etymologia or its relative paronomasia, etymologies appeared in Aristotle's very peculiar left-over domain of lexis, which we call style, and represented the manipulation of phonetic material, a kind of joke that plays on resemblance in sound.7 Etymology was also part of grammar, as well as of rhetoric and dialectic; Varro placed the study of etymology on the same level as the study of declensions of nouns and conjugations of verbs; Quintilian subsumed etymology under ratio, reason, which was one of the three canons of proper usage, a principle of grammar as the ars recte loquendi* Etymology designated a disciplinary strategy, as well as a discursive tactic, a technique which finds derivations by certain procedures, per certas associationes: Isidore named these ex causa, thus rex from a recte agenda; ex origine, thus homo from humus; or ex contrariis, thus the notorious lucus a non lucendo. Then etymology could be considered a genre as well as a discipline; to refer to a word's etymology was to refer to the oratio brevis, the brief narrative of the procedure of derivation. Whether as figure, topos, discipline, or genre, etymology maintains a continuous identity as language skill, as instrument both of useful analysis and forceful use, in Greco-Roman, medieval, and Renaissance cultures; in the Middle Ages, etymology achieved a quasi-institutional status: Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae served as the program which schooled an elite's capacity to come to terms with and exploit an alien body of inherited texts; it furnished a kind of medieval Ramism, a simple and easy method of dealing with books of legendary importance, in a time of cultural decadence. Curtius has claimed the Etymologiae as the basic text which molded thought categories in all genres and disciplines of the Middle Ages, a text which drew its power from the premise of a direct relation of entailment, the premise later enunciated in Dante's famous "nomina sunt consequentia rerum" that is, to understand and manipulate names is to know and use reality. Then, in the Renaissance, etymology served a different function in a program of assimilation of a cultural heritage; in Humanism, it is not so much the case that scholarship increased classical allegiance, as that the nature of the Latin language and the condition of the Latin heritage demanded philological strategies. In a text such as Tortelli's Orthographia, a tissue of advice on spelling and speculation on roots, the Humanist zeal for othography, for correctness and accuracy, was a consequence of a moral zeal for establishing the true character of the ancestral language.9 Proper spelling of the etymons made possible insights into the nature of the Greek as well as Roman political and philosophical achievements; it func109

Fables of Power

IX

tioned as part of a general therapy of correctness; their return to the sources, ad fontes, was, after all, a ritual of purification. It is essential to grasp that in this whole development etymology was never solely a descriptivist tactic, simple antiquarianism, but always concerned with the issues of linguistic power; Zumthor argues that the classical or medieval notion of the relation of root to derivation was more an ideal than a real (phenomenal) relation: that is to say, etymologizing stipulated relations between language, mind, and being.10 Etymology described an aggregate, unsystematic in nature, in which an indefinite list of words, necessarily interrelated by sound, necessarily revealed a mosaical structure of presupposition and value. Etymology as argument thus had great suppleness, a suspicious flexibility, and etymology as not very tightly disciplined power-play was from the beginning the scene of ideological confrontations and distrust. In this rather daft and long-winded conversation which represents the etymological enterprise, the lament in the collection of the eighteenth-century legist Duker is typical: etymology, like metaphor, can be simply the product of wit and ingenuity, not of direct derivations, verba ex verbis, but of allusions confected by ingenious men. 11 Besides disgust, there are two major academic responses to the ambition and confusion of etymology in modernity: first, philology, particularly in the nineteenth century, attempts to discipline etymology into becoming more careful, precise in searching out phonological and morphological analogies; second, there is not only critique, but denial of the project. Certainly etymologies work against the grain of current linguistic interests; if modern grammar is defined as the study of syntax, the focus on the isolate word, rather than on the syntagmic unit of the word-in-a sentence or phrase, subverts language as systemic form. Malkiel notes two more incompatibilities: etymology, as ineluctably historical, is distrusted by the linguistics which emphasizes synchronic structures; and etymology, as irretrievably dishevelled, is embarrassing to linguistic scientists. Malkiel relates that Emile Benveniste, either out of tact or shame, publishes his etymological articles in philological journals, and his grammar in proper linguistic reviews.12 Yet it is the connection of etymology with power which provokes denial, as opposed to denigration. The grammarian Charles Fillmore does not question etymology as anti-syntax but as pro-power; etymology poses loaded questions, it is "weighted," polemical. There is, in Charles Kahn's monograph on the Greek verb "to be," a meticulous critique of what he regards as the essentially mythographical nature of the etymologists' search for an Urbedeutung: Kahn claims that the distinction made between root and derivation in etymological argumentation is a qualitative distinction, made on the basis of a number of mistaken premises: e.g., the postulate of the original simplicity of language, which entails the consideration of the Urbedeutung as concrete, sensible, and particularly vivid, anschaulich. On this basis, the etymologists place the existential use of "to be" as concrete, therefore prior to the more abstract, predicative, copulative use—which is exactly 110

IX wrong, he argues.13 Etymology, then, reeks of ideology; it can become the vehicle for disguised dogmas, for a race or folk wisdom, and thus etymologies become fables of irrationalist power.14 Kahn's remarks on etymological argument suggest the usefulness of a formalist account of etymological discourse. The residual discursive structure would necessarily be narrative, oratio brevis; no matter how compressed in lexicographical codes or poetic figures, etymologies continue to give accounts of either originary civil events or strings of interconnecting events of derivation. They deal in "character" and "plot"; the location of the etymon defines the heroic agency of the root-construct, the derivation recites its intrusion in the movement from early usage to late.15 The reconstructions, like stories, follow a line, recall a linear or temporal dimension of semantic facts, and, very like stories, are necessarily fictive. Both the classical emphasis on the argumentative, and the modern stigmatization of the polemical nature of etymology seem to dictate that the first issue for analysis should be "aspect" in Todorov's terms, or "voice" in Genette's, as more important than the issues of "time" or "mode"; that is to say, the formalist should first concentrate on the relation of the subject of the enunciation, the etymologizer, to the narrative, or on the manner or aspect in which the narrator perceives the derivation plot.16 My moralist bent would be to underline the nature of the classical role of the etymologizer as a public trust; his duty is to demonstrate specific social constraints on the individual's (reader's) use of language; he is engaged in a kind of linguistic jurisprudence. The narrative is a responsibility: when it is used as an instance of the topos "definition," it is a story of a word's force, to constrain forceful use in argument: a double power.17 And since the narrator has recaptured the power from loss, from designations involute et confuse,18 the narrator possesses still a third dimension of force—discovery, knowledge as power. Etymologists as narrators cope with power, but, further, the coping activity postulates a social domain that is at the same time richly specified as a temporal domain, in which the linkages of past, present, and putative uses are forged by the etymologizer. In brief, the etymological narratives operate within an intricate system of force and time: they must relate the past social usage, the previous act of discovery or recapture, to a present argumentative or "literary" exigency. The root represents a social convention, or choice, which is beyond the domain of individual choice; the discovery is a repeatable act of learning; the use or argument an evocation of the originary, authentic invocation of social rule, while the reader's conviction would be both an act of compliance with the constraint of proof, as well as an assent to the validity of previous social choice for present individual judgement. Each narrative would define one particular social constraint which would, in a situation of good faith, serve as guide to both narrator and reader. All—derivation, constraint, use—have a "historical" dimension; power, reso111

Fables of Power

IX

nance, social cohesion are essentially time-bound. The biography of the word which is the etymology is a major symbolic form expressing this linearity, and its use in argument is to advocate a linear social cohesion. With so much to accomplish in such brief compass, it is no wonder that, in our formalist pursuit of aspect or voice, we must define etymologizers, as a group, as theoretically greedy. Etymological theory has a penchant for having its cake and eating it too: thus, etymologizers employ both of the antithetical theory options— language structure as "anomalous," and language structure as "analogous." That is, they may exploit the historical, contingent, aleatory—the etymons as stemming from arbitrary choice or chance; or, with equal enthusiasm, represent and use language as a web of structural similarities and formal differences.19 Etymologists may regard language as natural or conventional, motivated or arbitrary, just as their discourse may have an ornamental or argumentative, a rhetorical-poetic or rhetorical-dialectical end. In any case, the forms of etymological narrative easily reveal the aspect, the nature of the disciplinary premise and motive of the narrator. "Motivation," indeed, becomes one of the key terms in the study of etymology as a thoughtform. There are, to be sure, trivial and uninteresting plots, which merely disjoin recognizable parts, plots where the issue of voice is scarcely pertinent. But in the etymologies which are highly motivated fables of highly motivated words, there are varieties, intensifications; Guiraud speaks of retro-motivation, Wandruska of hyper-motivation, terms which apply equally to etymologist and etymon.20 In retro-motivation, names create situations, narratives generate structures, words engender things; e.g., a similarity in sounds or letters becomes the prey of semantic strategies: "Roma" can be claimed as the anagram of'"Amor/ 9 or related to the Greek "rome," force; the newly endowed word is then used as proof of phenomenal character or event, Rome as amorous, forceful; instead of words representing reality, reality reflects the deformations of the sign systems. In hyper-motivation, etymology becomes not so much an elite's perspective on a learned heritage, as in Isidore of Seville, as a strategy for the creation of novel capacities; the novelties are justified by the premise of language as intensively unified, holistic: a coherent web of repetitive patterns, reflecting the gross interconnectedness of the roots and branches of language. Consider Wandruska's characterization of Heideggerian etymology: in contrast to a positivist view, which asserts lexical atomism, the rigid autonomy of words, the sharp historical discontinuities of the use and range of vocabularies, and thus the dysfunction of etymology, Heidegger assumes that the intricate coherence of language baldly represents philosophical coherence. Etymology, in making plain an armature of motivated signifiers, reveals an armature of connected meanings, signifies, which is the object of philosophical inquiry. For Heidegger, language is an existential oracle; for Wandruska, Heidegger is the

112

IX

Pablo Picasso of language, celebrating, in an almost ritualistic mode of repetition and stress, the vast possibilities of verbal forms as no one else. Many etymological fables, then, are narratives of events and successions of events where vowels and consonants are agents, linked in a conspiracy of sound to beg questions, determine cultural preferences, endow contemporary choices with historical rationalizations, and justify a natural language as naturally astute. These conspiracies give rise to an array of plots. The grossest distinction in plot has its source in aspect or voice of the narrator; Malkiel opposes the academician, who works with analogies of morphological or phonological structure, oblivious of the root, and thus of the derivation plot, to the "folk" etymologist who enthusiastically labors to give the aboriginal root heroic status, acting persistently and forcefully to shape cultural history.21 The plot of unilinear development dominates, of course, because, as a search for origins, it is a search for authenticity of a peculiarly efficacious sort; therefore, most are simple anecdotes, platitudinous and self-evident. Yet, the plots may turn on an intervention of chance, fate, as well as a rediscovered archaic social fact or an aboriginal metaphor or pun; they relate exotic accidents, decisions that gave us gifts of expression. Advocacy may distort unilinear plot: consider the scenarios of circularity, or inversion and reversal. Thus in the Isidorean etymology, "mors dicta, quod sit amara, vel a Marte qui est effector mortium," the movement from the issue of death to the quality of bitterness, the elision (in w/,"or") of bitterness and war as the cause of death is more circular than linear; death, bitterness, Mars, death in war represent a semantic field rather than a progressive development of meaning. Then, if derivations are structural, they can stem from structural oppositions as well as similarities; the notorious derivation of lucus from a non lucendo illustrates a commitment to the power of verbal abuse, to the reality of catachresis, where antithesis is more powerful than concord. If etymology is a species of biography, the etymon as hero may be Promethean, but also may be picaresque—travelling hard, and shaped by close encounters.22 But, to return, if we agree that etymologies are structures intimately concerned with power, and that etymologists try to locate power, the shifts in attitudes toward, or uses of etymology within literary discourse and linguistic research may reveal shifts in attitudes toward, or uses of power. Indeed, etymology, as intellectual fabling, raises the issue of narrativity and its relation to power in a very economical and elegant way. Etymology, as a non-mimetic mode or genre, has its source in an enunciative situation where the author speaks for himself, avoids the complications of the "literary" as mimetic, the multivalences of novel or epic.23 Economical but rich: etymologies as instances of a genre reflect a peculiar mixture of ludic, not to say hilarious, and scientific motives; they are always, ostensibly, research, but often self-involved, in a reflexive, reinforcing manner.

113

Fables of Power

IX

Etymologies may also operate within a space of cramped confinement, as a game, or within a project of indefinite, encyclopedic range. In the etymological structures I have described, it seems that the interrelation of movement and stasis, derivation and base, history and origin, is always at stake. But not always. There is a very specific and pejorative shift in modernity which denies the issue even while indulging in the practice, and thus constitutes a rejection of a particular problematic of linguistic power, and the abnegation, or abdication, of a domain of power as well. I am hypothesizing a very simple shift— pre-modern to modernity, calling the first stage classical, but finding it redundant to name a subspecies of the second "post-modern." The most interesting evidence of this shift is the confrontation of two different contemporary readings of the Vichian etymological fables: the first representing an honest attempt to come to terms with and define his classicism, the second claiming that only denial of Vico's stories is honest and useful. Prof. Battistini, in his fine essay "Etimologica mythopoetica," sees Vico as strengthening, although transforming the classical connection of origo and vis.24 His is an historical reading, an effort to place Vico in his Early Modern context; he insists on the strong contrast between the very limited conclusions drawn by the scholarly etymologists of the seventeenth century such as Vossius, and the very broad implications seen by Vico; Vico is a social scientist, not an erudit, and Vichian etymologies are social fables, political strategies. Battistini struggles to divorce Vico's theory from his shady methods, for it is difficult to ignore the fact that Vico plays fast and loose with his phonemes; for example, in the New Science Vico first derives clientes, heroic subordinates, from duere, "to shine in the light of arms (whose splendor was called cluer), for they reflected the light of the arms borne by their respective heroes," (N.S., 556); a little later, (N.S., 573), Vico complacently cites the grammarians' derivation of clientes from colentes, tillers of the soil. Battistini is correct, I believe, in finding in Vichian etymology a very heightened sensitivity to time: a sensitivity he shares to a certain extent with the seventeenth-century E. Tesauro, with his fable of the Latin language murdered by Italian, a matricide, and with Cesarotti in the eighteenth century, with his models of languages formed and transformed in time by the interactions of their genio grammatical, logical structure, and their genio rhetorica, expressive and cultural proclivities.25 In Vichian etymology, the etymons or roots function in two temporal domains at once, and etymology is, therefore, contemporary politics as well as classical erudition. The etymons are, first, diagnostic of early social structures, motives, functions of a nation, and second, they also weigh in both the past and present speech activity of a society, they constrain, (N.S., 1003). The linguistic past is not simply precursor; it is studied not simply as anticipation, preview of the present, but as an ingredient, constitutive of the present. Diagnosis indicates how 114

IX

the structures of one stage of a culture form the context for later stages; the famous three ages of language and society—of gods and hieroglyph, of heroes and poetry, of men and the vulgate—are thus co-present in a relevant, vital way. Etymologies reveal language as both a sequential and a layered structure; roots are imaginative crystallizations within words, "lexicalized metaphors," connections which remain as hidden matrices of later sociolinguistic activity For Battistini, then, Vice's theory of historical ricorsi is simply his etymology writ large; large, complex structures of continuity are constituted by microstructures of continuity—a pointillist political canvas. Prof. Bertolini's essay on "Vico and Etymology," on the other hand, clearly expresses an anti-classical choice, a preference for a "modern" intellectual style; here Vico is not the summation of classical moments, not even E. Said's prototypical modern thinker, but the target of choice for modernist revisions.26 "History, Bertolini pronounces, is the "tamed surface of suppressed scandals"; the aggression is scholarly, not political, and the scandals suppressed are Vichian deceptions, not aboriginal outrages. Thus, for Bertolini, Vichian etymological plots reveal the pathological paternalism of the father/son relation, represented, of course, in the root/derivation relation. There can be one, and only one, deep structure of etymological fable, a Freudian one: etymological derivation is not "historical" in a vivifying sense, but represses life. Bertolini's reductive zeal more than counteracts pre-modern etymologists' theoretical greediness. Further, as an impoverishment of narrative, it mislays the Vichian investigative promise, and therefore mislays its insights into power. In Bertolini's viewr, etymology becomes a struggle of privilege with freedom, where "origin" equals the metaphysical abomination "absolute presence" or "truth," and derivation, repressive regression. He dissolves Vichian fables into a tissue of Derridean erasures, cancellations, rewritings—all scars; Vico is a regressor deconstructing himself as represser—all waste. In contrast, to view Vichian narratives as performances in a classical mode is to focus on their goal of recovery of enduring capacities to signify. But Vichian perseverance of meaning is not in the modern mode of paternalism; the originary truth is not prescriptive, authoritative in a naive sense of an approved imposition of control. Rather, the etymological narrative reveals an enduring capacity which is a potential born of "poverty" and "ignorance" (N.S., 456), not a prescription, since one does not prescribe poverty, but a parameter. Recall that Battistini insists that the Vichian narratives make a contribution to philosophical sociology, not grammar, to a rather dour view of human sociability, rather than propriety of use. Narrative agents signal that which remains a temptation or need in successive periods of the same society; they signal also remnants of institutions which preserve temptations and needs. Further, only in languages where the parameters still function, can narratives function as enlightening: there root and derivation are in political dialogue, both participants in a continuum of social presence and moral obligation. For Vico, languages which are weakened and disordered by 115

Fables of Power

IX

crowds of borrowed words, confused by false eloquence; the reflective ironies, the false and frigid poetry of cultural decadence are less beautiful, and therefore less expressive, and therefore less true: and as a result, the study of these languages is less precise, and less politically useful, diminishing political insight and power (MS., 445). Indeed, Battistini has carefully described the premises and procedures of a programme which he would, I believe, carefully deny: in exploring the inclusive "historical" or "natural" Latin language, the Vichian etymologies reconstitute a national identity For Battistini points out that Vico is not interested in the easy mechanisms of grammatical analogy, but in the anomalous features of the semantic landscape, a domain of civil action; he focuses not on grammatical morphology, the case structures of signifies but the complex field of semantic referents, siginifies; thus the derivation of testamentum from testamen is not important, but the derivation of testamentum from testatio mentis is, for it relates one native power structure to another, it derives ex rerum ipsarum vi et potestate.21 And Vice's strategy is to exclude as far as possible the exotic from the indigenous; he will reject the derivations of the Renaissance "grammatici" who strain after Greek or Babylonian or Egyptian sources, since only the derivation of Latin from ancient Latin has any intrinsic diagnostic interest; he prefers, as Battistini points out, to derive the Latin pater from patefaciendo semine rather than from the Greek Trar^p.28 Yet there is a severe anti-ideological bias in Vico's account of national identity; his description insists upon a strong connection between barbaric and civilized, includes social dysfunction as well as the functionally apt; "the most ancient wisdom of the Italians," the "national genius," is a rough justice, a cluster of desperate, even unwitting maneuvers, not for naive celebration.29 The etymologies disclose a fell dimension of the indigenous or autochthonous; Vichian definitions of political capacity focus on archetypal confrontations with human dysfunction, rather than withfortuna, sheer contingency; politics contends, as it develops, with humanity (N.S., 523, 550). Then, the etymologies, which assume barbaric ricorsi as well as corsi, thicken the political identity by repetitions; Italian roots recall and reaffirm the lessons of ancient Latin: the medieval usage legnaggi, lineages, recapitulates the heroic claims of stirpes, stems (N.S., 531). Vico, in sum, constructs a linearity rich in the resources of survival. Let me at this point interrupt the discussion of etymology with a hasty characterization of the shift in modernity in the relationship of modes of humanistic inquiry to the issue of power, a characterization I have derived only in part from the evidence of etymology. To assign responsibility, I have named this shift an "abdication" of power, but I find it useful to distinguish two different stages or strategic moves in this trend to political dysfunction. In the early modernity of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, intellectualist abdication can take on the form of a tactic of division, of bifurcation into two domains for subject as well as mode of inquiry: a domain of taste and a domain of policy. The definition of a 116

IX

domain of taste subtracts from the general realm of critical judgment; not only do we have tasteful and amusing talk of pictures and music, but tasteful talk of policy as well. A gentleman, for instance, is marked by his freedom to indulge or not indulge his taste for policy; his domestic realm, the prized physical setting for the exercise of taste, sequesters politics. Taste as social, if schooled, talent requires judgments different in kind from judgments rooted in an ethical-political base, a requirement which diminishes the moral valence of aesthetic value. The classical complementarity of otium and negotium, leisure and business, becomes an opposition. Thus, for example, Joseph Spence, in his iconographical treatise, the Polymetis (1747), enjoins Latin as an amusement for a gentleman in his leisure, but stipulates it as counter-productive for the busy, those in trade or the professions; Latin, and Latin etymology, become social credentials.30 The bifurcation not only abets the scholar's embarrassing involvement in the guiding of conspicuous consumption, but becomes an abdication of "real" social power, an acceptance of complicitous status. It is also a relational defeat, a correlative happening; at the same time that the humanities fail to develop, the natural sciences develop institutions and the discipline of a close-knit community of inquirers, a discipline described in great detail by the historians of science: a discipline which achieves power, and overrides the division of domains. Spence, then, is exemplary of an eighteenth-century complicity of serious investigation and societal strategies, a complicity which contributes to the very complicated typology of nineteenth- and twentieth-century etymological dictionaries described by Malkiel—a plethora of enterprises which reflect peculiar combinations of dilettantish and ideological interests: race-myth, nationalism, folk curiosity, and exact philological discipline. Still, this complicity with, or co-optation by, social elites is balanced by a second dysfunctional initiative of denial of the essentially social problematic of discourse. While Home Tooke's Diversions of Purley (1780—) retains the polite discursive form and polite aims of "tasteful" inquiry, it is, like Vice's New Science, a serious, not complicitous, etymological investigation.31 Yet it rejects Vice's definition of etymological science as social science; its strategy represents, in contrast to Vice's, a total retreat into a psychologistic domain; the entire corpus of roots and derivations, gathered from all languages, is to be employed as evidence of mental structure and process. The notion that language has a communicative function and thus a civil purpose is set aside. Where Vico's etymology assumes linguistic consciousness as the shared or collective consciousness stipulated later by de Saussure, and then maps a relevant domain of law and religion and custom, Tooke's etymologies produce evidence of the inner workings of Leibnitzian monads, and attempt to define the psychological and even neurophysiological functions of individual minds.32 It is a strategy which is no more than a caving-in to solipsism, the methodological temptation Descartes expressed in his passionate and compelling essay on method. This second dysfunctional moment of denial is both recapitulated and rein117

Fables of Power

IX

forced in the modernist abdication of power which takes the form of the assumption by the humanistic disciplines of the role and techniques of subversion. Edward Said, to be sure, in his most stimulating essay, "Abecedarium culturae," defends subversion as necessary, and singles out Foucault's commitment to subversion as especially praiseworthy, heroic; he notes that Foucault insists that well-motivated discourse, and particularly the discourse generated by disciplines, must be violence.33 The modes of subversion, however, may be simply current and disguised transformations of classical modes of normality: thus "erasure" would be a form of mimesis, and "violence," "scandal," "transgressions" may aim at a new gravitas, concinnitas, and copia. Certainly there is something uncomplicatedly fashionable, tasteful, in the brittle, anxious fancy for decoupage, rarefaction—fashionable, perhaps, in the same mode as consumptive disease was fashionable in the early nineteenth century. But, in a more serious vein, subversion as an isolating gesture is rooted in the presupposition of the isolation, autonomy of discourses; isolation, for example, and its promise of an autonomous discipline motivates the Saussurean postulate of the arbitrary, not motivated nature of language. This isolation can be exploited either as oracle or game, in a divinatory or ludic mode; in either case, the isolation undervalues linear connections, sequence in particular; "intertextuality," by and large, takes place in a ruleless domain which has no temporal dimension at all. The abdication, then, finds expression in the abandonment of narrative as the symbolic form of linearity, and imposes the duty of an attack on the contribution of linearity to learning and politics. Thus, I would argue, the single, general, and interesting shift in etymology is a shift from the classical strategy of making static structures linear ones (for, as Zumthor pointed out, it restated ideal relations as historical, traditional ones),34 to a modern strategy of making the linear static. Take Jacques Derrida: his etymologies are mostly jokes, and since the aim is subversion, it is difficult to say whether the plots are in good or bad faith. Besides the wisecracks, we find abstemious, dour, word-centered strategies; there is a disposition to make the rhetorical figure of paronomasia philosophically weighty, a disposition Wandruska notices in Heidegger as well, when he cites a brief passage in which the forms of the verb ziehen are used dozens of times.35 Or, consider Derrida's insertion of the hyphen, which is regarded as a self-explanatory tactic of great perspicacity, (e.g., "pro-gramme/' "re-present").36 The tactics are only arithmetic; the hyphen is simple subtraction, a minus sign, while the addition of morphemes, grammatical forms, to the root—e.g., "alterity alters"—is paradoxically reductive. In both instances the intention seems to be that of reinforcing the autonomy and isolation of the text, of circumscribing its pragmatic force or practical responsibility by the simple means of lexical impoverishment. The hyphenated word, for example, is frozen in separate frames; for the reader to unite them is to disobey some vague and slippery imperative which requires decoupage as cleanliness. While the tactics of enclosure invoke the privilege of a "game" as a demar118

IX

cated, self-sufficient realm, the mode of subversion insures that it is an outsider's, a guerilla gamester's, not an insider's play, play one cheerfully joins. This is play absolved from the contractual commitments of learned dialogue, recognizing no disciplinary or historical contexts, play committed to what Foucault calls a "desinvoluture studieuse.'^1 But the rejection of context disallows self-contextualization on the part of the subversives; they fail to apply subversion to their own discourse, since their simple and tidy assumption is that any discussion of subversion is nonsubversible. The problems their texts present, then, are not complex; rather, they are of the simplicity of classical logical dilemmas, the insolubilia; they recall the ancient wheeze, "The Cretan": we have a flock of Cretans telling us all Cretans lie. Further, modernism as subversion is the source of the false dilemma of knowledge or power, and thus abdicates proper, as well as improper, subversible power. A fundamentalist classicist like Charles Kahn would no doubt relate this abdication to their epistemological bedevilment, the obsession with "how we know," as opposed to "what we know," which has beset Western philosophy, he claims, since Descartes.38 This is a bedevilment which radically questions modes of cognition in such a manner as to dematerialize learning into acts of rewriting, while at the same time it reifies power, learning's correlative, materialising the reactant power into acts of subjugation and domination. The isolation of the text is a sanitation move, a response to cognitive anomie. In order to value literature, to define it as pure or true subversion, it is thus necessary to define literature as an "organized form of knowledge" which is "radically frivolous," which rejects, resists power by means of its studious frivolity.39 In contrast, the classical mode etymologizes power as potentia, not potestas, and thus de-reifies power into possibility, capacity, potential. Just so, power as potential or possible is the subject of classical etymological narratives, which trace power in the relation of root and derivation, trace, that is to say, the linear, timebound development of enduring capacities and possibilities within the historical, social, and linguistic whole. Compare the solipsist etymologies of Heidegger and Derrida; their divinatory and ludic word-centering results, on the one hand, in the reincation by default of matter outside the sphere of epistemological comfort, (outside the text), and on the other, an austere dissolution of subjects within the sphere into a web of simple relations of difference and similarity; the lexicon becomes a jungle gym, rooted in place, an armature for their gymnastic turns. 40 We note, of course, the naivete of classical etymology: not engaged by the necessity of subverting its correlate, power, not epistemologically insecure—a naivete, however, that helps it to avoid the reification of divergent discourse as hostile conspiracy. The distance between classical naivete and modern sophistication is measured by the horror Roland Barthes expresses at the notion of naive, unproblematic signifying. "Denotation!" he exclaims, "it is a scientific myth. It is to believe that there is a 'true' state of language, as if every sentence contained an etymon (an origin and truth)." 41 Barthes feels compelled to associate the heresy of 119

Fables of Power

IX

unproblematic signification with the heresy of linear, temporal connection in usage; Barthes feels equally threatened, we must deduce, by an accessible truth, and by historical bonds, a sociability not of his own creation. For indeed, each classical etymological narrative claims to crystallize a proclivity, a habit, a disposition. Vichian etymologies can characterize gross qualitative shifts in cultural style, opposing societies in tune, not simply with their national and cultural heritage, but with general cognitive and expressive capacities as well, to societies profoundly self-deceived, beset by a false eloquence, a frigid solipsism, a barbarism of reflection (N.S., 1106). A Vichian, I suppose, would describe Derrida as a barbarian of reflection, and Derridian disciplines as generating a frigid poetry, discourse resistant to etymological connection, closed, shut; discourse which diminishes capacities. Recall Vichian derivations are both diagnostic of archaic factors and revealing of factors which still weigh; his premise is that etymological fables, which offer rich characterizations of past possibility increase the potential of present action by their instruction: sequence adds to politics. Thus, Vichian linearity stipulates the essential continuity as that between barbarism and civility, between the primitive and the rationally organized, a stipulation which creates uncomfortable but challenging parameters for social or ethical theory. There is a parallel stipulation, of course, in modern inquiry in Alasdair Maclntyre's serious linearity. Maclntyre, recall, has hypothesized that a classical and thus "satisfying" description of moral behavior takes account of the narrative unity of life, of the domains of cooperative practices (e.g., medicine, physics) in which virtues are exercised, and of the shared traditions of exemplary civil behavior.42 It is intriguing that both Maclntyre and Vico have focussed on the redefintion of "heroic" life as a key strategy in the revision of moral-political theory. But where Maclntyre's account of the narrative unity of heroic life is coherently edifying, Vico's etymology is an indefinitely elastic, expansive narrative project; Battistini remarks that Vico seems to claim that it is possible to reconstruct from one word entire chapters of heroic history.43 And unlike Maclntyre, Vico works against the moralistic grain: where the traditional emphasis is on the gulf between barbaric and civilized—originally, recall, an etymological contrast between the disorderly babble of the primitive tribes and the logically ordered Greek discourse—Vico's account claims that barbaric expectations, claims, and expedients remain encapsulated in modern usage. And where Maclntyre's account of Greek heroism is ingratiating, Vichian etymologies redo classical heroism as inhospitable, punctilious, sour, and defensive (N.S., 319, 637, 667, 952-53, 965). The continuities the etymologies disclose are not single lines of versions, anticipations of classical philosophical virtues, but connections which are confutations, reversals of difficult motives: the root of order is in jealous possessiveness, and civil virtues have their source in aggressive conservatism (N.S., 586, 597, 599, 629). Thus, Vichian etymologies do not furnish moralistic prescriptions but give a detailed (if 120

IX

highly speculative) account of the very elements of inhumane humanity which are the pressing topics of political inquiry today. In contrast, modern word-centered investigation diminishes our sensitivity to range in capacity, and thus our politics, by repeated investigations of the single scenario of ideological manipulation, at the same time as the inquiry itself functions as power-game; the controlling axiom is that the reader's loss is the author's gain. To be sure, Derrida, has mounted, felt he must mount, a frontal attack on linearity as a productive category in inquiry; here, his most interesting maneuver is to juxtapose good with bad linearity, in his use of music as a club to beat syntax, language line.44 But compare Wittgenstein's use of music as a figure which illustrates language competence; his musical examples thicken our sense of hearing and learning, connect the activities of understanding themes and grasping meanings as essentially, not accidentally, linear, as timebound in a fruitful and exciting way 45 To move from Wittgenstein's very rich description of time and line in language back to etymology is to retreat from the elegant to the primitive; this is an invidious contrast, which usefully makes a point: etymology's chief benefit is a very primitive and pure experience of linearity. Further, it is the primitiveness that insures the purity; etymologies are redundant or circular, they are playful, they are suspect, and they assign a most unfashionable importance to memory; they maintain a raffish, untidy presence on the fringe of respectable language inquiry, offering both a temptation and a threat to abstract formalists who search for synchronous grace. First, consider redundancy: narrative as subject and object, as learning activity and information. Recall Vice's faith in narrative: "History cannot be more certain," he claims, "than when he who creates the things also narrates them." Narration is a participative art; the etymologies are successful narratives because their small scale makes the task of self-construction easy; as narratives, they engage the musical type of comprehension, which either grasps the sequential, linear "all at once," or which seizes a theme in its recapitulations, as in the harmonious understanding of Wittgenstein's figure; it is a comprehension indefinite or open-ended in nature, evading the demonstrative force, the violence of closure, the q.e.d. of the syllogism. To say that the form, not the daft content of etymologies is valuable is to speak imprecisely, for narrative form allows the reader to compensate, to reconstruct the content. The purity of etymologies also relates to their playfulness. Malkiel laments, of course, that etymology has a tendency to descend into an erudite parlor game;46 but play can be one of the tactics of the constructive tolerance which Paul Feyerabend calls "philosophical anarchism," a strategy of creating a breathing space for theories to prove themselves.47 Modernist etymology and word-centering are, to be sure, playful in excess; but the connections their play forges are textual, not discursive ones; they create arenas for formalist jousting, and they avoid history like the plague. In contrast, classical etymologies maneuver skittishly, but well 121

Fables of Power

IX

within a social domain; they enjoin concrete, particular experiences of social constructs, of rules and conventions. Thus, on the one hand, the narratives claim to give an account of the process of discursive construction, the social negotiation of the lexical constraint; but also, the narratives argue; they evoke their historical status as rhetorical argument, as instances of the use of the topos of definition, and thus attempt to force a conjunction between the discourse which formed the root, and readers' discursive choice, to compress past and present discourse by stipulating the derivation as a pertinent social constraint. Then, etymologies focus on event, and the succession of discursive events, crystallized in the spelling of a word, and in this way provide an experience of an intimate relation between parole and ecriture, a relation, of course, denied by "textuality" premises. Etymological practice is certainly suspicious, probably quackery in great part; Paulhan tells the story of the linguist Meillet, who compared studying etymology to the project of squaring the circle, and suggested that all communications to the Academy of Inscriptions on etymology be returned unread.48 But the suspect quality is functional. Classical etymology attempts far too much; it is unrepentantly transcultural, cross contextual; it mixes its metaphors. But then, this rashness avoids the circularity, the question-begging of normal science and normal philosophy, stuck fast in their own disciplinary matrices and socio-historical contexts, raising no questions that cannot be answered by neat description, necessarily selfjustifying, self-confirming. Thus etymology, as rash, avoids the charge of do-nothingism, of triviality, which Richard Rorty feels is Derrida's strongest argument against normal philosophy and for abnormality, for teratogenic initiatives.49 Classical etymological statements, confined to the word, are much more outrageous than the sophisticated attempts at analysis of very large units, the discursive events in series, which are the proper subject matter of the cultural historian, according to Foucault. But where the very complexity of Foucault's analysis, which interlaces lists of topics with lists of methods and techniques, causes him to lose the thread of history, as the sixteenth-century historian La Popeliniere would say, the linear connection of the derivation may be startling, but it is unavoidable.50 One agrees with Zumthor that etymology is defective because it ignores syntax as the context of word, and thus etymological dictionaries can purvey untrustworthy polysemy. Yet etymology as science abandons the consideration of linear syntax on the sentence level in a process of searching for a syntax of discursive event and social rule on a much larger scale; when etymological explanation forces gross temporal connection on a formally insignificant unit, it works at once on the largest and smallest scale. Further, etymology's restriction to the isolate unit, its tactics of employing the smallest units as the vehicles of the greatest cross cultural connections, places a most unfashionable emphasis on memory. Etymology makes vast calls on the memory because, as learning, it is not so much used as stocked; one does not "cash in" an individual etymology for a present instantiation; one does not "dis-

122

IX

pose of," without residue, the stock of derivation stories in the construction of an overarching linguistic system. At the same time, the etymological project functions as a laboratory, as well as a storehouse;51 it is a continuous discovery procedure, a procedure which produces an inventory or list which needs remembering because it resists classification and system. And, etymology makes calls upon the memory because it does not contribute to learning in a progressive mode, a mode, that is to say, where earlier work can be discarded; Malkiel points out that etymology has the baffling characteristic of producing more eccentric, and more outre, biographies the further it proceeds.52 Where systematic inquiry moves toward greater simplicity, memorable tidiness, etymological productions become more and more baroque: they create an informational midden. Etymology, in resisting system, and exercising memory, tests our sensitivity to linear connection. It suggests the existence of a domain which permits a very basic and direct experience of linearity, a domain which supports a very limited and very simple investigative activity which needs narrative in an uncompromising way. In that brillant phenomenological essay, La Preuve par I'etymologie, Paulhan claims that the truth of an etymology is only the truth of a simple anecdote; etymology is only a genre, only a discursive form.53 An analogous narrative fundamentalism, where narrative form defines both subject and mode of investigation, invests Maclntyre's claim that "narrative unity" is the neglected as well as essential dimension of classical moral life—a unity in which narrative integrity and moral accountability mutually presuppose each other.54 For Vico, narrative is the essential dimension of civil life, and etymology reconstructs a civil history of shared beliefs and tactics, deploying the constraints and the appropriations of traditions. Further, this Vichian narrative suggests a connection with Freudian histories which tends to undermine Bertolini's Freudian deconstruction of Vico; just as Freud hypothesized the rich temporal interrelations of irrational and rational, so for Vico the powerful continuity is that between primitive and civilized. For both, history is the history of "the return of the repressed." Yet, in comparison with Vico, Freud seems compromised by solipsist premises, since for Vico the "repressed" is primarily a shared barbarism, not individual guilt. Like Freud, he assumes the coherence of phylogenetic and ontogenetic, civil and personal developments, but he chooses to emphasize the heavy impact of phylogenetic on ontogenetic. Etymologies disclose "encapsulated" barbarisms; Vico's national identity, recall, is a traditional civil disability, rather than an unproblematic native genius.55 Vico explains the constraints of these encapsulations by hypothesizing a larger, more inclusive narrative of corsi and ricorsi. In Vico's academic ricorsi the recovery of "the most ancient wisdom of the Italians" was the recovery of a very complex and informal web of beliefs, imperatives, and predilections; the recovery forces comparison with historical ricorsi, and specifically with our own equally complex and informal web of beliefs, rules, and dispositions; then, in turn, the 123

Fables of Power

IX

comparison, in establishing the conviction of irreducible complexity and informality, argues the falsity, naivete of projects which claim solutions in the cancellation, transcendence, or deconstruction of the past. While Vico's assumption of the persistence of the past is also a hypothesis of the vulnerability of the present, deconstruction presents a radical version of the Hegelian project, since it requires self-designation as a completely pure, as opposed to a synthetic, progressively pure, intellectualist project. "Subversion" as modernist policy is a claim to create detachment, distance from history; it also indicates a tendency in Heideggerian historicism for historical disinvestment. In sum, the modernist strategy I have opposed to classical etymologizing is stipulated by anit-social premises; certainly it is the case that the definitions of community which could be extrapolated from the investigative activity would be thin and would recall Utopian definitions. The modernist abdication of power is less acession of authority than a choice of intellectual emigration. But the emigration cedes a domain verified by etymology as of intrinsic interest for the investigation of social function and dysfunction. Etymology purveys a linear fundamentalism, in which sequence connects language and society; if there is a social question, the answer must have a temporal dimension; if it is public, it is historical. Even delusive or self-delusive etymologies furnish brief, unavoidable encounters with the hypothesis of a connection between preceding and successive social usages: encounters radically unlike the anxious and exclusive confrontations of modern critic and non-contemporary author. An etymology is a primitive experience of an originary social decision; etymology collectively deals in meanings not only as "intended" but as accepted; the individual acts of deriving defined in the word are exemplary acts of historical reception, and they illumine a typology of assent which includes a great variety of social mechanisms such as corroding, resisting, punning. It is clear that etymology, as the study of the strategies of assent to the past, "reads forward," and thus undermines "Whiggish" condescension, the tactic of "reading back" the present into the past; but at the same time, etymologies do not compel our assent, but are permissive: if not this meaning, some other. And, while etymology supports scholarship as a linguistic jurisprudence which orders the past as a morally pertinent domain, it also supports the possibility of aesthetic refinement; the intellectual voluptuousness Paulhan describes as attached to a good "fit" of former root with present use indicates the pleasures of the discovery of a fit between past and present sociability56 Etymologies deal in opportunity, and challenge as well as oblige; etymology can be exploited as a means of aligning contemporary and past usages in a provocative mode; etymological engagement acts as a tying of social bonds, a tactic of social solidarity, very like a liturgical celebration—endlessly repetitive, essentially shared.

124

IX

Notes

1. Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris, 1971). "Fables of Power" was presented first as a paper at the conference "Narrativity and Power" at Rutgers University, 1979. 2. Y. Malkiel, Etymological Dictionaries: A Tentative Typology (Chicago, 1976), pp. 16, 47. 3. Thus, for example, H. J. Jackson ends his article "Coleridge, Etymology, and Etymologic," Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (1983), with this quotation from Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, (London, 1825), p. xi: "accustom yourself to reflect on the words you hear, or read, their birth, derivation, and history. For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized," p. 88. 4. The very fine "Etymologia et origo a travers la traditione latine," by Guy de Poerck, in Anamnesis: Gedankboeck E. A. Leemans (Brugge, 1970), pp. 191-228, is a useful brief synthesis; basic references are, of course, the article "Etymologic" by I. Opelt in the Reallexicon fiirAntike und Christentum (Stuttgart, 1964), vol. VI, col. 797f, and the entry "etymologia" in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae; on the inventive and figurative uses of etymology see also H. Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, (Miinchen, 1960), sections 111, 392, 466. 5. Cicero, De inventione, (Loeb ed., Cambridge, Mass, 1960), II.xvii.52; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, (Loeb ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1959), vol. 3; VII.x.l. 6. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum, Libri XX (Oxford, 1957), ed. W. M. Lindsay, I.xxix: "Nam dum videris unde ortum est nomen; citius vim eius intelligis," cited in de Poerck, p. 214, and also in E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), in Excursus XIV, "Etymology as a Category of Thought," 497. Bernard is also cited by Curtius; the quotation is from his Commentary on theAeneid (see Curtius, p. 498). 7. On etymological figure as pun, see Aristotle, Ars Rhetorica (OCT, Oxford, 1959), ed. W. D. Ross, in the discussion ofskommata, 141 Ob. 8. Institutio oratoria, I.vi.lf: "Sermo constat ratione vel vetustate, auctoritate consuetudine. Rationem praestat praecipue analogia, nonunquam et etymologia." 9. C. Besomi and M. Regioliosa, "Valla e Toretlli," Italia medioevale e umanistica, 9 (1966), esp. 75-121. 10. Thus, history replicates mode; or, first argument, then event; see P. Zumthor, "Fr. Etymologic, (essai d'histoire semantique)," in Etymologica; Walter von Wartburg zum siebsigsten Geburtstag (Tubingen, 1958), pp. 877, 880. 11. C. A. Dukerus, Opuscula varia de latinitate iurisconsultorum veterum (Lugduni Batavorum, 1711), p. 30. A compilation of suspicion is the OED's entry, "to etymologize." 12. Y. Malkiel, "Etymology and Modern Linguistics," Lingua, 36 (1975), 109. 13. Ch. Kahn, The Verb "Be" in Ancient Greek, inj. Verhaar, ed., The Verb "Be" and its Synonyms; Foundations of Language, Supp. Series, v.XVI, (Dordrecht, 1973), 3 7 If 14. Malkiel, Etymological Dictionaries, p. 33. 15. Malkiel, Etymological Dictionaries, p. 44. 16. G. Genette, Figures III (Paris, 1972), p. 7 If. 17. Argumentative and narrative functions are associated in a peculiarly loose fashion. The etymology may be described as a topical argument or as an argument from exemplum, arguing content from name (adnotatio) or relating a case, invoking the event of naming as exemplary, and illustrating a proper use. Indeed, the ambiguity, the instability of the

125

Fables of Power

IX

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

etymological gambit has its analogue in the exemplum\ see A. Vitalie- Brovanone, "Persuasione e Narrazione; L'Exemplum tra due retoriche," Melanges de I'ecolefranccaise de Rome, 92(1980), I, 87-112. Boethius, In topica Ciceronis commentarius, in M. Tullii Ciceronis Opera, ed. J. C. Orelli, (Zurich, 1883), V.I, p. 291; cited in De Poerck, p. 196. Particularly interesting is de Poerck's discussion of the reciprocity of perseverantia and dedinatio in Varro, p. 199f; see also D. J. Taylor, Dedinatio; A Study of the Linguistic Theory of M. T. Varro, in Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, III; Studies in the History of Linguistics, 2 (Amsterdam, 1975). P. Guiraud, "Etymologic et ethymologia; (Motivation et retromotivation)," Poetique, 4 (1972), 405-13; M. Wandruska, "Etymologic und Philosophic," inEtymologica, 857-71 (see n. 10). "Etymology and Modern Linguistics," p. 106. J. Paulhan, La Preuve par I'etymologie (ftiris, 1953), p. 72, speaks of etymologies as minute dramas, within the word. G. Genette, "Genres, 'types', modes,"Poetique, 32 (1977), 397f. A. Battistini, La degnitd delta retorica; studi su G. B. Vico, (Pisa, 1975), pp. 101-52.1 have used the translation of the New Science of M. Fisch and T. Bergin (Ithaca, 1968); a brief statement of his investigational program is to be found in Sections 400-403. One could claim that Georges Dumezil's project confirms Vico's; see his Mythe et epopee (Paris, 1968), or Idees romaines (Paris, 1965). E. Tesauro, II Cannocchiale Aristotelico, int. A. Buck (Zurich, 1968); M. Cesarotti, Saggio sopra la lingua italiana (Padua, 1785). A. Bertolini, "Vico on Etymology: Toward a Rhetroical Critique of Histoircal Genealogies," Yale Italian Studies 1 (1977), 93-106; E. Said, "Vico in His Work and in This," Beginnings, Intention and Method (Baltimore, 1975), pp. 347-81. De universi iuris unoprincipio etfine uno, mil diritto universale, ed. F. Nicolini, (1968), p. 185, cited in Battistini, p. 141. Cited from Lepolemiche, ed. G. Gentile and F. Nicolini (1914), p. 244, in Battistini, p. 144. The De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, interestingly enough, begins as a Cartesian project of epistemological definition; (1914), ed. G. Gentile and F. Nicolini. I have discussed taste as a social competence in "Translation as Taste," The Eighteenth Century, 22(1981), 32-46. There is a very precise and very sympathetic discussion of Tooke in H. Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860 (Princeton, 1967), p. 44f. In Genette's terms, Tooke's etymology represents a cratylismepre-babelien, while Vico's is a cratylisme babelien, "Avatars du cratylisme," Poetique 4 (1972), 384; reprinted in Mimologiques; voyage en Cratylie (Paris, 1976); Battistini refers to this concept, p. 145. In Beginnings, Intention and Method, pp. 279-343. Zumthor, "Fr. Etymologic," p. 877f (seen. 10). Wandruska, "Etymologic und Philosophic," p. 864; for a positive evaluation of "static" etymology see P. Chantraine, "Etymologic historique et etymologic statique," Academic royale de Belgique; Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres et Sciences morales et politiques, 5 ser., 56 (1970), 80-95. J. Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967), pp. 27, 105; this is precisely the kind of etymological work which the Renaissance etymologists, as well as Vico, found uninteresting; see Battistini, p. 126. Foucault, L'Ordre du discours, p. 72. Kahn, The Verb "Be" in Ancient Greek, p. 404.

126

IX

39. L. Bersani, "The Subject of Power," Diacritics (Fall, 1977), 12. 40. On the compulsion to reify the "ineffable," see R. Rorty, "Philosophy as a King of Writing: An Essay on Derrida," New Literary History 10 (1978), 151. 41. R. Barthes, Roland Barthes par R. Barthes (Paris, 1975), p. 71. 42. A. Maclntyre, After Virtue; A Study in Moral Theory (London, 1981), p. 169f. 43. Battistini, p. 149. 44. Delagrammatologie,pp. 105-106, 128-29. 45. See, in particular, Zettel (Oxford, 1967), 155f; The Brown Book, in The Blue and Brown Books (New York, 1958), 17. 46. "Etymology and Modern Linguistics," p. 120. 47. P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London, 1978), p. 186. 48. La Preuve par I'etymologie, p. 30. 49. "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing," p. 155. 50. L. V. La Popeliniere, L'Idee de I'histoire accomplie (Paris, 1599), p. 23f. 51. Malkiel, Etymological Dictionaries, p. 32. 52. "Etymology and Modern Linguistics," p. 118. 53. La Preuve par I'etymologie, pp. 45, 63. 54. After Virtue: for example, "Heroic social structure is enacted epic narrative," p. 121; and "The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest," p. 203. 55. R. G. Collingwood's "encapsulations" take account of the historical factors which persist, in different contexts, with different values; Collingwood, of course, was a reader of Croce's reading of Vico; see the Autobiography (Oxford, 1968). 56. La Preuve par I'etymologie, p. 78; Paulhan speaks of'une volupte intellectuelle,faite a lafois de plaisir et de puissance."

127

Fables of Power

X

Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi As long ago as 1939, Felix Gilbert demonstrated the usefulness of a textual analysis of the moral-political discourse of the Renaissance. He argued that a fundamental political reorientation can be diagnosed in the alterations in the genre of advice or counsel, for example, in reading Machiavelli's Prince as a transformation of medieval and humanist "Mirrors for Princes."1 Since then, of course, Quentin Skinner, appealing to the initiatives of analytic philosophy of language, has advocated a more sophisticated project: the formal redescription of the Prince as a series of "speech-acts." Yet the fundamental assumption remains the same: for both Gilbert and Skinner, the structure of political rhetoric reveals rhetoric as politics, discourse as action.2 Since a traditional exercise in the definition of Florentine political thought has been the comparison of Machiavellian and Guicciardinian achievement, it seems to follow that a formal analysis of Guicciardini's political rhetoric would be useful. I shall argue that the Ricordi, the collection of observations, exhortations and maxims which presents a telling example of the state of the art of political and moral advice in Florence in the early sixteenth century, is central to the vital Guicciardinian difference. I shall also claim that the strength and unity of his differential contribution relates to the proverbial form of the Ricordi. A major focus of modern scholarship on the Ricordi has been the definitive establishment of the texts of the five successive redactions of the maxims. These redactions, available in the 1951 critical edition of R. Spongano, include two very early lists of maxims of 1512, the second adding 16 new ricordi to the original 13; a much larger collection of 161 maxims, retaining only 8 from the 1512 lists, was produced in the period 1523-25; a fourth redaction of 1528, which contains all of the ricordi of 1512 as well as all of the previous collection, plus 12 new ricordi', and the final redaction of 1530 which contains 91 new ricordi plus 130 from earlier collections, many of them radically revised. The concern with the redactions has been a concern with progressive change in the text. The central issue, of course, is the direction and force of the intellectual movement between versions, an issue E. Scarano Lugnani addresses in her monograph, Guicciardini e la crisi del Rinascimento.3 First, she notes the deepening of the political theoretical interests in the third redaction, accompanied in places by the elimination of "municipal" interests, the specifically Florentine references of the early ricordi. The municipal concern returns in the fourth

X 95

Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi

redaction of 1528, an urban interest which, she speculates, reflects Guicciardini's preoccupation with the contemporary Florentine political crisis. The fifth redaction represents a radical transformation on the plane of internal organisation as well as in selection of content; the tone is now "exquisitely" theoretical and contemplative. Thus, for example, where there had been a nourishing reciprocity between example and rule in the third version, in the fifth collection, according to Lugnani, the maxim absorbs totally the illustrative event, depriving it of any autonomous interest; the concrete and particular event is now mere example. I wish to argue, however, the essential unity of the Ricordi, a unity grounded in the constraints of proverbial form. 4 My interest lies in characterizing Guicciardini's exploitation of the ricordi form as both a cognitive tactic and a moral act: my premise is that "proverb" and "maxim" represent a meta-discursive strategy, a sign system or code which reorients the reader to political-moral reality.5 Lugnani has raised the issue of the relation of the Ricordi to Guicciardini's major texts in claiming that it is in the ricordi of 1523-25 that the major themes of Guicciardini's mature work, specifically the History of Italy, are first isolated. My claim is that the proverbial form dominates the Ricordi, where it is employed by Guicciardini to both intensify and enlarge political consciousness and moral sensitivity, and thus makes a heavy contribution to the thematic structure of Guicciardini's history.6 But first, any analysis of Guicciardini's use of the ricordo form must begin with his self-conscious statements about the Ricordi as discursive practice. In these statements the ricordo takes its place in a semantic field composed of proverb ("proverbio" 97), saying ("detto" 163), rule ("regola" 111), and maxim ("massima" 192). The congruence of the ricordo and proverb form is attested by the instances where the ricordi are simply versions of proverbs. This is the case in ricordo 136, a restatement of the classical tag "Audaces fortuna iuvat"; or 138, a reissue of "Ducent volentes fata, nolentes trahunt"; and 163, an updating of "Magistratus virum ostendit." Or, a ricordo may attempt either to correct an "antico proverbio" (96), or to make a strong and concrete case for its validity (33, 54, 116, 144). Then, Guicciardini appeals to a proverb to criticise the proverbial strength of the Ricordi as practice; in ricordo 210 he begins, " 'Poco e buono' dice el proverbio" (" 'Less is more,' says the proverb,") and then raises the question whether he has diluted his message by producing too many ricordi. Verbosity must contain nonsense, he says, while economy is easily digested: a selection ("fiore") might have been better. Here Guicciardini recognises economy as formal value. And certainly it is the case that any account of the proverbial form must stipulate the criterion of economy. In the proverb, a skeletal prose purveys skeletal premises; it is a severe statement of guarded expectations of human behavior. The simplicity of form is designed to obtain sophistication of response; the minimum of descriptive effort is to achieve a maximum of critical response, by means of the elimina-

X 96

tion or reduction of naive assumptions and superfluous inferences. Where the proverb is preceptive, it is designed to limit the exposure of designated action to the least possible amount of speculative damage. Proverbial effect relates to the piquancy of stating broad imperatives in a language of narrow surprises; general assent or inclusive attitudes are constituted by means of incisive raids upon a domain of cherished beliefs and shared moral truisms. Used within the context of serious investigation, the preferred use of proverb is as a folk wisdom which subverts folk cant. But if a primary attribute of the proverbial form is economy, a primary value of a collection of proverbs is richness. Just so, Terence Cave has emphasised the complementarity of the criteria of brevitas and copia in sixteenth-century literary theory and practice; Erasmus' Adagia, indeed, is "a stylish example of the marriage of copia and brevitas" (20-21). Brevity in the adage "Festina lente" is described as "gem-like"; that is, a small compassable unit which is both enduring and resettable, a relocatable brilliance.7 Complementarity of brevity and richness, or unitas and varietas, invests the single proverb as well. In a contemporary humanist collection of proverbs, Filippo Beroaldo claims that proverbs are "similar to laws, in that a narrow text gives rise to the widest possible interpretation; contained by the greatest brevity, they unfold the most fruitful meaning."8 And thus the generative complementarity of brevitas and copia affects the cognitive strategy of the proverbial form. At issue, of course, is the fit of the proverbial form in the general argument of the receiving text, and thus the relation of general and specific, rule and experience. Within the context of his inclusive political-historical project, Guicciardini wishes to give a pragmatic (useful) account of events; he is constrained, because he starts with obdurate and resistant events, to argue backwards, to search, as the rhetorician searches, for general lines of argument, topoi, which will account for the events. Aristotle specified in his Rhetoric that maxims can function as major premisses in an argument; they supply a general or common meaning which can be applied to specific events in conclusions.9 The proverbial tactic is one of epistemological clarification and deconstruction; as major premiss, it dismantles other, less economical premisses. The proverbs accomplish "home truths" by eschewing claims with systematic or academic resonances; proverbial tactics evince a distrust of syllogistic chains of propositions, lengthy argumentative development. Proverbial form, then, qualifies generality and the relation of rule and example, instantiation and maxim. But whereas Lugnani claimed that the redactions evince a development in the direction of generality where maxim "swallows" event, Hess has characterised the aphoristic relation of universal and individual in Guicciardini as a tension: they subsist in a dialectical mode in the sense that each is incomplete without the other.10 Further, one must note Guicciardini's pervasive tendency to focus on the reception or consumption as well as the production of maxim; proverbs "address" a unified body of producers/consumers. In ricordo 79, the unity of meaning must be subordinated to the variety of use.

X 97

Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi

Specific circumstances of application may constrain a total reversal of import; thus the proverb "el savio debbe godere el beneficio del tempo" may stipulate either celeritd (decisiveness) or procrastination. The relation of general to specific is certainly not a straightforward one in which genus exhaustively explains species. The proverbial appeal is to a wisdom, which, while it might cohere with the propositions developed in a formal Aristotelian or scholastic matrix, claims a diffuse collective origin. It specifies a domain of informal and irregular acts of invention and judgment, and provides, therefore, space for thought-experiment. Just as Cicero insists that the domain of juridical oratory is created by the fact that laws are not omnicompetent, and thus judges have discretion, so Guicciardini privileges the cases which cannot be decided by reference to law only, but require a jurisprudential strategy, a manner of adjudicating a variety of opinions (111, 113). The relation of species to species, of exemplary to imitative act, is equally aporetic: "to judge by example is very misleading," because tiny differences in contributing circumstances can cause great variations in effects (117, 114). The potential imitator of exemplary events, then, operates in a realm of contingency, judging and reckoning "giornata per giornata" (114). The Ricordi represent a deliberate strategy for gaining a different purchase on civil issue, a use of proverb to enter and change political debate. At the same time, the proverbs represent a direct and simple edifying address: both affirmations and subversions make unequivocal calls on judgment and act. For the proverb aims for the broadest popular recognisability; proverbial generality appeals to a continuity with traditional memory, and gives a suggestion of cross-cultural validity. The proverb, Guicciardini claims in ricordo 12, has universal application because it is a universal phenomenon; all nations have the same proverbs, even if expressed in different words, because they express the same resolution of similar experiences. And the verbal form of the proverb is of such rigidity that Guicciardini's ricordi confuse; the reader hesitates whether to judge them as newly-minted or obscurely archaic expressions (82, 140). The proverb is easily counterfeited; "artificial" proverbs, by virtue of the simplicity and rigidity of form, have the same force as "real" ones. What I now claim is that a focus on this proverbial strategy enables a revision of one of Lugnani's characterisations of the Ricordi and the reinforcement of a second. First, Lugnani sees in the changes that took place between the early and late redactions a rejection of Florentine, municipal interests. My hypothesis is simply that Guicciardini's proverbial strategy represents the endurance, not cancellation of this municipalist motive. That is to say, the invocation of proverbial authority is at the same time an invocation of the communal wisdom familiar to, indeed, identified as, the collective possession of small-scale societies. The archetypal proverb is an appeal to a shared residual knowledge, which is the firm possession of unlettered or literate inhabitants of a social network. The attribute "communia" of proverbs is a shared assumption of both Guicciardini's Ricordi and contemporaneous humanist collections; indeed, the notion of communality

X 98

underwrites a continuity between "learned" and "popular" forms. 11 Then, Fubini (153ff.) notes that the successive redactions of the Ricordi demonstrate a progressive movement towards a more generic "literary" expression; yet, while removing local "Florentine" expressions, the author retains the originary vulgar force, and though he discards "Florentinity" he discards "Latinate" usage as well. Guicciardini is not so much repudiating municipalism as removing parochialism in order to raise urbane instruction to a more general, and therefore accessible, plane. Proverbs, the form and content of the Ricordi, both strengthen the Florentine claim to special wisdom and appeal to a general audience's nostalgia for small communal identity. A very specific instance of this appeal would be, of course, Guicciardini's tactic of attributing a saying to his father (44, 45); indeed, he also cites a source, Pope Leo, as attributing a saying to his father (25). Generality does not specify cosmopolitanism but intimacy and informality. As we observe the intimate and informal quality of the social relations which are often the object of Guicciardinian investigation, we notice at once that a very high proportion of the Ricordi deal with the production and reception of "benefits," namely, not only the material rewards but also the offices, good will, trust and advice which are the currency of civil society. Here, I might add, is a clear instance where Guicciardini does not appear as anti-classical, for there are very strong parallels with the theory and practice of benefits Seneca adumbrated in his De Beneficiis. Like Seneca, Guicciardini depicts a network of benefits as constituting the most important social bonds: "quae maxime humanam societatem alligat."12 Both the Senecan and Guicciardinian initiatives focus on personal rather that institutional transactions; the choices depicted are not primarily choices of public policy, but of private, for example, familial needs. Thus, when Guicciardini intones "nothing is more precious than friends" (14), he refers to a thick discursive matrix where one's reputation, and thus power, is continuously assessed, voted up or down. The Ricordi, then, stipulate and explain a peculiar domain of civil interest, but, most importantly, they indorse a particular tone and point of view in defining ethical values in this domain as well; to use the proverb is to engage in a peculiar type of moral work. Indeed, the strong appeal of the proverbial account relates to its moral claims; recall that Aristotle remarked that the maxim invests a speech with moral character: "There is moral character in every speech where the moral purpose is conspicuous, and maxims always produce this effect, because the utterance of them amounts to a general declaration of moral principles (1395b). Further, as Aristotle noted, the use of maxims has powerful effect because it authenticates the popular morality: "The maxim is a general statement, and people love to hear stated in general terms what they already believe in some particular connection" (1395b). This statement by no means establishes the superiority of general rule to specific insight. Indeed, the proverbial strategy in an interesting way undermines the project of the construction of an exhaustive set of eternal moral rules.13

X 99

Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi

Thus, proverbial universality is an appeal to shared capacity or possession and not ontological order. Further, while Guicciardini depicts and appeals to a heavy, vital, social network which is both confrontational and omnipresent, he also enjoins a peculiarly negative, almost quiescent moral capacity. This, I think, is the motive of Lugnani's claim that the Ricordi are cognitive and not preceptive in tone (73). Recall that in ricordo 9 Guicciardini asks his audience to read his maxims often and hold them in mind, for they are easier to understand than to observe. They must become a habit of mind, always fresh in the memory; in an earlier version he remarks that habit will insure that use will then seem as rational as it is easy (Bl 1). Guicciardini's initiative is designed to shape attitudes or stances, rather than alternative policies (170,176); when he enjoins his readers to hold a maxim deep in their hearts ("avessino bene nel cuore," 196), he wishes to induce a mental state of cognitive alertness. In the relations of rule and example (110), of book and experience (186), in his emphasis on discretion ("discrezione" 6), on thoughtfulness ("pensare" 83, B25), on reflection (152, 187, 215), he describes as desideratum a passive and receptive frame of mind, flexible and open to the variations of experience (10), the mixed nature of things (213). His skeletal prose construes a simple armature, a perceptive screen; proverbial injunctions enjoin a sieving activity which need not produce a formula for heroic results. "Cognitive" is not equivalent to "academic," of course; the emphasis on discretion and flexibility is also a de-emphasis of book learning, ("dottrina," "libri" 186); reasoning not reading strengthens reflective capacity (187, 208). And his insistence on the bankruptcy of hindsight (22) and the impossibility of foresight or prophecy (23, 57, 58, 114, 176, 182, 207, 211) contribute to construing proper mentation as an almost empty readiness. Further, proverbial constraints, in forcing epistemological pessimism, limit moral possibility. The Ricordi, which radically demarcate the domain of the real from that of the ideal, the realm of "is" from that of "ought," also contribute to the attenuation of the preceptive drive. In ricordo 128 and 179, what "ought to be" is not the proper object of cognition and investigative scrutiny, and therefore ceases to be a topic in the schooling of the will as well.14 The pessimism enjoins a still further refinement of the definition of the "real"; "real" becomes "the perception of the real." The ricordi which deal with benefit concern the success or failure of the benefit given to induce the receiver to perceive the benefit as gain (40, 42, 43, 44, 86); the benefit must operate in a domain of gratitude and ingratitude, of reputation of liberality or miserliness (42, 158, 185, 217), of designations of respect or offense (B148, B153). We may detect in the proverbial strategy a general moment of interiorisation. If the proverbs describe or stipulate spiritual capacity, they also deal with goals as spiritual achievements. "Honor" becomes not so much a public charge as a private possession; true integrity of reputation is an assessment by the individual of his own attitudes and accomplishments. The Ricordi also define a temporal

X 100

dimension to moral competence and public reputation. Memory is an enabling capacity; the Ricordi are useful, available in so far as they are remembered (9); benefits and offenses exist in a domain of memory (24, 25, 62, 130, 150, 207). Reputation, the vital ingredient of success, is shared memory, a consensual remembrance (42, 158, 217, 218). But Guicciardini, like Seneca, develops a phenomenology of memory which distinguishes function and dysfunction. Not simply benefit, but the memory of benefit creates social bonds; the moralist who engages in "healing souls and maintaining faith in human affairs," Seneca claims, also has the duty of "engraving upon minds the memory of services" (De Beneficiis I.iv:6). Similarly, ingratitude, as destroying bonds, is a social evil; Guicciardini attacks the "malcontenti" as distorting political equations (131).15 Intimate domain and moral initiative are entwined, then; the Ricordi aim to provide a reflective command of intimate social relations; Guicciardini employs the proverbial form to generate a peculiarly thick description of moral competence within an informal social context. The specific and interesting locus of moral insight is the domain of benefits, a Senecan domain where benefits are a recalcitrant necessity: they are, on the one hand, the essential social cement or glue, and, on the other, extraordinarily hard to give and receive. Pessimism is, of course, constrained by the formal criterion of brevity; moral optimism requires an elaborate argument. Like Seneca, Guicciardini premises the essential fragility of human nature, its susceptibility to evil motives and forces: "malos esse nos, malos fuisse, — invitus adiciam, et futures esse."16 But also like Seneca, Guicciardini enjoins purity of motive: a benefit entered into a calculus of loss and gain is not a benefit; the benefit lies in the generosity ("benevolentia") of intention.17 Discussions of virtuous purity are circumscribed by the de-reification tactics of the Ricordi. His few direct references to virtue concern the sphere of will and affect; at one point he describes the extreme satisfaction one gains from the repression of illicit desire (B17). Positive attributes are attributes of manner; Guicciardini does, at the end of the collection, produce a list of characteristics of a virtuous mode: "cioe fargli con ragione, con tempo, con modestia, e per cagione e con modi onorevoli" (217). There is, to be sure, ambiguity: one ricordo maintains that true merit lies in action rather than disavowals of inaction (129); another will, with infinite caution, claim that the greatest good is to harm no one (139). "Harmlessness" denotes moral parsimony. And, in general, proverbial form represents and imitates proverbial capacity. The economy and elegance of the prose state, without excess, the economical premisses of the true state of affairs as a state of affective artifice. That is to say, the maxims are quintessentially proverbial as deconstructive of moralism, rather than reinforcing it, as humanist collections seem. The proverbial initiative, as spare and necessitous, inculcates habits of mind rather than political roles; it subverts law and inefficient ways of discussing moral issues; it insists on the limitation of the will, while addressing an audience from which it expects reasonable behavior; it underlines the im-

X 101

Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi

portance of perception and reputation, and thus underscores the necessity of dissimulation and reticence as well as of frankness and liberality. The enunciation of proverb questions or even subverts the status of proverbial rule, which applies as hedge and constraint; every general injunction imposes a burden of specific and therefore difficult use. Indeed, the strategy denies fixed rules of action at the same time as it attempts to fix the potential to observe and reflect. The issue which remains to be discussed is: What is the place of the Ricordi in Guicciardini's work as a whole? I have already cited Lugnani's remark that the major concepts of the History of Italy made their first appearance in the Ricordi; I have tried to make the case that the dominant proverbial form was at the same time a cognitive tactic and a moral strategy. Indeed, this choice of mode illumines the place of Guicciardini's work in Florentine political and historical thought as well. I shall claim that we must see the Ricordi as the product of a double initiative in Florentine moral-political inquiry, an initiative both traditional, in its proverbial appeal to a social wisdom of time immemorial, and revolutionary, partaking of the radical innovations of Machiavellian political analysis. Or, the initiative may be judged traditional, radical, and classical. While he makes few references to classical protagonists or authors in the Ricordi, Guicciardini mentions Tacitus three times (C13, 18; B101); in ricordo 18, his observation that Tacitus spoke as much to the issue of how subjects can live under tyranny as to how tyrants can maintain their rule, is, I would argue, as much a summary of Guicciardini's program as of that of Tacitus.18 Just so, Machiavelli's Prince recapitulates this agenda: it is as much addressed to the task of accommodation to the failure of republican possibilities as to that of constructing a principate. Guicciardini, like Machiavelli, employs the shock tactics of depicting the current political dilemmas of tyranny in rich, compelling, and Tacitean detail. But in Guicciardini there is a specific commitment to the use of the proverbial form in order to authenticate a modus vivendi, a potential of endurance for a reader now defined as Tacitean subject rather than Ciceronian citizen. Certainly the careers of both Machiavelli and Guicciardini reflect the imperative that the subject with a capacity for generous endurance must embrace the role of counsellor. Guicciardini, when he claims that the subject of a principate has greater opportunities than the subject of a republic (107), describes these opportunities specifically as those of proverbial prudence. The central assumption of the Ricordi, I have argued, is that the dominant matrix of all civic activity, both political and moral, is one of intimate obligation and benefit. By the relocation of virtuous activity within this intimate network of social bonds, Guicciardini is justifying the fundamental importance of a domain of intimate relations which persists within, or even encloses, the new political power structures. One of the tasks of the Ricordi is to refine and correct the distinction of public and private spheres by placing the public domain within the matrix of affect and then subordinating political action to the affective network. 19 From this follows the transformation of the notion of "public" into

X 102

"public perception": the politician functions in a realm of perceptions, reputations, deceptions, and self-deceptions. The very simple republican definitions of political space of earlier Renaissance "Civic Humanism" are effaced by this strategy; further, many maxims make specific contributions to the definition of the peculiarity of the princely domain.20 Here the coherence of "public" and "political" entirely breaks down. The Ricordi stress not only the web of dissimulation which invests courtly activity, but insist on the opacity of the court to civic framework, of the palace to the forum: "often there is such a dense cloud or a thick wall between the palace and the market place that the human eye is unable to penetrate it" (141).21 This proverbial version of contextual challenge coheres with the notion of proverbial response; the account stipulates the isolation of the prince in a difficult environment, and thus severely circumscribes the possibilities of action of both prince and subject, immersed in an ambiance of opinion and affect, deception and interest.22 The prince must use benefit and punishment as both spur and bridle (B3), but use must be related to affective reality. Like Seneca, Guicciardini emphasises disparities in the phenomenology of memory: because of habits of self-deception (165), the subjects of a prince tend to overemphasise their own merit (26, 52); therefore, while their memory of beneifts granted tends to be fleeting (24, 203), their resentments of injury are durable (23, 150). And because of their feckless optimism, hope is stronger than fear as motive (5, 62, 173). Thus Guicciardini also recommends to the prince evasiveness and time gaining tactics (36).23 Then, Guicciardini offers counsels of affective prudence to counsellors as well as to the prince; the subject also must recognise that he has to operate within a realm of affective reality (151, 154). Guicciardini recalls Castiglione when he recommends to the subject the virtues of a prudential stylishness; intensely private graces and accomplishments may be the means to political achievement; deft gentility may gain the ear of the prince for the community good (179, 220). Thus proverbial strategy, by assuming an intimate politics, stresses the omnicompetence of proverbial wisdom; the same tactics control personal affairs and policy decisions (197, 198). The very existence of disinterested public motive is impugned by Guicciardinian cynicism; expressions of an ideology of liberty, he claims, are more likely expressions of self-interest (66). Both proverbial omnicompetence and the omnipresence of dysfunctional affect blur the definitions of public and private. Where a topos of civic humanist history, such as Leonardo Bruni's History of Florence, was the necessity for separation of public and private interests and the condemnation of the private use of public power, Guicciardini recommends the talent of "His Catholic Majesty" in representing actions for his own interests as actions for the common good (142). In contrast, J. G. A. Pocock is probably correct in seeing Machiavelli as "Civic Humanist" in his retention of a well-defined public political sphere.24 There are, to be sure, broad similarities in Machiavellian and Guicciardinian strategies: they share, obviously, premisses of the fragility and mobility of

X 103

Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi

human affairs. However, they agree not so much on a simple premiss of the evil of human nature as on a complicated awareness of the necessity of dissimulation. Their emphasis on the dominant matrix of perception is at the same time a focus on agility, on the capacity to master perception, on the uses of frankness as well as deception, on the usefulness of reticence, but, above all, on the importance of discretion. Discretion, here, is the product of deliberation and interior dialogue; both Machiavelli and Guicciardini have "intellectualist" proclivities. Ricordo 83, which presses meditation on political actors, is of a piece with Machiavelli's letter to Guicciardini, which deplores the lack of opportunity for "thinking" as opposed to both action and talk.25 But I will claim that Guicciardini's Ricordi, as a rich instantiation of proverbial strategy, provide a more tough-minded account of political history and political possibility than Machiavelli's Prince. Machiavelli teaches by example. The Discourses as well as the Prince can be seen as a tissue of narrative paradigms, and the paradigms often isolate Machiavelli on the high ground of policy decisions, forcing him to draw inferences from one complex political situation in order to make sense of another. One of the difficulties of the Prince, then, is the presence of naive injunctions to imitate involuted, even tortuous, policies. It is true that this in effect often subverts imitative response by denying his reader simple models or exemplars. But while his accounts often leave the reader little to imitate, this dialectic of imperative and subversion makes his style difficult, if not repellant. Guicciardini has a more sophisticated notion of imitation, and thus a more suggestive conception of the relation of exemplar to image and of general rule to specific use.25 Guicciardini emphasised the pertinence of receptive frame; his notions of exemplarity and instantiation require of the reader "a good and perspicacious eye" (117), habits of close attention to detail, and a taste for variety and surprise. It would seem that it is in clear contrast to Machiavelli that Guicciardini exclaims: "How wrong it is to cite the Romans at every turn. For any comparison to be valid, it would be necessary to have a city with conditions like theirs, and then to govern it according to their examples" (HO). 27 It would seem, then, that Guicciardini's "classicism" is peculiar as well. While Machiavelli attempts a thorough integration of classical Roman and vernacular Italian examples, Guicciardini's Ricordi read classical texts as a vernacular wisdom. Thus the Ricordi represent, on the one hand, a manifestation of municipalism, i.e., Florentine patriotism, and, on the other hand, recapitulation of a proverbial strategy used by those hard-pressed Romans, Tacitus and Seneca.28 And certainly there are important differences between "normal" humanist modes of classical appropriation and Guicciardinian tactics of use. The contemporaneous discourse on proverbs of Beroaldo and Polydore Vergil shares the fundamental humanist assumption that there is nothing so humble or ordinary that cannot be rendered splendid by oratorical ornament. And Polydore Vergil's second collection, the Adagiorum Liber, displays the humanist passion for discourse analysis; here he accounts for proverbs as verbal strategies, figures of

X 104

speech: metaphor, allegory, allusio, hyperbole, scomma.29 Both the ornamental and analytic initiatives attest a basic humanist commitment to "manipulation." A compendious late Renaissance collection by Grynaeus responds to the challenge of accessibility; proverbial wisdom, organised under the topoi, the commonplaces of argument, becomes instantly useful to the reader as writer. 30 And in the most manipulative of all strategies, Henri Estienne's work Les Premices not only organises proverbs under commonplaces but engages in an elaborate double discourse; to demonstrate use, "proverb" becomes the active verb "proverbialise"; his aim is to write "proverbs epigrammatizez," or rather, "epigrammes proverbializez."31 It would not do, then, to overemphasise a discontinuity between classical or "learned" and popular proverb. Indeed, Stackelberg detects a general trend of "proverbialising" sententiae in the late Renaissance; the aphorism, which began as a learned, specifically medical maxim, is presented increasingly in "unsystematischen, unpedantischen, und kurzgefassten Darstellungsweise."32 Certainly, the late Renaissance collectors treat Guicciardini and Machiavelli as well as Tacitus and Seneca as quintessentially proverbial.33 The homogeneity of tone of proverbial wisdom is rooted in the homogeneity of premiss of the nature of political behavior. Tacitus, Seneca, and Guicciardini teach the importance of an enduring intimate community, the face-to-face encounters within an imperial or princely context, tyrannical or not. The basic constraint of proverbial omnicompetence constrains a description of response to occasions of the widest possible distribution: that is, to the ordinary give-and-take of individuals forced to use objects and services as signs. Proverbs teach skills for close encounters; since princely encounters are necessarily invested with intimacy, they teach political survival as well. The Ricordi share procedures with Roman imperial satires and letters, histories and essays, while they eschew another classical strategy: that of the formal exercise which relates to political policy and structures to a general logico-ontological system. Seneca and Guicciardini prefer informal investigation, a presentation of a heterogeneous group of insights as explanatory of the variety of experience; the "authority" of the writer derives from a bond with an assumed collective wisdom. To be sure, it is somewhat suspicious to attribute an "anthropologising" consciousness to Guicciardini in the light of the current historical fashion of explaining the behavior of Renaissance Florentine elites, indeed, of all classes by reference to modern anthropological constructs. But my emphasis on the proverbialising moment in the Ricordi is a claim for the wit and perspicacity of Guicciardini's conflation of reading, experience, and counsel.35 The Ricordi must be placed within the general context of the production and reception of counsel in the sixteenth century.36 And again, we should observe the coherence of humanist and Guicciardinian proverbial strategies. First and most importantly, all strong initiatives recognise the imperative of investigating a social paradigm and fabricating a notion of community which takes account of the severe constraints of a "courtly" environment. Thus the humanist Beroaldo insists on personal in-

X 105

Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi

terdependence as fact: the prudentia of the prince in the matter of wisdom; counsel is a matter of discursive exchange, rather than solipsist construction.37 At the same time, for Beroaldo as well as Guicciardini the task of counseling is complicated by the difficult as well as useful intimacy of the court. A topos of the texts of counsel is the attack on the flattery which infects the relation between prince and courtly subject; Beroaldo thus describes adulation: " . . . veluti gangrena serpens latissime intra limina potentiorum . . . " (De Optimo Statu n.p.). And surely, when Guicciardini, citing Tacitus again (B101), refers to Tiberius' rating of the deplorable Roman patriciate, he focuses on the dangers of the politics of intimacy. When Guicciardini represents the isolation of a prince (141), the latter appears as isolated in a crowd. This, of course, is the state of affairs which the proverb, as communal wisdom for communal use, addresses. Beroaldo makes a specific connection between "proverbial" and "political"; advice to princes, he claims, is easily couched in proverbial terms (De Optimo Statu ciiiv.v). But where Beroaldo goes on to invoke an abstract understanding of ideal political forms, the claims the Ricordi make, as proverbial, are those on a residual, shared experience of intimate relations. Discretion is as much a condition as a result of reading. Thus Hess describes Guicciardini's advice as requiring intimate response: as "diario di esperienza," it demands a series of immediate and naive reactions from life. 38 The appeal of the proverbial mode is a much less simple, direct, and didactic approach than it at first appears. In all evaluations of moral discourse, one must make a distinction between useless moralism and true moral work. Both Machiavelli and Guicciardini efface moralism by new and rigorous varieties of moral work which allow neither the cheerful truism nor smug casuistry to survive as valid stratagem. Like Machiavelli, Guicciardini is thoughtful but not academic. There is no attempt either to teach a programme of canonic moral texts or to place one's own work within a tradition of systematic commentary. The perspicuity of Guicciardini's project, however, lies in a proverbial capacity to repel attempts to stray from intimate experience in the formulation of political insight, a capacity which subverts intellectual as well as political solipsism.

Notes 1

Felix Gilbert, "The Humanist Concept of the Prince," JMH ll(1939):449-83. Quentin Skinner, " 'Social Meaning' and the Explanation of Social Action," in Philosophy, Politics, and Society, fourth ser., eds. P. Laslett et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2

X 106 1972), 144-45. An intriguing Derridian effort is that of Michael McCanles, The Discourse of "II Principe" Humana Civilitas 8 (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1983); a neoAristotelian reading can be found in E. Garver, "Machiavelli's Prince: A Neglected Rhetorical Classic," Philosophy and Rhetoric 17(1980). 3 "Le cinque redazioni dei Ricordi," in Guicciardini e la crisi del Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1979), 6Iff. Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi, ed. R. Spongano, Autori classici e documenti di lingua pubblicati dall'Accademia della Crusca (Firenze: Sansoni, 1951). All Italian citations, unless otherwise noted, will be from the primary, or C version of Spongano; all English translations will be those of M. Domandi, Francesco Guicciardini: Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). 4 G. Hess, "Guicciardini und die Anfange der moralistischen Literatur," in Gesellschaft-Literatur-Wissenschaft: Gesammelte Schriften (1938-1966), ed. H. R. Jauss and C. Muller-Daehn (Miichen: 1967), claims that a focus on the successive versions is necessarily a focus on the issue of the Ricordi as "eine eigene, neuartige Form von literarischer Aussage . . ." (15). " 'Inhalt' und 'Ordung' sind demnach wenig wichtig. Worauf es ankommt, lasst sich am ehesten an der Struktur (oder Form) des Aphorismus erkennen" (18). 5 Recall that Kenneth Burke begins his project of relating literature to life with the proverb, as strategy for dealing with, naming situations, as originary instance of literary activity as social action; he asks, "Could the most complex and sophisticated work of art legitimately be considered somewhat as 'proverbs writ large'?" "Literature as Equipment for Living," The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1941), 296. "Strategy," of course, is the key construct of Burkean rhetorical analysis. Burke, I think, would claim that for Guicciardini to begin with proverb would indicate Guicciardini was getting down to brass tacks in political speculation; here Guicciardini enjoins "realistic," not simply "self-gratifying" strategies (298). On proverb or adage in the Renaissance see R. L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), esp. ch. 2, "Small Forms: Multo inparvo," 32ff.; Terence C. Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), ch. 1, "Copia" and N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975), ch.8, "Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors." 6 See M. Fubini's seminal discussion of the stylistic and thematic importance of the Ricordi, "Le quattro redazioni dei Ricordi del Guicciardini: Contributo allo studio della formazione del linguaggio e dello stile guicciardiniano," Studi sulla letteratura del Rinascimento (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1971), 126-77. Fubini cites E. Fueter's dismissal of the Ricordi as neither stylistically nor theoretically as interesting as La Rochefoucauld's Maxims only to confute it (126); further, Fubini emphasises unity in progress: the later redactions develop a more "generic and literary" expression, but do not lose or diminish the insights of earlier redactions of the proverbs (143ff.). 7 Fron Margaret M. Phillips, Erasmus on his Times: A Shortened Version of the Adages of Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), 3. 8 P. Beroaldus, Proverbiorum Libellus (Venezia: 1498), xxxvi r: "Ad haec habent proverbia quiddam simile legibus; quarum scriptum angustum et interpretatio latissima. Siquidem summa brevitate conclusa: intellectum uberiorem complectuntur." 9 Aristotle, Rhetorica, tr. W. Rhys Roberts (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), 1393b.

X Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardims Ricordi

107 10

G. Neumann, "Einleitung," Der Aphorismus: Zur Geschichte, zu den Formen und Moglichkeiten einer literarischen Gattung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), cites Hess, "Guicciardini und die Anfange der moralistischen Literatur," and comments that in the aphorism the relation is essentially problematical; the aphorism is a "Konfliktform des Erkennens zwischen einzelnem Faktum and generalisierender Aussage. Die 'Ricordi' Francesco Guicciardinis leben aus der Dialektik von caso und regola, von Situation und Leitsatz: Aus ihrem Spannungsfeld entspringt dem Leser die politische Einsicht" (7). 11 Thus P. Beroaldus: "Vulgares sententiae sunt proverbia. Vulgares scriptores sunt Virgilius et Cicero. Quid enim magis in ore vulgi est, quid usu populari magis detritum? Docti indoctique, urbani et rustici, opifices omnes . . . ," "Oratio proverbiorum," Opuscula quae in Hoc Volumine Continentur . . . (Venezia: 1508), Ivi r. See also the prefatory letter to Polydore Vergil's Proverbiorum Libellus (Venezia: 1498). The attribute "communis" is, of course, medieval as well: G. Vecchi, "II 'proverbio' nella pratica letteraria dei dettatori della scuola di Bologna," Studi mediolatini e volgari 2(1954):283-302 cites two medieval definitions: "Premittendum est generale proverbium, id est communis sententia, cui consuetude fidem attribuit, opinio communis assensum accommodat. Incorrupta veritatis integritas adquiescit . . . ," from Matthew of Vendome, Ars Versificatoria, in E. Faral, Les Arts poetiques du XII et du XIII siecle (Paris: Champion, 1924), 284, and "Proverbium est sermobrevis communi hominum opinione comprabatus . . . ," from Bene di Firenze, Candelabrum 288. 12 Seneca, De Beneficiis, in Moral Essays III.I.iv:2, tr. J. W. Basore, (Cambridge: 1975); the list of benefits I used is Seneca's, I.ii:4. I do not think it is necessary to make a case that Guicciardini "read" Seneca, although the proverb of 138 is Senecan: Senecan texts permeated Florentine culture. R. Sabbadini claims Seneca's philosophical works as "notissime," Le scoperte dei codici latini e greet ne' secoli XIV e XV: Nuove ricerche (Firenze: Sansoni, 1914), 250. 13 S. Cavell attacks a naive moralism which insists that "the concept 'good' is simply application of a general principle to individual cases" (cf. P. Foot, "Moral Beliefs," in Theories of Ethics, ed. P. Foot [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967], 85). Cavell eschews the search for moral "rules": "No rule or principle could function in a moral context the way regulatory or defining rules function in games. It is as essential to the form of life called morality that rules so conceived be absent as it is essential to the form of life we call playing a game that they be present . . . ," The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 307; cited in Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapolis Press, 1982), 185. 14 The notion of the proverb as eschewing cognitive optimism and thus moral simplicity is medieval as well; see Vecchi, "II 'proverbio,' " (286), where he cites Boncompagni di Firenze's definition: "Proverbium est brevis verborum series obscuram in se continens sententiam," Palma, in C. Sutter, Aus Leben und Schriften des Magisters Boncompagno (Freiburg: Mohr/Siebeck, 1894), 103. 15 Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, tr. R. Gummere (Cambridge: 1970), LXXXI.24: "At contra sapientia exornat omne beneficium ac sibi ipsa commendat et se adsidua eius commemoratione delectat. Malis una voluptas est et haec brevis, dum accipiunt beneficia, ex quibus sapienti longum gaudium manet ac perenne." 16 Seneca, De Beneficiis I.x:3; see Ricordi 41, 134, 135, 201. 17 Seneca, De Beneficiis I.viil; Ep. LXXXI.21; see Ricordi 11, B43.

X 108 18

"Insegna molto bene Cornelio Tacito a chi vive sotto a' tiranni el modo di vivere e governarsi prudentemente, cosi come insegna a' tiranni e modi di fondare la tirannide." 19 See, for example, Ricordi 1, 71, 93, 175, 191, 193, 195, 196, 198. 20 See Ricordi 2, 4, 53, 77, 88, 90, 94, 128, 130, 131, 153, 154. See N. Rubinstein's account of "Civic Humanism" in "Le dottrine politiche nel Rinascimento," in // Rinascimento: Interpretazioni eproblemi, eds. M. Boas-Hall et al. (Bari: Laterza, 1979), 183-237. Note that Rubinstein comments on Guicciardini's distrust of "liberty." 21 ". . . spesso tra '1 palazzo e la piazza e una nebbia si folta o uno muro si grosso che, non vi penetrando 1'occhio degli uomini. . . . " 22 See Ricordi 38, 53, 88, 90, 94, 98-101, 103, 132, 170, 174, 184, 186, 195, 200. 23 A close reading of both the De Beneficiis and the Ep. LXXXI will reveal many parallels with the Guicciardinian account of benefit exchange. It is intriguing that K.-D. Nothdurft, in Studien zum Einfluss Senecas auf die Philosophic und Theologie des zwolften Jahrhunderts, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1963), has pointed out that the early "Mirrors for Princes" and their sources, e.g., William of Conches' Moralium Dogma Philosophorum, also employed the central passages from the De Beneficiis to describe the princely situation. One could say Guicciardini transforms the Furstenspiegel by employing fresh Seneca to refurbish old Seneca; see Nothdurft, esp. 10Iff. 24 The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975). 25 Niccolo Machiavelli, Lettere (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1961), 451. 26 1 have discussed another revision of Machiavelli an exemplarity in "Pasquier's Recherches de la France: The Exemplarity of His Medieval Sources" (paper read at the Medieval Academy, April, 1983). Felix Gilbert notes the lack of exempla in the History of Italy, in Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), 282. 27 "Quanto si ingannono coloro che a ogni parola allegano e Romani!— Bisognerebbe avere una citta condizionata come era loro, e poi governarsi secondo quello essemplo: el quale a chi ha le qualita disproporzionate e tanto disproporzionato, quanto sarebbe volere che un asino facessi el corso di uno cavallo." 28 The connection of Senecan wisdom and proverbial form is medieval; typical of the medieval florilegia which employ the strategy of distilling Senecan texts into lists of aphorisms is Les Proverbes Seneke, a late thirteenth-century text, embedded in a chronicle; see E. Ruhe, Les Proverbes Seneke le philosophe: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte des Speculum historiale von Vinzenz von Beauvais und der Chronique dite de Baudouin d'Avesnes, Beitrage zur romanischen Philologie des Mettelalters 5 (Miinchen: Hueber, 1969). 29 Polydori Vergilii Urbinatis Adagiorum Liber (Basilea: 1521), 3. 30 J. J. Grynaeus, Adagia, id est: Proverbiorum, proemiarum et parabolarum omnium . . . (1629). 31 H. Estienne, Les Premices, ou le I livre des proverbes epigrammatizez, ou, des epigrammes proverbializez . . . (1584). 32 J. von Stackelberg, "Zur Bedeutungsgeschichte des Wortes 'Aphorismus,' " in Der Aphorismos 21 On. 33 Stackelberg cites G. Canini d'Anghiari, who translated B. Alamos de Barrientos' Tacito Espanol (Madrid: 1614), and who also produced Aforismi politici, cavati daW historia dltalia di M. F. Guicciardini (Venezia: 1625), in "Bedeutungsgeschichte" (214).

X 109 34

Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardinis Ricordi

See the review essay of E. Brucker, "Tales of Two Cities,"/!///? 88(1983):599-618. This is in opposition to M. Gagneux's rather reductive Marxist reading of Guicciardini as simply spokesman for his class; see "Ideologic et opportunisme chez Francois Guichardin, in Ecrivains et le pouvoir en Italic a I'epoque de la Renaissance, Centre de recherche sur la Renaissance italienne, eds. A. Rochon et al. (Paris: Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1973), 155-242. Dale Kent's work in the fifteenth-century letters of the Medici archive, for example, would seem to reveal similar "anthropological" investment in the reciprocal bonds of gratitude and benefit between patron and client, with similar constraints and moral rationalisations, and thus would substantiate Guicciardini's account as perspicacious ("The Dynamic of Power in Cosimo de' Medici's Florence", unpublished paper). 36 On the history of the career and role of the intellectual as counselor in Renaissance Italy see F. Gaeta, "Dal comune alia corte rinascimentale," and A. A. Rosa, "La Chiesa e gli stati regionali nelPeta dell'assolutismo", Letterratura italiana: I, II letterato e le istituzioni, ed. A. A. Rosa (Torino: Einaudi, 1982); on Guicciardini see esp. Rosa, 267-69. 37 P. Beroaldus, Libellus de Optimo Statu & Principe, in Opusculum Eruditum . . . (Bologna: 1497), n. p. "Sit igitur princeps non solum ipse preditus prudentia verum etiam consiliarios prudentes habeat: quibus bene consulentibus credere possit. Nemo enim per se unquam solus ita sapit: Nemo ita circumspectus ac sagax: Nemo ita lineus est ut non aliquando labet atque cecutiat." This notion of the counseling situation recalls N. Elias' construct of "figuration" as "a structure of mutually oriented and dependent people. . . . they exist . . . only as pluralities, figurations," The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, tr. E. Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 261. 38 G. Hess, "G. und die Anfange der moralistischen Literatur" (27); "Bei der zeitlichen Nahe zu Montaigne —und der Nahe romantischer Tagebticher' — lag es wohl nahe, den Bekenntnischarakter der Ricordi zu betonen und sie als 'diario di esperienza,' als 'storia e confessione' des Ich zu deuten" (17). To be sure, Colie felt that intimate exchange was an attribute of all Renaissance "mini-genres," but her originary example was Erasmus 1 Adagia, a text which continually requires the reader to make connections and supply contexts and functions (Resources of Kind 35ff.). And perhaps we can reconcile the "privacy" of the Ricordi, demonstrated in the thinness of its publication history, with its intrusive, interventionist nature if we see privacy as related to demanding intimacy. Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), ch. 1, claims that "Guicciardini's ultrapragmatic family Ricordi, unpublished during the Renaissance, have the status of a concealed weapon. . . ." Whigham also regards as central Burke's definition of literary strategy as proverbial strategy. 35

XI

PASQUIER'S RECHERCHES DE LA FRANCE: THE EXEMPLARITY OF HIS MEDIEVAL SOURCES At the beginning of his revised version of Book I of the Recherches de la France (1596), Etienne Pasquier claims the intrinsic interest of the anciennete of France, and claims that all he writes, he writes for France—"toutefois escrivant ici pour ma France, & non pour moy."1 Certainly it is the case that it is neither possible nor desirable to displace the current working hypothesis, initiated by Kelley, Huppert, and Franklin, that Pasquier's history, like other histories of his period, responds to the exigencies of the Civil Wars and fits into a program of political use of history.2 The Recherches, then, contributes to a Gallican project of finding indigenous paradigms for French policy; they substantiate Pasquier's fundamental axiom: in the well-ordered state "le peuple soit sujet au Magistral, & le Magistral a la loy."3 I propose, however, by focusing on Pasquier's use of the exemplum—the narration of a particular episode to illumine and edify—to develop an additional, modifying hypothesis of reciprocity: the Recherches represents not simply a sixteenth-century reorganization of medieval material, but a medieval reorientation of sixteenth-century historical politics. That is to say, not only are the exemplary incidents medieval, but the exemplary form or strategy as well; this exemplarity constrains a particular tactic of "use" of history in the confection of moral-political identity. I shall claim that Pasquier's epitome of Book V —"La commemoration de quelques notables exemples, que ie voy ou n'estre deduits par le commun de nos Croniquers, ou passez si legerement qu'il son a plusiers inconnus"4—signals an anomalous, but diagnosticaHy interesting, project within 1. Etienne Pasquier, Recherches de la France (Paris, 1665), 2. While Pasquier began his investigations of French antiquity with Fauchet as early as 1549, and the first two books were published in 1560 and 1565, the definitive form is the posthumous edition of 1621. 2. See Donald Kelley, Foundations of Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970); John H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York, 1963); George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana, 1970); Claude Gilbert Dubois makes this summary in La Conception de I'histoire en France au XVJe siecle (1560-1610) (Paris, 1977), 22: "s'il existe des horizons nouveaux dans la conception de Thistoire au XVIe siecle, ils consistent, nous semble-t-il, dans Tapprehension du phenomena politique, percu dans ses rapports avec la force economique, la force militaire, et 1'appareil des lois." 3. Pour-Pearler du Prince, 887, bound in the 1665 edition of the Recherches, 871-894. This is from the speech of the Politique, which seems to be the spokesman for Pasquier. 4. Recherches, 5.

XI 52

the Recherches. The general character of the Recherches, recall, is that of an informal aggregate of separate investigations, largely philological in character, inquiries into issues of usage and custom, with numerous etymological analyses of the terminology of offices, titles, and functions. The learned disquisitions center on the public, secular, and ecclesiastical institutions, on the "private" institutions and pursuits of civil life, as well as on the poetry, the language, and the university life of medieval France. While there are two other books (Book I and VI in the final version) which are constructed as political narrative, Book V, with its selfconscious exemplary organization, represents a peculiar, and peculiarly negative, strategy. First, to be sure, we note that Pasquier eschews positive and simplistic moralism; he eschews the exemplarity of Charlemagne, Philip Augustus, and Louis IX for the obscure exemplarity of the Merovingians. But the examples of Book V are not only obscure but horrid. Pasquier, indeed, presents Book V as a reading of Machiavelli, although a reading which in its eccentricity approaches parody. Pasquier's incursion into exemplarity is organized as a self-conscious confrontation of Machiavellian exemplification strategy. In chapters one through four, which deal with Carolingian as well as Merovingian episodes, there are numerous incorporations of the disturbing lexicon of Machiavellian analysis; thus, the Machiavellian dictum that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved is a recurring theme in Pasquier's commentary. But in the remaining chapters, five through twenty-nine, (chapters added by the editors in the posthumous edition because they provided continuity between the earlier chapters and the succeeding book on the Capetians), the Machiavellian preoccupation dominates. Pasquier's thesis is that the Merovingian Queens, Fredegonde and Brunehaud, two princesses who have played their roles "pleins d'effroy & de lamentation," are more edifying as exemplars than Machiavelli's hero, Cesare Borgia.5 The key chapter in this initiative of ironic or at least, one would hope, lighthearted chauvinism is the tenth: "Comparaison des deportemens de Fredegonde & Brunehaud, Reynes selon 1'ancienne lecon." Pasquier's case for the heroism of Fredegonde uses a strategy of reversal. Fredegonde's history is as full of "meschancete & sceleratesse" as Borgia's, but her worth was greater as her means were less. First, she was a woman, not a man, and she was not even a queen by birth but "une simple Damoiselle," who embarked on a great career of dishonor, proceeding from mistress of Chilperic to mastery of the realm; on her way, she disposed of the first two wives of Chilperic; she engineered the assassination of Sigebert, the Merovingian princess, and of Clovis, child of the first wife; finally she crowned her blatant adultery with the murder of her husband. And at this point, according to Pasquier, she becomes the rewarding subject for Machiavelli's pen: left with an infant son of four months, but armed with a bloody cunning and a virile and warlike disposition, she knew so well how to play her role that 5. Ibid., 399, 408. Resonances of Machiavellian language abound in the Pour-Parler du Prince as well; the Politique, for example, claims that the Curial's tyrannous kings act like lions, not men (892). The editors' rationalization of the location of chapters five through twenty-nine is on page 397.

XI PASQUIER'S RECHERCHES DE LA FRANCE

53

she not only died a natural death in bed, but her son Clotaire achieved a happy and successful reign. Clotaire's accomplishment, indeed, parallels that of Augustus in both infamy and success, although Clotaire's virtue is the greater, since he succeeded at four months, while Augustus was already twenty or twenty-one. "Et c'est pourquoy ie dis & soustient hardiment que Machiavel se devoit mettre cette Fredegonde en bute dans son chapitre de la Sceleratesse, comme parangon de toutes les autres."6 But Pasquier's confrontation of Machiavelli is not simply a matter of ironic, if patriotic, subversion. The aim of Book V is to substitute a better political sense, a wisdom that transcends the Machiavellian emphasis on heroic innovation, exemplary act. I shall argue that while sixteenth-century politics and humanistic values and techniques affected Pasquier's account of the Middle Ages, Pasquier also permits medieval material to modify categories and results, form as well as substance of his sixteenth-century project. I shall further argue that the modification becomes explicit in Pasquier's break with classical, or humanistclassical, exemplification tactics and his reactivation of a medieval exemplary tactic. In his exempla, Pasquier not only employed medieval sources and information, but a simple and efficient medieval mode of processing information as well. For the definition of "classical" and "medieval" modes I shall turn to JeanMichel David's useful introduction to the Table Ronde of the Ecole Francaise de Rome on exemplum.7 Of course, the resort to argumentation by example, the justification of example as more useful than precept, and the characterization of history as exemplary in mode pervade classical and post-classical historical discourse. But David has made a gross qualitative distinction between classical and medieval tactics: briefly, he maintains that "classical" exemplarity employs the incident of virtus, the historical event of individual prowess, to exemplify a well-demarcated civic virtue for the use of an heroically constituted citizen. Medieval exemplarity, on the other hand, employs a "story" —not necessarily heroic—to illumine a shared truth, a prior system or consensual frame of fundamental values. David's hypothesis is admittedly a confrontation of very abstract types: still, the typical elements indicate important strategic differences. In the medieval mode, David claims, the use of the exemplum to construct or confirm consensus dominates the use of the exemplum to instruct in heroic virtue. Machiavelli, then, in his emphasis on the individual's political competence, on his capacity for "coups d'Estat" which count, which realize specific ends, is "classical"; Pasquier, I will claim, reverts to the medieval mode insofar as he asserts that the primary focus of exemplification must be on the illumination or explication of a consensual truth, rather than on individualistic virtue. 6. Ibid., 408-409. 7. Jean-Michel David, "Presentation," Rhetorique et Histoire: L'exemplum et la modele de comportement dans le discours antique et medieval, Melanges de I'Ecole Francaise de Rome 92 (1980), 9-14. Mathias Wesseler's Die Einheit von Wort und Sache: die Entwurfeiner rhetorischen Philosophic bei Marius Nizolius (Munich, 1974) has an excellent brief section on Renaissance exemplarity (105fi). I am arguing a reversal of the Renaissance problematizing strategy Karlheinz Stierle explicates in his "Histoire comme Exemple, Exemple comme Histoire," Poetique 32 (1972), 176-198.

XI 54

Claiming that an analysis of Pasquier's exempla should reveal an intriguing retromotivation, I shall turn to the first of the three major concerns specified by David for the formal analysis of exempla, the conceptual structure premised by the exemplary narration. Pasquier's ancient France, very simply, constitutes a consensual truth, a unified political and cultural domain which is at the same time complex and homogeneous. To define the unity of ancient France and the unifying policy of medieval community—"la commune police"—was the goal of the Recherches;8 but, at the same time, unity was a methodological premise as well: "Tout homme de bon entendement, sans voir une histoire accomplie peut presque imaginer de quelle humeur fut un peuple, lors qu'il lit ses anciens Statuts & Ordonnances, & d'une mesme jugement peut tirer en conjecture quelles furent les Loix, voyant sa maniere de vivre."9 But Pasquier claims and describes more: common policy was common competence; the pervasive unity, the homogeneous integration of civil structure and political process is not simply the discovery of the modern historian, but a personal set of dispositions and beliefs possessed by the individual medieval agents whose actions his archive records. Thus, in chapter thirty-one of Book IV Pasquier discusses at length the use of the chess game metaphor in the Romance of the Rose; here Pasquier asserts not only that chess games are figures for the political realities of the times—the move of checkmate presumes that "de la conservation ou ruine de nostre Roy depend la conservation ou ruine de nostre Estat"—but that the strategies of unity are the internalized possessions of the protagonists: knights, Pasquier notes, could play on horseback, from memory; they had skills of which he, Pasquier, understands only the grammar, and not the rhetoric.10 Medieval history teaches a consensus of dispositions and attitudes; medieval exemplars teach exemplary attitudes. The chess game also indicates that Pasquier's primary strategy in confecting unity is one of distinction-making: Pasquier defined France by asserting disjunction between Roy and Royaume in order later to assert specific and important conjunctions between the two. The distinction allows Pasquier both to accept and correct Machiavelli's exempla; he may accept Machiavelli's insight that to focus on "grands coups d'Estat" may be to focus on "sceleratesse and meschancete,"11 but he will place the exemplary wickedness in a double frame: first of the Realm of France, and, second, of the Judgment of God. One may recall Pasquier's delight in the conclusive chess move as asserting the interdependence of Roy and Royaume; one can also recall that the crimes of Fredegonde both went unpunished and assured the continuity of the Crown. Then Pasquier warns us not to ignore the connection of kingship and miracles in the monastic chronicles; Clovis furnishes a case in point, a Belle lecon certes a tous les Princes, pour leur enseigner de ne separer les affaires d^Estate, d'avec celles de Dieu, & tous les Miracles dont nos Moines ont gratifie la memoire de 8. Recherches, 5. 9. Ibid., IV, c. 1, p. 320. 10. Ibid., 378-379. 11. Ibid., 385.

XI PASQUIER'S RECHERCHES DE LA FRANCE

55

nostre Clovis, particulierement cettuy. Non toutefois qu'il faille rejetter ce qui en est ecrit; Car Dieu souvent exerce ses Miracles, non en consideration des Roys, ains du Royaume qu'il favorise.12

But like Machiavelli, Pasquier does not assert a simple correspondence between human prudence and divine wisdom; in a political brochure he remarks, as he has good cause to remark, the temerity and arrogance of the contemporary spokesmen who would assign divine sanction to human affections.13 Very often, human "sagesse" is "folie" in the eyes of God.14 Like Machiavelli, then, he distances the divine from the human; Clevis's choice of Roman Catholicism smacks more of prudential motives than of providential interference; Emperor Louis's accomplishment of the death of Bernard must be seen as a deed of men, rather than of God or of Justice.15 Pasquier's stipulation of the unavailability of divine judgment for manipulation and his sense of the ultimate unknowability of the divine frame suggest a "Calvinist" revision of medieval collective value; yet since he both asserts divine force and refuses to read human events in a reductive, providential mode, he both avoids what often seems like Machiavellian moral relativism and maintains the critical independence of Machiavellian analysis. He distances, but does not "bracket-off," divine judgment; the Christian conceptual frame retains a powerful presence in exemplification in that it acts as an abstract and inclusive frame which grants ultimate significance to exemplary act. Yet at the same time his definition of ancient France is specifically and richly historicist; his search for the ancient virtues of church, state, and culture produces not a continuity of heroic exploit, but an elaborate and durable native set of rules and precedents.16 Pasquier depicts so dominant, so detailed a structure, that his tactic approaches a tactic of reification of andennete as an object of honor and reverence.17 Again, his exemplification is of David's medieval variety, insofar as the logically prior and vital component is the consensual frame, rather than the illustrative episode with its virtus. Pasquier makes a sronger claim than the commonplace claim that the Middle Ages is a good source of exempla; rather, his work leads us to believe that his medieval sources taught him how to reverse Machiavellian classicism. This conceptual structure, which grounds the exempla, affects, of course, the internal structure of the exempla, David's second issue for analysis. The structure of exempla of Book V, for instance, can be seen as both privileging and subverting the difficult and provocative Machiavellian structure. In terms of David's definition of "classical" and "medieval" exemplarity, Machiavelli sets out his political problematic in the classical terms of individual effort, virtu. But where 12. Ibid., 386. 13. "Exhortation aux Princes et Seigneurs du Conseil Prive du Roy," in Ecrits politiques, ed. D. Thickett (Geneva, 1966), 41. 14. "Plus grande et sage conseil ne pouvoit estre par luy pris selon le monde, pour la conservation de son Estat, que cettuy, si vous en parlez a Machiavel, & ses Escoliers. Or voyez ie vous prie comme la sagesse du monde est une vraye folie devant Dieu." Recherches, 385. 15. On Clevis's ecclesiastical policy see Recherches, 384f; on Bernard, 388. 16. See, in particular, Recherches, II, c. 6; on Parlement, 55ff. 17. Recherches, 415.

XI 56

Machiavelli emphasized the creation or recreation of a state's identity by the Prince, Pasquier stipulates the state as environment of dynastic episode; the prince's action very often impinges on the surrounding context only in an ironic mode. Pasquier's exempla do not unfold plots in which virtu struggles with fortuna\ rather, exemplary plots delineate the intended, or, more likely, the unintended consequences of royal action working on the framework of the realm. Thus Pasquier's Gallican version of the medieval papacy notes that the wickedness of "this Pope or the other" did not seem to diminish the power of the Holy See, and that progress of Roman episcopal power was at times simply the product of circumstance and chance.18 Often exempla demonstrate only the incoherence, the ill-motivation, or the lack of significance of the historical episode of "heroic" action. But further, specific structures of Machiavellian and Pasquierian exemplarity must relate to specific functions of securing particular kinds of moral assent from the audience, according to David. Pasquier's whole historical initiative, perhaps, could be seen as part of a critical, negative Tacitean moment. Recall that Marc Fumaroli names Tacitus as the hinge, the pivot on which the program of cultural politics swings from a sixteenth- to a seventeenth-century orientation.19 Pasquier's tactics of considering scoundrels as edifying as heroes, his exemplary uses of the untoward or horrific, the intellectual uses to which he puts the vicious —all of these strategies could be named "Tacitean." But the sterility of the heroic—an insight gained, undoubtedly, from contemporary as well as Merovingian events — forces a shift in focus to collectivities and to the delineation of the importance and endurance of the heavy political and civil texture of French history. Pasquier does not hold up the Merovingian kingly exempla for kingly imitation; he certainly does not proceed on Machiavelli's classicist principles of reducing the political domain to a series of political acts. His research subverts, as Machiavellian research subverts, simplistic notions of the moral possibilities of heroic action; but his examples subvert Machiavellian heroism as well. The reification of anciennete is a necessary strategem, for Pasquier's central interest in antiquity is its pertinence for the present; the effect of the heavily delineated conceptual structure of the other eight books of the Recherches is to insure that the exemplarity of Book V is accepted as ironic exemplarity. Further, the nature of the political discovery stipulates the form of exemplary response. Pasquier seeks not a heroic response to heroic episode, but the learned reader's assent to a general and pervasive state of affairs. "Stories" illustrates the consensual: as, for example, when the unintended consequence of terrorism is the endurance of the realm. The direct personal consequences, in the case of Fredegonde a quiet and peaceful death after a life of crime, are only ironically instructive. But the rich development of identity and continuity lay in the gradual 18. On the papacy, see Book III, passim, but especially 137, 148. 19. Marc Fumaroli, LAge de I'eloquence; Rhetorique et 'res literaria' de la Renaissance au seuil de I'epoque classique (Geneva, 1980) 153: "[Tacitus] est pour ainsi dire le gond sur lequel le XVIe siecle tourne pour laisser entrer le XVIIe."

XI PASQUIER'S RECHERCHES DE LA FRANCE

51

complication of a large number of institutional precedents and constraints. The circumscription of exemplarity to Book V, or to brief, simple, and confining historical analogies, circumscribes reader reaction as well. Thus, from the internal structure of the exemplum one can infer the obligations of author and reader of the exemplum, David's third analytic issue. These are made explicit in Pasquier's Pour-Parler du Prince, a dialogue on monarchy and monarchical responsibilities by four participants, the Escolier, the Philosophe, the Curial, and the Politique, which presents both positive and negative definitions of exemplification modes. The Scholar, claiming the usefulness of letters and learning for the Prince, praises History as exemplary: Quelle plus grande utilite que la lecture des Histoires? desquelles, ny plu ny moins que la femme par la glace du mirouer prend conseil de sa bienseance, quand elle se met en public, aussi estant icy un Prince, comme sur un eschaffaut, expose a la veiie du peuple, se mirant aux exemples des autres grands personages, apprend tout ce qu'il luy convient faire.20

The Courtier, in riposte, denies the efficacy of books and bookishness and criticizes the scholarly use of exempla: Ainsi toy accumulant exemples dessus exemples, sans aucun discours de raison, as pense confondre le ciel & la terre, & toutefois a la moindre response que ie mettray en avant, ie m'asseure que tu verras toutes tes belles harangues, comme une fumee, s'efuanouyr en avant.21

Both views nourish Pasquier's own use of exempla', the Scholar's figure stipulates, for instance, that the Prince contemplate a collectivity of images. While the sociable lady checks her own reflection for the benefit of her public appearance, the prince, essentially a public figure, always on display, gazes into a crowded mirror of multiple exempla; he faces a task of collation. The Courtier's critique, on the other hand, requires the integration of exemplary narrative into argumentative discourse: amassing raw, undigested lumps of information is useless. As the Politique asserts later in the dialogue: "les lettres prises simplement sont choses indifferentes.22 And it is certainly the case that Pasquier as author engages in continuous dialogue with his sources; the narratives of the Recherches are beset with constant interruptions, commentaries, and conjectures of Pasquier. The key verb is "deduire": presented with an archive or chronicle, the author/reader must infer the significant structure. Given the necessarily biased nature of any contemporaneous account, the reader must resort to critical modes of reading: to an account of a purported murder by Brunehaud, for example, Pasquier applies the conjecture of cut bonol And since the murder was to her disadvantage, it is questionably her crime.23 Pasquier meshes his summaries of the exemplary 20. Pour-Parler du Prince, 873; cf. the interesting use Orest Ranum makes of this citation in Artisans of Glory (Chapel Hill, 1980), 78. 21. Pour-Parler du Prince, 879. 22. Ibid., 884. 23. Recherches, 412.

XI 58

deeds of Fredegonde and Brunehaud within a machinery of balancing accusation and excuse; no exemplary account is left to stand on its own merits. Further, Pasquier is continuously engaged in a dialogue with the reader as well. The assent that the exempla are to secure is the assent of the "docte & sage Lecteur." Thus, where Machiavelli addresses the reader masked as Prince, Pasquier addresses the Prince in his competence as learned reader. A second reading of Pasquier's dictum —"les lettres prises simplement sont choses indifferentes" — affirms naive reading as pastime, useless indulgence.24 The reader must process information; the Prince, looking into a crowded mirror, is required to confect his own image, confect his own consensus of moral-political truth. In summary, analysis of the exemplary strategy of Pasquier reveals an intriguing shift in the premises, procedures, and goals of his history. I have argued for a special kind of medieval influence: the shift should not be read as the result of medieval source being allowed to influence an early modern project, but as the result of the superimposition of an internalized medieval task on a very different humanist, or classicist, task. Pasquier's incorporation of Machiavellian forms signals that the Recherches represents not simply a pious, antiquarian project, but a strenuous attempt to rethink political possibilities and options. For Machiavelli, we must admit, attempted a political statement of deep theoretical interest; Machiavelli's historical discourse is both brilliant, usefully subversive, and dysfunctional, encouraging readings which contradict. Specifically, Machiavelli's classicizing exempla undermine his theory, while Pasquier's medieval exempla make sense of the Machiavellian project. Thus Pasquier's exemplary tactic disconnects the reader from the exemplary. Machiavelli retained the Quintilianesque premise that we copy what we admire and demanded that the reader move from admiratio to imitatio.25 But where Machiavelli yoked the duty of imitation to his presentation of vicious efficiency, Pasquier retains the Machiavellian analysis of efficiency while subverting the duty of heroic imitation. Pasquier's exempla enjoin disjunction. But the strategy enjoins consensus as well, in what I regard as a felicitous moral-political initiative. The priority of consensual purpose over individual action which David assigned to the medieval exemplum reinforces the priority of community over citizen in Pasquier's historical politics. His new, combined strategy, with its "constructivist" view of the role of the historical reader, where the authority of the author is grounded in his critical and comparativist competence, and where correctness of response on the part of the reader depends on similar talents of collation and critique, constrains the task of placing a global political construction on the episode. Pasquier's exempla are not injunctions to virtuous action; rather, they impose 24. Pasquier claims he addresses himself to the "docte & sage Lecteur," not the populace, in Recherches, 415; his attack on simple reading, his insistence that Kings must be discreet in the use of books, "& non les lire son plaisir" is in the Pour-Parler du Prince, 885. 25. See Quintilian, Institutio oratorio X.2.2.: "Atque omnis vitae ratio sic constat, ut quae probamus in aliis facere ipsi velimus." Machiavelli's complaint that historical exempla "essere piu preston ammirate che imitate" is in the Preface to Discorsi sopra laprima deca di Tito Livio (Milan, 1960), 1,124.

XI PASQUIER'S RECHERCHES DE LA FRANCE

59

on the French reader the obligation of assimilating his or her own laws and history. The discovery of unity in the linear and spatial continuity of France, the postulate of polity as, to employ John Rawls's terms, "the social of social bonds," requires both author and reader to engage in the public reconstruction of public value. Pasquier's initiative is felicitous in comparison with modern projects as well; where the basic building blocks of post-Kantian, moral-political theory are the individuals —the "moral persons," in Rawls's phrase — 26 Pasquier reaffirms morality as essentially public, shared, and refuses the inconsistency of deriving a public morality from an infinity of personal acts. The c/v/7asconfects the person, rather than the reverse; and, finally, the historian confects, or realizes, the community.

26. See John Rawls, Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), and his amplifications in the Dewey Lectures, printed in Journal of Philosophy 11 (1980), 515ff.

XII

Shakespeare and Rhetoric lassical accounts of the origins of Greek rhetoric emphasize two very different and very distinct points: first, they specify that the occasion for the development of rhetoric as discipline was the flood of litigation in Magna Graecia after the fall of the tyrants; second, they claim that the essential strategy of rhetorical training was to infuse the prosaic genres-forensic, deliberative, celebratory—with the strengths of poetry: rhetoric stipulated the mastery of intonation and rhythm, of visual and aural figuration.1 The accounts simply juxtapose forensic argumentative needs and poetical skills, thematic occasions and strictly formal modes. The rhetor must accept and meet the obligation of specific social interventions with a loose, informal, hetereogeneous, and open-ended armamorium of formal tactics. The unpretentiousness of this account, which merely juxtaposes theme and form, is in sharp contrast to modern rhetorical theory which presents elaborate rationalizations of the determinations of form by theme: all formal choices are highly motivated, all

c

*See the summaries of A. Plebe, Breve storia delta retorica antica (Milan: Nuova Accademia, 1961). An early version of this paper was read as a commentary in the seminar "Shakespeare and Renaissance Rhetoric" at the Shakespeare Association, Montreal, March, 1986.

XII 138

motivations are grounded not merely in a systemic theory of language but in a systematic interrelation of language, mind, and reality. Recently, however, the usefulness of this intellectualist initiative in accounting for poetic performance has been challenged. In a most perspicacious article on 'The Significance of Terza Rima," John Freccero has hypothesized that in Dante's Divine comedy this relation of form and theme is reversed; Freccero claims that the intricate entrelacements of rhyme scheme and triadic verse structures privilege thematic entrelacement, trinitarian formulations. "The theological principles/' he claims, "that seem to underlie Dante's formal patterns are themselves derived from literary principles. The Christian theory of recapitulation is derived from linguistic categories."2 In other words, thematic system is rooted in the non-systemic domain of aesthetic form. Freccero advises us to look for the source of the generative power in what we know the authors can do, rather than in what we think they might possibly have read. Freccero's strategy of reversal, I will argue, suggests an elegant, economical account of Shakespeare's rhetorical competence. It permits a very specific, very sharp focus on the originary and humble sense of rhetorical mastery as aural mastery. It is, perhaps, naive of me to point out that dramatic talent is an aural talent; dramatic production, after all, is an aural achievement. (It is serendipitous, and confusing, that Shakespeare reads well in the study.) And from this obvious postulate follows readily the explanation of accomplishment; aural facility is the source of dramatic success. Shakespeare's skills are the originary rhetorical, that is to say, poetic skills of intonation and rhythm, and these skills have the same originary, loose, non-necessitous relation to the specific social interventions of his plays. Moreover, we may choose to recall that rhetorical skill as aural skill was a Renaissance insight; for example, in the Art of English Poesie Puttenham appeals to "auricular figures," and Puttenham recognizes the necessity for those who address a large audience to invoke "the great sound of speech."3 2

"The Significance of Terza Rima," in Dante, Petrarch, Boccacio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, ed. A. Bernardo and A. Pellegrini (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 193), 14. *The Art of English Poesie, ed. G. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). J. Crewe, in his "The Hegemonic Theater of George Puttenham," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 71-85, gives a very provocative account of this text: of the "natural" powers of poetry, of the "occasional" nature of drama, and of the author's anti-moralist defense of dramatic ethics.

XII Shakespeare and Rhetoric

139

But perhaps an invocation of the modern dramatic oeuvre of Tom Stoppard may serve to bring this central aural competence into sharp focus. Consider, for example, the resonances of Shakespeare's representations of moralizers in his plays with Stoppard's characterization of the "other" George Moore as moral philosopher in Jumpers.4 What is illuminating about Stoppard's work is the disjunction between what he knows and what he can represent. Shakespeare, I think, shares with Stoppard speed, brilliance, and an intuitive, not argued comprehension of ethical issues. Their response to academic, scholarly moralism is parody, and their parodic talent is an aural one, essentially that of a listener. That is to say, they grasp the rhetoric, not the reality of their contemporary learned culture; by duplication or caricature of cadence and rhythm, pitch and tone of academic address, by not engaging with written argument, they convey the essential emptiness, the failure of such moralistic address to genuinely engage ethical issues. The nature of Stoppard's diagnostic skill is only underlined by the fact that the long monologue of the philosopher in Act One is presented as a rhetorical exercise, as the drafting of a public address to his colleagues. Their talent, then, is necessarily non-academic, but at the same time, entirely serious; their attendance or non-attendance at Oxford is entirely beside the point, since their forays into ethical territory produce serious investigative results. For Shakespeare and Stoppard focus precisely on the nature of the dysfunction of moralizing discourse. For, if we accept Bernard Williams' thesis that ethics is only a practice, never simply theory, then we must assess all ethical investigation as a practice, as a response to and creation of ethical situation.5 And just so, Shakespeare and Stoppard focus on investigative practice. A focus on orality/aurality is always a focus on practice, and it represents a proper choice for critical response to dysfunctional moral ideologies. Shakespeare hits off the "tone" of moralism. And by focussing on tone, I shall claim that Shakespeare and Stoppard are enabled to push the argument, the investigative function further than is permitted by the parameters of academic disputatio of their contemporaries. Further, both dramatists are sensitive to the fact that the vast majority of argumentative discourse, including the argumentation of philosophers, is as Stephen jumpers: A Play (New York: Grove Press, 1972). 5 B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

XII 140

Toulmin pointed out quite a while ago, informal, loose, fragmentary—understructured.6 To give an account of quotidian argument it is necessary, both Stoppard and Shakespeare agree, to retain this informality while reinforcing strategic shifts and significant interruptions, gaps. And both are adept in using purely formal, aesthetic markers to signal shift and interruption.7 Thus, while Shakespeare realizes it would be tedious and false to repeat lengthy written argument, it is both efficient and sharp to convey by the precise representation of the cadences of moralistic argument the moral failure of the hierarchical paradigm, the "trickle-down" model which invests academic practice, qualifying and marring the relation of academic producer and non-academic consumer of moral texts. The power of Shakespeare and Stoppard's dramatic analysis, then, is funded by an exclusive strategy, a focus on only the tone, and thus only the ethical considerations that invest the academic practice itself; it is a focus, not on what they say, but on what they do. Therefore, it is a very refined rhetorical sensitivity, rather than the command of academic rhetorical terminology and academically schooled argument, which is the source of ethical insight into dysfunctional academic moralistic practice. However, there is a strong tendency in modern scholarly accounts of Shakespeare to suggest Shakespeare's appropriation of a very learned, a very "literary" body of rhetorical doctrine. Now, it is certainly the case that rhetoric as discipline provides us a repertoire of descriptions of formal strategies. Taking advantage of Freccero's elegant hypothesis, that it is possible to describe theme as motivated by form, we can use the tropological repertoire to epitomize whole texts as well as segments of texts; there is a cottage industry which finds and explicates "meta-tropes" in the text.8 Yet, I would argue that there is an asymmetry in the relation 6

1964).

S. Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

7 It is precisely this skill in the depiction of argumentation that P. Parker describes in "Shakespeare and Rhetoric; 'Dilation' and 'delation' in Othello/' in P. Parker and G. Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985). 8 Thus, at the Shakespeare Association seminar Trousdale's paper used chiasmus to structure The Rape of Lucrece, and Altman used hysteron proteron to present a very intriguing reading of Othello. On Trousdale's Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), read J. Henderson's review, Rhetorica 2 (1984): 93-101.

XII Shakespeare and Rhetoric

141

between Shakespeare and Stoppard's rhetorical competence and the use of scholarly rhetorical analysis. On the one hand, we have an extraordinary aural/oral skill which is both diagnostic and generative; on the other, we have a tropological industry, a vested academic interest in historical continuities in doctrine. The industry claims symmetry: Shakespeare's competence is an academic one; he is, not to put too fine a point upon it, a scholar. To be sure, this bemusement with learned taxonomies of tropes is indicative of the perverseness of academic rhetoricians in another way. In the case of Jumpers, for example, such a preoccupation would miss a genuine rhetorical opportunity if it entailed a failure to confront a major engagement of the drama to a specifically rhetorical skill: that is to say, to actio, to pronuntiatio. Jumpers is filled with jumpers; an acrobatic spectacle is the matrix for the technical verbal display. Bodily pronuntiatio comments upon the discursive dysfunction of the philosopher-protagonist and on the academic environment which nourishes dysfunction.9 It is important to accept the fact that while we may epitomize, we do not do Shakespeare's moral work; Shakespeare's and Stoppard's skill is a pragmatic one in both senses; it is an efficacious, practical response to specific discursive events and their relations to extra-discursive practices, to contexts, speakers, and listeners, a response cast and delivered in terms of formal values. Indeed, their formal competence determines an exclusive, powerful concern with event. It is, therefore, always a focus on ethical considerations; it necessarily concerns itself with precisely those issues of equality and hierarchy, good faith and bad faith, irony and hypocrisy which invest social praxis. And, it is necessarily anti-academic in the sense that it works against academic colonizations, institutional appropriations of serious investigational tasks. And, it is against the rhetoric of the academy. For in the Renaissance, academic rhetoric, rhetorical pedagogy had a tremendous investment in moralism. Naturally, those engaged in teaching rhetorical skills to adolescents felt compelled to emphasize moral responsibility and discursive courage; they taught a cheerful voluntarism, a dogged optimism about the possibility of willing and acting the good; 9 P. Kuentz, in his "Les 'Oublis' de la nouvelle rhetorique," in B. Conein et al., Materialites discursives, (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1981), 35-43, points to the attenuated problematic of modern rhetoric in comparison with the ancient.

XII 142

they assumed the transparency of practice to theory, and the possibility of easy transference of theoretical gains to practical action. Shakespeare disinvests these academic commitments. One of the important issues of the 16th century was the problem of good counsel; Shakespeare's contribution to the elucidation of this issue was to note the complicity of rhetoric and moralism in noting that bad counsel sounds good. But his representations of this wellsounding counsel, say, Polonius' advice to Laertes, are forced on the audience in a strenuous way. There are, of course, two audiences for theatrical discourse, that of the fellow-protagonists on stage, and that of the listener/viewers. To use Ducrot's terminology, the first is the destinataire, the one to whom one speaks, and the second the auditeur, the one in front of whom one speaks.10 But parody switches the two roles; it speaks to the auditeur in front of the destinataire. The auditeur submits to the parodised rhythms and intonation while watching the equivocal, and privileged, reaction of the destinataire on stage. Thus Shakespeare's formal presentation of moralism is anti-closure, it forecloses self-gratulatory response, sanctimonious reception on the part of the listener/viewers. The asymmetry of the relation of Shakespeare's rhetorical skill and our academic rhetorical analysis is simply underscored by the subversion of the audience's possibilities of closure; we must put up with the fact that the analysand moves precisely and cleverly to destroy the pretentions of the analyst. The position of the academic listener/viewer is invidious, is not privileged at all. Academic rhetorical listeners must take account of the dramatists' subversions of academicism, and of academic rhetoric in particular, in its institutional appropriations of social issues. One could say that Shakespeare and Stoppard practice what Foucault preaches: that is to say, they act on the premise that the serious investigator of intellectual and power elites must radically question the unions of power and knowledge, the reciprocating attempts at co-optation by these elites. Yet the asymmetry between practice and analysis does not entirely set aside the claims of symmetry as investigative canon. And here I would like to raise a meta-rhetorical issue: to focus on contemporary rhetoricians as my historical archive, rather than on 10

O. Ducrot, "Analyse de textes et linguistique de I'enonciation," in O. Ducrot et al., Les Mots du discours (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 35-36.

XII Shakespeare and Rhetoric

143

Shakespeare's rhetoric. In the fact of Shakespeare's disvestiture, it seems counter-productive to re-invest in academic ideologies while giving an account of his work. The academic ideology which dominates modern theories of rhetoric, and modern discussions of Renaissance rhetoric, is radical Nominalism, whose fundamental postulate is the total disjunction between language and reality, words and things. Perhaps in response to what the classicist Charles Kahn has called our "post-Cartesian epistemological bedevillment/' our neurotic concern with how we know, a great many rhetorical theorists focus on rhetoric as epistemology.11 The high-watermark of this preoccupation is, of course, the Rhetorique generale of Groupe Mu, which stipulates rhetorical figures as the primary, indeed, only, cognitive strategies.12 But neither Trousdale's insistence that Shakespeare makes strong distinctions between things and words, res and verba, nor J. Altaian's thesis that Shakespeare regards verba as controlling res, requires attributing to Shakespeare a radical Nominalist philosophical position. It does not seem intuitively right to describe Shakespeare as trapped in a "prison house of language," nor to distort or ignore Shakespeare and Stoppard's realistic engagement with specific rhetorical occasions. Real Men Don't Eat Quiche and Real Nominalists Don't Write Plays. In this dominant Nominalist ideology, the conflict of rhetoric and philosophy in the Renaissance is simply one instance of a continuous conflict of well- and ill-motivated inquiry. This history of a psychomachy between rhetoric and philosophy in the Renaissance depends on a particular account of the interrelations of the trivial arts in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; the stalking horse is an evil alliance of logic and grammar, or more particularly, of Scholastic logic and Speculative grammar, an alliance which produced a coherent, exhaustive, and completely wrong-headed systematic interconnection between logic and ontology, words and things. But an alternative account of the Trivium in the Renaissance supports a humbler, simpler, and historical intellectual orientation, rather than radical Nominalism. The focus of the rhetores and grammatici in 14th, 15th, and 16th century Humanism was on linguistic usage, on tangles and fields of meaning in quotidian use, both in classical 11

Ch. Kahn, The Verb 'Be' in Ancient Greek (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973). J. Dubois et al., Rhetorique generale (Paris: Libraire Larousse, 1970).

12

XII 144

and vernacular languages. The dominant motive, according to Amos Funkenstein, was historicist, and the dominant strategy historical contextualism; the work of rhetoricians such as Lorenzo Valla was not only the critique of a pretentious logic, but the careful and very detailed mapping of domains of semantic* compossibility, of discursive and thus cultural wholes.13 The achievements are marked by a devotion to discursive experience, to the patterns of usage, to the historical phenomena of replication and linkage in the employment of words. It is this Renaissance rhetorical task that I will argue is both context and analogue for Shakespeare's work. In sum, Shakespeare's practice is certainly rhetorical: theatrical competence is a quintessentially rhetorical competence. But his interests do not have to be defined as those of rhetoric as discipline, and his mastery does not have to be stipulated as mastery of pedagogical formulations. If it is impossible to make a case for Stoppard as analytic philosopher, it is unnecessary to claim Shakespeare as academic rhetorician. What I have been suggesting is that a return to some of the more modest classical rhetorical self-definitions is useful: recall that for Cicero in the consideration of sources of rhetorical power as represented in the triad natura (ingenium), ars (doctrina), and exercitatio, ars is the least significant; exercise, practice makes mastery a matter of nature; ars or doctrina is drawn from practice. Then, the classical account which does not stipulate systematic connections of specific interventions and formal skills, which simply juxtaposes occasion as demand to form as solution, subverts over-intellectualizing rhetoric as Nominalist epistemology. Thus, Shakespeare, as both shaping and reflecting Renaissance rhetorical interests, masters, but does not need the radical Nominalist commitment; his interests are simpler, less abstract: his focus, like that of the Humanist rhetores and grammatici is on the web of usage, on compossibility of meaning, on the verbal description of adjacent possible worlds. 13 A. Funkenstein, "Periodisation and Self-Understanding in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times/' Mediaevalia et Humanistica, n.s., 5 (1976): 3-23; Funkenstein claims a connection between Leibnitzian compossibility and "possible worlds" formulations and Vichian modes; I would claim a connection between the intrinsically interesting rhetorical developments in Valla and Leibnitz; on Valla see S. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia, (Firenze: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1972), and my "Lorenzo Valla's Grammar of Subject and Object," in / Tatti Studies, 2 (1987), 239-267.

XIII

THE CONVERSABLE WORLD EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE RELATION OF RHETORIC AND TRUTH A perfectly ordinary reaction to Jane Austen's novels is to remark that they seem "true," historically correct. The reaction is in large part due to the manner in which Austen "accounts for" the fictional events she gives an "account of"; the reader senses, for example, the diagnostic power of her descriptions of conversation. Austen's skill is a capacity both to epitomize and to analyze a broad shift in the English cultural program in the eighteenth century. Further, her skill is necessarily a skill in discursive critique, because this revisionary moment is primarily a transformation of traditional rhetorical programs. The core of the classical rhetorical program had been constituted by the integration of three tasks—docere, delectare, movere: rhetoric as discipline regulated a discourse of instruction, delight, and persuasion. We note in the eighteenth-century program not only the persistence of each of the original interests but the reassertion of the strategy of integration as well. The program, while it serves new orientations and new goals, retains classical rhetorical premise and procedure: significant truth is still defined by locating it in a pragmatic domain of use, of political and social utility, and the procedure for the definition of truth still requires the assumption that moral and aesthetic values are at once hegemonous and conjoint. Thus, for example, the philosopher David Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals presents a rhetorical program: The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other. (Principles of Morals 172)1

XIII 234

Here speculation on moral truth precedes and produces discursive engagement; Hume's definition of moral work is the classical definition of epideictic task. Furthermore, Hume retains the strict rhetorical connection between affect and rational persuasion; the domain of moral judgment can be mapped by the tactics of aesthetic judgment: in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection. There are just grounds to conclude, that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species, and demands the assistance of our intellectual faculties, in order to give it a suitable influence on the human mind. (Principles of Morals 173)

For Hume, then, the domain of moral truth is an empirical realm of specific facts and sentiments, a domain pervaded by contingency, and one that requires very specific tactics of investigation and argument: the very domain presumed by Ciceronian and Quintilianesque treatises on argument. Hume's reworking of A Treatise on Human Nature as "enqueries," even his preference for inductive as opposed to deductive modes, acknowledges the value of critique governed by rhetorical and inclusive as opposed to formal and exclusive logical rules. The Enquiries, indeed, is a summary rejection of doctrinal truth defined by systematic methods in favor of practical truth characterized by informal methods, a truth that, as practical, requires persuasive discourse.2 The pragmatic nature of the eighteenth-century program exemplified by Hume's Enquiries helps explain its practical force; the program both shapes intellectual discipline and invests social behavior. The ability to engage in pleasant and informal, "polite," argument and in the argumentative development of moral and aesthetic judgment, "taste," constitutes a general receptive competence, an accomplishment in the discovery of true propriety, "truth." Rhetorical discipline is reassembled as a new skill that is the duty, property, and talent of a new social elite; the faculties to be developed in education and social intercourse enhance and give meaning to status and connection: taste, for example, is a mode of social communication, the hegemonous social competence.3 But a precise description of Austen's skill requires more than a general reference to Austen as both beneficiary and critic of this program; it demands a specific focus on the peculiar alliance of rhetorical skills and aesthetic interests forged in the eighteenth century, a union of argumentative modes and aesthetic topics that intervened directly in the reorganization of investigative roles as social roles. This reorganization underwrites the perspicacity of Austen's account of her society by assuring the coherence of social and investigative rules. To describe this alliance I shall appeal to a limited range of texts. I shall begin with the works of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, turning to his "Advice to an Author" for a description of the discourse of inquiry and to his Second Characters for his definition of aesthetic value. I shall focus next on Hume's eight essays on aesthetic topics, where his strongly

XIII The Conversable World

235

empiricist treatment of the reception (rather than the production) of art redefines and authenticates the new discourse of taste, and then on Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, which projects a receptive ethics, a new moral critique. Finally, I shall examine Austen's novels, which translate Hume's philosophical project into a literary project and in the process become powerfully descriptive of the new social-discursive rules—descriptive, in short, of the essential constraints of "gentlemanlike behavior." Shaftesbury's confection of the role of critic is a key event in the transformation of rhetoric into criticism, a criticism that retains an argumentative cognitive strategy, a rhetorical theory of truth, to discipline reception. Shaftesbury substitutes "rhetorical" argument for "philosophical" system; recall his stricture that "the most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system" (Cooper, Characteristics 1: 189). But it is a highly privatized notion of discipline; aesthetic truth is defined in argument, but the argument that is both paradigmatic and preparatory is a typically Renaissance argument, the interior dialogue. Just as Petrarch developed the genre of interior dialogue as a mode of inquiry, so Shaftesbury takes the position in "Advice to an Author" that soliloquy—discourse requiring the dividing of oneself into two persons, and thus a dialogue with the self—originates insight (Characteristics 1: 105—6).4 Shaftesbury projects a notion of discipline as an internal self-discipline; his dialogic introspection is a kind of private empiricism where the rules of discourse are the rules of inquiry: "'Tis the hardest thing in the world to be a good thinker without being a strong self-examiner and thorough-paced dialogist in this solitary way" (Characteristics 1: 112). This dialogue with the self generates an awareness of the values of harmony, order, and proportion, which mark good moral performance as well as aesthetic production (Characteristics 1: 228, 279). Shaftesbury represents these values not in a "systematic" fashion as preexisting armatures but as qualities attached to, and to be derived from, the disciplined exercise of verbal and visual skills. His "Advice to an Author" admits the necessity of transferring to public discussion the attribution of value but presents the rules of this investigational public exchange as no other than the social rules that acknowledge a reciprocity and symmetry of sincere intention. The exchange that develops and communicates values is, moreover, remarkably untrammeled, even irreverent and combative, certainly neither pious nor genteel. Shaftesbury's stance against enthusiasm is also a stance pro wit; in the essay "Freedom of Wit and Humor," he states that "truth, 'tis supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights, or natural mediums, by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough recognition, is ridicule itself, or that manner of proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just raillery in any subject" (Characteristics 1: 44). A free-ranging wit is the preserver of virtue and wisdom, and there can be no exemptions by "custom or national opinion" from its critique (Characteristics 1: 9,15). Furthermore, free access to the argumentative domain is a guarantee of personal development: "All politeness is owing

XIII 236 to liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision" (Characteristics 1: 46). Enthusiasm, or intolerance, is marked by a refusal to abide by the "fair laws of combat by wit and argument" (Characteristics 1: 47). Accessibility does not entail slackness, however; Shaftesbury's discipline is a tight discipline, and he makes a strong distinction between "control, debate, argument" and "uncontrolled harangue" (Characteristics 1: 111). Furthermore, aesthetic truth is not a matter of simple sensuous reaction, "false relish," but of reflection and processing (Second Characters 61, 43). He regards his own skill as discursive and asserts that his science is "no better than that of a language master, or a logician" (Characteristics 1: 104)—indeed, he emphasizes his discipline as "trivial," of the trivium—yet his posture is not masterful: a strong cooperative model obtains, the kind of eloquent equity characteristic of gentlemanly debate as opposed to the authoritarian and ungenerous maneuvers of learned discourse. The preface to Second Characters shows that while the genre group he aspires to seems modest and informal enough— "noctes atticae, evening conversations, hours, virtuoso-amusement, plasticentertainments, Deliciae elegantiae artis" (Second Characters 6)—he is obviously taking great pains to place himself precisely as an author and to place his book in a framework that will ensure its proper reception. Thus he reminds himself: "And even the we, us, ours, never used but in a sense as it were, taking in the reader, cooperating with the writer, and discovering, investigating, as a party himself" (Second Characters 12).5 He knows that the skill he would impart must seem easy, so that he must write in such a way that his mixed audience "may comprehend, or be persuaded that they comprehend"—an important qualification—"what is there written in the text" (Second Characters 8-9). Shaftesbury, then, takes very seriously the array of approved roles for his audience—amateur, dilettante, virtuoso. Perfectly aware of the fun and security of collecting, he is less interested in the role of patron-collector than of virtuoso-critic; his method of criticism and self-criticism is used not only to allow liberation from the errors of taste, of expensively misplaced patronage, but also to make the roles of patron-collector and virtuoso-critic independent and richly "respectable" (Characteristics 1: 174, 214; Second Characters 12— 13). His anxiety to modify roles reshapes the Shaftesburian forms of discourse. Here again we see continuity with Renaissance motives: recall the development between Petrarch's letters and Montaigne's essays—the development of a discursive form that permits a personal view of a large variety of topics; wholeness, unity of vision, is the goal of an extending, stretching exercise.6 In the essay form which both Shaftesbury and Hume employ, variety of topic evidences coherent individual achievement, and a hungry introspective empiricism nourishes omnicompetence, inclusive control. Ernst Cassirer has argued the importance for the history of aesthetics of Shaftesbury's basic requirement that the critic have intuitive sympathy with, and penetration of, the intentions of the producers of art (313—14); I would

XIII 237

claim that Shaftesbury saw sympathy and penetration as a social duty of a social class. It is not the hackneyed postulate of the coherence of beauty and truth that is the guide for his project but the thesis that beauty grants access to a defensible social role, a true vocation. A privileged access open to the privileged, it requires that great pains be taken to construct an enabling discourse, a discourse that makes possible a response to the "finer and more delicate imitations of art," for, he claims, it is by the "nicest slightest touches . . . and not by exaggeration, amplification, straining, tightening, overcharging" that art instructs (Second Characters 100). Delicacy, then, is an important constraint—requiring an uncommon, probably classbound investment—a constraint that permits the intuition of unity, a common enough intellectual goal. Since "the unity and equality of life [are] made by the unity of object," which is in turn the attribute of true art, the life of an artist is "worthy even of a liberal and noble born youth." If, that is to say, he is a genius, and if he does not slight his first, "economic," duty to family and public (Second Characters 174—75). But discursive practice is Shaftesbury's stated priority; where even the vulgar can feel and recognize, only the virtuoso of reception can prove, demonstrate. Shaftesbury's hero is the critic, whose talent is first formed by interior dialogue, then exercised by the critic "giving voice and accent" to obscure and implicit thought; finally it begins to act in public dialogue to improve the reception of the arts, and therefore the production of the arts, of the nation (Second Characters 22-23, 93, 112, 156-57, 177, 234). In contrast with Shaftesbury, Hume's avowedly philosophical competence presents the tasks of the critical construction of taste and the analysis of virtue as interconnected in the most explicit and strong manner: moral sentiment is the taste for virtue, and the discourse of edification is necessarily a discourse of pleasure, delectation. Hume's essays on aesthetic issues resume Shaftesbury's empiricist attack on system and retain Shaftesbury's empiricist emphasis on the reception, not the production, of art. At the same time, Hume places more stress on the accessibility of the canons of good taste, which are discovered by exercising the skills of public argument in the exploration of shared experience. Hume, of course, is constrained by the intransigence of his empiricism; the effect of his radical skepticism is to force the discussion onto the ground of the common language of common sentiment.7 This intransigence also expresses itself in discursive tact: Hume's pronouncements on discourse in the essays call for a general lowering of sights—another kind of accessibility. Hume praises contemporary eloquence as Attic, that is to say, as "calm, elegant, and subtile" speech that "never raised its tone above argument or common discourse" (Essays 109).8 The harangue, for Hume as well as Shaftesbury, is out: "The merit of delivering true general precepts in ethics is indeed very small" (Essays 223). And consider the modesty of the verb in this sentence: the intent of the essay as form, he claims, "is to mingle [emphasis added] some light of the understanding with the feelings of sentiment" (Essays 239).9 To mingle finely, perhaps,

XIII 238 because in the essays as a whole, "to refine" is the crucial verb, the relevant illocutionary act; and his coordinate noun, "delicacy," connotes the values of precision, refinement, decorum (Essays 240). Yet the exercise of delicacy of taste is subject to dispute and submits to the rules of argument; the authors "must produce the best arguments that their invention suggests to them; they must acknowledge a true and decisive standard to exist somewhere . . . and they must have indulgence to such as differ from them in their appeals to this standard" (Essays 248). The essays on aesthetics appeal to the philosopher, concerned with the structure of thought, and to any self-defined moralist, concerned with the nature of society. The operative postulates are, first, that aesthetic issues are necessarily serious issues to the staunch empiricist, and second, that aesthetic competence is both a social competence and a social duty. In the essay "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," Hume's distinction is that delicacy of passion is a captive in the domain of chance, fortuna, while delicacy of taste acts in the domain of virtu; taste is not only a capacity to discriminate the works of genius, which proceeds by clarifying and rendering sentiment distinct (discovering the conformity of object and organ), but also a competence that enhances the other activities and attitudes of a civilized life (Essays 6—7, 234, 242). Hume contrasts the stability of the law, which "is the slow product of order and liberty" but is easily preserved (Essays 124), to the vulnerability and fragility of the arts, which depend on a refined taste or sentiment for preservation. The more vulnerable, the more need for cherishing. Luxury— "great refinement in the gratification of the senses" (Essays 275)—and delicacy represent two levels of social value; furthermore, of the three areas of achievement—industry, knowledge, and humanity—humanity is the particular concern of the arts: "The more these refined arts advance, the more sociable men become: nor is it possible, that, when enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation, they should be contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations" (Essays 278). It is the elision of boundaries between refinement, sociability, and conversation that is intriguing. Certainly the vindication of conversation as humanizing must sound endearingly familiar to the historian of rhetoric: "beside the improvements which [men] receive from knowledge and the liberal arts," Hume claims, "it is impossible but they must feel an increase of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together" (Essays 278).10 Hume's "Of Essay Writing" is a social manifesto of the eighteenth century, lightly proffered, doggedly received; it makes a distinction between the "learned world," the preserve of scholars, and the "conversable world," presided over by the ladies, asserting, in the neat language of irony, a functional differentiation between the two domains: The conversable world joins to a sociable disposition, and a taste for pleasure, an inclination for the easier and more gentle exercises of the understanding,

XIII The Conversable World

239

for obvious reflections on human affairs, and the duties of common life, and for observation of the blemishes or perfections of the particular objects that surround them. Such subjects of thought furnish not sufficient employment in solitude, but require the company and conversation of our fellow-creatures, to render them a proper exercise for the mind; and this brings mankind together in society, where every one displays his thoughts in observations in the best manner he is able, and mutually gives and receives information, as well as pleasure. (Essays 568)11

Hume's justification of the conversable world is in two rather simple senses an aesthetic one: first, the conversable world is the agreeable, pleasurable domain; and second, domestic aesthetic objects, the decorative arts, are claimed as a serious interest and pertinent environment.12 But more important, the discourse of the conversable world is socially redemptive: his contrast between learned and conversable is a contrast between the solitude of learning and the conviviality of conversation, between the passivity of knowledge and the activity of exchange (Essays 278). Conversation liberates, since good conversation is distinguished by its facility, its freedom of expression (Essays 569). Even its exclusive nature is of use; eloquence, public oratory, is unfortunately constrained by the need to appeal to the general populace (Essays 108; cf. Principles of Morals 241). When Hume specifies three pleasures in life—ambition, study, and conversation (Essays 276)—he overvalues conversation as a disinterested social act: the rules of conversation are ethical rules. You are civil, or you are not conversing: Among the arts of conversation, no one pleases more than mutual deference or civility, which leads us to resign our own inclinations to those of our companion, and to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance so natural to the human mind. A good-natured man, who is well-educated, practices this civility to every mortal, without premeditation or interest. (Essays 127—28)

The rules of conversation are premised on equality, deference, generosity; social refinement expresses itself in a compensatory tactic: "to throw the bias on the opposite side" (Essays 132). But Hume is not only claiming that equity is the ruling convention of conversation; he is also maintaining that the discursive experience of equity generates the sense of common interest that is the sense of "humanity." If we turn to An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, we see that the constructs which invest the conversable world can modify those of the learned world; indeed, Hume stipulates the conversable world as the site of serious investigative projects. Recall that Hume defined the work of the moralist as the task of epideictic discourse; all moral speculations must be pragmatic, must produce speech acts of praise and blame. But it is the moralist's immersion in conversation and social intercourse that is the source of his moral standards: General language, therefore, being formed for general use, must be moulded on some more general views, and must affix the epithets of praise and blame,

XIII 240 in conformity to sentiments, which arise from the general interest of the community. (Principles of Morals 228 )13

The more we converse, the more we learn of the principles of humanity and universal moral sentiment. Discourse is the privileged domain of benevolence—a virtue that is "cherished by society and conversation" (Principles of Morals 275)—a domain where the classical canons of the useful and agreeable, "utile et dulce," are the criteria of value (Principles of Morals 268). The learned world, in sum, must both recruit and prove itself in the conversable world. Hume as moral philosopher is concerned with uniting a plausible psychological story with his moral principles, and he deplores the fact that philosophers have ignored the psychological dimension, that is, the passions, in their systems of ethics (Principles of Morals 213).14 They ignored, then, the absolutely basic fact that "social virtues . . . have a natural beauty and amiableness" (Principles of Morals 214). And conversely, they were blind to the fact that an aesthetic value, the sublime, is nothing but "the echo or image of magnanimity," a moral value (Principles of Morals 252). The passions, as Alasdair Maclntyre has so convincingly argued, furnish the bridge concept between "is" and "ought"; for Hume, any account of moral competence must consider sentiment as well as reason, feeling as well as circumstantial fact: moral action is passionate action.15 But the learned world has hitherto produced implausible and unnatural moral accounts: Theories of abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age: in a successive period these have been universally exploded: their absurdity has been detected: other theories and systems have supplied their place, which again gave place to their successors: and nothing has been experienced more liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion than these pretended decisions of science. (Essays 248)

While Hume's antisystematic bias recalls a classical rhetorical bias, his critique pushes far beyond classical moral tradition. Hume presents a morality, as well as an aesthetics, of reception. For Hume, virtue is "whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation" (Principles of Morals 289).16 Pleasure, in sum, is not simply the mode of edification; pleasure is the sign of truth. Just as there is no architectural beauty till a spectator appears who can evaluate the structure—"from his sentiments alone arise its elegance and beauty"—so there is no particular "fact" of crime; rather "crime" arises entirely "from the sentiment of disapprobation" (Principles of Morals 289). Still, any emphasis on reception requires some emphasis on production; it is significant that Hume employs Cicero's orations to illustrate his notion of receptive ethics: the full panoply of Cicero's epideictic eloquence is required to elicit the response "crime" (Principles of Morals 292). But the conversable world of Hume's essays, of course, offers simple, durable rules and undemanding opportunities; after all, Hume points out, belles

XIII The Conversable World

241

lettres, which d'Alembert places in the domain of reflective discussion, has not prospered under the complex rules and unnerving demands that obtain in the cloisters of the learned world, and he suggests the return of literary territory to the dominion of conversation. Hume indeed embarks on an extended diplomatic metaphor, very droll, in which he casts himself in the role of ambassador from the world of learning to the domain of ladies, sovereigns of the realm of conversation, asking for an offensive-defensive league against the enemies of reason and liberty (Essays 569-70). What is quite clear is that "aesthetic" qualifies not simply topic but also function and criterion: because they possess delicacy, the ladies are sovereigns; the fundamental law of the conversable realm is the standard of taste. Hume has described the maneuver whereby peripheral interests capture the center; the decline of rhetoric as discipline and training must not obscure for us the fact that the new pervasive control, the taste which is a social competence, represents a reorganization of old rhetorical concerns. For in this way antisystematic discursive modes with strong aesthetic-empiricist premises reconstruct general, serious investigative moments as social instrumentalities: the primary, central domain where criticism functions is the conversable world. Where Shaftesbury had developed the role of the adult (male) virtuoso critic, Hume describes the resources and constraints of community. To be sure, Hume is frankly horrified at the thought of the ladies as sovereigns of both worlds, the "public" republic of letters as well as the intimate realm of conversation, as was certainly the case in the French salons (Essays 571). But it is precisely Hume's restricted realm of the feminine, domestic, and conversable that Austen will appropriate (Essays 135). In "Of Essay Writing" Hume has specified the boundaries, rules, and goals of the domain of the conversable, and in so doing, has specified the program for Jane Austen, whose novels are the literary fulfillment, the fleshing out, of this program, and an ingenious use of an ironic suggestion. Austen takes up Hume's thesis that the conversable world is a site of serious inquiry but rejects his satiric description of "female sovereigns." The maneuver accomplished is not so much the cession of literary territory to the conversable world as the deft and thorough amalgamation of the critical and conversable polities. That conversation is the site and mode of discovery of character and plot, of insight and issue, is the premise not only of Austen's rapid and efficient dialogue, but also of the series of set pieces, the neatly demarcated debates dispersed throughout her novels. These debates have the particular literary purpose of clarification of plot and solidification of character, as well as the more general, perfectly serious purpose of clarification of issue and attitude. But further, an examination of these debates, which are guided by Hume's canons of "calmness, elegance, and subtlety," but which vary in topic from the solemn to the consummately light, shows that a significant number of the arguments turn on aesthetic issues. For Austen's purposes, conversation is the perfect form, aesthetics is the perfect topic; she employs the argumentative

XIII 242

occasions to depict a well-motivated experience as the precise definition of pure aesthetic experience: every display of taste is a display of social form; conversation is an exercise of social tact, true taste. The debates thus not only orient the protagonists to the nature of experience but also orient the reader to the nature of the protagonists' social competence and moral intelligence.17 Aesthetic choices precede moral choices; aesthetic judgments prepare future events. The aesthetic arguments spring readily enough to mind. Recall the discussion of the nature of the picturesque in North anger Abbey: a leisurely meeting with Henry and Eleanor Tilney taking place in the picturesque landscape surrounding Bath, a meeting achieved only by the most dogged perseverance on the part of young Catherine Morland. The charm of the dialogue lies in Austen's cheerful acceptance of the social reality that not every match is an even match, in either marriage or debate; the literary clarification is the reader's insight into the naturalness and simplicity of Catherine's character, conveyed by means of Austen's very sophisticated, ironic exposure of contemporary aesthetic pretension to taste in painting and in novels, an exposure made by means of attributing lack of pretension to all the protagonists (1.14.10-15).18 The arguments on aesthetic issues in Pride and Prejudice, in contrast, are much more truly arguments, engaging the formidable talents of Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy, and stipulating proper argumentative tasks of definition and distinction. The sharper exchanges assert the power of rules. The argument on music at Lady Catherine de Bourgh's, which includes Elizabeth, Darcy, and his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam, has the major function of clarification of plot: it illumines the completely unmutual regard of Darcy and Elizabeth. But it also performs the minor task of relegating the miserable Lady Catherine "out of the discussion" into self-imposed exile. Here a badly placed discursive role defines a failed social role (2.8.174—76). Furthermore, Elizabeth's attempts to put Darcy out of the discussion anticipate her later rejection of his proposal as "ungentlemanlike" in form and repulsive in fact, a rejection that achieved its powerful effect because of her emphasis on faulty discursive form (2.11.189). There are, of course, two extended debates on aesthetic issues in Mansfield Park: the general discussion of the improvement of Rushworth's estate, Sotherton, and the prolonged arguments over the choice of play for the Mansfield Park theatricals. By far the most complicated of Austen's set pieces is the many-jointed argument that emerges from the series of dialogues Fanny Price has with a series of protagonists during an afternoon spent in the gardens of Sotherton, most of the dialogues beginning with, or turning on, issues of the aesthetics and morality of landscape. This complex series must serve the double literary function of definitively orienting Fanny to both the Crawfords and the Bertrams and of preparing the reader for the inevitable turns of plot generated by the various future combinations of the two families: all of this

XIII The Conversable World

243

is extracted from sympathetic or callous reactions to avenues and fences, prospects and landscapes (1.10.97—106). Certainly Mansfield Park is the most literal expression of the axiom that aesthetic experience is the site of discovery; the environmental contexts— the parsonage shrubbery for Fanny Price and Mary Crawford's somewhat dysfunctional dialogue, the ramparts of Portsmouth for Fanny's issueless encounter with Henry Crawford, the gardens of Mansfield Park for her late new understanding with Edmund Bertram—all serve to make the dialogue easier: opaque moral situations can be referred back to the simpler structures of aesthetic reaction. Then, much of the dialogue in the early novel Sense and Sensibility is forthrightly organized around the constructs of "genius" and "taste." Elinor Dashwood's admiration for innate propriety and simplicity of taste (1.4.19) is contrasted with the enthusiasm of her sister Marianne's pursuit of aesthetic genius. For Marianne, reciprocal love is marked by conformity of aesthetic judgment (1.10.47) or by reciprocity of genius and taste: in an excess of sisterly feeling she cheers Elinor with the notion that in a long courtship Edward Ferrars would at least have time to develop a taste for Elinor's genius (1.4.22). The evidence for moral competence in judgment is largely displayed in discursive practice. Discursive sensitivity is the source of moral sensitivity for author, reader, and protagonist. Thus, while of all Austen's heroines Marianne Dashwood is the most explicit and most assertive in her claims to aesthetic competence, her social performance is beset by verbal incompetence: on one hand, she concedes that much of the current discourse on the picturesque is pure jargon; on the other hand, she herself is reduced to silence in a situation that rules out enthusiasm (1.18.97). To be sure, through the protagonists in Mansfield Park Austen furnishes straightforward discussion of pronuntiatio— in sermons, in the reading aloud of Shakespeare, and in theatrical productions. But pronuntiatio is not a serious discursive issue for Austen; Henry Crawford's delivery of Shakespearean lines is described as compelling, but at the same time it is placed firmly in the context of adolescent exercise: learning to read aloud well is part of a boy's education (3.3.336—38).19 Mansfield Park also proffers some easy alignments of judgment and language: when both Edmund Bertram and the Crawfords give Fanny Price necklaces for her brother William's amber cross, the reader may join Fanny in contrasting the simplicity and decorum of Edmund's plain gold chain and his transparent manly prose with the more elaborate necklace and positively Byzantine discourse of the intriguing Crawfords (2.8.258-60). Northanger Abbey, on the other hand, contains not only extensive ironizing of aesthetic discourse but also the most prolonged and self-conscious critique of discursive practice, a critique in which Austen's diagnostic skill in rhetorical analysis makes the link between faulty discourse and moral incompetence explicit. The contrast between Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe is a contrast between well- and ill-motivated substandard discourse; "truth" is at stake in the comparisons of Catherine's naive and candid formulations with

XIII 244

Isabella's verbal overkill. Isabella is fundamentally sloppy and imprecise, so careless that the most perfidious betrayal has no name. The self-deceptive exaggerations of Isabella and James Thorpe—those two loose cannons on the deck of society—both complement and underline the selfish deceptions of General Tilney and his eldest son. What is always at stake in the Austenian text is the accurate description of the competence to make moral judgment. Virtuous or proper perception is defined by Hume's "warmth" and "delicacy" (Principles of Morals 225); furthermore, the definition stipulates a union of warmth and delicacy: Catherine Morland's warmth, for example, can support the easy correction of her unrefined Gothic sensibility. The archetypal embodiment of this harmony of warmth and delicacy is, of course, Anne Elliot, the heroine of Austen's last novel, Persuasion. As its title would imply, Persuasion has an obvious and explicit rhetorical interest, and has the most direct movement from issues of aesthetic response to the process of describing and classifying feeling as emotion and the basis of a personal bond. Anne's argument with Captain Benwick about the most "useful" genres of literature is a direct confrontation between Benwick, who represents strong feelings that recognize no frame, and Anne, who represents that Humean and Austenian project—strong feelings contained within a polite frame. The dialogue looks back to the discussion between Captain Wentworth and Louisa Musgrove on the attraction of strength of feeling and anticipates the discussion between Anne and Captain Harville on the definition of virtuous strong feelings. The argument also serves the literary function of plot orientation, clarifying for the hero, Frederick Wentworth, his strong feelings for Anne; he is enlightened not by means of the views she expresses but by means of his perception of the debate as a close male-female encounter, a discursive intimacy (1.11.100—1). Persuasion presents a complicated tissue of differences of opinion and contrasts in judgmental capacity: of Anne and Wentworth; of Anne, Wentworth, and Louisa; of Anne, Mary, and Elizabeth Elliot; of Sir Walter and William Elliot—a web in which Lady Russell functions as a kind of inadequate center and thus a focus for the illumination of bad judgment: as a protagonist in argumentative exchange, she makes persuasive cases for the wrong point of view. Where Persuasion offers strong contrasts of good and bad judgment, Sense and Sensibility heavily illustrates flaws, either misalignments of aesthetic and moral choice or overextensions of aesthetic taste to moral judgment. Marianne Dashwood's reactions to character range from her enthusiasm for Willoughby's pursuits, talents, and genius to her decided opinion that Colonel Brandon has neither genius, taste, nor spirit: "his understanding has no brilliancy, his feelings no ardour, and his voice no expression" (1.19.43; 1.10.51). When the villainous Willoughby passes her tests, while Edward Ferrars, a hero, fails them, it is clear that it is Marianne's testing capacity that is at fault. The determined selfishness of the John Dashwoods is attributed to neither Mrs. Dashwood nor Marianne, yet both err in the overextension of aesthetic competence, which makes Marianne, in particular, fail in benevolence,

XIII The Conversable World

245

Hume's most "pleasing" virtue. In Emma, on the other hand, Austen indicates deficiency, not surplus: Emma's lack of interest in aesthetic matters seems diagnostic of the series of blunders she makes in the discrimination of character; Emma, in short, is morally tone deaf. Thus the debates in Emma—which are often negative in tone and function—turn less on aesthetic issues, on positive positions on matters of taste, than on the false enterprises undertaken by protagonists deficient in social delicacy whose activities are stigmatized and excluded in debate. Delicacy most assuredly characterizes Austen's tactics of definition. The texts contain strong commonsense oppositions, but oppositions that are, in an interesting way, subservient to the "minute distinctions" which Hume had stipulated as the moralist's concern (Principles of Morals 225). One could contrast the refining motives of Austen with the reductive ones of Thomas Peacock. While the victims of Austenian irony share qualities with the victims of Peacock's burlesque, Austen confects an "integrated" male-female community of serious domestic commitment, whereas Peacock, through satiric strategies, generates only a ludic situation, a masculine game. The total effect of her minute discriminations is to perfect the definition of a society with extraordinary capabilities for both control and encouragement, discipline and motivation. Austen's domestic domain of moral competence is not the realm of the "lesser morality" of good manners, the sphere of "company" ruled by "politeness," which is subsumed by Hume under the domain of "society" ruled by "justice" (Principles of Morals 209, 261).20 This is condescension, and Austen does not condescend. The boundaries and rules of her domestic conversable world exploit those of Hume's nourishing "general conversation," and her results improve on Hume's results: where Hume drew ideal pictures of domestic peace, Austen describes the tough-minded precision that creates an elegant social economy.21 She improves on Hume by employing Shaftesburian modes; Austen is a virtuoso critic with Shaftesburian flashes of wit and irreverence. Shaftesburian also is the exploration of the private or personal origins of useful truth: whereas the Shaftesburian critic begins with interior dialogue, the Austenian heroine corrects and revises general debate by means of interior debate, contention with the self.22 But like Hume, Austen places much less emphasis on the transfer of receptive virtue, the achievements of taste, to the production of the fine arts; the vital transfer is to the social domain of moral action. And all—Hume, Austen, Shaftesbury—agree that discursive accessibility or liberty is the condition of intellectual work; all are engaged in refining the rules of discursive equity that make discovery possible. For Austen, domestic discourse improves on Hume's general conversation as the best provider of ruled liberty; conversation is not simply an idle, leisurely preoccupation but the purposeful construction of life and attitude and value, a project with socially redemptive values. Domestic peace is more than the reward of professional—naval or ecclesiastical—excellence. Without at all advocating carelessness toward duty or profession—even Mr. Bennet is observant of his hay and his horses—

XIII 246 Austen portrays not action as generating leisure, but leisure as the frame for activity. But leisure is domestic; the virtues of both hero and heroine are primarily domestic virtues: the respectability of Sir Thomas Bertram, displayed in his horror of amateur theatricals, is a commitment to domestic virtue, a commitment which the accomplished Henry Crawford, for all his zeal for his own country house and landscape, lacks. We have moved, then, from a theoretical treatise that claimed that belles lettres is in the province of argument and that taste, aesthetic truth, is established by debate to a belletristic project, a series of argumentative novels that employ set debates on taste to orient the protagonists, and thus the reader, to the nature of true experience. This is truly sophisticated empiricism. From Shaftesbury's description of the member of society as having primarily an economic duty but also a spiritual obligation to be receptive to, even to participate in, art; to Hume's description of conversation, a refined art, as a social template that patterns discovery; to Austen's use of fictional debates to describe social forms: in all we find a rich interconnection that entwines aesthetic interest, a dialogical or rhetorical discovery of truth, and social-moral value. Aesthetics provides the entree to a general consideration of the goals, texture, and rules of life of a leisured elite; one moves easily from the theory of aesthetic truth to the theory of true behavior. The dominance of the argumentative mode obtains not simply in aesthetic inquiry or inquiry in general but in the formation of a matrix of linguistic and social rules governing persuasion, a rule matrix that invests the general strategy of a hegemonous social group. The argumentative mode that invested aesthetic inquiry comes to dominate the discussion of propriety and pleasure. The hegemony of conversation and the onmicompetence of rules governing conversation are shown in the fact that mastery of the rules is tantamount to social mastery. Some of the rules are old rules, Renaissance rules, to be sure; but there is a shift, for example, from the valorization of negligence, a courtieresque sprezzatura, to the valorization of precision and refinement. The informality that masks precision still preserves its restraint by requiring ordinary exchanges to produce endless small discriminations, explicit taste. But the primary competence that marks both discursive and social skill is a persuasive, argumentative one; what keeps the practitioners "honest" is the rules of the debate, the necessity of submitting to argument, to patterns of concession and closure, offering and riposte. Here rhetorical commitment is not simply a persistent, mild, English interest in elocutio, or style, but rather a serious and central preoccupation with discursive enlightenment, with affective or rhetorical edification. Austen's project epitomizes the eighteenth-century transformation of the classical rhetorical tasks of docere, movere, delectare; it reasserts the connection of truth and pleasure within a pragmatic frame. Austen's rhetorical analysis of the conversable world describes a critical competence that controls a manageable social space; the confected dialogues and debates furnish a precise account of the variety of successful and unsuccessful appropriations of the Shaftesburian critical task by a social elite. In

XIII The Conversable World

247

Austen's modest domain of conversation, the rules for determining success and failure put in place a decorum of equity, a decorum that generates as well as reflects equity. Austen, like Shaftesbury and Hume, stresses that good argument is accessible argument; the Austenian novels give us a strong account of equitable access for women. Her heroines argue well. They initiate exchanges that are nontrivial and interesting as theory—exchanges where failure defines as surely as success. And the debates point to another layer of accessibility: the heroines have access to rules as well as performance; they not only experience failure, but they may stipulate failure. In the Austenian text the exploration of "pure," that is, aesthetic, experience assumes and confirms an easy introspective empiricism and facilitates critique as self-critique—a strong extension of the equitable impulse to include and discipline the self. The rule that enjoins the conversationalists to start from, or at least take seriously, the experiences of beauty and pleasure is a rule designed to ensure honesty as well as lucidity. Austen's novels enjoin moral work.

NOTES 1. See Cicero, De Oratore (1.9.35), and De Officiis (1.4.14). Hume does not specify his Ciceronian inspiration as "rhetorical." In a letter of 1739 to Hutcheson, he claims that throughout book 2 of A Treatise of Human Nature, Cicero's De Officiis (he might have added De Finibus) was "in my Eye in all my reasonings" (The Letters of David Hume [1:34]). 2. Hume asserts that ethics presents questions of fact, not of abstract science (Principles of Morals 174). In "A Dialogue," appended to Principles of Morals, Hume makes some antiphilosophical statements that recall Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (5.14.28-29); see "A Dialogue" (340, 341). Furthermore, it is significant that Hume felt compelled to rewrite A Treatise of Human Nature as "enqueries"; in section 1 of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding he claims his own task as a kind of discursive meditation: "Happy, if we can unite the boundaries of the different species of philosophy, by reconciling profound enquiry with clearness, and truth with novelty! And still more happy, if, reasoning in this easy manner, we can undermine the foundations of an abstruse philosophy, which seems to have hitherto served only as a shelter to superstition, and a cover to absurdity and error" (An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding 16). On "use" as criterion, recall Principles of Morals (179): "In general, what praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach to the contrary!" 3. Elsewhere I have argued that "the possession of taste is the possession of an enabling capacity . . ., a social competence that is agile, inclusive, and pleasantly coherent, and that both vivifies and protects social roles." See Nancy S. Struever, "Translation as Taste." 4. See Francesco Tateo, Dialogo inter tore e polemica ideologica nel 'Secretum' del Petrarca. 5. Thus in "Idea of the Work" Shaftesbury proposes an epistolary form, since the use of "private address" or a "half-general address" to friend and general public enables an intimacy and directness (Second Characters 5, 7, 8, 12). 6. See Marc Fumaroli, "Genese de Pepistolographie classique" (888), and UAge de ^eloquence (154-55).

XIII 248 7. "Common," of course, does not denote "popular"; on Hume's aesthetic empiricism see Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment (305—6). The relevant essays of Hume are "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," "Of Eloquence," "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing," "Of Tragedy," "Of the Standard of Taste," "Of Refinement in the Arts," and, "Of Essay Writing," all found in Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. 8. See Stephen Toulmin's formal analysis of informal argument in his Uses of Argument. 9. On the essay as genre, the remarks of Edward W. Said are perspicuous; see "The Text, the World, the Critic" (186-87). In a letter to Gilbert Elliot written in 1751, Hume claims: "I believe the philosophical Essays contain every thing of Consequence relating to the Understanding, which you would meet with in the Treatise; & I give you my Advice against reading the latter. By shortening 6c simplifying the Questions, I really render them much more complete" (Letters 1: 158). 10. See Hume's Principles of Morals (238). 11. In a letter of 1753 to Dr. Clephane, Hume's heavy irony in regard to "the ladies" is inspired, interestingly, by a question of lexical usage (Letters 1: 182—83). 12. There are several passages in Principles of Morals that elaborate on the importance and pleasure of domestic environment; see, for example, 179, 220. 13. See also Principles of Morals (274). Earlier in the same work, Hume claims, in asserting the accuracy of introspective moral reaction, that "the very nature of language guides us almost infallibly in forming a judgement of this nature; and as every tongue possesses one set of words which are taken in a good sense, and another in the opposite, the least acquaintance with the idiom suffices, without any reasoning, to direct us in collecting and arranging the estimable or blameable qualities of men" (174). 14. The appeal to the passions, of course, is regarded as the peculiar competence of the classical rhetorician; see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria Book 6. 15. On reason as no motive to action, see Principles of Morals (293—94); the whole of appendix 1 on "Moral Sentiment" is pertinent. See also Alasdair Maclntyre's "Hume on 'Is' and 'Ought.'" He notes that "we could give a long list of the concepts which form such bridge notions between 'is' and 'ought': wanting, needing, desiring, pleasure, happiness, health—and these are only a few" (463). Maclntyre's paper confronts misreadings of Hume; Maclntyre's claim that he was tempted "to retitle this paper 'Against Bourgeois Formalism in Ethics'" (459) should be related to his statement that "the difference between what Hume has been thought to assert and what Hume really asserted is very much the difference between Hare and Toulmin" (466). Here, I believe, Maclntyre is underlining the connection between mode of argument and meaning: Toulmin, of course, is the defender not simply of a naturalistic psychological basis for ethics but of informal modes of argumentation as well. 16. There is a striking analogy with the radical strategies of the Renaissance rhetorician Lorenzo Valla. In his Repastinatio dialectice et philosophice, Valla reduces the ten predicaments of Aristotle to two, actio and qualitas, a tactic that has strong implications for ethical theory (see, in particular, I.c.10, 73—98; I.c.17, 134—39). In De vero falsoque bono, one of Valla's major emphases is on the "naturalness" and thus the veracity of pleasure, voluptas. 17. The easy movement from taste in the arts to taste in life and manners is, of course, Shaftesburian; see Characteristics (1: 192—93) and Second Characters (22—23). 18. References to Austen's novels are to section, chapter, and page as found in The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (1949 reprint). 19. It is interesting that in the same chapter Edmund Bertram argues that an improvement in reception is in part the cause of an improvement in the production of sermons: "there is more general observation and taste, a more critical knowledge diffused, than formerly; in every congregation, there is a larger proportion who know a little of the matter, and who can judge and criticize" (3:3:340).

XIII The Conversable World

249

20. Austen, of course, is aware of this subordinate domain of accomplishment; good company, Anne Elliot claims, is "the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation" (Persuasion 2.4.150). 21. See, for example, Hume, Principles of Morals (220); but this work is permeated with evocations of domestic tranquillity. 22. Fanny Price makes the point of the interior guide's authority: "We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be" (Mansfield Park 3.11.412; cf. Hume, Principles of Morals 174). Gilbert Ryle too has argued that Austen is Shaftesburian, in "Jane Austen and the Moralists."

XIV

ETHOS AND PATHOS IN RUSKIN'S RHETORIC; FLORENCE AND HIS AESTHETIC POLITICS My argument is that Ruskin possessed not simply a bag of rhetorical tricks, but a substantive rhetorical program. The very specific, even elaborate psychology of address of this program shaped his aesthetic politics, and, therefore, stipulated the nature of Florentine achievement. It is helpful to view Ruskin's rhetorical theory as a gloss on the strong version of classical rhetorical psychology found in Book Six of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, which is devoted to the final part of the oration, the peroration. Here Quintilian claims that the appeal to the emotions dominates not simply this final action of the orator, but the entire oration; it is the form of eloquence that rules. Indeed, the peculiar task of the orator, - proprium oratoris opus - is the moving of the souls (animi) of the audience; emotions are motions of the soul which cause motions of the soul. There are two kinds, he claims: pathos (adfectus), describes the more violent emotions and ethos (mores), designates those which are calm and gentle; in the one case the passions are perturbing, in the other, subdued; the former command and disturb, the later persuade and induce a feeling of good will1. Not metaphor, not narrative structure, not argumentative techniques, but the appeal to the emotions is the quintessential rhetorical competence. Ethos and pathos, Cicero claims, must permeate the oration as blood pervades the body, (sanguis in corporibus)2.

1 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, tr. by H.E. Butler, Cambridge (Mass.), 1953, VI, I, pp. 4-5; VI, II, pp. 8-9. 2 Cicero, De oratore, vols. I and II, tr. by E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Cambridge (Mass.) 1988,s.310.

XIV

And just so, Ruskin's descriptions of artistic competence as well as critical competence is saturated with references to ethos and pathos. To gloss Ruskin's rhetorical program, with its central commitment to psychological truth, one can resort to Book II of Aristotle's Rhetoric which contains, according to Pierre Aubenque, a fully "rhetorised" psychology, an account of ethos and pathos organised into topics for use in discourse3. It is a psychology of continuum, and assumes a hierarchical series of interactive faculties - sensation, imagination, memory, intellection - which is the basis for rhetoric, as it authenticates the full range of rhetorical appeals. The proof by ethos persuades by presenting the character of the speaker; the proof by pathos persuades by moving the audience. Aristotle's description of the passions and mores constitutes a hermeneutic, his rhetoric functions as a diagnosis of human dispositions and competences which affords a basis for rhetorical appeal. Rhetoric indeed includes a very large number of extremely specific techniques of address, but their informed use depends upon a very rich brew of psychological assumptions. I shall argue that from a set of very simple psychological premises, Ruskin develops a meticulously elaborated aesthetic politics, which controls his description of Florence as urbanist achievement, as well as his project of nineteenth-century English reform. Ruskin is through and through a politician, because of his rhetorical perspective. Rhetoric is not an aggregate of skills, the source of ornaments in his political oratory, but the discipline which organises the accounts of the psychology of creator (artist) and audience (polity, community). Rhetoric is not derived from politics; politics is derived from rhetoric. The obvious place to begin to study Ruskin's definition of pathos is the famous chapter of Book III of Modern Painters on the pathetic fallacy4. Ruskin's stock, of course, has suffered a serious decline in the twentieth century; part of the general dissatisfaction of the thinking classes was his highly charged presentation of his own ethos. Yet, I am persuaded by the recent characterisation of Ruskin as a rigorous, if unsystematic thinker5. What is striking about Ruskin's definition of the pathetic fallacy is that he employs the occasion to attack the metaphysical pretensions of nineteenth-century 3 Aristotle, On Rhetoric. A Theory of Civic Discourse, tr. G. Kennedy, New York 1991; P. Aubenque, Pathos et Logos, in C. Viano (ed.), Corpus et anima, Paris 1996. 4 J. Ruskin, On the Pathetic Fallacy, in ID., Modem Painters HI, in E.T. Cook - A. Weddenburn (eds.), The Works of John Ruskin, London 1900, V, pp. 201-220. All citations from Ruskin, with the exception of Praeterita, are from this edition, using the volume and page numbers of this edition. 5 Cf. G. Wihl, Ruskin and the Rhetoric of Infallibility, New Haven 1985.

80

XIV Ethos and Pathos in Ruskin 's Rhetoric; Florence and his Aesthetic Politics

German philosophy of aesthetics. Ruskin claims that their terms "subjective" and "objective" are completely meaningless. Their use represents a strategy which claims the aesthetic qualities, as subjective, are completely "unreal", merely the products of the beholders, and completely dissociated from the "objective" presence of the object, either, for example, of the sky, or the picture of the sky. Yet Ruskin asserts that "blue" is not our sensation of blue sky, but the power to produce the sensation which inheres in the object6. The primary question the artist or critic must ask is: "Is it so?"7 Ruskin, by disallowing subjectivity and objectivity, forces us to confront "what is so" in art. The picture is nothing but the truth but so presented that it will need the help of the imagination to make it real8. It is the imaginative capacity of both artist and viewer which is at stake, however. Recall that the major purpose of the five volumes of the Modern Painters is to defend the painting of J.M.W. Turner, by no means a photo-realist, from the unimaginative response of his contemporaries. A picture is "the expression of power and intelligence of a companionable human soul", a soul "of penetrative imagination and strong affect"; the picture's truth needs the beholder's imagination to make it real; none of it can be enjoyed until the imagination is brought to bear on it9. We must note the force of "companionable"; Ruskin focusses on a sociable experience, a shared experience of like minds; he specifically disallows violent feeling; this produces "a falseness in all our impressions of external things"; this is, indeed, the pathetic fallacy. No, what is needed is acuteness of feeling and command of it10. Proper pathos, in short, is an attribute of ethos', the picture and the reception of the picture demand sincerity. The primary flaw of the ethos of the artist or viewer is idolatry, the interposition of a false response, a distortion between the object and the creator/viewer11. What I shall argue is that Ruskin's peculiar rhetorical aptitude is integrative; for example, his account of artistic value and technique is completely integrated with his program for the critical reception of the artistic product. Ruskin's manifestoes both for art and criticism are, primarily, intrinsically ethical and pathetic: his remarkable gift is for intricating the moral and emotional. These highly rhetorical concerns color Ruskin's entire account of Italian Renaissance art, and motivate 6

Ruskin, Modem Painters ///, cit., vol. V, p. 202. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 185. 9 Ibid., pp. 185,187,268. 10 Ibid., pp. 205 and 218. II This is the central argument of Wihl, Ruskin and the Rhetoric of Infallibility, cit. I

8

81

XIV

the characteristic strategies of definition of Florentine, or Roman, or Venetian culture. I shall focus on Mornings in Florence, a guide-book; it is late, written near the onset of a series of mental breakdowns that finally silenced him. It is full of intense, subtle intrications of ethos and pathos and of the ethos/pathos of his Italian artists with the ethos/pathos of his readers. His Anglophone audience is defined as a philistine bunch of shoppers, frequently apostrophized as lacking in creativity and sensitivity; there is a failure of imagination, indiscriminate, superficial -, and a failure of control, - sentimental, careless. This posture, to be sure, has aroused antipathy in his readers. Henry James describes another Ruskinian guide-book, St. Mark's Rest, as "pitched in the nursery-key, and might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess"; James deplores the "narrow theological spirit, the moralism a tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies". Yet he admits that Venice "has had the good fortune to become the object of passion to a man of splendid genius"12. Osbert Sitwell, a great fan of the Baroque, remarked that "so frightened still, are many people, even young ones, by the gaunt shadow of Ruskin, that bogey of our nursery, his figure fitfully illuminated by the dim religious light of his 'Seven Deadly Lamps', that they refuse even to consider any manifestation of late Italian art"13. Putting aside the Protestant prudery, admitted by Ruskin himself14, we should note well that he usually addresses a collectivity, a community of either viewers or producers. On the slippery slopes of Ruskin's argument, there are frequent slides from considerations of ethos, character, to stipulations of ethnos, collective character. Yet, to his credit, collectivity is often defined in terms of mores, customs, as well as with straightforward racial, genetic characterizations. It is, in fact, an almost Jungian strategy: the attribution of a collective unconscious in artistry, a shared instinctual mode of representation, a collective creative nature which is fraught with moral tendencies and emotional charges. Ruskin despises art as [oratorical] harangue: "[...] the best art is the work of good, but not distinctly religious men, who, at least, are conscious of no inspiration, and often unconscious of their superiority"15. 12

H. James, Italian Hours, ed. J. Auchard, University Park 1992, p. 8. O. Sitwell, Discursions on Travel, Art, and Life, London 1931, pp. 22-23. J. Ruskin, Preaterita, Oxford 1994, pp. 198, 221, 227-228, 333 and 448; Ruskin claimed that reason combined with romantic pleasure made a bitter Protestant of him, ibid., p. 228 (an intriguing psychological self-analysis). 15 ID., The Relation of Art to Religion, in ID., The Slade Lectures on Art, XX (1870), p. 56. 13

14

82

XIV Ethos and Pathos in Ruskin's Rhetoric; Florence and his Aesthetic Politics

A benefit of this emphasis on collectivity of effort is that Ruskin's description of Florentine art is more than a linear narrative of heroic accomplishment, (of, say, Cimabue and Giotto); it becomes an explication of the community's imaginative and technical practices. He points out that in Florence there was a conscious program of integration of elite and worker competences; there, philosophy was studied with the useful arts; there, masters of public affairs were masters of art16. This, of course, is in contrast with Ruskin's description of class oppositions of worker and capitalist in nineteenth-century England in his texts on political economy. We should note, in short, that the nineteenth-century dogma of individualism, so often attributed to Jacob Burckhardt, Ruskin, and other historians of the Renaissance, is not the dominant factor in their accounts of Italian accomplishment. Thus Burckhardt specifies in the remarkable brief section 42 of the Judgements on History and Historians that the crucial element in the Florentine achievement was the Florentine environment as "society", a mixed, diverse substratum, "the living soul of culture and art"; in Florence "a living disposition is formed"; if this or that were not beautiful, "non s'usaria a Firenze"11. Ruskin's primary definition of Florentine creative capacity is ethnic, as a Tuscan or rather, Etruscan one. Ruskin, of course, had available to him George Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (London 1848), perhaps Inghirami, perhaps the magnificent eighteenth-century edition of Thomas Dempster's De Etruria Regali Libri Septem, most certainly some text of the Etruscan ideology of freedom, expressiveness which contrasts with Roman authoritarianism and servility. In Ruskin's map of Italian cultural development he claims "central stood Etruscan Florence", as an essential mediating, moderating influence; "it directed the industry of the [Lombardic] North into the arts of peace; it kindled the dreams of the Byzantines into the fire of charity"18. The definition of Italy is the definition of a series of collective, ethnic capacities. The Lombardic Gothic of Verona is of intrinsic importance to Ruskin as the triumph of the instinctual over the merely imitative capacity; rude and infantine in itself, and surrounded by fragments of a nobler art of which it is quick in admiration and ready in imitation, yet so strong in its own new instincts that it reconstructs and rearranges every fragment that it copies or borrows into harmony with its own thoughts [...] all the borrowed elements being subordinated to its own primal unchanged life19. 16

ID., Mornings in Florence, XXII, p. 307. J. Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, Boston 1958, p. 87. Ruskin, Mornings in Florence, cit, XXII, pp. 327-328. 19 ID., The Lamp of Life, in ID., Seven Lamps ofArchiteture, VIII, p. 195.

17

18

83

XIV

And, of course, this independence is both in contrast with Venice and contributory to the Venetian syncretic capacity. The Ducal Palace is "the central building of the world", because Venice is the vital site of encounter of Arabic, Lombardic, Byzantine, Roman art20. And, of course, the enemy of all Early Renaissance creativity is the Roman Renaissance, the very Rome, of course, which in the ideology of the Etruscan style, is the enemy of all life, spontaneity, and joy in artistic achievement. The definition of the Roman Renaissance, with the terrible social costs exacted of the workers by its "aristocratic follies" is the crucial moment in the integration of his political-economic program of the 1850's with the moral-aesthetic theory of Modern Painters. The 1870's tourists he addresses in Mornings in Florence are the products of this dysfunction; they are in Florence because, and in spite of, the fact they have nothing to look at (except advertising), nothing to do21. But, above all, in defining the Etruscan, Ruskin defines collective moral strategies. In Aratra Pentelici (1872) he compares the Greek with the Etruscan in his definition of true aesthetic program: where the Greek "is formed during, and in consequence of, the national effort to discover the nature of justice, the Tuscan [is formed] during and in consequence of the national effort to discover the nature of justification"22. Here, by associating the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith with the Tuscan, Ruskin succeeds in integrating his English Protestant beliefs with his aesthetic proclivities. In both Greek and Tuscan cultures, the mimetic instinct, the imaginative longing, and the discovery of the Ethical "brings precision and truth into all its manual acts"23. It is imperative, in short, for the ethnos to seek an ethos; the collective capacity must choose the right thing to idolize, in order to make the proper expressive choice. And, make no mistake, expression and reception are the heart of Ruskin's enterprise. Creating and viewing are the modes of exchange of social value, an exchange which pervades, dominates the life of the community. And, pervades all aspects of this life, the humble, quotidian artifacts as well: "the manual arts are as accurate exponents of the ethical state as others", he asserts; further, the "main business" of art "is in the service of the actual uses of daily life"24. 20

ID., "The Quarry", the first chapter of The Stones of Venice, is perhaps Ruskin's fullest statement of collective, ethnic creativity in the Italian Renaissance. 21 ID., Mornings in Florence, cit., XXII, p. 329. 22 ID., Aratra Pentelici, XX, pp. 227-228. 23 Ibid.., XX, pp. 227-229. 24 ID., Art in Relation to Morals, in ID., The Slade Lectures on Art, XX, pp. 77-78; ID., Art in Relation to Use, XX, p. 107.

84

XIV Ethos and Pathos in Ruskin 's Rhetoric; Florence and his Aesthetic Politics

Thus, Florence is central. Giotto's Campanile is the most perfect Christian expression, it is compendious of all beauty25. Ruskin may speak of the pure Etruscan/Greek decoration of the Pisan Baptistery, or he may describe the Chapel at Santa Croce as an Etruscan-Greek vase "turned upside-down and outside-in", but it is Giotto's pure Etruscan piety and his swift expressive power, (exactly like Turner's) which engages most of his attention in the guide26. Here is a combination of Northern (domestic, practical, household) value with the Byzantine (monastic, unpractical); he insists on the domestic as well as the monastic, the sense as well as the nonsense in this true assessment of Christianity as both familiar and mystical27. Giotto transforms the rude, formal types of the Lombard and Byzantine into a "personal, domestic character"; Giotto is the first to know the center of both kinds of lives28. It is a reconciliation which Ruskin claims makes the simplest household duties sacred, and highest religious passions serviceable29. It is a reconciliation as well of Ruskin's cherished aesthetic values of simplicity and the sublime, purity and acute feeling, loveliness. Ruskin's rhetorical success, I am arguing, is not based solely on purple passages, such as the famous description of Turner's "Slave Ship" in the first volume of Modern Painters, but on a rhetorical program of sharp, rigorous definition of ethos and pathos30. He possesses a fully "rhetorised psychology", very similar to the psychology attributed to Aristotle by Aubenque, a very rich repertoire of psychological distinctions immediately available for argument. It is this capacity which enables Ruskin to move swiftly, perhaps too swiftly, from aesthetic considerations to political-economic critique and policy formation. It is the texture of the psychic life of the workmen which is at stake in much of his politics, and this quality is rooted in the presence or absence of free expressive capacity; visual, decorative form is not simply symptom, but substance and indeed purpose of a society's efforts. If we turn to Modern Painters, we find the program spelled out. Expressive wrongs create deep psychological scars; for the workmen, creating false images warps, dishonors imagination. The serious basis of Ruskin's contrast of 25

189.

ID., The Lamp of Beauty, in ID., Seven Lamps of Architecture, cit, VIII, pp. 187-

26

ID., Mornings in Florence, cit., XXII, pp. 319, 340-342. Ibid., pp. 331-333. Ibid., p. 332. 29 Ibid., p. 333. 30 In the Ariadne Fiorentina he remarks that "My vanity is never more wounded than in being called a fine writer, meaning - that nobody need mind what I say". 21 28

85

XIV

medieval and modern is in the realm of life functions, of the physical and moral health of the producers and receivers. In the Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruskin stresses that the psychological state of the worker is vital to good art; it is good "if the man's mind as well as his heart went with his work"; speaking of a "vile" Gothic church near Rouen, Ruskin claims that "the men who did it hated it, and were thankful when it was done"31. In "The Opening of the Crystal Palace", he makes an invidious distinction between the workmen of the present, and the thirteenth-century workers in "feeling, intention, and information"; he remarks in Modern Painters III, on the "loving enthusiasm, creative skill, the playful energy of things" in the Gothic32. The modern collectivity, producers and receivers, can "fall into a curious web of hesitating sentiment, pathetic fallacy, wandering fancy"33. And, he speaks for himself: when Ruskin laments at the end of his life, "I wish I knew less and had drawn more", he was judging, not a career choice, but the moral tone and fiber of his existence34. This opposition of "knowing" to "making" is a Burckhardtian strategy as well; Burckhardt asks "whether the gathering of knowledge [in the nineteenth century] does not stand in the way of higher productivity, whether the acquisitive spirit [he has in mind the German entrepreneurial philology] and the general haste are not destroying the genuine great mood, in creative persons as well as in those who ought to appreciate"35. We are speaking here not so much of Hay den White's form as content, as of content as form, as formal shaping force in cultural practices. In the different, strong rhetoric of Ruskin the issues of character and passion shape expressive reach. The Aristotelian innovation, according to Jakob Wisse, was to insist that rhetoric had a foundational interest in basic psychological factors. If ethos and pathos are coequal with logos as "proofs", as modes of making believe, then the rhetorical perspective is one that guarantees a consuming interest in the operations and faculties of the soul. For Ruskin, interest stipulates intervention; his concern for the health and welfare of the imagination and the passions is not merely a persuasive and manipulative, but a political interest. It is not simply that rhetorical success is based upon appeals 31 The pertinent sections are in Ruskin, The Lamp of Life, cit, sections 3-6, 21, 24; ID., Seven Lamps of Architecture, cit., VIII, pp. 191-198, 213-215, 218-220, especially pp. 214,218. 32 Ruskin, Modern Painters HI, cit., V, p. 103. 33 Ibid., p. 216. 34 Ruskin, Preaterita, cit., p. 325. 35 Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, cit., Part III, "1872".

86

XIV Ethos and Pathos in Ruskin 's Rhetoric; Florence and his Aesthetic Politics

to a range of faculties, rather, a rhetorical program must cultivate and nourish these faculties. How does this fit with his Tory-anarchist politics? The rhetorical program, I would argue, provides the crucial connection of aesthetics and politics. And, Ruskin's aesthetic politics has some advantages over the liberal individualist politics of his contemporaries such as John Stuart Mill. Ruskin predicates collectivities, collective imaginative programs of creation and reception, and his program is justice for the souls of all; liberal individualist politics, on the other hand, has no capacity to resist the colonisations of extreme economic individualism, the theorists of the free market that had brought Britain, according to Ruskin, to a deplorable moral-aesthetic state, a state of dysfunction which incapacitates the workers. In contrasting English and Continental cultures, Ruskin claims in the chapter on "Of Finish" in Modern Painters III that the modern English demand for perfection, finish in the products of its industry destroys workmen's souls, "[...] the best powers of workmen's minds"36. In the last volume of Modern Painters Ruskin's chapter, "Of Vulgarity", associates vulgarity with a false interest in finish, and with "deadness in heart and body"; false finish is inconsistent with both prudence and passion37. The pragmatic nature of this psychology, its focus on reception, on the effect on audience, is always manifest; bad artistic practices "[...] will only make us shallower in our understandings, colder in our hearts, and feebler in our wits"38. The misery and distress of the poor and the middle classes are in part owing to artistic/ethical lack, to the moral waste of bad production39. Psychological content forms moral-political possibility; we do not have a simple combination of moral and aesthetic interests in Ruskin; morality is the achievement of the aesthetic. To return to Florence and Italy. Mornings in Florence is vintage Ruskin in that it contains much of the Old Testament, of the Jeremiad, of the tone of lamentation he shares with his beloved Dante. There are many references to the sad state of Florence - that "Italy is a wreck, and a viciously neglected one", is a constant in all his writing on art -40, and to the irredeemable frivolity of his tourist-audience, - "But lunch is near, my friends, and you have

36

Ruskin, On Finish, in ID., Modern Painters III, cit., V, pp. 151-156. ID., On Vulgarity, in ID., Modern Painters V, cit., VII, pp. 343-362, see especially pp. 357-358. 38 ID., The Lamp of Life, cit, VIII, p. 219. 39 ID., Inaugural Lecture, in ID., Slade Lectures on Art, cit., XX, pp. 39-40. 40 ID., Praeterita, cit., p. 238. 37

87

XIV

that shopping to do, you know"41. But note the political conviction: even Florentine demolition in the thirteenth century is politically correct, in contrast with ninetenth-century policy: [...] nothing is thrown down without complete certainty on the part of the overthrowers that they are able, and willing, to build as good and better things instead [...] and [...] these abolitions of private wealth were coincident with a widely spread disposition to undertake [...] works of public utility, from which no dividends were to be received by any of the shareholders [...]42.

Florence is, I would argue, absolutely central to his aesthetic politics; it is the centering, Etruscan place. His aesthetic politics, grounded in an elaborate, pragmatic psychology, gives him great sensitivity to the historical succession of urbanist programs in Florence. With considerable ingenuity, he begins his account of Florence for the tourists by remarking the "polarising", shaping effect of the great Dominican and Franciscan building programs of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, the two poles of magnetic force at either end of a civic space which organise that space43. But the Baptistery is the true center, indeed, the central building of Etrurian Christianity. Forty years ago, he claims, you could stand at the very center of the city and feel the dawn: The Baptistery of Florence is the last building raised on the earth by the descendants of the workmen taught by Daedalus; and the Tower of Giotto is the loveliest of those raised on earth under the inspiration of the men who lifted up the tabernacle in the wilderness. Of living Greek work there is none after the Florentine Baptistery; of living Christian work, none so perfect as the Tower of Giotto44.

This is a remarkable descant on Matthew Arnold's opposition of the Hellenic and Hebraic, to be sure, but it is more. It is the definitive Ruskin: urban architecture is not the rind or shell, but the kernel, the very proof and substance of political achievement. You encounter not artifact, but the community of workers; the urban space is the field of common achievement, the culminating effort of Burckhardt's culture as the "spontaneous", liberating human force.

41

ID., Mornings in Florence, cit., XXII, p. 408. ID., Val d'Arno, XXII, p. 81. ID., Mornings in Florence, cit., XXII, pp. 299ff. "Ibid., p. 413. 42

43

88

XV

Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir Nam et omnia disciplina memoria constat, frustraque docemur, si quidquid audimus praeterfluat. For our whole education depends upon memory, and we shall receive instruction all in vain if all we hear slips from us. Quintilian, Imtitutio oratoria, 11.2.1

Rhetoric and Memory Inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio (Cicero, De invent tone, 1.7.9): these are the "parts," the capacities, of rhetoric; memory is, for Quintilian, simply the "firm perception of the soul of words and things," firma animi rerum ac verborum perceptio, with perception, of course, as one belonging to the continuum of faculties of the Aristotelian soul. Quintilian reinforces the simplicity by characterizing it as a storehouse, thesaurus (11.2.2), and disavows the existence of any special art of memory before treating a few current techniques cursorily (11.2.4). These same special arts, of course, become the site of so much late medieval and Renaissance investigation, the domain Frances Yates and Paoli Rossi have explored for us (Yates 1966; Rossi I960). The relation between rhetoric and memory is an intriguingly reciprocal one; memoria may form part of, be a capacity or skill of, the rhetorician. Rhetorical interests, while they constitute only part of the rich domain of memory as cultural practice, may motivate many of the organizational programs of memorizing. Mary Carruthers' The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990) has the virtue of its eclecticism: memory is variously described as a dominant praxis of medieval culture, and as such, can include a set of techniques — preeminently

XV 426 the Rhetorica Ad Herrenmm's architectural system; or a descriptive psychology; or an educational program. And Carruthers argues persuasively that it is also a preoccupation holding a central place in medieval ethical life, with its rich interconnections with, for example, the practice of meditation and of spirituality in general.

Rhetoric and Time The truly central motive for rhetoric's interest in memory, however, lies in the strong, ineluctable connection of rhetoric with the problematic of time. Martin Heidegger's definition in Being and Time - "rhetoric is the first fundamental hermeneutic of the everydayness of being-with-others" (Heidegger 1962: 178) — not only ties rhetoric to his own philosophy of time, but insists on its investigational skills, hence implies that rhetoric must be seen as hermeneutic, as inquiry. The passage marks the central preoccupations of rhetoric as Miteinandersein, living with others, and Alltaglichkeit, everydayness as timefullness (Heidegger 1962: 138). The inevitability of being with another, the premise that man is not self-sufficient but is "there" (da) for another being (Sein) is firmly connected with the timefullness of our everyday life, its iterability, its demanding changefullness. He then proceeds to define rhetoric as the discipline of political action, a discipline that exists and functions entirely inside politics, as it construes being with one another through language, in controlling the practice of dealing with beliefs (doxa), cares (Besorgen), and passions or dispositions (Befindlichkeiteri) (Heidegger 1924). But further, Heidegger's assertion of the central ity of the problematic of time — and here rhetoric is a kind of precursor to his own project - can support the argument that in investigating the connection of rhetoric and memory, one gets at the deepest, most central obligations of rhetoric, both in theory and practice. Since all interaction is soaked in values, attributed, contested, or claimed, and thus is political, in rhetorical quotidian practice you are on the ground floor of political performance. Very simply, rhetorical analysis is necessary to politics because of its timefullness: everything in discursive action is iterable, to be done over and over again; the strong preoccupation of rhetoric with discursive effect, called "relativism" by the philosophers, is simply paying attention to this iterability. Later I will argue that the connection between rhetoric and history is particularly strong because history as a discipline of description/explanation and interpretation, one dealing with the problematic of time, is a second fundamental hermeneutic of the timefullness of social existence. The connections of time, memory, rhetoric, and history unfold in an account of a practice of recollection. It will be my argument that the use of memoir, personal narrative, to explicate history by Giambattista Vico, Benedetto Croce, and R. G. Collingwood, is a highly motivated initiative of vital importance in defining their contributions to the theory of history.

XV Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir

427

Memoir and Memory The reciprocity noted above — memory is a rhetorical capacity, rhetoric is a memorial capacity — argues the importance of rhetoric as furnishing the skills of presentation, the articulation, and thus design, of memory, the organization of access to memory for effective use in discursive action. This is the basis for the use of the memoir genre: the memoir is the organization of past experience by past experience; that is, a life narrative orders a range of pertinences, instantiations of scientific or artistic or political or moral capacity. The personal narrative becomes fundamental to the unfolding of interests, all dependent on the past experience of the subject/author. The personal narrative is a very self-conscious confection, a replication of the truly important events, the events of transition, of change in life experience. The memoir is a generic response to the vital task of designing memory and employs rhetorical values and procedures to fulfill this task. (I am using "memoir" simply as an inclusive term for the genres of recollection.) The primary constraint on the memoir is that the structure of the "life," this narrative of living through change, becomes the point of view for relating and assessing all issues of accomplishment and error. For the life of inquiry, which is the interest of this chapter, the requirement poses very specific limitations on both mode of presentation and on the topics, and succession of topics, raised. But, beyond this, I would argue that the memoir is one of the most rhetorical of genres, pervaded by rhetorical values, constrained by rhetorical modalities and techniques. Memory as rhetorical competence, as memoir, for example, is control of relevant past experience — "theirs" and "ours" — for the purpose of articulating that experience within a specific descriptive task. Because of the heavy investment in timefullness, there is a corresponding investment in the rhetorically motivated design of time. First, and this is admittedly a rather superficial concern, we note the recurrent, intrusive modality of memoir presentation as a captatio benevolentiae: the reader must be engaged, "captivated," by the story of the author. It is an intermittent captatio, however, one that arises in, and follows from, usually quite minor actions, actions the author is eager to stipulate as significant. Even errors can be exploited as captivating, for the texture of the memoir is that of a continual lapsing into appeal for understanding. Second, and obviously the basis for this tactic of captatio, is the focus on the speaker/author's character, ethos, in Aristotle's terms, as the primary rhetorical pistis or proof (Aristotle 1959: 1356a).1 The speaker's character can both originate and conclude discussion of particular strategies and initiatives. In the academic or investigative memoir, the major strategy for delineation of ethos is to isolate the personal development, in general to set in opposition modes of personal inquiry and the institutions, conventions, customs and so on of inquiry that form the context. Insofar as accomplishment is to be justified as unique, the solitariness and uniqueness of the life justifies it. I will argue that this topos of isolation is peculiarly strong in both Vico and Collingwood; the tactic moves the discussion deliberately away from the

XV 428

physical and intellectual space of the confines of "authority." The first-person focus necessarily queries institutions, faculties, committees; the early parts of the narrative resort to tales of overcoming formations and procedures. The pervasive rhetorical interest in time, development, change, sustains the continuous, repetitive application of the rhetorical canon of decorum. Quod decet, "what is apt," appropriate, rules the presentation of the past experiences that are of intrinsic interest. Further, understood as a precision of attention to shifts in persona, times, and places, "what is apt" is itself a historicist strategy, peculiarly fit to illumine developmental inquiry. The task of specifying ethos by appeal to decorum is not a simple one; it is not a matter of sheer timeliness, of contextualism as an account of situation. It requires a doubled arguing of the narrative: first, the assertion of the appropriateness, thus the moral value of the speaker's decisions; and next (in order to make the case for persistence in aptness of character) the definition of his new responses to new facts, breaking new ground. The ordering of past experience becomes an obligation to define renewal, innovation. Thus, in the memoir, the intrication of memory as competence with decorum as principle generates an account that argues theoretical innovation. Further, decorum as characterizing the representation of the connections of persons, times, places in the memoir illuminates the arguments and the changes in arguments. Decorum makes these arguments and changes accessible, even edifying. It is the novel, counter-intuitive presentations of individual contexts of times, places, persons that illuminate achievement or error, that mark the strategy as functional or mistaken. And decorum as principle stipulates that the memoir is not an exemplum. The life is not exemplary, it is not presented for imitation; the isolation topos defines the speaker's relation to the reader as well: the inimitable nature suggests the need for the reader's own apt, revisionary effort. Finally, the memoir uses narrative strategies as argumentative strategies. There is a specific juncture in the career of the author to appeal to this genre; in Vico, Croce, and Collingwood, midway is seen — very self-consciously by Croce, at the age of fifty — as appropriate. At this point one recapitulates the early gains and losses and prepares for future action. The representation of stages, and of transition between stages, is crucial for a claim to "progress." Narratives of contest set up a quest for authenticity against the apparatus of authority. In addition, however, the narrative gathers in the temporal stages, collapsing and rearranging the stages in the text itself by means of anticipation and recollection, by flashback. It is a story punctuated by acts of retrospection and projection. The memoir can present a temporal manifold as well as a linear temporality. It is also discontinuous, incomplete; the author is not dead yet.3

History and Memoir The memoir task is the organization of past experience by resort to past experience. The memoir as "highly rhetorical" is marked by persevering attention to design,

XV Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir

429

presentation of recollections; the memoir of an inquirer has particular motivations, for the design and presentation must be apt, appropriate for justification, not simply of the life but of the inquiry itself. It is obvious that the memoir as design of memory does work comparable to history work. The relation of a narrative of experiential development, when introduced into the task of explaining the nature of historical inquiry, supplies us with a recapitulation, a duplication of tactics, encapsulating personal experience of time in the account of historical investigational achievement. The narrative embeds the personal narrative of time, the "memory work" of the author. At no point is time, or the experience of time, not at stake. Exemplary for the choice of memoir as genre and for the explication of modes of historical inquiry are the texts of Vico, Croce, and Collingwood. The texts, indeed, form a continuum: Croce claims that Vico is the thinker "most like himself" and refers to him frequently as source of developmental change; Collingwood translated both Croce's Philosophy of Giambattista Vico and Croce's autobiography early in his (Collingwood's) career (1913 and 1927). The three texts, then, present a rich range of possibilities of intersection of personal development and theories of history, and do so, moreover, within an ongoing, general "idealist" historical program, with possibilities of influence and critique, remembrance and rejection.

Vico: Vita scritta da se medesimo (1728) The New Science is novel as both prolegomena to a research program and the research itself; the Vita becomes the site for the consideration of the historical task in its context, and as a personal achievement. In articulating an individual's narrative of inquiry, it gives access to that inquiry and represents it as "true to life": if personal, then authentic. First, of course, the Vita is not Vico's project but a commission, a response to an invitation to join an assembly of lives of contemporary intellectuals for a periodical publication. 3 The background of Vico's type of memoir is of intrinsic interest. Marc Fumaroli has done considerable work on the genre of memoire proper in seventeenthcentury France. What is useful for a reading of Vico is Fumaroli's list of generic values: it is of the middle style, as opposed to the grand style, of history; it presents itself as pure and necessarily partial witness of personal truths; and the classical models are dissimilar — Caesar's Commentaries (nuda historia), and St. Augustine's Confessions, with its paradigmatic emphasis on introspection and accountability (Fumaroli 1994: 241, 211, 214). But Fumaroli also makes the case for Descartes' Discourse on Method as a defense of an intellectual life, as highly rhetorical, exemplary of a programmatic use of memory (Fumaroli 1988: 34—8). A. Battistini accepts the Discourse as Vichian model (indeed Fisch claims that Vico's choice of speaking of himself in the third person is a bad-tempered response to Descartes' egotistic use of the first person), but Battistini adds St. Ignatius Loyola's life, and the Jesuit genre of "Spiritual Exercises," as important in shaping the genre as exercise, a "working-out";

XV 430 the Vita is itself a perspicuous and primary contribution to the inquiry (Note 1231-42). The memoir's basic rhetorical obligation is Aristotelian, the justification of the ethos of the speaker. Thus the memoir of inquiry translates a list of personal strengths into innovatory investigative tactics; the life narrative integrates the elements of modesty, struggle, exchange, inspiration into an apt, "decorous" account of a coherent whole: remembrance constitutes a career. If the memoir is the design of memory, narration is the design of the ethos of the narrator. Thus Vico will narrate, he promises, "plainly, step by step," the Vichian development in order to clarify its proper and natural causes (126/18). But this is in contrast to the meretricious Discourse on Method, where Descartes "craftily feigned" (astutamente finse) his life work simply to advance his work at the expense of others' (113/7). Vico mentions the chief influences on his early years - Vulteius, for example, prompted him to better ordering his inquiry (115/8) — but influence is intricated with genius. As a youth, Vico claims he had a mind already universal from a study of metaphysics, already invested in principles. His mind already had begun abstracting the particular conditions of equity into the general maxims of justice (116/10; 123/ 16); yet it was not a genius (ingegno) made rigid by too much metaphysics (118/11). He argues, in short, for his intellectual tact, his aptness. But the dominant topos of the Vichian account is isolation: his interrupted formation, the physical solitude of a stay of "nine years" as tutor in the country (119/12; 128/20) from whence he returns as a stranger in his own land (132/23), the desk that becomes his citadel for retreat (200/85), reinforce the spiritual isolation produced by quarrels, contests, and rejections of his work by an uncomprehending elite ruled by ambition: Descartes designs his theses "in order one day to reign in the cloisters too" ("per avere un giorno il regno anche tra i chiostri") (129/ 22); the vital contrast is between Vico's brilliant strangeness and dysfunctional establishments. But the recollections amplify Vico's major innovations. In the New Science, s. 349, Vico makes his fundamental assertion of replication and reciprocity: "He who meditates this science narrates to himself this ideal human history so far as he himself made it for himself." With this bold statement, Vico summarizes the notion of "idealist" history so fascinating to Croce and Collingwood, and, of course, the practice acquired as described in the Vita. Thus, if the New Science has as both topic and evidence for the history the "modifications of the mind" (NS: 331), the modifications must be internalized, personalized. His axiom, that truth and the "made" are reciprocal, verum factum convertuntur, stipulates the narrative as an account of authorial "making," apoiesis in some very strong, not "literary," sense. Of non-divine ideas, "we make them all by thinking them and contain them all in ourselves" ("e tutte in conoscendo le facciamo, e tutte le contemiamo centre di noi"). Making is necessarily "making in time," and characterizes narrating as well as the narrated (Vita: 127/19). There can be no divarication between Vico's own narrative and the civil history he attempts. The memoir is simply the validation by recollection of his work as his own, the lived

XV Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir

431

practice of ideal human history. And the reader must find this inimitable: he cannot "imitate" Vico, he must "do" his own history. The rhetorical use of memoir has significant consequences for the definition of inquiry (unless, of course, one "fictionalizes" like Descartes). The narrative form, of course, assumes that knowledge comes from practice, from past experience of practice. It does not repudiate formal proof, the tools of argumentation, but embeds standard arguments in the narrative of faulty, attenuating practices; it avoids the begged questions of a dominant formation's treatise genres. The highly rhetorical tactics of the life narrative, dwelling on contests and affiliations and their affects, are perfunctory with orthodox ideas, setting aside the treatise strategies. In the narrative, the engagement with the depiction and justification of the narrator's ethos requires the canon of decorum, aptness, to be applied to his own practice, and thus it is always contextualized in its discontinuities and mistakes, its "timefullness." The practice is not exemplary, imitable, in some simple didactic fashion. The memoir indeed argues self-dependence, and thus curtails interest in dominant inquiry modes, proffering only its own, inimitable practice.

Benedetto Croce: Contribute alia critica di me stesso (1915) Memory as the experience of the past belies pastness; the memoir is of inquiry present, at-hand. This is the essential insight delivered by Croce's Contribute, which he resolutely claims is not a memoir; that is, I suppose, in the usual sense of self-serving academic collections of facts (22/12). Again the recollections of stages, transitions of the narrative, are necessary to illumine the advances in inquiry, the rejection of the inappropriate in theorizing. And if Vico feels he advanced from philology to a "philosophical" philology, Croce's memoir of 1915 describes a progress, from his vital text of 1893, inspired by Vico, History Subsumed Under the General Concept of Art, to the central texts of 1902, 1905, and 1908, the Aesthetic, the Logic, and the Philosophy of Practice: a process in which he learns to discard his early, total involvement with antiquarian Neapolitan history. He transcends, he claims, his work of accumulation of mere erudition (83/49). He discards as well much philosophy, particularly German philosophy: "I burnt my abstract moralisms and learnt that the course of history has the right to bend and break individuals" (59/34-5). While working on the philosophical texts, "it never occurred to me that the spontaneous mental impulse might be pointing out the road on which I should put my best efforts and enjoy my purest pleasures and highest consolations — should find, in a word, my calling" (44/26). Or, in short, his memory is of ignoring pure mental impulses, of unawareness of the deep affect of inquiry; what he recollects is pure incomprehension: "I was driven to philosophy by the longing to assuage my misery and to give an orientation to my moral and intellectual life" (44/26). The ethos the recollections justify is dominated, not so much by the isolation topos we found in the Vichian Vita, as by claims to independence in first assimilating, then

XV 432

superseding, influences from Silvio Spaventa and De Sanctis, from Labriola's Marxism, and from Hegelianism. De Sanctis is an early, and revered, model for historical-critical studies, yet Croce places before us his own improvements over De Sanctis in theoretical sharpness and systemic coherence; it is simply a matter of another (better disposed?) mind redoing the thought — "risolvere il pensiero del De Sanctis in una mente disposta in altro modo dalla sua" (80/47). Marx is used and discarded; Hegel is described as ambivalent, both living and dead, in the famous text of 1906. Croce's text makes an invidious distinction between Croce's recollection practices and the group memories, the group identities of particular schools of Marx and Hegel with their alliances and pieties rooted in a false sense of the piety as directed to the objective and transcendent. And, again, the memory work and the history work coalesce; self-consciously "idealist" in assuming the primacy of mind in creative practices, the text itself is presented as an instrument of investigation: "strumento di lavoro." It is a life narrative collapsed into investigative process. It is always important to note the simplicity, the clarity of Croce's equations of inquiry with life itself; memory, it seems, is still the Aristotelian internal sense that translates and preserves the other senses' work, recollection is simply thinking the past, thinking is simply collection of the self. In the Contribute the recollections are presented to give the strongest possible argument for idealism; he claims "biografia come vicenda esclusivamente di pensiero"; this work, an autobiografia mentale, and history itself is only history of thought — but not of texts.10 The presentation of his development is one continuous testimony to the omnicompetence of recollection as reexperience, of his capacity to internalize and make his own the experiences of others. We do not learn by reading books, "but only by reenacting [this is Collingwood's choice of term] their mental drama in one's own person" (65): "ma col ripetere in se medesimi, sotto lo stimolo della vita, il loro dramma mentale" — with echoes, of course, of Vico's title (38). His major work was the rejection of the transcendental - in the shape of religious belief, or Hegelian telos but transpiring in a process of transcending earlier theory. Yet this transcending work requires remembered life experience, "the experience of that which must first have been lived in one's own person" (83); "che bisogna prima aver vissuto a se stessi" (49). More grandly, "the problem is simply the life of thought as I have lived it" (81); "questo vita stesso, come realmente e particolarmente 1'ho vissuta" (48). He achieves his concept of reality as comprising all particulars by living particularly and really; it is a personal acquisition. When he attacks "mere erudition" he points out that "my real material I have found within myself" (84); "la vera materia 1'ho trovata in me stesso" (49). The strongest impression, the most powerful insights are those of selfknowing; thus whenever he read Hegel, "I seemed to be plunging into myself (96); "d'immergermi in me stesso" (57). From the experience of his own life process, history is defined as development of spirit: he moves, he notes approvingly, from a naturalistic logic to one of spiritual grades and development (93); "di gradi spirituali e della sviluppo" (55). Further, his logic of supersession required a belief in open-endedness, the lack of a religious or

XV Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir

433

Hegelian telos, end; he himself will be material for another's recollective reexperience, his own supercession. It is impossible to attain truth as closure (102; 60—1). "I know that I had completed nothing, closed nothing" — "io sapera che in realta non avero ne compiuto ne chiuso nulla" (108/64); "since whenever we take a step, everything moves"; "perche a ogni paso nostro si muove sempre il tutto" (109/64). Roberts characterizes Croce's history as a perpetually growing, free, creative reality; he offers "mundane idealism," "radical immanence," "mundane monism" as markers of his absolute historicism (Roberts 1987: 64). But the epithets do little to clarify the memoir; rhetorically, Croce has used the Contribute to isolate and revalue memory as competence, practice, resource.

R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939) Once again, we find the recollections presented within a narrative of stages, supersessions, recapitulations, revisions. If Croce disavows his early antiquarian research in the history of Naples in his conversion to a very ambitious theoretical program, Collingwood claims his early, deep investment in archeological method and research as providing a "flanking attack" on Oxonian philosophical dysfunction: Oxford needed some historical scholarship; research can correct positivism.11 The recollections as justifications of Collingwoodian ethos, while they recall Croce's assertion of independence, intensify Vico's claim to isolation. Collingwood's overwhelming priority is to discredit Oxonian "realism"; thus chapter 6, "The Decay of Realism." His attacks on his colleagues take on a tone of truly scarifying personal bitterness; the realists are not simply inept, but meretricious: "only building cardhouses out of a pack of lies" (52). "It would have been quite useless to put [my ideas] before my colleagues" (72). His captatio benevolentiae works by attainder; he attributes "ordinary malevolence" to the philosophers (P40). The isolation he claims is that of a "revolutionary"; he is a revolutionary in his theory that truth belongs, not to single propositions - a notion produced by an early, false partnership between logic and grammar — but to a complex of question and answer (37). This dialogic realm is precisely the domain of history: any solution is illuminated only by its question; to specify the appropriate question for an answer — a cultural practice, a doctrine — is the goal of historical inquiry, an act of historical reconstitution (39). There is, in short, an "appropriate," apt connection of issue and outcome that a decorous history provides. History expounds whole situations (104); metaphysics is simply a history of the changes in absolute presuppositions as the sources of questions, and thus expounds beliefs held, not pure knowledge (66). And again, we notice the coalescence in the memoir text of the memory work presented and the historical work theorized. Like Croce, he regards his life work as the rapprochement of philosophy and history (77). All history is the history of thought (110); the historian must "think over for himself" his material (111). When he argues that to think about philosophies not your own, you must think

XV 434 about them historically (58), he describes this process as a matter of "getting inside other people's heads, looking at the situation through their eyes," accessing their past experience, evidently (58). The hey term we have noted already in Collingwood's translation of Croce: "reenactment." This accomplishment is a highly personal one, a transaction of the self. In chapter 10, "History as Self-knowledge of the Mind," the presence of the historical past is very like the memory possessed; the historical construct is not a "free" thought but "encapsulated" (113); we reenact former transactions within complexes of question and answer; we put our questions, the complex is their part of our history; it is encapsulated, a possession internalized by the agents of later historical situations (98, 100, 112-13). In short, we have "idealism" again, and, again, idealism accounted for in the memory work presented in the memoir. All science depends on our knowledge of past experience (87); the historian asks questions of the past, but the evidence is here. The Vichian modifications of the mind that constitute history, the Crocean history that is, essentially, only contemporary history — both are recalled in Collingwoodian reenactment. And all three recollect recollection, the highly patterned design and presentation of past experience, that energizes history tout court. The high stakes of memoir and history are identity, authenticity. "I must do my own work myself" (54). Every personal narrative is a recapitulation of the experience of time, every historical narrative is a recapitulation of the personal activity of recollection. The integrity of memory is its isolation, self-possession; the beneficence of memoir rhetoric lies in persuading us of the integrity.

Memorial Rhetoric There is a mutually supportive reciprocity: memory is a capacity necessary to the rhetor; rhetoric designs and presents memories for use, effect. The inaccessible memory is lost potential, the memoir is simply one of the strongest formal initiatives for rhetorical display of human capacity. What we have focused on are not the special rhetorical arts of memory — which Quintilian maintained do not exist — but on the rhetorical qualities and constraints of large discursive structures: the strategies of design and presentation of memory. To be sure, Vico made some intriguing statements in his Vita about his memory techniques, and on the effect of pedagogy on memory. Geometry invigorates memory, and refines the imagination, where algebra confounds the memory and imagination goes blind (124—5/16—17). He reports that he did not follow the usual school practice of writing extracts into commonplace books — a decontextualizing tactic, indeed — but marked directly on the texts themselves, laminating them with a layer of Vico, it seems (120/13). He reports that he read the Latin authors three times; he prides himself on reading entirely without notes: that is to say, others' notes, glosses (134/25). All this confirms our sense of Vico's notion of an active memory as competence. But of truly fundamental interest is another reciprocity, that between the program of

XV Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir

435

idealist history — where history is essentially Croce's "self-knowledge of the living mind" — and memoir strategies and results. The important point is the duplications invested in the memoir form and the historical strategies. The memoir, as organization of past experience, is austerely limited to the consciously recalled; the investigational program also limits itself to the author's experience of the past, the process of recollection and understanding. The memoir deals directly and specifically with the historian as Croce's pursuer of "conoscenza individualizzante" (Croce 1958: 31). It engages, indeed, with the reflexivity of history's timefullness and the historian's dailyness. The choice of memoir form by those engaged in projecting the novelties of an idealist historical program is over-determined. To return to Battistini's claim that the Jesuit "spiritual exercise" is a source for Vico's Vita, we can see that for Croce and Collingwood as well the peculiarly rhetorical exercise of writing a memoir generates theory, as a discursive effect, as well as recounts it; thus the isolation topos defines critical distinctions, and the use of decorum as contextualizing principle defines new connections. Each employment of a rhetorical modality - narrative structure, the argument from ethos, the principle of decorum — strengthens the case for investigations' utter dependence on memory work. And in the memoirs of the historical theorists, each employment strengthens the case for history as hegemonous investigation. But also, the pressures from the memoir form are reciprocated by the pressures from the premises and values of the idealist program. Croce, for example, argues that the autobiography of Vico is an extension of the New Science to the biography of the author, to the history of the individual life; and it is just as original, as it is just and true. 12 The argument from ethos, the task of justification of the speaker's character is constrained by the principle of decorum, the necessary selection of the factors apt, appropriate to the time, place, persona of the inquirer's decisions, factors which mark them as "moral," characterful. This contributes to a factitious, dissonant, interrupted account, rich in qualifying detail. The accomplished memoirist produces an "edgy" account, careful and clear in depicting contests, determined to convey the affect of conflict, success, failure. Thus Vico's claim to be "elated" by the confirmation of his theories by new texts; "glad" not to have been derailed from a literary project by timidity (130—1/23—4). But beyond this, the narrative form, with its empiricist bias, its treatment of the life as "evidentiary," as a traditional historical form, produces historical results. The career of the historian-memoirist both illumines and is illumined by his narrative investments. Narratives of recollections of personal acquisition and loss, of revisions and critiques of work, with its insistence on using recollections for reproposing motives, shifts in motives, or for admissions and claims of affects, trauma, only underline the idiosyncrasy of historical work. The memoir form proclaims that, indeed, all the historian has is his past experience in all its roughnesses, dislocations, discontinuities. The memoir is unable to give an account of the narrator as "transcendental subject," but only of an inquirer lodged in ephemera, making theoretical claims. Further, the memoir as site of theoretical discussion has the benefit of avoiding the treatise-genre rules, counters its argumentative constraints, avoids the issues, external

XV 436 to the memoirist's development, and relegates parallel investigative modes. The memoir does not repudiate formal proof, tools of argumentation, but does not give them the final word; it embeds argumentation in a narrative of practice, flawed, openended. Thus, in the Vichian narrative the issues of Cartesian metaphysics appear simply as contributions, useful or not, to the ongoing conversation of Neapolitan intellectuals. The narrative, it seems, conveys a kind of immunity to perdurable varieties of argument. But here Louis Mink raises issues which affect the function of recollective narrative in the historical enterprise; narrative as rhetorical argument, that is. Mink, in his papers on Collingwood, makes two points about Collingwood's theory that are pertinent both to memoir and history work. First he paraphrases Collingwood's premise: what makes a fact "historical" is not its happening in the past, but our rethinking the same thought which created the situation (Mink 1987: 218). And thus, Mink claims, Vico's verumlfactum coalescence merely states that "natural facts" are relevant only to the extent they enter the consciousness of man (263). History is not facts, but experience of facts; history is not "out there," waiting in the wings, so to speak, but mental processing. The memoir is concentrated idealist historiography. Second, Mink claims Collingwoodian narrative form is, in a strong sense, not representing evidence "out there"; narrative "shows" activity, and this has a kind of incorrigibility, immunity. Historical narrative is not evidence for history, it carries its own "ingredient conclusions" (284). Incorrigibility is, of course, not a truth-claim, but a formal claim. The memoir is a similarly autarchic effort, much beholden to its rhetorical tactics for the persuasiveness of its ingredient conclusions. At this point it is useful to compare Mink's autarchic notion of narrative with the "poetic" definition of Verene, in his chapter on "The Idea of Autobiography"; Verene (1991) makes a case for Vichian autobiography as modern — not ancient, Socratic — self-knowledge in the form of a historical narrative, but a narrative that is both historical, as genetic account of the formation of the self, and in the form of a myth, fable (84). Also, the autobiography as narrative of his own humanity enables Vico's philosophy of history, the New Science as autobiography of collective humanity. Here Verene repeats the idealist emphasis on coincidence of memoir and history work (88). What is vital for Verene, however, is that the Vichian narrative, as speech, is poetry: "metaphorical in the sense of transference because in the act of autobiographical writing the self transfers its being into words and thus the reality it makes for itself in words is never what it itself is."1 What Mink and Verene offer us is in effect a choice between a rhetoric of design and articulation of memory as interpretive, or as fundamentally transgressive, tropological. Here, I would argue, one of the useful aspects of memorial rhetoric is that it neatly avoids various rhetorical ideologies. It corrects, I believe, the accounts of Vico's rhetoric as, simply, "tropical." Vico's axiom verum factum convertuntur is the basis for his notion of poiesis, facere, "making." And Vico counters the reduction of poiesis to "poetry" in some literary sense; here one is tempted to gloss Verene's argument that the source of the New Science is in imagination, with Vico's assertion that "imagination is nothing but extended or compounded

XV Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir

437

memory," "la fantasia, ch'altro non e che memoria o dilatata or composta" (NS: 211). Rather, Vico's interest is in broad definitions of cultural practices, "making" such as the invention of the legal fictions of Roman law, for example. And Vico's etymologies disclose the originary metaphor/root not as "transgression" but as simple-mindedness, poverty of maneuver (NS: 405). This is perfectly compatible with the Vichian notion of historical work as "making the narrative for oneself," that would require, on occasion, internalizing barbarism, and that is incompatible with the reduction of rhetoric to a very thin notion of creativity as metaphoric translation, transgression only. Further, the notion of rhetorical figures as "cognitively" powerful, hegemonous, as "prefiguring" entire investigative programs, is dubious insofar as it is a call upon a transcendent source or impulse, an impulse counter to Vichian notions of history transpiring in a process of modifications of the mind, temporally and spatially exactly defined. The assumption that rhetoric is essentially or merely transgressive, tropical, is, perhaps, one of the motives for raising the issue of the "fictionalizing" memoir; we find both Ajello and Willette distressed by Croce's "fictions," his transgressions of truth, of exact spatiotemporal definitions. But the attribution of fiction raises the issue of address: does the rhetorical design of memory specify an audience? What is the relation, in our three memoirs, between the inquirer's narrative of theoretical development and a public practice? If the rhetoric of memory is pervaded by the strong concern for timefullness, appropriateness, contingency, what is the projected temporal dimension of its effect? The discursive practices of the three memoirs are radically different in their accounts of inquiry recollected. Vico recounts the public effect of his new science as almost nil; his isolation and neglect are almost total; he makes few appeals for public effect. Croce intersperses in his texts aspirations to public effectiveness, but proffers a rather banal pragmatism; his "personalized" history prepares the individual for action, illumines action; the later additions to the Contributo are apologetic for his lack of effectiveness in politics. Collingwood offers a stirringperoratio in his last chapter on "Theory and Practice"; he describes a conversion experience. The Spanish Civil War and the international crisis of the 1930s forces him to give up his academic isolation; it "broke up my purpose of detached professional thinker" (167). Yet the chapter functions as simply a. peroratio, a rhetorical cadenza, oratory displaced. The contemporary response to these memoirs and their political effect is, in general, bafflement. Jonathan Israel argues for hypocrisy, insincerity on Vico's part: while he needs to be a Catholic Nominalist, Israel says, he was secretly a radical democratic theoretician (Israel 2001: 664—70). The Vita strategies undercut Israel's argument: Vico achieved, over a long period, and "at great cost," a New Science that, in effect, argues the futility of wishing for an untimely regime (NS: 338). David Roberts (1987) describes, cautiously partisan, Croce's great political difficulties of the 1920s, and again in the 1940s and 1950s; Croce's theory allowed, barely it seems, a switch from anti-liberalism to anti-Fascism. A widespread reaction to Collingwood's polemics is bewilderment at the bitterness of the personal tone.

XV 438 The politics that all three memoirs possess is, in the main, academic politics; if there is a shared motive for persuasive effect, it is a redundant one, reiterating a traditional rhetorical bias. In a sense, all three memoirs use rhetorical skills and assumptions to replay the old quarrels between rhetoric and philosophy, the rhetorical opposition to the ahistorical, objectivist claims of an ill-motivated philosophy. Rhetoric, devoted to discursive effect, with a strong array of premises and values that prompt and critique discursive practice, has an entire armamorium of rhetorical weapons to employ against objectivism. Vico opposes Descartes' scientism, his philosophic commitment to the hegemony of natural philosophy (natural science) in his period. And consider Croce's pleasure in vanquishing a naturalistic logic; his historicist commitment is in part an attack on the philosophical positivist inquiry of the late nineteenth century. And Collingwood's strong rejection of the philosophical realism of Oxford is again an attempt to save historical competences and gains.1 Or the memory task modifies the rhetorical politics. In Heidegger's definition, rhetoric's double interest, in timefullness and in living together, in the use of language to construe community in time, founds the original Greek stipulation of rhetoric, not as an autonomous linguistic techne, but as functioning — entirely? — inside politics (SS1924: 51). Rhetorical interventions are based on politicality, on an ineluctable concern with discursive negotiations. Memoir, pervaded by rhetorical assumptions and techniques, pushes the author/reader relationship into negotiation. Both the author/inquirer and reader/inquirer must negotiate and express modes of practice at once responsive and tenacious. Yet Battistini characterized Vico's Vita as "personalissima e inimitabile" (Note 1241). In the memoir form there are linked immunities; it assumes the incorrigibility of the narrative as non-representational (what could be our basis for questioning the personal acts of "showing"?) and posits the inimitability of the life narrated. The presupposition of memoir rhetoric is purely Heraclitean: the life depicted cannot be done over again. Vichian, Crocean, Collingwoodian accounts of discovery guard their discoveries as irrevocably theirs. The memoir-inquiry not only attempts to foreclose errors, unusable orthodoxies, but also redefines success as isolation, and this defines the reader/interlocutor, in his isolation, as capable of discovery — his own, "timefull," decorous. The isolation topos holds not only for the speaker but also for his audience; the antipathy to authority invalidates the speaker as authority. The Vichian memoir is most enabling: it leaves us unconvinced that Vico intends his reader to fill in the blanks, interstices of his New Science; I am not sure he thinks it possible. But all three memoirs of the discoveries — a Collingwoodian logic of question and answer, a Crocean philosophy as methodology for history, a Vichian verumlfactum equation — simply authenticate future discovery. The unique task of the memoir is to convince the reader of the uniqueness of memory, historical talent. The goal of the memoir is, in brief, the justification of memory, and thus the privileging of the strategies of ordering, articulating memory. Rhetoric's (relativist?) focus on timefullness is the devotion that fuels and disseminates the practices of memory. And the devotion, this essential virtue of rhetoric with

XV Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir

439

its civic, interactive engagements and its illuminations of timely capacity, decorum, aptness, sustains inquiry in general. NOTES But see the perspicuous argument on the centrality of ethos in the Rhetoric in Garver (1994). In Heidegger's SSI924 lectures, when he claims that the Zeitlichkeit of ethos is pollakis, frequency (76), and not Daiier, duration (101), he offers the primary criterion of value of rhetoric, kairos, both as the timely and as the appropriate strategy; to prepon, the decorous, deem, deals with the radical contingency of practical life. In a very odd formulation he defines meson, the ethical choice of the "mean," not as arithmetically arrived at, but as kairos (55, 67). 3 William D. Blattner (1999) has an extensive discussion of Heidegger's switch from a consideration of linear temporality to the hypothesis of a temporal manifold; the notion of a "manifold" of time is pertinent to the discussion of memoir, as the linearity of the narrative is often interrupted, reversed, reiterated. 4 Croce (1927, 1989) are the two editions, henceforth cited with the page numbers of Collingwood's translation first, then the Galasso; thus, 75; 43—4. 5 Max Fisch and Thomas Bergin (1944). I will use this translation and the Italian version of Andrea Battistini (1990); in the second volume, Battistini's notes are invaluable (1231-1315); to be referred to as "Note." Henceforth the Vita will be cited with the page numbers of the Fisch-Bergin translation first, Battistini's edition second. The invitation was by G. A. Di Porcia and it was published in Raccolta d'opmcoli scientific} e filologici, 1 (1728). 6 But see Battistini, Note 1239-40, on the "nine" years; Maria Conforti (2000: 10) argues, as does Battistini, that Vico much exaggerated his isolation. 7 Vico, New Science (1968). Henceforth cited as NS, with the paragraph number. 8 See Galasso, "Nota del Curatore" in his edition of the Contribnto, 105—31, for comments on this switch from scholar to philosopher and the peculiar philosophical voyage of the 1990s. Useful biographical information is scattered throughout the essays in Roberts (1987). 9 Galasso, Note 129; Roberts (1987) defines idealism as simply an assumption of the primacy of mind. 10 Galasso, Note 127. 11 Collingwood (1970). Henceforth cited by page number, as here, 26. 12 Thus Croce: "L'Autobiografia de Vico e in somma, 1'estensione dell Scienza nuova all biografia dell'autore, all storia della propria vita individuate; e il metodo ne e, quanto originale, altrettanto giusto e vero," cited in Verene (1991: 41). 13 Fellman (1992—3: 232) remarks that history itself, to Vice's mind, is "the image in which man recognizes himself," "1'immagine in cui 1'uomo conosce se stesso." Richard Rorty (1982: 41) makes an even stronger, more specific point: "the self-image of the philosopher. . . depends almost entirely upon how he sees the history of philosophy." Thus Rorty (1982: 52) remarks the very heavy personal investment in doing the history of one's discipline', "the whole force of Heidegger's thought lies in his account of the history of philosophy." 14 Verene (1991: 90). But Verene also argues that the Vita, as speculative, not reflective, is essentially "rhetorical," as "topical"; it employs rhetorical invent io, finding arguments in the topoi, places; but Vico's places are images, and thus he is employing an imaginative, poetic rhetoric (84-5). Verene's theory of place-images is very close to one of the memory systems that Quintilian mentions and dismisses (Quintilian 1958: 11.2.21). 1 2

XV 440 15

16

See Thomas Willette's (1999) very insightful article on "Croce and Napoli nobilissima (1892-1906)," where he comments on Ajello's historical anxieties. But the memoir strategies are much more programmatically manipulative than plain "fictionalizing." Some of Collingwood's major themes are "shadowed by" rhetorical arguments; for example, Collingwood's commitment to the analysis of larger discursive structures in his logic of question and answer; his focus on "beliefs" in his definition of metaphysics as a history of absolute presuppositions; the interest in audience reaction as well as speaker intention in his analysis. But I am not claiming that Collingwood self-consciously borrows anti-philosophical weapons from the rhetorical armamorium; many of his critiques of the hegemonous "classical" philosophy are classical in origin, and carried by the rhetorical tradition, among others.

REFERENCES Aristotle (1959). Rhetoric (W. D. Ross, Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Battistini, A. (ed.) (1990). Giambattista Vico Opere, 2 vols. Milan: Mondadori. Blattner, W. D. (1999). Heidegger's Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carruthers, M. (1990). The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cicero, M. T. (I960). De invention? (H. M. Hubbell, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collingwood, R. G. (1970). An Autobiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conforti, M. (2000). "Echi dell'Accademia nell' epistolario di Vico." Bollettino del Centra Studi Vichiani, 30: 93-107. Croce, B. (1927). Benedetto Croce: An Autobiography (R. G. Collingwood, Trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Croce, B. (1958). "Commemorazione di un amico inglese." In Nuove pagine sperse. Serie prima. Vita, pensiero, letteratura. Naples: Ricciardi. Croce, B. (1989). Contribute alia critica di me stesso (G. Galasso, Ed.). Milan: Adelphi. Fellman, F. (1992—3). "Vico e Kant in cammino verso la ragione storia." Bollettino del Centra di Studi Vichiani. 22-3: 213-33. Fisch, M. and T. Bergin (1944). "Introduction." In The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (Fisch and Bergin, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fumaroli, M. (1988). "Ego Scriptor. Rhetorique et philosophic dans le Discours de la methode." In Problematique et reception du Discours de la Methode et des Essais (H. Mechoulan, Ed.). Paris: Vrin (31—46). Fumaroli, M. (1994). "Les Memoires au carrefour des genres en prose"; "Les Memoires, ou 1'historiographie royal en proces"; "Retz: des Memoires en forme de conversation galante." In La diplomatic de I'esprit: De Montaigne a La Fontaine. Paris: Vrin (183—281). Garver, E. (1994). Aristotle's Rhetoric: A Study in Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. (1924). "Grundbegriffe der aristotelische Philosophic." Vorlesung SSI924. Notes of Walter Brocker, Herbert-Marcuse-Archiv. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (W. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Trans.). London: SCM Press. Israel, J. (2001). Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mink, L. (1987). Historical Understanding (B. Fay, E. O. Golob, and R. T. Vann, Eds.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Quintilian (1958). Imtitutio oratoria, 4 vols. (H. E. Butler, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roberts, D. (1987). Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism: (Essays: 1972-1980). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rossi, P. (I960). Clat'is universalis; Art e mnemoniche e logica combinatoria de Ltdlo a Leibniz. Milan: Riccardi.

XV Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir

441

Verene, D. P. (1991). The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vico, G. B. (1944). The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (M. Fisch and T. Bergin, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vico, G. B. (1968). The New Science of Giambattista Vico (T. Bergin and M. Fisch, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vico, G. B. (1990). Giambattista Vico Opere (A. Battistini, Ed.). Milan: Mondadori. Willette, T. (1999)- "E stata opera di critica onesta, liberata, italiana; Croce and Napoli nobilissima (1892—1906)." In The legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views (J. D'Amico, D. A. Trafton, and M. Verdicchio, Eds.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press (52—87). Yates, F. (1966). The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

XVI

Petrarch's Invective contra medicum: An Early Confrontation of Rhetoric and Medicine Petrarch's Invectives against the Doctor is most certainly an archetypical Renaissance confrontation of rhetoric and medicine, as well as a primitive encounter of Humanism and science, or at least pseudoscience.1 It is possible to perform a rhetorical analysis which is simply an account of the rhetorical techniques employed, the figures and the arguments of what is, after all, a rhetorical tour-de-force.2 But to refine our notion of the Invectives as an encounter of an UrHumanist and a proto-science, a Peircian motive for rhetorical analysis is more useful, although I am afraid this requires a brief overview of the Peircian enterprise. C. S. Peirce (1839-1914) was a practising physical scientist, with a life-long fascination with logic; he himself describes an early epiphany, his reading at the age of twelve of his brother's copy of Whately's Logic. Early on, he made an essential amendment: not science but inquiry considered in its broadest gauge is his object; within inquiry, he privileged discovery: in a late assessment of Kepler's astronomy, 1

The edition of the Invective contra medicum I use is that of A. Bufano, in Opere latine diFrancesco Petrarca (Turin: Unione tipografica-editrice Torinese, 1975), vol. 2; on the origin of this text see U. Bosco, "Datazione della Invective contra medicum" in Saggi sul Rinascimento italiano (Florence: Le Monnier, 1970), 217, 227. 2 Conrad Rawski, "Notes on the Rhetoric in Petrarch's Invective contra medicum," in Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later; A Symposium, ed. A. Scaglione (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 249-277, provides an excellent, although Rawski claims by no means complete, technical analysis. Modern Language Notes 108:4 (1993), 659-679. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

XVI 660

for example, he asserted that he was concerned only with the enlargement, not the arrangement or systematization of knowledge. His abiding aim was to discover the logic of discovery, the very structure and process of true, that is, scientific innovation. But his fundamental breakthrough came with his pragmatic maxim: "the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action"; the criterion of a discovery is its practical effect.3 Peirce's formulation of his project went through many stages; his early insistence that all thought transpires in signs founds his semeiotic, and at times logic was subsumed under semeiotic, at times equated with it. But at one point he claimed to refashion the trivium: grammar "studies the ways in which an object can be a sign"; logic "studies the ways in which a sign can be related to the object independent of it that it represents"; while rhetoric is "the science of the essential conditions under which a sign may determine an interpretant sign of itself and of whatever it signifies, or may, as a sign, bring about physical results." Rhetoric, which he calls methodeutic, has the duty of explicating the physical effects of signs.4 While this definition is certainly compatible with the classical notion of rhetoric as the mastery of the arts of persuasion, the serious function of Peircian rhetoric is to describe the practical effects of signs in general inquiry itself. A Peircian rhetorical analysis discloses Petrarch's invective as itself a rhetorical analysis of medical investigative practice, an analysis which concerns itself primarily with the practical effects of words and signs. Petrarch's Invectives against the Doctor, a 1353 reworking of earlier interventions and rejoinders in a quarrel in 1352 over the 3

Peirce describes his early encounter with Whately in a letter to Victoria, Lady Welby, Dec. 4, 1908, published in Semiotics and Signifies; The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. Ch. Hardwick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 85. For the intellectual biography of Peirce, one must rely not simply on Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), but also on the articles of Max H. Fisch in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism, ed. K. L. Ketner and G. J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Fisch is critical of the Collected Papers, ed. Ch. Hartshorne, P. Weiss et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931f.); the new chronological edition, Writings of C. S, Peirce, ed. M. Fisch et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982f.) is not near completion. According to Fisch, the essential articles are the Journal of Speculative Philosophy series, (1867-8), Writings, vol. 2; the "pragmatism" series of the Popular Science Monthly, (1877-8), Writings, vol. 3; and the Monist "evolution" series, (1891-3); also important are a "Guess at the Riddle," Collected Papers, vol. 1; and "The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents," Collected Papers, vol. 7; the Kepler reference is at 7.180. And recently H. Putnam and Ketner have edited the Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898, Reasoning and the Logic of Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 4 Peirce, "Ideas, Stray or Stolen about Scientific Writing, No. 1," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 11 (1978), 147-55.

XVI 661

treatment of Pope Clement VTs illness, taken together with several of the Letters of Old Age which deal with medicine, are in part, of course, motivated simply by a steady ill-temper, nourished by personal encounters.5 And in part, as many students of Petrarch have maintained, it represents an Augustinian, Christian onslaught on "pagan" Averroist science.6 But I shall argue that what is of intrinsic interest is that his negative critique of medicine stipulates a positive program; that from his condemnation of the difficulties of medical practice can be drawn an account of what medical inquiry should, must be. Petrarch insisted in both the Invectives and the late letters that his object was not medicine in general but a doctor or doctors; the particular antagonist in the Invectives was a physician who had responded angrily to his letter to Clement VI warning him against the crowd of physicians besieging him in his illness.7 Yet, the letter recycles Pliny's broad attacks on doctors as a cohesive group, a proto-profession. Thus Petrarch proceeded, like Pliny, to remark the weaknesses of the relation of this group to their field of practice, their mode of inquiry.8 They had, first of all, wrongly conceived this space of medical investigation and practice. Petrarch's primary tactic in the Invectives, a sure-fire rhetorical winner, was to discriminate between the prestigious liberal arts, which dealt with the spirit, and the lowly mechanical arts, such as medicine, which dealt with the body (ICM, I, 828-30; II, 850; III, 896, 938) .9 But the lengthy invec5 I have used, in general, the translation of A. Bernardo, S. Levin, and R. Bernardo, Letters of Old Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 2 vols.; G. Fracassetti, Lettere senile (Florence: Le Monnier, 1869), 2 vols., uses a different text; there is still no critical edition of the Latin; see Opera, (Basel, 1554; reprinted Gregg Press, Ridgewood N.J., 1965), vol. 2. The ill temper is particularly evident in Letters of Old Age, XII, 2, 453; references to volume, letter number and page number in my text are to Bernardo's translation. However, Petrarch's pique did not prevent him from consulting physicians through his frequent ailments, see Thomas G. Benedek, "The Medical Autobiography of Petrarch," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 41 (1967), 332-41. 6 Charles Trinkaus, among others, has emphasised Petrarch's Augustinianism; but see the recent article of Carol Quillen, "A Tradition Invented: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism, "Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992), 179-208. 7 The provocative letter to Clement VI is in Le Familiari, ed. V. Rossi (Florence, Sansoni, 1934), V, 19; Petrarch recounts his confrontation with this doctor in the Seniles, XII, 1, 444; XVI, 3, 613. 8 Petrarch's source is Pliny, Historia naturalia, tr. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), Book 29, 1-8; Petrarch makes repeated use of Pliny, see especially, the Invective, henceforth cited as ICM, I, 828; II, 868, 872; III, 912. 9 The classification of medicine as a mechanical art can be found in Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalion, II, 20; see ICM, 828, fn. 11; Petrarch refers to medicine as a mechanical art also in XII, 2, 454, 466, 473-4.

XVI 662

lives develop the doctors' false approach to their object; their words, the discourse of their university formation and their practice, "spiritualise," render abstract, the body. Petrarch's epithet "mechanical" is rooted in a detailed description of the medical object as physical bodies in physical contexts (ICM, III, 932). Moreover, these are physical bodies in constant movement, in a context of constant change. Bodies and cure are responsive to the seasons of the year as well as season of life: youth, middle age, old age all demand different physical regimens (Sen., XII, 1, 438; XII, 2, 469); all treatments cannot go in lockstep; there are different occasions which need different cures; and, of course, diet and regimen are not simple interventions, but contexts for further interventions, further physical change (XII, 2, 470-1). And, there is a glaring disjunction between the doctors' wordy pretentions to know and the difficult nature of the evidence before them; Petrarch employs the classical topos that the physical bodies do not speak, they offer mute signs: Petrarch, whose classical textual resources are limited, cites several times the passage from Virgil's Aeneid (XII, 397), that remarks the physician as dealing in mute signs, (ICM, III, 938). Yet, when recognised, this medical semiotic must also be an opportunity; the signum is direct testimony of physical states. And the doctor's resources are mute as well: he works with drugs, not words; not colors, (rhetorical), but odors; physics, not rhetoric (Sen., V, 3, 186; Sen. Ill, 8, 108-9; XII, 2, 458; XVI, 3, 614; ICM, III, 938). The muteness, thus absolute need for interpretation, the unceasing physical change, the "volubility" of fortune define the domain: so much uncertainty, such a medley of doubts (XII, 2, 459).10 Second, their flawed concept of their space of operation, is accompanied by a false notion of method; in Peircian terms, their beliefs give rise to improper habits of investigative action.11 For Petrarch, however, the domain of incertitude requires conjectural response, (XII, 2, 459-60). Because of the radical particularity, the ineluctable specificity of the diseases only partly revealed by signs, the physicians' proper, if humble, sometimes degrading, response is mute attention, care in use of signs. Petrarch points to the difficult 10 Fracassetti, Lettere senile, vol. 2, 242-3, translates a passage not found in Bernardo's edition: "Vedi volubilita di fortuna, incertezza ed inutilita della medicina," XII, 2. 11 Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," Writings, vol. 3, 263-4: "The essence of a belief is the establishment of a habit, and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise."

XVI 663

relation of the infinite variety of human symptoms with the doctors' speculative command of a range of drugs, some of them harmful, poisonous (XII, 2, 459). But Petrarch rebukes the doctors for concealing the signs under a cloak of abstract verbiage. In their search for academic prestige, they have developed bad discursive habits which obscure diagnosis and distort cure. At the same time, they are inadequately academic; Petrarch attaints their discursive habits as immature, recalling school books, not adult mastery, "semper scolastice literator, nunquam literatus aut magister" (ICM, III, 928); Petrarch, in contrast, ranks dialectic properly, as via, not terminus, means, not end (ICM, II, 876). It is not clear whether Petrarch was aware of the classical quarrel of the medical sects of the Rationalists and Empiricists; if so, he glosses the quarrel by attacking the Parisian and Oxonian habit of syllogizing as dysfunctional rationalising; it destroys ingenuity; its employment leads to absurd conclusions; their concern with producing definitions, keeps them from engaging in cure (XII, 2, 469; ICM, III, 932).12 He blames the disputations of crowds of physicians Pliny described, the turba dissidentium medicorum (ICM, I, 826, 874), on their inveterate habits of indulging in baseless assertions (XIII, 9, 495-6); their sophistic mode, full of barbarisms, leads only to systematic error (ICM, II, 876f). Obviously, Petrarch disallows a linkage between their dialectic and true science. Consider the function of the defense of poetry in Invectiva III. Poetry balances medicine in Petrarch's overview of mental activity; while the syllogizing habits of the doctors conceal, not reveal the object of their inquiry, poetic invention, under the concealment of figure, reveals truth; obscurity gives the opportunity for intelligent inquiry, exercitii nobilioris occasio (ICM, III, 914). To be sure, science is firm, impermeable, and thus neither medicine nor poetry are sciences; but this eschewal of stability is not an eschewal of utility; when he cites the Horatian maxim that usus is the ius loquendi, he recommends the rightful apprehension of the mutability of words, a rhetorical canon (ICM, III, 898-900). The essential linkage in Petrarchan inquiry as a whole is between truth as goal and 12 On Petrarch and the dialecticians see Pietro Paolo Gerosa, Umanesimo cristiano delPetrarca; Influenza agostiniana, attinenze medievali (Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1966), 208f. V. Nutton remarks that a good manuscript of Galen's works was available at the papal court in 1353,/o/m Caius and the Manuscripts of Galen, (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1987), vol. 13. Petrarch seems to collapse dialectic and logic; on this issue see Eleonore Stump, Dialectic and its Place in the Development of Medieval Logic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

XVI 664

liberty of practice; his praise of the liberal arts is as of a liberating practice (ICM, I, 822; II, 856).13 The poet works to find and present values and situations of strenuous human import; he adjures the doctors to be not professors of medicine, but of healing (XVI, 3, 614). He contrasts unfavorably the career of the meddlesome dialectician with that of the sordid trade of surgeon (XII, 2, 459). Doctors read everything, he complains, neglecting only medicine (XV, 14, 593; cf. XVI, 3, 614); yet he denies that the physicians even know what philosophy is (XV, 14, 594). To be sure, he asks them to delve more deeply into the causes of things, and not to be so ready to dispense remedies (XVI, 3, 614). Yet his focus is on liberality of speculation, useful conjecture (ICM, I, 822, 824, 826); he contests hard and fast precepts, used without experience (ICM, I, 828, 836, 840). But whose experience? What kind of experience? Petrarch's third concern is that the confusion, willful confusion about conceptual space is linked with a very dysfunctional sense of mind/body relations. The same very daunting psychological issues confront the doctor as well as the rhetor; the passions affect bodily health as well as moral, civil health. While Petrarch distinguished the liberal arts, which deal with the spiritual, from the mechanical arts, which deal with the corporeal, he also reminds the physicians that regimen concerns the anima as well as the body; food acts on the soul as well as the body; the passions of the soul constitute a parameter of cure (XII, 2, 466). The most important mind/body connection in medicine lies in the domain of confidence, fiducia; affect colors inquiry as well as cure, and Petrarch distinguishes between his own desire for the good, desiderium et affectum boni, and the bad passions, primarily cupidity, of the doctors (ICM, II, 860), and between the proper selfconfidence, fiducia, of a practitioner and arrogance, superbia (ICM, II, 856). But it is confidence in the patient-doctor relation which is crucial; Petrarch warns of the dangers of credulity in doctors (V, 3, 167; XII, 1, 450); he warns as well of the dangers of incredulity, (XVI, 3, 615), the isolation of his fear of doctors (XV, 8, 582). Confidence is a need as well as a danger, then; he emphasizes the usefulness of hope in helping the body, without harming the soul (III, 8, 109). The doctor is to make confident, to inspire faith, and 13

Horace, Ars poetica, tr. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 71-72.

XVI 665

this is the traditional emphasis; but there is a typically Petrarchan twist to the issue of confidence in the exchange of letters between Petrarch and the Paduan physician, Giovanni Dondi, (XII, 1 and 2). Petrarch replied to Dondi's prescribed regimen and diet with an account of his own regimen; as he launches into a spate of almost enchanting self-concern he essentially reduces the issue of cure to a personal, familiar one. Health is a matter of individual apperception, one's mental grasp of the body one inhabits. It is the patient's observation, the internal counsel of nature, "that inner infallible consultant," not nature simple that must guide; he follows the "laws of nature and my inveterate custom" (XII, 2, 463, 465). Confidence is self-confidence; persuasion is self-persuasion in this revisionary mode of mind-body relations. For in an intriguing shift of perspective, Petrarch seems to maintain that it is the patient's selfconfidence in this counsel and his ability to communicate this counsel to the physician that counts; Petrarch's narrative, the case history he relates at length, is pertinent to medical diagnosis as well as cure. To be sure, this insistence on doctor as listener is somewhat inconsistent with his contention that doctors deal primarily with mute signs. In this late exchange with Dondi, Petrarch's confidence is in his self-knowledge; his own experience, not the doctor's, is instructive (XII, 1, 449). Still, the Invectives, and the letters as well, are primarily concerned with a fourth issue, medicine as practice, as intervention. And the rhetorical interest in analysis of practical effects of signs dominates; he urges a doctor in a late letter not to be one of those who argue, but one of those who cure—if there are any (XVI, 3, 616). The discursive interventions of doctors are harshly treated; syllogizing not only distorts diagnosis, it is ineffective, not persuasive (XII, 2, 461). It is often diversionary: he attacks those who promise us health, but stuff us with syllogisms (XVI, 3, 614); XII, 2, 232); physicians do indeed use rhetoric, but to hide their defects, (ICM, III, 934).14 Proper medical discourse is modest, unadorned, (III, 8, 109); for the physician to intervene he must be regarded by the patient as "expert in his art, diligent in observation, worthy not 14

Petrarch is not above employing syllogizing, in deepest irony, of course; see ICM, III, 932: "Certe ego nunc risu et verecundia impedior sillogismum tibi tuo parem mittere, quo probem te vilissime servum rei. Quod urbanius possum dicam: si quod alio spectat, et ad aliud refertur, et propter aliud est inventum, illi serviat oportet, ut tu vis. Medicina autem tua pecumian spectat et ad illam refertur et propter illam est. Conclude, dyaletice: ergo pecunie serva est."

XVI 666

through wordiness, but through sincerity, for his office is not to persuade, but cure" (III, 8, 109-10). Petrarch sees a double difficulty in medical practice; on the one hand, there is a strict obligation to intervene, a necessity to practice: medicine is not an abstract art (XII, 2, 458). And, of course, his insistence that he attacks not the discipline, medicine, but the practitioners, the medici, underlines this practical focus. But when Petrarch concedes that medicine is more necessary than poetry, he accompanies this concession with strenuous disattributions of capacity to intervene.15 He dismisses the doctors as "spectators" (III, 5, 98); like the dialecticians, they are rich in tedium, poor in remedies (V, 3, 167).16 Here, of course, Petrarch can draw on Christian as well as classical sources for this disattribution; he will ascribe cure or health to Providence, not the physician (XV, 14, 594-5; XVI, 3, 613-4). When he describes some physicians as Averroists he is condemning their religious orientation as troublesome, interfering, (ICM, II, 878). But the strongest constraint on medical efficacy in practice is also its primary source of efficacy; the canon of decorum rules; Petrarch again and again returns to decorum, this primary rhetorical imperative, as defining the primary medical obligation. The goal is the appropriate, the apt response to that ineluctable variability of symptom and time (ICM, II, 866; III, 900; XII, 2, 470). The necessity of practice, coupled with the ineradicable specificity of situation, make particular interventions the ones doctors make. Petrarch at no point goes beyond the traditional medical, rhetorical, or ethical discussions of decorum as criterion. Petrarch makes pious sounds about moderation; he seems to have a rule; but he disagrees with Cicero that it is mediated by doctor's skill (XVI, 3, 615; cf XII, 2, 464-5) ;17 indeed, his moderation is simply an attitude that accompanies decorum, an aspect of appropriate practice. Petrarch as rhetor, accustomed to working in a domain of probabilities, working with conjectures, aware of the power of the passions 15 Petrarch also argues that the more necessary is not by that more noble: "Igitur putas necessitas artium nobilitatem arguat. Contra est; alioquin nobilissimus artificum erit agricola; sutor quoque et pistor et tu, si mactare desieris, in precio eritis," ICM, III, 894-6; cf. Ill, 910. 16 ". . . the doctor had done nothing at all, nor could he have except what a loquacious dialectician, rich in boredom and lacking in remedies, can do"; "Medicum nil omnino vel fecisse, vel facere potuisse, nisi quod dialecticus loquax potest, taedii dives, inopsque remedii." 17 Cicero, De offidis, tr. W. Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 2, 24, 86.

XVI 667

and the necessity for the orator to intervene, and accepting the canon of decorum, has found little difficulty in describing the physicians' modest grasp of a physical realm of uncertainty, which requires a conjectural response to mute signs; he easily concedes the difficult context of mental/physical linkages, and most readily insists on the physicians' obligation to intervene in a decorous manner. It is fortunate, then, that medicine is the one natural science Petrarch took an interest in, since his rhetorical habits allow him to isolate what is most intriguing in medicine for inquiry in general, considered in its broadest range. Petrarch's double definition, of bad medicine and good poetry, delivers a concept of inquiry in general that pursues true invention and real efficacy. Again, Petrarch's negative critique addresses a positive program to the doctor: because you are working in a conceptual space invested with uncertainty, you must not ignore uncertainty; because you are limited to mute, physical signs, you must confront these signs of health and illness with conjectures which will aptly, decorously respond to individual cases; there are complex mind/body issues which require and determine your practices; you are engaged in a mechanical intervention, a practice which is necessary, where theory is ancillary; you must acknowledge a complementary model of mind/body, liberal/mechanical practices. What is of Peircian interest is the place of Petrarch's design in the general history of inquiry in the Renaissance. But, since the elements of this program are to be found in the classical medical tradition itself, the same elements make appearances in the contemporary Scholastic treatises, the texts of Petrarch's enemies; the negative definition of positive capacity is certainly embedded in an archetypical text, Pietro d'Abano's Conciliator of the Differences of the Philosophers and Doctors, completed in the early 14th century. Pietro d'Abano assuredly had the Parisian training Petrarch laments (XII, 2, 469); he taught at Bologna, a hotbed of "Averroism," before moving to Padua in 1306. He incorporates syllogisms in his arguments, and cites Averroes as The Commentator; indeed, he was attacked as Averroist by the Dominicans of St. Jacques in Paris, although Bruno Nardi maintains that he did not hold central Averroist tenets.18 But d'Abano is, arguably, more Classicist than Pe18

I use the edition, Conciliator controversarium quae inter philosophos eet medicos versantur (Venice: apud Juntas, 1548). Nancy Siraisi's discussion of d'Abano in Arts and Sciences at Padua; The Studium of Padua before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973), is excellent. D'Abano notes the attack on him as Averroist by the Dominicans in Differentia 48; Nardi contests the notion of d'Abano as Averroist in "La teoria dell'anima e la generazione delle forme secondo Pietro d'Abano,"

XVI 668

trarch; he worked directly from the Greek in his revisions of translations of Galen.19 The Conciliator, as conciliation, most certainly requires the presentation of the probabilist, conjectural, particularising constellation of factors. The scholastics' Classicism, as well as Petrarch's, recaptures the disputes as well as the doctrines. The same four parameters selected for inclusion accuse untidiness, but enable practice; the parameters of dis-ease are the parameters of efficacy. Conciliation, indeed, represents a peculiarly supple generic choice. The tone is surely intellectualist: he begins by asserting the importance of all seven liberal arts for medicine and in particular, logic, as the modus sciendi communis (4v). Nancy Siraisi has remarked the significance of the institutional context, since at both Bologna and Padua the arts and the medicine faculties were joined.20 Tellingly, d'Abano's tone is not contestatory, but accommodating; the aim seems to underwrite the presentation of the classical medical disputes in a fairly rich and quite even-handed manner; indeed, the weight of the argument shifts, in a balanced, even problematic fashion. The texts selected advance, in a pleasant way, the notion of medicine as both science and practice, as both theoretical and intervening. In Differentia 3, An medicina sit scientia cum eius appenditiis, we find the development of an interest similar to Petrarch's in the conceptual space of probability, uncertainty; and, he gives a very generous account of the classical linkages of uncertainty of domain and conjectural response that Petrarch had noted: medicine deals with the corruptible and mutable, the cure heals individual men, and does not pertain to universal man (5v).21 Whether d'Abano argues for or 1-17, and "Intorno alle dottrine filosoflche di Pietro d'Abano," in Studi sulla tradizione aristotelica net Veneto, I: Saggi sull'Aristotelismo padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), 19-74. P. O. Kristeller makes the point that Petrarch's opponents in the De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia were probably Bolognese, not Paduans, in "Petrarch's 'Averroists'; A Note on the History of Ajristotelianism in Venice, Padua, and Bologna," Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 14 (1952), 59-65. The continuing popularity of the Conciliator is attested by a seventeenthcentury epitome, Conciliator enucleatus sen differentiarum philosophicarum et medicarum petri apponensis Compendium, Gregori Lorsti, acad. Giessena (Giessae: Casparus Chemlinus, 1621). 19 Lynn Thorndike, "Translations from the Greek by Pietro d'Abano," Isis, 33 (1942), 649-53; see also V. Nutton, "Galen on Prognosis," Corpus medicorum graecorum, 8.1.1 (1979), 27. 20 Siraisi, Arts and Sciences at Padua, c. 1, "The Studium of Padua," 15f. 21 See the argument cited in Differentia 3, (8r): ". . . medicari non est scientia

XVI 669

against medicine as science, for or against medicine as mechanical art, he retains his probabilistic, particularist focus, for the tactic of conciliation defines medicine as both theory and practice. In Differentia 1 he cites medicine as scientia particularissima (4r), but this is one of a series of characterisations; medicine is also described as an art, a habitus of right action; or, as theory, it is a science, as practice an art (6r f.) But even more intriguing is his discussion in Differentia 135, An confidentia infirmi de medico conservat in salutem, of discursive interventions by the doctor. Like Petrarch, d'Abano explains confidence, fiducia, in terms of mind/body relations, and he utilises a wide range of classical formulations of the intimacy of these relations as the context for practice; he cites Galen's claim that by intervention of the mind only the body can be cured; he notes the use of the principle of decorum: more "tender" patients are more susceptible to persuasion. Petrarch realised the importance of hope; d'Abano cites instances of the sick being led into convalescence through the hope of a famous doctor, and cites as well the claims that actions dependent on confidence are more efficacious than some manual, pharmacological interventions. His arguments demonstrate his flexibility, his sense of the range of pertinent factors in the creation of confidence. And, again appealing to decorum, he relates that the notions sited in the imagination heal more than those in the intellect, because of their particularity, as opposed to the universality of opinions. There is, of course, an insistent and useful emphasis on the corporeal contribution to the psychology of confidence. The intellect must abstract from the phantasy, but the phantasy is in the likeness of the corporeal, and a confidence subsisting in the intellect depends, therefore, on sense. Here he cites Aristotle: "nihilsit in intellectu quinprius fuerit in sensu." The intellect, as more distant from sense than the imagination is less particular, and therefore less sure. But, like Petrarch, he enjoins a religious dimension; d'Abano cites Matthew as well as Aristotle: ''fides tua te salvam fecit" (201r).22 Indeed, d'Abano shows himself much less hostile than Petrarch to the discursive interventions which address states of mind of the directe: sed quidam actus et labor particularis, et de tali nulla est scientia . . . regulat in actu operandi particularem et tune consequitor medicinae finis perfecte, quod ostenditur." 22 Nardi notes with alarm d'Abano's emphasis on the importance of praecantatio to fiducia, Saggi, 37; however, d'Abano's astrological interests can be read more cheerfully as an early variety of cosmic environmentalism.

XVI 670

patient; he not only cites Galen's Prognosticon—"he who persuades best, heals best"—but utilises classical references, to be found in rhetorical as well as medical texts, to the interactions of the body and the passiones animae; confidence is, of course, a passio animae (201r).23 In contrast, Petrarch rather incoherently disallows medical eloquence as dysfunctional in his letter to Pope Clement VI, while recommending to him at the end of the letter a proper frame of mind, good cheer, as conducive to health.24 In short, we could argue that d'Abano includes a rhetorical analysis, and his vital strategy is a psychological mapping onto practical effect. But a Peircian focus on the practical requires not simply taking account of the practical resonances of investigative program; rather, Peircian methodeutic, rhetorical reconstruction of inquiry requires a pragmatic account of the construction of inquiry itself, for the most important practical effects for Peirce are in inquiry itself, in the actions and revisions of action and attitude of a community of inquirers. Peircian rhetoric would address the community as a whole, redescribing the Petrarchan confrontation with the doctors as a stage of negotiation in the construction of inquiry in general; Petrarch and his Scholastic opponents actively need each other, and interactively define themselves.25 Book III of the Invectives, the attack on medicine and the defense from the medical attack on poetry, is an account of interactivity, an example of a specific act of selfcharacterisation. And in Book IV these tactics of self-definition go to the remarkable length of distinguishing the proper ambiance, the 23 The connection between confidence and the passions, between persuasion and biological and psychological factors is made as well in rhetorical treatises; see Terence O. Tunberg, "What Is Boncompagno's 'Newest Rhetoric?' ", Traditio, 42 (1986), 299-334; Boncompagno applies the medical doctrine of the four humors to delivery, declaring that the different dispostions, (sanguinei, cholerici, phlegmatici, et melancholia] have different styles of voice and gesture, Rhetorica novissima, Bibliotheca luridicaMediiAevi, ed. A. Gaudenzi (Bologna, 1892), vol. 2, 260, (316). And d'Abano recommends not simply the use of rhetoric in persuasive practice, but the use of rhetorical figures to explain medical theory, Differentia 1, 3v. 24 Familiari, V, 19, 61-64: "Ad hec et exactam tui custodiam et, que ad salutem corporis miris modis adiuvant, spem bonam ac letum animum habeto, si te, si nos omnes, si tecum egrotantem Ecclesiam salvam cupis." 25 Vincent Crapanzano argues that identities, self-characterisations are instants, momentary interruptions in a process; identity is the product of interactive moments, negotiations between self and other. Further, there is a "Third," 25. a guarantor of the language of identity formation, Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire; On the Epistemology of Interpretation, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. 95; to be sure, it is the "Third," the guarantor of language, which is at issue with Petrarch and the Scholastics.

XVI 671

right physical context of these roles as a nourishing solitude on the one hand, and the city with its vicious temptations as well as opportunities for practice on the other. The Invectives show Petrarch developing and testing his identity as inquirer; the Averroists, the medici, are simply an extreme test, a radical occasion for Petrarchan selfconstruction (ICM, I, 836, 844).26 There are, as well, affinities between Petrarch and his opponents. The most marked affinity between the contestants is activity; their classicism is not passive reading, but active interference; they require a rational critique of classical authority. In the letters of Petrarch and the Paduan physician Giovanni Dondi, there is an interest in novelty that shadows the debate of Ancients vs. Moderns.27 Counter-intuitively, Dondi, in the letter to Guglielmo Centeuri edited by Neal Gilbert, takes the side of the Ancients: Dondi excoriates the modern physicians as investigating only the surface, where the Ancients probe the depths, and he associates profundity with true innovation.28 Petrarch, on the other hand, asserts that Hippocrates does not add one iota to Dondi's work (XII, 1, 438; cf. XII, 2, 473); Dondi's invoking Hippocrates' or Galen's authority is simply that, an invocation (V, 2, 173; XII, 2, 454, 456; ICM, IV, 966); and Petrarch claims he can not react to Galen, but to a contemporary crowd of loquacious Galenists, a typical "Humanist" strategy of segregating dysfunctional modern readings (ICM, I, 830; V, 3, 173).29 Or, Petrarch will discriminate between the enduring authority of Cicero on oratory and the false, specious authority of doctors (XII, 26 Tiziana Pesenti, "Generi e pubblico della letteratura medica padovana nel tre e quattrocento," in Universitd e societd nel secoli XII-XVI, Atti del nono convegno internazionale di studio tenuto a Pistoia (1979), (Bologna: Presso le sede del Centre, 1982), 523-545, describes the conflation in late fourteenth-century Padua of literary and scientific interests, genres, sodalities on "popular" as well as professional level, see especially 544-5. See as well the discussion of Katharine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 198f, 220f. 27 Neal W. Gilbert, "A Letter of Giovanni Dondi dall'Orologio to fra Guglielmo Centeuri; A Fourteenth-century Episode in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns," Traditio, 34 (1978), 299-346; see note 1, 301, on the Petrarch-Dondi exchange. 28 Gilbert, "A Letter of Giovanni Dondi," Latin version, 335; English translation, 343; "Que vere de novo inveniantur scientie absurdum est quaerere, tarn exigue sunt aut nulle. Satis est et abunde modernis si illorum queant tantum superficies attingere, que veteres illi altissime tractavere." Gilbert cites from Dondi's reply to Petrarch on the need for a rational critique of authority, 311. 29 ICM, I, 830: "Ita enim de illo scriptum video; nee excipitur Galienus, coetanus— nisi fallor—suus, vir et ipse non indoctus, sed indoctorum atque loquacium abundantissimus successorum."

XVI 672

2, 458); he also points to the historical supersession of Greek authority by the Latins (XII, 2, 472). He is unintimidated by the Greek learning of the medici; he insinuates that the doctor's use of Greek terms is pretentious, not practical (V, 3, 173). And, besides a rational critique of authority, the medical problems require a particularistic critique of rational systems; Petrarch asks, rhetorically, why should a Greek or Arab who never saw me, and was buried a thousand years before I was born, know me better than I do? (XVI, 3, 615) Petrarch's individualised approach to the counsels of nature is a reinvestment of the basic affinity of rhetoric and medicine: both Dondi and Petrarch see their disciplines as practical, both are engaged in individual intervention, both are committed to strategies of decorum, to the pursuit of the apt. Petrarchan activity defines him not simply as a reader of texts, not merely a hermeneut in pursuit of "meanings"; he proffers both a non-trivial objection to pure theory, and a non-trivial obligation to intervene. A more accurate historical account of these 14th century modes, then, requires an exchange of epithets: the "scholastics" are more Classicist, the Humanists more scientifically astute than in the usual opposition.30 Further, there are Petrarchan and Scholastic affinities within a larger Renaissance community of inquirers, longitudinally considered. Both Petrarch and Pietro d'Abano assemble materials which will be reassembled in the 16th century Humanist texts Nancy Siraisi considers, Agrippa von Nettesheim's De incertitudine, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola's Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium, and Juan Luis Vives' De causis corruptarum artium; all these texts describe the conceptual space of uncertainty in medicine as in other disciplines.31 But the affinity with Petrarch and d'Abano is a produc30 Cesare Vasoli, "Per un ricognizione delle fonti della storia della scienza in Italia," Profezia e ragione; Studi sulla cultura del Cinquecento e del Seicento (Naples: Morano, 1974), 405-75, notes the importance of d'Abano in his project of "rethinking" the texts; Vasoli regards him as typical of very diffuse, wide-ranging naturalistic interests; that this range includes magico-astrological elements as well as medicalphilosophical ones is significant, not stupid, 413; Vasoli argues that our focus should be, not on the fourteenth-century figures as precursors of modernity, but as engaged in "problemi squisitamente fllosofici e questioni fondamentali di metodo," 417. Vasoli notes the long quarrel between "i sostenitori della 'continuita' tra la tarda scienza scolastica e la nuova scienza galileiana e postgalileiana e coloro che accentuano invece fortemente il contributo della cultura umanistica alia nascita di una nuova mentalita e di un diverse e fecondo atteggiamento scientifico," 423. 31 N. Siraisi, "Medicine, Physiology and Anatomy in Early Sixteenth Century Critiques of the Arts and Sciences," in New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought, ed. John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London: Duckworth, 1990), 214-229.

XVI 673

tive affinity, and suggests a productive, not nihilistic skepticism; this strand of skeptical approach functions as a stage, or level, an incomplete strategy recognising inconclusiveness. Uncertainty functions as discipline as well as limitation, and skepticism acts as a mode of inquiry that evaluates probabilities, refines hypotheses within a world of irregularities. And, most importantly, the skeptical habits of interest are those, and those only, which are responsible to the concrete, particular demands of practice. This skepticism does not simply question dogmatic assertions, naive epistemology; rather, it is a component of specific projects of investigation that must result in specific interventions; rhetoric and medicine as intervening disciplines require peculiar habits of investigation. And, there are affinities with the classicism of some of the medical texts of the late 16th and 17th centuries, with Argenterio and Lionardo Di Capoa, for example.32 Argenterio presents a perspicuously anti-authoritarian reading of Galen; and Di Capoa refuses to lament the loss of many Greek medical texts; if they were like the ones saved, there would be small loss. Humanism, I would argue, is in nuce post-Humanism, there is continuously present a line of antiauthoritarian, fragmented, disinterring use of classical sources: a pragmatic motive, to be sure. Further, incertitude itself is regarded as liberating. Thus Argenterio argued the absolute lack of certitude in medicine in making a case for freedom of inquiry; Di Capoa's conviction of the uncertainty of medicine also motivates his pleas for a policy of political tolerance of intellectual diversity. The distance between conjecture and practice, hypothesis and remedy, (chemistry is an example), militates against naivete. He is acutely aware of the disastrous connection of dogmatic medical systems and violent, damaging cures; he warns against premature systemic applications, having well in mind the hair-raising results of the new chemical nostrums. The original confrontation of an Ur-Humanist with a protoscience raises the problem of the investigative response to uncertainty in a very modest way; the response is rooted not in the domain of metaphysics and doctrine, but in very specific, often informal, human occasions. And in the succession of Renaissance texts which deal with medicine, scepticism is not a metaphysical gesture, but a 32 N. Siraisi, "Giovanni Argenterio and Sixteenth-Century Medical Innovation," Osiris, 2nd series, 6 (1990), 161-80; Lionardo di Capoa, IIparere, 2nd ed. (Naples: Ruillard, 1689). On di Capoa, see Michel Rak, "Una teoria dell'incertezza; (note sulla cultura napoletana del sec. XVII)," Filologia e letteratura, 15 (1969), 239-97.

XVI 674

productive practice, in so far as its cause and duties are radically particular; that is to say, in this domain, scepticism is not simply an epistemological, but a practical, even an ethical imperative. This modesty is corrective of a simplistic, immodest modern historiographical moment. Nicholas Jardine assures us that natural science as we know it is a nineteenth-century concept; Humanism most certainly owes its strong definition to nineteenth-century historians.33 The major effort in the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of this science has been to trace the development of a dominant Cartesian-Galilean paradigm of demonstrative deduction within academic practices and "high" science. Recently, however, historians have engaged in a different strategy, searching for the roots of an alternative model of inquiry in anti-academic, at times Humanist practices and the "low sciences." Ian Hacking has argued for the emergence of a new conceptual space in the seventeenth century, a space engendered by what he calls the "loss of certainty" in the Renaissance, and marked by a double definition of probability, epistemological and statistical.34 Carlo Ginzburg, in deploying his new evidentiary paradigm, uses a seventeenth-century connoisseurphysician, Giulio Mancini, to exemplify the vogue for inquiry which is presumptive, conjectural, inconclusive, and which he opposes to a Cartesian-Galilean paradigm of demonstrative certainty. It is pertinent to our argument that Hacking maintains the importance of the "low sciences," which include medicine, for the development of anti-authoritarian reading, and probabilistic strategies; Ginzburg sees the classical medical semiotic as a model for the investigation which deals conjecturally with mute traces.35 While the notion of the medicine of the early modern period as a 33

N. Jardine, "Demonstration, Dialectic, and Rhetoric in Galileo's Dialogue," in The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. D. Kelley, R. H. Popkin, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 102, cites S. F. Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York, 1978), and E. Bellone, A World on Paper; Studies in the Second Scientific Revolution, tr. M. and R. Giaconni (Cambridge, 1980). D. Pietropaolo, in "Grassi, Vico and the Defense of the Humanist Tradition," New Vico Studies, 10 (1992), 1-10, claims the first use of "Humanism" as movement is in Friedrich I. Niethammer, Der Streit des Philanthropomismus und Humanismus in der Theorie des Erziehungsunterrichts unsre Zeit (Jena: Fomman, 1808). 34 Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability; A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 35 Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidentiary Paradigm," in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, tr. J. and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96-125.

XVI 675

fertile domain for scientific advance seems hilarious, the obvious faults and hilarity owe in no small measure to the dominance of systemic theory, the dogmatising Petrarch had warned about. The peculiar felicity of the medical domain for the emergence of the new conceptual space and the new paradigm lies in its untidiness, its resistance to colonisations by deductive tautologies; medicine's modest recognition of intractable irregularities funds its receptiveness to a logic of discovery, and a practice of decorum. And just so, Stephen Toulmin and Albert Jonsen's Abuse of Casuistry connect the deliberative practice of seventeenth-century moral casuistry, functioning under the rubric of Probabilism, with the investigative strategies and practices of the modern medical clinician; both casuistry and clinical work are decorous practices, geared to produce the apt response to particular problems.36 I am arguing the intrinsic interest of the medical domain for the history of inquiry in general in the Renaissance: the conjunction of issues—mind/body; probability; the place of conjecture; the necessary inconclusion; the demands of semiotic, of non-discursive signs plus the intricate relations of the classical vocabularies of investigation—Aristotelian, Galenic, Empiricist; the intrusion of new natural scientific investigative material from Paracelsian chemistry and comparative anatomy; the coincidence with other "spiritual" interests in modes of healing spirit as well as body—all combine to make medicine a complex but challenging source of questions, and in particular, for questions which find no facile conclusions, readily accessible, easily acceded to. But just here we must note the productive affinity of rhetoric and medicine; it is the pairing of rhetorical and medical interests which is perspicuous, which allows the development of a new conceptual space and activity. Certainly Petrarch's rhetorical predilections focussed interest on fundamental medical issues. The basic affinity of rhetoric and medicine lies in their adherence to decorum as canon, the privileging of the appropriate response to radical particularity. They share decorum as strategic practice because they share perceptions of the domain of events they must address as uncertain, a sense of civil or bodily health as confusedly individualised. And they share as well, as we have seen in Pietro d'Abano, the old Sophistic, indeed Gorgian, then Pyrrhonian, insight into "our susceptibility to linguistic confiscation." Again, it is the modesty, impurity of the do36 Albert R. Jonsen, Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry; A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

XVI 676

main which is useful; it furnishes not a guarantee, but an opportunity for discovery. The flexibility of poetic invention and of decorous rhetorical/medical response generate useful habits of investigative action. Then, as Toulmin has pointed out, flexibility is the criterion and goal of the very mechanisms of rhetorical training; a large part of textbook instruction, and in particular the manuals available to Petrarch, Cicero's De inventions and the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herrenium, instill the habits of controversial action, debate in utramque partem; these habits must take account of and function in the conceptual space of the merely probable, the radically uncertain, which is, of course, medical as well as rhetorical space.37 In no sense, of course, does Petrarch break new experimental ground in physical research in his invectives; on the other hand, both in the invectives and the letters he advocates an investigative as well as treatment program of specific interest, practical use, and considerable tact, given the state of fourteenth-century research. What might be read as cheap shots, simple dispraise, in effect reiterates the parameters of diagnostic action. In so far as Petrarch's rhetorical analysis is Peircian, focussed on the practical effects of signs, it tends to develop a Peircian description of inquiry. Peirce, in his alternate account of inquiry, by setting the priority of hypothesis to proof, approves the hard work of hypothesis, abduction working within a domain of probabilities, refining conjectures in response to intractible uncertainty.38 But what is most intriguing is the return of the old mind/body issues, the psychological factors. Most certainly the passions constitute another paired interest of orator and physician. The vital connection for the Renaissance medical treatises was between confidence and cure, for Peirce between beliefs and the habits of action of inquirers within inquiry. Peirce's work, from the early Journal of Speculative Philosophy articles of 1867-68 on was strongly anti-Cartesian. But Peirce's fundamental disagreement was with Cartesian psychology, and he argued that Descartes' plot of moving from an exhaustive skepticism to an omnicompetent intuitionism was incapable of explaining dis37 Tom Conley's excellent short history of rhetoric, Rhetoric in the Western Tradition, (London: Longmans Green, 1990), is one of the few surveys which emphasises the relation between rhetoric and inquiry modes; he stipulates as one of the four major rhetorical initiatives the "controversial"; by this he indicates an investigative moment which deals exclusively with the probable. 38 On the predominance of irregularity in scientific investigation see Peirce, "A Guess at the Riddle," Collected Papers, 1.406.

XVI 677

covery. Peirce later claimed his pragmatism stemmed from a psychological thesis—that beliefs are that which dispose to action—of Alexander Bain's Mental and Moral Science of 1868.39 Peircian pragmatism focuses on beliefs as energizing inquiry, on the practical choices of action within inquiry itself; he shifts interest from science as a system of acquired facts, a structure of "dead certainties," to science as a mode of life, invested with psychologistic interventions. The psychological funds the practical, just as the probabilism funds abduction. Peirce substituted for a Cartesian solipsist psychology a communitarian model of interactivity, transpiring over an indefinite period of time, dealing in a conjectural, tentative fashion with the irregularities of the vast majority of phenomena. "Truth" and "reality" are the products of communal agreements in the very long run indeed; they have no value as individual intuitions, private ideas, no matter how clear and distinct. Thus, taking into consideration both the Renaissance rhetoricalmedical mind set and the accounts of Hacking, Ginzburg, and Toulmin, one could argue, in a Peircian way, for an alternate inquiry mode as persisting historically through the Renaissance, a kind of minority report which counters the unique value of the CartesianGalilean deductive paradigm and its anticipations with an argument for the exceptional importance of a logic of discovery, of innovation rather than proof.40 Of intrinsic interest to the Renaissance historian is that the model which can be developed can be shared by Humanist and Scholastic; it inhabits the texts of humanism and science. An account of these affinities may refine the argument, now 39 See Alexander Bain, Mental and Moral Science; A Compendium of Psychology and Ethics (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), part 4, "The Will, c. 8, "Belief," 371-385. Bain, of course, was interested in rhetoric as well; see his English Composition and Rhetoric, (1887), where, like Peirce, he focussed on the practical effects of discursive tactics. Fisch has given an account of Peirce's appropriation of Bain's psychological constructions in his "Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism," in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism, 79-109. 40 Henri Gouhier, of course, argues the Scholastic-Cartesian continuity: "le cartesianisme occupera toutes les positions que 1'etaient par raristotelisme," in "La crise de la theologie au temps de Descartes," Revue de theologie et dephilosophie, ser. 4, vol. 3, (1954), 54. Charles Lohr opposes a "Christian" to a "secular" Aristotelianism, particularly in reference to the development of medicine in Italy, which was "concerned less with the hereafter than with the concerns of men in the world." To be sure, such a concern invests medicine, but the quite cosmic astrological-spiritual interests of this medical tradition rather undermine the notion that these concerns are merely terrestrial, only material; see his "The Aristotelian Division of the Speculative Sciences," in The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. D. R. Kelley and R. H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 49-60.

XVI 678

a piety, that the divisions between Humanism and scholasticism, or Humanism and science have been exaggerated.41 I admit Petrarch does not evince an interest in scientific discovery as such, yet he has an acute sense of what makes the medical domain resistant to premature system, receptive to conjecture, hypothesis. Petrarch's rhetoric, as Peircian and pragmatic, places Petrarch not simply as Humanist as reader of texts; and just so, a Peircian account will not reduce d'Abano's project to a "Scholastic," purely intellectualist program, as he is both aware of complicated mind/body relations as context, and he roots a conjectural practice in the intractible particularity, thus uncertainty of bodily phenomena. Such an alternative Peircian account of the Renaissance requires a narrative of both conflation and division: a conflation of a particular humanism with a particular scholasticism, as well as a division within scholastic and scientific endeavors, on the basis of their taste for the alternative logics of discovery and proof. In sharp contrast we have the description of the Humanists by J. H. Randall as those who "displayed all the customary ignorance and futility of intellectual revolutionaries, and [who] proposed new methods distinguished chiefly by the novelty of their ignorance."42 But rather than Randall's opposition of systemic science to frivolous Humanism, the Peircian opposes systemic demonstration to a Humanist and Scholastic inquiry of discovery, preoccupied with the uncertain, the probable, and the specific. Petrarch's rhetorical anal41 See Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text; The Tradition of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), "Introduction," 4-5. Grafton has a plot of conflation of humanism and science, yet it seems to produce an oxymoron, an authoritative science; he combines a positivist notion of science with humanist philological zeal; there are undoubtedly authoritarian moments in humanist philology as a method to establish classical "authority," but it delineates a merely auxiliary intellectual activity, rather than the pragmatic interest in use of the classics I have been describing. In contrast, look at Peirce's probabilistic notion of historical science, "The Logic of Discovering History from Ancient Documents," Collected Papers, 7, 89-164. 42 J. H. Randall, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science, (Padua: Editrice antenore, 1961), 17. To be sure, Peirce had an even lower opinion of humanists: ". . . all the humanists were no better than litterateurs, with the total lack of ratiocinative power which I have seen in the literary men whom I personally have known, such fools! On the intellectual level of wine-tasters of Bordeaux," in a letter to Victoria Lady Welby, March 14, 1909, Semiotics and Signifies, 115. Or see in his Lecture Seven, "Habit," of the Cambridge Conference lectures of 1898, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, 229: "The renaissance, on the other hand, condemned the scholastic terms as not being Ciceronian, with the result of making renaissance philosophy as soft and savorless as a sage pudding."

XVI 679

ysis, since it is diagnostic of, as well as productive of practical effect, designs inquiry. His rhetorical account of medicine is fruitful because rhetoric and medicine felicitously share interest in the canon of decorum, in mind/body relations, and share as well a conviction of the necessity of practice, of discursive and mechanical interventions.

XVII

Rhetoric and Medicine in Descartes' Passions de I'dme The Issue of Intervention The two dominant strategies for the historical definition of rhetoric are both strategies of comparison, and both are unsatisfying. First, the quarrel, or at least the dialogue, of rhetoric and philosophy has sponsored a great deal of research as well as invective; second, the place of rhetoric in the Trivium, as independent of or dependent on grammar and logic, has been the organizational metaphor for much of the history of rhetoric as institution and of rhetorical pedagogy. However, the first tactic simply demonstrates that rhetoric is not a hegemonic mode of inquiry into the structure of thought and reality, while the second does not address rhetoric as interventionist, as involved in the cure of the body politic. But "cure" suggests a different comparative strategy, a dual history of rhetoric and medicine. And certainly in the Renaissance the analogies between rhetoric and one of Ian Hacking's "low sciences", medicine, seem quite piquant. Both, I shall argue, are rather shaky empirical sciences; both rest their claims to certainty on control of certain methods, but both are beset by the uncertainties of empirical observation: by inadequate methods of reading and reacting to multiple and diffuse, manifest or occult signs. Beset by uncertainty, both are obliged to be interventionist - in the cure of the body or of the body politic -; and, the interventionist discourse of both attracts opprobrium. Their interventionist nature is both their strength and their vulnerability. In the tradition, rhetorical intervention can signal seduction and manipulation, malevolent power; the attitude towards medical intervention is more complicated, but Renaissance literature is full of ambivalence and distrust: consider Francesco Petrarca's Invective contra medicum. 1. The Problematic of the Passions Most intriguingly, they share a difficult topic: the recalcitrant, fractious domain of the passions, for appeal to the passions is the special competence of the rhetorician, while the passions are central to holistic cure in pre-modern medicine. What I shall argue is that the most important issue confronting the historian of rhetoric and medicine in the late Renaissance is the peculiar, and

XVII Rhetoric and Medicine in Descartes

197

innovative involvement of both disciplines in the redefinition of the passions. The redefinitions not only change the possibilities of eloquence and cure, but serve as the submerged but powerful context of the attitudes toward physical and moral interventions in modernity. In the late Renaissance/Early Modernity there is an exemplary expression of this disturbingly vital issue. The text of Descartes' Les Passions de I'dme (1649) is of extreme interest since it attempts to address the most fundamental metaphysical issues of soul/body (or mind/body in our terms) relations by a strategy of defining the passions. And, in his prefatory letter Descartes claims he speaks as a physician; it is precisely the physiological perspective which is needed.1 Descartes most certainly is aware of the novelty of his treatise; he claims he is the first to attempt a complete taxonomy of the passions, and he also claims a "distance" between his effort and all previous efforts to classify (Art. 1, 68).2 The structure of the treatise is simple: Book I deals with the basic mechanism, with the relation of soul/body, passions/animal spirits. Book II defines the "Primitive Passions", which are six in number: Wonder, Hate, Love, Desire, Joy and Sadness; only Wonder is purely intellectual. Book III deals with the nature, function, and signs of the particular passions, which are species of the primary ones. Yet behind the Cartesian text is not only William Harvey and the new anatomists, but classical medical and rhetorical texts on the passions as well. These classical accounts have many resemblances, shared points of view. An archetypical rhetorical account of the passions can be found in Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, Books VI and XI; while I am making no claim that Descartes consulted this text, it is certainly the case that it summarises very

1

2

I must note that G. Rodis-Lewis, in her edition of the Passions (Decartes [1964a]), insists that Descartes means "en Physicien" as "Physicist." Taking the various prefatory statements together, however, we can triangulate the positions more precisely; the First Letter, probably by Descartes, describes physics as explaining the body and its remedies and illnesses to the Physician, and claims that theology and the practice of medicine have been wrongly divorced from Physics. And in Descartes' reply to the Second Letter he explicitly disavows the role of rhetor or philosopher, while he certainly does not claim to be a medical practitioner. Yet, Descartes' usage is not incompatible with the historical usage of "Physician" as referring to a medicus with pretensions, with interests in natural philosophy or physics. Descartes is, I would argue, recapitulating the speculative ambition of Medieval and Renaissance academic medicine, the very ambition that motivates the English usage of "Physician." Art. 1: "[...] toutefois ce que les anciens en ont enseigne est si peu de chose, et pour la plupart si peu croyable, que je ne puis avoir aucune esperance d'approcher de la verite qu'en m'eloignant des chemins qu'ils ont suivis. C'est pourquoi je serai oblige d'ecrire ici en meme fa9on que si je traitais d'une matiere que jamais personne avant moi n'eut touchee." And Art. 68: "[...] je sais bien que je m'eloigne de 1'opinion de tous ceux qui en ont ci-devant ecrit [...]." Very useful for the context of this claim is Deprun (1988). All references to the Passions of the Soul in the text are to the article numbers.

XVII 198

well the rhetorical privileging of the passions.3 Quintilian states flatly that the rhetorician's capacity to "move" depends on the capacity to imitate, represent the passions. In the transition between Books V and VI, the transition between argument and passionate appeal, Quintilian claims that while the philosophers would prefer not to deal with the passions, to deal only with reason, this is not a possible option in the legal practice of the courts. Moreover, Quintilian's distinction between ethos as mild, gentle feelings and pathos as violent feelings exacerbates the point: the rhetor must use violence, force: he must perturb the audience. To be sure, while his stipulation that the orator must first experience the passions himself demands a kind of symmetry which can pass for sincerity, the rhetorician self-consciously functions in the domain of fiction, phantasy, vivid imagination as the sources of feeling. Vividness, vitality, "fire" are the things he must communicate to the judge. But the mention of "fire" invokes the Hippocratic elements, humors, temperaments; the discussion turns on the physical as well as the imaginative. The strong connection in Book XI is between the task of moving, the passions as object, and the body as domain. It is to the delivery, pronuntiatio, that the audience responds: "ut audit, movetur" (XI.iii.2). Our voice is dependent on the strength, robustness, moisture of our lungs; our memory is dependent also on our physical condition. Quintilian recalls that gesture, actio, is most important to Cicero; in his own treatment Quintilian goes into extremely fine detail about gesture and deportment as communicating - or not - passion and fire. He appeals to the case of the actors to demonstrate the enormous difference between poetry heard and poetry read. But the overarching rhetorical criterion, missing in drama, is decorum, appropriateness: voice, gesture, argument all must be entirely suited to the nature of the defendant; and, the orator's capacity is itself dependent on his own nature - a personal decorum which supports his strategies of decorum. Again, while making no claim that Descartes consulted this text, the parallel account in classical medical literature is Galen's On the Passions and Errors of the Soul4 The intertwining of moral wisdom and ars bene dicendi is a topos of Quintilian; the intertwining of moral philosophical instruction and medical cure is a Galenic topos. Passion, as an internal, violent force acting in the 3

4

Quintilian (1960), VI.ii.5: "ubi vero animis iudicum vis adferenda est et ab ipsa veri contemplatione abducenda mens, ibi proprium oratoris opus est." Where Levi (1964), esp. chapters 9 and 10, emphasises the philosophical sources, the rhetorical case for the centrality of the passions, in my view, resembles more the Cartesian, with its stress on the ineluctability, rather than the anti-rationality, evil of passion. It is precisely the question-begging moral categories, such as "concupiscible/irascible", that Descartes evades. Galen (1963); the original text is in Galen (1937). Like the Cartesian account, Galen emphasises Anteriority: "Can you not take and tame this thing which is not some beast from outside yourself but an irrational power within your soul, a dwelling it shares at every moment with your power of reason?" (Galen [1963], 46).

XVII Rhetoric and Medicine in Descartes

199

body, can be the source of error. Pervasive in his account is the metaphor of disease; both passion and error are described as operable or inoperable cancers, needing surgery, or beyond surgery. The goals of cure are embedded in this view of the functionality of every part of body and spirit in regard to the whole; this telic notion embeds in turn the rules of "complexion", harmony, natural bent, balance; his doctrine integrates the four elements with the four humors with the four temperaments. Suggestively "rhetorical" is the Galenic stipulation of "decorum" as canon; complexion, harmony, balance are a physical appropriateness; each individual is to attempt correction and cure according to his own natural propensities; each must achieve his own proper complexion. And, error in Galen's account represents another doubling of interest and investment. The domain of rhetoric is the domain of beliefs; errors of the soul, for Galen, are inadequate believing practices: not simply false and reckless assent but weak assent, a failure to affirm what one's training authenticates, e.g. the failure of an elderly geometer to assent to Euclid's theorems. Then, in his discussion of cure, Galen connects moral-philosophical, medical, and discursive moments: the primary resource for the ordinary, self-loving individual is the counsel of others; since we are blinded by egocentricity, Galen insists on the necessity of a mentor and and the mentor's interventionist discourse as enabling both diagnosis and cure. Indeed, Galen's positive account of the good mentor is not all that different from Quintilian's praise of the mature orator. In the Classical programs the diagnosis of passions by the mentor is central to cure, and the representations of the passions constitute the core of the orator's power. In the Renaissance texts which provide the context of Descartes' Passions of the Soul the indication of passions and errors, cure and correction is pervasive. Again, health becomes a moral choice, error is like disease, discourse is the instrument of cure. For example, a very simple rhetorical and poetic expression of the program is the topos of poetry as a sweetener of bitter medicine (Sir Philip Sidney uses Montaigne's rhubarb as example), or, the topos of eloquence itself as the medicine for the soul.5 And, certainly the continuities between Classical program and Cartesian are many. Descartes' descriptions of the passions recall Classical literary and dramatic usages, recall, indeed, the rhetorical injunctions of pronuntiatio his accounts are standard, derived. Yet his passions are not only "literary" but locatable, physical. The Cartesian insistence on the door or valve-like function of the pineal gland to connect body and soul is very like the stipulation in medieval Arabic medical texts of the function of the vermis, a worm-like door or 5

See the discussion in Plett (1975); he cites Sidney's Apology for Poetry (134) and Harington's Brief Apologie ofPoetrie (128) on this issue.

XVII 200

valve that gave or denied access to the various ventricles of the brain; the point in both accounts was to concretise, to render physical, the initiation of mental acts.6 Descartes' passions are truly placeable; they are the "perceptions, sentiments and emotions of the soul" which manifest themselves in flushing, heat, cold, trembling, contractions of the heart. Descartes certainly speaks as a physician, but his descriptions are those of the orator's actio, and of the defendant's feelings the orator must imaginatively present in his actio. Yet, I would also argue that the Cartesian formulations show signs of strain, of a sharp discontinuity with the Classical, an intervening episode of great revisionary force. We must not forget that there is no simple, direct link between Classical medicine and rhetoric and Descartes' applications of early modern anatomical discoveries; we must confront the interventions of Christian anxiety. Peter Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity remarks the "metaphysical ferocity" of the late antique Christian intellectual; horrified by the pervasive decay and death of the "world" around them, the Christian theorists make the Paulinian assertion of the opposition of Flesh and Spirit into the basis for a radical program of metaphysical transformation.7 The Stoic sage, surely the model for Galen's mentor, is warped, distorted in their Spiritualist mirror. But at the same time, the Christian elite, intrigued, like the non-Christian intelligentsia, by doctoring and medical speculation, addicted to medical reading, specifies the body as site of conflict; the notion of the error of the passions is radicalised, and sexual purity, continence becomes the key strategy of liberation from the dying world and decaying flesh. The sub-text of Brown's book is, I would argue, that the survival and triumph of the Christian sect owes in great part to its deliberate selection of the body as the domain for the strategies of radical differentiation of Christian identity and truth. While I would not claim that virginity is a metaphysical gesture for Descartes, it is the case that, exacerbated by another episode of Christian "metaphysical ferocity", the almost intractable soul/body issue becomes the site of major metaphysical confrontation once again in the late Renaissance and Early Modernity. The debate pushes the implications of mind/body linkages to an almost vertiginous edge, drives the debate to the articulation of "metaphysical horror", Descartes' horror. The thesis of L. Kolakowski's stimulating essay on this horror is that the strenuous search for an ultimate ground, 6 7

Harvey (1975), 15, describes the vermis from Haly Abbas, The Royal Book, tr. Stephen the Philosopher (Venice, 1492). Brown (1988); a continuous strategy of Brown is to footnote the involvement of spiritual interests and bodily preoccupations by means of intermingled references to medical and devotional texts; he will also describe Tertullian as "a Stoic, and like so many of his contemporaries, a voracious reader of medical literature" (77); Gnosticism is, of course, a "cure" (108).

XVII Rhetoric and Medicine in Descartes

201

an absolute meaning for the physical universe is simply the obverse side of an intense experience of human fragility. He also notes that desperate metaphysics enables science; certainly the contemplation of the relation of material to spiritual raises the issue of cure in a fundamental way.8 And, of course, the description of the passions is a means of confronting the mind/body problem. In Descartes' text on the passions there are very troubling boundaries, very questionable limits assigned to body and soul. Perhaps Gilbert Ryle's metaphor for the Cartesian model, the "ghost in the machine", should be revised as "the ghost trapped in the machine"; or, "the ghost caught in the gears of the machine."9 Descartes recognises no parts in the soul (Art. 68), but his premise of the indivisibility of the soul entails that the soul is truly joined to all the body (Art. 30). And, in a peculiar phrase, he claims that there is "no subject" which acts more immediately against our soul than the body to which it is joined (Art. 2).10 Further, the machine is dominated by two very different kinds of moving parts: the soul's passions and the bodily spirits are intricated with each other, and their normal functioning can create untoward as well as toward effects in morality and health. The "passions of the soul" are the perceptions, sentiments, or emotions which, while they relate particularly to the soul, are caused, entertained, and fortified by the movement of the "spirits" (Art. 27), defined as "air" or "wind", the most live and subtle parts of the blood (Art. 7, 10).11 The passions are thus invested in the whole body, and they are given to the soul only to incite the soul to consent and contribute to actions, in the main, for the sake of the body (Art. 40, 47, 137). The will, the only actio of 8

Kolakowski (1988), 13, 15. Ryle (1969), ch. 1: "Descartes' Myth" (11 f.). But Gallotti (1989) discounts the commonplace notion of Cartesian dualism (76; 83, fn. 1); she argues that dualism is not Cartesian, but an invention of his followers; she presents a much more complicated notion of union/distinction: union - the experiential rapport of the subject with reality - is combined with distinction - an analytic category for philosophy. 10 It is precisely in response to the scholastic distinction concupiscible/irascible that Descartes claims: "[...] je ne connais en Tame aucune distinction de parties [...]" (Art. 68). In Art. 30, he states that "[...] il est besoin de savoir que Tame est veritablement jointe a tout le corps, et qu'on ne peut pas proprement dire qu'elle soil en quelqu'une de ses parties a 1'exclusion des autres, a cause qu'il est un et en quelque facon indivisible [...]." And in Art. 2:"[...] nous ne remarquons point qu'il y ait aucun sujet qui agisse plus immediatement centre notre ame que le corps auquel elle est jointe, et que par consequent nous devons penser que ce qui est en elle une passion est communement en lui une action [...]." Here Descartes reiterates Lorenzo Valla's point about the reversibility of passion/action constructs (Valla [1982], 1:96, 154; 11:445); this is a powerful tactic in revising ethical theory, and therefore the possibility of intervention. 1 * The definition of the passions in Art. 27 stipulates them as "des perceptions, ou des sentiments, ou des emotions de 1'ame, qu'on rapporte particulierement a elle, et qui sont causees, entretenues et fortifiees par quelque mouvement des esprits." Animal spirits in Art. 10 are "[...] ces parties du sang tres subtiles [...]"; in Art. 7 "[...] un certain air ou vent tres subtil [...]." 9

XVII 202

the soul, does not have the power to incite the passions; the passions are absolutely dependent on the body (Art. 41), thus the soul is not entirely in control of the passions (Art. 46).12 The confusion is compounded in that the actions of the soul can cause movements of the very spirits which, in turn, cause, entertain and fortify the passions of the soul. Descartes' passages on the evocation, dissimulation and the uses of the passions for health or illness could be taken straight from any rhetorical text; but the classical accounts of the passions are embedded in accounts of involuntary physical actions. It is a moral Moebius strip, a continuous loop of reversible relations of body and soul, the physical and moral. Descartes' text, then, attempts simplification, tidiness, but produces difficulties. The new anatomy, especially Harvey's contribution, lends precision and detail to the account of bodily process. But the contributions of rhetoric remain very strong; the orators, in claiming the passions as their peculiar competence, had made the case, the case Descartes uses, for the centrality of the passions in the economy of action. Certainly it is the case that rhetorical interests are rooted in the passionate body in a way logical interests are not.13 But the new medical material proves a bizarre, distorting environment for the Classical material; it distorts, in particular, the concepts of moral intervention. The extraordinarily thick description of the indications and untowardnesses throughout the text tends to make Descartes' claim that it is possible for the soul to gain "absolute empire" over all the passions sound like whistling in the dark (Art. 50). Then, to name "generosity" as the key virtue is intriguing; but the definition seems to stipulate a very weak virtue; the description is of a habit or disposition to firmness, resolution in the will to regulate desire (Art. 144, 153, 161).u But weakness of will is precisely that which is at issue in the Christian ethic Descartes engages. Indeed, the Paulinian metaphor of the struggle of the Flesh against the Spirit and the Spirit against the Flesh finds a new expression in Descartes. For, particularly at the site of the pineal gland, we find locked in combat the body and its spirits with the soul and its will. Here the energy in combat comes from the passions, which arm the soul, even arm the soul against the soul employing its "indigenous" arms of judgement, 12

Art. 41 defines the actions of the soul as the acts of the will, and in its power, while the passions "[...] dependent absolument des actions [of the body] qui les produisent, et elles ne peuvent qu'indirectement etre changees par Tame, excepte lorsqu'elle est elle-meme leur cause." Art. 46 insists that the passions "[...] sont non seulement causees, mais aussi entretenues et fortifiees par quelque mouvement particulier des esprits." Deprun ([1988], 410) makes the strong point that Descartes' theory is not so much "psychosomatique" as "somatopsychique." 13 This, of course, is the argument of Books VI and XI of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria. 14 Generosity is defined as consisting in part"[...] en ce qu'il [un homme] connait qu'il n'y a rien qui veritablement lui appartienne que cette libre disposition de ses volontes [...] et partie en ce qu'il sent en soi-meme une ferme et constante resolution d'en bien user [...]" (Art. 153).

XVII Rhetoric and Medicine in Descartes

203

premeditation, industry (Art. 47-48).15 And, in a further complication, useful intrusions of judgement or reason are explained at other points in the argument as enabled by the entertainment and fortification of the passions, in turn, of course, fortified by the spirits (Art. 203, 206, 211). Descartes in effect proffers two scenarios: a good plot of tranquillity (Art. 190), the mark of virtue (Art. 180), and a bad plot of violence (Art. 148).There are passages which recall the Quintilianesque contrasts of gentle emotions, ethos, with violent passions, pathos, for there are points at which Descartes describes the tranquillity of the soul, in its interior emotions, undisturbed by the violence of the passions carried by the spirits (Art. 46, 147-148). In these plots the body intrudes at almost every junction, more or less, and the soul is continuously agitated, more or less. To be sure, the indivisibility of the soul requires that the body intrudes at all points and levels, particularly in moral events (Art. 57, 71, 137, 147). When I employ the Moebius strip as model for the description of the tight, interactive relation of passions/spirits, I am also invoking Saussure's metaphor of the relation of signifier/signified as two obverse sides of the same sheet or strip of paper. The tightness of the relation is the source of confusion and obscurity of our knowledge of our passions (Art. 28). Difficulty is everywhere: with the soul joined to the whole body (Art. 30), and with no distinctions, divisions in the soul (Art. 68), Descartes describes complete vulnerability. And, recall that he notes the haphazard, careless, betraying activity of the animal spirits in imaginations, dreams, illusions as well (Art. 21, 26). Indeed, indistinct good and evil can make their impression in the brain without any intervention of the soul (Art. 93); passions can be excited by good and evil which regard only the body (Art. 94). Vices can be passions (Art. 160), but virtues may share the same passion with vices, since virtues are simply well-formed thoughts, and the same movement of spirits can fortify well- or ill-formed thoughts (Art. 160 f.).16 The Cartesian arguments tend to reify dangerous liaisons; the connections of thoughts to corporal actions, once made, are hard to change (Art. 136); it is difficult to separate movements of blood and spirits from thoughts (Art. 211).17 15

In describing this contest in Art. 48 Descartes insists "[...] qu'ils [certains hommes] ne font jamais combattre leur volonte avec ses propres armes, mais seulement avec celles que lui fournissent quelques passions pour resister a quelques autres. Ce que je nomme ses propres armes sont des jugements fermes et determines touchant la connaissance du bien et du mal [.»]." 16 1 do not see the "optimism" which Pulcini (1989), 91 detects in the Cartesian program. Levi notes strain when he claims that the separation of intellectual from moral interests in Descartes' Discours has the purpose of overcoming the moral irresolution which would attend a general methodic doubt (Levi [1964], 246). 17 In regard to these dangerous liaisons Descartes insists that "[...] il y a telle liaison entre notre ame et notre corps, que lorsque nous avons une fois joint quelque action corporelle avec quelque pensee, Tune des deux ne se presente point a nous apres que 1'autre ne s'y presente

XVII 204

There is, indeed, an almost Freudian emphasis on the absolute importance of very early experience, for Descartes resorts to some late Renaissance arguments about the influence of even pre-natal experience (Art. 136). Then, the remedies for excessive passion carried by the spirits are rather lamely described as resorts to memory, imagination, to mental diversions, as well as to the "resolution" which has been problematised by the full account (Art. 211). And memory also is problematised. Consider the rhetorical definitions of memory as orator's capacity: in the Classical texts memoria is a matter of technique, a rational program employing available tactics in continuous exercise; in the Cartesian account memory itself is hostage to the passions (Art. 41, 74-75). Similarly, where in Quintilian fantasy and the imagination are means exploited to represent the passions, techniques of persuasion, in the Cartesian formula dreams, reveries - the imaginations produced by "fortuitous agitations of the spirits" (Art. 21) -, take their place as causes alongside the perceptions of the senses of the body. But the Cartesian account represents a strong revision of the notions of physical intervention, of medical cure as well. Interdependence is a kind of double jeopardy; from the double definitions, rhetorical and medical, comes a double hazard, rhetorical and medical. And, Harvey's governing metaphor of circulation, unending motion, underlines and is reinforced by the continuous agitation, movements of the passionate soul. If, on the one hand, his uses of the rhetorical prescriptions are intertwined with his uses of the anatomists' descriptions of involuntary physical behavior, on the other hand, his uses of rhetorical notions of how to influence moral action modify accounts of physical phenomena in a way which must necessarily not only limit moral action, but prejudice health. Thus he uses the prescriptions of rhetorical actio andpronuntiatio for the proper display of emotions to define the exterior signs in the body of passions, e.g., of anger (Art. 199), of envy (Art. 184), and astonishment (Art. 73), passions which invest, intensify moral actions, but which invest, intensify bodily functions as well. The five principal passions - love, hate, desire, joy, sadness (Art. 69) - are involved with the heart, blood, liver, etc., unlike the neatly brain-located intellectual admiration. Thus good and evil are accompanied by changes in the heart and blood, while the pure "connaissance" of admiration stays in the brain; indeed, the passions functioning within moral scenarios are described as useful for health, or causes

aussi [...]" (Art. 136; cf. Art. 107). And in touching on ethical difficulty in Art. 211, Descartes claims that "[...] ces mouvements excites dans le sang par les objets des passions suivent d'abord si promptement des seules impressions qui se font dans le cerveau et de la disposition des organes, encore que 1'ame n'y contribue en aucune fa9on, qu'il n'y a point de sagesse humaine qui soil capable de leur resister lorsqu'on n'y est pas assez prepare."

XVII Rhetoric and Medicine in Descartes

205

of illness (Art. 97 f.).18 The passion of desire affects general physical competence: renders the senses more acute, the parts of the body more mobile (Art. 101); and, there is a differential of utility to the soul and body with both sadness and joy (Art. 141). Joy, in regard to the soul, cannot be bad; sadness cannot be good; but joy as well as sadness can be, in regard to the body, unhealthy, if too violent and immoderate. The passions not only infiltrate but encase, enclose the body and body functions. "Aesthetic" refers to the external and its impingement on the bodily senses; in so far as the soul is touched more strongly by the senses than by that which is represented to it by reason, the aesthetic is more significant. Aesthetic passions are the most violent; "horror", repugnance for the ugly is more powerful than the reaction to good and evil (Art. 85). Then, while Descartes speaks of a "pure" devotion to God, or a "pure" intellectual joy, he also makes clear that the soul, in effect, receives no other fruit of the goods it possesses than passion, joy (Art. 91, 216). All passions, as passionate, are physical; the exceptional privilege of intellectual joy does not disguise its exceptional nature. This pure joy is estranged, isolate. Cartesian passions, in other words, are formidable beyond even the classical passions. It is as if the introspective program enforces a weighty, untoward self-concern. 2. Cartesian Passions and Intervention in Intellectual History The Passions of the Soul is of intrinsic interest for the historians of rhetoric, ethics, and medicine, then. Certainly the Renaissance rhetorics do not stipulate that rhetorical talent, per se, is productive of ethical relativism; rather, they describe a talent which engenders a sensitivity to real options, genuine choices. And, Renaissance/classicist cure comprises a wide ranging if naive program of useful psycho-somatic intervention. But the voluntary talent which is the resort of the Cartesian subject seems totally inadequate to its task of moral and physical healing; the continuous bodily movement and passionate agitation prejudice the Cartesian program in some fundamental way. And, of course, the "publicity" of the rhetorical program is lost; because the combat is internal, solitary, there is precious little the monologic rhetoric can do for civility; because the intrication of body and soul is so strict, medicine's interventions are similarly hedged, constrained. There is, to be sure, both gain and loss. On the one hand, Descartes' theory counters Christian/Aristotelian orthodoxy, which 18

For example, in Art. 97, "[...] je remarque en 1'amour, quand elle est seule, c'est-a-dire, quand elle n'est accompagnee d'aucune forte joie, ou desk, ou tristesse, que le battement du pouls est egal et beaucoup plus grand et plus fort que de coutume; qu'on sent une douce chaleur dans la poitrine, et que la digestion des viandes se fait fort promptement dans 1'estomac, en sorte que cette passion est utile pour la sante."

XVII 206

emphasises the unnatural, immoderate nature of the passions: the two varieties, concupiscible/irascible, are straightforwardly two varieties of sin (Art. 68). On the other hand, public evidence and public dialogue give way to introspection as the only evidence; the interior monologue is the only genre of inquiry into the passions.19 This is a considerable warpage of the context for rhetorical and medical work. Kolakowski claims that the metaphysical search was a response to a sense of human fragility; the Cartesian metaphysical horror also intensifies fragility. Descartes' Passions of the Soul represents a concatenation of ill-sorted elements: Christian metaphysical anxiety, the new medicine, the old classical rhetoric and medicine; this revisionary work on the passions provides not simply notions of intervention, of medical and rhetorical cure, but the context for cure: a difficult context, a pickle. For, the most troublesome Cartesian legacy is, perhaps, its pervasive solipsism. Descartes' use of Harvey gives a specific, processual structure to a physical isolation totally subversive of the old, interpersonal Galenic and rhetorical moments. Descartes' struggle to describe the sources of passion and his particular emphasis on "interior" moments simply underline his difficulty in articulating introspective evidence; the accounts produce a heavily textured solipsism, a solipsism that serves to question and diminish communication and communitarian issues. In modernity, community medicine and communitarian rhetoric struggle for identity in this damaging environment. For the most important trait exhibited by this peculiar moral/physical effort is that the scenarios are, irrevocably, private. Civility seems to be defined as a simple extension of egoist, solitary interests to "someone else" (Art. 64 f., 154 f., 193 f.). Cure addresses a lonely combat, inside the skin. Harveian circulation reinforces functional and dysfunctional movement. Medical cure is intensely personal, a cure of the self; it must take account of or be thwarted by the intimate relations of passions and body. And think of the Cartesian obsession with the "reality" of dreams - "so interior, so close, so remarkable" (Art. 26) -; the obsession is a significant piece of the deep background of Freudian cure, perhaps. Then, for the rhetorician, the model produces no interesting arguments for civility, no basis for civil interventions; and, rhetorical eloquence may call itself the medicine of the soul, but the verbal effects of eloquent interventions must play themselves out in a machine. Thus the mind-body issue shaped not only the medical debate, but the very notion of debate or counsel itself. Rhetorical as well as medical capacity is at stake. 19

Consider Levi's citation of Descartes' letter to Elizabeth, September 1, 1645: "[...] tout nostre contentement ne consiste qu'au tesmoignage interieur que nous avons d'avoir quelque perfection" (Levi [1964], 292); here the person is voyeur of the self.

XVII Rhetoric and Medicine in Descartes

207

The very ground shifts beneath the feet of orator and physician. For, ascertaining the limits of soul and body of course ascertains the limits of spiritual and bodily intervention. The holistic assumptions which had funded both Galen's and Quintilian's programs continue to invest this late Renaissance inquiry. Granted the premises of holistic medicine, the adjustments, then, define cure; briefly, the greater the interest in the "spiritual", the "psychic", the greater the faith in psychotherapy, and in particular, in discourse as cure, therapeutic counsel. We have, in short, early versions of the modern materialist confrontations with psychoanalysis. Interestingly, Descartes manages to pursue both materialist and psychic arguments at once. The 17th century consideration is not simply the relation of language, mind, and reality, an epistemological issue, but the relation of language, mind, and the body as experienced reality. The vector pursued is succinctly indicated in Digby's aphorism: "where philosophy leaves off, medicine begins."20 Indeed, what I have been suggesting for intellectual historians is just such a shift of focus: instead of considering the Cartesian program as context for modern speculation of an epistemological or metaphysical bent - the philosophical range of interests most frequently addressed in modern historiography -, the historian might well consider the Cartesian program as context, not for modern theory, but for modern practice: context for the interventionist disciplines of medicine - obliged to therapy, cure of the body -, and rhetoric - obliged to therapy, cure of the body politic. And, of course, as a gloss on modernity, it is a comment on the Renaissance as well. By attending to the Cartesian text on the passions one refocusses the difficult problematic of intervention, for the passions are crucial both for medicine, in so far as it is Galenic, holistic, intricating mind and body in cure; and for rhetoric, since the passions are the peculiar source of the rhetorician's special competence. The Cartesian treatment of the passions goes a considerable distance to illumine the difficulties of modem interventionist acts. For Descartes' Passions of the Soul shifts the parameters. It is over-simplified, reductive, but basically correct to maintain that the classical and Renaissance moments produced a cheerful, open attitude toward human interference, friendly counsel, and towards the work of the mentor in both the rhetorical and medical domains. But the Cartesian program makes a constricted, dubious situation for interventions, particularly discursive ones. There are only two defining traits of a passion, Descartes claims: it is useful (Nature meant the passions to be of use to the body), and it has an internal cause, the body and its animal spirits are its source.21 It is one thing, however, 20

Digby (1579), 374: "Ilia medicinam informal ubi namque desinit Philosophus ibi incipit Medicus." 21 Thus in Art. 52:"[...] 1'usage de toutes les passions consiste en cela seul qu'elles disposent 1'ame a vouloir les choses que la nature dicte nous etre utiles [...]"; cf. Art. 74: "[...] 1'utilite de toutes

XVII 208

to use the circulatory metaphor to define a body machine with, essentially, two moving parts, the spirits in the blood and the passions; it is another to claim the spirits are like a "wound watch" (Art. 16); the tension, the movements are intractible. The soul's difficulty in control of its passions is a lack of capacity to unwind the spring.22 Then, in Article 44, Descartes promulgates the two principles of preservation of health; there is only Nature, an innate Moebius strip, and only Habit: habituation, conditioning may alter, after a time, the innate constitution. His notion of Nature supports a determinism of the constitution of both mind and body, and his notion of Habit subverts the possibility of radical change - significant, novel interference. The determinism of Nature, which he insists is benign, forces him to resort to appeals to Providence in fateful situations (Art. 145-146); the resort to Habit (Art. 44, 50), surely a scholastic strategy, describes intervention as psychological conditioning. Descartes, I have argued, funds both sides of the materialist/psychic opposition we note as aroused by the psychoanalytic movement in modernity; but he funds as well not only the thesis of absolute linguistic creativity of Noam Chomsky, but the radical behaviorist conditioning of Chomsky's arch-enemy, B.F. Skinner. Nature and Habit, in turn, are hedged by two factors: 1) the persistence, durability of contingent, fortuitous connections between passions and spirits once made; 2) the isolation of the mechanism. The machine and its motions, the evidence it utilises, and its responses - all are introspective, private, solitary, and circumscribe the humane goals as private, solitary; autonomy is goal (Art. 140, 154, 156); inner contentment is value (Art. 148). Radical contingency surrounds a solipsist project marked by determinism and modified by conditioning and Providential interventions. The mechanism supports, then, only a very limited therapy program. Article 211 speaks of the soul as needing to "attempt" to separate the movements of the blood and the spirits from our thoughts, and "to take warning" from the falsity of all presentations involving the imagination - two very lame tactics.23 Indeed, it is impossible not to take note of the decline in effort and result in Book III of the text; there is a slide into lame moralism, a moralism which lacks the specificity and positivity of Renaissance accounts. Further, as les passions ne consiste qu'en ce qu'elles fortifient et font durer en Tame des pensees [...]"; cf. 137. Then, in Art. 207, he argues that impudence is not a passion "[...] parce qu'il n'y a en nous aucun mouvement particulier des esprits qui 1'excite [...]"; cf. 172, 175, 194. 22 In Art. 16 he compares the manner of movement of the spirits to the way in which "le mouvement d'une montre est produit par la seule force de son ressort et la figure de ses roues." 23 Descartes notes how few are capable of such a separation; dubious as well is the strategy of "[...] se souvenir que tout ce qui se presente a 1'imagination tend a tromper Tame [...]" (Art. 211).

XVII Rhetoric and Medicine in Descartes

209

Gouhier points out, for Descartes shared training, shared history, shared memory provide flawed conditioning. Education is not the solution but the problem; Descartes laments the tenacity of infant school prejudices, and erudition is useless. In general, a memory filled with remembrances is a great danger; memory renders the intelligence anemic. The only source of truth is primary, intuitive evidence; thus the sadness which is only of the soul is always "true", always well-founded.34 Then, it is intriguing to observe what Descartes does not bother to rethink. The novelty he claims lies to a great extent in the use of Harvey's circulatory model, where his account of the interaction of body and soul becomes an account of an obdurate mechanical process. But the descriptions of the external signs and the functions of the passions are classical. The uses and the harm of the passions are from classical rhetoric, medicine, and ethics; the bodily visible signs are rhetorical and medical; and, surely, the notion of the possible conscious control of the external signs of visage and eyes is oratorical (Art. 112113). He still uses Galenic notions of temperaments, complexions to describe different human constitutions (Art. 36, 134, 184, 199), but, interestingly, he splits the Galenic concept: there is a constitution of mind, and a constitution of body (Art. 134). The persistence of this classical material attests the effectiveness of Descartes' Jesuit schooling, perhaps. Garin is undoubtedly correct in emphasising the influence of Descartes' philosophical and rhetorical training at La F16che; Garin is also astute in noting Descartes' equivocation about the Jesuits, for Descartes claimed La Fteche provided superb teaching of absolutely flawed doctrines.25 What the Passions of the Soul demonstrates is that the Jesuits taught so well that, while Descartes discarded, or replaced, their system, he simply embedded (if this does not connote too much stability) the elements of their system in his circulating machine. There are, I think, two very important aspects of the Cartesian use and abuse of classical/Renaissance rhetoric. First, Gouhier is accurate when he refers to the "Revenge of Rhetoric." Descartes, he argues, found himself unable to do without rhetoric; rational demonstration was not enough; he felt the need to obtain his interlocutor's assent, the need to convince the "Other."26 This the Cartesian methodiser found peculiarly hard to do: the method is to produce the experience of the self as true inventor, the "Other", in grasping the method, is to replicate the originary experience of self-invention, the first, startling, intuitive grasp of the evidence.

24

Gouhier (1955), 87 f. Garin (1985), 7 f. 26 Gouhier (1955), passim. 25

XVII 210

But, the interlocutor, as capable of such naive, pure appropriation, is not there. The Cartesian Other is the "false adult", the grown-up steeped in the history, the memories, the schooling of his post-natal life (Art. 90). Cartesian methodic address, his primary intervention, simply assumes an addressee Descartes does not believe exists. Worse, the false adult has been developed by dialectic and rhetoric, both of which Descartes rejects as arts of words, of only trivial interest, incapable of mastery of the issues of Cartesian knowledge.27 Second, Cartesian dysfunction is precisely in the range of interventionist acts, in the domain of civil cure, in activities of dialogue and counsel. The very basis of discursive intervention has been eroded by 1) the dominant mode of proceeding as silent, internalised, introspective; 2) by loss of faith in counsel, in other people's learning.28 The interior monologue is the discourse of cure; throughout the text there is no mention of counsel, no figure of the mentor. It is a self-administered cure, self-therapy. There is not a civil bone in the body of the Cartesian argument. True, there are some unmotivated, unexpected appeals toward the end of Book III to convivial pleasures (Art. 64 f., 193 f.). But Descartes' fear and loathing of rhetoric, memory and history deprives discursive moral intervention of its material, its issues; and Descartes' appropriation of the medical figure, the anatomy of circulation, places the therapist outside of the cure, a voyeur of external signs of internal movements, and an observer of introspective talents. The dual focus on rhetorical and medical interests in the Cartesian text, then, suggests a relocation of a fundamental problematic. It usefully describes a complication of medical and rhetorical interventions when it describes the constraints on ethical and rhetorical and medical programs of the intense interactions invested in the notions of the passions of the soul. The Cartesian argument offers a peculiar justification of anti-rhetorical attitudes and supports prejudices against certain aspects of medical therapy. Curiously, it is the very thick intrications of body and mind, not a neat dualism, which supports these negative moments. At the same time, while rhetorical and medical moments are overridden by this program, the attempt and the mode of their subordination is of real significance for the Cartesian statements of pre-modern issues. It is not original to claim that Descartes has a pivotal place between Renaissance 27

Recall the tone of the isolate that pervades Descartes' "Praefatio ad lectorem" in Decartes (1964b), 7 f.; especially 9: "[...] nullum vulgi plausum, nullamque Lectorum frequentiam expectem [...]." 28 Kolakowski (1988, 25) deplores Descartes' "[...] abstractly concocted doctrine of collective solipsism [...]." And, of course, this is precisely the point at which C.S. Peirce takes issue with the anti-pragmatism of Descartes' program: Peirce postulates that 1) we have no power of introspection; 2) we have no power of intuition; 3) we have no power of thinking without signs; 4) we have no conception of the absolutely uncognizable (Peirce [1984], 11:213). This is, of course, a strong "rhetorical" program.

XVII Rhetoric and Medicine in Descartes

211

and modernity; but here his interference marks the end of Renaissance strategies in a most specific and conclusive way. It is not that his "rationalism" confutes Renaissance optimistic rationalism; rather, there is a reciprocity of impediment in his medical metaphor and his defiance of rhetorical/historical competence. The linkage of rhetorical and medical interests illumines the change in the notion of capacity for action and the possibility of bodily and political health. On the one hand, the linkage exposes a general problematic; on the other hand, it underlines the constraints on rhetorical program in post-Cartesian thought. Finally, I am arguing for a different posture towards the use of the history of rhetoric in intellectual history, and for the intrinsic interest of this focus for the mapping of intellectual-historical projects. An account of rhetoric as a literary/aesthetic phenomenon is useful and good; the use of rhetorical analysis of high-cultural texts warns us about stylistic seduction in these texts. But consider another use: the tendency of the history of philosophy to emphasise the epistemological difficulties of the Cartesian program as they impinge on modern philosophy simply inspires rather dispiriting academic debates. But the rhetorical/medical agenda depicts Cartesianism as context for practical interests; in so doing, it indicates that the history of rhetoric has not yet realised its potential in general intellectual history.

Bibliography Brown, Peter Robert Lament. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Deprun, J. "Qu'est-ce qu'une passion de Fame? Descartes et ses predecesseurs." Revue philosophique 178/4 (1988), 407-413. Descartes, Rene. Les Passions de I'dme. Ed. Genevieve Rodis-Lewis. Paris: J. Vrin, 1964(a). —. "Praefatio ad lectorem." Oeuvres. Vol. 7: Meditationes de prima philosophia. Ed. Charles Adam/ Paul Tannery. Paris: J. Vrin, 1964(b), pp. 7-11. Digby, Everard. Theoria analytica. London: Bynneman, 1579. Galen. De propriorum animi cuiuslibet affectuum dignotione et curatione/ De animi cuiuslibet peccatorum dignotione et curatione/ De atra bile. Ed. Wilko de Boer. Corpus medicorum graecorum, 5/4,1.1. Leipzig/ Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1937. —. Galen on the Passions and Errors of the Soul. Tr. Paul W. Harkins. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1963. Gallotti, C. "Un capitolo del confronto ragione-passioni: II dibattito sul teatro." Teorie delle passioni. Ed. E. Pulcini. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989, pp. 75-88. Garin, Eugenio. Vita e opere di Cartesio. Bari: Laterza, 1984. Gouhier, H. "La resistance au vrai et le probleme Cartesien d'une philosophic sans rhetorique." Retorica e Barocco: Atti del HI Congresso Internationale di Studi Umanistici, Venezia, 15-18 Giugno 1954. Ed. Enrico Castelli. Roma: Rocca, 1955, pp. 85-97.

XVII 212 Harvey, E. Ruth. The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1975. Kolakowski, Leszek. Metaphysical Horror. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1988. Levi, Anthony. French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions 1585 to 1649. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Peirce, Charles S. "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities." Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Vol. 2: 1867-1871. Ed. Edward C. Moore et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984, pp. 211-242 ('1868). Plett, Heinrich F. Rhetorik der Affekte: Englische Wirkungsasthetik im Zeitalter der Renaissance. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1975. Pulcini, E. "II declino deH'amour-passion in epoca moderna." Teorie delle passioni. Ed. E. Pulcini. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989, pp. 89-112. Quintilian [Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius]. Institutio oratoria. 4 vols. Tr. H.E. Butler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1960. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson, 1969. Valla, Lorenzo. Repastinatio dialectice et philosophic. 2 vols. Ed. Gianni Zippel. Padua: Antenore, 1982.

XVIII

Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere (1681): a legal opinion on the use of Aristotle in medicine Lionardo Di Capoa's Par ere is just that: an opinion in response to a specific request by the Viceroy and the Consiglio Collaterale in 1678 put to a group of prominent Neapolitans for counsel on a legal regulatory policy; at the behest of his friends it was expanded for publication in 1681, then revised in 1689. Di Capoa was noted for his polymathy, and had a polymathic formation; he began as a student of law, switched to medicine at his friends' urging, spent a period of rustication in Capoa both in literary pursuits (writing over 2,000 Petrarchan sonnets), and, in Democritean fashion, anatomizing innumerable animals. Returning to Naples to publish the sonnets, he was robbed of both sonnets and horse, and took up medicine again, functioning, with Tommaso Cornelio, as a principal of the Accademia degli Investiganti\ later, like Cornelio, he gave up the practice of medicine for the sole pursuit of 'natural philosophy'. He was the recognized leader in private instruction in chemistry (there was no university instruction).1 The Par ere was apiece d'occasion: the death of a favourite of the Viceroy after a new chemical remedy was administered by a Galenist who was a dilettante in chemistry had generated doubts; were the medicaments themselves responsible for deaths? Should medicine and chemical cures be further regulated? Di Capoa begins his response with a political image: the Viceroy is obligated to defend the public against domestic as well as foreign enemies; ignorant, avaricious, and vain medical charlatans qualify, since their remedies may injure and kill. But Di Capoa immediately proceeds to assert that, since medicine is such an uncertain, dubious and inconstant art, regulation is extraordinarily difficult; indeed, it is so uncertain that it can hardly qualify as a 1 Amenta (1710), 1-27. On the intellectual ambiance of Di Capoa, see Fisch (1968); Torrini (1981); (1977); (1987); and (1974). Rak (1969), focuses on Di Capoa's method. LeClerc (1723) remarks that Di Capoa has as purpose only the demonstration of the incertitude of medicine, which makes his account partisan and partial, 'Preface', **2r f.

XVIII 323

Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere

science, since there are no rational principles which clearly control it; so uncertain, he will argue, that the best policy must be complete intellectual tolerance, lest bad therapies are inadvertently approved, good ones rejected.2 The form of the lengthy published version is, simply, a history of medicine, divided into eight Ragionamenti; the first six dwell primarily on the frailty of medical theory and practice, the last two suggest a positive programme of reform to the Viceroy. My first consideration will be the tissue of argument, the modalities of Di Capoa's advocacy of intellectual freedom; we find not so much a historical use of rhetoric, as a rhetorical use of history. Then, in considering his use of Aristotle in medicine, I shall claim a bifurcation: if his program of institutionalizing intellectual liberty requires the deinstitutionalizing of Aristotelian discursive practices, it assumes, at the same time, a core, or residue, of Aristotelian theory, the 'metabiology' of the De anima. The historical modalities of the Parere Why is his opinion a history? Because history delineates precisely what intellectual freedom fosters, and what subverts freedom. History argues for tolerance when history discriminates the uses of permissiveness in theory and practice. Di Capoa does not proffer a simple historical model of progress from ancient error to modern truth; he balances a lack of piety toward ancient authority with a severe critique of modern, as well as ancient, academicism.3 It is a most complex model, in which discontinuity overlies continuity, loss invests gain. Historical contingencies interrupt the linear authority of the ancients, and qualify the linear progress of the moderns as well. Age nourishes novelty in his pleasant figure of a world growing old while gaining new enrichment (38-9). He notes the originary importance for medicine of a primitive, golden age, when men and animals were gleaners of natural remedies, an age of human immediacy to nature which gave rise in Greece to the philosophical brilliance of Democritus; and, he notes, there is no nation so barbarous that it cannot make useful discoveries, witness the corticcia (quinine) of Peru (47). He assumes progress and golden ages: yet, while he celebrates the brilliance of modern inventions - the work of Galileo alone may obscure all the 2 Di Capoa (1689a), 2; referred to henceforth simply by page number. I have used this second edition, but there are some significant differences between the texts; the first edition is more contentious, focused. There was an English translation of the first Ragionamento, Di Capoa (1684), referred to as UP in the text. 3 Besides Rak (1969), see his (1971), p. 113; Rak maintains that Di Capoa furnishes the only systematic text on history beforeG. Valletta; Rak considers the relation of history to the programme of liberta di filosofare. See also Badaloni (1961), pp. 124-47, on the significant historical strategies of Di Capoa.

XVIII 324

glory of antiquity (47) - his exemplar of disciplinary progress is not invention in natural philosophy, but formal development in painting (37-8). In his model there is no smooth line of ascent or descent, but a ragged line of interruptions, debilitating contests, regress. The peculiar difficulty of medicine as discipline is the body; because of the extraordinary intricacy of its structures, even modern research produces only weak conjecture (98-9). The, perhaps ineradicable, uncertainty which invests our grasp of physiology gives rise to contests, and contests to differing solutions; contending solutions provoke more uncertainty, and thus new contests (85, 87, 89, 30f.). His strong interest is in dysfunction, decline. His account of Renaissance revival describes gain sponsoring loss; thus the seemingly unalloyed gain of the revival in pure Latin of the classical texts extant only in barbarous Carolingian translations is also a revival of contests within the faculties (22; UP 68). Paracelsus's chemical innovations inspire the contests of Galenist-Paracelsists, Paracelso-Galenists, Galeno-chemists (29, cf. 31; UP 85); both the empirical research of Paracelsus, Harvey and Vesalius, and the ingenious system of rational medicine of von Helmont fall victim to exasperating appropriations (26, 29-30, 33). For, the generic difficulty of inquiry as a whole is academicism. He begins Ragionamento IV by refusing to lament the loss of so many classical texts: if the books that were lost were anything like the ones saved, there is small loss. And, the blame must rest not with the barbarians, but with the 'literati' themselves; the brilliance of the Greeks was smothered in its own weed-like growth (150-1). His account of decline is an account of the damage wrought by institutional practices and communal behaviour. There are, to be sure, a series of encounters which harm medicine: with the 'servile' Arabs (12, 20, 263), with, indeed, the barbarians (47, 314, 342), but the truly hurtful encounter is with philosophy. Philosophy, in its long decline into academic triviality, carried medicine with it (19). The addiction to philosophy made it impossible to investigate the truth (89). The proliferation of medical schools is rooted in complicities; the addiction to philosophy is a source of quarrels and sects; medicine became a battleground: 'un fertilissimo campo, che litigi, piati, e discordie ad ogn'ora produce literati' (170). He criticizes even sceptical critique, the academic habit of arguing, endlessly, in utramque partem (99). The gains of early philosophers are lost in the transmission by an academy engaged in sophistic quarrel; our inheritance was obscured by contentious ambition (158); the sectarians were debilitated by 'too much study' (19). He cites Bacon: 'the lighter only swam to the top, whilst the weightier, and those of greater value, sank to the bottom' (20). The good texts therefore crumble into dust, the bad are transmitted with beautiful words (151). This complicated model of disciplinary development, a struggle of academicism with uncertainty, requires ingenious tactics of intertextuality, in

XVIII 325

Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere

which the moderns may critique the ancients, to be sure, but the ancients critique the moderns as well. Di Capoa cannot present a simplistic story of gradual progress from ancient to modern theory and practice, and cannot subscribe to a simple conflict of ancients with moderns. Rather, he supports tactics of reciprocal critique: not only may modern investigations, primarily in anatomy and chemistry, correct ancient theory and practice (37, 227, 253), but ancient theory may modify modern empirical initiatives. Certainly Aristotelian theory must be judged in the light of Paracelsian experience, Aristotelian experience by the natural-historical contributions of early modern travellers (390-1); Paracelsus revises Hippocrates (189); Homer is illustrated by Paracelsus (145). But there are episodes of intertwined loss and gain: Paracelsus's 'renewal' of ancient philosophy is veiled in poetic allegories, obscure enigmas (28-9; 268f.); in von Helmont experiential gain is complicated by theoretical loss: Democritean elegance could correct Helmontian fancifulness (282). And, a mark of Di Capoa's lack of piety towards academic practices is his irreverent use of literary exempla to critique scientific claims. He expresses scorn for Aristotle's experience in comparative anatomy by invoking Boccaccio: Aristotle assumes our stupidity, just as Frate Cipolla did, in deceivingthe simple citizens of Certaldo (390). The Hippocratic Oath has, in its brazen, duplicitous, claims to honest virtue, its analogy in Ciappelletto's death-bed confession, with its egregious lies (204).4 The complex model of disciplinary development may require intertextuality, and may nourish a skeptical perspective; Di Capoa, in attacking academic medical formation, argues a double failure. There are two investigative strategies, the systemic, which is false in itself, because of its habits of abstraction and generalization, and the empirical, which is proper, but is subject to attrition through time, through the ambition of its followers under the pressure of sectarian loyalties (394). Both, system and experience, are betrayed by habits of action in time, 'undone' by temporicity; failure is not dogmatic or empirical, but both; the difficulties of sensation and judgement are enhanced by academic practices: the addiction to philosophy, or new empirical research, or better transmission - all produce quarrels. What is there left, he asks, in these practices to critique error? Not reason, not experience, not authority (89). Yet, Di Capoa seems to embrace uncertainty as fruitful, productive of developmental results as well as dysfunctional quarrels (89, 98, 170, 223, 241). Modern progress may be, simply, progress in refining uncertainty. The 1689 4 There is, indeed, a second line of polemical offence and defence in the contests concerning medicine of the seventeenth century, which is a philological-stylistic line; the quarrels Anton Bertini engages in over his La medicina difesa dalle calunnie degli uomini volgari, e dalle opposizioni de dotti (Lucca: Marescandoli, 1699), often hinge on issues of usage and Tuscan propriety. And, Bertini makes extensive use of Petrarch's letters as well as his Invective contra medicum in his delineation of the case against medicine.

XVIII 326

supplement to the Parere, the Incertezza, is a cautionary tale of specificity: the microscope, united with the disciplines of vital (chemical) and simple anatomy reveals marvels; the more you see, the more you don't know.5 The more finegrained the account, the more reserved Di Capoa becomes about subject and aims; he is particularly cautious about the relation of investigative gain and therapeutic gain. Any focus on the temporal dimension of inquiry, then, is, inevitably a focus on loss as well as gain. And, Di Capoa insists on the moral resonances of investigative loss and decline. In Ragionamento III he contrasts the tranquillity of the golden age with the wars and contests of civilization, and connects their onset with intellectual wars and contests (84-85). Maurizio Torrini has emphasized the peculiar Neapolitan insistence on the connection between programmes of civil renewal and of innovation in science, and the highly 'practical', professional nature of the early reactions against the 'moderni'.6 Just so, Di Capoa focuses on the basic incivility of medical practice, the seemingly obdurate vexations of professional behaviour which exaggerate contest, and even cause regressions in inquiry. Since medical incivilities have particularly severe results - injury and death - the viceregal programme Di Capoa advocates is a plea for freedom: the only policy which will permit medicine's escape from the debilitating quarrels of the community is to foster a community of experiential inquirers who are 'free and disengaged', 'contrary to all sects, and not wholly enemies to any of the sectators' (34; UP 101-2). Free, in short, for agency, responsibility. Di Capoa's historiographical strategies the rhetorical vividness of the malpractice events, the enargeia employed in his narratives - are meant to define doctors' agency, to segregate the work of the individual from institutional matrices, and to increase his resistance to theory. Di Capoa and Aristotelianism in practice If the Di Capoan history sees inquiry dysfunction as rooted in academicism, and if the dominant discursive formation of the 'medici filosofanti' is Aristotelian, then Aristotelianism is - and this is not unprecedented - the target for critique, the object for reform. First, Di Capoa insists on both the necessity for medical engagement with serious philosophy, the consideration of basic structures, 'first principles' of human faculties and functions, and, at the same time, on the dangers for the physicians of contracting bad habits from philosophers. And, the distinction between medicine as operative and 5

Di Capoa (1689b); referred to henceforth as I with page number. Torrini, (1987), p. 364; see Torrini, (1981), p. 847: 'L'idea del progresso del saperenon rinvia solo alPesperienze e ai suoi interpret!, ma anche alle leggi e all'instituti civili.' The quarrels with the traditionalist medici were formative of the academic programme; the Galenists were attacked as both theoretically in error and ethically wrong. 6

XVIII Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere

327

philosophy as contemplative underlies his very specific attack on the entrenched, institutionalized discursive practices of the Aristotelian schools; it is these practices which both create and transmit erroneous method and dogmatic pride. Indeed, the lengthy critique of Aristotle of Book VIII includes earlier Renaissance claims - by Ramus, Cardanus, Vives, Patrizio, Nizolio that Aristotle's metaphysics is nothing but his logic in disguise, a fetishizing of words, a verbal concern masquerading as inquiry, a 'guazzabuglio di soli vocaboli' (399). Galen is the exemplary appropriator; his defects, Di Capoa claims, stem not so much from the difficult content of medicine as his 'sinister' mode of philosophizing (252, cf. 257). What is sinister is his bemusement with logic; Galen is mere 'giuntatore e perfido sofista' (101); regarding himself as a master of logic (4), he restates the history of medicine to conform to his own views; but his syllogisms amount to mere 'dicerie' (22). Thus a key Galenic construct of diagnosis and therapy - sympathy - is nothing but a 'beautiful word', merely aesthetic in function (177); indeed, logic causes us to dwell in 'cose finte' (323). And, just as Aristotle's obsessive preoccupation with logic impedes his other investigations (323), so, as both Cardanus and Averroes point out, Galen's logic corrupts: it is the poison which invests all his work: 'il veleno di tutte sue opere, il troppo studio della loica' (259, cf. 255f., 4, 22, 419-22). And Di Capoa faults the doctors, not only for their logical inadequacy, but for their failure to understand that medicine is the wrong domain for syllogistic colonization. In a description of human faculties (which owes much to Aristotle's De animd), he moves from an account of the necessary uncertainties of our incorporated faculties to argue the specific, more troubling uncertainties of medicine. In medicine, only the probable, never the certain, demonstrative can obtain (93f.); he cites Celsus's characterization of medicine as an ars conjecturalis (307); medical arguments are not only untidy but tedious: long chains of arguments moving from the verisimilar to the verisimilar, producing few, not very solid, conjectures (101, cf. 98). Decorum is medical as well as rhetorical canon: the doctor must note the necessity of an appropriate response, of taking into account different places, persons, times, circumstances; the same maladies do not follow the same causes, or occur in the same circumstances, nor are the maladies which seem the same in truth the same disease (103,148,188). 7 To summarize briefly his pervasive, minutely detailed critique of logical habits of action, the truly damaging use of logic is in system-building, and the truly deplorable effect of medical system-building lies in the systemic advocacy 7

I have argued elsewhere, 'The Medical-theoretical Background in Naples of Vico's New Science', paper read at 'Vico and the Map of Modernity', Yale University, that rhetoric, medicine, and history were all 'life-sciences' in this investigative climate; Vico connects oratory, medicine and politics as conjectural arts in Vico (1968a), p. 262.

XVIII 328

of cruel, noxious therapies, the use of systemic rigour to justify rigorous, violent cures. Pretentious dogmatism, as opposed to a cautious probabilism, stipulates harsh purgatives and debilitating bloodletting (241, 244). He sees health and life itself subjected to the controversies, sophisms of the modern 'Galenisti filosofanti'; they, more than Galen himself, use logical violence to advocate violent cure; they should be condemned as fierce, barbarous, since they care not to comfort and aid, but to inflame and afflict, such that the patients sicken and die miserably (88).8 Recall Torrini's insistence on the Neapolitan connection between civil and scientific renewal; just so, Di Capoa attacks the barbarously cruel practices as the ultimate incivilities of injury and murder. The Peroration of Ragionamento VI precedes the positive programme of Books VII and VIII; drawing from Pliny and Celsus as well as Petrarch and Renaissance authors, Di Capoa recounts the narratives of the avarice, credulity, impiety, dementia of the doctors as dangerous to the wider community (62). He uses a political metaphor to describe bloodletting: with delusive hopes, the doctor takes away the unique sustenance of life, the blood which is like the riches essential for the health of the republic (226-7). The doctors use logic'to throw dust in the eyes of the multitude' (18, cf. 35). And, a political metaphor dominates his programme of reform; the choice is between servitude and freedom, the servitude of the sects, and the freedom of inquiry. Medicine alone, he claims, still suffers under the yoke of Aristotle and Galen (264-5); what yoke? The yoke of Aristotelian logic: Lorenzo Valla, he claims, was the first to liberate philosophy from this blind and miserable servitude (414).9 Ragionamento VII reviews the subjects taught; geometry is especially useful, ethics is useful, of course anatomy, chemistry most of all; but his key reform is the severance of logic from medicine (and, of course, to dispense with logic is to dispense with Aristotle's metaphysics): the doctors need to know only so much logic as to grasp the uncertainty of medicine (323). The thrust of Di Capoa's opinion is the institutionalization of complete liberty of philosophizing, intellectual tolerance in its most severe form; the disallowance of any kind of dogmatic instruction, stripping from all medical texts pretentious rationalizations. He claims the need to teach all ancient and modern authors, but a long citation from Montaigne (425-6), suggests, rather, an anti-livresque stance; his recommendation for clinical experience for the speziali, (pharmacists), as well as the physicians, an experience which requires 8 Bertini (1699), pp. 298-99, 32, dismayed at Di Capoa's attacks on medical doctrines, acknowledges that he must be credited with the decline of ferocious bloodletting practices in Naples. 9 See Rak (1969), p. 253, on Valla as model for late seventeenth-century inquiry; Torrini, (1981), p. 848, speaks of their programme to sever logic from medicine.

XVIII Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere

329

observation of the effects of their medications (428), balances his distrust of theoretical authority with a pessimism about actual practice. He recommends no regulation: he notes its failures, particularly in regard to the chemical medications which provided the occasion for his text (i.e. the approval of 'angelic powder', 348-9); he contests even the notion of additional licensing: it is the lawyers' idea, and they do not like being examined (429). Di Capoa and Aristotle's theory Di Capoa's attack on Aristotelian discursive modes seems simple, ordinary Aristotle-bashing. As one would expect with such a complex historical model, however, his point of view is more discriminate: his aim throughout is the nourishment and protection of proper medical research and practice; he does this by stripping away dysfunctional Aristotelian habits of action, while retaining the rich problematic of the biological texts, in particular, the De anima. Here, indeed, Aristotle can be seen as proffering a 'metabiology': a coherent conceptual framework for the explanation of life-phenomena - the capacities for responsiveness, change, self-movement. Aristotle offers a 'biological concept of the soul' as the 'first actuality of life', the principle of life.10 The most basic, most generative presupposition is continuity, both an internal continuum of functions and processes of body and soul, which assumes the faculties of the souls - the vegetative, sensitive, rational - as contiguous and interactive, and the external continuum of life across species, between beast and man. Indeed, the soul is the hinge on which the biomedical theory turns in the seventeenth century. J. S. Wilkie argues a major rearticulation: the soul/body relation of Aristotle is replaced by the mind/body opposition of Descartes. For Andre Pichot, the Cartesian paradigm damages the Aristotelian-Galenic one, but, from 1650 to the nineteenth century there is a period of continuing contestation, and there is no dominant paradigm.11 According to Miles Burnyeat's scenario, Aristotle's theory was formulated against Platonic dualism and Democritean materialism, and it did not survive the Cartesian dualism and mechanistic materialism of the seventeenth century; the materialism demolished Aristotle's notion of matter, and therefore his notion of body/soul relations, leaving us with Cartesian dualism and the - seemingly intractable - mind/body problematic. He advises us, then, to 'junk' the Aristotelian psyche. But countering Burnyeat in the same collection of articles 10

Tancred-Lawson, refers to Aristotle as metabiologist in his introduction to his translation of the De anima, Aristotle (1986a), pp. 48f.; Sorabji (1974) speaks of Aristotle's biological concept of the soul. The De anima was designed, according to Tancred-Lawson, as the first lecture of a series on the life sciences, and thus key to the metabiology. 11 Wilkie (1958); Pichot (1993).

XVIII 330

on the De anima, Kathryn Wilkes claims that the Aristotelian psyche is theoretically superior to Cartesian mind as framework for inquiry; it is more generous in its five characteristics of 1) unity (the continuum hypothesis I referred to above); 2) its insistence on capacities and functions rather than events; 3) the focus on activity (especially social activity, as opposed to Cartesian solipsism); 4) heterogeneity, structured developmentally, vertically, horizontally; 5) its avoidance of the difficult Cartesian concept of consciousness.12 Di Capoa maintains a theoretical investment in the anima: this is not a recuperation, or a conscious continuation, of Aristotle on Di Capoa's part. Rather, what we can discern is a residue left over after his critique of both ancient and modern theory. Di Capoa finds loss as well as gain in the new mechanistic dualism of Descartes, and, while the immense body of scholastic commentary drops out, the Aristotelian anima remains as framework, yet hollowed out, excavated of many Aristotelianisms; it is a frame for critical assessment of practice as well as theory. Thus, in the same passage where Di Capoa laments the early separation of Greek medicine from proper natural philosophy, he claims that no less damage occurs when the doctors give up the anima, the most noble part of their study, relating to the regulation of all human actions, and the cure of maladies of the soul (13). And, rather like seething the kid in the mother's milk, he cites an 'Arabic' text which condemns Galen's inadequate grasp of Aristotle: Galen knows as much about logic as a turtle or an ox to fly, and thus his failure to grasp the potency/act distinction leads him into the error of claiming babies are not rational, and thus not truly human. Also, not understanding rational/irrational are contradictories, Galen asserts that men and animals possess reason to some degree; finally he attributes to animals knowledge of that most pernicious medical aphorism: 'contraries heal contraries', clearly a terrible infraction of Aristotelian tidiness (26). A dominant, and traditional, motive, of course, is the prestige the doctors derive from their engagement with the soul.13 The necessary integration of natural philosophy in medical work, necessarily integrates the anima framework in the medical domain; to fail to do so would be an act of foolish abstention. But another motive is the motive of protection of holistic cure: when Di Capoa advocates the study of ethics for the doctor, he points out that ethics has for subject the Tanimo dell'uomo' (325); one needs ethics to 12 Burnyeat (1992) and Wilkes (1992). Lloyd (1992) points out that 'the soul is the major articulating framework for his zoology', and thus inquiry must not be limited to the human, an issue of importance for seventeenth-century comparative anatomists. 13 Tiraquelli (1566), cap. 31, 'An ars medicina nobilitate derogef, 224-6, 291-317, argues that the medical profession does not derogate from noble status because of its care of the soul.

XVIII 331

Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere

understand the 'passion dell'anima'; the separation of cure of body and soul is harmful (325). Aristotle's continuum, not a Cartesian gap, is the support for the range of cure which necessarily moves, as Plato's Charmides has it, from the cure of the eye to the cure of the head, from the cure of the head to the whole of the body, and to the soul (123-5). The 'passion d'anima' is often causes of ills, and he mentions Galen's book on the 'difetti d'animo' (325). Then, maladies are healed through the passions (238); he notes the placebo effect: people may imagine medication helps (103); still, the long discussion of the healing power of music in the 1681 edition is truncated in 1689. Further, the inclusiveness dependent on continuum keeps Aristotelian notions of the anima in his discussion of epistemology. The construct is retained in the definition of the inquirer's capacity as well as in the conceptualization of the objects of life inquiry. The soul is our most noble, most principal part, but it is 'unita e avviticchiata\ united, clinging to, the body. The anima is incorporated, and prey to delusion about bodily sense, yet the senses do not deceive, they serve delusion; uncertainty is rooted in the varied operations of the incorporated anima. This lengthy account often counters Aristotle, but within the Aristotelian frame (90f). Our knowledge of the body is a result of the confrontation between the exquisite, delicate fineness the anatomizing work with animals required (96) and the physiological limitations of 4una troppo poco delicata tessitura degli organi de'nostri sentimenti'. Parere ends rather lamely, with a promise to discuss chemistry at more length, a promise fulfilled in the Incertezza de medicamenti. Medical inquiry must combine semplice notomia (anatomy) with notomia vitale (chemistry) and, with the all-important aid of the microscope, explore not simply the operation of medicaments on bodies, but the effect of bodies on medicaments (/, 38-9). The three Ragionamenti describe the extreme difficulty of the analysis of the effects of medicaments, and thus function as three additional chapters in the argument against the regulation of medicine. Again, Di Capoa is engaged in a positive effort to nourish and protect a discipline: in the Incertezza he focuses on methods, resources, instruments. He is, necessarily, since human vivisection is not an option, concerned with the 'maravigliosa fabbrica degli animali' (/, 39; cf. Parere, 95, 'ammirabile magistero de 'corpi degli animali'), and the uncertainty which invests it. Even if their anima is corporeal (as opposed to the immortal, most pure spirit of man), it is not reducible to our fantasizings; if it is just dispositions of the parts of the body, how do they produce such marvellous operations of sensation? How can we hope to describe it as simply insensible corpicciuolil Or if it is an air (aura), how again can we conjecture its corpuscular composition? It is not remarkable that Descartes denies the soul to brutes, and asserts that they

XVIII 332

operate like clocks, or other artificial machines - but such a prodigious machine would be unimaginable (/, 40). The greater part of the treatise is devoted to a review of the difficulties of penetrating the marvellous operations, and in particular, of the stomach and the digestion of food and drugs; again, both ancient research, such as that of Aristotle (/, 43), and modern are criticized: in speaking of a Paracelsian remedy, he remarks that it is not the first time a medicament presented under a false persuasion succeeds (7, 47). The tone recalls a passage in the Parere, which reviews the remarkable capacities for self-cure of animals: if such delicate, perspicacious and valuable comprehension is attributed to animals, how much more should we attribute to man with his anima spirituale (106-7)?14 Even if we conceded the soul of brutes to be corporeal, we could not concede Descartes's view that clocks or other artifical machines could furnish an adequate figure for the numberless complexities of the life operations of beasts, even the simplest, the nutritive faculty: the machine model is a blunt instrument for the 'exquisite' work on animals (96; cf. 90f). Di Capoa's admiration for Descartes is tempered by, precisely, uncertainty; he notes Descartes's 'confusion' about the intricate fabric of the brain (96). Di Capoa wishes then, to protect medicine not only from mechanical applications of logical techniques, but also from premature, reductionist applications of beast/machine metaphors. And, while Descartes's mechanistic dualism might impede a comparatist research programme, Aristotelian biology would not. Indeed, biological continuum assumptions support not only comparative research but Pyrrhonist circumscription of human capacity. Not only does Di Capoa's history reveal well- and ill-motivated factors in medicine, but medical research, in turn, supports his specifically sceptical-historical posture. Recall that in Sextus Empiricus's account of Pyrrhonism, the first trope of the sceptical critique is the comparison of human/animal sensate faculties in order to delimit precisely the extent and soundness of human capacity.13 And just so, the comparatist research of Di Capoa has a negative impact in its salutary effect of limiting dogmatic, overweening assertions about capacities, a caution which will, in turn, subvert facile notions of therapy and cure of ailment. Di Capoa most certainly displaces the old Aristotelian terminology of potency/act, matter, form and entelechy (401-6), and accedes to the modern corpuscularian vocabulary of description. Size, figure, motion and site are factors pertinent to chemical analysis, yet, in their obscurity and invisibility, have not yet produced any explanatory process: its explanations 14

Cf. Parere, 95; Incertezza, 63f.; see Rak (1969), 270. Sextus Empiricus (1932), I, 40f., on the first trope; also I, 236-41, on the affinity of medical Methodicism with Scepticism. Di Capoa notes the remarkable capacities of beasts (Parere, 106-7, Incertezza, 63f.). 15

XVIII 333

Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere

are 'nude and simple conjectures', and the process still la cosa da ricerca' (51, 57); corpuscles describe not machines, but the 'marvellous' revelations of the microscope, the 'vital operations' of medicine on the body and the body on medicine.16 A machine is not 'marvellous' enough. The retention of the anima construct is a tactic of caution; it fits with his mild scepticism as a tactic of inclusiveness, not retreat; it 'provides leeway'. Aristotle inPre-Vichian Naples Let us return to the Neapolitan context which is one of contest: while in the 1660s and '70s the contest was with a retrograde professionalism, in the 1690s the Par ere itself became a prominent issue of theological debate, when it was attacked for its anti-Aristotelianism by Benedetto Aletino (G. De Benedictis), and defended by the party of innovators, which included Francesco D'Andrea, Lucantonio Porzio, Giuseppe Valletta and Constantino Grimaldi.17 One could argue the usefulness of the Inquisition in Naples in focusing libertarian argument: Di Capoa developed in the 'Discorso per difesa dell'arte chimica..' the notion that while Aristotelian physics had become infested by heretics, chemistry was 'neutral';18 then, in Ragionamento VIII, he tactfully attacked Aristotle's impieties - he did not have a theory of creation or of personal immortality of the soul (382-3) - before attacking his sperienze (384f.); he attacks as well the impieties of Galen, who claimed that the temperament was animo (86), and of Epicurus, who thought the soul was composed of corpicciuoli', rather, the emphasis is to be reversed: the perfection of the universe is shown in the littlest, microscopic creatures; the triumph of chemistry is a triumph of scale (420, 422). Di Capoa's ingenuity lies in the fact that neutrality is useful, and the 'impieties' are not useful programmatically. The Aristotelian concept of the soul as the principle of life provides, ironically, resistance to the theological conservatism of the Aristotelians. But my original interest in Di Capoa was an interest in the biomedical theory of Vico's Neapolitan background. I have argued that Di Capoa does not engage in a paradoxical acceptance and rejection of Aristotle, but proffers a double strategy which nourishes and protects medical discipline by first, retaining a problematic of large biological interest, and second, stripping its methodology of dysfunctional discursive practices: a rich problematic and a 16 Papini (1990), p. 28, argues that the microscope adds another layer of ontological difficulty in the definition of'entity', 'life': 'Immaginiamo per un momento la situazione vissuta di Vico, in cui la microscopia ha aperto nuovi campi di osservazione e di interpretazione, a un livello di realta radicalmente diverso rispetto a tutto cio che precedentemente si e ritenuto e visualizzato come esistente'. 17 For an account of these quarrels see the articles of Torrini and Fisch on the Accademia degli Investiganti, as well as the monographs of Rak. 18 Torrini (1974), p. 12.

XVIII 334

lean method. What I shall now claim is that Aristotelian metabiology provides a supple frame both for Di Capoa's 'chemical vitalism' and strategic initiatives of Vico's New Science.19 'Biologism' motivates the strong revisions of Vico; his programme is an intrication of body science and civil science. Certainly, for instance, it is the case that Vico denies any intrinsic interest to physics; his axiom 'nature is genesis (nascimentoY privileges primitive, original structures, and recalls Di Capoa's enthusiasm for a 'golden age' of primitive immediacy to nature; further, M. Papini has noted that Vico's primitives are chemically defined as men 'di stereo e di nitro '.20 But, most importantly, the Vichian poetic logic, his strikingly original thesis of the priority of poetry derives from, I would argue, an Aristotelian assumption of the continuum of life; metaphor is an originary language stage of embodied structures, assigning meaning by attributing sense and passion to the insensate; and, metaphor endures, weighs in later language stages; etymology discloses hidden continuities in belief and practice.21 The construct of vital continuum justifies his many uses of phylogenetic/ontogenetic parallels of individual and social development patterns; continuum asserts that the understanding of the body, the continuum of sensitive appetite and rational will, bestial and human, is essential to the comprehension of a full range of motive, the analysis of civil action developed as a linkage of barbaric and civil, bestioni and citizen. Aristotelian problematic of life requires an account of life changes, of movement, of self-movement, and requires, therefore, historical strategies; Di Capoa's natural philosophy is intrinsically historical; Vico's New Science is intrinsically biological.22 And, the biological is 'civil'. Wilkes remarks the 19

Papini (1990), p. 52, claims that 'la chimica del tempo affascinail metafisico napoletano, perche apre nuovi orrizonti sulla continuita e contemporaneamente sulla trasformabilita di quella metafisica soggiacenza, che dal mondo naturale conduce all'entita corporea umana (su cui possono operare la medicina e la spargirica) fmo alle soglie della mens'. The biomedical theory can by no means be reduced to a simple 'vitalism'; cf. Sloan (1977); Henry (1986) and (1987). What I am arguing, of course, is that if, as Pichot has it, there is only the choice between the Cartesian and Aristotelian notions of life at this time, it seems reasonable to count Vico as an Aristotelian. 20 Vico (1968b), s. 147. Rak speaks of Di Capoa's enthusiasm for 'golden ages' (Rak (1969), p. 260); Badaloni (1961), pp. 138f., describes similar historical strategies in Vico and Di Capoa. The vital text in the New Science is 1045: 'a man is properly only mind, body, and speech, and speech stands as it were midway between mind and body'; see Cantelli (1986), p. 185. 22 Both Jardine, in his work on Kepler, and Joy, in her work on Gassendi, claim that in the natural-philosophical inquiry of early modernity history is not peripheral. The centrality of the insight into the temporality of science itself, and the stipulation of the necessary historical competence of the scientist marks this inquiry; see Jardine (1984); Joy (1987); to be sure, Jardine's essays in philosophy of science, Jardine (1986) and (1991) maintain that all science is intrinsically historical. Torrini remarks on the historical conception of the constitution of knowledge in Cornelio's Progymnasmata physica (Venice: Baba, 1658), 'Preface', in Torrini (1981), p. 107.

XVIII 335

Lionardo Di Capoa's Parere

Aristotelian stress on the psyche's capacity for social activity, and remarks the benefit of the absence of the Cartesian construct of 'consciousness' with its difficult epistemological solipsism.23 Surely Vico's rejection of solipsist Cartesian mind underwrites his rejection of an individualist, moralist Humanist historiography. Then, Badaloni has noted the parallels between the complexity of Di Capoa's historical model of interruption, regress, recuperation in enquiry and the Vichian model of corsi and ricorsi.24 Biologism, in short, does not entail organic determinist plots; the difficult, uneven models of Di Capoa and Vico subvert simple linear determinism, and they in effect 'temporalize' a static Lovejovian 'Great Chain of Being'; history, for both, functions as severe critique of reifications of processes. Finally, to return to the Par ere as a legal opinion, a response to a political issue: here history provides the evidence for uncertainty, and supports the claim that uncertainty not only requires freedom, but produces it; change requires freedom of enquiry, but freedom is the consequence as well as cause of change. Consider Di Capoa's invocation of the Ship Argo figure in the Incertezza as illumination of the historical issue of the persistence of identity in change: if every part of the ship is replaced, is it still the Argo (/, 64)? This is surely a 'life' issue, and bespeaks the importance of Aristotle's psychology for his zoology. Is it anti-essentialist? It is surely anti-materialist; thus medicine, as discipline, is simply the concatenation of actions of scholars and sects, their transmissions and disjunctions in transmissions; Di Capoa focuses on the continuity of repair efforts, on methods and practices that work with uncertainty.25 The identity is all the more interesting as highly wrought, worked over; and it places a burden on the doctor/scientist as historian at all times, not intermittently. Indeed, the recommendation requires history as community practice, for a detailed appreciation of passage of time within the community serves as a prophylactic against sectarianism: the complex model imposes vigilance. Sextus Empiricus noted that Plato was both dogmatic and aporetic; the accomplishment of Di Capoa was to distill the aporetic out of the available Aristotelian dogma.26 Di Capoa, in short, both participates in and responds to Pichot's continuing crisis in late seventeenth-century biological theory; and, the

52

p- -

23

Papini sees 'una continuita tensionale tra anima, animus e mens\ in Vico (1990),

24 Badaloni (1961), p. 143 compares Di Capoan and Vichian repetition. 25

Hull (1984), seems to argue that it is compatible with Aristotelian biology to regard 'natural kinds' or species as 'historical entities [which] may undergo total turnover of their constituent elements just so long as they do so gradually and remain sufficiently cohesive in the process' (p. 17); the biologist does not generate, then, 'covering laws', but historical narratives. 26 Sextus Empiricus (1932), I, 221; Tancred-Lawson stipulates the 'aporetic' as the valuable in Aristotle (1986a), p. 85.

XVIII 336

response is, at the same time, a significant contribution to the redefinition of historical enquiry in pre-Vichian Naples.

XIX

Hobbes and Vico on Law: A Rhetorical Gloss Rhetoric is the first fundamental hermeneutic of the everydayness (Alltdglichkeit) of being-with-others (Mitteinandersein). M. Heidegger, Being and Time1

H

obbes and Vico gave us a strong revision of the terms and issues of political theorizing, a revision that is primarily a contest of the philosophical account that dominated early modernity, an account that claimed to establish universal, timeless, moral truths, the values of the individual human being, as the central constructs that exhaustively explain politics. But Hobbes and Vico share a profound pessimism in regard to individual capacities and actions. Both assume that the primary phenomena to be considered must be those of interaction, of "being-with-others." These revisions represent strong changes of scale: their basic strategies are those of diminution and expansion. For Hobbes the theoretical gain is a sharp diminution of the domain of politics, a narrowing that is at the same time an intensification. Politics is only the motions of deliberation, aversion of Michel Meyer's definition of politics as the discursive negotiation of differences. Hobbes excels at describing the thick texture of apoliticality, of anarchic and authoritarian acts which hedge about political interaction. For Vico there is a vast increase in the relevance of the domain of law, which becomes foundation, archive, and explanation for the entire range of civil interactions. To read the New Science is to confront a thick texture of legal rules and exempla employed to authenticate the complex, cyclical narrative of our institutions and practices.

XIX 64

The constant resort to the minutiae of legal practices both situates and relegates political theories and justifications. My thesis is that modern theory has ignored this early modern revisionism, pursuing the elusive goals of traditional, or classical, political philosophy. By examining "law" as topic in Hobbes and Vico, we may appreciate how the traditional constructs of "justice" and "power" can have no edge in their discussions, or in ours.

HOBBES There is no such thing as "good" law; there is law. Olga E. Tellegen-Couperus

The Romanist Alan Watson has argued the importance of the isolation of Roman law, its resistance to the colonizations of Greek philosophy. To read, retroactively, the investment of laws and legal practices by philosophical values is to misread the achievements of Roman law and the persistence of the Roman legal heritage. The peculiar resistance, the particular isolation key to understanding this achievement and heritage, is the resistance to Greek philosophical moralizing.2 Hobbes acknowledges both the general and particular resistances of law to philosophy. Thus in his A Dialogue of the Common Laws he refuses a philosophical investment of law, a tactic rendered piquant by his austere critic taking the role of "Philosopher" in the Dialogue. He considers Sir Edward Coke's dictum, "reason is the life of the law" and that equity is perfecta ratio, perfect reason; and, interpreting the written law as consisting in vera ratione, true reason; yet, here he finds his own reason at a stand, for "it frustrates all the laws in the world."3 Coke's belief in legal reason is an artificial perfection, an academic justification. Thus Coke's scenario of law as made by the perfection of professional legal wisdom is wrong; law is made by authority, not by learned, wise men: "none can make a law except he that has the legislative power" (D.5). Further, when Hobbes's Philosopher claims "I read not to dispute, but to obey" (3), the sense of "dispute," I suggest, is not "contestation of law's force," but "debate." He denies, in short, the possibility of a dialectical origin or development of law; he insists on law's formulaic presence, the fact of law. The focus of Hobbes's account of law is on authority, and initiating acts of authority. "Contract" is not essentially egalitarian, then, but a subspecies of authoritarian act (L.c.l3,c. 14).

XIX

HOBBES AND Vico ON LAW: A RHETORICAL GLOSS

65

With the rich description of authority, there is a reconsideration of the domain of politics; Hobbes devotes a great deal of attention to dark accounts of the febrility, inadequacy of the practices and intrusions of deliberation and counsel.4 The elaborations on the quality of deliberation follow from his definition of politics, which is now more economical, elegant; politics is reduced to process only, behavior. Thus what makes a commonwealth "political" is institution, a process of "agreeing among themselves" of the participants, and thus it assumes a conversation, the founding discourse (L.,159). I shall argue that Hobbes's definition is rhetorical insofar as politics is simply deliberative process, and it does not encompass, but it is hedged about by initiating interruptive and dismissive acts of authority. Politics as behavior is the discursive extrapolation from the complex, but basic life capacity of deliberation—"the whole sum of desires, aversions, hopes and fears combined till the thing be either done or thought impossible" (L.,48)— where "reasoning" is simply a subspecies (L., 49). "Rhetoric, not Philosophy": A Gloss Insofar as Hobbes focuses on law, he takes on its resistance to philosophical strategies of assigning universal truths; in so far as he focuses on legal and political processes, he takes on board rhetorical interests and analysis. Or, Hobbes's hostility to the classicizing philosophy that had dominated, with its investments of universal values, the discussion of law, renders the premises and procedures of philosophy's classical antagonist, rhetoric, interesting. These are premises and procedures available to and exploited by Hobbes, according to Leo Strauss.5 These beliefs and habits of action in inquiry could be usefully employed to help dismantle systemic philosophic error. Hobbes's particular hostility is to the political and moral philosophy of Aristotle. This makes Aubrey's citation of Hobbes— "Aristotle's Rhetoric and discourse of animals was rare"—of great programmatic interest.6 It is the connection between the two that is of interest to Hobbes. The Rhetoric accommodates the discourse of animals, that is, the Rhetoric folds into an analysis of political deliberation the physiological psychology of Aristotle's biological texts. The "fully rhetorized psychology" Pierre Aubenque finds in Aristotle's Rhetoric //is the rhetorical accommodation of biologism to politics, integrating fundamental animal capacities of motion and self-movement with specifically political capacities of acting, moving, persuading.7 The Hobbesian psychology, marked in many places

XIX 66

by borrowings from Aristotle, furnishes a "practical anthropology" which is the basis for the account of human interactions of both Hobbes's Human Nature and his Leviathan. Hobbes uses, I would argue, the new mechanistic language of the seventeenth-century psychology simply as a gloss on the Aristotelian model of continuum of contiguous, interactive faculties and actions of nutrition, sensation, perception, self-movement, passion, desire, imagination, and intellect. As a single range of faculties it is monistic and thus "impure." Here, mechanistic motion gives a version of Aristotelian motion. Hobbes paraphrases Aristotle's claim that nature is the principle of movement and change, and, therefore, if we do not understand motion, we do not understand nature: "life itself is but motion" (L.51,40-41; Aristotle, Physics, 200bl2-15). The rhetorical account of political life is of motions, process, alterations, assertions, negations of beliefs and dispositions, of politics as radically "timefull." A twentieth-century revival of Aristotle's Rhetoric, the SSI924 lectures of Martin Heidegger, illumines Hobbes's seventeenth-century revival.8 Heidegger claims that in the Aristotelian text rhetoric is not an autonomous linguistic techne, but that it functions entirely "inside politics," while ethics "depends upon" politics. Aristotelian "being" is essentially "being-with-others," and the distinctive human capacity, language, is essentially address to others; rhetoric is basic to life as the zoepolitikemeta logon. Heidegger takes the Rhetoric as offering a new perspective on the "Grundbegriffe"; he situates it at the center of inquiry, complicitous, implicated in theorizing and practicing politics as the hegemonous practice of living with others, while philosophical ethics is an external speculative moment. Further, in the definition in Being and Time, rhetoric as the first systematic hermeneutic of the dailyness (Alltaglichkeit) of being-with-others (Mitteinandersein), Heidegger re-specifies the Hobbesian focus on motion, timefullness. The concern of rhetoric with discursive changes, effects on others, with persuasion, deemed a weakness by philosophers, must be redefined as a strength. In Hobbes the complex reaction is to retain the philosophical ambition of theoretical oversight, but radically redrawn as a version of "inside" rhetorical description. Rhetorical inquiry of speakinglistening situations exhausts the elements of political action: desires, choices, passions, imaginings, judgements, beliefs, and reasonings; to be sure, the political process must be public, and the hegemonous topic is public utility. We must recognize that his lengthy discussions of state formation and dissolution are based on his refined sense of what constitutes,

XIX HOBBES AND VlCO ON LAW! A RHETORICAL GLOSS

67

within the bounds of biological life, political life.9 Because rhetoric accommodates biologism, it corrects political and ethical philosophy. Tactics of Definition Within this physicalist, processual, archetypically rhetorical view of politics the elements of legal theory and practice shift strategically. Hobbes accepts Aristotle's most basic assumption that stable definitions—"settled significations of words" (L.,33)—are necessary to dialogue; but he insists as well on the arbitrariness of settlement and on stability's frequent, very frequent, absence. Stability is achieved only within the micro-environment of the argument. Thus the definition of "natural law" when related to political arbitrations is not the staple definition of Greek philosophizing of Roman law: "the interpretation of the laws of nature, in a commonwealth, dependeth not on the books of moral philosophy" (L. 263).10 In Hobbes's text natural laws become "qualities that dispose men to peace and obedience" (L.,212), or habits of mind that dispose men to peace and charity; natural law retains its moral valence, but now in the form of a human proclivity, not transcendental rule. It is a disposition, "Befindlichkeit" a primary object of rhetorical analysis, in Heidegger's account. The account of legality is entirely dependent upon a physicalist account, not simply of men as political actors, but of sovereignty; that is to say the sovereign, "being the person of them all" (L.,161) is the primary, only political entity that counts. His definition of "sovereign" is to counter talk of the "state," of "power" as imprecise, and, perhaps, falsely reifying inadequate definitions (L., c.5). The definition of the sovereign as an "artificial man" employs organic terms. It has an "intended immortality"—this is its programmatic statement—but a natural mortality: the sovereign, is "soul," that is "life," that is "motion"— a neat Hobbesian finesse. Once departed, the "members" (a physicalist trope for citizens) no longer receive their motion from it; therefore, the obligations last no longer than the power (208). I emphasize "natural" and "power" in order to show how unpretentious is Hobbes's account of corporate life. There is the originary "power" as desire in the psychology, and there is resigned, alienated power, that is, sovereign, artificial power, "common" power (155). As power, so justice. This is no essential, transcendent virtue; it is desirable as named by, subsequent to the law, (L.,115; D.,29). It is, like "natural law," a quality (a habit of mind) that relates to man in society,

XIX 68

not in solitude (L., 115). Again, in physicalist terms, it is not a faculty of mind or body, it is not an innate capacity, and, there is no solipsist, only a relational, quality of justice. But note Hobbes's definition of equity; here the shift away from justice as interest is most profound. Again, equity is not a universal, eternal value, coherent with reason as valuable, enduring capacity, but a discursive assignment, an articulated belief, one of Heidegger's "Aussagen" speaking-outs, the speaking-hearing that is the fundamental material of rhetorical/political discussion. In a remarkable passage, where Hobbes begins by pointing out that there are many senses of the legal terms in the rules but "there is only one sense of the law"— this is a rough equivalent of "there is no such thing as 'good' law, there is law"— he goes on to give us this complicated sentence: "the intention of the legislator is equity, for it is contumely to think otherwise of the sovereign" (L.,267). Where do we locate this thought? There is certainly no assertion of an "essentialist" good law; but political life requires the assignment of equity as quality of sovereign mind, as its own tactic of furthering, disposing its mortal motions. This is a very great distance from the political philosophy that is tedious, bland in its optimism, question-begging in its impositions of definitions. But Hobbes's descriptions of the authoritarian, his precise accounts of our lurches into the apolitical, nourishes the diminution, perhaps, but also the intensification, the concentration of the political. Stipulating politics as only process, and process rhetorically defined as discursive negotiations, Hobbes honors his physicalist premises, the minute account of our capacities and incapacities of the Human Nature and the Leviathan.11 The "covenant" of "everyone with everyone" that creates the political commonwealth (L.,159), loses its Protestant resonances of religious compact; it is simply the last act of group deliberation, i.e., the "will" that he had defined as simply, only, the last act of deliberation (L., 126). Politics depends on useful capacity: there is no inconsistency between human nature and civil duties (L.,702). Both solid reason and powerful eloquence combine in civil execution (L., 701). Politics is also unhappily dependent on the undependable, on fatal flaws: the distinctively human communicative capacity, that which distinguishes us from animals, is "the art of words" that can represent good as evil, and evil as good. Insofar as they lack this capacity, bees have a social advantage over us (L., 156-57). Hobbes, like Vico, does not maintain that our natural sociability is naturally nice (NS, 135); we are distinctively dissimulative.

XIX

HOBBES AND Vico ON LAW: A RHETORICAL GLOSS

69

It is a politics of impurity and movement. In the scenarios of incessant motions of life passions fund the civil and thus legal behavior: the passion of fear "inclines men least"— a peculiar, edgy formulation— to break the law (L., 285). Further, since "being" is "being-with-others," emotions must not be defined as internal, private states of mind; Hobbes discovered, according to Dumouchel, that emotions are the "very being of the social."12 For Hobbes, emotions are reactions to the representations of ourselves by others: "in the pleasure men have, or displeasure from the signs of honor and dishonor done unto them, consisteth the nature of the passions" (HN, 40). Then to name a person's emotion is aperlocutionary act; assigning an emotion is highly political. Further, if we accept Meyer's definition of politics as the discursive negotiation of differences, we can assimilate Hobbes's deference to passions: passions are a primary cause of alterations, changes; where reason establishes coherence, consensus, passions require politics: no life, no motion; no motion, no passion; no passion, no differences; no differences, no politics.13 The incessant, repetitious acts of politics insure no progressive purification of process. The narrowing of politics to process insures that Hobbes has no fascination with technical fixes, structures, no commitment to the careful definition and elaboration of institutions and programs of institutional reforms. The mark, the only material effects of successful sovereignty is not institutions but simply cultural production; the alternative to life as nasty, brutish and short is invention, such as navigation, building, arts, letters, etc. (L., 113). If we return to his Dialogue, this disinterest in institutional forms, and the further political resonances of his view of law become more clear. Hobbes's Philosopher questions the Lawyer's claim: "the law is nothing but the study of reason"; how could it be, when the greater part of men are so "unreasonable"? (D.,9) The thought that the laws have a vital, rational being is wrong: "the laws of themselves [are] but a dead letter" (D.,10). The Lawyer's plaint to the Philosopher, "You make it of the essence of a law to be publicly and plainly declared," is unwittingly correct (D., 27): it is the quality of publicity, accessibility that determines legality. This definition of law defines its political possibilities; it is never a matter of internal states of mind, of the scholarly judgements, even when scholars put them into play. And while an understanding of life faculties and actions is basic to political theorizing, an appeal to self-consciousness as warrant, private act of authentication,

XIX 70

is simply an appeal to an inaccessible base of justification strategies. Thus "self-consciousness" of "rights" is useless: "what are you better for your right" in the face of loss of conditions for its exercise (D.,30)? To move from inquiry into law to investigations of morals is a movement from the consideration of the essentially public to the pastimes of privacy, a movement which Hobbes rejects. The Dialogue also asserts that to claim reason as the life of the law allows the claims of individual reason to betray law; it furnishes an excuse for disobedience, it is simply solipsism. "On this ground, any man, of any law whatsoever, may say it is against reason, and thereupon make a pretence for disobedience" (D., 4). Thus the philosophical project, preoccupied with self-definition, is simply redefined as the discourse produced by leisure that betrays politics. It is precisely at this point that the concurrence of the Hobbesian and Vichian projects becomes obvious. Vico Hobbes uses law; Vico makes law the center of his inquiry. Vico, like Hobbes, absorbs the resistance of law to philosophical colonization, and, to a greater extent than Hobbes, Vico focuses on the Roman legal isolation from Greek philosophical influences, in particular its imperviousness to the moral philosophizing of an "esoteric Hellenistic wisdom." The New Science is an announced revision of the practice of inquiry: the Vichian argument against the dominant early modern philosophical readings of law and politics starts from a strong antipathy to the general philosophic investigative concern with private morality; this has misrepresented and diminished interest in public capacities and activities.14 Thus Vico's attack on the "solitary" or "monastic" philosophers (130) with their focus on individualist ethics. Like Hobbes, with his distaste for the constant quotation of classical philosophers such as Aristotle and Cicero and their invocations of individual liberty as political value, and his disparagement of ideologies of individual reason as becoming justifications for civil disobedience (L., 202), Vico finds the solitaries—Epicureans and Stoics—as the source of theorizing that repudiates basic interactive concerns, the primacy of "being-with-others," in Heidegger's terms. The thought of Epicureans and Stoics is, in particular, totally incompatible with the lessons of Roman jurisprudence (335). On the one hand, they mislay, in their esoteric wisdom (979), the

XIX HOBBES AND VlCO ON LAW: A RHETORICAL GLOSS

71

body of unreflective judgements, the sensus communis of a nation. On the other hand, the philosophers give us a most inadequate notion of how individual intentions, conatus, function in social scenarios (340), as they do not study human affairs in the economy of civil institutions (342). Vico, indeed—wrongly, in my view—associates Hobbes with Epicurus; yet he praises Hobbes for trying "to enrich Greek philosophy by adding a great part which it certainly had lacked . . . the study of man in the whole society of the human race" (179). But Vico's quarrel is not simply with the "solitaries" but with the legal erudition of early modern scholars such as Grotius and their attempts at philosophical systematization of law, and, in particular, of Roman law (310,313,318).15 Most importantly, philosophy dismisses time; Grotius is anachronistic: he reads erudite doctrine back into the early stages of law (350, 972). This is, I would argue, another version of the rhetorical concern with timeliness, timeladenness, we have seen in Hobbes. Grotius begins not at the beginning, but at the middle, assuming the continuous presence of modern nations and of a mature philosophy (394, 493). The scholars read the ancient documents as if the authors had gone to school with Aristotle (455). This accusation is based on the most fundamental Vichian premise—that nature is genesis, nascimento, that origins explain identity of a society or a practice (147). But Grotius's erudition loses sight of the barbaric origins of Rome (1075); he is like the erudite who rely in vain on a philosophic myth of the innocence of a Golden Age (518, 1079). Just so, Hobbes's statement that "there is scarce a commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in all conscience be justified" (L., 706), counteracts wishful theorizing, retrospective justifications. He shares Vico's distaste for Golden Age myths, paralytic in effect. Then, Vico's disaffection for Greek philosophical explanations is rooted in his profound interest in Romanitas, and in particular the massive, dense presence of Roman law as source and evidence for Roman and Italian meaning and program. In keeping with his commitment to nature as genesis, to origins as identifying, he often cites the ur-text of the Twelve Tables. The Twelve Tables as text is described as tesoro, treasure-house, and testimonio, witness of the natural laws of Latium (915, 154); and, of course, Homer, just as the Twelve Tables, offers "civil histories" of early politics (156). In keeping with his notion of philosophy as late intervention, Vico repeatedly attacks the traditional notion that the Twelve Tables were an import, that Greek philosophy

XIX 72

was the source (284, 285,915,978,985,992). A remarkably large proportion of the arguments, indeed, the whole texture of the New Science, is constituted by the invocations of Roman laws as specifying intriguing and counterintuitive elements in the development of Roman civility. Watson has told us to focus on the formulaic quality of Roman law, on laws as often a deliberate response to other laws and to the needs of legal procedures; this is precisely the kind of practical dependence on rigid verbal formulae Vico needs to develop his narrative of Roman polity (966); and, of course, it is the kind of legal witness that subverts philosophical, rationally rephrased accounts; law as formula responds to specific historical demands of practice and not to rationalistic justifications. 16 It is the extreme verbal punctiliousness of law's employment that resists moral philosophical apologies. Also, it is subject to ironic erasure; formulaic law may produce natural equity only ironically. Further, the study of Roman law is essential to an understanding of Europe and of the "returned" barbarism of the Middle Ages, as well as the returned civility of modernity. Indeed, for Vico, European identity is the borrowing of Roman law (287).17 "Rhetoric, not Philosophy": A Gloss It is a topos of Vichian studies that, since Vico's entire academic career was spent as a professor of rhetoric, rhetorical interests are fundamental to his New Science. Yet, counterintuitively, Vico has less of an engagement than Hobbes to developing in some specificity a "practical anthropology" from rhetorical premises and procedures. Vico's rhetorical pedagogy is entirely transformed as an inquiry mode in the New Science. The vital connection is not with the rhetorized psychology Hobbes employs to such advantage, or with the tropological formalism, the "four master tropes" so much emphasized in twentiethcentury essays on Vico's rhetoric. Rather, the fruitful interaction is between legal interpretation and rhetorical hermeneutics. Indeed, according to G. Crifo, the canons of legal interpretation that appear in the Roman Corpus iuris civilis are simply rhetorical canons.18 The remarkable sophistication of Vico's treatment of law, a treatment that boldly revises both the theory and the nature of the accounts of the basic transactions in "being-with-others," draws upon his command of rhetorical-legal hermeneutics. Vico's rhetoric may best be seen as a bundle of investigative allegiances. Thus the acquaintance of Vico is, surely, not with Greek rhetoric,

XIX HOBBES AND VlCO ON LAW: A RHETORICAL GLOSS

73

but Roman. To be sure, Johannes Stroux has made the point that any Greek influence on Roman legal practice is, precisely, through Roman rhetoric, not Roman philosophy. 19 Vico is perfectly aware that the Roman oratores, advocates, trained in rhetoric, shared with the jurisconsults interpretative tasks in law; he is also aware of distinctive tasks and changes in task. "It was formerly traditional, among the jurists, not to depart from the strict letter of the law; today it is the spirit of the law that they constantly resort. In legal questions, jurists formerly clung to the literal wording, orators emphasize the spirit and intent of the law; in our day, the jurist takes over the function of the orator."20 In other words, to understand the relation between orator and jurist, rhetoric and law, one must engage the most basic hermeneutical issues. Vico's mastery of the Latin tradition of rhetorical manuals, as we see in his own manual, is exceptional. These manuals pointedly classified careers hierarchically. In Cicero's texts philosophy is the occupation of leisure, surrogate for a defeated or idle politician. Quintilian's Institutio oratoria is a manual for the whole of education, a rhetorical training that encompasses all social strategies, all tasks of leisured relief. But Quintilian's text is primarily a manual for a legal practice that is the surrogate, the replacement for the political career lost to the citizen in imperial times, a legal career that Vico realizes in turn "falls into the silence" of imperial rescripts, the repression of interpretative strategies. Beyond this, the very heavy investment of the manuals with instruction in legal technique in effect offers a "phenomenology of law," a very rich account of the tactics, modalities, and effects of legal argument. That is to say, only the very thick description of the nature of the experiences of jurist and orator, client and advocate communicates true political or social knowledge. All the usages of terms must deliver an acute sense of historical context. Vico describes his new method as a "philosophical philology"; his achievement is first to decouple philology from philosophical objectives, then recouple philosophy, as simply theoretical ambition, with a philology reliant on rhetorical analysis. It is a new empirical science of civil interaction, useful to the commonwealth (138-40), that employs rhetorical canons to analyze law as the primary body of evidence and explanation. Tactics of Definition What I would now argue is that Vico's rhetorical investments in premises and methods, like those of Hobbes, support very strong , and at

XIX 74

times, very similar revisions of the philosophic accounts of law and politics. Most certainly Hobbes and Vico share a commitment to impurity, to the (Aristotelian) continuum of faculties as a continuum of contiguous, interactive capacities and actions where monism guarantees mixture, impurity. For Vico, intrications of mind and body explain constitutional elements (630, 185, 699), and thus Vico's insistence on the compass of the faculty of imagination. In Vico, imaginative as well as rational universals expound sections of human development. Imagination as an original, fundamental capacity (born in poverty of intellect) molds Roman law. Early law, in his famous aphorism, can be a "serious poem," a construction of controlling fictions, introducing so many empty masks without subjects, so many imaginary rights (1036-37). But Vico, unlike Hobbes, has a developmental model; poverty, ignorance are origin and source of all our languages, polities, modalities (120,122,404). Yet—and this we must return to—poverty is not only origin, but, as designating basic human capacities designates capacities or incapacities that are always with us, Vico describes three languages, three jurisprudences, three politics, yet since they represent human faculties, they exist in each and all; Vico proffers a very complex model where linearity of development and simultaneity of psychological potential coexist and modify each other continuously (446). Thus Vico's pessimism, like Hobbes's, generates strong redefinitions of the basic legal and political terms of social inquiry. He is most ingenious in his use of Homer as well as the Twelve Tables for the redefinition of early stages (156,915). Heroism, for example, is strongly revised as the mode of a primitive aristocracy, all verbal scrupulosity and punctiliousness (936,965,968); what marks their strategies is Watson's formulaic legalism, primarily manifest in the enforcement of "propriety in the use of words" (969,939). There is a similar deflation in Hobbes: the aristocracy's honor is "only abstaining from cruelty" (L., 140). The "philosophical heroism" of moral nobility is an oxymoron, a non-historical confection; it is a late invention, a conceit of scholars (959). But most intriguing is Vico's historicization of "equity." Like Hobbes, Vico's psychology of impurity disallows pure, rational principles, and stipulates mixed, "passionate principles." Just so, Vico defines equity as "tender effect," tenerezza (991, 994, 998, 1002). But Vico's equity is a value defined and redefined in history; thus he resorts to Ulpian's definition of civil equity as "a kind of probable judgement not naturally known to all men" (320). The republican praetors must soften the

XIX HOBBES AND Vico ON LAW: A RHETORICAL GLOSS

75

severity and temper the rigidity of the Twelve Tables in practices of equity (978). Like Hobbes, Vico may decouple law and morality: in the early, fraught stages a rigorous, "scrupulous" "civil" equity is simply reason of state, "ragion di stato" (328, 949, 953). "Natural" equity, equity as "benigna," is a late attainment of a late society, a "school"— an education, not an invention—of philosophers (327); it is the last, best artifice and as last, ephemeral, doomed to impermanence (953).21 Here Vico's usage of "natural" is very like that of Hobbes in his definition of "natural" law as disposition to peace; but, again, for Vico the natural law of developed reason was not current through all times and places (972). And like Hobbes Vico reconciles univocity—there is only one operational sense of law at a time—with the intractable arbitrariness in usage of legal terms. The late, "vulgar" sovereignty (signorid) over language and letters imposes senses on the law which the powerful must observe (936). Still, the genius of Roman law lay in "their endeavors to keep the words from shifting from the original meanings as much as possible" (1003): perseverance of legal usage fosters perseverance of civic identity. In Vico's ingenious explications of key legal terms we find, perhaps, his strong rhetorical commitment to temporicity as constraint and value in inquiry. We have observed Heidegger's insistence on defining rhetoric as the hermeneutic of the dailyness of being-with-others, and just so is Vico's inquiry obsessed by time, by time as development, process in politics and law, and by transitions in human faculties and capacities, as well as by intrusions of time of circumstances, variety of conditions in practices. Vico deplores our insensitivity to not only long process but early barbarism, when he claims "native customs, and above all natural liberty, do not change all at once but by degrees and over a long period of time" (249). He defines this "natural liberty," however, as ferocity, clinging to property (290). It is, moreover, our barbarism, now, still; a ferocity that is formative, perduring; a barbarism Vico's reader must internalize. It is significant, I think, that Heidegger's rhetorical account of timefullness helps prepare the ground for his later, philosophical rejection of linearity, his proposal of the model of a temporal "manifold"—where present, past, future simultaneously qualify, invest existence.22 And just so, Vico's complex model that combines linearity and simultaneity deprives his social science of the goal of transcending time, progressively overcoming time (446). And beyond this the most striking Vichian

XIX 76

investment in temporicity is irony. It is not enough that poverty, ignorance, incapacity must be noted; the very operations of intentions must be questioned. Thus Vico insists on the intrusion of the irony of unintended consequences as explanatory in historical development; ironized time not only submerges moral credit, but revalues narratives of technique and institution; tactics of domination may end by subjugating the subjugators. Vico's project of an "ideal, eternal history of providence" is richly specified, astonishingly fragile. Vico does not simply portray a law demoralisee—obvious in his contrast of custom as king, law as "tyrant" (308)—but describes the attributions of "good" to law or legal practice as the result of powerfully complicated political processes. Totally different ambitions arise in this inquiry, in sharp contrast to those of the dominant philosophical interests Vico confronted. We notice the peculiar goal: to define "the causes of distinction of Roman law" in the double sense of superiority and specificity (281). We notice as well that some of the axioms that Vico lists at the beginning of the New Science are of a truly dense concreteness, at times simple restatements of rather obscure Roman legal rules. Finally we note the decisive rejection of philosophical confections of "oughts": "Philosophy considers man as he should be and so can be of service to but very few" (131); Vico contests the use of "oughts" for either practice or for practice of inquiry; only very thick descriptions of the manifestations and ironies of "is" allow us to place properly the various social and investigative invocations of "oughts." Here legal history is of immense value in providing the sources in practice for ethical speculation.

SPECIAL EFFECTS Hobbes and Vico present strenuous, inventive revisions of the dominant early modern philosophical account of politics. Some of the critical strength, I would argue, stems from Hobbes and Vico's awareness of law's resistance to, isolation from philosophy and philosophical systematization. That such a central body of action, freighted with meaning, is resistant to philosophical formal rigor is important to both Hobbes's and Vico's theorization of politics. But the critical, revisionary edge comes not simply from a replication of law's resistance to philosophy, but from resort to a rhetorical hermeneutic. The recognition that legal behavior is permeated through and through with rhetorical habits of

XIX HOBBES AND Vico ON LAW: A RHETORICAL GLOSS

77

action and analysis—by the topical modes of discovery, by the insistence on decorum, timeliness as value, by, indeed, the notion "time is of the essence"—shifts the analytic emphasis entirely. In Vico's case a combination of the use of law as topic and rhetoric as diagnostic skill develops a repertoire of motives, pseudo-motives, inventions, adaptations from the legal archive. Whoever attempts to construe a political theory on the basis of Vichian research finds the issues vastly and usefully complicated—opaque to academic rationalization. In Hobbes's case, the inclusive impurity of his rhetorized psychology is the basis for his rejections of the rationalistic justifications of academic law. Their revisions prompt strategies of scale, strategies of diminution and increase. For Hobbes, impurity invests, limits the'transactive powers of political actors. The study of law demonstrates that law and legal negotiations and politics are hedged about, constrained by the impurities writ large, by initiating and dismissive acts of authority, by the intrusions of the unnegotiable, the violent. If politics is simply the motions or transactions, the discursive negotiation of differences, not much qualifies as "politics." For Vico politics becomes the free-floating mechanisms of negotiation, loosely tied to social-economic realities, heavily engaged with law. Vico's striking increase in the appeals to the domain of law as archive for explanation of the totality of social interactions embeds the political in an extraordinary range of capacities and possibilities of interaction, all marked by transience and irony; his precision is in the description of the flawed, mixed, unfinished, ironic. But in both cases, the limitation of politics to process, or to a discontinuous strand of interactive practice, undercuts the philosophical goal of "exact," strong definitions of universal values that fit systemically, logically in an ahistorical account of a.politicaperennis, with a goal, perhaps often unacknowledged in these accounts, of stipulating a perfect polity. Hobbes's political philosophy, I would submit, had been hollowed out by his rhetorical diagnostic interests. Vico presents an ambitious program—"an ideal eternal history," "a philosophy of authority," etc., but it is stood on its head: the philosophical topoi he addresses are raw materials, the shared opinions, endoxa, that are the target of negotiation and not conclusions of inquiry. And thus their strong innovations in definition. Neither Hobbes nor Vico offer a counsel of perfection. Hobbes's lucidity in pessimism serves primarily to save politics from the mistakes of systemic misunderstanding, ambitious misconstrual. For Hobbes, law displays authority and the

XIX 78

authoritarian; his "rhetorical" sensitivity is to what constitutes negotiation, what is failure of negotiation; it is a tact, a refusal to define the apolitical as political. Vico's goal was an ideal inquiry, not the ideal as goal of inquiry. Rather, his elaborations aim for precision, a rhetorically sensitive precision of the specific past negotiations of differences, alterations, changes. In Vico's inquiry, the texts of Roman law are of particular diagnostic use: laws are read to explore originary, perhaps perverse, intentions, as well as later initiatives of the repair of their consequences or to explore the efforts of salvaging unintended consequences to repair intentions. Law reveals not simply a range of practices in transition, but a range of strategies of domination and resistance, practices and strategies caught in and compromised by reactive, adjacent strategies. Most certainly, the account denies mono-causal paradigms—economic, political, religious—and it denies them any delivery modes. It saves us, for example, from improbable scenarios of intrusive competences and rationalizations; formulaic legal argument does not deliver natural equity; and legal fictions of early Roman law can't be elite rationalizations, because as products of imagination, fantasia, they must be poems (1036-37). The tropes that preserve the gravitas of law and respond to the changing facts of life cannot be reduced to weapons of class warfare. The figures that make strong connections from new issues of behavior to foundational endoxa are at the service of the whole, not part—Rome, not class. Irony works to defeat rational-choice interests precisely through legal identifications. For all their obvious differences, Vico and Hobbes share an inventive early modern pessimism. Vico's Roman narratives substantiate Hobbes's pessimistic psychology; the accounts embedded in legal history support the Hobbesian account of incapacities. I have argued elsewhere that it is the Roman critique of Rome in the late republican and imperial times that is the source of the innovative critique of early modernity. It is not Cicero the "Civic Humanist" of his treatises, the hero of the twentieth-century republican ideologue, Hans Baron, but Cicero, the acute, very rhetorically acute, observer of political failure in the Ad familiares that is of use. He gives us some of the very best accounts of rebarbative difficulties, of unnegotiable differences; he is a student of incapacities as well as capacities of politicians; Cicero, Sallust, Lucan, and Tacitus furnish the materials of early modern perspicacity. We lose the edge, the lesson of Hobbes and Vico to: first, insist on

XIX HOBBES AND VlCO ON LAW: A RHETORICAL GLOSS

79

our own reading of Cicero as civic humanist, purveyor of a Greek moral-philosophical account of Roman law and politics, and second, to characterize the achievement of early modern political Classicism as simply "Civic Humanist." The wrong Cicero gives us the wrong early modernity; here our history of political thought seems controlled by the same philosophical assumptions that dominate our political theorizing. These mistakes in the history of political thought generate theoretical loss. But Vico reads Cicero, almost exclusively, as a legal semanticist; he reads as the legist he is, for specific and telling historical usages. Hobbes, recall, deplores his fellow theorizers' habits of constantly citing the Greek and Roman texts, particularly Cicero and Aristotle, for their encomia of personal liberty as the criterion of a good state. Hobbes's tactics of definition produce, to Clarendon's outrage, a range of new definitions to counter the "school" terms.23 But they also deny the sloppiness of the political philosophizing with its canting uses of history, the banal "history teaching philosophy by examples." His rejection of the use of exemplary mini-narratives, Roman or Greek, clears the way for simple argumentative arbitrations. Consider "justice"; Hobbes, starting from his assumption that "justice" is a quality of social life, develops restrictions on the use of "injustice" that are variations on the theme: "there is no such thing as 'good' law", thus: "they that have sovereign power may commit iniquity but not injustice" (L.,163), and acts of enemies of the state are not injustice (L., 705). Sovereign wrongs and external attacks are not inflections of the rule of law. To apply the name "injustice" is to fabricate a moral authority; bad theory supports bad practice. Vico's vast expansion is of a dephilosophized law, undiluted by ethical-theoretical colonizations. Vico does not use Cicero's De legibus, a treatise modeled deliberately on Plato's Laws, aspiring to a Platonic kind of authority. For Vico, Cicero's consolidation in Book I of nature, reason, virtue, and goodness with justice would certainly be an example of esoteric Hellenistic wisdom, of a solitary "monastic" strategy, a personal program, not an account of Roman law.24 Rather, the very dense texture of Vico's legal and mythological narratives replaces a didactic program, not at all instructive, with accounts of the specific fabrications of justice and equity. Timefullness as criterion of inquiry energizes the transference of the complexity of equity issues into an account of the tangles of "power." Vico's strategies of dispersal, fragmentation

XIX 80

of power is in the interest of specifying the great historical range of tactics and reversals of tactics of domination and subjugation. Hobbes's definitions of power are, in contrast, restrictive; his physicalism, recall, specifies power only as intractable, continuous desire of the life in continuous motion, or as alienated desire, sovereign power (L., 85-86). He is, of course, not tempted to attribute stable moral value to sovereignty: "the name of tyranny signifies nothing more nor less than sovereignty" (L., 706). The account of the sovereign is not an account of a neutral, always efficacious "life" of the state. The nottyrannous legislative power creates political fissures, unless it is totally coherent, that is, arbitrary and absolute: "the civil sovereign is fain to handle the sword of justice unconstantly, and as it were too hot to handle" (L., 706). Hobbes's definition of deliberation, recall, is as not simply life capacity, but incapacity; civility renders justice unstable. I have been arguing for the perspicacity of Hobbes's and Vico's strong revisions of the political philosophical project of early modernity. Yet modernity tends to read Hobbes and Vico as simply versions, not revisions of the standard philosophical account, an account which takes political theory as simply as extrapolation from ethical theory. My contention is, that Hobbes's and Vico's inventiveness lies in the discovery of a basic political theoretical necessity: Politics demands novelty. Because of the "timefull" pressures on interactions, "being-with-others," the domain of Heidegger's rhetoric, there is no discussion more fraught with fashion, and, at the same time, more susceptible to the quick exchange of deadening theoretical conformities—sound-bites, so to speak. "Inventiveness" as reaction to philosophical orthodoxy, a breaking-out from a discussion lumbered by a philosophical tradition where moral definitions rule, is the invention of Hobbes and Vico. Timefullness as constraint is basic in Hobbes's theory; if to understand nature we must understand motion, the rhetorical accommodation of biologism's motion is to secure motion, process as a primary and proper political topic. And Hobbes's stipulations of interactive transiency as qualifying political motions is, perhaps, the source of Vico's association of Hobbes with Epicurean chance. Further, Hobbes's equation of nature, life, motion does not generate accounts of perfect function in motion but rather, a severe sense of the alterations, changes that impose requirements continuously. The seeking of "power after power" of the political subject is not read as a rational "Darwinian" strategy of survival, but an endangered activity, requiring novelty of response.

XIX HOBBES AND VlCO ON LAW: A RHETORICAL GLOSS

81

Vico's essential project is an exploration of time, of iterability as descriptive of unique repetitions; the alterations of Vichian ricorsi are possibilities of response re-experienced, transformed. Vico employs irony in history as a explanatory diagram for solutions drawn from inadequate, outdated responses; irony is a straightforward statement of the creative limits of philosophical definition. Vico's preoccupation with time is so sophisticated, so severe, that invention is simply the quality of transaction, required to keep up with the uninterrupted flow of novelties of interaction. There are specific therapies, rhetorical in part, proffered by Hobbes and Vico. The Hobbesian elegance of definition of politics as merely "necessary," that is physical, deliberations saves us from the topos "Politics is a necessary evil." Garry Wills has shown us how this topos follows from bad rhetorical analysis, premising an innocent citizen-audience confronted by evil politician-speakers. But, properly, rhetoric assumes there is no innocence to corrupt; there is simply, and in the first place, participatory listener responsibility.25 The politician has not a supererogatory but an ordinary responsibility as listener; the citizen is no better off, and no better than the politician. Then Hobbes's skill in representing our frequent lurches into the apolitical, either authority or anarchy, saves us from the futility of trying to stretch the definition of the political to include the apolitical. In Hobbes's account, again, politics can be initiated, interrupted and dismissed by authority. (Thus, for example, we call the recent election edict of the Supreme Court not "political" but "apolitical," an authoritarian edict that cancels politics.) Another benefit of Hobbes's focus on law is the blocking of confused moralizing, that is to say, moral category mistakes. An exemplary Hobbesian target is the Lawyer of the Dialogue, who cheerfully redescribes species of outcomes, full of risk, as general, foundational values. In contrast, the particular benefits of Vico's devotion to accounting for the "timefullness" of our existence, our "being-with-others," derive in part from his remarkable methodological sophistication in utilizing timefull legal evidence. Vichian use of the legal archive offers a narrative therapy, the myriad glosses of the serial repetitions, of disjoined episodic occurrences that eventuate in slight but vigorous reorientations. Timefullness as constraint, of course, may manifest itself in the irony of unintended consequences; the irony cancels, blocks retrospective moralizing, scenarios of naive good intentions accounting for all manner of progressive practices.

XIX 82

Finally, Hobbes and Vico provide strong, but disparate, general benefits for theorizing politics. Thus Hobbes's minimalism. If Aristotle's Rhetoric gives the political version of his discourse of animals, Hobbes's rhetorized psychology offers the perspicacious account of the political, interactive version of individual capacities and actions; he gives a close reading of the political motions, motions in speaking-listening situations that survive acts of authority and violence. Hobbes's emphasis on the overwhelming presence of authority and authoritarian acts in initiating, interrupting, and dismissing politics simply sharpens the definition of politics as only acts of deliberation, negotiation, attempts at counsel. For Hobbes, the dearth of politics is a reflex of the abundance of authoritarian strategies. In Hobbes's scenarios in the Behemoth, for example, political negotiations are almost continuously susceptible to authoritarian gesture. The refinements of Hobbes's theorizing of politics stem in great measure from his assumption of a vastly reduced domain of political activity. Not much qualifies as politics; very little indeed, as we learn from the Behemoth, qualifies as useful; and since ethics is derived from the political domain, not much qualifies as ethics. This generates a cold caution in his attribution of sins and virtues, and great precision in describing acts of attribution; great sections of the available political theorizing are simply dropped. Indeed, for both Hobbes and Vico, the futility of moralisms is vital to theorizing politics. To be sure, this notion is in part the result of their rhetorical tact in performance, a tact Skinner describes in Hobbes. Most certainly, the tact expresses the belief Hobbes shared with Vico, and with Montaigne, that there is no use in restating imperatives of virtue in a prescriptive tone of voice; the statements resist reception. But note the disparities. For Vico, rhetorical analysis allows him to read back from the legal texts to the web of legal behavior—claims, contests, decisions. Vico takes the vast number of texts to open a vast field of inquiry: a veritable phenomenology of law as context of political action. Max Fisch has argued the very broad implications of Vico's focus on law in his analysis of Vico's account of the Roman Twelve Tables. Fisch, as philosopher, claims that social philosophy should "follow" law, not social science; Vico has shown us how law is a superior "base and proving ground" for theory.26 But the superiority is rooted in the law's resistance, philosophy's failure to penetrate law; the very thick texture of legal citation of the New Science prevents the superimposition of a web of begged questions, read back into the law; Vico's quotation is disquotation. Just so, Watson warns

XIX HOBBES AND VlCO ON LAWC A RHETORICAL GLOSS

83

of the difficulty of using legal evidence; it is not straightforward; it is a "distorting mirror," warping ideologies out of recognition. Vico is quite at home with these distorting reflections, and uses them to revise drastically the available political theory.27 In sum, both Hobbes and Vico employ the rhetorical taste for disorder, impurity to develop counsels of imperfection: pathology as perspicacity.

NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 138. 2. Alan Watson, "Legal Isolationism III," in The Spirit of Roman Law (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 158-7 l,esp. 164: his point is "not that the republican jurists were unaware of Greek philosophy, but that they failed to make constructive use of it" (163). See also his "Law and the Roman Mind," Roman Law and Comparative Law (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia, 1991); on its particular resistance to moralizing philosophy (5). 3. All citations of Hobbes are to the Wm. Molesworth edition, The Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes (reprinted London: Routledge, 1994); A Dialogue of the Common Laws, vol. 6; Leviathan, vol. 3; Human Nature, vol. 4. This reference is to the Dialogue, 4. Text references are L. (Leviathan), D. (Dialogue), and HN. (Human Nature). 4. The richest description of deliberative dysfunction is, of course, his Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars in England, and of the Counsels and Artifices by Which They Were Carried On From the Year 1640 to the Year 1660, vol. 6. 5. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes; Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. E. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Strauss carefully notes parallels between the text of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Hobbes, especially in relation to the passions; he claims that Hobbes counteracts this influence later. 6. Andrew Clark, ed., "Brief Lives," Chiefly by Contemporaries, Set Down by John Aubrey, Between the Years 1669 and 1696 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 357. The full quotation attacks Aristotle's philosophy as well: "I have heard him say that Aristotle was the worst teacher that ever was, the worst polititian and ethick—a country fellow that could live in the world [would be] as good; but his rhetorique and discourse of animals was rare."

XIX 84

7. P. Aubenque, "Logos et pathos; pour une definition dialectique des passions," in Corps et dme; sur le De anima d'Aristote, ed. C. Viano (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 37-49. 8. M. Heidegger, "Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophic," SS1924; I use the ms. of Walter Brocker's lecture notes, Herbert-MarcuseArchiv. But it is essential to note that Heidegger's investment in Aristotle's Rhetoric of SS1924, arguably the best twentieth-century reading of the text, is effaced, lost in his later political speculation. 9. In his "Review and Conclusion" to the Leviathan he describes this work on "artificial bodies" as simply an interruption to his "speculation of bodies natural"; perhaps not an interruption, but an elaboration (L., 714). 10. Like the Roman legists, Hobbes takes on board Greek biology, but like the Romans, he failed to use Stoic philosophical development of natural law: see A. Watson, "The Legacy of Justinianian Natural Law," in Roman Law and Comparative Law. He cites Ulpian, D. 1.1.1.3: "Natural law is that which nature taught all animals ..." (215). Vico's knowledge of Ulpian was extensive. 11. Michel Meyer, "Postface," Aristote: Rhetorique: des Passions (Paris: Editions Rivages, 1989); he claims Aristotle defines politics as, and only as, the discursive negotiations of differences (139). 12. P. Dumouchel, Emotions; Essai sur le corps et le social (Paris: Synthelabo, 1995), 43f., on Hobbes; 71-72; 92: Tetre du vivre ensemble humain." 13. Thus Aristotle, Rhetoric, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 1378al9-22: "The emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure." 14. All citations from Vico's New Science are from the translation of T. Bergin and M. Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), citing section numbers; this is section 5. Text reference is NS. 15. In Vico's early legal treatises, Opere iuridiche; II diritto universale, ed. P Cristofolini (Florence: Sansoni, 1974). One finds a strong critique of Grotius, along with Pufendorf and Selden, in the De universi iuris unoprincipio et fine uno. This work is important for the innovations of the New Science. The "philosophical philology" is foreshadowed in the De constantia iurisprudentis; see esp. I, c.5-7 for a critique of Plato, the Stoics, Epicurus; and he continues to disagree with Grotius. 16. A. Watson, "Law and the Roman Mind," Roman Law and Comparative Law, 7-8 on the necessary emphasis on law's formulaic quality; see as well "Culture of Judges," 230-31, where Watson speaks of a peculiar legal mental process "appropriate to establishing lawness." 17. See my "The Definition of Europe in Vichian Inquiry," New Vico Studies 14 (1996): 25-46.

XIX HOBBES AND VlCO ON LAW: A RHETORICAL GLOSS

85

18. G. Crifo has written extensively on this; see, in particular, his "Droit et rhetorique chez Giambattista Vico," Melanges offerts a Raymond Van der E/rt (Bruxelles: Editions Nemesis, 1986), 101-11. 19. Johannes Stroux, "Summa ius summa iniuria," in Romische Rechtswissenschaft und Rhetorik (Potsdam: Stichnote, 1949), esp. 52. 20. Vico, chapter 11 on law in his Study Methods of Our Time, trans. E. Gianturco (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), is of particular interest; but cf.MS284. 21. This is shrewd of Vico if we follow A. Watson: "the importance of the idea of fairness in legal development will thus usually be hidden," Law Making in the Later Roman Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 176. 22. W. D. Blattner, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), has a thorough discussion of Heidegger's substitution of "temporal manifold" intricating past, present, future for linearity. 23. Edward, Earl of Clarendon, "A Survey of Mr. Hobbes His Leviathan," in G. A. J. Rogers, ed., Leviathan: Contemporary Responses to the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), 191f. 24. Alan Watson, in his "Cicero the Outsider," Appendix A to The Spirit of Roman Law, 195-200, recognizes, like Vico, that Cicero's systematization of Roman law is opposed to the jurists' program. 25. Thus the gloss of Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1006a25-26: "But the person responsible [for the argument] is not he who demonstrates, but he who acquiesces, for even in disowning reason he sustains it." Heidegger argues strongly in the SS1924 that "hearing" is the primary sense, and the importance of a focus on the listener in political rhetoric. 26. M. Fisch, "Vico on Roman Law," Essays in Political Theory Presented to George Sabine, ed. M. R. Konvitz and A. E. Murphy (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1972), 87-88. If we look at Fisch's "Vico and Pragmatism," in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism; Essays by Max Fisch, ed. K. L. Ketner and C. J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986), 20126, we find, I would claim, an intriguing suggestion: does modern pragmatism replicate, not simply aspects of Vichian argument, but the strategies of classical rhetorical critique of philosophy? Does Richard Rorty's insurgency, for example, share tactics with rhetoric: the avoidance of self-created philosophical problems such as "other minds"—of no conceivable use to rhetorical analysis—the focus on beliefs, not knowledge of "truth"; the preoccupation with justification of beliefs as addressed to an audience, and to ever "newer and more imaginative ones"? See Rorty and His Critics, ed. R. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), esp. 242f., 262f. 27. Watson, Ancient Law and Modern Under standing (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 3: law does not offer simple, direct evidence of simple, direct ideas of society.

INDEX d'Abano, Pietro: XVI 667-75, 678 abdication of power: IX 116-18 Agricola, Rudolph: V 246-7, 251 d'Alembert, Jean le Rond: XIII240 Aletino, Benedetto: XVIII 332 Altaian,!.: XII 143 d'Andrea, Francesco: XVIII 333 Anselm, St: VII 547-52 Arendt, Hannah: III 220; VI 124 Argenterio, Giovanni: XVI 673 argumentative mode of aesthetic inquiry: XIII 246-7 Aristophanes: VI115 Aristotle and Aristotelianism: I 68, 74-5, 78, 80; II 69-78; III 217-18; IV 3, 10-15, 20-21, 24-5; V 245-7, 251, 258; VI 107-27; VII 542-50; VIII 193, 197; IX 108-9; X 96-8; XIV 80, 85-6; XV 425, 427, 430; XVI 669; XVII205-6; XVIII 323-35; XIX 65-7, 70, 74, 79,82 Arnold, Matthew: XIV 88 Athenian democracy: I 79 Aubenque, Pierre: I 75; IV 12; V 247; VI 106, 116, 118; XIV 80, 85; XIX 65 Aubrey, John: IV 12; XIX 65 Augustine, St: I 76; XV 429 Augustus Caesar: XI 53 Austen, Jane: XIII233-5, 241-7 Averroes and Averroism: XVI 666-7, 671; XVIII 327 Bacon, Francis: VIII200, 203; XVIII 324 Bain, Alexander: XVI 677 Baron, Hans: XIX 78 Barthes, Roland: IX 119-20 Battistini, A.: I 77; IX 114-16, 120; XV 429, 435, 438 Bellah, David: III 225 Benveniste, Emile: IX 110 Berger, Peter: III 225 Beroaldo, Filippo: X 96, 103-5 Bertolini,A.:IX115, 123 Blatmer, W.D.: I 71; VI 119-22, 126 Boccaccio, Giovanni: VIII201; XVIII 325

Bracciolini, Poggio: VIII 199 Brown, Peter: XVII200 Brunehaud, Queen: XI 52, 57-8 Bruni, Leonardo: X 102 Brunschwig, Jacques: IV 23 Burckhardt, Jacob: V 244; VII 553; XIV 83, 86, 88 Burke, Kenneth: I 72; II 66 Burnyeat, Miles: XVIII 329-30 Camporeale, Salvatore: VII 541-6, 549-55; VIII194 Carr, David: VI 122 Carruthers, Mary: XV 425-6 Cassin, Barbara: VI 114 Cassirer, Ernst: XIII 236 Castiglione, Baldassarre: X 102 Cato:IVll Cave, Terence: X 96 Cavell, Stanley: V 256 Celenza, Christopher: VII 541, 543, 552-4 Celsus: XVIII 327-8 chess: XI 54 Chomsky, Noam: XVII208 Christianity: VII 546, 551; VIII198-9; XI 55; XVII200, 202, 205-6 Cicero: I 74, 78; IV 3-12, 16-28; V 246, 250; VI 125; VII 551, 555; IX 108-9; X 97, 101; XII144; XIII234; XIV 79; XVI 666, 671, 676; XVII198; XIX 70, 73, 78-9 Clarendon, Earl of: XIX 79 Clement VI, Pope: XVI 660-61, 670 Clotaire, King: XI 53 Clovis: XI 54-5 Coke, Sir Edward: XIX 64 Collingwood, R.G.: I 77; XV 426-38 Constant, Benjamin: III 221 Constantine: IV 15 conversation: XIII 239, 246 Copenhaver, Brian: VII 545, 552-4 Comelio, Tommaso: XVIII 322 Cousin, Victor: III 221-2 Cox, Harvey: III 225 Cranz, F. Edward: VII 546-55 Crifo, G.: I 75, 77-80; XIX 72 Croce, Benedetto: I 77; XV 426-38 Culture Criticism: III 224, 228

2

Curtius, E.R.: II 69; IX 109 Cusanus: VII 546-52, 555 Dante: IX 109; XII 138; XIV 87 da Rho, Antonio: VIII193 Darnton, Robert: II 71 Darwin, Charles: III 217 Dasein: I 68, 70; VI106-12, 119-25; VII 542 David, Jean-Michel: XI 53-8 Davidson, Donald: I 73 De Man, Paul: I 73; II 66 De Romilly, Jacqueline: IV 21; VI 124 Defoe, Daniel: VIII203 Democritus: XVIII 323 Dempster, Thomas: XIV 83 Dennis, George: XIV 83 Derrida, Jacques: I 73; IX 115, 118-22 Descartes, Rene: I 76-7; VII 548; VIII194; IX 117, 119; XV 429-31, 438; XVI 676-7; XVII 197-211; XVIII 329-32 Di Capoa, Lionardo: XVI 673; XVIII 322-36 Digby, Everard: XVII207 Dilthey, Wilhelm: I 69; III 216, 218; IV 2-7, 12-18, 21, 26-7; V 248; VI116, 119-22; VII 544-5, 550 Dockhorn, Klaus: I 81-2; III 215-20, 225-6; VI 107 doctors: see medical practice: Dondi, Giovanni: XVI 665, 671-2 doxa: VI107, 109 Ducrot, O.: XII 142 Dukerus,C.A.:IX110 Dumouchel, Paul: IV 13; VI113-14; XIX 69 emotions: XIX 69 Epicurus and Epicureanism: XVIII 333; XIX70-71 equity, definition of: XIX 68, 74 Erasmus: IV 2; V 250; VII 549; VIII 204; X96 Estienne, Henri: X 104 ethics: VIII 191-7, 205-6; XVIII 330-31; XIX 82 etymologies: IX 108-24 Euclid: XVII199 evolutionary theory: III 217, 219 exempla and exemplarity: XI 51—9 existential authenticity: V 249-50 Feyerabend, Paul: II 67, 70, 76-7; IX 121 Fillmore, Charles: IX 110 Fisch, Max: XV 429; XIX 82

INDEX Fish, Stanley: II 67; VI124 Flaubert, Gustave: III 222 Florence: X 103; XIV 82-8 Foucault, Michel: II 68; IX 108, 118-19, 122; XII 142 Franklin, John H.: XI 51 Freccero, John: XII138 Fredegonde, Queen: XI 52-8 Freud, Sigmund (and Freudian-ism): IX 123; XVII 204, 206 Fumaroli, Marc: I 75-7, 80; XI 56; XV 429 Funkenstein, Amos: XII144 Gadamer, Hans-Georg: III 215-18, 223-4 Galen: XVI 669-73; XVII198-200, 206-9; XVIII 324, 327-33 Galileo: XVIII 323-4 Garin, Eugenic: I 70; VII 544-5; XVII209 Genette,G.:VIII197;IXlll genre: II 75; IV 23; VIII197-8; IX 113 George, Edward: V 245-6, 252 Gibbon, Edward: II 72 Gilbert, Felix: X 94 Ginzburg, Carlo: XVI 674, 677 Giotto: XIV 85, 88 Gouhier,H.: XVII208-9 Grassi, Ernesto: I 67-74, 80-82 Grimaldi, Constantino: XVIII 333 Grotius, Hugo: XIX 71 Groupe Mu: XII 143 Guicciardini, Francesco: X 94-105 Guiraud,P.:IX112 Habermas, Jiirgen: V 257 habit: VI111-12, 120; XVII208 Hacking, Ian: XVI 674, 677; XVII 196 Harvey, William: XVII 197, 202, 204, 206, 209; XVIII 324 Hegel, G.W.F.: IX 124; XV 432-3 Heidegger, Martin: I 68-75, 78-81; III 217; V 251; VI 105-27; VII 542-5, 552, 555; IX 112-13, 118-19,124; XV 426, 438; XIX 63, 66-70, 75, 80 Helmont, Johannes Baptista von: XVIII 324-5 Herodotus: II 68 Hess,G.:X98, 105 Hippocrates: XVI 671; XVII198; XVIII325 Hippocratic Oath: XVIII 325 history, discipline of: II 66-8 Hobbes, Thomas: I 74-5, 82-3; IV 8-27; VI113-14; XIX 63-83 Homer: XVIII 325; XIX 71, 74 Howe, Irving: I 73

INDEX humanism: I 68-73, 82; IV 2-4, 14, 27; V 248, 252; VII 542; VIII191-2, 197-206; IX 109, 116, 118; X 100, 104; XII 143-4; XVI 659, 671-4, 677-8 Hume, David: XIII233-40, 244-7 Huppert, George: XI 51 Husserl, Edmund: VI119-22 invective: VIII198-205; XVI 660-62, 676 irony: XIX 75-8, 81 Iser,W.: VIII202 Isidore of Seville: IX 109, 112-13 Israel, Jonathan: XV 437 James, Henry: XIV 82 James, William: III 227 Jardine,L.: VIII 200, 203 Jardine, Nicholas: XVI 674 Jonsen, Albert: XVI 675 Julius Caesar: I 76; IV 7, 22; XV 429 Jung, Carl Gustav: XIV 82 Kahn, Charles: IX 110-11, 119; XII 143 kairos: VI 110-12 Kelley, Donald: XI 51 Kelly, George Armstrong: III 216-17,220-28 Kepler, Johannes: XVI 659-60 kinesis'. VI 108-9 Kisiel, Theodore: VI122, 127 Kolakowski, L.: XVII200, 206 Kripke, Saul: VIII 196 Kuhn, Thomas: II 77; III 225 Lamartine, Alphonse de: III 222 La Popeliniere, L.V: IX 122 Laufer, Romain: IV 27 Leibnitz, Gottfried: IX 117 Leo, Pope: X 98 liberty: IV 17-20, 27 life-worlds: V 256-7 linearity of history: II 73-6; IX 121-4 linguistics: II 73; IX 110, 114 Livy:IV6,26;V251 Lorch,M.: VIII192 Loyola, Ignatius: I 77; XV 429 Lucan: IV 6; XIX 78 Luckmann, Thomas: III 225 Lugnani, E. Scarano: X 94-101 Luther, Martin: IV 2; VII 549 Machiavelli, Niccolo: II 79; IV 2, 6-12, 25-6; V 258; VIII197; X 94, 101-5; XI52-8 Maclntyre, Alasdair: IX 120, 123; XIII240

3 Makkreel, Rudolf: VI 121-2 Malkiel, Y.: IX 108, 110, 113, 117, 121, 123 Mancini, Giulio: XVI 674 Marx, Karl: XV 432 medical practice: XVI 661-79; XVII196-200, 204-11; XVIII 323-31 memoir, use of: I 75-7; XV 426-31, 434-9 metaphor: I 73-4 Meyer, Michel: VI108, 114, 124; XIX 63, 69 Mill, John Stuart: XIV 87 Milton, John: IV 23 mind-body opposition: XVII 200-201, 206-9; XVIII 329; XIX 74 Mink, Louis: XV 436 Miteinandersein: VI 113-16, 122-3 Momigliano, Arnaldo: VII 555 Montaigne, Michel Eyquern de: XIII236; XVII199; XVIII 328; XIX 82 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis: III 220 More, Thomas: V 258 Namier, Sir Lewis: II 72 Nardi, Bruno: XVI 667 natural law: IV 22; XIX 67-8, 75 Nettesheim, Agrippa von: VI 672 nominalism: XII 143-4 Norefia, Carlos G.: V 246-7, 251 Ober, Josiah: I 79 Octavian: IV 23 Papini,M.: XVIII 334 Paracelsus: XVI 675; XVIII 324-5, 332 Parsons, Talcott: III 225 Pasquier, Etienne: XI 51-9 passions: XVII196-207; XIX 69 pathetic fallacy: XIV 80-81 Paul, St: VII 545-6; XVII200, 202 Paulhan,J.: IX 122-4 Peacock, Thomas: XIII245 Peirce, C.S.: III 216-27; VI107, 119; VII 547; XVI 659-60, 667, 670, 676-8 Perelman, Charles: VIII204 Petrarch: V 250; VII 551-2; XIII235-6; XVI 659-79; XVII 196; XVIII 328 Pichot, Andre: XVIII 329, 335 Pico della Mirandola, Gian-francesco: XVI 672 Plato: VI 116, 119; XVIII 331, 335; XIX 79 Pliny: XVI 661, 663; XVIII 328 Pocock, J.G.A.: X 102 Polydore Vergil: X I 0 3

4

Pompey: IV 7 Popper, Karl: II 77 Porzio, Lucantonio: XVIII 333 power: XIX 79-80; see also sovereign power pragmatism political: V 250-51 rhetorical: V 256-8; VII 553 probabilism: XVI 675 proverbs: X 96-105 Pseudo-Dionysius: VII 548-50 Puttenham, George: XII 138 Pyrrhonism: XVIII 332 Quintilian: II 68-71, 74-5; V 244-5, 250-51; VII 548; VIII 191-2, 195, 202; IX 109; XI 58; XIII234; XIV 79; XV 425, 434; XVII197-9, 203-4, 207; XIX 73 Rabelais, Francis: VIII203 Rambach,JJ.:III215 Ramism:VIII203;IX109 Randall, J.H.: XVI 678 Rawls, John: XI 59 Regoliosi, Mariangela: VII 544 Renaissance art: XIV 81, 84 Renaissance thought: I 70, 72; IV 2-7, 12, 15-17, 27; V 243-4, 252; VII 542, 548-54; VIII 191, 200, 203-5; IX 109; X 94, 104; XII138, 141-4; XIII235-6, 246; XVI 659, 667, 672-7; XVII196-7, 200, 204-11; XVIII 324, 328 Renan, Ernest: III 222 Reynolds, L.D.: VIII200 rhetoric definitions of: I 80-81; III 218; VII 543; XIV 80; XV 438; XVII196; XIX 75 history of: IV 2; XVII211 Rizzo, S.: VIII 199 Roberts, David: XV 433, 437 Roman law and politics: IV 2-8, 16-28; VI125; XV 437; XIX 64, 67, 70-75, 78-9 Roman Renaissance: XIV 84 Rorty, Richard: I 73-4; V 256-8, IX 122 Rossi, Paoli: XV 425 Ruskin, John: V 244; XIV 79-88 Ryle, Gilbert: XVII 201 Said, Edward: IX 118 Sallust: IV 6; XIX 78 Saussure, Ferdinand de: II 75; IX 117-18; XVII203

INDEX Schleiermacher, Friedrich: III 216 scholasticism: XVI 678; XVIII 330 sectarianism: IV 9-10; XVIII 335 Seneca: IV 6, 11; X 98-104 Servius Sulpicius: IV 17 Sextus Empiricus: XVIII 332, 335 Shaftesbury, Earl of: XIII234-7, 241, 245-7 Shakespeare, William: XII 138-44; XIII243 Shklar, Judith: III 225; VII 551 Sidney, Sir Philip: XVII 199 Silvestris, Bernard: IX 109 Siraisi, Nancy: XVI 668, 672 Sitwell, Osbert: XIV 82 Skinner, B.F.: XVII208 Skinner, Quentin: I 74; X 94 Smith, P. Christopher: I 68; VI110, 120 solipsism: XVII206 Sophists: VI116 soul, the, concept of: XVII201-5, 208-10; XVIII 329-33 sovereign power: IV 23-5; XIX 67, 80 Spaventa, Silvio: XV 432 Spence, Joseph: IX 117 Spongano, R.:X94 Stackelberg, J. von: X 104 Stierle, K.-H.: VIII 197-8 Stoicism: I 78-9; IV 26; VIII197; XIX 70; XVII200 Stoppard, Tom: XII 139-44 Strauss, Leo: XIX 65 Stroux, Johannes: XIX 73 subversion: IX 118-19, 124 Sulla: IV 22 Swift, Jonathan: VIII203 Tacitus: II 68, 76; IV 6; X 101-5; XI 56; XIX 78 Taylor, Charles: VI124 Tellegen-Couperus, Olga E.: XIX 64 Tesauro,E.:IX114 Thucydides: II 75 Tiberius Caesar: X 105 time and temporality: VI 110, 117-27; XV 426-8 Tocqueville, Alexis de: III 220-23, 226-8 Tooke,Horne:IX117 topics in history: II 69-73, 78-9 Torrini, Maurizio: XVIII 326, 328 Toulmin, Stephen: XII 139-40; XVI 675-7 Trousdale, Marion: XII143 Turner, J.M.W.: XIV 81,85 The Twelve Tables: XIX 71-5, 82 Vahanian, Gabriel: III 225

INDEX Valla, Lorenzo: IV 2, 14-15; V 248; VII 541-55; VIII191-206; XII144; XVIII 328 Valletta, Giuseppe: XVIII 333 Varro: IX 109 Vasoli,C.:V 248; VIII194 Venice: XIV 83-4 Verene,D.R:XV436 Vesalius: XVIII 324 Vico, Giambattista: I 67-71, 74-82; II 70; IV 25-6; VI 125; VII 553; VIII 195; IX 114-17, 120-24; XV 426-34, 438; XVIII 333-5; XIX 63-4, 70-83 Virgil: XVI 662 Vives, Juan Luis: IV 2, 14-15; V 243-53, 256-8; XVI 672; XVIII 327 Vulteius: XV 430

5 Walzer, Michael: III 226-8 Wandruska, M.: IX 112-13, 118 Ward, John O.: V 243-6, 252-3, 257 Watson, Alan: XIX 64, 72, 74, 82-3 White, H.V: I 72-3; VII 554-5 White, Hayden: II 66-70, 74-6; XIV 86 Wilkes, Kathryn: XVIII 329-30, 334-5 Wilkie,J.S.: XVIII 329 Willette, Thomas: XV 437 Williams, Bernard: VII 554-5; XII 139 Wills, Garry: XIX 81 Wilson, N.G.: VIII 200 Wisse, Jakob: XIV 86 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: II 73-5, 78; IX 121 Yates, Frances: XV 425 Zumthor,R:IX110, 118, 122