...or, where the Negative Capability of Romantic aesthetics meets the Learned Ignorance of Quattrocento mysticism.
I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Keats, Letter of 1817
Even the very profound Aristotle, in his First Philosophy, asserts that in things most obvious by nature such difficulty occurs for us as for a night owl which is trying to look at the sun. Therefore, if the foregoing points are true, then since the desire in us is not in vain, assuredly we desire to know that we do not know. If we can fully attain unto this [knowledge of our ignorance], we will attain unto learned ignorance. For a man-even one very well versed in learning-will attain unto nothing more perfect than to be found to be most learned in the ignorance which is distinctively his. The more he knows that he is unknowing, the more learned he will be. Unto this end I have undertaken the task of writing a few things about learned ignorance.
[...]
Hence, regarding truth, it is evident that we do not know anything other than the following: viz., that we know truth not to be precisely comprehensible as it is. For truth may be likened unto the most absolute necessity (which cannot be either something more or something less than it is), and our intellect may be likened unto possibility. Therefore, the quiddity of things, which is the truth of beings, is unattainable in its purity; though it is sought by all philosophers, it is found by no one as it is. And the more deeply we are instructed in this ignorance, the closer we approach to truth.
Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia, 1440
March 30, 2006
Pigeons, sex, fenceposts
Earlier today, I saw two pigeons having sex on a fence-post.
I think this is a metaphor for something, but I haven't yet decided for what.
I think this is a metaphor for something, but I haven't yet decided for what.
March 28, 2006
Questions, questions
The popular definition of the rhetorical question seems to be: 'a question that does not expect an answer.' And, like most popular definitions, it is quite wrong. In fact, the rhetorical question goes further: it is a type of question that demands a response. The point of the rhetorical question is that it has a point. It expects an answer, often a quite specific one: 'no', for example, or 'yes'; but it may demand a response of a different order: an emotional reaction, an intellectual move, or an act. The undermining of the term in popular speech is a corollary to the decline of rhetoric more generally speaking. If the RQ (I adopt the abbreviation in preference to the use of the pernickety classical term erotema) really were a question that does not expect a response, then this subtle rhetorical technique has somehow become indistinguishable from base sarcasm. 'What are you, some sort of idiot?' is not a rhetorical question; it is a sarcastic one (as is, for that matter 'What am I, some sort of idiot?'). Ditto 'Why don't you just shut up?'
RQs do not always expect a specific answer, of course. In fact, the more subtle deployment of the technique is in the formulation of a question that gets at some point without coming to the point. This is where the RQ brushes up against the paradox.
RQs always had a better time of it in classical oratory, since both Greek and Latin grammars facilitate a basic distinction between questions that expect the answer 'yes' and questions that expect the answer 'no'. English gets around this in various clumsy auxiliary and adverbial ways ('Surely you don't agree with him?' [No!] or 'You do agree with me, don't you?' [Yes!]); but it foregoes the elegance of a wittily deployed 'num...?' or the straight-to-the-point effectiveness of a trenchant 'nonne...?' (starting a question with 'NOT NO' drops a pretty big hint on where you're going with it). Mind you, subtlety was not necessarily what was sought after in classical forensic oratory: Cicero's speeches are full of pretty outrageous assumptions and beggings-of-the-question packaged up in RQs. Starting a speech against a man suspected of sedition with: 'How long do we have to put up with this shit? How long are you going to keep playing us for fools, you crazy bastard?' (In Catilinam I; I paraphrase) is not a particularly even-handed way of going about things. In fact, it smacks less of the rhetorical question and more of the 'Have you stopped beating your wife yet?' double-bind.
All of this suggests that RQs are merely statements (or accusations, orders, requests, exhortations, etc.) masquerading as questions. But that doesn't tell the whole story. RQs are, it is true, basically illocutionary in that they are formulated to achieve something in their very utterance. The masquerade is not mere sophistry, since the reformulation of an utterance as a question actually changes the content of the utterance.
It makes it more ambiguous, for one thing. 'Will no-one rid me of this meddlesome priest?' might have been just a casual expression of exasperation (with an undertone of toys-out-of-the-pram 'Who's the King here, anyway?'), but it was taken as an order, and the speaker lived to regret it. That was unintentional (if it's true), but this ambiguity can also be a feature of self-aware speech or writing. The RQ does not only add force to certainties; it can also be used as a matter of principle in sceptical enquiry. 'What do I know?' is itself a rhetorical question, because it exhorts us to keep looking. That's why Montaigne adopted it as his device.
So leading questions are all well and good, but what about the more subtle variety of rhetorical question, the one that doesn't really want to convince you of its point, but rather, to make you think about the implications of the question? The RQ in this mode is more poetic, too. What about the 'ubi sunt...?' motif, a once popular poetic form that is structured around the repetition of a rhetorical question ('Where are they now?')? Alternatively, what about something like this: 'And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green?' No, they didn't, of course, but what does it mean to have asked the question? Or else: 'All the lonely people / Where do they all come from?' The question does not make much sense; and no answer presents itself. Nevertheless, it is moving somehow, in a way that the same sentiment formulated differently would not be.
Another variation, and possibly a vice in my own writing, is the asking of a question followed by the supplying of an immediate negative response (anthypophora if you like). The speaker here can end up taking on a hectoring tone, bludgeoning his audience into submission by the sheer force of his own monomaniacal irrelevancy. Or he may proceed, more Socratico by burying whatever claim he is really making under a morass of banal and idiotic questions that really have nothing at all to do with the argument. Schopenhauer recommends using this technique in The Art of Always Being Right.
The RQ is used a lot as an act of imposture. If you're making some outrageous, counter-intuitive claim, be sure to formulate it as a question. That way an absurdity might pass by unnoticed. Slavoj Zizek does this a lot, and it works quite well. But isn't that precisely because the logic of late capitalism forces us to consume pathologically while dissimulating the disavowed truth of our own desire, and is it not therefore true that the symbolic order requires us to displace our beliefs onto it in order that ideologies of exploitation might sustain their hegemony? The answer to these kinds of RQ tends to be: 'Maybe...but probably not.'
There's also the use of the RQ to evade responsibility for one's own utterances. But whose fault is that?
RQs do not always expect a specific answer, of course. In fact, the more subtle deployment of the technique is in the formulation of a question that gets at some point without coming to the point. This is where the RQ brushes up against the paradox.
RQs always had a better time of it in classical oratory, since both Greek and Latin grammars facilitate a basic distinction between questions that expect the answer 'yes' and questions that expect the answer 'no'. English gets around this in various clumsy auxiliary and adverbial ways ('Surely you don't agree with him?' [No!] or 'You do agree with me, don't you?' [Yes!]); but it foregoes the elegance of a wittily deployed 'num...?' or the straight-to-the-point effectiveness of a trenchant 'nonne...?' (starting a question with 'NOT NO' drops a pretty big hint on where you're going with it). Mind you, subtlety was not necessarily what was sought after in classical forensic oratory: Cicero's speeches are full of pretty outrageous assumptions and beggings-of-the-question packaged up in RQs. Starting a speech against a man suspected of sedition with: 'How long do we have to put up with this shit? How long are you going to keep playing us for fools, you crazy bastard?' (In Catilinam I; I paraphrase) is not a particularly even-handed way of going about things. In fact, it smacks less of the rhetorical question and more of the 'Have you stopped beating your wife yet?' double-bind.
All of this suggests that RQs are merely statements (or accusations, orders, requests, exhortations, etc.) masquerading as questions. But that doesn't tell the whole story. RQs are, it is true, basically illocutionary in that they are formulated to achieve something in their very utterance. The masquerade is not mere sophistry, since the reformulation of an utterance as a question actually changes the content of the utterance.
It makes it more ambiguous, for one thing. 'Will no-one rid me of this meddlesome priest?' might have been just a casual expression of exasperation (with an undertone of toys-out-of-the-pram 'Who's the King here, anyway?'), but it was taken as an order, and the speaker lived to regret it. That was unintentional (if it's true), but this ambiguity can also be a feature of self-aware speech or writing. The RQ does not only add force to certainties; it can also be used as a matter of principle in sceptical enquiry. 'What do I know?' is itself a rhetorical question, because it exhorts us to keep looking. That's why Montaigne adopted it as his device.
So leading questions are all well and good, but what about the more subtle variety of rhetorical question, the one that doesn't really want to convince you of its point, but rather, to make you think about the implications of the question? The RQ in this mode is more poetic, too. What about the 'ubi sunt...?' motif, a once popular poetic form that is structured around the repetition of a rhetorical question ('Where are they now?')? Alternatively, what about something like this: 'And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green?' No, they didn't, of course, but what does it mean to have asked the question? Or else: 'All the lonely people / Where do they all come from?' The question does not make much sense; and no answer presents itself. Nevertheless, it is moving somehow, in a way that the same sentiment formulated differently would not be.
Another variation, and possibly a vice in my own writing, is the asking of a question followed by the supplying of an immediate negative response (anthypophora if you like). The speaker here can end up taking on a hectoring tone, bludgeoning his audience into submission by the sheer force of his own monomaniacal irrelevancy. Or he may proceed, more Socratico by burying whatever claim he is really making under a morass of banal and idiotic questions that really have nothing at all to do with the argument. Schopenhauer recommends using this technique in The Art of Always Being Right.
The RQ is used a lot as an act of imposture. If you're making some outrageous, counter-intuitive claim, be sure to formulate it as a question. That way an absurdity might pass by unnoticed. Slavoj Zizek does this a lot, and it works quite well. But isn't that precisely because the logic of late capitalism forces us to consume pathologically while dissimulating the disavowed truth of our own desire, and is it not therefore true that the symbolic order requires us to displace our beliefs onto it in order that ideologies of exploitation might sustain their hegemony? The answer to these kinds of RQ tends to be: 'Maybe...but probably not.'
There's also the use of the RQ to evade responsibility for one's own utterances. But whose fault is that?
March 25, 2006
On Not Knowing The Names Of Trees II
Having Misidentified a Wild-Flower
A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
Richard Wilbur
Setting aside a belief in the divine harmony of the universe (not really my cup of tea), what can we say about this poem?
We have all, I'm sure, experienced the sensation of being wrong about something, and being set right in our misconception by the intrusion of some seemingly extraneous, adventitious 'piece of the real'. How to speak of such apparently spontaneous admonitions? The gentle influence of some benevolent natural force? Hardly. Nature's indignant response? Not at all. Are we enthused with the breath of some spirit of natural harmony? Nope. The song of the thrush lacks intentionality, that much we know. And what if it wasn't a thrush? What if we misidentified that distinctive warble? Would a car-alarm do instead?
We know that human consciousness is an adaptable thing, how infinite in faculties, how express and admirable, in apprehension how like a god! It is greedy for detail, jealous of its own conceptions, egotistical in the extreme. It is reflective; its technology is one of Total Internal Reflection. It works unceasingly and tirelessly to recuperate contingent detail, setting it in turn to work in constructing the towering edifice of its own self-importance. How noble in reason! Hegel wrote about the 'cunning of reason': the idea itself can remain aloof, letting the passions do its work for it without having to get involved in the messy business of the struggle for meaning.
The human mind is resolutely structural in its perceptions: it has no regard for essence, only for place. The figure of the King has no value in and of himself: his value is in the place he occupies in the symbolic economy. Economy figures it just about right, I think: we all know that money is notional, that it has worth only by virtue of the place it occupies in the system; it has no use value: it is pure exchange value. Does the singing thrush have the capacity to mean in and of itself? No: it is only by virtue of the place it occupies in the structure that it can mean something. OK, a pretty banal insight. But doesn't the same hold true for every element in the system, every single idea and image and trope on the merry-go-round of consciousness? Isn't interchangeability the basic principle of all thought? So much for reason.
In apprehension how like a god, indeed: the mind works just like one of those petty, selfish, sex-crazed gods of antiquity, reaching out always to possess for itself whatever it perceives to be beyond itself. It is basically pathological. And as with Apollo's infatuation with his beloved, the reluctant Hyancinthus, desire always eventually works towards the destruction of its object. Hyancinthus died and was transformed into a flower. 'I am the author of your death', said Apollo. The flower bore the signature of its origin: the letters inscribed on its petals, AI AI, so that everyone would be able to tell the flower's name and the truth of its story. Nature answers back, as she always does in the strange universe of the Metamorphoses. In its failure to possess the object of its desire, in the failure of its attempt to appropriate, consciousness has succeeded in inscribing that object with the trace of its authorship: it has created the world.
A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
Richard Wilbur
Setting aside a belief in the divine harmony of the universe (not really my cup of tea), what can we say about this poem?
We have all, I'm sure, experienced the sensation of being wrong about something, and being set right in our misconception by the intrusion of some seemingly extraneous, adventitious 'piece of the real'. How to speak of such apparently spontaneous admonitions? The gentle influence of some benevolent natural force? Hardly. Nature's indignant response? Not at all. Are we enthused with the breath of some spirit of natural harmony? Nope. The song of the thrush lacks intentionality, that much we know. And what if it wasn't a thrush? What if we misidentified that distinctive warble? Would a car-alarm do instead?
We know that human consciousness is an adaptable thing, how infinite in faculties, how express and admirable, in apprehension how like a god! It is greedy for detail, jealous of its own conceptions, egotistical in the extreme. It is reflective; its technology is one of Total Internal Reflection. It works unceasingly and tirelessly to recuperate contingent detail, setting it in turn to work in constructing the towering edifice of its own self-importance. How noble in reason! Hegel wrote about the 'cunning of reason': the idea itself can remain aloof, letting the passions do its work for it without having to get involved in the messy business of the struggle for meaning.
The human mind is resolutely structural in its perceptions: it has no regard for essence, only for place. The figure of the King has no value in and of himself: his value is in the place he occupies in the symbolic economy. Economy figures it just about right, I think: we all know that money is notional, that it has worth only by virtue of the place it occupies in the system; it has no use value: it is pure exchange value. Does the singing thrush have the capacity to mean in and of itself? No: it is only by virtue of the place it occupies in the structure that it can mean something. OK, a pretty banal insight. But doesn't the same hold true for every element in the system, every single idea and image and trope on the merry-go-round of consciousness? Isn't interchangeability the basic principle of all thought? So much for reason.
In apprehension how like a god, indeed: the mind works just like one of those petty, selfish, sex-crazed gods of antiquity, reaching out always to possess for itself whatever it perceives to be beyond itself. It is basically pathological. And as with Apollo's infatuation with his beloved, the reluctant Hyancinthus, desire always eventually works towards the destruction of its object. Hyancinthus died and was transformed into a flower. 'I am the author of your death', said Apollo. The flower bore the signature of its origin: the letters inscribed on its petals, AI AI, so that everyone would be able to tell the flower's name and the truth of its story. Nature answers back, as she always does in the strange universe of the Metamorphoses. In its failure to possess the object of its desire, in the failure of its attempt to appropriate, consciousness has succeeded in inscribing that object with the trace of its authorship: it has created the world.
March 17, 2006
The Book of Nature
I'm writing this post because I've become aware of a conflict in my thinking on the matter of linguistic determinism. For a long time I've felt comfortable with the wholesale rejection of linguistic determinism on the model of the 'strong' Whorf hypothesis. But it strikes me now that it's difficult to square this stance with my ideas on rhetoric and the primacy of language, as set out, not altogether successfully, in previous posts. In this post I'm hoping to clarify my thinking in the good old heuristic mode; I'm mainly writing this for my own benefit, and I'm sure that much of what I say will come across as naïve, badly-thought-through, or just plain wrong.
The crux of the matter is this: like anyone who adheres to the tenets of classical rhetoric, I am persuaded that language, broadly speaking, determines thought; but I fail to be persuaded that the conceptual systems made possible by different languages are fundamentally different. You can see the bind I'm in.
Steven Pinker very convincingly demolishes one version (his own strawman version?) of linguistic determinism in The Language Instinct. And indeed, I find it hard to believe that the German-speaker's mind functions in any fundamentally different way from the Chinese speaker's. No need even to posit a deep-structure universal grammar to accept this contention - it's just common sense (that we all have a common sense). Of course, it's possible to make arguments based on the notion that the Chinese mind deals only in the concrete and is incapable of abstraction, or that German Idealism could not have existed were it not for German syntax – but these arguments generally turn out to be specious, putting the cart before the horse, the chicken before the egg and the destination before the letter all at once.
It's a clumsy way of conceptualizing the problem, to draw sharp lines between different languages on the basis of political divisions, while paying scant attention to different idioms within a language. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy, and the notion that different ways of thinking derive solely (or even predominantly) from the nature of the individual speaker's mother tongue (whether it be Swedish, Sanskrit or Swahili) is clearly flawed. Better to think in terms of linguistic subsystems – not least because few of us possess sufficient mastery of many different languages to make comparisons meaningful. Many of the arguments for strong linguistic determinism, it seems to me, rest on the researcher's (deliberate?) inability to convey the sense of a peculiar idiom in a familiar idiom. Just because other languages' grammars/idioms/phraseology seem bizarre and incommensurable with 'our way of thinking' when we read them in translation, doesn't mean that they really are incommensurable. And linguistic researchers are not necessarily skilled translators; sometimes they are downright tendentious.
The 'weak' version of linguistic determinism says that different languages/idioms shape different ways of conceptualizing things, and so open up different fields of 'things' possible to conceive of – without necessarily positing the incommensurability of those ways of thinking. This I can accept, with some reservations.
I recently took a look at Ann Moss's excellent book on Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn. It is the author's contention that the shift from the technical Latin of medieval scholasticism to humanist Latin was at the root of a new conceptual system. Her earlier work on Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought is a favourite of mine; and, of course, I never for one minute questioned the notion that our reading structures our capacity to think. But this new idea seems to me to go one step further: are we to believe that the advent of a new kind of expressivity (new syntax, new lexicon, a new poetics) was at the root of a new way of conceptualizing Truth?
Let's turn to Erasmus for the answer; writing from the heart of the debate (this from the De ratione studii of 1512):
[NB: It may seem perverse of me to persist with this words/things dichotomy in this post-Saussurean semiotic universe, but let's keep it as simple as possible for the moment (my English-speaking mind can't cope with indigest complexity - it needs to build up to it).]
For a start it would seem that knowledge is altogether twofold: knowledge of things and knowledge of words. Knowledge of words comes first; knowledge of things is more important ['cognitio...verborum prior, rerum potior'] ... As things are only known through verbal signs, anyone who is not skilled in the power of language ['sermonis vim'] will of necessity everywhere misjudge things, blindly, fancifully, crazily. Finally, you may observe that there are none more prone to everlasting quibbling about verbal minutiae than those who boast that they have no time for words because they are concentrating on things.
Now Erasmus was saying nothing much new here (Augustine might even have agreed with him); but he was setting out, in his characteristically robust style, a position that was controversial enough in its own way. That parting shot at the pedants, which rings true even today, has greater significance in the context of the Aristotelianism (and its scholastic Latin) that Erasmus is writing against. A few centuries later someone else set it out much more pithily (although I'm not too sure he was saying quite the same thing): 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world' (proposition 5.6 of the Tractatus). The implications of the view of language Erasmus describes here are far-reaching: to be sure, 'things are more important', but words 'come first' and cannot be dispensed with. We know things only by virtue of words. Those who boast that they have no time for words are clearly both blind and crazy, since attending to words is what comes first: err at that stage, and you fast become lost in the forest of things. Things are worthless without words. Meaning emerges only from discourse when the speaker possesses sufficient mastery of the language arts, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic. To attend to substance over style (or to claim to be doing that) is to go wrong: the way you say something is more important than what you [think you're] say[ing], in that nebulous region of the mind that deals in ideas. Words precede things.
Permit me to backtrack a little. Perhaps I shouldn't have said that the how is more important than the what: better to borrow Erasmus's formulation and say that words are more powerful than things; vis sermonis exceeds vis rerum. I think it's essential not to lose sight of what's bound up in that little phrase: verborum prior, rerum potior, lest I fall into the scoptical scepticism of radical relativism. It's a tricky one: prior versus potior, 'first' versus 'more important' or even (if we translate 'potior' in a slightly different but no less accurate way) 'more powerful' – in which case the opposition I posited is compromised. Choice of words is everything at this delicate stage. Can we tease it out any further, or is this entanglement a Gordian knot? One thing's for sure: cutting it by brute force might solve the bind, but we will have lost something in the process.
Let's try again: words come first; words are at the cutting edge of experience; they are the first and the last, the alpha and the omega. Things cannot exist independent of words: things cannot precede words, they can only emerge into the light of understanding once words have had their say. Words are shared; things, not necessarily. Things do not exist in some ideal Platonic realm: they exist by virtue of their instantiation in language. No relativism here: language is shared, held in common, conventional; there is no private language. Nevertheless, the capacity of words to mean things is not strictly limited by convention: there is still poetry.
Foucault, in Les mots et les choses (irritatingly translated into English as The Order of Things) set out a whole trajectory of the evolution of the language/knowledge axis since the Renaissance episteme, going from resemblance through measurement (in the era of Classicism) to the opening up of the 'human' disciplines (in the modern era). Things have changed since the Renaissance, and so have words. Nevertheless, I'm still inclined to believe in this idea, from Foucault's first chapter on 'The Prose of the World' (paying due attention to the qualifying clause):
The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text.
The crux of the matter is this: like anyone who adheres to the tenets of classical rhetoric, I am persuaded that language, broadly speaking, determines thought; but I fail to be persuaded that the conceptual systems made possible by different languages are fundamentally different. You can see the bind I'm in.
Steven Pinker very convincingly demolishes one version (his own strawman version?) of linguistic determinism in The Language Instinct. And indeed, I find it hard to believe that the German-speaker's mind functions in any fundamentally different way from the Chinese speaker's. No need even to posit a deep-structure universal grammar to accept this contention - it's just common sense (that we all have a common sense). Of course, it's possible to make arguments based on the notion that the Chinese mind deals only in the concrete and is incapable of abstraction, or that German Idealism could not have existed were it not for German syntax – but these arguments generally turn out to be specious, putting the cart before the horse, the chicken before the egg and the destination before the letter all at once.
It's a clumsy way of conceptualizing the problem, to draw sharp lines between different languages on the basis of political divisions, while paying scant attention to different idioms within a language. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy, and the notion that different ways of thinking derive solely (or even predominantly) from the nature of the individual speaker's mother tongue (whether it be Swedish, Sanskrit or Swahili) is clearly flawed. Better to think in terms of linguistic subsystems – not least because few of us possess sufficient mastery of many different languages to make comparisons meaningful. Many of the arguments for strong linguistic determinism, it seems to me, rest on the researcher's (deliberate?) inability to convey the sense of a peculiar idiom in a familiar idiom. Just because other languages' grammars/idioms/phraseology seem bizarre and incommensurable with 'our way of thinking' when we read them in translation, doesn't mean that they really are incommensurable. And linguistic researchers are not necessarily skilled translators; sometimes they are downright tendentious.
The 'weak' version of linguistic determinism says that different languages/idioms shape different ways of conceptualizing things, and so open up different fields of 'things' possible to conceive of – without necessarily positing the incommensurability of those ways of thinking. This I can accept, with some reservations.
I recently took a look at Ann Moss's excellent book on Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn. It is the author's contention that the shift from the technical Latin of medieval scholasticism to humanist Latin was at the root of a new conceptual system. Her earlier work on Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought is a favourite of mine; and, of course, I never for one minute questioned the notion that our reading structures our capacity to think. But this new idea seems to me to go one step further: are we to believe that the advent of a new kind of expressivity (new syntax, new lexicon, a new poetics) was at the root of a new way of conceptualizing Truth?
Let's turn to Erasmus for the answer; writing from the heart of the debate (this from the De ratione studii of 1512):
[NB: It may seem perverse of me to persist with this words/things dichotomy in this post-Saussurean semiotic universe, but let's keep it as simple as possible for the moment (my English-speaking mind can't cope with indigest complexity - it needs to build up to it).]
For a start it would seem that knowledge is altogether twofold: knowledge of things and knowledge of words. Knowledge of words comes first; knowledge of things is more important ['cognitio...verborum prior, rerum potior'] ... As things are only known through verbal signs, anyone who is not skilled in the power of language ['sermonis vim'] will of necessity everywhere misjudge things, blindly, fancifully, crazily. Finally, you may observe that there are none more prone to everlasting quibbling about verbal minutiae than those who boast that they have no time for words because they are concentrating on things.
Now Erasmus was saying nothing much new here (Augustine might even have agreed with him); but he was setting out, in his characteristically robust style, a position that was controversial enough in its own way. That parting shot at the pedants, which rings true even today, has greater significance in the context of the Aristotelianism (and its scholastic Latin) that Erasmus is writing against. A few centuries later someone else set it out much more pithily (although I'm not too sure he was saying quite the same thing): 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world' (proposition 5.6 of the Tractatus). The implications of the view of language Erasmus describes here are far-reaching: to be sure, 'things are more important', but words 'come first' and cannot be dispensed with. We know things only by virtue of words. Those who boast that they have no time for words are clearly both blind and crazy, since attending to words is what comes first: err at that stage, and you fast become lost in the forest of things. Things are worthless without words. Meaning emerges only from discourse when the speaker possesses sufficient mastery of the language arts, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic. To attend to substance over style (or to claim to be doing that) is to go wrong: the way you say something is more important than what you [think you're] say[ing], in that nebulous region of the mind that deals in ideas. Words precede things.
Permit me to backtrack a little. Perhaps I shouldn't have said that the how is more important than the what: better to borrow Erasmus's formulation and say that words are more powerful than things; vis sermonis exceeds vis rerum. I think it's essential not to lose sight of what's bound up in that little phrase: verborum prior, rerum potior, lest I fall into the scoptical scepticism of radical relativism. It's a tricky one: prior versus potior, 'first' versus 'more important' or even (if we translate 'potior' in a slightly different but no less accurate way) 'more powerful' – in which case the opposition I posited is compromised. Choice of words is everything at this delicate stage. Can we tease it out any further, or is this entanglement a Gordian knot? One thing's for sure: cutting it by brute force might solve the bind, but we will have lost something in the process.
Let's try again: words come first; words are at the cutting edge of experience; they are the first and the last, the alpha and the omega. Things cannot exist independent of words: things cannot precede words, they can only emerge into the light of understanding once words have had their say. Words are shared; things, not necessarily. Things do not exist in some ideal Platonic realm: they exist by virtue of their instantiation in language. No relativism here: language is shared, held in common, conventional; there is no private language. Nevertheless, the capacity of words to mean things is not strictly limited by convention: there is still poetry.
Foucault, in Les mots et les choses (irritatingly translated into English as The Order of Things) set out a whole trajectory of the evolution of the language/knowledge axis since the Renaissance episteme, going from resemblance through measurement (in the era of Classicism) to the opening up of the 'human' disciplines (in the modern era). Things have changed since the Renaissance, and so have words. Nevertheless, I'm still inclined to believe in this idea, from Foucault's first chapter on 'The Prose of the World' (paying due attention to the qualifying clause):
The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text.
March 11, 2006
Sunt enim litere multis instrumenta dementie
In spite of the fact that Socrates studied with all diligence to acquire a knowledge of human nature and to understand himself, and in spite of the fame accorded him through the centuries as one who beyond all other men had an insight into the human heart, he has himself admitted that the reason for his shrinking from reflection upon the nature of such beings as Pegasus and the Gorgons was that he, the life-long student of human nature, had not yet been able to make up his mind whether he was a stranger monster than Typhon, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, partaking of something divine (Phaedrus, 229 E). This seems to be a paradox. However, one should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. But the highest pitch of every passion is always to will its own downfall; and so it is also the supreme passion of the Reason to seek a collision, though this collision must in one way or another prove its undoing. The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.
-Kierkegaard
-Kierkegaard
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