Meg Hughes has completed her prelims at Purdue, and the thought of her accomplishment, her sharp mind, her deep reading, and her swift movement through things sent me back, sifting through some memories–as well as some ancient “WriteNow” and “WordPerfect” files on my old Macintosh.
Back when I was getting ready to begin my comprehensive exams at UIC, I remember running into John Huntington in the corridor. John looked on and commented, almost to himself as much to me, that when he took his exams, he felt he knew more then than he had ever known before . . . or since. There is some truth to that . . . at least so goes my testimony of the experience now as seen from his vantage (play to the tune of “The Circle of Life”).
But enough nostalgia! Kudos to Meg.
Late in the reading for my exams–it was the late 80’s, and we had a different, less apocalyptic George Bush as president (kinder? gentler?)–I began to cull quotations from my readings. I thought of a “joke”–one, alas, that I wound up never delivering. But the plan was this: at the end of the test period, as I submitted my exams, I was going to pull out and attach my “Montaigne Thing.” I even wrote up an introduction for context, which works adequately enough today, too. Without further ado then, here is, circa 1989, my Montaigne Thing, never submitted before this blog entry:
Please accept the following appendix. It’s become an appendix to my body, since, having found these quotations too indispensable to leave at home, I carry them in my wallet.
It’s called “The Montaigne Thing” in homage both to our President and to its inspiration, Montaigne, who used to adorn his study with quotations that particularly pleased him. In honoring both Montaigne and George Bush, we thus pay homage to those underlying principles of every one of our thoughts, the principles of permanence and change.
The reason, I think, that there is so much satire directed at George Bush when he says “the vision thing,” “the peace thing,” or some such expression, is not so much that he is an easy target, or a victim of the fishbowl environment of the presidency. Rather, at least in this case, it is that some profound Truth is captured in a surprising, almost ludicrous way. The Truth here is a major one, an epistemological one that I am sure you’ll see me discussing a number of times in these Exams. It’s that great Vygotskyan principle of “abbreviation,” or Burke’s theory of entitlement, whereby a single linguistic sign comes to encompass whole worlds of discourse. The substantive “thing” comes to represent whole processes–it is a noun that creates activities of thought.[1] It is a miracle, or what those of a more secular disposition have call “magic.”
From Permanence and Change of Kenneth Burke, p.272:
[Note: “troublesome antics”: being social, a cooperative agent in a competitive scene, a “propounder of new meanings,” of “education, propaganda, or suasion,”.etc.]
In these troublesome antics, we may even find it wise on occasion to adopt incongruous perspectives for the dwarfing of our impatience. We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made institutions–but beyond these tiny concentration points of rhetoric and traffic, there lies the eternally unsovable Enigma, the preposterous fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. Our speculations may run the whole qualitative gamut, from play, through reverence, even to an occasional shiver of cold metaphysical dread–for always the Eternal Enigma is there, right on the edges of our metropolitan bickerings, stretching outward to interstellar infinity and inward to the depths of the mind. And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man, there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss.
From Attitudes Toward History, p41:
The progress of humane enlightment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.
From Rhetoric of Motives, p. 265
So we must keep trying anything and everything, improvising, borrowing from others, developing from others, dialectically using one text as comment upon another, schematizing; using the incentive to new wanderings, returning from these excursions to schematize again, being oversubtle were the straining seems to promise some further glimpse, and making amends by reduction to very simple anecdotes.
From the Topics of Aristotle, 164b
For it is the skilled propounder and objector who is, speaking generally, a dialectician. To formulate a proposition is to form a number of things into one–for the conclusion to which the argument leads must be taken generally, as a single thing–whereas to formulate an objection is to make one thing into many; for the objector either distinguishes or demolishes, partly granting, partly denying the statements proposed.
From Montaigne’s “Of Coaches,” p. 685:
It is very easy to demonstrate that great authors, when they write about causes, adduce not only those they think are true but also those they do not believe in, provided they have some originality and beauty. They speak truly and usefully enough if they speak ingeniously. We cannot make sure of the master cause; we pile up several of them, to see if by chance it will be found among them.
For one cause will not do
We must state many, one of which is true. Lucretius
From Montaigne’s “Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers,” p. 574:
This bundle of so many disparate pieces is being composed in this manner: I set my hand to it only when pressed by too unnerving an idleness, and nowhere but home. Thus it has built itself up with diverse interruption and intervals, as occasions sometimes detain me elsewhere for several months. Moreover, I do not correct my first imaginings by my second–well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but only to vary and not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors, and I want people to see each part at its birth. It would give me pleasure to have begun earlier, and to be able to trace the course of my mutations. A valet who served me by writing at my dictation thought he had made a rich booty by stealing from me several pieces chosen to his taste. It consoles me that he will gain no more by it than I have lost.
St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, p.675:
In the first place, then, I wish by this preamble to put a stop to the expectations of readers who may think that I am about to lay down rules of rhetoric such as I have learnt, and taught too, in the secular schools, and to warn them that they need not look for any such from me. Not that I think such rules of no use, but that whatever use they have is to be learnt elsewhere; and if any good man should happen to have leisure for learning them, he is not to ask me to teach them either in this work or any other.
From A Grammar of Motives, p. 440:
All told, dialectic is concerned with different levels of grounding. It may be arrested after but a brief excursion, hardly more than a half-formulated enumeration of the most obvious factors in a situation. But whatever the range of the enterprise, the procedure is in general thus: Encountering some division, we retreat to a level of terms that allow for some kind of merger (as “near” and “far” are merged in the concept of “distance”); then we “return” to the division, now seeing it as pervaded by the spirit of the “One” we had found in our retreat.
From Erasmus’ De Copia, p. 89:
For there are those who hold a great many things in their minds, as though stored up in the earth, although in speaking and writing they are wonderfully destitute and bare.
From Erasmus’ De Copia, p. 87:
Therefore, whoever has resolved to read through every type of writer (for he who wishes to be considered learned must do that thoroughly once in his life) will first collect as many topics as possible. He will take them partly from classes of vices and virtues, partly from those things that are especially important in human affairs, and that are accustomed to come up most often in persuasion; and it will be best to arrange these according to the principle of affinity and opposition. For those that are related to one another automatically suggest what should follow, and the same thing is true of opposites.
Judith Rice Henderson, “Erasmus on the Art of Letter-Writing,” in Renaissance Eloquence, p.349:
[On the disease of schematization–or, a highpoint of Medieval thought:]
Now they were laboring so diligently to imitate Cicero that, like Nosoponus, they must lock themselves in an inner room, sealed from all disturbances, on nights proclaimed auspicious by astrology, eat only ten small currants and three coriander seeds coated with sugar to avoid distracting the brain, shun marriage and family and turn down public office, all to produce a letter of six periods asking a friend to return a book.
And what claim to dialectic would I have did I not let the Enemy speak?
From John Locke’s Essay, pp. 248-249:
To conclude this Consideration of the Imperfection, and Abuse of Language; the ends of Language in our Discourse with others, being chiefly these three: First, To make known one Man’s Thoughts or Ideas to another. Secondly, To do it with as much ease and quickness, as is possible; and Thirdly, Thereby to convey the Knowledge of Things. Language is either abused, or deficient, when it fails in any of these Three.
[W.S. Howell, 18th C, pp. 442-443: on DeQuincey’s absurdity, the castrophe of topical argument]
Back to the good guys:
Vico, p. 73
For when you instruct your prince, you do not teach him to approach the art of criticism directly, but inculcate him with many examples over a long period, before he is taught the art of forming judgements about them. [direction by way of indirection; danger of developing the critical faculty before eloquence]
[1]Note how we have a grammatical term for a verb acting as a noun, the “gerund,” but none for a noun acting as a verb. Perhaps creating such a term would help clarify the covert, but often momentous, power of naming.