Thoughts on Rhetoric / Descartes / Certainty / Imagination / Post-Renaissance Humanists
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE: VICO’S IDEALS IN AN AGE OF CERTAINTY
In Rhetoric in the European Tradition, Thomas Conley speaks of Giambattista Vico as a little known professor of Rhetoric from Naples who “exercised no visible influence in the eighteenth century” (199). Only in later centuries has his reputation enhanced. However, Vico has an important and timely, if overlooked, place in the history of rhetoric. Vico’s dedication and adherence to the discipline of rhetoric in a time when it was attacked, or in Conley’s words, “classicized.” Vico’s reaction against what he called “modern philosophical critique,” the preeminent Cartesian method, ironically gave rhetoric the very voice that it is supposed to train. Vico sees the Cartesian method as useful, but devoid of the imagination and invention that a rhetorical education prizes and nurtures. This applies also to his educational method, in which he found a useful place for Cartesian theory, but offered something altogether more humanistic and classical.
In On The Study Methods of Our Time, we find Vico looking back to the ancients (865). Critiquing Francis Bacon (although Vico recognizes him as a “pioneer”), he desires not to achieve an “absolutely complete system of systems” but to remedy cultural gaps. Moving away from the realm of supremacy and empiricism, Vico instead points to the ancients with their unified disciplines and progressive successes. While the ancients were “handicapped” by a lack of scientific knowledge or technological advancement, they “nurtured the reasoning powers of their young men” (869). In scientific method, the “study methods of our time” are clearly superior to those of the ancient, but Vico finds fault with the modern, Cartesian focus on “pure, primary, truth.”
In Discourse on Method, Descartes shows skepticism about philosophy, rhetoric, and the type of Humanistic education that those like Vico and the ancients propose. Such philosophy is full of “unstable foundations” and he concludes that it contains “nothing that is not doubtful” (5). As Bizzell and Herzberg note, “The method of Descartes owes nothing to argument and everything to solitary mental analysis” (793). At its center, the Cartesian method proposes that proof is strong enough to speak for itself, and therefore has no need to be embedded in flowery speech or metaphor. Perhaps implied in the method is a future student who will be able to recognize truth using Descartes’ guiding aims of certainty and empiricism in place of invention and dialectic. One need not argue every side when science indisputably shows which side is correct. Descartes hopes to “include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it doubt.”
If Descartes seeks to remove the boundaries of doubt and ambiguity, Vico explores the avenue that these factors play in the edification of humanity. This focus is best exemplified in Vico’s metaphor that describes the “aim” of his humanistic method: “it should circulate, like a blood-stream, through the entire body of the learning process.” Simply, man is a living, breathing creature, not a calculator forever computatively seeking a correct answer. Rather, metaphysically and spiritually, he should be a creature of wonder, loving argument and poetry, and “useful to human society” (877). “What is eloquence,” Vico asks, “but wisdom, ornately and copiously delivered in words appropriate to the common politics of mankind?” Still, Vico keeps in mind that the end goal is truth, but differs with Descartes on the means with which to arrive there. However, Vico does not resent the sciences. He merely influence the strain that the Cartesian method influences on education.
Vico’s Orations compiled as On Humanistic Education are equally enlightening. In an oration titled On True Learning, he suggests that philosophers often disguise ignorance as pretended knowledge (87-89). After presenting his audience with a dialogue that illustrates this, in which a philosopher “proposes to demonstrate physical phenomena by geometric methods,” he argues:
Why do we pretend to impose on a man of sane mind geometric demonstrations which he cannot follow? Such a one, although he has unobstructed vision and is vigilant, is still not able to see the sun in full daylight, even though we know that the mind is attracted to truth as the eye is to light. Let us at last confess our natural limitations. Our studies are valuable insofar as we learn that we do not know or we know only a few things. (89)
Learning that “we do not know” is a far cry from the Cartesian condescension against probability. However, without this, invention and independent discovery become lost an important place within the confines of education. As Bizzell and Herzberg note, “Such a method oppresses rather than inspires students” (863). Rhetorical study, on the other hand, encourages the guiding virtues of invention and imagination that allows a student to develop his intellectual powers. These skills are bolstered through the improvement of memory and eloquence, and a renewed focus on ethics. In his writings, Vico clearly does not express disdain for science, but does note that the current educational system dedicates “an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences” (871).
As Vico points out in On The Study Methods of Our Time, the ancients supercede modern thinking because of their focus on the big picture – the guiding principles. Modern philosophical critique, in its dedication to reason, overlooks the universals that thinkers like Plato and Augustine for which so passionately strive. In an oration titled On the Liberal Arts and Politic Power, Vico channels the Platonic desire for dialectic to order the soul (118). Though this passage is long, I feel compelled to include it in its entirety because it sums up what I wish to prove so plainly. Vico sees rhetoric as a necessary part of an education that includes science to such a large degree that he includes such particular sciences as mechanics, optics, and geometry. In his description of a “supreme commander,” he refers to virtues both of spirit and mind. His sketch is similar to that of Plato’s divine charioteer guided to the heavens – all the virtues are aligned, and he is not merely “decorated with an ostentatious helmet and crest.” Vico illustrates the virtues of the mind as such:
“Dialectic provides him with cautiousness of judgment so that he may avoid surprise ensnarements. Geometry teaches the design of the camp and the battle order of the troops in a circle, then dispersed, then in square and finally in wedge-shaped formation as conditions require. By arithmetic he can establish the number of the enemy from the location they occupy. Optics allows him to estimate from a distance the height of fortifications and the length and duration of a march. Architecture erects the arches, builds the walls of defense, the ramparts, and excavates the trenches. Mechanics contributes to the inventions of artillery, and moral philosophy aids him in knowing the customs and nature of the people. The lessons of the past will enable him to know what to avoid and what to pursue. Eloquence gives him the means to arouse the reluctant to battle, to encourage those who are dispirited in defeat, to restrain the exuberant in victory. How much utility the natural sciences contribute to the military arts is confirmed by the example of the leader who accounted for the causes of the eclipse of the moon or sun to his frightened troops and thus urged them on to great feats.” (emphasis added)
Rather than replace science and its study, Vico only desired to renew the focus on the integration of rhetoric and oratory because of the power it placed on invention and imagination. The “supreme commander” cannot rule by his control of scientific faculties alone, or the elevation of his own reason to a status above received wisdom and historical knowledge. Instead, the sciences (geometry, arithmetic, mechanics, architecture, optics) have an important place alongside the rhetorical skills of eloquence and dialectic. It is interesting, and perhaps intentional, that Vico couches this exhortation in between the rhetorical virtues of dialectic and eloquence, as though all the scientific skills are aided by a mastery of oratory.
Also, the “lessons of the past” play an important role in the training of this supreme commander. Similar to Machiavelli’s Prince, who must take into account all factors both present and past in became a successful monarch, Vico’s commander must master the twin virtues of science and rhetoric.
Is Vico chasing phantoms? In an immediate sense, yes. As Peter Burke notes, a “cult of Vico” rose forty years after his death, thus exaggerating his influence on culture while he was alive (2). Burke writes, “It has been observed that Vico finally became famous at the very moment when posterity had nothing more to learn from him” (89). The prominent attacks on rhetoric were too vociferous and contemporary to be ignored. In History of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat expresses that the Society became wary of language and distrustful of the “shallowness” and deceitfulness inherent in Rhetoric (Bizzell and Herzberg 796). Whether or not Sprat really wanted “to return back to the primitive purity” of language, the message was clear: rhetorical education had a limited place in the brave new world divorced from “these specious Tropes and Figures.”
But Vico’s contentious voice gave confidence to a later generation who would use his name and his legacy as a rallying call to fellow rhetoricians. The thinkers and poets influenced by Vico – Coleridge, Arnold, Blake, and Marx among them – belie the claim that nineteenth century posterity had nothing to learn from Vico. The humanistic education owes much to what at the time was considered a mere reaction to Descartes. As rhetoric found a new flowering in the works of Newman and Mill, the words of Vico rang proud and true. Questioning the posterity of certainty and Cartesian thought, these writers began to look to Vico as a voice of humanity and sanity in a time when man was subtly encouraged to become a rational machine removed from the conversations that nurtured the great ages before them.
In short, Vico bravely and iconoclastically preserved the voice of his beloved ancients from louder modern influences. For this, modern rhetoric is thankful in its own preservation as a discipline, as are the imaginative, inventive students that the discipline continues to produce.
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE: VICO’S IDEALS IN AN AGE OF CERTAINTY
In Rhetoric in the European Tradition, Thomas Conley speaks of Giambattista Vico as a little known professor of Rhetoric from Naples who “exercised no visible influence in the eighteenth century” (199). Only in later centuries has his reputation enhanced. However, Vico has an important and timely, if overlooked, place in the history of rhetoric. Vico’s dedication and adherence to the discipline of rhetoric in a time when it was attacked, or in Conley’s words, “classicized.” Vico’s reaction against what he called “modern philosophical critique,” the preeminent Cartesian method, ironically gave rhetoric the very voice that it is supposed to train. Vico sees the Cartesian method as useful, but devoid of the imagination and invention that a rhetorical education prizes and nurtures. This applies also to his educational method, in which he found a useful place for Cartesian theory, but offered something altogether more humanistic and classical.
In On The Study Methods of Our Time, we find Vico looking back to the ancients (865). Critiquing Francis Bacon (although Vico recognizes him as a “pioneer”), he desires not to achieve an “absolutely complete system of systems” but to remedy cultural gaps. Moving away from the realm of supremacy and empiricism, Vico instead points to the ancients with their unified disciplines and progressive successes. While the ancients were “handicapped” by a lack of scientific knowledge or technological advancement, they “nurtured the reasoning powers of their young men” (869). In scientific method, the “study methods of our time” are clearly superior to those of the ancient, but Vico finds fault with the modern, Cartesian focus on “pure, primary, truth.”
In Discourse on Method, Descartes shows skepticism about philosophy, rhetoric, and the type of Humanistic education that those like Vico and the ancients propose. Such philosophy is full of “unstable foundations” and he concludes that it contains “nothing that is not doubtful” (5). As Bizzell and Herzberg note, “The method of Descartes owes nothing to argument and everything to solitary mental analysis” (793). At its center, the Cartesian method proposes that proof is strong enough to speak for itself, and therefore has no need to be embedded in flowery speech or metaphor. Perhaps implied in the method is a future student who will be able to recognize truth using Descartes’ guiding aims of certainty and empiricism in place of invention and dialectic. One need not argue every side when science indisputably shows which side is correct. Descartes hopes to “include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it doubt.”
If Descartes seeks to remove the boundaries of doubt and ambiguity, Vico explores the avenue that these factors play in the edification of humanity. This focus is best exemplified in Vico’s metaphor that describes the “aim” of his humanistic method: “it should circulate, like a blood-stream, through the entire body of the learning process.” Simply, man is a living, breathing creature, not a calculator forever computatively seeking a correct answer. Rather, metaphysically and spiritually, he should be a creature of wonder, loving argument and poetry, and “useful to human society” (877). “What is eloquence,” Vico asks, “but wisdom, ornately and copiously delivered in words appropriate to the common politics of mankind?” Still, Vico keeps in mind that the end goal is truth, but differs with Descartes on the means with which to arrive there. However, Vico does not resent the sciences. He merely influence the strain that the Cartesian method influences on education.
Vico’s Orations compiled as On Humanistic Education are equally enlightening. In an oration titled On True Learning, he suggests that philosophers often disguise ignorance as pretended knowledge (87-89). After presenting his audience with a dialogue that illustrates this, in which a philosopher “proposes to demonstrate physical phenomena by geometric methods,” he argues:
Why do we pretend to impose on a man of sane mind geometric demonstrations which he cannot follow? Such a one, although he has unobstructed vision and is vigilant, is still not able to see the sun in full daylight, even though we know that the mind is attracted to truth as the eye is to light. Let us at last confess our natural limitations. Our studies are valuable insofar as we learn that we do not know or we know only a few things. (89)
Learning that “we do not know” is a far cry from the Cartesian condescension against probability. However, without this, invention and independent discovery become lost an important place within the confines of education. As Bizzell and Herzberg note, “Such a method oppresses rather than inspires students” (863). Rhetorical study, on the other hand, encourages the guiding virtues of invention and imagination that allows a student to develop his intellectual powers. These skills are bolstered through the improvement of memory and eloquence, and a renewed focus on ethics. In his writings, Vico clearly does not express disdain for science, but does note that the current educational system dedicates “an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences” (871).
As Vico points out in On The Study Methods of Our Time, the ancients supercede modern thinking because of their focus on the big picture – the guiding principles. Modern philosophical critique, in its dedication to reason, overlooks the universals that thinkers like Plato and Augustine for which so passionately strive. In an oration titled On the Liberal Arts and Politic Power, Vico channels the Platonic desire for dialectic to order the soul (118). Though this passage is long, I feel compelled to include it in its entirety because it sums up what I wish to prove so plainly. Vico sees rhetoric as a necessary part of an education that includes science to such a large degree that he includes such particular sciences as mechanics, optics, and geometry. In his description of a “supreme commander,” he refers to virtues both of spirit and mind. His sketch is similar to that of Plato’s divine charioteer guided to the heavens – all the virtues are aligned, and he is not merely “decorated with an ostentatious helmet and crest.” Vico illustrates the virtues of the mind as such:
“Dialectic provides him with cautiousness of judgment so that he may avoid surprise ensnarements. Geometry teaches the design of the camp and the battle order of the troops in a circle, then dispersed, then in square and finally in wedge-shaped formation as conditions require. By arithmetic he can establish the number of the enemy from the location they occupy. Optics allows him to estimate from a distance the height of fortifications and the length and duration of a march. Architecture erects the arches, builds the walls of defense, the ramparts, and excavates the trenches. Mechanics contributes to the inventions of artillery, and moral philosophy aids him in knowing the customs and nature of the people. The lessons of the past will enable him to know what to avoid and what to pursue. Eloquence gives him the means to arouse the reluctant to battle, to encourage those who are dispirited in defeat, to restrain the exuberant in victory. How much utility the natural sciences contribute to the military arts is confirmed by the example of the leader who accounted for the causes of the eclipse of the moon or sun to his frightened troops and thus urged them on to great feats.” (emphasis added)
Rather than replace science and its study, Vico only desired to renew the focus on the integration of rhetoric and oratory because of the power it placed on invention and imagination. The “supreme commander” cannot rule by his control of scientific faculties alone, or the elevation of his own reason to a status above received wisdom and historical knowledge. Instead, the sciences (geometry, arithmetic, mechanics, architecture, optics) have an important place alongside the rhetorical skills of eloquence and dialectic. It is interesting, and perhaps intentional, that Vico couches this exhortation in between the rhetorical virtues of dialectic and eloquence, as though all the scientific skills are aided by a mastery of oratory.
Also, the “lessons of the past” play an important role in the training of this supreme commander. Similar to Machiavelli’s Prince, who must take into account all factors both present and past in became a successful monarch, Vico’s commander must master the twin virtues of science and rhetoric.
Is Vico chasing phantoms? In an immediate sense, yes. As Peter Burke notes, a “cult of Vico” rose forty years after his death, thus exaggerating his influence on culture while he was alive (2). Burke writes, “It has been observed that Vico finally became famous at the very moment when posterity had nothing more to learn from him” (89). The prominent attacks on rhetoric were too vociferous and contemporary to be ignored. In History of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat expresses that the Society became wary of language and distrustful of the “shallowness” and deceitfulness inherent in Rhetoric (Bizzell and Herzberg 796). Whether or not Sprat really wanted “to return back to the primitive purity” of language, the message was clear: rhetorical education had a limited place in the brave new world divorced from “these specious Tropes and Figures.”
But Vico’s contentious voice gave confidence to a later generation who would use his name and his legacy as a rallying call to fellow rhetoricians. The thinkers and poets influenced by Vico – Coleridge, Arnold, Blake, and Marx among them – belie the claim that nineteenth century posterity had nothing to learn from Vico. The humanistic education owes much to what at the time was considered a mere reaction to Descartes. As rhetoric found a new flowering in the works of Newman and Mill, the words of Vico rang proud and true. Questioning the posterity of certainty and Cartesian thought, these writers began to look to Vico as a voice of humanity and sanity in a time when man was subtly encouraged to become a rational machine removed from the conversations that nurtured the great ages before them.
In short, Vico bravely and iconoclastically preserved the voice of his beloved ancients from louder modern influences. For this, modern rhetoric is thankful in its own preservation as a discipline, as are the imaginative, inventive students that the discipline continues to produce.
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