Ramus as Credibility

We can say with certainty how many editions of Omar Talon’s and Peter Ramus’s Rhetoric were published in the 16th century—it’s not this that causes tension over the man, Ramus, and his legacy. The briefest, though most contentious, way to describe this legacy is by explaining that Ramus reorganized the academic curriculum of his day, so that where previously invention and arrangement had been areas of study in both rhetoric and logic, under Ramus’s revision they were studied only under the subject of logic. Behind this division is a method (which Ramus calls “method”), but this and lots of other innovations made Ramus a controversial though influential figure in his own time—and he continues to generate controversy today. For one thing, he serves as a sort of test for credentials in Renaissance rhetoric. Here is a passage from a review by Peter Mack of E. Armstrong’s book A Ciceronian Sunburn:

Armstrong’s view of Ramus is distorted by a widely shared misunderstanding. Ramus always insisted that rhetoric and dialectic had to be taught together. So when he removed invention and disposition from rhetoric and taught them within dialectic he was making a clear delineation between the two subjects (where previously there had been a large overlap) rather than impoverishing rhetoric and depriving students of access to invention. (Rhetorical Review 5.3)

Through his review, Mack, a Renaissance rhetoric heavyweight, employs his correction of Armstrong’s misunderstanding as a means of critiquing Armstrong’s hold over the rhetorical educational and theoretical milieu of the period on which he writes.

What Mack is questioning here is methodology, and that on two levels. Behind Armstrong’s widely sharing in a misunderstanding looms the figure of Walter Ong, who wrote the most thorough treatment of Ramus in the last century, and also compiled the definitive bibliography of Ramistic rhetoric. Ong’s treatment of Ramus is scathing—it would only barely be overstatement to say that Ong blames Ramus for all the problems of modern epistemology, notably its privileging of geometric schemata and fixed textuality over the fluid negotiation of oral exchange. When Mack criticizes Armstrong, then, he is in part critiquing Armstrong’s reliance on Ong’s polemic, his failure to get at the real work of Ramus and the environment in which he worked and to which he was responding. And there is some point here—despite the title, Armstrong’s work does not really explore the complexities of Ciceronianism and anti-Ciceronianism as they were understood and debated among rhetoricians in the century he examines, and this lack of context certainly affects how Armstrong presents Ramus’s work, which was certainly an intervention into this debate.

There is another level at which Mack is critiquing Armstrong’s methodology, however, and it has to do with a more fundamental opinion about rhetorical-historical work. The unstated premise of Mack’s critique is that the value of historical work is in revealing the truth of the past as it really was—its goal is accuracy and this is a goal with value in and of itself. The possibility of this “widely shared misunderstanding” of course rests on the further possibility of a non-misunderstanding, the possibility of something in this past moment that can be understood properly, and apprehended in its truth—a fact about Ramus and his method, or at least his educational system. In his reliance on Ong’s work, however, and in the arrangement of his work and its focus, both of which are unconventional, Armstrong is working out of a somewhat different idea of historical work, one that uses history as a reaction to and intervention into the present. We can see Armstrong’s reliance on Ong’s work as sloppy historiography, but we could also see it as a privileging of current discussions and problems within rhetoric over a now past debate about the intricacies of Ciceronian imitation.

I find myself wrestling with this problem daily—or at least on whatever days I get to work on this stuff. What I bring to this question, and the way it affects my work, is that I ultimately am reluctant to consider the past as a stability, but see it instead as a set of conventions that are agreed upon and then worked within. The purpose of rhetorical-historical work, for me, is to intervene in the present—which is done, for me, by finding ways to push at the bounds of those conventions, to deform those conventions. My obsession right now (and for the past three years, and for the next three) is that I think the problem of queenship in the sixteenth century exerts a tremendous influence on the development of rhetorical theory in the second half of the sixteenth century—but I can’t say I make this claim as a way of fixing more adequately the truths of the past. I make it instead because I believe that there is an inherent value in rethinking and reworking the sets of conventions that bound the narrative of this rhetoric’s history, which are built on discussions of Descartes and Ramus rather than of Catherine DiMedici. Such a Hayden White-inspired belief is as untested a premise as a Kristeller-inspired belief (such as that I have ascribed to Peter Mack) that the discovery of truth has a liberatory value in and of itself. So I admit that I can’t really justify my position and that I can’t really resolve these conflicting positions, even within my own work, but articulating them at least reflects the place from which I begin.