March 3, 2017. This weeks reading's most important revelation comes from the concept of the sign and the signifier. Had I only depended upon my beginning critical theory class or Google I would have not known that the idea of a sign/signifier pair does not come from Ferdinand de Saussure. According to Wikipedia, the "concept of signs has been around for a long time, having been studied by many philosophers who include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and others from the medieval period such as William of Ockham." John Locke and later, David Hume use the idea of the sign/signifier pair in the assigned readings without giving credit to the ancients. I've noticed such unacknowledged credit to original authors among most of the great thinkers, from Matthew Arnold to Carl Jung. It is the great deception of those whose work provides a basis for the clearing in the forest of social stability that we are taught what the laws of ethos are and only later learn how those laws are used in the court of life. The right to claim the great ideas of the past seems to be perfectly acceptable as long as that claim is sublimated into a greater contemporary awareness. What truth has the power to stand unchanged against reality? At least with well-founded rhetoric, one may find themselves as a great crusader who sheds light into the darkness of reality. What then when technology provides alternatives to unassailable reality? Shall rhetoric be the way, the truth, and the light?
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| John Locke (1632-1704) |
I'll begin this week's posting by looking at John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding." Locke describes words and their scope of usage in a logical and easy to follow manner until Chapter 5, and he even asks his readers to participate in thought experiments. One point of interest to me about Locke's style of writing is his use of lists. I would like to know what the term is for the ordered listing of things such as reasons listed as first, secondly and so on. Locke's parents were Puritans, and I encountered many lists during my undergraduate readings in Early American Literature class. The listing style makes things very clear, and I seldom encounter it in contemporary literature.
Locke applies a pragmatic instructional approach to explaining how words enable communication as well as how they aid in the mind's process of understanding. The essay makes clear to the reader that the thing (the signifier) and the concept (the sign) are not the same. Locke builds on this fact to explain the ideas of mixed modes, substances, relations, and abstract and concrete terms. He is an empiricist and believes the human mind to be without pre-existing ideas at birth. Similarly, the essay assumes a reader may have no knowledge of his essay's subject. His style progressively sequences conclusions which become premises for further conclusions as a means to build ever increasing insight into the subject of how human understanding results in knowledge.
Since sections are left out of the essay that I am reading, I did not know if it was Locke or the omissions by the editor that caused me to have a muddled impression of what mixed modes are. I ran a search for "the mixed modes of Locke" on Google and read through Sparknotes's summary and the analysis of Locke's ideas. Afterward, I easily read through the rest of the essay. Sparknotes on Locke
I looked at some entries in Google Books, and the authors seemed unsure about what exactly Locke meant by the more nuanced meanings of his terms. Different authors understood the "idea of substance" somewhat differently, and so I let the less academic Sparknotes suffice for my reading.
Admittedly, I could have spent weeks examining the details of the essay and still would have felt I missed a few things. But, that is what makes the essay so interesting. It brings to mind many concepts such that the reader gets a sense of dimensionality as if there were a three-dimensional or perhaps fractal hierarchy of signs in the space of contemplation. I wondered at one point if I could take the idea of the sign and make a circular argument that led entirely through his species and generas back to the original idea of the sign to show that the function of the sign performed identically at all levels; to come back to the reason that Baudrillard stated that the simulacrum is true in his book Simulacra and Simulation.
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| Giambattista Vico (1668-1774) |
Vico during his argument attempts to show that "rhetoric provides a superior philosophy of knowledge" (862). I chose to look for the components of the Aristotlean canon of invention in Vico's essay and their subcomponents as well as make reference to Cicero's rhetorical method. My reason for making such a layman's analysis is to provide me with knowledge that I can use later in a rhetorical multimedia presentation. To recap the five cannons of rhetoric are invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. According to Professor Andrew R. Cline Ph.D. invention is "[t]o discover the available means of persuasion.
To begin with we might ask, what is the exigency of the essay? So, what has happened or failed to happen to prompt Vico to write the essay? The editor in the introduction to Vico's article states that "he was regarded as a reactionary because of his opposition to Descartes" and that "Vico was [the] appointed professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples in 1699 and served until 1741 . . . [he] hoped--though in vain--to be appointed to the much more prestigious chair of civil law" (862). From these statements then it is easy to conclude that Vico had a vested interest in rebuffing the status quo by way of using rhetoric to make a "[m]odern philosophical critique . . . [:] the common instrument of all our sciences and arts" (866). On the other hand, his insight as a rhetorician may qualify him more than others to genuinely propose "a curriculum that concludes with the study of eloquence, a study which he sees as interdisciplinary and (in modern terms) meta-theatrical, a way to link the other disciplines and bring them to bear on public issues" (863). His essay argues for a more balanced educational system. If academia "accepts Cartesianism, it will [according to the editor] unduly privilege natural science and mathematics while devaluing other kinds of knowledge, and it will do so to the detriment of society, which will eventually lack leaders educated in public affairs" (863).
Whatever Vico's motive for writing the essay, whether personal or altruistic or both, it refutes the pressures on academic curriculum presented by Francis Bacon in his treatise "Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning" (865). Vico disclaims Bacon because of his failure to resolve cultural gaps within "Dignity and Advancement" (865). And, he aligns Bacon with "the potentates of mighty empires"--elitists (865). Although such anti-Bacon sentiment may appear offensive to some, it provides Vico with the ability to set the stage in a short proomium which he concludes in the following paragraphic axiom: "No doubt all that man is given to know is, like man himself, limited and imperfect. Therefore, if we compare our times with those of the Ancients--if we weigh, on both sides, that advantages and deficiencies of learning--our achievements and those of Antiquity would, by and large, balance" (865). After explicating a few of the differences of Modern and Ancient cultures he states that "[t]he foregoing provides the theme of the present discourse: Which method is finer and better, ours or the Ancients?
Thus, the theme of Vico's invention stage is to find a better solution than Bacon's through the analysis of the pros and cons of modern and ancient learning systems. This is what is called stasis theory within Aristotle's invention canon, and it is attributed to Cicero's work in his book Di oratore in which "inventio is dialogic and must be pursued pro and con" (Thomas O. Sloane, "Reinventing Inventio" 461). The comparison and contrast of the Modern methods with the Ancient's methods are what Vico uses to create "true or seemingly true arguments for the sake of making [his] case appear probable" (Slone 462).
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| David Hume (1711-1776) |
"A thousand men may have a thousand different opinions about some one thing; but just exactly one of the opinions is true, and the only difficulty is to find out which one that is. As against that, a thousand different sentiments aroused by some object are all right, because no sentiment represents what is really in the object, and so no sentiment runs any risk of being false. A sentiment does mark a certain conformity or relation between the object and the organs or facilities of the mind; but there is no chance of error there, because if that conformity didn't exist the sentiment wouldn't exist either." -- David Hume. To which Baudrillard might add, "the simulacrum is true."
Hume distinguishes between sentiment and philosophy and argues that aesthetic appreciation may be cultivated through practice. He claims his essay is a "means to mingle some light of the understanding [of the sentiment of beauty] with the feelings of sentiment" (11). Hume, unlike Vico, begins his essay's invention stage by pointing out that all people have prejudices of taste. He uses stasis theory to discover what the basis for disagreement is. The author presents his rhetoric through comparisons of opposites: applaud/blame; virtues/vices. He conjectures that the "unanimity [the consensus of what is virtuous versus what is vice] is usually credited to the influence of plain reason, which in all these cases maintains similar sentiments in all men, and prevents the controversies to which the abstract sciences are so much exposed" (7-8). He goes on to say that "the harmony of morals can be explained as arising from the very nature of language" (8). The general precepts of virtue versus particular pictures of how people behave allow the author to refute the reasonable position that since individuals have different tastes, philosophically, it is impossible for there ever to be a standard of taste" (8).
Hume's argument depends on his awareness of what the linguist Saussure describes as a sign/signifier pair where the sign is the perception of the object, the concept, and the signifier is the real object. Since all people across all history recognize that something, in general, is beautiful, Hume argues that this fact means for all practical purposes that beauty exists objectively. And further, that the art critic may tune their subjective tastes, their sensibilities, through practice and experience such that the objective signified elements within the details of a work of art might be classified as having a particular aesthetic value.
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