Knowledge Breaks Apart Without the Text

The lack of art in modern analytical writing begins with the scholastic philosophers in the 11th century, who saw ideas as distinct from the text in which they are expressed. For example, the scholastics actively discouraged Bible reading, even among advanced students and teachers. Instead, the central text of Christianity became Peter Lombard’s Four Books of Ideas (mid 12^th century), which extracted the basics of Christian doctrine. The Bible texts would only confuse people, the scholastics thought; it was much more convenient to go straight to a clear, concise summary of Christian beliefs and key issues. Accordingly, doctoral students would not research what we today call primary texts but would write their dissertations on Peter Lombard or other secondary sources.

The Humanists and their intellectual descendants down to the present day saw this practice as evidence of the scholastics’ backward intellect, pedantry, and jealous guarding of their own authority. On the contrary, the scholastics viewed themselves as progressives, and their approach to knowledge simply corrected the errors that had slipped into education through reliance on the pagan auctores and the poetic form of reading they imply.

We share their view of knowledge even today. At all levels of education, we assist learning with textbooks—you can think of Peter Lombard’s Ideas as the first textbook. A textbook presents extracts of knowledge that purport to establish the fundamental principles of a given discipline, whether literature, organic chemistry, marketing, or some other field. In public schools, panels of educators collaborate to write textbooks that become de facto standards. School boards and administrations choose textbooks explicitly to inculcate in students the closest approximation to the truth of a given subject. As a result, textbooks often enjoy near monopoly power, which enables publishers to charge exorbitant prices for them, commonly approaching $200 today. They’re also flat and artless.

Textbooks alter the way people read. When you see students studying, they typically hunch over thick textbooks—for chemistry, math, law, and so on. The textbooks feature thin, glaring white paper and small, black type. They smell like chemicals. Students highlight passages with fluorescent yellow or pink markers. They can then go back and read the highlighted passages to refresh their memory before an exam. Students accept that reading means mostly reading for information and that pleasure is irrelevant.

Unhooking ideas from words made specialized knowledge possible. In the ancient world, authors couldn’t stray far from the rhetorical expectations of their audience. People could study natural and social phenomena; they could accumulate observations and speculate about them. But the work produced from these studies seldom goes beyond reporting and cataloging. The analytical method that the scholastics developed allowed them to delve into theological questions. Other scholars could apply the method to other topics.

In addition, scholars could develop other analytical methods and models to explore the world. If scholars didn’t have to produce “art” in Plato’s sense, they could invent any methods they wanted without worrying about disappointing readers’ expectations. In fact, each scholar could devise a method appropriate for his particular topic. Thus, scholasticism enabled the innumerable economic models, data models, climate models, and so on that we have today. As a consequence, the fields of knowledge grow increasingly apart. Any literate person could read Strabo’s Geography or Ptolemy on astronomy. The general reader today cannot easily digest the latest scholarship on these subjects because they lack the specialized knowledge and understanding of methods, which have become so elaborate over the centuries.

The Art of Language at the Center of Education

High culture maintained a continuity from the ancient world into the Middle Ages. Literary life and education had revived in the fourth and fifth centuries after the near collapse of the Roman empire in the third century. The later Roman emperors such as Diocletian and Constantine restored order and prosperity. During this time, the empire became Christian. Although some wanted to get rid of pagan learning altogether, the faction that saw value in the classical authors prevailed.

Church fathers such as Augustine and Jerome wanted Christians to be good readers so that they could get the most out of the Bible. That meant honing their reading skills by studying the best Greek and Latin writers, who were pagan: Virgil, Cicero, and the rest. Not only were these authors skillful with language, their books contained ethical lessons that the church approved of. These writers formed the auctores, a Latin word meaning not just “authors” but also “authorities”—that is, those whose work should guide us. The Greek and Latin texts that survive today largely reflect what the early churchmen in the fourth and fifth centuries picked out as canonical from the whole corpus of classical antiquity. They gave ancient literary culture centuries more life.

Martianus Capella put his stamp on the Roman style of eduction for 1,000 years with his work The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, written in the 420s or 430s. In this allegory about the education of a public speaker (the type of education that any Roman official or professional would have had), Mercury stands for the raw talent of eloquence while Philology stands for study. Her handmaidens are the seven liberal arts, which Martianus describes in two groups. The trivium consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; the quadrivium consists of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

From the fifth century to the Renaissance, these are the subjects that students across Western Europe studied. They did not represent different disciplines or departments; they were not studied and taught by different scholars. Rather, they formed a single curriculum that any teacher would teach. Young students would focus on the trivium, older students on the quadrivium. By the time they matriculated, students had all mastered the same set of learning. And this learning was based on the study of texts and the art of language.

 

A Holistic View of the World Requires Art

In antiquity, people did not stray far from this literal, concrete sense of reading and thinking, even in abstract philosophy. Plato sets up his dialogues like plays or novels. The Phaedo exhibits multiple narrative frames (like a modern story such as Heart of Darkness). It opens with an Athenian, Phaedo, on a visit to the small city of Phlius in the Peloponnesian peninsula. His friend there, Echecrates, quizzes Phaedo about Socrates’ last day before his execution, which Phaedo spent with him. This set-up for the dialogue indicates that Socrates’ fame endures after his death and that his influence reaches even out-of-the-way towns far from Athens. Phaedo agrees to tell the story. After his conviction for undermining the moral character of Athens’ youth, Socrates won a few days’ reprieve from his death sentence while a sacred boat sailed to the island of Delos and back in a religious ceremony. Phaedo says:

We had all made it our regular practice, even in the period before, to visit Socrates every day [in jail]. We used to meet at daybreak by the courthouse where the trial was held, because it was close to the prison… On this particular day we met earlier than usual, because when we left the prison on the evening before, we heard that the boat had just arrived back from Delos; so we urged one another to meet at the same place as early as possible. When we arrived, the porter, instead of letting us in as usual, told us to wait and not to come in until he gave us the word. The commissioners are taking off Socrates’ chains, he said, and warning him that he is to die today.

After a short interval he came back and told us to go in. When we went inside we found Socrates just released from his chains, and Xanthippe—you know her!—sitting by him with the little boy on her knee. As soon as Xantippe saw us she broke out into the sort of remark you would expect from a woman. Oh, Socrates, this is the last time you and your friends will be able to talk together!

Socrates looked at Crito. Crito, he said, someone had better take her home.[i]

Plato dramatizes the scene expertly in a few sentences. Socrates’ friends pursue their daily routine, yet the routine is broken in a couple of minor respects in anticipation of the terrible event to come. They find Socrates free of his chains yet condemned to die that evening. Socrates’ wife and child are with him, yet Socrates asks them to be taken away. Does Xanthippe’s exclamation reflect sadness for Socrates that he has only one more day for his favorite activity, talking, or a bitter taunt because Socrates has spent so much of his foreshortened life away from her? Plato would not have written such a compelling vignette if he meant us to take the subsequent dialogue at face value. Here we catch Socrates in full stride talking about life and death, a poignant topic for this day:

Do not these examples [pairs such as smaller/bigger, weaker/stronger] present another feature, that between each pair of opposites there are two processes of generation, one from the first to the second, and another from the second to the first? Between a larger and a smaller object are there not the processes of increase and decrease, and do we not describe them in this way as increasing and decreasing?

Yes, said Cebes.

Is it not the same with separating and combining, cooling and heating, and all the rest of them? Even if we sometimes do not use the actual terms, must it not in fact hold good universally that they come one from the other, and that there is a process of generation from each to the other?

Certainly, said Cebes.

Well then, said Socrates, is there an opposite to living, as sleeping is opposite to waking?

Certainly.

What?

Being dead.

So if they are opposite, they come from one another, and have their two processes of generation between the two of them?

Of course.[ii]

Naturally, Socrates goes on to argue that life and death are just two aspects of a single, unending cycle of regeneration. If Plato had omitted the opening story, we might be tempted to treat Cebes’ part as vestigial—he serves merely to underline that Socrates is right and to add a little space in what would otherwise be a long monologue. Since we do have the opening frames, we can read more into this exchange. On reflection, we spot the flaw in Socrates’ reasoning. Bigger and smaller are comparative adjectives with no substance; living and dying are physical states or processes. We can speak of a “process” by which something smaller becomes bigger only as a metaphor or abstraction, and we can’t conclude that any analogous process governs life and death, which are fundamentally different kinds of things.

Why doesn’t Cebes catch the obvious mistake or raise objections? Perhaps grief over the impending death of his friend Socrates renders him dumb, or perhaps he humors Socrates in his last conversation. A short while later, Cebes observes that “when people are asked questions, if the question is put in the right way they can give a perfectly correct answer….”[iii] We then wonder whether Socrates has been asking questions the right way. Does Plato want us to admire Socrates for plunging into philosophy rather than his family in his last hours, or should we disdain Socrates for ignoring the warmth of human relationships so that he can gas on about gimcrack ideas? We couldn’t ask these kinds of questions unless Plato had set up the drama so skillfully.

We can never extract from Plato a flat statement summarizing his view of any particular philosophical issue because the dialogues read like plays rather than essays. We have to consider the situation in which every statement occurs, the character of the person who utters it, whether it is meant to be taken ironically, whether it is contradicted or modified by later discussion, and so on. Every idea is spoken by a character rather than by Plato himself. In this way, Plato forces us to read his very words. We can’t isolate his ideas from his text and disregard the latter. We have to contend with Plato’s art. In the ancient world, writing and reading were always a form of art, not an instrument of the straightforward, scientific mind.

[i] Plato, “Phaedo” 59d-60a, tr. Hugh Tredennick, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 42- 3.

[ii] Ibid., pp.53-4. “Phaedo” 71a-c.

[iii] Ibid., p. 55, “Phaedo” 73a.

The Text Is the Reader’s Fate

Last time I described the use of the first person in a monument to Phrasikleia. The first-person narration adds yet a further dimension to the life force of the statue. The ancient Greek visitor would have read the inscription aloud because silent reading had not been invented yet. (Silent reading became widespread only in the early Christian centuries as a means of private devotion.) Throughout classical antiquity, people voiced the text in order to read it, and they often did so in the company of others. We can imagine a visitor standing in front of Phrasikleia’s monument as though meeting her for the first time. He sounds out the syllables to discover what they mean. The speech would seem spontaneous, of the moment.

The reader would thus voice the role of the statue, re-enacting its words as though he were an actor in a kind of miniature play who steps forward and delivers his line. In this way, the first-person inscription offers a mechanism for reviving Phrasikleia temporarily in the reader. The reader lends her a mouth, a tongue, a throat, lungs. Indeed, a whole body belongs once again to Phrasikleia. The reader becomes Phrasikleia. “I” is not a character who happens to narrate the story. We ourselves become the character and inhabit the story. It becomes our self at least for the moment.

The self of the statue and inscription does not substitute for Phrasikleia’s identity. It’s not a matter of resemblance even if we may assume that the statue looks like the human Phrasikleia did. Most visitors would never have seen the living Phrasikleia, so the soul or force of the monument that they feel consists of something else beside the echo of the living girl it might have evoked for her family and friends.

Indeed, they too never really knew Phrasikleia either, except as a self, that is, through the image or images she projected of herself. As in a dream, all selves exist on the plane of image, regardless of whether they are “real” (the girl) or “fake” (the statue). The viewer or reader experiences them the same way, and only subsequently do we attribute the self to life or art and assign different values to it.

The self comes from an act of linguistic creation. The Greeks and Romans imagined fate as an utterance. The gods observe humans and their actions dispassionately. At the critical moment, when the future of an individual hangs in the balance, the gods announce what will happen to him. The decree marks his character eternally. Hector will forever be known as the Trojan hero who was slain by Achilles and dragged around the walls of Troy behind a chariot. The gods made Hector’s fate manifest by pronouncing it. The act of speaking this fate equals the fate itself.

The word “fate” originally meant simply “that which has been said.” What had seemed unclear and indeterminate to humans one moment becomes clear and fixed the next, after the gods speak. We readers fashion our own fates through a similar act of pronunciation. An undifferentiated stream of words flows swiftly before our eyes and through our minds. At some point, like Creeley’s student, we cease to be passive observers and become the protagonist of our own dreams. We pick out a passage that strikes us. We start to hear rhythms in the text. We create something new out of them. That is who we are. That is our fate.

Writer, Text, Reader

Let’s start by reconsidering the main elements at play when we read. Typically, we imagine the page as a kind of rear-projection screen. The author sits out of sight behind the screen and projects words onto it. We readers sit in front of the screen. We can’t see what the writer is doing. We merely consume the words as they appear before our eyes.

The writer takes an active role. He puts a great deal of thought and effort into creating the text. We admire this creativity. We allow him all freedom to develop it. The text comes from somewhere deep in the writer’s soul. Its source is ultimately unknowable. The writer’s uncommon skill and the inaccessibility of its source enhance the value of the text in our eyes.

By contrast, the reader is passive. We are supposed to take the text as a given. We do not question its legitimacy. Thus, we restrict ourselves. Our task is to determine what the writer means. Or if we grant that the meaning extends beyond the author’s intention, we look for what the text means. We employ theories and methods to ensure we come up with an interpretation that remains true to the text, without contamination by our personal concerns. We do not allow the reader an artistic process which demands creative freedom and which unfolds deep in the soul.

However, if we do view the reader as a creative artist on par with the writer, the reader starts to play an active role. The text serves as a starting point for the reader’s imagination to go where it wants to go. The text becomes a catalyst for the reader’s own meaning. Readers would then need to pay as much attention to their soul and creativity as the writer does. The value that readers create justifies the liberties they take with the text. That value will come in the form of any change the reader makes to his own life or the world around him.