E-Book Content
TRENT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/ramusmethoddecayOOOOongw Quiiacuit mifcris mutilus laccr obrutus vndis Ramus, ab obfccena iam reuirefcic huraoY Nam facie exprefsi rapiamur imagine vulcus Artificis doclalineadu&a maim. A: meiioic fui fa: eric vir parre fuperftes* Ingcmj vigcanc cum monimenra fui. Nic. Berg. Pic. Er. Pof. PETER RAMUS THE YEAR OF HIS DEATH RAMUS Method, and the Decay of Dialogue FROM THE ART OF DISCOURSE TO THE ART OF REASON By Walter J. Ong, S.J. Young man, listen to me: You will never be a great man if you think that Ramus was a great man. — Justus Lipsius, Misc. Letters, 89 Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1958 © Copyright, 1958, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 58-10403 Printed in the United States of America FOR BERNARD AND MARY MULLER-THYM FOREWORD JLhis book is an attempt to study Ramism in its historical context. Any historical study is selective, and the selection of items one makes is in¬ evitably determined not only by what one is studying but also by one’s own position in history, which provides each of us with certain more or less fixed and familiar perspectives. Viewed in perspectives familiar to us today, Ramism is in many ways an inexplicable phenomenon, and thus an invaluable one, for to interpret it we are forced to establish new alinements in the history of thought and sensibility and to revise some of our ideas from the inside. Ramus was not a great intellectual but a savant with wide-ranging interests whose most distinctive attitudes were superficially revolutionary but at root highly derivative. His way of attacking the genuine weaknesses of the scho¬ lastic heritage while preserving unwittingly the basic presuppositions respon¬ sible for these weaknesses (and for much strength) made his views congenial to the vast numbers of impatient but not too profound thinkers who became his followers, and it gives both him and them tremendous historical value to¬ day. Like a nerve ganglion, Ramism connects not only with readily discernible end-organs — explicit doctrines or theories of one sort or another — but also with more hidden, and at least equally important areas in Western culture, alerting us to unsuspected connections between pedagogical developments and the rise of modern physics, between rhetoric and scientific method, or between dialectic and the invention of letterpress printing. Besides demanding some realinements in our thinking, the study of Ramism presents certain practical difficulties. The treatment of the history of ideas and sensibility in the Western world before 1750, particularly when one is dealing in terms of formal education, is becoming increasingly difficult today, when many students and even scholars passionately interested in this history have no real command of Latin. The present work has been written in frank acknowledgement of the realities of this situation. All Latin citations have been put into English (the more important ones being given also in the original in footnotes). Latin book titles in the text are ordinarily translated into English so as to preserve the reality and urgency which the concepts in play had for their authors and readers. The Latin original of such titles can always be found in the footnotes and, in fuller form, through the Bibliography, where copies of now rare books — and, in the present work, these are many — are also located. For a guide through the labyrinth of Ramus’ own works and those of