The Future of Thinking: Rhetoric and Liberal Arts Teaching

The Future of Thinking

Learning to think is a complex process made up of reading, writing, listening, speaking and remembering textual materials. The humanities subjects are based on texts and their interpretation, analysis and evaluation. The aim of this topical book is to encourage practical educational reform by shifting the emphasis from the reception to the production of texts. The authors show how to adapt rhetorical skills to give students a versatile range of strategies for making sense of texts. By learning to work with language, students learn to think, a process which requires the active participation of the students themselves. The authors argue that this approach encourages the development of practical and transferable critical skills in a wide range of humanities students: short written and spoken exercises are given as much weight as the formal essay, and the emphasis is always on the learning activities of the students themselves, rather than on the passive reception of information. These methods have been employed successfully in trial runs, and the book includes the first exercise used, plus student feedback on this method of learning. Jeff Mason is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Middlesex Polytechnic and the author of Philosophical Rhetoric. Peter Washington is Senior Lecturer in English at Middlesex Polytechnic and the author of Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English.

The Future of Thinking Rhetoric and Liberal Arts Teaching

Jeff Mason and Peter Washington

London and New York

First published in 1992 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1992 Jeff Mason and Peter Washington All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Mason, Jeff Future of Thinking: Rhetoric and Liberal Arts Teaching I. Title II. Washington, Peter 808 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Mason, Jeff The future of thinking: rhetoric and liberal arts teaching/Jeff Mason and Peter Washington. p. cm. Includes index 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. Education, Humanistic. 3. Critical thinking. I. Washington, Peter. II. Title. PE1404.M36 1992 808 .042–dc20 92–7668 ISBN 0-203-97540-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-07318-9 (Print Edition)—ISBN 0-415-07319-7 (paperback)

Contents

1

Introduction

2

Aspects of thought

11

3

Rhetoric and composition

26

4

Philosophical and literary exercises

43

5

Samples and preliminary results

65

6

The future of thinking

87

1

Bibliography

100

Index

101

Chapter 1 Introduction

Each age selectively forgets the past in its drive towards self-definition. This fact is clearly displayed by current attempts to rethink the purpose and value of teaching the liberal arts to future generations of students. The familiar disciplines of history, philosophy and literature survive, but their raison d’être is largely forgotten. Subjects which evolved from traditions of humane study going back to the ancients are taught without reference to the rational curriculum they devised. Little remains of that training in rhetoric which informed western pedagogy until the end of the last century. Now cut off from that training, the standard humanities disciplines seem increasingly out of date and irrelevant to political and economic pressures very different from those which brought them into being. They are beginning to seem remote and educationally incoherent. Distance is increased again by the recent blossoming of theory in all the liberal arts, which questions the assumptions of standard teaching methods and curricula. This puts traditional teachers of the old subjects in a different position. Many fondly cultivate and transmit traditions to which they owe everything, but often are unable to recognize what has brought them to the present situation. This ignorance makes it difficult for them to see the way through to a worthwhile future for their disciplines. Struggling on in an increasingly painful present, unable to look back and fearful to look forward, many teachers, not surprisingly, cling to the attitudes and methods that moulded their own outlook, even though they are pessimistic about the future. The liberal arts are attacked from within the university by theorizing radicals and from without by those who cannot see the practical use, public service or personal pleasure of the ancient disciplines and their modern descendants. Traditional liberal arts teachers either retreat ever further into an ivory tower under the banner of ‘Standards’ and ‘Tradition’, or they lapse into weary cynicism. Everyone is familiar with the figure of the beleaguered humanities teacher moving to a position of offended virtue or ironic resignation. In recent years these painful alternatives have come to look inevitable as teachers face the dismal prospect of becoming part of an antiquarian minority or a branch of service teaching for other, apparently more important, studies including science, technology, business and job training.

2 THE FUTURE OF THINKING

To some extent, liberal arts teachers have only themselves and their pretensions to blame for this situation. Blinded by their own supposed intellectual and moral superiority, they ignored the rising prestige of the natural sciences throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even when classical literatures went into eclipse at the beginning of the present century, taking the traditions of rhetorical training with them, vernacular languages took up the claim to supremacy, most famously in the work of F.R.Leavis, who for a short time almost succeeded in asserting the claim of English literature to dominate the curriculum of the liberal arts. Literary theorists have recently renewed such claims to moral and political insight and authority, but without much impact outside the more rarefied research universities. For the most part, teachers of the liberal arts have resigned themselves to the bleak alternatives outlined above: resentful marginality or service teaching. The writers of this book, however, contend that this dilemma is a false one. We are not compelled to cling to an idealized past or to reject it in favour of an inferior role in the pedagogical hierarchy. There is instead a third option of creatively reviving past practices, and in particular the rhetorical tradition which gave that past its meaning. In this book we propose to diagnose the unease visibly infesting liberal arts faculties on both sides of the Atlantic and to suggest a way to put them back on to a secure footing with a valuable job to do for the foreseeable future. By the liberal arts we mean primarily philosophy, history and literature. All three have suffered in recent years from over-specialization and excessive professional inbreeding, becoming ‘academic’ in the bad sense. At the same time there is public disquiet about their ultimate value. Ironically, the inbreeding is a result of trying to turn what looked like amateurish enterprises into serious disciplines, but it has had the effect of raising more and more questions in the world outside higher education about the relevance and usefulness of liberal arts courses at the higher levels. The special knowledge of teachers is perceived to be more and more divorced from students’ interests or abilities. Intellectuals are seen to wrangle about logocentrism, the canon and other abstruse topics, while uncomprehending or hostile taxpayers increasingly wonder whether they are getting value for money. They have a point, and it is time for liberal arts teachers to respond to it. We argue that a justification in terms of intrinsic value or social utility is not sufficient to secure the future of the study of the humanities. Both of these justifications have merit, but neither alone is sufficient. In this book we propose to revive the best spirit, if not the letter, of the ancient rhetorical education. We eschew the old reliance on mechanical learning and rote memorization enforced by punishment, which eventually helped to discredit traditional pedagogy. However, we retain, augment and adapt many rhetorical precepts and methods. In this way it is possible to revitalize liberal arts teaching and to restore to it a value beyond the technical arena of scholarly discourses on

INTRODUCTION 3

the one hand, and the demands for advanced literacy built into a mass education on the other. We explain how to go about this task in the following chapters, but first something needs to be said about the relationship between humanistic pedagogy and the rhetorical tradition. The story of this relationship is effectively the story of western education. Our version of the story begins in Athens in the fifth century BC, at a time when educational controversies were curiously similar to our own. Our narrative begins with two opposing camps: the traditionalists or pietists and the sophists or technicians. The first taught reverence for tradition and the gods. The second emphasized the transmission of effective communication skills. There were, of course, many variations and combinations of these positions, as there are today, but it is striking how clearly one can trace their distinctive evolution through the centuries, right down to our own time, when the war between the traditionalists and the sophists is still waged as fiercely as ever, this time between traditional humanists and theoreticians versus the advocates of skills training. The reputation of rhetoric has varied during its long history, according to the dominance of one or other of these parties. Each of them has a different theory of rhetoric and a self-image partly shaped by attitudes toward and conceptions of it. Traditionalists, emphasizing ‘content’, tend to minimize the importance of rhetoric, relegating it to the domain of grammar, while technicians, indifferent to content, tend to exalt its powers. Both of these approaches were rightly criticized by Socrates, and these criticisms still have force. Socrates stands for free enquiry and expression, a position we advocate in this book. A vital point is that both traditionalists and sophists regard rhetoric as a mere adjunct, decoration or support, something which is added on to the substance of what we write and say to make it more attractive or persuasive. This has the effect of devaluing the very means we use to think and express ourselves. In both cases we are left with a paradox. If content is of no importance, then nothing is worth saying. If content is allimportant, then expression is trivialized. In practice these extremes are rare, but the attitudes of cynicism and literalism they engender are not. A significant force in western education, however, is one which conceives and wills an alliance between humanism and rhetoric, between tradition and technique. This middle way is well formulated by Socrates. In reaction to traditionalism and sophistry, Socrates argues that a proper education takes as its topic human being itself. Yet this topic can be investigated properly only if it is accompanied by a rhetorical training which promotes the aims of the study and the investigation of its great subject. This was the founding impulse of the best educational conventions of the next two and a half millennia. It was the basis of the liberal arts as we understand them, and it explains why their future is so intimately bound up with the future of rhetoric in education. This education aims to produce capable speakers and

4 THE FUTURE OF THINKING

writers who can find the right words to address the right audience persuasively and well at the right time and in the right place. The ancient motive of this education was to produce citizen orators, capable of acting effectively in public life. Roman education, for example, was largely directed to public life, to the production of statesmen and administrators who could manage the expanding empire and create a civilized order within it. In a world governed equally by force and by words, the pedagogic emphasis was placed on linguistic skills useful in the public domain. Some teachers, like the sophists, taught language skills on the basis of utility or expediency alone. But there were others, among them Cicero and Quintilian, who insisted on the moral worth of rhetorical training. They cultivated a myth of human nature and development which remained (and perhaps remains) the fundamental assumption of all liberal education, namely, that an education in the liberal arts plays a crucial role in forming the wellrounded characters who will be able to participate effectively in political life. The epistemological and pedagogical assumptions behind this myth are that training and practice can improve and even perfect nature. This is the fundamental principle of rhetorical pedagogy. Left alone, potential can be wasted. Training is necessary to shape and sharpen the greatest natural ability. In the ancient educational dispensation, students learnt to express and become themselves by imitating others and taking up alien forms of expression. They attempted to do what others had done before them, not to attain a unique style so much as typicality, conformity to a model of the ideal. However, it is acknowledged in the best rhetorical handbooks that no amount of slavish imitation can make up for natural ability, and that individuality will emerge from rigorous practice in the most able students. Good teaching takes these students beyond the rules they assimilate through memory and training, and brings them to the threshold of competence and their own distinctive styles. The rest is left up to the individual. At the same time, pupils learn to become effective citizens. Good citizenship and rhetorical competence are intimately connected, for nature requires that it be improved or perfected not only in the technical, but also in the moral sphere. Furthermore, the two go together. Without the acquisition of fairly sophisticated linguistic skills we cannot become either full citizens or fully developed moral human beings. Rousseauesque and Romantic notions about natural goodness, individuality and self-expression have bedevilled pedagogy in the present century. They were absent among the ancients, who valued the social and communal virtues above all. The moral and political value of rhetorical education was to promote social good. The greatest of the rhetorical teachers in antiquity rejected the cultivation of mere technique. They rejected the strategy of winning arguments at whatever cost to the truth. They did not view language as a neutral instrument which can be turned legitimately to any end by the skilful orator. On the contrary, they insisted on the crucial importance of rhetorical training precisely because

INTRODUCTION 5

language must be treated with the greatest circumspection and respect as the means by which we articulate our ideas of truth, justice and goodness. This, too, is a fundamental principle of humanist education. The old paidaeia, or system of education, was based upon learning classical languages and texts through memorization, imitation and exercise in the use of language. It lasted until the advent of science, the ‘scientific method’, and the powerful influence of developing technologies. The consequences of this upheaval put the balanced, coherent and integrated classical curriculum under the enormous strains which have nearly effaced it, and by which it is still affected. The rise of science in the seventeenth century saw a split in the rhetoric of education itself into literary and scientific camps. The literary camp extolled tradition and the transmission of culture. The scientific camp viewed the study of languages, rooted in a hidebound and traditional past, as something to be replaced with the enlightenment of scientific study. This new force in education had its own rhetoric, whose principal figure involved a complex tangle of hierarchically organized binary oppositions expounding the superiority of free enquiry over authority, of reason and experiment over feeling and tradition, of progress over reaction, and so on. These oppositions have become so deeply embedded in the debate about education that it is extremely difficult to dislodge them. Their broad effect is to polarize the debate in terms of arts versus sciences, the past versus the present, with the effect of falsely identifying humanist education with the party of piety and tradition, thereby marginalizing the liberal arts in general, as they are squeezed between the contemporary demand for ‘relevance’ and social accountability. Three recent developments have begun to modify this sharp polarity: the reappearance of ‘skills’ teaching, the decline in the prestige of science, and the rapidly blurring disciplinary boundaries both within and between the arts and sciences. Furthermore, with the revival of interest in tropes and in the rhetorical status of language, we have become more alert to the ways in which the binary oppositions outlined above affect our thinking. Nevertheless, the educational crisis in which we find ourselves is still effectively the product of a confrontation between the needs of a new scientific, technological, political and economic order, and the old humanist system of education, many of whose principles remain in place, however shaky and misunderstood. In recent years this argument has taken on familiar forms. The debate turns on rival conceptions of ‘human nature’ and the place of the education system within the political and economic direction of society. The traditionalists wish to continue teaching the old things in the old ways, governed by loyalty to traditional disciplines and values. In their view, manners change but human nature does not. At its best, education should be concerned with this ‘nature’. Radicals, on the other hand, emphasize the historical evolution of human nature operating in a landscape of changing social and material forces. They object to fixed notions of the self and human nature, viewing them as the fictions of ruling

6 THE FUTURE OF THINKING

ideologies. The purpose of higher education is not to reinforce these fictions but to subvert them. Fierce though these arguments often are within the institutions of higher education, they do not substantially affect the argument of this book. Seen from outside, the parties look remarkably similar. Both the antagonists in this debate unite against the whole-hearted advocate of vocational education and skills training. Both want no such irresponsible distractions from the main function of education, which is to prepare students for their moral and political life in society, whether as solid citizens or as radical reformers. The problem as we see it is that the parties to these arguments insist upon creating false dilemmas: either skills or knowledge, tradition or innovation. These are precisely the dilemmas the old rhetorical paidaeia was designed to avoid, in its emphasis on the integral relationship between a subject and its articulation, or a discourse and its rhetoric. This is a very good reason to return to the ancient methods, not in a spirit of reaction or antiquarianism, but as part of the search for a new pedagogy that will see the great disciplines of western thought into the next century and beyond. The liberal arts have lost their way. To find it we must think again about the learning process and what we expect from students. Our method is based on the ancient principle that we learn by doing, by imitating, and by making mistakes. Cognitive skills of interpretation, analysis and evaluation are acquired through trial and error. The same may be said for expressive skills as well, which involve far more than simply finding the right words. The pedagogy advanced in this book begins with the proposition that training and practice are propaedeutic in the full sense: they enable us to learn how to learn. Along the way many other things are learnt, many texts remembered, but the process itself is crucial. This is not an abrogation of responsibility on our part. We recognize the importance of the syllabus, but understand that there are inevitable differences and disputes about what it is best to read. However, these differences and disputes should not be allowed to inhibit the intellectual growth of our students. Unless we fully subscribe to the view that education is indoctrination, in which case the liberal arts are redundant, we must assume that we are in the business of developing in our students the ability to reject rationally what we tell them. Our whole aim as teachers is to render ourselves obsolete as each generation of students comes to intellectual maturity. We emphasize this point because there seems to be a curious assumption that teachers are already obsolete, and that students are intellectually, if not emotionally, autonomous, when just the reverse is probably true. On this assumption the teacher’s task is merely to supply information and direct discussion. This approach has something to recommend it when we know for a fact that our students have attained cognitive and expressive competence, but how often is this the case, even at the postgraduate level? The purpose of a liberal education is neither to transmit dogmas and undigested information nor to focus exclusively on individual self-development,

INTRODUCTION 7

but to enable students from any background to grasp the complexities of contemporary life and to become more articulate about them, whether in public or private. It is not a substitute for religion, political commitment, psychoanalysis, or any other route to personal or social fulfilment. Nevertheless, by developing expressive and cognitive skills through the teaching of specific disciplines, an education in the humanities may provide a means to understand these things better. What the skills are, how they are transmitted, and what sort of thinkers are produced by them, will emerge in the course of the book. The ancient pedagogy had its longest run training members of a small ruling class to share in oligarchic or imperial power. The mass of the people had no share in this and spent their time as labourers in mainly agrarian societies. This education system eventually failed to serve the needs of large democracies and therefore failed to survive. The demands of individual development, mass education and vocational training have imposed severe strains on the liberal arts, which until recently were secure in the service of elite education. The question before us is whether there is anything of value in the old curriculum for contemporary society or whether something entirely new is now needed. We take the first view. The ancient teaching methods can still provide for the intellectual, moral and political development of individuals capable of making democracy work. Our system of education is designed with this in mind. The fate of large democracies is intimately involved with their systems of education. The rhetorical education in this book is democratic and designed to meet the needs of a democratic society. The choice of educational goals is always a political one, and the authors’ position must be clear on this point. The citizens of a democracy must be able to sustain open and informed debate on many difficult and possibly intractable questions and topics. They need to be able to think for themselves, to reach their own conclusions and to act on them. It is therefore not the teacher’s role, any more than the politician’s, to stand guard over the minds of individuals. The educational task is to teach students how to think seriously about serious issues. If this runs the risk of promoting irresponsible freedom in some individuals, then that is a danger of living in a liberal democracy, in which citizens are free to broadcast their opinions, to choose, and to make their own mistakes. Especially in democracies with large and diverse constituencies, education demands not only basic literacy but also a widely diffused study of the humanities. All citizens need to be able to weigh and discuss ever more complex arguments, and as many as possible should attain some degree of intellectual sophistication. There are no simple answers to the pressing questions that face all of us. The job of teachers is to present alternatives, different ways of interpreting texts, different conceptions of the world. There is nothing more dangerous to a democracy than a restriction on what can be thought and expressed within in. Choice means something only if there are real alternatives to choose from. A liberal education is one which teaches that there is always more than one way to

8 THE FUTURE OF THINKING

see things and that it is always up to the individual to judge just where the truth lies on any given issue. A more pragmatic defence of liberal arts training turns on the much abused phrase, ‘transferable cognitive and expressive skills’. Study of the humanities fosters skills which find application in the world of making a living and working with others. These skills are mainly textual or linguistic. They cover such abilities as that of understanding the meaning of sentences, interpreting a passage, dissecting an argument and judging its validity, as well as those involved in putting one’s case to the public. We take it to be self-evident that the ability to compose a written passage with some assurance and to speak fluently to others is of value in nearly every walk of life. Throughout this book we explore some of these skills and how they are brought into being through practice. However, a temptation must be avoided. The temptation is to sever the link between form and content, and to assign to each a separate branch of study. The misleading appeal of this strategy is that it sets up the acquisition of skills as a goal and then proceeds to define and teach them, without care in the selection of content. The rationale for teaching language skills on their own seems clear enough from a pragmatic, marketorientated, perspective. Many institutions encourage critical thinking and skills courses to secure a future for their specialist liberal arts teachers. These courses provide a space where teachers can work without continually having to justify their right to exist. Composition or critical thinking teachers have a clear job to do, the results of which are appreciated by a wide public. Everyone wants graduates who write coherent English, who understand a memo, and are able to speak to a meeting and hold their own in argument. Teach these skills to students and everyone is likely to acknowledge that a good and worthwhile job is being done. To introduce the question of content at this point may seem to confuse things. The skills approach is able to sell itself without becoming embroiled in controversies over content. We reject this view as a matter of educational principle. Without something worthwhile to learn, the acquisition of skills is a barren occupation. Moreover, since there must be some content even in a skills course, it seems a waste to develop cognitive and compositional skills while working with mediocre texts and second-rate ideas. We do not say that it is impossible to learn the relevant skills in this one-sided manner, only that there are better ways to do it. If we turn this debate around and make content the centre of attention, a very different picture emerges. What matters here is coming to grips with history, literature and philosophy. The skills now appear necessary only in so far as they advance the project of learning, not as ends in themselves. This is correct, but we maintain that the skills must be taken seriously and consciously developed. The fact that these same skills are transferable to other contexts is an external good, welcome in itself, but not the primary focus of the teaching process.

INTRODUCTION 9

A properly thought out curriculum provides material worthy to develop those cognitive and expressive skills everyone agrees have a positive value. They should be acquired by working with significant texts. Nevertheless, the success of various skills courses shows that it is not necessary to share this outlook. Our pedagogy takes up both positions and upholds the rights of both. Thinking demands something to think about. Having something to think about demands the ability to think. We analyse thinking into textual activities that accord in many ways with the way humanities subjects are currently taught. They have all evolved from the language-based educational disciplines of the past. With the possible and partial exception of history, the arts subjects centre upon texts of one kind or another. Each of the main humanities subjects has discovered its own ways of working with them. There is a case for teaching skills and content separately, but neither is as strong as one which appeals to both principles at once and includes them in a single approach. They are equally important. Sometimes it seems that the skills argument makes all the running, because it claims a clear public utility. But taken by itself, this stance is one-sided and ultimately a cul-de-sac. The contents, course materials and syllabuses provide a focus for study. The practical orientation of our teaching does not remove the obligation to cultivate standards of objectivity in our students as an operative ideal or regulative principle. Students have something to learn from their studies that is not always easy to grasp and requires persistent effort and some serious commitment to make headway. In the first instance, it is an effort to understand textual materials whose immediate relevance is of ten far from clear. By and large, teachers will continue to set the reading list in the belief that the books considered are of sufficient standard to support a term’s work. Students must take it on a fair amount of trust that the texts will repay the effort of study. Syllabus is not all-important. We want to emphasize the move from syllabus to method, from the form of learning to its practice. The result is that whatever material is considered worthwhile to study, individual students will learn how to handle it and to form cogent opinions about it. In general, this change of emphasis gives priority to providing access to texts, the sense of where to look for relevant information or interpretations when they are needed. This represents a real move away from authority, not in the sense that we pretend to give students a freedom they do not possess while they are learning, but that we are teaching them to be intellectually free at the end of the process. This is a matter of the development of practical, cognitive and expressive skills, and rests neither upon a settlement of all outstanding problems with the canon nor upon the amount of material which is covered in any particular course. Our strategy avoids the standard criticism of rhetoric that in the end it cares more for appearance than reality, more for victory than truth. The reason that the old rhetoric is susceptible to this charge is partly due to its own complicity. As philosophy, logic and science separated themselves from the province of rhetoric, the latter was left with but a fraction of its former scope. By the seventeenth

10 THE FUTURE OF THINKING

century there remained little more than elocutio, or the study of style. Rhetoric came to be seen as a concern for mere ornamentation and empty sophisticated language. This is because rhetoric, as it were, agreed not to concern itself with the question of content and so lost itself in stylistics, poetics and semiology. However, it is not necessary for rhetoric to co-operate in its own demise. It does not have to pretend indifference to content, and indeed many of the ancient rhetoricians made this very point. Rhetorical training was held to acquaint individuals with the best that has been said and thought on which to model their own thinking. We do not have to share the ancient ideals to recognize the connection between a textual, linguistic education and the development of an individua1’s power to think. Our texts and contexts are very different now, but the methods of rhetorical education still apply. The solution to the problems of liberal arts teaching is to see compositional and critical thinking skills as part of its educational project and not as something separate. This is what has happened with the critical thinking and remedial writing movements. At one time they provided a useful defence against the erosion of humanities programmes. A certain number of teaching hours are secured by skills courses that were lost to shrinking enrolments in specialist classes or to demands for increased teaching loads. Now, however, we must put the pieces back together again. The present humanist curriculum is a decayed and fragmented relic of the old unified rhetorical paidaeia. Our aim is to restore that paidaeia and its unity in a form suited to our present circumstances. It is not based on immutable canonic texts, hierarchical or paternalistic values, but rather on the principles of active study. It is therefore a flexible, but principled, approach to the teaching of the liberal arts. It works to instil in our students habits of intellectual autonomy. In the condusion we suggest what the future of thinking might be like under the influence of a reconceived rhetorical pedagogy. The question now before us, however, is the nature of thinking, and the best ways to develop it.

Chapter 2 Aspects of thought

This chapter theorizes the need for an advance in rhetorical training in the humanities. It traces the development of thinking as a specialized activity through the exercise of different aspects of thought. By a ‘specialized activity’ we mean one that is acquired through training and discipline, something one learns to do. Thinking as defined here amounts to the mastery of linguistic, social and logical codes; in sum, the thesis is that to think is to have the active ability to read, write, listen, speak and remember. This competence, or proficiency with signs and their employment, is the chief benefit of an education in the humanities and certainly in literature, history and philosophy. Let us explore the hypothesis that one learns to think by working through the aspects of thought. Reading and writing are aspects of a complex set of activities which constitute a significant part of the ability to think, and these include equally speaking and listening. All four depend upon memory to supply much of the matter for discussion. Learning to think involves internalizing and appropriating all available means of expression to form the patterns of individuated thought. Thought and its style are inseparable. Cognitive and expressive skills are bound together. The unfortunate tendency is to split them apart for economic reasons. If we separate cognitive and expressive abilities, then it appears we can achieve the economy of a division of labour. Some will teach thinking, others expressive skills. A similar split between philosophy and rhetoric occurred in the history of the humanities. Philosophy became the royal road to knowledge, while rhetoric offered a rather more pedestrian route to success in public life. That, at least, is the story as philosophers tell it. With the notable exception of Giambattista Vico, few of them make much of rhetoric except as a field to be excluded from the search for philosophical truth. It is not our purpose to analyse further the vexed relations between philosophy and rhetoric. The purpose is to understand that our powers of conception and cognition are closely related to our ability to give forms to our thoughts— primarily in words— for language is the prime field of rhetoric. However, we must avoid the temptation to think that rhetoric is a specialized subject which ought to be taught on its own; that path is already well worn and is clearly faulty. To possess rhetorical skill but nothing to say is one of the things that gave

12 ASPECTS OF THOUGHT

rhetoric a bad name in the first place. To teach the techniques of persuasion and the production of linguistic effects with any material that comes to hand impoverishes those techniques through the lack of content. Well-meaning as they are, the recent trends toward ‘study skills’, ‘learning to learn’ and ‘critical thinking’ are misguided. These trends respond to a lack of linguistic training and practice in college students, who need informal logic, practice in writing, close supervision and contact. However, all this costs too much. ‘Critical thinking’ classes and the rest are designed to make the necessary economy. What are the alternatives to these trends? The authors’ basic thesis is that humanities classrooms should become rhetorical workshops. Given limited resources, there are constraints on what anyone can achieve, but we are convinced that whatever the limits, something positive is possible along these lines. In other words, a philosophy class, a literature class, a history class and so on, will freely descend to the level of grammar, ascending through logic and rhetoric, all the way to the more specialized arguments and ideas of philosophy, literary theory and historiography. The only breaks in the continuum which extends from the minutiae of linguistics to the greatest of ideas are arbitrary. One proviso to bear in mind at the outset is that we are not talking about students who need total remedial language training. We assume the possession of a basic level of linguistic competence on the part of the great majority of students. We are working on the next step, the one in which students encounter a higher level of reflective sophistication in language. So when we advocate that classrooms become rhetorical workshops, we do not mean to transform them into ‘bonehead’ English courses. On the other hand, it is never forbidden to make clear a point or two which should not have been a problem in the first place. If the discussion comes to centre on grammar and syntax, so be it. Little things, if passed over, cause students trouble later on. Better to take the points as they come, and always have a weather eye out for grammar and various stylistic devices. These latter, while never ends in themselves, are necessary to productive study. READING One of the best features of a rhetorical workshop is that it helps students become creative in their reading. Borrowing a theme from contemporary literary theory, we can say that reading is a productive activity, that by reading a text properly one is rewriting it. Reading in the humanities is not a matter of allowing the words on the page to unscroll themselves and pass away. The mind should not be a blank slate waiting to be imprinted upon by the words of the text; that is a recipe for blankness and an empty mind. The passive approach to reading seems fine as long as the words are passing through the mind. The problem arises after they have gone, after the book has been closed. The stone which causes ripples in the pond settles to the bottom, the

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ripples cease, their passage unmarked in the water. Similarly, the words cease to echo in the mind, leaving not a trace behind. It is embarrassing to witness students who have just ‘read’ something struggle to remember the first thing about it. However, with some preparation, it is possible to read with more retention and comprehension. Two capacities stand out. One is the capacity to remember text. The other is the capacity to ask questions. Memory delivers the material for reflection. Access to texts is provided by the process of questioning. It is helpful to adapt the Kantian view that we should go to nature not as a child to its mother for instruction, but as a judge to a witness, to make nature answer our questions. We test hypotheses and put constraints on our experiments. We look for what nature has to say on particular issues of our choosing. In reading, the same holds true. Students should not go to it simply to wait for a general enlightenment, but with specific questions in mind. They should make the text answer their questions, and not allow it to ramble on. A questioning approach to reading foregrounds the index at the back of the books we read. A question is taken to the index and then chased through the book. Cross-questions arise. After pursuing a number of them, our hunch is that the text will start coming together, much as the roads of a city come together for the person who has driven along them from many different directions. One question leads to another, that to another, and so on, The end is a circle of questions which mutually suggest one another and lead one through the text in different directions. The linguistic construction is a playground of meaning. Texts are endlessly interpretable. But interpretation is an activity, a practice which again can be broken down into many different activities and practices. To ask a question is also to ask for an interpretation of the text questioned. It may even invite certain interpretations, while excluding others. All this comes of asking questions of a text. To give students questions to take to the text is to equip them with a way into it. It is not the only way, but one that deserves conscious implementation. Asking questions of the text awakens an active involvement with it. The reader forearmed with questions will listen to the text for the answers or attempted answers or non-answers it supplies. By listening with attention, he or she will be more likely to remember the answer. Remembering the answer is to remember something which is said in the text, explicitly or implicitly related to the question that is asked. This questioning attitude towards reading aids memory without becoming a rote exercise in memorization. Different sections spring out of a text when confronted with different questions. Attention is mobilized and thus memory is activated, since it is much easier to remember a text one has questioned than one that has been allowed, as it were, to flow through the mind unimpeded and uninterrogated. All this is in aid of becoming active in the face of often recalcitrant material. The students’ plates are heaped with it; then they are asked to devour it all at

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once. They need to develop a stomach for the job. Their teachers need to break everything down into more manageable bits and build up an appetite for the material at the same time. It is a question of motivation. By becoming active, students will improve their reading abilities as a matter of course and as a matter of practice. There are at least three ways of reading texts about which it is helpful to remind students. The first is skimming, by which topic sentences stand out, introductions and conclusions, chapter headings and so on. The second is dipping. This is typical of the questioning approach, in which we trace a topic through a text by using the index. The third may be called close reading. This involves a word by word analysis and interpretation of a text which is small enough to grasp in this intense way. We should encourage a mixture of reading habits in our students. The basic materials of the humanities are words and texts. Asking questions is just one way of doing something with them, one way of remembering what is in them. To be able to think, you need something to think about, and that is normally what someone said or wrote. But to have something to think about, one needs to remember what it is someone said or wrote. The education of memory is essential to the success of an education in the humanities. In this endeavour the humanities have an advantage over the physical and experimental sciences in that they have access to the in-itself of their materials in a way that the others do not. This is true of philosophy, of literature and true even of history, which in other respects escapes textualization. The in-itself of a text, as we use the term, is just the words that compose it. Putting aside the problems of corrupt texts, the being of text is just the words which compose it. This is not to say that we escape the hermeneutic circle nor is it to say that words and texts are not subject to iterability and recontextualization. We may not understand a text at all, and yet we can possess it in a way we can possess nothing else on this earth. When you remember the words as they are on a page, the entirety of the text is yours. Mistakes are possible, but so is checking whether you have got it right. Putting radical scepticism to one side, the check is absolute. ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ Does that line appear in my old copy of Hamlet? Is it exactly the same? If it is, then I have the line right. Nothing is left out. The question is what to do with the lines of the text once they have been learnt. As far as text is concerned, to know it is to remember and thus to possess it. The beyond of the text is not in the text but in its possessor and in its many interpretations and contexts. To understand a text is simply to be able to do some thing with it, enlarge it, contract it, analyse it and generally to say something cogent about it. Time enters here. The education we describe takes both clock and lived or ‘subjective’ time. The latter is the time it takes for meaning or significance to form around the texts we possess. As one comes to have more to say about a text, its relation to other texts and to history, it becomes more suggestive and

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allusive, more densely packed with meanings and interpretations. The texts become pretexts for various forms of discourse, the stories and quotes we tell ourselves and others to comment upon or to criticize. Without the ability to make some comment, to speak about it, a person might know a text intimately the whole of life, and yet retain but a superficial understanding of it. The point of reading and remembering is to acquire material to think about, and to exercise thought about it. Understanding is what emerges from a reading and rereading of texts. In fact, rereading is necessary for understanding. We do not mean the kind of understanding which merely results in an adequate paraphrase, or a knowledge of the meaning of the sentences that compose the text. We mean the understanding which grows out of a reflective reconsideration of texts that can be approached from many directions, interpreted in many ways. Our job is to approach texts from a variety of directions and to uncover the fields of interpretation. This involves a certain decentring of our own perspective, but it is just that versatility which should emerge from reading in the humanities. The importance of rereading highlights again the crucial role played by memory in the humanities. Rereading aids understanding on the condition that the first reading is remembered in the second. Time is again the crucial element. It has passed since the first reading. This difference in the time of reading gives the reader something by which to gauge his or her progress in understanding. Typically, rereading produces a response which says ‘I had not seen that point before, how did I miss it?’ Remembering what one had thought is as important to rereading as looking at the text again. One enters into a dialectical movement or conversation with one’s former readings. The comparisons are instructive. It is crucial that students feel they are making progress, and that includes progress in reading through Given this account, it would seem we must be immortal to do it justice. The task is never-ending. If we are always rereading what we have already read, how will we ever read anything new? Indeed, how should we ever get beyond the first book we ever read? This is a sophistical question, but it nevertheless points up practical obstacles to the attainment of perfection in these matters. There are no perfect readers. There are, however, better and worse ones, and it is our job to become better ourselves and at the same time enable our students to improve. It is a valuable exercise, in this context, to conceive of what can be done in ideal circumstances, if only to sharpen our awareness of the real and less than ideal circumstances in which academic work is carried out. Ideally, then, reading and rereading go together. Students take from their books what they remember and the ways of working with them. This observation brings us to speech and writing as the two main ways in which students become active in relation to their readings.

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SPEECH Speech is a neglected issue of higher education. Of course, there are speech and drama departments in universities and colleges. There are debating societies and poetry-reading groups, public lectures and so on. But except for students majoring in speech and drama, or interested in debate, poetry readings and the like, speech skills are allowed to develop haphazardly. Nothing much is made of them. The reason for this is that students are not, by and large, graded on their facility of speech. They are graded on their essays and exam performance. Developing the ability to speak in public was one of the primary goals of the old rhetorical training. Into the Middle Ages, and down to this very day in some institutions, the ability to make a verbal defence of one’s thesis is a condition of attaining advanced degrees. The oral exam as part of the process leading to a doctorate is still with us. Once again, however, its role has become attenuated through the years. In any event, the oral exam is only part of graduate assessment, and not the largest part. This leaves us with a problem. If we are not going to grade students on how well they speak, then how are we to incorporate the acquisition of speech skills into the curriculum? Leaving this question aside, pretend for the moment that students are willing to do what is best for their education even if they are not graded for it. What, then, can be said for speaking as one of the most important ways of coming to grips with the material provided by reading? Let us conceive of speech as exploration. As such, it is also the realm of error, creative error. Self-correction is at the heart of learning in the humanities. Making errors is necessary to the process of self-correction. One must see where one has gone wrong. The publicity, mutuality and reciprocity of speech makes it a good vehicle of self-correction. The other person is there to remember what you have said, to question, to point out difficulties and to explore remedies. Consider a philosophical conversation as exploration. I say something to you. There is some idea I am unsure about and I try to increase my certainty by asking if you can grasp it or agree with it. We are simply talking together. You say ‘Is this what you meant? X is F.’ ‘No’, I say ‘that is not quite it. It is hard to put. Try this.’ I try again. Is that better? And so it goes, with no natural stopping point beyond the calls of nature or of duty. Little by little, over a period of time, I begin to get clearer about what I am saying by listening to you. I make mistakes. I’m often unclear, confused or totally off base. I need your help. The give and take of engaging another in philosophical discussion helps to clarify thinking. It makes clear how well one has grasped an argument, its logic or its concepts, and how well one has understood another philosopher’s theory. Now flip the coin over. The other side is speaking. Talk is reciprocal give and take; otherwise it ceases to be dialectical and falls back to the dominant rhetorical forms of the past, persuasive or ornamental speech-making. There is nothing wrong with these forms. In a debate, for example, speeches themselves enter into a kind of give and take within a limited formal structure. Even here, however,

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something is lost; namely, self-correction and error-making. Anyone who prepares for a debate tries to anticipate what the other side is going to object and to answer it in advance. There is some room for spontaneity at the end, but the speakers will not be in the mood to make mistakes and explorations. This is why grading speech is a bad idea. It is too inhibiting. The point is that in conversation you are to feel free to let your hair down, rummage around in the arguments and see what comes out. Thoughts are like arrows. They have a dynamic and a direction. They are let loose in speech and where they are going is not always clear. Of course, if we grade students on what they say, such freedom will be lost. In an exam the other person is not just another person, but a judge. This fact infects the whole situation with artificiality and self-consciousness. Good talk is a falling away of self-consciousness. The self is not the centre of one’s thinking; it is the argument, the novel, the historical period or whatever the topic is. We have at least two people who are interested in the same thing and in talking about it. In this way both increase their understanding and their ability to respond to it and to each other. In talking about an idea, a theory, an argument or an interpretation, one actively assimilates and transforms one’s own relation to it and thus begins to put it in perspective. The give and take of conversation contains within it the means to repair communication. It is an arguable point whether we ever finally succeed in communicating our ideas perfectly to others; but in this case, as in the case of reading, there is better and worse. In conversation the speaker has another chance to speak and the listener another chance to listen. As the formulations change, so do the understandings of the interlocutors, both of what they are saying and of what they are hearing. In humanities subjects, good talk depends upon a shared world of references. The question ‘What shall we say?’ does not arise if there is enough common ground. This is what reading and memory provide: something to talk about and ways to talk about it, found initially in what has already been said or written. However, to read without talking about what is read is an incomplete activity. Books, articles and lectures are grist to the mill and refined through discussion. They are a challenge to teachers and students to find something pertinent to say. The present emphasis on writing as the basis for grades has marginalized speech. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that when speech is considered to be important, as in the delivery of conference papers, the old rhetorical form of controversy is the dominant one. This context negates the free-wheeling exploration of ideas that humanities talk at its best should be. In the Middle Ages, for example, an apprentice philosopher would be expected to defend a thesis to the assembled ranks of students and masters. They would throw questions at the candidate, who would then be judged by the whole group on the basis of verbal replies. Facility with language and nimbleness of wit were undoubtedly of value. The ability to put down a pesky heckler would also have been of particular use. These techniques have come down to us. They are used in

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academic debates, but they are never made explicit. Students are meant to catch on. Those who succeed in this make progress, others are discouraged. In philosophy, the standard format of public professional speech consists of reading out loud to an audience the contents of written papers. Often it is a matter of reading out what is never meant to be heard in the first place: a printed text to be pondered in the silence of the study. The result is a piece of writing which is transferred directly to speech. The paper is a form of writing to which it is often difficult to listen. Closely argued papers are to be considered slowly and in detail, pondered, reread. To hear such a paper is an excellent exercise in concentrated listening, but it is not the best way to begin a discussion. The structure of paper-reading at conferences seems to be a hangover from the Middle Ages. It is a variant of the apprentice’s stand-up defence of a thesis. The form of the delivered paper calls for attack, defence and controversy. The speaker tries to defend a thesis against objections from the floor. A line is drawn and there is a choosing of sides, for and against. The giving of academic papers verbally can be seen as a kind of truncated debate in which the preponderance of time is spent in the initial delivery. This mode of attack and defence does not translate very well into conversation. Like self-consciousness, being on the attack or the defence is not a way to enjoy the exploration of arguments to see where they lead. For this reason, except as an exercise, the adversarial mode of discussion should be prevented from taking over as the dominant mode of talk. Instead, we should emphasize that talking is a creative and co-operative activity where the participants are not trying to score points at each other’s expense, but rather to understand and advance both their own thoughts and those of the other. Talking is a mobile form of communication. It is quick, subtle. It adapts to rich contextual changes and is filled with the ephemeral meanings of the moment. Talk is always a vanishing activity of interaction. Precisely because talk is fluid, it leaves no marks behind. This is perhaps one reason why talk is devalued. To one who sees only an instrumental utility in language use, talk that does not issue in action is just so much steam: the bellows blow, air moves. Everyone talks, but actions count. Talking to people is a way of relating to them and entering into a social world which is partly constituted by such talk. Furthermore, talk is not always a matter of information transfer. People speak of what concerns and interests them, and often speak simply to maintain human contact. The phatic dimension of speech, idle chat, shooting the breeze, gossip and hearsay, all serve to keep lines of communication open and in good repair. None of it is to be despised. On the other hand, the sort of talk furthered by the study of the humanities goes beyond idle chat. It is conversation as a form of enquiry. If I tell you five times in half an hour that my Aunt Polly died, leaving her entire fortune to the local home for stray cats, you get the message the first time. Something else must be going on in the repetitions. Probably it is such a strange event that I cannot get it out of my mind. Repetition is a way of taking in that

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information to have it settle down. Repetition takes away its strangeness. The listener, however, learns nothing after the first time the news is told. The same holds with all forms of gossip, including academic gossip. The built-in limitation is that information, once passed, loses its value. A secret everyone knows is no longer worth knowing. The difference between simply passing the time and entering a discussion of philosophy, history or literature is that the latter is a process the outcome of which is neither known nor ever fully intended. Surely we would not bother to investigate some matter if we knew the outcome in advance. Enquiry is openended but topic orientated. It brings to bear on the topic all the reading, writing, listening and remembering that precedes every similar discussion. Such conversation is a movable feast. Each time a topic is raised and discussed it is enhanced by all the thought that has developed since the last time it was explored. Unlike gossip or shooting the breeze, conversation centred on topics from the humanities subjects benefits from previous experience. It may be an old topic, but it is always possible to give it a new treatment, to raise points previously ignored or not perceived, and, in general, to advance our understanding of it. In the case of the topic of my aunt’s odd will, it is not possible to make such advances, since the idea of an advance does not apply. Information stays put, while enquiry moves on. Conversational enquiry is not static, but develops a momentum of its own through continuity. Time enters again as a crucial element in an advancing discussion. The more time we have to talk, the richer our talk may become. We do not have to be in the position of characters in a Beckett play, reduced to repetition, boredom and despair. A humanities conversation or discussion uncovers novel connections of thought and unexpected lines of enquiry and discussion. The problem is not running out of something to say, but running out of the time in which to say it. In the writing-centred or ecricentric universe, scholarly research is a solitary activity. First I go to the library and pick out books to read silently to myself; then I digest that material in silent cogitation or incidental chat. The main task comes with sitting down to write. I am writing at my desk alone. This difficult task is made harder if someone is trying to speak to me. At the time of writing I must concentrate on what I am doing to the exclusion of others. Conversational skills do not develop in isolation but through dialogue. It is not only the argument that is the issue, but coming to understand one another’s point of view to the extent that this is possible. We often seek agreement without attaining it, but our efforts are sometimes rewarded with an insight into how another perspective is possible. This is a valuable gain, but not one that is open to sudden insight alone. To develop a conversation with another human being is to develop a relationship with that other. The conversation and the relationship change together over time, deepening and widening through shared learning.

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Learning, in this context, amounts to the incorporation of the cultural and textual vocabulary of one’s own and adjacent fields of enquiry into a familiar repertoire. No one can hope to assimilate everything in similar depth or detail, but the subject areas of the humanities overlap in many places and each of them implicates the others. There are none but heuristic boundaries around the disciplines. To engage in fruitful discussion involves the possession of the relevant vocabulary and the ability to use it appropriately. We are surrounded by signs of all kinds. We read them unconsciously and consciously, fluently or incompetently. The point of studying the humanities is to become, among other things, a skilled reader of signs, to recognize their uses and abuses. In conversation this means building up a large reservoir of concepts and references, ready to be used if the conversation turns in their direction. There is a kind of readiness at work which often leaves a talker wondering how the argument moves the way that it does. To converse is to explore ideas in the company of another person. It is a form of community, if only a community of two, and then, only for a time. In language we distinguish active and passive vocabularies. In the active vocabulary are all the words which the individual is ready to use if the occasion arises. In the passive vocabulary are all words which are understood but seldom used. Therefore, one’s passive vocabulary tends to be much larger than one’s active speaking vocabulary. Perhaps the same may be said for cultural and textual vocabularies. Our passive vocabulary is greater than our active one. We all have a wide experience of signs; what is needed are the codes which make that experience accessible. This is not a mysterious process. There is nothing occult in the practices which lead to linguistic and conversational facility. The two are connected, but emphasize different aspects of the same continuum. There is a point at which linguistic competence merges imperceptibly into conversational competence. Facility in handling cultural and textual material goes with an increasing general vocabulary and better use of it. By acquiring a grip on the workings of language, we increase the competence with which cultural materials are assembled and expressed. LISTENING Conversation is never completely impersonal or objective. It takes two to have a dialogue. Speaking is the other side of listening. Just as writing is at the centre of academic careers at all levels and talk is ‘mere talk’, speaking is at the centre of conversation and listening tends to be an afterthought. We must rectify this now. It is not a conversation if one person does all the talking and the other simply agrees from time to time. Some of the later Platonic works are like this, dialogues in name only. The interlocutor merely allows Socrates to continue his monologues. The listening voice lacks identity and appears to be nothing but a literary device.

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If this happens in a face-to-face conversation, dialogue ceases. The reason that listening plays second fiddle may be as simple as the fact that people tend to pay more attention to what they are saying than to what someone else is saying. The lecture is not ideal, for precisely this reason. If students do not know how to listen, it is easy for them to drift off and let the sounds of the lecturer’s voice fall into the background, like reading with a vacant mind. The case of listening to a lecture is the same as that outlined for reading and talk. It is a matter of becoming more active in the process of listening. In practice this means taking up once more an interrogative stance, asking questions silently to see if the speaker answers them, does not notice them, ignores them, answers slightly different questions, and so on. It is important that the student bring his or her reading to bear in the lecture, the better to question and consolidate it. The supreme test of listening is memory. Can the student remember what the teacher has said? In a lecture, professors speak and students listen. Communication is mainly in one direction. Nevertheless, if students walk out of a lecture remembering nothing of what was said, the lecture was either very bad or one which had been allowed to vanish. With practice it is possible to improve listening technique to the point that it becomes effortless and, given half a chance, enjoyable. In lectures this involves taking notes. Here listening and writing come together. However, the point of students taking notes is not to have a comprehensive record of everything the professor has said. This would preclude actually listening to the lecture. Key words, phrases, and the occasional sentence are all that need to be written down. Their function is to act as aidesmémoires. A useful exercise for students is to write out a short précis of the lecture, based on the notes, shortly after the class has ended. The cultivation of listening abilities would certainly make lectures more interesting. However, the benefits active listening confers on conversation are even greater. In conversation we both have a chance to speak. Sometimes what I have to say relates to something you have just said. I might ask for clarification, put in an objection, raise a question, try to extend what you have said to see if you agree with it. The list goes on. The point is that when you have something you are trying to say, I try to help you to say it through my interventions. Criticism, too, is to be welcomed, if it is delivered in a friendly way. When I have something to say, you listen to me and return the favour. We are each, if you like, the keeper of the other’s thoughts, since it is through conversation that we have access to the other’s thoughts as well as to our own. Socrates saw himself as a midwife of ideas. He helped people bring them to birth, to see whether they were genuine or mere gusts of wind. In conversation we take turns being pregnant and giving birth and helping someone else do the same. The ability to listen, to concentrate and stay with an idea, is the heart of conversation. By listening one stays with another person to concentrate on the topic.

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The role of the listener in conversation is to be a repository of what the speaker is saying, providing the speaker with access to what he or she has said. Once again memory proves to be the key. The listener can raise a question of consistency, for example, only because of a comparison between what the speaker said before and what later. It is easy to forget such things in the process of speaking and very helpful to have someone there who can remember them and point to any discrepancies. Of course, the services of the listener go far beyond simply pointing out contradictions. On the basis of listening it is possible to ask questions, to notice obscurities or infelicities of expression, to paraphrase an argument or to follow it up in novel ways. All of these activities can be recuperated in conversations, reprised, themselves questioned and explored. We take turns to lead the way and read the signs. For example, what you say reminds me of something I had forgotten, but which is suddenly relevant to our present concerns. Waiting my turn, I feed this recollection back into the discussion and see how, or if, it makes a difference to what you are saying. Outright incomprehension and disagreement are not preferred options, nor is agreement a form of submission to another’s doctrine. We can agree to explore ranges of ideas, noting our differences for future discussion, and continue to learn from each other. The role of a listener, then, is the same as the role of a speaker, but a speaker of a definite kind, the kind who has been listening. It makes all the difference in the world whether the person you are addressing actually listens to what you have to say. This is not discovered until the speaker receives some feedback from the listener. A listener who never spoke or gave a sign would be the silent partner in a monologue, not part of a conversation. To be a conversation, we have to hear the different voices speak, and each must speak for itself. We see this happening very clearly in Plato’s Gorgias, when Callicles becomes tired of what he sees as Socrates’ posturings. He is clever enough to think that Socrates’ call for a proper dialogue is just a ruse by which he can give vent to unsavoury ethics at the same time as he makes his interlocutor silent out of shame. So Callicles lets Socrates know that he is on to the strategy and gives the answers Socrates wants to hear just to help him get on which his speech and finally shut up. The time for a dialogue between them, if it ever existed, is over. The conversation is finished. Socrates must carry on by himself. If Callicles’ own voice cannot be heard, he will not speak at all. Callicles is that kind of character. What holds speakers and listeners together is a world of common interests, concerns and topics of discussion plus a public world of historical, literary and philosophical references. This, of course, must be slowly built up and is another reason why it takes time for such conversations to get under way. It takes time to cover the topic just as it takes time to become accustomed to the person you are conversing with. It matters just as much who you are talking to as what you are talking about. A good conversation, one that goes somewhere and is creative, is

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one in which you are talking to an interesting person about a fascinating topic. That is the ideal. Of course, it goes without saying that the other also finds oneself just as interesting and the topic just as fascinating. Monologues bear down on us. The monologuist speaks from a position of authority. Powerless to reply, we must sit there and take it. A conversation is not like this. Speaker and hearer are within range of one another. It is not a matter of expert advice passed down the line of communication. A true conversation is between equals, if not in immediate expertise, then as thinking human beings. Otherwise we would not have enquiry but merely individual speculation. We must be within range of one another to make the work truly a joint venture. There is no point in listening if one is to get no chance to reply. Monologues can be tuned out. One always has the option to make the perfunctory replies: ‘Yes’, ‘You don’t say?’ and their equivalents. The listener must, even in a pseudoconversation, make the appropriate noises every once in a while, or the speaker will stop speaking to ask for confirmation of the listener’s attention. The main problem of the lecture is that it is a highly monologic form based on an institutional power structure. A lecture is given with the presumption that it would be a good idea if students paid attention to it. But from the students’ point of view, this is not always obvious. If there is no call to reply, the temptation is to tune out and let the lecture flow by. Listening to a lecture is something one must learn to do through practice. The listening which belongs to conversation evolves through all the talking people do to each other. It evolves through all our relations with others and grows with those relations. The question of listening is a large topic. Let us limit it here to the kind of listening which is involved in conversations about topics from the humanities. It is this kind of listening that our pedagogy encourages and fosters. It is a listening that reverberates or resonates with all the reading, writing and talking which is part of the same process of education. WRITING This brings us to the last and largest topic of all, the question of writing. Our interest at this stage lies in writing as it connects with the other aspects of thought: reading, speaking, listening and remembering. However, there are some preliminary difficulties which must be disposed of first, before we can go on to see writing in its proper perspective within our educational project. These difficulties begin with the fact that writing dominates the humanities at institutions of higher education. It dominates the lives of undergraduates because they are graded primarily on their written performance. It dominates the lives of the graduate students who are trying to produce dissertations, and it dominates the lives of untenured lecturers and others who seek to publish. We, on the other hand, are looking at writing together with remembering, reading, talking and listening. What role does it have to play there? Reading allows us to enter into other thoughts. We can think along with them. Talking

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and listening belong together and together are a way of exploring an historical, materio-cultural and ideological world. Conversation is also a form of human solidarity. Writing consists of many possible activities. To write is to do many things at once. Writing about subjects from the humanities enables one to discover what one thinks in a determinate and systematic way. Words on the page stay put in a way that sounds in the air do not. They have a kind of spurious stability. The ink stays on the page. That is not the problem. The problem is to discover one’s own thoughts in the act of expressing them. If I write a paragraph, for example, and later wonder what it means, this shows that I did not know what it was I was thinking at the time I wrote it. It is possible to temporize in conversation in a way that is more difficult in writing. Vagueness and bad arguments can slip by even the most attentive listener. This can give the impression that all is well with one’s thinking, when the reverse is the case. The exercise of writing makes you put yourself on the line, and holds you to it. The writer can reread what he or she has written. This puts the writer into an analogous position to the listener in a conversation. It enables the writer to enter into self-conversation. I am not the self who wrote yesterday’s paragraph, not if it exceeds my comprehension today. Writing is an extreme form of selfalienation and objectification. It allows the writer to confront himself or herself somewhat as if by another person. Writing consolidates the work of the other principal aspects of thought. It is the coping-stone of study in the humanities, but not for that reason any more necessary to the whole than the others. Without parallel development of our powers of reading, conversation and memory, writing essays on topics from the humanities becomes a merely formal exercise or a tedious irrelevance. With that development, it can become a means of taking stock of one’s thinking so far, to look back and ahead. To write is to call ‘Time out, I am going to work this out for myself.’ Study in the humanities is not by definition a solitary affair, but reading and writing often are. Writing, in particular, seems to be most closely wedded to the image of the scholar as lone thinker and scribbler; Descartes before his oven, Spinoza over his lenses, Schopenhauer in retreat. However, this is not the only image we have. We also have that of Socrates questioning the value of writing and spending his time talking with other people in the market-place. Plato set up his school to pursue enquiries with others. This more communal image of intellectual life is obscured by the situation of writing within the humanities. Because writing is of ten a solitary affair, the image of the thinker as someone sitting alone with his or her thoughts has come to dominate our collective sentiment. Essays, papers, monographs, theses and books are only a very few of the possible modes of writing. They are favoured modes which have arisen for historical and academic reasons. The point to note is that essays and theses arise out of the practice of writing. They are not, at first acquaintance, the most natural

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of forms. They appear rather formal and stilted, the distillation of past rhetorical practices. We are less likely to over-privilege writing if we consider it with the other aspects of thinking. Writing essays or anything else is just part of a more complex learning process which incorporates and interpolates the results of reading and conversation. Nevertheless, the continued priority of writing in the educational system behoves us to take a careful look at the practice of writing. This we now proceed to do.

Chapter 3 Rhetoric and composition

There is far more of a positive element in art, that is to say, something which can be taught and handed on from one generation to the next, than is usually believed. (Goethe 1971: 425) At the end of the last chapter we suggested that writing dominates work in the humanities. Speech plays a part in tutorials, seminars, interviews and viva voce examinations; but it is on the analysis of printed texts, on the production of essays, and (above all) on written tests, that progress (however measured) largely depends. In Chapter 2 we looked at some of the ways in which the imbalance between writing on the one hand, and reading, conversation and remembering on the other, might be redressed. Now we turn to writing itself. This might seem a paradoxical move in the light of our claim that writing has already been given too much attention, but although the written product is all-important in the contemporary humanities faculty, the productive process has been largely neglected. Not only is it assumed that undergraduates will be able to write to the necessary standard, but more importantly, the practice of writing is not thought to be very interesting, even in literary studies. Whether it is a textbook or a student essay, what counts is the finished product. The view seems to be that, so long as one can drive the car, there is no need to meddle with the engine. So on the one hand writing is fetishized, on the other ignored. This is not to say that it is not taught at all, at least in American colleges. But this teaching is often beside the point, divorced from critical reading within a specific disciplinary context. Almost all students are bad writers. That is not surprising. Most of them dislike writing because they do not know how to write, and they do not learn how to write because they dislike writing. It is difficult to say why this should be the case, but the contrast with reading is suggestive. Students in the humanities often become students precisely because they are good readers: because they think of reading as a pleasant and rewarding activity. They have learnt to read fluently if sloppily early in their careers, and reading appears to them almost a natural skill, like eating or breathing. They cannot remember what it is like to be non-readers.

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Yet writing, which they began to learn at about the same time, remains obstinately alien for all but a few. They can write, but it gives them little pleasure. No doubt this has something to do with the way in which reading and writing are taught at school; and this teaching is in turn shaped by deeply rooted cultural assumptions about the nature of the two activities and the relationship between them. Reading is considered an essential life skill. It is also easier to teach. Yet writing is apparently difficult to teach, and enough skill to sign one’s name and fill in the odd form is all that most people require. The rest is relegated to the dire province of ‘self-expression’ and ‘creativity’, thought of as an extra like music and woodwork. This situation is aptly symbolized by making writing solely the responsibility of the unfortunate English teacher, who is then blamed by his or her peers for failing to teach it well enough. It rarely occurs to them that they should be teaching it themselves. The consequence and partial cause of this attitude is that reading and writing are taught separately. It is here the rot begins, for when we separate the two we diminish both. Once we put writing in the category of pure creativity, we encourage our children to think of it either as an ‘extra’ or as the natural gift of a few. Both the separation and the specialization become more acute as children progress through the education system. By the time they reach undergraduate level their reading competence and their writing skill may well be in inverse proportion. This produces the bizarre situation in which students of literary studies are reading the most sophisticated material while barely able to put their thoughts together on paper about the simplest thing. As any college English teacher will know, this is not an exaggeration: it takes a good three years to get many perfectly intelligent undergraduates beyond pass level in their written work. How is this to be remedied? The ideal answer is obviously to teach reading and writing in a different way from the start. The old rhetorical curriculum offers a way of doing this, though it is likely to be a long time before teachers can be persuaded of the merits of such an approach and trained to apply it. However, one of the greatest virtues of our rhetorical curriculum is that it can be entered at any time and at any level. In this chapter we propose to show how it might be adapted to help contemporary undergraduates in the field of literary studies with their writing skills, in the light of two principles which clearly belong together: first, that writing and reading cannot usefully be studied apart; and second, that at the higher levels both skills are usefully taught only in the context of particular discourses. READING AND WRITING It was Erasmus who urged students to ‘write, write, and again write’ in order to improve their reading. At the same time he insisted that by careful reading they would best enrich their speaking and writing. He knew that none of these skills

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makes any sense on its own, and that reading and writing are not just complementary but unimaginable without one another: writing implies reading, and vice versa. Recent theorists have suggested that this distinction is a kind of delusion: the one just is the other. To read is to rewrite, to write is to read the already-written. Yet radical theory is almost exclusively concerned with interpretation. Even Marxism, with its complex accounts of ideological production and the materiality of the sign, has little to say about composition: the actual business of putting words on paper. This is no doubt partly due to the sheer volume of reading necessary in all humanities subjects today. It is a profound irony that, if writing is all-important in determining final ‘success’ in such disciplines, students spend most of their time preparing for that success by reading. Even with the guidance of reading lists, and the careful selection of appropriate topics, a student may spend weeks producing one essay. Quite apart from giving an undue importance to stereotypical essay-forms, this only helps to make essay-writing more daunting and prevents the development of facility in writing. Ironically, this manoeuvre weakens reading skills, for it is by writing that students take possession of course materials. In this process they learn the arts of arrangement and selection. The task of writing enjoins them to confront the vast mass of secondary texts with an editorial eye. The ability to scan selectively is a basic reading skill. A good writer is a good reader; a bad writer a bad reader. SUBJECT SPECIFICITY It is important to teach not just writing but particular modes of writing, geared to reading programmes. In the early stages, reading and writing can and should be taught without reference to any particular subject matter. But even a limited degree of specialization requires particular techniques. The novelist and the quantity surveyor do not write in quite the same way, any more than the postgraduate student of poetry and the traveller with a map read in quite the same way or with the same purpose. Learning to play the cello is not the same as learning to play the piano, though both are musical instruments and may join in a common repertoire. Yet even at undergraduate level writing is usually taught in a curricular no man’s land. This is largely the consequence of traditions formed by a combination of the Aristotelian theory (expounded in the Rhetoric) that rhetoric has no proper subject matter, and the Ciceronian view that it is a multipurpose collection of skills applicable to any material. The resulting pedagogy is an unfortunate mixture of generalizations and over-detailed prescriptions. Like the fashionable ‘critical thinking’ courses, composition is taught as a skill on its own. Students are drilled by precept and practice in the acquisition of style and the writing of themes, thereby repeating all the worst and none of the best features of the ancient tradition. The old rhetorical paidaeia was designed to suit lawyers and legislators who needed to speak persuasively and at will on any topic, matching their manner to

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subject, audience and occasion. But contemporary students in the humanities are concerned less with persuasion than with communication. Their first task is not to attain short-term adeptness in any subject, but to achieve a thorough study of specific disciplines. These two approaches are not exclusive: study in the humanities should provide what are now called transferable skills, including the quick and easy assimilation of new material, and the ability to make something of it. But in the modern curriculum, whose full scope is far beyond any individual, such skills are best acquired through engagement with particular subjects. In consequence, we take the view that each discipline has its appropriate rhetoric which is learnt only through the study of that subject. What we need, therefore, are not the generalized rules and detailed prescriptions of the ancient rhetorical hand-books, but subject-specific writing programmes which complement the reading, listening, speaking and remembering which are all part of learning to think. What counts, we believe, is not just learning how to write, but learning how to write (and read) in this or that discipline. Driving a car may, in the long run, help one fly a spaceship, but a general course in cosmic navigation is of no help on the road. The authors teach philosophy and literary studies and share an interest in the ways in which the two domains overlap. We are therefore well aware that the common ground between philosophy and literature is a fruitful area of study. But we are also aware, from the experience of teaching our students, of the differences between, and within, these disciplines. Both as critics and as writers, students need to become aware of these differences. As we shall see in Chapter 4, their critical activities support their writing; but the reverse is also true, learning to write in different modes sharpens critical insight. Like the distinction between cognitive and expressive skills that underpins all our chapters, the distinction between composition and criticism, synthesis and analysis, is a convenience not a principle. We take it to be axiomatic that, like reading and writing, composition and criticism must work together if they are to develop properly. What can unite them is precisely the revived rhetorical practice outlined in our introduction. And if there is some overlap and even repetition between the chapters, we regard this as a virtue. For the attainment of competence in writing and reading, as Erasmus points out, can only come with endless practice of both. It is not originality that counts here, but constant application. What is true of playing a musical instrument is true of writing. There is no short route to improvement. PROBLEMS WITH THE USUAL APPROACH What practical difference does our approach make to the way in which literary studies are taught? As an example, let us suppose that we are running a course in twentiethcentury fiction. Among the texts are some experimental novels: perhaps by

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Calvino, Llosa, O’Brien or Kundera. Normal practice is for students to read the novels; to attend seminars and/or lectures; and then to be given reading lists and essay questions. Weak students write their essays by quoting or paraphrasing critics or by falling back on the descriptive methods they learnt at school. Strong students compare critics with one another and finally give their own account of the text. Either way, the work falls into three stages: reading, reflection, writing. The third stage of producing an essay is tacitly assumed to be the point of the whole process; for, as we have observed, it is on such writing that students are judged, and such judgement is one step on the road to examination success and prosperity in the outside world. This seems to be the obvious and logical sequence of actions: you cannot reflect on what you have not read; you cannot write without reflection. There are, however, problems with such a sequence. First, students read with minimal guidance. While this can have merit for experienced readers, it is also enormously wasteful of time and effort among the inexperienced, who should be going to texts with questions, not with empty minds. Precisely because of their comparative facility as readers, too many students of literature assume that their task amounts to little more than browsing in a few pleasant books and recording their impressions of the experience. This is no doubt why many of them choose the subject in the first place. Their approach is subjective and aesthetic. Their interest in the mechanics of the text is minimal. Many of their tutors share this assumption. The model of the innocent consciousness encountering the richly layered text is still dominant in many English departments. Underlying this model is the assumption that the sheer volume and variety of reading will eventually reach a point at which critical methods and concepts begin to form, almost of themselves. The violent and justified reaction against this model among recent literary theorists goes to the other extreme, turning the study of literature into the more or less sophisticated conning of elaborate ideological or stylistic paradigms. But this only replaces blankness with confusion in the average undergraduate mind, unaccustomed as it is to dealing with the complex hierarchies of theory. More to the point, both old and new approaches make the mistake of paying too much attention to the syllabus and not enough to the student. They want to pour their strong wine into new bottles without calculating the strength of the glass. The second stage of the sequence, reflection, involves the same difficulties as the first. Few readers understand what it is they are looking for unless directed. With a reading list and essay topics in hand, the student tends to overemphasize the significance of the essay. Appearing as the end product of other activities, it can easily seem like the culmination and the objective of these activities. This feeling is encouraged by the fact that the essay is the only form of writing most students produce. Undergraduates spend their time either preparing to write essays or actually writing them. Apart from making the essay itself a daunting task, this detracts from other activities. Seminar discussion, for example, can often seem a waste of time which might be better spent in the library. Even

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reading the texts themselves becomes an irritating distraction from consulting the critics and writing the essay. The logical outcome is that writing essays is a tiresome preliminary to graduation, which is a boring preparation for etc. etc. These problems are compounded by a number of other practical and theoretical difficulties: the rapidly increasing volume of secondary texts; uncertainty about the relationship between primary and secondary texts, and about the situation of the student essay vis-à-vis both. Finally there is the fragmentation of the curriculum and the differences of opinion among teachers about the nature and function of the critical essay. These are compounded by a general uncertainty about why it is we study the humanities at all, and why we approach them in the ways we do. Taken together, such problems undermine the very basis of the conventional undergraduate essay. Text plus critical commentary may provide the basic structure of literary or philosophical discourse, but students are usually being asked to provide a form of metacriticism by commenting on the commentaries. They often find that the ‘text’ is itself a commentary on other texts. These fascinating theoretical questions need discussion, but they are also profoundly confusing for the student who wishes to know what to write about. As the volume of critical literature grows, the problem becomes more acute. Only a few years ago it was assumed that primary texts were the primary materials, fortified by reference to critics. This is no longer so obviously the case. Without reading them all, the sheer volume of critical writings makes it very difficult for students to make more than arbitrary choices between them. These practical problems, once incidental and remediable, are now central and potentially destructive of the whole discipline of literary studies and, by extension, the other liberal arts. They stem in part from the collapse of a rhetorical curriculum in which composition and criticism formed two aspects of a unified outlook. There is, of course, no way back to that unity, and any revisions of the curriculum will have to take the different approach we discussed in Chapter 1. However, it is possible to deal with some of these problems by changing the sequence of learning which has become so fundamental to undergraduate life, and by breaking down the rigid relationship between reading and writing which dominates it. This means placing writing at the beginning of any course of study, which in turn involves looking at the function of literary criticism in a rather different light. CRITICAL MODES There are two prevailing critical modes in literary studies. The first is fairly popular and its function is to promote the understanding and appreciation of literature. At one end of the spectrum this includes the great mass of weekly and monthly journalism and the genre of literary biography. At the other end there is textual exegesis and every kind of historical and scholarly study. Much of this material

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is too sophisticated or specialized for the general reader, but it is produced with a nod in that direction. There is another class of criticism written for academics, which is heavily theoretical. Its purpose is not so much to promote general understanding as to argue the case for one theoretical perspective or another. It is polemical, recondite and assumes that the reader exists primarily for the text. Both critical modes operate in academic life and both are biased in favour of reading. This last point might seem obvious. What else is criticism for, it may be asked, if not to help in the task of interpretation? But there is a third sort of criticism whose purpose is primarily heuristic and reflexive. This is exemplified by the ancient rhetorical tradition in which students study the work of others in order to improve their own. This critical activity places demonstration before evaluation and explanation. The point of studying models is to evolve our own technique. In this critical mode, the text exists primarily for the writer. The notion of studying texts as a basis for composition provides criticism with a badly needed raison d’être and points the way to overcoming the serious estrangement many students experience in the study of seemingly remote texts. The obsessive distinction between primary and secondary, between ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’, and the feeling that students produce only a very inferior version of the latter, exacerbates the difficulties many already have with writing as an alien process. Confronted by the chasm between the highly finished products they study and the dismal texts they produce, it is no wonder that many undergraduates despair. If the study of literature is to be of any value it is essential to overcome these problems. The revival of a rhetorical paidaeia is one way towards this. PROGYMNASMATA We therefore propose to substitute a new model sequence of activities for literary studies, in which writing is present from the outset. Instead of beginning with the reading of texts, followed by reflection, then by critical writing, we want to begin with reading and writing together, with the second based on the first. We understand writing primarily as a stimulant to the reflective stage of study. In practice this means beginning with text-based exercises the ancients called progymnasmata, or preliminary exercises. Their virtue is that they can be adapted to students at any level of competence. This is important today. While the classical schools of rhetoric provided a carefully graded and integrated training which took pupils from the nursery classroom to graduate school, the diversity and complexity of contemporary schooling makes this virtually impossible. So we need to ask ourselves two questions. First, what exercises can be adapted to fit the different liberal arts courses, and more particularly, which exercises suit the discipline of literary studies? Many old rhetorical exercises such as encomium, commonplace and proverb have only marginal relevance today. Like the study of pronuntiatio they belong

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to the domain of public speaking, the law courts and political assemblies. They derive from the notion of rhetoric as persuasion, inappropriate to contemporary conditions. The Augustinian theory of rhetoric as communication with which we are working, demands a different approach. Our objective is not to produce orators, but good writers and critical thinkers. Though some exercises, such as refutation and confirmation, are more suited to philosophical discourse, it can certainly be argued that all students of literature should be able to argue or defend a case. One word of caution. It is vital that these exercises are not seen as merely preliminary to essay-writing. Although they also serve that function, they have expressive and cognitive value in themselves: cultivating mental and verbal flexibility, encouraging students to think about things in different ways. If the essay is seen as the inevitable and only outcome, much of the point of these exercises is lost, because it is from them that the much-lauded ‘transferable skills’ are derived, which are part of liberal arts disciplines. We must remember that skill is always ‘skill in something’. There is no such thing as skill in the abstract. So the most useful thing we can do to develop transferable skills is to make sure that our pupils learn specific skills as well as possible. Without that, there are no skills to transfer. Of course any discipline in the humanities involves useful verbal and cognitive skills. Reading rapidly and accurately, mastering and arranging quantities of information, developing arguments are only some. The progymnasmata can help to strengthen and broaden these skills, but they also have refinements of their own to offer, especially in the domain of expressive style and mental flexibility. The purpose of these exercises is not to produce intellectual uniformity; far from it. They are designed to develop fluency at the individual’s own level of competence, whatever that may be, and however it may develop. DISPOSITIO AND ELOCUTIO Classical rhetoricians subject composition to very close scrutiny under the headings of dispositio and elocutio: arrangement and style. Their exercises tend to follow this distinction, some concerned with argument and structure, others with tropes and figures of speech. Dispositio The structure of an oration, from which the student essay descends, is conventionally divided into five parts: introduction, exposition, proof, refutation and conclusion. Much ancient commentary is tedious and not especially helpful to the novice, caught as it is between the pitfalls of minute observations and vague generalizations. The general principles of arrangement are easily and briefly stated but useless without practice. Most time in composition classes is spent telling students how to write essays. Most of this time is wasted because

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the advice boils down to the useless Aristotelian dictum that the oration must have a beginning, a middle and an end. The problem is that writing an essay is like learning to swim. The student must first acquire the basic skills before he or she can learn to use them appropriately in each different situation. This problem is compounded in literary studies because no two texts or writers are quite alike. Without judgement honed through practice, general maxims are useless. In this learning process there is no substitute for expensive individual tuition; the painstaking dissection of each pupil’s work with a tutor. But if there are no useful general rules for the student, it is possible to make some recommendations to the teacher. The first essays should be brief and centred upon specifically designed topics. All too often students are simply issued with an indiscriminate list of essay questions, which cover the range of essential topics without indication as to possible approach or level of difficulty. Length and scope are also taken for granted. This may have been a reasonable procedure when all undergraduates shared a common background and education, but it is very rarely the case today. Any group of undergraduates reveals a wide range of abilities and linguistic attainments. Moreover, the essays they wrote at school were largely descriptive or factual, not analytic and theoretical. The kind of analytical work required at undergraduate level, taking in such factors as tone, style, interpretation, textual commentary, linguistic analysis, argument, and so on, is perfectly well within the capabilities of most students, but they are rarely prepared for it. It is rather like being asked to fly a spaceship when one has only just learnt to manage a bicycle. The principles of navigation may be the same but the technical skills are quite different. The essay is still the most significant piece of writing most students do, and it will remain important even when supplemented and nourished by the exercises described in this book. The assumption that all essays are very much alike is profoundly mistaken. The term covers an enormous range and variety of forms. Essays are no more uniform than novels or plays, though they may have formal characteristics in common. This is obvious to teachers of literature, themselves schooled in making fine rhetorical discriminations. In short, the notion of the allpurpose essay-form, equally suited to geography and philosophy, should be treated with great suspicion at the level of undergraduate writing. By the same token, variations in audience count for a great deal: the seminar paper, the undergraduate essay, the position paper, the extended essay, the project, the learned article, the thesis, the specialist book, the popular book, the newspaper article, the review, the blurb, the letter, the leader, the tabloid paragraph, all call for different approaches. This is just to name the forms common in academic life. Outside academia other forms of address are legion, from the homily to the insult. Yet many students cannot even distinguish between the essay and the seminar paper delivered orally to the class. They do not grasp, for example, that the degree of detail necessary in an essay is otiose in

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the paper, while the paper requires a consciousness of the spoken word and its effect which the essay does not, unless it is designed to be read aloud. Elocutio This adds up to an insensitivity to style, in the widest sense of the term. For many students, all forms of non-fictional writing are one form; and the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is about the only one they grasp. The result is that they overemphasize its significance. For this reason, working with style offers a more fruitful starting point for composition than a one-sided attempt to master abstract theoretical principles. Style is something most students can think about constructively once they are past the naive stage of discussing texts purely in terms of content. The study of style is valuable beyond the bounds of literary studies. The mental exercises outlined below are adaptable. They can be shaped to fit all the humanities and perhaps the social sciences as well. Even such unlikely candidates as geography and engineering stand in need of rhetorical analysis. Scientists generally might benefit from scrutiny of their own language use, especially concerning the buried metaphors that sustain their disciplines. Indeed, it is precisely students in these other disciplines who are most in need of rhetorical instruction. But if students of literature are vestigially aware of style as a crucial element in any discourse, they usually have a shallow notion of it as something which is itself superficial. They think of style as the dress of thought, an ornament added to the substance of the text. This is an ancient tradition, made respectable by Roman rhetoricians and sanctified for modern use by eighteenth-century practice. We take the rather different, though equally ancient, view that style is not something added to discourse but something fundamental to it, operating at every level from the single phrase to the whole disciplinary field. Ultimately it is about the relation of parts to a whole. This grand notion of style is really what many ancient rhetoricians mean by the guiding principle of decorum, that is the suiting of means to ends. Style is fundamental to the nature, function and effect of our discourse, not something added on for aesthetic effect. This is as true of an undergraduate essay as of an epic poem, and it means that in each case we must bear our audience in mind and the purpose we have in addressing it. Paying attention to style is far more than a matter of fiddling with details; properly considered, it entails thinking about the whole scope of any piece of writing. Yet because the study of style begins with the simplest elements of discourse, it is both an excellent way into the understanding of texts, and the best basis for the formation of individual style. This approach has the added advantage of helping to overcome students’ estrangement from the literature of the past by helping them to situate themselves practically in relation to that literature. They will begin to appropriate the text. They will get inside it, identify with it and

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learn that style is not accidental but essential. At the very least they will begin to see that style is there, even in the drabbest prose. There is another closely related point here, which we might make by analogy with philosophy. Anyone engaging in philosophical discourse is entering into dialogue with the great philosophers of the past, however modestly or inadequately. To discuss philosophy is, in a sense, to philosophize. The same does not seem to hold true of literary studies, where criticism appears to be a different kind of text than the one on which it comments. To approach texts through style is to begin breaking down the rigid distinctions between primary and secondary, creative and critical, by showing that there are many different kinds of discourse. The Romantic hierarchy which puts creation so far above criticism is thus overcome. The student’s efforts need not be dreary rehearsals of other people’s ideas, but a creative appropriation of their material. Without knowing it they are entering into the great discourses of the past. Like their predecessors, they are in dialogue with the writers they read and discuss. Stylistic commentary among ancient rhetoricians tended to focus on figures of speech, and here again the rhetorical text-books are not always helpful, so concerned are they with minute distinctions and microscopic effects. However, a more relaxed view of style provides a useful way into the rhetorical paidaeia. What we do not need from the old study manuals is their wearisome cataloguing of technical devices. What we want to keep are (1) their practical approach to the study of style, and (2) their insistence that composition and criticism, synthesis and analysis, must go together. We might also learn from their starting point. Students find large structures such as the argument of an essay difficult to grasp, but they are usually capable of imitation and analysis at the local level. The trick is to use these capacities to ease them into more elaborate attempts. Most students show little feeling for the style of the material they discuss, and even less for their own, which is usually a long way behind their models. This distance is most embarrassingly marked in literary studies. The average essay on Jane Austen, for example, however worthy its discussion, usually serves to underline only the author’s remoteness from his or her subject’s stylistic felicity, which puts a large question mark over the value of the essay and the degree of understanding it indicates. This suggests that literature students stand in as much need of rhetorical training as any other. CASE STUDIES It is now time to introduce a specimen course in twentieth-century fiction which we have chosen just because nothing might seem more remote from ancient rhetorical practice. Our twofold purpose is to deepen understanding of texts and to develop writing skills. The obvious way to study style on the small scale is through extracts. To begin with we work in miniature, and thus can begin anywhere. Later on there is time

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to consider large-scale rhetorical effects. Let us suppose that the novel under discussion is Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. We deliberately choose a novel in translation to avoid the minute scrutiny of diction which usually passes for stylistic analysis. Given the language in which this book is written, Anglophones will be compelled to focus on other matters such as tense and person, to which little attention is paid in the usual discussions of fiction. This is a very distinctive and delightful book and any extract chosen at random gives a flavour of the text and provides an intriguing passage to work with: ‘I can’t find it, but no matter,’ you say to her. ‘I noticed you have another copy anyway. In fact, I thought you had already read it…’ Unknown to her, you’ve gone into the storeroom to find the Flannery book with the red band. ‘Here it is.’ Ludmilla opens it. There’s an inscription. ‘To Ludmilla… Silas Flannery.’ ‘Yes, it’s my copy…’ ‘Ah, you’ve met Flannery?’ you exclaim, as if you knew nothing. ‘Yes…he gave me this book…but I was sure it had been stolen from me, before I could read it…’ ‘Stolen by Irnerio?’ ‘Hmmm…’ It’s time for you to show your hand. ‘It wasn’t Irnerio, and you know it. Irnerio, when he saw it, threw it back into that dark room, where you keep…’ ‘Who gave you permission to go rummaging around?’ ‘Irnerio says that somebody who used to steal your books comes back secretly now to replace them with false books…’ ‘Irnerio doesn’t know anything.’ ‘I do: Cavedagna gave me Marana’s letters to read.’ ‘Everything Ermes says is always a trick.’ ‘There’s one thing that’s true: that man continues to think of you, to see you in all his ravings, he’s obsessed by the image of you reading.’ ‘It’s what he was never able to bear.’ (Calvino 1981:126) Transcription Two types of progymnasmata remain especially relevant to the study of fiction: translation and impersonation. Both generate a wide range of exercises. However, before we approach them, there is a preparatory appropriation of the text to be carried out. Students should begin their course of study by writing the passage out, being careful to reproduce accurately spelling, punctuation, and any typographical oddities, just as if they were transcribing a computer program. This request may well be met with indignant cries, but these are worth

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overcoming. It will almost certainly transpire that most of the moaners cannot even copy accurately, which will help tutors suggest tactfully that they may not be reading the passage accurately either. Most people associate copying with the Middle Ages, but until the recent advent of cheap texts, copying by hand was very common. Economy, however, is not the reason we recommend transcription. The aim of this exercise is to encourage concentration on the words and phrases the writer (or translator in this case) has actually used, not the vague impression of them most reading gives. What are these words and phrases exactly? We need to remind them that they owe the author, the text and themselves the duty of accuracy before beginning to make the wild interpretive claims so tempting in literary studies. It brings home the truth that one is never too good to improve. Two musical analogies are appropriate. The greatest performers continue to practice the simplest exercises, and student composers often still copy out complex scores in order to get inside them. Finally, this operation underlines the fact that there are many things to do with a text before interpreting it. This is important in an age which equates criticism largely with interpretation, and which tends to assume that there is no such thing as the uninterpreted text, on the grounds that to read at all is to interpret. But there is a kind of reading more like computer scanning, which simply seeks to establish what we might call the facts of the text, not its meaning, but the way it is composed. Students should learn to come to terms with these before they launch out on interpretation. Translation Once the passage is accurately transcribed, students are ready to start on preliminary translation exercises. These are designed to sharpen the sensibility, to awaken it to elements in the prose which it is easy to take for granted. We use the term translation in the widest sense to cover every method of changing the form of the text while keeping its contents the same. Later, under the heading ‘Impersonation’, we will consider ways of keeping the form and/or style intact, while changing the contents. Translation exercises include alterations in every feature of the grammar and syntax, reductions and amplifications of the text, turning it into monologue, changing the point of view, and so on. Obviously the material will determine which exercises are appropriate, but most of the examples discussed below can be used with philosophical and historical as well as literary texts. Tense and person Certain features of this text are obvious. It consists largely of dialogue. It is in the present tense. It is narrated by one of the characters. Later, we will do some

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work on the dialogue, but first it is worth looking closely at the basic constituents of tense and person. The first task is to substitute the past or future tense for the present, which is such a distinctive feature of this passage from Calvino. This is more difficult than it sounds, because the tenses are already complex and students will be faced with the problem of which ones to change. This leads to a discussion about the effects of different tenses, why Calvino has chosen to write in the way he has, and what differences are made by the changes. It is worth stressing that this exercise, though complex in its implications, requires no technical knowledge beyond the ability to distinguish the basic tenses. We then go through a similar procedure substituting ‘I’ for ‘you’. There are only a few places in the passage where this is possible but they make a drastic change in its rhetorical status, opening the way to a discussion of narrative viewpoint, crucial to any study of fiction. Finally, we experiment with different combinations of these exercises, changing both tense and person in more involved ways, attributing the dialogue to different persons, altering the time to the future, and so on. These exercises draw attention to the actual nature of the text by considering its possible alternatives, thus inviting readers to focus very closely on why the text is as it is and not otherwise. It reminds them that the text is something constructed, not a gift descended from heaven. Précis and summary Next come the précis and summary. English language examinations have turned these into dreary businesses largely concerned with efficiency and almost devoid of theoretical interest. In fact, the philosophical implications of these exercises for the study of literature are profound and we discuss them in the following chapter. They raise questions about the nature of language, about exactly what constitutes a text, and about the relation between style and content. Briefly, précis gives the general sense; summary lists the important points. Students should attempt both exercises at various lengths. The first exercise is to see whether they can sum up the passage in a single phrase or sentence. Can they reduce it to half-length? Can they list the ‘points’ covered? After this they might consider the different modes appropriate to different purposes. Is attempting to summarize a passage briefly in an examination answer the same as simply alluding to it in conversation? How important is it to retain elements of style, such as the use of the present tense? What difference does reported speech make? The purpose of this exercise is to show that every text works at many levels and in many ways. The length of a précis or summary will depend upon the difficulty of the task, and the time available to pursue it.

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Monologue, dialogue, reported speech Making a précis of the Calvino passage will almost certainly involve turning it into reported speech of one sort or another. This can lead on to changes in the entire mode of the piece and various types of paraphrase. If the passage contains reported speech, one invites students to turn it into dialogue. Alternatively, the passage quoted here might be turned into monologue, or reported entirely in the third person. We might see the action from the other person’s point of view, change the sexes of the participants, make them mother and son, husband and wife, two sisters, and so on. These exercises are extensions of the experiments with person and tense with which we started. Amplification The next exercise requires students to develop the passage, to explore and expand its points. This makes us think about what the writer may have left out, overlooked, compressed or alluded to. It also causes us to reflect on what we may be bringing to the text and how we are interpreting it. Amplification is obviously most suited to short passages of perhaps a phrase or a sentence in length to begin with. At this stage the imagination is free to wander, confined only by the spirit of the piece. Students might want to name the characters, to fill out their dialogue, to invent more of their relationship, either out of context or in the light of what they know of the book. Now they are writing fiction themselves, getting inside the skin of the writer, learning what it might feel like to be Calvino writing this novel. And though their amplification begins by staying very close to the given text, there is no reason why they should not take wing, once the basic exercises have taken effect and become habitual. Impersonation Such an approach leads students to another group of exercises involving impersonation, a central feature of ancient practice. This can take a number of forms. We begin by inviting students to impersonate the author, extending the narrative by a few lines or a paragraph. Then, in the same vein, they produce an entirely original piece ‘by’ Calvino about some quite different topic. At this stage we look at more of the novel to get its full flavour, and sample some of the other narrative strategies it uses. It is equally interesting to impersonate one of the characters in the story, to write on from his or her viewpoint. The same applies to other characters in the book. Having done that, the next stage is to take on the persona of a critic commenting on Calvino the novelist. No doubt the tutor will suggest critical texts. Having established what critic X has to say about Calvino’s work, can we construct his views on this particular passage? And can we do so in his style?

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At this point the exercise opens out in a very important way. Given the tendency of novels such as If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller to undermine the distinctions between truth and fiction, fact and fable,what could be more salutary then to practice different kinds of discourse, both fictional and critical? Could we not then construct a dialogue between two critics with very different views on the subject of this novel or something in it? For example, we might have Lodge and Leavis, or Lukács and Barthes discuss the passage under consideration. The dialogue does not have to be long. The point is to establish rhetorical and ideological differences. The writing of dialogue is especially useful because it gives students a route into understanding conflicting viewpoints. Criticism is not a matter of right or wrong but of coherent, articulate interpretation. This sort of exercise provides an excellent transition from text to criticism. Students can treat critics in just the way they treated the extract from the novel. Indeed, this is the next stage, which uses these exercises as a basis for the student’s own critical writing. One of the problems with the characteristic undergraduate essay is the half-digested authorities it refers to. Understandably, students rarely have the time to come to terms properly with their critical sources, which they use rather as quarries for useful material. Getting to grips with the ways in which criticism is actually written, learning to identify with the critic as we identify with a poet or a novelist, is a profoundly illuminating exercise which becomes more than an exercise for the committed reader. This approach is equally useful for the philosopher and the historian. USING COMPARISONS One difficulty with the study of style is that the inexperienced have no benchmarks, no ways of recognizing what is distinctive. One way of overcoming this is to use comparison. We might, for example, take a passage of approximately equal length out of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds: Biographical reminiscence, part the ninth: It was the late summer, a humid breathless season that is inimical to comfort and personal freshness. I was reclining on my bed and conducting a listless conversation with Brinsley, who was maintaining a stand by the window. From the averted quality of his voice, I knew that his back was towards me and that he was watching through the window without advertence the evening boys at ball-throw. We had been discussing the craft of writing and had adverted to the primacy of Irish and American authors in the world of superior or better-class letters. From a perusal of the manuscript which has just been presented in these pages, he had expressed his inability to distinguish between Furriskey, Lamont and Shanahan, bewailed what he termed their spiritual and physical identity, stated that true dialogue is dependent on the conflict rather than the confluence of minds and made reference to the importance of

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characterization in contemporary literary works of a high-class, advanced or literary nature. The three of them, he said, might make one man between them. (O’Brien 1960:160) The use of comparisons can considerably extend the scope of the exercises discussed here. For example, students can rewrite part of one passage in the style of the other at every stage of the way, substituting persons, tenses, narrative voices, and so on. Clearly the Calvino and O’Brien passages are very different in almost every respect. One might simply compare them in discussion, but it is more illuminating to try out different techniques to bring home to readers exactly what is involved in the writing. HOW DOES IT HELP? The authors take for granted the usefulness of mental and stylistic exercises in sharpening the critical intelligence. This aspect is developed in the following chapter. Finally, we need to address the question of how such exercises will help students become better writers. Clearly, our premise is that reading and writing, interpretation and composition, are intimately connected. Improving the one improves the other. Sharpening the critical faculties helps writing. But as we know to our cost, this is not the case if we approach criticism only through analysis. On the contrary, such an approach actually estranges the student from his or her own writing by making it seem either pitifully inadequate, or too difficult to embark upon. The practical involvement of students is therefore essential, and this is one good way to achieve it. The lowlier one’s beginnings in any craft, the easier is the way in. No silversmith starts by making a Cellini vase. Why should undergraduates be expected to understand difficult works in history, literature and philosophy before they have become competent in the practice of these disciplines? Copying and imitating others is therefore not only a useful preliminary to producing one’s own work; it is, indeed, the recognized route into all traditional crafts. We should therefore think of learning as a craft in which the student is an apprentice, the teacher an initiate. In this hierarchy, writers are artisans, not inaccessible geniuses.

Chapter 4 Philosophical and literary exercises

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and make it one’s own. Henry James, The Art of the Novel Given the unity of cognitive and expressive skills expounded in the last two chapters, how can we best encourage our students to apply these skills to the formidable mass of texts they will confront in any academic course? How can we stimulate the mind and the sensibility to become active in the face of often recalcitrant and abstruse material? Too frequently, enthusiasm and talent are stifled by the sheer volume of reading. In this chapter we suggested some exercises which will help students to assimilate that reading, while sharpening their critical powers. Where do they start? How do they continue? Above all, what is it they are to accomplish? Before the end of the rhetorical era such questions had very definite and detailed answers which could be taken for granted. There was a broad, unified curriculum within which philosophy, history and literature, and the ways in which they were studied, all had their allotted roles. Pupils who went through the mill of school and university covered a common sequence of graded exercises which provided them with an intellectual lingua franca. This is no longer the case. Instead, we have a vast and complex landscape of more or less distinct disciplinary fields, each with its own methpdologies. Rhetorical praxis has been detached from subject matter and relegated to classes in composition, creative writing and critical thinking. The irony is that students arriving at college rarely have an adequate training in the elements of the disciplines they now propose to study at advanced level, because the rhetorical paidaeia on which these disciplines rested has all but vanished from schools. Any return to the traditional rhetorical training is unthinkable, if only because it is no longer appropriate to contemporary conditions. Though the world is as much governed by language as ever it was in antiquity, the purpose and context of that language have changed. Then, it was the property of a governing class

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with a common ideology and a unified field of knowledge. Now, there is no common ideology, even within the relatively homogeneous societies of the West, and the governing classes are no longer synonymous with the educated sector of the population. Conservatives are inclined to see this as a misfortune, radicals as their opportunity to build a brave new world. In fact, it is neither. As we saw in the first chapter, the consequence of these changes is simply that our education system no longer matches our social and political needs. We are faced with the task of revitalizing the system. Put starkly, higher education today has a wider brief than to produce statesmen and administrators. Instead, we have to educate increasing numbers of the population at large, whatever their initial outlook. To do this we have to put the old university disciplines on a new basis, and abandon the idea that education has a culturally and socially homogenizing national role. The fragmentation of the curriculum and profound social and political changes have put a big question mark over the survival of a humanities community retreating in the face of increasing criticism and suspicion. The result has been the introduction of changes designed to suit a market economy and the demand for a functionally literature workforce. However, once we realize that for most people a college education is not the prelude to life as an academic, we can think again about the role and value of further education to individuals and society as a whole. Higher education has different purposes for different individuals and must always remain flexible enough to cater for their needs. Its main task is training the majority of students to think and express themselves more efficiently. The test of the effectiveness of its teaching strategy is simply whether it does so. This is the point at which the rhetorical tradition can be usefully reborn. We are not talking about years of gruelling training and negative reinforcement. Rhetorical education has always had a tendency towards mechanical learning. The ancient rhetoricians churned out dicta to be memorized at a furious rate. The main problems with the old systems are that they tend to stick rigidly to a preordained scheme; to fuss over details; and to grade students on rhetorical productions. This last implies the presence of a judge and audience, a public place of shame or honour. It also implies standards of stylistic conformity and accuracy which are no longer appropriate. Pleasing a judge is important for future lawyers and politicians, who benefit from early exposure to the public forum. Conformity and accuracy may be useful for future civil servants. But for most students, who need to acquire intellectual flexibility, expressive fluency and imaginative openness, they are neither necessary nor beneficial. Reduce the importance of the judgement, the shame and the honour, and you diminish the constraints that inhibit experimentation with content and form, matter and style. Rhetoric becomes a field of language play, not a collection of dreary routines. Released from its narrow equivalence with persuasion, and freed from the need to convince large audiences about life and death issues, it is the

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gymnasium of the mind. Here students begin to test and assess their own powers. They become judges of themselves. AN ANALOGY Literary, historical and philosophical texts have pedagogic value only to the extent that the student assimilates and transforms them through work. There is more than enough material. None of it is worth a bean without the active intervention of the student. Cognitive and expressive skills are developed through use of the material and, hence, through the practice of exercising the mind. Let us explore this analogy, without forgetting that analogies only take us so far. Everyone agrees that a certain amount of exercise is good for the body and for physical health. Exercise not only builds new muscles, but also keeps them in shape. Bending and stretching keep the body supple and prevent stiffening. Little by little is the key to healthy regular exercise. Sporadic and intense bouts of physical exertion are not beneficial. We want to build habits of exercise which both produce and maintain physical excellence and health. The mind is analogous to the body. It needs exercise. This exercise both produces and maintains it. We want to add new muscles to the mind and keep them fit. We do this by building habits of exercising the mind so that it goes from strength to strength, long after the time when the body has passed the peak of its perfection. Some mental exercises are analogous to weight-training and are aimed at strength. Others are analogous to gymnastics and are aimed at suppleness and balance. The former produce mental muscles where none existed before; the latter, through bending and stretching, keep them agile. Just as a programme of physical fitness contains a number of different exercises, so will a programme of study. We need to develop logical powers, a sense of style, the ability to describe, analyse, argue and invent. Some of the exercises can be carried out in the classroom, but others are strictly extracurricular. Study is self-initiating and self-propagating. The first step is always one’s own, and it is into the unknown. Our job as teachers is to find ways to encourage students to become self-moving and self-motivated. Therefore, we should do everything we can to make the material come alive for them. However, this does not happen for them through our actions, but through their own, by working with the texts they study and discuss. The analogy with physical exercise is the answer to those who see the study of poetry, philosophy and history as alien and unnatural. It is a second nature produced by the training of the first. This is worth explaining to students, who are required to trust their teachers at the outset with unfamiliar and sometimes difficult exercises. In the end, trust must be replaced by self-motivation, and this comes only with practice. We cannot ride a bicycle well and with pleasure if we do not learn to ride it at all.

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PRACTICAL MATTERS Like physical exercises, the first mental exercises should be brief and easy, ascending by stages of difficulty to the most intricate and sophisticated operations. Even the brightest students can benefit from the simplest tasks, if these are repeated and discussed. The combination of practice and reflection is vitally important here. Too often there is a long gap between what students do and any response to it. Basic exercises, designed to be complemented in class time, are one way of overcoming this problem. Students learn to work with the material instead of regarding it as an inert, inaccessible mass. They learn to think, speak, read and write ‘on the spot’. Initially, the exercises are done in class. Later on, more complicated tasks may be set and brought to the class for discussion; but to begin with, it is useful to work in situ. Our practice is to assign a short, anonymous writing exercise in the first part of a session; to collect and shuffle the papers; and then to read them out one at a time. The results are not graded. Virtues and vices of every kind, from grammatical slips to good and bad arguments, are remarked. Obviously there are other ways of going about it, depending on the size, type and character of the class. Anonymity is valuable for several reasons. First, because it encourages everyone to take part wholeheartedly without embarrassment. Each student does some writing every week and the seminar carries fewer idle passengers. Second, because it lets students make their mistakes and submit to criticism without feeling that shame which paralyses so many. Third, because it minimizes competitiveness and promotes objectivity. Fourth, because it shows that what matters in this forum is the effort to learn as part of a group. For this reason, it does not matter if only a few texts are actually read out, discussed and criticized each week. No one is singled out or neglected. But where to begin? It does not matter. To begin at all, anywhere, is to discover what is needed. Below, we suggest some simple starting points for the fields of philosophy and literature. We choose them for the same reason that musicians repeatedly practise the most elementary parts of their craft. There is great value in the simplest tasks. PHILOSOPHICAL EXERCISES Précis, paraphrase and summary are three exercises which call upon roughly parallel networks of concepts. Let us examine them in more detail. Précis is an act of compression. We take a larger text and make it smaller, always trying to leave nothing out. Of course it is impossible to do this, so the exercise admits only degrees of perfection. However, we need only a better and a worse to begin to make progress. It does not matter for the present discussion whether our conception of better and worse itself changes through time. There is progress too, perhaps, in judging what is better.

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Précis is impossible, which is precisely why it makes a good exercise. We ask students to take any number of pages, put them into one, and to think about what this involves. We might advise them to make an outline, to number the major points they find in the text, and to express each as succinctly as they can. We tell them to try to be conscious of what they are leaving out and why. The number of pages does not matter. The exercise is the same whether they are reducing a book, chapter or section of text. For a beneficial result, however, a précis of one side of one page is a good length for the classroom exercise or as homework. The exercise of précis-writing develops critical powers. A précis does not simply copy salient features of the original text, but selects and orders them as well. To write one involves wrestling with the text to the extent that questions are posed, the answers to which find their way into the précis. In fact, a précis is just the answer to the question which asks what the central points of the text are, and in what order they occur. It develops the ability to find and then to set out the main points of a text in as few words as possible. The précis appears straightforward. It does not question but attempts to mimic its object, the text. A good précis is true to the text and conceals an identity of form within its difference in length. It goes directly to the central points of the text. The margins are consigned to marginality, the shadows remain in the shade. It seeks identity, not difference. As a metaphysical theory, the logos of the précis may have little to recommend it, but as an exercise in compression and concentration it has much. The students’ viewpoint can be enlarged only if it first has a focus of some kind. The exercise of writing a précis encourages that focus to be taken up and articulated into its parts. The précis brings together features of the text which are marked as significant within it. Phrases such as ‘the reader should particularly note the following point’ and other subtler variations indicate places that are highlighted in the text itself. Précis-writing is an exercise of analysis followed by synthesis. The longer text is analysed and the result is synthesized. If the précis is a reduction in scale, then the original is taken apart only to be put back together minus its least necessary and peripheral portions. The longer text is itself a whole which precedes the précis and its analytic bias. Practice in this exercise is a practice in analytical criticism. It can sensitize minds to those guiding signals, sometimes very faint, which emanate from the text. SUMMARY AND PARAPHRASE A word of caution. In speaking of summary and paraphrase we are in danger of falling into the presiding temptation of rhetorical study, to complicate and proliferate the use of linguistic forms. The more one begins to uncover the workings of meaning and effect-producing devices of language, the more tempting it is to skip wider questions in order to concentrate on details. For example, we can argue that the difference between précis and summary is that

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the former reproduces the structure of the original text while the latter states its conclusions. But what is the difference between these and the abstract? It is easy to see how to start asking such questions, but difficult to see where to stop. Our rule of thumb is to mark only the differences which make a difference, and thus to reconsider the place of rhetorical training within philosophical education. We must choose rhetorical exercises useful to this pursuit, not cling to the manuals of the past. Their use makes sense only within a wider educational project. Philosophy is one field where rhetorical exercises become philosophical. Not all rhetorical exercises will be of use to philosophy students, and some will be of more value than others. The same is true with the other disciplines, but each will have to make its own selections. With this in mind, let us return to the question of paraphrase. As much as anything, this exercise encourages mental expansion. The problem is to make unfamiliar concepts and technical terms part of everyday understanding, to make them part of an active vocabulary. This means using the concepts in differing contexts, pondering the questions and difficulties of interpretation which arise from them. Strictly speaking, paraphrase asks us to put in other words those we find before us. Those ‘other words’ could be anyone’s. In philosophy, the point of writing a paraphrase is for students to put the argument in their own words, not simply to rearrange the terms of the text to be paraphrased. Paraphrase calls upon a wide variety of skills. Students have to decide, once again, what the object text is saying and doing, but the real test is to find the right example to make the point in a way that connects with their own thoughts and concerns. It is a kind of translation, not from language to language, but from idiom to idiom within the same language. The challenge is to capture another’s words in one’s own. This is impossible to perform perfectly, yet again we recognize a better and a worse in translations of all kinds and can give reasons for our judgements. Paraphrase forces the individual to confront the text as an object to be transformed through work into another text. This second text is a reading of the first, but never the only one. The important thing is that in the paraphrase we find an interpretative strategy at work. Since no paraphrase is perfect, each leaves out elements which another might include. It is instructive to question the strategy of selection at work in a paraphrase, one’s own or another’s. Paraphrase highlights portions of the text and puts others in the shade. The attempt to put another’s thoughts and arguments in one’s own words makes the student aware, upon questioning, of the many possibilities of interpretation. This awareness of textual complexity feeds right back into reading and writing, talking and listening. Students begin to come at texts from different directions, sensitive to the tensions in and around the text. This is an advance in thought, since it brings with it an increased power of expression, one with the considerable resources of langguage behind it. Paraphrase is practice in the making of interpretations. Its aim is to say the same thing in other words and to say it consistently, intelligibly and coherently.

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Behind the difference of words it looks for the sameness of meaning and thought. A good paraphrase is one in which the reader or listener can recognize the similarity between the text to be paraphrased and the paraphrase itself. To read or evaluate a paraphrase requires a comparison with an original. Yet this ‘original’ always slips away. The text is there, but it is not possible to compare the meaning of the text to that of the paraphrase, since the meaning to be compared is already part of an interpretation of the text. Both a paraphrase and its reading are always provisional and selective. Nevertheless, this instability of meaning does not prevent us from comparing what we see in the paraphrase with what we see in the ‘original’. For example, faced with a paraphrase of Kant’s analytic in terms of a computer model of the mind, a positive response runs as follows: Yes, that’s just how Kant would have made that point, if he had been speaking in late twentieth-century idioms. Instead of using the language of faculty psychology, he would use the language of computer programming and neural networking. Kant’s categories are the basic computational programs built into the hardware of the brain. They perform preset activities in fixed ways, and outside of them the computer is not programmed to deal with input of any kind. This restatement of Kant’s position is not wholly adequate, but it might be a good paraphrase. There would seem to be not much difference between paraphrase and analogy. The ‘other terms’ in the example are borrowed from computer science. They have their own uses in well-defined contexts. The analogy is between Kant’s categories of pure reason and the computer’s program. They are both a matter of software, a question of structure. We can push the analogy to illuminate the computer model of the mind and Kant’s transcendental psychology. This is a good result in an exercise designed to sharpen the mind. So is the inevitable ‘failure’ of the paraphrase or analogy. The exercise of producing paraphrases has built-in imperfections. Errors are part of the learning process and students should not be penalized for them. We do not judge a musician on how well the scales are played; nor should we judge students upon their rhetorical exercises. However, because grades are necessary in present circumstances, assessment is made if précis, summary, paraphrase or analogy are attempted in an essay or exam. The exercises discussed so far, with the possible exception of analogy, are straightforward and serious. You have to keep your mind on the task at hand, to boil down or render an original text whose status is always in question. There are others which give students a considerably freer hand. These are imaginative translations and transpositions of the voice and vocabulary of another thinker outside straightforward contexts. The paraphrase of Kant into the language of computer theory takes one step in this direction. Now let us take another.

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One exercise in philosophy which asks for something more than analysis and re-synthesis is the task of imaginatively working through the response of a longdead philosopher to a contemporary issue. To follow our example, we might ask Kant to respond to the issues surrounding the current debate about artificial intelligence and the chances of producing machines that think. Whatever Kant’s view is, students are never going to get anywhere with the question except by trying to respond to it themselves. If they put themselves in Kant’s place, what would they think about it? This is a good question, but one without a ‘right’ answer. It is an exercise, one which calls upon their ability to identify with the thought of another, if not always sympathetically and with admiration. The field is wide. What is Rousseau’s position on animal rights? Will Mill please comment upon business ethics? How would Plato intervene in the debate on euthanasia? How would Aquinas argue the abortion issue? Will Carnap help us with the question of embryo research? Let us have Russell on pluralism, Hegel on the political ferment in Eastern Europe, Feuerbach on religious revivalism, and so on. How would Descartes view the ‘decentring’ of philosophy? There is no end to the number of exercises that can be devised on this model. Relevance to subjects and topics will uncover those most useful for particular courses. Such an exercise is good because it makes students work through a philosophy from the inside. Writing as someone else, the work of imaginative synthesis is required. They must ask themselves, ‘If I were Kant or Descartes, how would I see the world, how describe it, how adapt my philosophy to cover novel questions or previously unimaginable contexts?’ The mere asking of these questions starts a train of others which lead in ever-widening circles through the philosophy at work in the text, an effective way of doing something constructive with it. This exercise develops a mimetic skill, but does not culminate in the performance of another text. Its aim is the creation of a distinctive voice or style of thought through the internalization and assimilation of linguistic devices and codes embodied in texts which are initially alien. A variant of the exercise that asks philosophers to comment upon current issues is one that asks them to talk to each other. What would Descartes have to say to Wittgenstein? to Heiddeger? to Derrida? We must remember, here, that these names conjure up the writings we attribute to them. The Descartes which students imaginatively reconstruct in their exercises is not so much the man himself as a useful fiction of the texts. This is the Descartes who is led into contemporary debates. We make him answer our questions and discuss our topics. This kind of philosophical and rhetorical exercise encourages reflection on the text and its relations to a world we still inhabit. The technical name for this is prosopopoeia. It means ‘to speak in the voice of another’. In many ways it is cousin to the paraphrase, but the ‘other words’ are not the student’s own, but those of whoever is to speak. To do a good job with this exercise requires textual knowledge, understanding and imagination. The knowledge required is simply a memory of what the writer says on different

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topics. Learning the language and the lore is a bit tedious. You have to sit down and remember a few definitions, a few maxims. Understanding comes with further reflection on them. Descartes wrote ‘Cogito ergo sum’, but what this sentence rneans depends upon interpretation and critical reflection. This further work is impossible if we do not have his writings, as it were, on tap. A student must know Descartes well in order to enter imaginatively into the question of his response to other issues or other philosophers. The completed exercise reflects a level of achievement in understanding the figure concerned. From paraphrase and prosopopoeia, let us move to another sort of exercise which asks us to write in the style of a thinker. This will often involve trying out different philosophical genres, at least in miniature. Thus, one invites students to write a dialogue like Plato, a journal à la Kierkegaard, a stoic meditation in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius, aphorisms in the style of Nietzsche, an essay such as Locke’s, or numbered paragraphs in the manner of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The value of exercises like these is similar to that of prosopopoeia: it invites students to enter the world of the text, to move about in it, to pick up the feel of it and the arrangements of its parts. It invites an imaginative identification with the text through an exercise of imitation. The critical task comes later and is all the better for students who have entered into the spirit of the philosophy they study. They learn by granting, for the sake of argument, both assumptions and conclusions in order to explore fully the universe projected by the work. Students are more likely to remember their own spoken and written productions than those of others, however brilliant. The words, in this case, are the words of the text, the thoughts are of another thinker. By systematically granting assumptions and following arguments, students discover a way to look at a wide variety of topics and questions from something like a unified perspective. Of course, it is often impossible, given the best will in the world, not to notice discrepancies between remarks of the same philosopher. Often, the more one tries to find supporting evidence for a philosopher’s theory, the more one begins to notice cracks. The game is to pretend not to notice them for a specified time. Let the Emperor continue to think he is finely dressed until we find out what he does. There is no fun in pointing out his nakedness too early. Writing or speaking in the style of a given philosopher on a wide range of issues is one very good way of entering the study of philosophy itself. It makes accessible a fairly stable body of thought by which students may thread their way through the labyrinth of confusing theories. It gives them something to compare with the other theories and philosophers they encounter. The fact that it is only an illusion of stability does not prevent it bringing together and concentrating some main questions of philosophy. If the student knows, in the sense of remembers, what Descartes said about the main questions in epistemology and metaphysics, than that student is in a better position to understand the various criticisms which are levelled at Descartes’s philosophy, better able to see that while there are many sides to philosophy, each can be supported and criticized.

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QUESTIONING THE TEXT One argument does not a philosophy make, nor a single contradiction destroy. The imitative exercise of writing in the mode of a given philosopher or text encourages students to see the work as marshalling arguments and points in order to bring them to bear, concertedly, on a philosophical theory or practice. By trying to argue Descartes’s or Kant’s position, students can go to the text and ask for help. Where do the philosophers touch the question at issue? How do they handle it? How many arguments can be gathered up and used to put together a ramified defence or extension? Anything which encourages students to take an interrogative attitude to the text is good for study. Questioning the text is one of the main ways to do something with it, though not the only way. In the exercise under consideration, we are asking the text to show us what makes its case most strongly. However, it is equally feasible to do the opposite and question the text as to its weaknesses. In this way the exercise of writing in the style of someone else, or arguing another’s case, turns into the basis of a critical approach to the texts under consideration. It is by remembering what philosophers have said and written that students become able to uncover flaws in their reasoning. Consider Descartes’s philosophy again. There is evidence in it of anxiety over the seemingly insoluble puzzles generated by the supposition of a mind-body dualism. The connection between them remains a mystery, not least for Descartes. He gestures towards his ignorance and asks us to do better. He is not very interested in the problem, and his infamous appeal to ‘animal spirits’ in the pineal gland shows more exasperation than philosophical sense. So, by trying to enter Descartes’s philosophy, to go along and encourage it, the student also feels those tensions and anxieties, feels the force of implicit or explicit criticisms. Exposition and philosophical criticism are two sides of the same coin. The one works from within, the other from without. When the time comes to assign grades, we give the best ones to critical essays, not ones which, however competently, do no more than recapitulate a given argument. The exercises under consideration give students practice in thinking in terms other than their own, and thus increase those very terms. However, this is not the whole story. We need to add exercises which bear more directly upon the development of critical competence. LITERARY EXERCISES It is often assumed that literature and philosophy have to be studied in different ways. Philosophy is concerned with arguments and ideas, literature with themes and styles. While it is perfectly true that two very different disciplines appear to have grown up, closer examination often reveals that the differences are matters of emphasis. A poem may have a strong and subtle argument, while a page of philosophy may rely heavily on a metaphor. For this reason all the exercises

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applied to the study of philosophy in the previous section can be used with equal profit when discussing literature. In order to illustrate this, we suggest working some of these exercises with an example which seems about as far away from philosophy as it is possible to go: a ‘Romantic’ poem which represents everything people conventionally expect of poetry, and which they often say should not be analysed. Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel than or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. (‘Remember’, in Rossetti 1970) There are many ways to approach this poem, but most of them are concerned with its meaning, whether they be naive biographical interpretations or fearsomely difficult deconstructions. As we saw in Chapter 3, however, there are several stages in reading which come before formal interpretation. We must first scan the text, establishing how it is put together, what is or is not there. Memoria We begin with an exercise of transcription. Once this is done, we we add another task, more associated with poetry than philosophy: memorizing the text. It is extraordinary that one of our major mental powers remains almost entirely untrained in today’s schools, presumably because it is associated with sentimental images of cruel teachers in dreary classrooms flogging Latin poetry into baffled school-children. Yet memory is a vital part of any education worth the name and it is more than a merely mechanical skill. Quite apart from the pleasure to be derived from learning poetry, or even passages of prose, what is memorized grows in the mind (or the unconscious) without effort on our part. Historically, of course, poetry is the product of a memory culture. Rhymes, stanzas and verbal patterns contribute to ease of recall. In our age of electronic information retrieval, poetry can now perform an equivalent function by stimulating an ability which may otherwise become atrophied.

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Most important of all, learning a poem is a way of appropriating it, and appropriation is the first step to understanding. Of course memorizing a poem is not the only way of taking possession of it, and we are not suggesting it can or should be used in every or even many cases. One cannot, after all, memorize long poems or whole novels. But if our memory is well trained we will not need to commit them to heart. Memory begins to work involuntarily, like any other faculty. Students may not remember whole poems or passages accurately, but what might be called the general memory grows in strength and their impressions become sharper and more long-lasting. We also take the view that rote learning is not necessarily a bad thing, but can be a pleasure and a convenience. To resort to a calculator or book of tables every time you need to know the product of four times nine is wearisome indeed. Yes, we can remember learning poems at school and hating every minute of it, but that is because the task was presented as a hurdle, a painful test, not as an intriguing, delightful and productive game. When students have transcribed and memorized some lines of the poem, they should check one another’s work carefully for discrepancies. Why should they do this? Something was said on the subject in Chapter 3 but the study of a poem suggests several other powerful reasons. First, it reminds them that they are dealing with something visible, palpable, scriptive, composed of material signs whose accurate transcription is the first condition of study and understanding. The status of literature’s existence on the page is a hot theoretical issue at present, so this exercise also raises theoretical questions. Second, the process of transcribing and checking makes students read the words with close attention. Laziness is the main enemy in textual criticism and this exercise at least forces students to be aware of exactly what words are on the page before they begin to produce interpretations. Third, the exercises draw students’ attention to the complexities of typography and punctuation, so often taken for granted, yet playing a crucial role in the understanding of texts. This may be easier to comprehend with a poem that looks distinctive on the page, and it leads to serious discussion concerning the significance of stanzas and verses, rhyme schemes, titles and every other visual aspect of the text. Fourth, students with any sensibility will immediately improve their feeling for a writer’s style and ambience, simply by noticing such things as the order of the words and the manner of punctuation. The more limited students are encouraged to notice that there is a style. It will no doubt be said that these activities are puerile. Certainly it may seem so when set beside the barrage of complex literary theories to which first-year undergraduates are often subjected. Our argument is simply that it is useless to erect an elaborate building if the foundations are rotten or non-existent. In all too many cases, teaching at undergraduate level is as much a matter of stripping away useless habits and prejudices as it is of anything else. Too many students

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arrive at college full of half-baked, half-understood theories but can hardly transcribe or read aloud a few lines of prose or verse with any accuracy. Learning the poem and writing it out may awaken livelier students to the realization that the poem ‘exists’ in a problematic way. It has one kind of existence as signs on a page, another in the reader’s memory, and yet another in the writer’s imagination. The perception of these diverse modes of existence is one way of opening up the route to theoretical discussion of what a poem ‘is’ and what it does. Thus the simplest exercises can generate the most sophisticated theoretical philosophical discussion, where students have the aptitude for it. Clearly one cannot write out every text studied, nor is there any need to do these exercises with more than selected examples. Transcribing and memorizing a few lines of Milton or Pope, for example, can do more to open students’ eyes to their distinctiveness than wearily reading endless pages of criticism. But though economy of effort is desirable, the primary purpose is the banishment of readerly passivity. Almost all readers tend to become lazy and vague over time. Once a student learns how to fillet a text quickly and efficiently, the details tend to slip by unnoticed. The task of reading becomes routine, mechanical, and thereby selfdefeating in the long term. Yet in the short term even its mechanical qualities can be a virtue, in that any student, however unprepared, can perform this first stage on the road to critical competence on a par with his or her more able contemporaries. Having transcribed and (perhaps) memorized the poem, students are then asked to note every interesting feature of it: rhyme scheme, form, unusual diction, appearance on the page, sound and so on, without reference to the poem’s meaning. The point of this is to get them to look at the text (verse or prose) as a construct or machine. Once again, this focuses attention and sharpens responses when we come to discuss what the poem means. Précis, summary and paraphrase Having appropriated the text, the students are ready to begin tentative exercises in interpretation, starting with summary, précis and paraphrase. There is no need to repeat here the differences between them or the justification for these exercises outlined in the last section. All three are valuable for reasons which are apparent in the following discussion. In essence, all three are forms of translation. Where a second language is available, a most valuable exercise involves translating the poem or part of it, and then discussing the problems involved. This was, of course, central to the classical curriculum in which all students had access to one or two other languages. Sadly, this is rarely the case in English-speaking countries, for just as people are said to learn about their own country by going abroad, so they learn about their own language by learning another. Fortunately, there are different kinds of language even within one tongue. We can, as it were, treat poetic diction (in so far as the poem has any) as a foreign

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tongue. This approach raises yet another crucial question about how far the poem is in colloquial English, and how far it is a variant of poetic or literary language. This is a central issue for any student of literature, but it applies with equal relevance to other disciplines in the humanities. The question of philosophical languages is clearly a vital one. What are they? What relation do they have to ‘ordinary’ language, whatever that may be? What do they tell us about the capacity of ordinary language? Why do they come into being? We begin by asking students to paraphrase the poem in about the same number of words. It may be best to take the task stage by stage, concentrating on the first four lines, then the next four, and so on. From this procedure problems of interpretation will soon emerge, although we are concentrating for the moment only on the literal or surface meaning of the words. Finding enough synonyms is a problem in itself, which may cause some students to notice that one word does not simply stand in for another in a straightforward way. They may also become aware that the simple diction of the poem carries a whole complex of subtle references. Having done this they are asked to make both a summary and a précis of the text, that is, a list of the points it makes and a reduced version of the poem itself. Both these tasks are fear-somely difficult and we would not expect students to succeed. Their value lies in the attempt and the subsequent comparison and discussion of versions. Instead of the usual vague claims about what the poem means, students are thus forced to give chapter and verse for their interpretations, and argue them out with others. At this stage other meanings emerge and students are faced with the further problem of how to deal with them. Do we give what appears to be the surface meaning priority? Is there, in fact, just one surface meaning? How do we distinguish between levels of meaning? Is the poem about different things at the same time? Though the word ‘death’ is never mentioned, most readers assume the poet is referring to death—but is she? How valid is that assumption? Is the whole poem really about death, or is it about some other kind of parting? These exercises draw attention to two things: (1) why the poem is as it is and how it might have been otherwise; and (2) how different interpretations arise. On the first point, students are invited to notice the difference between the sonnet and its prose paraphrases. What part do the rhymes play? How does the sonnet structure shape the poem? The student’s attention is drawn to the sentence structure of the poem, to compare it with their own. Taking the first sentence, and paraphrasing only that, for example, how far can students preserve the structure as well as the sense? Do they notice the extended repetition of ‘gone away’, the balance of ‘Nor’ and ‘When’, the variation on ‘turn’ and ‘turning’? Can they reproduce them? And if so, how? The paraphrase is developed further by asking students to write about the part played by this or that word in the poem, ‘remember’, ‘turn’, ‘vestige’ and so on, bringing out its particular sense or senses in the poem.

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Amplificatio When this is done we take the process two stages further, reducing the poem and expanding it. First we ask for statements of the theme in a single sentence. Then we put the reducing procedure into reverse, amplifying or expanding the poem, analysing the stages by which it proceeds, taking into account sonnet structure, punctuation and the emotional evolution of the poem, as well as steps of the argument. This is more complex than appears at first. It is worth imposing a word limit on this exercise to prevent subtler students from being carried away. Alternatively, the revelation of each subtlety in one or two examples will show how indefinite exegesis is, a useful theoretical lesson in the distinction between exposition and interpretation (such as it is), and the multiplicity of interpretive nuances. At this stage students compare their expositions with other people’s to see what the differences are, and why. This exercise is far more valuable than the somewhat aimless discussions which often pass for work in seminars and group tutorials. Whatever help the tutor gives with initial exercises, students must be encouraged to rely on each other at the comparative stage. The point of these exercises, beginning with the formalizing of conventional attempts to say what the poem is ‘about’, is to show that Rossetti’s choice of theme and language, easy and natural as they may sound, are at least in part the product of highly sophisticated conscious artifice. Students are led to reflect on whether the poet has chosen the best methods to say what she seems to want to say; whether it could usefully have been done otherwise; how far the words are distinguishable from the sense; where the metaphors and similes are, what they are, and what they do; how the punctuation works and so on. There are many possible variations of these exercises, and they can be adapted to suit any sort of text, including those most resistant to any sort of summary, such as surrealist poetry. Even in that case, the attempt to summarize or paraphrase is most illuminating, if only negatively. The greatest virtue of the practical approach, however, is that it forces students to back up their accounts of the poem with detailed reference to the text, and it encourages them to be less narrow minded about the attribution of meaning. Ethopoeia and prosopopoeia Having ‘translated’ the poem in various ways, we can then move to forms of imitation and impersonation. These open the way to more imaginative work, after the stricter exercises which establish the nature of the text as it is. In this way students deepen their understanding of formal and thematic elements of the poem by creating their own work out of the material it provides. Students begin by imitating the basic elements of the poem’s style: sentence structure, rhyme scheme, verse form and diction. Take the first sentence once again. We have already invited students to notice its distinctive structural

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features. Now we want to ask other questions. Are they aware of the play of vowels and consonants at work here? Do they observe how and why the lines are laid out on the page as they are? Do they understand how and why the rhyme is closed? Some will answer these questions affirmatively. Some will seem to know instinctively, others to have learnt the answers, but few will be able to put coherent reasons to their perceptions. This is why the next set of exercises is so pertinent. Students are asked to reproduce features of the first sentence, in a sentence of their own, whether of structure, sound or rhyme. The point is for them to understand and use voice, tone, style and manner as distinct from subject matter. Can they get inside the skin of this highly idiosyncratic poet? In the ancient handbooks, impersonation finds two common forms, ethopoeia and prosopopoeia. The first involves writing for a known character, real or fictional; the second means inventing both characters and words. Strangely enough, impersonation is very much out of fashion among academic critics, though the writers they study revel in it. Speculating on what characters in novels might do outside them, for example, is sternly discouraged by most teachers on the grounds that it distracts attention from the text. This is a legacy of twentieth-century attempts to institute literary studies as a serious university discipline by banishing all imaginative or creative approaches in favour of scientific rigour and narrow definitions of objectivity. Fortunately, recent theory and criticism shows signs of moving away from these false and absurd dichotomies, albeit in alarmingly sophisticated forms. Pedagogic practice has been slow in following suit, but we can restore both ethopoeia and prosopopoeia to undergraduates by introducing them to critical practice as we introduced them to compositional practice in Chapter 3. Ancient teachers are very positive about the value of impersonation for inculcating the principle of decorum. By learning to speak and write ‘in the manner of’, students learn how to suit styles to characters and situations. For modern purposes, we can see that this also works the other way round. Learning to write and speak ‘in the manner of’ is a most effective way of finding out just what that manner is, what it does, what it cannot do, and why it is in use. The pleasure many people take in mimicry suggests that there is a huge reservoir of talent and interest to be tapped among our students if they can apply their taste for parodies to the study of literature. Having learnt how to imitate the elements of style, students are ready to impersonate this poet and the characters in her poem in a number of ways. They begin by writing a few more lines, stanzas, or even a whole poem in the manner of Christina Rossetti; on a similar subject or on something very different. This is an alarming challenge for students resistant to verse, but that gives it all the more value, since it is propaedeutic to a full understanding of poetry. After that, they might write a poem in reply by the person addressed in the poem, or turn the poem itself into a verse or prose dialogue between the two characters.

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Taking the process further might involve writing critical commentary on the poem in the style of this or that critic. It would clearly be best to begin with very distinctive critics: Arnold, Eliot, Leavis and Lukács spring to mind as writers whose style and stance are easily imitated. This exercise provides a vital link between the creative and critical processes we have emphasized in this book. The student employs just as much imagination impersonating the critic as impersonating the poet. After these experiments in ethopoeia this sequence of exercises concludes by asking the students to imagine a friend or contemporary of Rossetti’s commenting on her poem, or inventing a modern poet’s response to her work. The possibilities are many and will be limited only by available time, student aptitude, and educational priorities. However, we need to remind ourselves again of the danger inherent in the rhetorical paidaeia: that it can become an end in itself for those fascinated by it. Our principle in this case is utility. These exercises are worth doing only if they help students to understand the ways in which texts are produced and the critical procedures by means of which they are interpreted. Theme, plot and character So far we have concentrated on the textual minutiae of one poem. But how useful are these methods when dealing with plays and novels, for example, or when discussing theme, plot and character? A few words on this topic is in order. As with short poems, the tendency of initial discussions about longer texts is to ask what they are about. Though inevitable, this can have a very depressing effect on discussion, by reducing all critical discourse to subjective squabbles about interpretation. One solution to this problem is to ask students to summarize or paraphrase the ‘theme’ at different lengths: in a phrase, a sentence, a short paragraph, a long paragraph, and so on. This is a way of bringing home to them that the theme is not simply a little nugget to be extracted like gold from the text’s ore. More importantly, it makes them pay close attention to the text. This exercise is more illuminating in the case of plot because it focuses attention so sharply on the problem of just what the plot is. Is it the same as the story? Is it the causal mechanism on which the story hangs? If so, which elements of the narrative are causal and essential, which superfluous, and so on? Students summarize the plot at different lengths, taking in different levels of detail. The discussion of character is a rather different and more sophisticated exercise that involves a number of operations, beginning with the student’s description of the character in his or her own words, continuing with conjecture about how that character behaves in other circumstances, and concluding with the student writing as that character so described and understood.

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It is neither desirable nor necessary to expound a complete manual of rhetorical criticism. Given the basic concepts of translation and imitation which underlie all the procedures described in these chapters, it is open to all teachers and students to make up their own exercises. SECONDARY LITERATURE Most of our discussion has dealt with primary texts, but contemporary study is at least as much based on critical commentaries. The trouble is that these are often as difficult as the works they refer to. Students find it hard to take up an independent and critical attitude to them. How are undergraduates to learn to make their own discriminations in the catalogue of criticism and commentary? One teaching strategy is to familiarize students with examples of journal articles, and to point out the patterns of critical arguments displayed in them. A good exercise is to have students write short reports on critical essays which discuss a topic or questions from the course reading list. Another is to ask for an outline of a critical argument, laying bare its structure. Précis and paraphrase are used to develop critical skills. The student works through someone else’s critical argument, which at the same time makes it more clear just what a critical argument is. When the time comes to write an extended essay or take an exam, the student will at least possess some idea of the forms that criticism takes. Critical competence is also encouraged through another exercise which we borrow from the ancient sophists: playing devil’s advocate. This exercise is not far removed from the exercise of writing in someone else’s style. In both cases students pretend to be something they are not. Playing devil’s advocate is a game in which the rules specifically encourage arguing a case whether or not it is at cross purposes to normal commitments and beliefs. For example, we ask all those who believe in God to argue for atheism, sceptics to argue for the existence of knowledge, libertarians for totalitarian government, pro-life advocates for the rights of women to opt for abortion, prochoice advocates for the immorality of abortion. In literary studies there are many comparable issues in which it is possible to choose sides and reverse them for the sake of argument. The value of playing devil’s advocate lies partly in the critical insight it provides, but also in the experience of role-playing it affords. These exercises are experiences in alienation. By playing devil’s advocate students learn to anticipate the objections that can be raised against their original positions. They discover that there are perspectives other than their own which have ceased to be mere intellectual abstractions. The exercise of devil’s advocate puts flesh on the bare bones of the opposing position and thus makes it more real.

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THE SPOKEN WORD We have discussed a range of writing exercises which give rise to discussion and then to more writing. We conclude this chapter by describing some speaking activities which are useful to literature and philosophy teachers, and by extension to liberal arts teachers in general. Like the training of memory, the training of speech is no longer fashionable outside speech and drama departments and debating societies, but we believe it is an important part of education in the humanities. It is a good idea, if possible, to devote some class time to formal debate, in which members of the class argue different sides of a philosophical or critical issue. The preparation for debate invites assessment of the pros and cons of different theories. The execution brings increased awareness of the role of body language and vocal delivery in putting the case. The point of this exercise is not to produce polished debaters so much as articulate speakers who can rise to the occasion at will and on demand. This is part of being fully articulate. The necessity of face-to-face communication in human affairs is not confined to courtrooms, assemblies and great ceremonial occasions. Speaking out in class as a participant in debate helps to incorporate this element of face-to-face address in the experience of the student so that he or she will gain some appreciation of the materiality of language, its strengths and weaknesses, the effects it produces in all kinds of audiences. By working with linguistic devices, patterns of recognition build up which add to speaking, reading and writing skills. The spoken address, the written page and the writing page complement each other. Practice in the use of linguistic devices to argue for and against philosophical claims and theories leads to increased critical competence and interpretative skill. Plainly, however, these exercises should not be done slavishly or in too much detail. READING ALOUD One of our themes is that writing and reading are privileged over speaking and listening. Before concluding this chapter, let us see what can be done to redress this imbalance. It is instructive to ask a student to read a page out loud. Often, there are pauses and awkwardnesses in presentation. Some sentences do not read very well; they do not make sense read out loud just as written. Faced with this lacuna, everyone is invited to rewrite the sentence so that it can be read out successfully to an audience. What often happens is that students attribute to their written work a meaning taken from the time of writing, which vanishes upon a later reading. Something which obviously made sense at the time of composition fails on a later occasion to do so. The exercise of reading written work out loud facilitates the development of a sense of distance between writing and reading out. At times it almost seems to the student as if someone else produced the piece he or she

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wrote last week. It can raise the questions ‘What did I mean by that?’, ‘What is the connection between this sentence or paragraph and the last or the one yet to come?’, ‘I knew what I meant then, but now I do not. What has gone wrong?’ This is a constructive puzzle to contemplate. It shows that Sartre was right when he said that rewriting is the essence of style. However, it is one thing to hear this, another to realize it for oneself. The need for rewriting becomes apparent when a first draft is read out loud. Speaking exercises have a great advantage. They sharpen the student’s awareness that what he or she says is directed to an audience. In debate, or in reading out written work, the audience is actually in the room, not a vague hypothetical audience of written work. It is hard to ignore the members of the audience while addressing them in person. This makes speaking in public a daunting proposal for many students. There is plenty of room for slips and embarrassment. Yet here, as elsewhere, practice makes competent. We find it helpful to keep the exercises short, no more than a single side of A4 paper at the maximum. We cultivate anonymity in the class. Each student reads a page picked at random from the pile. This puts the student more at ease, and shares the difficulty he or she might have in reading it equally with the author. In the end the whole class has a laugh, but not at a named person’s expense. Another method assigns the reading of a common class text to different students in turn. Of course it is the soundness of an argument that is to convince us, not its sound. Nevertheless, to read out a page of a philosopher’s or critic’s work requires an interpretation to give it sense, just as in the case of one’s own writing. The words are another’s, but to read them with sense is already to have grasped a meaning. The very act of reading out a passage contributes to an understanding of it. Difficulty in reading it out may reveal a problem in the student’s thought or in that of the text concerned. Such exercises, therefore, feed into the development of desirable critical competences. Reading aloud is improved by practice. The exercise of rereading the same text traces the movement of understanding. Difficulties of rhythm and emphasis are sorted out as one comes to grasp the point: ‘The stress goes here because it makes sense that way.’ Students begin to be able to see the meaning of the punctuation marks, to take hints from the text and to use them in reading. Though it has a mechanical component, reading text out loud also engages our imagination and understanding in such a way that our ‘reading’ and interpretation of the text come out in our reading of it. Another useful speaking exercise is the previously mentioned class report. This is distinguished from students reading out essays to the class. The trouble with such occasions is well known. They tend to become overblown. Students become nervous when they have to perform in front of the class. Occasionally some interesting work is produced in this way, with a student who reads out a longish essay. However, as everyone who has ever gone to an academic conference will know, delivery is not a strong point with most speakers. They tend to concentrate on a written text, held before them to read aloud. Couple this

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with a monotonous vocal tone and everyone is set for a somnolent forty minutes or so. At a conference of specialists one can expect a certain amount of common interest and knowledge. In class this cannot be assumed. Usually the hardpressed speaker is the only student who has gone into the material in any depth. The others are hoping for a free ride. The result is what happens when lecturers themselves forget their student audiences and imagine a room full of their peers, to whom they speak with all eloquence. Unfortunately this leaves out groundlings. The class is lost when the speaker’s words fail to address them, when the whole exercise is carried out at a level far exceeding the capacity of the actual audience. In class presentations we are not dealing with professionals come to deliver learned disquisitions, but with students who, by and large, simply rehash some of the secondary literature. The way forward is to take seriously the idea that it is what the students do with text that is important. The trouble with a major paper is that it is the burden of a single student. The load must be shared. Think of the class as engaged in a common project to which students and teachers contribute. The aim is to come to grips with some set of texts and the issues surrounding them. No one person is on the spot, but two or three can spread the burden and the work. We want more shorter contributions from students. The paper is too big. A short report is just right. Since the bulk of papers amount to little more than commentary, why not make this task explicit and ask students for short pieces on selected secondary readings? Like magic, the onus falls off the student and on to the shoulders of the author. If, out of that process, the student develops a critical perspective, well and good. There is plenty of room for these concerns to be expressed at the end of their reports, but if not, everyone will be at least acquainted with a relevant text and point of view. This is a definite contribution to the class. By giving reports the students will learn to address an audience not only with increasing confidence, but also with a sense of belonging to an investigation which is that of the class as a whole as well as every member of it. Self-consciousness and the possibility of embarrassment attend any public speaking. The practice of giving reports is meant to minimize these distractions. The student is not on the line. The report is not as personal as an essay or paper. Yet giving a report aloud does exercise the student’s ability to expel air at controlled rates of speed, to anticipate succeeding sentences and to shape a vehicle of cominunication. Ironically, the act of reading out a report, or giving one, does put across to an audience some thoughts arising from the text. It is thus already one step down the path that leads to giving papers. It is already a performance, though not one likely to be judged too harshly. The text is what everyone is looking at, and this gives the speaker an illusory feeling of invisibility, enough to practise delivering talks without too much worry. The practice of reading short reports aloud to an audience makes selfforgetfulness easier than holding up an original thesis and defending it from

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attack. When the thesis is criticized, it has nothing to do with the student who is delivering the report. This makes it easier for everyone to take that step back and consider the thesis on its own merits rather than how its success or failure reflects on the one who reads it out, as of ten happens on occasions of controversy and judgement. It is no wonder people feel nervous in that context. The report, on the other hand, is short and informative. It is researched in the library, adds to class knowledge and discussion, and limits the responsibility of the reporter. The point is to get students used to small acts of writing and speaking about their reading and listening and remembering. The vocal exercises of reading out a passage or a report reflect an understanding and interpretation of the text or script. The reading of the text recalls other texts, other issues, other questions. The same holds true with writing. All these different aspects of thinking feed into one another, build upon one another, support one another, and augment each other’s powers. The exercises we have explored represent a fair sample of the kinds of practice that facilitate a philosophical and literary education conceived as one which produces people who have the means to think for themselves about the issues raised by their studies. The exercises of paraphrase and analogy, of compression and expansion, roleplaying, reading aloud and playing devil’s advocate are not by any means a complete list. The main thing is that teachers begin to find more ways to encourage students to become active in the face of the text. This task is facilitated for us by the efforts of generations of grammarians, logicians, rhetoricians and sophists who devoted their lives to making fine distinctions in language use and noting the effects they produce in different audiences. Though the ancients often went overboard in the construction of elaborate systems of schemes and tropes, what they lef t behind is a treasure trove of exercises from which we can construct a rhetorical workshop in the contemporary classroom.

Chapter 5 Samples and preliminary results

Our revised rhetorical pedagogy for the humanities turns on the efficacy of the exercises to increase learning in philosophy and literature. We believe, however, that the results have general implications for higher education. The project continues to evolve as we write. In this chapter the reader will find complete exercises from two small groups of students who were enrolled for the literature and philosophy degree of Middlesex Polytechnic, London, in 1990. The exercises are expressly designed to suit a first-year course on Plato and Aristotle and a second-year course on Schopenhauer. In addition, there is an end-of-term evaluation exercise which asked for comments from first-year students, anonymously, on the progress of the class and what, if any, benefit the students felt they received from the new format of classroom exercises. The particularity of the circumstances at Middlesex Polytechnic—the fact that the literature and philosophy classes are small and proceed in two-hour increments, that we work with lectures and seminars, and that our students all pursue the same course of study—limits the conclusions that can be drawn from them for different institutions and degree courses. Nevertheless, we believe it is instructive to describe our practice and display its early results in some detail. The principles remain the same, though the problems change. The examples are from the philosophy class, but they could just as easily have come from classes in literature or history. We have two two-hour classes per week. One of these is a lecture, the other a seminar. Suppose the lecture concerns Aristotle’s theory of human happiness. The seminar on this lecture begins with one half-hour devoted to general discussion of the topic. This is followed by a halfhour period in which students write their exercises, and for the last hour a few of the pages are read out slowly to the class and discussed. The students’ assignment is to write no more than one side of an A4 piece of paper on the topic or topics of the day. Doing the assignment is a voluntary action. If a student wishes to sit and look at a blank page for half an hour, so be it; even that can be a learning experience. Another important point is the anonymity of the contributions. There are no names on the writings presented here. It is up to a student to volunteer or not to volunteer the information that it is his or her work that is up for examination and questioning. As time passes and the class

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members get to know and trust each other a bit, anonymity is not as important. For some students, however, it may remain an incentive to contribute to the class. So far the exercise is voluntary and anonymous. The coping-stone is nonassessment. Rhetorical exercises are not graded. The protection of anonymity is put up against the fear of judgement. No one wants to be thought a fool. Take away the fear of judgement, or rather personal judgement, and you take away some of the fetters of thought. Anonymity, and the fact that no one’s degree will suffer, frees the students and the teacher in their criticism and judgement of exercise work. To make it more random we shuffle the papers before picking out individual pieces to read to the class. Some escape, for a while, but there is always a chance that it will be their page that comes out of the pile; up for judgement after all, but at one remove. Some students find it unsettling at first, but they generally settle down after a while. The fact that they suffer in silence and privacy does make a difference to how much of a risk they are willing to take in writing their pages. Because we emphasize speaking as well as writing, the students take it in turn to read out other students’ pages. This is a good exercise in many ways. It makes students understand the importance of legible handwriting and structured expression. But even if everyone in the class had a portable word-processor and typed out their page of writing, the value in reading it out loud to the class would be preserved. Not only bad handwriting gets in the way of oral delivery, but also bad or misleading grammar and syntax. This point is crucial in philosophy, and valuable to other humanities disciplines. Conceptual clarity has a direct relation to perspicuous grammar. Reading another student’s page out loud faces a student with numerous choices of stress, intonation and inflection. All these, in the delivery itself, imply an act of interpretation which is at the same time a choice from the pool of possible readings. It is impossible to read out a passage without providing it with a reading. If a student can make neither head nor tail of it, a garbled version emerges, even though all the words may be read in their proper order. You might try reading the samples in this chapter out loud to yourselves. Difficulties of interpretation in the reading soon emerge, more for some than for others. It is not hard to imagine some of the ways class discussion can open out from this point of application, or the benefits students can derive from it. One benefit a student receives upon hearing his or her classmates’ pages read out anonymously is that it makes clear the differences in the quality of the written pages; from the senseless to the grammatically seamless, from the difficult to the effortless, from the random to the highly organized, from the superficial to the deep. In the process, the student gets a chance to develop incrementally. For example, a page is read out. It is a piece of passable prose. Another one is read, which is worse, while another is slightly better. By appreciating the variations in writing, students realize that improvement is not out of reach; even those near the top have themselves to improve upon. With

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application, nearly everyone can progress to a level of adequacy or competence which far outstrips what can be achieved without training and practice. Another benefit is that it soon becomes clear that there is not always a one-toone correspondence between good writing and good thinking. If you read the student responses, you will see that some of them are written well but touch a problem very superficially, while others are poorly written, but have a deeper grasp of the problem. So writing clearly and well is an aid both to thinking and to the communication of a thought. The interesting, but badly written, efforts would benefit from grammatical coherence if not elegance of style. In philosophy at any rate, thinking style is rarely of primary importance, but at the same time it is impossible to think about anything coherently without some style or manner of proceeding. Let us look a little more closely at the writings of a first-and second-year philosophy class. The order is purely random. It is helpful to refer to the exercise when reading them. The pages are transcribed with a minimum of change, keeping the lack of punctuation, etc. However, we have left out the passages which are crossed out on many of the pages. Occasionally the transcription from the handwriting is so tenuous that we have tried to make some sense where none was directly to be found. The first set have a commentary to indicate lines of questioning. The rest speak for themselves. The two exercises given here are not meant to be original or out of the ordinary in any way. They simply ask the students to comment upon and consider some questions from Aristotle and Schopenhauer. At the end of the chapter we will give some more examples of the types of exercise one can set in relation to teaching ancient philosophy. It is for literature or history or cultural studies teachers to devise for themselves the exercises most suited to the needs of their students and their subjects. EXERCISE I, YEAR I: ARISTOTLE ON PLEASURE Consider and comment on either or both of the following two quotes from Aristotle’s Ethics (1976:81). The questions at the end are suggestions. the argument of some thinkers that there must be something better than pleasure, because the end is better than the process (genesis, coming-intobeing) is not conclusive; because pleasures are not processes, nor do they all involve a process; they are a species of activity (energeia), and therefore an end (telos). They result not from the development of our powers, but from the use that we make of them. Nor have they all some end other than themselves; this is so only in the case of those that are involved in our advance to the completion (perfection) of our nature. It is therefore incorrect to call pleasure a perceptible process; we ought rather to say ‘an activity of our nature state’, and ‘unimpeded’ instead of ‘perceptible’.

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(p. 252: Book VII 1153a 9–15) Each of the senses is active relatively to its object, and its activity is perfect when it is in a good condition and is directed towards the highest object that falls within its range of sen sation…therefore the activity of any sense is at its best when the organ is in the best condition and directed towards the best of the objects proper to that sense. This activity will be most perfect and most pleasurable; for there is a pleasure corresponding to each of the senses, just as there is to thought and contemplation; and it is most pleasurable when it is most perfect, and most perfect when the organ is in a healthy condition and directed towards the worthiest of its objects; and the pleasure perfects the activity…as a sort of supervening perfection, like the bloom that graces the flower of youth. (p. 320: Book X 1147b–1175b) Do these passages flatly contradict each other or is there a way to see them as compatible? Is there an alternative to this either/or? Both passages agree that pleasure is not a process (a coming-into-being); are they both perhaps wrong? What does it mean, in the first passage, where Aristotle says that not all pleasures have ‘some end other than themselves’, but only ‘those that are involved in our advance to the completion (perfection) of our nature’? Aristotle compares the mind to a physical organ of sensation in the second passage. There is, he argues, a pleasure corresponding to ‘thought and contemplation’. How far will this analogy hold? Student 1. Not all pleasures ‘have some end other than themselves’…‘only’…‘those that are involved in our advance to the completion (perfection) of our nature’. What does this mean? I found, at first, the above quote extremely difficult to grasp and to a certain extent unreadable. This, I feel I have to say, was due to the disruptive influence of my fellow students around the classroom. ‘Not all pleasures’ can be loosely translated as ‘some pleasures’ and so the first section can be interpreted as ‘some pleasures have some ends other than themselves’. Which means certain pleasures are means towards something else which involves the activity of that pleasure. A ‘pleasure in itself’ is therefore something which is an end which pertains to the perfect nature of that person exercizing the pleasure which is an activity. An activity of this kind is not a process but an actualization of perfection. The rules, then, for this pleasure or what this pleasure involves is of paramount importance and if this pleasure runs in accordance with the ‘doctrine of the mean’ then it is a ‘good pleasure’, if it does not then it is what I understand to be Aristotle’s bad pleasures and therefore a mean for something else. Comment: Students usually stick to the topic, but sometimes one will make a more personal comment, as in the first paragraph above. As for the rest, it was

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pointed out that the correct inference from ‘not all’ to ‘some’ is lost in the confusions that follow. It occasioned a discussion about what Aristotle means by activity as opposed to process. Student 2. Both passages state that pleasure is not a process. Pleasure is not a development of our powers but comes from the use we make of them. A process would involve a separate end but pleasure itself is the end. ‘Pleasure perfects the activity.’ The healthy eye looking at the perfect object has reached its limit of perfection; it is pleasure that makes this activity perfect. If our aim is perfection and all our activities are geared towards the completion or perfection of our nature and if, as Aristotle states it is pleasure that perfects our activities then pleasure itself must be the end we seek, pleasure of the mind is our ultimate goal. And if pleasure is the ultimate end then it can never be a process towards a end. Comment: This one is clearly enough written. The discussion tends to centre on the philosophical question of whether pleasure of the mind is identical with happiness without making it explicit. Student 3. I think that there is both a pleasurable process and an end. However sometimes pleasure can be ephemeral. If you drink or eat too much, your pleasure can result in your not feeling too well. There is a process in pleasure because sometimes people undertake Herculean tasks in order to satisfy their personal desires. They may during this process endure much hardship, yet the result of their efforts may be pleasurable. It’s like getting up at 9:30 in the morning, is not funny, yet if it means that you get a degree it would have been worth it, I think. So there is both a process and an end, and only taste or circumstance can help interpret which is best—sometimes the process, sometimes the result. Comment: This one takes a more personal line. The first-person singular makes its appearance twice. It is not clear, however, that the argument leaves Aristotle without comeback. There is nothing in the processes mentioned that is pleasurable per se. Student 4. The two quotes become compatible if we accept that the pleasure of our rational soul and our irrational soul can be considered as separate. The first passage concentrated on the pleasure of the rational mind when it has reached a state of unimpeded actualization. Pleasure for the mind is not a process but a state of being; the faculty and the thought have become one and the same. The second passage however discusses the pleasures of the irrational element of the soul, namely the ‘appetites’. The pleasures of the appetites are impeded by the temporality of being man; a mortal as opposed to being divine. In the same way that the senses derive the most pleasure when they are most perfect the appetites derive the most pleasure when they are least impeded. Pleasure for the appetites is limited in the same way that we as humans are limited. When we die the limits on our pleasure, that is, the highest pleasure—or rational thought— becomes unlimited. We are no longer the divine because we have become divine.

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Comment: Quite a bold one, this. It is one of the better ones in our opinion because it argues a thesis and comes to a conclusion which is by no means selfevident. There can be an argument with the position of Student 4, because Student 4 has a position to maintain, even if it turns out to be finally untenable. Student 5. Aristotle differentiates between pleasure as an ‘activity’ and as a ‘process’. As an activity, pleasure would also be the ‘end’. As a process, pleasure is the ‘coming into being’. But surely pleasure can be both a process and an end in itself. Pleasure can be an end in itself as well as having an end other than itself. Completion and conclusion of action or activity is not necessary for pleasure in every case. Aristotle argues that pleasure comes not from the development of our powers, but the use of them, but cannot activity embrace both of these? Pleasure does not have to have a definite aim or end. Comment: This one is more confusing. The writing obstructs understanding. There are mistakes as well. To say that Aristotle ‘differentiates between pleasure as an “activity” and as a “process”’ implies that a pleasure can be a process, which Aristotle explicitly denies in both formulations. Not as competent as the preceding one. Student 6. ‘Both passages agree that pleasure is not a process.’ They seem to be right because the specific quality of pleasure is complete at any given moment. It is a sort of whole. A process cannot be said to be complete until it is actually finished e.g. the process of building; when each section of a house is made the process of building it is complete, at the end. Pleasure is not a final result but a way of embarking upon an action. Like persistence, when something is done with persistence the end reached is not persistence, but rather an action that has been undertaken persistently. Aristotle uses the analogy of a pleasure corresponding to ‘thought and contemplation’. He says that most pleasure is reached by, for example, an eye when it is in the best of health, and directed to the best of its objects. The analogy holds well because, while Aristotle didn’t agree with Plato on the good-in-itself, he pursued the necessity of realizing self-thinking thought, the un-moved mover. To him, this idea of pure form is the best in the realm of the mind. Comment: Here the first paragraph brings out the contrast between an activity and a process better than anyone else so far. The notion of pleasure as ‘a way of embarking upon an action’ may not be the most felicitous phrase, but it does capture something of Aristotle’s account of pleasure. The simile of persistence is not clear enough. This is another working page: something is argued, though not always with perfect clarity. Student 7. In the first passage Aristotle says that pleasure is not a process but an end in itself. When he says pleasures result from the use we make of our powers, not from the state of development of our powers it is his way of saying pleasure is a supervenient by-product of our development but not the development-in-itself. So, exercising any of our 3 soul-parts (nutritive, sedentary

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or rational) will result in pleasure which is the supervenient by-product of that activity. In this sense actualization is only possible if virtue and training are brought to bear because otherwise a man will pursue the pleasures of the senses alone and only his nous patheticon will develop. So, pleasure is synonymous with activity but not development. Virtue will guide potential into actualization to assume development+the best pleasures will be the supervenient by-product. Comment: The mistake about grades of soul in Aristotle near the middle of the page made for a perfect opportunity to correct it, both for the perpetrator and for the class as a whole. This one struggles a bit, seeming to catch and miss points at the same time. The good thing about it is that it is struggling, rather then resting content with a writing technique which avoids the problems. It is clear from these and the next set of examples that the performance of the students is variable. Strengths and weaknesses of different kinds bless and afflict their pages. The worst case is one that displays sheer incomprehension, since in that case there is no place to start the process of enlightenment. Fortunately, this does not happen very often, and did not quite happen in the preceding examples. A couple of them were close, but none of the students is beyond improvement. EXERCISE II: SCHOPENHAUER AND HIS CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY Comment on one or more of these quotes from The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer 1969) bringing in your own understanding of philosophy as you reflect upon it now. The animal learns to know death only when he dies, but man consciously draws every hour nearer his death; and at times this makes life a precarious business, even to the man who has not already recognised this character of constant annihilation in the whole of life itself. Mainly on this account, man has philosophies and religions…there are on this path…the strangest… opinions of the philosophers of different schools, and the most extraordinary, and sometimes even cruel, customs of the priests of different religions. (p. 37) this nineteenth century is a philosophical one; though by this we do not mean that it possesses philosophy or that philosophy prevails in it, but rather that it is ripe for philosophy and is therefore absolutely in need of it. This is a sign of a high degree of refinement, indeed a fixed point on the scale of the culture of the times. (p. 47)

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every science…leaves things as they are…. This is the real point where philosophy again takes up things and considers them in accordance with its method, which is entirely different from the method of science…. Philosophy has the peculiarity of presupposing absolutely nothing as known; everything to it is equally strange and a problem; not only the relations of phenomena, but also those phenomena themselves… (p. 81) we, who are…aiming…at philosophy…at unconditioned knowledge of the world…start from what is immediately and most completely known and absolutely familiar to us…in order to understand what is known to us only from a distance, one-sidedly, and indirectly. (p. 125) philosophy…considers the universal alone. (p. 141) …according to my view, philosophy is nothing but a complete and accurate repetition and expression of the inner nature of the world in very general concepts, for only in these is it possible to obtain a view of that entire inner nature which is everywhere adequate and applicable. (p. 264) Philosophy can never do more than interpret and explain what is present at hand; it can never do more than bring to the distinct, abstract knowledge of the faculty of reason the inner nature of the world which expresses itself intelligibly to everyone in the concrete, that is, as feeling. (p. 271). In my opinion, all philosophy is always theoretical, since it is essential to it always to maintain a purely contemplative attitude…to inquire not to prescribe. But to become practical, to guide conduct, to transform character, are old claims which with mature insight it ought finally to abandon. (P. 271) The genuine method of considering the world philosophically …is precisely the method that does not ask about the whence, whither, and why of the world, but always and everywhere about the what alone. (p. 274) The following exercise papers appear without comments. Readers are invited to make their own.

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Student 1. How can an animal only know death when he dies? If, when he dies, the conscious awareness of the world and self is annihilated, then he can never know death. In fact death would be as meaningless as his existence because he could never have any awareness of himself in death. Indeed it would be doubly meaningless because the animal is supposed to have no sense of self while in life. Schopenhauer suggests that because a man consciously draws closer to his death every hour, that life is made a precarious business. However, it is not the individual’s life itself that becomes precarious. It is only precarious in the individual’s judgement of his life as precarious. It is a sentiment, an opinion and tells about Schopenhauer’s attitude [to] the world rather than an objective philosophical enquiry. Schopenhauer seems to invade every aspect of his philosophy; he cannot separate his sentiments from his observation of the world. Thus his philosophy seems more akin to the depiction of an artistic vision: he is not philosophically investigating the world, he takes the world through his own sentiment and then seeks to rationalize it into his ‘philosophy’. Schopenhauer suggests philosophies and religions are brought about by a refusal by man to accept the character of constant annihilation of life itself: because life is the ‘precarious business’, man needs philosophies and religions as crutches against the pain of existence. Yet Schopenhauer’s philosophy has as much of a creed as the philosophies and religions he talks about—I am expected to have faith in his picture of life as being characterized by suffering, yet that seems on as shaky ground as the best of all possible worlds philosophies. Student 2. Philosophy presupposes that nothing is known, whereas science only supposes that something is known, when it can be demonstrated inductively. This presupposition on the part of philosophy is philosophy. Science is about things in the phenomenal (as Kant defines it) world. Philosophy has greater licence than science, licence which allows it to try and solve problems at the expense of method. (As philosophy investigates being, and as being is changeable, abstract and peculiar, so is the research which hopes to know it. If the will could be seen, constructed, deconstructed, joined to other substances etc. then philosophy would be scientific.) However, with method philosophy rarely solves anything, and without method its endeavours are just as fruitless. Instead, philosophy presents us with a series of speculative notions. Perhaps Schopenhauer is so ‘anti-striving’, because he has been part of the striving of philosophy. Perhaps he is slightly solipsistic in believing that because his striving has been in vain that everybody else’s will be. Were he a chemist, striving to produce a medicine to save the suffering of thousands, Schopenhauer might not have been so cynical about his endeavours. Student 3. Schopenhauer’s conception of the nineteenth century as being an essentially philosophical period in history is based on the realization that the myth of Heaven on Earth as being a possibility is a fallacy propagated by religious dogmatism and Hegelian optimism. It is a manifestation of the human need for purpose in and meaning to existence. This is a need that can never be

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completely satisfied in this life. Schopenhauer paints a picture of life being fundamentally absurd and without purpose. Yet it is still driven by the unstoppable engine of the will which is the fundamental essence of life itself. The nineteenth century is a point in history in which the striving of human beings for ultimate and complete knowledge had reached its peak. The only essential metaphysical knowledge reached has been the recognition of the human desire for meaning and purpose. This desire is the fundamental drive of philosophy which as Schopenhauer says ‘considers the universal alone’. Student 4. Only through the sad fact that man knows that he is going to die does he presume that life has a meaning. It is this search for this meaning that has bred philosophy and religion. The attempt to offer a meaning in life or, failing that, postulate that the meaning of life is given by something that we cannot know—a sort of life—after death. Schopenhauer sees this as cruel because it encourages the striving that is the antithesis to his own of acceptance and resignation. Schopenhauer’s idea that ‘a need for philosophy is a sign of a high degree of refinement’ seems to be fallacious. If an author has a need for philosophy is it not simply a continuation of the process of a search for meaning? If we look at it from the point of view that suggests that in looking for a meaning as or performing a higher function than mere acquaintance. Does this not suggest a paradox with Schopenhauer’s ideas of acceptance etc? Looking for a meaning is a striving of the will which we would be better off without. Student 5. From the passages 37, 125, 271, we can see that Schopenhauer has a distinct opinion on the use of philosophy. He claims that philosophy is to aim at ‘unconditioned knowledge of the world’. This implies a kind of universality of knowledge unrestricted by culture, character, morality and religion. In passage 37 Schopenhauer presents a reason for philosophy and religion seeming to stem from fear. As rational beings we are conscious of our own mortality which Schopenhauer claims makes ‘life a precarious business’. Therefore man devises philosophies and religions in an attempt to explain life and the certainty of death. Is all this futile? What Schopenhauer appears to dislike is the use of cruelty in religion i.e. Catholic promises of hell and damnation for unforgiven sins. In passage 271 he condemns the use of philosophy for practical guides to conduct, he sees these as old misguided ideas which should be abandoned. So what is philosophy for Schopenhauer? A contemplative process through which one can have theoretical knowledge. I feel that Schopenhauer is attempting to break away from teaching us the ‘correct’ way to live and is essentially avoiding dogmatism. This idealist approach for aiming for unconditioned knowledge is appealing. I feel that in studying philosophy one can broaden our knowledge of the world without having that knowledge restricted by moral laws and religious/ethical obligations. Student 6. Schopenhauer’s conception of philosophy (and mine) Philosophy occurs because of man’s awareness of death. Death renders all our subjective

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pains and achievements futile. It is the Abyss upon which we walk a tightrope in everything we think, say or do. Philosophy and Religion and Art are the manifestations of our will for knowledge and our desperate need to understand our own condition. A philosophical awareness of life and its necessary conclusion of death is a sign of cultural refinement. Philosophy seeks truth. Truth and love of truth draws us into philosophy. By confronting what is most inexplicable and haunting in our phenomenal experience (ultimate conclusion of Death) our understanding and pursuit of life must afterwards be enhanced. For Schopenhauer philosophy remains theoretical and inquisitive and he states that its practical pursuit should be abandoned. This is where my view of philosophy divorces from Schopenhauer’s. In recognizing the futility of death Schopenhauer equates this with the futility of life but I refuse to see life as anything other than an immense precious gift with as much (if not more) potential for pleasure as well as pain. Anything can only be in opposition and contrast to something else. Practical concerns are utterly important and philosophy renders itself impotent by remaining theoretical. Philosophy should ask why?—if it remains in the arena of what? it can never give practical enlightenment. Schopenhauer’s pessimistic, realistic, resignation is attractive but because it does not affirm life in contrast to death it swallows hope and meaning in its own foul breath. love from a naive idealist But maybe he was being ironic! Student 7. As Wittgenstein was later to say philosophy (itself) leaves everything as it is. This view is prefigured in Schopenhauer but for him philosophy appears, is symptomatic of something else. In saying of his own time that it was ripe for philosophy and ‘a sign of a high degree of refinement’ he seems to be suggesting that philosophy is a characteristic of impending death. In that it universalizes it is in that sense a relief from particular striving and at the same time a stage nearer the end, a move in itself towards annihilation. Its application to practical problems is something that ought to be abandoned, since that makes it no more than an extension of will. Student 8. Man is the only creature that has knowledge of death before it actually happens—animals are blessed with ignorance about the annihilation of life itself. Because of this knowledge of death, man is the only creature with philosophies and religion; perhaps to try and gain answers to the meaning of life so that they can create an illusion of optimism for themselves. Schopenhauer believed that we should shed these illusions and face up to how the world really is. Schopenhauer believed that ‘philosophy…considers the universal alone’. This is because he believed that there is one will which mirrors the world of representation. Our wills are simply particularized parts of the one. Even reason,

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is simply the highest form of the manifestation of this one universal will. Our characters actions are also manifestations of this universal will. Student 9. Schopenhauer is making an historical point here the key phrase is ‘it is ripe for philosophy and is therefore absolutely in need of it’. The industrialization of the western world, which had taken a grip upon Germany in particular, forced men to have a different attitude to philosophical questions this led, inevitably, to the nihilism which is present in the writings of Schopenhauer. From a social perspective the movement into urban environments of the mass of the German peasantry must have contributed to Schopenhauer’s bleak pessimism. He does paint a gruesome picture of life in the factories and any reader of the twentieth century can see the development of nineteenth century philosophies as being directly related to social and economic change leading to both Marx and Nietzsche. At the time when he was writing it obviously appeared to Schopenhauer that the time in which he was living afforded far greater scope for philosophy than ever before, for the first time it was acceptable to produce secular works without persecution and, since Kant, the synthesis of rational and empirical philosophies enabled the new thinkers to approach the fundamental questions of their society from a solid basis in transcendental idealism. It is fairly obvious that thinkers in the nineteenth century being faced with a world in complete turmoil regarded themselves as critical ingredients for the formation of a new consciousness, but Schopenhauer wrote his work at the beginning of this massive change in social and economic situations and his outlook is extremely bleak yet, faced with a much changed society now his ideas of pain as the central essence can still be applied. STUDENT EVALUATION 1 The regime of weekly exercises that you have been doing is designed to help you assimilate philosophical texts and incorporate philosophical concepts into your thinking. How well is it working? Partly, the new format is the result of a priori ideas, but it must still be validated by experience, your experience. As usual, your one page will be unsigned, but just to give you that added measure of distance from the prejudices of the teacher, we will not read them in class. In fact, they will be put into a sealed envelope and delivered by one of you directly to the course leader, who will transcribe them into even more anonymous print. There is no way we will ever know who said what. So feel free to say what you think. You have all had long enough to have some thoughts on the subject. The task today is to evaluate your experience of the philosophical exercises you have been doing this term. It may be of help to think of answering the following questions, but they are only guides.

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Sample questions How effective have the exercises been in helping you to come to terms with philosophical texts? Have they improved your writing or critical thinking skills? Is our practice of reading out exercises a good way to use seminar time? Can you think of a way to make improvements? Can you think of any exercise that would be a useful addition to the stock or any that are tailor-made for philosophy? What do you understand to be the underlying reasons or purposes for the use of the exercises in a philosophy course? Any other comments? Student 1. To be asked to write about something each student doesn’t know until he gets his paper from the teacher and in a limited given time, seems to me to develop readiness of critical thinking skills. The student doesn’t write when he feels like but when it is being required and that improves the student’s response to stimulus in any circumstances. At some time is not rush forwards repeated conclusion because through the prose the reasoning is unfolded in ideas which a student might have not thought to have. In fact to have a blank paper to fill is like a mirror in which our thoughts will be reflected more easily than they are altogether in the students mind. Student 2. The exercises are half an hour in duration, in which time we have to rationalize an aspect or moral of thought. This obviously requires our involvement to achieve the result of a complete page of prose reasoned and grammatically correct, must induce the students to think. Thought should be the common denominator of all seminars so the more excellent the thought the more useful the seminar. The exercises by nature must focus the student as ambiguity etc. More is required of the student if he or she has to write, more thought more concentration, more focus, more accuracy. More is better than less! I think we should read our own text out so that we may answer the questions relevant to it, and thus justify our position, or not. This would help to discover the merits of our arguments and the truth. Student 3. Its a bit hard to say how beneficial this system of teaching has been as I lack any real frame of reference regarding ‘old type’ or ‘normal’ seminars apart from my weekly English seminar (which is very ‘old Type’). I think that there are probably several +’s and −’s in this system. The weekly writing exercise is very useful because it drops me in a jungle of whatever philosopher we’re studying and I have to find my bearings from that position. This system has sometimes occasioned a kind of creative leap where several disparate strands have become inspired into a new picture. But.

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You could argue that these exercises could be done at home as an aspect of our (the student) commitment and responsibility to ourselves and the course and that seminar time would be better used in instruction. What I am saying is that the advantages of writing I listed above could be accrued from any writing, anywhere so why do them in precious seminar time. However, being put ‘on the spot’ with regard to having the piece read out is nerve wracking enough (in spite of the anonymity) that it drives me and stimulates my competitiveness. I love it when I’ve written well and the class responds positively. Another disadvantage is that I sometimes wonder what its all about and if this degree course I’ve sacrificed my career for isn’t just another 1960’s hand down, me-generation work shop type hippy indulgence i.e. I am saying I don’t have any clear sense of the rational behind it. To summarize. The exercise stretches me. But is it worth the seminar time when it could be done elsewhere? Why isn’t the system explained more clearly? The informality of such an approach does encourage risk taking in teacher/student relations and that seems good. Student 4. The exercises have been helpful to me in understanding philosophy to a certain extent although I do have some criticisms. Firstly, I object to the way the exercises have been read out; continually stopping to comment on spelling mistakes or punctuation. Although these comments can be useful it disrupts the flow of each exercise and it is impossible to remember and understand what the person has written and so there can be no discussion on the particular subject. Also the pretence that the exercise is anonymous is annoying as if the exercise isn’t done by someone, they are pressured, and we all know who does each exercise by the writing and the style. One of the best exercises we have had was when we each had to argue for an opinion in which we didn’t believe. That encouraged people to lash at and understand the other point of view and in some cases people found that they did agree after all. The exercises have encouraged people to voice their opinions whereas before they may have kept them to themselves. Student 5. For myself, I find the weekly exercises to be a really enjoyable way of sorting out all the information thrust on you in the philosophy lectures. There seems to be much more energy in this form of seminar, as the discussions which arise tend to have much more of a focus than that of an ordinary seminar. Writing your argument in a set time period means that you are forced to concentrate fully on the topic at hand. Through doing it you can learn to quickly clarify your argument and write it down as economically as possible, i.e. there is no time or space for waffle; and because it is read aloud there is much more thought put into the way you write. If the seminars were purely oral, there wouldn’t be as much significance placed on style, all would be dominated by the actual content.

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Also, this style of seminar seems to be well structured, so that you always come away feeling that you have achieved something. It gives everybody a chance to have their views put forward, for those who would normally sit and say nothing do not find such shyness when writing. Writing anonymously means that those who find it difficult to speak out in an ordinary seminar have a greater chance of participating. Student 6. Some thoughts on the new pedagogy I cannot think of anything negative to write about the principle of this method of teaching. It is a useful and positive exercise to perform coming as it does immediately after the lecture. It helps to clarify and ‘nail down’ ideas with which we have been present in the two hours previously. My response, however is not unqualified! Although it has improved my ability to think critically about very specific aspects of a philosophy, I find it difficult to relate this criticism to a philosophy as an interactive system of components. This is perhaps a more a sign of my confidence in my own critical abilities than a fault in your method. It is worth noting, however, other possible reasons for this and the ways if any they might be brought to bear on the structure of the exercises. We are often given a choice of quotes or paragraphs on which to comment. The result of this is that the reading out and subsequent discussion is often hurried and very diverse. So, rather than grasping one or two ideas or important issues, I find that I have a less certain idea of an approach to a text. It is interesting to note that the occasions when we were given a choice of only two quotes almost all the students chose to comment on the same one. This, though giving the seminar more specific topic of discussion, would suggest that the more difficult pieces of text would have merited attention. Is a compromise possible? Perhaps the answer is to have only one largish quote that accompanies central themes of any particular philosopher. To rewrite a portion of a text was for me, not as useful as other exercises we have performed. It is unfortunately easy to paraphrase without comprehension. It may be useful to be given an isolated piece of text and ask how we can link it to what we know of a philosophy. This may encourage us to interpret something we don’t know with something we do know. This may also raise critical questions as to how and if a philosopher is able to reconcile one portion of his systems to another, thereby giving a deeper critical perspective. To end on a positive note, I feel that it has involved me in the understanding of the text to an extent that I would not otherwise have reached. Any form of teaching that puts demand on the student has to be preferable to dogmatic lecturing as the sole approach. The exercises undertaken throughout the first term, have definitely led to a greater understanding of the philosophical texts. As well as improving written skills, the exercises help to organize patterns of thought that may have been previously confused. In merely speaking, thoughts can lose their objectivity and

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become long-winded and effusive. However concise, written work does I feel help the students to systematically organize these previously confused thoughts into straightforward sentences. Short samples of written work do tend to open the mind further than typical seminar conversation, often discussion can breed stubbornness and an inability to listen with an open mind. However written exercises can break down these barriers and result in greater realization and understanding of the texts; for instance on one occasion recently the lecturer asked me to write in support of Aristotle’s ideas as I was stubbornly in conflict with them. However, at the end of the exercise I had completely changed my mind, and my perception of his work. The reading of exercises in class results in a loss of our inhibitions. In effect ‘the new Pedagogy’ gives every student a greater scope for understanding than typical seminar discussion, and overcomes the problems of shyness and reluctance in students. The reading of each piece of work means the ideals of everyone are related without damage to their anonymity. Student 7. To begin with I felt that the exercises were unfulfilling in that the subjects or students were asked to comment on a piece of philosophical text in half an hour which, at the time, I felt was far too short a period. Secondly I felt that the virtually constant chatter of my fellow students was extremely destructive and very annoying. Incidentally, this chatter is happening right at this very moment. The topic of their conversation concerns this very exercise and I feel a little perturbed by this. At the moment I cannot think of anything else to say as my concentration level is easily tipped over and what I mentioned above has totally dominated my mind. It is now a quarter of an hour into the exercise and I will now try and synchronize myself into a different mode of thinking. Now, to talk of the exercise itself and the end result: Personally I am not very talkative in the seminar itself but do get a little satisfaction out of what is being said. The greatest fulfilment I get is when my own short essay is read out and even though the contest has been somewhat hindered by the aforementioned chatter I feel I can see where my errors lie. So, the disadvantage of these exercises is that the conscientious student is not getting very far in cultivating his potential due to disruptions. The advantage is that if your own particular essay is written out you feel you are improving due to the expert comments made by the lecturer. Finally, following on from what I said I get the sense that students switch off occasionally when someone reads out other people’s essays. I admit that I am guilty of such things but that is a fault I know I need to rectify. Student 8. I consider the practice of reading out exercises a good way to use seminar time because it encourages discussion often on seemingly small points. By hearing several views on one topic we are given different angles which may not have occurred to us. The exercise points out the importance of accuracy and

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being able to back up a point which can easily be seen as invalid or misled given the context. It can still be seen that several members of the group invariably remain silent for whatever reason. While nobody should be pushed to talk, some other method could be employed to help them break the ice. E.g. they could be asked the odd specific question or be asked to expand on a point somebody else has made. From essays and seminar exercises, it is clear that everyone in the group has something to say whether they would admit it or not. Jeff picks up on minor points of grammar which, while being a bone of contention for some students, is good, even though at this point our grammar shouldn’t need correction. I would say that the exercises are beginning to improve my critical thinking skills. After about 7 years away from education I feel happy even in the knowledge that a beginning and a small start in the opening of my mind is being made. SAMPLE EXERCISES The following seven exercises were taken from a Greek philosophy course which centred on Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nichomachaean Ethics. The first six focus on Plato and the last on Aristotle. They make no claims to great originality or innovation but indicate the range of possibilities available to this method of teaching. In the invention of exercises in thinking, the only limit seems to be that of ingenuity itself. Exercise I The setting of the following quotation is this: Socrates has just finished demolishing the definition of justice put forward by Polemarchus that ‘justice is to help your friends and harm your enemies’ (334b8) by getting him to agree that it is never right to harm anyone. Now Thrashymachus, the professional teacher (sophist) and speaker (orator), takes up the challenge and defines justice as the interest of the stronger. Here he identifies the stronger with the governing party. Your task is to rewrite the following paragraph in your own words. Thrashymachus: Each type of government enacts laws that are in its own interest, a democracy democratic laws, a tyranny tyrannical ones and so on; and in enacting these laws they make it quite plain that what is ‘right’ for their subjects is what is in the interest of themselves, the rulers, and if anyone deviates from this he is punished as a lawbreaker and ‘wrongdoer’. That is what I mean when I say that ‘right’ is the same thing in all states, namely the interest of the established government; and government is the strongest element in each state, and so if we argue correctly we see that ‘right’ is always the same, the interest of the stronger party.

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(Republic, 338e–339a) Exercise II It is generally agreed that Socrates and Thrashymachus do not see eye to eye and that their discussion of justice ends in an impasse if not a stalemate. Your task is to write two paragraphs, one describing how Thrashymachus looks to Socrates and the other how Socrates looks to Thrashymachus. Exercise III ‘Do we learn with one part of us, feel angry with another, and desire the pleasures of eating and sex and the like with another?’ (437a) This question comes up at the beginning of the section on the three parts of the soul: nous, thumos, and epithumiae. In the larger context an analogy is made between the three parts of the soul and the three classes of society: guardians (philosopher kings), auxiliaries (soldiers), and workers. The excellences proper to these classes also extend those of individuals: wisdom for the guardians, courage for the soldiers, and self-discipline for the workers. The wise are driven by truth, the soldiers by honour, and the workers by pleasure. In the individual and in the state, justice is finally agreement about the ruling principle. Justice is a harmony of all the parts of soul or state. Expand upon this question or the topics surrounding it. Two suggestions: Answer the question: Yes, different parts of ourselves do desire these different things; or No, they do not. This is why… Give some reasons. Reformulate the question so as to bring out what is involved in learning, in feeling angry, and in physical appetite. Exercise IV Write about one of the following criticisms of Plato’s moral philosophy. Write how strong you think the criticism is and whether you think Plato can defend his position. The first three quotations are from Irwin (1977) and the fourth from Crossman (1971). Plato might be taken to say that morality is what promotes the agent’s happiness; and this seems to be an absurd account of morality. We are inclined to say that moral principles apply to everyone, and it is morally intolerable to prescribe that everyone is to promote my happiness. Plato seems to be no less wrong if he means that each man ought, from the moral point of view, to pursue his own interest; for the moral point of view is concerned with anyone’s happiness, and Plato has not shown that the interests of individuals following his advice will be coordinated in a morally satisfactory way.

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(p. 251) [Socrates holds that only what contributes to a person’s happiness has a rationally justifiable claim on the individual. Another kind of moralist, the deontologist, accepts a different principle.] If morality is rationally justifiable, an agent has sufficient reason to accept it, apart from any concern with his own happiness. [p. 250]…moral principles are not restricted in their content or application by any external end; principles of justice…are valid whether or not they promote some nonmoral end apart from them, and are not reducible to technical principles for achieving some external good. (p. 259) If we count on a virtuous man to respect other people’s rights and promote their interests, whether or not he will achieve the good he pursues, we will not be satisfied with Plato’s view of moral obligation. [His view does not allow a proper concern for human rights.] (p. 278) At the end of his life Plato knew he had failed…. His researches in logic, in astronomy, and in mathematics could satisfy his thirst for knowledge and ensure him lasting fame: they could not console him for his failure to solve the problem which Socrates had set. For it was precisely the application… of philosophy to everyday life, which Socrates had demanded and for which he had died…. The spirit of disinterested criticism and scientific inquiry seemed to have contributed nothing to the elimination of social evils. It had diagnosed the disease, but the cure which it applied had been completely ineffective. (p. 165) Exercise V ‘At present,’ I said, ‘those who do take up philosophy are quite young, and study it in the interval before they go on to set up house and earn their living; they start on the most difficult part (I mean abstract argument), give it up when they’ve barely touched it, and are then considered complete philosophers. Later in life, if they accept an invitation to listen to a philosophic discussion by others, they think it quite an event, the sort of thing one does in one’s spare time, and by the time they are old any spark they have in them is extinguished more finally than Heraclitus’ sun, new every day. It will never be relit’ ‘And what’s the right way to approach it?’ (Republic, 498a)

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Your task is to become active in the face of this text. There are a number of ways this can be done. Pick one or make up your own. You can question the text; e.g. ‘What’s wrong with the approach to the study of philosophy described in the first paragraph?’ You can answer the question at the end. You can comment on any part of it. For example, the line ‘they start on the most difficult part (I mean abstract argument)’, and then barely touch it. Does this mean that abstract argument is not the best place from which to begin the study of philosophy? Where else might one begin? Exercise VI Iris Murdoch in The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977) takes Plato’s side in his condemnation of art. Analyse and evaluate one or more of the following critical paragraphs from Murdoch’s book. Plato gives to beauty a crucial role in his philosophy [but] he practically defines it so as to exclude art. (p.2) Art and the artist are condemned by Plato to exhibit the lowest and most irrational kind of awareness, eikasia, a state of vague image-ridden illusion…[compare the Cave analogy] (p.5) The poets mislead us by portraying the gods as undignified and immoral [or laughing]…. Music and theatre should encourage stoical calmness, not boisterous uncontrolled emotion. We are infected by playing or enjoying a bad role. Art can do cumulative psychological harm in this way. (P. 5) art is always bad for us in so far as it is mimetic or imitative. (p.5) Art naively or wilfully accepts appearances instead of questioning them… [e.g.] a writer who portrays a doctor does not possess a doctor’s skill but simply ‘imitates doctor’s talk’. (p.6) it is easier to copy a bad man than a good man, because the bad man is various and entertaining and extreme, while the good man is quiet and always the same. (p.6)

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Artists are interested in what is bad and complex, not in what is simple and good. They induce the better part of the soul to ‘relax its guard’…images of wickedness and excess may lead even good people to indulge secretly through art feelings which they would be ashamed to entertain in real life…. Art both expresses and gratifies the lowest part of the soul, and feeds and enlivens base emotions which ought to be left to wither. (p.6) Only ‘rationally controlled pleasures are good’ [There are higher and lower pleasures and art aims to gratify the lower pleasures and to give them an aesthetic gloss which is only an excuse for self-indulgence. Plato argues we must cultivate the pleasures of learning, rather than strive to acquire sophisticated aesthetic tastes.] (p. 10) the aesthetic…is of interest only in so far as it can provide therapy for the soul… The area of acceptable art where pure pleasure, true beauty, and sense experience overlap is very small. (p. 12) Exercise VII in arguing about what is for the most part so from premisses which are for the most part true we must be content to draw conclusions that are similarly qualified. (Aristotle 1976:1094–5) Write a paragraph or two about this quote, bringing in the following paired concepts, words or phrases. Use them in any order or combination to bring out what is involved in Aristotle’s view about what we can expect from reflecting upon moral matters. practical reason vs theoretical reason; necessary vs contingent truth; moral virtue vs intellectual virtue; logic vs rhetoric; certainty vs probability.

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CONCLUSION The point of designing exercises is to develop reasoning skills and expressive ability; to help students to become active in their thinking. It is not so much the exercises themselves that are important but the use made of them by students. As old-fashioned as it sounds, classroom exercises do serve to concentrate the mind and give it something to work on at the same time. If they are designed with particular courses in view and made part of the learning process, we believe that students can only benefit. This claim cannot be demonstrated at present, for it has not been tried. It is based on an a priori intuition about the learning process, but one which can be given empirical trial. Let us give it a try and see what happens. Certainly the results, even if negative, can only advance our understanding of the educational process.

Chapter 6 The future of thinking

The conclusion of this book lies outside its pages, in the institutions of higher education. It is not so much a matter of a prescription or recipe for the future as of attitude and educational principle. The book is not a specialist contribution to some well-established debate; it is the attempt to rethink the topic of education in the liberal arts, its value to a democratic society, and its function in the training of articulate human beings, literate in the ways of texts and language. Our goal is to help students to work with and through texts to their own eventual understanding and expression. This is what our pedagogy aims to do: to invite students to become articulate in their own beliefs, to acquire the critical skills necessary for an informed judgement and to have access to the codes which stand at the gates of intelligent and informed enquiry and debate. It may seem to some that ours is simply another writing-based teaching strategy. Composition teachers, for example, may think there is nothing new here. This is an understandable mistake. However, we should not be misled by the fact that the exercises presented in the last chapters are mainly concerned with writing. This is because writing is the most visible manifestation of cognitive and expressive skills, and because of its place in the grading system. In most liberal arts or humanities courses students are graded on their ability to write competent answers to exam or essay questions. Finally, it is because of a perceived lack of modest writing skills on the part of college graduates that it is natural to make development of these a top priority in rethinking teaching practice. The reason that our pedagogy looks like a writing course is due more to the exigencies of institutionalized liberal arts teach ing than to our philosophy of education. This philosophy is that of a bottom-up learning process which enables students to integrate scholarly practice into their lives in such a way as to form those intellectual habits which produce a well-stocked and functioning mind. The result is a writing-based set of exercises. However, the principles behind the exercises are general. Thinking requires the cultivation of all the powers of thought involving the use of words and concepts. Speaking is as important to expression as writing, though it draws on different motor skills and enters into different contexts. Reading, as we argue, is the other side of writing and its skills are just as complex and powerful. Listening is the other side of speaking, and is

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itself an inconspicuous art. Memory is the touchstone of the whole process and development of thinking, to which speaking, writing and the rest belong as equal partners. Two principles of education lie behind this account of learning to think. The first is that the powers of thought are developed through the actions and practices which produce and characterize them. The other is that we learn to think best if we are given something worthwhile to think about. There is no need to determine in advance just what will count as worthwhile. The questions and topics which have received serious attention over the years, or which are particularly relevant to present interests and concerns, have a prima facie case for consideration. What is important is that the texts selected to be read, written and spoken about are judged worthy of sustained attention. Without this belief, there is no reason to consider them at all. Our teaching strategy, therefore, will accommodate any changes to curriculum or canon so long as it is judged that the changes provide a reading list of positive value. The authors support a liberal education that gives students access to the working of linguistic codes and devices, empowering them to communicate effectively in a world which is shaped by language as well as the material bases of life. The purpose of liberal arts teaching is to extend the power of language to the widest possible audience. It is not to tell people what to think or how to think it. Accordingly, we conceive of formal education as a time of experimentation with the ways of thinking. Our ends are met if the students themselves become capable and desirous of reflective thought. We want them to make up their own minds, but more importantly, to have minds to make up. Thinking, education and training belong together. The result of study is not so much knowledge as the ability to learn. The more knowledge one has, the better one studies texts and interprets signs. Knowledge and its growth are part of the process of learning, but not its end. The three or four years most students have to consider a succession of texts is actually but the beginning of a lifetime’s learning, although it comes to an end formally with the attainment of a degree. The knowledge acquired is consolidated later, if at all, in second thoughts, perhaps long after graduation. A number of factors conspire to prevent undergraduate work from counting for much after graduation. The college years are treated as a final institutional stage of formal education, beyond which there is an informal education in the university of life. This perspective encourages the belief that the only acceptable reason for textual study is the acquisition of knowledge. Books may collect dust but the knowledge remains. Course content is imparted to fill students’ minds with it. Yet this perspective is fundamentally flawed. The distinction between formal and informal education, if insisted upon, fosters the kind of educational system we see embodied in liberal arts courses today. Even if no one believes it, the assumption is that knowledge is the end of education, since it is to knowledge in our students that we look when it comes to grading their academic performances. Students are graded in humanities subjects

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for two things: their knowledge of texts and their level of expressive competence, primarily in writing. Since knowledge and information are conveyed through texts, it is only natural to think that the goal of study is their communication. Knowledge in the liberal arts is primarily a knowledge of texts. In every class students are held responsible for the content of these. They are held responsible for remembering what is said or written in them, and also for the various contexts by which they have been taught to frame and interpret them. Though they contain ambiguities, not all texts are equally ambiguous. To test students on what they have learned of the content of their courses presupposes that the content is clearly enough stated to be grasped by any attentive reader. Without this presupposition, it makes no sense to grade them. Expression is judged primarily for grammatical correctness, where this affects the sense of what is written. There is no great concern with eloquence. Style is not something that can be measured against anything except different models and paradigms, yet when coupled with genuine effort it is reflected in the grades. Student writing shows itself to be excessively rhetorical precisely at the point where the material runs out, since it is almost always a matter of obvious padding. Rhetoric here works to prevent the beginning and end of what the student has to say from coming together too quickly. In the event, the quality of the student’s writing style is judged, though not in a quantifiable way. The assumption is that we can tell the difference between clear and obscure writing, between a clear but shallow essay or answer, and an obscure but thoughtful one. Furthermore, it is also assumed that these differences are in the writing, and not simply a matter of individual taste. In a rough and ready way, the grading process demands the conviction that there is a limited objectivity in the texts students read. As for style, what this amounts to in practice is the recognition that there is a standard of acceptable writing, however ineloquent or rough. In present institutional practice, the weighting is in favour of what has been learnt over how well it is expressed. Once again the impression is given that knowledge is the raison d’être for study, rather than the other way round. We do not attack the grading system, but bring out what is involved and presupposed by it. It is only natural that grades come to dominate the educational process, but they measure only one part of the student’s intellectual growth and aptitude. Other facets of the student’s achievements cannot be tested within the framework of an undergraduate course hedged in with deadlines, mid-term exams, finals, projects or dissertations. It is difficult to tell how much course material is actively retained in the minds of students. Often one suspects not much, for the simple reason that course work fails to find a permanent relevance to their thoughts and aspirations as they move out into the world. They never become scholars, in the good sense of self-motivated investigators of texts and interpretations. The academic year peaks at exam time, which is seen more as the end of something definite, than as another beginning in a continuing process.

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The real value of an undergraduate education in the study of texts is to familiarize students with the workings of their language and its uses in different contexts. Knowledge is important because it facilitates learning. The reverse is also true. As one learns to learn, it becomes easier to retain information and absorb the knowledge on offer in the pages of course contents. However, knowledge is inferior to learning, because it does not matter how much people know when they are dead. The point is to put the knowledge one has accumulated to use in an education which realizes itself in the course of a lifetime. This ideal has inspired some great teachers in their work. However, institutional structures and procedures often make it an uphill struggle. One obstacle is the pervasive sense that college is an interlude, a time of play before the serious work of life begins. To accept this is to assign what is learnt in college to those childish things one puts aside in adulthood. Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias, puts it best. The charge is against philosophy, but stands for all the liberal arts. ‘For philosophy, Socrates, is all very well if it is touched upon at the right time of life, but if someone should pursue it beyond that point it becomes a waste of time and ruins people’ (484c5–9). The presumption is that study should come to an end, that it is the basis of something further, rather than an end in itself. Although Callicles does admit in the same passage that a liberal education suits free human beings, he draws a line against the life of enquiry beyond that which is useful for a life of action. This view is crippling. There is no reason whatsoever to stop studying after graduation. The university of life may not have a reading list, but there is nothing in its regulations that prevents reading. Even a busy practical existence has room for a continuing text-fed self-dialogue within it. There is room for some reading, some rereading, and plenty of space for memory. It is a commonplace now that texts float in a sea of intertextuality. In the background move the shadows of other texts, other readings. In memory these texts are instantaneously available. They suggest each other, move each other. Thought advances in the process by which the memory of one text leads on to another text or thought, for which questions of connection arise. These questions lead to others, pointing up novel links or aporiae in a developing thought process. If our claim is true, that mind comes into its own through exercising the different aspects of thinking, then to develop the full potential of their minds, students must engage in appropriate mental activities, not only as part of course requirements but as part of their everyday lives. There is nothing mysterious about mind, in the sense we indicate. It stands apart from the questions of mindbody dualism or reductive physicalism. The question of mind is not so much metaphysical as practical. The trouble with the way things now stand is that the time which is spent in formal study goes to waste when it is not taken up in habits which finally become second nature and almost, as it were, unthinking, spontaneous intellectual responses.

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We do not expect small children to read and write very much before they are six or seven years old. Why should we expect students to take less time to develop the higher skills expected of them in college? If we take cultural literacy and the content of courses seriously, then a maturing process is surely necessary before course materials are assimilated and consolidated by the students. If we can start them thinking about the vast and absorbing fields of study to which they are introduced, then this maturational process will have a chance to occur. Time will take care of the rest. The students will find, after they have reached a certain point in their thinking, that it continues under its own steam. Teachers have nothing to do but to continue their own studies. Students learn to think for themselves by thinking. What the teacher supplies in this approach to student work is not so much knowledge but texts and the means of transforming and commenting upon them in different ways. The development of cognitive and expressive skills is to be expected more from the efforts of the students than from information imparted to them by a third party. There are, however, educational reasons to continue with formal assessment of student work. Sometimes it is good to be put on the spot. Like other formal limitations, the time constraint of exams focuses the mind and brings all energies to a point. Formally assessed essays and undergraduate theses are valuable to students because they constrain them to make their thoughts accessible to others. In writing essays for assessment, the student has a chance to put into play those cognitive and expressive skills which our pedagogy aims to develop. However, it is important to put exams and formally assessed written work into perspective. They are only part of a student’s life, and not the most important part of the learning process. The difficulty is to keep this perspective when realizing that it is only by formal assessment that students attain their accredited degrees. Here we have tried to duck this problem by stressing a stage of training which is not formally assessed and leaving it to normal assessment procedures to assign the grades. Our theory predicts that the revised rhetorical training described in this book will produce a general rise in grades, but that will have to wait for empirical confirmation. As long as exams and essays are the basic materials of formal assessment, there is always the temptation to see the attainment of grades as the important thing rather than the road to their attainment. Motivation to achieve good grades has pushed many a reluctant scholar to the books, the desk, the writing pad and computer. So far so good. However, if grade motivation remains the force behind academic work, then the attainment of the grade will coincide with a cessation of the work. A transformation of motivation is required. This happens already for those lucky students who begin a course because they think it will be an easy grade to make, but stay out of interest. Grades get them into the subject but do not keep them there, either because making good grades becomes easy or because grades cease to matter. However, if it turns out that without very much effort it is possible to bring more students to realize the value of what they have studied and that

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nothing prevents them from continuing after graduation, then more will gain the life of the mind, a far more valuable possession than ephemeral academic success. Our teaching opens up a world of ideas to the students along with the power to move through it with increasing effortlessness and enjoyment. No amount of preaching the value of a well-rounded education is going to make very much difference to someone whose interests centre elsewhere. The only way that humanities courses can prove themselves is by providing students with an experience they cannot find elsewhere and one which, with time, becomes a living interest. If we want people to think in the ways outlined in this book, they must practise and experience them. These experiences of thinking are rather mundane. They are the experiences of paraphrasing a paragraph, of writing out the premisses of an argument, of making a summary or a précis. They are also the experiences of role-playing in words, taking up different forms and constraints, producing samples of different genres and styles, developing an argument or assessing one. These and others like them make up the exercises by which the mind is formed and strengthened. This process also involves speaking to others in different contexts, from the personal and intimate to the impersonal and formal. Students develop their ability to speak to groups of various sizes as part of the learning process. How this is to be brought about given present priorities and financial constraints is not easy to see. What is needed are contributions from all relevant parties on the best ways to proceed, the best experiments to try. In the end, experience will reveal the means to encourage improvements in expressive and cognitive competence. Once we take the lid off questions about the form and function of humanities teaching, there is no telling in advance what gains can be made in educational strategy. The one certain thing is that we can do better. The open-ended task of providing a good set of activities and exercises to improve verbal skills is matched by the task of reading, listening and remembering. It is easier now to see writing exercises as only part of a much wider process, embodying a number of different competences. Good research by able investigators has gone into answering these questions already, but the work has been fragmented by the lack of a unifying perspective. There are many books and articles about how to write better, how to read, to listen, to remember and to speak. They can now be brought together by the perspective developed in this book. It is also possible to bring in other research which at first sight does not appear to apply to liberal arts students. For example, the work on aphasia, dyslexia, dyspraxis and autism becomes relevant to our teaching practice, when we remember that faulty actions, or parapraxses, extend into the normal population. Students, in mild ways, suffer from analogous dysfunctions. By becoming conscious of the impediments to thought we can begin to overcome them, through trial and error, if in no other way. The point is to have an inclusive educational goal at the forefront of any thought about teaching practice.

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With this in mind let us consider the future of thinking. Unless there is a restructuring of humanistic pedagogy along the lines of that projected in this book, the prospects are bleak. As the world becomes increasingly saturated with momentary images, the ability to think in a coherent and sustained way is bound to fade. Language is at the heart of (textual) thinking and without concentration and active participation in its work, the individual is cut off from the resources necessary to form independent judgements and to contextualize the data which are constantly coming in from all sides. An anecdote may help to make this process clearer. At an institution of higher education in California the bread-and-butter courses of the philosophy department are those which satisfy the general education requirements. Introductory courses in logic, ethics and the history of philosophy take in a great number of students majoring in other subjects. Individual lecturers are normally expected to teach over a hundred of these students each term, each of whose work must be assessed. Because of the numbers, some of the teachers use multiplechoice and short-answer questions to test the student’s knowledge. Others use only student essays as the basis of assessment. My solution was to devise a test with two parts: one a multiplechoice section, the other a short essay of a couple of sides of paper. To my surprise, the students came up in great numbers to complain about the essay part of the exam, claiming that they had never before been asked to write one. Some said it was unfair, since in their whole time in college they had been assessed by multiple-choice tests. These students were missing those expressive and cognitive skills that only competence in language can produce. They felt a lack in their education, though the only way they found to express it was in a suspicion of essay-writing. They were not at ease in the world of texts and the ideas expressed in them. The mistakes they made on the knowledge side showed that their memories needed work. How well they listened is anybody’s guess, because except for those who choose to intervene in the discussion, there was no way to tell. Silence means many things. Some silent students are indeed listening intently and actively. Some are silently posing questions, making comparisons in their minds, following trains of logic. Others merely daydream, doodle or ponder the ironies of a system which puts them in a room from which they would rather be absent. Others are simply bored or nonplussed. Humanities or liberal arts subjects and topics are eternally contestable. There are no final conclusions, only the latest conclusions. In history, literature (poetry) and philosophy we enter a world of uncertainties, an unstable world constantly in motion. Philosophy and the other humanities subjects are thus capable of questioning their own presuppositions and foundations. They do not have to do so but the capacity is always there. The liberal arts are capable of self-renewal, of finding a better rationale for their own existence. To some extent it is possible to overcome the fragmentation of special subjects without giving up the results of scholarly research. The problem

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is partly that there is a tension between the research demands of a professional career and a teacher’s commitment to the educational needs of undergraduates. Along with the sentiment that covers the college years in a haze of irresponsibility goes the one which takes students seriously only at the graduate level. This attitude is part of that which sees knowledge as the end of education. The students come in empty and go out full. In between there is the reading of texts, listening to the professor lecture, and passing formal assessment requirements. The professor lectures to impart knowledge and information. To the extent that scholarly knowledge remains the same from year to year, what is imparted does not change significantly. No wonder large numbers of students tend to disappear into a blur of terms. This would not matter so much, except that it is professors who come to know the material better by lecturing on it for years. As already mentioned, we tend to remember our own productions better than those of others. Good lectures have a place in any text-based course, but the point is to turn students into teachers themselves, into teachers of themselves. The best way to do this is to sift and share all relevant specialized knowledge under a common educational imperative. Our imperative is to turn out articulate human beings. This adjective captures with some clarity those expressive and cognitive skills which our teaching method is designed to build and enhance. Intuitively, an articulate person is one who is at home in the world of words and signs. In the past, such a person represented an elite, educated segment of society. This is still true to some extent, though not to the same degree, and less so as more students have access to higher education. We argue that the charge of elitism should not make us give up the project of extending the powers of language to the largest possible number of people. The fact is that to be inarticulate in our society is to be rendered powerless to intervene effectively in a course of events which demands making oneself heard. This is not a good position in which to be. To make a difference you must be able to engage with the means of expression. If the free and informed debate characteristic of democracy is to continue, it is crucial that as many people as possible achieve a high level of cognitive and expressive skill. Even as an ideal, a full and open discussion will occur only if everyone contributing to the debate can make a difference to its course. Individuals and groups of people are marginalized if they are unable to communicate effectively in a public forum. Access to language is necessary to make oneself heard in the babble of a democratic society. It is a disadvantage to be linguistically incompetent and unable to express oneself outside a narrow range. But if we make the goal of turning out articulate human beings a high priority of our educational policy, surely we can find a better way to use our limited time and resources than we do at present. You do not have to be articulate to go to heaven, but it is different on earth. The function of the

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humanities in the next century will be to empower students with the best range of textual activities we can devise. They will do the rest. Another important feature of our approach is the perception that the best teachers are happy teachers. The way things are structured now, it is often strikingly difficult for teachers to find the leisure to carry on with their studies. Administrative duties and the demands of grade production take a toll on the time necessary to reflect upon and explore a subject. Outside of a contract for pure research, there is no way to totally remove the tedium of a teacher’s life. For those untenured staff who work in research institutions there is the additional burden of the pressure to publish. Writing for tenure is not exactly a leisure occupation. Nevertheless, the burdens of the teacher are to be minimized. This means that the time spent in carrying out mundane and repetitive activities is also to be kept to the minimum. Teaching is an equation: teachers on the one side, students on the other. So far the emphasis has rightly been put on the students and the prospects for their intellectual growth. We tend to think that professors can take care of themselves. But we can already see that this works both ways. If teaching is felt to be a distraction from the real point of one’s work, the books and articles one hopes to produce, then teaching suffers. The answer lies in the development of research and teaching at the same time. Like the problem of promoting speech skills, however, this admits of no easy solution. The case of students and teachers is parallel. Students, we agree, need to develop cognitive and expressive skills, taught together in the same class. They need to think about something and learn to think about it at the same time. The one feeds into the other. With the lecturer, the impetus of research ought to provide the teaching with a stream of new ideas. Conversely, research ought to be carried out with the question of how it might be taught or communicated constantly in mind. A problem at the moment is that where research is concerned, it is to one’s peers that one writes. The same material is presented differently, first to one’s colleagues and then to students. The gap between these audiences is very wide and makes a great difference to how the material is considered. The difficulty is to pitch it at the right level. The greatest difficulty lies in doing both at the same time, without going over the heads of one audience or condescending to the other. Part of this problem lies in the assumptions we make about different audiences. With a professional audience it is not necessary to waste very much time on preliminaries. The level of common knowledge is assumed to be quite high. But more than this, it is assumed that the members of the audience have achieved a certain high level of competence in the field under discussion. With introductory students it is just the opposite. One can assume very little about the possession of relevant background knowledge. Hence the step-by-step approach of many introductory courses, starting with the step each student takes from the place he or she is standing.

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It is unlikely that this gap can ever be closed completely, but it is better to address the larger rather than the smaller audience, if there is a choice in the matter. It is only proper that there should grow up a standard of excellence in any field of enquiry which is taken to the level of professional competence. The work that has already been done makes a certain shorthand perfectly in order. There is simply no need to start over from the beginning. To play a game there must be rules, and the rules for advanced debates are different from those of introductory discussions. Nevertheless, it is possible to address a wide audience if the issues have a general significance. Teachers require leisure to develop their own ideas, to enter debates and to contribute to current discussions. Something is wrong if, in the name of efficiency and value for money, teaching structures, procedures and demands systematically reduce leisure time. The same constellation of attitudes which assigns the college years to a pleasant hiatus in the serious business of making a living, and which counts knowledge as the end of the educational process, also sees virtue in efficiency and full time-tables. Leisure time is seen as waste time, much in the way as the colonists saw the land of Aboriginal inhabitants going to waste, since it was left without improvements. The life of thinking is not like this. There are none but arbitrary timetables in the learning process, and that process has none but an arbitrary end. Individuals grow up and start to learn different things. If they are lucky, they continue to learn for their entire lives, and die learning. The unlucky finish learning at graduation and spend the rest of their lives repeating and elaborating a moribund conception of the world and the place of ideas within it. The same thing can happen to professors. The whole academic enterprise becomes a chore and a burden. The occupation of lecturer or professor is less and less fun as the demands on time increase along with nagging questions about how satisfying such a life really is. So, we should make it a general rule never to introduce a teaching scheme which increases the workload of teachers. This point has bedevilled the progress of continuous assessment. However worthy as an ideal, it requires teacher time in great measure. According to our imperative, formal assessment, whether continuous or summary, should be kept to a minimum, for it contributes the major part of academic drudgery. However, though the task of assessing student work remains, it is worth-while to change the subject of assessment. Instead of assessing the students’ work, we should assess the results of teaching practice. This shift in the spotlight of assessment could help to reduce routine tasks and to produce good results in that student work which is formally assessed. If we take the general powers of articulation to be desiderata of rhetorical pedagogy, then our practice should reflect this. We should devise, through our collective imagination and ingenuity, experiments in teaching aimed to produce students who can read, write, listen, speak and remember (texts) to a high order. Without testing the students at every turn, we can test the experiments we make.

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It is possible to assess the efficiency of the learning strategy advanced in this book without involving students directly in the assessment procedures. We can determine how well the pedagogy is working without initially submitting the students’ work to direct judgement of worth. For example, it is possible to take the anonymous sheets of paper produced each week in the workshop seminar, number them, identify them by handwriting, not by name, and order them in the succession of weeks in which they are produced. A parallel control group does not participate in the exercises. Determinations can then be made about how each group compares with the other, and how much individuals in the experimental group improve from the beginning to the end of the course. Evidence of accelerated improvement in the performance of the students in the workshop seminar would provide some confirmation of the efficacy of rhetorical paidaeia. If there is no change in their work, or if it gets worse, that will be the time to go back to the drawing board. Our educational theory is inspired by a priori ideas, but their use is not indifferent to empirical results. We gain leisure time by turning our attention away from individual grades to an assessment of the efficacy of the teaching practice. If it turns out that the workshop seminar is a good way of promoting the acquisition of expressive and cognitive skills, then it is no longer necessary to save and grade the students’ exercises, laboriously going over them each week with a red pencil. This job can be done in class, by correcting mistakes once for everyone rather than one by one. Students receive the benefits of having a close reading of their written work in an economic environment which cannot support individual tuition. Economic constraints are realities, and the revival of rhetorical education does not shy away from them. The new pedagogy is not utopian except in the sense that it is guided by an ideal of what a textual education can mean for the individuals who take it up and do something with it in their lives. This process is meant to be enjoyed, to be taken as a challenge, to stretch the mind. The distinction between teachers and students is one of degree. Teachers are advanced students. They, too, should enjoy the process, be challenged and stretch themselves. We should strive to reduce the drudgery of teaching, while all the time increasing the work of the students, not immediately under an onerous threat of judgement, but as the exercise and play of newly developing minds becoming conscious of the aspects of thought. This is a useful fiction. Exercises are not graded, but grades must come in the end. The relation between exercises and grades is indirect. The best way to prepare for assessment is to explore and try out the various forms of language and argument. The student will prepare indirectly in this way for the final assessment, while feeling free to chance his or her arm in the exercises. This is all to the good, since the point of education as we see it is to introduce students to the life of the mind in such a way that they will take it up for themselves. To sum up, teachers provide enjoyable and challenging activities for students to try which are designed to convince them of the value of study through their experience of texts and textual discourse. At the same time the teacher

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disseminates the course contents, using them as the raw materials for student work, rather than as a culminating knowledge. Thus, while it may appear that the authority of the teacher is undermined by this approach, it is actually a liberation. The weight of having to know, of being an expert, is removed. The teacher is like a guide who undoubtedly leads the way, but nevertheless accompanies the others on the journey. And though the guide knows how to go, knows the general landmarks, there is still no escaping the contingencies of the road. Besides this, the guide does not know everything about the route. Each trip brings fresh discoveries. The guide shares a frontier of ignorance with the others. To acknowledge that students must do the work for themselves, that no one else can do it for them, is to put teachers clearly in the role of facilitators and catalysts. Once this is conceded, it should not be beyond human wit to organize teaching in such a way as to allow this role to be played with greatest effect. The purpose of institutional regulations is to make the way straight, not to frustrate the learning process. It is a case of designing requirements for the benefit of the students and the teachers, not the other way around. If the results are as we expect them to be, the clamour of suspicion and hostility towards the liberal arts coming from the outside world would begin to die away. It is true that the general public is most impressed by visible gains in expressive competence. Graduates who are seen to have achieved a high degree of literacy and articulateness, to be capable of structured writing, of producing reports and notes, to be competent speakers, show that their higher education has not been wasted. At the same time, though the cognitive side is more recondite, everyone can see that it is better, on balance, to write and speak and think about something significant than something insignificant. The transmission and acquisition of (textual) knowledge is still important, though no longer defined as the end of education. With a secure raison d’être, the work of teaching can proceed without the nagging feeling that the effort is not worth the result. If the real investigation is held to take place by experts speaking at a very high level, then a question is cast on the value of the project of teaching students who will never reach an advanced level, whose thinking will remain somewhat superficial and introductory. If serious discussion begins in graduate school, then the talk of undergraduates is of little value. This cannot be right. Whatever the level of one’s attainment of cognitive and expressive skills, there is never a good reason for complacency. If talk and discussion lie on a continuum between the beginner, the intermediate and the expert, then all discussion is significant and the basis for further development. As long as we can make it clear what we want to come out of it, an education arranged on this basis puts the students first, while it gives them at the same time the elements of their course studies. To put it roughly, the ancients devised a system of education which came to raise form over content, device over substance. The moderns devised a system which raises content over form, resulting in a forgetfulness of the materiality of

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language. The next step is to use the former to reanimate the latter, but in a way of our choosing. Our philosophy does not look backwards, seeking a return to some imaginary good old days of a classical education, but the reverse. It is to make the resources of language available to a larger number of people than ever imagined or approved in the ancient world. It is to use what was a prop of social hierarchy to the very different end of turning out human beings capable of partaking in the debates of democratic societies, of effective communication. It may be that democracy is a fiction, albeit a useful one, and the best we have, but it becomes less of a fiction the more people gain advanced literacy through text-based studies. The future of thinking depends upon everyone who cares about the quality of mental life, and, indeed, the existence of mental life. It will take a concerted and co-operative effort to make the institutional structures we have inherited from the past work for us, or to transform them into something new. We do not propose a wholesale destruction of teaching practices in the humanities. It is possible, beginning with the circumstances in which we find ourselves, to work in the direction of a student-based, self-initiating, self-correcting process of learning and discovery; one which gives students interesting and challenging work assignments; one which reduces the burdens of the teachers. Student activity is central to the learning process. This agreed, how the details work out for subjects outside the two discussed in this book, philosophy and literature, is a matter for others. It would be very interesting to see how an activity-based course could be developed for history, art history, the history of ideas, drama, drama criticism, cultural studies, minorities studies, women’s studies and other textual interdisciplinary programmes. This book succeeds if it raises a debate about the fundamentals of educational practice. It does better if it convinces a significant number of people to produce analogous teaching strategies for their own subjects. Teachers from all branches of the humanities can contribute to an educational process that projects a significant future for liberal arts education, before the liberal arts themselves become ancient history. The genesis, development and termination of university departments and courses does not bolster confidence in their immutability. Critical thinking and composition courses, useful though they are as a stopgap, are not intellectually fulfilling. They will preserve jobs but not job satisfaction. Something must be done. This book argues what it is. Whether to take up the challenge to invent a supplement of their own, or to produce something altogether better—it is up to readers themselves to decide. Either way, the case for an advance in educational strategy is made.

Bibliography

Aristotle (1976), Ethics, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Calvino (1981), If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, London: Secker & Warburg. Cicero, De Oratore, Cambridge Mass.: Loeb Classical Library. Crossman, R.H.S. (1937) Plato Today, London: Allen & Unwin. Goethe, Johann W.von (1971), Italian Journey, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irwin, Terence (1977), Plato’s Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues, Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1934) The Art of the Novel, ed. Blackmuir, New York Scribner’s. Murdoch, Iris (1977), The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Brien, Flann (1960), At Swim-Two-Birds, London: MacGibbon & Kee. Plato (1974), The Republic, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Quintilian (1965), On the Education of the Citizen-Orator, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Rossetti, Christina (1970), ‘Remember’, in A Choice of Christina Rossetti’s Verse, ed. Jennings, London: Faber & Faber. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1969), The World as Will and Representation, New York: Dover. Smith, John H. (1988), The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of ‘Bildung’, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Vickers, Brian (1988), In Defence of Rhetoric, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Index

active vocabularies 26 activity-based courses 124–6 adversarial mode 23, 43 amplification 51, 73–4 analogy: computer model 62–3; physical exercise 57–8 analysis (précis-writing) 27, 50–1, 59–61, 71–3 analytic, Kant’s (paraphrase) 62–3 ‘animal spirits’ 67 anonymity 59, 79, 84 answers (and non-answers) 17 appropriation (of text) 18–19, 46, 48, 68– 71 Aquinas, Thomas 64 argument 23, 43 Aristotle 43; Ethics 86–91, 104, 109; on pleasure 83, 86–91; Rhetoric 36 Arnold, Matthew 75 arrangement (dispositio) 43–4 art (sample exercise) 107–8 Art of the Novel, The (James) 55 arts-sciences debate 6–7 aspects of thought 14–15; listening 26–30; reading 16–20; speech 20–6; writing 30–2 assessment procedures 122–4; see also grading system At Swim-Two-Birds (O’Brien) 53–4 attack and defence (debate) 23 audience 44, 57, 121–2;

reading aloud 79–82 Augustinian theory of rhetoric 42 body language 78 Callicles (in Gorgias) 29, 114 Calvino 47–54 Carnap, Rudolf 64 case studies (rhetoric and composition) 47– 53 characters: invention of 63–5, 74–6; in poetry 76–7; writing for known 74–6 checking process 48–9, 69–70 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 5, 36 citizenship 4–5 class reports 77, 80, 81–2 classroom: exercises see samples and preliminary result; reading aloud 79–82, 84–5 close reading 18 cognitive skills 8–9, 12, 14, 55, 57; grading system 110, 115, 123; priorities 118, 120–1, 123, 125; transferable 10, 11, 37, 42 commentaries 39–40 common ideology 56 common interests 29 commonplace (exercise) 42 communication: see exploration 21–6; skills (transmission) 3–4 comparisons (using) 53–4 101

102 INDEX

composition see rhetoric and composition compositional skills 11, 13, 35–6, 37; dispositio and elocutio 43–7 computer model analogy 62–3 conference papers (delivery of) 22–3 confirmation (exercise) 42 contemporary issues (response of dead philosophers) 63–5 content 4, 10–12, 45, 49, 112, 114, 125 controversy 22–3 conversation: as exploration 21–6; listening in 26–9 copying (transcription) 48–9 course content 4, 10–12, 45, 49, 112, 114, 125 critical: competence 54, 78, 80; devils advocate 77–8; modes 39, 40–1; procedures (impersonation) 75–6; thinking 10, 13, 15, 36 criticism 28, 37, 52–3 cross-questions 17 Crossman, R.H.S. 106 cultural vocabulary 25–6 curriculum 1, 2, 11, 21; fragmentation 39, 56; rhetorical 35, 40

education system: learning process and 7–10; paidaeia 6–7, 13, 36, 41, 46, 55–7, 76, 123; scientific method 6–7; skills approach see skills approach; syllabus 8, 11–12; see also curriculum Eliot, T.S. 75 elocutio 12, 43, 45–7 encomium (exercise) 42 enquiry, conversation as 24–5 Erasmus, Desiderius 35, 37 errors (as learning process) 21, 63 essays 31, 32, 35–6, 38, 39; dispositio and elocutio 43–7 Ethics (Aristotle) 86–91, 104, 109 ethopoeia 74–6 evaluation exercise 98–109 examinations (grading) 22, 110, 112–16 exercise analogy 57–8 exercises see samples and preliminary results experiential learning 116–17 exploration (speech as) 21–3, 26 expressive skills 8, 12, 14, 55, 57; grading system 110, 112–13, 115, 123; priorities 118, 120–1, 123, 125; transferable 10, 11, 37

death (Schopenhauer on) 91, 93–7 debate 20, 21–2, 23, 78 defence and attack (debate) 23 democracy 9–10, 120 deontologist 106 Derrida 64 Descartes, René 32, 64–5, 66–7 devil’s advocate exercise 77–8 dialogue 51; impersonation 52–3; listening 14, 21–2, 26–30; speech 14, 20–6; tense and person 49–50 dipping 18 discourse (style element) 45–6 dispositio 43–4 drama 20

face-to-face address 78 Feuerbach, Ludwig A. 64 fiction (literary studies): case studies 47–53; critical modes 40–1; dispositio and elocutio 43–7; problems with usual approach 38–40; progymnasmata 41–3 figures of speech 43, 46 Fire and the Sun, The (Murdoch) 107–8 form 10–11, 12, 49, 125 future of thinking: experiential approach 116–17; grading system 112–16; priorities/prospects 118–26; study aims/strategies 110–12

INDEX 103

Goethe, Johanne W.von 33 Gorgias (Plato) 29, 114 gossip 24 grading system 22, 110, 112–16, 122–4 grammar 4, 15, 16, 84–5 happiness (Aristotle on) 83, 86–91 Hegel, G.W.F. 64 Heidegger, Martin 64 ‘human nature’ 7 humanism-rhetoric relationship 3–6, 13 humanities, rhetorical training in see aspects of thought ideas 28 If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller (Calvino) 47–54 imagination: in amplification 51; in impersonation see impersonation; writing in style of 65–6, 74–6 imaginative synthesis 63–5 impersonation 48, 49, 52–3; ethopoeia 74–6; prosospopoeia 63–5, 74–6; writing in style of 65–6, 74–6 in-itself (of text) 18 index (in questioning approach) 17, 18 information 24, 112, 114 interpretation of text 17, 19, 49, 78; see also paraphrase; précis; summary interrogative approach 16– 17, 18, 27, 66–7 Irwin, Terence 106 James, Henry, The Art of the Novel 55 journal articles (study of) 77 judgement 57, 82, 84 Kant, Immanuel 16, 62–4, 66, 94, 97 Kierkegaard, Søren 65 knowledge 112, 113–14, 124, 125 languages (types of) 71 learning: to learn 15, 111, 114;

shared 25–6, 59 learning process: and purpose 7–10; see also aspects of thought Leavis, F.R. 2, 75 lectures 27, 30, 83–4 liberal arts: binary oppositions 6–7; dilemma and response 1–3; future of thinking 110–26; humanism-rhetoric relationship 3–6, 13; learning process 7–10; rhetorical education 12–13; skills approach 10–11; syllabus 11–12 linguistic devices 78, 111 linguistic skills 5, 15–16, 26, 118–20, 125– 6 listening 111; aspects of thought 14, 21–2, 26–30 literary-scientific opposition 6–7 literary exercises 37, 67; amplification 73–4; ethopoeia and prosopopoeia 74–6; memorization 68–71; précis, summary and paraphrase 71–3; secondary literature 77–8; theme, plot and character 76–7 literary studies: case studies 47–53; critical modes 40–1; dispositio and elocutio 43–7; problems with usual approach 38–40; progymnasmata 41–3 Locke, John 65 logocentrism 3, 60 Lukács, Giorgi 75 Marcus Aurelius 65 Marx, Karl 97 Marxism 35 meaning (of text) 62, 72 mechanical learning 3, 57, 126; of poetry (and transcribing) 68–71 memory 14, 16–19, 111; of listener 27, 28;

104 INDEX

mechanical learning 3, 57, 126; transcribing exercise 68–71 mental exercise 57–9 metaphors 45 Mill, J.S. 64 mimetic skill (development) 64 mimicry see impersonation mind: -body dualism 67, 115; computer model 62–3; exercise 57–9 monographs 32 monologues 27, 29–30, 51 morality (sample exercise) 105–6, 109 motivation 17–18; grades 113, 116; self- 58, 113 Murdoch, Iris, The Fire and the Sun 107–8 narrator (person/tense) 49–50 natural goodness 5–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 65, 97 non-answers 17 objectivity 11–12, 59, 74, 113 O’Brien, Flann 53–4 oral examination 20 oration (structure of) 43 ‘original’, paraphrase and 62 paidaeia 6–7, 13, 36, 41, 46, 55–7, 76, 123 papers (writing/delivery) 22–3, 32 paraphrase 51; literary exercises 71–3, 77; philosophical exercises 61–6 passive approach (reading) 16, 70 passive vocabularies 26 person, tense and 49–50 persuasion 4, 15, 21, 36, 42, 57 philosophers: response to current issues 63–5; writing in style of 65–6 philosophical conversation as exploration 21–6 philosophical and literary exercises 37; exercise analogy 57–9; literary exercises 67–77;

philosophical exercises 59–61; questioning the text 66–7; reading aloud 79–82; rhetorical paidaeia 55–7; secondary literature 77–8; spoken word 78; summary and paraphrase 61–6 philosophy 46; -rhetoric relationship 14–15; Schopenhauer’s conception 91–7 physical exercise analogy 57–8 Plato 27, 32, 64–5, 83; Gorgias 29, 114; Republic 104–8 pleasure (Aristotle on) 83, 86–91 plot (in poetry) 76–7 poetry: literary exercises 67–77; readings 20 Polemarchus (sample exercise) 104 possession (of texts) 18–19 précis 27; case study (Calvino passage) 50–1; literary exercises 71–3, 77; philosophical exercises 59–61 preliminary exercises (progymnasmata) 41–3, 48 primary texts 39, 41, 46 progymnasmata 41–3, 48 pronuntiatio 42 prosopopoeia 63–5, 74–6 proverbs 42 public life (education for) 4–5, 14, 36 public speaking 20–6, 36, 42; reading aloud 79–82, 84–5 punctuation 69–70, 73, 74, 80 questioning: by listener 27; the text 16–17, 18, 66–7 questions, sample (student evaluation) 98– 104 Quintilian 5 radical theorists 1, 6–7 reading 22, 111; aspects of thought 14, 16–20;

INDEX 105

passivity in 16, 70; rhetoric and composition 33–6; sequence 38–40 reading aloud 79–82, 84–5 reading lists 38, 39 reducing procedure (poetry) 73 reductive physicalism 115 reflection (approach problems) 38–40 refutation 42 religion (Schopenhauer on) 91, 93–5, 97 repetition (in talking) 24 reported speech 51 reports 77, 80, 81–2 Republic (Plato) 104–8 rereading 19–20, 80 research (development) 120–1 rewriting 79 rhetoric: -humanism relationship 3–6, 13; -philosophy relationship 14–15 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 36 rhetoric and composition 33–4; case studies 47–53; critical modes 40–1; dispositio and elocutio 43–7; progymnasmata 41–3; reading, reflection and writing model 38–40; reading and writing 35–6; subject specificity 36–7; usefulness 54; using comparison 53–4 rhetorical curriculum 35, 40 rhetorical education 9, 12–13; see also aspects of thought rhetorical paidaeia 6–7, 13, 36, 41, 46, 55– 7 rhyme scheme 72, 74 role-playing 117; devil’s advocate 77–8 Romantic movement 46 Rossetti, Christina 68, 73, 75 rote learning 3, 17, 69 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 64 Russell, Bertrand 64 samples and preliminary results 83–5;

conclusion 109; exercise (Aristotle) 86–91; exercise (Schopenhauer) 91–7; sample exercises 104–9; student evaluation 98–104 Sartre, Jean-Paul 79 scanning 36, 49 Schopenhauer, Arthur 32; conception of philosophy 83, 91–7; The World as Will and Representation 91–7 science/scientific method 6–7 secondary literature 77–8 secondary texts 39, 41, 46 self-consciousness 22, 23, 81–2 self-conversation (writing) 31 self-correction 21, 126 self-motivation 58, 113 seminars 38, 39, 83–4; student evaluation 98–104 sentence structure (poetry) 72, 74 shared learning 25–6, 59 shared references 22, 29 signs (in conversation) 26 silence (meanings) 118–19 skills approach 4, 6, 8–9, 10–11, 13; see also cognitive skills; compositional skills; expressive skills; linguistic skills; transferable skills; verbal skills skimming 18 Socrates 4, 27, 28, 29, 32, 104–6 sonnet structure 72, 73 sophistry/traditionalism 3–4 speech: activities 78–82, 111; aspects of thought 14, 20–6; reading aloud 79–82; reported 51; spoken word 78 Spinoza, Baruch 32 spoken word 78 structure (composition) 43 students: activity (centrality) 124–6; evaluation 98–109

106 INDEX

study: as maturing process 114–15; programme 58; skills 15 style 70; elocutio 12, 43, 45–7; writing ‘in the manner of’ 65–6, 74–6 subject specifity 36–7 summary 50–1; literary exercises 71–3; philosophical exercises 61–6 surface meaning 72 surrealist poetry 73 syllabus 8, 11–12 synthesis (précis-writing) 27, 50–1, 59–61, 71–3 talk (for understanding) 21–6 teachers: dilemmas and responses 1–3; facilitator role 124–6; and learning process (purpose) 7–10; leisure time 122, 123; research 120–1 tense, person and 49–50 text: appropriation 18–19, 46, 48, 68–71; in-itself of 18; interpreted see interpretation of text; meaning 62, 72; primary 39, 41, 46; questioning 16–17, 18, 66–7; reading of 16–20, 38–40; secondary 39, 41, 46 textual vocabulary 25–6 theme (of poetry) 74, 76–7 thesis 32, 82; defence of 20, 23 thinking/thought: apects of see aspects of thought; future see future of thinking; learning to think 15, 111, 114; style 85; see also critical thinking Thrashymachus (in sample exercise) 104–5 time factor 19, 25 topics of conversation 22, 24–5

Tractacus (Wittgenstein) 65 traditionalism 1–4, 7 transcendental psychology 63 transcription 48–9; and memorization of poetry 68–71 transferable skills 10, 11, 36–7, 42 translation 48, 49; see also paraphrase; précis; summary tropes 7, 43 typology 69–70 understanding: appropriation and 18–19, 46, 69; rereading and 18–19, 80; talk for 21–6 verbal skills 42, 117 Vico, Giambattista 15 vocabulary (of speech) 25–6 vocal delivery 78, 80 voluntary assignments 84 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 64, 96; Tractacus 65 words 18, 71–2 World as Will and Representation, The (Schopenhauer) 91–7 writing: apects of thought 14, 30–2; for a known character 74–6; legible/grammatical 84–5; ‘in the manner of’ 65–6, 74–6; practice of see rhetoric and composition; skills development 110–11; style (of student) 113