Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 405 - Divide and Conquer - the Spread of Ramism.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Divide and Conquer the Spread of Ramism. It's been a while since we heard from the Department of Nominative Determinism here at Hopwag headquarters. The last time they spoke up, it was to point out how appropriate it was that Pico della Mirandola was born into the title Count of Concord. But they've just circulated a memo after hearing the last episode about Peter Ramus, in French, Pierre de la Ramée. It turns out that Ramus means branch in Latin, so it's almost too good to be true that Ramism, the movement inspired by his ideas, is renowned for its use of branching diagrams that lay out conceptual divisions. There are many, many examples, but a nice one would be the division of philosophy itself, presented by Johann Frege in 1576. It divides our favorite discipline into parts and instruments, with the parts further divided into the study of natures and the study of ethical issues. The study of natures, again, has two subdivisions, since we can study quantities or qualities, the former being mathematics, the latter the physical sciences. Finally, mathematics is divided into arithmetic and geometry. Of course, listening to me go through that is much less clear than seeing it on the page, with branching lines showing the relationships like in a family tree set on its side. And clarity was the point. As the medieval jurist, Azzo, had pointed out centuries earlier, division stimulates the mind of the reader, provides sense to the intellect, and cleverly molds the memory. The practice of division goes back way further than that. The technique is already found in the dialogues of Plato, especially the Sophist and the Statesman, which helped to inspire Ramos. Plato mostly worked with divisions into two, or dichotomies, but occasionally allowed divisions into more than two. Likewise the Ramists. For instance, that diagram by Frege is mostly dichotomous, but lists six disciplines under the physical sciences. Ramos may also have been influenced by more recent divisions, like those that became increasingly common in medical literature around the 1530s. But by the turn of the 17th century, the branch diagrams had become a hallmark of Ramism. They captured visually everything this movement represented, good and bad. Diagrams are clear and easy to understand, but they can easily be suspected of sacrificing nuance for the sake of that clarity. Living in a post-Ramis world, we take for granted the way that tables and charts present information in a highly abstract manner, and we understand that the abstraction is a two-sided coin. With power to instruct comes power to mislead, as when a chart highlights a certain kind of information while suppressing others. You're also more liable to remember information presented in tabular form, a fact that made Ramism quietly revolutionary. It proposed a change to something as fundamental as the way people remember. Mnemonic techniques were at least as old as philosophy itself, already Aristotle talks about them in his short treatise On Memory, but they had often used concrete imagery, like remembering ten things by imagining them sitting in front of ten different houses on a familiar street. By contrast, as Francis Yates has written, the Ramist man must smash the image both within and without, must substitute for the old idolatrous art the new imageless way of remembering through abstract dialectical rules. The branch diagrams put those rules to work on the page, a perfect encapsulation of the purpose of dialectic, which in Ramus's words, is like some mirror representing the universal and general likenesses of all things. One might even go so far as to say that the blank page becomes that mirror, reflecting a logical or conceptual space that is then marked out in unbroken lines, as Ramus put it. The method was facilitated by the new technology of printing, which allowed the diagrams to be reproduced in the textbooks that came to be used all over Europe. Tellingly, the diagrams became more and not less regimented as the decades passed. They are more a feature of later Ramist works than of Ramus's original publications, and become increasingly constricted by the rule that each concept should be divided exactly in two. The heyday of Ramism was between 1570 and 1630, and its region of greatest influence was in Central Europe. One might expect this to be the result of Ramus's own travels, when he was temporarily forced to flee Paris after converting to Protestantism. But actually, Ramism began to spread earlier than that in northwestern Germany, and remained a stronger force there than in the cities Ramus actually visited. It didn't hurt that Ramus's main publisher, Andre Wechssel, relocated to Frankfurt shortly after Ramus's death, churning out hundreds of editions. Aside from the works of Ramus himself, the textbook on rhetoric by his close collaborator, Omer Talon, also became important in the movement. That movement was taken up not so much in the universities, about which we've talked so much in this series, as in what Americans like me would call high schools, what in Germany were then, and still are, known as Gynasian. We're talking here about education for teenagers, an ideal context for Ramus's user-friendly methods. From France and Germany, the methods were exported all over Europe and beyond, as far north as Scandinavia, as far east as Transylvania and Hungary, as far west as Ireland, and later on even to Harvard University, in my hometown of Boston. Proponents of Ramism constantly emphasized the usefulness of their approach, a result of its abbreviated curriculum, its efficient teaching methods, and its emphasis on practice. Ramism would not train men to become great scholars like Erasmus, but it was perfectly suited to prepare young men to work as, say, merchants, competent in mathematics and Latin, without being overly well-read in the classics. Speaking of the flourishing Ramus program at the city of Herbon, one observer said bluntly that, students educated here quickly find suitable employment. The modern scholar Neil Gilbert, whom we saw two episodes ago calling Ramus's project the very acme of banality, also commented that Europe was deluged with small convenient school manuals in which the life of traditional subjects was systematically and methodically eradicated and reduced to rules so simple that any child, literally, could learn them. Here you can feel free to imagine the highly trained theologians of the Sorbonne, or indeed Erasmus, rolling their eyes at this lowering of standards. Actually, you don't need to imagine it, because plenty of people were carping about it at the time. In Paris, one of Ramus's own colleagues compared the students' enthusiasm for his teaching to their enjoyment of pantagruel, as a game and for amusement, and for good measure added that everything Ramus was saying had been lifted from better scholars like Wala, Agricola, Vives, Melancton, and Agrippa. In 1593, the English Protestant Richard Hooker called Ramism, an art which teacheth the way of speedy discourse and restraineth the mind of man that it may not wax over wise. A few years later, a professor at Hempstead said, Do not think that philosophy, such a divine good, consists of childish trivia, and who appeals to children more than Ramus? In the seventeenth century, Roger Bacon was still added. He called Ramism a method of imposture by which men may speedily come to make a show of learning who have it not. The works of the Ramus are, he said, much like a frippars or brokers shop that hath ends of everything but nothing of worth. Some impression of the bitterness and longevity of these disputes over Ramism is conveyed by the fact that there was a controversy over it in Sweden at the University of Uppsala in 1638. When a Ramus professor there was attacked for his methods, he pleaded in his own defense that the works of Ramus were a perfect introduction for beginners, who could then move on to Aristotle. There was more at stake here than pedagogy. The Swedish crown liked the idea of freeing the curriculum from the time-consuming methods of the scholastics, both for the sake of efficiency and as a way of undermining the power of the Church. Speaking of which, religious concerns were also important in spreading the ideas of Ramus. He had, after all, died as a Protestant martyr, specifically a Calvinist one, though this did not preclude his being used at Lutheran institutions. An admirer at Leiden wrote breathlessly, Ramus, ornament of the wise, while you were shaping the noble arts by laws and method and your own life by piety, a pack of sophists took you down with their teeth and blind fanaticism by the sword. However, you are strong like the high rising palm tree. Not long after his murder, he was honored in an ode written in England, comparing him to Saint Stephen. In Britain, Ramism would often be connected to the rigorous reform of the Puritans. It was a match made in heaven, as they might have said themselves. In the eyes of critics, what drew the Puritans to Ramism was a shared penchant for simplistic dogmatism, and of course the irreverent disregard for long-standing tradition that was epitomized by Ramus's polemics against Aristotle. It was indeed Aristotelianism that was the main rival to Ramism in this period, albeit that in central Europe this was a version of Aristotelianism that had itself grown out of the Reformation. We know all about it already, the humanist approach to Aristotle attached above all to the name of Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon was himself not overly impressed by Ramus. In 1543, he said of the latter's work on dialectic, it is a good effort but contains many foolish statements, and added that it was rather long-winded in the French manner. He would no doubt have been stunned to learn that this long-winded Frenchman would be his main competitor for impressionable hearts and minds in the decades to come. What then would be the fundamental differences between Ramist and Philippist methods? Understandably, people usually say Philippist and not Melanchthonist. As we know, Ramus did not entirely reject the value of Aristotle, but he was celebrated and scorned in equal measure for his famous attacks on this leading philosophical authority. Thus, we have such documents as a textbook from 1586 in which every reference to Ramus is underlined, enabling the reader to extract just the attacks on Aristotle. You can imagine the delight such impudence would have given teenage students if this was not their parents' logic. These kids could also be grateful that they weren't being asked to slog line by line through Aristotle, perhaps even in the original. That certainly made things easier on them, though we should pause for a moment to pay tribute to the students at Leiden, who in 1582 protested that they wanted to study Aristotle in Greek and not be taught from facile Ramus textbooks. It was in the context of the ensuing debate that Justus Lipsius made his famous remark, no one will be great for whom Ramus is great. That Parisian critic of Ramus was right to say that his ideas were inspired by humanists like Valla, Agricola, and so on, but in his program there was no time for the deeply learned classical scholarship that made Melanchthon such an admired figure. Ramus himself didn't even have an advanced mastery of Greek. As Howard Hudson has said in his excellent book on German Ramism, humanism, it appears, had spawned something which now jeopardized humanism itself. And in another book on education in this period, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine have suggested that Ramism was key in what they call a shift from humanism to the humanities. Such classical learning as was imparted to young students was subordinated to the pragmatic goals of Ramism, in which the aim of classical education was to produce effective writers and active participants in civic life rather than original scholars and philosopher kings. Thus you might find the greats of Latin literature simply mined for quotations to illustrate dialectical and rhetorical techniques. The point was not to prepare the kids for a lifetime of close engagement with Cicero or Virgil, it was to give them the ability to write a competent letter or give a persuasive speech themselves. Aside from the rather elitist worry that the Ramus were making things too easy on their students, the Philippists had philosophical objections. The most important has to do with those branch diagrams. We saw Ramus comparing dialectic to a mirror held up to all things. His definitions and dichotomous divisions were supposed to be a reflection and representation of reality. Here the Aristotelians objected that there is often a difference between our conceptions and things as they are in themselves. Classificatory concepts in the mind or on the printed page do not really correspond straightforwardly to the world. For instance, in logic we deal with genera like animal as well as species like human or giraffe and individuals like Buster Keaton and Hiawatha, but in reality there are only the individuals. There is no such thing outside the mind as just animal or just giraffe. Then too, the neat divisions of the Ramus could be entirely too neat. Applying their methods to the medical art, Ramus might say that bodies are either healthy or sick and then further divide sicknesses into types. But is every body really just healthy or just sick? You might have a psychological illness but be physically fit, or you might have respiratory problems but fantastic skin. The Aristotelians summed up this whole line of criticism by saying that Ramists had wrongly absorbed the function of metaphysics into dialectic, that is, logic. Metaphysics is a study of being, whereas logic is a study of the concepts we use to discourse and argue about being. It was fatal to confuse the two. Such critical reactions notwithstanding, it was also possible to combine the two educational programs. Take Johannes Piscator at Herborn. He integrated Melanchthon's approach with Ramism and applied the latter even in theology. Even when he taught the more introductory arts, he made clear the applicability of these arts to religion by offering scriptural passages to exemplify points in Omer Talon's rhetoric. Other German Ramists who made use of more traditionally Aristotelian material were Andreas Kramer, Friedrich Boerhaus, and Rudolf Goklenius, all of whom wrote works comparing the two systems. The general attitude was captured by Johann Usted who modified Lipsius' dismissive remark so as to say, no one will be great for whom Ramus alone is great. The same eclectic approach would be seen elsewhere in Europe. A survey of book collections in England shows that there, Ramist works often shared shelf space with Aristotelian ones. Up in Scotland, Andrew Melville developed a curriculum in Glasgow that also combined the true traditions. His use of Ramism was less ideological than pragmatic as it helped him cover a number of disciplines quickly in a situation where he was the only instructor. As we already saw with the case of Uppsala, one way to exploit the advantages of Ramism was simply to use it for younger students who could then graduate to more advanced material. This was the recommendation of the aforementioned Johann Usted. It especially made sense in a university setting since Ramus' own works had dealt with the liberal arts of language and mathematics, not the higher disciplines of law, theology, and medicine. But as we just saw with Piscator, some Ramus were determined to impose their methods even at the higher level. We duly see the telltale diagrams presenting the whole content of jurisprudence, and we see scholars insisting that the study of law and the other advanced sciences must bear in mind the criterion of utility, always the watchword of the Ramists. Ultimately though, it was a stretch to extend these methods to such demanding fields. Around the turn of the 17th century, the new encyclopedist approach of Bartholomew Kekkoman and others, which we touched on back in episode 385, arose as a new rival. Kekkoman appreciated Ramus' contribution to logic, but was one of those who criticized his conflation of logic with metaphysics. Instead, logic was put back in its place as an introductory art, with metaphysics as the highest of sciences. The Aristotelian curriculum was used as the basis for comprehensive works that emphasized the idea of a system, and that went well beyond the limited goals of the Ramists. The upshot was that in a 1626 textbook on dialectic, the Dutch scholar Franco Burgestijk identified three main schools in logic, Ramism, Aristotelianism, and the encyclopedic approach of Kekkoman. Ramism was never the only game in town, but it had an impressively long afterlife, to the point that it has been credited with helping to shape the mind of Descartes. Not bad for a method that unleashed opposition and mockery wherever it went, the kind of treatment never meted out to the teachings of Melanchthon. For a crude, rather amusing example, we can conclude with an anonymous English play about academic life from 1598 called Pilgrimage to Parnassus. It features a character who is himself a victim of nominative determinism. His name is Stupido, and he represents Ramus at the University of Cambridge. Poor Stupido, who is described as a moving piece of clay, a speaking ass, a walking image, and a senseless stone, provides the author with a chance to make in-jokes about the battles over logic at Cambridge, which in at least one case, led to actual fisticuffs. In the end, a traditionally Aristotelian textbook by John Seaton had managed to fend off competition from Peter Ramus. This would have been much regretted by Stupido, who was made to admit, Surely in my mind and simple opinion Mr. Peter maketh all things very plain and easy. As for Seaton's logic, truly I never look on it, but it makes my head ache. Pretty hostile stuff, but of course this was not an age for treating your opponents gently. As fevered as the disputes over Ramism were, they paled in comparison to the clash of religious beliefs that made itself felt across Europe in politics, in everyday life, and of course in philosophy. France was no exception. There, the Reformation spawned decades of violence and warfare, including the massacre in Paris that took the life of Ramus himself. Amidst the chaos and carnage, a few spoke out in favor of a less militant approach. Instead they recommended agreeing to disagree. But I trust that will be unnecessary here, as you'll all unanimously agree to join me as I look at French ideas about toleration next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gups.