Activity

Hello All,
The following piece (and others) by Walter Ong (like Francis Yates) I think quite necessary reading, may provide some enlightenment on the background of the topological metaphor et al. (et alia, et alii or et aliae … your choice) … It may also (on p. 224) shed some light on a possible deeper meaning of the phrase “yadda, yadda, yadda” as often heard on Seinfeld. :-).
Enjoy!
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SYSTEM, SPACE, AND INTELLECT IN RENAISSANCE SYMBOLISM
Author(s): Walter J. Ong, S.J.
Source: Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, T. 18, No. 2 (1956), pp. 222-239

One way of looking at the Renaissance is to regard it as a time when the world was flooded with sound. This was the melodious age of poetry and rhetoric, following on the vocally impoverished, cacophonous Middle Ages. The ancient tongues found voice again, and the vernaculars came into their own, spurred by the renewed attention to rhetoric, the art of speaking, that is to say, of speaking aloud.

Today we are especially aware of the aural emphasis in Renaissance culture through the work of scholars such as Lucien Febvre and through the exhaustive treatments of the rhetorical tradition which has become an American specialty at the hands of Morris W. Croll, C. S. Baldwin, Donald Lemen Clark, T. W. Baldwin, Rosemond Tuve, Douglas Bush, Richard McKeon, Maurice B. McNamee, Sister Miriam Joseph Rauh, George Williamson, and others. But there is another series of phenomena which marks this same period and of which, largely through our growing knowledge of the history of science, we are becoming more aware. For the Renaissance is also the age out of which modern mechanics and modern physical science grow. It is the age not only of Poggio and Erasmus, but of Copernicus, Vesalius, and Galileo as well.
The outlook which terminated in the mathematical transformation of thinking and yielded the world of modern science has roots which are much older than the age of humanism and are exceedingly ramified. Recent studies have underlined the fact that the humanists in general exercised a retarding influence on the physical sciences and have stressed the fact that the pre-humanist scholastic age was the great seed-bed of modern scientific habits of mind. Since Duhem, the role in the development of modern science played by the impetus theories elaborated in medieval Paris and elsewhere has been studied in detail, and the more recent work of A. C. Crombie, Annaliese Maier, and a host of others has filled in our knowledge of many other aspects of physical and optical theory. Panofsky has pointed out certain fascinating analogies between the aims and

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performance of Gothic architecture and scholasticism (1), and has further described the evolution in painting which, by the High Renaissance, resulted in the assertion of a kind of infinite pictorial space, through which the beholder looked and in which he felt himself situated, and to which all other interests of the artists had finally to yield : no longer could a floor be tilted up to display its parquetry nor the animals in a hunt treated each as a thing interesting in itself, enveloped in its own particular space more or less independent of its ” real ” position in ” modern” or ” infinite ” perspective (2). This dominance of geometrical considerations in man’s response to reality has obvious scientific implications, and Benesch has suggested certain connections between it and the new cosmology .

However, these various shifts in emphasis are further involved with something more pervasive than architecture or painting or even the new science. In the present study I should like to draw attention to a series of developments in the history of ideas which specifically relate the shifts in symbolization and conceptualization observable in the physical sciences to another series of shifts in the ways of representing the field of knowledge and intellectual activity itself. This latter series of shifts is observable in the three artes sermocinales, or arts of communication-grammar, logic, and most particularly dialectic, or, as it came later to be styled, logic. At present, it seems best not to go into the question of causal relationships between these shifts, to decide whether the way one thought about knowledge brought on the changes in ways of thinking about the world, or whether the converse was true. The sequence could be either way, or, better, both ways. The psychological operations involved in the shifts are so subtle and concern so many people over so great a period of time it is impossible to discover in full detail which new way of symbolization preceded which. The important thing is that the two shifts work in concert, that man’s view of the universe and his view of his own mind are in great part correlatives.
The present documentation will be scant, for full documentation, which has to be largely from original sources, would itself require much more space for notes than this entire text. Such documentation should soon be available, with other material, in a full-length study in book form which I hope soon to have published, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue.
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(1) Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, Pennsylvania : The Archabbey Press, 1951), esp. pp. 30-67. Cf. the same author’s Studies in Iconology (New York : Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 172-73.
(2) Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953), I, pp. 3-20, 57-61, etc.
(3) Otto Benesch, The Art of the Renaissance in Northern Europe (Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 1947), pp. 124-43.

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II
In many ways, the greatest shift in the way of conceiving knowledge between the ancient and the modern world takes place in the movement from a pole where knowledge is conceived of in terms of discourse and hearing and persons to one where it is conceived of in terms of observation and sight and objects. This shift dominates all others in Western intellectual history, and as com pared to it, the supposed shift from a deductive to an inductive method pales into insignificance. For, in terms of this shift, the coming into prominence of deduction, which must be thought of in terms of visual, not auditory, analogies-the ” drawing ” of conclusions, and so on, not the ” hearing ” of a master-is already a shift toward the visual and a preparatory step for induction, from which deduction was never entirely separated anyhow. Stress on induction follows the stress on deduction as manifesting a still further visualization in the approach to knowledge, with tactics based on ” observation “, an approach preferably through sight.
The remote origins of the auditory-to-visual shift need not concern us in detail here. They have been traced to the difference between the Hebraic concept of knowledge, auditory and consequently personalist and existential, and the Greek concept, based on analogy with vision ‘. For the Hebraic (as perhaps for the present-day Arabic world still), to know (yadha’) meant to know one’s way around, to ” know what’s what “, to ” be in the know “, whereas for the Greek, to know (yiyvwsxw) meant to see, to intuit, to envision intellectually.
However, compared to the modern world, even the Greek tended to set knowledge within an auditory frame. Only with the slow development of scientism out of the Greek tradition have the promises or possibilities latent in the visualist orientation of the term (gignosko) been finally realized. Socrates’ technique, if not his objective, had been real, oral dialogue. Plato retained this dialogue perforce in reporting Socrates’ teaching, but he reduced it to the visualist medium of writing and, in his own mind, allowed concern for dialogue to be eclipsed by the visualist notion which obsesses him, that of the ” idea “, a term used originally to designate the look or appearance of things. Following Plato had come Aristotle’s search for sciences which were ” objective “-objects being items in a visile’s universe, as persons are in an audile’s.
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1 See R. BULTMANN, Gnosis, trans, by J. R. Coates (London : A. and C. Black [1952]), pp. 1-6, 15-18.

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Even Aristotle, who thought of himself as the inventor of what we should today style logic, is far from decisive in dissociating this science from dialectic, that is, from implication with dialogue and sound. He uses the term (logoixn) to refer to dialectical reasoning, with its suggestion of dialogue, and generally equates (logikos); and (dialektikos), contrasting both with the term (analutikos), which refers to scientific procedure, and with (sullogismos), which refers to formal reasoning or inference. Most significant of all, his notion of predication is based on ” saying ” or vocal assertion. Aristotle’s categories or predicaments are radically things said of, or accusations brought vocally against, a subject.
This kind of inability to dissociate an art of thinking from an art of speaking is passed on, directly or indirectly, through Cicero to the Middle Ages, and thence through John of Salisbury (1) and, more equivocally, through Peter of Spain, until it floods into the Renaissance, where it rekindles interest in actival dialogue (2) and crosses with other tendencies to generate curious offspring such as Ramism.
Compared to the ancient world, the world of scholasticism is a visualist age. The ancient educational ideal of the orator here yields to a less auditory ideal as rhetoric is superseded by dialectic, and dialectic itself begins to lose the two-sided character of genuine dialogue and attenuate itself into a teacher’s monologue under the lecture system of the teachers’ unions which we call universities. Isidore of Seville’s kind of encyclopedism in his Etymologies, drawn out of the ancient world and organized around words, is replaced by the new encyclopedism of Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum, a concept which is so typically medieval as to furnish the Medieval Academy of America with the name of its journal-and which seeks to concentrate man’s knowledge in the visile’s symbol of a mirror. But most of all, the visualist tendency is fed from within scholastic dialectic or logic itself.

Studies matured within the last decade are beginning to bring out the startling advances over Aristotelian logic made by the medieval logic which has for four centuries lain almost completely unknown, even to those-or especially to those-who think of themselves as neo-scholastic philosophers, but who profess a logic which is not at all that of the main medieval current, as represented in Peter of Spain, Ockham, Buridan, Burleigh, Tartaret, and the rest famous as old scholastic logicians. As against Aristotle’s logic,
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(1) John of Salisbury, Metalogicus, Lib. I, cap. x, in Patrologia Latina, CXGIX, 837 B-C.
(2) Eugenio Garin has reaffirmed the pre-eminence of dialogue as a literary form typical of the Renaissance In his Medioevo e Rinascimento, Studi et ricerche (Bari, 1954), II, 1 ; see Andre Ghastel, L’eptre et le discours, BHR., XVI (1954), p. 381.

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medieval logic is, like modern mathematical logic, highly quantified (1) -which means, for our present purposes, that it is a logic very high visual component.

This logic, I should like to suggest, is best viewed not as the prelude to or as the accompaniment of Thomistic metaphysics with which it has almost nothing to do, although it is in its own right and on its own terrain quite as respectable an achievement, as the prelude to modern mathematics and mathematical physics. In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of pre-mathematics, a subtle and unwitting preparation the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking which will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: in the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way which has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the scholastic experience. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonians, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place-not the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite the promising beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the same common scientific knowledge but the scientific tradition itself which they share is not a m of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. It represents a new state of mind. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our s world traces its origins back always to seventeenth and sixteenth century Europe, to the place where for some three centuries or more the arts course taught in universities and para-university schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and a companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in the ancient academies (2)
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(1) See Philotheus BOEHNER, O.F.M., Medieval Logic (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1950 ; Joseph T. Clark, S. J., Conventional Logic and Modern Logic: A Prelude to Transition, with a preface by Willard Van Orman Quine (Woodstock Maryland : Woodstock College Press for the American Catholic Philosophy Association, 1952) ; Ernest A. Moody, Truth and Consequence in Medieval Logic (Amsterdam : North-Holland Publishing Co., 1953). Father Clark’s work gives explanations of quantification in logic – see the index.
(2) See Louis John PAETOW, The Arts Course at Medieval Universities ( Urbana Ill. : University of Illinois Press, 1910) ; also Stephen d’lRSAY, Histoire des universites (Paris : Auguste Picard, 1933-35), vol. I, passim.
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In the scholastic arts program as registered in the Chartularium of the University of Paris and in other such documents, the quantified formal logic of the Middle Ages, it is to be noted, is a companion piece, not so much of metaphysics, as might be popularly imagined, for metaphysics as such amounted to little enough historically in scholastic philosophy, but rather, chiefly, of the physical or natural sciences. In this, as well as in its own internal preoccupations and structure, it shows itself the medieval correlative of modern formal logic or mathematical logic, which also appears conjointly with an interest in physical science.
In these perspectives, which can only be suggested here, certain phenomena characteristic of the Renaissance can be regarded as the culmination of a quantified, visualist drive more concerted than the world had ever before known. This drive is marked by an increased sensitivity to space and a growing sophistication in ways of dealing with quantity and extension, which comes to a climax not only in the neutral Copernican cosmic space that supplanted the less abstract, more crudely physical space of ” favored directions ” in Aristotelian cosmology (1), but also in even more subtle psychological shifts felt through the whole of society and affecting man’s entire outlook on reality. The sensitivity to space is obvious in the whole medieval, and even more the Renaissance, cultural complex, and is seen, for example, in the artist’s attitude toward the world which he projected from his consciousness. ” Of all artists “, remarks Gyorgy Kepes, ” the Greeks alone reveal space concepts limited by Euclidean geometry” (2). With the Middle Ages, the artistic sensibility was already more spatially sophisticated, even when its relationship to the extended universe seemed more simple:
“The finite universe of late medieval times found a pictorial counterpart in the limited, shallow, ” abstract ” spaces of Giotto. Stage by stage, art kept pace with developing cosmological concepts… The past seven centuries have given us the “sym bolic” space of early Flemish masters; the “rational” space of fifteenth century Renaissance Italy, deep and clear; the ” ideal.” space of Raphael and the High Renaissance, in which a clear foreground, continuing the spatial characteristics of the world in which the observer finds himself, converges upon a spatially mysterious, other-worldly realm ; the soaring, levitational space of Gothic cathedrals ; the poised and balanced spatial volumes of the High Renaissance church of San Biagio at Montepulciano ;
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(1) See H. BUTTERFIELD, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (London, G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1949), chap. V.
(2) Gyorgy KEPES, Art and Science, in Explorations (University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada), I (1953), p. 82.
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the ” exploding ” space of the German Baroque at Vierzehnheiligen; the pervasive space of the Impressionists, dissolving all solid form; the laminated, timebound space of the later Cubists (1).”
The mind has its spaces, too, and at the time of the Renaissance, nothing is more evident than the role which spatially oriented conceptualizations begin to play in the notion of knowledge itself. The general stage had been set, as we have seen, by the quantification of medieval logic, which gave occasion to think of mental operation less by analogy with hearing and more by analogy with more or less overtly spatial or geometric forms. The central strategic operation in the procedure of visualizing knowledge at this time
was undoutedly the exploitation of letterpress printing. I believe that there is no doubt of an intimate connection between the mental habits encouraged by medieval logic and the emergence of printing which is a curious phenomenon in the extreme, for the reason that all the elements necessary for its use had been known from antiquity -lead castings, brass dies, paper or its equivalent, ink, and presses, none of these were new. However, the reasons for the interest in and final development of successful printing techniques cannot be gone into here. But the psychological implications of the process must be looked at.
Basically, the new procedure was a technique for giving permanence to sound by transmuting it more perfectly into silence, technique for fixing the word in space more adroitly than eve before. Not only was it now possible to have an unlimited number of paper surfaces on each of which words were set in exactly the same spatial relationship to one another, but the very technique of producing this spatial organization was itself an adventure in local motion such as the parts of words had never before seen.
Writing had reduced the sound of words to visual equivalents, and the alphabet had further dismembered these equivalents into visual parts. But printing from movable type cast from matrices struck from a die or punch-the essence of the achievement perfected by the Fust-Schoffer-Gutenberg combination-had spatially unmoored these parts themselves. Letters thus acquire local motion. More than that, their manufacture had been reduced to a matter of simple local maneuver. With one set of punches, one could move over bits of softer metal and strike out whole boxfuls of matrices. Casting from one set of matrices, one could produce whole fonts of type. With one font of type, one could set up an indefinite number of lines and compose an indefinite amount of type for making up an indefinite number of printing forms. From
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1 Loc. cit.
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one form, one could print an indefinite number of pages simply by moving the paper into contact with the type and pressing it. Space had become pregnant with meaning, not only in the orderly arrangement within the book itself, but even more in the font of type, and still more in the little box of punches, in whose tiny compas were imprisoned more pagefuls of words than in a pre-Gutenberg inkwell the size of the Heidelberg tun.

This advance in the way of dealing with knowledge could not but affect the notions of what knowledge itself was. Curtius has examined the ways in which writers, in the Middle Ages and later, exploit the book and activities associated with the scribal art as symbols (1). But in this connection the evolution of the very notion of what a book is deserves closer looking into. With the invention of printing, this notion itself undergoes metamorphosis. Rather than a record of something someone had said, a book now became an object, belonging more to the world of things and less to the world
of words. Silent reading now began to replace the older oral habits of the manuscript age, when even a scholar reading privately to himself habitually picked the words off the page one by one and aloud (2). Book titles change from addresses to the reader to become labels like the labels on boxes, for, with the spread of printing, books became items manufactured like tables and chairs. As objects or things, they obviously ” contained ” knowledge. And, since knowledge could be ” contained” in books, why not in the mind as well?
At this point, the whole intellectual world goes hollow. The mind now ” contains ” knowledge, especially in the compartments of the various arts and sciences, which in turn may ” contain ” one another, and which all ” contain ” words. Discourse contain sentences, sentences contain phrases, phrases words, and words them selves contain ideas. (It is hardly necessary to remark that ” sentences ” or ” periods “, ” commas “, and the other paraphernalia of syntactical analysis were quite other things than this to the ancients and to medieval man (3).) What is more, ideas contain other ideas, for the Ramist and Kantian notions, as well as the Renaissance scholastic and most neo-scholastic notions of ” analysis ” are bound up with this outlook (4).
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(1) Ernst Robert CURTIUS, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated from the German [Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948] by Willard R. Trask, “Bollingen Series”, XXXVI (New York: Pantheon Books, [1953]), pp. 302-47.
(2) See H. J. CHAYTOR, From Script to Print : An Introduction to Medieval Literature (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1945), pp. 13 ff.
(3) See Walter J. ONG, S.J., Historical Backgrounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Punctuation Theory, in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, L1X (1944), pp. 349-60.
(4) Father Peter HOENEN, S.J., reports on notions of analysis among Renaissance and more modern scholastics in his De origine primorum principiorum scientiae, Grego rianum, XIV (1933), pp. 153-84.

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What you are thinking is now less than ever what you are converse with yourself about. It is simply what is “in your mind” The new orientation is as ineluctable as it is subtle, rendering ineffectual the very efforts to escape it. Thus, when the humanist attempt a retreat into classical antiquity, their very reason for doing so and their way of conceiving their maneuver reveal them as men of the Gutenberg era. Erasmus’ and others’ assert all the knowledge possible to man is contained in the writings of the ancients clearly manifests the spatialized understanding of knowledge typical of post-medieval man.

The use of printing need not be regarded as the cause of this shift of the focus of knowledge toward spatial analogies, but rather as a spectacular symptom of the general reorientation This reorientation is far flung in its implications, being on one side with the emergence of the topical logics (logics of common-places or ” place “-logics, and thus in effect spaces-logics) of Rudolph Agricola and Peter Ramus and their half-successful bid to replace the predicamental logics (statement-logics) ; on another side with the interest in plotting the surface of the globe makes this same Gutenberg era the great age of cartography and exploration; and on still another with what is probably fundamental stylistic difference between ancient writing a writing-the immeasurably greater exploitation today of metaphors and of imagery which in one way or another admits of diagrammatic analysis.

III
The related visualist phenomena which appear in such riot are all, to a certain extent, subsumed or summarized in the changed way of conceptualizing the field of knowledge as a whole. The stepped-up visualism which reaches its initial climax in the Gutenberg era and thence moves on to still greater conquests was having con sequences in man’s way of picturing the universe of the mind quite as real as its consequences in man’s way of thinking of the physical universe. No ” field ” of knowledge was spoken of yet-that was to come later, as field physics was to come later, too-but the ways of thinking about mental activity had grown increasingly spatial in the Middle Ages.

One of the great climaxes in scholastic philosophy is the wave of interest in what we call today the ” structure ” of a science (the term was to come into use in the late Renaissance period). By the late sixteenth century, this interest had become an obsession in the discussions on method and related matters which Ramus,

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Descartes, and Francis Bacon do not at all initiate-as it is sometimes taken for granted that they do-but rather bring to a climax. Well before these men, the method discussions are big with diagrammatic symbols: ” method ” itself (a ” way after ” or ” way through “), ascensus and descensus, analysis and synthesis (a mathematical notion used by Ramists, and by others after them, to replace the more elusive, less diagrammatic genesis which had been the term Aristotle himself paired with analysis), and the like (1).

These concepts derive from antiquity and are to be accounted for basically by the fact that any attempt to explain mental activity tends to deal with the activity in terms of analogies with the sense of sight, since reduction in terms of one or another type of sense knowledge is inevitable, and reduction in terms of other senses, hotably of hearing, while enhancing the mysterious and existentialist implications of knowledge, serves little to satisfy the demand for some sort of explanation, for ” clarification “. However, despite their presence in philosophy from the beginning, nothing in antiquity or in the Middle Ages matches the clatter which such terms make from about the 1540’s on. At Cambridge in the 1580’s, as at Paris three or four decades earlier, the method disputes threaten to set all the university dons and a great many of the students at one another’s ears, first in the philosophy courses on the arts faculty, and thereafter by a kind of chain reaction up through the other faculties of medicine, law, and theology.

The method disputes had been initiated in an age which could not yet differentiate philosophies from one another with the adroitness which we feel we can command today, for it had as yet no ” -isms ” at all in its conceptual apparatus. When the early sixteenth century speaks of what we should today glibly call ” Thomism “, ” realism “, and ” nominalism “, it habitually thinks not in terms of different philosophies but in terms of different persons -of “blessed Thomas “, of the ” reals ” (reales), and of the ” nominals” (nominales)-with their different approaches or ” ways” (viae), or else of these persons’ different ” opinions ” (opiniones).
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1 Some of these terms are discussed in John Herman RANDALL, The Development of Scientific Method in the School of Padua, in Journal of the History of Ideas, I (1940), pp. 177-206 ; R. I. MARKUS, Method and Metaphysics : The Origins of Some Cartesian Presuppositions in the Philosophy of the Renaissance, in Dominican Studies, II (1949), pp. 356-84 ; Walter J. Ong, S.J., Peter Ramus and the Naming of Methodism, Journal of the History of Ideas, XIV (1953), pp. 235-48 ; etc.
2 Thus we find Juan de CELAYA’s Expositio… in librum Predicabilium Porphyrii cum questionibus eiusdem secundum triplicem viam beati Thome, realium, et nominalium (Paris. 1516 – copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris), or the same author’s Expo sition, in librum Predicamentorum Aristotelis, cum questionibus eiusdem secundum viam triplicem beati Thomae, realium, et nominalium, novissime… revisa… (Paris, 1520 -copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris). The use of opinio for what today would be called ” a philosophy ” is very common, and it connected with classical usage. Thus one finds “Expositio magistri Georgii… nominalium opinionum r?cit?toris…” fol 1 in Interpretatio Georgii Bruxellensis in Summulas Petri Hispani… (Paris, 1496 – copy in the Bibliothque Nationale, Paris). For other similar instances of the term, see the list of titles in Joseph P. MULLALLY, The Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain (Notre Dame, Indiana : Publications in Mediaeval Studies, 1945), pp. 145 ff.

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Needless to say, there is no talk of philosophical “systems” for the application of this particular concept to philosophy is a relatively late product of epistemological visualism, tied up directly with the transit from Aristotelian to Copernican space.

IV
The notion of a philosophical ” system ” or of philosophical “systems” is so well established today that it is hard for us to believe that it has a history at all. System is, of course, an ancient Greek term, translatable perhaps as ” set-up ” or organized, composite whole, but its application to the realm of the mind, and in particular to philosophy, becomes current only after the medieval experience terminating in the methodological disputes, which give unequivocal evidence of the penchant of the time of viewing know ledge with the help of visualist, quasi-diagrammatic constructs. Conceived of as a ” way through ” a problem or investigation, or as a ” way after ” a desired answer, method is patently a concept based on a visualist analogy, which takes up the concept of ” way and further visualizes it by conferring on it a fuller implication of direction. This fashion of dealing with the notion of ” way ” contrasts strikingly with the Scriptural use of this notion when Christ asserts, in an obviously personalist and existentialist context ” I am the way “-the ” I ” being here not only a Person, but On to Whom the audile’s rather than the visile’s world is particularly relevant, the Incarnate Word of God, Who is also the Truth an the Life.
By setting the term ” way ” in this context, the biblical text, recognizing the general validity of the ” way ” metaphor, in effect discourages attempts to elaborate on its visualist or spatial implications independently of auditory or oral connections. For, while the work of the Incarnation, in Christ’s own earthly life and as continued by His Church, takes place in space, and while notions such as ” mission ” can apply to it, it is always the work of One to Whose Person the auditory-oral notion of Word particularly belongs. The work of Christ’s visible Church is carried on in space, but by means of preaching- fides ex auditu -as well as of the sacraments, which are visible signs, to be sure, but, as Aquinas long ago pointed out, which differ from the quasi-sacraments of the Old Law by having words (or, in the case of matrimony, the equivalent –a consent) as their determinating ” form “. The very Sacrifice
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of the New Law, unlike those of the Old, is effected by words. In this context, it becomes impossible to interpret the ” way ” which is the God-Man in terms of crude visualist constructs alone. And in the interior life, although ” the Kingdom of God is within you “, Catholic spiritual writers find little ascetic value in the contemplation of mandalas or other semi-diagrammatic constructs associated with Yoga and Buddhism, but a great deal of value in an auditory-oral ‘directive : silence.

The ” way ” of the methodologists, on the other hand, was free or gradually freed itself, from auditory or oral commitments as it was elaborated in terms of ascent (ascensus) and descent (descensus), division, partition, distribution, induction, deduction, analysis, and the rest of the psycho-geometrical apparatus used to describe the intellectual processes. Here we are in a definitely spatial universe. Its psychic space is like that of the Aristotelian physical cosmos. The Aristotelian cosmology, as is well known, did not operate by purely geometrical laws such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton were to favor, but rather in terms of favored directions, up and down, the directions presumably followed by substances seeking their natural levels in the universe. Horizontal motion was, in this scheme, difficult if not impossible to account for intelligibly. This universe was directional, as against the Newtonian universe, which was to be more purely geometrical, directionally neuter. Now the space which figures, by analogy, in the method literature is directional, too, for the very notion of method is highly directional. Method proceeds to an end through median points or ” means “. The axiomatics associated with methodology is thought of as concerned with ascent to the first principles or axioms or dignitates, and with descent from them to conclusions (1).
One trouble with this directional universe was that the ends toward which or away from which it moved often, if not always, proved to be unattainable limits such as those in calculus rather than readily ascertainable points. Once one moved away from generalized discussion to particulars, it was very difficult to produce genuinely first principles. Each of the various arts or sciences was nominally connected with its first principles, but, although one could intuitively discern the order which a science ideally should have in relation to its first principles arrived at inductively and thereafter functioning deductively to give the interior structure of the science its consistency, no one could actually produce a complete science fully rigged out with its first principles and all their conclusions. From this point of view, all the sciences were imperfect, and most of them little more than shambles.
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(1) See MARKUS, op. cit. ; RANDALL, op. cit.

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Peter Ramus was to protest this before the University of P and the whole world, and, although there was violent resistance to Ramus’ own notions on method and although many of his opponents were beyond a doubt intellectually abler men than he, no could take up his challenge and produce even one thoroughly ” methodized ” art of science, logically consistent from start to finish (1). Some few cited Euclid’s Elements, but Ramus ins that this, too, was not properly ” methodized ” or reasoned out. Ramus was, as we know today, to some extent right about Eu whose geometry is not quite so complete a deductive system a has been taken to be (2). However, Ramus’ strictures against Euclid give evidence of impatience more than of genuine insight, and his own attempts to remedy the intolerable situation in which he all the arts by ” methodizing ” not only geometry but all the arts as well, are the amateurish works of a desperate man who is not a thinker but merely an erudite pedagogue.
With the method discussion at this point and the visualist tide running strong, an important shift took place in the whole notion of space, signalized if not caused by the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus in 1543, the year of Ramus’ own first published works. Copernicus’ astronomy approach the universe from the point of view of purely geometrical space, in which no direction was more favored than any other, since neither up-and-down motion nor any other directional motion had priority over other kinds, any more than it does in a geometrical abstraction. This new approach had the effect of highlighting the notion of system (systema).
Although this term had always been applicable to the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic cosmos, it was not particularly exploited in this connection for the reason that this cosmos was conceived as one unique system without even an imaginable competitor. The notion of wholeness was so inevitable that it was not particularly attended to. Hence the notion of system, an organized whole, was a rather uninteresting one. It was not even practicable to imagine the parts of the Aristotelian universe as lesser wholes, for this universe had no really detachable parts forming little systems of their own. The earth-moon relationship could not be imagined as a system comparable to the sun-earth relationship, because neither was conceived of in the purely geometric terms which invite such comparison. The sphere of the moon was a special part of the cosmos
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(1) A complete check list of the Ramist disputes is given in the Ramus and Talon Inventory which I have just completed and which gives the nearly eight hundred editions (some 1100 separately printed titles) of the works of Peter Ramus and literary lieutenant Omer Talon, with locations of copies in European and American libraries. This inventory will, I hope, appear as a companion volume to Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, spoken of above.
(2) See George Henry FORDER, The Foundations of Euclidean Geometry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927).
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which belonged in its own altogether particular place among the celestial spheres, as the sphere of the sun belonged in its own place. Neither was thinkable as being anywhere but in its own orbit.

The Copernican hypothesis changed all this. The newly proposed explanation encouraged thinking of even the Aristotelian system as a system or organized whole by proposing another system to supplant it. It was a case now of one whole against another. Moreover, the Copernican cosmos itself was a system involving an incalculable number of minor systems: not only that of the earth and sun, but that of the moon and the earth, of Juppiter’s moons and their mother planet, of the rings of Saturn, and, as was later to appear, of whole solar systems and whole galaxies outside ours.

V
How much the advent of Copernican geometrical cosmic space depended upon the unsatisfactory status of the Aristotelian explanation of the external universe and how much upon more upon the subtle pressures due to the general build-up of the visual sensibility symptomized by the emergence of printing in the West, by the phrenetic interest in method, and by many allied phenomena which mark the Copernican period but which are too abundant and to complex to be gone into here, no one at present can say. It is certain that Copernicus’ new approach was in some measure tied up psychological forces, for it depended on no new discoveries- these were to come later as corroboration-only on a new way about what everyone already knew. However this may be, the notion of system, given its new currency, took hold in with the universe of knowledge quite as quickly as it did in connection with the physical universe, and exactly in those areas where the method agitation had been strongest. Methods of knowledge give rise to systems of knowledge. Thus we find the Ramist Johann Heinrich Alsted, author of several famous ” methodized encyclopedias (1), publishing at Herborn in 1610 his Double Mnemonic System of knowledge (Systema mnemonicum duplex) and his Mnemonic System of the Liberal Arts and of All Curriculum Subjects (Artrium liberalium ac facultatum omnium systema mnemonicum). This was twenty-one years before the first appearance of Galileo’ sopra i due massimi systemi del mondo. Galileo’s work
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(1) J. H. ALSTED (Alstedius), Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia libris xxvii complectens universae philosophiae methodum serie praeceptorum regularum… (Herborn 1620); Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta… (Herborn, 1630) ; etc. Someone among his contemporaries discovered that an anagram of Alstedius is sedulitas. called a very modest anagram.

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was to give the notion of system an urgency and currency which it had never known before, but the welcome for the notion had been well prepared outside the field of astronomy in works treating the cosmography of the mind.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the habit of thinking of philosophy itself, the quondam love of wisdom, in terms of a “system” had become well established, and with it the habit of thinking of theological systems and of systems and orbits of other sorts of knowledge as well. Indeed, as early as 1620, a philosophical system, explicitly so-called, had been launched by Alsted: Philosophy, he says, as viewed in the mind is a habitus, as viewed outside the mind, a systema (1). But if he anticipated Galileo, Alsted-teacher of the important educational reformer Jan Comensky or Comenius, who wrote the Orbis pictus, a visual education system-does not anticipate Copernicus. The system of philosophy which he envisions is conceived by analogy with a free-wheeling Copernican universe in a neuter geometrical space, for throughout this period system or systema, used absolutely and without qualifications, means a celestial system. Having once conceived of various ” systems ” of philosophy, Alsted and others deal with these ” systems ” by ” harmonizing ” them, making use of a conceptualization indubitably associated with the old harmony of the spheres.
What it all came to, or comes to-how far what we call philosophy or theology or history or any other kind of knowledge can be related even analogously to a twirling set of bodies free-wheeling in space is a matter which no one ever explained. The concept of system simply took unquestioned hold of the mind, applying itself everywhere. By the early eighteenth century, there is a real epidemic of systems. The New Intellectual System of the Universe by Ralph Cudworth has by this time become famous, together with a thousand other systems : book titles announce systems of medicine, systems (that is, school courses) of physics, systems of geography, systems of divinity, metaphysical systems 2, Bartholomew Keckermann’s System of Rhetoric (or course in rhetoric), A New System… for a General Peace (London, 1746), and A New System of the Gout and Rheumatism (5th ed. ; London, 1719). The fad which Copernicus had loosed was coming into its own.

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(1) ” Philosophia est comprehensio disciplinarum liberalium inferiorum : et alias dicitur encyclopaedia… Comprehensio ilia spectatur in mente ut habitus, extra mentem ut systema.” ? Alsted, Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia (Herborn, 1620), p. 2.
(2) Early instances of the appearance of the term ” metaphysical system ” are : Rudolph Gockel (Goclenius) the elder (1547-1628), Isagope in peripateticorum et scho lasticorum primam philosophiam, quae vulgo dicitur metaphysica, cum alio novo systemate metaphysico M[agistri) Constantini Cnirimii… (Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1612, copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris) ; Clemens Templer (Templerus), Metaphysicae systema methodicum… per theoremata et problemata selecta concinnatum [with notes and scholia supplied by Gockel] (Hanau, 1616, copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris). In devising systems, Ramists or circles where Ramists predominated, such as that at Frankfort and Hanau, were in the lead.

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Anyone could now envision a system. Application of the Aristotelian ” system “, if anyone had troubled to advert to it as a system, to the field of knowledge would have been difficult in the extreme. Conceived along Copernican lines, system was a much more man euverable concept, quite as visually satisfying as method was, and without some of the annoying disabilities of this other earlier favorite. Even as popularly conceived, a method or ” way through ” suggested patience and painstaking labor-the inability of anyone, except perhaps Euclid, to produce even one perfectly organized or methodized science was embarrassing and discouraging in the extreme. There was difficulty about the very notion of ” end ” in method, the goal toward which the “way” led, for the great problem of method, at least since Aristotle, had always been this : How is it that in an investigation we can set a methodical procedure, when the method must depend on understanding what we are looking for, and we obviously cannot understand what we are looking for until the investigation itself brings us to it ? Thinking of knowledge as governed by the diagrammatic, easily imagined, and only loosely applicable notion of system was more satisfying than thinking of it in terms of method and these conundrums. It was comforting to think of oneself, or of one’s enemy, as possessing a philosophical “system”, something which whirled dazzlingly around a center in the mind like the Copernican spheres around the sun, a whole self contained and independent of the rest of reality. Such pictures could cover intellectual situations of which one knew -really very little. The very looseness and inadequacy of the system metaphor was and is one of its greatest recommendations.

VI
The rise of the notion of system as applied to the possessions of the mind is only one in a whole kaleidoscope of phenomena whole mark the shift from the more vocal ancient world-truly an audile’s world-to what has been called the silent, colorless, and depersonalized Newtonian and post-Newtonian universe. This is no place to settle whether the shift is to be applauded or regretted. I here presented simply as an historical fact in the evolution of human thought. As a fact, it deserves to be approached with a humble curiosity out of which we can hope to mature understanding both ourselves and of external reality.
Certain advances and certain losses connected with the shift are discernible enough. Out of it has come modern science, with

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the possibility it offers for increasing the subjection of matter and impregnation of matter by spiritual forces, in so far as these spiritual forces can orient themselves within their own spiritual realm. Out of the same shift have come the more contestable advances in human relations themselves, with the possibility of greater social justice which, if by no means realized, at least ambitioned with conscious concern by far more people today than ever before. For social planning, human engineering, managerial revolutions, and, on other side of the ledger, the welfare state, are all part and parcel of the ” objective ” approach to even human existence which, not initiated, was at least furthered by the new scientism coming out of the Renaissance as by nothing else before.

The new world was a world of objects as nothing before had ever been. An “object” in its basic conception-something thrown against, thrown in the way of-is obviously a formulation with visualist roots, and one predestined to dominate scientific thin (One recalls St. Thomas Aquinas’ insistence on the “object” in approach to knowledge and to psychology, for he was a visile there ever was one.) In this sense, object is opposed not to subject but to person. Inasmuch as the world of science is a world of objects, which are exteriorities or surfaces, conceived of by analogy with the data of visual apprehension, it is not a world of persons, or interiorities manifesting themselves by a word. For even in this sublunar world, sound or voice comes from the interior of things, not so as to exteriorize this interior but to enable it to communicate with other interiors. Little wonder that in the post-Newtonian object-world, God’s voice, too, is silenced, that revelation becomes meaningless, and that the Creator-a visile’s God-become more than a kind of mechanical brain. You need no person to run a machine. But you need a person to utter a word. You also need a person to elicit from you an act of faith. For there is no way to believe “in” an object, or even to believe ” in ” an object in a purly objectified, impersonal context. By definition, objects as such in the sense of impersonalizations should be dealt with by being seen. That is why above the sensible world there are no longer any objects only persons.

These matters are objects for reflection, not for reform. It impossible for us to abrogate the history which has shaped our minds and our sensibilities and made us fit for twentieth century existence. We are committed to being intellectual visiles in ways in which earlier men were not, by the very fact that we are irrevocably explainers, cultits of the clear and distinct, reasonable men. The ideals of reasonable men and scientific explainers need not be repudiated, irrelevant as they have sometimes been and perhaps are to types of minds and types of approaches other than our own.

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However, such ideals do need to be complemented by a return to something larger than a merely visile, scientist’s view. The history of philosophy itself has largely been the history of a search after more and more adequate visualist or spatialist analogies by which to represent and deal with the real universe and the universe of the mind, but we are living in an age today which has begun to feel uneasy about this quest.

The uneasiness is shown in the growing or recurrent suspicion that such notions as system may, in the last analysis, prove to be philosophical mare’s nests. This suspicion need not lead to a new irrationalism at all. It should mean a recurrence of certain other approaches to knowledge which marked the Renaissance, the approach through voice and sound, the Hebraic rather than the Greek approach. Here knowledge is contained not in a system, but in discourse, in conversation, and not in abstract conversation, but in the real conversation which has been going on since man appeared on earth. This point of view submerges the visualist, explanatory approach and with it science itself in something more ultimate and more transcendent, in the existentialist situation, with their our most immediate contact is through voices and persons rather than through observation and objects. In this more living and vocal view of reality, which represents a symbolization the polar opposite of that whose evolution has been discussed so briefly and inadequately here, science is only arrested dialogue of man with man, and an echo of the interior dialogue in silence of each soul with God.

Walter J. Ong, S.J.