Posted By BillHeise on June 16, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
—–
I had dropped out of academia for the second time in my life. I had made huge gains in my field, where I pointed out that the development of allegory was influenced Aristotle and logic. The Moderns and postmoderns alike were both on the side of the aesthetic whole over divisive logic. My thesis had been that allegory was a developing enterprise, and not an enterprise which Moderns and postmoderns alike could describe without actually having to look at the underlying philosophy. I had looked at the underlying philosophy, and I had found significant differences between, say, allegories of the 12th century and allegories of the 13th.

This made sense to me, but I could not find the source for reading allegories this way in the Middle Ages. This placed me at the mercy of historical and cultural critics, who needed a medieval source before they could place an idea in the Middle Ages. My problem was that I had managed to perfect a logical definition which I derived from the Romantic period, but not in the medieval period. This was okay with me because I was looking for some underlying humanistic similarities between human beings, rather than forcing open differences at every turn. I realized as I was writing my dissertation that I had failed to find the principle of the integration that Cochrane had pointed me to.

One of the reasons (though certainly not the only reason) I left academia was because I could not convince others of my case for an underlying similarity between the modern and medieval periods.

This was (and remains) an important point to me. D. W. Robertson, Jr. had been one of the first people to introduce historical criticism in his Preface to Chaucer. He had done so by opposing medieval allegory, which looks through the text on the page to the underlying world of spirit, to the New Critical method, which autotelic methods (meaning self-contained) of reading. There were no cultural forces involved in reading New Criticism. After Robertson, medieval studies went full bore in the opposite direction.

Robertsonhad made looking for sources and analogs the key to placing a work within the medieval culture. Without such sources and analogs, a critic (like me) could be accused of importing modern ideas into the Middle Ages. And believe me, I was accused.

But in 1994 (the last year I was at UIUC), after a generation of people collecting sources, cracks were appearing in the system. It turned out that the “dictionary method” employed by medieval scholars have not yet reached the “truth.” R. Howard Bloch, following Derrida, complained that the “dictionary method” led only to more dictionaries, and not to any stable logocentric “truth.” He reasserted the skeptical proposition of postmodernism are the hopeful proposition of the Moderns.

But elsewhere in the scholarly world, Stephen Greenblatt had introduced source study into the Renaissance as a hedge against New Criticism, and Renaissance scholars were quite excited about the prospect of not having to limit their inquiry into Renaissance literature to what the text says on the page. So even as the medieval view of source study was dying, another system of source study had grown-up in its place.

This, of course, confused me. I had been a medieval scholar, and as a medieval scholars I was looking for new methods to replace the old, tired historical and cultural methods that I had inherited and which had been shown to introduce falsehood into their picture of the truth. But when I got into Renaissance studies, source study was new. I was once again being invited to explore the larger world outside the text.

This introduced a conflict in me that I could not resolve while I was in graduate school. My medieval professors had been quite conservative, and so they were happy enough to have me follow the tried-and-true methods of the past, despite the fact that they recognize that those methods had some significant problems attached to them. My Renaissance professors, on the other hand, kept pushing me towards more source study, more cultural criticism. It seemed to me they were erecting barriers in criticism, rather than tearing them down.

This seemed to me to be another instance of the non-integrative philosophy that Cochrane had been talking about. I wanted to have an integrated personality, not a personality that fed itself on disintegration of others. So I academia and got a job in business, which was much less stressful. And I started reading for pleasure again. In 1996, I picked up Cochrane again for the first time in many years. It was a period of consolidation.

Consolidation periods are important in my life. I go through bursts of creative thought, followed by periods of consolidation of those thoughts. I go back and revisit old books, and I think about the difference between my life when I first read a book like Cochrane’s in my life today. I measure the difference between the two points of view. One of things I’ve been doing on my blog is revisiting my old thoughts before I move forward once more. These periods of consolidation do not last forever. Eventually I fit the pieces of the puzzle into clearer focus (nice mixed metaphor), and I move on.

When I read Cochrane again, I realized that what I had been missing was right before me all the time Augustine had provided the principle of integration into the classical world. His point was that the classical world itself could not resolve its internal conflicts. It was only after the integrative work of Augustine that the principle of the personal self came to the fore. Cochrane notes that Augustine’s Confessions was the first autobiography in history.

So start reading Augustine again, with the view that he had managed to integrate his personality into larger universe. What I found was that he had used a careful reading of Aristotle, in particular his Organon. The Organon is Aristotle’s introduction to the bases of logic. It includes the Categories, On Interpretation, Topics, Prior Analytics, and Posterior Analytics).

Okay, so it doesn’t sound exciting at all. It was exciting to me, for I had found the principle of integration within a logical framework. It was precisely this framework that thinkers like Robertson had deliberately excluded from the domain of inquiry when he wrote that “Aristotelian jargon” was nothing more than a “convenient academic refuge” (Robertson Preface to Chaucer 312).

I spent some of my limited spare time going back and reading Augustine looking for clues to the integrative framework which had eluded me through graduate school. And I found it there, precisely in the Father of the Middle Ages where scholars have been trained for two generations not to look for logic and science. Robertson was not alone in his dismissal of the relevance of medieval scholastic logic to the modern world. Yes, scholars who were concerned with Frege’s Sense and Reference were concerned with Ockham’s nominalism, but this was thought of as an “academic refuge.”

My sense is that the divisions of logic had the reputation of having nothing to do with the whole humanity. The Modern world was built upon the hope that by getting away from logic that we could reattach ourselves to the underlying “real world” that we had lost through too much logic (see Rousseau and his followers). This, in my opinion, was the reason that Sheila reattached herself to the larger world of goddesshood away from the world of logic. Logic is limiting. Metaphysical symbols were unlimited in their extent.

However, by 1960, the modern world was under attack, and this attack spilled over into the mainstream gradually throughout the 1980s and 90s. But rather than looking to logic, Derrida and his followers looked to the skeptical tradition of logic. It could not gain access to our whole, metaphysical self. Instead, it went around in an endless circle of words. It was all very Hamlet-like.

I did not know what to do with the strategic part of my argument, which had stalled. I couldn’t make my strategic case, and without it, I couldn’t really make any case at all. People knew that art had nothing to do with logic, so there was no point in even discussing it with me.

As I said, I had gotten so frustrated with this situation that I took my marbles and went hom. Tired of being so misunderstood in my chosen field, I had moved on from my failing academic career into a much more lucrative and by contrast much less stressful career in business.

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
Tags: