H. P. GRCIE E J. L. SPERANZA: I VERBALI DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE: ACONZIO

 G.: Let us begin with the devil, because Aconzio has the good sense to catalogue him rather than merely denounce him. S.: You mean the Stratagemata Satanae. G.: Precisely. It is one thing to say that error exists; it is another to classify its methods. The second is always more philosophical. S.: Because classification already implies method. G.: Exactly. And Aconzio, unlike later romantics of confusion, wants the field cleared before anyone starts praising mystery. S.: Yet he is hardly a dry classifier only. G.: No. That is the pleasure of him. He can list the devil’s arts with almost bureaucratic severity, and then turn round and argue for toleration with genuine heat. S.: So one side of him is taxonomic, the other moral. G.: Better: both are moral, but by different routes. The taxonomy is moral because it identifies the forms by which minds are led astray. S.: And the method is moral because it is meant to secure common ground. G.: Just so. He is not interested in method as intellectual drill for its own sake. He wants a shared rational footing from which sects may cease burning one another. S.: That sounds nobler than most methodological prose. G.: It is. Most methodological prose is written by men who hope to improve journals. Aconzio hopes to improve Christendom. S.: That is a larger brief. G.: Uncomfortably larger, yes. S.: Then why do you say he almost invents conversational implicature and then disinvents it? G.: Because there are places where he seems to see that what is conveyed in discourse outruns what is explicitly stated, especially once passion, superstition, and polemical habit enter. S.: And then? G.: And then he recoils into method, as if to save discourse from its own excesses by stricter procedural light. S.: So he glimpses the richness of implication, then fears its abuse. G.: Exactly. He sees that implication may unite understanding, but also that it may become one of Satan’s own favourite devices. S.: Which means he cannot simply celebrate the unsaid. G.: No. For him the unsaid is double-edged. It may be prudential, reverent, suggestive, or charitable. But it may also be calumny, insinuation, faction, superstition, and the pious lie. S.: Then your sympathy with him lies not in any shared doctrine of the unsaid, but in a shared awareness of its power. G.: Admirably put. He and I meet in the recognition that the life of discourse is not confined to what is baldly asserted. S.: Yet you are more relaxed about that than he is. G.: Quite. I do not believe one can cure language of implication without also curing it of civilisation. S.: Whereas Aconzio hopes to discipline implication by method. G.: Or at least to submit it to a regime of honesty, charity, and fear of God. S.: You say that dryly. G.: Because I am English. S.: He is not merely Italian either, though. He becomes, in a sense, English by exile. G.: A fellow Brit, as I like to tease him. One of those imported reformers who improve England by making it less certain of itself. S.: Yet England also excludes him from sacramental comfort. G.: Yes. That too matters. He arrives as a dissenter among dissenters, then proves too difficult even for the relatively tolerant arrangements available. S.: So he is out of place nearly everywhere. G.: Which is one reason he remains philosophically alive. The settled thinker is often dead on the page. The displaced thinker still has to think. S.: Then we must take seriously his engineering too. G.: Very much so. The man drains marshes, reports on fortifications, and writes on method. That is an admirable combination. S.: Because he knows that systems fail both in argument and in water. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become hydraulic. S.: I shall try to remain only moderately marshy. G.: Better. Now, De methodo. The title alone already distinguishes him from those who later make a virtue of formlessness. S.: You are thinking of Feyerabend. G.: Inevitably. “Against method” is the sort of title one can only write after several centuries of method have made thought safe enough to become rebellious theatrically. S.: Whereas Aconzio writes before the safety. G.: Exactly. He writes when method is still a weapon against superstition, dogmatic cruelty, and factional delirium. S.: So for him method is emancipatory. G.: Yes. It clears ground. It does not narrow the mind in order to make a school; it clears a place where adversaries may at least begin from terms not wholly poisoned. S.: Then method is a precondition of toleration. G.: In his best moments, yes. If one cannot agree on procedures of inquiry, one falls back upon punishment. S.: That is a bleak but plausible anthropology. G.: Very plausible. He sees that where argument fails institutionally, force enters as the counterfeit of conviction. S.: Which is why he is so severe on penalties for heresy. G.: Precisely. Once opening one’s mouth calls the executioner, Scripture itself becomes idle, because no one will risk inquiry. S.: So persecution destroys exegesis. G.: More than that. It destroys the very common world of reasoning in which differences might be tested rather than exterminated. S.: Then there is a political pragmatics here. G.: Absolutely. Aconzio is not merely a theorist of method in the abstract. He is an analyst of what happens to discourse when fear colonises utterance. S.: Then would you say that persecution is the coercive annihilation of implicature? G.: That is too neat, but not wholly wrong. Under persecution, one either says nothing, says less, or says falsely. The spectrum of implication becomes distorted by terror. S.: So the unsaid no longer belongs to tact, but to survival. G.: Yes. And that is why his concern with clarity is not pedantry. It is an attempt to keep discourse from becoming a battlefield of insinuation policed by power. S.: Yet he also writes Stratagemata Satanae, which seems almost to revel in the machinery of delusion. G.: Because one must know the enemy’s repertoire. Method alone without pathology is naïve. You must know how discourse goes wrong. S.: Then the two books belong together more closely than one first assumes. G.: Exactly. De methodo says how inquiry ought to proceed; the Stratagemata say how it is corrupted in practice. S.: So method and devilry are reciprocal categories. G.: A little grandly put, but yes. One defines the other by opposition. S.: And the feminine abstract nouns? G.: Ah yes. Superbia and her companions. I rather like the almost allegorical severity of it. Vice is personified, but analytically personified. S.: Not simply in order to moralise, but to identify recurring operations. G.: Exactly. Pride, calumny, faction, superstition, hatred, schism. These are not merely private sins but public distorters of understanding. S.: Which suggests that for Aconzio conversation is always in danger of becoming liturgical warfare. G.: Very good. Especially in sixteenth-century religion, where every doctrinal nuance may be weaponised. S.: Then when he speaks of a common footing, he does not mean agreement in creed, but agreement in the manner of handling disagreement. G.: Precisely. That is why he matters. He is trying to discover the procedural basis of coexistence amidst substantive division. S.: Which sounds very modern. G.: It does, but one must not modernise him too quickly. His common ground is still sought under God, not under some later liberal neutrality. S.: So the fear of God remains a positive condition of discourse. G.: For him, yes. Not because terror is epistemically salutary, but because piety, rightly understood, may humble the egoism that turns every disagreement into persecution. S.: You sound almost Anglican. G.: My mother would have approved. S.: She liked Aconzio, you said. G.: She would have liked his gravity, his seriousness, and the fact that he is both doctrinally troublesome and morally strenuous. S.: Like many of your favourites. G.: Unfortunately, yes. S.: Then let us ask about the “of” in Il timore di Dio. G.: Ah, the famous little English question in Italian dress. “Of” there is not an empty link. It is the whole relation. S.: Fear of God: not God fearing, but the human disposition oriented toward God. G.: Exactly. The genitive preposition carries the direction of piety, and Aconzio’s whole practical programme hangs on such orientations. S.: So even a small function word can house theology. G.: They often do. The little words carry the burden while the grand nouns preen. S.: Which again makes him Gricean in your preferred sense. G.: Yes. He notices that serious understanding depends not only on majestic content but on the way relations are silently structured. S.: Then implicature for him would be less an achievement than a risk to be disciplined. G.: I think that is right. He knows that what is suggested, insinuated, or left to be gathered can either deepen charity or inflame division. S.: So there is no innocent “beyond the literal.” G.: None whatever. The beyond is where angels and devils both work. S.: That is a good line. G.: Keep it and make it worse. S.: Happily. Then would you say that Aconzio distrusts rhetorical surplus? G.: He distrusts undisciplined surplus, certainly. He is not against richness of understanding, but against the ways in which rhetorical and doctrinal habit let words carry poison unexamined. S.: So method is an antidote to inherited implication. G.: In part, yes. Communities build up default inferences around words: heretic, church, truth, authority, obedience. Aconzio tries to break those sedimentations open. S.: Which is already a form of conversational analysis. G.: Quite. Not in my vocabulary, but recognisably in my territory. S.: Then perhaps what fascinates you is that he knows that language does not merely report divisions; it reproduces them. G.: Exactly. If every term comes loaded with inherited accusation, the exchange is corrupted before it begins. S.: So method must include lexical hygiene. G.: Very much so. Though “hygiene” always risks sounding antiseptic. Better perhaps: lexical justice. S.: I shall keep both and choose later. G.: A dangerous editorial freedom. S.: One of my stratagems. G.: Satanic already. Now, the toleration issue. He is not merely saying, “Be nice to heretics.” S.: No. He is saying that coercion destroys the very possibility of honest inquiry. G.: Precisely. Once dissent is penalised, the public use of reason collapses into either conformity or coded speech. S.: Then persecution manufactures bad pragmatics. G.: Excellent. Fear generates evasions, innuendo, silence, counterfeit assent, performative orthodoxy. Conversation becomes theatre under police supervision. S.: Which means the persecutor never really hears belief at all. G.: Very good. He hears only its constrained simulacrum. S.: Then Aconzio’s toleration is epistemic as much as moral. G.: Entirely. It protects not only persons but the conditions under which utterances can be sincere, disagreements explicit, and understanding corrigible. S.: That sounds almost like the cooperative principle under Reformation duress. G.: A dangerous but useful comparison. S.: Because for you too conversation presupposes good faith, mutual recognisability, and a shared willingness not to destroy the exchange. G.: Yes, though I did not usually have to add “under pain of burning.” S.: Oxford had milder sanctions. G.: Only slightly. S.: Then what of his being “dated”? Reformation, Basel, exile, naturalisation, marsh drainage, and all the rest. G.: Speranza does well to resist that entire embalming gesture. Aconzio is not merely a date with a printer’s line attached. S.: Because chronology can kill a mind before one has read it. G.: Exactly. Historiography often behaves like a mortuary catalogue. Reformers here, toleration theorists there, anti-trinitarians in that cabinet, engineers elsewhere. S.: Whereas you want to talk to him. G.: Naturally. A living intelligence is wasted if one treats it merely as a museum label. S.: So Speranza lets you enjoy him without condescension. G.: Yes. That is one of his principal virtues. He restores the possibility of philosophical pleasure in figures whom academic periodisation has over-disciplined. S.: Not stripped of context, but not imprisoned by it. G.: Precisely. One must know he is sixteenth-century, displaced, anti-papal, heterodox, and all the rest. But one must not let those labels do all the reading. S.: Then perhaps the real Aconzio appears between the labels. G.: Often the best philosophers do. S.: And the devil’s list helps. G.: It does. Lists can be wonderfully anti-sentimental. They prevent us from speaking vaguely of “evil influences” and force us to identify operations. S.: Such as pride, hatred, slander, schism. G.: Exactly. And once identified, they become analysable rather than merely feared. S.: That is very much your own instinct too. G.: Yes. If a thing can be distinguished, it can often be disarmed. S.: Not always. G.: No. But confusion favours the enemy. S.: Aconzio would have liked that. G.: I think so. Though he might have wanted me to capitalise Enemy more often. S.: Which you would refuse. G.: Quite. Capital letters are usually where theology begins to shout. S.: Then one final question. Does Aconzio think method can wholly defeat stratagem? G.: No. If he did, he would not have written the stratagems at all. He knows corruption is permanent. S.: Then method is not victory but vigilance. G.: Splendid. Yes. Vigilance, discipline, repeated clearing, repeated return to what may be commonly tested. S.: So the toleration he seeks is not softness but a hard civic precondition of truth-seeking. G.: Exactly. Toleration is not indifference to truth; it is the refusal to let force pretend to be an argument. S.: Then his relevance now is obvious. G.: Obvious, but one must say it without vulgar updating. Better to say that he remains intelligible because the conditions he feared are perennial. S.: Fear colonising speech, inherited accusation corrupting words, coercion distorting assent. G.: Yes. Those are not dated problems. S.: Nor is the devil. G.: Alas, no. He merely changes his vocabulary. S.: And sometimes acquires better printers. G.: Very good. S.: Then your final judgment? G.: Aconzio is valuable because he joins three things seldom joined well: a seriousness about method, a pathology of corrupt discourse, and a principled defence of toleration as the condition of shared inquiry. S.: And the link to your own work? G.: He reminds one that implication is never merely an ornament of conversation. It may be a trap, a shelter, a courtesy, a poison, or a bridge. The task is to know which. S.: That is nearly a motto. G.: Too neat for a motto. S.: Then a warning. G.: Better. S.: Method without charity becomes persecution; charity without method becomes confusion. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Basilean, with a damp English edge.