H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: SIMONESCHI

 G.: Let us begin with the spelling, because rettorica with the double t looks like a schoolmaster’s revenge on ease. S.: Or a Venetian insistence that rhetoric must first be made visibly difficult before it may become socially fluid. G.: Very good. Rhetoric made orthographically strenuous so that boys do not mistake it for mere chatter. S.: And because in Italian the double consonant already slows the mouth and thickens the form. G.: Yes. Rettorica is heavier than retorica, and that heaviness is not insignificant. A discipline of speech ought occasionally to impede speech. S.: So the very spelling pedagogises. G.: Precisely. One may call that prammatica in old dress. Orthography as ethical restraint. S.: Then Simoneschi is already doing with the title what he later teaches in the body: rhetoric is never merely transparent. G.: Exactly. Now, the trivium. So called because it is trivial, or because later people are stupid? S.: Surely because the road had three ways before the schoolboys arrived and downgraded the adjective. G.: A pity. The trivium is one of those cases in which etymology preserves dignity while usage slowly destroys it. S.: Grammar, dialectic, rhetoric. Three roads to intelligibility, and each later called trivial by those who owe them everything. G.: Exactly. Which of the three, then, is most trivial? S.: The temptation is to say grammar, because everyone thinks he already has it. G.: Yes. Grammar is despised because success in it becomes invisible. One notices grammar mostly when someone else lacks it. S.: Logic retains prestige because it sounds severe. G.: And because philosophers like anything that can be numbered or symbolised without blushing. S.: Which leaves rhetoric to be despised as ornament. G.: Yes. Yet of the three, rhetoric may be least trivial in actual civilisation. S.: Because it governs uptake. G.: Exactly. Grammar lets one produce a sentence, logic lets one prevent some embarrassments, rhetoric lets one be understood, resisted, admired, distrusted, obeyed, laughed at, or forgiven. S.: So rhetoric is both the most dismissed and the most operative. G.: Very good. That is the old injustice of the trivium. S.: Then if Simoneschi writes Il vello d’oro, overo la rettorica, he is in part rescuing the least respected of the three. G.: Or showing that the least respected discipline secretly governs the other two in civic life. S.: Because a perfectly grammatical and valid utterance may still fail completely if addressed without rhetorical intelligence. G.: Precisely. No theorem survives bad dinner conversation. S.: Which is perhaps why philosophy would have been quite different if it had started with the quadrivium. G.: Ah yes. If boys had first been made to count, measure, harmonise, and watch the heavens before they learned to decline, infer, and persuade. S.: Bologna might have produced fewer jurists and more cosmologists. G.: Oxford fewer sermons and more instruments. S.: You say that as if it were a loss. G.: It would have been a civilisational mutilation. Speech precedes stars in social necessity. One must first know how to address another before one can safely measure the spheres. S.: And yet the quadrivium looks nobler on paper. G.: Nobility is a dangerous curricular principle. Arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy: they promise order. The trivium teaches one what to do with disagreement. S.: Which is a more urgent human problem. G.: Much more urgent. Civilisation is mostly the management of disagreement in words before it becomes disagreement in steel. S.: Then if philosophy had begun with the quadrivium, it might have been more mathematical and less civic. G.: Exactly. More proportion, less persuasion. More celestial order, less disputation. Very grand, very inhuman. S.: Yet some philosophers would have liked it. G.: Naturally. Philosophers are always tempted by environments in which no one interrupts. S.: And Kierkegaard? G.: Kierkegaard is useful here because he reminds us that philosophy is not itself one of the seven liberal arts, however often philosophers try to smuggle it in under dialectic. S.: So what gives? If philosophy is not one of the liberal arts, why does it keep behaving as if the trivium and quadrivium were its preparatory provinces? G.: Because philosophy is a parasite of good preparation and an enemy of every completed curriculum. It requires the liberal arts, then criticises them, then pretends it invented the need for them. S.: A familiar vice. G.: Very. Kierkegaard would say perhaps that one may master all seven liberal arts and still fail in existence. S.: Which sounds like a criticism of both Bologna and Oxford. G.: As well it should. Universities are good at producing prepared persons who have not yet begun. S.: Then Simoneschi, by writing on rhetoric, is taking the most socially dangerous of the preparatory arts and treating it as if it already were philosophy. G.: Exactly. That is what interests me. He does not merely preserve rhetoric as inherited school matter; he makes it the living site of practical intelligence. S.: Which is why you are tempted to say that his prammatica is just conversational rhetoric. G.: More than tempted. I think much of what later calls itself pragmatics is rhetoric recovered under a cleaner conscience and a less human vocabulary. S.: That will offend the cleaner consciences. G.: They deserve some offence. If one says “He is a fine fellow” and means nearly the opposite, one is not doing formal semantics; one is practising an art of contrast, expectation, and social inference. S.: Irony, litotes, meiosis, strategic concession, all the old furniture. G.: Exactly. The rhetoricians named them, taught them, domesticated them. We later arrive and say “implicature” and “defeasible uptake” and congratulate ourselves on modernity. S.: Then Simoneschi is your ancestor. G.: In a sense, yes, though I would prefer not to be entered in a Venetian pedigree without proper warning. S.: Too late. Now, which of the trivium’s three disciplines would collapse first if philosophy began with the quadrivium? G.: Rhetoric would be first demoted, because number flatters itself as universal while rhetoric insists upon audience, occasion, and local climate. S.: Which is exactly what Simoneschi’s Venetian title opposes. G.: Yes. A rettorica veneziana says already: universal manuals are not enough. The way one means in Venice cannot be reduced to a Roman handbook or a rationalist grammar. S.: Because Venice has water, masks, republic, mercantile indirection, civic hierarchies, maritime metaphor. G.: Exactly. A rhetorical climate, if one likes. Meaning is locally weathered. S.: Then pragmatics, if it is conversational rhetoric, must also be locally weathered. G.: To a degree, yes. I still want my general principles, but their realisation is always modulated by local norms and background encodings. S.: So Simoneschi gives you what your own theory tends to abstract away from. G.: Very good. He supplies the lived density of a social world, where the same irony, understatement, or concessive move may function differently in Venice, Bologna, Oxford, or a papal court. S.: Which means universal pragmatics risks becoming thin. G.: It risks that always. But thinness is sometimes the price of explanatory ambition. S.: And rhetoric keeps the blood. G.: Exactly. Rhetoric remembers that utterances are not merely inferential items but social manoeuvres in places inhabited by habits, classes, and weather. S.: Then what is Simoneschi trying to do? G.: I think he is trying to preserve rhetoric as civic intelligence rather than as dead school ornament. He wants to teach how meaning actually travels in Venetian life. S.: Which is why he chooses rettorica and not perhaps eloquenza. G.: Yes. Eloquence flatters the speaker. Rhetoric as art, especially under the title Il vello d’oro, suggests acquisition, difficulty, navigation, pursuit, and reward. S.: The golden fleece of speech. G.: Precisely. A prize not merely of style but of situated competence. S.: Then would you say he is formulating maxims of conversation? G.: In effect, yes, though not in my compressed way. He is teaching practical norms: when to understate, when to concede, when to ironise, when to invoke the local metaphor, when to let shared civic knowledge do the work. S.: So his manual is a maxims-book in rhetorical clothing. G.: Something like that. But older and probably wiser about persons. S.: Which brings us back to the least trivial of the trivium. G.: Yes. If one asks what is most often called trivial, rhetoric wins or loses, depending on tone. If one asks what is least dispensable in actual life, rhetoric wins comfortably. S.: Grammar one may absorb unconsciously; logic one may do badly and still survive; rhetoric one neglects at the cost of social extinction. G.: Very good. One can live with poor logic longer than with no tact. S.: That is a sentence undergraduate philosophers should copy out. G.: In handwriting, preferably. Now, would philosophy have been better if it had started from the quadrivium? S.: Better for system, perhaps; worse for civilisation. G.: Exactly. One would get cleaner structures and fewer quarrels properly managed. The history of philosophy would have looked more mathematical and less rhetorical. S.: Less Plato in the marketplace, more Pythagoras in the counting-house. G.: Yes. And less Cicero, which would be intolerable. S.: So Bologna without the trivium first would not really be Bologna. G.: Quite. A university of law without grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric properly prior is simply an archive with pretensions. S.: And Oxford without the trivium first would have had fewer schools and more machines. G.: Yes, and perhaps less common-room malice, which would be too high a price. S.: So the triviality of the trivium is civilization’s false self-description. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. S.: Only academically. G.: Worse. Now, grammar. Do we dismiss it too quickly? S.: Of course. Grammar is what survives by becoming background. Because everyone depends on it, everyone calls it elementary and then forgets it. G.: Exactly. It is the most invisible of the three. Its triviality is the invisibility of success. S.: Logic, then, is the one that advertises itself most. G.: Yes. It keeps its dignity because it can formalise, classify, and punish. Philosophers like punishable structures. S.: Whereas rhetoric resists complete formalisation. G.: Which is why philosophers have alternately despised and stolen from it. S.: Simoneschi, though, does not steal. He simply continues the older tradition in which rhetoric already includes what you would call conversational reason. G.: Precisely. It is not accidental that his Venice cares more for what is meant than for what is merely said. Maritime republics live by implication. S.: Water carries subtext. G.: Beautiful nonsense, but serviceable. The point is that Venice as a social world encourages indirection, tact, irony, and calibrated saying. S.: Then a universal manual of correct speech would indeed miss the point. G.: Very much so. Simoneschi’s rettorica veneziana is already a protest against exportable correctness. S.: Which sounds unexpectedly modern. G.: Because the local always sounds modern once universalism begins boring people. S.: Then perhaps the sequence should be: trivium first because humans need speech before ratio; rhetoric last within the trivium because institutions distrust what they most need; philosophy born parasitically on both; and pragmatics a late return of rhetoric under analytical customs. G.: That is very good. S.: Thank you. G.: Again, do not become pleased. S.: I am only regionally satisfied. G.: Better. Now, what of double t again? Why rettorica and not retorica? S.: Because the word wants weight. It is not merely rhetorical in the modern newspaper sense, but rettorica as inherited craft, thick with school, church, and Tuscan resistance to simplification. G.: Yes. Orthography as memory. The doubled consonant keeps older instruction audible. S.: So even the spelling says: this is not casual talk; this is disciplined social art. G.: Exactly. And discipline there means not formal abstraction, but trained sensitivity to occasion. S.: Which is what your maxims try to capture in thinner terms. G.: Yes. “Be relevant,” “be as informative as required,” “avoid obscurity,” and so on. One could almost imagine Simoneschi laughing and saying: of course, but tell me in Venice, to whom, in what room, under which mask? S.: Which would be an excellent challenge to a universalist pragmatics. G.: Exactly. The maxims need local biographies. S.: Then rhetoric is where maxims become manners. G.: Splendid. Keep that too. S.: I seem to be keeping a lot. G.: Rhetoric is acquisitive. Now, could philosophy itself have been one of the liberal arts if only curriculum had been arranged differently? S.: I doubt it. Philosophy is too restless to remain a “liberal art” in the curricular sense. It feeds on them, surpasses them, and then complains about its nourishment. G.: Precisely. Kierkegaard would say perhaps that philosophy enters where the liberal arts end and existence begins troubling their adequacy. S.: So philosophy is post-curricular by nature. G.: A useful phrase. It requires formation, but its proper work begins once formation is no longer enough. S.: Then Simoneschi stands at the threshold, teaching the last of the old arts in a way that already verges on philosophy. G.: Yes. That is why he matters. In good rhetoric one can already see the structure of practical reason among persons. S.: Which is why you like to say “prammatica as rettorica conversazionale.” G.: Exactly. Pragmatics is not the abolition of rhetoric but its redescription under the pressure of modern conceptual tidiness. S.: And perhaps its partial de-localisation. G.: Yes. We abstract upward from Venetian, Oxonian, Roman, and other climates in order to say something general about utterance and uptake. S.: Yet the climates remain. G.: They always do. Generality is never the whole weather. S.: Then if philosophy had begun with the quadrivium, one might have had cleaner generalities and far worse local intelligence. G.: Which is another reason to be grateful for the old trivial roads. S.: Even if they are called trivial by the descendants of their beneficiaries. G.: Especially then. The highest compliment civilisation pays its foundations is to call them elementary and forget them. S.: A rather ungrateful compliment. G.: The only kind civilisation reliably gives. Now, one final ranking. Most despised of the trivium? S.: Rhetoric. G.: Most self-important? S.: Logic. G.: Most invisible? S.: Grammar. G.: Least dispensable in actual conversation? S.: Rhetoric again. G.: Good. And Simoneschi’s achievement? S.: To show that rhetoric, far from being a decorative appendix to thought, is the local art by which thought enters civic life without drowning in universal rule-books. G.: Excellent. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Venetian, with one doubled consonant still afloat.