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

 G.: Let us begin with the arithmetic, because if one starts with arithmetic one may at least postpone theology. S.: A promising curriculum already. G.: The trivium is three, the quadrivium four, and the philosopher’s first temptation is to say that four comes after three for no very good reason, since 3+4=4+33 + 4 = 4 + 33+4=4+3. S.: Exactly. If summation is commutative, why should education not be? G.: Because curricula are not algebra, and because schoolmen liked roads better than equations. S.: Still, if the quadrivium looks nobler, why not begin there? Arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy first; grammar, dialectic, rhetoric afterward. G.: Because the child must first say before he may safely count, and must first hear before he may harmonise. Civilisation begins in address, not in number. S.: Yet the quadrivium has the dignity of measure. G.: It has the dignity of remoteness. The trivium has the indignity of necessity. S.: Then the trivium is called trivial only because it is too close to life to look sublime. G.: Precisely. Grammar, logic, rhetoric are despised because they cling to mouths, ears, and schoolrooms. S.: Whereas arithmetic and astronomy at least pretend to the stars. G.: Yes, and therefore seduce philosophers into thinking they are purer. But purity is often educationally useless. S.: Still, a philosophy student should start with the quadrivium. G.: Why? S.: Because philosophy likes abstraction, order, ratio, proportion, and the sense that things fit beyond chatter. G.: That is exactly the mistake. Philosophy is not one of the liberal arts at all. S.: Kierkegaard would agree. G.: He would say one may master all seven and still fail to exist. S.: So what gives? G.: I give. S.: That is not a curriculum. G.: It is the beginning of one. Philosophy receives from the liberal arts and then refuses to be filed among them. It is a parasite with principles. S.: Then if philosophy is not one of the seven, why does it keep behaving as if the seven were its vestibule? G.: Because it needs preparation but cannot be reduced to preparatory order. The trivium teaches one how language moves; the quadrivium teaches one how order seduces; philosophy begins when one suspects both. S.: Then perhaps the right order for the philosopher is not the old order at all. G.: Perhaps. But old orders are usually wiser than their descendants. The trivium comes first because humans must enter speech before they may admire number. S.: Yet if 3+4=4+33 + 4 = 4 + 33+4=4+3, why should the order matter? G.: Because education is not addition but dependence. One may count to seven either way, but one cannot speak well by astronomy. S.: Some moderns have tried. G.: And that is why nobody reads them. Now, Simoneschi. S.: At last. The Venetian of rhetoric. G.: Yes. Or rettorica, with the doubled t, which already sounds more proper and less modernly flattened. S.: Does the double t matter philosophically? G.: Everything matters if one is old enough. Rettorica feels heavier, more scholastic, more inherited, more like a discipline and less like a newspaper sneer. S.: So retorica sounds modern and vaguely pejorative; rettorica sounds craft-bound and institutional. G.: Exactly. Orthography as memory. The doubled consonant carries the schoolroom in its teeth. S.: Then Boncompagno da Signa—or Signa, as you prefer to abbreviate him—is already fighting on behalf of rhetoric as an art, not a mere social vice. G.: Precisely. And that is why there are so many treatises on rhetoric. S.: Why indeed? Why not one authorised text, one Vulgate of persuasion, one King James of the tongue? G.: Because there are many conversational maxims, many climates of speech, many audiences, many courts, many cities, many masks, and no single authorised version of prudence. S.: That sounds like a Venetian answer. G.: It is. Simoneschi’s Venice would laugh a universal rhetoric off the quay. S.: Yet Cicero nearly tried to provide one. G.: Cicero provided a magnificent Roman rhetoric for a Roman language under Roman conditions, and then died under the illusion that Latin would remain Ciceronian forever. S.: Until Marc’Antonio’s sicario corrected the assumption. G.: Quite. Once you are murdered for politics, your syntax ceases to govern posterity. S.: Harsh. G.: Historical. Cicero wrote as if the city and the language were still one body. Medieval and vernacular rhetorics arise because that body dies and multiplies. S.: So there cannot be one authorised rhetoric because there is no one authorised social world. G.: Exactly. The very plurality of rhetorical treatises is evidence that meaning is local, tactical, genre-bound, institution-bound, and not reducible to a single universal manual. S.: Which means your pragmatics, if it is conversational rhetoric, also cannot be entirely universal. G.: That is the difficulty. I can formulate general principles, but the realization of those principles is always local, and Simoneschi’s Venice insists on that. S.: Then what you call maxims are perhaps only the thinnest skeleton of what Signa calls rettorica. G.: Yes. A useful skeleton, but a skeleton still. S.: And Signa would complain that skeletons do not write letters. G.: Very likely. Or seduce. Which brings us to the ruota di Venere. S.: Ah yes, the erotic wheel. G.: A wheel of patterned expectation. A little machine of genre, role, tone, and implication. Very civilised, if one does not ask too many moral questions before supper. S.: Then his rhetoric is already a pragmatics of emotional uptake. G.: Exactly. It teaches not only what to say, but how the saying licenses certain inferences and blocks others. S.: Which sounds rather like your own insistence that what is meant outruns what is said. G.: It is structurally the same territory, though mapped under older names and with much better prose. S.: Better than Cicero? G.: In the vernacular, yes. Cicero is admirable but dreary if worshipped too long. He writes for a world that thought Latin would remain itself. Signa writes for a world in which language has already escaped into life. S.: So Cicero is the rhetoric of the republic; Signa the rhetoric of the living aftermath. G.: Very good. And the aftermath is always more pragmatically interesting than the original constitution. S.: Because people now have to infer across variety. G.: Precisely. Cicero may still imagine that educated Latin carries its own authority. Signa knows that meaning has to navigate local expectations, regional styles, emotional codings, and the vernacular body. S.: Then the many treatises arise because no one rhetoric can survive the multiplication of contexts. G.: Yes. Treatises proliferate because speech proliferates socially. One text might suffice if mankind spoke under one sky and to one senate. But once you have Bologna, Venice, courts, communes, chancelleries, love letters, diplomatic letters, episcopal letters, petitions, consolations, and all the rest, rhetoric becomes plural by necessity. S.: So there is no authorised King James of persuasion because persuasion has no authorised crown. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased. Now, back to the trivium and its triviality. S.: You still owe me an answer. Which is most trivial? G.: If by trivial you mean most despised, rhetoric. If you mean most invisible, grammar. If you mean most self-important, logic. S.: And least dispensable? G.: In actual human affairs, rhetoric. S.: Then the most trivial of the trivium is the one civilisation pretends it can do without while secretly relying on it. G.: Exactly. People think grammar merely mechanical, rhetoric merely ornamental, and logic the only honourable one. In practice grammar keeps the floor from collapsing and rhetoric keeps the guests from leaving. S.: While logic keeps the philosopher busy. G.: Usually with furniture. Now, the quadrivium again. What if we did begin there? S.: We would have more proportion and less address. G.: More astronomy and worse quarrels. S.: Better music, perhaps. G.: Worse sermons certainly. S.: Bologna would be a university of calculators. G.: And Oxford a place of instruments without college jokes. Intolerable. S.: Yet the philosopher might be more mathematically disciplined. G.: And socially useless. Philosophy that begins in the quadrivium alone becomes seduced by order before it has learned the trouble of persons. S.: So the old order—trivium first—is a concession to politics. G.: To humanity. Speech first, measure second. One must first know how humans actually mismanage sense before one is allowed the stars. S.: That sounds anti-Platonic. G.: It is anti-idolatrous. One may still admire number later. S.: Then why do so many philosophers secretly wish the quadrivium came first? G.: Because number and proportion flatter the fantasy that thought may escape rhetoric. S.: Which is false. G.: Utterly. Even the philosopher of mathematics must ask, suggest, omit, contrast, concede, and direct attention. In other words, he must do rhetoric while pretending not to. S.: Hence your suspicion that pragmatics is rhetoric recovered under an anaesthetic. G.: Very much so. And Signa proves it because he teaches under other names what we later claim as a discovery. S.: Such as? G.: Audience design, inferential expectation, generic cues, tactful omission, strategic excess, role-sensitive address, calibrations of intimacy, all the old arts. S.: All in medieval epistolography? G.: Especially there. Letters are laboratories of managed implication. S.: Then Signa is formulating conversational maxims. G.: In effect, yes. Not in four neat headings perhaps, but in practical doctrines of how one should speak under this or that role, relation, occasion, and desired effect. S.: So your maxim of Quantity becomes his rule about how much to say in a petition or a love-letter. G.: Exactly. Relevance becomes fitness to occasion. Manner becomes decorum plus clarity plus tact. Quality becomes not only truthfulness but genre-suitability. It is all there, just distributed differently. S.: Then what does Venice add? G.: Venice adds local complication. A maritime republic with masks, commerce, patrician hierarchies, and civic indirectness does not speak like Cicero’s senate-house or a Tuscan court. S.: So Signa’s implicatures are Venetian. G.: At least in flavour, yes. Maritime metaphors, social calibrations, local expectations, a whole rhetorical climate. S.: Which means Cicero’s maxims would be intolerably dry there. G.: More than dry—misaligned. Cicero’s art was built for Latin as a public political instrument under republican oratory. Signa writes for a world where letters move among shifting social roles and the vernacular has entered the room. S.: Then to imitate Cicero too closely in Venice would be like wearing a consul’s toga into a canal. G.: Splendid. Keep that too. S.: I seem to be collecting these. G.: That is the right appetite in rhetoric. Now, you asked why there need be so many rhetorical treatises. Let us answer plainly. S.: Because there are many communities of implication. G.: Excellent. And because no single rhetorical scripture can legislate for all of them. The Vulgate and the King James translate one revealed text. Rhetoric does not translate revelation; it manages circumstances. S.: So revelation may have one authorised text, but prudence needs libraries. G.: Perfectly done. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become bibliolatrous. Now, what of philosophy’s place relative to the seven liberal arts? S.: If philosophy is no liberal art, then perhaps it begins where the seven prove insufficient. G.: Yes. The arts prepare capacities; philosophy reflects on their conditions, limits, and seductions. S.: Then the philosopher should perhaps indeed begin with the quadrivium and then proceed to the trivium, not because 4+34 + 34+3 equals 3+43 + 43+4, but because order must first be admired and then speech mistrusted. G.: Ingenious, but wrong. One must first be taught how talk works badly, or one will treat order itself as a rhetoric-free miracle. S.: So the trivium must still come first because philosophy needs to know the disorders of saying before it can assess the temptations of measure. G.: Precisely. The philosopher who begins with geometry may become too quickly enamoured of clean deduction. The philosopher who begins with rhetoric knows earlier that human meaning is muddy. S.: Which is almost an argument for beginning with rhetoric itself. G.: It is. And perhaps one day a sane university will. S.: Then grammar and logic become servants of rhetoric? G.: Not servants, but companions in a dangerous hierarchy. Grammar furnishes the forms, logic disciplines consequence, rhetoric governs uptake. In practice, rhetoric often rules because without uptake the others remain private excellences. S.: Then the trivium is not three equal roads, but one little republic of unequal powers. G.: Very good. Grammar is the law, logic the bench, rhetoric the street. S.: And the quadrivium? G.: The observatory, the counting-house, the chapel choir, and the geometer’s room. S.: You make it sound positively habitable. G.: Only after one has learned to speak in the street. Now, Signa’s title. Rhetorica, not ars dictaminis narrowly, though he teaches that too. S.: So he wants the larger dignity. G.: Yes, but in a vernacularly elastic world. He takes the old classical inheritance and bends it toward actual social writing. S.: Which again is where you think your pragmatics meets him. G.: Exactly. He knows that meanings are not mechanically encoded. They are produced through patterned expectations, role recognitions, and shared craftsmanship. S.: Shared craftsmanship is a lovely phrase. G.: It is also accurate. Conversation is more artisanal than philosophers like to admit. S.: Then the wheel of Venus is really a wheel of inferential permissions. G.: Very good. A marvellous phrase, and obscene enough to be medieval. S.: I shall cherish it. G.: Briefly. Now, one last return to the order of arts. Suppose we did invert them. What would philosophy lose? S.: It would lose its early contact with living linguistic practice. G.: Exactly. It would become proportion before address, harmony before disagreement, astronomy before irony. S.: And gain? G.: A dangerous premature confidence in structure. S.: Which is why 3+4=4+33 + 4 = 4 + 33+4=4+3 is not the right analogy after all. G.: Yes. Educational sequence is not commutative because dependence is not additive. I give, as I said. S.: A very English solution. G.: A very exact one. Number is commutative; formation is not. S.: Then the old order survives. G.: Under protest, but yes. The trivial road remains prior because it is the road of mouths and ears. S.: And Signa, by writing on rhetoric, proves that the least respectable of the arts is often the one nearest to actual philosophy. G.: Precisely. He teaches how thought enters civic life through address, and that is a philosophically deeper matter than many quadrivial purities. S.: So the final judgment on rhetoric? G.: Not the decoration of thought, but the management of shared inferential life among persons. S.: And on Cicero? G.: Magnificent, but written under the illusion that Latin would remain his forever. S.: And on Signa? G.: Wiser about decay, plurality, local implication, and the vernacular afterlife of intelligence. S.: And on philosophy? G.: No liberal art, but a tyrannical dependent of them all. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Florentine, with one Venetian letter still undelivered.