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

 G.: Rotondi’s contributo in the Corriere librario is exactly what one expects Rome to produce after a war: a little civic resurrection by way of paper. S.: And you think Rome does this unlike Oxford. G.: Entirely unlike Oxford, and unlike Bologna too, though for different reasons. S.: Yet Rome was the cradle of Latin dialectica. G.: Yes, which is part of the nuisance. A city may be philosophically foundational without being educationally comfortable. S.: So Rome gives origin without giving ease. G.: Precisely. Rome invented a public severity of reason that Oxford later domesticated and Bologna earlier institutionalised. S.: Then what is wrong with Rome? G.: Nothing, except that it is too much itself. Rome is always performing Rome. S.: Whereas Oxford performs not performing. G.: Exactly. Oxford’s greatest theatrical gift is to call theatre “the ordinary.” S.: And Bologna? G.: Bologna is an old machine that knows it is a machine. That already makes it more honest than either. S.: So Rome is theatre, Oxford is disguised theatre, and Bologna is apparatus. G.: Admirably compressed. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become Roman about it. S.: I shall remain only municipally pleased. But tell me why Corriere librario set you thinking about cities at all. G.: Because corriere sounds like movement, urgency, running with news. And then one remembers that books in Rome do not run; they circulate by being talked into existence. S.: Which sounds rather Roman. G.: It is anciently Roman. The old city spread texts by chains of hands, patrons, slaves, readers, scribes, and talk, not by the modern fantasy of neutral distribution. S.: So the contributo is already civic before it is bibliographic. G.: Entirely. Contributo, not article. Contribution, as if the city were being rebuilt by notes and notices. S.: You like that. G.: I do. It is one of the few respectable postwar sentiments. S.: Yet you still say Rome does not compare with Oxford. G.: Not as a university city in our sense. Rome is too large, too layered, too central, too imperial, too ecclesiastical, too administrative, and too self-conscious ever to behave like a town of dons. S.: But Oxford is a city. G.: Barely, and by a technicality. S.: Christ Church. G.: Exactly. Because Christ Church is a cathedral, Oxford acquires the legal dignity of a city, which is a splendid example of ecclesiastical geometry turning a ford into an urban concept. S.: So Oxford is a city because a church insists on it. G.: More or less. The cathedral confers municipal metaphysics. S.: And your monks joke? G.: Ah yes. Oxford is a city in which the monks are the students. S.: Meaning? G.: Meaning that the true cloistering population is not the chapter but the undergraduates, while the fellows are merely senior students with better carpets. S.: Not masters? G.: Only administratively. In spiritual economy they remain advanced pupils. S.: That is unfair to some fellows. G.: A pity, but not a decisive one. S.: Then Rome differs because its students do not resemble monks. G.: Rome’s students resemble citizens, clerks, provincials, pilgrims, ideologues, and survivors, but never properly monks unless they are literally monks. S.: So the city enters the philosophy by the social posture it invites. G.: Precisely. A city teaches before any faculty does. S.: Then what did Rome teach dialectic? G.: Gravity, publicness, legal form, sentence, forensic edge, and the habit of treating reason as something uttered before others under conditions of consequence. S.: Not Athenian dialectic, then. G.: Not in the first instance. Athens gives the drama of questioning, the gymnasium, the porch, the school. Rome gives the forum, the case, the maxim, the sententia, the public weight of saying. S.: Which is why you say Latin dialectica is Roman, not Athenian. G.: Exactly. Greek supplied the terms; Rome supplied the civic musculature. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford supplies the staircase, the tutorial ambush, the donnish aside, and the habit of pretending that public reason is private correction prolonged. S.: That is very Oxford. G.: It ought to be. One earns these sentences by climbing too many stairs. S.: So if Rome teaches sentence and forum, Oxford teaches question and interruption. G.: And also postponement. Oxford loves truth best when one can defer it to next week’s essay. S.: Bologna again? G.: Bologna teaches syllabus, chair, faculty, common examination, visible structure, the city as already university-shaped. S.: While Oxford hides the structure in persons. G.: Exactly. Oxford turns institutions into names and names into corridors. S.: Rome turns names into monuments. G.: Yes, and that is the trouble. Monumentality can overteach. S.: Yet Rotondi, with his little contributo, seems not monumental at all. G.: Which is why he is interesting. He is doing Roman circulation at the modest scale: trade circular, whisper network, bookshop survival, civic reconstruction through bibliographical appetite. S.: So the city acts through small media. G.: Very much so. Rome is never only marble; it is also paper, gossip, recommendation, and the old hand-to-hand method of making a text a public object. S.: That sounds rather like ancient dialectic too. G.: Exactly my point. Dialectic in Rome was never merely school logic. It was reason in circulation. S.: Through courts, senate, household, library, patronage. G.: Yes. Through every institution where speech acquired consequence. S.: Then perhaps city means the arrangement of consequential speech. G.: Splendid. Keep that. S.: Happily. Now tell me why London enters as the place for redbricks. G.: Because England, absurdly, has long allowed London to be both capital and anti-university city. The true civic universities, the redbricks, grew elsewhere under smoke and self-improvement. S.: Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool. G.: Exactly. London is too much metropolis to feel like a philosophical city of formation. It is a place of institutions rather than an institution-shaped place. S.: As Rome is. G.: In that respect, yes. Both capitals overdetermine the mind. They produce philosophy, certainly, but less by collegiate intimacy than by traffic, administration, and collision. S.: Whereas Oxford and Bologna are more total in their educational shape. G.: Quite. In Oxford one cannot cross the street without hitting a curriculum. In Bologna one cannot discuss a degree without encountering a ministry. S.: And in Rome? G.: In Rome one cannot buy a book without history stepping on the transaction. S.: Which Rotondi’s Corriere librario proves. G.: Exactly. Even the title corriere is already civic etymology pretending to be commerce. S.: You said before that a bookseller’s courier does not run but circulates. G.: Yes, and that is where Rome becomes philosophically apt. It does not compare with Oxford because Oxford institutionalises thinking. Rome historicalises it as one lives. S.: So Rome is less a university town than a city in which philosophy cannot avoid becoming urban memory. G.: Excellent. That is the right distinction. S.: Then why do you still resist saying Rome is superior? G.: Because origin is not supervision. Rome gave Latin dialectic its civic stamp, but Oxford and Bologna each did something Rome did not: they made prolonged educational habitats out of thinking. S.: Rome remained too broad. G.: Too broad, too symbolic, too interrupted by empire, church, state, ruin, and rebirth. S.: Whereas Bologna could simply teach. G.: Bologna could teach with old institutional confidence. It had the chair, the faculty, the gloss, the degree, the visible order. S.: And Oxford could tutorialise. G.: Which is a mixed blessing, but an effective one. It turns philosophy into a weekly domestic nuisance. S.: Not unlike monastic correction. G.: Hence my monks. The Oxford pupil lives under regulated reading, periodic examination, small-room exposure, and the quasi-liturgical cycle of essays. S.: So the undergraduates are novices. G.: In a sense, yes. And the fellows are monks who lost their vows but kept the timetable. S.: Christ Church then becomes not merely cathedral but enabling fiction. G.: Precisely. It lets Oxford call itself a city while remaining fundamentally a federation of cloisters and staircases. S.: Rome, by contrast, has too many real streets. G.: Yes, and too many centuries walking down them. S.: Then is a city bad for philosophy? G.: Not at all. But different cities encourage different modes. Athens favours public disputation and school formation. Rome favours forensic gravitas and civic sententiousness. Bologna favours institutional continuity. Oxford favours miniature adversarial pedagogy. London favours publication and dispersion. S.: And the redbricks? G.: They favour seriousness without medieval costume, which is no small contribution. S.: You sound almost affectionate toward them. G.: Only almost. They had to build what Oxford merely inherited and disavowed. S.: Then where does Rotondi belong among these cities? G.: In Rome, but at the anti-monumental level. The second-hand shop, the circular, the contributo, the bookseller’s network, the civic whisper system. S.: So he gives you Rome below the triumphal register. G.: Exactly. Rome in paper sleeves rather than marble. S.: And that is perhaps truer to dialectic than the monuments are. G.: Often yes. Dialectic needs circulation more than commemoration. S.: Yet Rome remains the source. G.: Of Latin dialectica as public practice, certainly. Cicero is unthinkable without the city that trained the sentence to carry civic consequence. S.: Not Athenian, then, because Athens gives the form but Rome gives the civic weight. G.: Very good. Plato invents the dramatic conversation; Rome invents the magistrate’s sentence as philosophical material. S.: And Oxford makes the sentence into a question. G.: Or into an essay title, which is sometimes worse. S.: Bologna makes it into a syllabus line. G.: Exactly. S.: London turns it into a review. G.: Very often. And a badly paid one. S.: Then perhaps the city influences philosophy chiefly by deciding what kind of speech is socially serious. G.: That is excellent. S.: Better than “arrangement of consequential speech”? G.: Its companion, perhaps. One should keep both. S.: I shall. G.: Without becoming metropolitan about it. S.: Never beyond Bloomsbury. Now, what does Rome teach that Oxford cannot? G.: That speech is public before it is pedagogic. Oxford teaches one to answer. Rome teaches one to utter under history. S.: And what does Oxford teach that Rome cannot? G.: That thought may survive by being local, dry, and weekly. S.: Bologna? G.: That institutions need not hide in personalities to be intellectually formative. S.: And London? G.: That publication is a form of civic weather rather than education. S.: That is quite severe. G.: It is only London. S.: Then if a student of philosophy moves from one city to another, he changes not only library but genre. G.: Precisely. In Athens he converses, in Rome he pronounces, in Bologna he studies, in Oxford he is corrected, in London he submits. S.: Very dry. G.: Geography deserves it. S.: Then Rotondi’s contributo matters because it is Roman dialectic in miniature: a civic note that makes books move by implication, recommendation, and urban memory. G.: Splendidly put. S.: Thank you. G.: You are improving. S.: Oxfordly? G.: Unfortunately. S.: Then the final verdict on Rome? G.: Rome does not compare with Oxford or Bologna because it is not, in the relevant sense, a university city at all; it is the city in which Latin dialectic learned to sound public, grave, and historically burdened before universities turned such habits into methods. S.: And Oxford is still a city. G.: Yes, by cathedral courtesy and undergraduate monasticism. S.: And the punchline? G.: Rome made dialectic public, Bologna made it curricular, Oxford made it claustral, and London, being London, made it reviewable.