Nathaniel Perrin

*Prometheus Chained* by Harold Parker, R.S.A. [Source URL](https://victorianweb.org/sculpture/parker/3.html).

It is a painful thing to grapple with the fixtures of our finitude.

To feel yourself bound in some body, perpetually condemned to wander a restricted zone of space and time. It seems brash foolishness to claim ourselves free when we are locked within temporal horizons of less than a century. How vast the corridors of history, and how small our permitted patrol.

Though the body itself is consigned to extensions of locality, the mind offers an escape through language and intuition.

The utterance of the lips breathes persistence into the past. Even as the spoken word wilts in the stilling and stilting of sound waves, the word enters the ear, and the mind. Here it is lost or stored with varying levels of alterations. But in this way does language slip the bonds of time through the communication of what was into the now. The oral tradition is the persistence of spoken pasts through the networks of minds who hold onto it. Myths, legends, and epics etched upon the ethnic scroll of a people's memory.

Writing too advances this form of historical transcendence. Transmission through sight from ledger to consciousness and back again. Writing is the means of not only conversing with the dead, but living their lives as well. A journey into the underworld.


But this prompts the question: what of the incongruity of temporal consciousness?

This paradigm of transmission and communication presupposes the equality of transmitting consciousness and the receptor consciousness. But time mutates all it touches. And those standing downstream from the original speaker will only hear the word through the reverbations of the Heraclitean river.

How then can we understand the original, standing where we are as we do?

Such is the problem of hermeneutics. Whether by Heidegger's pessimism or Gadamer's optimism, we must recognize our own positioning as beings of historicity. Not just in body, but in mind, and perhaps even in soul. We are historically effected consciousness.

Our minds are rendered partial and finite through their very nature. Our ideas and world will always be enclosed by the lack of what we do not know, and that layer surrounded by what we do not know that we do not know.

Those who stand a millennium, a century, or even one generation before us seem alien and strange to us. Why do they talk that way? What are their thought patterns that could give rise to such expressions? Miscommunication awakens us to the hermeneutic distance which gaps our understanding from theirs.

Our foundations, our innate prejudice, essentially prevents us from grasping them as they know themselves in their foundations. Thus, the impossibility of absolute or universal knowledge. Knowledge is built out of tribes. We only delude ourselves into the myth of universal, scientific knowledge through a tribe that has transformed itself into a world empire. We live under the tribal religion of Western science and culture, whose sprawl and ability to subsume all else allegedly gives warrant to its claim to be "universal". In our moment, one tribe rules over the rest, at least for now.


It is humbling to come to terms to these restrictions. That we may never know some things due to the nature of our birth. The technologies and cultures of our time limit the horizons of our understanding, as it does for all others.

Yet the sense that this limitation is tragic or negative in some sense is itself a presupposition, a prejudice of attitude. To think that knowledge can be formed *ex nihilo* without grounding. That a lever can exist without a fulcrum. It rests upon a mode of Western arrogance which believes that knowledge exists in itself without sociohistorical grounding or timing.

This is why Gadamer frames these limitations, restrictions, and horizons as positive markers. These are the building blocks of shared knowledge and understanding. Without our particularly instantiated language and culture, we would have no means or tools to build any knowledge at all. Gaps and absences, stripped of all positive historical content, cannot be used to build something enduring. A house of winds is no house at all.

His conclusion is that in some ways we can as historically effected consciousness transcend our particular time and place through transhistorical dialogue. As a classicist, Gadamer certainly had specific materials in mind for this. We cannot fully rise up out of our situation, so to speak. But one never could. But we can reach across the gap and thereby reach some shared understanding of the world, thus enriching ourselves and our knowledge while recognizing that we cannot become equal or identical to those on the other side of the gap.

It is a cheery image, but it is also a stark reminder of the cosmic inequality that we inhabit. For those on the quest for knowledge, we suffer such a profuse embarrassment of riches compared to those in pre-literate times, or even those scholars who spent countless years copying texts by hand or doing word counts. All labor that can be achieved digitally now within milliseconds. 

We must remember our fortune, even if we so rarely steward our fortune well. We do not know how long we will be able to keep it.

This is merely a first breath at wrestling with our historicity. Perhaps Gadamer's vision cracks under pressure and closer analysis. That we will have to see at some future time.

What it means to be human, bound in space and time

Wrestling with historicity

A translation of Bernhard Riemann's inaugural lecture

Riemann: 'On the Hypotheses which Lie at the Root of Geometry'


Self-improvement is the bread and butter of the American culture. A cultural strand that can be traced from our contemporary vloggers, through business executive self-help books, back through corny early twentieth century pamphlets, all the way to Ben Franklin's autobiography. To understand the American spirit, one must grapple with the entrepreneurial drive that underpins our culture, in both action and talk. The American mentality is tied up in a firm, concomitant belief that we are volitional selfs with both self-defining power as well as some capacity to will our destiny. This belief is not without its consequences, only one of which I will consider here.

To define self-improvement is difficult. It is an energy, a mindset. The onus is on you the individual to bring yourself forward, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. By sufficient application of willpower, many things (if not all things) are possible.

There is much to laud in such an optimistic temperament. But it is not without its dangers.

And few writers name this danger better than Byung Chul-Han who writes frequently on the burnout and depression endemic to the systems of self-improvement culture. In *Psychopolitics* particularly, he articulates a rather illuminating point on this topic.

Traditional Marxist theory is built on what can loosely be described as the employer-employee dichotomy. How the employer oppresses the work through arduous, menial, alientating labor. A story many are familiar with.

Byung Chul-Han believes that this analysis has become obsolete in reference to contemporary office culture. For the source of motivation to be more productive is no longer rooted in the boss but in ourselves. It is no longer so universally the case that the taskmaster applies the whip to the workers in order to make them more productive, we apply the whip to ourselves. The professional class is one that has automated oppression and alientation by casting such conditions upon ourselves through cultural drives.

One dominant cultural narrative of our day, the "you can do it" rhetoric, has inculcated a new impetus, particularly in millennials on down, that the rat race can be won if you apply enough grit and elbow grease. And if you don't win, well it's your fault.

In this model, bosses don't need to be over-demanding to get more work out of their employees. Rather the employees, driven on by a urgent mixture of guilt and lust for opportunity, feel the need to put in overtime or become better "contributors" so that they can be noticed, move up the ladder, be successful, etc. Ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for your company.

And for the guilt-ridden, there is no limit of what can be asked of yourself. So long as you live in the gap between where you are and where you want to be (which is almost the entirely of our lives), there is always more to be done.

Thus we burn ourselves out in a manic frenzy to do enough so that we can succeed. Because the sky's the limit. If you don't get what you want, after all, it's only you to blame.

And as cultural streams often go, this mindset is not limited to the career sphere. It bleeds downstream, into other pools of life.

Self-improvement culture has slowly percolated outward to become, in the minds of some, a universally applicable dictum to all spheres of life. Nothing should escape the optimization mindset. A lot of this I believe is a bequeathment of Web 2.0, a necessary development out of the envy and desire that the new glut of luxury imagery produces. There are other contributors to this development, to be sure, but this particular swathe of tooling has certainly accelerated this particular evolution in our collective psychology.

One of the most evident cases of the expansion of self-improvement culture is its application to the body. Bodybuilding is deeply tied in with the self-improvement ethos, so much so, that the vast majority of traditional self-improvement programs are almost anchored in gym-going as the necessary condition to improve one's life. The discourse is rooted in the gym.

Between 2000 and 2019, gym memberships nearly doubled in the US from 32.8 to 64.2 million. In the next five years, fitness industry spending is expected to increase 171.54%.

These are extreme growth numbers, especially as the United States population is an aging one, and 60% of gym membership holders are below the age of 35.

It is speculation to tie these two as correlation, but let us suppose they are related. How are they then interconnected?

One evident reason is body image. This is readily observable in the public gyms of the past few years. All the selfies, the self-filming, the live-streaming, etc. Attention and validation. Broadcasting the body and its subjection to improvement.

There is one direction of our culture that reduces your value to your visually-presented physical condition. Because that is one facet that is presentable and communicable through photography and videography. It is possible to get traction through Instagram or TikTok through the immediate impression of the visual condition of your body. Physical athletics is one the most highly valuated forms of achievement now because it is immediately verifiable. By contrast, the most accomplished writer or mathematician in the world could hardly gain any such traction through such media focal points by the presentation of their accomplishments. The media shapes the message. And in this case the message is the person, i.e. the body. The medium can only convey the physical, and so the motivations of most people become increasingly and more stringently materially driven.

Hence the irony of the prized abdominal six-pack for men. A meretricious moniker of athleticism and strength. Although its achievement depends on self-starvation and often abandonment of muscle mass, cultural aesthetics have deemed it a laurel of strength. It is strange because of how unnatural it is. One need only read the anorexic routines male celebrities undergo to reach this look. And contrast that to the masculinity of older stars such as Bert Reynolds or Sean Connery. Hairy chests, firm guts, and strong men. Bulk often accompanies strength, but bulk is inadmissible in Hollywood imagery for a strongman starting in the mid 90s. (An interesting contrast is Robert De Niro in *Taxi Driver*. His body fat certainly dips sub twelve percent for that role, but his emaciation is presented as freakish rather than as beautiful or glorifiable.)

What it comes down to is that fat and hair are visual deterrents that subtract from conventional photographic appeal. Rather, we are told the most masculine men are those with baby-smooth chests and washboard tummies. Even when those who possess these feature may unfortunately tend to act more like fops or dandies than true masculine types.

(There is of course the female half of the equation, but I feel the point on body image sufficiently made here, the dots are easy to connect.)

In any case, this self-improvement ethos, in its increasing urgency over the years, has extended its reach to fitness, education, finances, real-estate investment, etc. You aren't enough if you aren't constantly improving. How are you convincing the shareholders of your psyche that you will be better next quarter, how you will do more. Convince them of your growth and your earnings.

And nearly universally in these mantras, it is driven purely by material factors.

The purported end goal of self-improvement is greater accessibility to wealth, power, sex, attention, and the other usual suspects which populate the common motivators for a material life.

In fact, this is baked into the very etymology of improvement which stems from the Latin term *prode* which translates as useful or profitable.

Self-improvement is to render yourself more useful for yourself and your goals.

---

That may sound all well and good to most.

But it is a fundamentally nihilist position.

More than just the egoism it entails, self-improvement is soulless.

Some may criticize the oppressive, hostile, enslaving nature of self-improvement culture. I will criticize it for its motives and results.

Self-improvement as a whole, because it is driven by material motives, is fundamentally boring. It produces boring people. Men and women, both.

The exclusive focus on externalities has also led to a neglect, if not outright abandonment, of the interior self.

Hence the general observation that some people use the gym as a replacement for having a personality. And it should not be too controversial to say the same goes for those chasing money, cars, bedroom delights, and other elements of the hedonistic package.

None of these self-improvement tips and tricks point to the cultivation of the soul. The reading of books, spiritual wonder, travel sans tourism, or anything that would make you a deeper, more interesting person. The kind of experinces which would make you capable of having complex emotions to wrestle through.

As a counterpoint, one may see transcendental meditation as a very popular practice which leads to internal cultivation. 

But frankly meditation is better proof of the exact opposite. In its consumerist forms, meditation is rooted in the ablution and destruction of thought. It is a denial of self, and this is not a good thing. By perverting important breathing habits to stifle and silence the thoughts that spark in the quiet stillness. 

Meditation becomes a crutch by which many seek to bypass internal development. To avoid thinking at all costs, even when such self-reflection may be beneficial. This is not internal cultivation, though it may be parried around as such.

Although it is boasted as a practice to root yourself, rid yourself of toxicity, or other slogans, meditation is a repeated practice to blot out and/or silence the inner self. It is directed toward an annihilation of the internal self.

That is not to say meditation cannot be helpful for those who spend too long wrestling in the interior corridors of their consciousness, but for those whose problems and thoughts are no more surreptitious than a child's, then there is an issue. We are meant to be more than blank mirrors, doing nothing more than reflecting what mass culture tells us to buy or look like.

The self-improvement package is based on the external aesthetics of consumerism, spoon-fed by marketing companies and other glitzy media. Tingling your dopamine with those fun sensations which keep you simple, and are purportedly supposed to keep you happy. Surface without depth. You become one of the Eloi.

But the truth is no amount of gym-time, work-time, bed-time, wealth, or even fame can ever stop you from being a thoroughly boring person.

What makes us distinctly human is our interior landscapes, where the mind and heart mesh in curious patterns, and we have thoughts and experiences that deviate from the monolithic norm handed down to us by centralized zeitgeists.

What self-improvement suffocates and leaves entirely untended are precisely these gardening tools of the soul: literature, philosophy, lepidopterology, and other quirky hobbies whether tactile or intellectual. The accumulation of experiences that can redeem your existence on the ledger of time.

The growth of the interior, that which is not reducible to material usefulness, that which is not presentable or communicable through social media, with the rare exception of those who have creatively subverted that medium.


---

One should stand against self-improvement in the sense that is foisted on us as some one-size-fits-all *modus operandi* for encountering the world and ourselves.

Physical fitness, nutrition, and hard work all play their role. But they should never come at the cost of the cultivation of the soul. The increasing of wisdom and knowledge, and the development of true character. While our culture may eschew any sort of internal virtue in favor of all that which can be demonstrated externally, the truest people, and the most interesting ones, are those who hold internal convictions and values generated from within, rather than spoon-fed from without.

How boredom and leisure without a panoply of distractions can lead to true internal growth. How releasing the gas pedal of your career and going off into the wilderness by yourself may bring you to a spiritual epiphany that an over-optimized schedule could never otherwise experience?

Perhaps a new injunction is required to force people to be bored more often, to reject consumerist travel, to rejuvenate the life of the mind. A spiritual or intellectual diet as sparse and ascetic as the physical ones some nutritionists force on themselves.

That is one essential step to retrieving meaning in life and rejecting the nihilism that percolates in our cultural moment.

Admittedly, none of what has been said here clearly defines what are soul-cultivating habits versus those that are not. Aside from some blustery gestures to books. That ought be discussed elsewhere. This was merely to open the door, and to understand the ways in which self-improvement can lead to self-annihilation, and the dangers therein.


A new lens for the cultivation of the soul

Against self-improvement


A brief note in English for the confused. It was customary in medieval philosophical pedagogy to write notes and commentary on Peter Lombard's *Sentences*, as one transitioned from apprentice to journeyman, so to speak.

The *Sentences* (1150) are a compilation of patristic and medieval opinions on a wide variety of questions spread across four books. A prototype textbook, if you will.

Philosophical education today, benighted beyond any recognizable form, neglects to carry on this tradition. So I am taking it upon myself to self-inflict this exercise as a philosophical rite-of-passage. It will likely be an intermittent project, spread over years, and left incomplete. But it will be good fun.

For those who know better, please do forgive my underdeveloped Latin style, and the anachronistic smatterings of medieval and modern formulations.


---

# Sententiarum libri IV
## Prologous

### Incipit Prologus.

Petrus Lombardi:

> 1. Cupientes aliquid de penuria ac tenuitate nostra cum paupercula in gazophylacium Domini mittere, ardua scandere, opus ultra vires nostras agere praesumpsimus, consummationis fiduciam laborisque mercedem in Samaritano statuentes, qui, prolatis in curationem semivivi duobus denariis, supereroganti cuncta reddere professus est. Delectat nos veritas pollicentis, sed terret immensitas laboris; desiderium hortatur proficiendi, sed dehortatur infirmitas deficiendi, quam vincit zelus domus Dei.

Desiderium finiti tendit ad infinitum. Sic homo ut ens finitum necessario nostrum Dominum ut infinitum creatorem omnium rerum cupere debet. Operam nostram tanquam sacrificum offerimus, etsi "terret immensitas laboris", enim hoc est nostrum propositum: glorificare Dominum. Hoc naturalissimum desiderium est.


> 2. Quo inardescentes, «fidem nostram adversus errores carnalium atque animalium hominum» Davidicae turris clypeis munire vel potius munitam ostendere, ac theologicarum inquisitionum abdita aperire, necnon et sacramentorum ecclesiasticorum pro modico intelligentiae nostrae notitiam tradere studuimus; «non valentes studiosorum fratrum votis iure resistere, eorum in Christo laudabilibus studiis lingua ac stylo nos servire flagitantium: quas bigas in nobis agitat Christi caritas».

Caritas Christi nobilissimum desiderium, vis lacerat quae pectus hominis velumque templi lacerat. Non est ullum maius mobile.

> 3. Quamvis non ambigamus «omnem humani eloquii sermonem calumniae atque contradictioni aemulorum semper fuisse obnoxium. Quia dissentientibus voluntatum motibus, dissentiens quoque fit animorum sensus, ut cum omne dictum veri ratione perfectum sit, tamen dum aliud aliis aut videtur aut complacet, veritati vel non intellectae vel offendenti impietatis error obnitatur ac voluntatis invidia resultet. Quam Deus huius saeculi operatur in illis diffidentiae filiis qui non rationi voluntatem subiciunt, nec doctrinae studium impendunt, sed his quae somniarunt sapientiae verba coaptare nituntur: non veri, sed placiti rationem sectantes. Quos iniqua voluntas non ad intelligentiam veritatis, sed ad defensionem placentium incitat: non desiderantes doceri veritatem, sed ab ea ad fabulas convertentes auditum. Quorum professio est magis placita quam docenda conquirere, nec docenda desiderare, sed desideratis doctrinam coaptare. Habent rationem sapientiae in superstitione, quia fidei defectionem sequitur hypocrisis mendax, ut sit vel in verbis pietas quam amiserit conscientia; ipsamque simulatam pietatem omni verborum mendacio impiam reddunt, falsae doctrinae institutis fidei sanctitatem corrumpere molientes, auriumque pruriginem sub novello sui desiderii dogmate aliis ingerentes. Qui contentioni studentes, contra veritatem sine foedere bellant. Inter veri namque assertionem et placiti defensionem pertinax pugna est, dum se et veritas tenet et se voluntas erroris tuetur».

Esse plus est differentiam habere, ita voluntate manifestata. Unitas Dei  quoque unitas voluntae. In hoc mundo, ratio voluntatem afflectur, ita opinio depravationi conformatur. Methodus dei huius saeculi est. Igitur, quidquid auditus est, radices suas in voluntatibus depravatis magis quam in divina veritate invenit. Sic Petrus Lombardi scripsit: "Inter veri namque assertionem et placiti defensionem pertinax pugna est, dum se et veritas tenet et se voluntas tuetur." Illa discordiam et voluntatis suae assertionem contra voluntatem Dei concupiscunt.

> 4. Horum igitur et Deo odibilem ecclesiam evertere atque ora oppilare, ne virus nequitiae in alios effundere queant, et lucernam veritatis in candelabro exaltare volentes, in labore multo ac sudore volumen Deo praestante compegimus ex testimoniis veritatis in aeternum fundatis, in quatuor libris distinctum. In quo maiorum exempla doctrinamque reperies; in quo per dominicae fidei sinceram professionem, vipereae doctrinae fraudulentiam prodidimus: aditum demonstrandae veritatis complexi, nec periculo impiae professionis inserti, temperato inter utrumque moderamine utentes. Sicubi vero parum vox nostra insonuit, non a paternis discessit limitibus.

Deus huius saeculi suam ecclesiam propriam--cathedralem dicere possit-- quae est organum suae erroris, suae cupiditatis ut seminare discordias habet, ubi nulla esse debent.

Magis nostra vox non discessere debet a paternis limitibus. Nam Deus fines secundum naturalem nostram finitatem determinavit.

> 5. «Non igitur debet hic labor cuiquam pigro vel multum docto videri superfluus, cum multis impigris multisque indoctis, inter quos etiam et mihi, sit necessarius», brevi volumine complicans Patrum sententias, appositis eorum testimoniis, ut non sit necesse quaerenti librorum numerositatem evolvere, cui brevitas collecta quod quaeritur offert sine labore. In hoc autem tractatu «non solum pium lectorem, sed etiam liberum correctorem desiderio, maxime ubi profunda versatur veritatis quaestio: quae utinam tot haberet inventores, quot habet contradictores!» Ut autem quod quaeritur facilius occurrat, titulos quibus singulorum librorum capitula distinguuntur praemisimus.

Magnum quidem studium numquam superfluus est, etiam doctis. Veritas iterum et iterum revocanda est, ut commemoramus occasiones per circulos festorum. Studere ritus est, non actus singularis.

### Explicit Prologus.

## Liber I - De Mysterio Trinitatis
### Distinctio I
#### Caput I - Omnis doctrina est vel de rebus vel de signis

> 1. Omnis doctrina est de rebus vel de signis. Veteris ac novae Legis continentiam diligenti indagine etiam atque etiam considerantibus nobis, praevia Dei gratia innotuit sacrae paginae tractatum circa res vel signa praecipue versari. Ut enim egregius doctor Augustinus ait in libro De Doctrina Christiana: «Omnis doctrina vel rerum est, vel signorum. Sed res etiam per signa discuntur. Proprie autem hic res appellantur, quae non ad significandum aliquid adhibentur; signa vero, quorum usus est in significando». – Eorum autem aliqua sunt quorum omnis usus est in significando, non in iustificando, id est, quibus non utimur nisi aliquid significandi gratia, ut aliqua sacramenta legalia; alia quae non solum significant, sed conferunt quod intus adiuvet, sicut evangelica sacramenta. – «Ex quo aperte intelligitur, quae hic appellentur signa, res illae videlicet quae ad significandum aliquid adhibentur. Omne igitur signum etiam res aliqua est: quod enim nulla res est, ut in eodem Augustinus ait, omnino nihil est; non autem e converso omnis res signum est», quia non adhibetur ad significandum aliquid.
2. Cumque his intenderit theologorum speculatio studiosa atque modesta, divinam Scripturam, formam praescriptam in doctrina tenere advertet.
3. De his ergo nobis, aditum ad res divinas aliquatenus intelligendas Deo duce aperire volentibus, disserendum est; et «primum de rebus, postea de signis disseremus».

Prima quaestio de rebus and signis est, prima non solum per philosophiam pertinet, sed etiam ad rectam Scripturae interpretationem. Interpretationem incipere debet ut occurrat omnibus rebus.

Doctrinae sunt factae de docente. Docere est ostendere. Res ostenduntur signis.

Sed quid signum est? Augustine dixit: "Proprie autem hic res appellantur, quae non ad significandum aliquid adhibentur; signa vero, quorum usus est in significando."

Si hoc verum est, tum videtur res sine signis existere non posse. Id quod est proprium rei, est modo negatio, i.e. non esse significari. De quibus signa propriora quam res sint. Hoc dicere licet?

Investigandum est quid sit res per se, signum per se (quantum fieri esse per se potest), et quomodo utrumque alteri sit dispositum. Quomodo stant et pertinent.



Commentarius viae philosophiae secundum morem scholasticorum

Scriptum super sententiis Petri Lombardi

A summary of the appendix to World as Will and Representation Vol. 1

Schopenhauer's comprehensive critique of Kant's philosophy


Note - This review was originally written in 2018. This is a redraft. Also forgive the poorly formatted image, I will fix it, when I am not so lazy.

---

To write a masterful monograph which applies a single disciplinary methodology flawlessly, that is a challenge. But to write a book steeped in elegant multidisciplinarity, rich in erudition, and spiced with some dry wit, that is a feat of its own.

As a student of the premier media ecologist Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong roots the sometime offputting frenetic energy of his mentor in a grounded, accessible style by crafting an analysis of that nebulous bridge period between the "medieval" and the "modern". Ong takes one individual as a particularly revelatory nexus of parallel historical developments, the educator Petrus Ramus (1515-1575). Across the chapters of this book, Ong he deftly navigates the development and the implications of Ramus' revolutionary approach to pedagogy, printing, humanism, and beyond. I will only briefly introduce some of these dimensions as a teaser of what a reader can find inside Ong's study.

#### The birth of methodology

One should not forget that in this time Aristotle was king. Ramus was decidedly anti-Aristotelian, as his polemics make no secret of. This rendered him a particularly controversial figure in his own day. The Western university curricula had been thoroughly rooted in Aristotle for several centuries by now, so Ramus' attempt to dethrone "The Philosopher" were not met with cheerful acceptance by the scholastic university system, as one might expect.

The Scholastics (a term Ong finds problematic though useful) decried Ramus for jettisoning Aristotle because it left him with a weak *methodus*, which can be defined as the way one proceeds through their subject matter.

Method had not been problematized in such a way before. What is a method and how does one arrive at it? This is the quintessential Cartesian or Bacon question (or whichever Enlightenment figure floats your boat). Ong contends that through his disruption of Aristotelian teaching, Ramus unintentionally prompted this modern question of method not just between humanists and scholastics but also within these two camps as well. A question that has haunted the natural and human sciences to this day.

#### Print and pedagogy

Print technology was still relatively new at this point in time. It had been used for Bibles and then weaponized for the Reformation, but the technological developments surrounding the book had not yet percolated into the realm of pedagogy, until Ramus. Ong argues that Ramus was the first to employ print diagrams and charts as he implemented them in his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic. What medieval philosophy and logicians had taken page upon page, subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, to detail in a way that could only make sense to a reader with a remarkable scrutiny of effort, all this verboseness was easily displaced by the visual diagram. Abstruse concatenations of text gave way to clear, simple, visual diagrams which could make the meaning of a thousand words clear in one picture. A revolutionary achievement in the dissemination of knowledge and the circulation of teaching.

Furthermore, while before many writers perished under the suffocating weight of critics' rebuttals (if not snuffed out by the church), Ramus was remarkably proactive in utilizing print technology to respond to his adversaries. He rapidly and repeatedly printed new editions of his books with *corrigienda*, supplemental arguments, or refutations of counter-arguments. He incorporated his critics' points into his own work, thus strengthening his own presentation despite others' attempts to negate it.

The printing press also mobilized Ramus' ability to spread his ideas. Rather than being constrained to a network of universities as manuscript culture had been constrained to do, Ramus was an early figure in the transnational republic of letters, becoming a central figure for the Anglophone Puritan movement in England.

And this is not because Ramus possessed a prodigious degree of foresight, at least in Ong's view, but it is because he had particular reformist goals *contra* scholasticism and was placed at a rare intersection of historical circumstances which allowed him to utilize new scholarly tools in his endeavour.


#### Debunking Thomist Nostalgia

Ramus was a Huguenot. Ong was a Jesuit. And Ong makes no effort to conceal his preference for Catholicism throughout his work. That is fine for me though, for he also has absolutely zero sympathy for the neo-Thomist nostalgia movement which had pervaded twentieth century Catholicism. At the time for him this was Jacques Maritain, but it continues under various auspices via Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, Charles Taylor, and most prominently for me personally in my undergraduate experience.

The basic premise of this Catholic metanarrative is that Thomas Aquinas came along and more or less solved philosophy with the perfect blending of Aristotle and Christianity. This was the ultimate fulfillment of the Western philosophical tradition. However, the innovations of John Duns Scotus corrupted this intellectual utopia and brought us an intellectual Fall called modernity. A simplistic retelling, yes, but that's the basic gist.

Ong has several remarks on this subject (I have several more but will refrain from interjecting here).

First, the idea that Thomism reigned as some supreme vogue tradition until it was displaced by Scotus or the Reformation, that has zero historical grounding. When Aquinas died, the University of Paris only felt it necessary to preserve a few of his commentaries and his treatise on aqueduct construction. More than that, teachings espoused by Aquinas were explicitly condemned as heretical in 1277, until this decision was somewhat discreetly reversed when he was canonized in 1322. Not many realize that Aquinas has a much more controversial reception history than his nostalgists often acknowledge.

Second, scholasticism was not institutionally built on faculties of theology. If one considers the hard numbers of what represented scholasticism, the vast majority of those at scholastic institutions were logicians, and Thomas was not a strong logician either. Theologians constituted a significantly smaller number of scholars than their counterparts in logic, and their voice in pedagogy was often unheard. Thomism was at best a marginal doctrine, even among the literate and educated, it was not a universally promulgated doctrine.

Another laudable observation from Ong is the problematic nature of using terms such as realism or nominalism to distinguish medieval thinkers. Such an anachronistic label is often used to bifurcate the Western philosophical tradition, but in Ong's view, this method of teaching the history of philosophy introduces more misconceptions than it does impress accurate ones. They ultimately misframe the conversations of medieval and Renaissance thought.


#### Media Ecology: Spatial Cognition

 Ong is foremost remembered as a media ecologist, as his predecessor Marshall McLuhan was. And this frame of observations is also prevalent in this work as well. One of the key arguments of this book is that the technology of the print book was part of a larger ongoing development of constructing and defining knowledge almost exclusively in visual and spatial terms. 
 
 Charts and diagrams are visual ways we construct, relate, delineate, and compartmentalize knowledge. For Ong, the wake of print technology ushers in semantic evolution as well. With more people reading instead of listening, philosophical vocabulary became increasingly visualistic as well (e.g. the word definition means the physical delimitation of space). 
 
 For Ramus, the true nature of things was not conveyed through oral dialogue or lectures but through the written word and its containment in visual spaces. Scholastic pedagogy featured the oral monologue of the professor while humanist pedagogy showcased the text as the primary instrument for truth and understanding. The humanists engaged in oral dialogue for the sake of discerning the more real truth contained (this, also being a spatial term) within the written/printed text.

#### Literary and Philosophical Impacts of Ramist Pedagogy

Ong also draws attention to a variety of ways that Ramism gave birth to the greatest minds of the Renaissance. He argues that it was only because education shifted from listening-only to dialogue and exercises that required the students to think and imagine more, that great thinkers and writers of the later Renaissance like Shakespeare were possible. This pedagogy made the minds of the next generation more synthestic, imaginative, and thus creative. He argues that the visualist typology of Ramus' works were an important precursor to the highly visual style of writers such as the English metaphysical poets.

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There are a wide variety of other historical, etymological, pedagogical, and philosophical arguments that Ong convincingly weaves into his narrative, and it is truly remarkable that he could cover so much ground in his studies (especially since he personally traveled around the world to track down thousands of various copies and editions of Ramus' works). This is truly a landmark study, a classic which is essential for anyone interested in intellectual history, methodology, media ecology, or the history of the book.

Wrestling with historicity

Riemann: 'On the Hypotheses which Lie at the Root of Geometry'

Against self-improvement

Scriptum super sententiis Petri Lombardi

Schopenhauer's comprehensive critique of Kant's philosophy

Review: Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason