The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric

3. How Insides Get Outside Again: The Logic of the Methodical Memory

3 How Insides Get Outside Again: The Logic of the Methodical Memory Since eighteenth-century discourse theorists accepted the notion that the process of inquiry was constituted by a review of the mind's contents and operations, they next had to find some way to insure that when the results of inquiry "went public" these results exactly represented the primary, internal mental process that had produced them. The problem was this: How could a speaker or writer's memory of her investigative process be accurately translated into discourse that would be intelligible and coherent to outsiders? Discourse theorists found a solution to this problem in a logical tradition called method. Method had the handy properties of being suited to the arts of discovery as well as those of communication. In other words, method could function in the interior world of individual minds when they were engaged in investigation , as well as in the external world as a means of establishing connections between minds through discourse. The term method has been used since classical times to designate any orderly or systematic procedure, and it continues to be used in this loose sense. However, an important technical use of the term method began to emerge among the generation of scholars who immediately preceded Descartes. Walter Ong defines this historical use of method to mean "a series of ordered steps gone through to produce with certain efficacy a desired effect-a routine of efficiency" (225). I During the late Renaissance , method was a process of inquiry; thinkers who were rebelling against scholasticism turned to it as a non-Aristotelian means of finding new knowledge and of organizing received knowledge. The description of method that follows will probably cause contempo33 34 The MethodicalMemory rary readers to wonder how any serious thinker could ever have relied upon it as a procedural guarantee for the truth of an inquiry process. But post-Renaissance logicians and philosophers took method very seriously indeed. It seemed to them to offer a guarantee that the operations of the human mind were consonant with those of nature. As I have tried to establish, modem thought relies at its core on the ,assumption of a representative consonance between minds and nature. So, as we shall see, the philosophers who expounded the virtues of method were anxious to ground its authority in the natural order. Method also offered the twin promises of efficiency and comprehensiveness to the new philosophers who launched the project of studying the physical world by means of empirical investigation. Its use lent a kind of security to the intellectual adventurers who had rejected classical texts as an ultimate source of knowledge, who were setting out, in fact, to rewrite what could be defined as knowledge. Of course, faith in method still lingers in the contemporary notion of the scientific method, which is widely accepted, even today, as a procedural guarantee for certain kinds of truth. Early in the history of method (1637), Rene Descartes averred that method consists entirely in the ordering and arranging of the objects on which we must concentrate our minds's eye if we are to discover some truth. We shall be following this method exactly if we first reduce complicated and obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones, and then, starting with the intuition of the simplest ones of all, try to ascend through the same steps to a knowledge of all the rest. (20) In other words, the methodical movement from the complex to the simple induced a native, elemental understanding-an intuition-that could not be questioned, apparently because of its irreducibility to anything else. Once the investigator had discovered this irreducible, elemental minimum, she had a basis from which to begin a systematic inquiry into the more complex features of any field. The orderly nature of this process reassured the investigator, in essence, that she had left no stone unturned in her pursuit of knowledge. But method had yet another use, and that was to explicate the results of mental investigations to others. From its beginnings method was associated with teaching. For example, in 1599 the British logician Thomas Blundevilledefinedmethodas"acompendiouswayofleamingorteaching any thing" in his Logike (qtd. in Howell, Logic and Rhetoric 289). Contemporary commentators, like Hans Aarsleff, have noted that the attractiveness of method as a means of learning anything was its efficiency: How Insides Get Outside Again 35 "Method is ... a problem in learning theory and...