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1. Charmed and Plain Tropes
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Chapter 1 Charmed and Plain Tropes )( arguments over the new plain style in seventeenthcentury England were about the nature of language and the shape of the cosmos. On the one side, a group of experimentalists advanced the idea of plainness, which they used as a code word to signal a nonenchanted understanding of tropes and, more broadly , a modern worldview. to be rhetorically plain in the experimental sense was to be epistemologically sound, religiously levelheaded (i.e., non-superstitious), and ontologically enlightened, and—moreover—to have all of those other qualities that signaled an unruffled refinement that mystics and sorcerers could never achieve, and would never want to achieve, even if they could. Plainness was a philosophical position, not a syntactical one; it was perhaps the first and most substantial rhetorical tenet of what finally emerged as Enlightenment rationalism. On the other side, in opposition to the new experimentalists, were a collection of magicians, sages, and spiritualists of various sorts, all of whom resisted the precepts of modern scientific rhetoric. they used tropes not as mere instruments 9 10 CharmeD anD Plain TroPes (i.e., words to dress the ideas), but rather as enchanted devices capable of transmogrifying reality and, in certain configurations, transporting audiences into metaphysical states of mind. For most numinous philosophers, rhetorical style still carried the residue of the Word and the name at the beginning of the world, which gave form to reality itself. In the mysterious rhetoric of the late Renaissance, the canon of style still had a cosmological dimension; it existed in the same category as entelechy, chiromancy, and other theological systems of shape tied inextricably to notions of divine teleology. In its grandest sense, therefore, rhetorical style—whether linguistic, architectural , painterly, etc.—was to be seen as informed by and infused with cosmic purposes and superlunary correspondences. this sublime idea of rhetoric, needless to say, is a world away from the utilitarian concept discovered among the new scientists, but it is nonetheless related. the emergence of the new plain style is inextricably linked to the decline of mystery and magic: the former initiates the latter. arguments for stylistic plainness are part of a larger conflict between magic and science at the crux of seventeenth-century intellectual life. this conflict provides the most significant broader context for a proper understanding of early modern rhetorical reform, which had very little to do with grammar, aversion to tropes, and so forth. Most discourses (plain and elaborate) contain rhetorical elements of various kinds, an idea not lost upon the new philosophers interested in creating a modern linguistic paradigm based upon learning’s advancements. When seventeenth-century plain language reformers complained about metaphors, for example—and most of them vehemently did—they meant something different from the basic idea of a metaphor. kierkegaard’s pseudonymous antiClimacus says that “to understand and to understand” are “different things,” and in a similar fashion, metaphors and metaphors were different things for the experimental philosophers and other language reformers.1 arguments for a new plain style predicated a shift in worldview behind the use of metaphors, and the use of rhetoric 1. Søren kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. alastair Hannay (new york: Penguin , 1989), 123. [52.14.221.113] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:42 GMT) CharmeD anD Plain TroPes 11 more broadly. this shift is best characterized as a movement away from charmed conceptions of tropes and toward merely decorative conceptions of tropes. the same sentence, then, in a gestalt-like fashion, might very well take on discordant stylistic connotations, depending upon whether the Weltanschauung informing it is occult or scientific. the idea of rhetoric, in other words, did not for the modern experimentalists possess some essential quality that made it undesirable. In the absence of numinous energies, and in the absence of magical and mystical ways of thinking about language, new philosophers embraced rhetoric. the purpose of this opening chapter is to sketch the rise of the new plain style in seventeenth-century England, beginning with Francis Bacon’s and Daniel Sennert’s arguments against magical language early in the century and concluding with Joseph Glanvill ’s critiques of spell casting in the Restoration. I discuss thomas Browne and thomas Hobbes as foils for the advancement of learning . Browne espouses an occult philosophy of rhetoric, and so works directly against the precepts of plainness, while Hobbes advances a radically materialistic and cynical philosophy of rhetoric (antioccult , but also anti-experimental), which explains why most new scientists were...