As I read this week, I could tell it was the end of the semester because my patience is really waning and poor Peter Ramus was the primary victim of my impatience. While I can see Rick’s point, that Ramus was loosening the bonds from the classics, I just felt like his piece was such a step back.
Ramus tries to claim that dialectic is available to everyone, and in this way he makes a liberatory move, but he does it at the cost of separating rhetoric from dialectic – again. On page 686, Ramus claims, “invention, arrangement, and memory belong to dialectic and only style and delivery to rhetoric.” This separation of dialectic and rhetoric lands us right back at Plato’s distinction between philosophy, the work of dialectic, and rhetoric, the work of those horrible sophists.
I love how one of the explanations that Ramus gives for Quintilian’s omission of dialectic is that, “ Quintilian reveals himself to be quite ignorant of dialectic, for he has either not heard or not read anything about the role of judging” (687). Assertions like this by Ramus remind me of reading English 106 papers – it’s a pretty huge leap to say that Quintilian only avoids dialectic because he’s ignorant about it. The biggest problem I see with Ramus is how this, and many of his other sweeping statements were so decontextualized. While the introductory materials to Ramus allude to this lack of context, I still found it so problematic. In reference to Quintilian I found this particularly disturbing because I think that Quintilian actually considered his cultural context in his writing.
So, I’ve decided thumbs down on Ramus. I’m glad we read him, but I can’t say I really like him (and this has a whole lot to do with the fact that I like Quintilian).