Fundamentals to Misunderstanding Politics
Chapter 0.2 Why Are Maxims Adyanta
(or “Tent Stakes”) Needed?
(see Chapter 0.1 here)
Oak Boat: So why do we need this crap? Well, according to Dewitt T. Stame’s introduction to the Proverbs or Adages of Erasmus, proverbs and maxims (and maybe adyanta) are useful in four ways:
(1) to promote the understanding of philosophy, (2) to strengthen argument, (3) to add ornament and gracefulness in speech and writing, and (4) to clarify the meaning of some of the best authors.
And Stame also warns: “Erasmus cautions, however, that proverbs serve not as food but as condiments. They are not to be employed to weariness but for gracefulness.” [1]
Newt Monk: The world has too many condiments these days; it’s choice anxiety that will bring us asunder.
Oak Boat: Well, it’s always a good idea to remember that tent stakes are not condiments.
Newt Monk: Welp. And after Erasmus came Montesquieu:
With regard to mores, much is to be gained by keeping the old customs. Since corrupt peoples rarely do great things and have established few societies, founded few towns, and given few laws; and since, on the contrary, those with simple and austere mores have made most establishments, recalling men to the old maxims usually returns them to virtue. [2]
Oak Boat: Welp. And after Montesquieu came Rousseau (echoing ancient Solon):
The more you multiply laws, the more you cause them to be despised: and all the overseers you institute are nothing but new lawbreakers bound either to share [their bounty] with the old ones, or to do their plundering on their own. [3]
Newt Monk: Welp. And before them all was Emperor Aurelius, telling us, and telling himself, that: “You will never be remarkable for quick-wittedness.” [4]
Oak Boat: Welp. And before Aurelius came Confucius, telling us, and telling himself, that: “The superior man wishes to be slow in his speech and earnest in his conduct.”[5]
Newt Monk: Welp. And before Confucius came the end of the Third Age, where in the Red Book of Westmarch readers of this age are told that what we want to call a maxim (but can’t), and that thing that might be something between a catena and an adyanta, might once have been called a riddle. For:
In one thing you have not changed, dear friend,’ said Aragorn: ‘you still speak in riddles.’
‘What? In riddles?’ said Gandalf. ‘No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.’ He laughed, but the sound now seemed warm and kindly as a gleam of sunshine.[6]
NOTES
[1] Dewitt T. Starnes, “Introduction,” Proverbs or Adages by Desiderius Erasmus Gathered Out of the Chiliades and Englished (1569) by Richard Taverner, (Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimile & Reprints, 1956), pp. viii, x.
[2] Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des Loix (The Spirit of the Laws) (1748), trans. and eds. Anne Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone, (Cambridge UP, 1989), (V, 7), p. 49.
[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’oeconomie politique (Discourse on Political Economy) (1755) in Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, (Cambridge UP, 1997, 2003), p. 14.
[4] Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, (New York: Penguin, 1962), (V, v).
[5] 孔子 Kong Fuzi (Confucius), 論語 (Analects) in The Complete Confucius, (ed.) Nicholas Tamblyn, trans. Tamblyn (?), (Melbourne: Golding Books, 2016), (IV), p. 11.
[6] J. R. R. Tolkien, “The White Rider,” The Two Towers in The Lord of the Rings, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954–55; 50th Anniversary Edition, 2004), (III, v), p. 496.
Fundamentals to Misunderstanding Politics
Chapter 0.1 What Do You Mean By “Maxims?”
(see Chapter 0.0 here)
Newt Monk: Thus, do not listen to what I say or seem to say, but try to get a glimpse of what I say I saw in some book written by either Boethius or Machiavelli from long ago, particularly in regard to contemporary politics.[1] In those books I once found what used to be called “maxims” or “rules of thumb,” though better metaphors might now be needed. I therefore sometimes think of them as seeds, as pods, as starting points, as springboards, as tent stakes, as prefabricated political truths, as carbon-composite cookie-cutter constants, as givens, as groundings, as grounds keeping, hence the term “tent stakes” I keep returning to.
Oak Boat: Right, the important thing is that these things-once-called-maxims are not ends in themselves but means (methods, applications) to help scoot one along toward some distant end that will likely never actually be reached but, nonetheless, as an end personified, stares down and scowls at the stooped traveler across her whole journey.
Newt Monk: And as I can’t prove that any of my findings from Boethius and Machiavelli are in common use (particularly in central Texas), I must follow R. B. Y. Scott’s introduction to his 1965 translation of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII to say that what I found were not maxims but artifacts, like finding arrowheads in a field:
Strictly speaking, an epigram, an aphorism, or a maxim does not [p. 4] qualify as proverbial unless it has passed into common use. An epigram like Lord John Russell’s is a perceptive observation wittily expressed, but no one would quote it unless he were discussing the present subject. An aphorism like “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is philosophical in tone and lacks the common touch. A maxim is an axiom or rule of conduct which may or may not gain widespread acceptance, such as “Knowledge is power.” The homeliness of the truth expressed and the simplicity, conciseness, and picturesqueness of its expression characterize the anonymous familiar popular saying. “Dead men tell no tales.” [“]A new broom sweeps clean.” “Chickens come home to roost.”[2]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims, these words, observations by dead authors. Rhetorically, one could say what you want is somewhat equal to eidolopoeia: presenting a dead person as speaking, or assigning words to the dead. Yet what you want is also somewhat equal to ethopoeia: putting oneself in the place of another to then understand, express that person’s feelings better.[3]
Newt Monk: Yes, this whittling down of terms, of finding which one is the sharpest, does help. I think what I found in Boethius and Machiavelli sometimes involves the usage of a kind of catena, which Old Oxford has defined as “a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine.” Plus, the idea of a literary catena was once envisioned by the great bookman Andrew Lang as being “a golden chain of bibliophiles,” that is, as in a chain of quotations from the best books on the best topics found by the best readers, the best lovers of books, etcetera.[4]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims––these words, observations by dead authors––but you might call them catenas…. Hmm. Rhetorically, one would say that what you ask for sometimes involves epicrisis: the quoting of a passage followed by commenting on it. Still, what you ask for appears to be more than mere antithesis: the attempt to conjoin contrasting ideas.[5]
Newt Monk: Indeed, I think at the end of the day I can only call this thing an adynata—a term that in medieval rhetoric meant something akin to stringing together impossibilities, as an attempted confession that all words eventually fail us. And so calling them “tent stakes” is as good a vivid metaphor for the abstract term adynata as any other I suppose.[6]
NOTES
[1] From Jung:
A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transmuting the primitive and merely natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. This achievement, and this alone, constitutes his personal value, for which he may take credit without necessarily succumbing to inflation….
To the philosopher as well this vision comes as so much increment, and is simply a part of the common property of mankind, in which, in principle, everyone has a share.
(Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewessten,(Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1928), trans. by R. F. C. Hull as “Relations between ego and unconscious,” (1928) in The Jung Reader, ed. David Tacey, (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 105)
And let me add from Walter Kaufmann:
Another question remains which in some cases may be most important of all: What did the author see? The answers to such questions as, for example, what concrete instances he had in mind and against what view he aimed his proposition, do not necessarily solve this central problem, though they are relevant and important. Nor is the difference between what an author saw and said necessarily reducible to the difference between what he meant and what his proposition means. What he meant to say may well have been as wrong as his proposition, and nevertheless he may have seen something important.
(Critique of Religion and Philosophy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1958), pp. 72–73)
[2] R. B. Y. Scott, “General Introduction,” The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 3–4.
[3] See Richard A. Lanham (ed.), A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991).
[4] Andrew Lang, “Bibliomania in France,” Books and Bookmen, (London: Longman, Green, and Co; Second Edition, 1887), p. 105.
[5] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
[6] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
