Ramism - Placing Ramism

Placing Ramism

Frances Yates proposed a subtle relationship of Ramism to the legacy of Lullism, the art of memory, and Renaissance hermetism. She considers that Ramism drew on Lullism, but is more superficial; was opposed to the classical art of memory; and moved in an opposite direction to the occult (reducing rather than increasing the role of images). He "abandoned imagery and the creative imagination". Mary Carruthers, referring back to Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, commented that

An alternative to this aspect of Ramism, as belated and diminishing, is the discussion initiated by Walter Ong of Ramus in relation to several evolutionary steps. Ong's position, on the importance of Ramus as historical figure and humanist, has been summed up as the center of controversies about method (both in teaching and in scientific discovery) and about rhetoric and logic and their role in communication.

The best known of Ong's theses is Ramus the post-Gutenberg writer, in other words the calibration of the indexing and schematics involved in Ramism to the transition away from written manuscripts, and the spoken word. Extensive charts were instead used, drawing on the resources of typography, to organise material, from left to right across a printed page, particularly in theological treatises. The cultural impact of Ramism depended on the nexus of printing (trees regularly laid out with braces) and rhetoric, forceful and persuasive at least to some Protestants; and it had partly been anticipated in cataloguing and indexing knowledge and its encyclopedism by Conrad Gesner. The term Ramean tree became standard in logic books, applying to the classical Porphyrian tree, or any binary tree, without clear distinction between the underlying structure and the way of displaying it; now scholars use the clearer term Ramist epitome to signify the structure. Ong argued that, a chart being a visual aid and logic having come down to charts, the role of voice and dialogue is placed squarely and rigidly in the domain of rhetoric, and in a lower position.

Two other theses of Ong on Ramism are: the end of copia or profuseness for its own sake in writing, making Ramus an opponent of the Erasmus of Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style; and the beginning of the later Cartesian emphasis on clarity. Ong, though, consistently argues that Ramus is thin, insubstantial as a scholar, a beneficiary of fashion supported by the new medium of printing, as well as a transitional figure.

These ideas, from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, have been reconsidered. Brian Vickers summed up the view a generation or so later: dismissive of Yates, he notes that bracketed tables existed in older manuscripts, and states that Ong's emphases are found unconvincing. Further, methodus, the Ramists' major slogan, was specific to figures of speech, deriving from Hermogenes of Tarsus via George of Trebizond. And the particular moves used by Ramus in the reconfiguration of rhetoric were in no sense innovative by themselves. Lisa Jardine agrees with Ong that he was not a first-rank innovator, more of a successful textbook writer adapting earlier insights centred on topics-logic, but insists on his importance and influence in humanistic logic. She takes the Ramean tree to be a "voguish" pedagogic advance.

It has been said that: