Chapter 2: Nature and Technique
But we are to investigate at the beginning whether there is a technique for sublimity or profundity, for some think that those who reduce such matters to handbooks of technical pronouncements are on the whole misled. You see, they say that things great in nature are innate and not teachable; that nature is the only technique for getting them: the workings of nature are made worse and more wretched when reduced to the bare bones by technical handbooks. 2. But I declare that it will be proven otherwise, if anyone would look to see for himself that in passages that are emotional and lofty nature often loves to be a rule unto herself and does not love to be random and without an orderly way of presenting things; and that it is nature which underlies all things as a kind of first element and archetype of creating, though technique is sufficient to know “how much” to say and the right moment in each case and also to provide a fixed discipline and usage; and that great things are subject to danger when left alone by themselves, apart from knowledge, unsteady like ships without ballast, left to impulse and unlearned audacity; as they ought to have the spur, so ought they to have the bridle. 3. Just what Demosthenes used to say about the common life of mankind-that good luck is the greatest of goods, but second, no less important, is making good plans (and if the second is not present, it will entirely remove the value of good luck)—I would say about speeches and writings: nature has charge of good luck, technique of good planning. But what is most important is that we can learn from no other source than technique what in speeches and writings depends wholly on nature. If, as I declare, he who looks down on those engaged in useful learning would make for himself a peroration of these things, he would no longer consider theorizing on the subject “too much” and useless.
Commentary
technique: Aristotle observes that technique (often translated “art”) imitates nature (Physics 194a21), unlike Oscar Wilde, who said that nature imitates art. In Metaphysics 980a28, Aristotle says that experience deals with the particular, technique with the universal. It comes into being, he says (Metaphysics 1047b33), by learning. It differs from science thus: where science is concerned with being, technique is concerned with what comes into being (Posterior Analytics 100a8). In The History of Animals 640a31, Aristotle defines “technique” as the logos of a work without matter. And, perhaps most relevant for Longinus, in Nicomachean Ethics 1140a7 ff., Aristotle says that technique is a kind of disposition characterized by logos that is “poetic” (i.e., productive) as distinct from “practical.” It is in this last passage that Aristotle cites the famous remark of the tragic poet Agathon: “Technique loves chance and chance loves technique.” The Stoic definition, found in the Fragments of the Ancient Stoics ([ed. von Arnim ], 1.73; 2.93), is repeated almost exactly by Philo, in the middle of the first century A.D. (On the Preliminary Studies 41): a technique is a system of apprehension of things worked into a unity with some beneficially useful end in mind.
In the opening passage of the Rhetoric ( l354a6-11 )-a passage which seems to underlie the diction and argument of ch. 2 as a whole—Aristotle explains the preliminary conditions for a technique: some, he says, engage in rhetorical usage at random, others by custom and habit; hence it “is clear that it should be possible to do these things by a way or method.” Whenever, he suggests, men do something either automatically or by habit, the subject allows for theoretical investigation of the cause, and “by now,” says Aristotle, “all would agree that such a subject is the work of a technique.” For the difference between knowledge and technique see Ch. 6, n. on pure knowledge and critical decision.
handbooks of technical pronouncements: the word “pronouncement” had a technical meaning by the time of Longinus: “the edict of a Roman governor.” In classical Greek it signified an order or command that had been trans mitted. It was also used to mean the precepts of a philosophical or literary school. Our word “rule” in its narrower sense is a good equivalent. The later rhetoricians often make it sound as if one could be a great writer merely by following the “rules” which they had distilled from their minute studies of the masters. It would appear that antiquity, too, had its “neo-classic rules,” against which many romantically re-own position is capable of “proof.” belled. See also following note.
things great in nature … are innate … not teachable: compare the Latin, and English, proverb: “Poets are born, not made”—an amusing use of “made,” in view of the English use of “maker” to designate a poet. The romantic quality of the criticism is familiar in our own culture, e.g., Wordsworth’s lines “we murder to dissect” and the reaction to the neo-classicism of the eighteenth century which we find in Keats and Shelley and, in our own day, in D. H. Lawrence and the contemporary hallucinogenic poets.
The debate conducted in antiquity on what part “nature” played and what part was played by “art,” or “technique,” was long and sterile, as such arguments usually are. The great critics and poets have always recognized the place of both. Behind this particular form of the debate lies the Socratic prob lem (Meno and Protagoras) of whether virtue is teachable.
I declare that it will be proven other wise: Longinus contrasts himself with his opponents both by the dramatic use of “I” and by the fullness of his expression: “proven otherwise.” The “roman tic view” he regards as a sentiment; his
a rule unto herself: from the Greek word we derive “autonomy.” The word almost means “automatically,” and yet not “licentiously.” Himerus (Oration 1.1) uses it to mean “poetic license,” though this is very late Greek. As far back as Herodotus, the term signifies “living by one’s own rules,” i.e., independence. It is easy to see how the idea shades off into “spontaneity.”
first element and archetype: the adjective “first” may be construed with both nouns. Both “element” and “archetype” are used only here in Longinus. The rhetorical “doublet” is not merely rhetorical: “element” suggests the tone and style of authors like Aristotle and Euclid, “archetype” suggests Plato, each of whom contributes to the intellectual milieu of Longinus, both of whom he seeks to harmonize and combine—a sort of esthetic Boethius. Philo, in Who is the Heir 126, sets us the following analogy:
divine wisdom : genus : archetype
human wisdom species imitation
“how much” literally, “how muchnesses”; that is, a sense of proper magnitude, of knowing when to stop. The word also appears in 12.1, where development (amplificatio) is said to consist of “quantity and abundance.”
a discipline: the Greek word translated here as “discipline” gives us our English word “ascetic.” In Greek, it indicates military and gymnastic exercise, and then, by extension, intellectual practice, as distinct from theory and even from teaching: for example, Philo (On the Preliminary Studies 69) says that he who acquires what is fine by discipline and not by teaching listens not to what is said but rather to him who says it, and imitates his life. In later Greek (from the 1st century CE. on), the word also signifies a philosophical or religious sect. In Christian writers the noun signifies a monk or hermit.
without knowledge …unsteady … without ballast: the clause contains one abstraction and two images. In the phrase “without knowledge,” Longinus uses the strongest word for intellectual certainty known to the ancient Greeks. The definition of “knowledge,” from Aristotle, through the Stoics, down to the first century CE., as well as thereafter, is remarkably consistent: an apprehension that cannot be tripped up, that is strong and sure, and that cannot be faulted by argument (see Fragments of the Ancient Stoics 1.68; Philo, On the Preliminary Studies41). Cf. also definition of “technique” in the n. on technique above. The pilot is a Platonic symbol for such abstract knowledge: in the Theaetetus 144A, Plato uses the image of “ships without ballast,” an image which, as Russell’s note on this passage demonstrates, was frequently imitated. An extended parallel, not mentioned by Russell, occurs in Dio Cassius (52.16.3): “Our city, just as a great merchant-ship filled with a varied throng of all kinds, without a pilot, for many generations now being borne in huge waves, reels and is driven here and there, just as if without ballast” (italics added).
unlearned audacity: the word “audacity” can be either honorific or pejorative, much like such English words as “dare” or “nerve” (as in the phrase “to have the nerve to” do something; see ch. 32, n. on mollifying). It is, however, always pejorative in Longinus. “Un learned” is the adjectival form of the regular Platonic word for “ignorance.”
spur … bridle: a famous and popular image; see Russell’s note for classical parallels in Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For a striking variation on the idea to be found in contemporary literature, see Roy Campbell’s comment on some novelists who were praised for writing “with firm restraint”:
They use the snaffle and the bit, but where’s the bloody horse? (On Some South African Novelists)
what Demosthenes used to say: the passage can be found in Demosthenes, Against Aristocrates 113; Longinus has para phrased accurately. Russell also cites Isocrates 1.34, to which we may add Agathon’s aphorism, quoted by Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics 1147al9-20): “technique loves chance and chance loves technique.”
learn from no other source than technique: the point, which Longin us takes up again in Ch. 8, lies at the heart of his solution to the old problem of whether poets are born or made: nature vs. technique. Most sensible critics agreed that there had to be both; it is the special and unique contribution of Longinus that, without denying the validity of the dis tinction or the terms, he shows how even what nature has to give is explicable and learnable only in terms of technique—at least “by now,” as he remarks in 8.1(see ch. 8, notes on capacity for speaking and those left come from technique). It is clear that Longinus wishes to deny the claim of those critics who thought that “natural talent” is beyond the limits of critical analysis—a kind of critic still with us, especially since the Romantics.
In the verb “learn” (literally, “learn utterly”), Longinus emphasizes that there is much more to be learned, that the limits of the subject have yet to be reached; and in what remains of his work, we can see how far he extends those limits beyond what we know of previous critics, as well as of many since.
make…a peroration of these things: peroration is the concluding section of a speech, in which the speaker is to sum up his case with all the techniques of persuasion at his disposal. Quintilian, for example—a sober critic—suggests that in a peroration one may “pour on every emotion and endow persons with imaginary speeches and rouse up the dead [i.e., imagine dead men as speaking (4.1.28); see ch. 16].” The root of the Greek word for “peroration” is logos, which means both “speech” and “reason.” Longinus, then, is asking his critics to go through a complete process of reasoning with themselves, cast in the form of a speech, i.e., rhetoric, with a peroration of such nature as to convince themselves.
Longinus appeals to the jury of his fellow and rival critics to take his introductory remarks, his “prooemium,” as an invitation to “perorate,” to reason out with and for themselves, the logical conclusion of his arguments even if they should not choose to read what he has to say about the act of criticism. To do otherwise, to argue as a critical principle that critical analysis of greatness and sublimity is impossible, is to deny the possibility of criticism. Since the material both of Longinus and such critics consists of speeches, which have both prooemium and peroration, such critics would be denying the very form which they praise, and, in addition, would cut themselves off from sincere students of useful learning.
