In “Current-Traditional,” characterizations of reality were analyzed according to an epistemic continuum said to represent “the processes one may follow in working through any kind of cognitive or creative act” and which range across algorithmic, heuristic, and aleatory positions (3). Berlin equates the assumptions of the binary fields, algorithmic and aleatory, as having consistent, but erroneous, epistemological assumptions, and he recommends the heuristic process as providing the best rhetoric. But what is significant to the present discussion is that Berlin’s continuum foregrounds the writer, so that, again, his entree into the epistemological equation comes by way of the individual. In “Major Theories,” Berlin, although ostensibly continuing to champion a notion of the “heuristic” perspective, displaces this continuum in his view with an analogy to Richard Rorty’s difference between hermeneutic and epistemological philosophy:
For the hermeneuticist truth is never fixed finally on unshakable grounds. Instead it emerges only after false starts and failures, and it can only represent a tentative point of rest in a continuing conversation. Whatever truth is arrived at, moreover, is always the product of individuals calling on the full range of their humanity, with esthetic and moral considerations given at least as much importance as any others. For Current-Traditional Rhetoric truth is empirically based and can only be achieved through subverting a part of the human response to experience. Truth then stands forever, a tribute to its method, triumphant over what most of us consider important in life, successful through subserving writer, audience, and language to the myth of an objective reality. (777)
The “heuristic” position of the continuum has thus previously been depicted as the process of choice for an individual involved in “any kind of cognitive or creative act.” The “hermeneutical” position that Berlin now describes, where truth is located in “the product of individuals calling on the full range of their humanity, with esthetic and moral considerations given at least as much importance as any others,” allows Berlin to make an explicit social and political overture, a sign, if you will, of positions yet to come.19 For the time being, however, Berlin justifies the compromise of “truth” and thus “the mind/cognition” and, tacitly, the “individual” as the basis for changing his notion of epistemology toward a greater social and political orientation.
Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges
As Donald Stewart notes in the foreword, Berlin urges us to ask why we think what we think, why we teach what we teach, and why we think that what we teach is important. That we are unable to answer these questions is due to never having asked the questions of ourselves. Even if we have asked them, he argues, we lack the historical knowledge necessary to inform a significant reply. Berlin continues to argue for rhetoric’s consequences for human behavior, but he now contends that it is in the composition or communication class where students are “indoctrinated in a basic epistemology, usually the one held by society’s dominant class, the group with the most power” (2). Teachers in these courses thus have a great responsibility, which he says explains why throughout history, rhetoric enjoyed a central role in students’ education. Why now, since the late nineteenth century, Berlin questions, is the value of rhetoric courses so contested, despite their often being one of the few required courses in the curriculum? He proposes to answer this through an examination of both the noetic fields informing the rhetorics taught and their place in the larger culture. It is also his intention, to study how noetic fields determine how a composing process is conceived and taught.
To get a sense of how noetic field figures in his cognitive map, it is important to understand how he now describes rhetoric: “A rhetoric is a social invention [. . .] the codification of the unspeakable, as well as the speakable. [. . .] In any social context, furthermore, there are usually a number of rhetorics competing for allegiance” (1). Relative to rhetoric’s propensity for change and conflict, Berlin explains that
[r]hetoric has traditionally been seen as based on four elements interacting with each other: reality, writer or speaker, audience, and language. Rhetorical schemes differ from each other, I am convinced, not in emphasizing one of these elements over another. Rhetorical schemes differ in the way each element is defined, as well as in the conception of the relation of the elements to each other. Every rhetoric, as a result, has as its base a conception of reality, of human nature, and of language. In other terms, it is grounded in a noetic field: a closed system defining what can, and cannot, be known; the nature of the knower; the nature of the relationship between the knower, the known, and the audience; and the nature of language. Rhetoric is thus ultimately implicated in all a society attempts. It is at the center of a culture’s activities. (2–3)
This notion of rhetoric is considerably enlarged from previous conceptions, where in “Current Traditional,” rhetoric provides a framework for instruction designed to encourage “exploration of each of the elements of the communication triangle in the attempt to bring forth discourse (2), and in “Major Theories,” a rhetoric is determined by the conception of its units (writer, reality, audience, and language) “both as separate units and in the way the units relate to each other” (766). Now Berlin’s conception of rhetoric subsumes these characterizations and expands to assume its place at the very center of culture. It is a bold claim. Berlin justifies it through the adoption of the notion of noetic field.
Berlin borrows the term noetic field from Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, pages 317–334. It is meaningful, I think, that the heading at the top of page 317 reads “Crisis in the Humanities,” since part of Berlin’s goal is to argue the legitimacy of the composition course. I extrapolate from this passage in Ong the notions that apparently influence Berlin to embrace noetic field as appropriate to his burgeoning enterprise.
Ong writes that noetic structures “have held together man’s [sic] life world,” so that it is through the changes of these structures that he attempts to explain changes in the humanities that may have been, he says, previously obscured “or guarded and not always advantageous” (318). Further, the failure to grasp these changes may be due to our inability to adequately discern the interrelatedness of the study of humanities and other human responses to actuality. The principal agents of change in the humanities, those altering noetic and psychological structures, are attributable to the growth of knowledge in four areas. The first has to do with the atrophy of traditional puberty rites, where paradoxically, the importance of the rite was assumed, even though that importance could not be described prior to experiencing it. Relevance could be apprehended only after the rite was experienced. If, Ong asks, “the humanities function as an initiation rite, an induction, an entrance into some area, what area are we to choose?” (322). Learning proceeds from the known to the unknown, so the student must be placed in a space described as “one where the lore of the culture is centered” (322). Berlin would appear to answer Ong that the composition course can provide students this rite of passage, but to so argue, Berlin must situate rhetoric, indeed, place it “at the center of a culture’s activities” (Writing Instruction 2–3).
The second area of knowledge growth involves the romantic cultivation of the unknown, which, Ong writes, is the consequence of “an overload of organized knowledge” (324). The result is that “consciousness of the unconscious is [now] a permanent part of our thinking” (325). The