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 remote, the formless, the “vaguely limned areas of human consciousness” are now part of our noetic field and are as reflectively organized as the rational knowledge that preceded it. Recall that now part of Berlin’s description of rhetoric is that it is “the codification of the unspeakable, as well as the speakable” (1).
The synchronic present is the third area, the place where “knowledge of the past thus bears in on us to define the here and now, where all ages meet” (326). Due to the overload of knowledge and a demand for relevance, the past has been diminished as the present assumes greater distinction, a “stampede,” Ong writes, that “may prove self-annihilating if it crowds out first hand knowledge of the past by neglecting the linguistic and other tools that make such knowledge possible” (327). From this, Berlin justifies his approach to historiography and its particular relevance to the field as an aid in legitimizing its claims in the academy and in the culture.
The fourth area, the anthropologizing of knowledge, however, might have been particularly significant to Berlin. Referencing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s work, Ong says that de Chardin’s purpose was to anthropologize actuality through an interpretation of the world through the interpretive lens of the phenomenon of man [sic]. It is the business of the writer, Ong concludes, “to take hold of the maximum in the tradition and transform it as completely as possible” (332). This transformation “entails anthropologizing because it centers history not in the movement of material and the redefining of political boundaries, but in the human consciousness and in the patterned shifts in personality structures which in great part determine the externals of cultures and of history and at the same time are determined by these externals” (334).
This is the crux, then, of what Berlin wanted to accomplish with the use of noetic field: the relationship between rhetoric, reality, human consciousness, and culture or that which, as Ong says, has “held together man’s [sic] life world” (318), a relationship that renders rhetoric far more fundamental than Berlin has thus far ever claimed. While he insists that noetic fields should be viewed relative to their position in larger social structures, it is likely that Berlin stopped using the term after this publication because it is too imbricated in humanism and its concomitant focus on individuality, autonomy, and transcendence to serve his ideological purpose.
Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985
Although Berlin’s purposes in writing this monograph are multiple and broadly conceived, I contain my discussion to his cognitive mapping of rhetorics and writing processes. This work represents a significant departure for Berlin, as his cognitive map is now drawn in a distinctly different manner. He has abandoned the use of noetic field and resumed the use of epistemology. Significantly, he has also now explicitly included ideology and added literacy as factors in his interpretive matrix. Apparently at a point of transition in his conceptualization, Berlin
