ABSTRACT
If the men of the Renaissance were merciless towards scholastic education, if they thought that they must eradicate it completely in order to construct in its place an entirely new educational system, this was above all because of the predominance of dialectic and debate. These inspired such revulsion in them that it never even occurred to them that the arts which had been so enthusiastically practised over a whole series of generations must necessarily meet some intellectual need. All they could see in them was a monument to human stupidity. Consequently they did not stop to make a reasoned criticism of them; for the most part they contented themselves with railing against them, ridiculing them and heaping scorn upon them. No one had more fun at the expense of the dialectic than did Rabelais. It is dialectic personified that he portrays for us in the character of Dame Quintessence, Aristotle’s god-daughter and queen of the kingdom of Entelechy. This old maid, 1,800 years old, surrounded by licensed abstractionists, eats nothing for dinner except a few categories, jecabots (a Hebrew word meaning abstraction), second intentions, antitheses, metempsychoses and transcendent prolepses. The courtiers are busy resolving the most abstract and tortuous questions. Some are milking he-goats, others are gathering thorns from grapes, and figs from thistles; others are ‘ creating large things out of nothing and causing large things to return to nothing’; others ‘ in a long room were carefully measuring flea-jumps, which act I was assured was more than necessary for the government of the kingdoms, the conduct of wars and the administration of republics’. It is not difficult to see how hard it was for dialectic to recover from such sarcasm and that an art personified by the wretched Janotus and his colleagues ‘riff-raff, sophists, students, lecturers, lunatics, at the Sorbonne’, should have been definitively discredited in public opinion. And yet, I believe, there are grounds for appeal against a judgment which was as harsh as it was precipitate, and for reviewing this case which was dealt with in too summary a fashion. It was such a review that we had already begun to undertake in the foregoing chapter.
