Henry Bowles (University of Oxford)
Despite inroads into folk psychology in the verbal arts (e.g., Snell; Guthrie 1975; Gill 1996, 2006; Schiappa; Long), modern scholarship of ancient understandings of mind still overwhelmingly samples philosophy: the mind in rhetoric and literary theory remains a relatively unknown world. This neglect causes two major distortions. First, a ‘noetic’ distortion: neglecting the mind in literary-critical texts means that historians of philosophy omit a large swath of the historical record on a critical issue. This leads to an overemphasis of the intentional mental activity constituting the analytical and moral end of much Academic and Peripatetic thought (e.g., Kahn; Brunschwig and Nussbaum (eds.); Annas). Second, an ‘aesthetic’ distortion: the neglect of mind within rhetorical and literary-critical scholarship deprives the field of insight into both the authorial mind and the folk understanding of mind operant in aesthetic theory (Jameson 2009, 1981): it has led to an aestheticised reading of only generically aesthetic texts (Rancière). Conversely, the benefits of an emic and etic analysis of psychology in such texts include a diversified understanding of the experience and concept of mind in antiquity.
Quintilian is Exhibit A of the noetic and aesthetic distortions in the reception of psychology in literary-critical texts. He sells the Institutio oratoria as a new rhetoric, one grounded in psychology, the ‘foundations’ (fundamenta) of the person that ‘lie hidden’ (latere) (Inst. 1.pr.4-5). Despite this, scholars of rhetoric largely treat the Institutio as a more robust Rhetorica ad Alexandrum (e.g., Lausberg; Kennedy 2013; Winterbottom 2019). Historians of philosophy, meanwhile, treat Quintilian as a virtual non-entity, partly because he understands cognition as mostly non-intentional. This has led to distortions within Quintilian studies: that its subject is an epigone of trends in Imperial philosophy and—perplexingly—in the business of ethics (Winterbottom 1964; Fantham 1995; Walzer).
This paper shows that Quintilian delivers on his promise of a psychological rhetoric. He theorises a five-part model of mind deserving of attention from both historians of philosophy and scholars of rhetoric: (1) character (hexis, mores); (2) affect (adfectus); (3) memory (memoria); (4) preconscious (cogitatio); and (5) conscious thought (animus, mens). Temporally, each stratum from character to conscious thought embeds less time. Spatially, each stratum after character is nearer conscious intervention.
The implications of this paper are four-fold. First, the priority of non-intentional cognition in Quintilian’s concept of mind suggests that ancient theorists of verbal art are a rich source for accounts of an unconscious. The rhetoric of choice in Imperial Stoic and Epicurean thought makes this especially striking. Second, the originality of Quintilian’s catachretic description of the ‘multiplex’ mind (Inst. 10.7.9) makes its author an unlikely epigone of contemporaneous philosophy. Third, Quintilian’s understanding of mind as ultimately cognitive suggests the limited reach of the ontogenetic and phylogenetic biological unconscious from Academic and Peripatetic thought. Fourth, Quintilian’s overriding concern with psychology suggests that scholars keen to find in him the great theorist of the uir bonus dicendi peritus have mistaken ethos for ethics.