Wit and Judgment

Roger D Lund has an intriguing article on wit in seventeenth century English literature in the January 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas . Lund quotes Hobbes, whose statement sets up the opposition that continued through the following century: “Those that observe . . . similitudes, in case they be such as are but rarely observed by others, are sayd to have a Good Wit; by which, in this occasion, is meant a Good Fancy. But they that observe their differences and dissimilitudes; which is called Distinguishing, and Discerning, and Judging between thing and thing; in case, such discerning be not easie, are said to have a good Judgment.” For Hobbes, this was a very unequal contest; for him, as for Locke, “the products of wit were by definition less dependable than the products of judgment precisely because wit derived from the apprehension of apparent similarity . . . . There is virtually no eighteenth-century discussion of wit that does not conjure in some sense with these distinctions. Nor we will find any defense of wit which is not forced to refute or at least modify Hobbes’s assertion that wit is both distinct from and interior to judgment, in part because of its susceptibility to the deceptions of similitude.”

Problem is, Hobbes tended to challenge the authority of wit/similitude on the basis of metaphorically-rich argumentation. He accepted that there was room for an occasional “apt similitude” in an argument, but he was more in favor of a mode of thought more comparable to geometry than poetry. At one point, he challenges over-reliance on ancient authorities by arguing, “They which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little summs into a greater, without considering whether those little summs were rightly cast up or not; and at least finding the errour visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to cleere themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their bookes; as birds that entring by the chimney, and finding themselves inclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glasse window, for want of wit to consider which way they cam in.” As Lund points out, “it is ironic that a passage equating reasoning with computation should depend not on logical demonstration but on a shifting repertoire of figurative comparisons. Here reading is like computing, and reasoning from conclusions of ancient authority is like the compounding of many smaller errors into a much larger miscalculation. Those misled by such false computations are like birds entrapped in a closed room, misled by false lights from deceptive windows. In a characteristically deconstructive gesture Hobbes denounces similitude in a rhetoric that is dependent upon it.”

Two thoughts: This raises the possibility that the dissociation of sensibility to which Eliot pointed might have occurred sooner than he realized; the Metaphysical poets were perhaps already operating within a split sensibility. Second, Lund’s last comment suggests that the seeds of postmodernism are sown as soon as modernism is formulated. Hobbes’s attempt to siphon off the rational/judgment from the wit/similitude/imagination and set them in opposition is not AWAITING a deconstructive dissolution; it IS a deconstructive dissolution.