A Few Thoughts on the Metaphysics of Grammar - A Book Review of “The Office of Assertion” by Scott Crider

Stephen Alexander Beach 

(1449 Words) 

So I finished Crider’s book, and instead of going chapter by chapter I wanted to just offer a few summary points from my reading of the book. Overall, the book is a helpful guide to the mechanics of writing a powerful essay or academic paper. Probably most of us who have been through college or higher academia know how to write papers from practice and a sense we have developed over time, but could not directly spell out the rules behind rhetoric or what separates this type of argument from another type. Crider gives formal expression to these skills of writing in a clear and concise way in this book, which, to me, seems to be written for a graduate student looking to improve their writing or a teacher who wants a text to use as a basis for helping their students grow. 

Overall the book follows a simple process that the writer must go through to achieve their goal. There is invention, or coming up with an argument, organization, whereby the writer arranges the pieces together correctly, style, where word and phrasing most comes into play, and re-vision, where the process can be refined with help from others. Crider leads the reader step by step through these phases of the process and offers many practical points to think about in the process of writing. These practical points I may revisit in my own times of formal writing, and so the book will be a good reference. There is no point in recounting much of it here, as the book itself is already laid out very simply with a detailed outline to help the reader find exactly what they are looking for in the book. 

Good Writers Are Philologists

As a philosopher, what I wanted to talk about here were a few philosophical points which stuck out to me in my reading. First, Crider mentions that every good writer is a philologist, or one who studies the meaning of words. I was immediately reminded of the American writer David Foster Wallace and his work Infinite Jest, which I have been recently reading off and on. Infinite Jest is at once a display of a crude view of the addictions which plague American (and Western) life, and yet is written with a depth of vocabulary that even the most educated person is often turning to a dictionary. But it is precisely in his depth of knowledge of the meanings of words, and the slight nuances that separate synonyms from one another, that gives the unique flavor to his writing. It strikes me that some of the greatest writers in philosophy often had to create new words to express the ideas they were investigating, from Aristotle to Heidegger. Anyway, Crider mentions a study of Latin as a way of deepening one’s skill in this regard. I would add a study of Ancient Greek to this as well. When one knows about the roots and history of words it makes it that much easier to begin to play with the and come up with the precise meaning that one is looking for as a writer. (80) 

The Metaphysics of Grammar

Second, one of the main points of the book is that rhetoric is separated by sophistry by a grounding in truth. The effect that good rhetoric produces in the audience is a result of the words that are spoken or written. Those words that are written are justified by a logic of ideas in the mind of the writer. That logic of ideas is only justified, though, by a grounding of those ideas in reality itself, in a metaphysics which gives them objectivity. This is something that I’ve continually noticed in my PhD work in Aristotelian metaphysics. Some of the best explanation of metaphysical concepts resides in books on logic. Why is that? This is because logic, while dealing with the workings of the mind and reason, takes its justification and existence from reality itself. Logic only exists in human reason if there is an inherent metaphysical logic and intelligibility to reality. 

And so Crider hits up against this point in the book with what he calls the “metaphysics of grammar.” Grammar, words, ideas, are not social constructs, but have an objectivity to them because they are categories of reality. They express one of three fundamental metaphysical states (and if you’re familiar with my work on the Pre-Socratics you will recognize this immediately). Grammatical categories and words either deal with being, becoming, or relations. 

“In the metaphysics of grammar, each part of speech concerns one of three conditions - being, becoming, or relation: Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives concern being, and so too do both gerunds and participles, the first a verbal noun, the second a verbal adjective; verbs, infinitives (perhaps), and adverbs concern becoming; and prepositions and conjunctions concern relation. … Simply put, at the most fundamental level, a word will express what a thing is, what it does, or what its relationship to other things is.” (84) 

Crider quotes a lot throughout the book from Richard Weaver and his work The Ethics of Rhetoric. Here is a quote that Crider uses where Weaver talks about the importance of the noun and the verb. What’s interesting here is that the noun and the verb, respectively, express the fundamental Pre-Socratic dichotomy of reality as being and becoming, change and stability. You can’t escape it!! 

I will also quote Weaver here: “The verb is regularly ranked with the noun in force, and it seems that these parts of speech express the two aspects under which we habitually see phenomena, that of determining things and that of actions and states of being. Between them the two divide up the world at a pretty fundamental depth; and it is a commonplace of rhetorical instruction that a style made up predominantly of nouns and verbs will be a vigorous style. THESE ARE THE SYMBOLS OF THE PRIME ENTITIES, WORDS OF STASIS AND WORDS OF MOVEMENT …, which set forth the broad circumstances of any subject of discussion. The truth is supported by the facts that the substantive is the heart of the grammatical subject and the verb of a grammatical predicate.” [bolding is mine] (84, 85) 

Thinking In Stories 

Third, Crider had some helpful passages about the power of using metaphor in rhetoric. In a metaphor we have “… a matter of imagining new relationships between entities often sundered in the conventional comprehension of things.” (102) In other words, when we use metaphors we are attempting to get at the nature of a thing by comparing it to something else which we may know better. And so we create a substitute identity for it which allows us to access a deeper understanding of the mystery involved. 

This is actually the very same thing we do when we think. Our concepts are metaphors for realities whose mysteries exceed our capacity for understanding. And so we simplify them with words or phrases we can understand more easily. This, on a larger scale is what we do with all of reality in the philosophy of worldviews (another topic I have written a lot about). The universe, existence as a whole, exceeds our capacity to grasp it, and so we simplify it into a story which has an origin, identity, and purpose which we can grasp to a degree and actually function within. In other words … we think in stories. 

“That re-imagining may be the highest exercise of the rhetorical faculty, since important meta-phors, those metaphors which we forget are meta-phors, become ways of structuring our understanding of the world. When a student says, "I see what you mean," he or she may not realize that a metaphor is being employed intellectual understanding is physical sight-yet it is there nonetheless. Some metaphors are so common that they become con-cepts. Indeed, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the authors of Metaphors We Live By, argue, and conclusively prove, that "human thought processes are largely metaphorical" (6). "Metaphor" literally means "carrying across," the transference of meaning from one field to another. What Lakoff and Johnson prove is as true of our concepts as it is of-our metaphors because they turn out to be the same activity.” (103) 

And so we can see here again that rhetoric, human language, ideas and logic … they all stem from the existence and mystery of the metaphysical. (How absurd then the analytic philosophy that so dominates many universities today.) 

Overall, while Crider’s book may not have been the most entertaining to read, it will certainly help you with your writing and give you guidance and principles by which you can improve your rhetoric. I would definitely recommend. 

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1- Crider, Scott. The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric For the Academic Essay.