Some years ago, I read a discussion in Stephen Prickett’s Words and the Word that stuck with me. Now, his discussion is quite erudite, and in what follows I am not actually digging into the background of his discussion; nor am I doing his discussion justice. I am simply bringing one tiny corner of a complicated apparatus to bear on a problem which is simple but perennial: the illegitimate conversion of “intensive” and “extensive” claims.
When I criticize “not…but…” statements that treat “both/and” situations as “either/or” situations because the speaker believes one term is “deeper” than the other, I have several reasons in mind. One is the problem that such errors commonly happen because of a hidden dualizing habit, a habit that leads us away from reality and tends to create scope problems: we attempt to affirm a univocal truth out of scope, or treat an analogical truth as though it must be expressed univocally, and in so doing we tend to create conflicts over equivocations (or false agreements by equivocations, which are arguably worse). Another reason is that frequently this failure to observe the proportions of things happens because intensive and extensive claims are being illegitimately converted.
Very roughly speaking, then, “intensive” claims describe things according to their purpose; “extensive” claims describe things according to their present condition.
“Intensive” claims, when I think about them very rigorously, must finally refer to final causation (the end intended by the one who effects the change), but may more roughly be thought of has having do do with instrumentality (describing a thing in terms of “how it can be used”).
Similarly roughly, “extensive” claims describe things according to their extension in space and time; they answer “to what extent” questions. “Extensive” claims have to do with the present condition of things, and by themselves do not indicate any direction of change.
A common example of an illegitimate conversion of “intensive” and “extensive” claims is the majoritarian fallacy. “Why should I vote for Snookums?” asks the skeptic. “10,000,000 people voted for him!” answers the enthusiast.
Now, the enthusiast may be relying on an enthymeme, here, with a suppressed premise like “Do you believe you are wiser than all of them?” or “Surely you must be able to discover the reasons so many support Snookums!” But this argument is, in default of available evidence, at an impasse; there is no proper support for “This is the [correct] end to pursue” from any act of counting things. Similarly, “But there were no good reasons to vote for Snookums!” is not a meaningful effort to answer “Did Snookums get enough votes to win?” Now, a lack of [good] rationale may be a reason for opposing such a result, but it does not help us to determine whether the result occurred.
The urgent and emphatic point, here, is that there is no question of one kind of claim being more relevant than the other; they are incommensurable precisely because they are coordinate. “Intensive” claims are necessary to proper description no more and no less then “extensive” claims are. Even apart from any larger metaphysical question, we can find this type of description in the language of chemistry:
An extensive property is a property that changes when the size of the sample changes. Examples are mass, volume, length, and total charge.
An intensive property doesn’t change when you take away some of the sample. Examples are temperature, color, hardness, melting point, boiling point, pressure, molecular weight, and density. Because intensive properties are sometimes characteristic of a particular material, they can be helpful as clues in identifying unknown substances.
(source: General Chemistry Online)
The application is specific to chemistry, but the principle is clear: the qualities by which something is what it is–what would be the “design features” for someone making that substance–are “intensive.” The extent of the manifestation of those qualities here and now–the size of the body, so to speak–are obviously “extensive.” These categories are quite stable, and end up being reconceptualized as every richer or more impoverished metaphysics finds itself tasked to account for them: we are very nearly speaking of “form” and “matter,” or in another case of “essence” and “accident,” and pretty exactly speaking of “substance” and “extension” (a la Descartes), when we use this language of “intensive” and “extensive.”
[And, in fact, a robust understanding of this relation does require that we think in terms of analogy, for it is only by analogy that we conclude that the intensive and extensive qualities inhere in one being (the tacit analogy of our “common sense,” that is, our “coalition” of various senses in one perceptual field, “within” which we locate ourselves and our body parts).]
So when we speak of iron, we would know that both hardness and magnetism and conductivity count; we would know that whether iron can be magnetized does not depend on how much we have, but also that the effective strength of the magnet does depend on its mass. We would know that you cannot make a sword or a rail if you do not have a sufficient mass of iron, and that you cannot do either if iron is not hard, either.
Similarly, we know that both butter’s reactions in heat and the flavors it contains depend on other factors than the size of the stick of butter, but we would regard as preposterous a chef who told us, “It doesn’t matter how much butter you use–it’s all about getting the butter with the most perfect fat content.” Similarly, a shoe salesman who offered papier-mache shoes that fit perfectly would be no more likely to get repeat customers than one who claimed that, provided the leather and stitching were of the highest quality, the width was irrelevant.
In other words, when we are talking about things that can be described in this way, it is precisely the analogy of being–the understanding born of our own mode of consciousness, warranted by our common creaturely relation to a Creator whose Being is partially manifested by our being’s participation with Him–that fuses these disparate features into one object of consideration or perception for us.
Why, then, do we seem to constantly replicate these same silly “not…but…” structures in talking about humane and religious subjects?
A recent example:
One can make a long list of them:
- “Not head knowledge but heart knowledge”
- “Not a religion but a relationship”
- “Not a destination but a journey”
- “Not an organization but an organism”
- “Not a proposition but a Person”
- “No creed but Christ”
And so on and on, ad nauseam.
Yes, of course, I am familiar with the rhetorical trope called “antithesis,” and I quite understand that one might say something like this in a broader context, where it would be otherwise well-understood, for added emotional effect. I would suggest it is still a poor choice, because any of these situations can be confronted with a more precise and more effective figure. For example:
- “Knowing facts about someone is not the same as knowing that person, let alone befriending him”
- “When your religious practice has less effect on your schedule and your budget than your child’s soccer team and your cell phone bill, what kind of friendship with God do you expect to have? What are you teaching your children?”
- “Stop building your life around Aerosmith lyrics. Grow up.”
…and so forth.
But the larger problem is not merely one of too much reliance on one rather stale and imprecise rhetorical figure, but of the way that figure reflects and builds the plausibility structures, the “conventional wisdom” or “institutional lore,” that shape our ways of teaching and living together. When a whole approach to group learning, or to evangelistic method, or to liturgical planning, or even to theology, begins to reflect a rhetorical flourish as though it were a crucial insight, we can be sure that some influence in our formation makes us find such a conversion acceptable. We would not, for example, accept a similar use of raging hyperbole as a legitimate foundation for arguments and teaching plans: “We’re failing if every child that graduates from this school doesn’t end up canonized” might be the sort of thing an enthusiast would say, but nobody would write it down and sell books attempting to lay out a plan for it.
And again, we can lay some of this off on an excessive love of paradox, a common affliction among teachers and other intellectuals. Miseducation in “critical thinking” has everything to do with this, as does a loss of contact with the wisdom traditions that properly surround aphoristic learning. But this does not account for the consistency with which this “not… but…” emerges as an effort to move specifically from one kind of claim, taken as a weak or superficial or static or rigid one, to a different kind of claim, taken as vital and deep and supple and refreshing. In other words, these “not… but…” structures assert a generic difference.
So what makes this structure seem plausible, and why do I think it is corrosive of sound reason, especially where religion is in view?
What happens is this.
First, attempts to justify some discernable reality, like the hard work of learning an ancient language, “cash out” that reality in terms of the particular aims & desires most current between the speaker and audience, like better job prospects. Note that this reinforces the idea that there is some separation between the “extensive” and the “intensive” description of language learning. Someone might say, “Learning a language is worth it because it will look great on your resume.” Another will then intensify this claim: “Don’t just learn a language to be learning a language; learn a language to get a great job!” In short order, this can even become inverted, as “Be sure to learn the language that will get you the best job!” becomes “Don’t waste your time on a language that won’t get you a great job.”
And so a thing (learn a language) and its opposite (don’t bother) end up apparently warranted by one and the same backing claim: that the “cash value” of language learning is resume padding. Perversely, the more successful the original defense of language learning was, the more any effort to adduce additional intrinsic value or extrinsic benefits will be met with accusations of “changing the subject” or “moving the goalposts.”
This last accusation is highly motivated, because it arises from the second stage of this illegitimate conversion. Because the effort to “cash out” the extensive features of the reality in terms of one intensive feature–“learn a language because you want a job”–underscores the separation of those features in the minds of speaker and audience, the intensive feature’s measures tend to be taken as the extensive features of a new (mis)understanding of the original reality. Where “fluency in conversation with native speakers” or “comprehensive description of the features of the language” or “ability to translate scholarly prose” might have been measures of language learning, extensive claims compatible with a wide variety of aims and desires and particular targets (intensive features), after the “cash out” in terms of “better job” gains currency this will change. Someone will ask that the language:job link be measured, another that the fluency: job link be measured, and as this fresh set of extensive claims preoccupies language learners, extensive claims about language learning as such will be seen as abstruse and unrelated to the new project.
The same thing happens when “not a head knowledge but a heart knowledge” becomes current, so that some specific display of “heartfelt belief” or “vulnerability” or “repentance with tears” or “holy laughter” or “praying through” ends up being first a proxy measure and then a narrowed, reductive replacement for the reality of the faith, received and lived, infused and participated, really intended and concretely enacted.
We have a responsibility to help people integrate their lives into the Life of the Body of Christ; let us not create stumbling blocks with bad rhetoric.