Victor M. Hamm - Language, Truth, and Poetry (Aquinas Lecture 25)

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The Aquinas Lecture, 1960

Under the Auspices of the Aristotelian Society
of Marquette University

by
VICTOR M. HAMM, Ph.D.

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Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 60-9736

COPYRIGHT 1960
BY THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY
OF MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY

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The Aristotelian Society of Marquette University each year invites a scholar to deliver a lecture in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas. Customarily delivered on a Sunday close to March 7, the feast day of the society's patron saint, the lectures are called the Aquinas lectures.

In 1960 the Aquinas lecture Language, Truth and Poetry was delivered on March 6 in the Peter A. Brooks Memorial Union of Marquette University by Dr. Victor M. Hamm, professor of English, Marquette University.

Dr. Hamm was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 21, 1904. He received his A.B. degree from Marquette in 1926 and his M.A. degree in 1928. In 1929 he received a second M.A. degree from Harvard University followed by the awarding of the Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1932.

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During 1932 and 1933 Dr. Hamm travelled through England, France, and Italy as a Sheldon Travelling Scholar from Harvard. Following his return he accepted a position as instructor in English at St. Louis University and remained there until 1934. From 1934 to 1937 he was assistant professor of English at the College of Mount St. Joseph, Cincinnati, Ohio.

In 1937 he returned to Marquette as associate professor of English and in 1945 was promoted to professor. Dr. Hamm was named visiting professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany in 1952, and in 1957 he held the same position at the University of Wisconsin.

His published books and monographs include a translation with an introduction to Pico Della Mirandola: Of Being and Unity (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942); The Pattern of Criticism (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1951); and The College Book of English Literature, a joint effort with J. E. Tobin and William Hines (New York: American Book Co., 1949).

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Another monograph, Taste and the Audio-Visual Arts, was published by the Marquette University Press on February 1, 1960.

In addition, Dr. Hamm has contributed articles to Thought, The New Scholasticism, PMLA, Philological Quarterly, Journal of Aesthetics, and Comparative Literature.

To his writings the Aristotelian Society has the pleasure of adding Language, Truth and Poetry.

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Much has been written about the nature of language and the nature of poetry, the relation of language to poetry, and of poetry to truth. With the pullulation of philosophies and theories of language and of poetry which have marked our day we have landed in what looks like a real mare's nest of opinion and speculation. Never, apparently, was confusion worse confounded. Never was it more difficult to find one's way about in the maze of ideologies and theories. Bibliographies accumulate; controversies rage. One seems to be standing on one of the uncompleted tiers of the Tower of Babel after the confusion of tongues. This may, indeed, be only the illusion of the ignoramus lost in

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the maze of learning, but it is a real predicament for the ignoramus just the same. I am that ignoramus, and if Socrates was right in his conviction that his only claim to superiority above other men lay in his consciousness of the fact that he knew nothing, that proud assertion of intellectual humility might be my consolation. But Socrates was too humbleor too proud! We can, after all, know something in our human way of knowing, which is tentative and shadowy, but not, I think, illusory. If we have not the intellects of angels, neither are we condemned to the dark subrational gropings of the beast. If knowledge is difficult, it is not impossible.

With these preliminaries disposed of, I shall try to examine the state of affairs as I see it in the area my title suggests, paying particular attention to two extreme views of the problem of language, truth, and poetry, and attempting a third view which may, I hope, commend itself more to our sense of reality.

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We are still living intellectuallydespite recent developments away from its crude original formin the atmosphere of positivism, for perhaps the reigning school of philosophy in Great Britain an d the United States is that of Logical Positivism deriving from the Cambridge School of Analysis and the Vienna Circle. These philosophers are particularly concerned with language; in fact, they conceive of philosophy as nothing more than logical analysis, i.e., as a clarification of the language of everyday. Let us look briefly at Professor A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth,

1 Cf. Gustav Bergmann, The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, (New York: Longmans, Green, 1954); John A. Dineen, The Course of Logical Positivism, in The Modern Schoolman, XXXIV (1957), 1-21. For the recent developments alluded to in my text, cf. A. J. Ayer, W. C. Kneale, et al., The Revolution in Philosophy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1956), and Father Francis C. Wade's review of this book in The New Scholasticism, XXXII (1958), 121-23.

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and Logic, from the title of which book I have taken the cue for my present lecture. This book, first published at London in 1936, has, says Gustav Bergmann in his examination of the school, attained almost the status of a text-book. A sampling of Professor Ayer's positions as expressed in key statements throughout this little volume will indicate what the logical positivist thinks of language, and what hope for truth and for poetry exists on this foundation.

Ayer's view of philosophy as mere linguistic analysis leads him to deny to propositions any validity other than tautology or empirical verifiability. Thus:

To say that a proposition is true is just to assert it, and to say that it is false is just to assert its contradictory. And this indicates that the terms true and false connote nothing, but function in the