The term classical is difficult to define. We think of it often in contrast to romantic, but that too is hard to make clear. The best explanation I have found to understand the two words is by the American literary critic Irving Babbitt in his Rousseau and Romanticism: “A thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique…. A thing is classical, on the other hand, when it is not unique, but representative of a class.” By class he means not a social group (although, as Babbitt says, that’s been a confusion), but a category or kind or ideal, exactly what Plato was referring to with his notion of ideas.
To this definition of the classical we may add an observation by the American scholar Robert Cushman which appears in his rigorously intelligent and beautifully written treatment of Plato entitled Therapeia: “The Ideas stand for an antecedently real Ideal Structure with which, as a condition of knowledge, the human mind is essentially akin and must become explicitly conformed.” Reading the word “conformed” could likely put us off a bit, because we will hear its secondary meaning of “being obedient or compliant.” Cushman’s point, however, is the same as Babbitt’s, and it refers to the primary definition of “conformed”: “to bring into harmony or accord.”
Now what do these observations have to do with language? They explain the principle underlying the requirement that we be precise in the way we use words. The Ideal Structure which Cushman refers to means that from the classical perspective, there is a way the world is put together and a way that it isn’t; that what is true is what accords with a primary reality, and what is false deviates from that. The one is cognitively harmonious, the other dissonant; the one cares for truth, the other, confusion. And since language is an artful system by which we represent ideas, we either advance the truth or hinder it as we are careful or careless with our words.
The title of Cushman’s work, Therapeia, means watchful care in Greek, and we are correct to see our word therapy as cognate to that Greek. Cushman’s concern was to understand what Plato meant by such watchful care of one’s soul, which Plato believed was the most important preoccupation a person could have. And because language is an extension of the soul, to care about linguistic structure—its elements and the degree to which they precisely point to meaning—is also to care about the truth. That, at least, is the classical position. Soul and word, psyche and logos: all are bound together and inextricable. All this on the assumption, of course, that we want the truth.
This is why, too, so much emphasis is put in traditional language study on the definitions and etymology of words and their synonyms. If I say, for example, that someone is diligent in her work, does that means the same as saying she is industrious? The dictionary will explain that diligent derives from a Latin verb meaning to love or respect; industrious, again from the Latin, means actively skillful. One can be both loving and skillful, of course, but one can also be diligently unskillful or indiligently skillful. The skillful physician, for example, who lacks diligence may also lack the profound insight necessary for a patient’s best care.
Likewise, if I describe someone as proud, do I mean the same as vain? If an outcome is inevitable, is it necessarily ineluctable as well? Is a pattern the same as a design? The answers to these questions are not difficult to find, but we are motivated to worry over them when we realize that the effort to learn and make and maintain the proper distinctions between things preserves and promotes the truth. Precise definition stabilizes meaning by establishing a center around which change can take its measure. Change is not the problem; unrestrained change, from which riotous confusion may ensue, is.
We are not, therefore, compelled to choose between the classic or romantic, but only to find the right balance of stability, or oneness, and change. Babbitt also makes this essential observation: “Life does not give here an element of oneness and there an element of change. It gives a oneness that is always changing. The oneness and the change are inseparable.” Indeed, and if we can remember that, we give ourselves a chance, both as persons and as a community, to avoid confusion and build for peace, because what we then write and speak will conform to—be in accord with—a center which is stable and permanent and true.
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