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Corrective Redefinition: An Example from Arnold
From Chapter Three. "The Word Restored: Definition, Redefinition, and Satiric Redefinition"
Forms of Definition
Introduction: an Example from Kingsley's Sermons
Preacher's Definitions: Carlyle
Simple Definition: Ruskin
Denying Someone Else's Definition
Corrective Definition: Arnold
Satirical Definition: An Example from Thoreau
Definition as Theme and Technique
Introduction
Mailer: A Twentieth-Century Example
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Matthew Arnold's famous definition of culture, which also makes use of the same intertwined claims of intellectual and moral superiority, well exemplifies the next step or stage in this series of associated techniques: corrective redefinition. Whereas Thoreau's attack upon the application of the word insane to Brown and his followers is a purely negative technique, used only for purposes of attack, corrective definition (or redefinition) follows an initial attack upon received meaning by the sage's assertion of a correct one. Like the sage's use of the prophetic pattern, corrective definition follows negative by positive. For example, at the opening of Culture and Anarchy, Arnold directly confronts opposing points of view, which are in fact opposing interpretations, by claiming that his opponents do not in fact understand the words they use. According to him, "the disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity." These latter opponents of culture claim that "it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it."
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Like Ruskin, Arnold well knew the standard code words that had such appeal to many Evangelicals in his intended audience, and he uses one of them -- serious -- to advance his cause. Many raised as evangelicals both within and without the Church of England took rather puritanical attitudes toward secular culture because they believed the truly serious person, the person concerned with the things of Christ, did not have much time, energy, or attention for such essentially trivial activities.
Confronting this source of opposition head on, Arnold uses a device particularly popular in the Evangelical sermon, claiming that those who thus interpret the meaning of the term culture both do not know the meaning of the word and also, by their misuse of it, demonstrate that they are not "serious" people: "No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all" (5.90). As Arnold, who would have made a fine advertising copywriter, was well aware, his charge that his opponents were not "serious" bore with this suggestion of a basic lack of earnestness a subtle suggestion that such intellectual lightness and frivolity undoubtedly connected to an unenviable moral and spiritual state. Then, having first turned the tables upon his self-righteous opponents by appropriating one of their favorite cant terms, Arnold again turns the tables on them when he argues that he and all other lovers of culture are the truly "serious" men, for according to him, culture implies both the "desire to see things as they are" and a corollary "balance and regulation of mind." Culture, he adds, is "properly described" as deriving from "the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure k knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good" (5.91). Culture, in other words, hardly implies, as its opponents had charged, either idle curiosity or exclusiveness and vanity. Rather culture turns out to be, in contrast, an essentially moral and religious matter -- a matter, in fact, of particularly high seriousness, a matter to engage the minds and souls of all truly "serious" men and women.
Print version published 1986;
web version last modified 28 March 2000, Karlskrona, Sweden