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�Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Barbara]. Sisson
Consulting Editors:
Eva Brann, Beate Ruhm von Oppen,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Editor's Note
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but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
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Requests for subscriptions should be sent to The St.
John's Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404.
Although there are currently no subscription fees, voluntary contributions toward production costs are gratefully
received.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW (formerly THE COLLEGE) is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Edward G. Sparrow, Dean. Published twice yearly, usually in winter and summer.
Volume XXXI!
WINTER 1981
Number 2
© 1981, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0010-0862
Cover: Library of Hadrian, west facade. Photo by Alison Frantz.
Composition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
�~HESTJOHNSREVIEWWINTER8]
1
The Libraries of Ancient Athens Homer A. Thompson
17
Guardian Politics in The Deer Hunter Nelson Lund
29
The Scientific Background of Descartes' Dualism Arthur
Collins
43
Family Pages, Little Facts: October George Dennison
49
The Latin-American Neurosis
53
The Origins of Celestial Dynamics: Kepler and Newton
Wilson
66
Recent Events in the West Leo Raditsa
82
The Streets on which Herman Melville Was Born and Died
Meyer Liben
85
DeGaulle's Le fil de /'epee
95
FIRST READINGS
Irwin's Plato's Moral Theory
98
101
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Carlos Rangel
Curtis
Will Momsey
Davtd Bolotin
AT HOME AND ABROAD
Letter from Nicarauga and Guatemala Honor Bulkley
FROM OUR READERS
t
�Figure 1. West side of the Agora; view from the southeast, 1956.
tl
WINTER 1981
�The Libraries of Ancient Athens
Homer A. Thompson
Our knowledge of the Athenian libraries is now, and always will be, exceedingly scrappy. For the Classical and
Hellenistic periods we have a little, but tantalizingly elusive,
literary evidence, supported by virtually no archaeological
remains. For the Roman period, in contrast, we can point
to a couple of actual buildings, but the literary testimonia
become extremely meager. Nor need I remind you that
none of the individual libraries known from ancient Athens can compare in fame or in institutional importance
with the libraries of Alexandria or of Pergamon, which
stand out above all others. Athens, moreover, could not
vie in the sheer number of her libraries with Rome; according to the regional census of Constantine in A.D. 350,
Rome had twenty-eight public libraries.
Nevertheless we shall find reason to believe that it was
Athens which contributed the expertise, the "know how,"
essential to the organization of the Alexandrian Library.
The kings of Pergamon, in turn, in setting up their library
a century later, undoubtedly drew heavily on both Athens
and Alexandria. As for the contents of these justly famous
libraries, there can be no doubt that the contribution from
Athenian authors was greater than that from any other
national group.
Interesting also ·is the variety in the kinds of libraries
known to have existed in ancient Athens. We read about
private collections, academic libraries, and public libraries,
ranging in date from the Archaic period into Roman Imperial times. The money for setting up and maintaining
these libraries came from various sources: private philanthropy, culture-conscious foreign princes, the Roman emField Director of Excavations from 1947 to 1967, Horner A. Thompson
has worked on the most recent excavations, since their beginning in
1931, of the ancient Agora in Athens, where clearance of the Agora of
Classic'al times is now nearing completion. He has been a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., since 1947.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
peror. The testimony of such non-Athenian writers as
Polybios and Plutarch indicates that Athens was a good
place in which to carry on serious scholarly research.
Aristeides of Mysia, writing in the second century after
Christ, observed that Athens had stocks of books such as
you could find nowhere else in the world, together, Aristeides adds, with splendid baths, race courses, and gymnasia. (Panathenaicus XIII, 188).
According to a widespread tradition the first library in
Athens was formed by Peisistratos, the tyrant who with
his sons dominated Athens for much of the sixth century
B.C. He is reported to have made his collection accessible
to the people, and after the expulsion of the tyrant's family
in 510 B.C. the people are said to have added to it. The
collection, we are told, was carried off by the Persians in
479 B.C., but was sent back to Athens after Alexander's
conquests by Seleukos Nikator. All this sounds rather too
good to be true. How many books were available anywhere in the Greek world at this time, and how many
Athenians were capable of reading in the sixth century?
We know, however, that there was a great upsurge of interest in the arts, notably architecture, sculpture, and
painting, in the time of the Tyrants. Distinguished poets
such as Simonides and Anakreon were induced to come to
Athens. Peisistratos and his son Hipparchos were credited
with bringing together the Homeric poems into their canonical form, and with making the recital of those poems
a regular part of the newly founded national festival, the
Panathenaia. In view of all this I am prepared to believe
that Peisistratos may indeed have put together a small
personal collection of books; if so, he may well, in keeping
with his genial character, have allowed these books to be
consulted by interested citizens. But I would stop short of
having this collection carried off by the Persians: if
readers were few in Athens surely they would have been
even fewer in Persepolis!
1
�Figure 2. The Athenian Agora in the 2nd century A.D.; view from the
northwest. Drawing by John Travlos.
There is little record of book collecting in Athens in the
century and a half between Peisistratos and Aristotle. The
Athenians perhaps, were too busy writing to have time
for collecting. Yet this period witnessed a marked growth
in the reading public in Athens. One of many indications
is the fact that the practice of publishing official docu·
ments such as laws, decrees, treaties, and financial accounts began for all practical purposes at the end of the
sixth century and increased steadily through the fifth and
fourth centuries. This was a costly procedure, and it was
not likely to have been followed had not a large proportion of the citizens been able to read the inscriptions. The
growing interest in the theater in the course of the fifth
century may also have been a factor in stimulating the
circulation and collection of written texts. Scripts were
needed, after all, by the performers, and they were no
doubt wanted by literary-minded citizens.
In this connection it is interesting that Euripides should
have been sufficiently well-known as a book collector to
have drawn jibes from Aristophanes in his Frogs (!. 943)
and to have been credited by Athenaeus (1, 4) with the
possession of "one of the largest libraries in the ancient
world." Another collector of the late fifth century of
whom we read was Eukleides, presumably the archon of
1
2
403/2 B.C., the year in which the Athenians turned officially from the old Attic script to the Ionic.
Let me note in passing that a date around 400 B.C. ap·
pears to have been a turning point in the history of the
state archives of Athens. Public records had of course
been kept in earlier times, but in a random way, whereas
from now on procedure became more regular. About this
time a new meeting place for the Council of 500 was
erected on the west side of the Agora, and the old Council
House seems now to have been made available for the
storage of all manner of official records. One should be
careful not to equate archives with libraries. In antiquity,
however, official documents were written on papyrus or
parchment just like books, and they were rolled in the
same way. Consequently the methods of storing and of
cataloguing must have been similar. The same feeling for
orderly arrangement was essential to success in the keeping of both records and books. (Figures 1-5.)
We are woefully ignorant of the physical arrangements
employed in the Classical period for the storage of books.
We get some help, however, from the school scenes that
appear occasionally on red-figured vases of the fifth cen·
tury. In these scenes the rolls stand upright in wooden
chests with folding lids of a type used for many purposes
WINTER 1981
�in the Greek household. It seems probable that in the
Classical and Hellenistic periods books were stored in
similar containers even in large libraries. In the Roman
period, however, we know that the rolls were stacked hori·
zontally on wooden shelves, sometimes set in cupboards.
Men of letters are often shown with book boxes by their
sides: round or rectangular cases in wich the rolls stood
vertically. (Figure 3a.)
Strabo, writing in the time of Augustus, observed of Aristotle that he was "the first man of our knowledge to col·
lect books" (XIII,!, 54: -rr:p&roo, §'v 'iop.<v, ovvor-yaywv
{3.(3f..ia). If by this Strabo meant, as he probably did, the
first to build up a library as distinct from amassing volumes, his statement is entirely plausible. Let me remind
you that Aristotle came back to Athens in 335 B.C. as a
mature, indeed a distinguished scholar. He rented some
buildings in a grove sacred to Apollo Lykeios and the
Muses, and there set up the school which took its name,
the "Lyceum," from the divinity. Various indications,
some archaeological and some literary, point to a location
in the area of the modern Syntagma Square and the Na·
tional Garden, i.e., outside the ancient city wall toward
the northeast. Here Aristotle lived and taught until he was
obliged to leave Athens because of anti-Macedonian feeling in 323 B.C.; he died the following year in Chalkis.
Aristotle's style of scholarship necessitated a new conception in the handling of books. His range was wide: the
natural sciences, moral philosophy, politics, literary criticism, to name only the principal areas. In addition to his
original writings on these subjects he put together various
lists for general use such as records of the victors at the
Delphic and Olympic festivals and at the dramatic con·
tests in Athens. He must have worked with great intensity
himself, and he also employed assistants. As an example
of the amount of research that might go into the making
of a single book let me remind you that in preparation for
the writing of the Politics Aristotle had monographs composed on the constitutions of no less than !58 states; only
Figure 3. (Above) West
side of the Agora in
the 2nd century after
Christ (view from the
southeast). Model by
John Trllvlos.
Figure 4. (middle)
Tholos and Old Bouleuterion (view from
the southeast, ca. 450
B.C.). Drawing by
W. B. Dinsmoor, Jr.
Figure 5. (below)
Headquarters of the
Council of 500 (Boule),
ca. 350 B.C .. Old Bouleuterion and Tholos
are dark, New Bouleuterion and its Propylon light. Drawing by
fohn Travlos.
Figure
3a.
Attic red.figure
Lekytho' (450-25 B.C.) attributed to the Kluegmann painter,
Louvre.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
one of these special studies has survived: The Constitution of the Athenians. From the tempo of Aristotelian
scholarship we may be sure that it was based not only on a
large, but also on a well organized collection of books.
Aristotle, we must remember, was not only a great
scholar; he was also a busy teacher and the head of an active school. We have no knowledge of where he kept his
books or of how freely they were made accessible to his
collaborators and pupils. One thing, however, is certain:
the library remained the personal property of Aristotle,
and as such it was bequeathed by him to his successor,
Theophrastos. Theophrastos added his own holdings to
Aristotle's and bequeathed the lot to a friend and fellow
3
�Figure 6. Marble
head of Aristotle,
copy (lst century
A.D.), probably of a
portrait commissioned by Aristotle's
pupil, Alexander,
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.
scholar, Neleus, who was presumably thought to be in line
for the succession. But Neleus was not appointed; he
went off home to Skepsis in the Troad, taking the library
with him. (All this we Jearn from Strabo [XIII, l, 54], and I
continue to draw on Strabo's familiar and hair-raising
account).
Neleus's heirs in the Troad were ordinary people who
paid little attention to the library until alarmed by the efforts of the kings of nearby Pergamon to collect books for
their new library. The heirs then concealed the books in
an underground vault. Here they lay, suffering from moisture and bookworms, until eventually they were sold for a
large sum to one Apellikon of Teas. The sale included the
books of both Aristotle and Theophrastos. Apellikon is described as an ardent collector but a bibliophile rather than
a philosopher. He had copies of the damaged texts made,
but the gaps were restored with many errors. The result of
all this was that the Peripatetics who came after Theophrastos had virtually no books and so were not able to
philosophize in any practical way. After the faulty copies
became available they were able once more, to be sure, to
philosophize and Aristotelize but were forced to call most
of their statements mere probabilities.
Apellikon, Strabo continues, perished in the Mithridatic Wars. The original library fell into the hands of the
Roman general, Sulla, and was taken by him to Rome in
84 B.C. There the texts suffered once again through being carelessly copied for unscrupulous booksellers. The
next step is reported by Plutarch in his life of Sulla (XXVI,
l-2). The grammarian Tyrannion, a lover of Aristotle, saw
to it that a set of copies was sent to Andronikos of Rhodes,
later to become head of the Peripatetic School. This set
was used by Andronikos as the basis for the complete edi·
tion on which subsequent Aristotelian scholarship has for
the most part rested.
4
The account given by Strabo and Plutarch is very circumstantial and seems credible. But according to another
version preserved by Athenaeus, Neleus, the heir ofTheophrastos, sold the library to Ptolemy Philadelphos, King of
Egypt (283-246 B.C.). It may well be that the collection
was in fact divided, part going to Skepsis and so eventually
to Rome, the rest going to Alexandria.
So much for the most famous of all the libraries of Athens. It has had few rivals in the number of its vicissitudes,
and fewer still in the extent of its influence on scholarship.
Strabo, after describing Aristotle as the first man known
to have assembled books, went on to say that it was Aristotle who taught the kings of Egypt how to organize a library. This is an interesting but incredible statement. We
do know, however, that Aristotle's successor, Theophrastos, was invited to Alexandria by the first Ptolemy. Theophrastos declined, and Ptolemy had to be satisfied with
Theophrastos' pupil, Demetrios of Phaleron. In inviting
to his court a distinguished scholar such as Demetrios,
Ptolemy was following a practice already familiar at the
courts of Philip II and Alexander. Such persons were commonly expected to act as tutors to the royal family, to advise the monarch on matters cultural and scientific and to
enhance the tone of the regime. Although there is little
hard evidence for the role played by Demetrios, Peter
Fraser in his masterly book on Ptolemaic Alexandria
(1972) concludes that Demetrios' advice was significant in
shaping the two closely related establishments through
which Alexandria made its chief contribution to the culture of the western world,-! mean, of course, the Museum and the Library. The Museum has been regarded in
various ways. I have heard it described as the ancestor of
all institutes for advanced study. A contemporary poet,
Timon of Phlius, however, had this to say: "In the populous land of Egypt many are they who get fed, cloistered
bookworms, endlessly arguing in the bird-coop of the
Muses" (trans. P. Fraser). But there is general agreement
with the view that the Museum of Alexandria, as a small
and intimate society of research scholars committed to
the service of the Muses, was patterned chiefly on the
Academy and the Lyceum of Athens.
A similarly close link with Athens may be hypothesized
for the sister institution, the Library, or rather the Libraries, of Ptolemaic Alexandria. The older and much the
larger of the two libraries was included, like the physical
facilities of the Museum, in the palace complex. It would
seem to have been regarded chiefly as a research library at
the disposal of members of the Museum. The smaller
library, sometimes referred to as "the daughter", was incorporated in the Sanctuary of Sarapis founded by
Ptolemy Euergetes in the third century B.C. Here again
we are woefully lacking in specific information, but there
is good reason to believe that the Alexandrian Library, in
its breadth of scope, in its aim at universal coverage, and
in its careful organization reflects Athenian, more specifically Aristotelian, practice. In its turn, the Ptolemaic founWINTER 1981
�Figure 7. Ptolemy I Soter;
obverse of a coin of Ptolemy
II Philadelphos, British Museum.
dation was to exercise a role of incalculable importance in
the preservation, editing, and dissemination of earlier lit~
erature both Greek and non-Greek.
A word about the personalities, and first Aristotle. The
marble portrait now in Vienna admirably corresponds
with the image that can be recovered from his writings: a
man of great intellectual capacity seasoned with a little affectation and a good deal of astringency. (Figure 6.)
Demetrios of Phaleron, alas, has not been recognized
with certainty in any ancient portrait. He is said to have
have been recognized. Even the extensive excavations
carried out in the Sanctuary of Sarapis in the 1940s failed
to bring to light any plausible candidate for the daughter
library.
The most probable physical remnant of the Library is
this block of granite 17 1/4 inches in length. Found in
1847 in the garden of the Austrian consulate in Alexandria, the stone is now in Vienna. In the top, as you see, is a
shallow rectangular socket; on the front is the inscription:
!lto<IKOVp[O~<I r TOfWL (Dioskourides 3 volumes). The block
has generally been regarded as a container for books, and
for over a century scholars have been exercising their in~
genuity in fitting three papyrus rolls into the cavity. As an
alternative solution I would suggest that the depression
held a carved portrait of the author, either in the round
Figure 8. Granite base found in Alexandria, inscribed: flwaKoup[O"']S
r6p.ot, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Figure 9. Ptolemy III Euergetes; obverse of a silver coin
of Tarsos, Boston, Museum
of Fine Arts.
been honored by the Athenians with 360 bronze statues
in recognition of his services to the city. But when he was
driven out on the coming of Demetrios Poliorketes (307
B.C.) these statues were pulled down, sold, cast into the
sea, or turned into chamber pots. Aristotle on being asked
"What grows old quickly?" replied, "Gratitude."
Of Ptolemy I Soter we are fortunate in having some
magniQ.Fent portraits on coins. Here we are face to face
with a Churchill-like figure: a great warrior, national
leader and serious historian. Through the compatibility of
temperament between Ptolemy and Demetrios much of
the learning accumulated by the old Greek world was passed
on to the new, and the principal channel was the Library
of Alexandria. (Figure 7.)
The structures that housed both the Museum and the
Library were in all likelihood much more modest than
their fame would imply. In any case no structural remains
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
r
or in relief, and that copies of his writings were kept nearby
in a box or on a shelf. (Figure 8.)
Under the later Ptolemies the Library's holdings continued to be built up, and the pace of acquisition became
feverish when competition developed between Alexandria and Pergamon in the second century B.C. The channels of acquisition were both regular and irregular, and
the governing ethics were all too anticipatory of the modern commerce in rare books. Let me remind you of the
well known story told by Galen of how Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-221 B.C.) acquired a set of the works of the
Figure 10. Eumenes II; obverse of a unique silver coin,
British Museum.
5
�Figure ll. Pergamon: Sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros (view from the
southwest). The Sanctuary lies between the Theater (lower left) and one
of the Palaces (upper right). Model, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
F1gure 12. Pergamon: Sanctuary
of Athena Nikephoros (A); Library
(B); Palace (C);
Theater (D); Altar
::: : ·' =
=
-···-" =
:~~:::·:
of Zem (E). (H.
Kahler, Pergamon,
66).
three Attic tragedians: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. Learning that an official copy of these texts existed
in Athens, Ptolemy asked for their loan so that he might
have them copied for his Library. By way of security he
deposited with the Athenians fifteen talents, a truly enormous sum. The copies were made on exceptionally fine
papyrus. It was these copies that Ptolemy then sent to
Athens with instructions to the Athenians to keep both
the copies and the deposit. The originals remained in Alexandria, and the Athenians could do nothing but consent. The silver coin of Ptolemy Euergetes now in Boston
6
WINTER 1981
�Above, figure 14. Athena Parthenos, Varvakian copy, National Museum, Athens. Photo by Alison Frantz.
Left, figure 13. Athena from the Library in Pergamon, Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
shows you with what manner of man the Athenians were
dealin&. (Figure 9.)
Another distinguished personality led to the formation
of the other most famous library of the Greek world, that
of Pergamon. There is a portrait of Eumenes II (197 -159
B.C.) on a unique silver coin now in the British Museum.
It was this ruler who was chiefly responsible for making
Pergamon one of the greatest artistic and intellectual centers of later Greek time. (Figure 10.) Here, as often in the
Greek and Roman world, the library was incorporated in a
sanctuary. Above the Theater and the Altar of Zeus and
just in front of the royal palace lay the Sanctuary of Athena
Nikephoros, the patron goddess of the city. This old sanctuary was modernized by Eumenes and enclosed on three
sides with two-storied colonnades or stoas. The south,
outer side was left open so that the temple could be seen
from the lower city and the countryside. (Figures 11, 12.)
The Library occupied a suite of four rooms that opened
on the upper floor of the north stoa. Excavated by German scholars in the late nineteenth century, the structure
figures in all serious publications regarding Greek libraries. Nevertheless some problems of interpretation remain
and the ruins need to be thoroughly re-examined in the
light of our present knowledge. Without going into the
technical evidence let me state my own view briefly. The
books, I believe, were stored in wooden containers of
some sort in the three smaller rooms. The large north
room was a splendid lobby for the users of the library, and
at the same time a veritable art gallery. A massive stone
pedestal that bordered the back and two side walls was not
intended, as commonly supposed, to support book cases,
but for the display of sculpture. A central place was occupied by a great marble figure of Athena that was found
in front of the Library. (Figure 13.) The goddess was flanked
by statues of famous literary figures of the past with emphasis on those who came from Asia Minor. Inscribed
bases bear the names of Homer, Alkaios, Herodotos,
Timotheos. Dowel holes high up in the walls of the room
may have held paintings done on wooden panels. The
broad two-a isled colonnade in front of the four rooms provided a promenade where scholars might take the air in a
characteristically Greek way while enjoying a magnificent
view over the city and countryside.
Plutarch reports that Mark Antony bestowed on Kleopatra the contents of the Pergamene. library, some
200,000 volumes (Antonius 58, 9), presumably to compensate her for the destruction caused in Alexandria by the
fire of 48 B.C. Even if this account be well founded, the
loss did not put an end to libraries in Pergamon. We now
know, thanks to the German excavations of the 1930s,
that a substantial library was erected , in the time of Hadrian, in the Sanctuary of Asklepios by a woman, Flavia
Melitine. By this time the center of intellectual life had
shifted from the splendid but arduous heights to this
more luxuriously appointed establishment in the plain.
As we leave Pergamon let us glance back at the figure of
Athena which once presided over the Hellenistic Library.
7
�Figure 15. Athenian Agora: the Metroon. Draw-
ing by John Travlos.
Figure 16. Athenian Agora in the 2nd century A.D. (view from northwest). Model by John Travlos.
Figure 16a.
Athenian Agora.
Standing 3.5 meters high the statue is clearly a free adaptation, at a scale of one to three, of the image of Athena
Parthenos made by Pheidias for the Parthenon. (Figure 14.)
Such a recall is symptomatic of the close sympathy, cultural as well as political, that existed between Pergamon
and Athens. In recognition of their debt to the older city
the rulers of Pergamon one after another made splendid
gifts to Athens: a park in the Academy, a group of sculpture on the Acropolis, a stoa beside the Theater at the
south foot of the Acropolis, another two-storied stoa on
the east side of the Agora. This last building, erected soon
after 150 B.C., was reconstructed in the 1950s to serve as
a museum for the finds from the excavation of the Agora.
In Athens about the same time, in the third quarter of
the second century B.C., another major building project
took place on the opposite, i.e. the western side of the
Agora. Here the Old Council House that we believe, as
noted above, to have housed the official archives of the city
since about 400 B.C. was demolished to make way for a
large new building, the Hellenistic Metroon. The remains
are slight, but sufficient to justify the restoration which
shows the Metroon in relation to the New Council House
and to the round Club House of the councillors, the
Tholos. The primary function of the Metroon as of its
predecessor was the safekeeping of the state archives. A
wide range of material is mentioned in inscriptions and
ancient literary testimonia: decrees, treaties, public accounts, even on occasion the will of a prominent citizen.
8
Some of the old original texts of decrees were regarded as
"collector's items," and in the first century B.C. one lot
was stolen by Apellikon, the notorious collector of librar·
ies whom I have mentioned above (Athenaeus V, 214d-e).
In plan the Metroon comprised four rooms of which
the northernmost was much the largest. All four rooms
faced eastward toward the open Agora through a broad
Ionic porch. The second room from the south has the
scheme of a temple; an altar stood in the open square in
front of this room. In this compartment, presumably, we
must place the famous seated statue of the Mother of the
Gods, the "M~r~p 8t0lv," who gave its name to the building. The statue was a work of Pheidias or, more probably,
of his pupil Agorakritos. The goddess is referred to by
Deinarchos (I, 86) as "guardian for the city of all the rights
recorded in the documents." The rooms that flanked the
shrine were presumably the repositories for the storage of
documents which would have consisted for the most part
of papyrus rolls. The north room contained a small courtyard open to the sky: this, we assume, served as a cloister
where users of the archives, including research scholars,
might work quietly, emerging occasionally for a stroll in
the outer colonnade. (Figure 15.)
The similarities between this Athenian building and
the only slightly earlier Library in Pergamon are so many
and so striking as to indicate some close relationship. I
venture to suggest that the construction of the Hellenistic
Metroon may indeed have been one more benefaction
from a Pergamene ruler to the venerable city of Athens.
The kings of Pergamon were not the only benefactors
of Athens in the Hellenistic period. At some as yet unknown point near the north foot of the Acropolis and to
the east of the Agora was a gymnasium called the Ptolemaion, so named after its founder. The earliest references
to the establishment date from the middle of the second
century B.C. Which Ptolemy was responsible remains
uncertain: Euregetes (246-221 B.C.) and Philometor
(180-145 B.C.) have been proposed. For our present purpose the interesting point is that the Ptolemaion certainly
contained a library. In the Hellenistic and early Roman
periods the Ptolemaion rivalled the famous old gymnasia
WINTER 1981
�as a center both of secondary education and of intellectual
life. One would like to think that the library was part of
the original foundation. That would certainly have been
appropriate in a Ptolemaic context, but our evidence con~
sists only of a number of inscriptions beginning in the
year ll7/6 B.C. which record an annual gift of one hundred books to the library in the Ptolemaion from the
graduating class of ephebes, that is the young men who
had completed their two-year course of training in the
gymnasium. These books were presumably for school use,
and the annual donation may have done little more than
compensate for wear and tear. But the Ptolemaion certainly became more than a secondary school: describing a
day in Athens in 45 B.C., Cicero tells of hearing a morning lecture by Antiochos, then head of the Academy, in
the Ptolemaion. The Ptolemaion remains to be found.
Libraries are known to have existed in gymnasia in
other Greek cities, but it is very difficult to identify specific library facilities even when a gymnasium has been
excavateo. All the more welcome, therefore, is a bit of evidence which came to light in the Sicilian city of Taormina
in 1969. In red paint on the white plastered wall of what
was evidently the library of a gymnasium were written
short biographical notices of various writers: Kallisthenes
of Olynthus, Philistos of Syracuse, and Fabius Pictor of
Rome. The transcription of the entry for Fabius will serve
as a sample: first the name, then a brief listing of the
author's principal works: the arrival of Herakles, Aeneas,
and Askanios in Italy, the story of Remus and Romulus. A
date for the inscription about 130 B.C. is proposed by Professor G. Manganaro who has published the new find in
the Romische Frilhgeschichte of Andreas Alfoldi (1976).
We may be sure that these notices were in convenient
proximity to the book containers, and we may suppose
that similar aids were a regular feature of school libraries.
We return to Athens to consider the oldest Athenian library of which actual remains have been found. It was a
modest establishment founded by one T. Flavius Pantainos ca. A.D. 100 at the southeast corner of the Agora.
Its excavation began in the 1930s and was completed in
the 1970s. The remains on the ground are slight, chiefly
because the building was demolished in the late third century after Christ to make way for a new fortification wall
in which was incorporated much of the stonework of the
Library. (Figures 16, 16a.)
_
The Library stood just to the south of the Stoa of Attalos. Between the two buildings passed a marble-paved
roadway that led from the old Agora eastward to the Marketplace of Caesar and Augustus. The principal room of
the Library was a spacious hall measuring about 9.75 x
10.75 meters. This room opened on a colonnaded courtyard which was bordered by ranges of small rooms to
north and west; these in turn were flanked by Ionic colonnades. The main, probably the only, entrance led through
the middle of the west side. Some surely, and perhaps all
of the small rooms had no direct connection with the
Library. Certainly the suite of two rooms to the south of
TIIE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Above, figure 17. Library of Pantainos (view from north), 1975.
Left foreground, the south pier of
arch between Library and the
Stoa of Attalos.
Right, figure 18. Southeast corner
of Agora in 2nd century A.D.
(north at top). Drawing by John
Travlos.
Below, figure 19. Library of Pantainos (view from the southwest).
Model by fohn Travlos.
the entrance had served as a sculptor's studio. We came
on quantities of his marble chips and on some pieces of
his very second-rate sculpture. Some of the other small
rooms may have been shops-the location at this busy
corner was suitable. (Figures 17, 18.)
With the construction of the Library this became, architecturally, one of the most attractive parts of the Agora.
The building faced westward across the Panathenaic way
toward a small plaza that was bordered on the south by a
9
�Figure 20. Odyssey and Iliad from the Library of Pantainos, Agora Museum in Stoa of Attalos.
temple and a large fountainhouse. The west colonnade of
the Library was continued southward by the porch of a
slightly later shop building. Northward, between the Library and the Stoa of Attalos, was another small and intimate plaza partially closed on the side toward the old
Agora by an earlier monument and defined on the east
side by a marble arch closely contemporary with the Library. (Figure 19.)
Although the walls of the Library were of coarse, rubble
masonry the marble work of its porches was of good quality. The floors of the great hall and of the courtyard had
both been paved with marble, and the lower part of the
walls faced with marble. Of this revetment only the imprints remain in the mortar.
One would dearly like to know how the books were
stored in the Library of Pantainos. The walls seem too
thin to have accommodated niches such as are commonly
found in libraries of the Roman period for book cupboards. We may therefore suppose that the books were
carried on wooden shelving set against the walls as was
certainly the case, for instance, in the Villa of the Papyri
at Herculaneum.
Figure 21.
Odyssey.
Figure 23. Iliad. The right
hand held a sword, the left
probably a spear.
10
WINTER 1981
�Figure 22. Odyssey: cmass. The central figure is Scylla; on the lappets: Aiolos, three Sirens, Polyphemos.
Ancient libraries whether private or public were normally adorned with works of art, above all with statues or
busts of famous authors. Our library was no exception. Its
most striking ornament was undoubtedly a marble group
comprising a seated figure of Homer flanked by standing
figures of the Iliad and Odyssey personified. Only the two
female figures have survived and they only as torsoes
which had been used as filling in the late Roman wall that
overlay the west front of the Library. They came to light
in 1869 near the northwest corner of the Library, and they
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
are now displayed nearby in the Stoa of Attalos: robust
figures clad in armor and slightly over life size. They were
conceived of as daughters of Homer. The Iliad, traditionally the older poem, is appropriately shown as larger than
her sister. The Odyssey is signed, on one of the lappets of
the cuirass, by Jason the Athenian. Since it is altogether
probable that the statues are contemporary with the Library (about A.D. 100), they are important in the history
of sculpture as among the few closely dateable Athenian
works of imperial times. (Figures 20-24.)
11
�Figure 24. Inscribed base of the Iliad, Agora Museum in Stoa of Attalos.
The figures were Identified long ago by Georg Treu,
who recognized on the cuirass of the smaller statue
motives appropriate to the Odyssey: Scylla with her dogheaded extremities, Aiolos, god of the winds, Sirens, and
Polyphemos. The identification of the Iliad followed
naturally, especially since there are traces of a sword, her
normal attribute, held at her right side. Both figures show
marked weathering on their upper parts, and both have
the rich honey color characteristic of Pentelic marble that
Figure 25, Marble relief commemorating a victory in a literary coniest
By Archelaos of Priene, 2nd century RC, British Museum.
Left, figure 26. Arch between
Library of Pantainos (right)
and Stoa of Attalos (left),
(view from west). Drawing by
W. B. Dinsmoor, Jr.
Right, figure 27. T. Flavius
Pantainos(?), marble head
found near Library of Pantainos, Agora Museum, Stoa of
Attalos.
12
WINTER 1981
�has long been exposed to the elements. We may be sure,
therefore, that the group stood out of doors, and indeed it
was long ago observed by Paul Graindor that the bold
treatment of both torsos and drapery favored an architectural setting. (Figure 22.)
In 1953 from the curbing of a well of the Byzantine
period just to the west of the Library the excavators
recovered the many fragments of the plinth of the Iliad.
The inscription is enigmatic, but nevertheless helpful: "I
the Iliad both before and after Homer stand by the side of
him who bore me while young." This text justifies therestoration which I have already proposed, i.e. a group of
Homer flanked by his "daughters." Several such groups
are known, the most familiar being that at the lower lefthand corner of a relief of late Hellenistic date now in the
British Museum. The sculptor, Arkelaos of Priene, has
obligingly labelled all the figures. Homer seated, staff in
hand, is flanked by the Iliad and Odyssey, here shown as
small kneeling figures. (Figure 25.)
The chief question still outstanding about our group is
its original location. The Library has now been completely
excavated, and no base suitable for such a monumental
group has come to light within the building. In any case,
as we have already seen, the group must have stood outdoors. Since there is no reason to question its association
with the Library, we must look for a location outside the
building but close enough to it so that the association
would be obvious.
As a possible location I believe we should consider the
top of the marble arch that spanned the roadway between
the Library and the Stoa of Attalos. Of this arch there remain the lower parts of the two lateral piers, the threshold
between the piers, and one block of the crowning course.
We do not have time to go into technicalities, but I do
wish to point out that neither the arch nor the adjacent
colonnade of the Library would have made architectural
sense without the other. Moreover, the care with which
the Library colonnade is fitted to the arch leaves little
doubt that they are parts of one building program. (In contrast, the colonnade bordering the south side of the street
leading eastward toward the Market of Caesar and Augustus is related to the arch very awkwardly. That colonnade,
however, belongs to a slightly later building program
which, as we know from an inscription, was financed by
the People of Athens.) An arch of this type would certainly
have carried sculpture. No other candidates have been
found apart from our Homer group, and that group, as we
have seen, cries out for such a location. (Figure 26.)
Portraits of other great literary figures of the past may
well have figured among the furnishings of the Library,
and such may someday be recognized among the fragmentary sculptures found on the site. Nor is the founder
of the Library likely to have gone unhonored. As a candidate for a portrait ofT. Flavius Pantainos, I should like to
propose a marble head, well over life size, that was found
near the northwest corner of the Library in 1933. The
piece is so fresh as to indicate that it had not travelled far.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Figure 28. Dedicatory inscription from the Library of Pantainos.
The haircut and the tooling point to the time of Trajan,
and an identification with that Emperor has indeed been
proposed. But it really doesn't look like Trajan. Moreover,
the head is crowned with a laurel wreath that would be
unusual on an emperor. I prefer to regard it as representing the actual wreath or crown which the people of Athens
would surely have bestowed on Pantainos as a benefactor.
It is identical for instance with the wreath worn by
Tiberius Julius Aquila, the builder of the beautiful Library
of Celsus in Ephesus. (Figure 27.)
You may wonder how I can speak with such assurance
about the donor and the date of our Library. My source is
the dedicatory inscription engraved on the lintel from
above the entrance to the building; it now forms part of
the late Roman fortification wall. (Figure 28.) The text in
translation reads:
To Athena Polias and to the Emperor Caesar Augustus Nerva
Trajan Germanicus and to the city of the Athenians, the priest
of the Muses who love wisdom, T. Flavius Pantainos, son of
Flavius Menander head of the school, dedicated _the outer stoas,
the peristyle, the library with the books, and all the embellishment of the building, from his own resources along with his
children, Flavius Menander and Flavia Secundilla.
Figure 29. Notice
from the Library of
Pantainos, ca. A.D.
100, Agora Museum,
Stoa of Attalos.
13
�The emperor's title points to a date close around A.D.
100. Pantainos was a man of some consequence in Athens.
He is known to have held the archonship (which at this
time implied wealth) probably in A.D. 115/6, and he had
been honored for some reason with a portrait Herm. Nor
is it impossible that he was the grandfather of the Pantainos who is known as the head of the first Christian
Figure 31. Library of
Hadrian, west facade.
Photo by Alison Frantz.
Figure 32. Library of Hadrian, model in Musco della Civilta Romana,
Rome. Photo by Alison Frantz.
Figure 30. Hadrian; in the Agora excavations.
school in Alexandria and the teacher of Clement, the early
church father whose writings betray a wide knowledge of
pagan Greek literature.
The books presented by Pantainos have· gone beyond
recall. The building and all its embellishments are sadly
ruinous. What does remain to us, and that in its pristine
state, is a library notice. The text was engraved at convenient height on the shaft of a Herm. It reads, "No book
14
shall be taken out, for we have sworn an oath. The building shall be open from the first hour till the sixth." Who
were the "we" who took the oath? The expression used
here, coupled with Pantainos' description of himself as
"priest of the wisdom-loving Muses", makes one suspect
the existence of some society, perhaps a local "Museum"
such as is attested for Athens and for some other Greek
cities, the forerunner of modern Athenaeums. (Figure 29.)
Pantainos' building, modest though it may seem, is important as representing the type of public library that
must have been a normal component of the community
center of many a city throughout the Roman Empire.
We tum, finally, to a library of a quite different stamp.
The Emperor Hadrian is well known as a great philhellene, and above all as a devoted friend of Athens. His attitude toward Athens is happily symbolized in a marble portrait statue found near the west side of the Agora in 1931,
the first season of excavation. Athena, patron goddess of
Athens, stands on the back of the Wolf of Rome. The
Wolf has her fosterlings, Romulus and Remus: Athens has
her owl and sacred snake; the goddess is being crowned by
two Victories. (Figure 30.) In all her long history Athens
never had a more generous benefactor than Hadrian. The
Emperor contributed to many departments of the city's
WINTER 1981
�""
lo • • •
- ·- - - · ·
''---"'
.di:o
Figure 34. Library of Hadrian; quatrefoil church of the 5th century appears in the middle of the court.
Figure 33. Library of Hadrian; inner face of back wall of principal room,
showing niches for book shelves. Photo archive, John Travlos.
life: he completed the colossal temple of Olympian Zeus,
erected a temple of Hera and Zeus, built a sanctuary of all
the gods, a gymnasium and an aqueduct. At the end of his
well-known list of Hadrians's benefactions, Pausanias (I,
18, 9) remarked, "Most splendid of all is (a structure) with
100 columns; walls and colonnade alike are made of Phrygian marble. Here too are rooms adorned with gilded ceilings and alabaster, and also with statues and paintings:
books are stored in the rooms." (trans.). G. Frazer).
The identification of this building, the Library of Hadrian, is now securely established. It stood in the middle of
the city, just to the north of the Market Place that had
been built with the aid of grants from julius Caesar and
the Emperor Augustus. It rose a stone's throw to the east
of the Classical Agora, and it represents the final increment to that centuries-old community center. The Library was also the last fine building to be erected in
Athens in Classical antiquity and the most splendid of all
ancient libraries known to us. Although the great building
has not yet been completely excavated, and much of its
area is still cluttered with modern buildings, its visible remains, rising in a slum district of the city, startle one with
their monumental quality. (Figure 31.)
Since a good publication of the building by the English
scholar M. A. Sisson is readily available I shall be brief.
The principal facade was enlivened by fourteen monolithic columns of green marble once crowned with
statues. Through a columnar propylon in the middle of
that facade one entered an enormous colonnaded courtyard with a long pool on its axis; the open area was un~
doubtedly planted. Pleasant alcoves opened out from the
lateral colonnades, three on each side. (Figure 32.)
The richly adorned rooms mentioned by Pausanias are
recognizable at the far end of the court. A great central
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
chamber was undoubtedly the principal repository of
books. Two corner rooms, as demonstrated recently by
john Travlos, were certainly lecture rooms with sloping
floors and elegant appointments. Smaller intermediate
rooms were perhaps intended for special collections of
rare books that required greater security. Whether the
bilateral symmetry implies a division between Greek and
Latin as in the Library of Trajan in Rome we cannot say.
Enough remains of the back wall of the central room to
show that here, as in the Library of Celsus at Ephesos, the
books were stored in cupboards set into the face of the
wall on three levels. (Figure 33.)
Despite the monumental scale of the building and the
dazzling wealth of the building materials, the basic plan is
beautifully clear and straightforward. What is more, we
find here the same elements that we have observed in earlier libraries from Pergamon onward: one room of im~
pressive scale, ample provision for strolling in colonnades,
and quiet areas for more peaceful study or discussion.
The design is undoubtedly the creation of some gifted
architect chosen by the Emperor, perhaps a man who had
assisted in designing the several libraries in Hadrian's own
villa at Tibur, and surely someone who was thoroughly
familiar with the great buildings in the capital, above all
the Templum Pacis ("Forum of Vespasian") and the
Forum of Trajan.
The Athenian building may be dated in the l30s. It appears to have suffered severely in the Herulian sack of
A.D. 267. Its subsequent history is intriguing but full of
major uncertainties. Some of the surviving bases of the
main colonnade are of crude workmanship and presumably belong to some post-Herulian reconstruction. In the
propylon, high on the wall to the left of the doorway, if
you arrive when the sun is right, you may just detect a
15
�British Museum, by permission of the Trustees: Figs. 7, 10, 25
Deutschcs Archiiologisches lnstitut: Fig. 12
Alison Frantz: Figs.14, 31,32
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: Figs. 6, 8
Museum ofl"ine Arts, Boston: Fig. 9
Pergamon Museum, Berlin: Fig. 13
Staatliche Museen, Berlin: Fig. II
John_Travlos: Figs. 33-35
Short Bibliography
Figure 35. Quatrefoil church in the court of Library of Hadrian; second
period, 7th century {view from the southeast). Photo archive, John Travlos.
metrical inscfiption recording the dedication of a statue,
apparently a large one. The honoree was none other than
the high-ranking imperial official Herculius, Prefect of [].
lyricum from 408 to 412 A.D. The one who dedicated the
statue was Plutarch, founder of the Neo-Platonic School
and its head. In the epigram Plutarch describes himself as
"steward of letters", Hercu1ius as "steward of the laws."
My colleague, Alison Frantz, has argued persuasively that
Herculius may have been responsible for the repair of the
Library. The interest shown in the undertaking by the
famous philosopher Plutarch favors the view that at this
time the establishment still served the world of letters.
This is understandable, for even at this late period Athens
continued to be one of the most active intellectual centers
of the ancient world, attracting distinguished scholars
from near and far.
Later in the fifth century the pool on the axis of the library courtyard was filled in, and a church with an
unusual quatrefoil plan was erected in the middle of the
court. The church was rebuilt, with altered plan and inferior technique, in the seventh century. It may be assumed that the whole complex had suffered, like several
buildings in the area of the Agora, from the Slavic incursions of the 580s. There is no indication that the library
facilities survived this devastation. We know from our excavations in the Agora that by the seventh century lamps
had virtually ceased to be made in Athens. One may infer
that reading had declined to the point where neither
lamps nor libraries were needed. Here then our story
ends. (Figures 34, 35.)
Grateful acknowledgement for the use of illustrations is made as follows:
American School of Classical Studies at Athens (Agora Excavations):
Figs. 1-5, 15-24,26-30
16
General
Christian Callmer, "Antike Bibliotheken," Acta Instituti Romani
Regni Sueciae X (1944) 145-193
H. Kahler, "Biblioteca" in Enciclopedia dell' Arte Antica, vol. II (1959)
92-99
J. Platthy, Sources on the Earliest Greek Libraries with the Testimonia,
Amsterdam (1968)
Athens: Library of Aristotle
W. Jaeger, Aristotle, 2nd. ed. (1948) Ch. XIII: The Organization of Research
J.P. Lynch, Aristotle's School: a Study of a Greek Educational Institution (1972)
Athens: Metroon
H. A. Thompson, Hesperia 6 (1937) 115-217
H. A. Thompson and R. E. Wycherley, The Athenian Agora XIV
(1972) 25-38
Athens: Ptolemaion
R. K Wycherley~ The Athenian Agora III (1957) 142-144 (testimonia)
J. Delorme, Gymnasion (1960) 146f.
C. Pelekidis, Histoire de l'Ephebie Attique (1962) 263f., 266f.
M. Thompson, "Ptolemy Philometor and Athens," American Numismatic Society, Museum Notes XI (1964) 119-129
Athens: Library of Pantainos
Hesperia 4(1935) 330-332: IS (1949) 269-274; 15 (1946) 233; 42 (1973)
144-146, 384-389; 44 (1975) 332ff. (excavation reports); 15 (1946)
233 and Supplement VIII (1949) 268-272 (dedicatOry inscrlpti0r1)
J. Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens (1971) 432-437
H. A. Thompson and R E. Wycherley, The Athenian Agora, XIV
(1972) 114-116
Athens: Library of Hadrian
M. A. Sisson, Papers of the British School at Rome 11 (1929) 58-66
A. Frantz, "Honors to a Librarian", Hesperia 35 (1966) 377-380
J. Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens (1971) 244-252
Alexandria
R. Pfeiffer, A History of Classical Scholarship (1968) 95ff.
P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (1972) Ch. 6: Ptolemaic Patronage:
the Mouseion and Library
Pergamon
R. Bohn, Altertilmer von Pergamon II (1885) 56-75
E. V. Hansen, The Attalids of Pergamon (1971) 272-274, 355f.
0. Deubner, Das Asklepieion von Pergamon (1938) 40-43
C. Habicht, Die Inschriften des Asklepieions (Altertilmer von Pergamon
Vlll, 3. 1969) 15-18, 84f.
Ephesos
W. Wilberge, M. Theuer, F. Eichler, J. Keil, Die Bibliothek (Forschungen in Ephesos V, I) (1945, 1953)
F. Hueber and V. M. Strocka, "Die Bibliothek des Celsus," Antike
Welt 6 (1975) 3-14: restoration of facade
W. Oberleitner eta\., Funde aus Ephesos und Samothrake (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien) (1978) 113-115
Pompeii
L. Richardson, Jr., "The Libraries of Pompeii", Archaeology 30 (1977)
394-402
WINTER 1981
�Guardian Politics
The Deer Hunter (1978)
•
1n
Nelson Lund
I
NIVERSAL PICTURES' THE DEER HUNTER is not about the
Vietnam war. The film makes no statement about
the justice or prudence of our participation in that
conflict. Instead, it dares to remind us that most Americans-soldiers and civilians alike-gave little thought to
the great questions of foreign policy raised at the time.
And it dares to suggest that they are not to be damned for
that
This seeming indifference to large issues of political
morality probably accounts for much of the hostility that
critics have expressed towards the film. But if we refuse
either to disregard this indifference or to be prejudiced by
it, we can find our way through the film's deeper exploration of the grounds of political morality.
Though The Deer Hunter is. set in an era that most of us
remember vividly, we see in it almost nothing of what that
era recalls to us. The film begins by focusing on three
young Americans as they prepare to serve in the Army
during the late 1960s; it shows a few startling scenes from
their experiences in Vietnam; and it examines the aftermath of their service. But the fall of Saigon is the only historic event that plays a part in the film; no politicians appear or are mentioned; we hear nothing of the anti-war
protests or other civil disturbances of the time; and the
film's notorious Russian roulette sequences have no
known basis in fact.
The Deer Hunter makes us think about politics and war
and our country. But because it addresses these issues
only indirectly, and because of its odd juxtaposition of
U
Nelson Lund is a graduate student in the Department of Government
at Harvard University,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
wrenching violence and unfashionable sentiment, the
film is apt to leave the viewer shocked and disoriented. As
I hope to show, the film can lead us beyond this painful
confusion to an uncommonly true and useful view of ourselves and our society.
The film's protagonist, the deer hunter, is named for
the Archangel Michael, who guards the gates of hell,
brings to man the gift of prudence, and will in the final
judgment weigh the souls of the risen dead. The Archangel is the leader of the army of heaven, and is traditionally pictured bearing both sword and shield. As we
shall see, the deer hunter's name suits him welL
At many points in the film, Michael reminds us of the
most typically American hero, who is perhaps most familiar from the film Casablanca. The everyday manners of
this figure are cynical, independent, and somewhat disreputable. In fact, as we know, he lives by principles of
decency and is prepared in extraordinary circumstances
to sacrifice his own pursuits for the common good. Reluctant to become the hero of others, he always becomes the
guardian of decent people when they truly need him.
Most American art presents this character in his maturity and reveals enough of him to provoke our admiration
and respect. The Deer Hunter is unusual because it examines the difficulties of his genesis, and thus brings a special clarity to the complexities of his relations with the
people who rely on his virtues. Its most valuable effect is
This essay owes a great deal to my father, Horace N. Lund, who first
taught me much of what I learned again from The Deer Hunter. I am
a~so indebted to several friends who talked with me about the film, espeCially Leon Kass and Amy Kass. Larry Sonnenfeldt and Leo Raditsa read
early drafts of the essay and offered many sharp and generous criticisms;
all these suggestions were helpful, and the ones I accepted enabled me
to present my views more clearly and precisely-N.L.
17
�to help us add a new understanding to our old admiration
and respect.
about. The film's attention to this great question gives it
a significance beyond the obvious issues that are raised
by our country's experience in Vietnam or even in war
generally.
W
HEN WE FIRST MEET MICHAEL,
we are confronted
with a natural leader. He is more talented than
those around him, and more reckless. But the skill
and daring with which he drives his magnificent '59
Coupe de Ville show us that his talents and his inclina·
lions have few outlets better than those he can find at the
wheel of his automobile. He lives in a rather ordinary
working-class community in Clairton, Pennsylvania; most
of the men work in the steel mills, most of the women stay
in the background.
The mills themselves appear as a kind of earthly helL
The flames, the roaring noise, and the men's protective
garments convey a little of the sense of modern warfare.
But while war is the true earthly hell, life in the mills is
routine, depressing, and without the fascination that real
violence and sudden death can bring.
In the background, the steeple of the Russian Orthodox
Church soars above the residential part of town with cool,
distant grace. Early in the film, we enter the church to
watch a wedding that is truly majestic in its setting and
forms; but the magnificence of the ceremony appears
slightly comic because religion is so small a part of the
lives of the participants. The bride is pregnant, the
bridegroom's mother is distraught, the priest is a cipher.
Michael himself is openly amused by the rituals of piety,
and he appears truly interested only in the maid of honor,
Linda, who is also his best friend's girL
Young and restless, Michael is eager to escape the suf·
focating life that Clairton and the mills impose. But he
lacks the licentious and childish impatience for which so
many of his contemporaries of the 1960s are still
remembered. In the past he has lived for his occasional
hunting trips to the mountains, and now he has enlisted
in the Army. He wants adventure and challenge, but he
betrays no desire to rebel against Clairton or to cut his ties
with the town. The Army promises him a respectable way
out of his dreary and grimy home.
- Michael's maintenance of his ties with Clairton is emphasized by the fact that two of his friends have enlisted
with him for the war. Like him, they seem motivated by
restlessness. This desire for adventure is a private passion,
and to pursue it is to risk the protection and supports that
we find in social life. These men hope to reduce that risk
by leaving Clairton together and maintaining their friend·
ship in the Army. In this they are doing nothing unusual
or hard to explain; but they encounter unforeseen
troubles in the war.
Can men form friendships that allow them to pursue
their private passions while preserving the benefits of co·
operation and social dependence? The Deer Hunter shows
us difficulties that are easy to overlook; and it suggests
that the solution is hard to accept and harder yet to bring
18
II
on the wedding day of Stevie, one of
the enlistees. That morning, Michael proposes that
he and his friends go on one last deer hunt before the
departure for Vietnam; and he gives an odd reason for the
T
HE FILM OPENS
proposal. Upon noticing an atmospheric phenomenon in
which a kind of halo appears around the sun, he says:
"Holy shit! You know what that is? Those are sun dogs
.... It means a blessing on the hunter sent by the Great
Wolf to his children .... It's an old Indian thing." This
casual paganism is the first sign of how very different
Michael is from those around him.
That afternoon, Michael talks about the hunt with his
roommate Nick; Nick, who has also enlisted in the Army,
appears a little scandalized that they are discussing the
hunt just before Stevie's wedding. In the course of the
conversation, Michael makes a serious attempt to state
who he is. He firmly asserts his preference for the moun·
tains over the town; and he vehemently asserts the importance of killing a deer with one shot. According to
Michael, this is the right way to take a deer, and the fail·
ure to accept the principle indicates a lack of human
stature: "Two is pussy .... 'One shot' is what it's all about.
A deer has to be taken with one shot. I try to tell people
that, but they don't listen." Nick indicates that his own interest in the "one shot" ethic has declined and that he has
grown fonder of the natural beauties of the mountains.
Nevertheless, Michael insists that their other hunting
companions are defective: "They're all assholes. I mean, I
love 'em, they're great guys, but without you, I'd hunt
alone. Seriously, that's what I'd do." Nick calls Michael a
"control freak," without explaining how Michael's desire
for control is excessive; Michael responds by saying, "I
just don't like no surprises."
This scene foreshadows two of the major themes of the
film: the ambiguity of Michael's relationships to his friends
and the question of his own being. Quite clearly, he does
think of his hunting companions as friends, but it seems
that only his relationship with Nick makes his friendships
with the others possible. Michael treats Nick as an equal
because Nick has accepted the "one shot" ethic. And yet,
Nick is apparently not content that just the two of them
should hunt together, so Michael tolerates the presence
of the inferior hunters for Nick's sake. Though Michael
wishes to treat Nick as his equal, Nick is less committed
than Michael to the "one shot" ethic and more emotion·
ally dependent on those who do not accept it at all.
Michael seeks to overlook this difference between himself
and Nick; he apparently believes that they are or can be
WINTER 1981
�equals in friendship if they maintain their allegiance to a
common principle. Only later do we discover how crucial
the dissimilarity between them is; but we are enabled here
at the beginning of the film to see that it exists.
As Michael originally states the "one shot" principle, it
appears to be a statement of the right way to hunt; his
commitment to it appears as a striving for excellence, here
for the hunter's excellence. His vehement statement of
the principle suggests that only ignorance or self-indulgence could account for the failure to adhere to it. If this
is so, Nick's characterization of Michael as a "control
freak" is misleading because it tends to confound excellence with power, self-control with control over other beings. Nevertheless, Michael shows that he shares Nick's
confusion when he replies: HI just don't like no surprises."
Here Michael is obviously wrong about himself. One
who dislikes surprises does not find his greatest satisfac·
lions hunting wild game in the mountains; such activity is
anything but routine. And one who wants to avoid surprises surely does not volunteer for hunting's great
counterpart, war. Michael may believe that he wants to do
away with surprises, he may believe that he seeks power
or control in the broadest sense. But if what he is truly
seeking is excellence, he is a better man than he knows
and so should prove able to learn. Before the film ends,
Michael learns a great deal indeed.
During the subsequent hunting trip, Michael shows
that his commitment to a standard of excellence is no
mere private passion. A small base person named Stanley
has forgotten to bring some essential piece of gear; he
now expects to borrow Michael's spare. Stanley has a long
history of such irresponsibility, and Michael refuses to
lend him the gear. Stanley gets out a small revolver and insults Michael's manhood by commenting on his unaggressive behavior towards women. Michael, who happens to
be holding his rifle, takes a cartridge from his pocket and
very forcefully says: "Stanley, see this? This is this. This
ain't something else. This is this. From now on_you're on
your own." Michael slams the round into its chamber, and
the conflict continues until finally Nick intervenes; he
chides Michael for his stubbornness and gives Stanley
Michael's spare equipment. Michael angrily raises his rifle
and fires into the distance. Just before the argument,
Michael had noticed a deer running through the brush; no
one else was watching.
41
This is this" means first that weapons have purposes.
They have their proper uses, for example in hunting deer;
and they have their typical abuses, as Stanley's behavior
vividly illustrates. Michael must sense that this does not
apply only to weapons. Perhaps he sees it most clearly in
weapons because they are men's most necessary tools; the
way he drove his fancy Cadillac is enough to remind us
that an instrument's proper use is not always so easy to
see. Unlike most people, Michael insists on this standard
of what is proper when he can discern it and seeks it when
he cannot. The insistence is shown to us here at the be·
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ginning of the film; his seeking will be the spring of his
later education.
Michael's speech to Stanley has a further meaning implied in the conclusion, '(From now on you're on your
own." Those who are too ignorant or self-indulgent to
confront the world as it is become irresponsible. Like
Stanley, they tend to become derelict and apt to do unintended damage to themselves and others; as a result, such
people force others to take responsibility for them. Michael would refuse to tolerate Stanley's excess, but Nick
interferes: to prevent the group from breaking into factions, Nick has to deflect Michael from the natural course
of his principled intolerance. In frustration, Michael ap·
pears to violate his own principle by firing his rifle without a target. Were it not for his friendship with Nick,
Michael might become a solitary hunter; as we shall see, it
will be hard for him to become anything else.
.
URIN. c THE FILM, Michael becomes larger; by the end,
he would no longer insist so harshly on the "one
shot" ethic and he would not make such truthful
but difficult assertions as "this is this." But though he
does undergo an education, the film presents no educator:
nowhere in The Deer Hunter is there any man better than
Michael or any indication that such a man could exist. His
great triumph lies in his later mastery or education of himself, but the film leaves no doubt that he is superior to ordinary men from the beginning.
From the first, Michael is highly spirited; he is eager for
war, sure of his strength, and remarkably capable of doing
without the company of women. But in addition to this
raw virtue, Michael has a drive to understand what he
D
sees and hears.
An example of this drive occurs when Michael and the
other enlistees, fairly drunk and full of bravado, encounter
a Green Beret at the wedding reception. Michael inquires
about Vietnam and Nick expresses his eagerness for dan·
ger; Stevie echoes Nick's sentiments. When the soldier
snubs them by refusing to say anything but "Fuck it,"
Michael begins repeating the formulation in different
tones of voice, as though he is trying to discover what it
means: "Fuck it ... Fuck it." Finally, in a simultaneously
challenging and curious tone, he asks: "Fuck who?" While
Nick and Stevie seem surprised and worried, Michael
seems almost intrigued. He is sufficiently eager and indelicate to interrogate a veteran about his experiences, so he
must have some of the illusions common to spirited men
who have not seen combat. We would expect someone as
combative as Michael to respond to the man's rebuff with
mere anger or perhaps with awe. But Michael wonders
about the meaning of the man's behavior.
It is very rare to find a man as self-assertive as Michael
and also so ready to learn. The film offers no explanation
for the cause of this superiority and so encourages us to
infer that it has come about by nature. By calling atten-
19
�lion in this way to the natural inequalities among men,
the film commits a breach of the etiquette of our time.
Eventually the film suggests that these inequalities result
in a politically relevant hierarchy of human types; this
challenge to one of the deepest prejudices of our time has
probably caused much of the misinterpretation to which
the film has been subjected. That challenge, however, is
neither idle nor gratuitous. Events have made it necessary, and the film is careful to remind us of that fact.
Stevie, the boy who marries just before leaving for war,
is the most ordinary of the three main characters. l-Ie has
no great strengths or failings, no burning passions or re-
markable idiosyncracies. l-Ie is decent, but ineffectual-a
natural follower and indeed a natural loser. l-Ie loves his
fiancee and insists that she loves him. However sincere he
may be, his hopes seem preposterous since he has never
slept with this girl who he knows is pregnant. Stevie appears to be her dupe and perhaps also the dupe of the
child's father; later we learn that the father is almost certainly Nick. In war, Stevie proves incompetent, unlucky,
and weak. Michael repeatedly must save his life; and at
least once, he has to take a terrible risk with his own life in
order to rescue Stevie. Stevie loses an arm and both legs in
the war; and even after they return to America, Michael
has to carry him from the deadening comfort of the V.A.
hospital and force him to rejoin the town. Time after time
we are reminded that merely decent people cannot take
care of themselves.
Someone might protest against the harshness of this
view. But though the film does expose Stevie's shortcomings, it leads the viewer to see a problem rather than an
indictment. We might not have to emphasize Stevie's
weakness if his decency had sufficient support in the institutions of his community. The weakness of those institutions is the great problem raised by the film's treatment
of Stevie.
with a tanker-truck rolling into
Clairton at dawn, reminding us that the towns of
this country are connected to one another by close
ties of economic interdependence. But besides this, what
signs of a national community can we find in the film? We
see a football game on television and we hear popular
T
HE FiLM OPENS
music on jukeboxes; and there is a veterans' organization,
whose only role in the film is to provide the hall where the
wedding reception is held. These shared amusements
mark the people of Clairton as typically American; they
are typical, too, in their lack of curiosity about the nation's
public affairs. Working people, without much schooling,
they do not have much leisure or incentive to enlighten
themselves about the world beyond their city. Certainly
America's political institutions encourage this insularity.
With our complicated federal system and our traditions of
local independence, we have always inclined towards the
sort of provincialism that we see in Clairton. The fact that
20
this narrowness so often seems benign does not imply that
the nation as a whole is either unified or well-ordered.
Our own recollections of the late 1960s should be enough
to remind us that the strength of this country's social
fabric cannot be taken for granted.
Despite the lack of interest in public affairs, Clairton is
supplying three volunteers for the government's war. Obviously, then, the people here must feel that they belong
to the nation and that they owe her their allegiance. But
the United States has always been too large and too
diverse and too young to draw its greatest strength from
patriotic sentiment. At the wedding reception, the
bandleader introduces the three young men who are leaving "to proudly serve their country"; everyone listens in
respectful silence, and afterwards they cheer. But none of
the volunteers ever indicates that his enlistment has been
motivated by a sense of duty or political responsibility.
Patriotism lives in Clairton, but the people seem not to be
formed by it any more than by discussion of the affairs of
the day. And again, we can easily remind ourselves that
patriotism did not flourish during the 1960s in America's
more enlightened and vainly cosmopolitan cities.
Our political tradition, of course, has never sought the
sort of national enthusiasm to whose absence the film directs our attention. In this country, we have expected po-
litical liberty to bring the greatest possible freedom from
government intrusion into our private affairs and volun-
tary social activities. This proud tradition of individuality
and local independence has always acknowledged that direct national needs are the rightful concern of the central
government; accordingly, we hear of no draft-dodging in
Clairton. But the cultivation of citizens and decent human beings like Stevie has not been regarded as the necessary or proper concern of the government, except through
the local public schools. Moral education has been left
largely to the church and family; it is there that we must
look for the institutional underpinnings of the decency
that Stevie represents.
The looming presence of the Russian Church in Clairton reminds us that Christianity is a religion with univer-
sal claims. It addresses us from beyond all political
horizons and promises to provide a framework for human
decency that is both loftier and more solid than that provided by any merely political order. But the church in
Clairton fails miserably at its first task: helping its adherents to see the world as coherent and ultimately benign.
Stevie's mother is extemely distraught about the behavior
of her son, who is marrying a pregnant girl and volun-
teering for war. just before the wedding she approaches
her priest as he mechanically prepares the altar for the
service, and tearfully appeals to him: "I do not understand, Father. I understand nothing anymore. Nothing.
Can you explain? Can anyone explain?" The priest stiffly
embraces her but he has nothing to say. When priests can
no longer even attempt to answer the most pressing ques-
tions of an ordinary middle-aged woman, the church can
WINTER 1981
�hardly be thought to play a significant part in the moral
education of the young. A church that cannot even articulate a defense of Stevie's conduct can hardly provide
the basis for cultivating and protecting the kind of human
character that he displays. And one would have trouble
showing that any major church has recently been doing
better than this one does in Clairton.
What little family life we see in The Deer Hunter is a
mess. Stevie and his mother are without a common ground
of discourse, so they only quarrel; Nick's girlfriend is
beaten by her drunken father; Stevie's wife goes quietly
mad while he is away in the Army. Neither Nick nor
Michael seems to have any family at all.
Early in th~ film we see Stevie instinctively reaching for
the stability of family life: deprived of the psychological
protection that a strong home offers, he anxiously tries to
establish a family of his own. But his attempt is doomed.
He seems to believe that a ceremony is sufficient to establish a marriage, for he foolishly leaves for war a day or so
after the wedding. But even without this fantastic misjudgment, the prognosis for his marriage would be very
bleak. His bride's pregnancy directs our attention to the
disorder in the social institutions that surround and affect
the family. A leading purpose of the institution of marriage is to fix responsibility for the care of children. When
we see as decent a man as Stevie reduced to undertaking
responsibility for some otl1er man's child, we have to con-
clude that the private behavior of women has broken
loose from the restraints that are needed in any political
community. We might believe that he is just being generous if we were given any indication that he had much
chance of finding a more respectable wife. Since we are
not, we have to see his marriage as a pathetic, futile ges-
neither lust nor flirtation: he looks intently and thoughtfully at her, as though he is powerfully aware of some ignorance or other defect in himself. This expression comes
to his face again when he sees her at the reception. To
their surprise and embarrassment, Nick encourages them
to dance together. We see right afterwards that Nick did
this in order to free himself to pursue a sad and lonely
looking girl nearby; and then we see him repulse an earnest male friend in order to toy with this vulnerable girl.
While Michael is with Linda, he seems uneasy with himself in a way we have not seen before; he appears caught
between his attraction to her and his loyalty to Nick. He
has been drinking, and just as his attraction to Linda
seems about to win out, Nick interrupts them and she
hurries out of the room.
Unlike Michael, Nick treats Linda carelessly, as though
she is merely one of several goods that he wants but by
which he does not want to be confined. After the disturbing encounter with the Green Beret, he proposes mar-
riage to her; when she eagerly accepts, he qualifies the
proposal so severely that it becomes merely hypotheticaL
Disappointed, she remarks: "Anything that goes through
your mind comes out your mouth." After the reception,
Nick tells Michael of his attachment to Clairton and his
fear of not being able to return there from the war. We
can guess that his attitude towards Linda is similar. He
wants what she offers and he fears losing her forever, but
he desperately wants something more; and he senses that
Michael can lead him to a better life than Clairton and
Linda promise. Were it not for Michael, Nick might attempt, like Stevie, to arrange for a comfortable and regular existence; but in the presence of Michael, even Stevie
is drawn away from Clairton to the war.
ture against the social disintegration that began to be-
Though Nick's behavior towards women is more obvi-
come evident in the nation at large during the years when
ously blameworthy than Stevie's, Nick also senses more
clearly the real difficulties of doing well. We saw before
that Stevie's decency is bound up with his weakness and
blindness. Nick, on the contrary, is strongly aware of the
dangers of leaving Clairton and Linda. While alone with
Michael after the reception, he proclaims his love for
Clairton and asks Michael to promise not to leave him in
Vietnam. In order to permit Nick to keep his pride after
such a humbling request, Michael replies with a casual
formulation; but his tone of voice is quite solemn: "Hey
this story takes place. Because it points so clearly at the
weaknesses of the family, church, and government, the
film implies that those institutions are not likely sources of
the social re-integration that is so obviously desirable. And
the film certainly does not suggest that men like Stevie
are plausible agents of improvement.
NLIKE STEVIE, Nick is neither ineffectual nor very
decent. And unlike Stevie, he is quite handsome
and graceful. We have seen that he is not as emotionally self-sufficient as Michael. Neither is he as competent. Michael accomplishes feats with his car that Nick
did not think possible; Nick loses to Michael at pool; and
Michael takes the buck that we see them tracking together. But more important, and despite his admiration
for Michael, Nick is more irresponsible than his friend.
U
We can see this most clearly in their relations with Linda,
Nick's girl.
Nicky, you got it."
At this moment, Michael's dilemma becomes more
clear. As we know from Stanley's insults on the hunting
trip, Michael does not pursue women in the careless way
that Clairton's customs encourage. But his reluctance to
pursue Linda stems mainly from the conflicting claim of
his friendship with Nick. This suggests that Michael has a
normal male attraction to women, and that he restrains it
for the sake of his friendships with men. When we recall
that he would rather hunt alone than with men he dis-
As we observed earlier, Michael's attention at the wed-
dains, it appears that he is seeking in human relationships
ding is directed most forcefully at Linda. His face shows
primarily the equality that might foster sharing of the best
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
21
�experiences. The experiences that now seem most impor~
tant to him are hunting and its great brother, war.
Michael knows that his attraction to these pursuits is essentially male; hence he rather reasonably sets his attraction to women aside for the sake of his friendships with
men, and especially with Nick. And as his promise to Nick
reveals, Michael is ready to commit himself to those
friendships as firmly as one would commit oneself to marnage.
But Nick's need to hear Michael make the promise reveals the difficulty with Michael's reasoning. Nick shows
here that he is very dependent on Michael's strength, so it
is unlikely that they will prove equal in war or able truly to
share its experiences. In view of that, it might make sense
for Michael to reconsider the subordination of his interest
in women. By the end of the film, he does so. But it is a
mark of his nobility that he refuses to accept the implications of Nick's inferiority as easily as our argument sug~
gests that he might.
III
the men return to a
tavern that one of them owns. The hour is late, they
are tired and alone with each other. The tavern
owner, who sings in the church choir and regrets being too
unhealthy for military service, plays a Chopin nocturne at
the piano. The music soothes the men and provides a moment of peace between the hunt and the coming trip to
war. With an unforgettable rudeness, the film cuts suddenly to a deafening, fiery helicopter assault on a Vietnamese village. This transition vividly suggests the painful
and exhilirating shift that soldiers experience when they
truly leave civilized life by going into battle. Michael's
education begins here in Vietnam.
At the scene of the assault, we find Michael lying amid
the rubble and corpses; apparently there has been a firefight, he has been injured, and is just now regaining consciousness. As he comes to, he sees a solitary enemy soldier
hunting for survivors. Finding some civilians hiding in a
bunker, the soldier throws a grenade in among them. By
chance, one woman survives and emerges with a child in
her arms; the enemy coaly machine-guns her and the
child as she runs from the bunker. While this is happening, Michael grabs a flamethrower and charges him.
Though too late to save any of the civilians, Michael sets
the killer afire. And though the soldier has just signaled to
some other troops, Michael pays no attention to his own
safety; now in a frenzy he shoots the enemy again and
again, even after the monster is obviously dead. Michael's
anger and disgust seem to have taken control of his conduct; but though his act itself is neither moderate nor
beautiful, he is obviously moved by a deep revulsion at
the shamefully unnecessary violence.
As in the scene where he responds to Stanley's misuse
A
22
T THE END OF THE HUNTING TRIP,
of weapons, Michael loses some of his own self-control
when faced with an abysmally indecent man. But here the
goodness of Michael's anger is more clear. Michael is not
one of those eerie aficionados who are fascinated with
war, but neither does he seek to retain the equanimity
and outward dignity appropriate to most civilian situations. In this scene, Michael seems very disturbed-even
slightly deranged-but the cool efficiency of the enemy
soldier indicates the danger of carelessly importing moral
standards from one world to another.
with the murderer, more
American troops arrive by helicopter. The group
includes Nick and Stevie, and they are all taken
prisoner shortly thereafter. We now watch the VietCong
torture American and South Vietnamese P.O.W.s by forcing them to play Russian roulette against each other; the
captors amuse themselves by placing bets on the matches.
While waiting their turns, Stevie and Nick both lose their
composure. Stevie becomes hysterical and Michael tries
to calm him; Nick also needs Michael's help but he cannot
speak loudly enough to ask for it. When Michael and
Stevie are made to play against each other, Stevie flinches
and his cowardice saves him from destroying himself; but
the VietCong just throw him into a pit to die. Perceiving
the hopelessness of allowing the games to continue as
they have been arranged, Michael conceives a bold but
very dangerous scheme. He persuades Nick that they
should play against each other with extra cartridges in the
revolver; he hopes to clear two of the chambers, and then
use the gun against the captors. Quite against the odds,
the trick works. But Nick has to be coaxed and bullied
through the game: though it is his only chance of surviving, he does not have the strength to put his life so clearly
in the hands of an unfavorable chance. Michael is at least
as averse to dying as Stevie or Nick, but he can play if he
has to; and he can arrange an even more dangerous ver~
sian for the sake of overcoming the game.
Russian roulette will become the movie's most insistent
and memorable metaphor, and thr0 ugh it we can discover
some of what Michael learns. In an obvious way, the game
begins as an image of the experience of modern battle.
Nearly all articulate combat veterans speak of the terrible
disorientation caused by living where men die frequently,
violently, and with seeming total randomness. Some men
go mad, most become superstitious, and virtually all become cynical about the moral standards that regulate
peacetime life. The horror of this experience seems to
arise largely from the fact that other human beings are intentionally causing all this random death-and perhaps
too from the soldiers' awareness of their own active role in
maintaining the hostilities that make war what it is.
Russian roulette is an especially rich image because it emphasizes the participation of the victims in an activity that
makes little sense in terms of their most basic self-interest.
W
HILE MICHAEL IS ENGAGED
WINTER 1981
�Through this metaphor, the film turns our attention away
from the grand sweep of battle to the great psychological
demands of combat. Here we find the basis of the film's
statements about human excellence and its bearing on
our political life.
Since war cannot be done away with, there have to be
men who play that form of Russian roulette. The most
common way to play is probably Stevie's. Men like him
can be lured or pressed into the arena, and they can be
pressed and coaxed to participate up to a certain point.
But once they have to face what warfare brings, they in·
stinctively recoil and seek to escape it as quickly as possible. In the terrifying moments before he has to play,
Stevie screams: "I don't belong here .... I want to go
home." Though one's sense of natural justice grants his
proposition and makes one wish that his desire be satisfied, the conditions of battle usually allow very little scope
for acting on such sentiments. At least in part, Stevie's
manifest unfitness for war must account for the extraordi-
nary risks that Michael later takes for his sake; but after
Stevie has been thrown into the pit, Michael orders Nick
to forget about him and concentrate on the requirements
of his own survival. Nick thinks that Michael is playing
God, but his command has to be obeyed if Stevie himself
is to have any chance of survival.
Nick seems less weak than Stevie and he has a closer
friendship with Michael, so Michael chooses him to play
the more difficult form of the game. In order to enable
himself to go through with his plan, Michael deliberately
generates a terrific, concentrated hatred towards the captors. This hatred is not pretty, but it is necessary, as we
can see by contrasting it with Nick's paralysis. Though
Michael tries to bring out courage in his friend, Nick's attention is too focused on himself to allow him either to
hate or to respond calmly to the demands of the situation;
even with Michael's encouragement, he almost fails to
act. Michael's hatred gives him the detachment from himself that is needed to perform the unnatural act required
in Russian roulette.
As in the earlier combat scene, Michael's anger is the
engine of an appropriate though ugly action. Under
Michael's governance, Nick also manages to perform the
necessary act, but he is obviously acting beyond his own
capacities: without Michael and the inhuman ferocity
that he calls out of himself, Nick would be as helpless as
Stevie. Here Michael's spiritedness-his violent and even
savage self-assertion-is irrefutably justified. It should not
diminish our sense of that justification to point out that
Michael's hatred is not autonomous. His intelligence is responsible for the plan that he executes, and his savage
anger is therefore directed by a superior principle; but
only through his brute courage does Michael's intelligence come to rule him. Nick too can understand what
needs to be done; only Michael's stronger reserves of selfassertiveness and even brutality save him from falling into
Nick's confusion, self-absorption, and impotence. And
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
lest we think that Nick is somehow finer or more human,
the film shows him furiously beating one of the VietCong
corpses after the danger is past.
the three soldiers get separated. A
helicopter tries to pick them all up, but Stevie falls
into a river and Michael jumps off after him.
Stevie's legs are badly injured; Michael carries him out of
the jungle and turns him over to some South Vietnamese
troops who have a jeep. At this point we lose sight of
them, and the film shifts to Nick's experiences in Saigon.
Several scenes take place in which Nick shows signs of intense inner disturbance-he speaks only with difficulty,
A
FTER THEIR ESCAPE,
weeps easily, looks twice at Linda's picture, and imagines
once that he sees Michael in a Saigon bar. Finally an urbane Frenchman lures him into a house where people
amuse themselves by betting on Russian roulette matches
between men who play for money. Though Nick does not
see him, Michael is there watching the games. Unlike
most of the other people present, Michael seems neither
excited nor indifferent: his face reveals an intelligent, concentrated, absolutely serious-looking. At this moment we
know that he has been trying since we last saw him to
understand what he has been through. As soon as he sees
Nick, his concentration vanishes and he reaches towards
his friend.
When Nick sees the game, he frantically interrupts it;
after grabbing the revolver, he dry-fires at one of the players, dry-fires at himself, and rushes out of the building.
Michael chases after, only to see the Frenchman driving
Nick away in a car; with a gesture of final hopeless abandon, Nick throws a fistful of money into the air above the
crowded street.
After what Nick has gone through, the sight of men taking these risks without compulsion is too much to bear.
Nick's character has always been ambiguous or undefined: in Clairton he was discontented with the goods
within his reach, and yet unable to find principles or direction for himself. Like most people whose finest gift is a
longing for the good, Nick has tended to be dominated by
the most fascinating influence in his surroundings. So
long as that influence was Michael, Nick might safely
have sought the noble life; but once he faces Russian roulette without Michael's help, Nick cannot resist its gruesome magnetism. That magnetism is founded in war's
tantalizing suggestion that nothing good can stand up in
the violent onslaught of brute chance; when Nick sees
Russian roulette played voluntarily in the midst of civilization, he cannot resist the implication that human life is no
more than warfare, that everything is permitted, that
nothing is of enduring worth. The film later confirms this
scene's suggestion that Nick has just given himself over to
a career as a Russian roulette player; from now on he will
play for money and for love of the game. Like other men
who become enthralled by the spirit of war, Nick will live
23
�on for awhile, but only as a kind of ghost. He becomes indifferent to his own life and his own good; he moves in
our world but his eyes are open only to the incoherencies
that we all naturally resist. As a human being, Nick is now
dead.
Unlike Nick, who is captivated by Russian roulette,
Michael appears here as a student of the game. In its first
use in the film, Russian roulette was a metaphor for war as
experienced by ordinary men in battle. Most soldiers experience combat as something for which they are drafted
or for which they find that they have imprudently volunteered. The sight of war has its charms, but these are ac·
cessible chiefly to its observers, just as the pleasures of
Russian roulette are available to the spectators who bet on
the games. Seen from a distance, both follow fairly regular
patterns or rules and hence have a kind of coherence. But
these patterns so threaten the self-preservation of the participants that voluntary acceptance of life under them
appears to most men in combat as prima facie evidence of
insanity. This should not be surprising since the love of
living there is indeed conclusive evidence of insanity.
In Saigon, Michael returns to Russian roulette as a
spectator, but we do not see him betting on the outcome
and we see in him no love for the game he is watching.
Since he has not simply turned away from the game, he
must know that he may play again. Since he betrays no
desire to do so, he must also believe that playing can be
justified without reference to maxims of insanity. To sec
war as necessary and yet not as an end in itself is easy for
those who have little experience of it; it is not anticipating
too much to say that Michael's special excellence is to live
as a warrior without ceasing to govern himself. He differs
from enthusiastic mercenaries because he does not love
war; he differs from merely dutiful soldiers because he
does not take his bearings from the goals offered in civilian life. We saw Ivlichael exercising the warrior's courage
almost by nature in the first Russian roulette scene; his
looks in the Saigon scene indicate how difficult it is for
him to include such activity in his way of life; the madera·
tion he displays here enables him to appear in the film's
third and final section as the man whom justice would require to rule in Clairton.
W
he goes on a
hunting trip with his old friends; Stevie is too
crippled to come along and Nick is missing in
Vietnam. During the trip, Stanley begins stupidly
threatening another man with a revolver that he seems to
believe is unloaded. At the sight of this, Michael becomes
very angry; he takes the pistol away, discovers that it is
loaded, fires a bullet into the ceiling of the cabin, and removes the cartridges from the gun. He then chambers one
round, spins the cylinder, points the gun at Stanley's
24
rule. But in order to appreciate that conclusion, we need
to re-examine Michael himself.
Let us recall that the insanity of war is most evident
when one considers the threat war poses to the combatants' self-preservation. Any justification of war requires
IV
HEN MICHAEL RETURNS TO CLAIRTON,
head, and pulls the trigger. The gun does not discharge.
By our usual standards, Michael's conduct in this third
Russian roulette scene is unreasonable. For how could the
attempt to educate a person as vile as Stanley is be worth
the risk of committing murder? In part, Michael's action
may be an unthinking passionate objection to Stanley's
carelessness with human life; to the extent that this is so,
his conduct would resemble Nick's interruption of the
game in Saigon. But what Michael does is more measured
and purposeful. Unlike the players in the Saigon house,
Stanley is a danger primarily to innocent people; further,
Michael is tied to most of Stanley's potential victims, and
even to Stanley himself, by some ties of friendship; and
unlike Nick, Michael does not turn the gun on himself.
Above all, Michael's act is not a gesture, as Nick's is; it certainly is dramatic, but the drama points very clearly to a
simple and important lesson. After Stanley survives-and
the odds were quite high that he would-it is very unlikely that he will forget what Michael has taught. At least
he will probably stop playing with guns, and he may even
be moved to begin living in a generally more subdued and
responsible way. At the end of the film, his careful treatment of Stevie's wife suggests that he may be rising a little
from his habitual petty vanity and self-absorption.
To whatever extent Stanley is improved, we can attribute it to Michael's deliberate extra-legal coercion on the
hunting trip. Michael has stepped outside the law to exercise a rule that justly belongs to him; the film clearly and
correctly implies that unless men like Michael rule, there
will be no rest from the ills occasioned by the base and irresponsible. Since American institutions make little provision for such rule, private justice like Michael's can be
seen as a beneficial supplement to our officially political
life. But the unlawfulness and riskiness of Michael's open
assertion of rule over Stanley remind us not to expect that
such rule will ever play a powerful part in our government; and the dangers of trying to institute such domination should be obvious to us all. At the end of the film, we
shall be able to discover Michael's substitute for open
the introduction of considerations beyond the preservation of the combatants' lives. For them to accept such a
justification, they have to see their self-interest in broader
terms than those comprehended in self-preservation; and
rarely, if ever, can their motives for fighting be quite the
same as those of the army or nation as a whole. The same
difficulty arises in explaining Michael's participation in
the game of Russian roulette with Stanley. From the narrow perspective of self-interest his behavior is senseless,
even demented: he has very little to fear from Stanley, and
much to lose if Stanley dies by his hand. When we examine Michael's conduct in the light of the common interest
WINTER 1981
�Nick broke under the pressure of war. One might think
that this merely proves Nick's inferiority, and that
Michael should wait for friendship until he meets a man
truly like himself. His failure to do so indicates that he no
of Stanley and his potential victims, we can see the good
in what he does. But why should Michael risk himself for
these others? The fact that he displays such strong anger
in this scene suggests that something of his own is at
stake. In order to see what that might be, we have to look
once again at Michael as he is alone.
just before the Russian roulette scene with Stanley, we
watch Michael in solitary pursuit of a handsome buck. After some time, the animal stops at the edge of a clearing.
Michael draws a bead on it, and we expect to see his "one
activity that can be shared among equals.
Is friendship then impossible? Michael relaxes his "one
shot" ethic when he spares the deer, and he spends most
of the rest of the film caring for the people of Clairton.
His masculine virtue enables him to help them; but that
shot" virtue reconfirmed. But just as he seems about to
same virtue conflicts with his decision to care for them
take the shot, he jerks the rifle up, and shoots over the
deer. He appears agitated, and he asks in a strained vbice:
"Okay?" Though he seems to be talking to the deer, the
question must really be addressed to himself because we
then hear him answer in a long drawn-out shout: "Okay."
While the answer is being given, we do not see Michael
himself but look instead at the surrounding landscape. As
it sometimes happens in the mountains, the shout echoes
back: "Okay." This echo suggests that Michael finds himself in accord with nature.
rather than to despise or try to dominate them. The echo
in the hunting scene vaguely hints that nature supports
his decision, but the decision is also clearly a difficult one
for him to make. And we simply do not know why he
HROUGHOUT THE FIL", Michael has been a laconic
man. The fact of the film's title establishes the im·portance of this scene in which Michael chooses not
to slay his deer; but the one word he utters offers little indication of his motive for throwing away the shot. The
significance of the scene lies partly in its mystery. From
this point forward, Michael's motives are not explained to
the other characters and they have to remain somewhat
obscure to us, too. Fully to overcome this obscurity would
require knowing all that Michael knows, and perhaps
more; the film does not pretend to provide the viewer
with that knowledge, even for a moment. But we can attempt to see why this obscurity is necessary.
If we think back to the first section of the film, we can
see Michael has a kind of prisoner of his natural superi-
T
ority. His· dominant impulse was the masculine love of
hunting and war; his superiority emerged in his great com-
petence at those activities. Had he pursued his passion for
the development of his masculine superiority, he might
have become a solitary hunter or a mercenary soldier; had
he pursued this passion in his relations with his friends, he
would have tended to become a despot of one kind or
another. At times his speech suggested that masculine,
se1f-serving superiority is what he most desired: "Two is
pussy; 'one shot' is what it's all about_ ... This is this.
From now on you're on your own." But we never see him
live as though he completely accepts his own principles.
He is prevented from doing so by a different, and not specifically masculine, impulse: the desire for friendship, the
desire to share the best activities with other human beings.
Michael set aside his interest in women in order to pur-
sue that friendship with Nick in which he hoped to share
the most masculine activities. This project stopped when
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
longer thinks that the exercise of masculine virtue is an
makes it. From this point forward, we must confine our-
selves largely to examining the effects of Michael's activities in his new role as guardian-hero.
When Michael puts himself into a position to kill the
deer and then spares it, he enters into a peculiar relation-
ship with the animal. While it had previously been merely
a natural being, it now owes its freedom to Michael's
choice. Despite the deer's ignorance of Michael's responsibility for its future existence and activity, Michael now
rules it more nobly than he would have had he chosen to
destroy it. Similarly, Michael's rule over his decent
Clairton friends will be much less visible to them than his
direct but temporary domination over Stanley. For that
reason he will be able to begin establishing a community
rather than a mere reflection of the natural hierarchy
among human beings.
This change in Michael's relation to the people of
Clairton first emerges through the replacement of Nick
by Linda as the link between Michael and the others.
When Michael first returns to his hometown, he avoids a
party at his house arranged in his honor. Linda has been
living in the house, and he goes there after the others
have left in the morning. When the two meet, there are
moments of awkwardness, just as one would expect. Dur-
ing this first meeting, Linda brings out a sweater she has
made for Nick, and she tries to see whether it could fit
Michael; it is not the right size, but she is tearfully confident that she can alter it. Very clearly, Linda has little notion of the important and unalterable differences between
the two men; since she cannot truly appreciate what
Michael is, her present urge to give up Nick does not indicate that any great change has taken place in her since the
beginning of the film. When Michael offers to escort her
to her place of employment, she reveals both her appreciation of his outward appearance and her inability to understand what lies below his surface: "Mike, you're so
weird. You're always such a gentleman."
Like Nick, Michael has been attracted to Linda from
the start. Nick carried a picture of her to Vietnam, and we
saw him look at it twice just before his breakdown.
Michael carried the same picture, but we do not see him
25
�look at it until just before he returns to see her. With Nick
missing and probably dead, Michael now tentatively begins to reopen his own relationship with her. Though we
might have expected him to be offended by her confusion
in the scene with the sweater, he soon chooses to offer a
most generous and helpful interpretation of her ambivalence: "Linda, I just wanted to say how sorry I am about
Nick. I know how much you love him; I know it could
never been the same .... " We can be sure that if Nick
were to return, Michael would try gracefully to avoid standing between him and Linda. By paying such respect to the
prior claims of the old relationship between Nick and
Linda, Michael acts to preserve Linda's sense of the worth
of such claims. We know enough about Nick and Linda to
know that they are not the source of whatever strength
such claims might have; we saw before that Nick's commitment to her was less than wholehearted, and the film
hints that she has not been faithful during his absence.
But Michael knows enough about the fragility of the
bonds among human beings to be careful with those that
exist; he is opposed to overturning them for the sake of
what might be a specious improvement.
Because Linda is a woman and understands little about
Michael, she is impatient to feel the security that she
hopes he can offer: very soon, she desperately proposes
that they comfort each other by sleeping together. He
seems unoffended, but he only reluctantly allows her to
accompany him to his motel room; and we are permitted
to infer that he tries to comfort her without accepting her
offer of sex. Besides the problems that he must so clearly
recognize in establishing intimate ties with people who
cannot adequately understand him, Michael has just
learned that Stevie is alive and back in the United States.
just as Michael seeks to help Linda preserve a healthy respect for her past love, he must recognize the possibility
that she could undermine his loyalties to the friends who
followed him to war.
After the hunting trip and the encounter with the deer,
Michael returns to Linda and offers himself without his
previous reluctance; he now takes her for the first time to
his own bed at home. After she falls asleep, he looks at the
hunting trophies in his room and at the mills in the distance; now, finally, he goes out to visit Stevie. In war,
Michael was Stevie's protector. But in civilian life, friendships between men require that the natural distinctions
among them be very much obscured; this is what made
his relations with other men so difficult before he went to
war. Michael's new friendship with Linda, which is based
on the clear and acl!:nowledged natural distinction between the sexes, allows him to begin taking care of Stevie
in the artificial circumstances of civilized life. There is order in Michael's relationships with the people of Clairton,
an order made possible by his decision to relax his insistence on the primacy of his masculine, self-serving virtue.
When he visits Stevie in the hospital, Michael learns
that Stevie's wife has been receiving small carved ele-
26
phants and large amounts of cash from Saigon; she forwards the souvenirs and money to her crippled husband,
maliciously enclosing it all in socks. Michael immediately
knows that Nick must still be alive; though he does not tell
Stevie or anyone else, he also knows that Nick must be
getting the money by playing Russian roulette. Nick's sudden intrusion disrupts the order of Michael's relationships
in Clairton.
to the Communists and the
city is afire with the frenzy of America's final evacuation. Bombardment by enemy artillery provides the
flames that light the nights; the harsh light of day exposes
the desperate fever to escape among those who sense
what the victors from the north will bring. Somewhere in
this doomed city Nick, or what is left of him, continues to
pursue his private obsession. Michael is intent on finding
him, and by some miracle of cunning and daring, gets into
this earthly hell. He appears as resolute- almost as monomaniacal-as a man in Nick's occupation would have to
be.
In the course of tracking Nick, Michael encounters the
Frenchman who seduced him into his presenf career.
During their first conversation, Michael says that he
wants to find Nick in order to play Russian roulette
against him. Since we know that he has no such desire, we
have to wonder why he expresses it. He could as plausibly
have said that he wanted to see the famous American play
the game; in fact, one would think that the European
could more easily have understood such a motive. But
Michael must know more about Russian roulette than we
do. The first time he played, he not only won but he overcame the game itself. We have seen him studying its mercenary variety, and we have seen him use the game as a
tool of education in the United States. What began as a
metaphor for war has been subtly expanded so that it
points towards greater questions about the responsibilities
of human beings to themselves and one another. By so
mastering the game that he can play it usefully in civilian
life, Michael revealed that his own relation to it is one of
aversion and attachment. He never shows any love for this
purest form of exposing one's own well-being to dark and
uncontrollable forces. In this way he has shown that his
S
AlCON IS ABOUT TO FALL
early statement about his aversion to surprises has a core
of truth: in his heart, Michael has remained more a deer
hunter than a warrior. At the same time he appears to
have concluded that bravery and skill in Russian roulette
are conditions of the excellence he has always sought. He
plays it not only when it is obviously necessary, but
also-as with Stanley-when he judges that it can bring
some important good. In the last deer-hunting scene,
Michael appeared to turn away from the solitary pursuit
of his own excellence; he is a member of the Army's elite
Rangers, and the film gives no indication that he intends
to leave the military now that the war is over.
WINTER 1981
�Knowing so much about Russian roulette, or war
broadly conceived, Michael has to know that Nick's life
since he disappeared will have put a great deal of distance
between the two of them. We see him taking great risks to
find Nick; he must know that he will have to take greater
risks to bring Nick back. Michael has gone into hell after
his friend and he must somehow foresee that he is going
to have to play yet another round of Russian roulette
before he returns.
When Michael finds him, Nick shows no recognition.
He is intent on the present; except for the strange fact
that he sends elephants and his winnings to Stevie's wife,
he seems to have lost all touch with his past. In a desperate attempt to give Nick back his memory-to bring this
ghost back to human life-Michael arranges to play the
next game against him.
When he first came into the house where Nick plays,
Michael had been visibly distressed to see another player
kill himself. Now, at the table with Nick, Michael begins
urgently trying to talk him back to himself: "We don't
have much time .... Don't do it." When the spectators
have finished placing their bets, Nick still has not heard
Michael. Nick takes the first turn; the hammer drops on
an empty chamber. Since mere speech has failed, Michael
picks up the pistol and asks, "Is this what you want?"
After saying sadly, "I love you, Nick," Michael's face twists
up with a terrible dread that we have seen in no professional Russian roulette player. He puts the revolver to his
head and pulls the trigger; again, the weapon fails to discharge. But Nick remains oblivious to Michael's efforts to
reach him. As Nick picks up the gun again, Michael grabs
his wrist, sees track marks on his arm, and begins talking
urgently of home, of their friendship, of the mountains.
Now at last, what Nick would most remember about
Michael returns to him: he says, "One shot," laughs
softly, and blows his brains out. Screaming with grief,
Michael grabs the corpse and starts shaking it in an
instinctive effort to bring it back to life.
This scene invites us to interpret it in terms of
Michael's love for Nick. That love is surely what enables
him to risk himself in the game. But what is the basis and
framework of the love? Michael must know how small are
the chances that Nick could be retrieved from the living
death in which he finds him. By virtue of what principle
did he take upon himself with no visible hesitation this illicit 12,000-mile trip to hell in search of a man who is not
sane enough to return from there by his own will? And by
virtue of what principle does Michael risk Nick's life in the
round of Russian roulette they play?
In this scene, love is the passion that carries Michael
through the hardest part of the game, just as hatred or anger carried him through the previous games he played.
But in no case do these passions simply rule Michael's
conduct. In the other games, Michael was ruled by his insight into the justification for his participation. Here the
only visible justification for the risks he takes is the old
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
promise he made to Nick not to leave him in Vietnam. By
holding himself and Nick to that promise, Michael affirms
the gravity of a human relationship to which he has committed the word of his honor; he thus establishes the superiority of the relationship implied by a promise over
either of the human beings who participate in that relationship. We see in this last Russian roulette scene how
much Michael dislikes what he has to do; not once does
he seem tempted to protect his own human feelings with
callous notions about imperatives of abstract duty. Still,
he does set the authority of his promise above himself and
others, and he thereby brings that authority into being.
The Deer Hunter correctly teaches us that love and decency would not exist as goods were it not for this
harsh-and painful-insistence on self-respect.
As we saw before, Michael's earliest and highest hopes
have not been met: he has not found his equal and has not
found perfected friendship. Nor has his struggle against
the rule of chance in human affairs been wholly successful. It would be hard to imagine a man who takes firmer
responsibility for himself and for his own activity; because
of this he can be said to have done as much as one can do
to prevent chance from living within oneself. But in order
to achieve this victory, he has had to live where chance
does virtually rule: he has had to face enemies out beyond
the protecting conventions and institutions of civil society. In the film this is presented through his experience of
war; but the contrast between him and the other two soldiers shows that what truly distinguishes him is his understanding of what war reveals about himself and others. To
reach that just estimation of men, Michael has had to take
enormous risks and exercise great courage and moderation. Men with his natural talents and inclinations are rare
to begin with, and they are more likely than most others
to die in battle. The blessing of his survival will enable
him to help others more than they can fully appreciate.
After Nick's funeral, his
friends go to the old tavern to have breakfast alone
together. The scene is similiar to the one just before
the first transition to Vietnam. But this time it is day, now
there· are women present, and one of the group is very
conspicuous by his absence. While in the kitchen preparing the food, the tavern owner tries to choke back his tears
by humming and singing a little of "God Bless America."
In the earlier tavern scene, the orderly motion of his
music helped provide a brief but satisfying relief from
struggle; now, however, the pain that Nick's death has
brought seems as likely to break out in violent weeping as
in the reconciliation of song. Sensing that a critical moment is at hand, Linda begins to sing with a shaking voice:
"God bless America/Land that I love .... " Nick has lost
his life, Linda and the others have lost him; this prayer,
with its patriotism and its assumption about the cosmic
supports for patriotism, might allow those present to
T
HE STORY ENDS IN CLAIRTON.
27
�believe that these sacrifices were worthwhile. But their
hesitation to join in the singing betrays their doubts about
the song's credibility.
One man can ease those doubts. Michael once said that
these others were "assholes"; there is nothing to indicate
that they have changed much during the film. Michael
has always been skeptical of piety, adhering to a pagan
hunting religion if to any at all; nothing in the film indicates that he has found in the world the coherence that
could make this song even remotely plausible. Whatever
Michael may once have felt towards the others, and whatever he may now believe about the world, he joins in the
singing. As he is thereby ratifying their belief in the comforting words, his attention seems directed mainly at
Linda; but he performs the function of a priest for them
all. Michael has always had a natural air of authority, and
now his credentials are strengthened by the fact that he
has been with open eyes where none of them could go.
Without Michael's assent the singing would be ludicrous-by joining in, he protects the others from having
to admit how much reason there may be for despair. And
he protects them, too, from having to admit how dependent they are on him for protection from the horrors he
has survived. He bestows on them what freedom they are
28
capable of, much as he did for the deer he spared in the
mountains. The image of the deer should remind us that
one of the dangers he protects them from is his own urge
to dominate them by force.
At the last moment, Michael reminds his friends-and
us-that the reconciliation provided by the song is a little
too easy. The edifying words of "God Bless America"
could not be said to foster bad beliefs, but by themselves
they are empty. So at the conclusion of the singing,
Michael raises his glass and says: "Here's to Nick." By reminding the others of the importance of keeping the
memory of the friend who died, Michael tries to prevent
them from going too far into the refuge of comforting sentiment: he imposes on them at least a little of the difficult
work of cultivating the grounds in which a noble sense of
freedom and community can grow. They respond by repeating the toast in unison, and the film ends. Michael
knows how costly this communion has been, and how
fragile are the supports that make it possible; his work has
only begun, and may never be completed. But if we have
gained a greater understanding of the deer hunter and of
his place in our community, the film has achieved its principal purpose.
WINTER 1981
�The Scientific Background of
Descartes' Dualism
Arthur Collins
Dualism is the thesis that all the finite individual things
that exist in the universe are either minds or bodies.
Bodies are material things whose principle and defining
feature is extension or the filling of space, and minds are
nonmaterial things and their principle and defining
feature is thinking or being conscious. The most important aspect of Descartes' dualism is its characterization of
a human being as a composite entity. In an individual
man, mind and body are closely associated. In some sense
they are united. However, they cannot lose their distinctness as two separate substances, that is; as two entities
each of which endures through time, undergoes its own
changes, and thus accumulates its own history. Changes
the mind undergoes are changes in thought and consciousness, and the history of a mind is a sequence of
mental states, mental contents, and mental activities. The
body undergoes physical changes and has a physical history, the history of a material object. The crucial claim of
dualism is that the body is not the thing that thinks in a
man. The fundamental nature of body is being extended
and this contrasts with and excl!ldes being conscious.
Descartes' philosophical arguments for this dualism are
most fully rendered in his Meditations on First Philosophy.
It is worth reminding ourselves that this work bears the
subtitle, "In which the existence of God and the distinction between Mind and Body are demonstrated." 1 The
same arguments are prefigured briefly and partially in
Part Four of the Discourse on Method. They are recast in
Part One of the Principle of Philosophy, and they appear
elsewhere in Descartes' writings.
Although Cartesian dualism still exerts an immense influence in philosophy, Descartes' arguments for his dualism, from their earliest presentation, have been found
wholly inadequate by most readers. Even those who ac-
Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Arthur Collins has published articles in numerous philosophical journals on epistemology, philosophical psychology, and the history of philosophy.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
cept or share his dualist convictions have found his
defense of them quite unsatisfactory. The inadequate
arguments represent an effort to frame definitive demonstrations for convictions that were deeply held by Descartes and that were understandably compelling to him.
But the thinking which actually led Descartes to these
convictions is remote from the matters that figure in the
official proofs of his late metaphysical works.
Descartes' Argument
The Meditations can be divided into two unequal parts
at the end of the second day's thinking. Under this division the first part contains the initial encouragement of
systematic and radical doubt, culminating in the two general skeptical hypotheses: the dream hypothesis, and the
deceiving demon hypothesis. This first part also contains
the cogito argument by which doubt is at last halted in the
unshakeable self-knowledge of the thinking subject. It
concludes with the recognition in the latter part of the
Second Meditation, that the immediate contents of consciousness, construed only as "ideas" in the mind, all
share the indubitability of the cogito. At this point, the existence of the thinking subject and the existence and content of all his ideas are guaranteed. Preparation has been
made for the survey and classification of ideas in the
Third Meditation. Everything but this sphere of consciousness remains in doubt. The existence of a material
order and of the thinking subject's own body remain to be
argued for. Even the simplest mathematical propositions
have yet to attain standing as truths.
To this day, every philosophical intelligence feels the
power of this representation of the subjective starting
point for philosophical thinking. Although modern philosophers owe so much to the phenomenological starting
point discovered in the first two Meditations, almost nothing in subsequent thought has been influenced by arguments and claims found in the second part of the work.
29
�But the whole of Descartes' official defense of dualism is
found in this second part.
In the Third Meditation Descartes turns to God in devising an escape from the threatening prison of solipsistic
consciousness. Few have followed him in his view that the
idea of God is the first for which we are able to know a
corresponding existence. Of empiricist philosophies, only
Berkeley's accords comparable prominence to theological
premises in moving from the flux of immediate
experi~
ence to a more stable independent reality. Empiricism has
generally rejected the uses of theology on which Descartes relies.
The function of Descartes' theology in the Third Meditation is precisely to prepare the ground for the proof of
the existence of material things. The causal argument,
there mounted, claims that the existence of God is implied as a needed causal antecedent both by the existence
of an idea of God and by the subject's possession of that
idea. This reasoning is supplemented in the Fifth Meditation by Descartes' version of the "ontological argument"
for God's existence. The intervening discUssion concerns
the nature of human error and establishes the compatibility of man's imperfection with the conclusion reached in
the Third Meditation: Man's creator is an infinite and perfect God. This is Descartes' highly intellectualized version
of the traditional problem of evil. His solution emphasizes
human freedom and places responsibility for human deficiencies on men themselves, while God is asserted to have
made men capable of correcting all the errors to which
they are susceptible;
This reconciliation of divine perfection and human inadequacy is not original. Saint Augustine presented much
the same argument, although he vigorously rejected optimistic attitudes concerning man's power to correct his
shortcomings. Augustine adverts to the freedom of man
in order to deny God's responsibility for human vices. In
his proof of the existence of a material world and its distinctness from the mental, Descartes exploits an aspect of
the argument never contemplated by Augustine: If God is
absolved from responsibility for human failings only because man is free and, thus, responsible for himself, then,
insofar as man is not free, it should follow that God is
responsible for him. As we shall see, it is just this contrapositive entailment of an earlier solution to the problem
of evil that Descartes invokes in moving from our ineluctable belief in the existence of a material world to the justification of that belief.
The very same pattern-exploitation of an old argument for new ends-recurs in the use of the ontological
argument in the Fifth Meditation. This argument is best
known in the eleventh-century formulation of Anselm of
Canterbury and in the framework of its later rejection by
Thomas Aquinas. Descartes has proved the existence of
God in the Third Meditation. Is another proof added as
reinforcement? No, in the Fifth Meditation, the material
world is Descartes' real objective. The ontological argument serves to focus the discussion on the concept of es-
30
sences that Descartes requires in his subsequent reasoning. The discussion consists in an extended comparison of
our idea of God and our ideas of material things. Both are
construed as formulations of essences. For our purposes,
we can think of an essence as a cluster of characteristics
that define an entity of a certain type. In the case of extended things such as triangles, the investigation of essence
provides answers to the question, What must an existing
thing outside the mind be like if it is to be a triangle?
Then theorems about triangles are said. to be entailments
of the essence of triangles. Such propositions, formulating
geometrical knowledge, do not assert the existence of
anything. In the example considered by Descartes, knowledge of essence yields only an entirely secure but hypothetical statement: If there is actually a triangle
somewhere, then it has an angle-sum of two right angles.
A parallel examination of the essence of God as indicated
by our idea of God reveals, according to Descartes, that
the proposition "God exists" is entailed by this idea, just
as the angle-sum theorem is entailed by the idea of a triangle. Descartes' interest in the ontological argument really
lies in the contrast it affords between the essence of God
that sustains an existence claim and the essence of matter
that does not.
In the last Meditation the existence of material things is
proved via complicated appeals to the known essence of
material things and the now-known existence and character of God. Because his power is infinite, God could have
given us the ideas that we have of material things in our
geometrical thinking and in perceptual experience even
though there were no such material things outside our
thought. He could have planted ideas of external things
directly in our consciousness, or he could have induced
them through some intermediate reality, sufficient for the
production of those ideas, but entirely unlike a material
world. Such possibilities, however, would be inconsistent
with God's infinite goodness. For we have an irresistible
disposition to refer our perceptual ideas to material things
outside us. If no such material things were in fact the
source of those ideas, our disposition would be a systematic misinterpretation of our experience that we could
never correct. Just here Descartes employs the optimistic
principle introduced in the Fourth Meditation: God enables us to correct any errors to which we are susceptible.
This justifies the proposition that there is a material world
which is the source of our perceptual experiences and
which is the nonmental subject matter of which geometrical truths are true.
The dualism which is the final objective of the Meditations now requires only the proposition that bodies and
minds, both of which are known to exist, are also distinct
existences. Descartes argues that, though it may be that
every mind is an embodied mind, minds could exist without bodies and God could have made our conscious minds
just as they are without equipping us with bodies at all.
He seems to regard this appeal to God's power as a
needed premise for the distinctness of minds and bodies.
WINTER 1981
�This is likely to be confusing to his readers. After all, if the
essence of triangles is to be three-sided, and of pentagons,
to be five-sided, then, obviously, existing triangles cannot
be existing pentagons. But Descartes writes as though he
takes seriously the possibility that the thing that is conscious might be a corporeal thing, even though its essence
is consciousness, while the essence of corporeal things is
extension, and even though these are distinct essences.
We notice that the essence: being conscious, does not obviously exclude the essence: being extended, on logical
grounds, as three-sidedness and five-sidedness exclude
one another. But this difference is not the only foundation for Descartes' conviction that further reasoning is
needed.
Prevailing scholastic-Aristotelian conceptions explicated the relationship between mind and body with the
help of a ubiquitous form-matter distinction. Applied to
human existence, the soul is taken by this tradition to be
the form of the body, so that the animated body is a single
substance, and not a composite of soul and body, each
possessing an independent substantial existence. In light
of this doctrine, the immortality of the soul and its survival of the dissolution of the body in death became special problems for scholastic philosophers.
In addition to this tradition, Descartes takes into
consideration common-sense intuitions which make it difficult to think of a person as a mere association of a
spiritual being and some inert clay. In the famous phrase,
he allows that "I am not present in my body merely as a
pilot is present in his ship," 2 and he draws attention to
pains, which are experienced and not merely observed as a
pilot might observe events damaging to his vessel. This intimacy with the corporeal nature of one's own body arises
"from the mind's being united to and, as it were, mixed
up with the body." In a letter to his sometime disciple
Regius, Descartes says that an angel inhabiting a body
would perceive impinging motions but would not feel sensations as we do 3 An angel would be like a pilot in a ship.
In this letter Descartes expresses a confusing vacillation
between the accepted scholastic view that a man is an ens
per se (a substantial unity) and the view that a man is an
ens per accidens (a composite being) which an angel inhabiting a body would be. Descartes' vacillation is partly due
to his desire not to offend other religious thinkers and
authorities needlessly. He recommends qualified endorsement of the prevailing view to Regius as a matter of prudence. But his intellectual uncertainty is also apparent.
Descartes never reaches a satisfactory understanding of
the "mixing" of mind and body in human existence.
Descartes' demonstration of dualism amounts to these
propositions: (1) We have indubitable knowledge of the
existence of ourselves as thinking beings, and of the content of our conscious thought and experience. (2) The
idea of an infinite, perfect, and independent being, which
is the idea of God, is found among our conscious
thoughts. (3) We know that God must exist as the required
cause of the idea of God. (4) Some of our ideas are clear
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
and distinct, and propositions involving clear and distinct
ideas can be known to be true. (The seeming mutual dependence of this and the previous proposition is the foundation of the common charge that Descartes' reasoning is
circular.) (5) Mathematical truths are prominent among
those certified by their clarity and distinctness. (6) Perceptual ideas of sensuous qualities are confused ideas of
things external to our minds. (7) Geometry is clear and distinct thinking about extended things, without the confused sensuous aspect, but with an essential imaginative
component that connects geometry with perception. (8)
The goodness of God assures us that there is an external
world corresponding to and causing our perceptual ideas,
and that this reality exemplifies the truths of mathematics
in the form in which they are imagined in geometry, but
not as represented in perceptual experience. (9) From our
ideas alone we know that the essence of mind is consciousness and the essence of body is extension, and that
these are distinct essences. (10) The power of God certifies the real distinctness of existing minds and bodies,
though the thinking subject's mind is intimately connected
with his body in a way that is not entirely intelligible. (ll)
The distinctness of minds and bodies is confirmed by the
reflection that a mind is an indivisible thing, for example,
there is no such thing as half a mind. Bodies are all essentially divisible.
The striking thing about reactions of Descartes' early
readers to this argument for dualism is that so much of it
is ignored. The standard response to Descartes, one might
say, has been to accept his dualism and to pay little attention to his demonstration of its correctness. The authors
of "Objections" published with the Meditations write as
though Descartes has based his dualism on the first two
Meditations alone. In criticisms addressed to the Second
Meditation, Hobbes and Gassendi, authors of the third
and fifth set of Objections, respectively, both complain
that Descartes has only assumed that the mind is not corporeal.4 In replying, Descartes points out that he did not
claim to have proved the incorporeal status of the mind
until the Sixth Meditation. In the earlier context, where
these materialists find an unsupported assumption of dualism, Descartes merely notes that he can imagine that
there are no material things at all, though he is at the
same time conscious of his own existence. He cannot
imagine that there are not minds for his own conscious~
ness is incompatible with that supposition. Then he says
1
But perhaps it is the case that these very things which I suppose to be nonentities [that is, bodies imagined not to existL
and which are not properly known to me, are yet in reality not
different from the "I" of which I am aware. I do not know and
will not dispute the point. 5
At this point he does not dispute the view that the thinking
thing may be corporeal. It may be the body that thinks.
It is not only the predictably critical materialists who
31
�respond as though Descartes had rested his dualism on
the first two Meditations. The preponderance of readers
incline to look for, and to find, in the first part of the text a
more direct, less ornate argument for the nonmaterial
status of the mind. Then they find this simpler argument
inadequate; but it is not an argument that Descartes has
presented. The "diverse theologians and philosophers"
whose views Mersenne assembled as the second set of
Objections say
ous but still skeptical. Her attention is quite properly
focused on the desperate problem of mind-body interac·
tion that is imposed by the acceptance of dualism. She
writes to Descartes
Up to this point [the Second Meditation] you know that you
These critical reactions are at least partly a conse·
quence of the order of the argument in the Meditations.
We start with assurances about the mind and mental contents. The question at the beginning of the Third Medita·
lion is: What else exists? What is there in addition to this
mental reality? And the answers: God and the material
world naturally seem to be an articulation of further
realities outside the mind. There is an awkward turn of
thought in the reflection that the mind itself might be a
constituent of this further material reality. Managing the
awkward turn of thought, readers come to imagine that it
has eluded Descartes and that he rests his dualism on the
natural presumption of the otherness of body that derives
simply from the skeptical subjective starting point. When
we correct this misinterpretation, however, we are left
only with Descartes' unconvincing theological arguments.
Descartes' demonstration of dualism is, then, inadequate. Empiricists have generally eschewed any religious
foundation for metaphysics, and even the firm believers
among Descartes' first readers and critics found little to
convince them in his theological premises. This is under·
standable. However great our faith, how could we pre·
sume to have so fine a grasp of the implications of the
goodness and power of God as to rest upon it our confi·
dence that outer reality does fit our spatial intuitions and
does not fit our perceptual experiences? The response to
Descartes' argument shows that his premises are less attractive than his conclusions. We cannot avoid asking, Are
there not other reasons for his acceptance of a dualism
that, in itself, has seemed correct to so many philosophers?
are a being that thinks; but you do not know what this thinking thing is. What if it were a body which by its various mo-
tions and encounters produces that which we call thought?
For granted that you rejected the claim of every sort of body,
you may have been deceived in this, because you did not rule
out yourself, who are a body. For how will you prove that a
body cannot think, or that its bodily motions are not thought
itself?6
Even the judicious Antoine Arnauld either ignores or re·
jects out of hand the whole elaborate argument we have
summarized. In his, the fourth set of Objections, Arnauld
says
I can discover no passage in the whole work capable of effecting this proof, save the proposition laid down at the outset: I
can deny that there is any body or that any extended thing exists, but yet it is certain that I exist so long as I make this denial, hence, I am a thing that thinks and not a body, and the
body does not pertain to the knowledge of myself. But the
only result I can see this to give, is that a certain knowledge of
myself be obtained without knowledge of the body. But it is
not yet quite clear to me that this knowledge is complete and
adequate, so as to make me sure that I am not in error in excluding the body from my essence.7
It is true that Descartes does not give any fuller reason
for his contention that the essences of mind and body are
distinct than the clear and distinct separability of these
ideas in our thought. We can suppose all bodies nonexis·
tent but we cannot suppose all minds nonexistent. How·
ever, this is not Descartes' argument for dualism. He
invokes theological premises three times in moving from
this thought-experiment to the conclusion that the mind
is not material. The existence of God is needed to assure
me of the truth of what I think clearly and distinctly, by
ruling out the deceiving-demon hypothesis. The goodness
of God is appealed to in assuring me that my propensity
to refer perceptual ideas to an outer material reality is jus·
tified. Finally, the power of God is cited to certify the dis·
tinction between minds and bodies, however intertwined
their real instances.
Even Descartes' friendliest critics such as Father
Gibieuf and Princess Elizabeth do not find his reason for
the distinction between mind and body satisfactory, and
in their hesitations they pay no attention to theological
niceties. Gibieuf thinks that the claim to have established
the real essence of mind may have been accomplished by
an illegitimate abstraction. 8 Elizabeth's response is gener-
32
The senses teach me that the soul moves the body but neither
they nor the imagination nor the intellect teaches me how.
Perhaps there are properties of the soul unknown to us which
will overturn the conviction of the soul's nonextension which
I acquired from the excellent arguments of your Meditations.9
The Scientific Background
In the Meditations, we are invited to consider the
securely known conscious mind and then to ask, Could
this consciousness turn out to be a corporeal thing? Could
it be the body that thinks? It is instructive to consider a
parallel question that is not represented in the Medita·
tions at all. Suppose that we could, somehow, start from a
secure knowledge of material things and then ask, could
these material things themselves manifest intellectual ac·
tivities and consciousness? Could it be minds that are extended? No such question can arise in the Meditations
because, following the skeptical method, "the mind is
more easily known than the body." 10 These unfamiliar
questions, however, would far better reflect the order of
WINTER 1981
�discovery in Descartes' own attainment of a dualist metaphysics than the artfully organized questions and answers
of the Meditations. He is convinced that matter cannot
possibly think long before he attempts to prove that mind
cannot be extended. It is his scientific thought about the
material world, unencumbered by systematic metaphysics, that is the source of Descartes' conviction that mind
and matter are distinct essences and distinct existences.
The metaphysical doctrines for which he is famous did
not receive any formulation in Descartes' writings and
played no part in his thought for many years after he had
begun systematic study of the physical world. It is easy to
read the philesophy of the Meditations and the Principles
of Philosophy back into Descartes' earlier thought as expressed in his youthful scientific writings, in Le Monde,
and in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Etienne
Gilson's studies of Descartes have done much to correct
this error. 11 In the Discourse on Method, Descartes tells us
that after he had resolved on a life of search for truth and
had begun to construct scientific explanations on the
model of mathematical understanding
... nine years elapsed before I had yet taken any position con·
ceming the difficulties commonly disputed among the
learned or begun to search for the principles of any philosophy more certain than the common variety [plus certaine que
la vulgaire.] 12
Descartes identifies the success of his physical researches with the gradual elimination from his own thinking of a prevailing tendency to ascribe intellectual functions to mere physical things and events. Aristotelian
physical explanations fail, in his opinion, just because
they confuse mental and physical things and they ascribe
mental powers and functions to matter. These are the
scholastic accounts in terms of substantial forms and real
qualities that Descartes attacks in letters to other thinkers.
Writing to de Launay he says
The earliest judgments which we made in our childhood and
the common philosophy later, have accustomed us to attribute to the body many things which belong only to the soul,
and to attribute to the soul many things which belong only to
the body. So people commonly mingle the two ideas of body
and soul when they construct the ideas of real qualities and
substantial forms which I think should be altogether
rejected. 13
And to Princess Elizabeth
... we have hitherto confounded the notion of the soul's
power to act on the body with the power one body has to act
on another. We attributed both powers not to the soul, whose
nature we did not yet know, but to the various qualities of the
body such as weight, heat, etc. We imagined these qualities to
be real, that is to say to have an existence distinct from that of
bodies, and so to be substances, although we called them
qualities. 14
Descartes overcame these confusions by developing a
conception of material things that excludes mind. In his
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
replies to the sixth Objections, offered by anonymous
theologians and philosophers, Descartes says that his own
reasons set out in the Meditations for the view "that the
human mind was really distinct from the body and was
more easily known than it," were not fully persuasive,
even to him, when he first thought of them. He was like
an astronomer who could not stop thinking of the earth as
larger than the sun after possessing demonstrations that it
is much smaller. Then Descartes says that, to reinforce his
assent he "proceeded further," 15 keeping his ideas straight
until
I observed that nothing at all belonged to the nature or
essence of body except that it was a thing with length, breadth
and depth, admitting of various shapes and various motions.
[Such shapes cannot exist apart from the bodies that have
them and, in contrast,] ... colors, odors, savors, and the rest of
such things, were merely sensations existing in my thought,
and differing no less from bodies than pain differs from the
shape and motion of the instrument which inflects it. Finally,
I saw that gravity, hardness, the power of heating, of attracting and of purging, and all other qualities which we experience in bodies consisted solely in motion or its absence,
and in the configuration and situation of their parts. 16
One aspect of dualism emerges here from the concept of
the subjectivity of the sensuous. Descartes reports his appreciation of the fact that a shape cannot exist separately
from the body shaped, while color does not exist in the
shaped body and, therefore, must exist in some other substance. So a nonmaterial mind is implied here as the locus
of secondary qualities which have some reality somewhere but cannot be referred to the physical world. It is
often said that the mind for Descartes is a receptacle for
sensuous characteristics which have been removed from
bodies. There is justice in this interpretation. The last
clause in the quoted passage, however, leads to a deeper
reason for the thesis that the mind is nonmaterial.
l(Gravity, hardness, the power of heating" and other
~~qualities" are prominent in Descartes' examples of spurious scholastic explanations that purport to know about
the substantial forms of things and the real qualities they
contain. Descartes thinks of his own attainment of a far
superior conception of physical objects and events as
conditioned by the rejection of these concepts. The scholastic explanations Descartes discards are those often ridiculed for their vacuousness by later critics: burning wood
heats because the wood contains the power of heating;
opium induces sleep because of its soporific virtue. This
charge of vacuousness is not all Descartes' objection. He
finds the scholastic explanations defective because they
import a psychological dimension into the physical order
where explanation should only be mechanical. Qualities
and substantial forms are psychologically intelligible determinants of change. They are like souls.
Writing to Mersenne in 1643, Descartes says that there
are two principles that need to be established:
33
�The first is that I do not believe that there are in nature any
real qualities, attached to substances and separable from them
by divine power like. so many little souls in their bodies.
[Claims involving such qualities make assertions that we do
not understand, and] . .. the philosophers invented these real
qualities only because they did not think they could otherwise
explain all the phenomena of nature; but I find on the contrary, that these phenomena are better explained without
them.
The second principle is that whatever is or exists remains always in the state in which it is, unless some ulterior cause
changes it. . .. 17
The first principle excludes the psychological from
physics. The second rejects intrinsic causality, and it is
the foundation of Descartes' law of inertia. 18
The two principles of physics Descartes expounds to
Mersenne are closely connected and both focus on the re·
pudiation of mental functions in accounts of physical
change. Real qualities and substantial forms were con·
ceived by the scholastics as self-contained causes of motion, in the general sense in which both qualitative
changes and movements were called motions. If every
change of state (and motion is itself a state for Descartes)
must have some ((ulterior" cause, that is, external cause,
as the second principle requires, then there will be no selfinduced motions to be ascribed to the real qualities and
forms that are rejected by the first principle. But we still
have to ask why it is that Descartes construed the prevailing explanations as psychological and why he says they
amount to projecting "little souls" into material things.
The concept of substantial forms rests on Aristotle's
distinction between form and matter. Any existing entity
must be composed of something and that matter of which
it is composed must have some organization or other making it the particular thing it is,for the same matter has the
potential to figure in the constitution of many different
particular objects. So Aristotle thinks of rna Iter as potentiality which is realized in a particular being by form or
actuality. This pair of metaphysical concepts reflects a
Platonic influence and it was much exploited by medieval
thinkers. Unlike Plato, Aristotle usually says that forms do
not exist by themselves, apart from any matter, any more
than matter exists by itself without being anything in par·
ticular, that is, without any form at all. 19 The real qualities
and substantial forms of scholastic science are derived
from this basic concept of form and matter. To under·
stand them we should appeal to a further Aristotelian distinction between natural objects and artificial colloca·
tions, and to the Aristotelian emphasis on organisms as
the paradigm illustration of existing substances.
A natural entity for Aristotle is precisely one that con·
tains within itself the causal initiative for its own motions
and changes. 20 It is the possession of such self-realizing
potential that makes something into a substantial unity in
the fullest sense. 21 For Aristotle, this concept is the faun·
dation of the difference between artifacts and self-repro·
34
clueing things that are made by men 22 The intrinsically
caused motion that is best illustrated by reproduction
marks an entity as a natural object. Reproduction leads us
immediately to the emphasis on organisms that is characteristic of Aristotle.
We should note, however, especially because it is directly relevant to Descartes' thinking, that natural objects
manifesting natural motions are not confined by Aristotle
nor the scholastic tradition to living things. The down·
ward motion of heavy things toward ·the center of the
universe is a natural motion according to Aristotle. This
coheres with common sense in that one does not have to
do anything to a heavy thing to induce its fall except
remove obstacles. 23 One does not have to remove obstacles and then push the heavy thing downward. It is,
then, as though the push comes from within as part of the
nature of the heavy thing which will be manifested in selfinduced changes when inhibiting forces are removed. In
the same way, light things recede from the center and,
generally, the four elements have their proper places in
the universe, which is where they tend to go. The empirically observed universe has a layered structure, earth
mostly at the center, water for the most part next closest,
and so on. This seems obvious confirmation of the conception of natural motion since it appears that things
have mostly gone where they belong. 24 And Aristotle has a
theory of the transmutation of elements from heavy to
light and from light to heavy, which could account intelligently for the fact that a permanent stasis is not reached 25
Within the setting of this theory of natural motion, to say
that a body is heavy is just to say that it contains within
itself a causal factor that originates motion toward the
center. As we shall see, Descartes' contention that scho·
lastic physical explanations psychologize inanimate material things is especially clearly articulated in connection
with weight and gravitational motion. 26
In Aristotelian thought, the motions and changes that a
thing can induce in itself in virtue of its formal nature are
all construed as realizing an innate potentiality or attaining an objective. Such objectives are ascribed to the ob·
jects that are able to move themselves. The power to initiate motion is thus an intrinsic directedness. The motions
which result from this in-dwelling causal initiative are,
therefore, susceptible to teleological explanations citing
final causes. The natural motion that the contained quality gravity induces is a directed motion toward the place
the heavy object seeks to occupy.
This finalism connects the inanimate physical world
with essentially biological understanding. Gravitational
motion is assimilated to the pattern of explanation that
seems so natural for motions, like those involved in respiration, which have a legible goal in the welfare of the
breathing animal. So the paradigm of a substance is a living organism. The Aristotelian doctrine articulating four
types of explanatory question, usually called the theory of
four causes, can be thought of as an implicit definition of
an individual substance. For a thing that is a true substan·
WINTER 1981
�tial unity, each of the four questions, including the question that calls for a purpose or objective, has an answer.
Physicists as well as biologists investigate final causes of
phenomena. Although in some cases the efficient, final
and material causes collapse into a single factor for Aristotle, finality is never absent from natureP
The various souls that Aristotle finds in plants, animals,
and men are among the forms capable of initiating motions with obvious natural objectives. The organization of
complex organisms is intelligible in terms of hierarchies of
such forms. In De Anima, the rational soul is the highest
form of the body making up a man. It is "the first actuality
of the body," a doctrine taken over by Thomas and other
scholastics." Aristotle considers the possible separate existence of souls, which seems to be excluded by his formmatter conception of individual things. "Suppose the eye
were an animal, sight would have been its soul . .. ". 29 A
sightless eye could exist as a material object with a lower
form, though not really as an eye, while sight could not exist at all without some material embodiment. In a passage
that has reverberations in the Meditations, Aristotle goes
These Aristotelian-scholastic views are the occasion for
Descartes' contention that forms and qualities are like
"little souls" in material objects. The conscious rational
soul of man, in this tradition, is the substantial form of
man. It accomplishes in a consciously articulated way the
initiation of movement toward ends just as substantial
forms and qualities in inanimate objects initiate directed
changes in phenomena like combustion and the fall of
heavy bodies. The heat generated in combustion, as Descartes reads scholastic accounts, is the realization of a con~
tained goal-like potential in the wood. For Descartes, the
production of heat is not the goal of a material object. Nor
is burning a self-caused action in which a piece of wood
can engage. Nothing happens but the turbulent motion of
minute particles, progressively disturbing the stabler
structure of the unburned wood. Heat is merely a subjective feature of our perception of these particle motions,
which are not directed from within the particles that
move. In "La Traite de la Lumiere," tactfully summing up
his rejection of scholastic explanations of combustion,
Descartes says:
on to say
Though another may imagine, if he wishes, that there is in
From this it indubitably follows that the soul is inseparable
from its body, or at any rate that certain parts of it are (if it has
parts)-for the actuality of some of them is nothing but the actuality of their bodily parts. Yet some may be separable because they are not the actualities of any bodies at all. Further
we have no light on the problem of whether the soul may not
be the actuality of the body in the sense in which the sailor is
the actuality of the ship.3o
I want to emphasize that, in Aristotle's thinking, souls
are like the qualities gravity, heat, and attraction in that
they are originative causes of motion and change. Intrinsic causal agency is found in gravitational fall, in the
growth of plants, in the locomotion of animals, and in consciously directed human actions. Behavior-directing factors which are mental by Descartes' criterion are, for Aris~
totle, sophisticated versions of the same inner determina~
tion of motion that is manifested by heavy objects.
The Aristotelian model of explanation, invoking forms
as causes of motion, was accepted by the scholastic thinkers to whom Descartes reacts. 31 In scholastic terminology,
forms are qualified as substantial not because they are
thought to be independent substances. Substantial form
contrasts with accidental form. The substantial form of a
thing comprises its essential nature. Accidental forms
have the same status as intrinsic causes of change, al~
though possession of them is inessential:
... [T]he substantial form differs from the accidental form in
this, that the accidental form does not make a thing to be absolutely, but to be such, as heat does not make a thing to be
absolutely but only to be hot. 32
An existing thing could lack an accidental form that it has
and yet remain what it is. Accidental forms include the
real qualities that Descartes repudiates.
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
this wood the Form of fire, the Quality heat, and the Action
which burns it, as entirely distinct constituents, for my part,
since I am afraid of error if I posit anything more than what I
see must be there, I content myself with conceiving in it only
the movement of its parts. 33
The burning wood manifests only externally caused motions of particles. The realization of self-contained potentialities and the attainment of objectives, which do characterize actions of minds, are absent in combustion.
In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes says that he finds
"final causes to be wholly useless in physics," 34 for the reason that the purposes of an infinite Divinity are largely
opaque to men. But his scientific investigations have
given him a more fundamental reason for excluding finalism. He actually finds teleological explanations defective
even in cases where our assessment of purposes and ends
is quite correct.
This rule-that we should never argue from ends-should be
carefully heeded. For. .. the knowledge of a thing's purpose
never leads us to knowledge of the thing itself: its nature remains just as obscure to us. Indeed, this constant practice of
arguing from ends is Aristotle's greatest fault. 35
For example, when we rightly understand that the heart
beats in order to circulate the blood, we do not thereby
know anything at all about what makes it beat as it does.
We still need a causal explanation that purpose does not
provide or even suggest.
Descartes' most instructive criticisms of mental con~
cepts in physics concern weight and gravitational motion.
He portrays the evolution of his own thought about gravity as a gradual emancipation from a universal propensity
to mind-matter confusions traceable to childhood inter-.
pretations of experience:
35
�... I noticed that from infancy I had passed various judgements about physical things, for example, judgements which
contributed much to the preservation of the life I was then
entering; and I had afterwards retained the same opinions
which I had before conceived touching these things .... [And
although the mind was at the time] conscious of its own
nature and possessed of an idea of thought as well as extension, nevertheless, having no intellectual knowledge, though
at the same time it had an imagination of something, it took
them both to be one and the same and referred all its notions
of intellectual matters to the body. 16
The primitive theory of childhood springs from the intimate connection between phenomena and the conditions
for our survival as organisms. Sensations of pleasure and
pain succeed in the function of assuring survival precisely
through our inclination to identify pleasurable and painful sensations with the outer objects that stimulate them.
As a consequence of this biologically useful merging of
physical cause and mental effect we naturally develop a
mentalistic conception of physical reality.
Reconstructing his own intellectual biography, Descartes explains how the scholastic-Aristotelian explanation of the fall of heavy bodies springs from this childhood
imputation of "intellectual matters to the body." Gravity,
conceived as a real quality, is the self-contained cause of
motion in a heavy thing. This quality is a soul-like constituent, in the first instance, because it cannot be located inside the heavy thing as a part can be, just as the conscious
mind of a man initiates his movements but is not locatable
in some particular place within his body. The soul is able
to focus all its causal efficacy at a single point and so, too,
the formal quality "gravity" can exercise its causal force at
a point. In the case of the efficacy of the soul at a point,
Descartes means that, in the transition from intention to
behavior, a single part of the body can be moved in a particular way while the rest is unaffected. The heavy body
seems to mimic this in that, wherever a rope is attached,
all of the contained gravity acts at that one point "as if the
gravity resided in the part along which the rope touched
and was not diffused through the others." 37
Descartes' physics, however, rejects the concept of gravity as a space-filling quality of body that can act at a point.
Effectiveness at any selected point remains the right idea
when we are thinking about the operation of minds in
bodies that do have minds: "Indeed it is in no other way
that I now understand mind to be coextensive with body,
the whole in the whole and the whole in any of its
parts." 38
Descartes finds the most telling evidence of a confused
assignment of mental functions to matter in the alleged
directedness of gravitational movement.
The chief sign that my idea of gravity was derived from that
which I had of the mind, is that I thought that gravity carried
bodies toward the center of the earth as if it contained some
knowledge of this center within it. For it could not act as it did
without knowledge, nor can there be any knowledge except in
the mind. At the same time I attributed also to gravity certain
36
things which cannot be understood to apply to the mind in
the same sense; as, e.g., that it is divisible, measurable, etcYJ
In other words, the internal source of motion must be
understood within the scholastic explanation, not only as
an agency capable of inducing movements that express
the whole power of the inner cause at any one point in
the body, but also the inner agency must know where the
center is from the place the heavy body happens to occupy. Given a spherical universe, heavy bodies may reside
in any direction whatever from the center. It follows that
the same quality, gravity, is able to induce motions in one
body in any direction whatever. A body will move in a certain direction along a straight line through the center of
the universe, if it is on one side of the center, and it will
move in exactly the opposite direction along that same
line, if it is on the other side. How does this inner determinant manage to cause diametrically opposed motions?
The supposition that it does requires that the inner causal
factor be able to discriminate from one another the positions a body may occupy relative to the center. By analogy, a bird's nest is its natural place, and a bird is able to
and does move toward that nest, if the obstacles are not
too great. But this ability would be quite unintelligible if
we were not willing to ascribe to the bird something like
knowledge of the location of the nest. It would be unintelligible just because the ability imputed is a plastic disposition that issues in variously directed flight, depending on
the relative positions of bird and nest. It is not a brute tendency to move in some set way. Thus, the theory of
natural place and natural motion, widely accepted by such
prominent scholastic scientists as John Buridan and Albert of Saxony, does interpret gravity on a pattern suitable
for animal and human behavior that exhibits discrimination and intelligence. 4<l
In the last analysis, Descartes assigns even the intelligent performances of birds and all other nonrationalliving
things to the world of mindless mechanical interactions. A
man knows where his home is, and his knowledge together with his conscious control of his own movement
does indeed explain his homecomings at the end of the
day. The explanatory schema here, however, is grossly
misapplied, Descartes believes, in accounts of free fall,
and it is misapplied in accounts of the behavior of brutes
as well.
The uncompromising segregation of human actions
which do support psychological explanations and animal
behavior which does not is simply the consistent workingout of the implications of the rejection of mental factors
in elementary phenomena such as gravitational fall. The
essence of mind is consciousness. Where there is no consciousness, mind-like functions have no footing in scientific explanation. The deeply rooted inclination that we
possess to read psychological activities into nature is most
obvious in our thinking about animals that share so much
with us from the point of view of physiology. Even this almost irresistible psychologizing is the elaboration of the
WINTER 1981
�confused thinking of childhood wherein the inner conscious affective and sensuous representation is hopelessly
mixed up with the outer things that are both the causes
and the objects of the ideas that we have in perception.
Descartes adheres firmly to the view that physiology is
just mechanical physics applied to intricate structures and
elaborately organized functions that are found on a very
small scale in living things.
Contemporary materialist philosophers of mind rely on
the complexity of the brain and the nervous system to
lend plausibility to their hypothesis that neural events
may be identical with conscious experiences and thoughts.
No simple. working of levers and gears could produce a
feeling. But, perhaps, somehow, the billions of nerve cells,
each with its delicate electrical activity, interconnected in
hierarchical networks, containing a world of feedback
mechanisms, graspable as a maze of information chan~
nels, controls, dampers, and amplifiers-pei-haps mere
physical activity at this level, still dimly, partially, and provisionally understood, can amount to conscious thought.
Descartes is unattracted by this kind of speculation. He
was deeply impressed by physiology, and his visionary program for a physiological psychology in The Passions of the.
Soul is in the spirit of contemporary neurophysiology
even though the details of Descartes' neural science are
now but picturesque misconceptions. He is never tempted,
however, by the hypothesis of mind-brain identity. Complex physical events are only physical events.
This intuitive conviction that the intricacy of the physical cannot convert it into consciousness was well expressed
by Leibniz. In the Monadology, he suggests that the
microscopic size of things in the nervous system gives a
spurious aura of feasibility to materialism. But if the
mind-machine were enlarged to the size of a mill we could
enter it and would "find only parts which work upon one
another, and never anything by which to explain a perception [that is, a conscious experience.]" 41
Descartes' rejection of materialist conceptions of mind
rests on his conviction that his own gains in understand~
ing have been possible only because he has eliminated a
mental aspect from even the subtlest physical activities.
La Description du Corps Humain begins with the theme
of self-knowledge. Man's understanding of himself should
extend to anatomy and physiology and not only to the
moral dimensions of human existence. From this self-
study Descartes envisions unlimited practical results for
medicine in the cure and prevention of disease, and even
the retarding of old age. But these results will be forthcommg
... only if we have studied enough to understand the nature
of our own body and do not attribute in any way to the mind
the functions which depend only on the body and on the disposition of its organs. 42
Again Descartes cites patterns of thought developed in
childhood as an obstacle to understanding. We know we
have conscious control of some bodily movements and,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
therefore, we incline to ascribe a mental principle to all
the others. Ignorance of anatomical structure and the mechanics of physiology permits us to extend the psychological explanatory idiom to the motions of the heart, the
arteries, and digestive organs, ''though these, containing
no thought, are only bodily movements." 43 One body is
moved by another, not by anything non bodily. Where we
do not consciously experience the dependence of
move~
ment on the mind, we should not ascribe it to the mind.
... [A]nd even the movements that are called voluntary proceed principally from the disposition of the organs, since they
cannot be excited without those bodily dispositions, whatever
volitions we may have, even though it is the mind that determines thern. 44
The physiology of bodily movements, then, reveals that
even for movements under the control of the will, physical effects must have physical causes. Here the question
of a final reconciliation of a thoroughgoing mechanical
viewpoint with mental control is left open.
La Description will try to explain, Descartes says, "the
machine of our body" and to show that we have no more
reason to ascribe its physiological workings to a soul than
we have to impute a soul to a clock. 45 A clock plainly has
no soul, although its inner workings and outer behavior
are elaborately organized in ways that reflect the intelligence of its maker and the human objectives in its use.
These relationships to conscious mental activities are not,
in the case of a clock, the occasion for a confused imputa-
tion of thinking to the mechanism itself. But it is just this
confusion to which we are susceptible when we think
about the workings of an animal's body or our own.
Descartes' lifelong interest in automata, 46 clever prod-
ucts of engineers devised for the amusement of kings, provides him with another telling analogy with which to
expose the error of mentalistic explanations in physiology.
Automata seem to react to stimuli, to have goals, and,
generally, to move as though directed by a contained intellect. A naive spectator will actually believe that a mechanically operating automaton is guided by some kind of
conscious appreciation of the environment, and that it
manifests a will of its own and thought-out responses.
When we understand that such things are accomplished
by cleverly rigged magnets, or gears, or hydraulic valves
the illusion of mental control vanishes. 47 Descartes believes that the appearance of a mental element in the
natural machines that are animal and human bodies is just
as much an illusion, although it is much more difficult to
dispel.
The finest and most consistent expression of a mechanical conception of human physical existence extending to
all of the inner. and outer manifestations of mind appears
at the end of the posthumously published fragments of Le
Monde. Descartes has exploited throughout the book a
curious rhetorical device that is both prudential and intellectually liberating. He expressly offers, not an explanatory picture of our "world" and the human race to which
37
�we actually belong, but, instead, the complete science of
an imaginary world located somewhere in the reaches of
extension far from our skies.48 Suns and planets are
· formed by an evolutionary process commencing from an
initial chaos from which everything develops in strict obedience to permanent laws of motion. Living things and
the analogs of men, in this imagined world, come into existence in the same way. In the "Traite de L'homme",
these are "men of clay whom God has made to be as like
us as possible."49 Descartes does ascribe a mental constitution to these umen". Like US 1 they have ideas, appetites,
passions, and memories. The physical aspect of their existence is absolutely mechanical and wholly explicable
without any appeal to a mental constitution. Insofar as
Descartes believes that we are in fact such men, he
ascribes to us, here, a complete physiology without mindbody interaction.
I would like you to suppose that all the functions I have attributed to this machine, such as the digestion of food, the pulse
in the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the
members, wakefulness and sleep; the reception of light, of
sounds, or odors, of heat and similar qualities, by the external
organs of sense; the impression of ideas from them on the
organ of common sense50 and of imagination, the retention or
engraving of these ideas in the memory; the interior movements of appetites and of passions; and finally the exterior
movements of all the members, which are so well suited both
to the action of objects presented to the senses and to iriner
passions, that they imitate as perfectly as possible those of a
true man: I say I would· like you to consider that these functions follow entirely naturally in this machine, from the mere
disposition of its organs, neither more nor less than the movements of a clock or other automatoh follow from the disposition of its counter weights and wheels; so that there can be no
reason at all to conceive in it any other vegetative soul, nor
sensitive soul, nor any other principle of movement and of life
than its blood and its spirits, excited by the heat of the fire
which burns continually in its heart, and which is of no other
nature than all the fires which burn in inanimate bodies. 51
Of course, Descartes does not mean that the workings
of the human body do not show any indisputable marks of
mind and intelligence at all. God is responsible for the
constitution of men and his workmanship manifests a
standard of creative intelligence that no engineer can approach. The human body reflects, therefore, the mind of
God, but in the creation of the body-machine God has utilized only extended particles interacting according to
fixed laws. From this point of view, all of the motions of
the human body, molar and microscopic, including all
those that go into voluntary actions, have their sufficient
physical causes. Only this exceptionless principle could
justify the corresponding claim that no motions of the
"men" of Le Monde require explanations that invoke a
mental function.
Descartes drew back from this wholly mechanical man.
He mars the consistency of his insight by allowing a
38
unique locus of mind-body interaction in the pineal
gland. In this tiny gland, the animal spirits, which are the
most rarefied blood-like constitutent of the nervous
system, are affected by the mind. Descartes invokes the
fragile support of the fact that the pineal gland is not double and is, to that extent, a plausible site for a central integration of the functions of the many dual parts of the
sensory system and brain. 52 The animal spirits are only
deflected by mental influence, according to Descartes' aC:
count, so that the total quantity of motion of physical
things can remain constant.
Had Descartes retained the rigorously consistent view
he formulated at the end of Le Monde, he might have been
led to abandon the concept of a substantial mind altogether. The idea of deflection of the animal spirits re·
quires a quasi-physical influence and leads at once to a
"paramechanical" conception of mind. 53 And the interac-
tion creates a fundamentally unintelligible leakage from
the self-sufficient sphere of physical activity. Mental deflection of particles, however subtle they may be, violates
a crucial feature of a mechanical system like that which
Descartes' physical universe is supposed to comprise.
This is expressed by later science as violation of the conservation of energy. If nonphysical agencies can cause any
movement or deflection at all, that movement or deflection could, for example, compress a spring or raise a
weight, thus causing an increase in total energy. Defects
in his understanding of force leave Descartes without an
appropriate concept of energy in terms of which he might
have grasped this criticism. However, his limitation of the
supposed influence of the mind to deflections that leave
"the quantity of motion" unchanged reveal Descartes'
own qualms concerning the compatibility of conservation
and mind-body interaction. His clear grasp of inertia, requiring uniform motion in a straight line, should have but
did not reinforce those qualms considerably.
But for the pineal gland Descartes' dualism would have
a very different force. The tendency of his total scientific
effort is the elimination of mental direction as a factor in
explanations of physical changes and motions. Beliefs,
acts of will, desires, and intentions do not move parts of
the body any more than an inner quality, gravity, moves a
heavy thing, or inner self-realizing heat creates changes in
a piece of wood. Of course, we are left with the fact that
men do act, execute their intentions, and gratify their
desires.
The uncompromised vision at the end of the "Traite de
L'homme" rejects the idea that the relationship between
psychological explanations of human behavior and physical explanations of the motion of bodily parts can be expressed as any kind of interaction between substances.
Beliefs, desires, and the like, figuring in psychological accounts, are not physical causes and only physical causes
can move material objects. All motions, even of "the
blood and the spirits" have sufficient physical causes
although we do not have a complete account of these
physiological events. "No other principle of movement" is
WINTER 1981
�required, not in the case of a man's body any more than in
the case of an automaton.
For myself, apart from the outmoded scientific details, I
think this view of bodily motions is correct. The right way
of capturing intellectually the relationship of mental concepts and physical events is at present the subject of
scientific investigation and of unsettled philosophical
reflection. At present, a materialist philosophy of mind
that identifies beliefs and desires with neural states and
processes is dominant. Like the theory of the pineal gland,
this contemporary materialism assigns a causal role to
mental things. For Descartes' paramechanical events materialism substitutes a frankly physicalist interpretation of
mental functioning. The theory gets undeserved support
from association with the sophisticated physiology and
anatomy that has replaced Descartes' curious conceptions
of the facts. As far as I can see, materialists have not offered anything at all to make it intelligible that a physical
occurrence in the brain can be a belief, or a desire, or a
thought. 54
There is a strange irony in the mechanical perspective
on the body expressed in Le Monde. It is as though we
start wanting to know how a certain miracle occurs the
miracle of mental control of movements in the physical
world. How does a desire and a belief move a hand? We
know that muscles, not thoughts, move hands. Nervous
impulses, not desires, move muscles. The ironic explanation of the miracle that Descartes reaches, at least on this
occasion, is that the miracle does not occur. Beliefs and
desires and other mental things simply cannot be attached
to motions as their causes. The same irony appears in
Descartes' account of the miracle of vision. How do we
manage to get a conscious picture of the external world
through the organs of sense? In the Optics Descartes explains what happens when we see, invoking as a helpful
analogy a blind man feeling his way with a stick! Descartes
particularly wants to reject the idea that "intentional
species," which scholastic philosophers took to be tiny images, leap into the eye and somehow migrate to an inner
center of conscious reception. He interprets the transmission of light as a kind of pressure which does not involve
the entrance of anything into the eye, 55 just as pressures
in the blind man's stick do not involve a flow of things
through the stick and then into the hand. This is the
thinking that lies behind the Second Meditation when
Descartes says
1
1
But it must be observed that perception of the wax is not
sight, not touch, not imagination; nor was it ever so though it
formerly seemed to be; it is a purely mental contemplation . ... 56
In other words the miracle of real contact with outer reality does not occur at all. So vision is like blindness and
mental control is really automatism.
These understandings would be grotesque but for their
profound appreciation of the idea that elements in our
discourse about conscious experience are not to be iden1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tified with stages in physiological processes. The positive
thesis that Descartes adopts is unsatisfactory. Because he
thinks of the mind as a second substance with its own independent footing in reality, he is left with a "two-worlds"
view and the quagmire of unintelligible interaction that
leads to bizarre Occasionalism or idealist elimination of
the physical world altogether. Although he rightly rejects
confused interpretation of mental discourse that assigns it
physical referents, Descartes precipitates these difficulties because he posits an inevitably mysterious nonphysical mind.
The question remains, why did Descartes construct the
metaphysical proofs presented in the Meditations which
reflect the true foundations of his thinking so inadequately? There is a strand of reserve and secrecy in Descartes' writing. As a young man, Descartes described
himself with some aptness as entering on the stage of public life masked like an actor, so that his audience will not
see his true state of mind. 57 He intentionally published his
geometry in a form difficult to follow lest others, grasping
his discoveries too easily, claim to have possessed them already. He was always concerned about the reception of
his scientific innovations by religious authorities. He withheld the publication of Le Monde upon hearing of the
condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition. He always organized his presentations as prudently as he could. His life
and letters show an exceptional desire for privacy and
avoidance of embroiling controversy. Leibniz and others
complain that he conceals the sources of his ideas which
often contain unacknowledged influence of the writings
of others. The first concern of Descartes as a writer is not
the artless expression of his personal thought.
Descartes, however, certainly did believe that the
many-sided insights of scientific works needed a coherent
metaphysical foundation to replace the discarded Aristotelianism. The theological turn of his arguments rests on
sincere religious commitment. Furthermore the metaphysical arguments do involve as their first stage the articulation of the subjective point of view, which has great
power and from which the metaphysical arguments are
mounted with a certain naturalness. It is worth emphasizing that this systematic subjectivism is not part of the context of scientific investigation for Descartes. Egocentric
skepticism is absent from the methodology of the Rules.
There is no hint of the method of doubt or of the phenomenological resolution of doubt by the cogito argument in
the scientific work presenting the findings that motivate
Descartes' dualism.
Finally, the metaphysical demonstrations constitute a
conservative and backward-looking project for Descartes,
relative to the progressive content of his scientific
thought. The crucial arguments are reconstructions and
new employments of ideas taken over from existing traditions. Starting from the cogito argument, the Meditations
are full of Saint Augustine. The ontological argument is
Anselm's. In discussing causes that contain the reality of
their effects ''eminently" versus "formally", Descartes is
1
39
�employing traditional scholastic distinctions. 58 The concepts of essence and existence, as Descartes employs
them, are taken over from Saint Thomas and Aristotle.
None of this battery of terms, concepts, and arguments
appear in the scientific contexts that really motivate Des·
cartes' dualism.
We can see the late metaphysical works as a restatement
in which Descartes tries to connect his radical conclusions
to existing traditions of thought. This understanding does
not confer any greater merit on the tortured theology of
the official proofs of dualism. I should say that the influence of dualism, which is certainly not due to these arguments, rests, first, on the appeal of the subjective starting
point of the Meditations and, second, on a rough, wide-
spread, frequently unstated appreciation of the tendency
of Descartes' scientific thinking which I have tried to describe here.
Conclusions
The philosophical issues to which Descartes' dualism is
addressed are still at the center of metaphysics and epistemology. In contrast, the relevance of Cartesian science
diminished rapidly following the appearance of Newton's
superior theories. Descartes has retained prestige as a
mathematician, although his mathematical work is read
chiefly by historians. But Descartes' metaphysical writings have always been studied, and they have exerted a
decisive influence on modern thought, especially through
Berkeley, Locke, and Hume. It is Cartesian metaphysics,
separated from the context of scientific thought, that has
influenced empiricism.
In assessing Descartes' dualism we should restore its sci-
entific setting. We should also ignore the deficiencies of
his outmoded conceptions. This does not mean only that
we should overlook Descartes' beliefs that a fire burns in
the heart and that animal spirits are a rarified form of
blood. More important, we have to ignore his limited conception of physical objects and his reduction of physical
events to motions and impacts among particles. Even his
idea of causality ill fits contemporary physics wherein
The seeming difficulty is clear. If mental things like
beliefs and desires are not physical causes, and if only
such causes can account for physical changes and motions, then what is the connection between beliefs and
desires and human actions to which beliefs and desires are
patently relevant? Under the pressure of this question,
Descartes allowed an exception to his otherwise rigorous
mechanism, a unique channel connecting two metaphys-
ically incommensurable worlds, namely, the pineal gland.
This is a mistake. The mistake is engendered by a
substance-conception of mind. Descartes patterns his
thinking about mental concepts on material things and
events, as though, by somehow subtracting materiality,
we arrive at nonmaterial things and events. This kind of
thinking is encouraged by the methodological outlook of
the Meditations. We are more or less forced to conceive of
the mental as a realm of things and events. The phenomenological perspective seems to certify the reality of mental goings-on, and then raises the question: What is all
this? By this we mean: What is the metaphysical status of
mental things, the existence of which is assured? When
the materialist identification is rejected, mental things
and events necessarily appear to be another kind of reality.
Then the problem of interaction is generated and Descartes' compromise, so destructive of his principle insight,
is motivated_
We have to ask: What is a conception of mentality that
does not generate a second realm of things and then lead
to the hopeless problem of interaction? This question
from Descartes' perspective is, What are we to make of
the phenomenology of the Second Meditation, if we
neither identify mental things with neural things nor posit
any substantial res cogitans. It is helpful here to focus on
truth where Descartes focuses on reality. The thinking
subject, tentatively repudiating all empirical knowledge,
finds that his own beliefs and desires, as such, are not
jeopardized. Though the outer world may all be illusion,
he believes, for example, that he is in a room with an open
fire, and he desires to warm himself. Belief and desire arc
thus insulated from empirical skepticism. Descartes reads
this, in the idiom of realities, as demonstrating the ex-
istence of certain things (ideas in the mind) or the occurrence of certain events (thinking). Though there may be
causal relations are expressed in equations that do not
break up reality into discrete consecutive events. Let us
no firelit room, my believing-that-there-is is something
just imagine all of Descartes' old-fashioned ideas replaced
by some up-to-date conception of the physical world. We
want a conception that is free of psychological and teleological ideas. We do use such a conception of physical
this mode of expression we can retain the insights of the
subjective point of view by saying that "I believe I am in a
reality in our thinking and it corresponds to, in fact it is
the heir of, Descartes' mechanical universe of extended
particles.
Given such a conception of the physical world, I believe
that Descartes is right to exclude explanations that introduce nonphysical factors as causes of physical events.
He is also right to refuse a materialist reduction of the
mind to the body. The joint assertion of mechanism and
rejection of mind-brain identity can appear paradoxical.
40
that does exist, and my desiring does occur. Abandoning
firelit room" and "I want to warm myself by the fire" are
true, and these truths are independent of the existence of
the room and the fire. Though these subjective reports
are true, what their truth implies about realities is not obvious. In particular, it is not obvious that believing and
desiring are things that are present in, or go on in men.
Elsewhere I have argued that any account of belief that
identifies believing with an inner something, whether material or nonmaterial, cannot be correct. 59 At the least, reflection on mental concepts creates serious questions
WINTER 1981
�about the unargued-for interpretation of these concepts
in terms of inner realities, that is, the inter¢retation that
Descartes shares with contemporary mind-brain materialism. If this interpretation is set aside, we can try to
overcome the illusion that mental states must be identified with brain states lest they be identified with states
of some unscientific and intrinsically mysterious nonmaterial mind. This illusion is one of the pillars of mindbrain materialism.
In the "Conversation with Burman," Descartes is close
to the kind of understanding I recommend here. Explanations that state the purpose for which things take place do
not give a causal account even if the claim about purpose
is correct 60 Applied to psychology, Descartes' insight
amounts to this: We ask a man why he has done something, fired a gun, for example. The answer tells us that he
desired something (to scare the birds away from his field)
and that he believed something (that firing the gun would
scare away the birds.) So a combination of a desire and a
belief explains the action by displaying the purpose of the
behavior explained. If Descartes is right, however, this
leaves untouched all physical questions of the form: What
caused this object to move? And is it not clear that Descartes is right? Assuming the correctness of the psychological explanation, we know the man's intention and
the point of his behavior. But none of this sheds light on
causes of the movement of his finger on the trigger, any
more than it sheds light on causes of the movement of tlie
·
bullet in the gun barrel.
There is something naive in the idea that a man's believings and wantings are states and events inside him that
are capable of moving parts of his body, as contracting
muscles can move fingers and expanding gases can move
bullets. It would be preposterous to say that "wanting to
scare birds" might directly cause the motion of a bullet.
Nor could wanting something directly cause the motion
of a finger. As Descartes puts it, motions of fingers depend on "the disposition of the organs", which means
that there are physical events and conditions in the nerves
and muscles which explain the motion of the finger.
These physical causes are certainly not what is referred to
as "wanting to scare birds." When we are subject to materialist inspiration, we are tempted to place the causal efficacy of mental things further along in remote neural
stretches of the sequence of physical events. "Wanting to
scare birds" then becomes a posited neural cause, the immediate effect of which also has to be posited. A vague
sense of the fabulous complexity of the brain helps us to
imagine that this transaction that would be preposterous
out in the open is easily accomplished in the nervous
system. But, in fact, "wanting to scare birds" does not
belong anywhere in a sequence of causally intelligible motions of things. Nor are wantings spiritual occurrences.
We must formulate the truth-conditions for "He wanted
to scare the birds" without making wanting into any occurrence at all.
The difference between the Cartesian theory of the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
pineal gland and the materialist theory is that the materialist asserts that the relevant mental things are
themselves physical states and events. He does this precisely to make them eligible as causes of motions while
saving the principle: physical motions must have physical
causes. That is the principle that Descartes adopts and
also compromises. But the trouble with mental things as
candidate causes is not just their vexed metaphysical
standing. From the point of view of physics "knowledge
of a thing's purpose never leads to knowledge of the thing
itself."" Here, knowledge of the thing itself means knowledge of the causes of physical changes. Beliefs and desires
explain actions in terms of purposes and goals. As Descartes believed, these explanations, even if they are correct, leave all questions of physics unanswered.
Translations are from the English"language versions cited in these
notes. Wherever there is no English reference the translations are mine.
No references are given for well-known themes of the Meditations except where passages are quoted. For my general understanding of Descartes I am much indebted to other writers and most indebted to
Etienne Gilson.
The following abbreviations are used in these notes:
AT I-XI C. Adam, and P. Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, Nouvelle
presentation, Paris 1964.
HR I-II E. S. Haldane, and G. R. T. Ross, The Philosophical Works of
Descartes, London 1911.
AG
E. Anscombe, and P. Geach, Descartes: Philosophical Writings, London 1964.
K
A. Kenny, Descartes' Philosophical Letters, London 1970.
*'*
l. This subtitle appears first in the second Latin edition, 1642; HR I,
144; AT VII, xxi.
2. AG 117. See also note 30.
3. January 1642, AT III, 491; K 127-8.
.
4. For Hobbes' view, HR II, 61; for Gassendi's, HR II, 142. Descartes'
replies: HR II, 63, and 211.
5. AG 69.
6. HR II, 25.
7. HR II, 83.
8. K 123: AT Ill, 474.
9. K 144.
10. The LJhrase is part of the title of the Second Meditation.
11. See Etudes sur le rOle de la pensee medievale dans la formation du
systeme Cartesien, esp. zeme pt., 1.
12. Discours, Ill, AT VI, 30; P. Olscamp, Discourse etc., Indianapolis
1965, 25.
13. July 22, 1641, K !09; AT III, 420.
14. May 21, 1643, K 139; AT III, 667.
15. "Postquam autem ulterius perrexi ... ,"AT VIII, 440; HR II, 253.
This suggests a temporal order in Descartes' thinking that cannot be
taken literally.
16. HR 11, 253-4.
17. April26, 1643, K 135-6; AT III, 648-49.
18. Compare Principles, pt. 2, art. 37: "The first law of nature: that each
thing as far as in it lies, continues always in the same state; and that
which is once moved always continues so to move." Art. 39 asserts that
"all motion is of itself in a straight line." HR I, 267. For an illuminating
account of Descartes' concept of inertia and its influence on Newton,
see A. Koyre, "Newton and Descartes," in his Newtonian Studies, Cambridge 1965,69-76.
19. Metaphysics, Z, 8, l033a-4a. But compare L, 4, 1070a. 'I'his passage
seems to allow a possible exception in the separate existence of the
41
�forms of natural beings and, in particular, of the rational soul of man.
The same kind of suggestion is made at H, 2, l043b, "Whether the substance of destructible things can exist apart is not yet at all clear; except
that obviously this is impossible in some cases; e.g., a house or a utensil.
Perhaps, indeed, neither of these things themselves, nor any of the
other things which are not formed by nature, are substances at all; for
one might say that the nature in natural objects is the only substance to
be found in destructible things," W. D. Ross, Oxford 1908. It must be
noted that Aristotle speaks here of forms by themselves as "substances."
On this confusing alternative usage he does not apply the term to composites of form and matter, although this is commonly his practice
elsewhere. 'At 1070b-la, Aristotle states flatly, "Some things can exist
apart and some cannot, and it is the former that are substances." These
passages very much conform to the conception of soul-like separable
constituents, capable of causing motions in things of which they are
forms, that is, the very conception that Descartes ascribes to the
scholastics and then rejects.
20. Metaphysics, H, 3, 1043a-b.
2l. Metaphysics, H, 6, 1045a-b.
22. Physics, I, A, 1, l93a.
23. On the Heavens, Bk. I, 1, 7-8, 276a-b; and Bk. 3, 2, 300a.
24. On the Heavens, Bk. 1, l, 8.
25. On the Heavens, Bk. 3, 7, 314b-6b, and On Generation and Corruption, Bk. 2, 4, 33la-2a.
26. Holders of the sort of view to which Descartes refers are not limited
to Aristotle and the Schoolmen of the thirteenth century and later who
were so deeply affected by the rediscovery of Aristotle's works. Even
Saint Augustine voices both the idea that heavy things are directed to
goal-like natural places by their weight, and the idea that this activity of
heavy bodies resembles human desire-guided behavior. Augustine says,
"Our body with its lumpishness [Augustine has merely 'corpus pondere']
strives towards its own place. Weight makes not downward only, but to
his own place also. All things pressed by their own weight go towards
their proper places ... Things a little out of their places become unquiet.
Put them in their order again and they are quieted. My weight is my
love. By that I am carried wheresoever I be carried." Confessions, Bk. 13,
Ch. 9; trans. W. Watts, London 1912, 391.
27. Physics, Bk. 2, 3_~nd 7.
28. Physics, Bk. 2, 1, 4l2a-b; and Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q 76, a 4.
29. De Anima, Bk. 2, 1, 412a-b; trans. J. A. Smith.
30. De Anima, 413 3 • I take this to be the precedent for Descartes' pilotship analogy in the Sixth Meditation.
31. Gilson shows that these doctrines are prominent in the manuals
from which Descartes was taught as a boy at La Fleche. See Etudes, 155
and 161 n. For a full survey of the Aristotelian concept of form and substantial form in patristic, scholastic, and Renaissance thought, see
"Form und Materie," in Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, ed. J.
Ritte<, Basell971, Vol. 2, 978-1015.
32. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q 76, a 4, Dominican trans.
33. Le Monde, AT XI, 7. See also Gilson's discussion of this passage,
Etudes, 152-53.
34. AG 94.
42
35. Descartes' Conversation with Burman, J. Cottingham, London 1976,
19.
36. HR II, 254. The view that self-preservation is the biological function
of our confused experience of pleasure and pain is also presented in the
Sixth Meditation, without reference to the inadequate theories that
Descartes thinks this confusion tends to promote. HR I, 197.
37. HR II, 255.
38. HR II, 255.
39. HR II, 255.
40. See Crombie, A.C., Medieval and Early Modern Science, New York
1959, Vol. 1, 128, and Vol. 2, 46 and 68ff. Crombie also reports medieval
theories involving natural place influenced by Plato's Timaeus and
incorporating the on-Aristotelian notion of multiple worlds (no one
center) such as that of Nicolas of Cusa. Such accounts are part of the
historical background of Descartes' vortex theory of planetary motion.
Insofar as these alternative medieval cosmologies accepted some version
of the idea of natural motion, they are simply further illustrations of
what Descartes took to be a universal error.
41. Art. 17, Latta, R., The Monadology etc., Oxford 1898,228. Latta also
quotes Leibniz's "Commentatio de Anima Brutorum," (1710): "Whence
it follows that, if it is inconceivable that perception arises in any coarse
"machine" whether it be made of fluids or solids, it is equally inconceivable how perception can arise in a finer 'machine' ... ," Gerhardt, ed.,
Phil. Schriften, Vol. 7, 328.
42. AT XI, 223-24.
43. AT XI, 224.
44. AT XI, 225.
45. ATXI,226.
46. For a survey of Descartes' discussions of automata and an interpretive investigation, see F. Alquie, La decouverte metaphysique de I' hom me
chez Descartes, Paris 1950, 52-54.
47. See Discourse, HR I, 116; and Principles, IV, art. 203-04, HR I,
299-300.
48. AT XI, 31.
49. AT XI, 120.
50. That is, the sensus communis, a hypothetical organ or faculty which
integrates the input of the several senses according to Thomas and
other scholastics.
51. AT XI, 201-02.
52. Passions, art. 32, HR I, 346.
53. This is Gilbert Ryle's penetrating epithet, from The Concept of
Mind, London 1949, 19.
54. See my, "Could Our Beliefs Be Representations in Our Brains?"
Journal of Philosophy, 76, 1979, 225-44.
55. Dioptrique, I, AT VI, 84.
56. AG 73.
57. Cogitationes Privatae, AT X, 213. See also H. Gouhier, Premieres
pensees de Descartes, Paris 1958, 67.
58. For example, Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q 4, a 2.
59. Summa Theologica, I, q 4, a 2.
60. Cottingham, 19.
61. Cottingham, 19.
WINTER 1981
�Family Pages, Little Facts: October
George Dennison
W
E LIVE AT THE NORTHERN EDGE
of the hardwoods
in central Maine, a region of hills and mountains,
ponds, lakes, streams, rivers. Most of the homes
lie scattered in the intervale below us, a flat, narrow valley
that IS freshened and sometimes flooded by a rocky
stream, but a few rest on the sides of hills, as does ours. It
is the second week of October. The slopes across from us
catch the morning sunlight and have become dazzling
banks of reds, oranges, and yellows, all the more intense
because of the shadowed evergreens around them. A
week ago delicate sheets of ice covered the puddles between our sheds, and the children lifted them entire and
looked at one another as through panes of glass, but now
the days are so warm that Patricia goes into the garden
without shoes. The insects are gone. Most of the birds are
gone. Long, gleaming filaments of airborne spiders drift
across the fields and over the ponds.
What a mood we are in! We are torporous, yet restless;
restless, yet free of discontent, as if walking through the
landscape of a dream. I drove to the lakeside mechanic's
this morning and saw a broad-backed, red-faced country·
woman emerge from her car and stand looking at that motionless water. "Oh God!" she called to me, though we
were strangers, HAin't it some weather!" An hour later I
saw her again, sleepwalking, as are the rest of us, staggermg past the bank and the grocery store.
I look out the window of my bedroom workroom and
see Patricia going slowly up the hill, deep in thought. She
the wood's edge, one
throws herself on the tall grass
ai
arm across her eyes.
I should be working.
Wherever I look one, two, or several leaves with
.
.
'
mg motions, fall to the ground.
rock~
The table is covered with yellow paper. On the topmost
sheet I read:
He is sleeping in the wheelchair, his small bald head hanging
all the way forward. . . .
·
-a description of my former neighbor, Dana Tomlin
who is in a nursing home now. But my eyes go again t~
the sunlit window, where flies that were dead last night
are buzzing violently. Their wings are twisted. Nothing
works. Theu flights are wild arcs ended by collisions.
It is impossible to sit here.
As I leave the room I hear a far-off barking and think of
yesterday's sight of the Canada geese, whose honking, in
the distance, had sounded like dogs, but we had heard it
agam, closer, and had realized what it was. They were
right above us, not in a V but an undulant long line, noisy
and rapid. How powerful and grand they are! Everything
about them is forceful and grand. They passed out of
sight qmckly, honking noisily and stroking like rowers
with their powerful wings, and I was surprised by the longing and sadness I felt.
Ida's class at school has been reading poems and she
had been asked to write some at home. She is ten. The
geese in flight, she had said that evening looked like the
fishermen's buoys we had seen at the ~cean. She was
right. The geese had drifted up and down in their formation as if long, gently heaving swells were passing under
them. She composed aloud, dictating, and I wrote the
words for her:
Geese, when they are flying south
look like strings of buoys
bobbing up and down
on the deep, wide ocean.
Geo:ge Dennison recently published Oilers and Sweepers and Other
Sto~ws {Random House 1979). In 1969 he published The Lives of
Chddren: The Story of the First Street School.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Liza, her .sister, who is two years younger than she,
began chantmg all kinds of things, and some of these too
we wrote as poems:
43
�When the days are orange
leaves are falling down.
As I come out of the house the geese, the poems, the
girls-and four-year-old jacob, who had sabotaged everything that evening-mingle in my thoughts with images
from long ago that have been coming into consciousness
of late: fields of brown grass, a yellow brick building in
which certain sisters lived, twelve and thirteen, with
brand-new breasts.
If I had thought that I was going somewhere, this stepping out of doors into the mild, bright sunlight turns out
to be an arrival, and I realize abruptly that I don't know
what to do. I stand there indecisively and look across the
yard at the three dogs, who are sprawled in the grass with
as deep a lassitude as my own, and who lift their heads to
look at me, but do not alter their positions.
The dirt road ends in our dooryard. Across the road are
the barn and the shed, and between them, nose to nose
and bathed in light, stand the two drowsy, half-wild ponies. They are a sight to see. They have been gorging for
weeks. Our crop of corn had ripened progressively and
had been husked in the grass near the cornfield, and the
ponies had attended every session. They had eaten all the
husks, all the silk, many unfilled tips of ears. They had
consumed whole bushels of cooked cobs. After that had
come the apples, a flood of them, and once a feast of
slightly rotten pears. The ponies are so fat now as to be
comical, yet they are handsomer and more vigorous than
ever, and are enchanting to watch when they sprint in the
evening, as they do without fail before dark, just as the
fork-tailed swallows, all summer long, had sped around
and around the house at sunset. They gallop madly, apparently with abandon. They toss up their heads and then
plunge downward, kicking both heels high. They whinny
and veer off through the small orchard and come drumming back again, their curved haunches bunching and
thrusting powerfully. Their winter coats are almost complete: richly colored, deep-piled hair that is almost fur, a
mixture of soft and coarse that will bring them through
nights of twenty below, and a few of forty. They lift their
heads as I approach, and move them from side to side
looking sharply at my hands, which are empty of apples. I
stand there a moment scratching the powerful jaw of the
chestnut male, and he drops all the weight of his head into
my hands, either playfully or simply for the enjoyment of
resting. Without quite realizing what I am doing I close
my eyes and breathe deeply his mild, clean, yet pungent
aroma. And then I become aware that this streaming of
heated odors from his mouth and barrelled sides is consoling and deeply reassuring. Only a few seconds have
elapsed, but the jealous dogs are trotting toward me and
the foremost, a golden retriever, is barking querulously.
Now ponies and dogs follow me into the orchard, the dogs
gamboling competitively around my feet and the ponies
ambling lazily, moving their bodies as if in sections.
Only eight apple trees are left. Once there were four
44
hundred and the orchard went uphill into what is now a
stand of maples and pines. A few apples still dangle from
their twigs, plump and generous, and wonderfully decorative against the blue of the sky. I throw a stick and three
come down, and the alert ponies draw near. While I feed
an apple to the chestnut gelding, I hear again-actually I
imitate it in my throat-the slurred, dense, attractive
voice of old Eddie Dubord, who ten days ago helped me
split wood with a rented hydraulic splitter. He had fed an
apple to the pony in just this way, scratching the working
great muscles at the base of its jaw, saying, "Yeah,
Starbright, you put your firewood inside you, don't you!
Yeah-uhhh .... "
The ponies stay, the dogs follow me to to the vegetable
garden which is just uphill of the house. I lean on a rail of
the crude fence and look thoughtfully at the surviving
greens.
meant something! My
thoughts are scattered like leaves. I am scarcely a
person. There in front of me are the late crops that
must be harvested, the broccoli, Swiss chard, collard
greens, Brussels sprouts, survivors of the first frosts, and I
do actually see them, but I see the children, too, made
quiet by the stillness and the mild sun, wearing puffy
orange vests, kneeling in the canoe while I move us glidingly over the reflections of clouds and colored trees. It
was only yesterday, but these are remembered things now
and are almost on a par with other memories; exciting Fall
weather and I'm running home past lighted windows,
tossing a football. Again now, as repeatedly in recent
weeks, I see my mother's exhausted brave face the day
before she died, almost four years ago. The disease had invaded all parts of her body. She had become too weak to
hold a spoon or lift a cup. Early that morning it had spread
again and she could no longer form words. A young nurse
had been coming to the house. She had just changed the
bedsheets and gently lowered my mother's head to the
mound of pillows. My mother spoke to her, but a blurred,
gutteral sound came from her mouth, shocking to hear.
Without expressing annoyance, my mother closed her
lips, raised her hand and stroked the young woman's head.
The nurse had grown fond of her and was weeping as she
left us. We heard the opening and closing of the front
door. My mother looked at me and held out her hand. I
went to her. She took my hand and laboriously drew it to
her lips, and with a steady, grave look held it there a long
while, kissing it. Three years later my father too was dead,
not on the anniversary of her death, as he had hoped.
Now that they are gone I hear my mother's voice in my
own, and notice outbreaks of my father's temper. There
are glimpses of his face in Liza's brow and chin, and in
Jacob's eyes. Ida resembles my mother. Several days ago,
in the afternoon, when already this motionless time had
begun, I gave up stalking partridge in the shaggy high
fields of a neighbor and lay down in the sun by a stone
A
S IF THIS PURPOSIVE GAZE
WINTER 1981
�wall that made me think of loaves from an oven, and was
pulled under instantly. I slept deeply and for a long time,
and then did not awaken at once but passed into a waking
dream in which I imagined that I was coming into the entranceway of our present house, making noise, and my fa-
ther leaned around through the inside doorway angrily.
He was talking on the phone. He covered the mouthpiece
and began to upbraid me, but I forestalled him by indicating my apologies with gestures. I noticed that I had set
aside false pride and had not responded to his anger with
anger of my own. I began to feel buoyant. The actions of
the dream took on the quality of revelation. I put my arm
around him and kissed his forehead, and he blushed and
smiled happily. I too was happy, and I felt the excitement
of liberation that comes with understanding. The dream
changed now entirely into insight, a train of thought, the
gist of which stirred me as deeply as had the images. I
understood that touching, affectionate touching would
ease our relationship of its angers and relieve his need for
tokens of esteem. I thought of the times he had responded to affection with just this melting surprise,
blushing and smiling.
But a terrible unease invaded all this reasoning. Something was wrong. I became aware that I was not awake,
then opened my eyes and sat up in the cooling shadows of
the wall and remembered that my father was dead. The
ground was damp. The sun was low and the sky was white
with clouds. The sadness I felt was a child's sadness. I remembered things I had forgotten for decades, and could
see the faces of my parents in their youth, good-looking
and far younger than I was now. The images were so nu-
merous that I could scarcely register them ... and in the
very instant that I became aware of their abundance, they
vanished. I wanted to stop their going but could not, and
when I tried to call them back I found that my mind was
blank. I set out through the woods, which soon began to
darken, and walked the long way home without thought
at all.
who had been lolling at my feet while
I gazed at the garden, suddenly leaped up and
whirled around, barking explosively. They ran to the
road, arrayed themselves across the brow of the hill, and
with legs braced and heads slightly raised, barked without
cease. The sound of a lightweight motor grew louder, and
then a battered blue Volkswagen parted the dogs, who
bounded stiff-legged beside it, barking obstreperously as it
rolled to a stop under the locust trees.
Justine was nursing her baby. She smiled at me and
waved and looked down at the inconspicuous head. Her
somewhat pretty husband waved too, and sat there
behind the steering wheel watching them. A few minutes
later the chortling infant was clinging to its mother's hip,
wet-lipped and bedazzled, and I bent over to admire it,
really to bask for a moment in Justine's heady aura.
She asked for Patricia. I said that she was sleeping and
T
HE THREE DOGS,
1BE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
offered to get her. "No, no," said Justine, stopping me
with her hand, "we're not going yet . ... "
We carried five sacks of apples into the barn. The huge
space was dim and cool and was striped gorgeously with
gleaming blades of sunlight between the boards, vertical
in the walls and horizontal in the gables. Other bulging,
lumpy sacks, smelling of apples and hempen fibers, leaned
against one another in the hayloft. Beneath the loft and to
one side of it stood the massive press of roughhewn
beams. In a week or two we would gather here, perhaps
twenty of us. The sacks would be lifted and the apples
dumped noisily into a narrow high trough, along which
they would be hurried by hand to the belt-driven grinder.
A worker with a wooden rake would shove the emerging
pulp down another trough, steeply pitched, onto the
square platform of the press. There it would be levelled in
layers and covered with strong cloths stained a rich sienna
from many years of pressing. When the layers were complete, still other friends, pushing three or four abreast at a
stout lever, like sailors at a capstan bar, would crank the
giant screw slowly tighter, and the sweet smell of apples
would grow more intense. There would be ten or a dozen
children and several unengaged adults standing around or
sitting on the edge of the hayloft, legs dangling. After the
first pale flowing into the wax-lined barrel everything
would stop. Cups and glasses and dippers of this finest,
purest juice would be passed around, and many voices
would comment on its quality.
Justine and Henry would be missing all this. They were
going home to Albany for the winter. Patricia had offered
to press their cider and send it down by a mutual friend.
Before they left they stopped in the high doorway of
the barn and glanced at each other.
"The weirdest thing happened that night we did the
lambs," Henry said. I had helped him butcher two ewes.
They owned a ram as well, but had let it live, intending to
board it for the winter.
"We were just ready to go to bed," he said, "when we
heard this knocking at the door. ... "
"It was a pounding," said Justine. "It was strong."
"I said, 'Who's there?' -but there wasn't any answer,"
said Henry, "only this pounding. I thought, wow, what is
it? I opened the door, and my God, I couldn't see
anything ... but I heard something, and then I felt
something rush past me .... "
"It was the ram," Justine said. "He was wild. He ran
through the whole house. He pushed open the hall door
and went to the woodshed and stood there butting the
door . ... "
''That's where the ewes were," said Henry, "they were
hanging from the rafters in the woodshed."
-which I knew, as I had helped him carry the carcasses, and had myself draped the skins over the neat
stacks of split wood.
After they had gone I went to my room and wrote the
story of the ram in a notebook, appending it to a description of the slaughtering and cleaning of the ewes.
45
�I
SAT THERE A WHILE
reading earlier entries in the note-
book-descriptions, ideas, quoted words. There are
many such notebooks in this room, and journals as well,
and diaries, saved letters, clippings, unfinished literary
projects ... so much of it, finally, that I can scarcely avoid
seeing that its real purpose all along has been to stop the
draining away of time.
My parents' photograph album is here, on a shelf
among books. It ends in their early adulthood. I was six
then, my sister five, my bwther four. I seldom open it.
Those ochre and ivory images are as if imprinted on my
mind, one especially, of my mother as a young woman,
just twenty-two, extremely pretty, with something innocent in her face, a leftover glow of childhood. She wears a
skirted bathing suit. Her legs are curled to the side and she
is leaning on one arm in shallow water, on a sandy beach.
She seems to be happy and is looking trustingly into the
camera. Her arms and legs are long, yet are handsomely
rounded. Her abdomen, too, is slightly curved, but I
myself, in embryo, am the cause of that. How strangely
this image affects me! Here is the woman herself, who
later vanished into that beloved invention called mother!
And here, invisibly, is the young man, the mere youth
holding the camera. What was he like, free of me? Here
also am I, before time has begun. This picture astonishes
me. It entices and baffles me ....
vigorous, brash and tender. The strap of her canteen
crosses her chest diagonally, and she wears a headband,
from which a large fern sweeps back rakishly, like a plume.
She looks adventurous and dashing. The leader of this
trio, however, is observant, bright-faced Ida, who moves
along so lightly that one might expect her to turn a cartwheel at any moment, or take leave of the ground
entirely.
The children's faces are intent and serious. Having
greeted the dogs, they are silent again. They cross the
yard ... and Jacob deserts his sisters. "Mommy! Mommy!"
he calls. They have not seen Patricia, who is standing in
the grass now and is fully dressed. I hear the opening of
the front door, and hear it slamming backwards, and hear
the voice again, "Mommy! Mommy!" suddenly babyish.
This summons, and the flood tide of demand held in
readiness behind it release me from the doting happiness
I had been feeling. I become defensive. I let him call
Mommy! Mommy! and though I haven't moved, the fact
is, I am hiding. I say to myself He'll reject me if I go down,
it's Patricia that he wants-but I know that this is not the
reason. The reason is that this present mood, in which the
feelings are so close to words and the words to feelings, is
precious to me and must be defended, especially against
Jacob, whose demands are innocent and boundless. And
so I sit at my table and take up my papers. From the window to my right I can see the roadside trees of the valley.
Most are not large, but spaced among them are the
stumps of elms that once were large indeed. How handsome that road must have been when the huge trees towered over it, and wagons and horses went along in their
I
of the dogs again, and go
to the window. They have not run to the road, but in
the opposite direction, to the woods. Now I hear the
HEAR THE CHALLENGE BARKING
children's voices, and in the same instant, with a shock of
embarrassment, I see Patricia, entirely naked, sit up in the
tall grass and with hasty, guilty movements shake out her
red blouse and blue skirt. After the embarrassment, I feel
affection, admiration, and compassion for her middleaged longings, her large and stately, slightly dumpy, oddly
childish middle-aged body.· Then small anxieties appear. ...
But now the children come into view, who have long
been the antidote to my own desperations, and such happiness leaps within me as is almost frightening. How could
I deserve these three? They come through the wagonbreak in the low stone wall, where years ago cattle came
and went. They step out of the shadows of the trail into
the open sunlight of the yard, bare-legged, as in the
depths of summer. All three, even four-year-old Jacob,
carry walking sticks picked up in the woods. I can see the
barbaric whorls and streaks-red and blue Magic
Marker-Jacob had applied to his arms and cheeks after
breakfast. His shorts are cut-off jeans. Someone-Ida,
probably-has placed the stems of ferns under his belt.
The ferns cross his chest and flutter as he strides along.
He goes beside Liza, his great love, who is stalwart and
46
shade! The past is everywhere. There are cellar holes deep
in the woods, inexplicable stone walls, farm roads that are
now deer trails, rows of grayed apple trunks crumbling
among maples and pines. The papers on my table are de·
scriptions of these things, and of some of the surviving
elders, whose rural graciousness and sweet modesty have
often astonished me. The topmost pages are of Dana
Tomlin, whom I have seen twice this week at the nursing
home, and who is ninety-eight now. Three years ago, late
in the summer, I saw him standing in line at the bank
looking shyly all around him and smiling continually. He is
the eldest of the town's elders, and his manner showed a
consciousness of his status, but his wrinkled face was as
shy and sweet as a child's. His look of grateful happiness
affected everyone. People came to him and greeted him,
and he returned their greetings, though it was clear that
he did not know who they were. He was well-knit, or had
been-of a middle size and workaday substantiality. He
wore an old gray suit, a gray fedora hat, and button-up
shoes of a soft black leather. When he came to the teller's
window, he tweaked open a pouch-like leather purse,
looked down into it soberly, and rummaged about with his
thumb and forefinger. He was walking well then and must
have weighed thirty pounds more than he does now. He is
confined to a wheelchair, and his thighs and shins have
become mere rods of bone.
WINTER 1981
�I
HAD WRITTENo
... He was asleep in the wheelchair-rather, there in the
chair was a heap of old clothes out of which a hairless speckled head hung forward alarmingly. The young woman shook
him gently and said, "Dana ... Dana .... " There were other
patients in the community room. Some had been studying me
from the moment I had come in. Now at the sound of her
voice most of the others turned their heads. "Dana .... "
There was a stirring amidst all that clothing, as when some
small, shy forest creature stirs under a covering of leaves. He
braced himself with his hands. The cords of his neck tightened, and his shoulders and back slowly straightened. At last
he was looking at us. His small speckled face was anxious.
"Dana," the young woman said, "your visitor is here. You're
going out in the car today. Have you forgotten? It's a beautiful
day, Dana."
His face relaxed and took on its characteristic sweetness,
and he said, "Yes," very faintly, but he was still confused.
She spoke to him once more, in the loud, clear voice of nurs·
ing homes. He blinked laboriously while he listened. The
doughy, almost liquid folds around his eyes merged so thoroughly that it was surprising to see them part again.
"You can take him to his room. Call me if you need help,"
the young woman said, adding quietly, "He can't turn the
wheels."
I guided the chair down the corridor. He was looking at the
hands in his. lap. Presently he raised his head and said whisperingly, "Oh ... it's funny ... you know ... I can't always
think of what I want to. Tell me again where you live."
"I live in the house your sister lived in. You brought her
over one day about five years ago."
I was not sure he had heard me. He lifted his hand to his
watery triangular blue eyes and patted it with a handkerchief
was shearing sheep, so dad said to me, 'Would you rather haul
milk, or shear?' and I said,"-here he turned to me, smiling
wittily and peering goodhumoredly out of that triangular blue
eye-"I said it didn't make no difference, they was both work.
So that's when I started. I was sixteen years old .... "
I heard footsteps, then a rapping of knuckles on my
door, at no great height. The door moved inward, and
there in the doorway stood strong, diminutive Jacob, grinning expectantly. I could see that he had been primed
with a speech. His eyes danced on mine and he shouted
happily, "Hurry up, daddy, we're starved t' death!" Before
I could answer, the smile faded from his face, and his fouryear-old eyes darted omnivorously about the room. "What
are you doing?" he said-a temporizing question. By the
time he had reached me his fingers had handled half-adozen things. Someone-Patricia or Ida-had washed his
face and hands. He leaned against me and said, "Can I
see ... daddy, can I see the hunting knife and the pistol?"
He went by himself to the drawer where these things were
kept, and opened the drawer slowly, looking back at me
over his shoulder. I stood behind him and watched him
unsheath the knife, and unwrap the soft cloth from the
-automatic. The pistol awed him. He had scarcely any idea
what it could do, nor was it a symbol of anything in his
eyes, though certainly its sequestered place had given it
status. It was the object itself that impressed him, so
weighty and handsome. He turned it in his small
hands ....
There came a pounding on the downstairs wall that was
obviously Patricia, Liza, and Ida pounding in unison, and
we put away the knife and gun and went down to supper.
that had been balled in his fist. The other eye, the left, is blind
with cataracts.
"I had four brothers ... two sisters ... and a mother and
father," he said falteringly, "now I'm all that's left."
He sat there just breathing for a moment, apparently recovering from the effort of talking; and then with cautious, trembling movements he extracted a handkerchief from the breast
pocket of his flannel shirt, unwrapped a set of dentures and
fixed them into place.
"They drop out very easily now," he said, "so I keep them
in my pocket." The lines across his forehead deepened and
his single good eye grew brighter. He was smiling. "I lost two
teeth out o' them," he said. ''I'm afraid o' losin' the whole
thing." His entire face brightened with shy humor, astonishing to see, and in this very moment of finding pleasure in his
own wit he remembered that we had planned to go out, and
that I was the one who was writing something about the early
days of the town. Fifteen minutes later we were driving in my
car along a hilltop road in the most delicious sunlight and air.
There were woods to the left of us, and long vistas of pastures,
woods, and distant hills to the right, and he was telling me of
the milk route he had serviced for sixty years. His melnories
were geographical. He could recall the time of a thing once he
had established the place of it.
"We got started because the old creamery failed," he said.
"My dad went around to the farmers and asked if they'd let us
haul their cream to the North Folsom creamery. They said
they would. It was March. My dad took ill, and my brother
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
with autumn colors. One would
think that by now they would be familiar, but they remained astonishing, and our eyes, as we ate, at least
Patricia's and mine, went back to them again and again.
Glowing, blazing, flaming . .. one uses fire words. No
others are accurate. It is not only that the colors are intense, but that the leaves are translucent, the light passes
through them, and the colors are lit from within. It is due
to this effect, too, and to the profuse scattering of the
leaves in space that one receives so little sense of discrete
surfaces, but sees instead a vibrating haze of color.
The dining-room door was open, and the doorway
framed three bands of color. The topmost, a narrow band,
was a soft, rich blue. Then came the wide band of the
saturated reds and ochres. And finally-the widest band
of all-the bronzed greens of the dying grass.
VERY WINDOW GLOWED
E
blood
cranberries
pomegranate
Morocco leather
red apples
dark roses
hot magentas
rose madders
47
�-these are the reds of the red or swamp maple, some of
whose leaves also turn orange. The clouds of saffron,
slightly rusted, are poplars and birches. Here and there
one sees the dull purples of white ash, and the buckskin
and tobacco shades of red oak. But the flaming oranges
and lighter reds, the saturated ochres and the deep, sal·
mon pinks are sugar maples, intensified in color by the
pine, spruce, fir, and hemlock that surround them.
We ate quickly, almost heedlessly, so drawn were we to
the lingering warmth and light at the open door. Jacob
was the first one out. And as often happens, he gave immediate, naive expression to impulses we others felt as
well as he but were too inhibited to act upon. He began to
leap and twirl and throw out his arms. He kept it up even
after we others came out. Ida and Liza joined him at once,
and so did the three dogs, who barked in high-pitched,
complaining voices and ran from one whirling child to another. Patricia glanced at me and laughed. She was still
barefoot. She pranced out into the midst of the capering
figures and began to swing her arms and lift her knees. I
followed behind her, in spite of my self-consciousness. By
now the dogs were barking hectically. They plunged
against one another, sideswiping and nipping. A rubber
ball was lying there in the grass, and I threw it toward the
front of the house. All three dogs sped after it. They centered on it, growling in strange, plaintive tones. The aging
retriever picked it up ... and here one must say Ia and
behold! for just as the dogs turned, the brown pony and
the black one emerged from beyond the house, and all
five animals, side by side, wheeled together in a momentarily perfect flank, and came prancing towards us abreast.
Ida shouted with delight. Liza turned to see what was hap·
pening, and she shouted too. I glanced at Jacob. He hadn't
noticed a thing. He was still dancing. He was chanting or
talking to himself, was whirling and jumping, and kept
throwing out his arms, first one and then the other, m
marvelous, mighty gestures . ...
woods to my left. Had there really been a melting sun that
afternoon? There was no illusion now: winter was coming.
All this landscape that had seemed to be an emanation of
one's own torporous dream was real again. There were
real chores to do, real wood to split, carry and stack, real
cabbages to hang in the root cellar, chard and collards to
be picked and frozen, screens to be taken down, storm
windows to be installed, hay to be covered in the barn so
that the cider-makers wouldn't wet it ....
Earlier in the year I had tried to follow the spring thaw
in daily notes, and had brought my notes through May,
having kept track, though certainly skimpily, of returning
birds and returning green, and of the sequence of the
wildflowers. On the last day of May I wrote:
... more rain. Lilacs everywhere. The locust leaves are wellestablished, but are not full size. Dandelions are going to seed,
though the yellow heads are still plentiful. A few lightning
bugs ...
-and there my journal ended. Which is to say that it was
at this moment that I was carried off in the flood of sum·
mer, aware only that everything was shooting upward,
was spreading outward, was beautiful, and that I myself
was spinning like a top. Now in the dwindling of the cold
it all becomes perceptible again. Within a week the lavish
colors were gone, and the last leaves, as usual, did not fall
of their weight, but were pulled away by the wind and
knocked down by rain. Soon the hills had darkened to the
shadowed greens that would last until spring. The coldness of the nights persists into the days, and there comes
an afternoon that "spits snow," followed by a morning of
whiteness, which the sun transforms into vapors and fat
drops of water at the eaves. In the woods I notice a small
moth beating this way and that, apparently haphazardly,
and I wonder where it is going and how it survived the
freeze of the night before. And then, driving in the dark·
ness over wet asphalt roads, I see in the headlight beams,
as always this time of year, every quarter-mile or so in the
intervale, a little frog, or several, hopping across the road.
WALKEDALONE after dark up the lumber road that passes
for a mile through woods and then emerges into fields.
It was cold and the wind was moving briskly through
the trees. I wore a sweater and a woolen jacket. There had
been stars, but now the ~ky was overcast. Two screech
owls were screaming back and forth in the dark stretch of
I
48
They are so purposive, so doomed, so pathetically ineffi·
cient, going up laboriously in high Gothic arches just to
move forward a foot or two! I laugh and shake my head at
the wretches, yet slow the car so as to avoid crushing
them. They had been sitting on the heat-retaining road,
fending off the cold. Soon enough that glistening black
surface will be white with snow and ice.
WINTER !981
�The Latin-American Neurosis
Carlos Rangel
The political ground of Latin-American society has not
yet gotten over the earthquake of the Cuban revolution;
for that matter, no recovery is possible. What happened in
Cuba since 1959 marks at least as much of an era as the
Wars of Independence in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and as the enunciation of the Monroe
Doctrine in 1823.
The Monroe Doctrine's Perverse Results
For about one hundred and thirty-three years, Latin
America, a mosaic of sovereign states, existed in an infantile way in the face of the complexities of international
politics. Only Bolivar and a few other statesmen of the
generation of the struggle for independence grasped the
differences between the imperialistic powers and the risks
run by the small and the weak in a world where power settles essential questions. European affairs directly involved
this handful of untypically clearsighted men born under
Spanish rule. They lived high international politics intensely, often at a distance, but sometimes, like Miranda
and Bolivar, on the scene of events. France between 1789
and 1815 fascinated them like everybody else. They came
to understand strategic power-above all the naval power
that had decided events in England's favour. They kept in
touch with England, sometimes at the highest level-contacts favored by Whitehall's early concern at the crumbling
of Spain's empire in America. Because with Napoleon's
downfall they immediately perceived the danger of a
A Venezuelan, partly educated in the United States {at New York University), Carlos Rangel wrote The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship With the United States (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977), a
book that has become something of a classic in France.
This article first appeared in 1980 in the spring issue of Commentaire.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
restoration of the ancien regzme in their America also,
these men greeted President Monroe's declaration enthusiastically. Only Bolivar, however, grasped that LatinAmerica was exchanging the certainty of subjection to a
North American protectorate for the "open" risk run by
the other weak regions exposed to conquest, intervention,
or colonization by the great powers of Europe.
The external protectorate suffered one noteworthy
breach. Absorbed in their Civil War, the North Americans
did not check France's violation of the Monroe doctrine
when it sent troops to support Maximilian, installed by
Napoleon the Third on the throne of Mexico. But this
was merely an episode. The higher ranks of Latin-American society soon forgot that in the world as it is, the sovereignty and security of weak countries run permanent
risks. They took Monroeism for a part of the landscape
without anyone noticing, for a long time, that it diminished sovereignty and encouraged irresponsibility. Here is
the deep, perhaps irreparable harm that the United States
did Latin America-not the grievances habitually listed
under "imperialism."
Political maturity, the realism necessary for reasonably
effective policy, springs from the recognition of the precarious character of all security and from the consequent
recognition that survival requires unremitting efforts to
increase a society's margin of safety with its available ways
and means. Real military power matters-not a comic
opera army-and a serious, consistent, not excessively inept foreign policy. A society that meets these minimal
conditions will probably find itself upon the way of modernization and economic development. For economic development and modernization are the consequences
rather than the causes of political maturity. But Monroeism deprived Latin America of the "natural selection"
that makes political maturity the necessary condition of
49
�survival. With Monroeism (except perhaps in Brazil,
which would explain a great deal) the creole class suddenly regressed to the state of irresponsibility it had lived
in before the North-American and French revolutions
brought the "abnormal" generation of Independence.
The combination of Monroeism with traditions of slavery,
of a feudal-mercantilist economy with parish-pump politics, the legacies of three centuries of Spanish rule, pro-
duces after 1830 widespread mediocrity, specifically, the
"political underdevelopment" thaf)ean-Fran9ois Revel
has rightly underscored. 1 To explain the deep frustration,
-of a sOciety othCrwise fortunate in its endowment -you
have to look, as Revel suggests, to this "political underdevelopment." With its predominantly western character
this body of human beings should not theoretically offer
major obstacles to modernization, to economic and social
development, or to stable democracy. Some of these
countries even enjoy an urban infrastructure and "modern" institutions, such as universities, that are older than
those in the United States. In addition, the region enjoys
exceptional advantages in natural resources; in a living
space ample for its population; in a varied climate (which
cannot, therefore, be held accountable); in navigable
rivers, in a supply of fresh water unequalled elsewhere
which affords considerable resources for hydroelectric
power, etc. These relative advantages distinguish LatinAmerica from the rest of what is called the "Third World."
After 1945 with the complete realization of the "interAmerican system" and with the United States' assumption not only of hemispheric but of world leadership, the
security guaranteed South America free of cost even
made wars between Latin-American countries inconceiv-
-able: The activation of the "system" could stop outbreaks
of hostilities within a matter of hours (for instance in Honduras and El Salvador in 1969). But with the new era inaugurated by the Cuban revolution and the coincident
Americans. With astounding reasoning the Mexican
philosopher, Leopolda Zea (whom Jean Fran9ois Revel
cites), takes not only Washington's former complicity with
Latin American dictatorships for a manifestation of
Yankee imperialism, a truism, but he also calls the Carter
administration's pressure on right-wing dictatorships that
torture, diabolical neo-imperialism. Wicked and powerful,
the United States can do anything. We can do nothing.
After twenty years the embargo and the malevolence of
the United States still serve to excuse Cuba's failure in
everything except its resolute and lasting defiance of
North American predominance in the hemisphere -a defiance that lends the Cuban revolution prestige and measureless importance.
The Latin-American Neurosis
On a visit to Argentina in March 1979, in all likelihood
on business for the Chase-Manhattan Bank, David Rockefeller had a curious exchange with an Argentinian journalist at a press conference:
Journalist: You say that you have come to Argentina for meetings with bankers, but I have here a list of ten business enterprises, ostensibly Argentinian, actually controlled by your
family. Were you ignorant of this fact?
Rockefeller: Perhaps, if you show me the list, I may be able
to reply.
): (Reads a list)
R: Well, the International Basic Economy Corporation
(IBEC) is a company founded by my brother Nelson, who
died recently, and now directed by his son. Other companies
on your list are subsidiaries of IBEC. So it's correct that my
family has connections with them. But what are you driving
at?
): The Rockefeller family controls the policies of the
world, serious conflicts like the barely avoided war between Chile and Argentina over the Beagle Channel
again became possible in Latin America. Prolonged and
United States whatever the party in power. I should like to
know if you also intend to control Argentinian and Latin
American politics thanks to the companies you own i:n our
country, and the several score of others that belong to you in
Latin-American, such as Exxon and others on this other list.
bloody civil wars like the recent one in Nicaragua occur.
(Reads it).
All this happens with only the most cautious involvement
of the United States and without the activation of the
R: Your question is somewhat absurd. My family owns
none of the companies you have just mentioned. We are dealing with joint-stock companies in which one or other of us
from time to time may hold one percent or less of the shares.
The only exception is Rockefeller Center, which belongs entirely to us. My grandfather founded E:X:xon a hundred years
ago, but today we have almost nothing invested in it. You are
mistaken in supposing that we strictly control the businesses
on your list
widespread erosion of North-American power in the
"inter~American
system."
·with the crisis in Monroeism, denied by Washington
for some years but today recognized even in Presidential
speeches, Latin American leaders have experienced, with
dread, the inherent precariousness of the internal make-up
of their states and even of their survivaL' The bankruptcy
of the alibi that attributed every disagreeable occurrence
in Latin-America to outside interference (North-American
imperialism or-the obverse of the same false coin-the
international Communist conspiracy) should finally be
evident. Latin America, however, continues to be the last
region of the globe where educated men, with access to all
the available information, continue to pretend to believe
·in the omniscience and all-powerfulness of the NI;>rth
50
In his subsequent article (from which I drew the previous quotation) our insightful journalist delighted in his
success in making David Rockefeller admit his family was
sole owner of Rockefeller Center. 3 For this "holding com,
pany" could be presumed to own in its turn one hundred
and thirty-two companies in Latin America, including the
Exxon subsidiaries. Obviously, this fairly influential jourWINTER 1981
�nalist does not know what Rockefeller Center is. But what
need is there to bother about details of this kind, when a
member of the clan leaves the fortresses of Wall Street to
descend upon defenceless Argentina:
These people don't travel to far-away countries like ours
merely to inspect a bank branch. They come to have conversations with the Minister of Finance (an actual reason, it appears, for l\!Ir. Rockefeller's trip) and to receive information,
confidential information, about our economy-information
not vouchsafed the people of Argentina.
In politics and economics paranoia serves to keep a cer-
tain number of Latin-American leaders at the level of the
most out-of-date and ill-informed of their colleagues, in
countries undeniably poor and just out of colonialism.
The Latin-American neurosis, in face of the United
States, corresponds less and less each day to the facts. For
the weakening and inconsistency of the country, so long
the guide and protector of Latin America, can no longer
go unrecognized. With the Cuban revolution, however,
the United States' interest in this region reached its highest point in an intense but short-lived blaze. An interest, I
should add, always faint in public opinion and even
among North-American leaders-with the exception of
certain statesmen from Henry Clay (Secretary of State to
Monroe) to John Kennedy, for whom Latin America was
not only a private preserve that the United States maintained in face of European lusts, but also a sister region
that came to independence in the same surge of history
as, and in the wake of, the United States; and that embraced republican and democratic government, at a moment when that innovation survived only in the Western
Hemisphere.
Monroeism had two components: first, without the
close guardianship of the United States and her intervention if necessary in Latin America, other powers outside
the Hemisphere would necessarily intervene-with serious strategic consequences and dangers unacceptable to
the United States. Secondly, the real though condescending sympathy that idealistic North Americans have always
held for peoples whom they see attempting to better their
lot by adopting political institutions which they regard as
virtuous, because inspired by the North American
republic. The weapons revolution with its ICBM's and
nuclear rocket submarines that, for instance, made possession of the Panama Canal strategically inconsequential,
have made it bluntly clear that the second component was
much less important than the first. American public opinion's resistance to President Carter's attempt to part with
the Canal, came not of any interest-almost non-existent-in Panama or in Latin America, but because of the
legendary exploits, taught to Americans in school, of the
engineers and doctors who dug the canal. For Americans
the canal is not the Panama Canal but a North American
canal that crosses Panama (as a Senator put it). A man
who knows what he is talking about described the actual
attitude of the United States toward Latin America:
THE ST. JOHNS REVffiW
One of the more conspicuous hypocrisies of the (North)
American way in foreign affairs is the combination ofritualistic solicitude about the inter-American system with visceral
indifference to the Latin American ordeal. On ceremonial occasions United States leaders talk lavishly about hemisphere
solidarity. When a United States company is nationalized or a
United States diplomat kidnapped, Latin America creates a
brief stir in the newspapers. But one cannot resist the conviction-certainly Latin Americans don't-that deep down most
North Americans do not give a damn about LatinAmerica. 4
The United States now plainly displays the lack of interest
in Latin America as a whole (for instance, President Carter's speech of April 14, 1977) that before was "at the bottom" of its attitudes. From now on the Americans will
deal with particular situations, like relations with their
neighbor, Mexico, illegal immigration, and other problems
directly connected with them, that they cannot help seeing. They want to continue to count in Latin Americabut without acknowledging, still less affirming, the special
responsibility and the fraternal bond that existed in the
past.
After 1966 (when Johnson in the last spasm of Monroeism sent the Marines to the Dominican Republic), the
countries of Latin America found themselves more and
more abandoned by the power that had for so long "overprotected" them. Abandoned, just in the years when they
had to struggle to come to terms with the vast upheaval
triggered by the Cuban revolution.
With the most firmly established and the most cunning
political system of Latin America, Mexico alone weathered the storm, relatively unscathed. Mexico alone stood
up to the United States in the economic and diplomatic
ostracism of Cuba and refused to sever relations with the
Castro regime. As a result, it preserved its "progressive"
image abroad and kept the extreme left at home isolated
and insignificant-at the same time that it mercilessly
crushed not only the occasional underground guerrillas
but also, in passing, dissenting students, massacred in
their hundreds in 1969, during a demonstration right in
the center of the capital. Only Venezuela, which came
out of a military dictatorship just before the fall of Batista
(1958), found leaders capable of founding and defending
undeniably democratic institutions in the face of the double challenge from the militarists of the right and from the
armed extreme left, inspired and actively encouraged by
Havana.
Elsewhere the rising wave of the Cuban revolution
made for enduring upheavals, without anywhere establishing a truly socialist regime, or even a "military socialism,"
since the ((Peruvian model" betrays a kind of perfection in
economic and political failure. Everywhere it provoked
tragic civil wars; undermined long-standing democracies
(in Uruguay and Chile); spurred a new right authoritarianism, based as in the past on military power, but more
implacable, because for the first time since the establishmenfof professional armies in Latin America the "military
party" faces the problem of survival, in a hemispheric and
51
�world-wide political context that, in Cuba, brought the
dissolution of the regular armed forces and the execution,
imprisonment, or exile of all their officers.
This new situation is nowhere more discouraging than
in Argentina, a country once indisputably (and still essentially) the most advanced in Latin America. Sunk in its
present nightmare, Argentina shows how hard it is for
Latin America, more specifically, for Spanish America
(for, although analogous, Brazil is too distinct for automatic inclusion in generalizations about Latin America) to
overcome its political underdevelopment. Quite comparable to a serious neurosis, this difficulty in overcom-ing
political underdevelopment comes, essentially, because it
is our lot to share the "New World" with the United
States and because up to the present (in our inner conviction) we remain the dark panel in the diptych of the great
American enterprise.
The Paradoxical Prestige of Castro
back for the Cuban people and even for Latin America as
a whole; his submission to the strategic plans of the So·
viets, like his only noteworthy contribution to the business of our time. To the Soviets he handed over the youth
of Cuba, first for an army of disproportionate size, afterwards for an expeditionary force-a project that the Soviet Union must have conceived and guided for quite
some time, at least since 1965. But Latin America counts
what strikes any non-Latin-American as a shameful business for the Cuban nation and a bloody hazing for its
young people, forced to play the "Senagalese of the Soviet empire," as an additional plus for Fidel. Pro-Soviet or,
more generally, "leftist" circles are not the only ones not
to find fault with Fidel in this regard. Social Democrats,
liberals, and even Latin-American conservatives (and
many military men including officers) take secret pridethe pride of "decolonized men" -in the fact that our
home-grown soldiers have, for the first time in history,
trodden the soil of Africa, the Maghreb, Arabia, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, and Cambodia.
Everyone acknowledges the bankruptcy of the Cuban
I do not dare expect that political evolution in the near
revolution-except ill Lclfh1-Amefica. No one dreams any
future will deliver our America from permanent crisis and
longer of denying that the Cuban jails hold a very large
number of political prisoners, who receive unspeakable illtreatment.5 But when Fidel paid an official visit to Mexico
in May 1979, President Lopez Portillo greeted him at the
airport as "one of the men of the century." At the same
time hypocritical and sincere, Lopez Portillo's hyperbole,
reportedly, did him enormous service with the public
opinion of his country. Over the past twenty years, four
from swinging between economically incompetent populist democratic regimes with suicidal tendencies, and
equally or more incompetent authoritarian regimes-with
exceptions like the '(Mexican system," and with eccentric
deviations like the totalitarian regime in Cuba. Almost
without exception, the most gifted and educated LatinAmerican intellectuals (almost all, since 1960, "of the left"
and admirers of Castro) carefully evade profound critical
reflection about our society, and ardently persist in the
contrary enterprise: they reinforce all about them the
paralysing idee fixe that external agencies cause all of
Latin America's problems and that The Revolution will
provide their solution-revenge. The economists of Latin
America have, for instance, made an inordinate contribu-
tion to the theory of economic dependence as a sufficient
explanation for political underdevelopment. They are not
at all bothered by the fact that countries like the United
States, first of all, but also Japan, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and Spain, have each in their different ways
come through this ordeal, and that countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore are doing the same at
tliis very hour.
Not surprisingly, Fidel Castro and his revolution continue to enjoy measurelesS prestige and deep influence in
Latin America-prestige difficult for a European observer, even a Marxist sympathizer, to grasp. To such an
observer, Castro now looks like a pretty contemptible tyrant, unmasked; his revolution, like a fearfully costly set-
52
managers of the
44
Mexic'an system," quite different in
other respects (Presidents Lopez Mateos, Diaz Ordaz, Etcheverria and, now Lopez Portillo) have all sought to bolster their position and the dubious legitimacy of the only
Mexican party (Institutionalized Revolutionary Party) by
showing an unchanging desire to please Fidel Castro.
That makes one think.
Translated by Hugh P. McGrath and Leo Raditsa
l. Jean Franc;:ois Revel, "L' Amerique La tine et sa culture politique,"
Commentaire, Autumn 1978, 261-266: in English translation, "The
Trouble with Latin America," Commentary, February 1979.
2. For inStance, President Carter's speech berore the Organization of
American States on Aprill4, 1977.
3. Redaccion, Buenos Aires, 73, March 1979.
4. Arthur Schlesinger, "The Alli:mce for Progress: a Retrospective," in
Latin America: The Search for a New International Role, New York 1975,
58.
5. Of epochal importance in France: Pierre Golendorf, Sept ans d Cuba,
Paris, Belfond 1978; Armando Valladares, Prisonnier de Castro, trans·
lated, annotated and edited by P. Golendorf with an afterword by
Leonid Pliouchtch, Paris, Gmsset 1979.
WINTER !981
�On the Origins of Celestial Dynamics:
Kepler and Newton
Curtis Wilson
I wish to consider two moments in the emergence of
celestial dynamics, a Keplerian moment and a Newtonian
one, seeking to explore what the development of such a
dynamics meant to its authors. Before Kepler, astronomy
was a branch of applied mathematics, employing arithmetic and geometry, but having nothing to do with
physics or forces (in Greek, dynameis). It was Kepler who
introduced forces into the heavens, and thus founded
celestial dynamics. David Gregory, a follower of Newton,
writing in 1702, spoke of the new celestial physics that
"the most sagacious Kepler had got the scent of, but the
Prince of Geometers Sir Isaac Newton brought to such a
pitch as surprizes all the world." Actually, the Keplerian
dynamics and the Newtonian dynamics differ in important respects, but Gregory's singling out of Kepler- and
Newton makes sense. Kepler introduces a dynamics into
the heavens in the sense of hypothesizing a quantifiable
influence of one celestial body on the motion of another,
and Newton's universal gravitation does the same kind of
thing. Moreover, the mathematical results Kepler arrives
at by pursuing his hypothesis nearly coincide with
Newton's results, derived from a different dynamics.
Meanwhile, in the period intervening between the
appearance of Kepler's hypothesis in 1609, and the appearance of Newton's Principia in 1687, there were various attempts at proposing what may be called mechanical
causes for the celestial motions, but none of them allowed
of mathematical formulation, or led to an astronomical .
calculus, a way of predicting positions of planets. The
egregious Thomas Hobbes imagined that, as the southern
and northern hemispheres of the Earth differ with respect
A revised version of a lecture given at St. John's College in Annapolis in
May 1971. Curtis Wilson is at work on an article "Predictive Astronomy
in the Century after Kepler," to appear in Volume II of The General
History of Astronomy, Cambridge University Press.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to the proportion of dry land and ocean, therefore the
aethereal vortex or whirlpool that moves about the Sun,
having now more solid land to press against and now more
of the yielding ocean, would drive the Earth in a path
differing from a circle, perhaps approaching an ellipse.
Descartes figured out a reason why the suns or stars are
off-center in their vortices, so that in the solar vortex the
planetary paths are eccentric to the sun, but as in
Hobbes's case, the hypothesis did not lend itself to mathematization; on the contrary, because Descartes believed
the universe to be packed with vortices inclined at various
angles to one another, vortices that fill all space and interact with one another by transference of matter and motion, any simple mathematical rule for the planetary orbits
and motions becomes implausible.
In Kepler's and Newton's cases, we can ask how the
dynamical hypothesis and its quantification come about,
what they presuppose, what they mean to their authors.
The first sprouts of Kepler's celestial dynamics make
their appearance in his first venture into print, his
Cosmo~
graphic Mystery of 1596, published when he was just turning twenty-five. Since April 1594, Kepler had been holding
the position of district mathematician in Graz, with the
task of teaching mathematics to the boys in a Protestant
school, and making up an annual astrological calendar for
the province. The calendar was to show when to plant
crops, and what to expect of the weather and the Turks.
He was, let me mention, marvelously successful with his
first calendar: the cold spell he had predicted was so
grievous that herdsmen in the mountains lost their lives
or their noses from frostbite, and the invasions of the
Turks he had predicted were also grievous; the provincial
magistrates therefore added a bonus to his stipend. But
Kepler was not satisfied with this kind of astrological
hackwork. Beginning on the Sunday of Pentecost in 1595,
we find him concerned with, and indeed thinking unceasingly about, three large cosmological questions.
53
�At the start of the Cosmographic Mystery, Kepler says,
"there were three things above all of which I sought the
causes why they were thus and not otherwise: the number, size, and motions of the planetary orbs. That I dared
this was brought about by that beautiful harmony of the
quiescent things, the Sun, fixed stars, and intervening
space, with God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
That is, Kepler sees the spherical layout of the cosmos,
with the Sun at the center, and the stars at the periphery,
as an image or signature of the triune God, the Creator,
His Being, Knowledge, and Love. And with this vision
in his head, he makes bold to seek the number, spacings,
and motions that the Creator gave to the mobile bodies,
the planets, occupying the intermediate space between
Sun and stars.
Obviously, Kepler is at this point a Copernican, a heliocentrist. But he does not have a thorough knowledge of
the details of Copernicus's planetary theory. As he begins
his speculations, he has not read and does not even possess
Copernicus's book; he does not even know Rheticus's
Narratio prima, the book in which, in 1540, three years
before the appearance of the De revolutionibus, Rheticus
had communicated to the world the major outlines of
Copernicus's theory and given an account of its superi~
ority over the Ptolemaic theory. Kepler says that he had
learned partly from his teacher Maestlin at Tubingen, and
partly from his own thinking, the mathematical advantages
that Copernicus has over Ptolemy. The Copernican
arrangement, simply by its layout, accounts for certain
phenomena that are left unaccounted for, are left as coincidences, in the Ptolemaic arrangement. Why do the
Sun and the Moon not retrograde, while the other planets
do? Why do Mercury and Venus always keep relatively
close to the Sun, while the other planets can be at any
angular distance? Why are the superior planets always
lowest in their epicycles, when in opposition to the Sun?
For these questions and a few more, the Copernican
arrangement provides an answer; the Ptolemaic does not.
By the time he had finished his Cosmographic Mystery,
Kepler had apparently read the famous tenth chapter of
Book I of the De revolutionibus, where Copernicus says,
in his brief commendation of the heliocentric arrangement, Hwe find in this arrangement a marvelous symmetry
of the world and a harmony in the relationship of the
motion and size of the orbits, such as one cannot find
elsewhere." But even before, Kepler was asking not
merely in what the symmetry and harmony consist, but
also: On what are they founded? How does man come
to recognize them? And already at the start, Kepler has
answers to which he will always adhere: The world carries in itself the features of the omnipotent creator and is
his copy, his signature. To man, God gave a rational soul,
thereby stamping him in His own image. It is with that
soul that man can recognize the symmetry and harmony
of the Copernican world. Seeing that spherical Copernican world in terms of an idea of Nicholas Cusanus, as a
54
kind of quantitative representation of the indissoluble
triune essence of God, Kepler is encouraged to raise and
pursue his bold, naive questions.
One of the questions was not new. If you were a
Copernican, there were six circumsolar planets, not seven
planets as with Ptolemy, since Copernicus leaves the
Moon as a satellite of the Earth. Rheticus in his Narratio
prima had explained this sixfold number by the sacredness
and perfection of the number six: six is the first perfect
number, i.e., equal to the sum of its factors, l, 2, and 3.
A little later in the sixteenth century, Zarlino will be
using this same idea to explain the role of the first six
numbers in musical consonances; he will be the first musical theorist to include thirds and sixths among the consonances, as they needed to be included for polyphony's
sake. Kepler will be the second such musical theorist, but
here as in the case of the number of the planets he will
reject the notion of particular numbers as causes. He rejects number-mysticism in that sense. Numbers for him
are only abstractions from the created things, and hence
posterior to Creation; they could not therefore be used
by God as archetypal forms for cosmopoiesis, the making
of the world. Not satisfied with Rheticus's answer, Kepler
has to face the question afresh: why are there just six
planets, no more and no less?
The second and third of Kepler's questions were new.
They had to do with the causes for the relation of the
Sun-planet distances to one another, and for the ratios
of the planetary periods. In August of 1595 Kepler wrote
to Maestlin, his former teacher at Tubingen, telling of his
investigations, and asking whether he had ever heard or
read of anyone who went into the reason of the disposition
of the planets, and the proportions of their motions. In
the margin, Maestlin wrote in answer: "No."
Let me remark here that no analogous questions are
likely to arise in what can be called, and indeed came to
be called, the Ptolemaic system, which was what Kepler
had been officially taught at the university. By this term
I mean not the set of planetary theories in Ptolemy's
Almagest, but rather the world picture, current in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance, according to which the
planetary spheres are nested to fill exactly without remainder the space between the highest sublunary element,
fire, and the fixed stars. There is no trace of this picture
in the Almagest, but in 1967 it was discovered that it is
given in Ptolemy's Hypotheses of the Planets, the relevant
passage having been omitted from Heiberg's standard
edition of Ptolemy, apparently from some confusion
among the translators; most of the work, including this
passage, exists only in Arabic MSS, of which Heiberg
gives only a German translation.* What I now say is based
on this recovered portion of the Hypotheses.
*The discoverer was Bernard R. Goldstein; see his "The Arabic Version of Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses", Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society vol. 57, Part 4 (1967).
WINTER 1981
�be made to fit in such a sequence of nested spheres, using
the Ptolemaic numbers. In further justification Ptolemy
adds that "this arrangement is most plausible, for it is not
conceivable that there be in Nature a vacuum, or any
meaningless and useless thing."
!
'
/
F'i'gure 1
The Ptolemaic system, Ptolemy freely admits, involves
conjecture, but he also insists on its plausibility, as did his
followers through the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Tycho Brahe was still accepting it in the 1570s. The piau·
sibility is as follows. Ptolemy ·gives certain arguments in
the Almagest, and again in amplified form in the Hypoth·
eses, for a certain order of the planets, beginning Moon,
Mercury, Venus, Sun, and going on to the superior
planets;) won't repeat the arguments here. (The Sun,
note, is the central one of the seven planets or wandering
stars.) He had a very good value for the maximum dis·
tance of the Moon from the Earth, determined from
observations, namely 64 Earth radii. Assume now that
the maximum distance of one planet from the Earth is
equal to the minimum distance of the planet next above
it; take from the Almagest the ratios of nearest approach
to farthest distance for each planet, and start constructing
outward, using the Ptolemaic order. After the Moon
comes Mercury and then Venus. The maximum distance
of Venus turns out to be 1,079 Earth-radii, and the Sun
is to come next. But there was an independent method
for determining the relative distances of the Sun and the
Moon, a way invented by Hipparchus, described in the
Almagest, using eclipses. The method is unreliable, but it
did not come to be distrusted till the seventeenth century.
The result of that method, reported in the Almagest, was
that at its closest approach to the Earth, the Sun was
1,160 Earth-radii distant, 81 Earth-radii beyond the high·
est point ofVenus's orb. Is this a big gap? Ptolemy shows
in the Hypotheses, that by a very slight change in the data
of this determination, a change within the limits of obser·
vational error, the Sun at nearest approach will be found
to use up the extra 81 Earth-radii, and everything fits.
Moreover, this is the only order in which the planets can
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
This Ptolemaic system was very well known during the
sixteenth century, owing to the description of it in
Peurbach's Theoricae planetarum, which went through
many editions. I suspect it was widely accepted as filling
out the heavens, and allowing for the strange motions of
these divine beings~motions which, according to
Ptolemy, follow from the essence of the planet and are
like the will and understanding in man. Copernicus, and
also Kepler in the Cosmographic Mystery, explicitly reject
this system, but I do not think any really forceful argu·
ment was made till Kepler showed, some years later, that
the Hipparchic method for the Sun's distance, based on
observation of lunar eclipses, and in particular of the
width of the Earth's shadow, was practically useless, a
small error in the observations leading to an enormous
error in the final result.
The question of the reason of the spacing of the plane·
tary orbs does not, then, arise in the Ptolemaic system,
because all the available space has been used up in the
placing of the orbs. In the Copernican theory, on the con·
trary, there are unused spaces, not only a huge one beyond
Saturn, separating the solar system from the stars, but
also unused spaces between the hoop-shaped regions of
space that the individual planets pass through in their
motions (Figure 1). That is the effect of the economy of
the Copernican system, the elimination of the large
epicycles. Copernicus speaks of planetary orbs and
spheres; whether he believed them to be real or imaginary,
solid bodies or merely geometrical figures, remains a subject
of scholarly debate. Kepler thought Copernicus believed
the spheres to be real and solid, but in the Cosmographic
Mystery he is already pointing out some of the difficulties
with this conception. By what chains or struts is the Earth
with its atmosphere held within the solid spherical shell to
which it belongs? We are already in the heavens, and they
aren't solid. But in either case, whether the spheres are
real or not, there have come to be apparently functionless
spaces, and the question can be raised as to the reason of
the spacing of the planetary orbs.
Copernicus does not raise this question. He is apparently
seeking to redo not the cosmography of Ptolemy's
Hypotheses of the Planets, an exercise in geometrical
arrangement or layout, but the mathematical, predictive
astronomy of Ptolemy's Almagest, and he wishes to do
this job in a manner consistent with the first principles
of the astronomical art. A primary principle is that there
must be only uniform circular motion; this is required if
there is to be strict periodicity, if the motions are not
sometimes to fail, owing to their dependence on a changing
and thus changeable motor virtue. The intellect abhors
such an idea, Copernicus says.
55
�The Copernican insistence on uniformity of circular
motion will be taken up by later astronomers-Tycho,
Longomontanus, Bullialdus, and others-and echoed for
a hundred years and more by both heliocentrists and nonheliocentrists. Not only had Ptolemy failed to keep to the
principle but new phenomena, discovered since Ptolemy's
time, showed that there was an inequality in the precession of the equinoxes that Ptolemy had not suspected.
This was called the trepidation, supposedly proved by
observations of the Arabs collated with those of Ptolemy
and Hipparchus. According to one scholar (). E. Ravetz),
it was this supposed phenomenon that pushed Copernicus
into setting the Earth in motion. For, argued Ravetz, if
the precession of the equinoxes is due to the motion of
the stars, if this motion is non-uniform, and if the standard of time by which equality is judged is provided by
the diurnal rotation of those very same stars, then the
standard of time has been vitiated, and the entire system
has become logically incoherent.
The Copernican revolution, Ravetz wanted to argue,
was a logical necessity, forced on Copernicus if he was to
avoid logical incoherence in the measurement of time.
But this is wrong. The truth is that the uniformity of the
diurnal rotation would be vitiated slightly whether one
assigned the trepidation to the Earth or to the stars; in
either case, one would have to calculate one's way back
to a uniform measure of time-something astronomers
had long been doing with respect to the apparent diurnal
motions of the Sun. Fortunately, the trepidation is unreal.
Sometime after 1588 Tycho Brahe convinced himself
that it is merely the effect of the large errors in the times
of the equinoxes that Ptolemy reports in Book III of the
Almagest; and this is the conclusion of modern astronomy.
As for Copernicus, it was not the supposed inequality
56
in the precession, or the problem of measuring time, that
led him to cast the Earth into motion.
No, Copernicus's original motive appears to have been
opposition to the Ptolemaic equant-that point, not the
center of the circle, about which Ptolemy assumes the
motion on the deferent circle to be uniform. This violated
the first principle of the astronomical art, the assumption
of only uniform circular motions. With this idea primarily
in mind, Copernicus redoes the Almagest. Year after year,
from the time he first sketched out his idea until his death,
he labored over the revision of numerical constants, trying
to obtain an astronomy that would be accurately predictive, fitting all the available, recorded observations.
One recent biographer (Arthur Koestler) has judged him
to be timorous and myopic. What is more certain is that
in his efforts he met with discouragement: he could not
get the numbers to come right. And in any case, he is not
primarily looking at the emergent system with the eye of
a cosmologist; and he is not, like the young enthusiast
Kepler in 1595 and 1596, asking for the archetypal, a priori
reasons in the mind of God that will account for the layout of the heliocentric world.
Between Copernicus's death in 1543 and 1596, the
date of Kepler's Cosmographic Mystery, there were very
few Copernicans who spoke. out. The ill-fated Bruno; a
poet or two in the entourage of Henry III of France; Benedetti, Galilee's precursor in mechanics; a mystically minded
Englishman named Thomas Digges-they were few.
An overwhelming chorus of denunciation opposed
them. Melanchton (1497-1560), Luther's lieutenant and a
professor at Wittenberg, referring in 1541 to the Copernican doctrine, said, Hreally, wise governments ought to repress impudence of mind." Maurolycus, a very competent
and indeed innovative mathematician of Messina, said
that Copernicus "deserves a whip or a scourge rather
than a refutation" (Opera Mathematica, Venice, 1575).
Pyrrhonist skeptics like Montaigne and his followers were
fond of citing Copernicus and Paracelsus to show that
there can be found people to deny even the most universally accepted principles. In these references they desired
to show that we are so ignorant that it is even excessive
to assert that we know that we know nothing. And Tycho
Brahe wrote: "What need is there without any justification to imagine the Earth, a dark, dense and inert mass,
to be a heavenly body undergoing even more numerous
revolutions than the others, that is to say, subject to a
triple motion, in violation not only of all physical truth
but also of the authority of Holy Scripture, which ought
to be paramount" (Progymnasmata, 1602). And the list of
denunciations could be greatly extended.
Kepler turns out to be one of the early Copernicans,
one of a handful, to speak out; he does so before Galileo
does, and before his own teacher Maestlin. Maestlin
praises Kepler for his first book, saying, " ... at last a learned
man has been found who dared to speak out in defense of
Copernicus, against the general chorus of obloquy." And
WINTER 1981
�Kepler's defense has a unique character, starting as it does
from the notion of the spherical, Sun-centered world as
symbol of God, a geometrical reflection of His triune
essence, a signature of the Creator in the created world.
It is this symbol, Kepler explicitly states, that encourages
him to seek the reasons of the number, spacings, and
ratio of motions of the planetary orbs. This symbol of God
remains central in Kepler's thought; every one of his
major undertakings and achievements can be related to it.
Let me mention in passing that, just as Kepler's question about the spacings is inappropriate to the Ptolemaic
system, so it is unlikely to arise for a follower of Tycho's
system, which resembles the Copernican except that the
Earth remains stationary, and the Sun with the remaining
planets moves about the Earth (Figure 2). In letters written
in the late 1580s, Tycho says that he was induced to give
up the Ptolemaic system by the discovery, from measurements of the parallax of Mars when it is in opposition to
the Sun, that it is closer to the Earth than the Sun is. This
is possible in the Copernican system, but not in the Ptolemaic; the Tychonic system accommodates the fact by preserving the Copernican spacings (see Figure 2). Actually,
Kepler found later that Tycho could not have determined,
from his observations, the parallax of Mars; it was too
small for observational discrimination by the means at his
disposal. And poring over Tycho's MSS, Kepler concluded
that some assistant of Tycho had misunderstood instructions and computed the parallax, not. from observation,
but from the numerical parameters of Copernicus's system. In any case, if you do accept the Tychonic system,
then the path of Mars cuts across the path of the Sunnot impossible, because Tycho knows by now from his
study of comets that there are no solid orbs, but still
inelegant. And the entire set-up lacks the centered symmetry that provoked the Keplerian inquiry.
The answer Kepler finds to the first two of his questions, concerning the number and spacing of the planets,
is well known (Figure 3); the discovery comes after he has
tried many different schemes, and it comes, he tells
Maestlin, accompanied by a flood of tears. It is based on
the five regular solids or polyhedra. That there are just
five polyhedra, with all faces consisting of equal, regular
polygons and with all solid angles convex and equal, was
one of the discoveries of Theaetetus, and the proof of it
forms the culmination of Euclid's Elements. A beautiful
paradigm, this, of completeness of understanding: we can
prove that there are these five, and we can see why there
are no more.
Kepler's answer as to why there are just six planets is
a structure in which the regular polyhedra are encased in
one another like Chinese boxes, but with spheres in between, and with a sphere circumscribing the largest polyhedron and another sphere inscribing the smallest
polyhedron, so that there are six spheres in all (Figure 4).
His arrangement is: sphere of Saturn-cube-sphere of
jupiter-tetrahedron-sphere of Mars-dodecahedronTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Figure 3
'
I', ___ r'lcosct.\..e.d,..0l'L - --------G.a.or+\,
------------
Vt..Y\\1.!)
Figure 4
sphere of Earth-icosahedron-sphere of Venus-octahedron- sphere of Mercury. Each solid is inscribed in a
sphere which passes through all its vertices, and at the
same time has inscribed within it a sphere which touches
the centers of all its faces. The structure is not built outward from the Sun: it is built inward and outward from
the Earth's sphere, which divides the five regular solids into
two groups. The cube, tetrahedron, and dodecahedron
Kepler calls primary; each has vertices formed by three
edges, each has its own special kind of face-square,
triangle, or pentagon. The other solids, called secondary
because built out of the primary, are the octahedron and
icosahedron; these have their vertices formed by four and
57
�five edges, respectively, and have triangular faces. The oc·
tahedron is formed from the cube by replacing square
faces by the points at their centers; the icosahedron is
similarly formed from the dodecahedron. A similar transformation performed on the tetrahedron yields only
another tetrahedron.
Kepler therefore speaks of the secondary bodies, octahedron and icosahedron, as offspring of the cube and
dodecahedron, respectively; and he calls the latter bodies
their fathers, as the chief determiners of their forms. But
he also calls the tetrahedron their mother, as the one from
whom they receive their triangular faces. The tetrahedron,
meanwhile, is hermaphroditic in its production of tetrahedra. Of the primary solids, the cube has to come first,
because, Kepler says, it is "the thing itself," meaning, I
believe, that it presents to us the very idea of corporification, the creation of body by the regular filling-out of space
in the three dimensions. The transformation of cube into
tetrahedron is carried out by subtraction, replacing each
square face by one of its diagonals; the transformation of
cube into dodecahedron is carried out by addition, roofing
over the cube, turning each edge into the diagonal of a
pentagon.
Out of the 120 possible orders of the five bodies,
Kepler can say that he has chosen the one that singles
out, as a starting point, the very notion of corporification
or the creation of body, that singles out the Earth's sphere
as the very special place it is, the home of the image of
God, and that, given these conditions, has the most complete symmetry. And it shows at once why the number of
the planets must be just six; there are only five regular
solids, as Euclid proves, hence only six circumscribing
and inscribing spheres; the number has been deduced from
the very idea of the creation of body, of the world, by
an ever geometrizing, and let me add, echoing Kepler,
a playful God. And man was meant to understand these
things. Kepler says:
As the eye was created for color, the ear for tone, so was the
intellect of humans created for the understanding not of just
any thing whatsoever but of quantities . .. It is the nature of
our intellect to bring to the study of divine matters concepts
which are built upon the category of quantity; if it is deprived
of these concepts, then it can define only by pure negations.
Thus the five regular solids, the being of which depends
on quantitative ratios, form the basis of the layout of the
world; and man, the contemplative creature, was meant to
see and appreciate this beautiful structure.
But is it true? To know that, we must know that the distances in the construction jibe with the distances determined by the astronomers, and moreover, jibe rather
exactly. Kepler at different times ~xpresses the thought
that the imposed forms might not fit the world quite
exactly, but in that case he hopes to find reasons even for
the deviations.
58
F
Figure 5: The squares in the ·octahedron are ABCD, BDEF, and AECF.
The problem Kepler faces in testing his hypothesis is,
first of all, to know which distances to take from the
Copernican theory. The sphere of each planet must be of
such a thickness as to accommodate the planet's approaches
to and recessions from the Sun; but should one, for instance, allow space for Copernicus's equatorial epicycle,
which sticks out beyond the planet's path at aphelion?
And can one trust Copernicus's theories for Venus and
Mercury, which involve some peculiar hypocyclic and
epicyclic motions that keep time with the Earth's motion?
Moreover, Kepler thinks it incongruous that Copernicus
computes the planetary distances from the center of the
Earth's orbit rather than from the Sun itself. It is with
such considerations that Kepler begins his critique of the
details of the Copernican theories. But in disallowing the
equatorial epicycles, and in shifting to the real Sun as
reference point, Kepler is able to make a preliminary comparison of distances. The ratios for the intervals between
Mars and Jupiter and between Venus and the Earth come
out with zero percent error; for the Earth-Mars interval
the error is 5 percent, for the Jupiter-Saturn interval about
9 percent For the Mercury-Venus interval, with Copernicus's numbers, the error is unfortunately 20 percent
Kepler persuades himself-on the ground of Mercury's
very unusual situation and motion-that for Mercury the
sphere to be used is that inscribed, not in the octahedron
itself, but in the three squares formed by the twelve edges
of the octahedron-the octahedron is the only regular
solid that can be sliced through along its edges in such a
WINTER 1981
�way as to yield regular polygons (Figure 5). With this
concession, the Mercury-Venus error is reduced to 2
percent; the largest error remains that for Saturn, whose
distance is the greatest and therefore most difficult to
measure; the next largest error involves the Earth, and
a
Figure 6
c
Kepler has reason to believe that Copernicus's theory of
the Earth is in need of a major revision; and the average
error for all the intervals is but 3.3 percent. Seeing how
closely the numbers derived from observation and those
derived from his model agree, Kepler has his initial moment of elation; later on, as he calculates, there are doubts,
and then again moments of elation. He writes to Maestlin
that he suspects a tremendous miracle of God. Older,
more cautious, Maestlin, widely known as a competent
astronomer, comes to agree with him, comes to suppose
that it will be possible to obtain the distances of the planets
a priori, from Kepler's model. He assists extensively in the
preparation and publication of the book, in which Kepler
calls upon all astronomers to help in working out the details of the hypothesis. Among the readers were those who,
like Johann Praetorius of Altdorf, said that even if the
numbers came out exactly, it would not mean a thing:
astronomy should go back to its practical business of predicting the planetary positions on the basis of observations.
Tycho's reaction was less hostile: of course there are harmonies, he said, but one must work out the planetary
theories on the basis of exact observations first, before
investigating the harmonies. Tycho understands here
that the theories must employ uniform circular motion,
in accordance with the Copernican insistence on that
principle; and in contrast to Kepler he assumes that the
Earth is at rest.
This brings me to another theory that is contained in
Kepler's book, one which Tycho will object to, and which
even Maestlin finds, he says, too subtle. From the very
beginning, Kepler had had a third question: he had wanted
to account not only for the number and spacing of the
planets, but for the proportion of their motions. From the
very beginning, he had noted that the periods of the planets increase more rapidly than the distances, so that the
period of the planet twice as far from the Sun is more than
twice as great. This observation had been one of Kepler's
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
encouragements in the investigation of the reason of the
distances, because, he says, if God adapted the motions to
the orbs according to some law of distances, then surely
He also accommodated the distances to some rule.
The first mathematical rule Kepler proposes for the
periods is given in a diagram (Figure 6). Note that the diagram is pretty. Sis the Sun, ACB the sphere of fixed stars.
AEC and BFC are quadrants of circles with radius equal
to the radius of the stellar sphere, SC. To a given distance
of a planet from the Sun, SP, Kepler imagines that there
would correspond a "vigor of motion" or speed, proportional to the line EF. In the Sun would be the moving
soul, and an infinite force of motion; at the periphery
are the motionless stars, providing by their distance the
space for the planetary motions, and by the non-unifonnity
of their distribution, a background against which the contemplative creature, man, can locate the planets.
The difficulty with the scheme is that Kepler has no
clue as to the radius of the cosmos, SC, and without a
value for that radius, there is no possibility of calculating
the consequences of the hypothesis, and so subjecting it
to empirical test. This hypothesis, for Kepler at this point,
has a status similar to that of the other one about the five
regular solids, in the sense that it arises from the same
thought, of the world as symbol of God. The five-regularsolid theory had the assumed fact of spacings to work
with; this hypothesis has the assumed fact of some kind
of inverse relation between distance and speed.
Kepler tries another hypothesis for the motions which
is more testable, and in a rough way correct, although it is
not the right one (the right one is the third law that he will
discover only in !618). I shall not describe it, but will only
remark that here again Kepler is looking for a pure mathematical form, graspable by the mind because mathematical. He is looking for a form which will somehow make
the action of the Sun on the planets a symbol of the creating and radiative activity of the Godhead. He will therefore speak of the decrease in motive vigor with increasing
distance from the Sun as suitable; it was fitting that God
should have arranged matters thus.
Kepler also begins to compare the spreading-out of the
motive virtue to the spreading out of light from a center;
light, as he will say later, is a kind of mediating thing, intermediate between bodies and souls. Kepler is the first to
quantify light's intensity, to say that it varies inversely as
the square of the distance. It is by a similar quantification
of the Sun's motive virtue that he will arrive at his celestial
dynamics. He is already onto an important clue to it, in
eliminating Copernicus's equatorial epicycle, which was
totally incompatible with the five-regular-solid theory, and
in thinking about the individual planet as slowing up at
aphelion, in some proportion that he is not sure of.
Between the time of completing the Cosmographic
Mystery in 1596, and going to Prague to work with Tycho
Brahe in 1600, Kepler became involved in the study of
musical harmony, and a word must be said about this
59
�investigation as it relates to his study of the planets. Kepler
loved polyphonic music, which he regarded as one of the
dence between the soul and the bodily, as for instance,
when the interval of a sixth following on certain disso-
most important discoveries of modern times, ranking with
nances triggers a particular perception of sweetness; but
the compass and printing. In his Harmonic of the World,
published in 1619, he will write:
the bodily, in Kepler's view, does not account for the
psychic in the sense of constituting its intelligible cause.
Kepler's explanation for the correspondence between
soul and body takes us back to the sphere, image of the
triune God. By creative radiation from the center, one
gets the straight line, the element of bodily form, the beginning from which all body comes to be. A straight line,
rotated about one of its points, describes a plane, representing in this image the bodily. When the sphere is cut
by the plane, the result is a circle, the true image of the
created mind, which is assigned to govern the body. As
the circle lies both on the sphere and in the plane, so is
the mind at the same time in the body, which it instructs,
and in God as a radiation which, so to speak, flows from
It is no longer a marvel that at last this way of singing in several
parts, unknown to the ancients, should have been invented by
Man, the Ape of his Creator; that, namely, he should, by the
artificial symphony of several voices, play out, in a brief portion of an hour, the perpetuity of the whole duration of the
world, and should to some degree taste of God the Creator's
satisfaction in His own works, with a most intensely sweet
pleasure gained from this Music that imitates God.
Kepler refers here to the potentially infinite structure of
the polyphonic music he was familiar with; the Missa
Papae Marcelli, for instance, like a rope of many intertwined strands, might be imagined as going on indefinitely;
nothing in the internal structure requires that it come to
an end at this point or that.
Now for the production of polyphony, one needs to be
aiming at thirds and sixths as consonances; and these
intervals involve the ratios 4:5, 5:6, 3:5, and 5:8. The ancient derivation of the consonances, as for instance in
Plato's Timaeus, does not treat these ratios as consonances.
The trouble with Plato and the rest, Kepler says, is that
they didn't listen carefully enough, before setting out to
make their theory. Kepler sets out to make a new theory,
without invoking the causal efficacy of numbers, or the
perfection of the number six (Zarlino, we recall, had
claimed to derive the consonances from just this perfection of the number six). Kepler's solution involves the regular polygons constructible with straight-edge and compass,
which divide the circumference of the circle into equal
parts. If one imagines the circle stretched out into a
straight line, and transformed into a monochord, one has
the divisions giving the consonances required for polyphony, including thirds and sixths, fundamentally because of the constructibility of the pentagon.
The pentagon depends for its construction on the division of a line in extreme and mean ratio, the golden section. If you are familiar with that division, and know how
it can be indefinitely reproduced by subtracting the
smaller from the greater segment, or by adding the greater
to the whole, you may understand why Kepler views this
division as imaging sexual generation, and you will thus
gain an explanation of the tender feelings that accompany
thirds and sixths in polyphonic music. Kepler did not
suppose, and I do not believe that any theorist before
him supposed, that the inquiry into the physical conditions for the production of certain intervals would account
for the shades of feeling that those intervals arouse in
consciousness. On the one side we have instruments like
the monochord, from which we can get numbers; on the
other, we have subtle perceptions of harmony, dissonance,
restoration of consonance. There is a strange correspon-
60
God's countenance. Since now Kepler conceives the cir-
cle as the bearer of pure harmonies, and believes these
harmonies to be based in the nature of the soul, he comes
to speak of the soul as a circle, supplied with the marks of
the constructible divisions, the divisions that can be concluded with ruler and compass. It is an infinitely small
circle, a point equipped with directions, a qualitative
point. This is no doubt a metaphor or symbol, but it is by
such means alone that we can understand (insofar as that
is possible) how body, soul, and God are related.
The harmonic divisions of the circle apply, of course, in
the heavens, as well as in music; it is from these divisions
that Kepler develops his astrological doctrine, and also
his harmonic theory for the planetary eccentricities. I cannot take time to describe these here. Kepler comes to see
the five-regular-solid theory as inexact, an archetypal form
used to determine the number of planets, but not thereafter used in its exact quantitative relations by the
Creator, but slightly modified in order to jibe with the harmonic theory of the eccentricities. A playful God, ruled
by the necessities of geometry, may be forced to such expedients.
All these parts of Kepler's work are omitted, to say the
least, from the corpus of scientific knowledge recognized
today. Meanwhile, his great achievement in remaking
planetary theory, accomplished first for Mars in the years
1600 to 1605, is praised, sometimes on the mistaken
grounds that it is purely empirical. It is not. It involves
assumptions that are rejected today. Alternative paths to
the so-called Keplerian laws are conceivable, but neither
could they have been purely empirical. The empirical
evidence is too inexact; some reasoned guesses are required.
Kepler's study first of optics and then of the motions of
Mars in the years 1600 to 1605 leads to the development
of a possibility already. present in his thought. He is the
first to quantify the intensity of light, in accordance with
the inverse square of the distance from the source. (This
is a purely a priori derivation, involving no experimentaWINTER !981
�tion.) He does not regard light as material or corpuscular;
that would have meant Epicurean philosophy, which
like most good Christians of the time he abhorred. Rather,
he says, light is quantified according to surface, not according to corporeality. It is one of a group of immaterial
emanations, whereby bodies, which are isolated from
each other by their bounding surfaces, are enabled to be
in communication with one another. The motive virtue
issuing from the Sun, Kepler finds, must be another such
emanation, distinct from light, for as Kepler discovers in
about 1602, its intensity varies inversely as the distance
from the Sun, not as the square of the distance. The empirical support consists in what is known as the bisection
of the eccentricity, which he had been able to verify from
Tycho's observations in the case of Mars and the Earth.
A further step is taken in 1605 when he discovers that
that component of the planet's motion whereby it approaches and recedes from the Sun, can be regarded as
simply a libration, or what we would today call a simple
harmonic motion: this, he says, smells of the balance, not
of mind. By this he means that it is a pattern not chosen
for its aesthetic or mathematical beauty but determined
by the law of the lever and the nature of matter. Here is
introduced something that one can perhaps call mechanism: matter turns out to have inertia in the sense of
being sluggish, and it turns out to be pushed by an immaterial something in an incomprehensible way. As
Kepler clearly realizes, the mechanism or quasi-mechanism
could not, in principle, account for everything. It accounts for the actions but it does not account for the
initial conditions, the sizes of the orbits and their eccentricities. These must be works of mind, harmonically determined.
Kepler's Harmonies of the World (Harmonice mundi) of
1619 will remain his final testament. And indeed it is
through the spherical symbol, ultimate source of the harmonies that he calls archetypal, that Kepler was first
enabled to accept Copernicanism, and then, developing
the emanative aspect of the symbol, to banish from the
sky the celestial intelligences, the planetary movers of
Aristotle and Ptolemy, ultimate relics of paganism (as he
calls them), and to regard the planets as material, subject
to quantifiable forces that man from his moving platform
can measure.
Kepler wanted to dedicate his Harmonice mundi to
James I of England. For years, very naively from a political
point of view, he had looked to this monarch as the hope
of Europe, the one who could bring a religious peace out
of the strife of Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
The relevance of the Harmonice mundi to this end was
that it was a work of the liberal arts, the arts of peace as
Kepler called them, setting forth the principles of the harmonies with which the world had been adorned by its
Creator. Kepler thought that, could these things but be
seen, men would be raised above the level of doctrinal
dispute. But it is doubtful that James I read far into the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
book. And indeed, no one in the seventeenth century
that I know of accepted either Kepler's dynamics as a
whole (Leibniz undertook to revamp it), or his harmonic
even in part. And as the book first appeared for sale in
the market stalls, the Thirty Years War had already begun
its terrible course.
Turning to Newton, we will probably not expect to find
effusions about the celestial harmonies in his writings.
True enough, in the second edition of the Principia, explaining his rules of reasoning in philosophy, Newton says
that Nature is ever consonant with itself; and so we might
imagine it as emitting some single, deep organ tone. But
this is from the second edition, 1713, and the first edition,
1687, does not contain the rules of reasoning, at least in
their final form, and such as it contains, it labels "hypotheses". We are thus led to suspect that Newton's understanding of his great discovery when he was in the midst
of making it, was rather different from the understanding
he later came to have of it, when he was defending it before the world.
Shortly after the publication of the first edition, Newton
began a series of revisions, pertaining particularly to the
early part of Book III. He wrote a series of scholia to accompany those propositions, 4-9, which lead to the establishment of universal gravitation. I wish to quote to you
from the proposed scholium to Proposition 8.
By what proportion gravity decreases in receding from the
Planets the ancients have not sufficiently explained. Yet they
appear to have adumbrated it by the harmony of the celestial
spheres, designating the Sun and the remaining six planets ...
by means of Apollo with the Lyre of seven strings, and measuring the intervals of the spheres by the intervals of the tones.
Thus they alleged that seven tones are brought into being ...
and that the Sun strikes the strings. Hence Macrobius says,
"Apollo's Lyre of seven strings provides understanding of the
motions of all the celestial spheres over which nature has set
the Sun as moderator." And Proclus (commenting) on Plato's
Timaeus, "The number seven they have dedicated to Apollo
as to him who embraces all symphonies whatsoever, and therefore they used to call him ... the Prince of the number seven."
Likewise in Eusebius' Preparation of the Gospel, the Sun is
called, by the oracle of Apollo, the king of the seven-sounding
harmony. But by this symbol they indicated that the Sun by
his own force acts upon the planets in that harmonic ratio of
distances by which the force of tension acts upon strings of
different lengths ...
The same tension upon a string half as long acts four times as
powerfully, for it generates the Octave, and the Octave is produced by a force four times as great. For if a string of given
length stretched by a given weight produced a given tone, the
same tension upon a string thrice as short acts nine times as
much. For it produces the twelfth [i.e. an octave plus a fifth],
and a string which stretched by a given weight produces a given
tone needs to be stretched by nine times as much weight so as
to produce the twelfth ...
Let me briefly review the mathematical relation here (Figure 7). Imagine a series of six strings with length propor-
61
�But he taught that the sounds were emitted by the motion and
attrition of the solid spheres, as though a great sphere emitted
a heavier tone as happens when iron hammers are smitten.
And from this, it seems, was born the Ptolemaic System of
orbs, when meanwhile Pythagoras beneath parables of this
sort was hiding his own system and the true harmony of the
heavens.
Figure 7
tiona! to the distances from the Sun to the six planets;
let equal weights be hung on the strings; we thus obtain
six different tones-very dissonant with one another, let
me add, but Newton does not mention the fact. These
tones betoken different forces, which can be measured by
taking strings of equal lengths and hanging on them different weights, so as to give the same tones. Any two of the
weights will be inversely as the squares of the corresponding
lengths. Newton continues:
Now this argument is subtle, yet became known to the ancients,
for Pythagoras, as Macrobius avows, stretched the intestine of
sheep or the sinews of oxen by attaching various weights, and
from this learned the ratio of the celestial harmony. Therefore,
by means of such experiments he ascertained that the weights
by which all tones on equal strings [were produced] ... were
reciprocally as the squares of the lengths of the strings by
which the musical instrument emits the same tones. But the
proportion discovered by these experiments, on the evidence
of Macrobius, he applied to the heavens and consequently by
comparing those weights with the weights of the Planets and
the lengths of the strings with the distances of the Planets,
he understood by means of the harmony of the heavens that
the weights of the Planets towards the Sun were reciprocally
as the squares of their distances from the Sun. But the Philos~
ophers loved so to mitigate their mystical discourses that in
the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded vulgar
matters for the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth beneath
discourses of this kind. In this sense Pythagoras numbered his
musical tones from the Earth, as though from here to the
Moon were a tone, and thence to Mercury a semitone, and
from thence to the rest of the planets other musical intervals.
62
I have to say: Newton's interpretation of the ancient
texts is not a little dubious. Contrary to what all seventeenth-century Copernicans believed, the early Pythagoreans were not heliocentrists; Philolaus, a contemporary
of Socrates and the first Pythagorean to write down doctrine (for which he is supposed to have been appropriately
punished), did not in fact know the Earth to be round,
and his Central Fire was not the Sun. Again, so far as
anyone knows today, the law relating weights and stringlengths for different musical intervals was first discovered
not by Pythagoras but in the late 1580s by Vincenzo
Galilei, the father of Galileo Galilei. Indeed, the discovery
of this law, which can be verified very precisely if one has
a good ear (and Vincenzo was a musician)-this discovery
may have been what set Galileo on his course of experimentation, seeking exact numerical ratios in nature; he
started with pendulums (again, weights hung on strings),
and proceeded to motion down inclined planes, in order
perhaps to analyze the motion of the pendulum.
But the incorrectness of Newton's interpretations is not
my concern here. The sheer volume of the manuscripts,
the many variants and revisions, in all of which Newton is
seeking to show that the ancient philosophers before
Aristotle understood the Newtonian system of the world,
demonstrates that these views were important to Newton.
Can we make that fact intelligible to ourselves or must we
conclude simply that it is one of the queernesses of genius?
I want to speak briefly about the discovery of universal
gravitation. I have recently changed my mind on this matter. My previous argument (which I unfortunately published) was that before !684 Newton did not have his
"proof' of universal gravitation, therefore was uncertain
about the universality. I now suspect that before !684
a good deal more was missing than just the "proof'; I
suspect that the idea itself, as a clear and cogent proposal,
was not yet present to his mind.
The idea of universal gravitation can seem more paradoxical than we perhaps realize. For a long time, since the
1720s, it was generally thought that Newton already in
1666 had all his principal ideas, and was held up from producing his masterpiece by the lack of a good value for the
Earth's radius, or according to a nineteenth-century suggestion, by the lack of a certain mathematical theorem.
That interpretation is supported by no solid evidence
whatsoever; there is no sign that Newton entertained the
idea of universal gravitation before 1684. And up to !679,
all of Newton's statements about planetary motion imply
either Descartes' theory of vortices, and/or an aethereal
theory to keep the planets from receding from the Sun.
WINTER 1981
�Newton uses Descartes 1 term1 conatus recedendi a centro 1
the term which Huygens in 1673 replaces by the term
centrifugal force. Newton's thought about planetary motion during these years, like that of Huygens, remains confined to Descartes' analogy of the stone in the sling.
There is no evidence that, before 1679, Newton ever conceptualizes the orbital process as the falling of the planet
out of the rectilinear path it would follow if left to itself,
a falling towards a central attracting body.
Now this does not mean that during these years Newton altogether rejected the possibility of attractions and
repulsions as possible physical causes. He was not a Cartesian; he did not believe space to be identical with matter, and all transfer of motion to be by contact. He was
familiar with Gassendi 1 s counter-argument1 according
to which not everything that is, is substance or accident;
thus time and space need not be the accidents of anything,
but may independently subsist, and so space need not be
the space of something (namely body). This argument
may not have satisfied Newton, but given Torricelli's experiment with the barometer, he was willing to grant the
vacuum. While this discovery does not in itself lead to the
granting of real attractions and repulsions, it opens up
the possibility and even the desirability of hypothesizing
them. If there are spaces free of matter between the smallest parts of bodies, or the corpuscles of which ordinary
bodies are composed, then in order that the parts of these
ordinary bodies should cohere and various substances
should have the various chemical and physical properties
they exhibit, we may well be led to postulate "intermolecular" forces. No doubt, to hypothesize such forces was to
depart from the accepted norm of natural philosophy
established by Descartes. But Robert Hooke was doing
it, and Newton began doing it, speaking of the sociability
and unsociability of bodies in chemical reactions and cohesions. The forces he considered seem to have been
forces acting over very small distances; his alchemical
experiments were probably meant to find out about them.
In 1679 comes the famous exchange of letters between
Hooke and Newton, a polite fencing between bitter enemies. Here Hooke explicitly proposes that Newton work
out the path of a body under an inverse-square attraction that pulls the body away from its rectilinear trajectory. So far as the evidence goes, this is the first time that
Newton faced the planetary problem in such a form. And
under this provocation, he makes the great discovery that
a force of attraction, directed toward a fixed center, implies the equable description of areas, Kepler's so-called
second law. He applies this law, which allows him to use
area to represent time, to the ellipse with center of attraction in the focus, and finds that the force follows an
inverse-square law.
At one point I thought that it was Hooke who first placed
in front of Newton the idea of universal gravitation, so
that if Newton had not grasped it before, he did so now,
and proceeded to look for a way to test it. But the fact is
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that Hooke himself did not believe gravitation to be universal, that is, applicable to absolutely all matter. He had
generalized gravitation more than any previous author.
Earlier authors like Kepler had regarded attraction as belonging to cognate bodies, that is, closely related bodies
like jupiter and its satellites, or the Earth and its moon.
Thus Roberval could talk of a lunar gravity, a terrestrial
gravity1 a solar gravity 1 a jovial gravity 1 and so on.
Let me quote Hooke's view in 1678; he is here explaining
an hypothesis about comets:
I suppose the gravitating power of the Sun in the center of this
part of the Heaven in which we are, hath an attractive power
upon all the bodies of the Planets, and of the Earth that move
about it, and that each of those again have a respect answerable, whereby they may be said to attract the Sun in the same
manner as the Load-stone hath to Iron, and the Iron hath to
the Load-stone. I conceive also that this attractive virtue may
act likewise upon several bodies that come within the center
of its sphere of activity 1 though 'tis not improbable also but
that as on some bodies it may haVe no effect at all, no more
than the Load-stone which acts on Iron, hath upon a bar of
Tin, Lead, Glass, Wood, etc., so on other bodies, it may have
a clean contrary effect, that is of protrusion, thrusting off,
driving away ... ; whence it is, I conceive, that the parts of the
body of this Comet (being confounded or jumbled, as 'twere
together, and so the gravitating principle destroyed) become of
other natures than they were before, and so the body may
cease to maintain its place in the Universe, where it was first
placed.
Now Hooke is an inductivist of a sort, but induction is not
here leading to universal gravitation. That is, Hooke is not
concluding that every particle of matter attracts every
other in exactly the same way. In his correspondence with
Newton in the following year, Hooke suggests that Newton
may be able to think of a cause of the gravitating principle: now in Hooke's understanding-and I think in Newton's, too-to say that was to imply that gravitation is not
universal, for the material cause of gravitation could not
itself be subject to gravitation.
In view of the passages cited and others I shall refer to
later, I suspect that the idea of a truly universal gravitation became effectively present to Newton only after he
had discovered the "proof." Why propose a theory which,
by its very nature, precludes any mechanical explanation,
which seems to preclude being tested, and which, moreover, as Newton actually suggests once he has begun to
entertain it, would seem to put the calculation of a planetary orbit beyond the power of any human mind?
There is the problem, also, of explaining Newton's
delay for five more years after 1679. The best explanation,
I believe, is that Newton does not yet think he has discovered anything very important, and sees no direction in
which to pursue his discovery. Then Halley appears, probably in August of 1684, and persuades him that his discovery of the logical relation between the inverse-square
law and the Sun-focused elliptical orbit is important, and
63
�that he should publish it, to secure the invention to himself. Newton sets to work, and we have a series of MSS
which can be arranged in temporal order on the basis of
internal evidence.
In the first MS, there is no sign of the notion of universal
gravitation. Newton speaks of gravity as one species of
centripetal force-the term "centripetal force" making its
first appearance here (it is Newton's invention). There is
no hint of the problems of perturbation, the disturbance
of the orbit and motion of one planet by the attraction of
another planet. The inverse-square law is derived from
Kepler's third law as applied to the planets and to the
satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, that is, from the fact that,
for both the satellites and the circumsolar planets, the
squares of the periods are as the cubes of the mean distances from the central body. Newton shows that the revolving bodies must be subject to a centripetal force toward
the central body which varies inversely as the square of
the distance. The orbits are simply said to be elliptical.
The entire development, I believe, is up in the air, in the
sense that Newton does not know the cause of the attraction, does not know how exact Kepler's third law may be
(he had questioned its exactitude at an earlier date), and
is merely proceeding mathematically without knowing
what may underlie his derivation of the inverse square law;
it could be something that might lead to the results needing to be qualified.
To mention just one possible explanation, one that
Newton had thought up in the 1660s and proposed to the
Royal Society in 1675: the action of the Sun on the planets
might be due to the inrushing of a subtle aether, which
would serve as fuel for the Sun's burning. A similar but
different aether might be rushing into the Earth to produce terrestrial gravity; this aether might be transformed
chemically within the Earth, then issue forth as our atmosphere. The satellite systems of Jupiter and Saturn
might be sustained by similar circulations of aether.
These several centripetal forces would be explicable
mechanically, that is by impacts; gravitation would not
be universal, for the in-rushing aether would not itself
be subject to the forces it caused in other bodies.
In the second MS the notion of perturbation appears.
Newton is now assuming that all the bodies of the solar
system attract one another, just as Hooke had before.
Can the planetary orbits still be said to be elliptical? Hardly,
if the ellipses are drawn badly out of shape by the perturbations, the attractions of the different planets toward
one another. What must be done is to evaluate the relative magnitude of these perturbations. How is that going
to be possible?
Newton does it by considering the accelerations of the
satellites of Jupiter towards Jupiter, of the Moon towards
the Earth, of Venus towards the Sun_ Each satellite is
being accelerated towards the body round which it goes,
and that acceleration depends on the power of the central
body to attract, and so may be able to serve as a measure
64
of that power. Of course, to be comparable measures, all
three satellites ought to be at the same distance from
their central body, and they aren't. But we can shift them
in thought to the same distance, by using the inversesquare law. What we get, then, are the comparative attractive powers of Jupiter, the Earth, the Sun. That of the
Sun is overwhelmingly larger than the others.
But do we really have attractions here or not? Thus far
there has been no evidence that Newton's aethereal theory
for the planets is wrong. What then happens, I think, is
that Newton realizes a consequence of something he has
been assuming. In his derivation of the comparative attractive powers of Jupiter, the Earth, etc., he has been assuming that the quantity of matter of the satellite or test body
didn't (if you will forgive a pun) matter; it didn't matter
what mass it had, it was accelerated to the same degree
anyhow, the differences between the masses of the test
bodies could be ignored. Is that right?
Is it so on the Earth? Did Newton know the downward
acceleration of all bodies on the Earth, at a given place,
to be the same? Not at this moment. Earlier we know he
had assumed the rates to be slightly different for different
bodies, depending on their micro-structure, and the way
the downflowing aether affected them. Now, in the third
MS, Newton sets out to test the constancy, and this is
the most precise experiment reported in the Principia.
He takes equal weights of nine different materials; encloses each of them-gold, salt, wool, wood, and so onin boxes of equal size and shape, to make the air resistance
the same; and uses these boxes as the bobs for nine different pendulums, with very long but equal suspensions.
The pendulums, he says, played exactly together for a
very long time. The accelerations of these different materials, he concludes, cannot differ from one another by
more than one part in a thousand. Essentially the same
experiment, the EotvOs experiment, has been performed
in this century with a precision of one part in one billion.
Another way of stating the result, you may know, is that
inertial mass is proportional to weight.
At this point in the manuscript series, there appears
for the first time in history, so far as I know, a statement
of Newton's third law of motion, the equality of action
and reaction. Let me now put these two results together-Newton's Eotvos experiment, and his third law,
as they are put together in the Principia. The first implies
that bodies on the Earth are accelerated downward by a
force that is strictly proportional to what Newton now
calls their mass, by which he means their resistance to
being accelerated. (If the proportionality had not been
exact, the pendulums would not have played together,
would not have had the same periods.) If the same thing
holds with respect to Jupiter, with respect to Saturn, and
with respect to the Sun, then one can compare the
attracting powers of these different bodies in the way we
have already seen: by taking a test body, it doesn't matter
of what mass, placing it at a fixed distance from the attracWINTER 1981
�ting body, and seeing how much it is accelerated. Newton
couldn't do this physically, as we've said, but assummg
the inverse-square Jaw he could find from the actual acceleration of a body at one distance what the acceleration
would be if the satellite were placed at any stipulated
distance.
Now comes the final step. Since the mass of the test
body can be ignored, in the comparison of the attracting
forces of two bodies, one can use each as a test body for
the other. Then
A's power of attraction
B's power of attraction
acceleration of B
acceleration of A
By the third law of motion, these accelerations are inversely as the inertial masses:
acceleration of B
acceleration of A
mass of A
mass ofB
Putting the two results together,
A's power of attraction
B's power of attraction
mass of A
mass of B
All right, that's it. The gravitational force is proportional
to both the mass of the attracting and the mass of the
attracted body. Inertial mass belongs to bodies merely
because they are bodies. Therefore gravitational force
goes with all bodies; all bodies attract gravitationally.
Gravitational attraction is therefore inexplicable by any
mechanical model of matter in motion. The mechanical
philosophy, Newton concludes in the 1680s and 1690s,
is dead; he has rediscovered the ancient mystic Pythagorean truth of the harmony of the spheres. Gravitation,
he concludes, is the result simply of the immediate action
of God.
There was a tradition in seventeenth-century England,
pursued particularly by the so-called Cambridge Platonists
Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, having to do with the
prisci theologi or ancient theologians-Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Thales, Plato, and so on-whose
pagan wisdom, it was claimed, was really derivative from
that of the Hebrew prophets, especially Moses. More
and Cudworth· developed their interpretation of these
ancient doctrines into a justification for a new and revolu-
tionary natural philosophy, that is, for modern science
as it was coming to be in the works of Galileo and
Descartes. Newton, influenced by these men in earlier
years, now believes he has found the right interpretation
of the ancient wisdom precisely because he has found the
right natural philosophy. And so he writes:
Since all matter duly formed is attended with signs of life
and all things are framed with perfect art and wisdom and
nature does nothing in vain; if there be an universal life and
all space be the sensorium of a thinking being who by immediate presence perceives all things in it, as that which thinks
in us, perceives their pictures in the brain; those laws of motion
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
arising from life or will may be of universal extent. To some
such laws the ancient philosophers seem to have alluded when
they called God Harmony and signified his actuating matter
harmonically by the God Pan's playing upon a Pipe . .. To the
mystical philosophers Pan was the supreme divinity inspiring
this world with harmonic ratio like a musical instrument and
handling it with modulation according to that saying of
Orpheus "striking the harmony of the world in playful song".
But they said that the Planets move in their circuits by force
of their own souls, that is, by force of the gravity which takes
its origin from the action of the soul. From this, it seems, arose
the opinion of the peripatetics concerning Intelligences moving solid globes. But the souls of the sun and of all the planets
the more ancient Philosophers held for one and the same
divinity exercising its powers in al1 bodies whatsoever ... All
[their gods] are one thing, though there be many names.
And so Newton goes on to argue, using passages from
Plato and Lucretius and many other ancient writings, that
the philosophers of antiquity-Thales, Anaximander,
Pythagoras, Democritus, and so on-were really agreed
upon the atomicity of matter, the inverse-square law of
gravitation, the universality of gravitation, and further,
true mystics that they were, held the true cause of gravity
to be the direct action of God. The unity of physical,
moral, and theological wisdom is thus shown to have been
present in the beginnings of the world, transmitted from
Adam and Eve. That unity and that wisdom were gradually
lost, after the corruptions of the sons of Noah; but now
they have been recovered and restored by Newton, who
thus takes his place among the prisci theologi, the ancient
theologians. Newton is even able to find in the biblical
book of Daniel the prophecy of his, Newton's, rediscovery
of the truth.
So the first beginnings of a mathematized celestial
dynamics came, with Kepler, out of a trinitarian symbol,
the three-foldness of the Sun, spherical shell of stars and
intervening space in a Sun-centered world; Kepler had
his main idea from the beginning. With Newton it was
different, and the crucial justifying discovery came late,
with a precise experiment to test the exactness of the
constancy of the acceleration of gravity, and a new realization of the meaning of that constancy. And in a world that
has now lost its geometrical center, Newton accepts this.
discovery as a revelation of a mysterious, omnipresent,
unitarian God, to discourse of whom from the appearances,
as he will tell us in the General Scholium to the second
edition of the Principia, does certainly belong to Natural
Philosophy. But the most famous statement of the General Scholium, presented there as the outcome of inductivist caution, "f do not contrive hypotheses" (hypotheses,
that is, as to the cause of gravitation)-this statement
disguised rather than expressed the deeper ground of
Newton's original and I suspect persisting view, that gravi-
tation was indeed universal, and the result of the direct
action of God, so that no hypotheses for it could be successfully contrived.
65
�Recent Events In the West*
Er will mein Leben und mein Glueck; und fuehlt nicht,
dass der schon tot ist, der um seiner Sicherhett willen lebt.
Leo Raditsa
Introduction
After five years of evasion there is now something like
the beginning of awareness that in 1975 Soviet actions
changed fundamentally. In 1975 the Soviet Union began
to separate Europe from America by taking over countries, openly and through proxies, that border on trade
routes and have natural resources without which neither
Europe and the United States can survive. At the same
time the propaganda war, now carried on largely by countries of the so-called Third World, and the attack on international traditions (seizure of embassies, murder of
nations, murder of refugees, murder of political exiles,
and terrorism) intensified. The object of this apparently
chaotic and "spontaneous" second war is not only to distract attention from the strategic significance of recent
Soviet advances but also to destroy international public
opinion by making it complicit with murder-the public
opinion that Solzhenitsyn says has been destroyed in Russia and has left people helpless against themselves and
others. The Soviets aim to win control of Europe without
actually fighting a total war by exploiting the Free World's
fear of nuclear disaster and its present reluctance to fight
small wars-and even to defend itself by openly stating
the truth. But their success, if it can be called that, would
probably bring only bitterer wars.
'
.
This article is first in a series dealing with the United States in the
world-a series, in part, provoked by Raymond Aron's recent remark:
"Le peuple america in s'est toujours plus preoccupe de lui-m~me que du
monde exterieur." I write here in my own name, not as editor. My views
do not represent the editorial policy of The St. fohn's Review. L R.
66
In the United States and Europe the sense of crisis appears now widespread but mixed with resignation and bafflement. Both the bafflement and the resignation come,
probably, most of all from unacknowledged fear, but they
also come from lack of policy. The simple return to the
"containment" of the late forties and fifties does not
make sense, even if it were possible, for containment, especially the passivity and rigidity it tended to foster, has
had a lot to do with bringing us into the present danger.
Also, more importantly, containment focuses too much
on the future at the expense of the present struggle which
will decide the future. Policy must be more active, more
daring, more courageous, and what amounts to the same
thing, more modest. Above all, the government must not
be afraid to speak the truth.
In its further reaches the crisis we are now living started
in 1914. The struggle against totalitarianism is always in
part a struggle against ourselves, for totalitarianism sprang
from our thought and the distortions of our traditions. It
is not alien to us. We know it all too well-and until recently it has won widespread allegiance in the Free World.
What passes for totalitarianism's strength (actually, nothing more than force) comes from our weakness. Because
totalitarian regimes exist off our weakness, they are not
enemies which countries and in.dividuals can respect. As a
result, war with them is unceasing when it is not total and
self-destructive. Because we fear ourselves to some extent
in them, struggle with totalitarianism tends to undo reLeo Raditsa recently published Some Sense About Wilhelm Reich (Philosophical Library 1978). He writes frequently on current events in the
world for Midstream and other publications.
WINTER 1981
�spect for virtues otherwise selfevident, such as courage.
But it is from those who have lived under these regimes
and remained true to themselves that courage can be relearned. "Pygmies in power-the Mussolinis, Stalins, and
Hitlers-seem like giants; mediocrities like men of genius;
men of genius like madmen" (Lev Kopelev).
l. The Recent Background
Since 1975 seven countries have succumbed to commu~
nist aggression. In all instances the Soviets were involved.
Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Yemen, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan. (The situation in Mozambique is not
clear.) In Angola and Afghanistan resistance, mostly ignored, continues. Until recently only Solzhenitsyn dared
keep count. The end of 1975 made it plain that defeat in
Vietnam was not an isolated instance but a general route,
especially a psychological route that involved the whole
free world, profoundly.
Abandoned to a three-sided civil war in the collapse of
Portuguese self-confidence, Angola was invaded in 1975
by Cuban troops with East German and Soviet advisorsa clear violation of the self-determination of nations, open
aggression. Kissinger resorted to covert aid to the Angolans fighting the Cubans, but at the same time forbade
Moynihan to bring the aggression against Angola before
the UN. Once exposed, Kissinger's secretiveness pro~
voked a congressional prohibition against aid to Angola.
Had the opposition to the Vietnam War been rational, disinterested and forthright, against one specific, miscon~
ceived war, it would have been able to distinguish
between Indochina and Angola, and it would have known
the danger to the free world, especially to its raw materials
and trade routes, in the attack on Angola and on the Horn
of Africa.
But behind 1975 and the fall of Saigon lies 1973, and
1968 and 1967. These mark even more fundamental turning points whose importance begins to be perceived, dimly,
only now.
In 1967 Israel won a war and it conquered territory. It
struck first (because its survival depended on it) when it
became clear that Nasser was about to attack. But victory
and, worse still, inadvertent conquest as a result of the
readiness to fight for one's life (a "right" whose assurance
in article 51 of the UN Charter only serves to hamper its
exercise) violates all contemporary sensibilities, which exist on their denial of the most obvious experience of the
past.
Nobody knew what to do with this victory and this
strength. Above all it embarrassed us, especially our government. Like our own victory in the Second World War
we could not cope with it, especially in its contrast to our
incapacity to face either victory or defeat in Indochina.
Our government (for instance in 1969), in accordance
with the unmistakably expressed desire of people and the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Congress, helped Israel with economic and military aid;
but on condition that it show "flexibility" and assume
something like sole responsibility for the war-that it appear to deny itself. That there was a place for courage and
heroism in our world, and that it could be effective, was
more than we could bear: At the same time we could not
deny it outright, for that would be too obvious a self-betrayal. As a result of this victory of 1967, even the UN in
resolution 242 had to acknowledge, grudgingly, Israel's
"right" to survival. The ambiguity, really the ambivalence,
that shows itself in this resolution's refusal to accept the
victory it had to acknowledge, provided the basis for the
continuance of the war of 1967.
Inspired by the PLO's example, the terrorism which
started in a big way after Israel's victory in the 1967 war
represents a continuation and extension of that war
throughout much of the free world in order to undo its
victory and prevent negotiations for peace. 1 The terrorists
sensed they could win in the great cities of the free world
and in the UN the victory the Arabs had been denied on
the battlefield. This violence has worked. People who
before 1967 had never heard of the "Palestinians" or the
PLO now speak dimly of their "right" to "self-determination".' This capacity to carry on a war throughout the
world in random violence-a war that has been lost in
open battle-tells something of the character of the war
we are involved in throughout the world. Our world allows courage on the battlefield to be undone by cowardly
murder.
Without Soviet support and training this war would not
have been carried out in such a highly professional and organized manner. To my knowledge no government in the
free world has spoken out openly about Soviet involvement in terrorism. Yet it has been known in the West at
least since 1973 that since 1967 the Soviet Union has
been training foreign terrorists in Moscow. President Carter in his State of the Union message after the Soviet attack on Afghanistan never mentioned it.
With some exceptions (Israel, Italy since the murder of
Mora, Germany at least once, Britain lately) Western governments have negotiated with terrorists. Because of their
unwillingness to make public the Soviet Union's involvement in terroriSm, these governments have acted as if
each nation's terrorism was its own "personal" problem
that had no relation to the common danger they feared to
identify. In fact the terrorists are often native sons. This
capacity to make nations turn in on themselves (as if they
were alone in the world), in the illusion of looking out for
themselves, has been one of the worst effects of terrorism.
With its demonstration of the West's weakness and lack of
cohesion, the effectiveness of terrorism has probably surprised the Soviet Union. Events since 1967 have shown
that we, at least our governments, will put up with international wars as long as those that fight them (for instance, the terrorists) do not show undeniable courage.
1968 brought the open Soviet crushing of Czechoslovakia, which, unlike Hungary in 1956, had neither defied the
67
�Soviet Union in the name of democracy nor taken to
arms. An event that hardly affected Europe's and the
United States' relations with the Soviet Union: 1969 was
the beginning of so-called detente in Europe. By their
readiness to negotiate with the Soviet Union as if nothing
had happened, the governments of Europe and, three
years later, the United States, showed the Soviet regime
that despite their mild protestations they were indifferent
to the breaking of Czechoslovakia.
1969 also brought johnson's refusal ·to run for reelection. Within six months of Nixon's accession to office at
the beginnng of 1969 the first troops were withdrawn
from Vietnam-a change in policy which despite Nixon's
and Kissinger's intentions to the contrary eventually led
to the abandonment of South Vietnam-the necessary
consequence, in Hanoi's view, of Nixon's and Kissinger's
desire to lessen American commitment.
The 1973 war in the Middle East, which began with a
surprise attack on Israel on all fronts, and which Israel
barely survived, by luck and extraordinary courage, marks
another turning point. Its consequences were obvious,
though they were denied even by a publication of the
courage and the intelligence of The Economist.
Perceived accurately as a renewed outbreak of the continuing war in the Middle East, the War of 1973 also intensified and extended the war that had continued almost
unnoticed outside of Israel since 1967. Its chief feature
was the Arab oil-producing nations' and Persia's extortion-
ary resort to the oil embargo and the formation of an oil
cartel that included Venezuela and Indonesia.
Such a cartel represented a direct attack on the Atlantic
Charter, which had laid the basis of the prosperity of the
world since 1945 by insisting on the freedom of trade between nations, including specifically trade in natural re-
sources. The oil embargo threatened the world free trade
had made, in which the fiercest competition exists between nations rather than within them. Suddenly, states
which had nationalized their oil industries, or at any rate
controlled them, resorted to monopoly and artificial price
fixng, with not a murmur of protest from the Western industrialized nations.
Because it undermined Western leadership by attacking its guarantee of free and unrestricted trade between
nations, this extortionary action helped the Soviets more
than they could help themselves. The Arabs, some of
whom said they hated communism, were in fact undermining "capitalism". Consciously or not, they acted in
accordance with Stalin's understanding that held that
"revolution" could be brought about not only within nations but between them, by putting the poor and undeveloped nations against the industrial nations.
By allowing the Arab nations and Persia (which was primarily responsible for the second doubling of prices in
1973) to get away with this extortion, the United States
and its allies were not only undoing themselves but help1
ing the oil producing countries to undo themselves. Barely
five years later, the collapse of Persia showed this self-de-
68
structiveness to a world baffled because it had too long
told itself its paralysis would have no consequence. The
collusion of the blackmailed with the blackmailers blinded
them both to obvious facts. Neither the Shah nor the government of the United States, even after they had been
warned by what was left of the CIA and by Israeli intelligence, faced the opposition to the Shah within Persia.
The passive acquiescence. to oil extortion also immedi-
ately allowed the gap between America and Europe to
widen. It encouraged Europe to make her own arrangements. With the exception of Portugal-which allowed
American planes flying to the aid of Israel to refuel-and
the Netherlands, Europe indulged in a display of cravenness. Italy, which had been deeply moved by Israel's courage in 1967 and strongly supported it, held its silence in
1973. Its once leading newspaper, the Carriere della Sera,
shifted to a pro-Arab line.
The Arab resort to the use of oil as a weapon intensified
the extension of the Middle East War, which the terrorists
had begun after 1967, to every individual in the free
world. Within less than two years the extortion succeeded
in winning the acceptance of the PLO, with observer
status and in some sessions with the attributes of full sovereignty, at the UN.
Nor did the United States help Europe, which is dependent on the Middle East for about seventy percent of its
oil and, therefore, for its riches. (A one percent increase in
production brings with it something like one percent increase in oil consumption.) Acting as if its relation to Eu-
rope was of little importance, it has increased the pressure
on Europe by allowing its oil imports to increase staggeringly-by about forty percent in the period of 1973-1978.
The evasiveness of the United States and Europe toward oil extortion has also weakened their relations with
their own citizens, for they dared not bring home the grim
realities of their citizens. By 1978 on the average only
twenty-two percent of the real rise of the price in oil had
shown up in the price of gas and heating fueJ.l The rise in
inflation in almost every major country in Europe to levels
not easily controlled comes in part from this evasion.
The evasiveness about oil brought with it an evasiveness about the Soviets. Few in office spoke openly of
growth in Soviet conventional and nuclear armaments.
Only Margaret Thatcher has spoken with anything approaching forthrightness and conviction about the danger
facing the West, both the economic danger and the threat
from the Soviet Union.
In these years (after 1969) of great and obvious danger
in which we acted as if there was no danger, Kissinger
managed to persuade us that the time had come to negotiate with the Soviets. He even managed to persuade us to
think that they would help us out of our difficulties in
Indochina, that they could be made to cooperate at a time
of our obvious weakness. This willingness, initiated by the
government, to think the Soviet regime would behave
"more reasonably", that "super-power" relations could
WINTER 1981
�improve in the midst of obvious Western weakness, is the
most striking feature of the period.
The last decade shows that the Soviet Union and its satellites, for instance, Hanoi, will play upon our fear of nu·
clear destruction, which we call our yearning for peace,
until we are weak enough to be overrun. By abolishing
conscription, our government appears no longer willing to
risk our lives in our defense.
In the instance of Europe this subjection may not re·
quire direct Soviet conquest but simply neutralization.
Giscard d'Estaing's and Schmidt's readiness to meet with
the Soviet leaders as if nothing had happened, a few
months after the Soviet attack on Afghanistan, show this
process to have started already. Strangely, the economi·
cally weaker of the larger nations of NATO, Italy and
Britain, have shown themselves our bravest allies. The
governments of France and Germany are rich enough to
risk betraying their countries-and the rest of Europe.
American confusion allows them such indulgence. Would
Giscard and Schmidt have dealt with the Soviet regime if
Muskie had not preceded them with his meeting with
Gromyko in Vienna?
2. 1979
Afghanistan in 1980 showed Soviet brutality unmistakably to men who had mistaken their forgetfulness of the
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 for the illusions of
detente. 1979 had already told something of what the fu·
lure could hold. It was in 1979 that we began to understand the actual consequences of the war in Indochina in
the four years after the fall of Saigon.
For immediately after the fall of Saigon, Cambodia,
Laos, and Vietnam slipped off the map. First there was a
deadly silence, then dim suspicions of murder in Cam·
bodia, confirmed in hearings before a Congressional com-
mittee (July, 1977) and by Cambodian refugees in France.
The information was received numbly-there was nothing like a public outcry. It took Carter, as Paul Seabury
noticed, more than a year in office before he even mentioned, and then only meekly, the murder there.
The last we had seen was the bloody conquest of
Phnomph Penh in which patients were left to die on the
operating table. The New York Times reporter confessed
to a seizure of
~'double
vision": the butchery of conquest
and a whole population driven out into the countryside
was not at all what he had meant by "revolution". Faced
with slaughter before his eyes, he could tell the difference
between his aspirations and fantasies and murder: but he
had to see the slaughter. Knowledge, the experience of
the past, had not been enough. It must be this that drives
Solzhenitsyn to say that the West will not wake up until it
too has been through the camps.
The silence in the four years since the fall of Saigon
tells something about freedom and what free countries do
to the world. Without their presence there is no informaTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tion. You only find out when it is too late and at the risk of
the lives of those who dare bear witness.
And the murder of those who bear witness goes on right
now. In Persia, a young woman of thirty dared speak in
her own name, in the spring of 1980, of the murders of socalled government troops in Kurdistan and call for French
intervention. She was murdered almost immediately after
publication of her testimony in L'Express-murdered by
those readers of the international press, the "holy revolutionaries" of Teheran.
In 1979, with the boat people in flight from the North
Vietnamese regime and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians trying to cross into Thailand, the murder of the
previous four years broke before our eyes. 1979 started,
really, at Christmas of 1978, with the Vietnamese attack
on Cambodia. Numbering an estimated six hundred thousand men, the Vietnamese army is one of the largest in
the world, battle-hardened and arrogant in a victory won
not on the battlefield but in the newspapers, radio, and
television of Europe and the United States. Vietnam's
attack on Cambodia occurred in the days of President
Carter's recognition of the regime in mainland China (an-
nounced December 16, 1978, for January I, 1979). On
February 17, a few days after the visit of the Chinese
Vice-Premier to Washington, China attacked Vietnam.
The American government's apparent surprise showed
the good faith that informed the new relationship.
Since notlii"ng much worse than Pol Pot could be imagined, the first reaction to_ the Vietnamese invasion of
Cambodia was bafflement, even involuntary relief. At last
somebody had done something about Cambodia-had
made it possible to speak, even perhaps to think of it
again. Even McGovern had advocated intervention the
summer before (August 21, 1978).
But after baffled involuntary relief came doubt. The
North Vietnamese attempt to conquer Cambodia not only
substituted one totalitarian regime for another but, as
Prince Sihanouk' s voice suddenly clear from Peking reminded, threatened the extinction of Cambodia forever.
In its self-righteous support of the invasion, the Soviet
regime implied that opposition to the Vietnamese con·
quest amounted to support for Pol Pot. They did not even
have to remind us that Pol Pot had murdered for three
and a half years without even a word of protest from
Western governments. Or from the people. Nothing-no
demonstrations, those fabled demonstrations that just a
few years before had been taken for the most important,
even the only exercise of genuine freedom.
The State Department expressed its displeasure at the
Vietnamese and at the same time attempted to keep its
distance from Pol Pot. He was, after all, supported by the
Chinese regime which we recognized. The so-called
movement of the non-aligned (despite Castro's maneuvers later in 1979) did not recognize the Vietnamese regime in Cambodia, thereby implying Pol Pot had some
claim to 14 legitimacy."
With the Chinese attack on Hanoi about six weeks later
69
�It was in the Red Army, from the lips of General Korotayev,
that I first heard the stupefying thought, not entirely alien to
me: when Communism is victorious the world over, then
wars will be fought with the ultimate bitterness. Hadn't I had
similar thoughts that night after our disaster on the Sutjeska
River? Hadn't I reflected that forces stronger than ideology
and interests had thrown us and the Germans into a death
struggle amid those wild ravines? And now a Russian who was
also a Communist, Korotayev, was entertaining the thought
that wars would be especially bitter under Communismthough under Communism, theoretically, there would be no
classes and no wars. What horrors gave rise to these thoughts
in Korotayev and myself? And how was it that he had the
boldness so late at night, after supper and a cordial conversation, to express his thoughts, and I to listen in mute remembrance of horrors and reflections of my own?4
we again faced a war in which it was impossible to take
sides. The Chinese regime had at least responded to
Hanoi"s attack, which meant they took it seriously when
the West ignored it. But the Chinese were not combatting
aggression for the sake of the self-determination of Cambodia. Conquerors first of all of themselves (and of Tibet),
they were simply contesting Soviet and Vietnamese domination of the area (a Soviet-Vietnamese "friendship" treaty
had brought Vietnam nearly to the status of an "East-European" satellite barely a month [December 3, 1978]
before the Vietnamese attack). Mainland China was quite
comfortable with Pol Pot and supported him. Like the
Soviet regime, it takes murder to be the stuff of history
when it is merely the stuff of civil wars, or "revolutions".
Milovan Djilas, associate and victim ofTito, asked himself
recently when reliving his wartime: "Killing is a function
of war and revolution. Or could it be the other way around?"
The State Department sought a quick end to hostilities
in which the Chinese regime appears not to have done
well, but did nothing about the continuing Vietnamese
conquest of Cambodia.
We did not count. We were effectively shut out. For
four years we and the world we lead had meekly put up
Against this background of wars in which the United
States could take neither side but only intervene against
both, the President recognized mainland China. The expected recognition came unexpectedly and without pub-
with not knowing what was going on in those nations, and
lic discussion. Congress was not in session, and only the
now that they did not hide their actions, we did nothing.
Another fact came clear. The war for Indochina would
continue; it had continued. Since the United States had
been assumed to be the cause of the fighting, people
imagined that with its withdrawal, the violence would
cease. There would be no freedom, no peace, but fighting,
at least, would cease. Instead the fighting continued with
briefest notice (something like twenty-four hours) was
given to the Republic of China (Taiwan). In evading the
Senate's criticism, Carter deprived himself of its moderating support, which might have told in his dealings with
China. The Senate might have given him the strength to
recognize China without breaking relations with Taiwan
and without suspending, unilaterally, the treaty of alliance
with a year's notice-legally correct but certainly not
within the spirit of alliance, which is not made of paper.
After a few weeks the Senate passed a motion that expressed its support of Taiwan without explicit mention of
the readiness to defend it. In response, mainland China
made it as dear as it makes anything, that it limited its
greater furor and brutality, with plain murderousness, be-
fore the whole world, a war now of conquest between
communists where free men could discern nothing at
stake except destruction for destruction's sake. And it
spread. It threatens Thailand. It intensified, almost unnoticed in its international dimension, in Europe, in terrorist
attacks in Italy, in Turkey, in Ireland, in Spain where
every step towards a constitution and freedom encountered terrorist violence. But men did not connect the increasing domestic violence in the countries of Europe
with their incapacity to bring the destruction of Indochina to an end.
When Djilas visited the front lines on a visit to Moscow
in 1944, a Soviet general shocked him with his remark
that the worst and most destructive wars would come
with the triumph of "socialism" throughout the world.
Then the murder would start in earnest. The murder in
Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, the conquest of South
Vietnam by the regime in the North, the attempted conquest of Cambodia by North Vietnam, as well as China's
attack on Hanoi, all show the beginnings of that world of
bitter wars with no discernible object. The defense of
freedom in the world, which the totalitarian regimes call
unforgivabie aggression, gives the world its only stability.
Such a stability is not to be maintained without facing
danger frequently.
70
3. The Recognition of Mainland China
((commitment" not to attack Taiwan to a few years.
By repudiating Taiwan in shameless fashion at the moment he recognized China, Carter made it dear that the
United States took recognition of the regime in mainland
China for something like an affirmation of its "legitimacy."
Recognizing the regime in China a generation after it
seized power in civil war made sense, since it was about
time we looked that reality in the face; but making recognition amount to something like approval meant appearing to disown our previous thinking-our friends and
ourselves.
Our policy towards mainland China runs the risk of repeating all the mistakes of our war-time association with
Stalin and the Soviet Union-a policy that came from the
weakness of the democracies and has put us since 1945 in
a situation of fighting, and not knowing we are fighting, a
war, in Brian Crozier's phrase, called ({peace."
In their recent insistent coupling of the United States
and China, and their significant omission of Europe in
their propaganda about Afghanistan, the Soviets betray
WINTER 1981
�full awareness that association with China can compromise the United States and separate it from Europe and
NATO. They may not be as afraid of China as they
pretend-and we assume.
The worst part of the China policy is its motive. According to well-founded rumors it comes from a desire of
some high officials in the government to exploit this assumed Soviet fear of China. Instead of deluding ourselves
that we could exploit Soviet fear of China, we ought to
fear that such actions might provoke the Soviet Union to
irrational acts.
Any thought of using the Chinese to make up for our
government's lack of courage and forthrightness shows little common sense. The men in power (not office) in the
Soviet Union are accustomed to murder and imprisoning
without compunction. It is self-destructive to expect that
Western statesmen could manipulate these men. Especially American men in office, with their professors as advisors, who in most instances in the last fifteen years have
been incapable of addressing their own citizens effectively (and, therefore, of distinguishing their citizens'
capacity to think from the "public opinion" of the newspapers, television, and the polls).
Because in contrast to Hitler (who wanted to get back to
his drawing), the Communists in Russia and China are
not in such a hurry and appear, as an aide to Schmidt put
it (before Afghanistan), "predictable", there is a tendency
to assume they are not self-destructive, not at any rate as
self-destructive as the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in
Italy. But events in Indochina especially since the fall of
Saigon in April 1975 have shown again that Communists
when left to themselves cannot control their self-destructiveness.
... The twentieth century has also shown us that evil has an
enormous urge to self-destruction. It inevitably ends in total
folly and suicide. Unfortunately, as we now understand, in
destroying itself, evil may destroy all life on earth as well.
However much we shout about these elementary truths, they
will only be heeded by people who themselves want no more
of evil. None of this, after all, is new: everything is always
repeated, though on an ever greater scale. Luckily, I shall not
see what the future holds in store.S
Nobody can tell whether the Communists in China and
Russia will continue to turn against each other or again
join together against the countries that manage to enjoy
the consent of the governed. An eventual rapprochement
between the Communists in China and in Russia may
well be more likely than continued name-calling-and in
any case rapprochement is compatible with some namecalling. In his interview in Time at the beginning of 1979,
Brezhnev winked more than once at the Communists in
China. 6 There are talks, probably insignificant, now going
on. Totalitarian regimes can neither distinguish between
friends and enemies nor between war and peace.
The worst of it has been the kind of euphoria that has
greeted opening relations with China. From hearing travTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ellers return you hardly dare remember that China is a totalitarian country that has criticized the Soviet Union for
the slight distance it has supposedly taken from Stalin and
for not using nuclear weapons.
There is hardly any real information coming out of
China. There are np real voices like those now speaking
for Russia throughout the whole length and breadth of
the world, and those coming out of what has come to be
called "Eastern Europe". We know little; and we should
never act and think as if we know much.
One of the two books I know of on the Chinese camps
(Prisoner of Mao) shows them to be more terrifying than
the Soviet camps, for unlike the Soviet camps they are intent on destroying the power to think.'
He (Pasqualini, one of the writers of Prisoner of Mao) confesses that after a few years in the labor camps, he came, if
not exactly to love the system which was methodically destroying his personality, at least to feel gratitude for the
patience and care with which the Authorities were trying to
re-educate worthless vermin like himself. 8
Instead of deluding ourselves that we could effectively
exploit Soviet fears of China, we ought to take the Soviet
regime's fears of China seriously: they may know what
they are talking about. And they are not only the fears of
the Soviet regime, but of Russians, of men who can teach
us a thing or two about freedom. In 1974 Vladimir Bukovsky in Vladimir Prison, met a Chinaman, Ma Hun, who
had fled death in China in 1968 during the so-called "cultural revolution". He had been arrested by the KGB.
They took him for a spy after their failure to turn him into
one, because they could not conceive of anybody fleeing
to the Soviet Union for refuge:
... The boys used to ask him:
"Well now, Ma Hun, how do you like it here?"
"Velly good," he would say. "Velly, velly good."
"What do you mean, good? This is prison, starvation."
"What starvation?" Ma Hun looked astonished and pointed
at the flies flying about the cell. As if to say, if there had been
real starvation, this wildlife would long since have disappeared. The boys got a fit of the shivers-what do the poor
sods call starvation back in China?
In time Ma Hun was able to tell us about the starvation in
China, when they ate all the leaves off the trees and all the
grass. For fifty miles around you couldn't find even a dung
beetle .
. . . The more he told us about China, the more it reminded
us of our own 1920s and 30s, under so-called "Stalinism". But
if anything, it was worse in China: more cruelty, cynicism,
and hypocrisy. They didn't need any concentration camps
there, they simply killed off their undesirables. For instance,
all the Chinese volunteers who had been captured in Korea
and returned by the Americans were simply wiped out, to the
last man. But they were far from being the only ones. There
were the "class aliens," the "wreckers" and the "opportunists." And above all, of course, the intelligentsia. The rest
were herded into stafe farms and communes to be reeducated by work.
71
�... Soviet life still seemed like paradise to him: you were
paid money for your work, which you could use to buy food
and clothing without restriction. Not like in China, where
you got nine yards of cloth per person per year. As for hypocrisy, he was used to it. Soviet hypocrisy struck him as child's
play compared with the Chinese variety. 9
Because our policy does not come of sliength it cannot
support such individuals who live in China, who understand and love government by law and democracy and
speak out. The new regime has arrested some of these
men, after a few months in which they spoke their mind;
there has been no notice, as far as I know, from the governments of the West. 10
4. The Murder of Peoples
You now have to go to the refugee camps in Thailand
or in Malaysia, among the dying or those about to be returned to their death, if you want to hear the words of
john F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address of 1961 ("Let every
nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall
pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and
the success of liberty") said with a straight face:
We got to know that the Thai govt have sent thousands of
refugees back to Cambodia. We feel very sorry and disappointed about the news.
We have tried all our best to escape from Communist Cambodia to look for freedom.
Dear sir (President Carter), your Anierican people have
fighted for liberty with tears and blood. You realize very well
about the worth and happiness of freedom. We will rather die
in a freedom country than being sent back to unhuman Communist Cambodia. . . 11
In june 1979 in Vienna when Carter brought up the
"problem" of the refugees of Indochina, he met Brezhnev's icy silence. That silence means: these people will die
like flies and you will do nothing about it; words do not
mean much and you can talk all you like-we know you
do not mean it. 12
Who got the governments of the West finally to pay a
semblance of attention to the refugees? Thailand and Malaysia and Singapore. How did they do it? By blackmail, by
declaring they would let the refugees perish, by threatening the United States and Europe with their own
ideals-by actually driving something like forty thousand
refugees back from Thailand into western Cambodia to almost certain death-before everybody's eyes. The once
great nations of Europe and the United States called an
international conference in july 1979 in Geneva. What
happened at this conference? They asked Vietnam to
stop the flow of refugees sent to death on the South
China Sea. They thus accorded the regime in Vietnam,
72
not recognized by the United States, a kind of recognition. Cambodia was not even represented, because the
"nations" could not agree on its representation. At the
conference only the Chinese spoke open words-the
Chinese, who had backed and still back the murderous regime of Pol Pot. From them we took lessons in interna·
tionallaw! The Soviet Union kept silence except when it
accused China of driving men into the sea and blaming
Hanoi for it. 13
In effect the large nations of the West indicated to Hanoi that it could do what it wanted with those it wished
away as long as it did not involve the West in their extermination by putting them on the seas. (In june 1979 the
immigration minister of Australia estimated that two hundred thousand Vietnamese had died at sea in the previous
four years. In Hong Kong offici;Jls estimated Hanoi might
finally extort several billion dollars in gold from the Chinese and Vietnamese whom it allowed to take to the uncertain mercies of the seas.jl"' And the flow of refugees
stopped-for a time. The newspapers could turn to easier
subjects.
When the freespoken President of Italy, Pertini, sent
three Italian ships, which together could hold one thousand refugees, to the South China Sea in july, 1979, Hanoi savagely accused Italy of aggression. In answer the
Italian commander spoke in what sounded like embarrass·
ment of "humanitarian" considerations. Ships of the
United States were also active at this time pulling men,
women, and children out of the South China Sea. In an
unaccountable callous misreading of British public opin·
ion, Margaret Thatcher, by declaring she would not honor
the custom of first refuge, encouraged British merchant
men, at considerable expense, to avoid waters where men
were drowning.
The United States took on about half the cost of caring
for the refugees who had survived, but the United States
did not speak out in defense of the traditions of refuge
that reach back at least to the Odyssey and the earliest
books of the Bible. This catastrophe is as serious, and will
haunt us deeply, as the murder of twelve million individuals by the Nazis. This time nobody will be able to say he
did not know.
Solzhenitsyn, especially in the third volume of Gulag
Archipelago, and Bruno Bettelheim, in a remarkable essay
on Linda Wertmuller's Seven Beauties printed several
years ago in The New Yorker, show over and over again
that the readiness to do anything to survive in concentration camps-which is called "appeasement" in international relations-invites murder because it makes individuals helpless 1 5 The war now waged on an international
scale not only in Southeast Asia but in much of Europe
through terrrorism, in the Middle East, in South America
and, especially at this moment, Central America, may well
instill this camp attitude everywhere, both in government
and individuals.
Meanwhile, the Afghans fight the Soviet army with almost their bare hands.
WINTER 1981
�5. The Recognition of Terrorists
In 1979 the terrorist war against the West which had in·
tensified since 1967 began to culminate in the world-wide
effort of the fedayeen to achieve diplomatic recognition
as the representative of the Arabs of Palestine, and in the
success of Persia in forcing the world to take its collapse
for a ('revolution". Khomeini showed the connection
between the two events immediately upon his arrival in
Teheran when he embraced Arafat for all the world to
see, put the PLO in the Israeli embassy in Teheran, and
stopped all oil shipments to South Africa and Israel,
thereby increasing Israel's isolation and dependence on
the United States.
The "official" recognition of terrorism now threatens
to become the subject of international negotiations both
in the instance of the PLO and of Persia. Terrorists are
acting as if they were governments.
Ordinary terrorists are trained in Libya, Algeria, Syria,
Czechoslovakia, Moscow, and God knows where else (often by Cuban and East German as well as Soviet instruc·
tors). The terrorists in Teheran, in contrast, besides taking
lessons from the fedayeen are in some sense self·
taught-on American campuses.
In its most recent phase this use of "revolution" to at·
tack nations from without by undoing international law
started with the subjection of the UN to PLO propaganda
and "Third World" ways of not-thinking. Here the guilt·
riddling superstition that the hard-working countries were
responsible for the poverty of the poor countries would,
but for the courage of Moynihan's intelligence, have gone
unnoticed.
Inconceivable without the resort to the sale of oil as a
political weapon, which touches all important nations,
this "revolutionary" attack on international traditions accompanies inflation, which, especially in Europe, comes
from the forced rise in oil prices. Lenin knew that the
quickest way to destroy societies that obey their laws is to
undermine their currency. Inflation makes men feel their
work does not count enough even to make for a fair exchange. This kind of inflation too is an attack from without.
Supplied and supported by the Soviet Union, the PLO
and the so-called radical states like Libya have attacked internationally, especially in Europe. They have realized
they could better get at the United States through Europe
than through Egypt and attacking IsraeL For the United
States, as Joseph Churba manfully stresses, provides the
link between the Arabs of Palestine, which the PLO
claims to represent, and the peace treaty between Egypt
and IsraeL 16 Not mentioned in the treaty itself, the Arabs
of Palestine (called "Palestinians") appear in the appended agreement which Carter negotiated at Camp
David.
The attempt to win diplomatic recognition for the PLO
is an attack not only on Israel but on all legitimate governments. For Israel has a government which enjoys the deep
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
consent of those it governs. It is also one of the few
governments in the world whose policy toward terrorists
has been unambiguous from the start, and fearless.
The fedayeen's recent successes are not to be taken
lightly. Their representatives have been received in Portugal, in Spain (by the King in the fond illusion, almost immediately undone, that the PLO would restrain its
murder). In defiance of the best opinions of his countrymen who wanted him to support the peace between
Egypt and Israel, Giscard d'Estaing on a trip to the Middle
East called for the independence of the Arabs of Palestine, and found something like support from the government of Germany. The Council of Foreign Ministers of
the Common Market, in a Europe which rarely speaks in
unison on foreign affairs, especially in regard to the Soviet
Union, has issued repeated declarations favouring the
fedayeen: In Turkey the PLO, through the violence of
another fedayeen terrorist organization, won something
approaching diplomatic recognition. In Brazil in the summer of 1979 the Vice President of Kuwait demanded recognition of the PLO under the threat of cutting off the oil
on which Brazil depends for all but ten percent of its
needs. In his threatening speeches in Brazil, the Vice
President called openly for the destruction of Israel and
praised Nazism. This praise appalled his audience, for the
war still counts in Brazil, the only country in South America whose soldiers fought and died with the Allies in the
war for freedom. Arafat, too, received in July 1979 in an
official manner and in public buildings in Vienna by
Kreitsky and Brandt-although he was a guest, not of the
government of Austria, but of the Socialist International-openly declared the readiness of the PLO to use
the "oil weapon". Throughout these attempts to win diplomatic recognition on the basis of its past violence, the
PLO has never repudiated its desire, openly stated in its
"charter", to destroy Israel.
All this fury of activity comes because the peace between Israel and Egypt of March 1979 threatens the PLO.
The peace has made things more dangerous, for it can
make things better or much worse.
A real peace would threaten all regimes that do not
obey their own laws. (The move towards peace has in fact
encouraged Sadat to undo some of the authoritarian character of the Egyptian regime-and the tensions that will
come to the surface in Egypt if the peace takes hold may
undo him.)
Peace in the Middle East would represent a major triumph over the totalitarian powers, who after all have
made peace impossible in Europe. The tendency, however, to put pressure on Israel rather than on Egypt and
the other more accessible Arab states runs the clear risk of
turning the peace into a more effective means of undoing
Israel than war. Unequivocal American support for
Israel's distinction between self-rule for the Arabs actually
living in the West Bank and Gaza and an independent
fedayeen state might have strengthened Sadat, by helping
him face down the rest of Arab "opinion." Such policy
73
�might bring some of the Arabs to the recognition that in
attacking Israel they are attacking themselves, for without
Israel they would be helpless before the Soviets. 17 Without
Arab support the fedayeen could not make such an impression on the West fearful for its oil. The turning point
will probably come when Israel gives up the irreplaceable
Sinai air bases in 1982.
6. "Revolution" in Persia
In its capacity to involve the world in its troubles, Khomeini's Persia outdoes even the fedayeen. Without the
participation and the extorted approval of "international
opinion," the collapse of authority in Persia might not
have occurred-and it certainly would not have been able
to pass itself off as a "revolution."
This capacity of Persia to involve the whole world in its
collapse comes not because events in Persia had anything
to say to the world, but because of the West's servility in
its dependence on oil and because of Persia's geographical
an accurate assessment, attention would have necessarily
turned also on the Communist Party and the Soviet
Union who are "professionals" in using the fantasy of
"revolution" to seize power.
Nor did it impress people that Khomeini immediately
took Soviet positions in foreign policy; that he attacked
the "imperialism" of the United States; that he showed an
unseeing world he thought like a Marxist, not like a Mohammedan, when he released the blacks and the women
among the American hostages-since when have Mohammedans shown sensitivity to blacks and to women; that he
took weeks to criticize the attempted Soviet conquest of
Afghanistan, and then attacked both the United States
and the Soviet Union as equally "evil."
Writing in L'Express about eight months after Khomeini's alightment in Teheran, jean Fran<;:ois Revel
showed that almost all of the points of the program of the
Communist Party of Persia, announced six months be-
fore, had found fulfillment: nationalization of the banks,
removal of "undesirable elements" from the police, the
judiciary, and the army. All except the formation of an
position.
open coalition regime including the Communists.
Except for the West's servility in its dependence on it,
the facts that count about Persis are old. The sights that
the precipitous oil riches brought recalled Herodotus, es-
The seizure of Americans in the United States embassy
in Teheran represents another development in the open
effort to destroy international opinion. The "leaders" of
pecially his sense of grandeur's violation of proportion
Persia, some of whom had studied at American universi-
and, therefore, of rationality. Two thousand trucks rusting on the side of a road because of the lack of trained
drivers who finally had to come from abroad, from Korea
and Taiwan; harbours with their approaches clogged by
six months of ships because Persian stevedores would not
work (again men came from Korea and Taiwan), soldiers
kissing the Shah's feet in an embarrassing misunderstand-
ties, sensed the American administration would put up
with any violence short of murder. With his frequent
boasts that no American in his time in the White House
had died in battle, Carter invited violence short of murder. Upon Cyrus Vance's resignation after the failure of
the long-delayed attempt to rescue the captives, the news-
ing of ancient Persian custom.
Invested on january 6, 1979, by the Shah, the Bakhtiar
government tested the illusion that there was an impulse
to liberty in ancient Persia, strong, and thereby rational
enough in the midst of chaos to find viable expression in a
constitution. A veteran of the French Resistance and of
the Shah's arrests, Bakhtiar made the mistake of getting
the Shah to leave the country on january 16, 1979. This
was the moment to make the transition to a constitutional
autocracy (not a constitutional monarchy, for the Shah
was no king in any European sense). It was also the moment for the United States to back openly the Shah and
his new Prime Minister-who faced crowds, sometimes
papers repeated his associates' characterizations of the
Secretary of State as a man who never said an angry word,
who never gave way to his actual feelings. Soon after the
seizure of the captives, an editorial writer for the Wall
Street Journal described the men in the White House as
worrying most about the reaction of the American people
as if the mob were not in Teheran, but here.
The seizure of the Americans in Teheran meant to
show the whole world that there was no difference between diplomats and anybody else; that there was no such
thing as a government capable of protecting its own officials and, therefore, its citizens; that nobody, whether rich
or poor, was safe; that passports were pieces of paper. The
attack on diplomatic custom, by '~students", unprece-
nary unwillingness of newspapers, radio, and television to
dented except as deliberate act of war, was taken as a
novelty.
But the attack is deadly serious. It undermines the
world's recognition that something underlies both war
and peace which allows nations to distinguish between
them and negotiate with each other even when at war. In
his second inaugural address (in the importantly different
pay attention to the Communist Party of Persia and So-
circumstances of civil war), Lincoln referred to this com-
viet involvement, even in the face of fairly reliable reports
mon underlying recognition of something fundamental
that transcends war and peace when he spoke of both
Northerners and Southerners reading the same Bible.
manipulated, everywhere and strikes in the oil-fields skillfully timed by the Communists, to undermine the new
government. 18 The United States did nothing. It did not
support Bakhtiar by opposing the return of Khomeini.
The readiness to accept "revolution" as a label for
events in Persia found its telling match in the extraordi-
of KGB involvement with the "students" who had seized
the American Embassy. For had "revolution" represented
74
WINTER 1981
�The attack had immediate consequences. The Soviets
showed the increase of their influence in Persia: they
warned the United States not to attempt rescue. American paralysis in Persia in the face of outrage probably also
encouraged Soviet effrontery in attacking Afghanistan a
few weeks after the seizure of the hostages.
In the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitzyn tells of local populations refusing succour to fugitives, in fear of reprisals. He remarks that the Soviet regime
had not only destroyed public opinion in Russia but also
undermined customs-the unwritten Jaws.
These people have everything-they have food and they have
water. Why don't we just knock on the door like beggars:
"Brothers! GOod people! Help us! We are convicts, escaped
prisoners!" Just like it Used to be in the nineteenth centurywhen people put pots of porridge, clothing, copper coins by
the paths through the taiga.
I had bread from the wives of the village
And the lads saw me right for makhorka.
Like hell we will! Times have changed. Nowadays they turn
you in. Either to salve their consciences, or to save their skins.
Because for aiding and abetting you can have a quarter slapped
on you. The nineteenth century failed to realize that a gift of
bread and water could be a political crime. 19
7. Nicaragua, Central America-and
the Americas
Unlike Persia, where collapse with much murder came
from crowds supported by world-wide opinion in their
hatred of the Shah, Nicaragua suffered full-scale civil war.
Announced several years before it occurred, civil war
came as if on schedule-with regular announcements
from guerrillas, otherwise in hiding, to the major newspapers.
Faced with a long-awaited civil war that afforded no
meaningful alternative in Nicaragua, and therefore required outside arbitration and intervention (like Henry L.
Stimson's arbitration upon request of the warring factions
in 1927 in Nicaragua), Brzezinski remarked to jean Franyois Revel, at the moment of the victory of the Sandinistas
in july, 1979, that nobody yet had found out how to
fashion democracies. 20
The truth, however, comes a little closer to home. In
announcing the "Alliance for Progress" on March 13,
1961, meant to face the threat of Castro's seizure of
power in Cuba to the rest of South America, Kennedy
connected economic aid to democracy and the rule of law.
Such an emphasis led to the public appreciation of democratic statesmen like Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela
and Alberto Lleras Camargo of Columbia 21 After a few
years the connection grew forgotten. A general neglect of
South America followed. Some years later Kissinger, without any embarrassment, disparaged its strategic "geopolitical" significance, even though Castro's destruction of the
Monroe doctrine had brought all of South America closer
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to the civil war raging in the minds of men-and in many
places, not only in their minds.
In the absence of a forthright persistent American policy to support the constructive forces in South America,
confusion deepened the polarization Castro incited in
South America. Hatred of the United States drove much
of South America (with the important exception of Brazil)
to take itself, incredibly, for part of the "Third World".
The polarization that this hatred encouraged helped destroy freedom in Chile and Uruguay and further undermine Argentina, the Canada of South America at the
beginning of the century. In its turn the destruction of
freedom in Chile (which Kissinger had ignored along with
the rest of South America until a few months before
Allende won a plurality in September 1970) became a test
of conscience throughout the world second only to the
war in Indochina. It brought South America further into
the struggle for Europe which rages throughout the world
-while Europe (with the exception of France in Africa)
tends to local riches, and the United States yields to the
distraction of the "big" problems like mainland China and
negotiations to limit arms and the danger of "nuclear
holocaust".
Civil war broke out in Nicaragua after the passage of
the Panama Canal treaty. Despite the provisions of the
treaty that allow the United States control of the canalunti1 the end of the century, an increase in instability in the
entire Caribbean followed its approvaL
Panama, which benefited most from the treaty, made a
show of its efforts to train and supply fighters for Nicaragua. (In Costa Rica there was training also, but only because the government could not prevent what it would
not openly endorse: individuals of vacillating allegiance,
probably within the government, warned the training
camps when the police sought to move against them.)
Panama, in its open encouragement of civil war in Nicaragua, which violated South American traditions of not
taking sides in the civil wars of neighbors, took the place
of Cuba, which denied involvement-until victory 22 As in
Persia, the amateurs at "revolution" took the place in public of the professionals in the seizure of power.
The war for Nicaragua began the civil war for Central
America, the only region in South America where the
United States has intervened directly (and repeatedly) to
insure freedom of the seas in the access to the canal. Reporters told of youths, or teenagers, sometimes posing as
Nicaraguans, coming to Nicaragua from all over South
and Central America-most of all from Chile, Uruguay,
Colombia and Panama. They came because they wanted
to bring a war like the war for Nicaragua home.
Propaganda crosses frontiers more quickly in South
America than anywhere else in the West. So does fear.
For men there, especially capable and important people,
often do not harbour loyalty to the lands of their birthand they keep much of their money abroad. In January
1979, people in Guatemala, where property is more evenly
distributed than in Nicaragua, said nothing like Nicaragua
75
�could happen to them for fifteen or twenty years. By De·
cember 1979 they estimated two, at the outside, five
years. El Salvador is deeply at war. In 1980 there was violence from all sides in Guatemala-more or less unreported and ignored abroad. In the immediate region, the
prize is Costa Rica, the other democracy, besides Venezuela, left in South America. Law abiding and courageous,
for instance in its votes at the UN, it is a country that
astonishes sensitive travellers in its contrast with the rest
of the region.
Other prizes are of even more consequence than Costa
Rica. Totalitarian self-conquest (for totalitarianism spreads
with the, in appearance, uncontrollable self-destruction of
states) of Central America in civil war would isolate South
America from the United States even more than the
countries of South America and the United States have
isolated themselves from each other. Self-conquest of
Central America would also mean pressure on the canal,
on the surrounding waters-an freedom of the seas, hardpressed elsewhere: by means of the willful extension of
territorial waters, by the increasing presence of the Soviet
fleet on the oceans, by Kadafi's designs on Malta (for instance, his recent attempt to keep an Italian company
from exploring for oil off its coast). An inheritance from
the eighteenth century, freedom of the seas means not
only trade and the riches it brings, but the movement of
individuals and words. Like OPEC's attack on trade, the
threat to the freedom of the seas endangers freedom
within nations, for there cannot be much freedom within
at least some nations without free movement between
them.
As his situation worsened Somoza suddenly grew, like
the Shah, unbearable to people who had hardly thought
of him before. Nobody defended him (only a few men in
Congress, who still clung to the old phrase, "He's a son-ofa-bitch, but our son-of-a-bitch"). Nobody remembered
Somoza's loyalty at the UN: Nicaragua had voted in defense of Israel, when the Shah had not. The murder of the
courageous newspaper editor, Chamorro, was connected
with Somoza. When informed of the murder, Somoza, according to people close to events, expressed astonishment genuine in appearance. The murder may have been
the work of his henchmen who killed without his knowledge as danger increased.
Unlike the Shah, Somoza and his army fought in total
disregard of international opinion, and in spite of the
United States government's refusal to supply him with
arms and spare parts after the beginning of 1979 (February 8). He was a tyrant with a tyrant's courage, mixed in
with brutality and cowardice. Unlike his successors, however, he had set a date for elections in the near future.
In some sense the extent of Somoza's dominance over
Nicaragua brought the civil war, for it made it impossible
for another caudillo to replace him with a coup in the
fashion usual in much of South America. His predominance also helped turn opinion outside Nicaragua against
him. At a time when visitors to Nicaragua itself reported
76
numbing terror in which all who did not flee were compelled to choose sides, people elsewhere hoped destruction would bring democracy. The devastation in Nicaragua with forty thousand dead still has not left its imprint
on the world's senses.
There is no way in such a situation for the United
States not to influence events. The refusal of the American government to supply arms and spare parts to Somoza
and the later refusal to intervene without the support of
the OAS (June 21-23, 1979) helped bring Somoza down
and discouraged negotiations to stop the civil war. Refugees from Nicaragua received little attention except from
newspapers in Spain and Central and South America.
With Soviet backing, the victors called for the "extradition" of Somoza after he fled; as if he, like the Shah, were
an ordinary criminal. As in Persia, there were to be no visible exiles, for exiles mean there is another side. A civil war
in which no side was entirely right came to be taken for a
"revolution." And men abroad hoped for democracy and
the rule of law.
Within Nicaragua too, hopes for democracy sprang
from terror. Towards the end almost everybody who
would say anything was against Somoza-but not, in most
instances, for the Sandinistas. Trained and armed abroad,
the Sandinistas, however, did the fighting-until towards
the end when they were joined by volunteers, many of
them adolescents. The people who tried to tell themselves
the fall of Somoza would occasion democracy were not
doing the fighting. Those who fought did not want democracy. This division between those who fought and
those who did not persisted after the cessation of open
hostilities, for the victors did not disarm themselves.
Many young people in Sandinista uniforms (which are not
distinguishable from those of the police) are said to be on
the streets of Managua and, presumably, other cities in
Nicaragua. Rebelo, a non-Sandinista member of the
Junta, remarked upon his resignation in April 1979, "How
can you have genuine pluralism under a gun?"
The coalition (the Junta) of the guerrillas and the democratically-minded individuals amounts to a truce which
allows those who fought to hold something like the acquiescence of those who did not. The guerrillas need this
truce because their aim-the self-conquest of all of Central America-can only be achieved if the rest of Central
America and the world persuade themselves that their seizure of power is actually a "revolution for democracy".
The truce also helps win credits-which are coming from
Germany (Federal Republic).
At the formation of the coalition, the armed guerrillas
also went about the country organizing the same kind of
capillary neighbourhood and local organizations that
help'ed the Communists take over in East Germany. The
recent campaign against illiteracy probably reinforced this
local control. In the spring of 1980 the guerrillas increased
their representation in the Council of State. There are indications that they, not the coalition, have come to an
understanding with the Soviets. There have been execuWINTER 1981
�tions without trial and murders and disappearances; at
least sixty-five hundred men are in prison without due
process. Although reported, these facts receive little
attention.
Civil war in Central America intensifies not only because of Western, especially American, paralysis in Persia
and Afghanistan but also because of the instability in
Cuba. Within hours after the inadvertent removal of
Cuban guards from the Peruvian embassy in the spring of
1980, something like ten thousand men sought asylum.
The misery in Cuba was plain for the whole word, including South America, to see. Costa Rica with her usual cour·
age declared her readiness to receive them, until the other
South American nations agreed about who would take
how many. The refugees would have been living witnesses
to Castro's Cuba in South America, where, in contrast to
the United States, Castro still fascinates people in spite of
themselves. Desperate to keep the refugees in the Peruvian compound out of South America, Castro allowed
thousands of others to leave for the United States to distract attention from them. He managed to make it look,
not as if they were fleeing, but as if he were "dumping"
them on the United States. To discredit them he flung
among them in unabashed spite common criminals, undesirables, and the sick unto death.
In a few weeks something like a hundred and twentyfive thousand reached the United States. Castro had
turned a responsibility that touched each of the Americas
into an embarrassment in appearance forced upon the
United States. A fitting nemesis for a President who had
announced himself a patron of ''human rights" -and who
had withdrawn his support from Somoza in their namebut had discovered he did not have the guts for it. In this
at least Kissinger recognized his limitations-without,
however, acknowledging them.
War of subversion and self-conquest abroad-in this instance, in Central America-to face down instability at
home-in this instance, in Cuba-is that the future? In
the next ten and twenty years, Soviet-supported self-conquest through chaos abroad, especially outside of Europe,
could be matched by rational struggle for liberty in "Eastern Europe". For the courage of resistance and the love of
liberty in Russia and the other countries to the east can
only be publicly ignored-as it has been in Poland in recent days by the governments of the West-at the expense of Western self-knowledge and self· respect. "Inside
the country (Russia), these are times of ever greater
repression. '' 23
8. Europe-and Us
I have said little of Europe. Our-and Great Britain'sincapacity to bring the Second World War to an end in a
real peace with the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Europe has made the history of Europe our history.
But Europe, the Europe of the West, acts as if it does
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
not know that the war throughout the world is for Europe. Even when terrorists attack her innards, in Spain,
Turkey, Italy, Ireland, and Germany, her governments,
for fear of offending the Soviets and because of guilt at
previous weakness before violence, act not as if Europe is
under attack, but as if terrorism is their own domestic affair. Even a man of the intelligence and courage of Raymond Aron says that Soviet nuclear predominance is
"only" important because of its "political effects." As if
"political effects," in this instance the disintegration of
daily life and the death-like yielding up of the courage to
live, were not what is at stake in the struggle! Surrender
threatens to take place without struggle and, therefore, is
more likely to lead to self-destructive violence and the resignation which leads to total war.
Not recognizing the war now going on means expecting
that a brutal civil war, in which communist trained and
supplied forces brought down the tyrant, will bring de·
mocracy to Central America. It means taking it for
granted that totalitarian regimes can interfere in civil
wars, but not free governments.
The European civil war (for with no apparent limited
objectives the war that started in 1914 has turned into a
civil war-into a war to undo governments and even to
change "human" character) that came to a halt but not to
an end in 1945 has continued outside of Europe, first of
all in 1950 with the Soviet-supported attack on Korea. But
somehow because it was only Europe that really counted,
Europe that center of so much to love and so much to
hate, so obviously destroyed and wrecked, we and especially Europe, Western Europe, did not realize that the
European civil war, the World War in the twentieth century, continued-because it continued outside of Europe.
The war continued also in Eastern Europe with the Soviet slaughter of six hundred workers in Berlin in 1953 and
of unnumbered Hungarians in 1956 and with the tanks in
Prague in 1968. Yet Western Europe, at least its governments, forgot these events.
Without any reference to the rest of the world, NATO
centered on the defense of this Europe of the West, and
the United States' commitment to it. In the beginning
there was some pretence that NATO was directed against
Germany-the treaty names no enemy, for fear of offend·
ing the Soviet regime. In those very years the Soviet
Union sent many of its veterans from the Second World
war to the camps because Stalin feared the courage they
had learned in battle. He thus showed that he could not
bring the war to an end abroad, because he feared to end
it at home.
No matter what the Uriifed States did, Europe could no
longer hold its sway abroad. More than any country Britain showed the extent war had undone Europe. Had undone victors as well as defeated-the unmistakable mark
of a civil war-for, although she had stood alone and victorious, she suffered a loss of confidence similar to the defeated and conquered. With the intelligence that comes
of courage, she helped Greece save herself from herself
77
�until the beginnings of civil war, in the latter half of 1946.
Then she astonished Marshall, Acheson, and Truman at
the end of February 1947 with the announcement that
she would withdraw from Turkey as well as Greece in six
weeks. She no longer looked outward upon the world. She
turned herself on herself. Her political life threatened to
turn into an ideological struggle. This struggle eroded the
consensus that makes possible law-abiding opposition, in
which sides respect each other enough to criticize each
other. As in many countries in the rest of Europe, parties
in Britain threatened to turn into factions. They spoke
words incomprehensible to each other, and acted as if
only domestic strife counted, as if there were no world
elsewhere. This was especially true after Parliament's inability to get the truth out of the government after the
failure in the Suez 1956.
The withdrawal of Europe, encouraged by the United
States, freed the rest of the world to imitate the worst of
Europe, in the name of ridding itself of Europe, to continue the civil war and slaughter that had brought Europe
to exhausted dependence on the United States. The more
much of the rest of the world denied Europe, the more it
imitated Europe servilely. As everybody knows, huge portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin hang in the main
square of Peking. The world knows neither how to get
along with Europe or without it. Except for the United
States.
The United States showed an answer to the questions
that had been tearing Europe apart-a way of recovery
from the civil war that the French Revolution had
brought to Europe. This capacity to cope with Europe
because they could distinguish themselves meaningfully
from it drew Tocqueville. His book on Democracy in
America tells as much about Europe as about America.
Mindful of the security two oceans gave the Federation, Tocqueville wondered whether its open way of life
would withstand conflict with other nations once its success drew it into the world-into Europe. With a constitution centered on preserving men from themselves, could
it cope with others, especially with wars, which are the
stuff of history?
Tocqueville called the United States a democracy, not a
republic, at a time when egalitarian aspirations had not
yet overcome experience of Republican sobriety. This
emphasis on the egalitarian temptation in the American
way of living that Tocqueville took to be irresistible told of
his experience of Europe's levelling and the reaction
against it which appeared to force a choice between
equally outrageous alternatives. At the same time that he
saw the future in the United States, Tocqueville wondered whether they could remain free of the struggles
that were at Europe.' Egalitarianism and thirst for direct
participation might undo representative institutions
based on the recognition of differences in ability and character; The Federalist's distinction between ancient, direct
democracy and a federated, representative republic might
give way to the pressure of men's aspirations and words.
78
To some extent, especially in recent years, his doubts
have shown themselves in our life. But we remain a Republic in some sense in spite of ourselves.
The Europeanization of the politics of the United
States occurred, to an astonishing extent, during the Indochina war, which produced a kind of extremization, "politicization," and polarization of attitudes. There were
fearful analogies to the polarization that in many European countries prolongs the European Civil War brought
to a truce in Europe in 1945.
In some sense it was difficult to tell whether the United
States was being Europeanized or Europe Americanized.
In the United States there was the collapse of many in the
groups taken for the "Establishment" in the face of the
threat of disapproval of crowds (made up to some extent
of their sons and daughters and their friends) in the years
1968-69. A collapse Kissinger powerfully describes in his
memmrs.
The declarations against the war in Indochina often
took exaggeration for conviction. They often rang hollow,
because they served to deny, rather than to admit, individual responsibility and error. A few years later, in 1978, the
international show "trial" and murder of Aldo Mora with
his ambiguous forced confessions further emphasized the
relation of these testimonials to totalitarian self-accusations. Above all the "times" required you to bear witness
against yourself by attacking yourself in others.
... Special attention must be paid . .. to clandestine activities
since a person is inclined to forget something if it is not waved
in front of his eyes. The West and developing countries are
filled with citizens who by reason of their positions are able to
promote Soviet influence and expansionist goals.
Some of them are motivated by ideas that at least merit discussion. After all, in the Soviet Union, the ideological epicenter, and in China as well, Communist ideology is not a
complete fraud, not a total delusion. It arose from a striving
for truth and justice, like other religious, ethical and philosophical systems ...
There are others among such people who conduct themselves in a "progressive" manner because they consider it
profitable, prestigious or fashionable.
A third category consists of naive, poorly informed or indifferent people who close their eyes and ears to the bitter truth
and eagerly swallow any sweet lie.
Finally there is the fourth group-people who have been
"bought" in the most direct sense of the word, riot always
with money. These include some political figures, businessmen, a great many writers and journalists, government advisers, and heads of the press and television. Over all, they
make up quite a group of influential people. 24
Recently, one of the most courageous journalists of
Europe, Indro Montanelli, founder of the important
newspaper, II Giornale Nuovo, took the measure of the
confusion of American and European ''public" opinion
that passed itself off as agreement. In the midst of criticizing Carter for vacillatioll, hypocrisy, and weakness, he
suddenly asked himself: Whose president is this, anyhow?
WINTER 1981
�This is our president, he answered himself. We made him
with our demonstrations and protests against the war in
Vietnam. What did we have in Italy to do with that war?
Nobody asked us to fight and die in it.
Montanelfi' s observation helps us understand why the
confusion of America and Europe occurred. It came of
the United States' evasiveness towards its allies as well as
towards its own citizens. For who has ever heard of a socalled "imperial" power undertaking a war without the
help, without even the strong public support of almost all
its major allies? Kissinger writes in his memoirs of the em-
barrassed desire of European leaders to avoid Vietnam,
even in private conversation.
The present dangerous ambiguity in Europe is connected with the crisis in American leadership, that is, in
American self-knowledge and capacity to remember and
to distinguish its responsibilities from those of others. To
my knowledge some of the Israeli leaders are the only men
in office who can reason coherently in public with reference to what actually happened in the past, with a living
grasp of international law and the distinction between war
and peace. Kissinger in his memoirs attributes occasional
examples of admirable lucidity to Nixon, but they are always private words-not even words for his cabinet.
Since 1945 it has become clear that it takes much
longer than a generation for countries and governments
destroyed in war, to rebuild confidence, good sense, and
readiness to take responsibility for themselves and their
defense. Expectations in 1945-1948 overestimated the
difficulties of economic recovery and underestimated the
difficulties of political recovery. Individuals were too
stunned by the slaughter and destruction to take in its
political consequences.
There was even a tendency to take economic recoverywhich has turned out to be much more than recoveryfor political recovery instead of as the necessary but not
the sufficient condition for political recovery. In fact
Europe's prosperity has made Europe's lack of political
self-confidence and fear of self all the more brutally apparent. This contrast between well-being and lack of confidence in government and politics had much to do with
the crisis in Europe in the seventies. A similar terror of
self took hold in the United States.
There are dramatic signs that things are changing deeply
in Europe-or could change-if leaders in the United
States woke up and exercised leadership (like the leadership General Haig exercised at the risk of his life when he
led NATO). Europe in the last years appears to have admitted to itself that its grasp of events at home and abroad
is weak. This is most obvious in France (which still counts
in matters of intellectual leadership) but it appears to be
happening also in Italy and elsewhere. We see a readiness
to drop Marxist ideology and to admit that it has served
largely as an evasion of reality and of hard study for something like a generation. We see also a refusal, after the
euphoria of the past, to entertain illusions about the Communist parties in the West. This readiness to drop pretenTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sions means there is less shouting, and a good deal of
emptiness. But it is an emptiness in which fundamental
facts stand out in their isolation.
It is time to return to the less pretentious authors;
Cavour, Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, The
Federalist, Mirabeau:_and the road to them, oddly, leads
through the Russian writers. For we have had to learn
common sense in blood, other people's blood.
In Italy individuals in their late teens appear more lithe
and resilient than people of the same age twenty years
ago. About ten years ago teenage couples openly holding
hands appeared on the streets of Rome. These young people seem more pragmatic, much less, if at all, given to the
self-immolation in ideology which characterized many of
those fifteen and twenty years older. But they need to
hear common sense. The man and woman in their early
twenties who wrote the remarkable pornographic novel
that is also a love story, Porci con le Ali (Pigs with Wings),
show more clearheaded understanding of life in Italy in
the last fifteen years than most of the men now in their
late thirties or early forties who are coming into the center
of Italian politics. The generation that went through the
war and the destruction of freedom in the twenties and
thirties, which had in some sense neither fathers nor sons,
also appears finally on the verge of coming to terms with
itself. Those in most trouble are those in between, those
in their late thirties and forties who wish to belong to the
new world but refuse to admit they are caught in the
breakdown of the old.
France has awakened to the realization that she has become a serious contemporary nation, ready to work and
compete in international markets. In the face of an organized attempt to destroy her government in terrorism,
Italy shows remarkable courage and unanimity. Many of
her public men and her journalists do not flinch before
death or disablement in the streets. This war has cleared
heads: the Socialists have distinguished themselves to
some extent from the Communists, and the Christian
Democrats, in response to the electorate and with continuing internal struggle, are facing the Communists instead
of entertaining coalition with them.
The debate in the fall and winter of 1979 about receiving Pershing and Cruise missiles was fierce throughout
Europe, even in France which, with its forces not directly
under NATO command, had nothing to decide. In Italy,
Cossiga's government openly braved Communist opposition to win acceptance of the missiles in a debate comparable in intensity to the decision to join NATO and the
West in 1949. During the debate, Gromyko visited Bonn,
and Ponomarev, in charge of subversion abroad, appeared
before an Italian Parliamentary committee. Such interferences in "internal affairs" were unthinkable ten years ago.
The first direct elections to the Parliament of Europe in
June 1979 showed something like sixty percent participation (thirty percent in England). Despite the presentation
of issues, in many countries, in terms of domestic politics,
people knew the vote was for Europe. It was not clear,
79
�however, whether Europe meant also Europe to the east.
By his visit to Poland at the time of the election, Pope
John Paul II reminded western Europe of Europe's larger
disaster-especially in his distinction between nation and
regime.
There is also a darker possibility. Under threat of Soviet
SS 20 missiles, already pointed at every major city in Eu·
rope, and new installations every week, Europe, despite
its denials, threatens to take its distance from the United
States. It is an open secret that relations between the
United States and Germany have been troubled.
In the face of the courage and responsibility of Poland,
western governments did little. Perhaps necessarily, but
not wisely, for weakness does not amount to the prudence
of restraint. And Poland's renewed struggle is only in its
beginnings. Taken more or less for granted, Soviet domi·
nance of Poland violates both the Yalta agreements,
which centered on Poland, and the more recent Helsinki
agreements. The response of the governments of Europe,
with the exception of Britain, to the Soviet attack on
Afghanistan was weak. It did not lead to economic sane·
lions to match those of the United States. (Australian, Argentinian, Canadian, and Western European surpluses
largely undid the American refusal to sell seventeen million tons of grain to the Soviet Union). It did not even lead
to a boycott of the Olympics-with the exception of Ger·
many and Japan. (The governments of Great Britain and
Italy could not persuade their Olympic committees to
withdraw.) There was more resistance to Persia's under-
mining of international custom. The readiness of the governments of Europe to let things drift in indecision shows
itself in their slowness in admitting Spain and Portugal
into the common market and Spain into NATO (while
the Soviet Union hints that Basque terrorism will cease if
Spain stays out of NATO).
The drift of some of the governments of Europe towards unacknowledged accommodation undermines the
confidence of their best citizens. Except for the Commu·
nists the whole French press criticized Giscard's readiness
to meet Brezhnev in Warsaw soon after the Soviet attack
on Afghanistan.
At a moment when there are indications of the political
recovery of Europe from the devastation of the World
War, Europe is most threatened. Its life defies Soviet policy, which since 1945 has assumed that the political recovery of Europe could not take place. With the brutality that
he took for realism Stalin said at Yalta that after such a
war there had to be an intermission for something like
fifty years. He did not think the destruction could be done
away with, that there could be a real settlement; only a
pause before the next round. Such a Soviet attitude as·
sumes that the West, especially the United States, is not
in earnest about freedom but needs to talk of it for the
purpose of its vanity. It also assumes that the defeat, dev·
astation and humiliation of Europe divide it irrevocably
frojil the United States, despite the disguise of a genera·
tioil of enterprise, hard work, and riches. The constant re-
80
call in Soviet propaganda of the destruction of the World
War, which makes visitors to Moscow think time has
stood still, testifies to the grim, but in some ways realistic
assumption, that Europe and the United States-but es·
pecially Europe-cannot recover politically from its selfdevastation.
Such an attitude amounts to holding that there is no
way of avoiding the consequences of "history" or stopping its drift, that the destruction of one generation continues after it. Just such an attitude informs Soviet refusal
to do anything about the murder in Indochina, its determination to "let it work". Sakharov writes:
A nation that has suffered the horrible losses, cruelties and
destruction of war, yearns above all for peace. This is a broad,
profound, powerful, and honest feeling. Today, the leaders of
the country do not, and cannot, go against this dominant desire of the people. I want to believe that in this regard, the Soviet leaders are sincere, that when peace is involved they are
transformed from robots into people.
But even the people's deep wish for peace is exploited, and
this is perhaps the cruelest deception of alL The deep yearning for peace is used to justify all the most negative features in
our country~economic disorder, excessive militarization,
purportedly "defensive" foreign policy measures (whether in
Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan) and lack of freedom in our
closed society ... 25
But a little later:
... The dogmatic bureaucrats and the new people replacing
them-anonymous and shrewd cynics, moving in the many
"corridors of power" of the departments of the Central Committee, the K.G.B., the ministries, and the provincial and regional party committees-are pushing the country toward
what they consider to be the safest path but that is in reality a
path to suicide.
Everything is as is was under the system of power and economy created by Stalin. The leaders carry on the arms race,
concealing it behind talk of their love of peace. 26
And elsewhere:
But the world is facing very difficult times and cruel cataclysms if the West and the developing countries trying to find
their place in the world do not now show the required firmness, unity, and consistency in resisting the totalitarian challenge.
. Europe must fight shoulder to shoulder with the transoceanic democracy, which is Europe's creation and Europe's
main hope. A certain lack of unity, of course, is the reverse
side of the coin of democratic pluralism, the West's major
strength. But this disunity is also caused by the systematic Soviet policy of driving "wedges", a policy that the West has not
resisted adequately because of carelessness and blindness ...
Western unity is one of the main conditions for international security, unity that will promote resistance and ultimately lead to rapprochement and the convergence of world
systems, averting thermonuclear catastrophe. 27
More serious than any crisis since the thirties, the present crisis comes not only because of Europe's weakness
WINTER 1981
�but also because Europe threatens to grow stronger. It
comes also because the United States has for something
like ten years been unable to exercise effective leadership.
Europe's strength still depends on our leadership.
also betrays remarkable grasp of the functioning of democracies, for instance, for the significance of Nixon's resignation in 1974 and of De
Gaulle's withdrawal in 1969.
II. From a letter addressed to President Carter from one of 40,000
Cambodians forced back into Cambodia at gunpoint after they had
sought asylum in Thailand. Henry Kamm, Internl1tional Herald Tribune,
june 16-17, 1979.
12. Neue Zuercher Zeitung, June 18, 19, 1979. At this meeting Brezhnev
said:
l. For the connection of the rise in terrori~m with an international dimension throughout the West with the 1967 war, Paul Wilkinson, "Terrorism: International Dimensions", Conflict Studies, 113, November
1979. For Soviet and East European involvement in terrorism since
1967, Brian Crozier, Strategy of Survival, London 1978. Between 1968
and 1977 more than two hundred American diplomats and more than
five hundred simple citizens and businessmen suffered at the hands of
terrorists. Fifty were murdered. Israeli intelligence found three maps of
an East German training camp with one of the terrorist's names written
on the back after a PLO attack near Tel Aviv on March II, 1978 in
which thirty four Israelis were murdered. In October 1971 Dutch authorities at Schipol airport seized four tons of Czech anns destined for
the Provisional IRA.
See now Robert Moss, "Terrorism," The New York Times Magazine,
Sunday, November 2, 1980. Claire Sterling's book on terrorism in its international dimension will appear in the spring (Holt Rinehart &
Winston). International Terrorism-the Communist Connection, Washington, 1978. See also, Stefan T. Possony and L. Francis Bouchey.
2. The Security Resolution (242, November 22, 1967) does not mention the fedayeen but speaks simply of "achieving a just settlement of
the refugee problem."
3. The Economist, December 22-28, 1979, 7-8 and 49-50. In 1979 imports of foreign oil were thirty percent above 1973.
4. Milovan Djilas, Wartime, New York 1977, 384-385.
5. Nadezha Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, New York 1970, 289.
6. Time, January 22, 1979.
7. Baa Ruo-Wang (Jean Pasqualini) and Rudolph Chelminski, Prisoner
of Mao, New York 1973 (Penguin Books 1979); see also Lai Ying, The
Thirty-Sixth Way, New York 1969.
8. This is Simon Ley's {"Human Rights in China", National Review,
December 8, 1978, 1537-1545 and 1559) characterization of Prisoner of
Mao.
9. Vladimir Bukovsky, TO Build A Castle-My Life as a Dissenter, New
York 1979,414-416.
10. See the statement of Wei Jingsheng, introduced by Simon Ley, "La
lutte pour Ia liberte en Chine", Commentaire 7, 353-360. Imprisoned
recently, Wei Jingsheng shows similarities between Teng Hsiao-p'ing's
way of dealing with the past and Mao Zedong's way of operating. He
The Soviet Union opposes any interference in the internal
affairs of any other country. We are persuaded of the principle that every people has a right to determine its own destiny.
What is the point of the attempts to make the Soviet Union
responsible for the objective course of history and to use
them as pretexts for worsening relations?
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
13. NZZ, july 24, 1979.
14. NZZ, June 19, 1979; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 19,1979.
For the Vietnamese among the boat people, NZZ July 25, 1979, 3.
15. Bruno Bettelheim, "Reflections", The New Yorker 52, August 2,
1976, 31-36.
16. Joseph Churba, The Politics of Defeat, America's Decline in the Middle East, New York 1977.
17. Sec Paul Eidelberg, "Can Israel Save the U.S.?", Midstream, December, 1978, 3-9.
18. See Robert Moss, "The Campaign to Destabilise Iran," Conflict
Studies 101, November 1978. In the summer of 1978, Navid, a weekly
published in Persia with the covert sponsorship of the KGB, called for
an "anti-dictatorial broad front" with the mullahs playing an important
role:
We are ready to put at the disposal of our friends from other
political groups all our political, propaganda and technical resources for the campaign against the Shah.
19. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gult1g Archipelago 1918-1956, 3,
New York 1978, 161.
20. Henry L. Stimson, American Policy in Nicaragua, New York 1927.
21. See President Kennedy's Message to Congress of March 22, 1961.
Also Carlos Rangel, The Latin Americans, New York 1977, 55-57.
22. For the Cuban and Nicaraguan admission of Cuba's role in Nicaragua, NZZ july 28, 1979, 3.
23. Andrei D. Sakharov, "A Letter from Exile", The New Yorl< Times
Magazine, June 8, 1980.
24. Sakharov, "Letter", The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1980.
25. Sakharov, "Letter", The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1980.
26. Sakharov, "Letter", The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1980.
27. Sakharov, "Letter", The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1980.
81
�The Streets on Which
Hertnan Melville Was Born and Died
Meyer Liben
Suddenly a file card showed up among my papers, and
on it was written:
Herman Melville
Born-6 Pearl St., NYC
Died-104 East 26th St., NYC
I live midway between these two streets, each is within
walking distance, and it struck me as proper (walk or no) to
visit both these locations.
Very few of our classic American authors were born in
New York City, and Melville is the only one I can think of
who was born and died in New York City, on Manhattan
Island (which I unfairly equate with New York City).
Henry James was born in New York City and died in
London.
I know that Pearl Street is close to the Battery, and I
had no particular difficulty in finding it. Walking east on
the street, the numbers were growing (!) higher, so I
turned around, walked west, and found 6 Pearl Street. It is
on the south side of the street, Pearl Street lying between
State Street on the west and Whitehall Street on the east.
Six Pearl Street is now a rather handsome modern building, the Seaman's Church Institute of New York, which is
located at 15 State Street but swings around the corner
onto Pearl. On the side of the Institute building, next to a
garage entrance (one leading down) is a plaque with the
following inscription:
Meyer Liben (1911-1975) was a New York writer much of whose work
remains unpublished. (See "From Our Readers")
82
"Heritage of New York"
A house on this site was the birthplace
of the novelist and poet
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
"Moby Dick," among his numerous sea-tales
attained enduring recognition
in American literature
Plaque erected 1968 by the New York Community Trust
Two things struck me particularly. One was the transposition of his birth and death dates (first wrote birth and
life dates), and I wondered what were the statistical possibilities for such a transposition, and whether among the
Pythagoreans or the Kabbalists, whose emphasis on numbers is so well known, such a transposition has a special
meaning. It is a kind of reverse symmetry, adds an eccen-
tric or mysterious dimension to the fixity, the unalterableness, of the dates of birth and death.
The other thing that struck me was the emphasis on
Melville as a teller of sea-tales. Although so much of his
writing is about the sea (Pierre and Bartleby are two notable exceptions that come to mind) I don't think of him as a
writer about the sea, because, I guess, of the power of his
psychological and· metaphysical ruminations, or maybe
because so many of his great works are not exactly "sea
yarns," though a deep and intricate narrative pulses
through them.
The place of Melville's birth is now surrounded by skyscrapers. A huge office building takes up all of the other,
WINTER 1981
�the northern side of the street. It is I Battery Park Plaza,
as well as 24 State Street.
Next door to the birthplace is a fairly new restaurant
building with some offices in it, and then a huge office
skyscraper, almost completed, extends to Whitehall, and
goes back to State, kind of surrounding the Church
Institute.
Pearl Street is fairly narrow. It is just off Battery Park, a
few blocks away from the Battery itself. One can see the
Bay (if that's what it is at this point) and smell the sea.
To get the feel of the street (on which Melville lived for
the first five years of his life and which, according to
William Earl Dodge, in a speech delivered on April 27,
1880, entitled "A Great Merchant's Recollections of Old
New York," and reprinted in Valentine's Manual, 1921,
was the wholesale dry goods center of the city in 1818
when he, Dodge, worked there as a boy, at a time when
the city's population was less than 120,000, and the
Battery a favorite promenade), I walked east, past the U.S.
Army building on Whitehall Street (now the city's main
induction center, and the scene of many disturbances
against the Vietnam War). A short distance from
Whitehall is Moore Street. There are a number of old
buildings on the north side of Pearl, though it is difficult
to guess their age, and I saw none dated. One of the old
row of buildings is:
E. Bergendahl Co.
Ship Chandlers
Down to Broad Street the buildings are quite modern.
On the corner of Broad and Pearl is the Fraunces Tavern,
scene of Washington's Farewell to his officers (is this another famous farewell address?).
Still heading east on Pearl Street, there is a row of quite
old buildings between Broad and Coenties Slip, which
buildings seem to be coming down, and on the corner of
Pearl and Coenties Slip is
Carroll's Bar & Grill
Est. 1856
the bar closed and padlocked.
(Melville mentions Coenties Slip in Redburn:
"Coenties Slip must be somewheres near ranges of
grimlooking warehouses, with rusty iron doors and shutters, and tiled roofs; and old anchors and chain-cable piled
on the walk. Old-fashioned coffee houses, also, much
abound in that neighborhood, with sun-burnt sea captains
going in and out, smoking cigars, and talking about
Havana, London, and Calcutta."
Curious in the above paragraph is Melville's change
from umust," as though he were writing about a place he
had heard about, to an actual description of the neighborhood in which he was born.)
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Continuing east, close to Hanover Square (that's a
name you'd think would have been changed during the
Revolution), at 93 Pearl, is an old building with the sign
The Hamilton Press, then a street unnamed, going north
(the car traffic, that is) which a passerby told me was Wall
Street, then Pine, Maiden Lane, John, mostly full of huge
office buildings ....
I walked back on the north side of Pearl, but saw nothing new from this perspective, and sat down on a bench in
Battery Park.
So this was Melville's block as a kid. The stones tell you
nothing. Why should they? They're not even his stones.
And if they were his stones? Knocking your head against a
stone street.
I wondered if Hawthorne's choice of the name Pearl for
the ethereal illegitimate girl in The Scarlet Letter had anything to do with the name of the street on which his
friend was born.
So much social and physical change in this century and
a half, but Pearl Street probably winds as ever, with the
s.rme contours.
I heard the cries of boys playing ball in the park, glad-some cries winning me away from this search for spirit in
stone.
(Still wondering what the neighborhood was like then, I
later looked into the New York City Guide-seeking spirit
in paper-put out in 1939 by the Federal Writers Project.
There is no mention of Melville being born on Pearl
Street. The origin of the street name is given thus: " ... so
named because of the sea shells found there in the days
when the East River almost reached this street."
So Pearl Street goes right across Manhattan Island.
The Guide notes that Melville is buried in the
Woodlawn Cemetery, 233rd Street and Webster Avenue,
in the Bronx. But there are hardly any cemeteries in
Manhattan.)
104 East 26th Street is between Park Avenue South
(4th Avenue) and Lexington Avenue. I often pass the
street on my way to the Belmore Cafeteria, a few blocks
away on 4th Avenue, a favorite haunt of taxicab drivers.
104 is at the end of the Armory which fronts on Lexington
Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets and then swings
around toward 4th Avenue. The site of the house in
which Melville died is about the same distance from the
corner of 4th Avenue as the house on Pearl Street in
which he was born is from State Street.
I walked the block, whose buildings are mostly fairly
new, except for the Elton Hotel, at 101 East 26th Street,
right across the street from 104, and this hotel could easily
have been there when Melville was alive. It looks kind of
run-down now. The street is a stony one, a block of unrelieved stone. Spirit is buried in stone, the way spirit and
heart are buried in a body. I looked at the stones on East
26th Street, as though for a sign from the household gods.
Shall these stones live?
83
�Walking back toward 4th Avenue and the Belmore Cafeteria (after looking at the front of the Armory), I noticed,
next to the number 104 on the Armory wall, that someone
had scrawled, in black crayon on a whitewashed section of
the wall:
Herman Melville lived here
which Melville was born had come down. Stones come
down, cities of stone come down, countries disappear
'from sight (the way Atlantis sank to the bottom of the
sea), books and papers turn to dust, we have memories
and die with them. Such was the conventional nature of
the melancholia, gloom, which passed over and through
me at thought of the dissolution of our human-made objects by the combined presence and labor of time, air, water, fire, and man.
not
Herman Melville died here
What will outlast stone, paper, and the memory of
man? Spirit, we hope, and the spirit, for one, of Herman
Melville Lives!
Had I a black crayon in my pocket, I could have scrawled
that on the wall, knowing full well that it would have been
rubbed off one day, sooner or later, or might conceivably
last as long as the building (for why would anyone want to
erase from an armory wall the. notation that Herman
Melville lived here, that he lives?), disappear when these
stones came down, the way the stones of the building in
84
Melville, whose books, the paper on which they are written and printed, will surely dissolve, the memory of
Melville and his works maybe disappear, but the word (we
hope) which was in the beginning, lives through to the
end (of some new beginning), maybe (I imagine) in some
flaming scroll that neither time nor the elements can destroy, and so back to the imagination and memory of man.
But who knows where or if it is, and it is not our business
to seek (doesn't seem to be here on 26th Street between
4th and Lexington Avenues), likely not even to think
about it (much).
WINTER 1981
�De Gaulle's Le fil de /'epee (1932)
Will Morrisey
N !927, optimism pervaded the world. The international
Left admired Stalin; the Right applauded Mussolini;
centrists remembered Wilson fondly and put their faith
in the League of Nations. Non-ideologues could afford to
ignore the political enthusiasts, for there was money to be
made and Lindbergh's exploits to celebrate.
The French shared the fashionable sentiment of the
day, but contrived a unique expression of it: the Maginot
Line, a series of fortifications built along the German
border in hope of suppressing whatever ambitions their
former enemies might still harbor. The French government, including its military leaders, believed that a defensive strategy was more prudent than one of counter-attack; in the Great War they had learned (too well) that the
strategy of attack-at-any-cost brought exhaustion and
stalemate. Thus pacifism, another aspect of optimism,
provided buttressing for this sentiment, a place for humanitarian worship.
But the country was not free of heretics. Marshall
Henri Petain dissented, albeit with discretion; he was fortunate to have a less cautious protege who could be sent
out for the riskier acts of sacrilege. Major Charles de
Gaulle, at Petain's insistence, was allowed to read three
lectures to higher-ups at the Ecole Superieure. Being
higher-ups, they doubtless found the young officer's subject provocative:
I
The more he spoke, the more uncomfortable and angry the
professors in the front row became. For de Gaulle's theme was
the vital role of leadership, and the picture he painted of the
leader was at once a criticism of his superiors, a justification of
himself and a veiled but unmistakable tribute to the Marshall. I
A freelance political writer, Will Morrisey is an associate editor of
Interpretation-A Journal of Political Philosophy. This article comes
from om unpublished book, De Gaulle/Malraux: Reflections.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Petain, who introduced each lecture, must have enjoyed
himself. De Gaulle's career was not advanced, however,
and a repeat performance at the Sorbonne later that year
did not even cause resentment-only indifference. The
lectures were, to use Nietzsche's word, untimely.
Later, de Gaulle revised them, added a 1925 article on
military doctrine and a new essay on the relationship of
the military to politics, and published them in 1932 under
the title Le fil de I'epee. At the time, few cared to read this
apologia of an obscure man. But twelve years later the
man was no longer obscure, and the second edition sold
well. The book had turned out to be not only an apologia
but, as Stanley Hoffman has written, "a self-portrait in anticipation."' De Gaulle would become the leader he had
imagined.
*
*
*
HE FORWARD'S EPIGRAPH IS: "Etre grand, c'est soutenif
une grand querelle," *a line taken from Hamlet. But
the epigraph omits the second half of Hamlet's original sentence:
T
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honor's at the stake.
For de Gaulle, the object of contention-France-is not
at all trivial, but honor is indeed at the stake, along with
survival.
He begins:
*All quotations from Le fil de !'epee (Paris 1944), "Le Livre de Poche"
edition (Paris 1973). All translations are the author's.
85
�Incertitude marks our epoch [as it marks Hamlet]. So many
denials ["dementis"; also "disappointments" or "contradictions"] of conventions, -previsiOns, doctrines, so many trials,
losses, deceptions, so many scandals, shocks, surprises have
shaken the established order.
The military, being part of that order, suffers from
"melancholy"; de Gaulle notes that this is usual after a
period of effort. But this usualness consoles no one;
everything in "the ambiance of the times appears to trouble the conscience of the professionals". The masses, having endured the cruelties of force, "react with passion"
against it. A "mystique" arises, which not only causes men
to curse war but "inclines [them] to believe it out-of-date
[perimee: also, "no longer valid"], to such a degree as they
wish that it were." Men try to exorcise this "evil genie";
"to inspire the horror of sin, a thousand painters apply
themselves to representing [war's] ravages." They evoke
"only the blood, the tears, tombs, not the glory with
which people consoled their sorrows." They deface "History's" traits "under the pretext of effacing war," thus attacking the military order "at its root." In his first book, La
discorde chez l' ennemi, de Gaulle showed how immoderation and imbalance undermined the legitimacy of the
German rulers during the Great War. In Le fil de ['epee he
warns that immoderate fear of war threatens the
legitimacy of the French military and, ultimately, that of
the state.
De Gaulle finds this ambiance "only too easily explicable"; it is
... the instinct of preservation of enfeebled Europe, which
senses the risks of a new conflict. The spectacle of a sick man
who shakes his fist at death can leave no person unfeeling.
He also discerns a rhetorical strategy. Those who would
establish an "international order"-obviously, he refers to
the League of Nations and its publicists-in the name of
the people (who are, de Gaulle remarks tartly, "temporarily
made wiser"), need "a vast collective emotion" to do it.
"Now one does not rouse crowds other than by elementary sentiments, violent images, brutal invocations."
Clearly de Gaulle does not lack rhetorical skill either; here
he accuses the internationalists of the same sort of
rhetoric that they decry. He also reminds them of other
sentiments:
Without disavowing any hope, where do we see that the
passions and the interests that cause armed conflict silence
their demands? that anyone renounces willingly what he has
and what he desires? that men, finally, cease to be men?
Given human nature, internationalists cannot depend on
voluntary consent when building a peaceful world order.
If such an order appears, it will appear because it was imposed. And one cannot impose anything so ambitious
without the aid of the very military force that internationalists decry. "Whatever direction the world takes, it will
not dispense with arms."
86
Indeed, de Gaulle goes beyond the negative, force-asnecessary-evil argument: "Without force, in fact, can one
conceive of life?" Only in an "immobile world." Force is
the "resource of thought, instrument of action, condition
of movement."
Shield of masters, bulwark of thrones, battering-ram of
revolutions, one owes to it, turn by turn, order and liberty.
Cradle of cities, scepter of empires, gravedigger of decadences, force gives the law to the people and regulates their
destiny.
Like Nietzsche, de Gaulle sees force as that which,
through its role in causation, pervades and unifies the
world. He may not see it as the only such entity. Force
underlies both order and liberty, for example, because it
can serve masters and revolutionaries alike. But, obviously, order and liberty are distinguishable states; they imply certain ends, not merely means. De Gaulle does not
present force as an end. It is a resource, shield, and battering-ram; it enables and regulates-but does not prescribe.
What does, then?
In truth, the military spirit, the art of soldiers, their virtues
are an integral part of the capital of humans. One sees them
incorporated in all phases of History .... For finally, can one
understand Greece without Salamis, Rome without the
legions, Christianity without the sword, Islam without the
scimitar, the Revolution without Valmy, the League of Nations without the victory of France? And then, this abnegation of individuals to the profit of the ensemble, this glorified
suffering-the mental stuff of which one makes soldierscorresponds par excellence to our esthetic and moral concepts:
the highest philosophical and religious doctrines have not
chosen another ideal.
Actually, some have-as de Gaulle knows very well. Of
the two religions mentioned here (coincidentally, he places
them in the middle of the list,- paired as if equivalent),
Christianity does not teach self-abnegation for the glory
of the ensemble, so much as it does self-abnegation for the
glory of God-and force is not the way one goes about it.
But de Gaulle will come back to this point later.
Returning to the contemporary world, de Gaulle contends that if French military strength declines, that decline would imperil/a patrie and "the general harmony" as
well. Whether it is thought to be good or bad, if military
and political power "escapes the wise, what fools will seize
it, or what madmen?" In the end, responsibility involves
power. "It is time that the military retake the consciousness of its preeminent role, that it concentrate on its object, which is, simply, war." To do this, "to restore the
edge to the sword," it must "restore the philosophy proper
to its state"; for de Gaulle, a "philosophy" both energizes
and provides the ends which energy, force, and power
serve.
Le fil de !'epee, then, contains a military philosophy, not
a "philosophy of life" -although the one implies the
WINTER 1981
�other. The book has five chapters, of two, three, three,
three, and four sections, respectively; fifteen in all.
•
•
HE FIRST CHAPTER'S TITLE- "The
T
*
Action of War" -de·
picts war as a thing one engages in, and suggests de
Gaulle's thesis that war is essentially active, not sus·
ceptible to what he calls "a priori" planning. Consonant
with this, he uses a Faustian epigraph: "In the beginning
was the Word? No! In the beginning was the Action."
Faust, like Machiavelli and Bacon, aspired to the domina·
tion of things, and this chapter studies the opposition be·
tween the autonomous flow of events, and those men
who would dominate that flow-Heraclitus versus Machi·
avelli, if you will.
"The action of war essentially comes to the character of
contingency": the enemy's strength and intentions, the
terrain, events, the direction, speed, and manner of one's
strike, men and materiel, atmospheric conditions. "In war
as in life one can apply the ["everything flows"] of the
Greek philosopher; what has taken place will no longer
take place, ever, and the action, whatever it may be, might
well not have been or been different." He quotes Bergson
(a friend of de Gaulle's family), who revived and metamorphosed Heraclitean metaphysics twenty years earlier, on
the intelligence's discomfort when it attempts to grasp
what is not constant, fixed, and definite, but is instead
mobile, unstable, and diverse. Logic doesn't work there; it
is, de Gaulle writes, like trying to catch water in a fishnet.
Intelligence does have its function: "elaborating in advance the givens of the conception, it clarifies them,
makes them precise, and reduces the chance of error". It
defines the problem, and formulates hypotheses on how
to deal with it. But the faculty that gives us "a direct con·
tact" with Hthe realities" is intuition, "the faculty which
links us most closely to nature." Intuition gives us not only
"profound perception" but the "creative impulse"; for
life (inconceivable without force) produces, and the intui·
tion, by linking us to life, enables us to be productive.
We participate in what it is possible to find there of obscure
harmony. It is by instinct [de Gaulle uses "instinct" and "intu-
ition" interchangeably] that man perceives the realitY of
conditions which surround him and that he experiences the
corresponding impulsion.
Military inspiration is analogous to that of the artist; in
either case, as de Gaulle quotes Bacon, "It is man adding
to nature." De Gaulle apparently means that man adds to
external nature by linking himself with it. He then draws
upon its productive force, which expresses an obscure in-
herent harmony; this force, filtered through man, re·
emerges in the world in order to master it. Alexander's
"hope," Caesar's "fortune," and Napoleon's "star" were
"simply the certitude of a particular gift putting them in a
strict enough relation to realities to dominate them
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
always." One might recall Bacon's observation that to
master nature one must know and use nature's laws. But
de Gaulle, unlike Bacon, promises no utopias brought by
the advancement of learning. Human nature has limits,
and de Gaulle recognizes that fact more clearly than
Bacon does. The most J:!e asserts is that such great men
give others "the impression of a natural force which will
command events"; they possess, as Flaubert said of Han-
nibal (in Salammb6), "the indefinable splendor of those
destined for great enterprises." (Nevertheless, despite his
assertion that such men can dominate realities, the ex-
amples he chooses are of men who could not dominate
them "always," as he surely realizes.)
· The intelligence takes what instinct gives it and makes
those "givens" coherent, definite.* This enables the
military leader to set goals and priorities, decide timing,
and placement, coordinate the various operations and
their phases-in a word, to synthesize.
It is why all the great men of action have been meditative.
All possessed to the highest degree the faculty to retreat into
themselves, to deliberate inwardly.
Some critics exalt instinct, claiming that there is no true
art of war because chance alone determines battles. De
Gaulle cites Socrates, who, he claims, told Nichomachides
that the popular assembly's choice of a leader was unim·
portant because a dishonest and incapable citizen would
lead the army no worse than a skillful and conscientious
general. But that is not what Socrates says in the pass~ge
de Gaulle alludes to. In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Book
III, chapter 4, Nichomachides complains that the assembly elected Antisthenes, a man without Nichomachides'
military experience to be a general. What Socrates con·
tends is not that the choice of commanders doesn't matter, but that military experience doesn't matter. He claims
instead that what matters is the ability to rule. Antisthenes
had managed a chorus well, even though he had no musi·
cal skill, because he found the best masters to do his work
for him.
Xenophon's words could not be innocently misread as
de Gaulle misreads them. A slip of memory is just as
unlikely, for de Gaulle's memory, which he trained since
childhood, was nearly infallible when he wanted it to be.
As if to prove it, de Gaulle next correctly recalls Socrates'
remarks to Pericles (son of the famous Pericles), which oc·
cur in the following chapter of the Memorabilia. "It is
true," .de Gaulle writes, "that the same Socrates, inter-
rogated by Pericles on the cause of the indiscipline of the
Athenian troops, held responsible their leaders, who were
incapable of commanding them." De Gaulle has good
reason to be "forgetful" concerning the Socratic defense
*Although de Gaulle writes that the iritelligence attributes form to the
"givens" instinct provides, it's important to recall that the givens are not
inchoate, but possess "an obscure harmony" of their own. To what extent that harmony must match the form attributed to the givens by intelligence is not clear; obviously, there must be some relationship, or the
battle-plan wouldn't work.
87
�of amateurism in war; as we've seen, de Gaulle wants
France to have a professional army. De Gaulle prizes
military experience. His book is an attack on the notion
that anyone who can rule well can also rule an army. The
last chapter, "Politics and the Soldier," gives a more subtle view of the relationship between politicians and
soldiers than Xenophon's teaching. Perhaps de Gaulle
cites Xenophon falsely-as Bacon, in his Essays, cites the
execution of Socrates under the oligarchy-to seem
authoritative to the ignorant and to stimulate those who
are not ignorant.
De Gaulle's mention of Socrates' teaching to Pericles'
son also has a point for those who know that passage. In
their conversation, Socrates and young Pericles consider
how one may lead the Athenians so as to enhance the city's
fame and to defeat its enemies. Notable among these ene·
mies are the Boeotians, "who formerly did not dare, even
on their own soil, to meet the Athenians in the field
without the aid of the Spartans and the other Peloponnesians"; the Boeotians now "threaten to invade Attica
single-handed."' They can do so because Athenian
military affairs are commanded by "men who are greatly
deficient in knowledge." To counter this threat, Socrates
suggests that the Athenians, "if equipped with light
arms," could "do great mischief to our enemies, and form
a strong bulwark for the inhabitants of our country" by oc·
cupying the mountains on the frontiers of Attica,
especially those bordering on Boeotia.
The parallel between democratic France, threatened
(according to de Gaulle and Petain) by Germany, and ancient democratic Athens, threatened by Boeotia, is suggestive. France, it is true, has no mountains on the German
border; but in a 1928 essay called "The Historical Role of
French Places," de Gaulle described the military uses that
French terrain had and could be put to. He praised the
use of fortifications, but also insisted on the need for
mobility-precisely the combination of a strong defensive
bulwark and a maneuverable attack force that Socrates
recommends to Pericles.
De Gaulle ends this "epistemological" essay by noting
that military men sometimes neglect the cultivation of intelligence, especially when afflicted by the "depression of
spirits" which follows a "great victorious effort." But
more frequently they make the opposite error, longing to
''deduce the conception of known constants in advance"
-what de Gaulle calls "a priorism" -an activity which
''exercises a singular attraction over the French mind."
The "speculative and absolute character" of such dogmas
"render them seductive and perilous."
In section ii de Gaulle turns to the non-intellectual
faculties of the leader. Petain, he tells us, said that giving
orders calls for the greatest effort of any part of an action.
"In fact," de Gaulle continues, "the intervention of the
human will in the chain of events has something ir·
revocable about it"; from this derives the military leader's
responsibility, one of "such weight that few men are
capable of supporting it entirely."
88
It is why the highest qualities of mind do not suffice.
Without doubt, the intelligence aids, without doubt, instinct
pushes, but, in the last resort, the decision is of the moral
order.
An officer must act, and not conceal his incapacity by
claiming that he has no specific orders, or by looking after
details only, as certain French generals did during the
Franco-Prussian War. The other extreme, the exaggeration of initiative "to the point of violating discipline and
smashing the convergence of efforts," was exemplified by
the German general, Alexander von Kluck, during the
Battle of the Marne; such indiscipline usually occurs in
"the absence or the softness of the decisions of the
superior echelon." (De Gaulle studies the von Kluck inci·
dent in his 1924 book, La discorde chez l'ennemi and later
discusses the Franco-Prussian war in La France et son
armee, published in 1938.)
The mean between these two extremes is "the spirit of
enterprise," necessary if the leader will "win over the
others." He must do so, for he needs not only to know
what he wants to do and to order it done, but to have the
authority that ensures his men's obedience. Army discipline helps-it is a sort of contract wherein subordinates
pledge their obedience-"but it does not suffice for the
leader to bind the executants by an impersonal
obedience.''
It is in their souls that he must imprint his living mark. To
move their wills, to seize, to animate them to turn themselves
toward the purpose that he has assigned them; to make grow
and to multiply the effects of discipline by a moral suggestion
which surpasses reasoning; to crystallize around himself all
that there is in their souls of faith, of hope, of latent devotion
(but not, apparently, of charily)-such is [the nature of] his
domination.
Training of leaders is part of the preparation for war;
such preparation can occur during a war or during
peacetime. But peacetime is a poor time to prepare for
war (although obviously, one should not wait until the
enemy attacks), because it produces second-rate leaders.
Good leaders are hard to recruit in peacetime: "the pro·
found motive of the activity of the best and the strongest
is the desire to acquire power," and the peacetime army
offers ambitious men no place to command, and slow advancement. De Gaulle, again echoing Nietzsche, defines
"power" broadly. After 1815, when the French saw many
years of peace ahead of them, those men desirous of
power-Thiers, Lamennais, Comte, Pasteur-went into
politics, law, speculation, and the arts. They did not go into
the army. A Pasteur does not desire power in the vulgar
sense; he desires power in that he wishes to accomplish
something worthwhile. If power is what the best men
want, it would seem that they are inspired by that
"Bergsonian" intuition mentioned earlier, which 1inks
them with the forces of life. They have what Bergson called
''l'energie spirituelle.''
WINTER 1981
�Today, it is toward affairs that ambitions turn; money is, for
the moment, the apparent sign of power and the French
nourish willingly the conviction that international laws and
ententes will succeed in preventing war.
De Gaulle does not camouflage his skepticism about this
"conviction," and the desire for money that underlies it.
Not only do ambitious men shun the peacetime
military, but peacetime military leaders tend to promote
the least-gifted men in their ranks. They select their successors by observing field exercises, which test superficial
cleverness, the ability to grasp the immediate features of a
circumstance, and flexibility of mind-rather than real ap·
titude, the power of seeing the essentials of a circumstance, ahd genuine understanding.
Finally, "powerful personalities" often lack "that superficial seductiveness which pleases in the course of ordinary life." The mass may admit their superiority, but
does not love them, and they are not chosen for advancement at times when no danger seems near. Of all the
young major's statements, this may have angered his
superiors most. Not only was de Gaulle just such a "personality," criticized for his supposed arrogance, but he
dared to suggest that his superiors are of the mass, men
who recognize his excellence but will not reward it.
De Gaulle's conclusion: "Our times are little propitious
to the formation and selection of military leaders"
because the intensity of the Great War led to "a relaxation
of wills, a depression of character," which led to "moral
lassitude." War and soldiers are held in little esteem.
*
C
*
*
"Of Character," concerns Gaullist
ethics. De Gaulle's epigraph-"The smell of the
world has changed" -comes from Georges Du-
HAPTER TWO.
hamel; to choose a sentence from one of the era's best-
known pacifists probably amused de Gaulle, especially in
writing on the "spirit of his age."
The French army has had "powerful life only by the effect of an ideal, issuing from the dominant sentiments of
the epoch and drawing from that harmony its virtue and
radiance." Ethics, it would seem, derive from sentiment,
not reason-and fashionable sentiment, at that.
As de Gaulle rehearses his examples, this "spirit of the
age" explanation of ethics seems accurate. In the seventeenth century, Louvois's reforms unified the military so
as to serve the interests of the sovereign, who was en-
gaged in unifying the country. The Republican army of
Hache was possessed of a "rather ostentatious contempt
for honors and rewards," an affectation that "went well
with glory."
When de Gaulle comes to the contemporary state of
things, we detect a tone of irony, for de Gaulle has already
noted that today's ambiance is anti-militaristic. Presumably, the army most consonant with "the times" would be
the army the French have now: torpid, defensive, hard for
de Gaulle to get promoted in. There have been improveTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ments in institutions, equipment, and, he admits, in
military thinking, but these aren't sufficient. To achieve
"efficacity" the French army needs "a moral renaissance."
The "rejuvenating ideal" of this epoch is "character,"
"the virtue of difficult times." The second chapter studies
the opposition between the ambiance of the times as seen
by most people and the ambiance de Gaulle presents,
which excludes those aspects of fashionable thought and
sentiment which tend to undermine the security and the
grandeur of France.
"The man of character," the Gaullist leader, has recourse
~'to
himself." "His impulse is to impose on action
his mark ... to make it his affair." "He has the passion to
will, he is jealous to decide." Uninterested in profit, this
"gambler. .. searches less for gain than to succeed, and
pays his debts in his own money." If he loses he reacts not
with sorrow bUt with "some bitter satisfaction." The man
of character "confers nobility to action; without him [action would be] the dismal blemish of the slave, thanks to
him, [it is] the divine sport of heroes."
He doesn't act alone. Subordinates assist him; their virtues are self-sacrifice and obedience. Counsellors and
theorists help him plan. But his "character" is "the supreme element, the creative part, the divine point." We
recall that intuition perceives the creative and forceful
realities; character, too, links a man to that in life which is
creative and forceful~ more, it is itself creative and force-
ful. On the level of ethics, of human action, it corresponds
to the "obscure harmony" of nature.
This property of vivifying the enterprise implies the energy
to assume the consequences [he may be thinking of Bergson's
"energie spirituelle"]. Difficulty attracts the man of character,
for it is in gripping [the difficulty] that he realizes himself.
But whether or not he vanquishes, it is an affair between it
and him. Jealous lover, he never shares what it gives him, or
what it costs him.
What it gives him is "the austere [or harsh: apre] joy of being responsible." This paradoxical phrase epitomizes the
Gaullist balancing of opposites in the domain of ethics.
De Gaulle is now far from Machiavellian success-philosophy; the telos of Machiavellian virtu has little to do with
true austerity. De Gaulle combines the individualism of
such
~·moderns"
as Machiavelli and Bacon with the au-
sterity of the "ancients." Self-realization in struggle and
the austere joy of being responsible: one thinks of Nietzsche, or, perhaps, of Aristotle's great-souled man.
In peacetime the man of character has detractors, "but
in action, enough of criticism!" And in a passage reminis-
cent of Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics, Book IV, Chapter 3), de Gaulle writes:
Reciprocally, the confidence of the small exalts the man of
character. He feels himself obliged by this humble justice rendered to him. His firmness increases in measure, but also his
benevolence, for he was born a protector. If the affair sue-
89
�ceeds, he distributes advantage generously, and, in the case of
a reverse, he does not allow reproach to descend on any but
himself.
Esteem and loyalty exchanged for security: to "ancient"
and "modern" themes, de Gaulle adds a "medieval" one:
the ideal relationship of the vassal and his lord. With intuition, de Gaulle wrote, one "participates" in reality's ere~
ative force; with character, he might have added, one
participates in the reality of other men, calling up their
creative force, as well as one's own.
In ordinary times, the man of character's superiors
often dislike him, calling him "arrogant and undisciplined." De Gaulle writes from experience. "But when
events become grave" he receives justice; "a sort of
ground swell pushes to the first level the man of character." He "does not abuse" his moment, scarcely tasting
"the savor of revenge, for the action absorbs everything."
Not quite Aristotelian magnanimity-which eschews revenge because revenge is small and it is large, rather than
because action preoccupies it-but de Gaulle's man of
character comes nearer to achieving it than do most of the
men of his time.
De Gaulle shows that "character" is not an exclusively
military virtue, any more than intuition is. He finds it in
Alexander, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Clemen<;eau, but also in Galilee, Columbus, Boileau, and Lesseps.
He fails to list a religious leader (unless one would so
characterize Cardinal Richelieu).
. . . the success of great men implies multiple faculties.
Character, if accompanied by nothing, only gives daredevils
and stubborn personalities. But inversely, the highest qualities
of mind (alone) cannot suffice.
Sieycs and Talleyrand were notable for their qualities of
mind, de Gaulle contends, but they were not great men.
De Gaulle writes more against the ambiance of his
"time" than with it. In the third section of this chapter he
"reconciles" this ambiance with his notion of "character."
The pre-1914 world, he observes, was an era of stability,
economy, and prudence. It is gone. "Competition, aided
by technique," comprise the "allegorical group which
symbolizes the new age." The postwar generation, adventurous and money-conscious, take initiative and self
reliance as their virtues. The army should "reflect" these
virtues, but obviously de Gaulle would have it "reflect" a
judiciously modified version of them; he does not advocate money-consciousness in soldiers and, as he has
already written, these are bad times for the military. The
"dominant sentiments" of an epoch, in de Gaulle's view,
are really those among the popular sentiments which the
man who would dominate his epoch selects-because
they most nearly resemble his own virtues. There are
epochs in which such a man cannot advance, and undominating men predominate. De Gaulle waits, writing books.
While the army waits, it will be paralyzed if its leaders
smother initiative, along with "the taste to be responsible and
90
the courage to speak plainly." De Gaulle wants "character" respected. Each individual should have responsibility
on his own level. (This idea anticipates the "participation"
that de Gaulle advocated in 1969, wherein capital, labor,
and technocrats would share power on the governing
boards of industry, and whereby local governments would
have more responsibility.) If "character" is respected, the
army will have fewer regulations, get better results. Better
men will adopt the military career, and continue in it, because the army will allow them to exercise"their capacity
to act," which is what such men want.
' '0
*
*
*
the central chapter of Le fil de
l'epee, consists of de Gaulle's final diagnosis
F PRESTIGE;·
of, and prescription for, the epoch's disease.
Prestige is usually a matter of appearance only, but de Gaulle
chooses as this chapter's epigraph a phrase from Villiers de
L'Isle Adam-"In his breast, to carry his own glory" -a phrase
which links prestige to character.
Authority has decayed in the postwar era. Men are either
reticent and unsure, or overconfident and obsessed with
forms.
This decadence follows the decline of the moral, social, political order which, for centuries, held sway in our old nations.
By conviction and by calculation, one has for a long time at·
tributed to power an origin, to the elite rights which justify
hierarchies. The edifice of these conventions has collapsed .
Deference fades; perhaps this is the other, negative, side
of the taste for initiative de Gaulle cited before.
But the crisis can't last.
Men cannot, fundamentally, do without being directed.
These political animals have need of organization, that is to
say of order and of leaders.
Ancient sources of authority no longer exist, but "the
natural equilibrium of things will bring others, sooner or
later, better or less good, proper in all cases to the establishment of a new discipline." Even as he dismisses the
old, de Gaulle affirms something ancient: the idea, discarded by Machiavelli and Hobbes, that man is a political
animal, by nature and not by convention. The "new discipline," of course, will be in large part conventional; still, it
responds to a natural requirement, and will be "better or
less good" than its predecessors-not merely "historically
relative."
De Gaulle sees the beginnings of the new discipline in
"the individual value and ascendence" of certain "new
men." Once, the mass accorded credit to a man's function
in society, or to his birthright. Now it respects "those here
who know [how] to impose themselves"-dictators, technicians, athletes-men who owe success to their own efforts. In the army today, rank has some importance, but
upersonal prestige" has more.
WINTER 1981
�In section ii, the central section of the central chapter,
de Gaulle writes frankly of prestige. Prestige is "a sort of
sympathy inspired in others," comprised of affection, sug·
One can observe, in fact, that the leaders of men-politicians, prophets, soldier-who obtain the most from others,
identify themselves with high ideas . ...
gestion, and impression, which depends on ((an elemen-
tary gift, a natural aptitude that escapes analysis." Not
dependent on intelligence, it is undefinable, although one
can isolate "some constant and necessary elements" of it.
Mystery is one of them; "one reverses little what one
knows well." Mystery doesn't come from isolation~the
most isolated man is unknown, not mysterious-but from
reserve, which contributes to the sense that the man
The prophets' centrality on the lisi suggests that they do
not differ from secular leaders, at least in their self-identification with "high ideas." In view of the assertion that
this is a selfidentification, one may wonder if such men
are models of evangelical perfection, but at the least we
can say that all of them embody ideas rather than argue
possesses a "secret," or a "surprise" with which he can in-
for they are "renowned less for utility than for the extent
of their work" ~sentiment glorifies them. Useful men appeal to our rationality, but great men do not strive for
tervene at any time. "The latent faith of the masses does
the rest."
for them. "Whereas, sometimes, reason blames
them"~
Prestige also involves an outer reserve, one of words
and of gestures-"appearances, perhaps, but according to
usefulness.
which the multitude establishes its opinion." Great sol-
even so, he shows an ethical seriousness, an elevation,
diers have always taken care to appear in a certain way; de
that Machiavelli lacks. De Gaulle's exemplary leader does
not "enjoy himself." Indeed, the suffering that comes of
his solitude-among-men partly explains why some leaders
"suddenly reject the burden." Years later Andre Malraux
·would remember this passage as he considered de Gaulle's
final retirement. De Gaulle completes this section with an
anecdote: Bonaparte (he usually calls him Napoleon, but
Gaulle reminds us of Hamilcar in Flaubert's Salammb6,
Caesar in his Commentaries, Napoleon. "Nothing enhances authority more than silence"; for action demands
concentration, and speech dissipates strength. There is a
necessary correspondence between "silence and order,"
and de Gaulle quotes the Roman phrase, Imperatoria brevitas. Aristotle's human animals are political due to their
capacity of reasoned speech or logos. De Gaulle, with his
intuitionism (a distrust of verbal depictions of reality), apparently does not believe that the natural order, including
human nature and the politics it necessitates, can be comprehended through the use of language. Politics becomes
as much the art of silence as the art of speaking, and Gaullist rhetoric emphasizes brevity and symbolism instead of
elaboration and argument.
There is liberated from such personages a magnetism of
confidence and even illusion. For those who follow them, they
personify purpose, incarnate aspiration.
This is de Gaulle's most Machiavellian chapter. But
here, in a personal moment, his given name seems more
appropriate), regarding "an ancient and noble monu-
ment," agreed with a companion who thought it
sad~
"comme la grandeur!" he added.
The third section of "Of Prestige" is the eighth of the
book's fifteen sections, the central one. It extends the previous treatment of individual authority to the army. The
ambiance of the time damages corporate as well as individual authority. "For recovering (prestige), the army has
little need of laws, demands for money, prayers, only a
vast internal effort." "The military spirit" needs distance
and reserve, as does the great man; such partial isolation
contributes to prestige, because military rigor and cohesion have always impressed men.
To become such a personification or incarnation, the
leader responds to "the obscure wish of men" who are imperfect, who therefore "accept collective action with a
view that it tends toward something great." Whereas the
great man realizes himself by participating in a difficult
action, lesser men complete themselves by participating
in a collective action, under the direction of a great man.
The leader needs "the character of elevation," but leader·
ship
... is no affair of virtue, and evangelical perfection does not
conduct the empire. The man of action scarcely conceives of
himself without a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, ruse.
This chapter thus examines the opposition between
means and ends. In de Gaulle's view, it is ends, results,
that count; if the leader uses the means of realpolitik for
"realizing great things," those means will be forgotten because he satisfies "the secret desires of all."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Some current trends favor the development of military
spirit. "Individualism is in the wrong" today: trades unionize, political parties and sports are mass-oriented, as well;
Ia machinisme has increased and the division of labor intensifies, leading to less eclecticism and fantasy; labor and
leisure are equalized; standardization exists in education,
housing, and fashions. (Earlier, de Gaulle wrote that individual initiatives were fashionable; but the contradiction
is less de Gaulle's than that of his "time." Again, we notice de Gaulle's selectiveness.)
As important as these current trends may be, the army's
self-esteem matters more. The military must not only appear firm; it must feel "confidence in itself and in its des·
tiny." "The day when the French nobility consecrated its
ardor to defending its privileges rather than to conducting
the State, the victory of the Third Estate was already certain." The military should therefore avoid reacting to the
public's anti-militarism by a selfish defense of its privileges. This won't happen if the military reminds itself, and
91
�the public, that anti-militarism is understandable, even
good-(for men should not want to destroy each other)but nevertheless inadequate. Foreigners envy French
prosperity, and France's geography renders her vulnerable to invasion; therefore the French need a shield. The
military serves the French, not only itself.
And war is not purely evil. "The desires of conquerors"
have brought riches, advances in science and art, "marvel~
lous sources of wisdom and inspiration." "With what vir-
tues [arms] have enriched the moral capital of men!"
Courage, devotion and "greatness of soul" are among
them. Armies have transported ideas, reforms and religions; Hthere would have been no Hellenism, no Roman
order, Christianity [the central item on the list], Rights of
Man, modern civilization but for their bloody effort."
Pacifists and bellecists are both right:
the age of Descartes' Discours de Ia. Methode, Bossuet's
Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, Richelieu's "realistic
politique," the "practical administration" of Colbert, and
the "objective strategy" of Turenne. The French mind
then "constrained itself by the rule of mesure and of the
concrete." At his best Napoleon shared this sense of
mesure and the ability to adapt strategy to circumstances;
but more often in French history-especially in the eighteenth century and in the generation that fought Germany in 1870- "a priorism" dominated. And failed.
Although military strategy and ethics are not the same,
de Gaulle sees a relationship between them. "A priorism"
in strategy habituates leaders to disregard circumstance;
this makes them intellectually and ethically weak, for "a
doctrine constructed in the abstract" has often "rendered
blind and passive a leader who, in other times, had made
proof of experience and audacity."
Arms have tortured but also fashioned the world. They
have accomplished the best and the worst, begetting infamy
as well as the most great, by turns groveling in horror or radia ting in glory. Shameful and glorious, their history is the history
of men.
The central section in "Of Doctrine" is an analysis of
the doctrine employed by French leaders in the Great
War.
Military thought turned toward the offensive. This orientation was salutary . ... But the strategy went too far.
The history of men is not a tale of evangelical perfection.
And de Gaulle repeats: if an international order comes, a
military force will "establish and assure it."
It is not merely a "pragmatic" argument. The army's
greatness, like that of individuals, depends on virtue-if
not evangelical virtue. This military virtue can be described with a paradox: the army's pride would be worthless were it not accompanied by self-sacrifice. There is "a
French strategists propounded "an absolute metaphysic
of action" modeled on Prussia's offensive drives in 1870.
That strategy worked against an inactive opponent; but
the Great War demonstrated that a mobile and resolute
opponent can resist such an attack-strategy.
Colonel Petain had objected to this doctrine of attack,
curious relationship, but incontestable, between the re-
arguing for the importance of circumstances and the need
nunciation of individuals and the splendor of all."
Most Frenchmen give their energies to profit-making,
and it's difficult to find soldiers who don't imitate civil-
for maximum obtainable fire support at the time and
ians. Here also, however, balance will assert itself; "in a
fracas of bankruptcies, scandals and judicial prosecutions"
the forgotten "moral values" will return to "the great daylight of public respect." With this return, and a natural
pulling-back from extreme corruption, the army's prestige
will return also. For its prestige rests on such virtues.
' 'I
*
*
*
N WAR, there are principles, but they are few,"
wrote Bugeaud, the unsuccessful defender of
Paris in 1848. De Gaulle uses this remark as the
epigraph for "Of Doctrine," the simplest, if not the shortest,
chapter of Le {il de I'epee. De Gaulle here outlines a stra-
tegic doctrine, not an ethical one, because war is not ex-
clusively a problem of ethics. Battle plans count, too.
Once more, de Gau1le insists on the importance of circumstances. A statesman will fail, despite will, hardness,
national resources and alliances, if he "does not discern
the character of his times." The French military tends to
ignore war's empirical character, he claims. But in the sev-
enteenth century it did not; that was, de Gaulle observes,
92
place of attack ("concentration of means" forms Hthe
basis of execution"). He proved the validity of his thesis in
the Battle of the Marne. But his superiors persisted in advocating, and practicing, an attack-strategy; only after the
failure of their "systematic audacity" during the April
1917 offensive did they relent. As we know, de Gaulle
thinks the present French military stance is too defensive.
He has praised a military strategy of action and leadership.
Nevertheless, he is careful to warn against any "a priorism "-of attack, or of defense.
De Gaulle turns to the defense-strategy in the third section. The new doctrine may end in "abstract deductions
and foreclosing conclusions." Obviously an extension of
Petain's teaching on firepower, it involves the concentra-
tion of firepower, coupled with the siting of offensives
only in those places where the terrain is best suited. Unfortunately, this strategy neglects other variables-most
notably, the enemy, who may not decide to occupy the
sites that French guns can most easily fire upon. "May
French military thinking resist the age-old attraction of
the a priori, of the absolute, and of dogmatism!" It should
instead "fix itself in the classical order," the "taste for the
concrete," the "gift of mesure" and the "sense of realities."
*
*
*
WINTER 1981
�studies the opposition expressed in
its title, "Politics and the Soldier" ~specifically, the
tension between politicians and soldiers. Like the
fourth chapter, it addresses the practical question: What
should leaders think and do?
Politicians and soldiers may, as the epigraph from Musset claims, "go two by two/Until the world ends, step by
step, side by side." But they'll rarely go amicably. In
peacetime the politician has the dominant role; in wartime he shares it with the military leader, and interdependence is not conducive to friendship. Politicians and
soldiers are different men, and not especially compatible
T
HE FIFTH CHAPTER
ones.
The politician attempts to udominate opinion"-
whether it be that of the monarch, the council or the people (the one, the few, or the many)~because he can do
nothing except insofar as he acts in the name of the sovereign. Pleasing and promising, not opposing and arguing,
lead to advancement; "to become the master he poses as
servant. ... " After acquiring power he must defend it~
convincing prince or parliament, flattering passions, aid~
ing special interests. It is a precarious career in an unstable world.
Unlike that of the soldier, whose world is built on hierarchy, discipline, and regulations, he advances slowly, but
with slight worry of demotion. As de Gaulle knew only too
well, the off-battlefield danger for a military man is stagnation, being "posted" to nowhere and forgotten.
The two men act differently. The politician reaches his
goals by governing himself; the soldier is direct. The politician's eyes are far-sighted (and beclouded) because for
him reality is complex, mastered only by calculation and
ruse. The soldier short-sighted (but also clear-sighted) because for him reality is simple, controlled by resoluteness.
The politician asks, "What will people say?" The soldier
asks, "What are the principles?" That such men find one
another distasteful seems predictable.
Nor is it entirely bad. Soldiers who make laws alarm
1
neighboring countries, and politicians who intrude into
the army corrupt it with partisan doctrines and passions.
The public interest is best served by their collaboration in
defense of the country from external dangers~and their
separation in defense of the country from internal
dangers.
Before elaborating on that suggestion, de Gaulle devotes two sections to the difficulties of enacting it. In
peacetime the two "sides" bicker (especially in those
regimes where public opinion has influence). Arms are expensive, and are therefore unpopular except among soldiers, who are "only too ready" to believe war will come,
because wartime brings their chance for glory and advancement. Civilians, who have no reason to want war,
who fear it, refuse to believe that another war approaches.
When war comes, soldiers and politicians unite, ini-
tially. Later, if the war lingers on, the civil government
feels its own impotence, becomes frustrated. The public
also becomes irritable. Reverses of fortune excite recrimiTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
nations. Soldiers and politicians are men who want power,
and do not want to share it. If one group succeeds in subordinating the other, the destruction of the balance may
ruin the country~as it did in 1793 and 1870, when the
French politicians dominated the military and caused battlefield defeats, and in 1917 when the military undermined
civilian authority in Germany.
A country avoids that predicament, not by hiring pleasant fellows to run the government and the army, but by
finding leaders who are not pliable or docile. "It is
necessary that les maitres have the souls of maitres, and it
is a very bad calculation that excludes from power
characters accused on the pretext that they are difficult."
Nor can the two groups of men separate entirely. As
always, circumstances differ, sometimes from day to
day~personalities, the phase of the war, and so forth. No
a priori compartmentalization works. But their purposes
are separable. "The most just glory" that a statesman can
win comes from his success in maintaining the "national
will" during war. Soldiers, however, should deal with the
fighting.
In the fourth and last section de Gaulle explains the
ethical and institutional bases for the balance and partial
separation of power between civil and military authorities. Although fluid, changing with circumstance, the relationship between the two does not depend on "chance"
to "inspire" leaders. It depends on the institution of a
system that educates men of character to lead well.
"Other epochs assured [this] by a social and political
regime which mingled in the families and in the councils
all the sorts of servants of the State": Roman patricians
and Prussian nobles held both civilian and military posts;
French nobles served in one branch or the other, but understood the problems of both. Too, the sovereign "personified all the powers, symbolizing their harmony."
"Resulting from this perpetual osmosis was a reciprocal
understanding between toga and arms which is no longer
in the spirit of the times" ~although de Gaulle would like
to revive it. De Gaulle implies that parliamentarism lacks
the unifying sovereign who would compel politicians and
soldiers to think of shared ends, if only by symbolizing the
harmony of all state powers.
Nonetheless, today's military leaders retain "the secret
esteem of the strong for the strong." The "man of character" wants things his way and remains alone among subor-
dinates. But as he protects helpful inferiors and attacks
his enemies, he also esteems others of his kind; he may
conceal this esteem, but he acts in accordance with it.
Relations between great-souled equals are productively,
not injuriously, tense. With classical moderation, unmen-
tioned in this section but presumed by it, the secret
esteem of the strong for the strong prevents the selfdefeat brought on by petty squabbling that de Gaulle
found in the German leaders during the Great War, as
described in La discorde chez l' ennemi.
De Gaulle now proposes an institutional basis for this
concordia discors. He does not as yet propose a political
93
�revision for France, although he has hinted that one may
be needed. He suggests an educational reform:
One could conceive, it is true, of a providential State
wishing to prepare a political, administrative, and military
elite, by studies done in common, to direct, if such should be
the case, the wartime effort of a nation.
De Gaulle's civic education would increase the accord
between the two domains in wartime and clarify discussions and laws concerning military power in peacetime. It
would not "solve" the problem because the problem isn't
susceptible to rules. But it would help.
Intuition and character aren't teachable assets. "One
does nothing great without great men," the "ambitieux of
the first rank ... who want nothing in life but to imprint
their mark on events and who, on the shore where they
spend their ordinary days, dream only of the surge of
History!" These are men who know that an illustrious
military career must serve "a vast policy," that a states~
man "of great glory" defends his country.
*
*
•
of his time's "incertitude" and the
"melancholy" of the army, de Gaulle attempts to
restore the mental balance of his contemporaries by a
defense of power. Many writers who lament the disappearance of authority in the modern West prefer to avoid
discussing power. Not de Gaulle.
In the first three chapters he begins with epistemology,
and therefore metaphysics, moves to ethics, then to
politics. In the fourth and fifth chapters he discusses more
immediate concerns: military doctrine and educational
reform. One may say that he moves from the theoretical
and timeless to the practical and immediate.
Gaullist epistemology reconciles, without blending, the
"flow of events" -and the need to adjust to them-with
the attempt to dominate events. The leader intuitively
perceives the nature of things (which is creative, forceful
and possesses an "obscure harmony"), using his "intelligence" to translate these perceptions into effective actions. This intellectual process complements the ethical,
decision-making faculty, the "spirit of enterprise" which
balances the extremes of passivity and rashness.
I
N THE FACE
Gaullist ethics reconciles, without blending, the "spirit
of the age" with "character," under the aegis of the will to
power (broadly defined), which animates the best men. In
94
selecting, ordering, and directing certain aspects of "the
ambiance of the times," the leader realizes himself, feeling "the austere joy of being responsible" -the joy of the
great-souled or magnanimous man. Intuition and intelligence, plus character, yield grandeur.
Gaullist politics reconciles, without blending, the
means and the end. Authority's present disrepute can't
persist for long, because men are by nature political
animals, by which de Gaulle means that they need leaders
and an ordered life. Prestige is that which enables the
leader to lead. De Gaulle associates it with the use of
words, with actions, and with the personification of
aspirations and purposes. The end of politics is grandeur,
and the means are not those of evangelical perfection.
Such means are forgiven, however, because they serve
"the secret desires of all." War, which is not politics but
shares some of its characteristics, embodies the tension of
means and ends in the extreme, having both tortured and
fashioned the world. As with all products of human
nature, perhaps as with human nature itself, it is both
shameful and glorious.
Gaullist military strategy depends on balance, mesure. It
is anti-dogmatic because dogmatism encourages leaders to
be passive, complacent, and blind to circumstances.
Gaullist civic education reconciles, without blending, the
politician and the soldier. Though the two are by nature
different-the one speaks in order to gain power, the
other acts in order to gain power-their mutual will to
power and consequent attempts to achieve it cause
discord. But their natural similarity can make possible the
concordia discors that is Gaullist reconciliation. That similarity is the secret esteem of the strong for the strong.
Both serve the country, realizing themselves by selfsacrificing patriotism. If its members participate in common studies, this elite will suffer less discord.
De Gaulle concerns himself, on each "level" of human
life, with the problem of establishing a concordia discors
which does not sacrifice, but rather enhances, the integrity of the participating elements. He thus avoids the extremes of totalitarianism and egalitarianism and provides
a basis for republicanism, in a century wherein republicanism has declined.
l. Aidan Crawley, De Gaulle, Indianapolis and New York 1969, 53.
2. Stanley Hoffman, Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s, New
York 1974, 217.
3. Xenophon, Memorabilia, Book 3, Chapter 5.
WINTER 1981
�FIRST READINGS
Plato's Moral Theory: The Early and
Middle Dialogues, by Terence Irwin, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977.
Terence Irwin's book is an attempt at a
critical exposition of the moral theory in
Plato's early and middle dialogues. It is intended to show that Plato's questions concerning morality are "legitimate moral
questions" (285; cf. 266), and that his
"questions and answers, right and wrong,
are not of purely historical interest. ...
that they raise issues which justify the effort to decide for or against his views" (4).
Some readers might regard the continuing
significance of Plato's moral thought as being so obvious as to need no discussion.
But anyone familiar with the neglect of the
ancients among contemporary academic
philosophers must welcome Professor Irwin's efforts. Moreover, Plato's admirers
and followers themselves might profit from
a careful, yet critical, discussion of his
moral teachings. Indeed, even the legiti~
macy of Plato's questions, let alone the
truth of his answers, is not so obvious as it
may seem. It is not self-evidently legitimate
to ask-as Irwin rightly emphasizes that
Plato does ask- "whether it is worthwhile
to do what morality is normally supposed
to require", e.g. to benefit other people
(251, italics mine; cf. 249-50 and 265-66).
According to Professor Irwin, Plato's
moral thought centers around three Socratic questions: What is morality (i.e., virtue)? What sort of morality is worthwhile
for a rational man? What is the right
method for reaching knowledge about
morality? Socrates and Plato both assume,
acCording to Irwin, that a genuinely moral
man will be able to understand his own
morality, to defend it against criticism, and
in particular to justify it as being ultimately
worthwhile for him. Because of these demands, Socrates and Plato agree that any
genuine virtue must be in the virtuous
man's self-interest, and must be understood by him to be so (5). Socrates and
Plato disagree, however, in their further
thoughts about the character of virtue and
about the correct method of justifying it.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Irwin distinguishes between Socrates and
Plato on the basis of the difference between those dialogues thought to have
been written first and those thought to
have come later. He accepts the conventional scholarly opinion that we can trace a
development from Plato's early dialogues,
which present the thought of Socrates, to
the middle (and late) ones, in which Socrates becomes a spokesman for Plato himself.
What is most noteworthy about Irwin's
argument, and what has aroused most controversy, is his interpretation of Socrates.
According to Irwin, Socrates held that vir~
tue is a kind of knowledge, a knowledge
that is first glimpsed as the result of crossquestioning, but which is also a teachable
expertise or craft (159). Irwin's boldness
shows itself above all in the latter claim,
namely that Socrates thought of virtue as a
teachable craft.
As for cross-questioning, or the Socratic
elenchus, Irwin gives an illuminating outline of its typical features. Socrates tests
some rule of conventional virtue in terms
of our beliefs about examples (i.e. whether
this or that kind of action would be virtuous), and especially in terms of our general
assumptions that virtue is always admirable, and worthwhile for the virtuous man.
"The elenchus," says Irwin, "adjusts our
conceptions of the virtues to our view of
what is worthwhile over all" (6, cf. 39, 47).
Thus, the method of cross-questioning is
not merely negative or critical, but is intended to yield positive results.
As Irwin points out, however, there are
shortcomings in this elenctic approach to
moral knowledge, Although the elenchus
yields valuable positive insights (40), it
must rely on the interlocutor's own convictions about disputable moral questions. Is
it clear, for instance, that admirable or noble action is always good, in the sense of being worthwhile for the agent (49, 117)? The
elenchus, with its demand that we try to
justify our moral beliefs, helps bring our
deepest moral beliefs to light (40, 70; Compare Kant, Critique of Practical Reason,
Part One, Book Two-especially Chapter
Two, Section Five, "On the Existence of
God as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason"). But a clearer awareness of our deepest moral beliefs is not yet knowledge that
they are true. And there are radical critics,
like Thrasymachus, who seem to reject all
morality, or at least all recognized morality,
on the grounds of its not being worthwhile
for the moral man himself. "Socrates
notices that moral questions raise disputes
with no acknowledged arbitrator, and may
cause skepticism about whether there is an
authoritative answer to be found" (75).
And the method of cross~questioning does
not go far enough to remove such skepticism.
According to Irwin, Socrates tries to
answer this skepticism by pointing to the
contrast between our many differences
over moral questions and our universal
agreement about the arts and crafts. "If
Socrates could show that virtue is a craft,
these doubts [about the possibility of moral
knowledge] would be silenced" (75). Now a
craft, as Irwin understands it, is knowledge
of the means to produce some product-a
product distinguishable from the productive activity itself, and for which we have a
previously recognized desire. There is little
controversy among craftsmen, or between
craftsmen and other men, since the craftsmen accept the ends of their craft as previously given, as goods that the non-craftsmen
already desire. Accordingly, if virtue, or
true morality, were merely a knowledge of
the means to produce some further good
that everyone already desires, it would no
longer be a matter of irresolvable dispute.
(There need be no dispute, at any rate,
about what it is.) In particular, if true
morality were a knowledge of the means to
produce some definite kind of happinessdistinct from moral action itself-that all
men necessarily desire, then even the radically nonmoral man could be taught to become moral. He could be taught to choose
true morality as the most efficient means
to achieve the same nonmoral good he had
previously been pursuing without it (84).
And as a consequence, the skeptic, if he is
to be distinguished from the nonmoral
man, would be compelled to acknowledge
95
�that moral questions admit of rational solutions.
Irwin elaborates at length the implications of treating virtue as a craft-above
all, the implication that virtue {i.e., moral
knowledge) is of merely instrumental
value. Though Socrates never says so explicitly, Irwin offers indirect textual evidence, and he argues at length that the
need for consistency with the craft-analogy
must have led Socrates to accept this implication. And yet the overwhelming impression one gains from Socrates' life, and
especially from his death, seems to oppose
Professor Irwin's suggestion. This evidence
suggests instead that Socrates must have
regarded virtuous activity as its own (highest) reward. Irwin himself points to Socrates' emphatic assertion that one should
always prefer justice to injustice, no matter
what the future consequences (58; cf. 240).
And Socrates even contends, according to
Irwin, that virtue is in itself sufficient to
ensure happiness for the virtuous man
(100; Compare Ap. Soc. 4lc8-d2, and cf.
Chapter VII, Note ll, page 326). Now it
may be logically possible for a merely instrumental good to be of such boundless
worth. Yet how could a man in his senses
have absolute confidence in the goodness
of any state of soul that wasn't somehow
good in itself? (cf. M. F. Burnyeat's review,
in the New York Review of Books, September 27, 1979) Irwin himself draws attention
to this great difficulty (!00-01, 26!, 28182), and he later speaks of the identifica·
tion of morality with some craft-knowledge
as being "intolerably over-simplified" (17576). Why then, without the compulsion of
unambiguous evidence (cf. Chapter VI,
Note 63, page 323), does he claim that Soc·
rates made this identification?
According to Irwin, Socrates identified
virtue with craft-knowledge in order to provide "objective" justification for his moral
doctrine (73-75). Now it is true that Soc·
rates often contrasts his interlocutor's inability to teach his "virtue", or even to
show its worth, with the craftsman's ability
to teach an obviously useful trade. Moreover, Irwin quite rightly insists that Socrates is serious about the superiority of
craft-knowledge, as knowledge, to our socalled knowledge of what virtue is. But it
does not follow that Socrates believed that
"real virtue-not fully embodied in anyone
96
at the moment-will be a craft" (75).
Socrates had no illusions that moral controversy could ever be laid to rest by an authoritative craftsman, or with the discovery
of some new craft (see ·especially Crito
49cl0-d5). To be sure, he sometimes pretended otherwise (Charmides 165c4-e2;
Laches !84c4-!85d2). But Socrates' inten·
tion, in pretending to seek a teachable
craft-knowledge of virtue, was to awaken
some of his listeners to genuine awareness
of their own ignorance. Here, as elsewhere
(notably in Chapter IV on the l'rotagoras),
Irwin fails to appreciate Socratic irony.
This failure may stem in part from his belief that the non-moral man, or the radical
critic of conventional morality, raises legitimate questions, and makes demands that
Socrates must have hoped to satisfy (35-36,
73, 175). But Irwin's disregard of Socratic
irony stems also from his failure to see the
need for it, to see the serious obstacles that
hinder any attempt to share one's knowledge of ignorance with others (cf. Ap. Soc.
2lc7-e2 and Republic 492a5-c2. Consider
also Irwin's apparently unquestioned claim
to know that "the common [unplatonic]
conception of justice", or at least one of its
key elements, is truly "justice", or the "virtue" that is "real justice" [246-47, 2!!-12;
cf. 67-68, 98, !63, 253).) According to lr·
win's interpretation, Socrates' moral theory contains a deep conflict-between the
very great good he expected a virtue to be,
on the one hand, and his attempt to transform his moral beliefs into knowledge, on
the other. But what Irwin calls a conflict
within Socrates' moral theory is instead
Socrates' way of raising a fundamental
question about morality, or the moral
world-view, itself.
According to Irwin, it was Plato (i.e. the
Socrates of the "middle" dialogues) who fi·
nally concluded that the attempt to treat
virtue as a craft could not succeed. Instead
of regarding morality as a merely instrumental good, he saw that it must be viewed
as a good in itself, and as a necessary component, if not the whole, of human happiness. But how could he justify morality, so
understood, against its radical critics? Plato
seems to have decided-and rightly, according to Irwin (175-76; cf. I)-that the
demand for a defense of morality in terms
of some nonmoral final good "cannot plausibly be met" (Compare Aristotle, Eudemian
Ethics l248b9-!249al7). As an alternate
justification, Plato developed his own most
characteristic, and paradoxical, doctrines.
His Theory of Forms, his Theory of Recollection, and his teaching about the ascent
of "rational desires" are all intended, in
part, to explain how we can acquire knowledge of the highest moral good as being
good.
Irwin's interpretation of the middle
dialogues contains quite a few valuable
insights. He is right to emphasize the continuing relevance of Socrates' moral questions in the later dialogues, even in some of
their seemingly most metaphysical passages. And he discusses clearly and cogently some important difficulties {e.g.
about the separation of the Forms from the
particulars, and about the Republic's seemingly equivocal use of the term "justice")
that enthusiastic Platonists tend to ignore
or else slough over. But his horizon is severely limited by inadequate attention to
the drama of the dialogues, to what happens as distinct from what is said {3). And
partly because of this, Irwin is far too ready
to assume that Plato failed to see certain
major, and rather obvious, problems in his
own arguments (cf. 3-4, !0, 155, 163-64,
233, 242, 258). He thus never considers
that Plato might have chosen, or felt compelled, to leave these problems as questions
for his readers. As a result, he fails to recognize some of the most important questions
that Plato intended his readers to ask.
To illustrate this claim, I limit myself to
what Irwin says about philosophy and the
philosopher-king. Irwin contends that Plato
was mistaken, even in terms of his own argument, to suggest that "the philosopher
in the Republic will want to stay contemplating the Forms and will not voluntarily
undertake public service" (242). Now the
philosopher in the Republic is indeed a
public servant, but not because he wants to
be one, but rather because he is compelled
to, out of necessity. And yet Plato's overall
argument, as Irwin interprets it, requires
instead that the contemplative philosopher
also value virtuous action, including public
service, as a good in itself (243). According
to Irwin, Plato was inconsistent on this key
point, and he never faced the problems
that his attraction to a "solipsist [i.e.,
selfish] contemplative ideal" creates for
the rest of his moral theory (257-58; cf.
WINTER 1981
�255). This criticism presupposes, of course,
training
that Irwin has correctly understood Plato's
moral theory as a whole. But Plato's moral
theory, as Irwin presents it, culminates in a
vague and obscure teaching-about the
virtuous man's "rational desires"- that Irwin himself seems to regard as just barely
defensible (246-48; Compare 278-79 and
285-86). And there is no reason to think
that Plato could ever have been satisfied
with this theory that Irwin attributes to
him. Perhaps, then, Plato was not being
inconsistent when he acknowledged the
power of the "contemplative ideal".
Wouldn't it have been better for Irwin, instead of dismissing that ideal as an aberration, to admit that he couldn't yet make
sense of the whole of Plato's thought?
According to Irwin, Plato's conception
of the philosopher also contains a more
serious flaw than the mere one-sidedness
with which it stresses his contemplative
nature. This other flaw, which Irwin regards as part of the deepest weakness in
Plato's moral theory, is the "bizarre" conclusion that only philosophers-indeed
only those wise men who have beheld the
Forms (Republic 517b7-519a)-possess genuine virtue (283-84). As Irwin sees it, Phito
was led to this conclusion in the following
manner. Plato agrees with Socrates' "basic
demand" that a genuinely virtuous man
must be able to justify his way of life with
good reasons, and not merely with the "sec·
ond-hand support" of "custom, authority,
training, and the rest" (284). And he "rightly
insists", as Irwin interprets him, "that it is
worthwhile in itself, and can fairly be expected of a virtuous man, to try to defend
and justify moral beliefs rationally" (284).
But he then makes what Irwin calls the
"mistake" of thinking that "this kind of justification [sic] requires the capacities and
Republic" (284).
(284, italics mine) is not necessarily "worth-
Irwin argues as follows to try to show
that Plato was mistaken in limiting genuine
virtue to successful philosophers. He
claims that "the most plausible defense" of
Plato's basic demand [for justification of
one's moral beliefs] presupposes a respect
for persons as "autonomous agents" (274).
It requires us to regard "an individual's efforts to find a rational justification for his
own beliefs" as being intrinsically worthwhile. Accordingly, a man's attempt "to ex·
amine, understand, and justify his beliefs
as far as he can" -even though he may
possibly find "the wrong an~wers" and
have "the wrong beliefs" -is sufficient to
make him "more virtuous" and even "virtuous" (284-85). Plato "does not notice",
however, that his demand for knowledge,
or at least "the most plausible defense" of
its legitimacy (284-85), requires such great
respect for the very attempt to understand.
Instead, he mistakenly limits true virtue to
successful philosophers, or to the wise.
In fact, however, Plato's conclusion
about true virtue is not a result of any such
oversight (cf. also 164). Plato could never
have remained satisfied with Irwin's "de·
fense" of the "demand for knowledge and
justification," or with Irwin's implicit assumption that virtue requires little more
than the loss of innocence. Plato was well
aware that he was saying something surprising when he limited genuine virtue to
the wise. But once a man has asked, with
Glaucon and Socrates, why virtue (or justice) is worthwhile or good for him, it is no
longer so easy to dismiss Plato's conclusions about it. Plato's strict teaching about
virtue follows from his awareness that a
man's attempt to justify his moral beliefs
might indeed not be good. Merely "to try to
while in itself', nor even useful. Attempts
that fail to lead to insight, or at least to
right opinion, could easily be worse and
less worthy of esteem than the morality
that relies on the "second-hand support"
of "custom, authority, training, and the
rest".
We can be grateful for Irwin's straightforward attempt to distinguish the true
from the false in Plato's moral thought. Irwin's posture toward Plato's thought is
more fruitful than either the patronizing
"veneration", or the open contempt, of
those who treat it merely as a part of theirrevocable past. And Irwin clearly brings a
superior intelligence to his work. But his efforts to be open to Plato's thought are
thwarted from the beginning by his own
patronizing, for instance by his thoughtless
belief that Plato is "more concerned to present and recommend his views ... than to
argue for them or explore their consequences in any detail" (3). Because he accepts this caricature of Plato as primarilyat least in his writings-a mere spokesman
for certain opinions, Irwin fails even to
glimpse the full beauty of Plato's writing or
the full range of his thinking. The failure of
Irwin's interpretation stems from his inability to accept the guidance that the dialogues can offer if one begins by looking up
to them, as to a possibly competent
teacher.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
of the
philosopher in
the
defend and justify moral beliefs rationally''
David Bolotin
David Bolotin recently published Plato's Dialogue on Friendship: an Interpretation of the
''Lysis'' (Cornell University Press 1979)
97
�AT
HOME AND
ABROAD
Letter from Nicaragua and Guatemala
At the airport, customs and immigration
officials wear green fatigues and shiny
black boots. Guards in the same uniform
carry rifles. A sign on the wall reads "Welcome to Free Nicaragua." The capital,
Managua, bears traces of the war alongside
other older ruins. Empty and barren except
for tall grass and a few inhabited ruins,
central Managua still shows the devastation
of the 1972 earthquake. Despite all the
reconstruction money from abroad, Somoza
appeared not to rebuild, to the anger of
many before his fall. Instead, Managua
spread out with new construction on the
perimeter of this area.
Everywhere there are reminders of the
war: damaged buildings, cars with bullet
holes and broken windows, shelled-out
factories. Each neighborhood tells its own
story. In the poorer areas younger residents
recount battles in graphic details that
sound a bit exaggerated. People speak of
Nicaragua's sufferings under Somoza, the
"inhuman tyrant": he bombed the poorer
neighborhoods of Managua, killing many
more civilians than Sandinistas; he ordered
doctors in city hospitals not to let wounded
Sandinistas survive.
But the victory of the Sandinistas in
July 1979 now overshadows the memory of
the war's suffering. The names of streets,
schools, hospitals-entire neighborhoodshave been changed to commemorate
victory: the A. C. Sandino Airport, the
Lenin-Fonseca Hospital, the Highway of
the Resistance, and more. Monuments to
Somoza or his family have been destroyed
or defaced. New ones have been erected
to commemorate the Sandinista war heroes
and civilians who gave their lives. The red
and black flag of the FSLN (Sandinista
Front of National Liberation) is everywhere.
People praise the Sandinistas for "making
the revolution possible" and for "giving
the victory to the people." They mean not
just victory, a year ago, but all that has
happened since. When an American-type
grocery re-opened, selling basic foodstuffs
98
instead of luxury goods, housewives praised
the "revolution" and the Sandinistas for
making it possible for everyone, not just
the rich, to shop there. This praise was
typical; hardly anyone I met had any criticism of the Sandinistas after their first year
in power. Most Nicaraguans I met seemed
to be in a kind of euphoria which came
of surviving a brutal war in which so many
died for the "liberation" of their country.
They appeared willing to work hard to
reconstruct their country and "continue
the revolution."
The remains of July's anniversary celebration of victory were still in evidence on
the streets of Managua in early August.
Banners proclaimed that "In NicaragUa, it
will always be the 19th of July." Billboards
and posters all over the city repeated a few
key slogans: "Sandino yesterday, Sandino
today, Sandino forever"; "An armed people
is the guarantee of victory"; "People,
Army, ... unity guarantees the Peace";
"Cuba yesterday, Nicaragua today, El
Salvador tomorrow." Others advertise new
government programs. The faces of Cesar
Agosto Sandino, the legendary rebel hero
of the 1920's and 30's (from whom the
FSLN took its name) and of the late Carlos
Amador Fonseca, Cuban-trained guerrilla
and founder of the FSLN, appear in all
shapes and sizes. The most dramatic are
their portraits in lights on Managua's two
tallest buildings, the Bank of America and
the Intercontinental Hotel.
Many songs that are popular now grew
out of the war; they are also heard in other
Central American countries, though only
in homes, not on the radio. For Nicaraguans, they are now for entertainment, but
perhaps for other Central Americans, they
serve a more serious purpose. Many are
about guns and other weapons. "The
Garand", for instance, is about how to
load, aim, shoot, and disarm the Garand
M-1 rifle; it lists its specifications and praises
its accuracy. There are also hand grenade
songs and homemade bomb songs. Other
songs tell of the heroic deeds and sometimes tragic ends of Sandinista guerrillas.
With catchy slogans, the songs are sometimes moving in their revelation of the
passion and hope of the Sandinistas' long
struggle. A song commemorating Carlos
Fonseca begins "When we were in jail, a
member of the National Guard. full of joy,
came and told us that Carlos Fonseca had
died. And we replied, 'Carlos Fonesca is of
the dead that never die!' ... "
Carlos Fonseca had promised that when
the Sandinistas took power, all Nicaraguans
would have the opportunity to learn to
read and write. The Sandinistas claimed
that there were 669,000 illiterate adults
(forty percent of the population), of whom
ten percent were considered "unteachable."
So, the Sandinistas formed the "Popular
Army of Literacy" (EPA). According to the
newspapers, 50,000 young people from all
over the country left their homes and
families to teach their "comrades" to read
and write. Members of the Sandino Army,
students, even some volunteers from
abroad made up many of the literacy
"brigades"; all the "brigadistas" that I met
were under thirty. In exchange for their
services, they received room and board.
Classes were held in homes, factories,
farms, whenever the students had time. By
August, newspapers claimed that 464,500
people had learned to read and write, 70%
of their goal.
The crusade received an enormous
amount of publicity. In the official Sandinista newspaper, headlines declared towns
and districts "liberated" and "victorious
over ignorance" as more and more areas
reached their goal. A billboard-sized chart
set up in front of the Palace of the Revolution showed the progress of each region.
The media called the brigadistas "sons of
Sandino''. They claimed service in the
EPA amounted to fighting for the FSLN in
the war, because the EPA was "fighting"
the "next phase of the revolution." They
published simple handwritten letters from
WINTER 1981
�the newly literate that thanked the brigadistas and praised the Sandinistas and
the "revolution" for bringing them "out of
the darkness and ignorance." The two
television stations (now controlled by the
"Sandinista System of Television") showed
people who had just learned to read and
write, reading newspapers and talking
about how it felt to be able to read. When
only a little short of their goal, the government planned a "victory" celebration in
Managua, in honor of EPA's workers.
Independent and openly critical of the
Somoza regime, La Prensa for decades
stood for political life in Nicaragua. The
murder in 1978 of editor Pedro Chamorro,
allegedly on Somoza's orders, set off the
public protest and wide-spread strikes that
led to full scale civil war. Fifteen months
later, Somoza had La Prensa-which had
kept printing after Chamorro's murderbombed and burned. A month later, shortly
after the Sandinista victory, La Prensa, using another newspaper's facilities in nearby
Leon, was back on the streets. Chamorro's
widow was named to the five-member ruling junta (resigning less than a year later to
go back to La Prensa). Left in the hands of
another family member, Xavier Chamorro,
the newspaper all but lost its independence. Editorial comments suggesting that
reporters distorted facts in the service of
"imperialism" prefaced articles critical of
the Sandinistas or communist countries. In
the end, under pressure from the board of
directors, Xavier resigned-to start his own
newspaper with workers who had struck to
preserve La Prensa's pro-Sandinista line.
Members of the Chamorro family now
run all three major newspapers in Nicaragua: La Prensa is run by Jaime Chamorro,
El Nuevo Diario by Xavier, and the official
FSLN paper, La Barricada by Carlos
Chamorro. La Barricada, named for the
way battles were fought behind barricades
in the streets, features Sandinista propaganda above all. Much of the content of
El Nuevo Diario, while not strictly propaganda, is nevertheless pro-Sandinista and
against the U. S. Only La Prensa-which
prints much of the same news as the
others-also prints letters from readers
which question Sandinistas about friends
or family members who have disappeared
from jail or from the streets. The other
newspapers refer to La Prensa as the
"bourgeois" paper. All three comment on
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
each other's "inaccuracies" and "misrepresentations". When an article head·
lined, "Elections? The People have not
asked for them!" appeared in La Barricada,
La Prensa responded the next day with the
results of its own poll that showed that
roughly eighty percent of the people questioned wanted elections. Most of the criticism now centers on La Prensa for its
articles mildly critical of the Sandinista
regime.
All three newspapers print the regime's
column, "Our New Trench-Lecture for
the Literate". Printed in extra large type
with only a few lines to an installment, it
tells the story of A. C. Sandino and the
beginnings of the rebel movement in a
simple kindergarten style especially tailored
to the reading ability of the newly literate.
This column claims that the peasants were
Sandinistas too because they served as the
"ears" of Sandino and his men. According
to the column, even the children helped
the "revolution". With their noise, they
prompted the "traitor" (Somoza's father)
and the "invaders' (the U. S. Marines) to
overestimate the number of rebels.
The victory of the Sandinistas is told
everywhere in Central America. In tiny,
overpopulated El Salvador, the violence
has become unpredictable; some call it
open civil war. I found the situation too
dangerous and continued north to Guatemala. Guatemala, too, has seen a great
increase in political violence in the last
year, but the situation is not yet as bad as
in El Salvador. Still, when I think of Guate·
mala, I am afraid-afraid of what is
happening now and what is likely to
happen soon. As one U.S. congressman
put it, Guatemala is a bloodbath waiting to
happen.
In Guatemala, what there is of a middle
ground, a moderate side, is shrinking
rapidly. There are many factors involved in
the situation, but it is the extremist violence
from all sides that polarizes the country.
While the government may in fact be on
the middle ground, opposition groups feel
that it arid any groups that support it also
support-or at least condone-extremist
violence. Although the government at least
outwardly condemns violence, some of
their methods~i.e. killing Indians suspected of collaborating with the guerrillas-tend to have fhe opposite effect. The
Indians, alienated from the government by
these acts, turn to the guerrillas. The government seems to be doing itself in. Conservative groups, on the other hand, see
the opposition-i.e. any group that does
not support the government-as supporting the Marxist guerrillas and therefore opposed to peaceful means of reform or
change. The extreme conservatives take
matters into their own hands, as they hold
the government to be ineffective. There is
an all-pervasive attitude of being anti-anticommunist, anti-fascist, anti-government.
Although the terms "left" and "right" are
used by the different groups to label their
opposition, it is not that simple, since
different groups on the same "sides" have
different ideologies.
Extremist violence takes standard forms:
assassination, murder, and kidnappingsometimes for ransom, but more usually
the victims' bodies are discovered days
later. There are many groups, each with its
own targets. Some, particularly the Marxist
guerrilla organizations, claim public responsibility for their acts-especially kid·
napping, since the guerrillas usually ask for
ransom. Most terrorism, however, is face·
less, with perpetrators identified in the
newspapers as "unknown men". These
"unknown men" murder labor leaders and
organizers, student leaders and professors,
opposition party officials, journalists, and
priests-anyone suspected of "leftist"
sympathies. That these "unknown men"
operate as groups is apparent from their
methods; that they are radically "rightwing" is clear from their choice of victims.
It is widely believed that they are govern·
ment supported. The arguments for this
are compelling, though not conclusive.
First, in the late sixties-another peak in
guerrilla activity in Guatemala-the Army
and other government security forces
openly killed and terrorized the same
people in the same way. Many believe that
the government now operates underground
to protect itself from being accused of
resorting to terrorism. In several incidents
some connection with the government has
been established. In June, an unsuccessful
murder attempt took place on the national
university campus, which has seen much
terrorism. Two snipers shot at a student,
wounding him seriously. The two men did
not have time to make their getaway, however, and other students saw them and
chased them down. The students burned
99
�one alive and then lynched them both.
The wounded student was rushed to a
government hospital, but his family, fearing
for his safety, removed him to a private one.
Within 24 hours, more "unknown men"
tried unsuccessfully to gain entrance to
the hospital, shooting up windows and
doors with machine guns. As soon as his
health permitted, the student sought asylum in Costa Rica. The two snipers were
said by the newspapers to have been "confidential agents" of the Army. The Army
acknowledged this but denied any connection with their actions. In other
incidents, vehicles used have been traced
to branches of the government, such as the
judicial department. That some members
of these groups have been members of
government security forces does not prove
that they were acting on orders from the
government. The government, however,
raises suspicions, because it appears to do
little to prevent or investigate these incidents. The vice president, Villagran
Kramer, protested the continuing violence
by threatening to resign, but was reportedly
silenced by threats on his life. Eventually,
however, he did resign and went to the
u.s.
There are four main Marxist guerril1a
organizations now operating in the country.
Mainly involved in shoot-outs with the
Army in the mountains and in urban
terrorism, they say they aim at total ''revolution". These groups are underground:
your next door neighbor could be a member
and you'd never know. I was taken into the
confidence of some people who claimed
membership in one of these organizations.
Cautious and not ready to answer many of
my questions, they did, however, tell me
a great deal. Comparatively successful in
their everyday working lives, these people
still lived in the poor neighborhoods they
grew up in. They say they want someday
to "liberate" the people of Guatemala, the
poor and the Indians, from the "oppression" of the government. And when they
say this, their dedication to- the cause
becomes apparent. They are willing to die
for it like heroes, knowing that it may be
without glory, in anonymity.
The guerrilla group of the men I talked
to is separated into two main divisions. The
larger is the guerrilla army-in-training hiding
in the mountains. These men claim that
Indians make up thirty percent of the army.
100
(Even a few Indian enlistments would
terrify conservative Guatemalans, who
have up to now taken Indian passivity for
granted.) Smaller, and up until recently,
more active, the second division is made
up of independent units, each with a
specific mission: procuring arms, making
explosives, trailing prospective targets,
gathering information, stealing vehicles,
etc. Their arms and money come from
ransoms and bank robberies-and other
less easily identifiable sources. Guns and
ammunition are stolen from Army depots
and outposts. They receive, they told me,
arms, money, and training from Nicaragua-one of them received instruction
in the use of new weapons at a Sandinista
training session in southern El Salvador a
few months ago. (Aid from Cuba and from
the P.L.O. is also suspected. See Robert
Moss, "Terror: A Soviet Export," New York
Times Magazine, 8 November 1980.) They
have an overall plan which is known by all
members, but its specifics are revealed only
little by little. Unlike the Sandinistas, the
leaders of the organizations have not yet
made themselves known publicly. Members
of units, I suspect, know only their immediate superiors. Although they call themselves Marxists, they are much better at
saying what's wrong with the current
government and what it stands for than at
explaining their own political ideas and
their plans. What is important to them now
is "bringing the revolution," without imposing their ideology. They believe that, as
in Nicaragua, those who do the fighting
will end up in power.
To prevent further polarization of the
country, the government has launched an
expensive advertising campaign. There are
radio, newspaper, and television ads with
the theme "Let us maintain the peace in
Guatemala." One ad tells Guatemalans
that their brothers, the soldiers of the
Army, protect them from "foreigners" and
"traitorous" Guatemalans who want to
steal their land. Another ca11s upon "citizens" to stand up against terrorism for the
sake of their and their children's future.
Another shows Cubans upon their arrival
in the U. S. speaking of the hardships of
life under communism. To my surprise,
many Guatemalans doubted that the
Mariel boatlift brought more than a few
hundred refugees to the U. S. They dismissed accurate reports in the newspapers
of more than 100,000 refugees as propaganda of the government and the rich.
There is also a big campaign to promote
the government of General Lucas Garcia
as "progressive" and humanitarian. Ads
show hospitals, roads, and public housing,
some already built, and some under construction, other planned-but too few, too
late, in the opinion of many Guatemalans.
In August, the guerrillas succeeded in
sharply cutting down public attendance at
an important rally in support of the government and against terrorism. A few days
before the rally, bombs exploded all over
Guatemala city. The biggest one, which
killed eight persons and wounded many
others, went off in the park in front of the
National Palace, where the rally was to
take place. Guerrilla groups publicly
claimed responsibility for the bombs, and
the turnout (forty thousand in a country
where twice the number is not unusual)
was not nearly what had been expected.
The country's wealthy elite seem determined to fight the "communist threat,"
in the government's phrase. These people
do not believe that the "leftist movement",
as they can it, is popular and spontaneous.
They claim rather that it is directed and
financed by outside parties, namely Cuba
and Nicaragua. A rancher on the Caribbean
coast explained that he let the Army maintain and train several hundred soldiers on
his property in order that they might guard
the coast. He claims that boats carrying
arms from Cuba have been intercepted.
People like this rancher feel that they've
got their backs against the wall, and that
they must-and will-fight to preserve
what they feel is theirs.
In the face of such violent conditions,
life goes on, but there is more and more an
atmosphere of fear, and a feeling of
impending disaster. Killings by extremists
leave no one untouched. While each side
has its own targets, innocent people who
are in the wrong place at the wrong time
lose their lives. People who have reason
to believe that they are on somebody's
"list" try to insure their safety. Dealing
with these threats alters everday life-as
Salvadoreans who have fled to Guatemala
because of death threats can attest. In some
instances, it means having bodyguards,
although this is not always very effective.
For most, it means never keeping a regular
schedule. It means never taking the same
WINTER 1981
�route to work, using different cars, coming
and going at irregular hours. It means not
always spending the night at home but
going to the homes of friends and family
to keep from establishing a predictable
pattern. For many, many Guatemalans, it
means carrying a gun-especially at night.
A woman who fears for her husband, an
economics professor at the university, says
he's being watched and followed. She says
she knows what happens to professors
suspected of "leftist sympathies"-if they
do not flee to Mexico, or "join the guerrillas in the mountains," they are murdered
or they disappear.
When I left Guatemala in August, friends
on all sides felt that the situation would
wait for the outcome of the U. S. elections
in November. Even large business deals
were pending the results of the elections.
More conservative Guatemalans have
been infuriated with the Carter administration and its human rights policy. They
feel that the State Department and the
administration have supported the "leftist
movement", if only by not unequivocally
supporting the current government. From
the way they talked about the U.S. election,
one would think they could vote. The
guerrillas I spoke with hinted that if Carter
were reelected they could take their time,
but if Reagan won, they might have to
speed up the implementation of their plan.
The elections are sure to be front page
news, just as the conventions were, reflecting their importance in Guatemala's
affairs. Among the conservatives, although
there is an anti-Carter attitude, they are
not anti-American. Some people even believe that if anything drastic happens, the
U. S. will step in. The only strong antiAmerican attitudes I encountered were
among students and guerrillas. On the
whole, Guatemalans are still fairly friendly
to the U.S. This may change in the future.
In Nicaragua before the war, there was not
nearly the widespread anti-Americanism
that one encounters there now. For while
Washington and the Sandinistas deal with
each other, the Nicaraguans do not forget
the verse of the FSLN hymn that replaced
their national anthem: "The sons of
Sandino/Not to be sold nor surrendered~
Ever!/We fight against the Yankee/Enemy
of humanity."
HONOR BULKLEY
A student at St. John's College, Annapolis,
Honor Bulkley has made three extended visits
to Central America in the last three years, most
recently for three months in the summer of 1980.
FRoM OuR READERS
To the Editor:
Thank you for publishing the marvelous
"Three by Meyer Liben" in the July The
College/The St. John's Review.
In your note on the stories, you quote
George Dennison's description (1976) to
the effect that he [Liben] was "an unknown
first-rate writer." In my book, The Ordeal
of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and
the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Basic
Books 1974) on page 208, you will find an
attempt to appraise the greatness.
july 18, 1980
jOHN M. CUDDIHY
The passage Mr. Cuddihy refers to reads:
All these considerations come to mind
when we reflect on Malamud's most
recent novel, The Tenants (1971). Why
the vogue for Malamud's stories, rather
than those incomparably better stories
of Meyer Liben, for example? Liben's
characters are precisely observed; they
resist, with the stubbornness of stones,
being blown up into Malamudian emblems. They are thus culturally unavailable; obviously, this is "minor fiction."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
101
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Office of the Dean
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St. John's College
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thestjohnsreview
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The St. John's Review (formerly The College), Winter 1981
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1981-01
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Sisson, Barbara J.
von Oppen, Beate Ruhm
Wilson, Curtis A.
Thompson, Homer A.
Lund, Nelson
Collins, Arthur
Dennison, George
Rangel, Carlos
Radista, Leo
Liben, Meyer
Morrisey, Will
Bolotin, David
Bulkley, Honor
Brann, Eva T. H.
Description
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Volume XXXII, Number 2 of The St. John's Review, formerly The College. Published in Winter 1981.
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ISSN 0010-0862
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_32_No_2_1981
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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pdf
St. John's Review
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